Raul R. Pillar is probably right with his theory , that terrorists (foremost al-Qaeda) do not necessarily need Afghanistan as a safe haven to attack the US in future and that the presence of US troops in the area should not be justified with just this target – to eradicate such breeding places.
Experts on AfPak sprout out of the ground like mushrooms – everyone gets his go at what it’s all really about and what should have been done in the first place or what the future will definitely look like. While one would expect, that having so many smart people around who all know so much about this place that noone really seems to understand, the picture would become more clear, the floods of opinions and predictions on the topic just make the situation worse.
Two new Pakistani Nationals and NADRA a mess: Hussein here and Malek here.
“People in the West think we live on some barren land and ride camels. We never traveled on camels. We had horses. Our history is not properly represented.”
A young lady designer, apparently Feeha Noor Jamshed, has announced that we never traveled on camels. This we included all her designer friends, and staff of family-owned brand [...]
US authorities have confirmed that Joseph Andrew Stack who crashed a plane in government office in Austin, TX is not a terrorist. Austin’s Chief of Police, Art Acevedo, stated,
“I consider this a criminal attack by a lone individual.”
They testified this after proclaiming that it was indeed a suicide attack. Indeed, an ‘interesting’ definition. A man hits [...]
Report from a pashtun teen.
Some truely interesting material circles around a recent research paper published in Nature that got some criticism around – maths and conflict. I am fascinated by it since these are tools we commonly use in our field (especially for Hydrology) and I really wouldn’t have thought about applying it in conflict studies. So basically I have no clue about joining these two topics and am myself just about to dive into the topic.
I just returned from the cinema watching Boz Salkyn, a Kyrgyz movie – a simple story about bride-kidnapping, love and the Kyrgyz people. It has some Heer Ranja aspects. It’s emotional, completely a-political without the aim to critizice society, the state or question religion
I was reading today’s DieZeit articles on Afghanistan, in particular the current discussions in Germany going on over the air strike on petrol trucks in Kunduz and wondering how here in Central Europe the war in Afghanistan is primarily a war over our morale. As McChrystal has suggested we are leading a completely people-centred COIN [...]
Qalandar Bux Memon has recently published an article commenting on Hillary Clinton’s visit and her statements in Pakistan. Read it here at the Samosa, but it was also published in DAWN and referred to by Yasir here. I recieved emails from Pakistani Leftist Political Activists who praised the article and I guess it was cheered [...]