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 [...]

Yesterday, October officially became the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Afghanistan since the war began. The death toll was pushed over that grim marker by improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the single deadliest weapon used against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. IED deaths have increased alongside U.S. troop increases every year since the U.S. invaded.

NATO forces might take comfort in the fact that they tamped down the number of civilian deaths attributed to them compared to the elevated levels of recent months. But McChrystal (rightly, I might add) put forward a measure of success as the total number of Afghans protected from violence, not just the number killed by U.S. and NATO troops. Measured by that criteria, Operation Khanjar was a blunder that triggered a wave of civilian deaths caused by insurgent push-back.