The White House hopes that a smooth transition will help them to begin drawing down American forces this summer and end the foreign combat mission in Afghanistan by 2014. But the withdrawal begins at a time when security is worse than it has been in nine years.

The choices for America in Afghanistan are simpler than they appear in the fog of political debate: We can win or we can lose.

More than just counterterrorism, counterinsurgency is necessary to defeat al Qaeda.

The United States will begin to abandon Afghanistan yet again in July 2011, and it will not bode well for the war on terrorism.

Terrorist groups that pose a clear threat to the United States, including the group behind the Times Square bombing attempt, have been omitted from the State Department's Foreign Terrorist Organization list.

Al-Qaida is a movement that requires extreme violence to win success. The war will continue, and seems more likely to grow than to end.

Osama Bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zawahiri and the senior al-Qaida leaders see themselves, as does the Bush administration, in a large and long war for the future of the region, beyond Iraq.

A new set of publicly releasedIraqi documents may help Americans understand the nature of the threat Saddam Hussein posted.