Last June, local “auxiliary” police in southern Afghanistan, fighting alongside Dutch troops, helped repel a major Taliban assault on the lush Chora Valley. In the aftermath of the fighting, the Dutch commander singled out the local cops for praise. “Their morale is very high,” said Lt. Col. Gino Van Der Voet. But now NATO commanders in Afghanistan have decided to end local police training, fearing that cops in remote areas — most of whom once fought for tribal warlords — might one day turn their weapons against Kabul and the U.S.-led coalition. The change in policy perhaps signals a shift [...]
From the TV footage coming out of Nepal these days, it is easy to forget that the Himalayan nation is struggling to build a viable democracy. Almost every day since mid-March, when anti-Chinese protests erupted in Tibet and other countries, images of Nepali police beating Tibetan demonstrators have been beamed around the world. Nepal’s major political parties and former Maoist rebels have promised to build an open and inclusive state after years of turmoil. The people are preparing to vote April 10 for a new assembly that would write a new constitution embodying a federal democratic republic. Yet barely two [...]
Thomas Barnett says of the WaPo article describing recent American missile strikes against Taliban targets inside Pakistan: Scary combination: we step up unilateral strikes inside another nation because we fear their new leadership will back away from such commitments. Does that sound sustainable to you? The obvious answer is, No. But this also brings into stark relief the tension between the two pillars of President Bush’s Pakistan policy, namely national security/counter-terrorism on the one hand, and democracy promotion on the other. You’ll recall that it’s in the name of these two policy goals that President Bush was authorized by Congress [...]
