Noah Shachtman got an interview with Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and asked about the likely prospective NATO-Afghan offensive in Kandahar. Specifically, Shachtman wanted to know how a U.S. military that’s emphasized the need for local buy-in from Kandaharis for the attack is More…
Gen. Stanley McChrystal has long made clear that the next major offensive by NATO and Afghan forces in Afghanistan, following the reclamation of Marja in Helmand, will be Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban. With Marja barely in the “hold” phase, though, it came as a surprise in McChrystal’s More…
Reuters reports that Afghanistan’s parliament quietly passed a blanket amnesty for human-rights abuses committed before the fall of the Taliban. A war widow from western Kabul named Sakina comments to Eurasia Insight that President Hamid Karzai “wants to give the Taliban money, land and privileges. [And] to me, More…
Here’s another measure of how unlikely it is that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) can actually bring along GOP votes for closing Guantanamo Bay if only, only, the Obama administration caves on trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court. Last week, Graham’s two best Senate friends, John McCain (R-Ariz.) and More…
It’s gotten much less attention than his unilateral revision of Afghanistan’s electoral law, but Afghan President Hamid Karzai is scaling back a milestone for human rights in post-Taliban Afghanistan: setting aside parliamentary seats for women politicians. Things are still in flux, and for weeks, a spokesman for the More…
[F]ive U.S. officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, tell Declassified that the HIG—which the Obama administration has billed as a less-controversial alternative to the Bush administration’s use of secret CIA prisons and “enhanced” interrogation techniques that human rights advocates had described as torture—is not being
Still no confirmation of The Christian Science Monitor’s major story about the Pakistanis arresting half of the Taliban’s senior leadership. But The New York Times has a great piece this morning about the restored closeness of the CIA and its Pakistani counterpart, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency. That close-but-uneasy More…
I don’t have a clue whether this is true or not, but Anand Gopal of the Christian Science Monitor is saying that Pakistani security forces have arrested fully half of the Afghan Taliban’s leadership — the Quetta Shura — in Pakistan. If true, that should decisively settle the debate More…
As the extensive NATO/Afghan campaign to take the Helmand Province regions in and around Marja — home to an estimated 75,000 Afghans– away from the Taliban enters its second week, NATO is emphasizing the steps its taking to provide for Afghan civilians. A New York Times report on Saturday More…
Apparently a direct result of the interrogation of captured deputy Afghan Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar:
Police in northwest Pakistan arrested Mulvi Kabir, one of the top 10 most wanted Taliban leaders and a former Taliban governor of Afghanistan’s Nangahar Province, Fox News reported on its website Sunday.
rss