Back before email, a world traveler who wanted to keep in touch and couldn't just pop into the nearest Internet café, might drop you a series of postcards from one exotic locale after another. Pepe Escobar, that edgy, peripatetic globe-trotting reporter for one of my...
If you think the Afghan War is increasingly unpopular in the United States, try Europe. A recent German Marshall Fund poll offered these figures on the question of the "share of population who want to reduce or withdraw troops" from that country: Romania, 71...
In Washington, calls are increasing, especially among anxious Democrats, for the president to commit to training ever more Afghan troops and police rather than sending in more American troops. Huge numbers for imagined future Afghan army and police forces are now...
Here may be the single strangest fact of our American world: that at least three administrations – Ronald Reagan's, George W. Bush's, and now Barack Obama's – drew the U.S. "defense" perimeter at the Hindu Kush; that is, in the rugged, mountainous lands of...
A presidential candidate opposed to the Iraq War is elected and enters the Oval Office. Yet six months later, there are still essentially the same number of troops in Iraq as were there when his predecessor left, the same number, in fact, used in the original invasion...
On this one-way planet of ours, it's hard sometimes to imagine things any other way, but for a moment let's try. Imagine, for instance, that in recent years the director of Iranian intelligence oversaw a program of "extraordinary rendition" aimed at those who were...
