Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment, Little souls who thirst for fight, These men were born to drill and die. The unexplained glory flies above them, Great is the Battle-God, great, and his Kingdom – A field where a thousand corpses lie. –Stephen Crane, Do not weep, maiden for war is kind. According to The [...]

I usually don’t do this, but I have to take my friend Spencer Ackerman out for a ride. (In my defense, brother, just keep in mind that I’m taking you out for a ride for a blog post in which you took your friend out for a ride. Just sayin’.) And, I want to say at the outset that on a critical point he’s the victim of some really bad timing, and that on that point he’s made a concession, but the episode is illustrative of a larger problem within the ranks of the left-leaning national security crowd and the way they’ve handled counterinsurgency doctrine in the public debate.

In case you hadn’t heard, the next stop in General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan is Kandahar, the ideological heart of the Taliban. Using the spadework done in advance of the Marjah operation as a template, McChrystal says the plan is to…

Pespective on “Political Violence.”

Obama is Tougher on Terrorists Than Bush Ever Was

Military officials say that civilian casualties in Marjah, Afghanistan are “inevitable” as U.S. and allied forces launch Operation Moshtarak, the largest military action since the U.S-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The New York Times recently published the full text of U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry’s memo to President Obama detailing his deep reservations about sending more troops to Afghanistan. The White House ignored his warnings and sent troops anyway.

The Obama Administration just unveiled a huge Defense Department budget for next year shaped by the Afghanistan war. War spending is exempt from the president’s proposed spending freeze, despite President Obama’s statement at West Point that, “we can’t simply afford to ignore the price of these wars.”

Next Wednesday, President Obama will give his first State of the Union address. It’s a safe bet he’ll discuss the Afghanistan war. You probably recall that the President recently committed to start drawing down troops in Afghanistan in July 2011.

Corruption is flowering in the shadow of the Afghanistan war. A new report published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reveals that bribery consumes an amount equal to 23 percent of the GDP of Afghanistan. Afghans are forced by corrupt government culture to pay more than a third of their income in bribes. Earlier this month, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction reported that 3/4 of all their active corruption investigations involved at least one Westerner.