The Washington-hosted summit on nuclear security heard Barack Obama warn of the fearful prospect of a non-state group using a nuclear weapon. How realistic is it, and how to prevent it?
The Barack Obama administration places drone attacks at the heart of its military strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But its enemy too is capable of making deadly use of evolving technology.
A decade of pitiless wars and brutal inequalities has made the arguments of the book “Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century” - first published before 9/11, and now in its third edition - more relevant than ever. In his 450th column for openDemocracy, Paul Rogers looks back and forwar
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.
