As part of peacekeeping efforts, stability operations—post-conflict military efforts to bring peace and security to a region or country—represent an ongoing challenge for both military planners and civilian policymakers. RAND research has provided effective strategic recommendations in many such operations, helping those involved in unified stabilization, peacekeeping and security, transition, and reconstruction.
REPORT
The Global Train and Equip "1206" Program is a multiagency security cooperation program that supports U.S.-led capacity-building activities focused on counterterrorism and stability operations with foreign military partners. Interviews with policymakers and subject-matter experts, combined with a survey of program stakeholders, revealed some challenges and best approaches to establishing an assessment framework for 1206 Program projects.
REPORT
This book identifies the procedures and capabilities that the U.S. Department of Defense, other agencies of the U.S. government, U.S. allies and partners, and international organizations require in order to support the transition from counterinsurgency, when the military takes primary responsibility for security and economic operations, to stability and reconstruction, when police and civilian government agencies take the lead.
REPORT
This book examines six case studies of insurgencies from around the world to determine the key factors necessary for a successful transition from counterinsurgency to a more stable situation. The authors review the causes of each insurgency and the key players involved, and examine what the government did right — or wrong — to bring the insurgency to an end and to transition to greater stability.
COMMENTARY
The SCAF's attempts to curtail dissent and the democratic process have fueled doubts about its true intentions. Will the military fulfill its promise to support democracy? Or will it seek to replace Mubarak's rule with its own or that of a friendly autocrat? write Jeffrey Martini and Julie Taylor.
COMMENTARY
If Libya is to have a chance of replacing Qaddafi with something better, the United States, its allies, and the rest of the international community will need to pivot very quickly from the rather straightforward requirements of war fighting to taking seriously the complex and demanding tasks of peace building, write James Dobbins and Frederic Wehrey.
REPORT
Using primary sources and interviews with those involved in the fighting and its aftermath, the authors describe the 2008 Battle of Sadr City, analyze its outcome, and derive implications for the conduct of land operations. Their analysis identifies factors critical to the coalition victory over Jaish al-Mahdi and describes a new model for dealing with insurgent control of urban areas.
REPORT
A sustained focus on Afghanistan at all levels of the U.S. government is needed for the United States to make the most of its limited influence on the complex Afghan peace process.
NEWS RELEASE
A sustained focus on Afghanistan at all levels of the U.S. government is needed for the United States to make the most of its limited influence on the complex Afghan peace process.
COMMENTARY
Both Iraqi and Kurdish officials have expressed concern that ethnic violence will break out in the north once U.S. troops withdraw. Though many state publicly that the U.S. "occupation" must end, some of these same officials say privately that they would like U.S. troops to remain as a go-between, writes Larry Hanauer.
REPORT
Continuing tensions between Arab and Kurdish communities in Iraq could lead to inadvertent armed conflict unless Iraqi leaders resolve outstanding disputes regarding federalism, the legal and political status of disputed territories, and the management of northern Iraq's oil and gas resources.
REPORT
An analysis of 30 insurgencies worldwide between 1978 and 2008 determined what factors were ultimately correlated with success or defeat. Comparing Afghanistan in early 2011 against this scorecard results in an uncertain outcome for the conflict there, but the findings may help provide additional guidance as operations continue.
COMMENTARY
Most major plots and attacks, including 9/11 and 7/7, were directly linked to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. Travel there has been essential to improving bomb-making skills, receiving strategic and tactical guidance, and undergoing religious indoctrination, writes Seth Jones.
COMMENTARY
What's needed is an international conference of all the regional players that have a greater stake in the outcome of the Afghan/Pakistan conflict than does the U.S., writes David Aaron.
JOURNAL ARTICLE
This article examines ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) operations in Afghanistan as a way to get at the strategic disconnects in ends, ways, and means that the author believes are endemic to large-scale protracted stability and COIN (counterinsurgency) operations against adversaries who do not pose palpable existential threats to the members of an alliance.
COMMENTARY
In many cases, idealism and realism conflict, as evidenced by U.S. military interventions over the past four decades, writes Harold Brown.
COMMENTARY
The countries in a possible "second wave" of Arab revolutions have dim prospects for consolidated democracies. Other than tribes, Libya essentially has no civil society, and it has a long-isolated educated class. Yemen has civil society organizations but fewer well-educated individuals, writes Julie Taylor.
COMMENTARY
The long-term objective of a train-and-equip program for the Libyan revolutionary government would be to create a professional military force in a post-Qaddafi Libya that could support democratic institutions free of extremist elements, writes Angel Rabasa.
REPORT
Unstable and violent political environments often give rise to a range of complex problems for peaceful development. RAND Europe reviewed the state of the art in monitoring and evaluation in stabilization environments and found ways to improve practice.
COMMENTARY
Afghans in general are much more optimistic about their future than we Americans are about ours, write James Dobbins and Craig Charney.
COMMENTARY
The question, then, is whether stopping the fighting—which could also require forcibly removing Qaddafi—is worth the price of deep military engagement and responsibility for Libya's postwar future, writes Robert E. Hunter.
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