Skip to content

July 12, 2010

US can win Al-Qaeda war by just $50 million

By Zahid Malik (President and Editor-in-Chief Pakistan Observer)

The United States is caught in a Catch-22 situation vis-à-vis war on terror and is looking for some face saving mechanism to get out of the mess which has mind-boggling costs not only for the US but also for its allies. Defence analysts in Washington now openly say that the US war against Al-Qaeda, following 9/11 attacks on Twin Towers, has reached at a stage where Pentagon finds itself caught in a quagmire.

According to dependable estimates by some of the US think-tanks, the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has reached $ 1.05 trillion. Even after adjusting for inflation, that’s four times more than America spent on fighting World War I, and more than 10 times the cost of 1991’s Gulf War (90 per cent of which was paid by the US allies), the war on terror looks set to surpass the cost incurred on the Korean and Vietnam wars combined, to be topped only by World War II’s price tag of $3.5 trillion.
Read More »US can win Al-Qaeda war by just $50 million

Pakistan Politics: Which of our politicians has the ‘essential ten qualities’?

  • by

 A politician or member of parliament is basically a representative of his countrymen and his own family. History has countless evidences where almost all the major changes to take place on our planet, whether good or bad, have come due to the acts of politicians.

According to Vicki Bourne, a former Australian senator, a good politician needs ten qualities. The first quality of a politician is that he must be humble and know that there is no positional power. The politician must be aware of how little power he has individually and that true power is only a product of collective action. Vicki said the second quality of a politician is that he must be nice to others and keep people on his side for he may need their support at any time.Read More »Pakistan Politics: Which of our politicians has the ‘essential ten qualities’?