Juan Cole

A common explanation for the US presence in Afghanistan is Washington’s interest in Central Asian fuel sources– natural gas in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and petroleum in Kazakhstan. The idea of Zalmay Khalilzad and others was to bring a gas pipeline down through Afghanistan and Pakistan to energy-hungry India. Turkmenistan became independent of Moscow in 1991, […]

The big news out of Iraq over the weekend was the awarding of a handful of new oil development contracts to companies such as Royal Dutch Shell and Russia’s Lukoil. These bids follow earlier awards of fields for development to China. The American oil majors failed to conclude any new deals, though Exxon Mobil won […]

Deepak Tripathi, former BBC journalist and author of the book Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan (Potomac, January 2010) writes in guest op-ed for IC: Since the launch of the Iraq Inquiry in London at the end of July 2009, covers have been coming off with increasing frequency to reveal the circumstances leading […]

Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has announced the end of the Pakistani military campaign in South Waziristan, although he seems to reserve the possibility that it might nevertheless continue. The reason for the ambiguity is surely that South Waziristan is a huge place, and that many fighters of the Taliban movement of Pakistan melted […]

The USG OSC translates or paraphrases Pakistani Urdu editorials on President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize: Pakistan Urdu Press Roundup on Obama Receiving Nobel Peace PrizeThe roundup of excerpts from articles and an editorial on the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to President Obama, the reasons behind the act and the criteria set in place by Alfred […]

Not only have Blackwater mercenaries (now Xe) helped the CIA kidnap people (“rendition”), but it is now coming out that they’ve been helping launch covert assassination drones in Pakistan. The revelations, which have outraged the Pakistani people, have forced the USG to cancel the contract. Aljazeera English reports on the fear gripping mosque-goers in the […]

If it is true that the Nobel committee awarded President Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush, they must have been dismayed to discover that Bush’s war on terror remained the framework for Obama’s acceptance speech. It was a great speech, with its references to Gandhi and King and its […]

Antony Adolph writes in a guest op-ed for IC: A Missile Shield by Any Other Name: Is Obama’s Global Military Strategy Taking Shape in Eastern Europe? No one wants to sit on a sofa that’s uncomfortable for too long, so why would Eastern Europeans, let alone the world? The ‘SOFA’ in question (a Status of […]

The world has noted the irony that President Barack Obama is delivering his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize after launching an escalation of the Afghanistan war. Of course, the critique is a little misplaced, since the prize is for a specific policy success, not for being a pacifist. Still, Mr. Obama was clearly […]