Judah Grunstein writes [h/t Joshua Foust, emphasis mine]: To my mind, the problem that the debate reveals, and that no one has addressed so far, is the degree to which Afghanistan now represents policy paralysis: We cannot achieve our goals with our current approach, but we can neither afford the costs that a fully resourced [...]
Archive for September, 2010
Losing a Gamble in Afghanistan
Posted: September 15, 2010 in UncategorizedTags: Afghanistan, Joshua Foust, Judah Grunstein, Robert Green, Rommel, The 33 Strategies of War
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Who’s Really “Relying on Assumptions and Beliefs to Shape Reality” in Afghanistan War Debate?
Posted: September 14, 2010 in UncategorizedTags: Afghanistan, Afghanistan Study Group, Andrew Exum, COIN, counterinsurgency, Joshua Foust, Matthew Hoh
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 [...]
Security in Afghanistan Crumbles as Counterinsurgency Fails
Posted: September 12, 2010 in UncategorizedTags: Afghan National Army, Afghanistan, Afghanistan war, anti-war, Army, Brave New Foundation, COIN, corruption, counterinsurgency, failure, Hamid Karzai, Kabul Bank, Kabulbank, military, Obama, Pashtuns, peace, Rethink Afghanistan, strategy review, war in Afghanistan, white house
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. While General David Petraeus serenades the major news media in the United States with the siren song of “progress,” security in Afghanistan is rapidly deteriorating, and [...]
You shall love your Muslim New York neighbor as yourself.
Posted: September 11, 2010 in UncategorizedTags: 9/11, bigots, Christian, Christian nation, Christianity, God, Ground Zero, Ground Zero Mosque, Islam, Islamic center, Jesus, love, Lower Manhattan, Muslim, nonviolence, Park51 Center, prodigal son, Republican, September 11, Tea Party
The text from the lectionary for tomorrow in Christian churches is the story of the parable of the prodigal son. The deeper meaning of the story is Jesus’ warning to his ethnic brethren that the cultural purity movement they’d mounted in resistance to the Roman occupation of Palestine had become so exclusionary as to render [...]
