michael mullen

Here’s the guest list for today’s White House meeting to discuss Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy. New additions to the discussion: Amb. Susan Rice, a close Obama adviser turned ambassador to the U.N.; and Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, the “war czar” who will oversee interagency policy coordination. Wait, isn’t that Richard Holbrooke’s job…?

If it’s true, as reported, that the question of the CIA’s drone strikes against al-Qaeda in Pakistan is bolstering support for the so-called counterterrorism option in the Obama administration’s Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy, then tomorrow’s meeting at the White House looks, from the attendance sheet, like it’ll debate precisely that issue. Here’s the just-released list of scheduled [...]

Not that this was in any real doubt, even after the admiral’s dust-up last week over Afghanistan troop levels with Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, but the committee just unanimously voted out Adm. Michael Mullen’s nomination for another two years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [...]

This was an extremely bad day for the Obama administration. Right after Obama’s “Meet The Press” declaration that he would not allow strategy to be driven by resources, the leaker of the the McChrystal strategy review attempted to do precisely that, even though McChrystal’s review itself states that such an outcome is undesirable even while [...]

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) read the McChrystal strategy review before Bob Woodward put it on The Washington Post’s frontpage, and among the thing he’s tried to do for the past two weeks is play up Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s emphasis on what McChrystal calls “radically expanded and embedded partnering” with Afghan forces as a way to [...]

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee told our own Dave Weigel that “those in the Pentagon who do answer to the commander in chief and have to answer for his policy decisions” aren’t “at a point of liberty where they can speak their minds” on the overhauled missile defense system. That sounded a lot like Huckabee [...]

As I pointed out a couple weeks ago when reporting on a joint press conference, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seems more comfortable with increasing U.S. troops in Afghanistan than Defense Secretary Bob Gates does. And today, when Mullen, testified for his Senate hearing to be renominated as chairman, he [...]

A huge airstrike in northern Afghanistan has left at least 80 dead, including some civilians. The strike hit fuel trucks taken by insurgents as civilians were extracting gasoline from their tankers.
The U.S. military command in Afghanistan, USFOR-A, tweeted five hours ago that the strike was against “a large number of insurgents,” with no mention of [...]

For years, public diplomacy — and its uniformed cousin, ’strategic communications’ — has been discussed in Washington like a mantra: just find the most authentic ways of telling the “story” of the United States or of particularly unpopular U.S. actions, and suddenly people will realize that they just misunderstood America and problem solved. Critics countered [...]

There was a minor controversy in April after Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, disclosed that military commanders in Afghanistan have requested an additional 10,000 troops atop the 17,000 that the Obama administration ordered deployed earlier this year. Not a whole lot got made of the incident, [...]