One of the news stories drawing my attention today is a report in the New York Times suggesting that Afghanistan has almost US$1 trillion worth of mineral deposits. The article, citing US geologists, lists iron, copper, cobalt, gold, and lithium as existing in vast quantities in the country’s soil. Lithium in particular has been highlighted,… [Read more]

There was a time when audio or video messages issued by Osama bin Laden would be front-page news, and we’d all wonder if a new al-Qaeda terror attack was imminent. However, in recent years, a widespread belief has developed that bin Laden is irrelevant, and that the real terror threat to the West comes from… [Read more]

In case you didn’t notice, Sunday December 27 marked the 30th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which we now know was a pivotal event in world history. It was partly with this anniversary in mind that I recently read Artyom Borovik’s The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in… [Read more]

US President Barack Obama is stepping up the war in Afghanistan by sending an additional 30,000 American troops there in the first half of 2010, on top of the 68,000 already there. Other Western countries have around 40,000 troops in Afghanistan. Soon, the Western troop deployment will exceed peak Soviet occupation levels of 110,000-120,000 in… [Read more]

As US President Barack Obama ponders whether to send an additional 40,000+ American troops to Afghanistan, the bigger question is whether the US really has enough troops to neutralise its enemies. The US has a demonstrable ability to defeat conventional military forces in places such as Iraq (1991, 2003), Serbia (1999) and Afghanistan (2001), but… [Read more]

Pakistan is one of the most geopolitically important countries in the world today, and how it evolves will affect a whole range of strategic issues. These include: The future of political Islam The fate of Afghanistan The spread of nuclear weapons The economic development of South Asia The development of energy resources in Central Asia… [Read more]

Eight years after the ‘9/11’ terror attacks, the outcome of the subsequent ‘War on Terror’ is still inconclusive. Overall, I have not really changed my view from the blog post I wrote on the seventh anniversary. Neither ‘the West’ and its allied governments nor al-Qaeda and its offshoots have scored a decisive blow. In any… [Read more]