Author Archive
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Campaign Desk
Tracking a Meme
October 21, 2010 11:47 AMIf you opened the New York Times yesterday, you probably saw Carlotta Gall’s big story on the military offensive in Kandahar. “Coalition Forces Routing Taliban in Key Afghan Region,” it blares in the headline, and the story is little... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
What Really Happened in Takhar?
September 3, 2010 10:58 AMThere was an air strike this week in Takhar, a province wedged between Badakhshan and Baghlan in northeastern Afghanistan. The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) claims they managed to kill off a major leader in the Islamic Movement of... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
The Assange Leaks
July 26, 2010 03:18 PMJulian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has compared his organization’s latest leak of almost 92,000 U.S. military documents relating to the war in Afghanistan to “opening the Stasi archives” in East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
What’s Secret in ‘Top Secret America?’
July 22, 2010 10:34 AMEditor's note: At the time this article was published, Joshua Foust was employed by Northrop Grumman, a defense contractor. Here’s a neat exercise: with the obvious exception of some interviews with corporate and agency spokesman, and a bizarre interview with... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
Bribe This
October 6, 2009 12:00 PMThere is a dark irony to the faintly racist idea that Afghans are unprincipled mercenaries available to the highest bidders, especially given the rampant panic in Washington at the inescapable conclusion that Hamid Karzai stole his own reelection. And still,... Continue reading
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Behind the News
Please, Don’t Retweet This
August 21, 2009 02:11 PMOn Thursday, August 20, Afghanistan had its second-ever presidential election. It’s a big deal for several reasons, not least of which is that the entire U.S. mission there is predicated on the attempt to create a self-sustaining government, one capable... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
The Meta-War in Georgia, One Year On
August 18, 2009 12:11 PMIt’s been a year or so since Russia invaded its tiny southern neighbor, Georgia. The details of why and how it happened remain in deep dispute: each side viciously disputes who really started the conflict, and each side’s partisans viciously... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
Stop the Ambulance Chasers!
January 12, 2009 01:25 PMNow that the war in Iraq is won, according to journalist-bloggers like Michael Yon, we can expect to see a virtual horde of journalists and pundits descending on America’s other war—the one in Afghanistan—seeking continued employment as instant... Continue reading
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Campaign Desk
Somalia: Quicksand, or Vital Interests?
January 6, 2009 08:52 AMMatthew Yglesias recently argued at The American Prospect: The Somali situation was, in many ways, improving as of two years ago. At which point the Bush administration initiated a new adventure that, like most Bush administration deeds, was... Continue reading
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Behind the News
LeT’s Not Jump the Gun
December 2, 2008 07:00 AMLast week’s attacks in Mumbai were, in a word, horrific. As happens after every crisis, the pundits and analysts swarm the nearest media outlets to share their views on what happened, why, and who did it. This is perfectly understandable—a... Continue reading
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Behind the News
The Unbearable Lightness of Kabul
December 1, 2008 12:56 PMLate last week, a car bomb exploded near the American embassy in Kabul, killing at least four civilians. The bombing is part of the larger story in which terror attacks in Afghanistan’s capital have increased over the last... Continue reading
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Behind the News
Phantom Militias
November 3, 2008 03:44 PMVerifiable stories out of northwestern Pakistan are difficult to come by: the entire region exists in what Rosanne Klass once called "a smattering of romantic fact so closely mixed with romantic fiction that it would be difficult to disentangle the... Continue reading
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Behind the News
Take Me to the Other Side
October 22, 2008 02:03 PMNir Rosen’s blockbuster article in Rolling Stone on his “embed” with the Taliban in the Ghazni province of Afghanistan is being roundly praised as a stellar work of investigative journalism. But does it really... Continue reading
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Behind the News
Why We Fight
October 14, 2008 01:05 PMMany in the press have begun to declare the war in Afghanistan either unwinnable (off the words of one outspoken British commander) or some cynical exercise in colonialism. David McKiernan, the general in charge... Continue reading
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Behind the News
All Poppies Must Die
October 6, 2008 01:01 PMDid you know the one thing missing from Southern Afghanistan was an increased focus on eradicating poppies? After a whopping three day visit to the country, U.S. Army Gen. John Craddock, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe, <a... Continue reading
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Behind the News
Did We Just Invade Pakistan?
September 26, 2008 01:03 PMOver the last few years, the war along the Afghan-Pakistan border has progressed from scattered bombing incidents to almost daily reports of American incursions with Pakistanis returning fire—now, even without American troops having to enter Pakistani territory. Is... Continue reading
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Behind the News
The Battle of Ashgabat
September 19, 2008 12:31 PMJust before midnight of Friday September 12th, the police in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, began an all-night shootout with a group of radical Islamists. Saturday morning’s reports said twenty policemen died in the fight, indicating that the energy-rich Central... Continue reading
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Behind the News
The Birth (and Death) of a Meme
September 10, 2008 01:54 PMSometime last fall, a new story began making its way out of Afghanistan: the country’s roads are being paved, and with that paving comes newfound security. The claim was repeated by many embedded reporters, both freelance and staff, and for... Continue reading
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Behind the News
Citizen Propagandists
September 2, 2008 11:49 AMEthan Zuckerman, the co-founder of the citizens’ media project Global Voices, notes an interesting angle to the Russo-Georgian Conflict: Part of the reason this war is such a riddle is that we’ve entered a new phase in... Continue reading
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Behind the News
Coming Clean About Casualties
August 29, 2008 01:23 PMOne of the challenges the U.S.-led coalition faces in the war in Afghanistan is controlling the narrative surrounding its actions. Often, the accounts given by officials differ so sharply from those of local eyewitnesses that the coalition’s portrayal of events... Continue reading
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Desks
The Audit Business
- Audit Notes: Facebook IPO edition
- The Chicago Tribune lights up the flame-retardant industry An outstanding investigation show how chemical companies preserve a toxic cash cow
The Observatory Science
- The western frontier KQED Quest, Pacific Standard keep their eyes on the other coast
- USA Today’s oily, gassy rainbow Detailed cover story a bit too rosy about ‘energy independence’
Campaign Desk Politics & Policy
- The over-covered image war Journalists are exaggerating the risk that Mitt Romney will be “defined” early
- Medicare and the $500 billion bogeyman Will a half-truth still work for the GOP?
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