Obama met Monday morning in the Situation Room with his national security team for his monthly assessment of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This month’s meeting serves to kick off several weeks of debate over the pace of the draw down of U.S. combat troops in Afghanistan, which Obama has said will start in July.
Joe, …
My esteemed colleague Mark Thompson and the New York Times are both reporting this morning on the ongoing debate about how fast to leave Afghanistan–although I don’t think anyone is talking about actually…leaving, at least not …
The White House and Pentagon won’t admit it, but everybody else knows the size and scope of the continuing U.S. presence in Afghanistan is now subject to debate. That’s the result of a perfect storm of factors — the killing of Osama bin Laden, the weariness of the American public, and the continuing zaniness of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Many good things may come from the death of Osama bin Laden. But the prospect that thousands of Taliban fighters will suddenly lay down their arms seems unlikely to be one of them–despite this hopeful assessment by Maj. Gen. John F. Campbell of the 101st Airborne Division:
I agree with Les Gelb’s assessment that we can be out of most combat operations in Afghanistan by the beginning of 2013. (In fact, I made a similar proposal last January.) Here’s how it would work:
A little over a year ago, I visited the town of Senjaray in Kandahar Province and reported on the remarkable, but seemingly futile, efforts of an U.S. rifle company from the 4th Infantry Division, led by Captain Jeremiah Ellis, to reopen a school that had been closed and booby-trapped by the Taliban. I’ve been following the progress of …
Since the start of the Arab Spring, the American media has paid precious little attention to the war in Afghanistan and our related headaches in volatile neighboring Pakistan. But less news has not meant good news. Today the New York Times reports that Pakistan is demanding the CIA sharply scale back its activities in that country, …
Perhaps TIME’s most memorable cover of 2010 featured the image of an Afghan woman who’d had her nose sliced off by the Taliban, with the cover line, “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan.” The story was a reminder that it’s women who could suffer the most if the Taliban, with its primitive cultural mores, was to regain control of the …
The first thing that you need to know about the massacre of 12 people that took place in Afghanistan today is that Mazar-e-Sharif is not a particularly radical town. It is not Pashtun, it is not Taliban. It is so quiet that NATO dispatched the near-pacifist Germans to keep the peace there. And so today’s massacre–in protest of the …
Regular Swamp readers will have noticed that I have been on a bit of a hiatus of late. My mother died suddenly and two weeks ago. While I’m still immersed in family issues, I couldn’t watch the flood of GOP responses to President Obama’s speech on Libya go through my inbox unremarked. I received statement after statement hammering …
Rolling Stone has published a trove of grisly photos from a now infamous case of a small group of U.S. soldiers who allegedly murdered Afghan civilians early last year.
This case made headlines last summer when the Army charged five soldiers in the murders of three unarmed Afghan civilians. In a particularly morbid twist, the alleged …
By TIME contributor Mark Benjamin
Rolling Stone‘s Michael Hastings has penned another potential career-ender for a U.S. Army general. In this case, however, the most riveting aspect of Hasting’s expose on Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, a three-star general in charge of training Afghan troops, isn’t Caldwell’s possible crimes, it is the …
President Obama stops to view a generator as he tours a General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York on January 21. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)
–John Heilemann tells the story of Obama’s White House realignment at the hands of Pete Rouse and the first flickers of the re-election effort as a shattering of hubris.
–His State of …
