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 More…
Check out The New York Times’ tick-tock of how the Obama team came to its Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy. Two observations.
One, Vice President Joe Biden is described as the voice of “caution.” But that appears to be cashed out in terms of Biden urging a clearer, al-Qaeda-based objective for More…
Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, did an interview yesterday with Margaret Warner of the NewsHour. He didn’t really say anything unexpected — the war is “winnable” but not in strictly-military terms; security in Afghanistan is inextricable from security in Pakistan; he thinks the More…
Afghan Ambassador Said Jawad doesn’t like people saying candidly that his government and its NATO partners aren’t winning the war against the Taliban-led insurgency, but there’s little other way to describe this anecdote, reported in an excellent piece from The Washington Post on Sunday about southern Afghanistan:
When
Via Abu Muqawama, let’s presume for the sake of argument that we know everything we need to know about the Obama administration’s forthcoming shift in Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy from this report from the Associated Press:
The U.S. goal in Afghanistan must be to protect Kabul’s fragile government from collapsing
Reading President Obama’s endorsement of reconciliation efforts with the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan, I wondered the other day whether the U.S. military would repeat its efforts in Iraq and seek to cut deals with particular insurgent outfits independent of the national government. At yesterday’s Pentagon briefing, a reporter More…
Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, spoke to the Pentagon press corps yesterday and gave some indications of the state of his thinking on the war. Let’s do this listicle style.
A U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan’s Herat Province yesterday killed an insurgent leader named Ghulam Yahya Akbari. Today, the U.S. military command in Afghanistan sent out a press release about the steps that U.S. and Afghan officials are taking to respond to reports of Afghan civilian casualties. U.S. troops are More…
He promised to do so on the campaign trail, and now he’s done it: President Obama has approved a troop increase to Afghanistan. His just-released statement is below. Notice that the forces approved appear to be less than the 20,000-30,000 troops requested by Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. More…
I noticed last week that the Afghan Defense Minister, Ahdul Rahim Wardak, and the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, signed an accord to better integrate military planning in the war effort. It was unclear to me, though, where the cooperation would take place More…
rss