He didn't look pleased, said a local paper about Afghan President Hamid Karzai's reaction to Obama's election victory. The KabulPress website went even further, saying the whole presidential palace in Kabul is mourning the Republicans' defeat in Washington. If I were Karzai, I too would be upset. No more happy...

Americans have a new strategic plan for the region, said newspapers in Afghanistan recently. For the first time the US has shifted the focus of the "war on terror" to the Pakistani border regions, they explained. This is big news, so when I combed the Afghan press, I expected to...

A few months ago I wrote an enthusiastic article about Barack Obama for the Huffington Post. In response a poster said: "You mean the same Obama who didn't even know that Afghanistan doesn't need Arabic translators because they don't speak Arabic?" Ouch, I thought. But then came this post: "At...

"I don't understand how anybody can dislike the US," said a senior Oxford academic I met in 2003. His position at the university required a great deal of traveling - he had seen the world and was an intelligent man. So how is it he failed to comprehend a basic...