Inside the White House, opponents of Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, President Donald Trump’s second national security adviser, want him out. This week, they’ve made their campaign against him public, leaking to reporters details about the rocky relationship he has with…
So, yes, a larger number of people died, and many more were injured, and a lot of time and money was wasted protecting a fighting retreat, because the political-military risks of an attempted immediate retreat – both within Afghanistan and far beyond, and for many years – were unacceptable, just as the decision for it, given the real existing correlation of political interests and forces in 2009, was actually impossible. Instead, the Afghan Surge worked – politically. Politically, it was a tremendous success. Militarily, it never had very good prospects, but its narrowly military-political failure – its inability to transform Afghanistan into Japan at bargain prices – has the further benefit of removing further illusions about what is and isn’t possible even for the best data-driven school-building expeditionary killing machine the world has ever seen.
I happened to catch HBO’s The Battle for Marjah last night. Here’s the trailer, but be warned that it’s misleading. What’s misleading is that there’s not a lot of “action” in this documentary at all. That very lack of action,…
Unable to figure out why the President “is” sending troops to Afghanistan, Charles Krauthammer concludes a column about his quandary by reaching across the aisle… for a melodramatic cheap shot: Sen. Kerry, now chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, asked…
William Jacobson asks (at home blog here): Am I crazy and dangerous for pointing out [Frank] Rich’s intellectual laziness and predictability? Well, since you ask: Probably just a little, maybe not as dangerous as you’d like to be. Otherwise, you’re…
[T]he leaking of this memo and the notion that it represents the opinions of many in the Pentagon ought to scare Israelis and leave them less willing than ever to make the sorts of concessions Washington believes can strengthen the…
Who has the sense that President Obama is politically and morally invested in the surge being ramped up in Kandahar? When does he speak of it in public? When does he lend the weight of statesmanlike rhetoric to the military…
“These two should talk,” sez Rex in re: Tony Blankley and Jennifer Rubin. Why? Each one could probably have written the other’s work, and neither is saying anything that we all haven’t heard (and that many of us have said)…
[amazon-product]0465009549[/amazon-product] Considering the centrality of “Munich” to American thinking on foreign policy – and the centrality of the war that followed to what America has become – there’s an argument for considering 1938 to be as important to our understanding…
Anyone who’s been interested in American military adventures and misadventures over the last couple of decades has probably seen Anthony Cordesman on TV at some point offering his highly professional, well-researched, crisply presented, carefully hedged, and almost invariably pessimistic assessments…
