Archives for December 2009

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi says that it is up to President Obama to sell his troop surge to Democrats in Congress. Then she called for a bowl and washed her hands. Jeremy Scahill on MSNBC (h/t The Nation) pointing out that not only are another 30,000 troops being deployed to Afghanistan, but also […]

DAWN.COM | Provinces | Bomber strikes at Khosa’s house in D.G. Khan A suicide bomber failed to reach his target and instead blew up innocents at a market in the province of DG Khan, a Punjabi area that abuts more tribal, Pashtun districts. The death toll has risen to 33 in later reports. Zulfiqar khosa, […]

FT.com / UK – Arrest warrant for Livni issued in London This incident is admittedly only a minor brouhaha, since former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni was forced to cancel her trip to London and since David Miliband, the British secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs, immediately dissociated himself from the court warrant […]

A common explanation for the US presence in Afghanistan is Washington’s interest in Central Asian fuel sources– natural gas in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and petroleum in Kazakhstan. The idea of Zalmay Khalilzad and others was to bring a gas pipeline down through Afghanistan and Pakistan to energy-hungry India. Turkmenistan became independent of Moscow in 1991, […]

The big news out of Iraq over the weekend was the awarding of a handful of new oil development contracts to companies such as Royal Dutch Shell and Russia’s Lukoil. These bids follow earlier awards of fields for development to China. The American oil majors failed to conclude any new deals, though Exxon Mobil won […]

Deepak Tripathi, former BBC journalist and author of the book Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan (Potomac, January 2010) writes in guest op-ed for IC: Since the launch of the Iraq Inquiry in London at the end of July 2009, covers have been coming off with increasing frequency to reveal the circumstances leading […]

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has announced the end of the Pakistani military campaign in South Waziristan, although he seems to reserve the possibility that it might nevertheless continue. The reason for the ambiguity is surely that South Waziristan is a huge place, and that many fighters of the Taliban movement of Pakistan melted […]

The USG OSC translates or paraphrases Pakistani Urdu editorials on President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize: Pakistan Urdu Press Roundup on Obama Receiving Nobel Peace PrizeThe roundup of excerpts from articles and an editorial on the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to President Obama, the reasons behind the act and the criteria set in place by Alfred […]

Not only have Blackwater mercenaries (now Xe) helped the CIA kidnap people (“rendition”), but it is now coming out that they’ve been helping launch covert assassination drones in Pakistan. The revelations, which have outraged the Pakistani people, have forced the USG to cancel the contract. Aljazeera English reports on the fear gripping mosque-goers in the […]