Archives for February 2009

President Obama said on Friday that the US has no long-term goal of keeping US troops in Afghanistan. (See below). In contrast to Obama’s pronouncements on getting out of Iraq, he has not announced a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. (The full text of Obama’s remarks on the withdrawal from Iraq is here.) Meanwhile, the […]

The Defense Department has reversed the Bush administration’s ban on photographs of returning coffins of US military personnel killed in war abroad. Apparently a lot of the families of fallen warriors liked the ban. Future such families will be able to keep it in place for their loved ones if they so choose. But everyone […]

Even as President Obama sends 17,000 extra US troops to Afghanistan and intends to spend $140 bn on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2009, rumors of negotiations with Taliban elements keep surfacing. The Dari Persian Afghan newspaper Chiragh editorialized on February 23, 2009, on the possibility that cooperation against the Taliban might prove grounds […]

A US soldier from Wisconsin was announced killed in Afghanistan on Wednesday (he died on Tuesday). Three British soldiers were killed Wednesday by a roadside bomb in the southern Pushtun Helmand Province, and another died in hospital from wounds earlier received in Helman. The death bring the toll among the multi-national forces since Friday to […]

An informed observer writes in a guest op-ed for IC: I am troubled by the publication of Uri Dromey’s piece in today’s Guardian. My reaction to the content is that the piece attempts to blame the victims– which is a well known sophist technique. As for the misleading explanations of what seems to be the […]

President Obama included this sentence in his State of the Union Address , “I will soon announce a way forward in Iraq that leaves Iraq to its people and responsibly ends this war.” The LAT explains this cryptic reference, based on leaks that suggest that President Obama will announce next week a 19-month timetable for […]

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will announce at the Gaza donor’s conference next week that the US will give $900 million to help rebuild the Gaza Strip. That is about a billion dollars. It is obvious why Clinton is making this gesture. The United States’s name is mud in much of the Muslim world because […]

The following comments may contain spoilers. Directors Danny Boyle’s and Loveleen Tandan‘s “Slumdog Millionaire” swept the Oscars this year, in a remarkable sign of globalization. The creative team behind the film was largely British (Tandan began as a casting director and the screenplay was by Simon Beaufoy). But it was based on an Indian novel […]

Some parts of the world, you know better than others even if you are a world traveler. The Khan al-Khalili Bazaar in Cairo is one of those special places for me. I once interviewed its older goldsmiths and silversmiths about their recollections of when the jewellers’ guilds disappeared. They thought, the 1940s. I ransacked the […]