This report is part of collaboration with WNYC’s “It’s a Free Country” to cover the 25 most captivating congressional races from around the country.
Alan Grayson, the former Democratic representative from Orlando who made national headlines for his pointed criticisms of the Republican Party, is running for Congress — More…
Vice President Biden will probably have the last laugh now that Gen. Stanley McChrystal is returning to Washington to learn his fate as commanding general in Afghanistan after insulting his civilian bosses and colleagues to Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings. No matter what happens to McChrystal, the article strengthens More…
Gen. Stanley McChrystal is citing these figures in the expansion of the Afghan security forces as an accomplishment of his first year in command of the Afghanistan war:
“A year ago, there were about 150,000 total Afghan national security forces,” he said. “Today, there are 230,000. That’s a significant
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
For the first time, the Department of Defense has established an office to guide policy on emerging non-traditional military activities like compliance with the rule of law, humanitarian emergencies and human rights. It’s a bureaucratic change that effectively frames international legitimacy as a security issue, a reflection of the legacy More…
Yesterday, the Taliban successfully killed at least 18 U.S. servicemembers and Afghan civilians a suicide car-bomb attack. Today, less successfully, Taliban forces attacked the nearby Bagram Air Field, an extremely secure and massive base. They didn’t make it beyond the outer perimeter — where, it’s worth noting, civilian trucks 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
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…
I was on a plane returning from Guantanamo Bay on Friday while the White House held a conference call about Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s visit to Washington, which formally begins tomorrow at the State Department. Here’s how Lt. Gen. Doug Lute, the White House’s Afghanistan-Pakistan coordinator, described the visit’s primary More…
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