Ask anyone in Kabul who Tulsi is and you’re sure to see eyes light up. “Tulsi? Of course! She’s the victim. Her daughter-in-law hates her and her two-timing husband has a younger woman. She was right to leave home with her three kids,” people will tell you with a huge grin of satisfaction. Then passersby will get dragged in as the discussion shifts to the latest episodes of Afghanistan’s best-loved TV serial. The title is a tad tortuous, but it translates roughly as: “Because the Mother-in-law Was Once a Daughter-in-law Too.” It’s the latest trend in Afghan popular culture: Indian [...]
SARKO ON THE RECORD — Eat your heart out, President Bush. Around 600 media types from 40 countries attended French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s press conference last week. That’s more than twice as many as a normal White House presidential press conference. Predictably, the real news was swamped by coverage of what Sarko had to say about his relationship with Italian girlfriend Carla Bruni. But Sarkozy was living up to his campaign promise to change France. He talked of making the three national television channels commercial free, financing them by raising taxes on independent channels and mobile phones, and by taxing [...]
Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani joined many commentators earlier this month in making the case for doubling U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan from the current 27,000. He and others argue that more troops would address escalating violence in the country and hedge against the increasing fragility of neighboring Pakistan’s government. Such a large-scale U.S. troop increase, however, could be disastrous in the region, where maintaining a relatively light U.S. footprint and building a more significant allied one is the paradoxical key to defeating al-Qaida and the Taliban. Even the 3,000-man increase that U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is currently considering [...]
