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Adam Gadahn, the Al-Qaeda spokesman believed killed in a US operation, was a teenage rock music fan who grew up on a Californian goat farm before he was drawn into radical Islam. The White House announced Thursday that US intelligence thinks Gadahn died in January in a "counterterrorism operation" in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. The 36-year-old was apparently not deliberately targeted in the raid, but he has long been one of the most wanted jihadist figures on the US hit list, with a $1 million bounty on his head. As an English speaker and senior Al-Qaeda propagandist, he was one...

A helicopter pilot and Britney Spears ex-boyfriend — who helped the pop princess quit booze — has been killed by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. John Sundahl, 44, was shot down during a flight from Kabul, where he’d been working as a private contractor transporting officials across the war-torn nation, according to the Daily Mirror. “She is devastated,” a source close to Spears told the UK paper. “Britney thought he was a lovely man.” A former real estate whiz, Sundahl dated Spears, 33, in 2007 after they met at Alcoholics Anonymous in Los Angeles. He spoke openly about her alcohol abuse.

The Department of Defense says an Army sergeant from New York City has been killed in Afghanistan. A soldier from Arizona was also killed. Military officials say Sgt. Ramon Morris, 37, and Spc. Wyatt Martin, 22, died Dec. 12 in Parwan province. The men died from wounds suffered when their vehicle was attacked with an improvised explosive device.

The Afghan soldier who killed US Major General Harold Greene had spent three years in the army before he squeezed off two to three bursts of gunfire from a first-floor window at a senior military delegation in Kabul, officials said on Wednesday. As details emerged about Tuesday’s attack at a military complex in the Afghan capital, a picture was forming of a rogue Afghan soldier who may have been difficult to spot before he killed Greene and wounded 14 coalition troops. Greene was the most senior US military official killed in action overseas since the war in Vietnam. His father described him to Reuters as...

Nineteen soldiers and over 50 heavily-loaded planes are on their way back to Denmark a week earlier than planned. The last Danish soldiers have left Camp Bastion in southern Afghanistan, the Army Operational Command (Hærens Operative Kommando - HOK) said on Friday. The withdrawal is taking place a week earlier than originally scheduled. The last 19 Danish soldiers will be flown back to Denmark on Friday after having left Camp Bastion on July 27th. HOK said a total of 54 heavy-loaded planes carrying 2,348 tonnes of material is being transported back to Denmark by way of Dubai. “That’s the equivalent...

Bleeding from both legs and his arm, Ryan Pitts kept firing at about 200 Taliban fighters, even holding onto his grenades an extra moment to ensure the enemy couldn't heave them back. On Monday, President Barack Obama draped the Medal of Honor around his neck, in a White House ceremony that also paid tribute to his nine platoon comrades who died that summer day in Afghanistan. Pitts, a 28-year-old former Army staff sergeant from Nashua, New Hampshire, is the ninth living veteran of America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to receive the nation's highest decoration for battlefield valor. In a...

President Barack Obama has tapped the vice chief of the Army to take over the U.S. command in Afghanistan later this year as America pulls out its combat troops and leaves a force of about 10,000 to train and advise the Afghan military. …

As the White House ponders its next moves in Iraq, it also faces the question of how to best prevent the precarious security order it has established in Afghanistan from unraveling once U.S. troops withdraw at the end of 2016. That question was put to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey when the pair appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday to discuss the Defense Department’s budget. “First, Afghanistan is not Iraq, internally, historically, ethnically, religiously,” Hagel responded. “Second, there is strong support in Afghanistan today for America’s continued [presence] as well...

The Obama administration has quietly repatriated a dozen detainees from a small U.S. military prison in Afghanistan, moving a modest step closer toward winding down the United States' controversial post-9/11 detainee system. President Barack Obama, in a letter to Congress released on Thursday, informed U.S. lawmakers that about 38 non-Afghan prisoners remained at the Parwan detention center outside of Kabul, down from around 50 a few months ago. A U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that a Frenchman, a Kuwaiti and 10 Pakistani prisoners were sent back to their respective home countries at the end of May....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration has quietly repatriated a dozen detainees from a small U.S. military prison in Afghanistan, moving a modest step closer toward winding down the United States' controversial post-9/11 detainee system. President Barack Obama, in a letter to Congress released on Thursday, informed U.S. lawmakers that about 38 non-Afghan prisoners remained at the Parwan detention center outside of Kabul, down from around 50 a few months ago.

Well, gee, $1 trillion or so just doesn’t buy what it used to. Take Iraq, for example. Or, should I say: Take Iraq, please, someone — and fix it. Fend off the nasty Islamic fighters of ISIS and keep that miserable sinkhole for American lives and money from coming back to bite us — again. Do you understand now, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Bolton and all you neocon nutjobs, why the invasion of Iraq in 2003 wasn’t a very good idea? President Obama sure does. Because now he’s neck deep in another crisis in this place, a country...

They heard someone saying that an American soldier was looking for an English speaker so he could talk with the Taliban. "Following his disappearance, IEDs started going off directly under the trucks. They were getting perfect hits every time. Their ambushes were very calculated, very methodical,"

President Obama finally completed the prisoner swap he has been pleading with the Taliban for years to accept. While the president draws down American forces in Afghanistan and hamstrings our remaining troops with unconscionable combat rules of engagement that make both offensive operations and self-defense extremely difficult, the Taliban get back five of their most experienced, most virulently anti-American commanders. In return, thanks to the president’s negotiations with the terrorists, we receive U.S. Army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl — who, according to several of his fellow soldiers, walked off his post in 2009 before being captured by the Taliban. (For more...

After five years as a POW, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is headed home. But the circumstances of his capture by the Taliban in Afghanistan remain unclear, indicating he may have walked away from his base. For now, the story for US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is one of physical and mental recovery and reunion with his family. But very soon it will involve debriefings about the nearly five years of his captivity by Taliban fighters, who apparently held him in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan, where his infantry unit had been engaged in combat. Military and intelligence experts will want to...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The only American soldier held prisoner in Afghanistan has been freed by the Taliban

Anybody can make a mistake, and that certainly appears to be what led to the Obama White House’s exposure of the top CIA official in Afghanistan this weekend. Unfortunately, as Roger Kimball details , this is not an isolated incident. In year six of the Obama administration, it speaks volumes about not just incompetence but immaturity and the skewed priorities that come with it. Exactly because anyone can make a mistake, large organizations — presidential administrations included — build layers of vetting into the disclosure of information to the public. In this instance, because the commander-in-chief made a surprise visit...

President Barack Obama slipped into Afghanistan for a surprise visit Sunday and made clear that the U.S. will likely maintain a limited role here even after its combat mission ends this year and America’s longest war comes to a close. “America’s commitment to the people of Afghanistan will endure,” he pledged. Speaking to troops gathered in an airplane hangar on this sprawling military base, Obama said the war had reached a pivotal point, with Afghan forces assuming primary responsibility for their country’s security. But while many of the 32,800 U.S. forces now in Afghanistan will leave in the coming months,...

President Obama made a surprise appearance in Afghanistan on Sunday. There is now buzz that the White House revealed the name of the CIA station chief in Kabul to a pool of reporters:

President Barack Obama is promising U.S. forces in Afghanistan that America’s longest war will come to a close at the end of the year. The president made a surprise visit Sunday to Bagram Air Field to celebrate the Memorial Day holiday weekend with troops. He says the war is at a pivotal moment, with Afghan forces taking over primary responsibility for the security of their country. …

President Obama has made an unannounced visit to Afghanistan this Memorial Day weekend, Fox News has learned.