The only thing Obama’s got right so far about his warzone-of-choice is the name, worries Eric Walberg

As more NATO trucks were being torched in Peshawar last week, a Karachi student managed to fling his shoe at warmongering US journalist Clifford May during his address to the Department of International Relations on “Pakistan ’s Role in Countering the Challenge of Terrorism”. In Washington, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi announced bitterly the US probably knows Osama Bin Laden’s where-abouts. He neglected to draw the appropriate conclusion about what the US is really up to in AfPak. Also in Washington, within hours of the decision of the Nobel Peace committee, US President Barack Obama met with his War Council.

It’s getting to the point that it’s hard to tell who is the biggest opponent of Obama’s plans to bring peace to AfPak: the Taliban, the Pakistani government, or the Nobel committee. Oh yes, or virtually the entire world beyond the Washington beltway.

The US slaughter in Afghanistan makes the Chinese creeping colonisation of Urumqi look like a picnic, bemoans Eric Walberg

Last week's riots in Urumqi, resulting in 180 deaths, recall similar protests in Tibet last year, though only 19 people were killed there. Both Uighurs and Tibetans exiles demonstrated during the Chinese Olympics, to little effect. Both regions, remote from the heart of Han China, were taken over under the communists, and are important strategically and as storehouses of mineral wealth to feed the new capitalist China's voracious appetite. They remind us that old-fashion colonialism is alive and well. Neither the Uighurs nor the Tibetans have any hope of independence, but they rightly would like the Han to be less greedy and invasive.

1/1/9 -- The war in Afghanistan is spreading its tentacles around the world. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai are now attributed to elements trying to divert the Pakistani military away from the Afghan border areas.