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, More…
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 More…
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 More…
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
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
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 More…
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 More…
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 More…
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 More…
In the spring of 2006, with sectarian violence in Baghdad claiming hundreds of lives every week, an officer with the First Cavalry Division submitted an essay to a counterinsurgency writing competition on how the U.S. military needed to adapt for a confusing war. Drawing on the writings of the obscure More…
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