What a May Day: Bin Laden dead

If Public Enemy #1 is dead, can Zawahiri be far behind?  I wonder if Zawahiri is in a larger city like Peshawar or Rawalpindi, but not anywhere near Abbottabad, given that his height and weight could help him merge with the locals ...
Funny though how quickly Wikipedia is updated, but not the FBI pages :)


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Reuters reports:

Osama bin Laden was hiding out in a mansion near a Pakistani military training academy and less than two hours' drive from Islamabad when he was killed in a dramatic CIA-led operation involving helicopters and ground troops on Sunday night. ...

"After midnight, a large number of commandos encircled the compound. Three helicopters were hovering overhead. All of a sudden there was firing toward the helicopters from the ground," said Nasir Khan, a resident of the town.
"There was intense firing and then I saw one of the helicopters falling down," said Khan, who had watched the dramatic scene unfold from his rooftop.
Senior Pakistani security officials said the operation, carried out at around 1:30 a.m., involved both helicopters and ground troops.

Reuters reports that "Express 24/7 television showed an image of what it said was bin Laden shot in the head, his mouth pulled back in a grimace."  


VOA adds:

Pakistan English-language television station Express 24/7 says two of bin Laden's wives and six of his children have been detained by U.S. forces. The station reports four of the terrorist leader's aides have also been arrested.
Express 24/7 says the neighborhood where the fight took place has been cordoned off and residents have been advised to stay in their houses.

 A report from Pakistan (ht)

Your next vacation spot? NOT!

What a wonderfully scenic photo, right?  Doesn't it make you want to pack your suitcase, dust off that passport, and head to the airport right away?

Don't.

This, says the NY Times, is a photo of
The village of Rihab in Wadi Dawan, a valley that is the ancestral home of Bin Laden.

I have blogged quite a few times about Yemen.  (editor: do you know if anyone actually reads them though?!!!)
Anyway, back to Yemen, which is where that bin Laden village is located.  I loved this description of the country in that NY Times piece:

Beneath the familiar Arab iconography, like pictures of the president that hang in every shop, there is a wildness about the place, a feeling that things might come apart at any moment. A narcotic haze descends on Yemen every afternoon, as men stuff their mouths with glossy khat leaves until their cheeks bulge and their eyes glaze over. Police officers sit down and ignore their posts, a green dribble running down their chins. Taxi drivers get lost and drive in circles, babbling into their cellphones. But if not for the opiate of khat, some say, all of Yemen - not just those areas of the south and north already smoldering with discontent - would explode into rebellion.

If not for the fact that this is one messed-up country, this paragraph would qualify as one of the best travel-writings ...
Oh, BTW, the title of the NY Times piece?  "Is Yemen the Next Afghanistan?"
The answer is a no-brainer!

We do too little for the place we all should call home: Africa

Register Guard, Dec 27, 2009

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — When students asked me about my winter break plans, my favorite reply was a simple one-liner: “I am going home.”

Their typical response was something along the lines of, “Oh, how long will you be in India?” That is all the opening I needed to engage them in a discussion of how Africa is the “home” for all humans. The “roots” of Alex Haley’s Kunta Kinte are connected to our own collective narrative as well.

Tanzania offers a compelling argument for why it is home to humans — going back to hominids, who were human-like precursors to our kind. The evidence, in this case, includes the well-preserved footprints of hominids in northern Tanzania, estimated to be 3.75 million years old.

Further, with coffee having originated in Ethiopia, the stretch of Africa that includes Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia is an important ancestral home to this avid coffee drinking human.

Tanzania is merely one country in the African continent, and at almost a million square kilometers, Tanzania has about four times the area of Oregon. Yes, four times — that is how large the country is. Dar es Salaam, the capital city, and its neighboring region has a population roughly equal to that of the entire state of Oregon. One can, therefore, easily imagine the challenge at the very early stages of planning the trip — how choose the parts of Tanzania to visit over the three weeks I will spend here. Of course, I am here to focus on a research question, but more on this later.

As I continued to work on my going-home travel plans, I brought in Africa and Tanzania as examples at the appropriate moments in my classroom during the recently concluded fall term. For instance, during a discussion on global climate change, I used maps to point out that the electricity consumption in New York City alone was equal to the consumption in all of sub- Saharan Africa, with the exception of South Africa. Yes, it caught the students’ attention.

Students’ response has been the same over the years: They are excited to learn about the continent of Africa when provided with the chance, and utterly disappointed if there is nothing presented despite their genuine interest in learning more. I remember one African-American student in particular who was visibly disappointed that there was nothing about Africa in the schedule of social science classes.

Even if the rest of us are not like that student, who was innately driven to understand Africa, the post-Sept. 11 world in which we live requires us to give Africa the attention it deserves. I hope that we have not forgotten the significant pre-Sept. 11 incidents in Africa. First, in 1998, came the near- simultaneous bombings at the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, Kenya, the work of al-Qaeda. Responding to these incidents, President Bill Clinton ordered missile strikes on precise locations in Sudan in an attempt to neutralize Osama bin Laden. Ten years later, al-Qaeda sympathizers have yet another safe haven in Somalia. Its capital, Mogadishu, has earned notoriety as the world’s most dangerous place.

From an economic perspective, Tanzania and most of Africa seem to be falling behind the rest of the world. Globalization, which columnist Thomas Friedman popularly refers to as the world getting flatter, has delivered a double whammy to Africa. On the one hand, the trend of globalization has further pushed the heavily populated nations of China and India closer to the United States and Europe. On the other hand, most African countries rarely register a blip in our academic and journalistic radars. The economic playing field does not seem to have been leveled for Tanzania and most of the rest of Africa.

Yet we continue to marginalize Africa, even though doing so serves neither our academic interests nor the geopolitical interests that govern our realpolitik. I suppose the election of Barack Obama as president has given us a wonderful opportunity: Instead of arguing over where he was born, why not channel all that energy into understanding Africa?

Wouldn’t we want to know more about our roots? 

Remembrance of things past--the White House

In 1994, we could go up close and personal and hang on to the fence and take photos.  I am not sure what Bill Clinton was up to in the Oval Office when I clicked this photo .... muahahahaha

I have not been to DC since 9/11; will be there next year for the AAG annual meeting.  I bet the city will look very different from how I remember it from 15 years ago.
Why the hell did bin Laden have to screw up things for practically the overwhelming majority on this planet :-(
Oh well, "there is no there there" ..... I wish it were otherwise ....

Fear and loathing in Islamabad

Ding dong the witch is dead—Musharraf stepped down when the parliamentary majority initiated impeachment proceedings against him. Having followed Pakistani politics from a distance ever since I could read newspapers, I suspected that this would trigger more instability and chaos. While recent developments indicate that I might be correct, being right in this case is, unfortunately, no cause for celebration.

Almost immediately after Musharraf’s exit, the ruling coalition government came unglued. The opposition was held together by a focused, singular, objective of getting rid of Musharraf. It no longer has that unifying force and, as a result, it is now a bitter struggle for power.

Leading one faction is Nawaz Sharif whose elected government was ousted by Musharraf in a military coup in 1999. The other faction is led by Asif Ali Zardari, who inherited the leadership mantle after his wife, the late Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated.

These two leaders and their parties formed the majority in the parliament. But, when Zardari became his party’s nominee for the presidency, Sharif pulled his party out of the coalition.

More bizarre developments threaten Pakistan’s extremely shaky democracy. Britain’s Financial Times reported a few days ago that Zardari is not well—he apparently "was diagnosed with a range of serious illnesses including dementia, major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder in a series of medical reports spanning more than two years." Would anybody want this person to be in-charge of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal?

As of these alone are not enough, it turns out that our ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, had taken it upon himself to advise Zardari. Apparently he was working with Bhutto even back in 2006. The personnel at the State Department, from Condoleezza Rice to the spokesperson, are furious with Khalilzad for bypassing diplomatic protocols, particularly during such sensitive situations. Naturally. Even under normal circumstances, locals do not appreciate any perception of foreign interference in their politics.

An ultimate complication in this tangled web: there have always been speculations that Khalilzad has plans to contend for Afghanistan's presidency—the current president, Hamid Karzai, has been so ineffective that a strong challenger might be able to unseat him at the elections in 2009. In case you are wondering how our ambassador can think of becoming the president of Afghanistan, well, Khalilzad is a naturalized American who was born in that country.

Meanwhile, Al Qaeda sympathizers and other militant fundamentalists have seized this political confusion as a wonderful opportunity to remind everybody of the havoc they can unleash. Suicide attacks and other forms of violence have increased, according to published reports. To complicate matters, neighboring Afghanistan and Kashmir have experienced a new round of violence and death.

The world has not gained anything from Musharraf’s exit. In fact, the biggest losses dwarf the few developments I have highlighted here. For one, Musharraf is now completely off the hook and does not even have pretend not to know the answer to the question that Jon Stewart posed so wonderfully when he was a guest on The Daily Show: “where’s Osama bin Laden?”

Second, with his exit, Musharraf does not have to clarify to anybody how much he was involved in nuclear proliferation. Musharraf placed the “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, A.Q. Khan, under house arrest soon as the world found out that he was actively involved in spreading nuclear know-how to countries, including Libya and North Korea. Recently, in the German publication Der Spiegel, Khan’s wife accused Musharraf of lying about her husband’s involvement in nuclear proliferation—that Khan was merely carrying out orders from the government. But, we will never find out what Musharraf knew, and when he knew it.

The irony of it all, or perhaps an insult to us Americans, is that Pakistan’s Daily Times reports that one of the two places that Musharraf may go into exile is New Mexico!

“It’s Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad world.”