We’re in the middle of a political struggle to define “defeat” in Afghanistan. What does that mean?
We’re in the middle of a political struggle to define “defeat” in Afghanistan. What does that mean?
Obviously, too soon to tell. But with the new Obama announcement setting an enddate-ish, my nominee might just be: Pakistan. Pakistan got to have heaps of aid despite spending the entire time...
Good morning Ducks, here are your links from South Asia... (I am not even going to pretend I know what's going on in the Ukraine, Syria, Somalia, or Venezuela. Â I'll stick to what I sort of...
Good mornin' duck fans! Let's start the week by revisiting last week's firestorm in ... Afghanistan Hamid Karzai has become a bewildering enigma for many Americans as he launched yet another verbal...
The second phase of the transition of security responsibility from ISAF/NATO to Afghan Security Forces has begun (the first phase began in July 2011).  This means that roughly 50% of the population will now be under the protection of Afghan troops.Some of the areas being handed over are still quite active insurgent zones including many parts of Helmand, Ghazni, and Nangrahar provinces.  For example, Ajristan, one of the districts in Ghazni, is reportedly completely under Taliban control. In fact, the Taliban have a strong presence in 13 out of the 19 districts in the province and there is...
The chasm between Pakistani and Western reactions to last week's NATO attack on Pakistani forces seems to be growing if official actions/statements, media reports, conversations with friends on all sides, and ad hominem twitter flame wars are any indication.It goes without saying that Pakistanis are still in mourning for the death of their soldiers in what is a major national tragedy for a country that has had many national tragedies in recent years. But there is more going on than the understandable hurt and anger that follows a tragic friendly fire incident. This incident appears to be...
Last night PBS' POV program aired the Danish documentary film "Armadillo" (filmed 2009; released 2010) about a Danish-British Forward Operating Base in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.Although much of the documentary portrays standard tropes and follows a time honored narrative arc from a long line of war films, Janus Metz's work sparked debate in Europe because it appeared to depict Danish soldiers "liquidating" wounded Taliban fighters and piling up the bodies to take trophy photos. Thus, as the director notes, the film challenges the notion of soldiers as heroes while also showing the ways...
 The Realist tradition in International Relations long ago won the big battle by getting the best name. By calling itself Realism, the realist tradition makes all other approaches to IR seem idealistic, based in dreams but not realities. Anything but grounded in hard, cold calculations of how things really are. But the joy of realism is how often its acolytes indulge in fantasy. Ah, but only if we could have the good old days of the cold war, for instance.* * Insert gratuitous cite of Mearsheimer's piece in International Security.Who do realists look to as their latter-day Bismarck? ...
How is it that time and time again we are persuaded to hang on for another year in Afghanistan with the mantra that counterinsurgency (a.k.a. COIN) will really work this time. While I certainly acknowledge the limited range of alternative options and oppose any peace agreement with the Taliban, I think that putting our faith in COIN time and time again is problematic... To understand why, perhaps a (not so brief) recap of how the discourse of COIN has mutated in Afghanistan would be helpful...From late 2003 to mid 2004, Robert Andrews, a CIA and DoD official and Donald Rumsfeld's head of...
The release of the first three of a reported 4,000 photos and videos from an American "kill team" in Afghanistan threatens to become the next "Abu Ghraib."  The horrific images of civilian corpses being photographed with grinning American troops raises important questions about the American military's ability to maintain professional standards and discipline; soldiers' (racialized) understanding of and ability to engage with foreign societies; and the underside of military culture. In other words, contrary to the military's spin machine, these images are not an aberration or simply the...
 It is impossible to know at this point whether there is any connection between these two disturbing events reported yesterday: NATO forces’ mistaken killing of nine boys gathering firewood in Afghanistan; and, a few hours later, the killing of two American soldiers at Frankfurt airport, apparently by a Muslim man of Kosovar origin.  We do know that other terror suspects have stated that they acted in response to U.S. policies in the GWOT, in particular the frequent killings of innocent civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. It would therefore not be surprising if this were true...
In his Introduction to the recent New York Times collection of materials on Wikileaks, Open Secrets Bill Keller comments on the way in which the newspapers involved shaped the leaks in accordance with their own agendas. Thus, the Guardian gave extensive coverage to leaked US army accounts of civilian casualties in Afghanistan, reflecting their scepticism about the war; the NYT, on the other hand, took the view that they had already given front page coverage to all the major incidents and so gave this matter much less emphasis. There is no doubt that the Guardian’s perspective was much more...