This article was first published on RealClearWorld, and is part of the MEI series titled: “The Middle East and the 2016 Presidential Elections.”
This article was published on February 5, 2016 on Foreign Policy’s South Asia Channel.
Amb. Robert Ford delivered the following prepared remarks at a hearing of the U.S. House Armed Services Committee on January 12, 2016. Click here to watch C-SPAN’s coverage of the hearing.
Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee,
It is an honor to be on this distinguished panel. Thank you for inviting me.
Saudi Arabia is back, knocking on Pakistan’s door. Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir and King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud’s son and deputy crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, arrived separately in the early days of the new year to persuade Islamabad to join hands with Riyadh in confronting regional security threats. That is, the Saudis want Pakistan’s support against Iran.
This paper is part of a MEI scholar series titled “The Middle East and the 2016 Presidential Elections.”
Abstract
This paper is part of a MEI scholar series titled “The Middle East and the 2016 Presidential Elections.”
This article was first published in The Hoover Institution’s The Caravan.
Daesh or ISIS does not represent an existential threat to any state except Syria and Iraq. It occupies and controls ungoverned space in the region between Iraq and Syria and in parts of northern Africa; and its self-proclaimed Caliphate has benefited from the seizure of some income producing assets in these areas. Daesh depends on the dynamism of success and expansion, both of which have been in short supply of late.
This article first appeared on NPR’s Parallels blog.
U.S. troops in Afghanistan lowered the flag and boxed up their gear at the end of last year as President Obama declared the formal end to 13 years of U.S. combat operations.
October 2015 marks the fourteenth month of formal U.S. military engagement in the struggle against the Islamic State (ISIS). The Obama administration was at first reluctant to engage U.S. military power in this struggle but then became more deliberate in its approach. U.S. involvement in the battlegrounds of Iraq and Syria has been evolving especially over the past year. This evolution has been defined and is in many ways limited by a strategy that emphasizes political change in Iraq and a broad coalition of states taking action against ISIS.
This article was first published on Foreign Policy’s South Asia Channel.
Read the full article in the September 2015 issue of The Ripon Forum.
It will be one year this September since the U.S. president declared the formation of an international coalition to ‘degrade and destroy’ ISIS. After 6,000 air strikes, 9,000 targets struck, 10,000 fighters killed, and various battles undertaken in Iraq and Syria, the war is at a strategic stalemate.
Twenty-five years ago, on August 7th 1990, an American interagency team walked into an urgent meeting with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, not knowing what would happen. A week earlier Iraq had seized Kuwait. The Americans feared that the Iraqi Army might keep going, seizing the Saudi oil fields. As a result of decisions made at that August 7th meeting, Iraq and terrorism have dominated American foreign policy for three decades and continue to do so.
If the hallmark of al-Qa‘ida was to execute simultaneous spectacular attacks to advance its strategic momentum, the month of Ramadan in June and July showed that the Islamic State (ISIS) is taking this tactic to a new level. Yet the extreme amounts of blood shed during the holy month will likely ultimately weaken ISIS, as tribes and other groups in Syria and Iraq, even more appalled by the organization’s barbarism, unite against it.
