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…
“The most important thing is to understand that before we do a military operation in Afghanistan, we really have got to get the consent of the people who are going to be affected by that operation,” Gen. Stanley McChrystal told Pentagon reporters in March, previewing his efforts to secure More…
Last week’s two drone strikes in Afghanistan rattled journalists. Didn’t Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, sharply restrict offensive air strikes? Laura King, reporting from Kabul for the Los Angeles Times, wondered if the two strikes, occurring in rapid succession, “signaled what More…
I reported yesterday that Gen. Stanley McChrystal will probably testify next week about Afghanistan war strategy. It’ll be interesting to see if he faces questions about the so-called “black jail.”
Two senior military officers from the shadowy world of Special Operations are playing a large and previously unreported role in shaping the Obama administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy, a move that underscores that the internal debate has moved past a rigid choice between expansive missions to provide security for Afghan More…
A piece in the Pakistan paper the News accused the U.S. military of taking the inexplicable step of abandoning “checkposts” on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border while the Pakistani military offensive in nearby Waziristan intensifies. According to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s staff, it’s just not true.
Today is the day. Now we wait for what Gen. David Petraeus described on Wednesday as two weeks of high-level internal strategy and resource debates to find out what additional resources, if any, the Obama administration will send to Afghanistan, and, more importantly, the strategy they’ll support.
But this More…
As I observed yesterday, one of the ways that the Republicans are going to try to box President Obama in on escalating in Afghanistan is to call for Gen. Stanley McChrystal to testify before Congress in the hopes of getting him on record contradicting Obama. (The Washington Times has More…
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