Registan.net

Now I like and respect Andrew Exum, but what is this?
Elsewhere, Max Boot — always among the more intellectually honest of the thinkers known as “neoconservatives” and someone I admire — has an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times largely praising the team President Obama has assembled for Afghanistan.
Boot could easily be right about […]

Bamian is one of those great provinces of Afghanistan that combine a rich history—aside from the giant Buddha statue creches, there are fortresses dating to Alexander the Great—with a permissive security environment. There is even a stunning lake, called Band-i Amir, that has become one of the centerpieces of a nascent tourism industry. At the […]

Last time we checked in on the Guardian’s Julian Borger, he was busy needlessly hyping the danger and challenges facing the Coalition in Kapisa Province. His latest dispatch, via Ex, is all about Ghazni.
Most days, weather permitting, a couple of US Black Hawk helicopters take off from Bagram airbase and do the rounds of Nato […]

The main features of Kapisa Province discussed in this post, hastily hacked together from a probably-inaccurate AIMS map. The Panjshir river is the squiggly blue line. Please click to enlarge.
BAGRAM AIR BASE, AFGHANISTAN — I’ve become almost permanently uninterested in reporting on Afghanistan. Reading these accounts describes a country and a people I have never […]

I’m curious if it is simply assumed that when reporters do an embed with the Taliban they’re being given a very carefully choreographed performance. That is, to a limited extent, the conceit behind military embeds (though they have their own problems, to be sure). But what we tend to see from Taliban embeds, whether recently […]

We bombed another wedding, this time in northwest Kandahar. Alex Strick van Linschoten visited the hospital where the wounded were carried:
The bombing, they said, lasted from 4-9pm. Noor Ahmad, Hazrat Sadiq and Mohammad Rafiq all lay on beds in the hospital next to Abdul Zahir. Between 3 and 5 years old, they are the cousins […]

‘Smile, we’re killing (fewer) Pashtuns!’

Somehow, Ann Marlowe keeps finding gullible editors, this time by declaring all the concern over civilian casualties to be a myth, some lie concocted by the Taliban and a willing liberal media.
The American Army has not always done itself a service in its relations with the media, allowing the insurgents to […]