Author: Michael

Panic wouldn’t help. Anger would make things worse. So, I stared out at the endless fields of northern Nigeria and thought, “I’m a pawn in their chess game. They were never rooks in mine.” In 2014, I served as an embedded advisor to Nigeria’s minister of agriculture and rural affairs, tasked with building agricultural markets to support stabilization. I flew north with a plan to win over the former minister of agriculture — a powerful businessman who I thought was my rook in the game of market reform.

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Once more unto the breach, India struck inside Pakistan in response to a terrorist attack. Once more, the two sides escalated — again to unprecedented levels — before agreeing to a ceasefire. It is tempting to consider this latest crisis as a somewhat larger replay of the last Indo-Pakistani crisis in 2019, but in fact it signifies a notable shift in India’s military strategy towards Pakistan, which has potentially grave implications for future crises.

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