Reports of Saleem Shahzad’s horrible death made the front pages of some of the newspapers in India today. Like the other alarming news from Pakistan lately, the murder of this prominent journalist only confirms India’s longstanding criticism of the ISI as a source of treachery. Anita Joshua, writing on the front page of the Hindu today, …
Pakistan
U.S., Chinese Interests on Display in Karachi Raid
As news emerged Monday about the attack on a naval base in Karachi, it appeared that Pakistan’s ally China might also be caught up in the mayhem. Some initial reports suggested that Chinese military personnel were being held hostage. That news was later denied by the Chinese Foreign Ministry. My colleague Omar Waraich’s story …
Global Briefing: Hollow Rhetoric and Bad Ideas
Obama’s Cairo II: At 11:45am EST, President Obama will deliver his latest speech on the Mideast from the State Department. TIME and Global Spin’s Tony Karon writes that the Washington venue is important: “Obama’s Mideast ‘reset’ speech is not aimed primarily at the newly empowered Arab public; its primary audience is Washington, where the …
Al-Qaeda’s Alleged New Leader: Who Is Saif al-Adel?
Terrorism expert Peter Bergen reports on CNN International that the Egyptian Saif al-Adel has been appointed as a “caretaker” leader of al-Qaeda, following the death of its emir Osama bin Laden. A Pakistani newspaper article datelined from Rawalpindi, the bustling city near Islamabad that’s home to Pakistan’s army headquarters, …
The Saudi-Iranian Cold War: Is This the Future of the Middle East?
It’s easy to overlook the killing of a single person in violence-plagued Pakistan, not least in Karachi, a seaside metropolis ever in danger of boiling over into sectarian bloodshed. But the murder of a Saudi diplomat by unknown assailants ought to raise eyebrows. Saudi Arabia’s tangled, pervasive influence in Pakistan has been well …
Global Briefing: Crimes and Misdemeanors
L’affaire DSK: The arrest of International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn on sexual-assault charges in New York has plunged France into a bout of “soul searching” and probably removes the greatest threat to unpopular French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s rule in upcoming elections. TIME’s global business correspondent Michael …
India Makes a Move in the Afghanistan Endgame
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Afghanistan this week at a crucial time for both countries and the troubled state lying between them. India and Pakistan have been engaged in a regional power struggle for influence over Afghanistan, and events of the last two days seemed to underline their differences. A day after India …
Bin Laden’s Diary: War Plans, or Musings from the Landfill of History?
“Since the end of the last civil war, the colonel had done nothing else but wait. October was one of the few things which arrived.” At least, it arrived for the aging military commander whose life is described in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s story “Nobody Writes to the Colonel Any More”. For Osama bin Laden, this year, the Navy SEALs …
What Bin Laden’s Death Gives Us, And What It Doesn’t
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 …
Osama is Dead, But ‘Bin Ladenism’ Endures in Southeast Asia
Just over a week after U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden, pundits seem keen to tout the end of “Bin Ladenism,” too. The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks “lived long enough to see so many young Arabs repudiate his ideology,” observed the Times‘ Thomas Friedman. Although he and others are right to celebrate the ‘Arab Spring,’ it seems …
Global Briefing, May 9, 2011: Socialists, Sellouts and Star Witnesses
Lessons Learned — On Battleland, Mark Thompson mulls the most important lessons of the OBL saga; TIME editors Nancy Gibbs and Bobby Ghosh and political columnist Joe Klein discuss the implications — short-term and long — of the killing.
Open Doors —In the Hindu, Nirupama Subramanian urges India to take advantage of the …
Al-Qaeda After Bin-Laden: Can the ‘Brand’ Survive?
While most of the U.S. media this week rolled out “box set”-type compilations of the best of ten years of reporting on Osama bin-Laden, the magazine most al-Qaeda watches are waiting for is the next edition of Inspire. Dubbed by the LA Times as the “Vanity Fair of jihadi publications,” the next edition of the glossy produced by al-Qaeda …
Pakistan May Have Been Cheating on the U.S., but Don’t Expect the Marriage to End
That Pakistan has been an unreliable ally to the U.S. is hardly news: just as Osama bin Laden was hiding in plain sight in Abbottabad, so has Pakistan’s security establishment scarcely bothered to conceal the fact that it pursues an agenda quite different from that of the U.S. While that establishment has helped the U.S. roll up hundreds …