National Security Studies Program

Archives: National Security Studies Program Articles and Op-Eds

No Torture. No Exceptions.

  • By
  • Peter Bergen,
  • New America Foundation
March 1, 2008 |

In a Manhattan courtroom in May 2001, four men were convicted for their roles in al-Qaeda's bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania three years earlier. The evidence against them had been collected without recourse to torture, coercion, or unorthodox interrogation techniques. The attacks had killed a dozen Americans and more than two hundred Africans, and family members of some of the victims attended the trial and testified about the devastating loss of their loved ones.

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Do No Harm

  • By
  • Anatol Lieven,
  • New America Foundation
March 1, 2008 |

If you don't know what to do, better to do nothing -- and the United States does not really know what to do in Pakistan. Moreover, things there are not nearly as bad as the Western media and some excitable politicians present. The situation is deteriorating, but the country is not yet close to failing. Although it is a flawed state, menaced by terrorists and insurgents, it is still a largely effective one.

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Inside Track: Politics as Usual?

  • By
  • Anatol Lieven,
  • New America Foundation
February 26, 2008 |

As the presidency of General Pervez Musharraf enters what seem to be its last days, we need to keep one thing firmly in mind. It is that despite the Bush administration’s support for Musharraf, it was also the Bush administration that did the most to destroy him, by forcing him into a subordinate role in a war on terror that most Pakistanis detest. It was not Musharraf’s (very mild) “dictatorship,” but the tag of “Busharraf” which originally crippled his domestic prestige. And if U.S.

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Al Qaeda in Lebanon

  • By
  • Nir Rosen,
  • New America Foundation
February 1, 2008 |

Just before 4:30 one afternoon last July, calls to prayer echoed from all the mosques in Ayn al Hilweh, a Palestinian refugee camp in the city of Sidon, south of Beirut. First built in 1948 for refugees from northern Palestine, the camp has grown into a ramshackle ghetto. Concrete and cinderblock line tight alleys with cobwebs of low-hung electrical cables. On the walls are layers of faded political posters -- some for Hamas, some for Fatah, and still others for Saddam and even Hezbollah leader Seyid Hassan Nasrallah -- marking the divisions among Palestinian resistance factions.

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Pakistan: Real and Imaginary Risks

  • By
  • Anatol Lieven,
  • New America Foundation
February 1, 2008 |

Pakistan is a fascinating but disturbing example of risk assessment by the western media and policymakers, especially when it comes to developments in the Muslim world. There is an enormous amount of public and private discussion of the supposed extreme dangers stemming from Pakistan -- sometimes described, as by the United States nuclear proliferation expert Joe Cirincione -- as 'the most dangerous place on earth'.

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The Killer Question

  • By
  • Peter Bergen,
  • New America Foundation
January 30, 2008 |

The last time I saw Benazir Bhutto was over dinner at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., three weeks before her October return to Pakistan. She was in enormously good spirits, almost effervescent. The years in the political wilderness looked like they were coming to an end. But, at one point, the conversation took a more serious turn as she began discussing the mysterious death of General Zia, the dictator who had hanged her father in 1979.

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Time Bomb

  • By
  • Steve Coll,
  • New America Foundation
January 28, 2008 |

At around noon on December 27, 2007, Benazir Bhutto arrived at a fourth-floor suite in the Serena Hotel in Islamabad to meet with Hamid Karzai, the President of Afghanistan. She “was in a very good mood,” Karzai told me recently. She admired his cape, and they laughed as he recounted how he had acquired it -- an improbable tale that involved a visit to the exiled King of Afghanistan. They sipped tea and coffee and discussed the region’s gathering political violence.

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For '08: A New Perspective on Worry

  • By
  • James Pinkerton,
  • New America Foundation
January 1, 2008 |

My New Year's resolutions:

I resolve to worry more about Pakistan's 75-weapon nuclear stockpile than about global warming. I am more worried about being incinerated by a loose nuke than I am about the water table rising a few feet.

Yet, I also resolve to worry more about global warming than about democracy in Pakistan. Democracy is wonderful, but only for people who want it, and who are willing to play by its rules. Democracy without self-discipline is a formula for, well, Pakistan.

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Pakistan Must Seek a Route From Dynasty to Unity

  • By
  • Anatol Lieven,
  • New America Foundation
December 29, 2007 |

To understand the implications of Benazir Bhutto's assassination for Pakistan, first imagine what that country would look like without her Pakistan People's party. It has been overwhelmingly a dynastic party and she was the last politically viable representative of the Bhutto dynasty. Without her to hold it together, it is highly probable the PPP will disintegrate.

In the short term, this is likely to benefit President Pervez Musharraf and the army but, in the longer term, Islamist extremists may have the most to gain.

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Bombs

  • By
  • Steve Coll,
  • New America Foundation
December 17, 2007 |

Last week, the Bush Administration released declassified extracts from a new National Intelligence Estimate about Iran’s nuclear program. The passages landed in Washington like a religious scroll; they radiated revelation. The N.I.E.

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