WPR Blog Archive

I was pretty self-satisfied with my Afghanistan-Pakistan balloon metaphor. In fact, so much so that I’ll be revisiting it later. But Jari thinks it’s stupid. Now, Jari calls himself The Stupidest Man on the Earth, so that might be a compliment, but I don’t think it is. Then again, Jari isn’t really stupid, he’s pretty smart, and I’ve been meaning to flag his blog for a while, because it’s worth a read. So maybe he’s always wrong when he calls something stupid. In any case, I think that’s what’s happened here. To begin with, Jari expresses skepticism that the Pakistani […]

Two quick follow-ups to Judah’s recent posts about the U.S. training mission in Pakistan: First, WPR readers would have seen this coming well before it appeared in the New York Times on Sunday. In a Sept. 5, 2008, piece on WPR, Malou Innocent wrote that a “40-page classified document titled ‘Plan for Training the Frontier Corps’ is under review at Central Command.” A few days later, on Sept. 9, 2008, as I reported on this blog, a senior defense official told a small group of reporters at the Pentagon that the United States would spend $800 million over three or […]

The contagion from the financial crisis has spread to Eastern Europe. Growth in the region is off, credit has dried up, and falling currencyexchange rates risk setting off a repeat performance of the Asiancontagion. The Latvian government already a victim of the fallout, and the European banking system is exposed through lavish loans made during the boom years. The IMF has stepped into the gap, but it is clearly and increasingly underfunded, leading to packages that are insufficient to stem the bleeding. A weekend summit of E.U. leaders called for recapitalizing the Fund, with the goal of doubling its current […]

Interesting that Dennis Ross has been named special advisor, reporting exclusively to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while Richard Holbrooke and George Mitchell were both named special presidential envoys, reporting both to Clinton and President Barack Obama. I would have thought that Obama would like to keep as close an eye on the Iran dossier as on the others. At first glance Ross’ official title, “adviser to the secretary of state for the Gulf and Southwest Asia,” reminded me of Jon Alterman’s WPR Briefing, The Middle East Moves East. Alterman suggested that the Obama administration’s regional approach would redraw the […]

More on COIN narrative, since the domestic opinion-shaping campaign seems to have been cranked up a notch. The “hearts and minds” costs of imprecise airstrikes in a counterinsurgency are too well-documented to spend much time on. Not surprising, then, that part of the narrative now being constructed for the Afghanistan War is the lengths to which American pilots go to avoid actually dropping bombs that might cause civilian casualties. What I did find surprising, though, was this: From 15,000 feet up, the pilots protect supply lines under increasingattack, fly reconnaissance missions to find what they call “bad guys”over the next […]

If you find yourself going, “Whuh?” everytime I or other bloggers mention COIN, or if you know what it refers to but never had the time or inclination to go through the U.S. Army field manual articulating it, the recently released U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Guide (.pdf) is a very informative, readable way to get up to speed. If the manual reads like a “lessons learned” from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, that’s because it is. That explains why, for instance, it stresses the difficulties involved in COIN campaigns in the aftermath of forcible regime change. It also explains why, by […]

I’ve been meaning to flag this James Acton post at Arms Control Wonk, a site that is always fascinating but that becomes essential reading in the days after any IAEA Iran report. Acton discusses the discrepancy between the amount of enriched uranium estimated over the course of the year by Iran and what the IAEA actually found in its annual measurement verification. Some have interpreted the estimates, which were about a third lower than what the IAEA measured, as evidence of Iranian deviousness. But Acton makes it clear that it could, in fact, be something worse: The fact that Iran […]

I went scanning the Pakistani English-language press for fallout over the American covert training presence in the FATA (just one low-key item in Dawn). Instead I stumbled across coverage of a proposed Village Defense Council program in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP). That’s the province that contains both the troubled Swat valley and larger Malakand disctrict, where the Pakistani government recently agreed to a controversial ceasefire deal with militants. (See Ahmed Humayun’s Briefing.) Both the News and Daily Times report that the province’s governor plans to distribute 30,000 rifles (you read that right) to carefully screened participants, who will be […]

I should have seen this coming. Two weeks ago, French President Nicolas Sarkozy paid a visit to Baghdad with his foreign and defense ministers. He promised to return before the end of the summer with a business delegation. Of course, business delegation these days is French for Areva, especially when Sarkozy is traveling in the Arab world. With Iraq now expressing interest, it might not be long before Baghdad and Paris sign a Memo of Understanding for a civilian nuclear reactor, Fabriqué en France. The levels of irony here are pretty deep: Under former dictator Saddam Hussein, Iraq sealed a […]

After reading this AFP piece about “State Department 2.0,” (which I found via Twitter), I’m now following the department’s Twitter feed. The article, which was published on Saturday, pointed out that the dipnote feed (which goes by the same name as the State Department blog), “only” had 1,770 followers at press time, comparing that total with the some 177,000 who breathlessly follow the Tweets of Britney Spears. Comparing the department’s drawing power with the lowest-common-denominator celebrity appeal of Spears is like comparing the ratings of C-SPAN and American Idol. A better comparison might be the Twitter feed of some reasonably […]

I’m probably wading blindly into a charged debate here, but Dambisa Moyo makes a compelling case against Western aid to Africa. When I was backpacking around Ecuador on a shoe-string budget fifteen years ago, I had the good fortune to meet a network of U.S. Peace Corps volunteers who put me up and showed me around their projects. A few years later, I was able to repeat the experience with a more respectable budget that allowed me to actually rent a room from a group of Belgian development workers. It was pretty obvious both times that the major beneficiaries of […]

The difference between foreign policy and foreign affairs is thedifference between what you hope will happen and what actually does.Last week I’d been all set to flag the $25 billion energy deal Russia and China just signed that injects much-needed Chinese cash (in the form of loans) intoRussia’s energy sector while guaranteeing much-needed Russian oilsupplies for the Chinese economy. This week the two countries arefacing the kind of diplomatic incident that often has serious consequences forbilateral relations. In case you missed it, here’s the video of Russian naval vessels sinking the New Star, a Sierra Leone-flagged, Chinese-owned cargo ship (via […]

The question to ask with regards to the covert American “training” mission to the Pakistani military on the Aghan border is, Why leak it to the NY Times now? The answer plays a central, if so far unexamined, role in Gen. David Petraeus’ COIN doctrine: narrative. As the heat lowers — real or perceived — in Iraq, American troops aren’t the only thing being diverted to Afghanistan. Outside of a rearguard action planning Iraqi withdrawal routes, the D.C. policy-making brain trust is migrating to the Afghanistan problem as well. The consensus is that the problem in Afghanistan is Pakistan, and […]

I’d actually had this one scheduled for next week, because I wanted to hit the globetrotting theme of Hillary Clinton’s first trip abroad as secretary of state. But then Barack Obama announced a troop increase in Afghanistan and, more importantly, Sam Roggeveen went and casually dropped that he’d interviewed Australia’s minister of the environment, Peter Garrett. Right. The rest, as they say, is history — or something that vaguely resembles it on a drastically reduced scale, anyway — and I had to go with this today. (You made me do this, Sam.) I wasn’t as big a Midnight Oil fan […]

InsideDefense.com reports that the U.S. military is nervous about Canada: Military officials believe Canadian immigration policies are creating a “favorable” environment for what the U.S. government deems to be potential terrorists seeking entry into the United States from the north, according to an internal briefing crafted by a U.S. Northern Command joint task force. Officials at the Joint Task Force-North believe a “large population” of so-called special-interest aliens, or SIAs, in Eastern Canada presents the “greatest potential for foreign terrorists’ access to the homeland,” according to a Jan. 15 briefing available on the organization’s Web site until recently.

This is a thought that I’m going to try to develop more over time. But this Ralph Peters takedown of the EU’s response to the financial crisis (via today’s WPR Media Roundup) is a good place to start. Over the past ten years, there have been twin trends towards integration, in some ways parallel but in many others overlapping: globalization and regional mulitlateral organizations. Both have created economic and political forces that transcend the traditional limits of state sovereignty. (See Samuel Makinda’s WPR feature article for a discussion of regional integration and state sovereignty.) As the global financial crisis has […]

I’ve always said that for all our focus on UFOs and high technology, when an extraterrestrial finally does make it to Earth, chances are it will be a non-intelligent, space-resistant insect. But if it turns out to be a mosquito, I’ll be seriously pissed.