Author Archives: News Sources

A challenge to Imran Khan on the drones-versus-Malala debate

In an open letter to Imran Khan, who many have come to regard as the leading light in Pakistani politics, Fahd Husain writes:

The moment you and your supporters say “we condemn the attack on Malala and also those who shot her, but…”, the moment this “but” enters the rationale, the duplicity of thought, the ambiguity of intent, the ambivalence of attitude and the confusion, yes confusion of vision bubbles to the surface like a toxic pollutant.

Why is that so bad? You ask. Are the lives of those killed by drones cheaper than Malala’s? Are they children of a lesser god?

No they are not, Mr Khan. All lives are equally precious. But that is not the point. The drones versus Malala debate – that unfortunately your party leadership and its followers have triggered – is no debate. It is not an ‘either or’ issue. Both are wrong.

So why this useless debate then? Here’s where, Mr Khan, I blame you. Why? Because you are the fountain from which your followers drink their political nectar. They parrot you (often nauseatingly on social media), they regurgitate your arguments and they peddle your logic. Your party leadership pushes your line on TV and defends your rationale on public forums.

In the last week or so, they have fallen flat on their faces. The reason: your ideas are not fully fleshed out. Some call it intellectual dishonesty. I prefer to call it intellectual laziness.

You cannot bring yourself to condemn the Pakistani Taliban like you condemn say, Asif Zardari or Nawaz Sharif. Fine. I do not have a problem as long as you have a certain credible logic for it, like you do for your attacks on Zardari and Sharif. But you don’t.

Is it so because, a) Pakistani Taliban are our people, who are misguided and can be reformed? b) They have killed forty thousand other Pakistanis because we are fighting America’s war and so they do, err… kind of, have a point? c) If the drones would stop, they would stop attacking Malalas and Kainats and Shazias, and stop dynamiting girls’ schools and stop demanding their version of the Sharia for the entire Pakistani society? Or Mr Khan, is it what you have said in your Economist interview, that if you condemn them who will protect your party workers from them?

The last one has left me at a loss of words. Are you saying, Mr Khan, that you will not condemn them, not out of conviction and power of logic, but because of – horror of horrors – fear?

I can be fearful. Your supporters can be fearful. Even your detractors can be fearful. But none of us, Mr Khan, are claiming the leadership of this country; a bold and courageous leadership, I may add.

I, Mr Khan, am the proud father of seven-year old twin daughters. When I look at Malala lying on that stretcher, and I visualise the faces of my daughters, my eyes well up. The pictures of little babies killed and injured by drone attacks bring a lump in my throat. They are all our children. Not one or the other, but all. [Continue reading…]

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White House ponders a strike over Libya attack

The Associated Press reports: The White House, under political pressure to respond forcefully to the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, is readying strike forces and drones but first has to find a target.

And if the administration does find a target, officials say it still has to weigh whether the short-term payoff of exacting retribution on al-Qaida is worth the risk that such strikes could elevate the group’s profile in the region, alienate governments the U.S. needs to fight the group in the future and do little to slow the growing terror threat in North Africa.

Details on the administration’s position and on its search for a possible target were provided by three current and one former administration official, as well as an analyst who was approached by the White House for help. All four spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the high-level debates publicly.

In another effort to bolster Libyan security, the Pentagon and State Department have been developing a plan to train and equip a special operations force in Libya, according to a senior defense official.

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U.S. drops Gaza scholarships after Israel travel ban

The Associated Press reports: Amal Ashour, 18, loves Shakespeare and American pop music. One of the brightest students in the Gaza Strip, she studied her senior year of high school in Minnesota through a U.S.-government funded program.

She had planned to study English literature this fall at a university in the West Bank through another U.S.-sponsored program, but just a month before school started, she was informed the scholarship was no longer available.

“When you live in Gaza, you’re a pawn in a greater political game,” she said in a telephone interview. “There’s nothing we can do about it.” She is now enrolled at Islamic University, a stronghold of Gaza’s ruling Islamic militant Hamas.

Under Israeli pressure, U.S. officials have quietly canceled a two-year-old scholarship program for students in the Gaza Strip, undercutting one of the few American outreach programs to people in the Hamas-ruled territory. The program now faces an uncertain future, just two years after being launched with great fanfare by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during a visit to the region. [Continue reading…]

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If extreme weather becomes the norm, starvation awaits

George Monbiot writes: I believe we might have made a mistake: a mistake whose consequences, if I am right, would be hard to overstate. I think the forecasts for world food production could be entirely wrong. Food prices are rising again, partly because of the damage done to crops in the northern hemisphere by ferocious weather. In the US, Russia and Ukraine, grain crops were clobbered by remarkable droughts. In parts of northern Europe, such as the UK, they were pummelled by endless rain.

Even so, this is not, as a report in the Guardian claimed last week, “one of the worst global harvests in years”. It’s one of the best. World grain production last year was the highest on record; this year’s crop is just 2.6% smaller. The problem is that, thanks to the combination of a rising population and the immoral diversion of so much grain into animal feed and biofuels, a new record must be set every year. Though 2012’s is the third biggest global harvest in history (after 2011 and 2008), this is also a year of food deficit, in which we will consume 28m tonnes more grain than farmers produced. If 2013’s harvest does not establish a new world record, the poor are in serious trouble.

So the question of how climate change might alter food production could not be more significant. It is also extremely hard to resolve, and relies on such daunting instruments as “multinomial endogenous switching regression models“. The problem is that there are so many factors involved. Will extra rainfall be cancelled out by extra evaporation? Will the fertilising effect of carbon dioxide be more powerful than the heat damage it causes? To what extent will farmers be able to adapt? Will new varieties of crops keep up with the changing weather? [Continue reading…]

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Cuban missile crisis: how the U.S. played Russian roulette with nuclear war

Noam Chomsky writes: The world stood still 50 years ago during the last week of October, from the moment when it learned that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba until the crisis was officially ended – though, unknown to the public, only officially.

The image of the world standing still is due to Sheldon Stern, former historian at the John F Kennedy Presidential Library, who published the authoritative version of the tapes of the ExComm meetings where Kennedy, and a close circle of advisers, debated how to respond to the crisis. The meetings were secretly recorded by the president, which might bear on the fact that his stand throughout the recorded sessions is relatively temperate, as compared to other participants who were unaware that they were speaking to history. Stern has just published an accessible and accurate review of this critically important documentary record, finally declassified in the 1990s. I will keep to that here. “Never before or since,” he concludes, “has the survival of human civilization been at stake in a few short weeks of dangerous deliberations,” culminating in the Week the World Stood Still.

There was good reason for the global concern. A nuclear war was all too imminent – a war that might “destroy the Northern Hemisphere”, President Eisenhower had warned. Kennedy’s own judgment was that the probability of war might have been as high as 50%. Estimates became higher as the confrontation reached its peak and the “secret doomsday plan to ensure the survival of the government was put into effect” in Washington, described by journalist Michael Dobbs in his recent, well-researched bestseller on the crisis – though he doesn’t explain why there would be much point in doing so, given the likely nature of nuclear war. Dobbs quotes Dino Brugioni, “a key member of the CIA team monitoring the Soviet missile build-up”, who saw no way out except “war and complete destruction” as the clock moved to One Minute to Midnight – Dobbs’ title. Kennedy’s close associate, historian Arthur Schlesinger, described the events as “the most dangerous moment in human history”. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara wondered aloud whether he “would live to see another Saturday night”, and later recognized that “we lucked out” – barely.

A closer look at what took place adds grim overtones to these judgments, with reverberations to the present moment. [Continue reading…]

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Israeli film ‘The Gatekeepers’ brings truths about occupation that Palestinians are vilified for saying

Philip Weiss writes: Last week I saw a riveting new Israeli film about moral corruption in the government. The Gatekeepers features lengthy interviews with six former heads of the security service, Shin Bet, who repudiate the security policy they carried out. The men say that Palestinians committed acts of terror due to political causes Israeli leaders refuse to address, that the Israeli methods of attacking the symptoms are themselves a form of terrorism, and Israel should be talking to Hamas.

In the takeaway moment of the movie, Avraham Shalom, a ruthless former official now old and reflective, tells filmmaker Dror Moreh that the Israelis are really no different from the Nazis in their occupations of Belgium, France and Czechoslovakia.

If a member of Congress or a mainstream columnist said any of this, he or she would be run out of town on a rail. Palestinians have said as much for years and been vilified. Israelis are allowed.

Of course it is great news that this stark and stylish film was featured in the New York Film Festival and that it has been picked up by Sony Pictures Classics. The film’s prominence, following the earlier success of The Law in These Parts and 5 Broken Cameras, signals a new discourse in the United States: Our prestige media are going to start talking about the vicious cruelty of the occupation.

And when you consider that this film was essentially authorized by the six former Shin Bet men– “They all approved the movie,” Moreh said at the screening I attended– it is a sign of a fresh political development: The U.S. liberal establishment is beginning to echo Ehud Olmert’s warning of five years ago, that Israel is going to commit national suicide if it does not end the occupation.

Fears of Israel’s demise motivated the Shin Bet men to talk to Moreh. They are trying to save Israel. [Continue reading…]

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In Syria in search of a gun

Damien Spleeters follows one Syrian fighter, Mahmoud al-Khalaf, on his arduous and fruitless search for a gun.

The Free Syrian Army’s lack of formal hierarchy appears to be an asset here [west of Aleppo], as it allows the citizens of the region to organize the insurgency locally and tailor their military response to their environment. Although the rebels in Jabal al-Zawiya recognize a general leadership above them — and though they place themselves under the FSA’s umbrella — these semiautonomous groups of fighters are organized along village and family lines. That gives them several advantages: They have natural intelligence-gathering networks, and they know the terrain like the palms of their hands, having relied on back roads for supplies and secret meetings for many months. These assets, coupled with basic military skills, have allowed them to drive a far superior foe out of the towns.

Now, Khalaf needs to draw on that network to join the battle. Later that night, after he arrives in Ibleen, five young men sit with him in a small room isolated from the family’s house. The glass on the door was broken by the army months ago. The fan on the ceiling is slowly balancing the light bulb, and the shadows are moving. One of the men has brought a “56” — a Type 56, a Chinese-made Kalashnikov knockoff.

Khalaf wants to buy a gun, and he wants it quickly. He has to go fight in the north, where he recently integrated into a group of insurgents whose commander is an acquaintance from Jabal al-Zawiya. His cousins are here to help with the arms deal. This “56” has a particular importance for him: It was captured 40 days ago from the army that had been occupying the village since Dec. 17.

Soon, the rifle is broken open, and Khalaf inspects its guts. “It was clean, but it was not as good as a Russian one,” he explained later, pointing out that the latter would have “diamonds” in the cannon.

Syria’s 19-month uprising has bred a set of popular mythologies into the minds of the men, who have only a hands-on knowledge of weapons. And these myths are now important elements in the arms market. The “diamonds” would make a rifle worth at least $2,000 — a price an insurgent could not easily afford. One of Khalaf’s cousins had brought a “German” to the meeting — actually, an Md.65, a Bulgarian AK variant — that was worth only $1,000. The lesser price was because it did not have the folding bayonet of the “56,” a completely useless accessory in the Syrian conflict. The “German,” however, was not for sale.

“Sixty percent of our weapons are from the army,” explains Khalaf. “The rest is given to us by other countries or bought from smugglers. Sometimes we also buy from friendly elements in the army. But since they keep a pretty tight inventory of their arsenal, we cannot buy the guns one by one. We have to buy the whole storage.”

Weapons from past wars have also filtered into Syria. Presenting a “NATO,” a Belgian-made FAL rifle, Khalaf says, “These ones are given to us by Libya. They are worth $2,000 apiece, or more.” The “NATO” comes with an ammunition problem: It is sold with only 100 cartridges per rifle, and the 7.62-by-51 mm rounds are not readily available to the insurgents. To resupply, a fighter would have to pay $3 per cartridge. As a result, these rifles quickly become useless. [Continue reading…]

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Doha’s Four Seasons Hotel Tea Lounge a painful exile for Syrians in Qatar

The National reports: No one at the Tea Lounge in Doha’s Four Seasons Hotel seems to have come to Qatar to take in the sights. An exiled Somali shuffles documents back and forth to the man across from him, dominating the conversation with quick talk. An Australian businessman whispers his order to a waitress, then begins to speak in hushed tones on his mobile phone.

“I don’t dare go outside,” says a woman with a nervous giggle into her phone, as a pall of cigar smoke envelops several men deep in discussion at another table. “All of the meetings are inside the hotel.”

Last year, the opponents of Muammar Qaddafi were said to have plotted and planned in the Tea Lounge and nearby lobby. These days, many of the people on its stiff, Victorian-style chairs and couches are Syrian.

An assortment of opposition leaders and businessmen are passing through Doha, hoping to attract Qatar’s arsenal of quickly-deployed cash and considerable diplomatic clout to their cause.

The stakes are higher than ever. Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, has denied reports that his country is providing weapons to the opposition in Syria – but few here doubt that his country is providing financial backing and non-lethal aid.

Security sources in Doha say that could mean everything from cash and military trainers to incentives for leading Syrian officials thought to be considering whether to defect. Another highly sought prize for any aspiring opposition leader is an appearance on Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite television station.

Last year, the Syrian National Council (SNC), the opposition coalition based in Istanbul, enjoyed Qatar’s “most favoured” status. But it has failed to win broad-based international support and so the Tea Lounge and lobbies of Doha’s five-star hotels are once again bustling crossroads for opponents of president Bashar Al Assad – and the diplomats and scholars who scurry to meet them.

Western diplomats and analysts are exasperated that opposition groups have failed to form a coalition that everyone can support.

“Conflicting personalities are a natural occurrence within the Syrian opposition, as elsewhere,” says Peter Harling, a Syria analyst for the International Crisis Group. “What is truly problematic is how uninspiring and shallow these politicians have been in formulating an actual vision for the future.” [Continue reading…]

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Pakistan outrage over attack on Malala

BBC News reports: The 14-year-old Pakistani girl shot in the head by Taliban gunmen is being flown to the UK for medical treatment.

Malala Yousafzai has until now been at a military hospital in Rawalpindi, with doctors saying her progress over the next few days would be “critical”.

She remains in a serious condition after the attack, which the Taliban said they carried out because she was “promoting secularism”.

Pakistan’s interior minister has said the attack was planned abroad.

Those involved would soon be caught, said Rehman Malik, without giving further details.

Malala left Pakistan on board an air ambulance provided by the United Arab Emirates, accompanied by a full medical team.

It was not immediately clear whether any of her family were travelling with her.

She is being taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham – an NHS (National Health Service) hospital which has a specialist major trauma centre.

The cost of her care and rehabilitation is being funded by Pakistan.

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The self-destruction of the 1 percent

Chrystia Freeland writes: In the early 14th century, Venice was one of the richest cities in Europe. At the heart of its economy was the colleganza, a basic form of joint-stock company created to finance a single trade expedition. The brilliance of the colleganza was that it opened the economy to new entrants, allowing risk-taking entrepreneurs to share in the financial upside with the established businessmen who financed their merchant voyages.

Venice’s elites were the chief beneficiaries. Like all open economies, theirs was turbulent. Today, we think of social mobility as a good thing. But if you are on top, mobility also means competition. In 1315, when the Venetian city-state was at the height of its economic powers, the upper class acted to lock in its privileges, putting a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro d’Oro, or Book of Gold, an official register of the nobility. If you weren’t on it, you couldn’t join the ruling oligarchy.

The political shift, which had begun nearly two decades earlier, was so striking a change that the Venetians gave it a name: La Serrata, or the closure. It wasn’t long before the political Serrata became an economic one, too. Under the control of the oligarchs, Venice gradually cut off commercial opportunities for new entrants. Eventually, the colleganza was banned. The reigning elites were acting in their immediate self-interest, but in the longer term, La Serrata was the beginning of the end for them, and for Venetian prosperity more generally. By 1500, Venice’s population was smaller than it had been in 1330. In the 17th and 18th centuries, as the rest of Europe grew, the city continued to shrink.

The story of Venice’s rise and fall is told by the scholars Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive. Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.

The history of the United States can be read as one such virtuous circle. But as the story of Venice shows, virtuous circles can be broken. Elites that have prospered from inclusive systems can be tempted to pull up the ladder they climbed to the top. Eventually, their societies become extractive and their economies languish.

That was the future predicted by Karl Marx, who wrote that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. And it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further — ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place. [Continue reading…]

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Weasel words that politicians use to obscure terrible truths

Patrick Cockburn writes: “Never believe anything until it is officially denied,” is a useful saying, advising scepticism towards whatever the government claims to be doing. This is the right mental attitude for any journalist or observer of the political scene. But for sniffing out official or journalistic mendacity, evasion and ignorance, a good guide is the use of tired and misleading words or phrases, their real purpose being not to illuminate but to conceal.

Suspicion of an attempt to deceive should be aroused by any sighting of the word “community”, as in “international community” or “Islamic community”: the phrases suggest solidarity and consensus of opinion where it does not exist. More toxic are policies pretending that there is something called “the community” that can look after people hitherto cared for by the state. When care in the community was introduced in Britain, it meant that people living in mental hospitals which were being sold by the government were kicked out to be looked after by a community that either feared or ignored them.

Certain words should set alarm bells ringing. Description of anything as “robust” is usually bad news because it implies effective measures are going to be taken, when this is unlikely. For instance, Patrick McLoughlin, the Transport Minister, seeking to defuse the scandal over the West Coast railway, promised a “robust investigation”. On the other hand, robust, when applied to state security, means something unpleasant, so “robust interrogation” has become synonymous with torture. [Continue reading…]

A phrase in journalism that always irritates me because, defying the odds, it is now so commonplace is: rare glimpse.

The New York Times dishes out rare glimpses so often they have ceased being rare. They purport to offer a privileged view through a window to which no one other than a seasoned Times reporter would have access. What the phrase conceals is that these rare glimpses are invariably spoon fed to reporters who gladly regurgitate information supplied by government officials — officials who make their disclosures to these particular reporters because of their willingness to serve as dutiful stenographers.

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Counting drone strike deaths

The U.S. government should provide an official accounting on who is being killed by drone strikes, said a new report released today by Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Clinic.

Counting Drone Strike Deaths is a systematic review of drone strike casualty estimates provided by media and aggregated by three major casualty tracking organizations: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Long War Journal, and New America Foundation. These organizations have filled the gaps left by the U.S. government, which refuses to officially provide information on casualties; however, their estimates are incomplete and, in the case of the latter two organizations, significantly undercounted the extent of reported civilian deaths in Pakistan during 2011.

“Drone strike casualty estimates are substituting for hard facts and information about the drone program,” said Naureen Shah, Acting Director of the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School. “These are good faith efforts to count civilian deaths, but it’s the U.S. government that owes the public an accounting of who is being killed, especially as it continues expanding secret drone operations in new places around the world.” The report warns that low civilian casualty estimates may provide false assurance to the public and policymakers that drone strikes do not harm civilians. According to the report, despite their strong efforts, two of the tracking organizations, the Long War Journal and New America Foundation, significantly and consistently underestimated the potential number of civilians killed in Pakistan during the year 2011.

Recounting the data, the Columbia Human Rights Clinic found reports of between 72 and 155 civilians killed in 2011 Pakistan drone strikes, with 52 of the reportedly civilian dead identified by name – a relatively strong indicator of reliability. By comparison, New America Foundation’s count was just 3 to 9 civilians killed during this period; Long War Journal’s was 30 civilians killed. In percentage terms, the Clinic found 2300 percent more “civilian” deaths than the New America Foundation and 140 percent more “civilian” deaths than the Long War Journal, based on minimum figures for Pakistan in 2011. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s estimates came closest to those found by the Columbia Human Rights Clinic: the Clinic found just 5.9 percent more “civilian” deaths than the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, based on minimum figures.

“The tracking organizations are all credible institutions, and the discrepancies in their counts show just how hard it is to get an accurate understanding of the impact of drone strikes from media reports alone,” said Chantal Grut, lead researcher and 2012 L.L.M. graduate of the Human Rights Clinic.

The tracking organizations’ estimates are based on news reports of particular strikes. The news reports suffer from common flaws. For example, they often rely on anonymous Pakistani government officials or unnamed witnesses for the claim that “militants” — rather than civilians — were killed. In Pakistan, more in-depth reporting is all too rare because of limited access for journalists, and it is likely that some deaths and possibly even entire strikes are not captured.
“Accuracy and access are problems for any war-time reporting,” said Grut. “But with drone strikes, we’re seeing the labels ‘militant’ or ‘terrorist’ used to describe people killed, despite the limited information and on-the-ground reporting.” The report explains the ambiguity of these terms and cautions media and observers against repeating “militant” estimates without more information and greater qualification.

In the rare but significant cases where on-the-ground reporting has offered evidence of civilian deaths from drone strikes, the U.S. government has failed to officially respond or provide information about whether it conducts its own investigations into potential civilian deaths. The report calls on the government to investigate reports of civilian casualties, track and release drone strike casualty information, and disclose the standards and definitions it uses to categorize individuals as subject to direct attack. Investigations are a crucial first step toward recognizing and dignifying the loss of families and local communities.

See the complete report, Counting Drone Strike Deaths.

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Questions on drones, unanswered still

The New York Times‘ public editor Margaret Sullivan writes: Understanding American drone strikes is like a deadly version of the old telephone game: I whisper to you and you whisper to someone else, and eventually all meaning is lost.

You start with uncertain information from dubious sources. Pass it along, run it through the media blender, add pundits, and you’ve got something that may or may not be close to the truth.

How many people have been killed by these unmanned aircraft in the Central Intelligence Agency’s strikes in Yemen and Pakistan? How many of the dead identified as “militants” are really civilians? How many are children?

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism in Britain has estimated that, in the first three years after President Obama took office, between 282 and 535 civilians were credibly reported killed by drone strikes — including more than 60 children. The United States government says the number of civilians killed has been far lower.

Accurate information is hard to come by. The Obama administration and the C.I.A. are secretive about the fast-growing drone program. The strikes in Pakistan are taking place in areas where reporters can’t go, or would be in extreme danger if they did. And it is all happening at a time when the American public seems tired of hearing about this part of the world anyway.

How does The New York Times fit into this hazy picture?

Some of the most important reporting on drone strikes has been done at The Times, particularly the “kill list” article by Scott Shane and Jo Becker last May. Those stories, based on administration leaks, detailed President Obama’s personal role in approving whom drones should set out to kill.

Groundbreaking as that article was, it left a host of unanswered questions. The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed Freedom of Information requests to learn more about the drone program, so far in vain. The Times and the A.C.L.U. also want to know more about the drone killing of an American teenager in Yemen, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, also shrouded in secrecy.

But The Times has not been without fault. Since the article in May, its reporting has not aggressively challenged the administration’s description of those killed as “militants” — itself an undefined term. And it has been criticized for giving administration officials the cover of anonymity when they suggest that critics of drones are terrorist sympathizers.

Americans, according to polls, have a positive view of drones, but critics say that’s because the news media have not informed them well. The use of drones is deepening the resentment of the United States in volatile parts of the world and potentially undermining fragile democracies, said Naureen Shah, who directs the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia University’s law school.

“It’s portrayed as picking off the bad guys from a plane,” she said. “But it’s actually surveilling entire communities, locating behavior that might be suspicious and striking groups of unknown individuals based on video data that may or may not be corroborated by eyeballing it on the ground.” [Continue reading…]

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Incensed by Malala attack, jirga declares war on Taliban

The Express Tribune reports: Incensed by the attack on teenage child activist Malal Yousafzai, a local jirga has declared war on Taliban until the elimination of militancy from the picturesque valley.

The valley wriggled out of the clutches of Taliban following the 2009 military operation against notorious militant commander Mullah Fazlullah aka Mullah Radio who claimed responsibility for the attack on Malala.

“The attack on Malala Yousafzai and other girls was a cowardly act which should be condemned on every platform,” Saifullah Khan, the chairperson of the Nepkikhel Aman Jirga, told a news conference at Swat Press Club on Saturday.

“The attack shows that even children are not safe from the evils of terrorists. But we clearly extend our message to anti-Pakistan elements that such cowardly acts will not deter us from fighting against terrorism,” he said.

Khan added that the Nepkikhel Aman Jirga had stood firm in the battle against terrorism. “We invite the entire nation to stand with us against terrorists. We have made countless sacrifices for the restoration of peace and we are ready to render more for maintaining peace in our region,” he said.

Criticising the attack on schoolchildren, Khan said if the Taliban were bold enough, they should dare to come out of their hiding holes and fight.

“It is not bravery to attack innocent children. They are only defaming Islam, Pakistan and our nation in the name of their own version of Islam,” he said.

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America: ruled by the rich

Nicholas Carnes writes: Elections are supposed to give us choices. We can reward incumbents or we can throw the bums out. We can choose Republicans or Democrats. We can choose conservative policies or progressive ones.

In most elections, however, we don’t get a say in something important: whether we’re governed by the rich. By Election Day, that choice has usually been made for us. Would you like to be represented by a millionaire lawyer or a millionaire businessman? Even in our great democracy, we rarely have the option to put someone in office who isn’t part of the elite.

Of course, many white-collar candidates care deeply about working-class Americans, those who earn a living in manual labor or service-industry jobs. Many are only a generation or two removed from relatives who worked in those fields. But why do so few elections feature candidates who have worked in blue-collar jobs themselves, at least for part of their lives? The working class is the backbone of our society, a majority of our labor force and 90 million people strong. Could it really be that not one former blue-collar worker is qualified to be president?

My research examines how the shortage of working-class people in public office affects our democracy and why there are so few former blue-collar workers in government in the first place. The data I’ve studied suggest that the working class itself probably isn’t the problem. It’s true that workers tend to score a little lower on standard measures of political knowledge and civic engagement. But there are many more workers than there are, say, lawyers — so many more, in fact, that there are probably more blue-collar Americans with the qualities we might want in our candidates than there are lawyers with those traits. If even only half a percent of blue-collar workers have what it takes to govern, there would still be enough of them to fill every seat in Congress and in every state legislature more than 40 times — with enough left over to run thousands of City Councils.

Something other than qualifications seems to be screening out people with serious experience in the working class long before Election Day. Scholars haven’t yet confirmed exactly what that is. (Campaign money? Free time? Party gatekeepers?) But we’re starting to appreciate the seriousness of the problem.

If millionaires were a political party, that party would make up roughly 3 percent of American families, but it would have a super-majority in the Senate, a majority in the House, a majority on the Supreme Court and a man in the White House. If working-class Americans were a political party, that party would have made up more than half the country since the start of the 20th century. But legislators from that party (those who last worked in blue-collar jobs before entering politics) would never have held more than 2 percent of the seats in Congress. [Continue reading…]

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Why the U.S. used nuclear weapons against Japan for political, not military reasons

Washington’s Blog: Like all Americans, I was taught that the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to end WWII and save both American and Japanese lives.

But most of the top American military officials at the time said otherwise.

The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey group, assigned by President Truman to study the air attacks on Japan, produced a report in July of 1946 that concluded (52-56):

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

General (and later president) Dwight Eisenhower – then Supreme Commander of all Allied Forces, and the officer who created most of America’s WWII military plans for Europe and Japan – said:

The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.

Newsweek, 11/11/63, Ike on Ike

Eisenhower also noted (pg. 380):

In [July] 1945… Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. …the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude….

Admiral William Leahy – the highest ranking member of the U.S. military from 1942 until retiring in 1949, who was the first de facto Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and who was at the center of all major American military decisions in World War II – wrote (pg. 441):

It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.

The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

[Continue reading…]

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Stress: The roots of resilience

Nature reports: On a chilly, January night in 1986, Elizabeth Ebaugh carried a bag of groceries across the quiet car park of a shopping plaza in the suburbs of Washington DC. She got into her car and tossed the bag onto the empty passenger seat. But as she tried to close the door, she found it blocked by a slight, unkempt man with a big knife. He forced her to slide over and took her place behind the wheel.

The man drove aimlessly along country roads, ranting about his girlfriend’s infidelity and the time he had spent in jail. Ebaugh, a psychotherapist who was 30 years old at the time, used her training to try to calm the man and negotiate her freedom. But after several hours and a few stops, he took her to a motel, watched a pornographic film and raped her. Then he forced her back into the car.

She pleaded with him to let her go, and he said that he would. So when he stopped on a bridge at around 2 a.m. and told her to get out, she thought she was free. Then he motioned for her to jump. “That’s the time where my system, I think, just lost it,” Ebaugh recalls. Succumbing to the terror and exhaustion of the night, she fainted.

Ebaugh awoke in freefall. The man had thrown her, limp and handcuffed, off the bridge four storeys above a river reservoir. When she hit the frigid water, she turned onto her back and started kicking. “At that point, there was no part of me that thought I wasn’t going to make it,” she says.

Few people will experience psychological and physical abuse as terrible as the abuse Ebaugh endured that night. But extreme stress is not unusual. In the United States, an estimated 50–60% of people will experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives, whether through military combat, assault, a serious car accident or a natural disaster. Acute stress triggers an intense physiological response and cements an association in the brain’s circuits between the event and fear. If this association lingers for more than a month, as it does for about 8% of trauma victims, it is considered to be post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The three main criteria for diagnosis are recurring and frightening memories, avoidance of any potential triggers for such memories and a heightened state of arousal.

Ebaugh experienced these symptoms in the months after her attack and was diagnosed with PTSD. But with the help of friends, psychologists and spiritual practices, she recovered. After about five years, she no longer met the criteria for the disorder. She opened her own private practice, married and had a son.

About two-thirds of people diagnosed with PTSD eventually recover. “The vast majority of people actually do OK in the face of horrendous stresses and traumas,” says Robert Ursano, director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. Ursano and other researchers want to know what underlies people’s mental strength. “How does one understand the resilience of the human spirit?” he asks.

Since the 1970s, scientists have learned that several psychosocial factors — such as strong social networks, recalling and confronting fears and an optimistic outlook — help people to recover. But today, scientists in the field are searching for the biological factors involved. Some have found specific genetic variants in humans and in animals that influence an individual’s odds of developing PTSD. Other groups are investigating how the body and brain change during the recovery process and why psychological interventions do not always work. The hope is that this research might lead to therapies that enhance resilience. [Continue reading…]

Note that while this report focuses on advances in the biological understanding of trauma and resilience, Ebaugh’s recovery did not result from conventional medical treatment.

Ebaugh, who now specializes in therapy for trauma victims, agrees that drug-based treatments could aid in recovery. But some people may find relief elsewhere. Religious practices — especially those that emphasize altruism, community and having a purpose in life — have been found to help trauma victims to overcome PTSD. Ebaugh says that yoga, meditation, natural remedies and acupuncture worked for her.

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