WPR Blog Archive

Nathan Hodge, on assignment in Iraq and writing over at Danger Room, discusses the operational adjustments required by the soon-to-take-effect SOFA: The new catchphrase here is “warrant-based targeting”: U.S. forces willneed to secure warrants from Iraqi judges in order to conduct missionsto detain suspects. How this will work in practice, however, is stillsomething of an open question. This had struck me upon reading the document last month, but it’s worth pointing out that despite the emphasis placed on a light fingerprint in the COIN tactics that guided the Surge, “light” is used in comparison to war zone environments. What we […]

I mentioned my email correspondence with Sam Roggeveen, editor of the Interpeter. Here’s a note he sent me regarding a recent post on the increasingly endangered F-22 procurement program: You raise the possibility that US stimulus spending might find its way to the arms industry and that items like the F-22 will be offered toJapan and Australia. I really wouldn’t worry too much. Arms spending may be stimulatory inthe US, because it is domestic spending. But although Japan andAustralia are not as hard hit by the global financial crisis as the US,it is biting, so both countries will want to […]

If you haven’t made the Lowy Institute’s Interpreter blog a regular stop on your daily internet commute, I highly recommend that you do. And I don’t say that simply because I’ve struck up a collegial email correspondence with the blog’s editor, Sam Roggeveen (of which more later). The Interpreter’s contributors are all insightful analysts of not only Australia and Asia, but of America and the world as well. They offer a neighborhood perspective on the Asian Century ahead, and the kind of frank opinions of America’s role in the world that only a close and trusted friend can provide. And […]

Kommersant has a worthwhile discussion of the MAP-less path for NATO military-to-military cooperation between Georgia and Ukraine. Again, a lot of the interoperability and military standards development is already taking place on the ground. But the key here seems to be steering clear not only of describing this as a fast-track membership path, or even a way to scrap the MAPs altogether, but actually limiting it to the politically undefined gray area that doesn’t set off Russia’s alarms. In other words, the Gates “no red lines” approach. The Kommersant article suggests that the Bush administration has already walked the proposal […]

It turns out Kim Jong Il really did suffer a stroke in October, according to François-Xavier Roux, the French doctor who treated him, as quoted by Le Figaro: Kim Jong Il was the victim of a stroke, but he was not operated on. He’s doing better now. The photos that were just released seem to me to be current and authentic. It seems to me that Kim Jong Il is running North Korea. I can’t say any more, I’m constrained by medical confidentiality and state secrecy. (Translated from the original French.) The Kims apparently have a long history of seeking […]

I’ve been thinking a lot about regional approaches the last few days, ever since this sentence from David Axe’s WPR piece on the India-Pakistan rivalry set off some bells and whistles: The State Department’s approach to Centraland South Asia is still based on what [the RAND Corporation’s Seth Jones] called a “Westphalian” model,with U.S. ambassadors in each country pursuing separate, strictlynational strategies. “State’s responses tend to be more diplomacywithin country, instead of at regional level.” “Ideally, therewould be a White House position that is much moreregional[ly-focused],” Jones said. “It’s been floated by some in theObama campaign.” The way in which […]

What is it with the Bush family and late-term U.N. resolutions authorizing use of force in Somalia? All the reporting I’ve read about the Somalia piracy crisis, beginning with David Axe’s WPR feature from way back in October (yes, WPR is that far ahead of the curve), has emphasized the fact that that the piracy crisis is simply a water-based expression of a land-based problem. But the land-based problem is a lack of governance, and solving it demands a thorough, bottom-to-top stabilization and reconstruction operation — what we used to call nation building under Bush I — of the kind […]

The EU Observer is reporting that the EU heads of state gathered in Brussels for a two-day summit have reached an agreement on a second Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty before the end of 2009. As a condition for the do-over, Ireland received EU assurances of non-intervention on taxation and social issues like abortion and euthansia, as well as assurances regarding Irish worries about how European defense would impact the country’s neutrality. The 26 also agreed to maintain the “one country, one commissioner” system on the EU High Commission. The Lisbon Treaty had envisaged a rotating commission of reduced […]

Last week in her regular WPR column, World Citizen, Frida Ghitis presciently called attention to the threat that Pakistani-based terrorist networks pose to Europe. Today, police in Brussels arrested what is being reported as an al-Qaida linked terrorist cell after one of the fourteen people under surveillance, who had arrived last week from either Pakistan or Afghanistan, recorded a last testament video and bid farewell to his family. The arrests come on the eve of an EU heads of state summit, and although the police are unsure whether the summit was targeted, the risk it posed led them to accelerate […]

When word leaked of the Bush administration’s efforts to get NATO to scrap Membership Action Plans for Georgia and Ukraine (which the alliance had already postponed in April) and instead immediately begin the process of raising the two countries’ militaries to alliance interoperability standards with an eye towards eventual membership without the MAP’s formal process to guide it, my initial reaction was to wonder what Whiskey and Tango’s favorite dance is. But Jeffrey Mankoff, writing at the New Atlanticist, offers a pretty compelling argument for the idea: The problem is that a decision on NATO membership is fundamentally political, and […]

I’ve written before about the macroeconomics of a counterinsurgency-based security posture, and specifically how COIN resembles a transfer of wealth, as compared to WWII, a.k.a. the “public works program” that ultimately got us out of the Great Depression. Andrew Exum of Abu Muqawama obliquely makes a similar point in a post titled “When Guns = Butter”: This is a genuine conundrum.Does one, in an effort to trim the budget, cancel the F/A-22 program?Or does one, in the midst of a severe recession, keep what has become afederal jobs program? In addition to trimming the budget, the justification for cutting the […]

Bernard Finel makes a number of good pointsover at the New Atlanticist about the Bush administration’s successfulcounterterrorism policies that nonetheless do not reduce terrorism. Inparticular, he argues that the emphasis on state sponsorship of terrorgroups tends to equate the agendas of the various actors, ignoring howstates that do fund or train terror groups usually do so for pragmaticrather than ideological reasons, often to find the groups they’vesponsored ultimately escaping their control. Finel argues thatwe should instead concentrate on the spaces beyond states’ control thatare exploited by terrorist groups as operational bases: Seven years after 9/11 we still do not have […]

Enlightening and entertaining piece from John Vinocur in the IHT on the relationship between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. As far as bilateral relations built on personalities, the two make an odd, and as Vinodur notes, unstable match. Of course, Sarkozy has a way of making any match (e.g. his marriage) seem odd and inherently unstable. A lot of the current cooperativeness between the two is a result of the leadership gap in Washington at the moment. I suspect that once President-elect Obama becomes President Obama, both men’s attention will turn, in large part, to […]

I don’t have too much time to develop this thought, so I’ll treat it like an actual blog post and just toss it out there. Scanning today’s most stubborn foreign policy challenges, I’m struck by how many of them are either deferred maintenance on unresolved post-Cold War arrangements or direct legacies of Cold War policies. The Russia-Georgia conflict driving so much tension in U.S.-Russia relations, for instance, is a result of the “frozen conflict” approach to the thorny details of a final status agreement on the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The terrorist threat emanating out of the Afghan/Pakistani FATA […]

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari makes a compelling case for restraint and regional cooperation in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks in a NY Times op-ed, although I had a multi-stage reaction to the following passage, in particular: The world worked to exploit religion against the Soviet Union inAfghanistan by empowering the most fanatic extremists as an instrumentof destruction of a superpower. The strategy worked, but its legacy wasthe creation of an extremist militia with its own dynamic. What at first seemed like a disingenuous gloss on Pakistan’s instrumentalization of the Taliban on second reading seemed to put the longer […]

Defense Sec. Bob Gates gets the last word on yesterday’s asymmetric blog war, in a Foreign Affairs essay that should put to rest any doubts about whether or not he should have stayed on at the Pentagon. The entire piece is too well-constructed to dissect, so I recommend just clicking through and reading it all. But the operative word is balance, and as a reflection of how well the piece achieves that balance, all the concerns and criticisms that I cited yesterday are represented: the need to build capacity for the wars being fought balanced by the emphasis on conventional […]

In the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, the very alarming scenarios of India-Pakistan conflict, as well as the question of the degree of Pakistani institutional involvement, have dominated the discussion. That’s fine and necessary. But Bruce Hoffman’s takeaway in his National Interest piece is noteworthy as well: The attacks demonstrate how a small number of armed and trainedterrorists can paralyze a city, stymie the security force, underminepublic confidence in the ability of government and the authorities torespond, and generate worldwide attention and publicity. At first glance, that seems relatively obvious. My own first reaction, in discussing the attacks with a […]