History never repeats; but it rhymes, and it often echoes. What can Robert Kaplan’s study of the mujahidin teach us about ISIS?
History never repeats; but it rhymes, and it often echoes. What can Robert Kaplan’s study of the mujahidin teach us about ISIS?
Was the British Army an effective force in bringing stability and order to Iraq’s Shiite heartland in Basra? Were British troops efficient and effective in confronting the insurgencies they faced in Afghanistan and Iraq? And, as a major Western military power, did they study their enemy?
While Chinese President Xi Jinping is busy greeting world leaders this week at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Beijing, here in the quiet, old Dutch town of Galle, Sri Lanka, Chinese tourists are visiting one of the best preserved colonial-era cities in Southeast Asia.
Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a recently released prisoner of the Taliban, has become the target of one of Washington’s favorite games: shooting first and asking questions later. Much of what has been said about Bergdahl is so blatantly partisan or so needlessly abusive as not to deserve comment. In the course of it, however, a couple of […]
Beijing is going all out in its efforts to rein in terrorism, following the latest attack at a morning street market in Urumqi, which killed at least 43 people and wounded dozens. The bombing in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, has been blamed on five suspects, all Uighurs, the region’s most populous Muslim minority. Police said that […]
Eric Margolis is an American-born award-winning and internationally syndicated columnist. With three decades of reporting from the world’s hotspots in the Middle East, Southwest and Central Asia, Mr. Margolis is considered a veteran of many conflicts. His articles have appeared in major Western and Asian newspapers. Mr. Margolis is also a regular contributor to major […]
By Sarwar Kashmeri It is time to stop pretending that a residual American military presence in Afghanistan can make any difference to the future of that ancient and troubled land. The future of Afghanistan will be determined, as it has always been, by the Afghans, at their own pace and in conjunction with the countries […]
My last post noted how the blockbuster memoir by Robert M. Gates reinforces the points many observers have made about the defects of the Obama administration’s national security process. The revelations also bolster my own argument that President Obama and his team share a good deal of the responsibility for the ongoing crisis in relations between Washington and Hamid Karzai’s government […]
This documentary is engaging in that it is a departure from the typical documentary. It’s about United States National Guard soldiers trying to train an indigenous Afghan army from mid- to late 2000s in Heart, Afghanistan. It centers on the 207th Corps of the nascent Afghan National Army. The frustration on the part of the Americans […]
When the average American is asked how much of the federal budget they believe is allocated to foreign aid, the response is 25 percent — twenty-five times the current amount. When Americans are surveyed on how much funding they believe should be allocated to foreign aid, the response is 10 percent. In reality, USAID comprises less than […]
Depending on how you are dressed, you can signal your status, identity, job and a myriad other markers which help locate you in a sociopolitical context. They can show your distinctiveness, or membership within a group. Many jobs require a uniform, from the armed forces to hospitals to customer services, and in many countries around […]
Joe Biden is in India this week, the latest effort in the Obama administration’s three-year effort to enlist New Delhi in a closer strategic partnership aimed at hedging against a rising China. Indeed before departing Washington, Biden declared that the United States welcomes New Delhi’s emergence as “a force for security and growth in Southeast Asia and […]
This year’s session of the annual U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue, which brought Secretary of State John Kerry to New Delhi two weeks ago, produced few headlines. The gathering was preceded by low expectations as well as talk (here and here) about how bilateral affairs have plateaued in the years since the nuclear cooperation agreement between President George W. […]
Last week I asked, among other things, how people could expect outside intervention to bring peace and stability to Syria given the experience of Afghanistan and Iraq. That calls for some elaboration. There have been instances in which outside forces have brought stability to a postconflict situation. The successful instances tend not to attract fewer […]
Secretary of State John F. Kerry is in New Delhi for the annual U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue. He’s receiving plenty of good advice (examples here, here and here) on what he and Salman Khurshid, the Indian foreign minister, can do to energize the nascent strategic partnership that just a few years ago looked so promising but which now is stuck […]