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Tehran, Iran -- The latest cycles of violence are part of an overall Israeli plan to keep the region unstable. It is simply another installment of the raw reality that Israel has little regard for international systems of law and order.
Tehran, Iran -- Peacekeeping is indeed the primary task of the Security Council. But that task has been neglected for such a long time that the Middle East is in urgent need of a boldly enforced peace making plan. A durable plan with foreign troops on both sides of Israel's borders is needed.
Tehran, Iran - Recent events in the Middle East seem to justify scholar Samuel Huntington's rough view of racial purity and his resistance to intercultural encounters. He must be thrilled these days. War is a by-product of intellectual bankruptcy which presumes ingrained antagonisms between cultures.
Tehran, Iran - The United States' excessive spending in the Mideast and fiscal recklessness has led to a massive debt. This worries Asian countries that supply the U.S. goods. Like Bashir says, China might escape the consequences of this shifting U.S. demand for goods, but the impact on more fragile economies in the region will be significant.
Tehran, Iran- Terrorism is usually defined as act of violence against ordinary people for political purposes. The events of August 10 in UK were indeed successful police work against criminals. It was exemplary of how a system of law enforcement and international cooperation must operate against aimless criminals that seek nothing more than a venue for a spectacular and morbid event.
Tehran, Iran- It seems that North Korea has taken its best shot with its nuclear program. It first opted out of NPT, then tested its 1960's vintage missile technology and it has now experimented with a crude nuclear device.
Tehran, Iran- Washington needs to think hard and change course. There are some signals that it's doing so, such as Vice President Cheney's "80 percent solution".
Tehran, Iran - Back in 1922, a young Winston Churchill said being in Iraq is akin to "living on an ungrateful volcano". Some 80 years later, the Bush Administration must feel the same way.
The agenda for the first U.S.-Iran meeting in Baghdad was about Iraq and a search for solutions to turn Iraq’s misfortunes around. Each party has its own interest in seeing a stable Iraq and some sort of light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.
Pakistan is not a country. It is a failed British fantasy about the fabrication of a nation-state. It has other failed and failing peers in the Middle East, all fabricated during the 20th century. It is time to seriously review all of these structures and redraw the borderlines.
Pakistan is not a country. It is a failed British fantasy about the fabrication of a nation-state. It has other failed and failing peers in the Middle East, all fabricated during the 20th century. It is time to seriously review all of these structures and redraw the borderlines.
The Question: After Benazir Bhutto's assassination on Thursday, what's next for Pakistan?
Welcome to Crossed Wires Central of opaque politics, in a Non-Proliferation Treaty non-signatory member called Pakistan, where the political process is plagued by exponential variants of extremism while players might wear uniforms, civilian western-style clothes or traditional robes as they co-exist and befriend drug lords, game the intelligence apparatus, blend in as university professors, or expediently co-exist with the newly regrouped Taliban, lawyers, facilitators for al-Qaeda, or the visiting president of Afghanistan.
A large corps of retired military chiefs can serve as the nexus or the guiding hands in the background where there are no dividing lines and where principles are rather fluid. Typical political players could be any combination of the above in a puzzling Byzantine and or Faustian combination, layered with tribal allegiances that often trump national cohesion. Thus, the vapid political process is subordinated to names, personalities and proven politics rather than a process of politics that is neither democratic nor totalitarian. Throughout its sixty-year history, all new political faces have either been the product of coups or the assassination of a tribal elder. None have climbed the ordinary process of political concurrence or the rise through the ranks of a multi-party system.
The Current Discussion: The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan. Rather than sending more troops, is it time to negotiate a truce there?
The situation in Afghanistan has several variables and unstable elements that yearn for reassessment. It is not possible to formulate a simple answer without having to completely rethink of the most obvious variables.
It is time to reassess the present state and structure of the Taliban as they are likely to have revamped their structure. They started as a group of extremists with intolerant and violent practice of Sunni Wahhabism, which eventually served as a cover for criminal deeds. The Taliban, originally grouped in northern Pakistan, mostly recruited from southern Afghan Pashtun tribes. They eventually took over Afghanistan in 1990s in a civil war against tribes from the north and the Mujahideen that fought the soviet occupiers. Over the course of the civil war, Afghanistan transformed from a poor and shambolic country into a ruin and a failed state that eventually hosted al-Qaeda—a loose affiliation of Arab Sunni extremists and a criminal enterprise that aimed to change the Saudi regime. So the answer to the first question, some seven years later, is whether the Taliban are set in their religious cult or if they are now purely a pack of criminal opportunists.
The Current Discussion: A U.S. military tribunal court has convicted Osama bin Laden's driver Salim Hamdan of providing material support for terrorism after detaining him for nearly seven years. Is this a step forward or a step back in the war or terror?
This is hardly an event or a milestone in a murky process. There is not enough verifiable information available to make a fair assessment of events, personalities and circumstances. Perhaps Mr. Hamdan is guilty; it’s also possible that he was just a clueless grunt and a daily wage earner, in his daily job of moving a madman from one cave to another mud hut village. The concepts of terrorism, civilisation clash, or freedom fries might have been as relevant to him as nanophysics, writing computer programs or Chinese poetry! Who knows?
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