Center for a New American Security

I had some concerns that a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed from Richard Fontaine and John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security treated the fraudulent Afghan presidential election too blithely, proposing to simply work around Kabul and deal directly with the provinces. But if this Washington Post story is correct, the Obama [...]

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 [...]

In the course of a puffy Politico profile of Nate Fick, the CEO of the  Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank with close ties to the White House, comes the snipe from the American Enterprise Institute:
“Think tanks develop into a more mature institution when they are willing to say unpleasant things [...]

I don’t know what he’ll say, but Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg probably wouldn’t address an audience convened by the Obama administration’s shadow Pentagon if he wasn’t prepared to issue some set of policy principles for handling China. The Center for a New American Security announced that Steinberg will give the keynote speech at [...]

The president of the Obama administration’s shadow Pentagon lends support to Sen. Carl Levin’s (D-Mich.) proposal this morning to bolster the Afghan security forces instead of ordering a second U.S. troop deployment to Afghanistan this year. While John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security, said the Afghan troops/U.S. troops dynamic isn’t [...]

So: $25 billion, five years and 17,000 U.S. trainer troops to yield 400,000 total Afghan soldiers and cops. That’s Center for a New American Security president John Nagl’s estimate of what it’ll cost to double the size of Afghan security forces, Bloomberg’s Indira A.R. Lakshmanan reports. Next week, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. forces [...]

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, [...]

One of the early lights of the national security/foreign policy blogosphere, Marc Lynch, is the latest scholar to sign up with the Center for a New American Security, the unofficial think tank of the Obama administration’s Pentagon and State Department.
Marc, a political science professor at the George Washington University, started his blog Abu Aardvark in [...]

Truly the Center for a New American Security is a revolutionary power, not a status-quo power. First the counterinsurgency-heavy think tank is greeted as liberators within the Gates Pentagon and the State Department. Now, via Small Wars Journal, CNAS wants your TV as well. Army special-forces veteran and CNAS senior fellow Roger Carstens — a [...]

Via Abu Muqawama, NATO is holding a contest for the best viral video answering the question of Why Afghanistan Matters. I’m not sure what to think of this. On the one hand, it kind of makes you wonder whether this means NATO governments aren’t able to compellingly answer the question themselves, which is a dangerous [...]