Category Archives: Politics: International

A few days ago the New York Times was the home of happy headlines about the war in VietnamAfghanistan. But that’s so yesterday.

News (2/21/11): Midlevel Taliban Admit to a Rift With Top Leaders

Recent defeats and general weariness after nine years of war are creating fissures between the Taliban’s top leadership based in Pakistan and midlevel field commanders, who have borne the brunt of the fighting and are reluctant to return to some battle zones, Taliban members said in interviews.

Op-ed (2/20/11): The ‘Long War’ May Be Getting Shorter

IT is hard to tell when momentum shifts in a counterinsurgency campaign, but there is increasing evidence that Afghanistan is moving in a more positive direction than many analysts think. It now seems more likely than not that the country can achieve the modest level of stability and self-reliance necessary to allow the United States to responsibly draw down its forces from 100,000 to 25,000 troops over the next four years.

The shift is most obvious on the ground. The additional 30,000 troops promised by President Obama in his speech at West Point 14 months ago are finally in place and changing the trajectory of the fight.

Today (2/25/11), not so much:

U.S. Pulling Back in Afghan Valley It Called Vital.

After years of fighting for control of a prominent valley in the rugged mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the United States military has begun to pull back most of its forces from ground it once insisted was central to the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The withdrawal from the Pech Valley, a remote region in Kunar Province, formally began on Feb. 15. The military projects that it will last about two months, part of a shift of Western forces to the province’s more populated areas. Afghan units will remain in the valley, a test of their military readiness.

While American officials say the withdrawal matches the latest counterinsurgency doctrine’s emphasis on protecting Afghan civilians, Afghan officials worry that the shift of troops amounts to an abandonment of territory where multiple insurgent groups are well established, an area that Afghans fear they may not be ready to defend on their own.

Time for more psyops aimed at the media

IsMubarakStillPresident.com has the news:

via techPresident.

And they use the internet.

An example is this web video, created in China.  It is framed as a parable, but as you can see from this analysis at China Geeks it is really about recent incidents that have outraged the Chinese public. The video, now on Youtube, was first posted on Tudou, a Chinese video site, but has been taken down.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnw5BvxSDmM&amp

Here’s the start of China Geeks’ analysis at via “Little Rabbit, Be Good” A Subversive New Years’ Video Card:

This video has been being passed around today on Twitter, Weibo, and other Chinese social networking sites. Most of my Chinese friends have seen it, although they almost all also work in media. Still, it’s fair to say the video is pretty widespread.

Regardless of what the disclaimer says8, it is probably obvious even to those who don’t speak Chinese that this video makes repeated and explicit reference to real life events. The milk powder death, the fire, the illegal demolitions, the beating of protesters, the self-immolation, the “Tiger Gang” car accident, etc. are all references to real-life events that any Chinese viewer would be immediately and intimately familiar with.

Of course, sarcastic animations and other web jokes about these incidents are common. What is not common is the end of the video, which depicts a rabbit rebellion where masses of rabbits storm the castle of the tigers and eat them alive. For viewers who have already gathered that in this picture, rabbits represent ordinary Chinese people and the tigers represent the government/the powerful, this is a revolutionary–literally–statement. The clip ends with what seems almost like a call to arms for the new year, with Kuang Kuang saying it will be a meaningful (有意义, could also be translated as “important”) year and then the end title reading: “The year of the rabbit has come. Even rabbits bite when they’re pushed.”

This isn’t the bullshit so-called “inciting to subvert state power” that Liu Xiaobo was given eleven years for. This video is actually inciting people to subvert state power.

This is, by the way, the year of the Rabbit in the Chinese Zodiac.

Update: boingboing, How China censors Egypt news, and why the story is so sensitive in China sends you to Global Voices Advocacy, China: Bridging news on Egypt. This begins:

On 28 of January, when commenting on the political situation in Egypt, the spoke person from Chinese foreign ministry stated that the Chinese government will continue to support the Egyptian government in maintaining social stability and oppose any foreign intervention in Egypt. Since then, the term “Egypt” has been blocked from search in major social media websites, such as Sina and Sohu micro-blog hosting sites.

I have no idea if this video claiming to have images from North Korea is authentic, but I am prepared to believe that it is. And the initial image of the woman starving in the fields is certainly … unforgettable. Not for the faint of heart.

Rimjin-gang News From Inside North Korea ASIAPRESS:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh4CtTGAzKw

Rimjin-gang claims to be “The first-ever independent publication in the world written directly by people of North Korea.”

North Korea is usually considered to be one of the few, maybe the only, Internet-impervious state.