CNAS

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 [...]

Most reporters I know are on tenterhooks today to see what happens in the first round of presidential elections in Iran. The Guardian is reporting a large turnout already, which favors Mir Hussein Moussavi, the candidate of the reformists who’ve been wild in the streets like they were on the cover of old L.A. punk [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In February, I did some reporting about how it was far from clear whether the Obama administration embraced the proposition that public diplomacy is a national security mission. Some observers wondered whether Judith McHale — now confirmed as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, who came from the Discovery Channel — would revert to [...]

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 [...]

“Success equals leadership plus strategy plus resources” said retired Lt. Gen. David Barno about Afghanistan. Although he doesn’t say it himself, he had the first element, as the former U.S. commander there from 2003 to 2005, but never the other two. He thinks that the confirmation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal as the new commander and [...]

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 [...]

If you didn’t wade through the details of counterinsurgency strategy in Spencer’s liveblog of Gen. David Petraeus’ keynote speech this morning at the Center for a New American Security conference, you may have missed this interesting nugget: Petraeus tore down a Weekly Standard report that the FBI was reading Miranda rights to detainees captured in [...]

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 [...]