While this post serves, I think, as a good introduction to the next two days’ worth of Capitol Hill testimony on Afghanistan from Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, let’s take it a step further. The comparison with Gen. David Petraeus’ dramatic September 2007 Iraq hearings may be More…
State Department officials have been assuring reporters for the last week that by January, more than 1,000 diplomats, development workers and other U.S. government civilians will be positioned in Afghanistan to help their soon-to-be-100,000 uniformed counterparts in an effort dubbed the “civilian surge.” Indeed, just this morning, Paul Jones, the More…
As mentioned earlier, tomorrow morning Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Amb. Karl Eikenberry begin two days of hearings on the revised Afghanistan strategy. I’ll be providing up-to-the-minute coverage on this blog. And to that end, I was thinking about writing some preview questions about what to look for, as I More…
Fresh out from the Department of Defense: word of the first units deployed to Afghanistan as part of the “extended surge.” It’s a whole lot of Marines and the Army’s 1st Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division:
The Department of Defense today announced the deployment of approximately 16,000 additional forces
As announced last week, Michele Flournoy, the Pentagon’s policy chief, explained and defended the Obama administration’s Afghanistan strategy this morning at epicenter of neoconservatism in semi-exile, the American Enterprise Institute. Many of the scholars around AEI have overcome their antipathy toward President Obama to applaud the strategy, even if More…
Via The Weekly Standard, a USA Today/Gallup poll finds support for Obama’s “extended surge” in Afghanistan:
A narrow majority of Americans support President Obama’s revamped strategy on Afghanistan, according to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Wednesday, but there are broad concerns that
Two new videos recorded by the Secretary of State, who’s in Brussels today for the NATO foreign ministerial meetup. Intelligently, these are released with translated versions in Urdu, Pashto and Dari (and, less intuitively, in Arabic). For Afghanistan, Clinton emphasizes — as counterinsurgency doctrine suggests — what the U.S. can More…
“Syndicate of terror” was how Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton described the relationship between al-Qaeda and the various insurgent and terrorist networks across the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a position eagerly endorsed by her colleagues Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen. Anticipating the argument that the syndicate More…
“Our civilian commitment must continue even as our troops begin coming home,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this morning about the revised Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy, reprising a theme of her testimony yesterday. She has said this for months, as has President Obama. And, for More…
Here’s a point that might have gotten lost in the shuffle yesterday during coverage of the marathon Afghanistan testimony from Secretaries Clinton and Gates and Adm. Mullen. The biggest inflection point in President Obama’s West Point speech was the line where he expressed what U.S. and allied troops, broadly More…
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