David Andelman, editor of the World Policy Journal, had his assistant email us to let us know his journal is available for free during November. Ordinarily, I’m annoyed by this stuff and just delete it, but I like WPJ, and there are two articles in this issue I think readers here would enjoy:
The first is by Charles Cogan, and he argues (pdf) that “The Taliban… was created initially as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Pakistani ISI in 1992,” so therefore if we cannot dissuade Pakistan from its continuing support of the Taliban, we should scale back our efforts in Afghanistan “with the option to strike Al Qaeda whenever we can.” How Rory Stewart of him.
The second is by David Lewis, who speculates (pdf) about the next 25 years in Central Asia. Like all future predictions, it is both cheesy and extremist, but having worked for a futurist, I can relate to the problems in writing this kind of thing. I’m not sold on the certainty of Russia and China fighting proxy wars in Eastern Uzbekistan, but what do I know anyway.
Regardless, these are both worth reading and pondering. And being able to get an issue of WPJ without a library subscription is nice, too.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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{ 1 comment }
eh.
When talking about the Taliban, let’s all pretend Niyazov never existed.