Forgive me if this reads like I’m greasing a source, but as part of the holds on administration appointees released by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) last week, Douglas Wilson became the Pentagon’s new assistant secretary for public affairs. Why’s that significant? Because at a time when global skepticism about More…
After the confusion over what happened during a December U.S.-Afghan raid in Kunar Province that resulted in about nine deaths, the NATO command in Afghanistan, known as ISAF, is reacting more rapidly to potentially damaging stories about civilian casualties.
Xinhua reported earlier today that a protest in Helmand Province’s More…
For years, public diplomacy — and its uniformed cousin, ‘strategic communications’ — has been discussed in Washington like a mantra: just find the most authentic ways of telling the “story” of the United States or of particularly unpopular U.S. actions, and suddenly people will realize that they just misunderstood America More…
Via Abu Muqawama, NATO is holding a contest for the best viral video answering the question of Why Afghanistan Matters. I’m not sure what to think of this. On the one hand, it kind of makes you wonder whether this means NATO governments aren’t able to compellingly answer More…
The New York Times identifies the State Department official who urged Twitter to reschedule a site maintenance — and risk disrupting the communications of thousands of Iranian dissidents using the #IranElection hashtag — as a 27-year old guy in the Policy Planning shop named Jared Cohen. Although he’s More…
In February, I did some reporting about how it was far from clear whether the Obama administration embraced the proposition that public diplomacy is a national security mission. Some observers wondered whether Judith McHale — now confirmed as the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, who came from the More…
Allow me to revise and extend a remark I made yesterday when I noted that Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Judith McHale made some “gestures to treating public diplomacy as a national security issue” in her confirmation hearing testimony last month. Though a lot of people More…
As the number of displaced people rises due to the fighting in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wants to up the totals for U.S. relief aid, according to this just-released statement:
“The humanitarian crisis in Swat gets worse every day, which
President Obama has arrived in Saudi Arabia for the first leg of of his outreach to what-we-maybe-shouldn’t-call-the Muslim world and, unsurprisingly, Osama bin Laden has released his latest mixtape screed against Obama and the United States more broadly. This time, to blunt the message of reconciliation and respect More…
Via Matt Yglesias, al-Qaeda’s leadership continues to sweat the non-demonic nature of President Obama:
Al Qaeda’s second-in-command told Muslims not to be fooled by U.S. President Barack Obama’s policies which, he said on an Islamist website on Monday, are no different to those of his predecessor, George
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