al-Qaeda

Pakistan: Missing Piece in America’s Afghan Puzzle

Even the post-mortems on the intervention in Afghanistan have replicated the US’s decades-long failure to reckon with its sometime strategic partner’s priorities.

January 28, 2022

Michael Ratner’s Tragedy, and Ours

The career of the veteran constitutional rights litigator offers a case history of how US humanitarians ended up sanitizing the war on terror instead of opposing it.

September 1, 2021

The US–Saudi Story, by an Aramco ‘Brat’

For years, I believed the myth that Saudi Arabia had not been colonized. I accepted Aramco’s slickly packaged origin story—that the company was a benevolent actor in the Kingdom, working hand in hand with the Saudi people to bring a much-needed commodity to the world.

January 31, 2020

Beyond Afghanistan’s ‘Graveyard for the Living’

Even before President Trump’s bungled diplomacy undercut months of patient effort by his envoy, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, the notoriously doctrinaire Taliban have shown little taste for compromise. Their rhetoric, which always tends toward the histrionic, is now triumphalist.

September 24, 2019

Undefeated, ISIS Is Back in Iraq

Even in parts of Mosul itself, reconquered in 2017 by government forces after a long and costly campaign, the ominous black-and-white ISIS flag has flown again in recent months, causing panic and fear in village after village.

February 13, 2019

The Innocence of Abu Zubaydah

The government has never brought any charge against Abu Zubaydah, in either civilian or military court, presumably because it understands that he has committed no crime. Instead, the United States is content that he should be forgotten, out of sight and out of mind.

September 28, 2018

What Makes a Terrorist?

The greatest difficulty for our ability to understand and respond to terrorism and radicalization is linear thinking. Radicalization is a complex system that cannot be reduced to its individual factors.

August 23, 2017

Getting Them Dead

After reading the article that appeared under the headline “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will” in the May 29 *New York Times*, I couldn’t talk about much else. I found myself wanting to analyze it, as one might dissect a literary text, to better understand how it produced its effect on the reader: in my case, shock and awe, tempered by consolatory flickers of disbelief. Like literature, the story resists summarization, partly because the *Times* reporters, Jo Becker and Scott Shane, employ detail, word choice, diction, and tone to direct and influence the reader’s response without, on the surface, appearing to do so—and to make a familiar narrative seem new.

June 6, 2012

Why Are We Abandoning the Afghans?

What will Afghanistan look like in 2014, after a dozen years of occupation, more than 2,800 NATO soldiers killed, and an expenditure of $1 trillion? If the participants in this week’s NATO summit in Chicago are to be believed, what they will leave behind is little more than a series of fortresses in enemy territory.

May 22, 2012

The New US War in Yemen

The United States is quietly being drawn into an escalating conflict in Yemen. The new conflict may be as much about Saudi Arabia, the longtime US ally and Yemen’s northern neighbor.

May 21, 2012