War & Conflict Archive

It is no secret that the survival of Iraq within its current official borders is very much in doubt. The lightning-fast battlefield victories of the extremist Sunni group the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)—which recently renamed itself the Islamic State and anointed itself as the new caliphate—have revived the old debate about a potential partition of the country. Iraq, a product of European colonial mapmaking, could split into three states: one Sunni, one Shiite and one Kurdish. But as Iraqis fret and international observers debate the country’s future, Israelis across the political spectrum have come forth to declare […]

The collapse of the Iraqi army as it faced an extremist onslaught shocked many Americans, particularly those who had worked hard to help create it. The $25 billion of American money and seven years of intense effort seemed wasted as four of Iraq’s 14 divisions simply crumbled. In Washington, flustered policymakers and military leaders scrambled, searching for an effective response and trying to understand how the disaster happened. In the flurry of finger-pointing, pundits and politicians missed the bigger issue: The slow reaction to Iraq’s failure is one more manifestation of a deep flaw in the way Americans think about […]

Late last month, the White House unveiled a request for $65 billion in additional spending for the war in Afghanistan and other defense programs, on top of the approximately $500 billion in the Pentagon’s base budget. Over $58 billion of that request would fund the Pentagon’s Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), which cover military activities that would have previously fallen under the Bush-era rubric of the war on terror. The rest would go to the State Department. The OCO request, which is more than $20 billion less than the placeholder amount in the fiscal year 2015 budget request announced last March, […]

Like it did with the crisis in Ukraine, China is trying to keep out of the chaos in Iraq. But as the central government in Baghdad confronts the Sunni militants spearheaded by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an al-Qaida splinter group that aims to create an Islamic caliphate from eastern Syria to northwestern Iraq, it will be hard for China to preserve a policy of noninterference. This time around, unlike what happened in Ukraine, China cannot keep out of another sovereign nation’s internal affairs—until now a cornerstone of its diplomacy—given Beijing’s huge economic and commercial interests in […]

The ongoing civil war in Syria has spread across the Iraqi border in recent months, putting Iraq back at the center of the region’s security agenda. As the forces of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) take control over a large part of Iraq, the Kurdish population has become increasingly assertive in the pursuit of its own autonomy, and Iraq has once again become a policy challenge for Washington. This report examines the implications of the growing conflict for Iraq, the U.S., Syria and a potentially independent Kurdistan, drawing on articles published in the past year. ISIS in […]

The Syrian war, currently overshadowed by its offshoot in Iraq, remains a ruinous blight on international diplomacy. Nearly half a year after the furiously hyped but fundamentally hopeless peace talks between the government and moderate rebels in Geneva, no end to the fighting is in sight. President Barack Obama has requested $500 million from Congress to train and equip rebel forces, suggesting that he is resigned to an extended proxy war with Russia and Iran, which continue to assist Damascus. Yet while the Geneva talks petered out in February, remnants of international cooperation over Syria have survived. Moscow and Washington […]

Last week, three former Soviet republics—Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova—signed association agreements with the European Union. All three countries contain breakaway territories that Russia either effectively controls or directly supports. While the world was riveted by Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008, and the crisis over Ukraine’s eastern regions continues to make headlines, far less attention has been paid to the case of Moldova. On the country’s eastern edge, between the Dniester River and the border with Ukraine, sits Transnistria, a self-declared state home to about 500,000 people of mostly Slavic descent that announced its independence during the collapse of the […]

In remarks at the U.S. Embassy in Manila early last month, U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Philip Goldberg praised the elite counterterrorism unit sent to advise the Philippine military after the attacks of 9/11, known as the Joint Special Operations Task Force Philippines (JSOTF-P), as having “gained the trust and earned the respect of our host nation partners.” The unit, he pointed out, was also the “first element of the U.S. Armed Forces to deploy” to areas affected by last November’s typhoon. But after more than a decade in the Philippines, the United States is phasing out the task force. […]

The Democratic Republic of Congo has changed. Five years ago, the country’s eastern provinces were entering a second decade of low-intensity violence marked by the proliferation of armed groups perpetrating atrocities that had enveloped the region since the collapse of the Zairian state in 1996-1997. The ineffective, grossly undersized United Nations peacekeeping mission struggled to keep track of the chaos around it, and diplomatic efforts to address the conflict had little impact. The national army, known as the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (FARDC), was useless at best and actively harmed the population at worst. When rebels […]

On June 15, Juan Manuel Santos emerged as the victor of a close and contentious battle for the Colombian presidency. He ran on a campaign promise to continue the peace talks he started with the country’s main leftist guerrilla army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), in November 2012. His re-election, Santos declared, was proof that Colombian voters had given him a mandate for peace and wanted to complete the process. Santos’ second-round victory relied in large part on the support he received from most of the established segments of Colombia’s political left, which, though historically not a major […]