Ambassador Richard Holbrooke has passed on. He served in the Obama Adminstration in the capacity of United States Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He served in diplomatic leadership roles since the 1970’s and was most renowned for being the architect of the Dayton Peace Accords, the framework that ended the Bosnian War in 1995. […]
Funny how Russia’s esteemed riot police, whose noble truncheons are so effective at bashing the heads of liberal democracy activists, couldn’t quite summon the same spirit against a much larger and more dangerous group of ultra-nationalist hooligans. A hard core group of Spartak Moscow fans rampaged through the capital on Saturday, shouting xenophobic slogans and […]
A new poll covering all of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces was released today by The Washington Post, ABC News, the British Broadcasting Corp. and ARD television. Let’s go over some of the polls main findings: Afghans are more pessimistic about the direction of their country, less confident in the ability of the United States and its […]
Wikileaks may be to espionage as the internet is to newspapers. Why should governments pay good money and risk agents’ lives when they can get dirt on their enemies with the click of a finger? Think about it: Russia allegedly paid thousands of dollars (and a fair amount of risk to its international reputation) in […]
I’ve already said my peace on the shameful acts of the Wikileaks’ group and their enablers in the mainstream media and this latest State Department secret document dump only solidifies my feelings. While the leaders and leakers of Wikileaks are rightly being near universally condemned, major newspapers like the New York Times, The Guardian, etc. […]
Sunday’s Wikileaks release containing some 250,000 diplomatic cables included headline-creating news regarding Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. One of the cables, marked as “confidential” (not a terribly high level of secrecy) was “classified” and perhaps written by Donald Lu, who at the time was the US Chargé d’Affaires in Baku. The cable summarizes in great detail […]
From today’s New York Times on the most recent Wikileaks document dump–this bit on the corruption endemic in Afghanistan politics: Suspicions of corruption in the Afghan government: When Afghanistan’s vice president visited the United Arab Emirates last year, local authorities working with the Drug Enforcement Administration discovered that he was carrying $52 million in cash. […]
The mind implodingly bad news on Afghanistan has taken another downward tailspin. So much so that even pop-culture savvy New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has gotten in on the blame game. And here’s why: Because there is now a somewhat more clear deadline on NATO withdrawal in Afghanistan (electoral politics requires that President Obama […]
This month has been chock full of news on Afghanistan and NATO’s enterprise there. There’s been talk of war and peace, and long-run effort to develop sustainable stability within and between tribes and political factions in and outside Kabul. It’s all interesting, rich stuff. Nevertheless, no piece of all that news can hold a candle […]
In a stunning development, Emin Milli, the second so-called “donkey blogger,” was granted a release from prison today by an Azerbaijani court. Details are still sketchy, and Radio Free Europe does not appear to have confirmation yet that Milli is actually out as of press time. One of my sources claims that Milli has been released, […]
This blog may have been the first news source anywhere (or at least the first non-Azeri source) to confirm that Adnan Hajizade was actually released from prison – although RFE/RL was apparently first to report the court’s decision to release him. See attached two superb pictures taken by freelance journalist Turkhan Karimov. Karimov emailed me, saying […]
In a surprise move, jailed “donkey blogger” Adnan Hajizade was released from prison in the last two hours. He had been serving a two-year sentence on charges of “hooliganism” after being mauled by thugs in a Baku cafe in 2009. Coincidentally, the charges and the assault took place not long after Hajizade produced (and starred […]
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