Afghanistan

The Gitmo Files

As if the Obama Administration’s inability to shutter Guantanamo Bay despite its pledge to do so weren’t bad enough, now it has to deal with a torrent of classified documents about the Cuban detainee prison and its 779 inmates.

Here’s what the 700 documents say, in a nutshell:

Overdosing on `Tea’

Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post has an essay in Sunday’s paper explaining how he thinks the U.S. military got snookered by Greg Mortenson, author of the now-controversial Three Cups of Tea. But in the Philadelphia Inquirer, foreign-affairs columnist Trudy Rubin prefers to accentuate the positive.

The Predator Feud Drones On

A peek inside the tensions between Islamabad and Washington over the CIA’s use of armed Predator drones over Pakistan to take out Taliban operatives in safe havens along the Af-Pak frontier, from Time’s Omar Waraich in the Pakistani capital.

Mullen Talks Tougher in Pakistan

Usually when Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talks, it’s reported as “commenting” or “remarks.” But Wednesday he let the Pakistani military and its Inter-Services Intelligence unit know that their cozy relationship with the Haqqani terrorist network threatens relations between the two countries. The local …

Chilling Report From Afghanistan

A Taliban suicide bomber reached deep into the Afghan defense ministry Monday — one of the most secure buildings in the country — before he was discovered, The Long War Journal reports.

The bomber reached the third floor of the Ministry of Defense and came close to the Afghan defense minister’s inner circle. He was stopped by Afghan

Up-armored Jock Straps

We reported a month ago on the epidemic of wounds to soldiers’ private parts in Afghanistan when IEDs detonate beneath them. To help deal with the problem, the Army is now sending titanium athletic cups out with the troops, according to USA Today.

Pentagon Journalism Review

Kind of sweet that just as Columbia University was announcing this year’s crop of Pulitzer Prize winners, the Pentagon inspector general was saying the Rolling Stone piece that led to the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal nearly a year ago didn’t pass muster with Defense Department editors. The IG concluded that there was …

Four Strikes

Cory Provus, a Milwaukee Brewers baseball team broadcaster (since when did that become a position on the diamond?) recently visited troops recuperating at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in D.C.:

We met one young soldier from Staten Island, NY, that [hey — he’s a broadcaster] lost all 4 limbs while in Afghanistan. But there he was

Tempest in a Teapot

Greg Mortenson and his book, Three Cups of Tea, may literally be, alas, a parable, or perhaps a fable, for the modern age. Now that 60 Minutes has asserted that his accounts of his days in deepest Pakistan were fabricated or exaggerated, there are the denials from the author and the bitter aftertaste of another idol smashed.

Of …

Damn.

If you read enough stories of war and mayhem, your eyes tend to roll along from start to finish (assuming you get that far). But every once in awhile you’re stopped cold by a sentence, like this one. What brings you up short is that it surfaces without warning in the middle of a pretty positive story, kind of a reader’s IED. This one …

  1. 1
  2. ...
  3. 30
  4. 31
  5. 32
  6. 33
  7. Next