Author Archives: Paul Woodward

Hundreds of women lead protest in Afghanistan

Hundreds of women lead protest in Afghanistan
By Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times, December 10, 2009

Several hundred women, many holding aloft pictures of relatives killed by drug lords or Taliban militants, held a loud but nonviolent street protest today, demanding that President Hamid Karzai purge from his government anyone connected to corruption, war crimes or the Taliban.

“These women are being very brave,” said the protest leader, her face hidden by a burka. “To be a woman in Afghanistan and an activist can mean death. We want justice for our loved ones!”

Afghan police, in riot gear, monitored the rally as it worked its way slowly through muddy streets to the United Nations building here, but they did nothing to disrupt the event.

The unusual display of political activism by women comes as Karzai is under increasing pressure to remove from his cabinet anyone connected to rampant corruption, including links to the flourishing drug trade. His own finance minister says corruption is the biggest threat to the future of Afghanistan. [continued…]

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McChrystal’s stovepipe operation

McChrystal’s stovepipe operation
By Mark Perry, Asia Times, December 10, 2009

President Barack Obama’s national address last Tuesday not only detailed the United States’ strategy on Afghanistan, it laid bare his new administration’s strengths and weaknesses – and confirmed the growing suspicion that, eight years after September 11, 2001, meeting America’s global challenges with a military response remains the default position of the Washington policymaking establishment.

“Don’t underestimate the impact that eight years of the [George W] Bush administration has had in Washington,” a senior State Department official explained this last summer. “The Bush people set out the language of the war on terrorism, invented the vocabulary, defined the terms. People talk about the importance of ‘doing’ diplomacy, but no one really knows what that means or how tough it can really be.”

At least initially, this assessment seemed contradicted by the administration’s flurry of diplomatic activity. Its first months were taken up by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s globetrotting, special envoy George Mitchell’s high-profile Jerusalem meetings, AfPak specialist Richard Holbrooke’s repeated initiatives with Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari – and Obama’s decision to engage Iran in direct talks about its nuclear program.

Suddenly, surprisingly, the military seemed relegated to playing a minor role in Washington: Bush’s hero David Petraeus, the US commander for the greater Middle East, was no longer in the headlines, the war in Iraq seemed well in hand and Defense Secretary Robert Gates was nowhere to be seen.

All of this changed in May, when a series of well-timed Taliban offensives led to a spike in US casualties and Gates decided to replace the US Afghan commander, David McKiernan, with Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal. The change did not come as a surprise to Pentagon officers, who had watched Petraeus and McKiernan struggle through a difficult relationship: “The two couldn’t be in the same room together,” a McKiernan aide says. “We knew there’d be a fist fight if we left them alone.” The disagreement was personal: McKiernan resented answering to an officer whom he had once commanded and viewed as politically ambitious.

But the relationship was also scarred by a subtle disagreement over how to meet the Taliban challenge. Both McKiernan and Petraeus agreed that the Taliban posed a security challenge to the Afghan government, but McKiernan focused first on development – on building what he called “human capital”. Petraeus disagreed: you can’t build “human capital” without security, he argued, and the security situation in the country was deteriorating. Then too, Petraeus thought, what was needed in Afghanistan was an officer who could respond creatively to what Petraeus believed was turning into an asymmetric fight – and McKiernan was an officer with a deep background in running conventional wars.

McChrystal, a former Green Beret and a celebrated special operations commander, was the answer. Petraeus recommended a change to Gates, and Gates agreed. Within days of his May 11 appointment, McChrystal showed up in the Afghan capital, Kabul, with a team of counter-insurgency experts who commandeered McKiernan’s headquarters and fanned out throughout the country.

McChrystal’s teams were told to identify the problem and find a solution. “They absolutely flooded the zone,” a US development officer says. “There must have been hundreds of them. They were in every province, every village, talking to everyone. There were 10 of them for every one of us.” Not surprisingly, within weeks of their deployment, McChrystal’s team leaders had concluded that the US was facing was an escalating insurgency that could only be checked with an increase in US troops. In-country State Department officials rolled their eyes: “What a shock. If you deploy a gang squad, they’re going to find a gang,” a senior State Department official says with a tinge of bitterness. “They were looking for an insurgency and they found one.”

“From the minute that McChrystal showed up in Kabul, he drove the debate,” a White House official confirms. “You’ll notice – from May on it was no longer a question of whether we should follow a military strategy or deploy additional troops. It was always, ‘should we do 20,000 or 30,000 or 40,000, or even 80,000’? We weren’t searching for the right strategy; we were searching for the right number.”

A senior State Department official, watching McChrystal from her State Department perch in Washington, remembers the frustration among the department’s top policymakers: “We kept saying ‘we need to open up to the other side, like we did in Iraq with the Anbar insurgency,’ and the military kept saying, ‘well this isn’t Iraq.’ And so we’d answer: ‘fine, so if Afghanistan isn’t Iraq, then why do you keep talking about a surge?’ And we never got an answer.”

The State Department’s frustration extended into the embassy in Kabul, where the US ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, was having his own problems with McChrystal. The appointment of Eikenberry in March of 2009 had been greeted with skepticism in the State Department because of his background as a West Pointer, a retired lieutenant general and a US security coordinator in the country. But if anyone would be sympathetic to McChrystal, it was now thought, it would be Eikenberry.

But that’s not what happened: Eikenberry won friends among professional diplomats for his easygoing manner and quick understanding of their problems – and for his open irritation at McChrystal’s imperious manner. “McChrystal came in and he just thought he was some kind of Roman proconsul, a [Douglas] MacArthur,” an Eikenberry colleague notes. “He was going to run the whole thing. He didn’t need to consult with the State Department or civilians, let alone the ambassador. This was not only the military’s show, it was his show.”

But McChrystal was not only able to “flood the zone” in Afghanistan, he was able to do so in Washington. As the director of the Joint Staff, a position he held just prior to arriving in Kabul, McChrystal established the Pakistan-Afghanistan Coordinating Cell (PACC), a 70-person military-civilian operations group housed in the Pentagon’s National Command Center, one of the most secure offices in the world. “This isn’t a place you just wander in and out of,” a senior Pentagon official says. The “PACC” bypassed the normal command structure – and the State Department. It reported to McChrystal, who rotated its officers in and out of Kabul every three to four months.

The PACC is “a stovepipe operation”, this senior Pentagon official notes. “It’s beautiful. It’s headed up by McChrystal acolytes, former special operations officers who view him [McChrystal] as their patron. So they follow his lead. And there is no requirement for them to share any of the information they get from Kabul with the State Department or anyone else – let alone with Eikenberry. This is McChrystal’s game. The PACC people in Washington pass information to McChrystal without going through any channels and they take the best information from Kabul and they brief [JCS chairman Admiral Mike] Mullen – and he briefs the president. So during the run-up to the Afghanistan decision, the military always looked current. They had the best information. Everyone else looked like a bunch of amateurs. Eikenberry was out of the loop. He had no chop [influence] on any of it. They just ran circles around him.” [continued…]

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The New York Times and the war

Pakistan and the war
Editorial, New York Times, December 8, 2009

In his speech last week, Mr. Obama laid down a marker for Islamabad, declaring “we cannot tolerate a safe haven for terrorists whose location is known and whose intentions are clear.” In private, administration officials have been even more explicit, warning Pakistani leaders that if they don’t act the United States will, including with more attacks by unmanned aircraft.

Such strikes have killed several top extremists, but the program is hugely unpopular in Pakistan and Mr. Obama must be judicious about expanding it. That means three things: extremely careful targeting, no civilian casualties or as few as possible, and no publicity.

Drones won’t be enough. Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders must finally be persuaded that this is not just America’s war, it is central to their survival. In recent months, the Pakistan Army has gone after Taliban fighters in the Swat Valley and Waziristan. Yet the Army leadership is refusing to strike at the heart of the Taliban command in Baluchistan Province. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Subject as I am to occasionally feeling the allure of a conspiracy theory, it’s hard to avoid thinking that the New York Times is, or at least sees itself, as a quasi-branch of government. It’s proclivity to function as a fourth branch appears after all to be so much better developed than its interest in belonging to the Fourth Estate. Rather than question the administration it would much more happily collaborate.

The task at hand now is to persuade the Pakistanis that the Americans have a better understanding of what’s going on inside their own country than they do. At the same time, the US needs to expand its clandestine war in Pakistan and the New York Times gravely advices that this must be done with “no publicity”.

What kind of a newspaper calls on a government to conduct warfare in secrecy? What kind of paper would advocate that no one photograph the dead?

A paper of record that has swallowed the talking points hook, line and sinker, that the fastest way to end the war is by expanding it.

It’s onward ho! to Baluchistan for Mr Keller and his prim armchair warriors.

Pakistan told to ratchet up fight against the Taliban
By David E Sanger and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, December, 2009

he Obama administration is turning up the pressure on Pakistan to fight the Taliban inside its borders, warning that if it does not act more aggressively the United States will use considerably more force on the Pakistani side of the border to shut down Taliban attacks on American forces in Afghanistan, American and Pakistani officials said.

The blunt message was delivered in a tense encounter in Pakistan last month, before President Obama announced his new war strategy, when Gen. James L. Jones, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, and John O. Brennan, the White House counterterrorism chief, met with the heads of Pakistan’s military and its intelligence service.

United States officials said the message did not amount to an ultimatum, but rather it was intended to prod a reluctant Pakistani military to go after Taliban insurgents in Pakistan who are directing attacks in Afghanistan.

For their part the Pakistanis interpreted the message as a fairly bald warning that unless Pakistan moved quickly to act against two Taliban groups they have so far refused to attack, the United States was prepared to take unilateral action to expand Predator drone attacks beyond the tribal areas and, if needed, to resume raids by Special Operations forces into the country against Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders. [continued…]

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Taliban prepare to return to power

Taliban shadow officials offer concrete alternative
By Griff Witte, Washington Post, December 8, 2009

Like nearly all provinces in Afghanistan, this one has two governors.

The first was appointed by President Hamid Karzai and is backed by thousands of U.S. troops. He governs this mountainous eastern Afghan province by day, cutting the ribbons on new development projects and, according to fellow officials with knowledge of his dealings, taking a generous personal cut of the province’s foreign assistance budget.

The second governor was chosen by Taliban leader Mohammad Omar and, hunted by American soldiers, sneaks in only at night. He issues edicts on “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” stationery, plots attacks against government forces and fires any lower-ranking Taliban official tainted by even the whiff of corruption.

As the United States prepares to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan to bolster Karzai’s beleaguered government, Taliban leaders are quietly pushing ahead with preparations for a moment they believe is inevitable: their return to power. The Taliban has done so by establishing an elaborate shadow government of governors, police chiefs, district administrators and judges that in many cases already has more bearing on the lives of Afghans than the real government. [continued…]

US surge will only prolong Afghan war
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, December 6, 2009

American and British exponents of a military escalation or “the surge” in Afghanistan opportunistically expound two wholly contradictory views of Taliban strength. At one moment they are a movement of immense power on the verge of seizing power in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the possibility that they might soon have control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. But the next moment Mr Brown is claiming that the Taliban have almost no support among Afghans. In the US, Mr Obama and Mr Gates imply that the insurgents have such shallow roots that they can be largely defeated in 18 months so US troops can start to withdraw. [continued…]

The surrealism of the Afghan surge
By Jeffrey Sachs, Huffington Post, December 7, 2009

President Barack Obama risks leading the US deeper into the same kind of nightmare as Vietnam, with the same profound misconceptions and arrogance of the US military and the CIA. It just requires a glance at the picture on p. A29 of Sunday’s New York Times to see how absurd the US decision-making process really is. Among the people in the room briefing the president, there isn’t a single person with deep non-military knowledge of either Afghanistan or Pakistan. We see plenty of generals and politicians but nobody who knows about the people, culture, economy, climate, agronomy, extreme poverty, and traditions of the people themselves. [continued…]

US leaves in Iraq equipment that it may need in Afghanistan
By Ernesto Londoño, Washington Post, December 7, 2009

Even as the U.S. military scrambles to support a troop surge in Afghanistan, it is donating passenger vehicles, generators and other equipment worth tens of millions of dollars to the Iraqi government.

Under new authority granted by the Pentagon, U.S. commanders in Iraq may now donate to the Iraqis up to $30 million worth of equipment from each facility they leave, up from the $2 million cap established when the guidelines were first set in 2005. The new cap applies at scores of posts that the U.S. military is expected to leave in coming months as it scales back its presence from about 280 facilities to six large bases and a few small ones by the end of next summer.

Some of the items that commanders may now leave behind, including passenger vehicles and generators, are among what commanders in Afghanistan need most urgently, according to Pentagon memos. [continued…]

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Israel must unpick its ethnic myth

Israel must unpick its ethnic myth
By Tony Judt, Financial Times, December 7, 2009

What exactly is “Zionism”? Its core claim was always that Jews represent a common and single people; that their millennia-long dispersion and suffering has done nothing to diminish their distinctive, collective attributes; and that the only way they can live freely as Jews – in the same way that, say, Swedes live freely as Swedes – is to dwell in a Jewish state.

Thus religion ceased in Zionist eyes to be the primary measure of Jewish identity. In the course of the late-19th century, as more and more young Jews were legally or culturally emancipated from the world of the ghetto or the shtetl, Zionism began to look to an influential minority like the only alternative to persecution, assimilation or cultural dilution. Paradoxically then, as religious separatism and practice began to retreat, a secular version of it was actively promoted.

I can certainly confirm, from personal experience, that anti-religious sentiment – often of an intensity that I found discomforting – was widespread in left-leaning Israeli circles of the 1960s. Religion, I was informed, was for the haredim and the “crazies” of Jerusalem’s Mea Sharim quarter. “We” are modern and rational and “western”, it was explained to me by my Zionist teachers. But what they did not say was that the Israel they wished me to join was therefore grounded, and could only be grounded, in an ethnically rigid view of Jews and Jewishness.

The story went like this. Jews, until the destruction of the Second Temple (in the First century), had been farmers in what is now Israel/Palestine. They had then been forced yet again into exile by the Romans and wandered the earth: homeless, rootless and outcast. Now at last “they” were “returning” and would once again farm the soil of their ancestors. [continued…]

Is Israel a democracy?
By Gershom Gorenberg, The American Prospect, December 4, 2009

After the war, the 156,000 Arabs remaining in Israel were about 15 percent of the population. They became Israeli citizens, with the right to vote and be elected. But most Arab towns and villages remained under restrictive military government. “The Israeli authorities viewed the Arab population as hostile and potentially seditious,” as Hillel Cohen writes in Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967, an Israeli best seller that has just come out in English. Cohen’s title is ironic. It refers to the web of collaborators and informers that security agencies built among the Arab minority. The network’s purpose, Cohen writes, was not only to uncover hostile groups and agents of enemy countries. It was also to control political life down to the village level and to “reshape Arab consciousness and identity,” divorcing Arab citizens from Palestinian nationalism.

Using previously classified documents, Cohen charts in fascinating and disturbing detail how collaboration shaped life among Israeli Arabs. Pro-regime Arabs tried to keep wedding singers from performing communist and Arab nationalist songs. Teachers in Arab-language schools were hired or fired based on political loyalties. “Naturally, this affected the quality of teaching,” especially since educated Arabs were more likely to have Arab nationalist leanings, Cohen writes. The military government over Israeli Arabs was dissolved in 1966. The Arab parties set up as satellites of Jewish ones have vanished. Arab citizens now vote mainly for parties that outspokenly demand their rights. “State supervision of political speech has lessened” but not disappeared, Cohen writes. Yet alongside (frustratingly slow) progress within Israel, a far more blatantly ethnocratic regime has developed in the territories that Israel conquered in 1967. Israel’s democratically elected governments rise and crumble based on their position on the occupation. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — As a liberal Zionist, Gorenberg is unwilling to judge Israel as a democratic failure, but if instead of asking whether Israel can realize a democratic possibility he was merely to coldly judge whether Israel can be seen moving along a democratic trajectory, he could spare himself any further hand-wringing.

Still, don’t just read the snippet above — read the whole article.

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What the U.S. elite really thinks about Israel

What the U.S. elite really thinks about Israel
By Jeffrey Blankfort, Counterpunch, December 7, 2009

The Council on Foreign Relations is always near the top of the Left’s list of bogeymen that stand accused of pulling the strings of US foreign policy. It is right up there with the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, right? Wrong. If that was the case, those arguing that US support for Israel is based on it being a “strategic asset” will have a hard time explaining a Pew Research Center survey on America’s Place in the World, taken of 642 CFR members between October 2 and November 16. The Pew poll not only reveals that the overwhelming majority, two-thirds of the members of this elite foreign policy institution, believes that the United States has gone overboard in favoring Israel, it doesn’t consider Israel to have have much importance to the US in the first place.

What can be concluded from the answers to questions that dealt with the Israel-Palestine conflict is that the general public forms its opinions from what it hears and reads in the mainstream media which are largely biased towards Israel while CFR members have greater access to as well as interest in obtaining more accurate information and are less susceptible to pro-Israel propaganda. That apparently not a single US newspaper saw fit to report on the opinions of CFR members, under those circumstances, is not surprising. [continued…]

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The interview Ha’aretz doesn’t want you to see

The interview Ha’aretz doesn’t want you to see
Pulse, December 6, 2009

Rehaviya Berman conducted an interview with Ali Abunimah, for Ha’aretz, a few weeks ago. The Interview was never published. Berman decided to publish it on his blog [Hebrew] and I decided to translate it, for your reading pleasure:

Exclusive: One On One with the Leader of the Electronic Intifada
Rehaviya Berman

Meet Ali Abunimah, the son of a Jordanian diplomat, a Palestinian activist, and the man who brings the hottest news of the struggle to thousands of people. His message: Forget two states, one will be tough enough to get it right. [continued…]

Inside story – the battle for Jerusalem

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Iran is no existential threat

Iran is no existential threat
By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, Foreign Policy, December 4, 2009

After months of halfhearted, fruitless attempts at engagement, the United States and its European partners are effectively re-enacting George W. Bush’s Iran policy. In 2006, after Iran had ended a nearly two-year voluntary suspension of uranium enrichment, then-U.S. president pushed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to send Iran’s nuclear file to the U.N. Security Council, which duly imposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic. But the sanctions did not prove “crippling,” as Bush had hoped: Iran continued to expand its nuclear infrastructure, and the risks of a military confrontation between the United States and Iran climbed.

Unfortunately, Barack Obama’s administration has decided to repeat this sorry history. Last Friday, the IAEA passed a resolution urging Iran to send most of its current stockpile of low-enriched uranium abroad. It also reported Iran once again to the Security Council. Iran has wasted no time in upping the ante rather than backing down, saying it would restrict cooperation with the IAEA only to those measures “statutorily” required. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also announced that the Islamic Republic would build 10 new enrichment facilities in coming years. He later added, “Iran will produce fuel enriched to a level of 20 percent,” the level required for Iran’s research reactor in Tehran. This would be well above the 3 to 4 percent level that Iran has already achieved in producing low-enriched uranium and would take Iran closer to the 90 percent-plus level required for weapons-grade fissile material. [continued…]

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Is Turkey the only real country in the Middle East?

Is Turkey the only real country in the Middle East?
By Rami G. Khouri, The Palestine Note, December 7, 2009

Every time I visit Turkey I ask myself what is it that makes me marvel at the many political and economic developments that make it stand out as the most impressive country in the greater Middle East. Watching Turkey’s significant foreign policy initiatives these days to cement good relations with its neighbors, I think I understand why: This is the only country in the Middle East region that acts like a normal, mature country.

Turkey’s mix of lively domestic politics, dynamic social and cultural life, and strong and internationally expanding economy all come together through the agency of a government that actually leads by taking initiatives, but is also held accountable to the citizens through regular elections. Turkey is the only country in the Middle East region that has both a democratic domestic system and an activist foreign policy. It is refreshing to witness this phenomenon in contrast with the largely passive and often dysfunctional countries across the Middle East.

The critical elements in Turkey’s success that others might learn from strike me as three in particular: freedom of speech and association that allow domestic politics to proceed in the direction defined by a majority of the citizenry; civilian authority over the armed forces and security agencies; and, pragmatic, humble realism in coming to terms with the realities of a pluralistic society where minorities demand rights that the majority should acknowledge. [continued…]

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Was Russian secret service behind leak of climate-change emails?

Was Russian secret service behind leak of climate-change emails?
By Shaun Walker, The Independent, December 7, 2009

The leaked emails, Professor van Ypersele said, will fuel scepticism about climate change and may make agreement harder at Copenhagen. So the mutterings have prompted the question: why would Russia have an interest in scuppering the Copenhagen talks?

This time, if it was indeed the FSB behind the leak, it could be part of a ploy to delay negotiations or win further concessions for Moscow. Russia, along with the United States, was accused of delaying Kyoto, and the signals coming from Moscow recently have continued to dismay environmental activists.

When Ed Miliband, the Secreatary of State for Climate Change, visited Moscow this year, he had meetings with high-level Russian officials and pronounced them constructive. But others doubt that Russia has much desire to go green.

Up in the far northern reaches of Russia, there are stretches of hundreds of miles of boggy tundra; human settlements are few and far between. Often, the only inhabitants are indigenous reindeer herders, who in recent years have reported that their cyclical lifestyle is being affected by the climate: they have to wait until later in the year to migrate to winter camps, because the rivers do not freeze as early as they used to. In spring, the snow melts quickly and it becomes harder for reindeer to pull sleds.

Much of Russia’s vast oil and gas reserves lie in difficult-to-access areas of the far North. One school of thought is that Russia, unlike most countries, would have little to fear from global warming, because these deposits would suddenly become much easier and cheaper to access. [continued…]

The stolen e-mails: has ‘climategate’ been overblown?
By Bryan Walsh, Time, December 7, 2009

The controversy over e-mails stolen from global-warming researchers at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s University of East Anglia has become so divisive that there is even disagreement over what to call it.

Skeptics of global warming, who have long considered climate change a fraud, refer to the incident as “Climategate,” with obvious intimations of scandal and cover-up. Advocates of action on warming call it “Swifthack,” a reference to the 2004 character attacks on presidential candidate Senator John Kerry by the group then known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — in other words, an invented scandal propagated by conservatives and the media that does nothing to change the scientific case for climate change. [continued…]

The climate denial industry is out to dupe the public. And it’s working
By George Monbiot, The Guardian, December 7, 2009

The denial industry, which has no interest in establishing the truth about global warming, insists that these emails, which concern three or four scientists and just one or two lines of evidence, destroy the entire canon of climate science.

Even if you were to exclude every line of evidence that could possibly be disputed – the proxy records, the computer models, the complex science of clouds and ocean currents – the evidence for man-made global warming would still be unequivocal. You can see it in the measured temperature record, which goes back to 1850; in the shrinkage of glaciers and the thinning of sea ice; in the responses of wild animals and plants and the rapidly changing crop zones.

No other explanation for these shifts makes sense. Solar cycles have been out of synch with the temperature record for 40 years. The Milankovic cycle, which describes variations in the Earth’s orbit, doesn’t explain it either. But the warming trend is closely correlated with the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. The impact of these gases can be demonstrated in the laboratory. To assert that they do not have the same effect in the atmosphere, a novel and radical theory would be required. No such theory exists. The science is not fixed – no science ever is – but it is as firm as science can be. The evidence for man-made global warming remains as strong as the evidence linking smoking to lung cancer or HIV to Aids. [continued…]

Why Copenhagen may be a disaster
By Bill McKibben, TomDispatch, December 6, 2009

Physics has set an immutable bottom line on life as we know it on this planet. For two years now, we’ve been aware of just what that bottom line is: the NASA team headed by James Hansen gave it to us first. Any value for carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere greater than 350 parts per million is not compatible “with the planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” That bottom line won’t change: above 350 and, sooner or later, the ice caps melt, sea levels rise, hydrological cycles are thrown off kilter, and so on.

And here’s the thing: physics doesn’t just impose a bottom line, it imposes a time limit. This is like no other challenge we face because every year we don’t deal with it, it gets much, much worse, and then, at a certain point, it becomes insoluble — because, for instance, thawing permafrost in the Arctic releases so much methane into the atmosphere that we’re never able to get back into the safe zone. Even if, at that point, the U.S. Congress and the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee were to ban all cars and power plants, it would be too late. [continued…]

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U.S. man accused of helping plot Mumbai attack

U.S. man accused of helping plot Mumbai attack
By Ginger Thompson and David Johnston, New York Times, December 8, 2009

An American at the center of an international terrorism investigation has been charged with helping plot the 2008 rampage in Mumbai, India, that left 163 people dead, according to a Justice Department complaint unsealed on Monday.

The suspect, David C. Headley of Chicago, is accused of helping identify targets for a Pakistan-based terrorist group called Lashkar-e-Taiba, whose two-day attack on luxury hotels, a popular restaurant, a Jewish community center and a crowded train station brought India’s financial capital to a halt and shocked the world. The complaint described Mr. Headley’s repeated scouting visits to the sites nearly two years before the attacks, which have reignited tensions between India and Pakistan.

The authorities say that among his conspirators was Ilyas Kashmiri, regarded by Western officials as one of the most dangerous Islamic militants operating in Pakistan’s restive tribal areas.

The charges, including six counts of conspiracy to bomb public places and to murder and maim, significantly expanded the government’s case against Mr. Headley, 49. And his profile — he has roots in the United States and links to high levels of the Pakistani government and military — makes him a highly unusual terror suspect. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — What would make Headley truly unusual would be if there really was such a person as a typical terror suspect.

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After delays, deal set on Iraq election law

After delays, deal set on Iraq election law
By Marc Santora and Riyadh Mohammed, New York Times, December 7, 2009

Lawmakers pulled Iraq back from the brink of a constitutional crisis on Sunday night, brokering a last-minute compromise that will allow for the first national elections since 2005.

A deal on the election law has fallen apart before, underscoring the deep sectarian divide that remains in Iraq, despite a drop in violence. Fighting over the law also threatens to complicate the American withdrawal.

After months of wrangling, the Iraqi Parliament gathered just before midnight to approve a deal that had been secured only hours before in closed-door talks.

“It is a great achievement for Iraq,” said Khalid al-Attiya, a deputy speaker of Parliament, shortly after the vote. The deal had been approved Sunday by Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish leaders, according to government officials, so it was unlikely to collapse again. [continued…]

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The third Viva Palestina Gaza convoy leaves London

“What Viva Palestina have achieved on their previous convoys has been incredible. Not only did they break the siege on Gaza, but they brought much needed aid, and solidarity on a massive international scale. The efforts of everyone from right across the world who took part in the previous convoy’s by giving up their time to drive to the stricken region of Gaza should be fully commended.

“To everyone taking part in the 3rd Viva Convoy, I wish you all the very best of luck, and your efforts for the people in Gaza just warms my heart. You bring hope, solidarity, peace, and love from right across the world. I am with you all the way in spirit.” — Noam Chomsky

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Obama wanted a surge, he’s getting a surge, and it feels good

Obama wanted a surge, he’s getting a surge, and it feels good
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, December 6, 2009

Mine might not be a headline the New York Times would choose, but that’s the story they tell under their flatly descriptive: “How Obama Came to Plan for ‘Surge’ in Afghanistan.”

The narrative reads like a script for NBC’s “West Wing” as it dramatises Obama’s deliberative process and that seems to have been the object of the exercise for this stellar team of reporters: paint a picture of presidential solemnity that will inspire confidence in how Obama makes decisions and thereby drum up a bit of good old-fashioned blind-faith in the presidency.

If there is no inescapable logic to the idea that a faster surge will enable a swifter withdrawal, then — the Times would have its readers believe — we shouldn’t worry our little heads about that because our fabulously diligent president has performed an operation of executive intelligence that renders all further consideration superfluous.

In a similar vein I’ll spare readers here the tedium of wading through a 4,660-word article and pick out some of the highlights. Actually, to my eye there is really only one point of substance:

Mr. Obama and his advisers … considered options for stepping up the pursuit of extremists in Pakistan’s border areas. He eventually approved a C.I.A. request to expand the areas where remotely piloted aircraft could strike, and other covert action. The trick would be getting Pakistani consent, which still has not been granted.

For “expand the areas” read: Baluchistan.

If getting Pakistani consent to open a new front in the war simply comes down to diplomatic finesse, then yes, you could call it a “trick” managing to get those instransigent Pakistanis to do the right thing.

In reality, it is merely the imperatives of fluent story-telling that compels the Times to glide over this important detail in the much larger and grimmer story of the war. Understanding why Baluchistan represents a red line that Pakistan refuses to abandon is something that Washington might grasp only when it’s too late.

The matter of most importance both for this administration and for the New York Times has less to do with people, places, history and geography, than it does with high-value words. Words like “surge”.

Obama wants to push in hard so he can pull out fast.

A three-month strategic review thus produced a choreographic solution:

The plan, called Option 2A, was presented to the president on Nov. 11. Mr. Obama complained that the bell curve would take 18 months to get all the troops in place.

He turned to General Petraeus and asked him how long it took to get the so-called surge troops he commanded in Iraq in 2007. That was six months.

“What I’m looking for is a surge,” Mr. Obama said. “This has to be a surge.”

That represented a contrast from when Mr. Obama, as a presidential candidate, staunchly opposed President Bush’s buildup in Iraq. But unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama wanted from the start to speed up a withdrawal as well. The military was told to come up with a plan to send troops quickly and then begin bringing them home quickly.

On November 29, after winning the approval of all his immediate advisers, the president moved into action:

Mr. Obama then went to the Situation Room to call General McChrystal and Ambassador Eikenberry. The president made it clear that in the next assessment in December 2010 he would not contemplate more troops. “It will only be about the flexibility in how we draw down, not if we draw down,” he said.

Two days later, Mr. Obama flew to West Point to give his speech. After three months of agonizing review, he seemed surprisingly serene. “He was,” said one adviser, “totally at peace.”

Obama wanted a surge, he’s getting a surge, and it feels good — at least for now.

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Separatists, Islamists and Islamabad struggle for control of Pakistani Balochistan

Separatists, Islamists and Islamabad struggle for control of Pakistani Balochistan
By Chris Zambelis, Jamestown Foundation, December 3, 2009

To say that the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in October 2001 shook Pakistan to its core would be an understatement. Since then, the war in Afghanistan has spilled over into Pakistan on multiple levels. The escalating cycle of violence between Pakistani security forces and a patchwork of tribal militants, particularly the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and foreign fighters aligned with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) is a case in point. Many observers of Pakistani affairs have used the deteriorating situation in the tribal agencies along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier as a bellwether of future trends in Pakistan. In this context, it is no surprise that events in Pakistan’s tribal areas seem to draw the most attention. Yet Pakistan’s Balochistan province is also beginning to draw interest as a center of Taliban and al-Qaeda activity.

Reports that the U.S. is seeking Pakistan’s approval for expanding its controversial drone campaign against targets in Balochistan – a clear red line for Pakistan – have raised serious concerns in Islamabad about Washington’s ultimate intentions (The News, [Islamabad], September 29). As the Obama administration escalates its military campaign in Afghanistan, Pakistani leaders have expressed deep concerns about the potential destabilization of Balochistan resulting from the intensified fighting expected in Afghanistan in the coming months (The Nation [Lahore], November 27). As if these concerns were not enough, Balochistan remains a hotbed of ethno-nationalist militancy, drug smuggling, and organized crime. Balochistan is also in the throes of a refugee crisis that has been largely ignored. The confluence of these trends – which indirectly or directly reinforce each other – is making an already dangerous situation worse with severe implications for Pakistan and the wider region. [continued…]

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Jones: Bin Laden still spends time in Afghanistan

Jones: Bin Laden still spends time in Afghanistan
AP, December 6, 2009

National security adviser James Jones said Sunday that al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden still spends some time inside Afghanistan. Most recent U.S. estimates have placed bin Laden inside Pakistan. But Jones, a retired general, said the best estimate is that bin Laden “is somewhere in North Waziristan, sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border.”

Jones described it as “very, very rough, mountainous area. Generally ungoverned and we’re going to have to get after that to make sure that this very, very important symbol of what al-Qaida stands for is either, once again, on the run or captured or killed.”

Earlier, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the U.S. hasn’t had any good intelligence for years on bin Laden’s whereabouts. He said he couldn’t confirm reports that bin Laden had been seen recently in Afghanistan. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Even if logic dictates that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, no intelligence, no sightings, no videos certainly points in one direction: bin Laden’s dead. Why by this time should he be presumed alive?

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Obama’s ideal partner: Turkey

Obama’s ideal partner: Turkey
By Joshua W Walker, Today’s Zaman, December 6, 2009

U.S. President Barack Obama laid out his new Afghanistan strategy on Tuesday night by ordering an additional 30,000 US forces to the country.

While the majority of the analysis and discussion in Washington has centered on the levels of US forces or the president’s reasoning for it, the president emphasized that the “burden [in Afghanistan] is not ours alone to bear.” Declaring that not only is NATO’s credibility on the line, but that the security of the US and all of its allies are at stake, the president invoked the international consensus on Afghanistan that led to a 43-nation coalition that has operated in the country since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, to sell his new strategy. Yet the reality is that this international coalition is waning, not surging, and is in desperate need of a regional champion that can serve as a model partner for the US in Afghanistan. Obama’s ideal partner is Turkey.

Consider the facts: Turkey boasts the second largest military in NATO after only the US and the largest in Europe. Turkey has been a close American bilateral and NATO ally for more than 60 years. In addition to being a member of almost every European organization, Turkey is a UN Security Council member, a member of the G-20, has successfully pushed Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu as the secretary-general of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and is one of the few examples of a fully functioning Muslim-majority democracy in the Middle East. On top of all of this, Ankara has close historic ties with Afghanistan that date back to the 1920s when the founder of the modern republic, Atatürk, served as a model for modernization that collapsed only after great power interference in Kabul carved up the country. Often referred to as Afghanistan’s “closest neighbor without borders,” Turkey also shares considerable cultural, ethnic and linguistic links that make it an ideal partner for the US to work with. [continued…]

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Iran will not quit treaty, its nuclear chief asserts

Iran will not quit treaty, its nuclear chief asserts
By Nazila Fathi, New York Times, December 6, 2009

Urging moderation after a week of harsh rhetoric over Iran’s nuclear program, the head of the country’s nuclear agency emphasized Saturday that Iran would not seek to pull out of the international Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Iran’s state-run Press TV reported.

The comments by Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, came just a day after the government ratcheted up tensions with the West by saying that it would keep the details of 10 planned uranium enrichment sites secret until six months before they would become operational.

The announcement on Nov. 29 that Iran would seek to build the new sites was taken as defiance of a resolution by the United Nations’ nuclear agency pushing Iran to halt all uranium enrichment activity immediately. Several hard-line members of the Iranian Parliament went even further, demanding that Iran pull out of the nonproliferation treaty and stop complying with international inspections under the agreement.

On Saturday, Mr. Salehi sought to assure that Iran had no interest in pulling out of the treaty, and he implied that any other suggestion was an attempt by Western countries to force Iran into a corner. “I think the West is trying to force us out of the N.P.T.,” he was quoted as saying on the Press TV Web site. [continued…]

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