Last Tuesday’s deadly attacks on Shiite processions in Kabul and Mazar-e Sharif in Afghanistan are further evidence of dangerous instability in neighboring Pakistan and of the Pakistani state’s failure to act coherently to counteract it. A clear understanding of the group responsible is important to understanding the crossborder ramifications of the attacks. Contrary to reports in prominent news outlets, the Pakistani Sunni sectarian terrorist group Lashkar-e Jhangvi (LeJ) was not responsible for the attacks. Rather, an LeJ splinter group known as Lashkar-e Jhangvi al-Alami (LeJ-A) — not the original LeJ organization — has claimed responsibility for them. A person claiming [...]
If national security flows from economic strength, then the ongoing global economic crisis is poised to strike at one of the more underappreciated tools in the security kit — the checkbook. We’re all familiar with the term “checkbook diplomacy.” But “checkbook security” has played a largely unsung role in America’s approach to national security over the past decade — from “buying off” Sunni insurgents in Iraq as part of the Surge to funding development projects in Afghanistan as part of the war effort to helping countries in Latin America and Africa improve their capabilities to fight drug traffickers and organized [...]
In a recent World Politics Review article, U.S. Army Col. Gian Gentile declared that COIN is “dead” as the motivating intellectual concept for the U.S. Army. Although combat continues in Afghanistan, to some extent guided by the precepts set forth in the Army’s “Field Manual 3-24: Counterinsurgency,” Gentile argues that the inability of COIN doctrine to produce a definitive outcome in Afghanistan, along with the end of fighting in Iraq, serves to render the school of thought obsolete. Indeed, Gentile argues that the Army should abandon the “search for lessons of strategic value from the past 10 years of counterinsurgency [...]
