In recent memory, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan have received the lion’s share of the attention of U.S. policy in Central Asia. This is not surprising. It would be hard to ignore two wars and the issue of preventing nuclear proliferation either by Iran or from an unstable Pakistan. Yet, U.S. foreign policy has omitted a region that has sparked conflict between two nuclear armed states as recently as 1999. That region is Kashmir.
The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded that the Indian government condoned torture to gain control of Kashmir.
Even in the best of times, corporate fraud, Nazi connections, hate groups and Eastern European drug rings were lurking beneath Sweden’s surface.
If nothing else, Holbrooke’s career illustrates the continuity of American foreign policy over every administration for which he worked.
Remember as the invasion of Iraq was about to begin, when the Bush administration decided to seriously enforce a Pentagon ban, in existence since the first Gulf War, on media coverage and images of the American dead arriving home at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware? In fact, the Bush-era ban did more than that. As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote then, it “ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers’ homecomings on all military bases.”
This past summer, WikiLeaks, an on-line source of anonymous whistle-blower revelations, unveiled damning information about the war in Afghanistan and its “official portrayal.” Sidebar revelations also cast doubt on Pakistan’s alliance with the United States, charging Pakistani intelligence agencies with “aiding insurgents.” Pakistan and the United States forcefully denied any chink in their “strategic partnership.”
The financial collapse of Ireland, coming as the latest in a string of disasters, hardly shocks global public opinion. For people engaged in the development debate, however, it is resonant with meaning.
The reactions of British youth to university fee increases can serve, to a certain extent, as a lesson to American youth.
Albania’s communist regime was orthodox and extreme. When other East European countries liberalized slightly after Stalin’s death in 1953, the Albanian ruler Enver Hoxha held firm, calling the Soviet Union “revisionist.”
Lowering the benchmark for COIN success.