The New Republic

Fred Kaplan articulates an ambivalence that I largely share about an Afghanistan escalation. The bottom line is that there are no good options here for the U.S., and choosing the least bad is a combination of hopeful guesswork and prioritizing national costs and risks. READ MORE >>

The Pakistani military finally got serious, more or less, and launched a big offensive into Talibanland in South Waziristan. But this important LA Times story says the results have been something less than dazzling: READ MORE >>

It's hardly convenient for the White House to see Pakistan's prime minister* president on the brink of toppling just as Obama rolls out his new(er) strategy for Afghanistan, which we care about in large part because we want to see a stable Pakistan. That said, Zardari has been a hapless and ineffectual prime minister president, and it seems that the military basically holds Pakistan together anyway. READ MORE >>

A new Washington Post poll shows that the proportion of Americans who believe global warming is occurring has dipped by one tenth in the past year (from 80 percent to 72 percent). Leave aside the fact that most of this shift might be explained by the margin of error. Isn't it still remarkable that a majority of Republicans still believe warming is occurring? Several years ago that fact alone would have been cause for a headline. READ MORE >>

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Given that everyone agrees Israel can't just destroy Iran's nuclear program--what with underground bunkers and secret facilities--people often wonder why Israel would launch air strikes that could have calamitous consequences. This Council on Foreign Relations analysis offers one explanation: READ MORE >>

So, multiple outlets are reporting that Obama is days away from a decision on his Afghanistan strategy, and that he will likely present it to the nation in a prime time (unlike his mid-March speech, which was delivered on a Friday morning). For now there's not much to say, except to remind people that the waiting game has just begun. It will take months to get those troops over there. The winter will put a chill, so to speak, on combat operations. And it probably won't be clear many more months--maybe a year--whether we've turned the conflict around. Take your patience pills. READ MORE >>

It's often said that you can't hope to apply Iraq strategy to Afghanistan because the two countries/conflicts are so different. But Stanley McChrystal seems not to agree: READ MORE >>

CFR has an illuminating interview with Carnegie's George Perkovich: READ MORE >>

Les Gelb thinks Obama's trip to Asia was a flop, and that the time would have been better spent on a Hawaii vacation. He also wonders whether, after a couple of foreign trips with little to show for them, Obama's foreign policy team is serving him well: READ MORE >>