Word: afghan
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...military, but having a six-month strategic review is not one of them. No doubt, the President should have spoken with McChrystal more than once over the summer. The military's mistake was going ahead with a flawed battle plan that did not secure Kandahar, the second largest Afghan city and the fulcrum of the insurgency. That mistake made the six-month strategy review necessary, as did two other factors: the disastrously corrupt Afghan presidential election and a vastly improved capability to gather intelligence on al-Qaeda, which has resulted in the killing of more than half...
...that the plan Gelb laid out is close to what the Administration will decide to do in the next few weeks - two brigades, or 10,000 troops, will probably be sent to secure Kandahar city and environs, and two other brigades will be sent to train and advise the Afghan security forces. (See pictures from the Afghanistan election...
...Afghanistan is Obama's war now, so branded after he approved dispatching 21,000 more U.S. troops into battle earlier this year, a move that will raise the U.S. troop level there to 68,000 next month. He also tapped Army general Stan McChrystal as his new Afghan commander to develop a new strategy to win the war. But McChrystal found the security situation there in a dangerous decline, and says he needs 40,000 additional U.S. troops to have the best chance of turning things around. Obama's inner circle is having doubts over whether the President should approve...
...Obama will meet behind closed doors for three hours with his Afghan-war advisers on Wednesday. They held a similar session last Friday, and have scheduled a third one for Friday. "My assessment, having been a participant in this, has been that we've had ample opportunity to provide our best professional military advice," Army general David Petraeus, chief of the U.S. Central Command overseeing the Afghan war, told an Army audience Tuesday. "General McChrystal has been participating in these by video teleconference." Afghanistan, he added, "requires a sustained substantial commitment." But, perhaps more politically astute than McChrystal - who called...
...trying to explain the worsening security situation on the roads, a British contractor recounts a joke that Afghans love to tell about themselves. It goes something like this: Alexander the Great was marching across the Hindu Kush mountains on his way to India over 2,000 years ago. The Greek had heard that Afghan tribes had fierce fighters, so he dispatched part of his force through the northwest, which was supposed to be the easier route, and led the remainder of his army straight through the middle of the Hindu Kush. The commander who had gone through the northwest, expecting...