Syria: As his adversaries scramble for a strategy, Assad sets his terms

Tony Karon writes: That which has not been achieved on the battlefield can rarely be achieved at the negotiation table, and the harsh reality facing Syria’s opposition is that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad has not been defeated, nor is it in danger of imminent collapse. Assad has promised, former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan announced Monday, to begin a partial implementation of Annan’s peace plan by withdrawing troops and heavy weaponry from opposition-stronghold cities on April 10. In response, Western powers were left warning of unspecified “consequences” for failure to do so, and citing the history of Assad breaking promises. Skepticism from opposition activists on the ground was hardly surprising, but had little effect — they haven’t exactly been party to shaping Annan’s plan, which in itself is a reflection of their relative weakness in the power equation right now. Formulating a strategy in response to Assad appears to be the role of the Western and Arab powers who’ve backed the exile-based Syrian National Council, and after last weekend’s inconclusive Friends of Syria meeting in Istanbul, they don’t appear yet to have achieved a strategic consensus.

The Assad regime may, in fact, be feeling pretty smug: Its foreign adversaries were unable to prevent its brutal pummeling of cities controlled by opposition fighters, which scattered those fighters and forced the rebels to abandon an insurrectionist strategy of seizing control of whole towns in the hope of prompting mass defections that would bring down the regime. It has proved impossible, thus far, for the rebels to hold ground against counter-offensives by regime forces whose advantage in weaponry is overwhelming. Instead, the insurgency is on its back foot, struggling to find the arms and ammunition to sustain the confrontation, and reduced to waging a more diffuse campaign of guerrilla attacks and terror strikes. The regime, meanwhile, has remained largely intact with its core security forces remaining focused and motivated by the sectarian dimension of the war. Nor does the regime appear likely to collapse internally in the near term, even if the repression it has unleashed precludes it restoring long-term stability.

The Annan peace plan reflects the reality that the opposition and its international backers have been unable to impose terms on Assad on the ground. Western and Arab powers have been forced to walk back from the demand that Assad stand down as a pre-condition for resolving the crisis; Annan’s plan involves a cease-fire, demilitarizing the conflict and creating space for peaceful political opposition, but its key dimension is the recognition that the political negotiations over Syria’s future will be conducted with the regime, rather than after it has been dispatched.

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Federalism is unlikely in Libya, however, decentralization is probable

Wolfram Lacher writes: “Eastern Libya declares autonomy.” In spite of international headlines such as this one, talk of the country’s impending disintegration is misleading. Although the participants at the March 6 Barqa Conference (Barqa is the Arabic name for Cyrenaica, or the region of northeastern Libya) claimed the right to speak for their region, the initiative for self-administration and the move toward federalism triggered furious reactions in Cyrenaica. Given this lack of support in the region itself, the push is unlikely to succeed.

Foreign media coverage of reactions to the initiative focused on anti-federalism demonstrations in Tripoli and the angry response of the chairman of the National Transitional Council, Mustafa Abdul Jalil. But this emphasis on the tension between the central government and proponents of northeastern autonomy is misguided. More important were the reactions against the decisions in the northeast itself. The local councils of the area’s major cities – Benghazi, Darna, Bayda and Tobruk, which also saw large demonstrations against federalism – all immediately made clear their opposition to the Barqa Conference’s declaration and refused to recognize its proposed regional council.

In addition, the Muslim Brotherhood – which has an important base in northeastern Libyan cities – called the declaration the work of narrow-based and personal interests. Furthermore, the initiative has not received significant backing from the disparate armed entities that are controlling the northeast. For instance, the region’s most powerful militia grouping, the Union of Revolutionary Brigades (Tajammu Saraya al-Thuwwar), opposed the conference, and the Barqa Military Council (an unofficial grouping of several army units situated in the region) distanced itself from the conference, declaring that it would not get involved in politics.

Proponents of federalism undoubtedly have an influence in Cyrenaica – perhaps more so than in other regions. Leading figures at the Barqa conference included tribal notables as well as intellectuals. The most prominent of these was Ahmad Zubair al-Sanusi. He is a member of the royal family that ruled Libya from 1951 to 1969, and was appointed to head the regional council. But without the local support of the region it claims to govern, the regional council has little chance of actually governing Cyrenaica.

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How the Saudis are squandering their most precious resource

In this series of four Landsat images, the agricultural fields are about one kilometer across. Healthy vegetation appears bright green while dry vegetation appears orange. Barren soil is a dark pink, and urban areas, like the town of Tubarjal at the top of each image, have a purple hue. Credit: NASA/GSFC

NASA reports: Saudi Arabia is drilling for a resource possibly more precious than oil.

Over the last 24 years, it has tapped hidden reserves of water to grow wheat and other crops in the Syrian Desert. This time series of data shows images acquired by three different Landsat satellites operated by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.

The green fields that dot the desert draw on water that in part was trapped during the last Ice Age. In addition to rainwater that fell over several hundred thousand years, this fossil water filled aquifers that are now buried deep under the desert’s shifting sands.

Saudi Arabia reaches these underground rivers and lakes by drilling through the desert floor, directly irrigating the fields with a circular sprinkler system. This technique is called center-pivot irrigation.

Because rainfall in this area is now only a few centimeters (about one inch) each year, water here is a non-renewable resource. Although no one knows how much water is beneath the desert, hydrologists estimate it will only be economical to pump water for about 50 years.

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Christof Koch on free will, the singularity, and the quest to crack consciousness

John Horgan talks to Christof Koch about his latest book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist.

Horgan: You seem to have written your latest book in an attempt to achieve catharsis. Did it work?

Koch: Yes, it did help me resolve a long-brewing conflict between my Catholic upbringing and faith on the one hand and my scientific view of the world on the other. And writing the book also helped me deal with a more personal crisis.

Horgan: Your late friend and colleague Francis Crick once told me that free will was an illusion. Do you share this pessimistic view?

Koch: Well, Francis was right in that the standard conception of free will, that has the soul hovering above the brain and making it “freely” decide this way or that, is an illusion. It simply does not work at the conceptual or empirical level However, more subtle readings of free will remain, as I discuss in my book. Yet we are all less free than we like to believe. What remains, though, is that I am the principal actor in my life, so I better take responsibility for my actions.

Horgan: Do you think consciousness will ever be really, totally, explained? Could the “mysterians” [who propose that consciousness is not scientifically solvable] turn out to be right?

Koch: There is no law that states that all phenomena will have an explanation that humans can apprehend or understand. But my gut feelings—based on the past several centuries of progressively ever more successful explanations of the natural world—is that there will be better and better answers to the puzzle of our existence. We are not condemned to wander forever in some sort of epistemological fog. We will know. We will understand consciousness.

Horgan: Can you tell my readers, briefly, what Integrated Information Theory is and why you think it may be the key to consciousness?

Koch: The Integrated Information Theory of consciousness of Giulio Tononi is a general and quantitative way to approach the problem of consciousness. Ultimately, science needs to explain why some systems—a healthy and awake human brain, for example—give rise to conscious sensations, to experience, while other biological networks—the immune system, for example—do not. We also need to answer questions about consciousness in severely injured brain patients, in new-born babies, in a fetus, in dogs and cats, frogs, bees and flies and in artificial creatures, in iPhones and the internet. And only an information-theoretical account of consciousness is rich and powerful enough to be able to answer those sorts of questions in a meaningful and empirically accessible manner.

This is a clip from an interview — the whole interview is worth watching.

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A ‘closing window’ on Iran blocks out realistic diplomacy

Tony Karon writes: ‘I believe there is a window of time to solve this diplomatically but that window is closing,” President Barack Obama said last week about the nuclear standoff with Iran. The “window closing” phrase was then echoed on Friday by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who insisted: “We are determined to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

But hang on a minute. Three weeks ago, Mr Obama warned that he would take military action if it became necessary to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. But in the same breath, he pointed out that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, and had not in fact taken a decision to do so despite steadily amassing infrastructure that would enable it. Mr Obama quoted approvingly from a recent speech in which Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reiterated his long-standing fatwa declaring that the construction, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons was a “sin against Islam”.

So, if Mr Obama himself has emphasised that Iran is not moving towards his trip-line for military action, unless there’s been a qualitative shift towards weaponisation in Iran’s nuclear work in the past three weeks, who is closing the metaphorical “window” for diplomacy?

There may be three related elements at work. First, there is Israel threatening unilateral military action based on its own red lines and on its own timetable unless Iran yields. Then there’s the fact that Mr Obama’s Iran strategy was designed by Dennis Ross, who has since returned to his old job at a think tank created by the pro-Israel lobby Aipac. Mr Ross believes the only way to achieve diplomatic results with Iran is to pin it in a chokehold of sanctions, and make it believe worse is to come.

And then there’s Mr Obama’s concern with securing his re-election in November, which requires tough-guy posturing on Iran to counter charges from his Republican opponents, egged on by Israel’s alarmism, about being “weak” in the face of an Iranian “danger”.

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Boredom, terror, deadly mistakes: Secrets of the new drone war

Jefferson Morley writes: So you want to be a drone pilot? Have a seat in the operator’s control station that guides the remotely piloted aircraft. You could be sitting in a trailer on Creech Air Force Base in Nevada or doing your duty at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. From this perch, you can see a battle space on the other side of the world. You are virtually on the front lines of war.

One of the screens in front of you has a live full-motion video feed from the aircraft (perhaps showing the home of an anti-American sheik and his family in Pakistan or Afghanistan). A second screen has mission data like the altitude of the drone and its fuel level. A third screen displays multilayered menus of more data. You can steer the drone with the joystick in your right hand; the pedals beneath your feet control its rudder. But if you want to turn on the autopilot, it will require 22 keystrokes on one of several available keyboards.

Your partner, the “sensor operator” seated next to you, controls the camera. He or she can zoom in on the face of the man you are hunting. Is this target a danger to the United States? The keyboard in front of you enables you to communicate with a JAG (or a CIA lawyer) to make sure that your target qualifies under the Rules of Engagement. You have audio contact with the Combat Air Command Center in Qatar, which must authorize the firing of missiles. When it does, you push the button on the joystick and send the missile on its way. Then, an explosion. If you want, the sensor operator can train the camera on the wreckage.

If you don’t feel comfortable in this seat, you’re not alone. When the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board studied the drone operator control stations last year, it found no less than 17 flaws in the “poorly designed” system, including “poor ergonomics” and ill-conceived input systems, like the autopilot activation. While much of the drone war remains shrouded in official secrecy, the Air Force’s ongoing campaign to improve the ground control station provides a window into America’s newest way of war.

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In defence of ‘Iraq syndrome’ — intervention is only ever in our interests

David Wearing writes: Every so often, a memorable phrase enters the discourse, providing a telling insight into some of the deeper assumptions held in our political culture. One such term, now mostly forgotten, is the “Vietnam syndrome.”

The Vietnam war claimed the lives of 58,000 US soldiers, seriously damaged Washington’s prestige as an imperial power and caused untold hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Indochina, which had been subjected by America’s forces of liberation to levels of aerial bombing last seen in the second world war.

Over subsequent years, those keen to see the US again exert its military might in the world lamented the stubborn persistence of a “Vietnam syndrome” among the public and many policymakers. The latter were increasingly unconvinced of the practical feasibility of military action, while the former saw the potential human costs as intolerable and, in many cases, were resolved to actively oppose a repeat of the Vietnam experience.

It is worth reflecting on the fact that a widespread popular aversion to the horrors of war – something one might regard as quite healthy – should come to be repeatedly described as a “syndrome”; a collective psychological defect that would hopefully be overcome at some future date. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that state violence has long been a highly valued policy tool, as indicated by the vast resources devoted to it, out of all proportion to genuine needs of “defence.”

After the comprehensive defeat of a disobedient former ally, Saddam Hussein, in the 1991 Gulf war, George HW Bush declared euphorically, “by God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!” Many senior Republicans spent the next few years cultivating various fantasies about what could be achieved the next time an opportunity arose to let US forces off the leash. Such an opportunity was presented to them on 11 September 2001.

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Muslim Brotherhood miscalculates in its political monopoly

Issandr El Amrani writes: Since a little over a week ago, when the Islamist majority in Egypt’s parliament rushed through the appointment of a constituent assembly without any serious attempt at building a broader consensus, the country’s already ailing transition began to appear that much more fraught. The Muslim Brotherhood’s decision on Saturday to nominate its strongman, Khairat Al Shater, as a presidential candidate delivered another shock wave that could end whatever chance Egypt had left at achieving a stable democratic transition.

It should first be noted that the Muslim Brothers are perfectly within their rights to have chosen this course of action. The constitutional declaration in place since the end of March 2011, accepted by most political forces despite some doubts about its legality, gives parliament the right to appoint the constitutional assembly.

In allying with the Salafist Nour Party, with which it controls over 70 per cent of parliament, the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) could very well control the process and outcome of the nomination process for the assembly. Likewise, even if it had repeatedly stated that it would not field a presidential candidate, and even expelled members who disagreed with this decision, it has the right to change its mind according to the changing political context.

Nonetheless, the decision to abandon any pretence of inclusiveness in the appointment of the constituent assembly is a mistake – one that might be explained by the distrust that reigns between the military junta now ruling Egypt and the Brotherhood, but a mistake nonetheless.

What it shows first and foremost, as the Brotherhood stands on the threshold of the political power it has sought for over eight decades, is a contempt for other political forces at a time when Egypt is sorely in need of a consensus that can support the momentous changes ahead. The question, for now, is not so much what the Brotherhood and other Islamists intend to do about the constitution – even if they can be expected to maximise the role that Sharia will play in the new Egypt.

In fact, unlike Salafists, the Brotherhood has provided few details of what its ideal constitution would look like, and not even a clear position on contentious issues such as the implementation of traditional Islamic punishments or the treatment of non-Muslims.

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Koch Brothers’ very bad week

Adele M. Stan writes: Were there a way for a few billion clams to wipe a week off the calendar, one imagines that Charles and David Koch, the multibillionaire principals of Koch Industries, would like to see the final week of March 2012 vaporized, at least in the public mind. For the Kochs, it was a week of bad news: a new documentary about their political activity and corporate negligence was making a splash — on the same day a story broke announcing an FBI investigation of two Wisconsin groups tied to Americans for Prosperity, the political ground organization they founded and fund. (Full disclosure: AlterNet is a supporter of the documentary, Koch Brothers Exposed, and I appear in the film.)

Things got even worse the next day, Friday, March 30, when the billionaire brothers learned that a federal court handed down a decision that may ultimately require certain non-profit groups, such as Americans for Prosperity, to reveal their full donor list, and the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, who wrote a devastating profile of the brothers last year, reported on the Kochs’ involvement in a barrage of anti-Obama ads sponsored by a tax-exempt non-profit called the American Energy Alliance, which may also now be required to reveal its donor list.

On the very same day, another federal court struck down portions of Wisconsin’s controversial law that stripped collective bargaining rights from most of the state’s public employees — a law championed by Americans for Prosperity, and rammed through the state legislature a year ago by the AFP-supported Gov. Scott Walker. Here, we take a closer look at the Kochs’ very bad week. [Continue reading…]

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Philip Weiss reclaims his American spirit

Philip Weiss writes: I need to reclaim my American spiritual roots. This website [Mondoweiss] has been about Jewishness for me because the neoconservative project for the Middle East made me Jewish (as I have said many times) but I will have a Jewishness that is authentic to my experience. I love the Passover deliverance story only if it is shared. I hate the Purim story, I don’t even know what my Torah portion was about. The story of the binding of Isaac has helped me understand my relationship with my father, and all authority, but honestly I was more thrilled by getting to the place it took place in Minnesota when I was 21 — Dylan’s Highway 61– than by Mount Moriah in occupied East Jerusalem.

I don’t need Jewish sovereignty over the Temple Mount to believe in the binding. Any more than my wife needed Christian sovereignty in Jerusalem to bring me along when a group of English nuns she’d met took her on the Stations of the Cross last year, a powerful story about heresy and excommunication.

I find as much power in Jim’s beating his deaf daughter in Huck Finn as I do in the binding of Isaac, and I want an identity politics that respects my spirit and the American winds that move it, from Mark Twain to Melville to Carson McCullers to Isaac Singer to Schocken’s translations of Kafka to my lapsed Protestant wife’s yoga and ayurvedhic medicine and Tarot. I don’t want chosenness. Not when I’ve learned so much from lapsed Catholics with values of humility and egalitarianism. And J Street has credibility in part because its leader’s father was in the Irgun? What does the Irgun have to teach me?

Do I sound like a nativist? I don’t care; Israel never called to me. I believe Zionism’s greatest achievement is the idea of Jewish physical labor. I don’t want my foreign policy guided by Jeffrey Goldberg who felt unsafe here and emigrated to Israel. I would rather a nativist foreign policy that is thoughtful of the Americans who are likely to have to go off and do the fighting (not us).

I can’t understand Hebrew because I had American enthusiasms. I was listening to the Wailers and role-modeling Joseph Pulitzer who said that his job was to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, and Harrison Salisbury who put out the Pentagon Papers and Sy Hersh who exposed My Lai and Melville who said that all men wear muzzles on their souls and he wanted to undo the muzzles, anticipating gay liberation by 100 years.

I am sick of our media valorizing a democracy that has not had our hard lessons in liberation.

That has not integrated the armed forces—we did that in 1948.

That excludes minorities from the governing coalition – we fixed that in 1964.

That redlines Palestinian home sales—we got rid of the gentleman’s agreement in the 60s.

That has segregated schools– we attacked that in 1954.

That breaks historic compromises and extends rightlessness into the territories—we did that between 1854-1861, till that regime was washed away by “verry much bloodshed,” as John Brown prophesied.

I’m proud of a country that gave a home to Ali Abunimah when Israel wouldn’t let him or his family go to the place his parents were born. And if Israel ceases to be a Jewish state it will be no spiritual rubble for me, no, it will be because it honors a principle that my forefathers put down in the Declaration of Independence and our leaders are still struggling to make real.

Religion is the thing that gives your life meaning. It’s the codes and ideas and koans and dreams and stories that sustain you and give you purpose and explain your responsibilities to yourself and others and the land. It’s not a book in a church. Emerson said the dead books scatter your force, lose your time and blur the impression of your character. My codes are American ones, shot through with Jewish diaspora yearnings and my wife’s mystical explorations, and my story is American and my guides are American pantheists from Thoreau to Joan Osborne.

My story is only half American — I was 29 when I arrived here — but having been guided by Thoreau most of my life, I can say Phil and I share the same faith.

Beyond that, there is something about Jewish identity in America that I not only can say as a non-Jew, but that is a dimension of Jewish identity that must in fact be illuminated by non-Jews.

In a society in which there is little evidence of any remaining institutionalized mainstream antisemitism, for the vast majority of us non-Jews, Jewish identity is something about which we are indifferent. Whether someone is or is not a Jew simply does not matter. No one scores or loses any points on account of being Jewish.

Hearing Peter Beinart describe his grandmother’s experience of repeatedly being uprooted because she was Jewish shows the stark contrast with different places and times where Jewish identity was not simply an internal and communal self-identification, but was a target for hatred.

As much as such memories remain embedded in the Jewish experience, they are at least for most American Jews not a significant dimension of contemporary Jewish life in this country. And in the absence of external forces of negative reinforcement, the only thing that really threatens Jewish identity is that individual Jews become tired or see no reason to labor at differentiating themselves from non-Jews.

When identity can only be sustained through a firm grasp, it seems inevitable that over time that grasp will loosen and the identity will gradually dissolve and transform.

As much as modernity may have made all of our identities much more difficult to grasp, we are less at risk of becoming untethered than at risk of tying ourselves to false anchors.

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How Israeli Big Brother became a hotbed of thoughtful debate

Mia de Graaf writes: In the UK, Big Brother is known for turning fame-hungry contestants – the Nadias, Chantelles and Jade Goodys of this world – into instant celebrities. Though normally no more high-brow, Israel’s equivalent has this year achieved a surprising twist, by making a superstar out of “Palestine sympathiser” Saar Szekely.

Szekely, 27, is the wild-card candidate whose stated objective was to voice leftwing views on prime-time television. In a house full of reactionaries and with a predominantly rightwing audience, Szekely’s mission looked certain to be short-lived. But for all the Facebook pages clamouring for his annihilation, the Tel Aviv-based artist has made it to tomorrow night’s final, and along the way become something of a heart-throb.

Entering the house in January, Szekely was, for the first few weeks, overshadowed by the usual extreme eccentrics – a newlywed couple, a prostitute, a “transfer-housemate” from Big Brother Argentina. Nine weeks into the show, however, his conversations started to get more air time, and have become the focus of the series.

“I like the way he expresses himself,” says one viewer, Shelly Malnick, 23, from Haifa. “I don’t agree with everything he says. There are harsh things he has said about soldiers that were really hard to listen to. But he doesn’t stoop to bickering – he has a backbone and he never steps down from a well-mannered discussion. That is why most Israelis love him.” It helps, she says, that he is “very good looking”. More leftwing viewers, needless to say, are smitten.

But it was the development of his unlikely friendship with housemate Eran Tartakovsky – a former Israeli army officer – that, according to the Maariv Daily’s deputy editor, Shai Golden, sparked Szekely’s success. “Eran embracing him was like giving him a kosher stamp,” said Golden.

Eran, who claimed in his audition tape to “hate Arabs more than I hate cancer”, was Szekely’s hawkish counterpart on the show. But the ploy backfired when the pair bonded: “They became close. It took the leftist extremism out of Saar and put the man in front.”

In the following clip, Szekely does most of the talking while Tartakovsky, the man in black shorts lying on his back, mostly listens.

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U.S. draws up plans for nuclear-powered drones

The Guardian reports: American scientists have drawn up plans for a new generation of nuclear-powered drones capable of flying over remote regions of the world for months on end without refuelling.

The blueprints for the new drones, which have been developed by Sandia National Laboratories – the US government’s principal nuclear research and development agency – and defence contractor Northrop Grumman, were designed to increase flying time “from days to months” while making more power available for operating equipment, according to a project summary published by Sandia.

“It’s pretty terrifying prospect,” said Chris Coles of Drone Wars UK, which campaigns against the increasing use of drones for both military and civilian purposes. “Drones are much less safe than other aircraft and tend to crash a lot. There is a major push by this industry to increase the use of drones and both the public and government are struggling to keep up with the implications.”

The highly sensitive research into what is termed “ultra-persistence technologies” set out to solve three problems associated with drones: insufficient “hang time” over a potential target; lack of power for running sophisticated surveillance and weapons systems; and lack of communications capacity.

The Sandia-Northrop Grumman team looked at numerous different power systems for large- and medium-sized drones before settling on a nuclear solution. Northrop Grumman is known to have patented a drone equipped with a helium-cooled nuclear reactor as long ago as 1986, and has previously worked on nuclear projects with the US air force research laboratory. Designs for nuclear-powered aircraft are known to go back as far as the 1950s.

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Aung San Suu Kyi’s victory does not bring Burma freedom

Zoya Phan writes: I have dreamed for many years of seeing Aung San Suu Kyi elected to parliament and watching thousands of people celebrating in the streets. Yet, while the scenes made me happy, I also felt a strange emptiness inside.

We always expected that Aung San Suu Kyi being allowed to take a seat in parliament would be a final step on the road to democracy. Instead, it is only the first. Aung San Suu Kyi is even more cautious. Asked last week how democratic Burma was on a scale of one to 10, she answered “on the way to one“.

Too much importance has been attached to these byelections, whose significance is more symbolic than practical. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, will have about 5% of the seats in parliament, compared with 80% for the military and the main military-backed party. Even if Aung San Suu Kyi had a majority, parliament has very limited power, and the military has an effective veto over its decisions.

Yet, as Aung San Suu Kyi hoped, the byelection campaign has successfully mobilised many people, breaking down the fear of engaging in politics after generations of dictatorship. Now she is trying to use the limited new political space to bring genuine democratic reform, but the challenges are immense. To use these byelections as a benchmark for judging change is a mistake. Even had they been free and fair, and they were not, they don’t mean Burma is now free.

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Afghanistan names general to run U.S. prison, asserts control

Reuters reports: Afghanistan named a three star general to take over Bagram prison from the U.S. military and with him, final say over which prisoners are released, an issue with the potential to open another rift in relations between Washington and Kabul.

The issue of the release of any of the 3,200 people held in the prison at the sprawling American base, north of Kabul, is sensitive to both countries as Afghanistan assumes full security responsibilities ahead of departure of most NATO combat forces in 2014.

Washington fears the prisoners, most of whom it says are mid to high level members of the Taliban, might return to the battlefield as has happened in the past, citing the case of a Taliban commander transferred from Guantanamo Bay to Afghan custody in 2007 who ended up fighting coalition forces again.

“They (the United States) can have a consultative role, but not a veto,” said Aimal Faizi, chief spokesman of President Hamid Karzai.

“What’s the point of the transfer if we don’t have full control,” he said, in remarks that have become increasingly assertive following a string of incidents that have strained U.S.-Afghan ties, notably the killing of 17 villagers blamed on a U.S. soldier and the burning of Korans at the Bagram base.

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