david mckiernan

The Cable’s Josh Rogin interviews Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Kit Bond (R-Mo.), who attended this afternoon’s White House meeting on Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy. Not a lot of detail emerged, but this is Bond’s takeaway:
Obama pledged not to return to a counterterrorism approach, where troops “shoot and then fall back to the base,” Bond said.
Obama told [...]

There were lots of signals from Defense Secretary Bob Gates at his press conference today. I didn’t want to let my imagination run away with me, but his body language was tight and his face looked tired. He looked like he had to make precisely the kind of momentous decision that he does, as it [...]

At the bottom of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s deeply reported story about why Defense Secretary Bob Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen relieved Gen. David McKiernan from his command in Afghanistan is this bit of insight into some of the value added by the 60-day strategy review recently completed by (mostly) Washington think-tankers for McKiernan’s [...]

So reports Barbara Starr. Gen. Stanley McChrystal has already come to the conclusion that there are too few Afghan forces, and they’re, ultimately, the ballgame. So: what to make of all this?

Does President Obama really want to make this argument for why he’s flip-flopping on the release of the torture photographs:
I want to emphasize that these photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib …
I haven’t seen the photographs, of [...]

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) cut through the pleasantries. How can Ambassador Richard Holbrooke be sure that the troop buildup in Afghanistan wouldn’t “escalate, rather than diminish the threat” by pushing insurgents eastward into Pakistan?
If this were the Bush administration — and Peter Feaver can disagree with me here — an emissary would have denied Feingold’s [...]

One more thing really quickly about Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s ascension to commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. On Friday, I blogged about changes in the command structure in Afghanistan emanating from, among other places, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s review of Afghanistan strategy. What I should have noted, in retrospect, is [...]

If you want a sign of how thoroughly Gen. David Petraeus is taking command of the Afghanistan war, look no further than today’s surprise news that Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who ran special operations in Iraq for Petraeus during the 2007 troop surge, will be the new ground commander. McChrystal is known as one of [...]

To adapt, clumsily, one of the more memorable quips of what used to be called the War on Terror: in Afghanistan, we set up the military command structure that we can, and in Iraq, we set up the military command structure that we must. Except maybe not anymore. (You see that piece of writing right [...]

Whatever you do, don’t miss The New York Times’ epic interview with a Pakistani Taliban tactician about what has become “a seamless conflict” on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The tactician is based out of Wana, in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but spends much of his time focused on Afghanistan. His superiors, for [...]