What might the drone strike against Mullah Mansour mean for the counterinsurgency endgame? (Vanda Felbab-Brown, Bradley S. Porter, Brookings)

An American drone strike that killed leader of the Afghan Taliban Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Mansour may seem like a fillip for the United States’ ally, the embattled government of Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani. But as Vanda Felbab-Brown writes in a new op-ed for The New York Times, it is unlikely to improve Kabul’s immediate national security problems—and may create more difficulties than it solves

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/order-from-chaos/posts/2016/05/25-targeting-the-afghan-taliban-felbabbrown-porter

Global consensus and dissensus on drug policy (Vanda Felbab-Brown, Bradley S. Porter, Brookings)

In a new Brookings Cafeteria podcast (audio below), Senior Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown discusses the upcoming Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly on the World Drug Problem (UNGASS 2016), to take place April 19 to 21.

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Vanda Felbab-Brown is a senior fellow in the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. She is an expert on international and internal conflicts and nontraditional security threats, including insurgency, organized crime, urban violence, and illicit economies. Her fieldwork and research have covered, among others, Afghanistan, South Asia, Burma, Indonesia, the Andean region, Mexico, Morocco, Somalia, and eastern Africa.

Bradley S. Porter, Brookings. Senior Research Assistant, Foreign Policy, Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence

The global poaching vortex (Vanda Felbab-Brown, Bradley S. Porter, Brookings)

As the world celebrates World Wildlife Day on March 3, the planet is experiencing alarming levels of species loss—caused, in large part, by intensified poaching. Wildlife trafficking and its associated activities affect national and international security in a myriad of ways: They can provide support to criminal groups, increase risks of health epidemics, and further degrade the already fragile ecological systems on which humans depend. Efforts to combat wildlife trafficking, meanwhile, provide new opportunities for cooperation between the United States and China, among other countries.

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/order-from-chaos/posts/2016/03/02-wildlife-trafficking-felbabbrown-porter