Summary: The United States has now been fighting in Afghanistan longer than the Soviet Union, whose occupation lasted nine years and 50 days before the USSR retreated in defeat on Feb. 15, 1989. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on November 29, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, Osama bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora when American military leaders made the crucial and costly decision in December 2001 not to pursue the terrorist leader with massive force. The report affixed a measure of blame for the state of the Afghanistan war today on military leaders under former president George W. Bush, specifically Donald H. Rumsfeld as defense secretary and his top military commander, Gen. Tommy Franks.

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Summary: WikiLeaks’ cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an unprecedented look at backroom bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders, and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on November 28, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that many soldiers and policy makers believe the conflict in Afghanistan may be harder and more intractable than the war in Iraq.

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Summary: Weekly report of U.S. military deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, compiled from U.S. Department of Defense news releases and iCasualties.org. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on November 26, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that President Barack Obama, in his 2009 Thanksgiving message, called the nation’s attention to the men and women in uniform who were away from home sacrificing time with family, and also spoke about health care reform, the Recovery Act, and job creation.

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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: Rep. Michele Bachmann’s enthusiasm for extending the Bush tax cuts has put her at odds with fact-checkers, once again. For distorting the tax proposals to a ridiculous extent, PolitiFact rate Bachmann’s claims “Pants on Fire.” … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on November 20, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that a suicide bomber killed 16 people and wounded at least 23 others in a busy city square in western Afghanistan, while near the capital Kabul a powerful former warlord an ally of Afghan President Hamid Karzai narrowly escaped an assassination attempt.

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Summary: Weekly report of U.S. military deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, compiled from U.S. Department of Defense news releases and iCasualties.org. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on November 19, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that, according to a November 2009 Anti-Defamation League Special Report titled “Rage Grows in America: Anti-Government Conspiracies,” a wave of anti-government hostility had swept across the United States since the election of Barack Obama as president, creating a climate of fervor and activism with manifestations ranging from incivility in public forums to acts of intimidation and violence.

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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: Weekly report of U.S. military deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, compiled from U.S. Department of Defense news releases. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on November 15, 2009, Aubrey Immelman reported that Iraq’s Sunni Arab vice president, Tareq al-Hashimi, threatened to veto the country’s election law unless changes were made giving Iraqis living abroad more guaranteed seats in parliament.

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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: Eight years ago today, on Sunday, Nov. 10, 2002, Maple Lake, Minn., student Joshua Guimond was reported missing from the campus of St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. Josh remains missing and his case appears no closer to resolution than the day he vanished. To move Josh’s case forward, it is critical that the Stearns County Sheriff’s Department refer the case to FBI behavioral scientists now for review and recommendations. … One-year retrospective: One year ago today, on November 10, 2009, Aubrey Immelman provided his weekly report of U.S. military deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

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