Today, I want to go over recent cooperative measures and conferences in our beloved Central Asian region. With Obama soon to be in the White House and multilateralism all the rage, I thought it was about time. In all seriousness, these cooperative efforts regarding such important transnational issues as terrorism, trade, drug trades, and disease […]
I just finished Barnett R. Rubin and Ahmed Rashid's Foreign Affairs piece on US/NATO Afghan and Pakistani policy, titled ‘From Great Game to Grand Bargain: Ending Chaos in Afghanistan and Pakistan.‘ Rubin, who has a blog and a forthcoming book, and Rashid are two giants in the field and I was looking forward at what […]
Last Tuesday and Wednesday, with the latter in a joint news conference with the secretary general of NATO, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Afghan President Karzai voiced his displeasure with international NATO presence in his country and called for a timetable of withdrawal. In front of Scheffer, he used more careful language, calling for a 'timetable […]
I wasn't going to write a post today, it being Thanksgiving Day here and all, but then I read this article detailing recent laws in the works in all five of our CA states curtailing the freedom of religion. Yesterday, I spoke about one aspect, the wearing of the hijab in school settings in Kyrgyzstan […]
The legal and cultural battle of whether or not Muslims should be able to wear a headscarf, hijab, in educational or other government facilities has been a well-publicized, contentious debate in such places as Turkey and France, both either straddling or inside the West, but this issue is also starting to boil in parts of […]
Good news that hopefully just keeps getting better. The Afghan government, not US/NATO troops, has arrested 10 suspects in the Nov. 12 female student and teacher acid attack. It looks like it was a combination of local Kandahar and federal police and law officials who performed the investigation, arrests, and has reportedly garnered confessions from […]
A Russian journalist assaulted and left for dead for exposing an abuse of power by the authorities. The whole world knows the story of Anna Politkovskaya: a Putin opponent gunned down in the lobby of her Moscow apartment after publishing a series of articles on Russian atrocities in Chechnya. Except this journalist is called Mikhail […]
The New York Times, which has done a more than decent job covering the people, culture, and political situation of the Uighurs in China's Xinjiang Province, has a well-researched piece examining the impact of several mummified Xinjiang ancestors’ genetic background. A museum in the province's capital of Urumqi holds several well-preserved mummified humans found in […]
It appears that the Taliban's leader Mullah Omar may yet still have his day in the hot Afghan sun as President Karzai has publicly invited him to negotiations to end the violent conflict that has plagued the state since 2001. Karzai has promised the Taliban leader, who was ousted from power by the US in […]
I haven't done much book reviewing on this blog besides Ahmed Rashid's ‘Descent into Chaos‘, and that's really not going to change, but I would like to list a group of recent publications concerning Afghanistan and Central Asia that you may find interesting and worth looking into. Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a […]
Georgia is nervously calling “for an independent investigation into who started the war between Russia and Georgia…after the New York Times and BBC's Newsnight programme raised serious doubts about Georgia's claim that its attack on the breakaway Georgian enclave of South Ossetia on August 7/8 was in response to Russian aggression”. But it was the […]
Last Wednesday, a couple perpetrators used water guns to shoot acid at a group of girls headed to school in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Details about this despicable act are still rather muddy, with the number of perpetrators and victims still unclear after reading several reports. The New York Times report has the number of victims reaching […]
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