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America's 'detainee 001' – the persecution of John Walker Lindh

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Frank Lindh - Jul. 10 (Opinion) - In 1998, aged 17, my son John Walker Lindh travelled to Yemen to study Islam and learn Arabic. In April 2001 he went to Afghanistan. Then 9/11 happened. He was captured by US troops, tortured, and jailed for 20 years, an innocent victim of America's 'war on terror' John Phillip Walker Lindh, my son, was raised a Roman Catholic, but converted to Islam when he was 16 years old. He has an older brother and a younger sister. John is scholarly and devout, devoted to his family, and blessed with a powerful intellect, a curious mind, and a wry sense of humour. Labelled by the American government as "Detainee 001" in the "war on terror", John occupies a prison cell in Terre Haute, Indiana. He has been a prisoner of the American government since 1 December 2001, less than three months after the terror attacks of 9/11. John is entirely innocent of any involvement in the terror attacks, or any allegiance to terrorism. That is not disputed by the American government. Indeed, all accusations of ...

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The Two Faces of Pakistan

Thu, 05 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

National Journal - By Michael Hirsh - May. 05 (Opinion) - “We are with you unstintingly.” Those were the words that then-Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said to the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Wendy Chamberlin, just after 9/11. Musharraf’s promise proved to be largely a lie—but not entirely untrue. Ever since then, whether the Pakistani regime was autocratic or democratic, Islamabad has played a well-thought-out double game with the United States that's involved handing over some jihadis and protecting others for Pakistan’s own purposes.

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Pakistan did its part

Tue, 03 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Asif Ali Zardari - May. 03 (Opinion) - Together, our nations have suffered and sacrificed. We have fought bravely and with passion and commitment. Ultimately we will prevail. For, in the words of my martyred wife Benazir Bhutto, “truth, justice and the forces of history are on our side.”

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After Osama Bin Laden ...

Mon, 02 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Nicholas Kristof - May. 02 (Opinion) - President Obama has just announced that the United States killed Osama bin Laden today in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and recovered his body. It has been nine years and seven months since Osama orchestrated 9/11, but an American team finally killed him. His body is in American hands. This is revenge, but it’s also deterrence and also means that bin Laden won’t kill any more Americans. This is the single most important success the United States has had in its war against Al Qaeda. So what does this mean? First, it is good for the United States reputation, power and influence that we finally got bin Laden. Bin Laden’s ability to escape from the U.S., and his apparent impunity, fed an image in some Islamist quarters of America as a paper tiger — and that encouraged extremists. Bin Laden himself once said that people bet on the strong horse, the horse that will win, and the killing underscores that it’s the United States that is the horse to bet on. Moreover, this sends a message that you mess with America at your peril, and that there will be consequences for a terror attack on the United States. That said, killing bin Laden does not end Al Qaeda. Ayman al-Zawahri, the Egyptian No. 2, has long played a crucial role as Al Qaeda’s COO. And Al Qaeda is more of a loose network than a tightly structured organization, and that has become even more true in recent years. AQIM, the version of Al Qaeda in North Africa, is a real threat in countries like Mali and Mauritania, and killing bin Laden will probably have negligible consequences there. The AQIM terrorists may admire Osama and be inspired by him, but they also are believed to be largely independent of him. And Anwar al-Awlaki, the Qaeda-linked terrorist in Yemen, likewise won’t be deterred by bin Laden’s killing — Awlaki’s ability to engage in terrorism will be affected more by the upheavals now taking place in Yemen and whether that country has a strong and legitimate government that takes counter-terrorism seriously. It’s also true that bin Laden’s killing might have mattered more in 2002 or 2003. At that time in countries like Pakistan, many ordinary people had a very high regard for bin Laden and doubted that he was centrally involved in the 9/11 attacks. Over time that view has changed: popular opinion has moved more against him, and you no longer see Osama t-shirts for sale in the markets. Some people still feel a bit of respect for his ability to outwit the United States, or they are so anti-American that they embrace anybody we don’t like, but bin Laden has been marginalized over time. Osama’s declining image also means that he won’t be a martyr in many circles (although if Americans appear too celebratory and triumphant, dancing on his grave, that may create a sympathetic backlash for Osama). Many ordinary Pakistanis, Yemenis and Afghans will simply shrug and move on. His death won’t inspire people, the way it might have in 2002. And Al Qaeda is already going through a difficult time because it has been sidelined by the Arab Spring protests; on top of that, losing its top leader will be a major blow. It will be fascinating to see what the Pakistani reaction is to a U.S. military operation on their soil. It seemed to me that President Obama was going out of his way to sound deferential to Pakistan — and to emphasize that Osama was an enemy of Pakistan as well as of America — precisely because he was concerned that Pakistanis might react with outrage at an American military operation.

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U.S.-Taliban Talks

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 11:50:57 -0800

New Yorker - By Steve Coll - Feb. 19 (Comment) - It is past time for the United States to shift some of its capacity for risk-taking in the war off the battlefield and into diplomacy aimed at reinforcing Afghan political unity, neutrality, civil rights, and social cohesion. The recent talks are nevertheless a constructive step. For too long, American political strategy in Afghanistan has been subordinate to military and intelligence operations. Thinking and learning through principled discussions with an enemy is an opportunity, not a trap.

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Why fear the Arab revolutionary spirit?

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Slavoj Žižek - Feb. 01 (Opinion) - The western liberal reaction to the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia frequently shows hypocrisy and cynicism.

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US embassy cables: The job of the media is not to protect power from embarrassment

Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Simon Jenkins - Nov. 29 (Opinion) - It is for governments – not journalists – to guard public secrets, and there is no national jeopardy in WikiLeaks' revelations Is it justified? Should a newspaper disclose virtually all a nation's secret diplomatic communication, illegally downloaded by one of its citizens? The reporting in tomorrow's Guardian of the first of a selection of 250,000 US state department cables marks a recasting of modern diplomacy. Clearly, there is no longer such a thing as a safe electronic archive, whatever computing's snake-oil salesmen claim. No organisation can treat digitised communication as confidential. An electronic secret is a contradiction in terms. Anything said or done in the name of a democracy is, prima facie, of public interest. When that democracy purports to be "world policeman" – an assumption that runs ghostlike through these cables – that interest is global.

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C.K. Chivers' The Gun explains how the AK-47 changed the world.

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 11:09:00 -0700

Slate - By Nicholas Schmidle - Nov. 01 - In late 1945, Sergeant Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov entered an office contest more pressing than even the most rabid of Fantasy Footballers could fathom. Joseph Stalin wanted a new gun, and the Soviet leader tasked his army with selecting the best

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Pakistan's Pashtuns Feel More Alone Than Ever

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Radio Free Europe - By Shaheen Buneri - Oct. 25 (Opinion) - Pashtuns straddling the Pakistani-Afghan border face serious challenges to their survival, and it's very hard for them to know whether the world recognizes their numerous sacrifices in the ongoing war, or whether all of them have simply been dismissed by the outside world as Taliban supporters and sympathizers.

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America’s Worst Politician

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By George F. Will - Oct. 24 (Opinion) - Americans of all political persuasions can come together in affirming one proposition: Public life would be improved by scrubbing Rep. Alan Grayson from it. This act of civic hygiene probably will be performed Nov. 2 by voters of Florida’s Eighth Congressional District.

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CIA admits 'missteps' in handling double agent in Afghanistan

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Christian Science Monitor - Oct. 20 - The Chapman military base incident, where a double agent killed seven CIA agents, calls into question the wisdom of turning the Afghan conflict over to the CIA. ...

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Petraeus rewrites the playbook in Afghanistan

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By David Ignatius - Oct. 19 (Opinion) - Gen. David Petraeus appears to be making a strategic pivot in Afghanistan, supplementing his primary mission as military commander with the "warrior-statesman" role he had in Iraq, where he was able to fuse the political and military elements of the campaign.

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The invisible casualties of Afghanistan | Clancy Sigal

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 13:09:30 -0700

The Guardian - Sep. 15 (Opinion) - The IRA tried to murder me on three separate occasions.Nothing personal, just that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Provos' deadly "mainland campaign" against Brits took the form of planting IEDs, improvised homemade bombs, in central

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Why Doesn't the World Care About Pakistanis?

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Foreign Policy - By Mosharraf Zaidi - Aug. 23 (Comment) - The United Nations has characterized the destruction caused by the floods in Pakistan as greater than the damage from the 2004 Asian tsunami, the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake combined. Yet nearly three weeks since the floods began, aid is trickling in slowly and reluctantly to the United Nations, NGOs, and the Pakistani government.

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Undoing WikiLeaks's damage

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Marc A. Thiessen - Aug. 09 (Opinion) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has made clear that his objective in releasing tens of thousands of classified documents was to "end the war in Afghanistan" and "oppose an unjust [war] plan before it reaches implementation." He may well achieve his goal. Assange's illegal disclosures are helping the Taliban to undermine Gen. David Petraeus's counterinsurgency strategy before it has a chance to work.

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Afghan officials talking to Taliban

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 06:36:07 -0700

Aljazeera - Aug. 08 - A senior adviser to the Afghan president has told Al Jazeera that the government has begun talking to some Taliban leaders and a number have left the insurgency. "I see it [the reintegration] as a good, positive, momentum," Masoon Stanekzai, a senior

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'Data journalism' scores a massive hit with Wikileaks revelations - The Guardian

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - Jul. 26 (Opinion) - 'Data journalism' scores a massive hit with Wikileaks revelations The Guardian The Wikileaks revelations about the conduct of the war in Afghanistan have been rightly hailed as a triumph of "data journalism." There was, of course, a source of sorts, because someone leaked the 92000 classified military documents. ... Thousands of 'Secret' Afghan War Files Released on Internet Voice of America Wikileaks founder defends release of Afghan war files National Post Pakistani spy agency denounces US intel docs Washington Post Aljazeera.net BusinessWeek Financial Times all 2,010 news ...

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Time to Get Out of Afghanistan

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Richard N. Haass - Jul. 18 (Opinion) - After nearly nine years of war, however, continued or increased U.S. involvement in Afghanistan isn’t likely to yield lasting improvements that would be commensurate in any way with the investment of American blood and treasure. It is time to scale down our ambitions there and both reduce and redirect what we do.

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What would reconciliation look like for the U.S. and Taliban?

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By David Ignatius - Jun. 29 (Opinion) - Even as the United States and the Taliban continue to pound each other on the battlefield, the two adversaries appear to be conducting parallel internal debates about what an eventual political reconciliation might involve.

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Topic A

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Danielle Pletka, Kurt Volker, Gilles Dorronsoro, Erin M. Simpson, Zalmay Khalilzad, Tod Lindberg, Anthony H. Cordesman - Jun. 27 (Opinion) - The Post asked foreign policy experts what, if any, effects last week's change in command would have. Below, responses from Danielle Pletka, Kurt Volker, Gilles Dorronsoro, Erin M. Simpson, Zalmay Khalilzad, Tod Lindberg and Anthony H. Cordesman.

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Afghans believe US is funding Taliban | Daniella Peled

Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Daniella Peled - May. 25 (Opinion) - It's near-impossible to find anyone in Afghanistan who doesn't believe the US are funding the Taliban: and it's the highly educated Afghan professionals, those employed by ISAF, USAID, international media organisations – and even advising US diplomats – who seem the most convinced.

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Killer fungus is no mystery to Afghan poppy growers

Mon, 17 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Nushin Arbabzadah - May. 17 (Opinion) - Afghanistan's opium producers believe they are victims of a biological attack by the United States...

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Climate link to lizard extinction

Fri, 14 May 2010 09:22:52 -0700

BBC News - May. 14 - Page last updated at 9:22 GMT, Friday, 14 May 2010 10:22 UK Science reporter, BBC News Lizards are more vulnerable to climate change than previously thought Climate change could wipe out 20% of the world's

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The consensus about drones

Tue, 11 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The News International (PK) - By Mosharraf Zaidi - May. 11 (Opinion) - In the drone debate, people are being motivated by factors that do not relate to reason. A lot of the debate is being driven by emotions, and by ideology. That is why supporters of drone attacks within Pakistan will cite facts as selectively as opponents of drone attacks. When the facts are accumulated, it is rather easy to draw some big picture conclusions that might even resemble a consensus. If you are motivated by emotions however, those conclusions won’t change how you feel. What are those conclusions? Essentially, there are three. The first is that drones are not popular. The second is that innocent civilian deaths are real. The third is that drone attacks have been the most effective instrument in beheading the organizations capacities of Al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Pakistan’s FATA. Beyond these three simple facts, there are nuances, and there are variations in degrees. There are differences in definitions, and there are differences in approach. But nobody in any credible position can dispute these three facts. Drone attacks are not popular, drone attacks kill innocent people and drone attacks have compromised Al-Qaeda and its affilaites’ ability to operate.

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Revenger's tragedy: The forgotten conflict in Pakistan

Mon, 10 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Independent - By Patrick Cockburn - May. 10 (Opinion) - Reuters India (blog)Revenger's tragedy: The forgotten conflict in PakistanIndependentThe arrest of Faisal Shahzad for planting the Times Square car bomb has forced America to confront the bloody conflict in Pakistan that inspired his actions ...U.S. drone missiles kill at least six in PakistanReutersUS Drones Kill at Least 10 in PakistanVoice of AmericaIntel officials: US missiles kill 10 in PakistanThe Associated PressBBC News?-Daily News & Analysis?-Reuters India (blog)all 378 news articles??

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