'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

NATO trucking woes in Pakistan continue

The Daily Telegraph's Isambard Wilkinson reports that the main trade association for Pakistani trucking companies that haul NATO goods into Afghanistan from Karachi has now decided to halt all NATO...

NATO's Russian route to Afghanistan

NATO's deputy assistant sec-gen for security cooperation and partnership, Robert Simmons, has been in Moscow pushing forward the plan to open a Russian route to resupply the NATO positions in...

Newsflash! Russia lets NATO trans-ship weapons to Afghanistan

The Kyiv Post reported yesterday that, Russia has granted NATO-member Germany permission to ship weapons and equipment for its force in Afghanistan overland through Russia, the Russian Foreign Ministry said...

First big global challenges for Obama

While Ahmadinejad and Hamas are making nicey-nice in their first overtures to President-elect Barack Obama, leaders in Russia and China have sent their first rhetorical "shots" across his bows. The...

J. Diehl criticizing Saakashvili

WaPo columnist Jackson Diehl is a quintessential liberal hawk. So when he expresses open criticism of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, as he did today, that means there are serious cracks...

Georgia-Hizbullah: Dept. of Delicious Ironies

So today, Wired's Noah Schachtman draws attention to the fact-- as indeed, I suspected might well happen-- some strategists in the 'west' have started to recommend that, as it rebuilds...

US probing Russian Red Lines in Georgia

Two interesting recent posts from Wired's Noah Schachtman. In this one, Sept. 5, he cites this London Times report as saying that last week, US/NATO military people managed to connect...

The longterm status of Georgia: Challenges ahead

Georgia's US- and Israeli-built armed forces got pulverized by the Russians during last month's short war over South Ossetia. The Bush administration has promised $1 billion to the Georgians in...

HRW revising its Russian cluster bomb accusations

Yesterday, Human Rights Watch started to step back from the claims it made very loudly last month that during the fighting in Georgia,"Russian aircraft dropped cluster bombs in populated areas...

Russia and the world

Yesterday, the Russian government recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In today's FT, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev explained why. (The two main house organs of British capitalism are...

NATO's supply lines in Afghanistan

... First of all, they're incredibly long. That makes sustaining the troops in the field there incredibly expensive. Another way of looking at that, in the present hyper-privatized era of...

More on NATO, etc.

The statement issued by the NATO foreign ministers' meeting yesterday was considerably more sensible than the belligerent, jingoistic rantings that make up much (though thankfully, a decreasing amount) of the...

NATO's crisis

... Hint: It isn't just the organization's massively long over-reach in Afghanistan, as revealed in the ever-mounting casualties among western forces and the continuing, dire crises of insecurity and pauperization...

Sarkozy's ceasefire, Georgia's future

The NYT was able to use its people's good relations with the Georgian government to get hold of the text of the ceasefire agreement that Sarkozy got the Russians to...

On US over-stretch

When I blogged about the Ossetia crisis Sunday, I wrote that one thing it clearly showed was that "The 'west' is hopelessly over-stretched, what with all its current commitments of...

The South Ossetian War: Some thoughts

Some of the best running commentary on the War of South Ossetia has been that produced by Bernhard at Moon of Alabama over recent days. Including this post today. What...