If you were to read two new government reports on American aid to Afghanistan, you would come away first astounded and then utterly furious, just as I did. Ten years into the Afghan war, our government still heedlessly throws many billions of dollars at Afghan organizations that steal some of it and pass the rest off to militants who use it to kill American troops.The State Department, for example

NEWPORT BEACH ― It has been raised more than 70 times in the last 50 years, mostly without commotion. It must be raised again this summer if the United States government is to continue paying its bills on time. But now America’s debt ceiling has become the subject of intense political posturing and touch-and-go negotiations behind closed doors. And, obviously, the outcome has implications that go

WASHINGTON ― The botched defection several months ago of Musa Kusa, Libya’s former foreign minister, illustrates the uncertain strategy that has plagued the NATO campaign against Col. Moammar Gadhafi. But even so, the Gadhafi regime is feeling enough pressure to send an emissary to Washington this week to explore a possible negotiated settlement. Kusa, a prominent member of Gadhafi’s inner circle,

JAKARTA ― The Association of Southeast Asian Nations stands at a defining moment. Its member states are constantly being evaluated for their economic potential and desirability as a market for investments, goods, and services. At the same time, their effort to forge a community free from external intervention is shaping a new regional order based on common security and shared prosperity.In geopoli

OXFORD ― Can moral judgments be true or false? Or is ethics, at bottom, a purely subjective matter, for individuals to choose, or perhaps relative to the culture of the society in which one lives? We might have just found out the answer.Among philosophers, the view that moral judgments state objective truths has been out of fashion since the 1930s, when logical positivists asserted that, because t