military

Interesting piece from Walter Pincus reflecting anxiety within CIA that the nation will lose intelligence now that the Obama administration is requiring the CIA to use the Army Field Manual on Interrogations as a template for questioning detainees. There’s this bit of pushback to the concept of ending torture:
Another intelligence official, who also asked not [...]

From a Washington Post breaking news alert:
President Obama will oppose the release of several dozen photos depicting abuse of detainees held in U.S. military custody abroad, reversing his previous position on the grounds that the photos could inflame anti-American sentiment and endanger U.S. troops.
Update: The Post now has a story up on the decision.
In announcing [...]

Not necessarily from the Taliban, but from a military coup responding to the threat the Taliban poses to the viability of Pakistan. Fox News reports that Gen. David Petraeus is telling people privately that the next two weeks (!) are a test of the Zardari government’s survivability. Anonymous sources allegedly familiar with Petraeus’ talks with [...]

No, not in any sort of mushy “save the planet, save lives” way. This latest proclamation comes not from environmental groups, but from the Pentagon.
Half of all U.S. military casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq are caused by attacks on convoys, reports The Washington Post. And many of these convoys are used to transport fuel to [...]

Want to read an extremely thorough response to Pakistani Ambassador Husain Haqqani’s remarks on the ceasefires in Pakistan’s Swat Valley? Over at the Weekly Standard’s blog, Bill Roggio goes off. To take one point that has deep implications for the Obama administration’s nascent efforts at bolstering Pakistani counterinsurgent capability:
The Pakistani military has been claiming it [...]

I doubted yesterday that the Obama administration would seek a return to the Karshi-Khanabad air base in Uzbekistan — the government of Islam Karimov kicked the United States out in 2005 after the Bush administration admirably denounced one of his civilian massacres — but it seems I was wrong about that. In the aftermath of [...]

After you’re done with Daphne’s piece about legal tests for President Obama’s abandonment of torture, don’t miss Jane Mayer’s interview with White House counsel Greg Craig about the backstory to last week’s executive orders. Craig tells Mayer that the advocates for the new reviews of detentions and interrogations policy who made the biggest impact on [...]

The last time I heard Gen. David Petraeus, commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, talk about Afghanistan, he was endorsing the Karzai government’s efforts to explore negotiations with reconcilable elements of the Taliban. Now the Central Command chief is putting together a massive strategy review for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, [...]

Remember how I said in my piece this morning that the Center for American Progress’s new defense report “largely embraces the tenets about the future of warfare put forth by a rising generation of counterinsurgency theorist-practitioners emerging from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars”? Or how on Tuesday afternoon, I was like, “I have a feeling [...]

In my piece on Friday about Bob Gates’ agenda in the Obama administration, Larry Korb raised the question of what outmoded programs he’s going to ax. After all, anyone can posture about defense reform. Budgetary priorities are where the adults distinguish themselves from the children.
So it’s fortuitous that Julian Barnes — no, not the novelist, [...]