I like Londonstani’s Pakistan dispatches for Abu Muqawama very much. And I find the point made in this post very interesting. But professionally I have to cringe when I read this: The Sufi tradition has very deep roots in Pakistan. The country is dotted with shrines that are visited by thousands of people daily from [...]

I don’t really want to see Avatar, and I skipped out on a trip taken by some friends this weekend to see it, owing both to the snowstorm and my Avatar apathy. But I think any science fiction fan is well-equipped enough it’s possible to appreciate Annalee Newitz’s i09 post about the racial subtexts of [...]

Eli Lake, just back from Baghdad, reports: The U.S. is reaching out to followers of a key Shi’ite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia once battled U.S. troops and who remains a powerful leader, particularly among Iraq’s urban poor. A top Sadrist political leader in Baghdad, Qusay al-Suhail, told The Washington Times that he and his [...]

Spent a couple days working on a piece about what comes after outreach to Iran. The answer, printed in the Washington Independent, is multilateral sanctions and… outreach to Iran. Two senior administration officials, Undersecretary of the Treasury Stuart Levey and Undersecretary of State William Burns, have for months quietly assembled working groups across the government [...]

The Brooklyn rapper Joell Ortiz — new mixtape here — tweeted this 70s local news clip and added that his uncle was in the Devil’s Rebels way back when. When I grew up in Brooklyn, your mom didn’t have to tell you not to go to Bushwick, because you had enough sense in your head [...]

There isn’t an argument against the rich blowback potential of drone strikes in Waziristan or missile strikes in Afghanistan that isn’t also an argument against the same thing in Yemen. We can’t have a real conversation about sustainable counterterrorism that revolves around two poles and two poles alone: 1. Ground-force heavy counterinsurgency with heavy political [...]

1. Over the course of several days of testimony and public appearances a week and a half ago, Gen. McChrystal, Amb. Eikenberry, Gen. Petraeus, Undersecretary Flournoy, Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan & Pakistan Jones, and Deputy Secretary Lew praised the ministers of Defense, Interior, Agriculture, and Rural Rehabilitation & Development. All those dudes kept their [...]

I’m here to lend some tea and sympathy to Vali Nasr, the scholar of political Islam who now works as Richard Holbrooke’s Pakistan adviser. Nasr is a smart guy and an enthusiastic Twitterer. The problem is his job gets in the way of those two things. See, I follow Vali Na– sorry, I follow @vali_nasr, [...]

Check out that glamour shot of Marc Lynch for his redesigned blog. The grey color scheme in the shot recalls the Earth-Pig Born. Well done. (Even if it’s lost on us RSS readers for the most part.) And RIP Ayatollah Montazeri, the leading Shiite cleric to challenge the Iranian regime’s legitimacy. We can read these [...]

D.C. has a ludicrous amount of snow blanketing it right now, so YouTubing I go. The unearthed gem of the evening: Agnostic Front, sometime in the 80s, on a cable access show lip syncing to “Victim In Pain” and “Last Warning.” As a three-piece. With Roger playing guitar. And no Stigma. Unless that dude is [...]