surge

I detect some snark behind the reporting here:
Obama sought Wednesday to cool that debate, staking out a middle position in an appearance with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who is planning to withdraw his nation’s 2,500 troops in 2011. Obama said he was not going to decide whether to escalate until he had “the strategy [...]

Remember how I said on Tuesday to keep a watch on what Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, says about Afghanistan now that he’s back from his trip there? This morning, the eighth anniversary of 9/11, he’s giving a speech on the Senate floor — in advance of the expected [...]

Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) didn’t win every fight, as this clip of his January  2007 speech against the troop surge in Iraq at the National Press Club shows. But what’s remarkable about this speech is how, despite the anguished and passionate tone (”We cannot simply speak out against an escalation of troops in Iraq, we [...]

The GOP nominee would send troops to Wall Street, to national forests to protect oil drilling and to Chicago to guard against Obama’s terrorist cronies.

One thing I didn’t mention in my just-published piece about Gen. David Petraeus’ talk before the Heritage Foundation today: Donald Rumsfeld was there. And it was awkward.
For starters, Rumsfeld is the most inconvenient figure in the GOP foreign-policy establishment, a modern-day Robert McNamara whose name is synonymous with self-deception, outright deception, arrogance and failure.

I don’t really have much to add to Laura and Matt’s takes. Just one quick item worth mentioning.
These two things cannot coexist: the McCain-Palin insistence on deferring to ground commanders in war and the McCain-Palin insistence that the “surge strategy,” as Palin put it, is necessary in Afghanistan.

Earlier today I wondered what Gen. David McKiernan, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, thought about empowering tribal forces to augment Afghan police and soldiers — that is, creating a “Sons of Afghanistan” force like the Sons of Iraq. I posed the question to McKiernan at a press conference today. The short answer: not a [...]

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is not the only Democrat criticizing President George W. Bush’s announcement today that the Pentagon will withdraw only 8,000 troops from Iraq by February — while shifting just 4,500 additional troops to increasingly restive Afghanistan.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said he was “stunned” by the news, while Sen. Carl Levin, [...]

ISTANBUL – It’s 10 p.m. in the lowest level of the Istanbul airport. In 20 minutes I’ll be allowed to board my plane to Kabul, bringing me to the capitol city of Afghanistan at the crack of dawn. Before I made my way down to the gate, an International Herald-Tribune headline caught my eye, for [...]

According to the latest Terrorism Focus, a useful compendium of counterterrorism tidbits put together by the Jamestown Foundation, Iraqi jihadis are crediting the surge with messing them up. The new issue doesn’t seem to be online, but check this out, courtesy of someone claiming to speak for an insurgent outfit called the Abu Bakr Army:
The [...]