So ends a foreign policy experiment that began with two choices in 2011. In that hinge year, President Obama decided to stay out of the Syrian conflict and to passively accept the withdrawal of all U.S. ground forces from Iraq (which he later claimed as a personal achievement during his reelection campaign). I’m not sure […]
KABUL, Afghanistan — President Barack Obama declared this week that the U.S. military has reached a “turning point,” but when NATO’s military coalition begins a new mission in Afghanistan at the end of the month, little is likely to change for the thousands of troops whose deployment extends into next year. NATO’s International Security Assistance […]
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration plans to keep hundreds of extra troops in Afghanistan on a temporary basis next year, above the force of 9,800 that President Barack Obama had previously announced for 2015, in another sign of the challenges the United States faces as it extricates itself from a 13-year war. U.S. officials, speaking […]
Dismissing private military contractors as mercenaries can be simplistic and misleading, as their deployment in Sierra Leone’s Civil War displayed. That the country is rebounding despite 2014’s Ebola crisis is due in part to the success of contracted firms neutralising destabilising rebel groups. For impoverished Sierra Leone with its history of civil warfare, more unwelcomed […]
Netherlands legalized the choice of some members of No Surrender, a biker gang, to travel to Syria and Iraq and fight alongside Kurdish forces against the Islamic State. They are no longer the only European biker gang to enter the fray, as German group Median Empire also announces its presence in Kobani, Syria. An extensive […]