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…
No sooner did the Post speculate about the future of CIA asset/drug-deal facilitator/quasi-warlord/Kandahar official/presidential brother Ahmed Wali Karzai than Dexter Filkins of The New York Times reports that no one is really going to bother trying to oust an unmovable political object. And since that’s the case, More…
The Washington Post has a great story that looks at the opening phases of the forthcoming U.S.-NATO-Afghan push to take the regions surrounding Kandahar city away from the Taliban, an operation expected to be militarily underway by June. But as Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in More…
Michael Cohen, with something between bewilderment and respect, calls Hamid Karzai a gangster. He means it in the slang sense of someone who doesn’t care what you think of him; will do dirt right in front of your eyes; and dare you to do something about it. And reading More…
I had no luck getting members of Congress to talk yesterday about the relationship between Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of the Afghan president, and the CIA. But Jeff Stein, I belatedly see, got Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) to talk about the connection last week. Here’s how More…
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) vouched for Ahmed Wali Karzai in a speech on Monday, saying he was never shown any evidence that the brother of the Afghan president is a druglord when he asked the intelligence community to produce it. But the report that Karzai is in fact More…
As I’ve been writing since last night, the tale of the CIA’s payments to Ahmed Wali Karzai seems less like a story about corruption than it does a story about the insurgency. Gretchen Peters, author of a recent book about the drug trade in Afghanistan and its effects on More…
It seems like only yesterday that members of Congress bitterly determined that the CIA didn’t sufficiently or accurately brief them about various important secret activities. That’s because it was! But today is a new day, and no one on the Hill wants to talk about whether they’ve More…
Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security, one of the advisers for Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Afghanistan strategy review, doesn’t know if Ahmed Wali Karzai is indeed a CIA asset. But he blogs that the perception of his interlocutors on the Afghan president’s brother is rather severe: More…
Should it really surprise us that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the suspected druglord and brother of President Hamid Karzai, is, as The New York Times reported last night, on the CIA payroll? Remember how the United States entered Afghanistan in 2001. It wasn’t with infantry and air strikes. It More…
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