Friday, March 25, 2011 at 17:12 | Scott Lucas in Africa, EA Global, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran 2015 GMT: Graffiti in Syria, "Your turn has come, doctor", referring to President (and ophthalmologist) Bashar Al-Assad:
2005 GMT: Video of the protest by about 2000 people in front of State TV in Cairo today (see 1615 GMT):
Last week, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu wrote for The Guardian of London about his approach to foreign policy.
The context, Davutoglu explained, was a “natural” history, “flowing” from “abnormalities” --- such as the division of peoples of the region by colonialism and Cold War --- to democracies spreading in the Middle East. In the course of time, he says, an ordinary Turk or Arab can change the history but you are bound to lose if you resist the “momentum of the history” which is giving the “dignity” of this region back.
AKP, Ahmet Davutoglu, Bashar al-Assad, Iran, Libya, NATO, Namik Tan, PKK, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Syria, The Guardian, Turkey Saturday, March 12, 2011 at 12:59 | Scott Lucas in Africa, EA Global, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran 2210 GMT: In Egypt, actor and activist Aly Sobhy, whose detention we noted earlier today (see 1430 GMT), has been released.
Sobhy was seized by the military on Wednesday as he tried to get the names of protesters who had been detained in Tahrir Square in Cairo.
2130 GMT: Another video of today's mass pro-democracy march to Safriya Palace in Bahrain:
2020 GMT: Al Jazeera cameramen, Ali Hassan Al Jaber, has been killed after a crew of the Arabic-language channel was ambushed by regime forces near the town of Benghazi.
Reporter Nasser Al Haddar was also injured by a gunshot.
The inauguration of a new Parliament in just weeks threatens to worsen ethnic tensions and instability and to drive an important part of President Hamid Karzai’s political base into the arms of the insurgency, Afghans and foreign officials warn.
Despite numerous obstacles, NATO and American officials had pushed strongly for parliamentary elections in September, gambling that a successful vote would show progress in the war and new growth in Afghanistan’s democracy.
Instead insecurity, disaffection and fraud, particularly in the south, left the country’s largest and most important ethnic group, the Pashtuns, with sharply reduced representation. The results have been vigorously disputed for three months and have pushed the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis.
Myth: There has been significant progress in tamping down the insurgency in Afghanistan.”
Reality: A recent National Intelligence Estimate by 16 intelligence agencies found no progress. It warned that large swathes of the country were at risk of falling to the Taliban and that they still had safe havens in Pakistan, with the Pakistani government complicit. The UN says there were over 6000 civilian casualties of war in Afghanistan in the first 10 months of 2010, a 20% increase over the same period in 2009. Also, 701 US and NATO troops have been killed this year, compared to 521 last year, a 25% increase. There were typically over 1000 insurgent attacks per month in Afghanistan this year, often twice as many per month as in 2009, recalling the guerrilla war in Iraq in 2005.
Juan Cole, Mullah Omar, NATO Friday, December 17, 2010 at 9:15 | Scott Lucas in Afghanistan, EA Afghanistan-Pakistan, US Foreign Policy The video of President Obama's presentation on Friday of the Afghanistan and Pakistan Annual Review. The transcript that follows includes not only Obama's address but also the briefing by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates:
We have already posted the unclassified summary of the Review, along with our snap reaction, "Big Damn Deal". A special analysis will be posted on Saturday:
THE PRESIDENT: Good morning, everybody. When I announced our new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan last December, I directed my national security team to regularly assess our efforts and to review our progress after one year.
Sunday, December 5, 2010 at 7:42 | Scott Lucas in EA Middle East and Turkey, Europe and Russia, Middle East and Iran 
Last week, Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was in the US for discussions with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Davutoglu also delivered a speech at Georgetown University about Ankara's "zero problem with neighbours" strategy.
In regional politics, within the contexts of the Middle East, Asia, Russia, the European Union, and the fight against terror, Washington needs Turks as much as Ankara needs Washington. This, Davutoglu underlined, is the significance of the "model partnership" set out by President Obama in his address to the Turkish Parliament in April 2009.
Ahmet Davutoglu, Hillary Clinton, NATO, Turkey 
Afghan president Hamid Karzai is a changed man. His worldview now is decidedly anti-Western. When I spoke with him earlier this month at the presidential palace in Kabul, Karzai told me that the US has been unable to bring peace to Afghanistan or to secure cooperation from Pakistan, which continues to give sanctuary to the Taliban. He rejects the barrage of US criticism at his government on issues like corruption and poor administration and says the original sin of all these faults lies with the Americans.
Success/withdrawal is dead. Long live the new date for success/non-withdrawal.
The amnesia in most of the reporting on this week's NATO summit on Afghanistan is quite remarkable. No one mentions that, only weeks ago, President Obama's policy was for a total pull-out of US combat forces by July 2011. Instead the assumption --- pushed by the US military --- was now established: troops would remain until 2014.
And now, even more remarkably, the media is pulled along with yet another narrative: "NATO and American officials also warned that if Afghanistan had not made sufficient progress in managing its own security, 2014 was not a hard and fast deadline for the end of combat operations."
It will be a perpetual transition.
1750 GMT: No Hypocrisy at All Alert. Shayan Ghajar, writing for insideIRAN, summarised what we have been noting for weeks: "Iran Begins Media Campaign to Highlight West’s “Human Rights Abuses".
Press TV's latest contribution is an on-line poll:
About the human rights situation in the United States, do you think………
A) There is the largest number of human rights violation cases in this country?
B) There is the least number of human rights violation cases in this country?
C) There are as many human rights violation cases in this country as in any other country but the international body should exercise constant supervision over it?
(Current position: A --- 50%; B --- 24%; C --- 26%)
