Pashtun

As an anthropologist conducting research in Afghanistan, I find that whenever the gaze of the international media falls on Afghan women I feel uncomfortable.

The U.S. war in Afghanistan is one of three U.S. wars against low-income countries (Vietnam war and Iraq war) which posed no security threat to the U...

The propensity in the U.S. to conflate Islam with violence precludes the possibility of nonviolent Muslim protest motivated by an internal incentive, be it secular or religious. However, the concept of nonviolence is not foreign or new to Muslims.

The question now is; who should control all of Southern Afghanistan's tribal structure, and ultimately attempt to sooth tensions over what will soon become the full political formation and structure.

Drone attacks are wrong. I'm sure to be called an appeaser of terrorists for saying that, particularly in light of the latest events in Mumbai. But I ...

For centuries the inner-cohesion and tribal balance of the Pashtuns, Afghanistan's ethnic majority, has been maintained by an ancient tribal code of honor called Pashtunwali, or "way of the Pashtuns".

To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, the U.S. is on the wrong road, and it should do an about-turn and walk back to the right road. Whoever turns back soonest is the most progressive.

CNN provided me with an advance copy of their "Taliban" documentary and arranged a discussion with filmmaker, Paul Refsdal, who risked his life embedding himself in a Taliban fighting unit -- a move supposedly blessed by Taliban leadership.

Now that America is in full mid-term election frenzy, expect more calls for tougher US military action in "AfPak." Already unpopular politicians are terrified of being branded "soft on terrorism".

By placing a high premium on a new political path to victory, General Petraeus turned the Iraqi Sunni population -- the backbone of the insurgency -- against al-Qaida and other anti-Western extremist militants.

It is not unusual for US interpreters in Afghanistan to be ignorant of the languages they claimed to be fluent in. Faking understanding of a foreign language is a common vanity.

I came to Afghanistan with the expectation that I would be able to play the "Muslim card" and build alliances easily. Not exactly so.

Afghanistan's history offers ample evidence of resistance against the old colonial motto: divide and rule. Partition would be an invitation to a Russian roulette in the regional nuclear club.

Karzai, U.S. clash over anti-corruption force. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has ordered an investigation into the Afghan Major Crimes Task Force, whi...

The Obama administration needs to modify its "belief about the moral benefit and policy utility of nation-building." You do not have to engage in the grandiose project of nation-building in order to achieve our limited goals.

I am the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. You can read my work on The Seminal or at Rethink Afghanistan. The view...

The U.S.'s policy setbacks provide a great gift to the Iranian clerical rulers by helping them enhance their clout and expand their international maneuvering space against the West.

The whole Strategic Dialogue is a farce. We're not accomplishing any of our national security goals in the AfPak region, we're actually making our problems worse!

A coalition government in Afghanstan, while supposedly offering the best of both worlds, tacitly condones an illegitimate election and would require America to broker power among competing personalities.

That failure has finally occurred in Afghanistan and the consequences will be devastating, yet Washington continues along in a dreamlike haze, narrowing the argument to simplistic Vietnam era clichés while the world moves on without it.

I was an early supporter of yours. So I hope you will accept the following analysis and proposals as being from a friend as well as a person with cons...