Helena – Page 52 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

Lessons from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan

Someone called Artemy Kalinovsky has just published a thoughtful essay at the AfPak Channel arguing that, for precedents for many of the dilemmas the US military faces in Afghanistan, we should look no further afield than to the Red Army’s experiences in Afghanistan a quarter-century ago.
I have a lot more to say on this topic. But I’m tired.

IPS analysis of Iraq and related regional tensions

… is here. Also here.
One of the points I make there is this:

One notable aspect of the political tempests now swirling around Iraq is that neither in Iraq nor in the U.S. has there been any significant movement calling for the U.S. to delay or reverse its continuing pullout.

I truly think this is significant. The adamant refusal of just about all (non-Kurdish) Iraqis to ask the US to rescind or reverse its withdrawal plans surprises me not one jot. But I do think the fact that no-one in the US is calling for the US to “do something” to prevent further carnage inside Iraq is particularly notable.
I say this as someone who has always said that the American military is the organization that’s just about the most ill-suited in the world to be able to “help” Iraqis if political turmoil overtakes their country…. This is a part of my deep opposition to “liberal hawkism” in all its manifestations.
So fundamentally I’m really glad there are no significant American voices calling for the US to use its military to try to “help” Iraqis right now.
(Of course, it also helps that it was the Bushies who signed off on the Withdrawal Agreement. So the republicans are not now able to raise the whole question of the advisability of a US withdrawal from Iraq as an ati-Obama partisan issue.)
But I am still, also, more than a bit mystified. Where have all the people gone who, before the Bush administration’s conclusion last November of the Withdrawal Agreement with Iraq, were ominously warning that the US “could not” withdraw with anything like a fixed timetable from Iraq because afterwards Iraq might “spiral into bloody chaos”, or whatever?
Where are those people now?
What I’m sensing is that– perhaps especially after the economic collapse of last fall– most Americans have turned their back on their previous fondness for exotic foreign military adventures. Both Iraq and Afghanistan turned out to be not nearly as much “fun” as they used to be for those people.
This is mainly good– especially if it means there will be far fewer loud calls within the US political elite for foreign military interventions, for allegedly ‘humanitarian’ or any other purposes, over the years ahead, than there have been throughout all the years since the end of the Cold War.
But it’s also a bit worrying, if it means that Americans have become much more inward-looking and xenophobic.

Visser goes 2.0

The wise and well-informed analyst of Iraq affairs Reidar Visser has responded to the pleadings of the masses (well mine, anyway) and created a blog, Iraq and Gulf Analysis, on which he’s posting his shorter research notes as well as links to his longer analytical pieces.
Mainly, this past week, he’s been writing about the ISCI succession and the newly reconfigured Shiite bloc, the INA. He’s also loaded onto the blog all his past pieces, which are thereby now handily archived and accessible for us.
Thanks for doing this, Reidar! Now all your work will show up in a timely way on my Google Reader.

More on Norway’s targeted divestment

The compendiously smart and well-informed blogger Profco has a lot of great background about Israeli-Norwegian relations over at TPM Cafe today.
S/he wrote it, of course, in light of Norway’s recent decision to divest itself of previous investments in the company Elbit, which produces electronics for Israel’s illegal Wall.
Profco notes that Haaretz has put a new lead onto its story about this, noting the following:

“Further steps of protest”! Like what? Does Israel, too, have a $400 billion sovereign wealth fund that it can deploy in defense of its national values around the world?
Maybe the Israelis will unleash dirty tricks, or an invasion and occupation, or a suffocatingly tight siege against Norway?
Um, maybe better not, since Norway is not only a pretty darned exemplary western democracy but also a member of NATO.
Gal’s spluttering threat looks really childish, all in all…
So now, when will other western investment institutions start following Norway’s excellent lead?

Pat Lang on the dangerous, continued rise of ‘COIN’-mania

Lang makes some important points here about the distortion of what should be a rational, nationwide discussion about the US military’s massive and troubled engagement in Afghanistan.
He writes,

The interests of the reigning generals, the neocons and the Brothers of the Order of Counterinsurgency at CNAS are coming together now. The mechanisms for propagation of the faith in COIN as a vehicle for the program of the AEI crowd are widespread. Among them are internal blockage of access to blogs like this one by the armed forces, exclusion from the main stream media of dissenting voices and the editorial page of the Washington Post.

CNAS— the Center for New American Security– is a relatively young but currently very influential think-tank that’s been a hot incubator for “liberal” hawkishness. Michele Flournoy, one of its founders and its first president, is now Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy and may well replace Bob Gates as Secretary.
All the “mechanisms for propagation of the faith in COIN” that Lang mentions are important. But let’s hope that wise heads and the continuing military and financial realities of the situation in Afghanistan can speedily turn the debate in Washington in the direction it needs to go.
Oh yes, and some serious, pro-withdrawal popular pressure is really necessary, too.

Bravo, Norway!

Norwegian Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen today announced that the country’s $400 billion-strong sovereign wealth fund, the Oil Fund, has divested itself of all investments in the large Elbit company, based on Elbit’s involvement in the building and maintenance of the illegal Wall built by Israel deep inside the occupied West Bank.
Elbit, based in Haifa, makes surveillance systems used by Israel on the wall.
Bloomberg reports that Halvorsen told a press conference in Oslo today that,

Amira Hass, reporting this development for Haaretz, notes that Halvorsen’s decision comes in response to vigorous protests that have been mounted in Norway against Norwegian involvement in settlement-related and Wall-related companies.
She adds,

You can find the Coalition’s information on this here.
Norway’s decision on Elbit is a breakthrough. The Bloomberg piece gives more details about the operations, thinking, and other recent ethics-related decisions taken by the country’s Finance Ministry regarding the investment portfolio of the Norwegian Oil Fund.
It tells us that before today, the ministry, based on the advice of the ethics council that the Oil Fund established in 2004, had previously divested itself from 30 other companies, though some of these bans were later rescinded. For example, a ban was earlier imposed on Thales, Europe’s biggest maker of military electronics, because it was making cluster munitions; when that production stopped, the ban was rescinded.
I hope that portfolio managers in other institutions with large investment portfolios– including of course, pension funds and universities in the US– are looking closely at Norway’s latest decision and, crucially, the reasoning behind it.
Divesting from direct financial entanglement with Israel’s large-scale and continuing construction and control projects in the occupied territories strikes me as unquestionably the right thing to do, regardless what one thinks about the issue of a broader divestment from Israel as a whole so long as its government continues with these illegal policies.

An exiled Palestinian visits “home”

I’ve been reading the blog entries that Palestinian-American writer and activist Nehad Khader has been posting about her first-time visit back to her grandparents’ homeplaces (here, etc.)
Amazing, heartfelt writing. (HT: Adam Horowitz at Mondoweiss.)
Nehad writes:

Also, see her post about the Palestinian embroidery exhibition she put on in Philadephia before she left on her trip.
New Jewish immigrants to Israel from around the world are all given– in addition, of course, to instant citizenship, the right to reside in the country endlessly, and generous baskets of social benefits– a set of experiences, carefully stage-managed by the state’s Ministry of Absorption, that is supposed to make them feel as though they are coming “home.”
There is not one iota of stage-management in Nehad’s experiences, or of artifice in her reaction to them.
It is intriguing to me how nowadays, Palestinians with western passports are among the most privileged of Palestinians, being abe to travel much more freely among the many places of Palestinian residence– inside Israel, in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, the OPTs, Gulf countries, etc– than most of the Palestinians who still live in the Middle East.
Indeed, once you get to Gaza or the West Bank, the ability of Palestinians residing in those occupied areas to travel freely to visit close relatives in other places of Palestinian dispersal become almost zero.
Nehad was able to go to Syria, where she had spent her early years in the huge Yarmouk refugee camp. She went to Jordan (and of course found relatives there, too)… and now she’s in Israel.
The experience of being a Palestinian refugee today really is very different from what it was in, say, the 1950s. It’s true that Nehad and other Palestinians with western passports are among the luckiest, regarding the ability to travel. But nowadays, even many Palestinians living in Gaza or Lebanon, in the very worst of all the circumstances faced by Palestinians, can keep in some touch with relatives in other places through the internet, Skype, etc.
True, it is still nowhere near the degree of connectedness that people in rich and middle-income countries are coming to take for granted. But it’s a lot more connectedness than Palestinians had with each other in earlier decades… And of course, this has consequences.
One has been to keep a keep rich and textured sense of Palestinian-ness alive in all these places of dispersion. Another has been to make it just about impossible, in this century, to think of “splitting” the Palestinians currently resident in the OPTs from those of their brethren– including yes, in every family there, close family members– who have been forced to stay in the diaspora.
Thus, the rights, claims, and needs of the diaspora Palestinians cannot simply be ignored in the peacemaking, which is what the Israelis have always wanted– and what US diplomacy over the past 16 years essentially aimed at, too.
The Zionists have just about finished with their massive project of “gathering in” their people. The Palestinians’ roughly parallel project has not yet begun to be implemented.

Israel releases nine of 32 Hamas legislators

The Israeli government today released nine of the 32 Hamas-affiliated legislators, elected in June 2006, whom it had been holding since June 2006.
International law completely prohibits the detention of any persons when they’re captured solely to be held as hostages. But the basic criminality of the action– in the case of the captured legislators or any of the other thousands of Palestinians held without charge or trial in Israel’s infamous detention camps– has never for some reason caused western government to stop giving aid and succor to Israel.
The fact that Israel’s capturing of duly elected legislators— along with the numerous other actions Israel took to punish the winners of the 2006 election and the people who had elected them– went completely unpunished by western governments that proclaim a commitment to “democracy” also revealed most of those governments to be complete and unashamed hypocrites when it comes to taking the side of any Israeli government, even when it significantly violates international law.
But now, the release of these nine legislators signals the possibility that this situation of deep illegality on behalf of Israel and its backers in the international community is starting to be unspooled?
Will the release of these legislators be followed by the release of all the other Palestinian legislators– from Hamas and other parties– who are held by Israel without charge or trial, and in often very abusive conditions?
Will it also be followed by concerted international action to lift the quite inhumane siege that Israel has maintained on Gaza for many years, which was tightened significantly after Hamas’s electoral victory and then once again after the failure of Israel’s assault against Gaza last December to topple Hamas from power?
Since Gaza is still, under international law, a territory that’s under Israeli military occupation, Israel has special responsibilities under IHL for the welfare of the Strip’s residents. The fact that it has not only failed to meet those rsponsibilities but has also maintained a very damaging and inhumane policy of collective punishment against the 1.5 million Gazans for the past 43 months is almost certainly a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, that is, a war crime.
Certainly, all governments around the world that claim to uphold “the rule of law” should intervene vigorously to end Israel’s siege of Gaza. The aid convoys, very limited in capacity, that go to Gaza through Egypt or via the sea should be supported not only by a small number of plucky western activists and NGOs but by all governments that claim to support international law.
Does Israel’s release of these Hamas legislators– which may well have been carried out in response to pressure from western governments– signal that these governments are about to get tougher in their insistence on Israel’s compliance with international law in other ways, too?
I certainly hope so. The deliberately pursued suffocation and squeezing of Gaza by Israel, under the eyes of the watching world, has been a travesty of any concept of international “justice”. President Obama and his officials have “asked” Israel to lessen the conditions of the siege. Israel has done nothing to respond.
So what’s next?

Why Blair wants Dahlan to retake Gaza?

The Mail Online’s Nick Pisa recently put together a great series of photos of Tony Blair, Middle East envoy extraordinaire (very extraordinaire!) reclining and romping aboard various rich people’s luxury yachts between 2004 and roughly last week.
Pisa wrote,

Tony Blair still has some rich friends. The ex-prime minister was spotted yesterday living it up on board a £150million superyacht as a guest of the world’s fourth richest man…

Blair is, as we know, the person charged by the Quartet with “responsibility” for getting the Palestinian economy up and running. To that end, he and his staff have taken over a whole floor of rooms in the very expensive American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem– even though Blair is only there for roughly six weeks a year…
But of course, with Blair’s penchant for big luxury yachts now well established over the years, he’s going to need somewhere in “Palestine” for his rich friends to come in and pick him up, isn’t he?
Blair’s personal income has been estimated to be above $7 million/year. Average incomes in the OPTs are, I believe, a little lower than that.
Gideon Rachman (to whom goes the HT for the Mail Online story) writes that though there’s been much speculation about Blair becoming the first “President” of the EU, with all the anti-materialist pieties he’s spouting these days it looks more as if he’s running for Pope.
Rachman comments on these pieties:

I would take it all a bit more seriously if Blair hadn’t spent part of the summer as a guest on “Rising Sun”, a vast yacht, owned by Larry Ellison, the Californian billionaire.

Afghanistan debate: The missing international ingredient

With amazing rapidity, an extremely serious debate has erupted in Washington over whether the war in distant Afghanistan can be won, and therefore whether it is worth continuing to try to fight it. The apparent skulduggery that surrounded the recent elections certainly contributed to that, by making it suddenly seem even more improbable that a ‘nation-building’ program could be successfully completed any time in the foreseeable future.
Yesterday, the weighty paleo-conservative commentator George Will weighed in, arguing in the WaPo that it’s “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan”
Yesterday, too, the NYT editorial board hosted an entire discussion on the topic of “Is It Time to Negotiate With the Taliban?” The answer, from just about all their eight expert contributors, was “Yes”.
This, while the commander of US and allied forces in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal is on his way to Washington where he is widely expected to argue for an increased commitment of US troops to the the theater, and pursuit of an accelerated campaign of counter-insurgency/nation-building there.
Today, the WaPo’s David Ignatius waded into the debate, arguing for a “Middle Way” between shooting and talking in Afghanistan.
Also today, the WaPo hosted a forum of six outside contributors to reply to George Will. All except Andrew Bacevich were arguing for continued, and if necessary increased, US military engagement.
Just about everywhere else in the US public discourse, this issue is now being just as hotly debated… But nearly all these discussions fail to mention one factor that is vital both to the hope of Afghanistan’s people ever regaining some amount of internal stability and to the hope of the US forces avoiding a complete catastrophe there: That is, the fact that there are numerous other, significant but non-western, states that have strong interests in Afghanistan and a significant ability to intervene helpfully there in a number of ways.
The way most of the discussion here in the US is being conducted you’d think the whole “story” about Afghanistan consists of an outsize US super-hero trying to deal with a large number of very complicated (and generally rather ungrateful and un-cooperative) Afghan actors, with some bit parts being played by NATO allies and the still-troublesome government of Pakistan.
But if we admit– as I think we must– that the US is ways over-stretched in Afghanistan and needs to find a way to radically reduce its presence, a question immediately arises as to how to do that. Thinking about that challenge only in the context of “talking to the Taliban” or not talking to them misses a large part of the point.
Three additional questions that immediately arise are:

How

In addressing all these questions the international– that is, beyond-NATO and beyond-Pakistan international– context of the whole situation in the country becomes key.
Afghanistan sits in a central Asian arena in which China, Russia, and Iran all have strong interests. Ways stronger and more compelling, indeed, than the interests the US claims to be pursuing in the country!
But thus far, Washington has worked to sideline the degree of influence that any of these actors can have on political-strategic decisionmaking in and regarding Afghanistan. That prerogative has been reserved for– of all bodies!– the explicitly western, and anti-Russian military alliance, NATO.
This, even though over recent months NATO has become a lot more reliant on Russian transit rights for the very survival of its troop presence in Afghanistan. (As I’ve written quite a lot about here over the past couple of years.)
Over years past as I wrote a lot about what was needed for the US to be able to undertake a withdrawal from Iraq that was speedy, total, and generous, I always– like the 2006 Iraq Study Group– stressed the advantage of the US drawing all of Iraq’s neighbors into a serious negotiation of the post-withdrawal “rules of the game”; and I argued, too, that the UN had a special ability to convene and lead such a negotiation.
As it happened, in Iraq, as the Bush administration came last year to accept the need for a full US withdrawal it managed to do so with only minimal coordination from those of Iraq’s neighbors that it still hoped to marginalize and oppose (mainly Iran.) But of course, the failure to have an effective all-neighbors forum for Iraq continues to hamper Iraq– though not so much so, the US, as it withdraws.
In Afghanistan, the geostrategic situation that US forces face if and when they contemplate a withdrawal is significantly different. In Afghanistan, the significant neighbors include two of the world’s veto-wielding “big powers”. Also, in Afghanistan, the sheer logistics of a withdrawal are very much more complex than in Iraq. There’s no handy and compliant neighboring staging post such as those provided near Iraq by Kuwait, Jordan, and Turkey… And in case anyone hadn’t noticed this, the terrain within and around Afghanistan is mighty hard to traverse or operate within!
So even just in organizing the logistics of any significant US/NATO drawdown from Afghanistan– let alone the politics and diplomacy of how to do that– the US will be forced to coordinate closely with the country’s “neighbors” (broadly defined). And those will include Russia, China, and Iran.
How will that go? Who knows? What seems clear to me is that, for now, many in the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party and in Putin’s inner circles in Moscow must be relatively happy to see NATO bashing its had against a brick wall inside Afghanistan– degrading its capabilities by the day as it does so, while also acting as an ever-increasing drag on the US national budget.
So they might not be in any big hurry to help Washington out… On the other hand, since the main effect of US actions thus far inside Afghanistan has been to allow the Talibs to reconstitute, and since the Talibs pose a much more present threat to China and Russia (and also to Iran) than they do to the US, at some point I imagine these powers may well become happy to step in and help the US exit from the quagmire.
For a price.
Anyway, in all of this, the UN will play an increasingly important role. It is still, after all, the main place where inter-big-power business gets done in the world.