For the past few months it seems that New Delhi has been shrouded in a thick, meandering fog. For the auto rickshaw drivers and fruit vendors, the intelligentsia and the elite who occupy the steamy Gangetic Plains, the fog has become, as all things in India must, symbolic of an uncertain future. A Pakistan on the verge of doom? An Olympic China who this summer will put India in the shadows? An increasingly bellicose Russia? Wrong on all counts.
On the first day, Colombian military and police forces launched an attack on an encampment of the Colombian guerrilla group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) in Ecuadorian territory, killing over 20 people.
The U.S. base at Guantanamo has been called many things. The “gulag of our time” (Amnesty International General Secretary Irene Khan, May 2005). “The key strategic intelligence platform in the war on terror” (Charles Stimson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, January 2007). The “legal equivalent of outer space” (unnamed Administration official). The right place for “the worst of a very bad lot” (Vice President Dick Cheney, January 2002) and for the “most dangerous, best trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth” (former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, January 2002).
The seas both divide and unite Japan and the United States. Caught between countering threat and promoting maritime cooperation, the two countries have worked together to build regional approaches to terrorism and piracy.
On February 4, President Bush announced a baseline military budget of $515.4 billion for the next fiscal year, not including funds for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the largest one-year Pentagon request in real, uninflated dollars since World War II. This Fiscal Year (FY) 2009 figure represents a 7.5% increase over the 2008 appropriation of $479.5 billion and is expected to be the first of many rising requests supposedly needed to replace equipment lost and damaged in Iraq and to gear up for the security threats to come. As Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen explained last October, “we’re just going to have to devote more resources to national security in the world we’re living in right now.”
Against the backdrop of fear and horror spread by suicide bombers, a groundswell of hope has emerged in Pakistan after a decisively anti-Musharraf election result. Even as secular opposition parties gained a clear majority in the February 18 parliamentary election, the Pakistani president dismissed any thought of resigning and said he’ll work with the new elected civilian setup. To back him up, the State Department reaffirmed America’s main policy objective in Pakistan for which it deems Musharraf to be indispensable.
A common flaw in U.S. foreign policy is the politicization of foreign assistance. Whether Republican or Democratic, U.S. administrations allow narrowly defined “national interests” – instead of needs, priorities, and realities in a given country – to dictate foreign assistance. As a result, foreign aid often backfires, undermining long-term U.S. interests and fueling instability, conflict, and violations of core human rights standards. Nowhere is this truer than in Central Africa’s Great Lakes Region. Today, President George W. Bush supports corrupt, illegitimate regimes that will either cooperate in the Global War on Terror, provide U.S. companies access to vital natural resources, or both. If history is any indication, this infusion of wealth and military training is likely to be disastrous for the people of Africa.
Since the closure of its military bases in the country in 1991, the United States has incrementally regained, transformed, and deepened its military presence and intervention in the Philippines. The manner in which the United States has attempted to re-establish basing in the Philippines illustrates its attempts to radically overhaul its global offensive capabilities to become more agile and efficient while overcoming mounting domestic opposition to its presence around the world.
It was nearly three in the morning, on a recent Saturday, when the door of a Washington DC jail cell slammed closed with me inside. After an already grueling day in police custody that began at 1:30pm and included being handcuffed for eight hours straight at one point, the ability to move freely (albeit in a 5×7 cell) was a welcomed relief.
One of the more interesting phenomena to emerge from the U.S. debacle in Iraq is the demise of the unipolar world that rose from the ashes of the Cold War. A short decade ago the United States was the most powerful political, economic, and military force on the planet. Today its army is straining under the weight of an unpopular occupation, its economy is careening toward recession, and the only “allies” we can absolutely depend on in the United Nations are Israel, Palau, and the Marshall Islands.