Author Archives: News Sources

The risks of the French intervention in Mali

Hannah Armstrong writes: Mamadou Doumbia was so thrilled that France intervened this weekend to beat back a jihadi offensive in Mali that on Monday he took me to buy a French flag to mount next to the Malian flag on the dashboard in his taxi.

“If you had given me a French flag nine months ago,” he said, “I would have burned it.”

Just last week, Mamadou was waiting in Bamako in terror as the Al Qaeda-linked trinity that controls northern Mali and has imposed a form of Shariah law there advanced southward on multiple fronts. With the militants closing in on the buffer zone between the rebel-held north and the government-held south, the capital erupted in a series of antigovernment protests and strikes.

There was no doubt that Mali, whose political class and military forces were decimated by the northern rebellion and a coup d’état last March, was not ready to meet its enemy in battle. In Bamako, we were receiving reports that Malian soldiers were already starting to shed their uniforms and flee. The jihadis seemed set on capturing Sévaré, a garrison town about 350 miles northeast of Bamako, with an airport of unparalleled strategic importance.

But Monday, on our way to the busy intersection where a dozen young boys were selling French flags, Mamadou broke into an enormous smile upon hearing a radio broadcast from Sévaré. French airstrikes had killed 60 jihadi rebels in the northern city of Gao, it reported, and the rest were said to be running away. “People have started to smoke cigarettes and wear long pants!” Mamadou translated for me. “They’re playing soccer in the streets!” he said.

The French, by all accounts here, saved Mali from an existential threat and the region from the nightmare of seeing a terrorist stronghold expand.

Yet the hasty, ad hoc French deployment brings dangers of its own. One consequence is that it legitimizes the putschist regime that toppled a twice-elected president last March. Other governments, in particular Washington, had been reluctant to intervene in Mali, largely because of objections to the continued hold on power of Capt. Aya Sanogo, the leader of last year’s coup. The French’s push forward not only validates his presence; it enhances his powers. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s reactionary revolutionaries

Robin Yassin-Kassab writes: In August 2012 Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi attended a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Tehran. His presence at the conference was something of a diplomatic victory for the Iranian leadership, whose relations with Egypt, the pivotal Arab state, had been at the lowest of ebbs since the 1979 revolution.

Egypt’s President Sadat laid on a state funeral for the exiled Iranian shah. A Tehran street was later named after Khalid Islambouli, one of Sadat’s assassins. Like every Arab country except Syria, Egypt backed Iraq against Iran in the First Gulf War. Later, Hosni Mubarak opposed Iranian influence in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, worked with the US and Saudi Arabia against Iran’s nuclear program, and was one of the Arab dictators (alongside the Abdullahs of Jordan and Saudi Arabia) to warn darkly of a rising “Shi’ite cresent”. Not surprisingly, Iran was so overjoyed by the 2011 revolution in Egypt that it portrayed it as a replay of its own Islamic Revolution.

Iran also rhetorically supported the revolutions in Tunisia and Libya, the uprising in Yemen, and, most fervently, the uprising in Shia-majority Bahrain.

In Syria, however, Iran supported the Assad tyranny against a popular revolution even as Assad escalated repression from gunfire and torture to aerial bombardment and missile strikes. Iran provided Assad with a propaganda smokescreen, injections of money to keep regime militias afloat, arms and ammunition, military training, and tactical advice, particularly on neutralising cyber opponents. Many Syrians believe Iranian officers are also fighting on the ground.

Iran’s backing for al-Assad is ironic because at a certain point the Syrian revolution was the one that most resembled 1979 in Iran – the violent repression of demonstrations leading to angry funerals leading to still more in a constantly expanding circle of anger and defiance; the people chanting allahu akbar from their balconies at night; women in hijabs joining women with bouffant hair to protest against regime brutality. [Continue reading…]

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Algeria hostage crisis sparks fears of escalation across region

The Guardian reports: The attack on the Algerian gas field has raised fears of the conflict in Mali becoming an international battle bleeding across the porous borders of the Sahel and Sahara region.

It also presents a major challenge to the military-dominated regime in Algiers – still in the shadow of a decade of bloody civil war – which had been accused of having an ambiguous stance towards the Mali crisis.

Algeria will now firmly be dragged into resolving the Mali conflict, while also dealing with the return of major action by Islamist groups on its home turf.

The hostage-taking has spelled out the complexities of the unrest in the Sahel: a tangled mix of communal tensions, economic struggle, desertification, poverty, criminality, kidnapping and smuggling, which shifts seamlessly across borders.

With six days of French airstrikes failing to erode the Islamist gains in Mali, French special forces prepared to launch a land assault on Wednesday around Diabaly, 250 miles (450 km) from the capital.

France’s aim is to secure the vast desert area seized last year by an Islamist alliance, which combines al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) – the terrorist network’s north African wing – with Mali’s homegrown Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (Mojwa) and Ansar Dine rebel groups. But the Algerian hostage drama at the BP oilfield far away to the north at the Algerian-Libyan border marks a turning point and a widening of the game.

Attacks on oil-rich Algeria’s hydrocarbon facilities are very rare, despite the country’s decades of fighting an Islamist insurgency, mostly in the north.

Jon Marks, associate fellow at Chatham House, London’s leading foreign affairs thinktank, said: “The attack is remarkable for a number of reasons.

“If you look at Algeria’s conflict of the 1990s, out of which AQIM sprang, the major oil and gas fields of the deep south, a strategic interest to Europe, were not attacked. Even in Algeria’s bloody history, this is the first time there has been major attack on a hydrocarbon facility.

“It shows the degree to which the events in Mali are an international Sahel and Sahara-wide issue. These groups are international: including Malians, people who came from the Libya conflict, but also from Algeria and Mauritania.”

He said the attack showed how deep-rooted those groups were. “The groups we are now calling AQIM, that the French military are targeting, have roots going back decades in the region. They have been involved in cigarette smuggling, electronic goods smuggling, guns, drugs, a lot of criminality.”

He described it as a potent “interface” where criminality meets politics in an area that is “more and more desperate”. [Continue reading…]

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Israel’s upcoming tribal census

Daniel Levy writes: Israelis will go to the polls on Jan. 22 to elect a new parliament and, by extension, government — an event that has so far attracted relatively little international attention. Understandably so: Benjamin Netanyahu just came closer than any Israeli prime minister in more than two decades to serving out a full parliamentary term, and nobody expects him to lose. His putative challengers from the center have been unable to find, coalesce around, or attract enough support for a credible alternative candidate.

If this election does have a headline, it is the coming of age of Israel’s new right, encapsulated by the candidacy of Naftali Bennett, 40, the new leader of Habayit Hayehudi, the “Jewish Home” Party, which is storming to third place in the polls, having shared the honor of being the smallest party in the outgoing Knesset. Bennett, a former advisor to Netanyahu, is an interesting character: A dot-com millionaire of American parentage, he served in the military’s elite Sayeret Matkal unit, wears a kippa, and is deeply rooted in the national religious movement. Bennett’s soft-spoken style often obscures his hard-line views: He is radically pro-settler and even annexationist in his position on the territories. Israel’s most popular political satire show, Eretz Nehederet (“A Wonderful Country”), has caricatured him as a new software app: the iBennett, a modern version of the old settler model — “no beard, no crazy-mystical gaze, smaller kippa” — but with occasional glitches (the spoof iBennett character recognizes there are other nations in God’s promised land, sounding reasonable, but then reverts to type by claiming “God will strike them with a plague of frogs”).

Alongside Bennett’s rapid rise, Jan. 22 is best understood as a “Tribes of Israel” election — taking identity politics to a new level. Floating votes may exist within the tribes of Israel, but movement between tribes, or political blocs, is almost unheard of. Israelis seem to relate their political choices almost exclusively to embedded social codes rather than contesting policies. [Continue reading…]

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Opening the Gate of the Sun

Adam Shatz writes: At 2.30 on Sunday morning, the Israeli army removed 250 Palestinians from Bab al-Shams, a village in the so-called E1 corridor: 13 square kilometres of undeveloped Palestinian land between East Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank with a population of 40,000. Israel has had designs on E1 for more than a decade: colonising it would realise the vision of a ‘Greater Jerusalem’, and eliminate the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. After the UN vote to recognise Palestine as a non-member observer state, Binyamin Netanyahu declared that Israel would build 4000 new settler homes in E1. The high court issued a six-day injunction against his order to ‘evacuate’ Bab al-Shams, but Netanyahu was in no mood to wait. Once the Palestinians had been driven out, the land was declared a closed ‘military zone’.

It was another bleak day in the story of Palestinians trying to hold onto their land in the face of Israeli expansionism. But it was also something else. Bab al-Shams was no ordinary village, but a tent encampment set up by Palestinian activists, a number of them veterans of the Popular Resistance Committees who have been organising weekly demonstrations against the ‘separation fence’ in the villages of Bil’in and Nil’in. Several journalists noted that the residents of Bab al-Shams used the same tactics as Israeli settlers: pitching their tents, laying claim to the land, establishing ‘facts on the ground’. But the differences were more significant than the resemblances. The pioneers of Bab al-Shams were Palestinians, not foreigners. When settlers establish wildcat outposts, they know that the authorities may chastise them for it but will nonetheless soon supply them with electricity and water, and even build roads and access routes on their behalf. The people of Bab al-Shams knew that an IDF demolition crew would appear in due course: less than three days, as it turned out.

Bab al-Shams took its name from Elias Khoury’s epic novel, published in 1998. In the book, Bab al-Shams (‘the gate of the sun’) is a secret cave where a Palestinian fighter, Yunis, and his wife, Nahilah, meet to make love. They turn it into ‘a house, a village, a country’. Nahilah calls it the only liberated part of Palestine. Khoury gave his blessing to the village of Bab al-Shams. ‘What these guys did in three days,’ he told me, ‘was they opened the Gate of the Sun and liberated a small part of Palestine.’ [Continue reading…]

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Wyden letter to CIA director-nominee Brennan seeks legal opinions on killing of Americans

Press release from the office of Senator Ron Wyden: With the confirmation process for Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan to be Director of the Central Intelligence Agency set to be begin shortly, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is asking Brennan to provide Congress with the secret legal opinions outlining the government’s ability to target and kill Americans believed to be involved in terrorism.

In a letter to Brennan [PDF] sent today, Wyden reiterated his concerns that the intelligence community, Justice Department and the Administration have not been adequately forthcoming to Congress on their legal justifications for targeting and potentially killing U.S. citizens believed to be involved in terrorism activities. He said that it is important that the legal opinions guiding these activities be released so that Congress and the American people can “have full knowledge of how the executive branch understands the limits and boundaries of this authority…”

“For the executive branch to claim that intelligence agencies have the authority to knowingly kill American citizens but refuse to provide Congress with any and all legal opinions that explain the executive branch’s understanding of this authority represents an alarming and indefensible assertion of executive prerogative,” Wyden wrote in the letter.

For more than two years, Wyden has been seeking these legal opinions and others but has either received insufficient responses to his inquiries or no response at all. He has asked that prior to the start of Brennan’s confirmation hearing in the Intelligence committee that he and other committee members and their cleared staffs are given these opinions and that written assurance be given to the committee that future legal opinions related to this topic will also be provided.

“I have an obligation from my oath of office to review any classified legal opinions that lay out the federal government’s official views on this issue, and I will not be satisfied until I have received them,” Wyden continued in the letter.

Wyden also asked for a list of countries in which the intelligence community has used its lethal counterterrorism authorities. He also is seeking declassification of secret legal opinions made by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel one of which regards common commercial service agreements. He has asked for this legal opinion to be revoked.

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Hagel fits within Washington’s war-averse consensus on Iran

The Forward reports: From his temporary office on the Pentagon’s third floor, Chuck Hagel is already working at full speed. He’s devoting his time not just to learning a new job, but also to clarifying his positions on Iran — the issue his former Senate colleagues have vowed to question him on most intensively when his nomination for secretary of defense comes up for confirmation.

The new image Hagel is fashioning for himself is less contrarian than the persona he adopted during his years in the Senate. On January 15, in a meeting with New York Senator Charles Schumer, the former Republican senator from Nebraska, who earlier criticized U.S. sanctions against Iran as counterproductive, and military action against it as potentially ruinous, “rejected a strategy of containment and expressed the need to keep all options on the table in confronting that country,” Schumer said in a statement after the meeting. “But he didn’t stop there,” Schumer added. “In our conversation, Senator Hagel made a crystal-clear promise that he would do ‘whatever it takes’ to stop Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons, including the use of military force.”

This does not make Hagel an Iran hawk. Washington analysts still see him as a member of the war-averse faction in Obama’s future Cabinet, at a time when the president has gradually inched toward more openness to the use of military force against Iran if talks and sanctions fail to stop its nuclear program. But it does bring him closer in line with today’s Washington consensus — a consensus that is itself more war-averse compared with the days shortly before President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, when an administration official told Newsweek: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”

Obama’s view, said Dov Zakheim, who served as under secretary of defense in the Bush administration, now prevails among military and civilian policymakers.

“There is a consensus in Washington that every effort should be made to avoid a military strike,” said Zakheim, who added that the powerful impact of sanctions on Iran’s economy, as well as the unity of the international community in hewing to those sanctions, were important factors in this thinking. But if this approach ultimately fails, secretaries of defense “tend not to be ideological,” Zakheim said. “They look at the intelligence and the advice in front of them. My guess is that Hagel will do the same.”

In effect, Hagel’s acceptance of the “all options on the table” approach and the Washington establishment’s evolution toward seeing military intervention in Iran as unwelcome except as an absolute last resort enable both sides to move toward each other. The dual movements make Hagel’s transition into the role of Obama’s right hand on military issues much easier. [Continue reading…]

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The neocons overreach on Hagel

Scott McConnell writes: The neoconservative decison to charge that Chuck Hagel is an anti-Semite strikes me as a tactical blunder — a decision grounded in the idea that since they can’t defeat the nominee on the issues, their better option was to try to assassinate Hagel’s character, presumed to be one of his greatest strengths. Such accusations raise the temperature around the nomination, with consequences difficult to foresee. But just as anti-Semitism is a blight, so are false accusations of it. Peter Beinart has perceptively noted that no one in America ever pays a penalty for falsely maligning someone as an anti-Semite. This may be true today, but like all social rules, it is subject to renegotiation.

Ali Gharib at Open Zion has done a superb job deconstructing the evidence, or, I should say, “evidence,” on which the charge is based: leaders of the Nebraska Jewish community who are alleged to think that Hagel has a Jewish problem deny there is anything of the sort. Hagel may not always have acted like Alfonse D’Amato in his attending to them, but really, why should he?

Since we know that genuine anti-Semitism has deep social and psychic roots in Western societies, it shouldn’t be surprising that the leveling of false anti-Semitism charges for political ends also has contours worth exploring. Quite unexpectedly, the Hagel nomination is opening a rich vein for their study. One thing one finds is that those who are quick to deploy false charges of anti-Semitism have begun to take on traits historically associated with bigoted paranoia.

Take for example the Wall Street Journal‘s Bret Stephens, the first to play the anti-Semitism card against Hagel. Last month he notoriously wrote, “Prejudice—like cooking, winetasting, and other consummations has an olfactory element. [With] Chuck Hagel…the odor is especially ripe.” Beinart and others have deconstructed Stephens’s charge, the centerpiece of which is that Hagel, in an interview, used the term “Jewish lobby” instead of “Israel lobby.” But connoisseurs of literary criticism may notice an eerie parallel to Stephens’ toxic paragraph. If evidence of Hagel’s anti-Semitism cannot be substantiated by facts or logic, it can nonetheless be smelled. It’s as if Stephens is seeking to transport us back to the world of Marcel Proust and the Dreyfus Affair, where the anti-Dreyfusards (the anti-Semitic precursors of French fascism, and, via Theodore Herzl, a propellant fuel for the birth of Zionism) were confident they could smell the Jew, an outsider even when an habitué of the best salons of Paris. Only, of course, Stephens has reversed the roles, as it is he who smells Hagel. [Continue reading…]

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Mali’s rebels hold the advantage in a ground war on desert plains

Andy Morgan writes: Fortunately for the French, there’s been no sign of the surface-to-air missiles that the Salafist mujahideen in northern Mali are reported to have stolen from Libya. But taking control of the skies is one thing, winning a ground war and restoring peace is an altogether different prospect.

The French government claim they are merely softening up the territory for military intervention led by the Malian army and a coalition of regional Ecowas forces. What they have failed to mention is that the Malian army hasn’t won a military encounter against Tuareg rebels in the north since the early 1960s, at least not without the help of pro-government Tuareg and Arab militias who know the terrain. Unfortunately, these militias won’t be on hand to help this time round – not in the short term at least.

The north of Mali is as alien to the average soldier from southern Mali as the Alaskan tundra is to a citizen of Massachusetts or Manchester. That sense of alienation will be felt even more keenly by troops from Nigeria, Senegal, Benin and Ivory Coast, used to jungle and savannah bush warfare, when they finally roll onto the vast treeless plains of the southern Sahara.

This is the land where the local Tuareg or Arab in his souped-up turbo 4×4 is king. Iyad Ag Ghali, the Tuareg leader of the Salafist Ansar Dine militia, is a master of the kind of hit-and-run guerrilla warfare that suits the desert conditions and the sheer size of territory, roughly equal to that of Spain. His mujahideen showed their verve last Sunday by capturing the small town of Diabaly, north of Mopti, with a lightening strike that originated over the border in Mauritania. This ability to crisscross borders is another important aspect of the Islamists’ Houdini-esque style of combat. [Continue reading…]

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Humanity’s march towards self-destruction

Chris Hedges writes: Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth — intellectually and emotionally — and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth — as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury — as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship. [Continue reading…]

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The dishonorable smear of Chuck Hagel — a warrior who despises war

At Forbes, Doug Bandow writes about the ongoing no-holds-barred campaign to prevent Chuck Hagel being confirmed as the next secretary of defense: The overriding objection to him is that he is the living refutation of everything the War Party stands for. He fought in battle, understands the human cost, offers skepticism rather than enthusiasm for new interventions, and would be no Pentagon rubber stamp. A liberal with no military experience and little confidence in military matters might be cowed or, better yet, coopted. Not Hagel.

Of course, it wouldn’t do even for the Neoconservatives to charge Hagel with being insufficiently enthusiastic for war. So they have come up with a number of other charges. For instance, he opposed some sanctions again Iran and even urged — shock, shock! — negotiations with Tehran. However, this makes eminent sense. If you liked war with Iraq, you would love war with Iran. Lighting a match to the Middle East, the likely consequence of an attack on Iran, should be a very last resort. After being lied into war with Iraq, Americans want to make sure the same does not happen again with regard to Iran.

Even more serious to Neocons is the claim that Hagel is anti-Israel. Never mind that he routinely voted for aid to Israel and backed Israel in other ways. And that Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. diplomat now at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, commented after interviewing Hagel in 2008: “Hagel is a strong supporter of Israel and a believer in shared values.” The latter didn’t — the mind boggles at the thought! — sign every letter presented to him by AIPAC, the spear point of the Israel Lobby in America. Indeed, Hagel had the temerity to call some of them “stupid.”

Moreover, he did not automatically absolve Israel from responsibility for the consequences of its actions. To the contrary, he joined with many Israelis in recognizing that after decades of military occupation of millions of Palestinians, Israel shared responsibility for the tragic results: “Both Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in a war not of their making.”

Worse, Hagel understood that shared people and values did not mean that the U.S. and Israel always shared the same interests. This truth is anathema to Neocons, who insist that Washington policy should be defined by the demands of the most extreme parties in Israel. However, Hagel believed that the duty of American officials is to promote America’s, not Israel’s, interests. As Hagel explained: “I’m a United States senator. I support Israel. But my first interest is I take an oath of office to the Constitution of the United States. Not to a president. Not a party. Not to Israel. If I go run for Senate in Israel, I’ll do that.” This same sentiment should apply if a legislator is a Polish-American, a Southerner, a fraternity member, or a Mason.

Since Hagel’s positions fit well within mainstream support for Israel, some of his critics pulled out the Big Smear: he obviously is an anti-Semite. Normally one would expect the burden of proof to fall on those who made the charge, but his critics offer no personal statements or actions that actually are anti-Semitic. They prefer innuendo. One of the more vicious pieces came from Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute who intoned: “I do not know that he is one, nor am I convinced that he is not.” Among her evidence that he might be: “It could even be his questionable taste in friends around Washington, or the fact that the government of Iran has welcomed his nomination.”

Others complain that he pointed out the obvious (that there is an Israel Lobby). He once referred to the “Jewish Lobby” (which he acknowledged was a mistake, and he referred to “Israel Lobby” elsewhere in the same interview). And he did all those other terrible things, such as refuse to turn on his autopen for whatever letters AIPAC sent his way. Oh my!

Were the smear not so vicious it would be worth a laugh. Just as anyone who dissents from liberal orthodoxy risks being called a racist, so too anyone who dissents from Neoconservative orthodoxy now risks being called an anti-Semite. Indeed, the definition of anti-Semitism has changed. It once meant someone who hates Jews. Today anti-Semitism means someone hated by Neocons.

There’s a tragic danger of calling wolf once too often. There are anti-Semites. They should be shunned by polite society and denied political power. But Hagel is not one. By promiscuously using the charge to intimidate and bully for political purposes, the Neoconservatives are making it less likely they will be believed if a real anti-Semite arrives on the scene. Unfortunately, today no one can believe any charge of anti-Semitism coming from the usual suspects.

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Mali and the sandstorm of war

Andy Morgan writes: The vastly conflicting accounts of victories, defeats, advances, retreats, casualties and captives that have come spewing forth from the mouths of the spokespersons on either side of the conflict in recent days illustrate the dire opacity of this conflict and the near impossibility for a journalist to find the copper-bottomed truth about what is going on. A friend who works for Al Jazeera recently told me that in her honest opinion, the war in Northern Mali is the hardest conflict to understand in the world. Even obsessives like myself, who spend more time reading reports and analyses about the crisis or talking to people closely involved than is strictly healthy, have to admit that more often than not we are enveloped in a sandstorm of supposition and guess work.

Iyad Ag Ghali, emir of the Touareg lead Islamist militia Ansar ud-Dine.

Such is the case with the recent Islamist advance. I’ll give you my hunch, but it’s only a hunch. Short of trading my safe European home for a god-forsaken AQIM hostage camp in the Tegharghar mountains, I can’t do any better. My guess is that the Iyad Ag Ghali, emir of the Touareg lead Islamist militia Ansar ud-Dine has become impatient with the Burkinabé sponsored mediation process between Mali and the two ‘Malian’ rebel factions, the nationalist MNLA and Ansar ud-Dine, which has been dragging on for a few months. The resumption of these talks that was due to take place on January 10th has now been pushed back to January 21st. Algeria has also re-entered the fray as a mediator, a role which it considered its own almost by divine right before it was taken off them by Burkina Faso at the beginning of the rebellion last February. This has no doubt taken the wind out of the Ougadougou talks and confused matters considerably. Both Ansar ud-Dine and MNLA signed an agreement to cease hostilities and pursue negotiation with Mali in Algiers on December 21st. It’s this agreement which Ansar ud-Dine are now reneging upon.

The belligerent talk coming out of Bamako following the guarded approval given to a military intervention in the north by the UN in December undoubtedly angered Iyad Ag Ghali and his Touareg side-kicks. You can feel this anger in the tone of the Political Platform which Ansar ud-Dine posted on their website on January 2nd. What Iyad and his ghostwriter are saying, in grossly simplified terms is the following: “I trusted you (Mali) at the end of the rebellion of the 1990s. You betrayed my trust by reneging on your promises and fomenting ethnic war in the north. This was gross ingratitude considering that it was ‘my’ rebellion that enabled you to overthrow your military dictatorship and bring back multi-party democracy in 1992. Now, once again, you’re double-crossing me. You persuaded us to agree to a cease-fire and to renouncing the armed struggle while you were busy importing tanks from Bulgaria and talking about war day in day out. Well if you want war, you can have it.” Iyad, a wily old jackal if ever there was, is no doubt gambling on the fact that the Malian army is too weak to offer any great resistance to his mujahedeen. He also knows that if he were to capture Mopti, the pressure this would then heap on the military junta and its political puppets in Bamako would be so immense that even if his Islamist army couldn’t hold such a large and hostile city for long, it might just afford him the time and strength to push through his demands for an autonomous Azawad modeled on the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan in northern Iraq. It’s a high stakes game but that’s nothing new. Ever since he launched the rebellion of 1990 with a handful of men and a few old Touareg swords, Iyad has proven himself to be a high-stakes player, at least in military terms.

The guessing game becomes even more enthralling when one tries to work out what’s happening within the Islamist coalition itself. There have been significant changes in the last few months, but owing to the standstorm of war it’s been extremely hard to make any sense of them. First the old desert fox, ‘Mr Marlboro’, Moktar Belmoktar was given his marching orders by the MUJAO command in Gao. Was his old adversary Abou Zeid, head of AQIM in Timbuktu, just too sick and tired of him? Was Belmocktar sick and tired of the more brutal and zany behaviour of the MUJAO chiefs in Gao? Was he just piqued that the emirship of Al Qaida in the Sahara was handed over to Yahya Abou El Hamam rather than to him? Who knows. After Belmoktar’s departure, there has been further splintering or atomizing of the Islamist movement, generally along ethnic lines. [Continue reading…]

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Chastened U.S. takes cautious view of Mali conflict

AFP reports: The United States has chosen to play a cautious supporting role to France’s military action against Islamist fighters in Mali, after Washington’s own attempt to build up the African nation’s army backfired badly.

While the Pentagon promised transport planes, refueling tanker aircraft and spy planes to back up France’s intervention in Mali, officials made clear President Barack Obama was deeply reluctant to plunge America into a fresh war against insurgents.

“I think the United States was very cautious not to get involved in another complex operation, which is sold as easier than it actually is,” Stephanie Pezard, a scholar at the RAND corporation, told AFP.

“It didn’t want to be bogged down on another front that’s maybe not of the highest strategic interest either,” she added.

But the French military action also raised questions about a much-touted US policy that hopes to counter terror groups in Africa and elsewhere by bolstering foreign armies with advice from elite American special forces.

The US administration had pinned its hopes on shaping a new generation of Malian officers, but some of the units ended up defecting to join insurgent fighters, with weapons and hardware falling into the hands of militants.

And in March last year, an officer who had attended several training courses with the US military, Captain Amadou Sanago, led a coup against the Malian government, prompting Washington to suspend its security assistance.

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Making sense of Mali’s armed groups

Al Jazeera: French planes have bombed targets in Mali in what they consider a fight against al-Qaeda-linked fighters. But the region is a cauldron of instability with a diverse blend of religious fighters, ethnic militas and secularists.

After spending weeks reporting from the country’s restive north, Al Jazeera’s May Ying Welsh reviews some of the different groups and what they want.

MNLA (National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad)

The secular separatist Tuareg rebel group wants an independent state in northern Mali called Azawad. MNLA say they want this state for all the peoples of northern Mali (Tuaregs, Songhai, Arabs, and Fulani are the main ethnic groups). They have some token members from the Songhai ethnic group, but the fact is that 99 percent of MNLA fighters are Tuaregs whose motivation is to have a Tuareg state.

The leader of MNLA is Bilal Ag Cherif, an Ifoghas Tuareg, and his deputy is Mahamadou Djeri Maiga, who is a Songhai. The group which once controlled the cities of Gao and Kidal has largely melted back into the population awaiting its next chance.

The MNLA is generally disregarded and underestimated because it has receded and allowed al-Qaeda-linked groups to take over the field. But it’s important to remember the genesis of this crisis was an action by the MNLA to take over northern Mali, and all that is happening can be seen as a kind of reaction. The aspirations of the MNLA are deep-rooted going back to the first Tuareg rebellion in 1963. Their demands are not going to go away and those demands will continue to be the deep root of the northern Mali crisis. [Continue reading…]

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The Israelis who never want peace with the Palestinians

David Remnick writes: At a makeshift theatre in the port of Tel Aviv, hundreds of young immigrants from Melbourne, the Five Towns, and other points in the Anglophone diaspora gathered recently to hear from the newest phenomenon in Israeli politics, Naftali Bennett. A forty-year-old settlement leader, software entrepreneur, and ex-Army commando, Bennett promises to build a sturdy electoral bridge between the religious and the secular, the hilltop outposts of the West Bank and the start-up suburbs of the coastal plain. This is something new in the history of the Jewish state. Bennett is a man of the far right, but he is eager to advertise his cosmopolitan bona fides. Although he was the director general of the Yesha Council, the main political body of the settler movement, he does not actually live in a settlement. He lives in Ra’anana, a small city north of Tel Aviv that is full of programmers and executives. He is as quick to make reference to an episode of “Seinfeld” as he is to the Torah portion of the week. He constantly updates his Facebook page. A dozen years ago, he moved to the Upper East Side of Manhattan to seek his fortune in high tech, and his wife, Gilat, went to work as a pastry chef at chic restaurants like Aureole, Amuse, and Bouley Bakery. Her crème brûlée, he declares proudly, “restored the faith of the Times food critic in the virtues of crème brûlée.”

Closer to his ideological core is an unswerving conviction that the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem might as well relinquish their hopes for a sovereign state. The Green Line, which demarcates the occupied territories from Israel proper, “has no meaning,” he says, and only a friyer, a sucker, would think otherwise. As one of his slick campaign ads says, “There are certain things that most of us understand will never happen: ‘The Sopranos’ are not coming back for another season . . . and there will never be a peace plan with the Palestinians.” If Bennett becomes Prime Minister someday—and his ambition is as plump and glaring as a harvest moon—he intends to annex most of the West Bank and let Arab cities like Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin be “self-governing” but “under Israeli security.”

“I will do everything in my power to make sure they never get a state,” he says of the Palestinians. No more negotiations, “no more illusions.” Let them eat crème brûlée. [Continue reading…]

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The tension at the heart of the Internet: whether to own or to make

A 2003 map of the internet created by the Opte Project.

I don’t make it a habit to copy and paste whole articles. Instead, I generally engage in an informal exchange — take an extract and send some readers to the source. It seems like an equitable arrangement. But once in a while a piece just seems too good to break apart and so I take the liberty of re-posting it from beginning to end.

On a weekend when there was a torrent of posts responding to the death of Aaron Swartz, an obituary by Brendan Greeley stood out for me. It serves as an eloquent reminder about how the internet came into existence and what allows it to function.

The Internet is not so old. Its graybeards live still. Vint Cerf, author of the Internet Protocol, has been installed as Google’s “chief Internet evangelist,” a ceremonial title he chose himself. Tim Berners-Lee, who gave us HTML, has been knighted. He now sits at the head of his own foundation at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a guardian of the language he wrote. And languages are the best way to think of these contributions.

The Internet is a voluntary agreement, a group of languages we’ve all decided to have in common. The Internet Protocol allows computers to talk to each other. You could use a different language, but since the rest of the world already speaks IP, you’d be lonely, speaking only to yourself.

When he was barely a teenager, Aaron Swartz began playing with XML, an Internet language like Sanskrit or classical Greek—flexible, elegant, and capable of great complexity. XML is most often used to move large amounts of information, entire databases, among computers. You open XML by introducing new terms and defining what they’ll do, nesting new definitions inside of those you’ve already created. Of this, Swartz created a kind of pidgin, a simple set of definitions called RSS.

Before RSS, the Web was static, a place of bookmarks. You had to go to a site to see what was new. Swartz’s pidgin made it easy for updates to travel among websites. If you see a box on a Web page that reads “new headlines,” those headlines very likely arrived on the back of an RSS feed. At the age of 14, Swartz made the Web move. He committed suicide on Jan. 11 at the age of 26.

Swartz was not the only author of RSS. Dave Winer, also often credited with the standard, wrote his own remembrance of Swartz; he also linked to his own chronology of the development of RSS, which does not mention Swartz at all. This uncertainty is endemic of the way the Internet moves forward. Its greatest advances have come from smart people trying to solve the same problem for free, together or at odds, and often in the orbit of a university. As a teenager, Swartz hung out at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, where Winer was also later a fellow.

Commercial empires rely on these advances. Then they attempt to own them. When Apple decided to start accepting RSS as a way to get podcasts into iTunes, it marched all over the standard, muddying it with its own mostly superfluous Apple-centric definitions. It had the power to do this, back when it owned the market for portable MP3 players. Apple did not invent RSS or podcasting, but it has won mightily from the work of Swartz and Winer. Twitter was founded as a podcasting company. It later used RSS as one of the ways to distribute its messages.

This is the tension at the heart of the Internet: whether to own or to make. You can own a site or a program — iTunes, Microsoft Word, Facebook, Twitter — but you can’t own a language. Yet the languages, written for beauty and utility, make sites and programs useful and possible. You make the Internet work by making languages universal and free; you make money from the Internet by closing off bits of it and charging to get in. There’s certainly nothing wrong with making money, but without the innovations of complicated, brilliant people like Swartz, no one would be making any money at all.

RSS was just one of Swartz’s accomplishments. He helped found Reddit, a social networking site. He could have been Mark Zuckerberg, and the two traveled in the same circles in Cambridge, Mass. But where Zuckerberg built an empire, Swartz kept looking for fights. He challenged the practice of charging to download case law, which sits in the public domain. He snuck into a closet at MIT with a laptop and used the university’s connection to download much of the archive of JSTOR, a fee-based catalogue of journal articles, many written by taxpayer-funded academics. The Department of Justice prosecuted him for this; his family believes the harassment played a part in his death.

Swartz wasn’t an anarchist. He came to believe that copyright law had been abused and was being used to close off what, by law, should be open. It’s hard to find fault with his logic, and there’s much to admire in a man who, rather than become a small god of the Valley, was willing to court punishment to prove a point. The world will have no trouble remembering Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, and this is as it should be. But it should remember, too, people like Aaron Swartz, the ones who make those empires possible.

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