As of Sunday evening, the number of Tomahawk missiles dropped by NATO forces — mainly from the U.S. thus far — on Libya stands at 124, according to Vice Adm. Bill Gortney, director of the U.S. Joint Staff, and as reported by multiple news outlets.
If you wanted to underscore the continuity in strategy that exists for Afghanistan and Pakistan now that President Obama has fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, there is absolutely no more potent symbol of doubling down on that strategy than to place Gen. David H. Petraeus — the foremost counterinsurgent in More…
President Obama and Gen. Stanley McChrystal began their decisive one-on-one talk in the Oval Office at 9:51 a.m., according to ABC’s Jake Tapper. Whether or not McChrystal loses his command, all signs point to Obama sticking with his current Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy. If so, that means that operational and More…
Gen. Stanley McChrystal is citing these figures in the expansion of the Afghan security forces as an accomplishment of his first year in command of the Afghanistan war:
“A year ago, there were about 150,000 total Afghan national security forces,” he said. “Today, there are 230,000. That’s a significant
After 30 years of war, Afghanistan’s economy is based around opium and foreign aid. But an important New York Times piece reports that geological data indicate that Afghanistan actually possesses an estimated trillion-with-a-T dollars’ worth of mineral wealth. And that’s most likely a bad thing.
Yesterday, I cited a blind quote in a McClatchy story from a Defense Department official. It raised doubts that the force levels anticipated for Kandahar’s “rising tide” — 20,350 NATO and Afghan troops by September — are sufficient to protect the population from insurgents. “None of this makes any More…
A Taliban operative driving a car bomb attacked a NATO convoy in the Afghan capital today, killing at least six U.S. and allied troops and at least 12 Afghan civilians. The Associated Press:
The powerful blast occurred on a major Kabul thoroughfare that runs by the ruins of a
A lot of Jonathan Alter’s (extremely credulous) account of the Obama administration’s fall 2009 internal deliberations over Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy will be familiar to readers who watched that debate unfold. But this is at least a new layer of detail:
When he spoke to McChrystal by teleconference, Obama couldn’t have
Hamid Karzai went home to Afghanistan last week having reached a modus vivendi with the U.S. on the non-offensive in Kandahar. The Obama administration, the military, NATO and Karzai now speak of a “rising tide of security” taking hold over the southern city, with security operations playing a decisively More…
This New York Times piece about farmers in Marja voting with their feet is perhaps the clearest evidence yet that the “holding” phase of February’s massive NATO/Afghan invasion of the Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province is going poorly:
Over 150 families have fled Marja in the last two
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