Center for a New American Security

It's very hard work to run an organization, let alone one that's constantly being spied upon and sued.

Julian Assange, on why his organization does not publish donor information.

What is the over/under on current or former U.S. government officials who read that sentence in today's Wall Street Journal and choked on their coffee? 2,000? 5,000?

I work as a defense policy analyst at a think tank. I get paid to do research and then give informed opinions about issues of interest to policy-makers. Those policy-makers can either accept my recommendations or, more often than not, reject them.

I've noticed on my Twitter account that opinion on the information contained in the leaked Afghanistan documents obtained and released by Wikileaks varies between "yeah, we knew that. So?" to "Oh my God!".

Now that Gen. McChrystal is gone and consensus has formed that Preisdent Obama was well within his rights to have fired him, it's worth going back and looking anew at the Rolling Stone piece that got him fired.

I was not among those who criticized the article James Risen wrote about the $1 trillion mineral find in Afghanistan. I was content to fret about the conflict trap in which countries dependent on primary commodity exports often find themselves.

A few months ago, I was sitting around on a Saturday morning before a rugby game when I got an email on my blackberry from Greg Jaffe, who was in Afghanistan. I started reading this email aloud to some of my teammates, pausing every few seconds because I was laughing too hard to continue. I told Greg that he had to publish this email in some format or else I would post it on Abu Muqawama.

A story has been rumbling on in Pakistan for a couple of weeks now that just plain refuses to go away. 

The daily newspaper, the Nation, published an article on Nov 5 claiming US journalist Matthew Rosenberg, South Asia Correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, was spying in Pakistan. Rosenberg left the country and the WSJ responded with an open letter signed by a bunch of US, British and French outlets along with Al Jazeera.

I often do not agree with my friend Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, but he is certainly one of the more talented journalists I know and surely one of the bravest as well. I was having dinner at his house in Beirut one evening about a year ago, and as the night wore on and more wine was imbibed, a journalist visiting from London started in on me for having served as a solider in Iraq. Ghaith, who was himself severely wounded in a U.S.

Hey, look, everybody, Seymour Hersh has another article for the New Yorker. In this one, people told him a bunch of stuff, and him not wanting to make people feel bad, he went ahead and printed all of it. I have no idea what percentage of this article is true and what percentage is just some stuff people made up.

Hahaha, I'm starting to get media requests via my CNAS email account for Londonstani, which is hilarious if understandable given the quality of his dispatches. I know you guys are enjoying them as much as I am -- and more than what's usually on offer here. For what it's worth, I have been trying to pressure Londonstani to pull an Abu Muqawama and reveal himself, if only so we can start getting serious about shifting this blog's focus away from just counterinsurgency and more toward Middle Eastern and Central Asian security issues in general.