Here's comedian Tony Martin on the TV biopic of former Prime Minister Bob Hawke that screened last Sunday:

Like everyone I’ve spoken to, I found it impossible to concentrate on the film’s narrative – the usual ‘ghost train’ approach to a public figure’s life (‘Look, there’s the bit where he wore the America’s Cup jacket’) – as I was spending all my time evaluating whether the actors looked enough like who they were supposed to be. Would it have been better with David Field, who did Hawkie in The Night They Called it a Day? Didn’t the bloke doing Keating used to be the camp hairdresser in the Decoré ad? Is that Bill Kelty or Matt Lucas from Little Britain? Is that Graham Richardson or Griff Rhys-Jones? Is that Gerry Hand or Brick Tamland? Who’s Josh Lawson meant to be? And where’s Gareth Evans? (‘Gareth’s stuck in Jakarta’, a line of dialogue informed us, and you could feel the entire nation’s disappointment.)

And here's some of Tony Martin's best work, from the early '90s sketch comedy series, The Late Show. This one's about border protection (Martin is the narrator):

Back in June 2008 I wrote a post about the 'Genovese Syndrome', a phenomenon that describes why people (and sometimes states) are so reluctant to intervene in what seem to be dire emergencies:

In The Shield of Achilles, Phillip Bobbitt argues that the Genovese Syndrome helps explain state inaction in the face of humanitarian disasters such as the one that occurred in the Balkans in the 1990s. Bobbitt says it's not apathy or cowardice that paralyses individuals or states in such emergencies, but ambiguity. Is this really an emergency? If so, is outside action justified? By whom? And what type of action? There are uncertainties involved in addressing each of these questions, but until they are all resolved, action is impossible. And emergencies, says Bobbitt, 'by their very nature involve actual harm or the threat of harm'. So we are also constantly weighing up the risk to ourselves in deciding whether to act.

Here's a South African government ad (in the guise of an experiment) which illustrates the problem nicely (h/t Daily What):

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) is wicked smart.

Here he is on Apple CEO Steve Jobs' use of a a public relations tactic that Adams calls 'the high ground manoeuvre', which could be applied to business, politics, diplomacy...you name it:

I first noticed an executive using it years ago, and I've since used it a number of times when the situation called for it. The move involves taking an argument up to a level where you can say something that is absolutely true while changing the context at the same time. Once the move has been executed, the other participants will fear appearing small-minded if they drag the argument back to the detail level. It's an instant game changer.

For example, if a military drone accidentally kills civilians, and there is a public outcry, it would be a mistake for the military to spend too much time talking about what went wrong with that particular mission. The High Ground Maneuver would go something like this: "War is messy. No one wants civilians to die. We will study this situation to see how we can better avoid it in the future."

Notice that the response is succinct, indisputably true, and that the context has been taken to a higher level, about war in general. That's what Jobs did. It's a powerful technique, and you can use it at home.

There's a limit to the method. I don't think that BP could have gotten away with it as a response to the oil spill because the problem was so large and it seemed unique to BP. But if they had tried the High Ground Maneuver, it would have looked like this: "All of the easy sources of oil have been found fifty years ago. If the oil industry stops taking risks, many of you would be out of work in less than a decade. We all want a future of clean energy, but no one sees a way to get there as quickly as we need to. We will do everything we can to clean up the spill, and to make things right with the Gulf economy."

The drone example doesn't actually sound all that convincing. But despite Adams' own misgivings, his suggested BP strategy seems like it could have been pretty effective.

New British PM David Cameron is in Washington writing the latest chapter in the famed US-UK 'special relationship'. Here are a couple of trailers for a feature film which explores a previous chapter. The film makes its Australian debut next week at the Melbourne International Film Festival:

Early this month, in one of my regular Linkage posts, I embedded a YouTube video of a documentary called 'China: The Roots of Madness', and referred to it as a '1967 film produced by the CIA'.

I soon got some correspondence from The Wall Street Journal's Hugo Restall disputing this characterisation of the film's origins, though Hugo was initially unable to say who did produce the film. He then found a copy of the book which accompanied the documentary, and discovered that it was directed by the accomplished Mel Stuart ('Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory').

Hugo emailed Mel Stuart, who confirmed that the CIA had nothing at all to do with the production of the film.

(PS. No editor likes running corrections, but as corrections go, this one is pretty cool. My thanks to Hugo Restall for setting the record straight and putting us indirectly in touch with some Hollywood royalty.)

The ABC's Mark Colvin today adds his voice to that of Michael Fullilove in calling for an Australian equivalent to the Washington Post's investigation into America's intelligence bureaucracy.

Colvin and Fullilove are absolutely right to demand more public and media scrutiny of our intelligence agencies, and Colvin lists some good reasons why it might be overdue. Australia's intelligence community has seen spectacular growth since the 9/11 attacks, and there are legitimate questions about how well that growth has been managed. Can agencies talk to one another or are they 'stove-piped'? Has strategic direction of the overall intelligence community been maintained amid all this growth? Is there too much intelligence being produced for the 'customers' to digest? 

But Colvin also implies that the intelligence community is deserving of scrutiny because of its past failures of prediction; he lists some familiar cases of US intelligence bungling:

It failed to predict the fall of the Shah of Iran and the ascension of the Ayatollah Khomeini, it didn’t see the collapse of Soviet-bloc Communism coming in the late 1980s, it missed the warning signs that Saddam Hussein was about to invade Kuwait...

When Age journalist Jason Koutsoukis came up with a similar list in 2007, I criticised his article for being too focused on prediction, and I think the same argument still holds true. If intelligence agencies are getting their predictions wrong, then the proper line of criticism is not, 'they need to make better predictions'. Rather, it is that they need to get out of the prediction business altogether. Good intelligence is not about giving decision-makers a sense of certainty about the future; it is about giving decision-makers the tools to cope with uncertainty.

Which brings me to Colvin's closing comment about the need for a 'strong and effective counter-terrorism apparatus'. If predicting the behaviour of states is difficult, then it is as nothing compared with trying to understand terrorists.* read more

Yesterday, six Lowy Institute research staff spent the day aboard the guided missile frigate, HMAS Sydney, at the invitation of Captain Peter Leavy. Our thanks to Captain Leavy and the incredibly hospitable crew of Sydney for a memorable day. We witnessed gunnery practice, at-sea refuelling, fighter jet fly-bys and got a detailed tour of the ship.

My photography skills being what they are, only two shots are worth sharing with you (more from colleagues later, I hope). The first is of the crew casting off from HMAS Kuttabul in Sydney, and shows the new vertical launch missile system installed on these recently upgraded frigates. Under the hinged lids of that innocuous-looking box in the foreground are eight anti-aircraft missiles: 

• The end of cheap Chinese labour?
• Lloyd's of London hired Chatham House to write a report on energy security. Here's a critique.
• The ADF has been busy in Nauru, disposing of unexploded ordnance from World War II. (Thanks to Danielle for the link.)
• Walter Russell Mead says think tanks have flooded the market, though our Prime Minister seems to find at least one of them useful.
• Just following up my promise of last Friday, here's the recording of Defence Minister Senator John Faulkner's speech at the Lowy Institute. The Australian's coverage mentioned my question to the Minister.
• Poor people lack many things, but the obvious one is money. Why not just give it to them? (H/t Browser.)
• Below, a Washington Post video promotion of a much talked-about new investigative series on America's vast intelligence bureaucracy (the spy agencies have responded). As Michael Fullilove tweeted, an Australian newspaper could do worse than to emulate the WaPo.

In case you've been under a rock, 'Old Spice Guy' is an internet meme that exploded and has now flamed out, all in the space of a week (you can read the details here).

This instalment is somewhere in between the funniest and lamest of the series, and I feature it because it has some connection with the business of The Interpreter. But if you haven't caught up with Old Spice Guy, best to go back to the bizarrely funny the first few ads (here's the whole collection on the dedicated YouTube channel):

UPDATE: Oh, dear Lord, no. World Vision and Tim Costello have done an Old Spice Guy parody that needs to be taken behind the shed and slaughtered with a blunt axe. Watch it if you dare. (Thanks to Danielle for the link.)

Defence Minister John Faulkner has just left the Lowy Institute, having delivered a speech about Afghanistan. A transcript will be posted as soon as possible, and there will be audio and video available next week.

Afghanistan has hotted up as a debate topic on The Interpreter just lately (and there is much more to come), so I used the contributions we have received from Soldier Z and Soldier X in my question to Senator Faulkner. In their posts, Z and X both lamented the lack of strategic guidance from Government. These are the lines I quoted back to the Minister. Here's Z:

Curious Australians, however, will not find any substantive written policy statement on Afghanistan in the public domain...Australian policy for Afghanistan has been made by press conference and press release, first by Howard and then mimicked by Rudd in 2009.

And this is X:

We are soldiers, and we are asking to be led. We have chosen this life, and when directed, we shall go willingly to war. We recognise that every time we enter combat we may not be valiantly defending Australian soil. But if we are to stand in the dust; if we are to take life and have it taken from us; and if we are to bury our friends; then all we ask is that our government articulate its strategy and lead us.

I asked the Minister if the Government had any plans to release a comprehensive national strategy statement on Afghanistan. While he never directly answered this question, it is fair to say that his response was passionate. He pointed in particular to his regular Ministerial Statements to the parliament, which he described as 'comprehensive, substantial, detailed and frank'. He also described his commitment to openness and transparency, and argued that, as Defence Minister, he had set standards in this area that were likely to be maintained by the next minister.

There's much more to say about the speech, including on a terse exchange between Faulkner and the Lowy Institute's Whit Mason, regarding this op-ed about the ADF's rules of engagement in Afghanistan. More on that soon.

When I walk past the Apple store in Sydney I regularly see tourists taking photos of it, just as they would the Harbour Bridge or Opera House. It's not too surprising; the reverence and loyalty which consumers show toward the Apple brand is legendary.

But when I spotted photos of Apple's store in Shanghai, it did seem to suggest that this relationship was being taken to a whole new level. For what does this store entrance resemble other than a minimalist open air temple, with the object of worship lit ethereally at its centre?

Asia has no common religion, language or culture holding it together. But perhaps, as Malcolm Cook observed, consumerism is one common theme.

Photo by Flickr user Photo Giddy, used under a Creative Commons license. 

Just in case you missed it, I want to highlight the closing paragraph of this post from guest blogger Jason Thomas:

If you are not a military strategist or a new-age counterinsurgency warrior and can't work out why the war in Afghanistan is taking so long, look in the backyard of your own communities and ask yourself why gang intimidation, drug trafficking and violent crime haven't been cleaned up; the answer is fundamentally the same. The truth is, defeating an insurgency requires a massive social re-engineering and a rebuilding of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Except in Afghanistan, we are trying to do it for a whole country.

To reinforce this point, check out the evidence Anthony Cordesman from the CSIS has assembled on the huge mountain the coalition needs to climb to 'nation-build' Afghanistan.

It takes generations to achieve better social outcomes in our own neglected communities. What makes us think we can do it for an entire country that we know barely anything about? It almost defies belief to think we are collectively pursuing a policy that is so plainly unachievable.

• In the course of a blistering blog post about the catastrophic failure of the global environmental movement, Walter Russell Mead recommends this Economist piece that argues for scepticism about the concept of 'climate wars'.
• Since nation-building is justifiably out of fashion, here's a proposal for a minimalist conflict-prevention strategy for the UN.
• 'Ideas having sex': Reason magazine explains why the exchange of ideas is the key to understanding human innovation and progress. (h/t Browser).
• A cheap alternative to spy satellites: this hydrogen-powered aerial drone will be able to stay aloft for 96 hours.
• UN Dispatch recommends the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Institute's new multidimensional poverty index.
• A new US Naval War College paper on US-China maritime confidence building.
• Defence Technology International reports that a British sniper in Afghanistan has recorded a kill from 2475 meters. Cpl Craig Harrison 'took out two Taliban wielding a machine gun and fired a third shot into the weapon to disable it.'

So, this seems to have conquered the blogosphere in the last 24 hours. After complaining about the plot holes in several different sci-fi TV shows, an anonymous reviewer decides that the most ridiculous and unbelievable series of all is on the History Channel, about something called 'World War II':

Probably the worst part was the ending. The British/German story arc gets boring, so they tie it up quickly, have the villain kill himself (on Walpurgisnacht of all days, not exactly subtle) and then totally switch gears to a battle between the Americans and the Japanese in the Pacific. Pretty much the same dichotomy - the Japanese kill, torture, perform medical experiments on prisoners, and frickin' play football with the heads of murdered children, and the Americans are led by a kindly old man in a wheelchair.

Anyway, they spend the whole season building up how the Japanese home islands are a fortress, and the Japanese will never surrender, and there's no way to take the Japanese home islands because they're invincible...and then they realize they totally can't have the Americans take the Japanese home islands so they have no way to wrap up the season.

So they invent a completely implausible superweapon that they've never mentioned until now. Apparently the Americans got some scientists together to invent it, only we never heard anything about it because it was "classified". In two years, the scientists manage to invent a weapon a thousand times more powerful than anything anyone's ever seen before - drawing from, of course, ancient mystical texts. Then they use the superweapon, blow up several Japanese cities easily, and the Japanese surrender. Convenient, isn't it?

The Interpreter: scanning the internet for hilarity so you don't have to.

• The market economy with Chinese characteristics: China cuts exports of rare earth metals by 72%. (Thanks to Malcolm for the link.)
• Foreign Minister Stephen Smith announced over the weekend that Australia's new ambassador to Indonesia will be Greg Moriarty.
• Why did Germans get so upset about Rudd's downfall? (Thanks to Danielle for the link.)
• Nine reasons the coalition is losing in Afghanistan, by Harlan Ullman.
• Protestors, aided by the government, have bullied the UN out of Sri Lanka.
• Why argue? Confronting someone with the facts may not convince them to change their mind — it might even have the opposite effect.
• If Germany is so concerned about having to pull Greece out of the financial doldrums, why does it continue trying to sell arms to Athens?

Since the Australian political week has been dominated by asylum seekers and 'stopping the boats', this is kinda sorta relevant. OK, not really, since the lyrics are all about exploration and freedom (note the reference to Geoffrey Blainey's The Tyranny of Distance).

Anyway, a great tune, and a nice way to start the weekend. (Also, check out the Wiggles version!)

• Afghanistan: New Yorker journalist George Packer says no one 'has been able to come up with an alternative to the current strategy that doesn't carry great risks.' Democracy Arsenal lists several alternatives.
• Newly released Nixon tape transcripts will make uncomfortable reading for Henry Kissinger.
• No soup for you! Military-themed blog Danger Room recently posted an item about al Qaeda that obliquely referenced Seinfeld's Soup Nazi. You won't believe what happened next...
• The WSJ's China blog reports on the scams and scandals surrounding Shanghai's World Expo.
• Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein warns about the dangers of confirmation bias (h/t Wilkinson):

Fairly few political commentators know enough to decide which research papers are methodologically convincing and which aren't. So we often end up touting the papers that sound right, and the papers that sound right are, unsurprisingly, the ones that accord most closely with our view of the world.

After posting my piece about the Institute of Public Affairs' attitude toward developing a global consensus on climate change, I invited a response from the IPA's Alan Moran. The email exchange went as follows:

ROGGEVEEN: Alan, I just wanted to alert you to my post and to invite your response.

MORAN: Thanks Sam. Nobody thinks that Australia’s actions in cutting emissions would have any effect unless near universal adoption of the same approach. There are those who see Australia with 1.5% of the world’s GDP as having far more influence than this. Mr Rudd clearly thought if we take a lead others will follow. That is now a distant memory. If we move and others don’t we have a penalty and must accept lower living standards.

ROGGEVEEN: Yes, I get that, but you clearly seem to believe that it is a good thing for a global consensus to emerge on climate change. So what action do you propose the government should take to encourage such a consensus?

MORAN: Nothing. I am a great believer in conserving resources. We think everyone waits with baited breath on our every word but we are too small fry and nobody would pay any attention.

(My thanks to Alan for giving his permission to publish this).

UPDATE: I originally published only the second half of this exchange, but for completeness, I added the first part.

On Tuesday, the Lowy Institute published a new Policy Brief called 'Confronting the Crisis of International Climate Policy', in which authors Fergus Green, Warwick McKibbin and Greg Picker argue for the adoption of an international carbon price. They published an opinion piece in yesterday's Financial Review to accompany the launch (all AFR content is firewalled), and today the AFR published a letter in response from Alan Moran, of the free-market think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs.

Moran touches on a diplomatic question in his letter:

The Australian economy has a trivial effect on global emissions...Rather than saddling ourselves with additional imposts, Australia would be better off eliminating all present forms of carbon tax and waiting for some sort of global consensus, should this occur, before incurring the economic damage of a carbon tax.

I'm struck by the passivity of this proposed approach. Moran says Australia should wait for a global consensus on carbon pricing, should it occur. But what if a global consensus doesn't occur?  

Moran's submission to a 2009 Senate Committee adds more detail to his proposed approach. It argues that Australia should put together a plan for emissions reductions that can go into effect in 2020, should there be a consensus. Yes, waiting will incur slightly higher cost, the submission argues, but that's worth it, considering the uncertainty of the science, the possibility of technological advances, and the difficulty of achieving global consensus.

I'm in no position to judge the economic or environmental merits of this proposal, but it feels like there's an element missing from it. Namely, if the climate change problem is urgent enough that Australia should develop a plan along the lines Moran proposes, then isn't it also urgent enough for the Government to do more than simply wait for a consensus to emerge?

The logical extension of Moran's proposed approach seems to be that the Australian Government ought to act so that the likelihood of global consensus is increased. That action could take many forms (some would say Australia needs to set an example by adopting a carbon price early; others say Australia should launch a major diplomatic initiative), but it surely needs to do more than just wait.

Photo by Flickr user Dead Air, used under a Creative Commons license.

And so, with the retirement announcement from Senator John Faulkner, Australia is set to lose yet another Defence Minister. When the next government is sworn in, we will have our eighth Defence Minister since the Howard Government took office in 1996. Has any other department — let alone one with such huge responsibilities and budget allocation — suffered that kind of turnover?

A thread through the commentary on Faulkner is his enormous personal integrity and the emotional weight which the deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan has placed on him. The Lowy Institute's Hugh White takes this one step further, speculating that Faulkner may in fact harbour doubts about the Afghanistan mission itself. Faulkner's office denies this.

Hugh also repeats the oft-made observation that the Defence portfolio is a graveyard for political careers. Perfectly true, and in that context it's worth going back to Graeme Dobell's column after Labor lost its previous Defence Minister, Joel Fitzgibbon. Graeme points to some deep structural and cultural problems that will hobble the next minister just as they have all the others.

• A quick FYI: selected Interpreter columns appear weekly on the English-language site of the Chinese business magazine, Caixin.
• Recently we learned from CIA Chief Leon Panetta that there are just 50-100 al Qaeda members in Afghanistan. So what about Pakistan? More than 300, says another senior American intelligence source.
• Profile of David Brooks, NY Times columnist and one of the Obama White House's favourite Republicans.
• We often feature the geopolitical blogging of the strategist Tom Barnett. Here's a wonderful personal post on he and his wife's first meeting in Ethiopia with the two children they are adopting.
• Has the Gillard climbdown on the resource tax increased sovereign risk for mining companies? Journalist Peter Martin discusses.
• Beijing has announced US$100 billion worth of infrastructure investment for western China.
• Via the Foreign Policy Association's East Asia blog, a 1967 film produced by the CIA called 'The Roots of Madness', on China's political history. It's also on YouTube:

The conventional wisdom about Prime Minister Gillard's tactics — that, prior to calling an election, she is 'clearing the decks' of potentially weak issues which the Opposition could use to hurt the Government — seems convincing. First there was the resources rent tax, yesterday we saw the asylum-seeker issue addressed at the Lowy Institute, and Ross Gittins speculates that we could see a green subsidy package emerge soon in order to cross climate change off the list.

But back to asylum seekers — is that issue crossed off with a pen or just a pencil? I noted yesterday the highly equivocal language in which Timor-Leste and New Zealand had spoken of the 'regional processing centre' initiative. Alex Oliver backed this up with her post on the official Timor Government media release. It seemed these two countries were doing the absolute bare minimum to make Gillard's announcement credible.

This may simply have been because they had so little time to study the idea, and it should also be noted that, on Lateline last night, Timor-Leste President Jose Ramos Horta's language was slightly more positive:

If Timor-Leste, if prime minister Gusmao were to be amenable to such a possibility of Timor-Leste hosting a processing centre for asylum seekers, if he were to be amenable to that, I am in principle in agreement, based on my very profound humanitarian convictions.

So it seems Prime Minister Gusmao has the casting vote. Australia's relations with Timor-Leste have been rocky of late, with Gusmao having some unkind things to say about Australia. If he dismisses or even just criticises the idea, what does that do for the credibility of Labor's policy, and for Labor's election chances?

Photo by Flickr user Rusty Stewart, used under a Creative Commons license.

• Why do we need diplomats? Because it's a profession with its own knowledge, procedures and language. '(D)iplomacy can well do without rank amateurs in the same way that medicine can do without snake-oil merchants.'
• ASEAN is becoming weaker, argues CFR's Joshua Kurlantzick.
• Freedom in retreat around the world: a Washington Post op-ed looks at the Freedom House data.
• The Security Sector Reform Resource Centre has a blog.
• The people of Finland now have a legal right to broadband access.
• What's changed in Japanese foreign policy under Prime Minister Kan, and what hasn't?
• The UN has created a new agency for women. (Thanks to Tim for the link.)
• Any foreign correspondents covering China who are reading this may wish to participate in a survey for an academic study on how journalists use social media.
• The Guardian has an excellent piece on 'Technology Entertainment Design', better known as TED, the organisation that has transformed the academic conference. Hans Rosling is one of the speakers who launched TED as an online phenomenon.

Julia Gillard has just finished her first major speech as Prime Minister, delivered to a large (and remarkably patient — the PM was almost an hour late) Lowy Institute audience.

Here's  a copy of the speech, which was focused almost entirely on boat people and border protection, and not on the broader Gillard outlook on foreign policy. That's a speech we're still waiting to hear; it will presumably come at some point before the election campaign. 

Some early impressions:

• The major announcement from the speech was a proposal to set up, in Timor-Leste, a regional processing centre for 'irregular entrants' to Australia. This was painted as a 'new broom' approach, though experts might ask how different this really is to previous off-shore processing efforts.
• Gillard claimed that she had discussed this proposal with the Timorese President and the New Zealand Prime Minister, but neither seem bowled over by the idea. According to Gillard, Ramos Horta said he 'welcomed the conversation about this possibility', while John Key said he was 'open to considering this initiative constructively'. That's straight out of the Humphrey Appleby school of evasive language.
• A short section at the end of the speech on refugee integration into Australia had an interesting change of emphasis from the Coalition Government. Gillard insisted that refugees play by the rules: learn English, get a job and send their kinds to school. In a sense, that's red meat conservatism, but notice that the cultural component that influenced Howard Government rhetoric ('the Australian way of life', 'Australian values') is missing.
• I thought this might have been the moment to announce Australia's new ambassador to Indonesia, since Bill Farmer has just left his post. But nothing doing.

Peter Leahy's post includes a now familiar complaint about the Defence Department's handling of public relations and media access in Afghanistan. This is also a routine criticism from the Australian media, and it will be interesting to see if it is made again in tonight's Four Corners story about Australia's role in the Afghan war, by one of our finest journalists, Chris Masters.

In this context, note that the British Defence Ministry is giving its military personnel in Afghanistan a bit of latitude with the use of social media by launching a new blogging initiative. A spokesman is quoted as saying:

This is a first for the British forces. Servicemen and women have been blogging for years of course privately on personal pages, but we have never provided the platform to bring all those blogs together before.

Translation: they're going to do it anyway, so they may as well do it from inside the tent; then we at least have a chance to contain any damage.

That's cynical but also wise. When it comes to public relations, the bureaucratic instinct is to seek control. But that's simply not a practical response in the information age. So the MoD has decided to reduce the risk of dangerous or embarrassing disclosures by bringing their bloggers into the fold.

For Australian TV viewers, one of the unexpected pleasures of this FIFA World Cup has been 'Santo, Sam and Ed's Cup Fever!' on SBS.

Some of their work reminded me of the debate we staged recently on the effect Australia's various football codes have on our regional reputation. Rugby Union and Rugby League clearly play an important role in our relations with Pacific countries, but in regards to soccer, perhaps the best thing Australia ever did for Oceania was to leave it:

Of course, we also did New Zealand a footballing favour by leaving the Oceania Confederation. It's another chance to poke fun at the Kiwis:

Reinforcing Harry Gelber's point about foreigners trying to create a new political culture in Afghanistan, here's a piece from an Afghanistan expert we've featured before on The Interpreter, Rory Stewart:

We can do other things for Afghanistan but the West -- in particular its armies, development agencies and diplomats -- are not as powerful, knowledgeable or popular as we pretend. Our officials cannot hope to predict and control the intricate allegiances and loyalties of Afghan communities or the Afghan approach to government. But to acknowledge these limits and their implications would require not so much an anthropology of Afghanistan, but an anthropology of ourselves.

The cures for our predicament do not lie in increasingly detailed adjustments to our current strategy. The solution is to remind ourselves that politics cannot be reduced to a general scientific theory, that we must recognize the will of other peoples and acknowledge our own limits.

Acknowledging limitations is one thing. Taking the next step of drawing down the West's commitment is another. Consider the situation President Obama faced when he came to office:

It was understandable that Obama would be reluctant to tell his newly appointed commanding general, with decades in the Special Forces and a row of medals on his chest: "I have not spent any time in Afghanistan and have never served in the army, but I can tell you that you are wrong. You will not defeat the Taliban, additional troops will be a waste of time and I reject your counter-insurgency theory. Instead, we will reduce our troop presence. And as the situation deteriorates in southern Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the Taliban increase their control and the Republicans mock me for my weakness, I will take the full blame for having over-ruled my general's advice. (And I will also take the sole blame if there is another terrorist attack on the United States)."

The Atlantic's Mark Ambinder has some screengrabs on his blog of what is alleged to be the first ever al Qaeda English-language magazine.

I say 'alleged' because Ambinder does not dismiss the possibility that this is a trick played by Western intelligence agencies. The teaser on the magazine's front page — 'MAKE A BOMB IN THE KITCHEN OF YOUR MOM' — looks just absurd enough for the whole thing to be a hoax.

An information strategy that mocks al Qaeda would be a welcome change from one that paints the organisation as ten feet tall and an existential threat to the West. But maybe the best strategy is not to talk about al Qaeda at all. On Wednesday, the Cato Institute's blog ran an extract from what looks a promising book: U.S. Counter-Terrorism Strategy and al-Qaeda: Signaling and the Terrorist World View, by Joshua Alexander Geltzer. Here's the extract:

In addition to calling far less attention to its own actions, America should call far less attention to al-Qaeda — and, moreover, should almost always avoid naming the terrorists themselves...While the political profit to any American politician of constantly naming al-Qaeda persists, resisting that temptation would frustrate al-Qaeda’s strategy of elevating its own status and framing its campaign against America as a viable enterprise in which all Muslims worldwide should enlist, aid and abet. Not only should al-Qaeda and its leaders be named less by American officials, but the label of al-Qaeda also should not be used to describe what are, in truth, diverse and splintered militant Islamist movements, organizations and networks.

• For those of you who study Israeli affairs, here's a useful blog that translates the Hebrew media into English. (H/t The Arabist.)
• A very amusing and insightful post by an Indian blogger observing China from close-up.
• Britain's Royal United Services Institute publishes a defence of the Joint Strike Fighter. (H/t Ares.)
• From the US Naval War College Review, The political economy of piracy in the South China Sea.
• Terrific op-ed in yesterday's Australian on how the Afghanistan war is morphing into one giant PR campaign.
• The FT on how high-speed trains are transforming Europe. Also on transport, Autopia summarizes some new IBM research on the world's worst commutes: 

On Monday I posed the question: why does Ghana's status as the lone African side left in the World Cup mean that all Africa is cheering for Ghana? Is there really such a thing as a pan-African identity?

The Atlantic carries an article offering a partial explanation for why Africans are getting behind Ghana:

Under leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere and even Joseph Mobutu, nationalism thrived in the 1960s and 70s. But the African states that have since failed their citizens time and again today inspire a less than robust sense of civic pride. Ethnic, linguistic or religious identification may generally be stronger than the political borders that partition the West African coast, for example--or do not partition the vast, conflict-ridden eastern Congo. And for many of the African nations that did not qualify--Senegal, Kenya, Angola and Egypt, to name a few--the South African World Cup was always going to be a proxy war.

For some, the tournament is an equally important battle of imagery that Ghana's success will help to fight. "It's important to promote good news on this continent," says Teddy Ruge, an entrepreneur living in Kampala. "The team is one good news story that deserves as much ink as possible..."

Photo by Flickr user Impact Tarmac, used under a Creative Commons license.