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.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal effectively settles this calibration of how his strategy for the “process” of securing Kandahar shifted in reaction to local perspectives:
The operation to secure the Kandahar region will unfold more slowly and last longer than the military had planned, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said. The slower pace
Something that yesterday’s look at the NATO/Afghan “process” to secure Kandahar overlooked is that one of the reasons U.S. officials have taken pains to say that operations in Kandahar won’t look like the February invasion of Marja is that Marja isn’t going particularly well. While the insurgents do not More…
This New York Times piece about a “shift” in the NATO-Afghan plan to secure Kandahar from Taliban insurgents to a focus on civilian efforts is kind of overstated. It’s true that over the last couple of weeks U.S. and Afghan officials have de-emphasized military operations and stopped using the word More…
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
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…
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