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"My time in the Obama administration turned out to be a deeply disillusioning experience." It was close to midnight on Jan. 20, 2009, and I was about to go to sleep when my iPhone beeped. There was a new text message. It was from Richard Holbrooke. It said, "Are you up, can you talk?" When I called, he told me that Barack Obama had asked him to serve as envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He would work out of the State Department, and he wanted me to join his team. "No one knows this yet. Don't tell anyone. Well, maybe...

KABUL, Dec 27 -- NATO-led forces killed a mid-level Taliban commander and another militant in Afghanistan while a civilian driver died in a rebel attack on a convoy of oil tankers, officials said ON Wednesday. Abdullah Jan Pashtoon, a mid-level insurgent leader and an another rebel were killed in a Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) airstrike in eastern Laghman province on Friday, the force said in a statement. “Several sources of intelligence, assessed collectively, indicate that ISAF forces did indeed kill Jan Pashtoon,” spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Paul Fitzpatrick said in a statement. The statement said Pashtoon was known to...