Balochistan: too small an olive branch,
“They ordered me to rape her. She was so thin and was crying when they brought her in the room. I was terrified to look at her, as I thought she was a spy or an agent”, says Munir Mengal, a 33- year- old Baloch, living in forced exile in...
Russia's domestic Muslim strategy - the lurking threat,
Russia’s internal Muslim problems are no doubt of greater political importance than its relations with foreign Muslim countries. Russian attitudes towards its Muslim minorities are full of contradictions, probably inevitably so.
America and Israel-Palestine: dangerous disarray ,
Barack Obama’s greatest foreign-policy challenges in his first ten months in office have been in the “the greater middle east” - that wide arc stretching from Palestine and Israel through Iraq and Iran to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
There is no honour in ‘honour killing’,
Yet again, the international media reports on an ‘honour killing’ in Jordan. Three men were charged last month and are now being tried with premeditated murder after allegedly stabbing their divorced sister to death because they believed she was...
Kabul has never ruled Afghanistan,
The inauguration of Afghanistan’s president Karzai, in a capital city turned into a deserted fortress for the occasion, has doubtlessly constituted one of the very lowest points in the painful history of the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and its...
Pakistan PM warns Obama on Afghan escalation,
On Thursday, it was reported that Pakistan’s prime minister, Yusuf Gaza Gilani, warned the Obama administration of the dangers of increasing troop levels in Afghanistan. The prime minister expressed concerns that any such troop increase would...
Liberal Peace is dead? Not so fast,
Beneath the burden of inefficiencies, insurgencies and corruption, and unable to hold its ground when liberal institutions collide with the local context, liberal peace as statebuilding seems to be seeking the exit door in Afghanistan.
Long...
3 days left to tell us how politics should change...,
There's just a short time left to contribute to POWER2010, the grassroots campaign to renew and strengthen our democracy from the bottom up.
The campaign is committed to giving everyone across the country a say in what reforms are needed to...
What can London Citizens teach the left?,
I'd heard impressive things said about London Citizens and their ability to mobilise vast numbers of people in pursuit of their collectivist agenda, but I don't think anything could have prepared me for their Autumn Assembly on Wednesday...
Looking into the void: James Naughtie’s northern odyssey, part two,
After James Naughtie’s laugh a minute, cliché-ridden put down of Scotland and the town of Kilmarnock, I listened to his latest jaunt on the Today programme into the northern territories with a mix of fear and trepidation.
This was an altogether...
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