Mullah Omar, the de-facto leader of the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, is calling for a surge of fighters in Afghanistan to counter our planned surge: Ahmed Rashid, the Pakistani journalist, wrote in Canada’s Globe and Mail on Saturday that Mullah Omar’s letter “to the commanders of...

Christian Wolmar writes in the Guardian, about a delicate and often unspoken aspect of personal hygiene that Southasians have practiced since the year dot: Three years ago I went to India and discovered botty nirvana. While I was suffering from one of those inevitable bouts of Delhi belly, I was sta...

Imagine that, after World War II, instead of investing in the Marshall Plan in Europe, we allowed Europe to slide into decay. Eight years after the end of the war, unemployment across Europe is 40%. There are reports of literal starvation in the countryside. There are pockets of prosperity — t...

For a country where there is an average daily power cut of 14 hours it is hard to carry on with normal life. Bibek Paudel discusses the challenges Nepal is facing and who are responsible for this....

Votevets’ Brandon Friedman knows that the questions we need to answer about Afghanistan are out there. What are the goals of US involvement? What is the main objective of the military strategy? What would “victoryâ€� look like, and what allows US troops to leave? How will we pay for an escal...

(originally posted at MWC News) “I have some good news and some bad news,� the sergeant in the joke tells his men. “The good news is that you are going to change your dirty socks. The bad news is that you are going to exchange them among yourselves.� I am not the only person who is reminded ...

Image by Army.mil via Flickr Asia Times Online It may seem there could be nothing in common between the blowing up of a bridge in the Khyber, the usage of an air base nestling in the foothills of the Pamirs and the launch of a 60-pound (37.2 kilogram) satellite into the night sky that will circle th...

Following up on Thurston’s answer to Brandon Friedman’s debunking of five myths that progressives ostensibly hold regarding the escalation in Afghanistan, I’d like to dilate one of Thurston’s principal observations: “he [Friedman] doesn’t quote a single anti-escal...

Scholars talk about an “Arab Cold War” from roughly 1954 to 1967 between Nasser’s Egypt and Saudi Arabia, especially once King Faisal took over in the early 1960s. Defeat for Nasser in 1967 actually brought him closer to Faisal, though Sadat’s decision to forge a separate pea...

A new report reveals the human cost of suspending constitutional rights in Punjab, India from 1984 - 1995. Ensaaf and the Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) released a report this week presenting verifiable quantitative findings on mass disappearances and extrajudicial executions in t...