The southern Afghan city founded by Alexander the Great (and which still bears a Pashto version of his name) is the latest target of the US/NATO/ISAF military forces. Initial efforts to secure key roads into Kandahar began last week. "Operation Omaid [Hope]" as it has been dubbed aims to gain control of this city which is the original home of the Taliban movement. The operation is expected to take several months to complete.The Taliban (i.e....
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Cyber-War: Emerging Threat or Phantom Menace?
Apparently the ruckus between Google and China amounts to a "cyber war."This sounds familiar. In late February, former director of national intelligence Michael McConnell declared on the WAPO opinion pages that we are losing some sort of "cyberwar." Then earlier this month Obama administration cyber-czar Howard Schmidt announced "there is no cyberwar" at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco. At Government Computer News, William Jackson...
“Girls Don’t Do Math Past Algebra”
Today, a group of articles in the Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the New York Times, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and other newspapers, comment on the AAUW (American Association of University Women) report which will be webcast this Thursday. These articles reminded me of a teacher that I'd had when I was young, who, despite my stellar performances in math courses, told me that girls don't do, or need to do, math past...
Seeing the whole board on financial reform
Clive Crook does: The problem is not just that specific rules – higher bank capital requirements, for instance – threaten profits and are therefore opposed. It is that all governments see themselves as partners of their industries in world competition. Regulators seek not a level playing field but one tilted to their own groups’ advantage. This is not a hidden bias. It is proudly advertised. A government that did less than stand up for its own...
What is the status of CIA drone operatives in international law? (Short answer: I don’t know, but that shouldn’t matter.)
Despite our modern ideas about a separation between civilians and soldiers in international law (and then complain about the breakdown of the legal distinction in counterinsurgency conflict or situations like Pakistan), civilians have almost always accompanied military forces into the field. These include journalists, clergy (not within the armed forces of an army) and “camp followers” which may have included cooks, tailors, menders,...
Digital Burqa
A few days ago, Charli pondered "whether or not the Internet and social media empowers civil society or instead simply offers states new tools of repression and governance." And she provided a link to an excellent video about Iranian bloggers. I haven't been able to get the question or the video out of my head. This is not my topic/area of research, but I will offer a few tentative thoughts to see if it will spark some discussion...What color...
Margaret Moth
Margaret Moth died over the weekend after a long battle with cancer. Margaret was an incredibly talented photo-journalist who covered numerous conflicts. It was her video work, shot during the first months of the Bosnian war for CNN, that defined the war and set the standard for the way journalists -- especially camera crews -- filmed and reported the conflict. In July, 1992 she was hit and seriously wounded by a sniper's bullet on sniper alley...
Methodology411: Nemesis
Nemesis. No, I don't mean the tenth Star Trek film, a film that many of us Trekkers would like to simply imagine never happened (and thanks to J. J. Abrams' rebooting of the franchise, we now can). Instead, I mean the long-theorized stellar companion to our Sun -- perhaps a brown dwarf star -- the existence of which could perhaps help to explain cycles of mass extinction on Earth. NASA's WISE satellite, presently conducting a survey of the...
Things I Learned Doing My First Bloggingheads Diavlog
1) A small puppy, if walked real hard first, will sit quietly outside long enough for a decent taping with no unseemly background noise. (I had worried about that.)2) It's important to spell out your acronyms on the first use in speech just like in writing. 3) I say "um" a lot more than I ever thought. Anyway, check it out. UN Dispatch's Mark Leon Goldberg and I talk about pirate economics, the Somalia aid scandal, gender politics, and the...
The Latest on U.S. Militarism
In my U.S. Foreign Policy class this semester, students read the latest book from historian Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008). As in his prior work, Bacevich is critical of the apparent militarism in American foreign policy. Primarily, he argues that the U.S. is too willing to use military force as an instrument of policy and that the American people and its leaders overestimate the effectiveness of...
Are you #^&@%! kidding me?
Our political discourse is seriously out of control. Retired Marine Corps General John J. Sheehan -- an ardent opponent of gays in the military -- testified before the Senate Armed Services today that the decision by the Dutch government to allow gays to serve in its military contributed to the events at Srebrenica in 1995. Apparently, the Dutch decision --and the overall "liberalization" of the Dutch military -- contributed to its "weak"...
Pondering Social Media and Global Civil Society
Random connections between things: Today, I'm at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy giving a guest lecture on global advocacy networks, in a class on Statecraft taught by my colleague Dan Drezner, who has an article coming out in the next issue Brown Journal of World Affairs on whether or not the Internet and social media empowers civil society or instead simply offers states new tools of repression and governance. Then, with all that...