Jim Risen has a blockbuster story about a gift and a curse for Afghanistan’s blighted and beleaguered economy: geological research indicating the existence of enormous amounts of potential mineral wealth. The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include [...]

Via Feral Jundi, ISAF released this video yesterday in which Gen. McChrystal explains eight of his guiding principles in counterinsurgency, much of which will be familiar to observers of the Afghanistan debate. In the spirit of McChrystal’s “imperative” that the force recognized it will be judged “every minute of every day” by what it does, [...]

About that earlier post on how Obama wanted Karzai to respond to July 2011 by governing but Karzai responded to it by accelerating Taliban reconciliation? Fired intel chief Amrullah Saleh presents that contention to the New York Times. This could very easily be the grinding axe of a cashiered official. But prudence suggests that Mark [...]

A couple years ago I had an idea for a essay for some staid squarebound policy journal. It was going to be called “The Strategic Utility of Ridicule in Counterterrorism.” The basic argument is that derision and ridicule allow counterterrorist agents to contextualize conspiracy-motivated extremist groups in a manner likely to force extremists to further [...]

Read Michael Cohen’s piece on this. You can see its antecedents in an exchange we had a couple weeks ago. So not to belabor the point, but if Michael wants to know why there isn’t more liberal outrage over Afghanistan — and by which he means more liberal institutional outrage, I gather — here are [...]

Will Imboden invents a problem: [N]ow that attacking BP (or “British Petroleum” as Obama calls it, even though that has not been the company’s name since 1998) has emerged as a core tactic in the Obama Administration’s scramble to arrest their own falling political fortunes, they risk doing real damage to relations with a key [...]

Call it the Rorshach Doctrine. Fadi Elsalameen has perhaps the most insightful column on the Gaza Siege written since the inception of this cruel mistake.

Something I didn’t know about the “Axis of Evil” speech: according to Amb. Ryan Crocker, who was part of a diplomatic channel with Iran on mutual interests in Afghanistan following the fall of our mutual Taliban adversary, it had quite the unintended impact. Crocker told the CNAS annual conference that the inclusion of Iran in [...]

And she’s about sustainable American power, operating from the premise — not a normative desire so much as an assessment of emerging realities — that defense budgets need to drop. That means leveraging partner relationships and building partner capacity, more indirect action, and rebalancing the civilian and military proportions of the national-security burden. It also [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 482-10 June 10, 2010 DOD Identifies Marine Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Lance Cpl. Michael G. Plank, 25, of Cameron Mills, N.Y., died June 9 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He was assigned to 7th Engineer [...]