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I’ve done eight embeds with the American Army in Afghanistan, and met women soldiers of every rank and capability. But it’s my experience as a journalist trailing Libyan freedom fighters in 2011 that makes me applaud Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s decision to allow American women to apply for combat military occupational specialties.

While the United States is a hundred years ahead of Libya in gender equality, the fading rhetoric of protectionism that was a good part of the combat ban in the US for decades is alive and well in Libya.

Jabhat al-Nusra, the Salafist faction of the Syrian insurgency that was recently labeled a terrorist organzation by the United States government, recently launched a failed attack against the town of Sere Kaniye in Syrian Kurdistan.

My pal Jonathan Spyer, who has been following the Syrian war as closely as anyone and is now writing a book about it, has this to say in the Jerusalem Post:

The Sere Kaniye fighting is an indication of the increasing transformation of Syria’s civil war from an insurgency against the dictatorship of Bashar Assad into a many-sided conflict in which the various ethnic and sectarian communities of Syria fight over the country’s ruins.

[…]

[I]t is now mistaken to think of the Syrian civil war as a single conflict, pitting the Assad dictatorship against a popular insurgency.

The Assads, for all their many faults, grasped a certain truth – that Syria, a state established by British and French colonialism – lacked any real binding identity and could be held together only by force. The force of the dictatorship is now gradually receding and fading. As it does so, the incompatible component parts that it held together are beginning to separate.

The regime itself is turning into a structure operating on behalf of the Alawi minority. The Sunni Arab insurgency is also divided along ideological and tribal lines. The Kurds in northeast Syria, meanwhile, are making clear that they want no part of either the Sunni Islamist rebellion or the reduced dictatorship. In a manner similar to their compatriots in Iraqi Kurdistan, they are seeking to create a defensible haven for themselves. The Islamist rebels are trying – so far without great success – to force their way into this haven.

The war-within-a-war in northeast Syria thus offers stark evidence of the extent to which “Syria,” as a unified state, no longer really exists.

As Westerners evacuate Libya’s eastern city of Benghazi, Islamist militias—whose fighters apparently number in the thousands—are moving in.

An unnamed activist there says, “There isn't anyone fully in control of Benghazi…[Militias] control entrances into the city, streets, key infrastructure. The police don't want to challenge them because they just don't have the manpower.” A downtown police chief says, “We only have pistols and rifles. They have tanks and heavy weapons. We want to do our job but some police officers are simply afraid.”

This sort of thing happnened in Iraq shortly before entire cities were taken over and occupied by terrorist organizations. Eastern Libya may well end up suffering the same grim fate as Northern Mali if the government doesn’t get its act together, and fast.

Leonid Brezhnev would have smiled when President Viktor Yanukovych made public his list of “The New Elite of the Nation” on December 29, 2012.

The 60 lucky individuals who made the list of the “presidential reserve cadres” are overwhelmingly local apparatchiks: directors, secretaries, heads, and deputy heads of the many bureaucratic agencies that misrule Ukraine. There are also two businessmen, one doctor, and one professor, although just what they’re doing there is anybody’s guess.

At the height of its panic in December 2011, as tens of thousands of protesters in Moscow demanded free elections and political reforms, the Kremlin announced several concessions, the chief of which was the reinstatement of direct gubernatorial elections, abolished by Vladimir Putin in 2004. Having ceded ground to the opposition, the regime tried its best to limit the damage. Between January and June 2012, while the old rules were still in effect, the Kremlin made a slate of gubernatorial appointments, reducing the number of regions that were supposed to hold elections in October of that year from ten to five. Among the provinces that were denied the right to elect their governors in 2012 were the Yaroslavl and Sverdlovsk regions, where Putin’s United Russia party—even according to official results—received, respectively, 29 and 33 percent of the vote in the 2011 parliamentary election.

During the morning of January 21st, three China Marine Surveillance vessels—the Haijian 23, 46, and 137—entered the territorial waters of Japan north of Kubajima, one of the Senkaku Islands, in the East China Sea. This followed an intrusion by the Haijian 23 and two sister vessels during the preceding Saturday, also in the morning.

In 2010, a computer virus now known as Stuxnet went out of control. Originally created to infect and disable Iranian nuclear plants, Stuxnet, in concert with another malicious program called Flame, went—as you might expect almost any virus to do—out of control, in fact it went crazy.

It infected, for example, Chevron, a Fortune 500 company that only admitted contracting the Stuxnet infection in November, although for over two years it kept the devastating intrusion a secret. Around the same time as the Chevron assault, published reports by Symantec, the software security giant, indicated that not simply Iran, but Indonesia and India also found their systems infected: in all, some 15,000 unintended consequences.

Just as I'm finally ready to depart for Libya, travel warnings go from bad to catastrophic.

The United States government is now saying “the potential for violence and kidnappings targeting Westerners in Benghazi is significant.” The British Foreign Office says, “We are aware of a specific, imminent threat to Westerners in Benghazi. We advise against all travel to Benghazi and urge any British nationals who are there against our advice to leave immediately.”

I cannot possibly defy these kinds of warnings. Following through on my plans at this point would be like going to the beach after a tsunami warning is issued. After processing this information, if I were to go there and get myself kidnapped or killed, I'd deserve a Darwin Award. I may not be right about everything, but I'm not dumb enough to earn myself a Darwin Award.

So what I'm going to do instead is cover the Syrian civil war from Lebanon. I think it's a worthwhile substitute. That gruesome civil war has been spilling over the border for a while now. Lebanese are rushing into Syria to fight against Bashar al-Assad while Syrians are fleeing in terror across the border to Lebanon. What happens in Syria affects Lebanon and Iran, and what happens in Lebanon and Iran affects Israel, and what happens in Iran and Israel affects the United States. The current disaster in the Levant is just as important, if not even more so, than what's going on in North Africa.

The general public may perceive Lebanon and Libya to be equally dangerous, but they aren't, at least not for me, and not now, for a couple of reasons. First, no one is targeting Westerners in Lebanon at the moment. And second, I know Lebanon better I know any country in the world aside from the United States. I can handle myself there even if all hell breaks loose.

When I made the decision to go to Libya, things were dicey. I can handle dicey. I've been to Iraq seven times, I covered the Israeli-Hezbollah war from the front line, and I made a beeline for Georgia when Russia invaded. But Libya has apparently transformed itself from dicey to deathtrap since I made the decision to go there, and it took so long for the government to approve my visa that I couldn't go during the relatively “safe” window of opportunity that I had in November and December.

The absurdly long visa delay and the crap security conditions are related, I think. Libya just doesn't have a functioning government. Its bureaucrats don’t have it together any better than its security personnel.

This is the first and only time I have ever had to pull the plug on a trip, so believe me when I say I didn't make this decision lightly. I really did want to go. I didn't expect to enjoy myself there, but there was no doubt in my mind that a journey to post-Qaddafi Libya would be just as searing an educational experience as my first trip nine years ago.

Anyone who donated to my Libyan Kickstarter campaign and thinks I'm making the wrong decision, that I should go to Libya in spite of the rapidly deteriorating conditions, can have their money back. Just send me a message and I will take care of it.

And to those of you who understand and can still support me, thank you so very much.

When arrogant thugs start talking the language of compromise and reason, you know they’re getting desperate. Look at the Soviet Communists. When they felt on top of the world, they insisted they’d “bury” the West. When they knew the jig was up, they discovered the pleasures of détente. Some fifteen years ago, when I visited Cuba as part of a cultural-educational group, our guide Ernesto insisted that the embarrassingly visible prostitution and black-marketeering we encountered on all of Havana’s streets were part of human nature. When he said, “We’re just like you,” I knew that Cuban communism was kaput. Most recently, North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un stated: “An important issue in putting an end to the division of the country and achieving its reunification is to remove confrontation between the north and the south.” There goes another socialist paradise.

There’s a dangerous blame game being played now among the pundits, laying the responsibility for the conflict in northern Mali and the recent terror attack on the In Amenas gas field in Algeria on the overthrow of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. In the words of this recent New York Times story, “Qaddafi had mostly kept in check his country’s various ethnic and tribal factions … He acted as a lid … Once that lid was removed, … there was greater freedom for various groups—whether rebels, jihadists, or criminals—to join up and make common cause.”

Zero Dark Thirty, screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow’s new film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, is weathering a storm of criticism. Critics overwhelmingly give the film positive reviews, but activists claim that it approves of and even glorifies the use of torture against suspected al-Qaida terrorists held in secret CIA prisons and “black” sites.

The accusation is ludicrous. Nothing in Zero Dark Thirty suggests that either Boal or Bigelow approves of torture. So many have accused Bigelow of torture advocacy that she took to the pages of the Los Angeles Times and answered the charges directly. “As a lifelong pacifist,” she wrote, “I support all protests against the use of torture, and, quite simply, inhumane treatment of any kind.” Not only is she against torture—she’s a pacifist.

The reason she’s being called out for the opposite—David Edelstein at Vulture.com even calls the film “borderline fascistic” and “barely distinct from a boneheaded right-wing revenge picture”—is that she set her own opinions aside and depicted the hunt for bin Laden journalistically and objectively. The film’s electrifying final third dramatizes the raid on the al-Qaida leader’s compound in Pakistan, while the middle third shows the painstaking detective work that went into tracking him down. The film’s first third—the portion catching all the flak—takes place in secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan and Poland, where terrorist suspects are ruthlessly interrogated for intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts.

Anti-torture activists are picketing theaters in cities around the country and handing out leaflets. They seem to be confusing activism with journalism and art, which I suppose makes sense, since they’re the activists and Bigelow is the artist. But someone needs to explain to them how journalism and art work.

“Those of us who work in the arts,” Bigelow writes, “know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.”

But Bigelow’s critics didn’t want art, nor were they interested in a journalistic account. They wanted a cinematic op-ed piece and didn’t get it. True, neither the writer nor filmmaker articulate an anti-torture message, but those trained in the arts know this sort of thing is not always necessary or even desirable. Good novelists and filmmakers can manipulate the emotions and even opinions of their audience, but they also know that the strongest emotions and opinions are self-generated. One of the first things a student of creative writing hears from a good teacher is “show, don’t tell.” If you want the audience to think something is horrible, you don’t tell them something is horrible. You show them something that’s horrible and let them come to a conclusion about it themselves.

The first third of Zero Dark Thirty not only depicts scenes of prisoner abuse; it also includes gut-wrenching scenes of mass murder and terrorism. No character waltzes in front of the camera later to tell the audience that terrorism and suicide bombings are wrong. That would be gratuitous and insulting, as if the audience were made up of four-year olds.

The scenes depicting prisoner abuse are trickier, because the film’s protagonists are committing violence against helpless captives. It’s less obvious how we’re supposed to feel about that. American public opinion is divided. Speaking for myself, I sank in my seat and cringed during those scenes. I saw the movie twice, and I was no more comfortable the second time around.

My feelings of revulsion were entirely self-generated. Neither Boal nor Bigelow told me to feel that way. If the film had lectured the audience, or if one character lectured another, my own natural reaction to what I had seen would have been somewhat diminished. That’s why calling a book or film “preachy” isn’t a compliment.

There is no getting around it: What took place in those CIA black sites was a nasty business. If you abhor what went on there, you should appreciate the fact that Zero Dark Thirty portrays it unflinchingly. If, on the other hand, you approve of the rough methods used to extract information from captured al-Qaida members, if you think the results were justified by the means—rest assured that none of the film’s characters will step in front of the camera and call you a monster. Zero Dark Thirty doesn’t tell anyone what to think. Its shows us what we should think about.

Journalists and consumers of quality journalism should be thankful for this; artists and consumers of quality art should be thankful, too. Activists, and those with an activist way of thinking, are the ones who have a problem with the neutral and balanced approach—not because they want to be lectured themselves, but because they want to sit in a room where everyone else is being lectured.

Read the rest in City Journal.

On Tuesday, Beijing voted in favor of a UN Security Council resolution condemning North Korea for the launch of its three-stage rocket last month, a step it has long been reluctant to take. But does it matter?

China had initially insisted that the Security Council rebuke Pyongyang only with a statement issued by its president. The council’s president issued a statement after the North’s previous test, in April last year, not a resolution as Washington and others wanted. A presidential statement carries far less weight than a formal resolution.

Beijing’s decision to go along with a resolution this time has been hailed as progress. As one Security Council diplomat told Reuters, “The Chinese move is significant.” Yes, it’s positive that China relented and agreed to a formal resolution rather than a presidential statement, but neither form of condemnation promises to change the North’s behavior. And while the proposed resolution extends the existing sanctions to other agencies, most notably North Korea’s space agency, no additional sanctions have been added.

Last summer, as Vladimir Putin’s regime was hardening its crackdown on the pro-democracy movement, opposition activist Alexander Dolmatov fled to the Netherlands, where he applied for political asylum. His “guilt” in the eyes of the Russian authorities was his participation in the May 6th rally in protest at Putin’s inauguration, which was brutally dispersed by police. As of now, 19 people have been charged with “mass disturbances” in connection with the protest—despite the findings by the Kremlin’s own Human Rights Council that no such “disturbances” took place. One of the protesters, Maxim Luzyanin, has been sentenced to four and a half years in prison. Eleven more are currently in pretrial detention. Among them is Sergei Krivov, a 51-year-old scientist and father of two minor children, who is in the sixth week of hunger strike in protest at his unlawful arrest.

Algeria is a black box for most Western foreign correspondents. Most of us, including me, have never been there. I sort of want to visit, but the place gives me the creeps in a really bad way. It is by far the most bloody-minded and ruthless place in the neighborhood.

The biggest reason this fact is not widely known is because during the unspeakable civil war there in the 1990s, every faction—including the government side—murdered reporters both domestic and foreign. Pretty much nobody went there to cover it. So between 100,000 and 200,000 people were massacred with hardly anyone outside the country even knowing about it.

You’re therefore not likely to read much of anything in the mainstream media about the gruesome scene at the Ain Amenas natural gas plant by anyone with a solid grasp of the country. Algeria wanted to be off the media map. And so it is.

Adam Garfinkle, the editor of the indispensable magazine The American Interest, says he is not an Algerian expert, but he is compared with just about everyone else, and he wrote a background essay that everybody should read. I can only excerpt part of it here. You really ought to head over there and read all of it.

To properly set the stage for what I am about to tell you, dear reader, let me point out that the Algerian leadership is a stark atavism. There was a time when “progressive”, “socialist” and avowedly secular military elites lorded over huge swaths of the Arab world. These elites were invariably friendly with the Soviet Union in the Cold War parallax that defined the region’s geopolitics, with the conservative monarchies and a few outliers (Tunisia, Lebanon) more or less associated—one should not say allied—with the West, and in most cases the United States by indirection. Egypt before mid-1972, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Algeria and, for a time, Southern Yemen all muscled up with a Soviet-supplied and trained order of battle. Of these “progressive” military governments, Algeria is the only one left aside from the Assad regime in Syria, which is reeling on its last legs.

The present Algerian leadership consists of the very last remnants of the old guard that experienced the war of independence against France, and the generation right behind it experienced the civil war. Taken together, then, this leadership is as battle-hardened, ruthless and cold-blooded a group of guys as can be found anywhere. This is not a kind and gentle military that holds regular sensitivity-training sessions; it’s a military that uses eight bullets when two will do nicely, and that has no qualms about feeding still wriggling bodies through the wood chipper. They are also very proud and exquisitely sensitive to any slight coming from the general direction of foreigners. One former U.S. Air Force helicopter pilot (who of course will not be named) involved in a limited training mission has had this to say: “. . . the Algerians . . . . proved to be completely inflexible and almost hostile to the idea of working with us. Could it be their past experiences with the French or just garden-variety suspicion of the U.S. and our intentions?” Answer, friend: Both and neither. Yes, experience and suspicion figure in, but these people are just professional hard-asses and, as I say, they’re proud of it.

That said, they are also these days, I suspect, growing more fearful by the month. They are, as I say, the last of the breed of independence-era Arab military “progressives”, whose legitimacy formula has long since passed its sell-by date. If you look at a map of which parts of the country voted which way back in 1991, you can see that the government party won nowhere outside of the capital, and that the entire Tuareg south was disaffected both from the government and from the Arab Islamist opposition. Since 1991-92 the Amazigh—the Berbers—have also made their ticked-off presence very well known. And the general rise of Islamist energies with the so-called Arab Spring—particularly in neighboring Tunisia and in Egypt, but also in next-door Morocco—has probably got the Algerian leadership feeling not only somewhat antique but also increasingly isolated. At least some of them have to fear that if there is a second coming of their civil war, they might lose this time. These guys are so proud that they would never show fear publicly. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t down there somewhere in their guts.

And that, it seems to me, goes far to explain why they reacted to the In Amenas attack the way they did: quickly, and with deadly force. As I said in my second Flogging Mali post: “What the Algerians are saying, in effect, is we’re not going to come after you if you leave us alone, but if you mess with us we will show no mercy.” Well, just the next day, on the front page of the January 18 New York Times, I found evidence for my interpretation. The government spokesman, a fellow named Mohammed Said Oublaid, said as follows: “Those who think we will negotiate with terrorists are delusional.”  Just in case the Western journalists present did not get the point, Oublaid added: “Those who think we will surrender to their blackmail are delusional.”

It’s not hard to imagine the scene behind the curtain. The senior generals tell Oublaid to go out there and make one point, and one point only: We are focused on deterring more attacks against our country, period. And that had the merit of being true. The Algerian leadership did not give a flying fork about the hostages, Algerian or foreign. The way they see it, you play hard-ass and maybe a few dozen people die; you go soft and a new plague of civil war will kill tens of thousands. The bleating of some foreign governments about how the Algerians failed to employ standard counter-terrorist protocol—stun grenades and tear gas to help avoid needless bloodshed—completely missed the point. Maybe the Algerians know how to do that sort of thing and maybe they don’t, but it doesn’t matter because in this instance they wanted to shed blood. They wanted to look as unsentimental as a frozen brick, because that was the way to deliver the message they wished to send. And send it they did.

Read the whole thing. 

Last week the air in Beijing was so toxic that officials forbid school children from playing outside. Pharmacies sold out of protective masks. Emergency rooms hit capacity day after day with coughing Chinese complaining of respiratory problems, itchy eyes, and blurred vision.

At its worst the AQI, or air quality index, as measured by the US Embassy, hit 755. Elsewhere in northern China, the government’s own readings (based on a similar AQI index scale) climbed even higher. Online reports coming in from Hubei Province cited numbers as high as 900 or even 1,000. Neither the US nor the Chinese AQI index has a description or warning for pollution that is above 500. When it was designed, the idea that pollution would ever get that bad was unthinkable. But according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, a reading of 301 or greater triggers a health warning of “emergency conditions.”