This story; from China is predictably horrible: Chinese authorities have sentenced two women in their 70s to a year’s “re-education through labour” following their application to hold a protest demonstration during the Beijing games, a relative said yesterday. Officials said this week they had not approved a single permit for a demonstration, despite designating three…
Read More Can’t we be more helpful and appropriate?I am currently reading Antonio Giustozzi’s Koran, Kalashnikov, and Laptop – The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan. I’ll review it more fully when I’ve finished reading it – now there’s an idea – but here’s something that stands out for reasons of pure partisan rage. John Reid has been mocked plenty for saying that he thought…
Read More John Reid RetrobloggingRecall this post from December, 2006? It was about how the Iranian government was actually rebuilding things in Afghanistan; things like electricity supply, fibre-optic interconnection, roads, and maybe even a railway. Not just that, but they were supplying today’s version of Marlboros and jeans; the best Internet connection in town. The Christian Science Monitor goes…
Read More Iranian Money: Rebuilding AfghanistanLast weekend, for the first time in years. A couple of things – first of all, they’re knocking down the first attempts at regeneration now, whilst a lot of the empty sites that used to be mills are still empty. The whole 60s grey tickytacky city centre is gone, leaving half a mile of rubble.…
Read More Back in BradfordOK, so Thomas P.M. Barnett is purring like a kitten at the discovery that his Blueprint for Action has been translated into Turkish. Barnett’s famed prescription, the so-called SysAdmin Force, seems to be vanishing under the far horizon. Check out this NYT report from western Afghanistan. It seems the Iranians are dramatically out-competing NATO &…
Read More Bandwidth! Low latency! Sexy!James Glanz of the NYT reports at great length on the electrical siege of Baghdad, with detail, network maps, and more. Great. Obviously, this being a blog, the primary meaning of this is an excuse to moan about the press. Why didn’t Glanz (or anyone else at the NYT) report on this back in 2004,…
Read More Electricity – let it wash all over me! Or notThat leaked Rumsfeld memo. What strikes me is that it’s incredibly poor in quality. Rumsfeld was clearly…well…labouring under delusions of adequacy when he wrote this. Consider the “options”. “Significantly increase the number of US trainers and transfer more equipment to Iraqi security forces,” “Reduce quickly the number of US bases, currently 55, to five by…
Read More Even More Iraq!If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ll know most of the stuff in this Washington Post story, but it’s good to have it all in a handy quick-reference guide.
Read More In their own world