Juan Cole

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. […]

A poster to one of the lists I am on wrote: “US policy is to allow no sanctuaries anywhere on the globe for anti-American terror groups. No training camps. No organizations, no fronts. No funding. No meetings. No travel. Identified leaders will be taken out. Operations such as those which existed a year or two […]

*Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf expressed reluctance to endorse war between the US and Iraq at the Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Kuala Lumpur. Pakistan is on the Security Council at the moment and is one of 6 nations from which the US hopes to draw supportive votes for the resolution just introduced by Britain and Spain, […]

*Pakistan’s four provincial legislatures voted for 80 members of the Federal Senate, and the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) and its allies, who control the lower house, seem close to having a simple majority in the upper chamber. Some of the seats were distributed to “technocrats” and women who ran unopposed, their party affiliations determined by […]

*Dawn reports that a senior US State Department official has said, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are in safe hands and the United States is satisfied with the measures Islamabad has taken to secure them, says a senior official of the US State Department. The official was not named by Dawn but presumably was Undersecretary of State […]