nathaniel fick

Nate Fick — whom Center for a New American Security chairman Richard Danzig announced this morning as the next CNAS CEO; he’s barely in his 30s — and Andrew “Abu Muqawama” Exum are talking about their new paper on Afghanistan and Pakistan. I blogged about that paper here, so please read that post instead of [...]

“Success equals leadership plus strategy plus resources” said retired Lt. Gen. David Barno about Afghanistan. Although he doesn’t say it himself, he had the first element, as the former U.S. commander there from 2003 to 2005, but never the other two. He thinks that the confirmation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal as the new commander and [...]

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 Congressional efforts to put them in the recent [...]

Remember the Center for a New American Security, the counterinsurgent-heavy defense think tank that used to be run by Michele Flournoy and Kurt Campbell before they became, respectively, undersecretary of defense for policy and assistant secretary of state for East Asia? Several other scholars at the think tank are probably going into the administration as [...]