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What better way to spend some time off than sharing a fascinating read from Small Wars Journal with Battleland readers (who are doing just fine, thank you very much, under Army vet and Time writer Nate Rawlings’ steady hand). Over at SWJ, Mehar Omar Khan of Pakistan writes of the way words are bandied about [...]
Saturday’s killing of two U.S. military officers inside the highly-protected Afghan Interior Ministry in Kabul by a Taliban-allied shooter is an apt microcosm of the decade-long conflict. The Pentagon was quick to label the killings “murder” and a “tragedy,” and Marine General John Allen, commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, labeled the still-at-large [...]
Great Washington Post piece on China’s intense desire for stability on Korean peninsula, thus the clear backing of the “Great Successor” Kim Jong Eun. Wrap-up paragraph says it all: The notion of a democratized Korean Peninsula with U.S. troops positioned directly along the Chinese border — one scenario in a North Korean collapse — is [...]
Bill Ardolino over at Small Wars Journal reports the impact the already-underway U.S. troop pullout from Afghanistan is having in the violent eastern part of the country. He doesn’t like what he sees: …in truth, the Obama administration’s accelerated drawdown of US forces has undercut a needed infusion of forces from RC South to the [...]
WAPO and NYT reporting over the weekend that the US will send around 100 armed advisers to help the Ugandan military work the stubborn problem of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a beyond-its-expiration-date insurgency that’s terrorized rural populations across four states for a couple of decades now. These guys really are the worst of the worst, [...]
Counter-insurgency is so 2007. Everybody knows that Republicans and Democrats have quietly agreed that flooding some dusty foreign land with U.S. troops is too expensive, and we can’t stomach the casualties any longer. All the cool kids are into counter-terrorism now. (Note to think tanks: It’s no longer hip to tell reporters things like, “We [...]
Astute longtime DIA intelligence analyst John McCreary reviews what happened Tuesday in Kabul and doesn’t like what he sees: Three major Taliban attacks have taken place in Kabul this summer…One such attack is a perhaps good fortune. A second might have been a coincidence, but three is a strategic trend. Violent instability is always centripetal [...]
Some old-timers speak of deja vu all over again: just as Afghanistan became the Soviet Union’s Vietnam, it could also become America’s. Tuesday’s complex attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul — reputed to be a safer place — raises anew questions about the scope of the decade-old U.S. war in Afghanistan, and its chances [...]
In the decade after 9/11, just how much did the U.S. military have to recalibrate to fight the wars it found itself launching in Afghanistan and, 18 months later, in Iraq? This week, on Command Post, we discuss the retooling of the American armed forces with Eric Schmitt of the New York Times — co-author [...]
