When militants serving the Haqqani Network attacked the Indian Embassy in Kabul in 2008, killing 54, it took several months for suspicions to leak out that the group may have been behind the attack. Not so with last week’s commando-style assault on the U.S. Embassy and other sites in the capital. Within hours Afghan officials were …
Af-Pak
Pakistan’s Floods: Deja Vu, All Over Again
These days when it rains in South Asia, it doesn’t just pour — it floods. A month of monsoon squalls has deluged hundreds of towns and villages in northwest India and Pakistan. The latter has seen the most acute flooding, and, on all evidence, has been the least prepared for it. At least 233 people have already died and 300,000 …
Even as He Clashes With Israel, Turkey’s Erdogan is Displacing Iran’s Influence
The handwringing in the U.S. over the rock-star reception Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is eliciting on his “Arab Spring” tour of post-dictatorship Egypt, Tunisia and Libya is misguided. Erdogan represents a reality-based, credible and very popular incarnation of the old Bush Administration idea of a moderate Middle …
Lengthy Expose on a Journalist’s Death Heaps Scrutiny on Pakistan’s ISI
Dexter Filkins’s deeply reported piece in the New Yorker on the assassination of Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad earlier this year is worth the read. Yes, it covers territory we’ve all trod across — the likely involvement of Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, the ISI; the confused allegiances of the Pakistani …
For the U.S. to Leave Afghanistan, It Has to Be Ready to Stay
When former Saudi Ambassador Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud suggested last week at a terrorism conference hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington that the U.S. should have used the death of Osama bin Laden in May as an excuse to immediately pull troops out of Afghanistan, he was met with …
How 9/11 Provoked the U.S. to Hasten its Own Decline
During his first year in office, President George W. Bush was confronted by the key strategic challenge facing the United States in the new century, in an incident that began with the diversion of a U.S. aircraft — by Chinese fighter planes, which forced a U.S. Navy spy plane to land on the island of Hainan after a collision that …
Afghanistan’s Shrinking Security Forces: A Gaping Hole in Obama’s War Strategy
The military intervention in Afghanistan that began a month after the 9/11 attacks is the longest war in U.S. history, costing 1,750 American lives (and counting) and upward of $300 billion (and counting). And it’s becoming harder to believe Washington’s promises that the end is in sight. President Obama will, this year, withdraw …
Is Libya a New Model of U.S. Intervention, or an Afghanistan Do-Over?
It’s easy to see how Libya offers a “new model” for American intervention abroad when comparing it with the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq in 2003, but the mission to overthrow the regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has too much in common with the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan to mark it, at this stage, as the herald of a new era of …
Why Turkey Holds the Key to the Regional Power Game on Syria
As the Assad regime on Sunday escalated its brutal crackdown by sending gunboats to shell the coastal city of Latakia, yet the rebellion shows no sign of abating despite at least 1,700 deaths so far, Syria’s fate may come to rest less in the hands of its own people, than in the corridors of power in neighboring and more distant …
U.S. Global Influence Tanks with the Economy
You say you want a revolution? Not now, mate, can’t you see we’re busy?
“It’s the economy, stupid,” was the focal message around which Bill Clinton organized his against-the-odds 1992 campaign victory over President George H.W. Bush. The incumbent had presided over the soft landing of the collapsing Soviet empire and driven Saddam …
Five Lessons the World Will Take From U.S. Economic Policy Gridlock
Washington may have cut an unlovable deal to avert a default on its debts, but U.S. and global stock markets are tanking anyway. That’s because the measures agreed Tuesday can’t reverse the slide of the U.S. economy — its fundamentals, to use a phrase beloved by politicians, are less than sound. So, what the world sees in America’s …
Why Did Pakistan’s Spy Chief Make a Secret Trip to China?
Reports reveal Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, head of Pakistan’s main military intelligence agency, the ISI, flew on a secret mission to Beijing for urgent talks this Monday. The visit followed swiftly on the heels of yet another round of diplomatic squabbling between Washington and Islamabad. During a heated summer of disputes, tensions …
What the Oslo Bombing May Reveal About the State of the Global Terrorist Threat
(Update July 23: This post was originally written hours after Friday’s blast, when police and media speculation — and jihadist web sites — were pointing at Islamist extremists as the likely perpetrators of the Oslo terror attacks. On Saturday, however, Norwegian police had charged a 32-year-old Norwegian who they said was a Christian …