This epilogue to Scahill’s bestselling book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, is posted with the kind permission of its publisher, Nation Books. On January 21, 2013, Barack Obama was inaugurated for his second term as president of the United States. Just as he...
In a Boston Review article titled The Sound of Terror: Phenomenology of a Drone Strike, Nasser Hussain attempts to … provide a phenomenology of drone strikes, examining both how the world appears through the lens of a drone camera and the experience of the people on...
To one Nobel Peace Prize winner from one who isn’t: “Drones are fueling terrorism.” So spoke Malala Yousafzai to President Barack Obama. She’s the 16-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban for daring to urge the schooling of girls. She was...
Supporters of the impending U.S. strike on Syria claim that it is necessary to punish the Assad regime for using chemical weapons on its citizens and to prevent it from further employing them. The situation, says Washington, calls for “humanitarian intervention.” ...
The 12-year U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is slowly coming to a close, with most U.S. troops slated to leave the country by 2014. Since 2001, over 2,200 U.S. soldiers have been killed occupying the country, and nearly 18,000 have been wounded. By some estimates the...
Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars details the growing use of extrajudicial assassinations by the U.S. executive branch to strike at targets around the planet, without any declaration of war or meaningful congressional oversight. And it documents the human toll of such unchecked power by featuring some of the innocent victims of this global war.
Afghanistan, which manages to generate only about $2 billion per year of its own revenues and depends on international donors for the rest of its budget, suffers from a kind of resource curse. With plenty of cash and no accountability to citizens—as well as minimal oversight by donors—Afghan officials are free to rip off donor resources and ignore or extort their fellow citizens with relative impunity.
With the exception of the current U.S. commander in Afghanistan, virtually everyone has concluded that the war has been a disaster for all involved.
Dr. Barnett R. Rubin is Director of Studies and Senior Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation of New York University, where he directs the Afghanistan Regional program.
Faced with an impending withdrawal deadline and ineffectual Afghan security units, U.S. planners have pitched the Afghan Local Police (ALP) program as an affordable short-term fix to fill the country’s security vacuum. Yet despite some success in achieving security gains, ALP units have been accused of committing serious human rights abuses against local populations with apparent impunity.