bruce riedel

One of the back stories in The Washington Post’s account of the current Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy debate presented by some anonymous administration officials is that Gen. Stanley McChrystal took the playbook set by the Bruce Riedel-penned March white paper on strategy for the region and started changing the plan on the ground.
Back in Washington, some civilians [...]

Throughout the February and March debates about Afghanistan, I wrote what I understood the emerging Obama administration approach to be: a counterinsurgency approach in Afghanistan to achieve a counterterrorism goal in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That view was informed by a variety of talks with administration officials. And when Obama unveiled his strategy, in a speech [...]

It might be going on five months since the Obama administration pledged to “develop metrics … that give you an idea of our success rate” in Afghanistan, as outside adviser Bruce Riedel put it on March 27, but Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, thinks it’s “important the Administration [...]

If Bruce Riedel, chairman of the Obama administration’s Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy review, has a bottom line as to the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence’s relationship with extremist groups, it’s that such relationships are deliberately murky. ISI is not a “rogue intelligence agency,” he told a crowd last night at the International Spy Museum, but instead mostly follows the [...]

The Cairo speech has eaten up most of my day, but last night, Bruce Riedel, the chairman of the Obama administration’s strategy review on Afghanistan and Pakistan, appeared on a panel at the International Spy Museum to talk about the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence organization and its relationship to Afghan and Pakistani extremism. (More on [...]

On CBS’ “60 Minutes” Sunday, President Obama said “There’s got to be an exit strategy” for Afghanistan, but today he … didn’t give one. What’s the story with that?

Last week, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael Maples, acknowledged a simple truth about the presence of the Taliban senior leadership in Pakistan. “Sir, the Quetta Shura is operating openly, as you know, in Quetta,” Maples told Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Both Maples and [...]

Commenter Ali Ahmed Kurd took me to task the other day for possessing insufficient knowledge of Pakistan when looking at the current clash between President Asif Ali Zardari and leading opposition figure Nawaz Sharif. I plead guilty then and my plea stands. But the situation in Pakistan is getting real. In Lahore, former Prime Minister [...]

For more on using counterinsurgency means to counterterrorism ends, Marc Ambinder is hearing things about the White House Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy review, run by former CIA official Bruce Riedel. First, to my point about governance assistance being a necessary component of counterinsurgency:
The Riedel review plans to recommend a sweeping overhaul of efforts to rebuild civil society [...]

Sure enough, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told the Senate Armed Services Committee this morning that the greatest threat to the United States comes from the global economic meltdown. But take a look at what he had to say about Afghanistan.