CESRAN Int.

Zarif Nazar and Charles Recknagel In many parts of Afghanistan, living near the border brings advantages.   Villagers can earn money from the cross-border trade as merchants or as carriers. Even...

  Ahmed Rashid Here is the real dilemma faced by the Western alliance in its continuing war against terrorism. Pakistan's military dictator, General Pervaiz Musharraf, has been responsible for the...

  Ahmed Rashid President Pervez Musharraf again finds himself in the eye of the storm. Al-Qa'eda is baying for his blood as a result of the carnage inside the Red...

Ahmed Rashid As Obama announces an aggressive counter terror campaign in Afghanistan, the region’s most dangerous nation—Pakistan—gets more grim by the day. Ahmed Rashid on President Zardari’s loss of control. In...

Ahmed Rashid There was no warning of the bombings in London. The British intelligence service MI5 did not pick up any proverbial chatter, as usually talkative terrorists discuss the last...

Ahmed Rashid   IN AFGHANISTAN: a war going in the wrong direction, a fatally flawed election, reconstruction at a standstill and a growing political vacuum that the Taliban is filling...

Ahmed Rashid   Nawaz Sharif is not part of the American script for the war on terror and the future of Pakistan, written by mandarins in the US State Department....

Ahmed Rashid Visits from three senior U.S. officials in three weeks indicate troubles in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. Washington has failed to deliver on the regional strategy it promised this spring,...

Francis Fukuyama I am probably the only person in the United States who actually likes the fact that President Obama set an 18 month timetable for the beginning of a...

Sergei Blagov  Russia wants to turn a newly minted Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan into its major vehicle for post-Soviet economic integration in Central Eurasia. Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus signed...

Ahmed Rashid   Switch on any of the dozens of satellite news channels now available in Pakistan.   You will be bombarded with talk show hosts who are mostly obsessed...

Sean Maroney    Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission says it has canceled the presidential runoff, originally scheduled for this Saturday. The announcement came a day after President Hamid Karzai's challenger, former foreign...

The military said that the explosion in Bajaur was caused by a vehicle packed with explosives [AFP]   Pakistan's military has denied that a US drone attack was behind the deaths of as...

Karzai agreed to take part in a second and decisive round of voting after talks with US officials [AFP]   The senior US envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan has said...

Deirdre Tynan   The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) is undergoing a metamorphosis that could transform the Islamic militant group into a far more dynamic foe for Central Asian governments, as...