I have to admit that since watching Afghanistan Commander General Stanley McChrystal‘s mesmerizing interview on 60 Minutes, I have made time nearly every day to get back in shape and do some running.
Sitting in my Berlin hotel room last Tuesday night/Wednesday morning at about 1:30 am, I saw a note from the White House come through the transom that was not about the President’s West Point speech on Afghanistan and Pakistan but rather about new presidential appointments.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) is speaking at Brookings today on the Obama administration’s course in Afghanistan. His speech, while largely supportive of the frame that Obama has brought to the challenge — a narrowed mission, discussion of an offramp, and more — also includes lingering doubts.
This is a guest note by Nicholas Kitchen, Editor of IDEAS Reports and a Fellow of the LSE IDEAS — or for acronym-challenged, Diplomacy & Strategy at the London School of Economics Barack Obama: Last Transatlantic President? When Barack Obama took office in January, expectations of what the new President could bring to international affairs…
The Carnegie Endowment’s Karim Sadjadpour is one of the best commentators explicating the Iranian Government’s behavior in the business. He recently did and interview with Middle East Progress on the state of play in Iran that I found insightful.
Some quick thoughts on Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s visit to Washington this week. -It is clear that Turkey and the United States have different approaches to Iran’s nuclear program. The United States is still calling for “zero enrichment” and is threatening additional sanctions if Iran does not cede to the P5+1 demands.
Hillary Clinton would have probably flown more miles this year had she not badly injured her wrist in a nasty State Department parking lot fall, but she still logged a very impressive 185,731 in flight miles so far this year.
Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan is leading a delegation of top Turkish political and business leaders in Washington D.C. this week.
I just had the privilege of attending the swearing-in ceremony for my old friend David Huebner as the next US Ambassador to New Zealand. Demonstrating the importance of this appointment to the White House, Vice President Joe Biden gave the oath to the openly gay lawyer turned diplomat.
Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation as well as the co-director of New America’s Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative, where Katherine Tiedemann is a policy analyst. This post was originally published at the AfPakChannel.
