By Steve Hynd
Not Denmark, nor Switzerland in the Hindu Kush - more like Kosovo, Mosul or Columbia.
Afghanistan could look like Iraq, the Balkans or Central America if NATO succeeds in its mission there, the alliance's top commander said on Monday.
"It will be a world in which there is a central'" [...]
By Steve Hynd
On June 10, 2006 three detainees at Gitmo's Camp Delta were found hanged in their cells. The government's own autopies showed they'd been hanging there for at least two hours, in cells under suposedly constant surveilance by video cameras and guards.
By Steve Hynd
Tom Friedman, when he shucks his schtick that every brown person is just a child who needs American leadership, can actually state the bleeding obvious pretty well.
The president’s spokesman, Robert Gibbs, said flatly: “This can’t be nation-building.” And the president told a columnists’ lunch on Tuesday that [...]
By Steve Hynd
David Cameron promises a civilian surge from the Ministry of Silly Walks.
I wish British conservative leader David Cameron would make his blessed mind up. Does he want to kowtow to the neoconservative wing of his party and their Bushite buddies or [...]
By Steve Hynd
Nir Rosen lays the truth out there:
"The troubles with COIN are institutional. The American military and policy establishments are incapable of doing COIN."
It's something I've argued in the past and that Sean Naylor adds more evidence for today. Rosen says it for pretty much' [...]
By Steve Hynd
General Stan McChrystal is signalling to the Afghan leadership that Obama's 2011 "beginning of the end" is just a number they shouldn't take seriously.
The top US military commander in Afghanistan has met senior politicians there as part of a charm offensive to sell Barack Obama’s new strategy.' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Let the incremetal escalation continue!
Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he asked the president for flexibility on the number in case military commanders in the field request additional medics or troops trained to detect improvised explosive devices.
Gates told a Senate committee Thursday that he got approval for the [...]
We're very honored indeed to bring you a guest post by Mosharraf Zaidi, op-ed columnist and blogger. A version of this article appeared in The News in Pakistan, on Thursday, December 03, 2009. Regards, Steve.
When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pulled the Al-Qaeda card on Pakistanis during her visit' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Justin Elliot at TPM has done sterling work getting some figures out of the DoD on the number of private security contractors in Afghanistan.
The latest figure on DOD contractors in the country is a whopping 104,100, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command tells TPM. That number, which [...]
By Steve Hynd
Today, both US SecDef Bob Gates and UK prime minister Gordon Brown revealed that Obama's announcement of a 2011 "beginning of the end" - and Brown's earlier announcement of a 2010 date for starting a British withdrawal - were simply PR statements intended to soften public perceptions of [...]
By Steve Hynd
Whether they be pro-occupation neoliberals, anti-occupation realist conservatives, or any of the other various permutations, the overall opinion of pundits seems to be that Obama's speech stank on ice. It wasn't one of his best performances by a long chalk. He seemed at times visibly angry' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Spencer Ackerman does a great job of being an impartial journalist so he shouldn't come in for too much mocking, but he's posted his own position on the Afghanistan escalation in a way that needs to be mentioned and mocked just once. The post is titled' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Glenn Greenwald has a post on Obama and his supporters' use of exactly the same rhetoric on his Afghanistan escalation as Bush and his pro-war cheerleaders used to justify Iraq. It's impossible to excerpt so just go read it. Everything old and Dubya is new again and' [...]
By Steve Hynd
The new December issue of Pragati, the Indian national interest review, is out - and I've a short piece in it summarizing some thoughts I've been blogging about on a possible Chinese role in Afghanistan. There have been several signals from China that, should the United [...]
By Steve Hynd
Today, the UK prime minister Gordon Brown pledged 500 extra British troops for Afghanistan. But as the Spectator's Peter Hoskin notes, Brown seems to be jumping the gun on his own promises to the British people.
Brown seems to be using this announcement to tell a story' [...]
By Steve Hynd
While we're talking about Afghanistan and humanitarian considerations, how about this?
Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said he was wary of strict benchmarks that put both sides in an untenable situation if they're not met. But he said an [...]
By Steve Hynd
Ben Smith at Politico is responsible for a piece that really ticked me off today.
As President Barack Obama prepares to make the case for sending more troops to Afghanistan, some allies are urging him to return to a line of argument little heard since the Bush [...]
By Steve Hynd
It's rare for me to agree with Kathleen Parker. Even her criticism of Sarah Palin as "out of her league" didn't go far enough - Parker should have said "out of her mind". But when it comes to the GOP's new "purity test", she isn't entirely wrong.' [...]
By Steve Hynd
With any Iranian nuclear fuel swap deal seemingly DOA, the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency has swiftly passed a vote condemning Iran for not being forthcoming enough in answering charges derived from the dodgy Laptop of Death and has called upon Iraq to [...]
By Steve Hynd
We've already covered some of the news on Afghanistan readers might have missed over Thanksgiving. Now, what about its neighbour Pakistan?
Well, the big pre-Turkey story was Jeremy Scahill's expose of the involvement of a Blackwater subsiduary in gathering intelligence, drone operation and covert operations there. The U.S.' [...]
By Steve Hynd
We hope all our American readers had a good Thanksgiving. But the news keeps rolling on despite holidays, so it's time to play catch-up with foreign policy and affairs. Let's start with Afghanistan and the ongoing U.S.-led occupation there.
With Obama's speech on his new Afghanistan strategy due on [...]
By Steve Hynd
Another year, another Thanksgiving, eh? It's been quite a year, too. Last year we were all wondering if Obama's campaign rhetoric would translate into reality. This year we're just thankful he's not George W. Bush, but rather the American version of Tony Blair.
But this is to be a positive post. Among' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Our good friend Jeremy Scahill broke a truly massive story yesterday at The Nation.
At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of [...]
By Steve Hynd
McClatchy has the scoop - President Obama will announce on Dec 1 that he will order 34,000 additional troops sent to Afghanistan.
As it now stands, the plan calls for the deployment over a nine-month period beginning in March of three Army brigades from the 101st Airborne Division [...]
By Steve Hynd
The BBC reports on the property bubble in Kabul.
According to local estate agents, prices in some parts of Kabul have risen by 75% in the past year.
Part of this increase is due to the prices that international agencies are willing to pay to acquire properties in [...]
By Steve Hynd
The scariest domestic political story of the day is this one: "Matters of faith, politics on table as Palin visits Graham"
"He's followed her career and likes her strong stand on faith," said son Franklin Graham, who was present for the 2 1/2-hour get-together. "Daddy feels God was using her'" [...]
By Steve Hynd
Yesterday, my good friend Derrick Crowe posted a quote from a recent piece on just wars by the Center for American Progress. It struck me as perfectly encapsulating the pitfalls of the kind of "we didn't mean to aquire one" notion of benevolent empire Americans seem to' [...]
By Steve Hynd
David Milliband, the British Foreign Secretary, is a typical Blairite. If his lips are moving, he's spinning something - nothing gets said without it serving a domestic political purpose. Yesterday he had this to say about Afghanistan:
In an interview with the Guardian at the end of a visit [...]
By Steve Hynd
Last December I wrote: "it is already an accepted fact among the Very Serious Person set that Obama's idea of negotiation without preconditions will get exactly one shot, will fail, and then the bombs will begin to fall." Well, that looks to be the way events [...]
By Steve Hynd
Dan Froomkin asks today what I asked yesterday: what's taking so long with Obama's AfPak decision? And he comes to the same answer: fear of the Wuss Factor.
according to Paul R. Pillar, a Georgetown University professor who formerly served as the CIA's chief intelligence analyst for [...]
By Steve Hynd
Hamid Karzai has survived his inauguration for a second term as Afghanitan's president, and has spoken like a King: he has promised to end' [...]
By Steve Hynd
It's become fairly conventional wisdom that the regional winner of the Iraq war was Iran, which now has its pensioners in control of the Iraqi central government and - theoretically - all that oil. Kurds and Sunnis may have something to say about that, however, especially [...]
An Afghan policeman auditions for the role of Estragon
By Steve Hynd
Even those of us who oppose any kind of McChrystal Plan for troop escalation in Afghanistan are getting a bit antsy waiting for Godot Obama to make his mind up. I realise that its a complex set of issues [...]
By Steve Hynd
Yesterday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mullen told reporters that the Army isn't at a "tipping point" yet, even though the stress of repeated combat deployments has driven Army and Marine Corps suicides up to a record rate alongside cases of post-traumatic stress.
Today, Spencer Ackerman' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Wonderful news: our protoges have learned their lessons well and outstripped us:
Lawless Somalia and war-torn Afghanistan topped a blacklist on Tuesday of the world's most corrupt countries drawn up by the anti-graft watchdog Transparency International.
TI's annual corruption index showed how countries devastated by conflict have become overrun by [...]
By Steve Hynd
Did the U.S. and allies just put Karzai on the "dead pool" list?
The establishment of a new investigations unit with the backing of Scotland Yard's Serious Organised Crimes Agency and the FBI was announced in Kabul by senior officials flanked by the US and British ambassadors following' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Faced with cratering support for the occupation in Afghanistan, Britain's Gordon Brown is trying to thread the needle by claiming that the UK's presence there is justified while looking for the fastest possible exit strategy- preferably a strategy that shows tangible progress before next year's general election. In what' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Yesterday, the Jerusalem Post ran a short piece claiming that:
Iran has completely rejected a UN-brokered nuclear deal, but US President Barack Obama has postponed the official announcement on Teheran's refusal due to internal political reasons...The official reportedly told journalists in Paris that Iran has also refused to [...]
By Steve Hynd
There's been a substantial change in Obama administration rhetoric in the last week or two, which has only accelerated after Gen. Eikenberry put his spanner in the escalationists' works. Hillary Clinton, talking to ABC News this Sunday, gives the clearest indication yet that the administration is looking' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Support for the continuing occupation of Afghanistan is cratering in Britain, according to a new poll for the Independent on Sunday.
In a ComRes poll for the IoS this weekend, an overwhelming proportion – 71 per cent – supported this newspaper's call for a phased withdrawal of British [...]
By Steve Hynd
The Pakistani press has noticed a letter by Sir Nicholas Barrington, former British envoy to Pakistan, in the London Times:
“Massive foreign bases encourage ideas that the Americans and NATO want to stay in, and dominate, Afghanistan . Many think that the West is motivated by a [...]
By Steve Hynd
A shockingly insensitive U.S. Army has arrested a single mother and soldier who couldn't find a carer for her child while she was on deployment to Afghanistan. The Army also handed the child over to Child Protective Services and now plans to fly the soldier to Afghanistan for' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Stories like this encourage my view that diplomatic ranks tend to be drawn from over-privileged frat boys with only a tenuous hold on reality.
The interior ministry said an 'unidentified object' found recently in the vehicle of Danish embassy security advisor Chris John turned out to be a fake bomb, the [...]
By Steve Hynd
The news that Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other detainees accused of helping orchestrate the 9/11 attacks are headed to New York for federal trial has all the wingnut pantswetters beside themselves in horror. You'd think KSM was Magneto from the way they carry on.
The perfect' [...]
By Steve Hynd
According to the Financial Times:
As US President Barack Obama prepares to make a final decision on whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, his visit to Beijing next week will be an opportunity to press China to [...]
By Steve Hynd
Peter Galbraith, who was recently in the news in a good way for slamming UN complicity in Afghan election corruption, is back in the news in a bad way. Galbraith, who was a signator of the PNAC letter calling for the invasion of Iraq and a major influence [...]
By Steve Hynd
Today's must-read is by Aram Roston over at The Nation as he gets in-depth about a major part of the Taliban's funding: "the US military's contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes" in deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars to contractors and' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Spencer Ackerman has a great piece today based around a leaking staffer inside the National Security Council's deliberations on Afghnaistan strategy. The staffer noted that everyone at the NSC is annoyed with Ambassador Eikenberry for apparently leaking his own cables to Obama and confirms that the NSC' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Just as it seemed that all was hunky for the escalationists, US ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry has stuck his oar in the works. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post have the leaked story of secret cables from Eikenberry to the White House:
expressing deep [...]
By Steve Hynd
Reuters has an interesting report today from diplomats at the IAEA in Vienna:
Iran has effectively stopped expanding active uranium enrichment since September, diplomats said, while considering a big power offer to fuel a medical reactor if it turns over enriched material seen [...]
By Steve Hynd
I have to admit that, as a European - a Scotsman - in a foreign land I don't really get America's Veterans Day. Reading blogposts and tweets by American writers today, I've seen countless expressions of support for those who serve because they "defend our freedom". I managed' [...]
By Steve Hynd
I'm loathe to link uber-dork Jake Tapper but he does have the story of the day:
Senior administration officials tell ABC News that President Obama at his war council meeting tomorrow will assess four different specific strategies for Afghanistan and Pakistan, including two different options put forward by Gen. Stanley' [...]
By Steve Hynd
With British public opinion now overwhelmingly against the occupation of Afghanistan following the deaths of five UK soldiers at the hands of an Afghan policeman last week, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has taken only seven days to do his own strategic review. Unsurprisingly, he's come up [...]
By Steve Hynd
It was inevitable that Remembrance Sunday would mean a lot of British soul-searching over continued military involvement in Afghanistan. That introspection was evident in national newspapers today, including in the London Times, where foreign correspondent Christina Lamb had a long and thoughtful article about the ongoing [...]
By Steve Hynd
Sy Hersh has a must-read piece on Pakistan's nukes, examining how secure they are, in the current issue of the New Yorker. He get's a lot right, and has a lot of illuminating passages about the US/Pakistan relationship, but in the whole piece - eight pages in [...]
By Steve Hynd
In a new interview with German mag Der Spiegel out today, Obama's National Security Adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, is sounding skeptical about the McChrystal escalation request for extra troops in Afghanistan. He says, dismissively, that "generals always ask for more troops".
SPIEGEL: The Obama administration is reviewing [...]
By Steve Hynd
The Obama administration has a new so-called Afghan Compact which is designed to increase good governance in Afghanistan and reduce corruption. The main problem, though, is that any compact needs two sides agreeing to implement it.
The success of the so-called "Afghanistan Compact" will hinge on Karzai's willingness' [...]
By Steve Hynd
By now you may have heard about the shocking situation at Fort Hood, Texas, where three shooters have killed 12 and wounded 33. AP has just reported Lt. Gen Bob Cone as telling a news conference that all three killers were U.S. soldiers and that all the [...]
By Steve Hynd
We blogged about the incredible Staffordshire Hoard when it was discovered back in September. Well, now another hoard of gold jewellry has been found, this time near my old alma mater of Stirling, in Scotland - and yet again, it was an amateur metal-detector using treasure [...]
By Steve Hynd
Looks like yet another in the seemingly endless series of causus belli de jour hyped stories about Iran has just bitten the dust.
VIENNA (Reuters) - U.N. inspectors found "nothing to be worried about" in a first look at a previously secret uranium enrichment site in Iran last [...]
By Steve Hynd
Another British soldier has died for Bush and Blair's Afghan adventure - the one neither Obama nor Brown have the balls to admit they should get out of.
230 British soldiers have now died in Afghanistan. For reference, the number of British servicemen killed during the Falkland [...]
By Steve Hynd
The news that an Afghan policeman has shot British soldiers who were mentoring his unit, killing five and wounding six more, has sent shockwaves through the UK's press, public and political parties today.
British and Afghan officials said the men were killed at a police checkpoint when the policeman' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Sonali Kolhatkar is co-director of the Afghan Women's Mission and has worked closely with RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) for almost a decade. She has an op-ed at Foreign Policy In Focus that should be read by everyone concerned about an occupation without end in' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Mother Jones' David Corn, live-tweeting the White House presser as always, has just reported that Gibbs has refused to be drawn on specific anti-corruption measures the U.S. will demand of Hamid Karzai, saying only that the U.S. Embassy in Kabul was working on the matter.
The trouble with' [...]
By Steve Hynd
The Seminal at Firedoglake is asking for everyone's help in keeping Derrick Crowe, their Afghanistan Fellow, writing his excellent posts.
Derrick has been writing regularly on the war, bringing to bear facts, video testimony, statistics, political insight, and thoughtful arguments to drive home [...]
By Steve Hynd
The Afghan Independent Electoral Commission stands revealed as not at all independent, as Dave noted earlier - declaring Karzai the victor in the presidential election without a run-off. That, as I understand it, isn't technically constitutional. They themselves were saying just the other day that it was' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Robert Naiman has a good catch over at Daily Kos today. He notes that, back in November last year, David Ignatius of the Washington Post wrote that he worried whether Obama had the strength of character to negotiate with the Taliban the way John McCain would and, [...]
By Steve Hynd
Sean Naylor, staff writer of the Air Force Times, might be expected to be somewhat partisan, so I'll give him a partial pass on his latest article, channeling scary stories from McChrystal's head of intelligence, Maj. Gen. Mike Flynn. However, what Flynn himself has to say is' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Let's try a little experiment. Who do you think wrote this?
The current strategy is exactly what Al Qaeda wants—the United States distracted and pinned down by internal conflicts and trapped in a quagmire that has become the perfect rallying cry and recruitment tool for Al Qaeda. The United [...]
By Steve Hynd
Alternative post title: Spin, Spin As Fast As You Can...
Yesterday, the BBC spoke to opposition candidate Abdullah Abdullah's senior adviser Ahmed Wali Massoud about the Afghan election run-off. He confirmed other reports by not-too-anonymous Western diplomats that Abdullah was thinking about dropping out of the race [...]
By Steve Hynd
Or between paper and reality.
HuffPo's interview with NBC broadcaster Brian Williams in Kabul illustrates how the "force protection" paradigm wins out over well-meaning manuals and papers about "population-centric" COIN better than I ever could.
HP: There's all this talk of making the cities more secure. Is there any sense that [...]
By Steve Hynd
The $65 billion annual trade in Afghan opium and heroin kills up to 100,000 people every year - dwarfing U.S. troop casualties and outdoing even Afghan civilan deaths from the war there - according to a new report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime [...]
By Steve Hynd
At the start of the month, the deputy general of the China Council for National Security Policy Studies, Li Qinggong, set out his plan for an American exit route from Afghanistan in the English-language China Daily. In an article that, according to former Indian ambassador [...]
By Steve Hynd
Somethings gone wrong with comments. Although everything seems O.K. at our end there are no comments sections on any of our most recent posts. I promise, we're not trying to lock you all out from commenting! We've got a support request in to Typepad and we'll get this' [...]
By Steve Hynd
I was interested to see Gareth Porter mention Hamid Wardak, the son of Defence Minister Rahim Wardak, as allegedly running an unregistered security force with a U.S. military contract in his piece I cited earlier today. I'd come across the younger Wardak in a rather different' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Investigative journalist Gareth Porter today draws attention to the large number of private warlords doing deals with the U.S. and its allies in Afghanistan.
The revelation by the New York Times Wednesday that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, has long been on the [...]
By Steve Hynd
Reuters has some news from the IAEA HQ in Vienna that looks sorta reliable:
a Western diplomat familiar with the Iran offer said Tehran was instead proposing to enrich the material domestically under supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
..."They don't want the LEU taken out," said the' [...]
By Steve Hynd
It's got to the point where Afghanistan's Independent Electoral Commission isn't even pretending to be other than shills for a Karzai victory.
Observers and U.N. advisers attributed much of the cheating to so-called ghost polling stations that never opened but returned results or to stations that opened in areas [...]
By Steve Hynd
Via Italian news agency ADNkronos, comes an eye-opening report from the Afghan anti-corruption department:
Anti-corruption officials believe graft is eating up a staggering 75 percent of the Afghan government's revenues, a news conference heard on Wednesday. A senior official in Afghanistan's anti-corruption department, Muhammad Yasin Osmani, said most [...]
By Steve Hynd
The Center for American Progress, which has been broadly supportive of the occupation of Afghanistan - and further escalation there - until now, has a very useful page of profiles on the coterie of US-friendly warlords and narcolords who are now running that country.
The following profiles represent [...]
By Steve Hynd
This morning terrorists attacked a UN guest house in Kabul, Afghanistan, killing six. At the same time, rockets were launched at a major hotel used by Western ex-pats. The Afghan Taliban have already taken responsibility for the attacks, which they said were aimed at those aiding the [...]
By Steve Hynd
The New York Times, in what must be a measure of how sure they are of their information, rolled out the big guns today - Filkins, Mazzetti and Risen - to write the story of how Afghan president Hamid Karzai's brother has been on the CIA payroll for [...]
By Steve Hynd
According to The Guardian (h/t Gregg Carlstrom)
Iraq has started lobbying for approval to again become a nuclear player, almost 19 years after British and American war planes destroyed Saddam Hussein's last two reactors, the Guardian has learned.
The Iraqi government has approached the French nuclear industry about [...]
By Steve Hynd
Despite every member of both the Obama administration and Gordon Brown's government who has an opportunity to voice an opinion getting ready to follow Richard Holbrooke's spin that there will be less "irregularities" in the Afghan run-off election, none really believe it. It's all about creating an [...]
By Steve Hynd.
Paul McGeough is the chief correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, author of "Kill Khalid" and a veteran reporter of over 20 years experience, including more than 20 assignments in Afghanistan since 2001. Today, he published the text of his speech to a conference on the Afghanistan crisis [...]
By Steve Hynd
A Channel Four poll released today has some bad news for the ruling Labour Party and its Conservative opposition as both consider their policy platforms for a general election.
Just 6 per cent of those taking part in today's poll said that British troops were winning the war, compared' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Veteran Afghanistan journalists Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, authors of "Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story", spoke in Washington D.C. today about the current situation there. The Institute for Public Accuracy published its notes from their talk:
They said today: "Opinion here indicates that the administration is behind the'" [...]By Steve Hynd
News agencies are reporting that Iran has failed to accept the IAEA's draft deal and has instead made a counteroffer to buy the medium-enriched fuel it needs for its research reactor. Obviously, that's a non-starter for the other parties to these talks, as it would [...]
By Steve Hynd
Remember that General McChrystal's entire plan for those extra troops is to hold the line until the Afghan security forces can stand up, so that we can stand down. There's a problem with that; the Afghan police haven't recruited anyone new for a month and a half.
American' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Five more years of fighting. That's the best case scenario in Afghanistan according to Sir David Richards, head of the British Army, in a BBC interview reported via the Daily Telegraph:
“I’d say we have got five years of declining violence … and then we’ll go into a [...]
By Steve Hynd
In the midst of a military assault on the South Waziristan territory of the TTP-aligned Mehsud clan and a series of panic-inducing terrorist attacks across the country, Pakistan appears to be reaching for that old standard response to fear - hate of "the other".
I've already written about how the' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Will Iran accept the IAEA's draft deal to send the bulk of its uranium stocks abroad to be further enriched? At the moment, there's cause for a little optimism. Gregg Carlstrom notes that Iran's deputy parliament speaker has said that Iran "doesn't accept" the deal, but he' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Over the past two days, there have been contradictory statements from the White House and Pentagon on whether events in Iraq might affect the speed of American drawdown there. First, on Tuesday morning, the London Times reported that General Odierno, the commander in Iraq, was having second thoughts about the [...]
By Steve Hynd
Associated Press reports that the U.S. has conducted yet another drone attack in Pakistan, and U.S. officials believe they've killed two Al Qaeda members.
There's a bit of a snag though - the strike was inside territory claimed by anti-U.S. militant leader Hafiz Gul Bahadur's territory in North' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Various agencies are reporting that negotiators from Iran and other nations meeting at the IAEA headquarters in Vienna have agreed a draft deal which would send the bulk of Iran's current uranium stockpile out of the country. The draft has been sent to the capitals of the various' [...]
By Steve Hynd
Anyone who cared to look already knew that the Pakistani military doesn't practise anything akin to "population centric counterinsurgency". But their assault on TTP strongholds in South Waziristan seems to be taking matters to a whole new level. A level in which the phrases "collective punishment" and "ethnic'" [...]
By Steve Hynd
So, Hamid Karzai and his pet electoral commission have accepted the results of fraud investigations which dumped 1.5 million votes from the Afghan election counts and the need for a runoff election - but only after Western governments told him in no uncertain terms that if he [...]
By Steve Hynd
1.3 million Afghan ballots have been tossed as obviously fraudulent by the UN's watchdog, reducing Karzai's share of the vote to only 48.3 percent. His main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, actually increased his own share thereby, to 31.5 %.
Now, everyone is waiting to see whether Karzai's tame Afghan [...]
By Steve Hynd
One of the big debates generated by the Obama administration's deliberations over whether or not to send extra troops to Afghanistan has been the exact nature of the relationship between the various Taliban factions and Al Qaeda's leadership. Escalation advocates have argued that the relationship is strong and [...]
By Steve Hynd
It looks like the neo-whatever interventionist crowd might wait a long while for their troop escalation.
The White House has said that it will take no decision on sending more troops to Afghanistan until it determines the new government is a "true partner".
White House Chief of Staff Rahm [...]
