Monthly Archives: January 2013

British troops to be sent to Mali

The Guardian reports: A major increase in the UK commitment to help French and African forces in Mali and the region has been confirmed by Downing Street and the defence secretary, Philip Hammond, in an urgent statement to the House of Commons.

Amid concerns on the Tory benches that Britain is being drawn into a conflict without an exit strategy, the government said that 200 UK troops would train an African regional force outside Mali, with up to 40 more on an EU training mission inside the country. A further 70 RAF personnel will oversee the use of Sentinel surveillance, to be based in Senegal with 70 supporting crew and technical staff, and 20 will staff a C-17 transport plane for a further three months.

Britain has offered a roll-on, roll-off ferry to help transport French armour to Mali by sea, landing on the African coast. Britain is also offering air-to-air refuelling capacity to operate outside the UK, but based in Britain. It is possible the US will provide air-to-air refuelling.

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America’s widening clandestine operations in Africa

The New York Times reports: The United States military is preparing to establish a drone base in northwest Africa so that it can increase surveillance missions on the local affiliate of Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremist groups that American and other Western officials say pose a growing menace to the region.

For now, officials say they envision flying only unarmed surveillance drones from the base, though they have not ruled out conducting missile strikes at some point if the threat worsens.

The move is an indication of the priority Africa has become in American antiterrorism efforts. The United States military has a limited presence in Africa, with only one permanent base, in the country of Djibouti, more than 3,000 miles from Mali, where French and Malian troops are now battling Qaeda-backed fighters who control the northern part of Mali.

A new drone base in northwest Africa would join a constellation of small airstrips in recent years on the continent, including in Ethiopia, for surveillance missions flown by drones or turboprop planes designed to look like civilian aircraft.

If the base is approved, the most likely location for it would be in Niger, a largely desert nation on the eastern border of Mali. The American military’s Africa Command, or Africom, is also discussing options for the base with other countries in the region, including Burkina Faso, officials said.

The immediate impetus for a drone base in the region is to provide surveillance assistance to the French-led operation in Mali. “This is directly related to the Mali mission, but it could also give Africom a more enduring presence for I.S.R.,” one American military official said Sunday, referring to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

A handful of unarmed Predator drones would carry out surveillance missions in the region and fill a desperate need for more detailed information on a range of regional threats, including militants in Mali and the unabated flow of fighters and weapons from Libya. American military commanders and intelligence analysts complain that such information has been sorely lacking.

The Africa Command’s plan still needs approval from the Pentagon and eventually from the White House, as well as from officials in Niger. American military officials said that they were still working out some details, and that no final decision had been made. But in Niger on Monday, the two countries reached a status-of-forces agreement that clears the way for greater American military involvement in the country and provides legal protection to American troops there, including any who might deploy to a new drone base.

The plan could face resistance from some in the White House who are wary of committing any additional American forces to a fight against a poorly understood web of extremist groups in North Africa.

If approved, the base could ultimately have as many as 300 United States military and contractor personnel, but it would probably begin with far fewer people than that, military officials said.

Some Africa specialists expressed concern that setting up a drone base in Niger or in a neighboring country, even if only to fly surveillance missions, could alienate local people who may associate the distinctive aircraft with deadly attacks in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

Last June, a Washington Post report noted that: conventional aircraft hold two big advantages over drones: They are cheaper to operate and far less likely to draw attention because they are so similar to the planes used throughout Africa.

The bulk of the U.S. surveillance fleet is composed of single-engine Pilatus PC-12s, small passenger and cargo utility planes manufactured in Switzerland. The aircraft are not equipped with weapons. They often do not bear military markings or government insignia.

The Pentagon began acquiring the planes in 2005 to fly commandos into territory where the military wanted to maintain a clandestine presence. The Air Force variant of the aircraft is known as the U-28A. The Air Force Special Operations Command has about 21 of the planes in its inventory.

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The Pentagon’s expanding cyberwarfare capabilities

The Washington Post reports: The Pentagon has approved a major expansion of its cybersecurity force over the next several years, increasing its size more than fivefold to bolster the nation’s ability to defend critical computer systems and conduct offensive computer operations against foreign adversaries, according to U.S. officials.

The move, requested by the head of the Defense Department’s Cyber Command, is part of an effort to turn an organization that has focused largely on defensive measures into the equivalent of an Internet-era fighting force. The command, made up of about 900 personnel, will expand to include 4,900 troops and civilians.

Details of the plan have not been finalized, but the decision to expand the Cyber Command was made by senior Pentagon officials late last year in recognition of a growing threat in cyberspace, said officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the expansion has not been formally announced. The gravity of that threat, they said, has been highlighted by a string of sabotage attacks, including one in which a virus was used to wipe dat a from more than 30,000 computers at a Saudi Arabian state oil company last summer.

The plan calls for the creation of three types of forces under the Cyber Command: “national mission forces” to protect computer systems that undergird electrical grids, power plants and other infrastructure deemed critical to national and economic security; “combat mission forces” to help commanders abroad plan and execute attacks or other offensive operations; and “cyber protection forces” to fortify the Defense Department’s networks. [Continue reading…]

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Inside the war for Syria’s mountains

Martin Chulov reports from the Alawite heartland in the mountains of western Syria: The al-Nusra member the Guardian met had not been expecting strangers. His head swathed in a black turban, and with a Kalashnikov strapped to his chest, he walked slowly down a potholed road towards us before stopping warily several metres away. He scanned us purposefully from head to toe, inhaled deeply, then said: “What’s going on?”

The American-accented English was as much a surprise as finding him there in the first place, living in a house next door to the main rebel outpost in the region, along with 20 or so other members of the group at the vanguard of the fighting.

His opening remark was less an icebreaker, however, than the beginning of an interrogation. For 40 minutes, sometimes chilling, sometimes charming, he tried to gauge our provenance and our reason for journeying south into Jebel al-Krud, the giant plateau that soars above Latakia and Tartous to the south.

The region is steeped in Islamic history, and has a tradition of sectarian coexistence. About 800 years ago, the Islamic warrior Salah al-Din – a Kurd better known to Europeans as Saladin – used the mountains and valleys of the area to prepare to battle the Crusaders. Kurds travelled with him from what is now northern Iraq, and settled here. Christian and Alawite communities are also long established.

Our interrogator eventually offered tea. “You do not share my ideology,” he said. “But you are here on humanitarian grounds.” The concession amounted to a travel pass. “Where is your flak jacket? We have an obligation before God to do what we can to protect ourselves,” he said, pointing at the camouflage vest covering his shirt. “So should you.”

Sheer cliffs climbed vertically from the first stretch of the road south, soon giving way to plunging, emerald ravines still flush with blue floodwaters. Villages peppered the hilltops, grey blobs against an iridescent green whenever they emerged from the fog.

Around one bend, white crosses jutted starkly from the graves on a hilltop. This was the Christian village of Jdeida, on the edge of Idlib province and Jebel al-Krud. Barely a home here had escaped shell damage since it was taken by rebel groups six weeks earlier. And next to none of the locals had remained.

One family had stayed behind. “We don’t have an option,” the elderly Christian man said. “The situation is as you see it. This is the first time there hasn’t been shelling here in more than a week. We haven’t seen the sun or sat in our garden in all that time.”

The man’s wife picked an orange from the tree at the centre of the courtyard and offered it on a silver tray.

His 90-year-old mother sat on a stone wall, her left eye red with a chronic infection, her right streaming with tears. “We can’t go anywhere to get medicine,” she said between sobs. “We are not with anyone, my son. We are too old for this. Please let it end.”

Neither side seems to have any will to bring the war for the mountains to a close. [Continue reading…]

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Most of Timbuktu’s manuscripts saved?


Updated with comment below.

In interviews with TIME on Monday, the preservationists [of Timbuktu’s centuries-old artifacts] said that in a large-scale rescue operation early last year, shortly before the militants seized control of Timbuktu, thousands of manuscripts were hauled out of the Ahmad Baba center to a safe house elsewhere. Realizing that the documents might be prime targets for pillaging or vindictive attacks from Islamic extremists, staff left behind just a small portion of them, perhaps out of haste, but also to conceal the fact that the center had been deliberately emptied. “The documents which had been there are safe, they were not burned,” said Mahmoud Zouber, Mali’s presidential aide on Islamic affairs, a title he retains despite the overthrow of the former president, his boss, in a military coup a year ago; preserving Timbuktu’s manuscripts was a key project of his office. By phone from Bamako on Monday night, Zouber told TIME, “They were put in a very safe place. I can guarantee you. The manuscripts are in total security.”

In a second interview from Bamako, a preservationist who did not want to be named confirmed that the center’s collection had been hidden out of reach from the militants. Neither of those interviewed wanted the location of the manuscripts named in print, for fear that remnants of the al-Qaeda occupiers might return to destroy them.

That was confirmed too by Shamil Jeppie, director of the Timbuktu Manuscripts Project at the University of Cape Town, who told TIME on Monday night, “There were a few items in the Ahmad Baba Library, but the rest were kept away.” The center, financed by the South African government as a favored project by then-President Thabo Mbeki, who championed reviving Africa’s historical culture, housed state-of-the-art equipment to preserve and photograph hundreds of thousands of pages, some of which had gold illumination, astrological charts and sophisticated mathematical formulas. Jeppie said he had been enraged by the television footage on Monday of the building trashed, and blamed in part Mali’s government, which he said had done little to ensure the center’s security. “It is really sad and disturbing,” he said.

After posting this last night, I thought I should add a question mark to the headline. At this point it doesn’t seem like anyone is in a position to accurately quantify how many of Timbuktu’s rare manuscripts might have been destroyed by the city’s Islamist occupiers before they fled. Although the Ahmed Baba Instititute, where fire damage was reported, is the principal facility housing Timbuktu’s treasures, there are dozens of family-owned libraries around the city containing thousands more manuscripts. None of the reporting I have seen indicates whether these collections were either secured or damaged.

While the fate of the manuscripts remains unclear, it’s easy for journalists to overplay a story that dovetails so neatly with the routing-of-the-barbarians narrative, rather than stick with what can actually be established at this time — which is not much.

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Destruction of Timbuktu manuscripts is an offence against the whole of Africa

A Quran from the 12th century in Timbuktu

Jonathan Jones writes: The reported destruction of two important manuscript collections by Islamist rebels as they fled Timbuktu is an offence to the whole of Africa and its universally important cultural heritage. Like their systematic destruction of 300 Sufi saints’ shrines while they held Timbuktu at their mercy, it is an assault on world heritage comparable with the demolition of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2001.

The literary heritage of Timbuktu dates back to the 15th and 16th centuries when the gold-rich kingdoms of Mali and Songhai traded across the Sahara with the Mediterranean world. It took two months for merchant caravans to cross the desert, and while gold and slaves went north, books were going south.

In his Description of Africa, published in 1550, the traveller Leo Africanus marvels that in the bustling markets of Timbuktu, under the towers of its majestic mosques, the richest traders were booksellers.

They were selling manuscripts by Arab scholars on everything from astronomy and arithmetic to Islamic law, as well as mystical texts on Sufism, the otherworldly, saintly style of faith that the al-Qaida-affiliated Ansar Dine finds so offensive. [Continue reading…]

In a 2010 BBC documentary, Aminatta Forna tells the story of the lost libraries of Timbuktu.

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In Israel, advocates of peace are viewed as extremists

Outside Israel, Shlomi Eldar is best known as the TV broadcaster who spoke to Gaza doctor, Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish, moments after al-Aish’s three daughters had been killed in an Israeli strike during Operation Cast Lead in 2009.

In an interview with Haaretz, Eldar says:

A few days after the end of Operation Pillar of Defense [November, 2012], I gave a talk at a Herzliya high school. The children, who said they came from good homes, told me we have to kill all the Arabs, including the Israeli Arabs, because where do they get off thinking they will get control of the country. Their ideal is to go into the army and kill as many Arabs as possible. That’s one side of the picture, Israeli youth, the new generation, living in an atmosphere of demonizing the Palestinians − which is something the Israeli media are responsible for in no small measure. The other side of the picture is the young generation in Gaza, a child of five or nine. Let’s say he is not wounded, but a four-ton bomb landed next to his house. Do you know that in Operation Pillar of Defense, not one pane of glass remained intact in the whole of Gaza? It’s a tactic of creating sonic booms to frighten people without hurting them. A child who has a bomb like that land next to him can’t hear anything for the next three days. What does he think about the Jews afterward? And where will we end up, if this is how Jewish youngsters think about Arabs?

Nowhere good.

We are on a nothing-to-lose track. Which is why I say there is no future. When I told the high school class that we have to look at them as human beings, one boy jumped up and said, “Who do you vote for? You’re extreme left, no?” I replied, “It would surprise you to know who I vote for.” But that’s not the point. The point is that we in Israel have reached a situation in which if someone says we have to talk peace, he’s considered extreme left.

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How the New York Times covers the Israel lobby: by pretending it doesn’t exist

Cartoon by Matt Wuerker appearing in Politico, January 23, 2013.

The cartoon above, which appeared in Politico a few days ago, is pretty straightforward in identifying who is behind the campaign against Chuck Hagel’s nomination as defense secretary: the Israel lobby. (It’s worth noting, Politico is a fairly lobby-friendly publication, so the willingness of its editors to name names in this case has more to do with stating what is blindingly obvious rather than springing from some desire to ‘out’ the lobby.)

How does the New York Times cover the same story? Assign it to a reporter who apparently doesn’t believe the Israel lobby exists.

In Jim Rutenberg’s mind, the campaign against Chuck Hagel is a story about the effects of the Supreme Court decision, Citizen’s United. You have to go all the way down to paragraph nineteen in his report before Rutenberg mentions the Emergency Committee for Israel (creators of the anti-Hagel ChuckHagel.com website which doesn’t even get mentioned in the article).

Even though Rutenberg refers to Sheldon Adelson as a prominent backer of the anti-Hagel campaign, he only comes up after mentioning major conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity and Crossroads GPS who are not involved in the fight against Hagel.

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How the pharmaceutical industry deceives doctors and patients

Fake pharma ad for "Havidol"

Ben Goldacre writes: In 2010, three researchers from Harvard and Toronto found all the trials looking at five major classes of drug — antidepressants, ulcer drugs and so on — and then measured two key features: were they positive, and were they funded by industry? They found over 500 trials in total: 85 percent of the industry-funded studies were positive, but only 50 percent of the government-funded trials were. That’s a very significant difference.

In 2007, researchers looked at every published trial that set out to explore the benefit of a statin. These are cholesterol-lowering drugs which reduce your risk of having a heart attack, and they are prescribed in very large quantities. This study found 192 trials in total, either comparing one statin against another, or comparing a statin against a different kind of treatment. Once the researchers controlled for other factors (we’ll delve into what this means later), they found that industry-funded trials were 20 times more likely to give results favoring the test drug. Again, that’s a very big difference.

We’ll do one more. In 2006, researchers looked into every trial of psychiatric drugs in four academic journals over a 10-year period, finding 542 trial outcomes in total. Industry sponsors got favorable outcomes for their own drug 78 percent of the time, while independently funded trials only gave a positive result in 48 percent of cases. If you were a competing drug put up against the sponsor’s drug in a trial, you were in for a pretty rough ride: You would only win a measly 28 percent of the time.

These are dismal, frightening results, but they come from individual studies. When there has been lots of research in a field, it’s always possible that someone — like me, for example — could cherry-pick the results and give a partial view. I could, in essence, be doing exactly what I accuse the pharmaceutical industry of doing by only telling you about the studies that support my case while hiding the rest from you.

To guard against this risk, researchers invented the systematic review. In essence a systematic review is simple: Instead of just mooching through the research literature, consciously or unconsciously picking out papers here and there that support your pre-existing beliefs, you take a scientific, systematic approach to the very process of looking for scientific evidence, ensuring that your evidence is as complete and representative as possible of all the research that has ever been done.

Systematic reviews are very, very onerous. In 2003, by coincidence, two were published, both looking specifically at the question we’re interested in. They took all the studies ever published about whether industry funding is associated with pro-industry results. Each took a slightly different approach to finding research papers, and both found that industry-funded trials were, overall, about four times more likely to report positive results. A further review in 2007 looked at the new studies that had been published in the four years after these two earlier reviews: It found 20 more pieces of work, and all but two showed that industry-sponsored trials were more likely to report flattering results.

I am setting out this evidence at length because I want to be absolutely clear that there is no doubt on the issue. Industry-sponsored trials give favorable results, and that is not just my opinion or a hunch from the occasional passing study. This is a very well-documented problem, and it has been researched extensively without anybody stepping out to take effective action, as we shall see. [Continue reading…]

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Timbuktu mayor: Mali rebels torched library of historic manuscripts

The Guardian reports: Islamist insurgents retreating from Timbuktu set fire to a library containing thousands of priceless historic manuscripts, according to the Saharan town’s mayor, in an incident he described as a “devastating blow” to world heritage.

Hallé Ousmani Cissé told the Guardian that al-Qaida-allied fighters on Saturday torched two buildings that held the manuscripts, some of which dated back to the 13th century. They also burned down the town hall, the governor’s office and an MP’s residence, and shot dead a man who was celebrating the arrival of the French military.

French troops and the Malian army reached the gates of Timbuktu on Saturday and secured the town’s airport. But they appear to have got there too late to rescue the leather-bound manuscripts that were a unique record of sub-Saharan Africa’s rich medieval history. The rebels attacked the airport on Sunday, the mayor said.

“It’s true. They have burned the manuscripts,” Cissé said in a phone interview from Mali’s capital, Bamako. “They also burned down several buildings. There was one guy who was celebrating in the street and they killed him.”

He added: “This is terrible news. The manuscripts were a part not only of Mali’s heritage but the world’s heritage. By destroying them they threaten the world. We have to kill all of the rebels in the north.”

On Monday French army officers said French-led forces had entered Timbuktu and secured the town without a shot being fired. A team of French paratroopers crept into the town by moonlight, advancing from the airport, they said. Residents took to the streets to celebrate.

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As rebels flee, world turns to challenge of repairing Mali

Toronto’s Globe and Mail reports: Faster than expected, a French-led offensive has swept into two key towns in northern Mali, putting Islamist rebels on the run. But as the insurgents melt back into the Sahara wastes, the world is left with the same dilemma as before: how to rebuild a shattered state that remains a haven for terrorists.

It’s a challenge that Western donors will confront at a conference on Tuesday, when the African Union pleads for more than $400-million to allow thousands of African troops to remain in Mali for at least a year. But money alone is not enough to put the country back together.

Canada is among the countries that will consider pledging funds to support Africa’s military effort. Canada is already contributing a massive military transport plane for a 30-day mission in Mali, and is considering other non-military help.

By capturing the strategic city of Gao and pushing the rebels out of the fabled town of Timbuktu on the weekend, the French and Malian forces have regained two of the three biggest urban centres in northern Mali with surprising ease.

Thousands of people celebrated in the streets of Gao on Sunday, dancing to music that had been banned under the harsh rule of the Islamist extremists. They cheered the French and Malian troops, greeting them as liberators from radical militias that had ruled with brutal force, compelling women to wear veils and amputating the hands of accused thieves.

Meanwhile, the insurgents were reported to have abandoned Timbuktu after repeated French air strikes, while French and Malian forces took control of its airport and probed into the ancient town, cautious because of the risk of ambush or counterattack.

Of the three main northern towns, only the town of Kidal – much further north – remains in rebel hands.

Yet the battle for the main towns was always destined to be the easiest step in a vastly complex task. The insurgents have spent months preparing a network of caves and tunnels in the desert and mountains. They have dramatically expanded their weaponry and vehicles. And they remain an elusive foe, ready to strike back when Mali is vulnerable again.

France has neither the resources nor the will to remain an occupying power in Mali indefinitely. The task for Africa and the West now is to restore Mali’s crumbling military and government structures, filling the vacuum that had allowed the Islamist radicals to thrive for years.

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Selling a new generation on guns

The New York Times reports: Threatened by long-term declining participation in shooting sports, the firearms industry has poured millions of dollars into a broad campaign to ensure its future by getting guns into the hands of more, and younger, children.

The industry’s strategies include giving firearms, ammunition and cash to youth groups; weakening state restrictions on hunting by young children; marketing an affordable military-style rifle for “junior shooters” and sponsoring semiautomatic-handgun competitions for youths; and developing a target-shooting video game that promotes brand-name weapons, with links to the Web sites of their makers.

The pages of Junior Shooters, an industry-supported magazine that seeks to get children involved in the recreational use of firearms, once featured a smiling 15-year-old girl clutching a semiautomatic rifle. At the end of an accompanying article that extolled target shooting with a Bushmaster AR-15 — an advertisement elsewhere in the magazine directed readers to a coupon for buying one — the author encouraged youngsters to share the article with a parent.

“Who knows?” it said. “Maybe you’ll find a Bushmaster AR-15 under your tree some frosty Christmas morning!” [Continue reading…]

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Israeli eugenics program halted

Ethiopian immigrants arriving in Israel, October 2012.

Haaretz reports: A government official has for the first time acknowledged the practice of injecting women of Ethiopian origin with the long-acting contraceptive Depo-Provera.

Health Ministry Director General Prof. Ron Gamzu has instructed the four health maintenance organizations to stop the practice as a matter of course.

The ministry and other state agencies had previously denied knowledge or responsibility for the practice, which was first reported five years ago.

Gamzu’s letter instructs all gynecologists in the HMOs “not to renew prescriptions for Depo-Provera for women of Ethiopian origin if for any reason there is concern that they might not understand the ramifications of the treatment.”

He also instructed physicians to avail themselves of translators if need be.

Gamzu’s letter came in response to a letter from Sharona Eliahu-Chai of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, representing several women’s rights and Ethiopian immigrants’ groups. The letter demanded the injections cease immediately and that an investigation be launched into the practice.

On December 9, the Times of Israel reported: Ethiopian women who moved to Israel eight years ago claimed Israeli officials coerced them to receive injections of Depo-Provera, a long-acting birth control drug, as a prerequisite to immigration.

Speaking to reporters on an episode of Israel Educational Television’s investigative show “Vacuum” that aired on Saturday, several immigrants described the intense pressure placed on them to keep their families small. The women claimed Israeli representatives from the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and the Health Ministry told them that raising large families is especially difficult, that it is for hard people with many children to find work and support their families, and that many landlords would not be willing to rent apartments to large families.

Gal Gabbai, the show’s anchor, reported that in the past decade, approximately 50,000 Ethiopian Jews have immigrated to Israel. During that period, the birth rate among this community, which has traditionally favored very large families, has plummeted by nearly 50 percent.

Several women interviewed by Gabbai said that they were told at the transit camps in Ethiopia that they had to receive the shots if they wanted to immigrate to Israel and continue receiving medical treatment from the JDC. Furthermore, many of the women claimed they were never told that the shots were to prevent pregnancy. Rather, they were under the impression that the shots were vaccinations.

Some women reportedly refused to tell their husbands about the shots, fearing the men would be furious.

The report said many women continued to receive Depo-Provera after arriving in Israel, despite suffering such side effects as severe headaches and abdominal pains.

One woman who suffered from osteoporosis said she has been receiving shots for four years without ever being warned that Depo-Provera was dangerous to women in her condition.

A hidden camera in a local health clinic recorded a Ethiopian woman being told by a nurse that this shot is given “primarily to Ethiopian women because they forget, they don’t understand, and it’s hard to explain to them, so it’s best that they receive a shot once every three months… basically they don’t understand anything.”

Israeli authorities denied all of the allegations.

“In with the New Year, out with the Africans,” a video report by David Sheen showed one of the most recent and bluntest expressions of racism in Israel, as residents of South Tel Aviv demanded that the government round up, jail and deport all non-Jewish African asylum-seekers.

Apologists for the Jewish state might have responded in one or two ways: to argue that the demonstrators are marginal (even though the included a member of the Knesset), or that even if their actions are ill-conceived, these Israelis are driven by the desire to protect Israel’s Jewish identity.

What the government policy designed to limit the size of Israel’s Ethiopian population makes indisputable is that racism is institutionally based in the workings of the state.

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Ann Jones: The Afghan end game?

The euphemisms will come fast and furious.  Our soldiers will be greeted as “heroes” who, as in Iraq, left with their “heads held high,” and if in 2014 or 2015 or even 2019, the last of them, as also in Iraq, slip away in the dark of night after lying to their Afghan “allies” about their plans, few here will notice.

This will be the nature of the great Afghan drawdown. The words “retreat,” “loss,” “defeat,” “disaster,” and their siblings and cousins won’t be allowed on the premises.  But make no mistake, the country that, only years ago, liked to call itself the globe’s “sole superpower” or even “hyperpower,” whose leaders dreamed of a Pax Americana across the Greater Middle East, if not the rest of the globe is… not to put too fine a point on it, packing its bags, throwing in the towel, quietly admitting — in actions, if not in words — to mission unaccomplished, and heading if not exactly home, at least boot by boot off the Eurasian landmass.

Washington has, in a word, had enough. Too much, in fact.  It’s lost its appetite for invasions and occupations of Eurasia, though special operations raids, drone wars, and cyberwars still look deceptively cheap and easy as a means to control… well, whatever.  As a result, the Afghan drawdown of 2013-2014, that implicit acknowledgement of yet another lost war, should set the curtain falling on the American Century as we’ve known it.  It should be recognized as a landmark, the moment in history when the sun truly began to set on a great empire.  Here in the United States, though, one thing is just about guaranteed: not many are going to be paying the slightest attention.

No one even thinks to ask the question: In the mighty battle lost, who exactly beat us?  Where exactly is the triumphant enemy?  Perhaps we should be relieved that the question is not being raised, because it’s a hard one to answer.  Could it really have been the scattered jihadis of al-Qaeda and its wannabes?  Or the various modestly armed Sunni and Shiite minority insurgencies in Iraq, or their Pashtun equivalents in Afghanistan with their suicide bombers and low-tech roadside bombs?  Or was it something more basic, something having to do with a planet no longer amenable to imperial expeditions?  Did the local and global body politic simply and mysteriously spit us out as the distasteful thing we had become?  Or is it even possible, as Pogo once suggested, that in those distant, unwelcoming lands, we met the enemy and he was us?  Did we in some bizarre fashion fight ourselves and lose?  After all, last year, more American servicemen died from suicide than on the battlefield in Afghanistan; and a startling number of Americans were killed in “green on blue” or “insider” attacks by Afghan “allies” rather than by that fragmented movement we still call the Taliban. 

Whoever or whatever was responsible, our Afghan disaster was remarkably foreseeable.  In fact, anyone who, from 2006 on, read Ann Jones’s Afghan reports at TomDispatch wouldn’t have had a doubt about the outcome of the war. Her first piece, after all, was prophetically entitled “Why It’s Not Working in Afghanistan.” (“The answer is a threefold failure: no peace, no democracy, and no reconstruction.”)  From Western private-contractors-cum-looters making a figurative killing off the “reconstruction” of the country to an Afghan army that was largely a figment of the American imagination to up-armored U.S. soldiers on well-guarded bases whose high-tech equipment and comforts of home blinded them to the nature of the enemy, hers has long been a tale of impending failure.  Now, that war seems headed for its predictable end, not for the Afghans who, as Jones indicates in her latest sweeping report from Kabul, may face terrible years ahead, but for the U.S.  After more than 11 years, the war that is often labeled the longest in American history is slowly winding down and that’s no small thing.

So leave the mystery of who beat us to the historians, but mark the moment. It’s historic. Tom Engelhardt

Counting down to 2014 in Afghanistan
Three lousy options: pick one
By Ann Jones

Kabul, Afghanistan — Compromise, conflict, or collapse: ask an Afghan what to expect in 2014 and you’re likely to get a scenario that falls under one of those three headings. 2014, of course, is the year of the double whammy in Afghanistan: the next presidential election coupled with the departure of most American and other foreign forces. Many Afghans fear a turn for the worse, while others are no less afraid that everything will stay the same.  Some even think things will get better when the occupying forces leave.  Most predict a more conservative climate, but everyone is quick to say that it’s anybody’s guess.

Only one thing is certain in 2014: it will be a year of American military defeat.  For more than a decade, U.S. forces have fought many types of wars in Afghanistan, from a low-footprint invasion, to multiple surges, to a flirtation with Vietnam-style counterinsurgency, to a ramped-up, gloves-off air war.  And yet, despite all the experiments in styles of war-making, the American military and its coalition partners have ended up in the same place: stalemate, which in a battle with guerrillas means defeat.  For years, a modest-sized, generally unpopular, ragtag set of insurgents has fought the planet’s most heavily armed, technologically advanced military to a standstill, leaving the country shaken and its citizens anxiously imagining the outcome of unpalatable scenarios.

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Egypt’s Morsi declares ‘state of emergency’

Al Jazeera reports: Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has declared a 30-day state of emergency and a night-time curfew in three cities along the Suez Canal that have seen deadly clashes in recent days.

In a televised address late on Sunday, Morsi said the emergency measures in Port Said, Ismailia and Suez would take effect on Monday from 9:00pm local time (19:00 GMT) to 6:00am (04:00 GMT), warning that more action would be taken to stem the latest eruption of violence across much of the country.

“I have said I am against any emergency measures but I have said that if I must stop bloodshed and protect the people then I will act,” Morsi said.

He also called for dialogue with top politicians starting on Monday to resolve the situation.

Deadly clashes across the country between protesters and police have killed at least 48 people since Friday, when Egyptians commemorated the two-year anniversary of the revolution that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak.

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Malians celebrate, French-led forces clear Timbuktu

Reuters reports: Residents of Mali’s northern town of Gao, captured from sharia-observing Islamist rebels by French and Malian troops, danced in the streets to drums and music on Sunday as the French-led offensive also drove the rebels from Timbuktu.

The weekend gains made at Gao and Timbuktu by the French and Malian troops capped a two-week whirlwind intervention by France in its former Sahel colony, which has driven al Qaeda-allied militant fighters northwards into the desert and mountains.

In Gao, the largest town in the north where the Islamist insurgents had banned music and smoking, cut off the hands of thieves and ordered women to wear veils, thousands cheered the liberating troops with shouts of “Mali, Mali, France, France”.

French special forces backed by Rafale fighter jets and Tiger helicopters had helped capture the town early on Saturday.

Among the celebrating Gao crowds, many smoked cigarettes, women went unveiled and some men wore shorts to flout the severe sharia Islamic law the rebels had imposed for months. Youths on motorcycles flew the flags of Mali, France and Niger, whose troops also helped secure the ancient town on the Niger River.

“Now we can breathe freely,” said Hawa Toure, 25, wearing a colorful traditional African robe banned under sharia for being too revealing. “We are as free as the wind today. We thank all of our friends around the world who helped us,” she said.

French and Malian troops also arrived at the weekend at the fabled Saharan trading town of Timbuktu, more than 300 km (190 miles) to the west of Gao, and were working to restore government control over the UNESCO World Heritage Site.

A Malian military source said the French and Malian troops had met no resistance up to the gates of Timbuktu and controlled the airport. They were working on flushing out any Islamist rebel fighters still hiding in the city, a labyrinth of ancient mosques and monuments and mud-brick homes between alleys.

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