Strategic Paradigms by Ehsan Ahrari

Former Secretary of State Collin Powell famously told President George W. Bush before he invaded Iraq, if you send troops to that country “you are going to own it.”  That is otherwise known as the “the Pottery Barn rule,” “You break it, you own it.”  Now, the United States “owns” Iraq as well as Afghanistan. [...]

The current shape of the Afghan conflict is such that either the United States or the Taliban has to be decisively defeated. No other outcome is likely become a reality anytime soon.

 When al-Qaida was ranting against the corrupt and inept Arab and Muslim dictators as “slaves” of America, it had captured the sympathy of quite a few people in the Arab world, who agreed with that organization’s criticism of their rulers, but not with its brutal ways.  The Arab awakening is bringing about the kind of [...]

President Barack H. Obama’s announcement of his new strategy on December 1, 2009, conclusively makes the war in Afghanistan “Obama’s war of choice.” The President spoke from one of the hallowed symbols of America’s military power–the United States Military Academy at West Point. Gone is the rhetoric of the wastefulness of Bush’s war of choice [...]

The real test of President Barack H. Obama’s dealing with China and Russia will emerge in his success to persuade those countries to support the U.S. in pressuring Iran to give up its nuclear weapons aspirations.  Obama has reported to have lobbied China on that issue during his recent visit. He also broached Russia in the recent [...]

President Barack H. Obama’s recently concluded trip to East Asia has created an irrational buzz in the American media about how the declining hegemon is increasingly behaving as such, and how China seems to be exploiting that perception to further its own advantages. The second part of this buzz is not contentious, since all great [...]

As President Barack H. Obama is edging toward making up his mind about accepting, partially accepting, or not accepting General Stanley McChrystal’s advice to insert more troops in Afghanistan, I hear an abundance of metaphors flying.  One metaphor was used by the candidate Obama himself during the presidential campaign, when he described starting the war [...]

Major crises of each generation create heroes and villains related to them. This is true for all nations. One of the recent trends inside the United States, when facing the crisis du jour, is to examine how leaders who faced similar crises in the past behaved; what mistakes they made, and why they made those mistakes; [...]

As the Obama administration ponders America’s warfighting strategy for Afghanistan, there are muted comparisons between the current U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and its involvement in South Vietnam in the 1960s. Given that the United States was defeated in South Vietnam, such comparison serves as an added burden for the mandarins of America’s national security strategy, [...]

President Barack H. Obama spoke to the Muslim world from Cairo on June 4, 2009.  Symbolically, that day will always be remembered every time someone raises the issue of the United States’ relations toward the world of Islam.  The following statement he made that day will go down in history as a memorable one:  The [...]