Key indicators of reassessment and public inquiry include a sustained decrease in the reported number of strikes since 2010 and an even sharper drop in recent months.

Members of Congress have become increasingly vocal in expressing their concerns, exemplified by John Brennan's extended confirmation process for the CIA directorship and Sen Rand Paul's 13-hour Senate filibuster over the US drone policy.

In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama pledged to "continue to engage Congress" and to ensure proper transparency to the American public. Recently reported findings of the president's intelligence advisory board that the US intelligence community has become too focused on military operations to the neglect of intelligence gathering, reflect American concerns over the drone strikes programme.

To read the full op-ed, click here.

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This op-ed first appeared in Dawn on April 26, 2013

Photo courtesy: U.S. Air Force

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is prevented from running for a third term. But this does not appear to have diminished his ambitions to remain a political force after leaving office, a goal he hopes to achieve by hurting his political opponents and pushing his top aide, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, as the best candidate in next month's poll.

Alarmed by both of these prospects, Ahmadinejad's many influential foes are working to stop him - and they are leaving no stone unturned in their efforts (including, according to the Iran News Network site, the blocking of text messages containing the family name Mashaei - a filter that was reportedly removed once the story broke.)

To read the full op-ed, click here.

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This op-ed first appeared at CNN.com on May 7, 2013

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons

The peace talks, proposed May 7 by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, face significant obstacles from the recalcitrant Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad and a fragmented opposition.

Nonetheless, the U.S.-Russian diplomatic Hail Mary could finally begin to shift the deadly dynamics of the 2-year-old Syrian conflict from deepening militarization toward a political solution designed to end the horrific violence.

To read the full op-ed, click here.

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This op-ed first appeared at CNN.com on May 10, 2013

Photo by FreedomHouse via flickr

In retrospect, this arms race was incredibly costly, wasteful and dangerous. If war had started, the two superpowers would have destroyed each other and probably all of humanity.

But deterrence did work. And the U.S. never attacked the Soviet Union or any other nation to stop them from becoming nuclear powers.

So, why does it seem that the U.S. has a different strategy toward North Korea and Iran?

To read the full op-ed, click here.

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This op-ed first appeared at CNN.com on April 30, 2013

Photo by jonkeegan via flickr

Faced with a big drop in orders for goods and services from the Pentagon, U.S. defense contractors face the prospect of lower earnings, downsizing and worker layoffs unless they can find new customers. Other countries around the world could become those customers.

In a globalized world where U.S. security is increasingly linked to weaker nations' insecurity, the next new business opportunity for the defense industry lies not solely in building armies, but in helping to build secure and resilient societies worldwide.

To read the full op-ed, click here.

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This op-ed first appeared in Investor's Business Daily on April 29, 2013

Photo courtesy of U.S. Army Europe Images vis flickr

Supporters of the g7+'s New Deal hope it will be as game-changing as its predecessor.

The New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States is intended to change the paradigm of international engagement with fragile states. It is the foundation of the g7+'s goal to amplify the role of the states governing the 1.5 billion people who persevere in fragile environments around the world.

The g7+'s New Deal is structured around three pillars:

• Peace-building and state-building goals.
• Inclusive and country-led transitions out of fragility.
• Relationship-building with donor partners.

Notably, three of the five peace-building and state-building goals relate to good governance, which suggests members believe some degree of institutional resilience and rule of law is vital for development. Membership in the g7+ thus requires states to admit that their capacity for good governance is weak and unsustainable.

The New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States has not gone unnoticed. In 2011, more than 40 countries and organizations endorsed it at the High Level Forum for Aid Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea. Supporters include Afghanistan, the Solomon Islands, Germany, Denmark, and the African Development Bank - a diverse community that facilitates peer learning and dual engagement activities.

Such interactions meld country ownership with accountability in a way that conditionality cannot. The progress that nations choose to hold each other accountable for is informed by South-South understanding. The constraints, challenges, and capabilities that affect one member often apply to other members. The initiative therefore carries legitimacy not replicable in traditional development partnerships.

Partner countries and multilaterals have taken steps to support pilot countries. In one example, Sweden and the United States partnered with Liberia, with the U.S. Agency for International Development providing technical assistance to Liberia's New Deal task force.

The World Bank, while not a specific pilot country partner, has been also proactive by facilitating South-South knowledge exchange about oversight of extractive industries and integrating fragile state issues into its country strategies.

The U.N. has an important role in New Deal implementation because it has a peacekeeping or peace-building mission in nearly every pilot country. Although the General Assembly has not formally endorsed the New Deal, individual U.N. agencies have been vocal about supporting the endeavor.

At headquarters level, a U.N. task force on New Deal implementation is co-chaired by the Peace-building Support Office and the U.N. Development Program. The heads of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, Department of Field Support, and the U.N. Development Program have instructed their country representatives in pilot countries to provide active support for New Deal implementation.

At the country level, the U.N. peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the peacekeeping mission in South Sudan have incorporated New Deal principles or mechanisms into their strategies.

However, it remains to be seen how far the momentum generated by recent global consultations and agreements will carry the g7+ in achieving their goals. After all, the New Deal is an unapologetically ambitious framework. Its implementation is, as always, subject to political will and financial resources.

Four states took the first step of conducting baseline fragility assessments, with positive results for fostering national dialogue, but three pilot countries remain at the starting line. Partnerships have not moved as quickly as projected, and g7+ members acknowledge they must "speed up and scale up"[1] implementation. Additionally, basic objectives of g7+ members, such as defining 'fragility' and securing government buy-in, remain challenges.

One major concern of g7+ observers is whether all members are committed to engaging sub-national government stakeholders, civil society and local populations. Successful New Deal implementation is in part dependent on national government accountability to those they govern. Civil society has been involved at International Dialogues on Peace-building and State-building and some country-level workshops, but its broader participation is limited and unknown.

For example, South Sudan recently presented a draft assessment to stakeholders, but it is unclear how well civil society was represented at that validation workshop. Yet South Sudan itself noted that a strong civil society is crucial to the accountability of public institutions and advocacy of marginalized groups. By emphasizing more deliberate and transparent engagement with stakeholders outside of the national government, g7+ members can better ensure that their work reflects the priorities and values of their populations.

Effective implementation will require members to capitalize on international interest, particularly in the run-up to 2015. That means collaborating with state, private, and grassroots sectors; maintaining transparent status updates; as well as focusing on governance peace-building and state-building goals to solidify stability gains as well as attract economic opportunities.

Ideally, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will back his declaration that the U.N. "will play its part"[2] with advocating for New Deal funding, and U.N. agencies will be flexible with requests for alignment with national priorities. Most importantly, member states should remember what makes the g7+ unique: they should continue to hold each other publicly accountable for their results.

Despite these challenges, the ramifications of the New Deal are already being felt. Its acceptance by the international community has made it harder to ignore the priorities of fragile states, who are now speaking with a clearer, more assertive voice on the international stage.

Stimson Spotlight by Shu Liang

[1] International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding. "International Dialogue Update, Jaune 2012." http://www.interpeace.org/publications/cat_view/21-international-dialogue?orderby=dmdate_published&start=25

[2] Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. "Secretary-General's Remarks at Fragility Assessment Workshop." 15 August 2012. http://www.un.org/sg/statements/index.asp?nid=6247

To read the full article, click here.

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This article first appeared in 38 North on April 23, 2013

Photo by stephan via flickr

There is one important and critical difference between the two brothers who apparently carried out the attacks in Boston and the majority of second-generation Muslims in the United States: the Tsarnaev brothers lived in two worlds, yet apparently did not feel they belonged to either. The brothers were ethnically Chechen, but lived in Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia and then the U.S.

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This op ed first appeared in Newsday on April 23, 2013

Photo courtesy: Federal Bureau of Investigation

However, several African political commentators contend that putting Mali's laudably democratic but habitually fragile and chronically ineffective regime back together again is simply a bad idea.

Whether right or wrong, this criticism highlights an unsettled question for Western interventionist powers: Wherever a liberal regime has collapsed and a Western power has interceded to deter further violence, should the intervening power insist on restoring similarly high levels of democracy?

Most Western diplomats would likely answer "yes, of course," with little hesitation. However, a recent analysis of the record of stability among liberal democracies with extraordinarily youthful populations-like Mali's, where nearly half of the population is under the age of 16, and fertility remains greater than six children per woman-suggests that under these circumstances, the state and its citizens might fare better with somewhat less democracy.

In 1972 Freedom House published its first annual global assessment of political rights and civil liberties States assessed as Free (the highest ranking) that also had a very youthful population (a median age of 25 years or less) have been exceptionally unstable. For that 40-year period, their year-to-year risk of dropping out of the Free category has consistently remained about six times higher than states with a more mature age structure (see Figure 1).

The consequences to the populace of these "youthful democratic dropouts" have often been severe. Within five years of losing Freedom House's Free assessment, about half of these dropout states were being ruled by autocratic regimes (assessed as Not Free) or had hit the lower rungs of partial democracy (low scores in Freedom House's Partly Free category).

Why should a liberal regime be such a "poor fit" for states with youthful populations? Political demographers argue that when young adults dominate the adult population, and when the growth rate of school leavers and young job seekers is high and the possibility of employment is low, militant state and non-state actors find it easy to recruit.

Roughly 80 percent of all new civil and ethnic conflict since 1970 has initially emerged within states with a youthful population. The political violence and social tensions that commonly prevail under such conditions tend to build elite support for authoritarians promising increased security. Those same tensions undermine the legitimacy of highly democratic regimes-states permitting openly competitive politics, guaranteeing free speech and assembly, and limiting police power.

These general findings make a great deal of sense and there is now a substantial amount of statistical evidence to support them. Realistically, however, neither the criticisms of African journalists nor the theories of political demographers are likely to have much bearing on decisions to remake or modify Mali's regime.

Nonetheless, it might be wise for those involved to understand the historic odds of obtaining and maintaining a liberal regime among states that have experienced Mali's youthful demographic conditions. For the period that data are available, those odds have been consistently low.  

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Photo Credit: By Makadaka via Flickr

China has deployed a powerful force of civilian, paramilitary and naval vessels to back up its disputed claims to about 80% of the waters and seabed of the South China Sea, including hundreds of tiny islands and reefs scattered across thousands of miles.

While it has little or no basis in international maritime law for its claims, China has become increasingly assertive because of its growing military power and fast-growing demand for the abundant supplies of oil, natural gas and fish in the South China Sea.

To read the full op ed, click here.

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This op ed first appeared in Investor's Business Daily, April 4, 2013

Phot credit: By jovike via flickr