The Dahiyya, Gaza, Sadr City… the march of destruction continues

Attentive Middle East watchers have remarked since 2003 on the similarities between Israel’s various military actions against its neighbors and those of the US in Iraq. The bottom line in all these engagements is that the “western” power has used its military to try to impose its control over the peoples of foreign countries. (I wanted to say “citizens” of foreign countries, but the “citizenship” the Palestinians have is fragmentary and thin, since they have no state of their own. But still, the West Bank and Gaza do not in any sense “belong” to Israel. Hence, my term “peoples of foreign countries.”) But in all these cases, the attempt to impose control– to extract the “compliance” of the natives by using brute force– has failed.
In Lebanon, in 2000 and once again in August 2006, the Israeli government came to recognize the counter-productive nature of its project, withdrew its forces, and halted the use of stand-off weapon attacks against the country.
In Gaza (and the West Bank), it is still grimly trying to continue the project.
In Sadr City, as in many other parts of Iraq, the US occupation forces are suddenly finding themselves in a very Gaza-like, or Dahiyya-like, situation. The natives are refusing to comply– and they are refusing to be cowed by the amazingly destructive arsenals used against them.
Like the Israelis in the 33-day war in Lebanon, the external assailants do not have anywhere near enough ground troops to be able to “swarm” the territory. So, like the Israelis in the 33-day war in Lebanon, they’re trying to cow the population of Sadr City by the use of very destructive standoff weapons. So almost inevitably, oops… here comes Petraeus’s Qana. AFP tells us:

    A US rocket attack damaged a hospital in the Iraqi capital’s violent Shiite stronghold of Sadr City on Saturday, wounding 28 people as American forces claimed to have killed 14 militants in the district.

AFP had a reporter on the scene. He or she

    said the district’s main Al-Sadr hospital was badly damaged and a fleet of ambulances was destroyed.
    Just outside the hospital, a shack which appeared to have been the target was reduced to a pile of rubble.
    The military said it destroyed a “criminal element command and control centre” by munitions from a “rocket system” at approximately 10 am (0700 GMT).
    “Intelligence reports indicate the command and control centre was used by criminal elements to plan and coordinate attacks against Iraqi security and coalition forces and innocent Iraqi citizens,” it said.
    Hospital staff said at least 28 people wounded in the strike were brought inside for treatment at the complex which had its windows shattered and medical and electrical equipment damaged.
    Medical staff and other hospital workers were livid.
    “They (the Americans) will say it was a weapons cache” that was hit, said the head of the Baghdad health department, Dr Ali Bistan, who arrived to assess the damage.
    “But in fact they want to destroy the infrastructure of the country.”
    He charged that the attack was aimed at preventing doctors and medicines from reaching the hospital which is in an area that has seen increased clashes between American troops and militiamen loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
    The hospital corridors were littered with glass shards, twisted metal and hanging electrical wiring. Partitions in wards had collapsed.
    Huge concrete blocks placed to form a blast wall against explosions had toppled onto parked vehicles, including up to 17 ambulances, disabling emergency response teams.

So the US military claims that the shack was a “criminal element command and control centre.” I would like to see their evidence on that. I would also like to see the reasoning of the US military on why this structure, so close to a hospital, had to be destroyed at that time and in that disproportionately violent way.
The NYT’s Alissa Rubin writes that the destroyed structure was “a small building next door to the hospital that neighbors said was used as a place of prayer for hospital employees, pilgrims and neighborhood residents.” She notes that “the sign at the iron gate at the entrance to the building demolished by the American strike reads ‘Imam Hussein’s Resthouse.'”
She had a lot of other details about the attack. But the big picture is that US forces can’t win this battle, and there is no way they can “win” this war in Iraq. Meantime, they are sowing mayhem and destruction in communities around Iraq; causing Muslims around the world to hate Americans even more than they do already; eating up billions of dollars of US taxpayer dollars per month; and diverting resources and attention from solving the many other huge problems humankind faces around the world.
But tonight, it is the tragedy and shame of the US assault on Sadr City that I’m thinking most about.

Yet more evidence of GWOT failure

In Chapter 2 of the Re-engage! book I present a chart (Fig.2.1) that displays the numbers of fatalities inflicted worldwide by terrorists, 1998-2006.  Now, the State Department’s National Counter-Terrorism Center has just published its report on how the "Global War on Terror" went in 2007, and once again the picture is sobering. Their main page of statistics is here.  Scroll down to see just how badly the GWOT has been going over the past three years.

However, the figures for just those years don’t show the size of the contrast between the situation before the US invaded Iraq, and the situation after.  Before 2003, the annual global fatalities from terror never exceeded 5,300.  In 2003 they climbed just above 6,000; and every year since 2004 they have exceeded 12,000, showing a continuing increase each year.

In 2007, the number reached 22,685.

I have now updated the chart on global fatalities.  You can download it as a Word document from here.

This record provides additional, very tragic evidence to my argument that the way the Bush administration has responded to the challenge posed by the terrorists has not worked. I still strongly maintain that a more effective policy would be based  on (1) solid, but always rights-respecting police work and cooperation among police agencies across borders; (2) a recognition that terrorist violence is a challenge faced by many of the world’s peoples, and not just Americans; and (3) pursuit of a holistic, ‘human security’ approach to building the security of all the world’s nations, interdependent as we all are.

The use of massive military force to invade distant countries has not worked.  We are surely smart enough to recognize that we need to try something different?

(Cross-posted onto Re-engage blog. Please go comment over there. But if anyone can tell me how to export an Excel chart into a web-page that can then be posted directly into a blog, please enlighten me. Thanks!)

Great resources on Quakers… on YouTube!

I just found a collection of wonderful video shorts on YouTube, that show members of the Quaker meeting (congregation) in Watford, UK, both practicing and talking about Quakerism. They are produced by someone called Chris, I believe Pettit.
I was drawn, first to this 4m40s video in which some Watford Quakers talk about the Quaker testimonies. But then I watched, and really enjoyed, the two 8-minute videos described as “An introduction to Quakers”, parts 1 and 2; and this shorter video about our very distinctive form of decisionmaking and (anti-)leadership.
I am so grateful to Chris and the members of Watford meeting for producing and posting these videos. We’re a rum lot, Quakers. We have such great respect for integrity and dignity of all other persons that most of us find it very hard to think of doing anything that might suggest “proselytizing.”
Well, actually that applies mainly to the Quakers (Friends) who– like the British Friends and those of us on the east coast of the US– still hold “unprogramed” meetings for worship… But the further west you go across the US, the more the Quakers become, in many respects, like other Christian churches. Till in the midwest they start calling their congregations “churches”, not meetings, and they start having pastors and programing a liturgy for their worship sessions… And then when you get even further west they start being “Evangelical Friends” who– guess what!– evangelize… And hence, most Friends (Quakers) in the world today (a) live in Africa, and (b) are Evangelical.
I have worshiped with great joy with Evangelical Friends in Africa. But still, I love our very simple, non- or anti-hierarchical pattern of worship and internal organization. You can find out a lot more about it by watching some of these videos, including, in the first part of the “Introduction to Quakers” the camera will even take you inside a worship session very similar to the ones we have, in Charlottesville.
Check ’em out!

Ethanol and the discourse of the US “National interest”

Yesterday, Pres. Bush referred to the huge subsidies the US government gives to farmers to grow corn for conversion into ethanol, a car fuel, by saying:

    “the truth of the matter is it’s in our national interests that our farmers grow energy, as opposed to purchasing energy from parts of the world that are unstable or may not like us.”

For many years, those two words “national interest” have been widely used in US political discussions as a kind of conversation-stopping trump card. “Oh! The ‘national interest’ is at stake! Then I’d better stop criticizing the president!” — that was the kind of reaction past leaders sought, and too often won.
But who defines this slippery thing called the “national interest”, anyway? In Chap. 7 of my book Re-engage! America and the World After Bush, I write:

    [I]n line with the human security precept that true security is people-centered rather than state-centered, we can start thinking about our own country’s national interest in a new, more people-centered way, very different from the “big power” way it has generally been understood until now.

I then go on to ask some questions about how the adoption of this definition of the US “national interest” might actually change many aspects of our relationship with the rest of the world. (Posing queries intended to stimulate further discussion is a very Quaker thing to do. Anyway, I hope you find these queries in my book thought-provoking, when you read them.)
This current, mounting global food crisis is an instance in which we certainly need to adopt the people-centered rather than big-business-centered definition of “national interest”.
It is certainly not in our interest, as US citizens, that the activities of our country’s very well-funded Big Ag sector and the financial sectors that have been speculating heavily in foodstuffs– and fuel– over recent months should be allowed to continue to pursue policies that are driving hundreds of millions of our fellow-humans in poor countries into hunger, and towards outright, directly life-threatening starvation.
These big business sectors need to be effectively controlled and regulated by a political leadership that understands– finally!– that the greed of US car-owners should never be allowed to over-ride the right that all the world’s men, women, and children have to adequate and assured sources of nutrition. (Elsewhere in the book, by the way, I note that most “rights” activists in the US have focused far too tightly on issues of civil and political rights around the world, and have given short shrift to the frequently far more pressing issues of social and economic rights.)
The WaPo’s smart and thoughtful business columnist Steve Pearlstein has a good column in today’s paper on the role that speculators have been playing in the current food crisis. For those of you who are interested, the whole of the column is worth reading. As was his previous column, here.
Some highlights from today’s Pearlstein:

    Speculators have always played a prominent role in commodities markets, but in the past year, they have literally overwhelmed them, causing a dramatic increase in trading volume, volatility and prices and disrupting many of the normal relationships between producers and end-users.
    Many of these were the same hedge funds and hot-money investors who had gorged on sovereign debt of developing countries, tech and telecom stocks, subprime mortgages and commercial real estate and now needed a new thing to focus on. Others — including, it is said, some sovereign wealth funds — looked to commodities as a hedge against the falling dollar. But perhaps the biggest push came from pension funds, foundations and university endowments whose managers had all gone to the same conferences and read the same academic papers, suggesting that a basket of commodity futures would provide a good hedge against stock and bond market declines.
    …[T]he Bank for International Settlements estimates that the value of all the derivative contracts traded on the unregulated over-the-counter markets surged from about $3 trillion in the spring of 2005 to more than $8 trillion today.
    Whatever the number, it’s hard to imagine that it wasn’t a significant factor in skyrocking prices…
    … [T]he only people who don’t believe speculation is driving a commodities bubble are the big commodity traders and the commodities exchanges, which are profiting handsomely from the soaring prices and trading volumes, and the regulators at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, whose economists cannot seem to find statistical evidence that financial investors have had much of an impact on commodity prices.

US citizens need to start acting responsibly and quickly to bring these devastating speculations in basic foodstuffs under some form of rational and accountable control. This is in our direct interest as a citizenry, since so many of our own citizens are being harmed by the food-price rises.
But in today’s irreversibly hyperconnected world it is always, also, in our interest to make sure that actions taken by our government and our fellow-citizens on Wall Street, in Big Ag, and other big-business sectors stop inflicting harm on the world’s poorest, most vulnerable people.

How we think about the global food crisis

I was really disappointed, when watching the BBC’s US newsfeed this evening to hear the two evidently well-fed white-guy anchors talking about the mounting global food crisis in ill-informed and patronizing terms. One of them said something like, “It looks as though it could cause hunger and even perhaps a degree of social unrest.” No recognition there of the desperate straits that millions of families in the low-income world are already living in, and the imminence of not just “hunger” but actual megadeaths from starvation… and not just “social unrest”, but social collapse, war, and all the associated pestilence.
This editorial in the WaPo, back in March, wasn’t much better. It spoke only of the possibility of some people in what is still coyly called “the developing world” being pushed into “privation or even hunger.” It also, quite unconscionably, failed to mention the relationship between US subsidies for the new “biofuel” industry and the current shortages of food grain around the world.
This week, however, the WaPo news section has what looks like a very informative series on the unfolding global food crisis Tomorrow, they’ll be publishing an article on “The problem with linking food and fuel.”
My recommendations for what citizens of rich countries should be doing and pushing for right now to address the crisis remain the same as I stated at the beginning of the month:. We should:

    1. drastically reduce the amount of meat we all eat;
    2. stop the subsidies for biofuels immediately; and
    3. push our governments to stop the current financial speculation in basic foodstuffs.

Meanwhile, we should also do all we can to restore agricultural livelihoods to the millions of families in the low-income world who have been pushed off their land by the combination of (a) massive subsidies given to rich-world farmers, that has allowed them to dump their products on poor countries, and (b) the imposition on poor countries by the (rich-country-dominated) IMF of ‘structural adjustment programs’ that wiped out many supports those governments used to give to their farmers.
This is probably the first food crisis in history that the whole of a united humanity has faced together. Can we come through it with our basic relationships with each other and our sense of compassion and human decency all intact?
Remember, there is enough food for everyone in the whole world, if we are wise and generous in how we decide to distribute it among our fellow humans. And we have the know-how to make the harvests of the years ahead even better, with the right distribution of inputs including credit to small farmers around the world), and fair methods for distribution of the subsequent harvest.
Left to themselves, I don’t think the markets can solve this one. Governments need to come together on a basis of equality and mutual respect among all persons, rich or poor. In 2000, all the governments of the world came together to endorse the Millennium Development Goals. The very first of those goals included that the proportion of people suffering from hunger should be halved by 2015. The base-line for that goal was 1990, so in 2000 maybe it looked quite doable. Today, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the world’s poorest, most vulnerable people think that “goal” was nothing but a sick, unserious promise.

“Justice” and politics

I long ago concluded that “justice” is always, inescapably, a highly political matter. Including– perhaps especially– the workings of criminal courts, which for some reason so many western liberals seem to completely conflate with the idea of “justice” simpliciter.
A criminal court, remember, is always established, funded, and supported (or not) within a specific political context. I suppose that it is the de-contextualization of these aspects of a criminal court’s operations that allows so many people in the western rights movement to believe that the operation of such courts can ever be completely a-political.
Where a political system is well-constituted, and its leadership accountable, the courts can be reasonably– but never perfectly– fair. But today, on both sides of the US-Iraqi divide, we have highly politicized criminal-court proceedings carrying on, both of which are 100% products of the Bush administration’s divisive, “GWOT” approach to the world. Why should anyone be surprised that these court systems are lousy with politicization, corruption, and abuse?
In Iraq, the work of the US-created, and US-manipulated “Iraqi Special tribunal” grinds on. Now, 16 months after the horrendous travesty of the Saddam execution, we have former Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, and others, being tried on charges of involvement in the execution of 43 merchants accused in 1992 of having hoarded foodstuffs in Baghdad. That was, let’s not forget, a time when western-imposed sanctions were starting to bite in Iraq. Actually, since politically-imposed starvation is now occurring on a wider and more visible basis once again in many developing countries, a number of those countries may soon resort to the death penalty for foodstuff speculators. I am not quite sure how such executions– inhumane though they, like all executions, including those regularly carried out in the USA, are– rise to the level of an atrocity, as such? Nor am I clear what kind of criminal responsibility Tariq Aziz bears for them…
(“Grotian Moment”, anyone?)
And 8,000 miles away from Baghdad, we have the outrageous, and equally politicized, proceedings of the Guantanamo Kangaroo Courts. Huge kudos to Air Force Col. Morris Davis, who yesterday told one of the hearings at the quite unconstitutionally constituted Kangaroo Court, under oath, that at an earlier stage, when he had been working as the Defense Department’s chief prosecutor for terrorism-related cases,

    top Pentagon officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, made it clear to him that charging some of the highest-profile detainees before elections this year could have “strategic political value.”

I am “shocked, shocked” (that is, not actually shocked at all) to discover that this court in Gitmo had been so heavily politicized.
Davis told the KC hearing– which was open to some reporters– that,

    Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II, who announced his retirement in February, once bristled at the suggestion that some defendants could be acquitted, an outcome that Davis said would give the process added legitimacy.
    “He said, ‘We can’t have acquittals,’ ” Davis said under questioning from Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, the military counsel who represents [five-year detainee Salim Ahmed] Hamdan. ” ‘We’ve been holding these guys for years. How can we explain acquittals? We have to have convictions.’ ”

Davis also said that,

    Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, the legal adviser to the top military official overseeing the commissions process, was improperly willing to use evidence derived from waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning. “To allow or direct a prosecutor to come into the courtroom and offer evidence they felt was torture, it puts a prosecutor in an ethical bind,” Davis testified. But he said Hartmann replied that “everything was fair game — let the judge sort it out.”

George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror” has caused our country’s proclamations of support for its ideals to be ridiculed around the world. That is, in itself serious. But it has also significantly subverted the very national institutions that are intended to embody these ideals. Both these pieces of significant harm to our country will take some time to roll back and repair.
What can the post-Bush government in this country do about the scores of detainees who remain at Guantanamo, all of whom our government has subjected to significant mistreatment– or, in many cases, actual torture. Some of these individuals have been somewhat reliably accused of involvement in serious criminal acts; but against many of them the evidence is far more flimsy, if not completely fabricated, extracted under torture (and therefore unusable in any respectable court of law), or in some cases, quite non-existent.
But we were told when Gitmo opened that these were all “the worst of the worst.” That was a clear calumny.
But what to do about these individuals, some– but not all– of whom may be tempted to engage in violent acts after their release.
I believe that the US authorities, under any president and flavor of congressional leadership, is singularly unsuited to being able to sort out this issue. The U.N. should be invited to establish a commission of enquiry on the whole matter of the Bush administration’s illegal detentions policies around the world, with a view to finding a humane, rehabilitation-based future for these men and due accountability for those U.S. officials who have wilfully subjected them to such horrendous and in many cases long-sustained ill-treatment.
Supporting a solution like that would be the very best way for a new US leadership to reaffirm, and reinstate, our country’s values.

Iraq-Afghanistan: The crunch approaching?

George Bush’s general approach to dealing with the problems of Iraq and Afghanistan– as to the many other rapidly mounting challenges that confront Washington both globally and domestically– has been best summed up in this short animated cartoon published on April 11 by the WaPo’s extremely gifted Ann Telnaes. (Check out some of her other animations there, too.)
Bottom line: At this point, facing these omnipresent challenges, Bush is working simply to minimize the amount of damage they cause to him, and to presumed Republican nominee John McCain, in the time remaining till the November 4 election. And he is doing this, even if it quite predictably (and predictedly) results in building up much greater challenges for whoever it is that succeeds him next January.
But what if Bush’s attempt to postpone the eruption of full-blown crises until after Nov. 4– and preferably, from his perspective, until after January 20, 2009– fails, and these crises start erupting within the next six months?
This might well happen. Regarding many issues, including the domestic US economy and the Palestine question. I know that for the people directly concerned, their situations are already in extreme crisis. But I am talking here about the potential of these crises to become full-blown challenges to the Bush administration’s attempt to hold onto Washington’s power to “control” events in very distant parts of the world.
Today, it is the (functionally linked) crises the US faces in Iraq and Afghanistan that seem likely to mount most speedily to this point.
The functional link between these two crises is, of course, the force-level constraint and the trade-offs that exist between the two theaters in terms of the US military’s force planning. (One notable distinction between the US’s bid for global hegemony over the past 15 years and the maintenance by Britain, France, and other European powers of their globe-circling “empires” in earlier eras is that in the case of those European empires, the vast majority of the cannon-fodder required to police the distant colonies was pulled from the pauperized indigenous peoples of other colonies. The US, by contrast, has no power to compel citizens of other countries to fight its wars for it, and has shown little ability to persuade them to do so, either. Hence, it is the US that in both Iraq and Afghanistan has done the vast majority of the paying to raise the fighting forces, and the fighting and the dying there. Unlike when, for example, it was the British Army that got majorly caught short in Iraq in WWI– and it was Indian troops who did most of the dying there.)
Now, US force levels are stretched to the limit. The “surge” in Iraq was supposed to be temporary, but has turned out not to be. A week ago, when the Green Zone in Baghdad came under sustained mortar fire, the US and its Iraqi Security Force proxies tried to dig into, take, and control the whole of the southern third of Sadr City, in an attempt to deny the mortar-firers the proximity they needed to be able to hit the GZ. That involved a massive attempt at quadrillaging the southern end of Sadr City, an area that is home to 2.5 million human souls.
(I should note that Badger, over at Missing Links, is quite right to castigate all those US commentators on Iraqi affairs who did not sharply criticize the anti-humane quality of this US-led assault on Sadr City.)
Anyway, the US-led attempt to prevent the mortaring of the GZ was spectacularly shown to have failed yesterday and today, when a dust-storm prevented the US from flying the aircraft used to spot launchers, and the mortaring of the GZ resumed again.
It seems from that account by the WaPo’s Sholnn Freeman that the US-led forces had been trying to simply to carve a barrier right through the middle of Sadr City, in order to establish that line as a forward defensive perimeter for the GZ. That meant trying to push the new barrier right through the middle of some very densely populated districts. I can certainly imagine some of the suffering that has inflicted on all the families who live anywhere nearby. (The US military reported that 38 “gunmen” were killed in Sadr City yesterday. How about the noncombatant casualties, though? Also, why should we believe their designation that all those they counted as killed were actually involved in hostilities?)
Meanwhile, one other, extremely important effect of the US-led attempt to quadrillage Sadr City has been to firm up an emerging anti-US alliance between Iraqi MPs and political currents from a number of different currents that span Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic divides. About 50 leaders, including Ahmed Radhi, a member of the Iraqi Accord Front, and other Sunni-Arab and even Kurdish figures, joined a pro-national dialogue, and effectively pro-Sadr, protest in Sadr City yesterday.
McClatchy’s Hussein Kadhim and Raviya H. Ismail added to that report the following about Moqtada Sadr’s position:

    Sadr’s latest message, delivered during Friday prayers, called for the bloodshed between Iraqis to stop, yet asked for a united force against the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
    “We want liberation of ourselves and our lands from the occupier,” part of the message read. “To have a real government and have real sovereignty.”

I can certainly see that, after five years of the gross mismanagement of their country by the occupying force, many Iraqis– including many members of the struggling new Iraqi security forces– would find this appeal quite attractive.
(More analysis of the anti-US bloc from Badger, here. Kudos to him for his attentiveness to the politics of the story.)
Meanwhile, all has most certainly not been going well for the US-led effort in Afghanistan. Yesterday, the Taliban showed their ability to penetrate close to the heart of a very high-security event being staged by the Karzai government, with all the foreign ambassadors and other dignitaries present. Themilitary display and speeches there were designed both to mark the anniversary of the mujahideen’s victory over the Soviets 16 years ago, and to demonstrate the capabilities of the new, US-built and US-controlled Afghan security forces.
Oops.
Asia Times Online’s Syed Saleem Shahzad gives a lot of helpful background about the Taliban action. He notes that the attackers “penetrated no fewer than 18 security rings around the parade’s venue and they used their latest weaponry – small mortars that are only manufactured by a few Western countries, including Israel.” They got to within 500 meters of the event’s main stage, sending salvoes from machine guns and rocket launchers into the back of the stage.
Karzai and the dignitaries escaped unharmed, but three Afghan Security Force people and three Taliban were killed in the ensuing shootout.
It sounds eerily like the attack Egyptian Islamists mounted in 1981, when they killed President Sadat while he was reviewing troops at a big, high-profile public event staged to commemorate the Egyptian army’s successful crossing of the Suez Canal eight years earlier. In that one, the attackers succeeded in killing Sadat. In both cases, the attackers had evidently gathered useful intelligence cooperation from people within the national armed forces involved.
Since yesterday’s attack in Kabul, NATO and US spinmeisters have been working overtime to try to put a brave face on what happened. (E.g. here.) But the event certainly points to the fragile nature of the US-led order in Afghanistan. Shahzad’s piece has lots more details and what looks like a good and fair analysis. His bottom line: NATO has gotten smarter and somewhat more effective, but the Taliban have also adapted and learned… “Indeed,” he warns, “the Taliban have lined up a stream of attackers to target Kabul to rattle the Afghan government and NATO forces in coming days and weeks.”
Over recent weeks, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has pleaded and pleaded with the NATO allies to commit more combat troops to Afghanistan. With little success. So how can the dangerous military situations that the US and its small number of combat-willing allies now face in both Iraq and Afghanistan be dealt with without disaster? Hard to say. But calling for the UN to convene and lead a much broader–that is, no longer US-dominated– political stabilization effort for both countries seems to be the only way to avoid a disaster in one or both theaters that might well blow up– even on George W. Bush’s watch.

    Update Monday evening: A well-researched piece of reporting about Afghanistan in Tuesday’s CSM, by Anand Gopal. He has material from an interview with a strongly pro-Taliban student at Kabul University, and a lot of other fascinating material.

China to resume talks with Dalai Lama rep– great!

China announced today it would resume talks with an envoy of the Dalai Lama that have been broken off since July 2007.
This is great news. McClatchy’s Tim Johnson reports that the official Xinhua news agency has found a way to start climbing down from its recently belligerent anti-DL rhetoric by issuing the following statement:

    It is hoped that through contact and consultation, the Dalai side will take credible moves to stop activities aimed at splitting China, stop plotting and inciting violence and stop disrupting and sabotaging the Beijing Olympic Games so as to create conditions for talks.

Still not a strongly “enlightened” statement, but it looks as if they’re trying to find a way to bring the Chinese people along with the process of diplomatic re-engagement.
The very best of luck to this effort.

CSM piece on America-World relations, today

I have a big piece in the CSM today that urges Americans to build a relationship with the rest of the world on the basis of strong commitment to the ideals of human equality and nonviolent problem-solving. (It’s also here.)
If you go to the CSM website’s version, you can even here the audio of an interview my editor, Josh Burek, did with me on the subject.
My book gets a nice mention there.
In the article I note that human equality is a fundamental American value, and that the UN, which was a great American creation, is built on the ideas of equality and nonviolent problem-solving.
The piece is a gentle critique of the whole discourse of American “leadership”, which is the dominant discourse in Washington today. (How to regain it, after Bush has squandered it, etc.) Actually, if I’d dealt with the issue more thoroughly I would have noted that “leadership” can be exercised in a number of different ways and certainly need not involve the “leader” in question throwing its weight around. Moral leadership, shared leadership, and leadership that is dedicated primarily to effective team-building are all much more useful concepts of “leadership”, as such.
Anyway, tell me what you think…

Tahdi’eh– Hamas says Yes

So Hamas has now signed on to a ceasefire/truce plan with Israel that covers in the first instance only the Israel-Gaza front, but with a proposal that this be extended to the West Bank according to a fixed (but at this stage undisclosed) timetable.
This is in line with the expectations I reported on here on Tuesday.
In the Reuters report that’s linked to above, Jonathan Wright writes that,

    Israel said it was ready for “quiet” at the Gaza border, but that it would require a complete halt to attacks by Hamas on Israelis, a stop to cross-border rocket fire from all Palestinian groups and an end to weapon smuggling into Gaza.
    “We can’t have a period of quiet that will just be the quiet before the storm,” said Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
    [An un-named Palestinian official close to the talks] said Hamas made any truce conditional on Israel opening all of Gaza’s border crossings and halting military action in the territory.
    The Islamist group had backing from other Palestinian militant factions in the enclave, he added.

With this agreement, both sides would seem to win a significant portion of what they sought. Israel wins the cessation of attacks on its people from Gaza. Hamas wins Israel’s agreement that this ceasefire be reciprocal (no small feat), and also the lifting of the siege of Gaza.
But each side has things it wants to win that it still has not. Primarily, for the Israelis, the release of Gilad Shalit (which will be part of a prisoner exchange); and for the Palestinians, the extension of the tahdi’eh to the West Bank (in their locution, this would constitute a “comprehensive” ceasefire.”)
Egypt’s intel chief Omar Suleiman has been the main intermediary in these negotiations. Al-Masry al-Yawm‘s Fathiyya Dakhakhni reported today that Suleiman is due to travel to Israel pretty soon to resume negotiations on these remaining issues.
No word yet on whether Hamas has specified the length of the timetable within which they want to win the extension of the ceasefire to the West Bank, far less what that length might be.
Wright attributes to Egypt’s official MENA news agency a quote from an un-named senior Egyptian official to the effect that this truce “would contribute to talks between Israel and the rival Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, as well as to reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah.” That I doubt. In fact, coming just as Abu Mazen is about to meet Bush here in Washington, it considerably undercuts Abu Mazen’s position by showing the whole world that Israel considers it more important to negotiate a tough deal with Hamas rather than to make nice with him in the US-sponsored formal peace talks.
At this point, I imagine that many Israeli officials are concerned first and foremost about securing a degree of calm in their country as they prepare for their 60th anniversary celebrations. Hamas and its allies are the ones with the ability to deliver– or withhold– that calm. Abu Mazen is not.
One main issue ahead will be that of responsibility for verifying the ceasefire. This is crucial to its robustness. I hope Omar Suleiman has made provision for that. Because without verification, any small (or large) mischief-maker on either side of the line could easily torpedo it. Maybe if, under the terms of the siege being lifted, the EU regains a (possibly slightly differently configured) monitoring presence at Rafah, then an expanded EU mission could also provide ceasefire verification?
Let’s wait and see.