counterinsurgency

The official readout from yesterday’s White House meeting on Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy was predictably uninformative. (”When it come to decisions as important as keeping this country safe and putting our troops into harm’s way, the President has made it clear that he will rigorously assess our progress,” etc.) But remember how I called Defense [...]

As President Obama reconsiders some of the assumptions of the counterinsurgency strategy he announced in March for Afghanistan and Pakistan, a conference featuring many of the luminaries of the counterinsurgency community discussed both the challenges inherent in counterinsurgency, including some lessons yet to be applied in Afghanistan.

No counterinsurgency leadership conference would be complete without the U.S. military’s chief theorist-practitioner of counterinsurgency, Army Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia — and this one at the National Press Club is no exception. Petraeus’ remarks in Washington come, of course, at an extremely delicate [...]

At a conference on leadership in counterinsurgency at the National Press Club sponsored by Marine Corps University, Eliot Cohen, the respected Johns Hopkins scholar who advised Condoleezza Rice at the tail end of the Bush administration, slowly and steadily built up a critique of the Obama administration on Afghanistan. Obama’s apparent reconsideration of counterinsurgency strategy [...]

A huge airstrike in northern Afghanistan has left at least 80 dead, including some civilians. The strike hit fuel trucks taken by insurgents as civilians were extracting gasoline from their tankers.
The U.S. military command in Afghanistan, USFOR-A, tweeted five hours ago that the strike was against “a large number of insurgents,” with no mention of [...]

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty got an exclusive interview with Hamid Karzai after yesterday’s presidential debate. The whole thing’s fairly predictable — Karzai lists his accomplishments in office and dismisses his critics — until Karzai slips this in:
“I repeat that the war on terrorism is not inside Afghanistan, as was the case in the past. This [...]

The editor of Small Wars Journal, one of the most influential defense policy blogs around, is getting tired of the recent nervousness about Afghanistan.
How about a novel approach at this particular point in time – give the Commander in Chief, the National Command Authority, State… and most importantly, the Commanding General and his staff in [...]

Aides to Pakistani Taliban leader Beitullah Mehsud confirm that a CIA drone strike has killed the man who inspired and led a vicious insurgency from the tribal areas into the Swat valley. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Quraishi, said Mehsud’s death is “is almost confirmed” through an on-the-ground verification process, just to be “100 percent [...]

I wondered yesterday whether and how Gen. Stanley McChrystal would incorporate private security companies into his population-protection mission in Afghanistan. A post from Nathan Hodge, who’s in Afghanistan right now for Danger Room, highlights an area where such coordination is particularly necessary: the roads.
Roads are everything in Afghanistan, precisely because there are so few of [...]

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, sheds a bit of light about what’s going on in Helmand in an interview with The Los Angeles Times’ Julian Barnes. Here, Barnes asks McChrystal what the general meant by saying the Helmand campaign has to be a visible public success:
The Helmand operation was [...]