What is the US government's real agenda in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Is it engaged in anything that contradicts its official alliance with Pakistan? And how big of a factor is natural resources in what the US war machine is doing? Kiren Chaudhry has gone to the region to investigate. In a conversation this past August, she characterized the US military/security effort as chaotic.

What is the US government's real agenda in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Is it engaged in anything that contradicts its official alliance with Pakistan? And how big of a factor is natural resources in what the US war machine is doing? Kiren Chaudhry has gone to the region to investigate. She characterizes the US military/security effort as chaotic.

Led by radical reform-minded rulers, Iran and Turkey embarked on a democratic trajectory in the early 1900s, and those two nation's democratic traditions suggests the basis for a future, very productive relationship with the US. So argues Stephen Kinzer in his new book, which recounts a series of turbulent and extraordinary events in the histories of Iran and Turkey.

Iranian students, both in Iran and abroad, mobilized against the Shah's regime and then, after 1979, against the Islamic Republic. Taraneh Hemami and Gita Hashemi are part of Theory of Survival, an art exhibition inspired by student protest literature.