Afghanistan

Once again, the Bushies have trotted out the appeasement charge, comparing to Neville Chamberlain people who believe that the only hope of getting anywhere with adversaries is to engage in discussions. That Bush made this charge as a guest of a foreign government, especially an Israeli government where many of...

This afternoon, the House of Representatives made history. By an overwhelming margin, lawmakers passed the landmark new GI Bill which will make college affordable to the more than 1.6 million Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

As President Roosevelt said when he signed the original GI Bill for...

After the National Intelligence Estimate last November which reported that Iran had no nuclear program since 2003, many of us breathed a sigh of relief. It was official: When it came to attacking Iran, the administration hadn't a leg to stand on.

But, as with Iraq, it was used to...

It's Tuesday May 13, 2008 and on this day in history, The Beatles debuted the movie Let It Be in 1970 and back in 1943 German and Italian forces surrendered in Africa but that's nothing compared to what we have for you today.

Right now, it's 7:30 am here in...

When it comes to hypocritical "Support the Troops" rhetoric, I thought I'd seen it all. But I was wrong. This week, a small group of Democrats are using back door dealings to torpedo the widely-supported new GI Bill. For anyone new to the issue, here's the bottom line up...

For the five Afghans who returned home on the same flight as al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj and the other three prisoners described in my previous article, the future is disturbingly uncertain. As I reported last December, when 13 of their compatriots were released from Guantánamo, they, like the...

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...

Last week I told you about a press conference in which leading Republicans and Democrats got together to call for a new GI Bill. And I said we'd have to wait to see if action was going to follow up those words. Tomorrow, we find out.

Congress has...

Pakistan today is taking baby steps back to becoming a democracy again, after nearly eight years of the rule by fiat of General Pervez Musharraf, the "liberal autocrat". The Nigerian author Chinua Achebe put it very well: "Democracy is not something you put away for ten years, and then in...

I don't believe a word this administration says about Iran. We hear the Iranians are just moments away from flipping the switch on a nuclear weapons program. Then a national intelligence estimate discredits that theory. We hear they are funneling arms to the Iraqi insurgency and "special groups" (by the...

Sometimes it's just flat-out funny to watch the Bush administration spin when it comes to military operations. The New York Times reported this weekend that the U.S. could see a surge of troops into Afghanistan. Surely, groups like VoteVets.org have to be happy with that, right? I mean, since...

Imprisoned for six years without being charged or given a trial, Al Jazeera cameraman Sami Al Hajj was finally released from the US Navy prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The man, who was "emaciated," as his attorney said, because of his hunger strike...

Yesterday, amid all of the Mission Accomplished "nostalgia" and reports on the April death toll in Iraq hitting a new (recent) high of 50, one particular fatality in Afghanistan nearly escaped attention.

He was an Army Ranger on his seventh tour of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan. I did an...

The fall of the Taliban six years ago heralded new rights for Afghan women: no more beatings, no more repression, and no more mandatory burqas. But did their health and well-being improve?

More than 1,600 Afghan women die in childbirth out of every 100,000 live births. In some of the...