Recent Posts

The Long, Quiet Death of American Foreign Policy

With the protection of the nation’s interests abroad entirely subordinate to domestic politics, it’s now almost impossible to maintain a prudent strategy. A sked for his opinion of Western civilization, Mohandas K. Gandhi wryly replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” We could say the same about U.S. …

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The Day Afghanistan Died

If you’ve read the plethora of post-mortem reports on Afghanistan, there are plenty of enemies to go around, from corruption, to incompetent leadership, to 20 years of rosy assessments from our own defense establishment. For me, there is a single day that Afghanistan died, and it was June 16, 2021. …

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Why Exactly Did We Abandon Bagram Air Base?

The Economist’s Shashank Joshi tweeted an important observation that deserves to be highlighted. President Biden was either confused or — worse — actively misleading the American people when he said at Thursday’s press conference that senior military officers advised him to abandon the Bagram air base because there “was not …

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Afghanistan Nightmare Gets Worse

Our nightmarish exit from Afghanistan got worse on Thursday when a suicide attack at the Kabul airport killed 13 U.S. troops, as well as dozens of Afghan civilians. It was the heaviest combat loss for the U.S. since the downing of a Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan a decade ago. Prior …

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Afghanistan and the Propaganda of Infinite War

The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban’s re-ascendance are producing some incredible lamentations about the decline of American power. This apprehensiveness about withdrawal is premised on the belief that the U.S. acts as a force for good and is vital to the effort to defeat the scourge of global …

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US-Taliban ties on razor’s edge. China is the winner

A panoramic view of Mes Ayna on the gentle hills and craggy mountains in Logar province 40 kilometres south-east of Kabul, Afghanistan, where Chinese firms signed contracts to mine one of the world’s largest untouched copper deposits estimated to contain 450 million metric tonnes of ore worth at least US$50 …

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