MORGANTOWN – It was a sunny May Saturday in Morgantown, 24 years ago, when a group of Gene Vance Jr.’s friends gathered at Whitetail Cycle & Fitness to talk about the buddy they knew – but didn’t. Vance was a Special Forces operative who was fluent in Farsi and recognized with ...
by Daniel R. DePetris Three years ago, the U.S. military was at Kabul’s international airport frantically organizing evacuation flights out of Afghanistan as the Taliban returned to power in the capital city after a 20-year hiatus. The evacuation mission was rushed, with overwhelmed ...
by Daniel DePetris Nearly 21 months after the U.S. withdrawal from a two-decadelong misadventure in Afghanistan, an increasingly polarized Washington continues to ask the same old questions. Who lost Afghanistan? Was Afghanistan ever America’s to win? Who is at fault for the collapse ...
The Biden administration admits to having made some mistakes — some — in its withdrawal from Afghanistan, but the admission doesn’t come close to acknowledging the catastrophe that occurred during the August 2021 retreat. Ex-President Donald Trump, meanwhile, is in full-force denial ...
by Jack McCain As a Navy pilot and Afghanistan veteran, I know what it means to come down to the wire. On many occasions throughout my career, I’ve had only a few seconds to make the right call for myself and those aboard my aircraft. And as the son of former Sen. John McCain, I ...
by Metra Mehran and Natalie Gonnella-Platts The student is a woman majoring in computer science at a private university in Afghanistan, but since the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan last year, the main thing that she seems to be studying is the regime’s manipulation of ...