COIN

The officers’ involvement signals the debate has moved past a rigid choice between expansive counterinsurgency missions and narrowly tailored efforts to find and kill terrorists.

One of the defining moments of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Afghanistan strategy that I covered yesterday came when Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) asked why we needed to take a counterinsurgency approach to Afghanistan when a commando raid in Somalia, without the aid of a large troop mobilization, had killed a key al-Qaeda [...]

As the Taliban’s fighting and governing prowess improves, Sean Kay puts together a Plan B for Afghanistan over at Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel. Rather than expand the war’s aperture, Kay’s proposal is premised on restricting it to the areas where al-Qaeda’s mixture with the Taliban is most acute:
Shift from COIN to containment: Rather [...]

President Obama should be commended for his reality-based presentation of what the United States is after in Afghanistan:
ABC’S TERRY MORAN: Define victory in Afghanistan, or maybe that’s not the right word.
OBAMA: I’m always worried about using the word “victory” because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender [...]

Just got off a fascinating conference call with Col. John Agoglia, the head of the Counterinsurgency Training Center-Afghanistan, which seeks to instill and harmonize counterinsurgency capabilities across the 43 contributing coalition militaries in Afghanistan, as well as the Afghan security forces. If Agoglia has a bottom-line message to get across — both to his trainees [...]

To build on one aspect of Daphne’s post, there was an interesting debate during the July 7 Senate hearing on military commissions about the degree to which it was feasible to expect soldiers on the battlefields of Afghanistan to consider the courtroom admissibility of statements they extract from detainees they take. The general consensus was [...]

As if to remind people why there was a “serious” CIA program possibly aimed at assassinating members of al-Qaeda, bin Laden lieutenant Ayman Zawahiri has a new audiotape message to the Pakistani people. It’s what you’d expect: only Zawahiri’s allies in the Pakistani Taliban represent the historic mission of a Muslim bulwark to Indian aggression [...]

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 [...]