The Current Discussion: CIA Director Michael Hayden says al-Qaeda is more or less defeated in Iraq and Afghanistan. Should the Bush administration take credit? How much?

I am still trying to figure out the nature of the conflict or war and the basic fight or argument of al-Qaeda versus the United States. I wonder whether it all can be framed in the common perspectives of the rest of the world. It seems convenient that the apparent rise and defeat of al-Qaeda, a group with no pre-invasion presence in Iraq, is so timely with the American election season! What about the war on terror? Is that one over too, or will be put on the same backburner – where the war on drugs (for example) sits? Are these comments just telegraphic codes for election slogans for the next five months?

Continue »

The Current Discussion:Is there a growing global agenda -- that is, an agenda of issues being discussed that affects the world rather than individual countries? Or are local concerns still paramount?

There is no growing global agenda. Only a few people insist upon returning to the time when the world was believed to be flat. There has never been a common agenda. A series of ill-conceived tactical patchworks, inward-looking ideas and flamboyance have always cluttered the path and have been hyped as “good for the world” by the guidance and “leadership” of a selfish few.

Continue »

The Current Discussion: After Ireland voted down EU reforms last week, we're left wondering: Is the EU unraveling?

The question is an emotional exaggeration. It is not logical to banish more than six decades of convergence and nurtured commonalities just because less than one percent of all EU citizens have voted against an admittedly very complex treaty of 300 pages and very technical language. Alas, Ireland owes its development of the last two decades to the EU and its generous grants, soft loans and funding that frames the remarkable transformation of that island nation over the last two decades.

Continue »

The Current Discussion: The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan. Rather than sending more troops, is it time to negotiate a truce there?

The situation in Afghanistan has several variables and unstable elements that yearn for reassessment. It is not possible to formulate a simple answer without having to completely rethink of the most obvious variables.

It is time to reassess the present state and structure of the Taliban as they are likely to have revamped their structure. They started as a group of extremists with intolerant and violent practice of Sunni Wahhabism, which eventually served as a cover for criminal deeds. The Taliban, originally grouped in northern Pakistan, mostly recruited from southern Afghan Pashtun tribes. They eventually took over Afghanistan in 1990s in a civil war against tribes from the north and the Mujahideen that fought the soviet occupiers. Over the course of the civil war, Afghanistan transformed from a poor and shambolic country into a ruin and a failed state that eventually hosted al-Qaeda—a loose affiliation of Arab Sunni extremists and a criminal enterprise that aimed to change the Saudi regime. So the answer to the first question, some seven years later, is whether the Taliban are set in their religious cult or if they are now purely a pack of criminal opportunists.

Continue »

The problems in Zimbabwe have accumulated over four decades. Mr. Mugabe’s self-indulgent ways have markedly accelerated ever since he has found support for his views on “independent African politics”-- in South Africa and predominantly from President Mbeki. But the present impasse is an artificial and hollow craving for unlimited power that flies in the face of independence movements in Rhodesia. In turn, this drive for power is stripping all democratic institutions to a carcass of the original goals. Blends of populist methods have eroded economic, and thus national, security in this odd experiment.

Continue »