WPR Blog Archive

What to think about the possibility of Iraq demanding that a troop withdrawal timetable be attached to the Status of Forces Agreement currently being negotiated? Kevin Drum has the relevant links and caveats here. I’d simply add that an Iraqi request for a withdrawal timetable presents a useful thought experiment: By removing the moral obligation to prevent the country from descending even further into a bloody civil war, it forces advocates for a continued engagement to do some soul-searching. If an unstable Iraq is as serious a threat to American national security as they maintain, then the logical conclusion is […]

I found this Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation chart via Matthew Yglesias last night. As you can see, it uses a side by side comparison of U.S. and Iranian military capacity to effectively debunk the idea that Iran poses any kind of existential threat to the United States. Yglesias acknowledges the risk to regional stability represented by Iran acquiring a nuclear weapons capacity, but says that’s “a far cry from saying that Iran is, as such, any kind of serious military threat.” My first thought last night was that this line of argument is convincing because it blurs the […]

For some background analysis on how the strategic rivalry between India and Pakistan plays out in Afghanistan, this post by Troy, Abu Muqawama’s resident Aghanologist, is worth a click. In a nutshell, India has long supported the Northern Alliance, while Pakistan has supported the southern Pashtuns from whom the Taliban movement springs. Troy explains that the Pakistani military’s alleged support for the Taliban should be understood as a hedge against an eventual NATO pullout, after which they consider it unlikely that Hamid Karzai would be able to survive. That brought to mind what Nikolas Gvosdev, in describing a presentation by […]

According to this article in The Hindu, Indian PM Manmohan Singh’s gambit to push through the U.S.-India nuclear deal could squeak through, but his margin for error is pretty slim. With the Left Party formally announcing its intention to leave the governing coalition, Singh is depending on votes from the Samjwadi Party to survive a vote of confidence he has called for later this month. But the math is tight: The Left’s decision, though expected, set off a flurry of political maneouverings with the government, which have 230 members in the Lok Sabha without the Left, asserting that it had […]

I’d seen this video mentioned a few times on several sites over the past week, but it wasn’t until Hampton emailed it to me that I actually clicked through: If you’re curious about the video’s background, the NY Times has a write-up here. I don’t know whether Matt Harding is “making a difference.” I do know I had a smile on my face about two seconds into watching him, and his friends the world over, dance. (The little added touch with the Indian dancers is pure gold.) And I have a hard time imagining anyone, anywhere not having the same […]

According to Le Monde, at a seminar on EU-NATO relations, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner announced some “ambitious” goal for EU defense to reach over the next decade. They include the ability to conduct concurrently: – Two stabilization and reconstruction missions of up to 10,000 men, for up to at least two years; – Two rapid reaction operations of limited duration; – One emergency evacuation operation invovling European citizens; – One surveillance/interdiction operation using air or naval forces; – One civil-military humanitarian assistance operation of up to 90 days; – Up to ten civil security missions (light armed police/gendarmerie) of […]

You’ll recall a few weeks back that Afghan President Hamid Karzai threatened to send Afghan forces across the Pakistani border to pursue Taliban insurgents if Pakistan didn’t start addressing the problem. Now, in the aftermath of the suicide bombing attack on India’s embassy in Kabul, a spokesman for the Afghan Interior Ministry declared, “We believe this attack was carried out in coordination and consultation with an active intelligence service in the region.” That’s a pretty strong, if veiled, accusation, one that’s not without precedent. But the fact that the target in this case was apparently India’s military attache in Kabul […]

Le Monde reports that Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has accepted his invitaiton to the Union for the Mediterranean launch summit, set for next Sunday in Paris. Turkey, too, has apparently agreed to send an as yet undetermined representative, as will Libya, despite Muammar Khaddafi’s opposition to the project. That’s a promising start for a project high on French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s agenda, although with all the questions and challenges that remain to be addressed, it might be something of a Pyrrhic victory.

In noting the retirement of Australia’s Chief of Army Peter Leahy, Sam Roggeveen at The Interpreter points out that the gathering consensus among Western militaries emphasizing counterinsurgency-based force structures (of which Leahy was a proponent) is not necessarily well-suited to Asia’s potentially volatile realignment of power that is taking place between nation-states. Sam’s point is well-taken, and illustrates the dangers of pack thinking. I just got back from interviewing a French general who’s a vocal advocate of adapting the French force structure for “wars of proximity,” and it’s striking how rapidly and how widely COIN doctrine is winning acceptance, even […]

“Other states indicate themselves in their deputies . . . . but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors . . . but always most in the common people. Their manners speech dress friendships — the freshness and candor of their physiognomy — the picturesque looseness of their carriage . . . their deathless attachment to freedom — their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean — the practical acknowledgment of […]

The German printing company supplying many of Zimbabwe’s new banknotes has agreed to halt shipments after a “political and moral assessment.” Supposedly, high level pressure from the German government contributed to the move. Without new paper money, the question is what will happen next in Zimbabwe’s economic crisis. Might a reduced money supply actually slow the country’s 165,000 percent inflation? If it did, who would this help more, average citizens, or the Mugabe-connected elite? Any economists or Zimbabwe experts out there want to weigh in?

Indian PM Manmohan Singh has decided to stake all the marbles on the U.S.-India nuclear deal, risking his coalition government in an effort to push the deal through. The Left parties, which have opposed the deal all along, are already planning to follow through with their threat to leave the government. Singh is counting on the Samajwadi Party to hold off early elections and see the deal through. M K Bhadrakumarat at Asia Times Online describes Singh’s hardball political calculations here. What’s surprising is his reasoning: He is personally convinced of the imperative of transforming India’s foreign policy and of […]

Call it a coincidence, but on the same day that British Foreign Minister David Miliband backed Nicolas Sarkozy’s ambitions for EU defense, the French government awarded the job of dismantling the decommissioned, asbestos-laden aircraft carrier, the Georges Clemenceau, to an English shipbreaking yard. The trick with Miliband’s announcement, of course, is that it commits Great Britain to nothing. Still, while maintaining that NATO must remain the cornerstone of European defense, he echoed the argument of EU defense proponents: But as the Balkans wars in the 1990s demonstrated, unless Europe can develop its own capabilities it will be consigned always to […]

For a good rundown of what’s at stake in the mounting political crisis between Turkey’s Islamist AKP party on the one hand and the secular army and judiciary on the other, click through to this Howard Eissenstat piece over at Foreign Policy Watch. The takeaway is that given the ease with which Turkey’s Islamist parties have successfully reinvented themselves in the past, there’s a real risk that the army will pursue a more muscular approach to eradicate the AKP once and for all this time around. That, in turn, risks alienating the AKP’s religious base from the principles of democratic […]

I don’t know how much coverage it’s gotten in the States, but because she’s a dual citizen of France, Ingrid Betancourt has been a cause célèbre here for the past six years. And today she’s free. I’ve found myself particularly moved by the personal tragedy of her story over the years, but also of the national tragedy it incarnates, and never more so than watching her ten-minute address on the tarmac following her liberation. The courage of her political struggle grew out of her love for her country, and she and her family suffered terribly for it. Yet the sentiments […]

I’ve become something of a Turkey booster recently, so I might not be the most objective observer. But it seems obvious, as this item over at FP Passport points out, that you don’t organize a coup d’état against a government that’s racked up a string of successes, both domestically and abroad, and dramatically improved your country’s influence and image. It should be mentioned that the coup in question was planned in 2004, and the recent arrests (most notably of four former generals) are part of an ongoing investigation into an alleged Turkish “deep state” of ultranationalists in the military, business […]

Nikolas Gvosdev describes an unease (among participants at a Carnegie Council panel on the Rise of the Rest) with the concessions and limited leverage that result from globalized interdependence. The new environment is definitely less conducive to a “with us or against us” approach, which I think is a historical feature of American foreign policy, even if it has been exagerrated by (and therefore associated with) the Bush administration. Gvosdev is mainly referring to the American dependence on emerging countries as sources of capital and energy. But it extends beyond that as our strategic partners increasingly find their interests interwoven […]