Military Archive

From Bosnia to Rwanda, United Nations peacekeepers have always faced tough choices that come with operating in complex, dangerous environments. Today, the climate is no less challenging. Record fatalities and injuries for U.N. personnel have increased pressure from some quarters to embolden U.N. peacekeeping and political missions with stronger, more aggressive mandates. But recent decisions made by the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, such as a mandate to support a regional, non-U.N. counterterrorism unit in Mali, the G5 Sahel Joint Force, risk plunging blue helmets into the quicksand of unwinnable wars. This short-term thinking poses considerable long-term risks […]

Although the Islamic State continues to carry out sporadic attacks in parts of Iraq, the focus across the country has largely turned to post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation. Harsh sentences are being meted out to suspected Islamic State militants and their collaborators. The Associated Press reported in March that 19,000 people have been detained or imprisoned on suspicion of connections to the extremist group. Of those, 3,000 have been sentenced to death. Meanwhile, a growing backlog of cases and a dearth of available evidence have stymied efforts to compensate victims. In an email interview, Ali Al-Mawlawi, head of research at the […]

What a difference a year makes. Last October, then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson delivered a major policy speech on U.S.-India ties and the critical role India would play in the Trump administration’s new Indo-Pacific strategy. A month later in Vietnam, at the annual summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, President Donald Trump championed India’s role in the region—even though it’s not a member of APEC—signaling that he was serious about accelerating strategic cooperation with India. But now, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary James Mattis in New Delhi this week for high-level talks with their Indian […]

Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR’s newsletter and engagement editor, Benjamin Wilhelm, curates the top news and analysis from China written by the experts who follow it. Signs of improved ties between China and Japan have rekindled hopes of swift progress toward establishing the China-backed Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP, which would be the world’s largest free trade deal if it ever comes to fruition. China initially unveiled the agreement as a rival to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from after taking office. Japan led the efforts to salvage and revise the TPP without the […]

Aug. 11 was the beginning of a very difficult week in Afghanistan. After several weeks of growing pressure from the Taliban, over 1,000 of its fighters attacked Ghazni, a city of 270,000 that straddles the vitally important Highway 1 linking Kabul with the south of the country. The attack on Ghazni brought back haunting memories of the battle for Kunduz in the summer of 2015, when the Taliban seized control of a major Afghan city for the first time since 2001. A series of Taliban attacks across several neighboring provinces compounded an already bad situation. In the Ghormach district of […]