Aryn Baker spells it out over on Global Spin:
If President Obama’s plan for withdrawal demonstrated the unusual feat of simultaneously pissing off both sides of the aisle in the US, he need not despair: in Afghanistan he most certainly drew applause from both the Taliban, and Karzai – who crowed in an interview with CNN on Sunday that
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That’s the word from Capitol Hill as detailed in this morning’s lead story in the Washington Post:
Freshman Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) could serve as a poster boy for the new breed of conservatives who are eager to wipe out government waste and inefficiency, no matter where they find it. Kinzinger, an active-duty Air National
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We’ve all seen the airplane-sized Predator and Reaper drones now flying and fighting over Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan and Yemen. They’re fairly big (the Predator has a 48-foot [15-m.] wingspan) and costly ($5 million each). But there are fleets of smaller and cheaper man-launched …
The New America Foundation’s sponsored debate over defense spending showcased two schools of American political thought entirely comfortable with allowing American power and influence to decline on the global stage.
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Thousands of soldiers, gravely wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq, become as much as they can be through months of rehabilitation in the Army’s Warrior Transition Units. Every once in awhile a story pops up about how things fells apart for a specific WTU …
We reported on the growing use of prescription drugs by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq more than three years ago. The Pentagon is finally catching up. It wants to spend $23 million next year for drug testing to make sure troops aren’t illicitly taking legal drugs like Valium and Vicodin.
But the House Appropriations Committee has …
A senior White House official was eager Thursday night to hear from a reporter on just how President Obama’s decision to pull 10,000 troops out of Afghanistan by year’s end was playing. “How do you think he did?” he asked at the fringe of Pakistani ambassador Husain Haqanni’s annual barbeque. “Well, Mullen and Petraeus were pretty …
That’s the title of a sour but thoughtful piece now up on Small Wars Journal:
As in Vietnam, the war in Afghanistan was lost before it was begun: it is lost because it cannot be won. Again our massive and superior military force is losing a campaign to a tough insurgent force. Again we are spending tens of billions overseas, and
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As Washington debates the fate of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the 30,000 troops and others assigned to its main base — Bagram — north of Kabul are tending to more mundane matters. They’re leading the same sort of dreary lives, punctuated by horror and farce, that have defined soldiers’ lives in these parts since Alexander the Great …
The President’s decisions are more aggressive and incur more risk than I was originally prepared to accept.
— Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in his prepared statement to the House Armed Services Committee Thursday morning, on the Afghan troop withdrawal announced by President Obama Wednesday evening
The U.S. troop presence has peaked in Afghanistan at 101,000 and from here on out the Afghans will increasingly be on their own, President Obama made clear Wednesday night. The military challenge going forward is easy to describe, but tough to execute: can the fledgling Afghan national security forces — salted with corruption, …
After a decade of war in Afghanistan, the battle lines — at least among the activists — are clearly drawn. The usual suspects have been rolling out their voice boxes atop soapboxes to explain, in advance of President Obama’s speech Wednesday night, why we must keep fighting, or come home. Few fall in-between.
This is what …
We always think of “collateral damage” as harm done to individuals by a wayward bomb. But sometimes collateral damage applies to an entire nation. That’s the sense you get from Mark Kukis’ new book, Voices from Iraq, a People’s History, 2003-2009. He delves into the shards of war to see how those most affected — after all, we …
