December 2010
13 posts
This is the Velvet Underground plus a very young...
“The various contradictions and examples of ill-digested scholarship that mark...”
– From an absolutely brutal review of Robert Kaplan’s new book, Monsoon, by my friend Manan Ahmed.
“I don’t wash for four days and I don’t change my clothes. The closest I come to...”
– From one of my favorite bloggers in Afghanistan.
A brief history of Mt. Everest's Open Graveyards →
“That’s another part of the tragedy of this,” said a senior U.S....”
– Just in case you were wondering just how badly Wikileaks has ruined American diplomacy. Everyone loses when diplomats cannot honestly report back what they saw. It makes conflict and deception more likely. This is Wikileaks’ fault.
Good Right Until The End
Arthur Brisbane, Public Editor of the New York Times, has a good explanation for why his newspaper participated in leaking the embassy cables this week. Basically, and despite my opposition to the leaks I agree with this, the leaks are newsworthy, and the Times would have been negligent to ignore them. Brisbane then lists why he thinks these are newsworthy:
Iran is pursuing WMD (which we knew)
...
When Zahid Hussain's "The Scorpion's Tale" Comes...
I reviewed Zahid Hussain’s new book, The Scorpion’s Tale: The Relentless Rise of Islamic Militancy in Pakistan—And How It Threatens America over at Foreign Policy:
Understanding how Pakistan became the incubator for so many terror groups — an exciting alphabet soup of acronyms like the QST, the TNSM, LeT, JeM, HN, TTP, and many others — requires understanding...