Afghanistan

Radio Shariat Returns. Why?

by Joshua Foust
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Pajhwok reports (thanks for all the RTs, guys!) that Radio Shariat, the FM radio station that transmitted Taliban edicts during the 1990s, is online in Ghazni. What’s interesting about their report is that they state the frequency—88 MHz—and note many irregularities with how people are reacting to it. For example, the report indicates that the [...]

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Baitullah Mehsud Is Alive! Or Dead. Hrm.

by Joshua Foust
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Bill Roggio quotes his usual round anony-officials saying that Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban leader, wasn’t killed by yesterday’s airstrike that killed his other wife. The New York Times, however, reports that his own men say he is dead and that they are convening a meeting to determine who becomes the next robot target. The [...]

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Quote of the Day

by Joshua Foust

I recently asked an old friend of Karzai’s why Karzai would choose as his running mate Muhammad Fahim, a controversial figure who has been accused of multiple human rights abuses over many years. “Karzai believes that his two greatest mistakes as president were the removals of Sher Muhammad Akhundzada and Marshal Fahim,” he said. Both [...]

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Is Spencer Ackerman Saying Danger Room Should Give Me More Props?

by Joshua Foust
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Spencer Ackerman has been on a bit of a kick lately with MainStreamMedia outlets ripping off blogs and not giving them their due credit (thanks to, ironically, a complaint by an MSM reporter that Gawker ripped off his work). So then let’s set up a comparison with part-time Wired blogger Nathan Hodge, and the extra [...]

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Air Strike in Arghandab Kills Four

by Joshua Foust
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Initial reports say all four were from the same family. Villagers as a group brought the bodies to the Kandahar governor’s house. According to Alex Strick van Linschoten, there is a protest scheduled for tonight. We’ll see what that turns into. Update: Pajhwok has more details.

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Nasim Fekrat Continues the Hope Train

by Joshua Foust
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Nasim Fekrat makes me supremely jealous. He’s about my age, and has won numerous awards and fellowships for his efforts at blogging. Part of that is because he blogs from Afghanistan, where journalism can be a dangerous business for locals. But part of it, too, is that he is a blogging evangelist, and travels into [...]

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Gnomes on Tribal Militias

by Nathan Hamm

Dan Green has a plan for standing up tribal militias in Afghanistan in the latest issue of Special Warfare and SWJ. And here I was getting my hopes up that the tribal militia fad had died out earlier this year. Anyhow, Green points out that a tribal engagement strategy for Afghanistan should recognize that Afghan [...]

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The Virtues of Getting Off the FOB

by Joshua Foust

On my way home from Afghanistan earlier this year, I wrote a long essay about how all the force protection measures the Army has put into place to safeguard the lives of its soldiers have actually been contributing to the insurgency and making their deployments more dangerous. A month later, one of my friends in [...]

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Talking In the Graveyard of Empires with Seth Jones.

by Joshua Foust

Today, at 5 p.m. EST, I’m going to be hosting a book salon chat with Seth Jones at the blog collective FireDogLake, over his new book In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan. Just click on the link, register for an account, and come join the discussion! He’ll be answering questions for two [...]

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British MPs Urge End to Disastrous Afghan Drug War

by Joshua Foust

“Britain should abandon its anti-drug role in Afghanistan and focus on securing the country against the Taliban insurgency, a prominent group of U.K. lawmakers said Sunday,” according to the Associated Press. The story goes on to note that hundreds of millions of dollars (along with several billion dollars from the U.S.) has not noticeably contributed [...]

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