27 December 2004 Generation Change By Gwynne Dyer The disasters of the world are due to its inhabitants not being able to grow old simultaneously. There is always a new and intolerant nation eager to destroy the tolerant and mellow. Cyril Connolly, “The Unquiet Grave,” 1945 That’s history for you. King Lear was a striking …
1 March 2004 Blowing Up Pakistan By Gwynne Dyer “We’re going to get our troops inside Pakistan in return for not forcing Musharraf to deal with Khan,” said a former senior US intelligence official quoted in Seymour Hersh’s article on US-Pakistan relations in the most recent issue of ‘New Yorker’ magazine. It’s a perfectly balanced …
OOPS! I LEFT THE LAST TERRORIST ATTACK IN JAKARTA OUT. PLEASE USE THE REVISED VERSION BELOW 7 September 2003 Two Years On: The Score By Gwynne Dyer Two years on, September 11th is still a raw anniversary for most Americans, who cannot forget the terrible scenes in lower Manhattan as three thousand of their fellow-citizens …
17 August 2003 All The News That Fits The Stereotype By Gwynne Dyer Sitting in Cairo in a flat borrowed from a friend. Turn on the TV and catch the news on BBC World: six stories in fifteen minutes. Iraqi guerillas blow up a couple of pipelines. European hostages released by Muslim guerillas in Mali. …
16 February 2003 The Question of Pakistan By Gwynne Dyer When the National Security Council does the worst-case analysis in a US attack on Iraq, what do its members tell themselves about Pakistan? You know, the world’s second-biggest Muslim country, the one with the nuclear weapons. Do they ever worry that the backlash elsewhere against …
27 January 2003 Indo-Pak Nukes: A Modest Proposal By Gwynne Dyer It started with Pakistan’s ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, saying in early January that he had threatened nuclear war against India during last summer’s tense confrontation, when more than a million soldiers were mobilised along the common border. India’s defence minister, George Fernandes, replied that …
7 November 2002 Two Cheers for Democracy By Gwynne Dyer One of the reasons that democracy is so rare in the swath of Muslim countries from Pakistan to Morocco is that both the local regimes and the United States are terrified that the Islamist extremists would come to power if there were free elections. Two …
8 October 2002 Pakistan: The Persistence of Democracy By Gwynne Dyer Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharraf was so determined to ensure that neither of his two democratically elected predecessors made a comeback that he made a few constitutional changes before calling parliamentary elections. Both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif served two terms as prime minister, so …
22 September 2002 Kashmir Is Still Ticking By Gwynne Dyer “The Pakistani uranium enrichment facilities, as far as we know, are working three shifts around the clock,” said Zia Mian, a Pakistani physicist at Princeton University, in late May. So far as we know, they still are. The threat of a war over Kashmir is …