George Packer's Blog, page 247

Lakers-Celtics: A Night in Boston

In Boston last night to give a talk at the annual fundraiser of the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation Project, or PAIR—an excellent group of lawyers who work their hearts out pro bono for people seeking political asylum, including a few I know, and wrongly detained immigrants. But the point of this post is much more important: I was checking in at my hotel when a very big, light-skinned black man in shorts and a tennis shirt...

Data Can Destroy Your Brain? Really? Come On

Ahem.

Lakers-Celtics: A Personal History

1969 was not a happy year in American history, but for sheer pain, nothing—not Nixon's inauguration, not the bombing of Cambodia, not the Manson murders—could compare in my eight-year-old's mind with the Lakers-Celtics finals. After a decade of defeats, this was the year the Lakers were finally going to end the curse of the leprechaun. But aging Boston won in seven, this time on L.A.'s home floor, with Wilt Chamberlain benched down the stretch, and in spite of the immense gallantry of my...

Israel Takes the Bait

The Israeli raid on a flotilla bound for Gaza was worse than a crime, it was a blunder. None of the extenuating qualifications raised by its defenders matters—that the death toll was lower than on an average day in Lahore or Mosul; or that the relief ship carried (in addition to an Irish Nobel laureate, a Holocaust survivor, and a best-selling Swedish novelist) a lot of Turkish Islamists who were ready for a fight; or that Hamas is at least as much to blame for the suffering in Gaza as...

"My Life with the Taliban"

Abdul Salam Zaeef, barely thirty years old, was the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan just before and after the September 11th attacks. The Taliban regime he served was so isolated that Zaeef became its youthful, thickly bearded international face while American bombs were falling on Taliban lines and Northern Alliance troops swept down toward Kabul. A few weeks after the fall of Kandahar, Zaeef disappeared in Pakistan. It turned out that Pakistani intelligence had handed him over to American...

The Age of the Electronic Loner

The fall of Arlen Specter and the rise of Rand Paul don't make an overnight revolution in American politics. Instead, they continue trends that have been with us for a while: the decline of party establishments, the erosion of the center in Congress, the power of media (mainly conservative) to control the political agenda. We are seeing the rise of the politician as electronic loner, brought to power in a system that looks more like direct democracy than republican government.

The Senate used ...

Big Banks Will Do Anything to Win Back Your Love

Harry Reid filed a cloture motion last night to end debate on financial reform. Dozens of amendments have come up for a vote, most of them relevant and substantive, some not so much—Jim DeMint of South Carolina's border-security amendment, filed expressly to sink another amendment, by Oregon's Ron Wyden, that would have ended the noxious senatorial privilege of placing secret holds to block nominations. Last week, from the Senate press gallery, I saw Dick Durbin of Illinois standing in the...

The Clocks Are Ticking for Iraqis

Three years ago, it seemed as if the American withdrawal from Iraq might resemble the chaotic scenes that accompanied the fall of Saigon. That's one reason why I spent months looking into the possible fate of Iraqis working for the U.S. there—because there wasn't any plan for them in the event of an American evacuation.

By the end of August, all U.S. combat brigades will be out of Iraq. The good news is that there won't be any frantic helo-lifts from a Green Zone landing pad. Tens of...

Statecraft as Psychiatry

Last summer, I sat at the corner of a very long banquet table in the presidential palace in Kabul and ate lunch with Hamid Karzai. He was seated in the middle of one side, flanked by assorted ministers and aides; directly across from him was Richard Holbrooke, flanked by assorted diplomats and aides. My notes show that the small talk didn't last long.

HOLBROOKE: Wherever our troops have driven out the Taliban in Helmand over the last few weeks, there has been no effort to bring in...

Is This It for Newsweek? Should You Care?

Should we cry for Newsweek? That it's been put on the auction block does not come as a surprise. A top editor recently told me that its sale, radical alteration, or demise was likely. Nor have I been reading it regularly, playing a small role in the magazine's thirty-three per cent drop in circulation over the past decade. When I've been overseas, especially in places where few publications find their way, I always look for it—in Iraq, for example, where Newsweek's international edition kept ...