Just a quick note to explain the light posting this week. I just got back from Prague, where I attended a “pre-London” conference on PRTs in Afghanistan organized by the Prague Security Studies Institute and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. It was a very informative few days, with the panel presenters and audience made up almost exclusively of ground-level actors working in Afghanistan. I’ll be writing it up for the WPR front page tomorrow, so I don’t want to go into too much detail. But I’ll just note two initial impressions. First, when we hear about the lack of “unity of [...]
Here are a few of this week’s highlights from WPR’s video section: – Minister Mizuho Fukushima, leader of Japan’s small Social Democratic Party, has rejected plansto build a new U.S. Marine base on the island of Okinawa. This video explains what ramifications this could have for Hatoyama’s coalition government. – Youth in Southern Sudan are taking up arms to protect their villages from cross-border attacks. This video shows how the young soldiers are fighting the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army. – A New America Foundation conversation with author Steven Hill discusses how Europe’s innovation has led to a more supportive, ecologically [...]
There’s been a lot of speculation about the mid- to long-term impact on U.S. foreign policy of the Haiti earthquake and America’s response to it. I was surprised to see how quickly the assumptions turned sour. Already last Friday, I participated in a France 24 program in which one analyst had already identified Haiti as a long-term — and major — problem for President Barack Obama, along the lines of waging the Afghanistan war and winding down the Iraq war. My sense is that this is a bit overblown. The unfolding operation in Haiti is a stability operation, not a [...]
