Michael Hughes

The U.S. has been financing both sides of the war in Afghanistan since 2001 as a startling percentage of foreign aid continues to flood Taliban coffers on a daily basis, according to Douglas A. Wissing in his new book, Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban.

A U.S. House Foreign Affairs committee hearing held last week on human rights violations in Balochistan elicited predictably defensive reactions from Pakistan after the proceedings exposed the brutality of the sub-colonial racist ethos the country's Punjabi elite inherited from their British overlords. According to Pakistan's rulers and right-wing...

GOP candidate and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a self-styled "ideas man," proclaimed after his South Carolina victory that he was running on a platform of "American exceptionalism" -- an intellectually shoal paradigm that makes "Yes We Can!" seem downright Emersonian.

But it would seem any Republican candidate to be...

Iraq war apologists are capitalizing on last week's bombings in Baghdad to blast President Obama for allowing the premature mass exodus of American combat troops from Mesopotamia -- a decision that will purportedly enable Al Qaeda to flourish and cause the people of Iraq endless suffering. But these war lovers...

Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald's novel The Voice takes its audience on a quest for the real Holy Grail, entwining scientific mythology with geopolitical intrigue in an esoteric thrill-ride Dan Brown couldn't dream up, as a frustrated journalist unravels a 5,000-year-old mystery involving Templar knights, Celtic priests and...

If you thought their economic plans were disastrous, wait until you get a load of the foreign policy doctrines Republican presidential candidates bandied about during their most recent primary debate. Bombing Iran, abating foreign aid to zero, intimidating China and torturing people are just a few examples of what GOP...

It was a surreal sight to behold -- a Muslim woman bedecked in black abaya and full veil whilst hobbling on Louboutin red soles in a Doha market where Bedouin were selling spices and fabrics next door to Sri Lankans peddling designer jewelry. Then again Qatar is the land of...

Although for one to suggest the U.S. had any alternatives to leveling Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 is to invite ridicule, legendary Afghan resistance commander Abdul Haq had, in fact, an indigenous remedy for overthrowing the Taliban, rounding up al Qaeda and establishing a legitimate government in Kabul.

Although his recent New York Times polemic slamming Afghan war critics is entitled "This War Can Still Be Won," Army Special Forces Major Fernando M. Luján makes an interesting admission near the end of his piece when he concedes that "winning" is a meaningless word when it comes...

For some yet unknown reason the mainstream press would have you believe Afghan peace czar Burhanuddin Rabbani's assassination has doomed the reconciliation process and any chances for peace in Afghanistan -- which is an absurdity given the fact such a process never truly existed anyway.

From the New York Times...

The Taliban's recent 20-hour siege of Kabul featured an RPG barrage against the U.S. embassy, prompting some analysts to draw parallels to the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Reason being, in 1968, despite the presence of 500,000 American troops, the Vietcong were able to launch audacious attacks...

"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." -- Friedrich Nietzsche

There is no moral justification for the mass slaughter that took place on the morning of September 11, 2001, when sadistic religious zealots murdered...

Afghan native and humanitarian award winner Hasan Nouri waited nearly 25 years to see Osama bin Laden brought to justice for the murder of his dear friend, journalist Jim Lindelof. However, Nouri's joy has been fleeting, vitiated by the reality that the blood of innocents continues to stain the streets...

Although President Barack Obama's 2009 Cairo address to the Islamic world was designed to invigorate U.S.-Arab relations, America's capricious policies in the face of pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East have betrayed his words.

Obama heralded a new beginning based upon shared principles of truth, justice and progress....

"Political interest can never be separated in the long run from moral right." --Thomas Jefferson

Although Afghanistan achieved de jure independence in 1919 after a 40-year stint as a British protectorate, Afghan self-determination has been ruthlessly undermined for the past three decades by external actors bent on satiating the geopolitical...

President Barack Obama's recent announcement to drawdown troops in Afghanistan struck an aporetic chord in Pakistan due to fears the U.S. will offset this deescalation by intensifying its covert war across the border -- a strategy which features a CIA drone program designed to execute high-value extremist targets sanctuaried in...

The United Nations Security Council is suffering from what experts are calling the Libya hangover effect, a disorder chiefly symptomized by deafening silence and decisional paralysis, which has neutered the Security Council in the face of Syria's widespread violent repression, impeding the passage of any type of resolution...

U.S. officials are in a panic trying to find the elusive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar because he's the only individual, in their minds, with sufficient authority to bless a political settlement on behalf of most Afghan insurgents. However, Omar's whereabouts remain a mystery -- presuming he's still...

Afghan-American scholar Jawied Nawabi once quipped the only attribute that distinguishes Afghan president Hamid Karzai from the Taliban is beard length -- a sentiment shared by Naseem Pashtoon Sharifi who fled Kandahar to avoid being assassinated for daring to threaten the Karzai family's commercial concerns. That...

When NATO vaticinated that Muammar Gaddafi was on the cusp of filicide U.S. leaders felt morally obligated to bomb Libya -- a double standard of historic proportions considering they've stood idly by while Pakistan conducts systemic slaughter in Balochistan province in what historian Selig Harrison has described as...