Peter Scoblic from TNR will join the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, working on security issues generally and nuclear issues specifically. This is a very good thing. Scoblic knows a ton about nuclear policy; is a real arms-controller; is a smart and idiosyncratic thinker; and is a motorcycle-boot clad hesher. He was a force for [...]

I wanted to clarify the circumstances under which Gen. McChrystal’s command is/isn’t securing local buy-in for a prospective Kandahar operation, and so the general’s spokesman, Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, fielded some questions. An excerpt: “We remain committed to political dialogue in Kandahar and elsewhere: through the discussions that coalition officials have with Afghans in shuras [...]

Every DC Metro rider is familiar with how defense companies blanket the place in ads for their latest appropriation-ready swag, and Andrew Exum snaps this appalling photograph of Northrup Grumman peddling their eyes-in-the-sky tech through a victory of a bombed out apartment complex. (Or something — the caption doesn’t really make much sense given the [...]

I’m hesitant to say anything about the Thomas Drake prosecution because Siobhan Gorman is a friend and a respected colleague. Luckily, Glenn Greenwald and John Cole say what needs to be said. Glenn: [H]ere you have the Obama DOJ in all its glory:  no prosecutions (but rather full-scale immunity extended) for war crimes, torture, and illegal [...]

I won’t have anything as insightful to say about the new batch of ACLU-forced disclosures on the CIA torture-tape-destruction as Marcy will, so I will do the smart thing and defer. I just note that the CIA was not using digital video in 2002. You would think the billions spent on the agency would at [...]

Joe Klein has an absolute beast of a piece following a company commander named Jeremiah Ellis who labors to build the “deliverable” that the locals on the outskirts of Kandahar, where his company is based, want the most: the reopening of a school the Taliban closed. Along the way he battles chain-of-command bureaucracy — Capt. Ellis, [...]

I put this on as an update to yesterday’s COIN post, but then expanded it for the Washington Independent, as it’s only fair, given the debate we had yesterday. USA Today reports on a disturbing statistical rise in ISAF-caused civilian casualties during the first three months of 2010 versus the first three months of 2009. [...]

A reporter-friend came up to me at the Constitution Project’s gala before Attorney General Eric Holder’s keynote speech. He didn’t look happy. “You’re not going to like this,” he said. Sure enough. Holder’s speech was in the classic telling-hard-truths-to-your-base mold. Once the Obama administration decided to retain the military commissions, Holder became obligated to defend [...]

Gestures of respect are themselves respected. And Oren picked a particularly significant date upon which to meet with J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami.

My friend Matthew Yglesias makes good points about the realities of impunity in war in his “COIN Kills” piece for TAP, but it’s a shame he didn’t deal with the relevant body of data on civilian casualties in the counterinsurgency era in Afghanistan. That comes from the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan and it’s [...]