Welcoming an Asian Elephant in Africa
All eyes are on China and its growing involvement in Africa, but India’s expanding relations with African countries have gone largely unnoticed. China’s intentions create anxiety; Ind...
J. Peter Pham
China’s Play for Somalia’s Oil
As this column has chronicled over the past year and a half, United States policy toward the remnants of the former state of Somalia has evolved into a sort of dramatic farce played out in the fo...
Op-eds
Selling AFRICOM
In my testimony last week before the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the United States House of Representatives, I noted that the creation of the n...
Op-eds
Providing Security While Peacekeepers Tarry
Last week the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1769, which authorizes a force of up to 26,000 peacekeepers to restore security to the Darfur region of Sudan where fou...
Op-eds
“Total Force” for AFRICOM
Early last month, President George W. Bush named Army General William E. "Kip" Ward to be the first commander of the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM). If confirmed by the Senate – hea...
Op-eds
Mired in Mogadishu
Two weeks ago a "national reconciliation congress" that Somalia's ineffectual "Transitional Federal Government" (TFG), under pressure from international donors who are its only means of supp...
Op-eds
Degrees of Enmity and the “War on Terrorism”
Last Tuesday, the Bush Administration released portions of a new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland. The first of the "key judgments" of the NIE com...
Op-eds
Give War a Chance!
Two items in the batch of international news and commentary at the end of last week strike us as particularly noteworthy, justifying our recall in a new context of the title of P.J. O'Rourke...
Op-eds
The Indian Tiger’s African Safari
While the African travels of Chinese leaders and their troubling arms sales to regimes on the continent, have caused increasing concern in Washington and other Western capitals, India's grow...
Op-eds
The Security Challenge of West Africa’s New Drug Depots
Last week, gendarmes in the Senegal seaside resort of Nianing seized fifty-one 24-kilogram sacks containing a record 1.25 metric tons of cocaine with a street value of over $100 million....
Op-eds
The Moral Hazard of Kosovo’s Independence
Last week's summit between President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin resulted in no "grand bargain" that could pave the way for the birth of an independent Kosovo. The mo...
Op-eds
Cabinda: The “Forgotten Conflict” America Can’t Afford to Forget
Because of the sense of urgency repeatedly communicated by this column as well as the parallel efforts of other "Africa hands," the precarious situation of Nigeria – which I have described...
Op-eds
Beyond the Illusions
Steven Rosefielde and D. Quinn Mills, Masters of Illusion: American Leadership in the Media Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 568 pp., $34.00. As America's great exp...
Op-eds
Hu’s Selling Guns to Africa
In recent years, United States policy makers and analysts as well as American businesses and non-governmental organizations have begun paying closer attention to the already significant – a...
Op-eds
Hezbollah, Hamas, and Humanitarians
While most Middle East watchers know about the takeover of Gaza by Hamas and its transformation into the terrorist enclave of "Hamastan," readers of the mainstream press might be surprised to lea...
Op-eds
The End of War as We Know It?
I have been following the Hamas takeover of Gaza with a sense of what Yogi Berra, in reference to Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, described as "déjà vu all over again." Almo...
Op-eds
Al Qaeda’s Franchise in Africa
More than a year ago, I inaugurated this column with an essay whose title – "The War on Terrorism's Forgotten Front" – laid out what has been one of the recurring themes of this...
Op-eds
Nigeria: Flailing State
On the final day of their summit last week at the German Baltic seaside resort of Heiligendamm, as they are nowadays wont to do, the leaders of the G8 received a select delegation of their Africa...
Op-eds
Conservative Columnist
Next week, President George W. Bush will welcome Vietnamese President Nguyen Minh Triet to the White House, the first Vietnamese head of state to be received there since Nguyen Van Thieu of South...
Op-eds
Securing the New Strategic Gulf
In his 2006 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush issued a call for the United States to "replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025" and to "make...