After they finish helping the Mariners, there’s perhaps more work to be found for O’Pollahan in Helmand province, the “Taliban stronghold” located in southern Afghanistan. To the untrained eye, and to those who lack the kind of exclusive perspective dispensed by EvenLiberalWarCritics(TM), the situation looks well-nigh shitty. Behold: Here in Helmand, the breadth of the […]
Category: afghanistan
A bit more on the Rohde and Sanger; this struck me as emblematic of Condi’s tenure as National Security Advisor: In a February 2002 meeting in the White House Situation Room, Mr. Powell proposed
IB writes: I was very pleased to see a handful of commentators politely question Hilzoy’s nostalgia for the Afghan War that could have been (but that “unserious” people understood ev
More evidence of Bush’s “great neo-conservative mind” in action: On April 17 [2002], Mr. Bush traveled to the Virginia Military Institute, where Gen. George C. Marshall trained a century ago. “Marshall knew that our military victory against enemies in World War II had to be followed by a moral victory that resulted in better lives […]
Early in the nineteenth century, the Durrani Empire, which had governed Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan since 1747, began to collapse. The Durrani Empire came about through an effort by Afghan tribe
A difference of opinion is developing between American and European approaches to poppy eradication in Afghanistan. Jon Lee Anderson in the New Yorker: In Uruzgan, the Dutch have advocated a policy of
Almost no one remembers this, but about an hour after George W. Bush’s flight-suit strut across the deck of the Lincoln, Donald Rumsfeld appeared in Kabul with Hamid Karzai and announced that the war in Afghanistan had all but concluded. Thus spake Rummy: The president of the United States and General Franks and I have […]
It’s not as if the Sharansky test really evidences much in the way of a deep understanding of democracy; it reminds me a lot of Prussia under Frederick II (believe what you will, but obey), but
Kingdaddy makes an interesting comparison: If you look at Japan then, and the United States now, you might see some familiar faces. A determined faction of aggrieved nationalists, having gambled the n
The disappointing course of Operation Iraqi Freedom invariably, for an American, brings the Vietnam War to mind. The Vietnam analogy is of limited applicability to the current situation in Iraq. I mean “limited” in every sense of the word; it’s good for some things, not for others. Another useful comparison for the Iraq intervention is […]