South Asia

As Sri Lanka reels from a series of deadly Easter Sunday attacks, the problem of violent extremism enters the spotlight once again. How can the U.S. and the world anticipate and counter the threat of terrorism, which experts agree cannot be addressed by military means alone? Amna Nawaz talks to former diplomat Farah Pandith, whose new book “How We Win” outlines a strategy for keeping us safe.

As President Donald Trump heads to his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, he'll have the support of many other world leaders, former ambassador Nicholas Burns told CNBC on Thursday.

Sri Lanka is ostensibly a country at peace, eight years out from the end of its bloody civil war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), an insurgency that fought for an independent state for the Tamil ethnic minority. Sri Lanka today is also a democracy, one whose turn away from authoritarianism over the last two years has been enthusiastically welcomed by the international community. And yet, members of a marginalized ethnic minority are reporting ongoing sexual assault and torture by the state.

The international opprobrium heaped on Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, for her inactivity on the Rohingya crisis front, obscures an uncomfortable truth.

David Miliband, President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, discusses the drivers behind the displacement of over 65 million people and the changes that must be made to existing political and humanitarian systems in order to address the crisis on a global scale.

"...[T]he well-intentioned Western effort to create a new Afghan state from scratch was equally misguided, as the new constitution envisioned a centralized, Western-style government in Kabul that was at odds with Afghan history and traditions. It also presumed a level of administrative competence and a revenue base that far exceeded Afghan capacities. Yet none of the international participants who embraced this outcome seemed to realize they had taken on an unrealistic and open-ended burden and that the new Afghan state would be dependent on lavish outside support more or less indefinitely."

In the global revulsion at the recent terror attacks in four Muslim countries, the United States and its allies have a new opportunity to build a unified command against the Islamic State and other extremists. FDP Senior Fellow David Ignatius examines the diplomatic relationships needed to create an effective counterterrorism strategy.