United States

I’ve now settled in DC, and my internship with the French embassy has been everything I hoped it would be, and more (by the way, the French cafeteria inside the embassy is awesome). Obviously, though, anything I write on this blog is just me and doesn’t reflect the position, thoughts or analysis of any anyone else – for better and for worse. Just to be clear, this means I do not speak for the French embassy, I do not speak for the French government, I speak for no one but me in my personal capacity as a blogger, no more, no less.

[Read part 1 here]      Focused first and foremost on consolidating his power, like any political leader facing an insecure environment (the same principle applies to North Korea, who seeks a nuclear deterrent to ensure regime survival), Karzai failed to make the needs of the Afghan people his priority, as reflected in the flawed loya jirga most recently.

Deciding Afghanistan's Stability Everywhere but Afghanistan

The peace and stability of Afghanistan, the subject of numerous international, regional and national consultations, consistently shuts out the Afghan people themselves, and the recent peace jirga (June 2-4) hosted by Hamid Karzai was no exception. This calls into question the validity of the Obama administration’s approach, on more levels than one.

One of the key initiatives that President Obama announced during the State of the Union address was a freeze on federal spending increases, and one key area of spending he made a point of exempting was the defense budget.   That reminded me of this essay on US military spending by the Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow.  He does a fine job of listing the threats the United States faces in the world and our analyzing our ability to meet them, but one statistic jumped out at me: for 2010 the Pentagon budget will be roughly $700 billion, this, Bandow notes, is only a little more than the inf