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 …
I can remember the first time I came to Washington some 35 years ago and walked around the White House, protected from the outside world by a freshly-black-painted, wrought-iron fence. I recall doing that not so long ago. I did it again Tuesday afternoon, at least on the Pennsylvania Avenue side. But down by the South Lawn I was …
The White House has announced that President Obama on June 22 is going to reveal the way forward in Afghanistan — which, boiled down, means how many of the 100,000 U.S. troops now there will be coming home in short order. Then, some 24 hours later, the Senate Intelligence Committee plans to hold a confirmation hearing for General …
Well, it’s good to know the two Koreas are still hard at work on that reconciliation and reunification thing. This AP report from a couple weeks ago (OK, I’m a little behind in my reading…) sort of says it all about the most recent round in the never ending song of love between the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic …
Dov Zakheim was the Pentagon’s top money man when Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld surprised him by tapping Zakheim to run Afghanistan’s reconstruction — in addition to his day job. He writes about the challenges of war-making, nation-building and budget-balancing in A Vulcan’s Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the …
Tom Barnett raised some eyebrows Wednesday with his grim prognosis on Battleland on the U.S. role in Afghanistan:
It’s a dependency – pure and simple. The longer we stay, the more we’ll infantilize the system. Ten years in and virtually everything we’ve set about to create is still described as “fragile” – meaning it collapses and
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Former colleague and TIME contributor Adam Zagorin breaks news here on Battleland with exclusive reporting on the latest federal action over the infamous death of “the Iceman” at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2003:
By Adam Zagorin
It has been nearly a decade since Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi prisoner known as “the Iceman” — for …
Bandol, France
Attached herewith is an important essay on the long term implications of the Netanyahu – Obama spectacle of late May. The author, William R. Polk, has kindly granted me permission to distribute it.
Polk is one of the most knowledgeable observers of the Middle East as well as the general politics of
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“We are no longer in the Cold War,” Leon Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee at his confirmation hearing Thursday. “This is more like the blizzard war, a blizzard of challenges that draw speed and intensity from terrorism, from rapidly developing technologies and the rising number of powers on the world stage.”
USA …
A hat-tip to Defense Secretary Robert Gates for warning of NATO’s “dim, if not dismal future” unless its non-U.S. members starting funding their defenses more robustly. After 11 weeks of attacks on Libya, he noted, the allies are running short on bombs. “The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the …
