I read The Times’ piece about Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar’s arrest and kept getting tripped up by all the Pakistani officials quoted and paraphrased in a state of outrage that they weren’t invited to any negotiations with the Taliban. (“On the one hand, the Americans don’t want us to More…
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty got an exclusive interview with Hamid Karzai after yesterday’s presidential debate. The whole thing’s fairly predictable — Karzai lists his accomplishments in office and dismisses his critics — until Karzai slips this in:
“I repeat that the war on terrorism is not inside Afghanistan, as
More from Gen. McChrystal’s interview with The Los Angeles Times’ Julian Barnes. Barnes asks McChrystal if there’s an opportunity to get members of the Taliban’s coalition to lay down arms:
There absolutely is and I don’t think it is necessarily not possible with the Taliban. Most of the fighters
Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal expressed skepticism about the prospects for both cleaving al-Qaeda from the Taliban and for reincorporating the Taliban within the Afghan government. “I don’t think the Taliban have any reason to turn their back on al-Qaeda,” he told Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), saying it “might be easier More…
PBS’ Margaret Warner is in Afghanistan and interviewed President Hamid Karzai for last night’s edition of the NewsHour. The interview showed a disjointed performance — the 17,000 additional troops ordered to Afghanistan by President Obama are seven years “too late” but he “welcomes” their presence anyway — especially when More…
What’s going on with the Afghanistan insurgent-reconciliation process? Last month, the Kabul government seemed disinclined to deal with the leadership of the insurgency, including the Taliban’s Quetta Shura and key factional chiefs like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaleddin Haqqani. But now the Christian Science Monitor’s Anand Gopal reports More…
Afghan Ambassador Said Jawad doesn’t like people saying candidly that his government and its NATO partners aren’t winning the war against the Taliban-led insurgency, but there’s little other way to describe this anecdote, reported in an excellent piece from The Washington Post on Sunday about southern Afghanistan:
When
Reading President Obama’s endorsement of reconciliation efforts with the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan, I wondered the other day whether the U.S. military would repeat its efforts in Iraq and seek to cut deals with particular insurgent outfits independent of the national government. At yesterday’s Pentagon briefing, a reporter More…
Obama to The New York Times:
Mr. Obama said on the campaign trail last year that the possibility of breaking away some elements of the Taliban “should be explored,” an idea also considered by some military leaders. But now he has started a review
Counterinsurgency made-man Dave Kilcullen — you remember him: counterinsurgency adviser to David Petraeus and Condoleezza Rice — has expressed skepticism about negotiating with the Taliban in the past. But that may have been a definitional issue, whereby ‘Taliban’ works as a stand-in for ‘Afghan insurgency.’ Because in More…
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