In January of this year, in the same Pakistani town of Abbottabad where Osama bin Laden met his demise, a senior Indonesian militant named Umar Patek was arrested. One of the leaders of the al-Qaeda-linked Southeast Asian terror group Jemaah Islamiah (JI), Patek is believed to have helped coordinate the 2002 bombings on the Indonesian …
Af-Pak
When Bad Guys Die, What Happens to the Bodies
Among the ironies surrounding the discovery and death of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan is the location of his final resting place: according to reports, the arch-terrorist who we’ve imagined for years skulking in caves and stalking the arid, rugged badlands of the Af-Pak border is now sleeping with the fishes of the Arabian …
Abbottabad: The Beautiful Place Where Bin Laden Died
The idyllic, verdant town where Osama bin Laden had been in hiding — and where the terrorist-in-chief met his end yesterday — is now under a particularly glaring spotlight. As we now know, bin Laden took sanctuary in a compound here, lying amid an affluent community which includes numerous prominent retired Pakistani army staff. The …
What Ghost Will Emerge from Bin Laden’s Watery Grave?
While the U.S. indulges in its fit of euphoria over the killing Osama Bin Laden, attention is rightly falling on how the death of the world’s most wanted terrorist will play out in countries where he once enjoyed a modicum of sympathy, if not outright support. His alleged “burial” at sea seems a rather desperate, blatant attempt to …
Bin Laden’s Death: What This Means for Pakistan’s ISI
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 …
Why Bin Laden’s Death No Longer Really Matters
Before leaving for a vacation in South Africa in December of 2001, my editor asked me to prepare an obituary for Osama bin Laden for TIME.com on the assumption that he might well be killed in Afghanistan while I was on the beach in Cape Town. Almost ten years later there was finally a reason to call up the old file: President Barack …
Great Game 3.0?
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, …
Ambassador Loses Fighter-Jet Bid, Takes Marbles, Goes Home
Some big news from New Delhi today on one of the world’s biggest outstanding defense orders: the $10 billion contract to supply 126 fighter jets to the Indian Air Force. After the news broke that both U.S. bids were out of the running, the U.S. Ambassador to India, Timothy Roemer, resigned.
This morning’s newspapers revealed that the …
Why Americans Care More Than Brits Do About the Royal Wedding
A quick glance at the news from the real world and it’s not hard to see why the media-consuming public of the United States appears willing to lose itself in the fantastic miasma created by saturation coverage of the Disney-for-adults spectacle of a British royal wedding.
There’s nothing new about the decline of the erstwhile empire …
An Ally in Gitmo: the Story of Sufian bin Qumu
On Battleland, Mark Thompson rightly says that the leaked tranche of documents detailing interrogations with detainees in Guantanamo Bay contains “no bombshells.” We’ve known for a while that methods of interrogation deployed there were suspect, if not in violation of international conventions, and that dozens of inmates were seized and …
After Petraeus: Why Starting Over Isn’t a Good Thing in Afghanistan
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 …
Does Pakistan Really Want a Stable Afghanistan?
In recent weeks, ties between Islamabad and Washington have grown more strained than a cup of sickly sweet South Asian chai. A prolonged kerfuffle over Raymond Davis, the American CIA agent who gunned down two Pakistani men allegedly pursuing him in Lahore, sparked protests across the country and triggered a diplomatic crisis that, while …
Why Three Cups of Tea are Not Enough
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 …