Diplomacy & Politics Archive

ELDORET, Kenya — In a milestone ruling issued Monday, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has decided to bring four prominent Kenyan political figures to trial for war crimes allegedly committed during the 2007-2008 post-election violence that engulfed the country, East Africa’s economic powerhouse and former paradigm of stability. Striking at the core of Kenyan political society, presidential frontrunners and Members of Parliament William Ruto and Uhuru Kenyatta will now face charges of masterminding the grassroots violence that claimed 1,200 lives, injured countless more and displaced hundreds of thousands. Civil service chief Francis Muthaura and radio broadcaster Joshua arap Sang will […]

Who shall we bomb next? Pundits and commentators have begun to fall over themselves declaring the necessity of launching military campaigns against Syria and Iran — the former to prevent a humanitarian disaster and the latter to forestall the development of a nuclear weapon. The catalyst for this enthusiasm is the success of NATO’s aerial campaign in Libya, a war that apparently vindicated the long-standing promise of advanced, precision-guided airpower to cheaply and easily solve inconvenient political problems. Unfortunately, the rediscovered enthusiasm for intervention demonstrates only that the foreign policy punditocracy is committed to serially mislearning the lessons of airpower […]

Law enforcement officials from seven West African countries met in Sierra Leone last month to discuss increasing anti-corruption efforts at a conference organized by the U.S. State Department and U.S. Justice Department under the auspices of the West Africa Cooperative Security Initiative (WACSI). In an email interview, Boubacar N’Diaye, an associate professor of black studies and political science at the College of Wooster, discussed the WASCI. WPR: What is driving the West Africa Cooperative Security Initiative, and which U.S. government agencies are involved? Boubacar N’Diaye: The driving force behind the WACSI is the United States’ desire to curtail drug trafficking […]

Relations between Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan have grown increasingly strained in recent weeks, particularly after Erdogan, a Sunni Muslim, urged the Shiite leadership in Iraq to resolve sectarian tensions, which have escalated in the wake of the recent U.S. military withdrawal from the country. Maliki responded by telling Erdogan to stop interfering in Iraqi affairs, with the sharp exchange between Baghdad and Ankara taking an alarming turn when several rockets were fired at the Turkish embassy in Iraq last week. According to Henri Barkey, a Turkey expert at Lehigh University, the recent […]

Residents in the Syrian city of Homs are tired of the fighting between Syrian forces and defectors, which has disrupted city life. World News Videos by NewsLook

On Jan. 15, in polling that the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) characterized as not meeting the “fundamental principles of democratic elections,” the ruling Nur Otan party of Kazakhstani President Nursultan Nazarbaev won just more than 80 percent of votes cast and 83 out of 108 seats in Kazakhstan’s lower house of parliament, the Majilis. The OSCE, which had the largest and longest election observation mission in the country, cited the exclusion of opposition parties as well as numerous problems with counting and other violations at some of the polling places they monitored in concluding that the […]

Newly inaugurated Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina ordered the army to join the fight against organized crime and drug cartels last week. In an email interview, Bruce Bagley, chair of the department of international studies at the University of Miami, discussed Guatemala’s place in the war on drugs. WPR: What is the nature of Guatemala’s drug crisis, and what has recent policy been to confront it? Bruce Bagley: Guatemala has become a major transit country for cocaine moving north along the Pacific Corridor from Colombia to Mexico and into the United States. Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s militarization of Mexico’s anti-drug […]

BOGOTA — The Colombian government is under increasing pressure to crack down on drug gangs and bolster an inefficient judicial system following a recent forced curfew across parts of northern Colombia by one of the country’s main drug gangs. Earlier this month, the Urabenos, one of Colombia’s main drug trafficking groups, distributed menacing leaflets in dozens of municipalities in six Colombian provinces, ordering the inhabitants not to leave their homes. “We don’t want to see anyone walking around or doing any kind of work,” one leaflet said, adding that the imposed shutdown was in retaliation for the recent killing by […]

Defense policy analysts and pundits are wasting ink arguing back and forth about whether or not counterinsurgency is dead or alive. The real debate — the one that risks getting lost in the noise about counterinsurgency’s vital signs — concerns the future of the U.S. Army. As the U.S. military ends its role in Iraq and winds down in Afghanistan, the U.S. Army, alone among the armed services, has no compelling narrative for how it fits into the nation’s defense. The questions today surrounding the future of counterinsurgency are no less intense than the debates over whether or not counterinsurgency […]

For the past several years, the widely accepted view among defense analysts had been that counterinsurgency, or COIN, represented the future of U.S. defense planning and operations. This consensus was initially driven by the belief that “effective COIN” had “won” the Iraq War, and later by the need, as former Defense Secretary Robert Gates put it, to fight “the wars we’re in.” Now things have become far less clear. Awareness has set in that the effects of the 2007-2008 “surge” in Iraq were only partial and, even at the time, only partly achieved by the shift toward conducting what we […]

The first page of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps’ Field Manual 3-24 (.pdf), entitled “Counterinsurgency,” states, “Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation-builders as well as warriors.” Authored in 2006 by Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the director of the CIA, and Lt. Gen. James F. Amos, currently the commandant of the Marine Corps, the manual essentially enshrined counterinsurgency as nation-building in U.S. military doctrine. This required U.S. soldiers and marines to undertake, in roughly proportionate measure, five tasks: safeguard the indigenous population, improve democratic governance, combat corruption, deliver economic projects and institute the rule of law […]

Americans often assume that insurgency is a modern phenomenon, invented by Mao Zedong and refined by his emulators. The notion permeates official thinking, including Department of Defense definitions and doctrines. In reality, insurgency has existed ever since states and empires began attempting to impose their will on people too weak to resist with conventional military means. Indeed, counterinsurgency is a common function for most states and an inevitable one for empires. That said, the strategic significance of insurgency has ebbed and flowed over time. When the chance of direct conflict between great powers was high, insurgency became background noise in […]

Is counterinsurgency dead, as some observers claim? Is it alive and well, as others have argued? Or is it, as still others maintain, merely evolving? One thing is certain. Once fashionable within the Washington beltway, counterinsurgency — or COIN, as it’s known — has come under withering criticism, as violence in Afghanistan escalates and the Pentagon tightens its belt. Many of counterinsurgency’s critics are convinced that the U.S. would do well to avoid such campaigns in the future. Who can blame them? The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have extracted an ever-mounting toll in time, blood and treasure from a […]

Japanese Foreign Minister Koichiro Gemba paid a two-day visit to Turkey earlier this month. In an email interview, Selçuk Esenbel, a Japan specialist at Bosphorus University, discussed Japan-Turkey relations. WPR: How deep are diplomatic and trade relations between Japan and Turkey, and what is their recent trajectory? Selçuk Esenbel: Since Japan and what was to ultimately become the modern state of Turkey first established relations in 1873, ties have been friendly with no serious conflicts of interest. Geographic distance has hampered the development of close trade ties, but generally speaking Turkey has always been very friendly toward Japan. Since the […]

Human life expectancy at birth, which remained stunningly fixed for thousands of years before suddenly doubling over the course of the 20th century, now seems destined to experience a similarly bold leap across the 21st century. When it does, it will shift human thinking about population control from its present focus on the outset of life to the increasingly delayed final curtain. The problem is that the technological advances that will make extending life expectancy possible are likely to come far faster than our political systems — including the democracies — can handle. The potential outcome recalls the plot of […]

Outgoing Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has left his home nation to seek medical treatment in the U.S., while protesters call for justice against him despite immunity. World News Videos by NewsLook

With anti-government protests in Romania moving into their second week, demonstrators are showing a persistence unusual for this part of the world, underscoring the symbolic importance they have placed in calling attention to their widespread grievances. The woes that have brought Romanians to the streets — low incomes, corruption and rising authoritarianism — are familiar to many in Eastern Europe. Indeed, the protests, which according to police estimates brought 13,000 people to the streets across the country over the weekend, follow similar demonstrations in Russia and Hungary, leading some to suggest that this is the European incarnation of the Arab […]