Juan Cole

Jimmy Carter, Speech on Afghanistan (January 4, 1980), warning “Fifty thousand heavily armed Soviet troops have crossed the border and are now dispersed throughout Afghanistan, attempting to conquer the fiercely independent Muslim people of that country.” Carter said, ‘ Massive Soviet military forces have invaded the small, nonaligned, sovereign nation of Afghanistan., which had hitherto […]

Nieman Watchdog > Ask This > 'There hasn't been two seconds of intelligent discussion about living standards in Afghanistan' Afghanistan is an economic basket case. The blurb says correctly: ‘ The poverty in Afghanistan is almost beyond imagining. Thirty Afghans die from TB every day; life expectancy is 43 years; per capita income is $426; […]

Radio Azadi reports in Dari Persian that the government of President Hamid Karzai has greeted the Obama plan for that country “warmly”. Kabul interprets the plan as a pledge to build up the Afghan military and then turn over security duties to it, a sequence that many Afghans find appealing. As expected, the Taliban rejected […]

See my just-published Salon.com article, “Obama’s surge: has the president been misled by the Iraq analogy?” Excerpt: ‘ President Barack Obama’s just-announced plan for Afghanistan seems modeled less on Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam strategy than on George W. Bush’s Iraq exit strategy. Or, at least it is modeled on the Washington mythology that Iraq was turned […]

1. Obama’s plan depends heavily on training 100,000 new soldiers and 100,000 new policemen over the next three years. It has taken 8 years to train the first 100,000 soldiers fairly well, and the same period for the Europeans to train a similar number of police badly. Can the pace really be more than doubled […]

President Barack Obama’s commitment to “finish the job” in Afghanistan by sending 55,000 US troops to that country (counting the 21,000 he dispatched last winter shortly after being inaugurated) depends heavily on a hope of building up an Afghan government and army over to which the US can eventually turn control. But one of the […]

Switzerland on Sunday voted by 58 percent in favor of banning minarets. This campaign poster was banned for being racist, but apparently the goal of the poster, now that is all right. Swissinfo surveys the headlines in Switzerland Monday morning and finds that the press there universally condemned and expressed dismay at Sunday’s vote. Editors […]

Solar Power Costs 50% Lower than Last Year : CleanTechnica Thin-film solar is leading the way down to greater affordability. Higher finance costs have hurt recently, but those are expected to ease, while the equipment is likely to get cheaper. Solar is the only real game in town to decisively solve the world’s energy problems– […]

Afghan border police say they killed 27 Taliban fighters in Khost Province. If the Afghan security forces were that good, however, then they wouldn’t have allowed several captives in a prison, including several Taliban commanders, escape. This is the level of efficiency President Obama can expect from his Afghan partners if he, as expected, does […]