WPR Blog Archive

Rob over at Arabic Media Shack poses the question, God Save the Queen or La Marseillase? The Marseillaise, hands down. Indeed, its soaring refrain is high on the list of reasons I’m glad my son has dual citizenship. That urge to run through walls Rob mentions upon hearing it is no coincidence, by the way. As an anthem, it’s true to its revolutionary battle-cry roots, complete with alarms about the enemy come to “cut the throats of your sons” and calls to “water our fields” with their “impure blood.” (Intellectually, of course, I prefer La Marcha Real, Spain’s national anthem, […]

I don’t have a whole lot to say about President Obama’s withdrawal timetable, officially announced today, other than that it strikes me as hitting the sweet spot on all fronts. I’m a bit surprised at the degree to which the Democratic Congressional leadership criticized the 35-50K residual force from August 2010 to the end of 2011. That sounds like wise and logical contingency planning, every bit as dependent on circumstances (which in this case means amenable to acceleration) as the rest of the timetable. It’s interesting to note that Obama called former president Bush before addressing the Marines at Camp […]

India announced it would begin building a homegrown aircraft carrier. Given the porous state of India’s defense procurement system, I’ll believe it when I see it. The rule of thumb with carriers is that having one means having none, due to the downtime during scheduled drydocks. India already has one, which means they need a second one to shore up their invesment. This could just be a negotiating ploy in its ongoing dispute with Russian over a refitted Russian carrier. If not, look for China, which has been making noises about building a carrier for some time, to respond in […]

In addition to all the middling naval powers that have been able to send publicity-generating patrols to the region, Kenya seems to be the big winner from the Somalia piracy crisis. After Britain and the U.S., the EU has now finalized an extradition accord (French language, via Nicolas Gros-Verheyde, English-language report here) so that pirates captured by its naval mission can be transferred to the Kenyan authorities, rather than simply released. Kenya, in effect, will function as a proxy for the non-existant Somalian criminal justice system. David Axe covered the impact Somalian piracy has had on Kenya, as well as […]

Meanwhile, with all the gloomy news out of South Asia, 2point6billion flags a significant milestone: For the first time, all of the region’s governments — India, Pakistan, Bhutan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives — have been democratically elected. Check back in tomorrow to see if Pakistan and Bangladesh stay on that list. But it’s certainly something to be celebrated while it lasts.

When discussing the Afghanistan War, the conceit among both advocates and opponents to escalation is to treat the Pakistani border areas as safe havens for Afghan insurgents targeting American forces. Developments over the past few years, culminating in the recent ceasefire in Swat, put the lie to that conceit. Here’s what Lt. Gen. David McKiernan lets slip when asked at the very end of this Chicago Tribune interview whether he’s concerned about the Swat truce: Absolutely. Because the insurgency is a regional insurgency. It’s hardto imagine regional stability without a resolution of these sanctuariesthat militant groups operate from. More precisely, […]

Steve Hynd, writing at the New Atlanticist,makes the good point that a lot of analysis of the Taliban treats themlike a monolithic movement, when the groups referred to are actuallydisparate elements with varying degrees of rivalry, cooperation and agenda overlap.I’m definitely guilty of that, so via Hynd, thisAnand Gopal article is a good start towards getting a better handle on the more precise taxonomy. But whether it’s the Afghan Taliban targeting Kabul (Mullah Omar and Jallaludin Haqqani), or the Pakistani Taliban targeting Islamabad (Baitullah Mehsud and Maulana Fazlullah), over and over, the common refrain when discussing the Talibans’ (as opposed […]

It’s probably reductionist, simplistic and uninformed of me, but I’ve long considered that the biggest source of cultural misunderstanding between the West and the Islamic World was their fundamental disagreement over the role of women in society. Not that there is any monolithic, uniform opinion on either side of the debate. But for me, modernism culminates in — if it doesn’t quite boil down to — the liberation of women from biologically determined social roles. But if the Islamic World has embraced almost all other aspects of modernism — after all, what’s more modern than uranium enrichment? — the sticking […]

Two months ago in a post on Iraq’s prospects for developing into a regional power, I parenthetically mentioned the following: Funny how we’ve heard a lot about the impact of falling crude prices on Russia, Iran and Venezuela, but not on Iraq. Two months later, we begin to hear about it (via today’s WPR Media Roundup), and with oil exports accounting for 90 percent of the Iraqi government’s revenues, the consequences have been immediate and drastic. Future reconstruction projects are being postponed, and the government will have to tap into its $35 billion oil revenue reserves not only to finance […]

Typically thin sourcing for the British press, but according to the Telegraph, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is facing a mini-rebellion within the officer corps because of his plan to professionalize the military. Note to Vlad: Talk to Paul Bremer before you fire 200,000 officers during a global depression. Apparently the grunts aren’t very happy, either. Conditions are atrocious, and morale is low: . . . The feeling of discontent is even deeper in the non-commissioned ranks, who complain of appalling conditions in their barracks. Doctorswere summoned to one unheated navy base earlier this month. Of 1,000sailors housed in the […]

The head of the Special Operations unit of Turkey’s National Police was just found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. I’ll be keeping an eye on this over the next couple days. There’s no indication from the article, but the Ergenekon case immediately comes to mind. In any event, this kind of story generally signals a can of worms.

In his WPR column on Monday, Andrew Bast wondered which word Americans least wanted to hear regarding Afghanistan: state building or war? If our alternate supply routes are any indication, we might not really have much of a choice. So far, we’ve got the state-building angle covered: Uzbekistan freight routes and Turkemenistan airspace have now been added to the Russian and Kazakh “northern corridor” for non-lethal supplies. But if we’re going to escalate the war effort, we’re going to have to get some guns in there somehow.

On a side note, Jari also raises another very important question: Have you guys ever actually handled a balloon full of water? The answer to this is yes. In fact, as a senior at Hunter College H.S., I participated in a water balloon attack against the neighboring Lycée Français that is the stuff of legend. (Anyone who has ever gone to school in the near vicinity of a Lycée Français needs no explanation for why we organized this attack.) As water balloon attacks go, it was massive, involving four large cardboard cartons full of them, and a dozen or so […]

Apparently no one told Nicolas Sarkozy that Italy is not in the Middle East.

The bad news is that, a) the Pakistan Supreme Court has barred former prime minister and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif from office, heightening tensions in Pakistan’s already fractious and fragile political landscape; and b) the success of American counterterrorism operations in the FATA has probably redirected the terrorist threat towards Pakistan. The good news is that, a) Indo-Pakistani relations seem to be thawing after the Mumbai attacks, with a side meeting scheduled between the two countries’ foreign ministers at an upcoming Sri Lanka conference; and b) this is the last Pakistan–related post of the day. (I promise.)

Back to the balloon metaphor. The flurry of developments in Pakistan,taken in combination, suggests a significant shift in the Taliban’sstrategic emphasis. It’s based on inherently unstable deals andalliances, and is in all likelihood seasonally motivated and thereforetemporary. But in broad strokes, it looks as follows: – Consolidating its bridgeheads in Swat and NWFP through allegedly lucrative (as in $6million in government indemnities) ceasefireagreements with the Pakistani government. – Preparing to meet the U.S.’s 17K troop escalation in Afghanistan witha spring offensive that combines up-to-now divided Taliban elements ina pact brokered by Mullah Omar. (Via John McCreary’s Night Watch.) In other […]

There was some suggestion following the IAEA’s Iran report last week that Iran might have made a political decision to not expand its enrichment capacity as quickly as it might have. The argument centered around roughly 1500 new centrifuges that had been installed but not yet put into operation. But in yet another essential ACW post, Jeffrey Lewis presents a compelling case for why the centrifuges might be evidence of an acceleration in, or at least a maturation of, Iran’s enrichment pace. Essentially, Lewis argues that Iran’s halting, small-batch installation process in the past reflected its lack of expertise. Now […]