By Anwaar Hussain Way up on the shadowy ladder in the dark world of spooks comes the name of Mossad. Responsible mainly for intelligence collection and covert operations, including paramilitary activities, it is one of the three institutions in the Israeli Intelligence Community. The other two are known as Aman and Shin Bet  tasked for [...]

by Farhat Taj There is a deep abyss between the perceptions of the people of Waziristan, the most drone-hit area and the wider Pakistani society on the other side of the River Indus. For the latter, the US drone attacks on Waziristan are a violation of Pakistani’s sovereignty. Politicians, religious leaders, media analysts and anchorpersons [...]

By Anwaar Hussain President Obama’s decision to surge the troops’ level in Afghanistan is understandable. That is the only thing America can do in fact. They cannot just pack their bags and go home. They are losing the war with the present troop strength. All other conventional tactics have been tried out. The troop surge [...]

By Anwaar Hussain Strange title, eh? Wait a bit please. Hoh is the surname of a former Marine who fought in Iraq and became a diplomat in a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan and who on September 10 this year resigned in a high-profile protest of the Afghan war. In so doing, Matthew Hoh became the [...]

By Joe Palmer East Africa: In 1966 the U S Agency for International Development built a residential school for the training of teachers in Somalia near the city of Afgoi on the Shabelle River a dozen miles inland from the capital city, Mogadishu. The construction contract was given to a company in Nairobi, Kenya. There [...]

by Milton Bearden As the United States settles into its eighth year of military operations in Afghanistan, and as plans for ramping up U.S. troop strength are under way, we might reflect on an observation made by the Chinese military sage, Sun Tzu, about twenty-five hundred years ago: In military campaigns I have heard of [...]

By Daniel Luban The U.S. State Department fiercely denied claims made by Ehud Olmert about his influence over President George W. Bush, in an incident that has stirred up old debates about the role of the Israeli government and the so-called “Israel lobby” in formulating Middle East policy in Washington. On Monday, Olmert claimed that [...]