Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation as well as the co-director of New America’s Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative, where Katherine Tiedemann is a policy analyst. This post was originally published at the AfPakChannel.
The 2009 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) released last week rates Somalia as the World’s most corrupt country and New Zealand the least. The CPI is a project of Transparency International, a global non-profit, that analyzes business and expert surveys to measure “the perceived level of public-sector corruption in 180 countries and territories around the world.
With all of the talk and controversy about the war in Afghanistan in the past months, it has been easy for many to forget that despite the reduction in violence brought about partly by the 2007 troop surge, Iraq remains troubled.
For those who haven’t seen it yet, CNN’s Nic Robertson and Paul Cruickshank had an excellent piece air this weekend, detailing efforts by former Libyan terrorist leaders working with the Libyan government to convince jailed militants to renounce violence and al Qaeda for good.
Alexandra Taylor is a Research Intern with the New America Foundation. The rocket fire from a southern Lebanese village into Israel a little over a week ago by a relatively unknown militant group, the Ziad Jarrah Division of the Abdullah Azzam Brigade, is the most recent reminder of the tenuous peace across the Blue Line….
Indian border troops in Kashmir. In his remarks yesterday at the launch of the AfPak Channel, the new joint project between the New America Foundation and Foreign Policy magazine, New America President Steve Coll defined US interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan as going beyond the standard aim of disrupting, dismantling and defeating Al Qaeda.
This is a guest note by Jim Krane, a former AP Persian Gulf correspondent. His new book on Dubai, City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism, is available here. As Americans, Israelis and Palestinians continue their endless peace-jockeying, a more hopeful solution has emerged.
Patrick Doherty directs the New America Foundation/U.S.-Cuba 21st Century Policy Initiative. This post originally appeared at The Havana Note. Governor Bill Richardson is visiting Cuba on a trade mission for his state this week.
Many writers and thinkers have had late nights and early mornings in the past few days, owing to the release yesterday of the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report.
There will be much more on this in the days to come, but here is the heavily-redacted 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report on interrogation practices, scanned and posted by The Washington Independent and with commentary from Spencer Ackerman.