helmand

We may not know success until we see it in Afghanistan, to borrow Richard Holbrooke’s comment yesterday, but Brian Glyn Williams writes at the Af-Pak Channel that defeat in Afghanistan has a very definable profile, and it looks like risk-aversion.
For the vast majority of troops at ISAF headquarters, Afghanistan remains an enigma, a threatening land [...]

So, according to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the strategic goal of the Helmand river valley campaign is to disrupt and deny opium revenue to the insurgency. There’s a first principle problem here, though, and one that raises a separate question about whether Helmand is, indeed, a “sideshow,” as an anonymous senior military official told The Wall [...]

One of your two Afghanistan must-reads today is this amazing Yochi Dreazen/Peter Spiegel piece reporting Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s view of the war he’s conducting. There’s too much in here for just one blog post, so you really ought to read the whole thing. A major point: while McChrystal is said to be undecided over whether [...]

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, sheds a bit of light about what’s going on in Helmand in an interview with The Los Angeles Times’ Julian Barnes. Here, Barnes asks McChrystal what the general meant by saying the Helmand campaign has to be a visible public success:
The Helmand operation was [...]

From a paragraph deep in this New York Times piece based on talks with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan:
Aides said General McChrystal was seeking to bring to his new position the same high-speed tempo and precise synchronization that were hallmarks of his terrorist-hunting days as head of the military’s Joint [...]

So after I wrote this post, I checked in with State Department contacts to see what’s on the horizon for resourcing the Marine offensive in the Helmand River Valley. The biggest piece of news I can report: lots of diplomats are anticipating a relaxing Fourth of July. But there’s more.
The two State Department and USAID [...]