WASHINGTON (AP) — The No. 2 U.S. commander in Afghanistan said Wednesday that U.S. military advisory teams will start deploying to Afghanistan this year to help Afghan combat forces as they take a more prominent role in fighting the Taliban. (more)
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban dismissed reports they are preparing to talk peace with the Afghan government, and a NATO report leaked Wednesday shows captured insurgents full of confidence they will seize power after international troops leave. (more)
The White House is hoping to end its ten year old war with the Taliban in Afghanistan through a political settlement. Let us all pray that the negotiations will be successful. It is past time to get our soldiers out of there. But as with most things in the Middle East, there is a little “catch” that complicates things and makes pulling out our troops hard to do. It is hard because the war didn’t start with political maneuvering. It started with the blowing up of the twin World Trade Center Towers in Manhattan. The war came in with a loud bang; it is unlikely to go out with a whimper. (more)
When a YouTube video featuring Marines urinating on Taliban corpses surfaced earlier this month, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta responded quickly and clearly: “I condemn it in the strongest possible terms.” The directness contrasted with the more indefinite conclusion of an eight-month Air Force investigation into the motive of an Afghan pilot who killed eight of his U.S. Air Force mentors in a suicidal shooting spree at Kabul International Airport (KIA) last April. The report found that shooter Ahmad Gul — who spent 18 months at a fundamentalist mosque in Pakistan before recently returning to Afghanistan because he “wanted to kill Americans” — prayed all night before the attack at his pro-Pakistan Kabul mosque and shouted in between shots for “good Muslims [to] please stay away.” Yet even with the writing seemingly on the wall — indeed, he wrote “Allah is one” on a wall with his blood and died of his self-inflicted wounds chanting “Allah, Allah” — the report found no conclusive motive. It did, however, partially rule out one: “none of the co-workers believed subject was a religious radical.” (more)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration is moving ahead with plans for negotiating with the Taliban, confident that talks offer the best chance to end the 10-year-old war in Afghanistan. But the military worries things are moving too fast, and intelligence agencies offered a gloomy prognosis in their latest Afghanistan report. (more)
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the killing of a Voice of America journalist in Pakistan Wednesday, The New York Times reported. (more)
In an appearance on “Imus in the Morning” on the Fox Business Network, former Navy SEAL officer Leif Babin criticized the reaction to a video of U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban, pointing out that the media focuses on that while ignoring the sacrifices of fallen soldiers. (more)
The video of U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban soldiers that surfaced last week has sparked its share of outrage. However, it is the Obama administration’s reaction that has Texas Gov. Rick Perry concerned. (more)
American commentators, public officials and the Taliban expressed outrage over a video that appeared last week showing U.S. Marines urinating on the dead corpses of enemy Taliban combatants. But was the act any worse than killing Taliban fighters with drone strikes? (more)
International outrage over a video of U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters consumed media coverage Friday. Some conservatives cheered the Marines for showing such profound disrespect to the dead insurgents, while many on the political left demanded more forceful condemnation. (more)
Our so-called mainstream media have launched a new anti-military feeding frenzy. The furor is over a crude 39-second video showing four Marines apparently urinating on the bodies of three dead Taliban combatants. In hysteric rhetoric akin to “news reports” on the 2004 Abu Ghraib photos, hordes of print and broadcast “correspondents” rushed to describe the viral video, which surfaced Jan. 11, as evidence of an “atrocity” and “desecration” that reflects the “depravity” of our military in general and the U.S. Marines in particular. As usual, the effort to denigrate our armed forces means that the potentates of the press ignored far more important stories. (more)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration hopes to restore momentum in the spring to U.S. talks with the Taliban insurgency that had reached a critical point before falling apart this month because of objections from Afghan President Hamid Karzai, U.S. and Afghan officials said. (more)
The CIA’s RQ-170 “Sentinel” drone captured by the Iranians last week may have gone down in Afghanistan and then transported to Iran by friendly forces on the ground, a former officer in the elite Quds Force branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards told The Daily Caller. (more)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Herman Cain suggested Friday that the Taliban were playing a role in Libya’s new government, adding another foreign policy misstep to his stumbling presidential campaign. (more)
Even The New York Times is shocked. Here’s how the story begins: (more)
The Daily Mail reported Monday that the United States was backing a plan to allow the Taliban to open up a headquarters in Qatar, presumably in order to facilitate negotiations with the Islamist organization to help end the Afghan war. (more)
On November 26, 2008, in the afterglow of Barack Obama’s election, gunmen terrorized Mumbai, India’s financial capital, with a siege that claimed 166 lives. The event would have profound implications for the Obama presidency. Blame for the carnage was quickly laid at the doorstep of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a Pakistani Islamist group long deemed a terrorist organization by the United States, and intelligence showed that LeT was known to sometimes train at camps in Pakistan with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. (more)
So what if the pre-2002 Taliban government of Afghanistan harbored terrorists that were responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. And never mind if more recently the Taliban reacted to the death of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden with a pair of suicide bombers – they’re not really our enemies. (more)
On NPR’s The Takeaway this morning, host John Hockenberry claimed that although the Taliban doesn’t “love” America, the organization “has never been an enemy of the United States” because “they’re not sending planes over to New York or to the Pentagon.” (more)
The Taliban have begun using child suicide bombers in eastern Afghanistan, underscoring the increasingly brutal nature of the fighting in a volatile region that is emerging as the central front of the U.S.-led war. (more)
