Kenya's Most Wanted - By Suzanne Nossel

The victory of indicted war criminal Uhuru Kenyatta in Kenya's presidential election poses a familiar dilemma for the West: how to weigh support for human rights against economic and security interests in a part of the world marked by terrorist threats, simmering regional conflicts, and increasing economic and trade opportunities. But Kenyatta's victory also raises a potentially thornier conundrum: whether actively opposing his assumption of power will indeed advance the cause of international justice at all.

Last week's Kenyan elections were a messy affair. There are allegations of fraud in the electoral register and the country's electronic counting system crashed, leading Raila Odinga, the runner-up, to challenge the result. But the current outcome seems likely to hold. If it does, Kenyatta -- the son of the legendary Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta -- will soon begin a five-year term.

The contentious outcome echoes the country's last vote, in 2007, when Odinga lost narrowly to a different opponent. Back then, Odinga also disputed the result and -- saying he did not trust the courts -- urged his followers to take to the streets. Two months of unrest ensued, including boycotts, ethnic clashes and more than 1,000 deaths. During this upheaval, according to an indictment issued by the International Criminal Court, Kenyatta and others engaged in the wholesale displacement, torture, persecution, and ever murder of ordinary Kenyans. Kenyatta stands accused of directing leaders of a Kenyan criminal syndicate to attack perceived opposition supporters. He has vehemently denied committing any crime, vowing to cooperate with the court and mount a robust defense.

The indictment was a landmark for the ICC. Most of the court's cases targeted abuses by militias during armed conflicts. This time, in what observers called a warning shot for African and other global leaders accustomed to using violence to defend their rule, the court went after top national leaders who had used brutal repression to maintain political power. The case was also noteworthy because it was undertaken by the ICC prosecutor himself without a request from either the U.N. Security Council or the Kenyan government. After the indictment was issued, the Kenyan parliament passed by a wide margin a non-binding protest motion calling to withdraw the country from participation in the ICC.

Fast forward five years to this year's contested Kenyan election. This time the country's constitution had been strengthened with a bill of rights; the courts have been cleaned up. Those improvements seem to have helped avert violence thus far. But while lives may be spared this time around, the stakes in this election are still high for Kenya, Western governments, and the ICC. The United States and Kenya have cooperated in fighting terrorism ever since the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. Under the Obama administration, economic and security cooperation and the sharing of intelligence have intensified, particularly on Somalia, home to the al Qaeda-linked militant group al-Shabab. Nairobi is a prime media hub for the continent and is the locus for the United Nations' vital peacekeeping and humanitarian programs throughout Africa. The United States and Europe are aware that if Kenya pivots away from them, it will likely be in the direction of China, which is already heavily invested in Kenyan oil, mining, transportation, and infrastructure projects.

Despite, or perhaps because of, their close relationships with Nairobi, the United States and Europe have not hid their distaste for a Kenyatta victory. U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Johnnie Carson warned Kenyans before the vote that "decisions have consequences" and Britain has announced that its diplomats would have only "essential contacts" with Kenyatta. The impetus to treat Kenyatta as a pariah is motivated not just by recoil at his alleged actions, but by the practical notion that to deter them, the international community must make war crimes out of bounds not just legally but also politically, diplomatically, and socially. If the ICC hopes to avert abuses and isolate war criminals, it must ensure that indicted leaders can't simply go on with business as usual. This is why there has been so much pressure on governments to shun and isolate Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who has been indicted and subject to an arrest warrant by the ICC for five counts of crimes against humanity.

How the Muslim Brotherhood Hijacked Syria's Revolution - By Hassan Hassan

No one in Syria expected the anti-regime uprising to last this long or be this deadly, but after around 70,000 dead, 1 million refugees, and two years of unrest, there is still no end in sight. While President Bashar al-Assad's brutal response is mostly to blame, the opposition's chronic failure to form a viable front against the regime has also allowed the conflict to drag on. And there's one anti-Assad group that is largely responsible for this dismal state of affairs: Syria's Muslim Brotherhood.

Throughout the Syrian uprising, I have had discussions with opposition figures, activists, and foreign diplomats about how the Brotherhood has built influence within the emerging opposition forces. It has been a dizzying rise for the Islamist movement. It was massacred out of existence in the 1980s after the Baathist regime put down a Brotherhood-led uprising in Hama. Since then, membership in the Brotherhood has been an offense punishable by death in Syria, and the group saw its presence on the ground wither to almost nothing. But since the uprising erupted on March 15, 2011, the Brotherhood has moved adroitly to seize the reins of power of the opposition's political and military factions.

According to a figure present at the first conference to organize Syria's political opposition, held in Antalya, Turkey, in May 2011, the Brotherhood was initially hesitant to join an anti-Assad political body. The group had officially suspended its opposition to the Baathist regime in the wake of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza in 2009, and it pulled out of an alliance with Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian vice president who defected in 2005.

The Brotherhood nonetheless sent members to participate in the conference, including Molhem Droubi, who became a member of the conference's executive bureau. Meanwhile, it took steps to form fighting groups inside Syria, recruiting potential fighters and calling on its relatively meager contacts on the ground in Homs, Hama, Idlib, and Aleppo.

As the idea of a unified opposition group to lead the popular revolt gained momentum, the Brotherhood became more involved. A month after the meeting in Antalya, it organized a conference in Brussels, attended by 200 people, mostly Islamists -- one of the first obvious fractures in the unity of the opposition. The Brotherhood subsequently organized several conferences that formed opposition groups to serve as fronts for the movement, allowing it to beef up its presence in political bodies.

After the conference in Brussels, at least three groups were formed "to support the Syrian revolution." The organizations continued to hatch, and a few months after the first conference they were present in opposition bodies that later formed the core of the Syrian National Council (SNC), an umbrella group that ostensibly represented all anti-Assad forces. The council set aside seats for both the Brotherhood and members of the Damascus Declaration, a group of Syrian reformists established in 2005 -- but the Brotherhood already had a significant presence within the Damascus Declaration group.

The Case for Just-in-Time Immigration - By Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg

It is often said that government could learn a thing or two from the private sector, but what if the very same management innovations that powered the recent surge in global productivity could be leveraged to solve America's immigration problem? It sounds far-fetched, but "just-in-time" production strategy -- which matches supply and demand for manufacturing components, thereby reducing wasteful imbalances -- is crying out to be applied to immigration policy. We have the technology and the data to do it -- all we need is the will.

Despite persistent unemployment problems, the United States faces significant labor shortages, particularly in the manufacturing and technology sectors. Large employers like Siemens, Apple, Microsoft, and LinkedIn, for example, have struggled to fill thousands of job openings because of the lack of suitable candidates. Meanwhile, current immigration policies permit too few skilled worker visas and dictate long waiting periods for skilled H-1B visa holders to obtain green cards. Current green card quotas, moreover, are woefully insufficient to meet labor demands in many sectors. Fortunately, there's an easy fix for this mismatch between supply and demand for human capital: dynamic "just-in-time" labor and immigration policies that let in immigrants as they are needed.

American success in the postwar period was built on the free flow of trade and capital -- and human capital was an essential part of the story. From 1970 onward, roughly 10 million college-educated women chose to work professionally instead of becoming full-time wives and mothers. Between 1970 and 1990, 17 million immigrants came to the United States, and made profound contributions to construction, agriculture, manufacturing, technology, and the service sector. They also changed the lives of a generation of working mothers. The availability of legal, reasonably priced childcare allowed women to manage their familial obligations while competing in the global work force. The advent of the dual-income family, in turn, provided a formidable boost to our consumption-driven economy for the next four decades.

Today, human capital flows are seriously obstructed by political gridlock in Washington. At the same time, the Baby Boomer generation is graying, retiring, and increasingly relying on the social welfare programs to which it contributed -- but not enough given the longer life expectancy of its members. In a blink of an eye, it seems, the Boomers have gone from the locomotive to the caboose.

The key to solving this demographic challenge is a sustained and selective immigration policy. Based on data collected by the PEW Research Center and the Department of Labor-Bureau of Labor Statistics, the United States needs roughly 50 million new immigrants over the next 20 years in order to meet our demographic and balance-sheet demands. That's about 2.5 million immigrants per year, compared to the roughly 2 million (one million legally and one million, give or take, illegally) who have arrived in the United States every year for the last two decades. It's not much of an increase -- 500,000 people per year -- but it's enough to make a positive difference in our fiscal deficits, consumption, savings, and investment needs, and to take care of the household and other employment demands of an aging population.

To meet these needs, the United States should adopt four policies that balance supply and demand for human capital -- bringing the U.S. immigration system more in line with just-in-time principles. First, the government should make it easier for foreign students who graduate from U.S. colleges and graduate schools to obtain work visas, as Mayor Bloomberg and others have suggested. The United States trained them, so it should have the option of keeping them.

Pulp Non-Fiction - By Michael Peck

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Smaller Is Smarter - By John Arquilla

There is an emerging consensus, in Congress and around the country, that government spending must decline, but there is just as strong a sentiment that there are far more artful ways to achieve this than by across-the-board cuts. In the case of domestic entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, this growing awareness has sparked some bold thinking about reforms, particularly among Republicans in Congress. In the defense sector, however, there is far less evidence of a willingness to contemplate innovative ideas. But if there were, a world of intriguing possibilities would open up.

Unfortunately, the bipartisan reaction to sequestration as it bears upon military matters has been to try to figure out ways to wriggle free of its constraints, perhaps even to avoid any spending reductions over the next 10 years, much less drawdowns amounting to an additional $500 billion on top of currently planned cuts. If this sentiment prevails, a signal disservice will have been rendered to the military and the American people, because the failure to insist on defense spending reductions will continue to allow the military to forgo making tough and much needed choices about future directions. Strategic affairs are in great flux, due to factors ranging from radical technological change to the rise of a series of wars between nations and networks. A failure to transform the military now will only increase perils -- even if spending cuts are avoided.

The challenge before us is to embrace budgetary constraints as empowering rather than crippling. And there are many good examples of professional militaries that seized such opportunities, extending far back in history. In the 6th century of the Common Era, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian sought to restore territorial holdings in the West that had been lost as Rome declined and fell -- yet he had only the slenderest of financial resources with which to carry out this goal. However, he picked skillful generals, Belisarius and Narses, who made the most of what little they had as they pioneered the development of new types of military formations. The great strategist Liddell Hart saw in the heavy cavalry troops that were created, in part to make up for a critical lack of legionary infantry, a clear foreshadowing of modern armored warfare. And so, with always outnumbered forces, Belisarius and Narses reconquered and held Italy, Africa, and southern Spain for the Empire.

A more modern example of success-under-constraint is the post-World War I army of Germany's Weimar Republic. In this case, treaty restrictions and the parlous state of the economy kept the active-duty force quite small -- limited to 100,000 soldiers. Their commander, General Hans von Seeckt, used this in two important ways. First, he emphasized the profound importance of understanding the operational implications of key maturing technologies: tanks, planes, and radio. His focus on mobile maneuvers led to the rise of blitzkrieg. Second, force-size limits led him to rethink the active-reserve mix, and to nurture the notion of cycling through large numbers of young men on short active-duty periods, then moving them into vigorous reserve programs -- sometimes under the guise of labor organizations. Thus Germany eventually had a very large trained manpower pool upon which to draw, allowing the army to expand rapidly and effectively when war came.

To some extent, the U.S. military during the decade after Vietnam followed a similar pattern of development. Active-duty forces were reduced by 40 percent, from 3.5 to 2.1 million. Defense spending declined sharply as well, falling from $344 billion in 1972, at the end of the war, to just $295 billion by 1979 -- over a 14 percent drop before factoring in the effects of inflation. Yet in the face of these challenges, the smaller active army became more professionalized and a new doctrine began to form, Air-Land Battle, which was formally introduced in 1982 and focused on the importance of the swift movement of information and the striking power of precision-guided munitions. Like the German Reichswehr, the post-Vietnam U.S. military found its way ahead despite considerable constraints. Even the spending increases under Ronald Reagan were relatively short-lived as, by the time the elder President Bush submitted his final budget for FY 1993, the actual spending level was only $15 billion more than at the end of the Vietnam War. In inflation-adjusted dollars, this was quite a reduction.

The Iraq War That Might Have Been - By Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor

In October 2003, a team of Pentagon intelligence analysts identified a promising twist in a war that seemed to be going terribly wrong: Sunni tribal leaders in Iraq's hostile Anbar province had come forward with offers to help secure western Iraq.

"Leaders of these tribes -- many of whom still occupy key positions of local authority -- appear to be increasingly willing to cooperate with the Coalition in order restore or maintain their influence in post-Saddam Iraq," noted the memo, which was approved by Ronald L. Burgess, Jr., the major general who served as the director for intelligence on the Joint Staff and would later rise to run the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The classified memorandum was duly forwarded to American civilian and military officials in Baghdad. But the suggestion largely fell on deaf ears. It would take three more years before Sunni tribes would help turn the war around in the "Anbar Awakening."

In our years of research on the Iraq war, we have uncovered a number of similarly hidden forks in the road -- lost opportunities that might have dramatically shortened the Americans' ordeal in Iraq or decisions whose full significance was not apparent until years later. Many are chronicled in internal government documents, thousands of pages that we reviewed in the course of our reporting -- in effect, amounting to a secret Iraq archive that sheds new light on the nearly nine-year-long war.

These memoranda, 23 of which are being published today in the new ebook edition of Endgame, our history of the conflict, cover the whole long arc of the war.

The documents, many of which are being published for the first time, include the dawning awareness that the United States had stumbled into an intervention that would be more taxing and prolonged than it had anticipated -- a point driven home in a blunt 2004 cable from John Negroponte, the first American ambassador in post-Saddam Baghdad, warning President George W. Bush that the United States was "in a deep hole with the Iraqi people" and needed at least five years to get the country on its feet. (Bush's response: "We don't have that much time.")

And they cover the full range of adversaries as threats appeared to multiply. A briefing for Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy defense secretary, outlined three options for carrying out "Operation Stuart," a 2004 contingency plan to capture Muqtada al-Sadr, the fiery anti-American cleric. The operation was never executed as the Americans pondered the risks. ("Accidentally killing Sadr during an arrest attempt would make him an anti-American nationalist icon and Islamist martyr" was one of the potential "unintended consequences," the briefing noted.)

The United States, the documents show, gained critical insight into al Qaeda in Iraq after U.S. troops stopped a vehicle near Taji on Dec. 19, 2006. The hard drive and thumb drive that were found contained al Qaeda reports, which became known as the Taji DOCEX (for "document exploitation"). The al Qaeda material helped shaped the U.S. military understanding of how al Qaeda operated in Baghdad and the surrounding rural "belts."

Another adversary that was chronicled in the reports was the Jaysh al-Mahdi, Sadr's Shia militia, which infiltrated the Interior, Health, and Transportation ministries, colonizing the very instruments of the state.

Through a combination of political appointments and thuggish militia tactics, the Mahdi Army, also known as JAM, had infiltrated the Baghdad International Airport (BIAP), the nation's main gateway to the world, even securing positions as sky marshals. "By controlling BIAP, JAM has the ability to smuggle weapons, money, and people under the protection of official cover," noted a June 2007intelligence assessment. The infiltration had occurred under the nose of the American military's largest headquarters at Camp Victory. The airport was eventually purged of Sadrist influence in a classified operation dubbed Silver Sabre.

Iran's activities also figures heavily in the classified annals of the war. One set of classified reports chronicles the messages that Qasim Suleimani, the commander of Iran's Quds Force, sent through Iraqi intermediaries to Gen. David Petraeus, the top American commander in Baghdad.

Suleimani's message was that that he, not Iranian President Mahmoud Admadinejad, was the "sole decision-maker on Iranian activities in Iraq," Petraeus told the Pentagon. And Suleimani had an offer for the Americans: The Shiite militiant groups Iran was supporting in Iraq would reduce their attacks if the Americans would release Qais Khazali, a Shiite militant leader who was linked to a botched kidnapping that led to the death of American troops. Petraeus turned the offer down.

Here is how the documents illuminate four pivotal episodes that might have turned out differently -- along with, perhaps, the war itself.

North Korean Pastoral - By Roger Shepherd

The Baekdu Daegan mountain range twists its way more than 1,000 miles down the length of the Korean Peninsula, from the sacred peak of Baekdusan on the North Korea-China border to Jirisan in central South Korea. Today, it is choked off by landmines and barbed wire at the demilitarized zone, but once, it was considered the "spine of the nation" -- a source of spiritual energy and strength for the Korean people.

At least 75 percent of the Korean Peninsula is covered by mountains, and long before the country was divided -- first by Cold War politics and then by a war -- Koreans shared a reverence for the power of these peaks. Mountains are prominent in Korean art and literature. Koreans practicing animism once paid homage to mountain spirits to ensure them safe passage on their journeys. Today, the lyrics of both countries' national anthems still sing the praises of Baekdusan, or Great White Mountain, the sacred peak said to be the place of ancestral origin for the Korean people.

Over the past two years, New Zealand native Roger Shepherd was granted rare permission to spend more than two months in the mountains of North Korea as part of his efforts to document the Baekdu Daegan as one ridge, north and south. Shepherd has made three trips to the country, during which he covered more than 6,000 miles and visited more than two dozen mountain peaks.

"These days we see Korea as divided," Shepherd says. The Baekdu Daegan system, he tells FP, helps remind us that geographically, Korea is still one entity with a shared history and a shared culture as mountain people. "I hope my work can reinvigorate that mindset." These are the revealing photographs from his time in the country known to most of the world as "one of the most closed and secretive nations on earth."

Above, farmers catch a lift across the Saepo-gun plateau below the Baekdu Daegan ridge in Kangwondo, DPRK.