Afghanistan
August 21, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
In an outstanding speech tonight, President Trump announced that the U.S. will not pull out of Afghanistan, but instead will fight with less restraint and more military forces. Trump needed to do two main things in his speech: (1) explain why he was breaking his campaign promise to abandon Afghanistan and (2) distinguish his approach to the fight from President Obama’s. Accomplishing the second objective would help make the breach
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April 14, 2017 — Scott Johnson
Last week President Trump authorized a limited missile strike against the Syrian regime for its use of chemical weapons against civilians. I explicated what I thought was “the message in the missiles” (I stretched to find 10 messages). Yesterday the United States dropped the “mother of all bombs” — the most powerful conventional bomb in the American arsenal — on an Islamic State cave complex in Afghanistan on Thursday. The
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April 13, 2017 — John Hinderaker
One of the liberal media’s themes these days is that President Trump has changed his position on a variety of issues. I think this is about 25% true and 75% false. What is most notable, I think, is how strongly Trump has moved to fulfill his campaign promises. One of many areas where President Trump is doing exactly what he said he would do is the war against ISIS. On
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February 9, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Gen. John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, testified today that Russia is helping the Taliban. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Russia has been publicly legitimizing the Taliban by claiming that it fights Islamic terrorists while the Afghan government does not. At the hearing, Nicholson declined to say whether Russia is providing material support — e.g., arms, training, etc. — for the Taliban (who, themselves, are
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June 20, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
As Scott discussed below, the Obama administration has decided to remove Omar Mateen’s pledge of loyalty to ISIS from the transcript of the shooter’s 911 calls to the police during his rampage. How does Team Obama defend this effort to airbrush reality? Attorney General Loretta Lynch said: What we’re not going to do is further proclaim this man’s pledges of allegiance to terrorist groups, and further his propaganda. We are
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June 8, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
Adam Goldman and Missy Ryan of the Washington Post report that the Obama administration believes approximately 12 detainees released from the prison at Guantanamo Bay have launched attacks against U.S. or allied forces in Afghanistan that have killed about a half-dozen Americans. In March, Paul Lewis, who oversees Guantanamo issues at the Defense Department, admitted to Congress that former Guantanamo inmates are responsible for the deaths of Americans overseas. Since
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May 23, 2016 — Paul Mirengoff
I believe it’s widely known, though also widely forgotten, that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton orchestrated “peace talks” with the Taliban. Clinton discussed her role in some detail in her book, Hard Choices. Robert Potts at the American Thinker provided a good summary of Clinton’s involvement, as described by her, in this article. Clinton’s goals were to “shatter the alliance between the Taliban and al Qaeda, end the insurgency, and
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December 23, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post reports that Iraqi troops, supported by U.S. air strikes, have stormed into the center of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province. At last word, they hadn’t yet retaken the city from ISIS, but their prospects of doing so seem excellent. According to the Post, this is the first major offensive by the Iraqi army in which Shiite militias have been largely excluded. Thus, it can be viewed
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October 15, 2015 — Steven Hayward
Back in late 1979 and early 1980, Jimmy Carter finally got a clue. To be sure, it took the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—the first ever direct use of Soviet troops outside of its post WWII sphere of influence in Eastern Europe—to get Peanut-Brain to concentrate adequately. He announced the Carter Doctrine (declaring that any Soviet move toward the Persian Gulf would constitute an attack on U.S. vital interests), called for
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February 13, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, General John Campbell, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, delivered upbeat testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee about the effects of our military effort in that country. Campbell documented the extraordinary progress Afghanistan has made on numerous fronts in the 13 years since the U.S. toppled the Taliban. I don’t think there’s any dispute about this. Campbell also contended that the present situation is quite
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January 28, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
As Scott discusses in the post immediately below, the Obama administration today claimed that the Taliban is an “armed insurrection” — you know, kind of like George Washington’s Continental Army — not a terrorist group. It is therefore materially different, spokesperson Eric Schultz argued, from ISIS. Thus, it is okay for the U.S. to swap prisoners with the Taliban (see Bergdahl, Bowe), but not okay to make concessions to ISIS
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January 19, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
ISIS is actively recruiting members in Afghanistan, according to Gen. John Campbell, the top U.S. commander there. Already, ISIS has secured the services of Mullah Raouf Khadim, an experienced former Taliban commander. Not only that, Raouf reportedly is leading a contingent of ISIS fighters in Afghanistan’s southern province of Helmand. The U.S. deserves an assist on this one. We released Raouf from Gitmo in 2007, sending him back to Afghanistan.
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January 2, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
Were it not for the high probability that 2015 will be significantly worse, 2014 would long be remembered as an awful year in Afghanistan. Sufficiently awful for Pamela Constable to write that “the last time Kabul felt like this, the Taliban reigned.” Constable reports: Many winters ago, I stood in a vast, empty intersection of central Kabul. The only sounds were the jingle of passing horse carts and the ticking
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December 16, 2014 — John Hinderaker
The Pakistani Taliban carried out an appalling terrorist attack on the Army school in Peshawar yesterday, murdering more than 130, mostly children, and wounding many more. Reports indicate that one teacher was burned alive in front of her class and some of the children were decapitated. It reportedly required more than eight hours for the Army to clear the school of terrorists. The Taliban has claimed responsibility–credit, in their eyes–for
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November 23, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
President Obama has decided to authorize an active combat role for the U.S. military in Afghanistan for another year. This is a reversal. In May, Obama said that the American military would have no combat role in Afghanistan next year, and that missions for the troops remaining there would be limited to training Afghan forces and hunting the “remnants of Al Qaeda.” However, now, as the New York Times reports,
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October 12, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
It seems likely that air strikes alone aren’t going to accomplish President Obama’s alleged goal of degrading and destroying ISIS, and almost certain that an air campaign of the low intensity we’ve witnessed so far is inadequate. It also appears that the Iraqi Army and the rebels we support in Syria are not up to the task. Accordingly, if we truly want to degrade/destroy ISIS, or even set it back
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October 9, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
Several days ago, I noted the half-heartedness of President Obama’s air campaign against ISIS. I suggested that ISIS’s march towards Kobani presented a golden opportunity to degrade that outfit, inasmuch as it was traveling in large numbers through mostly open terrain. Instead, our air sorties appear to have been intermittent and limited. Max Boot quantifies the half-heartedness of Obama’s air campaign against ISIS in both Iraq and Syria. He does
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