Circling the Lion's Den A glance at the conflict in Afghanistan

To St Antony's College, Oxford this afternoon for a presentation by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn of their latest book, Poetry of the Taliban, (Hurst, 2012). Alex and Felix have lived on and off in Kandahar for some years and have immersed themselves in the culture of the city and its p

Strange happenings in Pakistan, where new minister for Information Technology, Raja Parvez Ashraf, decided early on Sunday morning to block access to Twitter for the whole country. The ostensible reason was because the micro-blogging platform had apparently refused to remove allegedly blasphemous co

The growth of the media in Afghanistan has been portrayed as a success story, but much of the recent expansion is based on donor support. If this declines, much of the media will wither or fall prey to factional, religious or extreme forces. So says a new policy briefing from BBC Media Action, The m

The Telecoms and Internet sectors in Afghanistan have been a major success story, according to a new report from Internews, The State of Telecommunications and Internet in Afghanistan: Six Years Later, written by Javed Hamdard. By 2012 the telecoms sector had been able to attract investment of over

Here's a short excerpt from the beginning of the military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay from last Saturday 5 May, that is trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others. You can find this and other transcripts here . Judging by this excruciatingly banal extract, this is going to be a long, drawn-out aff

A close examination of the documents seized in Abbottabad by US Special Forces last May and released by the Combatting Terrorism Center last week reveals an inconsistency. The complete translated documents made available on the CTC website are very poorly translated and contain basic grammatical and

What is known about the cleric whose death last week sparked the intense fighting in Miranshah in North Waziristan, Pakistan, over the weekend? The death of Maulana Naseeb Khan Wazir on 3rd May seems to have been the cause of the deadly and gruesome incidents in the militant-controlled city.The firs