Monthly Archives: November 2007

NEWS: Staying on the path

Rice: Iran resolution doesn’t OK war
AP, November 11, 2007

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday she does not believe a Senate resolution authorizes President Bush to take military action against Iran.

“There is nothing in this particular resolution that would suggest that from our point of view. And, clearly, the president has also made very clear that he’s on a diplomatic path where Iran comes into focus,” Rice said.

The Senate in late September voted 76-22 in favor of a resolution urging the State Department to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.

While the resolution, by Sens. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., attracted overwhelming bipartisan support, a small group of Democrats said they feared labeling the state-sponsored organization a terrorist group could be interpreted as a congressional authorization of military force in Iran. [complete article]

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NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Iran not scared by Israel (after strike on Syria)

Iranian FM: Israel is no military match for Tehran
AP, November 11, 2007

Iran’s Foreign Ministry said on Monday that Israel poses no military threat to Iran, adding that any aggression on Israel’s part would spark retaliation and accusing Israel of trying to sabotage relations between Tehran and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“The Zionist regime [Israel] is less than nothing to pose any kind of threat to Iran,” ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told reporters Sunday when questioned about recent comments on Tehran’s nuclear program made by Israeli officials.

It was not clear what Israeli threat Hosseini was referring to, but his statement came as Iran continues to defy international demands that it suspends uranium enrichment, a process that can produce fuel for a nuclear reactor or fissile material for a bomb. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — I’ll hazard a guess about what Hosseini was referring to: the Israeli strike on Syria on September 6. Maybe this is the last Syria strike story — the one in which not even the word “Syria” appeared.

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NEWS, ANALYSIS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: The long and winding path to democracy

Washington envisions a Pakistan beyond Musharraf
By Howard LaFranchi, Christian Science Monitor, November 13, 2007

President Bush continues to praise Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf as a valued ally in the war on terror. At the same time, US officials are pressuring the military leader over his declaration of emergency law – though some Pakistanis call it pressure with kid gloves – as if he were the only acceptable game in Islamabad.

Yet even as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice argues for patience toward General Musharraf, some US officials and South Asia experts are doing what they say the US has failed to do: envision and prepare for a post-Musharraf Pakistan.

“Washington’s approach to Pakistan has always been that the devil we know is better than the devil we don’t know. But there is every reason to believe that with Musharraf and Pakistan, that is not the case,” says Selig Harrison, director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy in Washington. “Musharraf has blinded Washington over and over again with a mastery of blackmail, but in the two areas we worry most about – nuclear proliferation and Islamist extremism – there are alternatives that are just as good, if not better.” [complete article]

Musharraf’s survival may hinge on elections
By Robin Wright, Washington Post, November 12, 2007

The Bush administration is betting that President Pervez Musharraf can survive the crisis in Pakistan if he moves decisively to lift emergency rule and hold elections over the next two months, despite new U.S. intelligence concerns about the dangers of long-term instability or, worse, a political vacuum, U.S. officials say. Timing is the key, they add.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice yesterday called on Musharraf to restore constitutional rule “as soon as possible.” The administration is considering sending a senior official to Islamabad this week to tell the Pakistani leader that he must urgently rescind restrictions on the media, civil society and opposition politicians, which could discredit any January elections — and endanger both Pakistan’s stability and his political future, the sources said. [complete article]

See also, Some doubt Musharraf can be ousted (LAT) and Pakistan to detain Bhutto in bid to stop protest march (NYT).

Editor’s Comment — Funny how an administration that is “dedicated to helping the Pakistani people come to a more democratic path” places all its attention on the theater of (riggable) elections yet says nothing about reinstituting the judiciary. The path to democracy is clearly much more appealing than the destination.

And how representative of Washington thinking is this? One former State official envisages one post-Musharraf scenario this way:

A less favorable alternative for the US, Markey, says, would be the rise of the Pakistan Muslim League (N), led by exiled former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

“That wouldn’t mean an extremist Pakistan, but they just aren’t as keen on working that closely with the US, and they don’t see the world through Washington’s lenses,” says Markey.

Neocolonialism is alive and well. Can you imagine anyone in Pakistan saying, “We fear the next US president might be one who doesn’t see the world through Islamabad’s lenses”?

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NEWS, ANALYSIS, OPINION & FEATURE: In Iraq, it’s getting harder to find any bad guys

Who’s the Enemy?
By Robert Dreyfuss, TomDispatch, November 11, 2007

Who is the enemy? Who, exactly, are we fighting in Iraq? Why are we there? And what’s our objective?

Nearly five years into the war, the answers to basic questions like these ought to be obvious. In the Alice in Wonderland-like wilderness of mirrors that is Iraq, though, they’re anything but.

We aren’t fighting the Sunnis. Not any more, anyway. Virtually the entire Sunni establishment, from the moderate Muslim Brotherhood-linked Iraqi Islamic Party (which has been part of every Iraqi government since 2003) to the Anbar tribal alliance (which has been begging for U.S. support since 2004 and only recently got it) is either actively cooperating with the American military or sullenly tolerating what it hopes will be a receding occupation. Across Sunni-dominated parts of Iraq, the United States is helping to build army and police units as well as neighborhood patrols — the Pentagon calls them “concerned citizens” — out of former resistance fighters, with the blessing of tribal leaders in Anbar, Diyala, and Salahuddin provinces, parts of Baghdad, and areas to the south of the capital. We have met the enemy, and — surprise! — they are friends or, if not that, at least not active enemies. Attacks on U.S. forces in Sunni-dominated areas, including the once-violent hot-bed city of Ramadi, Anbar’s capital, have fallen dramatically. [complete article]

Inside the surge
By Jon Lee Anderson, The New Yorker, November 19, 2007

Joint Security Station Thrasher, in the western Baghdad suburb of Ghazaliya, is housed in a Saddam-era mansion with twenty-foot columns and a fountain, now dry, that looks like a layer cake of concrete and limestone. The mansion and two adjacent houses have been surrounded by blast walls. J.S.S. Thrasher was set up last March, and is part of the surge in troops engineered by General David Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq. Moving units out of large bases and into Joint Security Stations—small outposts in Baghdad’s most dangerous districts—has been crucial to Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy, and Thrasher is now home to a hundred American soldiers and a few hundred Iraqis. This fall, on the roof of the mansion, amid sandbags, communications gear, and exercise equipment protected by a sniper awning, Captain Jon Brooks, Thrasher’s commander, pointed out some of the local landmarks. “This site was selected because it was the main body drop in Ghazaliya,” he said, indicating a grassy area nearby. “There were up to eleven bodies a week. Most were brutally mutilated.” [complete article]

2008: The year of federalism in Iraq?
By Reidar Visser, historiae.org, November 12, 2007

In all the speculation about the fate of the US “surge” policy in Iraq, many analysts have overlooked a date on the 2008 calendar which is bound to become fateful: 11 April. On that day, the current moratorium on creating new federal entities – a last-minute addition to the Iraqi federalism legislation in October 2006 – comes to an end. From April 2008 onwards, the administrative map of Iraq could change dramatically.

The Iraqi constitutional and judicial modalities for creating new federal entities are poorly understood in the West. Under the legal framework adopted in October 2006, there are two paths to a federal status for an existing governorate: based on grassroots initiatives (by one tenth of its voters or by one third of the governorate council members) any Iraqi governorate can call a referendum for the creation of a new federal entity – consisting either of itself, or of itself in union with other governorates where the same kind of initiatives are launched (except Baghdad). A successful bid for federal status requires a simple majority of Yes votes in all governorates concerned. This is a complicated procedure, but it is at least a method that is based on popular initiatives. As such, it is antithetical to the recent resolution by the US Senate on federalism in Iraq, where there are suggestions about foreign “assistance” and elite conferences to “help” the Iraqis design a new administrative map – in other words, a plan to impose federalism on the entire country, not only “from above”, but also from the outside. [complete article]

Iraq to ease Baghdad controls
By Stephen Farrell, New York Times, November 13, 2007

Iraqi military commanders signaled on Monday that they will soon remove some roadblocks, blast walls and other restrictions that had been imposed over the past nine months as part of the effort to reduce violence here in the capital.

However tens of thousands of American troops will remain on the streets of Baghdad, and the announcement appears to have been made to indicate to their constituents the Iraqi leaderships’ desire to change the emphasis from the military crackdown in the earlier stages of the operation to providing vital utilities and social services to the Baghdad population. [complete article]

The plight of American veterans
Editorial, New York Times, November 12, 2007

As an unpopular, ill-planned war in Iraq grinds on inconclusively, it can be a bleak time to be a veteran.

There is little outright hostility toward returning military personnel these days; few Americans are reviling them as “baby killers” or blaming them for a botched war of choice launched by the White House. Indeed, both Congress and the White House have been hymning their praises in the run-up to Veterans Day. But all too often, soldiers who return from Iraq or Afghanistan — and those who served in Vietnam or Korea — have been left to fend for themselves with little help from the government.

Recent surveys have painted an appalling picture. Almost half a million of the nation’s 24 million veterans were homeless at some point during 2006, and while only a few hundred from Iraq or Afghanistan have turned up homeless so far, aid groups are bracing themselves for a tsunamilike upsurge in coming years. [complete article]

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NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: PLO rejects recognition of Israel as religious state; Hamas and Fatah fight

Erekat: Palestinians will not accept Israel as ‘Jewish state’
By Barak Ravid, Haaretz, November 12, 2007

Saeb Erekat, chief negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization, rejected on Monday the government’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

In an interview with Israel Radio, Erekat said that “no state in the world connects its national identity to a religious identity.”

Also Monday, dozens of prominent Palestinian residents of Jerusalem published an appeal to the Abbas, asking him not to make concessions to Israel over the holy city in the upcoming talks. [complete article]

At least half a dozen killed at Gaza rally
By Taghreed El-Khodary and Isabel Kershner, New York Times, November 13, 2007

At least six Palestinians were killed and more than 100 wounded here on Monday when a rally by the relatively pro-Western Fatah movement to mark the third anniversary of the death of its founder, Yasir Arafat, ended in armed clashes with its rival, Hamas.

Doctors at two Gaza hospitals said all of the dead and most of the wounded were Fatah supporters who had taken part in the rally.

Tens of thousands of residents of the Gaza Strip had turned out for what became the largest show of support for Fatah since the Islamist group Hamas seized control of the territory in June. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — No amount of analysis of the power struggle going on inside Palestinian politics can undo this simple fact: the sight of Palestinians killing Palestinians does more to corrode international sympathy than anything else.

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ANALYSIS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: The nuclear threat to democracy

So, what about those nukes?
By David E. Sanger, New York Times, November 11, 2007

The administration says it hopes to put Pakistan on a path to democracy. But Washington’s actions show it does not want to go so fast that nuclear control becomes a casualty. So President Bush was on the phone to General Musharraf on Wednesday to press for the patina of a return to democracy: He said General Musharraf must shed his title as army chief, hold parliamentary elections early next year, and find a way to work with Benazir Bhutto, the opposition leader with whom the United States has urged him to share power. The general promised to hold elections by February, but the crisis was far from over.

“The nightmare scenario, of course, is what happens if an extremist Islamic government emerges — with an instant nuclear arsenal,” said Robert Joseph, a counterproliferation expert who left the administration this year. John R. Bolton, the former United Nations representative who has accused Mr. Bush of going soft on proliferation, said more bluntly that General Musharraf’s survival was critical. “While Pervez Musharraf might not be a Jeffersonian democrat,” Mr. Bolton said, “he is the best bet to secure the nuclear arsenal.”

Americans might feel better about the arsenal if they knew how big it was — or even where the weapons were stored. Pakistan has done its best to keep that information secret.

There are also more than a dozen nuclear facilities, from fuel fabrication plants to laboratories that enrich uranium and produce next-generation weapons designs, that Al Qaeda and other terror groups have eyed for years. How safe are they? [complete article]

See also, Pakistan nuclear security questioned (WP) and Suitcase nukes said unlikely to exist (AP).

Editor’s Comment — How safe are they? This is currently Washington’s most vexing question. Indeed, as the New York Times presents it, the issue of nuclear peril is now being spun in such a way that we are meant to fear that Pakistan is such a dangerous place that it’s not safe enough for democracy.

So, when we pose the question, how safe are they?, we don’t pause to consider what should already be obvious: Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are already in the wrong hands. General Musharraf isn’t “indispensable” because, as John Bolton claims, “he is the best bet to secure the nuclear arsenal.” He’s immovable because he has no intention of letting go of the keys to his power. As Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark note, the Bhutto deal that Musharraf backed out of amounted to little more than the appearance of a transfer of power. In the secret negotiations prior to her return, Bhutto:

…agreed to an unprecedented compromise, ceding, should she win [upcoming elections], the foreign, military, internal and external security as well as Pakistan’s WMD portfolios to Musharraf. That left her with only a handful of power-light cards to play, while still giving the military a veneer of legitimacy.

But in Pakistan, nothing is agreed until it actually happens. And Musharraf backtracked as soon as Bhutto returned to the country Oct. 18.

Fueled by a potent mixture of patronage, tribalism, backstabbing, side dealing, blackmail and straightforward medieval feudalism, politics Pakistan-style makes Washington and London look like a pajama party. And Bhutto’s return to Pakistan was spectacular as well as murderous. It began with two ear-splitting bangs, the first when two explosions blew up her motorcade in Karachi, killing 145 and injuring hundreds more, and the second when Bhutto aides accused agents allied to the country’s pervasive intelligence establishment of arming the suicide bombers.

Bhutto swiftly picked herself up and dramatically began to galvanize support, with Pakistanis previously indifferent or critical of her embracing her high-profile return – a breath of fresh air after the vacuum of almost a decade of military repression.

Realizing this momentum could help her overwrite the power-ceding deal that had brought her home, Bhutto upped her campaign, bringing Pakistani politics to the boil. She condemned the country’s extremist groups and religious parties. She accused the government of manipulating them. An editorial in Pakistan’s Daily Times noted: “Ms. Bhutto arrived, not carrying flowers but a bunch of accusations.”

This was what Musharraf most feared.

Fears about the future of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are legitimate, but the presumption that they are currently in safe hands is fanciful.

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OPINION & EDITOR’S COMMENT: The species of oppression by which we are menaced

The coup at home
By Frank Rich, New York Times, November 11, 2007

…there’s another moral to draw from the Musharraf story, and it has to do with domestic policy, not foreign. The Pakistan mess, as The New York Times editorial page aptly named it, is not just another blot on our image abroad and another instance of our mismanagement of the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It also casts a harsh light on the mess we have at home in America, a stain that will not be so easily eradicated.

In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We’ve become inured to democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.

This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf’s. [complete article]

See also, Abdicate and capitulate (NYT editorial).

Editor’s Comment — Whereas Frank Rich sees in America, “a people in clinical depression,” I’m inclined to think his diagnosis a little too forgiving. What he sees as a “permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years,” has, I believe, much more distant roots. Signs of their growth were anticipated over 150 years ago and described quite clearly in Democracy in America.

If an American rebellion is not around the corner, it appears to have much less to do with a form of political depression than with a pervasive indifference. Bush and Cheney have exploited that indifference but they didn’t create it.

This is how Tocqueville anticipated the trend through which we would end up too comfortable to care:

…the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
What sort of despotism democratic nations have to fear, Chapter VI, Section IV, Volume III, Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville.

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FEATURE: Power is never relinquished without a struggle

Washington hails Musharraf as an ally in the war on terror, but critics make a case that Pakistani leader is a terrorist
By Adrian Levy,Catherine Scott-Clark, San Francisco Chronicle, November 11, 2007

In Pervez Musharraf, the West has got the leader it has unreservedly championed for the last nine years, someone it fears it cannot do without, a weakness that Musharraf has manipulated since he signed up to the war on terror in the days after 9/11. It is an increasingly cantankerous and one-way pact that has enabled the growth in power of the most destabilizing factor behind Pakistan’s implosion – the one Musharraf never referred to: the Pakistan military itself.

Musharraf likes to be seen as a firefighter, and has portrayed himself as a bridgehead between the West and the badlands of Islamic South Asia, where our own spooks and soldiers are rarely able to tread. He has worked hard to finesse his special relationship with Washington, familiarly known inside Pakistan as “Mush and Bush,” and it has paid off with Pakistan receiving billions of dollars in U.S. aid.

Underpinning this deal are Musharraf’s published credentials. He has always given the impression that he and his troops are Western-leaning moderates. However, the real Musharraf is far more complicated, and a good deal of the time we have paid the general to stand by us, he has been cosseting the forces that are bent on undermining the West, as part of a policy of defiance that stretches back two decades.

Musharraf’s career took off in the mid-1980s, when he was dispatched to train fighters aiding the mujahedeen in Afghanistan – all part of a U.S. proxy war to eject the Soviet army that had invaded there in 1979. The conflict brought a secular Pakistan army into close proximity with jihadis, serving to radicalize ordinary soldiers, as well as sharpening their intelligence skills and battle craft.

Musharraf won his first real plaudits in 1988 when he was ordered to cool a political uprising by Pakistani Shiites living in Gilgit, in the north. Using out-of-work mujahedeen fighters, Musharraf’s men killed hundreds, crushing the revolt, and he was rewarded with a job at army headquarters.

Born a Sunni, he had never identified with political Islamism but from then on he understood the power of manipulating faith. By the mid-1990s, as director general of military operations, he was serving Benazir Bhutto, who was in her second term as prime minister. He lobbied her to revive a flagging insurgency that Pakistan had lit in the Indian-administered sector of the divided state of Kashmir in 1989. “He told me he wanted to ‘unleash the forces of fundamentalism’ to ramp up the war,” Bhutto recalled.

Musharraf claimed he could gather as many as 10,000 fighters to send over the border, and he reached out to four extremist Sunni organizations, including one founded in 1987 by three followers of Osama bin Laden. Uncaring or oblivious to the consequences, Musharraf’s Kashmir plan sparked one of the bitterest episodes in Indo-Pakistan relations, giving birth to a vast army of battle-hardened Sunnis who would move on from Kashmir to fight the world over.

In 1996, Musharraf did it again, making contact with the Taliban, then an army of refugees and students. No one could have known in 1996, when the Taliban took control of Kabul, Afghanistan, where it would all lead. But Musharraf could not plead ignorance when he secretly rekindled the alliance long after 9/11. [complete article]

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NEWS: Musharraf: “The emergency reinforces the war on terror”

Musharraf gives no date for end to rule
By Jane Perlez and David Rhode, New York Times, November 11, 2007

In a defiant news conference Sunday, the Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, refused to give a date for the end of the de facto martial law that he imposed more than a week ago and suggested that it would continue indefinitely, including during parliamentary elections in early January.

Speaking one day after President George W. Bush said Musharraf was the best president for Pakistan, the general said the emergency decree was justified by the need to fight terrorism, and would “ensure absolutely fair and transparent elections.” [complete article]

See also, Bush, Rice defend Musharraf as an ally (WP), Pakistan to America: keep out (Bashir Goth), and Pakistan emergency ‘aiding Taliban’ (Al Jazeera).

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OPINION: Bush’s sluggishness over Pakistan-based proliferation

Those nuclear flashpoints are made in Pakistan
By Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, Washington Post, November 11, 2007

George W. Bush is hardly the first U.S. president to forgive sins against democracy by a Pakistani leader. Like his predecessors from Jimmy Carter onward, Bush has tolerated bad behavior in hopes that Pakistan might do Washington’s bidding on some urgent U.S. priority — in this case, a crackdown on al-Qaeda. But the scariest legacy of Bush’s failed bargain with Gen. Pervez Musharraf isn’t the rise of another U.S.-backed dictatorship in a strategic Muslim nation, or even the establishment of a new al-Qaeda haven along Pakistan’s lawless border. It’s the leniency we’ve shown toward the most dangerous nuclear-trafficking operation in history — an operation masterminded by one man, Abdul Qadeer Khan.

For nearly four years, under the banner of the “war on terror,” Bush has refused to demand access to Khan, the ultranationalist Pakistani scientist who created a vast network that has spread nuclear know-how to North Korea, Iran and Libya. Indeed, Bush has never seriously squeezed Musharraf over Khan, who remains a national hero for bringing Pakistan the Promethean fire it can use to compete with its nuclear-armed nemesis, India. Khan has remained under house arrest in Islamabad since 2004, outside the reach of the CIA and investigators from the International Atomic Energy Agency, who are desperate to unlock the secrets he carries. Bush should be equally adamant about getting to the bottom of Khan’s activities.

Bush’s sluggishness over Pakistan-based proliferation, even as he has funneled about $10 billion in military and financial aid to Musharraf since Sept. 11, 2001, is even harder to explain when one considers the damage Khan has done to the world’s fragile nuclear stability. Khan used stolen technology and black-market sales to help Pakistan obtain its nuclear arsenal, setting the stage for a possible atomic showdown with India. He played a pivotal role in helping Iran start what we increasingly fear is a clandestine nuclear-arms program, allowing Tehran to make significant progress in the shadows before its efforts were uncovered in 2002. He gave key uranium-enrichment technology to North Korea. And if all this weren’t enough, he was busily outfitting Libya with a full bomb-making factory when his network was finally shut down in late 2003. Khan has been held incommunicado ever since, leaving the world with new nuclear flashpoints — and some burning, unanswered questions about his black-market spree. [complete article]

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OPINION: War talk about Iran is a mistake

The spy who wants Israel to talk
By David Ignatius, Washington Post, November 11, 2007

Efraim Halevy, the former head of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, titled his memoirs “Man in the Shadows.” But now that he’s out in the sunlight, the 72-year-old retired spy chief has some surprisingly contrarian things to say about Iran and Syria. The gist of his message is that rather than constantly ratcheting up the rhetoric of confrontation, the United States and Israel should be looking for ways to establish a creative dialogue with these adversaries.

Halevy is a legendary figure in Israel because of his nearly 40 years of service as an intelligence officer, culminating in his years as Mossad’s director from 1998 to 2003. He managed Israel’s secret relationship with Jordan for more than a decade, and he became so close to King Hussein that the two personally negotiated the 1994 agreement paving the way for a peace treaty. So when Halevy talks about the utility of secret diplomacy, he knows whereof he speaks.

Of course, Halevy looks like the fictional master spy George Smiley — thinning hair, wise but weary eyes, the rumpled manner of someone who might have been a professor in another life. And Halevy has the gift of anonymity: You would look right past him in a crowded room, never imagining that he was the man who had conducted daring secret missions. After he appeared here with former CIA director George Tenet at a conference sponsored by the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center, Halevy agreed to sit down for an interview.

Halevy suggests that Israel should stop its jeremiads that Iran poses an existential threat to the Jewish state. The rhetoric is wrong, he contends, and it gets in the way of finding a peaceful solution to the Iranian nuclear problem.

“I believe that Israel is indestructible,” he insists. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may boast that he wants to wipe Israel off the map, but Iran’s ability to consummate this threat is “minimal,” he says. “Israel has a whole arsenal of capabilities to make sure the Iranians don’t achieve their result.” Even if the Iranians did obtain a nuclear weapon, says Halevy, “they are deterrable,” because for the mullahs, survival and perpetuation of the regime is a holy obligation. [complete article]

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NEWS, ANALYSIS, OPINION & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Looking for Iran in Iraq

Iraq: Call an air strike
By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times, November 10, 2007

“… the literature on counter-insurgency is so enormous that, had it been put aboard the Titanic, it would have sunk that ship without any help from the iceberg. However, the outstanding fact is that almost all of it has been written by the losers.”
– Martin van Creveld, in The Changing Face Of War, 2006

Amid the George W Bush administration’s relentless campaign to “change the subject” from Iraq to Iran, how to “win” the war against the Iraqi resistance, Sunni or Shi’ite, now means – according to counter-insurgency messiah General David Petraeus – calling an air strike.

On a parallel level, the Pentagon has practically finished a base in southern Iraq less than 10 kilometers from the border with Iran called Combat Outpost Shocker. The Pentagon maintains this is for the US to prevent Iranian weapons from being smuggled into Iraq. Rather, it’s to control a rash of US covert, sabotage operations across the border targeting Iran’s Khuzestan province.

With the looming Turkish threat of invading Iraqi Kurdistan and President General President Musharraf’s new “let’s jail all the lawyers” coup within a coup in Pakistan, the bloody war in the plains of Mesopotamia is lower down in the news cycle – not to mention the interminable 2008 US presidential soap opera. Rosy spinning, though, still rules unchecked.

The Pentagon – via Major General Joseph Fil, commander of US forces in Baghdad – is relentlessly spinning there’s now less violence in the capital, a “sustainable” trend. This is rubbish. [complete article]

Iraqi fighters ‘grilled for evidence on Iran’
By David Smith, The Observer, November 11, 2007

US military officials are putting huge pressure on interrogators who question Iraqi insurgents to find incriminating evidence pointing to Iran, it was claimed last night.

Micah Brose, a privately contracted interrogator working for American forces in Iraq, near the Iranian border, told The Observer that information on Iran is ‘gold’. The claim comes after Washington imposed sanctions on Iran last month, citing both its nuclear ambitions and its Revolutionary Guards’ alleged support of Shia insurgents in Iraq. Last week the US military freed nine Iranians held in Iraq, including two it had accused of links to the Revolutionary Guards’ Qods Force.

Brose, 30, who extracts information from detainees in Iraq, said: ‘They push a lot for us to establish a link with Iran. They have pre-categories for us to go through, and by the sheer volume of categories there’s clearly a lot more for Iran than there is for other stuff. Of all the recent requests I’ve had, I’d say 60 to 70 per cent are about Iran. [complete article]

Broken supply channel sent weapons for Iraq astray
By Eric Schmitt and Ginger Thompson, New York Times, November 11, 2007

As the insurgency in Iraq escalated in the spring of 2004, American officials entrusted an Iraqi businessman with issuing weapons to Iraqi police cadets training to help quell the violence.

By all accounts, the businessman, Kassim al-Saffar, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, did well at distributing the Pentagon-supplied weapons from the Baghdad Police Academy armory he managed for a military contractor. But, co-workers say, he also turned the armory into his own private arms bazaar with the seeming approval of some American officials and executives, selling AK-47 assault rifles, Glock pistols and heavy machine guns to anyone with cash in hand — Iraqi militias, South African security guards and even American contractors. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — The path travelled by one of those Glocks is revealed in a report in The Guardian. The reporter describes interviewing a Sunni insurgent — one of America’s newly recruited fighters. “He pulled his pistol out and showed it to me. It was a Glock, supplied by the US to Iraqi security forces. ‘This belonged to the commander of al-Qaida here,’ he said. ‘They called him the White Lion. I killed him and got his gun.'”

Americans said to have proposed a six-month truce to the resistance groups
By Badger, Missing Links, November 9, 2007

Al-Hayat says this morning that it has learned from “sources in the government and sources close to the armed groups” about a plan including a followup reconciliation meeting, to be arranged by the Iraqi Reconciliation Agency, but to be held under American and international auspices, along with a proposal for a six-month truce between the armed resistance groups and the American/Iraqi forces. [complete article]

Forced Iraq postings ‘may be necessary’
By Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, November 11, 2007

Four days before a deadline for Foreign Service officers to volunteer to go to Iraq or face the prospect of being ordered there, the State Department notified employees yesterday that “about half” of 48 open assignments there for next year have been filled.

“This reduces but does not eliminate the possibility that directed assignments may be necessary,” Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte wrote in an e-mailed update. Filling the remaining jobs is still “the Department’s priority,” he said, adding that he is optimistic that more will volunteer. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — The email had to come from Negroponte and not the Sectretary of State herself because madame secretary declines to use email. That’s right! “Rice does not use e-mail.”

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OPINION: Is Islamophobia the ticket to the White House?

Rudy and Pat: hate expectations
By Eboo Patel, Washington Post, November 11, 2007

You have to wonder how the conversation went: Did Rudy begin by convincing Pat that hating Muslims was more important than hating homosexuals? Or did he start by saying that hating Muslims should come before protecting fetuses?

One thing is crystal clear: Rudy knows Republican math. To win Republican primaries, you have to win the hearts of the Religious Right. And Rudy wasn’t going to do that with his life story (multiple marriages, multiple divorces) or his social positions (pro gay rights, pro choice). His only hope was to change the subject. And hating Muslims is a popular topic in Religious Right circles these days.

Here is what Rudy had to say about his new BFF Pat Robertson: “… he has a tremendous amount of insight into what the main issues are and how they should be dealt with.”

The main issue for Rudy is how to exploit the current fear of Muslims into a winning presidential campaign. Pat Robertson will offer his insights on that issue alongside America’s most prominent Islamophobes, including Norman Podhoretz, Peter King and Daniel Pipes. [complete article]

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ANALYSIS & OPINION: There is no single story to al Qaeda

There’s no single story to al-Qaeda
By Jason Burke, The Observer, November 11, 2007

In the mountains of the Swat valley, in north western Pakistan, a militant cleric called Maulana Fazlullah has successfully carved himself a miniature version of a Taliban state. His most potent weapon has been his radio station. ‘It’s all about the message,’ one of his associates told me in Peshawar, the nearest city, last month.

Islamic militants around the world have long known this. ‘The battle will be fought in the media,’ said al-Qaeda’s chief strategist, Ayman al-Zawahiri. After a suicide bomb in Afghanistan last week killed women and children, Taliban spokesmen phoned correspondents within minutes to deny responsibility. The videos pouring out of al-Qaeda’s in-house production system may indeed be, as some optimistically say, a sign of operational weakness and a consequent reliance on propaganda, but they are still coherent and cleverly targeted and their strength is that they explain, in simple and unvarying terms, what the militants believe to be the cause of the violence: the supposed war on Islam by the West and their allies among heretic, apostate and hypocritical Muslims.

In contrast, media interventions by Western governments, militaries and security services tend to be flat-footed. Last week, a speech by the new head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, generated many headlines, largely frightening ones about al-Qaeda ‘grooming’ British youths and ‘more than 2,000’ dangerous individuals on our streets. Evans’s disappointment at this coverage was in some ways understandable, having made the effort to remind his audience of journalists that as ‘we are tackling a threat which finds its roots in ideology… we must pay close attention to our use of language’ and having pointed out that the more lurid coverage of terrorism made him ‘grit his teeth’. [complete article]

Engineers of Jihad
Crooked Timber, November , 2007

While looking for something entirely different (research on the Italian mafia), I just came across this absolutely fascinating new paper (pdf) by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog on engineers and Islamic terrorism. There’s been a lot of speculation about the visible elective affinity between education in certain technical disciplines and propensity to join Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, none of which has stopped some loons from claiming that the jihadists were led astray by trendy leftist post-modernist academics in the humanities and social sciences. Gambetta and Hertog use a combination of illustrative statistics, qualitative data and logistic regression to show not only that there is a strong relationship between an engineering background and involvement in a variety of Islamic terrorist groups, but to arrive at a plausible hypothesis as to why this relationship pertains. [complete article]

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NEWS: Khatami rallies reformists

Iran’s Khatami urges reformists to rally for change
AFP, November 10, 2007

Former president Mohammad Khatami has called on fellow reformists to rally for change in the next parliamentary polls, warning that Iran was faced with “great threats”, newspapers reported on Saturday.

“The objective of the reformists is not only to collect votes but to serve the country. Our country is facing great threats and unfortunately there are serious concerns,” Khatami was quoted as saying by several reformist papers.

The former president addressed a number of reformist leaders on Thursday calling on them to consolidate their efforts ahead of the parliamentary elections on March 14. [complete article]

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OPINION: Hamas’ army impresses Israelis

Good news from Gaza
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz, November 11, 2007

The group of reservist paratroopers returned all astir: Hamas fought like an army. The comrades of Sergeant-Major (Res.) Ehud Efrati, who fell in a battle in Gaza about two weeks ago, told Amos Harel that “in all parameters, we are facing an army, not gangs.” The soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces were impressed by their enemy’s night vision equipment, the tactical space they kept between one another – and their pants even had elastic bands to make them fit snugly around their boots. This is good news from Gaza.

First, it is good that reservists were sent on this mission because “if these missions were left to the regular soldiers, no one on the home front would understand what’s happening in Gaza,” one of them said. Indeed, the time has come for the soldiers to speak out. But the news the soldiers brought is also encouraging on several other levels. According to their descriptions, a Palestinian Defense Force has emerged. Instead of a rabble of armed gangs, an orderly army is coalescing that is prepared to defend its land. If it makes do with a defensive deployment against Israeli incursions, we will again have no moral claim against them: Hamas is entitled to defend Gaza, just as the IDF is entitled to defend Israel.

The coalescence of an army also ensures that if Israel tries to reach an accord with the Hamas government – the one and only way to stop the firing of Qassams – there will be someone in Gaza to prevent the firing. An armed and organized address in the chaos of Gaza also means good news for Israel. But the respect the reservists felt for the way Hamas fought is liable to trickle down deeper. “The Palestinians never looked like this,” the surprised soldiers told Haaretz. Perhaps we will finally stop calling them “terrorists” and refer to them as “fighters.” A bit of respect for the Palestinians and, in particular, an end to our dehumanization of them is liable to mark the beginning of a new chapter. [complete article]

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NEWS: Jordan prepares for undemocratic elections

Jordan, fearing Islamists, tightens grip on elections
By Thanassis Cambanis, New York Times, November 11, 2007

This month’s legislative elections were supposed to be a watershed in this pro-American kingdom’s slow but committed march to democratic change.

But Hamas’s rise to power in the Palestinian Authority and its violent takeover of Gaza in June have cast a heavy shadow over politics in Jordan, where a Hashemite monarch maintains a tight, authoritarian grip on a restive Palestinian majority and an activist Islamic opposition.

As a result, the government has dropped plans to change its byzantine electoral law, prohibited some critics from seeking office and threatened to bar independent observers from the polls. And, with less than two weeks before the Nov. 20 vote, opposition candidates are accusing the government of rampant voter fraud. [complete article]

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NEWS, ANALYSIS, OPINION & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Pakistan and the failure of American interests

Pakistan’s Plan B deficiency
By Gary Sick, Los Angeles Times, November 10, 2007

What is happening today in Pakistan takes me back to the time when the Iranian revolution was brewing, when I was the desk officer for Iran on the National Security Council.

The ultimate reason for the U.S. policy failure then was the fact that the U.S. had placed enormous trust and responsibility in the shah of Iran.

He — and not the country or people of Iran — was seen as the linchpin of U.S. strategy in the Persian Gulf. Everything relied on him. There was no Plan B.

As a consequence, the endlessly mulled-over U.S. response to Iranian instability was that we had no choice except to support the shah. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Even though it’s only a few days ago that General Musharraf was described by the Bush administration as an “indispensable” ally in the war on terrorism, it is probably inaccurate to say that the administration has no Plan B. Plan B is Benazir Bhutto. That said, Gary Sick’s point still applies: the U.S. government’s strategy in Pakistan hinges on its reliance on a handful of personal relationships. This is hardly surprising during a presidency in which a handshake has so often served as a substitute for a genuine meeting of minds and the cultivation of mutual understanding.

At the same time, the development of foreign policy — whether in this administration or any other — is invariably hamstrung by an idea that is regarded as axiomatic: that the U.S. government in its conduct of foreign affairs must focus on one thing and one thing alone: the defense and advance of American interests.

This gives rise to a myopic and self-referential attention. The Bush administration has focused on General Musharraf in as much as he is perceived as being helpful to the advance of American interests. In the process his American backers have lost sight of the extent to which their friend operates to the detriment of Pakistan’s interests. Yet if an underlying assumption — understood but rarely expressed — is that America’s interests can only be pursued at the expense of others, perhaps it’s time to entertain an idea that no American politician would ever dare utter: America’s self interest is not worth defending.

It is time for a new foreign policy paradigm. As Barak Obama puts it, “the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people.” And as James Traub in a New York Times Magazine feature on Obama puts it even more succinctly, “What’s good for others is good for us.”

Pakistanis’ anger at Musharraf extends to U.S.
By Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times, November 10, 2007

It takes almost no effort to find people who are angry with Pervez Musharraf on the streets of this bustling city. The Pakistani leader’s name comes up quickly in casual conversation, yoked with unprintable adjectives and harsh denunciations of the emergency rule he has imposed.

But dig just a little deeper and another target of resentment surfaces: Musharraf’s richest, staunchest and most powerful patron, the United States.

“We blame the U.S. directly for keeping us under the rule of the military,” said Arfan Ghani, a 54-year-old professor of architecture. Musharraf, who heads Pakistan’s army, is just “another dictator,” Ghani told an American reporter, “serving the interests of your country.”

Musharraf’s already abysmal popularity has reached a new low after he declared a state of emergency Nov. 3. But sinking alongside it is the public image of the United States, which many Pakistanis see as the primary force propping up an autocratic ruler. [complete article]

Pakistan: inside the storm
By Salman Raja, Open Democracy, November 9, 2007

The United States and the European Union have made some noises about the restoration of the constitution and the holding of free elections at the earliest opportunity. This is not enough: it must be emphasised that any call to hold elections without the restoration of the judges who have been ousted plays directly into General Musharraf’s hands. Twelve out of sixteen supreme court judges, including the chief justice have been ousted pursuant to the provisional constitutional order (PCO) issued on 3 November by General Musharraf in his capacity as the chief of the army staff. This order has no constitutional validity and is simply an assertion of military power. Only judges with known affiliation to the military junta have lined up to take a fresh oath of office under the PCO, in violation of their original oath to defend the constitution. Independent-minded judges have not been offered the fresh oath and if offered would not have taken it.

As a consequence, apart from the decimation of the supreme court, nearly 50% of the judges of the provincial high courts have been stripped of their office. This is a virtual demolition of the judiciary in Pakistan. The US and the EU are not talking about it. Elections without the restoration of the sacked judges will amount to throwing a cloak of ratification over the general’s assault. A true demand from outside, one consistent with the democratic ideals these states profess, would be “no elections without the restoration of the judiciary”. It is very clear that there can be no free elections under General Musharraf’s watch with a handpicked docile judiciary looking the other way. [complete article]

Pakistan strife threatens anti-insurgent plan
By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, November 9, 2007

The political turmoil in Pakistan is threatening to undermine a new long-term counterinsurgency plan by the U.S. military aimed at strengthening Pakistani forces fighting Islamic extremists in the country’s tribal areas, according to senior military officials. The officials said the initiative involves expanding the presence of U.S. Special Forces and other troops to train and advise the Pakistanis, who have been largely ineffective in battling the hard-line militants.

Even as the Bush administration reviews aid to Pakistan in light of Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of emergency rule last weekend, U.S. military officials are moving forward with the plan — ordering equipment, surveying training facilities outside Islamabad, and preparing to send in dozens of additional military trainers, who are expected to begin arriving early next year.

“This train has already left the station,” said a senior military official familiar with the effort. “We on the ground are moving ahead under the ambassador’s guidance.” [complete article]

See also, Benazir Bhutto is permitted to leave home (NYT).

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