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MORNING EDITION

In-house. Chris Albon, writing from South Africa, notes that when all else fails and medical services collapse (as have done in SA this past week), military personnel are often the ones who fill the gap. Journalist, author, and academic Anatol Lieven reviews three recent books on Afghanistan.

Iran sanctions.  The central bank of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has asked Emirate lenders to declare remittances to Iran on a monthly basis, in a study of the economic impact of UN sanctions. The Emirates are home to a sizable community of Iranians, and the central bank states that it was already tracking remittances on a quarterly basis; the study is meant to more closely examine the specific impact of the latest round of sanctions. (It also effectively establishes an additional layer of sanctions compliance). 

Koran burning. Alternate title: "Never underestimate the influence of deliberate stupidity on international relations." This has been churning for a few days now, and there isn't a lot to be said about it that wasn't captured in the alternate title: a small Florida congregation calling itself the "New Testament, Charismatic, Non-Denominational Church" is planning a Koran-burning party, to be held this Saturday, in commemoration of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Local fire safety officials aren't impressed; neither is General David Petreaus, who thinks it could (and already has) inspire(d) backlash in Afghanistan.

Speaking of which, David Rieff, on the "unwisdom of crowds": "...our political crowds are studies in lowest-common-denominator subordination of the individual to the collective and of the thought to the slogan: in short, complexity to simplicity." More: "The lesson, whether about geopolitics or daily life, should be clear: If what you are thinking could just as easily be expressed in a slogan, and shouted out or held aloft on a banner by a crowd, then you are probably not thinking at all. And in troubled times such as our own, times of the most enormous moral, social, cultural, and technological dislocation, that is immensely dangerous."

Righthaven. It was only a matter of time before the "copyright troll" nabbed a big (or at least official) fish in its net. The company, which buys intellectual property rights so it can sue copyright violators, has filed suit against US Senatorial candidate Sharron Angle for allegedly reprinting "two Las Vegas Review-Journal articles on her campaign website without permission." Idle thought: Righthaven's strategy might look and feel slimy, but the flip side of things is that such efforts could - could - nudge online news and other media towards new norms of behavior. Cross-posting, aggregation and liberal appropriation of other forms of intellectual property (ie. images) are almost standard practice, but no less legally murky for all the mainstream media adoption of such web-based worst practices. Sitting on the editorial side of the fence, I've developed an acute sensitivity to what that means after expending all manner of effort getting content ready for publication, only to see it appear elsewhere, unlicensed, unpaid for - to the benefit of others who haven't expended said energy and resources.  

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VIDEO

Inland Effects of the BP oil spill, video courtesy of National Geographic.

But a practical political downside of this designation is that it risks shrinking humanitarian space in Pakistan while the country is in the middle of one of the worst humanitarian disasters in its history. Funding guidelines and the power of the purse-string make it extremely challenging for aid groups to do business with black-listed local organizations, and in the US it is a federal offense to provide “material benefits” to any such group. In a recent ruling the Supreme Court interpreted “material benefits” so broadly that even disseminating international law to such groups could result in penalties for aid organizations.

Now, consider four facts. First, civilian NGOs in areas like Pakistan – stateless in places, dangerous and at present in the midst of both man-made crises and natural disasters – must often rely on assistance and cooperation from local armed groups in order to access vulnerable civilians. Second, in areas where such groups are already substituting for the state, their support may be indispensable to getting humanitarian supplies and care to the needy. Third, in places where such groups are responsible for crimes against civilians, humanitarian diplomacy (or what the US would now deride as “negotiating with terrorists”) may be a vital tool for the protection of civilians. Fourth, the appearance of even-handedness allows aid groups a protective cloak of neutrality on which their own lives may depend: aid workers are often attacked as soon as local groups believe they are siding with “the enemy” rather than simply assisting civilians in an impartial manner.

These tensions are not new. But now that the Pakistani Taliban is labeled a “terrorist organization” it may be that much politically trickier for aid groups to access, protect and assist Pakistanis in Taliban-controlled areas of the country. This will not only prevent Pakistani civilians from accessing aid, but may also imperil aid workers, who will increasingly be seen as tools of the US rather than neutral humanitarians. So it’s ironic that it’s this very risk, in part, that the State Department has cited in its decision to blacklist the Taliban – as the designation is only likely to make the scenario worse.

Preventing humanitarian diplomacy by neutral agencies with groups to whom the US is politically opposed has drawbacks for the US as well. Under such circumstances, the aid organizations most likely to get access to civilians in those areas will be those funded by non-Western sources. In terms of public diplomacy, or what the US calls “hearts and minds work,” this risks wasting the opportunity for Western-backed aid groups to provide secular assistance and protection to the Pakistani people. This role is likely to be picked up instead by those elements of the (admittedly diverse) Islamic humanitarian sector who are least dependent on Western funding sources… including elements in Pakistan that may be using humanitarian “soft power” for very different ends.

Jonathan Benthall has written a great deal on the relationship between US foreign policy, the shrinking of secular humanitarian space and the proliferation of the Islamic humanitarian sector post 9/11, and he is interviewed here. 

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MORNING EDITION

In-house. Eric Randolph writes about India's fragmented civil society, in response to a recent article in The Diplomat.

WikiLeaks. There's been some netbuzz about the rape/molestation charges against Julian Assange in Sweden. See James Fallows at The Atlantic, Heather Horn at Atlantic Wire, and Fabius Maximus for an extensive round-up of coverage.

Bruce Hoffman blogs at the National Interest. So does Paul Pillar, along with a few other notables. Remarkable, really. I have no idea how interactive they are with commenters, but that's besides the point. What's important is that some very authoritative voices have been added to the social media brew (and they aren't writing for the Foreign Policy juggernaut!). One to watch.

Corruption in Afghanistan. There's a really simple solution, according to one Kabul merchant, Ahmed Shah Hakimi, quoted in a NYT article on Afghans' loss of faith in their political leaders.. Everyone knows who the corrupt members of the government are, he claimed. “What the Americans need to do is take these Afghans and put them on a plane and fly them to America — and then crash the plane into a mountain... Kill them all.” The article follows a week of reporting on the status of Kabul Bank, believed to be at the centre of official Afghan corruption. The Guardian reports Kabul Bank is set to receive a US$200 million Afghan government bailout to stem the hemorrhaging caused by thousands of bank clients withdrawing their funds.

The McChrystal syllabus. Not exactly the much rumoured "graduate seminar in counterinsurgency" descriptor beloved of the COIN-blogging realm... The Yale Daily News, Yale's college daily, has published detailsof the graduate seminar on leadership that retired General Stanley McChrystal will be leading this fall. The published syllabus reveals what you'd expect someone of McChrystal's recent experience might be teaching, but what caught my eye was this little gem: "... while students enrolled in the class are free to talk with the media about their impressions of the class, the seminar itself will be off the record." I can understand McChrystal's personal sensitivities, but it strikes me as counterproductive that students attending a university seminar won't be able to discuss, cite, or otherwise share the knowledge gained from it. There's also more than a little irony in the fact that a seminar on leadership is happening behind closed doors. Integration into civilian life continues...

NATO's forever wars. NATO has been involved in Crisis Response Operations since 1996, when the Implementation Force (or IFOR) was stood up for the Former Yugoslav states. There were some NATO air operations (notably, through lift-and-strike) from 1994, but full-on, ground-based interventions only started in 1996... and have been a constant of the alliance ever since. The Stabilization Force (SFOR), which replaced IFOR in 1997, was stood down at the beginning of December 2004; NATO had the Kosovo Force (KFOR) and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), as well as various other sundry missions, to keep it knee-deep in crisis. David Bosco suggests that that may be coming to an end, and what's a political-military alliance to do in the absence of war?

Recover some sense of itself, I think. Constant crisis, and the constant "innovation" that it drives, can be in its own way a perverse form of inertia. The NATO and Allied Command Operations bureaucracies have been in near-constant turmoil over restructuring, cuts, expansion, more cuts, more restructuring, fighting to keep, justify or shed personnel, developing capabilities to satisfy operational requirements, cutting programs, offices and funds in order to pay for those same operations... the list goes on. It can often feel as if nothing much is actually getting done. Many of the uniformed staff officers assigned to NATO billets claim (and as I heard it said often enough) more than a little ruefully that change is the illusion of progress. How else to demonstrate something - anything - achieved, in such a schizophrenic, incoherent environment? A little stasis, I think, will be good for the soul. 

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VIDEO

The boss is a robot.... an observation made by many. Now there's proof.  Video courtesy of the New York Times.

In response, the South African government deployed its health workers of last resort: the military. The South African Military Health Service (which interestingly is its own branch of the South African military) has sent medical personnel to 37 hospitals around the country. These military doctors and health workers are charged with keeping at least some public emergency services open. This is not the first time a nation has relied on the military to provide health service during strikes. In February, Nigeria deployed Army and Air Force doctors and nurses during a state hospital strike. While far from ideal, the world's militaries provide a valuable but under-recognized service as the health care providers of last resort.

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MORNING EDITION

In-house. Joshua Foust discusses the apparent contradictions involved in charging militants with criminal behavior. John Matthew Barlow explores our love affair with violence. Faisal Devji, in his first column for Current Intelligence, explains the true significance of the Park51/Ground Zero Mosque debate.

Collective responsibility inevitably causes some degree of discomfiture in discussions of politics and violence. Leon Wieseltier's note on the Park51 debate don't break the mould. I'm still chewing on it; my first reaction is that Wieseltier walks a fine line, and only the elegance of his prose keeps his argument from straying into dangerous territory. But that's always the case, isn't it? Our understanding of the vagaries of cultural and collective influences on individual behavior inevitably relies on language as its crutch - the ability to clearly articulate and convey meaning, if not truth.

The bank bleeds. Kabul Bank, that is. Its depositors have withdrawn US$180 million over the last couple of days, according to Dexter Filkins, reporting for the New York Times. Loss of confidence in the bank follows news that it's at the heart of massive fraud and corruption investigation, and that the government would take control of it to correct the problems. President Karzai's take on the current situation? Piffle. It's all been made up by the press. “People don’t need to be worried," he's quoted as saying. “We’ve got enough cash to support the bank," and "Even if the whole financial system in Afghanistan collapses, we have enough money to support it." Well then. No problem, nothing to see here, move along. 

Political science and journalism. The American Political Science Association (APSA) conference in D.C. hosted a panel on the subject, including the likes of Marc Ambinder, politics editor at The Atlantic. His thoughts on the subject are worth noting, particularly when, in what reads like a natural progression, he strays into the differences between political science and history - something that many of us who do both (or all three, if you include the journalism) have been struggling with for some time:

Political science does not have a good explanation for Sarah Palin, and while it can, in retrospect, apply its theories of candidate selection, it cannot tell us why John McCain believed that he could trust Sarah Palin, or why President Obama was so stubborn about health care. It cannot shed much light on the personality of a president and how presidential personalities effect governing and management. There are typologies, but they are created post-facto and aren't very satisfying. Historians can locate Sarah Palin fairly easily (as they can Glenn Beck) as the latest in a series of conservative populist candidates that have been revolting against elites from the days of Jacksonian America, but their stories are satisfying because journalists are predisposed to recognize patterns (even where they do not exist) and jump onto a narrative. Historians tend to be closer to journalists in using descriptive, reporting-based analysis, rather than the hard tools of social science, to answer questions.  

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VIDEO

Indonesian trash mountains, video courtesy of France24.

Hollywood has immortalised them: Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Butch Cassidy, Jesse James, Al Capone, Bugsy Malone, Bonnie & Clyde.  As Connolly points out, Teddy Roosevelt was photographed hanging out with the likes of Cassidy and the Sundance Kid during his own wild years before he became president in 1901.  

At the same time, fictional gangsters like the Corleones are part of the cultural landscape of the United States. 

American pop music, especially mainstream hip hop, perpetuated the tradition.  Hip hop narratives trace the rise and fall of modern-day gangsters, drug dealers, and outlaws.  American TV is plastered with similar images: in The Wire, which, ironically, starred a bunch of British actors as gangsters and hardmen in the wilds of Baltimore, Maryland (affectionately nicknamed “Bodymore, Murderland” on the show).

But Americans aren't the only ones so fascinated and obsessed. One of the biggest hits of French singer Serge Gainsbourg's  career was his  “Bonnie & Clyde” duet with (then lover) Brigitte Bardot: 

In the UK, gangster films were the country's only film industry export in the late 1990s and early oughts. Legendary actors Terence Stamp and Malcolm McDowell (one of the most sinister looking men on the planet) found themselves thrust back into the limelight as gangsters in films such as The Limey and Gangster No. 1, respectively.  Around the same time, Guy Ritchie burst onto the scene with his excellent gangster films, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000).  Of course, Ritchie has long since lost the plot, largely due to his obsession in filming his now ex-wife, Madonna, an exceptionally bad actress. 

Right now, two of the biggest grossing films in Quebec are about the legendary French gangster/outlaw, Jacques Mesrine. His long career included time spent in jail, and spectacular escapes therefrom, in Montreal. He was finally gunned down in a hail of bullets in Paris in 1979.  Mesrine: Killer Instinct and Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, were wildly successful in France upon their release in 2008. Vincent Cassel, one of France's biggest names, stars as Mesrine, and Roy Dupuis, Quebec's biggest film star, fills the bill as one of his henchmen.   

In short, the only Western country I can think of that does not have this fascination with violence and outlaws is Canada.  Certainly, American, British, and French gangster films do well here, and we consume American TV, and American music, but our own indigenous stock of outlaws and rebels is obscure.  Train robbers like Billy Miner, who preyed on trains in the Fraser Canyon and Fraser Valley of British Columbia (but even then, Miner was American, and was born and died in the Great Republic to the South), are all but forgotten. Rebels like Louis Riel, the Métis leader in the late 19^th century, are still divisive figures over a century later. 

(Billy Miner, the "Gentleman Train Robber")

Long and short: this foreign gaze at Americans, examining their fascination with violent criminals and outlaws obscures more than it shows, and it removes the lens from the rest of us who are just as riveted with violence, outlaws, and rebels.

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MORNING EDITION

In-house. Greg Smith and co-author Jordan Hale discuss shipping containers, ubiquitous computing, and the fabric of urban life. Stassa Edwards critiques kitsch-cum-history, American style, through the work of Normal Rockwell. Adam Weinstein remembers Joe Biden in Baghdad, and explains why Obama's Iraq decision is the right one. Eric Randolph is laid low by the local flora and fauna in New Delhi.

Diplomatic immunity? I never heard of it... Apparently, some airline staff expect you to fly more than halfway around the planet in cramped seats, eating passable-to-bad food, and like it. No complaints, or the air host/hostess will call security. And have you investigated on suspicion of being a terrorist. If you've had the misfortune of booking a flight with multiple layovers, god help you if you ever, EVER, tell anyone out loud that you hope the flight you're on is your last one. Because only terrorists would say such a thing. Never mind your diplomatic status as a member of an official government/military delegation.

Ambivalence on Iraq. George Packer has a thoughtful piece on Obama's Iraq speech. It's not as good asAdam's essay, of course, but it's more thoughtful than most of what's being written. And more pessimistic. Packer is, I think, ambivalent - admiring Obama's intellectual honesty and wincing at his lack of forthrightness.

What happened to Julian Assange's hair?  For the last month or so, pictures of Julian Assange have shown him with progressively darker hair. At first, I thought someone had floated pictures of  a younger version of him. Now, with the chatter turning increasingly to his alleged megalomania, I'm not so sure. Vanity? Couldn't be...

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VIDEO

Language learning adventures in China, video courtesy of The Atlantic.

Here's the thing: this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. For starters, the CIA and the TTP are, in a practical sense, at war with each other. Alleged CIA assets inside Pakistan are routinely executed by the TTP; in response, the CIA has orchestrated a massive bombing campaign by remotely piloted drones -- one of which killed the TTPs original leader, Baitullah Mehsud, months before the Chapman attack.

Here's the other thing: there isn't much evidence the TTP had targeted Americans in Afghanistan before the CIA began bombing their compounds sometime in 2004 (Nek Muhammed, Baitullah Mehsud's predecessor, was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan that year). Granted, many Pakitani Taliban, including Muhammad and the Mehsuds, had claimed allegiance to the cause of Al Qaeda, and had bragged of providing refuge to Taliban fighters returning from Afghanistan... but until very recently they had not directly meddled in a significant way in the war in Afghanistan.

Of course, the U.S. has declared war on anyone who helps al Qaeda. I'm not going to argue that the U.S. should not go after these terrorists, since the world will be a better place with them gone. I'm just puzzled at the indictment of Hakimullah. Ever since Baitullah Mehsud's death at the hands of the CIA -- the Camp Chapman attack was supposedly in retaliation for it -- Hakimullah has narrowly avoided being killed in several drone strikes on housing compounds where he was staying. Considering the role the CIA has already had in trying to kill him, it would make sense that he'd try to strike back.

Which brings us to this criminal charge: conspiracy to kill Americans and using a weapon of mass destruction. The latter charge is fundamentally stupid, the result of the U.S. government defining down the idea of "WMD" so that anything that goes boom is now a weapon of mass destruction, rather than the normal idea of WMD as chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons designed to inflict mass casualties. The former is difficult to square with how warfare works: in essence, the Department of Justice is making it a crime to resist offensive military operations in your own homeland.

It might seem a semantic distinction, especially given the massive campaign to assassinate Hakimullah, but it's really not. The U.S. has made it a crime to fight in a war -- not to commit specific atrocities, the way one would normally define a crime or a war crime, but to attack spies conducting an assassination campaign in a war. Despite the terrible loss of intelligence agents, that is war. It is violent, and you do not enjoy specific immunities from reprisal if you choose to participate in it. The CIA is an armed actor in the war in Afghanistan, and it is one of the only American agencies actively participating in the war in Pakistan. It is not exempt, in a legal sense, from its targets fighting back.

In a manner of speaking, this also highlights some of the bizarre angles to the idea of the war on terror. The U.S. seemingly can't make up its mind about how it should go after militants. It wants to kill some, capture others, and exclude still more. It wants to reconcile some, but won't say how or under what conditions. It tries to assassinate leaders, killing their families in the process, but then charges them with conspiracy to commit murder when they hit back. The whole thing's a mess, with overlapping initiatives and contradictory objectives.

Then again, I suppose that's a reasonable summary of the War On Terror anyway.

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MORNING EDITION

In-house. A brief public service announcement: stay up to date with CI RSS feeds. CI has added a number of new features, including blogs by staff writers Adam Weinstein and Stassa Edwards and the one that you're reading right now. The Readbook is cross-posted into the Agenda, but if you just want the straight Readbook goods, then you can have it.

Kabul's expat drinking scene. Alternate title: "Die, imperialist, die." The Guardian newspaper's Comment is Free section often publishes some very smart opinion and analysis. Not always, though. Seema Jilani, a physician and freelance journalist, spews vitriolic about the expat drinking scene in Kabul. Like any such environment, I'm sure it gets ugly from time to time. I'm sure it's that much uglier for the privilege it bestows on the foreign few against a backdrop of heart-wrenching deprivation. There are, it must be said, almost always a good number of those expats who are mannerless and oblivious to the hardship around them. But sitting right beside them are other expats who've sacrificed much to lend a hand. Some have even been killed in displays of local hospitality that, by comparison, make "colonialist" slights levied against local dignity relatively benign by comparison. You wouldn't know it from Jilani's venom. Relativizing the many and varied contributions of the monolithic foreigner - particularly against the pain of many (though by no means all) Afghans who've suffered unbelievable cruelties for an inordinately long period of time - lacks tact and grace, and provides no more useful insight than the stereotypes she herself so artlessly caricatures.

Afghanistan war reporting is as hard as war reporting gets, according to former journo and founder of Public Affairs books, Peter Osnos. He argues that fewer people are paying attention to the war in Afghanistan that did to the war in Iraq, and Afghanistan logistics are really, really difficult. Osnos provides a handy rundown of who's who in the zoo, including the usual suspects - the NYT, WaPo, the Wall Street Journal, among others. He quite rightly notes the solid contribution of Foreign Policy magazine's AfPak Channel, "universally praised for its comprehensive and creative collection of the best of what is available about the region," as well as CNN's Afghanistan aggregation site. He misses the boat somewhat when he writes "there are also a cadre of freelancers, bloggers, and NGO representatives, but I can't really judge their importance," which is too bad. Not only is the core of the AfPak Channel itself a blog, but the cohort of Afghanistan bloggers includes a number who are based in or closely study and monitor the country - and are, arguably, better sources of well-informed opinion and accurate analysis, if not actually "news" per se.

Afghanistan's banking crisis. Afghanistan's Central Bank has taken over Kabul Bank in a Karzai-authorized move to prevent cronies of one sort or another from bleeding the bank's coffers completely dry. This looks like it might be the first credible anti-corruption measure Karzai has taken, though the story is much too convoluted for such a simple outcome. Some pretty significant sums of money were "loaned" out - amounts cited were in the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars - to well connected people, for pretty dubious purposes. These kinds of extractive economies are fairly typical of conflict states, but the quantities in the Kabul Bank case are staggering.

Barack Obama as Pontius Pilate? Whatever you might think of David Rieff - whether you agree or disagree with him - his writing is always worth reading. In a missive expressing his anger at Obama, his tone is especially shrill:

I am told that, in a recent private conversation, one senior administration official angrily demanded to know what critics expected him to do—“tell the Senate that we need sixty billion dollars and that we’ll be there ten years?” But that is precisely what they should do if they are serious about prosecuting the war. If the administration continues on its present course, doling out the truth with an eyedropper, it will soon become clear that its Faustian bargain, not only with Hamid Karzai and his band of merry thieves and drug dealers in Kabul and with the government of Pakistan, but also with its own collective conscience, isn’t even getting anything. At least Faust got something from the Devil.

The dying, and why we do so poorly at caring of them. There are many reasons, apparently. Interesting. 

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VIDEO

Roof riders in Bangladesh, video courtesy of Al Jazeera English.

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MORNING EDITION

In-house. Dr. Keith Hanlon of the Open University in London writes about cash transfers to developing nations. 

Corruption index. Afghanistan's government is hopelessly corrupt, and that's the spanner in the works of the international community project to fix the country. Except it may not be, once you look closely enough. It almost seems trite to suggest there's opportunity in corruption - "corruption that works for you and corruption that works against you" - but I'm skeptical that a more mature approach to local corruption, for lack of a better way of describing it,  would ever be allowed to develop, much less become the basis for positive change. 

Diplomacy is a dead end. Career wise, that is - a common perception in the US that a senior diplomatic assignment, especially to the UN, is the equivalent of occupational cement shoes. Colum Lynch explains and debunks. Nice piece.

Longshot Magazine. Alexis Madrigal shares lessons learned from the crowd-sourced and resourced project, which involved putting together a glossy print magazine issue from scratch in just 48 hours. 

Righthaven LLC. The company continues its campaign of acquiring newspaper copyright so it can sue bloggers for infringement. Righthaven doesn't go for the big boys; instead, it aims for volume, picking off small bloggers and content aggregators for a "few thousand" dollars apiece. On the one hand, I applaud the effort to corral copyright-violating activities. On the other, this just feels creepy and opportunistic. 

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VIDEO

The Golden Temple at Amritsar. Interesting community atmospherics, video courtesy of the New York Times.