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After Petraeus Paid Them For Peace, Are Sunnis of Anbar Now Paid by Bandar...
Iraq has been seeping back into the headlines lately, as civilian deaths there have now reached a level last seen in 2008. What is striking about this increase is that it did not occur until almost 18...
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Lindsey Graham and John McCain: Hypocrisy Tourists in Kabul
Today’s New York Times dutifully bleats to us that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been “warned” over his plan to release 88 prisoners from the Detention Facility in Parwan over the objections of the...
View ArticleUS Stumbling Toward Exit From Afghanistan
Hamid Karzai continues his expert gamesmanship in his dealing with the US, forcing deadline after deadline to be abandoned in the US effort to get him to sign the Bilateral Security Agreement that...
View ArticleLatest Night Raid Afghan Civilian Deaths Put BSA into Further Doubt
Back in October, I noted that one of Hamid Karzai’s primary barriers to signing the Bilateral Security Agreement is his objection to night raids carried out by US-trained death squads because of the...
View ArticleDoes the Military Have a New Goal of Hanging Afghanistan Failure on Obama?
On Monday, I could only reply with the Twitter equivalent of uncontrolled laughter when Robert Caruso tweeted a quote from Stanley McChrystal, who was appearing on Morning Joe to hype the paperback...
View ArticleYou Can’t Spread Justice in an Insecure Country
Back in July, SIGAR noted that $50 million in US funds had been awarded in a sole source contract secured only by a short letter of agreement between the Department of State and the contractor, the...
View ArticleIs Sharif Making a Play for Counterterrorism Funds US Cut from Afghanistan...
Back in early November, the US carried out one of its most controversial drone strikes in Pakistan, killing TTP head Hakimullah Mehsud just hours before peace talks between the TTP and Pakistan were to...
View ArticleThe Unspeakable Tragedy of Homeless Drones
Yesterday, I speculated on whether Pakistan’s Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was turning his back on his campaign promise of peace talks with the Taliban so that he could seek US counterterrorism funds...
View ArticleUS Doubles Down on “Crazy Karzai” Meme
As the US military bumbles and stumbles toward an ignominious exit from Afghanistan that is looking more and more like it will follow the script from the Iraq exit, it appears that the final ploy from...
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Shuttle Diplomats Are Better Than Shuttle War Mongers
Top: shuttle diplomats Ahtisaari, Annan and Zedillo. Bottom: shuttle war mongers Barrasso, Graham and McCain. Today’s Washington Post carries a story that is quite unlike their usual coverage that...
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Public Finally Realizes Military Failed in Iraq & Afghanistan, But Will...
At long last, after over twelve years of war in Afghanistan and nearly eleven years since the invasion of Iraq, the majority of citizens in the US admit that the vaunted US military failed to achieve...
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Afghanistan, Pakistan Peace Talks With Taliban Continuously Marred by...
For both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the prospect of a future not marred by terrorist attacks is a strong incentive to explore peace talks with the Taliban groups that have fueled the bulk of the...
View ArticleMike Rogers Throws Tantrum Over Obama’s Drone Policy
It seems that Mike Rogers lately is aiming to take over the Emptywheel blog. When he’s not yapping about criminalizing journalism or dissembling about Congressional briefings on the Patriot Act...
View ArticleBreaking: Four Senators Rediscover Congress Has Oversight Role for Committing...
Don’t look for this important bit of news in the New York Times or Washington Post. At least at the time I started writing this, they hadn’t noticed that Senators Jeff Merkley, (D-OR), Mike Lee (R-UT),...
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Civilian Casualties Rise Yet Again in Afghanistan, Confirming Surge Failure
Click on image for a larger view. The United Nations is the best source of information on the impact of the war in Afghanistan on civilians. They released their latest data this weekend (pdf), and...
View ArticleUS Decries Rule of Law in Afghanistan While Calling for Overruling Afghan...
Without a single hint of awareness of the irony involved, the US military yesterday released a statement decrying Afghanistan’s decision calling for the imminent release of 65 prisoners held at the...
View ArticlePeace Talks Prove Fatal for Yet Another Participant
Earlier this week, I noted that a ranking member of Afghanistan’s Taliban, Abdul Raqib, was gunned down in Peshawar, Pakistan. It turns out that Raqib wasn’t just any Taliban leader, though. He had in...
View ArticleAfghan Army Post in Kunar Province Overrun by Taliban, 21 Killed
In the worst attack in at least six months, Taliban fighters overran an Afghan army base in Kunar province near the Pakistan border, killing 21 Afghan soldiers who were said to have been sleeping at...
View ArticleIs John Brennan Shaping Pakistan’s New Counterterrorism Program?
There are now multiple reports (one of the earliest is here) that while the world was concentrating on a number of pressing developments in the Ukraine and elsewhere last week, John Brennan slipped...
View ArticlePreparations Underway for Zero Option in Afghanistan
As I posited yesterday, Pakistan appears to be putting together a US-style counterterrorism structure. This morning, we see even stronger hints that a full-blown military offensive against the Taliban...
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