In Libya, the captors have become the captive

The New York Times reports: One night last September, a prisoner named Naji Najjar was brought, blindfolded and handcuffed, to an abandoned military base on the outskirts of Tripoli. A group of young men in camouflage pushed him into a dimly lit interrogation room and forced him to his knees. The commander of the militia, a big man with disheveled hair and sleepy eyes, stood behind Najjar. “What do you want?” the commander said, clutching a length of industrial pipe.

“What do you mean?” the prisoner said.

“What do you want?” the commander repeated. He paused. “Don’t you remember?”

Of course Najjar remembered. Until a few weeks earlier, he was a notorious guard at one of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s prisons. Then Tripoli fell, and the same men he’d beaten for so long tracked him down at his sister’s house and dragged him to their base. Now they were mimicking his own sadistic ritual. Every day, Najjar greeted the prisoners with the words What do you want? forcing them to beg for the pipe — known in the prison by its industrial term, PPR — or be beaten twice as badly. The militia commander now standing behind him, Jalal Ragai, had been one of his favorite victims.

“What do you want?” Jalal said for the last time. He held the very same pipe that had so often been used on him.

“PPR!” Najjar howled, and his former victim brought the rod down on his back.

I heard this story in early April from Naji Najjar himself. He was still being held captive by the militia, living with 11 other men who had killed and tortured for Qaddafi, in a large room with a single barred window and mattresses piled on the floor. The rebels had attached a white metal plate onto the door and a couple of big bolts, to make it look more like a prison. Najjar’s old PPR pipe and falga, a wooden stick used to raise prisoners’ legs in order to beat them on the soles of the feet, rested on a table upstairs. They had gotten some use in the first months of his confinement, when former victims and their relatives came to the base to deliver revenge beatings. One rebel laughed as he told me about a woman whose brother had his finger cut off in prison: when she found the man who did it, she beat him with a broom until it broke. Now, though, the instruments of torture were mostly museum pieces. After six months in captivity, Najjar — Naji to everyone here — had come to seem more clown than villain, and the militiamen had appointed him their cook. Slouching in an armchair among a group of rebels who smoked and chatted casually, Najjar recounted his strange journey from guard to prisoner. “One of the visitors once broke the PPR on me,” he told me.

“Naji, that wasn’t a PPR; it was plastic,” one rebel shot back. “You could beat a pig with a PPR all day, and it wouldn’t break.” Besides, he said, the visitor in question had a ruptured disc from one of Naji’s own beatings, so it was only fair. The men then got into a friendly argument about Naji’s favorite tactics for beating and whether he had used a pipe or a hose when he gashed Jalal’s forehead back in July.

The militia’s deputy commander strolled into the room and gave Najjar’s palm a friendly slap. “Hey, Sheik Naji,” he said. “You got a letter.” The commander opened it and began to read. “It’s from your brother,” he said, and his face lit up with a derisive smile. “It says: ‘Naji is being held by an illegal entity, being tortured on a daily basis, starved and forced to sign false statements.’ Oh, and look at this — the letter is copied to the army and the Higher Security Committee!” This last detail elicited a burst of laughter from the men in the room. Even Naji seemed to find it funny. “We always tell the relatives the same thing,” one man added, for my benefit: “There is no legal entity for us to hand the prisoners over to.”

Libya has no army. It has no government. These things exist on paper, but in practice, Libya has yet to recover from the long maelstrom of Qaddafi’s rule. The country’s oil is being pumped again, but there are still no lawmakers, no provincial governors, no unions and almost no police. Streetlights in Tripoli blink red and green and are universally ignored. Residents cart their garbage to Qaddafi’s ruined stronghold, Bab al-Aziziya, and dump it on piles that have grown mountainous, their stench overpowering. Even such basic issues as property ownership are in a state of profound confusion. Qaddafi nationalized much of the private property in Libya starting in 1978, and now the old owners, some of them returning after decades abroad, are clamoring for the apartments and villas and factories that belonged to their grandparents. I met Libyans brandishing faded documents in Turkish and Italian, threatening to take up arms if their ancestral tracts of land were not returned.

What Libya does have is militias, more than 60 of them, manned by rebels who had little or no military or police training when the revolution broke out less than 15 months ago. They prefer to be called katibas, or brigades, and their members are universally known as thuwar, or revolutionaries. Each brigade exercises unfettered authority over its turf, with “revolutionary legitimacy” as its only warrant. Inside their barracks — usually repurposed schools, police stations or security centers — a vast experiment in role reversal is being carried out: the guards have become the prisoners and the prisoners have become the guards. There are no rules, and each katiba is left to deal in its own way with the captives, who range from common criminals to Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, the deposed leader’s son and onetime heir apparent. Some have simply replicated the worst tortures that were carried out under the old regime. More have exercised restraint. Almost all of them have offered victims a chance to confront their former torturers face to face, to test their instincts, to balance the desire for revenge against the will to make Libya into something more than a madman’s playground. [Continue reading…]

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Syria’s election charade could trigger yet more unrest

Jane Kinninmont writes: Middle Eastern rulers are well acquainted with the arts of cosmetic reform. But Syria’s electoral charade is only likely to anger the opposition. On Tuesday, the UN peace envoy to Syria, Kofi Annan, gave a sobering press conference saying that torture in Syria was worsening, that the government still appeared to be using heavy weapons, and that there is a high risk of civil war. His spokesman added that there are credible reports that Syrians who speak to the UN observers – who number just 60 – are at risk of being arrested or even killed.

The same day, the head of the Red Cross said 1.5 million Syrians were in need of humanitarian aid; and opposition activists at the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said more than 800 people, mostly civilians, have been killed since the internationally brokered “ceasefire” began on 25 April. The Turkish prime minister, Recip Erdogan, said there had been 10,000 deaths, 25,000 refugees in Turkey and 100,000 in Jordan, and that President Bashar al-Assad’s regime is “finished”.

Meanwhile, in Damascus, officials enthused about the country’s parliamentary election, held on Monday. The ever-friendly Tehran Times described the “environment of democracy” and quoted the interior minister saying there were “no problems, except some minor things that usually occur in elections”. The Syrian government will be hoping that the election will help it to regain legitimacy and marginalise an opposition it continues to brand as terrorists and thugs. It follows a February referendum on constitutional amendments that – in theory – ended the one-party rule of the Syrian Ba’ath, and limited any holder of the presidency to a maximum of two seven-year terms (Assad has been in office for 12 years). The government also formally lifted the emergency law that had been in place in Syria for decades. But in the context of the uprising and the subsequent state-led violence, it’s clear these “reforms” are too little, too late.

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Annan sounds Syria civil war warning

Al Jazeera reports: Kofi Annan, the international envoy, has said his six-point peace plan for Syria is a “possible last chance to avoid civil war”.

Annan, the UN-Arab League envoy entrusted with bringing an end to the violence, said on Tuesday that world powers shared a “profound concern” that Syria’s violence was escalating into civil war.

He said they had pledged to deploy 300 truce monitors to Syria by the end of the month.

Addressing the UN Security Council from the Swiss city of Geneva via video-link, Annan said there had been “a spate of bombings that are really worrying” and that the UN mission, mandated with monitoring a April 12 ceasefire in the country, “is the only remaining chance to stabilise the country”.

The peace bid was not an “open-ended” opportunity for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Annan said.

“There is a profound concern that the country could otherwise descend into full civil war, and the implications of that are frightening,” he said.

Annan said failure to prevent a civil war “will not only affect Syria, it will have an impact on the whole region”.

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The Saudis and al Qaeda

CNN reports: The chairman of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee expressed dismay that someone leaked information about a double agent who infiltrated al Qaeda and helped foil a plot to blow up a U.S.-bound plane.

“It’s really, to me, unfortunate that this has gotten out, because this could really interfere with operations overseas,” Rep. Peter King of New York told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday. “My understanding is a major investigation is going to be launched because of this.”

The double agent, who volunteered as a suicide bomber for the terrorist group, was actually working as an intelligence agent for Saudi Arabia, a source in the region familiar with the operation told CNN.

The man left Yemen, traveled through the United Arab Emirates and gave the bomb and information about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to the CIA, Saudi intelligence and other foreign intelligence agencies, the source said.

The agent works for Saudi intelligence, which has cooperated with the CIA for years, the source said.

“Indeed, we always were the ones managing him,” the source told CNN.

The suspected bomb-maker is a Saudi called Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri.

Richard Barrett, who heads the al Qaeda-Taliban sanctions monitoring committee at the United Nations, told Reuters he was “pretty certain” Asiri was the top suspect in the latest plot.

Saudi intelligence presumably knows a lot about him since he served nine months in jail in Saudi Arabia for attempting to join a militant group in Iraq to fight U.S. troops there.

He later moved to Yemen and joined AQAP, providing the bomb that killed his younger brother in a failed bid to assassinate Saudi counter-terrorism chief Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in 2009.

Later that year, security sources say, Asiri was behind the attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day. Both the Detroit airliner bomb and the bomb used in the failed attack on the Saudi prince turned out to have been sewn into the would-be bombers’ underwear…

In the latest plot, although an unnamed Saudi agent is said to have infiltrated AQAP, it’s hard not to wonder whether he was already a member of the group and he was then recruited by the Saudis. Given that in a previous plot, Asira used his own brother as a suicide bomber, the agent in the current case might also have had close ties to the bomb maker. Moreover, given the political unrest in Yemen and the existence of a Shia insurgency, it’s also reasonable to ask whether the Saudis see al Qaeda as both a threat and an asset.

“We always were the ones managing [the agent],” CNN quotes their source saying, and although this source is merely identified as “a source in the region familiar with the operation,” the “we” in this quote presumably refers to Saudi intelligence.

“It’s really, to me, unfortunate that this has gotten out, because this could really interfere with operations overseas,” says Rep. Peter King. Indeed. But it could prove more than unfortunate but acutely embarrassing if it turned out that the U.S. has become an occasional beneficiary of Saudi Arabia’s ambiguous relationship with al Qaeda.

At a time that the issue of possible ties between the Saudi government and the 9/11 attacks are once again being raised, the Saudis clearly have an incentive to present evidence that their fight is strictly against al Qaeda.

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Double agents and drones

A successful infiltration of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula by a Saudi intelligence agent with CIA oversight will be hailed in Washington as a major success, but it begs an important question: if the operations of the bomb maker, Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso, could be tracked so closely, why couldn’t he have been arrested instead of killed by a drone strike?

The supposed rationale for assassinating suspected terrorists by remote control is that they are so elusive and operate in such inaccessible locations that capture is impossible. It’s hard to imagine how this could have been the case with al Quso. He must effectively have been under surveillance and rather than make use of what might have been multiple opportunities to arrest him, the CIA apparently decided there was no need — he could simply be eliminated whenever necessary.

As a battlefield practice, take no prisoners is considered a war crime. For the Obama administration it has become standard procedure — and a procedure that the American journalists virtually never question.

The New York Times reports: The would-be suicide bomber dispatched by the Yemen branch of Al Qaeda last month to blow up a United States-bound airliner was actually an intelligence agent for Saudi Arabia who infiltrated the terrorist group and volunteered for the suicide mission, American and foreign officials said Tuesday.

In an extraordinary intelligence coup, the double agent left Yemen, traveling by way of the United Arab Emirates, and delivered both the innovative bomb designed for his air attack and critical information on the group’s leaders to the C.I.A., Saudi and other foreign intelligence agencies.

After spending weeks at the center of the terrorist network’s most dangerous affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the agent provided critical information that permitted the C.I.A. to direct the drone strike on Sunday that killed Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso, the group’s external operations director and a suspect in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000.

He also handed over the bomb, designed by the group’s top explosives expert to be invisible to airport security, to the F.B.I., which is analyzing its properties.

Officials said the agent, whose identity they would not disclose, works for the Saudi intelligence service, which has cooperated closely with the C.I.A. for several years against the terrorist group in Yemen. He operated in Yemen with the full knowledge of the C.I.A., but not under its direct supervision, the officials said.

The agent is now safe in Saudi Arabia, officials said. The bombing plot was kept secret for weeks by the C.I.A. and other agencies because they feared retaliation against the agent and his family.

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A plan to turn on the peace process or start a war?

A month ago, Shaul Mofaz, the then newly-elected leader of Israel’s Kadima party said, “I intend to replace Netanyahu,” and insisted, “I will not join his government.” Some time between then and now, he changed his mind.

The New York Times reports: The chairman of the opposition in the Israeli Parliament agreed early Tuesday morning to join the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a surprise move that staves off early elections and creates a new unity coalition with a huge legislative majority, according to a spokesman for the chairman.

The spokesman, Yuval Harel, said that Shaul Mofaz, the newly elected head of the centrist Kadima Party, would become a special minister in Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet “in charge of the process with the Palestinians.” Two other conditions of the agreement, which Mr. Harel said would be announced at a 10:30 a.m. news conference on Tuesday, were that the Parliament would pass legislation to require national or military service of all Israeli citizens, including ultra-Orthodox Jews, and to overhaul the electoral process itself. The agreement is scheduled to run until late next year.

Mr. Harel said that Mr. Mofaz, a former defense minister and military chief who ousted Tzipi Livni in last month’s Kadima primary, met with Mr. Netanyahu “at midnight at the prime minister’s home in Jerusalem and they signed a contract.”

“It was at the initiation of both sides,” Mr. Harel added. “This is the best way to get influence.”

Mr. Netanyahu had said in a speech to the convention of his right-leaning Likud Party on Sunday night that he wanted early elections to avoid the instability of a campaign season stretching more than a year. With his coalition divided over how to replace a law expiring Aug. 1 that exempted many religious Jews from military service, it seemed that the current government had decided to disband. Elections were scheduled for Sept. 4 rather than when the government’s term expires, in October 2013.

The deal, which was first reported online by The Jerusalem Post, came after the Israeli Parliament took the first steps Monday to dissolve itself. “Moments before the dissolution of the Knesset, a hasty meeting to establish a national unity government,” Carmel Shama-Cohen, a Likud member of Parliament, wrote on his Facebook wall.

With Kadima’s 28 seats in Parliament, Mr. Netanyahu will have a government that includes 96 of the 120 lawmakers, covering a broad section of the political spectrum.

A spokesman for the prime minister’s office said he could not confirm the online reports of the deal. But Mr. Harel said that Mr. Mofaz met in the early hours with the members of his faction and that they had all approved it, though the chairman is the only Kadima member who will get a minister’s portfolio and join in Mr. Netanyahu’s closed cabinet forums.

If taking over a peace process that has been hopelessly stalled seems a dubious prize, Mr. Harel said it would soon be proven otherwise. “That’s part of the deal,” he said. “To turn on the process.”

Larry Derfner writes: Why does a national leader decide to scrap new elections that he and everyone else knows he’s going to win by a landslide, which is what Bibi did last night? Because he’s got important work to do and he wants what’s called “industrial peace” – or, as Netanyahu himself put it, “stability.” Our national leader wants to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities and he’s waiting for the right opportunity to do so – when the Obama administration is hard put to stop him, meaning sometime between now and the November 2 U.S. presidential elections. Starting such a war is going to require every gram of attention and effort Bibi can call forth, and he doesn’t want the pressure of elections and forming a new government as (huge) distractions, which he would have had from now into October if he’d gone ahead with elections in September. Now, without those elections and with an absolutely unshakable coalition, he can give his full concentration to saving Israel from annihilation, as he sees it.

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In preparation for war against Iran, U.S. set to give Israel largest grant of military aid ever

Following a decision by the U.S. House of Representatives Defense Appropriations Subcommittee which just approved over $948 million in funding for Israel’s anti-missile defense programs, Israel will receive a record $4 billion in military aid in 2013.

The Jewish Press reports: Approximately $679 million of the funding will go to the Iron Dome, thanks in large part to legislation initiated last month by Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) and Howard Berman (D-Calif.), chairwoman and ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, respectively.

The remaining $269 million will go to Israel’s other anti-missile initiatives: the short-range David’s Sling ($149.7 million), and the current long-range Arrow anti-ballistic missile system and its successor the Arrow 3 ($119.3 million). These projects, unlike the Iron Dome, are joint Israel-US projects.

While the increase in funding for the Iron Dome was expected, with the Department of Defense stating in March that it “intends to request an appropriate level of funding from Congress to support such acquisitions based on Israeli requirements and production capacity,” the funding for the other projects represents an increase of $169 million over the Obama administration’s proposed number.

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Bahrain may not be Syria, but that’s no reason for activists to turn a blind eye

David Wearing writes: A violent crackdown on a broad-based, pro-democracy movement is, with the best will in the world, never going to be the easiest thing to defend. Nor is the staging of a major international sporting event in the country in question, when the regime is obviously going to try to use that event to help launder its reputation in the eyes of the world. Still, it remains inevitable that, when power and profit are at stake, the indefensible will be loudly defended. So it proved with last month’s Bahrain Grand Prix.

One recurring theme in the efforts to deflect criticism of the race was the line that there are worse places than Bahrain. Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmad Al Khalifa, the regime’s foreign minister, tweeted: “If any here to cover ugly bloody confrontations, go to syria. Here we have a grand Prix to enjoy”. Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone advised journalists to “Go to Syria and write about those things because it’s more important than here”.

Even David Cameron, while dodging the question of whether the race should proceed and making the standard noises about the importance of Britain’s ally undertaking political reforms, echoed the line when he said: “I think we should be clear: Bahrain is not Syria.”

The retort from Ecclestone and the Bahraini foreign minister, that worse things are happening elsewhere, also happens to be a favourite of the Israeli state and its defenders. A week before the Bahrain Grand Prix, activists arriving in Israel to protest about its treatment of the occupied Palestinians were presented with a letter from the prime minister’s office, noting that they had not chosen to protest against the Syrian or Iranian regimes, or against Hamas’s rule in Gaza, but instead had chosen “the Middle East’s sole democracy, where women are equal, the press criticizes the government, human rights organizations can operate freely, religious freedom is protected for all and minorities do not live in fear”.

Activists and journalists who draw attention to Israeli human rights abuses are by now well accustomed to hearing this argument being made, sometimes with the accompanying insinuation that Israel is being “singled out” for more sinister reasons. It is interesting to see this rhetorical device being employed in both these situations, and of course, fairly obvious problems apply in each case. [Continue reading…]

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Secret U.S. program releases high-level Taliban prisoners in exchange for pledges of peace

The Washington Post reports: The United States has for several years been secretly releasing high-level detainees from a military prison in Afghanistan as part of negotiations with insurgent groups, a bold effort to quell violence but one that U.S. officials acknowledge poses substantial risks.

As the United States has unsuccessfully pursued a peace deal with the Taliban, the “strategic release” program has quietly served as a live diplomatic channel, allowing American officials to use prisoners as bargaining chips in restive provinces where military power has reached its limits.

But the releases are an inherent gamble: The freed detainees are often notorious fighters who would not be released under the traditional legal system for military prisoners in Afghanistan. They must promise to give up violence — and U.S. officials warn them that if they are caught attacking American troops, they will be detained once again.

There are no absolute guarantees, however, and officials would not say whether those who have been released under the program have later returned to attack U.S. and Afghan forces once again.

“Everyone agrees they are guilty of what they have done and should remain in detention. Everyone agrees that these are bad guys. But the benefits outweigh the risks,” said one U.S. official who, like others, discussed the issue on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the program.

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Election puts French Afghan force on notice

The New York Times reports: A spokesman for the French military here said that about a fourth of French troops were on course to leave Afghanistan by the end of this year, while they awaited word on whether the new French president would speed up their withdrawal.

Troops from France, the fifth-biggest troop-contributing country in the NATO-led coalition, would drop to 2,600 by the end of the year, from 3,400 now, according to Lt. Col. Francois Guillermet, a spokesman for the French military.

About 200 French troops, mostly combat forces, left Afghanistan in March ahead of schedule in the wake of an attack by a rogue Afghan soldier that killed four French soldiers and wounded 15.

President-elect François Hollande of France had said during the election campaign that he would withdraw all French combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2012 — a year sooner than France’s already accelerated withdrawal.

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Trying to mold a post-Assad Syria from abroad

The New York Times reports: Emad ad-Din al-Rashid, a former assistant dean at the Islamic law college of Damascus University, opened his MacBook Air laptop and flipped through spreadsheets detailing the unmet needs of seemingly every besieged neighborhood across Syria.

From his spare office in a fifth-floor walk-up on a drab Istanbul street, Mr. Rashid spends eight hours a day calling into Syria, mostly to lobby hundreds of his former theology students to join his new Syria National Movement, patiently building a network that he hopes will one day become the Islamist movement’s power base.

While opposition groups are mostly concentrating on ending the brutish rule of President Bashar al-Assad, they are also positioning themselves for the longer-term question of who will rule in a post-Assad era. For that, they know from watching what happened in other Arab countries like Tunisia and Egypt that they need a good ground game.

“The Syrian people don’t want to hear about politics right now, they want to focus on toppling the regime,” said Mr. Rashid, 47, an amiable man with a neatly trimmed, salt-and-pepper beard. “But you have to be present politically before the system falls.”

A broad spectrum of political organizations outside the country are jockeying for position, anticipating a new, democratic government in Syria for the first time since a 1963 military coup established the supremacy of the Baath Party and emasculated the rest.

The jockeying has alienated many Syrians, particularly those inside, who complain that members of the fractious opposition exile group, the Syrian National Council, are fixated more on grabbing appointments that they can leverage into domestic influence later than on forging the unity needed to defeat the government. The wrestling continues nonetheless. It remains unclear which group, if any, will emerge the dominant player.

Given the triumphant sweep of Islamist parties across North Africa, Syria’s Islamist leaders itch with anticipation that this is their moment, too. The Muslim Brotherhood is the dominant actor, but two other Islamist organizations, the National Action Group and Mr. Rashid’s Syria National Movement, are vying for influence. All are based abroad.

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The emperor has no clothes: Palestinians and the end of the peace process

International Crisis Group, Middle East Report #122, executive summary: Does anybody still believe in the Middle East Peace Process? Nineteen years after Oslo and thirteen years after a final settlement was supposed to be reached, prospects for a two-state solution are as dim as ever. The international community mechanically goes through the motions, with as little energy as conviction. The parties most directly concerned, the Israeli and Palestinian people, appear long ago to have lost hope. Substantive gaps are wide, and it has become a challenge to get the sides in the same room. The bad news is the U.S. presidential campaign, Arab Spring, Israel’s focus on Iran and European financial woes portend a peacemaking hiatus. The good news is such a hiatus is badly needed. The expected diplomatic lull is a chance to reconsider basic pillars of the process – not to discard the two-state solution, for no other option can possibly attract mutual assent; nor to give up on negotiations, for no outcome will be imposed from outside. But to incorporate new issues and constituencies; rethink Palestinian strategy to alter the balance of power; and put in place a more effective international architecture.

For all the scepticism surrounding the ways of the past, breaking with them will not come easily. Few may still believe in the peace process, but many still see significant utility in it. Ongoing negotiations help Washington manage its relations with the Arab world and to compensate for close ties to Israel with ostensible efforts to meet Palestinian aspirations. Europeans have found a role, bankrolling the Palestinian Authority and, via the Quartet, earning a seat at one of the most prestigious diplomatic tables – a satisfaction they share with Russia and the UN Secretary-General. Peace talks are highly useful to Israel for deflecting international criticism and pressure.

Palestinians suffer most from the status quo, yet even they stand to lose if the comatose process finally were pronounced dead. The Palestinian Authority (PA) might collapse and with it the economic and political benefits it generates as well as the assistance it attracts. For the Palestinian elite, the peace process has meant relative comfort in the West Bank as well as constant, high-level diplomatic attention. Without negotiations, Fatah would lose much of what has come to be seen as its raison d’être and would be even more exposed to Hamas’s criticism.

But the reason most often cited for maintaining the existing peace process is the conviction that halting it risks creating a vacuum that would be filled with despair and chaos. The end result is that the peace process, for all its acknowledged shortcomings, over time has become a collective addiction that serves all manner of needs, reaching an agreement no longer being the main one. And so the illusion continues, for that largely is what it is.

More than any others, Palestinians have become aware of this trap, so have been the first to tinker with different approaches. But tinker is the appropriate term: their leadership, in its quest to reshuffle the deck, has flitted from one idea to another and pursued tracks simultaneously without fully thinking through the alternatives or committing to a single one. For a time, it seemed that President Mah­moud Abbas’s September 2011 speech at the UN General Assembly – resolute and assertive – might presage a momentous shift in strategy. But after the Security Council buried Palestine’s application for UN membership in committee, the logical follow-up – an effort to gain support for statehood at the General Assembly – was ignored. After admittance to one UN agency, the leadership froze further efforts. After refusing negotiations unless Israel froze settlements and without clear terms of reference, Abbas consented to talks. After threatening to dissolve the PA, central figures waved off the idea and declared the PA a strategic asset. After reaching a reconciliation agreement with Hamas, the two parties reverted to bickering.

One can fault the Palestinian leadership for lack of vision, yet there is good reason for its irresoluteness. Whatever it chooses to do would carry a potentially heavy price and at best uncertain gain. Negotiations are viewed by a majority of Palestinians as a fool’s errand, so a decision to resume without fulfilment of Abbas’s demands (settlement freeze and agreed terms of reference) could be costly for his movement’s future. His hesitation is all the stronger now that he has persuaded himself that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s positions are incompatible with a two-state solution. A decisive Palestinian move at the UN (whether at the General Assembly or in seeking agency membership) likely would prompt a cut-off in U.S. aid and suspension of tax clearance revenue transfers by Israel. A joint government with Hamas could trigger similar consequences without assurance that elections could be held or territorial unity between the West Bank and Gaza restored. Getting rid of the PA could backfire badly, leaving many public employees and their families penniless while also leading to painful Israeli counter-measures.

The trouble with all these domestic and international justifications for not rocking the boat is that they are less and less convincing and that perpetuating the status quo is not cost-free. A process that is turning in circles undermines the credibility of all its advocates. It cannot effectively shelter the U.S. from criticism or Israel from condemnation. Europe can fund a PA whose expiration date has passed only for so long. The Palestinian leadership is facing ever sharpening questioning of its approach. Most of all, the idea that to end the existing process would create a dangerous vacuum wildly exaggerates the process’s remaining credibility and thus assumes it still serves as a substitute for a vacuum – when in reality it widely is considered vacuous itself.

Finding an alternative approach is no mean feat. Contrary to what some say, or hope, it is not a one-state solution – which is championed, in very different versions, by elements of both the Israeli and Palestinian political spectrums. A one-state reality already is in place, but as a solution it almost certainly would face insurmountable challenges – beginning with the fact that it is fiercely opposed by a vast majority of Jewish Israelis, who view it as antithetical to their basic aspiration. By the same token, even though alternatives to the current process should be pursued, a solution ultimately will be found only through negotiations.

What should be explored is a novel approach to a negotiated two-state solution that seeks to heighten incentives for reaching a deal and disincentives for sticking with the status quo, while offering a different type of third-party mediation. In this spirit, four traditionally neglected areas ought to be addressed:

New issues. At the core of the Oslo process was the notion that a peace agreement would need to deal with issues emanating from the 1967 War – the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza – as opposed to those that arose in 1948 from the establishment of Israel, the trauma of the accompanying war and the displacement of the vast majority of Palestinians. But if that logic was ever persuasive, it no longer is. On one side, the character of the State of Israel; recognition of Jewish history; regional security concerns extending beyond the Jordan River; and the connection with the entire Land of Israel have been pushed to the fore. On the other, the issue of the right of return and the Nakba (the “catastrophe” that befell Palestinians in 1948); the place of the Arab minority in Israel; and, more broadly, the Palestinian connection to Historic Palestine have become more prominent. Within Jewish and Muslim communities alike, religion has become more prevalent in political discussions, and its influence on peacemaking looms larger than before.

As difficult as it is to imagine a solution that addresses these issues, it is harder still to imagine one that does not. If the two sides are to be induced to reach agreement, such matters almost certainly need to be tackled. Israelis and Palestinians, rather than refusing to deal with the others’ core concerns, both might use them as a springboard to address their own.

New constituencies. The process for most of the past two decades has been led by a relatively narrow array of actors. But the interests of those who have been excluded resonate deeply with their respective mainstreams. In Israel, this includes the Right, both religious and national, as well as settlers. Among Palestinians, it includes Islamists, Palestinian citizens of Israel and the diaspora. That needs to be rectified. A proposed deal that is attractive to new constituencies would minimise opposition and could attract support from unexpected quarters.

New Palestinian strategy. The Palestinian leadership has tested various waters but is apprehensive about taking the plunge. That approach appears less sustainable by the day, eroding the leadership’s credibility and international patience. Rather than ad-hoc, shifting tactical moves, the entire Palestinian national movement needs to think seriously through its various options – including reconciliation, internationalisation, popular resistance and fate of the PA – and decide whether it is prepared to pay the costs for pursuing them fully. If the answer is “no”, then it would be better to stop the loose talk that has been surrounding them of late.

New international architecture. Palestinian recourse to the UN is a symptom, at base, of international failure to lead and provide effective mediation. The body responsible for doing so, the Quartet, has delivered precious little since its 2002 inception; by creating an international forum whose survival depends on perpetuation of the process and whose mode of operation entails silencing individual voices in favour of a mushy, lowest-common-denominator consensus, it arguably has done more harm than good. Whether the body should be entirely disbanded or restructured – and if so, how – is a question with which the international community needs to grapple. Whatever the form, it ought to address the profound changes taking place in the Middle East, the opportunities they present and the risks they pose.

The inescapable truth, almost two decades into the peace process, is that all actors are now engaged in a game of make-believe: that a resumption of talks in the current context can lead to success; that an agreement can be reached within a short timeframe; that the Quartet is an effective mediator; that the Palestinian leadership is serious about reconciliation, or the UN, or popular resistance, or disbanding the PA. This is not to say that the process itself has run its course. Continued meetings and even partial agreements – invariably welcomed as breakthroughs – are possible precisely because so many have an interest in its perpetuation. But it will not bring about a durable and lasting peace. The first step in breaking what has become an injurious addiction to a futile process is to recognise that it is so – to acknowledge, at long last, that the emperor has no clothes.

Read the complete report, The Emperor Has No Clothes: Palestinians and the End of the Peace Process [PDF].

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Kashmir is killing India’s military and democracy

Pankaj Mishra writes: In July 1995, an Islamic fundamentalist group called Al Faran kidnapped six foreign tourists, including two Americans, in Kashmir. For a few weeks, the world’s attention was fixed on the Himalayan valley as the allegedly Pakistan-backed militants negotiated with Indian security officials and foreign diplomats.

Eventually, one of the Americans escaped. Another hostage, a Norwegian, was beheaded. The other four were never found.

The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 — Where the Terror Began, a staggeringly well-researched new book by two respected journalists, Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, concludes that the hostages were killed by local mercenaries funded and controlled by Indian army and intelligence.

The authors argue that the drawn-out negotiation, during which Indian intelligence allegedly knew the hostages’ whereabouts, was a charade, part of India’s larger effort to portray Pakistan as a sponsor of Islamist terror, thereby delegitimizing the Kashmiri struggle for freedom.

Certainly, India today no longer needs to highlight the role of the Pakistani army and intelligence in sponsoring extremist groups. It has also succeeded in shifting international attention away from the appalling facts of its counter-insurgency operations in Kashmir — tens of thousands killed, and innumerable many tortured, mutilated and orphaned. The tallying in 2009 of 2,700 unmarked graves containing the remains of people (often buried in groups) killed by security forces barely provoked any comment in the international media, let alone expressions of concern by Western leaders. [Continue reading…]

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The Pentagon’s addiction to failed wars

From a national security perspective, failure in war is war with no victory or tangible accomplishments.

From the commercial perspective of the military-industrial complex however, what has turned into the hidden success of the American way of war is that it can be made never-ending. In other words, failure in war has become the Pentagon’s bread and butter.

With U.S. troops withdrawn from Iraq, a significantly reduced military presence in Afghanistan not far away and a gradual winding down of the war on terror likely, the Pentagon needs new reasons to justify its bloated budget.

At a time when political leaders in Central and South America have become increasingly critical of the United States’ war on drugs, the Pentagon wants to put out a different message — one that the New York Times, as a government-sanctioned information service, is only too happy to deliver.

In Honduras, where the grimmest social service is on offer — free caskets and funerals for the poor who are getting murdered almost once an hour — the Pentagon’s happy message is that it can help this drug-violence afflicted nation through lessons learned in Iraq and the war on terror.

The Pentagon, delivering its message through a reliable Times “reporter”, is that an expanding U.S. military presence in Central America should not be seen as expanding because it employs “small-footprint missions.” And it shouldn’t be perceived as a military engagement because Americans are not doing the shooting.

Honduras is the latest focal point in America’s drug war. As Mexico puts the squeeze on narcotics barons using its territory as a transit hub, more than 90 percent of the cocaine from Colombia and Venezuela bound for the United States passes through Central America. More than a third of those narcotics make their way through Honduras, a country with vast ungoverned areas — and one of the highest per capita homicide rates in the world.

This new offensive, emerging just as the United States military winds down its conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and is moving to confront emerging threats, also showcases the nation’s new way of war: small-footprint missions with limited numbers of troops, partnerships with foreign military and police forces that take the lead in security operations, and narrowly defined goals, whether aimed at insurgents, terrorists or criminal groups that threaten American interests.

The effort draws on hard lessons learned from a decade of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq, where troops were moved from giant bases to outposts scattered across remote, hostile areas so they could face off against insurgents.

But the mission here has been adapted to strict rules of engagement prohibiting American combat in Central America, a delicate issue given Washington’s messy history in Honduras, which was the base for the secret operation once run by Oliver North to funnel money and arms to rebels fighting in neighboring Nicaragua. Some skeptics still worry that the American military might accidentally empower thuggish elements of local security forces.

While there is increasing skepticism that law enforcement backed up with military muscle can ever thwart a drug trade that is driven by American drug consumption, the Pentagon counters that fighting drug cartels is just like fighting terrorism. Indeed, deploying the rhetorical tactic that anything can be justified if it can be presented as a form of counter-terrorism, the war on drugs is now being framed as an integral part of the war on terror.

“The drug demand in the United States certainly exacerbates challenges placed upon our neighboring countries fighting against these organizations — and why it is so important that we partner with them in their countering efforts,” said Vice Adm. Joseph D. Kernan, the No. 2 officer at Southern Command, which is responsible for military activities in Central and South America.

Before this assignment, Admiral Kernan spent years in Navy SEAL combat units, and he sees the effort to combat drug cartels as necessary to preventing terrorists from co-opting criminal groups for attacks in this hemisphere.

There are “insidious” parallels between regional criminal organizations and terror networks, Admiral Kernan said. “They operate without regard to borders,” he said, in order to smuggle drugs, people, weapons and money.

Of course there is also one very large and powerful state that has a habit of operating without regard to borders.

One word that gets no mention in the New York Times article is decriminalization. It’s a subject that several Latin American presidents have said needs to be debated.

The war on drugs has been no more successful than prohibition, but whereas prohibition was abandoned after just 13 years, the war on drugs is now in its fifth decade. The United States doesn’t need to merely stop using the phrase “war on drugs” — it needs to end the mindset that led to a war on drugs.

Any politician willing to take on that challenge will also have to take on a serious fight against those who are profiting from this war: the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, and multiple U.S. government agencies.

After the recent Summit of the Americas conference in Columbia, Amy Goodman hosted a discussion on the issues on Democracy Now!

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U.S. has made war on terror a war without end

Fareed Zacharia writes: Whatever you thought of President Obama’s recent speech on Afghanistan, it is now increasingly clear that the United States is winding down its massive military commitments to the two wars of the last decade.

We are out of Iraq and we will soon be largely out of Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden is dead, and al Qaeda is a shadow of its former self. Threats remain but these are being handled using special forces and intelligence. So, finally, after a decade, we seem to be right-sizing the threat from terrorist groups.

Or are we?

While we will leave the battlefields of the greater Middle East, we are firmly committed to the war on terror at home. What do I mean by that? Well, look at the expansion of federal bureaucracies to tackle this war.

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for the intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet – the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. The largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

The rise of this national security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touch every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. Some 30,000 people, for example, are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications within the United States.

In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is, of course, a war without end. [Continue reading…]

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What could become a fatal remedy for climate change

Michael Specter writes: Late in the afternoon on April 2, 1991, Mt. Pinatubo, a volcano on the Philippine island of Luzon, began to rumble with a series of the powerful steam explosions that typically precede an eruption. Pinatubo had been dormant for more than four centuries, and in the volcanological world the mountain had become little more than a footnote. The tremors continued in a steady crescendo for the next two months, until June 15th, when the mountain exploded with enough force to expel molten lava at the speed of six hundred miles an hour. The lava flooded a two-hundred-and-fifty-square-mile area, requiring the evacuation of two hundred thousand people.

Within hours, the plume of gas and ash had penetrated the stratosphere, eventually reaching an altitude of twenty-one miles. Three weeks later, an aerosol cloud had encircled the earth, and it remained for nearly two years. Twenty million metric tons of sulfur dioxide mixed with droplets of water, creating a kind of gaseous mirror, which reflected solar rays back into the sky. Throughout 1992 and 1993, the amount of sunlight that reached the surface of the earth was reduced by more than ten per cent.

The heavy industrial activity of the previous hundred years had caused the earth’s climate to warm by roughly three-quarters of a degree Celsius, helping to make the twentieth century the hottest in at least a thousand years. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, however, reduced global temperatures by nearly that much in a single year. It also disrupted patterns of precipitation throughout the planet. It is believed to have influenced events as varied as floods along the Mississippi River in 1993 and, later that year, the drought that devastated the African Sahel. Most people considered the eruption a calamity.

For geophysical scientists, though, Mt. Pinatubo provided the best model in at least a century to help us understand what might happen if humans attempted to ameliorate global warming by deliberately altering the climate of the earth.

For years, even to entertain the possibility of human intervention on such a scale—geoengineering, as the practice is known—has been denounced as hubris. Predicting long-term climatic behavior by using computer models has proved difficult, and the notion of fiddling with the planet’s climate based on the results generated by those models worries even scientists who are fully engaged in the research. “There will be no easy victories, but at some point we are going to have to take the facts seriously,’’ David Keith, a professor of engineering and public policy at Harvard and one of geoengineering’s most thoughtful supporters, told me. “Nonetheless,’’ he added, “it is hyperbolic to say this, but no less true: when you start to reflect light away from the planet, you can easily imagine a chain of events that would extinguish life on earth.”

There is only one reason to consider deploying a scheme with even a tiny chance of causing such a catastrophe: if the risks of not deploying it were clearly higher. No one is yet prepared to make such a calculation, but researchers are moving in that direction. To offer guidance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.) has developed a series of scenarios on global warming. The cheeriest assessment predicts that by the end of the century the earth’s average temperature will rise between 1.1 and 2.9 degrees Celsius. A more pessimistic projection envisages a rise of between 2.4 and 6.4 degrees—far higher than at any time in recorded history. (There are nearly two degrees Fahrenheit in one degree Celsius. A rise of 2.4 to 6.4 degrees Celsius would equal 4.3 to 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit.) Until recently, climate scientists believed that a six-degree rise, the effects of which would be an undeniable disaster, was unlikely. But new data have changed the minds of many. Late last year, Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency, said that current levels of consumption “put the world perfectly on track for a six-degree Celsius rise in temperature. . . . Everybody, even schoolchildren, knows this will have catastrophic implications for all of us.” [Continue reading…]

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