I am currently reading Antonio Giustozzi’s Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop – The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan. I’ll review it more fully when I’ve finished reading it – now there’s an idea – but here’s something that stands out for reasons of pure partisan rage. John Reid has been mocked plenty for saying that he thought…
Read More John Reid RetrobloggingAbu Muqawama on Pakistan: Raise your hands if you think Pakistan would totally sell the U.S., India, and Afghanistan down the river to earn it a (temporary and illusory) respite from the Islamist insurgents currentlythreatening Islamabad. (You can’t see it on your computer monitor, but Abu Muqawama is typing with one hand because the other…
Read More Answering the wrong questionIt looks like an attempt to censor rightwing arsewit Geert Wilders’s anti-Islam home movie has broken YouTube. Pakistani authorities issued a circular to ISPs in Pakistan demanding that they block access to YouTube; but this doesn’t explain why it’s unreachable from the UK. A traceroute to www.youtube.com goes into PCCW’s network and dies; the explanation…
Read More YouTube is Borked: Pakistani Censors SuspectedIt looks like an attempt to censor rightwing arsewit Geert Wilders’s anti-Islam home movie has broken YouTube. Pakistani authorities issued a circular to ISPs in Pakistan demanding that they block access to YouTube; but this doesn’t explain why it’s unreachable from the UK. A traceroute to www.youtube.com goes into PCCW’s network and dies; the explanation…
Read More YouTube is Borked: Pakistani Censors SuspectedNonbarking dog of the year, 2007 was the fact that the increasingly heavyweight NATO force in Afghanistan’s logistics are dependent on the road from Kandahar-Quetta-Karachi, that is to say through Taliban and Baluch rebel country to Pakistan’s most politically unstable and violent city. As you’ll see at the link, someone finally attacked trucks on it…
Read More The Flashman OptionSomeone in Pakistan googles for US army jobs in pakistan as cctv operator.
Read More CuriousYou think things were bad in Pakistan? Think again; if Dawn‘s sources are worth anything, it’s now the policy of the British government, in the person of David Miliband, to get behind Nawaz Sharif and the Saudi lobby in Pakistani politics. We warned you; it looks like they’re heading for a kind of negative excellence…
Read More I got the poison! I got the remedy!I think TalkingPointsMemo has badly missed the point of this AP newsfart. Says Josh: You know things aren’t good when you see a headline about Pakistani refugees fleeing to Afghanistan. But they’re not fleeing into Afghanistan because they expect civil war any moment as a result of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination; for a start, we’re up…
Read More Missed!It is quite possible to simultaneously believe that Benazir Bhutto’s career was considerably less perfect than her public image, and also that her assassination is likely to have nothing but bad consequences for Pakistan and quite a few other places. I say this because you’d be surprised; opinion has already broken between uncritical Diana-isation by…
Read More Tell me more about this “accepting ambiguity” trick, it sounds strangely fascinatingWhilst we’re on the Pakistan blogging, immense respect is due to the Pakistan Policy Blog. It looks like Nawaz Sharif is coming home – like football, remember that? – apparently because the Saudis insisted that he be released from exile in Jeddah. The PPB makes the very good point that Musharraf has been gradually mutating…
Read More Pair of Pakistan Politics Posts!