karl eikenberry

Chances are President Obama will announce a readjusted Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy shortly after the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s very likely that strategy announcement will come paired with an announcement of a troop escalation. Before that happens, however, Obama will host one last all-hands-on-deck meeting with his national security team. Just added to the White House calendar is [...]

Because The New York Times is reporting that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is now the Obama administration’s indispensable interlocutor with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Lots of gauzy quotes:
“It is critical Obama develops a channel to Karzai where hard messages can go both ways,” said Bruce O. Riedel, who helped the administration formulate its [...]

That would be former Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.).
Via Ben Smith, Thompson says the problem with the Afghanistan war isn’t the seven years that the Bush administration presided over its deep and thorough decline, but the seven weeks that the Obama administration has taken to review how to reverse the Bush administration’s errors. It’s a mystery [...]

Update: I am retracting this post, published yesterday, titled “Inside This Morning’s White House Afghanistan Meeting: Anger With Eikenberry, ‘Beef’ With McChrystal.”
My original source for the post stands by the account provided. The individual, a National Security Council staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity, has provided truthful and verified information on past stories, and [...]

Lots of blind quotes are coming out from the Obama administration expressing strong support for Amb. Karl Eikenberry. I reported earlier today that there was anger with him at the White House after the press leak of his cabled recommendations to hold off troop escalation until Hamid Karzai’s government signals a robust commitment to anti-corruption [...]

Parlor-game speculation about who leaked what and why always reminds me of a line Mad Men’s Don Draper gives to Betty when she vents to him about the infidelity of her friend Francine’s husband: “Who knows why people do what they do?” Don, of course, is incapable of telling the truth, and uses Betty to [...]

Update, 8:50 a.m.: I am retracting this post, published yesterday, titled “Inside This Morning’s White House Afghanistan Meeting: Anger With Eikenberry, ‘Beef’ With McChrystal.”
My original source for the post stands by the account provided. The individual, a National Security Council staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity, has provided truthful and verified information on past [...]

The New York Times reports that President Obama is considering sending a far smaller number of additional troops to Afghanistan than previously mentioned:
Pentagon officials said the low-end option of 10,000 to 15,000 more troops would mean little or no significant increase in American combat forces in Afghanistan. The bulk of the additional forces would go [...]

Breaking news from The Washington Post:
The U.S. ambassador in Kabul sent two classified cables to Washington in the last week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban’s rise, said senior [...]

A powerful story from The Washington Post: a leading State Department foreign-service officer official in Afghanistan’s Zabul province has resigned in protest of the war, writing that he has “lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan.” Matthew Hoh’s departure was considered so damaging — probably more [...]