Word: afghanistans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...pictures of the war in Afghanistan's Kunar province...
...Obama has made some mistakes on Afghanistan, and so has the 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...
...weeks ago, a well-known U.S. military expert gave a wise speech about the near impossibility of making a counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy work in Afghanistan. He gave two examples. The first was digging a well: "How could you do anything wrong by digging a well to give people clean water?" Well, you could create new enemies by where you dug the well and who controlled it. You could lose a village by trying to help it. And then there was the matter of what he called COIN mathematics. If there are 10 Taliban and you kill two, how many...
...fact, most of the hoo-hah about Obama's Afghanistan strategy review has been a matter of smoke and mirrors. In a recent issue of this magazine, for example, Leslie H. Gelb - a prominent "opponent" of the current strategy - came out against the military's all-in option in Afghanistan, favoring instead a plan that would add three brigades, about 15,000 additional troops, this year. But the military's all-in option, a request for 40,000 more troops, is just that: an option. It is the upper end of three options that McChrystal has offered the President...
...President as flaccid on national security. McCain has been going around for the past few weeks telling all comers - heatedly, at times - that Obama's strategy review is essentially a waste of time, that the President has to, has to, go with the 40,000-troop option in Afghanistan. The Obama Administration, unnecessarily defensive, added fuel to the fire by having National Security Adviser Jim Jones and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates obliquely chastise McChrystal for public lobbying...