Soldier Mom Refuses Deployment
A sad and not terribly unusual case: An Army cook and single mom may face criminal charges after she skipped her deployment flight to Afghanistan because, she said, no one was available to care for her infant son while she was overseas. Spc. Alexis Hutchinson, 21, claims she had no choice but to refuse deployment orders because the only family ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 17, 2009 09:34
Searching for the Exit?
The scuttlebutt that's coming out now in Washington is that President Obama doesn't much like the plans for Afghanistan offered by his advisors: WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 12, 2009 13:37
Hasan a Muslim First, American Second?
In hindsight, it appears that Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the mass murderer who killed 14 (one of the soldiers killed, Francheska Velez, was six weeks pregnant) and wounded another 30 at Fort Hood, had long made it known that he sympathized with the enemy. Bloomberg's Justin Blum: Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of a shooting spree that killed ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 7, 2009 12:57
Pentagon Expected To Ask For Supplementary War Funding. As Usual.
Remember a couple of weeks ago, when Congress passed a $680 billion appropriation? Well, don't worry--the military will be getting still more money:The nation’s top military officer said Wednesday that he expected the Pentagon to ask Congress in the next few months for emergency financing to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though President Obama has pledged ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 5, 2009 11:07
OTB Radio – Tonight at 5:30 Eastern
The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live from 5:30-6:30 Eastern. Dave Schuler and I will be joined by Zenpundit's Mark Safranksi to talk about the "elections" in Afghanistan, today's off-off-year elections in the USA, and the state of opportunity in America. We'll also be taking calls at (646) 716-7030. Owing to a high trolls ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 3, 2009 16:49
What’s Next in Afghanistan?
President Karzai narrowly won a clearly fraudulent election. His main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, has withdrawn from consideration as a candidate, ruling out a run-off election. That leaves us with an Afghan government of little or no legitimacy, unworthy of our confidence or that of the Afghan people. Classical counter-insurgency strategy requires a government with the support ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on November 3, 2009 12:50
Obama’s Europe Neglect Could Bring Bush Nostalgia
My first piece for ForeignPolicy.com, "Europe's Obama Fatigue," is online. Despite George W. Bush's defiant "you're with us or you're against us" public stance, he actively solicited advice and input from his NATO partners. Obama, by contrast, is saying all the right things in public about transatlantic relations and NATO but adopting a high-handed policy and paying little attention to Europe. [...] It would ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 30, 2009 06:10
Friedman’s Vote on Afghanistan
Columnist Thomas Friedman has put in his vote for what we should do in Afghanistan: Don't Build Up It is crunch time on Afghanistan, so here’s my vote: We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig in deeper. We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 28, 2009 12:19
Minor FSO Resigns, Panic Ensues
An incredibly junior foreign service officer has resigned over disagreement with our AfPak policy, prompting a high level scramble within the administration and a long feature in the Washington Post. As I wrote in "While Obama Dithers," a piece for New Atlanticist, They've brought this on themselves. Granted, President Obama inherited this war and his people may have fought it differently had ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 27, 2009 09:04
Maintaining Commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan
Month to date there have been four U. S. casualties in Iraq. Each death remains a tragedy but that's a far cry from a year ago or two years ago. Fatalities in the Iraqi security forces have declined, too, each month of this year seeing fewer casualties than in the corresponding month of last year. Things are ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 25, 2009 19:07
Peter Galbraith Afghanistan Elections Podcast
My colleague Sarwar Kashmeri, a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council's International Security Program, has inaugurated the New Atlanticist Podcast series with an interview with Ambassador Peter Galbraith on the Afghanistan election crisis. Galbraith believes Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been permanently tainted by the fraud in the initial contest and argues that the issue of Karzai's legitimacy must ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 20, 2009 10:22
Afghanistan Run-off Ordered
Well, the UN-backed Electoral Complaints Commission has said that a third of the counted votes in the Afghanistan election were fraudulent and ordered a run-off between Hamid Karzai and second place finisher Abdullah Abdullah. Karzai looks unlikely to comply and nobody really wants a run-off, anyway. So, as I write in my New Atlanticist essay, "Afghanistan Election: Now What?" we're left ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 19, 2009 16:21
A Case for Humility in Afghanistan?
Stephen Coll, president of the New America Foundation, has an article in Foreign Policy making the case for more humble objectives in Afghanistan. In the article he criticizes both the counter-insurgency strategy advocated by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U. S. forces in Afghanistan: To succeed, counterinsurgency approaches require deep, supple, and adaptive understanding of local conditions. And yet, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 18, 2009 10:50
Fueling Afghanistan
For a long time now I've been saying that the biggest problem facing our forces in Afghanistan isn't the absence of a viable partner in the Afghan government or whether we should be pursuing a strategy of counter-terrorism or counter-insurgency or the tactics we're employing there. It's the logistics. Here's another example of that. Would you believe ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 16, 2009 13:37
Biden Right on AfPak
Ariana Huffington has generated quite a bit of buzz for her unlikely-to-be-taken suggestion that Vice President Biden resign in protest if President Obama sends more troops to Afghanistan. The cuteness of the suggestion has unfortunately overshadowed the opening paragraph in Holly Bailey and Evan Thomas' Newsweek piece on "A Day in the Life of Joe Biden" (HTML title: "Joe Biden, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway on October 15, 2009 16:24
