Center for a New American Security

Right before his confirmation as the next Afghanistan-war commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal’s Peter Spiegel, apparently embargoed until McChrystal departed for his new command. McChrystal quite obviously wanted to use the interview to emphasize that he’s informed by his experiences as someone who focused on capturing and killing [...]

I’m still at the Center for a New American Security conference, listening to the North Korea panel, but apropros of this morning’s discussions about Afghanistan and Pakistan: the House today passed Rep. Howard Berman’s (D-Calif.) Pakistan providing $1.5 billion of annual non-military aid.
The bill, however, continues to authorize military funding for Pakistan, and keeps accountability [...]

North Korea hasn’t really been a Center for a New American Security core competency — there’s little application for the stability-operations end of the conflict spectrum there — but Ambassador Wendy Sherman, a confidante of Secretary of State Clinton, is running a panel on the recent provocations by North Korea. “We are at a moment [...]

Here’s Sharon Burke, vice president of Center for a New American Security, who just got effusive praise from former Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), and who’s presenting a panel on those old atavistic security questions about natural resources. The idea of climate change, for instance, as a national security issue has been much derided, but it’ll [...]

Nate Fick — whom Center for a New American Security chairman Richard Danzig announced this morning as the next CNAS CEO; he’s barely in his 30s — and Andrew “Abu Muqawama” Exum are talking about their new paper on Afghanistan and Pakistan. I blogged about that paper here, so please read that post instead of [...]

We know what John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security thinks about the future of the U.S.-Iraq relationship. What does Samir Sumaida’ie, the Iraqi ambassador to the United States, think the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people want that relationship to be?
He’s “fairly optimistic” about the future of Iraq. “The price has [...]

I’m in an overstuffed ballroom at the Willard hotel for the third annual conference of the Center for a New American Security, where the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, Gen. David Petraeus, is delivering the keynote address. It’s an appropriate venue: Petraeus is effectively the leader of the counterinsurgency [...]

Another year, another position paper from the Center for a New American Security on Iraq. The previous bunch of CNAS Iraq position papers were authored by Michele Flournoy, now the undersecretary of defense for policy; Jim Miller, now the principle deputy undersecretary of defense for policy; Colin Kahl, now the deputy assistant secretary of defense [...]

Nancy Youssef at McClatchy reports that Defense Secretary Bob Gates has ordered incoming Afghanistan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his deputy, Gen. David Rodriguez, to spend 60 days reviewing war strategy. The task is nothing new for McChrystal, who just finished a different review of war strategy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff earlier this [...]

First, look into a mirror and say three times, “I will not interpret events in Afghanistan and Pakistan through strained analogy to Iraq, because doing so is sure to misinterpret organic and specific developments and the circumstances that gave rise to them.” Then note that Pashtun tribesmen near the Swat Valley are organizing a tribal [...]