Author: Helena

Countering Darfur’s anti-humane rebels

There was a significant op-ed on Darfur in the NYT today. It’s by Alan J. Kuperman, who was once Legislative Director for sen. Charles Schumer– and in it, Kuperman directly takes on the arguments of those in the US who argue that outside military intervention is needed to stop the anti-“black” genocide in Darfur.
Kuperman notes that,

    Without such intervention, Sudan’s government last month agreed to a peace accord pledging to disarm Arab janjaweed militias and resettle displaced civilians. By contrast, Darfur’s black rebels, who are touted by the wristband crowd [that is, people in the US “Safe Darfur” movement who wear green wristbands to signal their commitment] as freedom fighters, rejected the deal because it did not give them full regional control. Put simply, the rebels were willing to let genocide continue against their own people rather than compromise their demand for power.

This is a very strong statement of a case I’ve been making– in much more tentative terms– here on JWN over the past few weeks.
Kuperman recalls that, after US diplomatic intervention early this month the Khartoum government made even more concessions to the rebels, raising hopes that at last the two holdout rebel factions might be persuaded to join the peace agreement…

    But that hope was crushed last week when the rebels viciously turned on each other. As this newspaper reported, “The rebels have unleashed a tide of violence against the very civilians they once joined forces to protect.”
    Seemingly bizarre, this rejection of peace by factions claiming to seek it is actually revelatory. It helps explain why violence originally broke out in Darfur, how the Save Darfur movement unintentionally poured fuel on the fire, and what can be done to stanch genocidal violence in Sudan and elsewhere.
    Darfur was never the simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations. The region’s blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago — denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. Violence was initiated not by Arab militias but by the black rebels who in 2003 attacked police and military installations. The most extreme Islamists are not in the government but in a faction of the rebels sponsored by former Deputy Prime Minister Hassan al-Turabi, after he was expelled from the regime. Cease-fires often have been violated first by the rebels, not the government, which has pledged repeatedly to admit international peacekeepers if the rebels halt their attacks.
    This reality has been obscured by Sudan’s criminally irresponsible reaction to the rebellion: arming militias to carry out a scorched-earth counterinsurgency. These Arab forces, who already resented the black tribes over past land disputes and recent attacks, were only too happy to rape and pillage any village suspected of supporting the rebels.
    In light of janjaweed atrocities, it is natural to romanticize the other side as freedom fighters. But Darfur’s rebels do not deserve that title. They took up arms not to stop genocide — which erupted only after they rebelled — but to gain tribal domination…
    Advocates of intervention play down rebel responsibility because it is easier to build support for stopping genocide than for becoming entangled in yet another messy civil war. But their persistent calls for intervention have actually worsened the violence.
    The rebels, much weaker than the government, would logically have sued for peace long ago. Because of the Save Darfur movement, however, the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure Sudan to hand them control of the region. Sadly, this message was reinforced when the rebels’ initial rejection of peace last month was rewarded by American officials’ extracting further concessions from Khartoum.
    The key to rescuing Darfur is to reverse these perverse incentives. Spoiler rebels should be told that the game is over, and that further resistance will no longer be rewarded but punished by the loss of posts reserved for them in the peace agreement.

Kuperman’s conclusion is, “Ultimately, if the rebels refuse, military force will be required to defeat them.”
I disagree with this. I still maintain that there are always alternatives to the use of violence! And certainly in this situation, when the Khartoum government has expressed a commitment to general disarmament of militia forces, resettlement of the displaced, and reconstruction of the three Darfur provinces under a large degree of self-government…
Surely this is a project that could and should be easy to sell to the people of Darfur, even if not to all of their ambitious, self-appointed “leaders”.
But it’s interesting to see where Kuperman goes with his argument about the need to use force to quell the anti-humane rebellion. He argues that no UN force could achieve this. (And I would note here that if US and European forces were not so terrifically badly tied up in ill-planned missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, then they would be in a much, much better position to offer logistics and even personnel support for a UN force in Darfur… )
So Kuperman conclusion is this:

    we should let Sudan’s army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes. This option will be distasteful to many, but Sudan has signed a peace treaty, so it deserves the right to defend its sovereignty against rebels who refuse to, so long as it observes the treaty and the laws of war.

Though I agree, in general, with the argument that Sudan has a right to exercise its own national soveriegnty, I’m still not sure I totally agree with Kuperman’s proposal. For the anti-violence reasons given above; but also, the calibration of allowing Khartoum to re-assert its sovereign powers in Darfur while not enacting any atrocities might be very hard to achieve…
But Kuperman also makes a very good longer-range argument regarding the direction of US foreign policy:

    Indeed, to avoid further catastrophes like Darfur, the United States should announce a policy of never intervening to help provocative rebels, diplomatically or militarily, so long as opposing armies avoid excessive retaliation. This would encourage restraint on both sides. Instead we should redirect intervention resources to support “people power” movements that pursue change peacefully, as they have done successfully over the past two decades in the Philippines, Indonesia, Serbia and elsewhere.
    America, born in revolution, has a soft spot for rebels who claim to be freedom fighters, including those in Darfur. But to reduce genocidal violence, we must withhold support for the cynical provocations of militants who bear little resemblance to our founders.

This is an excellent argument. Following that advice would, of course, have avoided us getting drawn by Ahmed Chalabi and all his fellow Iraqi snake-oil salesmen into the tragically criminal invasion of Iraq– and would guide us not to accede to the invasion requests now being voiced by some anti-regime exiles from Iran.
I was interested to read Kuperman’s article. In 2001 he published a controversial short book on Rwanda in which he argued (I think) that the genocide there would have been much harder to stop militarily than most people thought, and that therefore claims that “the US could have stopped it but chose not to” were misleading… But he is evidently someone who has studied very closely the many ethical dilemmas entangled in the topic that western liberals like to call “humanitarian intervention”, but that people in the international humanitarian-law field often prefer to call “military action with a claimed ‘humanitarian’ motivation.” (Noting, of course, that wars are always launched with claimed ‘humanitarian’ aims much publicized. No national leader ever says publicly, ‘Okay chaps, let’s go out and launch ourselves a highly inhumane, unjust war.’..)
I would personally love to discuss all these issues more with Kuperman some time. I am strongly of the opinion that the “international community” needs to do a lot more to fund, refine, and upgrade our ability to launch all kinds of nonviolent interventions to protect lives and help broker and buttress peace agreements around the world, and that that is a better path to focus on than simply letting national governments reassert their own sovereignty while piously bleating at them from outside about the need to respect IHL norms.
But anyway, that discussion is for another day. For today, I am just glad to see Alan Kuperman entering the debate on Darfur with this feisty and generally strongly reasoned article.

Darfur peace deadline Wednesday

May 31 is a deadline for the parties to the fighting in Darfur to sign onto the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA), that was concluded in Abuja, Nigeria, on May 5. The augurs don’t look particularly good. Reuters is reporting that the head of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), Khalil Ibrahim, and representatives of the other holdouts– a faction of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA)– were heading to a last-minute meeting in Ljubljana, Slovenia to try to find common ground with the AU negotiators. (Slovenia? Why Slovenia? Nice beaches?)
Ibrahim told Reuters:

    “We are not going to sign this agreement unless there is a radical change including real regional government for Darfur, and reconstruction of Darfur, compensation for our people and a fair share of power.”

For his part, the AU’s Peace and Security Commissioner, Said Djinnit, told AFP today that, “Until the May 31 deadline expires, we are hopeful that the parties that have not signed will sign the Abuja peace agreement.”
That report continues,

    Djinnit said that if they fail to append their signatures on the Darfur Peace Agreement, the bloc’s Peace and Security council would meet to discuss measures to take against them.
    “We hope that they will exemplify a historic responsibility and to realise that the agreement is a good basis to achieve peace in Darfur,” Djinnit said.
    “If not, the Peace and Security Council will meet to see what measures to take … measures will be taken.”
    The AU special representative in Sudan Baba Gana Kingibe said efforts were continuing to woo the holdouts to sign the agreement.

Reuters is meanwhile also reporting that in Khartoum the two ruling parties, “are divided over sending U.N. forces to its violent Darfur region.” This, though last week veteran UN troubleshooter Lakhdar Brahimi apparently secured a guarantee from Khartoum that a joint AU-UN assessment team could begin working inside Sudan “within days.”
It all sounds like a very tangled web indeed. The near-daily reports of the UN. Country Team in Sudan make clear that throughout Darfur a continuing level of anti-civilian violence, often lethal, still continues– and that it is being committed by all sides. (You can access these reports and a lot of other great, up-to-date info through this excellent Reliefweb portal.)
Writing over at Headheeb May 26, Jonathan Edelstein noted the fragility of the DPA, and the possibility that the fighting in Darfur could spill over even more than it already has done into Chad and even perhaps the north of the Central African Republic. If you scroll down to the comments there, he makes this wise observation:

    I’ve noticed the same pattern in connection with Middle East peacemaking: the international mediators move heaven and earth to get the Israelis and Palestinians to sign an agreement, but then don’t invest the time in setting up monitoring and dispute resolution mechanisms. There’s a distressing absence of recognition that peace accords require maintenance, especially during the early stages.

In other words, it’s all very fine Robert Zoellick rushing over to Abuja at the beginning of the month to try to twist a few arms and win signatures onto the agreement, as he did. (He’d also made a similar arm-twisting visit to earlier rounds of the negotiations in Nairobi, as well.) But what the people of Darfur and the rest of Sudan really need to see is sustained, high-level commitment by Washington and all the world’s big powers to back the DPA by investing in real peacebuilding there. And to Jonathan’s list of what’s needed (ceasfire monitoring and dispute-resolution mechanisms) I would add a strong and crediblepeacekeeping presence, and also major reconstruction aid and a commitment to help the war-shattered communities to rebuild the livelihoods (as well as the lives) of their people.
As it is, it’s been a terrible struggle for the World Food Programme even to get, and once again to deliver, enough emergency rations to keep Darfur’s many thousands of IDPs alive (as I noted here.) People need to be able to return to their home communities in security and dignity, and start rebuilding a future! And as we know very clearly from what we see every day in Iraq or Afghanistan, people cannot do that under conditions of prolonged warfare or rampant public insecurity… The fighting needs to end. And the Abuja DPA provides a reasonable basis on which to do this.

More torture-related info

The New York-based organization Human Rights First has done consistently excellent work of fact-finding, analyzing, and seeking official accountability regarding the US government’s use of torture since 9/11.
I see that they have been “doggedly” following the trial of Abu Ghraib dog handler Sgt. Santos Cardona. Their coverage of this trial even includes a fascinating and informative blog about being kept about it by HRF staff attorney Hina Shamsi, who has been observing it inside the coutroom.
For example, last Friday Shamsi wrote,

    Capt. [Carolyn] Wood is one of the “Where’s Waldos” of the abuse puzzle; she was posted to both Afghanistan and Iraq, and some of the worst abuses that have yet come to light appear to have been committed under her watch. In late 2002, Capt. Wood was in charge of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion in Afghanistan.Soldiers under her command were implicated in the deaths by torture of two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar… Capt. Wood and members of her battalion were then transferred to Iraq, where, in July 2003, they were assigned to Abu Ghraib…

And in last Thursday’s post, Shamsi wrote about the appearance at the trial– as a defense witness!– of the infamous Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, former Commander of the Guantanamo prison who later became head of all “detention operations” in Iraq.
The whole blog makes fascinating reading. Shamsi has put lots of links to relevant documents right into the posts. And the side-bar contains many very useful links. Including one simply tagged Torture Facts, and one tagged Where are they now?
In “Torture Facts” you can learn this:

    * Over 15,000 people are currently in U.S. detention in just Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. As of February 16, 2006, in Iraq, there were 14,389 detainees in U.S. custody; as of December 2005, the U.S. was holding approximately 500 detainees in Afghanistan; as of February 10, 2006 there are approximately 490 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and one enemy combatants held in the U.S.;
    * 36 prisoners are believed to be held in unknown locations;
    * At least 376 foreign fighters detained in Iraq to whom the Administration has asserted the Geneva Conventions do not apply;
    * There were up to 100 ghost detainees in Iraq;
    * The U.S. transferred at least one dozen prisoners out of Iraq for further interrogation in violation of the Geneva Conventions;
    * 8 percent of 517 Guantanamo detainees were considered al Qaeda fighters by the U.S. Government. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection to al Qaeda or Taliban.
    * 5 percent of the 517 detainees held at Guantanamo were captured by the United States and the majority of those currently in custody were turned over by other parties during a time when the United States was offering large sums for captured prisoners.

These facts– for which footnotes are supplied on that HRF web-page– are even more shocking than I thought. (And several of them relate directly to the post I just put up here a short while ago.)
While I’m on the topic of human rights things, here is a version of the report that the UN Committee against Torture recently released about Bush administration’s many infractions of the Convention Against Torture, thanks to the BBC.

Hunger striking, human progress, and habeas

The number of Guantanamo detainees participating in the hunger strike there has now risen to 75.
That report, by AP’s Ben Fox, quoted Navy Commander Robert Durand as trying to downplay the seriousness of this action by the detainees by calling it an “attention-getting tactic”. Fox also quotes Durand as saying,

    “The hunger-strike technique is consistent with al-Qaida practice and reflects detainee attempts to elicit media attention to bring international pressure on the United States to release them back to the battlefield.”

Right…. Hunger-striking also happens to be “consistent with the practice of” Mahatma Gandhi, the courageous British women activists who were campaigning for the right to vote, etc etc.
Durand doesn’t mention this. I wonder why not.
Nor does he see fit to mention the violation of the fundamental right of habeas corpus that the detainees are campaigning against.
Habeas corpus is a bedrock of personal liberty in the Anglo-American system of law and society. Since I studied Latin for five years, I always knew that habeas corpus means “that you may have the body”, and I’d always assumed that it meant that individuals were thereby somehow given the right to have control over their own bodies (i.e., to enjoy personal liberty). Well, on reading that Wikipedia article linked to there, it seems clear that it does mean that– but it means it in a way even more profound than I had thought.
It’s not that through habeas corpus “the system” gives individuals the right to control their own bodies, but rather that antecedent to that the individual is assumed to already have the right to her or his own body, and that it’s the state, when it wants to infringe on that right, that needs to show ironclad due cause for doing so.
This concept of personal liberty was of course fully enshrined in the US Declaration of Independence, which states,

    We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Note that this speaks about “all Men”, not merely “all US citizens”. Also, of course, these days– thanks in good part to those suffragist hunger-strikers of 95 years ago– “men” also includes “women”…
So the issue for the detainees in Guantanamo– and in Bagram and all the other places where my government holds detainees who have not had the benefit of a trial, is give them liberty, or give them a trial that will show them and everyone else why it is right that they be deprived of their liberty for some period of time.
Some of these detainees have now been deprived of their liberty for 54 months. 54 months of treatment that has often been inhumane, brutal, and by design extremely disorienting. 54 months of their loved ones often not knowing whether they are dead or alive. 54 months of isolation, psychological attack on their personhood, and uncertainty.
Give them liberty, or give them a trial. It’s as straightforward as that.
The only circumstance under US (or international) law in which there would legally be a third alternative is if these detained individuals are classified as POWs, in which case they could continue to be held without trial for the duration of the relevant hostilities. But in return for the detaining government having that power, it has to guarantee a separate set of rights to the detainees: that they not be subjected to interrogation, and that the phsyical and psychological conditions of their detention meet the standards defined in the Geneva Conventions.
The Bush administration chose not to designate these detainees as POWs. Instead, it has used the category of “unlawful enemy combatants” in an attempt to deny them access both to the protections for POWs, and to the normal protections they would have under civilian law. That move deeply violated the US Constitution, as well as all relevant international law.
The Bushites cannot simply continue to hold these men– who between Gitmo, Bagram, and other extra-legal holding centers could well number more than 1,000 individuals– in this state of legal limbo forever. In fact, it should not continue for a day longer– for any of them.
Why do they not bring these men to trial? Cmdr. Durand accused the men of seeking to be released so they could “return to the battlefield.” But if they have trials and are found guilty of serious crimes, then they wouldn’t be released any time soon, would they?
Actually, the problem for Cmdr. Durand and the whole machinery of the Bush administration above him is that bringing these detainees to any form of a fair trial would be hugely problematic for the administration. For reasons including these:

    * In a fair trial, we the public would learn that for many of these detainees the evidence against them doesn’t amount to very much (and for many, might not actually amount to anything.) Therefore, the justification for having held them so long and treated them so badly would not live up to what the administration’s people have claimed until now.
    * In a fair trial, the detainees would be able to speak to the broaoder public about the way they have been treated for the past many months.

Would it reassure the apparatchiks in the administration to know that these are not new issues and concerns? That every European colonial power in recent history also faced them as it tried to “square” its commitment to a version of liberal politics at home with the brutality of its attempt to suppress anticolonial movements overseas?
Maybe not. But anyway, this current dilemma is one for the Bush administration to face.
As for the rest of us, all we can say is, “Give them liberty, or give them a decent trial.”

“Tajik intifada” in Kabul?

Al-Hayat is describing the demonstrations in Kabul yesterday as a “Tajik intifada”… That piece indicates that Khairkhaneh, the area of northern Kabul where the US military vehicle lost control and killed a number of passers-by, was near to the headquarters of former Defense Minister Gen. Muhammad Qasem Fahim, a leader of Afghanistan’s Tajik community; and the young people in the neighborhood then comgregated around the convoy to protest– and the American soldiers then fired into the crowd…
The ethnic-Tajik dimension to what happened hasn’t been mentioned in any of the western media reports that I can find except for this one in Newsday by Moises Saman and James Rupert.
They write:

    Various witnesses told of organized crowds of teenaged boys waving pictures of Ahmed Shah Massoud, a guerrilla commander killed in 2001 who is the hero of ethnic Tajiks from the Panjshir Valley in northeast Afghanistan. They voiced suspicion that Panjshiri political activists stoked the rioting to strike at President Hamid Karzai, who in the past 18 months has sidelined several top Panjshiri political figures. The country’s highest ethnic Tajik official, parliament speaker Yunus Qanooni, appealed for calm.

Evidently a lot of different (though overlapping) conflictual things are going on in Afghanistan these days. If the Kabul riots have a strong ethnic-Tajik dimension to them, that makes them noticeably distinct from anything to do with pro-Taliban activism. Though both these strands of the story indicate the deep and still-unrolling failure of the rebuild-Afghanistan project, as I noted here yesterday.
Tajiks make up around 27% of the national population and speak a language called Dari that is close to Persian.
Regarding the growth of Taliban activities– and as a follow-up to the Ahmed Rashid piece I quoted from extensively here yesterday– Rashid has a new piece up on the BBC website.
He writes:

    Nearly 400 Afghans have been killed in an unprecedented offensive by the Taleban, in a bid to pre-empt a major deployment by some 6,000 Nato troops this summer in southern Afghanistan.
    From just a few hundred guerrillas last year, Taleban commander Mullah Dadullah now claims to have 12,000 men under arms and control of 20 districts in the former Taleban heartland in the southern provinces of Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul and Uruzgan. There is also a strong Taleban-al-Qaeda presence in the eastern provinces bordering Pakistan.
    Why – five years after the Taleban and al-Qaeda were smashed by US forces – is Afghanistan facing a resurgent Taleban movement that is now threatening to overwhelm it?
    … Neither Nato, nor the American forces they are replacing, have offered an honest assessment of their successes and failures during the past five years.

He then runs through an important “checklist” of the failures of the policies pursued by the US, Nato, the UN, and the Afghan government in the south of the country. It starts (as certainly always seems important to note) with this:

    Washington’s refusal to take state building in Afghanistan seriously after 2001 and instead waging a fruitless war in Iraq, created a major international distraction which the Taleban took advantage of…

Anyway, it’s a good and searing piece of analysis there. (Many of the comments from readers beneath it are also worth reading.)

Afghanistan– the spark of an intifada?

The events in Kabul today looked ominously like the events in Gaza that triggered the Palestinians’ First Intifada against Israel at the beginning of December 1987. Today, as back then, a vehicle that was part of the foreign presence in the country apparently went out of control and ended up killing and injuring a number of the indigenous citizens… Today, as then, that lethal event triggered a response from the citizens that revealed a huge amount of pent-up anger and resentment… (Today, as then, the spokesmen for the foreign presence had previously been saying “all is fine and normal” with the general situation… But the eruption of anger gives the lie to that claim.)
It is far too early to tell how these events in Kabul will play out. The BBC is reporting that,

    At least seven were killed in the shooting and the riots which followed.
    About 2,000 people demonstrated in the city centre, with some moving on to attack buildings in the diplomatic quarter.
    For over two hours there were bursts of gunfire as hundreds of protesters rampaged through Kabul, burning cars and attacking police checkpoints.
    Police and the army – including tanks – moved in to restore law and order and the curfew from 2200 local time (1730 GMT) to 0400 (2330 GMT) was imposed…

But this is Kabul, remember– Afghanistan’s national capital. This is the one place in the country that was supposed to be quite secure for the US-led rebuilding project, even though there has been all kinds of tumult in other Afghan regions. Including in the south, where the Taliban have reportedly been regrouping in battle-groups of as large as 300 men…
Veteran Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid has a very serious piece in Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph. He writes:

    The last thing Tony Blair and President George W. Bush need, at a moment of multiple crises for both of them, is a revamped Taliban taking control of southern Afghanistan – but that is now not impossible to imagine.
    Bush and Blair have only themselves to blame, as they fought an unnecessary war in Iraq and allowed the Taliban and al-Qa’eda to fester in Central Asia during the five years that followed 9/11.
    Yesterday’s widespread riots in Kabul are indicative of how disillusioned many Afghans feel about the failure of the West to help rebuild their country.
    Nato is now stuck with the consequences…
    Fighting a full-scale guerrilla war is not what countries such as Italy, Spain, Holland, Germany and others enlisted for. The mandate from their governments is reconstruction, not combat.
    “Nato will not fail in Afghanistan … the family of nations will expect nothing less than success,” General James Jones, the head of US and Nato forces in Europe, told a recent seminar in Madrid.
    Gen Jones is now desperately trying to persuade contributing countries to end the restrictions they impose on their troops, making it impossible for some of them to fight or commanders to run a proper military campaign.
    “What is the point of deploying troops who don’t fight,” ask many Afghans. That is why Gen Jones calls these caveats – they now number a staggering 71 – “Nato’s operational cancer”.
    Nato’s weaknesses are what worry President Hamid Karzai and the Afghan government. The Taliban and al-Qa’eda know this and more. They have closely followed the testy debates in parliaments across Europe about deploying troops to Afghanistan. They count on inflicting a few bloody casualties, letting body bags arrive in European capitals, and then seeing the protests against deployment escalate.
    The Taliban are also testing American resolve. Nato’s deployment is part of Washington’s agenda to reduce its forces in Afghanistan. It is pulling 3,000 troops out this summer and possibly more later.
    The Karzai government is angry with Washington, because many Afghans see this as the start of a full American withdrawal.
    Despite Bush and Blair claiming to be successfully micromanaging the war on terror, the war is expanding and the region faces increasing chaos…
    Al-Qa’eda, now under the operational leadership of the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri, has helped reorganise the Taliban, create unlimited sources of funding from the sale of Afghan-grown opium and forged a new alliance linking the Taliban with extremist groups in Pakistan, Central Asia, the Caucasus and Iraq. Al-Qa’eda has facilitated a major exchange of fighters and training between the Taliban and the extremist groups in Iraq.
    Iran is spending large sums out of its windfall oil income in buying support among disaffected and disillusioned Afghan warlords. The day America or Israel attacks Iran to destroy its nuclear programme, these Afghans will be unleashed on American and Nato forces in Afghanistan, opening a new front quite separate from the Taliban insurgency.
    In Central Asia, the Western alliance is floundering. America lost its major military base in Central Asia after Uzbekistan kicked American forces out last year. Emboldened, tiny Kyrgyzstan is now demanding that Washington pay it 100 times more for the base it provides for American forces. Russia and China are working on making sure that America and Nato surrender all their remaining toeholds in Central Asia.
    All this is a result of America, Britain and others taking their eye off the ball and circumventing the indisputable truth of 9/11: that the centre of global jihadism and the threat it poses the world still lies in this region, not in Iraq…

Rashid concludes by writing:

    The Western alliance can still win in Afghanistan and root out terrorism, but only by means of a serious, aggressive and sustained commitment by its member countries. So far at least, that commitment is still not apparent.

I am not so sure that this is still possible. (Anyway, rebuilding Afghanistan is supposed to be UN commitment, and not just one that is dominated by the “Western alliance.”)
Rashid is glaringly correct, however, to note that the effort to rebuild Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban was dealt a body blow by Bush’s reckless decision to invade Iraq.
The poor, poor Afghans! This is the second time in recent history that the US, having won a significant military victory inside their country, then proceeded to majorly short-change the project of post-conflict reconstruction, thereby allowing it to sink back into warlordism, esclating social-political chaos, and all the miseries attendant on that situation.
The first time that happened was after the US-supported “mujahideen” forced the Soviets to withdraw their army from the country in February 1989… But after that, Bush I, and then Clinton, promptly forgot about Afghanistan and allowed the warlords (who had been Washington’s allies in the earlier anti-Soviet campaign– along with Usama Bin You-know-who) to wreak their havoc on the country’s people…
Then, in November 2001, the US won a second significant military victory in Afghanistan when it toppled the Taliban regime there (with the help of many of those same warlords). And once again, in the aftermath of the military victory, Washington took its eyes off the ball, this time swiveling them toward Baghdad.
What is the problem of the US policymaking class? When will they ever learn that a military victory is worth nothing on its own, unless the “victory” that it allows can be nailed down solidly through a smart and committed policy of social-political reconstruction for as long as it takes, afterwards?
(Actually, they did know that once–back in 1945. But somehow the lessons seemed to get forgotten after that.)
This time, the stakes for Washington, and the world, are enormous. Afghanistan seems to be turning into a powder-keg. The US position in Iraq is a draining and futile quagmire. And in both places, the collapse of US power that seems to be approaching faster each day will have much wider regional repurcussions… (Pakistan, for instance, will not easily escape from the tumult that reigns along its ungoverned borderlands with Afghanistan.)
Those of us US citizens who oppose war and violence need to be very calm as we point out that:

    (1) As the Dalai Lama says, violence always begets violence. The fact that the US has invested so hugely in massive machines of violence for so long, and has used them so broadly in the past five years, has unleashed huge cascades of violence around the world. Some of this violence comes back to hit Americans. But most of it has affected the poorest and most desperate people in the communities involved. We should all be ashamed.
    (2) But better than standing around being ashamed, it is time for our country to cease its reliance on violence and to find ways to redirect all that spending, training, and hardware that until now has been poured into the military, and
    (3) Meanwhile, nonviolent ways certainly always exist whereby the world’s conflicts and the any threats to the lives and wellbeing of the US citizenry can be addressed and resolved: We need to return to using and strengthening those nonviolent conflict resolution mechanisms.

Meantime, let’s all just hope and pray that the people(s) of Afghanistan can find a way to de-escalate the violence that now plagues so many of their communities. If the US military cannot be part of a project that is effective at rebuilding Afghanistan, then it should be withdrawn from the country. There, as in Iraq, the argument that the US military presence is needed in order to “keep the peace” now seems very hollow indeed.

How will this war be memorialized?

This US war in and against Iraq was lost a long time ago.  There remain
many large political questions regarding the manner, timing, and consequences
of the US exit.  But on this weekend, when Americans participate in
their annual commemoration of the fallen of former wars, I wonder what form
the future memorialization of this war will take– both here and in Iraq.

Wars, and those who have lost their lives in them, can be memorialized in
many different ways (or not at all.)  In the United States, memorials
to wars and warfighters past run the gamut from the bronzed triumphalism
of the horse-riding generals who prance atop the traffic circles in Washington
DC to the stark gash of Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial.  Somewhere
close to Lin’s mood (but less shocking) is the display in another of my favorite
war memorials, the one at Appomatox
Court House, the place where Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered his secessionist “Army
of Northern Virginia” to the federal general Ulysses Grant, thus marking
the end of any hope for victory of the slaveholding southern secessionists.

The Appomattox museum is in a rural area of Virginia around four hours’ drive south of DC. It is sited in a collection of small, old buildings in
a pastoral setting. The particular display that I like is a large room
that presents many photos of the war-dead.  I guess the US Civil War was
fought near the dawn of the age of photography, and the families of many of
the young men going off to war from North or South were able to have photographs
of their loved ones made, to remember them by, before they shipped out to
battle.  (Okay, it seems to have been almost solely the officers
who did that.  I guess photography was still expensive in those
days.)

The casualty rates in the war were truly appalling.  Photography and
the reloadable musket may have made their way onto the scene, but antibiotics
and the practice of antiseptic doctoring certainly had not.  A huge
proportion of those men who set off never came home again.  Relatively
lucky were the families who at least had a treasured daguerrotype of the
loved one, made before he left…

So in this room in the museum today, they have lined the walls with a few
hundred of these photographs.  Each one is mounted on a
matte made in the color of the side he fought for: blue, or grey. And the matted
photos have been put up on the walls in a checkerboard design: blue next
to grey next to blue next to grey…  The room commemorates them all,
equally. Look up close and you see the stiff images of those men, mostly young
men trying to look stern and brave, like warriors.  Look from a distance
and you see a sea of men all cut off in the bloom of their manhood, and
their political affiliations don’t matter at all.

The “message”, if you like, of that display is one of national reconciliation
and national unity, and it is very effectively and movingly conveyed.  (This
mood is lost completely if you click through
this
webpage maintained by the museum, where you click on two different flags
to see the slideshows of the dead from each of the separate sides…)

However, what we need with respect to the US-Iraq war is probably not at
this stage the projection of any message of “unity” or even “friendship”.
 Friendship between the two countries may, or may not, come. At some point.
 But when one country’s army is still occupying another country it seems dishonest to speak of that relationship as having anything to do with “friendship”.  Surely the message that we in the US anti-war,
anti-occupation movement should seek to have our memorial project instead is a strong message
of reproach to our government and to those individuals within it who
dragged our country– and also with far, far worse consequences, Iraq– into this
horrific war.

As well as a message of comfort, remembering, and compassion
to all those who lost loved ones or were wounded in this war.

Reproach and remembering are, of course, the two main messages of Maya
Lin’s beautiful Vietnam War memorial.  But reproach is also a strong
element in another U.S. memorial from the Civil War era:
Arlington National Cemetery
.

Arlington National Cemetery was established right on the grounds of Gen.Robert
E. Lee’s family home, on the banks of the Potomac River looking straight
across at Washington DC. Lee, who had been a general in the Union Army before
the Civil War, was probably the highest ranking military man to defect to
the Confederacy.  (His wife was also the grand-daughter of George and
Martha Washington.)  After Lee’s defection, the Union Army sent troops
to occupy his homealong with all its extensive pastures and other landholdings.  In
1864, the US government expropriated the land from the Lee family.  By
that time the dead from the war were becoming very numerous.  The Union
generals transformed much of the Lee land into a vast war cemetery, burying
the dead right up to the edge of the family home of the man they blamed most
for the prolongation of the rebellion and the terrible, continuing toll of
the fighting.

So here’s my plan.  Maybe the best reproach for this present war would be for
the next US administration to acquire land right up to the door of George
W. Bush’s family home on Prairie Chapel Road, in Crawford, Texas, and to
establish there a large and impressive monument of reproach, mourning, and
remembrance.  Or we could have two such monuments: one in Crawford,
and one in
St. Michaels, Maryland, that could take in and engulf the homes there of both Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld.

Of course, Cindy Sheehan and the folks at Camp Casey in Crawford did
a pretty good job last year, in starting to mount a reproach-and-remembrance
memorial there that would surely have caught George Bush’s eye whenever he drove
along Prairie Chapel Road to his “ranch”.  (Look at the second photo
here,
in particular.)

They used crosses… Which is okay as far as it goes, though perhaps a little too theologically specific for the great public monument I envision. I found the empty boots of the “Eyes Wide Open” exhibition very moving. Maybe something could be done along those lines, instead?

But that’s for later.

Cindy and her friends are resourceful and dedicated.  But they are still
just a bunch of under-resourced individuals.  What we need to do, as a citizenry,
is to get our whole national government into the right frame of mind regarding
the war in Iraq.  That means, first and foremost, electing a government
that will undertake
a troop pullout from Iraq that is speedy, total, and generous.  But it also means, in the years ahead, following that great group
of Vietnam-war veterans who managed to persuade Congress to build a memorial
to their war that was impressive, serious, and non-triumphalistic.  They
got Congress to give them a great location for their memorial, too.  

Probably, on second thoughts, the future Iraq war memorial should be located
on the National Mall in Washington DC.  As near to the White House– or to the Pentagon–
as possible, I say.

But there could still also be additional memorials in Crawford, Texas, and St. Michaels,
Maryland. Just like Robert E. Lee, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld should never
be allowed to forget the extent of the losses that their decision to launch
this war has inflicted on the world.

Nir Rosen and the omnipresence of fear in Iraq

Nir Rosen has a great piece of reporting/reflection about his most recent trip to Iraq in today’s WaPo “Outlook” section. He describes the trip as having taken place “a few weeks back.”
The headline there is simply Iraq is the Republic of Fear. That picks up on something Rosen wrote in the body of the piece. He recalled that “Under the reign of Saddam Hussein, dissidents called Iraq ‘the republic of fear'”… Well, actually it was Kanaan Makiya who coined that term, writing a book by that name that catapulted him to fame, glory, and financial security back in 1990-91.
Makiya subsequently used his considerable public prominence in the US to urge on the (already weighty) pro-invasion lobby. He was one of three Iraqi oppositionists brought into one of those key meetings with Pres. Bush back in 2002.
As Rosen writes, the anti-Saddam dissidents hoped the “republic of fear”

    would end when Hussein was toppled. But the war, it turns out, has spread the fear democratically. Now the terror is not merely from the regime, or from U.S. troops, but from everybody, everywhere.

He recalls some of the changes since he first went to Iraq to write about it in the early days after the invasion:

    At first, the dominant presence of the U.S. military — with its towering vehicles rumbling through Baghdad’s streets and its soldiers like giants with their vests and helmets and weapons — seemed overwhelming. The Occupation could be felt at all times. Now in Baghdad, you can go days without seeing American soldiers. Instead, it feels as if Iraqis are occupying Iraq, their masked militiamen blasting through traffic in anonymous security vehicles, shooting into the air, angrily shouting orders on loudspeakers, pointing their Kalashnikovs at passersby.
    Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis.

In this piece, as in the long article Nir had in the March-April issue of Boston Review, he delineates the breaking-up of much of Iraqi society into sect-based sub-communities. This time, in even more sickening detail than before.
He writes:

    Even shared opposition to the Occupation couldn’t unite Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites, and perhaps that was inevitable given their bitter history of mutual hostility. Instead, as the fighting against the Americans intensified, tensions between Sunni and Shiite began to grow, eventually setting off the vicious sectarian cleansing that is Iraq today.
    During the first battle of Fallujah, in the spring of 2004, Sunni insurgents fought alongside some Shiite forces against the Americans; by that fall, the Sunnis waged their resistance alone in Fallujah, and they resented the Shiites’ indifference.
    But by that time, Shiite frustration with Sunnis for harboring Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the bloodthirsty head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, led some to feel that the Fallujans were getting what they deserved. The cycle of violence escalated from there. When Sunni refugees from Fallujah settled in west Baghdad’s Sunni strongholds such as Ghazaliya, al-Amriya and Khadhra, the first Shiiite families began to get threats to leave. In Amriya, Shiites who ignored the threats had their homes attacked or their men murdered by Sunni militias.
    This is when sectarian cleansing truly began…

He concludes on a very pessimistic note:

    The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

Personally, I cannot be so gloomy. Firstly, because I guess by my psychological constitution and my moral-spiritual stance in the world I just am not (and cannot allow myself to be) that gloomy. And secondly because I truly do judge that a lot of the sectarian asabiyeh (sensitivity/ identification) that has arisen in Iraq in the past two years has been deliberately provoked and stoked by the occupation forces… In line with the infamous advice that Washington’s longtime pro-Israeli “Middle East guru” Martin Indyk gave back in April 2003, when he said publicly that the administration would have to play the imperialists’ traditional game of “divide and rule” in Iraq if it was to have any hope of “winning” there.
So if a lot of the inter-group hatred inside Iraq has indeed been stoked and provoked by the occupation forces and their more shadowy interventionist wings, then once the occupation ends, surely that stoking will also end?
Yes, it is true that inter-group hatred, once stoked, can all too easily acquire a life and cyclical dynamic of its own. It can’t “simply” be turned off– far less reversed. But in the absence of having the imperial (oh sorry, “occupation”) power always there, whispering fear-talk into people’s ears, and offering and making good on deliveries of lethal weapons to all sides, then at least there is more hope for an intentional message of national unity and national reconciliation to receive a decent hearing.
Also, if none of the people and leaders can any more harbor the hope that they can launch their own sectarian adventures while also receiving some protection from that outside power, then there is more chance that all Iraqis can sit down together and figure out more realistically how to deal with each other, with none of them any more relying on outsiders to put a finger on the scales in their support…
So though I have enormous respect and admiration for Nir Rosen, and feel quite confident that he was writing the truth of the situation in Iraq exactly as he saw it– still, I have also lived through and seen situations in which apparently deep-seated hatreds and cycles of violence have been overcome and transcended through the application of smart and compassionate policies of national unity. South Africa is one great example– how many of us, seeing the terrible inter-communal violence back in the 1980s, did not expect a continuation/exacerbation of the bloodbaths there? Mozambique is another. Lebanon, in its own quirky and radically unfinished way, is yet another. (How many people could have expected a Maronite-Sunni alliance such as we see today, or an Aounist-Hizbullah alliance, or indeed any of the literally scores of unlikely political configurations the country has seen since 1975? And still, there, none of the political forces has ever given any serious thought to the idea of secession… )
But anyway, my disagreement with Nir is mainly on the pessimism and fatalism of his prognosis. As for the observations and analysis in today’s article– why, everyone should rush to read them.

Haditha: massacre, cover-up– and now what?

Last November, there was an incident in the western-Iraq town of Haditha in which one Marine and 24 Iraqi civilians ended up dead. The next day, the New York Times reported this:

    “The Marine Corps said Sunday that 15 Iraqi civilians and a marine were killed Saturday when a roadside bomb exploded in Haditha, 140 miles northwest of Baghdad….The bombing on Saturday in Haditha, on the Euphrates in the Sunni-dominated province of Anbar, was aimed at a convoy of American marines and Iraqi Army soldiers, said Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, a Marine spokesman. After the explosion, gunmen opened fire on the convoy. At least eight insurgents were killed in the firefight, the captain said.”

That story from Capt. Pool was not challenged in the US MSM until March, when Time magazine ran a story– based on video footage shot by a local journalism student and testimony from the townspeople– that said that most or all of the Iraqi casualties had been killed in cold blood, and that none of them were “insurgents”.
The Time story provoked a serious investigation of the incident by the Marine Corps command. Today, Ellen Knickmeyer writes in the WaPo that,

    Two U.S. military boards are investigating the incident as potentially the gravest violation of the law of war by U.S. forces in the three-year-old conflict in Iraq. The U.S. military ordered the probes after Time magazine presented military officials in Baghdad this year with the findings of its own investigation..
    An investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service into the killings and a separate military probe into an alleged coverup are slated to end in the next few weeks. Marines have briefed members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and other officials on the findings; some of the officials briefed say the evidence is damaging. Charges of murder, dereliction of duty and making a false statement are likely, people familiar with the case said Friday.
    “Marines overreacted . . . and killed innocent civilians in cold blood,” said one of those briefed, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), a former Marine who maintains close ties with senior Marine officers despite his opposition to the war.

I agree with AP’s Robert H. Reidwho today wrote that the charges likely to be brought against the perpetrators of the Haditha massacre, “could threaten President Bush’s effort to rally support at home for an increasingly unpopular war.”
A number of commentators are comparing the expected effect of the full revelation of what happened in haditha to either the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, or the revelations about the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse in Iraq. However, in May-June 2006, the Bush administration starts out with the domestic and global assessments of its project in Iraq already far more negative than they were at the time of the Abu Ghraib revelations in April 2004.
Therefore, the Haditha revelations, as they are fully made, could well turn out to be “the straw that breaks the camel’s back” of US resolve to stay in Iraq. This, even though it is not clear to me that what happened in Haditha that day is necessarily the worst atrocity committed by the US forces in Iraq. How about the actions committed in Fallujah, or Ramadi, or Tel Afar?
The Haditha massacre seems to have had the same psychological dynamic as the Jenin Camp massacre committed by the IOF in April 2002. In both cases, the occupation force had suffered some casualties at the hands of resisters and then went on a rampage of bloody retribution against the local population. Military forces that go on rampages are generally something commanders want to avoid– not only because it riles the local public and helps keep the flames of resistance burning, but also because such incidents signal a dangerous lack of discipline among the troops.
That AP piece reports that, “U.S. Marine, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, is headed to Iraq to personally deliver the message that troops should use deadly force ‘only when justified, proportional and, most importantly, lawful.'”
Isn’t it about 38 months too late to deliver that message at this point?
Anyway, huge kudos to John Murtha and to all who have worked hard to uncover the facts about Haditha, to keep this issue alive, and to hold accountable those responsible… Perhaps in this case, as at Abu Ghraib, “those responsible” should include an American political leadership that used an inappropriately composed and inadequately trained military force to launch a gratuitous aggression against a foreign country, and then left those soldiers and Marines there for three-plus years without generating any effective plan for how to deal with the predictable local opposition to the occupation, or how to change the political dynamic and get the troops out.
No wonder some of those Marines were pissed-off, or just plain flat-out scared. If I were under the orders of this Commander-in-Chief I would be really scared, too.
Every month the occupation force stays will see the chance of another one, or two, or three Hadithas.
How can we risk that?
Get out now, before the rot sets in even deeper!
The Bush administration should announce immediately that it intends to have all US and “coalition” forces out of Iraq by the end of October. Then the planning and negotiation for that necessary step can begin in earnest.