US President Barack Obama’s formal declaration of the end of US combat operations in Iraq on August 31 is a good a moment as any to reflect on the war, the United States’ global position, and Obama himself.

Iraq War: Have The Goals Been Achieved?

First, let me address the Iraq War itself. There were several publicly [Read more...]

US President Barack Obama’s decision to replace General Stanley McChrystal as commander in Afghanistan raises the question of how the war effort there is likely to proceed under new commander General David Petraeus.  BMI’s Tim Cooper talks to Yoel Sano, Head of Political Risk, about the future of Afghanistan.

 

 What Next For Afghanistan? [16:00m]
Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

One of the news stories drawing my attention today is a report in the New York Times suggesting that Afghanistan has almost US$1 trillion worth of mineral deposits. The article, citing US geologists, lists iron, copper, cobalt, gold, and lithium as existing in vast quantities in the country’s soil. Lithium in particular has been highlighted, [Read more...]

There was a time when audio or video messages issued by Osama bin Laden would be front-page news, and we’d all wonder if a new al-Qaeda terror attack was imminent.

However, in recent years, a widespread belief has developed that bin Laden is irrelevant, and that the real terror threat to the West comes [Read more...]

In case you didn’t notice, Sunday December 27 marked the 30th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which we now know was a pivotal event in world history. It was partly with this anniversary in mind that I recently read Artyom Borovik’s The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in [Read more...]

US President Barack Obama is stepping up the war in Afghanistan by sending an additional 30,000 American troops there in the first half of 2010, on top of the 68,000 already there. Other Western countries have around 40,000 troops in Afghanistan. Soon, the Western troop deployment will exceed peak Soviet occupation levels of 110,000-120,000 in [Read more...]

As US President Barack Obama ponders whether to send an additional 40,000+ American troops to Afghanistan, the bigger question is whether the US really has enough troops to neutralise its enemies.

The US has a demonstrable ability to defeat conventional military forces in places such as Iraq (1991, 2003), Serbia (1999) and Afghanistan (2001), [Read more...]