Newshoggers (Free subscription) | 6 hours ago
By Steve Hynd With General McChrystal and Ambassador Eikenberry on the Hill today to give lawmakers testimony on Obama's Afghan surge, there's a definite gap opening between what the Obama administration says should happen and what Afghan president Karzai is saying. While McChrystal has been keen to stress Obama's 2011 "beginning of the end" date, while not being drawn at...
Newshoggers (Free subscription) | yesterday
By Steve Hynd Not Denmark, nor Switzerland in the Hindu Kush - more like Kosovo, Mosul or Columbia. Afghanistan could look like Iraq, the Balkans or Central America if NATO succeeds in its mission there, the alliance's top commander said on Monday. "It will be a world in which there is a central government, there are elections, there is reasonable...
Newshoggers (Free subscription) | yesterday
By Steve Hynd On June 10, 2006 three detainees at Gitmo's Camp Delta were found hanged in their cells. The government's own autopies showed they'd been hanging there for at least two hours, in cells under suposedly constant surveilance by video cameras and guards. Now, Seton Hall Law has a new report on the deaths at Camp Delta. Professor Denbeaux...
Newshoggers (Free subscription) | 12/06/2009
By Steve Hynd Tom Friedman, when he shucks his schtick that every brown person is just a child who needs American leadership, can actually state the bleeding obvious pretty well. The president’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said flatly: “This can’t be nation-building.” And the president told a columnists’ lunch on Tuesday that he wants to avoid “mission...
Newshoggers (Free subscription) | 12/05/2009
By Steve Hynd David Cameron promises a civilian surge from the Ministry of Silly Walks. I wish British conservative leader David Cameron would make his blessed mind up. Does he want to kowtow to the neoconservative wing of his party and their Bushite buddies or does he want to win the election? With 71% of the British people opposed to...
Newshoggers (Free subscription) | 12/05/2009
By Steve Hynd Nir Rosen lays the truth out there: "The troubles with COIN are institutional. The American military and policy establishments are incapable of doing COIN." It's something I've argued in the past and that Sean Naylor adds more evidence for today. Rosen says it for pretty much the same reasons. The fact is that once you get down...
Newshoggers (Free subscription) | 12/03/2009
By Steve Hynd General Stan McChrystal is signalling to the Afghan leadership that Obama's 2011 "beginning of the end" is just a number they shouldn't take seriously. The top US military commander in Afghanistan has met senior politicians there as part of a charm offensive to sell Barack Obama’s new strategy. General Stanley McChrystal hopes to reassure wary Afghans that...
Newshoggers (Free subscription) | 12/03/2009
By Steve Hynd Let the incremetal escalation continue! Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he asked the president for flexibility on the number in case military commanders in the field request additional medics or troops trained to detect improvised explosive devices. Gates told a Senate committee Thursday that he got approval for the 30,000 troop deployment to be expanded by as...
Newshoggers (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
By Steve Hynd Justin Elliot at TPM has done sterling work getting some figures out of the DoD on the number of private security contractors in Afghanistan. The latest figure on DOD contractors in the country is a whopping 104,100, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command tells TPM. That number, which is expected to grow, is already greater than the...
Outside the Beltway (Free subscription) | 12/04/2009
... is just a planning tool while giving hope to doves that the end is in sight? Was it, as analyst Steve Hynd put it, “simply PR statements intended to soften public perceptions of an occupation without end. That is, they were lies”? My view is somewhat more charitable than that. I tend to agree with George Washington University’s Marc Lynch , I haven’t heard anybody yet say that they...
Newshoggers (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
By Steve Hynd Today, both US SecDef Bob Gates and UK prime minister Gordon Brown revealed that Obama's announcement of a 2011 "beginning of the end" - and Brown's earlier announcement of a 2010 date for starting a British withdrawal - were simply PR statements intended to soften public perceptions of an occupation without end. That is, they were lies....
Newshoggers (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
By Steve Hynd Whether they be pro-occupation neoliberals, anti-occupation realist conservatives, or any of the other various permutations, the overall opinion of pundits seems to be that Obama's speech stank on ice. It wasn't one of his best performances by a long chalk. He seemed at times visibly angry at the apathy of his military audience, and they in turn...
Newshoggers (Free subscription) | 12/01/2009
By Steve Hynd Spencer Ackerman does a great job of being an impartial journalist so he shouldn't come in for too much mocking, but he's posted his own position on the Afghanistan escalation in a way that needs to be mentioned and mocked just once. The post is titled "I Guess I Should Say Where My Head Is At On...
Newshoggers (Free subscription) | 12/01/2009
By Steve Hynd Glenn Greenwald has a post on Obama and his supporters' use of exactly the same rhetoric on his Afghanistan escalation as Bush and his pro-war cheerleaders used to justify Iraq. It's impossible to excerpt so just go read it. Everything old and Dubya is new again and to be given a thin gloss of "change we can...
Newshoggers (Free subscription) | 12/01/2009
By Steve Hynd The new December issue of Pragati, the Indian national interest review, is out - and I've a short piece in it summarizing some thoughts I've been blogging about on a possible Chinese role in Afghanistan. There have been several signals from China that, should the United States withdraw military forces, China would help facilitate “deployment of international...
