Posted in Afghanistan, Pakistan on September 28, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Some great stuff I don’t have time to comment on right now (am putting the finishing touches on a story about a Finnish ISAF soldier wounded by friendly fire in 2006):
In the September issue of the CTC Sentinel, Anne Stenersen examines why the Afghan Taliban are unlikely to attack targets in the West. Food for [...]
Posted in Afghanistan on September 24, 2009 | 2 Comments »
I’ve poked fun at Fred and Kimberly Kagan many times in the past, so when they actually come up with something worth our attention, I feel I owe them a nod. Say what you will about the conclusions of their new PowerPoint on Afghanistan, you have to admit they do get down to specifics. For [...]
Posted in Afghanistan, Pakistan on September 23, 2009 | 4 Comments »
I’ve been a fan of Steve Coll’s ever since we both covered South Asia in the early 90s, so needless to say, I feel somewhat… what’s that nice English word… vindicated by this:
The United States has a deep interest in the emergence of a stable, modernizing, economically integrated, peaceful South Asia—by which I mean the [...]
Posted in Afghanistan on September 16, 2009 | 16 Comments »
Oh please, not this again:
The preparations most important to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks took place not in training camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight schools in the United States.
This meme of Afghanistan actually, really, truly not being so relevant to 9/11 has been doing the [...]
Posted in Afghanistan on September 16, 2009 | 5 Comments »
A group of American foreign policy scholars and activists has written a letter to President Barack Obama, urging him to re-focus the U.S. mission in Afghanistan “more clearly on al Qaeda instead of expanding the mission into an ambitious experiment in state building”:
[...] We are concerned that the war in Afghanistan is growing increasingly detached [...]
Posted in Afghanistan, Pakistan on September 8, 2009 | 2 Comments »
In his FP article ”Doubting Afghanistan”, Bernard Finel puts forward 10 questions he believes one must be able to “convincingly answer” to make “a compelling case” for bolstering the Western military commitment in Afghanistan.
To be precise, there are seven questions and three strawmen. And some of the questions come close to being… well, outright inane, [...]
