The United States and its allies are rethinking their commitment to Afghanistan by the week. But an attack on Iran would return all calculations to ground zero.
An Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure and personnel would be far more extensive than many realise. The prospect that it will happen in the next few months is increasing.
The ability of Iran’s military to learn from experience and become adept in irregular warfare echoes that of insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also presents the United States with hard choices.
The replacement of one United States general by another to lead the war against the Taliban leaves untouched the essentials of a failing campaign.
The revolving-door experience of United States military commanders in Afghanistan is but symptom of a flawed strategy with its roots in the response to 9/11.
A new report that highlights Afghanistan’s extensive mineral deposits provides fuel for the United States’s military project. But it also signals the existence of a wider resource-competition that reflects the 21st-century’s emerging geopolitics.
Iran is at the centre of a global storm: targeted by new sanctions, suspected by Washington, defended by Brazil and Turkey. But the complex diplomacy around its nuclear programme could be ended by decisions made not in the United States but in Israel.
Israel’s assault on a flagship attempting to break the blockade of Gaza has sparked international condemnation. Behind the crisis lie deeper shifts in world politics in which Turkey is playing a key part.
An official directive that grants the United States army expanded counterinsurgency powers reveals Washington’s imprisonment in an exhausted vision of security.
The diverse social insurgencies in such countries as Thailand, Greece, India and China can also be seen in a common frame, as responses to a global process that produces extreme inequality and exclusion.
The new pattern of United States military attacks in the AfPak borderlands is fuelling ever-greater hostility on the ground. The arrest of a presumed Taliban militant in New York is one of its symptoms. The long war is recharging itself.
An inconclusive general election casts uncertainty over the shape of Britain’s next government. The issue of national security, amid conditions of severe financial constraint, will be high on the incoming administration’s agenda. But the political space for a fresh approach to the country’s defenc
