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General Richard Dannat, the head of the British army, once remarked that the British Armed Forces are less understood and less honoured for their commitment and sacrifice by ordinary Britons than in comparable societies, like United States, and probably even less than in earlier periods.
But this is not unique to Britain. And it is part [...]

Last night I had dinner with a group of security experts and sat next to Chatham House’s Robin Niblett . We got to talking about the role of Ministers and how they seem to struggle with their role in overseeing today’s counter-insurgency missions i.e. operations like in Iraq. They shy away from detail, but are forced into [...]

Is the global economic situation having an impact on poppy eradication in Afghanistan? Afghan farmers are capitalising on soaring food costs by growing wheat instead of poppy crops, with the fall in heroin prices further fuelling the switch. This comes at a time when the price of a tonne of wheat in Afghanistan has almost [...]

Exactly how bad has the first half of this month been for the UN? Where does one start? You could choose Burma, where the international organization’s ability to deliver aid in a hostile climate has been hurled into doubt. Or Sudan, where Darfuri rebels sallied forth to attack Khartoum, demonstrating exactly what [...]

It may be too soon to determine what has trigged the current violence in Beirut. Some analysts have suggested Hezbollah took advantage of a labour strike on Wednesday by using it as a political opportunity and the strike quickly escalated into a flashpoint over Lebanon’s 17-month-old political crisis.
What is more clear is that the Lebanese [...]

Is the lack of fresh water a catalyst for conflict? The scenario has become fashionable of late, with Ban Ki-moon pondering such a future earlier this year, while John Reid made a great song and dance of it when he was Defence Secretary (perhaps he even did a rain dance). But it seems, according to [...]

It’s utter hypocrisy time in the Balkans.  With Serbia’s elections less than a fortnight away, everyone feels obliged to be nice to Belgrade in the hope that this persuades the voters to back the pro-EU liberals rather than the anti-EU nationalists.  But sensing that victory is in their grasp, even the hardliners are having to make [...]

Prince William, the second in line to the British throne, just finished a trip to Afghanistan, which probably happened at the same time as Taliban gunmen failed to kill Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a slew of international officials.
Despite Prince William’s safe return and President Karzai’s lucky escape, it should be clear to anyone that [...]

Last year I held a seminar at Demos on Silent Risks Tackling organised crime in the 21st century. A central argument put forward by the panel of experts was that as much of the harm done by organised crime remained hidden from the public eye the scale of the threat was still not widely [...]

What are the connections between climate change and migration? Not as obvious as one might think… one of the conversations we’ve been having in the coffee break is the lack of hard evidence when it comes to the relationship(s) between development, conflict, and climate change and the increasing difficulty to demonstrate cause and effect. Rhetorically [...]

Despite having practically invented modern counter-insurgency, today Britain is woefully ill-equipped for this kind of complex, mosaic-style warfare. The Times, echoing David’s post from a few days ago, has picked up on the problems Britain has in spending money in places like Afghanistan.
As readers will know, even though the Labour government sought to overcome the [...]

This just in from the BBC:
The head of the UN mission in Kosovo, Joachim Ruecker, has said he expects it to stay, throwing into doubt a planned June handover to EU officials. Mr Ruecker told the BBC that the extent of co-operation with the EU mission “had yet to be decided”.
“One thing is for sure,” [...]

The UN Mission in Kosovo is starting to look like that tedious guest at the end of your dinner party that just won’t leave. Except, in this case, the guest also happens to be your landlord. With the Security Council deadlocked, Kosovo is still subject to its Resolution 1244 of 1999 - and according to [...]

Yesterday, Congress heard testimony from James Locher III – the head of the Project on National Security Reform and the organisational genius behind the 1986 Goldwater-Nichol defence reforms that put the “joint” into the Joint Chiefs of Staff and later the Cohen-Nunn Amendment, which created the U.S. Special Operations Command.
Bringing together an impressive array of [...]

Today American Defence Secretary Robert Gates recommended that General David Petraeus be appointed head of US Central Command. Until Admiral William Fallon was sacked earlier in the year, the idea had been for  General Petraeus to replace General John Craddock as Supreme Allied Commander and help fix the failing mission in Afghanistan, especially after Paddy [...]

Barney Rubin has an excellent post updating on latest developments in Pakistan’s federally administered tribal areas.  Start, he says, from a clear recognition of one thing at least: the US has no plan.  Here’s a graph from the US Government’s General Accountability Office which proves the point:

Note especially the amount being allocated to political reform, [...]

Today, I gave the closing address at the RUSI conference, Protecting the Critical Infrastructure, in a session introduced by RUSI’s head of risk and resilience, Anthony McGee. From the introduction to the conference by RUSI’s head, Professor Michael Clarke:
Protecting the Critical National Infrastructure and ensuring the continuation of political, social and economic activity is vital [...]

I normally leave  scarcity issues to the other, better-informed contributors to this blog, but this week’s food riots in Haiti have brought UN peacekeepers face-to-face with the effects of rising prices, so I can’t keep my head that deep in the sand.  UN officials can talk about little except food prices at the moment.  John Holmes, [...]

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Back in the middle of February I posted on the plight of the Iraqi people in Basra suggesting that while the the city was not in the media spotlight things were turning from bad to worse. I ended saying I think we are going to see a lot more about Basra in the headlines in [...]

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