MER Article Editor's Picks (Summer 2009) Bakalian, Anny and Mehdi Bozorgmehr. Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009). Bashkin, Orit. The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Benedict, Helen. The Lonely The Editors • 1 min read
MER Article The Bitter Harvest Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province, is a nervous city. In the past, Quetta was a provincial capital where people were accustomed to taking leisurely walks on Jinnah Road, the main boulevard of the city, gazing at shop windows and haggling over the goods on display. Young Stephen Dedalus • 14 min read
MER Article Struggling for the Rule of Law In March 2007, when President (and General) Pervez Musharraf suspended Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, Pakistani lawyers took to the streets in large numbers. It was a dangerous street where they were met with batons, barbed wire, tear gas, bullets and bombs. If their immediate demand Daud Munir • 12 min read
MER Article Media Matters in Pakistan Imran Aslam, a senior Pakistani journalist, is president of Geo TV Network, where he oversees content for Geo News, Geo Entertainment, Aag (a youth channel) and Geo Super (sports). In 1983, he became the editor of The Star, an evening newspaper that blazed a trail in investigative journalism during the Kamran Asdar Ali • 11 min read
MER Article Pakistan’s Collateral Damage from the Wars in Afghanistan In late November 2008, international media attention was riveted by a series of highly orchestrated attacks across India’s financial capital, Mumbai, which left at least 173 people dead and hundreds more injured. The only attacker taken alive by Indian security forces disclosed his membership in Lashkar-e-Tayaba, the militant wing Humeira Iqtidar • 9 min read
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
