andrew exum

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 truth, and uses Betty to [...]

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:
I can, however, say that numerous military [...]

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 it is now overly focused on killing [...]

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 the last one he wrote. But why not see [...]

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 criticism of the program, such as the [...]

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 partner … it makes no sense [...]

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. The moves to separate the strategy [...]

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, as the Obama administration feared. Whether the administration [...]

At the bottom of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s deeply reported story about why Defense Secretary Bob Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen relieved Gen. David McKiernan from his command in Afghanistan is this bit of insight into some of the value added by the 60-day strategy review recently completed by (mostly) Washington think-tankers for McKiernan’s [...]

A pattern is developing with respect to the Afghanistan war. No one who advises Gen. Stanley McChrystal on his 60-day strategy review — results coming soon! — thinks the war effort is adequately resourced. First Andrew “Abu Muqawama” Exum of the Center for a New American Security came back from Afghanistan and appeared freaked out, [...]