On Wednesday, the Washington Post carried a remarkable article reporting that according to U.S. government assessments, the U.S. military escalation in Afghanistan has failed. The Post’s Greg Miller reported that An intense military campaign aimed at crippling the Taliban has so far failed to inflict more than fleeting setbacks on the insurgency Miller explains…
You can’t follow U.S. print media coverage of the war in Afghanistan for any length of time without running into some variation of the following assertion: "The Taliban Will Never Negotiate, As Long As They Think They’re Winning." No serious effort is usually made to substantiate this claim, which is asserted as if it…
A major contribution of the "inside experts" Afghanistan Study Group report (read here ; send to your reps in Congress here), released last week to spur Washington debate towards de-escalating the war at the next fork in the road is that its very first recommendation is this: 1. Emphasize power-sharing and political inclusion. The U.S….
President Obama wants credit for keeping his promise to end the war in Iraq. Some credit is due: the President reaffirmed his commitment to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, as required by the agreement between the U.S. and Iraq. But only partial credit is due, because the war-ending task…
Much ink has been spilled over the President’s pledge to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan in July 2011. The White House insists that the date is firm. But the pace of withdrawal is yet to be determined, and the White House hasn’t said a word about when – if ever – a U.S. military…
"Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" was former non-Senator Al Franken’s 2003 examination of the lies and distortions of right-wing pundits and politicians. Such a book, if it were written today, should certainly include a fair and balanced look at some of the lying liars still running our foreign policy: in particular, at…
Campaigning for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2008, Senator Barack Obama said: "I don’t want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place." But as Andrew Bacevich notes in his new book, "Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War," as President, Barack…
The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote this afternoon on the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This morning, the Senate version of the Afghanistan war supplemental was brought up under "suspension" rules, which require a 2/3 majority to pass. This expedited procedure is generally used for measures considered "uncontroversial," which is odd, to say…
The war supplemental for Afghanistan is expected to come back from the Senate to the House next week – without any kind of timetable for military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and without money to save teachers’ jobs attached. AP reports: In a take-it-or-leave-it gesture, the Senate voted Thursday night to reject more than $20 billion…
The majority of Americans want the Obama Administration to establish a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, CBS News reports. 54% think the U.S. should set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, with 41% opposed. Among Democrats, 73% think the U.S. should set a timetable, with 21% opposed;…