Lots of Twitter talk about this post on Tom Ricks’s blog about the counterterrorism/counterinsurgency relationship and Thomas Rid’s response to it. It seems like both talk past each other a bit — or would, if Ricks’s post knew about about Rid’s ahead of time. Argument summary: Ricks’s anonymous pal “Mr. XYZ” says counterterrorism requires counterinsurgency, [...]

Leave it to Josh Foust to tease out the implications of some of my reporting better than I did. Not only is ISAF re-highlighting its (apparently) civilian-casualty-free airstrikes, but it’s also letting the public know more about special-forces activity than it (I gather) ever has. Last month, Gen. Petraeus shared with me some rather detailed [...]

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 [...]

Who says hippie freaks and war hawks can’t live in mutual understanding and harmony? In a guest post today for The Atlantic’s estimable Ta-Nehisi Coates, author Ayelet Waldman writes of her experiences as the token liberal female Hebraic Berkeleyite at an Army War College seminar. And she comes away with one of the most important [...]

I’m kicking it to the new Big Boi album this morning, and in my morning news shuffling I came across this initially baffling headline: Taliban code of conduct seeks to win hearts, minds. It’s true, right? While that’s not exactly what I expected to read this morning, the insertion of “Taliban” where usually NATO/ISAF is [...]

It’s at Fort McNair at 6 p.m. and I’ll be covering it for Danger Room. Marc Ambinder and Tom Ricks have some good advance thoughts on Gen. McChrystal’s interrupted career. According to Marc, McChrystal turned down a lucrative consulting offer from Booz Allen. More complete thoughts will come after the ceremony. But whether you were [...]

Good post from Michael Cohen about people’s increased understandings of the limitations of counterinsurgency, keying off a talk from Dave Kilcullen. Apparently, Kilcullen gave a talk in New York about COIN and Afghanistan, and where he once might have said, “COIN is the least bad choice in Afghanistan so we have to find some modified [...]

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 [...]

We’re heading for the decisive moment with President Obama and Gen. McChrystal. To clarify the circumstances that either McChrystal will face if he stays in command or his successor will face — on the presumption that Obama didn’t decide yesterday morning to chuck a strategy it took him three months to forge — I put [...]