Venezuela after Chávez: Now for the reckoning. The Inside Story of How the White House Let Diplomacy Fail in Afghanistan - By Vali Nasr. It was close to midnight on Jan. 20, 2009, and I was about to go to sleep when my iPhone beeped. There was a new text message. It was from Richard Holbrooke. It said, "Are you up, can you talk? " When I called, he told me that Barack Obama had asked him to serve as envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He would work out of the State Department, and he wanted me to join his team. "No one knows this yet. Don't tell anyone. I first met Holbrooke, the legendary diplomat best known for making peace in the Balkans and breaking plenty of china along the way, at a 2006 conference in Aspen, Colorado. Now, making his sales pitch, Holbrooke told me that government is the sum of its people. He was persuasive, and I knew that we were at a fork in the road. Two months later, I was at my desk at SRAP, as the office of the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan quickly became known.
Holbrooke encouraged the creative chaos. Still, Holbrooke knew that Afghanistan was not going to be easy. Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chauhan epitomizes economic development via effective governance. T K Arun, ET Bureau Aug 6, 2012, 06.07AM IST Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan is the only senior politician in the country to openly admit that all politics is financed by black money. Since any effort to clean up the polity has to start with cleaning up political funding, getting someone to accept this reality is the first step. How has he fared, after admitting to this uncomfortable truth? "I have tried to create a debate in the polity and in my own party on the subject," was his reply.
He also is a champion of direct election of the political CEO, the chief minister or the prime minister, to insulate him from blackmail by legislators of fickle loyalty. The BJP had dislodged Congress CM Digvijay Singh back in 2003 raising three issues - bijlee (electricity), sadak (road) and pani (water). The chief minister trotted out his numbers with evident relish. What about the power sector? For the first time in our interaction, the CM was less than completely sure. Naxalism & India. Leaders: The world of Barack and Xi. Middle East and Africa: The cycle of history. Syria: The death of a country. AFTER the first world war Syria was hacked from the carcass of the Ottoman empire. After the second, it won its independence. After the fighting that is raging today it could cease to function as a state. As the world looks on (or away), the country jammed between Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Israel is disintegrating. Perhaps the regime of Bashar Assad, Syria’s president, will collapse in chaos; for some time it could well fight on from a fortified enclave, the biggest militia in a land of militias.
Either way, Syria looks increasingly likely to fall prey to feuding warlords, Islamists and gangs—a new Somalia rotting in the heart of the Levant. If that happens, millions of lives will be ruined. The road from Damascus Part of the reason for the West’s hesitancy is that, from the start of the uprising in 2011, Mr Assad has embraced a strategy of violence. Syrian blood now flows freely and sectarian hatred is smouldering (see article). Suffering on such a scale is unconscionable. Crisis in Syria.