Articles

Beyond the drum-beating and chest thumping about what a great job the Canadian soldiers did in Afghanistan, the question that needs to be asked is: what exactly did they achieve despite spending $20 billion on a war that is still raging and the Afghans are no better off today, in fact much worse, than they were 10 years ago?

Over the past year the political scene in Azerbaijan has been dominated by two centers of power: the autocratic regime centered around Aliyev and the Islamic movement centered around activists, journalists, scholars, lawyers and the wider Azeri population.

Given the straightjacket in which Abbas and his disgraced cohorts operate, not only is it entirely unlikely for him to defy Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it is hard to imagine he possesses any courage to defy his paymasters.

A large percentage of Muslims worldwide have become quite enamored with the phenomenon of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the political party — the Development and Justice Party (AKP) — he leads in Turkey.

After distorting the teachings of their own religion, Christianity, and then abandoning it all together, the Western world is now busy trying to give the same treatment to Islam in order to subvert it.

In the grand old days of colonialism, European nations used all sorts of elaborate excuses for occupying the fabulously wealthy territories of Africa and Asia. Rudyard Kipling called it the “white man’s burden” to transmit (European) culture and civilization to the unwashed natives.

Soon after the so-called Arab Spring began to blossom, Turkey’s popularity has been on the rise in the Arab world. Since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) was first elected in 2002, Turkey with its flourishing democracy, and rapidly growing economic and military might has become an emerging regional power.

Zainab Cheema reviews Timothy H. Parsons’ The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, And Why They Always Fail, published by Oxford University Press, 2010 (480 pages, hard cover, $29.95). Scholarship on empire is a veritable industry.

Even as Zionist Israel loses international support because of its cruel siege of Gaza, and is internally convulsed by strikes, one policy constant is its attacks on unarmed civilian Palestinians. On August 18, a series of airstrikes were launched against Gaza killing almost a dozen people including several children.

With America’s departure from Afghanistan now almost certain, new alignments are beginning to emerge among regional players aimed at securing the most favorable outcome for each country. Islamic Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan are in the forefront of this effort but Russia, China and the Central Asian republics are not far behind either.