Defense & Security Archive

Documents recently released by Honduran newspaper El Heraldo revealed what many Hondurans had long suspected: the presence of a hit squad within the police tasked with carrying out assassinations of law enforcement officials. In December 2009, Honduras’ anti-drug chief, Gen. Julian Aristides Gonzalez, was killed in his car in front of his daughter’s school in the capital, Tegucigalpa. His assassination came just days after he revealed the discovery of clandestine airstrips in Olancho, the country’s largest department and a hub for drug trafficking. His associate and former head of the anti-narcotics commission, Gustavo Alfredo Landaverde, was killed two years later […]

Five years after Cote d’Ivoire’s 2011 post-election crisis came to a bloody end, the trial of former First Lady Simone Gbagbo for crimes against humanity is set to open this month in Abidjan, the country’s biggest city and economic hub. More than 3,000 people were killed, 150 women raped and hundreds of thousands displaced during five months of fighting after Gbagbo’s husband, then-incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo, refused to step down despite losing the November 2010 presidential runoff vote to challenger Alassane Ouattara. Simone Gbagbo’s trial will mark the first time an Ivoirian court has dealt with international crimes committed during […]

The Gaza Strip will become “uninhabitable” by 2020, according to U.N. reports published in September 2015. This grim and alarming reality facing the nearly 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza is the result of both external and internal factors. Externally, successive Israeli wars in 2008-2009, 2012 and 2014 effectively destroyed the basic foundations of day-to-day life in Gaza. These wars were preceded and followed by land, sea and air blockades imposed by Israel, and later by Egypt. The blockades have led to one of the harshest regimes of collective punishment in modern times, limiting the flow of basic goods into […]

Five years after the killing of Osama bin Laden, the U.S. public seems to understand that the fight against terrorism is a struggle that’s here to stay. The challenge for government officials is to manage the threat without exacerbating it, or allowing terrorism to monopolize the time and resources at the expense of other compelling public policy needs. Most people get that—that is, until the next attack happens and the second-guessing starts. It was five years ago this week that the U.S. launched a successful operation in Abbottabad, Pakistan, targeting the leader of al-Qaida. Bin Laden was killed in the […]

It is always a risk to claim that the tide may be turning in India-Pakistan relations, where contentious security and political concerns have famously trumped avenues for collaboration time and time again. It is prudent, then, to approach last week’s meeting between India and Pakistan’s foreign secretaries with a degree of caution. It is far too early at this stage to know the actual significance of this brief meeting. But even if it did not lead to any breakthroughs, the meeting itself should not be ignored. It was an outcome, and a reflection, of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s perseverance […]

The 13th Summit of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation (OIC) wrapped up in Istanbul last month, chaired by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The summit was notable for the fact that it attracted over 30 heads of state, the highest number in the OIC’s nearly 50-year history. As usual, the OIC’s final resolution reflects a hodgepodge of bilateral, regional and global issues of interest to the Muslim ummah, or global community. This included pledges to fight Islamophobia, promote economic and scientific cooperation, combat terrorism, and deal with long-standing territorial conflicts in Israel-Palestine, Cyprus, Jammu-Kashmir and Nagorno-Karabakh, among others. But despite […]

There will be a major crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) before the end of 2016, and nobody really knows what to do about it. This is neither an alarmist nor even a particularly contentious statement. Diplomats, United Nations officials and independent analysts agree that trouble is looming over the DRC’s presidential election, which is supposed to take place in November. The constitution bars the sitting president, Joseph Kabila, from running for a third term. However, almost all observers believe he intends to cling onto power, potentially unleashing serious violence. Nobody can predict exactly how ugly this could […]