Too bad that the Torkham border was re-opened: the United States could have used an indefinite halt to the convoys as a pretext to leave Afghanistan.
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.
With little notice from most press outlets, NATO recently developed contingency plans to defend its Central and Eastern European member states against potential Russian aggression. This move follows the disclosure in January that the alliance would create such plans for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. But in late July, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said, “We have all necessary plans in place to defend and protect all allies. I think the Russians would be surprised if we didn’t. That’s the core purpose of the alliance.” This statement indicates that — in addition to developing plans for the Baltic region — NATO’s military wing has also produced strategies to protect states like the Czech Republic and Turkey, which previously lacked alliance defense planning.
This summer marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, where 8,000 Muslims, mostly men and boys, lost their lives in the single worst act of genocide in Europe since the 1940s. For many, the key lesson of Srebrenica is that the United States should have used military force against the Serbs sooner than they did. For others, Srebrenica is a painful reminder of the overstated value of military intervention as a solution to a humanitarian crisis which in reality, could have been avoided through diplomatic means.
Wars are rarely lost in a single encounter; Defeat is almost always more complex than that. The United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies have lost the war in Afghanistan, but not just because they failed in the battle for Marjah or decided that discretion was the better part of valor in Kandahar. They lost the war because they should never have invaded in the first place; because they never had a goal that was achievable; because their blood and capital are finite.
The massacre of 8,000 Muslims in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, in July 1995, is now being remembered worldwide, as this grim event reaches its fifteenth anniversary. This was the largest single mass killing of the entire Bosnian war, and indeed, it was the worst massacre that Europe has seen since the 1940s.
Will confining NATO to its own backyard and scaling back its mission could spell the beginning of its end?
President Obama’s call for a nuclear-weapons-free world in Prague last April unleashed a great outpouring of support from international allies and grassroots activists demanding a process to actually eliminate nuclear weapons. One recent and unexpected initiative has come from America’s NATO allies. Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Norway have called on NATO to review its nuclear policy and remove all U.S. nuclear weapons currently on European soil under NATO’s “nuclear sharing” policy. Despite U.S. insistence on strict adherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which prohibits the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear weapons states, several hundred U.S. nuclear bombs are housed in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Turkey.
As President Obama and his advisors debate future troop levels for Afghanistan, a new report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) muddies the water on one of the most important issues in the debate — the effects of Afghanistan’s drug production.
There are currently more than 100,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, about 65,000 of which are American. U.S. General Stanley McChrystal is asking for more, perhaps as many as 45,000 soldiers. However, there is rising opposition to the war in the United States and several NATO countries. The Taliban now have a permanent presence in 80% of Afghanistan, up from 72% in November 2008, and are spreading their influence to the north. The recent elections have been marred by fraud, and it is still unclear how and when the problems will be resolved. Obama has a lot on his plate and hears many conflicting voices on what should be done. But what do Afghans actually think?