Indian Prime Minister Modi has a huge crisis on his hands entirely of his own making after some of the ethno-religiously diverse Northeastern States of the so-called ‘Seven Sisters’ are erupting in rage after the passage of the ‘Citizenship (Amendment) Bill’ that many fear will result in “replacement migration” against the indigenous population there, which…
Islamabad, which just settled a Soviet-era debt dispute with Moscow, now wishes for “a new phase” in relations with Russia. Geopolitics, coupled with promising new trade opportunities, could help them thrive, analysts explain. Russia-Pakistan relations returned to a brighter place this week, when Prime Minister Imran Khan voiced his desire to give them a powerful…
A Washington Post report this week (reposted here) has exposed the US war in Afghanistan as a vile charade. Declassified government papers reveal notes and interviews by hundreds of senior US officials which attest to systematic lies and deception in the conduct of that war. The GW Bush and Obama administrations are directly implicated in…
“U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign,” the Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock reports, “making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” Whitlock bases that claim on a collection of candid, confidential interviews with more than 400 military…
This is arguably the ultimate road trip on earth. Marco Polo did it. All the legendary Silk Road explorers did it. Traveling the Pamir Highway back to back, as a harsh winter approaches, able to appreciate it in full, in silence and solitude, offers not only a historical plunge into the intricacies of the ancient…
I suspected from the moment the general election was called that the result would be a large Conservative majority, a calamitous defeat for Labour, and a decisive victory for Brexit. To prevent myself getting too depressed by this grim prospect, I picked out and read two books on crises that were far more dire: one…
