Tara McKelvey

It is still not clear what we are doing in Afghanistan, or why we are there, or what we hope to achieve, as shown by the fact that President Obama still does not have a credible way of measuring success in that country and that a review of the metrics is now underway, as The […]

Americans may have been surprised by the war between Russia and Georgia, which unfolded a year ago this week, but there were early signs of trouble. In fact, the decisions that led to the war date back to 1999, wrote Quentin Peel in the Financial Times today, citing the work of Andrei Illarionov, a former […]

A recent Supreme Court filing from Obama‘s lawyers included a section about the state-secrets privilege, arguing that it was rooted in the Constitution in much the same way that Bush-era lawyers had once done. The passage was not an important part of the filing itself, but it reflected the position of Obama administration lawyers and […]

The body of Navy Captain Michael Scott Speicher has been discovered in a grave in a remote part of Anbar province, the area where his jet went down in January 1991 at the onset of the Persian Gulf War. The story of his disappearance and the nearly two-decades long search for him captures the enduring […]

The arrest of Daniel Patrick Boyd in Willow Spring, North Carolina, raises questions about when and on what grounds people should be arrested for planning terrorist attacks. According to The New York Times, he was charged with “stockpiling automatic weapons and traveling abroad numerous times to participate in jihadist movements.” The second part is horrific, […]

Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth was taking a shower in the barracks of a military installation in Iraq last year when he was jolted with electricity and died; the Houston-based military contractor KBR had installed the pumps and water tanks for the shower, and the Defense Department’s inspector general report recently found that the contractor […]

These days, John C. Yoo, the author of the Justice Department torture memos, is traveling around the country and giving talks in order to defend his work for the Bush administration, as The Washington Post reports. At the same time, prisoners at Guantanamo are waiting for news on their situation. The prisoners were, by and […]

An odd and disturbing tale of a man who was drawn into the terrorist network appears in The New York Times, raising questions about U.S. intelligence gathering. Bryant Neal Vinas went from Long Island to Pakistan in search of a wife, according to the account, and along the way received al-Qaeda training. (Meanwhile, some experts […]

We know that drones kill, but we don’t really know if they kill the right people, or at least we don’t know how often. The Pentagon has been stingy with information on the accuracy of the drones. Counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen and Center for a New American Security fellow Andrew Exum called for a reduction […]

Two homemade bombs went off near a sidewalk in Sadr City, reports The Times, in a series of explosions that killed at least 15 people in Iraq and engulfed one vehicle traveling in a U.S. military convoy in flames. The attack serves as a reminder that the IED, or improvised explosive devise, is one of […]