Juan Cole

New Pakistani president Asaf Ali Zardari will face the challenge of a struggling economy. The stock market has lost 40% of its value since last March, currency reserves are deplete, and high energy and food costs are hitting ordinary folk hard. Aljazeera English examines the remarkable victory of Asaf Ali Zardari in Saturday’s presidential election […]

For the nine years before 2005, Asaf Ali Zardari, widower of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, was in prison facing corruption charges. On Saturday Zardari was elected president of Pakistan. Ironically, given Bush’s neoconservative agenda of democratizing the Muslim world, the most significant steps toward genuine parliamentary governance and rule of law, in Pakistan during […]

A conservative Republican woman who idolizes Margaret Thatcher decries McCain’s choice of Palin as cynical and dishonorable: ‘ In choosing a woman he doesn’t know or understand, purely for electoral advantage, he reveals a dishonourable lust for office, a disrespect for women generally and a dishonourable indifference to the future of his country. After all, […]

Russian archeologists are saying they have found the capital of the Khazar state. This largely Turkic state was multicultural, but its ruling sept converted to Judaism, which it used as the state religion. If it is borne out, this discovery will shed loads of illumination on Jewish history as well as on early medieval life […]

Reactions to Sarah Palin: Rick Steiner at Seattle P.I. slams the governor for her poor record on the environment. He says she has not taken climate change seriously, despite the thinning of the arctic ice cover; has sued Bush to stop polar bears being declared an endangered species (and lied about the scientific evidence); opposed […]

This story has been around for a week or so, alleging that Israel was planning to strike at Iran from Georgia. Arnaud de Borchgrave put it more cautiously, that the Israelis thought of their jets in Georgia as useful in case they decided to do a preemptive strike on Iran. More recently, deputy speaker of […]

The Republican Party convention in St. Paul gave us two American film narratives in an attempt to shift the national political debate away from issues and accountability to personalities and fluffy ideals. Former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan let the strategy slip in an unguarded open mike moment. Asked if Sarah Palin is the most […]

US ground troops conducted a raid into Pakistan’s tribal areas leaving an estimated 20 dead. The governor of the North-West Frontier Province, Owais Ahmed Ghani, said that the raid was ‘outrageous,” and the government charged that women and children were among the dead. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry called US ambassador Ann Patterson in for an […]