The Journalist and the Spies

On May 30th, as the sun beat down on the plains of eastern Pakistan, a laborer named Muhammad Shafiq walked along the top of a dam on the Upper Jhelum Canal to begin his morning routine of clearing grass and trash that had drifted into the intake grates overnight. The water flow seemed normal, but when he started removing the debris with a crane the machinery seized up. He looked down and saw, trapped in the grates, a human form. Shafiq called some colleagues, and together they pulled out the body. Occasionally, farmers and water buffalo drown in the canal, float downstream, and get stuck in the grates, but never a man in a suit. “Even his tie and shoes were still on,” Shafiq told me. He called the police, and by the next day they had determined the man’s identity: Syed Saleem Shahzad, a journalist known for his exposés of the Pakistani military. Shahzad had not shown up the previous afternoon for a television interview that was to be taped in Islamabad, a hundred miles to the northwest. His disappearance was being reported on the morning news, his image flashed on television screens across the country. Meanwhile, the zamindar—feudal lord—of a village twenty miles upstream from the dam called the police about a white Toyota Corolla that had been abandoned by the canal, in the shade of a banyan tree. The police discovered that the car belonged to Shahzad. Its doors were locked, and there was no trace of blood.
The previous afternoon, Shahzad had left his apartment, in the placid F-8/4 neighborhood of Islamabad, and driven toward Dunya studios, about five miles away. It was five-thirty; the television interview was scheduled for six. According to a local journalist who talked to a source in one of Pakistan’s cell-phone companies, Shahzad’s phone went dead twelve minutes later. His route passed through some of the country’s most secure neighborhoods, and no one had reported seeing anything suspicious. Some Pakistanis speculated that Shahzad might even have known the people who took him away.

It was a particularly anxious time in Pakistan. Four weeks earlier, American commandos had flown, undetected, into Abbottabad, a military town northwest of Islamabad, and killed Osama bin Laden. The Pakistani Army, which for more than sixty years has portrayed itself as the country’s guardian and guide, was deeply embarrassed: either it had helped to hide bin Laden or it had failed to realize that he was there. Certainly it hadn’t known that the Americans were coming.

Less than three weeks after the Abbottabad raid, the Army was humiliated a second time. A group of militants, armed with rocket-propelled grenades and suicide vests, breached one of the country’s most secure bases, the Pakistan Naval Air Station-Mehran, outside Karachi, and blew up two P-3C Orion surveillance planes that had been bought from the United States. At least ten Pakistanis affiliated with the base died. The components of several nuclear warheads were believed to be housed nearby, and the implication was clear: Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was not safe. In barracks across the country, military officers questioned the competence of Pakistan’s two most powerful men, General Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani, the chief of the Army staff, and General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or I.S.I. Some officers even demanded that the Generals resign. Ordinary Pakistanis, meanwhile, publicly disparaged the one institution that, until then, had seemed to function...

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Security for Peace: Setting the Conditions for a Palestinian State

As the Obama Administration continues its efforts to broker a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, this report looks beyond the issues of the day and focuses on what an international peacekeeping force to defend a two-state solution might look like. Though no individual case study can replicate the challenges of the Middle East, the authors extract lessons learned from other peacekeeping operations - including military and political lessons - that could be applicable.

Editor and contributing author Andrew Exum writes, “There should be no doubt that peacekeeping in a future Palestinian state would be fraught with difficulties, not simply because of the unique history and circumstances of the region but also because the international record of such operations is mixed. As this project makes clear, policymakers should tread cautiously when considering such an option. Any initiative to broker peace in the Middle East carries risk, but the more risks policymakers and leaders understand beforehand, the better prepared they will be to mitigate and manage them.”

Security for Peace takes an “end-around” approach to the problems of the Levant, imagining the goal – the establishment of a future Palestinian state – and asking what kind of security arrangement would be necessary to serve as a facilitator for such a state. Chapters in the edited volume include:

• Case studies on Southern Lebanon by CNAS Fellow Andrew Exum and Research Assistant Kyle Flynn, East Timor by Scott Brady, and Kosovo by CNAS Non-Resident Senior Fellow Dr. Richard Weitz;
• Military Lessons, by CNAS Non-Resident Senior Fellow Colonel Robert Killebrew, USA (Ret.), who draws on experience planning peacekeeping missions in Rwanda and Haiti, to illuminate key lessons learned in the field of peace operations since 1945;
• Political Lessons, by Ambassador James Dobbins, who draws on personal experience overseeing U.S. post conflict reconstruction operations in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan and research on peacekeeping since the Second World War; and
• An examination of four scenarios, by CNAS Non-Resident Senior Fellow Marc Lynch, that could precede a possible peacekeeping force.

Authors: Dr. Andrew M. Exum, Scott Brady, Dr. Richard Weitz, Kyle Flynn, Colonel Robert Killebrew, USA (Ret.), James Dobbins, Dr. Marc Lynch
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Christopher Hitchens, a Man of His Words

Anyone who occasionally opens one of our more serious periodicals has learned that the byline of Christopher Hitchens is an opportunity to be delighted or maddened — possibly both — but in any case not to be missed. He is our intellectual omnivore, exhilarating and infuriating, if not in equal parts at least with equal wit. He has been rather famously an aggressive critic of God and his followers, after cutting his sacrilegious teeth on Mother Teresa. He wrote a deadpan argument for trying Henry Kissinger as a war criminal, then was branded an apostate by former friends on the left for vigorously supporting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. (He memorably — a lot of what Hitchens has written merits the adverb — shot back that his antiwar critics were “the sort who, discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.”) And he is dying of esophageal cancer, a fact he has faced with exceptional aplomb.
This fifth and, one fears, possibly last collection of his essays is a reminder of all that will be missed when the cancer is finished with him.
Let’s begin with the obvious. He is unfathomably prolific. “Arguably” is a great ingot of a book, more than 780 pages containing 107 essays. Some of them entailed extensive travel in inconvenient places like Afghanistan and Uganda and Iran; those that are more in the way of armchair punditry come from an armchair within reach of a very well-used library. They appeared in various publications during a period in which he also published his best-selling exegesis against religion, “God Is Not Great”; a short and well-reviewed biography of Thomas Jefferson; a memoir, “Hitch-22”; as well as various debates, reading guides, letters and rebuttals — all done while consuming daily quantities of alcoholic drink that would cripple most people. As Ian Parker noted in his definitive 2006 New Yorker profile of Hitchens, the man writes as fast as some people read.
The second notable thing about Hitchens is his erudition. He doesn’t always wear it lightly — more than once he remarks, upon pulling out a classic for reconsideration, that he first read the work in question when he was 12 — but it is not just a parlor trick. In the book reviews that make up much of this collection, the most ambitious of them written for The Atlantic, he takes the assigned volume — a new literary biography of Stephen Spender or Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham, or a new collection of letters by Philip Larkin or Jessica Mitford — and uses it as pretext to review, with opinionated insights, the entire life and work of the writer in question, often supplementing his prodigious memory by rereading several books. He is a master of the essay that not only spares you the trouble of reading the book under review, but leaves you feeling you have just completed an invigorating graduate seminar...