When a country allows religious extremists to export their dangerous ideology of hate and intolerance – Nigerian airline bombers coming from Yemen, CIA-assassinating Jordanian double-agents in Afghanistan, or anti-American clerics in Pakistan – it’s a problem.
But the origin and strain of religion sometimes affects the response.
At a press conference last October in Kampala, President Museveni [...]
Posted in India on December 2nd, 2009 3 Comments »
Garbage is a problem that has plagued India for longer than most people have been alive.
Gandhi addressed it in his day, noting Indian’s penchant for keeping their houses immaculate yet caring little for anything outside of their doors. And this was 50 years before plastic.
Any area in India where people live is cursed with plastic. [...]
Posted in Afghanistan on August 23rd, 2008 No Comments »
Just after seven o’clock on a Wednesday morning in early December 2007, the ugliness of the Taliban insurgency struck again in the heart of Afghanistan’s capital city. A suicide bomber rammed his explosive-laden car into a mini-bus full of people commuting from their Kabul neighborhood of Chilsitoon, killing 13. As with most terrorist acts, the [...]
Posted in India on April 27th, 2008 2 Comments »
If I had to pin down one main impediment to development in Mumbai, it would have to be the “not my problem” attitude. This attitude is pervasive not only in the government bureaucracy, but in individual citizens.
I pass a construction site each day walking to and from work. It is right on a busy street, [...]
The dusty, pot-holed streets of Kabul led to a section of town where the houses morphed from mud-brick structures to multi-story, brightly painted pink, yellow, and green homes with barbed wire-topped security walls.
I was tracking down the head of the Islamic Scholars Council, who was a supporter of progressive women’s rights based on the [...]