The illicit arms business is booming in Lebanon today, as my colleague Nicholas Blanford pointed out in a story a few days ago.
And while Hezbollah arms dealer Abu Jihad claims that he doesn’t sell weapons to the Syrian opposition, since it would be akin to arming his enemies, he does allow that many Syrians are stocking up for …
In yesterday’s address to his followers on the anniversary of the 2000 Israeli pullout from Lebanon, Hizballah chief Hassan Nasrullah was typically bombastic when it came to his views on supporting the desires of the Palestinian people to live in freedom. When it came to Syrians seeking to liberate themselves from a corrupt and …
A couple of weeks ago, the Qatari English language daily the Peninsula ran the provocative headline, “Why Are We So Timid?” in its Saturday special issue. “Freedom eludes the Qatari media even as the country’s top leadership is keen to promote free expression and has lifted all kinds of restrictions on the local press,” opined …
The death of bin Laden is an opportunity for many things. A chance to reassess how we continue the war in Afghanistan, as reported in the New York Times today.
It offers the possibility of peeling the Taliban away from from al Qaeda, in the hopes that the earstwhile leaders of Afghanistan might eventually reconcile with the current …
When U.S. President Obama called Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari to tell him the news that Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. citizens in a lightening raid not far from the Pakistani capital last night, he also instructed his team to similarly inform their Pakistani counterparts. The question is, who was surprised when they …
The battle for Libya spilled across the border on Friday as forces loyal to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi clashed with Tunisian troops after chasing rebel fighters through the mountainous border areas. They also fired shells into the Tunisian town of Dahiba, wounding one resident. The fighting erupted nearly a week after the rebel forces had …
Rival empires vie for supremacy in a central Asian nation peopled by warring tribes. Sound familiar? If the Great Game was about England and Russia duking it out in the mountain passes of Afghanistan, the second iteration could be said to have taken place in the 80’s, when the United States took on the Soviet Union through its proxies, …
When asked about the lessons of Vietnam, military historians often quipped that ‘we didn’t fight one war for ten years, we fought ten wars for one year each.’ The same could be said of Afghanistan. Troops come in, learn the lay of the land, and leave, oftentimes within the span of six to fifteen months, depending on which country …
I will be the first to admit that I was an early adopter of Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea. When it first came out I reviewed it for TIME, and named it one of the 10 best books of 2006. I gave it out as Christmas presents, and encouraged my mother to read it in her book club. By no stretch of the imagination was it a work of great …
As I was preparing to leave Tripoli, I had a conversation with an Algerian British journalist who had just been released from detention by Libyan forces for reporting in the east of the country. He was angry that he had been picked up for doing his job, but didn’t let it color his reporting on the situation. As I had been gleaning …
The town of Zawiyah has been cleansed of dissent. A rebel stronghold in the early days of the revolt against Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s forces, this oil town on the western coast of Libya was the site of a pitched street battle that culminated in a rout that saw scores of antiregime protesters killed and hundreds more injured. Fresh green …
Such is the hothouse atmosphere of the Rixos Hotel, where the Tripoli press corps remains imprisoned by the Gaddafi regime, that any new source of information, be it a shopkeeper in a bazaar who manages to slip out a disparaging word about Libya’s leader or a rumor of the man himself out in the streets, sends reporters into a frenzied …
Last Saturday, March 26th, a woman burst into the dining room of the Rixos hotel, one of the two Tripoli luxury hotels where foreign journalists are forced to stay. Libyan security guards had taken her, she said, and gang raped for two days. Within minutes of her appearance, hotel staff and the ubiquitous government minders that frequent …
