Strategic Paradigms by Ehsan Ahrari

The continuing economic crisis has created new pressures and demands for reduced expenditures inside the United States.  The chief question is how to lower defense spending without damaging America’s capacity to project power globally and being able to fight more than one war in different regions of the world.  The fact that no such situation [...]

The U.S. invasion of Iraq was the outcome of the then rising militarism of the administration of George W. Bush.  Some would argue that it might also have been a natural reaction to the fact that American territory was attacked on September 11, 2001.  But the invasion of Iraq itself had a spurious pretext: to [...]

I watched former General James (Jim) Jones, Jr. on the Charlie Rose Show.  He was President Barack Obama’s ineffective National Security Advisor; not ineffective because he was not fit for the job, but because he was not one of the Obama groupies. As such, he remained in the outermost circle of the concentric rings established every [...]

India and Pakistan are two strange countries in a number of ways.  I will mention only one such trait here, to get the discussion going.  Despite India’s denial to the contrary, Pakistan is its chief obsession.  Pakistan feels similarly toward India, but it has many reasons to feel that way.  First, on the scale of [...]

The best metaphor to describe the resilience of al-Qaida is to compare it with a weed that is common in the American south –Kudzu.  You can’t kill Kudzu, because it sends underground runners that keep it alive even when you cut off the above-groundportion of it.  So, the killing of Usama Bin Laden in May [...]

“With friends like you, who needs enemies?” is an adage that both the Pakistanis and the Americans seem to be hurling at each other.  The outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, has recently stated that the Haqqani group is the “veritable arm” of the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service.  Even though [...]

The diffidence shown by the autocratic rulers to the unabashedly pro-Israeli American policy is becoming history in the Middle East, as the dictators are falling and the emirs and kings of that region are counting their last days in power.  The recent bastion of America’s one-sided policy in that conflict has been the U.S. Congress.  [...]

Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, is going to the U.N. Security Council next Friday to seek independent statehood for Palestine.  The United States has done all it could to talk Abbas out of it.  Now, it is going to use its infamous veto to deny statehood for Palestine.  That will be a shame [...]

Two themes that emerge from the material that the US Special Forces captured when they killed Usama Bin Laden (UBL) in Abbottabad, Pakistan, are worth considering.  First, we are told that the al-Qaida (AQ) leader was obsessed about carrying out another major attack on the United States.  He might have concluded that that might be the only [...]

As much as I oppose America’s intervention in the Arab world, it might not be a bad strategy to use American drones to attack Syrian troops who are massacring the unarmed civilian protestors in that country.  Such a strategy will also complement President Barack Obama’s strategy of “leading from behind.”