I'm so glad the semester is over so I can leave Friday to head to Brazil for a three week short course with my colleague Eugene Gholz. The topic is the World Cup "Rising Powers and Global Governance." We have reprised our 2010 edition of our South Africa short course...
Okay Ducks, here are your links from South Asia and Beyond! Marshal Mohammad Qasim Fahim, the Vice President of Afghanistan, has died of natural causes at age 57. Â Marshal Fahim fought along side...
In the all Ukraine all the time edition of the Duck, here are some essential reads from this week. Will ad more in a bit. Dan Nexon channeling his inner Henry Kissinger on the Monkey Cage Henry...
This duck is a bit under water these days. We've reached the mid-semester pre-spring break moment of high activity and low energy (warm weather and SXSW beckon). In the meantime, I've flagged a few...
Human Rights Watch has a new report on the killing of 190 civilians in early August by members of five Islamist rebel groups:  Ahrar al-Sham, Islamic State of Iraq and Sham,  Jabhat al-Nusra,  Jaish al-Muhajireen wal-Ansar, Suquor al-Izz Congratulations to Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons on the Nobel Peace Prize.  They won't have much time to celebrate given a mid-2014 timeline to destroy all of Syria's chemical weapons capabilities.  Here's a link to this week's OPCW press conference on the latest from Syria with Director-General Ahmet Üzümcü and members of the Syria...
The U.S. had two dramatic efforts to capture high priority terrorist targets, one in Libya and another in Somalia. The snatch and grab operation in Libya was a seeming success (though I'm wondering if last night's kidnapping of the Libyan Prime Minister was retaliation). Â The Somalia mission, coming one day after the 20th anniversary of the Black Hawk Down episode, was aborted when the team recognized that there was no way they could take their target alive, given heavy resistance and potential civilian casualties. The question that emerges from all this is: what the hell is the United...
We continue to degrade the U.S. brand, weakening America's ability to serve as a force for attraction around the world. Why would anyone want to emulate this particular crappy model of democracy? In terms of security, 70% of our intelligence community at the NSA and CIA have been furloughed (James Clapper and the WaPo raised the specter of a possible increased threat from terrorism and depending on your view of how active plotters are against America and its interests, you might find this logic persuasive). In terms of doing the nation's international business, staff at U.S. government...
I was transfixed this week by the week's events in Kenya, the attacks by Al-Shabaab on the Westgate shopping center that resulted in the deaths of at least 60 people. With friends just a stone's throw away from that mall, it was hard to turn away from that unfolding set of events. So, this week, to give you some context, I've linked a number of stories that try to explain how the attack could have happened, why al-Shabaab appears intent on this kind of action, and what this means for security in East Africa. At the same time as we have witnessed this horrific tragedy, there appears a...
The international news continues to be dominated by Saturday's terrorist attack at Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. The coverage of the attacks in most major newspapers has been excellent (and peppered with first-person reflections) due to the large number of reporters and photojournalists who are based in Nairobi. Somali Islamist group Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility via Twitter, and Twitter struggled to deactivate its feeds. The immediate demand was the withdrawal of Kenyan troops from Somalia, where they have been assisting AU forces and the interim Somali government since October 2011....
After last week's diplomatic overtures on Syria, we've entered a period of relative calm and back to our mixed bag of stories of interest. NPR is running a fabulous series on Brazil in the lead up to the World Cup, which is also timely since the Brazilian president cancelled her plans to visit the United States as a result of U.S. spying on her and other Brazilians, a revelation that came out of the Snowden affair. In other news, I'm going to link to stories on Chinese extraordinary measures to address pollution, how much energy electricity your average refrigerator uses, Nathan Jensen's...
It's late Friday afternoon -- here are a few things worth reading: Betcy Jose asks, with all of the attention on chemical weapons, why does it matter how people die in conflict? Sohail Hashmi and I agree we need stronger protection for civilians in conflict, but ignoring the use of chemical weapons is not the way to do it. David Petrasek is moderating and contributing to an excellent discussion of R2P and Syria at OpenGlobalRights. A go-to source for documents and links on Syria Trying to get to the bottom of this. Â There is a widening gap in reported regime casualties between the Syrian...
If you are like me, you have been transfixed by the unfolding story on Syria, the diplomatic gambit that has forestalled an imminent military strike. Alongside this important news has been the more picayune question of a Syria intervention advocate falsely claiming her academic credentials from my alma mater. Lost in the midst of all this Syria drama is the fact that the United States Men's National Team qualified for the World Cup. In my one vaguely nationalist refrain, we are going to Brazil! Read on about all of these things... It's an open question whether the Obama administration has...