WPR Blog Archive

I just wanted to take a moment to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving, and also to thank all of you who make WPR and this blog a part of your regular reading. I know how crowded the online media landscape is, because I spend quite a bit of time navigating it each day. Which makes your continued support all the more gratifying. I mentioned to Hampton that there are a few days out of the year that are especially tough for an expat, and Thanksgiving is definitely one of them. I’ve tried to explain the essence of what the holiday […]

The NY Times is reporting that it’s almost official: Secretary of Defense Bob Gates will stay on at the Pentagon in the Obama adminsitration, although it’s not certain for how long. I think the political optics of what signal this sends regarding Democrats ability to manage national security rightly take a back seat here to the fact that Gates has been very impressive in effecting the institutional changes necessary to support the operational needs of two ongoing wars. But the Pentagon’s final internal armistice lines (COIN vs. conventional and hard vs. soft power in Iran, for instance) have not been […]

I’m not really sure what to make of this NY Times report. After failing to secure Membership Action Plans for Georgia and Ukraine this past April in the face of strong German and French resistance to provoking Russia, in the aftermath of the intervening Georgia War that showed both the recklessness of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and Russia’s willingness to turn the frozen conflict into a hot war, and despite widespread popular opposition in Ukraine to the very idea of NATO membership, the Bush administration is now pushing to scrap the lengthy MAP procedures that guarantee operational compatibility altogether and […]

Must read from Arif Rafiq at the Pakistan Policy Blog on the recent developments in the Pakistani FATA: The reality is that none of the latest U.S. drone attacks could haveoccurred without the provision of intelligence by Pakistan’s military. This is why the targeting seems to be more precise — in clear contrastto the Angor Ada raid that yielded no high value targets and killedmainly innocent Pakistani civilians. In fact, most of the good U.S.intelligence on the tribal areas and al-Qaeda comes from the ISI. Rafiq goes on to speculate as to what caused the Pakistani military’s change of heart, […]

One of the defense evolutions flying under the radar for most people not immediately impacted by it over the past seven years has been the transformation of the National Guard and Reserves from a strategic reserve to an operational reserve. Along with stop losses and extended tours, deployment of reserve units as part of the operational rotation in Iraq and Afghanistan has functioned as a hidden draft affecting tens of thousands of troops at a time. Whether or not that’s advisable is besides the point, because it’s been necessary. But being that it’s taking place, it shouldn’t be on an […]

The AP is reporting that Salim Hamdan, otherwise known as bin Laden’s driver, will be serving out the rest of his sentence in Yemen. Robert Glyn Williams wrote a WPR feature just last month on Hamdan’s defense, for which he served as an expert witness. Meanwhile, the Bush administration is fighting a court order to release the 17 Uighur Muslim detainees who have essentially been cleared of enemy combatant status but fear being tortured if returned to their homeland in China. I don’t write about this very often, because there’s already a force of nature named Scott Horton who covers […]

Commenting on my post about the projected end state size of the Afghan security forces (I had taken the figure to be for the Afghan army alone), Joshua Foust has this to say over at Registan: I think, despite his deep skepticism, he might be underselling the problems even here . . . The State Department wants about 162,000 ANSF—Afghan NationalSecurity Forces, or all the troops and police combined. In 2010, thatwill cost more than Afghanistan’s total GDP. Literally, the U.S.government’s big plan is to build an Afghan security force whose costexceeds the total economic output of the country, and […]

I like the line of argument from David Capezza’s WPR piece on NATO-Russia relations. Taken to its logical extreme, it suggests that the way to resolve security disputes with Russia — like missile defense and NATO expansion — isn’t to engage in needlessly provocative behavior or to simply capitulate every time Vlad raises his angry head in our airspace, but to integrate Russia into the European security equation. I have my doubts about missile defense in general, in part due to its lackluster testing record. And I think that integrating Georgia into NATO is unnecessary so long as Russia considers […]

It’s striking the degree to which the “reasonable” foreign policy consensus on Latin America has drifted to the “left.” The Brookings Institution just released a report (via the NY Times today) that more or less echoes a letter addressed to the Obama campaign last month by the Latin American Studies Association and 400 academics (via Christopher Moraff’s WPR piece last week). It’s also striking the degree to which the major news outlets’ coverage of foreign policy plays catch up to WPR. Get it here first, folks.

Whether Barack Obama is at heart a Wilsonian idealists or “progressive realist,” as Nikolas Gvosdev put it in his recent piece for WPR, is one of the key questions about the incoming administration’s foreign policy. Early in the campaign, I worried that some of Obama’s foreign policy advisers’ rhetoric about “dignity promotion” and a “transformative agenda” indicated the then-candidate was disposed to a brand of idealism that Walter McDougall has called “global meliorism.” In our expression of support for the President-elect in the wake of his election victory earlier this month, the WPR editors again voiced the worry that Obama […]

To follow up on Anastasia Moloney’s WPR preview of the Venezuela elections, the NY Times is reporting that the opposition indeed made significant gains, but according to the WaPo, it apparently lost Sucre which would have signaled inroads into Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez’s core base urban poor. Chávez also managed to avoid some of the more significant symbollic defeats that had been forecasted, like the governorship that his brother was trying to inherit from their father. Still, the defeat is a substantial one for Chávez, and comes despite a good deal of pre-election government interference. How he responds to the […]

As much as the improved security in Iraq, the fact that Stuart Bowen is no longer tearing out any new ones is a sign of the improvements we’ve made with regard to warzone reconstruction operations. What this all means in the medium- to longrun, I find myself wavering on. It’s still possible that the country might degress into a Sunni-Shiite-Kurd free for all once we’re gone. (News that the Kurds have been arming themselves independently of the Iraqi Ministry of Defense somehow doesn’t come as such a shock.) And if it does, the past two years will have functioned as […]

About the only thing I can think of that promises to be a more difficult and painful task than rebuilding the French Socialist Party is rebuilding the NY Knicks, which explains why I haven’t been covering the PS’s recent efforts to make Bush v. Gore look like a lovefest much. But Art Goldhammer has been, and he offers both a sensible proposal for a shortterm compromise, as well as the likely consequences of a failure to do so. Meanwhile, Real Clear World’s Marc Desnoyers cites Le Monde as identifying far-left Olivier Besancenot and center-right François Bayrou as the two big […]

I usually don’t do any posting over the weekend, but that doesn’t mean the internal content management system gets shut down. To give an example, a not-so-little number kept rattling around in the cranium the past couple of days: 162,000. That’s the end strength goal the Dept. of Defense has now set for the Afghan National Army by 2010, in order to provide the manpower needed to adequately support U.S.-NATO operations once “surged.” Since Afghanistan’s population, according to the latest CIA Factbook estimates, is 32.7 million, that’s roughly the size, per capita, of the combined American military (including the Air […]

Lots of Syria news to digest at the moment, and not all of it terribly coherent. A good place to start, though, is this Brookings paper by Bilal Saab (via Friday Lunch Club). This, in particular, positively leaped off the page: Syria’s pragmatic statecraft during this episode did not emerge in avacuum but is part of a larger tactical reorientation in foreignpolicy. That reorientation began with the 34-day war between Hizbullahand Israel in southern Lebanon in summer 2006. The duration of thatconflict and the extent of the damage Israel’s punitive air strikesinflicted on Lebanon impressed upon Syrian leaders just how […]

Sam Roggeveen of the Interpreter discusses the particular challenge of trying to plan for China’s rise. Anyone who’s ever witnessed a Tai Chi exhibition will understand.

It’s rare to find balanced analysis regarding Nicolas Sarkozy’s foreign policy, no less so in France than in the U.S. The guy has a way of polarizing people to the point where most either love him or hate him, but lose all ability to calmly assess what he’s doing. Part of that has to do with Sarkozy’s frenetic nature itself, which lends itself more to caricature than to calm reflection. Max Bergmann’s analysis at Democracy Arsenal of this John Vinocur IHT column, though, is an exception to the rule, mainly because Bergmann nails the circumstancial opportunity that Sarkozy has tried […]