Free Republic

War On Terror: Sen. John Kerry, who was so wrong about Iraq, now says our commander in Afghanistan is "reaching too far, too fast" and that a "good enough" policy should suffice. It won't. Offering his advice on how to micromanage the war against the Taliban, Kerry said Gen. Stanley McChrystal, President Obama's hand-picked general to fight what he called a "war of necessity," is wrong in saying he needs 40,000 more troops to fight and win it. Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday, Kerry advocated a "good enough" policy designed not to achieve victory in al-Qaida's...

War On Terror: Sen. John Kerry, who was so wrong about Iraq, now says our commander in Afghanistan is "reaching too far, too fast" and that a "good enough" policy should suffice. It won't. Offering his advice on how to micromanage the war against the Taliban, Kerry said Gen. Stanley McChrystal, President Obama's hand-picked general to fight what he called a "war of necessity," is wrong in saying he needs 40,000 more troops to fight and win it. Speaking before the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday, Kerry advocated a "good enough" policy designed not to achieve victory in al-Qaida's...

Barack Obama we are told is a smart man. He attended Columbia University and Harvard Law. He lectured Constitutional law at the University of Chicago, but does any of this qualify him to be Commander-in-Chief? On the campaign trail, candidate Obama famously called Afghanistan the “good war”. But the truth of the matter, Afghanistan was the stagnant war. The enemy shifted its focus to Iraq because that is where we chose to fight. The Taliban and al Qaeda where chased out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan and needed to be regrouped. So they called on Islamic “freedom fighters” to engage...

The president appears to be dragging his feet on more troops for the struggle, but that's what an effective counterinsurgency strategy requires. During last year's campaign, Barack Obama stressed that while he wanted to withdraw from Iraq, he was no pacifist. "As president," he said on July 15, 2008, "I will make the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win." He began to make good on his word on March 27 when he announced a "comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan" that included...

Tom Engelhardt: Petraeus, McChrystal, And The Surgettes On Next Moves In AfghanistanGen. Stanley McChrystal, America's military commander in Afghanistan, tells David Martin the spread of violence in that country is worse than he expected. PHOTO Gen. David Petraeus (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool) STORIES Poll: Afghanistan Troop Increase Unpopular U.S. Commander May Revise Troop Request (CBS) Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The...

An astonishingly honest assessment — one that I fear is accurate — from the lefty blog Hullabaloo: Escalation is a bad idea. The Democrats backed themselves into defending the idea of Afghanistan being The Good War because they felt they needed to prove their macho bonafides they called for withdrawal from Iraq. Nobody asked too many questions sat the time, including me. But none of us should forget that it was a political strategy, not a serious foreign policy. There have been many campaign promises "adjusted" since the election. There is no reason that the administration should feel any more...

President Obama is resisting pressure from the Nato commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, for a rapid troop increase and shift away from judging success in the war by the numbers of Taliban killed, following the leak of a confidential 66-page report from McChrystal to the Pentagon. The report says "success demands a comprehensive counter-insurgency campaign" that shifts the emphasis to protecting and winning support from ordinary Afghans so as not to be seen as an occupying army. But the general warns that Nato forces must be prepared for an escalating rate of casualties as they take greater risks to...

WASHINGTON – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday she sees little support for sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, forecasting a potential showdown with the Obama administration over how to win the war. Pelosi's comments put President Barack Obama in an uneasy position as he considers whether to side with his top commander in Afghanistan, who is expected in coming weeks to ask for more troops and other resources. She is the highest-ranking Democrat to signal that any White House or Pentagon push for more troops will be resisted in Congress. "I don't think there's a great deal of support...

Four Marines died yesterday in Afghanistan when the Taliban laid a trap: Four U.S. Marines died Tuesday when they walked into a well-laid ambush by insurgents in Afghanistan’s eastern Kunar province. Seven Afghan troops and an interpreter for the Marine commander also died in the ambush and the subsequent battle, which lasted seven hours. Three American service members and 14 Afghan security force members were wounded. It was the largest number of American military trainers to die in a single incident since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion. The battle took place around the remote hamlet of Gangigal, in a valley about...

GANJGAL, Afghanistan — We walked into a trap, a killing zone of relentless gunfire and rocket barrages from Afghan insurgents hidden in the mountainsides and in a fortress-like village where women and children were replenishing their ammunition. "We will do to you what we did to the Russians," the insurgent's leader boasted over the radio, referring to the failure of Soviet troops to capture Ganjgal during the 1979-89 Soviet occupation. Dashing from boulder to boulder, diving into trenches and ducking behind stone walls as the insurgents maneuvered to outflank us, we waited more than an hour for U.S. helicopters to...

More than 70 people reportedly died in the strike on hijacked fuel tankers, despite the new U.S. commander's emphasis on avoiding civilian casualties. Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Istanbul, Turkey -- In an incident that could seriously undermine the central U.S. aim in Afghanistan, dozens of civilians were killed or injured early Friday in a NATO airstrike, Afghan authorities said. The predawn strike on a pair of hijacked fuel tankers in a remote part of northern Kunduz province killed more than 70 people, most of them civilians, according to Afghan police, provincial officials and doctors. Dozens of villagers suffered serious...

Nato has promised a full investigation into an air strike on two fuel tankers that killed up to 90 people in Afghanistan's northern Kunduz province. The alliance said many Taliban insurgents who had hijacked the tankers were killed but it admitted it had reports of many civilian casualties. The Nato-led forces said they regretted "any unnecessary loss of human life". President Hamid Karzai said targeting civilians was "unacceptable" and announced his own investigation panel. A statement from his office said the president expressed "deep sorrow for the loss of our compatriots" and "emphasised that innocent civilians must not be killed...

Republicans should never do to President Obama what many Democrats did to President Bush.In his column for the Washington Post on Tuesday, the influential conservative George Will provided intellectual fodder for the campaign among some Republicans to hang the Afghanistan war around the Obama administration's neck. Washington, he wrote, should "keep faith" with our fighting men and women by "rapidly reversing the trajectory of America's involvement in Afghanistan." "Obama's war," a locution one is now beginning to hear from other conservatives, is an expression of discontent that has been smoldering beneath the surface for several months. The weakening public support...

Afghanistan has made strides in many spheres over the past eight years despite its problems, writes the BBC's M Ilyas Khan after a recent journey through the country to cover elections. From the Communist takeover of 1978 to the destruction of Kabul in 1992 and its subsequent fall to the Taliban in 1996, Afghanistan has been back from the brink many times before. There is no reason why it should be different this time. I was in Kabul in March 2001 when the Taliban blew up the two 2nd Century Buddha statues carved into a mountainside in central Bamyan province....

IS PRESIDENT Barack Obama sliding down the slippery slope into a Vietnam-style quagmire in Afghanistan? By all accounts, the classified, 20-plus-page report that Gen Stanley McChrystal, the US commander in Afghanistan, delivered to his superiors at the Pentagon on Monday has not yet reached the president’s desk. Yet commentators yesterday warned it’s “time to get out of Afghanistan” and that “Afghanistan may be Obama’s Vietnam”. Gen McChrystal’s report is believed to prepare the way for a Pentagon request for further troop increases to protect Afghan civilians and train Afghan security forces. The Kabul government yesterday praised Gen McChrystal’s emphasis on...

The international community, with more than 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, does not have an exit strategy and will stay committed for the long term, Sweden's foreign minister said Tuesday. "There is no time line, it is clear that no one has an exit strategy, because we have a transition strategy," Carl Bildt, whose country is currently president of the European Union, told AFP. "It is vital that Afghans have the confidence that we will stay," he said. The emphasis of the foreign presence was shifting, he said, from military action against Taliban-liked insurgents, to training Afghan security forces and helping...

NATO’s war in Afghanistan could become an Iraq-like quagmire, if Western powers continue on their present pathTHIS IS THE just war, the "war of necessity," as Barack Obama likes to put it, in contrast to the bad war, the war of misguided choices in Iraq. But as a deeply flawed election went ahead in Afghanistan earlier this month, there were echoes, in the mission by the United States and its allies, of the darkest days of the Iraq campaign: muddled aims, mounting casualties and the gnawing fear of strategic defeat. Gloomy commentators evoke the spectre of the humiliations inflicted by...

President Barack Obama will review a new U.S. military report on Afghanistan this week and any decision on changing the U.S. presence there is weeks away, Obama's spokesman said on Tuesday. Obama would take some form of the report by U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal with him when he leaves on Wednesday for Camp David, where he will spend the rest of the week on vacation, spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters. The confidential report by the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan has been described by officials as an assessment of the situation on the ground and does...

George F. Will, the elite conservative commentator, will call in his next column for U.S. ground troops to leave Afghanistan, according to publishing sources. “[F]orces should be substantially reduced to serve a comprehensively revised policy: America should do only what can be done from offshore, using intelligence, drones, cruise missiles, airstrikes and small, potent special forces units, concentrating on the porous 1,500-mile border with Pakistan, a nation that actually matters,” Will writes in the column, scheduled for publication later this week. Obama ordered a total of 21,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan in February and March, and casualties have mounted...

A report by the top US general in Afghanistan is expected to admit the current strategy is not working, the BBC understands. General Stanley McChrystal will liken the US military to a bull charging at a matador [the Taliban] - slightly weakened with each "cut" it receives. His review is also expected to say that protecting the Afghan people against the Taliban must be the top priority. But the report will not carry a direct call for increasing troop numbers. The leak came as further results from last week's presidential election were expected to be released, at 1230 GMT. President...

A senior British diplomat has said an "explosive" meeting between the US special envoy to Afghanistan and the country's president is very worrying.US special envoy Richard Holbrooke is believed to have complained about the use of fraud in last week's election. But Lord Ashdown, a former special envoy to Bosnia who was put forward as special envoy to Afghanistan, said foreign interference was "unhelpful". He said foreign criticism could "de-legitimise the whole process". Lord Ashdown told the BBC: "I think if there are doubts about corruption in the election, etc, it would be far better, at least in the first...

By making the war in Afghanistan his own, declaring it a war of necessity and sending more troops, U.S. President Barack Obama has entered a race against time. The outcome is far from certain. To win it, the new strategy being put into place has to show convincing results before public disenchantment with the war saps Obama's credibility and throws question marks over his judgment. Already, according to public opinion polls in August, a majority of Americans say the war is not worth fighting. Almost two thirds think the United States will eventually withdraw without winning. There are similar feelings...

The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating along with U.S. public support for the war, Washington's top military officer said on Sunday as the new commander on the ground assesses whether to seek more troops. "I think it is serious and it is deteriorating, and I've said that over the past couple of years -- that the Taliban insurgency has gotten better, more sophisticated, in their tactics," said Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. U.S. combat deaths have risen since U.S. President Barack Obama ordered a troop buildup to confront a resurgent Taliban, with a record...

Sen. John McCain pushes for a more aggressive approachSen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) Sunday morning pressed for a more aggressive stance in Afghanistan, saying the Obama administration should make strides to create a clear-cut timeline for progress in the region. The presidential also-ran said on ABC's "This Week" that new Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal should specify exactly how many troops he needs in Afghanistan to "clear and hold" an environment so political and economic advancements can be made. "We're facing a very determined enemy that will stand and fight," McCain said. "But as the president described it in the campaign, this...

President says war in Afghanistan will not be easy or quickPresident Barack Obama said today the war in Afghanistan will not be easy or quick -- but it is one worth fighting. "This is not a war of choice," Obama said. "This is a war of necessity. ... This is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people." Speaking at a gathering of veterans in Arizona, Obama took a break from his health care pitch Monday to thank America's veterans and praise troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He vowed better healthcare for veterans...

A suicide car bomb has exploded outside the Nato headquarters in Kabul, killing at least three people and wounding about 70, Afghan officials say. A plume of smoke was seen rising above the area, where the presidential palace and embassies are also located. The explosion comes less than a week before Afghanistan stages presidential and provincial elections. Taliban insurgents have vowed to disrupt the elections and have stepped up their attacks in recent weeks.

The Taliban have gained the upper hand in Afghanistan, the top American commander there said, forcing the U.S. to change its strategy in the eight-year-old conflict by increasing the number of troops in heavily populated areas like the volatile southern city of Kandahar, the insurgency's spiritual home. Gen. Stanley McChrystal warned that means U.S. casualties, already running at record levels, will remain high for months to come. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the commander offered a preview of the strategic assessment he is to deliver to Washington later this month, saying the troop shifts are designed to...

ISLAMABAD (AFP) — The arrival of more US troops in Afghanistan could lead to a huge influx of Taliban fighters into Pakistan, threatening to destabilise the country, the US special envoy to the region said Friday. "I don't want to be alarmist here, but I'm predicting some massive influx," Richard Holbrooke told reporters, responding to questions about the impact on Pakistan of a reinforced US military presence in Afghanistan. "There are concerns that there may be some spillover as there was in the past," said Holbrooke, President Barack Obama's special envoy to the two countries. Obama is sending 20,000 additional...

... G.M.’s core problem is its corporate and workplace culture — the unquantifiable but essential attitudes, mind-sets and relationship patterns that are passed down, year after year. Over the last five decades, this company has progressively lost touch with car buyers, especially the educated car buyers who flock to European and Japanese brands. Over five decades, this company has tolerated labor practices that seem insane to outsiders. Over these decades, it has tolerated bureaucratic structures that repel top talent. [...] As a result, G.M. has steadily lost U.S. market share, from 54 to 19 percent. Consumer Reports now recommends 70...

With a push for more money and personnel, the president is signaling a 'lasting commitment' to Islamabad. Will it pay off?Writing From Washington -- The United States has just acquired a new client state -- one with 170 million people, nuclear weapons, an Islamist insurgency and Osama bin Laden. And that's the good news. The country is Pakistan, and last week it officially became the Obama administration's biggest and most daunting rescue mission. For months, the administration has been inching toward a deeper commitment of American dollars, military trainers and civilian advisors to strengthen Pakistan's government and security forces --...

RAMADI, Iraq – As the Marine Corps shrinks its footprint in Iraq's western desert, Iraqi community leaders here are publicly voicing worries about what will happen once the Americans are gone. They fear a wave of corruption and the return of the insurgency that once held sway over the area. Marines have begun divorcing themselves from the task of advising local leaders, the clearest signal that their role in Anbar province is quickly nearing its end. An Associated Press reporter embedded with the troops witnessed two cases in a single day of Iraqis — a headmistress and a party of...

The shooting deaths of four Oakland police officers have touched Oakland and the entire nation, and have also exposed the growing disconnect Mayor Ron Dellums has with the city he is supposed to lead. Friday's public memorial service at Oracle Arena for Oakland police Sgts. Mark Dunakin, Ervin Romans and Daniel Sakai and Officer John Hege took on an unintended political tone when at least two families did not approve of Dellums' inclusion on a speakers list that included Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, state Attorney General Jerry Brown, and U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. Dellums' omission at an event...

"Most men die of their remedies, not of their diseases," a smart-alecky Frenchman once observed. At this point, many Americans might be pondering a similar thought: What's worse, the recession or the prescription? It began with the federal government rescuing financial institutions because they were, allegedly, too big to fail. Somewhere along the line, treating this ailment included cajoling perfectly healthy financial institutions into accepting taxpayer medicine (some of those have returned the TARP funds) for the common good. Inevitably, a few institutions abused their new funding in supposed "reckless" corporate extravagance. Congress dealt with the ensuing populist fury...

OAKLAND -- A man being robbed by two Oakland men in the parking lot of the Fruitvale BART station managed to grab a knife from one of the assailants and stabbed the other one to death, authorities said today. The robbery victim was approached by the two 18-year-old men about 9:30 p.m. Thursday. One of the men showed a knife and the other said he had a gun, BART spokesman Linton Johnson said. Their target, a 23-year-old man who lives out of state, was robbed of some items before wrestling away the knife from one of the men and stabbing...

"Ditch the claptrap that we can't kill our way out of this: Well-focused killing, for decades, is our only chance - and Afghanistan's. And dump the feel-good platitudes. In the real world off-campus, good marksmanship trumps good will."

Criticizing the Oakland City Council for paying only "lip service" to resources for public safety, embattled Police Chief Wayne Tucker announced his resignation this morning. Tucker, at a press conference, spoke for about 10 minutes and then handed the podium to Mayor Ron Dellums. "Quite frankly I've lost faith in the City Council," Tucker said. "They've given lip service to public safety in the city." Oakland City Council members on Monday said that Tucker should resign or be fired because of scandals plaguing his department -- a position they planned to announce at a news conference today while calling for...

There is no question that the state is faced with one of the most dire financial situations in its history. But that seems to be about where the agreement ends. There are numerous theories, scapegoats and explanations offered for how it is the state finds itself $40 billion in the hole. And there are just as many differing ideas about how the state should work its way out of this mess. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed a collection of tax increases and spending cuts to bring the state back toward fiscal solvency. But along with the short-term problem, the governor...

Oakland voters may have shot their city in the foot by approving one ballot measure this week that boosts funding for children's programs while defeating another that would have beefed up the police force to fight crime. The passage of Measure OO to increase mandatory funding of children's programs by $16 million a year, coupled with the failure of Measure NN to hire 105 more police officers by raising property taxes, could be a thorn in city finances for years. Bottom line: Kids' after-school programs should be stellar - if the kids can get there without becoming victims of crime....

OAKLAND — The lead detective assigned to investigate journalist Chauncey Bailey's killing ignored evidence linking Yusuf Bey IV, former leader of Your Black Muslim Bakery, to a role in the killing and interfered in two other unrelated felony cases involving Bey IV, according to an investigation by the Chauncey Bailey Project. The Bailey Project's reporting has led to a police internal affairs investigation of that detective, Sgt. Derwin Longmire, and whether his relationship with Bey IV may have compromised the case. Law enforcement officials said the investigation of the Bailey killing is in crisis. If Longmire is charged with administrative...

From the day Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums took office nearly two years ago, residents have witnessed a steady decline in city government function as public confidence has withered. The city's administrative structure and finances are in deep distress. In the coming weeks, the city's elected officials must make significant cuts to balance a budget deficit that has grown to $50 million since the start of the fiscal year less than three months ago.There's also the question of who's in charge at City Hall after Dellums, under pressure, fired City Administrator Deborah Edgerly amid allegations that she tipped her nephew, a...

If there's any good news coming out of Oakland's City Hall right now, we're having trouble finding it. The city faces a deficit that could exceed $50 million. Recently outsted city manager Deborah Edgerly is being investigated by the FBI for allegations of fraud and nepotism. City officials can't account for millions of dollars that have disappeared from the city's reserve funds. And as Oakland's already sky-high crime rates shift out of lower-income communities and into the city's restaurants and nail salons, city officials look not just negligent but downright clueless. (Which is something that those lower-income communities might have...

The NYT's have finally admitted what pretty much everyone has already figured out for themselves. The surge has worked. But all that we have gained, all we have achieved could be undone by a precipitous withdrawal: Yet for all the signs of fatigue, General Petraeus is preparing to leave Iraq a remarkably safer place than it was when he arrived. Violence has plummeted from its apocalyptic peaks, Iraqi leaders are asserting themselves, and streets that once seemed dead are flourishing with life. The worst, for now, has been averted. And so in the general’s exhaustion comes the glimmer of hope,...

Russian troops on August 20 entered the Black Sea port city of Poti for the second day in a row, reportedly stationing columns of armed vehicles at the city’s main entrance and in an outlying district. The Georgian Ministry of the Interior states that Russian troops are "digging into" the port city, a strategic site and the location of a recent $200 million port development project. Although reports from the ground differ, Poti City Administration Chief Roin Gigiberia told EurasiaNet that Russian soldiers have started cutting potholes into the city’s streets and have set up check points on a bridge...

When bank robbery suspect Elmer Reyes crashed his getaway car on Interstate 880 in the East Bay, he told the officers who arrested him that the bad economy made him commit the crime. And when Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums responded to a spree of takeover robberies at restaurants in the city this month, he also blamed poor economic times as a motive for the crimes."The desperation of these crimes speaks to the broader issue of where we are in terms of this economy," the Quiet Mayor said. "When people become this desperate, they take desperate acts and we have to...

Russia apparently isn't in a quagmire. They apparently did go to the UN and ask for permission first. They are not in an unnecessary act of aggression. I haven't seen any drive by reporters lament any unilateral actions, have you?

<p>There is a neighborhood adjacent to Capitol Hill in Washington that is under siege. But the police can't turn things around on their own. On any given day, residents and visitors to the Trinidad area of Northeast are forced to traverse unfamiliar streets because D.C. police have barricaded the neighborhood as an anti-crime tactic - and when law enforcers accomplish that they are intent and in effect creating a police state in the nation's capital. Granted, there is considerable blood being shed in Trinidad. But how undemocratic to set up check points.</p>

After being led by two consecutive celebrity-politicians as mayor, the people of Oakland might be better served with a citizen-mayor, one with his - or her - feet firmly on the ground and familiar with residents' desires, government's challenges and the city's top priorities. With the scandal at City Hall in the past month as a backdrop, it's becoming increasingly clear that Oakland residents need a mayor with a ground-level view, not a fly-over assessment. Running a city where some crimes are skyrocketing, public schools are treading water and many residents are eager for independent leaders - who aren't beholden...

While Oakland officials dig out from their latest crisis - a criminal probe into the actions of City Hall's ousted chief administrator - the city's well-known gun violence and killings are again surging. In a city beset with social and structural ills, from political cronyism to budget and leadership shortfalls, about the only thing that seems to be on the rise in Oakland is the homicide rate. Since January, there have been 71 homicides in Oakland, 13 of them since police rounded up more than 50 alleged members of a violent street gang on June 17 - putting the city...

Over in Oakland they like it loud - so loud that all 45 of the Police Department's Harley-Davidson motorcycles have been equipped with shiny new tailpipes, at a cost of $500 apiece, to rev up their roar.It seems the cops just didn't feel safe on toned-down bikes."There's an old motorcycle adage that you are heard before you are seen," said Deputy Chief Dave Kozicki, explaining the department's decision to toss the bikes' muted factory-issued mufflers in favor of the more high-volume pipes.Kozicki cited an accident three months ago in which an Oakland officer riding a toned-down cycle was struck by...