Author: Helena

Bush and Blair: sufferers from Hubristic Syndrome?

Through an interesting and happy concatenation of events, I ended up at a small-ish lunch yesterday along with former British Foreign Secretary David Owen. He recently released– but only, alas, in the UK book market– a book called The Hubris Syndrome: Bush, Blair and the Intoxication of Power.
The first thing to remember is that David Owen was also– long before he became a Labour MP, and even longer before he became Foreign Secretary, or a leader of the SDP breakaway from Labour, or the EU’s chief negotiator on former Yugoslavia– he was a medical doctor. And he seems quite serious about having identified an actual clinical condition that occurs in some leaders in politics or business, called Hubristic Syndrome.
As lunch wound down we had a short conversation about the book, and the whole theory of what, I’m afraid, we will have to call “HS”. He said it’s important to distinguish it from bipolar disorder (which, I gather, he thinks W. Churchill probably suffered from.) He said HS often occurs in individuals who also have some form of adult ADHD or propensity to addictions.
I haven’t gotten ahold of the book yet, but this is from the “Synopsis” published on the Amazon.co.uk website:

    For many politicians, power seems to go to their head, and becomes a heady drug affecting every action they take. The Greeks called it hubris, where the hero wins glory, acclaim and success – but it is often followed by nemesis. David Owen suggests George Bush and Tony Blair developed a Hubristic Syndrome while in power. He provides a powerful analysis, looking at their behaviour, beliefs and governing style, in particular the nature of their hubristic incompetence in handling the Iraq War. Both of them, and in her last year in office, Margaret Thatcher, developed many of the tell-tale and defining symptoms. A statesman, politician and medical doctor, with personal knowledge of the war in the Balkans, David Owen has unique insight into Blair’s premiership, including several meetings and conversations with Blair from 1996-2004. With his long political experience, Owen has written a devastating critique of the way that Bush and Blair manipulated intelligence and failed to plan for the aftermath of taking Baghdad. Their messianic manner, excessive confidence in their own judgement, and unshakeable belief that they will be vindicated by a ‘higher court’, have doomed what the author believes could have been a successful democratic transformation of Iraq.

It seems like an interesting move, to “medicalize” what we might otherwise regard simply as extremely bad behavior in these leaders. To me, at first blush, it doesn’t seem a sufficient explanation of what has gone on with these two men (and Maggie T. in her last year in power.) I guess I’ll need to read the whole book to see whether the concept of HS has any explanatory power, or simply a degree of descriptive power.
Also, if what they’re suffering from is a medical condition, does that– or should that– decrease the degree of actual responsibility we should attribute to them in connection with actions and decisions regarding the war that certainly did seem to involve a high, possibly even criminal, degree of both recklessness and dereliction of duty– including the duty of “due diligence”?
On the other hand, as a Quaker-Buddhist, I do hold fast to the two ideas that (1) There is that of the divine in everyone, regardless of how much I might disapprove of her/his actions; and (2) Harmful behaviors spring from lack of awareness of the truths about the human condition, not from any intrinsic badness in the perpetrator’s personality… And certainly, one of the main symptoms of HS would seem to be a very serious divorce from awareness of reality.
One further note: At the lunch David made the point– as alluded to in the publisher’s synopsis above– that he had supported the original decision to invade Iraq. As longtime JWN readers are aware, I never did. I disagree with David Owen that the outcome of the invasion “could have been a successful democratic transformation of Iraq.” From that point of view, if I were to subscribe to his general diagnosis of Bush’s (and perhaps also Blair’s) condition, I would probably tend to date the onset of HS in both men to a time considerably before March 2003… And yes, in Bush’s case, there is plenty of evidence of that– including many of the conversations described in Bob Woodward’s “State of Denial”, and the materials in the Paul O’Neil/ Ron Susskind book on Bush.
But, as noted above, I really do need to read David’s book before I comment too much more.

UN expert on prospects for “Annapolis”

(Note: On 11/21/07 I revised the text of this post just a little, to increase the accuracy of my portrayal of the USIP event. ~HC )
Because of my continuing interest in the politics of peacemaking and conflict transformation (as I recently explored the topic a little, here), I went to a panel discussion at the US Institute of Peace yesterday on the topic of “Constructing an Effective Ceasefire.”
Now, I know that what the Palestinians and the Bushites are hoping for from the upcoming “Annapolis” meeting is something of considerably greater impact than merely a ceasefire. Indeed, the PA still avers it is insistent on tangible and monitorable progress towards the final peace agreement with Israel that is, surely, the desire of the vast majority of the people in the world. The government of Israel– consistent with many years of foot-dragging now– wants to move much slower than that.
(That foot-dragging has allowed government-subsidized Israeli colonial corporations to implant large numbers of illegal colonies inside the occupied Palestinian territories. Coincidence, or what?)
But still, even though I recognize there are differences between a ceasefire and a final peace agreement, I thought it would be good to trek along to USIP and catch up with some state of the art in negotiations theory. The theorists on hand were:

    Dr. Ranabir Samaddar, head of the Calcutta Research Group, who has completed research on three ceasefire-negotiating experiences he was earlier actively engaged in, in Sri Lanka, Nagaland, and Nepal; and
    Nita Yawanarajah, a staff member of the Policy Planning and Mediation Support Unit, at the UN’s Department of Political Affairs, described as “involved in UN negotiations and assessments of ceasefires in the Balkans and Sudan and …developing guidelines for ceasefire negotiations.”

It was a good refresher course. Particularly refreshing and illuminative for me because they focused mainly on situations well outside the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, the two regions I’m most familiar with.
Both took a cool, analytical look at what makes peace negotiations (in general, and not just those aiming at temporary ceasefires) effective.
Both looked dispassionately at the political components of successful peace negotiations. Samaddar noted, for example, that in government-insurgent conflicts, the governments have a strong interest in using the ceasefire to bring about the complete demilitarization of the insurgent side without opening up any of the insurgents’ grievances, while the insurgents seek strongly to use the ceasefire to get their political issues onto the table without, if possible, disarming.
Nothing new there. (Except perhaps to the people across in the US State Department who continue to parrot the Israeli line that all of Israel’s opponents need to disarm completely– at both the military and the ideological levels– before they can even be admitted to any negotiation.)
A successful negotiation would, the two panelists said, be one that laid out and won agreement to measurable, monitored steps being taken in parallel by each of the parties, so that neither would end up feeling taken advantage of by the negotiating process itself.
“But the prospects for peace are harmed if the government side insists too hard on the rebels’ demilitarization at the very beginning,” Dr. Samaddar underlined at one point. He also judged that governments frequently seem to have a self-serving and unhelpful understanding of why the rebels in any situation have accepted a ceasefire. “It is a queer understanding,” he said. “They frequently think that the rebels have agreed only because they are weak… And so instead of listening to the rebels’ grievances, the governments use the ceasefire to try to drive home a military advantage over the rebels. But that doesn’t build peace.”
But the most telling moments came when both he and Yawanarajah laid stress on the fact that, to be successful, a peace negotiation requires that both sides are experiencing a “mutually hurting stalemate.”
In question time, I asked Yawanarajah whether, in view of her analysis– which was considerably longer and more sophisticated than I’ve had time to describe here– she thought that the negotiators in “Annapolis” had “any hope in hell of success.” I mentioned, in particular, the fact that there very evidently is not a situation of a mutually hurting stalemate there. (This is a feature of the Palestine-Israel conflict that I have noted several times in recent years, including in my comments last year about Israelis sipping lattes in elegant malls in North Tel Aviv.)
Yawanarajah’s response– which she stressed she was giving in her personal capacity as an analyst and not as a UN official– was to concur with the judgment I’d expressed that they “didn’t seem to have a hope in hell” of succeeding.
H’mmm.
In her earlier presentation, she had noted that this whole question of “needing” a mutually hurting stalemate” raises thorny ethical questions. Should we, indeed, seek to impose hurt on the Israelis so that they would be hurting as much as the Palestinians? Probably not.
However, I would also note the following:

    1. To equalize the amount of “hurt” each side is suffering, we could also seek to decrease the amount of hurt being intentionally inflicted by the Israelis and the US on the Palestinians– in both Gaza and the West Bank. This route should certainly be followed. The total economic lockdown imposed on the Palestinians is anti-humanitarian and quite possibly illegal under international law; and it should be ended.
    2. The US, and much of the rest of what some people claim is an “international community”, is meanwhile actively involved in both maintaining the level of harm being inflicted on Palestinians and in providing continuing lovely benefits to Israel, through generous aid packages, trade preferences, etc etc.
    3. To cut back on those generous benefits would not involve the imposition of any real harm on the Israelis. They could still have a fairly nice lifestyle. (But oh, could the government still pay for overseas travel for Israeli seniors, and for in-home indentured labor from Third World countries for infirm Israelis? Could it continue, in sum, to give benefits to older and infirm Israelis that are far, far in excess of what the US government for its own citizens? Perhaps not…) But cutting back on the benefits that the US and other outsiders currently heap onto Israelis would perhaps signal to them that they cannot simply continue with their land-grabbing project in the occupied areas, with its concomitant harsh repression of Palestinian rights, and continue to drag their feet in peacemaking, and still be treated with generosity by the outside world.

Just a couple of suggestions there. But I do think that at the moral level, there is a significant difference between “withholding benefits” and “inflicting harm”, especially if the withholding of benefits does not result in any real harm… And meantime, the continued and intentional inflicting of harm on the Palestinians should be ended.
Finally, if anyone thinks that a party that has been actively colluding with Israel’s anti-Palestinian project for many years now could realistically be considered to have the moral authority and the neutrality required to act as lead negotiator on this issue, I would love to hear their arguments.
Go on, Condi: Persuade me!
Until now, though, I see neither morality nor realism in the “Annapolis” set-up.

Pakistan: Khalilzad’s third target?

China Hand had another very informative post yesterday about the US and Pakistan. S/he was looking specifically about the role that Zal Khalilzad may well have been playing in pushing forward the “Benazir Bhutto” option. As in his previous post on Pakistan, CH has marshalled a good array of serious evidence and uses it well to make a point.
CH writes:

    Khalilzad’s fingerprints are all over the events surrounding Benazir Bhutto’s return to Pakistan and the ongoing political crisis there.
    That’s bad news for Musharraf.
    … If we interpret our Pakistan policy as pro-Bhutto and structured by Khalilzad, with Musharraf as a devalued asset well on the way to becoming collateral damage, it makes a lot of sense.
    At this point in the lame-duck Bush administration, it would seem risible that the U.S. would even consider, let alone implement any grand plan for regime change.
    But Khalilzad, the only U.S. player to emerge from the smoking crater of our Middle East policy with his stature and mojo enhanced, a man of undeniable energy and ability, and, as an Afghan, with a visceral stake in the fate of his homeland’s would-be suzerain, Pakistan, is the guy who might try to pull it off.

Oh, and Benazir took the following obligatory step on the road to winning Washington’s endorsement of her candidacy:

    In a move reminiscent of Ahmad Chalabi’s extravagant promises to the neocons of intimate Iraq-Israeli friendship after he took power, in August Bhutto also initiated a meeting with Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., presumably to demonstrate that she would not be intimidated by Islamic fundamentalists inside Pakistan.

CH posits that the Khalilzad/Bushist game-plan may be as follows. First, they shoe-horn Benazir into power. Then they persuade India to make some concessions on Kashmir, strengthening BB politically within Pakistan and allowing her to turn the army more fully to battling the pro-Taliban insurgents in the north…

    Then the United States can open the military and economic aid spigots and win hearts and minds in a big way—a possibility that the Chinese are now presumably considering and planning for.
    After all, for Washington the opportunity to wean Pakistan away from the army and from the army’s major supporter and ally, China, is something that might make the whole venture worth risking by itself.
    A grandiose plan. If true. But workable?
    I don’t know how good a read on the pulse of the army or Pakistan Ms. Bhutto has after almost a decade of exile.
    Pakistan’s security establishment has ties to the Taliban dating back to the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
    Beyond that, the war on the borders is, in a word awful. The Pakistani army doesn’t want to fight it. The army is built to fight India, not chase tribesmen. And no army in the world likes to do counterinsurgency…

CH notes that, along with maintaining her longstanding ties to Khalilzad, BB has also been laying out some big money on “inside Washington” consultants… (Uh-oh. More shades of Chalabi here.) CH cites this piece from the new Washington political tabloid The Politico, which tells us that DC p.r. giant Burston-Marsteller and its lobbying and polling affiliates recently signed a contract with BB’s party, whereby the party pays them $75K upfront and then $28.5K monthly after that. No term mentioned there for the contract.
The names of all these firms are a sort of dizzying and frequently changing melange of names half-remembered from Congressmembers past, second-rate pundits, etc etc. But I think the polling firm is the same as the one Hillary Clinton’s using. (Can someone check that and confirm?)
Politico gives us these details:

    The contract filed with the Justice Department does, however, give some insight into what all of the money buys. Among the promised services: surveys of “100 American political, journalistic, and business elites in Washington, D.C., and New York”; an “internal brainstorming session”; and setting up meetings for Bhutto in Washington “with an eye towards convincing U.S. officials that Prime Minister Bhutto is still relevant to further the democratic process in Pakistan.”

CH’s very realistic-looking conclusion regarding all this:

    If the battle for control of Pakistan is going to be fought over hors d’oeuvres and aperitifs in Washington, Pakistan might be in for a rough time.
    Khalilzad has shown himself to be a natural and able ally of the educated, pro-Western elites in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan.
    But until now, the regimes he has fostered have been unable to square the circle between the rulers he installed and the impoverished, suspicious, and anti-American masses they’ve tried to lead into the U.S. camp.
    Will the third time—with Pakistan’s larger middle class and a society as yet not devastated by war and extremism–be the charm?
    Or will Pakistan serve as another example of what happens when the resistible force of democracy promoted by U.S. clients collides with obdurate nationalism fueled by anger and fear of the United States?

Good questions.
Can commenters here please stick to the topic at hand.

Pakistan in world politics

“China Hand” has a truly great post on “The China Factor in Pakistani Politics” over at her/his China Matters blog. I had noted it briefly toward the end of (the revised version of) this JWN post this morning, but it’s worth a lot more attention.
CH notes– correctly in my view– that, “China’s presence and interests in Pakistan dwarf America’s” and judges that,

    Pakistan’s alliance with China, which supports Islamabad’s confrontation with India and underpins its hopes for economic growth in its populous heartland, is probably a lot more important to Islamabad than the dangerous, destabilizing, and thankless task of pursuing Islamic extremists on its remote and impoverished frontiers at Washington’s behest.

So the question I’m wrestling with now is What role is the present unrest in Pakistan playing in the broader drama of global politics? (That is, the withering of US power on the dessicated vine of the Bushites’ incompetence, and the concomitant rise of China onto the world scene.)
I should note that in the past couple of days, some Chinese officials have done quite a lot to spur the current run on the dollar. As part of a “grand plan” by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, or not?
Not at all clear.
WaPo’s Neil Irwin echoed a lot of other reporting on the currency markets story when he reported in today’s paper,

    Top Chinese officials suggested at a conference yesterday that they would direct more of their future reserves into European assets — that the euro, not just the dollar, would increasingly be a currency of choice…
    “We will favor stronger currencies over weaker ones and will readjust accordingly,” said Cheng Siwei, vice chairman of China’s National People’s Congress. Another official said the dollar was losing its position as the world’s default currency.
    The words were consistent with signals the Chinese have been sending about wanting to move away from pouring all their reserves into dollars…

The Economist’s always-anonymous writers cast doubt on the “Beijing grand plan” theory when they noted that the “mid-ranking Chinese officials” concerned were “not actually responsible for foreign-exchange policy.”
So we by no means have enough evidence yet to conclude that a 1956 moment is at hand. (That’s a reference to the train of events in late-October 1956 when Eisenhower decided to pull the plug on the US’s support of the pound sterling, in an attempt– successful, as it turned out– to “persuade” the Brits to withdraw from Egypt… a development which by 1970 had led to the dismantling of the entire British military presence east of Suez and curtains for Britain as any kind of an independent global power.)
But regarding the current Chinese-US tussle for power, who yet knows what is actually happening? My judgment is that the Chinese are nowhere near ready yet to “move in” on the task of global governance that US hegemony has been performing with such disturbing results in recent years. Though some adjustment in the global power balance, as between Washington, Beijing, and a number of lesser players, is by now inevitable.
We should remember, too, that in the always-jittery and risk-ridden world of international financial and currency transactions– which has become a lot more potentially risky in the 51 years since 1956– it wouldn’t necessarily require a central “grand plan” from the CCCCP for extremely deep damage to be done to the global financial system. Sometimes, in the horrendous game of poker that international finance has now become, rumors can become self-fulfilling prophecies; what is “traded” internationally often has no relationship to any underlying reality; graft, speculation, and hyper-profits are rampant; and hundreds upon hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people stand to get hurt very badly indeed…
So while we all ponder these matters more, let me just return to China Hand’s blog post, and tease some more of the interesting portions of that out for you…
S/he writes:

    Beijing and Islamabad’s strategic priorities—countering India and nurturing economic development before confronting extremists in the hinterland—are in perfect sync.
    The two nations grew even closer when the Bush administration abandoned the Pakistan-centric order of battle of the Global War on Terror and opted for closer ties with India in the service of what looks like a different strategic objective—an attempt to counter China’s growing influence in South Asia.
    So, it would be rather ironic if the road to President Musharraf’s downfall began at a Chinese massage parlor in Islamabad.

Actually, not particularly ironic, as such. Intriguing, possibly. Titillating, perhaps…
But CH then goes on to lay out– with lots of good hyperlinked sources– how the actions that the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) Islamist extremists took against Chinese citizens working in that massage parlor back in June prompted Musharraf to launch the big crackdown on the Lal Masjid people… and that led to the security crisis.. that led (later) to last Saturday’s suspension of portions of the Pakistani constitution by Musharraf.
Well, CH doesn’t really adequately describe for us the last link in that causal chain. But s/he does cites this report from the June 22 edition of Pakistan Today as noting that,

    The Chinese ambassador contacted President Hu Jintao two times during the 15-hour [Chinese masseuse] hostage drama, sources said… The Chinese president expressed confidence that the Pakistan government would find out a peaceful solution to the hostage crisis. Sources quoted President Hu Jintao, expressing shock over the kidnapping of the Chinese nationals, has called for security for them.

China Hand notes this:

    China did not want to see its citizens and interests to become pawns in Pakistan’s internal strife.
    It’s a non-trivial point for China, which lacks the military reach to effectively protect its overseas citizens itself, but does not want to see them turned into the bargaining chip of first resort for dissidents in dangerous lands like Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, and etc. who are looking to get some leverage on the local government–or Beijing.
    It looks like China demanded that Pakistan draw a red line at the abduction, extortion, and murder of its citizens.
    A week after the kidnapping incident, Pakistan’s Federal Interior Minister was in Beijing…

So in early July, handpicked units of the Pakistani security forces finally went in to storm the Red Mosque. Three Chinese workers at an auto-rickshaw factory in the North West Frontier Province were killed in revenge– and as CH notes, the story was “splashed all over the Chinese media.” (As, here.)
CH sums up:

    A trusted ally demands real, meaningful, and risky action by Pakistan against terrorism. Because of the importance of the ally, the proximity of the threat to the political and economic heart of the country, and the tactical and strategic merits of the action, Pakistan responds positively.
    That ally is, of course, China.
    Not the United States.
    And that’s probably not going to change even if Benazir Bhutto takes power.

Tangled webs, huh?
Here, by the way, is what China’s Xinhua News Agency was writing about Pakistan on Tuesday:

    China is highly concerned about the situation in Pakistan, and believes the country has the ability to solve its own issues, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao Tuesday.
    “Pakistan is one of the important neighbouring countries of China. We believe the Pakistani government and people have the ability to solve their own problems and hope Pakistan could maintain stability and development,” Liu told a regular press conference.

By the way, as always, I’d love it if any JWN readers who can throw more light on these issues than I can would contribute their own analyses, hyperlinks, etc. to the Comments section here.

US “leadership” and Pakistan

Maybe I’m naive, but I have been amazed all over again to see the unthinkingly “imperial” way in which many or most US commentators have been writing and talking about the rising tensions in Pakistan… There they are, earnestly enquiring as to “Who might be better than Musharraf?”, in a context in which the main criterion of being “better” is simply assumed to be “better for us”… or turning their gaze back to Washington and asking self-referentially “Who lost Pakistan?”
Hey guys! Pakistan is not “ours” to lose! It belongs to its own people.
Yes, they have many internal political problems of their own. And yes, the US has been quite intentionally meddling in the country’s politics for decades* (and the Brits for even longer.) And yes, there are big issues in Pakistan that are justifiably of concern to the whole world community– nuclear weapons, and the possible prospect of a Taliban power-base providing a hospitable base to the global terrorists of Al-Qaeda in the future, as in the past (though this is not necessarily the way the Talibs would behave; and their inclusion or exclusion from locally-based peacemaking initiatives could do a lot to affect that question.)
But note that I said these concerns about Pakistan are ones the whole world community faces– and not simply the US, standing all on its own.
Over the past 15 years or so, ways too many US commentators and pols have fallen into what you might call the “Leadership representation fallacy”… That is, because they have just somehow assumed that the US exercises and by the natural order of things should continue to exercise “leadership” within (or over) the whole world community, then by extension, any development that affects the whole world community somehow affects the US uniquely.
Ain’t so.
In fact, I would be as bold as to say that in that part of the world– let’s say, for simplicity, the whole of the “arc of instability”– the US as an actor and as an idea is currently so toxic that our country is the last one on earth that should seek to exercise “leadership” in crafting solutions to the challenges arising from there that now face the whole world.
Actually, yes, the US is “unique”: right now it is uniquely unqualified to play any kind of a diplomatic “leadership” role anywhere in the Muslim world.
So please. Let’s have a little more self-awareness, and a lot less self-referentiality and self-aggrandizement in the way US commentators think and talk about these issues.
We should keep firmly in mind, firstly, that Pakistan’s governance is the responsibility of the country’s own citizens (and our first responsibility should be good governance in our country, which goodness knows, it certainly needs.)
And inasmuch as events in Pakistan do have an effect on the whole world, we should remember that America’s 300 million people are far from being the people most directly affected by it. India (one billion people), China (1.3 billion), Afghanistan, and the countries of Central Asia and the Middle East are all much more deeply affected than we are.
Think about it.
By the way: truly excellent reporting and analysis of China’s relationship with Pakistan is here, thanks to “China hand.” The opening line there:

    “Americocentrism dies hard.”

—-
* See this good piece by Spencer Ackerman at TPM-Muckraker, on the gobs of accountability-free funding the Bushites have been shoveling over to Musharraf since 9/11. (Hat-tip J. Cole.) Ackerman writes:

    Musharraf, of course, has been a crucial American ally since the start of the Afghanistan war in 2001, and the U.S. has rewarded him ever since with over $10 billion in civilian and (mostly) military largesse… [T]he U.S. gives Musharraf’s government about $200 million annually and his military $100 million monthly in the form of direct cash transfers. Once that money leaves the U.S. Treasury, Musharraf can do with it whatever he wants. He needs only promise in a secret annual meeting that he’ll use it to invest in the Pakistani people. And whatever happens as the result of Rice’s review, few Pakistan watchers expect the cash transfers to end…

And of course, you can put that together with this post I put up here yesterday, reporting on the significant rise in the Taliban’s power in both Pakistan and Afghanistan over the past year.
US tax dollars well spent there? I’d say not. Let’s have some real accountability here at home! (Not of the “who lost Pakistan?” variety, but of the “who totally mismanaged the reaction to 9/11, wasted our federal budget, and sowed death and havoc throughout a large chunk of the world?” variety.)

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.