Is it just me or has the world been having a rough 24 hours? In Iraq, lawmakers may have to postpone provincial elections set for October after they failed to come to a power sharing agreement between Kurds, Turkmen and Arabs over Kirkuk. As a result, the Sunni Awakening leaders may become disillusioned about the process after boycotting the elections entirely four years ago.
President Musharraf of Pakistan announced he would fight impeachment from the ruling parliamentary coalition, with an aide giving this unfortunate statement: "We will prepare a case, the president should be there (in parliament) and defend himself, and at least say 'I am not a crook'. Spencer Ackerman reports that Afghanistan's Ambassador to the U.S. explicitly blamed the Pakistan's ISI for the bombings of the Indian embassy, following President Hamad Karzai's lead.
Afghanistan is often used as a site of proxy battles between India and Pakistan, and it won't really be possible to bring U.S. presence there to a close without some kind of accord between the two countries. And in a development Robert Farley has been blogging about all day, Russia and Georgia's militaries clashed openly over a pro-Russian breakaway region of South Ossetia, with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin saying "war has started."
Kind of a rough day, isn't it?
-- A. Serwer
