October 19th, 2007
Warnings of the disaster that would come of an American attack on Iran are plentiful, increasingly urgent, and persuasive[i] – but it is not at all clear that they are working on the one vote that matters. The NewsHour on PBS television ran a short feature on the growing irrelevance of George Bush, but on […]
Read MoreArmed Conflict, Defence and Human Security, Nuclear Disarmament
October 14th, 2007
Without a negotiated settlement – that is, without a broad political consensus to support a new national order – inserting international military forces into any ongoing armed conflict risks prolonging and intensifying that conflict and puts the international community on one side of a civil war. And experience and logic tell us that political consensus […]
Read MoreOctober 11th, 2007
Some 80 percent of Americans think that nuclear weapons make the world a more dangerous place. Only 10 percent think the world is safer because of nuclear weapons. But when the same Americans were asked how they felt about their own country’s nuclear weapons, 47 percent said they made them feel safer and 32 percent […]
Read MoreOctober 8th, 2007
Over a weekend of turkey and pumpkin pie there was also time to reflect on the sixth anniversary of the October 7, 2001 attack on Afghanistan – an attack that launched a war that not only continues, but by most accounts, apart from those of the Foreign Minister,[i] shows declining promise of victory. The architects […]
Read MoreSeptember 30th, 2007
Some months back, in a not for attribution briefing on Afghanistan, a Canadian military official observed that the Taliban are skilled at luring foreign forces into tactical military victories that actually become strategic victories for the Taliban. A new report from UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on the situation in Afghanistan[i] essentially confirms that admission – […]
Read MoreSeptember 25th, 2007
While American news media and University Presidents were trying to decide whether Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be best characterized as the devil incarnate, a petty dictator, or just plain mad, he managed to deliver himself of at least one truth during his New York visit – “the nuclear bomb is of no use,” he […]
Read MoreSeptember 21st, 2007
Political correctness aside, Pearson’s point has not lost any of its trenchant relevance. He made the comment in his 1957 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and it was followed by three decades of the kind of Goliathon war preparations that are, and we hope will remain, unmatched in human history. Indeed, the legacy of those precocious […]
Read MoreSeptember 19th, 2007
The National Counterterrorism Centre of the United States delivers the cold hard facts:[i] in 2006 terrorist attacks rose by 25 percent and deaths at the hands of terrorists by 40 percent. But this time it’s not the devil that is in the details. It turns out that when you look closely, in Europe, Eurasia, East […]
Read MoreAugust 31st, 2007
Brig.-Gen. Guy Laroche, currently Canada’s top military commander in Afghanistan, puts it simply:[i] “I don’t talk to the Taliban.” In the same Canadian Press report, Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier is just as categorical: “Canada does not negotiate with terrorists, for any reason.” For both comments, the immediate issue was the negotiated release of South Koreans […]
Read MoreAugust 24th, 2007
It was a particularly arresting headline that warranted the further search: “Taliban, US in new round of peace talks.” Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistan Bureau Chief of the Asia Times Online, has been writing a series of articles on continuing efforts to negotiate deals which he says “aim to stop violence in selected areas and […]
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