A troubling report on the failure to reform madrassas–the “breeding grounds for jihad” in Pakistan from Dawn.
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has virtually shelved a US-aided, multi-million-dollar plan to reform seminaries considered nurseries of jihad, faced with uncooperative Islamists, as the military cracks down on the Taliban.
The government, allied to then US president George W. Bush’s ‘war on terror,’ initiated the project in 2002 in a bid to introduce a more secular curriculum to madrassas, sensing a homegrown threat from extremism.
It was billed as a policy U-turn after military ruler General Ziaul …

Dawn provides this interesting read on the state of affairs in Pakistan and US aid.
Comments in the press and endless TV debates on terrorism and the American offer of aid to combat it have come to sound more like expressions of ego than of realism. These statements appear an exercise in politicking and posturing and do not look the hard economic realities in the eye.
Moreover, the views of political parties are coloured by their own interests. Most unrealistic and perturbing, however, is the stand of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI). The …

This is how Al Jazeera reported Hillary’s stop in Jerusalem on Saturday.
The US has called for the resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians as soon as possible and without preconditions, an apparent climbdown on earlier demands for Israel to halt settlement building…
Mouin Rabbani, a contributing editor to The Middle East Report, said that it was not surprising that the US had changed its stance on the negotiations.
The US had initially demanded a halt to any construction in the occupied territories [AFP]
“In Januaray [and] February this …