by Rodger Payne | 9 Dec 2009 |
As you might expect, I've had a number of conversations with friends and colleagues about the prospects for the so-called "Afghan surge." Boosters like to point to the alleged success of the Iraq surge, but many of them ignore some salient points.For example, the U.S. also changed its military tactics in Iraq even as it implemented the surge. The military embraced counterinsurgency tactics, something it had been reluctant to do since...
by Charli Carpenter | 8 Dec 2009 |
The New York Times reported Friday that the Obama Administration has stepped up its Predator strike campaign in Pakistan concurrent with the announcement of a troop surge in Afghanistan. The article focuses on comparing estimates of civilian casualties from strikes and estimates of how controversial the strikes are - interestingly, the greatest blowback comes from Pakistanis who live outside of the tribal areas: many of those in the FATAs...
by Rodger Payne | 8 Dec 2009 |
Monday, Steve Walt posted about the environment, drawing reader attention to several corporate efforts to make themselves greener. When I read those kinds of items, I always suspect "greenwashing." Actually, to be fair, Walt noted that Jared Diamond wrote about these business initiatives in the NY Times. This one caught my eye: Walmart is working to reduce its energy expenditures because energy (e.g., fuel for delivery trucks) is...
by Bill Petti | 7 Dec 2009 |
A while back I started reading The Fat Tail, a book about political risk by Eurasia Group's Ian Bremmer (who also pens The Call for Foreign Policy) and Preston Keat, but couldn't really get into it. I recently picked it back up and have been plowing through. I am reserving my final judgment until I've had a chance to complete it. However, one area has already irked me enough that I wanted to post a (rather long) comment: their treatment of...
by Jon Western | 7 Dec 2009 |
A group from MIT won DARPA's recent balloon challenge. In case you missed it, DARPA placed ten 8-foot red balloons around the country on Friday and issued a challenge to groups to be the first to identify the correct location of all of them. The winning group received $40k.Here's how DARPA defined the challenge:a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building,...
by Charli Carpenter | 3 Dec 2009 |
It may come as a surprise to you that, having spent most of my career in a policy school, I have never taught a doctoral seminar surveying the field of IR theory. Until now. Frankly, I'm pretty daunted by trying to squeeze the empirical, substantive, methodological, epistemological and theoretical complexity of the entire field into a semester. I've settled on making sure they have a basic foundation on which to begin the IR comp reading list:...
by Charli Carpenter | 3 Dec 2009 |
Blogging will be light over the next few days as I'm traveling to conduct focus groups with global civil servants drawn from the network of organizations working broadly in the area of human security, to figure out why some issues resonate and others fall through the cracks in these networks. Before I disappear, I thought I'd draw readers' attention to a new human security campaign just taking off, to get your hunches as to whether it has what...
by Charli Carpenter | 2 Dec 2009 |
Foreign Policy covers "the world's reaction" to Obama's West Point speech last night on his troop increase in Afghanistan, but their sole representation of the Afghani reaction is a menacing quote from a Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahamdi. Al-Jazeera has a better look at the varied response within Afghanistan. The NY Daily News has a round-up of reactions from service-personnel. Rob Farley's discussion with Matthew Duss on Bloggingheads.tv...
by Rodger Payne | 1 Dec 2009 |
Trita Parsi, who heads the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), has won the 2010 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. The prize is worth $200,000.The press release describes the award-winning ideas from Parsi's Yale University Press book: Improving relations between Iran and Israel is the key to achieving lasting peace in the Middle East, says the winner of the 2010 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving...
by Daniel McIntosh | 1 Dec 2009 |
Serbia is going to the World Court today to ask for an advisory opinion on the independence of Kosovo. The US and most of the EU has recognized a new Kosovar state; Russia, Serbia, and most of the rest of the world has not. The Serbian Foreign Minister observed that the decision to go to court marked a "paradigm shift...the first time in the history of the Balkans that somebodyhas decided to resolve an issue of significance using exclusively...
by Charli Carpenter | 30 Nov 2009 |
60 Minutes ran an excellent expose on conflict minerals in the Congo last night. You can see some of it here:Watch CBS News Videos OnlineGood coverage of an under-reported area of the world. It left me with two thoughts: First, via Facebook, my colleague Virginia Haufler suggests this story shows that corporations rather than states are running the show in issue areas such as conflict minerals - both as trouble-makers and potential governors....
by Bill Petti | 28 Nov 2009 |
This week, the government of Dubai decided to delay payment on the tens of billions of dollars that it's Dubai World holding owes to various creditors (UBS speculates as much as $80B). Dubai World is the vehicle through which the state has invested heavily in various real estate projects around the world. In order to fund the expansive projects and investments, the government sought billions in debt to fuel their initiatives.By delaying payment...