This Week in War. A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism.

• The NATO summit is this weekend… and leaders are struggling to come together and present a united front on commitments.
• Col. Michael D. Wirt, a brigade surgeon with the 101st Airborne, has meticulously cataloged a database of the wounds and injuries he’s treated in Afghanistan, with extensive accompanying details. His careful documentation highlights the otherwise scattered nature of our knowledge about the impacts of the last decade of combat.
• NPR’s Morning Edition interviewed the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker.
• As part of economic reconstruction efforts, Afghanistan plans to start pumping oil within five months. This will be the first time the country has done this.
• Pakistan is making rumblings about allowing NATO to begin using the supply route to Afghanistan, which is getting it invited to the upcoming NATO summit. Pakistani negotiators suggested a $5000 per-truck transit fee, an amount which is a “sticking point” in talks.
• The parents of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a US soldier held by the Taliban since 2009, are now speaking out about their son, and the negotiations process to get him back.
• Nearly half a million Pakistanis have been forced to flee from border regions because of fighting spillover from Afghanistan and nearly a quarter million have registered for aid.
• The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill was on NPR’s Fresh Air, interviewed by Terry Gross about Yemen, AQAP and US drone policy.
• Yemen’s Press and Publication Court is trying two Sana’a-based journalists with Al Jazeera for covering the revolution in a suit filed by Saleh’s regime in June of 2011.
• North Korea has resumed construction of a nuclear reactor.
• The Free Syrian Army is receiving new, better weapons as of late — paid for by Persian Gulf nations and coordinated with assistance by the US.
• The Atlantic’s In Focus photo blog gathered together a stunning and stomach-turning (no, seriously, very very graphic and the graphic photos are shown in full) post of recent photography from the Mexican drug war. 
• Researchers find striking neurological similarities between returning combat soldiers and career pro athletes when it comes to a degenerative brain disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is believed to be caused by blast exposure. Traumatic brain injury, confirmed in nearly a quarter million troops, is considered a precursor to CTE.
• On Wednesday, the Army launched a probe of PTSD diagnoses and treatment at all of its medical facilities since 2001.
• Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has introduced the Gender Equality in Combat Act, which, if passed, would require the Pentagon to set a date by the end of the year for allowing women on the front lines. 
• The top five recipients of GI Bill education funds in the 2010-11 academic were highly problematic for-profit institutions, known to target veterans.
• The Hill is up in arms over the latest defense appropriations bill, the House GOP version of which abandons last year’s attempt at fiscal austerity and ups defense spending by $8m as well as increasing funding for nuclear weapons and slowing down the processes of force reductions. The President has threatened a veto.

Photo: Kabul, Afghanistan. A French soldier reads a book about Afghanistan while waiting at the airport for his flight out. Musadeq Sadeq/AP. 

This Week in War. A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism.

• News today: In Syria on Friday, the day after bombings killed 55, Assad’s government is calling for action on terrorism and the opposition is accusing the government of having ties with al-Qaeda forces.
• On Tuesday, the UN released numbers stating that more than 80 Libyan refugees have died so far this year in their attempts to reach Europe.
• Libya quietly passed a controversial amnesty law, offering a blanket pardon to any crimes committed by pro-revolution rebels.
• Egypt seized dozens of heavy weapons bound for the Sinai peninsula at the Libyan border on Thursday.
• Panetta has promised that no troops will be deployed to Yemen.
• The story of the double agent sent by Saudi Arabia to disrupt and foil an Al-Qaeda suicide bomber plot and his successful infiltration strategy.
• Turkey will not extradite fugitive Iraqi VP Tareq al-Hashemi.
• Joost Hiltermann had a longreads piece on sectarian conflict in Bahrain up on NY Books. In Manama, protesters blocked roads with burning tires, demanding the release of female activist prisoners, some of whom have been being held for a year.
• US Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter is leaving his post after not even two years on the job.
• The Red Cross is suspending its work in Pakistan pending a review after a ICRC health program manager was abducted and later killed in Balochistan.
• Pakistan has successfully tested another short-range nuclear capable missile, the Hatf III Ghaznavi, and the second such in two weeks.
• A cabinet of Pakistani officials will meet next week to consider reopening the NATO supply routes.
• Monday, the Pentagon Inspector General released a report expressing concern over the Afghan National Army’s pharmaceutical distribution.
• An AP-GfK poll puts public support in the US for the Afghan war at a record low of 27 percent.
• The US is continuing to search for a Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was captured by insurgents in Afghanistan in 2009.
• A rare bright news report out of A’stan: the UN is reporting that civilian deaths fell by 20 percent in the first four months of this year.
• Russia is claiming to have foiled a terrorist plot against the Sochi Winter Olympic games in 2014.
• In Honduras, days after the kidnapping and killing of journalist and gay rights activist Erick Martinez, another journalist named Alfredo Villatoro of HRN Radio was kidnapped on his way to work in the capital city of Tegucigalpa.
• The GOP members of the House Armed Services Committee voted to include a provision in the new FY2013 defense budget that would ban same-sex marriage on military bases. HASC’s draft also failed to include mention of sequestration cuts.
• Fearing Iranian nuclear capability, the GOP are pushing an East Coast missile defense shield.
• The prospect of war with Iran is dividing the Israeli defense community, with Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak leading a hawkish charge and numerous former intel chiefs publicly opposing them.
• Reporting by Noah Schachtman and Spencer Ackerman for Wired reveals that the US military held a course (now cancelled) at the Joint Forces Staff College taught officers that “total war” need to be waged on global Islam. The professor’s presentation includes quotes like: “This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.”
• On Wednesday, the FBI Chief said the recently thwarted bomb plot was a good reason to renew surveillance policies set to expire soon, extending the FBI’s abilities to spy on people abroad without a warrant.
• Here’s your new to-be Chief of Staff of the Air Force: General Mark Welsh.
• The Pentagon ceased cooperation with Marvel Studios on The Avengers because it did not treat military bureaucracy realistically (!).
• Sgt. Major Teresa King, the first female commandant of the Army’s elite drill sergeant school, has been fighting for her job amidst a mix of accusations that she set unfair standards. The Army has now said these accusations aren’t substantiated. King is asserting that her gender was a cause for mistreatment at the hands of her superiors, whom she says actively campaigned against her.

Photo: Dover Air Base, Delaware. An Army carry team transports the body of Master Sgt. Gregory L. Childs of Warren, Arkansas, killed in Afghanistan. Steve Ruark/AP.

This Week in War. A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism.

• This week marked the one year anniversary of Bin Laden’s death in a US raid on his compound in Abbottabad. NBC’s Rock Center program aired an in-depth look at the President’s situation room the night the operation was carried out.
• 17 de-classified documents taken from the compound in the raid have been released by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. You can read the CTC’s report on them, download them in the original form, or download translated versions of the documents.
• What impact has the Bin Laden raid had on aid groups in Pakistan? Declan Walsh examines the question.
• The Taliban have officially announced their spring offensive.
• IEDs are apparently a quarter less effective than last year. Check out Danger Room’s hard look at the stats on IEDs (which are really important stats to look at in evaluating any kind of progress).
• Obama signed a 10-year security deal with Afghanistan, which of course has some holes and flaws.
• The Pentagon released a report on progress in Afghanistan on Tuesday. As the Washington Post puts it: it “paints a mixed picture.”
• The Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) also released one of its quarterly reports. The report notes two major problems. First, the insistence of the Afghan government that the hired guns be replaced with Afghan locals is proving to be a stumbling block. Second, serious corruption is one of the main forces hampering the reconstruction process. 
• The Special Inspector General on Iraq Reconstruction has also released its quarterly report. I really encourage giving these watchdog reports serious reads. They contain so much valuable information.
• A New York Times longreads on the Afghan women who write poetry despite grave risk.
• In Egypt, deadly clashes between protesters, security forces, and armed plainclothes thugs in the Abbasiyya district of Cairo have disrupted the presidential election.
• In Syria, women pregnant from rape used as a weapon of war are committing suicide.
• Syrian activists have posted video of crackdown on student demonstrations at Aleppo University.
• A piece in the most recent issue of the Columbia Journalism Review tells how a filmmaker accidentally leaked the identity of a Syrian source, and highlights the importance of digital security in war correspondence. 
• Thursday was World Press Freedom Day and the Committee to Protect Journalists released a handbook on journalist safety.
• The UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay has announced the list of countries limiting human rights organizations, and this year Israel has been added to the list.
• Iraq’s fugitive Vice President, Tariq Al-Hashemi, a Sunni politician who fled Baghdad when the government issued an arrest warrant in December, has been charged, along with his bodyguards, with the murder of six judges. Al-Hashemi is currently in Istanbul and will not be present for the trial.
• On Wednesday, the British national police agency website was hacked. The British Defence Ministry is now acknowledging that it was also hacked.
• The Army is making changes to training and deployment, putting more soldiers under the direction of Special Operations commanders and assigning them to emerging risk regions.
• The audio is available for a CSIS panel on the roles of women in terrorism and counterterrorism.
• An increasing number of women are filling top executive positions in the defense industry.
• Nurses at VA hospitals are being scrutinized following investigation of patient deaths. 

Photo: Kabul, Afghanistan. Gunfire lights up a building occupied by militants in an April 16th battle with Afghan forces. Musadeq Sadeq/AP.

This Week in War. A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism.

This Week in War. A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism.

• Pakistani journalist Murtaza Razvi, senior assistant editor and head of magazines at Dawn, was found dead in Karachi yesterday, his body bearing the marks of torture.
• In Afghanistan, Salahuddin Rabbani, the son of slain former leader Burhanuddin Rabbani, will head the High Peace Council. 
• The Taliban engaged in an 18 hour attack on Kabul that was ended early Monday by Afghan forces on the ground and coalition air assaults.
• The LA Times published damning photographs of soldiers with the 82nd Airborne Division posing with the bodies of suicide bombers. WARNING: The pictures in the link are quite graphic.
• Interesting stat to consider: the US spends $14,000 annually per Afghan soldier, but each Afghan soldier is paid $1872. Here’s an interesting look into the finances.
• At least 36 were killed on Thursday in blasts across Iraq from Ramadi and Kirkuk to Baghdad. Hundreds were injured.
• Following South Sudan’s occupation of a disputed oil field, Sudanese president Omar Al-Bashir declared that he would teach his southern neighbour a “final lesson by force.”
• The Mexican police seized 250,000 US-made bullets that were being smuggled across the border.
• Ban Ki-Moon declares that Syria has not complied with the cease-fire. No one is surprised.
• A recent US-DPRK deal hailed as major progress has fallen through. North Korea is now saying it will not honor the deal to suspend uranium enrichment and long-range missile tests in exchange for food aid. A nuclear test seems inevitable.
• India successfully tested a long-range ballistic missile with nuclear capability, signifying a regional arms build-up.
• New polling data shows that Americans today report being more afraid of Iran than Americans in 1985 were afraid of the USSR. Interesting polling data, although I think we’re dealing with a different kind of fear.
• As Libya undergoes its critical transition, it cannot forget the victims of the war’s sexual violence.
• Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a Libyan commander who was abducted and flown to a Gaddhafi prison with the help of MI6, has begun legal proceedings against Jack Straw, the man who was at the time the British Foreign Secretary, for complicity in his torture during the rendition operation.
• Yesterday was Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. McClatchy brings us a terrible story about the plight of many aging survivors living uncared for and below the poverty line in Israel.
• Some 1200 Palestinian prisoners began an open-ended hunger strike this week, protesting the terrible conditions and humiliation inside their jails.
• Panetta announced a “special victims unit” to deal with sexual assault in the military.
• The Marines will open up their officer infantry school to women!
• The TIME Top 100 list included its usual fair share of odd choices, but also some on point ones relevant to this list. Former defense secretary Robert Gates wrote about our inimitable Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Admiral Mike Mullen wrote about Barbara Van Dahlen, who, through her program Give An Hour, mobilizes mental health professionals in support of veterans. Also notably on the list are cartoonist Ali Ferzat, Samira Ibrahim, Manal al-Sharif and Russian dissident Alexei Navalny.

Photo: At rest after setting up a camp that overlooks the Pakistan border. April 8. Javier Manzano/Polaris

This Week in War. A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism.

• Violence is threatening the ceasefire in Syria, and the UN Security Council moved to authorize the deployment of unarmed monitors to try and preserve it.
• A new report from Human Rights Watch, “In Cold Blood,” details extra-judicial executions by Assad’s forces in Syria.
• This week, violence spilled over from Syria into Lebanon and Turkey.
• Bahraini journalist Ahmed Al Bosta was beaten and arrested in Manama.
• A Memorandum of Understanding has been signed that allows night raids in Afghanistan to continue, but under the auspices of Afghan forces.
• Afghanistan’s defense minister has announced plans to make personnel cuts to the Afghan security forces after NATO’s 2014 drawdown, amounting to a planned force reduction of about 230,000.
• Afghan president Hamid Karzai has brought up the idea of an early presidential election before the transition.
• Pakistan sets new conditions for re-engagement with the US, including and end to drone attacks and an end to the use of Pakistan as a land route for arms transport to Afghanistan.
• Myanmar and its Karen rebels are in peace negotiations made more favorable by the recent political wins for Aung San Suu Kyi and her party. 
• Awkward but predictable: North Korea’s much-hyped long-range rocket broke apart shortly after launch, probably not even reaching the first stage of separation. Here is the White House statement (as well as the NORAD/Northcom statement).
• The 20th anniversary of the war in Bosnia served as a reminder of wounds that have persisted over the past two decades.
• Rwanda also reflected on a painful anniversary, marking the 1994 genocide.
• Sudan breaks off talks with South Sudan.
• Two Marines were killed during a training exercise when their V-22 crashed in Morocco.
• London’s Metropolitan Police say that their Anti-Terrorism Hotline may have been hacked and conversations recorded. 
• About 110,000 active-duty service-members took prescription sedatives, anti-depressants, narcotics, anti-psychotics and anti-anxiety drugs last year. 8% of the active-duty Army is on sedatives; 6% are on anti-depressants. This marks an eightfold increase since 2005. The Battleland Blog calls this ”yet another mental IED planted by recycling troops back into combat.”
• The Army surveyed 40,000 of its members to check up on its own report card and gets an A for having pulled through the last decade. Three cheers for bending but not breaking.
• Active duty Army whistleblower LTC Daniel Davis was on Democracy Now!
• A new report from CNAS looks at veterans post-service and their transition into civilian life.
• Homelessness among female veterans is climbing, even as overall veteran homelessness declines.
• And, for some nerdy fun, a statistical analysis of The Hunger Games: “Hunger Games survival analysis: in a Cox proportional hazards model, which covariates are associated with the odds (or hazard ratios) being ever in your favor?”

Photo: An Afghan horseman rides beside Qargha Lake in Kabul at sunset. April 5. Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty.

This Week in War. A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism.

• News today: Maulana Muhammad Qasim, provincial leader of Pakistani political party Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan, was killed this morning in Quetta, Balochistan.
• Micah Zenko curates some expert opinions on whether we’ll “win” in Afghanistan.
• Anatol Lieven, one of the best names in Afghan expertise, writes about the Afghan war in the New York Review of Books: “This has always been an Afghan civil war…”
• There’s growing concern over Iranian meddling in Afghanistan to exploit the situation and increase violence.
• US drone attacks launched from Afghanistan will end after 2014, according to the Afghan foreign minister.
• A story in the Washington Post about the exploitation of the young bacha bazi, or Afghan “dancing boys” taken as underage lovers for older men. Matthieu Aikins tweeted a few on point responses to that regarding increasing heteronormativity.
• The US put a bounty on Lashkar e-Taiba leader Hafiz Saeed, who openly mocks the $10m being offered for information leading to his capture.
• It has already been an incredibly deadly year in Karachi.
• Rare interviews with Syrian soldiers shed light on ongoing horrors.
• Detained Palestinian hunger striker Hana Shalabi, who spent more than 40 days on hunger strike, has been released.
• Bahrain’s best friend in Congress is now the representative from American Samoa, Rep. Eni Faleomavaega, who has been heavily influenced by pro-government lobbying.
• Iraqi universities face a number of political challenges.
• Qatar is refusing to hand over fugitive Iraqi VP Tareq Hashemi.
• The online forums for Al Qaeda went dark for the longest time since they began operation. They usually disappear and reappear, but this seems different. On Wednesday, one main site went live again, but others remain down. Terrorism scholars Aaron Zelin and Will McCants are interviewed about it here.
• A look inside the mission to catch Khalid Sheikh Muhammad.
• How the war on terror played its part in the Mali coup.
• The second US drone in four months has crashed in the Seychelles.
• Are nuclear drones going to be a thing?
• FARC, Colombia’s main rebel group, has released captives that had been being held for twelve years.
• A federal appeals court will hear the case of whether confidential IRA tapes made as part of an oral history project with Boston College should be released.
• Viktor Bout (“The Merchant of Death”), former Soviet arms dealer, has been sentenced to 25 years in his terrorism conviction. Russia does not approve.
• The research arm of the Pentagon, DARPA, has a big interest in neuroscience, which yields all sorts of questions of bioethics. 
• The first detachment of 200 Marines arrived in Darwin, Australia to be part of a permanent joint training hub as part of a US shift towards the Asia-Pacific region.
• News organizations including McClatchy, the Washington Post and the NYT filed an objection to the Pentagon’s plans to close a terrorism hearing scheduled for next week.

Photo: Sayagaz, Arghandab, Afghanistan. A member of coalition Special Operations Forces gathers firewood during snowfall. March 11. US Navy/Mass Comm Specialist 2nd Class Jacob L. Dillon. 

A Decade of War, the Women of Afghanistan and the White Savior Industrial Complex. There are a lot of reasons for concern about the fate of women and their rights in Afghanistan, and there continue to be further instances of bad news for the current and future status of Afghan women. President Karzai recently backed restrictions issued by the Ulema Council on the conduct of women. Recent reports about invasive searches of female visitors in Pul E-Charki prison are stomach-turning. This week Human Rights Watch released a report on the Afghan women jailed for “moral crimes” like running away from abusive husbands. There ought to be concern and anger, of course. However…

Women’s rights are often held up as the trump card for why Afghanistan needed/needs us. I’m not challenging the fact that the Taliban’s position and the current government’s position on women are reprehensible and warped and need to be addressed, but please, please don’t hold up women’s rights as justification for an extended military presence in Afghanistan. Or for that matter, ever having been in Afghanistan to begin with. Not only is that false on so many levels, but it’s repulsive to use something so crucial, so much about people’s daily human rights, as a superficial excuse to sustain a military presence that, after ten years, has at best kept at bay some of the forces that harm women and erase their voices and their rights. 

In light of critiques of #Kony2012 and fauxmanitarian sentimentality, it’s worth pointing out the elements of that in the rhetoric about trying to troop presence Afghanistan into being more gender equal. Not only is this a stretch of logic, but it’s hardly an accurate representation of any actual commitment by the international community to supporting positive gender role-related change. One only has to look at the vague, unsubstantiated encouragements toward handed down by this past December’s Bonn Conference to see that actual commitment to preserving and increasing women’s agency both politically and socially is a secondary, or tertiary even, concern. Women’s rights are used as a rallying cry and then tossed aside.

Malalai Joya, one Afghanistan’s most outspoken critics of Karzai and the West, and a prominent women’s rights activists, challenges the narrative on helping Afghan women, saying “the real struggle is between progressive Afghan women and men, and a phalanx of regressive forces.” Assuming the false dilemma of a choice between our decade of occupation and the utter helplessness of Afghan women at the hands of the Taliban is wrong. I support the idea of everybody working on social and economic and political strategies that support Afghan women in the peace transition, but that’s hardly what the US and the broader international community has done or attempted to do. The peace transition is favoring warlords over women’s rights. Unsurprisingly, we did not use our decade of war over there to build a system designed to give women the voice and power for which they are fighting. No white savior trophies being handed out today.

I’m going to yield to quoting Teju Cole to end this blog post, because I don’t think anyone can say it better: “there is much more to doing good work than “making a difference.” There is the principle of first do no harm. There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them.”

Photo of Afghan women demonstrating in support of a female lawmaker in Kabul. Oct. 2012. Via HRW.

This Week in War. A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism.

• News this Morning: Two days away from major international talks about Syria, violence continues to flare.
• Women Under Siege is crowd-mapping sexual violence in Syria. An amazing project.
• Foreign companies like KFC, Cinnabon and Four Seasons hotels continue to keep shop in Damascus.
• The discussion continues about Sgt. Bales, what exactly happened that night and what will happen now. The Pentagon has confirmed that it payed family members $50,000 a piece. 
• Yalda Hakim of the Australian SBS network has become the first Western journalist to enter the village where the massacre occurred. She interviewed survivors and Afghan guards on duty that night about what happened.
• A US government audit shows that security costs for the US in Afghanistan are set to rise by as much as 46%.
• Billions of dollars in cash are smuggled out of Afghanistan every year. This year $4.5bn was flown out of the country (compare that to USAID’s assistance to Afghanistan in 2011, which was around 2.5bn.
• Human Rights Watch released a report on the hundreds of women jailed for “moral crimes” in Afghanistan.
• The Arab League came to Baghdad. Check out my round-up on that from yesterday.
• The US has cut off aid to Mali following the coup. Assistance to the Malian government totaled $140m a year.
• Sudan and South Sudan are dangerously close to war. Senior envoys have met in Ethiopia to try and calm the situation.
• The revolution in Yemen has been accompanied by a sharp increase in US attacks against militants inside Yemen.
• Drones are always a popular topic of discussion and reporting, but there was a lot this week in particular. Peter Bergen and Jennifer Rowland of the New America Foundation report that drone strikes inside Pakistan in the first three months of this year are down sharply. PRI’s The World ran a piece on UAV proliferation. The Center for Democracy and Technology has an excellent timeline of the process and planning for implementation of domestic drones in the US.
• The Smithsonian interviewed counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke about Stuxnet.
• A cybersecurity bill has been introduced in the House by Republican sponsors. It parallels a similar Senate bill.
• The Washington Post profiled the heavy smoking, “irascible” convert to Islam who heads the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.
• The war in Afghanistan has seen a steep drop in public support inside the US. An NYT/CBS poll shows that currently 69% of the population thinks we should not be at war in Afghanistan, up from 53% four months ago.
• A touching and beautifully put-together NYT documentary by Micah Garon profiled USAF Lt. Col. John Darin Loftis who was recently killed in Afghanistan.
• IAVA released its annual survey of members this Monday. Veterans listed as their top concerns in this order: employment, mental health, disability benefits, health care, education, suicide and families.
• NBC has been doing a really nice job this week of focusing on employment for returning veterans.
• And… if you haven’t read Mitch Prothero’s piece for Vice on playing paintball with Hezbollah, you have to.

Photo: Soldiers wait in a transport plane to depart from Afghanistan to a transit station in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Vyacheslav Oseledko/AFP/Getty.

This Week in War. A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism.

• News this morning: Asma Al-Assad will be hit with EU sanctioning.
• The female members of Afghanistan’s High Peace Council say they are being sidelined.
• A two-part assessment of the past few months of the Afghan transitional process from the Afghan Analysts Network. (1, 2)
• There were two notable longreads pieces this week on Afghanistan, the massacre and the future of US involvement. One, by Neil Shea in The American Scholar, examines how his experiences on embed with US soldiers give insight into how the massacre happened. The other, by Matt Gallagher in the Boston Review, focuses on soldiers looking to the post-massacre political and military future.
• Here are the names of the sixteen victims of the massacre.
• I made a vision board for the Afghan war on Pinterest.
• Ahmed Rashid was interviewed about crisis and politics in Pakistan for NPR Fresh Air.
• An article on the powerful part women have played in the Libyan revolution in the Smithsonian.
• Brookings’ Saban Center has released a report that estimates the various costs of a Syrian intervention in order to be “executed properly.”
• This week marked the nine-year anniversary since the US dropped bombs over Baghdad during the now-infamous shock and awe. CNAS fellow Dr. Colin Kahl testified this week before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the deteriorating situation in Iraq. 
• The Khawajas, a prominent revolutionary family, are under siege by the government of Bahrain.
• Some really cool crisis-mapping work: mapping the mainstream media coverage of election violence in Kenya in comparison with citizen journalist coverage.
• The International Crisis Group has warned that militarized post-war policies in Sri Lanka could re-ignite violence.
• Soldiers overthrew President Touré in a successful military coup in the West African country of Mali, previously considered a quality example of African democratic leadership.
• A really fabulous look at some climate security policy dilemmas over at Duck of Minerva.
• NPR’s Morning Edition looks at cybersecurity legislation.
• The US is boosting its cyberweapons and cyberdefense research: $500m has gone to DARPA over the past 5 years for this purpose.
• A nuclear security summit is set to start in Seoul on Monday.
• Sebastian Junger has begun an organizaton called Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues that provides freelance journalists with three-day training sessions in emergency medical skills. 
• The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has updated its information on international arms transfers. Here’s a fact sheet assessing the trends and data from the 2007-11 period.
• Four female veterans are running for Congress this year! 
• According to the GAO, the Army has serious problems with its payroll system that are causing serious delays in paychecks and could prevent the Army from being audit-ready.
• Katy Perry pretended to be a Marine in her latest music video and I don’t so much know how I feel about this. Come to your own conclusions.

Photo: A Black Hawk takes off after unloading a team of Pathfinders and an Afghan patrol in Kandahar. US Army Flickr Stream.

Currently Reading: Ben Anderson’s No Worse Enemy: The Inside Story of the Chaotic Struggle for Afghanistan - his account of the war’s Afghan war’s downward spiral from the front lines in Helmand province. Very excited about this one.

[official website]