Longform’s Picks of the Week

Every weekend, Longform highlights its favorite international articles of the week. For daily picks of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform or follow @longform on Twitter. Have an iPad? Download Longform’s brand-new app and read all of the latest in-depth stories from dozens of magazines, including Foreign Policy.

The Great Taliban Jailbreak, by Luke Mogelson. GQ.

On the escape of hundreds of insurgents from Kandahar’s Sarposa Prison through a tunnel dug from the outside, and an unlikely suspect: the jail’s former warden.

When the stranger unbolted the cell door and whispered for them to hurry, Rahim assumed that somewhere in the prison a fight must have broken out. It was the middle of the night, and normally the heavy metal door remained locked until the morning call to prayer. For the past five months, Rahim had shared this cell, in Kandahar’s Sarposa Prison, with five other captured insurgents, two of whom he’d fought alongside in the fiercely contested district of Panjwai. Now, from where they lay on old blankets and cushions on the floor, all five gazed uncertainly at the man standing in their doorway. “We are your friends,” the man said. “There is a tunnel over here. Come quickly and get inside it.”

STR/AFP/Getty Images

Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will, by Jo Becker and Scott Shante. The New York Times.

How Obama decides on drone strikes.

Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.

“He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go,” said Thomas E. Donilon, his national security adviser. “His view is that he’s responsible for the position of the United States in the world.” He added, “He’s determined to keep the tether pretty short.”

Pete Souza/The White House via Getty Images

Tourist Snapshots, by Rolf Potts. Design Observer.

On the relationship between travel and photography.

The day before Eva left Ranong, I woke up at dawn and started working. After about 20 minutes, as I sat glowering at a sentence, a bubble floated over my shoulder and popped in front of my face. I turned to see Eva padding around the room, naked, dipping a small plastic wand into the bottle of bubble soap she’d bought at the market.

But the bubbles weren’t for my benefit; Eva paid me little mind as she meandered across the room, sleepy-eyed, entranced by her task. Her long-legged steps, which in hiking shorts looked gawky, gave her nudity a lithe elegance. I’m not sure how long I sat and watched this vision before she glanced over and bade me good morning. I told her I had never in my life seen anything so beautiful. Sometime in the far future, when I was lying on my deathbed, I said, this was the moment I wanted to remember.

DANIEL MIHAILESCU/AFP/Getty Images

The Vietnam Solution, by Robert D. Kaplan. The Atlantic.

How a former enemy became a crucial U.S. ally in balancing China’s rise.

Whereas America has been marginal to the Vietnamese past, China has been central. “The overwhelming emphasis of official Vietnamese history is on resistance, almost always against China,” Robert Templer writes in a pathbreaking 1998 book about contemporary Vietnam, Shadows and Wind. “The fear of domination has been constant and has crossed every ideological gap, it has created the brittle sense of anxiety and defensiveness about Vietnamese identity.” As one Vietnamese diplomat puts it to me: “China invaded Vietnam 17 times. The U.S. invaded Mexico only once, and look at how sensitive the Mexicans are about that. We grow up with textbooks full of stories of national heroes who fought China.” The Vietnamese fear of China is profound precisely because Vietnam cannot escape from the embrace of its gargantuan northern neighbor, whose population is 15 times as large. Vietnamese know that geography dictates the terms of their relationship: they may win the battle, but then they are always off to Beijing to pay tribute. That kind of situation is alien to a virtual island nation like America.

HOANG DINH NAM/AFP/Getty Images

The Undiplomat, by Julia Ioffe. Foreign Policy.

Obama’s ambassador to Moscow has gotten a rude welcome in Putin’s Russia. But he’s not going to take it anymore.

This winter, Michael McFaul discovered a number of surprising things about himself. He was imposing odious American holidays, like Valentine’s Day and Halloween, on the Russian people. He personally whisked Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny out of the country to Yale on a fellowship. He was inviting opposition figures to the U.S. Embassy “to get instructions.” And he was a pedophile. Or so his online tormentors claimed.

This was McFaul’s welcome to his new job: United States ambassador to Russia. Along with being attacked on state television and having picket lines across from the embassy, he was being followed — and harassed — by a red-haired reporter from NTV, the state-friendly channel. One day, a horde of activists from Nashi, a pro-Kremlin youth group, showed up at the embassy gates in white jumpsuits, and played dead: They did not want to be the victims of a revolution, like the unfortunates of Egypt, their posters said. As a result, the ambassador’s security had to be tightened.

MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

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