A suicide bomber attacked a suspected nuclear-weapons site Friday in Pakistan, raising fears about the security of the nuclear arsenal, while two other terrorist blasts made it another bloody day in the country’s struggle against extremism.
Increasingly daring and sophisticated attacks by terrorists allied with al Qaida on some of Pakistan’s most sensitive and best-protected installations have led to warnings that extremists could damage a nuclear facility or seize nuclear material.
Pakistan’s nuclear sites are mostly in the northwest of the country, close to the capital, Islamabad, to keep them away from the border with archenemy India, but that places them close to Pakistani Taliban extremists, who are massed in the northwest. Al Qaida has made clear its ambitions to get hold of a nuclear bomb or knowledge of nuclear technology. Several other sites associated with Pakistan’s nuclear weapons have been hit previously. [continued…]
iven the deeply disingenuous press conference on Tuesday in which world leaders congratulated Hamid Karzai for agreeing to obey the law he has sworn to uphold, the question of whether a second round of elections will be more credible than the first is largely irrelevant.
Chances are there will not be a second round; weather and logistics could easily combine to torpedo the effort, and the challenger Dr. Abdullah Abdullah has already hinted that he is open to talks “if winter should make a second round impossible.”
A runoff is in no one’s interests. The Afghan people are tired and disgusted, and no second round is going to redeem the democratic process in their eyes. The turnout is likely be miniscule – under 20 percent – making any talk of government legitimacy more than a little absurd. [continued…]
Gaza Strip ruling Islamic Hamas movement rejected on Friday the decree of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who called on the Palestinians to go for general elections on Jan. 24, 2010.
In a written statement sent to reporters, Hamas movement considered Abbas’ decree “a destructive strike” to all the efforts to achieve an inter-Palestinian reconciliation, adding “the decree is a rejected step.”
Meanwhile, Gaza-based Hamas leader Ismail Radwan told Xinhua in an interview that holding the Palestinian elections without a national agreement of accordance “is a response to the American instructions.” [continued…]
A short midlevel cleric, with a neat white beard and a clergyman’s calm bearing, Mehdi Karroubi has watched from his home in Tehran in recent months as his aides have been arrested, his offices raided, his newspaper shut down. He himself has been threatened with arrest and, indirectly, the death penalty.
His response: bring it on.
Once a second-tier opposition figure operating in the shadow of Mir Hussein Moussavi, his fellow challenger in Iran’s discredited presidential election in June, Mr. Karroubi has emerged in recent months as the last and most defiant opponent of the country’s leadership.
The authorities have dismissed as fabrications his accusations of official corruption, voting fraud and the torture and rape of detained protesters. A former confidant of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and a longtime conservative politician, he has lately been accused by the government of fomenting unrest and aiding Iran’s foreign enemies. [continued…]
Judge Richard Goldstone told Al Jazeera on Thursday that he is still waiting for the U.S. to back up its claim that his report on the war in Gaza has a number of flaws.
“The Obama administration joined our recommendation calling for full and good-faith investigations, both in Israel and in Gaza, but said that the report was flawed,” Goldstone told Al Jazeera.
The UN commission chairman said that if Washington points out the flaws, he would be ready to respond. “I have yet to hear from the Obama administration what the flaws in the report that they have identified are. I would be happy to respond to them, if and when I know what they are,” he said.
Israel has been dealing one blow after another to the rest of the world. While China has still not recovered from Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s absence from the reception at its Tel Aviv embassy – a serious punishment for China’s support for the Goldstone report – France is licking its wounds after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “vetoed” a visit by the French foreign minister to Gaza. And Israel has dealt another blow: Its ambassador in Washington, Michael Oren, will boycott the conference next week of the new Israel lobby J Street.
China, France and J Street will somehow get by despite these boycotts, Turkey will also recover from the great vacationers’ revolt, and we can expect that even the Swedes and Norwegians will recover from Israel’s loud reprimands. But a country that attacks and boycotts everyone who does not exactly agree with its official positions will become isolated, forsaken and detestable: North Korea of today or Albania of yesterday. It’s actually quite strange for Israel to use this weapon, as it is about to turn into the victim of boycotts itself.
Israel strikes and strikes again. It strikes its enemies, and now it strikes out at its friends who dare not fall exactly in line with its official policies. The J Street case is a particularly serious example. This Jewish organization rose in America along with Barack Obama. Its members want a fair and peace-seeking Israel.
That’s their sin, and their punishment is a boycott. [continued…]
President Peres on Wednesday harshly condemned the Goldstone report and told the U.S. envoy to the United Nations, Susan Rice that, “It is outrageous that a respected institution like the United Nations provides a platform to spread lies and stories about Israel.”
The Goldstone report accuses Israel Defense Forces and Palestinian militants of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during their Dec. 27-Jan. 18 conflict in the Gaza Strip.
The report also calls on the UN Security Council to refer the matter to the International Criminal Court at The Hague, which could prosecute Israeli officials for war crimes.
“The United Nations provides a stage for Ahmmadinejad, who threatens to annihilate Israel, and lets him stand judge,” continued Peres. “This is nothing short of ridiculous.”
Rice promised that the United States will continue to stand by Israel as a loyal friend in the fight against the Goldstone report. [continued…]
The United States and a number of important EU countries are pressing Israel to establish an independent commission of inquiry into the findings of the Goldstone report on last winter’s Gaza offensive.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicholas Sarkozy, for example, have written a letter on the subject to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and messages have been sent through diplomatic channels, in phone calls and in Netanyahu’s meetings with senior American and European officials, said a senior official in Jerusalem.
Netanyahu has yet to take a stance in debates in the cabinet and security cabinet on the issue, let alone decide on the matter. No decision is expected in the next few days, according to a source in the Prime Minister’s Bureau.
The main supporters of establishing a commission are Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor and Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, while the main opponents are Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai. [continued…]
Hamas authorities in the Gaza Strip should promptly implement the recommendations of the Goldstone report on Gaza by conducting credible investigations into serious laws-of-war violations by Palestinian forces, Human Rights Watch said in a letter sent October 20, 2009, to Prime Minister Ismail Haniya.
The United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, led by Justice Richard Goldstone, called on Hamas and Israel to investigate within six months alleged violations of the laws of war by their respective forces. The report said that Palestinian rocket attacks against Israeli population centers should be investigated as war crimes. The UN Human Rights Council voted on October 16 to endorse the recommendations of the Gaza report. [continued…]
Human Rights Watch was saddened to read in The New York Times on October 20, 2009 that its founding chair, Robert L. Bernstein, feels he must “join the critics” of our work on Israel. We fundamentally disagree with Mr. Bernstein’s views.
Human Rights Watch does not believe that the human rights records of “closed” societies are the only ones deserving scrutiny. If that were the case, we would not work on US abuses in Guantanamo Bay, police abuse in Brazil, the “untouchables” in India, or migrants in South Africa. “Open” societies and democracies commit human rights abuses, too, and Human Rights Watch has an important role to play in documenting those abuses and pressing for their end.
Human Rights Watch does not devote more time and energy to Israel than to other countries in the region, or in the world. We’ve produced more than 1,700 reports, letters, news releases, and other commentaries on the Middle East and North Africa since January 2000, and the vast majority of these were about countries other than Israel. Furthermore, our Middle East division is only one of 16 research programs at Human Rights Watch. The work on Israel is a tiny fraction of Human Rights Watch’s work as a whole.
It is not the case that Human Rights Watch had “no access to the battlefield” after the Israeli operation in Gaza in January 2009. Although the Israeli government denied us access, our researchers entered Gaza via the border with Egypt and conducted extensive interviews with victims, eyewitnesses, United Nations officials, local authorities, and others. As in war zones around the world, we also visited attack sites, analyzed ballistics evidence, photographed wounds, and examined autopsy and other medical reports.
Mr. Bernstein brought his concerns about our work on Israel to a full meeting of the Human Rights Watch Board of Directors in April. The board unanimously rejected his view that Human Rights Watch should report only on closed societies, and expressed its full support for the organization’s work.
Human Rights Watch stands fully behind the work we have done on Israel and around the world. [continued…]
The Afghanistan that Lindsey Graham, Joseph Lieberman, John McCain and seemingly countless other politicians have been visiting at taxpayer expense recently might as well be on Mars, so different is it, apparently, from the Afghanistan that Jean-Claude Muller, special councilor for international cultural matters to Luxemburg’s prime minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, and I visited just this past month.
As professional linguists, we were ostensively doing linguistic field work in Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor (we are researching a book provisionally entitled “The Tongues of the Taliban: How They Get Their Intelligence”). We funded the expenditure ourselves, and as linguistic researchers have no particular political axes to grind.
The Wakhan Corridor is that strange-looking panhandle in far northeastern Afghanistan that is strategically sandwiched between Tajikistan to the north and Pakistan’s awesomely snow-bound Hindu Kush to the south and that also abuts briefly and precariously on China. It is a demilitarized-zone creation of the 19th century Great Game that was viciously played out between Imperial Russia and the British Empire. It is an arbitrary creation and therefore geographically reflects the roots of many of modern Afghanistan’s current ills.
We entered Afghanistan from Tajikistan by walking unescorted across the no-man’s land at the Oxus River border station at Eshkashem. We were dressed as civilians and carried our own packs: no vehicles, no flak jackets, no body guards, just plain folks. We were, however, accompanied by our impressive guide and translator, whom we shall simply call Mr. T., a Tajik native of Khorug and a speaker of Tajik and Russian (he spent four years studying film at the academy in Moscow and, like all other Tajiks in his age group, served in the Russian army), as well as Dard; but his native language is Shugni, which is also widely spoken across the Oxus from Khorug in Afghanistan, as is Tajik: there are as many Tajiks (four and a half million) in Afghanistan as in Tajikistan. Then, too, Mr. T. had spent eleven years in Afghanistan working for Focus.
We were following the same route through the corridor that Marco Polo took just over seven centuries ago. We stayed with locals (so-called ‘homestays’); sometimes with major landholders, once with a highly respected local “pasha” and once in a hostel supported by the Aga Khan Foundation, but also often enough with people of very, very modest circumstances (the country’s per capita GDP is currently about $60.00). In every situation, the boundless hospitality and cordiality were overwhelming. Just as you initially begin to think the US ought to have left this godforsaken place yesterday, it’s finally the people that bind your heartstrings to it.
Clearly, we had all the advantages over “official” visitors pointed out by Joseph Kearns Goodwin in his “Afghanistan’s Other Front” and then some: not only could we move about freely as civilians in an ordinary van with an Afghan driver and thus be far less “likely to intimidate and more likely to elicit candor” than highly marked official visitors, the very advantages Goodwin stresses, but we also had one-on-one conversational access and abilities, something our military and politicians have woefully lacked for decades.
The Wakhan Corridor is a heady ethnic and linguistic mix coupled with profound religious differences: Ismailis fervently loyal to the Aga Khan, the 49th Imam, who saved them from certain starvation during the civil war in Tajikistan; Shiites; covert Buddhists; remnants of pre-Islamic paganism reminiscent of that in Ladakh and Nepal; and even vestiges of Zoroastrianism. And this corridor is what all of Afghanistan might have been and might still hope to be: safe and pleasant, even if initially dirt poor, with no evidence of a Taliban or al Qaeda and devoid of the corruption and rampant system of bribes that plagues the rest of the country. Then, too, we saw no poppies in the Wakhan Corridor, and we walked many fields.
Despite such diversity in the Wakhan Corridor, there was a unanimous belief that the Afghan government is simply an outrageous band of crooks on the take and that Hamid Karzai is chief among them. This disgust cut across all linguistic, age and belief groups. It was barely below the surface of any discussion, as was the question of when the “foreigners” would leave. There was no blaming the Russians, nor even our guide, Mr. T., who, as a Tajik, was clearly from the “wrong” side when talk turned to the Soviet era. The wreckage of that period is plain to see: discarded tank turrets decorate many of Eshkashem’s street corners. Most significantly, while there was a firm awareness of local pride of place, there was no patriotic fervor for an Afghanistan, seemingly a very alien concept for many.
The answer to the the questions of what to do about the rampant corruption on the one hand and the Taliban/al Qaeda on the other hand that plague Afghanistan … and the answer to these questions is clearly not more boots on the ground (just ask the Russians about that one … with an estimated cost of some $82 billion and the loss of their empire; though you can’t very well ask the 16,500 British troops slaughtered at the Khyber Pass in just one engagement in 1842, and the Brits didn’t get the message until the disastrous Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919) or elaborate training programs (Anti-bribing 101?) or monitoring all those police checkpoints where palms are greased, lies within the Wakhan Corridor itself and just across the Oxus River in Tajikistan’s Autonomous Gorno-Badakhshan Region, still known by its Soviet abbreviation GBAO.
The GBAO is just as culturally and linguistically heterogeneous as the Wakhan Corridor, if not more so. But once you leave the bribe-free GBAO, for which a separate visa is required in addition to that for entering Tajikistan, the police checkpoints and corruption start all over again: drivers from the GBAO are routinely racially profiled by Dushanbe’s traffic cops and required to hand over bribes. Once I convinced our Kyrgyz driver to trade his skull cap for my baseball cap, we started being waved past Dushanbe’s checkpoints.
In the end, it was Tajikistan’s disastrous civil war that raged for five years from 1992 until 1997 and that claimed more than 60,000 lives and uprooted more than a million refugees that left the GBAO independent, proud, united and with a clear and collective vision for a future, a vision that finally sees prosperity within its grasp from increased tourism and from providing a trade corridor for neighboring China; the Pamirs are set to become the hub of a new Silk Road, and, get this, it is the Chinese who are building the road system (lamentably with their prisoners, of which they have millions, who receive only food and lodging for their efforts).
For us as a nation, it should be abundantly clear that once people gain their independence and couple that independence with a sense of collective purpose and goals, then peace and (bribeless) prosperity usually follow.
Afghanistan per se is a fictitious socio-political unit that, by and large, was engendered in the wake of the 19th century’s Great Game; any resemblance to Iraq is real. As we see it, given the successes of the Wakhan Corridor and the GBAO, an effective solution to current woes would be to convert Afghanistan into a federation of largely autonomous “cantons” divided along ethno-linguistic lines (and even those of religious persuasion) and then encourage cross-border communication and cooperation between and among related groups; so, for example, between Tajiks on both sides of the Oxus River divide, between Belochis on both sides of the Afghan-Iran border, and so on.
We should also look for creative and novel non-military solutions such as replacing poppy cultivation with saffron cultivation (virtually economically equivalent crops), encouraging local handicraft co-operatives, whether operated by women or not (as has been successfully done in the GBAO), building rural schools along the lines of Greg Mortenson, engaging a variety of non-military players such as His Highness the Aga Khan in socio-political decision making, and so on. And we should largely absent ourselves to let Afghan diversity flourish once again. Going blindly down the same paths of militant aggression as did the Russians and British will surely once again end in ever greater disasters, even more so when we have so clearly failed at cultural understanding and linguistic communication.
Dr. Thomas L. Markey, Tucson, Arizona
Dr. Jean-Claude Muller, Institut archéologique du Luxembourg
When five days pour forth a lead story on the way “a coordinated assault” of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan has caused a grave risk to American interests; a lead about the serious counter-offensive mounted by Pakistan; a flash suitable for any date but run as a lead concerning the heroin trade of the Taliban (“Vast Network Reaps Millions from Drugs”); the launching of a serial memoir by a reporter “Held Captive by the Taliban,” which will extend to five parts; a flattering stoic-soldier profile of General McChrystal in the Times Magazine; a Pakistan follow-up suggesting that Pakistan’s army’s now fights well but is “meeting strong resistance” from the Taliban and cannot win without help; a sequence of three stories by different hands, tracing with approval the acquiescence of President Hamid Karzai in calls for a run-off (the very agreement the administration made a precondition for expanded American commitment); two op-eds over three days by military men not of the highest rank, urging escalation; and a reckless “scoop,” filled sparsely with random and often anonymous interviews regarding the supposed discontents within the armed forces at the length of the administration’s pause — when all this is the fruit of five days’ harvest at the Times, the conclusion draws itself. The New York Times wants a large escalation in Afghanistan. The paper has been made nervous by signs that the president may not make the big push for a bigger war; and they are showing what the rest of his time in office will be like if he does not cooperate. [continued…]
The White House logic that a decision on sending further troops would have to wait for the election debacle to be resolved is faulty, however. And Defense Secretary Robert Gates was among those willing to point that out. “We’re not just going to sit on our hands, waiting for the outcome of this election and for the emergence of a government in Kabul,” Gates said Tuesday. “The outcome of the elections and the problems with the elections have complicated the situation for us. But the reality is, it’s not going to be complicated one day and simple the next.”
Indeed, for purposes of creating a representative government as the foundation of U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, the key flaw of Afghanistan’s August election was not the widespread ballot fraud; it was the fact that almost 3 out of 4 voters didn’t show up at the polls because of the Taliban security threat. So, while a runoff election might satisfy the fraud complaints, it won’t make the resulting government much more representative unless millions more voters show up at the polls this time. But the deteriorating security situation and limits of the appeal of both candidates give little reason to expect that the rerun would see a voter surge; turnout in a runoff, if anything, could be even lower.
What’s more, despite the findings of the electoral commission, there’s widespread doubt in Kabul over whether a runoff vote will actually proceed. A power-sharing deal between Karzai and Abdullah is considered the much more likely outcome. But in reality, the manner in which the electoral stalemate is resolved doesn’t substantially alter the basic choice facing Obama: either send tens of thousands more U.S. troops, which U.S. commander General Stan McChrystal says are necessary simply to halt the Taliban’s advance, or draw down to a policing operation against al-Qaeda and abandon the goal of defeating the Taliban. [continued…]
Every military counter-insurgency strategy hits up against the probability that it will, in time, create more enemies than it kills. So you blow up a suspected Taliban site and kill two of their commanders – but you also kill 98 women and children, whose families are from that day determined to kill your men and drive them out of their country. Those aren’t hypothetical numbers. They come from Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, who was General Petraeus’ counter-insurgency advisor in Iraq. He says that US aerial attacks on the Afghan-Pakistan border have killed 14 al-Qa’ida leaders, at the expense of more than 700 civilian lives. He says: “That’s a hit rate of 2 per cent on 98 per cent collateral. It’s not moral.” It explains the apparent paradox that broke the US in Vietnam: the more “bad guys” you kill, the more you have to kill.
There is an even bigger danger than this. General Petraeus’s strategy is to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan. When he succeeds, they run to Pakistan – where the nuclear bombs are.
To justify these risks, the proponents of the escalation need highly persuasive arguments to show how their strategy slashed other risks so dramatically that it outweighed these dangers. It’s not inconceivable – but I found that, in fact, the case they give for escalating the war, or for continuing the occupation, is based on three premises that turn to Afghan dust on inspection. [continued…]
After nine suicide attacks in just eleven days that killed 160 people, including many from the security forces, the Pakistan army has finally started its long awaited offensive in South Waziristan where the Pakistani Taliban are based. The success of the offensive, against the backdrop of a serious civil-military division in Pakistan and unresolved debate in Washington, could be critical for the fate of Pakistan which is financially broke and politically paralyzed.
The army and the civilian government are once more at odds over policy towards the US and India, the insurgency in Baluchistan, and how to deal with militant Punjabi groups who are linked to the Taliban. Moreover, still unresolved and now an issue of growing international concern, is the sanctuary being given to Afghan Taliban in Pakistan.
Dozens of soldiers and police officers have been killed in suicide attacks from October 5 to 15 that included an embarrassing 22 hour siege of the army headquarters in Rawalpindi and the deaths of eight soldiers and three simultaneous attacks on police training camps and intelligence offices in Lahore. The spate of attacks could have been designed to prevent or delay the expected army offensive on its stronghold, but they also aimed to topple the government, impose an Islamic state, and, if possible, get hold of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. [continued…]
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed his government on Tuesday to draw up proposals to amend the international laws of war after a damning UN report on its war in Gaza.
The security cabinet did not, however, discuss calls made by ministers for an internal investigation into the 22-day offensive at the turn of the year that killed some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis, an official told AFP.
“The prime minister instructed the relevant government bodies to examine a worldwide campaign to amend the international laws of war to adapt them to the spread of global terrorism,” his office said in a statement.
Israel was dealt a heavy diplomatic blow with the adoption by the UN Human Rights Council of the report that accused both Israel and the Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip of war crimes.
Israel’s closest allies, the United States, Britain and France urged it to investigate war crime allegations raised by the fact-finding missions headed by Richard Goldstone, a former international war crimes prosecutor.
Defence Minister Ehud Barak backed Netanyahu’s call for a diplomatic campaign, saying that Israel should propose changes in the international laws of war “in order to facilitate the war on terrorism,” an official quoted him as saying. [continued…]
Which way for Hamas? By Nicolas Pelham, Max Rodenbeck, New York Review of Books, October 6, 2009
Whereas in 2008 Hamas brashly punched a hole through Egypt’s border defenses, unleashing an embarrassing stampede of Palestinians into Egyptian shops, Interior Minister [Fathi] Hamad says Hamas now “coordinates fully” with Gaza’s sole Arab neighbor. Hamas even poses as a guardian of Egypt’s national security, not least by killing al-Qaeda’s self-proclaimed preachers and other adherents in Gaza. “Our task now is governance, to consolidate stability rather than continue resistance,” says Hamad.
Yet a day after speaking these soothing words, the interior minister offered a very different political horizon. Between towering bodyguards from Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, he delivered an apocalyptic address to a summoned assembly of clan elders. It was angels that chased Israel’s army from Gaza in last winter’s war, he thundered, adding with a numerological flourish that whereas Israel beat twenty-two Arab nations, Gaza’s Islamic resistance had routed the enemy in just twenty-two days. The Jewish state, he concluded, would disappear in 2022.
Such reverses in rhetoric reveal a movement struggling to reconcile two competing audiences: the “international community,” which calls for Hamas to be more moderate, and a core constituency that grows suspicious at any sign it might be selling out. Much as Communist regimes tacked “Democratic” to their names to disguise totalitarianism, Hamas officials use the word “resistance” to hide the waning of their armed struggle. The culture minister, when he attends theatrical productions, speaks of Resistance Culture. The minister of economy hails recent openings of cafés and restaurants as triumphs of the Resistance Economy. “As long as we don’t raise our hands in surrender and continue to struggle, that’s resistance,” he said.
Hamas has failed to achieve the prime requisite for a more normal life: ending the siege. [continued…]
Iran turned up the heat on Pakistan on Tuesday, saying the group accused of carrying out a suicide bombing that killed top commanders of the elite Revolutionary Guards is based on its territory.
Islamabad strongly denied the allegations, saying the attack was an attempt to “spoil ties” with Iran.
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said members of the group accused of mounting Sunday’s attack in southeastern Sistan-Baluchestan province regularly criss-cross the frontier with Pakistan. [continued…]
According to a Tehran University political science author who wishes to remain anonymous, the Pishin attackers had multiple objectives. “First, they wanted to prevent a crucial unity meeting between Shi’ites and Sunnis in Sistan-Balochistan. Second, they wanted to exacerbate tension between the central government and the Balochi minority. Third, they wanted to cause new tensions between Iran and Pakistan, whose government is backed by the US and Saudi Arabia. Fourth, they timed their attacks with the critical nuclear meeting in Vienna to thwart any agreement on Iran’s proposal for nuclear fuel for the reactor in Tehran.”
There is a widespread belief in Tehran that the Pishin attack, especially as it claimed the lives of five IRGC commanders, could not possibly have taken place without the knowledge, and perhaps complicity, of Western and/or Israeli intelligence.
This sentiment is apparently shared by Russia, in light of the quick response by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who sent his condolences together with a firm message that Russia was prepared to cooperate with Iran against terrorism. This was in sharp contrast to the silence of US President Barack Obama.
“Iran is now baited into security tensions with nuclear-armed Pakistan and that simply strengthens the hands of the hardliners in Iran who believe that Iran needs a nuclear shield,” the same Tehran professor told the author. [continued…]
Approximately 2,000 strong, Jundallah claims to represent the Sunni Balochi struggle against the centralizing power of Tehran. Nonsense: pan-Balochi aspirations actually are better represented by other Balochi nationalist groups, such as the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) in Pakistan. Jundallah for its part does not threaten Islamabad; it is an ultra-sectarian, anti-Shi’ite outfit immersed in the intolerant Deobandi interpretation of Islam.
Jundallah has its headquarters in Karachi and bases in both Balochistans. It does have a firm connection to the South Waziristan tribal areas; it has been connected to the hardcore Sunni and viscerally anti-Shi’ite Lashkar-e-Jhangvi; and is definitely tactically connected to al-Qaeda, “talking” if not to the historic leadership ensconced, in theory, in South Waziristan, at least to the “new generation” al-Qaeda.
It was Jundallah that, last December, perpetrated the first suicide bombing ever in Iran, after spending a few years basically practicing sabotage, kidnapping officials and killing border guards. In May, only three weeks before the Iranian presidential election, Jundallah raised the stakes with an attack on the top mosque in Zahedan, the largest city in the southern part of Sistan-Balochistan.
Islamabad – as always when it comes to anything regarding Balochistan – is perplexed. It never knew how to deal with Balochi separatist movements in the first place – apart from iron-clad repression. But as far as Jundallah is concerned, Islamabad did try, it handed over Rigi’s brother, Abdul Hamid, to Tehran, branding Jundallah as a “terrorist organization”, and always protesting its innocence of the outfit’s designs. [continued…]
In an apparent shift from the Bush administration’s efforts to foster regime change in Iran by financing opposition groups, the Obama White House has all but dismantled the Iran Democracy Fund.
While the move has been criticised by neo-conservatives in the US, it has been welcomed by Iranian human rights and pro-democracy activists.
The controversial program was initiated by the Bush administration in an effort to topple the clerical regime in Tehran by financing Iranian NGOs.
While heralded by some in Washington, reactions in Iran to the program were overwhelmingly negative. [continued…]
An Iranian-American scholar who was jailed during the protests following Iran’s disputed presidential election has been sentenced to at least 12 years on charges of acting against national security, Iranian state media reported Tuesday.
Kian Tajbaksh, a sociologist and urban planner with a doctorate from Columbia, was arrested July 9 and testified during a mass trial of opposition supporters in August.
American officials have repeatedly called on Tehran to release Mr. Tajbaksh, who was the only American citizen included in the mass show trials that followed Iran’s postelection unrest. He spent four months in prison in 2007 on charges of endangering national security. [continued…]
The accession to power of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), a moderate Islamist organisation, provided the domestic impulse to redefine the country’s approach to the Middle East. Under the AKP, Turkey is rediscovering its eastern identity, combining it with moderate Islamist ideology into what is known as a neo-Ottoman outlook. This seeks to anchor Turkey as a pivotal Asian actor whose economic wellbeing depends on a stable environment: something it does not have yet. So a confident Turkey is going about shaping that environment with an ambitious “zero problems, zero enemy” policy, the brainchild of the foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu.
This strategic reorientation has been obvious in the intense diplomatic activity of recent weeks. The most striking achievement is the establishment of diplomatic ties with Armenia, a country in dire need of regional integration, and the re-opening of the Armenian-Turkish border after 16 years. Conveniently, an “impartial scientific examination” will determine how to define the killing of more than a million Armenians during and just after the First World War. This arrangement may be scuttled by the rage of many in both countries, but a longstanding taboo has vanished.
Then there was the first meeting of the Turkey-Syria High Level Strategic Cooperation Council in Aleppo, crowning a decade-long rapprochement between the two countries. Of course, this would not have been possible without Turkish bullying and Syrian capitulation. In 1998 the Turkish army threatened to “enter Syria by one side and exit by another” unless Syria ended its support for the PKK. The Syrian president, Hafez al Assad, caved in and expelled the PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, from Damascus. Syria also had to accept the loss of the province of Hatay, also known as Alexandretta. [continued…]
Under heavy international pressure, President Hamid Karzai conceded Tuesday that he fell short of a first-round victory in the nation’s disputed presidential election, and agreed to hold a runoff election with his top challenger on Nov. 7.
Flanked at a news conference in Kabul by Senator John Kerry, the head of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Kai Eide, the top United Nations official in Afghanistan, Mr. Karzai said he would accept the findings of an international audit that stripped him of nearly one-third of his votes in the first round, leaving him below the 50 percent threshold that would have allowed him to avoid a runoff and declare victory over his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah.
“I call upon this country to take this as an opportunity to move this country forward and participate in this new round of elections,” Mr. Karzai said, according to the English translation of his remarks, adding that he was grateful to the international community for its help. [continued…]
For a couple of days last month at a cavernous warehouse in the bleak industrial zone of western Kabul, diplomats, UN officials and election monitors gathered to watch hundreds of ballot boxes being opened and turned out on to the floor.
The colleagues from Kabul’s western missions rolled their eyes at each other as they witnessed not a chaotic assortment of marked and folded voting forms tumble out, but entire blocks of ballot papers that had not even been torn off from their book stubs. Others contained surprisingly uniform numbers of ballots all signed in the same hand and with the same pen, and overwhelmingly in favour of a single candidate.
One box did not contain any ballot papers at all; just a results slip with the final vote score showing a massive win for Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president many believe was all too aware of attempts to steal the country’s second ever democratic attempt to choose a leader.
Everyone present could see a huge amount of cheating had taken place on 20 August, albeit rather ineptly. “Some of us joked with each other whether the Afghans, after all the billions that have gone in to trying to create a functioning government, also need to be taught how to rig an election properly,” said one of the officials present, deeply cynical after weeks of revelations about Afghanistan’s disastrous election.
It was a tawdry end to what had at times been an exciting, even uplifting, election campaign. [continued…]
Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Tuesday prevented a debate by the Security Cabinet on the possible establishment of an inquiry committee on Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.
Barak said he believed such a committee would do more damage to Israel in the international arena, and commended the IDF once again for its conduct in the operation.
However the Cabinet did decide to establish a team to fight the Goldstone report, which claims Israel committed war crimes during Cast Lead, including its international and legal manifestations.
The team will be under the Foreign Ministry’s jurisdiction, and will involve officials from other ministries if need be. Its main goal is to prepare for a possible debate on the report by the UN Security Council in December. [continued…]
The author of a damning report on Israel’s winter offensive against Hamas in Gaza, Richard Goldstone, has said that Foreign Minster Avigdor Lieberman does not want there to be an Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Goldstone, a South African Jurist, made the claim in a conference call on Sunday with 150 U.S. rabbis from left-leaning organizations. He was speaking in reference to an Israeli assertion that the report would harm peace talks.
“That just is a shallow, I believe, false allegation,” he said. “What peace process are they talking about? There isn’t one. The Israeli foreign minister doesn’t want one at all.” [continued…]
Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s military offensive against the Gaza Strip, had an impact on the press. As regards its internal situation, Israel sank 47 places in the index to 93rd position. This nose-dive means it has lost its place at the head of the Middle Eastern countries, falling behind Kuwait (60th), United Arab Emirates (86th) and Lebanon (61st).
Israel has begun to use the same methods internally as it does outside its own territory. Reporters Without Borders registered five arrests of journalists, some of them completely illegal, and three cases of imprisonment. The military censorship applied to all the media is also posing a threat to journalists.
As regards its extraterritorial actions, Israel was ranked 150th. The toll of the war was very heavy. Around 20 journalists in the Gaza Strip were injured by the Israeli military forces and three were killed while covering the offensive. [continued…]
Why liberals kill By Thaddeus Russell, The Daily Beast, October 17, 2009
The left may be pressuring President Obama to exit Afghanistan. But their heroes—from FDR to JFK—promoted U.S. involvement in more wars than all modern GOP presidents combined.
Should President Barack Obama continue his escalation of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it will be the liberal thing to do.
What too few Americans realize—especially the president’s anti-war supporters, who accuse him of betraying liberal or “progressive” values—is that if he accedes to General Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops in Afghanistan and intensifies the drone attacks in Pakistan, he will follow squarely in the footsteps of the great liberal statesmen he has cited as his role models. Though opponents of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cheered loudly when Obama spoke reverentially in his campaign speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy, those heroes of the president promoted and oversaw U.S. involvement in wars that killed, by great magnitudes, more Americans and foreign civilians than all the modern Republican military operations combined. [continued…]
Saudi Arabia has two great worries over Iran. First, that Obama is pressing ahead with the normalization process with Tehran – a “thaw” was visible at the Geneva talks on October 1- and Tehran has begun responding to US overtures. The worst Saudi nightmare is coming true.
King Abdullah, who had refused to visit Damascus, landed there two weeks ago on a three-day visit in a desperate attempt to bring Syria into the Arab fold and to “isolate” Iran. Riyadh is worried that Iran’s status as a regional power will get a massive boost if the normalization process with the US advances, and that can only be at the cost of Saudi Arabia’s pre-eminence in the region. Riyadh helplessly watches a beeline of other Persian Gulf states reaching out to Tehran for accommodation.
In other words, Riyadh has a vested interest, which is no less than Israel’s, to disrupt the US-Iran nuclear talks. [continued…]
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We entered Afghanistan from Tajikistan by walking unescorted across the no-man’s land at the Oxus River border station at Eshkashem. We were dressed as civilians and carried our own packs: no vehicles, no flak jackets, no body guards, just plain folks. We were, however, accompanied by our impressive guide and translator, whom we shall simply call Mr. T., a Tajik native of Khorug and a speaker of Tajik and Russian (he spent four years studying film at the academy in Moscow and, like all other Tajiks in his age group, served in the Russian army), as well as Dard; but his native language is Shugni, which is also widely spoken across the Oxus from Khorug in Afghanistan, as is Tajik: there are as many Tajiks (four and a half million) in Afghanistan as in Tajikistan. Then, too, Mr. T. had spent eleven years in Afghanistan working for Focus.
Despite such diversity in the Wakhan Corridor, there was a unanimous belief that the Afghan government is simply an outrageous band of crooks on the take and that Hamid Karzai is chief among them. This disgust cut across all linguistic, age and belief groups. It was barely below the surface of any discussion, as was the question of when the “foreigners” would leave. There was no blaming the Russians, nor even our guide, Mr. T., who, as a Tajik, was clearly from the “wrong” side when talk turned to the Soviet era. The wreckage of that period is plain to see: discarded tank turrets decorate many of Eshkashem’s street corners. Most significantly, while there was a firm awareness of local pride of place, there was no patriotic fervor for an Afghanistan, seemingly a very alien concept for many.
