Rajiv Chandrasekaran of WaPo gets the scoop. His sources say that at a high level meeting in October, Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Karl Eickenberry pressed President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan to reconsider his decision to toss private security firms out of his country. Karzai exploded, called the US one of three enemies faced by […]
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South Asia
Enormous Truck Bomb Kills 6 US Troops in Afghanistan as Constitutional Crisis Looms
The NYT reports that the Taliban deployed a massive truck bomb against a joint US-Afghan National Army forward operating base in the Arghandab river valley north of Qandahar, killing 6 US soldiers, injuring a handful of others, and wounding as many as 11 Afghanistan National Army troops. The soldiers who were killed were inside a […]
Why our Afghanistan War Dead don’t Seem to be News
Tom Engelhardt makes an argument for why the US casualties in Afghanistan are nowadays virtually ignored by television news and get buried in the back pages in the print media. He suggests that the war dead are mostly young, rural or small-town, and working or lower-middle class. It is certainly the case that if the […]
Horrific Taliban Bombing of Would-Be Pashtun Militiamen
The administrative offices of Pakistan’s Mohmand tribal agency were hit by two suicide bombers on motorcycles on Monday, killing as many as 51 persons and wounding 120. The Taliban Movement of Pakistan [Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan or TTP] took responsibility for the attack, which appears to have been intended to disrupt the planned formation of a […]
Dec. 6: Top Ten New Wikileaks on Greater Middle East
Here are this weekend’s top ten Wikileaks revelations for the Greater Middle East: The US and India wanted to slap United Nations sanctions on Hafiz Muhammad Saeed and his group, Jama’at al-Da’wa, for terrorism. But Pakistan asked China to block this move at the UN, and Beijing complied. The Jama`at is widely considered a front […]
Bad “Weather” between Obama and Karzai Forestalls Meeting
Update: President Obama made a surprise trip to Afghanistan on Friday but is said to have gotten stuck on Bagram Base and could not meet face to face with Hamid Karzai. The press is saying that Obama cannot get to Kabul because of high winds and fog, making it impossible to fly helicopters to the […]
The Karzai Problem in Afghanistan: Wikileaks
The bodies of the six US troops — killed Monday by a newly recruited Afghan border guard who turned Taliban — arrived back in the United States late Wednesday. That 6 US soldiers were killed in one day was generally not news on the so-called news networks, though of course the major print media reported […]
Top Ten Middle East Wikileaks Revelations so Far
1. The British government’s official inquiry into how it got involved in the Iraq War was deeply compromised by the government’s pledge to protect the Bush administration in the course of it. 2. Afghan President Hamid Karzai routinely pardons drug dealers and corrupt officials. 3. Karzai’s brother, Ahmad Wali, is called a corrupt drug dealer. […]
Wikileaks Gates: No Iranian Help to Taliban
What they tell us: In summer of 2009, it was revealed that Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair informed the US Congress that, according to Marcus Baram at HuffPo, “Iran is covertly supplying arms to Afghan insurgents while publicly posing as supportive of the Afghan government.” That includes the provision of small arms, mines, rocket-propelled […]