Afghanistan

The White House's list of about 50 metrics to evaluate progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which it assembled to calm rising fears in Congress and the public about the Obama administration's increasingly embattled war strategy, is up on ForeignPolicy.com (with a more legible version here). The draft list, dated Sept. 16, 2009 and delivered to a closed congressional

The signers include the New America Foundation's Steve Clemons and the Cato Institute's Christopher Preble, political scientists Stephen Walt and John ...

Eight years after September 11, the "war on terror" has gone the way of the dodo. And President Obama talks instead about a war against al Qaeda and its allies.

What, then, of al Qaeda's enigmatic leader, Osama bin Laden, who has vanished like a wisp of smoke? And does he even matter now?

If the southern Afghan province of Helmand were a country it would be the world's leading producer of opium and its derivative, heroin. More than half the world's heroin originates here--much of it destined for the veins of junkies living in Europe.

In June 2005, U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officials and Afghan police raided the office of Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, the governor of Helmand, and found nine tons of opium in his office. He is no longer the governor.

A prominent critic, Michael Cohen, a defense analyst at the New America Foundation, has been blogging for months a feature called “Afghanistan Mission Creep ... and more »

Let me say at the beginning that I do not think that the existing mess in Afghanistan at present is the fault of the Obama administration. The president inherited it from George Bush, and simply did not have time between taking power in January and the Afghan elections of this month to carry out a radical change of course. If, however, the administration fails to change course after the (predictable) debacle that these elections have become, then the responsibility for subsequent disasters will indeed rest with President Obama… more

... have the troops to do these tasks on their own," says Michael Cohen, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation who has studied the issue. ... and more »

PETER BERGEN, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: The kinds of information that was given up by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed after being interrogated were about various plots they had on the drawing board to attack the United States a second time. But most of these plots were not serious. ... Original Transcript