November 25, 2008

Karzai wants the foreign troops out, too

So it's not just the US-installed government in Baghdad that is now acting uppity and turning on its former master... Afghan President Hamid Karzai told a team of visiting UN...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 04:44 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

November 23, 2008

Rumsfeld, Kagan, and Chalabi in the NYT

I can't believe that the NYT gave a huge chunk of its prime op-ed real estate today to allow war criminal Donald Rumsfeld to offer his views and advice on...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 04:58 PM | Fulltext link (18 comments)

November 20, 2008

Newsflash! Russia lets NATO trans-ship weapons to Afghanistan

The Kyiv Post reported yesterday that, Russia has granted NATO-member Germany permission to ship weapons and equipment for its force in Afghanistan overland through Russia, the Russian Foreign Ministry said...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 07:01 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

November 19, 2008

Logistical impasse for the US in Afghanistan?

Bernhardt of Moon of Alabama has a good short post up today on the huge logistics challenge involved in keeping the US/NATO forces in Afghanistan supplied. He's commenting on this...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 04:34 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

November 17, 2008

Operation Enduring Failure

Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old. --Rudyard Kipling It's been seven years since...
Posted by Don Bacon at 12:38 AM | Fulltext link (4 comments)

November 07, 2008

'China Hand' on extrajudicial killings

The excellent (though sporadic) blogger China Hand has a great new post today tracking the degree to which extensive use of extra-judicial killings has been incorporated into the "standard operating...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:14 PM | Fulltext link (3 comments)

October 15, 2008

Discussing Afghanistan, UN over at Registan

I am continually amazed at the number of otherwise thoughtful and well-informed Americans who seem to have a deep blindspot when it comes to looking at the record of the...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 06:01 PM | Fulltext link (4 comments)

October 13, 2008

More on Afghanistan, the unwinnable war

China Hand has posted yet another great round-up of what's been happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan recently. He notes that just about everybody except the US's leading politicians and Pakistani...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 07:10 PM | Fulltext link (7 comments)

October 09, 2008

US military admits to larger toll in August hit

So US Central Command has now admitted that the civilian casualty toll from that controversial air-raid in western Afghanistan August 22 was indeed much higher than they'd earlier said. The...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 07:37 AM | Fulltext link (8 comments)

October 07, 2008

Google Reader highlight #1: Registan

I thought JWN readers might want to check out some of the more interesting things I've been following on my Google Reader recently. So GR highlight #1 today is Registan,...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:59 AM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

September 18, 2008

Af-Pakistan on brink-- of what?

When the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs goes to Pakistan and the Defense Secretary to Afghanistan on the same day, as they did yesterday, you have to know they are...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:12 AM | Fulltext link (10 comments)

September 17, 2008

Turkey mediating between Afghanistan and Pakistan

While its mediation between Israel and Syria continues, Turkey's foreign ministry has now also launched a mediation between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Fascinating....
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:57 PM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

Afghanistan in Canadian election?

Canada has an election coming up October 14, and it seems its commitment to the NATO mission in Afghanistan could be an issue. (Hat-tip Afghanistan Conflict Monitor.)...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:47 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

September 10, 2008

September 11 and the war in Afghanistan

For many Americans, including many who have seen the war in Iraq as unjustified and unwise, the war in Afghanistan has until now had a very different aura. In the...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:55 PM | Fulltext link (6 comments)

September 08, 2008

Oliver North???

You know there's been this long-running dispute between, on the one hand, the US military command in Afghanistan and on the other, the Afghan government and the United Nations, over...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:45 PM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

August 04, 2008

Afghanistan: Can NATO succeed?

The more I think about this, the more outrageously-- and tragically-- improbable this appears. Let's review the reasons: 1. NATO is a military alliance. What its members have trained extensively...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:13 PM | Fulltext link (82 comments)

July 19, 2008

Talking of Afghanistan

While Obama is in Kabul, I hope he gets the chance to talk to Rory Stewart, whose recent piece on Time.com "How to Save Afghanistan" has a lot of good...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:59 PM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

July 14, 2008

Afghanistan's opposition as a peasant-based insurgency, by Bob Spencer

Long-time JWN commenter Bob Spencer sent me the text of a thought-provoking small essay he has written, that takes as its starting point that the opposition movement in Afghanistan can...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:36 PM | Fulltext link (1 comments)

July 02, 2008

Al-Qaeda redux?

The NYT's Mark Mazetti and David Rohde had an extremely important article in the June 30 edition of the paper, on the bureaucratic chaos and operational failure that have marked...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 07:30 AM | Fulltext link (2 comments)

June 27, 2008

Crunch time coming in Afghanistan?

Maybe crunch time is approaching much faster than I had expected in Afghanistan, for US military planners desperately trying to assemble forces to deal with the deteriorating situation there? Today,...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:21 PM | Fulltext link (28 comments)

April 28, 2008

Iraq-Afghanistan: The crunch approaching?

George Bush's general approach to dealing with the problems of Iraq and Afghanistan-- as to the many other rapidly mounting challenges that confront Washington both globally and domestically-- has been...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:31 AM | Fulltext link (11 comments)

February 02, 2008

Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan: Bushism in disarray

The past few weeks have not been good ones for the Bush administration's project of establishing firm, pro-western beach-heads in a broad swathe of western Asia from Gaza to Afghanistan....
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:57 PM | Fulltext link (18 comments)

December 17, 2007

US military finally has "Dannatt moment" on Iraq/Afghanistan?

The Bush administration finally seems to be waking up to the need to (1) find a more effective policy in Afghanistan, and (2) if necessary, recalibrate its commitments in Iraq...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:06 PM | Fulltext link (10 comments)

November 07, 2007

The real story in Pakistan/Afghanistan: Taliban rising

Asia Times's Syed Saleem Shahzad has a must-read story on their website Thursday. He writes: While the world's attention focused on the troubles of President General Pervez Musharraf following his...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:50 PM | Fulltext link (8 comments)

August 12, 2007

How invading Iraq harmed Afghan stabilization

David Rohde and David Sanger have an excellent piece of reporting in today's NYT, in which they go in some detail into exactly how, from mid-2002 on the Bushites' decision...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:34 PM | Fulltext link (37 comments)

August 06, 2007

Bush vs. Karzai

Sometimes a simple pairing of quotes speaks volumes. Case in point - Presidential comments about Iran by Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai and America's George Bush. Yesterday, Karazai appeared on CNN's Late...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 04:31 PM | Fulltext link (19 comments)

May 10, 2007

Legislators in Afghanistan and Iraq now edging off the US reservation

Afghanistan's "Senate"-- that is, the Meshrano Jirga upper house in the country's post-2001 bicameral system-- yesterday backed proposals that call for a cessation of military operations against against the Taliban,...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:25 PM | Fulltext link (6 comments)

April 18, 2007

When all else fails, blame Iran (Part II)

Matters must be really deteriorating in Afghanistan. Why else would the Pentagon brass now be darkly suggesting that Iranian arms have been "captured," supposedly on their way to the Taliban?...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 11:47 PM | Fulltext link (9 comments)

October 22, 2006

Afghanistan: US big media go AWOL

The news pages of the US MSM have gone completely AWOL on coverage of the rapidly unravelling strategic situation in Afghanistan. (A situation whose strategic importance I started to discuss...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:20 PM | Fulltext link (7 comments)

October 07, 2006

Rumsfeld, Afghanistan, militarism

So there is Donald Rumsfeld, nearly six years into the Bush administration, and he has still managed to evade all the attempts to even start to hold him accountable for...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 04:14 PM | Fulltext link (14 comments)

May 30, 2006

"Tajik intifada" in Kabul?

Al-Hayat is describing the demonstrations in Kabul yesterday as a "Tajik intifada"... That piece indicates that Khairkhaneh, the area of northern Kabul where the US military vehicle lost control and...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:49 AM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

May 29, 2006

Afghanistan-- the spark of an intifada?

The events in Kabul today looked ominously like the events in Gaza that triggered the Palestinians' First Intifada against Israel at the beginning of December 1987. Today, as back then,...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:53 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

September 10, 2005

Lest we forget, Afghanistan

Afghanistan was where Osama Bin Laden had his headquarters. The Bushies' first "response" to 9/11 was to take over the country with raw military force, tossing out the Taleban regime...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:56 PM | Fulltext link (7 comments)

January 07, 2005

The "new order" for Afghanistan's children

I received a horribly disturbing email feed today from the IWPR, which has been doing some great reporting from Afghanistan. This report is titled, LIVES SHATTERED BY SEXUAL ABUSE; Authorities...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:36 PM | Fulltext link (2 comments)

October 10, 2004

Afghan elections--a model?

In this Sept. 25 column in Al-Hayat, I asked: [I]s it possible that the upcoming Afghanistan election-like the one organized under U.S. military control in Vietnam in 1971-is more about...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 05:03 AM | Fulltext link (3 comments)

July 11, 2004

David Passaro/ Hyder Akbar contd.

The second good piece in today's NYT mag is a short "as told to" piece featuring Hyder Akbar. You may recall that Akbar is the young Bay Area Afghan-American who...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:14 PM | Fulltext link (8 comments)

January 06, 2004

Democratization as instant coffee?

The NYT has a lovely profile today of someone I have lots of admiration for: the veteran Algerian diplomat (and former Foreign Minister) Lakhdar Brahimi, who has also for the...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:36 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)