David Ignatius
12/17/2010

While substantial progress has been made in Afghanistan, the Afghan people themselves remain cautious and noncommittal to the American presence and Afghan government. They are not yet willing to trust that the Taliban will not win out and re-establish their authority. Afghan corruption and incompetence would appear to validate that concern, but measured improvement continues apace.

Ignatius is a twice-weekly columnist for The Post, writing on global politics, economics and international affairs.

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Nicholas D. Kristof
12/16/2010

Kristof looks at the heroic life of Dr. Hawa Abdi of Somalia, who has confronted armed militias there and forced them to back down. Today she runs a camp and hospital that serves 90,000 displaced people. She provides them with food and water and trains the people whose roots are in herding to farm and fish. She also runs a school, literacy and health classes for women, and a small jail for men who beat their wives. Kristof says she is an example of the tolerant and peace-loving side of Islam and what people can do when they tap into courage, compassion, and tolerance.

Kristof is a New York Times columnist.

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Matthew Kaminski
12/16/2010

Pakistan is becoming more like Afghanistan, only with a more advanced economy and nuclear weapons, writes Kaminski. The idea that Islamabad’s leaders can control the Taliban is probably a necessary fiction, but the reality is that many extremists have slipped their leash. Pakistan’s military has yet to show that it wants to–or that it can–control the Islamist wave. Gen. David Petraeus, the American commander in Afghanistan, certainly has contingency plans for Pakistan that go beyond extra doses of drones or diplomacy. Putting American boots in Waziristan is an obvious idea. But, Kaminski concludes, this is unappealing, as the fallout in Pakistan would be hard to predict. So for the moment America gets to pretend that Pakistan can do this on its own.

Kaminski is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.

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Robert Wright
12/14/2010

If there is no two-state solution to the situation between Israel and Palestine, Israel has two poor choices: give Palestinians the vote in occupied territories while the Arab birth rate makes Israeli Jews a minority or continue to deny the vote to Arabs, moving Israel toward global pariah status and giving terrorists propaganda to feed their calls for war. Wright says there is a third solution: have the United Nations create a Palestinian state now as it did a Jewish state. Although it would be tricky, it is better than the current state of affairs between Israel and Palestine.

Wright blogs for The New York Times on culture, politics, and world affairs.

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Edward Jay Epstein
11/26/2010

A UN investigation may soon implicate Hezbollah in the murder of the former Lebanese prime minister, says Epstein. If the agents of Syria or Iran are ultimately named by the UN’s special tribunal, the half-decade delay in justice for Hariri’s murder may be little more than a prelude. Syria and Hezbollah, which both possess the power to destroy Lebanon’s fragile government, will almost certainly denounce such a finding and shift the blame–as Hezbollah has already suggested–to their convenient bete noire: Israel. Such allegations and recriminations, meaningless as they may be, could drag on for another half-decade, if not longer.

Epstein, an investigative reporter, is currently completing a book on the 9/11 Commission.

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Maureen Dowd
11/24/2010

Dowd looks at the recent news that the US and Britain had been negotiating for months with a fake Taliban commander. She says this illustrates the futility of the war there because this illustrates the extent of the cluelessness we have about the Afghan culture. The Russians’ failure there should have been a warning to us about the odds of winning a war in Afghanistan because they were far more vicious than we are and were culturally much closer to the region.

Dowd is a New York Times columnist.

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Zalmay Khalilzad
10/20/2010

Although Pakistan has and continues to do a lot of good in the war on terror, it continues to give only sanctuary and support to the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani terrorist network. This hampers American military efforts while contributing to American and Afghan deaths and has helped to sour relations between the two countries. Current American policy with Pakistan is not working. Washington must offer Pakistan a stark choice between positive incentives and negative consequences. Khalilzad offers a number of examples.

Khalilzad, a counselor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the president of a consulting firm, was the ambassador to Afghanistan, Ira, and the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration.

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Thomas L. Friedman
10/20/2010

Friedman gives several reasons why President Obama is not anti-Israel. These include building a global coalition to stop Iran from making a nuclear weapon and trying to advance the peace process in the Middle East to get Europeans and the UN behind tougher sanctions on Iran. It is not an act of hostility to ask Israel to continue its expired 10-month partial moratorium on settlement-building in the West Bank to prevent Palestinians from avoiding peace talks, but Israel’s prime minister has been resisting this request or demanding a payoff from the US for continuing the freeze. Friedman gives two reasons why he is wrong to do so. He says president Obama is doing his job and Palestine and Israel’s leaders should do theirs and work for peace during this process.

Friedman is a New York Times columnist.

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Yossi Klein Halevi
10/14/2010

Halevi considers Israeli Defense Minister Barak’s attempt to persuade the Netanyahu government to extend a freeze on settlement building. For all the ambivalence toward the settlements, Halevi says there is good reason why the Israeli government should heed Defense Minister Barak’s advice and extend a settlement freeze. A freeze would prove that the obstacle to Middle East agreement isn’t the settlements–blueprints exist for resolving the settlement issue in a comprehensive peace agreement–but eather the more basic refusal of the Palestinian leadership to accept the legitimacy of Jewish sovereignty over any part of the land.

Halevi is a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and a contributing editor of the New Republic.

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