Category Archives: Issues

The U.S. can’t effectively promote democracy abroad unless it works better at home

Larry Diamond writes: In the global democracy promotion community, few actors are paying attention to the growing signs of fragility in the more liberal developing democracies, not to mention the more illiberal ones.

Broadly, we know why democracy and freedom are slipping back. What Francis Fukuyama calls “neo-patrimonial” tendencies are resurgent. Leaders who think they can get away with it are eroding democratic checks and balances, hollowing out accountability institutions, overriding term limits and normative restraints, and accumulating power and wealth for themselves and their families, cronies, clients, and parties.

Space for opposition parties, civil society, and the media is shrinking, and international support for them is drying up. Ethnic, religious, and other identity cleavages polarize many societies that lack well-designed democratic institutions to manage those cleavages. State structures are too often weak and porous, unable to secure order, protect rights, meet the most basic social needs, or rise above corrupt, clientelistic, and predatory impulses. Democratic institutions — parties and parliaments — are often poorly developed, and the bureaucracy lacks the policy expertise, and even more so the independence, neutrality, and authority, to effectively manage the economy. So weak economic performance, and certainly rising inequality, is added to the mix.

It isn’t easy to develop democracy in poor countries and weak states. And there is a significant failure rate even in middle-income countries. But if we don’t become more focused, more creative, more determined, more resourceful, and less apologetic in promoting democracy, the democratic recession is going to mutate into a wave of democratic regression, a bleak period for freedom, political stability, and the American national interest.

So what is to be done?

We need to begin by disaggregating the problem. Let’s start at the top of the hierarchy of democratic development and work down. I used to add at the end of this kind of lecture a reflective caveat,

“Physician, heal thyself.” In other words, we can’t be credible and effective in promoting democracy abroad if we don’t reform and improve its functioning at home. That was usually the last imperative I mentioned. Now it needs to be the first.

Like many of you who travel widely, I am increasingly alarmed by how pervasive and corrosive is the worldwide perception — in both autocracies and democracies — that American democracy has become dysfunctional and is no longer a model worth emulating. Fortunately, there are many possible models, and most American political scientists never recommended that emerging democracies copy our own excessively veto-ridden institutions. Nevertheless the prestige, the desirability, and the momentum of democracy globally are heavily influenced by perceptions of how it is performing in its leading examples. If we do not mobilize institutional reforms and operational innovations to reduce partisan polarization, encourage moderation and compromise, energize executive functioning, and reduce the outsized influence of money and special interests in our own politics, how are we going to be effective in tackling these kinds of challenges abroad? [Continue reading…]

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Afghanistan’s opium industry now employs more people than its military

Business Insider: Afghanistan’s opium economy provides more employment — “up to 411,000 full-time-equivalent jobs” — than even the country’s armed forces, according to a quarterly report released today by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

The country’s poppy cultivation is at an all-time high, covering more than 200,000 hectares, another SIGAR report found earlier this month.

Opium and its derivatives are the country’s largest export, worth $3 billion in 2013, an increase from $2 billion in the year before.

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The FBI’s secret House meeting to get access to your iPhone

National Journal reports: The Obama administration is ramping up its campaign to force technology companies to help the government spy on their users.

FBI and Justice Department officials met with House staffers this week for a classified briefing on how encryption is hurting police investigations, according to staffers familiar with the meeting.

The briefing included Democratic and Republican aides for the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, the staffers said. The meeting was held in a classified room, and aides are forbidden from revealing what was discussed.

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Iraq Peshmerga fighters arrive in Kobane

BBC News reports: Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters have crossed the Turkish border to help defend the Syrian town of Kobane from Islamic State.

Sources inside the town told BBC Arabic the unit was heading to the frontline about 4km west of Kobane.

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Western fascination with ‘badass’ Kurdish women

Dilar Dirik writes: A young Kurdish woman called “Rehana” has garnered a great deal of media attention over the past few days, after reports emerged claiming that she had killed more than a hundred ISIL fighters – single-handedly. A picture of the smiling beauty, wearing combat gear and toting a rifle, is still making the rounds of social media. Even as Rehana’s circumstances remain uncorroborated, the overabundance of attention she has received raises several important questions. It adds to the plethora of reports out there glamorising the all-female Kurdish battalions taking on ISIL fighters, with little attention to the politics of these brave women.

Preoccupied with attempts to sensationalise the ways in which these women defy preconceived notions of eastern women as oppressed victims, these mainstream caricaturisations erroneously present Kurdish women fighters as a novel phenomenon. They cheapen a legitimate struggle by projecting their bizarre orientalist fantasies on it – and oversimplify the reasons motivating Kurdish women to join the fight. Nowadays, it seems to be appealing to portray women as sympathetic enemies of ISIL without raising questions about their ideologies and political aims.

At the same time, critics have accused the Kurdish leadership of exploiting these women for PR purposes – in an attempt to win over western public opinion. While there may be an element of truth to such charges in some cases, those same critics fail to appreciate the different political cultures that exist among the Kurdish people as a whole, scattered across Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. They also ignore the fact that Kurdish women have been engaging in armed resistance for decades without anyone’s notice. [Continue reading…]

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Peshmerga forces delayed in Turkey en route to fight ISIS in Kobane

The Guardian reports: Dozens of Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters have been held up in Turkey en route to the Syrian border town of Kobani, where they will join the fight against Islamic State (Isis) militants.

The peshmerga command have not commented on the delay, but Turkish media cited an attack by Isis on Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters crossing into Kobani through the Mürsitpinar border gate as a reason for the delay. According to the newspaper Milliyet, three FSA members were wounded by Isis snipers on Wednesday. They are being treated at a Turkish hospital.

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First Look Media — trouble at’ mill

The Intercept calls this “The Inside Story Of Matt Taibbi’s Departure From First Look Media,” and it can rightly be called an exercise in public laundering more to the embarrassment of Pierre Omidyar than anyone else. Still, the real inside story would have to come from Taibbi himself and it’s hard not to wonder whether Greenwald et al were wanting to preempt that story.

And even if Omidyar can justifiably be criticized for micro-managing the operation he’s funding, those who thought he was going to be their media mogul sugar daddy seem to have had the attitude that the combination of his money and their creative genius was all it would take to create a new media business.

The conundrum they face might be this: is it possible to build an organization around individuals who don’t want to be part of an organization?

To view things like “which computer program to use to internally communicate, [and] mandatory regular company-wide meetings” as “trivial” is to confuse the trivial with the mundane. The mundane is often boring but that doesn’t make it unimportant or unnecessary.

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Where are the West’s female leaders?

Minna Salami writes: A report this week has exposed how progress towards gender equality is slowing down in the west. The Global Gender Gap Report showed that Europe has undergone the smallest change in terms of closing the gender gap. In terms of political empowerment, from Britain to Austria to Spain, in only nine years, women’s rankings have sunk sharply.

By contrast, the region with the largest positive change is Latin America where, just last weekend, Brazil re-elected a woman president, Dilma Rousseff. Also known as the world’s most powerful feminist, Rousseff will lead the world’s seventh-largest economy and fifth-largest nation for another four years. Voters in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and the Caribbean have also done a better job of electing women presidents and prime ministers. Today, only three of the 22 female heads of government are in the west (Germany, Denmark and Norway).

It’s commonly perceived that the western world is at the forefront of the campaign for women’s rights. State bodies such as the British Department for International Development, organisations such as the Cherie Blair Foundation and celebrities such as Madonna and Angelina Jolie all invest in women’s empowerment in the developing world, which is often seen as lagging well behind. But in truth, as the survey shows, when it comes to having women at the top levels of political leadership, industrialised western countries actually lag behind developing ones. Of 142 countries, Britain came just 63rd for the number of women in parliament and 75th for the number of women in ministerial jobs. The US was 83rd and 25th. [Continue reading…]

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With little warning, Egypt destroys 800 homes displacing 10,000 people in security operation

The New York Times reports: With bulldozers and dynamite, the Egyptian Army on Wednesday began demolishing hundreds of houses, displacing thousands of people, along the border with Gaza in a panicked effort to establish a buffer zone that officials hope will stop the influx of militants and weapons across the frontier.

The demolitions, cutting through crowded neighborhoods in the border town of Rafah, began with orders to evacuate on Tuesday and were part of a sweeping security response by the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to months of deadly militant attacks on Egyptian security personnel in the Sinai Peninsula, including the massacre of at least 31 soldiers last Friday.

That assault was the deadliest on the Egyptian military in years, and a blow to the government, which has claimed to be winning the battle against insurgents. The resort to a harsh counterinsurgency tactic — destroying as many as 800 houses and displacing up to 10,000 people to eliminate “terrorist hotbeds,” as Mr. Sisi’s spokesman put it — highlighted the difficulties the military has faced in breaking the militants as well as the anger that operations like Wednesday’s inevitably arouse.

“Our house in Rafah is more than 60 years old,” Hammam Alagha wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, detailing his family’s eviction in a series of widely shared posts. After an army officer told the family to evacuate — and Mr. Alagha said he refused — the officer “said tomorrow we will bomb it with everything in it.”

Mustafa Singer, a journalist based in Sinai who was near the border on Wednesday, said that while residents had met with officials in recent weeks to discuss compensation, the evacuation order on Tuesday — delivered over megaphones — took people by surprise. [Continue reading…]

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Kobane gets reinforcements in fight against ISIS

Masoud Barzani, President of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, explains why they have only sent a small peshmerga force to Kobane:

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Turkish military blocks locals from joining Peshmerga mission to Kobane

Rudaw reports: The Turkish military is holding Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers seven kilometers from the Turkish border to Syria, delaying their mission in the besieged city of Kobane, Peshmerga officials told Rudaw.

A Peshmerga commander says his troops are in the town of Pirsus, guarded by Turkish military to prevent enthusiastic locals from joining the Iraqi Kurdish unit. The Iraqi Kurdish troops will provide artillery support to the Syrian Kurdish militia defending the city.

He declined to provide further details about the location and timing of their passage to Kobane, but confirmed that the Islamic State had intensified attacks in expectation of their arrival and the US-led coalition planned targeted airstrikes to facilitate a safe crossing.

They will be the first foreign soldiers to be dispatched to the Syrian Kurdish border town, which has been under siege by ISIS for more than 40 days. Local Kurdish fighters have held out with backing from US-led airstrikes.

This comes a day after the Free Syrian Army (FSA) said 200 its fighters had entered Kobane at the request of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Syrian-Kurdish force that has been defending the city against an ISIS takeover. [Continue reading…]

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Occupy Democracy is not considered newsworthy. It should be

David Graeber writes: You can tell a lot about the moral quality of a society by what is, and is not, considered news.

From last Tuesday, Parliament Square was wrapped in wire mesh. In one of the more surreal scenes in recent British political history, officers with trained German shepherds stand sentinel each day, at calculated distances across the lawn, surrounded by a giant box of fences, three metres high – all to ensure that no citizen enters to illegally practice democracy. Yet few major news outlets feel this is much of a story.

Occupy Democracy, a new incarnation of Occupy London, has attempted to use the space for an experiment in democratic organising. The idea was to turn Parliament Square back to the purposes to which it was, by most accounts, originally created: a place for public meetings and discussions, with an eye to bringing all the issues ignored by politicians in Westminster back into public debate. Seminars and assemblies were planned, colourful bamboo towers and sound systems put in place, to be followed by a temporary library, kitchen and toilets.

There was no plan to turn this into a permanent tent city, which are now explicitly illegal. True, this law is very selectively enforced; Metropolitan police regularly react with a wink and a smile if citizens camp on the street while queuing overnight for the latest iPhone. But to do it in furtherance of democratic expression is absolutely forbidden. Try it, and you can expect to immediately see your tent torn down and if you try even the most passive resistance you’re likely to be arrested. So organisers settled on a symbolic 24-hour presence, even if it meant sleeping on the grass under cardboard boxes in the autumn rain.

The police response can only be described as hysterical. Tarpaulins used to sit on the grass were said to be illegal, and when activists tried to sit on them they were attacked by scores of officers. Activists say they had limbs twisted and officers stuck thumbs into nerve endings as “pain compliance”. Pizza boxes were declared illegal structures and confiscated and commanders even sent officers to stand over activists at night telling them it was illegal to close their eyes. [Continue reading…]

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Ann Jones: The missing women of Afghanistan

From the beginning, it was to be “Russia’s Vietnam.”  First the administration of President Jimmy Carter, then that of President Ronald Reagan was determined to give the Soviet Union a taste of what the U.S. had gone through in its disastrous 14-year war in Southeast Asia.  As National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski would later put it, “On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the [Afghan] border [in 1979], I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.'” And with that in mind, the CIA (aided by the Saudis and Pakistanis) would arm, train, and advise extreme Islamist factions in Pakistan and dispatch them across the border to give the Soviets a taste of what Washington considered their own medicine, Vietnam-style.

It worked in a major way. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev would later call Afghanistan “the bleeding wound” and, in 1989, a decade after the Red Army had crossed that border, it would limp home to a fading empire on the edge of implosion.  It was a classic Cold War triumph for Washington, the last needed before the Soviet Union stepped off the edge of history and disappeared… oh, except for one small thing: those well-armed extremists didn’t conveniently go away.  It wasn’t mission accomplished.  Not by half.  A taste of Vietnam for the Russians turned out to be only the hors d’oeuvre for a main course still to come.  And the rest of the disastrous history of what Chalmers Johnson would term “blowback,” even before it fully blew back not just on devastated Afghanistan, but on New York City and Washington, is painfully well known and not yet over.  Not by half.

As a result, when the Bush administration launched America’s second Afghan war in October 2001, whether it knew it or not, it was prescribing for itself a taste of the medicine it had given the Soviets back in the 1980s.  Think of it as the worst possible version of do-it-yourself doctoring.  Now, another 13 years have passed.  We’re three and a half decades beyond Brzezinksi’s urge to Vietnamize the USSR in Afghanistan and that Central Asian country is a basket case.  The Taliban insurgency is back big time; the Afghan army and police are taking horrific casualties, and you can bet that, with one eye on the collapsed Iraqi army the U.S. trained and armed, there are plenty of anxious people in the Pentagon when it comes to those Afghan security forces into which the U.S. has sunk at least $60 billion.  In the meantime, the “democracy” that the U.S. promised to bring to the country has experienced a second deeply fraudulent presidential election, this time with a vote so contested and filled with questionable balloting practices that the final count couldn’t be released to the country.  A new government was instead cobbled together under Washington’s ministrations in a way that bears no relation to the country’s constitution.

In the meantime, Afghanistan is rife with corruption of every imaginable sort and, worst of all, its only real success story, its bumper crop, is once again the opium poppy.  In fact, last year the country raised a record opium crop, worth $3 billion, beating out the previous global record holder— Afghanistan — by 50%!  On America’s watch, it is the planet’s preeminent narco-state.  And keep in mind that, in line with the history of the last 13 years of the American occupation and garrisoning of the country (with a possible 10 more to go), the U.S. put $7.6 billion dollars into programs of every sort to eradicate poppy growing.  So, once again, mission accomplished!  Today, TomDispatch regular Ann Jones, author of They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From America’s Wars — The Untold Story, looks back at what those 13 years of “America’s Afghanistan” meant to the women whom the Bush administration so proudly “liberated” on invading the country.  And given its success in poppy eradication, how do you think Washington did on that one? Tom Engelhardt

The missing women of Afghanistan
After 13 years of war, the rule of men, not law
By Ann Jones

On September 29th, power in Afghanistan changed hands for the first time in 13 years. At the Arg, the presidential palace in Kabul, Ashraf Ghani was sworn in as president, while the outgoing Hamid Karzai watched calmly from a front-row seat.  Washington, congratulating itself on this “peaceful transition,” quickly collected the new president’s autograph on a bilateral security agreement that assures the presence of American forces in Afghanistan for at least another decade. The big news of the day: the U.S. got what it wanted.  (Precisely why Americans should rejoice that our soldiers will stay in Afghanistan for another 10 years is never explained.)

The big news of the day for Afghans was quite different — not the long expected continuation of the American occupation but what the new president had to say in his inaugural speech about his wife, Rula Ghani. Gazing at her as she sat in the audience, he called her by name, praised her work with refugees, and announced that she would continue that work during his presidency.

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Brazil plans to lay trans-Atlantic cable free from NSA surveillance and U.S.-made technology

Bloomberg reports: Brazil is planning a $185 million project to lay fiber-optic cable across the Atlantic Ocean, which could entail buying gear from multiple vendors. What it won’t need: U.S.-made technology.

The cable is being overseen by state-owned telecommunications company Telecomunicacoes Brasileiras SA, known as Telebras. Even though Telebras’s suppliers include U.S. companies such as Cisco Systems Inc., Telebras President Francisco Ziober Filho said in an interview that the cable project can be built without any U.S. companies.

The potential to exclude U.S. vendors illustrates the fallout that is starting to unfold from revelations last year that the U.S. National Security Agency spied on international leaders like Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff and Germany’s Angela Merkel to gather intelligence on terror suspects worldwide.

“The issue of data integrity and vulnerability is always a concern for any telecom company,” Ziober said. The NSA leaks last year from contractor Edward Snowden prompted Telebras to step up audits of all foreign-made equipment to check for security vulnerabilities and accelerated the country’s move toward technological self-reliance, he said. [Continue reading…]

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U.S., Iran relations move to détente

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Obama administration and Iran, engaged in direct nuclear negotiations and facing a common threat from Islamic State militants, have moved into an effective state of détente over the past year, according to senior U.S. and Arab officials.

The shift could drastically alter the balance of power in the region, and risks alienating key U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates who are central to the coalition fighting Islamic State. Sunni Arab leaders view the threat posed by Shiite Iran as equal to or greater than that posed by the Sunni radical group Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Israel contends the U.S. has weakened the terms of its negotiations with Iran and played down Tehran’s destabilizing role in the region.

Over the past decade, Washington and Tehran have engaged in fierce battles for influence and power in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Afghanistan fueled by the U.S. overthrow of Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein and the Arab Spring revolutions that began in late 2010. U.S. officials still say the option of military action remains on the table to thwart Iran’s nuclear program.

But recent months have ushered in a change as the two countries have grown into alignment on a spectrum of causes, chief among them promoting peaceful political transitions in Baghdad and Kabul and pursuing military operations against Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria, according to these officials.

The Obama administration also has markedly softened its confrontational stance toward Iran’s most important nonstate allies, the Palestinian militant group Hamas and the Lebanese militant and political organization, Hezbollah. American diplomats, including Secretary of State John Kerry , negotiated with Hamas leaders through Turkish and Qatari intermediaries during cease-fire talks in July that were aimed at ending the Palestinian group’s rocket attacks on Israel, according to senior U.S. officials.

U.S. intelligence agencies have repeatedly tipped off Lebanese law-enforcement bodies close to Hezbollah about threats posed to Beirut’s government by Sunni extremist groups, including al Qaeda and its affiliate Nusra Front in Syria, Lebanese and U.S. officials said. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi Kurdish fighters cross Turkish border into Syria in battle against ISIS

The Guardian reports: Dozens of Iraqi Kurdish fighters have crossed the Turkish border to join fighters in Syria pushing back the attack by Islamic State (Isis) militants on the border town of Kobani.

More than 80 peshmerga fighters who arrived at the Sanliurfa airport in the early hours of the morning have reached Kobani.

The remaining 70 – who set off from Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish autonomous region in Iraq, on Tuesday – are still on the road in Turkey, driving in a convoy carrying heavy artillery and weapons along with armoured vehicles and ambulances. They crossed from Iraq into Turkey at Habur on Wednesday morning where they were met by enthusiastic crowds and Turkish security forces. The convoy is expected to arrive in Syria later on Wednesday. [Continue reading…]

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Only Syrian opposition and peshmerga can save Kobane claims Turkish PM

Reuters reports: Turkey cannot be expected to send troops to defend the besieged Syrian border town of Kobani and only Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters and Syria’s own moderate opposition can save it, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said.

U.S. warplanes have been bombing Islamic State positions near Kobani for weeks, but air strikes alone will not be enough to repel the insurgents, Davutoglu said.

“Saving Kobani, retaking Kobani and some area around Kobani from ISIS, there’s a need for a military operation,” he said in an interview with the BBC broadcast on Tuesday.

But made clear neither Turkey nor Western allies would commit troops.

“If they (international coalition) don’t want to send their ground troops, how can they expect Turkey to send Turkish ground troops with the same risks on our border,” Davutoglu said. [Continue reading…]

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The success of Tunisian secularists might not be advancing democracy

Monica Marks writes: A self-styled, secular, modernist party called Nidaa Tounes won against the Islamist Ennahda party in the Tunisian election this week. For many, the subsequent headline – “Secularist party wins Tunisia elections” – will seem more impressive than the fact Tunisia just completed its second genuinely competitive, peaceful elections since 2011.

Indeed, in a region wracked by extremism and civil war, the secularists’ victory will strike many as further proof that Tunisia is moving forward and is the sole bright spot in a gloomy region. Some may prematurely celebrate, yet again, the death of political Islam, arguing that Tunisians achieved through the ballot box what Egyptians achieved through a popular coup, rejecting the Brotherhood and its cousin-like movements once and for all. We should exercise caution, however, in labelling Nidaa Tounes’s victory part of a seamless sweep of democratic achievements, or seeing Sunday’s vote as a clear referendum against all varieties of political Islam.

Despite feeling kinship with the party because of its secular label, westerners understand surprisingly little about Nidaa Tounes, mainly because they’ve tended to hold the magnifying glass of critical inquiry up to Islamists but not secularists over the past three years. Counter-intuitively, Nidaa Tounes’s internal structure is noticeably more authoritarian than Ennahda, which boasts representative decision-making structures from its grassroots to national leadership. [Continue reading…]

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