The Names You’ll Never Know
As a parting shot, on its way out of Afghanistan, the United States military launched a drone attack that the Pentagon called a “righteous strike.” The final missile fired during 20 years of...
View ArticleWas the Afghan War a Schell Game?
I waited almost three months for some acknowledgement, but it never came. Not a bottle of champagne. Not a congratulatory note. Not an email of acknowledgement. Not one media request. Authors wait...
View ArticleThe War on Terror Is a Success — for Terror
It began more than two decades ago. On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” and told a joint session of Congress (and the American people) that “the course of this...
View ArticleWar Torn
We live on a planet in motion, a world of collision and drift. This was once an Earth of super-continents — Gondwana, Rodinia, Pangea. The eastern seaboard of the United States sidled up against West...
View ArticleThe Civilian Deaths You Haven’t Heard About
Madogaz Musa Abdullah still remembers the phone call. But what came next was a blur. He drove for hours, deep into the Libyan desert, speeding toward the border with Algeria. His mind buckled, his...
View ArticleGetting to Yes
What’s the U.S. military doing in Africa? It’s an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, straightjacketed in secrecy, and hogtied by red tape. Or at least it would be if it were up to the Pentagon. Ten years...
View ArticleThe U.S. Military is Winning. No, Really, It Is!
4,000,000,029,057. Remember that number. It’s going to come up again later. But let’s begin with another number entirely: 145,000 — as in, 145,000 uniformed soldiers striding down Washington’s...
View ArticleThe Pentagon Proclaims Failure in its War on Terror in Africa
America’s Global War on Terror has seen its share of stalemates, disasters, and outright defeats. During 20-plus years of armed interventions, the United States has watched its efforts implode in...
View ArticleRemote Warfare and Expendable People
In war, people die for absurd reasons or often no reason at all. They die due to accidents of birth, the misfortune of being born in the wrong place — Cambodia or Gaza, Afghanistan or Ukraine — at the...
View ArticleEpic Fail
Dressed in green military fatigues and a blue garrison cap, Colonel Major Amadou Abdramane, a spokesperson for Niger’s ruling junta, took to local television last month to criticize the United States...
View ArticleConstant Killing
There are constants in this world — occurrences you can count on. Sunrises and sunsets. The tides. That, day by day, people will be born and others will die. Some of them will die in peace, but others,...
View ArticleSuicide Squad
At the end of the last century, hoping to drive the United States from Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam’s holiest sites, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden sought to draw in the American military. He...
View Article