WITHDRAWAL OF U.S. TROOPS FROM AFGHANISTAN: EXIT STRATEGIES

After twenty long and frustrating years, America has finally withdrawn completely from Afghanistan. This paper gives an overview of American actions in Afghanistan, starting with the George W. Bush administration and the invasion of American troops, assassination of Osama bin Laden and suppression of Al-Qaeda’s activities, through the Obama administration, during which the ISAF mission ended and throughout which the withdrawal of American troops was announced. After that, an overview of the activities during the mandate of Donald Trump is given, during which definite conditions for the withdrawal of troops were created, by signing the agreement in Doha between the United States of America and the Taliban, which was meant to bring the peace to the Afghanistan. At the end of the paper, an overview of the activities and the situation on the ground during the administration of Joe Biden is given, during which the complete withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan was finally completed, which the Taliban used it to reoccupy the country and declare the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

Twenty-First-Century Torture

Immediately following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, members of the George W. Bush administration signaled that current rules regarding intelligence, detention, and interrogation were too confining. With approval from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the president declared that the Geneva Conventions’ detention and interrogation guidelines would not apply to Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees. The problem with Geneva, administration lawyers argued, was that it would tie interrogators’ hands. The CIA and the military wanted an explicit legal blessing for their interrogation programs. They got it in the form of a series of memos by the OLC and military lawyers, who defined torture in exceedingly narrow terms. The result was “enhanced interrogation,” which the administration claimed did not amount to torture but was still a sufficiently “tough” program to break hardened terrorists.

Do the Media Affect the Decisions of Policy Makers in Foreign Policy?

On July 16th 2021, the U.S. newly elected President Joe Biden hosted Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi at the White House. The main topic was the future of the U.S. troops in Iraq. The controversial American invasion, after more than eighteen years, is again in focus. The American media in particular is allocating long hours of its live coverage in discussing this sensitive topic. This paper investigates the complex relationship between media and policymakers in the USA. The paper uses the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as a case study to address the question of the media’s influence on policy decision-making. By choosing two main media outlets in the "stalwart" on democracy: The New York Times and Fox News. The paper goes through a detailed account of how the Bush administration was able to impose their interpretation of the situation and how the media fostered misperceptions among the American public in one of the most world’s controversial crises. The conclusion from this analysis was that the media don’t affect policymaking. On the contrary, the American administration shaped the news coverage almost entirely. The Bush administration in 2003 was able to employ media to form its war agenda and spreading it to the public. Media, even in a democratic system, was unable to give counter argument or even a critical attitude towards Bush administration foreign policy. Received: 5 August 2021 / Accepted: 4 October 2021 / Published: 5 November 2021

The Battles over Sustainability and Climate Change

The political battles between anti-regulatory and libertarian conservatives and environmentalists have focused on two major and interrelated issues: sustainability and climate change. The opening of this chapter sets the stage by looking at the “Great Pacific vortex,” a vast whirlpool of plastic garbage the size of Texas, as a symptom of environmental distress. The battle over unrestrained growth took the form of “the Bet,” a wager between the Malthusian population doomsayer Paul Ehrlich and the libertarian economist Julian Simon. Whereas Ehrlich said growing world populations threatened life on earth, Simon argued that population growth was the solution, not the problem. Scarcity triggers a substitution effect (kerosene for whale oil) and as population increases so does human ingenuity. In the 1990s, the battle over climate change upstaged the argument over population. Enter Al Gore. As scientists battled to build a climate model that predicted the impact of greenhouse gases on temperatures, Gore heard a lecture in which his professor at Harvard, Roger Revelle, showed the class a graph of the “Keeling Curve” that demonstrated an unmistakable pattern of rising temperatures. It transformed the path of Gore’s life and the debate over climate change. The formation of the IPCC, along with the climate conferences at Rio in 1992 and Kyoto in 1997, provided an international platform on which scientists and government officials debated the nature of climate change and the need for governments to act. The Bush administration not only rejected Kyoto but also encouraged increased purchases of gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks.

Digital media and democracy: tactics in hard times

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” explains an unnamed Bush administration official. This quote sets the tone for a new edited collection reflecting on the role of the media in constructing reality. The lack of a “truth” does not quell the public demand for one, as Boler aptly points out in her introduction: “The desire and longing for truth expressed by the public demands for media accountability is in tension with the coexisting recognition of the slipperiness of meaning” (p. 7). Media, then, in all their forms, become a central battleground for forging meaning and shaping reality. “Media are the most powerful institutions on earth,” Amy Goodman of Democracy Now claims, “more powerful than any bomb, more powerful than any missile” (p. 199). This series of interviews and articles explores how incumbent powers and media activists compete to produce and reproduce their versions of reality through the media. The contributors use the format to discuss the tenuous relationship between media and democracy and the changing role of the news media, as well as to present examples of tactical media. The resulting collection provides an excellent introduction to the current, troubling media landscape and its tactical opportunities.

Digital media and democracy: tactics in hard times

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” explains an unnamed Bush administration official. This quote sets the tone for a new edited collection reflecting on the role of the media in constructing reality. The lack of a “truth” does not quell the public demand for one, as Boler aptly points out in her introduction: “The desire and longing for truth expressed by the public demands for media accountability is in tension with the coexisting recognition of the slipperiness of meaning” (p. 7). Media, then, in all their forms, become a central battleground for forging meaning and shaping reality. “Media are the most powerful institutions on earth,” Amy Goodman of Democracy Now claims, “more powerful than any bomb, more powerful than any missile” (p. 199). This series of interviews and articles explores how incumbent powers and media activists compete to produce and reproduce their versions of reality through the media. The contributors use the format to discuss the tenuous relationship between media and democracy and the changing role of the news media, as well as to present examples of tactical media. The resulting collection provides an excellent introduction to the current, troubling media landscape and its tactical opportunities.

The Karzai Regime

Chapter Five, “The Karzai Regime,” discusses the strategy of the Bush administration and the formation of the new Afghan government from 2002 to 2005, including the constitutional process and development of an Afghan army.

US interaction with the TPSEP countries within the trade policy of the George W. Bush administration

The article is devoted to the study of the formation of the US foreign trade course in the Asia-Pacific region. Special attention is paid to the factors in bilateral relations with the TPSEP countries, which had a key influence on the decision of the George W. Bush administration to join the partnership. The author comes to the conclusion that failures in the implementation of the multilateral format of regional trade liberalization contributed to the fact that the United States entered the negotiation process on the TPSEP.

US Security Assistance to Pakistan in Post 9/11 Period

This paper attempts to understand the dynamics of United States aid assistance to Pakistan in the light of post 9/11 security developments in the world. The analysis of US foreign policy aid instruments generally indicates three broad objectives: strategic/politico-security benefits, economic interests and humanitarian concerns. Although one consistently recurring theme in US foreign policy aid provision, both in the Cold War period and the newer post 2001 ‘War on Terror’ period has been security. This theme has also defined US-Pakistan aid relationship in different times, with the exception of Bush administration, who unlike the Cold War period made an alteration byspecifying funds forpurpose-basedusage in sub-fields. This paper argues that Bush administration sought to achieve US foreign policy objectives by providing strategic aid to Pakistan much at the expense of domestic public opinion. It further stresses that change in administration in the US brought obstacles in aid flows to Pakistan as President Obama not only reduced the amount of aid under specific heads, but also openly accused Pakistan of fomenting the militants (the good Taliban), which in turn hurt the US broader strategic goals in the region and raised irreconcilable issues of trust between the two countries. The new administration of Trump went a step ahead by suspending many of the aid programmes to Pakistan, bringing the all-time trust-deficit between the two countries to an all-time low. This paper primarily applies the realist and neo-realist theoretical framework to understand the aid and security relationship paradigm between the US and Pakistan.