There’s a lot of talk about defense budgets, and some internal squabbling between Congressional liberals and Leon Panetta over balancing cuts to the military with cuts to the safety net. But I think some of this misses the larger point, that the budget that needs to be put under control is the largely secretive one, [...]

Let me make some brief thoughts on the President’s address. First of all, it was a somewhat poorly written, bumper-sticker-laden speech. Obama clearly wanted to claim a position of success in Afghanistan, and use the withdrawal as an example of that success. But there were a couple things that can serve as markers for the [...]

The political opposition in Yemen met with the new interim President yesterday, in the absence of Ali Abdullah Saleh. This was the first meeting between the two sides this year, and some see it as a possible move toward a deal on reconciliation and new elections in the civil war-ravaged country. This kind of discounts [...]

The official narrative on the raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout has completely unraveled. First it was a hard-core firefight with precision Navy SEAL commandos encountering human shields and a hail of bullets, deftly avoiding harm and hitting their targets. Now this has devolved into a scene where the SEALs took the compound completely by [...]

It has been a consequential last 24 hours for the future of the US mission in Afghanistan. Karl Eikenberry, the current US Ambassador to the country, has dissented from the prevailing view that more troops are needed to secure the country, in a pair of secret cables. The U.S. ambassador in Kabul sent two classified [...]