The wars that the U.S. is fighting in the Middle East and South Asia will not end until the U.S. implements tactical solutions that address civil and political instability and look beyond the fight against ISIS and the Taliban.

Every war has both a military and a civil dimension. This is especially true of counterinsurgency campaigns like Afghanistan, where the civil dimension is always a critical half of the battle.

It has long been all too clear that the U.S. has gradually built up the military capability to help local powers defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq without having strategy for dealing with the host of other problems that exist in bringing any kind of lasting stability to...

Terrorism has become one of the dominating national security threats of the 21st century. It is also one of the most complex — mixing the actions of states, extremists, and other non-state actors in a wide range of threats and types of conflicts.

There is a case for a deliberate U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Afghan government remains divided and weak, its security forces will take years of expensive U.S. and allied support to become fully effective, and they may still lose even with such support. Afghanistan...

Afghanistan may not be the forgotten war, but it has certainly become the war that the Department of Defense is doing an appalling job of explaining. Even at the best of times, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) public affairs team seems to focus on the ephemeral...

The United States is now reexamining its strategy for Afghanistan, and whether it needs to shift from a “deadlines-based” strategy tied to steady reductions in its forces and effort to a “conditions-based” strategy designed to meet Afghanistan’s actual needs. This...

Foreign aid has long been seen as the stepchild of U.S. national security. Polls show that most Americans have a grossly exaggerated picture of the size of the U.S. foreign aid effort, and no idea of where it actually goes, or what its purpose is. For many Americans, foreign...

There is a very real case for taking violent Islamic extremism far more seriously as a global threat, and for taking stronger measures to fight it. The United States was far too slow to react to the threat that ISIS and other violent Islamist extremist movements pose in Iraq...

A new Administration that came to office with clearly defined intentions to change many key aspects of U.S. policy, and to do so as soon as possible, can be expected to try to act as quickly as possible. There are times, however, when quick action can do more harm than good....

It provides a detailed analysis of the problems caused by both the failures of past U.S. Administrations to properly structure and resource the U.S. combat support forces, and military and civil aid missions necessary to support Afghanistan, and of the critical...