Pakistan, rightly or wrongly, is generally described as an “exporter” of terrorism. Now it is trying to export something different – its famous Murree beer produced at the nearly 150-year-old Murree brewery, Pakistan’s sole producer of beer. “Understandably, making beer and whiskey in a Muslim country, where 97 per cent of the population is officially banned from enjoying your...

Two of the 53 American Embassy workers being held hostage with the approval of the Iranian regime, after the facility was stormed on November 4, 1979. Thirty years ago today, the American Embassy in Tehran was stormed by followers of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It is a day that the current regime commemorates every year as a celebration of victory over what the leaders of the country like to call...

While Americans tuned into the political gyrations of a handful of elections yesterday and political operatives pontificating what it all means today, it remains dwarfed by what happened in Afghanistan. Five British soldiers embedded with locals were shot and killed by an Afghan policeman with whom they were mentoring at a security outpost in Helmand Province. The embedded NATO troops were carrying out a key...

Guest post by Jared Stancombe Jared Stancombe is a 2009 graduate of Indiana University, where his studies focused on peace and conflict studies in Northern Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. His other academic interests include counterinsurgency and complex military operations. He is currently an analyst for a U.S. government agency responsible for national security and is in the officer selection process...

So much for Beijing’s past pronouncements about the exclusively peaceful use of outer space. Days ago, the commander of China’s Air Force, Commander General Xu Qiliang, made a number of comments that have created a genuine tumult amongst defense analysts and China watchers. According to Malaysia’s Straits Times, with some additional quotes from the People’s Daily, General Xu said in...

Coming from a state-controlled mouthpiece of Muammar Gaddafi’s despotic regime, some may scoff at this article calling for President Bush to be brought before the International Criminal Court and charged with war crimes. The unfortunate truth, however, is that the sentiments expressed by OEA Libya’s Ali Mar’i al-Ahad are by no means out of the norm in the Muslim world and beyond. For OEA...

The subject of veteran suicides rises every so often, like a dark island that floats off shore, but lays submerged under the water most all the time. Only small boats with intrepid rowers that are strong enough to go out past the riptides can see the sleeping dead under the water. But every so often the ocean heaves and there it is again: the landmass rises and you see that it has been weighted down by huge...

This point has been made before, but not usually as bluntly as here (emphasis in original):

I just finished reading a fantastic and timely book. Fantastic because of how the writer, Doug Stanton, brilliantly and in gritty, sometimes grisly detail describes the unprecedented actions of a band of American Special Forces heroes who rode into Afghanistan after 9/11 during the opening days of what is now the Afghanistan War. Timely, not necessarily because of what these magnificent men did on horseback...

It’s not what you might think. It’s not dying in battle. It’s not losing your life. It’s losing your mind, your heart, your soul, and the life force inside you that makes you want to survive.

The news that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been declare the winner of Afghanistan’s hotly contested and controversial Presidential election now ensures that the Afghanistan issue be an ongoing controversial one on several fronts in several countries. Clearly, the fact that his prime foe former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah has pulled out rather than participate in a runoff that Abdullah insisted...

President Obama must understand that foreign wars are the undoing of U.S. Presidents and most domestic agendas. If he hopes to concentrate on getting us out of this deep recession, he cannot spend any more time in Iraq and in particular, enlarge or continue our dead-end involvement in Afghanistan. Perhaps he’s trying to find a way to break the news to the U.S. Military and the American people that we must...

There are a few strong voices in Israel’s media who are willing to call out Israel’s intransigence on issues related to the peace process for what it is — the self-destructive behavior of an arrogant spoiled bully convinced that consequences are for someone else. How did Israel’s leaders develop such an entitlement mentality? Levy’s answer: Washington, D.C.: Now is the time to say...

Presidential contender Abdullah Abdullah has announced he won’t participate in the upcoming runoff election, a move that insures a victory for incumbent Hamid Karzai. It is not clear at this point if he will formally withdraw or if he will simply stop campaigning. Abdullah has accused the vote counting commission of being biased in favor of Karzai and thus unable to run a fair election campaign. Most observers...

John Hannah is being roundly mocked for his NRO piece today in which he complains that Hillary Clinton is doing harm to U.S. interests abroad by contrasting Pres. Obama’s foreign policies with those of the previous administration, to the latter’s discredit. In her recent trip to Pakistan, Clinton told a group of students that she spent her entire Senate career opposing Bush’s policies, and...

Fox News Radio host John Gibson asked Liz Cheney for her thoughts on Barack Obama’s recent trip to Dover Air Force Base to witness the arrival of the bodies of U.S. troops who died in Afghanistan. Here is her response, via TPMDC:

The ongoing negotiations between Honduras’s coup leaders and president-in-exile Manuel Zelaya have borne fruit:

U.S. National Security Adviser James Jones faces Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov at the Kremlin, Oct. 29. The American right will no doubt have a field day with this article from Russia’s leading business daily, Kommersant. According the Kommersant’s Vladimir Solovyev, the White House has made clear that it is eager to see the START III nuclear reduction treaty signed before President Obama...

Moving on to another French view of the Afghan conflict, Laurent Joffrin of the newspaper Liberation suggests that however bad the situation may be, the West in the person of President Barack Obama should not pull out of Afghanistan – yet. For Liberation, Laurent Joffrin writes in part: “A second round in the presidential election has now been scheduled. The outlines of a state, painfully, are...

Is it a fact that President Obama is ‘dithering’ – as former VP Cheney has said – over a decision on Iraq? In his editorial for Le Figaro yesterday, influential French columnist Pierre Rousselin seemed to agree, if not in a much more sympathetic fashion than Mr. Cheney. For Le Figaro, Pierre Rousselin writes in part: “From theory to practice, Obama is having a decidedly hard time...

Front page of the NYT: Iran told the United Nations nuclear watchdog on Thursday that it would not accept a plan its negotiators agreed to last week to send its stockpile of uranium out of the country, according to diplomats in Europe and American officials briefed on Iran’s response. And yet, over at Memeorandum, as of 11:00 am ET, the top three memes were about Congressional ethics inquiries, the race in...

I live walking distance to Fort Logan National Cemetary. Every day, every every day come the black hearses, and color guard, the rifle squads and the often old VFW bugler. I can hear taps sometimes when the wind is just right. Military wife here (USAF 21 years of service by my DH). Working in post trauma recovery at VA over decades now, the men who volunteer to be escorts see it as silent duty, dont brag about...

I use the words, “stands witness,” because they have a very singular significance. George W. Bush did meet privately with selected families of fallen Americans, but he did not put himself there on the tarmac in the dead of night to witness, directly and in person, the graphic human consequences of his war policies. Whether the war in Afghanistan, or any war, is justified and necessary, or not, to...

Incredibly, President Barack Obama’s in-depth Afghanistan review is underplaying the evident peril that arming unruly warlords empowers them to use American war techniques to scuttle his agenda and settle mutual scores with more lethal force instead . It is fast-forwarding two great dangers. First, it is ensuring that Afghanistan can have no central government in Kabul capable of enforcing discipline on the...

Message to America: A bewildered man emerges Wednesday from a restaurant in Peshawar, Pakistan, to a scene of utter devastation. The Taliban have claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed at least 107. If this editorial from Pakistan’s The Nation is anything to go by, Hillary Clinton’s “hearts and minds” visit to Pakistan is, as the headline says, “falling flat”...