Making predictions is a fool's man's game…thankfully I love that game! While one cannot foresee what exactly the future holds, some trends can be seen. For instance, it is hard to foresee any changes in the political leadership of all the Stans’, as they are all deeply entrenched and seem to have learned much from […]
KABUL: Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Saturday paid a surprise visit to Afghanistan, where he spoke to troops battling the Taliban and held talks with President Hamid Karzai as a police officer and six Taliban have been killed in military operations in southern Afghanistan. The visit came as government and military sources speaking on […]
I realize that there is little that is funny about the situation in Somalia, including the piracy crisis that is the direct result of the anarchy and statelessness dominating that country on Africa's Horn. That said, is it just me, or does the following headline from the Mail & Guardian seem more like the promotional […]
Want to start a debate among South Africans? Get several of them together and ask what positive developments are likely to spring from the country's preparations to host the 2010 World Cup? Inevitably you’ll get someone passionately telling you that it is nothing more than an ill-fated jingoistic boondoggle while someone else argues as ardently […]
In the second to last installment of our Central Asian Year in Review I want to discuss two things: Issues and events in the CA region that have lacked media coverage commensurate with their importance and common misconceptions about our subject area. Afghanistan is at the heart of both. The story that has received the […]
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan ‚ Hours after a senior American diplomat personally delivered a stern warning that Pakistan must act against a terrorist group, the authorities here on Thursday detained the founder of the militant group accused by India and the United States of conducting the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Pakistani officials said that the founder, Hafiz […]
Kgalema Motlanthe has rejected as unnecessary calls for an investigation of the arms deal, which increasingly threatens to undermine the ANC even further at a time when the ruling party needs all the help it can get. It seems certain that between the work of the Scorpions, the investigations of the media, and probes from […]
Not that I’d get my hopes up, but the government and the National Congress in Defense of the People (CNDP), the main rebel militia, are meeting in United Nations-brokered talks to end the fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. The events, at UN African headquarters in Nairobi,are being facilitated bu Olesegun Obasanjo, […]
Today, in the second part of our Central Asia: Year in Review, we will discuss the global recession's impact on our region. A couple weeks ago, I went over Kazakhstan's sickening economy and their government's early efforts to stem the tide, while at the same time drawing a connection to how Kazakh and the rest […]
Don't you just wish you were in Russia? While we in the West are tightening our belts, those devil-may-care Russians are snapping up new Hermes ones for Christmas, throwing them into the back of their Hummers by the boxful! According to yet another article about Russian nonchalance in the face of global financial meltdown, […]
The international community has perked itself up over Zimbabwe again. As the country's post-election chaos swirled the West shook its head and waved its fingers, then the stalemate settled in and by and large Zimbabwe disappeared from the consciousness of most of the world. This is how the world deals with Africa. Today it's Zimbabwe, […]
Just a few days ago I was jotting down some of the major happenings in the Afghanistan and Central Asian region this past year and a few significant items came to mind, but it was not until I went over my resources, news clippings, and former posts did I realize that there were stories everywhere. […]
The death of Russia's archbishop Alexy II was a deep personal blow for Putin. After all, “the patriarch, like the Prime Minister, was a former KGB agent codenamed Drozdov, according to Soviet archives opened to experts in the 1990s”. In fact, when Putin gave him a medal for Services to the Fatherland, it was not […]