Pakistan seems to be in a double bind: Resist the United States and NATO and open the door to seizure of its nuclear-weapons program — or cooperate and suffer the same results.
Waging war is more often a sign of weakness, not strength, on the part of our leaders.
Has the Obama administration stooped to tampering with threat levels as Bush & Co. did?
Drones may seem like an over-reaction to local threats, but defense contractors are convincing police forces that they need them.
In his classic novel Every Man Dies Alone, just published last year in English but written immediately after World War II, Hans Fallada gets it right the first time.
Much as the United States needs to withdraw from Afghanistan, it needs to keep in mind the effects that our military standdown would have on India.
Why is the U.S. launching an offensive in Kandahar just as the process of bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table is gaining momentum?
Afghanistan is a crossroads of civilizations and an almost bewilderingly complicated place.
Over the past few centuries, however, it has more often than not been treated as a pawn in the “great game”. The country has also developed a reputation as the “graveyard of empires”, not least because outsiders’ forces have never succeeded in pacifying the place. Internal stability, such as it has ever existed, has been predicated typically upon de-centralized, and frequently shifting political arrangements between a weak centre and roiling periphery.
Yes, it would be funny if it weren’t so grim. After all, when it comes to squandering money and resources in strange and distant places (or even here at home), you can count on the practitioners of American-style war to be wildly over the top.
There are other reasons besides the bad example we set why states we occupy fail to jump through the U.S. democracy hoop.