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 historically been involved in […]
Can military and civilians successfully collaborate in conflict zones? This has been an open question for decades, but especially recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, where new approaches and the length of the conflicts provide a wealth of experience to examine. Current and potential insurgencies from Central Asia to Africa in which outside forces may intervene […]
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 the regional threats, unsurprisingly, is […]
The Syrian rebels, or opposition, or the Syrian National Coalition (the name this motley assembly of Sunnis, Salafists, jihadists, and foreign insurgents) agreed to take on in Doha as a prerequisite for U.S. support (money PLUS guns), successfully launched a surface to air missile (SAM) about ten days ago, bringing down a Syrian government aircraft. […]
Whether drowned out last week by the U.S. presidential campaign, or the crash of August waves at the beach, a rare but notable news item may have missed most readers. A suicide bomber in eastern Afghanistan killed four Americans, one of whom was a civilian aid worker, only the second such U.S. professional to lose […]
The Arab Spring awoke people to the power of social media in a political context. Of course, you would have to be living under a rock to think it was the first time Twitter was ever used to coordinate mass protests — it was hugely prominent in Iran during the 2009 protests, Moldova, and the Greek riots in […]
When speaking about US foreign policy during the Republican Primary debates, Mitt Romney often returns to a familiar theme: his belief that troop levels in Afghanistan should be determined through close consultation with the commanding generals on the ground. It is both a criticism of President Obama’s June 2011 decision to begin drawing down troop […]
NATO’s Afghanistan force ISAF has been strategically bombing rushedly discovered Taliban and Al Qaeda locations for some time now. This scaled up move is designed to get the Taliban leadership to the negotiating table. No doubt, apart from major disruptive turns away from the chosen path, the strategy is understood to be working. ISAF is […]