Joining the Toad Patrols of Britain

Toads are creatures of habit, heading back to their home bodies of water each spring to spawn. In Britain, that often means crossing busy roads. Groups of volunteers have sprung up to help them safely find their way home.

The Dark Side of the Expat Life

If you are a member of Rendezvous’s global tribe, “home” might be where your apartment, your work or your belongings â€" or even your family and friends â€" are. But it might also be a place where language and culture are confounding. And deep down, despite the thrills and invigorating challenges of an experience abroad, more often than not, we know it’s not a place we’ll stay forever.

This dislocation â€" psychic as well as geographic â€" comes with inevitable lonelinesses, small and large. There are holidays with family missed, and life events â€" weddings, birthday parties, memorial services, births â€" that happen without you.

When we asked recently who studies abroad, who stays put and why one comment struck many Rendezvous readers as particularly pointed, and poignant:

Alex Ellsworth, a former New Yorker, wrote:

Studying and living abroad has been a fantastic journey spanning twelve years and three continents.

But . . . expat life has a dark side: getting stuck in limbo, neither here nor there. I’ve watched as peers back home have married, had children, bought houses, advanced in their careers. Meanwhile, most of us here in Seoul find ourselves living Peter Pan-like existences. I’m entering middle age with nothing tangible to show for it.

Except wonderful, rich memories, sure. But the future looms.

So should I go home pre-emptively and try to build a life there But therein lies the expat’s problem: there’s nothing back home for me now. Home is not “back home;” home is Seoul. My life is here.

Colleen, in London, responded:

Thanks for your thoughts Alex. I very much share your sentiments about being abroad long term. Today especially I’ve been struggling coming to terms with being away from home for so long. I wanted to move to England for most of my 20s after studying abroad in London for my last semester of undergrad. I completed my MSc here in the UK and really been able to do all that I set out to do. It hasn’t been easy, but it’s been worth it. I would never have the kind of self-reliance and strength of character that I do today if I would have stayed stateside. That’s the really lovely bit of being abroad.

I have been living in England for 3 years now. I haven’t seen my family in 2 years and it weighs heavily upon my heart. Email and skype can only do so much for you. I do worry whether I should return and put down roots permanently for once in my life.

I am about to start a new permanent job, but I worry a lot about finances, visas, finding love and starting a family. I wonder if it would be easier to get on with life if I were in the states. How do you know when to pack it in and head back

I think this kind of thought and uncertainty is good. And it’s nice to have a place to express the thoughts and feelings with other expats.

And Kayan, in Algiers, wrote:

I totally agree with you Alex.

However, we can transform ourselves into “ants”. If you really feel attached to your adopted country, maybe it’s better to think about how to settle down permanently by finding a long-term work contract or establishing a family.

My best Asian friend did that in Paris and he’s just so happy about his family and job.

But it also depends on luck. We’d found love almost at the same time, then I broke up with my partner 5 years later and became “rootless” again.

Now drifted to Africa in my middle 30s, I have exactly the same ominous feelings about my future as Alex wrote.

The Hague, where our contributor Chris Schuetze lives, has several global courts and international headquarters â€" and, therefore, to a large and multinational expat population. Many of them do not learn Dutch both because of the complexity of the language and the fact that virtually everyone speaks English.

Separate American, French, German, Polish, European (with English, Spanish and Dutch streams), international and Indonesian schools mean that not even children â€" who have a much easier time picking up language â€" have to learn Dutch beyond a few playground pleasantries. In such situations it’s no surprise that home abroad never becomes simply “home.”

Join the discussion. Have you left your native country, for work or study Do you plan to return Do you fear that you have stayed too long Have you figured out how to have many “homes” What’s the secret

A Kurdish Spring on Many Fronts

LONDON â€" Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the rebel Kurdish Workers Party, the P.K.K., called for a ceasefire Thursday in the three-decades-long war between Kurdish rebels and the Turkish state, giving a whole new impetus to New Year celebrations by Kurds.

Hundreds of thousands of Kurds gathered in the eastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir to observe a holiday that they were long forbidden to mark publicly in Turkey.

In a message to pro-Kurdish legislators, Mr. Ocalan called for thousands of his fighters to withdraw from Turkish territory: “We have reached the point where the guns must be silenced and where ideas must speak.”

The truce marks the culmination of intensive negotiations between Mr. Ocalan and Turkish officials on ending a conflict that cost 40,000 lives.

The breakthrough will reverberate beyond Turkey’s borders to neighboring Syria, Iraq and Iran, all countries with large Kurdish minorities.

The estimated 30 million Kurds of the Middle East - official figures are deliberately vague - represent the largest nation in the world without a state of its own.

Although linguistically related to the Persians of Iran, which was also celebrating the pre-Islamic New Year festival of Nowruz on Thursday, the Kurds have maintained a distinctive culture that has survived centuries of division and repression.

The past decade, with the war in Iraq, the Arab Spring, and Syria’s descent into civil war, has seen a dramatic change in their fortunes.

Ten years ago this week, Kurds were fleeing to the mountains from the cities of northern Iraq in anticipation of attack by the forces of Saddam Hussein in the wake of a U.S.-led invasion.

Kurdish forces held the line in the north on behalf of the international coalition after Turkey refused to join the invasion.

A decade on, an autonomous Kurdistan is now the most secure and prosperous region of Iraq and enjoys close relations with a formerly hostile Turkey.

In Syria, Kurdish forces, including those allied to the P.K.K., have taken over territory and frontiers abandoned by the retreating troops of the Damascus regime.

Fears of a Kurdish contagion have now spread to Iran, where the pro-Syrian Tehran regime is concerned that a P.K.K. peace agreement will not only strengthen Turkey’s hand in the region but might also encourage unrest among its own Kurdish population.

“A P.K.K. that suspends its operations in Turkey is most likely to support the armed struggle of the Iranian Kurds and fight against Iran, or to go to Syria to boost and consolidate the gains of the Kurdish people there,” according to Bayram Sinkaya, writing for Turkey’s Center for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies.

For centuries, and before the creation of the modern Iranian, Turkish, Iraqi and Syrian states, rival powers used the Kurds to fight their wars with little benefit to the divided Kurdish nation.

In modern times, movements such as the P.K.K. have been used as proxies in conflicts between hostile neighboring states.

Analysts believe Turkey was prompted to make its own accommodation with a rebel movement it had failed to crush in response to the increasing influence within Syria of the P.K.K.-linked Democratic Union Party or P.Y.D.

“The Kurdish issue is Turkey’s Achilles heel,” Kadri Gursel wrote at Al Monitor, which covers trends in the Middle East. “It is its bleeding wound and as long as it remains as such Ankara cannot maintain an ambitious policy that would mean challenging regional powers.”

The ultimate success of Turkey’s attempt to solve its Kurdish question will doubtless depend on its readiness to recognize the democratic and cultural rights of its Kurdish population.

Kurdish movements in the Middle East, including the P.K.K., have broadly abandoned the objective of creating a pan-Kurdish state, an aspiration that was denied to the Kurds in the post-World War I settlement imposed by the world powers.

They now seek broader autonomy and equal rights within the established borders of existing states. The Turkish-Kurdish truce might bring them one step closer to that goal.

Within a changing Middle East, the Kurds might well discern a symbolic spark of freedom from the Nowruz bonfires they light on Thursday.

A Kurdish Spring on Many Fronts

LONDON â€" Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the rebel Kurdish Workers Party, the P.K.K., called for a ceasefire Thursday in the three-decades-long war between Kurdish rebels and the Turkish state, giving a whole new impetus to New Year celebrations by Kurds.

Hundreds of thousands of Kurds gathered in the eastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir to observe a holiday that they were long forbidden to mark publicly in Turkey.

In a message to pro-Kurdish legislators, Mr. Ocalan called for thousands of his fighters to withdraw from Turkish territory: “We have reached the point where the guns must be silenced and where ideas must speak.”

The truce marks the culmination of intensive negotiations between Mr. Ocalan and Turkish officials on ending a conflict that cost 40,000 lives.

The breakthrough will reverberate beyond Turkey’s borders to neighboring Syria, Iraq and Iran, all countries with large Kurdish minorities.

The estimated 30 million Kurds of the Middle East - official figures are deliberately vague - represent the largest nation in the world without a state of its own.

Although linguistically related to the Persians of Iran, which was also celebrating the pre-Islamic New Year festival of Nowruz on Thursday, the Kurds have maintained a distinctive culture that has survived centuries of division and repression.

The past decade, with the war in Iraq, the Arab Spring, and Syria’s descent into civil war, has seen a dramatic change in their fortunes.

Ten years ago this week, Kurds were fleeing to the mountains from the cities of northern Iraq in anticipation of attack by the forces of Saddam Hussein in the wake of a U.S.-led invasion.

Kurdish forces held the line in the north on behalf of the international coalition after Turkey refused to join the invasion.

A decade on, an autonomous Kurdistan is now the most secure and prosperous region of Iraq and enjoys close relations with a formerly hostile Turkey.

In Syria, Kurdish forces, including those allied to the P.K.K., have taken over territory and frontiers abandoned by the retreating troops of the Damascus regime.

Fears of a Kurdish contagion have now spread to Iran, where the pro-Syrian Tehran regime is concerned that a P.K.K. peace agreement will not only strengthen Turkey’s hand in the region but might also encourage unrest among its own Kurdish population.

“A P.K.K. that suspends its operations in Turkey is most likely to support the armed struggle of the Iranian Kurds and fight against Iran, or to go to Syria to boost and consolidate the gains of the Kurdish people there,” according to Bayram Sinkaya, writing for Turkey’s Center for Middle Eastern Strategic Studies.

For centuries, and before the creation of the modern Iranian, Turkish, Iraqi and Syrian states, rival powers used the Kurds to fight their wars with little benefit to the divided Kurdish nation.

In modern times, movements such as the P.K.K. have been used as proxies in conflicts between hostile neighboring states.

Analysts believe Turkey was prompted to make its own accommodation with a rebel movement it had failed to crush in response to the increasing influence within Syria of the P.K.K.-linked Democratic Union Party or P.Y.D.

“The Kurdish issue is Turkey’s Achilles heel,” Kadri Gursel wrote at Al Monitor, which covers trends in the Middle East. “It is its bleeding wound and as long as it remains as such Ankara cannot maintain an ambitious policy that would mean challenging regional powers.”

The ultimate success of Turkey’s attempt to solve its Kurdish question will doubtless depend on its readiness to recognize the democratic and cultural rights of its Kurdish population.

Kurdish movements in the Middle East, including the P.K.K., have broadly abandoned the objective of creating a pan-Kurdish state, an aspiration that was denied to the Kurds in the post-World War I settlement imposed by the world powers.

They now seek broader autonomy and equal rights within the established borders of existing states. The Turkish-Kurdish truce might bring them one step closer to that goal.

Within a changing Middle East, the Kurds might well discern a symbolic spark of freedom from the Nowruz bonfires they light on Thursday.

The Legacies of Iraq: An Ailing Press and an ‘Invade or Nothing’ Foreign Policy

American households will be blanketed this week by a torrent of coverage, commentary and regret about the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war. Liberals claim that Twitter - if it had existed - could have stopped the invasion. Conservatives argue that the links between Saddam Hussein and terrorism have, in fact, been underplayed.

The glaring lesson of the war is that American ground invasions destabilize the Middle East, instead of stabilizing it. The 100,000 Iraqis who perished, the 4,500 American soldiers killed and the $1 trillion spent should have halted what Tufts University professor Daniel W. Drezner has called the “creeping militarization of American foreign policy.” Instead, the civilian American institutions that failed us before Iraq have grown even weaker.

The State Department is the first example. Mr. Drezner correctly argues that as the Pentagon’s budget has ballooned in the post-9/11 decade, so has its influence over American foreign policy. Too many former generals, he contends, have occupied important foreign policy positions.

That trend has slowed in the second Obama administration, but the budget, planning capabilities and training programs of the State Department are still laughably small compared with those of the U.S. military. Money equals power, influence and a seat at the table in Washington. As one former national security reporter put it to me, weak civilian institutions lead to fewer potential civilian responses to crises.

In his first major speech as secretary of state, John Kerry tried to put the size of the American civilian effort in perspective. He cited a recent poll that found most Americans believe the State Department and U.S. foreign aid programs consume 25 percent of federal spending. In fact, they receive one percent. (The military gets roughly 20 percent.)

Mr. Kerry’s speech got virtually no press coverage. Just as it did a decade ago, the news media - a second vital American civilian institution - is failing us. This week the media is being correctly excoriated for its failure to be more skeptical of the Bush administration’s central justification for the Iraq war: weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist.

In the months before the invasion, The New York Times published a series of exaggerated WMD stories by reporter Judith Miller on its front page. At the same time, editors at the Times and other mainstream outlets largely ignored intrepid reports by Knight-Ridder newspapers that questioned the administration’s WMD claims.

Ten years later, Ms. Miller is a Fox News contributor. A harrowing report released by the Pew Research Center on Monday found that the full-time professional editorial staff at newspapers has declined by 24 percent since 1989. A separate analysis found that the ratio of public-relations professionals to reporters grew from 1.2 to 1 in 1980 to 3.6 to 1 in 2008.

The rise of social media and citizen journalism arguably fill the void created by dwindling newspaper resources. Eric Boehlert of Media Matters, the left-of-center media watchdog, argued this week that Twitter could have forced mainstream reporters to do a better job before the Iraq invasion. He cited recent cases of mainstream newspapers columnists being forced to respond to a torrent of criticism on Twitter about pieces they wrote.

Jonathan Landay, one of the Knight-Ridder reporters whose pre-invasion work questioning the WMD evidence received little attention, said social media might have made a difference. But he hesitated to say Twitter would have silenced the White House.

“Had The New York Times, Washington Post and the networks done the kind of reporting that we had, could the administration have been able to take the country to war I don’t know,” Mr. Landay said in an email message. “But social media would have brought far more attention to our work, and perhaps more journalists would have followed our lead.”

Looking back, Mr. Landay, a former colleague and longtime friend who now reports for McClatchy, blamed the news media and U.S. intelligence agencies. “The mainstream news media was as egregious in its failure to do its job,” he wrote, “as the U.S. intelligence community was in its failure to produce accurate intelligence on Iraq’s non-existent WMD.”

Today, fears of “another Iraq” dominate America’s foreign policy debate. The choice is binary. The United States can respond to a foreign policy threat by carrying out a risky ground invasion. Or it can do nothing at all. Diplomatic, economic and other non-military attempts to influence events overseas are given short shrift. Any American involvement will make the situation worse, the argument goes, and create another quagmire.

The Arab Spring showed that people in the Middle East desire democracy. Young Arabs, in particular, want self-determination, jobs and modernity. Washington has an interest in helping them but no inclination - and few non-military tools â€" to do so.

The United States continues to view military force as its principal means of addressing foreign policy challenges. Far more options are available. Every country is not Iraq.

David Rohde is a columnist for Reuters, former reporter for The New York Times and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. His forthcoming book, “Beyond War: Reimagining American Influence in a New Middle East” will be published in March 2013.