I have to go meet a friend of mine to celebrate his birthday, so this is going to have to be shorter than I’d like — I’ll expand later — but take a look at this Pentagon briefing with British Maj. Gen. Nick Patrick Carter, the commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan. Carter’s briefing [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 117-10 February 18, 2010 DOD Identifies Navy Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a sailor who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Petty Officer 1st Class Sean L. Caughman, 43, of Fort Worth, Texas, died Feb. 16, while supporting operations in Kuwait. Caughman was assigned to Naval Mobile Construction [...]

Maybe things aren’t as dire as this post suggested. Thompson, a longtime right-of-center defense wonk, writes the following: Had it not been for the Bush Administration’s ill-conceived war in Iraq, Barack Obama would not be President today. He bested his other Democratic rivals to win the nomination and then went on to defeat Republican nominee [...]

Continuing on the themes of the previous post, I see this was part of Austin attempted-murder-pilot Joseph Stack’s “manifesto”: I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs [...]

Consider: A software engineer furious with the Internal Revenue Service plowed his small plane into an office building housing nearly 200 federal tax employees on Thursday, officials said, setting off a raging fire that sent workers fleeing as thick plumes of black smoke poured into the air. A U.S. law official identified the pilot as [...]

So over the past several weeks the Obama administration has successfully interrogated Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab without torturing him — something Dick Cheney simply can’t contemplate — and will try him in a federal court, where he’s sure to be convicted. Then it continued to launch missile strikes in Yemen (not that that’s such a good [...]

David Rohde reviews two recent books on the Taliban (neither of which I’ve read; but the review reminds me to order the Zaeef memoir that Alex Strick van Linschoten assisted on) and his warning would have sounded a whole lot more dire if the review was published last week: [T[he books leave the reader to [...]

One of my oldest and best friends, Colin Asher, an award-winning reporter who mostly focuses on poverty issues, has a piece in the American Prospect about tactical shifts being considered by the anti-Afghanistan war movement to get its message out. This struck me as most significant: The recession, Obama’s weakest point, is the movement’s strongest. [...]

Apparently it wasn’t the artillery system that malfunctioned, it was human error. I defer to artillery experts, but why would you put this system back in the fight if the combination of it and faulty intelligence (or what-have-you) led to 12 civilian deaths? This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder if Gen. [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 116-10 February 17, 2010 DOD Identifies Marine Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Lance Cpl. Noah M. Pier, 25, of Charlotte, N.C., died Feb. 16 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He was assigned to 1st Battalion, 3rd [...]