Anyone who has ever taken the time to read through one of Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s quarterly reports to Congress will certainly tell you that the experience is harrowing. The audits reveal wasted taxpayer dollars, acts of fraud and corruption by U.S. contracting companies and government employees, as well as massive, unfixable development …

Could Afghanistan be the next Iraq? Within foreign policy circles, it’s become one of the most frequently posed questions of the summer. And according to many, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” “A future similar to Iraq’s may be inevitable,” warns Anish Goel, a South Asia fellow at the New America Foundation. “I watch and …

Is the next Banksy an ISAF vet? This article from a while back just caught my attention (H/T to Doctrine Man for pointing it out). The piece explores graffiti art on the security barriers at Kandahar Airfield. Great write-up, fantastic photos. If you’re in the ‘Stan and happen to pass by any graffiti art on your …

Several months ago — before the Bergdahl drama and Iraq’s abrupt meltdown — former Army Major Jim Gant received a brief flurry of attention due to the release of his biography American Spartan, authored by Ann Scott Tyson, which chronicles Gant’s turbulent career in Special Forces. It documents his dramatic rise to fame since 2009, …

Washington has descended into a familiar battle: the blame game. The issue is Iraq and a major territory grab by the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS), but that is unfortunately secondary to the brawl itself. Many Republicans, foremost among them Sen. John McCain, lambast President Barack Obama for failing to keep American troops …

This is the latest installment of our 5 Questions series, in which we feature an expert, practitioner, or leader answering — you guessed it — five questions on topics of current relevance in the world of defense, security, and foreign policy. Well, four of the questions are topical.  The fifth is about booze. We are War on …

Carlotta Gall, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).   In 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell told Pakistan’s then-President Pervez Musharraf, “You are either with us or against us.” This stirring rhetoric has been shown to be empty. Pakistan proved to indeed be both with us and against us, …

In the evening after a day of patrols in central Helmand, I would often find myself sitting and talking with my interpreter Mohammad. He was a Pashtun from Kabul who had been working with British forces – to whom I was then assigned – for some time. He was often smiling and always insightful. I …

This is another entry in the new WOTR series, Art of War. To submit to Art of War, email Kathleen.McInnis@warontherocks.com with “SUBMISSION” in the subject line. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (W. W. Norton & Company, 1899; 2005). Ann Scott Tyson, American Spartan: the Promise, the Mission, and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant (William Morrow, 2014). …

The ongoing presence of ISAF troops is now of little consequence to the people of southern Afghanistan. Their fate was decided in 2011, writes Christopher Johnston. The withdrawal of coalition soldiers from southern Afghanistan has been marked by silence, spreading almost imperceptibly below the Hindu Kush. Most International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops have already …

While upcoming elections and sustained Taliban attacks are keeping many Afghans on edge, the greatest long-term threat to Afghanistan right now is the slow, insidious rot of uncertainty that is permeating nearly every facet of Afghan society. This situation is adversely affecting the efforts of the international community that has invested and sacrificed so much …

In his State of the Union address, President Obama declared, “we’ve put al-Qaeda’s core leadership on a path to defeat.” Yet, he acknowledged that “the threat has evolved as al-Qaeda affiliates and other extremists take root” across the Middle East and Africa. Obama was articulating an oft-repeated White House mantra: Al-Qaeda Central—based in Afghanistan and …

I was at dinner a few months back when they brought up the little dead Afghan girl. A girl I had watched die, but had forgotten about. Buried, repressed, pushed into the same compartments in my mind that hold images of my father riddled with lung cancer and the wounded seagull I killed with a …

This is the latest edition of our Five Questions series.  Each week, we feature an expert, practitioner, or leader answering five questions on a topic of current relevance in the world of defense, security, and foreign policy.  Well, four of the questions are topical.  The fifth is about booze. We are War on the Rocks, after all. …

With President Karzai as unlikely as ever to sign a Bilateral Security Agreement with the United States, an early withdrawal of coalition forces from Afghanistan seems increasingly probable.  Although the focus will soon turn to determining how to safely extract coalition forces, the United States also needs to think about how to preserve the strategic …