Iraq: Two Suicide Bombers Kill 17, Wound 20

At least 17 peo­ple were killed and 20 wounded by two sui­cide bombers Aug. 13 in a cafe in the town of Sin­jar, about 240 miles north­west of Bagh­dad, the BBC reported, cit­ing local police offi­cials.
via Iraq: Two Sui­cide Bombers Kill 17, Wound 20 | STRATFOR.

The Iraqi Endgame: A Podcast

So the other day I did a pod­cast inter­view with the Inter­na­tional Rela­tions and Secu­rity Net­work, based in Zurich. The very nice inter­viewer, Kaisa Schreck, asked some pointed ques­tions and I hope I was able to draw upon my expe­ri­ence in Iraq to give some insight­ful answers. I’ll let you be the judge, how­ever. You can lis­ten to the […]

More US troops for Afghanistan: Are they inevitable? - Christian Science Monitor

News Chan­nel 7More US troops for Afghanistan: Are they inevitable?Christian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor­Wash­ing­ton — The 21000 US troops promised to Afghanistan have still not all arrived, …Emerg­ing GOP Line: Don’t ‘Rums­feld’ Afghanistan­The Washington…

Baitullah Mehsud May Be Dead

ISLAM­ABAD — If con­firmed, this would be a huge vic­tory in the fight against tak­firi mil­i­tants in Pak­istan:
U.S. and Pak­istani author­i­ties were inves­ti­gat­ing whether Pak­istani Tal­iban chief Bait­ul­lah Mehsud, who has led a vio­lent cam­paign of sui­cide attacks and assas­si­na­tions against Pakistan’s gov­ern­ment, was killed in a CIA mis­sile strike.
A Pak­istani offi­cial said Fri­day that reports of the militant […]

"It was always a bad year to get out of Vietnam"

Com­pare and con­trast:
Obama’s Viet­nam: “Viet­nam analo­gies can be tire­some. To crit­ics, espe­cially those on the left, all Amer­i­can inter­ven­tions after Viet­nam have been poten­tial “quag­mires.” But some­times clichés come true, and, espe­cially lately, it seems that the war in Afghanistan is shap­ing up in all-too-familiar ways. The par­al­lels are dis­turb­ing: the pres­i­dent, eager to show […]

Taking the Eyes Off the Ball

Both Nicholas Schmi­dle, author of “To Live or to Per­ish For­ever: Two Tumul­tuous Years in Pak­istan,” and Andrew Exum (Abu Muqawama, yo) are warn­ing that expand­ing the Pak­istan mil­i­tary oper­a­tion, cur­rently push­ing back the Tal­iban from the Swat Val­ley, to Waziris­tan right now is likely a big mis­take.
Schmidle’s con­cerns are logis­ti­cal and prac­ti­cal:
… it is unrealistic […]

Voter Fraud in Afghanistan -- AfPax Launches

My friend Eason Jordan’s new site has launched: AfPax Insider. And it’s got a doozy of a story on it.
Kabul – Brit­ney Spears is unwit­tingly pro­vid­ing the lat­est evi­dence that the com­ing pres­i­den­tial elec­tions in Afghanistan are shap­ing up to be tainted by mas­sive voter and vote-counting fraud.
The “Oops!… I Did It Again” Amer­i­can pop star is among mil­lions of […]

Taliban Giving Up? Not Likely.

Hm. This is inter­est­ing:
The Tal­iban on Mon­day urged civil­ians to return to the Swat Valley’s main city, promis­ing they would not attack secu­rity forces bat­tling for con­trol out of con­cern for the safety of trapped res­i­dents.
The order allegedly comes from Maulana Fazlul­lah, the Swat Tal­iban leader, who has ordered his men to stop fight­ing the Pakistani […]

Shooting Oneself in the Foot in Swat

How not to con­duct an effec­tive counter-insurgency (COIN) cam­paign:
ISLAM­ABAD — Thou­sands of pan­icked res­i­dents on foot and crammed in buses, vans and trucks fled Swat val­ley north of Pakistan’s cap­i­tal Tues­day fol­low­ing the break­down of a frag­ile truce between gov­ern­ment forces and the Tal­iban.
Author­i­ties lifted a cur­few for a few hours to allow res­i­dents to evac­u­ate as the […]

Interview with the Taliban

The New York Times has a fas­ci­nat­ing story today. It’s an inter­view with a Tal­iban logis­tics tac­ti­cian the Times has been work­ing on for six months. He finally spills the beans on the Tal­iban plans for Pak­istan and Afghanistan, the strate­gies they will use and what they fear.
He was clued into the Petraeus doc­trine, used to good effect […]

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