Burma’s stateless minority under the tip of globalizations’ spear A column of frail women and children in brilliant cotton tunics deftly balance aluminum jars atop their heads as they trundle down a steep, eroded jungle hillside. They are spending most…
A “Credible” Election
This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post. Today Pakistan awoke under a spell of relief. The electoral results seem, at least for the time being, to have been accepted as a sounding defeat by the ruling PML-Q. Rather than…
The Lion, the Arrow and the Bicycle
Along The Mall, Lahore’s primary commercial strip, a cluster of curious traffic police stood watch upon the odd rickshaw and teenage cyclist. Normally choked with a riot of buzzing traffic, The Mall was eerily quiet as the polls opened this…
Pakistan’s Elections: Situation Critical
This article originally appeared on the Huffington Post. Tomorrow morning millions of voters in Pakistan will cast their ballots in perhaps the most crucial vote in the nation’s sixty years of independence. The bloody campaign season has been rocked by…
The Eight-Hundred lb. Guerrillas
In early March 2003, with tens of thousands of American soldiers drilling and hydrating in the Kuwaiti desert, I had arranged to meet with a member of the famous Barzani clan at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. In hopes of setting…
One Day in the Valley
I came to Indian-occupied Kashmir in the context of a larger trip around South Asia to document the fraying edges of the much-hyped Indian ascendancy that I’d been hearing about ad nauseam in the American media over that last…