Afghanistan

Latest Articles

Review: Hell and Back Again

The real-life story of a young marine
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, Hell and Back Again offers a potent documentary correlative to the narrative of The Hurt Locker .
By GERALD PEARY | January 05, 2012

Memo to Jack Reed: Cut the bull on Afghanistan; iPad iLliteracy; hazing Cain

Lipstick on a pig
Phillipe and Jorge love Senator Jack Reed, but there comes a time when you just have to say, "Don't try to bullshit two bullshitters."
By PHILLIPE AND JORGE | November 02, 2011

Afghanistan: 10 years of war

Artist and critic Greg Cook confronts the experience
October 7, 2001. Military jets slice through the skies of Afghanistan, marking the beginning of what has evolved into the longest war in American history.
By EDITORIAL | October 06, 2011

A decade of turmoil

Rhode Island’s brightest minds on where we are now
9/11 has become such a given — such a fixed star in American culture and politics — that as the tenth anniversary approached, it was easy to imagine we had somehow come to terms with the attacks.
By DAVID SCHARFENBERG | September 07, 2011

Shamayel seeks a little lamb

And finds it not far from Portland at all
Twenty-one years ago Shamayel Kargar and her husband had a hankering for good lamb.
By LINDSAY STERLING | July 27, 2011

Will anything change now that Osama is dead?

Give peace a chance
The death of Osama bin Laden and the impending 10-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks have many people contemplating the gains and futility of nearly a decade of American engagement overseas.
By DEIRDRE FULTON | May 04, 2011

The death of Osama bin Laden proves that pragmatic progressivism works

Hope at last
You saw the meme buzzing around the Net on Monday: Barack Obama, in dark sunglasses, smirking: "SORRY IT TOOK SO LONG TO GET YOU A COPY OF MY BIRTH CERTIFICATE," it read, in I Can Has Cheezburger all-caps. "I WAS TOO BUSY KILLING OSAMA BIN LADEN."
By GREG COOK | May 09, 2011

Taking the long view

Obama's secret. Plus, Bill Taylor, RIP.
The surprising and dramatic death in Pakistan of Osama bin Laden at the hands of American Special Forces operating under shoot-to-kill orders from President Barack Obama was a triumph of singular rarity in the annals of international conflict.
By EDITORIAL | May 09, 2011

Libya: Why Obama is right

What's wrong with saving lives?
That the nation is apprehensive and ambivalent about President Barack Obama's military intervention in Libya is natural, even healthy.
By EDITORIAL | March 31, 2011

Give Malalai Joya a visa

Plus, Obama's Libyan War
In a display of mendacity worthy of the days when the late Senator Joseph McCarthy stifled free speech from coast to coast, the United States Department of State has denied a visa to Afghanistan's most internationally recognized activist, Malalai Joya.
By EDITORIAL | March 25, 2011

Review: A Marine's Guide to Fishing

A snapshot of a returned veteran's life
On the one-year anniversary of a life-changing incident on a foreign battleground, a Marine (Matthew Pennington) begins to take up his old life again.
By JEFF INGLIS | March 09, 2011

Reed on the Arizona shootings, the Tea Party, and why Bob Gates might stick around

Ask the Senator
Just days after the Arizona tragedy, the Phoenix sat down with Senator Jack Reed for a Q+A about the shooting, the Tea Party, and some troubling news out of Pakistan.
By DAVID SCHARFENBERG | January 12, 2011

Review: The Lyric does Dickens

Plus Iraq in the Aftermath
Plenty of theaters make A Christmas Carol sing. But the Lyric Stage Company of Boston, under the frenzied baton of Spiro Veloudos, is rendering an entire Dickensian symphony in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.
By CAROLYN CLAY | November 04, 2010

Review: Ariana

A winning take on fantastic ancient cuisine
This fine new Afghan restaurant makes it official: the odd-numbered side of Brighton Avenue between Harvard Avenue and Linden Street has so many good ethnic restaurants that you could eat out in a different country every week and never even cross the street.
By ROBERT NADEAU | October 27, 2010

Review: Medal of Honor misses the target

Fog of war
Could this be, at long last, the video game that deals frankly with the morass of war? Don't kid yourself.
By MITCH KRPATA | October 31, 2010

By | January 01, 0001

Just a reprieve? Unless Republican leaders learn from the past, another Iraq is in our future

In terms of foreign policy, the Republican Party remains unapologetically committed to Bush/Cheneyism
In his address to the nation Tuesday evening, discussing the end of American combat operations in Iraq, Barack Obama took great pains to be apolitical, nonjudgmental, and even gracious toward his predecessor.
By EDITORIAL | September 01, 2010

Review: The Tillman Story

The fraud of war: a hero of our time
An extraordinary convergence occurs about halfway through Amir Bar-Lev's infuriating, heartbreaking account of the life, death, and afterlife of NFL star turned problematic war hero Pat Tillman.
By PETER KEOUGH | September 01, 2010

Holy Everglades, Batman!

A 'gator in the biggest little; angry Americans are still angry; a few great women
What a shock to see the discovery of an alligator at Sissons Pond in Portsmouth! Based on the photographs, Phillipe and Jorge reckon it has to be the largest reptile ever seen in the Biggest Little outside of the State House.
By PHILLIPE AND JORGE | September 01, 2010

By | January 01, 0001

Afghanistan: The war that's killing us

Interview: Former Army colonel and current Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich explains why staying is a big mistake
For several years now, I've been reading Andrew Bacevich's articles and books that argue for a reimagination of how American government conceives of and executes foreign policy.
By PETER KADZIS | August 02, 2010

WikiLeaks: What it means

Plus, Mitt Romney — right-wing nut
Only a day after three of the world's most-prominent news organizations — the New York Times , the Guardian , and Der Spiegel — published reports based on the 90,000-plus purloined secret Afghanistan War documents released by WikiLeaks, the US House of Representatives passed a $59 billion war-funding bill on a vote of 308 to 114, sending it to President Barack Obama for his signature.
By EDITORIAL | July 28, 2010

Obama's Afghanistan promise

Idiot Box
This is a totally different war, guys.
By MATT BORS | July 29, 2010

Rough Seas Ahead

Will the economy, the oil spill, and Afghanistan conspire to sink Obama's presidency?
Eighteen months after Barack Obama took office with the largest plateful of troubles of any president in recent memory, it would seem only fair for him to finally get a stretch of smooth sailing.
By DAVID S. BERNSTEIN | July 14, 2010

Buzz off

By shouting down dissent, Washington is ignoring the sad truth in Afghanistan
Michael Steele, the imbecile chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), has gotten himself in trouble — again — with the party faithful.
By EDITORIAL | July 07, 2010

By | January 01, 0001

Review: Restrepo

War in the raw: taking the high ground in Afghanistan
Before his name became that of a hellish outpost on a mountaintop in the Korengal Valley, perhaps the most dangerous place on earth, PFC Juan S. Restrepo was a human being, a 20-year-old single father, an accomplished guitarist, and a medic in the 173rd Airborne Brigade.
By PETER KEOUGH | February 24, 2011

Worse than Afghanistan

Mainstream media flunks again
At almost the same moment that Rolling Stone was reordering the political landscape with its devastating profile of the now-resigned Afghanistan commander General Stanley McChrystal, a smaller, lesser-known political monthly, The American Conservative (TAC), was publishing a blockbuster that by all rights should have had an even bigger impact.
By PETER KADZIS | June 30, 2010