Addressing the subject of American assessments of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) in the run-up to ‘Transition” in 2014 and beyond, Anthony H. Cordesman’s 24th July 2012 testimony before the United States’ House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations is worth quoting: “No assessment system that measures performance against training, manning, or equipment […]

Visiting Canadian troops and various Afghan social and political representatives in Kandahar and Kabul in 2010, I had the opportunity to see first hand the first-rate professionalism, dedication and determination of the Canadian men and women serving there, both at the main base at Kandahar Airfield, and in several smaller sites. They were, and are, […]

(Q) So we all are a-twitter about KONY2012. Is it a well intended, if chronically and often misleadingly simplistic effort to promote awareness of a decades-long brutal conflict and to make real change? Or is it a blatant effort at self-promotion, mixed with fund-raising for self-interested purposes? (A) Most probably, it is both. And that […]

The international ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P) is triggered when a state and its government is either unable, or unwilling to fulfil its own prior responsibility to protect its domestic population from suffering one or more of the four mass atrocity crimes of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, or ethnic cleansing. R2P gives precedence to […]