The following is my contribution to the Afghanistan 2050 Roundtable hosted by the proprietors of ChicagoBoyz. The opening post of the roundtable – which explains its purpose and methods – can be found here. My piece is cross-posted at ChicagoBoyz with the rest of the submissions. The great challenge with interpreting the future is that […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. TOP BILLING: Haiti, Disaster Sociology, Elite Panic, and LootingGary Peterson. Resilience Science. 2010 January 30. This is one of the more compelling defenses of decentralization to be found under 2,000 words. Looking at disaster situations, Mr. Peterson does not find the disorder and chaos of […]
The big news to hit today’s foreign policy press was the release of several thousand DoD documents to The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Speigel by Wikileaks. As the title of the Times piece suggests, the top story to emerge from the leaks is the numerous field reports detailing how the Pakistani Inter-Service […]
A little recognized truth: the Directorate for Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s largest intelligence agency, is the prime reason Afghanistan remains an insurgent’s haven. While I have briefly touched upon this here at the Stage, others have covered the matter much more extensively. Writers such as “Zenpundit”, “Pundita“, and the folks at NewsHoggers (all on my […]
The following words were written earlier this night by the editors of War News Updates. I copy them here without alteration. Afghanistan: The Forgotten War “Brookyards.” War News Updates. 13 May 2010. WNU Editor: In one email, Michael Yon has summarized what I have been trying to say for the past few years …. we […]
This week has not been a pleasant one for Hamid Karzai. Following an embarrassing outburst where he declared, among other things, “I might join the Taliban”, Western media outlets have kept up a steady barrage of open editorials lampooning the President. Foreign Policy, Slate, Small War Journal, The Weekly Standard, the Huffington Post, and Politico […]
Author’s Note: A few days ago I finished reading Europe in Crisis, 1598-1648, by Geoffrey Parker. Parker is a renowned scholar of 17th century Europe, and for those unfamiliar with the period’s history I can think of no better introduction than this volume. This reading was the impetus for the following post. You can summarize […]
A question: Why is it that when one of India’s more influential English-language policy journals devotes an entire issue towards “stepping up in Afghanistan”, nobody in the rest of the English speaking world notices? India’s role in the region means something, right? Now, the Indian Army quickly shot the idea down, but I find it […]
TOP BILLING: Beijing’s Secret Succession Battle Willy Lam. Wall Street Journal. 24 September 2009. The Hakka People, China’s Leadership Caste “Curzon” ComingAnarchy.com 3 October 2009. Few people possess as much power as the ruling elites of the Chinese Communist Party. For American statesmen and diplomats, few topics have as much importance as the internal divisions […]
OBAMA’s WARMartin Smith. Frontline. 1 October 2009. This video was first brought to my attention by a post over at War News Updates. The editor of that site linked favorably to the summary of the video over at Danger Room, where Noah Shactman states, “It’s best televised look I’ve seen yet at how these marines […]
