In October 1944, with the end of World War II in sight, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin passed a note back and forth to each other at a conference in Moscow. On the piece of paper, Churchill had assigned percentages to several Eastern European countries. Stalin amended the numbers...
The struggle has been going on for four years and is once again approaching a possible turning point. On one side you have a majority of Democrat and Republican legislators united with the intelligence community in the team called “proponents of a massive US military presence across the...
The New York Times editorial board weighs in with its ethical take on the news of the agreement with Taliban leaders to end the US military presence in Afghanistan. The newspaper’s editorial describes the peace deal as “a ticket out of Afghanistan for American troops who’ve been there far...
Afghanistan has long been touted as the “graveyard of empires.” The British and the Soviets certainly discovered that lesson to their great regret. Perhaps future historians will judge the failure of the United States to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan over a two-decade period as a critical...
Donald Trump was right that Russia’s Afghan misadventure is a remarkably logical place to start when considering the present American debacle in that same country. As I approach 75, I’m having a commonplace experience for my age. I live with a brain that’s beginning to dump previously...
As the US seeks an urgent withdrawal, there will not be durable peace in Afghanistan, nor a dignified exit for America. John Bolton, the current US national security adviser, once wrote: “ Obama is pursuing ideological, not geopolitical, objectives.” If it was true about President...
When it comes to Afghanistan, sportsmen are slowly replacing warlords in popular imagination. More than a century ago, the Nobel Prize laureate Rabindranath Tagore, in his short story “Kabuliwala” (peddler), portrayed an Afghan dried-fruit seller befriending a little Bengali girl who...
In the 21st century, insurgent movements, now largely religious or terror-based or both, offer a grim new version of containment to the last superpower. Think of it as the all-American version of the human comedy: a great power that eternally knows what the world needs and offers copious advice...
This essay is the introduction to Tom Engelhardt’s new book, A Nation Unmade by War, a Dispatch Book published by Haymarket Books. As I was putting the finishing touches on my new book, the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute published an estimate of the taxpayer...
US Special Operations Forces were deployed to 149 nations in 2017, or about 75% of the countries on the planet. At around 11 o’clock that night, four Lockheed MC-130 Combat Talons, turboprop Special Operations aircraft, were flying through a moonless sky from Pakistan into Afghan airspace. On...
With the war on terror slowly becoming a generational conflict, are America's generals taking pages out of Nixon's playbook? It took 14 years, but now we have an answer. It was March 2003, the invasion of Iraq was underway, and Major General David Petraeus was in command of the 101st...
Afghanistan’s regional policy is not constructed around local rivalries. On December 4, the Sixth Ministerial Conference of the Heart of Asia-Istanbul Process was held in Amritsar, India. The Heart of Asia process was launched in 2011 as a new and complementary framework for enhancing...
