Comparisons to the Barbary pirates are imminent. Prepare thyself.
I was going to write a follow-up post about how inevitable it was that the coverage of the Holbrooke event would center around an off-hand line (or “flippant quip,” as Katherine Tiedemann at the Washington Note/NAF/AfPak Daily Brief would have it, who admits that much more substantial items were discussed, and then proceeds to write about nothing but the “flippant quip”:
I’ve just come from live-tweeting a conference with Amb. Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, and members of his interagency team hosted by the Center for American Progress. While there were certainly substantive issues discussed (the role of Iran, the upcoming presidential elections in Afghanistan, the state of the Pakistani Taliban post-Baitullah Mehsud), what caught my attention was a flippant quip by the ambassador.
Yes, the parentheticals in my writing are getting out of control. I’ll try to keep that in mind.)
But I think the final straw was Spencer Ackerman’s self-twittered/promoted/described “omnibus thinkpiece about the shape and the stakes of the current Afghanistan debate,” entitled “Obama Faces Rising Anxiety on Afghanistan.” The only anxiety rising was mine, as I slogged through his lengthy summary of progressive handwringing in the nation’s capital. So that’s that for that topic, at least for me and for now.
Onto the topic at hand. The A.P. filed a story early this afternoon:
First the ship reported it had been attacked in waters off Sweden. Then it sailed with no apparent problems through one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. And then it disappeared.
The Arctic Sea, a Maltese-flagged cargo ship, was supposed to make port in Algeria with its cargo of timber on Aug. 4. More than a week later, there’s no sign of the ship or its Russian crew.
Piracy has exploded off the coast of lawless Somalia — but could this be an almost unheard of case of sea banditry in European waters?
Naturally, near the end, the article cites a number of experts who say no:
”There have been no attacks in European waters,” said Pottengal Mukundan, director of the London-based International Maritime Bureau. ”It’s not the kind of area where pirates would find it easy to operate.”
Nick Davis, the chief executive of the Merchant Maritime Warfare Centre, told the BBC that if anything had happened to the ship, cargo would have been found.
”I strongly suspect that this is probably a commercial dispute with its owner and a third party and they’ve decided to take matters into their own hands,” he said Wednesday.
But that’s never stopped inane journalistic parallels before!
UPDATE: A very belated thanks and HT to RAG.
Tags: Ackerman, AfPak, Barbary Pirates, CAP, EU, Holbrooke, NAF, Pirates, twitter, Washington Note
This one needs an HT also!