david petraeus

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 [...]

Big scoop from Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy: right in time for that closed door briefing to the Senate on the metrics for judging progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan, here the metrics are. I can’t help but notice in light of this post that it begins with a restatement of the anti-al-Qaeda goal that the [...]

Laura Rozen, newly minted Politico hire, posts the integrated civilian-military campaign plan for Afghanistan from Amb. Karl Eikenberry and Gen. Stanley McChrystal. And if you turn to an appendix, you can find an elusive, chimerical beast: metrics for measuring progress. Well, sort of. They may not be the National Security Council’s metrics, but the document [...]

At the bottom of Ann Scott Tyson’s Washington Post piece about Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s assessment of the Afghanistan war is a bit of contradiction-heightening from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
In an interview with The Washington Post last week, Mullen said it might not be possible to fill requests from McChrystal for new [...]

Anthony Cordesman, a highly respected defense analyst and adviser to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s review of Afghanistan strategy, writes an op-ed that has an undercurrent of “McChrystal versus the world” running through it. For instance, there’s this blink-and-you’ll miss it reference, in a section about what it will take for McChrystal and U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry [...]

Kudos to Stars and Stripes. Its dogged reporting has now ended a contract that the Rendon Group, a CIA-tied communications firm, had with the Pentagon to profile journalists looking to embed with with the military in Afghanistan. But there’s no concession that the actual profiling occurred:
“The decision to terminate the Rendon contract was mine and [...]

It really helps to have metrics when stuff like this happens. Yesterday The Wall Street Journal published a story on all of the ways in which Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s command considered Afghanistan to be in crisis mode. It was  very good, very comprehensive, and very compelling. Its headline summed the whole thing up by saying [...]

One of the most important chapters of the 2006 Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual is the seventh chapter on leadership. “In COIN environments, distinguishing an insurgent from a civilian is difficult and often impossible. Treating the second like the first, however, is a sure recipe for failure,” it reads. “Those who engage in cruel or [...]

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?

You’re not going to believe this, but Scott Carney’s got a post up at Danger Room interviewing Somali pirates on their strategies for hijacking cargo ships, complete with video a pirate crew provided him. I hesitate to even describe this because it’s such a great get and you should just click through the link, but [...]