The Council on Foreign Relations has published a report authored by Matthew Waxman about the responsibility to protect (R2P). Waxman asks “whether the current international legal regime with regard to the use of military force – that is, international law regulating the resort to armed intervention – is appropriate and effective in determining and stopping […]
1) The Nation, Pakistan: Pakistan may be the most talked about country in the world today. Here’s “Pakistan’s Perspective” by Tariq Osman Hyder. Note what he writes about the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. 2) Der Spiegel, Germany: Really, you can’t get more brutal than this, from Klaus Brinkbäumer: The United States is now a republic of bloggers […]
A London court issued, then revoked, an arrest warrant for former Israeli prime minister, Tzipi Livni. The BBC reports on the Israeli and British government responses… Livni: “What needs to be put on trial here is the abuse of the British legal system… This is not a suit against Tzipi Livni, this is not a […]
1) Greece is at serious risk of total economic collapse—Prime Minister George Papandreou is proposing dramatic spending cuts, and tax hikes on banker’s bonuses, to ease the crisis. 2) Dubai has been bailed out by Abu Dhabi to the tune of $10 billion. 3) From FP: “How we invaded Afghanistan” (the Russians) 4) The New […]
From the SCOTUSBLOG: The Court’s denial of review of Rasul, et al., v. Myers, et al. (09-227) leaves intact a federal appeals court ruling that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and ten military officers are legally immune to claims of torture and religious bias against inmates who were at Guantanamo but have since been released. […]
The G77, a group representing 130 developing nations, has walked out of the Copenhagen negotiations. Find out more about it here. Also, find out more about the implications for global security here, where you can download CNA’s report, “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.”
1) (Dawn, Pakistan) Iran Husain tackles a fundamental issue in South Asian affairs: Pakistan as a security state. 2) (The Daily Star, Lebanon) Saif Nasrawi examines a growing political trend in Egypt. 3) (Hindustan Times, India) The Indo-Chinese climate change axis. 4) (Dar al-Hayat, Lebanon) Abdullah Iskandar on the Kurdish question and democratic government in […]
Where is the COIN strategy going to be centered? A helpful map of Afghanistan’s population density can be found here. Despite my repeated calls to do a better job sealing the border, I’m beginning to think we don’t have nearly enough troops to do even a halfway adequate job. We had a chance to win […]
2 for 1 on this Friday. We’ll start with the op-eds. 1) The always provocative Gideon Levy, in Haaretz: Let’s face the facts, Israel is a semi-theocracy. 2) Nir Rosen, in the Boston Review, hammers the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. 3) Hassan Haidar, in the Lebanese daily Dar al-Hayat: The Rediscovery of Afghanistan. 4) FP […]
The war in Afghanistan demonstrates that strategic problems arise from international law’s ambiguities. The legality of the Afghanistan War has been disputed by some from the very beginning. The major areas of dispute – whether the U.S. was required to provide evidence to the international community of Al Qaeda’s culpability for the September 11th attacks, […]
NBC news is reporting that a drone strike in Pakistan killed a “senior al-Qaeda figure”, but that it wasn’t Osama Bin Laden. Even if it were someone as high up as Ayman al-Zawahiri—al Qaeda’s number two—it would not change the reality on the ground. Capturing or killing Bin Laden or Zawahiri would be a major […]
1) General Petraeus before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today: Achieving progress in Afghanistan will be hard and progress there likely will be slower in developing than was the progress in Iraq. Nonetheless, as with Iraq, in Afghanistan hard is not hopeless. Wonderful to put to rest any suspicions that the military might be trying […]
One thing that could be considered, but won’t, is scrapping the absurd Afghanistan-Pakistani border. It was demarcated in the late-19th century by Great Britain as part of “The Great Game”, because Britain wanted to establish a buffer zone in between Czarist Russia and India. Needless to say, those political calculations don’t hold any worth today. […]
1) Dawn, Pakistan: We must come together—now 2) Dawn, Pakistan: U.S. signaling 3) The Nation, Pakistan: No light in the Afghan tunnel 4) Guardian, U.K.: The U.S. cash behind extremist settlers 5) Hurriyet, Turkey: Pakistan and Turkey’s difficult decision