Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak

Afghanistan’s defense minister, Abdul Rahim Wardak, can return home from this week’s U.S-Afghan-Pakistani meetings in Washington with full swagger. His longstanding proposal for a joint Afghan-Pakistani border patrol to curb Taliban cross-border movement has finally been endorsed by the once-skeptical Pakistanis. It’s no panacea, but it’s better to have it than not have it. (Thanks [...]

Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. troops in the Middle East and South Asia, and Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy, are set to go before the Senate Armed Services Committee at 9:30 (ish) this morning to discuss/explain the Obama administration’s Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy. Here are a couple things to watch for:
1. Benchmarks. President [...]

After being unsure how long it would take to train a 400,000-soldier Afghan Army, I started calling around to experts, and in the process it was gingerly pointed out to me that I misread The New York Times’ piece that reported the enlargement of the Afghan security force that the Obama administration will pursue. The [...]

We still seem to be a ways off from the Sons of Afghanistan. At a forum sponsored by the Center for a New American Security, I asked Abdul Rahim Wardak, the Afghan defense minister, to give some detail about how a controversial new auxiliary security force is different from a government (or U.S.-) supported tribal [...]

Speaking at the Center for American Progress, Afghanistan’s foreign minister, Rangin Dadfar Spanta, made a full-throated plea for the United States not to back away from supporting Afghan democracy. “In recent weeks and months, we have heard some views here and elsewhere that we need to reduce our expectations from Afghanistan, and instead pursue ‘realistic’ [...]

While President Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy review gets underway in earnest, several Afghan ministers are on their way to Washington for meetings with the Obama administration and Congress. Practically the entire Karzai government is headed in: Foreign Minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta and his top adviser Davood Moradian; Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak; Interior Minister Mohammad Hanif [...]