World Politics Review contributors John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security and Brian Katulis of the Center for American Progress discuss the conflict of visions for the way forward in Afghanistan with NewsHour’s Ray Suarez. Katulis and Nagl discuss recent discouraging statements by Afghan President Hamid Karzai and how a competing vision for the future of Afghanistan could affect allied forces’ operation there.
WikiLeaks, the controversial website where anonymous users can submit highly classified government and corporate documents, has recently come under fire for posts involving the war effort in Afghanistan. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange discusses the site and his motivation.
At the beginning of this year, I made the following observation: The novelty of the Obama presidency has worn off. What remains will be a long, hard slog of rebuilding America’s global position. And while the fancy rhetoric of 2009 convinced many to give Washington a second chance, 2010 needs to be the year of delivery. If not, Obama will discover, as Bush did before him, that America cannot lead if others will not follow. More than halfway through 2010, the Obama administration has made some progress on a number of the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. There […]
President Barack Obama speaks to the national convention of Disabled American Veterans about the impending troop withdrawal from Iraq, with an emphasis on the country’s dedication to its veterans. Click here for WPR’s Richard Weitz’s take on the speech.
In his assessment on how things could have been different in Afghanistan, David Sanger in Sunday’s New York Times repeats one of the fixed assumptions about America’s longest war to date: we wouldn’t be in the current mess in Afghanistan “if only [the Bush administration] had not been distracted by Iraq, or averted [its] eyes from the Taliban’s resurgence.” That’s almost certainly the case. But it turns out that without the Iraq war, the U.S. could well have found itself fighting in Afghanistan without NATO. It was the rapid U.S. advance across Iraq, particularly the fall of Baghdad, that turned […]
According to Taliban spokesman Qari Yusuf Ahmadij, the insurgent group is very happy about the Dutch military withdrawal from Afghanistan that began on Sunday. “We want to wholeheartedly congratulate the citizens and government of the Netherlands for having the courage . . . to take this independent decision,” Ahmadij told the Dutch daily Volkskrant, adding that, “We hope that other countries with troops stationed in Afghanistan will follow the Netherlands’ example.” Ahmadij’s remarks, though intended to be provocative, in fact raise key questions — namely, how many other countries will indeed follow the Netherlands’ example, and how quickly. The decision […]
The Guardian’s Sean Smith created this short film after a recent five-week trip to Afghanistan. Smith follows first a U.S. helicopter ambulance crew and then a group of U.S. marines on their daily missions. Viewer discretion is advised. This video contains distressing scenes and strong language.