It’s startling to be reminded how long ago 9/11 was because our public figures keep talking about the Afghanistan War like it started last year. General Petraeus let us know back in February in a Meet the Press interview that we were just then getting “the inputs about right,” and were now “starting to see some of the outputs.” Nine years into this war, and Petraeus lets us know they’re just getting warmed up. Good God.

In a recent interview with Der Spiegel, General Petraeus reiterated his anti-corruption push, in which he tells his troops to be careful where they spend their money. With the latest stories from DC that show folks like Blackwater/Xe, KBR, and other US contractors getting off the hook, you have to wonder if the strategy of “Do As We Say, Not As We Do” will ever work. And if it won’t, then why do we continue to spend money and lives to keep pursuing it?

The Afghanistan Study Group report is out, and the fight is on. A number of critiques have been leveled at the report, one of the most influential being Joshua Foust’s over at Registan.net, chunks of which are percolating upward into larger outlets. Foust is a smart guy with whom I regularly debate, but there’s a [...]

As President Obama’s strategy review for Afghanistan commences, let’s hope he’s balancing the information coming to him from his happy-talking generals with some independent news reading of his own.

The Pentagon’s public relations machine is working overtime these days trying to sell a theme of "progress" in Afghanistan to push back against calls to end the war. The message machine behind this push is gargantuan, costing $547 million and employing more than 27,000 people. But, as our latest Rethink Afghanistan video shows, all that [...]

War is not politics, it is violence – murder – on an enormous scale. It does not lead to democracy, security, or good governance, it leads to anger, humiliation, and above all else, more violence.

On college campuses, credit card companies entice naive undergrads into signing up for super-high-interest-rate credit cards by giving away “perceived high-value items” like t-shirts or coffee mugs. They’re called perceived high value items because they really aren’t worth as much as people assume. Their only purpose is to distract from the terrible terms in the [...]

The ability for the United States to project power abroad – to protect its national security interests – is broken.

Now is the time to rethink your position on the war in Afghanistan.

From TomDispatch tonight: A piece this site is particularly proud to post — a unique account of being embedded with the U.S. Army in an Afghan war zone and a vivid explanation of why American-style war is bound to fail in Afghanistan — Ann Jones, “Here Be Dragons, MRAPS, Sprained Ankles, Air Conditioning, Farting Contests, and Other Snapshots from the American War in Afghanistan”