One of the most powerful mujahedeen commanders in Afghanistan, Ismail Khan, is calling on his followers to reorganise and defend the country against the Taliban as Western militaries withdraw, in a public demonstration of faltering confidence in the national government and the Western-built Afghan National Army. Mr. Khan is one of the strongest of a […]
Recent anti-Japanese street demonstrations in China may signal the start of economic decline for a nation that won its reputation as the “world’s manufacturing factory” in the late 1990s and surpassed Japan in 2010 to become the second-largest economy after the United States. Although the riots were ostensibly meant as a protest against the Japanese […]
IN SEVEN weeks America‘s federal budget will self-destruct and plunge America back into recession unless Barack Obama can persuade the Republicans in Congress to raise taxes, which they have vowed never to do. So what is he doing between now and then? He’s heading off to visit south-east Asia and attend the East Asian Summit. […]
President Barack Obama will visit Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) later this month and meet President Thein Sein, who is trying to steer the country toward democracy. Yet sectarian strife could still deal a setback to the government’s significant political, economic, and social reforms that have been made since the democratic transition began in 2011. […]
Can China avoid becoming Japan? In a few decades’ time, we may be talking about how today’s up-and-coming economic superpower is starting to look like the Land of the Rising Sun and Falling Expectations. But before that, another country is first in line: the Republic of Korea. Despite differences in politics and size, China can […]
Xi Jinping may have to wait two years to gain control of the world’s largest army after he takes the Communist Party’s top job this week, a delay that may weaken China’s ability to address tensions with Japan and the U.S. In China’s past two transitions of power, the departing leader kept hold of the military for about […]
Lieutenant-Colonel Hussein Harmoush, one of the first Syrian army officers to defect, was contacted by the Muslim Brotherhood shortly after he arrived at a refugee camp in Turkey’s Hatay province in June of 2011. He was one of a small group of defectors, the Free Officers. Brotherhood members visited him several times and promised him […]
Dubai’s chief of police, General Dahi Khalfan al-Tamim, claims that the Muslim Brotherhood is “a small group that has strayed from the true path.” He also says that the revolution in Egypt “would not have been possible without Iran’s support and is the prelude to a new Sykes-Picot agreement” (1). And that Mohammed Morsi’s election in […]
Thirty years ago, I tramped across a soggy South Atlantic wilderness among 15,000 Royal Marines, paratroopers, Guardsmen and Gurkhas who fought that most surreal of campaigns, the 1982 Falklands war. It was obvious at the time that Margaret Thatcher’s South Atlantic adventure was a last imperial hurrah. But none of us would then have guessed […]
looking beyond borders 