Who Cares For Palestine?
This is the first time the Palestinians have followed through to form a government. It is supposed to reunite the divided territories and prepare for overdue elections after six months. Read More
Tag: Iran
Data Tells Peking’s Shift To Beijing; Persia’s To Iran
What’s in a name? Place names often change, and those changes stem from a tangle of politics and language. A fun tool from Google, the Ngram Viewer, lets us watch those changes play out across history. The Ngram Viewer charts how often a particular word appears in some five million books digitized as part of the […]
America’s Great Game
The Arabists never again came so close to implementing their vision of an American foreign policy sympathetic to Arab countries. Which isn’t to say they lost their influence in all ways. In what seems like a contradiction, Kermit Roosevelt was instrumental in the CIA-backed coup d’état that ousted the democratically elected leader of Iran, Muhammad […]
The Road To Ferghana
Ferghana is the hotspot of Central Asia. It is an ethnic soup with hundreds of thousands of Kyrgyz and Tajik living in Uzbek Ferghana and vice-versa. Ethnic tensions, sporadic violence and in 2010 the region erupted in violence when hundreds were killed. Read Here – The Hindu
Overtures From The Sunni Gulf
Pakistan’s military-to-military cooperation with Saudi Arabia goes back five decades. Between the 1960s and 1980s, tens of thousands of Pakistani troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia, working under Saudi command. Pakistani fighter pilots trained their first Saudi counterparts, and in 1969 flew jets that successfully repulsed incursions by Yemeni forces. Pakistani engineers built Saudi fortifications along its […]
Not All Gloomy In The Gulf
America’s Gulf allies are unhappy with what they see as a milquetoast response to ongoing Iranian aggression and a betrayal of a commitment to remove Iran’s strongest ally—Bashar al Assad. Gulf leaders see a declining US military presence in the Gulf and feel there is a vacuum developing. These perceptions are incorrect, writes DB Des Roches Read […]
From Gwadar To Somewhere
Despite the fact that the free trade zone port of Gwadar in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Balochistan has been an unprofitable enterprise with operational control now in Chinese hands, its potential remains. If anything, the development of the deep ocean port and an associated international airport, as well as the creation of a transport corridor connecting Gwadar […]
Is Iraq The New Investment Magnet?
For Grant Felgenhauer, a money manager whose hedge fund owns $110 million of Iraqi equities, the 15 explosions that rocked the country on a single day in mid-January weren’t a reason to stop buying. Read Here – Businessweek
Is Walt The New Keenan?
Plenty of pundits have jockeyed to be the top voice on the Middle East, but only one person’s ideas dominate the conversation Read Here – Tablet Magazine
Eyeing Karzai
Afghans are afraid of the country reverting to anarchy; an overwhelming majority of the people, including Pashtuns, feel that the residual presence of U.S. and NATO forces after 2014 is essential for the stability of the country. Read Here – The Hindu
