Free Range International

Ben Arnoldy at the Christen Science Monitor penned an excellent tale on reconstruction efforts going pear shaped and the consequences resulting from such folly.  It is an excellent piece of reporting from one of the truly professional foreign correspondents working the country today.  The report was original, focused and resulted from Ben going [...]

Last week, Kanani Fong of the blog The Kitchen Dispatch, arranged an interview for me with Tim Hetherington, who along with Sebastian Junger produced the award-winning documentary called “Restrepo”. Kanani signed onto the Restrepo team to spearhead a public relations effort, in conjunction with National Geographic, to get the film released nationwide in theaters. This is [...]

Editors Note:  This article is too good not to share in its entirety.  The reporter, Mitch Potter, was kind enough to give me permission to do so.  Mitch contacted me through the blog and Panjwaii Tim told me he was a great guy with lots of experience and knowledge who he was [...]

It looks like the new boss has convinced President Karzai to reverse his position on using tribal militias.  The new name for these soon to be created Arbaki is Local Police Forces (LPF.)  This is a plan which has been tried before with minimal success. In Kandahar the Local Defense Initiative (LDI) forces [...]

Spencer Ackerman over at Danger Room wrote a post last week with the disturbing title of East Afghanistan Sees Taliban as “Morally Superior” to Karzai.  This assessment came from the after action slides of Col Randy George who commanded Task Force Warrior this past year.  There is nothing in the article or Col [...]

Last Wednesday morning the local Taliban sent eight guys to attack the US Army base at Jalalabad Airfield known as FOB Fenty.  They initiated the attack with a car bomb in a rarely used entry point on the southeastern side of the airfield which is well away from the Torkham to Jalalabad road. [...]