Foreign Aid

To understand 21st century geopolitics, think of the global capitalist system: it is a marketplace, not a monopoly. In this diffuse network of nodes and connections, stronger and weaker ties, interdependencies and feedback loops, bad decisions are punished almost as quickly as the stock market punishes bad business models. We have just lived through the inaugural cycle of this geopolitical marketplace. Two decades ago, president George H.W. Bush proclaimed a "New World Order" at the United Nations General Assembly, yet today's world is multipolar and leaderless.

Much has changed since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but few American institutions have changed as much as the military.

At the most basic level, it has shifted from a peacetime military to a continuously wartime military, and it has done so for the first time since the United States got rid of the draft.

Agents of the East German Stasi could only have dreamed of the sophisticated electronic equipment that powered Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s extensive spying apparatus, which the Libyan transitional government uncovered earlier this week. The monitoring of text messages, e-mails and online chats — no communications seemed beyond the reach of the eccentric colonel.

Pakistan, and Pakistani-American relations, confront their worst crises in recent memory.

Pakistan's economy is in free fall, and its major cities are wracked by political violence, while Pakistani attitudes toward the United States have never been worse -- a legacy of the CIA contractor who shot and killed two Pakistanis in the city of Lahore this year, the campaign of drone attacks in Pakistan's tribal regions and the unilateral American raid to kill Osama bin Laden in northern Pakistan in May.

Pakistan, and Pakistani-American relations, confront their worst crises in recent memory. A host of interlocking challenges -- grounded in a deteriorating economy -- call into question Pakistan's ability to "muddle through" as it has in the past, and the next two or three years pose a crucial test for the country's efforts to arrest continuing socioeconomic decline.

As the East Coast of the United States was pounded by a hurricane over the weekend, mere days after an earthquake had cracked monuments and upset lawn furniture from Virginia Beach to Baltimore, Mother Nature was once again front-page news across the country.

Five years ago, hundreds of protesters took to the streets in Kenya in tribute to a murdered 15-year-old orphan boy, Isaiah Gakuyo. An uncle had apparently stabbed Isaiah with a pitchfork because the boy was HIV positive - the child’s mother and grandmother had both passed away from AIDS-related diseases.

The fate of Muammar Gaddafi's son wasn't inevitable. There was a choice and a decidedly better one. In February, as the Arab Spring unfolded, he dispatched an op-ed to several American newspapers, expressing a willingness to move toward a more open Libya. Every paper rejected it. But if that lost piece had been published, perhaps the dictator's son, Saif al-Islam, would have found a place among the rebels.

The imminent fall of Muammar al-Qaddafi's regime in Libya opens a world of possibilities for Libyans that would have seemed almost impossible a year ago. But scenes of rebels and their civilian supporters celebrating in Tripoli's Green Square and in Qaddafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound should not obscure the still volatile situation in Libya. Even before Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi's cameo appearance at the Rixos hotel on Aug.

Whither Gaddafi?

Two planes are reportedly waiting on the runway at Tripoli's airport to carry off Muammar Gaddafi to places unknown, according to Al Jazeera.

Saif Gaddafi, Libya's heir apparent, who has been arrested and is likely to be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court at The Hague, seems to be headed for an extended European vacation in Geneva. (He has always wanted to call Europe home.)

But whither père Gaddafi, The Leader?