WaPo’s Jeff Stein reports the Pakistani intelligence service has rushed Mullah Omar, spiritual leader of the Afghan Taliban insurgency, to a hospital for heart surgery.
Now why would Pakistan, an ostensible U.S. ally on the proverbial “war on terror,” provide health care for the one-eyed Taliban leader who is wanted for acts of terrorism? Continue reading »
That’s the scary message sent by the assassination of Salman Taseer, businessman politician, who dared cross the country’s religious fanatics, I mean, mainstream Muslim organizations, who applauded his murder. Supportive of the pardon of a Christian woman convicted of blaspheming Islam, Taseer was assassinated by a bodyguard offended by his liberalism.
Taseer’s death deprives Pakistan of a colourful politician with unusual reserves of pluck. More significantly, it signals a worrying reduction in the public space for public figures, who cannot even count on their own police to protect them. The country’s liberals have not felt so isolated since the dark years of the Zia dictatorship in the 1980s.
via The Hindu.
As documented in another Wikileaks cable from Beijing. How long can Mountain View take the torture?
Can Google do business ethically in China?
The Wikileaks documents released in the past few days revive that question, first posed in 2006 when the search engine entered China, by revealing the hardball tactics that Beijing’s communists use to bring Mountain View’s capitalists to heel. One Google executive, worn down by three years of Chinese harrassment, told a U.S. diplomat that the company might consider leaving China, a comment quoted in this July 2009 cable. With company co-founder Sergey Brin already going public with his qualms, Google’s Chinese future seems in doubt.
The cables reveal how Beijing relentlessly pressurizes Google to achieve its economic and political goals.
So says Analysis Intelligence, a Web site published by Recorded Future, a data mining startup that is jointly funded by Google and the Central Intelligence Agency.
we can say that the White House was successful in changing the story of their midterm defeat, but the success was temporary. The world still writes about the President much more positively than negatively, and the President received better coverage in our biggest rivals’ blogs than in their mainstream media sources.
If we don’t negotiate with the Taliban, he will. So says Ahmed Rashiid in FT.com with a bottom line policy recommendation that the wounded White House won’t like:
If Mr Karzai and most Afghans really do want peace talks with the Taliban then that should be Nato’s focus.
The revived auto giant was made in China, claims the People’s Daily, and they got some numbers that say the Chinese sit in GM’s driver’s seat.
GM and its ventures in China sold 199,641 vehicles last month, up 20 percent from the year before. That took its sales for the first 10 months of the year to 1,976,913 vehicles — a gain of 36 percent….
So even as America protects its manufacturing base, the dominant market power of China is felt. In the alternative universe known as mainstream American politics this will perhaps be cited as proof that Obama’s administration’s success in Detroit is a victory for Maoist socialism.
Talk of negotiation is ramping up because the Obama administration thinks it necessary to draw up a feasible plan to exit with dignity, this given the electoral “shellacking” it recently received with barely a flexed muscle. A sullen defeat, stretched out over time, tanks rolling on into adjacent border, replaying the recent Soviet past, will not do– especially with an opposition ascendant waiting by the sidelines for news of stubborn, drowning failure.
Overall strategic environment is not conducive to U.S. success, says former State Department policymaker, one of the band known as Bush Liberals. Admit and scale back, he says in touting last week’s Council on Foreign Relations report on Afghanistan
maybe we have to change things. And look around. You’ve seen al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula now; al-Qaeda in Maghreb. We’re fighting a difficult and flat organization. Given that we have a weak partner in the Karzai government and only a partial partner in Pakistan, we can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.
Armitage was clearly anchoring the left-wing of the panel. Eight dissenters called for staying the course showing that the policymaking consensus and in the South Asia press the story is playing as U.S. troops will fight Until 2014
With assassination suspects possibly still on U.S. soil, the Dubai assassins have dragged America into row over fake passports, says Times Online in London.
With police investigations already underway in Australia, Ireland, and Germany, the Obama administration is going to deal with this. WashPost and NYT are still playing the story inside, appropriate in light of the fact that there has been no official U.S. reaction, but that’s not going to last long.
For the Obama administration, this is where the rhetoric of the president’s Cairo address meets the realities of Middle East decisionmaking. Of course, Israel has the right to defend itself, and of course the U.S. assassinates al-Qaeda leaders every day. But the leaders and the publics of Arab countries (like the United Arab Emirates, where the hit took place) that are open to peace with Israel (and some of whom want U.S. help to deter Iran) are not going to be satisfied by the talking points that go over well in Washington and on cable TV.
