Defense & Security Archive

In Iraqi Kurdistan, the times of plenty and stability are over. The autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq has been hailed for most of the past decade as an emerging Dubai in Mesopotamia and the only success story of the Iraq war. But it is descending farther into civil strife, agonizing economic recession and a political stalemate that threatens to paralyze one of America’s most potent allies in the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State. Last Monday, Nechirvan Barzani, the prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), fired four ministers of his government, all of them members of the […]

Hailed at the time as the start of an “African Spring,” the October 2014 revolution that ousted President Blaise Compaore in Burkina Faso was called into question last month when an elite army unit staged a brief coup. But even before soldiers under the command of Gen. Gilbert Diendere derailed the transition, the process was in many ways already disappointing. Now the coup’s failure has opened another window of opportunity for real democratic progress, but serious questions over the likelihood of true reform remain. Many of Burkina Faso’s contemporary challenges are deep-rooted. Some of the country’s most important political figures […]

Will Vladimir Putin ever be satisfied? As the Russian president has launched his small wars in Ukraine and Syria over the past two years, countless pundits have tried to guess his long-term goals. Some believe that he is a megalomaniac, intent on an open-ended campaign against the West. Others discount him as a nervous nationalist, focused on stabilizing Russia’s disorderly southern flank. Cynics dismiss him as an opportunist, seizing chances to expand his influence whenever they arise. In New York, many diplomats and analysts affiliated with the United Nations take a fourth view: Putin is a conservative with a profound […]

Russia’s combat operations in Syria, barely three weeks old, are the kind of expeditionary campaign that Moscow has not undertaken since the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. This intervention is the consequence of Presidents Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama both following through on the original, respective paths they chose in Syria. While the United States sought to avoid military entanglement and stay out of the conflict—doing the bare minimum to appease regional allies in their efforts to force Bashar al-Assad out of power—Russia remained consistent in its belief that the Syrian state represents the only viable and legitimate […]

Backtracking on earlier plans for a withdrawal of U.S. forces, President Barack Obama announced Thursday that the United States will keep 9,800 troops in Afghanistan through 2016, before reducing the number to 5,500 by early 2017. “While America’s combat mission in Afghanistan may be over, our commitment to Afghanistan and its people endures,” Obama said during the announcement at the White House. The Obama administration originally planned to cut the number of U.S. soldiers in half by next year, eventually leaving 1,000 troops stationed at the U.S. embassy in Kabul by early 2017. But it changed course with the Taliban’s […]

The war in Yemen has pushed the country to the brink of famine, according to the United Nations’ World Food Program, while Yemenis are dying daily because of a lack of access to clean water supplies, basic medicine and even affordable transport to medical facilities. Yet despite a mounting international outcry, the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen is unlikely to have much of an impact on the calculus of the main players in the conflict, or their foreign backers. In truth, a solution to Yemen’s humanitarian crisis will only come once the warring parties believe a political solution works in their […]

Whenever it seems that the war in Syria can’t get more tragic and dangerous, it does. That conflict has already created the worst humanitarian disaster of a young century and empowered the barbaric self-declared Islamic State. And it could become worse. The Obama administration has avoided an entangling involvement, instead providing refugee aid and supporting some of the less repellent rebel groups, in the hopes that the combatants conclude that an outright military victory is out of reach and accept a power-sharing arrangement. That was a long shot from the beginning and became even less likely as the hatred between […]

When Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni took a surprise mid-September trip to Khartoum to meet his Sudanese counterpart, Omar al-Bashir, it solidified the unexpected rapprochement in what had been one of Africa’s thorniest relationships. Two of the continent’s longest-serving leaders, Museveni and Bashir have spent much of the past two decades sniping at one another publicly as each secretly worked to destabilize the other’s government. What is bringing them together, curiously, is one of the issues most responsible for this enduring animosity: South Sudan. Uganda provided consistent support to the southern Sudanese rebellion, which ended with South Sudan’s official secession in […]

In the aftermath of last weekend’s horrific bombings in Ankara, the Turkish people and international observers are trying to understand what went wrong with Turkey, a country that until very recently embodied the hopes of a more peaceful and interconnected Middle East. The answer inevitably leads to one man: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The evidence in the twin suicide attack that killed almost 100 people, making it the deadliest in Turkey’s modern history, points to the self-declared Islamic State. And yet, many people, searching for the bigger picture in Turkey’s crisis, have turned angrily in Erdogan’s direction. Turkey’s president, until […]

President Barack Obama’s interview Sunday evening with Steve Kroft of the CBS News program “60 Minutes” offered a revealing insight into the foreign policy mindset of the Washington Beltway—not due to anything that Obama said, but rather due to the questions posed to him by Kroft. When asking about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military interventions in Ukraine and Syria, Kroft directly challenged Obama. “You said a year ago,” said Kroft, “that the United States . . . leads. We’re the indispensable nation. Mr. Putin seems to be challenging that leadership.” Obama tried, in vain, to point out that Putin’s moves […]

While Iran’s nuclear program has topped the headlines in recent years, its missile program has mostly remained off the radar, with the exception of discussions of a potential Iranian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which could be used against the continental United States. Iran’s missile program, however, is relatively transparent, so it is remarkable that notable improvements in the range, accuracy and lethality of its arsenal have received far less attention than its nuclear ambitions, especially as these developments signal the missions Iran has in mind for its missiles. In particular, they suggest that unlike North Korea, Iran is in no […]

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Tunisia’s so-called National Dialogue Quartet was deeply moving to those us who are familiar with the country where the Arab uprisings began in late 2010. The Nobel Committee’s selection of the four civil society organizations for their work in facilitating Tunisia’s democratic transition since then was a welcome revalidation of the country’s potential to build a durable democratic state. For long-time watchers of the committee, it was equally striking that the Nobel Peace Prize did not honor an institution or individual committed to nuclear disarmament, as it has at every mid-decade year […]

The sight of Syrian rebels blowing up Russian-made Syrian army tanks with advanced American missiles, captured in videos uploaded last week to YouTube, has brought a nominally covert CIA program into the spotlight. For all the attention on the Pentagon suspending its failed program to train and equip a Syrian rebel force to fight the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the CIA’s two-year-old program to supply a handful of vetted rebel groups with TOW missiles, with Saudi Arabia and Turkey’s help, has been a surprising success, blunting a recent joint offensive by the Syrian army and newly arrived Russian forces near Hama […]

France’s increasingly close rapport with Saudi Arabia under President Francois Hollande has incensed some of his critics, who label him a hypocrite for touting a human rights agenda while maintaining cozy ties with the oil-rich Gulf nation notorious for public executions and beatings. Just recently, Riyadh stoked international outrage over news that 20-year-old Ali al-Nimr, arrested four years ago during anti-government protests—along with hundreds of other, mostly Shiite protesters in the city of Qatif—would be sentenced to death. Although France has not been particularly outspoken on Saudi Arabia’s frequent executions—175 in 12 months, according to an Amnesty International report from […]

In the traumatic months after the Sept. 11 attacks, American policymakers decided that the conflict with transnational extremism demanded an aggressive response. This made perfect sense: To go on the offensive as soon as possible is the American way. In the new conflict with al-Qaida and other extremists, the United Stated intended to fight them over there to avoid having to fight them here, as then-President George W. Bush put it. However appealing this might have been to the angry American public, there were challenges putting it into practice. To undertake a global offensive against extremists, the United States needed […]

In commenting on an article by Josh Marshall about Russia’s military intervention in Syria, I wrote that the best thing the United States has going for it in formulating a response is time. Russia simply does not have the hardware or logistical capacity to project force decisively over the long haul. That doesn’t mean that the intervention won’t have an initial impact. In fact, the introduction of Russian airpower and advisers, combined with Iranian and possibly Russian ground forces, has already shifted the momentum on the battlefield. This should not come as a surprise. After all, the initial American and […]

In the final countdown to the announcement of the winner of the world’s most prestigious award, the Nobel Peace Prize, the buzz is growing around two Latin American men. One is Argentine-born Pope Francis, whose unconventional style has made waves across the globe. The other is Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, whose efforts to forge a peace deal with Marxist rebels are already winning him accolades around the world, but remain controversial at home. On Sept. 23, while the world was enthralled by the papal visit to the U.S., Colombians who follow Santos on Twitter found an unexpected message from […]