Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) may have made quite the bureaucratic gambit today by calling for an acceleration of the schedule to train Afghan security forces ahead of any new U.S. troop deployment. That position attracted the support (with caveats) of respected counterinsurgency theorist-practitioners like John Nagl of the More…
Sure, the interview was Friday, but the Defense Department just released the transcript of Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ interview with Al Jazeera, and it’s hard not to notice Gates’ “correction” of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, who said a few weeks ago that “we’ll know” success in Afghanistan “when we More…
Maybe I should have added Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) to my list of Congress members to watch on Afghanistan. At his weekly pen-and-pad briefing, the Democratic majority leader in the House told reporters that the Obama administration needs to give Congress “a plan that members conclude can be More…
A huge airstrike in northern Afghanistan has left at least 80 dead, including some civilians. The strike hit fuel trucks taken by insurgents as civilians were extracting gasoline from their tankers.
The U.S. military command in Afghanistan, USFOR-A, tweeted five hours ago that the strike was against “a More…
There were lots of signals from Defense Secretary Bob Gates at his press conference today. I didn’t want to let my imagination run away with me, but his body language was tight and his face looked tired. He looked like he had to make precisely the kind of momentous decision More…
We still don’t know what it says. Not even Defense Secretary Bob Gates does, apparently, though it went to the Pentagon and NATO. The initial reports are that it says a lot of what it’s been expected to say: the war is hard but not hopeless; more Afghan More…
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 More…
So reports Barbara Starr. Gen. Stanley McChrystal has already come to the conclusion that there are too few Afghan forces, and they’re, ultimately, the ballgame. So: what to make of all this?
In one of the more bizarre subplots of the Iraq war, the United States has for years protected thousands of members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, an Iranian organization chartered by Saddam Hussein to carry out terrorist attacks against Iranian targets. The MEK has a cultish aspect to it — Elizabeth Rubin More…
Much as I agree with Andrew Exum that this Washington Post post-mortem tick tock on the killing of the F-22 is worth reading, this paragraph seems a bit, well, incomplete:
[Defense Secretary Robert Gates] bluntly warned Lockheed Martin that he would slice funding for the more modern F-35
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