Thanks to the miracle of timed posting, this blog suffered no service interruptions while I ventured out to Georgetown for an audience with Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the NATO secretary-general and a person whose standard-in-America-but-fairly-exceptional-in-Europe comfort with military force just fascinates me. I wish I could say that I came away from his speech and subsequent [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 133-10 February 22, 2010 DOD Identifies Marine Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Lance Cpl. Joshua H. Birchfield, 24, of Westville, Ind., died Feb. 19 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He was assigned to 3rd Battalion, 4th [...]

Writing in the Weekly Standard, Joseph Smith Jr. and Tara Ross reflect on George Washington: Yet few really knew him, despite his fame. He was a very private man when it came to personal matters. And his reputation sometimes seems to be built as much on myth as reality. As a result, America’s first president, [...]

Tomorrow night PBS’s Frontline is going to air a fascinating documentary about an Afghan journalist who embeds with the “central group” of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Taliban/al-Qaeda-aligned Hezb-e-Islami in the north of Afghanistan. (I can’t seem to embed the preview clip, so here’s the show’s website.) I’m not really sure how much I can say about this [...]

Things aren’t looking so good for SIGIR Stuart Bowen’s proposal for a new agency to integrate and coordinate civilian and military activities in war zones, post-conflict areas and failing states where U.S. resources are deployed. My new piece for the Washington Independent: In formal responses appended to the USOCO paper, two senior administration officials praise [...]

I probably should have hit this when Jane Mayer’s typically-excellent Eric Holder profile originally ran, but I got distracted, and as it happens I’ve been talking about this with colleagues. Check out this comment from Holder about the circumstances of information elicited from Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father: [L]ast week, the Justice Department confirmed that Abdulmutallab [...]

In addition to the good comments my McChrystal post generated yesterday, some smart friends with military experience had valuable insights as well. So here’s a post, reprinted with permission, from a friend I’ll call Reader C, who puzzled over Gen. McChrystal’s decision to keep open some combat outposts in eastern Afghanistan against the recommendations of [...]

Daniel Freedman has a sensible op-ed in Forbes reminding conservatives outraged about the Obama administration’s successful interrogation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (!) that their favorite president done it that way. Recall the case of plane hijacker Farwaz Younis in 1987, lured into an FBI capture: The reality is that the FBI agents who questioned Abdulmutallab [...]

This was at the bottom of this (early) morning’s daily update on Operation Moshtarek from NATO: The development situation in Marjah is progressing slowly due to ongoing resistance by the insurgents. There has been an increase in displaced persons with 542 families registering yesterday. The local government has provided assistance and relief to approximately 1,430 [...]

Jon Landay has a very good piece about Gen. McChrystal overruling his officers’ judgment in eastern Afghanistan about closing two remote military outposts that “were worthless and too costly to defend.” An official investigation into a deadly insurgent attack on one of them last fall ignored McChrystal’s role in the decision and appears to hang [...]