Ann Marlowe

Ann Marlowe is a writer and businesswoman based in New York City. She travels frequently to Afghanistan and publishes often on Afghanistan's politics, economy, culture and the U.S. military counterinsurgency strategy there, primarily in The Wall Street Journal, Weekly Standard, and Forbes.com.

Ms. Marlowe also writes about American politics, the war on terror, and the relationship of women to money, power, and work. In the 90s, she published frequently on rock, rap and blues music and youth culture.

Her articles have also appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, LA Weekly, the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle book pages, the Village Voice, National Review Online, VIBE, and The Washington Post.

Ms. Marlowe has been interviewed extensively on radio about Afghanistan and her books. She has also spoken to the U.S. Army on Afghanistan and addressed industry panels and college classes on popular music.

Ms. Marlowe was born in Suffern, New York and educated at public schools in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. She received her B.A. in philosophy magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1979 and studied classical philosophy there in the Ph.D. program in 1979-80. In 1984, she received an MBA in finance from Columbia University's Graduate School of Business.

originally published in The Weekly Standard, June 29, 2009

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/664uwbvd.asp

The Enemy at the Gate
Habsburgs, Ottomans and the Battle for Europe
by Andrew Wheatcroft
Basic, 384 pp., $27.50
The heart may sink a bit reading the Introduction to The Enemy at the Gate: “This book is first of all about Europe’s fear of the Turks and then, by the end, about fear itself.”

This book “is not a straightforward history” (italics Andrew Wheatcroft’s) but it soon becomes evident that the trendy posturing is skin-deep. Wheatcroft has, thankfully, not lived up to his promise to write about “fear itself.” His fourth book is primarily a military history of the clashes between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires in the 17th century, the fruit of more than 20 years researching the field. If anything, it is old-fashioned in its emphasis on day-to-day battlefield action, with little about the economic life of the two empires or behind-the-scenes political maneuvering.

Some of the most suggestive material here is on military organization, equipment, and tactics. Wheatcroft tracks the burgeoning use of grenades (named for their resemblance to pomegranates and giving their name to a new military branch, the grenadiers) and the bayonet, a new weapon particularly useful in defending against Ottoman cavalry. The Europeans who besieged Buda in the 1680s brought “wicker gabions to be filled with earth in front of the Ottoman lines”–ancestors of today’s Hescos.

It was by no means clear when the Turks besieged Vienna in 1683 that they fielded the less advanced army. Turkish flintlock muskets were more accurate than European matchlocks. The Turkish Janissary was “astonishingly versatile” as well, master of many weapons. But Janissaries had “no uniformity of equipment nor did they march in step like Western soldiers.”

Read the rest of this article »

Originally published on Forbes.com, 4/1/2009

http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/01/style-over-substance-opinions-contributors-barack-obama.html
Lately I’ve been trying to figure out why my friends buy dysfunctional products. I include myself for my two cursed MacBooks, each of which has been in the shop multiple times in their first year of service. I’ve been using Macs so long that it would be a major issue to change all my files, though every month or two I think about it.

But because of my MacBook horrors–which include having to buy a second one when the first one simply wouldn’t turn on the day before a month-long trip to Afghanistan–I’ve resisted the siren song of the iPhone and stayed with my reliable if unglam BlackBerry.

Yes, I’d love to have the function that identifies songs that are playing, and the photo storage is cool and good-looking. But from what I’ve heard, it just doesn’t work. Lately, every time I’ve walked up those silly transparent steps to the Moronbar at my local Apple Store with one of my two lemon MacBooks, I’ve watched the line of hipsters waiting to drop their iPhones off for repair–and recoiled.

Then my visiting friend from Los Angeles, Rachel, told me she needed to use my landline for a radio interview because her iPhone was unreliable. I knew I’d made the right choice. I don’t need another product that doesn’t work.

My friend Edward, who is 49, told me that a 27-year-old woman he recently went on a date with showed him how to use some of the apps on his iPhone. (Maybe that’s what people do on dates these days). Edward is brilliant but an “old 49″ who dresses like a man of 60. So the iPhone is the equivalent of sharper shoes for him. It involves him in the culture of younger folk.

The iPhone seems to have a fatal allure for my 50ish friends, and I’ve come to think they see it as a way of clinging to youth that doesn’t involve fashion mistakes or plastic surgery. With both the iPhone and BlackBerry now available for about $199, with a contract, neither is a signifier of wealth. But each has a meaning. And maybe the BlackBerry is a way of leapfrogging to full adulthood–the corporate world, seriousness, all that–for some users in their early 20s.
Don’t get me wrong, part of me wants an iPhone, too–the same part that occasionally buys really uncomfortable shoes because of how they look. And I understand those who have both iPhones and BlackBerrys; it’s like having both sensible shoes and stilettos. If you’re willing to lug around two devices (the reason many people give for buying an iPhone is that they don’t want to carry both an iPod and a BlackBerry), and can afford it, why not?

My bi-phone 51-year-old woman filmmaker friend Pamela loves her BlackBerry (”I’ve dropped it at least 300 times and no matter how hard it falls, it still works!”) and her iPhone. But what she e-mailed me about the iPhone reminds me of Edward:

“Not only is it useful in my line of work, having an iPhone is sort of like having a dog–you take it out and you instantly make friends with lots of very attractive young people–you sit around and trade tips on the best new apps or show each other photos or films you’ve made. This definitely makes it worth every penny.”

Ah yes, the very attractive young people–and so accessible! Who can blame Pamela? The quest for signifiers of youth is pretty harmless, in the field of consumer goods.

Read the rest of this article »

originally published on Forbes.com, 3/27/2009

http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/27/afghanistan-hamid-karzai-opinions-contributors-taliban-united-states.html
Nearly every day’s news now brings another “fresh approach” to Afghanistan. It’s good that President Obama has decided to send 4,000 additional trainers for the crucial task of shoring up the Afghan National Army rather than dumping combat troops into a situation where more combat isn’t a major part of the answer. But many of the ideas floated by the Obama administration for strengthening Afghan governance show an abysmal lack of common sense and specific knowledge of the country.

This week UPI, citing outgoing U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan William Wood, reported that the U.S. might be willing to allow a Taliban political party, as long as it respected the Afghan constitution. Responding to the story in an e-mail, policy expert Jeff Bliss commented, “Funny, I don’t remember the Nazis being able to restart their party after World War II.” Indeed. The Taliban didn’t exactly run a multi-party state, and their “ideology” consists of murdering those who don’t live exactly like they do.

Leaving aside its morality, this dumb idea gets the facts on the ground dead wrong. First, the insurgency isn’t primarily ideological, and bringing Taliban-like strictures to Afghanistan wouldn’t end it. The insurgency is first and foremost an intra-Pashtun power struggle. As Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason ably pointed out in the journal Orbis in 2007, Mullah Omar and most of the Taliban leadership are of the Hotaki Ghilzai tribal group. Almost all Taliban are members of the Ghilzai confederation. The Ghilzai and the Durranis–the tribal confederation to which the King and President Hamid Karzai belong–have been bitter rivals for hundreds of years, with the Ghilzais being odd man out for most of that time. Even now, they are poorly represented in Karzai’s cabinet and in governorships in the Pashtun provinces. (A free download of Johnson’s excellent article “Understanding the Taliban and Insurgency in Afghanistan” can be found here.)

Read the rest of this article »