I visited a mosque in Abu Dhabi, the oil soaked capital of the United Arab Emirates today with a friend of mine who lives and works here. I'm in the UAE en route to Afghanistan to cover the elections. The mosque is somewhat unique here in the Arabian peninsula in...

I normally write on and report about war and human rights issues. Not being able to travel to Iran in time before the election, I've been blogging it from afar like so many others. CNN took a break, albeit a temporary one, from celebrity/reality TV pseudo-news to set up its...

Tehran is burning. No, not with the odd motorcycle or public bus melting into the asphalt in the aftermath of thousands-strong demonstrations. Tehran is burning with the desires and aspirations of its burgeoning post-revolutionary youth who cannot stand to chafe under the stagnant "Revolution" one moment longer. This is not...

Late Tuesday night another one of the Hashwani family's hotels was demolished in a well-planned and executed suicide attack in Peshawar, Pakistan. The Pearl Continental (PC) Hotel chain is owned by perhaps Pakistan's most prominent Ismaili family, the Hashwanis. Major cooperations in Pakistan, when not wholly owned subsidiaries of the...

As President Barack Obama toured the Arab heartland of the global Muslim community, one can see a glaringly missed opportunity. In choosing to speak in Hosni Mubarak's Cairo and appear cozy in King Abdullah bin Aziz al Saud's Riyadh, Obama is further buttressing the al-Qaeda leadership's raison d'etre. While the...

I was watching the new Dan Brown/Ron Howard/Tom Hanks thriller Angels & Demons here in Los Angeles at the posh Grove mall off of Fairfax avenue. The audience settled in for a cozy yet loud end of the weekend showing. Hanks is furiously running around Rome with his subtly sultry...

Sri Lanka is not many things to many people. It does not have a possibly jeopardized nuclear weapons cache; it is not a majority Muslim nation addled by a lingering Bush-era war nor is it the stage for a celebrity scandal of any sort. What Sri Lanka is to those...

The answer is not quite. Not yet anyway. After recently attending several think tank events in New York and Washington in the last month, there was much talk of the nation the Economist labeled the "Most Dangerous Nation in the World" and Gordon Brown spoke of the area as a...

Thursday's edition of the New York Times had a cliched beltway piece by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker espousing a Pentagon plea that it's seeking three "new" billion dollars in military aid to Pakistan and must bypass the State Department in doing so. "Military supporters of the program said it...

Barack Obama is in office. Guantanamo is closing (though not immediately), America's interest in Iraq seems to finally be fizzling and the new president gave a distinctive address to the people of the Middle East via al-Arabiya, al-Jazeera's quietest rival. However one particularly disastrous bit of foreign policy President Obama...

As Israeli tanks and soldiers pound their way through the Mediterranean's most destitute outpost, let's think about how we arrived at this point.

During the 2006 war between the Israeli state and Hezbollah, the Middle East raged with hell fire once again. Israel has been battling the Shia milita cum...

I was sitting with my family in an Indian restaurant in Queens, New York at our annual pre-Thanksgiving dinner as my eye occasionally darted up to the screen overhead with images of Mumbai's Taj Hotel smoldering on a Hindi-language satellite channel. I thought to myself "This has got to be...

I did something absurd the other day. I bought a literally last-minute roundtrip airfare from New York to Los Angeles just to vote. While living in New York for several years, I've stubbornly insisted on keeping my residency on the West coast with every sincere intention of moving back there....

Bouncing in and out of muddy pot-holes, I noticed something fairly unusual in Pakistan. In a nation with perhaps the most feverish cricket obsession in the commonwealth, it is almost a strange sight to see boys play anything else. Instead of multiple cricket games being played on dusty pitches, in...

I reconnected with an Afghan friend of mine named Ahmad Idrees Rahmani who I hadn't seen since the 2001 war. He had recently completed a degree at Stanford and is setting up a new think tank called Afghanistan's Center for Research and Policy Studies in Kabul. We had a conversation...

A column of frail women and children in brilliant cotton tunics deftly balance aluminum jars atop their heads as they trundle down a steep, eroded jungle hillside. They are spending most of their day in search of the area's most valuable commodity, clean drinking water. After hours of searching, what...

2/19/2008 Lahore, Pakistan:

Today Pakistan awoke under a spell of relief. The electoral results seem, at least for the time being, to have been accepted as a sounding defeat by the ruling PML-Q. Rather than people taking part in mass civil violence, it was business as usual in Lahore's...

February, 18th, 2008, Lahore, Pakistan:

February, 18th, 2008 Lahore: Pakistan-Along The Mall, Lahore's primary commercial strip, a cluster of curious traffic police stood watch upon the odd rickshaw and teenage cyclist. Normally choked with a riot of buzzing traffic, The Mall was eerily quiet as the polls opened this morning...

Lahore, Pakistan: Tomorrow morning millions of voters in Pakistan will cast their ballots in perhaps the most crucial vote in the nation's sixty years of independence. The bloody campaign season has been rocked by a series of well coordinated suicide attacks, the most notable of which killed former prime minister...