Ahmed Wali Karzai, President Hamid Karzai’s half-brother and, seemingly, sole proprietor of Kandahar-the birth place of the Taliban in Afghanistan–has been assassinated by a close family associate. The reason behind the assassination has not been revealed. This news fundamentally roils politics, strategy and hedging in and for Afghanistan. Ahmed Wali, the most important linchpin of […]
Courtesy: Dawn.com Sixty-eight year old Bob Woodward, an associate editor at the Washington Post, is considered one of America’s most informed investigative journalists. In 1972, his disclosure and consistent reporting with Carl Bernstein of the Watergate Scandal led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Woodward, a Pulitzer Prize winning author of 12 bestselling non-fictions, […]
Kyrgyz Border Guard troops march in Osh June 15. They are part of the 500 reinforcements Kyrgyzstan moved to guard its southern border as the country tries to keep out drugs and terrorists. Bakyt Ibraimov Recently, the number of deadly cross border shootings has escalated on the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border. RFE/RL reports that in the past […]
As the US prepares to “withdraw” (sic) from Afghanistan, a fiasco that has made its Soviet “prequel” seem like a Hollywood success story, two new books add insult to injury. Written by a former British ambassador and a Russian journalist, and reviewed by Tariq Ali in the London Review of Books, “Afgantsy: The Russians in […]
The New York Times reported, less than five hours before a scheduled prime time nationally televised speech, that President Obama has indeed decided to drawdown the 30,000 surge troops out of Afghanistan. 10,000 are scheduled to leave Afghanistan by the end of this year; the other 20,000 by summer of 2012-just before the November election. […]
President Barack Obama is due to announce his plan to start pulling U.S troops out of Afghanistan during a televised speech to his American and international audience, his sixth since assuming office in January 2009. This rather militarily dicey and politically expedient move is being made right in the midst of wholesale national security changes in […]
Last week the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a regional security body with a total population of 1.5 billion people, held a 10th anniversary summit in the capital of Kazakhstan, Astana. The original “Shanghai Five” was formed in 1996 comprised of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. In 2001 when Uzbekistan joined the pack, it became […]
The death of Andrei Sakharov’s widow, fellow human rights activist Yelena Bonner, over the weekend brought out the usual opportunists. In Russia, right wing liberals like Boris Nemtsov immediately swooped down to claim her mantle: “The demise of such a Soviet dissident as Yelena Bonner is a huge loss for our society, which is badly […]
I recently watched the famous Russian director Alexei Balabanov’s 2007 movie Cargo 200 (or Gruz 200 in Russian). This blog entry is an attempt to explore and uncover the director’s message behind his artistic choice of making a visually, morally and emotionally poignant – if not shockingly grotesque – movie about the mid-80s in the […]
If there’s one man on Earth whom you never, ever want to cross, it’s Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. So, imagine how Dutch soccer superstar Ruud Gullit, the recently anointed £4 million a year coach of Grozny’s provincial soccer team, felt after receiving this little memo from the man who, whenever he even hears the word […]
The Russian military has finally achieved a quantitative edge over its erstwhile Cold War enemy. While America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have claimed the lives of some 6000 troops over 7 years, Russia has managed to lose nearly double that number of soldiers, in peacetime! According to NGOs cited in a distressing recent BBC […]
Since the Arab Spring the global media seems to have found a new obsession – a preoccupation with the remaining ruling dictators, their powers, legitimacy, impending revolutions, and the viability of totalitarian regimes in general. By the “global media” here I mean the news media (TV, radio, newspapers) and the Internet which also includes social […]
As was expected, during his farewell tour of bases in Afghanistan Secretary of Defense Robert Gates argued for maintaining the maximum number of combat troops feasible in Afghanistan well past the July drawdown. Just today, in Kandahar Province, Secretary Gates said that he’d advise the Obama administration to keep as many battle ready boots on […]
I wonder if something significant is brewing regarding the Karabakh issue. Yes, yes, I know: “something significant” has seemed to be in the offing year after year after year. And no breakthrough ever takes place. But I say this because the three OSCE Minsk Group presidents (Barack Obama, Dmitri Medvedev, and Nicolas Sarkozy) issued a very unusual […]
Putin may have waited a week after the sinking of the Kursk to even comment on the submarine disaster that claimed 118 lives, but his government virtually leapt to ban all EU vegetables in response to an E Coli. outbreak that has not even reached Russia. If only the government were this fast at reacting […]