Failed Index - By Elliot Ross

We at Africa is a Country think Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace should either radically rethink the Failed States Index, which they publish in collaboration each year, or abandon it altogether. We just can't take it seriously: It's a failed index.

This year, pro forma, almost the entire African continent shows up on the Failed States map in the guiltiest shade of red. The accusation is that with a handful of exceptions, African states are failing in 2012. But what does this tell us? What does it actually mean? Frankly, we have no idea. The index is so flawed in its conception, so incoherent in its structuring criteria, and so misleading in its presentation that from the perspective of those who live or work in those places condemned as failures, it's difficult to receive the ranking as anything more than a predictable annual canard issued from Washington, D.C. against non-Western -- and particularly African -- nations.

The problem is that there are any number of reasons why the Fund for Peace might decide that a state is failing. The Washington-based think-tank has a methodology of sorts, but Foreign Policy insists on making the list accessible primarily through a series of "Postcards from Hell." Flipping through the slideshow, it's impossible to shrug off the suspicion that the whole affair is a sloppy cocktail of cultural bigotries and liberal-democratic commonplaces -- a faux-empirical sham that packs quite a nasty racialized aftertaste. How do we know if a state is failing or not? Old chestnuts like the rule of law are certainly considered, but also in play are things like economic growth, economic "success," poverty, inequality, corruption, non-state violence, state violence, human rights abuses, body counts, terrorism, health care, "fragility," political dissent, social divisions, and levels of authoritarianism. And yes, we'll be indexing all of those at once, and more.

The golden principle by which this muddle is to be marshaled oh-so-objectively into a grand spectrum of state failure coefficients is apparently the idea of "stability." But is it really? Well, if you're an Arab Spring country, then yes, it's the "instability" of revolution or popular revolt that has put you in the red this year. Sorry about that. But if you're North Korea (the paradigmatic failed state in the U.S. imagination -- hence why Zimbabwe is often branded "Africa's North Korea"), it's because you're far too stable. If stability is the key to all this, and yet there's an imperative for places like North Korea still to be ranked as failures, then we're in trouble. The cart has long ago overtaken the horse. It would be very difficult indeed to conceive of a more stable form of rule than having power descend smoothly down three generations of the same family over six decades and more (perhaps the Bushes will pull off something like this one day). And, of course, it helps if the names of overweening rulers are spelled correctly: Cameroonian readers of the slideshow were startled to discover that they had been led for many years by someone by the name of "Paul Abiye," of whom they had never heard (the spelling has since been corrected).

Clearly, the value of stability to any society is uncertain and subjective. Foreign Policy explains to its readers that Malawi (No. 36 on this year's index) is to be considered a failed state on account of the 19 people killed by police during popular protests against Bingu wa Mutharika's government a year ago. Yet such dissent is evidence of the strength of Malawian civil society and the determination of ordinary Malawians not to get screwed by their government. Malawi is undoubtedly better off for these protests, not worse. What makes the country's listing as a failed state look even sillier is that Malawi recently endured a blissfully peaceful transition of power following Mutharika's sudden death, with constitutional guidelines scrupulously adhered to despite the vested interests of many of the country's ruling class.

One of our readers, the cartographer Jacques Enaudeau, called the index "a developmentalist ode to no-matter-what political stability and linear history." He's right, but as we've seen this stability fetish only applies to those states perceived as non-totalitarian. So how exactly can a democratic country like, say, Nigeria ever hope to satisfy the whimsical judgment of Foreign Policy magazine? The Occupy Nigeria movement that demonstrated against corruption and the removal of the country's fuel subsidy in January was a peaceful mass movement that achieved major gains for working people. It was a thoroughly global protest, with Nigerians in the diaspora taking to the streets of Brussels, London, New York, and Washington, D.C. to demand better governance in Nigeria. Yet these protests are listed on the country's "postcard" alongside terrorist attacks by Boko Haram as equal evidence of Nigeria's "hellishness." For some reason, the postcard neglects to mention the extraordinary spectacle of protesters in Nigerian cities standing guard outside each other's places of worship -- Muslims outside churches, Christians at the doors of mosques -- so that each group could pray without fear of further bombings.

Disorganized Like a Fox - By Elizabeth O'Bagy

When asked to explain why they aren't providing greater support to the Syrian opposition, U.S. officials have repeatedly fallen back on the excuse that the rebels are deeply fragmented and leaderless. The opposition in Libya, by contrast, "had a face," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a House panel this March: "We could actually meet with them. We could eyeball them. We could ask them tough questions." In his own testimony, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta echoed Clinton's worries, saying, "There has been no single unifying military alternative that can be recognized, appointed, or contacted."

These statements, however, get the dynamics of the Syrian uprising all wrong. It is not a "leaderless" revolution, as U.S. officials have claimed. And the United States and its international allies should no longer use such arguments as an excuse for inaction.

U.S. policymakers have failed to recognize the difference between a decentralized leadership and a fragmented -- or absent -- leadership. In travels to Lebanon, which many Syrian dissidents use as a base to organize, I have seen firsthand how the indigenous political opposition has produced strong leaders who have developed viable political structures on the ground. Despite their anonymity to international audiences, these leaders are well known inside Syria, are recognized by different opposition groups, and coordinate together to advance their shared goal of toppling President Bashar al-Assad's regime. They are decentralized out of necessity, to ensure the continuity of the uprising amid Assad's brutal crackdown.

The Assad regime's repression has actually made the opposition's political structures more resilient, as its leaders have been forced to create networks that will function beyond their life span. And because Assad's security forces retain significant control in many areas, it is unsurprising that the opposition has been reluctant to reveal the details of its leadership. Individual leaders have been forced to remain underground or risk being targeted by the Syrian government. When one leader is killed, as frequently occurs, another steps in to take his place. The grassroots political opposition has thus avoided becoming dependent on a single leader.

Homs is a powerful example of this system of leadership. During Assad's relentless shelling of the city in February, many of the Homs Revolutionary Council's leaders were killed. Yet the fluidity of leadership allowed the council to continue to function and provide invaluable services throughout the offensive. As one activist working in the council put it to me, "We are like the legendary hydra -- Assad kills one of us, and 10 more pop up in their place."

These local networks -- not the exiled opposition -- are truly guiding Syria's revolution. The network of nascent political structures begins in villages and city neighborhoods, where activists working in coordinating committees mobilize support for demonstrations. At the district and city levels, Revolutionary Councils and Revolution Command Councils coordinate the activities of the local committees and interface with armed opposition groups. These councils have largely coalesced behind three national organizations inside Syria -- namely, the Syrian Revolution General Commission (SRGC), the Supreme Council of the Syrian Revolution (SCSR), and the Local Coordination Committees (LCCs). These organizations serve as the main media conduits for the grassroots opposition, and they coordinate the activities of the regional councils.

These three national coalitions serve different constituencies and are divided by the demands of those they represent. Each organization has espoused a different vision for the revolution and a post-Assad future. The SRGC has adopted an aggressive platform for Assad's removal, actively supporting armed rebels through provincial military councils. The organization refuses to cooperate with the Syrian National Council (SNC), an umbrella opposition group that operates from exile, due to disillusionment with the SNC's endless internal power squabbles. The more moderate LCCs favor a political solution, proposing a plan for a peaceful transition of power in order to avert a violent collapse of the government. To achieve this objective, they have opted to cooperate with the SNC and have participated in numerous national conferences with the council.

The SCSR, which caters to young protesters, falls between these two. It has set the outlines for a political solution while also recognizing the importance of armed struggle. Although it has sent representatives to SNC meetings, it is not formally a member. Local activist networks and revolutionary councils meet to decide which national platform best represents their outlook and then align with it. The three groups' visions and approaches to the revolution differ, but all adhere to a system that grants local groups representation in the national organizations.

Justice Delayed - By David Bosco

A decade ago, the International Criminal Court (ICC) opened its doors for the first time. Four years after 120 countries voted to create a permanent institution to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression, the court that activists had long dreamed of was becoming a reality.

Or so it seemed. In a sleepy suburb of The Hague on that July day, two court officials took questions from journalists and, when they were finished, walked into the modern office building that would serve as the court's headquarters. They kept right on walking, though -- through the back door and straight out of the building. The ICC was just an empty shell. No offices were ready, and the court had no budget. Staffers bought the court's first telephones on their personal credit cards.

Even worse, the infant court faced a hostile superpower. In 2002, the United States was not only determined to keep its distance from the court -- it was using its weight to restrict the ICC's reach. A few weeks after the court opened, President George W. Bush signed legislation directing the United States to cut off military aid to any country unwilling to sign a pledge refusing to send U.S. citizens to The Hague. The measure went even further, authorizing the president to use "all means necessary" to free Americans held by the court. The ICC's first employees felt the institution's fragility acutely. One of the first judges, Sang-hyun Song, told me recently that he and other judges "were not at all sure about whether this new baby would be able to survive all the hostility shown by the big powers."

Ten years later, that same building in The Hague hosts a staff approaching 1,000 lawyers, investigators, and administrators from around the world. The court's annual budget exceeds $100 million. Once personae non gratae in Washington, court officials now confer regularly with the State Department and White House staff, and the United States has pledged to help investigations when possible. In all, the ICC has launched investigations in seven countries and brought charges against 28 individuals, including Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, former Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo, and notorious Lord's Resistance Army commander Joseph Kony. Perhaps most importantly, the U.N. Security Council has twice referred situations to the court (Sudan and Libya), giving the ICC jurisdiction where it had none before and bringing the court into the center of international efforts to manage conflict.

For all the distance the court has covered, however, its 10-year anniversary is still far from joyous. Growing pains and the dilemmas of prosecuting complex crimes, often in the midst of war, have left even some true believers frustrated. It took the court more than six years to process, try, and convict the first suspect captured -- Congolese militia commander Thomas Lubanga -- and that case still hasn't gone through the appeals stage. (The prosecutor clashed repeatedly with judges and defense counsel over the confidentiality of evidence, producing several long delays.) Meanwhile, the court's member states fret about the expense of the ICC's proceedings.

The ICC's difficulties run even deeper. The permanent court may be a milestone in the development of international law, but it is often a bit player when it comes to international politics. It relies almost entirely on states to fund its operations, aid its investigations, and, most fundamentally, enforce its arrest warrants. The ICC's first decade has demonstrated repeatedly that however much states may like the abstract notion of international justice, they're not often willing to elevate it to the top of their policy agendas -- or defend it in the face of competing interests.

The court's political problems have been most dramatic in Africa. Thirty-three African states have joined the court, the most from any region, but many African leaders reacted harshly to the court's indictment of Sudan's Bashir in 2009. The next year, the African Union decided its members had no obligation to comply with the court's arrest warrants and chastised then-ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo for making "egregiously unacceptable, rude and condescending statements." In 2011, the court's pursuit of several senior Kenyan officials led to renewed hostility between The Hague and African officialdom. Kenyan diplomats at one point tried to engineer a mass African defection from the court. Their bid was unsuccessful, but the animosity continues.

EuroFail - By Uri Friedman and Hillary Hurd

"As a general rule, meetings make individuals perform below their capacity and skill levels," Reid Hastie, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, once wrote. "[P]lease, don't just call a meeting and hope the magic happens. Take charge and take personal responsibility for meeting its objectives, whatever they are."

It's advice that European Union leaders would have done well to consider as they kicked off a closely watched two-day summit in Brussels on Thursday, while Italy and Spain watch their cost of borrowing soar. With France and Germany at odds about whether to address the European debt crisis by pooling eurozone debt or better integrating the region financially and politically, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has already tried to tamp down expectations for this week's summit, which is expected to produce a stimulus package and plans for a banking union.

"There is no quick solution and no simple solution," she warned in Berlin on Wednesday. "There is no one magic formula ... with which the government debt crisis can be overcome in one go."

The thing is, when it comes to major EU summits in Brussels, the region's heads of state haven't had one go -- they've had roughly 20 since 2010 (albeit with a changing cast of characters, as 14 of the 27 EU countries have switched leaders since the debt crisis began). And if the previous crisis-management meetings are any guide, we should expect this week's summit to be long on talk of turning points and short on game-changing results. Here's a look at what European leaders have accomplished in their previous gatherings -- and how they've chosen to frame those achievements.

THIERRY CHARLIER/AFP/GettyImages

The Missing 50 Percent - By Susan A. Markham

In 2008, women assumed 56 percent of the seats in the Rwandan parliament. This represents something of a paradox. Rwanda is still navigating the path to democracy -- but women have been making a positive contribution to the country's political life nonetheless. Women have been responsible for forming the first cross-party caucus to work on some of the country's most controversial issues, such as domestic violence, land rights, and food security. They have also formed the only tripartite partnership between civil society and executive and legislative bodies to coordinate responsive legislation, and ensure basic services are delivered. Rwanda is just one example of why the full and equitable participation of women in parliaments makes a difference. Research shows women are also more likely to work across party lines even in highly partisan environments. Their leadership and conflict resolution styles embody democratic ideals, and women tend to work in a less hierarchical and more collaborative way than their male colleagues.

This is why the recently published article on FP, "Who Cares How Many Women Are in Parliament?" misses the point about gender equality and political freedom. Authors Joshua Foust and Melinda Haring argue that the number of women in a parliament does not necessarily reflect whether the country is democratic, citing some well-established authoritarian regimes that have plenty of female MPs. But they neglect the importance of women in politics (that is, in positions of power) and the potential for a broader, democratic context.

We often refer to women's representation in national parliaments as a gauge of democracy; this is the measure cited, for example, in the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. Unfortunately, other data about women's political participation is undercollected, so we tend to rely on the number of women in office as an imperfect but important measurement of gender equality.

It's true: The number of elected women alone does not speak to whether a country is democratic. But when 50 percent of the population is missing from the public discourse, this is a symptom of a larger problem. The equitable representation of women in politics and government is just one piece of the democracy puzzle. Other political principles must be pursued, including an open and accountable government, free and fair elections, and an active citizenry. Without these other essential ingredients, a parliament, even one that includes women, will not be able to serve as a check on executive power.

And there is evidence that the full and equitable participation of women in public life is a critical part of the democracy equation. It helps to advance gender equality, and affects both the range of policy issues that are considered and the types of solutions that are proposed. Is this evidence supported by every woman, in every legislature, in every country? Of course not.

Women are not a monolithic bloc. The full participation of women -- or any group -- means expressing the full diversity of their opinions, beliefs, and experiences. But there are many indications that as more women are elected to office, policy-making increasingly emphasizes quality of life and reflects the priorities of families, women, and ethnic and racial minorities. Women's political participation has profound positive and democratic impacts on communities, legislatures, political parties, and citizens' lives. It helps democracy deliver.

The Prince vs. the 'Paupers' - By Michael Z. Wise

From a cliff-top fortress that looks more like Count Dracula's abode than Cinderella's fairy-tale castle, Prince Hans-Adam II von und zu Liechtenstein looks down on the capital of his micro-nation, content that he has the final say on its rule.

With a net worth estimated at $7 billion, the silver-haired monarch ranks among the world's richest heads of state, and he owns one of the most important art collections in private hands. His conservative principality, nestled between Austria and Switzerland, has the planet's second-highest GDP per capita, and it is an island of economic stability in troubled Europe. But discontented rumblings are afoot after Prince Hans-Adam's heir, 44-year-old Prince Alois, threatened to veto the result of a referendum last fall aimed at overturning Liechtenstein's ban on abortion.

Although Prince Hans-Adam supports a formal division of church and state, he and his family do not hide their Catholic devotion. Eighty percent of their principality's population of 36,000 is also Catholic. A massive carving of Jesus on the cross looms over the fireplace in Prince Hans-Adam's vaulted office, and when he showed me around the 130-room castle this past winter, we stopped in a chapel adorned with a Gothic altar where he and his offspring pray regularly.

But unlike in the United States, where the battle over abortion rights is part of a larger cultural war, the tempest in Liechtenstein is not primarily related to religious belief: Rather, it centers on the extraordinary degree of political power retained by a dynastic leader in the heart of 21st-century democratic Europe.

"Dominions ' are either accustomed to live under a prince or to live in freedom," wrote Machiavelli. Liechtenstein is accustomed to having some of both, but Prince Hans-Adam clearly tipped the balance when he used a 2003 constitutional referendum approved by 64 percent of the electorate to increase his leverage over parliament and the courts, obtaining power to irreversibly veto any law, dissolve the legislature, and appoint judges. But since November's unsuccessful bid to allow abortion -- it failed in the wake of a princely threat to veto it if it gained voter approval -- a new citizens' initiative is pushing for limits on the royal veto prerogative.

Even so, neither power nor money fully satisfies Prince Hans-Adam, who talks in terms of generations rather than the short-term goals of most elected leaders. To ensure a smooth succession, in 2004 he appointed his son Prince Alois as his representative in running day-to-day government matters, but he remains head of state and still exerts considerable influence. Prince Hans-Adam, free from the daily rigors of governance, has recently sought international recognition by writing a book -- called The State in the Third Millennium and published in 10 languages so far -- presenting Liechtenstein's odd constitutional monarchy as a model for other countries.

He also donated $12 million to Princeton University in 2000 to found the Liechtenstein Institute on Self-Determination, where he and his son serve as advisors. "Putting The 'Prince' Back In 'Princeton,'" a student blog at the university commented in 2010 on the 10th anniversary of the institute, which organizes research on governance and sovereignty issues in places like Afghanistan and the former Soviet Union. So far, it has avoided dealing with Liechtenstein itself, perhaps because academic scrutiny in a freewheeling intellectual setting might prove awkward for the princely benefactor. "He takes a real interest but does not try to influence it," said Wolfgang Danspeckgruber, an Austrian who directs the institute.

If at First You Don't Succeed' - By Jonathan Schanzer

The Palestinians may appeal to the United Nations for statehood. Again.

That was the message out of Ramallah on Sunday, June 24, when Fatah, the dominant Palestinian faction in the West Bank, concluded a meeting of its congress.

If you listened closely, you might have heard a collective head slap halfway around the world at Foggy Bottom. The U.S. State Department fought hard last year to derail this very process at the annual U.N. General Assembly meeting in Manhattan. The Palestinians delivered their request, but failed to garner enough support in the Security Council, thanks to heavy U.S. and Canadian lobbying. U.S. diplomats then prevailed upon the Palestinians to shelve their application for nonmember observer status, which would have granted them some of the rights afforded to sovereign states, including the ability to sue the Israelis for war crimes at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

The Palestinians backed down last year. This year, they may not take no for an answer.

Although deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak once single-handedly reined in Palestinian adventurism and prodded Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas back to the negotiating table, his successor, Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, may not follow suit. To put it mildly, encouraging diplomacy with the Israelis has never been part of the Brotherhood's platform.

Even if the military retains full control of foreign policy in Egypt (a likely scenario for the foreseeable future), it is still doubtful that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces will stand in the way of the Palestinian statehood campaign. Indeed, it's doubtful that any Arab state will. With the Arab Spring in full bloom, regional supporters of Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy have long since scurried for cover.

Abbas now cites Israeli settlement activity as the reason he refuses to negotiate. It was never a red line for him in the past, but it's now a convenient formula for him that can't lose. Palestinians support it. And you hear no complaints from the region, where anti-Israel rhetoric is growing increasingly strident.

According to Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, the PLO, which is leading the charge to Turtle Bay, is now following the lead of a different regional player: Qatar. In late March, Erekat announced that the Palestinian leadership had reached an agreement with Doha to try again at the U.N. Other Palestinian insiders confirm that the Qataris are leading the charge, and one former official says they're even funding the legal effort for the PLO, producing analysis on the costs and benefits of the statehood initiative.

Throughout the spring, in one way or another, Palestinian officials affirmed this new, yet familiar strategy. For example, Abbas told Tunisian representatives as much in late April, and an unnamed Palestinian official echoed the same sentiments to Xinhua in May. Citing this anonymous source, the Chinese news agency reported that Abbas was "drumming up support for another battle in the United Nations to get a recognition of an independent Palestinian state."

Turkey's Not Messing Around Anymore - By Justin Vela

ISTANBUL ' On June 22, a stricken Turkish RF-4 Phantom reconnaissance aircraft splashed down in the Mediterranean, brought down by anti-aircraft fire from the Syrian military. The pilots have yet to be located, and are most likely dead. The incident has deepened the rift between Turkey and Syria, former allies whose partnership deteriorated along with President Bashar al-Assad's brutal 15-month crackdown on his own people. Although this incident alone will not push Turkey into direct military confrontation with the Syrian regime, it has put the country in a position where one more incident will force it to, in the words of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, "teach those who dare to test the limits of its might."

Beyond the basic fact of a downed Turkish jet, Ankara and Damascus disagree over the essential details that led to the incident. Turkey insists that the plane was in international airspace when it was fired upon and had only crossed into Syrian airspace briefly, an event that President Abdullah Gul described as "routine." The Syrian regime, meanwhile, insists the Phantom was shot down well within Syrian territory -- a claim that backs up the regime's claim that the uprising, which the U.N. estimates has left more than 10,000 dead, is being guided by foreign powers.

Erdogan responded with typical anger over yet another Syrian provocation. In a June 26 address to a meeting of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Ankara that was attended by Arab diplomats, he announced that any Syrian forces approaching the countries' 565-mile border would be considered a threat and that any infringement of the border would be met with force. The Syrian regime presented a "clear and present danger," Erdogan said.

Meanwhile, Erdogan's top aides publicly pushed the message that the rules of the game had changed. Ibrahim Kalin, one of the premier's top foreign-policy advisors, expanded on the statement on Twitter: "The rules of engagement for the Turkish armed forces have been changed and expanded," he wrote. "Any military element approaching Turkish borders from the Syrian side will be considered a direct military threat."

A Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity, backed up this newly aggressive rhetoric. With the continued bloodshed in Syria and, now the shooting down of the Turkish Phantom, Ankara is no longer playing "Mr. Nice Guy," the official said.

Erdogan's words immediately raised the question of whether a de facto safe zone -- a policy option long broached as one way Turkey could hasten the Assad regime's demise -- was being created to aid opposition forces, yet neither the prime minister nor his advisors specified what "approaching Turkish borders" meant.

Turkey's understanding of how the incident played out has its increased outrage at Assad. The Turkish official told me that the pilots accidently entered Syrian airspace for five minutes, most likely miscalculating their flight path by incorrectly identifying a pair of mountain ridges toward which they were supposed to fly. They were informed of their mistake by Turkish radar station operators and returned to Turkish airspace. The pilots were then asked to correctly repeat their maneuver, which was meant to test Turkey's domestic radar capabilities, the official said. They returned to international airspace, looping around and flying back toward Turkey, parallel to the Syrian coastline, when they were shot down near the Syrian city of Lattakia, according to the official.

Turkey intercepted the Syrian radio communications during the incident. There was "no panic" in the voices of Syrian forces, the Turkish official said. It appeared they had been previously instructed to take such actions and proved themselves aware it was a Turkish aircraft, referring to it as the "neighbors'" plane.

There is no denying that Turkey has emerged as a regional hub of anti-Assad activity in the Middle East. In the past year, the opposition Syrian National Council (SNC) has established an office in Istanbul, with a section dedicated to military coordination. The nominal leadership of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA), along with an estimated 33,000 Syrians who fled the spiraling violence inside their country, are based in 10 Turkish camps in the border region. The U.S. State Department has also established an office in Istanbul to help train activists and provide non-lethal equipment to the opposition.

In the past weeks, reports have also claimed that Turkey's National Security Organization (MIT), its intelligence agency, has transported multiple shipments of weapons to rebels along the border. Turkey's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Selcuk Unal denied the claims, but one Syrian activist involved in transferring the new weapons from MIT to the rebels along the Syrian-Turkish border confirmed the shipments. "For myself, it was not my aim," said the activist, who had previously told me he preferred nonviolent measures to bring down the Assad regime. "But it's generally what everyone wants. It's sort of a victory."

Rumblings in Sudan - An FP Slide Show

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The Fast and the Ridiculous - By James Virini

The majority members of the U.S. House Oversight Committee have been granted their fondest wish -- their investigation into Operation Fast and Furious has caused the biggest proto-scandal in Washington, thanks to Attorney General Eric Holder's refusal to hand over documents and a House panel's vote last week to recommend the chamber cite him with contempt. No longer the private obsession of the right-wing media, Fast and Furious is on front pages and leading news broadcasts around the United States.

At issue now are two questions. First, what was the exact intent and oversight of the operation, run out of the Phoenix office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)? The agency says it was meant to track illicit guns going over the border into Mexico, as part of an effort to build cases against major smugglers. Where cross-border gunrunning is concerned, ATF is usually confined to interdicting low-level purchasers, thanks to crippling investigative limits put on it by Congress.

Fast and Furious evolved out of a larger initiative, Project Gunrunner, an ambitious plan to extend the ATF's investigative reach into Mexico and put the agency on more equal footing with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which leads the war on drugs and has informants embedded deep in the cartels. The controversial tactic of allowing guns to "walk" in order to see where they go, the central issue in the investigation, began late in George W. Bush's administration and was carried over into President Barack Obama's term. Between 2009 and 2011, the ATF lost track of thousands of guns, according to certain agents. Some reached criminal gangs in Mexico (which was the point), including two that were found at the scene of a 2010 shootout where Brian Terry, a U.S. Border Patrol agent, was killed. Others have appeared at crime scenes around Mexico.

The second question, which has pushed the ATF into the background, is what the attorney general is refusing to show the House Oversight Committee. While Holder has turned over 7,600 documents, as he never fails to remind the committee, he won't release memos and emails that committee members believe detail Justice Department debates about how to handle the Fast and Furious fallout. Committee Chairman Darrell Issa and other congressional Republicans make it no secret that they think Holder is running a coverup. They were more coy about suspicions that Obama is privy to it, but his decision last week to exert executive privilege on Holder's behalf has put an end to that.

Longtime critics of the ATF, from a libertarian banker I recently dined with to National Rifle Association director Wayne LaPierre, claim to believe the corruption runs much deeper. They say Fast and Furious proves the agency has been funneling guns to Mexican criminal organizations. Why the ATF would be doing this -- and making official policy of it -- is never part of the argument. Nonetheless, it's a short leap from that rock over the stream of reason and onto the one where Obama is actively working with Mexican cartels -- a belief that many Americans hold (just Google it).

While that sounds preposterous to most of us, including (one assumes) to most critics of the president, there is a place where the levelheaded believe what the anti-government fringe in the United States believes, and where Fast and Furious is a constant topic of conversation -- Mexico. Issa's investigation is a mainstay of news coverage there. Go on the comment boards of Mexican newspapers such as La Prensa or magazines such as Proceso, and you'll find that readers mention Fast and Furious, in conspiratorial tones, at every chance.

This spring, I was in Culiacán, home to the Sinaloa cartel and some of the worst recent violence in Mexico. Beginning in 2007, just as Project Gunrunner was getting started, the cartel's leader, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, was challenged for supremacy by a gang from the east, Los Zetas, and by the Beltrán-Leyvas, a quartet of murderous brothers who had once worked for Chapo. Gun battles broke out in the plazas and streets of Culiacán on a daily basis. Heads rolled, literally, a lot of them.

Rudderless - By Aaron David Miller

A couple years back, I gave a talk at Princeton on the indispensable role leaders play in successful Arab-Israeli negotiations.

A very smart professor from Turkey dismissed my argument as "reductionist," and wondered how I could have missed the broader societal and political forces responsible for success and failure. I simply responded that whatever her views on these matters, she herself hailed from a land in which one guy had fundamentally changed the entire direction of her country's modern history. We left it at that.

Shoot me if you want, but I'm a sucker for the great man (and woman) theory of history. Yes, broad social, political, economic, and cultural structural forces shape and constrain what leaders can do. And yes, Marx was right: People make history; but rarely as they please. Indeed, we have a cartoonish view of leadership in which presidents or prime ministers articulate a vision and then through sheer will persuade us to buy it. That's not how it really works. Instead, a leader more often than not intuits and exploits an opportunity when the times or circumstances offer it up.

Still, individuals count -- big time. For my money, it's human agency -- certainly in matters of war, peace, and nation building -- that is responsible for pushing societies toward the abyss or rescuing them from it. Wherever you stand on this issue, scholar John Keegan's stunning assertion that the history of much of the twentieth century is the story of six men (Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Mao) simply can't be ignored.

So here we are in the second decade of the twenty-first century, a full eight decades after this bunch tried either to take over the world or save it. Where are the big, bold, ballsy leaders? Plenty of very bad guys have come and gone -- Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic -- and some larger-than-life good ones like Charles De Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Anwar Sadat, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Nelson Mandela. But by and large, today we face a leadership deficit of global proportions. Some might even say we're rudderless.

One hundred and ninety-three countries are represented at the United Nations, among them more than 80-plus democracies. Is there one leader of any of them whom we could honestly describe as great, heroic, inspirational, transformational -- the author of some incomparable and unparalleled achievement at home or on the world stage likely to be seen or remembered for the ages? There are courageous dissidents in China, and Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi is indeed inspiring. But empowered leaders governing countries and directing change are harder to identify. Maybe we've entered the post-heroic era: tiny steps for tiny feet. And maybe that's not necessarily a bad thing.

But a look around makes you wonder about the quality and effectiveness of those leaders we do have. Forget the return of the greats we miss and the bad ones we don't want back. Do today's leaders have what it takes to deal with the problems and challenges at hand?

Start with the world's greatest nations -- the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. You might expect great leaders from great powers. But you don't see much greatness in the individuals who lead them: Barack Obama, David Cameron, François Hollande, Hu Jintao, and Vladimir Putin.

Instead, what you have is a bunch of talented, well-spoken guys facing a variety of economic and political challenges they cannot possibly overcome. At best, if they're lucky, they can be successful transactional leaders -- fixing a problem here and there, managing a crisis, or coping with one.

But transformational leaders who leave legacies that fundamentally alter their nation's trajectories? Not likely. Among them, Putin may actually prove to the most successful given his control and his objectives, but even this is no longer certain because of the generational divide he confronts, with so many younger Russians seeking change.

What about those consequential powers outside of the Perm Five -- Germany, India, Brazil? Surely there have got to be effective leaders here.

Angela Merkel is resilient, politically skilled. She's a survivor in German politics, but has been roundly criticized for failing to show leadership on broader European issues, particularly the eurozone crisis. And by all accounts, she won't make it into the Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, and Helmut Kohl category. India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may also be a skilled politician and technocrat who was once popular, but he's now too entangled in political intrigue and charges of corruption to join the ranks of Nehru and Gandhi. Brazil offered up an intriguing candidate in former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, but, well, he's not in power anymore.

What about finding consequential leaders in the Arab and Muslim world? The Arab dictators whom we knew and never loved -- Saddam, the Assads, Qaddafi -- were and are brutal and extractive figures, taking so much more than they ever gave to their people. The next rung down weren't quite as bad -- Mubarak, Ben Ali, Abdullah Saleh -- but clearly better for the United States' interests than for their own peoples'. With the passing of the Ben Gurions, Sadats, Begins, King Husseins, and Rabins, the Middle East has been in the age of politicians not statesmen for some time now. A younger generation of Israeli leaders -- Netanyahu, Barak, Olmert -- bears this out.

What about the Arab Spring? After all, revolutions and crises have in the past been inspired and directed, indeed even produced consequential leaders. It's way too early to draw conclusions, but the trend lines don't look all that encouraging. The Arab uprisings have been effectively leaderless. Egypt's presidential election produced a pretty grey Muslim Brotherhood leader who will be constrained severely by the military and by his own party even if he wants to be bold.

The Sudanese Stand Up - By Christian Caryl

What's happening in Sudan is nothing short of amazing. This is the country that has been ruled since 1983 by President Omar al-Bashir -- the man who faces a global arrest warrant after being convicted of war crimes by the International Criminal Court for his country's exterminationist policies in Darfur. This is a guy who was willing to kill millions of his compatriots -- and not only Darfuris -- in order to keep himself in power. Now, thousands of Sudanese are taking to the streets to defy him and his regime. Many have already disappeared into torture chambers for their efforts.

You could be forgiven if you hadn't noticed. Western media coverage has been thin. CNN aired just a few grainy videos -- which is actually pretty commendable, considering that even the New York Times can't bring itself to do more than printing a few terse Reuters dispatches. (Unless you count their excellent blog The Lede, which finally brought out a good piece on the protests late yesterday.)

But there are a few news organizations that have been doing their best to report on the developing situation: the BBC, Bloomberg, and Agence France-Presse. It's surely no coincidence that some of their correspondents have run into trouble with the authorities. On Tuesday the Sudanese authorities deported Salma El Wardany, a Bloomberg reporter who was arrested by the security services for several hours last week. An AFP journalist was also detained by the police until Western diplomats intervened on his behalf.

The Sudanese government has very good reasons for targeting the handful of foreign journalists in Khartoum. How the outside world covers the uprising in Sudan -- billed by some as the latest installment of the Arab Spring -- will have a major impact on what happens there next.

That was the most important takeaway from my conversation this week with Yousif Elmahdi, a young oppositionist in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. His activism really began in January 2011, when the Tunisian uprising first inspired Sudanese students to demonstrate against the Bashir government. Elmahdi was arrested and tortured by Bashir's secret police. This time around he's decided to confine his protest to the realm of social media rather than participate directly in the protests, but he has no illusions about what's likely to happen next. After our conversation he sent me a text:

Thank you -- I'm going to eventually get detained anyway if this thing increases so I'm trying to do as much as I can in the meantime without doing anything crazy to hasten the arrest.

And yet he was willing to let me use his name. That says something important, I think, about the grit of the people behind the protest movement now under way in Africa's third-largest country.

Why America Can't Have It All - By David Rothkopf

Anne-Marie Slaughter's article "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" in the current issue of the Atlantic has sparked a firestorm of debate. Drawing on her personal experience balancing her distinguished foreign-policy career with the demands of raising two sons, the piece exposes an internal struggle within Slaughter and other women aspiring to both career success and a rewarding home life. But in so doing, it may do something more than that. Slaughter, the former head of Policy Planning in Hillary Clinton's State Department, may have unintentionally -- or subconsciously -- offered up a powerful insight into the challenges faced not only by working mothers but those confronting America's top international and domestic policymakers as well.

The article explores the conundrums successful women face in achieving work-life balance with the kind of candor and nuance it rarely receives but richly deserves. And though Slaughter reasserts her belief that it is theoretically possible for women (and men) to "have it all," she notes that under current conditions, with American society, laws, and customs as they are, it can't be done today.

But contained within in this discussion are signs of a deeper problem dogging America, one that goes beyond this core social issue and extends deeply into the national crisis we are currently confronting. It is that we are society that believes in and actively promotes the myth of "having it all" in the first place. We elevate the rejection of compromise to the level of national ideal.

You see it in the imagery offered up in the fiction of Hollywood, not to mention the confections of Madison Avenue, Wall Street, and Washington, D.C. In each, images of achievement without sacrifice, of weight loss without diet or exercise, of gain without risk, and of economic growth without investment or prudence are dispensed like crack in a schoolyard. With each tantalizing idea -- live large today, pay later, follow Dr. Phil's three-minute prescriptions and enjoy love like you read about it in romance novels -- Americans are more drawn to a web of interconnected, impossible ideals and hooked on the expensive loans, get-rich-quick courses, wonder drugs, political schemes, and schemers who are the only beneficiaries of the perpetuation of such rose-colored fantasies.

This is not to say that the American dream is not real. But the dream was never having it all. It was always about having enough and perhaps, generation to generation, having it a little bit better. It was about tapping potential, not about confounding the laws of physics, biology, finance, or reason.

Yet, here is America trapped in political and policy debates that suggest having-it-all-ism might not just be a big problem for us -- it may be our downfall. Mitt Romney is out selling the standard Republican line that it is possible to fix budget deficits by cutting taxes further (the political equivalent of a quick weight-loss regime that lets you eat more and exercise less). However the Supreme Court rules on health care this week, it will not reverse the reality that Democratic reforms have failed to meaningfully change the rules, retirement ages, payouts, and fee structures that are driving the system into bankruptcy. Both political parties seem to want to remain the world's hyperpower without actually doing the hard work of setting priorities and accepting the sacrifices that go with maintaining that power. And the voters are letting them get away with it.

Deadwood - By Rajiv Chandrasekaran

When Richard Holbrooke became the Obama administration's Afghanistan point man in January 2009, Summer Coish was keen to join his civilian operation. She had the requisite credentials: a master's in public health and experience working on foreign development projects. For the previous five years, she had been splitting her time between New York and Kazakhstan, where she and a friend had started a glossy biannual magazine about Central Asia. Although she dug a little deeper into her savings to print each issue of Steppe, the publishing venture had swelled the list of contacts on her mobile phone. She knew more Afghan entrepreneurs -- from the founder of the country's most successful television station to the owner of the largest bottled-drinks company -- than anyone else seeking a job with USAID.

Coish, a tall blonde with a fondness for dangle earrings acquired in far-off bazaars, was just the sort of person Holbrooke desired for his Washington team. But she wanted to live in Afghanistan, so he introduced her to Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador in Kabul. He brought her to the swearing-in ceremony for the new USAID director in Kabul, who happened to be an old friend of Coish's from Kazakhstan. They talked about possible assignments for her and settled on a position in Kabul coordinating donations from other nations. It seemed a good fit with Holbrooke's goal of increasing international support for the reconstruction of Afghanistan.

Coish arrived in Kabul 14 months later. (It took that long for the sclerotic State Department bureaucracy to process her application and provide her a security clearance -- a process that required her to list all of her travel outside the United States and every "foreign contact" she had had in the previous eight years.) When she finally got there, she expected to work with a team of fellow Americans committed to helping rebuild Afghanistan. Long gone were the days when the U.S. government had assembled postwar reconstruction teams based on political fidelity, questioning prospective hires about their views on Roe v. Wade and capital punishment, as the Bush administration had during the first year in Iraq. Now, Holbrooke was recruiting the best and brightest in Washington. Coish believed the same standards would apply in Kabul.

Within a day, she saw she'd been dreaming. She divided most of the people she met in the highly fortified embassy and USAID compound into three camps: those who had come to Afghanistan because they wanted to make a lot of money -- with hazard pay and bonuses, some staffers earned as much as $300,000 a year; those who were getting their tickets punched for a promotion or a posting to a comfortable embassy in Western Europe; and those who were seeking to escape a divorce, a foreclosed home, or some other personal calamity. "It's rare that you ever hear someone say they're here because they want to help the Afghans," she told me after she had been there for a few months.

Everyone seemed bent on departure. One itching-to-go staffer designed an Excel spreadsheet he called the "Circle of Freedom." You entered the date you arrived and the date you were scheduled to leave, and it told you, down to the second, how much time you had left in Kabul. A USAID employee took to listing his time to freedom in the signature line of his email messages.

Set on a closed street off a traffic circle named for the assassinated Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, the U.S. diplomatic compound in Kabul was ringed by tall walls topped with razor wire. Rifle-toting Nepalese guards -- Ghurkas for hire -- patrolled the perimeter and manned three separate checkpoints everyone had to pass through before entering the embassy grounds. More than 700 Americans lived and worked on the grounds. Several hundred Afghans joined them during the day to translate, perform administrative functions, and clean the buildings. Employees wore identification badges around their necks. Blue cards were reserved for Americans with security clearances. The Afghan support staff had yellow ones that restricted their movements and subjected them to additional screening. When USAID administrator Rajiv Shah came to Kabul for a visit, he thanked the Afghan staff for their bravery and commitment during a town hall meeting in the embassy atrium. They never heard his words because guards barred yellow-badged Afghan staffers from attending the event.

As far as prisons went, the compound wasn't all that grim. There were a swimming pool, a bar called the Duck and Cover, and an Afghan-run café that served sandwiches and smoothies. A small convenience store stocked potato chips, candy bars, and lots of alcohol. The senior staff lived in apartments with kitchens, living rooms, and flat-screen televisions. Coish got a "hooch" -- a trailer containing a twin bed, a small desk and armoire, a bathroom, and a telephone with a Maryland area code. The trailer was surrounded with sandbags. To accommodate the influx of new civilians, the hooches were stacked on top of each other, with metal ladders and catwalks to access the second story.

Covering Up - By Ahmed Al Omran

Norah al-Faiz is supposed to be a symbol of progress in Saudi Arabia. She was appointed deputy minister of education by King Abdullah in February 2009, making her the kingdom's highest-ranking female official. At the time, many observers hailed the move as a sign of reform.

But controversy has dogged Faiz since the beginning of her tenure. When the news of her appointment first broke, the Saudi daily al-Watan published a small headshot of her, wearing a headscarf but showing her face. She reacted angrily, and quickly clarified that she wore the niqab, a black covering that hides the face except for a small slit for the eyes. For Saudi women who wear the niqab, showing their faces in public, let alone mainstream media, is unacceptable.

"The publication of my photo upset me immensely," she told the newspaper in an interview. "[I]t is well known that I am a Saudi woman from Najd," she said, referring to the conservative central region of the country, "and thus I wear a niqab. I will never allow the publishing of my photo in newspapers and I will not accept that it be put up anywhere."

Faiz asked the media not to use any photographs of her and, for the most part, it respected her wish. Upon her inclusion in Time's list of the world's 100 most influential people, the magazine used an illustration of a woman wearing the niqab. In response to questions about how she can work with her male colleagues -- given the strict gender-segregation rules that prohibit men and women from working side by side in government offices -- she responded that their interactions would be conducted "through closed-circuit TV." (In other words, she would sit in a different room from her male colleagues and would be able to see and hear them, while they would only be able to hear her voice.)

A woman's decision to cover her face is a personal choice, and I respect it. But despite Faiz's repeated invocations of her pious Najdi roots, she does not regularly wear the niqab. And the fact that she feels the need to tell the Saudi media differently raises some troublesome questions about the prospects of those trying to reform the kingdom's policies on women's rights from inside the system.

The evidence Faiz doesn't always wear the niqab is all over the Internet. Walid Fitahi, a well-known Saudi doctor, recently tweeted a photo of Faiz addressing Saudi graduates from American universities in Maryland that showed her wearing a white headscarf. A photo distributed by Saudi Arabia's official state news agency on the same day shows her in the same outfit, sitting next to Saudi Ambassador to the United States Adel al-Jubeir.

HASSAN AMMAR/AFP/Getty Images

No Special Sauce on This Currywurst - By Daniel Altman

Imagine, for a moment, what might have happened if the North American Free Trade Agreement had been something a little different, something a little more ... intense. Imagine that Mexico had not just opened its borders to American goods and services but had actually become the 51st state. Furthermore, imagine that all Mexicans had learned to speak English overnight. Extreme poverty in Mexico had disappeared, and much of its workforce had instantly acquired manufacturing skills. Finally, imagine that Mexico had, for the previous several decades, assiduously cultivated trading relationships with the rest of Latin America. And now, imagine that some years after this miraculous unification of Mexico and the United States, the U.S. dollar had become the common currency of much of the hemisphere. Can you see where I'm going with this?

When East and West Germany reunified in 1990, the whole was much greater than the sum of its parts. The East got the West's airtight economic institutions, its culture of precision in manufacturing, and its central position in the global economy. The West got a huge inflow of new workers -- the equivalent of about a quarter of its existing labor force -- and access to an enormous market that had been shut off since World War II. This market wasn't the wealthiest, but it had plenty of room to grow. And though these new workers weren't quite as productive as their counterparts in the West, on average they were more than 50 percent cheaper.

The sudden addition of millions of lower-wage, lower-productivity workers to the German labor force dramatically raised the return to capital. Once the initial growing pains of reunification subsided, investment started flowing in. Giving the new workers better equipment and installing them in refitted factories immediately made them more productive. At the same time, their lower wages made German exports much more competitive.

Then came the euro. Germany's exports to the eurozone became easier and more transparent, and buyers outside of the monetary union could pay for German goods and services with a versatile new currency instead of the trusty but limited deutschmark.

So, was it any wonder that Germany became a world-beating exporter? The first couple of years after reunification were rocky, and exports actually dropped. Then came the miracle: Germany's exports grew faster than its gross domestic product in every year from 1994 to 2008, when the global financial crisis started. In those 15 years, exports tripled while GDP (adjusted for changes in prices) expanded by just 27 percent.

Until the onset of the euro crisis, these stunning results had plenty of people saying that Germany had discovered some magic formula for export-led growth in an advanced economy. In The American Prospect, Eamonn Fingleton wrote, "It is high time the German economy got some respect" and called the German model "an extraordinary engine of economic success." It's true that Germany made some slight changes in economic policy during those boom years, including reforms in the labor market and the pension system. But pointing to those changes as the source of its growth was to ignore the elephant in the room -- the elephant with the word "reunification" painted on its side.

Who Cares How Many Women Are in Parliament? - By Joshua Foust and Melinda Haring

Last month The Economist published its annual infographic about the dearth of women in parliaments around the world. Not surprisingly, some of the most-developed countries -- Sweden, Germany, New Zealand -- top the charts. (Also present are two African countries, Rwanda and South Africa, that have mandated parliamentary quotas for women.)

Equitable representation of women in politics and government is an ideal promoted by every development organization and to which every Western government aspires. Though women comprise over 50 percent of the world's population, they are underrepresented as political leaders and elected officials. The National Democratic Institute puts it plainly: "Democracy cannot truly deliver for all of its citizens if half of the population remains underrepresented in the political arena."

There's a problem with this argument, though: There's no evidence to support it. In Cuba, women MPs comprise 45 percent of the parliament. Yet, in a country where women make up nearly half of the parliament, democracy is not "truly delivering for all of its citizens." And so it goes in many repressive states. They may have plenty of women in power but lag far behind on every meaningful index of democracy.

The Eurasia region illustrates this uncomfortable reality all too well. In Azerbaijan, 16 percent of MPs are female, but every single female MP is a member of the ruling New Azerbaijan Party, which loyally rubber-stamps every decree issued by strongman Ilham Aliyev. In fact, the parliament of Azerbaijan is entirely dominated by one party; there are zero opposition parties in parliament. In other words, there isn't any party parity. Does the number of women matter in a fake parliament?

It is simplistic to assume that the mere presence of women in a parliament corresponds to greater political representation.

What's missing from the focus on women's political participation -- in Azerbaijan and elsewhere -- is political party affiliation. The point of getting women into parliament is to increase representation and, in theory at least, fairness. If a woman is in parliament but she votes however her leader tells her to (as do the male MPs), what difference does gender make?

Western governments and NGOs spend millions of dollars annually trying to increase the number of women in elected legislatures. But counting the number of women in a parliament does not actually tell you how free, fair, or representative that political system is; it just tells you how many women are in parliament. It says nothing about their freedom to think and vote as they choose without fear of reprisal, which should be the primary measurement of parliamentary health.

Women's participation in government matters, of course, but that value comes only after a certain degree of freedom is established. Women can be just as venal, corrupt, and self-interested as men. (Imelda Marcos comes to mind, though pop star and dictator's daughter Gulnara Karimova of Uzbekistan could give her a run for the money).

5 Other People Ruining Zimbabwe - By Erin Conway-Smith

When Robert Mugabe turned 88 in February, he celebrated with five massive cakes, a soccer tournament dubbed the "Bob 88 Super Cup," and a beauty pageant. "The day will come when I will become sick," Mugabe told Radio Zimbabwe, according to AFP. "As of now I am fit as a fiddle."

Fortified with Botox, vitamin shots and black hair dye, Mugabe still seems pretty feisty, last week running down civilians with his motorcade and taking a bloated entourage to the United Nations sustainable development conference in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.  

Meanwhile, Zimbabwe is limping along, its economy broken and its government barely functioning. But while Mugabe continues to get all the international attention, he can't be held solely responsible for Zimbabwe's ongoing turmoil. Here's a list of five people who also deserve a bit of the blame.

1) Emmerson Mnangagwa

Known as "Ngwena," or "The Crocodile," for his reputed brutality, Mnangagwa is Zimbabwe's defense minister and the current favorite to succeed Mugabe. A veteran of the guerrilla war against the British, Mnangagwa went on to head the secret police in the 1980s, and he is thought to have orchestrated the slaughter of about 20,000 ethnically Ndebele civilians by a North Korean-trained army unit in the 1980s. Sokwanele, an activist group, called him "perhaps the one figure in Zimbabwe to inspire greater terror than President Mugabe."

More recently, Mnangagwa was Mugabe's chief election officer during the violent 2008 runoff vote, when thugs from the ruling party, Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF), waged a bloody intimidation campaign against opposition supporters. The Sunday Telegraph reported in April on a secret pact: Mugabe allegedly told Mnangagwa he would anoint him his successor -- as long as he ensured Mugabe's victory in the second round of voting. Mnangagwa dismissed this as mere noise intended to stir up interparty conflict. But according to Zimbabwe political analysts, "The Crocodile" is fighting hard in Zanu-PF's continuing power struggles.

Mnangagwa is also heavily involved in the construction of a military college near the capital, Harare, dubbed the Robert Mugabe National School of Intelligence, the Zimbabwean newspaper reported last year. Built by a Chinese construction company, the college has been financed with a $98 million Chinese loan, funded by a diamond deal with Chinese firm Anjin Investments. Mnangagwa recently admitted to Zimbabwean military involvement in the diamond trade, telling a university audience in Gweru that the Army struck deals with Chinese and Russian diamond firms to counter Western sanctions.

Joseph Mwenda/AFP/GettyImages

The Great Caspian Arms Race - By Joshua Kucera

The Caspian Sea, once a strategic backwater, is quickly becoming a tinderbox of regional rivalries -- all fueled by what amounts to trillions in petrodollars beneath its waves. Observers gained a first glimpse into this escalating arms race last fall, when Russia and Kazakhstan held joint military exercises on the Caspian, which abuts Iran and several former Soviet republics. Russia's chief of general staff framed it as a precautionary measure related to developments in Central Asia, saying it would prepare for "the export of instability from Afghanistan after the withdrawal of NATO troops from there."

But a scoop by a Russian newspaper, Moskovsky Komsomolets, told a different story. The newspaper got hold of a map apparently showing the real scenario of the exercise: the defense of Kazakhstan's oil fields from several squadrons of F-4, F-5, and Su-25 fighters and bombers. The map didn't name which country the jets came from, but the trajectory and the types of planes gave it away: Iran.

While the world focuses on the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran, a little-noticed arms buildup has been taking place to Iran's north, among the ex-Soviet states bordering the Caspian. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union created three new states on the sea, their boundaries have still not been delineated. And with rich oil and natural gas fields in those contested waters, the new countries -- Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan -- are using their newfound riches to protect the source of that wealth. So they're building new navies from scratch, while the two bigger powers, Russia and Iran, are strengthening the navies they already have. It all amounts to something that has never before been seen on the Caspian: an arms race.

The biggest reason for this buildup may be mistrust of Iran, but it's not the only one. The smaller countries also worry about how Russia's naval dominance allows Moscow to call the shots on their energy policies. Iran and Russia, meanwhile, fear U.S. and European involvement in the Caspian. All of this, among countries that don't trust each other and act with little transparency, is setting the stage for a potential conflict.

For the last several centuries, Russia has been the undisputed master of the Caspian. Tsar Peter the Great created Russia's Caspian Flotilla in 1722, and a quote from him still shines on a plaque at the flotilla's headquarters: "Our interests will never allow any other nation to claim the Caspian Sea." Until now, that's pretty much been the case. Because the Caspian was a relative strategic backwater for most of history, no one cared enough to challenge Russia. The Soviet Caspian Fleet, based in Baku, was perhaps best known for a novelty, the "Caspian Sea Monster," a massive experimental hovercraft/airplane.

Since 1991, however, the Caspian has started to matter. While the Caspian may still be marginal to Iran or Russia, it is of crucial strategic importance to Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. Upon gaining independence, those three countries quickly contracted with Western oil majors to explore the untapped resources in the sea, and discovered a fortune capable of transforming their economies. Caspian energy expert (and FP contributor) Steve LeVine estimates that the sea contains about 40 billion barrels of oil, almost all of it in the areas that those three countries control.

The issue of who controls what, however, is a tricky one. While certain pairs of states have worked out bilateral treaties dividing the sea between themselves, some boundaries -- most notably those involving Iran -- remain vague. In addition, the legality of building a "Trans-Caspian Pipeline" under the sea (as Turkmenistan would like to do, to ship natural gas through Azerbaijan and onward to Europe) is unclear, and both Russia and Iran oppose the project.

This uncertainty has contributed to several tense incidents on the Caspian over the last few years. In 2001, Iranian jets and a warship threatened a BP research vessel prospecting on behalf of Azerbaijan in waters that Baku considered its own. In 2008, gunboats from Azerbaijan's coast guard threatened oil rigs operated by Malaysian and Canadian companies working for Turkmenistan near the boundary between those two countries. And in 2009, an Iranian oil rig entered waters that Azerbaijan considered its own, prompting Azerbaijani officials to fret that they were powerless against the Iranians, Wikileaked diplomatic cables show.

The Caspian's New Sea Monsters - An FP Slide Show

 

Oil politics are behind yet another burgeoning arms race, this time in the long-overlooked Caspian Sea. Five coastal states are now competing to lay claim to the hydrocarbons it promises -- and in a region where Iran and Russia have traditionally dominated, the post-Soviet states of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan are building up military capabilities of their own. As Joshua Kucera writes for Foreign Policy, the result is an odd combination of mutual distrust, occasional cooperation, and a more than a bit of tension. 

Russia has long seen the Caspian as the swimming pool in its backyard, but here's a look at the rising naval powers dipping a toe in the waters.

Joshua Kucera

Build Burma from the Ground Up - By Elliott Prasse-Freeman

Burma has entered a new period of political evolution. It's a process rife with opportunity, to be sure. But perhaps this is also a good time to consider the risks.

Defining a political path as "democratization" does not necessarily ensure that it will be democratic. In today's Burma there is a distinct possibility that political elites -- in league with outside experts or capitalists --- will push ahead with reforms while ignoring the interests or ideas of average people, leaving many sections of the population even worse off than under tyranny. Such an approach must be contested. The voices of average Burmese must be incorporated into the decisions that will govern their future.

Twenty years of media and NGO reports have presented Burma as a totalitarian state, with all the sophisticated and encompassing powers that implies. The reality is actually rather different: This is a state that has been strong at violence but weak at management. While Burma's military state demonstrated a terrifying ability to quash dissent, it was never interested in establishing a rationalized bureaucracy with the ability and will to know and regulate every aspect of people's lives. Indeed, the military rulers often crafted implicit deals with the rural people (who make up two-thirds of the population), allowing remarkable freedom for villagers to devise their own coping strategies while the state took its pound of flesh.

This does not mean things were good: far from it. Human development and economic indicators have declined for years. But it does mean that the wrong evolution risks making things worse.

The problems lie primarily in two areas. First, state-led reform has serious limits. President Thein Sein and other reformers cannot impose their will on the country's periphery or in deeply-entrenched institutions such as the military. Second, liberalization in the absence of existing political structures can have dire consequences. Lacking education or skills, millions of people could be forced off their agricultural land and shunted into a low-wage, low-skill manufacturing sector. This would be exploitative even under the best of circumstances, but the further problem is that such a sector does not even exist in Burma. What then will the vast majority of Burmese do? Fire-sale liberalization could produce surplus populations, turning the long-awaited Burmese dream of democracy into a cruel nightmare.

The realities of the system have not, however, prevented the development aid machine from deploying to construct elite-level solutions that ignore Burma's political and economic reality. Indeed, international financial institutions are re-engaging the state; bilateral development aid will flow through state structures as well. This focus on elite institutions extends even to Burma experts: In Foreign Policy's recent project "16 Ways to Fix Burma," the suggestions largely focus on outcomes (build a multi-ethnic democracy, develop the rule of law, buttress the economy by exploiting cheap labor, etc.) that presume the state's ability -- and desire -- to lead such changes.

This focus neglects the functioning institutions that have taken up many "state" roles in thousands of Burmese communities over the last decade. Indeed, a remarkably robust and powerful set of citizens, self-organized into groups outside of the state, has performed the necessary heavy lifting that has enabled society's survival under a capricious and abusive military government. Many observers may have missed this because these groups have always flown under the radar. Their genius under the regime was to deliver services, subvert abusive policies, and mobilize local resources, all the while steering clear of anything that could be construed as politically threatening. Simply put, they learned to beg -- and beg quietly -- for permission to do the job the state should have been doing.

These groups must be made central to political reform. But because of the particular bargain they crafted with the state -- freedom to operate in exchange for political silence -- civil society organizations now risk being ignored. This is because, while political space has certainly increased, civil society groups may not necessarily be eager to capitalize on it, especially when "politics" has long signified a narrow set of dangerous activities (street protests, opposition) off-limits to civil society groups. Such groups may see little to dissuade them from this stance even now, when the political process has come to refer to an equally narrow domain reserved for elite parties and periodic voting rituals. Civil society activists do not realize that their activities could also encompass writing op-eds, mobilizing communities to contact administrators, drafting amicus briefs, lobbying parliamentarians, etc.

Mini 6.22

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Debating the Failed States Index - An FP Roundtable

To see the 2012 Failed States Index, click here. 

PAKISTAN | AFGHANISTAN | SUDAN | YEMEN | SOMALIA 

PAKISTAN

By Nadeem Hotiana

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the news of Pakistan's failure has been greatly exaggerated. We take exception to Pakistan's placement on the Failed States Index published in Foreign Policy magazine. The methodology fails to capture Pakistan's myriad strengths, while exaggerating its perceived weaknesses.

It would be helpful to deconstruct the methodology that is so cavalierly applied to Pakistan. The index singles out "the erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions," the "inability to provide reasonable public services," and "the inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community" as key attributes of a failing state. The compilers get it wrong about Pakistan on all these counts.

Pakistan today is on the cusp of an epochal transition. Even as it fights a full-blooded war against terrorists, it is completing a historic transformation from authoritarian rule to genuine democracy. This is the most legislatively active parliament in our history. It has cleansed the constitution of the debris of past authoritarian interludes and devolved power to the provinces, passed landmark legislation to help bring the residents of our Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Gilgit-Baltistan into the political mainstream, and taken the most comprehensive set of measures to address the grievances of the people of our Balochistan province. It has passed more legislation on women's rights than all of Pakistan's past parliaments combined, while tackling such issues as domestic abuse and property rights and establishing a National Commission on Women. It also established a National Commission on Human Rights with enforcement powers.

A boisterously vibrant media complements the coming of age of Pakistani democracy. The Pakistani military is part of this democratic evolution. It has earned the respect of the average Pakistani through its unflinching resolve to take on the terrorists and allow the political leadership to set the country's direction and policies.

This is not to say that Pakistan does not face challenges. We are on the front lines of the fight against terrorism, which has consumed precious resources. We also face pressures on a number of other fronts. Our infrastructure, for example, has suffered neglect. And yet, the work of the state continues to get done. The parliament continues to meet and make laws and even vote in a new prime minister through a peaceful constitutional change. The bureaucracy continues to deliver services. Schools, colleges, and universities continue to admit students and grant certificates, diplomas, degrees, and doctorates. The borders of the country continue to be defended and the scourge of terrorism continues to be met head on.

The economy, despite laboring under the impact of some of worst natural disasters to befall Pakistan (including the 2010 floods, when 20 percent of our landmass was under water), continues to perform creditably, managing a growth rate of 3.6 percent this year. Tax collection has surged by 25 percent, and remittances from Pakistanis abroad have increased by 21 percent as exports have surged to $25 billion. Pakistan's stock market continues to perform well. Clearly, the investors know or see something that the Failed States Index's compilers can't or won't.

Pakistan is an active and valued member of numerous international organizations. It maintains diplomatic relations with almost all countries of the world. It is currently a member of the U.N. Security Council, earning that place after a tough election. Pakistan has also historically been the top troop contributor to U.N. peacekeeping operations.

The true measure of a nation is not the number and magnitude of challenges it faces, but how it rises to meet them. Measured against that yardstick, Pakistan has hardly any equal.

Nadeem Hotiana is press attaché at the Embassy of Pakistan in Washington, D.C.

Can't We All Just Not Get Along? - By Michael A. Cohen

Does America need more bipartisanship in foreign policy? My fellow Foreign Policy columnist, Aaron Miller appears to think so, as he's twice argued in recent weeks that the next president should pick a secretary of state from the other political party. After all, says Miller, "for the first time in a quarter-century, the United States has a bipartisan -- even nonpartisan -- consensus on many of the core issues relating to the country's foreign policy." Indeed, according to Miller, "there's an emerging consensus in U.S. foreign policy that's smart, functional, and welcome. We should build on it."

Along the same lines, Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose writing in the Washington Post this past weekend, noted that "the basic template for American foreign policy has been relatively constant for almost seven decades now and needs only tweaking and updating, not fundamental revision."

While both are right that there is foreign policy consensus in the country today, it doesn't necessarily follow suit that this is something good. In fact, what the country needs now is not more consensus, but less. While foreign policy harmony often has positive attributes, it can also constrict national security thinking, limit policy options, and marginalize iconoclastic voices. Instead, the competition of ideas in foreign policy debates -- which as Miller implicitly argues doesn't currently exist -- is far more important than perpetuating a "consensus" that keeps new ideas or strategies from rising to the political surface.

At a time when the U.S. faces no serious security threats -- and the country is transitioning away from to a post-war on terrorism template -- there is no better time to have a robust debate about America's global responsibilities, the role of its armed forces and the nature of U.S. interests in a world that is perhaps freer, safer, and more prosperous than any point in human history. Solidifying the current consensus would have the opposite effect. As former Secretary of State Dean Acheson once wisely observed: "It isn't the fact that [foreign] policy is nonpartisan that's important, it's the fact that it's good."

On the surface, however, it might appear that the United States is in the midst of a rather robust partisan debate on foreign policy. Hardly a day goes by when Republicans miss a chance to attack President Barack Obama's foreign policy as weak, feckless, and apologetic. Yes, on issues like China, Syria, and to a lesser extent Iran, there are areas of reasonable disagreement. But dig down and what becomes visible is more convergence than contrast.

For example, while Mitt Romney likes to assail Obama for cutting the defense budget, the differences between the two candidates on the state of the military are actually not all that significant: Obama wants a giant military; Romney wants a gigantic one.  Indeed, after the signing of the debt limit deal last year, which called for as much as a trillion dollars in defense spending cuts both parties practically fell over themselves trying to run away from it. The ink was barely dry before Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was warning that the cuts would invite "aggression" against the United States. And the Republican-led House has already passed legislation that would take a sledgehammer to crucial safety net programs like meals on wheels and children's health care in order to protect the Pentagon's more than $650 billion budget. But the consensus stretches to cover more than just Department of Defense spending.

How about U.S. global alliances, many of which are a vestige of the Cold War and yet remain unchanged 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall? For example, the United States continues to massively underwrite and subsidize security responsibilities for Europe (via NATO) and the Far East (via U.S. security relationships with Japan and South Korea)  Good luck finding a significant voice in either party who thinks either of these situations -- driven as much by inertia than by actual U.S. interests -- is problematic.  What about the U.S. relationship with "allies" like Israel -- which regularly takes actions that are contrary to U.S. policy in the region, but are unquestioned among elite national security policymakers?

Or how about the unshakable agreement within both party elites on the necessity of prosecuting the war on terror via drone strikes in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen? To be sure, there is certainly a healthy amount of varying opinions between Republicans and Democrats on foreign policy tactics, but as Miller rightly pointed out recently: there isn't much difference between Obama and Romney's thinking on major strategic issues. While Romney is more likely to use tough rhetoric on Iran -- and might even talk himself into the use of force -- both men share the view that there is an abiding national interest in preventing Iran from getting a nuclear bomb (at practically any cost) and that containment of a nuclear Iran is unacceptable. Even in today's highly partisan political environment, the areas of contention in foreign policy are frequently less than meets the eye.

No Country for Armed Men - By Ahmed Rashid

LAHORE ' It was a sign of the misguided times in Pakistan that on June 5 -- a day when the country faced massive rolling electricity blackouts, a crashing economy, civil war in two out of four provinces, violence from the Himalayas to the Arabian Gulf, and a cratering relationship with the United States -- the Pakistani army decided it was the best moment to test fire a cruise missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads. It was the fifth such test since April, supposedly a morale booster for a wildly depressed public, a signal to India that Pakistan would not put its guard down despite its problems, and a message to U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, who had arrived in Delhi that morning, that Pakistan could not be bullied.

As Pakistanis baked in the sweltering heat without electricity or running water, facing an increasingly jobless future and little hope for improved education or health care, most people ignored the missile tests. India had been carrying out similar rocket tests, but has not faced anything close to Pakistan's economic malaise.

Then last week, in the most recent denouement of a long-running political crisis, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gailani was sacked by the Supreme Court -- raising all sorts of legal and constitutional problems. Many people termed the court's action a constitutional coup because parliament is the only body that has the power to dismiss a prime minister. Although a new prime minister belonging to the ruling Pakistan People's Party (PPP) will soon be in place, the ongoing political uncertainty is only likely to further escalate Pakistan's institutional meltdown.

All of Pakistan's major institutions of state and governance are now at loggerheads. The Supreme Court, the PPP government led by President Asif Zardari, the opposition parties, and the media have spent the last weeks preoccupied with a flurry of corruption scandals while hurling accusations against one another. So far only the army has come out clean as a whistle -- although corruption charges hover over many retired generals.

For the Pakistani army -- the world's most experienced in creating just the right atmospherics before mounting a coup the country is in a perfect storm for what would be its fifth military takeover. All the institutions of the state are discredited. Pakistanis have no faith in the politicians and there are many public doubts about democracy. Economic collapse and relentless extremist violence have taken a huge toll in life and property, while the breakdown of relations with the West has isolated Pakistan internationally like never before.

Except that this time -- considering the mayhem it faces and the lack of solutions it can offer the nation (especially after having irked the United States and NATO) -- the army is unlikely to mount a coup. Instead, the army would like to see the present PPP government be ousted by the Supreme Court, to be followed by an interim government that would oversee general elections. In this scenario, both the Supreme Court and the army could join hands to bring corruption cases against large numbers of politicians while the tough economic reforms demanded by the IMF, which the current civilian government has refused to carry out, can be implemented. This could mean an indefinite extension of the interim government and delayed general elections.

The ruling elites' failure to carry out reforms is at the root of Pakistan's troubles. The army and successive governments have long lacked the courage or will to make the necessary tough decisions, from making peace with India to blocking the growth of extremism to raising sufficient revenues from the landed gentry. In the 1990s, when the rest of the world was enjoying the peace dividend at the end of the Cold War, along with the spread of global markets and traded goods, Pakistan's economy remained stubbornly feudal. Indian cities like Bangalore and Mumbai raced to build call centers, car companies, and software giants, while Pakistanis struggled to provide electricity for their aging textile mills. Even Bangladesh and Sri Lanka surged ahead, opening their economies to policies building trade and investment and introducing new industries and agricultural crops as Pakistan fought its covert wars.

Meanwhile, the army immersed itself in conflict, first in Afghanistan supporting the mujahideen in the 1980s, then the Taliban in the 1990s, and then the jihadists in Indian-held Kashmir -- many of whom were actually Pakistani militants from Punjab. The idea of improving relations with its neighbors was as anathema to the army as carrying out basic economic reforms was to the political elite, from increasing taxes to ending subsidies to state-owned institutions that have bankrupted the country.