Karaka Pend

I’m with Ricks–always mind the Friday afternoons on hot summer days. The official memo on recommendations post-Ft. Hood have been released by the DoD. It gets into the weeds further on, but the crux of it is here: These initiatives will significantly improve the Department’s ability to mitigate internal threats, ensure force protection, enable emergency [...]

Not quite as slick as the Af-Pak Channel, but we make do. Important pieces on Pakistan and the flooding: U.S, Pakistan warn of militant plots over floods [Reuters] Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and a senior U.S. senator warned on Thursday that Taliban insurgents are trying to exploit rising anger over the country’s worst floods [...]

Last week, Adam linked to Drew Conway’s great illustration of the Wikileaks data at Zero Intelligence Agents. Today Mike Dewar, Drew and their team came out with a new animated graphic representation of the data, showing the surges and falls of incidents over time, as a heat map. Check out those summer months–it’s like a [...]

The buzz from this weekend was General Petraeus on Meet the Press, advising a drawdown in Afghanistan based more on ground conditions than on deadlines. From the Post: Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, warned of a bloody civil war and Taliban takeover if the United States fails there. He said the [...]

Pakistan is having a really rough time. Promenient NGOs have upped their concern to urgent need, citing nearly 1500 deaths and 2000 injuries, with doubtless more to come. The UN is trying desperately to intervene, trying to corral member nations into providing much-needed monies and aid to assist the thousands of people displaced by the [...]

It was a quiet week here at Attackerman. Or something. Spencer checked in from Afghanistan here, here, here, here, here, and here. Be sure to check out that second “here.” Adam checked in with the Wikileaks kid, Jenn talked about military recruitment and the recession, and we had a little tete a tete with don’t [...]

Just as soon as Omar Khadr’s trial began, it’s stopped; Khadr’s lawyer, Lt. Col. Jon Jackson, collapsed in the courthouse late yesterday. Doctors suspect it is related to a surgery Jackson had six weeks earlier, but nonetheless the judge ordered a thirty-day recess. This is, of couse, on top of the several years’ delay Khadr [...]

It’s a tough week to be in the Army. The Afghan National Army, that is. As the NYT times reports this afternoon, an independently run ANA mission this week has failed. The operation began when the Afghan Army sent a battalion of about 300 men from the First Brigade, 201st Army Corps, into a village [...]

For those of you familiar with Spencer’s extensive reporting on Guantanamo and the trial of Omar Khadr–and that should be all of you–today’s breaking news is that his trial has now begun, becoming the first revised military tribunal trial under the Obama Administration. There are many issues that will come up in this case, not [...]

Between drought-sparked wildfires in Russia, oil spills in the US and India, and the worst flooding in remembered history in Pakistan and surrounding areas, it’s been a tough summer for the environment. And arguably, Pakistan has the worst of it, with an estimated 15 million people affected by the floods. The Guardian today published a [...]