Briefing Archive

Sometimes one man’s life can serve as a mirror to reflect the unfolding history of a nation. Keep a watch on the struggles of one Iraqi by the name of Mithal al-Alusi and you will see the drama of Iraq’s modern history and the battle for its future. Sometimes the reflected image emits a hopeful glow. Often, however, it shoots back like a dagger, causing a wince of pain. Alusi, who marches to the sound of his own idealistic beat, has a way of unsettling and angering Iraqis, even as he seeds the soil with new ideas. In recent weeks, […]

In the last 12 months, events in Pakistan have developed at a frenetic pace. In October 2007, Benazir Bhutto returned to her homeland following years of exile and was greeted as a savior by millions of followers. Just two months later, in December, she was assassinated in an attack whose authors have still not been identified. Shortly after that, the political decline and fall of her rival Pervez Musharraf began. First the general lost the parliamentary elections, then his post as head of the army, and finally the presidency itself. Earlier this month, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, Asif Ali […]

NOT IN HARM’S WAY? — About 150 U.S. military personnel had an almost ringside seat at the Russian sweep across Georgia between Aug. 8 and 12 — an airbase near the Georgian capital, Tibilisi. Military spokesmen in the Pentagon and in Europe told Corridors that the American troops had been involved in a just-completed large-scale joint U.S.-Georgian exercise but had remained behind when the fighting erupted. More than 1,000 U.S. soldiers and marines had taken part in “Immediate Response 2008,” designed to improve cooperation in combat situations between American and Georgian forces. The exercise ended on July 31, but members […]

The U.S.-Indian civilian nuclear agreement may still have to clear the U.S. Congress, but Indian firms and industry groups are already celebrating the Nuclear Suppliers Group’s decision this month that effectively gave the agreement a green light by waiving a ban on the country engaging in nuclear trade. The U.S.-India Business Council, which has lobbied hard in support of the bilateral agreement that followed a joint statement in 2005 by President George Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, described the waiver as “a historic step forward for India and the world,” while the Confederation of Indian Industry said it […]

KOTA KINABALU, Malaysia — Philippine troops have launched surprise attacks on rebel strongholds in the country’s south as authorities brace themselves for an upsurge in violence expected once Ramadan is over. Military officials claimed at least 25 rebels were killed in weekend fighting after government troops went on the offensive in the rebel-held territory. Wire services also reported one government soldier was killed. However, independent sources said the fighting was of a much lower intensity than was seen in August, when ferocious rebel attacks left scores dead and caused 160,000 people to flee their homes as Christian villages were torched. […]

On Sept. 8, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced the most concrete U.S. punishment of Russia for Moscow’s military intervention in Georgia. In a brief press release, she related that President Bush was rescinding the proposed U.S.-Russia Agreement for Peaceful Nuclear Cooperation. She expressed regret at the decision, but described it as inevitable since, “given the current environment, the time is not right for this agreement.” Although Vice President Richard Cheney has denounced “Russia’s actions [as] an affront to civilized standards” and said they are “completely unacceptable,” the Bush administration had until this decision not penalized Russia so directly […]

Read Part I and Part II of this series. As European cocaine use has increased, heightened sea interdiction by the U.S. and the EU has pushed more traditional transatlantic cocaine trafficking routes — and their profits — further south in the Americas, making Venezuela and Brazil, via West Africa, Europe’s main suppliers of cocaine. While it is unknown exactly how much of the estimated 250 metric tons of cocaine that enters the EU by sea or air each year arrives from Africa, it is believed that the cocaine smuggled across the continent’s fragile Western region has a street value of […]

WASHINGTON — Among the gravest risks to the continuing improvement of the situation in Iraq is that Sunni militias now allied with the United States will not be successfully integrated into Iraqi Security Forces or find employment in the civilian economy, say Iraq analysts and U.S. government officials. But independent observers and U.S. officials differ sharply in their assessments of the possibility of a reversal in the Sunni “Awakening,” which is almost universally credited as a significant factor in recent reductions in violence. The Awakening movement began in earnest in 2006 in Iraq’s Anbar province, when U.S. commanders took advantage […]

BANGKOK, Thailand – Just inside the barricades surrounding Bangkok’s besieged Government House, a newspaper photo spread taped to a tarpaulin shows the grisly scene that erupted there early last week: police in riot gear squaring off with gangs of protesters in red and yellow; a man shooting a slingshot into the crowd; another grimacing while blood oozes from his face and head. But more than a week after that clash between supporters of Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej and the opposition People’s Alliance for Democracy, which killed one and wounded more than 40, the mood has lightened among protestors. The indecisive […]

When war breaks out, French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy is decidedly in his element. “BHL,” as he is known in France, made a first venture into his peculiar brand of literary war reporting as the self-appointed bard of the Bosniak cause during the Bosnian civil war in the early 1990s. This was then followed — in sometimes dizzyingly short order — by quick jaunts into war zones or areas of civil unrest in Algeria, Afghanistan (to visit Massoud), Sri Lanka, Burundi, Colombia, Southern Sudan and Israel (during the Israel-Hezbollah War of 2006), and even a brief foray into Darfur last year. […]

Read Part 1 of this series. Late last year, four French tourists were gunned down in Mauritania where they were picnicking by a roadside on Christmas Eve, prompting the cancellation of the 2008 Lisbon-Dakar Rally. Identified as an al-Qaida “sleeper cell” by local officials, the two shooters were later picked up in Guinea-Bissau, where it was revealed that one of the men had lived there for two years and spoke the local Creole language. The two men, along with three suspected accomplices, all Mauritanian nationals, were later deported to their home country. But the inability of law enforcement to function […]

NEW YORK — Both candidates for President of the United States agree that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear technology is a serious threat to national security, but neither has presented a serious strategy for dealing with the problem on the campaign trail. One seems to think he can talk Iran out of its nuclear program without specifying what he’d say to change the equation. The other summed up his strategy by inserting a few bombs into an old Beach Boys song. Campaign rhetoric rarely becomes policy, especially in foreign affairs, and the Iranian question is no exception. Certainly Barack Obama will […]

Stepped up U.S. drug enforcement and interdiction in Latin America, coupled with a falling dollar and a surging demand for cocaine on the streets of Europe, is leading to political and economic chaos across West Africa, where international narco-traffickers have established their most recent, and lucrative, staging grounds. In fact, the drug trade is fast turning large parts of the region into areas that are all but ungovernable — with major implications for international security. “The former Gold Coast is turning into the Coke Coast,” said a 2008 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). “The […]

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — The kinds of tourists you meet in Afghanistan are not quite the same as those you’d be likely to meet on the Costa del Sol. First of all, there are fewer of them, far fewer — perhaps only a few hundred a year. But if it can be said that Costa del Sol tourists share at least one trait in common (a love of the sun), today’s visitors to Afghanistan share something else: curiosity, perhaps with a dash of recklessness. While post-invasion Afghanistan has never descended into the kinds of violence and anarchy seen in Iraq, it […]

Although widespread fighting in Georgia has ceased, the war’s diplomatic repercussions continue to ripple throughout the region. One major concern in Washington is that Russia’s successful military intervention in Georgia will intimidate other former Soviet republics to, if not bandwagon with Moscow, at least distance themselves from the United States to avoid antagonizing a newly belligerent Russia. It is therefore no accident, as Russian Prime Minister Vladmir Putin likes to say, that U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney visited Azerbaijan last week. Cheney travelled to Baku even before arriving in Georgia and Ukraine, whose governments have been engaged in more acute […]

ON THE MARGIN — As usual, Washington’s foreign ambassadors went to the two conventions in force. Though they pay their own way, they are officially guests of the political parties, which corral them into a assigned areas to witness the proceedings, limit their access to the delegates’ portion of the floor to a few group visits, and organize programs of activities outside the convention itself. At the Republican Convention this week, the ambassadors’ schedule (interspersed with the occasional policy conference) included a visit to an ethanol production plant in Winthrop, Minn., and a tour of Minnesota Lt. Gov. Carol Molnau’s […]

Following years of promising gains since 2001, Afghanistan is in a tailspin. Not long ago, a sophisticated Taliban assault on a Kandahar prison freed 1,200 inmates, including 350 Taliban members. The attack came only weeks after Afghan President Hamid Karzai survived a fourth assassination attempt. The main forces behind the country’s downward spiral are al-Qaida and the Taliban, which have found sanctuary in the vast unpoliced region of western Pakistan known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Stabilizing the Afghan-Pakistani front of the war on terrorism will require U.S. policymakers to re-examine the fatal misconception that they face only […]