Juan Cole

*A Pakistani anti-terrorism court has remanded `Aqil Ahmad Abdul Quddus, the harborer of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, to jail. A warrant is out for his father, Dr. Abdul Quddus Khan, who had been at a wedding in Lahore and appears to have gone into hiding. Pakistani intellectuals like Najam Sethi have been demanding that the fundamentalist […]

*The Pakistani parliament has been sent home by Gen. Pervez Musharraf after having been paralyzed for several days by the chanting and filibustering of opposition politicians. They object to the sweeping powers he has arrogated to himself, including the “Legal Framework Order” of 19 unilateral amendments to the 1973 Constitution inserted by the general last […]

*An al-Qaeda leader reports on a militant web site that there were only 1900 “Arab Afghan” fighters in Afghanistan during the US war against the Taliban, and that 350 were killed. This is a lower number than most estimates I’ve seen. *A major rally of tens of thousands of protesters took place Sunday in Rawalpindi […]

*Dawn is reporting that the computer files and CDs confiscated from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed on his arrest in Rawalpindi demonstrate the breadth of his networking in the Philippines, Europe and the US. (He had lived in the Philippines in the mid-1990s and plotted terrorism there against US targets like airliners. Like many al-Qaida goons, he […]

Although the arrest of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, an al-Qaeda mastermind, has raised hopes that the war on terror is bearing fruit, the question of his patron inside Pakistan remains murky and troubling. He was arrested in a house owned by a Dr. Abdul Quddus Khan, a 78-year-old microbiologist characterized in Pakistani news reports as a […]

*Khalid Shaikh Muhammad was planning further terrorist attacks on the US. These would include, according to Newsweek, hijacking petroleum fuel trucks and smashing them into buildings, and destroying bridges in Washington, DC. He was trained in the US as an engineer. I was wrong yesterday about his being a Palestinian–his family is from Baluchistan in […]

*Pakistani security forces, including the Inter-Services Intelligence, conducted a raid in Rawalpindi that netted one of the biggest al-Qaeda fish yet caught. CIA men were also present. Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, one of Bin Laden’s right hand men and among the masterminds of the two World Trade Center bombings, is now in US custody in some […]

*Some 52% of Israelis are skeptical that Israel’s new rightwing government put together by Ariel Sharon will achieve peace and prosperity. 33% do not believe it will improve the security situation at all. 31% think it might, a bit. In other words, the Israelis are pretty realistic. But question: If they know this, why put […]

*Pakistan will back a second UN Security Council resolution against Iraq, essentially authorizing war, according to the Los Angeles Times. The government is aware that the war will be hugely unpopular with the Pakistani people and that there will be large demonstrations. They are reported as saying they are confident they can “weather” those demonstrations. […]