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By Chris Abani
$13.95
By Jeff Sharlet
$17.13
$17
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AP / Rahmat Gul
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Pointing to “the shaky, erratic and vague standpoint of the Americans” as one key reason for their decision, Taliban leaders in Afghanistan put the kibosh on plans to meet with U.S. envoys, releasing a statement on Thursday explaining the change of plans.
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cbsnews.com
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While he had visiting Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki close at hand, U.S. President Barack Obama took the opportunity Monday to make congratulatory noises from the podium about the end of the Iraq War and the imminent withdrawal of American troops from Maliki’s homeland.
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Gage Skidmore (CC-BY-SA)
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By Juan Cole — As someone who has been running for president for many years, Romney should by now know something about foreign policy and he should know where he stands.
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“Today I can say that our troops in Iraq will definitely be home for the holidays,” President Obama declared Friday, helpfully noting that this withdrawal plan makes good on one of his campaign promises. No doubt what he said strikes fear in the hearts of Republican presidential hopefuls and their supporting casts.
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Flickr / The National Guard
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President Obama will be able to say that he kept one of his promises from the ’08 campaign trail come Dec. 31 of this year, when all but 160 American troops will leave Iraq after more than eight years of heavy military involvement (read: war) in the Middle Eastern nation. (more)
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U.S. Air Force / Senior Airman Bradley A. Lail
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The withdrawal of American troops from Iraq is on track, said Pentagon officials Wednesday, though the Obama administration has yet to decide just how many troops will stay beyond the Dec. 31 departure deadline. (more)
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AP / Drew Angerer
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Despite the reduced number of U.S. troops in Iraq, the monthly death toll among Americans there has risen to a two-year high, reached when three soldiers were killed Wednesday in a rocket attack.
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So, now we know Obama’s big plan for pulling American troops out of Afghanistan, but it hasn’t exactly been well received. This week’s “Left, Right & Center” panel—featuring Tony Blankley, Matt Miller, Robert Scheer and Chrystia Freeland—offers no exception to the naysaying.
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U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Andrew Smith
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By Eugene Robinson — The many contradictions in President Obama’s speech about Afghanistan Wednesday night were perhaps intended to obscure the bottom line: Tens of thousands of American troops will remain for at least three more years, some of them will be maimed or killed, and Obama offered no good reason why.
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U.S. Air Force / Staff Sgt. Larry E. Reid Jr.
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By Bill Boyarsky — Barack Obama’s plan for a limited withdrawal from Afghanistan means tens of thousands of American troops will remain there, many of them fighting, for several years to come.
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White House / Pete Souza
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Set your TiVos: The White House announced Monday that the president will deliver an Afghanistan speech Wednesday. Obama’s advisers have been debating how many of the more than 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan to bring home, with the military’s top brass pushing to keep most there indefinitely.
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AP / Jason Reed
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By Bill Boyarsky — The White House account of President Barack Obama’s meeting with his Afghanistan team was insultingly vague for anyone wanting to know when—or if—the Afghanistan war will end.
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Flickr / U.S. Marine Corps Official Page
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Ahead of policy deliberations in Washington, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued for a modest approach to the U.S. troop drawdown in Afghanistan that will begin next month. He favors the removal of support forces in a strategy that would leave as much “combat power” in place as possible until the war’s end.
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U.S. Army
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By Bill Boyarsky — Remember the war, the one in Afghanistan? The recent Memorial Day weekend forced the news media to briefly focus on it. But otherwise the war and its heavy toll have faded from our national consciousness.
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Wikimedia Commons / The White House
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Come July, foreign forces will begin withdrawing from Afghanistan, coinciding with President Hamid Karzai’s plan to begin returning seven regions of his country back to local control.
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Flickr / Department of State
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U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has some choice words for Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, warning of increasing military pressure as the U.S. prepares to resume heavy fighting. “They cannot defeat us,” Clinton said as the war in Central Asia is catapulted into its 10th year.
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U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Michael Bracken
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New statistics show that the Afghan police force, upon whose shoulders eventual U.S. and British military withdrawal is based, is experiencing an unsustainable rate of attrition that sees one in five recruits bailing every year.
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U.S. Marine Corps / Chief Warrant Officer 3 Philippe E. Chasse
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Hamid Karzai and NATO would like Afghan forces to take over the country’s security by 2014, a goal Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell calls “aspirational,” as in “There may very well be the need for forces to remain in-country ... ” (more jibber-jabber after the jump)
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U.S. Air Force / Tech. Sgt. Efren Lopez
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The White House is pushing back against a McClatchy report that the administration plans to delay the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan from the previously announced July 2011 deadline to some time in 2014.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Scott Ritter — The president and the American people will all too soon come to recognize that the quagmire in Iraq is far from over. In fact, one might say it has only just begun.
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AP / Maya Alleruzzo
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American soldiers reportedly were called in to help Iraqi forces repel an attack by insurgents on an army base in Baghdad, just five days after the much-ballyhooed official end of U.S. combat operations in the country.
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AP / Karim Kadim
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By Robert Scheer — The carnage is not yet complete, and President Barack Obama’s attempt to put the best face on the ignominious U.S. occupation of Iraq will not hide what he and the rest of the world well know.
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Wikimedia Commons
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Iraq is now “sovereign and independent,” according to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who made this optimistic pronouncement on Tuesday, the official end day of the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from his war-ravaged country.
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Much fanfare was made about the so-called withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq this month, but as this Al-Jazeera report explores, we might want to read the fine print on this one.
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U.S. Marine Corps / Sgt. Joshua Greenfield
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Gen. James Conway, the head Marine in charge, says of the president’s promise to withdraw troops from Afghanistan by next summer: “In some ways, we think right now it’s probably giving our enemy sustenance.”
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AP / Sgt. Armando Monroig, U.S. Army
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The U.S. military is moving to trim its troop count in Iraq to 50,000 by Sept. 1, at which point the remaining personnel will assume an “advise-train-assist” role. But the American commander there says that if Iraqi security forces fall down on the job, U.S. troops could be thrust back into a combat role.
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AP / May Alleruzzo
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With the last American combat brigade pulling out of Iraq this week, the U.S. is turning much of the security effort there over to a small army of civilian contractors under the State Department.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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President Obama may have marked 2011 on his calendar to begin pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, but his commander there, Gen. David Petraeus, isn’t so sure. Withdrawal, Petraeus said in an interview with NBC, must be “conditions-based.”
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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The term withdrawal seems a bit overstated when it comes to describing the changing U.S. military strategy in Iraq, but President Obama emphasized the thematic over the technical in a speech he delivered Monday ... (continued)
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AP / Rafiq Maqool
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The British government has announced a 40 percent increase in aid projects in Afghanistan as it gears up to fulfill a pledge to remove its combat troops from the country by 2014.
Posted on Jul 18, 2010
READ MORE 
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Wikimedia Commons / U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Lorie L. Jewell
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Here we have a man whose job nobody should envy: Gen. David Petraeus was unanimously confirmed by the Senate on Wednesday to take over the top U.S. command post in Afghanistan ... (continued)
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Flickr / Truthout.org by Troy Page; adapted by Mr. Wright
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President Obama arrived in Kabul on Sunday on a surprise visit to Afghanistan, where he is expected to address U.S. troops as well as put pressure on Afghan President Hamid Karzai to step up the fight against corruption and drug trafficking.
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The timing of Wednesday’s series of three suicide bombings in Baghdad was significant, considering Sunday’s parliamentary election is just around the corner. The attacks happened in rapid succession in the morning and killed 32 people, including some who had been wounded in the first two blasts and were seeking treatment at a hospital in the Iraqi capital city.
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Flickr / Randy83
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One day after the Dutch Cabinet collapsed, the country’s prime minister has announced that he expects the Netherlands to pull out all its troops from Afghanistan in August.
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AP / Rafiq Maqool
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By Jane Merrick, Brian Brady and Kim Sengupta —
Seven out of 10 Britons back The Independent on Sunday’s call for a phased withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan as a landmark report by Oxfam this week exposes the real human cost of the war.
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AP / Khalid Mohammed
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Perhaps it was to be expected after the mass exodus of American forces in late June, but August was a cruel month in terms of the Iraqi death toll caused by insurgent violence—the worst in 13 months. Unfortunately, the trend might continue as Iraqis navigate the aftermath of U.S. troop withdrawal and anticipate their national elections early next year.
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Defense Dept. / Army Staff Sgt. Michael J. Carden
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After Wednesday’s multiple bombings in Iraq, which left about 100 dead and more than 500 wounded, Army Lt. Gen. Frank Helmick, the U.S. commander in charge of training Iraqi troops before the Americans’ departure, said there’s “much work to be done” during and after the hand-over.
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DoD
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While affirming the Dec. 31, 2011, date for the pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did mention in a speech to a Washington think tank the possibility of extending that deadline if Iraqi forces still required “further training and further support.”
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EPA
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Thursday saw the deadliest day since the withdrawal of most U.S. soldiers from Iraq’s urban areas, with 54 people being killed in attacks across the country. Some believe the increase in bombings is an attempt to delegitimize the post-U.S. Iraqi security forces. Others believe it to be just the continuation of six years of bloodshed.
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By William Pfaff — Now that American troops are withdrawing from the cities of Iraq, the calculation must begin as to whether the loss of some half-million to million lives and the ruin of the infrastructure and social structure of Baghdad and much of the rest of the Iraqi nation have served some good purpose.
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Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune —
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By Marie Cocco — As the media trumpets sound for the pullback of American troops from urban areas in Iraq, the essential lesson of our involvement must be recalled: Nothing about our entanglement in Iraq has ever been as it seemed.
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U.S. Army / Sgt. 1st Class Alex Licea
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The Iraqi capital threw a party Monday as U.S. troops began pulling out of Iraqi cities. It’s the first step in the military’s withdrawal plan, which promises to bring U.S. forces home by 2011. But it will be some time before many of the 131,000 troops return to the U.S., and there’s virtually no accounting of the thousands of private contractors and mercenaries.
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AP pool photo / Kirsty Wigglesworth
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By Robert Fisk — “We acknowledge,” the letter says, “that violence has claimed the lives of many thousands of Iraqi civilians over the last five years, either through terrorism or sectarian violence. Any loss of innocent lives is tragic and the Government is committed to ensuring that civilian casualties are avoided. Insurgents and terrorists are not, I regret to say, so scrupulous.”
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arcent.army.mil
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Six years after the disastrous invasion of Iraq, Britain’s armed forces have formally ended their combat mission in the war-torn country. Believing that their role is finished, U.K. government officials handed over control of their base to the U.S.—not Iraqi—military.
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U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Curt Cashour
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Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said he doesn’t expect the Iraqi government to ask U.S. troops to remain beyond the 2011 deadline. “I think that the Iraq leadership is focused on that this ends in 2011,” Odierno told the Associated Press. If security allows, the number of U.S. troops to be withdrawn this year will increase 3,500 (one brigade) over the number of 12,000 previously announced, the general said.
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