Pak-ghanistan
From Joe Klein’s good piece on Afghanistan: “Karzai is not incompetent,” a Western diplomat told me. “He is acting according to his own priorities — his family, his tribe, his nation, in that order.”...
Tagged: COIN
Population-centric=Tribal-centric
Elrod at The Moderate Voice, writing in response to criticisms of Obama’s Afghanistan strategy for setting a withdrawal date, argues: (h/t Matt Duss at WonkRoom): Quite simply, the Taliban does not have the luxury...
War Is Politics By Other Means
Scott’s recent post on President Obama’s decision re: Afghanistan is worth the read. He makes a number of very interesting points, but I’m not quite sure I get this part. Scott quotes the following...
Quick Reax to Leaked Obama Afghan Plan
The news is out on what appears to be the Obama plan on Afghanistan. It’s obviously quite provisional at this point, but it seems to line up with what I thought would be the...
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Afghanistan?
Spencer Ackerman points me to this Tom Ricks post on David Kilcullen’s speech re: Afghanistan. Ricks on Kilcullen’s central argument: His [Kilcullen’s] bottom line is that there are two real options in Afghanistan: Either...
Studying Vietnam Doesn’t Really Help
Evan Thomas and John Barry at Newsweek take a look at (a) revisionist history of Vietnam, now popular in some circles of the military and how it is influencing the current debate on Afghanistan....
Reviewing Obama’s War: Part I
This weekend I finally managed to have the time to sit down and watch this excellent PBS Frontline documentary called Obama’s War. Highly recommended and hats off to the folks at Frontline for a...
Governments Matter: Afghanistan Edition
George Packer has been digging through books on Vietnam as to what they may tell us about Afghanistan. (George is smart enough to know that actually Vietnam is probably not the best place to...
Behind Door #3 in Afghanistan
Br. Will is right that scaling down the Afghanistan effort in favor of civilian air strikes, just “air raiding the place” as then Candidate Obama called it, would by itself lead to more civilian...
Likelihood of Success in Afghanistan
Spoiler Alert: Not likely. Dr. Andrew Enterline and Joseph Magagnoli (a grad student of Enterline’s) have co-written a report surveying the history of counterinsugency success rates in the 20th century. In this instance, counterinsurgency...
Flip a COIN
With the apparent (and horrifically bloody) demise of the Tamil Tigers it’s worth I think reviewing the context of this whole counterinsurgency debate. Basically as Nir Rosen says there are two schools of counterinsurgency....
Winning the War Fought in the Wrong Location (While Still Losing the Peace)
Freddie thinks that those (like Reihan) who are nervous about new so-called modest (or lowered) expectations should be. Br. F-reddie also raises an question of feasibility of non-lowered expectations given Afghan history. (Also check...
