By Tyler Hooper
With U.S., NATO and International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) personnel set to withdraw the bulk of their military personnel from Afghanistan in 2014, regional powers such as China, India and Pakistan will have the opportunity to play an influential role in the country’s future. Both India and Pakistan have …
Each week the editors at FPA choose five must reads from around the web and five of the best of ForeignPolicyBlogs.com. So if you’re looking for reading for the weekend, we’ve got you covered.
Each week the editors at FPA choose five must reads from around the web and five of the best of ForeignPolicyBlogs.com
An Interview with Gissou Nia, Executive Director of IHRDC
To commemorate the fifth anniversary of the imprisonment of seven Baha’i Leaders in Iran, on Monday, May 6, the U.S. Bahá’í Office of Public Affairs is hosting an event at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. This event is …
This week’s must reads brought to you by the editorial staff at ForeignPolicyBlogs.com
By Sarwar Kashmeri
United States’ intelligence agencies and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are still not certain the Syrian government of President Assad has used chemical weapons against its opposition. Nothing has yet emerged from France, Germany or Britain to unequivocally confirm this charge either. But the clamor …
The Rise of Big Data
By Kenneth Neil Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger
Foreign Affairs
The Internet may have transformed the way we do business, live and govern, but a lesser-known technological trend, “big data,” has also been making waves. The premise — that we can learn more from a large body …
Even Violent Drug Cartels Fear God
By Damien Cave
The New York Times Magazine
“If the economy worked for the common good, there would be no Zetas. There would be no cartels,” says Robert Coogan, the chaplain at Cereso. Here the Zetas, Mexico’s most feared crime syndicate, run operations from …
by Abul-Hasanat Siddique and Casper Wuite
Abul-Hasanat Siddique and Casper Wuite, co-authors of The Arab Uprisings: An Introduction, talk about the political unrest in the Middle East, the Syrian Civil War, the globalization of media, and the future prospects for the region.
Is the unrest in the Middle East and North …
Each week, the editorial team at ForeignPolicyBlogs.com publishes a list of must-read articles from around the web. This week: Tweeting diplomacy, Cuba, Jordan, the U.S. in Pakistan, and one article on Margaret Thatcher.
By Sarwar Kashmeri
It would be a mistake to view President Obama’s visit to Israel as just a fence-mending exercise. It is in fact part of a planned redesign of U.S. foreign policy that will change the face of American leadership around the world.
The redesign began with the appointment …
Each week, Foreign Policy Blogs’ editors help you catch up on the best long-form reads you may have missed.
by Jennifer Norris
Americans who left the theatre watching “Zero Dark Thirty” thinking that the dark stain of torture is in our past, should be cautioned by our exit strategy in Afghanistan.
As a 2014 deadline for ending our combat mission in Afghanistan approaches, policymakers say that our main objective is to …
Obama’s Crackdown on Whistleblowers
By Tim Shorrock
The Nation
Since 2009, the World War I-era Espionage Act has been used to prosecute whistleblowers in the name of national security. Shorrock focuses on four NSA whistleblowers — Thomas Drake, William Binney, J. Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis — who exposed the failed …
By Tyler Hooper
On 12 March the Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, along with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, released a document titled “Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community.” The document outlines eight major “global threats” and numerous major “regional threats” to the U.S.
Among …
