West Asia

Defence Minister John Faulkner has just left the Lowy Institute, having delivered a speech about Afghanistan. A transcript will be posted as soon as possible, and there will be audio and video available next week. Afghanistan has hotted up as a debate topic on The Interpreter just lately (and

Prakash Mirchandani is the founder of Media Gurus and a Visiting Fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU. This is part two of a series on new media and the 'battle for Kandahar'. Is GEN David Petraeus launching a new form of exit strategy from Kandahar and Afghanistan? Certainly

Following the death of Private Nathan Bewes, the sixth Australian soldier to be killed in Afghanistan in little over a month, the public is again asking what the war is all about. Reacting to these concerns, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has trundled out a familiar policy one-liner, declaring

Dr Stephan Frühling is a lecturer in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU. President Obama's Afghanistan surge is now halfway between its announcement in December 2009 and the next major review planned for December 2010. With growing unease about the war in the US and allied countries

James Brown is a former Australian Army officer and former Lowy Institute intern. He is holidaying in the Middle East. Hezbollah put this billboard up yesterday at the Baalbek historical site in the Bekaa Valley. The guy in the photo is their dear leader Nasrullah

Soldier Z is a serving member of the ADF with operational experience in Afghanistan. This June, Australians were confronted with the return of five of its young treasures, killed in action fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Again, and in increasing numbers, Australians are asking why their sons

Before his public downfall, General Stanley McChrystal had a reputation for being a consummate professional. In Iraq, he became known as a savvy operator, a thinking-man's general with an every-man personality. Respected in Washington and venerated by his subordinates in the field, McChrystal

A response to Danielle Cave's recent post on the Western Sahara from Kamal Fadel, the representative to Australia of Polisario, the Western Sahara independence movement: I was surprised to read Danielle Cave's recent article on Western Sahara. It was nice to see a fresh perspective on the

No doubt the Gaza flotilla fracas will get a good chewing over in the weeks and months ahead. Here are five initial observations: The aim of the flotilla was to draw attention to Israel's long-running blockade of the Gaza Strip. In this regard, the goal of the organisers was to provoke an

Monty Pounder is graduate student at the University of Sydney and an intern in the Lowy Institute's West Asia Program. Among the criticisms leveled at the Government's decision to expel an Israeli diplomat yesterday in response to the use of forged Australian passports in the February

My thanks to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for the opportunity to meet Suman Dubey, editor and publisher of the Wall Street Journal India, who is visiting Sydney. That this newspaper exists at all says something quite profound about the way India has changed in recent years, and that

Here's a bracing contribution to our drone warfare debate. In the margin's of yesterday's ICG Asia Briefing conference in Singapore I talked with Samina Ahmed, ICG's Project Director for South Asia. She argues that much of what we hear about the effects of US drone strikes in the FATA areas of

The clip Sam posted last week on India's space program brings to mind two pieces by Bruce Sterling for Wired a few years back. The first looked at the possibility of India and China re-running the US-Russia space race. The closing para suggested one kind of answer to the 'value for money'

It is something of an understatement to say that Arab voting patterns have tended to favour the incumbent in recent years. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak gained 94% of the vote in 1999 (as the only candidate) but a constitutional amendment allowing for multi-candidate presidential elections saw

There's a question that surely crosses everyone's mind when they see a middle-aged man wearing a hair piece: 'what on earth makes him think we don't notice?' Iran held its annual Army Day Parade in Tehran on Sunday, and revealed the military equivalent of an ill-fitting toupé. For several years

Last Friday the Lowy Institute hosted distinguished Canadian scholar and former diplomat Dr David Malone. You can listen here to his full presentation on 'China and India: Can two tigers share a mountain?'. Below is a short interview I conducted with Dr Malone after the event. I don't

It's only April, yet 3 Quarks Daily is already at short odds to be my blog of the year (which isn't to say it's a new blog; just that I've only recently discovered it). They find the most fascinating material, which regular readers will know I link to often. The latest is a piece from this very

Having watched the new Matt Damon Iraq war-themed thriller over the weekend, I turned to the New Yorker's genius film reviewer, Anthony Lane, to tell me what I ought to think about it. Lane is in brilliant form right from the beginning: The fact that “Green Zone” begins with a bombing

James Brown has worked as an Australian Defence Force officer and completed his Masters in Strategic Studies in 2009. These are his personal views. The Presidents of China and Afghanistan met last week when Hamid Karzai visited Beijing to discuss deepening political and economic ties between the

Here's part of what Foreign Policy's Blake Hounshell thinks Barack Obama should have said to Hamid Karzai during Obama's flying visit: Look, I'm a patient man. But sooner or later you're going to have to wake up to the fact that I can't be propping you up forever. The American people's memories

James Brown has worked as an Australian Defence Force officer and completed his Masters in Strategic Studies in 2009. These are his personal views. Afghan President Hamid Karzai and ISAF Commander General Stanley McChrystal visited Uruzgan province in Afghanistan and met with Australian troops over

If it's not the Iranians seeking friends in the Pacific then it's the Israelis, and if it's not the Israelis it's the...Emiratis. The UAE's recently announced 'Partnership in the Pacific' is a US$50 million aid program administered by the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, for use solely in the

As a UN observer working in Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon in the mid 1990s I was often told by Israelis that their sometimes abrupt attitude towards people working for the UN was because they were similar to spiky fruit — rough on the outside but sweet on the inside. At the time I

Major Gen (Retd) Jim Molan is author of Running the War in Iraq. On Sunday, 7 February, Iraqis voted again. The national election was far from perfect, but there was no widespread violence. The parliament that I am proud to say I had a hand in creating in 2005 has, for all its faults,