Foreign Aid

This speech is a welcome step toward a sustainable Afghanistan policy, one that realizes that our interests in that country are real, but limited. This speech puts us on a path that aligns our commitment to Afghanistan with these limited interests -- a foreign policy one might almost call "humble."

President Obama's Afghanistan speeches are never really about Afghanistan. George W. Bush wanted his presidency to be about Iraq. From the beginning, President Obama has wanted his presidency not to be about Afghanistan, and so whenever he brings up the subject, he ends up talking about the other things for which he'd rather be remembered.

According to senior administration officials, the planning for President Barack Obama's announcement for the drawdown from Afghanistan began in January of this year when the president summoned top members of his national security team into the Oval Office and tasked them with coming up with a plan for the drawdown.

The calculations that went into the drawdown decision included the fact that "remarkable and "unexpected" progress had been made degrading al Qaeda infrastructure in its bases in the tribal regions of Pakistan over the past 18 months, explained one of those officials.

After more than 100 years of abuse, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is surely the most dysfunctional country on the planet. It started the 20th century under Belgium's King Leopold II, who oversaw the deaths of millions through exploitation and disease in what was then his personal fiefdom of the Congo Free State, a tyranny made notorious by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Independence in 1960 was accompanied by a vicious civil war and, soon after, the CIA-backed rule of Mobutu Sese Seko, one of the most kleptocratic leaders in world history.

The Afghanistan comments -- if perhaps not a fully articulated Afghanistan policy -- expressed by Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman (and to a lesser extent, Mitt Romney) provide an opportunity for a real look at a long-term U.S. policy for Afghanistan. The current debate over troop levels is good in that it focuses attention on the problem, but asking how many troops we should withdraw this summer and over the coming year is the wrong question, and much too narrowly focused. To date, our actions in Afghanistan seem to be reactive.

The news coming out of Sudan grows bleaker by the hour. Prospects for peace look less likely now than at any point since the north-south civil war, Africa's longest-running conflict, ended in 2005.

Co-sponsored by the New America Foundation and Innovations for Poverty Action

The vast majority of global health problems do not consist so much of finding a cure as delivering one. Improving health in the world's poorest countries requires solutions that are cheap and simple to administer -- and the good news is that these are increasingly available.

As reports mount of defections in the Syrian military and the government staggers from the killing of soldiers and police officers in a northern city this week, President Bashar al-Assad may turn increasingly to his brother, Maher, whose elite units in a demoralized army could prove decisive to his government's survival, activists and analysts say.

KARBEYAZ, Turkey — Hundreds more Syrians fled into Turkey on Thursday, anticipating a widening crackdown against pro-democracy demonstrators in the country's northwest, which has become the new focus of weeks of protests against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

The new influx across their border prompted Turkish authorities to set up a second refugee camp, while they reassured frightened Syrians that they would keep the border open and called once again on the Syrian government to allow peaceful demonstrations and to carry out reforms.