This is a guest note by Oliver Lough, who serves as an editor at the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU). For some members of the international community, Afghanistan’s parliamentary elections of September 2010 were, among other things, an extended exercise in expectations management.
This is a guest note by Salman Al-Rashid, a Master’s student at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and an intern with the New America Foundation’s Middle East Task Force.
According to a survey published on Monday by the BBC World Service, Iran is viewed as the country with the most-negative influence in the world. It’s not hard to see why. Iran’s nuclear program is the subject of much controversy and anxiety in the United States and Europe.
US Ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder just gave an on-the-record State Department conference call readout of NATO meetings on Libya and what capacity NATO might have on hand for various contingencies there. I tried but failed to get a question in, and the subject I would have raised was not covered in the call.
Fareed Zakaria has a piece in this morning’s Washington Post titled “America’s Grim Budget Outlook.” But his argument is less about budget cutting than the investment deficit America’s future faces compared with other periods of its history.
Al Jazeera Director General Wadah Khanfar gave a stirring tour de force of authoritarian control, conflict and change in the Middle East at the TED 2011 meeting in Long Beach which I attended this past week.
Maryland is wrestling with marriage equality legislation right now, and Maryland Delegate Sam Arora of Montgomery County — someone I thought was on track to be one of the new, great, young progressive leaders of the nation has just screwed over his constituents, including many in the gay community from whom he raised a lot…
This is a guest note by Lawrence Wilkerson, Visiting Harriman Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary, and Arturo Lopez-Levy, Lecturer in the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Dawn Gable contributed to this article.
China has grown rapidly over the past few decades, but the engine of its remarkable growth may be reaching its limit.
This is so much fun on its own. I don’t want to further comment — just smile. Charles Rangel invites you to “like” his government Facebook page.
