Civil-Military Centre of Excellence

http://www.civmilcoe.gov.au/web.php

Petraeus is changing the Afghan war's intensity, not its overall strategy

http://ricks.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/10/20/ignatius_kaplan_and_klein_just_don_t_get_it_petraeus_is_changing_the_afghan_war_s_i

Big Ideas from Small Countries

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/frankel2/English

Slow and bloody nation-building in Kandahar province

LAME, toothless and 80 years old, Haji Beardad is not exactly imposing. Yet the American soldiers in the northern Arghandab valley in Kandahar province court him assiduously, promising a school and a mosque for his village of Kuhak. For Haji Beardad, frail as he looks, is an important ally. Since he told the Americans that his people would co-operate with Afghan security forces and keep watch for outsiders, attacks in Kuhak have dropped sharply. “I’ve told everybody in the village to report if someone comes to visit or we’ll have him arrested,” he says.

Nagahan, a village west of Kuhak, even has a local militia to keep the Taliban out, in exchange for American promises of development—and sometimes plain cash. “We’re paying them off,” says Captain David Ahern of Alpha company, 1st battalion, 66th armoured regiment. Violence in Nagahan has also dropped sharply.

http://www.economist.com/node/17209697

Water

However, while the liberal–technical perspectives of international
institutions like the World Bank are often good at listing individual
inefficiencies (itemising how resources could be better exploited and
produced, and how infrastructure networks, institutions, tariff levels, etc
could be improved), they are generally blind to the fact that such discrete
individual inefficiencies always emerge and need to be understood within the
context of relatively durable social and political-economic structures.

Selby, Jan 2005 The Geopolitics of Water in the Middle East: Fantasies and realities, Third World Quarterly, 26(2), 329-349.