The results of Iraq’s provincial elections could be released as soon as tomorrow, and many in the government have praised it as a rousing success. But while it has been presented as a testament to the progress made by the United States in propping up the Iraqi government, serious irregularities have left the results in [...]
As the violence in Afghanistan continues to escalate, Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak has pointed out that a large number of the foreign fighters flocking to the nation to take part in the seven-year-long war are coming from Iraq. Its not exactly a secret that this has been happening: indeed transferring tens of thousands [...]
It’s no secret that the Afghan government and the international forces have not seen eye to eye on the large civilian death toll in the ongoing war: President Hamid Karzai regularly complains about such killings, while NATO tries to minimize them (to the point of dramatically underreporting their numbers). For the first time however, President [...]
The Sri Lankan military continued its attacks against the separatist north, yesterday alone killing 52 civilians and wounding around 80. At this point the offensive is confined to the last roughly 30 square miles of coastal land left to be conquered, but as the military has pressed forward into civilian populations, they have driven roughly [...]
In the wake of a roadside bombing, African Union (AU) forces from Uganda opened fire on a crowd of innocent civilians in southern Mogadishu, killing 39 of them. One of the AU vehicles was damaged by the bomb which provoked the attack. Outraged over the killings, the al-Shabaab movement’s spokesman Sheikh Mukhtar Robow Abu Mansoor [...]
At a press conference today in Moscow, Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev announced that the decision has been made to close a US military air base in the country. The two nations had been in negotiations over the amount paid by the US to use the base, and Bakiyev says the talks broke down. The Pentagon [...]
Much has been made of the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and their increasing control over the Swat Valley. The Pakistani military has been shelling the area, killing scores of civilians and promising to eventually reconquer the region. But the problem of “Talibanisation” doesn’t begin and end in the Swat Valley. Neighboring Bajaur has been a [...]
The Pine Bluff Arsenal, a United States Army installation in Arkansas, specializes in chemical and biological weapons. The military touts them as the only facility in the Northern Hemisphere which fills white phosphorus munitions. That’s the important point here, as it once again ties the US military directly into the Israeli war in the Gaza [...]
The situation in Afghanistan is bad. How bad? The head of the US military is warning against a comparison between Afghanistan and Vietnam because “Afghanistan is much more complex.” The policy recommendations keep coming in as the Obama Administration plans its escalation, but the proposed strategies couldn’t be more different. The Carnegie Endowment issued a [...]
Keeping a nation out of war is usually something to emphasize in elections: in Israel, where the nation has gone over two weeks without much in the way of military conflict it is the end of the war rather than the beginning which is seen as undermining the ruling coalition’s election chances. For a nation [...]
