HELSINKI, Finland, Nov. 20 (UPI) -- The U.S. Army recently funded a five-year, $50 million study by the National Institute of Mental Health to examine the factors possibly associated with suicide, including combat-related trauma, personal and economic stress, family history, childhood abuse, a military unit's cohesion and general mental health.
FRANKFURT, Germany, Nov. 20 (UPI) -- Nobody could accuse the 27-nation European Union of arousing inflated expectations with their new leadership team of Herman von Rompuy and Baroness Catherine Ashton. The traffic will not stop in Beijing when they arrive and President Barack Obama may well ask "Who?" when they come to call.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 (UPI) -- "It will be just like Syria," said the strategic scholar just back from Israel and speculating about the much-debated question of whether Israel will eventually bomb Iran's nuclear installations.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 18 (UPI) -- After eight years of war and huge expenditures of national treasure, is the United States really serious about succeeding in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Or, given the seemingly intractable nature of these conflicts and the exquisite difficulties of coping with foreign cultures, are the United States and its allies embarked on a mission that is unwinnable by most definitions?
HELSINKI, Finland, Nov. 18 (UPI) -- Just what are the "concrete metrics to capture performance progress" to measure the strength of diversity, at least according to the U.S. Army's own definition of the word?
PARIS, Nov. 16 (UPI) -- Whatever U.S. President Barack Obama was hoping to achieve at the Asia-Pacific summit in Singapore, it seems on the surface that he failed on two of the headline issues.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 (UPI) -- Former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev says the Soviet Union’s predicament in Afghanistan in the 1980s is similar to America’s today. Moscow’s efforts were stymied by tribal, clan and religious leaders. And later by the Taliban, then backed by the United States, now fighting them. His advice today: Bring in all the neighbors. Be on good terms with Iran.
HELSINKI, Finland, Nov. 13 (UPI) -- One hopes that the Obama administration's soon-to-be-announced new strategy for Afghanistan will at least be as successful as the Soviet strategy executed between 1986 and 1992.
HELSINKI, Finland, Nov. 11 (UPI) -- If Pentagon officials think that television commercials, interactive videos or slide presentations will do the job in addressing mental-health issues of the U.S. military, they are wrong.
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 11 (UPI) -- Presumably, the Obama administration will soon decide on its strategy and accompanying plan for Afghanistan and the region. No matter what it does, there are three certainties. First, Obama's choices range from bad to worse. Second, the plan will be savaged by critics of both the left and right. Third, implementation and not troop numbers, however important, will define success or failure.
FRANKFURT, Germany, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- The fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago may not have been the end of history, but it could be the end of Europe's role in making it.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- As the FBI's cyber sleuths comb through Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's hard drive, they will quickly conclude that this Virginia-born shrink of Jordanian-Palestinian descent inhabited an electronic global caliphate, the ummah, or universal community of Muslim believers, next to which the nation-state -- even one as powerful as the United States -- pales into insignificance.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 (UPI) -- As Washington and NATO grapple with Afghanistan's insurgency in the wake of rising tension and the recent presidential election debacle, policymakers should reconsider the options set forward by Uzbek President Islam Karimov during last April's NATO summit in Bucharest to expand the United Nations' "6 plus 2" working group on Afghanistan to include the alliance in its deliberations to resolve Afghanistan's problems.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 (UPI) -- If we are successful beyond President Obama's wildest dreams -- e.g., the Taliban is wiped out and a tough new Afghan government does not allow al-Qaida or other terrorists to conspire against us on their territory -- would that make us safer from radical Islam? The answer, of course, is no, because this is not about geography.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 4 (UPI) -- The debate over what to do next in Afghanistan has been politically polarized between those who attack the Obama administration for "dithering" and supporters who believe the president needs ample time to be a "decider." Unfortunately, this is a wrong and false debate.
