Author: Helena

China Hand on the bleak prospects for the US in Afghanistan

Longtime JWN readers will know I’m a fan of the analysis that a blogger called China Hand produces on Pakistan and Afghanistan. (He doesn’t, as it happens produce much on China. Go figure.)
Anyway, today CH has a well-worth-reading (though not short) post in which he deconstructs and tries to assess the policy toward the Pakistan and Afghan Taleban that he sees the Islamabad government as most likely pursuing.
Bottom line, at the end:

    if we let Afghanistan go down the tubes, as the deep thinkers in Pakistan are proposing, there’s no assurance that the Taliban can be rolled back in Pakistan.
    Perhaps this problem has become too big for the United States and Pakistan to solve on their own. And, since Washington and Islamabad apparently disagree on the definition of the problem, let alone the outlines of a solution, it looks like nothing but years of bloody muddle lie ahead.

I humbly submit, however, that there is another option, in addition to leaving the US and Pakistan to handle the whole Af-Pak/Taleban problem “on their own.” This would be for Washington to invite the UN Security Council to convene a broad and authoritative new conference, including, certainly, all Afghanistan’s neighbors, all the P-5 powers, and anyone else the Secretary-General considers worth inviting, and have that gathering take responsibility for real Afghan peacemaking away from the US and NATO.
The US and NATO seem almost uniquely ill-suited to the challenges in Afghanistan! I can’t imagine why anyone thinks these western armies could do anything to achieve stability in Afghanistan– at a price that’s affordable by their increasingly cash-strapped treasuries, or at all.
Sure, China and Russia might both be very wary of assuming any additional responsibilities in a place as intractable as Afghanistan. But it is, after all, far closer to them than it is to any NATO members; and the restoration of a decent degree of stability to Afghanistan and Pakistan is actually much stronger an interest for them than it is for the distant NATO members.
Of course I can quite understand, from a realpolitik POV, that China and Russia might both be extremely happy to see the US and its NATO allies continuing to degrade their forces and their treasuries by trying to hurl their militaries against the brick wall in Afghanistan. But at some point that has to be counter-productive for them.

‘Sensitive’ developments in Saudi Arabia? Succession-related?

Steve Clemons wrote on his blog Saturday that Dennis Ross was due to arrive in Saudi Arabia today on a big (and possibly hastily scheduled?) trip today.
He added that the Kingdom’s ambassador to the US, Adel Jubair, was due to hurry to Riyadh to help prepare King Abdullah for the Ross meetings.
Clemons also wrote:

    A source in the White House has shared with me that there is a lot underway right now with Saudi Arabia — and things are “sensitive.” I have no idea what is sensitive–

He then suggested quite a few items on the regional diplomatic agenda that might be “sensitive.’
I would say “sensitive” could well be some big development in the Kingdom’s slowly unfolding succession struggle.
To recap: Abdullah is 86. His half-brother Crown Prince Sultan is 82 and in very poor health– reportedly in a hospital in New York. When Abdullah traveled to Doha for the Arab summit at the end of the month, he appointed Sultan’s full brother, the “sprightly”, 75-year-old Prince Nayef, to be “second deputy prime minister”. First deputy PM is always, in this sui generis system, the Crown Prince. Previously the position of 2-DPM has been the stepping stone for successive sons of long-deceased patriarch King Abdul-Aziz to become later, 1-DPM (i.e. Crown prince), and later King.
When Nayef got the 2-DPM appointment, the well-informed Saudi expert Greg Gause wrote this about the development and about Nayef.
Bottom line: No non-prince ever really understands princely politics inside Saudi Arabia; but Nayef is extremely conservative on social issues and reform issues.
Early this month, the Guardian’s Middle East editor, Ian Black, had this article about Saudi succession issues.
He wrote there:

    the technical-sounding news about Nayef’s new job was something of a bombshell because it implied he was next in line for the throne.
    Taking into account the advanced ages of both Abdullah and Sultan, he could be sitting on it sooner rather than later.
    Experts point out that this is not certain. Formally, the choice is down to a secretive body called the Allegiance council, set up in 2006 and made up of the most prominent members of the royal family (all the sons or grandsons of the late King Abdulaziz, or Ibn Saud, the founder of the kingdom), who vote to appoint crown princes.
    Gregory Gause, of the University of Vermont, calls this a “wild card” in the succession process.
    Other Saudi-watchers predict that Nayef will eventually take over.
    “The question is still open but, most probably, Nayef will be king,” Mai Yamani, a London-based Saudi political analyst, said. “He is too powerful to be ignored.”
    Nayef’s claim to fame is more than 30 years of service as the interior minister.
    He organised the attack that ended the traumatic siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca 1979, and has led the fight against al-Qaida since the 9/11 attacks (having first blamed Israel’s Mossad and denied that any Saudis were involved).
    Brute force has been combined with a sophisticated rehabilitation programme to coax repentant “deviants” or jihadis back into the fold.
    With his son, Prince Mohammed, as the deputy minister, Nayef runs a classic and powerful Saudi fiefdom.
    He is also a social conservative who declared, days before his appointment, that there was no need for either elections or for female members of the advisory Shura council.
    Nayef rarely travels overseas, and is one of the few Saudi princes never to have visited Washington…

Anyway, at a time when the Saudis may well be dealing with some extremely sensitive succession-related issues, I imagine the presence of the extremely pro-Israeli Ross might be somewhat unwelcome.
Of course, there is a lot to discuss with the Saudis on the foreign policy agenda– including the collapse in Pakistan, where they are huge players, and the ever-simmering Palestine Question. But those two issues each have their own US special envoys, not Ross. (Steve Clemons wrote in that blog post that Palestine-Israeli envoy George Mitchell is also expected in Saudi Arabia this week.)
Oh, I see Xinhua is reporting about Dennis’s trip that he’ll also be going to Egypt. (As well as the UAE, Oman, Bahrain, and Qatar.)
Egypt?? That’s not part of the weird region of “South-west Asia” that is supposed to be Ross’s bailiwick. I wonder what all this is truly about?

Videos from the recent Georgetown University CCAS conference

… are now up on the website, here.
This is a fabulous resource. I shall certainly be coming back to it again and again. Many of the presentations were extremely important and well done: I learned so much from attending the two days of the conference.
The schedule for the conference is at the top of that web-page. Then scroll down to see the videos, which are not in the same order.
(My performance looks okay. One small mis-speaking– a reference to 40 Hamas people being incarcerated in the West bank, as opposed to 60 Hamas parliamentarians— and some possibly overdone, BBC-style hand gestures…. But it’s the way I communicate in large-group settings, so what can I do?)
Anyway, big congratulations to the CCAS staff for having gotten this up on the website so speedily. Just one small caveat: those presenters who relied heavily on Power Points get a bit short-changed since the videos don’t, I think, cue to those.

More dishonest argumentation from the WaPo’s Hoagland

Veteran WaPo columnist Jim Hoagland was a big drum-beater for the US invasion of Iraq, and he is now playing a belligerent and fundamentally dishonest role in trying to win US support for a still very possible Israeli attack against Iran.
In his column yesterday, Hoagland seems to be adopting a strongly Israelo-centric– or let me say Likudo-centric– perspective.
He writes,

    Obama has already offered diplomatic engagement to Iran without preconditions — making Tehran’s behavior, not Washington’s conduct, the dominant issue for international opinion. The policy adjustments have been necessary and adroitly handled.
    But they have also stirred doubts in Israel’s untested and politically heterogeneous government about Obama’s commitment to Israel’s security, as Netanyahu defines it…

And then this extraordinary piece of misjudgment:

    The nightmare scenario for Obama is that Israel launches an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities that is largely unsuccessful but that provokes an Iranian missile retaliation against Israel and all-out guerrilla campaigns by Hamas and Hezbollah. Could any U.S. president, however angry, turn his back on Israel in that situation?

No, Jim Hoagland. The nightmare scenario for any American president is that Israel launches an attack against Iran that then invites– and under international law, almost certainly justifies– Iranian retaliation against the vulnerable, over-extended supply lines in the Middle East of Israel’s strategic ally, the United States.
Not even one whisper of a mention of that possibility, Jim Hoagland? What an incredibly dishonest and extremely dangerous silence on your part!
Hoagland alludes to what is the most compelling evidence the Iranians would have, in certain circumstances, for retaliating against the US. Namely, that Israeli aircraft used in an attack on Iran would most likely have to have either flown through US-controlled airspace, whether in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, or elsewhere, or to have used refuelling planes supplied by the US to Israel for specifically defensive purposes.
If Israel uses other delivery platforms for munitions used against Iran, including missiles or drones, US collusion in the development of those weapons could also be argued by the Iranians.
In any case, the Iranians would have a very strong case under international law for an argument that retaliating against such a close Israeli ally in military affairs as the US would be justified in the event of an attack against them by Israel.
It has been that contingency that has kept several high-level American military planners up late at nights with worry for the past few years. It was that contingency that persuaded even the Bush administration to state forcefully to Israel last year that it would not give Israel the permission (and associated IFF codes) its planes would need if they were to fly to Iran over Iraq’s extremely sensitive airspace.
Hoagland referred to last year’s Israel-US exchange about overflight rights– but he made no reference at all to the concern many in the US military have about the blowback their very vulnerable forces would most likely suffer in the event of an Israeli attack against Iran. Why is he being so dishonest?
Elsewhere on the same page yesterday, I note, David Ignatius scored a hole in one by asking this simple question, in response to a series of vivid war reports the NYT has carried about firefights the US forces have been engaged in in Afghanistan’s remote Korengal Valley:

    I found myself wondering: Why is the United States fighting insurgents in the remote Korengal Valley in the first place? The story described the enemy as “Taliban,” but it said the locals are angry “in part because they are loggers and the Afghan government banned almost all timber cutting, putting local men out of work.” There’s apparently no sign of al-Qaeda in the valley, where people are fiercely independent and speak their own exotic language.
    While applauding the bravery of the U.S. soldiers, we should also ask the baseline question: Is this use of American military power necessary or wise?

He only raises the questions and is not yet prepared to give the only answer that makes sense to me. (Neither necessary nor wise.) But at least he’s heading in the right direction.
Unlike that dishonest old war-monger, Jim Hoagland.

Destruction of mosques in Israel after 1948

An argument that I heard from many peace activists in Israel and Palestine during my recent visit is that the Nakba– that is, the dispersal of the Palestinians from their homes, primarily in 1948, and the expropriation and frequent destruction of the properties they had left behind– was not a one-ff affair, but is a continuing process.
Current news photos of Palestinians in Gaza or Jerusalem who have been expelled from their homes through Israeli acts of violence, and are forced to live in tents while Israelis either take over or demolish their homes, are continuing evidence of this.
Recently I read Meron Rapoport’s painfully evocative article “History Erased: The IDF and the post-1948 Destruction of Palestinian Monuments”. It originally appeared– I believe only in Hebrew– in Ha’aretz in July 2007, and was published in English in the Jouranl of Palestine Studies in Winter 2008. Sadly, it’s behind a pay-wall.
Rapoport gives some information about a controversy that arose inside the Israeli bureaucracy about the IDF’s July 1950 demolition of the Mashhad Nabi Husain (Prophet Husain Mosque) in what had been the Palestinian town of Majdal– now, in Israel, Ashqelon.
According to local Islamic tradition, the mosque was the spot where the head of Husain ibn ‘Ali, one of the Shiite tradition’s most revered founders/martyrs had been buried.
After the mosque was levelled by the IDF, Shmuel Yeivin, the director of Israel’s department of Antuities, became quite angry.
Noting that the mosque in the nearby, abandoned Palestinian “village” of Ashdod had also been blown up, Yeivin wrote to the head of the “department for special missions” in the defense Ministry, “I believe the commander responsible for this explosion should be brought to trial and punished, because there was no justification for a swift, war-contingent operation.”
Guess what. It never happened.
Rapoport also noted that Israeli historian Meron Benvenisti has written of the 160 mosques in Palestinian “villages” incorporated into Israel under the 1949 Armistice Agreements, “fewer than 40 are still standing.”
This makes me want to go and read Benvenisti’s 2000 book on the subject, Sacred Landscape; The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948.
Anyway, I just wanted to mention the work of the two Merons here, because I recall that a few years ago some of the Israeli apologists who comment here at JWN were claiming there was no evidence at all regarding widespread Israeli destruction of Palestinian places of worship and cemeteries inside Israel.
Au contraire. There is lots of evidence– even for Engish-speaking readers. We just need to know where to look.

On bank governance: A modest proposal

I couldn’t help but be struck by the photo at the top of this article in today’s NYT, showing the CEO’s of the US’s 19 major banks lined up to await the results of Geithner’s ‘stress test’.
They are all men. Nearly all “white” men, though with a couple of ethnic South Asians there as well. Some preening, some looking slightly worried, all in white shirts and oozing opulence. (No surprise there.)
My proposal: Sack the lot of them. Sack all the male senior managers at each of these banks until you get to the highest-ranking women working there, and then make them into the CEOs, CFOs, COOs, etc.
There is more than enough evidence now out that shows that guys are just over-confident when it comes to assessing financial risk, and get more caught up than most women in risky behaviors that have a competitive edge. Just do a Google Scholar search on “gender risk finance”, and you’ll see the wealth of material that’s now available.
The article whose title I like best is “Boys Will be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment” (PDF here).
So why do the boards of these banks still consistently hire people with a Y chromosome into the top ranks of their management? Gosh, I’m still trying to figure that one out.
The results, though, have been clear: an excess of competitive risk-taking and an almost total disregard for the common good.

Sort of catching up here

I’ve been battling the flu for the past week. It made me feel mentally debilitated and above all TIRED. Since I’ve also been trying to write a big piece for Boston Review, I didn’t have any mental energy at all left over for blogging.
However, now, I am cautiously able to report some improvement.
A bunch of big things have been happening in the world this past week. Pakistan has been unraveling ways faster than most people expected. Iraq has also been in a bad way. The WaPo had a series from Afghanistan that seemed to convey that the military situation for the beefed-up US forces will be a lot more challenging than, I think, most Americans realize. The NYT’s business section had a fascinating report on the degree to which US home prices continue to plummet… The US Treasury has just released the first results of the ‘stress test’ it has applied to the country’s 19 largest banks– Treasury Sec Geithner is due to hold a news conference on the issue at 4:30 p.m. today.
All these developments indicate that the US’s power vis a vis the rest of the world is slipping quite a lot faster than it was at, say, this time last year.
I’ve been working so intensively on Palestinian questions these past four months that it’s been a while since I took a step back and looked seriously at the big picture of geopolitics. Maybe it’s time to do that with more regularity again.

Harman/Saban update

A propos of today’s Jane Harman story, Josh Marshall has been raising questions as to whether the “Israeli agent” mentioned in yesterday’s CQ piece might be Haim Saban, the Israeli-American entertainment mogul who also bought a huge amount of power and influence in Washington by buying out the whole the Brookings Institution’s Middle East research operation (since renamed the “Saban Center.”)
I have a few points to make regarding this:
1. An excellent late 2006 profile of, and interview with, Saban can be found here. It’s by Ari Shavit of Ha’aretz. You can learn a lot about Saban there, including his deep “passion” for Israel and the almost child-like delight he has in his ability to use his immense wealth to wield political power, e.g. in this section:

    “I’m not after power. But I do not belittle the fact that I can go to Angela Merkel in the Chancellory and say, ‘Hi, Angela, how are you?’ And she replies, ‘Haim, nice to see you.’ I don’t minimize that. That’s a great pleasure. And that I sit with Clinton in the White House and he goes to the refrigerator and asks me if I want regular water or fizzy? Sometimes I tell myself that there’s something a bit nutty here. He’s the president of the United States. I sell cartoons. So he is going to serve me and ask if I want regular or fizzy water?”
    Do you have the feeling that you are living in a movie?
    “I’m living in a movie all the time.”

2. Saban presents himself there as an Israeli-American, and he is almost certainly still a citizen of Israel (where he spent 19 years of his youth) as well as of the US. I am a dual citizen myself– of the UK and the US. I don’t know whether the holding of a foreign passport makes it “easier”, in US legal terms, for the NSA to wiretap a person. (Anyway, I always figured Dick Cheney would have been listening to my phone calls regardless of my nationality.)
For Saban’s part, from the Shavit interview he seems fairly strongly predisposed to go to bat for purely Israeli interests, even where these might clash with US interests, whereas since becoming naturalized as a US citizen in 1988 I have never felt the slightest urge to go to bat for British interests at the expense of any US interests at all. I don’t intervene in any way in British politics, and though Her Majesty might be shocked to learn this, I carry her passport mainly as a matter or personal and professional convenience at this point.
3. Anyway, if some of the heavy hitters in the US media would put some shoe-leather and other resources into reporting this story we’d have a far better idea of the identity of the un-named “Israeli agent”– who may or may not be an Israeli or a dual Israeli-US national– the wiretapping of whom led to the record of the call with Harman in the first place. Why have the WaPo and the NYT not yet published anything on this story?

More on Jane Harman, high-ranking pro-Israel mole?

Just how deeply have the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and its longtime backers and contacts in the Israeli securocracy wormed their way into the heart of US national decisionmaking? Considerable new evidence on this is provided in this important piece of reporting by Congressional Quarterly‘s Jeff Stein yesterday. (HT: The Arabist.)
Stein’s important scoop is about a series of moves that the high-ranking and strongly pro-Israeli California Congresswoman Jane Harman made in response to a telephonic appeal from an un-named “suspected Israeli agent” that she intervene politically to get the Justice department to reduce the charges against the two accused AIPAC spies, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman.
Stein writes,

    Harman was recorded saying she would “waddle into” the AIPAC case “if you think it’ll make a difference,” according to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA transcript.
    In exchange for Harman’s help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.
    Seemingly wary of what she had just agreed to… Harman hung up after saying, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”

Ah, but what she didn’t know was that the call was being wiretapped and recorded under the NSA’s wiretap program… And now, someone has leaked the transcript of that call to Stein.
Jane Harman is no ordinary member of congress. She was at the time, as the Stein piece notes, poised to become the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and thus privy to many kinds of intelligence that are not shared with ordinary members of congress– far less the citizenry.
It also meant she had powerful working relationships with members of the US securocracy and growing input into their decisions.
After the NSA overheard her saying she would intervene to try to save Rosen and Weissman’s skins, they and CIA head Porter Goss opened an investigation into her actions (the previous wiretap having been only into the conversations engaged in by her interlocutor.)
Stein writes:

    And they were prepared to open a case on her, which would include electronic surveillance approved by the so-called FISA Court, the secret panel established by the 1979 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to hear government wiretap requests.
    First, however, they needed the certification of top intelligence officials that Harman’s wiretapped conversations justified a national security investigation.
    Then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss reviewed the Harman transcript and signed off on the Justice Department’s FISA application. He also decided that, under a protocol involving the separation of powers, it was time to notify then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Minority Leader Pelosi, of the FBI’s impending national security investigation of a member of Congress — to wit, Harman.
    Goss, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, deemed the matter particularly urgent because of Harman’s rank as the panel’s top Democrat.
    But that’s when, according to knowledgeable officials, Attorney General Gonzales intervened.
    According to two officials privy to the events, Gonzales said he “needed Jane” to help support the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was about to be exposed by the New York Times.
    Harman, he told Goss, had helped persuade the newspaper to hold the wiretap story before, on the eve of the 2004 elections. And although it was too late to stop the Times from publishing now, she could be counted on again to help defend the program.
    He was right.
    On Dec. 21, 2005, in the midst of a firestorm of criticism about the wiretaps, Harman issued a statement defending the operation and slamming the Times, saying, “I believe it essential to U.S. national security, and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities.”
    Pelosi and Hastert never did get the briefing.

(The irony there was that Harman intervened strongly to defend the very wiretapping program that– whether she knew it at the time or not– had started to establish a pretty strong record of her own misdeeds.)
A year later, in November 2006, the Dems won control of the House– and Jane Harman, by then the Minority (Democratic) Leader on the Intelligence Committee was on the point of becoming its Chair. However, something evidently happened at that point that persuaded the powerful Pelosi that this would be a bad idea. Stein does not say what that something was. Rep. Sylvestre Reyes (Texas) became Chair instead.
Today, indeed, Harman is no longer even on the House Intelligence Committee.
This indicates to me that the extreme permeability to Israeli influence of many of the US’s leading national-security decisionmaking bodies that we saw during the early years of the Bush administration (and before that, during much of the Clinton administration) has slowly started to be rolled back in the past 2-3 years.
That early-Bush-era permeability– as manifested in the extremely strong influence of hawkish pro-Israelis in the Rumsfeld Defense Department, in Cheney’s office, and also, certainly in Congress– helped to feed completely skewed disinformation into the pre-2003 decisionmaking process over Iraq, and thus played a huge role in jerking our government into launching that mega-lethal and extremely ill-considered military aggression.
Now, today’s big “question” is whether the US will either launch a military attack against Iran or give Israel the permission it certainly needs if it is to use US assets and support to do launch one in its own name.
Might US decisionmaking once again be so permeable to Israeli disinformation and manipulation that Washington could get jerked into launching or allowing another ill-considered war– one that, this time, would draw our already overstretched military directly into a shooting war with a non-trivial and extremely sensitively located regional power?
This clearly is something that all US citizens have a strong interest in preventing. So the more we know about previous attempts by the Israeli securocrats to distort our country’s security-affairs decisionmaking, the better.
Huge kudos to CQ for publishing this story. I hope we see a lot more reportorial resources devoted to follow-up stories about all aspects of it.
But one last big question: Why, once again, do we see the WaPo and the NYT completely ignoring this important story, which CQ broke yesterday and should therefore have been in today’s editions of both papers?