Afghanistan

This past Saturday, March 16, 2013 marked an extraordinary moment in Pakistan’s history, as this is the first time that a civilian government has served its entire five-year term (from 2008 to 2013). And, for the first time in its history, the Pakistani military appears both unwilling and unable to mount a coup against any civilian government. The military has mounted four coups since Pakistan’s independence in 1947.

Quick question: Which Asian country has seen its life expectancy go up an astounding 18 years in just one decade, while turning from one of the world's most rural countries into one of its fastest-urbanizing? Oh, and the country's GDP increased tenfold in that same period.No, this isn't Japan in the 1960s, Singapore in the 1970s, South Korea in the 1980s, or India in the 1990s. It is Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban.

Barak Barfi reports on the real state of the Syrian Civil War after returning from a recent trip to the country, and Charles Kenny explains why mixing public health campaigns with covert operations is disastrous. Elizabeth Weingarten hosts.

The greatest loss of human life and economic damage suffered by South Asia since 2001 has not been due to terrorism and its ensuing conflicts, but rather due to natural disasters ranging from the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the Indus floods of 2010 to seasonal water shortages and drought.  Although such calamities themselves might not be preventable, their human impact can certainly be mitigated. This report argues that such mitigation of environmental stresses is possible only through regional approaches to ecological cooperation.

It has been a rough couple of weeks for U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. The Obama administration's reconciliation and transition efforts and parallel attempts to repair U.S.-Pakistan relations faced fresh challenges as the Pakistan-based Haqqani network was implicated in major attacks against the United States, NATO, and Afghanistan.  

When the United States led the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the mission was clear: retaliation against the Taliban government for offering safe haven to the masterminds of the 9/11 attacks.

Ten years later, the mission is no longer clear -- not to the American people, not to the Taliban, not to regional stakeholders, and unfortunately, not even to the nearly 100,000 American troops struggling to maintain a sense of purpose in some of the most forbidding terrain in the world. And the criticism and challenges to U.S. efforts in Afghanistan abound. What happened?

Divorces don't happen overnight, but there's always that one moment, that one comment when -- perhaps only in retrospect -- you can see the split coming. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's recent trip to Afghanistan may have been unannounced, but he wasn't shy when it came to speaking about Pakistan.

Before dawn on Friday, a man wearing an Afghan uniform shot and killed three U.S. soldiers during a meeting to discuss local security issues in the southern province of Helmand.

It was one of an unprecedented series of five attacks by people in Afghan security forces uniforms in the past week against NATO forces.

Peter Bergen discusses the Obama Administration's covert drone war in Yemen, White House information leaks, and the president's kill list. Evgeny Morozov explores the peaceful side of cyber warfare and the American cyber attacks on Iran. Elizabeth Weingarten Hosts.