How do you spell risk? (Hint: start with the letters b and p):  Former senior executives of BP are the gift that keeps giving. That is, in terms of insight into what's behind the long, downward spiral of a company that until recently was one of the most valuable on the planet. Just two weeks ago, former BP CEO Tony Hayward surfaced with a highly risky oil-patch acquisition in Kurdistan, the oil-rich northern region of Iraq whose right to sign such deals has been challenged by the national government in Baghdad. This week the news is from the United Kingdom, where a company backed by John Browne (Hayward's predecessor in the BP CEO shot) announced an enormous discovery of shale gas near England's seaside resort of Blackpool. Matthew Hulbert, of the Clingendael International Energy Program, told me that the prospect of new jobs will ultimately bring public support of the drilling, yet as of now protests have broken out in an effort to halt the operation, which uses hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, over concerns that it could contaminate local drinking water. Whatever happens, Hayward and Browne help us understand how it is that BP has repeatedly found itself in trouble in recent years (for example by letting safety problems linger at its Texas City refinery; cutting corners in a problematic Gulf of Mexico oilfield called Macondo; and flagrantly violating a covenant with its crucially important Russian partners): A bugger-the-risks, full-speed-ahead attitude may be bred into the DNA of BP's senior executives. The question is how far down in the ranks one finds this trait.

Murder in Kabul: The last time I saw Ibrahim Haqqani -- brother of the Saudi-backed Afghan militia leader Jalaluddin Haqqani -- it was 1991, and he was concealed under a bridge outside the eastern Afghan city of Gardez. Haqqani was leading a futile rebel assault against the superior forces of then-President Najibullah, and to reach the underpass, we had to dodge targeted artillery. It was a frightening dash, and Haqqani seemed no less rattled than we; a few weeks later, he and his men finally abandoned the effort to capture Gardez. Flash forward a decade, Associated Press correspondent Kathy Gannon reports that Haqqani has met with U.S. officials working to find a settlement with his brother Jalaluddin, who since a few years after that encounter under the bridge has been a leading Taliban general.

Read on