david petraeus

Here’s the guest list for today’s White House meeting to discuss Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy. New additions to the discussion: Amb. Susan Rice, a close Obama adviser turned ambassador to the U.N.; and Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, the “war czar” who will oversee interagency policy coordination. Wait, isn’t that Richard Holbrooke’s job…?

If it’s true, as reported, that the question of the CIA’s drone strikes against al-Qaeda in Pakistan is bolstering support for the so-called counterterrorism option in the Obama administration’s Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy, then tomorrow’s meeting at the White House looks, from the attendance sheet, like it’ll debate precisely that issue. Here’s the just-released list of scheduled [...]

So reports The Associated Press. The commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia was diagnosed in February and has undergone two months of radiation treatment, which the Pentagon reportedly calls “successful.” Petraeus certainly did not seem out of sorts two weeks ago, when he delivered an address to a Marine [...]

The war cabinet convenes this afternoon for the first of a series of debates over Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy. Previews that don’t preview much can be found here and here. And before that happens, word comes from Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, that if January’s Iraq elections go without incident — [...]

Today is the day. Now we wait for what Gen. David Petraeus described on Wednesday as two weeks of high-level internal strategy and resource debates to find out what additional resources, if any, the Obama administration will send to Afghanistan, and, more importantly, the strategy they’ll support.
But this morning I heard Barbara Starr on CNN [...]

Andrea Mitchell went on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ yesterday and made a claim that freaked out former Rep. Tom Andrews (R-Me.). Her sources, she said, had discovered something from Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s forthcoming resource request for the Afghanistan war:
The numbers are really pretty horrifying. What they say, embedded in this report by McChrystal, is they would [...]

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 [...]

As I observed yesterday, one of the ways that the Republicans are going to try to box President Obama in on escalating in Afghanistan is to call for Gen. Stanley McChrystal to testify before Congress in the hopes of getting him on record contradicting Obama. (The Washington Times has a longer piece today on that [...]