Last Monday, Julian Assange told reporters in London that the Afghan War Diaries reveal war crimes in Afghanistan, and reiterated this statement on Democracy Now! midweek. The claim has been widely reported and is being reported as fact by some sources. This installment in my series on the Wikileaks story will evaluate this claim and correct a few conceptual inaccuracies circulating in the press coverage.But first, here's what this post is not...
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The ticking clock(s) on Iran…
Apparently, containment of Iran is no longer an option and the Obama administration is showing signs of toughening its stance. In doing so, the administration appears to be shifting the anticipated costs and benefits (and the likelihood) of military strikes on Iran.One of Israel's leading commentators, Ehud Yaari, had this piece in yesterday's Jerusalem Post: I have solid information indicating that the top echelons of the administration –...
“An AQ/Taliban Executioner’s Dream.”
Quoting an anonymous former military intelligence officer, that is how Adam Swerer described the Wikileaks' archive published Sunday in an op-ed earlier this week. Joshua Foust concurred in a PBS essay:If I were a Taliban operative with access to a computer — and lots of them have access to computers — I’d start searching the WikiLeaks data for incident reports near my area of operation to see if I recognized anyone. And then I’d kill whomever...
UN Passes “Right to Water”: Diplomacy everywhere but not a drop to drink.
Yesterday the General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution declaring “the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of the right to life."The vote passed with 122 countries voting and 41 countries abstaining, including United States, Britain, Canada, Australia – but also other nations like Botswana and Turkey. On the other hand, China, Russia, Germany, France, Spain and...
Children shouldn’t have Strontium 90
The Washington Post calls this one of the ten worst campaign attack ads of all time (ranked 2nd behind Daisy Girl). Hmmm, I actually thought it made a good point -- and certainly summed up Goldwater's views on international treaties and arms control. I thought the line "they can make you die" was a nice touch. I guess the ice cream cone might have been a bit over the top....Still, it was Goldwater who gave us this classic during his acceptance...
Identifying Groupthink
Many of the Journolist critics have expressed concerns that the listserv's membership -- you had to be political "center to left" to join -- fomented groupthink. Andrew Sullivan's critique is succinct, but he's hardly alone in leveling the charge: "It is this tendency to groupthink and exclusivity that concerns me."Reihan Salam, who was generally sympathetic to Journolist in an on-line piece he wrote last week, has recalibrated his argument to...
From QIZ to ROZ
In 2008, after kicking around the idea for a couple of years, the US formally proposed to create Reconstruction Opportunity Zones (ROZs) in remote parts of Pakistan (FATA, NWFP, earthquake affected areas of Kashmir, a part of Balochistan province) and all of Afghanistan. The idea was modeled on the Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZ) preferential free trade agreement set up to help forge a liberal-economic peace between Israel, the Palestinian...
Why states shouldn’t count on Facebook for foreign policy
My colleague, Ben O’Loughlin at Royal Holloway, has written a blog post on the potential consequences of states in the West, particularly the US and UK, increasingly relying on informal social networking of its citizens to promote foreign policy priorities. This would be a move away from the kind of ham-fisted attempts at public diplomacy seen in the wake of 9/11 aimed at getting Arab states to “like” the west to allowing every day citizens to...
Kosovo: Countrified!
Just in case you were in suspense, the ICJ has declared that Kosovo's declaration of independence to be legal. Unsurprisingly, the Kosovars are happy, the Serbs are not happy and countries with independence movements are probably a bit more nervous. As the Guardian reports:The ruling is expected to have profound ramifications on the wider international stage, bolstering demands for recognition by territories as diverse as Northern Cyprus,...
The Transit Trade Agreement
Although the story has garnered relatively little attention in the US, the Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement (APTTA) is probably one of the most important developments impacting the medium-term economic and political health of Afghanistan. As the US State Department correctly noted,"This agreement is one of the most important, concrete achievements between the two neighbors in 45 years and represents the most significant bilateral...
Top Secret America: The Garrison State has arrived
A couple of thoughts on Dana Priest and William Arkin's series that began in the Washington Post yesterday. First, this is the type of story that is all but non-existent in our non-stop 24-hour news cycles -- a two-year investigative report that pulls together thousands of bits and pieces of information and carefully assembles them to tell the bigger story of where we have traveled in the past decade. (I see that the story actually bumped CNN's...
What I Ended Up Reading in Between World Cup Matches Abroad
Last month during the Greece/South Korea World Cup game, my eight-year-old son noticed the players speaking to one another in English, and asked me: “Mom, is English the official language of soccer?” As with so many of his astute little queries, I didn’t know the answer at the time. But while in Asia, I read three fabulous books that kept bringing me back to this question and finally not only answered it, but helped me see why it matters.First:...