ForeignPolicy.com

The lessons of geography appear to be ignored by policymakers in Washington D.C. these days. The Obama administration is pursuing tenuous negotiations with Iran regarding its supply of low-enriched uranium, in the hopes of taking the first step to erase the longstanding animosity between the two countries. It is also rethinking its Afghanistan and Pakistan policy to emphasize reconstruction and economic development. These two strategies are unfortunately disconnected -- despite the fact that Afghanistan shares a 600-mile-long strategic border with Iran.

Slum sanctuaries: For six weeks in 2005, photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen lived in a tiny sweltering ...

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stepped from the frying pan into the fire this weekend, when she sparked a controversy regarding U.S. policy toward Israeli settlements right after some tough days of public and private diplomacy in Pakistan. But was the controversy as serious as it seemed? And what does it means for the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts? Here, a fact check on some settlement myths and misconceptions.  

1. What is the significance of Clinton's linguistic acrobatics? 

The United States has two compelling interests at issue in the Afghan conflict. One is the ongoing, increasingly successful but incomplete effort to reduce the threat posed by al Qaeda and related jihadi groups, and to finally eliminate the al Qaeda leadership that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks. The second is the pursuit of a South and Central Asian region that is at least stable enough to ensure that Pakistan does not fail completely as a state or fall… more

In Christina Larson's photo essay for ForeignPolicy.com, Ms. Larson writes, "Beijing has spared no expense to ensure that the military parade and mass pageant planned for October 1 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the People's Republic are both spectacular and free from security snafus." ... ...

Headlines are now being prepared following U.S. President Barack Obama's convening of a trilateral Israeli-Palestinian-American peace summit today in New York. Many will seek to belittle the president's efforts thus far. The summit was being dismissed as a photo-op before it even happened.

The White House's list of about 50 metrics to evaluate progress in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which it assembled to calm rising fears in Congress and the public about the Obama administration's increasingly embattled war strategy, is up on ForeignPolicy.com (with a more legible version here). The draft list, dated Sept. 16, 2009 and delivered to a closed congressional

If the southern Afghan province of Helmand were a country it would be the world's leading producer of opium and its derivative, heroin. More than half the world's heroin originates here--much of it destined for the veins of junkies living in Europe.

In June 2005, U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officials and Afghan police raided the office of Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, the governor of Helmand, and found nine tons of opium in his office. He is no longer the governor.

Paul Wolfowitz's provocative critique of foreign policy realism has several key flaws. Most importantly, he sets up an artificial and contrived version of realist thought and fails to engage the problem of positive and negative variations in America's stock of power.