Seymour Hersh has long been the conscience of America’s foreign and military policy. It has not earned him much credit with our military. Nor is his reporting always above reproach. But he has played a necessary, perhaps ever more necessary role.
In the June 25 New Yorker, Hersh zeroes in on the efforts of General Taguba [...]
We hear once again of a “mistake” in Afghanistan. In the midst of a battle against the Taliban in an Afghan village, planes were called in. They destroyed the target. Unfortunately, there were children in the target. This has happened again and again in Afghanistan. It happens frequently in Iraq. The American or NATO troops [...]
The more we learn about Iraq, the less we seem to know. Americans try to get between the killers and their prey while many Iraqis want to kill Americans so that they can go back to killing one another. Of course, all Iraqis are not like this. But many of those who are not are [...]
Rory Stewart, who works out of Kabul, is presently a guest Op-Ed writer for the New York Times. He has been making a concerted effort to tell us, and the West, to “back off”in Afghanistan. This is very counter-intuitive for me. I was one of those who counseled when we went to Afghanistan after 9/11 [...]
The announcement that the British intended to evacuate nearly half of their forces cast a gloomy shadow over American plans. Commentators noted that several of the other coalition partners had plans to reduce their forces or leave completely in the near future. These were mostly small symbolic forces, but symbols are important.
Juan Cole tells us [...]
Congress is intent on showing up the foolishness of the administration, as exemplified by the sending of more troops to Iraq. Many of my comments have suggested the reasons why the surge is a foolish gamble.
Yet recent reports suggest that there is a chance that I may once again be wrong. There seem to [...]
In the January/February Foreign Affairs Barnett Rubin has summarized in excellent and disheartening detail the problems we face in attempting to stabilize Afghanistan. He asserts that we have not lost yet, but the country is still ours to lose. The importance of winning goes beyond both the welfare of the Afghan people and the [...]
Everyone wants to “get out of Iraq”, but no one has a clue as to how to do it. The situation is very different from that Eisenhower faced when he promised to bring peace to Korea were he elected (incidentally we are still living with the fallout from his “success”). The Korean War had a [...]
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