So we learn that Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales was on his fourth tour of duty in our misbegotten wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when he allegedly murdered 16 Afghan civilians in southern Afghanistan. His fourth tour of duty as an infantry soldier, thus putting him at far...

In the ten long years of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, during which we hoped to sow the seeds of democratic governance and equal rights for women, what have we achieved? The government we installed, virtually at gunpoint, has blossomed into the world's second-most corrupt state, after Somalia (our...

The final days of any year require us to take stock of that year, to weigh its merits and demerits, its achievements and ignominies. But history is written on an hourly basis, and every year's glories, catastrophes, triumphs and defeats are added to the long march of history; no year...

In Edward Girardet's fine new book, Killing the Cranes (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011), there is this damning sentence: "Simply put, it was the U.S. backing for the Islamic extremists in the 1980s that helped produce the current military quagmire in Afghanistan."

I first met Ed Girardet in 1987, in Peshawar,...

In the late 1980s when the Afghan mujaheddin were still fighting the Soviet Union's Red Army, I went to Peshawar, Pakistan, as field director of what was called the Afghan Media Project. We trained Afghans in Western-style journalism and established the Afghan Media Resource Center (AMRC), the first pan-Afghan news...

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future. Yogi Berra is said to have said that, but he also is said to have said, "I didn't say the things I said." That said, I'm going to make a prediction: things will get worse in Pakistan this year.

A few...

As the page turns into The Year of American Withdrawal, I think of a handmade sign I saw years ago taped to a wall in one of the control rooms of ABC News in New York: Toujours la même dreck." Same old, same old - only worse.

As the New...

The news coming out of Afghanistan is endlessly fascinating! Grimly fascinating, some of it, like watching the proverbial slo-mo train wreck, but there are also the stories that make us shake our heads, roll our eyes and cry, "WTF??" and "OMFG!!" and "What were they thinking?"

Agence France...

...is a failure to communicate.

Do the Afghan people want us to leave Afghanistan? Maybe. But what the Afghan people really want is to know why the hell we are in Afghanistan in the first place.

Stunning though it seems, a study by an international think tank found recently that...

By some accounts the U.S. military's offensive in the south of Afghanistan, the Kandahar Campaign, has made progress. The body count of insurgents is up. The U.S. and Afghan government forces hold more territory now than before the offensive, in this Taliban stronghold. But, as my former journalism student Ben...

The world's most corrupt nation is Somalia, according to the Berlin-based corruption watchdog organization Transparency International. Afghanistan is Number Two, but they're trying harder. Trailing Somalia, but just by a bag or two of cash, are Afghanistan and Myanmar (Burma), in a second-place tie, and Iraq is in...

What are we to make of it all? NATO, flying Taliban leaders to Kabul for talks. President Karzai, predicting Peace in Our Time. Zalmay Khalilzad, urging the U.S. to get tough with Pakistan. Taliban middle-managers by the score going to meet their virgins. Coalition forces kicking butt in Kandahar. Is...

Everyone seems to know how not to fix Afghanistan, but there's precious little in the way of ideas on how to fix Afghanistan. Insider journalist Bob Woodward has struck again, this time with a book called Obama's Wars, which chronicles the bitter, name-calling divisions within the Administration over...

Plans by a Florida fruitcake named Terry Jones to burn the holy book of Islam, the Koran, and the media coverage of the non-event, triggered widespread and sometimes violent demonstrations in Afghanistan. At least one person was killed, shot to death by perhaps Afghan security forces. Jones had earlier canceled...

The year 2010 saw the discovery by U.S. military planners that Afghanistan has tribes. The phrase "Anbar Awakening!" leapt to the lips of these savants, and a new strategy-of-the-week was born. Re-empower the tribal chiefs, they cried, and they will keep the Taliban at bay.

The Anbar Awakening, as...

The Vietnam war has often been compared to the current conflict in Afghanistan, but perhaps never quite so bizarrely as by Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal. In one op-ed he argued that "...an American withdrawal from Afghanistan, followed by a partial or complete Taliban victory, would mean a...

The Wikileaks avalanche of tens of thousands of classified documents relating to the war in Afghanistan is rumbling around the globe, and has triggered waves of denials, damnations, I-told-you-so's, oh-ho!'s and aha!'s. The White House and the Pentagon have naturally condemned the release of the documents and...

I have written previously that should the Taliban come to power again, they would be governing a far different place than the Afghanistan hijacked by the Taliban in 1996. There is another side to that coin: the Taliban today are a far different group than the holier-than-anyone zealots who came...

COIN, the U.S.'s murky and often incoherent counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan, seems an appropriate acronym, especially considering the wacky notion that the Taliban can be bought off with a fistful of coins. One element of the strategy for stabilizing Afghanistan is "reintegration," sometimes called "reconciliation," the idea that the Taliban...

This is a story about a US Army Reserve captain, Benjamin Tupper, and how the war in Afghanistan might have been won. But first, let's go to the replay.

A long, long time ago -- 2001 -- the war in Afghanistan began. Back then, the war had a purpose...