Editor's Note: FMSO’s Operational Environment Watch provides translated selections and analysis from a diverse range of foreign articles and other media that analysts and expert contributors believe will give military and security experts an added dimension to their ...

While Southeast Asian countries comprise some of the world's fastest growing economies and key transitional democracies, there are also those that resist democratization and many with pockets of persistent civil strife. In addition, Southeast Asia is home to hundreds of millions of Muslims, and--as evidenced by the Bali bombing in...

Scratch European anxiety about the coming invasion of Iraq and you usually discover a foreboding about repercussions among Europe's large and expanding Muslim population.

When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad emerged from seemingly nowhere to capture the Iranian presidency in 2005, American officials were dumbfounded. Whereas his predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, sought to assuage the West with talk of ‘dialogue of civilizations’, Ahmadinejad was crude and coarse.

If there is one success story since 9/11, it has been the efforts to combat terror finance. If military action is sometimes akin to conducting surgery with an axe, efforts to dry up sources of funding are like wielding a scalpel.

Until the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the American view of radical Islam and its many discontents was shaped more by the Middle East than South Asia. The U.S. has long been at odds with the raging Ayatollah in Iran, the murderous truck bomber in Lebanon and the masked Palestinian "freedom...

Is India a weak link in what used to be called the global war on terror?