Why Afghanistan is important: flashback to April 2007

UPDATE: This post has been linked and excerpted by John Brown’s Public Diplomacy Press and Blog Review. Brown is a PD expert and former Foreign Service officer who is now associated with Georgetown University. This is kind of a thrill for me, because — even though I know he’s just Googling “public diplomacy” and then linking to all the new results, probably — at my first job in DC I read his listserv/blog (cited as one of the 10 Best Blogs of ‘06 by U.S. News and World Report’s David Kaplan) every single day. Funny how things loop back around like that.

There’s a whole lot to write about lately — mostly on the President’s announcement of a new Af-Pak strategy, some ongoing and complementary discussion of CT vs. COIN, risk-avoidance in strategy and tactics, and a weirdly unfocused Andrew Exum on an anti-safe havens approach, but also a really, really bad article in Armed Forces Journal (inexplicably, the headliner of the April issue!) on conflict avoidance as national security strategy — but I’ve been dealing with computer issues for much of the last two nights (my usual reading and writing time), so my energy and patience are waning right now.

I’m hoping I can get the ol’ analytical juices flowing with a little stroll down memory lane — I’m going to post a few excerpts of a piece I wrote almost two years ago for a blog called the Weekend Economist, in which I responded to another writer’s argument about the relative perceived strategic importance of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

D. F. Wallace’s unfinished novel, from The New Yorker

I spent much of tonight [yes, I am that slow of a reader!] with “The Unfinished” an article in this week’s New Yorker about the truncated final novelistic effort of the staggeringly talented David Foster Wallace, who killed himself in September of last year at the age of (I think) 46. Wallace has been my favorite fiction writer since I read Infinite Jest — the 1,200-odd page tome for which he gained notoriety — during procrastination related to the writing of my graduate thesis back in 2002.

Blast from the past re: Russia and Europe

I should probably have a better recollection of the things that I’ve put up on the blog, but I’ve got to be honest with you: considering my memory, unless I wrote it in the last week, I’ve probably forgotten. (Note to parents and Dr. hab. Zdzislaw Mach: this does not include my graduate thesis.) So in my recent efforts to revive the blog, I’ve been glancing through some of my old writing. This afternoon I came across this, from way back in April 2007.  It seems topical in light of recent consternation over the impact of the Georgian war on Russia’s place in the international system. An excerpt after the jump.

Linked by The Issue

My post from a couple of days ago “Hostage-taking as an emerging tactic in Afghanistan,” was linked and excerpted in the July 31 edition of The Issue.  I’m listed as “View 2” alongside related pieces from Michelle Malkin, Disarmament Insight, and Middle East Forum.  How I managed to end up in such company is a mystery to me.

New home

I’ve been having a ton of formatting problems over on blogspot, so I’ve decided to move things over here. I’ve saved my meager archives in chronological order, and (miraculously) I’ve sorted out the timestamps to preserve the original date of composition. The only problem is that each post shows up as having been written around midnight, which probably isn’t far from the truth anyway.

Thanks for reading.

Letter to FP magazine

No posts for a while, so here’s the letter to the editor that Ryan and I co-wrote in response to Howard Gardner’s recent “contribution” to the Foreign Policy feature “21 Solutions to Save the World.” The tone of our letter is considerably more charitable than that of my initial, personal response on reading the piece.

Orwell and Rwanda

Tonight I read two things: an article and the beginning of a book. The former is Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” which has disabused me of any pretensions I had to being a good writer. The latter: Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, published in 1998 after the author traveled extensively in Rwanda. I recently watched “Hotel Rwanda,” which — apart from the performance of the great Don Cheadle — I have to say was a crushing disappointment. I could go on and on about oversimplification and a movie’s inability to address a complex issue like the Rwandan genocide in any meaningful way, but I’d rather not. Suffice it to say that I don’t think the film lived up to the hype. When talking about it with one of my roommates, she mentioned that she had the Gourevitch book and I should take a look at it.

The reason that I even mention the Orwell essay is this: part of the reason for starting this blog was to write regularly and to improve. I’m not sure that either thing has happened to the extent that I would have hoped. So Gourevitch can be my muse, and hopefully Orwell will be my inspiration.