Sharif begins talks on forming new government in Pakistan

The New York Times reports: Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif began talks on Sunday to form a new government, as partial election returns suggested that he and his party would have a commanding hold on Parliament. But Pakistani election officials said final results would take days, even as outrage grew over accusations of rampant vote-rigging, particularly in Karachi.

Mr. Sharif’s main opponent, Imran Khan, in his first public comments since Saturday’s election, said his party would investigate reports of irregularities. His supporters staged protests in Karachi outside the Election Commission office and in the upscale Clifton neighborhood, demanding a new election for all of that port city’s parliamentary seats. They also demonstrated into the night in Lahore.

“There was rigging in Lahore,” Mr. Khan said in a video message recorded at the hospital in Lahore where he was recovering after a serious fall last week. “What happened in Karachi was witnessed by everyone.”

Mr. Khan’s anticorruption campaign electrified the news media and large crowds in the weeks before the vote. But as returns trickled in over the weekend, it became increasingly apparent that his party would get only about 30 of the 272 seats in Parliament. And even the news of possible consolation prizes — having his party win control of the regional government of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, and becoming the new opposition leader — was still up in the air, pending further results. [Continue reading…]

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How the U.S. military protects its own rapists

National Journal reports: Based on the Pentagon’s most recent survey on the issue in 2010, the epidemic [of rapes and sexual assaults] affects more than 19,000 victims each year. Meanwhile, according to annual Veterans Affairs Department surveys, 20 percent of female veterans screen positive for “military sexual trauma,” as do 1 percent of male veterans — many of them victims of male-on-male rape. Cumulatively, the data suggest that hundreds of thousands of current and former members of the military have been raped, sexually assaulted, or subjected to “unwanted” sexual contact. In 2010 alone, the VA conducted nearly 700,000 free outpatient counseling sessions to veterans suffering from military sexual trauma.

And the military-justice system has failed to check that epidemic. Persistent, corroborated accounts (by victims and sex-crimes experts) describe a command climate that tends to cast suspicion and blame on victims. Too often, the system treats reports of rape and sexual assault not as heinous crimes to be prosecuted harshly but as unwanted distractions from “good order and discipline” to be dealt with, hastily, at the lowest command level. Frequently, this means simply transferring or demoting suspected perpetrators for “sexual harassment” and referring distraught victims to uniformed mental-health experts who diagnose them with “personality disorders” and help wash them out of the military.

A decade of conflict has almost certainly exacerbated the scourge. The Army had to relax its recruitment standards to fill the ranks at the height of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and an anonymous 2008 survey by the Naval Health Research Center reported that as many as 15 percent of incoming recruits had either committed or attempted rape before entering the military — twice the rate of their civilian cohorts. Counterinsurgency warfare also placed service members in a high-stress/low-oversight environment that was tailor-made for sexual predators: 25 percent of women and 27 percent of men who claimed “unwanted sexual contact” said that the assaults occurred in combat zones. Army investigators received increased reports of combat-theater rapes only after units returned to their home bases, where victims felt safer to report the assaults. (Of more than 130 women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly 40 percent died of “noncombat-related” injuries, often gunshots. Some were suicides, but others occurred under suspicious circumstances. A number of the deaths came after the women reported being raped.) “About half the women we see with military sexual trauma also have trauma from combat exposure,” said Deleene Menefee, a psychologist at the VA’s medical center in Houston. “On top of taking fire from the enemy outside the gates, they’ve had to cope with the trauma and fear of being attacked by the enemy from within.” [Continue reading…]

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Abuse of psychiatry in the U.S. far more extensive than occured in the Soviet Union

Yes, the headline could sound like hyperbole, but profound criticism of the ways in which psychiatric diagnoses are being applied is now coming from one of the leading bodies in the mental health profession. Moreover, this is more than a challenge to the theoretical underpinnings of modern psychiatry, since the widely accepted views about the nature of major disorders are bound together with assumptions about how they should be treated.

In the Soviet Union, psychiatry became a tool of political oppression used to silence political dissent. In the United States, psychiatry operates in the service of the pharmaceutical industry leading to anti-psychotic drugs having become the top-selling class of drugs.

Abilify, a drug developed to treat schizophrenia, is currently the top selling drug in this country — which does not mean that schizophrenia is the most common illness but rather that so-called “off label” prescribing has been promoted heavily and very effectively by the industry.

In what seems indicative of institutional fraud, linking psychiatry, the pharmaceutical industry, and government, there has been a fivefold increase in the prescribing of antipsychotic drugs being administered to children on Medicaid between the ages of 2-17. Many of these children are being drugged, even when so-called care providers are fully aware that their problems are social, not psychiatric — for instance, from suffering the effects of poverty or family problems. In other words, children who are the victims of the ills of society are being given emotional pain-killers whose purpose is to render them incapable of having feelings, and the drugs they are given dull their capacity to have any feelings — not just painful ones. Frequently they cause what becomes a cascade of unintended effects — effects which then get treated by additional drugs.

In the Soviet Union, no one was likely to be abused by the psychiatric system before they reached adulthood, while in America, millions of children are now being drugged by a system of care that has been corrupted by the interests of profit.

The Guardian reports: There is no scientific evidence that psychiatric diagnoses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are valid or useful, according to the leading body representing Britain’s clinical psychologists.

In a groundbreaking move that has already prompted a fierce backlash from psychiatrists, the British Psychological Society’s division of clinical psychology (DCP) will on Monday issue a statement declaring that, given the lack of evidence, it is time for a “paradigm shift” in how the issues of mental health are understood. The statement effectively casts doubt on psychiatry’s predominantly biomedical model of mental distress – the idea that people are suffering from illnesses that are treatable by doctors using drugs. The DCP said its decision to speak out “reflects fundamental concerns about the development, personal impact and core assumptions of the (diagnosis) systems”, used by psychiatry.

Dr Lucy Johnstone, a consultant clinical psychologist who helped draw up the DCP’s statement, said it was unhelpful to see mental health issues as illnesses with biological causes.

“On the contrary, there is now overwhelming evidence that people break down as a result of a complex mix of social and psychological circumstances – bereavement and loss, poverty and discrimination, trauma and abuse,” Johnstone said. The provocative statement by the DCP has been timed to come out shortly before the release of DSM-5, the fifth edition of the American Psychiatry Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The manual has been attacked for expanding the range of mental health issues that are classified as disorders. For example, the fifth edition of the book, the first for two decades, will classify manifestations of grief, temper tantrums and worrying about physical ill-health as the mental illnesses of major depressive disorder, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder and somatic symptom disorder, respectively. [Continue reading…]

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Boston Globe defends Stephen Hawking’s boycott of Israel

In an editorial, the Boston Globe says: When the esteemed physicist Stephen Hawking announced his decision to boycott Israel’s Presidential Conference, a gathering of politicians, scholars, and other high-profile figures scheduled for June, the response was as predictable as the movement of the cosmos that inspired Hawking’s career. The conference chair, Israel Maimon, called the move “outrageous and improper,” while Omar Barghouti, a founder of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement that advocates protests against Israeli policies, declared, “Palestinians deeply appreciate Stephen Hawking’s support.”

In fact, the decision to withdraw from a conference is a reasonable way to express one’s political views. Observers need not agree with Hawking’s position in order to understand and even respect his choice. The movement that Hawking has signed on to aims to place pressure on Israel through peaceful means. In the context of a Mideast conflict that has caused so much destruction and cost so many lives, nonviolence is something to be encouraged. That is equally true of attempts to inspire cooperation on the Palestinian side.

Chances for a peaceful solution in Israel and Palestine are remote enough without overreactions like Maimon’s. Foreclosing nonviolent avenues to give people a political voice — and maybe bring about an eventual resolution — only makes what is already difficult that much more challenging.

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Noam Chomsky helped lobby Stephen Hawking to stage Israel boycott

The Guardian reports: Noam Chomsky was among 20 academics who privately lobbied Professor Stephen Hawking to boycott a major Israeli conference, it has emerged.

Chomsky, a US professor and well-known supporter of the Palestinian cause, joined British academics from the universities of Cambridge, London, Leeds, Southampton, Warwick, Newcastle, York and the Open University to tell Hawking they were “surprised and deeply disappointed” that he had accepted the invitation to speak at next month’s presidential conference in Jerusalem, which will chaired by Shimon Peres and attended by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.

Hawking pulled out this week in protest at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, in the wake of receiving the letter and soundings from Palestinian colleagues. The 71-year-old theoretical physicist’s decision has been warmly welcomed by Palestinian academics, with one describing it as “of cosmic proportions”, but was attacked in Israel.

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An interview with Pankaj Mishra

Boston Review: Wajahat Ali: Reflecting on recent events, could an argument be made that the disastrous Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis have shifted the axis of power from the United States to rising Asia?

Pankaj Mishra: I don’t think Asians and South Asians have much cause for celebration if power is indeed shifting to the East due to the disastrous blunders of the United States. One still has to ask, whose power? And to whom is it shifting and who in Asia will it eventually benefit? We Asians have shown ourselves very capable of making the same kind of mistakes. I write from Japan, which has its own history of militarism and imperialism, and where the ghost of nationalism is yet to be exorcised. And we know about South Asia’s inability to defuse its toxic nationalisms or provide a degree of social and economic justice to its billion-plus populations.

WA: Your book focuses on late 19th-century cosmopolitan intellectuals, such as Jamal al din Afghani, Liang Qichao, and Tagore, who were early resisters to Western imperialism and colonialism. Do their lives and ideas inform and relate to the dissidents of today, such as the protestors in Tahrir Square, the revolutionaries in Syria, or civil society groups in Malaysia?

PM: People like al-Afghani, Liang, and Tagore were responding, in another era of globalization, to the growing predominance of a mode of political economy vindicated by the great power of the West and to the increasing violence and suffering of non-Western societies as they scrambled to organize themselves for life in the new, ruthless world of international relations. They were at the beginning of the process that we now seem more clearly in places like Egypt, Syria, or Malaysia—the formation of unwieldy and unviable nation-states over multicultural mosaics, the invocation of religious-ethnic solidarities (Malaysia), or the creation and eventual collapse of pro-Western military dictatorships (Egypt) to sustain and legitimize the rule of local elites. I think al-Afghani in 1890s Iran or Liang in early 19th-century imperial China would have recognized the daunting backdrop to ordinary struggles for freedom and dignity today—the general political fragmentation, the loss of the state’s legitimacy everywhere, and the rise of transnational elites who owe primary allegiance to themselves. [Continue reading…]

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Struggling to adapt: The Muslim Brotherhood in a new Syria

A report on the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, by Aron Lund, makes these findings:

The Syrian Brotherhood is not as strong as commonly believed. The incessant focus on the Brotherhood by the Assad regime, Western nations, and rival opposition groups has helped it build a fearsome reputation. Its actual political and organizational capability appears to be far more modest.

The failures of others have benefited the Brotherhood. The real reason for the group’s success in the exile community is the extreme disorganization of the rest of the opposition. As long as rival actors cannot get their act together, the Brotherhood will win by default.

The Brotherhood tries to distance itself from extremism. Despite its theocratic ambitions and a past history of sectarian violence, the Brotherhood now promotes a moderate Islamist approach and seeks to accommodate concerns about its ideology. Since 2011, it has consistently cooperated with secular groups, spoken in favor of multiparty democracy, and worked through mainstream opposition frameworks such as the Syrian National Council, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, and the Free Syrian Army.

Several armed groups linked to the Brotherhood fight in Syria. The leadership refuses to admit to having an armed branch, but Brotherhood exiles have been funding armed groups since late 2011. The organization now controls or sponsors dozens of small paramilitary units inside Syria.

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Car bombs in Turkey kill at least 42 near Syria border

The Los Angeles Times reports: At least 42 people were reported dead Saturday in a pair of car bombings in the southern Turkish town of Reyhanli, the latest apparent example of spillover violence from the conflict in nearby Syria.

More than 140 people were injured, with at least 20 in critical condition, according to Turkish officials and news reports.

The blasts reportedly caused panic in the town, where tension has arisen between Syrian refugees and Turkish residents. Reyhanli, in Hatay province, is just a few miles from the Syrian border and has been a magnet for Syrian refugees and rebels.

After the bombings, outraged Turks attacked Syrians and cars with Syrian license plates, according to reports from a resident and the BBC, which quoted local news reports.

Some Turks have objected to the influx of Syrian refugees and express fear that the region is being dragged into the Syrian conflict.

“I never witnessed any explosions when I was in Syria so they brought them here so I wouldn’t miss out,” said a Syrian woman, Fairouz, reached in her home in Reyhanli. “Today they are giving us many surprises.”

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Sharif poised to form strong government after Pakistan poll

Reuters reports: Toppled in a 1999 military coup, jailed and exiled, Pakistan’s Nawaz Sharif has made a triumphant election comeback and looks set to form a stable government capable of implementing reforms needed to rescue the fragile economy.

Sharif may not win enough seats to rule on his own but has built up enough momentum to avoid having to form a coalition with his main rivals, former cricketer Imran Khan’s Tehrik-i-Insaf (PTI) and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).

The steel magnate held off a challenge from Khan, who had hoped to break decades of dominance by Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) and the PPP, led by the Bhutto family.

The two parties have formed governments whenever the military, the most powerful force in the nuclear-armed nation, has allowed civilian rule.

Khan put up a strong fight and he is likely to remain a force in politics, possibly becoming the main opposition figure. The PPP, which led the government for the last five years, has done badly and could come in third place.

Television channels said of the results declared by midday on Sunday, Sharif’s PML-N had captured 94 of the 272 contested National Assembly seats.

Based on trends, it was likely to get around 130, and should easily be able to make up the required majority of 137 with support from independents and small parties.

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New York Times Pakistan bureau chief expelled on eve of country’s election

The Guardian reports: The New York Times’ Pakistan bureau chief has been expelled from the country, on the eve of the national election.

The paper said Pakistan’s Interior Ministry had not explained why it ordered Declan Walsh out of the country. Police officers delivered the interior ministry’s order to Walsh at his home at 12.30am local time on Thursday.

“It is informed that your visa is hereby canceled in view of your undesirable activities,” the order said. “You are therefore advised to leave the country within 72 hours.”

This means Walsh must leave Pakistan by the night of the elections. Saturday’s election is being hailed as a milestone in the development of the country’s much abused democracy – it is the first time in Pakistan’s history that one elected government has handed power to another.
[…]
Walsh told the New York Times he was away from his home when he received a phone call from an unrecognized number that said: “Come home now.” He said a half-dozen police officers and a plainclothes officer were waiting outside his home. The plainclothes officer then gave him the order and asked him to sign for it.

“I opened the letter in front of him because I knew it was something serious,” he said. “This was a complete bolt from the blue. I had no inclination that anything of this sort was coming.”

The finger of blame is likely to be pointed at the country’s powerful military establishment, which made clear its anger at some of Walsh’s reporting, particularly on the CIA’s clandestine drone programme, an extremely controversial subject in the country.

In March, Walsh reported that unnamed US officials had denied two drone strikes that had been reported by Pakistan’s media, most likely based on information provided by Pakistan’s military intelligence service. The report suggested the army “may be using the [drone] program to disguise its own operations”.

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Voting in Pakistan

Basharat Peer writes: [O]n Saturday, Pakistan was overwhelmed by an enthusiastic outpouring of voters across classes and ethnicities. Some waited for hours to get into the polling booths. Some walked miles, in temperatures ranging from a hundred to a hundred and ten degrees Farenheit. Some had flown from U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, and the United States, taking time off from their jobs, to be able to cast their votes and make a statement in favour of sustained civilian rule, in hope of a better Pakistan.

One of the Pakistanis who partly lives abroad is the London-based novelist, Kamila Shamsie, the author, most recently, of “Burnt Shadows.” Shamsie had returned to her city, Karachi, before the elections. As she left home to vote, she began to tweet #pollingboothtales describing the atmosphere. Shamsie was moved by a mass turnout of women voters: “They came in niqab, they came in hijab, they came in combat trousers and even a kaftan,” she tweeted.

Shamsie had never seen voters in Pakistan so intent on making it to the polling booths and casting their ballots. “I went to vote in the morning, stood around two hours with very good-natured, chatty women all around me. Then it turned out that the ballot papers were invalid because they didn’t have the necessary official stamp,” Shamsie told me. She went home and returned after an hour. “An hour or so later the stamps arrived at the polling booth and I went back, queued for another two hours. People were wilting, but still determined. And I finally cast my vote. I am very moved by the Pakistan populace’s faith in this battered process, and I’d like to see that honored by the government (probably a coalition) which comes in,” she continued. [Continue reading…]

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Two last-minute candidates stir up Iran presidential race

The Los Angeles Times reports: The run-up to Iran’s June presidential election took a dramatic turn Saturday with last-minute candidacy announcements by two controversial political figures: former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, top aide to outgoing incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In the final moments before the five-day registration period expired, Rafsanjani and Mashaei arrived via separate entrances at the Interior Ministry, where all would-be candidates were required to sign up by 6 p.m. Saturday.

Their cinematic entrance prompted cheers from rival groups of supporters who had gathered outside. Scuffles then erupted between the two groups, and order was not restored until police responded.

Ahmadinejad accompanied Mashaei, and the longtime friends held their hands aloft in a show of mutual support. Mashaei thanked the departing president, barred by law from seeking a third four-year term, for encouraging him to run.

Despite the theatrics, neither of the two candidates is guaranteed a place on the June 14 ballot. The Guardian Council, composed of senior clerics and jurists, vets candidates to determine who is qualified to run based on a series of criteria.

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Human activity pushes atmospheric carbon dioxide to highest level in 3 million years

LiveScience reports: The proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere broke 400 parts per million Thursday, according to one of the best climate records available.

The Keeling Curve, a daily record of atmospheric carbon dioxide, has been running continuously since March 1958, when a carbon dioxide monitor was installed at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. On the first day, the observatory measured a carbon dioxide concentration of 313 parts per million (ppm). The number means there were 313 molecules of carbon dioxide in the air per every million air molecules.

Now, the Keeling Curve has reached 400 ppm for the first time in human history, with a new measure of 400.03 ppm. The data are preliminary, pending quality control checks, according to the National Oceaninc and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

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‘America at its worst’

The Boston Globe reports: The secret transport of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s body from Worcester to a small community near Richmond, Va., was set in motion by a woman who said she was upset to hear about protests to his burial and wanted to see an end to the weeklong burial saga.

Martha Mullen, 48, of Richmond, said she was dismayed reports of protests outside of Graham Putnam & Mahoney Funeral Parlors in Worcester that she heard on National Public Radio.

“It portrayed America at its worst,” she said in an interview with the Globe this morning. “The fact that people were picketing this poor man who was just trying to help [funeral director Peter Stefan] really upset me.”

Mullen, a licensed professional counselor who has lived in Richmond for most of her life, said she was sitting in a Starbucks Tuesday when it hit her: She could be the one to end the controversy.

“Jesus says [to] love our enemies,” said Mullen, who holds a degree from United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. “So I was sitting in Starbucks and thought, maybe I’m the one person who needs to do something.”

Matthew 5:43-45: Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

Under the umbrella of the notion that America is a Christian nation, there really seem to be two faiths that compete for the prominent role of offering spiritual guidance to this country: Christianity and Americanism, and Americanism invariably is much more dominant.

Christian and non-Christian alike are generally aware that the teaching, love your enemy, is fundamental to Christianity. It’s not off on some doctrinal periphery — some kind of quaint injunction to be followed merely by the most pious among the faithful. On the contrary, it can be seen as a kind of litmus test that separates the faithful from the hypocrites. Yet there is a transparent contradiction between this feature of Christianity and American values.

For over a decade, American national fervor has been wrapped around the idea that nothing is of greater importance than national defense and combating terrorism. America’s need to assert global dominance is at the core of Americanism — evident whenever the chant, USA — USA — USA, articulates an allegiance to power. But there is nothing Christian about this identification with national power, which makes it all the more absurd that so many Americans seem to believe that you can wrap yourself in the flag, crush your enemies, and still claim to follow Jesus.

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History repeats itself with ‘war on terror’

Remi Brulin writes: More than a decade after the 9/11 attacks, we are finally getting a clearer picture of the ways in which the United States is waging what it calls its “war on terrorism.”

At the center of the government’s strategy has been the decision to shift the focus away from capturing and interrogating alleged terrorist suspects to killing them, with a series of covert wars prosecuted mostly by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command frequently relying on so-called kinetic operations: night raids, “find, fix and finish” operations, cruise missile strikes, and the increasing use of drones.

Yet these approaches raise not only fundamental legal and moral questions, but also doubts about their long-term strategic effectiveness. And, to a historian, they also carry disturbing echoes of the past.

Decades ago, Latin American regimes allied with the U.S., and then the U.S. government itself, insisted that they were fighting a war on terrorism. In the process, they resorted to methods and tactics that themselves fit any reasonable definition of terrorism. Indeed, America’s “targeted killings” and the 2004 decision to fund and train Iraqi special commandos echo very specific practices of the 1970s and 1980s. Considered in such a historical context, they highlight some of the fundamental contradictions and inconsistencies that lie at the heart of the discourse on terrorism. [Continue reading…]

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