The Londoner

By Sikander Hayat United States has declared that at the end of 2014, its army footprint in Afghanistan will be negli gi ble, contained in the designated bases and mostly in training capacity. American army will still have air cover, in case they get attacked by the rebels. At the same time, in theory at least, Afghanistan should have a new president as Hamid Karzai has already nearly completed his two allowed terms. What new alliance would bring about that new president is still to be seen. A ticket with a Pa shtun as president and a Tajik as vice president will have the most chance of winning and will be a stable choice. Anything else will make matters worse especially if Karzai tried to bring forward his own family members or loyalist to the fore. Provided the former scenario takes hold, a stable government is achieved and America leaves as promised, there is a good chance that Afghanistan despite its nascent state and infrastructure will be able to cope with t

The announcement of significant new Israeli settlement construction in East Jerusalem has put the spotlight on the city, but the changes it has undergone since 2000, when the parties first negotiated its fate, are far broader and have far deeper roots.  Israelis, Palestinians and the international community must adjust their strategies accordingly, or Arab East Jerusalem will continue its perilous decline, with catastrophic consequences for all. A pair of companion reports from the International Crisis Group describes how East Jerusalem has been altered in recent years, physically, but also socially, politically and emotionally. Extreme Makeover? (I): Israel’s Politics of Land and Faith in East Jerusalem , shows how the combination of Israeli settlement construction around and within East Jerusalem and increased religious activism has raised the costs of any future plan entailing partitioning the city. Extreme Makeover? (II): The Withering of Arab Jerusalem describes

If there is one man who deserves the credit for the growing Turkish-Kurd rapprochement , it’s Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani of Iraqi Kurdistan . Five years ago Kurds and foreigners alike laughed in his face when he told them that not only did he want Iraqi Kurdistan to export its own oil , but that he wanted to export it to Turkey , which has had an intractable problem with its own large Kurdish minority . Barzani’s strategy was one of patience: starting with confidence-building with the Turks and then coaxing small oil companies and then larger ones to risk Baghdad’s ire to drill for oil not only in the autonomous region but in territory disputed by both Barzani’s government and the Iraqi central government. Barzani sat down with TIME on December 13 to talk about the Turks, his stormy relationship with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the potential for an independent Kurdish state –and how that would affect members of the non-Arab ethnicity , which lives in

After all this misery, how can Syrians live together again? Part of his job was to ensure that religious clerics did not preach outside the government's line. If they did, he would unleash his men to arrest and torture them - and then monitor them for the rest of their lives. "We're fighting Wahhabism whenever we find it," the officer once told a new graduate in Sharia studies , who had visited him to build trust and avoid any future arrest. This young imam , now a commander of an anti-regime faction, says this officer acted with the callous, pathological arrogance characteristic of the Baathist regime . Then in mid-November, Abu Imad and 20 of his crew were killed in a battle with the Free Syrian Army . His body, dumped in the street, lay there for days; no one was willing to bury it. Scenes like that may bring closure to those whose kinsfolk or friends have been killed by the regime's forces in the most brutal ways imaginable. Many hope to

Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe triumphantly returned to power this week, five years after a humiliating resignation from office. His Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) , which ruled Japan for over half a century before losing the Lower House to the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in 2009, won a landslide victory that gives it a supermajority in the Japanese parliament. Yet the vote appears more to be a punishment for the failures of the DPJ than a reflection of deep support for the LDP. Given voter dissatisfaction with all of Japan's political parties, Abe and the LDP have a small window to convince the public that they have the answers to what ails Japan. Abe needs to hit the ground running. In particular, there are three things he should focus on: One: Economy, economy, economy Japan's voters are concerned most with the state of the economy and their personal finances. After two decades of economic stagnation , and a country that has sunk back

The Chinese government is rapidly building a bigger, more sophisticated military . Here’s what they have, what they want, and what it means for the U.S. In a single generation, China has transformed itself from a largely agrarian country into a global manufacturing and trading powerhouse . China’s economy is 20 times bigger than it was two decades ago and is on track to surpass the United States’ as the world’s largest. But perhaps most startling has been the growth of China’s ambitious and increasingly powerful military . Just 10 years ago, the budget for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was roughly $20 billion. Today, that number is more like $100 billion. (Some analysts think it’s closer to $160 billion.) The PLA’s budget is only a sixth of what the U.S. devotes to defense annually, but defense dollars go much further in China, and in the years ahead, Chinese military spending will grow at the same rate as its economy. Meanwhile,

Christmas will be more widely celebrated in China this year than at any time in memory. Everyone who claims any knowledge of the subject believes that the number of Chinese Christians has been growing steadily over the last decade. Communist bureaucrats harass Christians , isolate them, try to manipulate and divide them. And yet by the standards of recent decades, Chinese Christianity now seems remarkably resilient. No one knows how many Chinese are Christian . The State Administration for Religious Affairs, which supervises all religion, says there are about 25 million, apparently the government’s optimistic understatement. Christian activists , on their many blogs, claim 50 million to 100 million. The Global Religious Landscape , a demographic study released this week by the Pew Research Center, estimates 68 million, based on 2010 data. Whatever the real number, no one denies the memorable comparison made on the BBC in September by Tim Gardam, a journalist and

" ... Young guerrilla girl Kumsuni delivers letters to comrades, and one day is caught by the police. When the policemen demand the girl disclose information about the guerillas , she spits into the faces of her interrogators. As the policemen drag Kumsuni to her execution, the heroic girl cries out ' Long Live General Kim Il Sung! '" ...Pre-teen boy Ri Kwang-ch'un is a member of a secret anti-Japanese children's organization. Along with others, he helps the "Red Guard uncles". However, one day policemen apprehend the boy. When the "bastards" tortur

PESHAWAR, Pakistan -- Militants launched a coordinated assault on the main airport in the northwest city of Peshawar late Saturday, killing at least five people and injuring 45 others in an attack likely to renew questions about the government’s ability to combat Pakistan’s five-year insurgency. [Updated 11:57 a.m. Dec. 15: Authorities later raised the death toll to nine -- four civilians and five militants. ] Militants fired a volley of rocket-propelled grenades at Bacha Khan International Airport, damaging a section of the boundary wall, said Information Minister Iftikhar Hussain. The airport is also home to an air base used by the Pakistani air force. No aircraft were damaged in the attack, and after a couple of hours troops had secured the airport and surrounding area, Hussain said. There was no word as of late Saturday night where those who were killed or injured were at the time of the attack, but local authorities said most of the rocket fire hit houses

A woman shows off her ink-marked finger after voting in Egypt’s referendum. Photograph: Andre Pain/EPA Egyptians lined up in their thousands on Saturday to vote on a controversial new constitution that has pitted the government and its Islamist supporters against liberal and secular opponents in a bitter struggle over the way ahead for the Arab world's biggest country after the 2011 revolution. President Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who succeeded the deposed Hosni Mubarak last June, cast his ballot on the new basic law in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis shortly after the polls opened and was shown on state TV emerging with his finger dipped in ink, a measure to prevent fraud. Elsewhere in the capital there were long queues outside polling stations, where many supporters of the constitution said they were voting &

Bloomberg is reporting that Chuck Hagel will "likely to be nominated as Secretary of Defense" having passed through the White House vetting process. The former senator from Nebraska will likely be touted as a bipartisan choice, though Hagel is hardly beloved by the GOP establishment these days and leading Republicans will likely be skeptical of many of his foreign-policy views, particularly on Iran. The National Review quotes a senior congressional aide: “This is someone who will be extremely skeptical of the idea that, if push comes to shove, we should use military force against Iran... Fairly or not, if Senator Hagel is nominated by the president to be secretary of defense, it will be broadly viewed as a signal that the United States is not going to use military force to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.”  Is that a fair description? Hagel did say during a 2006 visit to Pakistan that "a military strike against Iran, a m

On Monday, North Korea announced it was extending the window for its rocket launch due to a technical glitch. On Tuesday, South Korean intelligence officials announced there were indications that the rocket was being dismantled. On Wednesday, North Korea conducted the missile test, which it carried out successfully. What happened here? It could be that this false delay was all about China. North Korea originally announced the missile test only a day after a high-level meeting in Pyongyang between Kim Jong Un and Wang Jiarui, head of the Chinese Communist Party’s International Department. Beijing, in the midst of a leadership transition and already dealing with a period of tense relations with its neighbors and the United States, must have been furious. Although publicly China adopted a mild approach to the coming missile test, behind the scenes it may well have been exerting significant pressure on Pyongyang to scrap the launch. While Beijing does have leverage

Narciso Contreras / AP A Free Syrian Army fighter offers evening prayers beside a damaged poster of Syria’s President Bashar Assad during heavy clashes with government forces in Aleppo, Dec. 8, 2012. On the night of Nov. 29, a dozen Syrian opposition figures gathered at a student eatery in Moscow called Picasso, a cheap dive on the campus of the University of People’s Friendship whose walls are decorated with a mashup of images from the artist’s blue period. It may sound odd that enemies of Bashar Assad were gathering in a country that still had the dictator’s back. But these men and their organization may be Russia ’s only hope of influence in a post-Assad Syria. As young men, several of the Syrians at Picasso had studied at the university, which hosted the exchange programs that formed the early bonds between Moscow and Damascus in the 1960s. Indeed, the gathering could have been mistaken for a class reunion, as toa

Americans wondering why North Korea has gotten away with building A-bombs and ballistic missiles—like the one it successfully tested Tuesday—need only consider Jeff Immelt.  The day before the missile launch, the CEO of General Electric and friend of President Obama endorsed China’s economic model and said “state-run communism may not be your cup of tea, but their government works.” What do the unpatriotic sentiments of GE’s boss have to do with U.S. policy toward North Korea? Both are based on the faulty but soothing assumption held by the elite establishment in American government and big business: that China is our partner. Two successive administrations—Bush and Obama—have based U.S. policy on North Korea on supposed Chinese cooperation. The theory is that Beijing doesn’t want North Korea armed with effective nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles any more than Washington or its allies, and will thus be of help. In 2003, Washington kicked off six-way talks hoping to

It is strange now to recall the jubilation with which the ‘Arab Spring’ was welcomed. Amid all the excitement of dictators toppling, many people here in the West, as well as some over there on the ground, forgot that the test of a revolution is not the overthrow of a tyrant, but what comes next. Though they will never admit it, the Arab revolutions surprised western governments as much as the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe. History is always producing the unexpected, which is why some of us never took it for granted that all this would have a happy ending. Now, almost two years after the Tahrir Square uprising, the fates of the revolutions and the region are at a deadly junction. The West’s swift initial support for the Egyptian rebels was understandable. First, because of the fresh memory of our failure to back the Green reform movement in Iran. But second, because it is just so easy to imagine from a position of comfort that when a dictator falls, a de

Mohammed Morsi may be the president of Egypt, but it's the Muslim Brotherhood that appears to be calling the shots. The Islamist group waited decades for a shot at power in the country and it isn't about to yield without a fight. He calls himself Sharif. He is a young man without a beard who wears a hoodie and athletic shoes. He doesn't look anything like a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but rather like one of those young revolutionaries his men are assaulting with stones, sticks and steel rods. ANZEIGE Sharif says that he hates these liberals and leftists, who began protesting against the Muslim Brotherhood and its president, Mohammed Morsi, after he acquired sweeping new powers through a decree issued in late November. Over the weekend, Morsi moved to rescind that decree, replacing it with a weaker one. But opposition protests have hardly abated as a referendum on the country'