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 have to admit I didn’t think he was — I thought it was lame to adopt an argument from authority against burning the Koran, but not that he was damaging civilian-military relations — but Michael Cohen makes the argument here. Now I would imagine that Petraeus is correct, but there is something deeply disquieting [...]

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 [...]

Kevin Baron of Stars & Stripes is traveling with Secretary Gates and he reports a bold statement from General Petraeus in Kabul during the secretary’s stop-over: Gen. David Petraeus said U.S. offiicals are seeing signs in Afghanistan that many Taliban members, including those at the “very senior level,” are preparing to take up the Afghan [...]

Matthew Yglesias on the, uh, middle of the end of the Iraq war: [T]he policy of disengagement from Iraq over the past 18 months has been a stunning success. Not because it’s solved all of Iraq’s problems — it hasn’t — but because it’s solved one of America’s biggest problems since the war began, the [...]

I see I forgot to ask David Petraeus an important question: Despite admitting that he has not purchased a compact disc in years, General David Petraeus revealed Wednesday that he is “an Enya guy,” referring to the new-age Irish musician. “I do like Celtic music. And Enya is among those,” the top U.S. commander in [...]

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan — I interviewed Gen. Petraeus on Tuesday in Kabul for Danger Room. In this post, Petraeus provides his most fulsome explanation to date of how he’ll structure troop reductions after July 2011. And in this one, he discloses the intense operational tempo that Special Operations Forces are experiencing this summer; discusses [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

On Wednesday, General Petraeus released an updated tactical directive that offered a fairly nuanced shift in guidelines for on-the-ground action. The unclassified bits were made available. We must continue – indeed, redouble – our efforts to reduce the loss of innocent civilian life to an absolute minimum. Every Afghan civilian death diminishes our cause. If [...]