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"Yet the empirical case for a worldwide state of war against a corporeal thing called Al Qaeda looks increasingly threadbare. A war against a name is a war in name only."

"It was just one brief exchange about Afghanistan with an aide late in 2009, but it suggests how President Obama's thinking about what he once called "a war of necessity" began to radically change less than a year after he took up residency in the White House. "

The Telegraph: "A decade of war in Afghanistan, in 50 pictures"

"The Afghan war is returning to the place it began: the violent eastern borderlands with Pakistan, where the Taliban and al-Qaeda slipped out of American reach a decade ago and have organized their insurgency ever since."

"The U.S. has lost billions of dollars to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan and stands to repeat that in future wars without big changes in how the government awards and manages contracts for battlefield support and reconstruction projects, independent investigators said Wednesday. The Wartime Contracting Commission urged Congress and the Obama administration to quickly put in place its recommendations to overhaul the contracting process and increase accountability."

"Now, a new book by award winning, independent journalist Douglas Wissing, chronicles how the US has in effect, funded both sides of its war in Afghanistan. In "Funding the Enemy: How US Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban," Wissing establishes a shocking pattern of policies in the Afghanistan war, and their consequences"

"Remember Milo Minderbinder, a fictional character in Joseph Heller's famous novel, Catch-22? Minderbinder is a war profiteer during World War II, "perhaps the best known of all fictional profiteers" in American literature. "

"Three years ago, a 23-year-old soldier walked off his base in Afghanistan and into the hands of the Taliban. Now he's a crucial pawn in negotiations to end the war. Will the Pentagon leave a man behind?"

"On May 20, 2010, General Stanley McChrystal, then the American commander in Afghanistan, referred to the operation in Marjah, Helmand-an operation earlier touted as a potential turning point for U.S. Afghan counterinsurgency (COIN)-as a "bleeding ulcer." [1] Immediately, we were reminded of a similar expression from an earlier Afghan War. On February 1986, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev speaking to the 27th General Congress of the Communist Party posited that the Soviet war in Afghanistan had become a "bleeding wound." Was McChrystal's comment just an unfortunate choice of words or a harbinger that the United States faced a Soviet-style disaster in Afghanistan?"

"Behind the scenes of the "war council." The New York Times has a fascinating, behind-the-scenes story about the administration's struggle to develop a plan of attack. The story quotes highly-placed sources around Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, et al. The most interesting revelation? GWB himself may actually be calling the shots."

"The resolution that the United States Conference of Mayors passed on Monday calling on President Obama and Congress to "speed up the ending" of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was not nearly as strong as the one it passed 40 years ago, calling on President Richard M. Nixon to withdraw all American troops from Vietnam within six months. "

"A group of former warlords who helped the U.S. topple the Taliban regime in 2001 have launched a political alliance against Afghan President Hamid Karzai's rule, in a re-emergence of old civil-war divisions as the country looks ahead to the departure of U.S. forces."

"An Army lieutenant colonel who accused senior U.S. officials of concealing bad news about the war in Afghanistan will receive the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling on Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Lt. Col. Daniel Davis laid out his concerns in "Truth, Lies, and Afghanistan,""

"When it comes to corruption in Afghanistan, the time may be now for the United States to look in the mirror and see what lessons can be learned from contracting out parts of that war."

"Though it hardly seems possible, Nov. 11 marked the 12th Veterans Day in which the United States has been at war in Afghanistan (nine of which also included fighting in Iraq)."

"An evaluation of the former general's record, however, shows that he made far more than one mistake, and that the consequences for the nation and thousands of individuals have been profound. It's time for the shroud of popular myth to be removed from Petraeus' war record."

"A close look at Mr. Karzai's growing alienation from the U.S. helps to explain why so many of America's war objectives in Afghanistan remain unfulfilled. It seems increasingly likely that the U.S. will leave behind both an undefeated Taliban insurgency and a dysfunctional government mired in corruption and utterly dependent on foreign aid."

"WASHINGTON - Reflecting a war-weary nation, the Senate voted overwhelmingly Thursday for an accelerated withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan after more than a decade of fighting."

"Here's what some of the foremost experts on the conflict -- from former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to American Enterprise Institute scholar Frederick W. Kagan -- identified as the biggest mistakes of the long war."

Interesting US Institute of Peace report on the feared Civil War 2.0 in Afghanistan.