Readbook: Afghanistan, the Art of Secrets & Advertising, & Mosques in Manhattan

WELCOME TO THE READBOOK, our daily trawl of content noteworthy, tl;dr, and below-the-fold. Posted early and updated throughout the day. Track updates via Twitter @EditorsCI. Get in touch via email at editors@currentintelligence.net. 

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MORNING EDITION

In-house. Eric Randolph's India Desk now boasts a fully loaded resources page, with links to his book research on the Maoist/Naxalite insurgency. Don't forget to read his manifesto while you're poking around in there.

Afghan War Diary.  Stay the course to limit the human tragedy that is now and that will inevitably follow; keep questionable company to do so. As the NYT pointed out, reaction to the Time magazine cover photo of Bibi Aisha's facial mutilation "has become something of an Internet litmus test about attitudes toward the war, and what America’s responsibility is in Afghanistan. Critics of the American presence in Afghanistan call it 'emotional blackmail' and even 'war porn,' while those who fear the consequences of abandoning Afghanistan see it as a powerful appeal to conscience." My deep thought: Afghans like Aisha deserve better leadership than they've currently got. I wonder what sort of dossier on alleged Karzai corruption might be extracted from the WikiLeaks Afghanistan War Log... 

The Art of Secrets and Advertising. A brace of interesting features in Slate, on media-government interfacing over publication of leaked and sensitive documents, and The New Republic, on corporate apology ads, "which have fast become a genre unto themselves." Inspired by BP's public relationss hamhandedness, its critique of BP, Toyota, Domino's Pizza, and GM apology ads is merciless in its marketing deconstruction. To be fair, it's a quick nibble on the subject, but it neglects, I think, the bigger role of the target audience, the fickleness of social media consumption, and the interplay between creative influences and political pressures that shape and skew ad production to begin with. 

Architectural inflections. In New York, the Landmarks Preservation Commission decided "Tuesday not to grant landmark status a building near ground zero that is now to be demolished to make way for an Islamic community center and mosque, little attention has been paid to the actual landmark-worthiness of the building under consideration." That's now being contested in a newly filed suit. Its champion, Timothy Brown, a NY firefighter and 9/11 survivor. describes the location "as a building that 'recalls not only mid-19th century New York City, but also 16th-century Rome and Florence'"... "'a fine example of the Italian Renaissance-inspiredpalazzi' that flourished in the mid-1800s in what is now TriBeCa,"... “'rich with inflections' of the era’s architecture."  

I want to believe. The Guardian, apparently taking inspiration from syndicated episodes of the X-Files, has stories on Britain's very own Roswell incident and the illegal introduction of cloned beef into the human food chain.

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EVENING EDITION

WikiLeaks Redux. The Pentagon has responded to WikiLeaks' rather awkward request for assistance - from the Pentagon - by stating pretty clearly that it considers the Afghanistan War Logs to be stolen property that should be immediately returned to its rightful owner. Hard to tell from the official Pentagon statement what comes next -  it sort of waffles between "please" and "or else" - but I imagine it'll come equipped with legions of lawyers, affidavits, summonses, etc. Meanwhile, the media view - something akin to "finders keepers, losers weepers" - remains true to form.

There's an element to this that I find baffling, to be honest. Raffi Khatchadourian argues a number of interesting points on this in the New Yorker - that we should accept WikiLeaks, cooperate with it, work with it, maybe become more like it. But something's clearly missing from his calculus, and I can't get past the wrongheadedness of it all. We don't encourage foreign governments to pilfer, through whatever means, our secrets. So why encourage or otherwise condone that kind of behavior from a non-state entity? The analogy isn't as simple as that, clearly. But neither is the idea that because there's a journalistic angle to this, then there's some sort of legal dispensation at play.

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VIDEO

Pakistan Floods. Al Jazeera English's latest coverage: