Afghanistan

Pakistan on Thursday descended into the kind of violence that tends to occur in Iraq, with a distinct Sunni-Shiite cast to it. But the larger context was a spillover of enmities from Afghanistan. Three bombs were set off in Quetta. The first targeted a pool hall in a Hazara Shiite neighborhood. When people came to […]

Afghanistan

Afghanistan: The End of America’s Longest War?

Juan Cole

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is in Washington for talks with the Obama administration on the gradual draw down of foreign troops from his country over the next two years. There are currently about 104,000 NATO and other outside troops in Afghanistan, including 68,000 Americans. In a recent piece for CNN, I wrote: “By summer of […]

Afghanistan

How America is Filling up itself and the World With Guns

Juan Cole

The American obsession with guns and violence is not unique, but it is distinctive. The US ranks 12th in the world for rate of firearm-related deaths. El Salvador, Colombia, Swaziland, Brazil, South Africa, the Philippines and some others are worse. But that is the company the US is in– not, say, relatively peaceful places like […]

Afghanistan

America’s Afghanistan Odyssey: When will Enough be Enough? (Stevenson)

Juan Cole

Jack Stevenson writes in a guest column for Informed Comment: The US has been involved, covertly or openly, in military actions in Afghanistan since 1979, with no end in sight. Nor, after all these decades, is the news very good. A Taliban assassination attempt has put Afghanistan’s chief intelligence and security official in the hospital. […]

Afghanistan

Afghanistan Commander Gen. John Allen Investigated; Meanwhile, Afghanistan sinking

Juan Cole

The emails to Jill Kelly of Gen. John Allen, US commander in Afghanistan and a friend of ex-CIA chief David Petraeus, are being investigated as possibly inappropriate. Meanwhile, actual Afghans face a difficult and perhaps bleak future because the way over-ambitious American project in their country is failing. And US veterans of the war struggle […]

Afghanistan

Juan Cole: Real Petraeus Failure Was Counter-Insurgency in Iraq, Afghanistan (Democracy Now!)

Juan Cole

Here is Amy Goodman’s interview with me, which was broadcast on Democracy Now! This morning. Via YouTube here Here is DN’s lead-in: CIA director David Petraeus has resigned following revelations of an extramarital affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, a married U.S. Army reservist. "This personal issue that cropped up that ruined his career at […]

Afghanistan

Real Petraeus Issue was Evaluation of Afghanistan

Juan Cole

Maybe it is because I was brought up in part in Europe, but I just cannot understand American puritanism’s obsession with public officials’ private lives. I can’t see that most private issues affect the quality of public service, and I don’t think people’s private lives are any of our business, nor become our business because […]

Afghanistan

Can Afghan Troops Hold the Line as US Withdraws, and Will US Seek to Stay in Central Asia?

Juan Cole

Aljazeera English does what so few US networks are bothering to do: It sends a correspondent to cover the take-over of forward operating bases in Afghanistan by the Afghanistan National Army from US forces, who plan to leave in late 2014. The report and the Afghan commander in Helmand are frank about the challenges of […]

Afghanistan

Romney’s Five Wars

Juan Cole

Mitt Romney’s speech at VMI on foreign policy has been widely condemned as vague and lacking in substance, sort of like the man who gave it. But the speech is also full of suggestions and criticisms of the Obama administration that are simply not realistic. The speech is Romney’s “Mission Impossible,” only without the cool […]