Foreign Aid

In the spring of 1999, the mayor of Istanbul, a rising young politician with Islamist leanings, was sentenced to 10 months in jail after falling foul of Turkey's powerful generals. This military elite, often referred to as "the deep state", had deposed four prime ministers since 1960, so taking on a mayor - even in a city as important as Istanbul - was routine business.

They charged him with "inciting religious hatred" for quoting a century-old poem with Islamist themes. Defiant, the mayor vowed to his supporters: "This song is not yet over!"

When Egyptians took to the streets celebrating the departure of the long-reigning president Hosni Mubarak nearly four months ago, a wave of euphoria seemed to grip the country. A new dawn beckoned. Exhilaration abounded. The Egyptian people would decide their own destiny.

Today, while much of that pride remains, according to a newly released poll conducted by the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center, an undercurrent of anxiety about the economy and security has settled in. The dawn has broken, but the future is foggy.

The map of Africa will be redrawn Saturday, as South Sudan becomes an independent nation through a peace process championed by successive U.S. presidents but still beset by lingering tensions from years of war.

President George W. Bush put Sudan at the center of his foreign policy in Africa, helping broker a 2005 peace agreement that ended a conflict that had claimed more than 2 million lives. President Obama has rallied international pressure to rescue that accord as it risked unraveling.

It's a fair bet that when Leon Panetta took the helm of the Pentagon last week, one of his marching orders was to find more ways to cut the defense budget, and not just around the edges.

One result of this is that the Army will very likely take a whacking.

To talk about war in Africa—in Sudan and Somalia, to name two countries now battling a horrendous drought—means talking about the weather.

Last week, the United Nations declared that the drought striking much of Africa's Horn, the knobby spit of land off the continent's east coast, is the worst on record for the past 60 years. The seasonal rains have failed for at least the third year in a row, and there's no chance that things will get better until at least 2012.

Fatality rates on roads in many developing countries are hideously high -- an estimated 130,000 people die on the roads in India alone. Buildings in those same countries often collapse without even the provocation of an earthquake -- the result of substandard construction. Many of these deaths could be prevented with regulation -- speed limits, car safety standards, building codes.

In 2009, veterinarians at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization made a remarkable announcement: Rinderpest, a livestock-borne disease, would soon be eradicated. OK, so maybe it wasn't front-page news, but rinderpest -- which causes animals to develop fever, followed by diarrhea and (frequently) death -- has over thousands of years been a recurring plague on human civilization.

The 100,000 people who are squatting on Dr. Hawa Abdi's farm in Somalia, which she has turned into one of the world's most innovative camps for displaced people, are today under assault by both weather and war.

At the camp, the nearby river has dwindled to a trickle. This year, the rains hardly arrived before they're ending.

"People are starting to eat grass," Hawa said. "All the animals are dead, now it is the humans."

President Barack Obama's decision to pull 33,000 troops out of Afghanistan by the end of next summer—10,000 of them by the end of this year—reflects a scaling back of U.S. goals and strategy in the war. Either that, or it doesn't make much sense.