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Within 24 hours of the leak of the Afghanistan assessment to The Washington Post, General Stanley McChrystal's team fired its second shot across the bow of the Obama administration. According to McClatchy, military officers close to General McChrystal said he is prepared to resign if he isn't given sufficient resources (read "troops") to implement a change of direction in Afghanistan: Adding to the frustration, according to officials in Kabul and Washington, are White House and Pentagon directives made over the last six weeks that Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, not submit his request for...

Breaking: General Stanley McChrystal tenders his resignation A senior Capitol Hill source tells me that General Stanley McChrystal had tendered his resignation to President Barack Obama and that the White House is actively discussing a replacement who could be quickly confirmed by the Senate. The source said that among the names being touted as possible successors are General James Mattis, the outgoing head of the US Joint Forces Command and due to retire after being passed over as US Marine Corps commander, and Lieutenant General William Caldwell, commander of Nato’s Training Mission in Afghanistan. Of course, offering to resign...

The number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan has surpassed the number in Iraq for the first time since 2003. As of Monday, there were 94,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and 92,000 in Iraq, according to the Defense Department. The move occurred slightly ahead of schedule; it had been expected to take place in June. U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan is expected to reach 98,000 by August, up from about 30,000 when President Barack Obama took office. Once all the troops are in place, NATO and Afghan security forces are expected to concentrate on 121 key districts in Afghanistan, according to...

American troops are often outgunned by Afghan insurgents because they lack the precision weapons, deadly rounds, and training needed to kill the enemy in the long-distance firefights common in Afghanistan's rugged terrain, according to an internal Army study. Unlike in Iraq, where most shooting took place at relatively short range in urban neighborhoods, U.S. troops in Afghanistan are more often attacked from high ground with light machine guns and mortars from well beyond 300 meters (327 yards, or just over three football field lengths). The average range for a small-arms firefight in Afghanistan is about 500 meters, according to the...

WASHINGTON, March 24, 2010 – This summer will mark the first time since 2003 that the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan will overshadow the American presence in Iraq, the top U.S. military officer told Congress today. Driving the eclipse is the 30,000-troop surge President Barack Obama announced for Afghanistan in December, roughly a third of which is in place, and with 18,000 of the additional forces expected to be in Afghanistan by late spring as troop levels in Iraq continue to drop. “Indeed, by the middle of this year, Afghanistan will surpass Iraq, for the first time since 2003,...

Senior White House advisers are frustrated by what they say is the Pentagon’s slow pace in deploying 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and its inability to live up to an initial promise to have all of the forces in the country by next summer, senior administration officials said Friday. Tensions over the deployment schedule have been growing in recent weeks between senior White House officials — among them Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, and Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff — and top commanders, including Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal,...

U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan “are not winning yet, but we are going to win,” Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, told Stars and Stripes in an interview Friday. But the general said it was not possible to say how long it will take to achieve victory, which he defined as a situation where “the insurgency is not an existential threat to the government or the people” of Afghanistan. He added that protecting civilians remains the goal of the allied counterinsurgency strategy. “There’s no way to put an exact timeline on it, because as...

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) -- A suicide bomber struck a forward operating base in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, causing an unknown number of American casualties, a U.S. military official said.

NOW ZAD, Afghanistan I Signs of rebirth are growing in this former Taliban stronghold in Helmand province just days after U.S. Marines stormed it in a ground-and-airborne assault that caught its Taliban occupiers by surprise. In the once deserted bazaar area in the western portion of town, hundreds of men from nearby villages defy Taliban threats and clear debris from fighting in exchange for pay from U.S. troops. In the district center next to the main U.S. military base, more than 100 children attend ad hoc classes in reading and writing. The classes, initially started by Afghan-American interpreters working with...

New military rules of engagement ostensibly to protect Afghan civilians are putting the lives of U.S. forces in jeopardy, claim Army and Marine sources, as the Taliban learns to game plan based the rules' imposed limits. The rules of engagement, or ROEs, apply to all coalition forces of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Their enactment is in response to Afghan President Hamid Karzai's complaints over mounting civilian deaths apparently occurring in firefights. Despite the fact that the newly arrived U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, imposed the more restrictive ROEs to minimize the killing of...

Gen. Stanley McChrystal's long-awaited testimony before Congress on the Afghanistan "surge" was, according to one account, "uneventful." The general himself, another story noted, was "a study in circumspection." And questioning from lawmakers was, said a third, "gentle." That's a nice word for it. "Ineffectual" is more like it. Throw in "callous," too, given House members' obligations to constituents in the war zone, operating under what are surely the most restrictive rules of engagement (ROE) in U.S. history. But not a single lawmaker appears to have ventured one question about these dangerously disarming ROEs, which, in Gen. McChrystal's controversial view, are...

FORT CAMPBELL, Kentucky — The highest-ranking military officer in the United States on Monday told soldiers, including many bound for Afghanistan, that he expects casualties to rise next year as additional U.S. troops pour into the war.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – President Barack Obama's order to surge 30,000 troops into Afghanistan presents the US military with a giant logistical challenge as it faces some of the most forbidding terrain in the world. With few paved roads and a vast, rugged landscape, moving soldiers and equipment into Afghanistan "is a bigger challenge than certainly was the case in Iraq," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last month. Fulfilling Obama's vow to send troops at the "fastest pace possible," the first units of the buildup are due to arrive within two to three weeks, and the military plans to have all...

Washington (CNN) – A leading Republican strategist and one-time aide to former Vice President Cheney said Sunday that President Obama’s recently announced decision to send an additional 30, 000 troops to Afghanistan is “a reassertion of the Bush doctrine.” “The [Bush] doctrine is no safe havens [for terrorists intent on harming the United States] and we go after those that provide a harbor [for such terrorists]. That’s the doctrine,” Republican strategist Mary Matalin explained Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. Obama’s decision to surge additional troops into Afghanistan is “solid policy,’ in Matalin’s view and “a reassertion of the...

Some parishioners in the Church of Obama discovered last week that their spiritual leader is a false prophet Consider the blow suffered by the liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, who issued a plaintive plea to the president on the eve of his announcement that he was sending 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan. By escalating the war, Moore wrote: "[Y]ou will do the worst possible thing you could do -- destroy the hopes and dreams so many millions have placed in you. With just one speech tomorrow night you will turn a multitude of young people who were the backbone of your...

Obama told us throughout the 2008 campaign that Afghanistan was the war we should be fighting. The conflict where we supposedly took our eyes off the ball (even though Bush handed control over to NATO long ago, as the left wanted) and the conflict where most of our resources should go to. So he becomes President and nominated McChrystal to head it up and sent over 21,000 more troops. He then told McChrystal that his mission was to destroy the Taliban. Then he forgot all about Afghanistan as he pursued his Socialist utopian dreams onto this country. Well, McChrystal took...

President Barack Obama's attempt to clarify his July 2011 deadline for a US departure from Afghanistan has resulted in more confusion and will dilute Pakistan's commitment to fighting the Taliban, Senator John McCain has told The Daily Telegraph. Sen McCain, who has led criticism in Washington over the President's most controversial element said that senior administration officials had only contradicted each other when trying to explain how the timeline for the beginning of a US troop withdrawal would work in practice. "Since the President made his speech we have not had further clarification, in fact we have had further contradiction,"...

Hovering in the shadows of President Barack Obama's decision last week to ramp up the nation's war effort in Afghanistan, even as he promises to bring it to a swift conclusion, are ghosts of another decision, made 44 years ago by a Texan in the White House. In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson took ownership of a war he, like Obama, had inherited. Gen. William Westmoreland wanted more troops in Vietnam, and after a protracted debate within the White House, Johnson sent them. Over the next three years, he would send hundreds of thousands more and launch a carpet-bombing campaign against...

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Nato Secretary General, said he had received commitments from 25 countries and details would be announced in the coming weeks. He said he also expected more pledges to follow an international conference on Afghanistan in January. Yesterday's meeting of Nato ministers in Brussels raised an extra 3,200 troops on top of the 3,800 soldiers pledged in the last month, including 500 from Britain and 1,000 from Italy. It came as Hillary Clinton, the United States Secretary of State, called on the alliance to rally behind the American-led surge of troops planned in 2010. "This is our fight,...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 4, 2009 – More than 1,000 International Security Assistance Force troops are partnering with Afghan forces to begin a large-scale operation in northern Helmand province. About 900 U.S. Marines and sailors and British forces began partnering today with 150 Afghan soldiers and police to start Operation Khareh Cobra, or Cobra’s Anger, to clear insurgent forces in the Now Zad valley. Marines from 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, Regimental Combat Team 7 and 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion are partnered with Afghan army and police. The forces began helicopter and ground operations in the Now Zad valley early this morning. Now...