Steve Russell : Hiding Behind a Girl

We are all Malala. Photo from Reuters.
I am Malala:
Hiding behind a girl

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / January 10, 2013

It is we sinful women
who come out raising the banner of truth
up against barricades of lies on the highways
who find stories of persecution piled on each threshold
who find that tongues which could speak have been severed.

-- Kishwar Naheed (Urdu-to-English translation by Ruksana Ahmed)

In the time suck that is Facebook, I changed my profile picture to one of Malala Yousafzai. Besides improving the visual appeal of the page, what was I trying to accomplish?

Malala is a 15-year-old student from the Swat Valley in Pakistan, an area formerly ruled by the Taliban, Islamic fundamentalists who believe that educating girls is sinful. This policy, coming from God, is not negotiable. Enforcement of the policy is up to any devout Muslim, as the God the Taliban follow is apparently too puny to enforce its own rules.

Enforcement in areas infested by the Taliban has included burning of schools and throwing acid on girls seeking to study.

At age 11, Malala began a blog published in English and Urdu by the BBC called “Diary of a Pakistani Schoolgirl” under the nom de plume Gul Makai (Corn Flower). When the Taliban fled, Malala’s identity became common knowledge. Fluent in English, the girl appeared on British and American television advocating that Islam does not ban education of women.

What does this have to do with us?

In Afghanistan, American troops have been dying in the longest war in the history of this nation. It began in 2001 when the Taliban refused to surrender the leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden.

Our troops ran the Taliban out of the cities and into the Pashtun tribal area along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. The Taliban had the support of the Pakistani government until we started shooting at the Taliban and demanded that the Pakistanis choose a side.

While Pakistan ostensibly chose our side, the Taliban are still a potent political force. We’ve seen this movie before. Only the Pashtun people can root out the Taliban insanity. Not the Pakistani army, and certainly not the U.S. army.

On October 9, a Taliban gunman attacked a school bus and shot Malala Yousafzai in the head. Two other girls were critically injured, but Malala was the target. “Malala was using her tongue and pen against Islam and Muslims,” the Taliban said, “so she was punished for her crime by the blessing of the Almighty Allah.”

So far, it appears that this crime has not received the blessing of the Pashtun people. Within the week, street demonstrations in Pakistani cities were displaying pictures of Malala.

Many years ago, world opinion was outraged when the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddhist statutes. The banning of television, sports, and music upset even local opinion. But by attempting to kill a young girl for the crime of wanting to go to school, the Taliban may finally have put themselves in a place where no decent person will shelter them.

What does this have to do with me, other than the fact that my son is a GI?

I would hope that no man with daughters would ask that question. Both of my daughters are well educated, and I’m proud of them. Two of my granddaughters are in college right now. One granddaughter is a toddler with a twin brother. While I know I will not live to see what they become, I have dreams for them both, no greater for the boy than for the girl. And there is another granddaughter who is Malala’s age.

I hate to trouble children with the existence of evil, but I hope my grandchildren will identify with Malala, with her courage and her ambition. They are Malala; all of our daughters are Malala. And so I am Malala.

Malala’s pen name, Gul Makai, comes from the heroine of a Pakistani folk tale, a Romeo and Juliet story, where the lovers meet at school. The romance between Gul Makai and her lover, Musa Khan, creates a war between their tribes.

Gul Makai goes to the religious leaders and persuades them, by reference to the Holy Quran, that the grounds for the war are “frivolous.” Inspired by the teachings of a girl, the leaders place themselves between the warring parties, holding the Quran over their heads, and persuade the two sides as Gul Makai has persuaded them. To seal the peace, the lovers are united in marriage.

According to the English translation by Masud-Ul-Hasan, “Most of the love stories generally have tragic ends; in the case of... Musa Khan and Gul Makai... events took a different turn. The credit for this goes to Gul Makai. She did not rest content to love, and die. She was a woman of action; she loved, won, and lived.”

Until Gul Makai, Malala Yousafzai, the lover of knowledge, is out of the hospital, this old retired teacher will hide behind the face of a brave young girl. I am Malala.

UPDATE ON January 4, 2013. I’m happy to report that people happening on my Facebook page will once more have to endure my mugshot, as Malala was released from the hospital today.

In the meantime, the Pakistani government has been moved by the international reaction to Malala’s shooting to publicly commit to girls’ education. Of course, like any other government, what the commitment means will depend on who is watching and who the players in government are from time to time, but saying as a matter of public policy girls can expect to be educated is a colossal step in the opposite direction from the one the Taliban were demanding when they tried to kill her.

Finally, Malala Yousafzai has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She would be the first child to win that honor. I hope all of us with daughters are rooting for her.

[Steve Russell lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

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Tom Hayden : An Expanding War in Pakistan

Creeping deeper into war: image of U.S. aerial drone from AP.
Droning on...
An expanding war in Pakistan

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / September 28, 2011

Slowly but surely, the United States is creeping deeper and deeper into a disastrous war in Pakistan. The peace movement and its political and media allies need to be ready. There is a growing community of activists and journalists already protesting and documenting the aerial drone wars over Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya.[1]

But the debate about drones cannot be isolated from the context of their use in the Long War as a substitute for American ground troops and in response to peace pressure from the American public.

Important as these perspectives may be, the peace movement may lose the debate if drones are seen in purely moral or economic terms or as a loss of democratic transparency. The fact is, however, that the use of drones will endanger American lives and security as they inevitably provoke violent counterattacks, such as those of December 25, 2009 (Detroit Metro Airport), February 2010 (guilty pleas in New York subway bombing plot), and May 1, 2010 (Times Square).

The U.S. already has a secret contingency plan to strike at 150 sites, nearly all in Pakistan, if another incident occurs that is traceable to any Pakistani source.[2]

The drones do not make America safer. They inevitably provoke blowback. They are not a way of waging war cheaply. They require massive investments in client states and “nation-building” on the ground. They kill people, but no victories are won from the air.

Obama has been warned about the drone strategy many times, even by his Afghanistan adviser Bruce Riedel, who privately told him in 2009:

Predator drone strikes only work because CIA paramilitary teams have an ultra-secret presence on the ground in Pakistan. Without the local informants these teams develop, there would not be good signals intelligence so that the drones know where to target. This was a risky enterprise that might collapse overnight. So don’t rely on drones... They look like a cheap way out, but they’re not.[3]

Pakistan is on fire, writes Imtiaz Gul.[4] Between 2002-2009, suicide strikes in Pakistan rose from one to 90 per year, along with 500 bombings and ambushes in that single year.

Critics of the drone strategy include David Kilcullen, the top counterinsurgency adviser to General David Petraeus in Iraq, the Long War Journal, and the New America Foundation. These are not peaceniks, but skeptics of counterterrorism from the air. According to the Long War Journal:

• 256 of 266 drone strikes against Taliban and al Qaeda targets, which began in 2004, have been, since January 2008, showing the increased reliance on the secret air war;
• Since 2006, there have been 2,090 “leaders," “operatives” from the Taliban, AQ and “allied extremist groups” killed, and 138 “civilians.” The CIA insists that no civilians have been killed by drones since 2008, a claim that no independent observers, including those in the mainstream media, believe. (New York Times)
• The vast majority of the drone strikes have been in North and South Waziristan, with 89 percent inflicted on North Waziristan in 2010, the period when peace talks with the Taliban were embraced by most of the international community;
• In 2010, there was a massive shift in strikes against tribal areas administered by Taliban leader Hafiz Gul Bahadar. Nearly all the attacks since 2008 have been against areas represented by four Taliban leaders/factions: in addition to Bahadar, the Haqqanis, the Mehsuds, and Mullah Nazir. Bahadar and the Haqqanis are based in North Waziristan.
• The number of Taliban/al Qaeda leaders killed in these areas in 2004-2011 has been insignificant militarily: 10 in the Haqqani network, seven in the Bahadar network, seven in the Mehsud network, one in the Hekmatyar network, etc.

The Long War Journal account concludes:

The Pakistani government considers Nazir, the Haqqanis, Bahadar, and Hekmatyar to be "good Taliban" as they do not carry out attacks against the Pakistani state. All of these Taliban factions shelter al Qaeda and various other terror groups.

The inescapable conclusion is that Bahadar, Nazir, the Haqqanis, and Hekmatyar -- warlords all -- are fighting against U.S. forces in their traditional regions of influence in Afghanistan, and would lessen or cease fighting if the United States followed a timetable for withdrawal from those areas.

Supporters of a Pakistani religious party, Jamaat-e- Islami, join a rally against the U.S. drone strikes in Pakistani tribal areas in Peshawar, Pakistan, April 23, 2011. Photo by Mohammad Sajjad / AP.
Does that mean the Taliban or its multiple factions and warlord allies will take over Kabul if the U.S. withdraws? Not necessarily, unless the fragile, corrupt, and dysfunctional Karzai regime simply implodes. But according to an insightful analysis in the Asian Times by Brian Downing, it is more likely that Afghanistan will be “carved up” by regional powers with vested interests.

In his scenario, “the regional powers, especially Pakistan, will use their influence with the Taliban to convince them to limit their ambitions to the south and east and accept a settlement with President Hamid Karzai at the helm in Kabul.” This is the opposite of the current U.S. military agenda. (April 27, 2011)

Second, Iran and Turkey are likely to weigh in to “press reluctant Afghan [allies] to accept the settlement.”

Third, the regional powers -- Pakistan, China, Iran and Turkey -- “will help to form a rentier state to govern the country,” as has happened often in Afghanistan’s history. A rentier state generally is defined as one supported by external funding and inputs far more than internally-generated revenues. Afghanistan currently has little economy beyond its illegal heroin production -- resulting in 90,000 European overdose deaths per year -- and the military investments of the U.S. and NATO.

Fourth, the same regional powers will cooperate and sometimes compete in developing Afghanistan resources, which include mineral resources and pipelines from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea.

Geopolitically, Pakistan and China share a common interest in limiting the presence of India in Afghanistan. A majority-Hindu India is America’s chief ally in Afghanistan, having backed the Northern Alliance interests during the past decade. Pakistan is in a state of “cold peace” with India, while China already operates a copper mine, and is building railroads along with a naval base on the Arabian Sea.

Iran, which has a long and porous border with Afghanistan, has close ties with the Northern Alliance forces (Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, etc.) and “loathes the Taliban, which massacred thousands of Shiites, killed several Iranian diplomats in Mazar-I-Sharif in 1998, and contributes mightily to [Iran’s] drug problem.” Iran, which originally helped the U.S. oust the Taliban, now would agree to “a settlement that restrained the Taliban, opened economic opportunities, and expelled the U.S.”

Like China, Iran’s Persian past casts a cultural legacy across Central Asia.

Where does all this leave the United States and NATO? Quite simply, in the dilemma of both spreading and fighting a contagion of Islamic resistance at the same time. Facing military stalemates -- at best -- in Iraq and Afghanistan, while teetering towards escalation in Pakistan and beyond. A budget crisis which includes no spending for another war. And a White House worried about who will be blamed for the likely quagmires.

Deescalation, an exit strategy, is the only way out of the rabbit hole.

[1] The first American drone strike against Libya was April 23, as reported by Reuters and ABC News.
[2] Woodward, Bob. Obama’s Wars, p. 46.
[3] Woodward, Bob. Obama’s Wars, pp. 206-207.
[4] Gul, Imtiaz, The Most Dangerous Place, 2009.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. This article was also published at Tom Hayden's Peace and Justice Resource Center. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Amy Goodman : Climate Change is the Real Deal

This Greenland glacier split in two, sending a 100 sqare mile iceberg floating off into the Arctic Ocean. Image from Mirror, U.K.
News at 11:
How climate change affects you

By Amy Goodman / August 13, 2010

Our daily weather reports, cheerfully presented with flashy graphics and state-of-the-art animation, appear to relay more and more information.

And yet, no matter how glitzy the presentation, a key fact is invariably omitted. Imagine if, after flashing the words "extreme weather" to grab our attention, the reports flashed "global warming." Then we would know not only to wear lighter clothes or carry an umbrella, but that we have to do something about climate change.

I put the question to Jeff Masters, co-founder and director of meteorology at Weather Underground, an Internet weather information service. Masters writes a popular blog on weather, and doesn't shy away from linking extreme weather to climate change:

"Heat, heat, heat is the name of the game on planet Earth this year," he told me, as the world is beset with extreme weather events that have caused the death of thousands and the displacement of millions.

Wildfires in Russia have blanketed the country with smoke, exacerbating the hottest summer there in 1,000 years. Torrential rains in Asia have caused massive flooding and deadly landslides in Pakistan, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and China. An ice shelf in Greenland has broken off, sending an ice island four times the size of Manhattan into the ocean. Droughts threaten Niger and the Sahel.

Masters relates stark statistics:

• 2010 has seen the most national extreme heat records for a single year: 17.
• The past decade was the hottest decade in the historical record.
• The first half of 2010 was the warmest such six-month period in the planet's history.
• The five warmest months in history for the tropical Atlantic have all occurred this year (likely leading to more frequent and severe Atlantic hurricanes).

"We will start seeing more and more years like this year when you get these amazing events that caused tremendous death and destruction," Masters said. "As this extreme weather continues to increase in the coming decades and the population increases, the ability of the international community to respond and provide aid to victims will be stretched to the limit."

Men row a boat carrying supplies while fleeing the flooded village of Karam Pur in Pakistan's Sindh province on August 10, 2010. Photo by Akhtar Soomro / Reuters.
And yet the UN talks aimed at climate change seem poised for collapse.

When the Copenhagen climate talks last December were derailed, with select industrialized nations, led by the United States, offering a "take it or leave it" accord, many developing nations decided to leave it. The so-called Copenhagen Accord is seen as a tepid, nonbinding document that was forced on the poorer countries as a ploy to allow countries like the U.S., Canada, and China to escape the legally binding greenhouse-gas emissions targets of the Kyoto Protocol, which is up for renewal.

Bolivia, for example, is pursuing a more aggressive global agreement on emissions. It's calling for strict, legally binding limits on emissions, rather than the voluntary goals set forth in the Copenhagen Accord. When Bolivia refused to sign on to the accord, the U.S. denied it millions in promised aid money. Bolivia's United Nations ambassador, Pablo Solon, told me: "We said: ‘You can keep your money. We're not fighting for a couple of coins. We are fighting for life.'"

While Bolivia did succeed in passing a UN resolution last month affirming the right to water and sanitation as a human right, a first for the world body, that doesn't change the fact that as Bolivia's glaciers melt as a result of climate change, its water supply is threatened.

Pacific Island nations like Tuvalu may disappear from the planet entirely if sea levels continue to rise, which is another consequence of global warming.

The U.N. climate conference will convene in Cancun, Mexico, in December, where prospects for global consensus with binding commitments seem increasingly unlikely. Ultimately, policy in the United States, the greatest polluter in human history, must be changed. That will come only from people in the United States making the vital connection between our local weather and global climate change. What better way than through the daily drumbeat of the weather forecasts? Meteorologist Jeff Masters defined for me the crux of the problem:

A lot of TV meteorologists are very skeptical that human-caused global climate change is real. They've been seduced by the view pushed by the fossil-fuel industry that humans really aren't responsible ... we're fighting a battle against an enemy that's very well-funded, that's intent on providing disinformation about what the real science says.

It just may take a weatherperson to tell which way the wind blows.

Copyright © 2010 Truthdig, L.L.C.

[Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 800 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December. Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.]

Source / Truthdig / CommonDreams

American tourists visiting Red Square wear masks to protect them from Moscow's air, filled with toxic smoke from raging wildfires. Photo by Pavel Golovkin / AP.
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Bob Feldman : A People's History of Afghanistan /13

An Afghani man sits in the rubble of Kabul, Afghanistan in 1995. Image from Countries and their Cultures.
Part 13: 1992-1998
A People’s History of Afghanistan

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog /July 5, 2010

[If you're a Rag Blog reader who wonders how the Pentagon ended up getting stuck "waist deep in the Big Muddy" in Afghanistan (to paraphrase a 1960s Pete Seeger song) -- and still can't understand, "what are we fighting for?" (to paraphrase a 1960s Country Joe McDonald song) -- this 15-part "People's History of Afghanistan" might help you debate more effectively those folks who still don't oppose the planned June 2010 U.S. military escalation in Afghanistan? The series so far can be found here.]

Since October 2001, the Pentagon has been waging an endless war in Afghanistan against the Taliban regime. Yet after the Taliban guerrillas first marched into Kabul in September 1996, an editorial in the October 8, 1996, issue of The New York Times stated that the Taliban regime “has brought a measure of stability to the country for the first time in years.”

In Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace, Chris Johnson and Jolyon Leslie indicated why the coalition of CIA and ISI-organized Mujahideen guerrilla groups that initially replaced the PDPA regime in Afghanistan in April 1992 failed to bring “stability to the country,” when they described what happened after the Mujahideen militia groups marched into Kabul:

Tens of thousands of civilians fled their homes... The public services that the Najibullah regime had maintained were soon a thing of the past...

About 20,000 people died in the fighting between April 1992 and December 1994 that followed the "liberation" of Kabul. Almost three-quarters of those who survived were forced to leave their homes and move across the city, or flee to squalid camps for the displaced in Jalalabad... Kabul continued to be the focus for rocket attacks from the outside until 1995...

In August 1992, for example the Mujahideen leader whose armed group had received the most military aid from the CIA in the early 1980s, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, “launched a barrage of rockets against Kabul from his bases north and east of the city that killed over a thousand civilians,” according to Angelo Rasanayagam’s Afghanistan: A Modern History.

The same book also noted that in January 1994, Hekmatyar’s Mujahideen group also “unleashed the most ferocious artillery and rocket attacks that Kabul had ever experienced” and “these attacks destroyed half the city, took some 25,000 civilian lives, and caused tens of thousands of Kabalis to seek safety in Pakistan or in the north” of Afghanistan.

The situation of women in Kabul also worsened dramatically after the CIA and ISI-organized armed Islamic groups entered Afghan’s capital city. As Guilles Dorronsoro’s Revolution Unending noted:

The arrival of the Mujahideen in 1992 inaugurated a range of restrictions from the wearing of the veil to the ban on women appearing on television... In Kabul all the armed groups... were guilty of rapes and kidnappings, leading sometimes to the suicide of young girls who had been dishonored. The very few women who dared to dress in the western style in the modern part of Kabul were harassed by the Mujahideen. All this was a new departure, and a contrast, since Afghan women had seldom before been threatened with deliberate acts of violence and certainly not with rape...

But, according to John Lucas’s “America’s Nation-Destroying Mission in Afghanistan” article, although the Mujahideen now set up a “Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice” to “control women’s dress codes and the length of men’s beards,” under the Mujahadeen government “women were still allowed to work” and were still able to be employed in professional jobs in Kabul.

Outside of Kabul, the Afghan countryside was pretty much ruled by Afghan warlords and Afghan drug lords. And by 1994, the country in the world that produced the most heroin was now Afghanistan.

But in November 1994 a new anti-feminist, Islamic guerrilla group of Afghan Pashtun tribes that was apparently backed by Saudi government money and Pakistani government weapons -- the Taliban -- initiated its military campaign to gain control of Afghanistan’s government. As Afghanistan: A Modern History observed, “the heavy Pakistani involvement in arming, training and even providing logistical support in Taliban field operations was no secret to informal observers as early as 1995” and “the generous Saudi funding was also well known.”

The Democratic Administration of Secretary of State Clinton’s husband also apparently wished, during the mid-1990s, to see the Taliban obtain control of the Afghan government, after one of its diplomats, Ms. Robin Raphael, held a meeting with Taliban representatives. According to the same book:

The United States... was not an uninterested party. An eventual take-over by the Taliban... served both the U.S. political strategy of "containing" [Iran], as well as its economic interests in fostering... an alternative land route through Afghanistan and Pakistan for the exploitation by U.S.-led companies of the seemingly inexhaustible oil and gas reserves of Central Asia.

Dator Zayar’s “Afghanistan: An Historical View” article also asserted that “the Taliban were the creation of the Pakistan military and intelligence establishment with the active support of the CIA” and that “U.S. imperialism is directly responsible for the Taliban reaction in Afghanistan.”

Less than three weeks after Taliban guerrilla fighters from Pakistan captured in two days the Afghan city of Kandahar on November 3, 1994, the number of Taliban guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan had rapidly increased to 2,500. And, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History, many of these Taliban insurgents were “armed with brand-new weapons that could only have come from Inter-Service Intelligence [ISI] warehouses in Pakistan.” So, by February 1995, the Taliban forces were able to capture the base near Kabul of Hekmatyar’s Mujahadeen forces.

Although the Taliban apparently began to act more independently of the Pakistani government in March 1995, during the summer of 1995 the Pakistan government’s ISI agency trained more Taliban guerrillas; and, according to Afghanistan: A Modern History, there is “no doubt that Pakistan through its ISI had played a key role in reinforcing the Taliban capacity to wage war.” The Afghan city of Jalalabad was then captured by the Taliban on September 12, 1996, and by September 26, 1996, the ISI-trained Taliban troops now controlled Kabul. By 1998, over 90 percent of Afghanistan’s territory was now controlled by the Taliban’s new Afghan government.

Coincidentally, after an October 21, 1995 agreement was signed between Turkmenistan President Saparmurad Nizazov, Unoca, and Unocal’s business partner -- the Saudi-owned Delta oil company -- to build a gas pipeline through Afghanistan, Unocal (which became a subsidiary of Chevron Texaco in 2005) began to handle “public relations for the Taliban and sponsored visits to Washington and Houston during the mid-1990s," according to Afghanistan: A Modern History. As the same book explained:

Behind... U.S. acquiescence in an eventual Taliban takeover, engineered by its Pakistan and Saudi allies, lay the Unocal game plan. Unocal was a consortium of U.S. oil companies formed to exploit the hydrocarbon reserves of Central Asia. Unocal and its Saudi partner, Delta, had hired every available American involved in Afghan operations during the jihad years, including Robert Oakley, a former ambassador to Pakistan, and worked hand-in-glove with U.S. officials. Unocal staff acted for a time as an unofficial lobby for the Taliban and were regularly briefed by the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI.

In U.S. eyes, the most important function of the Taliban would have been to provide security for the roads, and potentially for the gas and oil pipelines that would link the Central Asian states to the international markets through Afghanistan rather than Iran... The U.S. assistant secretary of state for South Asian Affairs, Robin Raphael, went so far as to state that the Taliban capture of Kabul was "a positive step.”

Following the September 1996 takeover of Kabul by the Taliban regime, Unocal Vice President Chris Taggart also said on October 2, 1996, that “if this leads to peace, stability, and international recognition, then this is a positive development.”

Support for the Taliban by the Clinton Administration apparently became “an economic priority,” after Unocal executives signed its October 21, 1995 agreement with the Turkmenistan president, based on potential gas exports evaluated at $8 billion, according to Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for Bin Laden by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie. Chris Johnson and Jolyon Leslie also observed in their Afghanistan : The Mirage of Peace book:

Afghanistan potentially offered advantages over all the alternative pipeline routes... The Clinton administration weighed in heavily on behalf of Unocal... In February 1997, and again in November of that year, Taliban representatives were in Washington meeting both Unocal and State Department officials. Unocal estimated it had spent some $15-20 million on the pipeline project... It hired... Zalmay Khalizad... a member of the National Security Council... Hamid Karzai... in 1997 represented Unocal in negotiations with the Taliban leadership...

Yet for Afghan women in Kabul, the victory of the Unocal, Clinton Administration, Pakistani government, and Saudi government-backed Taliban in September 1996 apparently “represented the triumph of the most fundamentalist tendency,” according to Revolution Unending. The same book also observed that the “earliest victims” of the new Taliban regime in Afghanistan “were educated women, who were mainly in Kabul and numbered around 165,000.” As a March 1998 article by N.O.W. vice president Karen Johnson noted:

On Sept. 27, 1996, the Taliban issued an edict that forbade women and girls from working or going to school. The edict took effect immediately, and women who tried to go to work the next day were beaten and forced to return home... On Sept. 26, 1996, women were 70% of the school teachers, 40% of the doctors, 50% of government workers and 50% of the university students... A woman must be accompanied by a male relative in order to leave the confines of her home…In the city of Kabul alone there are 40,000 widows who can no longer work to support themselves and their families... The Taliban asserts that the prohibitions for women and girls are religious and protective in nature...

But, according to Revolution Unending, for “country women” in Afghanistan “the principal effect of the arrival of the Taliban was an end to insecurity,” since rural Afghan women already lacked the educational and work opportunities that urban Afghan women lost after the Taliban militias entered Kabul in September 1996.

At least one writer has questioned the assertion that all actions of the Taliban regime’s Afghan government between September 1996 and November 2001 deserved condemnation. In his book, The World Is Turning, Don Paul wrote that “the Taliban... rebuilt schools and hospitals,” “eliminated (according to a year 2000 United Nations drug Control Program study) opium cultivation in their territory,” and “barred the selling of women as chattels.”

In addition, the Taliban (according to a speech by their roving Ambassador, Sayyid Rahmatullah Hashemi, at the University of Southern California on March 10, 2001) claimed that it allowed women to “work in the Taliban’s Ministries of Health, of Education, of the Interior, of Social Affairs” and allowed” more women than men” to “attend the schools of Medical Science that the Taliban had re-opened in all of Afghanistan’s major cities.”

Another early victim of the Taliban occupation of Kabul on September 26, 1996, was the Afghan government leader whose regime had collapsed in April 1992, Najibullah. Between April 1992 and September 1996, Najibullah had enjoyed sanctuary at the United Nations diplomatic premises in Kabul . But “one of the Taliban’s first acts after entering Kabul was to violate the United Nations diplomatic premises” to “torture and execute” Najibullah “and two companions in a particularly gruesome manner and expose their mutilated bodies in a Kabul square,” according to Afghanistan: A Modern History.

Datar Zayar’s “Afghanistan : An Historical View” article also observed that, additionally, the Taliban regime “unleashed a reign of terror with ethnic cleansing in Bamiyan and Mazar-e-Sharif and severe repression against oppressed religious minorities and nationalities” in Afghanistan.

Next: “A People’s History of Afghanistan—14: 1998-2001"

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s.]

• Previous installments of "A People's History of Afghanistan" by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog can be found here.

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Afghan Hawks : Make Your Case (And Chill with the Hot Air)

Photo by Michael Yon / Big Hollywood.
A suggestion to the Afghan hawks:
Give us facts, not just hot air

By Sherman DeBrosse / The Rag Blog / October 30, 2009

The supporters of Joe Biden seem to be on the defensive in the debate over what to do in Afghanistan even though the hawks have not advanced a strong case for escalating our involvement there. There seems still to be a basic assumption abroad that Americans must police the world, blindly follow the Pentagon, and apply more force when in doubt.

Those were clearly the assumptions of Dick Cheney, our most outspoken hawk, when he accused President Barack Obama of “dithering,” claiming taking time to deliberate about Afghanistan policy amounted to putting American lives at risk. In conjured images of a surrounded unit waiting for reinforcements. The former vice president has the right to criticize Obama, but we have a right to expect solid arguments rather than loaded words and appeals to emotion. If he had good arguments to offer, he did not bother to make them.

Of course, the greatest hawks are in the military. On October 13, Sy Hersh told a Duke University audience that the Pentagon was at war with the White House, and he bluntly stated that some of this was racially motivated. He added that the struggle is about control of policy and that it was calculated that President Barack Obama will lose support no matter what he does. All of this is reminiscent of the insubordination of Douglas MacArthur, the bad information the Pentagon fed LBJ in 1965, and the Navy’s theft of Nixon documents in 1971-1972.

When Pentagon staffers said they could not prepare a report on the advantages of a counterterrorism-only option because there were none, any serious observer could see that the military was in danger of exceeding its constitutional role. Hersh, a famous investigative reporter whose reports have been consistently well sourced, predicted that the Pentagon would get Obama to accept its will.

The Afghanistan hawks are talking about putting many more Americans in harm’s way. Those lives are precious. We have also reached the point where more care should be taken with the money we spend. By a conservative estimate Bush’s wars will cost between three and five trillion. Who knows how much more McCrystal’s proposed escalation will cost?

There is also the matter of priorities. Conservatives are outraged that almost $900 billion will be spent over ten years to extend health care to almost all Americans. They do not begrudge spending any amount on war and destruction.

Some might remember that the Pentagon strategists used game theory in the Sigma simulations to test various strategies for winning the Vietnam War. They never found one that would assure victory. Nevertheless, we slogged on because it was inconceivable that the commitment of massive forces and resources would not work.

The hawks have not offered compelling reasons to wade deeper into the Afghan morass, nor have they offered a strategy that promises success.

Before committing more troops to Afghanistan, the hawks should be sure that all or almost all of the following are true.


1. There should be a government in place in Kabul that will win the confidence of the great majority of the people.

This is what we know. The Afghans had a disputed election, and the UN sacked Peter Galbraith for revealing that there was a great deal of cheating on behalf of President Hamid Karzai. There were “ghost polling-stations” and far fewer people voted than were claimed. Bitterness against Karzai’s election tactics is intense. No one believes bitterness over the recently rigged election will dissipate soon. A third of the ballots cast for Karzai were tossed out and he now must face a run-off election. It is estimated that again there will be a low turnout due to Taliban threats and the widespread opinion there that the IEC favors Karzai. That may be why the Sirai Haqqani Taliban faction, operating out of North Waziristan in Pakistan, targeted the UN guest houses.

Few think we can be successful in Afghanistan without a government that commands the allegiance of most Afghans. Almost all admit that the Karzai government is impossibly corrupt. It is widely claimed that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s brother, is involved with a drug trafficker who also does business with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Yet many think this regime will be a solid and useful partner in ending the insurgency there. No one believes bitterness over the recently rigged election will dissipate soon.

In eight years, Karzai has made little progress in building up the army and police forces. The Afghan National Army stands at 94,000 and has had a little success in the north. It will take two years to increase it to 134,000. That is still far short of the 300 or 400 thousand that are needed. Who can remember that there were 91,000 when George W. Bush began to rebuild the ANA.

Counterinsurgency is really about keeping the Taliban from gaining control of any large part of Afghanistan so that they will not give Al Qaeda a safe haven. Richard Barrett, coordinator of the U.N.’s Al Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee, quotes remarks by Mullah Omar to the effect that the Taliban will focus on consolidating power, not bringing in Al Qaeda. The Taliban realize that giving bases to Al Qaeda got them kicked out in the first place. Doing so again would result in tremendous punishment and probable loss of power.

Any extended commitment that looks like imperialism or occupation will fail. To battle that perception, the administration should talk in terms of an expeditionary force that will remain around two years, more or less. Less, if the Afghan government does not appear to improve. . That puts the Karzai regime on notice that it must quickly put its house in order, and it precludes an open-ended war.


2. Pakistan will stop assisting the Afghanistan Taliban and will prevent its Taliban from entering Afghanistan.

Pakistan will continue playing a double game -- doing enough to get aid while keeping the Afghan Taliban alive. Pakistan has a vital interest preserving great interest in Afghan affairs. They distrust Karzai because he is too close to India and is permitting Indians to invest in Afghanistan. India is doing many good things there to help the Afghan people; the trouble is that their presence is one reason Pakistan still helps the Afghan Taliban.

Pakistan also complains that the Karzai regime is top heavy with Tajiks and that the Pashtuns are seriously underrepresented. The Pakistanis put the Taliban in power in the mid-1990s and learned that they are not ideal clients. For the moment, they are a useful tool. Pakistan would prefer to broker a new power-sharing arrangement in Afghanistan that would give the Pashtuns the upper hand while keeping the Taliban from the main levers of power.

The second problem with Pakistan is control of its border. It is true that Pakistan has sent 30,000 troops to deal with the Mehsud Taliban. The Nehsud insurgents no longer have much public support, but they will prove to be difficult to handle on the battle field.

It is a battle between troops trained to battle Indians in conventional warfare against guerillas. So far, that army has not shown skill in dealing with civilians in Taliban-infested areas or in helping refugees from the fighting.

The Pakistan Army managed to crack the alliance between the Mehsud and the Pashtun Pakistani Talibans led by Mullah Nazir and Hafiz Gul Bahadur. The army has repeatedly failed to deal effectively with them and has had to resort to bribery. Now Major General Athar Abbas promises to deal with those two, as soon as the Mehsud are crushed: “If you get the biggest bully in [the tribal lands,] all the other guys will fall into line.” If this were believable, Zazir and Bahadur would not have let the alliance with the Mehsud dissolve.

There is also another Pakistani Pashtun Taliban under Sirajuddin Hawwani, which is thought responsible for the Kabul bombings. In the past he had close ties to the ISI, Pakistan’s CIA. Now the Pakis tell us they have no idea where he is. The United States has evidence that he is operating out of North Waziristan. All three of these Paki Pashtun Talibans are Afghanistan-oriented and likely to be sending troops across the border with greater frequency.

Hilary gets an earful. Secy of State Clinton talks with Pakistani tribal people in Islamabad, Friday, Oct. 30, 2009. Photo by Irfan Mahkmood / AP.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confronted Pakistan on the matter of Siraj Hawwani and other Taliban who have been hiding out in Pakistan since 2002. Her charge that Pakistan has been colluding with these terrorists offended the Pakistanis, but it was important that she confront them on t his. The Pakistanis are willing to fight home-grown Taliban when those people threaten the regime. So far they have not moved against the Afghan Taliban in the tribal areas.

So long as these units are not attacking the Pakistani army, it is not in the army’s self interest to move against them. Similarly, there is no good reason to injure the Taliban in Afghanistan so long as Karzai pursues the same policies with respect to India and the Pashtuns.

It would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that the Afghan Taliban might eventually obtain shoulder mounted missile launchers from people in the Pakistani military. The Pakistanis have a large store of them, which they have manufactured. Though the military was once thoroughly secular, Islamic fundamentalism jihadism is common among the rank and file and is growing in the officer corps. We know that the Pakistani Taliban is using heavy weapons against the Pakistani army. How did they obtain them?


3. The “surge” techniques used in Iraq will be successful in Afghanistan.

The surge in Iraq focused on urban areas, and there are far fewer of them in Afghanistan. In Iraq, it involved buying off Sunni tribal leaders and their followers. It would be a step toward realistic thinking if advocates of escalation in Afghanistan admitted that purchasing support was a big part of the surge’s success. Bribery is worth trying in Afghanistan, where insurgent fighters get about $10 a month. We should try that in any case, but it is necessary to realize that the tribal structures in Afghanistan are not as powerful and coherent as in Iraq.

Only Bob Woodward has openly discussed another reason why the surge worked. Special Forces in Iraq, under McCrystal, carried out something like the Vietnam War’s Operation Phoenix and eliminated thousands of the insurgent cadre. It seems that that technique may not work in Afghanistan. Black ops there seem to convert people into Taliban supporters. That is partly why pilots and drone operators must get permission from a superior officer and a JAG lawyer before firing missiles. There is also concern about the negative consequences under international law if too many civilians are injured.

A U.S. counterinsurgency program will require far more troops that McCrystal is now requesting, in part because there are fewer urban concentrations and because of disadvantages presented by weather and terrain. Afghans in the south and east already see the U.S. as an occupying power, and the presence of more troops is certain to deepen that impression in those places and possibly spread it to the rest of the country. The McCrystal strategy would be an occupation, and foreign occupations of that country since the time of Alexander the Great have been failures.

Simply put, occupations breed anger, and long occupations breed still more anger and violence. Many experts claim that raising the number of U.S. troops there will simply provoke a great nationalist backlash. The Carnegie Institute concluded earlier this year that the coming of additional American forces actually helped the insurgency as Afghans saw them as occupiers. Success will require substantial forces in remote, mountainous places, where we have not always had great success.

Pakistan has 32 different linguistic groups, a mountain chain that extends 300 miles, and only 11,000 miles of roads -- less than a fifth of them paved. This will be an extremely difficult environment for effective counterinsurgency activity by foreign forces.

The battle of Wanat, Afghanistan, lasted only two hours on July 13. The base was up in the mountains at a place where we could disrupt the flow of Taliban fighters coming in from Pakistan. Nine Americans were killed and 29 were injured, amounting to a casualty rate of 75%. Warfare is the number one sport in Afghanistan, and these illiterate warriors are smart when it comes to tactics. They know that frequent bad weather inhibits airpower and they first go after heavy weapons and communications. They look for windows of opportunity to attack.

On that day they attacked at 4:20 a.m., firing rocket grenades at anti-tank rocket launchers and a 50 caliber machine gun. It took time for the choppers to arrive, and visibility was tough. The aircraft took some hits, but we retained the base.

Two weeks ago, at a base north of Wanat, we lost eight soldiers in a bloody day-long battle. They were killed by a well-armed force that dwarfed them in size. Their mission was to try to stem the flow of Pakistani Taliban fighters over the border to join their allies in the Afghan Taliban. Indeed, a number of the fighters were Pakistani Taliban expelled from the Swat Valley by Pakistan’s army.

The guerilla force that confronted the Americans numbered about 300. In Iraq, the guerilla forces seldom exceeded 30, with the possible exception of the fighting in Fallujah.

We found it necessary to abandon both those bases in Nurestan province.

Even General Stanley McCrystal admits we have not mastered the math of counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan. Sometimes 20-2+0. That is we take out 2 insurgents and the other eighteen might just quit and go home. Good. But sometimes 20-2= 47. We take out two important insurgents and their male relatives join the Taliban or some groups using that name.

Economic aid is a good thing, but we still have not mastered how to administer it. We have only learned recently that using non-Afghan contractors almost always alienates people. But now we learn that we have to be careful which Afghan contractors should be used.


4. Our allies are prepared to soldier on in Afghanistan for at least several more years.

Afghanistan has become a NATO mission, and our president would be well advised to invite NATO to join in these deliberations. Otherwise, it will appear that we are continuing the Bush policy of dictating to others. Obama was selected for the Nobel Prize in part because he turned away from unilateralism and opted for engaging our allies and others.

Obama asked Germany for more troops, and the Federal Republic refused. Now we learn that Italian troops in Sarobi area of Afghanistan bribed the Taliban not to attack them. This left the French vulnerable to attack because the Italians had not warned the French that they were bribing the Taliban.

The mood in Europe is clearly against sending more troops. France, Germany, and Great Britain have asked for an international conference to discuss how NATO forces can be phased out in Afghanistan. Prime Minister Gordon Brown upped his contribution by 500 troops and said counterinsurgency efforts were necessary. But he tied his commitment to more troops from other NATO countries and Afghan commitments to be more inclusive, fight corruption, and deploy more soldiers.

In view of the growing sentiment in Europe against the Afghanistan operation, it would be wise to learn how much support we could count on if we ramp up the effort to provide population security. Already some writers fear that extended involvement in Afghanistan could be the rock on which the NATO vessel breaks. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has endorsed Obama’s decision to review the policy and has said that it is more important to get the right strategy than to rely on putting in more troops.


1. The escalation plan has a diplomatic component that will contribute to success on the ground.

There are diplomatic options, but they do not promise success. Some of them may not be acceptable to the American people.

Hillary Clinton, supported by Henry Kissinger, has suggested that we call for a regional conference to discuss the situation in Afghanistan. It should include Iran, China, India, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Our nervous NATO allies should also be represented. Maybe nothing will come of a conference, but Iran, Russia, China, and India have many reasons to want stability in Afghanistan. The last thing they need is a state that exports terrorism. This would be a remodeled version of the old UN sponsored six plus talks of the 1990s and 2001. The U.S. should be represented by experienced diplomats from both parties.

Talks on Afghanistan might somehow be coordinated with talks about Iran. Russian Foreign Minister Sergi Lavrov told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that Russia and China opposed more sanctions against Iran at this time and favored multilateral talks with Iran. The U.S. has previously said it favored talking to the Iranians. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is in China arranging for the building of a refinery there in return for loans to Russian banks. He is probably also discussing Afghanistan.

Russia and China have been drawing closer to one another and, through the Shanghai Cooperation Council, are demonstrating that they do not want to see U.S. hegemony in Central Asia. They will not stand for Iran being crushed, but they oppose a nuclear armed Iran. It is possible we could work out a broad deal for Central Asia with them.

Our internal discussion of the Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan questions takes place as though they are not related. But they are interlinked. Many Afghans who are now on our side speak Persian and are strongly influenced by Iran. Iran could make things even worse for us in Afghanistan, but it has no reason now to want an unstable Afghanistan. By the same token, Iran could make the Iraq situation much worse if it supplied Shiite insurgents with ground to air missiles or even simply the devices the mujahedeen used against the Russians.

Our dealings with Iran can impact upon what goes on in Afghanistan. So far, they have gone tit for tat. For each black op and insurgent activity we sponsor in Iran, they have answered in kind. By appearing to be more reasonable than Bush, President Obama has obtained some important concessions from Iran and may be able to do more. But if Israel were to move against Iran, we could expect Iran to use its influence against us among its Afghan clients.

These are all important and relevant questions. The debate over what to do in Afghanistan could be improved if the hawks attempted to answer these questions. So far, the hawks have advanced nothing but macho appeals, emotionalism, and distortions. Years ago, this sort of thing was dismissed as “foreign policy fundamentalism” and was identified with Strangelove types like Curtis LeMay and unsophisticated politicians from the most remote provinces. Today, we hear it from a former Vice President, and it seems to represent the foreign policy of a party once respected for its real politik in foreign policy.

[Sherman DeBrosse is a retired history teacher. Sherm spent seven years writing an analytical chronicle of what the Republicans have been up to since the 1970s. The New Republican Coalition : Its Rise and Impact, The Seventies to Present (Publish America) can be acquired by calling 301-695-1707. On line, go here.]

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AfPak War : Not a Pretty Picture

Here there be monsters. Graphic from Asia Times.
War destabilizing Pakistan;
Veteran officer urges Afghan drawdown

By Roger Baker / The Rag Blog / October 16, 2009

The news regarding the war in Afghanistan just keeps getting worse. The NATO alliance war in Afghanistan is increasingly morphing into "AfPak" war that is also destabilizing Pakistan. Meanwhile the Taliban is steadily increasing in strength whereas the US/NATO forces are regarded by the population as corrupt and ineffective.

In one recent case, the Italian NATO troops bribed the Taliban to maintain the peace. When the French troops who were sent in to replace them were not in on the deal, they were attacked and mutilated.

Here is an exclusive report by a journalist who interviewed a top Taliban commander who outlines their strategy; an interview rather unlikely to be granted if the Taliban were not confident of victory.

Most observers, including even top generals like McChrystal, who are actively trying to promote an escalation of the war, agree that we are currently losing strength to the Taliban guerrillas.

Independent military observers think that any US escalation will strengthen the insurgents, and that we are unlikely to be able to prop up the unpopular Afghan army. And that if we could do so, it would take a long time.

Veteran Army Officer Urges Afghan Troop Drawdown

A veteran Army officer who has served in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars warns in an analysis now circulating in Washington that the counterinsurgency strategy urged by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal is likely to strengthen the Afghan insurgency, and calls for withdrawal of the bulk of U.S. combat forces from the country over 18 months.

In a 63-page paper representing his personal views, but reflecting conversations with other officers who have served in Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis argues that it is already too late for U.S. forces to defeat the insurgency...

In the paper, Davis argues that the counterinsurgency strategy recommended by McChrystal would actually require a far larger U.S. force than is now being proposed. Citing figures given by Marine Corps Col. Julian Dale Alford at a conference last month, Davis writes that training 400,000 Afghan army and police alone would take 18 brigades of U.S. troops – as many as 100,000 U.S. troops when the necessary support troops are added.

The objective of expanding the Afghan security forces to 400,000, as declared in McChrystal's "initial assessment", poses other major problems as well, according to Davis.

He observes that the costs of such an expansion have been estimated at three to four times more than Afghanistan's entire Gross Domestic Product. Davis asks what would happen if the economies of the states which have pledged to support those Afghan personnel come under severe pressures and do not continue the support indefinitely.

"It would be irresponsible to increase the size of the military to that level," he writes, "convincing hundreds of thousands of additional Afghan men to join, giving them field training and weapons, and then at some point suddenly cease funding, throwing tens of thousands out of work." -- Gareth Porter / IPS

Not only is the war in Afghanistan costly and nearly certain to be protracted into a war lasting years, but it is a logistical nightmare, with no clear goals. The few operable roads leading into the capital of Kabul are now frequently mined with IEDs. The Pentagon is reporting to Congress that the fuel to fight the war is costing the US $400 per gallon to deliver. Given the logistics, often the only way to supply US/NATO troops is by helicopter.

The Pentagon pays an average of $400 to put a gallon of fuel into a
combat vehicle or aircraft in Afghanistan....

The Pentagon comptroller’s office provided the fuel statistic to the committee staff when it was asked for a breakdown of why every 1,000 troops deployed to Afghanistan costs $1 billion....

According to a Government Accountability Office report published earlier this year, 44 trucks and 220,000 gallons of fuel were lost due to attacks or other events while delivering fuel to Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan in June 2008 alone....

The Marines in Afghanistan, for example, reportedly run through some 800,000 gallons of fuel a day.

Thanks to S. M. Wilhelm / The Rag Blog

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Tom Hayden Comic : The Long War

The Long WarText by Tom Hayden.Illustrated by Sam Marlow and Ellis Rosen. Edited by Paul Buhle.
Published by The Rag Blog.

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See additional frames, Below.

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[Tom Hayden, a prime mover in the Sixties New Left, was a California State Senator. A respected activist and author, he was a founder of Progressives for Obama and is the author of Ending the War in Iraq (2007), The Voices of the Chicago Eight (2008), and Writings for a Democratic Society, the Tom Hayden Reader (2008).]

[Sam Marlow and Ellis Rosen are graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Together they self-published two comics. Marlowe also worked as a digital colorist for Chicago comic artist, Paul Hornshemeier, on titles such as “The Three Paradoxes”, and Marvel Comics’ “Omega the Unknown.” He recently completed a short science fiction comic about the end of the world. He is currently volunteering at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Rosen lives in NewYork where he also works part time at the Barry Friedman Gallery.]

[Paul Buhle is an educator and a historian. He published the New Left journal Radical America during the 1960s and has written or edited many books on radicalism and culture. He now organizes leftwing comic books.]

Go here for earlier Tom Hayden comics published by The Rag Blog.

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Steve Weissman : Obama Speaks. Will Palestine or Pakistan Decide?

Barack Obama's speech drew huge audiences in the Muslim world. Photo by EPA / Telegraph, U.K.

A bigger problem for Obama's relations with the world's Muslims will be his military escalation in Afghanistan and his ever-deepening involvement in Pakistan.

By Steve Weissman / The Rag Blog / June 5, 2009

From his first "greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum," President Barack Hussein Obama showed how to use the bully pulpit. Some listeners might have found him pedantic or even preachy, but he was delivering his sermon to American and Israeli audiences as much as to the world's Muslims. "As the Holy Koran tells us," he set the tone, "be conscious of God and speak always the truth."

Nowhere was his truth more nuanced, more powerful and less applauded by his Egyptian audience than in his declaration of America's unbreakable bond with Israel, tying it directly to the Holocaust.

"Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich," he said. "Six million Jews were killed -- more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction -- or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews -- is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve."

These were strong words in a part of the world that continues to spread the anti-Semitic venom of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and regularly denies that the Holocaust happened, as Iranian President Ahmadinejad had done only the night before. Yet Obama found it equally "undeniable that the Palestinian people -- Muslims and Christians -- have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.

"For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation," he declared. "Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations -- large and small -- that come with occupation."

The Palestinian plight is "intolerable," said Obama. "America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own."

At a time when huge numbers of Israelis and Palestinians have lost faith in a two-state solution, the president of the United States was personally committing himself to meet the aspirations of both sides "through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security."

"That is in Israel's interest, Palestine's interest, America's interest and the world's interest," he declared.

How do we get from here to there? By the Arab states taking new steps beyond the Arab Peace Initiative, he urged. And by Palestinians and Israelis meeting the obligations they have already accepted under the Road Map.

"Palestinians must abandon violence," said Obama. "Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding."

Israel, he insisted, must acknowledge the Palestinians' right to their own state, take concrete steps to help resolve the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the continuing lack of opportunity in the West Bank, and put an end to Jewish settlements on Palestinian land.

"The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements," said Obama. "This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop."

Whether Obama can make his vision stick remains to be seen, though cynics will remain a dime a dozen. But, the success of the speech in Cairo will make it that much harder for Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to use his allies in Congress to soften Obama's demands on Israel. Obama added little new about how he hoped to bring Hamas or the Iranians, who supply Hamas, to accept a two-state solution.

A bigger problem for Obama's relations with the world's Muslims will be his military escalation in Afghanistan and his ever-deepening involvement in Pakistan. In his speech, he defended both as a response to al-Qaeda and other violent extremists "who pose a grave threat to our security" and who are "determined to kill as many Americans as possible."

The question he did not address was whether American intervention would subdue that threat or recruit more Afghans, Pakistanis and other Muslims from around the world against the United States. The evidence so far is that an overwhelmingly military response is doing far more harm than good. Why doesn't Obama see that? Why doesn't he heed his own advice to the Palestinians?

"Violence is a dead end," he told them. "It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered."

One need not be a nonviolent activist to hear the wisdom of Barack Hussein Obama's words, especially as American drones continue to kill innocent Afghans or Pakistanis.

[A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France.]

source / truthout.

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Pakistani Refugee Crisis Worsening

An internally displaced man holds up an identity card as he waits in line for relief supplies at a UNHCR distribution point at a makeshift camp in Mardan. Photo: Farooq Naeem.
Nearly 2.4 million displaced: UN
May 25, 2009

ISLAMABAD - Nearly 2.4 million people have registered with provincial authorities after fleeing an anti-Taliban military offensive this month in northwest Pakistan, the UN and government officials said Monday, AFP reports.

Ariane Rummery, spokeswoman for the UNHCR, said they had been given the figure by the North West Frontier Province authorities and expected the number to fluctuate after cross checks are carried out in the coming days.

‘In the new influx, 2.38 million people have been registered,’ she said. ‘That’s the new influx registered from May two from Swat, Lower Dir and Buner.’

Pakistan’s security forces launched their onslaught against Taliban fighters in the districts of Lower Dir on April 26, Buner on April 28 and Swat on May 8, sending terrified civilians fleeing their homes.

Most of the displaced are staying with friends and relatives, while others are crammed into government-run camps.

Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira told reporters the government was doing all it could to care for the massive number of uprooted people.

‘Around 2.3 million people have been displaced but this number is not final,’ he said.

The newly-displaced join more than 550,000 people who fled similar battles last year and rights groups have warned that it is Pakistan’s biggest movement of people since partition from India in 1947.

Source / Dawn

Thanks to Juan Cole / The Rag Blog

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Englehardt: The Expanding Afghanistan-Pakistan Conflict

Bodies of some of 25-30 Afghan civilians killed in NATO air strike, October 16, 2008. Obama has escalated the Afghanistan war. Photo: Abdul Khaleq/Associated Press.
Going for Broke: Six Ways the Af-Pak War Is Expanding
By Tom Engelhardt / May 21, 2009

Yes, Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it). So the recent sacking of Afghan commander General David McKiernan after less than a year in the field and McChrystal's appointment as the man to run the Afghan War seems to signal that the Obama administration is going for broke. It's heading straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known as "the big muddy."

General McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years he commanded the Pentagon's super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an "executive assassination wing" out of Vice President Cheney's office. (Cheney just returned the favor by giving the newly appointed general a ringing endorsement: "I think you'd be hard put to find anyone better than Stan McChrystal.")

McChrystal gained a certain renown when President Bush outed him as the man responsible for tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The secret force of "manhunters" he commanded had its own secret detention and interrogation center near Baghdad, Camp Nama, where bad things happened regularly, and the unit there, Task Force 6-26, had its own slogan: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." Since some of the task force's men were, in the end, prosecuted, the bleeding evidently wasn't avoided.

In the Bush years, McChrystal was reputedly extremely close to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The super-secret force he commanded was, in fact, part of Rumsfeld's effort to seize control of, and Pentagonize, the covert, on-the-ground activities that were once the purview of the CIA.

Behind McChrystal lies a string of targeted executions that may run into the hundreds, as well as accusations of torture and abuse by troops under his command (and a role in the cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the death of Army Ranger and former National Football League player Pat Tillman). The general has reportedly long thought of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single battlefield, which means that he was a premature adherent to the idea of an Af-Pak -- that is, expanded -- war. While in Afghanistan in 2008, the New York Times reported, he was a "key advocate... of a plan, ultimately approved by President George W. Bush, to use American commandos to strike at Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan." This end-of-term Bush program provoked such anger and blowback in Pakistan that it was reportedly halted after two cross-border raids, one of which killed civilians.

All of this offers more than a hint of the sort of "new thinking and new approaches" -- to use Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's words -- that the Obama administration expects General McChrystal to bring to the devolving Af-Pak battlefield. He is, in a sense, both a legacy figure from the worst days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era and the first-born child of Obama-era Washington's growing desperation and hysteria over the wars it inherited.

Hagiography

And here's the good news: We luv the guy. Just luv him to death.

We loved him back in 2006, when Bush first outed him and Newsweek reporters Michael Hirsh and John Barry dubbed him "a rising star" in the Army and one of the "Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls 'the shadows.'"

It's no different today in what's left of the mainstream news analysis business. In that mix of sports lingo, Hollywood-ese, and just plain hyperbole that makes armchair war strategizing just so darn much fun, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, for instance, claimed that Centcom commander General David Petraeus, who picked McChrystal as his man in Afghanistan, is "assembling an all-star team" and that McChrystal himself is "a rising superstar who, like Petraeus, has helped reinvent the U.S. Army." Is that all?

When it came to pure, instant hagiography, however, the prize went to Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, who wrote a front-pager, "A General Steps from the Shadows," that painted a picture of McChrystal as a mutant cross between Superman and a saint.

Among other things, it described the general as "an ascetic who... usually eats just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid sluggishness. He is known for operating on a few hours' sleep and for running to and from work while listening to audio books on an iPod... [He has] an encyclopedic, even obsessive, knowledge about the lives of terrorists... [He is] a warrior-scholar, comfortable with diplomats, politicians..." and so on. The quotes Bumiller and Mazzetti dug up from others were no less spectacular: "He's got all the Special Ops attributes, plus an intellect." "If you asked me the first thing that comes to mind about General McChrystal... I think of no body fat."

From the gush of good cheer about his appointment, you might almost conclude that the general was not human at all, but an advanced android (a good one, of course!) and the "elite" world (of murder and abuse) he emerged from an unbearably sexy one.

Above all, as we're told here and elsewhere, what's so good about the new appointment is that General McChrystal is "more aggressive" than his stick-in-the-mud predecessor. He will, as Bumiller and Thom Shanker report in another piece, bring "a more aggressive and innovative approach to a worsening seven-year war." The general, we're assured, likes operations without body fat, but with plenty of punch. And though no one quite says this, given his closeness to Rumsfeld and possibly Cheney, both desperately eager to "take the gloves off" on a planetary scale, his mentality is undoubtedly a global-war-on-terror one, which translates into no respect for boundaries, restraints, or the sovereignty of others. After all, as journalist Gareth Porter pointed out recently in a thoughtful Asia Times portrait of the new Afghan War commander, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld granted the parent of JSOC, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), "the authority to carry out actions unilaterally anywhere on the globe."

Think of McChrystal's appointment, then, as a decision in Washington to dispatch the bull directly to the China shop with the most meager of hopes that the results won't be smashed Afghans and Pakistanis. The Post's Ignatius even compares McChrystal's boss Petraeus and Obama's special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, to "two headstrong bulls in a small paddock." He then concludes his paean to all of them with this passage -- far more ominous than he means it to be:

"Obama knows the immense difficulty of trying to fix a broken Afghanistan and make it a functioning, modern country. But with his two bulls, Petraeus and Holbrooke, he's marching his presidency into the 'graveyard of empires' anyway."

McChrystal is evidently the third bull, the one slated to start knocking over the tombstones.

An Expanding Af-Pak War

Of course, there are now so many bulls in this particular China shop that smashing is increasingly the name of the game. At this point, the early moves of the Obama administration, when combined with the momentum of the situation it inherited, have resulted in the expansion of the Af-Pak War in at least six areas, which only presage further expansion in the months to come:

1. Expanding Troop Commitment: In February, President Obama ordered a "surge" of 17,000 extra troops into Afghanistan, increasing U.S. forces there by 50%. (Then-commander McKiernan had called for 30,000 new troops.) In March, another 4,000 American military advisors and trainers were promised. The first of the surge troops, reportedly ill-equipped, are already arriving. In March, it was announced that this troop surge would be accompanied by a "civilian surge" of diplomats, advisors, and the like; in April, it was reported that, because the requisite diplomats and advisors couldn't be found, the civilian surge would actually be made up largely of military personnel.

In preparation for this influx, there has been massive base and outpost building in the southern parts of that country, including the construction of 443-acre Camp Leatherneck in that region's "desert of death." When finished, it will support up to 8,000 U.S. troops, and a raft of helicopters and planes. Its airfield, which is under construction, has been described as the "largest such project in the world in a combat setting."

2. Expanding CIA Drone War: The CIA is running an escalating secret drone war in the skies over the Pakistani borderlands with Afghanistan, a "targeted" assassination program of the sort that McChrystal specialized in while in Iraq. Since last September, more than three dozen drone attacks -- the Los Angeles Times put the number at 55 -- have been launched, as opposed to 10 in 2006-2007. The program has reportedly taken out a number of mid-level al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but also caused significant civilian casualties, destabilized the Pashtun border areas of Pakistan, and fostered support for the Islamic guerrillas in those regions. As Noah Shachtman wrote recently at his Danger Room website:

"According to the American press, a pair of missiles from the unmanned aircraft killed 'at least 25 militants.' In the local media, the dead were simply described as '29 tribesmen present there.' That simple difference in description underlies a serious problem in the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. To Americans, the drones over Pakistan are terrorist-killers. In Pakistan, the robotic planes are wiping out neighbors."

David Kilcullen, a key advisor to Petraeus during the Iraq "surge" months, and counterinsurgency expert Andrew McDonald Exum recently called for a moratorium on these attacks on the New York Times op-ed page. ("Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent -- hardly 'precision.'") As it happens, however, the Obama administration is deeply committed to its drone war. As CIA Director Leon Panetta put the matter, "Very frankly, it's the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership."

3. Expanding Air Force Drone War: The U.S. Air Force now seems to be getting into the act as well. There are conflicting reports about just what it is trying to do, but it has evidently brought its own set of Predator and Reaper drones into play in Pakistani skies, in conjunction, it seems, with a somewhat reluctant Pakistani military. Though the outlines of this program are foggy at best, this nonetheless represents an expansion of the war.

4. Expanding Political Interference: Quite a different kind of escalation is also underway. Washington is evidently attempting to insert yet another figure from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era into the Afghan mix. Not so long ago, Zalmay Khalilzad, the neocon former American viceroy in Kabul and then Baghdad, was considering making a run for the Afghan presidency against Hamid Karzai, the leader the Obama administration is desperate to ditch. In March, reports -- hotly denied by Holbrooke and others -- broke in the British press of a U.S./British plan to "undermine President Karzai of Afghanistan by forcing him to install a powerful chief of staff to run the Government." Karzai, so the rumors went, would be reduced to "figurehead" status, while a "chief executive with prime ministerial-style powers" not provided for in the Afghan Constitution would essentially take over the running of the weak and corrupt government.

This week, Helene Cooper reported on the front page of the New York Times that Khalilzad would be that man. He "could assume a powerful, unelected position inside the Afghan government under a plan he is discussing with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, according to senior American and Afghan officials." He would then be "the chief executive officer of Afghanistan."

Cooper's report is filled with official denials that these negotiations involve Washington in any way. Yet if they succeed, an American citizen, a former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. as well as to Kabul, would end up functionally atop the Karzai government just as the Obama administration is eagerly pursuing a stepped-up war against the Taliban.

Why officials in Washington imagine that Afghans might actually accept such a figure is the mystery of the moment. It's best to think of this plan as the kinder, gentler, soft-power version of the Kennedy administration's 1963 decision to sign off on the coup that led to the assassination of South Vietnamese autocrat Ngo Dinh Diem. Then, too, top Washington officials were distressed that a puppet who seemed to be losing support was, like Karzai, also acting in an increasingly independent manner when it came to playing his appointed role in an American drama. That assassination, by the way, only increased instability in South Vietnam, leading to a succession of weak military regimes and paving the way for a further unraveling there. This American expansion of the war would likely have similar consequences.

5. Expanding War in Pakistan: Meanwhile, in Pakistan itself, mayhem has ensued, again in significant part thanks to Washington, whose disastrous Afghan war and escalating drone attacks have helped to destabilize the Pashtun regions of the country. Now, the Pakistani military -- pushed and threatened by Washington (with the loss of military aid, among other things) -- has smashed full force into the districts of Buner and Swat, which had, in recent months, been largely taken over by the Islamic fundamentalist guerrillas we call "the Pakistani Taliban."

It's been a massive show of force by a military configured for smash-mouth war with India, not urban or village warfare with lightly armed guerrillas. The Pakistani military has loosed its jets, helicopter gunships, and artillery on the region (even as the CIA drone strikes continue), killing unknown numbers of civilians and, far more significantly, causing a massive exodus of the local population. In some areas, well more than half the population has fled Taliban depredations and indiscriminate fire from the military. Those that remain in besieged towns and cities, often without electricity, with the dead in the streets, and fast disappearing supplies of food, are clearly in trouble.

With nearly 1.5 million Pakistanis turned into refugees just since the latest offensive began, U.N. officials are suggesting that this could be the worst refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Talk about the destabilization of a country.

In the long run, this may only increase the anger of Pashtuns in the tribal areas of Pakistan at both the Americans and the Pakistani military and government. The rise of Pashtun nationalism and a fight for an "Islamic Pashtunistan" would prove a dangerous development indeed. This latest offensive is what Washington thought it wanted, but undoubtedly the old saw, "Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true," applies. Already a panicky Washington is planning to rush $110 million in refugee assistance to the country.

6. Expanding Civilian Death Toll and Blowback: As Taliban attacks in Afghanistan rise and that loose guerrilla force (more like a coalition of various Islamist, tribal, warlord, and criminal groups) spreads into new areas, the American air war in Afghanistan continues to take a heavy toll on Afghan civilians, while manufacturing ever more enemies as well as deep resentment and protest in that country. The latest such incident, possibly the worst since the Taliban was defeated in 2001, involves the deaths of up to 147 Afghans in the Bala Baluk district of Farah Province, according to accounts that have come out of the villages attacked. Up to 95 of the dead were under 18, one Afghan lawmaker involved in investigating the incident claims, and up to 65 of them women or girls. These deaths came after Americans were called into an escalating fight between the Taliban and Afghan police and military units, and in turn, called in devastating air strikes by two U.S. jets and a B-1 bomber (which, villagers claim, hit them after the Taliban fighters had left).

Despite American pledges to own up to and apologize more quickly for civilian deaths, the post-carnage events followed a predictable stonewalling pattern, including a begrudging step-by-step retreat in the face of independent claims and reports. The Americans first denied that anything much had happened; then claimed that they had killed mainly Taliban "militants"; then that the Taliban had themselves used grenades to kill most of the civilians (a charge later partially withdrawn as "thinly sourced"); and finally, that the numbers of Afghan dead were "extremely over-exaggerated," and that the urge for payment from the Afghan government might be partially responsible.

An investigation, as always, was launched that never seems to end, while the Americans wait for the story to fade from view. As of this moment, while still awaiting the results of a "very exhaustive" investigation, American spokesmen nonetheless claim that only 20-30 civilians died along with up to 65 Taliban insurgents. In these years, however, the record tells us that, when weighing the stories offered by surviving villagers and those of American officials, believe the villagers. Put more bluntly, in such situations, we lie, they die.

Two things make this "incident" at Bala Baluk more striking. First of all, according to Jerome Starkey of the British Independent, another Rumsfeld creation, the U.S. Marines Corps Special Operations Command (MarSOC), the Marines' version of JSOC, was centrally involved, as it had been in two other major civilian slaughters, one near Jalalabad in 2007 (committed by a MarSOC unit that dubbed itself "Taskforce Violence"), the second in 2008 at the village of Azizabad in Herat Province. McChrystal's appointment, reports Starkey, has "prompted speculation that [similar] commando counterinsurgency missions will increase in the battle to beat the Taliban."

Second, back in Washington, National Security Advisor James Jones and head of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen, fretting about civilian casualties in Afghanistan and faced with President Karzai's repeated pleas to cease air attacks on Afghan villages, nonetheless refused to consider the possibility. Both, in fact, used the same image. As Jones told ABC's George Stephanopoulos: "Well, I think he understands that... we have to have the full complement of... our offensive military power when we need it... We can't fight with one hand tied behind our back..."

In a world in which the U.S. is the military equivalent of the multi-armed Hindu god Shiva, this is one of the truly strange, if long-lasting, American images. It was, for instance, used by President George H. W. Bush on the eve of the first Gulf War. "No hands," he said, "are going to be tied behind backs. This is not a Vietnam."

Forgetting the levels of firepower loosed in Vietnam, the image itself is abidingly odd. After all, in everyday speech, the challenge "I could beat you with one hand tied behind my back" is a bravado offer of voluntary restraint and an implicit admission that fighting any other way would make one a bully. So hidden in the image, both when the elder Bush used it and today, is a most un-American acceptance of the United States as a bully nation, about to be restrained by no one, least of all itself.

Apologize or stonewall, one thing remains certain: the air war will continue and so civilians will continue to die. The idea that the U.S. might actually be better off with one "hand" tied behind its back is now so alien to us as to be beyond serious consideration.

The Pressure of an Expanding War

President Obama has opted for a down-and-dirty war strategy in search of some at least minimalist form of success. For this, McChrystal is the poster boy. Former Afghan commander General McKiernan believed that, "as a NATO commander, my mandate stops at the [Afghan] border. So unless there is a clear case of self-protection to fire across the border, we don't consider any operations across the border in the tribal areas."

That the "responsibilities" of U.S. generals fighting the Afghan War "ended at the border with Pakistan," Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt of the Times report, is now considered part of an "old mind-set." McChrystal represents those "fresh eyes" that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates talked about in the press conference announcing the general's appointment. As Mazzetti and Schmitt point out, "Among [McChrystal's] last projects as the head of the Joint Special Operations Command was to better coordinate Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency efforts on both sides of the porous border."

For those old enough to remember, we've been here before. Administrations that start down a path of expansion in such a war find themselves strangely locked in -- psychically, if nothing else -- if things don't work out as expected and the situation continues to deteriorate. In Vietnam, the result was escalation without end. President Obama and his foreign policy team now seem locked into an expanding war. Despite the fact that the application of force has not only failed for years, but actually fed that expansion, they also seem to be locked into a policy of applying ever greater force, with the goal of, as the Post's Ignatius puts it, cracking the "Taliban coalition" and bringing elements of it to the bargaining table.

So keep an eye out for whatever goes wrong, as it most certainly will, and then for the pressures on Washington to respond with further expansions of what is already "Obama's war." With McChrystal in charge in Afghanistan, for instance, it seems reasonable to assume that the urge to sanction new special forces raids into Pakistan will grow. After all, frustration in Washington is already building, for however much the Pakistani military may be taking on the Taliban in Swat or Buner, don't expect its military or civilian leaders to be terribly interested in what happens near the Afghan border.

As Tony Karon of the Rootless Cosmopolitan blog puts the matter: "The current military campaign is designed to enforce a limit on the Taliban's reach within Pakistan, confining it to the movement's heartland." And that heartland is the Afghan border region. For one thing, the Pakistani military (and the country's intelligence services, which essentially brought the Taliban into being long ago) are focused on India. They want a Pashtun ally across the border, Taliban or otherwise, where they fear the Indians are making inroads.

So the frustration of a war in which the enemy has no borders and we do is bound to rise along with the fighting, long predicted to intensify this year. We now have a more aggressive "team" in place. Soon enough, if the fighting in the Afghan south and along the Pakistani border doesn't go as planned, pressure for the president to send in those other 10,000 troops General McKiernan asked for may rise as well, as could pressure to apply more air power, more drone power, more of almost anything. And yet, as former CIA station chief in Kabul, Graham Fuller, wrote recently, in the region "crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint."

And what if, as the war continues its slow arc of expansion, the "Washington coalition" is the one that cracks first? What then?

[Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.]

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

Source / TomDispatch

Thanks to Juan Cole / The Rag Blog

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