R.J. Matson/Post-Dispatch
President Barack Obama is scheduled to meet today with the Joint Chiefs of Staff amid reports that he is close to a decision on new U.S. strategies in Afghanistan.
Not surprisingly for a president who has made conciliation the watchword of…
Hamid Karzai, then the great hope for Afghan democracy, addresses Congress in 2004. (White House Photo)
Last week, Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., took a long walk with Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai in the gardens of the presidential palace in Kabul. At…
R.J. Matson/Post-Dispatch
Americans are being ill-served by the nature of the debate over President Barack Obama’s pending decision about the future of America’s efforts in Afghanistan.
No matter what you may have heard on talk radio or cable news, or read on…
R.J. Matson/Post-Dispatch
To read Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s assessment of the war in Afghanistan is to reach some disturbing conclusions about a conflict in which the United States has been engaged for eight years:
Afghanistan: Uphill all the way. (LA Times photo)
America’s involvement in Afghanistan in 2009 has begun to look like its involvement Iraq in 2005: Insurgency is growing. The government we helped install is feckless and at least partly corrupt. We don’t…
Ted Kennedy died last night.
Other stuff happened today.
Consider:
Dominick Dunne died.
Mark Sanford said heck no, he won’t go.
It seems an attack on a Democratic Party office in Colorado, initially and rashly attributed to GOP operatives, may have been the work of a leftist…
President Barack Obama
After all the heat former President George W. Bush took for his multitude of signing statements, you would think President Barack Obama would know better than to use them, too.
Well, apparently, he doesn’t.
According to this story from The Hill,…
Fighting in the Khyber Pass between Afghanistan and that part of India that's now Pakistan was never as romantic as in movies. And it won't be this time around, either.
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains
and the women come…
It would have been a shame if the first presidential debate had been postponed. The televised meeting between Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama restored a sense of gravitas to the 2008 presidential campaign after a week in which it turned…
Seriously, isn’t responding to a subpoena required? First Harriet Miers and others in the Bush administration refuse to testify under subpoena from Congress, which was investigating in the firing of U.S. attorneys. Now Todd Palin, first dude of Alaska, is…
This fascinating story from ABC News details the capture last month in Afghanistan of Dr. Aafia Siddique (or “Siddiqui”; Ar. عافية صديقي), the only woman ever named by the FBI as a top al-Qaeda operative.
Also significant was the “treasure trove” of…
Obama’s highly anticipated overseas tour, which includes visits to countries throughout the Middle East and Europe, has generated a flurry of news coverage in the U.S. and around the world. One sign of the attention being paid to Obama’s trip:…
I have previously translated Arabic al-Jazeera articles (and comments) in order to give readers of The Platform some idea of how the election is being followed around the world. Despite some alarming stories about what’s happened to other bloggers who have…
In a widely discussed op-ed in the New York Times this morning, Barack Obama laid out his plan for Iraq.
The major centerpiece of Obama’s policy in the War on Terror is that Iraq has been a “distraction” from the more important battle…
Not good: “‘More than 100 terror camps’ in operation in northwestern Pakistan”
A few days ago I wrote about the deteriorating situation in northwestern Pakistan and the rise of Taliban power and influence there. Apparently the situation is even worse than the…
The situation in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), which borders Afghanistan, has been going steadily downhill since 2006, when the Taliban began their campaign against the provincial and national Pakistani governments there.
To make a long story short, Pervez Musharraf’s government responded with a schizophrenic policy,…
My column today pulls together and reflects on last week’s three major developments in America’s ongoing effort to understand how the Bush administration came to approve and use abusive interrogation techniques on prisoners — something that violates every principle of…
The Supreme Court yesterday extended rights to U.S. prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba. The ruling, granting habeas corpus to the prisoners, is seen as a rebuke to the Bush administration. The White House rejected that notion,…
At 3:00PM this afternoon I participated in an editorial conference call with U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad (former ambassador to Afghanistan and later Iraq). During the call, Ambassador Khalilzad addressed a broad range of topics, including repression in…
Last week, the RAND Corp. released a massive study suggesting that as many as 300,000 U.S. troops who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan may be suffering from severe depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. Another 320,000 may have suffered traumatic brain…
