Ralph Peters has been a Post Opinion columnist since 2002. He is also Fox News' first Strategic Analyst. Ralph served for over two decades in the U.S. Army, as an enlisted man and officer, before retiring in 1998 to write and speak freely. He has experience in over 70 countries and is the author of 24 books, including novels, an adventure-travel memoir and works on strategy. While his home is at the Post, he also has editorial or contributor relationships with Armed Forces Journal, Armchair General Magazine and USAToday. He writes from the Washington, D.C. area, but remains, at heart, a proud coalcracker from Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania.
Our foreign policy suffers from a chronic learning disability: Neither Democrats nor Republicans can get it through their heads that supporting unpopular, corrupt foreign bosses always ends badly. Decade after...
April 13, 2010 12:00 AM
Nuclear weapons are not evil. Terrifying, yes. But their horrific capabilities prevented a Third World War. It all depends on whose finger is on the button. Until yesterday's formal announcement of the...
April 07, 2010 12:00 AM
Our government continues to insist that imminent magic will make President Hamid Karzai reform and make his Afghan government perform. Ain't gonna happen. The better diplomats and generals know it. But they...
April 06, 2010 12:00 AM
It's been an embarrassing week for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, prime minis ter and de facto czar. On Monday, Islamist suicide bombers struck just a rifle shot from the Kremlin. The worst of the two subway...
April 02, 2010 12:00 AM
As an intelligence officer or journalist, you've got to know which sources you can trust. And a source who's never let me down told me yesterday that the terrorist multinational based in Pakistan is coming apart....
March 31, 2010 12:00 AM
Wednesday, March 24, 2010, was the worst day for US diplomacy in recent memory. Between sunrise and sunset, we 1) handled our Israeli allies as enemies, 2) treated Pakistani gangsters as our benefactors and 3) got...
March 26, 2010 12:00 AM
It's wretched enough that our "friend" Ahmed Chalabi has become Iran's point man in Iraq. Now "our man in Kabul," President Hamid Karzai, is quietly shifting his loyalty to Tehran. Beyond Iranian President Mahmud...
March 24, 2010 12:00 AM
If the Obama administration continues to betray Israel, will any ally ever trust us again? We've been viewed as a fickle (if mighty) partner at least since the 1970s, when we abruptly dumped allies from Saigon to...
March 18, 2010 12:00 AM
THE ISSUE: Whether presidential candidates today have character, as their predecessors did. *** In looking for a president with the character of Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan, Ralph Peters asks,...
March 17, 2010 12:00 AMThe war is here. In our front yard. 18,000 dead in five years. With the casualty count worsening. And our attention is half a world away. In the wake of a Saturday night party in Juarez, Mexico -- across the Rio...
March 16, 2010 12:00 AM
Since the end of World War II, our country has had three great presidents: Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. Their politics varied, but these giants stand in sharp contrast to our last three...
March 13, 2010 12:00 AM
Threats, bombs and at least 36 dead didn't stop Iraqis from voting on Sunday. But the harder part -- forming a new, more inclusive national government -- lies ahead. Formal results won't come for a few days. We'll...
March 09, 2010 12:00 AMA good first step in waging war is to figure out why your enemy is fighting. For over eight years, we've refused to do that in Afghanistan. In the recent Marine offensive against the Taliban in Marjah, this resulted in...
March 06, 2010 8:21 PM
I was wrong. For years, I've argued that our government should pay more attention to South America. Now Hillary Clinton has -- and, boy, is it ugly. With tragic back-to-back earthquakes dominating the headlines from...
March 03, 2010 12:00 AM
The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency now not only admits that Iran's at work on nuclear warheads, but acknowledges that Tehran never stopped working on them -- despite no end of pleas, pledges and promises....
February 20, 2010 12:00 AM
The capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar -- the Taliban's equivalent of Gen. Stan McChrystal -- by Pakistani agents and CIA operatives is a big win. Subordinate only to Mullah Omar, the Taliban's CEO, Baradar ran...
February 17, 2010 12:00 AM
Attacking behind a vanguard of special operators and backed by an Army Stryker battalion, the 6th Marine Regiment has been conducting a textbook takeover of the Afghan city of Marjah. Meticulously planned and...
February 15, 2010 12:00 AM
Yesterday, the Islamist dictatorship in Tehran celebrated its 31st birthday with nuclear candles, crushing Iranian dreams of freedom and Western hopes of appeasement. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that his...
February 12, 2010 12:00 AM
In a breathtakingly cynical example of playing politics, the White House just accused Republicans of playing politics over its Miranda-rights Christmas gift to the crotch bomber. With fumbling terrorism czar John...
February 09, 2010 12:00 AM
As the administration fiddles and fumbles with its soft- on-terror policies at home, one Obama-blessed campaign abroad is hitting al Qaeda and its franchises hard: the drone war. Drones work. They kill terrorists....
February 04, 2010 12:00 AM
While pundits called President Obama on his failure to mention Israel and the Palestinian problem in last week's State of the Union Address, a far greater omission went ignored: Latin America. Aside from one...
February 02, 2010 12:00 AMWhatever planet Earth may find in short supply in 2010, violence and misrule will remain abundant, from the most-recent round of Muslim-vs.-Christian massacres in Nigeria to Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez's delight in...
January 30, 2010 7:45 PM
A highlight of this week's "what do we do about Afghanistan?" conference in London will be the announcement of a $500-million program to bribe low-level Taliban fighters to quit. I'm all for any program that...
January 27, 2010 12:00 AMWhat do Haiti and Afghanistan have in common, other than the presence of our military? They're both profoundly failed states that we pretend just need the right encouragement. We told ourselves that in Somalia, too....
January 25, 2010 12:00 AMAL Qaeda does one thing ex tremely well: killing Muslims. Between 2006 and 2008, only 2 percent of the terror multinational's victims were Westerners. The rest were citizens of Muslim countries. Even as al Qaeda...
January 23, 2010 12:00 AM
The Taliban scored a powerful psychological victory yesterday, as fewer than two dozen suicide attackers brought Afghanistan's government and capital city to a standstill. In a dramatic wave of attacks (possibly...
January 19, 2010 12:00 AMThere are two basic problems with the grotesque non-report on the Islamist- terror massacre at Fort Hood (released by the Defense Department yesterday): * It's not about what happened at Fort Hood. * It avoids...
January 16, 2010 12:00 AM
Google may have the backbone Congress lacks: The Internet giant is standing up to the bandits in Beijing. Why would a for-profit company threaten to pull out of what the investment gurus (who brought you the housing...
January 15, 2010 12:00 AMOn Christmas day, a terrorist known to our intelligence system tried to blow up 300 innocents on a US-bound flight. Our government's response is to take porno pictures of your wife and daughter. A radical-Islamist...
January 09, 2010 12:00 AM'Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the US intelligence community is only marginally relevant to our overall strategy." That's the opening line from a courageous, heartfelt report, "Fixing Intel," just...
January 07, 2010 12:00 AM
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