Current Analysis Modernizing Memorial Day Whoever made the decision to open the National September 11 Memorial Museum just a few days before Memorial Day was both bold and intuitive. The theme of remembrance unites both events, but the 9/11 memorial is a departure because it is dedicated to those so often forgotten in the recollection of na Amanda Ufheil-Somers • 2 min read
Current Analysis Seven Places You Didn't Know Were Part of the Middle East 1) Guantánamo George R. Trumbull • 4 min read
Current Analysis "Progress" in Afghanistan, Then and Now I recently came across a document in the archives, a reminder that the march of “progress” in Afghanistan sometimes seems more reminiscent of a never-ending marching band reliably circling a parade ground [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLJ8ILIE780]. The martial metaphor here isn’t accidental: As el Darryl Li • 4 min read
Current Analysis Death and Taxes Last year 27 cents [http://static.natprior.org/images/charts/2015/taxes-desk.png] of every income tax dollar in the United States went to the military. Even so, that proportion has not generated enough revenue to pay for the military’s operations over the last 13 years, which, in a historic departur Amanda Ufheil-Somers • 2 min read
Current Analysis In-Laws and Outlaws A jury today convicted on all counts Sulayman Abu Ghayth, a Kuwaiti preacher who made televised statements in support of al-Qaeda shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001. As expected, war-on-terror liberals are seizing upon the outcome as proof that civilian courts are a superior alternative Darryl Li • 7 min read
MER Article Quetta's Sectarian Violence and the Global Hazara Awakening On a cold February day in London, over 40 Hazara men, women and children sat wrapped in blankets at the foot of the King George V monument opposite the Houses of Parliament. They were protesting the bombing of a vegetable market on February 16 in Quetta, Pakistan, that killed at least 91 of their br Zuzanna Olszewska • 16 min read
Current Analysis "Green on Blue": Message Not Received American and NATO media handlers are in message control mode trying to contain the fallout from the escalation of insider killings of American and NATO soldiers by trained Afghan forces, known in military parlance as “green on blue” attacks. The latest rash of insider attacks [http://www.nytimes.com Steve Niva • 4 min read
MER Article Big Empire, Little Minds Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan (Knopf, 2012). Christian Parenti • 9 min read
MER Article Culture, a Weapon System on the Wane The concept of “culture” took on new life in US military strategy in 2006. At the time of the US invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, cultural knowledge and training played no role in US military calculations; it was simply not part of the vocabulary of war. Culture became an official ROCHELLE DAVIS • 10 min read
MER Article Bagram, Obama's Gitmo On President Barack Obama’s second day in office, one of the three executive orders he signed was a commitment to close the detention facility on the naval base at Guantánamo Bay as soon as possible but no later than one year thence. An inter-agency task force headed by White House counsel Greg Crai Lisa Hajjar • 28 min read
MER Article "Afghan Arabs," Real and Imagined During the holiday season of Ramadan 1425/October 2004, The Road to Kabul was one of the more popular television miniseries broadcast throughout the Arab world. The program traced recent Afghan history from one superpower invasion to another through a budding romance at Cambridge University between Tariq, a Palestinian pursuing Darryl Li • 13 min read
MER Article Barfield, Afghanistan Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). B. D. Hopkins • 3 min read
