Human Security Archive

As if to provide yet one more piece of evidence of the Afghan tragedy, the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) released a report yesterday showing the devastating effects of domestically produced opium on Afghanistan’s own population. It complements other studies (.pdf) that have highlighted the suffering that Afghan opium, heroin, and other opiates cause in other countries. Taken together, the reports make it clear that solving the Afghan drug challenge will require a comprehensive multilateral approach. Yesterday’s UNODC report (.pdf), entitled “Drug Use in Afghanistan: 2009 Survey,” confirms a pattern seen in the international evolution of the […]

Last week, President Barack Obama released his first National Security Strategy. Analysts and observers have focused much of their attention so far on how the new NSS breaks from the one formulated by the Bush administration. By this argument, Obama’s NSS represents a new direction both by “counting more on U.S. allies” than former President George W. Bush did, and by repudiating Bush’s unilateralism. In reality, the document does neither of these things. To be precise, it uses words like “diplomacy” and “allies” at statistically the same rate as Bush’s 2006 National Security Strategy and still claims that America “reserve[s] […]