The decision on Gen. McChrystal’s fate, the president said last night, will be  ”determined entirely on how I can make sure that we have a strategy that justifies the enormous courage and sacrifice that those men and women are making over there, and that ultimately makes this country safer.” That, however, begs the question: stay [...]

In the Grand Scheme of Things, John Nagl and I are on the same “side” of the Afghanistan strategy debate, and I hope he takes this post in the spirit of fair-weather criticism. His op-ed in the Daily News might be more persuasive to the Afghaniskeptic if it dealt with the realistic prospects for (a) [...]

Over at Small Wars Journal, two officers from Task Force Stryker in southern Afghanistan eulogize their friend and partner, the Argandab district governor Hajji Abdul Jabar, whom the Taliban assassinated in Kandahar last week. By coincidence, James Traub ran a piece in the New York Times Magazine yesterday focusing on U.S. military partnership in Argandab, [...]

I’d say there’s always next year, but the blogosphere is so 00s. At least Crispin and Roger got theirs.

Reading over a sadly-not-yet-available-online Joint Force Quarterly debate between John Nagl and Gian Gentile (yes, another! It will never end!) is Brian McAllister Linn, who finds that the COINdinista and the COIN critic are firmly within the same Kuhnian circle. This is Linn’s framework for understanding several contending schools of military perspectives: Guardians: “war is [...]

Man, Marc, I dunno about this: When was the last time a U.S. war effort was so tied to one man? An Army friend likes to say, “if there’s one thing the Army taught me, it’s that we’re all replaceable.” Minds wandered there today when Gen. David Petraeus briefly fell ill during his Senate hearing [...]

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, [...]

They’re not the same thing and the overlap is not perfect. But the National Security Strategy reflects many of the insights that the counterinsurgents developed in FM 3-24 and beyond. In the shared understandings of the relationship between legitimacy and power — with the correlative focus on the relationship between institutions and respect of rights [...]

Why is tomorrow my favorite wonky day of the month? Because the National Security Strategy finally gets released. For years, I’ve attempted to understand and interpret the grand strategy emerging from the Obama administration, and this is the long-awaited emergence of a foundational text. In advance of its release, I thought it would be appropriate [...]

Spent time yesterday watching public remarks from President Karzai, Secretary Clinton and Gen. McChrystal. Had to put together a piece summing up deliverables from the week’s Karzai visit to Washington. The two that outshine the others are both described as “processes” by the Obama administration and the Karzai government: the “peace process” to offer the [...]