Category Archives: World

This next week on Wednesday, 8 September at the New America Foundation a group of academics, business leaders, journalists, and other policy practitioners — organized as ‘The Afghanistan Study Group’ will formally release this new report titled “New Way Forward: Rethinking U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan.” The report can be downloaded here.

The Afghanistan Study Group is our effort at a Team B approach to thinking through an alternative policy strategy for Afghanistan given the problems undermining America’s current course.

But after reading the following article in the Washington Diplomat by Michael Coleman, it’s clear that former U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel — now co-chair with former Senator David Boren of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board — makes a darn good “Team B” package all on his own, particularly when it comes to no-nonsense thinking about the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars.

Read the entire interview but this is the most potent section on wars which Hagel thinks have been major strategic errors and which, in the case of Afghanistan, he thinks we need to unwind:

“I think we’re in a mess in Afghanistan and I think we’re in a mess in Iraq,” said Hagel, who voted in support of the war in Iraq based on the intelligence assessments and later admitted he regretted his vote. “Our military has been more valiant and done a better job than we could have ever hoped. But we have put the military in an impossible situation.”

Hagel flatly rejects the notion — now conventional wisdom among many Americans — that the war in Iraq has been a success. “Did you see today’s paper?” he asked, holding up a front-page story in the Washington Post that described vast swaths of the country as being plagued by electricity outages.

“Look at the facts: No government, less electricity and people want us out,” Hagel pointed out. “Anyway you measure Iraq today I think you’re pretty hard pressed to find how people are better off than they were before we invaded. I think history is going to be very harsh in its judgment — very, very harsh. And I think we’re headed for a similar outcome in Afghanistan if we don’t do some things differently.”

He stands by his assessment, outlined in his 2008 book “America: Our Next Chapter,” that the invasion of Iraq is the worst American foreign policy blunder since Vietnam, and one of the five worst in U.S. history.

Hagel said the United States “made a terrible mistake taking our eye of the ball in Afghanistan when we invaded Iraq.” Now, he argues that the United States is doing in Afghanistan exactly what George W. Bush famously warned against during his 2000 presidential campaign: nation building.

“We are where we are today — going into our 10th year in Afghanistan, our longest war — because we did take our eye of the ball,” he said. “It’s becoming clearer and clearer. We really made some big mistakes during that time. I have never believed you can go into any country and nation build, and unfortunately I think that’s what we’ve gotten ourselves bogged down in.

“You can dance around that issue any way you like, but the fact is that there are billions and billions of dollars we’ve spent and are still spending, over 100,000 troops, and all the assistance we’ve got going in there,” Hagel continued. “It’s nation building. We should not nation build. It will always end in disaster.”

He argues that the original aim of defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan — a group that the United States essentially “invented” during the Soviet-Afghan conflict in the 1970s — has morphed into something more complex. The U.S. is now building roads and schools, working to establish an Afghan government, and trying to negotiate peace among political factions that have been warring for centuries.

“We became completely disoriented from our original focus,” Hagel charged. “That problem in Afghanistan isn’t going to be solved with 100,000 American troops.”

It’s no surprise then that the former Senator believes it’s time for the United States to aggressively “unwind” in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is the kind of thinking that Obama needs to hear more often — whether it is Team B or in Cabinet meetings or through National Security Council advisers.

It may be time for President Obama to make Chuck Hagel part of Team A.

— Steve Clemons publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note. Clemons can be followed on Twitter @SCClemons

Read more: Aghanistan Study Group, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chuck Hagel, Team B, President's Intelligence Advisory Board, Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Politics News

Tokyo imposes restrictions on Iranian business interests over Tehran’s disputed nuclear programme.

Read more: Tokyo-Japan, Japan, Tehran-Iran, Iran, Islamic Republic of Iran, Home News

On a recent trip to Germany, I was cutting my pizza with a knife and fork, and as I brought the food to my mouth, my friend, German TV star Andreas Stenschke, said, “What are you doing?”

He’d previously criticized me for wanting to slice the pizza in sections, admonishing me not to pick up the slice in my hands in a proper Italian restaurant. “This is not Pizza Hut!” he exclaimed. It seemed a little bossy, but he is quite Teutonic, though Andreas is normally amiable (take a look at him). Since I was doing what I was told I was starting to become neurotic.

Apparently what caught Andreas’ attention was that I cut my pizza with my right hand, holding the fork in my left and then, having done so, put the knife down and placed the fork in my right hand as I speared the food on its way to be eaten.

When I realized what he was talking about, I was still confused until he demonstrated while eating his own meal that, after cutting his meat, he kept the fork in his left hand and simply grasped a piece, which he directed to his mouth.

I’d never noticed this behavior before after almost twenty trips to Europe and many more points elsewhere on other continents and somehow figured I’d been eating wrong my entire life. But how could this have happened? Aren’t we all trained to follow certain customs, such as the proper way to hold a fork between your middle and forefinger?

He was so amazed at how I was eating, and I was so unnerved after the previous criticism that I asked him tentatively if what he’d just noticed was as bad as eating the pizza with my hands? “No,” he said still a bit irritated, while shaking his head at my strange comportment.

The rest of the trip went okay, but it gnawed at me a lot until I got home, wondering if I were the only one in the world who ate that way. So, just to make sure, I did the only thing I could think of. I did a search on the Internet.

It’s incredible what you can learn just by inserting some words or an odd question. In my case, “What is the proper way to cut and eat your meat?” Amazingly, even such a relatively long search request revealed a response. In a video, according to Phyllis Davis, President of Executive Mentoring and Coaching, Inc., she revealed that I was eating in the proper fashion. Other search results said the same, referring to the way I was eating as the “zig-zag” style and explaining that Europeans did it differently. The way Andreas was eating.

It also indicated that a relatively small percentage of Americans eat a la the Europeans. Yet almost all the movies and TV series I’ve lately been watching show American characters eating the “continental” way instead of the predominant American manner.

The question is why?

Okay, I’ve become a bit obsessed in my observations, but here are some examples from films and TV shows. In Revolutionary Road, Leonardo DiCaprio eats his steak the European way, as do the kids eating pancakes on ABC’s Desperate Housewives. Meryl Streep gobbles her food that way in Julie and Julia and so do the characters on the CW’s 90210 and Supernatural , Fox Network’s Master Chef, as well as recent films such as The Kids Are All Right, Flipped, The Other Guys and The Switch. Even David Letterman, in a bit on CBS’ The Late Show recently, ate a piece of steak as Andreas did.

Now, it’s one thing if there are occasional examples of Americans eating as Europeans do, but in the media it appears unanimous. It’s as if no one, not one single person that I’ve seen on a show or film eats as I do or the folks I dine with, and while some of you may eat in that manner, can you really say that just about everyone in the USA does, too?

Maybe there’s some sort of high fallutin’ thing going around in the creative community, that it’s hip to eat like a Frenchman or savvy to chow down like a German or Brit? It’s not like it’s more genteel. I still can’t get the image out of my mind of Queen Elizabeth shoveling food in her mouth that way. I will admit it’s more efficient. And perhaps there are those who feel it’s uncool and a waste of time to put down your knife and switch hands when you could be using the few seconds saved to text your friends.

Anyway, it’s real odd, and I broached the subject on my trip to France last May, where I challenged my young cousin David to watch what I was doing. I cut my chicken and then asked him. “Tu as changé ta main,” he said, realizing I’d switched the fork to my right hand. I shrugged and then, quite intrigued, noticed his father, after cutting his meat, was eating with his right hand. Could it be cousin Patrice was eating like an American? Turned out he was just left-handed.

Sacre bleu!

Michael Russnow’s website is ramproductionsinternational.com

Read more: Abc, Film, Germany, Late Night Shows, Family, The Other Guys, Eating Out, Phyllis Davis, Andreas Stenschke, Nbc, Fox, Zig-Zag Style of Eating, Cbs, Queen Elizabeth II, France, Julie and Julia, Satire, Master Chef, Supernatural, The Late Show, The KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT, Meryl Streep, Great Britain, Michael Russnow, Desperate Housewives, Flipped, Revolutionary Road, Leonardo Dicaprio, Ram Productions, Cw, David Letterman, Europe, United Kingdom, Entertainment News

I was vacationing in Prince Edward Island, Canada this summer when I came across this article in The Globe and Mail: “The World Would Love to Be Canadian.” The writer, Joe Friesen, cites this startling statistic: “Given the choice, 53 percent of adults in the world’s 24 leading economies said they would immigrate to Canada.”

I’m teetering on the edge of joining them.

This isn’t a whimsical decision on my part. It’s been brewing since 1974, when my father took our family on our one and only camping trip. He rented an RV and we headed north from Massachusetts to Prince Edward Island, which he described as “a peaceful emerald isle of enchantment, where the sands are red and the waters sparkle silver.” Dad had never read “Anne of Green Gables”, but he made PEI sound tantalizing, like the Land of Oz without the Wicked Witch and her horrible flying monkeys.

Sadly, my mother did not take to camping. “Just more chores for me!” she declared, and forced us to turn around in Maine after driving a grand total of four hours. My parents were divorced soon after that.

Fast forward to my own divorce. When my first husband and I split up, I had two young children; I was dead set on giving them a family vacation, man or no man. Affording a beach vacation in New England was impossible on my single-parent salary, so I convinced a friend and her kids to join us on a week-long trip to Prince Edward Island after spotting an ad for a cottage there that rented for just $400 a week.

We drove 12 hours north from Massachusetts with our kids making more noise in that van than most rock concerts. Between the various stops to pee and feed them all, it was midnight by the time we reached the island. (In those days, the only way to get to PEI was the ferry.) The cottage was on a rutted red dirt road (still plenty of those up there, for all of you “Anne of Green Gables” fans). I was shaking with fatigue by the time we arrived. It was pitch black all around us, but the sky was a bowl of stars and we could smell the sea.

We woke the next morning to the sound of fiddle music. I sat up and looked out my window at Rustico Bay, where great blue herons dotted the shore. Tall purple and pink lupins waved like some Disney cartoon animation; I half expected the flowers to sing. Across the bay was a tall white church, and that’s where the fiddle music was coming from: a festival that we attended that very afternoon. I was hooked on PEI from that moment on.

I’ve gone back to Prince Edward Island every summer for the past 14 years, and sometimes in the fall or even winter, when the snow blows across the potato fields and the roads disappear out from under you. There is never a time when I don’t love it.

Yes, there are certainly moments while driving up Route 95 through Maine (where the state motto should be “Maine, the Infinite State”) when I think, “This is so not worth it.” Even in New Brunswick, where I’ve come to love the Bay of Fundy’s rocky shoreline and the long stretches of farmland with their big brown loaves of hay and spotted cows, I sometimes think, “Why can’t I find a closer place to love?” Then I cross the Confederation Bridge from the mainland to Prince Edward Island and fall in love with the place all over again. The colors seem brighter and the air is clearer here than anywhere else on earth.

The Globe and Mail article reports that more than three-quarters of those surveyed in China said they’d prefer to live in Canada, followed by Mexico and India at nearly 70 percent. Most respondents perceived Canada as a place where rights and freedoms are respected on a deeper level than anywhere else.

Is this true? By now, I’ve explored most parts of Canada, including many of its cities, from Vancouver to Ottawa, from Montreal to St. John. There is urban blight, as there is in the U.S., and visible evidence of unemployment — the Canadian unemployment rate is just over 8 percent overall. Certainly Canada isn’t free of crime or substance abuse. The last time I was in St. John with my mother, one drunken, spacey fellow stepped onto the escalator behind Mom and rested his chin on her shoulder, passing out for a second until she barked at him to back off.

Yet, wherever I’ve been in Canada, there is an overall feeling of goodwill from most people — my husband calls most Canadians “pathologically friendly” because of their willingness to chat you up — and generosity abounds. Most recently, I was staying at a friend’s house on PEI when another friend brought her bike over for my husband to pump up the tire. Within minutes, we were joined by two other neighbors, both asking if we needed help. They stayed for an hour.

Three years ago, my brother and I went in on a small summer cottage on PEI. It’s a typical cottage, mostly porch, overlooking Malpeque Bay. I bought it online, sight unseen, and we’ve camped out in it happily every summer, renting out empty weeks to help sustain the costs of having an extra house. This summer, I spotted the perfect year-round house for sale in the more remote eastern part of the island, near our favorite beach. Now we’re trying to decide whether to buy that one as well. This sounds luxurious, even decadent, this idea of having second homes, but neither costs more than most new cars here.

If we bought the farmhouse, I imagine one day retiring there with my second husband, or living there half of every year after the last of our five kids is off to college. I dream of raising alpacas and selling the wool; my husband is arguing on behalf of goats and cheese-making. Both are pipe dreams at this point. Sensibly, we’d probably do better just doing what we do now: writing and software engineering. But it’s the simplicity of having a ramshackle farmhouse on Prince Edward Island that lures us — and the good neighbors I know we’d find there.

Should we, or shouldn’t we, go for this dream? Am I fooling myself about Canada because the news headlines here are so awful (think war, oil spills, harsh immigration legislation)? Is it a purely escapist impulse, the kind we all have when fantasizing about living in our favorite vacation spots, that makes me want to flee north of the border? Or is Canada really a better place to live?

Read more: Canada, Prince Edward Island, The Balanced Life, Canadians, Living in Canada, Moving to Canada, Pei, Living News

Come hell or high water, India and Pakistan’s leaders continually nose-thumb one another. Each snub is met with a counter-snub; every kindness by suspicion and prickliness. Memories of ghosts past inspire cold shoulders today. Would the enemy crow about its magnanimity for all time to come? Might acceptance of help be construed by the other as weakness to be parlayed into future gain? Or, worst perhaps of all, would public opinion shift and make redundant much of the carefully-constructed paraphernalia of conflict?

Pakistan started getting inundated in late July. Only two weeks later, on August 13, with much of the country deluged, did India extend an offer of $5 million in aid. Predictably, Pakistan stonewalled. Both countries had swallowed pride before to accept assistance in kind after massive earthquakes, but taking pity money now was stooping just too low. And, funnily enough, the man who wrote the check, India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, did not once bother to commiserate with his neighbour in his Independence Day address two days later. Instead, like a stuck record, he once again cautioned Pakistan against fomenting terrorism in his country. For a man being hailed globally as a model of grace and humility, this was no shining moment.

Hackles raised, Pakistan dug in. Already paralyzed by bomb blasts, ground war, air strikes, a plane crash, and with a huge chunk of the country now deluged, was the country in any position to terrorize anyone? Moreover, its image in the West as the house of terror, a portrait etched to perfection by India, was already coming in the way of flood relief. A new imbroglio was thus created. Only a phone call from Manmohan Singh to Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani of Pakistan and a nudge, oops, more like a shove, from the Americans were able to resolve it. Gilani acquiesced in the subcontinental fashion, wherein ‘yes’ is often mouthed when ‘no’ is actually meant, and seemingly sealed the deal by sending choice mangoes to Singh.

While the mangoes were no doubt delicious, the money itself was presumed to be rancid. Gilani’s government went into contortions. Well, like bitter medicine, it had to be taken, but how to imbibe it? Direct ingestion would churn the stomach too much. Finally the via media of the UN was suggested and accepted without fuss. This time round India loosened its purse-strings by upping the offer to $25 million, and Pakistan showed tact in not balking.

The India-Pakistan side-show had once again stolen the thunder from the main task at hand, to get the world to come to Pakistan’s aid quickly and generously. Reams of global newsprint and gobs of cyberspace instead focused on the countries’ visceral mutual dislike, which always seems to make for fascinating copy and against whose powers even force majeure withers away. Noted commentators on both sides got into the act. Oh, how low can we go to accept money soaked with Kashmiri blood? We must not allow them to grandstand before the world. To show how caring they are and how much better off Kashmir would be with them.

The other side pulled no punches either. The money would go to the Taliban, who in turn would storm in on horse-hoofs and balkanize India. This must surely be the most potent $5 million in history! Others cussed at the churlishness of the Pakistanis. Look at them, beggars affording to be choosers, and when we extend a hand, instead of grasping it gratefully, they slap it. All they think about is Kashmir, Kashmir, Kashmir.

All the while the lives and livelihoods of millions were being washed away. Helping Haiti had become somewhat de rigueur for the world. So many global celebrities got into the act that fundraisers were held as far away as India. But even a candle isn’t being lighted by the country, at least visibly, when it comes to Pakistan.

Granted that public giving in response to disasters is somewhat removed from the subcontinental psyche. What after all is the government for? But many Indians hail from across the border and ramble on and on about a shared heritage and pleasant memories. Wagah, the India-Pakistan border post, has no dearth of candle-lighters ushering in peace. Bear-hugs and lavish meals abound whenever cricket teams and fans cross over. But if a crisis of such magnitude doesn’t shake people’s apathy, of what good is all the faux amity?

Or, perhaps Indians have decided it best to shy away from all things Pakistani? If Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan could have brickbats rain on him for innocuous comments made in favor of Pakistan earlier this year, imagine what fate could befall on lesser people. Some of India’s Muslims must surely want to mobilize relief for what in many instances are families and friends in the proximate country. Bucking the majoritarian trend can often invite peril though.

Global warming is hot but its effects have remained so far in the speculative domain. Many experts are now talking about a causal link between climate change and the devastation wrought in Pakistan. Sure, the river Indus is long and mighty, but no less so are its counterparts in India, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. Who can say where nature will go awry next?

While the UN plays an intermediary role, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is conspicuously missing in action. The body has been reduced to issuing banal statements once in a while. At best, it has served to bring India and Pakistan together when at their antagonistic worst. South Asia is no stranger to natural calamities. Why doesn’t SAARC establish a relief corpus to be funded by member countries and others? Much of the unseemliness witnessed recently would then be avoided. And, enemies in need might just be able to become friends.

Read more: Floods, Yousaf Raza Gilani, India, South Asia, War on Terror, Bollywood, Terrorism, Pakistan, United Nations, Angelina Jolie, Pakistan Floods, Taliban, Barack Obama, Kashmir, Haiti Earthquake, Manmohan Singh, Haiti, Haiti Earthquake Relief, Hillary Clinton, Un, Shah Rukh Khan, Saarc, Water, Hurricane Katrina, World News

Rebuilding Zimbabwe, presented by Tichaona Sibanda. Reports that South Africa will start deporting ‘illegal’ Zimbabwean immigrants in December will come as a big blow for many families who have long relied on remittances sent home by their loved ones. Vincent Chikwari, a pro-democracy activist said there are over a million Zimbabweans who

Read more: Zimbabwe, South Africa, Home News

Obama’s approvals began high like Bush’s but have now cratered dangerously close to Lyndon Johnson’s when he abandoned a reelection bid.

Read more: Afghanistan War, Lyndon Johnson, Afghanistan, 2010 Election, Afghan, Ronald Reagan, War, Democrats, Harry Truman, Jimmy Carter, White House, Barack Obama, Opinion Poll, 2012 Election, Iraq War, George W. Bush, Gop, Gary Langer, Republicans, Politics News

Pakistan High Commissioner Wajid Shamsul Hasan says the three cricketers accused of spot-fixing should receive life bans from cricket if found guilty.

Armed Basque separatist group Eta says it has decided not to carry out “armed actions” in its campaign for independence, the BBC learns.

The head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales says taxpayers should help fund the Pope’s visit because it is an official state event.