Recent news reports indicate that the Obama administration is having second thoughts about whether it wants to double the size of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. The president has directed the Pentagon to think very clearly about the specific strategy and purposes involved with any troop increase. Independent defense experts continue to debate the wisdom of applying a variant of the troop surge policy that has apparently stabilized the security situation in Iraq to Afghanistan, with its very different local conditions. One weighty constraint on the proposed force increases concerns logistics. Recent developments in Pakistan and Central Asia in [...]
According to a recent article in Global Security Newswire, President Barack Obama might seek an international agreement to limit weapons in space, reversing Bush administration policy. As noted on the White House Web site, the new administration is calling for “a worldwide ban on weapons that interfere with military and commercial satellites.” The president’s position on this issue is impractical and dangerous. Proponents of the ban argue that because the U.S. has the most space-based assets to lose in a future space war, it also has the greatest interest in restricting the use of space to peaceful purposes. An international [...]
In a television interview in late January with the Arab network Al Arabiya, President Barack Obama raised the issue of talks with Iran as part of a public diplomacy campaign directed towards the Middle East and Islamic worlds. Obama has a huge task ahead of him should he attempt to break the 30-year American-Iranian deadlock, but the payoff could be significant. While such a breakthrough won’t solve all the problems in the Middle East, rapprochement between the U.S. and Iran has the potential to positively impact on the precarious situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as on the security [...]
