David Petraeus

One of the women at the centre of an investigation that forced former CIA director David Petraeus to resign will not face charges, Florida federal prosecutors said Tuesday.

A backless dress, a shirtless FBI and all the latest on the scandal

And not so much about the personal indiscretions of public figures

As we approach the four-year anniversary of Jack Layton saying that really crazy thing, General David Petraeus speaks with Fox News about the way forward in Afghanistan.

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama insisted on a crucial distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghanistan, he said, is a war of necessity, while Iraq is a war of choice. In doing so, Obama, who had wrestled the anti-war Democrats away from his candidates like Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, was being consistent with his positions following 9/11. He opposed the war in Iraq, but supported the decision to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan. Since taking office, his administration has acted on both two fronts. On Iraq, it has adopted a policy which will essentially remove American troops from a combat role over the next two years, gaining the support of Republicans in the process. In the case of Afghanistan, Obama opted to move 16,000 troops out of Iraq and into Afghanistan to combat al Qaeda and its Taliban protectors. That too obtained bipartisan support. Since then, conditions on the ground in Afghanistan have deteriorated significantly, to the point the administration is now divided on whether to send a major new influx of troops (in the vicinity of 40,000) to pursue the effort to keep the Taliban from recapturing power.

My colleague Andrew Potter blogged a few weeks ago about Thomas Ricks’ new book, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. The book tells the story behind America’s strategic shift in Iraq – from one where the primary goal is defeating the enemy, to the current strategy which holds that the primary objective is winning over the population.

I wrote this article about tackling the Afghan insurgency for our website.

I believe David Petraeus’ speech at the weekend Munich Conference was by far the most important of the prepared remarks I heard. (There was a lot of fascinating stuff during the Q&A sessions afterward, which is not logged on the conference website, but Petraeus — in some ways more than Joe Biden — walked in with the most interesting, and certainly the most detailed, opening remarks.) What follows is actually less important than, for instance, the fairly detailed itemized list of additional battlefield resources the Obama administration will be seeking from its allies. But it kind of struck me as I listened back to the general’s speech. From the audio file: