What’s the difference between spray-painting a gigantic penis on a St Petersburg drawbridge and overturning a couple of police cars? Possibly five years in jail. But if both were symbolic acts of petty hooliganism (recently done by the hipster anarchist group Voina, Russian for ‘War’), why did the activists get off with only a slap […]
The International Crisis Group (ICG) released a new paper on Afghanistan’s judiciary sytem, its faults, failures and the way back to institutional legitimacy and stability. Please find the executive summary here. However, I highly recommend that you read the paper that you’ll find here, in PDF format. In the meantime, here’s a taste: The legal […]
The news of reconciliation in Afghanistan is nothing less than three-headed Cerberus, internally conflicted and unruly. One head: the Karzai story, pushed about in the major media outlets, that NATO is helping broker preliminary, testy, exchanges that might well precede a contested power-sharing agreement. The second, reported by the BBC is that the Taliban are […]
The Asia Foundation recently released a massive report on the views of the Afghan people. The report titled ‘Afghanistan in 2010: A Survey of the Afghan People‘ is over 200 pages and features Afghan replies to numerous questions about the state of their country and lives. Below is a chart of the overall national temperature […]
Big news out of Georgia (which is where I am until 17 November), where thirteen men were arrested on charges of spying for Russia, Georgia’s nemesis. Most of the men were arrested in October, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs made the announcement on 5 November, perhaps due to Reuters breaking the story a week […]
The New York Times’ journalism on Afghanistan is nothing short of a heroic record. Consider Dexter Filkin’s investigative journalism and then, think no more. But today, the series of photographs and story it published on the endemic incidence of self-immolation among women in Afghanistan is something beyond note, and approbation. It is revelatory and within […]
I was honoured to have had my Khodorkovsky = Kurils post savaged by no less a man than Anatoly Karlin at Sublime Oblivion, and no snark intended! While Anatoly may be a more incisive and high profile blogger than I, we both come from the broadly defined ‘left’ with a desire to correct the various […]
One is a telegenic billionaire turned dissident, and the other is a bunch of fog-sodden volcanic rocks at the edge of the earth. But the Khodorkovsky case and the Kuril islands dispute have more in common than meets the eye. The Kuril islands, like Yukos, were strategic assets seized by an emboldened Russian state from […]
I’d written earlier with some thoughts on how to cut apart the Taliban in Afghanistan from their Al Qaeda counterparts. Broadly, I’d argued that one needed to separate out the incentives and motivations (en bloc) of the Taliban from their foreign, multi-national, globalist counterparts. Separated out– as hanafis (nationalist jihadis) and salafis (globalist jihadis)– NATO […]
It was obvious a year ago that the 2010 midterms were going to be about domestic issues, specifically the economy, jobs, and health care. But it was hard to predict just how little foreign policy, the Afghanistan war included, would play in this political season. The war in Afghanistan has to be considered the top […]
My colleagues Pat Frost and Rob Grace ( over at the Law and Security Strategy blog) and I have written extensively on why the situation in Afghanistan looks grim. The war there is a long haul; the Karzai government is corrupt, a two-timing, untrustworthy thing; viable solutions to the conflict in Afghanistan require negotiated international […]
The story of US/Karzai government negotiations with members of the Taliban have already taken so many twists (mostly rhetorical rather than substantive) that one should not feel ashamed to be confused as to what exactly is going on between the two warring parties. One second the Obama administration admits (Gates) to ongoing negotiations and the […]
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