Juan Cole

Iraqi Kurds eye Kirkuk, Mosul Oil Fields Commander Hamid Efendi, the top-ranking Kurdish militia commander in Northern Iraq, said Saturday that he was committed to taking Kirkuk and Mosul for Kurdistan if the US went to war against Iraq. Kirkuk and Mosul are where the petroleum is, and possession of them would shift the balance […]

Egypt releases 120 Islamists The Egyptian government released 120 members of the Gamaa Islamiyya or Islamic Grouping from prison this past week, and is said to plan further releases. Fully 100 of these were from El Miniya. In the course of the 1990s, the Egyptian government is said to have jailed between 20,000 and 30,000 […]

More on Bali bombing and al-Qaeda I can confirm that Abu Bakar Bashir is “of Arab descent but born in Jombang, in Indonesia.” Kim Sengupta reported it in the Independent. I was also told that Abu Bakar Bashir is of Hadrami origin by someone who says he went to school with him. As Dr. Freitag […]

Things are going from bad to worse for the US in Pakistan. Now the Muttahida Majlis-i Amal or United Action Council, which groups six religious parties, is making a bid to actually form the national government in parliament. They put forward the firebrand pro-Taliban cleric Fazlur Rahman as potential prime minister. The MMA has pledged […]

Blowback from Reagan’s Afghanistan Policy The relevant information on the role of the US in encouraging the Chinese and the Pakistanis to arm the Mujahidin with ever more sophisticated weaponry is in a Washington Post article of July 20, 1992, by Steve Coll, of the Post’s Foreign Service. Orrin Hatch and Ikle, with some others, […]

Saudis Refuse Participation in an Iraq War The Saudis are again saying as loudly as they can that Saudi Arabia will not take part in any attack on Iraq. Prince Sultan, the minister of defense, said that Saudi Arabia would not “provide any assistance in any strikes against Iraq.” His reasoning appeared to be that […]

Bali Nightclub Bombing The death toll keeps rising in the bombing on Saturday of two nightclubs on the Indonesian island of Bali. Today I saw 187 given as the number of dead, with over 300 wounded. After September 11, any such scenes of a burning blast site just tear me up inside. I think of […]

Pakistan Election Results The Pakistan People’s Party, led by Makhdoom Amin Fahim, seems set to attempt to form a government in coalition with the Muslim League (QA) and the Muttahida Qaumi Movement. All three have a more or less secular orientation. PPP and ML (QA) are the two largest parties in parliament. The European Union […]

The Failure of Reagan’s Afghanistan Policy The Reagan administration policy in Afghanistan was not a “most successful departure” but, in my opinion, an absolute disaster that led in many ways directly to September 11. The Soviet Union was already on its last legs economically in the 1980s. As the empire collapsed, a Soviet-dominated Afghanistan would […]