troops

TWI national security reporter Spencer Ackerman appeared on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” last night to talk about his “game-changing” story on the limited number of troops available for an Afghanistan escalation. Video after the jump.

Update, 8:50 a.m.: I am retracting this post, published yesterday, titled “Inside This Morning’s White House Afghanistan Meeting: Anger With Eikenberry, ‘Beef’ With McChrystal.”
My original source for the post stands by the account provided. The individual, a National Security Council staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity, has provided truthful and verified information on past [...]

Breaking from The Associated Press:
President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday.

Combined with a recent congressional proposal to delay a troop request, the options request might allow President Obama to avoid the politically thorny question of ordering a second escalation of U.S. forces in Afghanistan this year.

Republicans put some effort into painting presidential candidate Barack Obama as an insufficient friend of American soldiers, with Exhibit A being his decision not to visit wounded soldiers in Germany. Once Obama became commander-in-chief, it became harder to argue that he hated his own troops. But the Department of Homeland Security report on right-wing extremism [...]

This is kind of some back-of-the-envelope troop math, but when I wrote earlier that Obama’s new 17,000-troop increase to Afghanistan was lower than Gen. David McKiernan’s requests for around 30,000 troops, I should have noted that about 5000 additional soldiers and Marines were tapped last year to go to Afghanistan as well. (I don’t know [...]

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, [...]

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan – Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser is the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in the eastern sector of Afghanistan, known as RC-East. That puts him in charge of an Afghan population of nearly nine million, spread out across an area about the size of Pennsylvania — if Pennsylvania were pockmarked by [...]

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan – In the predawn chill of 4 a.m., in uniform, in silence interrupted only by the morning chirp of hungry birds and a distant muezzin’s call to prayer, the soldiers of Bagram lined up at attention along Disney Drive.
Behind the avenue, to the east, four vehicles — two white trucks and [...]

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 [...]