In the frenzied discussions now taking place in Washington about how to prevent the Islamic State terrorist group from making further territorial advances in Iraq and Syria, one topic has been conspicuously absent so far.
Juan Carlos Pinzon Bueno, Colombia's minister of defense, is constantly on the move, traveling all over the country to meet with members of the armed forces and citizens as part of his duties. At any given moment, he may be on a military base awarding medals to the wounded in action, in a helicopter surveying a ministry-funded resettlement village for a displaced indigenous tribe, or in a remote rural village once ravaged by rebel violence, inaugurating five miles of road rebuilt by the Army Corps of Engineers.
"Interviews with scientists is completely out of the question and so is inspection of military sites," Abbas Araqchi, Iran's senior negotiator on its nuclear program, announced on state television on Saturday, just as Secretary of State John Kerry was conferring with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in a final push to meet the June 30 deadline for an Iran nuclear agreement.
A recent weekend brought two very different dispatches from the front lines of the global war on terror. The first was a tale of tactical success; the second a narrative of strategic failure.
The U.S. government's vast apparatus for data collection touches every aspect of human activity. But how can a system that seemingly has the capability to know absolutely everything still get major events so wrong?