Registan.net

David Tate, a videojournalist who sometimes writes for the Long War Journal, certainly thinks so:
By the time Qourbon and an uncle made it back to Want, in the late afternoon of July 11, the village of around 50 homes was nearly empty. Most of the women and children had already been sent to nearby villages […]

Missing in much of the discussion over the abandoned firebase in Want, Nuristan, is the role civilian casualties may have played in creating an environment suitable for blowback. While the assault on the peaceful wedding party in Nangarhar got all the attention, almost no one paid attention to the other group of innocents bombed in […]

Let’s leave aside the many questions born of observer bias in this Small Wars Journal post by an advisor to the Secretary of the Air Force defending the utility of 1000% increases in air strikes in counterinsurgencies and address the meat of the argument:
Why did General Petraeus defy doctrine and increasingly call on airpower in […]

Given some of the email I’ve received lately, I think it is important to remember something: I am not arguing, nor do I intend to argue, that the situation as it is unfolding in Northwestern Pakistan is not grave, nor do I think I argue that events there do not have an occasionally tragic effect […]

Months ago, I received a not insignificant amount of hate mail (including from a surprising source) over a post in which I accused the military, and the many fawning and propagandistic bloggers and journalists who cover them unskeptically, of being too calloused toward the lives of innocent people during air strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. […]

The Insurgency Research Group points to a thesis by Raja Hussain from the Naval Post Graduate School addressing the role of collateral damage in Afghanistan:
As a consequence of the ongoing insurgency and terrorist activities, American and NATO forces are struggling to win the hearts and minds campaign, an element which has been compromised […]

Back when I was reviewing a series of propagandistic posts on Long War Journal about an artillery strike into Pakistan (see here, for example, and here), I raised the problem of sovereignty. Very smart people raised the proper objection to the argument, which is that Pakistan doesn’t exactly exercise traditional sovereignty over the border […]