Irfan Yusuf is a lawyer, award-winning author, commentator and humorist. His comic memoir "Once Were Radicals: My Years As A Teenage Islamo-fascist" was published in May 2009. He currently lives in Sydney where he is completing his doctorate.
Some readers have advised me that they are rather disturbed by the kind of racist and xenophobic nonsense that I reproduce here from the blogs of the likes of Blair, Bolt, Akerman etc. For the benefit of such readers, I'll be posting the repeated moderating of hate-speech by News Limited employees on this blog.
So go to the Media Mullah blog if you want to read what the Uncle Rupert's Ayatollahs of hate-speech are upto.
While Australian and NATO troops are engaged in fierce fighting against the Taliban, the US-backed Islamist government of Hamid Karzai is secretly negotiating to strike a deal with Taliban leaders. The secret talks have taken place in Saudi Arabia, London and Dubai. The US denies any direct involvement in the secret negotiations.
It seems the deal involves allowing leader of the Hizb-i-Islami jihadi faction, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, to be allowed to eventually return to Afghanistan with full immunity from prosecution. Hekmatyar led one of the larger jihad factions that fought against the Soviet Union during the 1980's, most of his support coming from the US and Saudi Arabia. Following Soviet withdrawal, Hekmatyar served as Prime Minister but was unable to resolve differences with his main jihadi rival, the late Ahmad Shah Masud of the Jamiat-i-Islami faction. The current Karzai government is dominated by Masud loyalists.
But after 9/11, Hekmatyar decuded to support the Taliban. Following the Taliban's defeat, Hekmatyar has been in hiding.
The US has a budget deficit of over $1 trillion. The exact composition of this deficit - as in how much was pent on which areas of expenditure - has only now become clear. The former Bush administration, it seemed, was hiding the true extent of spending on defense. The new Obama administration wants to scrutinise defense spending much more carefully, but will he be able to keep a lid on this when defense contractors have so much influence over the political process?
