Global Pedestrian

Right now, just hours after someone detonated an improvised explosive device and killed four Canadian soldiers and one Canadian journalist in Afghanistan, I'm reflecting on words Canada's defense minister spoke back in March. Reacting to the pseudo-apology of a Fox News host who'd belittled Canada's ... Read More

The intellectual trap of exploring a new place — whether through actual travel or by reading a book set there — is the practically unconscious assumption that we can generalize. Having just finished The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, for example, I'm needing to remind myself that I have no fast ... Read More

I hope the New York Times will do a follow-up story on Friday's "G.I.’s in Iraq Hope to Heal Sacred Walls." The story — like an NPR broadcast in 2007 and a Smithsonian piece in 2008 — doesn't answer a question that hovers over the U.S. troops trying to restore Iraq's oldest Christian monastery: By ... Read More

The Good Soldiers is nearly unbearable. Relentlessly so. Commendably so. Whether you're a combat veteran, a soldier's mom, an Iraqi, the 43rd U.S. president, an ordinary American, or some pundit who likes to make bold, loud, baseless, unshakeable declarations about the glory or evil of war, reporter ... Read More

In a recent NPR interview, National Book Award finalist Daniyal Mueenuddin spoke with arresting candor about Pakistan, using the word "feudalism" to describe the structure of life in the Indus River Valley where his family owns land.This exchange between Mueenuddin and NPR host Steve Inskeep ... Read More

My dad read me Jack London's The Call of the Wild when I was nine. I graduated from high school in a city that makes a big deal of its Jack London Square. Still, my ignorance is such that I didn't know until last week that London once chose to live among England's poor, document the experience, and ... Read More

"The Most Failed State," a piece in The New Yorker's December 14 issue, scrutinizes Somalia and offers glimpses of the mix of nose-holding and open-mindedness U.S. leaders will need in Afghanistan if they're going to thin the ranks of the insurgency by getting "good Taliban" to defect.Somalia's ... Read More

Decoding the New Taliban, a book I blogged about once already, will probably find its way into more posts here because of its timeliness, depth, and variety of voices. The book's first chapter explores how drug money from Afghanistan's mammoth poppy harvest bankrolls the Taliban. What intrigued me ... Read More

As I've continued to use this blog to track the aftermath of a September massacre in west Africa, probably the most implausible claim from Guinea's coup leader has been his insistence that he had nothing to do with killings of civilians carried out by his own troops. Now, he's been shot himself, ... Read More

Just like the time Slate's Jacob Weisberg invited me to join his Mafia family, his latest tweet made me think some wiseass had hacked his Twitter account: "If you're looking for a hook-up in South Beirut, best to go through Hezbolllah." Still, I clicked the link and arrived at a Foreign Policy piece ... Read More

Reporting from Mexico for the December issue of the The Atlantic, author Philip Caputo writes that "drug trafficking and its attendant corruption are a malignancy that has spread into Mexico's lymph system."Caputo cites: • a Mexican law professor's conclusion that "17 of Mexico's 31 states have ... Read More

Graham Greene's The Quiet American and Antonio Giustozzi's Decoding the New Taliban — two books that I've started more or less simultaneously — are jostling in my brain. In the very first sentence of his introduction, Giustozzi writes words that might have come from one of the characters in Greene's ... Read More

I came home from Sunday night's thrilling Major League Soccer championship game sure that I would finish my weekend by writing about the explosive aftermath of the World Cup qualifying match between Egypt and Algeria. But I got diverted by glancing at Twitter, seeing this tweet, and reading a ... Read More

The story by Evelyn Theiss of The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer has been online since Friday and I can't stop wondering how Vietnam will react to it. The headline: "My Lai photographer Ron Haeberle admits he destroyed pictures of soldiers in the act of killing." The story also ran on the Ohio paper's ... Read More

The new Atlantic magazine has an intriguing dispatch about how "Iranians line up daily to cross the Astara River to buy and sell jeans, chickens, bras, laptops—and often sex and schnapps and heroin." Their destination -- the Azerbaijani town of Astara -- amounts to "the Tijuana of the Caspian ... Read More