Please note, with my apologies, because the columns are behind the New York Times subscription and archive firewalls, the links to the columns below are only accessible to TimesSelect subscribers. I do give clips of the articles, hopefully within fair use standards to give an idea about their contents.
In Monday's op-ed column in the New York Times, In Search of Cheney's 'Virtue' (behind subscription firewall), Nicholas Kristof presents another insightful piece, this time on the opportunities associated with energy efficiency and conservation.
Because the article is behind the NYT subscription firewall, I'm going to quote more then I otherwise might. If it's felt that I'm violating fair use rules, let me know, and I'll revise.
One of the things I particularly like about the current is the framing: a) Cheney's argument that energy conservation is a nice personal virtue but not practical for shaping government policy is false (big surprise coming from Cheney, I know) and
b) energy conservation and efficiency can be practically and economically beneficial.
So we need to push ahead with hydrogen and renewables, but the low-hanging fruit on the energy front is curbing demand — meaning more energy conservation. And it’s appalling that our government isn’t leading us on that.
"The best source of new energy is efficiency and conservation," notes Peter Robertson, vice chairman of Chevron. "The best source is not to use as much."
...
But new research has shown that improvements in energy efficiency often pay for themselves, actually leaving us better off.
"This is not a sacrifice deal," Daniel Yergin, head of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, says of conservation. "This is a technology deal. After all, we’re twice as energy efficient now as we were in the 1970s, and at the same time our economy has more than doubled."
James Woolsey, an energy expert and former director of the C.I.A., puts it this way: "People have radically overestimated the sacrifice and dramatically underestimated the opportunity."
Close to the end of the op-ed, he offers a critique of the media that applies generally, and not just in the case of discussions on energy and the environment.
I can’t help feeling that we in the news media are part of the reason that steps to battle climate change aren’t on top of the national agenda. We’re good at covering things that happen on any one day — like a tornado or hurricane — but weak at covering complex trends, like climate change. And we tend to cover disputes by having a dutiful quote from each side, without always explaining where the scientific consensus lies.
In a related column last year...
100-M.P.G. Cars: It's a Start, Feb 5, 2006
Imagine if we could develop a passenger car that averaged more than 100 miles per gallon -- or, if used only for short trips, 1,000 miles per gallon. What if it could cost the equivalent of only 75 cents a gallon to operate and needed to go to a filling station only every other month?
Surprise -- we have all that technology today! We even have a handful of demonstration vehicles to prove it. All we lack is bold political and corporate leadership to put this technology in play immediately.
These vehicles underscore that if President Bush is serious about curbing our addiction to oil, there's plenty more that he could do -- right now. There's no need for vague, long-term initiatives that are welcome but smack of procrastination.
What about some other things Kristof has written?
Reporting on Darfur earned Mr. Kristof a Pulitzer in 2006...
Never Again, Again, November 20, 2005
I'm sorry, but I couldn't cut anything from this column as a preview.
A Challenge for Bill O'Reilly, December 18, 2005
Let us all pray for Bill O'Reilly.
Let us pray that Mr. O'Reilly will understand that the Christmas spirit isn't about hectoring people to say "Merry Christmas," rather than "Happy Holidays," but about helping the needy.
...
Alas, not all prayers can be answered. Fox News Channel's crusade against infidels who prefer generic expressions like "Happy Holidays" included 58 separate segments in just a five-day period.
After I suggested in last Sunday's column that a better way to honor the season might be to stand up to genocide in Darfur (a calamity that Mr. O'Reilly has ignored), Mr. O'Reilly denounced me on his show as a "left-wing ideologue." Bless you, Mr. O'Reilly, and Merry Christmas to you, too!
Helping Bill O'Reilly, February 7, 2006
Kristof invited readers to help sponsor a trip to Darfur for Bill O'Reilly, with the caveat that pledges could not be earmarked for a one-way ticket.
Please, readers, help Bill O'Reilly!
After Mr. O'Reilly denounced me in December as a "left-wing ideologue" (a charge that alarmed me, given his expertise on ideologues), I challenged him to defend traditional values by joining me on a trip to Darfur. I wrote: "You'll have to leave your studio, Bill. You'll encounter pure evil. If you're like me, you'll be scared and you'll finally be using your talents for an important cause."
A few days ago, I finally got my answer. Mr. O'Reilly declared in his column: "I do three hours of daily news analysis on TV and radio. There's no way I can go to Africa."
A Sister's Sacrifice, November 26th, 2006
When the janjaweed militia attacked Fareeda, a village here in southeastern Chad near Darfur, an elderly man named Simih Yahya didn't run because that would have meant leaving his frail wife behind. So the janjaweed grabbed Mr. Simih and, shouting insults against blacks, threw him to the ground and piled grass on his back.
Then they started a bonfire on top of him.
But his wife, Halima, normally fragile and submissive, furiously tried to tug the laughing militia members from her husband. She pleaded with them to spare his life. Finally, she threw herself on top of the fire, burning herself but eventually extinguishing it with her own body.
...
Atrocities like this make up the news and constitute the Sudanese-sponsored genocide here in the region surrounding Darfur, but it is also stories like this -- of superhuman courage -- that keep me going through my reporting here. Invariably, the most memorable stories to emerge from genocide aren't those of the Adolf Eichmanns, but those of the Anne Franks and Raoul Wallenbergs. Side by side with the most nauseating evil, you stumble across the most exhilarating humanity.
How Do You Solve a Crisis Like Darfur, March 13, 2007
For anyone who thinks that "genocide" is absolutely the rock-bottom possibility, keep an eye on Darfur.
The area of crisis has already spread from an area the size of France to one the size of Western Europe, encompassing Chad and Central African Republic while threatening to reignite the separate war between north and south Sudan. And aid workers increasingly are finding themselves under attack, so that humanitarian access is now lower than at any time since 2004.
Save the Darfur Puppy, May 10, 2007
Finally, we're beginning to understand what it would take to galvanize President Bush, other leaders and the American public to respond to the genocide in Sudan: a suffering puppy with big eyes and floppy ears.
That's the implication of a series of studies by psychologists trying to understand why people -- good, conscientious people -- aren't moved by genocide or famines. Time and again, we've seen that the human conscience just isn't pricked by mass suffering, while an individual child (or puppy) in distress causes our hearts to flutter.
The Witness Next Door, May 14, 2007
One of the most unusual people in New Jersey these days is a tall 34-year-old black man named Daoud Hari. Others may lose their tempers at traffic jams on the turnpike, but he's just glad he's no longer being tortured.
Mr. Hari has just arrived in the U.S. from Chad and Darfur, where he says he was beaten and told repeatedly he was going to be executed. He is one of just a handful of Darfuris -- his lawyer knows of two others -- whom the U.S. has accepted as refugees.
I knew Mr. Hari in his previous life, because he interpreted for me early last year. We journeyed together along the Darfur-Chad border through a no man's land of villages that were being attacked by Sudan's janjaweed militia.
Spineless on Sudan, July 9, 2007
One of the most troubling signs is that Sudan has been encouraging Arabs from Chad, Niger and other countries to settle in Darfur. More than 30,000 of them have moved into areas depopulated after African tribes were driven out.
In the last few months, Sudan's government has given these new arrivals citizenship papers and weapons, cementing in place the demographic consequences of its genocide. And if Sudan thinks it has gotten away with mass murder in Darfur, it is more likely to resume its war against southern Sudan -- which seems increasingly likely.
He Rang the Alarm on Darfur, July 16, 2007
Some day an American president will visit a genocide museum in Darfur and repeat the standard refrain: If only we had known ...
But that excuse will ring hollow, because there was a whistle-blower in the heart of the Bush administration. Roger Winter, whom President Bush had appointed in 2001 to a senior post in the U.S. Agency for International Development, frantically tried to ring alarm bells -- but instead the administration turned away.
If there was a hero within the U.S. government on Darfur, it was Mr. Winter. But it was doubly frustrating for him because in 1994 he had the same experience during the Clinton administration, when he was running a refugee organization and desperately trying to galvanize officials to respond to the Rwandan genocide.
Mr. Bush, Here's a Plan For Darfur, August 6, 2007
Mr. Kristof presents eleven points of action to help end the crisis in Darfur.
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Rape & Courage in Pakistan...
Another Face of Terror, July 31, 2005
Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, is supposed to be our valued ally in the war on terrorism. But terror takes many forms, not all of them hijacked airplanes or bombed subways.
For the vast majority of humans, terror comes in more mundane ways -- like the violent hands that woke Dr. Shazia Khalid as she lay sleeping in her bed, and the abuse she's suffered at the hands of Mr. Musharraf's government ever since.
I mentioned Dr. Shazia briefly in June when I wrote about General Musharraf's quasi-kidnapping and house arrest of Mukhtaran Bibi -- the Pakistani rape victim who used compensation money to open schools and start a women's aid group. But at that time Dr. Shazia was still too terrified to speak out.
A Pakistani Rape, A Pakistani Love Story, August 2, 2005
Rapes occur in Pakistan at an estimated rate of one every two hours, and the rape itself is only the beginning of the horror. As in much of the world, the victim is frequently expected to atone for her "sin" by killing herself, while her attacker goes unscathed.
But Dr. Shazia Khalid, through all her tears, guilt and self-doubt, pushed for something more: punishment for the man who raped her. In my column on Sunday, I described how local authorities reacted after Dr. Shazia was raped early this year: they drugged her and confined her to a psychiatric hospital to hush her up.
It didn't work, and the incident provoked unrest in the wild area of Baluchistan, where the rape occurred, because of rumors that the rapist was not only an outsider, but also an army captain. President Pervez Musharraf became determined to make the embarrassment disappear.
Lining Up To Be Raped, September 20, 2005
Our close ally President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan visited the U.S. last week and fretted aloud about a surprising problem: The "easiest way" for Pakistani women to make money is to get raped, he said, so they're lining up to be raped and thus making him look bad.
That's right. He's nuts.
"You must understand the environment in Pakistan," The Washington Post quoted him as saying. "This has become a moneymaking concern. A lot of people say if you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped."
The Rosa Parks for the 21st Century, November 8, 2005
She may be the bravest woman in the world, but Mukhtaran Bibi was finally looking intimidated.
Mukhtaran is the Pakistani peasant woman who was gang-raped on the order of a local council, and then forced to walk home nearly naked before a jeering crowd. Instead of killing herself, as rape victims routinely do in such places, she prosecuted her attackers and became a women's rights leader in Pakistan.
But last week, she was confronted by something she found pretty scary: Midtown Manhattan.
Mother of a Nation, April 2, 2006
I don't know whether journalists felt it around the young Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., but around Mukhtar Mai I sense the presence of greatness.
Mukhtar, who also goes by the name Mukhtaran Bibi, is the young peasant woman -- she doesn't know exactly how old she is -- who three years ago was gang-raped on order of a local tribal council. Instead of killing herself, as was expected of any self-respecting woman, she prosecuted her attackers, used compensation money to start schools, and started a nationwide revolution to empower women.
A Heroine Walking in the Shadow of Death, April 4 2006
When I met Mukhtar Mai here two years ago, she was at her wits' end. Her campaign to fight rape and illiteracy had run out of money, and she was selling family possessions to keep her schools operating.
Now so much has changed. Mukhtar, who also goes by the name Mukhtaran Bibi, has become an international celebrity. Her autobiography is the No. 3 best seller in France and is coming out this fall in the U.S., movies are being made about her, and she has been praised by dignitaries like Laura Bush and the French foreign minister.
Pakistan has also provided a paved road, electricity and telephone service to this village, she herself has learned to read in one of her own schools, and her new aid group is flourishing.
Best of all, her campaign is really working: more women seem to be prosecuting rapes and acid attacks, and there's some evidence that such violence is dropping.
A Woman's Work Earns Her Enemies, April 8, 2007
You might think that the worst tragedy that could befall a couple would be for their young daughter to be raped and murdered.
But here in rural Pakistan, that was only the beginning for Hasina Bibi and her husband, Rashid Ahmed. Their story underscores how to be poor in the developing world often means having not only no food but also no justice -- and how any war against poverty must be devised not only to enrich the world's poorest people but also to educate and empower them.
A related column:
In India, One Woman's Stand Says 'Enough', January 15, 2006
The central moral challenge we will face in this century will be to address gender inequality in the developing world. Here in India, for example, among children ages 1 to 5, girls are 50 percent more likely to die than boys. That means that every four minutes, a little girl here is discriminated against to death.
One reason for such injustice is that many women docilely accept it -- even enforce it. But that may be changing, as I found in a slum here in the central Indian city of Nagpur.
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Sex Trafficking...
Girls for Sale, January 17, 2004
Some 700,000 people are trafficked around the world each year, many of them just girls. They form part of what I believe will be the paramount moral challenge we will face in this century: to address the brutality that is the lot of so many women in the developing world. Yet it's an issue that gets little attention and that most American women's groups have done shamefully little to address.
Bargaining for Freedom, January 21, 2004
In my last column, I described the sex trafficking in places like Cambodia as a modern form of slavery, and I believe that. But the scene that unfolded next underscored the moral complexity of a world in which some girls are ambivalent about being rescued and not all brothel owners are monsters. Some brothel owners use beatings and locked rooms to enslave their girls, but most use debts and ostensible kindness to manipulate them -- and the girls are often so naïve, so stigmatized by everyone else and so broken in spirit that this works.
Going Home, With Hope, January 24, 2004
At its worst, the trafficking system takes innocent village girls, often sold by relatives or kidnapped by neighbors, imprisons them in brothels to be raped repeatedly and leaves them dead of AIDS by their early 20's -- and yet there is far less international effort to save these children than to, say, save the Brazilian rain forest.
I ended up buying the freedom of two girls, Srey Neth for $150 and Srey Mom for $203. Srey Neth, a 17-year-old with short hair and increasing sass as she left servitude behind, is a third-grade dropout. Her family owns five acres of farmland, but her father caught malaria and they had to mortgage the land to pay for treatment to save him. The family risked losing the land altogether, so an older female cousin, Mam Di, suggested a solution.
"Mam Di said, half-seriously, half-joking, 'Your family is in debt, so you'd better go make some money by selling your virginity,' " Srey Neth recalled. "At first I didn't understand what she meant. But she kept explaining."
Loss of Innocence, January 28, 2004
Four years of sexual servitude had shattered Srey Mom's spirit and left her with no real family, other than the brothel owner she called "Mother."
After I had purchased the freedom of Srey Mom and Srey Neth, the two teenage prostitutes whose story I've told in my last three columns, we took Srey Neth back to her family. Then we had to drive clear across the country to return Srey Mom to her native village. During that long drive, she repeatedly vowed that she would never return to the brothels -- but she said it so insistently that the possibility clearly preyed on her mind.
"I'm going to go to the pagoda to pray that I never go back," she said, for she had seen other girls rescued from the brothels who ended up ostracized by outsiders and slinking back again.
Stopping the Traffickers, January 31, 2004
...Cambodia's success in fighting AIDS with condoms means that sexual slavery is not necessarily a death sentence.
The progress in Cambodia is mirrored by strides elsewhere, from South Korea to Romania and the Dominican Republic. And most of the credit goes to the Bush administration, particularly its State Department's trafficking office, which is shaming and threatening countries into confronting traffickers.
President Bush's policies toward women have often been callous -- cutting off, for example, funds for safe childbirth programs in Africa because of ideological disputes with sponsoring groups. But on trafficking, this administration has led the way.
Slavery in Our Time, January 22, 2006
Historians will look back in puzzlement at the way our 21st century world tolerates the slavery of more than a million children in brothels around the world.
India alone may have half a million children in its brothels, more than any other country in the world. Visit the brothel district in almost any city in India, and you can meet 14-year-old girls who have been kidnapped off the street, or drugged, or offered jobs as maids, and then sold into a world that they often escape only by dying of AIDS.
When I've written about "sex slavery" in the past, from Cambodia, I've sensed that readers assume the term is hyperbole. See if you still think so after hearing the story of Geeta Ghosh (video of Geeta is at www.nytimes.com/kristof).
Hitting Brothel Owners Where it Hurts, January 24, 2006
... as we try to develop policies to reduce sex trafficking, there are a couple of lessons here. First, it's difficult to extricate girls from prostitution after they've been trafficked. It's far more cost-effective to focus resources on reducing the number of newly trafficked people each year -- now hundreds of thousands.
Second, educating girls is the best way to give them the tools to resist trafficking or escape brothels. In the long run, one effective way to knock down brothels is to build schools.
But that's for the long run. To have a more immediate impact, we need to reduce the economic incentives for traffickers. Here are my suggestions:...
A Woman Without Importance, March 26, 2006
A person of unbelievable strength, Ms. Parveen fought back and refused to sleep with customers. So, she says, the brothel owner -- Mian Sher, the violent sadist who had kidnapped her -- beat and sexually tortured her, and regularly drugged her so that she would fall unconscious and customers could do with her as they liked.
This went on for six years, during which she says she was beaten every day. The girls in the brothel were forced to sleep naked at night, so that they would be too embarrassed to try to escape. Ms. Parveen says she believes that two of them, Malo Jan and Suwa Tai, were killed after they repeatedly refused to sleep with customers. In any case condoms were never available, so all the girls may eventually die of AIDS.
I wanted to look into the eyes of a man who could do these things. So I barged into Mian Sher's brothel, identified myself and interviewed him.
He warily offered me tea, pleasantries and flashes of violent temper. He denied kidnapping Ms. Parveen, saying that he had married her six years earlier. He also denied that he pimped the girls -- a claim undermined by a customer who was walking out of his brothel as I arrived. Others working in the area said that Mian Sher unquestionably ran a brothel, and that Ms. Parveen had been imprisoned in it.
Bush Takes on the Brothels, May 9 2006
Emphasis added, just because...
I'm guessing that President Bush's foreign policy will stand up about as well to the assessments of future historians as a baby gazelle to a pack of cheetahs.
Yet there is one area where Mr. Bush is making a historic contribution: he is devoting much more money and attention to human trafficking than his predecessors. Just as one of Jimmy Carter's great legacies was putting human rights squarely on the international agenda, Mr. Bush is doing the same for slave labor.
We don't tend to think of trafficking as a top concern, so Mr. Bush hasn't gotten much credit. But it's difficult to think of a human rights issue that could be more important than sex trafficking and the other kinds of neo-slavery that engulf millions of people around the world, leaving many of them dead of AIDS by their early 20's.
A Cambodian Girl's Tragedy: Being Young and Pretty, December 12, 2006
Slavery seems like a remote part of history, until you see scholarly estimates that the slave trade in the 21st century -- forced work in prostitution and some kinds of manual labor -- is probably larger than it was in the 18th or 19th centuries.
Or until you take a rutted dirt path in northwestern Cambodia to a hut between a rice paddy and a river, and meet a teenage girl named Noy Han. The girl, nicknamed Kahan, suffered the calamitous misfortune of being pretty.
...
One woman in the village, Khort Chan, had left as a girl and then reappeared years later. One day last year, when Kahan was 16 or 17 (ages are fuzzy here), she ate ice cream that Ms. Khort Chan gave her -- and passed out.
The Good Daughter, in a Brothel, December 17, 2006
One of the oldest social dichotomies is the one dividing good girls from bad, the madonna from the whore. But in poor countries where sex trafficking and globalization have fostered new forms of slavery, it is the saintly ones -- those who risk leaving their villages to help their families -- who often end up as whores.
Yan Kosal is a 26-year-old woman here in northwestern Cambodia who was devoted to her aging parents and desperately concerned with providing for them. Her mother is blind, her father is frail, and they depend on her -- the only surviving child -- for food.
Kosal earned only $30 a month as a peddler, barely enough to scrape by. So when a woman acquaintance told her that she could earn $90 a month selling snacks in Thailand, Kosal leapt at the opportunity.
Fighting Brothels With Books, December 24, 2006
So in this holiday season let me share the (happy!) story of a group of kids who have found a way -- from Washington State, no less -- to fight illiteracy and sex trafficking here in this remote and squalid town of Pailin in western Cambodia.
I stumbled across their effort by chance as I visited an elementary school here that bore an English sign with the name "Overlake School." Rural Cambodian schools normally are dilapidated and bare, but astonishingly this one had an English teacher who ushered me into a classroom in which sixth-grade students were pecking away at computers connected to a satellite dish.
"Many of my students have e-mail addresses," said the teacher, Tay Khy. "They e-mail students in America."
This remarkable scene -- barefoot students with Yahoo accounts -- came to pass because Francisco Grijalva, principal of the Overlake School in Redmond, Wash., read about an aid group called American Assistance for Cambodia (www.cambodiaschools.com) that builds schools in rural Cambodia. He proposed that his 450 students, in grades five through 12, sponsor construction of an elementary school in Cambodia.
Sanctuary for Sex Slaves, April 3, 2007
If the thought has ever flitted through your mind that your spouse isn't 100 percent perfect, then just contemplate what Shakira Parveen is going through. And give your own husband or wife a hug.
When Ghulam Fareed proposed marriage to Ms. Parveen, he fingered prayer beads and seemed gentle and pious. Ms. Parveen didn't know him well, but she and her family were impressed.
"The first month of marriage was O.K.," Ms. Parveen recalled. "And then he said, you have to do whatever I tell you. If I tell you to sleep with other men, you have to do that."
It turned out that Mr. Fareed was running a brothel and selling drugs, and he intended Ms. Parveen to be his newest prostitute. "I said, 'No, I don't want to sleep with other men,' " she said, but he beat her unconscious with sticks, broke her bones and at one point set fire to her clothes. Finally, she broke and assented.
The 21st-Century Slave Trade, April 22, 2007
Anyone who thinks that the word "slavery" is hyperbole when used to describe human trafficking today should meet Meena Khatun. She not only endured the unbearable, but has also shown that a slave trader's greed sometimes is no match for a mother's love.
Human trafficking is the big emerging human rights issue for the 21st century, but it's an awful term, a convoluted euphemism. As Meena's story underscores, the real issue is slavery.
Meena was kidnapped from her village in north India by a trafficker and eventually locked up in a 13-girl brothel in the town of Katihar. When she was perhaps 11 or 12 -- she remembers only that it was well before she had begun to menstruate -- the slaver locked her in a room with a white-haired customer who had bought her virginity. She cried and fought, so the mother and two sons who owned the brothel taught Meena a lesson.
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Healthcare in the Developing World...
The Illiterate Surgeon, June 12, 2005
Just about the worst thing that can happen to a teenage girl in this world is to develop an obstetric fistula that leaves her trickling bodily wastes, stinking and shunned by everyone around her. That happened four decades ago to Mamitu Gashe.
But the most amazing thing about Ms. Mamitu is not what she endured but what she has become.
'Save My Wife', September 17, 2006
Prudence Lemokouno was lying motionless on a bed in the bleak hospital here, her stomach swelled with a fetus that had just died, her eyes occasionally flickering with fright but mostly dull and empty.
Dr. Pascal Pipi, the lone doctor in the public hospital, said she had a few more hours to live, and then she would join the half-million women a year who die around the world in pregnancy and childbirth.
Her husband, Alain Awona, was beside himself. "Save my wife," he pleaded. "My baby is dead. Save my wife."
Prudence's Struggle Ends, September 24, 2006
As Prudence Lemokouno lay on a hospital bed here, spitting blood, her breath coming in terrible rattles, it was obvious that what was killing her wasn't so much complications in pregnancy as the casual disregard for women like her across much of the developing world.
Neither Western donor countries like the U.S. nor poor recipients like Cameroon care much about Africans who are poor, rural and female, and so half a million such women die each year around the world in pregnancy. It's not biology that kills them so much as neglect.
I began Prudence's story in my column last Sunday, and for a while I thought I would have a happy ending.
When Prudishness Costs Lives, December 19, 2006
This is an impoverished, authoritarian, war-ravaged country, but it offers an important lesson for President Bush and American school boards: Don't fear those lifesaving bits of latex known as condoms.
Cambodia has become one of the world's few success stories in the struggle against AIDS, and it has achieved that success partly by vigorously promoting condoms. This strategy has saved thousands of lives.
Cambodia has cut the prevalence of H.I.V. in adults from 3 percent in 1997 to about 1.8 percent today. In rural Cambodian towns like this one, billboards and posters promote condoms, and clinics and brothels have buckets of them. Health centers don't have X-ray machines or oxygen tanks, but they have phalluses to show visitors how to put on condoms.
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More on Pakistan...
The General and the Housewife, March 25, 2007
Gen. Pervez Musharraf is facing angry street demonstrations around the country in the most serious crisis of his presidency -- and that's partly because he picked a fight with a middle-class housewife who is proving tougher and shrewder than he is.
This drama is playing out in extraordinary scenes on Pakistani streets: crowds of roly-poly lawyers in dark suits braving clouds of tear gas to demand that Mr. Musharraf resign -- or even be tried for treason. It's impossible to know whether the protests will lead to a democratic revolution that topples Mr. Musharraf, to a military crackdown, or to a political deal that causes the protests to fizzle.
And behind it all is the saga of the general and the housewife.
"The nation is ready to rise up; there is a revolution behind me," says Amina Masood Janjua, a mother of three who has emerged as a nemesis of General Musharraf. Mrs. Janjua says she was a "very timid person," uninvolved in politics and content to be "queen of my house." But then two years ago, her husband disappeared, presumably kidnapped by government security agents.
Relations with Iran...
Hang Up! Tehran is Calling, January 21, 2007
One of the most worrying parts of President Bush's Iraq strategy doesn't have anything to do with Iraq. It's the way he's ramping up a confrontation with Iran.
Across a broad spectrum of policy levers, Mr. Bush is raising the pressure on Iran, increasing the risk that he will drag the U.S. into a third war in an Islamic country in six years. Instead of disengaging from war, he could end up starting another.
We could have taken another route. In 2003, Iran sent the U.S. a detailed message offering to work together to capture terrorists, to stabilize Iraq, to resolve nuclear disputes, to withdraw military support for Hezbollah and Hamas, and to moderate its position on Israel, in exchange for the U.S. lifting sanctions and warming up to Iran.
Some diplomats liked the idea, but administration hawks rejected it at once.
Iran’s Operative in the White House, March 20, 2007
If an 18-year-old American soldier were caught slipping obscure military paperwork to Iranian spies, he would be arrested, pilloried in the news media and tossed into prison for years.
But in fact there's an American who has provided services of incalculably greater value to Iran in recent years. So you have to wonder: Is Dick Cheney an Iranian mole?
Consider that the Bush administration's first major military intervention was to overthrow Afghanistan's Taliban regime, Iran's bitter foe to the east. Then the administration toppled Iran's even worse enemy to the west, the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.
You really think that's just a coincidence? That of all 193 nations in the world, we just happen to topple the two neighboring regimes that Iran despises?
Diplomacy at it’s Worst, April 29, 2007
In May 2003, Iran sent a secret proposal to the U.S. for settling our mutual disputes in a "grand bargain."
It is an astonishing document, for it tries to address a range of U.S. concerns about nuclear weapons, terrorism and Iraq. I've placed it and related documents (including multiple drafts of it) on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.
Hard-liners in the Bush administration killed discussions of a deal, and interviews with key players suggest that was an appalling mistake. There was a real hope for peace; now there is a real danger of war.
Cheney’s Long-Lost Twin, July 19, 2007
Could Dick Cheney and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be twins separated at birth?
The U.S. vice president and Iranian president, each the No. 2 in his country, certainly seem to be working together to create conflict between the two nations. Theirs may be the oddest and perhaps most dangerous partnership in the world today.
Both men are hawks who defy the international community, scorn the U.N. and are unpopular at home because of incompetence and recklessness -- and each finds justification in the extremism of the other.
"Iranians refer to their new political radicals as 'neoconservatives,' with multiple layers of deliberate irony," notes Gary Sick, an Iran specialist at Columbia University, adding: "The hotheads around President Ahmadinejad's office and the U.S. foreign policy radicals who cluster around Vice President Cheney's office, listen to each other, cite each others' statements and goad each other to new excesses on either side."
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And if we stretch way, way back, the New York Times piece prior to the whole Ambassador Joe Wilson - Valerie Plame - outing-a-CIA-agent-for-retribution scandal...
White House in Denial, June 13, 2003
... an administration official tells The Washington Post that Mr. Cheney's office first learned of its role in the episode by reading that column of mine. Hmm. I have an offer for Mr. Cheney: I'll tell you everything I know about your activities, if you'll tell me all you know.
To help out Ms. Rice and Mr. Cheney, let me offer some more detail about the uranium saga. Piecing the story together from two people directly involved and three others who were briefed on it, the tale begins at the end of 2001, when third-rate forged documents turned up in West Africa purporting to show the sale by Niger to Iraq of tons of "yellowcake" uranium.
Italy's intelligence service obtained the documents and shared them with British spooks, who passed them on to Washington. Mr. Cheney's office got wind of this and asked the C.I.A. to investigate.
The agency chose a former ambassador to Africa to undertake the mission, and that person flew to Niamey, Niger, in the last week of February 2002. This envoy spent one week in Niger, staying at the Sofitel and discussing his findings with the U.S. ambassador to Niger, and then flew back to Washington via Paris.
Which lead to Joe Wilson's own op-ed on July 16, 2003, "What I Didn't Find in Africa".
Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq?
Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.
...
In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake -- a form of lightly processed ore -- by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office.
and on a related note...
Cloaks and Daggers, June 6, 2003
On Day 78 of the Search for Iraqi W.M.D., yesterday, once again nothing turned up.
Spooks are spitting mad at the way their work was manipulated to exaggerate the Iraqi threat, and they are thus surprisingly loquacious (delighting those of us in journalism). They emphasize that even if weapons of mass destruction still turn up, there is a fundamental problem -- not within the intelligence community itself, but with senior administration officials -- particularly in the Pentagon.
"As an employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, I know how this administration has lied to the public to get support for its attack on Iraq," one of my informants rages. Some others see a pattern not so much of lying as of self-delusion -- and of subjecting the intelligence agencies to those delusions.
16 Words, and Counting, July 15th 2003
After I wrote a month ago about the Niger uranium hoax in the State of the Union address, a senior White House official chided me gently and explained that there was more to the story that I didn't know.
Yup. And now it's coming out.
Based on conversations with people in the intelligence community, this picture is emerging: the White House, eager to spice up the State of the Union address, recklessly resurrected the discredited Niger tidbit. The Central Intelligence Agency objected, and then it and the National Security Council negotiated a new wording, attributing it all to the Brits. It felt less dishonest pinning the falsehood on the cousins.
What troubles me is not that single episode, but the broader pattern of dishonesty and delusion that helped get us into the Iraq mess -- and that created the false expectations undermining our occupation today.
Save Our Spooks, May 30, 2003
"The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S.," notes Greg Thielmann, who retired in September after 25 years in the State Department, the last four in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. "And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things."
The outrage among the intelligence professionals is so widespread that they have formed a group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, that wrote to President Bush this month to protest what it called "a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions."
"While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political purposes," the letter said, "never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorize launching a war."
Secret Obsessions at the Top, February 7, 2004
In 1981, we now know, the K.G.B. chairman said at a secret conference that President Ronald Reagan was planning to launch a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. The Soviets became consumed with the U.S. threat, just as the Bush administration became obsessed with the Iraq threat. The K.G.B. ordered all its offices in NATO countries to seek evidence of Mr. Reagan's plans for a pre-emptive nuclear strike, and they code-named the effort RYAN.
Once K.G.B. officers knew what Moscow wanted, they found "evidence" everywhere of Mr. Reagan's secret plans for a nuclear strike -- confirming Moscow's worst fears.
...
The parallels between our Iraq intelligence mess and RYAN are telling. When a country's capital is in the grip of hard-line ideologues who demand a certain kind of intelligence, they'll get it. The result is an intelligence failure. And, more fundamentally, it's a political failure by the top leaders themselves.
So to me, the administration's recent effort to blame the intelligence community for the Iraq mess is as misleading as the drive to war itself. Nothing the C.I.A. did was as harmful as the way administration officials systematically misled Americans about the incomplete and often contradictory mountain of intelligence.
Time for the Vice President to Explain Himself, October 30, 2005
I owe Patrick Fitzgerald an apology.
Over the last year, I've referred to him nastily a couple of times as "Inspector Javert," after the merciless and inflexible character in Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables." In my last column, I fretted aloud that he might pursue overzealous or technical indictments.
But Mr. Fitzgerald didn't do that. The indictments of Lewis Libby are not for memory lapses or debatable offenses, but for repeatedly telling a fairy tale under oath.
What Did Cheney Know, and When Did He Know It?, November 1, 2005
Come on, Mr. Vice President, tell us what happened.
A federal indictment charges that criminality swirled around your office, and it demeans this administration and the entire country when you hide in your bunker and refuse to say whether you knew of any such activities.
Mr. Cheney, Tear Down This Wall, February 6, 2007
At the Republican National Convention in 2000 that nominated him for vice president, Dick Cheney told a rapturous crowd that Democrats "will offer more lectures, and legalisms, and carefully worded denials. We offer another way, a better way, and a stiff dose of truth."
So, Mr. Cheney, now that the Scooter Libby trial is raising doubts about your own integrity, you owe the nation an explanation. Here are a few questions to help frame your explanation of your activities:...
Return to the Top
Miscellaneous on Iraq, Islam, Diplomacy, more...
Time for an Extreme Makeover at the White House, February 21, 2006
As much as I like the resignation suggestion for Cheney, I doubt it will ever happen. Impeach! (Damn! So close to the end, too!)
So he should start over. For starters, here are four suggestions:
It's time for Dick Cheney to announce that he must resign because of poor health. His approval rating is only 29 percent, and his replacement could presumably be somebody far more popular, like Condoleezza Rice.
Don Rumsfeld should also step down. And just as President Clinton appointed a Republican as secretary of defense, Mr. Bush should appoint a Democrat, like Sam Nunn.
Mr. Bush should publicly admit mistakes and reach out more to Democrats, and even his critics. Mr. Bush has taken a few steps in this direction in his second term, but not enough.
Mr. Bush should emphasize policy goals that can generate bipartisan support. Mr. Bush's recent push for alternative energy sources was a fine example of that, as are his efforts to organize a U.N. peacekeeping force to stop genocide in Darfur. A trip to Africa to meet Darfur refugees and see how U.S. programs are fighting AIDS and poverty would help build bridges to critics at home and abroad.
Talking with Monsters, October 10, 2006
If there's one overriding lesson from North Korea's apparent nuclear test, it's this: We need to negotiate directly even with hostile and brutal regimes.
It's probably too late to clean up the mess that President Bush has made on the Korean peninsula, but there is time to apply the lesson to Syria and especially Iran -- where we may soon be facing a third military conflict in a Muslim country.
As former Secretary of State James Baker noted in an ABC News interview on Sunday: "I believe in talking to your enemies. It's not appeasement to talk to your enemies."
The administrations of both the first President Bush and of President Clinton talked to North Korea. That engagement sometimes seemed distasteful, but it averted war and created incentives for North Korea to moderate its behavior -- just a bit.
Looking for Islam's Luthors, October 15, 2006
Islam is on the rise for many of the same reasons evangelical Christianity is surging: they provide a firm moral code, spiritual reassurance and orderliness to people vexed by chaos and immorality around them, and they offer dignity to the poor.
While the thread of fundamentalism is real in Islam, so is the thread of reform. The 21st century may become to Islam what the 16th was to Christianity, for even in hard-line states like Iran you meet Martin Luthers who are pushing for an Islamic Reformation. One of the most surprising elements of this push for reform has to do with the emergence of a school called "feminist Islam."
I've written often about the honor killings and other abuses suffered by women and girls in some Muslim countries, and many Westerners think Islam is inherently misogynistic. But Muslim women themselves naturally resent that kind of Western paternalism, for they want opportunities and equality -- and yet they frequently don't want to discard their faith (or even their head scarves).
Sami's Shame, and Ours, October 17, 2006
There is no public evidence that Sami al-Hajj committed any crime other than journalism for a television network the Bush administration doesn't like.
But the U.S. has been holding Mr. Hajj, a cameraman for Al Jazeera, for nearly five years without trial, mostly at Guantánamo Bay. With the jailing of Mr. Hajj and of four journalists in Iraq, the U.S. ranked No. 6 in the world in the number of journalists it imprisoned last year, just behind Uzbekistan and tied with Burma, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
This week, President Bush is expected to sign the Military Commissions Act concerning prisoners at Guantánamo, and he has hailed the law as "a strong signal to the terrorists." But the closer you look at Guantánamo the more you feel that it will be remembered mostly as a national disgrace.
Mr. Hajj is the only journalist known to be there, and, of course, it's possible that he is guilty of terrorist-related crimes. If so, he should be tried, convicted and sentenced.
How about another rousing IMPEACH! for Guantanamo?
The Hand Behind the Taliban, April 1, 2007
The Taliban is on the resurgence, again ruling a swath of southern Afghanistan, and President Hamid Karzai is sure of the reason: Pakistan.
In an interview in his office, Mr. Karzai was scathing in his accusations of official Pakistani duplicity. For starters, he accused the Pakistani intelligence agencies of sheltering Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader, in the Pakistani city of Quetta.
"We have solid, clear information indicating that," he said. "And I'm sorry I cannot be silent about this. As much as our friends in Pakistan may not like my saying that."
Delaying the Inevitable, August 13, 2007
As we struggle to extricate ourselves from Iraq, it's useful to look at how the Soviet Union handled a similar position in the 1980s. Then we should do the opposite.
The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 based partly on an intelligence failure analogous to our own in Iraq: they believed that their poorly behaved puppet in Kabul was poised to switch loyalties to the United States.
By 1986, the Soviets wanted to end the Afghan war, and tried some of the same approaches that we have tried or talked about: a new constitution, a new leader, a policy of "national reconciliation."
These worked as well for them as they have for us.
There's far more than I could ever index here, but you can find a comprehensive list with a facile search feature in the New York Times index of his columns here: Nicholas D. Kristof's columns. I believe this index is available whether you're a TimesSelect subscriber or not, though you currently do need to subscribe to access the columns themselves. As I mentioned in my first DailyKos post, Kristof's writing is one of the reason's I do subscribe.
Farewell, for now, Nicholas Kristof. Your reporting will be missed while you work on your book with your wife, and your return will be anxiously awaited.
