“Of course it explains why the royal couple postponed their honeymoon to Abbottabad,” joked Jimmy Kimmel, one of the first U.S. television hosts to start mining Osama Bin Laden’s death for comedy. The funniest thing about Kimmel’s quip was that it appeared to contain a grain of truth. The announcement, the day after the wedding of the …
Pakistan
China Welcomes bin Laden’s Death, but Concerns About U.S. Focus Emerge
The online reactions in China to the death of Osama bin Laden have been diverse, with some celebrating the death of the terrorist, while a few mourned the passing of someone who challenged the global dominance of the U.S. Officially the Chinese government welcomed news that an American military team took out the Qaeda leader in Pakistan …
Avenging Bin Laden’s Killing: Terrorists Will Need Time
As yesterday’s story following Osama Bin Laden’s death indicated, security officials in Europe don’t foresee the demise of the al Qaeda leader sparking an immediate flurry of retaliation terror strikes by his followers. The logic behind that thinking doesn’t under-estimate the desire for revenge jihadists everywhere are doubtless …
Why Pakistan is Bin Laden’s Lone Success Story
Which world leader has the biggest headache caused by the death of Osama bin-Laden? That would have to be General Ashfaq Kayani, commander of Pakistan’s military and, as such, the most powerful man in the country where al-Qaeda’s fugitive leader had been hiding in plain sight.
Kayani now faces an escalation of the already crisis-level …
Could Bin Laden’s Death Speed The End To The Afghan War?
As accumulating press reports confirm, intelligence agencies, security officials, and independent experts around the globe agree the death of Osama Bin Laden in no way lowers the curtain on his al Qaeda organization, nor extinguishes the myriad radical groups and individuals sharing its ideology of international jihad. But if there’s …
Who’s the Other Islamic Militant Nabbed This Year in Abbottabad?
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …