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JERUSALEM — Last Friday, Sept. 11, Katyusha rockets fired from southern Lebanon landed near the town of Nahariya in northern Israel. Israel retaliated, firing shells into Lebanon and scrambling fighter jets. No one was hurt, but the incident highlighted just how easily and in how many ways fighting could restart across Israel’s dangerous northern border. The episode also brought to mind a mostly quiet rivalry that has lain dormant, but could stir without warning inside Lebanon: Hezbollah and al-Qaida despise one another, and in this part of the world, hatred usually leads to bloodshed. Israel declared that it held the […]

U.S. President Barack Obama announced a new phased, adaptive approach for missile defense in Europe, a revision of the Bush administration’s 2007 plan for missile defense. The administration says the new approach is based on an assessment of the Iranian missile threat, and a commitment to deploy technology that is “proven, cost-effective, and adaptable to an evolving security environment.”

The European Union’s 2007 Ascension Partnership with Turkey (.pdf) calls for Turkey to reform its laws to adapt them to the Law of the European Union. Among the required reforms is legislation to protect and expand the media’s freedom of expression, which has been stifled in Turkey by broad interpretations of the Penal Code — specifically a clause known as Article 301 — as well as simmering domestic tensions between secular Kemalist and Islamist groups. Freedom of the press in Turkey is protected under Article 26 of the Turkish constitution. In fact, censorship of the press was abandoned on July […]

In August, fighters from the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group rampaged through Ezo, a county of autonomous South Sudan that borders the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The rebels burned and looted homes, churches and health facilities, killed an undetermined number of civilians and kidnapped as many as 10 young girls, according to press reports. The LRA, which Washington has officially labeled a terrorist group, often forces children to become soldiers or sex slaves. The violence in Ezo displaced as many as 80,000 people, in a part of the world that’s already over-burdened by an estimated […]

There is an important element missing in the extensive coverage of Afghanistan: multilateral diplomacy. The Obama administration has been correct to emphasize the stakes for Pakistan in Afghanistan and, by extension, the seriousness with which the U.S. takes Pakistan’s stability. But it has begun to sound like Afghanistan has only one border, and only one important neighbor. So far, the administration and the media’s portrait has oversimplified the nature of the Taliban insurgency, defining it as essentially an extension of the fragility of the Pakistani state and political system. In truth, Pakistan is probably more stable than it looks, however […]

Eight years ago, a small number of U.S. personnel, working in tandem with local Afghan leaders, entered Afghanistan with a defined aim: to punish al-Qaida and overthrow the Taliban regime that harbored them. Over the past year, that mission has morphed into the much broader objective of rebuilding the Afghan state and protecting Afghan villages. Most recently, America’s top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, said a new strategy must be forged to “earn the support of the [Afghan] people . . . regardless of how many militants are killed or captured.” Such an undertaking, amounting to a large-scale social-engineering […]

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s latest visit to Moscow resulted in a package of arms and energy deals that highlight the mutually beneficial nature of the current Russian-Venezuelan relationship. Facing declining purchases from traditional arms clients, such as India and especially China, Russia has sought to compensate by expanding arms sales to new markets, including in Latin America. For the most part, however, Russian sellers have not been able to achieve major successes, despite Latin American countries doubling the volume of weapons they purchased between the periods of 1999-2003 and 2004-2008. Although the share of Russian arms exports going to Latin […]

The government of Iran struggled for decades to fit into the broader Middle East, and it has finally succeeded: It now sees its people principally as a source of instability rather than a source of legitimacy. Thirty years after the Revolution, the Iranian government has concluded that it is far better to anesthetize the population than mobilize it. It is a conclusion from which there is no turning back. The Middle East has no shortage of formerly youthful revolutionary regimes that have slunk into middle age. In decades past, coups in Egypt, Iraq and Libya all tossed out corrupt Western-oriented […]

In January 2009, retired Gen. Mauro Tello Quiñones took command of a police unit charged with combating drug-related violence in the popular Mexican tourist destination of Cancún. The assignment lasted just one week. In early February, Tello and two aides were kidnapped and killed. Before murdering Tello, the assailants broke his arms and legs and tortured him for hours. The incident provoked shock across Mexico, with the governor of Quintana Roo state calling it “truly horrible.” Even by the standards of the violent drug war that has consumed Mexico of late, this crime stood out for its brazenness and brutality. […]

While transnational illicit flows of people, goods and technology are not a new phenomenon, it has been widely recognized that the volume of these flows has increased dramatically in the globalizing era that has followed the end of the Cold War. This increase has largely been a result of the technical innovations associated with globalization, combined with the popularization of “free trade” ideals. Simply put, the sheer volume of international trade has meant that even states of the developed world increasingly cannot control their borders. What effect has this increase in illicit flows had on states and their power in […]

Elements of the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division are engaged in Afghanistan’s Wardak Province, southwest of Kabul. The division’s Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry, lost 8 killed and 25 wounded in just three months in mid-2009. Twenty-one-year-old Spc. Justin Pellerin, who was killed by a roadside bomb blast in Afghanistan Aug. 20, is one such casualty. In the days following his death, Pellerin’s friends remembered him, and mourned his loss. David Axe and Jason Reich report for World Politics Review.

During the last several weeks, Americans have found themselves back in the middle of a fierce debate over our continuing military effort in Afghanistan. What was Bush’s forgotten war had, until recently, seemed quite safely transformed in public opinion into Obama’s “war of necessity.” Now, because of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for significantly more troops, coming on the heels of his public declaration that the Taliban are essentially “winning,” the ruling Democrats have suddenly been thrust back into “quagmire” mode. Predictably, we are once again awash in feverish Boomer analogies to Vietnam, despite the pronounced absence in Afghanistan of any […]

Last week, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) issued a report calling for sweeping changes in the international financial and monetary order. Arguing for a reduced role for the dollar, the report advocated for a global reserve bank with the power to issue its own currency, to monitor its members’ national exchange rates, and to prop up or push down their currencies. In other words, UNCTAD is making the case for a global central bank. The U.N. is not alone in calling for such a move. Since the eruption of the global financial crisis last fall and […]

Amid devastated Somalia, a country mired for two decades in unforgiving conflict, Somaliland glows as an ember of hope. A moderate peace has held for 10 years in the autonomous region, reflecting a decade of efforts to expand governance, security and social institutions. Yet, despite it being a minor success in a sea of failure, regional and international organizations will not grant Somaliland status as an independent state, or give it a seat at the international roundtable. As another transitional government in Mogadishu fractures in the face of insurgent forces, and the international community scrambles to update policy positions, Somaliland […]

As adaptive and creative as the United States claims to be, one would think that, eight years after 9/11, the foreign policy establishment would have come up with a workable way to communicate its strategic message to the rest of the world. It hasn’t. Call it the $10 billion bungle, because that’s a reliable estimate of how much the U.S. has spent since 9/11 on the effort. Bringing the dilemma to the fore is a scathing indictment issued by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen in the latest issue of Joint Forces Quarterly. Mullen’s broadside goes […]

How young Somali immigrants searched for belonging, and found jihad. Second of a three-part series. (Part I )(Part III) When 26-year-old Shirwa Ahmed, a Somali-born immigrant living in Minnesota, blew himself up in Puntland, Somalia, on Oct. 29 last year, he became the very first American suicide bomber, and a harbinger of a looming crisis. Ahmed sneaked into Somalia in late 2007, followed by potentially scores of other young Minnesotan Somali-Americans. Since the first wave of “travelers,” as they are known, left America, Minnesota has become a quiet battleground. The miniature, homegrown war on terror has pitted government authorities and […]

Fariborz Ghadar of CSIS discusses whether tougher sanctions on Iran,including an embargo against the importation of gasoline, could beeffective.