The New Republic

Omar bin Laden, the fourth son of the Al Qaeda leader, cuts a striking figure. In one photo, he stares out from beneath an Adidas baseball cap, his beard closely trimmed -- an entirely different look from his father’s seventh-century aesthetic. He wears jeans and sits next to his much older wife, a pale-faced British woman with pig tails, whom he divorced a mere five months into their marriage. While his father would not approve of his lifestyle choices, few… more

...All three Democrats [meaning presidential candidates Edwards, Obama and Clinton] have turned to the same informal network of health-care experts for ongoing counsel--people like Gruber and Hacker and the New America Foundation's Len Nichols. And all three candidates have smart people working exclusively for them. But it was Clinton who inherited the senior staff from her husband's White House, including Chris Jennings and Gene Sperling, who spent years figuring out how to navigate legislation through a hostile Congress. (Whether that… more

...Under the Healthy Americans Act, the federal government would discourage insurance companies from competing to avoid medically risky beneficiaries--the way they do now--by prohibiting insurers from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions. That's a whole lot of regulation. People with high incomes and generous health benefits would end up losing some of their existing tax breaks--which is to say, they would pay (slightly) higher taxes. Some conservatives are sure to attack that. And, of course, it would achieve universal coverage--the traditional… more

"Take off your veil!" the Somali soldier shouted at the woman in the mostly empty street. Steadying his assault rifle with his right hand, he ripped away the woman's black niqab with his left. "Why are you coming so close to us? You have explosives?" He leveled the muzzle of his gun against the bridge of her nose. Her mouth, suddenly embarrassed and exposed, broke into a jester's forced grin.

"I just want a juice," she pleaded. Except for a handful… more

Two months ago, on a rainy afternoon in Islamabad, I paid a visit to the Red Mosque. Its militant imam, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, was suddenly a force to be reckoned with in Pakistani politics, his students having recently undertaken a series of violent protests aimed at showing their contempt for the government of President Pervez Musharraf. The proximate cause of their anger was the demolition of several mosques in Islamabad that authorities said had been built without the required authorizations,… more

This January, somewhere in Logar Province, 40 miles south of Kabul, a 20-year-old goat herder named Imdadullah strapped on a bulky black waistcoat lined with packages of TNT. The packages were wrapped with newspaper printed in Urdu -- the lingua franca of Pakistan -- and tied together with a cord that led to a switch attached to a battery capable of detonating the explosives. Glued to the newspapers were nails and ball bearings.

Imdadullah was in Afghanistan at the time,… more

Osama bin Laden will turn 50 this year. But, when we picture him today, most Westerners imagine a man who, addled physically by disease and psychologically by the repeated blows the United States has dealt his cause, looks much older than his age: a gaunt figure limping from cave to cave along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, one step ahead of U.S. forces -- surrounded, perhaps, by a small group of loyalists but cut off from the rest of the world, his… more

Last year, we published a book called Off Center, in which we argued that Republicans were governing well to the right of the U.S. electorate -- and getting away with it. Americans, we wrote, remained resolutely centrist and, if anything, had moved slightly leftward in recent years. But Republicans had managed to translate their razor-thin electoral margins into a well-financed political machine that pushed policy to the right while providing Republicans with what we called "backlash insurance" -- the capacity… more

I can't even imagine Iraq anymore. It exceeds my capacity to visualize horror. In a recent interview with The Washington Post's Anthony Shadid, a woman named Fatima put it this way: "One-third of us are dying, one-third of us are fleeing, and one-third of us will be widows." At the Baghdad morgue, they distinguish Shia from Sunnis because the former are beheaded and the latter are killed with power drills. Moqtada Al Sadr has actually grown afraid of his own… more

London, England -- On New Year's Eve in 1999, Islamist militants had plenty to celebrate. At the Taliban-controlled Kandahar airport, a planeload of hostages was being swapped for terrorists held in India. The hijackers -- Kashmiri militants -- had managed to secure the freedom of three key allies. Two, Maulana Masood Azhar and Mushtaq Ahmed Zargar, were Pakistani; but the third, a man named Omar Sheikh, was the scion of a wealthy British Pakistani family and had… more