CongressDaily – Obama To Request $14.2B To Train, Equip Afghan Forces
President Obama is preparing to ask Congress for another $14.2 billion to grow, train and equip the Afghan National Security Forces for the remainder of this fiscal year and in FY11
This is roughly equivalent to Afghanistan’s GDP.  Think about that.  And is just addition train [...]

U.S. ambassador puts brakes on plan to utilize Afghan militias against Taliban – washingtonpost.com
Afghan officials and Eikenberry have also expressed concern that unless there is a detailed plan to connect these village security forces to Ministry of Interior oversight, they could fuel the rise of warlords and undermine the already fragile government in Kabul. Another [...]

From Max Boot:
Commentary » Blog Archive » The Need for Getting Good at Nation Building
Problem is, the U.S. government still lacks the right resources and structures to tackle effectively the difficult task of state-building (or, as it is popularly known, “nation building”) in the Third World.
I find this sort of essay tremendously disheartening. Boot [...]

U.N. Blames Taliban for Afghan Toll – NYTimes.com
But the most striking aspect of the report was the shift in responsibility for the deaths of Afghan civilians. The survey found that the Taliban and other insurgents killed three times more civilians than the American-led coalition and Afghan government forces last year.
This should be the main message [...]

In a recent report, Major General Michael T. Flynn, Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence in Afghanistan levels a damning indictment against the U.S. conduct of the war in Afghanistan.  He argues,
Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy. Having focused the overwhelming majority [...]

Afghanistan: General Stanley McChrystal Tells Diane Sawyer Surge Blunted Taliban – ABC News
“We’ve been at this for about seven months now and I believe we’ve made progress. It’s not a completed mission yet,” he said.
McChrystal cited as evidence a meeting he recently held in a river valley in Helmand province, an area where the Taliban [...]

Matthew Yglesias » Home Page
Basically the military, and people with a military background, and people with a basically military orientation, have all come to appreciate that civilian economic development is very relevant to the kinds of security issues they are charged with tackling. The problem, however, is that the number of things people have to [...]

If the Afghanistan “surge” and new comprehensive strategy are to succeed, we need to make sure civilian efforts are coordinated and thereby achieve maximum impact. This will ensure that we can apply collective international pressure on President Karzai, and that our resources achieve maximum effectiveness.
See: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-12-17/whos-watching-karzai/
A few excerpts : 
“In his standard command briefing, Gen. Stanley McChrystal points [...]

The whole post is excellent, and the conclusions a very nice summary of the key problems with COIN:
Sic Semper Tyrannis : Counterinsurgency – a much failed strategy?
COIN is a badly flawed instrument of statecraft: Why?
- The locals ultimately own the country being fought over. If they do not want the “reforms” you [...]

From Ackerman’s coverage of McChrystal Testimony:
Even Further Clarification on Afghan Security Force End-Strength « The Washington Independent
During today’s House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Afghanistan, Rep. Gene Green (D-Texas) asked if an increase to 400,000 Afghan soldiers and police — that figure stands at a little under 200,000 total now — will be enough.
Gen. Stanley [...]