As a war of words breaks out between Hamid Karzai and Pervez Musharraf over accusations of Afghan insurgents using Pakistani territory as a staging ground, Islamabad broaches actually fencing off the border the way Pat Buchanan wants to fence off… Read morePakistan threatens to fence off Afghan border
Great, just what we need—military incursions to provoke a general uprising in Pakistan’s increasingly restive Tribal Areas. Just to give the teetering edifice of Musharraf’s dictatorship a healthy shove towards the abyss. Then we can have a nuclear-armed Taliban in… Read moreWar in Waziristan?
This brief analysis of the challenges facing the expanded NATO mandate in Afghanistan sheds light on the real politics of the “cartoon jihad”—obviously, the Danish cartoons have been seized upon as a symbol and crystalization of a much wider set… Read moreAfghanistan: violence inaugurates NATO expansion
“Death to Denmark!” Does it get any more surreal than this? From the foreign press on the escalating anti-cartoon protests: Police clobbered stone-throwing protesters with batons and fired tear gas in the Pakistanian city of Peshawar on Wednesday – Pakistan’s… Read more“Cartoon jihad” escalates
From AP, Feb. 9: A suicide bomber struck Thursday in Pakistan on the holiest festival for Shiite Muslims, triggering a riot that left a provincial town in flames and at least 27 people dead and more than 50 wounded. After… Read moreAshura violence in Pakistan, Afghanistan
A round-up on the Feb. 7 BBC shows how the crisis over the anti-Islam cartoons published in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten (and since reprinted in Norway and other European countries) is spinning out of control. The protests sweeping the Muslim world have… Read morePropaganda and the cartoon controversy
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) issues this response to “The Afghanistan Miracle” by Diane Tebelius, an op-ed which ran in The Seattle Times Oct. 4, 2005: The “Miracle” or a Mockery of Afghanistan? Ms. Diane Tebelius,… Read moreRAWA rejects “Afghanistan miracle”
From AP via Newsday, Jan. 5: Taliban militants beheaded a teacher in a central Afghan town while his wife and eight children watched, officials said Wednesday, describing the latest in a string of attacks targeting educators at schools where girls… Read moreAfghan beheaded for teaching girls
Eight men at the American detention camp in Guantánamo Bay have separately given their lawyers “consistent accounts” of being tortured at a secret prison in Afghanistan at various periods from 2002 to 2004, Human Rights Watch has announced. The men,… Read moreHRW: secret CIA torture center in Afghanistan
A woman poet well-known in literary circles in Afghanistan’s western city of Herat has died after being severely beaten by her husband, authorites report. Nadia Anjuman, 25, died late on Nov. 1, said provincial police chief Nisar Ahmad Paikar. “We… Read moreBeing a writer —or woman— still dangerous in Afghanistan
Baz Mohammad, a reputed Afghan drug kingpin who allegedly condoned selling heroin in the US in the name of jihad, has become the first person to be extradited from Afghanistan for prosecution. Upon his arraignment in Manhattan Oct. 24, Mohammad… Read moreAccused Afghan narco-jihadi extradited to NYC
Freedom’s on the march in Afghanistan—the freedom of fundamentalist fanatics to protect their faith from such blasphemous assaults as newspapers that condemn public stoning. From Reporters Without Borders, Oct. 24: Reporters Without Borders today called on President Hamid Karzai to… Read moreAfghanistan: newspaper editor gets prison for “blasphemy”
