IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 533-10 June 24, 2010 DOD Identifies Marine Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. Cpl. Kevin A. Cueto, 23, of San Jose, Calif., died June 22 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He was assigned to 3rd Battalion, 7th [...]

Tom Ricks, in Sunday’s Washington Post, makes a really — really really — bold prediction. This week’s confrontation between a senior Army general and the president of the United States may have signaled the beginning of the end of the war in Afghanistan. In a year or two, President Obama will be able to say [...]

The Senate managed to schedule them on a rare day I’ll working from the New York offices of Wired… Ah, I give thanks to the miracle of the internet for my  coverage. Now, sure, we’ll get hearing questions like, “Is Afghanistan half as hard as you are awesome?” But I’m hoping the Senate Armed Services [...]

An under-explored upside to Petraeus taking command in Afghanistan is the fact that he best personifies the need for Afghanistan strategy to fit into a regional strategy. Luckily, there’s Ernesto Londoño and Karin Brulliard to the rescue: Petraeus’s appointment as the new commander in Afghanistan is likely to be viewed as the best-case scenario in [...]

There’s a lot to recommend in Peter Beinart’s column on McChrystal yesterday, but this paragraph gets something important wrong: Obama’s problem isn’t that McChrystal is talking smack about him. His problem is that McChrystal isn’t pursuing his foreign policy. Well, now McChrystal is gone and Petraeus is in and the policy is the same. So [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 529-10 June 24, 2010 DOD Identifies Army Casualties The Department of Defense announced today the death of two soldiers who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. They died June 21 at Lar Sholtan Village, Afghanistan, from wounds suffered when a suicide bomber attacked their unit. They were assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 327th [...]

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 527-10 June 23, 2010 DOD Identifies Army Casualty The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. 1st Sgt. Eddie Turner, 41, of Fort Belvoir, Va., died June 22 at Camp Clark, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained from a non-combat related incident. He was assigned [...]

One of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done was to leave a hugely trafficked and successful job at TPM, an organization I loved working for and admire as an alum, and join my friend Laura McGann in a crazy scheme to launch an innovative online national-news organization. For the past two and a half [...]

Wow. So I didn’t expect Petraeus to go back to commanding a war. In light of this rather extraordinary circumstance, I’m reprinting my Washington Independent post about What It All Means and embedding the tacit message that it sends to those who wanted to use McChrystal’s implosion as a way to wind down the war. [...]

I’ve got some Bud Light Lime on my desk right now, courtesy of the Washington Independent’s Annie Lowrey. Till then, read Thomas Ruttig’s excellent assessment that the patient went terminal after President Karzai stole the election. (That’s word to Andrew Exum, who called that.) I’ll be talking about this stuff on al-Hurra at 5 p.m. [...]