In the latest Global Pulse episode, Pakistan at War, host Erin Coker asks who is to blame for the violence in Pakistan. Watch the episode and share your thoughts below!

Wednesday's market bombing in Peshawar capped off a particularly deadly month in Pakistan amidst a shored up military campaign in the country's western region of Waziristan.  More than 100 people died in Wednesday's attack, many of them women and children.

Global media largely attribute the recent bloodshed to the Pakistani Taliban's attempt to destabilize the government in retaliation for recent military efforts to drive extremists from the country's volatile North-West Frontier Province.

However, militant violence in Pakistan has been on the rise long before the government launched its new offensive. According to the terrorism database, South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), terrorist violence killed 2,155 civilians in 2008, compared to 140 in 2003. Similarly, nearly 1800 civilians have been killed in the first 10 months of 2009, exceeding the total number of civilian deaths from 2003 to 2006, according to the SATP.

Some international and media experts note that the Pakistani Taliban has absorbed Punjabi militants and other separatist groups, resulting in a new and dangerous band of extremists. These militants are further bolstered by al-Qaeda members who have taken refuge in the country's tribal areas near the Afghan border. This new incarnation of militants, notes the Council on Foreign Relations' Jayshree Bajoria, is "more violent and less conducive to political solutions than their predecessors."

In a Foreign Policy editorial, the Washington, DC-based Atlantic Council attributes Pakistan's inability to contain the growing extremist threat to a lack of modern military might and calls on the U.S. to furnish Pakistan with adequate weaponry to defeat the Taliban. Failure to do so, argues Shuja Nawaz, will result in continued terror strikes on the public. 

However, Pakistani blogger Riaz Haq blames the violence not on a lack of American weapons, but on government intelligence failures. "The best way to stop the increasing carnage on the streets of Pakistan...is to stop the attacks well before they occur," writes Haq. "Unfortunately, however, the intelligence agencies which are supposed to frustrate the blood-thirsty attackers appear totally ineffective, even paralyzed."
   
While the exact cause of the surge in violence may be up for debate, the toll it is taking on Pakistani civilians is undeniable.

The renewed clashes between government forces and the Taliban in North-West Frontier Province have resulted in a second wave of refugees fleeing the fighting, adding strain to already-crowded camps. According to the U.N., fighting in South Waziristan has forced an estimated 139,400 people from their homes [PDF link] and could displace thousands more.

The latest bombing in Peshawar has also disrupted the lives of Pakistan's urban residents. "The people want to go back to their mundane routines," writes Murtava Razvi in a Dawn editorial. "Youngsters want to go out to the parks, to the beach, to bowl, to eat out. Women want to go shopping unescorted, and men want to go about their daily chores without worrying about families left at home. This isn’t happening anymore."

In this week's Global Pulse episode, Obama's Nobel War and Peace Prize, host Erin Coker asks whether the Norwegian Nobel Committee made the right choice in awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama. Watch the episode and share your thoughts below!

Following the unexpected announcement in Oslo last week, much of the domestic press attributed Obama's Nobel win to his international appeal, particularly in Europe.  The Christian Science Monitor notes the award indicated "a particularly European appreciation" of the U.S. president, while an AOL News headline reads "Obama's Nobel Reflects Europe's Approval."

"The puzzled and heated domestic reaction…is only the latest instance of a gulf in perception between the two sides of the Atlantic," writes James Graff. "The Nobel Committee's decision is a European vote of confidence on the way this particular American president is setting the global agenda."

There is little doubt that Obama is popular among Europeans. A recent Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Survey reported that 93 percent of Germans and 86 percent of Britons said they had confidence in Obama to do the right thing in world affairs. Similarly, 91 percent in France rated Obama favorably -- a dramatic shift from 2008 when only 13 percent of French expressed confidence in George W. Bush.

However, even the U.S. president’s transatlantic supporters were baffled and perplexed by the win, calling the award premature and, like their U.S. counterparts, questioning what Obama had actually done to warrant such an honor.  
 
"It used to be the rule that the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to politicians if they could point to tangible political successes," writes Claus Christian Malzahn in a Der Spiegel editorial. "Awarding him the Nobel Prize now is like giving a medal to a marathon runner who has just managed the first few kilometers."

The U.K.'s Times Online took the criticism even further, calling the decision to award the prize to Obama "absurd," and accusing the committee of making a "mockery" of the award.

So if not an endorsement from Europe, what was behind the Nobel shakeup?

Some international media outlets point to former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjorn Jagland, appointed earlier this year to head the Nobel committee, as the driving force behind Obama's win. The Christian Science Monitor's global news blog notes that Jagland "has an activist vision for the Nobel as a prize that can spur peace, rather than simply reward its achievement."

France's Le Monde was even more blunt: "The former Nobel Committee president would have never nominated Obama."

Regardless of the politics behind the award, the reaction to Obama's Nobel is a reminder that action, not vision, will be most crucial in the president's long-term success at home and abroad.

In the latest episode of Global Pulse, host Erin Coker asks whether China's 60th anniversary festivities were a display of power for the world or just for Chinese citizens. Watch the episode and leave your comments below!

Media worldwide covered China's celebration of 60 years of communist rule, acknowledging China's rise over the past six decades, while also pointing out its spotty human rights record and the barring of its own citizens from attending the festivities.

Such general wariness of the Communist Party of China's (CPC) celebration may be indicative of a greater global anxiety concerning China's new place on the world stage. In marrying the tenets of communism with explosive economic growth, the country has, perhaps, come to embody the worst of communism and capitalism -- reckless urbanization within the rigid framework of a repressive authoritarian system. The result? A growing power whose rapid industrial expansion and repression of personal freedoms is both a detriment to its people and a possible threat to western interests.

Some experts question the durability of the so-called "authoritarian capitalism" model. "The more open and competitive an economy becomes, the greater the pressure to liberalize political institutions and democratize civil society," notes Tim Dunne in a Guardian editorial. "China wants the former while resisting the latter."

For state-run Chinese media however, capitalism remains an opposing ideology that is distinct from both the country's government and its burgeoning economy. A recent opinion piece in the state-run People's Daily extols socialism as the country’s historical choice, while an article on the CCTV website attributes China's private sector expansion to the country's larger socialist market economy.

In Yasheng Huang's 2008 book, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, the MIT professor points to reforms of governance, not market reforms, as crucial for China’s brand of capitalism to thrive. "Many of the endemic problems in the Chinese economy today—massive pollution, corruption, inefficient capital deployment, land grabs, and so forth—cannot be tackled without…reforms of Chinese political governance," a Reuters article notes in an analysis of Huang's book.
 
In the end, whether seen as a pure success story, a threat to the west, or the worst of two economic systems, China's continuing rise assures that it will not be ignored.

In this week's special behind-the-scenes episode, Inside Global Pulse, host Erin Coker gives viewers an inside glimpse of what goes into the making of a Global Pulse Episode, particularly the role of international news outlets. Watch this episode below!

Since the conclusion of the Cold War, and particularly in the last decade, U.S. coverage of international news has significantly declined. While U.S. news outlets briefly ramped up overseas coverage immediately following 9/11, in recent years international stories have once again dropped off in favor of nationally focused pieces. In 2008, foreign news coverage was at a record low.

Strained budgets and sinking ad revenues have further altered the global media landscape, forcing the closure of U.S. foreign bureaus from Paris to Bangkok, with foreign correspondents in the traditional sense becoming increasingly obsolete.

Ironically, news outlets broadcasting in English have exploded in the last decade. Such newly emerging global news channels include Russia Today, China’s CCTV, Al Jazeera English, France 24, and Press TV from Iran, to name a few.  

Why the news invasion? Some experts point to a desire to offer a unique country-specific perspective on a world media stage dominated by CNN and the BBC. A jab, perhaps, at "Anglo-Saxon imperialism." Others see the phenomenon as propaganda by non-democratic governments like China, attempting to skew the facts. Al Jazeera English is still reviled by many Americans as promoting anti-western bias at best, and as a mouthpiece for dangerous extremists at worst.

Regardless of one's position on these international outlets, the majority of Americans are unable (or unlikely) to tune in. In a Foreign Policy editorial, Cyril Blet, author of Une Voix Mondiale Pour un État, (A World Voice for a State), a book profiling the state of world news, notes that unlike in Europe and elsewhere, international channels in the U.S. are available only via special cable or satellite packages, if at all. The lack of easy access to international news channels, he says, puts Americans at a disadvantage.

"When American viewers can't access international news, their ability to take part in global conversations suffers greatly," argues Blet. "The average U.S. television-watcher doesn't ever see the diverse interpretations of any single event that filter in to most TVs across the world."

With the Internet making international programming more accessible than ever, this may change in the coming years. But perhaps less important than specific broadcast platforms in international news distribution, is the belief in the value of these global conversations.

For this week's Global Pulse episode, Iran’s Power Players, host Erin Coker asks the question: Are Khamenei and Ahmadinejad playing "good cop, bad cop"? Share your thoughts below!

In the nearly three months since Iran's disputed election and the massive street protests that followed, global media have turned their attention to the internal factional bickering within Iran's ruling party. Allegations of detainee abuse have created further fissures within Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's conservative government, with the country's leadership offering conflicting responses to the allegations.

Reacting to claims made by opposition candidate Mehdi Karroubi of detainee torture and sexual abuse, Iran's parliament speaker Ali Larijani vehemently dismissed the allegations as "sheer lies," according to a CNN report. Larijani's remarks contradicted police and judiciary officials who acknowledged detainee abuse at the now-shuttered Kahrizak prison and promised to investigate the claims. According to The Guardian, an unnamed Iranian MP said he had proof of the abuse, further contradicting Larijani.

As this week's episode points out, Ahmadinejad and the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have also appeared at odds over abuse allegations. According to a report that ran on the state-controlled Press TV website on August 28th, Ahmadinejad blamed the abuse on an enemy plot, saying that he had evidence which "exonerated revolutionary, military, security and intelligence forces." But three days later, following a report that the detained son of a conservative political advisor had died as a result of abuse, the BBC reported that Ayatollah Khamenei promised the young man's father that those responsible would be brought to justice.

The confusing signals reflect factional struggles at the highest levels of government, which can only be aggravated by the Iranian blogosphere's relentless pursuit of allegations of torture, sexual abuse and killings of detained protesters, often through chilling personal accounts. On September 2, the independent Radio Zamanah’s website reported that a rape victim and key witness in the case had disappeared. Mentions of the story surfaced several times throughout the day on the microblogging site Twitter, alongside posts like "Regime, No matter how many you execute, torture, or rape. We will never stop. We will never give up on our right to freedom," and, "Saeedeh's body was burned & almost unrecognizable (note that she was arrested from her house, so burning was deliberate)."

Even after the dust has settled on the present internal political struggle, it may take more than damage control to bridge the divisions between the Iranian government and its people.

This week’s Global Pulse examines hackers disrupting government websites. But governments are themselves hackers.
 
The Electronic Frontier Foundation describes how the U.S. National Security Administration and AT&T teamed up and “engaged in a massive program of illegal dragnet surveillance … of ordinary Americans.” Most analysts say China keeps track of its citizen’s computers through the “Ghostnet”, and by spying on communications through Skype. An article in Tech News World says that “Russia’s apparent effort to shut down Georgian government websites in August (2008) was one of the most public incidents of cyber attacks by a government to date.” Even liberal Holland has admitted to spying on a local news agency by means of hacking, as this article from the Der Spiegel website indicates.
 
It makes us wonder, is hacking different from a government’s spying on its own people and other countries? One obvious difference is that governments have more resources and personnel than hackers have. Bruce Shneier defines a hacker as “…someone who discards conventional wisdom, and does something else instead. Someone who looks at the edge and wonders what's beyond. Someone who sees a set of rules and wonders what happens if you don't follow them.” According to a study by Roger Blake at EFF, hackers are “mostly male, between the ages of twelve and twenty-eight” and, “consider themselves misfits and misunderstood.” The same study speaks of how hacker communities create their own information economy that values expertise in gathering information, much in the same way a surveillance operation does. 

Finally, a handful of accomplished hackers can grow up to become security consultants and “get to hack for a living.” In other words, they develop new security protocols for codes they are paid to break. So in the end, there is a continuum between hackers and governments that should give anyone pause before condemning one, or the other.

We called this week’s upcoming Global Pulse episode Uighur vs Han: China’s West Side Story, because it documents the “rumble” between Uighurs, the Turkic Ethnic minority of western China, and Han Chinese who have flooded into the region in recent years.

With our blogger Patrick Hazelton off this week, we point you to China Digital Times, an excellent source of news about China, to keep up with the situation. See especially this “Government Order to Filter Search Results”, which includes these black listed phrases:

“Bloody Xinjiang” “Xinjiang Blood”, “Xinjiang race massacre”

“Xinjiang Han Chinese, miserable” “Xinjiang Han Chinese, miserable position”

“Han and Uighur cannot live under the same sky” “Han and Uighur dogs cannot live under the same sky” “Han and Xinjiang people cannot live under the same sky”

And much more.

Evelyn Messinger
Series Producer

Was it a missile test or a space launch? Did it fall into the sea or put a satellite into orbit? While most media sources agree that North Korea failed at testing a missile, the North Koreans insist they successfully launched a satellite. The North also launched a propaganda assault inside the country, including patriotic songs supposedly transmitted from orbit and 1950s-style “space age” imagery.

SOURCES: Chosun Central Television, North Korea; KBS, South Korea; FCI, Japan; CCTV, China; NHK, Japan; ABC News, U.S.; Al Jazeera English, Qatar.

The International Criminal Court has issued a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President al-Bashir. He is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for the crisis in Darfur. But al-Bashir and many in the Arab and African world remain defiant and refuse to recognize the court's decision. Most western media outlets immediately vilified al-Bashir, while Arab, African and Chinese media support the president and ask the question: if al-Bashir can be accused of these crimes, why not the leaders of Israel or the U.S?

SOURCES: ABC News, U.S.; NBC News, U.S.; BBC, U.K.; SABC, South Africa; TV5, France; CCTV, China; Al Jazeera English, Qatar; Sudan TV, Sudan; Press TV, Iran.