“So let us today drudge on about our inescapably impossible task of providing every week a first rough draft of history that will never be completed about a world we can never really understand.”
Philip Graham,
Former President & Publisher
The Washington Post
By James Kitfield Next year the United States will withdraw its last combat troops from Afghanistan, ending more than a decade of conflict in that country. The threat from the core al Qaeda group that…
In each of the past three post-war drawdowns, the Defense Department has cut the number of troops by roughly a third. The problem this time around is the size of the all-volunteer force remained relatively…
Critics of the United States’ hands-off approach to Syria’s civil war have long warned that the costs of doing little to shape the conflict’s outcome would one day outweigh the risks of doing more. The…
With the Obama administration now pushing talks to try and end Syria’s civil war as early as next month in Geneva, a major complicating factor is the black flag of Al Qaeda that now flies…
A new report by Human Rights Watch gives an unsettling glimpse of the sectarian slaughter that could attend the collapse of the Syrian government if recent gains by Islamist extremist groups are not checked. According…
With Washington’s debt-limit crisis and government shutdown having shifted from an argument about Obamacare to a broader debate about budgets and spending, there is talk once again of a potential “grand bargain.” The prospects of…
The news that U.S. Special Forces commandoes carried out nearly simultaneous counterterrorism raids on Saturday has briefly illuminated a shadow war the United States continues to wage against Islamist terrorists around the world. A snatch-and-grab…