On the heels of yesterday’s announcement that NATO forces will cease joint patrols with their Afghan counterparts after multiple incidents of Afghan army and police shooting and killing troops, a prominent Republican chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee has flipped on the war, saying that the US should now withdraw as soon as possible. [...]

In a move that calls into question the continuation of the mission in Afghanistan, the US suspended joint military operations with Afghan security forces, after a spate of insider attacks that killed troops in the field. “We’re to the point now where we can’t trust these people,” a senior military official said. So far this [...]

The US has handed over the prison at Bagram Air Force base to Afghanistan, in the latest in a series of transitions to have the Afghans take control of their own security. The prison transfer was part of a bargain won months ago by Afghan President Hamid Karzai. However, hundreds of prisoners at the facility [...]

Congress comes back for what promises to be a quick mop-up session before the election. The main items of business include two expiring authorizations, one for farm programs and the other for the federal budget. The former is up in the air; on the latter, the House and Senate are closing in on a deal [...]

FOX19.com-Cincinnati News, Weather There are 15,000 media personnel in Charlotte at the Democratic National Convention. Some of that includes photographers, but any way you slice it, you have a substantial number of journalists. Not one of them has the fortitude to pull off what Ben Swann of Fox 19 Cincinnati did in an interview with [...]

I’ve been lax in getting around to the disturbing acceleration of “green-on-blue” incidents in Afghanistan. The entire situation is kind of too depressing to contemplate. We’re coming up on the 11th anniversary of war in that country, and even a process like recruitment for the local security forces, which everyone has touted as the best [...]

As a reminder that the United States is still at war, 6 US soldiers were killed in a roadside bomb attack in Afghanistan. As a reminder that the United States is still at war in countries you don’t even know about, there’s this from the Washington Post: In pre-dawn darkness, a ­Toyota Land Cruiser skidded [...]

In a report required by the War Powers Resolution, President Obama for the first time acknowledged that the US has taken “direct action” in Somalia and Yemen to attack remnants of Al Qaeda, spreading the battlefield authorized by the AUMF passed shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001. In the letter, the President updates [...]

One of the more confusing positions for Democrats in the end-of-the-year “fiscal slope” negotiations concerns where they stand on the defense trigger. Obviously, with Republicans desperate to close these cuts, at least for the first year, Democrats have an opportunity to leverage that into a better deal. However, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has undermined that [...]

A widely noticed article yesterday suggested that some Republicans would be willing to look at revenue-raising closures of tax loopholes to avoid the automatic cuts to defense programs, the so-called “trigger.” All of this caterwaul over returning military spending to 2007 levels, especially when ending no-bid contracts could pretty simply counteract the procurement cuts completely, [...]

NATO formally announced a new timeline for the winding down of troops in Afghanistan, agreeing to transfer responsibility for security to the Afghans by the summer of 2013, with the withdrawal of most troops timed for the end of 2014. This is a similar timeline to the exit of troops from Iraq, with a transfer [...]