So far, this Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Afghanistan is less about Kandahar and more about parsing what President Obama meant when he established July 2011 as an “inflection point” for beginning a transition to Afghan security.
Trying to clarify after yesterday’s initial back-and-forth with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), More…
According to an early-morning press release from ISAF, the NATO force in Afghanistan, Afghan troops supported by NATO forces have concluded a “five-day operation” north of Kandahar city that sounds major:
Directly contributing to the ongoing efforts of Hamkari security operations in Kandahar City and nearby districts, the five-day operation
Today’s now-postponed Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Afghanistan was overshadowed by Gen. David Petraeus’s brief but frightening loss of consciousness. But before Petraeus momentarily took ill about 45 minutes into the hearing, he and Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, made a vigorous case that training More…
I wasn’t able to make the Senate Armed Services Committee’s hearing this morning on Afghanistan owing to another commitment, so I had to catch the webcast. And a few minutes ago, right after Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the ranking Republican on the panel, called witness Gen. David Petraeus one of More…
Gen. Stanley McChrystal is citing these figures in the expansion of the Afghan security forces as an accomplishment of his first year in command of the Afghanistan war:
“A year ago, there were about 150,000 total Afghan national security forces,” he said. “Today, there are 230,000. That’s a significant
Gen. Stanley McChrystal effectively settles this calibration of how his strategy for the “process” of securing Kandahar shifted in reaction to local perspectives:
The operation to secure the Kandahar region will unfold more slowly and last longer than the military had planned, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said. The slower pace
To build out a theme from the previous post, it’s noteworthy how the National Security Strategy draws on conceptions of military power developed over the last few years by the theorist-practitioners of counterinsurgency in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Before 2006, counterinsurgency was an apocryphal focus of study by More…
Mark Mazzetti has a blockbuster piece in today’s New York Times about a secret order issued by Gen. David Petraeus last fall, with the aid of Adm. Eric Olson, that authorizes Special Operations Forces in the Middle East and South Asia to “fill intelligence gaps about terror organizations and other More…
Glenn Beck-like, I put my head in my hands over the sheer lunacy expressed by the much-disgraced former New York Democratic congressman:
• Earlier in the year, long before the allegations had been made public, Massa had called me with a potentially huge story: Four retired generals — three
From a U.S. Central Command press release:
The United States government delivered two Bell 412 EP helicopters to the Government of Pakistan today to assist the Pakistan military in its counterinsurgency efforts.
U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Michael Nagata handed over the helicopters to Brig. Gen. Tippu Karim, 101 Army
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