The president of the Center for a New American Security, John Nagl, has an op-ed in the New York Daily News arguing against despair for the Afghanistan war. “[I]t is possible over the next five years to build an Afghan government that can outperform the Taliban and an Afghan Army More…
In advance of this morning’s big Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Blackwater in Afghanistan, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) wrote a diary for the Seminal on Firedoglake pushing a bill to restrict private security companies from performing inherently-governmental security functions:
If this came in any other context except the aftermath of a dispiriting, fraud-filled election, this statement from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton would be a mundane discussion of how U.S. interests in a given country have to go beyond a dialogue with that country’s leaders. But since More…
If you saw me on al-Jazeera fifteen minutes ago making this point, sorry for repeating myself. But if not: Robert Gibbs said in his White House press conference today that the Obama strategy review for Afghanistan will go on — a troop decision is apparently still weeks away — More…
Ah, the Friedman unit, that beloved Internet tradition denoting the six-month increment many pundits believe will prove decisive in any war, only to be subject to an endless addition of … Friedman units. In the course of this very good New York Times piece outlining the stakes for More…
I had some concerns that a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed from Richard Fontaine and John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security treated the fraudulent Afghan presidential election too blithely, proposing to simply work around Kabul and deal directly with the provinces. But if this More…
Politico’s Laura Rozen obtained a formal dissent filed by a senior USAID development economist, C. Stuart Callison, against the development approach for Afghanistan and (mostly) Pakistan imposed by the Obama administration’s special representative, Richard Holbrooke. Holbrooke pledged in August that he would be phasing out costly U.S. contractors in More…
Most congressional hearings bring administration officials up for a grilling. Others present interest group-backed pseudo-experts to give canned analysis. Rarely do congressional hearings present eclectic analysts who address a given policy option from a first-principle perspective to an engaged group of lawmakers. Yet that’s exactly what happened Wednesday afternoon when More…
That’s the real question, isn’t it? Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) asks it of the witnesses at today’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
John Nagl, president of the Center for a New American Security: “An Afghan state able to secure itself against internal threat with minimal external help”; one that “does More…
Rory Stewart, the Afghanistan-war skeptic who heads the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, has one advantage over his fellow witnesses at this Senate panel: he’s better with quips. Stewart compares the Obama administration’s twinning of Afghanistan and Pakistan policy to a policy of dealing with “an angry More…
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