If Afghanistan is, in fact, a COIN engagement then the Obama administration should be using the best available COIN guidelines to assess it. Towards that end, the author has taken the liberty of extracting key points from Gen. Petraeus’s seminal work on the subject, Field Manual 3-24, to use as metrics.
Not only does India refuse to sign disarmament treaties such as the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, it’s also developing anti-satellite systems.
It’s notoriously difficult to defeat realists in a debate about disarmament. But two Stimson Center researchers finally provide disarmament advocates with some powerful tools.
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa was in India earlier this month making promises to resettle the war-displaced Sri Lankan Tamil minority one year after his government’s forces won a crippling victory over the Tamil Tiger insurgency. But can he deliver on his pledge and begin the healing of Sri Lanka’s deep ethinc wounds?
The McChrystal debacle dramatizes how military thinking dominates U.S. policy — look at how much of the budget the Pentagon commands — as well as the utter hopelessness of achieving anything but draining defeat from the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan. This lesson should have been learned after Vietnam. As Yogi Berra said, it’s “déjà vu all over again.”
Things are heating up for Iran. The international community, responding to doubts over the intentions of the Iranian nuclear program, has passed three sanctions packages over the past three weeks.
A Japanese cult leader took out a Washington Post ad in which false claims were made about leftists seeking to expel the U.S. military from Japan. In truth, protesters are focused on halting the building of a new U.S. base in Okinawa.
In recent years, there has been a growing tendency for think tanks and military brass to jointly pursue policy objectives, some of which are opposed by the public or the White House—take, for example, the campaigns to build support for the troop “surges” in both Iraq and Afghanistan. This trend, say critics, raises important questions about the appropriate role of the military in promoting particular policies and whether there is enough transparency and accountability in the work of policy groups. And, just as importantly, will there be a new joint campaign aimed at pressuring the Obama administration to delay troop withdrawal from Afghanistan?
Surely, generals play an important role in winning and losing wars. But it is misleading to imagine that they determine the outcome of a conflict whose causes stem from the underlying political and social system.
Obama has stated that, despite firing Gen. McChrystal, our Afghanistan strategy will remain the same. The appointment of Gen. Petraeus to succeed him suggest otherwise — for better or worse.