When President Obama on Tuesday signed a 10-year security agreement with Afghan President Karzai, it wasn’t announced how many U.S. troops would remain in Afghanistan past 2014 — the year Afghans are supposed to take over full responsibilty for security there. American military officials say that the planning figure is 25,000 troops, commanded by a [...]

Afghanistan and the United States have agreed the contents of a long-awaited deal to define their relationship after most foreign troops leave at the end of 2014, although the document sidesteps some of the thorniest questions about the US military presence.

Since World War II, American political leaders have shown themselves to be much better at starting wars than ending them satisfactorily. For example, the last two years of the Korean War, from July 1951 to July 1953, resulted in very little change on the ground but thousands of dead and wounded soldiers and Marines, because [...]

Hopes for a peaceful end to the Syrian crisis were fading rapidly on Sunday after President Bashar al-Assad refused to meet Tuesday’s deadline for withdrawing his forces from flashpoints across the country without guarantees from the opposition to stop fighting first. Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general, had called for a pullout to be completed [...]

The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan will not last forever. All empires end up leaving. The question is: How long? The Obama Administration and NATO are seeking a treaty that would keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan indefinitely as “support.”  But a recent CBS/N.Y. Times poll found that 80% of the U.S. public wants all troops home [...]

The United States has since the 1990s become increasingly the victim of an “exceptionalist” ideology that claims world leadership for the nation and an obdurate militarism, corrupting to American historical institutions and values. Terminating the Afghanistan War and ending the global projection of American military power of which it is a part are indispensable steps [...]

The chaos in Afghanistan continues to escalate in the aftermath of the recent massacre of 16 Afghanistan civillians by a troubled US soldier. As a result of the incident, Afghani President Hamid Karzai pleaded for the US to pull troops out of Afghan villages and to confine them to US bases. For more on this [...]

STUTTGART, Germany — It’s official: The Germany-based 170th Infantry Brigade will be inactivated later this year, followed by the 172nd Separate Infantry Brigade next year as part of a broad restructuring of the military force structure in Europe that also calls for the inactivation of two U.S. Air Forces in Europe squadrons and the eventual [...]

The American public has been told that the Iraq War is a thing of the past. Even still, the US Department of Defense is asking the federal government for almost $3 billion for “activities” in a country that they shouldn’t be in. The last US troops were supposedly withdrawn from Iraq just before 2012 began, [...]