Juan Cole

Both the European Union and Human Rights Watch have criticized General Pervez Musharraf’s attempts to stifle democracy in Pakistan. His “National Security Council,” very much unlike the US version, will virtually give the Pakistani military a permanent veto over domestic policy initiatives. He is conducting elections in a very limited manner, disallowing street processions or […]

Yemeni police have discovered a further 300 kg. of plastic explosives in the capital, Sanaa, which belonged to an al-Qaida cell. Two members of the cell had earlier accidentally blown themselves up, but apparently they had planned a large operation. Guantanamo captives from Yemen have in the past said that the U.S. embassy in Sanaa […]

Successes and Failures of the War on Terror Juan R. I. Cole Symposium on “Globalization and Terrorism” International Institute, University of Michigan September 11, 2002 On September 11, the al-Qaida terrorist network struck an epochal blow against the United States. It aimed at pushing the U.S. out of the Middle East as a status quo […]

One of the founders of Algeria’s “Armed Islamic Group” revealed in an interview with Asharq al-Awsat that Usama Bin Laden gave monetary aid to the Algerian fundamentalists beginning in 1992. That was when the military government threw out the election results, in which the Islamic Salvation Front had won a majority in parliament and repressed […]

The rebellion of Padshah Khan Zadran in Eastern Afghanistan appears to have failed for the moment. The disaffected warlord, who has vowed to overthrow Karzai, had rockets fired into the middle of Khost. He was trying to take the city from Governor Muhammad Hakim Tanival, Karzai’s appointee. Tanival’s forces have fought off the challenge. But […]

Bin Laden Preaches against U.S. Asim Daraz, an Egyptian journalist who lived in Afghanistan and associated for a while with Usama Bin Laden, showed videotape excerpts in London yesterday that help explain Bin Laden’s hatred for the U.S., according to ash-Sharq al-Awsat. One was a sermon Bin Laden delivered in Jidda at his family’s mosque […]

Instability in Afghanistan The ability of terrorist forces (whether al-Qaida or Gulbuddin Hekmatyar) to set off a huge car bomb explosion in Kabul, killing at least 30 and injuring 50, on the same day that President Hamid Karzai narrowly escaped being assassinated in Kandahar, demonstrates how much remains to be done there. U.S. preoccupation with […]

Iraqi Shi`ites and Hizbullah There seems to me to be a contradiction between the stated plans of the hawks in the Bush administration to establish a post-Saddam democracy in Iraq on the one hand, and other goals of the administration on the other. For instance, President Bush put Iran in the “axis of evil” and […]