Bøger af Catherine Dale

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States launched and led military operations in Afghanistan in order to end the ability of the Taliban regime to provide safe haven to al Qaeda and to put a stop to al Qaeda's use of the territory of Afghanistan as a base of operations for terrorist activities. Many observers argue that in succeeding years, as U.S. and world attention shifted sharply to the war in Iraq, the Afghan war became the "other war" and suffered from neglect. The Obama Administration, however, has made the war in Afghanistan a higher priority, by giving it early attention, regularly conducting strategy reviews, and making significant additional commitments of civilian and military resources. By early 2011, senior leaders, including the Commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), General David Petraeus, were pointing to discrete progress on the ground, though noting that such progress was still "fragile and reversible." In late 2010, NATO and the Afghan government agreed to pursue a key medium-term goal: the transition of lead responsibility for security to Afghans throughout the country by the end of 2014. The U.S. government has stated its intention to begin drawing down some U.S. forces from Afghanistan in July 2011, and also to maintain a long-term strategic partnership with Afghanistan beyond 2014. Strategic vision for Afghanistan is still, many would argue, a work in progress. President Karzai has consistently stressed the theme of "Afghan leadership, Afghan ownership." President Obama has consistently stressed the core goals of the United States: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent their return. Yet for the U.S. government, fundamental issues remain unresolved. These include: determining the minimum essential conditions required for Afghanistan itself to be able to sustain stability with relatively limited international support; defining the appropriate combination of U.S. efforts, together with other international resources, over time, required to achieve those minimum conditions; and balancing U.S. national security interests in Afghanistan and the region against other imperatives, in a constrained fiscal environment. This report, which will be updated as events warrant, describes and analyzes the key players in the war in Afghanistan; the strategic outlooks of the Afghan government, the U.S. government, and NATO; the threats to the security and stability of the Afghan state and its people; the major facets of the current effort: security, governance and anti-corruption, development, reconciliation and reintegration, and transition; mechanisms in place to measure progress; and critical issues that Congress may wish to consider further.

The stories say The Old Ones built wonderful cities, flew through the air and could send messages across the globe in the time it takes for an arrow to find its target. Caylen's seen enough relics to believe at least some of that, but she doesn't regret living in her world instead of theirs. She's a nomad, making her home in the Wildlands between the islands of civilization in the fortified cities. Her world can be dangerous, but she can't imagine living any other way. When her band of nomads rescues a young nobleman from Yorkton, Caylen's mother wants to deliver him to the nearest waypost, collect her reward, and move on. But Caylen is intrigued by Logan, and worried that his predictions of trouble for the nomads may be accurate. In order to protect the Wildlands she loves, Caylen has to leave them behind. In the city, she's not sure if she can trust anyone, not even Logan. And the more she learns, the more she realizes that she's far from the only one in danger. Her enemy is powerful and ruthless, and the cruelty she sees makes Caylen dream of the simplicity of the Wildlands. But she can't walk away from the suffering, so she'll have to stay and fight. It's the nomad way.

In recent years a number of observers and practitioners have identified various facets of U.S. government national security practice-decision-making, strategy-making, budgeting, planning and execution, and congressional oversight-as inherently "cross-cutting." They have in mind arenas-such as counterterrorism, and stabilization and reconstruction-that by definition involve multiple agencies, or for which responsibilities could be divided up in any number of ways among various agencies. For such facets of national security, they argue, the U.S. government is seldom able to conduct genuinely holistic consideration. The cost, they add, is a loss of effectiveness, or efficiency, or both. In order to encourage holistic consideration of national security issues, some members of this inchoate school have called for the use of "unified national security budgeting" (UNSB). To be clear, their goal is not to refine the U.S. federal system of budgeting, but rather to use budgetary mechanisms to drive changes in U.S. national security practices. Within this broad school of thought, various proponents call for the adoption of a number of different approaches, from a single shared funding pool for all national security activities, to mission-specific funding pools, to crosscut displays, to more strategically driven budgeting. In turn, various proponents apparently aim to achieve quite different kinds of change with their proposed remedies-from rebalancing the distribution of roles and responsibilities among executive branch agencies, to saving money, to revisiting fundamental understandings about how U.S. national security is best protected.