For the better part of five years, much of Somalia's long-suffering population has been caught in a deadly stalemate between al Shabaab, an al Qaeda-linked militant group, and African Union peacekeepers, known as AMISOM.

From Clausewitz, the Economist:  The secret NATO report on the Taliban leaked to the BBC is full of fascinating stuff, but it mostl

On Dec. 18, 2010, a police slap of a vegetable-cum-fruit peddler in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid triggered an "Arab Spring" that no one had forecast and that quickly spawned a long, dark Arab winter.

Beaufort is a great film. It tells the story of a platoon of young Israeli soldiers at the turn of this century pointlessly asked to defend an isolated, old Crusader fort deep in Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon at the very end of a failed occupation.

Historians may look back at 2011 as the year that the war on terror finally ended. Counterterrorism was not removed from America’s security policy tool box but it no longer serves as a strategic priority and no longer guides how the US structures its relations with nations around the world or thinks and plans for conflict.

The biggest story out of Africa last year did not occupy the headlines the way dramatic revolutions in the Maghreb, civil strife in West Africa, the independence of South Sudan, famine in the Horn of Africa, piracy off the Somali coast, fraud-ridden elections in the ironically-named Democratic Republic of the Congo, and various other developments each did in turn.

From Missy Ryan and David Brunnstrom, Reuters:  The West used an Afghanistan meeting on Monday to signal enduring support for Kabul as allied troops go home, but economic turbulence in Europe and crises with Pakistan and Iran could stir doubts about Western resolve.

Washington's failure to gain Iraqi approval for a significant U.S. military presence in that country beyond December could make it harder for Afghanistan to agree to a similar deployment beyond 2014.