mckiernan

So a couple months ago I asked David McKiernan, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, what he thought of the idea of arming Afghan tribesman along a “Sons of Iraq” model. He really didn’t seem very keen on it. But that seems to have been then.
Via Noah Shachtman at Danger Room, Anna Mulrine reports for [...]

In keeping with the McCain campaign’s announced strategy of smearing Sen. Barack Obama, here’s an ad from the McCain team portraying Obama as slandering the troops in Afghanistan.
Not a word of this is true:

I don’t really have much to add to Laura and Matt’s takes. Just one quick item worth mentioning.
These two things cannot coexist: the McCain-Palin insistence on deferring to ground commanders in war and the McCain-Palin insistence that the “surge strategy,” as Palin put it, is necessary in Afghanistan.

Sen. John McCain said one substantive thing about Afghanistan in Friday’s debate: we should take Gen. David Petraeus’ Iraq strategy and move it a few thousand miles east.
Or, as he put it, “Sen. Obama calls for more troops, but what he doesn’t understand, it’s got to be a new strategy, the same strategy that he [...]

Earlier today I wondered what Gen. David McKiernan, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, thought about empowering tribal forces to augment Afghan police and soldiers — that is, creating a “Sons of Afghanistan” force like the Sons of Iraq. I posed the question to McKiernan at a press conference today. The short answer: not a [...]