Establishment dick National icon Bob Woodward reports on a taped conversation that Fox News contributor Kathleen McFarland had with Gen. David Petraeus back when El Davo was still running things in Afghanistan, a tape that, mysteriously, did not surface until after General Dave resigned in disgrace from his position as head of the CIA. Kathleen…
Search Results for: WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
Suppose you gave a war and everybody got so bored they wanted to go home?
That seems to be the way things are shaking down in Afghanistan. As Slateman Fred Kaplan notes, when Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta stated, rather offhandedly, on February 1 that “hopefully” the U.S. would be “transitioning” [that is, getting the hell out of Kabul] in 2013, rather than the previously announced/anointed victory year of 2014,…
The Obama Wars
President Obama ran for office promising “to end a war.” The artful use of the indefinite article, especially when coming from a Harvard man, should have been a tip-off that ending a war didn’t mean, you know, “peace.” The President has ended the war in Iraq, pretty much, if you ignore our Baghdad “embassy,” a…
U.S. bad guy identification technology no longer lighting Fred Kaplan’s fire in Afghanistan
Well, that was quick. It seems like it was only two months ago—on Oct. 21, to be precise—that Slate’s Fred Kaplan was raving about our abfab, state of the art Guided Multiple-Launch Rocket System (aka “the 70-kilometer sniper round”), our High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (a “a 15-ton wheeled vehicle carrying a computerized fire-control system…
Socio-political notes from all over: The Ivies go down, Haas keeps covering aass, and Ryan Grim covers, and covers up for, “The Squad”.
The Ivies took a pounding, and New York Representative Elise Stefanik received a publicity boost more valuable than gold, and it couldn’t have come to a less deserving person.1 The supposedly brilliant scholars heading Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and M.I.T. came across as scripted robots, not responding actively to Stefanik’s leading questions—that “intifada”, which…
Alan Vanneman is very disappointed in Paul Krugman
Fuck yeah, I am. The source of my disappointment is Paul’s latest, Why America Is Getting Tough on Trade, the very title an irritant for the homage it pays to the meme that “getting tough” is always a good idea. Paul’s “nut graph” (I think that’s what it is) reads as follows: This is a…
Congressional Progressive Caucus speaks common sense to power: DC goes insane
If you live within 200 miles of our Nation’s Capital, you probably heard that enormous squeal of terror last week when, on October 22, 2022, the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent a letter to President Joe Biden making the not too remarkable suggestion—one would think—that the current bloody war in Ukraine can only be brought to…
Hey, hey, President Biden! How many kids did you kill today? Well, not many, as it turns out.
Yes, shocking news reported by The Week’s Ryan Cooper: Joe Biden is a good guy! Who’s all but halted the “blind man’s bluff” approach to targeting “bad guys” and anyone standing next to them initiated by President Barack Obama and heavily juiced by his successor, Donald Trump. Cooper explains how the supposedly fool-proof mechanisms developed…
In 1997 General McMaster wrote an excellent book about Vietnam, “Dereliction of Duty”. That should be the title of his autobiography as well.
Lieutenant General (three-star) H. R. McMaster, former national security advisor to Donald Trump, among other crimes, has been all over the airwaves recently, denouncing (of course) President Biden for having the courage to pull the plug on a 20-year farce—albeit one written in the blood of the innocents—known as the Afghan “War”—one of the very…
Fake news! Fake news hot off the press from the New York Times! Supplied to you courtesy of Elliot Ackerman
When is a war not a war? In his recent column for the Gray Lady, bearing the highly dubious title “The Afghan War Is Over. Did Anyone Notice?”, Mr. Ackerman, described by the Times as one of the paper’s “contributing opinion writers”, explains it all for you: Afghanistan in 2009 is not Afghanistan in 2020….