A lot of Jonathan Alter’s (extremely credulous) account of the Obama administration’s fall 2009 internal deliberations over Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy will be familiar to readers who watched that debate unfold. But this is at least a new layer of detail:
When he spoke to McChrystal by teleconference, Obama couldn’t have
Hamid Karzai went home to Afghanistan last week having reached a modus vivendi with the U.S. on the non-offensive in Kandahar. The Obama administration, the military, NATO and Karzai now speak of a “rising tide of security” taking hold over the southern city, with security operations playing a decisively More…
The presidential communique has been issued. A longer-term “Strategic Partnership Declaration” will follow by the end of the year. But the most important and immediate result of this week’s visit to Washington by Afghan President Hamid Karzai is a consensus each side will claim for two “processes”: one for outreach More…
The leak I got yesterday from Kandahar expressing skepticism that counterinsurgency can bring the nine-year war in Afghanistan to a successful conclusion has inspired another one. This time, a former CIA counterterrorism operative who has served on the ground in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq agreed to pass along a More…
The commanding general of NATO forces in Afghanistan repeatedly used the word “process” in a Pentagon press briefing to describe the gradual and ongoing movement of arriving forces into Kandahar, the next big contest of the Afghanistan war. The Taliban “certainly do not control Kandahar city,” Gen. Stanley McChrystal said. More…
At the White House this afternoon, Presidents Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai committed themselves to a “long-term partnership,” in Obama’s words, “that is not simply defined by our military presence.” Both expressed confidence in the ultimate success of a war in its More…
Noah Shachtman got an interview with Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and asked about the likely prospective NATO-Afghan offensive in Kandahar. Specifically, Shachtman wanted to know how a U.S. military that’s emphasized the need for local buy-in from Kandaharis for the attack is More…
Deputy Mayor Azizullah Yarmal walked into a mosque in central Kandahar, turned toward Mecca and began to pray to Allah. As he reached the point where he and the others in the mosque knelt in unison and then bent forward to touch their foreheads to the ground, gunmen made
“The most important thing is to understand that before we do a military operation in Afghanistan, we really have got to get the consent of the people who are going to be affected by that operation,” Gen. Stanley McChrystal told Pentagon reporters in March, previewing his efforts to secure More…
USA Today obtained statistics from NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s command in Afghanistan, that show an increase in civilian casualties attributable to NATO forces during the first three months of 2010 relative to the same period in 2009:
NATO troops accidentally killed 72 civilians in the
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