Anatol Lieven on Afghanistan, in the NYRB.

From the second of two posts on the future of Afghanistan by Anatol Lieven in the NYRB:

In fact, seen from the air at night, Helmand’s huge Western military installations—Camp Leatherneck, the US Marine base, and the adjacent Camp Bastion, the main British base—look like a giant spaceship, a great blob of blazing lights amid a dark sea of desert. At the height of the Western occupation, the camps used more electricity than the rest of the province put together. Every drop of fuel for the generators had to be shipped in through Pakistan, along with every drop of mineral water and every bite of food consumed by the troops.

And if you want to move from science fiction to Alice in Wonderland, ask yourself this: how has it been possible to bring all that stuff in by road through areas of Pakistan controlled largely by the Pakistani Taliban, allied to the Afghan Taliban—areas from which Pakistani Taliban have launched innumerable attacks on Pakistani forces? Why have there been so few attacks, and those few (to judge by circumstantial evidence) only when the Pakistani military wants to send a message to Washington? The answer appears to be that the Taliban tax these NATO convoys as they tax all other trade in the region: Obtaining tax revenues from mineral water, fruit juice, hamburgers, and other NATO necessities that do them no harm at all is, it turns out, far more advantageous than interrupting our supply routes. In other words, all these years NATO has actually been subsidizing the Taliban’s war effort.

For a couple of you who have an interest in Helmand Province.

That story about Kim Jong-un feeding his uncle to the dogs? Just as true as the one The Onion ran.

Recently there's been a story going around the world press that Kim Jong-un had his uncle executed by feeding him to 120 hungry dogs. It's gotten quite a lot of attention.

Turns out it's from a Chinese satirist's Weibo feed. Trevor Powell has the story:

On 11 December 2013 at 02:38:07 UTC, the China-based online satirist personality known as Pyongyang Choi Seongho (or someone posing as him/her) posted a tweet to his/her Tencent Weibo account describing in detail how Kim Jongun had his uncle Jang Songtaek devoured by ravenous dogs. The original tweet can be seen here:
http://t.qq.com/p/t/312572016688539

...

The following day on December 12, the Wen Wei Po news source in Hong Kong published an article quoting the tweet nearly word-for-word:
http://news.wenweipo.com/2013/12/12/IN1312120039_2.htm

A screenshot of the original tweet was included with the article on Wen Wei Po. The article also cites Pyongyang Choi Seongho by name as the original source. In addition to describing how Jang Songtaek and five accomplices were stripped naked, thrown in a cage, and fed to 120 wild dogs, the article also describes how Kim Jongun removed his uncle from power for supporting his exiled oldest brother Kim Jongnam in a potential power grab. It also says that no one else had the guts to arrest his uncle so they had to have Kim's second oldest brother Kim Jongchul come out of the woodwork to personally arrest him before fading back into obscurity because he'd be perceived as a threat himself if he actually tried to hold a senior government post.

The Wen Wei Po article must have sounded plausible enough for the Straits Times in Singapore to publish the first piece in English on it on December 24:
http://www.straitstimes.com/the-big-story/asia-report/china/story/jangs-execution-bodes-ill-china-20131224

From there, the story snowballed across the mainstream English news media and it still seems to have momentum. Major English news outlets from the U.S. to the UK to India to Russia have been publishing the report:
https://www.google.com/search?q=north+korea+dogs&tbm=nws
( discussion behind the cut )

It's all very much like that story in The Onion naming Kim Jong-un Sexiest Man Alive for 2012, that got picked up as serious news by China's official People's Daily newspaper.

There are two common themes here: 1) satire doesn't get caught by news editors when it's moving between Chinese and English, and 2) North Korea is the perfect setting for satire someone will take to be true.