If the United States is going to criticize Pakistan for not securing their border with Afghanistan, maybe we should be making sure that the other side of the border is sealed, too.
Stephen Walt is spot on with this blog post. COIN enthusiasts are among the many in Washington who believe American foreign policy must maintain an aggressive missionary aspect. This isn’t really a problem—we should be striving to make the world a better place—but it currently manifests itself in ways that are prone to failure and […]
Foreign Policy asks the question: “Who Killed Copenhagen?” FP does list hapless Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev), but the real culprit is the institution itself: the United States Senate. Indeed, the Senate is where bills go to die. American healthcare reform has been slowed and stalled throughout the year in the upper house. But […]
David Brooks on the NewsHour this past Friday proffered an all too familiar argument. Speaking about the decision to try 9/11 suspects in civilian courts in New York, Brooks said: This trial will become another act of propaganda. The future trials will become other acts of propaganda. And I think we have to understand that […]
A conversation in the comments section of one of last week’s posts deserves its own post. The conversation was geared toward answering this question: If the International Court of Justice (ICJ) rules some act illegal, is the act definitively illegal? Commenter Dan and I took opposing sides, him answering no, me answering yes. My position […]
1) Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s State of the Nation address sounds good—but Julia Ioffe is skeptical in the pages of Foreign Policy. 2) A free trade agreement between the United States and Pakistan would be a welcome boon in bilateral relations. 3) This is an example of an exceedingly dry headline. 4) Netanyahu decries potential […]
To the Pakistani military and Internal Services Intelligence: You are reaping what you sowed. But it is not too late to give up the obsessed, crazed determination to retain ‘strategic depth’ vis-a-vis India that has wrought such terrible destruction upon the peoples of South Asia. As I’ve mentioned several times before, the continuation of the […]
So says Gustavo De Las Casas, in an article for Foreign Policy. Basically, the argument is that if the West were to totally decimate the Al-Qaeda network, the global Jihadist movement would disperse, and the local cells that emerged would be that much harder to accurately track, and stop. It’s an intriguing thesis, and certainly […]
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer reported last night about the 10th anniversary of East Timor’s independence. Following Portuguese decolonization of Portuguese Timor in 1974, East Timor declared independence, and was subsequently invaded by Indonesia. East Timor battled Indonesia for independence for the next two decades, eventually winning in the late 1990’s. One particular line of […]
Not so fast. President Medvedev has resounded the main themes of reform for some time now, without his government (or, rather, Putin’s) following through. See a NYTimes article from yesterday on President Medvedev’s annual address to the Russian nation, as well as a report on the matter below in a CSFB Emerging Markets report. Reducing Russia’s humiliating […]
How the Fort Hood crime is prosecuted depends on how the word ‘terrorism’ is defined. However, as Slate notes: There’s no precise, internationally accepted definition of terrorism or who qualifies as a terrorist. One 1988 study identified 109 definitions for terrorism, and it’s a safe bet there are now many more. The U.S. Code contains […]
The New York Times earlier this week on Major Nidal Malik Hasan: In recent years, he had grown more and more vocal about his opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and tortured over reconciling his military duties with his religion. He tried to get out of the Army, relatives said, and apparently believed […]
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