Juan Cole

Update: Taliban in Kunduz in Afghanistan’s north attempted to assassinate warlord Muhammad Qasim Fahim on Sunday, but failed. One of his bodyguards was wounded in the attack. There are few Taliban in the north, but there are some Pashtuns in Kunduz and some of them have been radicalized. The violence underscores how perilous the security […]

Aljazeera English reports on the Kurdistan elections: For the first time in recent memory, the two major Kurdish parties (which are in a sense clans and clan allies) are facing significant opposition, as from the Goran or Change Party. Critics of the joint government of Kurdistan President Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party and (Iraqi President) […]

This issue of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s appointment of Esfandiyar Rahim-Masha’i as his first vice president came to a head on Friday. Rahim-Masha’i, the father of Ahmadinejad’s daughter-in-law, had offended the hard liners last year by saying Iranians are friends of the Israeli people (as opposed to the ‘Zionist regime.’) Ahmadinejad was presumably, by his appointment […]

I have been saying for some time that the US military presence in Iraq is highly unlikely to completely end at the close of 2011. I think the important thing is that the combat troops will be out and that the tiny number who remain will mainly be trainers of Iraqi troops; there will likely […]

What did Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki want from his visit to New York City and Washington, DC? Al-Zaman [The Times of Baghdad] makes some suggestions in this regard. First, he wants the United Nations Security Council to remove Iraq altogether from Chapter 7 status under the UN Charter. After the Gulf War, the UNSC put […]

The US military has, understandably and correctly, condemned the coerced video of a US soldier taken hostage by Taliban in Afghanistan. But I fear that the argument that the public humiliation of prisoners is against international law won’t take the US very far after 8 years of Bush-Cheney. After the evidence surfaced that the US […]

There are reports that hundreds or even thousands of protesters hit the streets late Tuesday in Tehran. There are reports of violent clashes with security forces, and many arrests are said to have been made, including of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi’s brother-in-law. Still, Mousavi remains defiant. WaPo quotes him saying, “”You are facing something […]

The problems facing the Obama administration in closing Guantanamo Bay appear mainly to center on finding a place for the prisoners to go. Very few of them are ever going to be tried. There is a handful of the truly murderous among them– the big al-Qaeda leaders caught mainly by Pakistan security forces, and those […]

Borzou Daragahi of the LAT explains that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei warned Monday that the opposition must cease its campaign of civil disobedience. AP argues that the struggle in Iran has moved to a new stage, and is no longer just about street protests. It is a now a struggle for power within the country’s […]