nato

President Obama, in an interview with NBC News, about the timing of his Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy decision:

“I think it is entirely possible that we have a strategy formulated before a runoff is determined. We may not announce it,” he said.
There is, it’s fair to say, angst among Obama’s supporters in Congress about what his strategy [...]

Lost in all the more-troops-or-not-more-troops fallout from the leaked McChrystal strategy review is McChrystal’s own assessment of the subordinate importance of those troops. From section 2-1, which Andrew Exum takes credit for crafting:
[I]t must be made clear: new resources are not the crux. To succeed, ISAF [the NATO command in Afghanistan] requires a new approach [...]

A later version of the Associated Press story I cited on joint NATO-Russia missile defense has this reaction from Russia’s emissary to NATO:
Since 2003, NATO and Russia have staged at least four simulated missile defense exercises. Both sides say they were successful.
“They showed (NATO’s and Russia’s) missile defense systems could be made interoperable,” [Dmitry] Rogozin [...]

It went kind of underneath the radar yesterday when President Obama decided to replace the proposed outdated-before-it-was-ever-built anti-ballistic missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic with a new four-phased plan for Iran-based missile defense, but Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had an intriguing speculation about what the [...]

Remember when I reported that the Obama administration and its allies were looking to salve legitimacy concerns in the Afghan presidential election by encouraging a broad coalition government? In Paris, a meeting of foreign envoys to Afghanistan produces this:
There was a sense at the Paris meeting that Mr Karzai would remain in power and that [...]

So we’re not going to get much security news after the Afghan government demanded that news organizations not report on suicide bombings and other violent incidents ahead of tomorrow’s presidential and provincial elections. But what happens after the election is more important than what happens during it. Already questions are swirling about whether the Afghan [...]

I didn’t have time yesterday to blog this, but it’s remarkable. In keeping with his recent move to restrict U.S. airstrikes out of strategic concern for losing Afghan support for the U.S.-NATO war effort, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, is putting forward new rules of engagement significantly restricting NATO forces’ latitude [...]

Via Abu Muqawama, NATO is holding a contest for the best viral video answering the question of Why Afghanistan Matters. I’m not sure what to think of this. On the one hand, it kind of makes you wonder whether this means NATO governments aren’t able to compellingly answer the question themselves, which is a dangerous [...]

Small Wars Journal has a copy of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s guidance to NATO’s International Security Assistance Force troops on how the Afghanistan war ought to be conducted. It’s reminiscent of Gens. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno’s messages to the troops about counterinsurgency and what the missions in Iraq under their commands were. (And probably self-consciously [...]

Nancy Youssef at McClatchy reports that Defense Secretary Bob Gates has ordered incoming Afghanistan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his deputy, Gen. David Rodriguez, to spend 60 days reviewing war strategy. The task is nothing new for McChrystal, who just finished a different review of war strategy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff earlier this [...]