Pentagon, Afghanistan | featured news

Taliban leaders in Pakistan are pressing their soldiers in Afghanistan to step up attacks but minimize civilian casualties, a message that is dividing fighters from the leadership and may encourage some to quit the insurgency, a top Pentagon official said.

An FBI investigation that led to the resignation of Gen David Petraeus also turned up evidence that Gen John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, was exchanging potentially inappropriate emails with a Florida woman involved in the scandal, Pentagon officials said.

Moving the mountain of U.S. military gear out of Afghanistan after more than a decade of war will cost billions of dollars and prove far more difficult than last year's withdrawal from Iraq, the Pentagon's No. 2 official said Tuesday.

The Pentagon is beefing up its spy service to send several hundred undercover intelligence officers to overseas hot spots to steal secrets on national security threats after a decade of focusing chiefly on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, once the top commander in Iraq and then Afghanistan, will leave the Pentagon Wednesday for the halls of the CIA next week.

The Pentagon has burned 9,500 copies of Army Reserve Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer's memoir "Operation Dark Heart," his book about going undercover in Afghanistan.

A Department of Defense official tells Fox News that the department purchased copies of the first printing because they contained information which could cause damage to national security.

The first wave of President Obama's new Afghanistan surge will add about 16,000 U.S. troops who got their orders over the past ...

The U.S. military is spending billions of dollars on construction projects to ensure Afghanistan's infrastructure can support American and coalition personnel in 2010 and years beyond.

As the Obama administration debates whether to shift its aims in Afghanistan, officials at the Pentagon and National Security Council have begun developing "middle path" strategies that would require fewer troops than their ground commander is seeking.

The commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan has finished his review of the war and that it is now being sent up the chain of command to the Pentagon and NATO headquarters, NATO says.