Middle East & North Africa Archive

Last month, 5,400 troops from across Africa participated in a military exercise in South Africa, the last joint exercise before the African Standby Force becomes fully operational. In an email interview, Gilbert Khadiagala, a professor of international relations at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, discussed the state of multilateral security cooperation in Africa. WPR: What are the planned objectives for African multinational security cooperation, in terms of institutional architecture and force structures, and where do those plans currently stand in terms of implementation? Gilbert Khadiagala: The African Union’s (AU) Peace and Security Architecture includes the creation of […]

Syria’s most successful rebel alliance may have just barely avoided breaking apart. Over the spring and summer of this year, the coalition of Islamist rebel groups known as Jaish al-Fateh, or the Army of Conquest, scored a series of dramatic victories over the regime of Bashar al-Assad in northwest Syria. But in the past several weeks, just as Jaish al-Fateh announced a major new offensive, one of its most hard-line factions, Jund al-Aqsa, very publicly quit the coalition. The acrimony that has followed the withdrawal of Jund al-Aqsa—an ultra-extreme splinter of al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra—has exposed the persistent and […]

As Russian warplanes continue to attack targets in Syria, the apparent decisiveness of Moscow’s actions, at least in the view of some observers, has obscured an important reality: the poor readiness of Russia’s accident-prone military, which could increase the risk of an error with significant political or military consequences. The United States and Russia have been engaged in so-called deconfliction talks to prevent accidental contact or clashes between American and Russian jets in the skies above Syria. But as a reportedly errant cruise missile strike in the early days of Russia’s intervention showed, along with Russian planes consistently breaching Turkish […]

With the U.S. presidential election only about a year away, no candidate for either party has laid out a comprehensive national security strategy or even a broad philosophy of America’s role in the world and the purpose of U.S. power. To the extent that national security has been raised at all, the presidential hopefuls are clamoring to appear the toughest, whether against the self-declared Islamic State, Iran or Russia, and to offer unqualified support for Israel and its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The candidates have talked of reviving America’s influence in the Middle East and restraining Russia, but they haven’t […]

In Morocco’s largest protest since 2011, more than 20,000 demonstrators, primarily youth, rallied in Tangier on Saturday, decrying the exorbitant cost of water and electricity. Although mass gatherings are scarce in Morocco, where the king holds a tight grip on power, the past three weeks have been punctuated by demonstrations over utilities prices, with protests spreading to other major cities in recent days. Protesters lashed out against Amendis, a subsidiary of the French utility company Veolia Environnement, which has serviced the relatively impoverished northern cities of Tangier and Tetouan since 2002. “Amendis, go home, Tangier is not yours,” demonstrators chanted, […]

Several weeks ago, Hillary Clinton spent 11 hours testifying before a congressional committee about the deaths of four Americans, including the then-U.S. ambassador, Chris Stevens, in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012. For anyone watching this spectacle, little new was gleaned, except for the fact that Clinton is a remarkably disciplined politician—and that whatever threat the GOP’s Benghazi obsession might have posed to her presidential prospects in 2016 is effectively over. What would have been of far greater interest, to both policy analysts and voters, is a look back on the U.S. decision to intervene in Libya, which Clinton strongly supported. […]

On Monday, following through on a threat issued last week, Iraq’s parliament voted unanimously to block Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi from passing anti-corruption measures and other pledged reforms without its approval. The move is just the latest sign of Abadi’s tug-of-war with Iraqi lawmakers. In August, in response to growing protests over graft and dysfunctional utility services, Abadi announced a series of reforms to deal with corruption and mismanagement. Most prominent among them were plans to eliminate several senior political offices that had become patronage vehicles, including Iraq’s three vice presidents and two deputy prime ministers, and to cut back […]

Is it riskier to be an austere politician or a humane one? Since the global financial crisis broke in 2008, economic austerity has been the single biggest source of contention in global politics. Some leaders, like British Prime Minister David Cameron, have persuaded voters to accept big cuts to state spending. Others, such as outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, have lost power to rivals that offered less painful fiscal alternatives. Yet if politicians talk up “austerity” at their own peril, they may find that the “humane” label is becoming equally costly. In Europe in particular, governments are struggling with […]