Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy wasn’t the only Obama administration official who addressed the American Enterprise Institute this morning. She was joined by Paul Jones, Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke’s deputy at the State Department, and Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, the head of the More…
As announced last week, Michele Flournoy, the Pentagon’s policy chief, explained and defended the Obama administration’s Afghanistan strategy this morning at epicenter of neoconservatism in semi-exile, the American Enterprise Institute. Many of the scholars around AEI have overcome their antipathy toward President Obama to applaud the strategy, even if More…
I wrote in my earlier post about Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy’s forthcoming Afghanistan speech at the American Enterprise Institute that I was going to try hard not to read anything into her speech to the neoconservative hothouse. And I did try. But apparently not hard enough. More…
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy, one of the Obama administration’s most influential officials shaping Afghanistan-Pakistan policy, will give a talk on Monday at the American Enterprise Institute elaborating on President Obama’s speech and adjusted strategy. It’s hard not to read too much into this, but I’ll try More…
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 More…
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 More…
An interview with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is slated to air on the NewsHour tonight and, according to an early transcript, here’s what she says in reaction to the McChrystal strategy review leak:
HILLARY CLINTON: I mean one of the points that the President has made continuously since
At noon today. Laura Rozen reports:
Scheduled to brief members: Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy; Holbrooke deputy Paul Jones; the ODNI’s Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and South Asia expert Dr. Peter Lavoy; NSC holdover “war czar” Ltn. Gen. Douglas Lute; and Joint Chiefs of
After initially promising to come up with benchmarks for judging the success or shortcomings of its Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy — the term preferred by the administration, I understand, is “metrics,” which I’m cool with — the Obama administration has yet to come up with any, and has resisted More…
A program that the Obama administration calls crucial to Pakistan’s fight against the Taliban is being criticized at the State Department and on Capitol Hill for overly militarizing the problem.
The dispute represents an early rift with some progressive members of Congress over discrepancies between the administration’s broad foreign policy More…
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