WPR Blog Archive

Jeff McCausland, senior fellow at the Carnegie Council, wears many hats. As a retired Army colonel who’s on a first name basis with Gen. David Petraeus and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, he has an acutely military perspective on the war in Afghanistan. As an analyst, professor, and former dean of academics of the U.S. Army War College, he also sees the conflict through an academic lens. When McCausland spoke to a small group at the council’s headquarters in New York yesterday, he combined these two perspectives and outlined the unique challenges of this particular war. To surge or not to surge? […]

Great stuff, as usual, from Yigal Schleifer, on the ways in Turkey’s foreign policy ambitions are driving Ankara to resolve formerly taboo issues. For Turkey, the lingering standoffs with Armenia, the Kurds (both domestically and in Iraq), and in Cyprus significantly diminish Ankara’s credibility on a number of fronts: as an EU aspirant, as a regional power able to mediate crises, and as a regional authority (in political terms). The key here is the “soft power” deficit incurred when a country is perceived as talking the talk, but not walking the walk. Of course, in Turkey’s numerous neighborhoods (the Middle […]

James Joyner suggests the end is nigh for the Obama honeymoon in Europe, and that Europeans might soon be thinking back with nostalgia on the good ole days of Dubya. While I largely agree with the former argument, and foresaw some bumps on the road even before President Barack Obama took office, there are a few nuances I’d make in his characterization of the latter. Specifically, if George W. Bush learned to listen to Europe, and in particular NATO, it was largely after he’d been chastened by the failure of the Iraq war and the 2006 mid-term elections. Up until […]

The Mexican city of Puebla has joined the women-only taxi revolution in a bid to protect women from harassment. The move comes over the objections of women’s rights advocates, who charge the measure fails to address underlying problems plaguing women in Mexican society. A new fleet of 35 bright-pink taxis driven by women have hit the streets, serving only female clientele. Each car comes equipped with a tracking device and an alarm, as well as mirrors in the back to allow women to fix their makeup. Most Puebla women have responded positively to the new service, but doubts remain among […]

We still don’t know the substance of Iran’s response to the proposal for multilateral enrichment cooperation on its experimental reactor. But this, from the NY Times, jumped out at me: . . . Some of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s conservative rivals have alreadycriticized the plan as a risky concession to the West, and on Thursday,the opposition leader Mir-Hussein Moussavi joined them, suggesting thatany response to the plan would have negative consequences for Iran. “Ifthey are put in place, all the efforts of thousands of scientists willgo to the wind,” Mr. Moussavi said of the proposed plan’s conditions,according to opposition Web sites. “If […]

If you haven’t yet read Nicolas Nagle’s WPR Briefing on the EU president sweepstakes, it’s a good jumping-off point for understanding the debate currently taking place here in Europe in the runup to the Treaty of Lisbon taking effect. Up til now, the leading candidate, Tony Blair, had kept his interest in the job discreetly implied, even if it was universally understood. But now it looks as if Jean-Claude Juncker’s official declaration of interest as well as some recent pointed personal attacks have smoked Blair out, or at least enough to mobilize his proxies to ratchet up the whisper campaign. […]

On a number of occasions recently, I’ve found myself wondering why Latin America doesn’t figure more prominently in not only discussions of institution-building and democracy promotion, but in some of those missions currently in progress. This NYT story about Chilean President Michelle Bachelet — who is leaving office with 70 percent approval ratings due to a single-term limit — offers a good opportunity to articulate that thought. Bachelet’s success combines equal parts skillful management and political courage. And in the broader global discussion regarding the future of progressive-left parties (failing dismally in Europe these days), her combination of fiscal responsibility […]

Jean-Dominique Merchet notes the latest example of civil law’s intrusion into warfare: The families of two of the French soldiers killed in an August 2008 ambush in Afghanistan are pursuing a civil lawsuit against the operation’s commanders for “deliberately endangering the life of another.” Now, two things worth noting here. The first is that the families are reacting in large part to the lack of any formal sanction of the unit’s officers, who even the army concedes committed “errors of evaluation” in the operation in question. The families also expressed dissatisfaction with the army’s account of the events that led […]

Dare I say it? A few shards of optimism coming out of Iran and Afghanistan? Yes, according to two videos we posted in our video section today. The first video, from Al-Jazeera, looks at a new Persian film, “No One Knows About Persian Cats,” which tells the tale of a young man and woman who try to form a band after being released from prison. Their efforts take us through the underground rock scene of Tehran where the city’s youth fight for their jams. Though the story is fictional, actors from the film (now in exile in the U.K, after […]

A few weeks back, I considered running an experiment here on the blog, where for a certain period of time, I would actually defend positions that were the opposite of my own. The idea was to challenge my own assumptions by adopting the point of view of haduJ — the anti-Judah that exists in some alternate reversed-pole universe. I increasingly wish I could say that my endorsement of an Afghanistan troop surge, even with all the caveats I put on the idea, is part of that experiment. But I wouldn’t do that sort of thing without announcing it first, and […]

As I mentioned to Hampton, only half-jokingly, it looks like I picked a bad week to come out in favor of an Afghanistan surge. Make that a really bad week. Seriously, I’m very conflicted about the way forward, and I think that comes through pretty clearly in this Bloggingheads segment I did with Michael Cohen. (The entire episode can be seen here.) We taped this early last week, before I’d read Tony Corn’s Small Wars Journal article (.pdf) that nudged my thinking past the tipping point. It’s easy to reduce my argument regarding the importance of political signaling to being […]

As they have in previous years, European countries continue to dominate the Top 20 in the Reporters Without Borders 2009 Press Freedom Index, despite poor showings from countries like France, Italy, Romania and Slovakia. Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Norway and Sweden all received top marks in the report, which tracks media freedom around the world. Yet despite Northern Europe’s steadfast protection of freedom of speech and expression, protections in other European countries showed further declines from last year. France and Italy dropped down the list by 8 and 5 slots respectively, drawing fire for authorities’ meddling in the press and physical […]

I was going to write this post this morning, but decided to hold off until Iran responded to the IAEA draft agreement on outsourcing the uranium enrichment for its experimental reactor. Good thing I did, because it’s actually an easier argument to defend now that Iran has initially declined to accept the deal. (For Iran, that’s not the same thing as rejecting it. But the argument stands nonetheless.) My original thought was to how it was that my pessimism before the first Geneva meeting earlier this month had been so off the mark. At the time, the revelation of the […]

Just to follow up on what I wrote yesterday, I realize that endorsing a time-bounded but significant troop increase represents something of a reversal, in that I’ve argued consistently for drawing down the U.S military footprint in Afghanistan. So I feel like I owe an explanation, even if some of my ambivalence has come through in my previous posts. Part of the reason for the shift is because, while I’m still very skeptical that we’ll be able to achieve even our minimal objectives in Afghanistan, I’m no longer convinced that they’re impossible. That comes from reading the arguments of a […]

The European Parliament has awarded the annual Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to the Russian human rights group, Memorial. The group, which lost one of its activists in an abduction-murder earlier this year, was awarded the prize in the name of all Russian rights defenders. Russia has seen a wave of kidnap-murders of prominent journalists, activists and lawyers over the last decade. Despite fierce criticism from human rights activists and Western politicians, as well as pressure on Russian authorities to do more to identify and prosecute the crimes, perpetrators continue to act with near impunity. In awarding this year’s […]

If you’re having trouble keeping the Afghanistan war debate straight, I can’t recommend highly enough Tony Corn’s article in Small Wars Journal (.pdf), titled, “Toward a Kilcullen-Biden Plan? Bounding Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.” Corn essentially argues that the problem with Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s strategic review is that it pays lip service to the importance of the political dimension of counterinsurgency without truly following it through to its logical conclusions, and that the troop increase he requested is presented as an open-ended commitment. Instead, according to Corn, the troop increase should be bounded in time, put in the context of Vice President […]

Looks like I’m not the only one that was puzzled by the plannedcancellation of the C-17 transport plane. Unlike other high-ticket aircraft programs,like the F-22, the C-17 is a plane that is currently in highoperational demand. And with the global shortage of strategic airlift,it’s one that is a very attractive export — even to countries likeFrance, which has traditionally avoided outsourcing its aircraftprocurement, but now finds itself in a pinch given the delays and costoverruns in the A400M program. Evenin the context of the COIN vs. conventional debate, the C-17 seems topass the test, since it fills a role in […]