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We think small when it comes to women. Micro, to be exact.
When I first started reporting on women entrepreneurs in conflict and post-conflict zones in 2005, nearly everyone, from IMF officials in their offices to development workers in the field, told me the only women I would find would be “selling cheese by the side of the road.” Women, I was told again and again, did not own the kind of growing businesses that created jobs and economic growth. This, it seemed, was strictly the purview of men. One customs official even joked that they were not sure why I had taken a week-long trip to Afghanistan to interview businesswomen when surely my interviews would all fit into the space of a single afternoon.
What I found when I began reporting, however, was that even in the poorest and most traditional countries, women owned businesses that went well beyond the

For centuries the inner-cohesion and tribal balance of the Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s ethnic majority, has been maintained by an ancient tribal code of honor called Pashtunwali, or “way of the Pashtuns”. This value system has been decimated after three decades of war, corruption, dislocation and religious fundamentalism — the offspring of incessant foreign meddling, both direct and via proxy.
Today, the Afghan government and the Taliban have made a conscious effort to devitalize Pashtunwali in their respective quests to control the population. Although it’s been dramatically weakened over the years, the tribal code still represents the prevailing norms that regulate Pashtun behavior, at both the individual and societal levels, and is still the tribe’s “center of gravity”.
The core tenets of Pashtunwali are based on self-respect, justice, hospitality, love, forgiveness, tolerance, loyalty, equality and

As United States involvement in Libya continues, I find myself at odds with some on the left opposed to the United Nation’s intervention to prevent the slaughter of civilians.
As I wrote on my blog over the weekend, like many, I’m wary of U.S. military intervention in other nations. I opposed the war in Afghanistan early because, along with the church I served at the time, I felt that U.S. intervention there would be harmful to the civilian population and that the United States would leave Afghanistan in a position similar to that of the Soviet withdrawal, weakened and humbled, without achieving our legitimate goal of defeating the terrorists who attacked the

After a 2010 Congressional election completely absent foreign policy debates, the irony is lost on no one that events around the world now completely dominate recent headlines. At first glance, it would be easy to see the Republican Party as divided from within as it tries to figure out how America should engage the world. On the one hand, the Tea Party is looking to slash America’s foreign policy budget down to the bone. One the other hand, we have Republican presidential hopefuls calling on the

A new report put out today by The Century Foundation urges the start of serious peace talks among the parties to the Afghanistan War. The report warns that even with the massive influx of U.S. troops over the past year, the war has settled into a stalemate in which neither side has a credible potential to eliminate the other on the battlefield. As such, the only credible path to an end to the Afghanistan conflict is through serious negotiations, which must begin now.
The Century Foundation’s call for serious negotiations to end the war reinforces the message pushed by the Rethink Afghanistan campaign for months, specifically that the only feasible way to end the war is through a political settlement, and the longer we wait, the less acceptable the settlement is likely to

As the bombing of Libya escalates, those who supported the attacks might want to ask themselves the following questions: What is next?
The death toll will mount and so will the structural damage to the country. Regardless of the hatred for Gaddafi, there will be inevitable resentment from Libyans upset at seeing the invaders of Iraq and Afghanistan target another Arab country. If the bombing does not work and Gaddafi continues to wage war against the rest of his country, will our intervention have helped or made the already bad situation worse? Do we then ‘stay the course’ to ensure freedom for the Libyan people?
These are questions that have yet to be answered by the authors of this new war, echoing the moral certainty of Bush and Blair and the disregard for public opposition.
Obama’s decision to involve the U.S. smacks of a cynical attempt to boost his popularity at home by appearing tough — an age-old trick used when the economy is in the doldrums and nothing appears to be working

Recently, I conducted an in-depth interview with Christopher Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, on his assessment of President Obama’s foreign policy, the implications of the WikiLeaks revelations, U.S. leadership in the age of globalization, excess defense spending and international development, the future of U.S. diplomatic engagement, and much more.
A 2000-word excerpt is below, while the full 4300-word transcript can be found at World Affairs Commentary.
Rahim Kanani: As you observe U.S. foreign policy in the context of the recent and continued uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa, how would you assess the Obama Administration’s current posture towards the crises?
Christopher Preble: I think that the Obama administration inherited a difficult situation, and has handled it reasonably well, all other factors being

The first time I taught a one-hour class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, a 20-year-old student made it very clear that while he might be studying ethics, law and morality in school, it was practicalities that really concerned him.
“If we are kicking in doors in Iraq,” the third year student — known in West Point parlance as a “Cow” — said, “and I find a guy who has a load of materials that could be used to build an IED in his home and explosive residue on his hands, I don’t have time to do a by-the-book interview do I? I mean, lives are at stake and we will have minutes, not hours or days, to get the info we need.”
The cadet’s question touched off a debate that easily lasted through the hour, with students arguing that Abu Ghraib and other forms of torture should always be off limits because they are illegal and they have harmed the United States’ larger strategic efforts, and others arguing that a soldier sometimes had to do “whatever it takes” to protect other soldiers from harm.
One argument that the class did not spend much time considering was the idea that legal, humane, interrogation techniques may, in fact, yield more accurate information faster.
A new book, Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force Took Down a Notorious Al Qaeda Terrorist by Matthew Alexander — an Air Force intelligence officer — is a first person account of the successes (and failures) of one 2-man interrogation team that is called on to repeatedly interrogate Iraqis in their homes, and make intelligence assessments in 10 minutes or less.
The book is a case study in what can be accomplished by interrogators who rely on their brains, rather than their fists, to gather information quickly.
Alexander and his partner abhor the use of abuse to make detainees talk. At one point, for example, in the kitchen of an insurgent, he struggles to pry the fingers of an angry Special Forces captain off the throat of a suspect.
Eventually Alexander prevails. But he observes, “If Walid had any thoughts of cooperating, they just

This week’s headlines were rightly dominated by news from Japan, Libya, and Bahrain. But developments on another international story — Afghanistan — also deserve our attention. Joining a growing list of Republican leaders, Haley Barbour took his first steps toward a possible 2012 run by sharply questioning our continuing presence in the country. This came on the heels of Mike Huckabee also distancing himself from the

By Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis
March 19 marks the eighth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, a nation that had no weapons of mass destruction and was not involved in the 9/11 attacks. It was sold to the American public as a war to defend our nation and free the Iraqi people. U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said our soldiers would be greeted as liberators and that Iraqi oil money would pay for the

General David Petraeus is in Washington, D.C., this week and, as expected, we are hearing claims of success and progress. No matter that we’ve heard these assertions and predictions before or that our elected representatives, charged on our behalf with oversight, are failing to ask such basic and elementary questions as:
or
or
Over the last couple of years, hasn’t anybody in the Pentagon or administration asked the hard questions of what would happen if we add 50,000 troops and tens of billions of dollars to a 30-year-old war in Afghanistan and it doesn’t turn out as we hoped? What do we do then?
or
Where is al Qaeda?
For those charged with oversight there is always a fine line between deference and respect. However, many members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, motivated by a lack of political and intellectual courage, have clearly chosen to abdicate their oversight responsibility and to elevate our general officers to a near clerical or infallible status and simply defer.
On Tuesday, the same day General Petraeus testified in front of the US Senate Armed Services Committee, I, along with Rolling Stone’s Michael Hastings and Professor Robert Pape of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, participated in a panel entitled “Afghanistan: A Countdown to July Redeployment” at the US House of Representatives:
During our panel, Michael Hastings offered a quip comparing the public relations efforts of General Petraeus to Charlie Sheen. At first consideration, it is just a wisecrack, but as Will Keola Thomas, an Afghanistan Study Group Fellow, explains quite well, it should be taken quite seriously:
Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings on the parallels between the PR campaign of a self-destructive major drug-consuming Hollywood star and General Petraeus’ publicity tour for a self-destructive policy in major drug-producing Afghanistan:
“This is the Charlie Sheen counterinsurgency

Today, we will spend roughly $325 million fighting in Afghanistan. Twenty million dollars was spent just during Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony to Congress this morning.
This month, we are on track to spend more than $10 billion in Afghanistan. This year, we expect to spend $120 billion fighting the war there.
And for what?
In the last year, we had the highest number of

I recently had the opportunity to see an early version of Heather Courtney’s new documentary, Where Soldiers Come From, a deeply emotional film following a group of young men from the Upper Peninsula (UP) who enlist in the Michigan National Guard following high school, and find themselves in the midst of the war in Afghanistan. The film itself is moving and well-made, contrasting the lives of working class rural young Americans, many of whom have few options in their communities, with the stark reality of war.
In full disclosure, Heather is a close family friend. In all honesty, that has nothing to do with the power of this

General David Petraeus is set to testify before Congress today, and he’s expected to again try to put a positive spin on a war effort that’s utterly failing to meet the goals set by its backers. While intelligence assessments show that tactical moves on the ground in Afghanistan have failed to fundamentally weaken the growing insurgency, Petraeus expected to offer “a mostly upbeat assessment today of military progress.” Petraeus’s Potemkin village tours of Afghanistan for visiting dignitaries may have “impressed” people like John McCain, but Defense Intelligence Agency head General Ronald Burgess rains all over the progress talk with the sobering news that the casualties inflicted on the Taliban have caused “no apparent degradation in their capacity to fight.”
As if to underline Burgess’ point, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a recruiting station for the Afghan Army, killing at least 35 people in northern Afghanistan on Monday.
Despite the assurances from the administration, the military and their think-tank allies, the massive troop escalations of 2009 and 2010 have failed to reverse the momentum of the insurgency or protect the Afghan population from insurgent intimidation and violence. From today’s L.A. Times:
While the Taliban maintained momentum in 2010 and early 2011, the escalation strategy backed by Petraeus failed to protect Afghans from violence as promised, with 2010 being the deadliest year of the war so far for civilians.
One of the most hawkish of the Petraeus backers in the Senate, Senator McCain, is working hard to set the bounds for acceptable debate in Congress, but he, like the counterinsurgency campaign, is failing:
McCain only sees what he wants to see,

I am calling for a non-violent revolution. A call to arms, without weapons.
On Tuesday the 8th of March, I joined Annie Lennox, Cheri Lunghi, Jude Kelly, Natasha Walter and hundreds of women on a march along London’s Southbank to celebrate 100 years of International Women’s Day (IWD).
It was encouraging to see so many women come together, but we should have been thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions perhaps? The first march in 1911 saw over a million women and men campaign to end discrimination against women and to demand equal rights.
Are we so complacent that we feel we do not need to demand gender equality? Many women are convinced there is equality between men and women. The fact however is that the US has never had a female president and, in the UK there has been just one female prime minister out of 52 male

Quick question – which U.S. President was the first to hold Ramadan itfar dinners at the White House, celebrating the breaking of the fast with Muslims? Hint: That same President visited Mosques more than once during his administration.
Many FOX News viewers may assume that it’s President Obama. But, it was actually George W. Bush.
It’s no secret that VoteVets.org had a number of issues with President Bush, most notably his decision to go to war in Iraq, and how he waged the

With all the turmoil and foreign affairs debate surrounding Afghanistan, it’s easy to forget about the millions of Afghan civilians still dealing with the consequences that have resulted from over thirty years of war. Families from all over the country who struggle to make a living are finding themselves caught between the crossfire of NATO forces and the Taliban. Anytime they interact or help one side, they risk facing major repercussions from the other. This dynamic has led to increased civilian casualties and waning support for the war at both home and

By Carol Smaldino, CSW
Commentary on David Brooks’ op-ed “The New Humanism” in The New York Times on Monday, March 7, 2011.
According to David Brooks, if we synthesize the information coming to us from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, sociology, behavioral economics etc, we will come to a more humanistic view of our conflicts, our nature and how we see things. To read an article on the level of Brooks’ Op-Ed in The New York Times is at once exciting and a bit off putting inasmuch as I find it kind of amusing or amazing that media people of his stature are just discovering what has been true for so long: the more we deny our emotions and shadows, the more we are doomed to act from them. My own writing of late has been occupied with how we might be capable of avoiding the emotional aspects of ecology and politics when it is so clear that we are motivated–and distracted–by powerful forces that pull us into black holes that, if we were more humanistically astute, we might have been able to avoid.
Of course, this raises a question about timing. Perhaps people simply haven’t been ready to integrate knowledge of ancient wisdom, mythology much less developmental

Among the many aspects of President Obama’s latest Executive Order on Guantanamo Bay is a requirement that detainees be assigned a “personal representative” to make their case to a newly-constituted review board. While that may sound like a nice idea, having recently seen what “personal representatives” do for U.S. prisoners in Afghanistan, I’m skeptical.
Yesterday’s order was billed by the Obama Administration as a generous addition to what the law requires, a “discretionary” additional annual review that the government will provide to prisoners it has deemed too dangerous to release and therefore detainable until (and if ever) this far-reaching war “against al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces” is over.
Given that this is an additional process of review – additional to the right of habeas corpus, or review by a federal court, that the Supreme Court has said the law already requires – it’s arguably a step forward. Although it represents an unfortunate acceptance by the Obama administration of the entire concept of long-term administrative detention based on some ill-defined concept of dangerousness, at least it gives prisoners another opportunity to defend themselves.
But is this a real step forward, or merely a dance around the requirements of due process?
The Administration’s decision to assign prisoners “personal representatives” rather than lawyers, and to allow continued indefinite detention based on classified evidence, reflects a serious limitation in the new order that parallels the problems I’ve previously pointed out about the review system in Afghanistan.
During a recent trip to Afghanistan, I and my colleague, Gabor Rona, observed a set of detainee review board hearings, or

With all the turmoil and foreign affairs debate surrounding Afghanistan, it’s easy to forget about the millions of Afghan civilians still dealing with the consequences that have resulted from over thirty years of war. Families from all over the country who struggle to make a living are finding themselves caught between the crossfire of NATO forces and the Taliban. Anytime they interact or help one side, they risk facing major repercussions from the other. This dynamic has lead to increased civilian casualties and waning support for the war at both home and

This Blogger’s Books from
Chaos for the Weary
Lee Camp
Satiristas: Comedians, Contrarians, Raconteurs & Vulgarians
by Paul Provenza, Dan Dion

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In the short-term budget agreement reached last week by Congress and the White House, $75 million in housing aid for 10,000 homeless veterans was cut. At a time when we’re pushing American soldiers to the limit of endurance, we just pushed 10,000 of them out of safe homes.
This mistake must be corrected in the longer-term agreement now being negotiated.
For the last few years, as troops have been returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, advocates and nonprofit providers have leveraged resources to address an alarming increase of veterans who are without stable housing, including the chronically homeless and a significant increase in the number of women. Marginal living conditions, scarce employment opportunities, physical injuries and mental health issues have made veterans more at risk of becoming homeless. For female veterans, family reunification challenges and experiences of abuse during their service exacerbate that risk.
USA Today last month reported on a recent federal analysis by HUD and the VA, which found that in 2009, 136,334 veterans spent at least one night in a homeless shelter — a count that did not include homeless veterans living on the

In his new book, The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan, author Bing West, former Reagan Assistant Secretary of Defense, tries to pass as “innovative solutions” what are really nothing more than stale Pentagon paradigms that didn’t work in Vietnam – that West believes should supplant General David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine. West’s archaic solutions are highly unlikely to show anyone how to get out of Afghanistan; however, they do have quite the potential to pave a road to perpetual war.
While discussing the book on Thursday at a forum hosted by the World Affairs Council in Seattle, West would have been best served to relegate the dialogue’s scope to the recycled military tactics he sees as some magic elixir. Unfortunately for West, during the question and answer session he exposed ethnic and cultural prejudices and a Western Christian worldview that has been the crux of the problem in the region since the days of British colonialism.
When asked how the U.S. could win, West encapsulated the essence of his strategy by declaring the only way to defeat the Taliban was to “put them down in the earth” – a dictum unlikely to be incorporated into West Point counterinsurgency curriculum anytime soon.
West’s plan, in more detail, consists of reducing troop levels, cutting off development aid to the Afghans and focusing solely on killing the

Last night, Columbia University’s Task Force on Military Engagement released its findings. ROTC–the Reserve Officer’s Training Corps–is welcome back on campus. Harvard followed suit. Both pro and con voices at these Ivy League schools have legitimate feelings about a uniformed presence on