Particularly over the last eight years, the United States was one big mouth. We lectured the world. We berated the world. We threatened and wheedled and roared. From the world’s perspective, however, the United States was like the teacher in the Peanuts comic strip: an incomprehensible wah-wah sound in the background. You generally ignored this voice of authority — so predictable, so monotonous, so deafening — unless it happened to pick on you.
In 1995, Sakena Yacoobi cofounded the Afghan Institute for Learning (AIL) — today one of the largest nonprofit organizations in Afghanistan — and is now its president and executive director. AIL provides education and health services to over 350,000 women and children annually in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with offices in the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Sakena has received numerous prestigious awards for peace-building, including the Peacemakers in Action Award from the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, the Gruber Prize, the Bill Graham Award from the Rex Foundation, and most recently, the Kravis Prize for Leadership.
One of the first difficult foreign policy decisions of the Obama administration will be what the United States should do about Afghanistan. Escalating the war, as National Security Advisor Jim Jones has been encouraging, will likely make matters worse. At the same time, simply abandoning the country — as the United States did after the overthrow of Afghanistan’s Communist government soon after the Soviet withdrawal 20 years ago — would lead to another set of serious problems.
I wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was in sixth grade. Fresh off my first viewing of Top Gun, I decided to serve my country by learning to fly an F-14. Fifteen years later, I’m a civilian with no flight experience whatsoever. This is hardly surprising. Childhood dreams don’t always become adulthood realities. What’s truly astonishing is that even if I had joined the military, and even if I were an accomplished pilot today, I might still lack any meaningful flight experience.
Last week Secretary of Defense Robert Gates briefed President Barack Obama on Afghanistan and the Pentagon’s proposal to send 15,000 more troops there by late spring. Obama is expected to accept the plan as a "down payment" on his pledge during the campaign to put more troops into the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban insurgents. These troops are only about half the number requested by the field commanders, and Gates will return with a new request soon.
Team Obama’s debut on the world stage at last weekend’s security conference in Munich was highly anticipated. With his pledge for a "new era of cooperation," Vice President Joe Biden struck the right note for a European audience still haunted by the Bush administration’s "with us or against us" approach. But once the memory of Bush fades, Europeans will realize the price of Barack Obama’s multilateralism. Like the U.S. president, they’ll be forced to define what kind of multilateralism they want and what they’re willing to sacrifice for it. More than any other issue, Afghanistan will produce this moment of truth sooner than might be expected, while determining NATO’s relations with Iran to a greater extent than expected.
As goods pile up in wharves from Bangkok to Shanghai, and workers are laid off in record numbers, people in East Asia are beginning to realize they aren’t only experiencing an economic downturn but living through the end of an era.
With multiple crises affecting our world – global economy, climate change, resource depletion – we must urgently redirect the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on preparing for war. The United States, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, and North Korea spent about $970 billion in 2008 on the military. That figure, alarmingly, is on the rise. For about one-tenth of this near-trillion dollar amount – about $90 billion a year – we can achieve more genuine security by eliminating global starvation and malnutrition, educating every child on earth, making clean water and sanitation accessible for all, and reversing the global spread of AIDS and malaria.
On the same day as President Barack Obama’s inauguration, China issued a white paper outlining its national defense strategy on Tuesday. In that paper, China pointed to a security situation that was "improving steadily" overall. At the same time, the paper explicitly referred to the growing threat from increased U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. Over Beijing’s protest, the Pentagon announced last October a deal for the sale of $6.5 billion in arms to Taiwan, including 30 Apache attack helicopters, 330 Patriot missiles, and 32 Harpoon missiles. Beijing referred to the deal as a "violation" of established principles that would cause "serious harm to the China-U.S. relations as well as to peace and stability across the Taiwan Straits."
The recent spike in pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia has generated a great deal of international media attention, including news reports sprinkled with ubiquitous references to Long John Silver, Jack Sparrow, and Captain Hook.