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Retired Army General William Boykin has been serially accused of wrongspeak during the War on Terror, and has therefore been dis-invited to speak at a prayer breakfast at West Point: General Boykin, a longtime commander of Special Operations forces, first caused controversy after the Sept. 11 attacks when, as a senior Pentagon official, he [...]  In strike aviation, especially in the old days, before smart weapons made the task of identifying and destroying hard targets easier, a principal risk to the striker was a phenomenon known as “target fixation.” This typically involved a low altitude attack which took advantage of direct and indirect terrain masking to approach a target, [...] ISAF has a new policy with respect to the murder of coalition troops by their ostensible Afghan allies: Military commanders in Afghanistan have stopped making public the number of allied troops killed by Afghan soldiers and police, a measure of the trustworthiness of a force that is to take over security from U.S.-led forces. [...] When our forces first went into Afghanistan, it was all about the kinetics. A couple of years ago, the mission moved to “hearts and minds”, firepower being eschewed in favor of making nice. Then came the “Afghan surge”, which never included as many forces as the forward commanders requested, but definitely resulted in increased [...] Sami Osmakac, a naturalized US citizen who was born in Kosovo, on living the good life, American-style: Osmakac, from Pinellas County, allegedly told an undercover agent that “We all have to die, so why not die the Islamic way?’” according to a federal complaint. A lethal melange of car bombs, explosive vests and AK-47s [...] Predictable consequences: A nearly two-month lull in American drone strikes in Pakistan has helped embolden Al Qaeda and several Pakistani militant factions to regroup, increase attacks against Pakistani security forces and threaten intensified strikes against allied forces in Afghanistan, American and Pakistani officials say. The insurgents are increasingly taking advantage of tensions raised by [...] Admiration and respect are often given to the dog soldiers and grunt Marines, whose lives in combat theaters are often characterized by hours of boredom marked with moments of terror. We hold our special forces operators in a kind of awe, for the training they undergo even before they are inserted into hostile situations [...] We got punched in the nose 10 years, 3 months, and 24 days ago. We got up, dusted ourselves off, buckled on our armor and went righteously to war against those who had conducted or facilitated that beating, throwing in an untrustworthy rogue regime with a history of manufacturing and using weapons of mass [...] The story today is not about the Taliban offering to open up peace talks with the US-led Afghan coalition by opening an office in Qatar. Talks in which neither Pakistan, nor – crucially – the minimally democratic government of Afghanistan have a seat at the table. That’s basically about a prisoner exchange, a handful [...] President Obama is famously a basketball fan, preferring to watch games rather than TV talking heads during his weekend downtime. Now the country he leads is contemplating the notion of putting up a fadeaway jumper on its way to the Afghan exit: The Obama administration is considering transferring to Afghan custody a senior Taliban [...] |
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