Dive into the archives.


  • Taliban Redux in Pakistan

    Militants in Swat, in the northwestern frontier of Pakistan, have pulled a copy-cat of Taliban demolition of the Bamiyan Buddha in Afghanistan on the Swat Buddha:

    From AsiaNews:

    Despite the many requests for greater protection, the government has failed to intervene in any way to defend the 40 metre tall statue, the second only in importance to [...]

  • Moslem Anti-Kemalist Turks capture Sinkiang!

    The Opposite End of China has a jolly good collection of headlines pulled from the New York Times archive between March 1933, when news of a Muslim uprising in western China reached New York, and January 1934, when an independent East Turkestan was established with it’s capital in Kashgar. This should take any great [...]

  • “New Great Game”? Says Who?

    I was just checking out the wikipedia article for the “Great Game“, a phrase coined ala-”World War II” to describe a series of political and military events and which all the namesakes to this blog were contributors. In the article, I saw this sub-section:

    New Great Game
    Main article: New Great Game

    With the end of the [...]

  • Turkey Looking to Iran

    Disappointed with the weak show of support from America and Europe, Turkey is now looking further east for support for its planned operations in Iraq. And they need look no further than Iran, also battling its own Kurdish independence movement. Al Jazeera reports that the foreign ministers of Iran and Turkey are increasingly expressing their [...]

  • Turkish Options

    As the Turkish-Iraqi tensions rise and small scale cross border operations begin, let’s examine Turkey’s situation and options at the moment.

    First of all, much fuss was made about the recent weak agreement between Iraq and Turkey which did not include an allowance for Turkish troops to cross into Iraq in so-called “hot pursuit” operations against [...]

  • Pornography on demand arrives in Taliban country

    I’ll have more on my trip to the UK shortly, but in the meantime:

    Satellite receivers arrived to the conservative town Kandahar in northern Afghanistan with the allied troops and, along with them, documentary films from Lithuania, Polish educational program and Catalan soap operas. All this is utterly new to the residents, as is pornography.

    After [...]

  • The Pipeline Game and Ceyhan

    Can Turkey help stem Europe’s dependence on Russian energy supply? No link for this WSJ article from earlier this month, but worth reading:

    The Pipeline Game
    Ceyhan, Turkey—The jetty that juts into the shimmering Gulf of Iskenderun here is the end of the line for crude oil pumped 1,100 miles from the Caspian Sea. This oil [...]

  • “Afghanistan is getting worse…”

    Almost six years after the US toppled the Taliban in what appeared to be a bulldoze of poorly armed fanatics by a well-trained and hi-tech western professional military, the Taliban is making a real comeback. And Afghan President Hamid Karzai says that security had worsened over the past two years, and that the US [...]

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