Afghan War

In the latest episode of an escalating undeclared air war between Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials here said Friday that an advanced Pakistani jet fighter was shot down after it strayed over Afghan territory and ignored warnings to change its course. The official Bakhtar News Agency described the downed plane as a sophisticated F-16 fighter, one of 40 supplied to Pakistan by the United States as part of a military assistance program linked to the Afghan war.

The Reagan Administration has given written assurances that it is ready to back a negotiated settlement to the six-year-old civil war in Afghanistan if the Soviet Union agrees to withdraw its troops from the country, State Department officials said Thursday. The U.S. offer, which is to be made public today in a speech by Deputy Secretary of State John C.

Sly and the projected "Rambo: First Blood Part III" won't be alone using the Afghanistan-Russian conflict as dramatic background. In fact, scheduled for a September shoot, Stallone's much-delayed sequel is lagging behind the pack. The first film to deal forcefully with the war is "The Beast." Now in post-production at A&M Films on a $7 million to $10-million budget, it's due in February from distributor Columbia.

Three GOP senators on Sunday sharply criticized the chairman of the Republican National Committee, increasing pressure on him to step down for implying that the war in Afghanistan is a lost cause. The Republican senators, led by John McCain of Arizona, the party's 2008 presidential nominee, stopped short of calling for Michael Steele's resignation.

WASHINGTON-- Paying tribute to dead soldiers and their families, President Obama said Monday that the nation had reached a "milestone” of relative peace, noting the end of the Iraq war and plans to end America's role in the Afghan war. “After a decade under a dark cloud of war we can see the light of a new day on the horizon,” Obama told a crowd of military families gathered at Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate Memorial Day. ...

Members of Congress on Tuesday ended a months-long standoff and agreed to fund President Obama's Afghanistan troop buildup, but not without debating withdrawal of U.S. troops from neighboring Pakistan. The release this week of leaked classified reports about the Afghan war propelled efforts by Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) to push to bring U.S. military personnel home from Pakistan by year's end. The House voted 372 to 38 against the resolution to curtail military operations in Pakistan, but the debate served as yet another example of growing antiwar sentiment in Congress.

The killing of Osama bin Laden has reignited a debate over how best to fight Al Qaeda-inspired terrorism, strengthening the position of those who argue U.S. strategy should rely on targeted strikes against militant leaders in places like Pakistan rather than send tens of thousands of American troops to wage war in Afghanistan. Bin Laden's death not only emboldened key political leaders to challenge President Obama's commitment to high numbers of ground troops in the nearly 10-year-old Afghan war, it prompted others to reconsider their support for a strategy that is costing billions of dollars a year yet has failed to eradicate the Taliban insurgency against Afghanistan's American-backed government.

The Outpost An Untold Story of American Valor Jake Tapper Little, Brown: 652 pp., $29.99   Into the Fire A Firsthand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle in the Afghan War Dakota Meyer and Bing West Random House, 239 pp., $27 When news broke that the American Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, had been attacked and four Americans killed, two questions dominated the immediate postmortem: Why wasn't there better...

What do we do when Boris N. Yeltsin dies? Given the man's uncertain health and intemperate habits, that is a question of some urgency. The Clinton Administration has gambled billions of taxpayer dollars, nuclear-arms control and the stability of one-sixth of the world on a model of autocratic rule that will come back to haunt. With our full blessing, Yeltsin has destroyed any power other than his own.

As his address at West Point on Tuesday night suggests, Barack Obama's presidency is turning out to be historic in more than the obvious way. Obama and Harry Truman are the only presidents to take office with the country engaged in two wars. (Though history lumps them together as World War II, the conflicts with Germany in Europe and with Japan in the Pacific were -- in military terms -- distinct struggles.) And even if he wins a second term, Obama also is very likely to be the first chief executive since Abraham Lincoln called on to function as a wartime commander in chief for the entirety of his presidency.