Just over 31 years ago, a much bleaker dawn greeted Americans awakening and getting ready to go to work than was the case Monday morning. Back in 1980, the U.S. military had just been humiliated at Desert One, deep inside Iran, trying to rescue the 52 hostages that had been held by Iran for six months. The U.S. military was forced to …
Afghanistan
How ‘Operation Kill bin Laden’ Went Down
The details remain foggy, but Osama bin Laden’s death early Monday local time began with a fleet of four helicopters slicing through the night skies over Pakistan from a U.S. base in northern Afghanistan. The mission, approved by President Obama on Friday, had been set for early Sunday local time but had to be delayed because of poor …
Panetta’s Challenge
When the President announced his new national security team last week most of the attention focused on David Petraeus at CIA and the problem of winding down the war in Afghanistan. Leon Panetta’s nomination as Secretary of Defense went almost unnoticed, by comparison.
But Panetta has the bigger challenge: how to manage a build down in …
Bin Laden: How They Got Him — And What Happens to al Qaeda Now
The reports started coming in more than a month ago: Osama bin Laden was on the move, and the U.S. had its eye on him. Stressed by the turmoil sweeping his part of the world – tumult he had no roll in sparking – bin Laden was trying to bolster al Qaeda’s credibility as young people Tweeted and Facebooked about a future that …
Pentagon Cites Gains in Afghanistan
Army Gen. David Petraeus is leaving his successor, Marine Lieut. General John Allen, “tangible progress” in Afghanistan to build on, according to the Pentagon’s semi-annual assessment of how the war is going. Easy for him to say, since by fall he’ll be running the CIA in Langley, Va.
Fancy Underwear Urgently Incoming for U.S. Troops in Afghanistan
We’ve reported on the problems IEDs can cause troops’ private parts when they detonate underneath them. Things have gotten so dire that the Pentagon is now skipping normal procurement rules mandating competition, to speed up the purchase and deployment of so-called “ballistic undergarments.” The justification for the no-competition …
Illuminating Kabul
U.S. cities like San Diego are debating the wisdom of putting solar-powered street lights along their roads. Heck — that’s already happening in…Kabul, Afghanistan? You bet. In fact, Colonel Thomas Magness IV, the commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Afghanistan, was raving about them Thursday:
There is no reliable
…
Sgt. Castro Comes Home Today
Insurgents killed Army Sgt. John Paul Castro April 22 in Afghanistan’s Paktika province. He was on his third combat tour — one to Iraq, two to Afghanistan — in his less-than-seven-year career. Castro’s last mission was “a fight that occurred at distances measured in hand-grenade range, within a complex environment of walled mazes …
Chilling Tale from Afghanistan…
…will be on the cover of this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine:
“Ask them, ‘Do they understand why we shot this dude?’ ” the lieutenant told his interpreter. During their last patrol to Qualaday, soldiers in the platoon had attacked Mullah Allah Dad with rifles and a fragmentation grenade that blew off the lower halves of his
…
Afghan Allies?
On Monday, about 500 prisoners, including more than 100 Taliban commanders, escaped from an Afghan-run jail in Kandahar. On Wednesday, a ticked-off Afghan pilot pulled a gun at Kabul airport, killing eight U.S. troops and a contractor before he was killed, news sources report from Afghanistan. The officer “opened fire on foreign …
More on that Afghan Prison Break
Time‘s John Wendle has more depressing news on that jail break in Afghanistan early Monday that allegedly sprung more than 100 Taliban commanders from the slammer in Kandahar. He also reports on the U.S. military’s reaction to the fiasco:
“Basically, there’s an order out to arrest anyone walking around barefoot in Kandahar City.”
A Constellation of Bronze Stars
Here’s something you don’t see every day: a U.S. bomb-disposal expert getting three Bronze Stars pinned on for a single tour. It happened April 18 at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, where Master Sgt. Benjamin Horton collected the trio for his heroics as an explosive ordnance disposal team leader. The citations for the medals lauded Horton …
Afghan Jailbreak
Meanwhile, back in the here and now, the Taliban staged a massive jailbreak in Kandahar early Monday that spirited at least 476 prisoners out of the biggest prison in southern Afghanistan. “We do not know if the tunnel was dug from outside or inside the prison,” the warden, Gen. Ghulam Dastagir Mayar, told the New York Times. With allies …