Nuclear Posture Review stuff kept me from blogging this when the release went out during Secretary Gates’ press conference, but an initial report from the NATO command in Afghanistan describes an extraordinary effort in the northwestern Afghan province of Baghdis. Apparently about 50 insurgents ambushed a joint patrol of Afghan More…
The Washington Post has a great story that looks at the opening phases of the forthcoming U.S.-NATO-Afghan push to take the regions surrounding Kandahar city away from the Taliban, an operation expected to be militarily underway by June. But as Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in More…
Afghan President Hamid Karzai is in a bad mood because President Obama is too mean to him. His people ran to Some anonymous official ran to The New York Times to say so:
“He has developed a complete theory of American power,” said an Afghan who attended the
Gen. Stanley McChrystal has long made clear that the next major offensive by NATO and Afghan forces in Afghanistan, following the reclamation of Marja in Helmand, will be Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban. With Marja barely in the “hold” phase, though, it came as a surprise in McChrystal’s More…
Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the secretary-general of the NATO alliance, told an audience at Georgetown University today that “this year” the alliance’s military command in Afghanistan “will be able to start transferring security responsibilities to the Afghans themselves” — well ahead of President Obama’s “strategic inflection point” of handovers beginning in More…
Speaking of Afghanistan, the Dutch government has become the first to fall over the Afghanistan war after the Labour Party walked out of a governing coalition to reject NATO’s entreaty to keep Dutch troops in the war effort. The Financial Times:
Dutch withdrawal will be a psychological blow to
As the extensive NATO/Afghan campaign to take the Helmand Province regions in and around Marja — home to an estimated 75,000 Afghans– away from the Taliban enters its second week, NATO is emphasizing the steps its taking to provide for Afghan civilians. A New York Times report on Saturday More…
This arrest doesn’t appear to be anywhere near as important as the last several. Nor was this individual captured in Pakistan. But this is the latest news from Operation Moshtarek in Afghanistan, courtesy of a NATO press statement emailed to reporters:
A joint Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) and
Perhaps one of the only big surprises in Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s December congressional testimony was his disclosure that the Taliban pays its soldiers about $300 per month, less than what the U.S.-sponsored Afghan government pays. According to Maj. Gen. David Hogg, the deputy commander for training Afghan soldiers, it’s More…
Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has said his country must reach out to its “disenchanted brothers” in an effort to stabilise the war ravaged nation.
Addressing a one-day international conference on Afghanistan’s future in London, the British capital, Karzai said that fighters who are “not part of al-Qaeda
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