Key Democrats' disenchantment with the war in Afghanistan appeared to accelerate Monday with Rep. John P. Murtha's hardening opposition to sending more troops U.S. troops there.

"In Vietnam it took 500,000 troops and that didn't solve the problem. So we have to take a different approach," the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on defense told my erstwhile CQ colleague Josh Rogin in his debut column at Foreign Policy online.

The father of the Pakistani bomb says that helping the CIA fight the Russians in Afghanistan gave his country "the space" it needed to develop nuclear weapons.

"We were allying with the United States in the Afghan war. The aid was coming," nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan said in an Aug. 31 Pakistan television interview, an English translation of which surfaced Tuesday.

"I maintain that the war had provided us with space to enhance our nuclear capability," Khan  added.

"The credit goes to me and my team, because it was a very difficult task, which was next to impossible. But given the US and European pressure on our program, it is true that had the Afghan war not taken place at that time, we would not have been able to make the bomb as early as we did," Khan said.

Former Air Force Maj. Matthew Alexander, whose questioning of a captured terrorist led to the elimination al Qaeda's top man in Iraq, said a pervasive "intolerance" of Arabs and Muslims among American interrogators led to abuses at Abu Ghraib and other prisons.

"Soldiers referred to them as rag heads and so on," Alexander said during a Monday talk at the International Spy Museum, in Washington, D.C. to promote his book, "How To Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq."

Senior American military officials Wednesday threw cold water on reports of an attempted coup d'etat in Qatar, nerve center for the U.S. military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

An influential Web site that tracks Middle East media reported on Monday, Aug.3, that "various Arab websites are reporting on the sudden firing of senior Qatari military officials after they staged a failed coup attempt."

The Persian Gulf state is home to the U.S. Central Command. American warplanes and drones also fly from a Qatar air base.

War reenactors, especially those who don the Blue and the Gray on weekends for play-action Civil War battles, are ubiquitous in the summertime, especially in the eastern United States.

But an enterprising college journalism student recently discovered young men in New Jersey, including veterans of Iraq and Somalia, practicing for an advanced counterinsurgency fantasy war game on a U.S. Army base in Upstate New York - with the blessing of military officials who've found the contests a good recruiting tool.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden more than backed up his boss's view Tuesday that U.S. and NATO troops are not winning the war in Afghanistan.

"We are not now winning the war, but the war is far from lost," Biden told a news conference in Brussels today after three hours of talks with NATO allies.

But an assertion by Biden that 70 percent of Taliban guerrillas could be persuaded to stop fighting or turn against their Afghan brothers-in-arms drew scoffs from experts in Kabul.