A seductive narrative of military progress in Afghanistan is spreading among United States analysts. The real story is more complicated.
The doubters of global warming are emboldened by their new ability - as in the “climategate” affair - to put climate researchers on the defensive. But the experience of comparable assaults on the discipline of peace studies in the 1980s suggests that hostile scrutiny can have longer-term benefits
The global effort to extinguish the nuclear peril needs to regain momentum. A bold act of leadership and imagination by one of the weapons-states could provide it.
The United States’s long-term operations in Helmand and elsewhere in Afghanistan face acute military and political pressures.
The ground-level realities of western military involvement in Afghanistan - including a few dozen soldiers in an isolated base - reveal the intractability of the war.
The deluge of publicity about a large-scale military operation against the Taliban must be set against Afghan realities that tell a different story.
The Barack Obama administration’s plans for subduing the Taliban are endangered by continuing insecurity in Iraq
The American-led effort to map Afghanistan’s future neglects the role of the country’s neighbours – and could yet be derailed by events over Iran.
On the anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration as United States president, the al-Qaida movement invites the respected SWISH management consultancy to assess its prospects.
The combination of Iran's effort to protect its nuclear facilities and Israel's to prevent its rival developing a weapon makes a crisis in 2010 all the more likely.
A series of intelligence failures that stretch from Afghanistan to the American heartland reveals the depth of the United States’s strategic predicament at the dawn of 2010.
