Iranian Plateau

Professor Mo Qayoumi grew up in Afghanistan in the 1950s and 60s before leaving the country to study and work in the US and the Middle East. For the past several years he has been collecting and publishing pictures of the Afghanistan he once knew on the internet.

While banding together to sing the national anthem en masse and kicking coconuts off people’s heads might seem frivolous, a former Pakistani ambassador says these feats are grabbing rare international attention for good news from Pakistan.

A Library of Congress report claimed that Iran has one of the largest spy agencies in the Middle East. Now, a ProPublica reporter questions the legitimacy of the figures because of uncertainty about who wrote it and where they got their information.

The British Indian Army invaded Afghanistan twice. Neither ended exactly smoothly, but the first invasion ended in disaster with the British Army retreating but being slaughtered on its way out of Kabul. A new book examines that history and some of the similarities between that invasion and the current U.S.-led effort.

India and Pakistan, countries that have fought two wars, will normalize trade relations after Pakistan reciprocated on a move India made in 1996.