Archives

Last week, Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), chair of the State & Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee, announced that she would cut $4 billion requested for State Department and USAID [...]

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of the media coverage around Michael Hastings’ incendiary profile of General Stanley McChrystal has focused on the junior high antics and petty name-calling of [...]

As I wrote yesterday, the Afghanistan war funding bill continues to get loaded up with popular and much-needed funding for programs like Haiti relief and oil spill cleanup. This creates a [...]

A congressional staffer told me months ago that she feared that the war funding bill would get loaded up with “Haiti relief and jobs and puppies and sunshine,” making it difficult for some [...]

Two months after the beginning of the NATO operation to defeat the Taliban in Marja, the news coming out the area is bleak. As recently as last Monday, the LA Times reported that in spite of an [...]

A prominent narrative relating to the offensive in Marja has been the military’s emphasis on reducing civilian casualties. For example, the Brookings Institution notes that unlike past [...]

Ann Jones, who has spent years working with women in Afghanistan, wrote a gripping piece for the Nation that guts the notion that war has helped Afghan women, and seriously questions the purpose [...]

Since the leaking of the McCrystal memo and the President’s professed skepticism of certain aspects of Afghanistan policy, the public has witnessed a media blitz from both sides of the [...]

The Obama administration will soon release 50 benchmarks to measure progress in Afghanistan. This report will be published on Sept. 24, a week after the election results are scheduled to be made [...]

This interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski in the late 90’s caught my attention.  The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan started what has become  thirty years of foreign occupation and civil war [...]