Question of the day: Can guards for your company kill Afghan civilians, set up shell companies to win contracts, siphon off weapons intended for the Afghan police while using the names of cartoon characters to sign for them, and still win additional multi-million-dollar contracts to guard U.S. More…
The rising tide of violence in Afghanistan identified in the United Nations’ most recent quarterly country report got the lion’s share of the press attention this weekend. But check out what it says about governance in the country. Given that out-governing the insurgency is central to NATO strategy More…
The president of the Center for a New American Security, John Nagl, has an op-ed in the New York Daily News arguing against despair for the Afghanistan war. “[I]t is possible over the next five years to build an Afghan government that can outperform the Taliban and an Afghan Army More…
It has an uncertain budget, a team of fewer than two dozen military officers and civilians, and barely a year to make its mark on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan before the U.S. begins its transfer of security responsibilities to Afghans. In that time, a new military task force will attempt to More…
A year after President Obama’s speech in Cairo vowing to reset relations with the Muslim world, Muslims worldwide are telling pollsters about their disillusionment with what they consider unfulfilled expectations.
According to the Pew Center’s new survey of global attitudes (PDF), released Thursday morning, citizens of Muslim nations report More…
From the brand-new Pew poll of international attitudes (PDF), just released half an hour ago:
Among Muslim publics – except in Indonesia where Obama lived for several years as a child – the modest levels of confidence and approval observed in 2009 have slipped markedly. In Egypt the percentage of
Something that couldn’t fit into my piece yesterday but bears mentioning: Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, told a Senate panel that al-Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan numbered in the “double digits.”
In a somewhat heated exchange with Sen. Lindsey Graham More…
At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Wednesday on strategy for the war in Afghanistan, a discussion of the Obama administration’s approach to securing the southern Afghan city of Kandahar — a crucial test for the escalated war — was overshadowed by a partisan dispute over the meaning of the More…
So far, this Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Afghanistan is less about Kandahar and more about parsing what President Obama meant when he established July 2011 as an “inflection point” for beginning a transition to Afghan security.
Trying to clarify after yesterday’s initial back-and-forth with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), More…
Lots of things were unclear about U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2008: the precise mission, the resources, the broader national dedication. But one thing wasn’t in doubt: The main area of U.S. focus was in Afghanistan’s Pashtun east, where the primary lines of Taliban infiltration from neighboring More…
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