The New Republic Online

In the current issue, I write about Afghanistan’s shaky future as the country tries to overcome years of violence and a devastating dependence on opium trade. The books and testimony below help to illustrate a place whose history is fraught with tragedy -- but where a cautious hope for a better life is beginning to take hold.

Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (Penguin, 2006).As the Taliban fell in late 2001, Sarah Chayes was… more

For all the bluster about the United States’ democratization policy, military action remains America’s principal weapon for confronting Islamist extremism. In many parts of the world, U.S. forces have teamed with the security and intelligence services of Muslim states to "take the fight to the enemy" and root out common foes. Muslim regimes from North Africa to Asia had been feeling the heat well before September 11 from Islamist groups that had labeled them apostate. Afterwards, joining America’s "coalition of… more

"The billion-dollar election." Get used to that phrase, because you’ll be hearing it a lot over the next year and a half. That’s the total that all candidates for the presidency are expected to spend on their campaigns between now and 2008. It’s a staggering figure that critics will surely cite as evidence that money has thoroughly corrupted politics. Newt Gingrich shocked the bluenoses back in 1996, when he said that there was too little money in politics, not too… more

In 2004, John Edwards was just another Democratic presidential candidate offering just another incremental plan to help make health insurance more affordable. It was a perfectly laudable plan -- one that would have made life better for millions of Americans struggling with the cost of medical care. And for that, surely, he deserved plenty of credit. Still, it wasn't as ambitious a scheme as the ones several of his rivals had put forth. Indeed, it would still have left some… more

Their arrest last month hit front pages around the world. Married for only three years and with an eight-month-old baby, they are now in British police custody, suspected of plotting to bring down several U.S. passenger jets over the Atlantic -- a plan that, had it succeeded, could have killed thousands. Ahmed Abdullah Ali, 25, is charged with conspiracy to murder. Historically, Islamist jihadis have kept spouses, siblings, and relatives in the dark, but not in this case: Abdullah’s wife,… more