Month: November 2007

The real story in Pakistan/Afghanistan: Taliban rising

Asia Times’s Syed Saleem Shahzad has a must-read story on their website Thursday. He writes:

    While the world’s attention focused on the troubles of President General Pervez Musharraf following his declaration of a state of emergency in Pakistan at the weekend, the Taliban have launched a coup of their own in Afghanistan and the Pashtun areas of Pakistan.
    … The November 4 declaration of an emergency and the preparations before it was enforced distracted the military. As a result, several villages and towns in the Swat Valley, only a drive of four hours from Islamabad, have fallen to the Taliban without a single bullet being fired – fearful Pakistani security forces simply surrendered their weapons.
    The Taliban have secured similar successes in the northwestern Afghan province of Farah and the southwestern provinces of Uruzgan and Kandahar, where districts have fallen without much resistance.
    A new wave of attacks is expanding the Taliban’s grip in the southeastern provinces of Khost and Kunar. And on Tuesday, the Taliban are suspected to have been responsible for the massive suicide attack in northern Baghlan province in which scores of people died, including a number of parliamentarians, most notably Sayed Mustafa Kazimi, the Hazara Shi’ite leader.

I have no reason to doubt the veracity of Shahzad’s account, and have often admired his reporting from Pakistan (and Afghanistan) in the past.
By way of background, in mid-October Tom Koenigs, Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Afghanistan, told the Security Council that “the number of violent incidents was up approximately 30 per cent on a month-to-month basis, with a significant increase in civilian casualties — at least 1,200 had been killed since January.”
Not many institutions in the west keep anything like a close enough watch on political and security developments in Afghanistan. One intriguing report I found was this one, issued by Swisspeace on September 30. (That’s a PDF file. You can get around half of the textual material from it in this HTML version. The PDF version has a map that illustrates handily the extent to which Afghanistan-related violence bleeds across the country’s borders– into Pakistan, and into countries to the north.)
The Swisspeace report recalls that the large “peace jirga” held with a total of 850 Afghan and Pakistani participants in mid-August called for the establishment of a smaller peace delegation that would hold a dialogue with the Taliban:

    While the Taliban initially responded positively, a Taliban spokesman later made talks conditional upon a withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan.
    The idea of seeking a negotiated settlement with the Taliban appears to have gained ground in Afghanistan and now even seems to be backed by the US, which could be explained by a possible military attack of the US in Iran. If the weakened President Karzai intends to win the presidential elections in 2009 he might indeed require Pashtun and Taliban backing to outweigh the growing opposition from former factional leaders of the Northern Alliance…

There is more analysis there, too, about the close linkage between the Afghan/Pakistan situation and the US-Iran situation…
(Talk about an “arc of instability”! And which outside power do we see caught right up in the middle of it???)
Regarding the possibility of the US “backing” the idea of intra-Afghan negotiations that include the Taliban, my first reaction is to say (1) that I think that trying to include one’s opponents in serious peacemaking efforts is always a good idea– q.v., my latest Nation article on Hamas and Hizbullah; but (2) if the administration is indeed considering such a switch, it should at the very least talk about it openly with the US citizenry so we can all understand the reasoning, rather than going about it slyly and as part of a still quite unjustifiable rush into a war with Iran.
I note that the Swisspeace report also stressed that,

    the Karzai administration continuously stresses its good relations with Iran. Iranian President Ahmadinejad visited Kabul for the first time in the middle of August. At the end of his visit, the two governments signed various agreements to strengthen mutual cooperation…

Note on the lawyers’ protest in Pakistan.
Much of the political drama currently being played out in Pakistan has to do with the role of lawyers in society and governance. This obviously closely linked to the issue of “the rule of law”, though it is not exactly the same as it. Musharraf’s sacking of four Supreme Court justices last Saturday has many echoes of the campaign Egypt’s Mubarak has been waging against the lawyers in his country, and I can’t help thinking through some of the parallels, and some of the apparent differences, in the two situations…
One thing that struck me, looking at photos both of the street protests mounted by some lawyers and of protesting lawyers being hauled away in trucks by the security forces, was the strong contrast in both dress styles and facial-hair styles between the two groups. The lawyers were almost to a man (no women in sight there) dressed in dark suits, white shirts, and dark ties, with cleanshaven faces. The security forces were wearing uniforms incorporating many more “traditionally Pakistani” sartorial motifs; and many had full, long beards…
In a rambly and extremely ethnocentric reflection on the pics of the protesting lawyers, the WaPo’s Philip Kennicott wrote this:

    It would be comforting to dismiss the image this way: If lawyers are running the revolution, how bad can it get?
    But bad news is not kept at bay so easily. To that effort to dismiss the image, the image answers back: If lawyers are this angry, then the trouble is serious.
    And indeed, the trouble is very serious. The United States has backed a dictator, while proclaiming democracy our loftiest goal. ..

The story in Pakistan/Afghanistan– which is increasingly only a single intermingled story– is actually far more serious than Kennicott or many people in the US media seem to realize. (See main story above.)
For my part, I’d note that many of the suits I saw in the lawyers’ pics looked far less well tailored than the “Brooks brothers” model Kennicott wrote about. Many of the lawyers looked like guys who’d had to save up a long time or even borrow money to buy the one decent suit required for their work in the courts… Buying into an occidentocentric version of “modernity” that may be increasingly irrelevant in their country as a whole.
Ah, and talking of the “west”, here’s a recent little report from the BBC that gives some indication of the strains that the US-led NATO “mission” in Afghanistan is causing to that august former Cold War alliance.
Amazing feat of geographic legerdemain, if you come to think of it, to be able to re-classify Afghanistan as somehow falling under the rubric of the “North Atlantic”…

Bushites and Pakistan: Strategic erosion, diplomatic own-goals

The first thing to note is that the (linked) security situations in Pakistan and Afghanistan have been getting significantly worse over the past 18 months. That is bad news– because civil strife is always bad news– first and foremost for the people of the two countries. See, for example, this report of mass arrests in Islamabad.
These situations are also a symptom of the reckless disregard with which the Bushites have viewed every single development in the world since their attention became obsessively focused on Iraq, in 2005-2006.
They are also, like the ongoing deterioration in Palestine, a symptom of the fact that the other big and emerging powers in the world either do not want to step in and stop the US from playing the blocking/disruptive role it has been playing, or they are unable to.
US strategic power everywhere in the world is eroding rapidly. The causes of this erosion are real and deepseated enough. But it is certainly only being accelerated by the Keystone Cops-ish ineptitude of the way US “diplomacy” is being handled.
Friday night, Condi Rice called Pakistani Pres. Musharraf and “warned” him against declaring martial law. The people in the State Dept. also apparently told the press Rice had done so. Musharraf , who has received more than $10 billion in US aid since 2001, swept the warning away like a minor irritant.
So who’s giving Condi and Bush advice on how to handle Washington’s diplomacy? It looks amateurish and desperate.
However, I don’t want to mock the Bushites too much. I’m a bit afraid that if they feel themselves to be in too much of a corner internationally they might take some rash and drastic action…
Meanwhile, Manan Ahmed over at Informed Comment Global Affairs gives an English-language rendering of the entire transcript of Musharraf’s epoch-making t.v. announcement– both the Urdu and the English portions of it.

Hoagie beats the war-drums… again

The WaPo’s sad “insider wannabe” columnist Jim Hoagland, still unrepentant for all the disinformation and escalatory war-wongering he propagated that helped catapult the US into invading Iraq, is now fully back in the same business: target Iran.
Once upon a time, a very long time ago, Jim Hoagland was an honest journalist. You know, the kind of person who would dedicatedly investigate facts and test the truth value of the various claims made by all kinds of politicians.
Yes, a very long time ago.
The lead in today’s piece was this:

    Iran is working to produce a 20-to-50-pound stockpile of enriched uranium that it can use to build atomic weapons within eight to 10 weeks, once it decides to do so — and has consistently lied to the United Nations about those efforts.
    That headline conclusion is one of two basic points that I draw from a series of private meetings on Iran’s nuclear ambitions involving diplomats, leading academic experts, senior military officers and experienced analysts from around the globe.

So, we’re supposed simply to take Jim’s word on the lead judgment there? He’s not going to name any of the “diplomats, leading academic experts, senior military officers and experienced analysts” whose info he claims to cite?
One aspect of this that I find intriguing is that he writes that these “conversations [were] organized by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).”
Oh, really?
I’ve been a member of the IISS for more than 20 years. No-one has ever told me about these “conversations,” or the data or analysis that Hoagie claims was presented in them.
So either the IISS is heavily engaged in organizing what look like extremely one-sided, bellicose briefings for a portion of its members– or Jim Hoagland is talking a lot of hot air.
Either one is, I suppose, possible. Though I’d like to think that the IISS still holds to some standards of objectivity and rigorous pursuit of the facts.
Hoagie’s piece is titled “How to rein in Iran without War.” But he uses some fairly dishonest argumentation at the end of it (as well as a lot of completely unsubstantiated allegations along the way.)
At the end he writes this:

    time is running out on the diplomatic track, where Russia and China are blocking a third round of U.N. sanctions against Iran. This allows Cheney and other hawks to argue that waiting on diplomatic results is a waste of time. Blocking sanctions actually increases the pressure on Bush to move unilaterally and militarily.

I beg your pardon? How does that argument go again?
Then this:

    The administration has too often pitched the confrontation with Iran as one that Bush alone will decide. Russia, China and Europe should do everything they can to prevent this from becoming necessary. Not backing the new U.N. sanctions brings it a scary step closer.

He just comes across like a second-rate thug. And the WaPo pays him how much annually, to peddle these kinds of bullying threats?
For the record, here’s what IAEA chief Mohamed el-Baradei has been saying about Iran recently.

1956 and all that

Last night, Bill and I hosted a fun little dinner party with some old friends (and one new one) in Washington DC. The conversation turned to 1956. Firstly, in the context of how, during the Suez crisis of that year, Pres. Eisenhower had “persuaded” Anthony Eden to back off from continuing his imperialistic aggression against Egypt by pulling the plug on Washington’s support for the pound sterling.
That, in the earlier context of our having discussed the fact that the amount of US federal debt that the People’s Bank of China now holds is almost exactly the same dollar total that the US war in Iraq has cost until now…
I interjected that I had actual memories of the British war effort. “You were only four at the time!” Bill said. But I do. We lived very near RAF Abingdon, the main base for the British paratroopers as they flew out to invade Egypt; and for nights on end I heard the very scary drone-drone-drone of aircraft taking off. Actually, I was a few weeks shy of four.
Then a little later, we were talking about the ongoing prosecutions against former AIPAC officials Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman– in which, as you can see here, the lawyers for the accused are now playing some politically intriguing hardball against current and former Bush administration officials, including Rice, Hadley, Douglas Feith, etc etc.
So that reminded me that the whole idea of AIPAC itself really dated back to 1956… To Morris Amitai deciding then, with his friends, that he wanted to build a political machine in this country that would ensure that never again would a US president be able to “dictate” the terms of a peace settlement to Israel.
I wrote a whole chapter on the US-Israeli relationship in my 1991 book The Superpowers and the Syrian-Israeli Conflict, tracking many of the themes that Walt and Mearsheimer would later expand upon including the shifting balance between the “shared values” rationale for tyhe relationship and the “strategic asset” rationale…
Anyway, 1956: an intriguing year, in many respects. And yes, I realize the US-Chinese relationship is a lot more complex, and probably at this stage symbiotic, than the US-UK relationship was in 1956.

Article in The Nation on Hamas and Hizbullah

I see that The Nation has put up on its website a teaser for a piece I wrote for them about a month ago, which is on the need for Hamas and Hizbullah to be included in Arab-Israeli peacemaking if those two respective tracks of it are to be successful.
The piece starts with a little vignette designed to show the degree to which the vast majority of members of the US “political class”– i.e., legislators and media bigwigs– have for many years now considered themselves bound to follow Israel’s lead, rather than their own reading of the US people’s interests, in matters of Israeli-Arab diplomacy.
Of course, this is also a big part of what Walt and Mearsheimer have been writing about.

    Update Sunday a.m.: Thanks to alert co-poster Scott for having figured out you can read the whole text here.

Sometime I might blog the slightly amusing story of how this piece got edited and then de-edited…

Restorative justice in a DC church

Yesterday’s WaPo had a fascinating account of an innovative program the DC police is running, to offer people who are “fugitives” from the law a safe-seeming and humane way to come forward and resolve their situations. Significantly, it is based in one of the city’s big churches, the Bible Way church.
Thursday, in the first of three days the program will run, some 150 fugitives turned themselves in. Most of them were reportedly wanted in connection with nonviolent crimes. One man who came forward in connection with an assault and battery charge was arrested and taken away in handcuffs. The authorities reportedly offered “favorable consideration” to those who came forward.
WaPo journo Robert Pierre added these details:

    The effort is part of a national program that has resulted in more than 5,000 people with outstanding warrants coming forward in five other cities. Most have shown up with family members, and the vast majority said they might have kept running if not for the non-courthouse setting.
    “They talk about the safety and sanctity of the church,” said Kent State University professor Daniel Flannery, who has surveyed participants in all six cities.
    Participants yesterday expressed similar feelings as they arrived at Bible Way Church. They were greeted at the front door by volunteers, many of them members of the church, who guided them toward metal detectors set up inside.
    Dozens and dozens of law enforcement officers were present, although most of them were in the background, many out of sight of participants. Church ladies and pastors chatted with the arrivals, offering them something to eat or drink.
    Soon, however, participants were ushered into the basement, where the wheels of justice were in full motion. People were outfitted with wristbands, introduced to defense attorneys and moved to makeshift courtrooms, where judges heard their cases.
    In one of them, Rufus G. King III, chief judge of D.C. Superior Court, presided. Activity swirled all around: People hustled in and out, reporters requested interviews. Noise from adjacent “courts” crept over walls that didn’t reach the ceiling. The commotion became so overwhelming at one point that King signaled to an aide, who promptly gestured for quiet in the nearby hallway.
    Order restored for the moment, King whipped through cases, dismissing some, setting new court dates for others. As he dismissed one marijuana possession case, King told the man: “We all know that marijuana isn’t going to grow hair on your palms, but it will get you locked up. You got off of this case, but don’t get another one.”
    The man nodded and left, smiling…

I should note that the US is one of the world’s greatest incarcerators, now having more than two million people in jail. It is a vindictive, ill-organized, and largely dysfunctional system that leaves almost no room for the education and social rehabilitation of inmates. Instead, once behind bars, many of them become even further socialized into tough-guy, violent behaviors. And of course, their family ties are nearly completely disrupted and cut off; and yet another generation of kids is forced to grow up without fathers or– as is increasingly the case these days– mothers.
(And this system of so-called criminal “justice” is one that many well-meaning Americans want to export to all corners of the world??)
I am delighted that these churches are working with the court system to offer this alternative. What I see in this report has many aspects of the far more humane, life-affirming, and effective “restorative justice” approach to dealing with wrongdoers. Including that the offenders are welcomed into this program with family members accompanying them, rather than being forced to stand in a criminal dock alone; and they are treated with hospitality and respect by the “church ladies.”
My Quaker meeting in Charlottesville has been quite involved with offender-restoration projects in the city and region there; and more recently it has been working with the juvenile justice system to put in place some truly restorative justice procedures as an option, whenever possible. But as far as I know, the Bible Way church here in DC is far larger than most Quaker meetings. It is great that they’re doing this.