This paper is part of a MEI scholar series titled “The Middle East and the 2016 Presidential Elections.”
According to the UN’s World Urbanization Prospects 2014, there are 28 “megacities” worldwide (i.e., urban agglomerations with populations in excess of 10 million). By 2030 another dozen will likely be added to their ranks.
This article first appeared on NPR’s Parallels blog.
U.S. troops in Afghanistan lowered the flag and boxed up their gear at the end of last year as President Obama declared the formal end to 13 years of U.S. combat operations.
This article was first published on Foreign Policy’s South Asia Channel.
This article was first published on Foreign Policy‘s South Asia Channel.
This article surveys and critically evaluates sectarian conflicts and trends in Balochistan during the War on Terror, concentrating primarily on the predominantly Shi‘i Hazara community based in Quetta.
Read full article at LobeLog.
In the unending panorama of violence that is today’s Middle East, one hopeful note emerged earlier this month with a low-key announcement from Saudi Arabia that drew scant attention from the American news media.
King Salman appointed a military officer, Gen. Thamer al-Sabhan, to be the kingdom’s first resident ambassador in Baghdad since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.
Soon after Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah formed a unity government in Afghanistan in September 2014, there were signs of rapprochement between Kabul and Islamabad. When President Ghani visited Pakistan in November, he went to the army’s headquarters in Rawalpindi and laid a wreath at the monument to the country’s fallen soldiers—an indication that the Kabul government had come to an understanding with the Pakistani army, which controls the country’s Afghan policy.
On May 13, more than 40 people were killed and at least 13 injured in a gun attack on a bus carrying members of the minority Ismaili Shi‘i sect in Karachi, Pakistan. This was not the deadliest attack of the year, as that dubious honor goes to a suicide bombing in a district in Sindh, which left 61 Shi‘a dead in January. Yet the brazen nature of the attack―carried out in daylight in the bustling megacity of Karachi by gunmen who reportedly boarded the bus and shot at passengers indiscriminately―was striking even in a country where over 2,000 people have been killed and 3,500 injured in sectarian attacks in the past five years.
This article was first published on Foreign Policy‘s South Asia Channel.
April 23, 2015 – Marvin Weinbaum, director of the Center for Pakistan Studies at The Middle East Institute, explains Pakistan’s decision not to provide military aid for Saudi Arabia’s operation in Yemen, and how Prime Minister Sharif is working to repair relations with Riyadh.
This article was first published on Foreign Policy’s South Asia Channel.
This article, co-written by James P. Farwell, was first published by The National Interest.
Shot in both legs, Shahruh Khan survived the Taliban attack on the Army Public School in Peshawar, Pakistan. “The man with big boots,” Al Jazeera quoted Khan as saying, “kept on looking for students and pumping bullets into their bodies.”
