International Slipstream

Oiling Popularity

Hit Machines

It isn’t easy to dissuade the Afghans from bumping off political rivals. On his tour of the eastern city of Jalalabad last week, defence minister Mohammad Qasim Fahim survived an assassination bid—a bomb placed in a pushcart exploded as his convoy was passing through a busy road. The explosion blew up the second car in the convoy; Fahim was in the fifth. Who plotted the attempt? There are three different theories. The first says it was a message to Fahim and interior minister Yunus Qanuni from local chieftains that the government should retract its policy of destroying poppy crop. Another view is that the supporters of deceased civil aviation minister Dr Abdul Rahman were avenging his killing—they believe Rahman had been lynched in February at the behest of the Northern Alliance. The third theory sees it as a retaliation from Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami, 300 of whose activists were arrested a fortnight back for allegedly plotting the assassination of interim leader Hamid Karzai and former king Zahir Shah.

Justice Delayed...
Uncle Sam’s adept at the difficult art of uniting his country. This was indeed the message inherent in the death penalty a Texan jury handed down to Mark Anthony Stroman, accused of hate-crimes at the time the US was reeling under the 9/11 attacks. Beginning September 15, the 32-year-old shot dead Pakistani Waqar Hasan, blinded Bangladeshi Rais Bhuiyan, and then killed 49-year-old Indian Vasudev Patel. It took less than six months to convict the accused. No doubt, he rendered the jury’s task easy: he pleaded guilty and said his crimes were in retaliation to September 11. A lesson there for Gujarat’s Narendra Modi.