Author: Helena

This guy’s been outside the US for too long!

I was reading a recent interview with Andrew Tabler, an American who’s spent the past 14 years in the Arab world, most prominently in Syria, and who’s about to take up a nicely funded fellowship at the AIPAC-founded ‘Washington Institute for Near East Policy. (HT: Josh Landis.)
There are a few interesting nuggets in the interview– though not as much useful information as you’ll find in Syria Today, the monthly magazine Tabler has edited for a few years now in Damascus, with much support from Syria’s “First Lady” (a quaint term that he himself actually uses), Mrs. Asma al-Asad.
So now Tabler is coming back to the US, where he says his goal is, “to try and make it so that whatever discussions come about are based on Syria as it is as well as what it could realistically be.” All well and good– though we could maybe explore a bit more what the meaning of “is” is?
But here’s the hilarious part of the interview:

    [Arabs] are a lot like Americans, especially from the countryside: very nice, personally very warm. On the surface, we’re very, very similar. But there are fundamental differences. The Arab world is badly ruled. Its rulers are not accountable to their people, and they often make very bad decisions…

Unlike Americans???
Here’s a guy who was not in the US during the lead-up to the Iraq war. Not in the country during Hurricane Katrina. Had still not– when he gave this interview– come to the US during the current– still accelerating– financial meltdown…
Welcome back to the United States, Andrew.

The Bush administration on the Right to Food: Uncaring, tone-deaf, or both?

So at the end of November, just as most Americans were preparing the gargantuan feasts they have every year on “Thanksgiving”, the US representative in the UN’s Third Committee was the only representative there to vote against a resolution on the “Right to Food” under which the UN General Assembly,

    would “consider it intolerable” that more than 6 million children still died every year from hunger-related illness before their fifth birthday, and that the number of undernourished people had grown to about 923 million worldwide, at the same time that the planet could produce enough food to feed 12 billion people, or twice the world’s present population.

The vote on that resolution was 180 to 1. Only the US voted against it. (HT: B of Moon of Alabama.)
As a US citizen, I consider that vote a disgrace.
The UN record of the vote and discussion, linked to above, tells us that,

    After the vote, the representative of the United States said he was unable to support the text because he believed the attainment of the right to adequate food was a goal that should be realized progressively. In his view, the draft contained inaccurate textual descriptions of underlying rights…

So according to this representative of the Bush administration (and still, tragically, of all of us who are US citizens), it is quite alright that “more than 6 million children still died every year from hunger-related illness before their fifth birthday”… because his, completely over-lawyered “reading” of the international declarations on this subject somehow make it okay?
This is a travesty of humanity.
It is also yet another international political disaster for the US.
It’s not enough that the US has felt in recent years that it has the “right” to invade other countries unilaterally, and quite in contravention of the UN’s norms on resolution of international differences?
It’s not enough that the US has felt it has the “right” to export a major destruction of agricultural livelihoods worldwide through its maintenance of of hefty subsidies to US Big Ag, while using the IMF to ensure that poor countries don’t subsidize their farming systems at all?
It’s not enough that the US has felt it had the “right” to export its completely toxic financial flim-flam “products” to other countries, forcing them to open their financial systems to receive said products??
… But now, the Bush administration– alone of all the other governments around the world– tells us it’s quite okay that six million children die each year from hunger-related illnesses… And this at a time when, yes, there is still enough basic food in the international system to feed everyone quite adequately, if it were distributed more fairly…
Why does the figure “six million” seem familiar?
That was the number of Jewish people who– along with smaller numbers of Romas and gay and disabled people– ended up dead because of the deliberate policy of the Third Reich to exterminate them.
But that was during the entirety of the European Holocaust.
What the UN Third Committee is talking about six million children being condemned to death each year by an international “system” in which the US is still by far the most powerful actor.
How can this be, for a single moment, acceptable?
Back on December 10, I noted the gross anomaly that the US government, which has presented itself as a strong “advocate” for human rights around the world, has still not ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, in which the right to “adequate food, clothing and housing” is explicitly spelled out.
I also spelled out that this language has strong relevance to the current situation inside the US, as well as in other countries.
Our country’s longstanding refusal to join the ICESCR makes it something of a “rogue state” on these issues, since 159 other nations have all signed and ratified it.
It is in the ICESCR, which entered into force in 1976, that the reference to the “progressive realization” of the listed rights can be found.
But since the US government hasn’t even fully joined the ICESCR, it is quite hypocritical that the US representative on the Third Committee was using that language about “progressive realization” to try to justify his vote that, essentially, allowed the killing of six million innocents each year to go ahead into the future, as heretofore.
Anyway, back in 1976, maybe some people thought it would take a few more years to get to the stage where it would, indeed, be possible to feed all of the world’s people.
That was 32 years ago. Nowadays, there is plenty of food to go around… if it is properly distributed.
But Washington now tells the world No, that needn’t happen.
And people in other countries are supposed to like and admire our country???
Here’s a strong plea to President-elect Obama and the incoming US Congress: Please have our country rejoin the world by ratifying the ICESCR as speedily as possible. And then do everything possible to ensure that everyone in the US and around the world can have access to healthy, assured food supplies, including by the restoration of agricultural systems inb low-income countries that have been wiped out by US food subsidies.
And let’s embed the rights spelled out in the ICESCR into all of the programs designed to save our own country’s economy and society from the ravages of the current crisis.

Afghanistan: “What would Thomas Jefferson do?”

Vampire06 of ‘Afghanistan Shrugged’ had an informative, well-written post yesterday about the challenges of trying– as the head of a US Army ‘Embedded Training Team’– to put into place the building blocks of procedural democracy in a place in eastern Afghanistan. (HT: Registan.)
V06 has enough self-awareness to understand some– but not all– of the ironies of his situation. Plus, he’s a good writer with an engaging, self-deprecating sense of humor.
His immediate challenge is to identify a location for the voter-registration center, in the northern part of Goumal District, right next to the border with Pakistan. The traditional tribal coloration of all the local terrain deeply impacts this issue.
He writes,

    What would Thomas Jefferson do?? I’m fairly sure he wouldn’t do what I’m doing which is standing there with my mouth open trying to catch some Afghan upper respiratory disease. Did I miss something along the way? Isn’t there some kind of UN monitor or some PhD in election science around to settle this?? Usually, if the question is really hard I ask my wife for the answer and she tells me and I sell like I knew it all along. You wives reading this know what I’m talking about, but that ain’t gonna fly here.
    OK, here we go. If I talk really fast and loud they’ll think I know what I’m talking about…

Now, V06 is in that district, as head of the ‘training team’ working with a battalion of the Afghan National Army. But don’t be in any doubt as to who’s really calling the shots here.
He writes:

    Because of our proximity to the border we have CAS [combat air support] circling the area, every 15 minutes or so we have them conduct a show of force our way of saying to anyone who might want to drop by unannounced; that we have a big stick to swing if needed. Later in the day we’ll here the gunfire from another unit closer to the border in contact. Be nice to everyone but have a plan to kill them.

Of course, the people flying CAS are Americans; and almost certainly the people able to “call them in” when needed would be the American “trrainers”, rather than the Afghan National Army officers. So it’s clear that it’s the US military that dominates the strategic environment there.
(I imagine our friends in Iraq are well aware this is what would happen there, too, if the US military is allowed to retain ‘training units’ with the Iraqi army even after US ‘combat troops’ have all supposedly evacuated the cities… )
But then, there is the also conundrum, very vividly represented by Vampire06, of how anyone can “implant” democracy in a distant foreign country, on the tip of a cruise missile or under the weight of a 2,000-pound bomb such as– in a big fight– the CAS people would be capable of delivering.
Democracy is, after all, at its very base a mutual agreement among the participants in a political system that they will not use force or coercion to decide tricky issues of policy arising amongst them, but will do so on the basis of an egalitarian respect for the views and preferences of all citizens, as brought together through a non-coercive process of deliberation and an accepted, well understood, and egalitiarian decision mechanism.
So how can you implant “democracy” in a situation where you have foreigners, backed up by cruise missiles and 2,000-pound bombs, making the decisions on behalf of a people who are living under foreign military occupation?
“Be nice to everyone but have a plan to kill them”? It doesn’t quite stack up to the high ideals and timeless principles of the US Declaration of Independence, does it?

Somalia and an international community in disarray (again)

So here we are, sixteen years on, and we once again have a major crisis of governance, civil chaos, and human suffering in Somalia; an international “community” that’s completely incapable of responding effectively; and a presidential transition here in Washington DC that complicates matters even further.
Maybe Somalia and its woes should stand– alongside Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and various other deeply troubled US projects– as a tragic monument to the mistakes Washington made during the years it wielded unrivaled power in the international system.
Somalia can also stand alongside those other projects as testimony to the failure of the US’s reliance on military means to address what are all, at heart, deeply political problems.
So here we are, sixteen years on.
Time for some lesson-learning, perhaps?
… This time around, we have the rapid unraveling of the US-backed political system in Somalia that was put in place by the bayonets of the Ethiopian army units that invaded the country almost exactly two years ago, at the behest of (and with much support from) Washington.
I’d love to know more about the decisionmaking of the Ethiopian regime, which recently announced it would be ending its (US-backed) occupation of Somalia. That occupation did win some backing from the African Union, which also deployed some token forces alongside the Ethiopians. It’s not certain if, as the Ethiopians withdraw, the AU forces will remain there. That seems doubtful… Meanwhile, the Islamic Courts Union, which had extended some valuable forms of unified control over much of the country prior to the Ethiopian invasion but were dispersed and brutally repressed by the Ethiopians, have been largely replaced by a younger generation of Islamist “shabab” (young men) who seem to be more hardline than the ICU.
The chief Ethiopian/US proxy in Somalia has been “President” Abullahi Yusuf, installed after the Ethiopian invasion. He and his backers have always been adamant, until now, that they would not negotiate in any way at all with the Somali Islamists. But the Prime Minister, Nur Hassan Hussein, has been more inclined to negotiate with the Islamists and other opposition forces. He and parliament opened impeachment proceedings against Yusuf yesterday.
Yusuf’s base of support has also been considerably weakened by two other developments: Big neighbor Kenya yesterday withdrew its support, calling him an “obstacle to peace.” And big demonstrations were reported in favor of PM Nur in Mogadishu and neighboring areas.
So it definitely looks as if Yusuf’s days are numbered. I hope Nur Hassan Hussein has the political smarts that will be needed to negotiate an internal political settlement in the country, because it seems there is absolutely no outside force capable of doing so.
On Tuesday, Condi Rice asked UN Sec-Gen Ban Ki-Moon to send UN peacekeepers to Somalia. Ban responded (not unreasonably) that (1) there was no peace to keep, and (2) none of the 50 countries he had asked, had agreed to commit any troops to this. So he looks incapable of pulling Pres. Bush’s chestnuts out of the Somali fire on this occasion.
Meanwhile, the main way the chaos in Somalia has been impinging on the international community in recent weeks has been through the spreading of the lawlessness on the country’s land into– and sometimes far beyond– its coastal waters.
International cruise ships filled with fun-loving Australians have been threatened! Supertankers carrying Saudi crude to the gas-guzzlers of North America have been threatened!
Notice that those incidents of piracy– few of which have been fatal to the people on the targeted ships– have received a whole lot more attention in the western media than the continuing, mega-lethal agonies of the people of Somalia.
The Somali “pirates” say they started their actions against international shipping after they became fed up with international vessels using their country’s waters to engage in illegal fishing and illegal trash-dumping. Quite possibly so… since of course, Somalia has no governmental coastal protection force capable of policing its long and fish-rich coastline.
On Tuesday, the UN Security Council did finally get around to doing something regarding Somalia. It passed Resolution 1851, which authorizes nations to use force to engage in,

    (Article 2)… seizure and disposition of boats, vessels, arms and other related equipment used in the commission of piracy and armed robbery at sea off the coast of Somalia, or for which there are reasonable grounds for suspecting such use…

Once these “suspicious” boats and vessels have been seized, the resolution apparently allows the seizers, or other countries with which they have agreements, to hold and try the accused pirates, “provided that the advance consent of the [Somali Transitional federal Government] is obtained for the exercise of third state jurisdiction by shipriders in Somali territorial waters… ”
It all sounds like an organizational and jurisdictional nightmare. Not helped when the US State Department declared yesterday, that it considers that resolution 1851

    “authorizes states cooperating with the Somali Transitional Federal Government to extend counter-piracy efforts to include potential operations in Somali territorial land and air space, to suppress acts of piracy and armed robbery at sea.”

So can we now expect to see US airpower being deployed against Islamists or others in Somalia, under the (in practice, hard-to-investigate) pretext that these targets are somehow connected with “piracy”?
The next few weeks will be important ones for the people of Somalia. And for the international “system” as a whole. The power projection capabilities of the US military are still hopelessly over-stretched, so it seems unlikely that the Pentagon’s planners will have the stomach for any particularly sustained campaign of attack against Somalia, under any pretext. Ships from numerous national navies are meanwhile steaming toward the Gulf of Aden and the Somali coast, to contribute to the anti-piracy efforts. The contributing navies include various European navies, the Indian navy, the Russian navy and probably also– playing for the first time ever a potentially combat-ready role in these waters– China’s navy.
Xinahua reported yesterday that,

    Chinese Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei confirmed that the government is “seriously considering sending naval ships” to the waters in the near future when speaking at a ministerial meeting of the UN Security Council on Somali piracy in New York on Tuesday.

Also on Tuesday, btw, a Chinese shipping boat that came under threat from the Somali pirates was rescued by members of other unidentified navies in the Gulf of Aden. That was, I think the fifth or sixth Chinese boat to have been targeted there.
A Chinese anti-pirate naval deployment to the East African coast will be the first deployment of a combat-ready force to the continent since the truly massive armadas the Chinese Muslim admiral Zheng He took to Africa in the 1420s. As I said, interesting times we’re living in.

Afghanistan: Some dots to connect

The Afghanistan Conflict Monitor does a great job of pulling together reports on breaking developments in that war-wracked country.
Here are three consecutive posts from today’s front page:

You can find many more details about the tragedy Afghanistan is living through, more than seven years into the country’s occupation by the US-led coalition, here.
Seven years into the US-led occupations of Japan and Germany, the situation in each of those countries was exponentially better than the situation in Afghanistan today.
The present model of overwhelmingly military, overwhelmingly western responsibility for Afghanistan’s in/security environment is clearly not working for the Afghan people. They– and the world– need a different model.

NATO trucking woes in Pakistan continue

The Daily Telegraph’s Isambard Wilkinson reports that the main trade association for Pakistani trucking companies that haul NATO goods into Afghanistan from Karachi has now decided to halt all NATO trucking until the security of the trucks and their drivers can be assured.
(HT: Afghanistan Conflict Monitor, again. Great resource!)
Wilkinson quotes Khyber Transport Association head M.S. Afridi as saying, ” “We have stopped supplies to foreign forces in Afghanistan from today. We have around 3,500 trucks, tankers and other vehicles, we are the major suppliers to Afghanistan, transporting about 60-70 per cent of goods.”
He writes,

    the main weak point, according to the Tariq Hayat Khan, the political agent for the Khyber tribal area, is on the outskirts of Peshawar city, which falls outside his jurisdiction and where the truck depots stand.
    The hauliers are asking the government to shift the depots away from Peshawar’s ring-road, to a less vulnerable place.

3,500 trucks is, I believe around five days’ worth of supplies for the NATO force in Afghanistan? Anyway, it looks like a stoppage that will have a significant impact for many ISAF troops in Afghanistan.
Afridi’s statement comes a week after a big attack in the Peshawar area left 160 Afghanistan-bound trucks as charred remains. But evidently there have been other attacks, too, since Wilkinson writes that “Hundreds of Nato and US-led coalition vehicles have been destroyed in the last two weeks after depots were targeted by hundreds of militants in northwest Pakistan.”
He adds this:

    Qudratullah Khan, a transporter from Khyber Agency who runs Al Qadri Cargo Company, said: “Transportation of goods to Afghanistan has become a risky job and even our lives at stake while taking the goods.
    “The vehicles carrying containers for Afghanistan are being looted in a broad day light, the drivers are killed and kidnapped, but we do not see any security or protection to us.”
    He added that there suspicions that drivers were involved in looting vehicles and convoys in collusion with the militants.
    …Mr Khan said the Taliban is taking 30 per cent of the goods as for the Taliban commander, Baitullah Mehsud’s “Islamic treasury”, and 30 per cent are shared by the drivers and transporters when these vehicles are looted or kidnapped.

So there’s a major problem of trusting the drivers. (And maybe, also, of trusting some of the army and security force units sent in to help guard the convoys?)
This certainly does not look like a problem that will be solved satisfactorily any time soon.
All of which increases the urgency with which NATO needs to conclude the negotiations it’s now holding with Russia about opening a major trans-shipment route into Afghanistan via the Russian railroads. Even more so, since NATO is planning to beef up its presence in Afghanistan, which means it will require an even thicker pipeline of shipments into the country.
Over the past few months Russia has lost a considerable amount of that portion of “leverage” it had with western nations by virtue of its status as oil exporter (though the leverage it derives from its gas exports has not declined as much.) But now, thanks to the deterioration of the security situation in Pakistan, Russia is acquiring considerable new leverage with the west by virtue of its rail network.
Stay tuned for developments in all aspects of this story. The situation in Pakistan does not look stable.

Israel’s revolving door for Palestinian prisoners

The respected Palestinian politician and humanitarian activist Mustapha Barghouthi notes that since Annapolis (remember Annapolis, folks?), Israel has released 990 Palestinian political prisoners– but it has arrested and detained (usually without trial) a further 4,950 Palestinians.
Israel, he said, now holds around 11,000 Palestinians, including 47 elected members of parliament.
A Palestinian non-state group holds one Israeli who at the time of capture was a combatant in the IDF.
So much for all the rosy promises and scenarios described at Annapolis, eh?
The promises regarding cutbacks in Israeli settlement building have proven equally content-free.
“Accountability”, anyone?

Bush’s militarism gets the shoe

Pres. Bush’s present tour to Iraq and Afghanistan was probably designed to be a “legacy-establishing” trip, or perhaps even– in the imagination of some of his advisers?– a victory lap. But yesterday’s incident, in which an Iraqi journo threw his shoes at Bush while yelling strong criticisms of him, seems an appropriate “footnote” to the arrogant militarism that dominated most of Bush’s time in office.
Because let’s be quite clear: That reliance on militarism has not worked. Early on, it registered some, very partial, “achievements”– the overthrow of the Taliban, the scattering of the bases Al-Qarda once had in Afghanistan, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the reliance on militarism failed to bring about the stabilization of the two countries invaded and their consolidation as strong and reliable US allies, a la post-1945 Germany or Japan. Instead, in both cases the overthrow of the old order through the use of force led to the unleashing of powerful new (or in Afghanistan, revived) anti-American movements, as well as a de-facto “legitimatization” of the use of force by those movements given that the US occupation forces were still dealing overwhelmingly with both countries through the use of brute military force rather than negotiation.
Meanwhile, Bush’s reliance on militarism in those countries– and elsewhere– has resulted in the deaths of thousands of Americans between service-members and private “contractors”; the maiming of tens of thousands more Americans; the sowing of chaos and civil war in both countries that has claimed many scores of thousands of their citizens’ lives, and the serious blighting of the lives of millions more; the imposition of budgetary burdens on the US economy that will take a generation or more to pay off; the torpedoing of the US “brand” and US credibility around the world; and a considerable increase in the power and influence of Iran in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Some months ago President Bush– ably advised, I believe, by Secdef Bob Gates– came to the realization that the goal of maintaining a dominant US military presence in the country in perpetuity was no longer realizeable. Hence, the administration’s final acceptance last month that it would have to sign a agreement with Iraq whose terms explicitly mandate a complete US withdrawal from the country by the end of 2011. (The US commander in Iraq, the ever-bellgerent Ray Odierno, recently claimed the US could change the terms of the agreement unilaterally and keep forces in Iraqi cities after the June deadline from their removal. But certainly the text of the treaty makes no provision for that.)
Maybe Bush hoped that when he went to Iraq yesterday, he would receive at least some recognition for the “graciousness” of the concession he’d made to the Iraqi negotiators? A different form of “Mission Accomplished”, perhaps?
Well, it’s possible he did receive some kind words from Nuri al-Maliki, the man who was installed as PM there primarily by the US occupation authorities but who then turned round and negotiated very toughly with the Americans this year. But few people will ever remember what Maliki said to Bush on this occasion. All that most people inside and outside Iraq will remember is the pair of shoes thrown at him– on video– at the press conference.
The guy who did that got wrestled to the ground by Maliki’s security men and was taken away to an uncertain fate. Maliki had lost considerable face by demonstrating that he couldn’t even control the cadre of heavily screened journos who are allowed into his press conferences. But McClatchy correspondent Laith makes clear that the anti-Bush sentiments run very extensively throughout the Iraqi press corps. Though Laith said he disagreed with the particular means of “self-expression” the shoe-thrower had used, he also said,

    I can’t blame the journalist for hating the U.S. president because I agree with all the Iraqis (not [the] politicians of course) that Bush’s policy destroyed our country.

But despite the bows they have made to raw, pragmatic realism in Iraq, Bush, Gates, and the president-elect all seem sold– for now– on the idea that reliance on near-unilateral US militarism still seems the best policy in Afghanistan.
How long will it take– and the lives of how many more people?– before the different branches of government in Washington really understand that War truly is not the answer, in Afghanistan any more than in Iraq?
The US citizenry needs to step up our activism on this issue. We need to all work together to give militarism the shoe.
(Update 3:25 p.m.: The LA Times blog has a good roundup of media attention in the Arab world, here. Note that even the usually pro-US Al-Arabiyeh network carried a commentary strongly supportive of the shoe-tosser.)