Pakistan

Greg Mortenson, the high-profile advocate of girls' education in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has been forced to defend his best-selling book "Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations ... One School at a Time," against charges that key stories in it are false.

Mortenson shot to international fame with the book, which describes his getting lost in an effort to climb K2, the world's second-highest peak, being rescued by Pakistani villagers in the village of Korphe and vowing to return there to build a school for local girls.

Anatol Lieven, who has reported on Pakistan off and on for 20 years, offers a compelling argument for reorienting Western interests (and investments) in its wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Please join the New America Foundation National Security Studies Program for a discussion with Anatol Lieven of his new book, Pakistan: A Hard Country, which the Daily Telegraph calls, “a wonderful book, full of learning, wisdom, humour and common sense.”

This Saturday marks the 40th anniversary of Bangladesh's war for independence from Pakistan. Given how bloody the war proved to be, and how limited development progress in the country has been since then, it might seem like a dubious occasion for those of us far from Dhaka to celebrate. But the war does have one unambiguously positive legacy: It gave the world an approach to dealing with cholera and other diarrheal diseases that has since saved many more lives than were lost during the fighting.

On Friday, March 11, 2011, Foreign Policy Magazine and the New America Foundation hosted a discussion on Peter Bergen’s newest book, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al Qaeda. The text has received much praise since its release and the discussion and following question and answer session addressed both the book’s aims and key themes. Mr.

In the first 11-and-a-half months of 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama's administration authorized more than twice as many drone strikes, 113, in northwest Pakistan as it did in 2009 -- itself a year in which there were more drone strikes than during George W. Bush's entire time in office.

Given the evident importance of the program to U.S. policy toward Pakistan, it is necessary to ask what we know about the drone strikes, where they happen, and whom they are killing.

To many Americans, the Afghan war understandably looked like a mess in 2010. The year began amid uncertainty at home and abroad about whether Barack Obama's administration was coming or going: Troops went in, but a date of July 2011 was set in advance for the soldiers to start heading home. The U.S. commanding general was fired in June for remarks he made to Rolling Stone; reports of picaresque Afghan corruption spread, encouraged in part by the U.S.

The job offer was suitably Holbrookean: I was standing in my kitchen in DuPont Circle about a year and half ago and the cell rang. On the other end an unmistakable voice boomed, "I'm calling from a plane flying from Riyadh to Washington. I want you to work for me. I land at Dulles in four hours. I need your answer by then." I mumbled something about needing to speak to my wife and my various bosses at CNN and the New America Foundation, and Ambassador Holbrooke quickly hung up. In the end the job offer never panned out, but I felt honored that Holbrooke had even considered it.

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke valued human relationships so deeply that he believed they could change the world.

For Holbrooke, listening was an elevated art. In public, he willingly waded into the planet's thorniest standoffs. And he solved them. He is best known for his success as chief architect of the Dayton Accords, where he successfully brokered the end of the war in Bosnia in 1995.

There will probably never be another American diplomat like Richard Holbrooke. The reason is partly personal. Most diplomats are careful, reserved, discreet… diplomatic. Holbrooke was the opposite. He didn't merely court reporters; he stalked them. And when they didn't write enough about him, he wrote about himself. He did not do subtle. When he bore down on people, he had about as much respect for personal space as Lyndon Johnson in a men's room. As Democratic doyenne Pamela Harriman once put it, "he's not entirely housebroken."