South Asia Archive

I’ve written before about what happens when sporting events and international relations collide. This morning, I ran across two articles that examine what might best be described as the underbelly of the global sports-industrial complex. One, in Der Spiegel, takes a look at the mixed impact that global demand for soccer balls has on the hand-stitchers of a Pakistani village that produces 40 million of them a year. That number goes up to 60 million during World Cup years. The other, by IRIN via AllAfrica.com, discusses an Ethiopian government report that found that human traffickers are using promises of a […]

BAGRAM, Afghanistan — Gov. Abdul Basir Salangi grew worried as the snow fell heavily in Afghanistan’s Parwan province on Feb. 8. Every day, some 14,000 cars, trucks and buses pass through Parwan’s Salang Pass — a system of winding roads and tunnels cutting through and over the Hindu Kush Mountains into northern Afghanistan. The snow could strand motorists, or even trap them in tunnels. In 1982, hundreds of people died when Soviet military convoys collided inside one of the tunnels. Vehicles idling behind the accident site filled the tunnel with carbon monoxide, suffocating the people inside. Salangi grabbed some security […]

WPR’s David Axe provides raw footage of Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne, attached to Task Force Gladius at Bagram as they patrol Parwan province. Axe’s most recent column discusses the challenges that face troops on the ground as the Afghanistan “surge” pushes forward.

BAGRAM, Afghanistan — Standing on a mountaintop, 1st Lt. Maximilian Soto swept his arm from side to side, indicating a 400-square-mile expanse of fields, rivers and streams surrounding the village of Estalef in Parwan province, just north of Kabul. “All this,” he said, “is mine.” With a force of just 26 men from the Special Troops Battalion of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, Soto provides security for a chunk of Afghanistan the size of a typical American county. “It’s quite difficult,” he told World Politics Review. In December, U.S. President Barack Obama announced he would be sending 30,000 new […]

National security types have long noted — and complained about — the relative lack of military veterans in Congress, which results in too few experienced votes being cast when the prospect of overseas interventions is raised. I have long noted — and complained about — the fact that Congress’ most prominent military vets hail from the Vietnam era, which has led many to instinctively reject the necessity and utility of conducting nation-building and counterinsurgency. Clearly, our lengthy interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan will alter this generational equation, but how will the experiences of today’s veterans impact their votes in tomorrow’s […]

NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff interviews U.S. Army Brigadier General Ben Hodges of the Southern Region Command in Kandahar about the Marjah offensive. Hodges says that the focus in Marjah is on governance, despite military operations, and that he expects a few more weeks of fighting there before the mission is complete. Furthermore, he says the tactics used to fight insurgents in Marjah will be used as a model for future offensives.

At an event last week at New York University, four men who know the Taliban better than most Westerners shared their perceptions of the group behind the insurgency fighting coalition forces in Afghanistan. What emerged was a portrait of shadowy figures, little understood by even those who have had close contact with the group. With “reintegration” now the “buzzword du jour” and calls for a negotiated settlement to the war gaining momentum, we have yet to understand just who it is we will be negotiating with. “We still understand very little about the Taliban,” said Alex Strick van Linschoten, echoing […]

It would be hard, under any circumstances, not to see this as a pretty significant development: The leader of anal-Qaida-linked Chinese militant group has been killed in a U.S. drone attack inPakistan’s restive tribal region, an official said on Monday. AbdulHaq al-Turkistani, the leader of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Party, and twocomrades died when a missile fired from a CIA-operated pilotless aircraft strucka vehicle in North Waziristan district Feb. 15. . . . Al-Turkistani hails from Uighur in China’s eastern province ofXinjiang. But in the current context of strained U.S.-China relations, as well as the need for China’s UNSC vote […]

The success of Operation Moshtarak, NATO’s military offensive to seize the Taliban-controlled town of Marjah in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, will be determined by how well coalition forces establish a functioning government now that the bulk of the actual fighting is over. Gen. Stanley McChrystal recently described the plan by saying, “We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in.” The concept of “government in a box,” or a functioning government ready for immediate deployment the moment combat operations end, is a novel one. Most of the attention lavished upon ISAF’s plans, however, has focused on the man chosen […]