Bill Ardolino over at Small Wars Journal reports the impact the already-underway U.S. troop pullout from Afghanistan is having in the violent eastern part of the country. He doesn’t like what he sees:
…in truth, the Obama administration’s accelerated drawdown of US forces has undercut a needed infusion of forces from RC South to
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WAPO and NYT reporting over the weekend that the US will send around 100 armed advisers to help the Ugandan military work the stubborn problem of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a beyond-its-expiration-date insurgency that’s terrorized rural populations across four states for a couple of decades now. These guys really are the worst of …
Counter-insurgency is so 2007. Everybody knows that Republicans and Democrats have quietly agreed that flooding some dusty foreign land with U.S. troops is too expensive, and we can’t stomach the casualties any longer.
All the cool kids are into counter-terrorism now. (Note to think tanks: It’s no longer hip to tell reporters …
Astute longtime DIA intelligence analyst John McCreary reviews what happened Tuesday in Kabul and doesn’t like what he sees:
Three major Taliban attacks have taken place in Kabul this summer…One such attack is a perhaps good fortune. A second might have been a coincidence, but three is a strategic trend. Violent instability is
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Some old-timers speak of deja vu all over again: just as Afghanistan became the Soviet Union’s Vietnam, it could also become America’s. Tuesday’s complex attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul — reputed to be a safer place — raises anew questions about the scope of the decade-old U.S. war in Afghanistan, and its chances for success.
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In the decade after 9/11, just how much did the U.S. military have to recalibrate to fight the wars it found itself launching in Afghanistan and, 18 months later, in Iraq? This week, on Command Post, we discuss the retooling of the American armed forces with Eric Schmitt of the New York Times — co-author of Counterstrike: The Untold …
The 10th anniversary of 9/11 closes in on us this week. Try as you might, you will not be able to avoid it. Amid the pathos and bathos, it’s time to take a knee and conduct a map check.
Just to cut to the chase: you can’t argue with success, and on 9/12 most Americans were petrified a second wave of attacks was likely. It hasn’t …
One of the most depressing things about the Vietnam conflict was the steady stream of announcements that so many more Viet Cong and North Vietnamese had died during the prior week than U.S. troops. We felt good about that until some 58,000 Americans had been killed.
By then, we were beginning to suspect that someone on the U.S. …
Greg Jaffe had a spot-on piece in the Washington Post‘s Labor Day edition discussing the U.S. government’s notion that permanent war is now the American way of life. He captures the all-but-paranoid notion that foreign enemies are forever plotting ways to end the American way of life, as we know it.
But while that is the view of …
There is a flood of 9/11 books now coming onto the market, but Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker of the New York Times should be atop the list of anyone curious about how the U.S. government has grappled with the challenges posed by al Qaeda.
Both authors …
This week, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey published his new professional reading list. At first glance, it doesn’t seem like a big story, but it does offer a look into the thinking of the general who will be leading our armed forces in the coming years. Every service has their respective professional development programs, …
Pakistan, you may have heard, is finding it challenging to battle the friendly (to them) Taliban forces on its soil that only cross into Afghanistan to kill U.S. troops (the Pakistanis have no compunction about killing the other Taliban — those trying to topple the government in Islamabad). So it was interesting to see the …
Since President Obama announced his plan to begin pulling 33,000 troops out of Afghanistan by the end of next summer, there’s been a lot of debate over whether this marks the end of a counter-insurgency campaign and the beginning of a counter-terror strategy. Is it really a binary choice — does it have to be one or the other — …
