I have a new piece up at Foreign Policy in Focus. It examines an often overlooked aspect of the U.S.’s current policy toward Iran. Here’s a teaser: For years, the United States and Israel have engaged in a covert effort to destabilize Iran’s government and sabotage its nuclear program. But these operations frequently escape mention […]
Not to turn this into a blog solely about why peace talks with the Taliban will fail, but here are some more things worth perusing. Dexter Filkins, who wrote the New York Times story to which I linked yesterday, elaborated on his story on the PBS Newshour earlier this week: Filkins says of the talks: […]
As a follow-up to my piece from last week about reasons to be pessimistic about success in peace talks with the Taliban, read today’s New York Times article on the topic. This sentence about the Taliban negotiators really says it all: The identities of the Taliban leaders are being withheld by The New York Times […]
The effort to reach a political accommodation with the Taliban is underway. Unfortunately, though, signs indicate that the endeavor will fail. We can learn some valuable lessons from the Soviet effort of the 1908’s. In 1987, Soviet Colonel Dmitry Timofeevich Yazov wrote a letter to the USSR’s Defense Minister criticizing, among other things, Afghanistan’s “national […]
The above words were spoken by Brigadier General Carmelo Burgio, the Italian officer responsible for developing the Afghan police force, as The New York Times reported yesterday. Recruiting is going well, if we just focus on the numbers. The target size for the Afghan National Army for October 2010 – 134,000 – was reached in […]
Over at Parabasis, where I used to post periodically, friend of mine, Isaac Butler, has an interesting post about Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I that is extremely relevant to modern events. Isaac writes that at the heart of the play lives a Machiavellian lesson: The thing is, Shakespeare uses all sorts of means– including his […]
Let’s say a guy is asked publicly whether he condemns a certain terrible thing. But the guy doesn’t want to publicly condemn this thing. So to evade the question, he instead condemns the entire category of things into which this specific thing belongs. Is there a name for this? This is what Ahmadinejad did on […]
There was an interesting development yesterday in the case of Ahmed Ghailani, who the U.S. has brought to court for his participation in the 1998 bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that the court would not accept testimony from the U.S.’s key witness because the U.S. learned about this witness through coerced […]
As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict trucks along, we shouldn’t forget about an important issue that often gets overshadowed: water. Here’s a story from the PBS Newshour last night: Israel is taking water from beneath Palestinian land. But also, Israel is more industrialized than the Palestinian territories so it needs more water, Israel claims, and much water […]
Recently, Robert Gates spoke of the danger of the existing divide between the military and the civilian population of America. He said: There is a risk over time of developing a cadre of military leaders that politically, culturally, and geographically have less and less in common with the people they have sworn to defend. Today, […]
I know that election-wise, most Americans are focused on the 2010 midterms, but one American is already focused on 2012: John “International-Law-Is-Not-Law” Bolton… While Bolton argues that international institutions are ineffective and threatening to U.S. interests, let Anne-Marie Slaughter give you the other side of the debate, as she explains how constraints can actually serve […]
Here’s an interesting idea from Robert Wright, writing in The New York Times. The Palestinians should give up on negotiations, reject violence, and begin peaceful demonstrations asserting that they should be given the right to vote in Israel. This movement would “gain immediate international support” and in “Europe and the United States, leftists would agitate […]
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