kandahar

As I’ve been writing since last night, the tale of the CIA’s payments to Ahmed Wali Karzai seems less like a story about corruption than it does a story about the insurgency. Gretchen Peters, author of a recent book about the drug trade in Afghanistan and its effects on the insurgency, helped me flesh that [...]

Should it really surprise us that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the suspected druglord and brother of President Hamid Karzai, is, as The New York Times reported last night, on the CIA payroll? Remember how the United States entered Afghanistan in 2001. It wasn’t with infantry and air strikes. It was with CIA operatives meeting with Northern [...]

Last month, a federal court judge ordered the Defense Department to release a 47-year-old father of two with a heart condition who the court ruled had been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for the past seven years without justification.
On Monday, the Obama administration said it plans to appeal the judge’s ruling.
Back in August, I noted that [...]

On Monday a federal court judge ordered the Department of Defense to release a 47-year-old father of two with a heart condition who it has imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for the past seven years without justification.

Yesterday’s landmark Wall Street Journal piece about Afghanistan featured an anonymous military official who downplayed the significance of the Marine campaign in Helmand as a “sideshow” and said the real prize was Kandahar. But, via Andrew Exum, Kabul-based human rights lawyer Erica Gaston wonders if Kandahar hasn’t already fallen to the Taliban.
• Taliban intimidation has [...]

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 [...]

More on yesterday’s buck-wild killing of Kandahar police chief Matiullah Qati. P.J. Tobia at True/Slant hears that the mysterious “U.S.-trained Afghan security guards” who killed Qati — along with nine of his men and the district’s senior criminal investigator — are actually Afghan soldiers “trained by US Special Forces to guard bases.” If so, I’m [...]

This one came to me earlier today from USFOR-A, the U.S. military command in Afghanistan:
There was no involvement of coalition or ISAF [International Security Assistance Forces] forces in the attack at a Kandahar police station today.
The incident was an Afghan-on-Afghan incident, and did not involve U.S. or international personnel or equipment.
And that was it for [...]

Finding that Guantanamo Bay detainee Abdulrahim Abdul Razak Al Ginco was no longer “part of” the Taliban or al-Qaeda after he was imprisoned and tortured by the groups, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon on Monday granted his petition for habeas corpus.
Al Ginco — who goes by “Janko” — is a Syrian citizen who was [...]