Second nuclear test: North Korea does what it says
By Scott Snyder, Global Security, May 25, 2009

North Korea did exactly what it said it would do on May 25, 2009, when it conducted a nuclear test as promised in its April 28, 2009, statement in response to UN sanctions imposed on three North Korean firms in accordance with an April 13, 2009, UN Security Council Presidential Statement condemning North Korea’s April 5, 2009, missile test. The test furthers North Korea’s strategic objective of making permanent its status as a nuclear weapons state. North Korea’s announcement of the test shows that a primary political target of North Korea’s nuclear test is domestic, as was the case with North Korea’s April 5th missile launch. [continued…]

No more sunshine in North Korea
By Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, May 25, 2009

North Korea’s latest actions, seen as recklessly dangerous by the outside world, may be broadly explained in three ways. The first is that Pyongyang is in the grip of an intensifying power struggle over the succession to the country’s ailing president and Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il.

The 67-year-old Kim recently re-emerged in public after suffering what appeared to have been a stroke last year. But he did not look well – almost a shadow of his former chubby, occasionally ebullient self. Some Korea-watchers suggest Kim has not fully recovered from the death in 2004 of Ko Young-hee, North Korea’s de facto First Lady and the mother of the younger two of his three sons.

Signs of internal tensions have continued to grow despite Kim’s political resurrection, including a cabinet reshuffle in which about one-third of ministers lost their jobs or were reassigned. A similar shake-up is said to have taken place among the highest ranks of the military. [continued…]

North Korea will not be ignored
By Joe Cirincione, Huffington Post, May 25, 2009

… this represents President Obama’s first foreign policy failure. Obama followed the advice of staff who recommended ignoring North Korea. The argument was that North Korea had no place to go and would eventually come back to negotiations. This was a strategy endorsed by many former Bush officials. There was nothing like the diplomatic approaches that Obama has started with Iran–and North Korea noticed.

Obama officials even put preconditions on renewing negotiations, reportedly blocking Special Envoy Stephen Bosworth from going to North Korea until that country promised not to conduct another missile test. Officials also backed the tough line taken by South Korea, including curtailing fuel shipments to the north. Worse, some officials seem to have concluded that North Korea’s program cannot be stopped, that the best we can do is “manage” the problem.

But North Korea will not be ignored. Or managed. Or coerced into compliance or collapse. These approaches were tried in the Bush administration. They failed. They only gave Pyongyang time to increase the threat of its nuclear and missile programs and export of sensitive technologies. [continued…]

Netanyahu bringing Israel closer to war with Iran
By Aluf Benn, Haaretz, May 26, 2009

Three arguments are normally made to reject the likelihood of an Israeli military option: the complexity of the mission, the U.S. veto and opposition in the government. It is usually assumed that Israel will seek to repeat the 1981 bombing of the nuclear reactor in Iraq. This is only one scenario and not a likely one.

There are other possibilities to consider: a war in the north that drags Iran in, or a strike against a valuable target for the Iranian regime, which leads Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to take action against “the Zionist regime.” If Iran attacks Israel first, the element of surprise will be lost, but then Israel’s strike against the nuclear installations will be considered self-defense.

The second argument, regarding American opposition to a strike, depends on the circumstances. It’s hard to imagine that Obama will order the interception of Israeli aircraft on the way to Natanz if all other ways of stopping the centrifuges have failed. Clearly the administration will have to chastise Israel, and let’s not forget the statements by CIA chief Leon Panetta, who warned against any operation not coordinated with the United States. But no one knows how Obama will behave in the moment of truth. He told Newsweek that he will not tell Israelis what their defense requirements are. Netanyahu liked this very much. [continued…]

Have we already lost Iran?
By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, New York Times, May 24, 2009

President Obama’s Iran policy has, in all likelihood, already failed. On its present course, the White House’s approach will not stop Tehran’s development of a nuclear fuel program — or, as Iran’s successful test of a medium-range, solid-fuel missile last week underscored, military capacities of other sorts. It will also not provide an alternative to continued antagonism between the United States and Iran — a posture that for 30 years has proved increasingly damaging to the interests of the United States and its allies in the Middle East.

This judgment may seem both premature and overly severe. We do not make it happily. We voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and we still want him to succeed in reversing the deterioration in America’s strategic position. But we also believe that successful diplomacy with Iran is essential to that end. Unless President Obama and his national security team take a fundamentally different approach to Tehran, they will not achieve a breakthrough.

This is a genuine shame, for President Obama had the potential to do so much better for America’s position in the Middle East. In his greeting to “the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran” on the Persian New Year in March, Mr. Obama included language meant to assuage Iranian skepticism about America’s willingness to end efforts to topple the regime and pursue comprehensive diplomacy. [continued…]

Iran’s Ahmadinejad rejects Western nuclear proposal
By Parisa Hafezi and Zahra Hosseinian, Reuters, May 25, 2009

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday rejected a Western proposal for it to “freeze” its nuclear work in return for no new sanctions and ruled out any talks with major powers on the issue.

The comments by the conservative president, who is seeking a second term in a June 12 election, are likely to further disappoint the U.S. administration of President Barack Obama, which is seeking to engage Iran diplomatically. [continued…]

Big crowd for moderate reflects serious challenge to Iran’s leader
By Nazila Fathi, New York Times, May 26, 2009

The strongest challenger to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attracted an unusually large and exuberant crowd of supporters on Monday during a campaign speech in this northwest city near the candidate’s birthplace, with only a few weeks before national elections that the incumbent stands a serious chance of losing.

The crowd for the challenger, Mir Hussein Moussavi, was extraordinary not only for its size — an estimated 30,000 — but also because the supporters were not paid, given free food, bused in or ordered by their workplaces to attend, a tactic sometimes used by Mr. Ahmadinejad’s campaign.

Many traveled here in private cars and learned about the rally despite new government restrictions on Facebook, the social networking site, which Mr. Moussavi’s campaign had been using to spread word of his candidacy among the country’s predominantly young electorate. The supporters gave a rousing welcome to Mr. Moussavi, who was born in Khameneh, a small town in the Azerbaijan area of Iran. [continued…]

They may not want the bomb — and other unexpected truths
By Fareed Zacharia, Newsweek, May 23, 2009

Everything you know about Iran is wrong, or at least more complicated than you think. Take the bomb. The regime wants to be a nuclear power but could well be happy with a peaceful civilian program (which could make the challenge it poses more complex). What’s the evidence? Well, over the last five years, senior Iranian officials at every level have repeatedly asserted that they do not intend to build nuclear weapons. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has quoted the regime’s founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who asserted that such weapons were “un-Islamic.” The country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, issued a fatwa in 2004 describing the use of nuclear weapons as immoral. In a subsequent sermon, he declared that “developing, producing or stockpiling nuclear weapons is forbidden under Islam.” Last year Khamenei reiterated all these points after meeting with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. Now, of course, they could all be lying. But it seems odd for a regime that derives its legitimacy from its fidelity to Islam to declare constantly that these weapons are un-Islamic if it intends to develop them. It would be far shrewder to stop reminding people of Khomeini’s statements and stop issuing new fatwas against nukes. [continued…]

Mohamed ElBaradei: ‘They are not fanatics’
By Mohamed ElBaradei interviewed by Christopher Dickey, Newsweek, May 23, 2009

The election of Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s Prime Minister has complicated matters. He’s left open the possibility Israel will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Unfortunately, we have to keep saying what we have been saying for years (and being vilified for it by the neocons): there is no military solution. There is only a diplomatic solution. Israeli President Shimon Peres made the point that you cannot bomb the knowledge [of Iranian nuclear scientists]. I wish that sort of thing had been said three years ago.

Had the Bush administration been more flexible, do you think it could have had a deal to freeze the Iranian enrichment program in its experimental phases?
There is no way you are able to deny them the knowledge. But if they do not have the industrial capacity, they do not have weapons. It is as simple as that. I have seen the Iranians ready to accept putting a cap on their enrichment [program] in terms of tens of centrifuges, and then in terms of hundreds of centrifuges. But nobody even tried to engage them on these offers. Now Iran has 5,000 centrifuges. The line was, “Iran will buckle under pressure.” But this issue has become so ingrained in the Iranian soul as a matter of national pride. They talk about their nuclear program as if they had gone to the moon. And they also understood—unfortunately, not wrongly—that if you have the know-how, you’re still kosher within the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And yet you are sending a message: I can do this; I have bought myself an insurance policy, and you don’t want to mess with me. [continued…]

Israel pulls plug on Iran regime change shop
By Laura Rozen, Foreign Policy, May 25, 2009

Israeli media are reporting that a small and unconventional Iran office in the Israeli Ministry of Defense will be shut down. The 30-year-old office has been headed by 83-year-old Uri Lubrani, who was de facto Israeli ambassador to Iran in the 1970s and famously predicted the fall of the shah. While the closure of the office may seem a minor bureaucratic matter, it also speaks to the demise of an idea that gained currency in some Washington circles just a few years ago and then faded: that the United States might support a plan of regime change in Iran.

Lubrani and his aide Itzhak Barzilay, who both served in Israel’s embassy in Iran in the 1970s, ran the small office on a shoe-string budget in an outpost of low buildings on the Defense Ministry’s Tel Aviv compound, overshadowed by two gleaming ministry office towers.

The unit (technically known as the Lebanon coordinator unit, perhaps because of Iran’s role in Lebanon) had in later years just four people and ran on a budget of just over a million dollars per year, according to Haaretz. “The main purpose of the unit was to maintain links with the Iranian community and political organizations, and follow the media in Iran.” [continued…]

Israel’s parliament to consider loyalty oath
By Matti Friedman, AP, May 26, 2009

An ultranationalist party headed by the Israeli Foreign Minister said yesterday that it has prepared legislation linking citizenship to an oath of allegiance, in what amounted to a threat to the country’s Arabs to swear loyalty to the Jewish state or risk severe punishment.

The bill follows a separate proposal on Sunday by the same party that would make it illegal for Arabs to mourn the “catastrophe” – the term Palestinians use to describe their defeat and exile in the war that surrounded Israel’s founding.

Both proposals by the Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party focus on the perceived disloyalty of the country’s Arab citizens, roughly a fifth of Israel’s population of seven million. [continued…]

Rahm Emanuel’s Mideast mission
By Dan Ephron and Michael Hirsh, Newsweek, June 1, 2009

William Daroff, who directs the Washington office of the United Jewish Communities and knows Emanuel, calls him “Obama’s secret weapon.” It’s not just that Obama can use Emanuel’s Israel-friendly reputation as a kind of shield, allowing him to display “tough love” toward the Jewish state. Daroff told NEWSWEEK Rahm has such a nuanced understanding of Israeli politics, he can easily act as the president’s BS detector as negotiations go forward. “The Israelis aren’t going to be able to slide anything past the administration because Rahm is who he is.” The Hebrew-speaking Emanuel, as much as anyone on the American side, will know if the Israeli prime minister is bluffing about his “red line” on Iran, or what he can really do about halting settlements in the West Bank. (Asked to comment, Emanuel’s spokeswoman, Sarah Feinberg, told newsweek that his goal was to ensure that the president has “every option available to him as we pursue peace.”)

Emanuel’s status as a near-native son gave some Israelis and Jews the impression he would be their guy on the Obama team—the pro-Israeli with the receptive ear. He had those golden Zionist credentials, after all: His father, Benjamin, had been a member of the Irgun, the right-wing Jewish militia that existed before Israeli independence. His Uncle Emanuel had been killed in a skirmish with Arabs back in the ’30s, prompting the family to change its name from Auerbach to honor him. But some in the Jewish community have been disappointed. Even his own rabbi, Asher Lopatin, has doubts about his absent congregant. “There is a lot of disappointment,” says Lopatin, who presides over the Modern Orthodox Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel Congregation in Chicago. “In some ways there was a heightened expectation because Rahm is so connected to Israel and the Jewish community. Instead what we’ve seen is more of the tough Rahm Emanuel. Not the warm Rahm.” [continued…]

My hotel is filled with young people who have come to ‘break the siege,’ like freedom riders
By Philip Weiss, Mondoweiss, May 25, 2009

It’s Monday night in Egypt. We are in El-Arish, a resort town about 20 minutes from the Gaza border, where we will go first thing tomorrow morning. I’m with a group of 13 activists and humanitarians mostly from New York, but the hotel is teeming with 45 or so other activists who have answered the call to come to Gaza to try and break the blockade. Most of them are young and sunburned; they have spent the day at the border not getting in. The good news tonight is that a European delegation of 100 people, with a convoy of ambulances and trucks and cars, seems to have gotten through the border after being held up by Egyptian authorities for several days.

We got that rumor at dinner and it has filled our group with confidence. Afterward, we bought bicycle pumps for the dozens of soccer balls we are bringing in, and I grabbed a handful of cosmetics tonight, just because life is not bread alone.

It’s an inspiring scene in the hotel. I wonder if Memphis hotels didn’t feel like this during the freedom rides. You see college kids walking around in 1948 (Nakba) t-shirts, and Penn State t-shirts too. Some carry guitars to play at the border tomorrow, many of the women wear head scarves. You sense that the issue has finally shed its oriental taboo and taking hold among the young. [continued…]

Jerusalem is not on the table, says Israel
By John Lyons, The Australian, May 26, 2009

Israel and the US now appear to be on a collision course after the announcement yesterday by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel would continue expanding its existing settlements.

Mr Netanyahu told the first cabinet meeting since his meeting with US President Barack Obama that Israel would not begin new settlements on the West Bank but that it would allow “natural growth” in existing settlements.

This was clearly at odds with Mr Obama’s request last week that Israel should stop settlement activity, a request reinforced the following day by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who specifically said there should be an end to “natural growth” after Israeli officials had been using the term following the meeting with Mr Obama. [continued…]

New evidence points to Hezbollah in Hariri murder
By Erich Follath, Der Spiegel, May 23, 2009

In months of painstaking work, a secretly operating special unit of the Lebanese security forces, headed by intelligence expert Captain Wissam Eid, filtered out the numbers of mobile phones that could be pinpointed to the area surrounding Hariri on the days leading up to the attack and on the date of the murder itself. The investigators referred to these mobile phones as the “first circle of hell.”

Captain Eid’s team eventually identified eight mobile phones, all of which had been purchased on the same day in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. They were activated six weeks before the assassination, and they were used exclusively for communication among their users and — with the exception of one case — were no longer used after the attack. They were apparently tools of the hit team that carried out the terrorist attack.

But there was also a “second circle of hell,” a network of about 20 mobile phones that were identified as being in proximity to the first eight phones noticeably often. According to the Lebanese security forces, all of the numbers involved apparently belong to the “operational arm” of Hezbollah, which maintains a militia in Lebanon that is more powerful than the regular Lebanese army. While part of the Party of God acts like a normal political organization, participating in democratic elections and appointing cabinet ministers, the other part uses less savory tactics, such as abductions near the Israeli border and terrorist attacks, such those committed against Jewish facilities in South America in 2002 and 2004.

The whereabouts of the two Beirut groups of mobile phone users coincided again and again, and they were sometimes located near the site of the attack. The romantic attachment of one of the terrorists led the cyber-detectives directly to one of the main suspects. He committed the unbelievable indiscretion of calling his girlfriend from one of the “hot” phones. It only happened once, but it was enough to identify the man. He is believed to be Abd al-Majid Ghamlush, from the town of Rumin, a Hezbollah member who had completed training course in Iran. Ghamlush was also identified as the buyer of the mobile phones. He has since disappeared, and perhaps is no longer alive. [continued…]

Spiegel article probably a plant
By Joshua Landis, Syria Comment, May 23, 2009

The Der Spiegel article is suspicious for many reasons. Here are a few put forward by SC readers:

1. The timing suggests that the story was released to provide maximum damage to Hizbullah’s and Aoun’s likely success in the elections.

2. The most recent UN investigative teams (in contradistinction to Mehlis) have been excellent at not politicizing or leaking evidence from the case.

3. Nasrallah has no record of assassinating Lebanese political figures that stand in his way.

4. The accusations against Syria in 2005 and 2006 turned out to be based on false witness, why should we trust this bombshell?

5. There are accusations that Der Spiegel and Israeli intelligence are in close cahoots. [continued…]

Pakistani refugee crisis poses peril
By Griff Witte, Washington Post, May 25, 2009

Bacha Zab, a 32-year-old fruit salesman, dodged army shelling and Taliban sniper fire to escape his native Swat Valley. But when he reached the safety of a government-run refugee camp in this northwestern Pakistani city, he was told there was no more room.

Instead, for the past 16 days, Zab, his wife and their four children have been in the care of a private Islamic charity with close ties to a banned militant organization. “We are asking for help from the government, but they won’t give it,” Zab said. “In the government camps, there are only problems.”

The government has been overwhelmed by the human tide that has washed over the northwest as about 2 million people have fled fierce clashes in Swat. With Pakistan experiencing its largest exodus since the nation’s partition from India in 1947, only a fraction of the displaced civilians are receiving assistance in government-run camps. The rest are fending for themselves or getting help from private charities, including some that are allied with the very forces the Pakistani army is fighting in Swat. [continued…]

Cheney’s bunker mentality
By James Ridgeway, Mother Jones, May 24, 2009

Say what you will about Dick Cheney, at least he’s consistent. While he was in office, the Vice President made a practice of exploiting the fear and loss wrought by the 9/11 attacks to advance his own political agenda—and he’s still doing it now. During his speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Thursday, according to Dana Milbank’s calculations in the Washington Post, “Cheney used the word ‘attack’ 19 times, ‘danger’ and ‘threat’ six times apiece, and 9/11 an impressive 27 times.”

In this putative rebuttal to Obama’s speech on national security, Cheney described how he spent the morning of 9/11 “in a fortified White House command post,” receiving “the reports and images that so many Americans remember from that day,” and then declared:

In the years since, I’ve heard occasional speculation that I’m a different man after 9/11. I wouldn’t say that. But I’ll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities.

Since he’s evoking his experience as a rationalization for torture, this might be a good time to review exactly what it was that Cheney was doing in the bunker on that terrible day. [continued…]

Land of the safe and home of the cruel
By David Bromwich, Huffington Post, May 25, 2009

Between May 15, when President Obama announced that he would keep the Bush-era Military Commissions to try enemy combatants, and May 21 when he replied to the opponents of his decision to close Guantanamo, we had an opportunity to judge the temper of this administration on issues of national security and the defense of civil liberties.

Obama’s May 21 speech at the National Archives combined a general repudiation of the Bush-Cheney policies with a surprising concession to methods that the former vice president, Dick Cheney, tried to graft onto the Constitution. This approach the Constitution repels as surely as a healthy body rejects poison; for in the Cheney interpretation, the common-law right of prisoners to be charged with a crime and to have due process in challenging the accusation was abridged in cases specified by the executive. Cheney singled out for detention as “enemy combatants” persons suspected of being hard-core terrorists without there being sufficient identification to charge or sufficient evidence to convict them.

We may think ourselves a safe country, but we can hardly be the United States of 1776, of 1865, and of 1945 so long as we retain a power imported by Dick Cheney and his lawyers from the 17th century into the 21st — the power of government to imprison and keep in jail a person against whom nothing has been proved and nothing charged. It is a bondage as complete as slavery; and like slavery, it can last for life. [continued…]

Iran nuclear danger downplayed in reports
By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2009

A pair of reports released Tuesday by prominent think tanks downplay the potential dangers presented by Iran, concluding that Tehran is at least six years away from building a deliverable nuclear weapon and that its ability to wreak havoc in the Middle East through surrogates is exaggerated.

A report by a group of Russian and American scientists and engineers at the EastWest Institute concludes that although Iran could build a nuclear device within one to three years of deciding to do so, it would not be able to deliver a long-range weapon for many more years. The scientists also say that a U.S. missile defense system being considered for Central Europe would be useless against an Iranian nuclear weapon.

A separate 230-page report by the Rand Corp., the result of political and military research for the U.S. Air Force begun in 2007, found Iran a less formidable adversary than some believe.

The report notes “significant barriers and buffers” to Iran’s ambitions because of the reality of regional ethnic and religious politics and “its limited conventional military capacity, diplomatic isolation and past strategic missteps.”

It argues for exploiting the gap between Iran’s ambitions and abilities while engaging with Tehran on areas of mutual interest, such as Afghanistan. [continued…]

Arms sent by U.S. may be falling into Taliban hands
By CJ Chivers, New York Times, May 20, 2009

Insurgents in Afghanistan, fighting from some of the poorest and most remote regions on earth, have managed for years to maintain an intensive guerrilla war against materially superior American and Afghan forces.

Arms and ordnance collected from dead insurgents hint at one possible reason: Of 30 rifle magazines recently taken from insurgents’ corpses, at least 17 contained cartridges, or rounds, identical to ammunition the United States had provided to Afghan government forces, according to an examination of ammunition markings by The New York Times and interviews with American officers and arms dealers.

The presence of this ammunition among the dead in the Korangal Valley, an area of often fierce fighting near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, strongly suggests that munitions procured by the Pentagon have leaked from Afghan forces for use against American troops.

The scope of that diversion remains unknown, and the 30 magazines represented a single sampling of fewer than 1,000 cartridges. But military officials, arms analysts and dealers say it points to a worrisome possibility: With only spotty American and Afghan controls on the vast inventory of weapons and ammunition sent into Afghanistan during an eight-year conflict, poor discipline and outright corruption among Afghan forces may have helped insurgents stay supplied. [continued…]

Swat valley could be worst refugee crisis since Rwanda, UN warns
By Declan Walsh, The Guardian, May 18, 2009

The human exodus from the war-torn Swat valley in northern Pakistan is turning into the world’s most dramatic displacement crisis since the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the UN refugee agency warned.

Almost 1.5 million people have registered for assistance since fighting erupted three weeks ago, the UNHCR said, bringing the total number of war displaced in North West Frontier province to more than 2 million, not including 300,000 the provincial government believes have not registered. “It’s been a long time since there has been a displacement this big,” the UNHCR’s spokesman Ron Redmond said in Geneva, trying to recall the last time so many people had been uprooted so quickly. “It could go back to Rwanda.” [continued…]

Trial of CIA, Italian agents provides rare look at intelligence work
By Sebastian Rotella, Los Angeles Times, May 19, 2009

The two spies were allies and kindred spirits.

Robert Seldon Lady, the CIA station chief in Milan, and Col. Stefano D’Ambrosio, the local head of the SISMI, Italy’s intelligence agency, shared pride in their fight against terrorism and disdain for self-serving bosses.

On a fall day in 2002, the American made an explosive revelation. He told D’Ambrosio that, over his objections, a CIA team was in Milan doing reconnaissance for the “rendition” of an Egyptian extremist ideologue. The American was worried that the risky operation would ruin his carefully built alliances, D’Ambrosio testified years later, and could even lead to a shootout between the Americans and the Italians if things went awry on the street.

With an urgent look, spy to spy, Lady said: “Talk to your people.”

D’Ambrosio recalled that he got the unspoken message: “In other words, he says . . . ‘This whole thing is so crazy that if . . . two operational chiefs in the field, who know the area, who work in this territory, say that an action is completely crazy, probably they will back off.’ ” [continued…]

Obama works to own Middle East timetable
By Mark Urban, BBC, May 19, 2009

Much of the US media on Tuesday morning flagged up President Barack Obama’s statement in talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would make a judgement by the end of 2009 as to whether Iran was negotiating in good faith about its nuclear programme.

Some have flagged this up as the kind of “deadline” that his Israeli visitor, Mr Netanyahu, would have liked.

However Monday’s statement from the president seems designed more to address those in this country and others who have suggested that his policy of dialogue with Iran is interpreted in that country as a sign of irresolution, something that buys them additional time to work flat out on their military nuclear capability. [continued…]

Expansion of settlement ‘slap in Obama’s face’
By Efrat Weiss, Ynet, May 18, 2009

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plane landed in Washington Sunday, contractors were being given a tour of the northern Jordan Valley settlement Maskiot in the framework of a tender that was issued to build a new neighborhood there.

“The tender is part of the process to populate the community,” Jordan Valley Regional Council Chairman David Elhayani told Ynet.

“This process takes a few months to complete. The timing is coincidental, and anyone who says otherwise is jeopardizing Israel’s security-related interests. There is a consensus among the Zionist parties that the Jordan Valley must remain under Israel’s control in any future (peace) agreement.”

Peace Now Secretary-General Yariv Oppenheimer said the fact that the contractors’ tour coincided with Netanyahu’s trip to Washington was “an indication of the government’s plan to expand isolated settlements.

“This sends a clear message to the US and the international community as a whole regarding the government’s plan to expand settlement construction,” he said. [continued…]

Corruption probe appalls — and encourages — Iraqis
By Jack Dolan, McClatchy, May 19, 2009

For the first time since modern Iraq was founded in the 1920s, a sitting government minister has been questioned publicly about corruption allegations, in this case about skimming millions of dollars from a national food-distribution program while ordinary Iraqis went hungry.

The parliamentary grilling of Trade Minister Abdul Falah al Sudany ran live Saturday and Sunday on state television, and everyone in Baghdad seems to have been watching.

“During Saddam’s time we could only dream of seeing something like this,” said Ali Hameed, 25, who was shopping at a market in Jadriyah.

By Monday afternoon, 100 legislators had signed a petition for a vote of no confidence in the trade minister, said Bassim Sharif, a member of parliament from the Shiite Muslim Fadhila Party. Only 50 are needed to call the vote, and a simple majority of the 275-seat parliament can force a resignation. [continued…]

And he shall be judged
By Robert Draper, GQ, June, 2009

On the morning of Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House. The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline secretary of defense, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.”

This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine. On March 31, a U.S. tank roared through the desert beneath a quote from Ephesians: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” On April 7, Saddam Hussein struck a dictatorial pose, under this passage from the First Epistle of Peter: “It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.” [continued…]

Heads in the sand
By David Rose, Vanity Fair, May 12, 2009

The history books will record that the so-called Sunni Awakening—when many of Iraq’s Sunni tribes, in return for money and other considerations, began cutting deals with American forces and turned away from their nationalist insurgency—got under way in late 2006. The Sunni tribes, concentrated in Anbar province, had long been the backbone of the insurgency. In the Iraq of Saddam Hussein, Sunni Arabs had exercised a domination far out of proportion to their numbers (some 20 percent of the population), and after the American-led invasion, suddenly excluded from power and influence, they exacted a bloody revenge. After the Awakening, the Sunnis helped obliterate al-Qaeda’s networks in most of Sunni Iraq, a development that many believe did more to dampen the violence than the subsequent “surge” in American troop numbers. Having reached a peak in 2006 and early 2007, the casualty rates for combatants and civilians quickly plummeted.

What the history books should also record, revealed here for the first time, is that the Sunni insurgents had offered to come to terms with the Americans 30 months earlier, in the summer of 2004, during secret talks with senior U.S. officials and military commanders. The Sunnis were gathered by an Iraqi named Talal al-Gaaod, a Sunni sheikh and wealthy businessman based in the Jordanian capital, Amman. The American officials included Jerry H. Jones, then a special assistant to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and later serving as an expert on transitional government to Rumsfeld’s successor, Robert Gates; the late ambassador Evan Galbraith, Rumsfeld’s special envoy to Europe; Colonel Mike Walker, the head of civil affairs for the Marine Corps in Iraq; and James Clad, then a counselor to the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (which was seeking to foster economic development in Iraq) and later the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary for South and Southeast Asia. These men were desperate to pursue the Sunni contacts, and took serious risks with their own careers in order to do so. They were supported by officers close to the top of the U.S. military, including Lieutenant General James T. Conway, then the Marine Corps commander in Iraq and today the commandant of the Corps. For a variety of reasons, some of them petty, some of them ideological, and some of them still obscure, these men were blocked by superiors in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House. [continued…]

Rumsfeld’s renegade unit blamed for Afghan deaths
By Jerome Starkey, The Independent, May 16, 2009

Troops from the US Marines Corps’ Special Operations Command, or MarSOC, were responsible for calling in air strikes in Bala Boluk, in Farah, last week – believed to have killed more than 140 men, women and children – as well as two other incidents in 2007 and 2008. News of MarSOC’s involvement in the three incidents comes just days after a Special Forces expert, Lieutenant-General Stanley McChrystal, was named to take over as the top commander of US and Nato troops in Afghanistan. His surprise appointment has prompted speculation that commando counterinsurgency missions will increase in the battle to beat the Taliban.

MarSOC was created three years ago on the express orders of Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary at the time, despite opposition from within the Marine Corps and the wider Special Forces community. An article in the Marine Corps Times described the MarSOC troops as “cowboys” who brought shame on the corps.

The first controversial incident involving the unit happened just three weeks into its first deployment to Afghanistan on 4 March 2007. Speeding away from a suicide bomb attack close to the Pakistan border, around 120 men from Fox Company opened fire on civilians near Jalalabad, in Nangahar province. The Marines said they were shot at after the explosion; eyewitnesses said the Americans fired indiscriminately at pedestrians and civilian cars, killing at least 19 people. [continued…]

Human rights investigator, attorney John Sifton: torture investigation should focus on estimated 100 prisoner deaths
Democracy Now, May 14, 2009

FBI interrogator, Ali Soufan: The interrogator uses a combination of interpersonal, cognitive and emotional strategies to extract the information needed. If done correctly, this approach works quickly and effectively, because it outsmarts the detainee using a method that he is not trained nor able to resist. The Army Field Manual is not about being soft. It’s about outwitting, outsmarting and manipulating the detainee.

The approach is in sharp contrast of the enhanced interrogation method that instead tries to subjugate the detainee into submission through humiliation and cruelty. A major problem is it—it is ineffective. Al-Qaeda are trained to resist torture, as we see from the recently released DOJ memos on interrogation. The contractors had to keep requesting authorization to use harsher and harsher methods.

In the case of Abu Zubaydah, that continued for several months, right ’til waterboarding was introduced. And waterboarding itself had to be used eighty-three times, an indication that Abu Zubaydah had already called his interrogators’ bluff. In contrast, when we interrogated him using intelligent interrogation methods, within the first hour we gained important actionable intelligence. [continued…]

Obama can’t turn the page on Bush
By Frank Rich, New York Times, May 17, 2009

To paraphrase Al Pacino in “Godfather III,” just when we thought we were out, the Bush mob keeps pulling us back in. And will keep doing so. No matter how hard President Obama tries to turn the page on the previous administration, he can’t. Until there is true transparency and true accountability, revelations of that unresolved eight-year nightmare will keep raining down drip by drip, disrupting the new administration’s high ambitions.

That’s why the president’s flip-flop on the release of detainee abuse photos — whatever his motivation — is a fool’s errand. The pictures will eventually emerge anyway, either because of leaks (if they haven’t started already) or because the federal appeals court decision upholding their release remains in force. And here’s a bet: These images will not prove the most shocking evidence of Bush administration sins still to come.

There are many dots yet to be connected, and not just on torture. This Sunday, GQ magazine is posting on its Web site an article adding new details to the ample dossier on how Donald Rumsfeld’s corrupt and incompetent Defense Department cost American lives and compromised national security. The piece is not the work of a partisan but the Texan journalist Robert Draper, author of “Dead Certain,” the 2007 Bush biography that had the blessing (and cooperation) of the former president and his top brass. It draws on interviews with more than a dozen high-level Bush loyalists. [continued…]

Separation anxiety as U.S. prepares to leave Sadr City
By Ernesto Londoño, Washington Post, May 17, 2009

The unthinkable is happening in Sadr City as the U.S. military begins to shut down its outposts to meet a June 30 deadline to withdraw from Iraqi cities.

Separation anxiety is growing among residents, local leaders and American soldiers in the sprawling, impoverished Shiite district that was once the most dangerous battlefield in Baghdad for U.S. troops.

“When the Americans leave, everything will be looted because no one will be watching,” an Iraqi army lieutenant newly deployed there said. “There will be a civil war — without a doubt,” predicted an Iraqi interpreter. Council members have asked about political asylum in the United States. [continued…]

World watches for U.S. shift on Mideast
By Helene Cooper, New York Times, May 17, 2009

[Chas] Freeman, in a telephone interview last week, said he still believed that Mr. Obama would go where his predecessors did not on Israel. Mr. Obama’s appointment of Gen. James L. Jones as his national security adviser — a man who has worked with Palestinians and Israelis to try to open up movement for Palestinians on the ground and who has sometimes irritated Israeli military officials — could foreshadow friction between the Obama administration and the Israeli government, several Middle East experts said.

The same is true for the appointment of George J. Mitchell as Mr. Obama’s special envoy to the region; Mr. Mitchell, who helped negotiate peace in Northern Ireland, has already hinted privately that the administration may have to look for ways to include Hamas, in some fashion, in a unity Palestinian government.

Mr. Obama’s meeting with Mr. Netanyahu, while crucial, may only preview the beginning of the path the president will take, Mr. Freeman said.

“You can’t really tell anything by what happened to me and the fact that he didn’t step forward to take on the skunks,” he said, referring to his own appointment controversy and Mr. Obama’s silence amid critics’ attacks. “The first nine months, Nixon was absolutely horrible on China. In retrospect, it was clear that he had every intention to charge ahead, but he was picking his moment. He didn’t want to have the fight before he had to have the fight.”

“I sense that Obama is picking his moment,” Mr. Freeman said. [continued…]

Images, the law and war
By Adam Liptak, New York Times, May 17, 2009

Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who has handled terrorism cases, said the only prudent course in the current case is to withhold the images. “If you’re in a war that’s been authorized by Congress, it should be an imperative to win the war,” he said. “If you have photos that could harm the war effort, you should delay release of the photos.”

But Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer with the civil liberties union, said history favored disclosure, citing the 2004 photographs from Abu Ghraib and the 1991 video of police beating Rodney King in Los Angeles.

But the touchstone remains the Pentagon papers case. It not only framed the issues, but also created a real-world experiment in consequences.

The government had argued, in general terms, that publication of the papers would cost American soldiers their lives. The papers were published. What happened?

David Rudenstine, the dean of the Cardozo Law School and author of “The Day the Presses Stopped,” a history of the case, said he investigated the aftermath with an open mind.

“I couldn’t find any evidence whatsoever from any responsible government official,” he said, “that there was any harm.” [continued…]

Obama and the Middle East
By Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, New York Review of Books, May 14, 2009

The time will come for the US to unfurl a grand diplomatic initiative. Not now. The most urgent task is to prepare the way for that day by countering the skepticism that has greeted and torpedoed every recent American idea, good or bad—from Secretary of State William Roger’s 1969 plan to the road map. The time is for a clean break, in words, style, and approach.

For many in the US, the notion of such radical change often is reduced to the question of whether or not to talk to Hamas. That is a diversion. The challenge is whether Obama can speak to those for whom Hamas speaks. They are the people who have lost faith in America, its motivations, and every proposal it promotes.

The broader point is this: a window exists, short and subject to abrupt closure, during which President Obama can radically upset Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim preconceptions and make it possible for his future plan, whatever and whenever it might be, to get a fair hearing—for American professions of seriousness to be taken seriously. It won’t be done by repackaging the peace process of years past. It won’t be done by seeking to strengthen those leaders viewed by their own people as at best weak, incompetent, and feckless, at worst irresponsible, careless, and reckless. It won’t be done by perpetuating the bogus and unhelpful distinction between extremists and moderates, by isolating the former, reaching out to the latter, and ending up disconnected from the region’s most relevant actors.

It won’t be done by trying to perform better what was performed before. President Bush’s legacy was, in this sense, doubly harmful: he did the wrong things poorly, which now risks creating the false expectation that, somehow, they can be done well. [continued…]

Do like Jimmy Carter
By Martin van Creveld, New York Times, May 15, 2009

The U.S. president who did most for Israel was not Harry Truman, who recognized the Jewish state almost immediately after it was founded. Nor was it John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. Or Gerald Ford, or Ronald Reagan, or the two George Bushes, or Bill Clinton, though all of these provided America’s ally with economic assistance, supplied it with arms and stood at its side at critical moments, from the 1967 Six-Day War to the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The president who did most for Israel was Jimmy Carter — the same Carter who has sometimes been described as an Israel-hater. In numerous appearances around the world, he has never shrunk from criticizing Israel for its faults, real and imaginary; the dislike is mutual. [continued…]

Israel: U.S. will know before any Iran strike
By Aluf Benn, Haaretz, May 15, 2009

Israel has acceded to American demands by pledging to coordinate its moves on Iran with Washington and not surprise the United States with military action.

During a trip to Jerusalem earlier this week, CIA chief Leon Panetta informed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that U.S. President Barack Obama demanded that Israel not launch a surprise attack on Iran. The message expressed concern that Israel would cause an escalation in the region and undermine Obama’s efforts to improve relations with Tehran. [continued…]

Lieberman’s party proposes ban on Arab Nakba
Retuers, May 15, 2009

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s party wants to ban Israeli Arabs from marking the anniversary of what they term “the Catastrophe” or Nakba, when in 1948 some 700,000 Arabs lost their homes in the war that led to the establishment of the state of Israel.

The ultranationalist Yisrael Beitenu party said it would propose legislation next week for a ban on the practice and a jail term of up to three years for violators.

“The draft law is intended to strengthen unity in the state of Israel and to ban marking Independence Day as a day of mourning,” said party spokesman Tal Nahum. [continued…]

Poll: 58% of Israeli Jews back two-state solution
Ynet, May 15, 2009

Some 58% of Israel’s Jewish public backs the “two states for two peoples” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a Smith Institute poll commissioned by Ynet revealed. [continued…]

The writing on the wall for Obama’s ‘Af-Pak’ Vietnam
By Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, May 13, 2009

It requires a spectacular leap of faith in a kind of superheroic American exceptionalism to imagine that the invasion of Afghanistan that occurred in November 2001 will end any differently from any previous invasion of that country. And it takes an elaborate exercise in self-delusion to avoid recognizing that the Taliban crisis in Pakistan is an effect of the war in Afghanistan, rather than a cause — and that Pakistan’s turmoil is unlikely to end before the U.S. winds down its campaign next door. [continued…]

The Taliban bogeyman
By Fatima Bhutto, Foreign Policy, May 14, 2009

President Asif Ali Zardari, less than a year into his reign, has managed to engage Pakistan’s armed forces, the seventh largest army in the world, in a guerrilla war with the newly formed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, our very own Taliban, in the North West Frontier Province. Rumors of Talibanization air daily on Pakistani television, radio and print media: The barbarians are at the gate, we are told, and warned that if there was a time to rally around the nation’s oleaginous president, a man known locally as “President Ghadari” or traitor in Urdu, this is it. However, the time for scaremongering has past — it is precisely President Zardari’s politically expedient use of national hysteria that has seen American drones welcomed over Pakistan’s airspace and has birthed a war that this government cannot win.

In the aftermath and fallout of 9/11, Pakistan saw its elite — the power brokers of the country’s politics and economy — turn against their traditional allies, the United States for the first time. As U.S. forces occupied first Afghanistan and then Iraq, Pakistan’s elite took an unexpected turn; they welcomed resistance to American foreign policy and supported, as they had never quite done before, Islamic parties that took control of local government and provincial cabinet positions in the North West Frontier Province. [continued…]

Caught in the crossfire – the Swat valley’s fleeing families
By Declan Walsh, The Guardian, May 14, 2009

Army footage shows laser-guided missiles slamming into mountain buildings that explode into a fountain of fragments. Warplanes blast away at Taliban targets in the Swat valley and ground troops push towards the main town, Mingora. When Pakistani forces kill the Taliban, few complain – this is a popular war, for now.

“We are progressing well,” a spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas, said.

Sometimes, though, they hit the wrong target. Jan Nawab, a slightly-built man with a scraggly beard, stood outside the house where he has taken refuge, and sobbed softly under the weight of the calamity that had befallen him. [continued…]

Pakistan hospitals, camps are overwhelmed
By Mark Magnier, Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2009

Shaista Behran lay on a hospital bed with a battered leg and a burdened psyche after watching several members of her family diebefore her eyes.

The 8-year-old and her family fled the village of Wodkhi in Pakistan’s war-torn Swat Valley last week, making it as far as the area’s biggest town, Mingora, when a mortar shell exploded nearby.

“I saw my brother, two sisters and my mother die in front of me,” she said, her words halting and barely audible, as a fly settled on her matted black hair. “Then everything went dark and I woke up here in the hospital.” [continued…]

Al-Qaida today: a movement at the crossroads
By Fawaz A Gerges, Open Democracy, May 13, 2009

If you wonder what has happened to al-Qaida, follow the trail of Arab and Muslim public opinion, and you’ll get a clear picture of its massive crisis of authority and legitimacy.

The balance of forces in the world of Islam has shifted dramatically against al-Qaida’s global jihad and its local manifestations.

Now, more and more Muslims view al-Qaida through a prism that focuses on the monstrosity of killing of non-combatants in general, not just Muslim civilians. Recent opinion surveys and my own field-research confirm that an overwhelming majority of Muslims are more than just unsympathetic to the ideology of Osama bin Laden and his followers; they place the blame squarely at his feet for the harm he has caused to the image of Islam and the damage his movement has wrought within Muslim societies. [continued…]

U.S. evangelicals join the nuclear-weapon-free world movement
By Rev. Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 6, 2009

In the storied and steady history of faith-based opposition to nuclear weapons, however, mainstream U.S. Evangelicals have been notably absent. Such has been our (yes, I’m one) absence that Michael Sean Winters, blogging on the website of the Catholic magazine America, wrote last week of the new Two Futures Project, “Nothing in recent memory is stranger than the emerging alliance between a group of activist evangelicals and former Cold War statesmen in support of an effort to eliminate nuclear weapons.”

As the founder and director of said alliance, I’m delighted to discover that we’re so superlative.

Last week we launched the Two Futures Project, a Christian movement led by a new generation of U.S. Evangelicals–with the blessing of our older forebears–for the complete, multilateral abolition of nuclear weapons. We have no illusions that the process will be quick or easy, and thus, are preparing for the work of a generation–to ensure nonpartisan continuity of purpose in U.S. political leadership for a nuclear-weapon-free world. Our goal is rooted in “the power of the ought,” as Max Kampelman and George Shultz call it, securing unshakable support for a post-atomic age, with the intention that its attainment would become the north star, or organizing principle, for U.S. nuclear policy. [continued…]

Obama reverses position on release of photos of detainee abuse
By Michael D. Shear and Scott Wilson, Washington Post, May 13, 2009

A month after making public once-classified Justice Department memos detailing the Bush administration’s coercive methods of interrogation, President Obama yesterday chose secrecy over disclosure, saying he would seek to block the court-ordered release of photographs depicting the abuse of detainees held by U.S. authorities abroad.

Obama agreed less than three weeks ago not to oppose the photos’ release but changed his mind after viewing some of the images and hearing warnings from his generals in Iraq and Afghanistan that such a move would endanger U.S. troops deployed there.

“The publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals,” Obama said yesterday. “In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in danger.” [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — The ACLU’s executive director, Anthony D. Romero, responded:
“The Obama administration’s adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president’s stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government. This decision is particularly disturbing given the Justice Department’s failure to initiate a criminal investigation of torture crimes under the Bush administration.

“It is true that these photos would be disturbing; the day we are no longer disturbed by such repugnant acts would be a sad one. In America, every fact and document gets known – whether now or years from now. And when these photos do see the light of day, the outrage will focus not only on the commission of torture by the Bush administration but on the Obama administration’s complicity in covering them up. Any outrage related to these photos should be due not to their release but to the very crimes depicted in them. Only by looking squarely in the mirror, acknowledging the crimes of the past and achieving accountability can we move forward and ensure that these atrocities are not repeated.

“If the Obama administration continues down this path, it will betray not only its promises to the American people, but its commitment to this nation’s most fundamental principles. President Obama has said we should turn the page, but we cannot do that until we fully learn how this nation veered down the path of criminality and immorality, who allowed that to happen and whose lives were mutilated as a result. Releasing these photos – as painful as it might be – is a critical step toward that accounting. The American people deserve no less.”

Torture debate dilutes the moral principle
By Ian Buruma, Taipei Times, May 11, 2009

If torture is an absolute wrong, whatever the circumstances, the question of its effectiveness is irrelevant. To hold the debate on those terms threatens to dilute the moral principle.

This leaves the question of why torture should be condemned absolutely, whereas other acts of war, such as bombing, which cause more damage to human life, might be acceptable as inevitable consequences of national defense.

Bombing can, of course, be a war crime if it is used as an act of terror against unarmed people. But military operations that kill or injure civilians often do not automatically qualify as crimes, as long as deliberately inflicting pain or humiliation on a helpless individual — even if he or she is an enemy — is not the aim. In the case of torture, that is the aim, which is why it is different from other acts of war.

A prominent US right-wing commentator recently opined that any attempt to hold the torturers, and their masters in the Bush administration, accountable, would make a mockery “of the efforts of the tough and brave Americans who guard us while we sleep.”

Aside from the fact that torturing people is not the same as combat and requires little bravery, this gets it exactly wrong. After years of torturing people in one of South America’s most savage “dirty wars,” Brazil’s generals decided to stop it because its institutionalized use was undermining the armed forces’ discipline and morale. It was making a mockery of men who should be tough and brave, but instead had become thugs. [continued…]

The hidden hand of Dick Cheney
By Juan Cole, Salon, May 13, 2009

While the Obama administration has adopted large numbers of policies that directly contradict Cheney’s positions, it would be a mistake to overlook Cheney’s continued influence on the executive branch through the precedents set by the Bush administration. Among the former vice-president’s most important legacies is increased government secrecy. Obama’s Department of Justice continues to rely on an alleged “state secrets” privilege. It has thus tried to block lawsuits by victims who alleged they were kidnapped and tortured by U.S. intelligence even though they were innocent of wrongdoing, on the grounds that such trials would reveal state secrets. The same state secrets doctrine was used by Obama’s DOJ in an attempt to block investigations of Bush-Cheney warrantless wiretaps. Likewise, the DOJ has attempted to block lawsuits seeking the release of Bush-era e-mails and to prevent prisoners held at Bagram air base in Afghanistan from appearing before a judge to challenge their imprisonment. [continued…]

Gaza laid bare
By Jason Larkin and Jack Shenker, Guernica, May, 2009

Israel’s air assault on Gaza began with attacks on the Strip’s main police stations, including one in Rafah’s densely populated Junaina neighborhood which left twenty-five officers dead. Over the course of the war, approximately two hundred and fifty civilian policemen would be killed and every major police office damaged or destroyed, according to figures provided by the Ministry of the Interior.

When it became clear that policemen were being targeted, officers were ordered to don plain clothes uniforms and continue their patrols carrying sticks rather than guns to avoid detection. Trestle-table desks were set up amidst the rubble of bombed police stations to maintain the administrative network of law enforcement in the Strip, and the thirteen thousand-strong police force continued to function. “We would not allow the Israeli aggression to bring chaos to our streets,” says Ihab Al-Ghusain, a spokesperson for the Ministry. “We simply made the best of what we had.”

The Geneva Convention stipulates that to be considered a legitimate military target, objects must contribute to military action. “Police were not combatants and could not represent legitimate targets unless actively engaged in hostilities,” claims Sarah Leah Witson, the Executive Director of Human Rights Watch.

There was no significant increase in theft or looting during the war, although several calls were made to an emergency police hotline reporting incidents of over-pricing by merchants. “We have a bad history of safety in Gaza,” says Mr. Al-Ghusain, “and as a result people here have suffered. In times of crisis, people need the reassurance of a working police force more than ever; we could have everything else, but without security we have nothing. That’s why it was so important to keep going.” [continued…] (Hat-tip to Mondoweiss.)

Taboo broken in US Middle East offensive
By Harvey Morris, Financial Times, May 10, 2009

A period of high-level diplomacy on the Middle East opens in New York on Monday, promising further insights into an emerging strategy from Barack Obama’s administration that is already raising concerns among Israel’s supporters.

On Monday, King Abdullah of Jordan said the US was promoting a “57-state solution” in which the entire Muslim world would recognise Israel. But he also warned that the new US administration had little time, before fresh violence erupted, to promote a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. [continued…]

Netanyahu meeting with Obama decides Mid-East’s future, says Abdullah
By Michael Binyon and Richard Beeston, The Times, May 11, 2009

President Obama’s critical meeting with Binyamin Netanyahu next week has become the acid test for the Administration’s commitment to peace in the Middle East, King Abdullah of Jordan said yesterday.

The monarch does not conceal his feelings about the Israeli leader. He described their last encounter – 10 years ago when he had just come to the throne – as the “least pleasant” of his reign. But he, and President Mubarak of Egypt, are expected to meet the Israeli leader before his trip to Washington, where the future course of the region could be decided.

The King said that he was prepared to believe what Israelis have told him — that a right-wing Government in Israel is better able to deliver peace than the Left.

“All eyes will be looking to Washington,” he said. “If there are no clear signals and no clear directives to all of us, there will be a feeling that this is just another American Government that is going to let us all down.”

If Israel procrastinated on a two-state solution, or if there was no clear American vision on what should happen this year, the “tremendous credibility” that Mr Obama had built up in the Arab world would evaporate overnight. [continued…]

Trivializing the Holocaust
By Uri Avnery, Antiwar.com, May 11, 2009

First of all, I want to apologize to all the good women who are engaged in the world’s oldest profession.

I recently described Shimon Peres as a political prostitute. One of my female readers has protested vigorously. Prostitutes, she pointed out, earn their money honestly. They deliver what they promise.

Israel’s president, on the other hand, only tells the truth by accident. He is a political impostor and a political sham. To him, too, apply Winston Churchill’s words about a former prime minister: “The right honorable gentleman sometimes stumbles upon the truth, but he always hurries on as if nothing has happened.” Or the words of former minister Amnon Rubinstein about Ariel Sharon: “He blushes when he tells the truth.” [continued…]

Obama worsening Afghan-Pak state
By Graham E. Fuller, Saudi Gazette, May 10, 2009

For all the talk of “smart power,” President Obama is pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush. The realities suggest need for drastic revision of US strategic thinking.

• Military force will not win the day in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; crises have only grown worse under the US military footprint.
• The Taleban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taleban — like them or not — as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in 2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the end, the Taleban are probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist.
• It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The “Durand Line” is an arbitrary imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. And there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan. The struggle of 13 million Afghan Pashtuns has already enflamed Pakistan’s 28 million Pashtuns.

[continued…]

Pakistan’s ethnic fault line
By Selig S. Harrison, Washington Post, May 11, 2009

To American eyes the struggle raging in Pakistan with the Taliban is about religious fanaticism. But in Pakistan it is about an explosive fusion of Islamist zeal and simmering ethnic tensions that have been exacerbated by U.S. pressures for military action against the Taliban and its al-Qaeda allies. Understanding the ethnic dimension of the conflict is the key to a successful strategy for separating the Taliban from al-Qaeda and stabilizing multiethnic Pakistan politically.

The Pakistani army is composed mostly of Punjabis. The Taliban is entirely Pashtun. For centuries, Pashtuns living in the mountainous borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan have fought to keep out invading Punjabi plainsmen. So sending Punjabi soldiers into Pashtun territory to fight jihadists pushes the country ever closer to an ethnically defined civil war, strengthening Pashtun sentiment for an independent “Pashtunistan” that would embrace 41 million people in big chunks of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

This is one of the main reasons the army initially favored a peace deal with a Taliban offshoot in the Swat Valley and has resisted U.S. pressure to go all out against jihadist advances into neighboring districts. While army leaders fear the long-term dangers of a Taliban link-up with Islamist forces in the heartland of Pakistan, they are more worried about what they see as the looming danger of Pashtun separatism. [continued…]

Fear and worry pervade refugee camps as Pakistanis flee assault on Taliban
By Pamela Constable and Haq Nawaz Khan, Washington Post, May 11, 2009

As they waited in rows of empty white tents, refugees from fighting in the Swat Valley said Sunday that they had been repeating a Koranic verse from the sayings of the prophet Muhammad.

“He who recites this will receive my blessing and protection,” one woman read from a pamphlet in Arabic. “If he is hungry, he will find plentiful food. . . . If he has fear of a cruel ruler or enemy . . . the fear will be gone.”

The army has launched an offensive in Swat against armed Taliban extremists, and for now at least, there is enough food, water and shelter for the estimated 200,000 refugees who since Thursday have poured into four camps set up by the United Nations and the government of this northwest Pakistani city.

But there is a pervasive sense of loss and worry among the families that keep arriving in overcrowded farm trucks and rented vans. In interviews in two camps Saturday and Sunday, some refugees said their homes had been destroyed in the fighting. Others said they had to abandon their goats and cows. And some, in their rush to escape, even had to leave their children behind.

“When the shelling started, my wife and I ran out to gather the children. It was like a hell outside, and we just started running,” recounted Taj Mahmad, 35, a vegetable-cart puller. “I realized that my son and my smallest daughter were missing. She is only 3. But my wife cried and said the rest of us would be killed if we stayed, so we kept going. I have no idea what happened to them.” [continued…]

The paradox of Israel’s pursuit of might
By Max Hastings, The Guardian, May 9, 2009

Three years ago in Jerusalem, I met a very bright couple in their late 40s, who had emigrated from Russia a decade earlier. When we began to speak of the Palestinians, the husband said: “In my Russian village in 1920, there was trouble with guerrillas. Budenny’s Cossacks came. They burnt the village from which the guerrillas came. The guerrillas returned twice more. The Cossacks burned two more villages. Then there was no more trouble with guerrillas.” This was the culture from which these two highly-educated Israelis came. They asserted that the Budenny method was the only proper one by which to address Hamas, Hizbollah and Fatah. The policies of recent Israeli governments suggest that their view is widely shared.

Between the late 1970s and 1990s, I was one of those foreigners who progressively fell out of love with Israel. I became persuaded that the arrogance of its faith in its own military power had induced its people to go far beyond a belief in defending their own society, to support a polity committed to perpetuating a great historic injustice against the Palestinians. Whatever government is in power in Jerusalem, there is a belief that peace with the Muslim world is unattainable; and thus that Israel must resign itself to a future dependent on its military capability rather than on negotiation. Associated with this is a belief that Jewish colonisation of the West Bank is a price the Palestinians must expect to pay for their refusal to make peace.

The most extraordinary, indeed nihilistic aspect of Israeli military policy towards the Palestinians is that it has sought to punish terrorism by deliberately wrecking the economic base of Palestinian society. On its own terms, this has succeeded. Today the only thriving industries in Palestinian territory are human reproduction, terrorism, and the propagation of grievances. The conditions in Gaza are, to us, almost unimaginable. Few have work. Most live in breezeblock barracks. From one year to the next they see nothing that is beautiful except the sea and sky. Hatred for their oppressors has become the only functioning engine of their society. People who have nothing have nothing to lose. [continued…]

Secret Israeli plan to encircle Jerusalem revealed
The Media Line, May 10, 2009

The Israeli government and a coalition of settler organizations have been secretly cooperating to encircle Jerusalem’s Old City with a network of national parks, trails, cable cars, escalators, tunnels and other sites, a report released yesterday claimed.

The detailed secret plan, presented to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert in September, has a stated purpose of creating “a sequence of parks surrounding the Old City” so as to “strengthen Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Israel.”

The confidential program, put together by the Jerusalem Development Authority (JDA) and sponsored by the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and the mayor of Jerusalem, was revealed yesterday in a report by Ir Amim, a non-profit organization which promotes “an equitable and stable Jerusalem with an agreed political future.”

“The program is sponsored secretly by the Office of the Prime Minister and the Mayor of Jerusalem, not only without public discussion, but without the existence of the project even publicly known,” Ir Amim said in a statement. “The exposure of the program grants for the first time a comprehensive view of how the government and settlers, working as one body, are creating a ‘biblical’ territorial reign.” [continued…]

Do we know the enemy?
By Moazzam Husain, Dawn, May 10, 2009

Waiting in line to drive through an army checkpoint on the leafy Shami Road of Lahore garrison, my driver hesitatingly utters: ‘Sir, can I ask you a question?’ ‘Yes sure,’ I tell him. ‘This is all a game isn’t it…. Ultimately they want to take away our nuclear weapons … don’t they sir?’

With military operations under way in Dir, Buner and Swat and the question coming from a retired infantry soldier who is now employed as my driver I assume the ‘they’ means the Taliban, the troublemakers, the Islamists, the militants, the rebels or some such. Still, to be sure I ask: who wants to take them away? ‘Why, the Americans, the Jews, the Indians of course. After all they are the ones funding the Taliban!’ he exclaims. I stare out of the windscreen and let my mind wander … to Islamabad, Constitution Avenue, to the information ministry. Do the folks there know how ordinary Pakistanis are thinking? [continued…]

Maliki always had his own script – now he’s acting it out
By Tony Karon, The National, May 9, 2009

In the Washington of the US president George W Bush, “the other war” was shorthand for Afghanistan; today, however, Iraq has inherited the Cinderella title. That shift is not simply a product of the hysteria fuelled over the past two weeks of the Obama administration predicting an apocalyptic collapse of Pakistan and scaring Americans with the spectre of a nuclear-armed Taliban. No, the US President Barack Obama has always made it clear that he believed Iraq had been “the wrong war” and, taking office at a moment when he hoped Iraq was on course to an acceptable outcome, he immediately recast the battle against the Taliban and al Qa’eda in the “Afghanistan-Pakistan” theatre as America’s strategic priority.

Obama plans to increase the US troop commitment in Afghanistan to some 64,000 soldiers by the summer and he hopes to find those reinforcements by bringing home more of the 134,000 troops currently in Iraq. The new military budget sent to Congress by the US Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, for the first time seeks more money ($65 billion) for Afghanistan than it seeks for Iraq ($61 billion). “Af-Pak” as it is known, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is the responsibility of a special envoy reporting directly to the president; the Iraq dossier is in the hands of a routine ambassador and a military commander reporting to Centcom chief Gen David Petraeus, whose top priority is the Af-Pak theatre. [continued…]

Whatever happened to Muqtada al-Sadr?
By Mark Kukis, Time, May 9, 2009

Sunni parliamentarian Salim al-Jubouri took Muqtada al-Sadr’s recent appearance in Turkey as a good sign. Sadr surfaced in Ankara ostensibly to discuss the situation in Iraq with top Turkish leaders, including President President Abdullah Gul and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey is a predominantly Sunni country, many observers noted, and maybe the militant Shi’ite warlord was making a show of nascent sectarian reconciliation. “The attitude is good,” says al-Jubouri, a member of the Sunni political bloc known in Arabic as Tawafiq. “But so far it’s all talk, we need to see actions.”

All talk indeed. Sadr’s visit to Turkey a week ago, his first public appearance in nearly two years, has renewed talk in Baghdad about what his plans might be in the months and years ahead. “I think Sadr picked Turkey to show himself in order to prove that he’s against sectarianism… and to try and kill the rumor that he is an Iranian toy,” says Tahseen al-Shekhli, a spokesman for the Iraqi government, which gained the upper hand over Sadr’s Mahdi Army forces in heavy fighting last year. Sadr’s followers, for their part, are notably reticent on the subject. Several figures prominent in Sadr’s political ranks refused to discuss the topic when contacted by TIME. That has left some in Iraq revisiting an old question that no one so far seems to be able to answer well: Where is Sadr living, and what is he planning next? [continued…]

Memos shed light on CIA use of sleep deprivation
By Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2009

As President Obama prepared last month to release secret memos on the CIA’s use of severe interrogation methods, the White House fielded a flurry of last-minute appeals.

One came from former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, who expressed disbelief that the administration was prepared to expose methods it might later decide it needed.

“Are you telling me that under all conditions of threat, you will never interfere with the sleep cycle of a detainee?” Hayden asked a top White House official, according to sources familiar with the exchange.

From the beginning, sleep deprivation had been one of the most important elements in the CIA’s interrogation program, used to help break dozens of suspected terrorists, far more than the most violent approaches. And it is among the methods the agency fought hardest to keep. [continued…]

Tortured profession: psychologists warned of abusive interrogations, then helped craft them
By Sheri Fink, ProPublica, May 5, 2009

Psychologists versed in the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape “SERE” program, which was meant to train American soldiers how to cope with torture if captured by the enemy, warned officials as early as 2002 that reverse-engineering SERE techniques for use on detainees could be ineffective and dangerous, a Senate Armed Services Committee report [3] revealed last week. What has been little noticed is that the same psychologists helped develop the very interrogation policies and practices they warned against.

The new information re-opens a number of questions that have tugged at the conscience of a whole profession since the Sept. 11 attacks. Is it possible for psychologists to uphold the ethical tenets of their profession while working within a system of interrogation that violates those tenets? Does it matter if they raised objections to the system of interrogation but cooperated with it anyway?

The moral dilemma is encapsulated in the experiences of a psychiatrist and psychologist who worked at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. According to the Senate report, in an Oct. 2, 2002, memo they prepared a list of harsh interrogation techniques that ended up influencing interrogation policy not only at Guantánamo, but also in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the same memo, they warned that these methods were likely to result in inaccurate tips and could harm detainees. Those warnings disappeared as the memo moved up the chain of command. [continued…]

Obama set to revive military commissions
By Peter Finn, Washington Post, May 9, 2009

The Obama administration is preparing to revive the system of military commissions established at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, under new rules that would offer terrorism suspects greater legal protections, government officials said.

The rules would block the use of evidence obtained from coercive interrogations, tighten the admissibility of hearsay testimony and allow detainees greater freedom to choose their attorneys, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The military commissions have allowed the trial of terrorism suspects in a setting that favors the government and protects classified information, but they were sharply criticized during the administration of President George W. Bush. “By any measure, our system of trying detainees has been an enormous failure,” then-candidate Barack Obama said in June 2008. [continued…]

Government could destroy records in hundreds of Guantanamo cases
By Chisun Lee, ProPublica, May 7, 2009

A stockpile of documents about hundreds of Guantanamo Bay detainees, some written by the prisoners themselves, could be destroyed under a little-known provision of a federal court order the Bush administration obtained in 2004.

For four years, records in the prisoners’ habeas corpus lawsuits challenging the legality of their detentions have been piling up in a secure federal facility in the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington, Va. Because much of the information is classified, the 750 or so attorneys representing the prisoners are required to do and store all their work on-site.

The provision is part of a broad order [1] (PDF) issued at the very outset of the habeas cases — at the last official count in January, 220 cases remained — that set rules for how sensitive documents and attorney access should be handled. It calls for the government to destroy all classified records given to, prepared by or kept by prisoners’ lawyers — including originals and copies of writings, photographs, videotapes, computer files and voice recordings — when the cases end. [continued…]

UAE: detention in torture case
Human Rights Watch, May 8, 2009

The reported detention of a member of the United Arab Emirates royal family, Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, in connection with the videotaped torture of an Afghan grain dealer is a significant development, but much more needs to be done to restore faith in the country’s police and justice system, Human Rights Watch said today.

UAE officials told American diplomats that the sheikh was put under “house arrest” this week and prevented from leaving the country as the Ministry of Justice conducts a criminal investigation of the incidents on the videotape, ABC News reported today. The government has not released any information about the detention.

“The videotape of this episode shocked the world,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The report of the arrest was reassuring, but now the government needs to make the details public. Secretive prosecutions will not deter further abuses and torture.” [continued…]

A million displaced in Pakistan’s war with Taliban
By Isambard Wilkinson, Daily Telegraph, May 8, 2009

Pakistan’s offensive against the Taliban has forced a million people to flee their homes, the United Nations said.

Air strikes rocked Mingora, the main town in the Swat Valley, on Friday as the armed forces pressed ahead with the latest assault designed to clear the area of Taliban insurgents who have claimed swathes of the country in recent months.

The latest assessment from the UN High Commission for refugees laid bare the scale of the fighting. The UN said that 200,000 civilians have already fled the Swat Valley and two neighbouring districts, while another 300,000 are either on the move or preparing to leave. Earlier offensives against the Taliban in other regions of the rugged North West Frontier Province near the Afghan border displaced another 500,000 people, bringing the total number displaced by the offensives to a million. [continued…]

Cynicism among Pakistani refugees
By Abdul Hai Kakar, BBC, May 8, 2009

Most displaced people say they have left their homes not because of the Taleban’s excesses, but because of shelling by the army.

“The Taleban captured our area and started patrolling the streets, they snatched vehicles from NGO staff, government officials and private individuals, and they threatened local people,” says Nasir Ali, a high school student.

“But it wasn’t as bad as the shelling by the army – that was what actually forced us to leave our homes.”…

I interviewed a large number of refugees in Swabi, but I did not meet a single person who actually saw the army and the Taleban as members of opposing camps.

Instead, I heard, they were “two sides of the same coin”.

“The Pakistani army has hurt us badly – but while they have killed civilians, I swear I haven’t seen a single shell directed at the Taleban,” says Shahdad Khan, a refugee sheltering at a camp in Swabi’s Shave Ada area.

Others question the Pakistani military’s stated commitment to “eliminating” the Taleban.

“No way,” Siraj tells me.

“The army brought the Taleban to our area! It’s politics. The Taleban and the army are brothers.” [continued…]

Adroit envoy states case for Pakistan
By Mark Landler, New York Times, May 9, 2009

On May 4, 1999, Husain Haqqani was yanked off a Pakistani street and bundled into a car, a blanket thrown over his head. He managed to keep his cellphone hidden in his pocket, and surreptitiously dialed a friend’s number to let her know he was in trouble.

That may have saved his skin, said Mr. Haqqani, now Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States. The news of his detention made it harder for his captors, Pakistani intelligence agents, to hurt him, Mr. Haqqani said, though he was roughed up and kept in jail for two months until a court ordered his release.

As the Obama administration struggles with another darkening crisis in Pakistan, Mr. Haqqani has become an influential figure in Washington — a silver-tongued interpreter in public of his country’s bewildering politics, but also a relentless, unyielding defender of Pakistan’s image and reputation….

Since moving to the United States, Mr. Haqqani has developed an affinity for American culture. He taught international relations at Boston University from 2004 to 2008, and he roots for the Red Sox. The American experience has only added to suspicions about him back in Pakistan.

“They see him more as a U.S. envoy than a Pakistani envoy,” said Mowahid Hussain Shah, a Pakistani lawyer. “They see him as someone who is competent and bright, but slick.”

Mr. Haqqani readily admits shifting his allegiances over the years. But he denies being an opportunist, saying he underwent a personal journey from being an Islamic activist in his youth to a conservative supporter of Mr. Sharif to an acolyte of the populism of the Bhutto clan. [continued…]

Afghan’s Karzai demands U.S. halt air strikes: report
Reuters, May 8, 2009

Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Friday called on the United States to halt air strikes in his country, following attacks this week that Afghan officials said killed 147 people.

“We demand an end to these operations … an end to air strikes,” Karzai said in Washington in an interview with CNN.

Farah Province deputy governor Yunus Rasooli told Reuters on Friday that residents of two villages hit this week by U.S. warplanes had produced lists with the names of 147 people killed in the attacks. [continued…]

Afghan war costs to overtake Iraq in 2010: Pentagon
AFP, May 8, 2009

The cost of fighting the war in Afghanistan will overtake that of the Iraq conflict for the first time in 2010, Pentagon budget documents showed Thursday.

On top of the basic defense budget of 533.7 billion dollars, the White House is requesting a further 130 billion dollars for overseas missions, including 65 billion for Afghanistan and 61 billion for Iraq.

“This request is where you’re going to first see the swing of not only dollars or resources, but combat capability, from the Iraqi theater into the Afghan theater,” Navy Vice Admiral Steve Stanley, director of force structure for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters. [continued…]

Israel’s bad-faith negotiating position
By William Pfaff, Truthdig, May 7, 2009

Israel has always believed in “creating facts on the ground,” whose existence may later come as an unpleasant surprise to others. Iran now seems to have learned from this Israeli precedent, to Israel’s disadvantage.

In diplomatic circles, in Europe as well as the Arab states, there has been discussion of the possibility of Iran’s being designated a “civil nuclear power,” exercising its right, under the Nonproliferation Treaty (which it has signed), to develop power for civilian uses.

This is what Iran has persistently claimed to be all it wants. The proposal goes on to say that whatever military work Iran has done is already faits accomplis—“created facts,” that are useless to contest. [continued…]

Pakistan launches full-scale military assault on Taliban
By Saeed Shah, McClatchy, May 7, 2009

Pakistan declared war on its homegrown Islamic extremists Thursday in a dramatic move that could trigger a wider conflagration.

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani, in a late-night televised address to the nation, said Pakistan would launch a full-scale offensive against Pakistani Taliban guerrillas who’ve seized control of the vast Swat valley, which is about 100 miles north of the capital.

Pakistan will no longer “bow our heads before the terrorists,” Gilani said in an 11 p.m. address as he called on citizens to rally behind the armed forces. He said that the government had tried peaceful negotiation with Taliban entrenched in the Swat valley, but the strategy hadn’t worked.

Pakistan had “reached a stage where the government believes that decisive steps have to be taken,” he said, and the army’s job now was to “eliminate the militants and the terrorists.”

Thousands of civilians have fled from Swat and neighboring districts in the fighting between the army and militants in the past week, but hundreds of thousands are unable to move and could be caught in the crossfire. Gilani appealed to the international community for humanitarian aid. [continued…]

Taliban’s popularity linked to perception it will lift Pakistanis from poverty
By Emi Foulk, Huffington Post, May 7, 2009

Socio-economic disparities run rampant, and corruption, classism and an entrenched feudal system all but ensure that the poor – more than 30 percent of Pakistan’s 170 million citizens, according to the World Bank – remain poor and marginalized.

Nine percent of Pakistanis lack access to clean water, according to the UN, and 38 percent of Pakistani children are underweight. Bonded labor continues unhindered in the most densely populated provinces of Punjab and Sindh.

Given the little that Pakistani governments, both civilian and military, have provided by way of land reform, education, health care and equitable justice over the past few decades, it’s not entirely surprising that an alternative – any alternative – holds appeal for Pakistan’s lower classes and peasantry. The Taliban in Swat have forced wealthy landowners out, and, in an ersatz land reform, passed the abandoned plots to the tenants who manned them. [continued…]

The battle for Pakistan’s soul
By Farrukh Rehan, Huffington Post, May 8, 2009

The conservative view held by many Islamist parties, populist politicians, retired army brass and hyper-nationalistic television anchors is that the Taliban are a reflection of the people’s desire for an Islamic system of governance, with quick justice, order and compliance with God’s will as the hallmarks of public life. Proponents of this view maintain that the excesses of the Taliban are greatly exaggerated, and that the real threat to Pakistan is from the US, which has destabilized the whole region with its Afghan war and its drone attacks on Pakistan. According to this view, the real aim of the US is to undermine Pakistan’s sovereignty and deprive it of its cherished nuclear weapons. To date, the conservatives have been more vocal, and gained more traction with the Pakistani public – drowning out the concerns about the Taliban by pointing fingers at George Bush, the US and India.

On the other side are people derided as “Liberals” and “Western apologists” by the conservatives. These liberals, many of them western educated, secular and belonging to the professional urban classes, have been reminding whoever will listen that while Pakistan is a Muslim majority country, it was created as a constitutional republic with the ideals of an independent judiciary, a parliamentary system of government, and representative democracy. Liberals argue that letting parts of the country become theocratic enclaves run by armed gangs of religious extremists undermines the ideals on which Pakistan was built, threatens its territorial integrity and is a recipe for disaster. Liberals insist that the Taliban, and their policy of “Islamicization at gun point” is the real threat to Pakistan, not India or the United States.

Which narrative ultimately prevails is crucial to Pakistan’s future because it determines whether the people of Pakistan see the fight against the Taliban and extremism as their own fight, or whether they will continue to see it as a US manufactured Global War on Terror into which Pakistan has been sucked. If Pakistanis see the fight in Swat as their own, then there will be public support for a continuing military offensive, there will be more latitude given to the bumbling civilian government of Asif Zardari, and there may even be some tolerance for the drone attacks which normally cause deep resentment among Pakistanis. But if the dominant narrative in Pakistan continues to be that Pakistanis are victims of global conspiracies, that the Taliban threat is exaggerated, and that Pakistan should have no part in fighting “America’s war”, then the military will most likely be forced to sign a truce with the Taleban, the civilian government will probably collapse under the weight of its unpopularity, and Talibanization will continue unchecked, one district at a time. [continued…]

Netanyahu’s three-step solution
By Simon Tisdall, The Guardian, May 7, 2009

Israel is under siege. More precisely, Binyamin Netanyahu’s government faces excruciating pressure on all sides as showdown talks loom with Barack Obama in Washington on 18 May. Circling the wagons will not work this time. Israel’s prime minister needs a breakout plan – and the outlines of his coming counter-offensive are taking shape.

The intensifying push to finally resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, and not just the Palestinian issue, stems partly from the dangerously unfinished business of January’s shocking Gaza carnage. More broadly, it is driven by the hopes of a new administration in Washington and the spectre of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Now Netanyahu is receiving much the same free advice from all directions. Drop your opposition to a two-state solution with Palestine and you will unlock a wider Middle East peace, said Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, this week, backed by EU policy chief Javier Solana. Accept you must relinquish the Golan Heights and anything is possible, said in-from-the-cold Bashar Assad, Syria’s president, backed by Egypt and the Saudis. [continued…]

Loss of nuclear monoply – an Israeli nightmare
By Yossi Melman, Haaretz, May 6, 2009

It is unclear whether the U.S. assistant secretary of state’s call to Israel to sign on to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty indicates a change in Washington’s policy toward Israel’s nuclear program, or even if the move was anticipated by the White House.

It is clear, however, that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. The U.S. has been protecting Israel for years, creating a diplomatic umbrella and pushing away any attempt, in any international debate, to discuss the nuclear weapons the entire world believes Israel possesses. [continued…]

Pakistan nuclear projects raise US fears
By Simon Tsidall, The Guardian, May 3, 2009

Pakistan is continuing to expand its nuclear bomb-making facilities despite growing international concern that advancing Islamist extremists could overrun one or more of its atomic weapons plants or seize sufficient radioactive material to make a dirty bomb, US nuclear experts and former officials say.

David Albright, previously a senior weapons inspector for the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency in Iraq, said commercial satellite photos showed two plutonium-producing reactors were nearing completion at Khushab, about 160 miles south-west of the capital, Islamabad.

“In the current climate, with Pakistan’s leadership under duress from daily acts of violence by insurgent Taliban forces and organised political opposition, the security of any nuclear material produced in these reactors is in question,” Albright said in a report issued by the independent Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. [continued…]

Pakistan strife raises U.S. doubts on nuclear arms
By David E Sanger, New York Times, May 4, 2009

The Obama administration inherited from President Bush a multiyear, $100 million secret American program to help Pakistan build stronger physical protections around some of those facilities, and to train Pakistanis in nuclear security.

But much of that effort has now petered out, and American officials have never been permitted to see how much of the money was spent, the facilities where the weapons are kept or even a tally of how many Pakistan has produced. The facility Pakistan was supposed to build to conduct its own training exercises is running years behind schedule.

Administration officials would not say if the subject would be raised during Mr. Zardari’s first meeting with Mr. Obama. But even if Mr. Obama raises the subject, it is not clear how fruitful the conversation might be. [continued…]

Spain okays Gaza war crimes probe against Israelis
Haaretz, May 4, 2009

Spanish National Court judge Fernando Andreu announced Monday that he will pursue his investigation into a 2002 Israeli bombing in the Gaza Strip, despite contrary advice by prosecutors at the court.

Andreu said the 2002 bombing in densely populated Gaza City might constitute a crime against humanity. That attack, using a one-ton bomb dropped from an Israeli F-16, targeted and killed alleged Hamas member Salah Shehadeh along with 14 other people. [continued…]

Gaza costs Israel its reputation for press freedom
By James Reinl, The National, May 3, 2009

Israeli restrictions on journalists during its Gaza offensive have seen the state downgraded in a survey of press freedom, removing the Middle East’s lone example of a “free” media environment.

A study made public by Freedom House on Friday saw Israel move from the “free” category to “partly free” after officials curtailed reporters and sought to influence coverage of the three-week invasion of the Gaza Strip, which ended on Jan 18.

The global report describes the region as having “the world’s lowest level of press freedom” with only Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon and Egypt ranking as “partly free” and all other countries as “not free”. [continued…]

If Israel acquiesces on Iran, world will follow suit
By Amir Oren, Haaretz, May 4, 2009

Israel’s strategy against Iran’s nuclear program has failed. If there were any clandestine elements that could have bought some time, their effectiveness is waning. At the obvious, external level – the level of politics – the world was urged to rally behind the effort to block Iran from acquiring military nuclear capabilities using distinctly un-Israeli arguments, concerning the dangers of expanding the nuclear “club” to the breaking point; of escalating competition for control over the Persian Gulf; and of bringing Europe within the range of nuclear armed missiles. However, in its pretentiousness, this is a typical Israeli approach: to educate the “other” about what is good and important for him, so he will realize what he must do, which also happens to be what Israel wants. A great idea if only there were buyers.

Other countries, who seem to be terribly selfish, insist on deciding for themselves what constitutes a threat to them and how much they are willing to invest in dealing with it. An Iran with nukes troubles them a great deal, but not to the point of going to war to prevent Tehran from having them. [continued…]

ADL poll: 66 percent of Israeli Jews back attack on Iran
By Aluf Benn, Haaretz, May 4, 2009

A large majority of Israeli Jews support military action aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities, according to a survey sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League.

According to the poll, co-sponsored by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, a large majority of those who support a move by the army said they would maintain their support even if the Obama administration opposed it. [continued…]

Kabul’s new elite live high on West’s largesse
By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, May 1, 2009

Vast sums of money are being lavished by Western aid agencies on their own officials in Afghanistan at a time when extreme poverty is driving young Afghans to fight for the Taliban. The going rate paid by the Taliban for an attack on a police checkpoint in the west of the country is $4, but foreign consultants in Kabul, who are paid out of overseas aids budgets, can command salaries of $250,000 to $500,000 a year.

The high expenditure on paying, protecting and accommodating Western aid officials in palatial style helps to explain why Afghanistan ranks 174th out of 178th on a UN ranking of countries’ wealth. This is despite a vigorous international aid effort with the US alone spending $31bn since 2002 up to the end of last year.

The high degree of wastage of aid money in Afghanistan has long been an open secret. In 2006, Jean Mazurelle, the then country director of the World Bank, calculated that between 35 per cent and 40 per cent of aid was “badly spent”. “The wastage of aid is sky-high,” he said. “There is real looting going on, mainly by private enterprises. It is a scandal.” [continued…]

In Baghdad, dread grows with death toll
By Liz Sly, Los Angeles Times, May 2, 2009

The crowds at the restaurants are thinning out. Parents have started to escort their children to school again. And cellphones are ringing more often than usual, with family members checking in just to ask, “Are you OK?” or “Is everyone safe?”

After a string of high-profile bombings and other attacks that killed 355 Iraqi civilians and security personnel and 18 U.S. troops last month nationwide, a pall has descended upon Baghdad, a lowering storm cloud swirling with echoes of the darkest days of Iraq’s civil war.

Above all, there is a sense of dread, rooted in the terrifying possibility that the calm that had brought the capital back to life over the last 18 months might have been just a lull.

“I feel a shadow of danger on the horizon, that the old days are coming back again,” Nidal Shahar, 36, said as she watched her children play in a nearly empty park along the Tigris River that would normally be crowded with families in the early evening hours. “It’s like we’re seeing the early phases again of the sectarian war.” [continued…]

Iraq bloodshed rises as US allies defect
By Ali Rifat, Hala Jaber and Sarah Baxter, The Sunday Times, May 3, 2009

Iraq is threatened by a new wave of sectarian violence as members of the “Sons of Iraq” – the Sunni Awakening militias that were paid by the US to fight Al-Qaeda – begin to rejoin the insurgency.

If the spike in violence continues, it could affect President Barack Obama’s pledge to withdraw all combat troops from Iraqi cities by the end of June. All US troops are due to leave the country by 2012.

A leading member of the Political Council of Iraqi Resistance, which represents six Sunni militant groups, said: “The resistance has now returned to the field and is intensifying its attacks against the enemy. The number of coalition forces killed is on the rise.” [continued…]

The AIPAC case in Washington, Iraq, and beyond
By David Bromwich, Huffington Post, May 3, 2009

Do we really want the U.S. to have a “special relationship to Israel” — with all the benefits and allowances this brings to adepts of channeling like Rosen and Weissman, and the sub rosa understanding that the American people have consented to the arrangement? In that case, every friend of Israel is a friend of the U.S., and there is no such thing as spying for Israel. An Israeli agent caught passing state secrets becomes an American agent by definition.

How close is Israel to the United States — in politics, national interest, practice of equality, and other relevant traits? How close do the people of either country wish us to be? AIPAC is based, of course, on an ideology of total identification. It would be absurd to claim that someone could spy on America for California or New York. Someone who seems to be doing that must be trying “to lubricate the wheels of decision-making” between the federal and state governments that are “close but sometimes quarrelsome friends.” The New York Times supposes the idea of information passed from the U.S. to Israel without both sides wanting it passed it is likewise simply absurd. The true doctrine is, they know we know they know. With the exception of the agents at the FBI, and maybe a few U.S. attorneys, everybody understands. But do we?

The suppressed alternative is that we treat Israel as an ally with whom we sympathize, but with whom on occasion we have differences which we are not afraid to show. Can Israel become again, what it once preferred to be, an ally of the United States in the same sense in which France or Australia is an ally? Or will it press, like AIPAC, for total identification of interest and cause? Our friends are your friends, our enemies are your enemies, our weapons are your weapons. And our self-destruction? It is time to slow down and look hard. [continued…]

Hamas: U.S. diplomacy’s final frontier
By Peter Beinart, Time, May 1, 2009

Israel’s new government is a headache the Obama Administration doesn’t need. Compared with Tzipi Livni, the woman he narrowly beat out, and even Ehud Olmert, the man he succeeds, incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahuis cool toward a Palestinian state. And although it includes the moderate Labor Party, Netanyahu’s ruling coalition teems with right-wing figures like Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, whose call for a loyalty oath directed at Israel’s Arab citizens dismays even Israel’s staunchest friends.

But if Israel’s new government is making the Obama team anxious, it’s nothing compared with the government that could be coming together next door in the Palestinian territories — where President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party may join hands with the Islamist militants of Hamas. That’s a problem, since the U.S. won’t have anything to do with Hamas or any government in which it takes part. A few months ago, when Hamas was at odds with Abbas and at war with Israel, that was an easy position to take. But now it’s becoming harder. And sooner or later, the U.S. may have to come to the same painful realization it has arrived at in Iraq and Afghanistan: the only thing worse than talking to terrorists is not talking to them. [continued…]

Lifting the Bush-era veil of secrecy
By Patrick Leahy, Boston Globe, May 3, 2009

The Obama administration’s decision to release more Bush-era memoranda, which sought to rationalize torture, shows that President Obama is following through on his promise to ban torture and to provide transparency to our government. The Bush-Cheney administration not only broke the law, it shattered the public trust and undermined America’s reputation around the world.

After withdrawing the so-called Bybee “torture memo,” the Bush-Cheney administration secretly reinstated the torture policy. While repeatedly claiming that the United States did not torture, the Bush-Cheney administration secretly authorized techniques that included waterboarding – up to 183 times in one case. This was not an “abstract legal theory,” or “hypothetical,” as Alberto Gonzales dismissively described in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. These were specific techniques, authorized by high-ranking US government officials and used on real people. We have prosecuted people for these kinds of acts against Americans, and condemned other nations for sanctioning these methods.

The techniques are wrong and their supposed legal rationale is just as bad. The idea that the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel would be used to contort our laws on subjects as serious as torture is appalling. The rationalization of these memos showed a willingness to ignore legal requirements as long as there is no clear mechanism of enforcement. These memoranda seem calculated to provide legal cover – a legal free pass – for these unlawful policies. The Justice Department was apparently being used to immunize government officials to conduct torture by defining it down and building in legal loopholes. [continued…]