Politics

When Pakistan ditched its ally, the Taliban, in September, and sided with the U.S., Islamabad and Washington fully expected to implant a pro-American regime in Kabul and open the way for the Pakistani-American pipeline. But, while the Bush administration was busy tearing apart Afghanistan to find Bin Laden, it failed to notice that the Russians were taking over half the country.The Russians achieved this victory through their proxy--the Northern Alliance. Moscow, which has sustained the alliance since 1990, rearmed it after Sept.

"So how come media objectivity is suddenly a bad thing?" asks columnist Michael Kinsley. "Conservative press critics are in another tizzy about objectivity and balance in American journalism. Only this time, their complaint isn't the lack of these fine qualities but that there's way too much of the stuff. ... The traditional conservative media critique is that journalists bend the news in a liberal direction because they're liberals.

A full page ad in the New York Times from the left/liberal Institute for America's Future is headlined "Sacrifice is for Suckers." It condemns corporate war profiteering saying that "in the days after the tragedy of September 11 ... lobbyists for GM, GE, IBM and other leading corporations were quietly approaching their friends in Congress, bearing a wish list with hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts and special favors. ... We must not allow the war profiteers to win permanent tax breaks by exploiting our national emergency..."

MIT Institute Professor Noam Chomsky, an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy, discusses U.S.-Muslim relations and reasons for the tensions between the two.