WPR Blog Archive

While it doesn’t quite live up to State of California v. O.J. Simpson, Kenya has just witnessed a remarkable bit of judicial theatre with the conviction and sentencing of a scion of one of the country’s most controversial white families. Thomas Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley) has just been given an eight-month sentence, on top of three years already served, for the killing of a poacher on his family’s estate in the Rift Valley. The 12,000 square miles of the Rift Valley highlands were systematically appropriated by a group of white farmers in the post-WWII era, and have remained to some extent […]

Richard Haass on his policy differences within the Bush administration: I argued for a new Iran policy and lost. I argued for a diplomaticapproach to North Korea and lost. I argued for a serious approach tothe Palestinian issue and lost. I wanted to deal with Syria, and I loston that. I also didn’t understand the allergy to internationalinstitutions. At some point, you run out of fingers to add up yourdisagreements. From an interview on wars of necessity vs. wars of choice over at Real Clear World. Interestingly, Haass obliquely underlines the disconnect between strategic objectives and resources that has plagued […]

There are a few items to flag on restrictions to immigration and internal movement in Europe, something I’ve been keeping a pretty close eye on: – Soeren Kern’s WPR Briefing from yesterday on how Spain’s problems with unemployment have led to a rethink of its immigration policy. – Risto Karajkov’s WPR Briefing on EU enlargement and the Balkans also includes mention of the EU’s eagerly anticipated visa-waiver program for the region, which might be another casualty of the financial crisis. – This EU Observer item describes how Switzerland is considering invoking an emergency clause in its bilateral immigration accords with […]

The speculation I’ve seen to date on the Obama administration’s approach to Iran’s nuclear program suggested that it was phasing out the demand for a freeze on uranium enrichment as a precondition for talks, instead making more intrusive IAEA inspections to protect against weaponization — the so-called Additional Protocols — the focus of any ultimate deal. Not so, according to this WSJ piece (via Friday Lunch Club). Instead, the Obama administration is likely to insist on the Additional Protocols as part of a substantial deal in addition to a “freeze for freeze” as a precondition for talks. The WSJ article […]

Matt Stone takes a Stephen Walt idea and runs with it, coming up with what he calls “strategic sufficiency”: [O]nce we agree on an operationalprinciple or principles . . . wemust do exactly the minimum necessary to achieve a strategicallysufficient outcome; any outlay beyond the minimum necessary will onlyrob resources from other theaters where those resources could beemployed with a better marginal return on investment. This is an economist’s way of thinking about foreign policy: resourcesare scarce; therefore maximize the return on any resources we employ.”Resources” can be thought of as troops on the ground, brains in theWhite House, the […]

In his WPR opinion briefing yesterday, Michael Wahid Hanna pointed out how the refusal by Sunni Arab states — and in particular Saudi Arabia — to get off the sidelines in Iraq is compromising U.S. efforts to create a diplomatic framework to stabilize the country and balance Iranian influence in anticipation of troop drawdowns. Interestingly enough, Turkey seems to have checked in at the scorer’s table and is getting ready to get in the game. And its objectives in Iraq — i.e., a non-federal state with a strong central government to prevent an independent Kurdistan, and plenty of economic development […]

The Indian government released a disturbing report this week on the extent to which child prostitution and trafficking for sexual purposes has become a major issue for Indian law enforcement. According to Indian Home Secretary Madhukar Gupta, there are an astounding 100 million people involved in these practices in one way or another. Of the more than 3 million sex workers in India, it is estimated that 40 percent of them are children. To illustrate the extent of the problems faced by millions of Indian children, the father of one of the stars of the recent hit-movie Slumdog Millionaire recently […]

By all accounts, the Obama administration’s new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy, and the troop increase to implement it, is a counterinsurgency approach to counterterrorism. In other words, the primary objective is no longer to build a stable Afghan state, and the primary enemy is no longer the Taliban per se. Instead, the tactics of population-centered warfare learned in Iraq will be applied to Afghanistan and the Taliban insurgency, but only in order to target al-Qaida more effectively. The appointment of Gen. Stanley McChrystal — a dyed-in-the-wool COIN man — as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan is seen as cementing this approach […]

It’s long been clear that Iraq is much more than a military problem. But with the progress on the political and security fronts of the past year or so, the biggest remaining obstacle to achieving lasting peace and stability in Iraq may now be economic. Listening to a presentation by Gen. Ray Odierno this afternoon at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, I was struck by how many of Iraq’s problems have an economic dimension. For example, Odierno repeatedly stressed the need for regional engagement. As Michael Wahid Hanna points out in his WPR briefing published today, this idea has been […]

There was a sense of “here we go again” last week, when the government of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili claimed to have suppressed an army mutiny fomented by Moscow, even as some 600 troops from several nations including the United States arrived in Tblisi for the start of a NATO-led exercise. Last August, the Georgian army began its ill-fated attack on the separatist region of South Ossetia a week after the end of a combined U.S.-Georgian exercise. Over 100 American military personnel were still in Georgia when the Russians counterattacked and swept across Georgia like a knife through butter. The […]

One of the great things about a blog is that you actually have a record of all the wild predictions you make that end up coming true. (The downside is that all the ones where you were dead wrong are there, too, but the less said about that the better.) Not only that, though, the act of writing them down helps you to actually remember them. An old friend of mine visiting Paris a month back reminded me how, fifteen years ago, I’d predicted that eventually, survival in modern society would depend on access to one corporation — the phone […]

This is a great rundown by Marc Lynch of a New America Foundation panel discussion yesterday on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lynch frames it as the context by which the Obama administration can use the next few weeks of high-profile visits, press conferences and speeches to set the table for a results-based regional policy. Lynch’s summary suggests that, similarly to the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategic rethink, a good deal of the work President Barack Obama has cut out for him is convincing the actors involved not just to do things that are painful or politically costly, but to redraw their strategic maps of […]

Last week, in his regular WPR column, David Axe drew the distinction between the often-incompetent foot soldiers conducting pirate hijackings off the Somalian coast, and the more sophisticated criminal networks that finance and direct them. Today, Nicolas Gros-Verheyde flags an article in the Spanish press. The article cites an EU NAVFOR military report to the effect that the Somalian pirates are being fed precise data on commercial shipping in the region by “well-placed persons” in London, and that the pirates avoid certain (read: British) vessels. Gros-Verheyde adds the caveat that the document just happened to make its way into the […]

A few thoughts on the announcement that Gen. Stanley McChrystal will replace Gen. David McKiernan as commander of American forces in Afghanistan. First, most of the news reports and blog commentary I’ve read so far trace the decision directly back to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, with some noting the role played by Joint Chiefs head Adm. Michael Mullen. Indeed, a few of the ledes I’ve seen have formulated it as Gates, or alternatively “the Pentagon,” calling for McKiernan’s resignation. That stands in stark contrast to the last two headline-making cases of a commander relieved […]

I’d like to flag this testimony by Daniel Hamilton (.pdf) to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on NATO’s strategic vision moving forward. It’s a nicely nuanced take on what is often portrayed — and here I include myself among the guilty — as an either/or affair. The strength of Hamilton’s approach is to distinguish between NATO’s “home” and “away” roles, then further distinguish between where it should lead, where it should support, and where it should selectively do one or the other on all of the core missions on both sides of the ledger (p. 3). That’s followed by […]

For anyone who enters the site through the blog, I highly recommend this WPR opinion Briefing by John Kilcullen, who argues that the time has come for unilateral U.S. recognition of the Palestinian state. It’s a provocative and thought-provoking piece, and an argument that’s impossible to dismiss out of hand. Kilcullen highlights how the peace process as currently configured conceives of statehood as a “holy grail” that must be earned, rather than as a fundamental means of achieving all the behavior expected of the Palestinians in order to “win” statehood. Perhaps most importantly, he points out that even should the […]

What many suspected has just been confirmed by a new report, African Economic Outlook 2008/2009, issued by the African Development Bank, the OECD Development Center and the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa. According to the report, the continent will be “gravely” affected by the global economic downturn: Following half a decade of above 5 percent economic growth, the continent can expect only 2.8 percent in 2009, less than half of the 5.7 per cent expected before the crisis. The authors anticipate growth rebounding to 4.5 per cent in 2010. Growth in oil-exporting countries is expected to fall to 2.4 per […]