As part of what appears to be something of international PR tour, delegates from the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) – the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood – spoke at Chatham House on Wednesday 28th last week in their first official visit to the UK, discussing the challenges faced by Egypt’s burgeoning democracy,
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On 11 March, a 38-year-old staff sergeant in the United States Army broke into three compounds in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan and killed 16 civilians, including nine children and three women. The incident has sparked reactions in both Afghanistan and in Washington, D.C.. The real impact of the shooting has yet to unfold. It may have
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The United States Army and Marine Corps deployed hundreds of small, throwable robots and robotic surveillance systems for use in foot patrols in Afghanistan in November 2011. The Pentagon and the Joint IED Defeat Organization commissioned ReconRobotics to design a system to counter attacks on ground troops. The programme cost the Pentagon $13.4 million. Foot
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On November 25, NATO aircraft hit two Pakistani border posts between Kunar Province in Afghanistan and Mohmand in Pakistan. The incident occurred when a joint Afghan-ISAF operation in Kunar called in NATO air support against insurgents which inadvertently hit the posts killing 24 Pakistani troops. In retaliation, Pakistan has closed the trans-border routes to NATO
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Ten years after UN delegates at the initial conference in Bonn, Germany discussed the fate of Afghanistan, over 1,000 international representatives began proceedings on 5 December in the west German city to ponder similar problems facing the Central Asian nation. Both the United States and United Kingdom have set withdrawal dates for their troops in
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On Monday 23 January, 150 medieval Jewish documents from the 11th century were discovered to be smuggled out of Afghanistan’s Samangan province. The cache includes poems, commercial records and other documents that may have originated from Silk Road merchants. The material may be useful in uncovering previously unknown details about Afghan Jewish civilization in the
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On Friday 27 January, President Nicolas Sarkozy announced that France will withdraw all its troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2013, a year before its drawdown was intended to take place. The decision came on the heels of the deaths of four French soldiers at the hands of the Afghan soldier they were training.
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Egypt has suffered under the continuous State of Emergency Law since 1980 when it was brought in after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. And so the news that Field Marshal Tantawi announced he would “end the state of emergency starting on the morning of January 25, 2012″ sounded as if it was another step
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  As the MPs pledged their loyalty to serve the Egyptian nation in the newly elected Parliament on Monday (23rd January), almost a year to the day since the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, political divisions and cracks were already beginning to show. A number of parliamentarians added their own personal flourishes to the scripted oaths,
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On 19th December, ‘Capital Talk’, one of Pakistan’s most watched current affairs programs, aired a special episode on Balochistan, focussing on statements made by Baloch leader Attaullah Mengal that the Pakistan army was committing atrocities in the province. The next day, Hamid Mir, the anchor of the program, received the following message on his Blackberry:
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