I truly want to hear the Clipse namedrop Ahmed Wali Karzai on the forthcoming Till The Casket Drops. Until then, here’s some digging I did into the alleged CIA asset’s drug facilitation, and how it helps the Taliban. It’s been widely speculated that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, is deep into [...]

Matthew Hoh did a Washington Post Q-n-A. He takes a lot of critiques of his let’s-get-out-of-Afghanistan position, which I don’t endorse, and answers them intelligently and honestly. We should all be able to argue as respectfully as this. This, however, struck me as a wise thing to say. Washington, D.C.: Not worth the fight? Have [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 843-09 October 28, 2009 DoD Identifies Army Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom. Maj. David L. Audo, 35, of Saint Joseph, Ill., died Oct. 27 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries sustained from a non-combat related incident. He was assigned to [...]

It’s Lady Liberty’s birthday today. I was way into the Statue of Liberty as a youth — I can’t tell you how many times I climbed that statue, or just took ferry rides with my mom just to hang out at her base. So I post this poem, for my mother. Not like the brazen [...]

I never know what to make of Asia Times, but this is an interesting piece that says the plan to abandon population centers in Afghanistan is resulting in precisely what the strategy is supposed to prevent: expanded safe havens for al-Qaeda’s strategic depth. The province is now under the effective control of the network belonging [...]

Is this a widespread inference? Afghanistan has been called the “graveyard of empires.” That is some impressive IO [information operations] phrase. It makes us fear failure in Afghanistan because it foreshadows the collapse of the whole western world — not just Afghanistan. I kind of think the phrase obscures more than it reveals myself. But [...]

So about Ahmed Wali Karzai. Remember we got into Afghanistan in 2001 thanks to the derring-do of CIA operatives who politicked with Northern Alliance warlords thanks to bricks of cash. That got us into Kabul and into Kandahar. People wrote books that celebrated it. Woodward wrote overwrought accounts of it. No one found it objectionable. [...]

Time for some serious Congressional hearings. The New York Times reports that Hamid Karzai’s brother, who has long been suspected of running a drug ring in southern Afghanistan — I mean, I asked Said Jawad, the Afghan ambassador to the U.S., about Ahmed Wali Karzai’s ties to opium trade in 2007 for TPM — is [...]

You didn’t think I just spent my day at J Street, did you? In between panels I got some face time with two important aides to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki — Sadiq Rikabi, his political adviser, and Mohammad Salman, his reconciliation chief. I wrote it up for the Washington Independent. A sampling: One thing [...]

So there I was at the J Street conference this morning to hear my friend Matthew Yglesias debate my former co-worker Jon Chait about what it means to be pro-Israel. And Jon started out by defining the criteria in terms of who one thinks is responsible for the conflict, historically; added that J Street has [...]