The National (UAE)

In August of this year I flew in to Kabul, a bustling city undergoing a construction boom, with shopping malls, new banks, restaurants and traffic jams, where I stayed in a hotel catering to weary journalists and aid workers. I arranged to meet two Taliban commanders who agreed to take me to their province, Ghazni – about 100 miles south of the capital. They picked me up one day from a posh Kabul neighbourhood in an innocuous-looking car and we headed south. We drove past barren… more

“My greatest fear about Emanuel is that he might perpetuate a ‘false choice’ orientation towards Israel in Middle East affairs that he’s going to have to compensate for and get under control,” said Steven Clemons, the founder of the Washington Note website and the director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. “There are no rational alternatives in the Middle East than actually delivering on a Palestinian state and finally putting the Middle East peace business… more

“Both Muslims and Arab-Americans have been ill-treated in this political environment,” noted Steve Clemons, a veteran observer of American politics and popular blogger who is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington think-tank. “There has been some tacit acceptance of that, even by people around Barack Obama,” he added. LINK

Sadly, the trajectory of Saudi Arabia in the 1980s and the 1990s suggests that Saudi Arabia indeed altered its course to accommodate its most conservative elements. As the leading Saudi experts Afshin Molavi and Jean-Francois Seznec wrote, the terms of the bargain were too favourable to those who opposed genuine modernisation: “While the king and the civil service would still control the hardware – defence, finance, oil, and foreign policy – he essentially handed over the software – the education system and the courts – to conservative forces.”… more

In Foreign Policy magazine, Ken Ballen and Peter Bergen said: "When a federal judge ordered the release of 17 Guantanamo Bay detainees earlier this month, it was the first real chance in the seven-year history of the prison camp that any of the prisoners might be transferred to the United States. In making his ruling, the judge categorically rejected the Bush administration's claim that any of the released prisoners, who are all Chinese Muslims, were 'enemy combatants' or posed a… more

On May 12, a few days after street fighting erupted in Beirut, I drove to Majd al Anjar, a Sunni stronghold in Lebanon’s Bekaa, close to the Syrian border, where gunmen were still blocking the motorway from Beirut to Damascus. At the edge of town, several hundred men with automatic rifles, rocket propelled grenade launchers, pistols and hand grenades stood before earthen barriers and fires. Some wore masks. There was nobody in command – this was a mob, not a militia. The men… more

Besides the obvious propaganda, the local news broadcasts extensive reports from the Palestinian territories and Israel, with exceptionally graphic images from Gaza of mutilated bodies and weeping families after raids by Israel. “Iran spends a lot of money and attention on its propaganda machine,” said Afshin Molavi, a political analyst on Iran at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC. Mr Molavi said the anti-Israeli and anti-US propaganda is actually aimed at winning over the Arab and Muslim world.

“Iran broadcasts news about Arabs, uses Arabic-speaking… more

If the 20th century really began with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in August 1914, which set in motion the start of a series of intrastate wars so brutal they killed tens of millions, then surely the beginning of this century was announced by the attacks of September 11, the harbinger of a new kind of war waged with spectacular acts of terrorism by non-state groups that seem likely to be a defining feature of the century to come.

On the beautiful morning of September 11, 2001… more

...In the Financial Times, Anatol Lieven argued that the British government was in a position to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran. "All that it needs to do is make clear to the US administration, initially in private but in public if necessary, that the consequence of an attack would be complete British military withdrawal, not only from Iraq but from Afghanistan as well. "Israel must have US acquiescence to launch an attack since by far the easiest route for one lies… more

The US government is pressing the new Pakistani civilian administration to back off efforts to remove Pervez Musharraf from the presidency.

But if the United States truly wanted to shore up democracy and help fight terrorism inside Pakistan, it would pursue the exactly opposite policy: the United States should publicly back the immediate removal of Mr Musharraf. A new public opinion survey shows why.

More than the ailing economy, the survey, conducted by Terror Free Tomorrow in collaboration with the… more