The Arabian and
Indo-Australian tectonic plates meet near Karachi, the Pakistani port city
inhabited by at least 15 million people.
But in recent weeks, Karachi has been reeling from violent seismic
activity along its ethnic and political fault lines -- not the collision of
geological plates nearby.
How the U.S. military is preparing civilians for a surge of their own.
After eight years of war, the United States and its allies still lack the data necessary to navigate Afghanistan's unforgiving terrain.
The United States and Colombia have been testing out COIN
strategies for years. But the major lesson for Afghanistan is a tough
one: there are no clean answers in messy wars.
Thirty years ago this month, Soviet airborne troops parachuted into Kabul and began a fateful occupation that became Mikhail Gorbachev’s Vietnam. Here’s the inside story of how it happened, as told by the KGB general who planned it.
By THE U.S. SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE
In December, 2001, a small group of U.S. special operations forces had al Qaeda's main man cornered in Tora Bora. Days later, he crossed the border into Pakistan unnoticed. Here is the story of the White House policy that let him get away.
Fissures within the military could tear not just the army but the entire country apart. It's coming sooner than you think.
Over on the AfPak Channel's Twitter feed, Katherine Tiedemann is live-tweeting a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty conference call on the Afghan elections and the upcoming presidential debate.
The news so far: incumbent Hamid Karzai has confirmed his participation, but challenger Abdullah Abdullah is refusing to participate, saying he wasn't adequately consulted. Technocrat Ashraf Ghani and populist longshot Ramazan Bashardost have agree to debate Karzai, however.
More background on the contenders here from AfPak Channel contributor Jean MacKenzie.
