Asia

Guerrillas fired mortar shells and used small arms to attack the major US military base in south Afghanistan, Qandahar Airfield, on Saturday. The operation was the third major attack by insurgents during the past week. They had also attacked a NATO convoy in the capital, Kabul, and had attacked Bagram Base north of Kabul. The […]

Pakistan

Pakistan’s Social Media Ban Endangers Economic Growth

Juan Cole

The Lahore High Court’s ban on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and some other social media sites was supported on Friday in Pakistan by rallies of students, attorneys and fundamentalists. Blackberry services have also been banned by the Pakistani telecom authority. But these knowledge workers are unwittingly shooting themselves in the foot and raising the question of […]

Afghanistan

Kabul Blast Kills 19, Wounds 52; 5 US Troops Dead

Juan Cole

The BBC is reporting that Afghan guerrillas deployed a suicide car bomb against a NATO military convoy in west Kabul near the parliament building Tuesday morning, killing at least 19 persons and wounding 52. Five US troops are said among the dead. MSNBC has a good video report: The enormous fireball destroyed twenty vehicles. Spokesman […]

al-Qaeda

Police: Shahzad has no Links to Taliban; Clinton Remarks Produce Firestorm in Pakistan

Juan Cole

Pakistani authorities doing the hard police work in Karachi of attempting to trace the network of friends and contacts of attempted Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad have come up empty-handed. There is nothing in Shahzad’s background that links him to the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (TTP or Taliban Movement of Pakistan), based in the Federally Administered […]

Afghanistan

Afghanistan: 57 Insurgent Attacks a Day; Taliban Vow Major Campaign; Karzai to Visit Washington

Juan Cole

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 […]