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Kazakhstan and the United States: Twenty Years of Ambiguous Partnership
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US Lessons for the Eurozone Restoring Confidence through Transparency
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Council News
Jonathan Paris Discusses Syrian Crisis with France 24
Jonathan Paris, nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center, appeared on France 24 to discuss Russia's support for the Assad regime and what it means for a possible UN resolution against Syria.
Damon Wilson US Senate Testimony: Ukraine at a Crossroads
On February 1, Atlantic Council executive vice president Damon Wilson testified at a hearing of the US Senate Committe on Foreign Relations on the topic: "Ukraine at a Crossroads: What's at Stake for the US and Europe?"
Michele Dunne on US-Egypt Relations for NPR's Morning Edition
Relations between the US and Egypt have taken a downturn since Egyptian authorities raided the offices of seventeen nongovernmental organizations in December - three of them US-funded. Michele Dunne, director of the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, spoke on NPR's Morning Edition about the situation and what it means for US aid to Egypt.
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The South Asia Center receives guidance and support from many experts throughout the world. Our senior fellows, guest-speakers, Center patrons, and visitors contribute heavily to the Center’s mission to “wage peace,” and engage the international community in the region. The Center asked our contributors the simple, but key question, “What you do expect in 2012?”
REGISTER
German General Issues Scathing Criticism of Berlin's Afghanistan Efforts
Peter Cassata | December 01, 2008General Hans-Christoph Ammon, the head of the German army's elite special commando unit KSK, called Germany's contributions to the NATO mission in Afghanistan a "miserable failure" while speaking to the German press agency DPA. IHT:
Breaking with a military tradition of keeping silent about policy, a top German general has branded his country's efforts in Afghanistan a failure, singling out its poor record in training the Afghan police and allocating development aid.
Germany was responsible for training the Afghan police, but the German Interior Ministry, led by the conservative Wolfgang Schäuble, has come under repeated criticism from the United States and other NATO allies for providing too few experts and inappropriate training.
[...]
The government had provided a mere €12 ($15.2) million for training the Afghan Army and police while the United States has already given more than $1 billion, he said. "At that rate, it would take 82 years to have a properly trained police force," he said. More damaging for Germany's reputation, Ammon said, was that its police-training mission was considered such a 'disaster' that the United States and EU had taken over responsibility.
Furthermore, the rare nature of Ammon's comments seems to have given gravity to his message:
The Defense Ministry said Ammon was expressing his personal views. Even so, because such views are rare, security experts said they showed the level of frustration building among senior military officers over German reluctance to provide adequate financing for Afghan mission or even explain to the public why Germany has 4,500 soldiers there.
Neither Chancellor Angela Merkel nor her conservative defense minister, Franz-Josef Jung, have been willing to debate the issue publicly. For the first time since German soldiers were sent to Afghanistan six years ago, Jung referred in November to the "Gefallene," or fallen soldiers, who had died there.
Merkel is facing increasing pressure both from her Christian Democratic Union party as well as from outside critics to more fully address the Afghanistan issue and Germany's role there. This pressure will likely grow next year, as Obama is expected to push Europe for greater troop contributions to Afghanistan upon taking office.
