Blogging the democratic revolution
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld arrived in Afghanistan yesterday. He met with President Karzai and discussed issues relating to Afghanistan????????s collaborative efforts with the international community to suppress the Taliban resurgence and the country’s efforts to curb the cultivation of opium poppy. Also, he met with US military commanders and NATO officials to discuss plans for…
Here’s a news item that I found particularly interesting. The first women ever to be accepted into training for front-line combat positions have just graduated from their training and become full-fledged pilots in the Pakistan Air Force. PAKISTAN welcomed its first female pilots into the country’s air force yesterday, breaking into the all-male front-line bastion…
Iran is dangerously close to producing a nuclear weapon and igniting a region-wide arms race. It could be within a couple of months or a couple of years. Nobody knows exactly how much time is left, but the day that Iran goes nuclear is one that many hope will never come. The thought of a…
Protests in the Middle East are rarely both large and spontaneous at the same time, although often it will appear that way. The same holds for the printing of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohemmed in a Danish newspaper, in which it appeared that many of the Muslim protestors took the same streets, bought and burned…
After more than a half century of war and the threat of nuclear disaster, in which tens of thousands of civilians have been killed by military personnel and terrorist groups, peace between India and Pakistan may closer than ever. Ever since the threat of a new war in 2002 sparked international fears of nuclear annihilation…
I have just published the last in a three-part series the global implications of the attacks in London of July 7, 2005. This last post, After London – The Infrastructure of Terrorism in Pakistan, is the one most relevant to democracy issues because it deals with both the socio-political and the military networks of militant…
After the bombings in London, President Musharraf promised to wage a “holy war against extremism,” as many terrorists are coming from his country. Madrasahs are basically religious schools in the Islamic world, and some of them implant militant Islamic ideology into their students. So the plan is to oversee what they’re doing and keep track…
Asif Ali Zardari was taken to his home by police immediately upon landing in Pakistan. Reposrts are alternatively saying that he has been detained or merely deposited at his home: Hundreds of PPP activists clashed with security forces at the Lahore airport in an attempt to meet their leader. The airport was sealed off after…