sons of afghanistan

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has put a provision into the next year’s defense authorization — which President Obama will sign today — that gives a thumbs-up to creating a pot of money for distribution to Afghan fighters who renounce the insurgency. It’s a reconciliation measure that Levin [...]

The Wall Street Journal’s Matthew Rosenberg (with aid from Yochi Dreazen) has a piece that I can’t recommend strongly enough: a profile of Gul Agha Shirzai, the “former” warlord who might end up replacing Hamid Karzai, that asks whether the alternative to a weak government of technocrats is a government of warlords.  That gloss is [...]

Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak might have been wary of it, but Interior Minister Mohammed Hanif Atmar gave a forceful defense of the Afghan Public Protection Force — an auxiliary security force that some worry amounts to a remobilization of private militias.

We still seem to be a ways off from the Sons of Afghanistan. At a forum sponsored by the Center for a New American Security, I asked Abdul Rahim Wardak, the Afghan defense minister, to give some detail about how a controversial new auxiliary security force is different from a government (or U.S.-) supported tribal [...]

Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, spoke to the Pentagon press corps yesterday and gave some indications of the state of his thinking on the war. Let’s do this listicle style.

In Afghanistan, you’ve got a war of unclear goals that everyone agrees has no military solution. But it’s also not clear if the alternative to open-ended conflict is to cut some kind of deal with Taliban elements — as increasingly-out-of-American-favor President Hamid Karzai has proposed — because it’s unclear whether elements of the Taliban would [...]

Over at the Weekly Standard, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross and Joshua D. Goodman have a piece purporting to give advice about how to export the Anbar Awakening — that is, the 2006-7 Sunni tribal break from Al Qaeda in Iraq — to Afghanistan. I guess the point of the piece is to push back against the contention [...]

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 [...]

When a policy rollout begins with a series of misrepresentations, you just know that policy is totally superawesome and its architects have total confidence in its wisdom and success. To boot, the Sons of Afghanistan tribal-militia pilot program in Wardak Province got brought up at Geoff Morrell’s Christmas-eve-day Pentagon press conference. Here’s how the Pentagon’s [...]

In October, Gen. David McKiernan, commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan expressed skepticism over the prospect of signing up tribal militias, Anbar Province-style, to fight the Taliban. Over the last several days, it’s become increasingly clear that a Sons-of-Afghanistan style approach — the recruitment of tribal auxiliaries — is nevertheless in the cards, and evidently [...]