More than 1,300 prisoners in Kyrgyzstan are said to have sewn their lips together in protest of poor prison conditions. Nearly 7,000 prisoners are also engaged in a hunger strike.
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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 […]
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 […]