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Since diplomacy fell flat last year, the White House has begun building up soft alliances against Beijing. It is not an easy task, but it is nonetheless a serious pursuit that has garnered at least a modicum of success in the form of Vietnam’s drift away from its cold war ally (on Monday Clinton nudged Cambodia to do the same). Among leading powers, the effort has gained some traction but not as much as the US has hoped. As the New York Times reported, at an economic summit two weeks ago,

the United States won support for a concrete pledge to reduce trade imbalances, which will put more pressure on China to allow its currency to rise in value. But Germany, Italy and Russia balked at an American proposal to place numerical limits on these imbalances, a step that would have further isolated Beijing.

It’s hardly surprising that these negotiations have become so thorny, what with China playing the same game with some of the same countries (even in Europe, where it’s boosting ailing economies as far-flung as Greece and Ireland and eyeing meatier prospects in between).

It’s unclear yet what kind of fruit this new tactic will bear, but with President Obama joining other G-20 leaders for a summit in South Korea next week, get ready to hear all about it. At least now you’ll have a little background.

Update. Apparently the Daily Beast agrees that this was the #1 sleeper story of the week. It feels good to get back to real news…

If you still need more to read after that, I can recommend a few recent finds. Perhaps as a reaction to the increasing frivolity of online journalism, I’ve found myself digging deeper into the world of print periodicals. This weekend, for the first time ever (I think), I went on a trip and did not take a book — just a potload of magazines and newspapers. It made for very informative travel. At the top of my list, Greg Grandin reviews the controversial history of “I, Rigoberta Menchú,” a personal account/oral history of state-sanctioned massacres in rural Guatemala. As I’ve mentioned before, Latin America is a big blind spot for me, so I’m always looking to learn a little more, and that’s basically why I enjoyed this piece (the debate itself proved less interesting). Same goes for Michael Reid’s Economist report on the region, which I’ve finally cracked open (sidenote: Reid has an excellent and expansive history of Latin America called “The Forgotten Continent”). In the newspaper world: on Friday the Times ran a great dual update (news story here, analysis here) on US-Chinese relations, and on Monday the WSJ ran a long report (which has apparently been shoved behind the paywall now) on the eurozone meltdown last spring. Finally, for the highbrow readers, an essay from the London Review taking apart Matt McGurl’s new book on MFA programs. All in all, a pretty good weekend of reading. Oh and another sweet journalist (Murray Sayle) has shuffled off this mortal coil, leaving behind an awesome obituary, which included this tidbit:

Mr. Sayle resigned from The Times [of London] in 1972 after it refused to publish his account of Bloody Sunday, the killings of 14 unarmed civil rights demonstrators by British soldiers in Derry, Northern Ireland. Mr. Sayle reported that the soldiers had not been fired upon by the demonstrators — a finding vindicated by a British government report this year, leading to an apology by Prime Minister David Cameron — and that the massacre resulted from deliberate government policy.

Good reading, everyone.

If reading is not an abstract, transferable skill, if reading comprehension relies upon sufficiently broad knowledge of important cultural, political, scientific, historical, and artistic materials, then we run squarely into delicate Culture War questions of curriculum. The inevitable question arises, “Who’s to say which traditions and histories and literature and philosophies should be required in the classroom?”

I’ll take Hirsch/Pondiscio’s advice: “Rather than idle away precious hours on trivial stories or randomly chosen nonfiction, reading, writing, and listening instruction would be built into the study of ancient civilizations in first grade, for example, Greek mythology in second, or the human body in third. . . . Let’s say a state’s fourth-grade science standards include the circulatory system, atoms and molecules, electricity, and Earth’s geologic layers and weather; and social-studies standards include world geography, Europe in the Middle Ages, the American Revolution, and the U.S. Constitution, among other domains. The state’s reading tests should include not just fiction and poetry but nonfiction readings on those topics and others culled from those specific curriculum standards.”

I realize this isn’t exactly revolutionary — that this sometimes happens on its own anyway — but I’m still struck by the vision behind it: that reading should encompass all areas of interest; that students who “like to read” shouldn’t just study stories and poetry; and that reading forms the basis of most learning and that we need more of it, not less.

At moments like this I’m reminded of how lucky I am to have job where I get to read so often, not to mention one that gives me the time to still be a student in the off hours. Most days, of course, that is easier said than done. The struggle against mindless entertainment is harder now than it has ever been: In every brain in this country there rages a battle for finite time and attention, and the worthier pursuits do not always win. But to know that we’re at a watershed in the intellectual tradition, that fewer and fewer stand to carry the mantle into the future, surely makes each little triumph all the sweeter.

Somewhat related to this: while looking into the work of Tony Judt, the acclaimed historian who died a couple of weeks ago, I came across an interview with Charlie Rose wherein Judt discusses his book “Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century” and asserts that students today have lost their citizenship in the country of time. By this he means that although history in the classroom used to be rather boring it nonetheless prepared students to comprehend the important issues and events they would encounter in their lives — it gave them reference points from which to draw larger ideas about the world (and in this sense history encompasses not just politics but the whole array of endeavors and developments that have come before us). To go back to the terms of the reading study, history used to give us domain knowledge.

Despite Judt’s assessment, though, I take hope in another thing that the Brainstorm post mentioned: with regard to future comprehension, the gap between no knowledge on a topic and some is greater than the gap between some and much. Understanding, therefore, can grown from a meager basis, which means that a little effort every day remains a powerful thing.

I don’t say this to foreground a critique of the war itself, but these facts were nonetheless swirling through my mind when I read Ann Jones’s column in this week’s Nation. You should really read the whole thing yourself, but it’s basically a counterpunch to everyone — from politicians and policymakers to the fanciful editors at Time magazine — who see this war as a kind of hero’s journey to save the women of Afghanistan. After debunking the more mythic version of the “Aisha” story (which lead the Aug. 9 cover of said weekly), Jones lays into the meat of her argument, worth quoting in full. Pay special attention to the ends of the 3rd and 6th graphs:

The Taliban do terrible things. Yet the problem with demonizing them is that it diverts attention away from other, equally unpleasant and threatening facts. Let’s not make the common mistake of thinking that the devil we see is the only one.

Consider the creeping Talibanization of Afghan life under the Karzai government. Restrictions on women’s freedom of movement, access to work and rights within the family have steadily tightened as the result of a confluence of factors, including the neglect of legal and judicial reform and the obligations of international human rights conventions; legislation typified by the infamous Shia Personal Status Law (SPSL), gazetted in 2009 by President Karzai himself despite women’s protests and international furor; intimidation; and violence. Women legislators told the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) last year that they have come to fear the fundamentalist warlords who control the Parliament. One said, “Most of the time women don’t dare even say a word about sensitive Islamic issues, because they are afraid of being labeled as blasphemous.” (Blasphemy is a capital offense.) Women journalists also told UNAMA that they “refrain from criticizing warlords and other power brokers, or covering topics that are deemed contentious such as women’s rights.” A series of assassinations of prominent women, beginning in 2005, have driven many women from work and public life. Women working in women’s organizations in Kabul regularly receive threatening letters and, recently, high-tech videos on their mobile phones showing women being raped.

The Taliban claim responsibility for some, but not all, of the assassinations and threats, while most members of the Karzai government maintain a complicit silence. These developments have sent into reverse what little progress women in the cities had made since 2001, while most women in the countryside have seen no progress at all, and untold thousands have been harmed and displaced by warfare. All this has taken place on Karzai’s watch and much of it with his connivance. Our government complains that the Karzai administration is corrupt, but the greater problem — never mentioned — is that it is fundamentalist. The cabinet, courts and Parliament are all largely controlled by men who differ from the Taliban chiefly in their choice of turbans.

If our government were truly concerned about the lives of women in Afghanistan, it would have invited women to the table to take part in decision-making about the future of their country, beginning with the Bonn conference in 2001. Instead, they have been consistently left out.

Our long history of woeful policies has put us and Afghan women in a double bind. If we leave, the Taliban may seize power or allow themselves to be bought in exchange for a substantial share of the government, to the detriment of women. But if we stay, the Taliban may simply continue to creep into power, or they may allow themselves to be bought (or “reconciled”) in exchange for bribes and a substantial share of the government, all to the detriment of women, while we go on fighting to preserve that same government. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s assurance that “reconciled” Taliban will agree to observe women’s rights under the Constitution is either cynical or naïve in the extreme. And the U.S. pretense that somehow women’s rights will be preserved if only we stay long enough to shore up the Karzai regime and the ragtag Afghan National Army is at best a delusion. Yet the specter of the demon Taliban somehow makes it seem plausible.

Before feminists and the antiwar left come to blows, we might do well to consider that every Afghan woman or girl who still goes to work or school does so with the support of a progressive husband or father. Several husbands of prominent working women have been killed for not keeping their wives at home, and many are threatened. What’s taking place in Afghanistan is commonly depicted, as it is on the Time cover, as a battle of the forces of freedom, democracy and women’s rights (that is, the United States and the Karzai government) against the demon Taliban. But the real struggle is between progressive Afghan women and men, many of them young, and a phalanx of regressive forces. For the United States, the problem is this: the regressive forces militating against women’s rights and a democratic future for Afghanistan are headed by the demon Taliban, to be sure, but they also include the fundamentalist (and fundamentally misogynist) Karzai government, and us.

In case you have just skipped the quote in the hope that I’ll be summarizing it (it happens), I want to highlight the last few lines again:

The real struggle is between progressive Afghan women and men, many of them young, and a phalanx of regressive forces. For the United States, the problem is this: the regressive forces militating against women’s rights and a democratic future for Afghanistan are headed by the demon Taliban, to be sure, but they also include the fundamentalist (and fundamentally misogynist) Karzai government, and us.

It was no surprise to hear that these guys are corrupt, but I had never thought so clearly about how foolish it is to think that just because American forces are trying to stabilize the country we must also, automatically, be working with some progressive local leaders. Perhaps it wasn’t even that — Karzai, after all, has been a known liability for years — but rather the assumption that just because Westerners are patrolling the streets instead of Talibs that life is steadily getting better for the people there. Unless the U.S. wants to fight this war forever, some nasty deals are going to be made — and progressive Afghans, it seems, are going to fall onto the wrong side of history no matter what the final terms are (which of course raises questions of our role abroad which I should probably strive to address at some future point).

If the Obama administration wants to keep public support for this war going — and I think, for now, it should; counterinsurgencies like this don’t work over night — it can’t let the mission creep from a security measure back into the Bush-era narrative of a humanitarian crusade. But as the Time magazine cover shows, perhaps it already has.

Today was another rough day in the violent Somali capital. Gunmen from the local Islamist group al-Shabab attacked a hotel in Mogadishu this morning, killing 33 people, including 6 MPs. The story of this region floats on and off the radar of most Americans, but after the attempted Christmas Day bombing over Detroit last year, I don’t think any instability this close to Yemen should go unwatched. If you don’t know much about this issue, you should check out the latest from World Affairs — an article by piracy expert Martin N. Murphy that backgrounds the regional problems and proposes that if the U.S. wants to get serious about helping Somalia, it has to get serious about stopping the pirates who thrive in the Horn of Africa.

Update: Apparently there was a dust-up in Yemen as well today (which also, oddly, resulted in exactly 33 deaths). World Affairs Daily gets the hat-tip on this one.

Update: Now reporting 30 killed in Mogadishu, including 4 MPs.

The Macon Telegraph in Georgia calls it “the iniquitous N-word.”

At the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., it’s “the dreaded N-word.”

Laura Schlessinger gave up her radio talk show last week after using on air what the Chicago Tribune called “the ‘n’ word 11 times in five minutes.”

And just what kind of word is this N-word — N technically being a letter that’s often used in statistics to mean the norm, in chemistry as short for nitro and in physics for nano?

Oh, snap, you mean the N-word — the euphemism for that taboo sound, the racial curse: in eye, double g and . . . er, excuse me; I almost cast a spell. You can’t spell it, either. . . .

This whole issue seems to boil down to a twelve-angry-men kind of scenario: there’s a core of bigotry surrounded by a cushion of discomfort and conformity and it’s going to take a few good men to see that fairness prevails. It’s really baffling that this has become as big of an issue as it has. I mean, does anyone have any idea how much shit goes on in Manhattan? Who would ever set out to shelter the Trade Center memorial from the rest of the city? First, you could never do it. Second, you can’t choose where this kind of thing happens and New York — with all of its chaos and complexity — was the city that was attacked, so let’s just accept that too (to wit). Oh and third, despite what a staggering number of Republicans apparently believe, there’s legally nothing the government could do to stop Abdul Rauf from incorporating a mosque into the fifteen-story facility he’s planning to create.

I also can’t help but think about the counterpoint to people who say a mosque near Ground Zero would disgrace the 9/11 memorial. The terrorists behind the attacks undoubtedly saw all Americans as equally culpable for everything terrible the West had ever done in the Middle East. Yet we reject that premise, and have decided to erect memorials to the dead in our centers of power, at the Pentagon and in lower Manhattan; we believe that even though some bad and — well, let’s just say inconsiderate — decisions have indeed been made by leaders in the government, military, and the world of business, an act such as 9/11 remains wholly unjust. Why then, can we not extend the same nuanced perspective to American Muslims? Wouldn’t that be a better way to react? A terrorist attack is of course very different from the kind of cultural offensive launched against this project, but both are rooted in the kind of ignorance we’ve been asked again and again to resist these last nine years. It just doesn’t make sense to lower ourselves, especially over something this benign.

PS: In the course of reading up on this story, I also came across a thoughtful and somewhat more conservative take on the issue, from Sam Harris at the Daily Beast. He argues that Islam, despite its equality under the law, is nonetheless unique today in the challenges it poses to followers and non-followers alike — and that we need to acknowledge the difference without simply turning a blind eye in the name of tolerance. I agree with that. But I’d also say Abdul Rauf has proven that he takes this approach as well, so why not bolster his leadership rather than lump him in with “jihadists”?