New Study Suggests Drone Strikes Don’t Kill as Many Pakistani Civilians as Claimed

It’s the most controversial counterterrorism program there is. The CIA’s remotely piloted aircraft, operating with the tacit consent of the Pakistani government, fire missiles at suspected militants in the Pakistani tribal areas where U.S. ground troops are prohibited from operating and where the Pakistani military is often hesitant to tread. More…

CNAS Releases Very Big Study for How to Yield a Palestinian State

Sure to give agita to the Israeli embassy in Washington: The Center for a New American Security publishes a 100-page multiple-case study of how the international community could midwife a Palestinian state from a security perspective.

It’s a long study, with seven authors, and I’ve barely made a crack More…

What’s Up With the Eikenberry Leak, Anyhow?

Parlor-game speculation about who leaked what and why always reminds me of a line Mad Men’s Don Draper gives to Betty when she vents to him about the infidelity of her friend Francine’s husband: “Who knows why people do what they do?” Don, of course, is incapable of telling the More…

McChrystal Adviser on Ahmed Wali Karzai

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…

What’s Behind the Drones?

Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security, a critic of the CIA’s Predator drone program in the Pakistani tribal areas, writes:

I worry that the CIA is carrying out their own campaign in part because a) it’s been getting kicked around so much since 9/11 that

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CNAS’s Exum Traces Three Afghanistan Scenarios

Andrew Exum, the Center for a New American Security scholar and adviser to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s strategy review, has a new policy paper out on Afghanistan. No one at the Defense Department will pay any attention to it, just like no one paid any attention to More…

Drone Strikes and How Insurgents Are Created

One more thing about the New America Foundation’s drone-strike report, which found that the drones have “only” killed Pakistani civilians one-third of the time. (We’re talking about “250 to 320″ civilians killed, according to the report.) One of the reasons the report exists is to push back against More…

Galbraith Opposes Escalation in Afghanistan

ThinkProgress has the video from “Good Morning America,” in which the ousted deputy U.N. special representative to Afghanistan says that the stolen election has unmoored U.S. strategy for Afghanistan to such a point that increasing troop levels doesn’t make sense. TP’s transcript:

In the absence of having a credible Afghan

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Now That the McChrystal Strategy Review Has Leaked …

The Washington Post’s headline — “McChrystal: More Forces Or ‘Mission Failure’” — does what the persons who leaked Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Afghanistan strategy review evidently wanted to do: box President Obama in to a static request for more U.S. troops and dare him to refuse his chosen commander’s recommendations. More…

Karzai: Now With More Votes Than Legitimacy

The BBC is reporting that Hamid Karzai now has more than 54 percent of the vote in Afghanistan’s presidential election, meaning he can avoid a runoff election, despite more than 2,100 fraud complaints and a mandated partial recount. That places the legitimacy of Karzai’s victory in doubt, More…