Steve Coll

It hasn’t quite turned out that way. Poverty and inequality are still monumental challenges, but Indian democracy itself has decayed in ways that Jaising did not foresee. She is now eighty and still active in public-interest law, but, when we spoke by telephone recently, she was fighting a criminal investigation against her and Anand Grover, her law partner and husband. Their case is one of many apparently arbitrary, punitive investigations that, in recent years, the Hindu-nationalist administra…

The coronavirus thrives off of complacent leaders, such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi—and has exacerbated the contours of global inequality.

Bin Laden has roots in Jeddah, the Red Sea port city where, in 1931, his father, Mohammed bin Laden, a poor migrant from Yemen, founded and built a construction company that grew eventually into the largest in the kingdom, as part of the family’s flagship conglomerate, the Saudi Binladin Group. It built palaces, renovated mosques in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and expanded across the Arab world. And, of course, it was part of the upbringing of Osama bin Laden, another of Mohammed’s sons…

A trove of unreleased documents reveals a dispiriting record of misjudgment, hubris, and delusion that led to the fall of the Western-backed government.

The Afghan statesman Zalmai Rassoul is recognized by the governments of the United Kingdom and Ireland—but not by the Taliban.

Last week, arriving for a one-day visit to Tel Aviv, President Biden descended from Air Force One and bear-hugged Netanyahu before a phalanx of cameras. “You are not alone,” he said later, in a speech to Israelis about the Hamas-led terror attacks of October 7th, when militants broke out of Gaza and murdered more than fourteen hundred Israelis and seized hostages. Since then, Biden has denounced the “bloodthirstiness” of Hamas and spoken evocatively of Israeli victims: “infants in their mother’s…

That pleading captured the pain and the moral complexity that often permeates hostage crises. Israel, tragically, has had experience with many such cases in Gaza and Lebanon, as well as with international hostage crises arising out of hijackings and other terrorist attacks, such as the seizure and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, in Munich. At times, Israel has negotiated lopsided prisoner exchanges to free its captives. In 2006, Hamas kidnapped Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier,…

On Friday, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, rejected calls for even a temporary ceasefire until Hamas and its allies return the more than two hundred and thirty hostages, many of them civilians, whom the militants seized in the October 7th attacks. Gilad Erdan, Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N., told CNN that no humanitarian break in combat was necessary, because Israel had allowed “the number of trucks entering Gaza now with food and medicines to reach almost a hundred trucks every…

Klinghoffer’s murder became an infamous touchstone in the nineteen-eighties era of made-for-TV hijackings, a time when armed liberation movements in the Middle East demonstrated the asymmetric power of spectacular mass hostage-taking. Terrorists of that era wanted “a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead,” as the RAND Corporation analyst Brian Jenkins put it in 1974, because they sought to call attention to their cause without alienating sympathizers. Yet hijackers also singled out Je…

On both sides, the celebrations were tempered by an awareness of those still in captivity. Hamas freed children and their mothers but not their fathers, and elderly women but not their husbands. The two hundred and forty prisoners whom Israel released were, according to the Jerusalem-based human-rights group B’ Tselem, a fraction of the nearly five thousand Palestinians held on security grounds as of September—a figure that rose sharply after October 7th. In Gaza, where Israeli bombing has kille…