Michele Flournoy

With a new Pakistani military response to Taliban advances underway, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy goes before the House Armed Services Committee this afternoon to discuss what military training and aid in counterinsurgency the United States is offering that the Pakistanis will accept. Working with a proud and powerful institution like the Pakistani [...]

Two new Obama administration senior officials got sent up for nomination today: Phil Mudd, undersecretary-designate for intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security; and Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary-designate for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the State Department.

I swear, I thought this week I’d be writing about U.S. efforts to train Pakistani forces in counterinsurgency. Really I did. You can ask my editors. I pitched the piece and everything. Made calls for it. Then all this torture stuff happened. Will I come back to the piece? Hopefully, yeah, but if I don’t [...]

If you like liberal Los Angeles Times columnist Rosa Brooks’ material, you’re out of luck: via Mike Calderone, she’s on her way out of journalism to advise Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy, though not before advocating a government bailout for the industry. It won’t be her first government job: she used to advise [...]

The New York Times has the details of the funding program to support Pakistani troops in counterinsurgency that Gen. David Petraeus and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy unveiled Wednesday:
The new approach, which requires Congressional approval, would give responsibility to the Pentagon and its Central Command for consulting with Pakistan’s military and determining what [...]

Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) has read the Army-Marine Corps Field Manual on Counterinsurgency that Petraeus quarterbacked in 2006, and he notes that it urges about 20-25 troops per 1000 inhabitants in a given intervention to provide for the security of that population. Doing some math, he calculates that even assuming all goes well with the [...]

Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) wants to know the answer to the million-dollar question: how will we know when the Afghanistan war is over? He specifically references Petraeus’ famous half-joking question to reporter Rick Atkinson during the Iraq invasion, “tell me how this ends.”

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) asks a critical question: given the links between some elements in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency and elements of the Taliban and other extremists, how can the United States really give increased military and intelligence aid to Pakistan? Won’t it end up, at least in part, aiding the stated enemies here?

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, asks why the new administration strategy didn’t expand the total size of the Afghan security forces. Flournoy says the administration wanted first to review whether that was necessary.

Here’s Michele Flournoy, the undersecretary of defense for policy and a co-chairman of the Af-Pak review. That review “went back to first principles” — “dismantling, disrupting and defeating al-Qaeda and its extremist allies,” which is “absolutely vital to our national interests.” This is “why we have troops in Afghanistan.” And there’s a lot of good [...]