Juan Cole

A hostage standoff at Pakistani military HQ in Rawalpindi ended violently on Sunday morning when Pakistani troops stormed the compound where the militants had holed up with 25 hostages. Three of the hostages were killed in the course of the assault, along with two army troops and four militants. Earlier the militants, some dressed in […]

I was listening to National Public Radio on the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama, and they brought on some nonentity from one of Rupert Murdoch’s faux “magazines,” who delivered himself of the remark that when he heard the news, he broke out laughing. He laughed at Obama. He is being […]

According to this Persian site, the old Taliban of Mulla Omar have issued a communique that holds out a promise and a threat. They said that if the outside Powers want to transform the proud, pious Afghan people into a colony, they were steadfast and ready to fight a very long war against this effort. […]

CNN reports that nearly one in four human beings is Muslim, based on a new extensive survey by the Pew Forum for Religion in Public Life. The number of Muslims they estimate, about 1.5 billion, is the one I have been using for some time based on my own back of the napkin calculations, but […]

Another big explosion has rocked Kabul, killing several persons and wounding more. I don’t know if Peter Galbraith still has a job at the United Nations after he went public with charges that the Electoral Complaints Commission, mainly appointed by the UN, was ignoring large-scale fraud in the August 20 presidential elections, fraud that mainly […]

You get your pick of polls on the Afghanistan war this morning. AP-GfK found only 40% of Americans any longer support the war, though they back sending one-off expeditionary forces to fight specific terrorist threats. Quinnipiac found a slight majority still in favor of the war. Widely diverging results such as this one suggest either […]

Nasrine Gross writes in a guest op-ed for IC Friends & Colleagues, I have just returned from Kabul. And I am shocked how little the extent of fraud in the presidential elections is understood outside Afghanistan. In this regard I have some data that I would like to share. During the summer and up until […]

When you tool around the blogosphere and the news sites, the discourse about Iran’s nuclear program is maddeningly contradictory. But I think a single hypothesis can account for all the known facts. These are: 1. Iran is making a drive to close the fuel cycle and to be capable of independently enriching uranium to at […]

On Saturday morning, a force of some 300 guerrillas attacked a US outpost and an Afghan police outpost in Nuristan. They killed 8 US troops and two Afghan police, but failed to overwhelm the bastions, and had to withdraw in the face of withering US air power once it arrived. Some of the fighters are […]