u.s. institute of peace

Last year the Army released its groundbreaking field manual on stability operations, FM 3-07, a key driver in getting the service to prepare itself for a future in which it worked between the extremes of conventional offensive and defensive military action. But many of the stabilization and reconstruction tasks it envisaged — training foreign [...]

Not only is Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki not the first high-ranking Iraqi official to suggest that the U.S. troop presence ought to continue after the 2011 deadline for withdrawal, he’s not even the first to do so at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Rafe al-Eissawi, Iraq’s deputy prime minister, floated a similar idea in remarks [...]

The last time I heard Gen. David Petraeus, commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, talk about Afghanistan, he was endorsing the Karzai government’s efforts to explore negotiations with reconcilable elements of the Taliban. Now the Central Command chief is putting together a massive strategy review for Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, [...]

I’m in one of the two massive ballrooms of the Washington Convention Center, where in a few minutes, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is going to present a tour of the foreign-policy horizon. That’ll kick off a day-long event sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Peace called “Passing The Baton,” outlining the national-security and foreign-policy [...]