After 13 years of war in Afghanistan – the longest in US history – the US government has achieved no victory. Afghanistan is in chaos and would collapse completely without regular infusions of US money. The war has been a failure, but Washington will not...

I read that Apple and Google have begun encrypting the data of customers so that nobody, including Apple and Google, have plaintext access to it. This of course means “so that the government will not have access to it.” The FBI is terribly upset about this,...

Few civilians were killed or wounded on Sunday. Most of the casualties took place in fighting or airstrikes. At least 197 were killed and 81 were wounded.

Muslims began to celebrate Aid al-Adha, but the fighting continued. At least 228 were killed across Iraq, and another 99 were wounded. Also, the Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib apparently is now in the hands of the Islamic State.

The claim has recently been made that the Obama administration concocted not only the imminent attacks on U.S. soil by the al-Qaeda cell The Khorasan Group, but the group itself, in order to make a case for self-defense and justify the bombing of Syria. As outlandish...

Celebrations are likely ongoing in Duluiya where a long siege is finally over. Meanwhile, at least 34 people were killed and 53 more were wounded across the country. Most of the casualties were militants.

On September 25, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) James B. Comey criticized Apple’s plans to update their operating system to exclude any kind of so-called backdoor for law enforcement access to encrypted data on Apple devices. Comey, like a true...

I apologize for the absence of a new column, but my health has not been all that great lately. It's nothing serious, so don't worry – I'll be back on Monday! NOTES IN THE MARGIN You can check out my Twitter feed by going here. But please note that my tweets are...

Veteran foreign correspondent Reese Erlich was in northern Iraq at the start of the U.S. bombing campaign against Islamic State. He interviewed Kurdish leaders, peshmerga fighters and U.S. officials. He says the reality on the ground is far different from the...

At a recent talk at the National Press Club in Washington DC, Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers in 1971, says he believes there’s not one person in the Pentagon who would agree that President Obama can achieve his aim of destroying ISIS in Iraq and...