Juan Cole

History News Network 7-29-02: Culture Watch Should College Kids Be Required to Read About the Koran? By Juan Cole The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assigns three books to incoming students every year. This year, one of the books, by Michael Sells of Haverford College, is about the Koran. Amazingly, the assignment of […]

Coming Showdown in Pakistan Pakistan’s military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, was required by his country’s Supreme Court to hold parliamentary elections by October of 2002. He has attempted to set the elections up so that he could meet the formal requirement but keep most power in his own hands. Some of his moves have a populist […]

A Bluff on Iraq? The article by Mary Dejevsky in the Independent on the talk about an Iraq campaign being a “bluff” is foolish. There is not any doubt that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz intend to go to war against Baghdad, and the signs I’ve seen are that they have convinced President George W. Bush to […]

A car bomb that the driver intended to use to blow up government ministers in Kabul was intercepted when it had a collision. It is not clear if President Karzai was among the intended victims. Political parties in Pakistan are continuing to buck President Musharraf. There may well be a substantial confrontation between them and […]

Ethnic conflict is on the rise in Afghanistan, as evidenced by a number of incidents that do not appear to have been reported in the major U.S. media, though the brave and diligent wire service reporters on the ground have been filing them. These conflicts may well draw the United States military into one side […]

The Russian Deputy Foreign Minister (Igor Ivanov) is in Iraq, and reiterated his government’s opposition to a US strike on that country. He implied that the US has been lobbying the other members of the UN Security Council to go along. (France is also opposed, so far). Ivanov did, however, urge Iraq to bring back […]

McNeill meets Ismail Khan; and Development Aid The fighting between ethnic Tajiks (Sunni Persian speakers) around the northwestern city of Herat with ethnic Pushtuns brought a visit from the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill. He met with Herat’s governor/ warlord Ismail Khan, offering US good offices in ending the […]

A Bush Appointee Brings up Concentration Camps for American Muslims The comments of Peter Kirsanow, a Bush appointee to the US Civil Rights commission, in Detroit over the past weekend are beyond belief. He openly brought up the possibility that if there were another big al-Qaida strike on the US, Muslim Americans could be put […]

Al-Qaida Continues to Recruit The Sunday Times reported on 7/21 that British intelligence now estimates that some 4,000 Muslims with British citizenship passed through al-Qaida training camps, many of them having fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya or the Balkans before returning to the UK. Previous estimates had been 80 or so. If true, this report indicates […]