That just happened: The United States is helping senior Taliban leaders attend initial peace talks with the Afghan government in Kabul because military officials and diplomats want to take advantage of any possibility of political reconciliation, Obama administration and NATO officials said Thursday. If it’s necessary to say: the fact that talks could get underway [...]

I didn’t really have anything valuable to say about Jim Jones leaving the White House, and by the time I thought of something serviceable, I discovered Fred Kaplan put it a lot better than I would’ve. From the perspective of the Afghanistan war, this is a key graph: As for future policy, many officials agree [...]

Check out the Washington Post‘s profile of an (apparently) corrupt Afghan police colonel who (apparently) gets security results. As much as the military seems to like Col. Razziq, it’s always disturbing when a solution for a complex security problem boils down to one guy. What happens if he’s killed? Or ousted? Or somehow indicted? If [...]

Abdallah Umar al-Qurayshi, a top al-Qaeda operative in eastern Afghanistan, made the mistake earlier this week of hanging out in the Korengal valley, where a NATO airstrike ended him. My friend James Gordon Meek of the New York Daily News, an absolute beast of a reporter, overthinks it a bit: But taking Al-Qurayshi off the [...]

When planning my trip to Afghanistan this summer, I opted not to go to the south. Why go south? I figured. Every reporter is going to head to Kandahar. Wouldn’t it make more sense to head east,* an area more clearly connected to al-Qaeda’s Pakistani safehavens than the south, so as not to be scrambling [...]

In the inbox, from a Pentagon briefing today: Taliban fighters in northern Afghanistan are tired of fighting U.S. and international forces and are looking to reintegrate back into society, the top military commanders of the NATO International Security Assistance Force element in the region said today. As a matter of basic empirical fact, what are [...]

After word leaked that one soldier had spoken to military police, several platoon members retaliated, records show. They confronted the informant and beat him severely – punching, kicking and choking the soldier, then dragging him across the ground. As a last warning, the documents state, Gibbs menacingly waved finger bones he had collected from Afghan [...]

Got an email this morning from ISAF. It was a press release titled “Escalation of Force Incident in Paktika.” This is how it began: KABUL, Afghanistan (Sept. 15) – An Afghan civilian was killed after failing to adhere to several warnings to stop approaching a security perimeter in the Sharan district, Paktika province Tuesday. Would [...]

Kind of a busy week for me last week, so the Afghanistan Study Group’s report got back-burnered. But now Josh Foust has persuaded me that it’s not worth my while. This is an epic burn: In a very real way, the Afghanistan Study Group blames our problems on Afghanistan—the civil war, the al Qaeda safe [...]

A couple days ago I was on the phone with my friend and occasional Afghanistan sparring partner, Michael Cohen, and the subject of corruption came up. Michael pointed me to a really pungent quote I had missed, from an anonymous Obama official in a Times story: “Fighting corruption is the very definition of mission creep.” [...]