The presidential communique has been issued. A longer-term “Strategic Partnership Declaration” will follow by the end of the year. But the most important and immediate result of this week’s visit to Washington by Afghan President Hamid Karzai is a consensus each side will claim for two “processes”: one for outreach More…
Not a whole lot of news came out of Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Amb. Karl Eikenberry’s White House news conference this afternoon. McChrystal patiently explained that the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban are “distinct but not completely unrelated.” Eikenberry used the adjective “successful” as often as humanly possible. McChrystal, the commander More…
I was on a plane returning from Guantanamo Bay on Friday while the White House held a conference call about Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s visit to Washington, which formally begins tomorrow at the State Department. Here’s how Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, the White House’s Afghanistan-Pakistan coordinator, described the visit’s primary More…
The Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan will soon augment his team with one of the senior-most officials responsible for implementing the civilian surge on the ground. Frank Ruggiero, who oversees 110 U.S. and allied civilians in southern Afghanistan, is set to become Amb. Richard Holbrooke’s deputy this More…
The New York Times has a good overview of an extremely powerful conventional weapons system that could be fired from a missile in the U.S. and reach anywhere on the planet in an hour. It’s called Prompt Global Strike. It’s an immature weapons system, barely in development, that looks More…
Noah Shachtman got an interview with Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and asked about the likely prospective NATO-Afghan offensive in Kandahar. Specifically, Shachtman wanted to know how a U.S. military that’s emphasized the need for local buy-in from Kandaharis for the attack is More…
Deputy Mayor Azizullah Yarmal walked into a mosque in central Kandahar, turned toward Mecca and began to pray to Allah. As he reached the point where he and the others in the mosque knelt in unison and then bent forward to touch their foreheads to the ground, gunmen made
Via Danger Room, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, took a jaundiced view of the role of contractors in Afghanistan:
“I think we’ve gone too far,” McChrystal said at France’s IHEDN military institute. “I actually think we would be better to reduce the number
USA Today obtained statistics from NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s command in Afghanistan, that show an increase in civilian casualties attributable to NATO forces during the first three months of 2010 relative to the same period in 2009:
NATO troops accidentally killed 72 civilians in the
About an hour ago, the NATO command in Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force, sent out a disturbing release expressing “dee[p] regrets” for an incident outside the southern city of Kandahar — soon to be the scene of a major military offensive. What happened? As too many of these things More…
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