Asia

The guerrilla forces in Afghanistan had launched new attacks on NATO and Afghanistan National Army targets in the past few days, after weeks in which they were busy making sure to get their cut of the profits from the poppy-based heroin trade. The return to the battlefield is an annual late spring and summer ritual […]

al-Qaeda

Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: Niass & Shahzad

Juan Cole

I received some snarky message after the Shahzad attempted bombing in Times Square, asking if I were still standing behind the idea of Islam as a religion of peace. It was a stupid comment. Classical Islamic law forbids murder and forbids terrorism, and it forbids aggression. Whether that makes it a religion of peace is […]

Afghanistan

Suspect Arrested in Times Square Bomb Plot; Afghan anger at NATO Grows

Juan Cole

As US authorities arrested Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American recently returned from Peshawar, on suspicion of ties to the Pakistani Taliban and involvement in the Times Square bomb plot, bad news is coming from Afghanistan itself. Pashtuns in the affected areas appear to be angry at the US invasion of Marjah this winter and convinced that […]

al-Qaeda

From Waziristan to New York

Juan Cole

It is a measure of the inter-connected character of our globalized world that the security of New York may be tied to events in distant, rugged and mysterious South Waziristan, Pakistan– a remote area even most Pakistanis know little about. And, US security may depend more on school-building and improving lives in South Waziristan than […]

Pakistan

Chaudhry: Dis(re)membering \pä-ki-ˈstän\

Juan Cole

This is a guest essay by Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, University of California, Berkeley, one of our country’s foremost academic specialists in comparative politics.: “…for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.”– Sigmund Freud. On assuming […]

Afghanistan

NATO Troops Kill MP Relative; Anti-American Demonstrations Nangarhar Demand US Withdrawal

Juan Cole

NATO forces raided the home in Nangarhar of Afghan parliamentarian Safia Siddiqi Wednesday night, in the course of which they killed her brother-in-law. In response, crowds in Nangarhar blocked a major thoroughfare in protest. The Dari Persian press says that crowds came out to demonstrate all over Nangarhar Province, chanting anti-American slogans and demanding that […]

Afghanistan

Taliban Resemble Successful Insurgencies

Juan Cole

CSM reports on a RAND study by Ben Conable and Martin Libicki of 89 major insurgencies in the 20th century and early 21st, and what they might tell us about the likelihood of Obama succeeding in Afghanistan. Connable found that weak governments prevail militarily against insurgencies only 10 percent of the time. RAND’s own news […]

Pakistan

Fundamentalist Rally Bombed in Pakistan, Kills two Dozen

Juan Cole

Two bombings shook the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar on Monday, killing 27 and wounding over 50 persons. Ironically, one bomb hit a rally of the fundamentalist Jama’at-i Islami (Islamic Grouping), a group that has sometimes been relatively sympathetic to the Taliban. Peshawar, a city of over 3 million, is about the size of Chicago […]

Afghanistan

170 Killed in Afghanistan as Gates, Cheney, Palin Wrangle over Karzai

Juan Cole

170 people were killed in Afghanistan during the past week in political violence, according to an interior ministry spokesman. Radio Azadi reports in Persian that the spokesman said Monday morning that there were 117 terrorist attacks in the country in the past week, quadruple the number in the previous week. The violence is placing in […]