Juan Cole

The UN-sponsored Electoral Complaints Commission in Afghanistan has determined that after fraudulent ballots are thrown out, incumbent Hamid Karzai received less than 50% of the vote, forcing him into a runoff with challenger Abdullah Abdullah. Karzai is now expected to accept on Tuesday that he must face a second round of elections, though over the […]

Islamabad’s campaign against the Pakistani Taliban in South Waziristan is largely irrelevant to the struggles of the US and NATO in Afghanistan across the Durand Line, according to Afghanistan News Net. The relevant groups are the Old Taliban led by Mullah Omar, based in Quetta; the Haqqani Network of Siraj and Jalaluddin Haqqani, based in […]

Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps personnel who traveled to the town of Sarbaz, district Pishin in the southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchistan fell victim Sunday morning to two bombing attacks carried out by the dissident Baluchi group Jundullah. Altogether the death toll in the attacks is about 29 as I write and it is expected […]

Dawn reports that about 30,000 Pakistani troops on Saturday moved into South Waziristan, a stronghold of the Mahsud tribe, whence have sprung important leaders of the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan or Pakistani Taliban Movement. One such leader, Baitullah Mahsud, was killed by a US drone strike this past August. The fighting continued for a second day […]

A Taliban roadside bomb attack killed 4 US soldiers in the south of the country, it was announced Friday. Gareth Porter reports on an alternative to Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s proposal for an additional 40,000 US troops in Afghanistan. Lt. Col. Daniel L Davis, who has experience in Iraq and Afghanistan and canvassed other officers with […]

Four pieces of news from what Washington now calls AfPak raised questions about the stability of Central and South Asia on Thursday and Friday morning. Given the energy resources in Central Asia and the emergence of India as a regional superpower, the destabilization of this region and continued American military involvement with it has momentous […]

Mortars were fired in Baghdad, killing 7, and three bombs went off in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, killing 4 and wounding 48. The bombings were near to holy Shiite shrines, which is extremely dangerous. The bombing of the golden dome at Samarra in February of 2006 set off a vicious Sunni-Shiite civil war […]

McClatchy reports that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met a rebuff in Moscow on Tuesday from Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the issue of further United Nations sanctions on Iran. Lavrov said of Iran, “We are convinced that threats, sanctions, or threats to use pressure are counterproductive in the present situation.” This language closely echoes […]

Scientific American summarizes two new studies giving evidence that the earth’s climate is highly sensitive to the amount of carbon dioxide in it. One is a a Science article by Aradhna K. Tripati, Christopher D. Roberts, and Robert A. Eagle. David Biello writes: ‘ “Modern-day levels of carbon dioxide were last reached about 15 million […]