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The armored truck came apart in a puff of smoke and debris. It was Aug. 20, election day in Wardak province, Afghanistan, southwest of Kabul. U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan had braced for increased levels of violence on this day. But the massive bomb — constructed of a plastic barrel with a nitrate fertilizer filler — that struck the American truck was more than anyone expected. Of the two U.S. Army soldiers riding in the front of the vehicle when the bomb struck, one was seriously injured. Specialist Justin Pellerin, 21, the driver, died instantly. Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are taking […]

The Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran says Obama is considering a”pretty significant shift in policy” on Afghanistan, from acomprehensive counterinsurgency and nation-buiilding campaign to a muchmore narrowed mission focused on counterterrorism. The fraudulentAfghanistan elections are at least one major factor in precipitatingthis change from March, when the White House promulgated a much moreexpansive Afghanistan strategy.

In southern Thailand, Muslim insurgents are targetinggovernment-run schools. For the insurgents, the schools symbolize theThai Buddhist state, and a threat to their Muslim Malay culture. Voiceof America’s Daniel Schearf reports from Thailand’s PattaniProvince.

Uri Dadush of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace provides apreview of the G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh this week. Dadush says worldleaders musttread carefully as they plan for the withdrawal of government support,insist onreforms needed to prevent a future crisis, and remove the uncertaintysurrounding the role of the G-20 as a forum for global economicgovernance

President Barack Obama’s rollback of the European-based ballistic missile defense system is a strategic blunder that will incentivize Russian intransigence at the negotiating table, erode relations with loyal U.S. allies in Central and Eastern Europe, and ultimately place the American homeland at greater risk. The about-face stands in a long line of similar American miscalculations on Russia and its leaders. Famously misreading his Soviet counterpart, Joseph Stalin, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once mused, “If I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, [he] won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for […]

In an interview with Margaret Warner of PBS’ Newshour, U.S. Secretaryof State Hillary Clinton says the Afghanistan strategy will beconstantly reassessed, and that troop levels are merely one decision that must be made as part of a larger policy process. Full transcript.

The Russian-state-sponsored television channel Russia Today quotes thechief of the Russian armed forces general staff as saying Russia wouldview any U.S. missile defense system negatively unless it were jointlydeveloped with Russia. It remains to be seen whether Russia will dropits plans to deploy missiles to its westernmost Kaliningrad region, thechannel reports. Related from WPR: Global Insights: Tough Road for NATO-Russian BMD Cooperation

In his first major speech as the alliance’s new civilian head, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told an audience in Brussels that the time had come to revitalize security ties between Moscow and the Western alliance. Reflecting the speech’s hopeful title, “NATO and Russia: A New Beginning,” Rasmussen identified several possible areas for deeper collaboration. But the most newsworthy focus of his presentation was on ballistic missile defense (BMD). Rasmussen’s remarks came on the heels of U.S. President Barack Obama’s announcement the previous day that his administration would suspend the U.S. missile defense systems planned for Poland and the […]

The decision by the Obama administration to drop the missile defense plan in Eastern Europe was based on a revised perception of Iran’s long-range missile threat. The move is bound to have multiple and contradictory effects on the thorny issue of Iran’s nuclear program, which is slated to be a central subject of multilateral discussions at the opening of the U.N.’s General Assembly this week, as well as at the G-20 gathering in Pittsburgh days later. Diminishing the threat perception of Iran’s missile program from previous assessments under the Bush administration is certainly conducive to the IAEA — that is, […]

As somebody who spends his workdays evaluating investment opportunities in emerging/frontier economies, I receive a lot of business pitches involving new technologies. The time I spend listening to these accounts of how things can ultimately work out for the better balances my work in the national security realm contemplating how everything must “inevitably” collapse into conflict. I find the perspective it offers invaluable, because it reveals how often what we call “realism” tends to be hopelessly trapped in centuries past. Right now the bulk of the pitches I receive focus on alternative energy. No surprise there, but not for the […]

Indian Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram’s four-day visit to the United States earlier this month helped take India-U.S. ties to a higher level in the vital areas of counterterrorism and intelligence-sharing. But it also spotlighted a few related security issues that have been left unaddressed. Cooperation between India and the U.S. in the fields of defense and security is one of the key pillars of bilateral ties identified by the Obama administration and reinforced during U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s India visit in July. Chidambaram’s visit, too, was a continuation of the same dialogue, focusing on an assessment of South […]

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the decision to abandon the Bushadministration’s plans for a land-based missile defense system inEastern Europe came about because of a change in the U.S. perception ofthe threat posed by Iran. The Associated Press reports.

When I was in Ecuador two years ago, a businessman named Ivan excoriated me about the limits Washington placed on business that local fishing firms could do with the U.S. The conversation went on for a while, but when it ended, he promptly introduced me to his teenage daughter and pleaded with me to speak to her so that she could practice her English. In fact, she spoke eloquently and fluently, but the irony was no less striking: The gringos to the north offered little opportunity to Latin America, but the best chance for Ivan’s daughter to succeed — leaving […]

How young Somali immigrants searched for belonging, and found jihad. Last of a three-part series. (Part I) (Part II) Somali-American terror recruits have common roots in an impoverished, neglected and sometime oppressed immigrant community. Their feelings of impotence and isolation — and their desperate searches for structure — are not new. But for the most part, any violent impulses simmered under the surface until late 2006, when the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia gave American Somalis — and their kinsmen all over the world — a cause on which to hang their dissatisfaction. In December of that year, thousands of Ethiopian […]

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez is leading a new diplomatic effort to strengthen ties with a set of distant partners. He signed a new billion-dollar arms deal with Russia, and has promised to ship gasoline to Iran to circumvent possible international sanctions. VOA’s Brian Wagner reports these moves have raised eyebrows in the Western Hemisphere, and especially in Washington.

Fourteen years after the massacre of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica in Bosnia, the perpetrator of the largest atrocity in Europe since World War II, indicted war criminal Gen. Ratko Mladic, still roams free. Worse still, if the recent anniversary of the massacre — which garnered little notice in European countries and the United States — as well as recent diplomatic signals are any indication, Europe and the U.S. seem ready to effectively turn the page on his arrest. This is surprising, because while the instruments of international accountability are slow and cumbersome, they are beginning to demonstrate the capacity to […]

When 200 tax inspectors made a surprise visit last week to the editorial offices of Clarin, one of Latin America’s largest newspaper and cable TV companies, it was clear that the simmering tensions between the media giant and Argentine President Cristina Fernandez had reached new heights. The day after the raid, the Clarin newspaper ran with the headline: “Official operation of intimidation against Clarin.” Regional press watchdogs and government critics were also quick to condemn the incident as an attack on press freedom in Argentina, part of what they claim is a wider campaign by the presidency to discredit and […]