Recent Posts

Beijing And Kabul Sans Islamabad – Analysis

Right from the inception of Pakistan, it has had the insatiable desire to keep Afghanistan under its tacit control; anything and everything for Afghanistan should go through Pakistan. Pakistan, from the 1980s, increasingly meddled in the affairs of Afghanistan. From training and nurturing the Taliban in the early 1990s to …

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Intelligence Work Is Exciting. And Traumatizing

Many people grow up wanting to be secret agents. I fell into the field somewhat by chance—though it turned out I was good at it and advanced quickly. Less than a year into the job, I volunteered to deploy to Iraq, where the United States was hunting down terrorists like …

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Trauma Takes a Toll in the U.S. Intelligence Community

There was nothing that unusual about the day when Karen Sudkamp reached her breaking point. She had spent years as an intelligence analyst watching drone videos of terrorists and military operations in almost real time. She had never thought much about the toll it was taking, until that one day …

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