The central justification of the U.S.-NATO war against the Afghan Taliban – that the Taliban would allow al-Qaeda to return to Afghanistan – has been challenged by new historical evidence of offers by the Taliban leadership to reconcile with the Hamid Karzai...
The death throes of the Mubarak regime in Egypt signal a new level of crisis for a U.S. Middle East strategy that has shown itself over and over again in recent years to be based on nothing more than the illusion of power. The incipient loss of the U.S. client regime...
Fifty years after Dwight D. Eisenhower's Jan. 17, 1961, speech on the "military-industrial complex," that threat has morphed into a far more powerful and sinister force than Eisenhower could have imagined. It has become a "permanent war state," with the power to keep...
The official line of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO command in Afghanistan, is that the war against Afghan insurgents is vital to the security of all the countries providing troops there. In fact, however, NATO was given a central role in...
This week's leak to the New York Times of a proposal for U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids against Afghan insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan may be intended to put more pressure on the Pakistani military to take action against those sanctuaries. But the...
The Barack Obama administration's claim of "progress" in its war strategy is based on the military seizure of three rural districts outside Kandahar City in October. But those tactical gains have come at the price of further exacerbating the basic U.S....
A diplomatic cable from last February released by WikiLeaks provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile program refuted the U.S. suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or intends to develop...
The revelation that the man presumed to be a high-ranking Taliban leader who had met with top Afghan officials was an imposter sheds new light on Gen. David Petraeus's aggressive propaganda about the supposed Taliban approach to the Hamid Karzai regime. Ever since...
The drone war that has been anticipated in Yemen for the last few months has been delayed by the failure of U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) to generate usable intelligence on al Qaeda there. That failure has given the CIA a new argument for wresting control of...
Andrew J. Bacevich emerged in the first decade of the century as this country's most widely read and widely respected critic of U.S. militarism and empire. He has addressed this issue with an intensity that is unprecedented for an academic. With the appearance of...
