India’s Untouchables to Get U.N. Boost

The United Nations is set to declare caste systems a human rights violation at the current meeting of its Human Rights Council in Geneva, in a bid to recognize centuries-old institutionalized discrimination against the world’s estimated 200 million Dalits, or untouchables. Draft principles being considered by the Council call for the “elimination of discrimination based on work and descent.” Dalits and similar groups face discrimination under existing caste systems in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Japan and Somalia. While Nepal came out in support of the move, India has objected to the use of the word “caste” in the draft principles […]

Revisiting Obama as Hamlet

I wanted to revisit this post on the growing meme of President Barack Obama as weak and vacillating, in which I said that on Israel-Palestine, Afghanistan and Iran, “there definitely seems to be a hesitation on following through on initial convictions and openings. . . . Obama has blinked.” Because in trying to address a number of interconnected trains of thought, I might have crossed some of the tracks up. To begin with, on Afghanistan, I don’t think Obama is wrong to pause and consider the strategic objectives before signing off on the resources requested. The problem is that I […]

No Good Options on Iran

When it comes to making sense of the options on Iran, the frustrating thing is that none of them are likely to work. That leads to debates where everyone very smartly rebuts the opposing viewpoint, only to defend an equally unsatisfactory proposition. I accept that actually getting meaningful sanctions applied — that is, overcoming Russian and Chinese obstructionism — is a longshot. I also concede that sanctions might not succeed in changing Tehran’s political calculus regarding its nuclear program. But most people who advance those two arguments tend to use them to justify one of three approaches: accept a nuclear […]

Obama as Hamlet

Let’s face it, the meme that’s currently taking shape is that President Barack Obama is weak and vascillating. And that’s a particularly lethal meme for a foreign policy oriented around engagement, cooperation, shared responsibility and a careful husbanding of dwindling U.S. power resources. Is it a fair characterization? It leaves out a number of policy positions where he has taken bold initiatives and followed them up well. His nuclear nonproliferation agenda, for instance, which I initially dismissed but have since come to appreciate, offers promising openings on a number of fronts. His handling of the much-needed U.S. image makeover, too, […]

Rights Group Campaigns to End Sierra Leone ‘Emergency’

Amnesty International has kicked off a campaign to raise awareness around Sierra Leone’s appalling level of maternal mortality, in a bid to pressure authorities to do more to guarantee both women and children’s rights. One in eight women faces death during pregnancy and childbirth in Sierra Leone, one of the world’s highest rates of maternal mortality. A vast majority of those deaths are from preventable conditions, AI charged in a recent report (.pdf), “Out of Reach: The Cost of Maternal Mortality in Sierra Leone.” Poverty, ignorance, institutionalized discrimination, tradition and distance combine to prevent many women from ever reaching professional […]

Poland Embraces EU Defense

Poland has just announced its policy priorities for its EU presidency in 2011. And topping the list is EU defense, followed by energy security. Jean Quatremer claims it comes in response to the U.S. reversal on the missile defense system, and characterizes it as a “véritable révolution.” The former is certainly possible, even likely. I’m less convinced by the latter. As Laura Chappell pointed out in her excellent WPR Strategic Posture Review for Poland, EU defense has occupied an increasingly prominent position in Poland’s national security calculations. The reason being, Poland prefers being actively involved in any security architecture that […]

Iran’s Second Enrichment Facility?

Update: The IAEA press office has just released a statement to the effect that the enrichment facility referred to in the news report is a pilot fuel enrichment facility that is now under construction. Iran informed the agency of its existence on Sept. 21, stating that enrichment will be up to 5 percent, and that no nuclear material has yet been introduced to the facility. This would call for dialing down the following post a few notches in terms of urgency, since the facility is not a fully operational one that had been kept from IAEA inspectors. But the general […]

Obama and Gadhafi: A Tale of Two Speeches

Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi’s speech yesterday at the U.N. was admittedly good for laughs, and it’s no surprise that it was the butt of many mocking posts around the Web yesterday. Nevertheless, and I’ll probably get in trouble for pointing this out, in his own inimitable style, Gadhafi said many of the same things as U.S. President Barack Obama. Gadhafi: “You are like a Hyde Park, without any substance,” he told the surprised delegates. “You just make a speech and disappear.” Obama: Speeches alone will not solve our problems — it will take persistent action. Gadhafi: “The preamble (of the […]

The Iran Nuclear Impasse

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev emerged from a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama with a more open attitude toward tougher sanctions against Iran in the event negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program don’t produce results. That’s a pretty quick dividend from the missile defense decision, but I think Nikolas Gvosdev is spot on here: But the crux of the matter for the U.S. is not when Tehran crosses theline and has a working bomb, it is trusting Iran to have a nuclearinfrastructure like Japan’s. I think that Russia will be far moresupportive of “trusting” Iran with nuclear technology than a U.S. […]

Rights Group Launches Pre-Election Burma Campaign

Human Rights Watch has launched a campaign to push for the release of political prisoners ahead of Burma’s elections next year. Rights groups have repeatedly blasted the ruling junta’s election plans as farcical, given the obvious lack of freedoms associated with the process. The HRW campaign, “2,100 by 2010,” is an attempt to counter ongoing junta arrests, intimidation and detentions of pro-democracy activists. As part of its crackdown, the Burmese regime has targeted people on a variety of spurious charges related to protests against forced labor and providing aid to victims of the deadly Cyclone Nargis. “The United States, China, […]

The Afghanistan Strategic Review

Amid signs that President Barack Obama is reconsidering first principles in Afghanistan, the Washington Post has published a redacted version of the strategic review conducted by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Most of its principle elements have already emerged since July, but to see them finally gathered and presented in a coherent draft helps clarify the assessment of where things stand. Curiously, I was most impressed and encouraged by the discussion of the Afghan insurgency’s strengths (pp. 2-5/2-8). I found myself thinking that, despite all of the insurgency’s recent advances, our understanding of its various strands, how they overlap, and their lines […]

Missile Shield Decision as Europe Reset

Two compelling analyses of the missile defense decision, one here by Robert Haddick and another here by Jeffrey Lewis. From everything I’ve read, the consensus across the board, with the exception of religious missile defense supporters and partisan opportunists, is that this was the right decision from a military hardware perspective. And both Haddick and Lewis fall into this camp. Haddick argues, though, that the politics are wrong, mainly because the reconfigured “adaptable and flexible” system does not represent the same kind of commitment to allies that an American presence on the ground does. Meanwhile, Lewis argues that contrary to […]

Brazil Fighter Jets: Sweden Strikes Back

Looks like Brazilian President Lula da Silva wasn’t far off when he joked that he’d end up getting the 36 fighter jets for free. Following Dassault and Boeing, Saab has now offered to make all the technology of its Gripen available, and to manufacture 40 percent of the aircraft’s components in Brazil. A Swedish deputy defense minister also announced that Sweden would sell the Gripens for just half the price of the competing aircraft. (You can check out the Rafale and Gripen promotional videos here in WPR’s newly revamped video section.) That means all three contractors have now met the […]

India-China Border Incidents

Depending on how close you have your ear to the ground, you might have picked up some buzzing about Chinese military incursions across the “Line of Actual Control” that comprises its vaguely defined border with India. The incursions have included a helicopter flyover, as well as an “Animal House”-type incident where Chinese soldiers apparently tagged stones on the Indian side of the line with “China” graffiti in red paint. But they occur in the context of a significant Chinese infrastructure buildup and militarization — one that has caused a good deal of concern in New Delhi — along its side […]

Senate Afghanistan Hearing

Spencer Ackerman’s rundown of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Afghanistan is well worth a read. Rory Stewart, John Nagl and Stephen Biddle gave testimony. The result is a very informative confrontation between three very different and articulate perspectives of that war. As Ackerman observes, it’s something of a rarity to see informative debate in the Senate.

Obama Gets Iran Ducks in a Row

It looks like President Barack Obama is getting his Iran ducks lined up in advance of the meeting scheduled between the P5+1 and Iran in October. Duck 1: On Tuesday, Obama spoke with French President Nicolas Sarkozy by telephone for a half-hour, during which Iran was a central topic of conversation. PressTV later reported that on Tuesday, too, Sarkozy told lawmakers from his governing UMP, “It is a certainty to all of our secret services. Iran is working today on a nuclear [weapons] program.” I’m still trying to confirm that Sarkozy actually made those remarks, since although AFP picked up […]

Training the Afghan Army

Most accounts I’ve read of the Afghan security forces have made the distinction between the Afghan army, usually described as needing a lot of improvement but competent and on the right track, and the Afghan police, always described as a disastrous combination of incompetence and corruption. That was at least partly reassuring, since the transfer of security operations to indigenous Afghan forces is a major component of both U.S. COIN doctrine and most optimistic assessments of a long-term (read: politically palatable) U.S. nation-building mission in Afghanistan. Recently, there’s been a bit of online discussion about why training the Afghan army […]

Showing 1 - 17 of 451 2 3 Last