A unilateral step to be taken by Defense Secretary Gates on DADT. “He will announce changes to the way the current law is being enforced that make it more difficult to begin investigations and kick people out,” a defense source told me. Ahead of full repeal, that’s something concrete on the issue in 2010. Attackerlady [...]

Jeff Gettleman has a good piece in the Times about the decline in popularity of al-Shebab now that Somalis get a taste of the viciousness of that organization. I am not going to presume to have any idea how representative the sample of Jeff’s piece is, as he’s in Mogadishu and I’m not. But I [...]

I am very happy the Washington Independent let me run this headline for a post about the frigidity emerging from yesterday’s Obama-Netanyahu meeting. The question becomes: is Obama Gucci or is he Jeezy?

Leah Farrall’s loooooong awaited article on al-Qaeda’s command and control is finally available for the internets. I’m in the middle of some stuff so I’ll have to defer comment. But do check it out. Also, here’s Bob Grenier, formerly the CIA’s chief counterterrorist, calling for negotiations with the Taliban. (“…it is hard to imagine a [...]

West Point hosts something called the Combating Terrorism Center, and each month, the CTC publishes a newsletter called the CTC Sentinel that’s filled with scholarly insight about various terrorism-related subjects. Unfortunately, the Sentinel doesn’t have an HTML version, so I’m afraid you’ll have to wait till next month to read an essay I thoroughly enjoyed: [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 228-10 March 23, 2010 DOD Identifies Marine Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Lance Cpl. Justin J. Wilson, 24, of Palm City, Fla., died March 22 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He was assigned to 3rd Battalion, [...]

Hours before the Netanyahu-Obama meeting at the White House, word got out a Jerusalem planning committee let settlers build 20 apartments in Sheikh Jarrah. If the Ramat Shlomo homes were an “insult,” what’s this? What has Netanyahu done since the Biden “insult” to demonstrate his commitment for peace? What got him the White House visit [...]

The Pakistanis want it, oh baby, they want it — so good so good so good yeah. The previously undisclosed document includes requests ranging from U.S. help to alleviate Pakistan’s chronic water and power shortages to pleas for surveillance aircraft and support in developing the country’s civilian nuclear program. That is some foreign aid we [...]

Via Andrew Sullivan, check out this bit of Stratfor analysis. I generally like its approach of looking beyond personalities and toward structural relationships to explain given sets of behavior, bloodless as that approach might be — and sometimes bloodless analysis overlooks very human concerns, aspirations and especially miscalculation. I’m not sure how I feel about [...]

This post — or, rather, paper — is kind of confusing and could have benefited from some editing. But here Ehsan Mehmood Khan, a Pakistani Army (I presume) lieutenant colonel, attempts to put the (mostly Afghan, sometimes Pakistani) Taliban’s warfighting methods into an analytical framework. Khan considers it a hybrid, which doesn’t seem so different [...]