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 [...]

Just back from a very quick jaunt to Chicago for friends’ wedding. (Very beautiful. Though as the evening went on, a bizarre mixture of the civil liberties community partying in post-Islamic Revolution Tehran could be gleaned.) What’d I miss? Not a lot, it would seem, but today Gen. Petraeus took command of the Afghanistan war. [...]

Jason Sigger reaches into my brain, steals a framing I’ve been struggling to come up with, and articulates it with a clarity that’s escaped me: al Qaeda’s presence in Pakistan makes a good basis for the case to support Pakistan in its counterinsurgency issues (which are deep-rooted in twisted history, admittedly). Who says we need 100,000 combat [...]

From the perspective of journalism, this Mark Perry piece in Foreign Policy isn’t exactly out of bounds, but there’s chalk on its spikes. It’s about a “red team” intelligence group in U.S. Central Command wrote a deliberately provocative piece thinking through the implications of U.S. military strategy in the Middle East not having anything to [...]

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 [...]

Wow. So I didn’t expect Petraeus to go back to commanding a war. In light of this rather extraordinary circumstance, I’m reprinting my Washington Independent post about What It All Means and embedding the tacit message that it sends to those who wanted to use McChrystal’s implosion as a way to wind down the war. [...]

Eli Lake reports that Pakistan desires more helicopters than, apparently the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Contingency Fund the U.S. established last year. The helicopters, they say, will support a “silent surge” of “more than 100,000 troops into the mountain lairs of al Qaeda’s senior leadership in the country’s Northwest Frontier Province.” In other words, exactly what the [...]

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 [...]

Torture enthusiast and perpetual infant Alan Dershowitz wants to attack J Street as anti-Israel because it believes in the end of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. He tries to triangulate J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami against Gen. Petraeus. He fails very badly and very predictably. The substance of Dershowitz’s attack on J Street concerns [...]