92 posts
Afghanistan in Sixteen Characters
NEW
“By May 1928 the basic principles of guerilla warfare…had already been evolved; that is, the sixteen-character formula: The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.”...
Denmark Shows How to Get Support for Afghanistan
NEW
While the Dutch government broke up over the war in Afghanistan, the Danish establishment seems to be very unified and serves as "an unlikely example of how to maintain public support for the war" writes the Wall Street Journal (HT: Atlanti...
Taliban using Human Shields
NEW
Both NATO and Afghan commanders have made statements that the Taliban are using civilians as human shields in Marjah (see this Guardian report ). The Afghan government and ISAF, meanwhile, are firmly focused on protecting the civilian populatio...
Is there any EU citizen in favour of us killing civilians in Afghanistan?
NEW
The news is that the Netherlands are like to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan after the government collapsed over this issue. I always had the question: Why are we down there? It is true: I don't want to be killed by a terrorist - nobody want...
Morning Brief (17-2)
NEW
Progress in AfPak. The biggest allied offensive in Afghanistan since 2001, Operation Mushtarak, which is going on in Marja, Helmand, “has so far proven to be a moderately successful affair”, the Economist says. And Pakistan’s captur...
Q & A on Afghanistan
NEW
I just met 100 people in Taunton as part of a Cabinet trip to the South West. Best question - "Why do Al Qaeda hate us so much?" Part of the answer was to read Bruce Riedel's book, "The Search for Al Qaeda". There was also lots on...
Boell Foundation: Civil Projects Need to Play a Greater Role in Afghanistan
NEW
I have interviewed the Director of the Heinrich Boell Foundation's Kabul office about yesterday's London Conference. Dr. Scheller states that along side security, the international community also needs to strengthen Afghan civil society and that Iraq...
Don’t betray Afghan women in the name of “peace”!
NEW
Peace is – generally – good, and war is – always – bad. There can be little doubt that to achieve something that can be called “peace” in Afghanistan some distasteful deals will have to be done. Just as in order to...
Getting Afghanistan right in London
NEW
WASHINGTON — World leaders meeting in London to discuss Afghanistan’s future have dealt themselves a weak hand. The principal obstacles to success in Afghanistan have not been the adversary’s strength or any lack of support for the intern...
The EU in Afghanistan
NEW
Today, Foreign Ministers and representatives from international organisations arrive in London ahead of the Afghanistan Conference. This is a landmark event. It will help us achieve our shared goal of a stable and secure Afghanistan that can exercise...
What next for Afghan politics?
NEW
General McCrystal's excellent interview with the FT on Monday sets out clearly the military case for a political settlement in Afghanistan. Military effort and civilian effort need a political purpose - the construction of a political ring within whi...
Morning Brief (27-1)
NEW
Buying off the Taliban? At tomorrow’s Afghanistan conference in London, the plan to reconcile with the Taliban will be officially unveiled. The New York Times has a report on the U.S. debate. And in a backgrounder for Foreign Policy, Alim Remtu...
Regional support for Afghanistan
NEW
The Turkish conference on co-operation in "the heart of Asia" brings together the neighbours of Afghanistan - from Iran round to Pakistan - preparatory to the London Conference. I have just spoken. Transcript is here: Istanbul S...
Morning Brief (26-1)
NEW
Karzai not a partner? Ahead of the London conference on Afghanistan (Thursday), the New York Times has obtained the full text of two cables the U.S. ambassador in Kabul Karl W. Eikenberry has sent in November to Washington. Quotes: “President Karza...
Morning Brief (25-1)
NEW
Negotiating with the Taliban. The New York Times editorializes about the coalition’s policy change in Afghanistan: Killing Taliban fighters won’t be enough. If there is any hope of defeating the insurgency, Afghanistan’s government will hav...
GMF Afghanistan analysis in advance of London conference
NEW
In a GMF video feature, Senior Fellow Dan Twining explains the importance of the Afghanistan conference on January 28, and the key topics shaping the discussion.
Time to Begin the “Afghanization” of the ISAF Mission
NEW
WASHINGTON – On December 1, 2009, President Barack Obama announced the United States will increase its military commitment as well as civilian engagement in Afghanistan. The President’s announcement has already resulted in the allocation o...
Pakistan: preparing for the London Conference on Afghanistan
NEW
My sixth visit to Pakistan comes at an important point, three weeks out from the London conference. I've had discussions with the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister in Islamabad and I will meet the President in Karachi later today.Pakistan is a key...
Morning Brief (8-1)
NEW
More German troops for Afghanistan? Ahead of the London conference on Afghanistan (28 January), a split in the German government between foreign minister Westerwelle and defence minister Guttenberg over the engagement in Afghanistan becomes obvious.
Afghan Conference 28 January
NEW
Over 60 countries are coming to London on 28 January to discuss the mobilisation of international effort in support of clear priorities for Afghan reconstruction and security improvement. Here is my video about the purposes of the conference. ...
Europe’s ‘Af-Pak Syndrome’
NEW
What does Afghanistan (and by implication, Pakistan) mean for Europeans? Is the threat posed by both merely transnational in nature, or does it also contain a geopolitical dimension? And how should Europeans respond? What conceptual changes are requi...
Will Coin work in Afghanistan?
NEW
“After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.” (Barack Obama) “They are coming already in coffins.” (Ari Rusila) US President Obama finally announced his new counter-insurgency (aka “Coin”) strategy in Afghanist...
Morning Brief (11-12)
NEW
Obama an armed liberal? The US president has used his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize for a moral justification of war. In his reference to the “just war” theory and the need to use US military power to prevent humanitarian disasters,...
Obama's Afghan Strategy: Regional Perspectives
NEW
The Atlantic Review is pleased to present this guest article by Dr. Shanthie Mariet D'Souza of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi, India.President Barack Obama’s ‘new strategy on Afghanistan’, unveiled on Dece...
Obama's Afghanistan Speech And Strategy
NEW
Foreign policy and political experts assess the president's speech. Below are responses from Frederick W. Kagan, Kimberly Kagan, Matthew Dowd, Meghan O'Sullivan, Gilles Dorronsoro, Douglas E. Schoen, Andrew J. Bacevich, Ed Rogers and Dennis Kucinich.
Obama has charted an Afghan course. Britain must lead the way on Pakistan | Timothy Garton Ash
NEW
European states should not simply make foreign policy in reaction to Washington, but look to our own vital interestsObama has spoken, but we must think for ourselves. What are our vital interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan? It is our vital inte...
Will Afghanistan prevent a second Obama term?
NEW
Lyndon Johnson forfeited a second presidential term because of his decision to escalate the Vietnam war. I do hope that Barack Obama”s decision to send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan will not have a similar consequence. The strategy i...
Afghanistan: time to go | Caroline Lucas
NEW
One thing is clear: Nato's military mission has failed. We need to focus now on a power-sharing deal to enable an early withdrawalIt is easy to forget that the nine-year war in Afghanistan began its life as "Operation Enduring Freedom". In the discur...
Failure of the Western Statecraft Model in Afghanistan
NEW
The number of corpses of European soldiers sent back home from Afghanistan continues to rise without an end to the conflict in sight. Only this Monday, the Italians have buried six soldiers killed in action there, amid calls for concluding a peace so...
McCain on Obama's AfPak Metrics
NEW
Senator John McCain finds Obama's metrics for evaluating progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan too vague, writes Foreign Policy: "It's just not the level of detail that we had hoped for," said McCain. "We need more substance ... we're...
The dangers of Karzai’s re-election
NEW
by Tomas ValasekThe final result of the Afghan election may not be known until the end of September, but it looks as if President Hamid Karzai will have done well enough to avoid a second round of voting. This is causing dismay in some western capita...
US-German Tensions over Airstrike in Afghanistan
NEW
Berlin and Washington might be switching positions in the blame game over civilian casualties. “An airstrike by U.S. fighter jets that appears to have killed Afghan civilians could turn into a major dispute between NATO allies Germany and th...
Why is the OSCE involved in Afghan matters?
NEW
I just saw this press release of the OSCE.Why does the OSCE need to engage in the training of Afghan custom officers? Isn't there enough to do within the member states of the OSCE, ranging from the ever continuing Russian-Georgian conflict and other...
Towards a democratic Afghanistan
NEW
Today, the population of Afghanistan go to the polls to elect the country’s president and members of provincial councils. These first Afghan-led elections since the 1970’s have been held under circumstances that are particularly difficult, given...
Video Blog: Strengthening Global Partnerships and the Next Afghan Government
NEW
Afghanistan represents a “laboratory” for testing transatlantic coopera¬tion in support of peace, security, and economic growth in fragile states. Results so far have been mixed, and arguably become worse. Jonathan White, senior program officer...
A Fundamentally Flawed Afghan Policy
NEW
This week’s elections in Afghanistan represent a critical milestone for the Afghan people and the international community. But, what comes afterward may be more important. President Bush’s attempts to fix Afghanistan foundered on an essential mis...
Germany to Kick Ass in Afghanistan?
NEW
Hey, hey, believe it or not, Germany is getting tough at the Hindu Kush. The Bundeswehr started its biggest operation yet in Afghanistan. 300 members of the Quick Reaction Force support the Afghan Army against insurgents near Kundus. For the first ti...
Afghanistan
NEW
The dignity and grief of the homecomings and funerals of those killed in Afghanistan is an important reminder of what we ask of our armed forces, of the recognition by the British public of what they do, and of the sacrifice that is asked from famili...
The War in Afghanistan: Obama's policy towards Pakistan
NEW
Afghan President Hamid Karzai, US President Barack Obama and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, 6 May 09The Obama administration's policy towards Pakistan, as outlined in this white paper, focuses on the need to improve cooperation between Afghani...
V. Putin:”Russia will not send troops in Afghanistan”
NEW
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will visit within two days (11-12 may) Japan. Ahead of his visit to Tokyo, Putin gave an interview to Japan’s Kyodo Tsushin News Agency, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation NHK, and the newspaper Nihon Keiza...
Dan Twining on Afghanistan and Pakistan
NEW
GMF’s Dan Twining talks to Reuters about Afghanistan and Pakistan.
NYT on Europe's 'Tepid Troop Commitment'
NEW
Harmony isn't a very interesting reporting item, and so from the NATO summit in Strasbourg-Kehl, we mainly get to see video images of burning hotels, and reports exaggerating the scope of disagreements. The New York Times report by Steven Erlanger an...
Afghanistan: an ongoing dilemma
NEW
I’ve been struggling since Barack Obama entered the White House over what my attitude towards NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan should be. One side of me does not believe we can achieve even limited goals; the other side says that we Europeans...
Europe Surging in Afghanistan?
NEW
That's what Daniel Korski notes in his latest ECFR policy brief. Factually, a lot of European countries have already sent more troops in Afghanistan, and still more are on the way there. Between November 2006 and March 2009, European troop levels inc...
Karzai’s administration “Worse than Taliban” [Ari RUSILA]
NEW
I almost got stroke while reading yesterday a headline “Worse than the Taliban – new law rolls back rights for Afghan women” in the Guardian. Not due the act itself but because it reflects the substance and outcome of EU’s civil crisis manage...
France and the US at odds over policing in Afghanistan
NEW
Paris and Washington disagree who should train Afghan policemen. The French see that as the EU's role, the American's as NATO's.The question was debated during US envoy Richard Holbrooke's meeting with NATO ambassadors on Monday. "The French are...
Escalation of violence in Afghanistan: Political consequences for the German engagement
NEW
Although the engagement of the international community has widened in geographical scope, time frame and deployment over the last 7 years, the situation in Afghanistan remains extremely fragile. Even the newly elected US President Obama recently stat...
Biden calls for European help in Afghanistan
NEW
Brussels never received so much attention from the previous US administration, so last week’s visit of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and today’s of Vice-President Joe Biden are most welcome. Most of the Vice-President’s engag...
Clinton and Nato allies rethink the Afghan campaign
NEW
Now for the serious stuff. One important topic of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s discussions with her fellow Nato foreign ministers today is the alliance’s campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. As a senior US official pu...
Afghanistan strategy without a Pakistan strategy
NEW
The Financial Times rightly opined, in a leader today, that the West needs achievable goals in Afghanistan and has to stop scoring own goals. Simply increasing the number of troops is not enough: a new strategy is needed. The trust of the Afghans...
A European option in Afghanistan
NEW
What to do in Afghanistan? It’s essentially impossible that there will ever be enough international troops available to mount a huge counter-insurgency effort to crush the Taliban; renewed big-scale civil war doesn’t bear thinking about.
Should Afghan opium be bought by Western Governments?
NEW
Tony Barber at the Financial Times has a very interesting article on a possible NATO policy of buying all of Afghanistan's opium crop and using it for medicinal purposes. The idea is that this will reduce the drug trade and reduce the funding of orga...
Whither Afghanistan?
NEW
A column by Gwynne Dyer, “Obama’s Vietnam?” prompted me to think about Afghanistan in the context of the change of administration in Washington. The first air-strike under President Obama has taken place in Pakistan, inevitable ki...
Britain to leave Iraq (in shame?), increase troops to Afghanistan
NEW
In an anticipated move, Gordon Brown announced that the remaining 4,100 UK troops will leave Iraq by the end of July. Mr. Brown is quoted by the BBC:I feel that the task that we set out to do is being done and that's why we can take a decision...
What will Britain do when Obama asks for more troops in Afghanistan?
NEW
font size=2 face=VerdanaThe UK may send an additional 2,000 troops to Afghanistan if President-elect Obama makes a request to allies, according to the a href=http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCATRE4AC9CW20081113?pageNumber=1amp;virtualBrandChan...
News from the New World - First in foreign policy: the withdrawal from Iraq and reinforced presence in Afghanistan
NEW
O+7, Tuesday eveningObama’s declared plan for withdrawal from Iraq will be the first ,urgent and huge foreign political job for the new President. And they are preparing it already in the transition team.But it will be linked to a reinforced pr...
A New Strategy for Afghanistan
NEW
pemfont face=VerdanaThis is a guest post by Dr. Assem Akram, author of two books on modern Afghan History and two works of fiction. He was born in Kabul in 1965, studied in Paris, where he obtained his PhD from the Sorbonne. He now lives in Springfie...
Progress, setbacks, and what counts as winning in Afghanistan
NEW
The attempt to twist what UK Commander Brigadier Carleton Smith has said about the situation in Afghanistan is a real pity.nbsp; His comments are an honest and compelling attempt to engage with the reality of how to deal with a counter-insurgency.nbs...
Afghanistan: Canard by name....
NEW
pAfghanistan and its neighbour Pakistan have been top of my agenda since last year. They were top of the agenda in talks this week with General Petraeus. And he got a more accurate representation of UK concerns than the garbled reports in the French...
The "Cabal" That Prevents a Counterdrug Program in Afghanistan
NEW
Why is Afghanistan a narco-state? Ambassador Thomas Schweich left the State Department in June and is now at liberty to identify the "cabal": An odd cabal of timorous Europeans, myopic media outlets, corrupt Afghans, blinkered Pentagon officers, pol...
Afghanistan on the Precipice
NEW
Des Browne, the British Secretary of State for Defence, spoke at the Brookings Institution on July 10, 2008 about the present state of Iraq and Afghanistan. Browne was quick to point out the recent success the coalition has had in Iraq, but his asses...
Afghanistan Update: June 2008
NEW
This month saw the Taliban, in a display of force and coordination, launch a daring prison break at a large facility in Kandahar freeing nearly 1,000 prisoners and around 400 Taliban fighters. While the coalition has been shifting troops to meet the...
Afghanistan: Germany's Troop Surge
NEW
On Sunday, two German police trainers got injured in an attack in northern Afghanistan, while at least 20 Afghan civilians, including many women and children, got killed in a US air attack, writes Deutsche Welle (in German) in a single article. That'...
More Combat Deaths in Afghanistan Than in Iraq
NEW
The Associated Press: American and allied combat deaths in Afghanistan in May passed the monthly toll in Iraq for the first time. Defense Secretary Robert Gates used the statistical comparison to dramatize his point to NATO defense ministers that the...
Does it matter on Afghanistan who’s elected?
NEW
WASHINGTON — As President Bush makes what many think will be his last trip to Europe, some observers are warning against high hopes for change after the U.S. elections. Timothy Lynch and Robert Singh say that Americans should not expect a b...
