Juan Cole

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould write in a guest op-ed for IC: “Rebuilding Afghanistan is the most cynically pro-American thing you could do anywhere in the world in terms of making it a strong ally in the best sense of the word. Not a puppet or a right-wing military dictatorship but a really good Islamic […]

A US predator drone strike on a Pakistani village in Orakzai killed 10 persons on Wednesday morning. The US maintains that it struck at a Taliban compound. The leader of the Pakistan Taliban Movement, Baitullah Mahsud, again threatened on Tuesday to strike at Washington DC. He has made a string of such threats for some […]

A suicide bomber struck a police station in the northern city of Mosul on Tuesday, killing 7 persons (4 policemen)and wounding 38 (17 policemen). Mostly Sunni Arab Mosul remains a center of guerrilla war against the Shiite-dominated Baghdad government and troops. Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that the government of PM Nuri al-Maliki has announced the […]

A truck bomber struck at police in downtown Mosul (pop. 1.7 mn.) on Tuesday morning, killing 7 and wounding 17. Al-Zaman writing in Arabic says that Iraqi troops continued for a third straight day their siege of the Sunni Fadl distrinct. The paper alleged that diseases are starting to spread among women and children because […]

Pakistani security forces quickly restored order Monday to the police academy near Lahore that was attacked on Sunday by militants. The Taliban Movement of Pakistan, led by Baitullah Mahsud, is being blamed for the police academy attack. The violence in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas spills out onto Punjab sometimes. End/ (Not Continued)

The USG Open Source Center translates an article from the Spanish newspaper El Mundo profiling Delbar Jan Arman, a former member of the Hizb-i Islami of Gulbadin Hikmatyar who fought the Soviets, and whose four-year tenure as governor of Zabul province in the Pashtun south was controversial because of charges of corruption and repression of […]

It seems fairly clear from McClatchy’s account that the slummy Sunni Arab district of al-Fadl in Baghdad went into rebellion against the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Saturday and Sunday, after the arrest of Adil al-Mashhadani. The latter was the leader of the Awakening Council or Sons of Iraq paramilitary that has been […]

Ten gunmen attacked a police training facility near Lahore on Sunday, killing 20 and wounding 150. They deployed 11 bombs and machine gun fire. Two the attackers were killed in a counter-attack. The police facility is near Wagah, the border crossing into India. Note that this site is very, very distant from the tribal regions […]

My column in Salon.com is out, “Obama’s domino theory,” in which I worry that “The president sounds like he’s channeling Cheney or McCain — or a Cold War hawk afraid of international communism — when he talks about the war in Afghanistan.” Excerpt: ‘[Obama’s] latter-day domino theory of al-Qaida takeovers in South Asia is just […]