Summary: According to the Pentagon’s latest congressionally mandated 6-montly report, violence in Afghanistan reached an all-time high from April through September 2010 — up about 300 percent from 2007 — as Western troops battled an increasingly sophisticated insurgency. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on November 23, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that the St. Cloud Times, after leading the charge in Minnesota earlier in the year to set a new standard for calling Rep. Michele Bachmann out for her radical extremism, backslid into the longstanding pattern of Minnesota media to gloss over or simply fail to report the full extent of Bachmann’s political paranoia and extremism. To compensate for this failure, I posted the full text of Times Washington correspondent Larry Bivins’ softball Bachmann interview, annotated and supplemented with critical content missing from the Bivens fluff-piece.

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Summary: There are growing signs that the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan has worn out its welcome, with “foreigner fatigue” becoming increasingly apparent among the Afghan people. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on November 21, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that the United States government had spent $53 billion on reconstruction in Iraq since the 2003 invasion — building tens of thousands of hospitals, water treatment plants, electricity substations, schools, and bridges — but that there were growing concerns Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans leave, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.

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Summary: NATO may keep fighting in Afghanistan past its 2014 target date for shifting authority to Afghan forces, according to Mark Sedwill, the alliance’s top civilian in the country. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on November 17, 2009, Aubrey Immelman provided his weekly report of U.S. military deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

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Summary: Insurgents set fire to a NATO fuel convoy, while a series of bomb blasts and insurgents attacks killed 11 people across Afghanistan, including five NATO service members. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on November 14, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that a Rasmussen Reports poll found U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s statewide job approval rating in Minnesota at 51 percent, with 45 percent disapproving and 4 percent not sure.

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Summary: An independent 25-member task force led by former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and former national security adviser Samuel Berger is cautioning President Barack Obama about the high cost of the Afghanistan war and suggests the United States should downsize its ambitions and reduce its military presence in Afghanistan if Obama’s December 2010 Afghanistan policy review finds the current strategy is not working. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on November 13, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that morale had fallen among soldiers in Afghanistan, while those in Iraq showed much improved mental health amid lower violence. There were 133 reported active-duty Army suicides from January 2009 through October 2009, compared with 115 for the same period in 2008.

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Summary: An internal investigation by the Central Intelligence Agency documents a litany of intelligence breakdowns leading to the Dec. 30, 2009 suicide attack in Afghanistan by Jordanian double agent Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi that killed seven CIA employees. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on October 20, 2009, Aubrey Immelman provided his weekly report of U.S. military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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Summary: Members of Afghanistan’s new peace council say releasing Taliban figures detained at Guantanamo Bay and scratching scores of others off the U.N. sanctions list would jump-start peace talks aimed at ending the 9-year-old war. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on October 12, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that Rep. Michele Bachmann told bloggers at an event in Washington: “Quite honestly I don’t even know anything about MSNBC.” To refresh Bachmann’s memory, MSNBC is the cable network on which she dishonored her office on October 17, 2008, when she called for McCarthy-like witch hunts to find out which members of Congress are “pro-America or anti-America.”

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Summary: Analysis on the 9th anniversary of the beginning of the U.S. war in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on October 7, 2009, Aubrey Immelman provided news and analysis on the 9th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan to topple the Taliban, destroy al-Qaida, and kill or capture Osama bin Laden and other leaders of the terrorist organization.

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Summary: Militants attacked and set fire to at least 20 tankers carrying oil for NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the third such strike inside Pakistan in as many days. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on October 3, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that President Barack Obama had met with Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, as he pondered whether the U.S. should send tens of thousands more troops to crush the Taliban in a broad counterinsurgency strategy, or shift to a narrower antiterrorism focus on al-Qaida in neighboring Pakistan.

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Summary: Pakistan has blocked a vital supply route for U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan in apparent retaliation for an alleged cross-border helicopter strike by the coalition that killed three Pakistani frontier troops. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on September 30, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that the Princeton, Minn., police and fire departments and bomb squads from Minneapolis and Crow Wing County were responding to reports of suspicious packages at the Princeton post office, high school, and public utilities building. It was later established that the packages contained “inert powders” and no hazardous materials — an apparent hoax. Police ultimately took two local teenagers into custody a couple of days after the incident.

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