Steve Coll's Blog, page 10

A Calculated Risk

In 1974, the Ford Administration conducted nuclear talks with Iran. Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, heir to the Peacock Throne and an American ally, had asserted his country’s right to build nuclear power plants. Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft sought a deal to reduce the risk that Iran could ever make an atomic bomb. They had to manage a restive Congress. A secret White House memo summarizing the problem noted that “special safeguards [that] might be satisfactory to Congress . . . are proving unacceptable to Iran.”

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Can Tulsi Gabbard Swing Hawaiian Voters to Sanders?
George the Fifth

The Once and Future Saudi Kings

The most significant political news from Saudi Arabia this week was not the death of King Abdullah, at the age of ninety, or the ascension of his half-brother Salman to the throne. Abdullah had been ill and Salman had been his designated successor for some time. The real news lay in a secondary announcement that Salman made upon becoming King. He named his nephew Muhammad bin Nayef as the Deputy Crown Prince, meaning that he is third in line for the throne. For the first time in modern Saudi Arabian history, a grandson of the kingdom’s first ruler, rather than a son, has a place in the order of succession.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Iran and Saudi Arabia: The Showdown Between Islam’s Rival Powers
Where Refugees Want to Go
Poetry and Politics in Iran

The Unblinking Stare

At the Pearl Continental Hotel, in Peshawar, a concrete tower enveloped by flowering gardens, the management has adopted security precautions that have become common in Pakistan’s upscale hospitality industry: razor wire, vehicle barricades, and police crouching in bunkers, fingering machine guns. In June, on a hot weekday morning, Noor Behram arrived at the gate carrying a white plastic shopping bag full of photographs. He had a four-inch black beard and wore a blue shalwar kameez and a flat Chitrali hat. He met me in the lobby. We sat down, and Behram spilled his photos onto a table. Some of the prints were curled and faded. For the past seven years, he said, he has driven around North Waziristan on a small red Honda motorcycle, visiting the sites of American drone missile strikes as soon after an attack as possible.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Obama’s Flawed Plan to Close Guantánamo
A Powerful Documentary About Pakistan’s Honor Killings
Pakistan’s Monster

Two More Years

“The American people have spoken,” Mitch McConnell said last week, after announcing his intention to lead the Senate’s new Republican majority. “They’ve given us divided government.” It’s a habit. Since 1981, party control of the White House and Congress has been split for all but six and a half years. Voters continually tell pollsters how disgusted they are that government doesn’t function, then cast their ballots in patterns that all but insure gridlock. This pathology has many causes. One is that the electorate that votes in midterm years is smaller, older, whiter, and, these days, angrier than the one that votes in Presidential years. This contributes to Election Night whiplash; the change of control in the Senate next January will be the seventh since the Reagan Administration.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Republican Debate: A Primer
Obama’s Flawed Plan to Close Guantánamo
Obama Signs Executive Order Relocating Congress to Guantánamo

We Want Dallas

For Redskins Nation in the Dan Snyder era, this is the cruelest time of year. We own the off-season. We have so many off-season trophies we can't find a case big enough to store them. Free agent acquisitions, coaching changes, contract negotiations, off-field drama--only the current Jets and Favre-infected Vikings are challengers anymore, and neither of them can tell the tale of Albert Haynesworth's gargantuan signing bonus payment, followed by his fitness test failures. Now, unfortunately...

What I Learned About Blogging

A little less than two years ago, I concluded that I should blog. My motives were vague. As an author, it seemed wise to go where audiences congregate. As a novice think-tank person, it seemed attractive to purvey research and ideas in an untraditional format. As a writer (distinct from being an author), I hoped that the largely unedited diary format might return my experience of the work itself to some of the joys of its origins—travelogue, humor, experimentation, very amateur photography...

Hague on Afghanistan

I promised in an earlier post to pass on a few remarks by the new British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, about his coalition government's outlook on Afghanistan. He made the comments during a recent visit to Washington. In my recent article in the magazine about the political track in the war, and the prospects for negotiations with the Taliban (subscription required), I report that officials in the previous British government, including David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, had urged...

Abdullah Abdullah

The Afghan opposition leader is in Washington and will drop by New America at 12:15 P.M. for a public event. He'll speak for fifteen minutes, then let me question him for a while, and finally will take questions from the live audience. If you're in D.C. and want to attend, please register; alternatively, go to our Web site and watch the live (or...

William Hague

…is the new British Foreign Secretary. He is an Oxford man, balding, and of course, pithy. As leader of the Conservative Party in Britain during Tony Blair's first term, he struggled to bridge his party's ideological divides and was trounced by Blair as a candidate for prime minister in 2001. More recently he has adapted himself to David Cameron's rhetorical and policy programs aimed at reviving the Conservatives as an electable expression of Britain's center-right. Earlier this week, his...

India 2030

At a think tank, it is possible to pass the time by pulling out of your in-box two-inch-thick research reports with titles such as, "India's Urban Awakening: Building Inclusive Cities, Sustaining Economic Growth." (This one happened to arrive from the McKinsey Global Institute.) As a one-time urban householder in India, I was curious enough in this case to page through the statistical forecasts and recommendations. Essentially, if I understand it correctly, the report's authors provide a...