Mike Mullen

On a blogger conference call this afternoon, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) announced he can’t support a potential addition of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. “We ought not to add troops in Afghanistan,” Specter said, adding that he questioned “even staying” in Afghanistan unless the administration demonstrates that continuing the war is “indispensable to our fight against [...]

Check out this New York Times piece about the Afghanistan debate’s latest shifts in the White House. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates are now on board with a 30,000-troop increase*, as is Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president is said to be [...]

President Obama will host this morning what’s expected to be his final meeting with his national security team on Afghanistan strategy ahead of a revision of/re-commitment to what the strategy will be and how to resource it. Attendees will include the chairmen of the military services, which means that this meeting will focus on how [...]

One more thing from that Washington Post report about the Afghanistan war game. It appears we have numbers for gauging a prospective troop increase for a counterinsurgency-based escalation, as well as numbers for a Biden-esque alternative:
The exercise, led by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, examined the likely outcome of inserting [...]

Reading The Washington Post’s write-up of Adm. Mullen’s call for a second U.S. troop deployment in Afghanistan this year, this poll figure stands out: the country is about split on the strategic importance of the war.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) may have made quite the bureaucratic gambit today by calling for an acceleration of the schedule to train Afghan security forces ahead of any new U.S. troop deployment. That position attracted the support (with caveats) of respected counterinsurgency theorist-practitioners like John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security. Accordingly, [...]

At the bottom of Ann Scott Tyson’s Washington Post piece about Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s assessment of the Afghanistan war is a bit of contradiction-heightening from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
In an interview with The Washington Post last week, Mullen said it might not be possible to fill requests from McChrystal for new [...]

One more thing from Adm. Mullen’s Joint Forces Quarterly piece. There’s a brief discussion about how the Taliban optimizes the unity of communications and actions:
Got a governance problem? The Taliban is getting pretty effective at it. They’ve set up functional courts in some locations, assess and collect taxes, and even allow people to file formal [...]

At the bottom of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s deeply reported story about why Defense Secretary Bob Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen relieved Gen. David McKiernan from his command in Afghanistan is this bit of insight into some of the value added by the 60-day strategy review recently completed by (mostly) Washington think-tankers for McKiernan’s [...]

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the National Press Club, is asked about drone strikes and civilian casualties in Afghanistan. “Don’t think in the history of counterinsurgency you can win by killing civilians who live there.” Specifically endorses Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s metric of “the number of Afghan citizens we protect … civilian [...]