Caitlin Pendleton is a student liaison to Tad Devine this semester. As rocks hit the bus windows, Tad Devine hit the floor. While seeking footage of poverty for an advertisement in the 2002 Bolivian presidential election, Devine, one of the campaign’s media and political consultants, was on a campaign bus that strayed from the heart of … Read more
The Harvard Political Union hosted a debate this past week between the Democrats and Republicans concerning the state of the US economy. The debate suggests that the political platforms of representatives from the Harvard Democrats and Republicans Clubs are very much aligned with those of the national parties. Despite opposing viewpoints, these young aspiring politicians found … Read more
The authorship question regarding Shakespeare’s plays has always elicited debate. How could a man with simply a grammar school’s education go on to be one of the most celebrated authors of all time? Using a lecture by Derek Jacobi as a framing device, Roland Emmerich’s Anonymous begins to tell the phantasmal tale of the Earl … Read more
Throughout the forty-two years of his rule, Gadhafi was always a larger-than-life figure. With his personal-style rule, he embodied the regime that he created in Libya, which ultimately provided a focus of hatred for those that overthrew him. The eccentric Brother Leader, and Africa’s King of Kings, saw himself as “leader of the revolution until the … Read more
As authoritarian regimes crumble throughout the Middle East, so too does the tenuous gulf that once separated politics from religion. The recent elections in relatively moderate Tunisia exemplified this shift through the victory of the previously banned Islamic Ennahdha Party and the distant fourth place finish of the main secularist opposition bloc. In Egypt, when and … Read more
The question is increasingly less, “Should we stay in Afghanistan?” as it is, “Can we stay in Afghanistan?” Needless to say, the toll that war wages is tremendous (financial, psychological, etc). As an idealistic college student, it’s easy to support measures to shrink the military budget to pay for more economy-building jobs (such as teaching and construction, … Read more
With President Obama’s pledge to end the war in Afghanistan in 2014 and with the war in Iraq nominally over, it is necessary to begin predicting and planning for the new power dynamics of a post-U.S. Middle East. Analysts have already pinpointed the Islamic Republic of Iran as the nation poised to fill the power vacuum. … Read more
We asked some of HPR’s brightest minds what they think about Afghanistan, now ten years after the start of the war. What’s next for Central Asia as the U.S. winds down its commitments? What’s been forgotten and what should the U.S. learn from this involvement?
Of all U.S. engagements in recent years, Afghanistan has been uniquely exploited for political purposes, both by the Bush administration and by Democrats-Obama among them-eager to appear sufficiently ‘hawkish.’ Although we are today vastly removed, temporally and psychologically from the immediate context of the invasion and cannot appreciate the security and political calculus behind the … Read more
For US policymakers, the War in Afghanistan is largely a function of two patently flawed options. On the one hand, significant reductions in American military presence would leave the Afghan state to fend for itself, a task that the government has proved unmotivated in and incapable of performing. Many members of Karzai’s government have intimate … Read more