Congressional bean counters are unhappy at the State Department's budget for Iraq. (Look at the Washington Post's story on State's budget request here.) As troops draw down to 50,000, the State Department civilian advisers and police trainers are going to lose the security of having quick reaction forces on call [...]

It's unquestionable that some damage will come to America's war effort in Afghanistan as a consequence of the 92,000 documents that WikiLeaks dropped the other night. And the confirmation of existing reports showing that America believes there are extensive ties between Taliban fighters and Pakistani intelligence will cause some awkward [...]

Is this the Second Coming of the Pentagon Papers? Will the WikiLeaks deluge of documents mark a turning point in the Afghan war? "Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation", proclaims a headline in the Guardian.  John Kerry says they raise significant questions about the conflict. The iconic Daniel [...]

92,000 documents. This week, Wikileaks unloaded on the world the greatest leak since the Pentagon Papers. On one level, the five years of secret documents obtained by Wikileaks and released in conjunction with the New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel tell a harrowing tale of the Allied [...]

We have it all wrong. We did not learn from our mistakes. There were countless signs of a complete unraveling, and now it has been undone. First there was the Rolling Stone article that broke the story about the division in the chain of command. Our military did not have [...]

General James Mattis eats nails, sleeps on nails, and can break a jihadi in half with one fingernail. At least that's the impression you get from reading about the new boss of Central Command, which oversees the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Marine Corp general's tough-talking style has attracted a [...]

President Obama's talk on Afghanistan has always been smarter politics than policy. It's hard to imagine, come 2012, that there will be any serious national security debate to be had with the President's Republican opponent. After all, no one can say that he hasn't been repeatedly launching air strikes on [...]

June was another brutal month in Afghanistan. More than 100 soldiers lost their lives. Scores of Afghan civilians were killed. A country that has seen war and bloodshed for almost 10 years is still no closer to peace, despite billions of U.S. and international dollars that have poured in to [...]

As I sat in a bar to watch the Ghana/US football match on Saturday, I was struck by the intense optimism of the young American men milling around the TV sets.  Their faces painted red, white and blue and their large, corn-fed bodies tensely focused on the game, they really [...]

Don't you just love all the writers, like me, who find it necessary to add a "Full Disclosure", which is supposed to provide absolute honesty about a potential conflict-of-interest?  Of course,  a really FULL disclosure would go something like this: "Full disclosure, this reporter is advocating this point of view [...]