South Asia

Meghan Garrity details the history of mass expulsions since the centennial of the signing of the Lausanne Convention—a treaty codifying the compulsory “population exchange” between Greece and Turkey. An estimated 1.5 million people were forcibly expelled from their homes: over one million Greek Orthodox Christians from the Ottoman Empire and 500,000 Muslims from Greece.

Charli Carpenter comments on  U.S. President Joe Biden's executive order, issued in February 2022, releasing $7 billion in frozen, U.S.-held Afghan central bank reserves. It has been proposed to use half of the funds to pay reparations to the families of 9/11 victims.

Charli Carpenter critiques U.S. President Joe Biden's recently issued executive order releasing $7 billion in frozen, U.S.-held Afghan central bank reserves. She argues that those funds belong to the Afghan people, and not to the United States and the Taliban.

Jacqueline L. Hazelton  details why the international jihadi terrorist threat to the United States is down since the al-Qaida attacks of 20 years ago. Not through war or other uses of organized violence, but through cooperation, use of legal and financial tools, and strengthening homeland defense and resilience.

William L. d'Ambruoso writes that ruthlessness does not guarantee success, but it usually proves necessary — a difficult truth that should sit uneasily with democratic counterinsurgents who are supposed to care about human rights. 

Charli Carpenter and Lise Howard write that a U.N. peacekeeping mission could help avert civil war in Afghanistan.

The Russian/Chinese-led bloc is expected to approve Iran's accession this week amid uncertainty over President Raisi's foreign posture and ongoing turmoil in Afghanistan.

Jacqueline Hazelton writes that regimes battling a counterinsurgency often depend on corruption to stay in power.

To prevent Afghanistan from falling into endless civil wars and put an end to the long-lasting suffering of Afghan people, it is imperative for regional and global actors to pressure the Taliban toward compromise and put all its efforts into finding a durable solution to the country's political crisis.

Jacqueline L. Hazelton analyzes why the United States fails at counterinsurgency in light of its withdrawal from Afghanistan. She asserts that the belief that democracy is necessary for long-term stability and can flow from the barrel of a gun is rooted in misleading accounts of past counterinsurgency campaigns, such as the Malayan Emergency and the 1948–1954 insurgency in the Philippines.