MER Article The Afghan Triangle The Pakistani army’s operation in the Swat Valley in northwest Pakistan is the most sustained in five years of selective counterinsurgency against the local Taliban. The toll already is immense: 1.9 million internally displaced, including tens of thousands housed in tents on parched plains; 15,000 s Graham Usher • 13 min read
MER Article American Torture Starting with the publication of the Abu Ghraib photos in April 2004, [1] there has been a steady cascade of revelations about the Bush administration’s brutal and dehumanizing interrogation and detention policies. These days, the last refuge for die-hard deniers is the euphemization that “enhanced interrogation” is not “torture. Lisa Hajjar • 15 min read
MER Article Dubai Glitzy Dubai, long considered the new Monte Carlo or the Las Vegas of the Middle East, has suffered one of the worst crash landings of this global recession. Dubai might be considered a bellwether of the global credit crunch. Until recently touted as a beacon of progress in an otherwise Christopher M. Davidson • 11 min read
MER Article The Many Cyprus Problems The poet T. S. Eliot called April the cruelest month, the month of change, the month when memory collides with desire. In Cyprus, April has become not only the month of cyclical changes, but the month of decisive ones. In April 2003, the checkpoints dividing the island since the 1974 Rebecca Bryant • 15 min read
MER Article From the Editors (Summer 2009) At least 60 people were killed in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan on June 23 by a US drone attack. The dead were among those attending a funeral for a suspected Taliban commander who, along with six other people, had been killed by a drone earlier that day. Since The Editors • 5 min read
