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Pakistan has arrested 500 suspected al-Qaida operatives in the past year, and has turned 443 over to the US authorities, according to Pakistani officials, as reported today in the Pakistani press. Now, there probably weren’t more than 5000 “Arab Afghans” in Afghanistan before 9/11, and some large number was killed by AC-130s or by massive […]

A huge tiff is going on between India and Pakistan in the wake of this week’s comments on nuclear war by General Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf said earlier this week that he was ready to use nuclear weapons had India crossed the Pakistan border last summer. Although his spokesman tried to retract the statement, it seemed […]

Informed Comment is on hiatus until after New Year’s Day. Enjoy the holidays! In the meantime, enjoy the following sites (the underlined parts are clickable): http://www.jerusalem.indymedia.org/ (Palestine Independent Media Center); http://www.indymedia.org.il/imc/israel/webcast/index.php3?language=en (Israel Independent Media Center) and http://www.iraqjournal.org/ Iraq Journal (Alternative views on the Iraq issue). Informed Comment does not necessarily endorse any particular report at […]

India almost went to war with Pakistan twice in the last year, according to India Today. Last winter, Indian forces prepared to attack the Pakistani line of control in Kashmir, but were dissuaded by the US and by the relocation of Pakistani terrorist camps from Kashmir to Pakistan itself. The war plans in the summer […]

From a discussion of so-called Koranic “belligerancy” in the Medinan chapters In general, theological explanations by themselves do little to explain foreign policy, while foreign policy debates tend to distort the meaning and history of theology. In Islam, the difference between the Medina chapters of the Koran (c. 622-632 A.D.) and the Meccan chapters of […]

A letter by Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s right-hand man, has been published by Asharq al-Awsat. Dated February 1998, the letter speaks of Americans as “the foreign investors” who “must be hit.” The term “investor” is part of a code in the letter, where everything is referred to as a “company” and an economic transaction. This […]

In response to a question raised about the request Paul Wolfowitz made to put 100,000 US troops into eastern Turkey on the Iraq border, and whether there was a prospect of Turkish troops going into Iraq in case a war broke out: The whole point of asking permission to put US troops into Turkey on […]

A number of Iraqi expatriate groups will boycott the forthcoming dissident summit in London, according to Asharq al-Awsat. Al-Hizb al-Islami al-Iraqi, a Sunni Islamist party, complains that Sunni representation at the summit is weak. He says that two-thirds of the delegates are Shiites. (He does not say that about 2/3s of Iraqis are Shiites; that […]

Al-Qaeda has launched a campaign against Usama Rushdi, a former publicist in Holland for the Islamic Grouping (al-Gamaa al-Islamiyyah), he says. The Islamic Grouping was implicated in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar el Sadat in 1981, and in the 1990s launched a series of terrorist attacks and challenges to the Egyptian government. Rushdi gained […]