Asia

An important price of President Obama’s decision to pursue a big new military campaign in Afghanistan under the rubric of ‘counter-insurgency’ has been a spike in civilian casualties, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. A new ICRC report notes, ‘ As the conflict has intensified and expanded geographically, civilian casualties have once […]

Congress has been briefed on a new National Intelligence estimate on Afghanistan that is said to throw cold water on the idea that the US military has made significant progress in Afghanistan as a result of President Obama’s troop escalation. In a further demonstration that people leak classified documents all the time in Washington–it isn’t […]

Rajiv Chandrasekaran of WaPo gets the scoop. His sources say that at a high level meeting in October, Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Karl Eickenberry pressed President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan to reconsider his decision to toss private security firms out of his country. Karzai exploded, called the US one of three enemies faced by […]

Tom Engelhardt makes an argument for why the US casualties in Afghanistan are nowadays virtually ignored by television news and get buried in the back pages in the print media. He suggests that the war dead are mostly young, rural or small-town, and working or lower-middle class. It is certainly the case that if the […]

The bodies of the six US troops — killed Monday by a newly recruited Afghan border guard who turned Taliban — arrived back in the United States late Wednesday. That 6 US soldiers were killed in one day was generally not news on the so-called news networks, though of course the major print media reported […]