A new piece of legislation signed into law on Monday, May 24, by President Barack Obama has the potential to end one of Africa’s longest-running insurgencies. The “Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Reconstruction Act” requires the Obama administration to prepare a multilateral strategy to eliminate the threat of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group originating in northern Uganda that has terrorized civilians in numerous African nations since the late 1980s. To be successful, however, policymakers charged with designing this strategy need to understand why the Ugandan government has failed to defeat the LRA in the past […]

A bus carrying around 60 passengers, including at least 20 local policemen, was winding through a thick forest in the eastern Indian state of Chhattisgarh on Monday when it suddenly exploded. At least 30 people were killed. Most of the rest were injured. Indian authorities were quick to pin the bomb attack on the country’s four-decade-old Naxalite-Maoist rebellion, named for Naxalbari, the town where the group first attacked government security forces in 1967. Naxalite fighters have been known to target security checkpoints along bus routes, and have warned bus operators not to allow police on board their vehicles. The Naxals, […]

When President Barack Obama first announced his plan in early 2009 for withdrawal from Iraq, it initiated a debate within U.S. national security circles: Would Shiite insurgents operating in the country stage a final attack on U.S. troops as they withdrew? Initially it was believed that such an attack would happen in the summer of 2009, as Coalition Forces consolidated to bases removed from local population centers, as per Obama’s plan. But 2009 passed without incident, leaving analysts slightly reassured about the impact of relentless Coalition Force operations targeting three key Shiite insurgent groups — Kata’ib Hezbollah, Jaysh al-Mahdi, and […]