Juan Cole

The protests against the regime in Iran on Monday were remarkable in several ways, I conclude on reading Borzou Daragahi’s account in LAT. One is the sheer number of cities where students came out for rallies: “Esfahan, Shiraz and Kerman, in the eastern city of Mashhad and in the western cities of Tabriz, Kermanshah, Hamedan […]

Bombings kill 46 people in 2 Pakistan cities | Top AP Stories | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle The market that was struck in Lahore, in Iqbal Town, is known as upscale– where there are American franchises like KFC and high end retailing. So there is a class conflict element to the bombing. The Pakistani authorities […]

Is the earth’s climate warming? Indisputably. Has the pumping of vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by human beings since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution contributed to global climate change? Also, indisputably. Would extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere cause warming? In the absence of some sort of offset, yes. In fact, […]

Afghan President Hamid Karzai urged the United States to back talks between his government and Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban. Former Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmad Mutawakkil says that if a negotiated peace could be reached between the Karzai government and the Taliban, the latter would abandon their vague alliance with al-Qaeda (via […]

Adam L. Silverman writes in a guest op-ed for Informed Comment: Politics and Politicking: Iraqi Elections, the Failure of Reconciliation, and the Consolidation of Power Adam L. Silverman, PhD[1] The politics surrounding Iraq’s national election law is eerily reminiscent of the Faulkner quote that “the past is never dead, it’s not even past”. While the […]

A US soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in eastern Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the US continued a new operation, Cobra’s Anger, in Helmand Province, announcing the capture of weapons caches. It is one of 22 offensives currently being pursued. But, no US or Afghan National Army troops have been killed in the Helmand operation and […]

The Taliban Movement of Pakistan, headquartered in South Waziristan, struck at Rawalpindi again on Friday. Two militants scaled a ladder to drop into a mosque in the city’s military residential area and then to shoot worshipers before detonating their belt bombs. They killed 40 and wounded nearly 100. Among the injured were former high-ranking military […]

The USG Open Source Center rounds up Pakistani Urdu editorials concerning President Barack Obama’s new Afghanistan policy. Pakistan: Urdu Press Roundup on Barack Obama’s New Afghan PolicyThe following is a roundup of excerpts from editorials and articles on the new Afghan policy announced by US President Barack Obama revealing sending 30,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan, […]

A Taliban guerrilla in Pakistani custody insists that he met Bin Laden in the mountainous province of Ghazni inside Afghanistan. The allegation is plausible. The US has very good aerial surveillance of the Pakistani Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but has never seen a trace of Bin Laden there. He fought over on the Afghanistan side, […]