A central pillar of the US military's counterinsurgent strategy is to go to the villages and win the support of Afghans, village by village, by building schools, infrastructure, and other civilian projects. There are innumerable obstacles: language barriers, the distrust of foreign occupiers, the lack of expert intermediaries from the village or region, the cost in time and resources, and so on. There is also the fact that 80% of what the US spends for Afghanistan goes to the military rather than to reconstruction. In the context of these difficulties, the Taliban are meeting the needs of many Afghan villages by giving them a kind of local justice and helping them to avoid corrupt government officials and other exploiters of their situations.
Bob
------------------------------
From The Times [in the UK]
December 30, 2009
Afghans turn to Taleban justice as insurgents set up shadow government
Jerome Starkey in Kabul
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6970962.ece
When Habiba’s elderly husband was badly beaten in a village brawl there was only one place, she said, that she could turn to for help and justice.
Barefoot and weeping, the farmer’s wife, 50, trekked for four hours through Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains to meet the local Taleban commander.
“My feet were bleeding and I cried the whole way but I didn’t care about my safety,” she said. “We are poor people. We know the Government doesn’t help people like us.”
Corruption and incompetence in President Karzai’s Government — particularly at local level — have forced a growing number of people to seek the services of the Taleban.
The shadow government is not limited to justice. In Helmand, in August, Taleban commanders issued printed travel permits on headed notepaper from the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” to let people through checkpoints on the roads in and out of Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital.
A senior Nato intelligence official admitted this week that the Taleban “has a government-in-waiting, with ministers chosen,” ready to take over the moment the current administration failed. He warned, in a bleak assessment of the insurgents’ strength: “Time is running out. Taleban influence is expanding.”
The Taleban, which Nato says run shadow governments in 33 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, are only too willing to help settle local disputes. Their strict, if brutal, interpretation of Islamic law is often preferable to the lengthy and costly Government alternative.
“My husband had a broken leg so he sent me to find Mullah Zafar,” Habiba said. “We don’t know anyone in the Government and we know they won’t solve our problems.”
Mullah Zafar Akhund is the Taleban’s shadow governor in Jaghatu district, Wardak province, a short drive south of Kabul.
Habiba’s husband, Abdullah, who is 20 years her senior, fought with a neighbour called Qasim over water rights. Village customs prescribe which fields should be watered at which times. Habiba said that Qasim was stealing the water when it was not his time and turned violent when her husband challenged him.
“I waited two hours to see Mullah Zafar,” she said. “He listened to my story and sent three of his soldiers to come back to my village. They spoke to the village elders who told them the same thing. The soldiers beat Qasim and ordered him to give us his water for seven nights.”
Habiba, an ethnic Hazara, is not a natural ally of the Taleban. Most of them are Pashtuns, and thousands of Hazaras were massacred under the Taleban regime. The insurgents have exploited local disputes that the Government cannot solve to gain footholds in new areas, irrespective of the ethnic divides. For many years, locals said, Mullah Zafar provided an alternative to
Government institutions.
Six months ago he felt sufficiently entrenched in Jaghatu to issue a decree that anyone found using Government services would face summary execution.
“Not everybody likes them but they were good to me,” said Reza Yousef, one of Habiba’s neighbours with a similar experience of Taleban justice. He spent four years petitioning government officials for help with a land dispute. “They didn’t care,” he said. “It took Mullah Zafar four days.
“Ten years ago we had a problem with our land,” he said. “One of our neighbours was powerful because he had connections [to a warlord] and he took some of our land.
“When [Hamid Karzai’s] Government came I complained many, many times but they didn’t hear me.”
Mr Yousef said that he could not afford the mandatory bribe to push his complaint through the system. He took his case to the village elders, or shura, and they ruled in his favour three times.
His neighbour, Younus, ignored their decisions, confident that he was protected through his links to Karim Khalili, the Hazara warlord recently appointed as one of Mr Karzai’s vice-presidents.
“It was around three years ago I went to Mullah Zafar and showed him the papers which prove the land is mine,” Mr Yousef said. “He sent four of his soldiers to my village to see for themselves and the next day he came to the village himself and held a shura with all the elders.”
The meeting, overlooked by insurgents armed with Kalashnikovs and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, was, in effect, a Taleban court.
“Younus was hiding in the place where they keep cows but they found him and they beat him badly. His face was bleeding,” Mr Yousef said.
Younus was exiled for two months and ordered to hand back the land. “If you complain to the Government it takes years; they ask you for bribes and you have to go to their offices every day,” Mr Yousef said. “That’s why people choose the Taleban.”
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
US policy has shaped disastrous Afghan wars for last 30 years
US government involvement in the wars of Afghanistan goes back to December 1979, when then President Jimmy Carter signed off on a memo from Zbigniew Brzezinski, then national security adviser. This set in motion a series of events the effects of which continue to this day. In the following article, Stephen Kinzer succinctly identifies how US policy was decisive in creating a force of radical Islamic soldiers, which led to the emergence of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, in opening up opportunities for Saudi Arabia to financially contribute and spread its conservative brand of Islam, and in giving tacit assent to the development of nuclear weapons by Pakistan's military dictatorship. All of this reflects an opportunistic, short-sighted, policy on the part of US presidents and their administrations that wastes money, wastes lives, destroys resources and infrastructure, and generates an ever-more insecure world. Obama is a part and now facilitator of this 30-year debacle.
Bob
----------------------------------
The moment that changed Afghanistan
The problems ailing Afghanistan began with America's decision to intervene in the country following the Soviet invasion in 1979
Stephen Kinzer
guardian.co.uk, Monday 28 December 2009 11.00 GMT
This week marks the 30th anniversary of the fateful decision, little noted at the time, that drew the US into its Afghanistan quagmire. If the current Afghan crisis can be said to have begun at any single moment, it was in the last week of 1979.
At dusk on Christmas Eve, following orders from President Leonid Brezhnev, units of the Soviet army crossed pontoon bridges over the Amu Darya river into Afghanistan. Brezhnev's decision was a catastrophic error that not only deeply damaged his country but also contributed to its extinction as a nation state. History is beginning to suggest, though, that decisions made in Washington during that week were just as tragically shortsighted.
One way for the US to have reacted to the Soviet invasion would have been to cheer the Soviets' stupidity and wait patiently for Afghan resistance fighters to do their duty to history. This would have been a prudent, restrained policy, one of limited ambition and risk. It would have kept the US out of a dangerous place where it had not previously been entangled and which it did not know well.
Instead the US chose the opposite path: hyperactive engagement. The CIA launched its biggest operation ever, pouring billions of dollars into the Afghan resistance, matched dollar-for-dollar by Saudi Arabia. This operation contributed decisively to the Soviet defeat, culminating in the Red Army's retreat back across the Amu Darya in 1988.
America's decision to escalate this war also had other effects that only became clear later. It brought tens of thousands of foreign fighters, including Osama bin Laden, to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. With them these outsiders brought harsh forms of Islamic fundamentalism that had been little known in Afghanistan. Their influence – Wahhabi fanaticism preached to Afghan resistance fighters in a war paid for by the US and Saudi Arabia – gave birth to the Taliban. Pakistan served as eager midwife and quickly turned the Taliban into its proxy force in Afghanistan. Once in power, the Taliban offered a safe haven to al-Qaida, which prepared the September 11 attacks there.
America's decision to plunge into Afghanistan 30 years ago also made the US an ally of Pakistan's reactionary military dictator, Muhammad Zia al-Haq. The CIA needed bases for its anti-Soviet army, and therefore required Zia's cooperation. No one seemed to care that he had recently hanged the elected prime minister he overthrew, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, or that his two transcendent goals for Pakistan were creating a "pure Islamic order" and building nuclear weapons.
Thanks to the marvels of declassification, we now know precisely when America's engagement in Afghanistan was set in motion. It was on 26 December 1979, just two days after the Soviet invasion. President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, sent him a memo entitled "Reflections on Soviet intervention in Afghanistan". Carter endorsed it, and soon the CIA was funnelling huge amounts of money through Pakistan to fundamentalist warlords. A year later, after Ronald Reagan replaced Carter, American involvement further deepened.
"It is essential that Afghanistan's resistance continues," Brzezinksi wrote in his historic memo:
This means more money as well as arms shipments to the rebels, and some technical advice. To make the above possible, we must both reassure Pakistan and encourage it to help the rebels. This will require a review of our policy toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid and, alas, a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy.
Until that moment, the US had been closely monitoring Pakistan's nuclear programme and blocking it whenever possible. As soon as Washington signalled to General Zia that it would stop monitoring the program in exchange for his help with the anti-Soviet war, he launched a global effort, led by AQ Khan, to assemble nuclear technology and fuel. Less than 20 years later, Pakistan successfully tested its first nuclear weapon.
Like so many American decisions to intervene in foreign lands, the decision in December 1979 to plunge into Afghanistan was made without serious consideration of the long-term consequences. It produced an apparent success that, with the passage of time, has come to look not much like a success after all.
Bob
----------------------------------
The moment that changed Afghanistan
The problems ailing Afghanistan began with America's decision to intervene in the country following the Soviet invasion in 1979
Stephen Kinzer
guardian.co.uk, Monday 28 December 2009 11.00 GMT
This week marks the 30th anniversary of the fateful decision, little noted at the time, that drew the US into its Afghanistan quagmire. If the current Afghan crisis can be said to have begun at any single moment, it was in the last week of 1979.
At dusk on Christmas Eve, following orders from President Leonid Brezhnev, units of the Soviet army crossed pontoon bridges over the Amu Darya river into Afghanistan. Brezhnev's decision was a catastrophic error that not only deeply damaged his country but also contributed to its extinction as a nation state. History is beginning to suggest, though, that decisions made in Washington during that week were just as tragically shortsighted.
One way for the US to have reacted to the Soviet invasion would have been to cheer the Soviets' stupidity and wait patiently for Afghan resistance fighters to do their duty to history. This would have been a prudent, restrained policy, one of limited ambition and risk. It would have kept the US out of a dangerous place where it had not previously been entangled and which it did not know well.
Instead the US chose the opposite path: hyperactive engagement. The CIA launched its biggest operation ever, pouring billions of dollars into the Afghan resistance, matched dollar-for-dollar by Saudi Arabia. This operation contributed decisively to the Soviet defeat, culminating in the Red Army's retreat back across the Amu Darya in 1988.
America's decision to escalate this war also had other effects that only became clear later. It brought tens of thousands of foreign fighters, including Osama bin Laden, to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. With them these outsiders brought harsh forms of Islamic fundamentalism that had been little known in Afghanistan. Their influence – Wahhabi fanaticism preached to Afghan resistance fighters in a war paid for by the US and Saudi Arabia – gave birth to the Taliban. Pakistan served as eager midwife and quickly turned the Taliban into its proxy force in Afghanistan. Once in power, the Taliban offered a safe haven to al-Qaida, which prepared the September 11 attacks there.
America's decision to plunge into Afghanistan 30 years ago also made the US an ally of Pakistan's reactionary military dictator, Muhammad Zia al-Haq. The CIA needed bases for its anti-Soviet army, and therefore required Zia's cooperation. No one seemed to care that he had recently hanged the elected prime minister he overthrew, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, or that his two transcendent goals for Pakistan were creating a "pure Islamic order" and building nuclear weapons.
Thanks to the marvels of declassification, we now know precisely when America's engagement in Afghanistan was set in motion. It was on 26 December 1979, just two days after the Soviet invasion. President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, sent him a memo entitled "Reflections on Soviet intervention in Afghanistan". Carter endorsed it, and soon the CIA was funnelling huge amounts of money through Pakistan to fundamentalist warlords. A year later, after Ronald Reagan replaced Carter, American involvement further deepened.
"It is essential that Afghanistan's resistance continues," Brzezinksi wrote in his historic memo:
This means more money as well as arms shipments to the rebels, and some technical advice. To make the above possible, we must both reassure Pakistan and encourage it to help the rebels. This will require a review of our policy toward Pakistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid and, alas, a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy.
Until that moment, the US had been closely monitoring Pakistan's nuclear programme and blocking it whenever possible. As soon as Washington signalled to General Zia that it would stop monitoring the program in exchange for his help with the anti-Soviet war, he launched a global effort, led by AQ Khan, to assemble nuclear technology and fuel. Less than 20 years later, Pakistan successfully tested its first nuclear weapon.
Like so many American decisions to intervene in foreign lands, the decision in December 1979 to plunge into Afghanistan was made without serious consideration of the long-term consequences. It produced an apparent success that, with the passage of time, has come to look not much like a success after all.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Afghanistan as part of a plan to dominate resources in the region
Lee Sustar analyzes the deeper reasons for President Obama's decisions to escalate the US military presence in Afghanistan. He argues that it is not really about defeating al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The expanding US military expansion is about efforts, however harmful to the Afghan people, to consolidate US geo-political interests in the Casbian Sea Region and in Central Asia. Afghanistan is but one link in a more general strategic plan in this great game that pits US interests against Russian and Chinese interests. It is a plan that implies that there are no viable economic and political options but to follow a militarized foreign policy for the sake of preserving a corporate-dominated capitalism in the US. The "war on terror" is a smokescreen. The plan is a fantasy that will ultimately foster further devastation and wars, as imperialism feeds on itself.
Bob
---------------------------------
http://socialistworker.org/2009/12/14/obama-and-the-great-game
Obama's turn in the "great game"
Lee Sustar examines the military, economic and political agendas driving Barack Obama's war drive in Afghanistan.
December 14, 2009
WHEN BARACK Obama says he wants to "finish the job" in Afghanistan, he's talking about a lot more than smashing al-Qaeda or crushing the Taliban. What he's after is a permanent outpost of U.S. imperialism in Central Asia, one of the most strategically important places on the planet.
Some knowledgeable observers, however, discount the idea that Afghanistan is part of a U.S. grand strategy. "The real goals of the Afghanistan escalation are domestic and electoral," journalist Christian Parenti wrote recently. "Like Lyndon Johnson who escalated in Vietnam, Obama lives in mortal fear of being called a wimp by Republicans."
According to Parenti, one of the leading independent journalists who's reported on the ground in the Afghan war, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was a "trampoline" for George W. Bush's administration to get into Iraq. And it's certainly true that Bush's neocons were eager to get to Iraq. We know now that former Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz argued for an attack on Iraq immediately after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
But in fact, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had--from the perspective of U.S. imperial strategists--its own powerful logic. One key reason, of course, is access to oil and gas resources in the Caspian Sea region and Central Asia. Journalist Pepe Escobar calls the region "Pipelineistan," [1] and sure enough, the U.S. is angling for pipelines to move natural gas out of the Caspian along a corridor that bypasses Russia and Iran:
Yep, it all comes down to black gold and "blue gold" (natural gas), hydrocarbon wealth beyond compare, and so it's time to trek back to that ever-flowing wonderland--Pipelineistan. It's time to dust off the acronyms, especially the SCO or Shanghai Cooperative Organization, the Asian response to NATO, and learn a few new ones like IPI [the Iran-Pakistan India pipeline] and TAPI [the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline].
Above all, it's time to check out the most recent moves on the giant chessboard of Eurasia, where Washington wants to be a crucial, if not dominant, player.
According to Escobar, the U.S. and China are competing to develop the Pakistan port town of Gwadar as the termination point for both proposed pipelines as part of the 21st century revival of the 19th-century "Great Game" in which rival imperial powers competed for influence in Central Asia.
Escobar's analysis is compelling--as far as it goes. He rightly focuses on the maneuvering for the most crucial commodity for modern industrial powers--oil. But even this understates the importance of Central Asia to U.S. imperialism. To understand why, it's helpful to recall U.S. strategic aims following the end of the Second World War in 1945 when the U.S. emerged as the world's dominant imperialist power.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THERE WAS only one clear strategic competitor to the U.S. after 1945--the USSR, which had turned East Germany and the Eastern European states under its military control into satellites. The USSR would go on to eventually roughly match the U.S. in nuclear firepower, establishing mutually assured destruction if one side launched a war against the other.
The U.S. national security doctrine of the late 1940s centered on the USSR's supposedly expansionist "communism." In reality, the U.S. was the driving force in the division of the world, creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to compel Western European powers to irrevocably join Washington's camp. As NATO's first secretary general, Lord Ismay of Britain, put it, NATO's purpose was to "keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down."
During the long Cold War, Washington and Moscow contended for influence the world over, starting with a proxy war on the Korean peninsula, and extending to many corners of the Third World. During most of that time, Central Asia was the most remote from Washington's influence. But Russia's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan to prop up an embattled pro-Moscow government changed all that.
Earlier that year, Washington had been shaken when the Iranian Revolution swept away the regime of the Shah of Iran, a U.S.-backed dictator who helped Washington put pressure on the USSR's southern flank. Fearful of Moscow's possible influence in post-revolutionary Iran, Democratic President Jimmy Carter declared that any attempt by the USSR to move into the Persian Gulf region would be treated as a hostile act directed at the U.S.--a policy soon known as the Carter Doctrine.
But while Washington was sounding the alarm about Moscow's supposed designs on the Gulf, the U.S. was stepping up its aggression in the USSR's sphere of influence by arming the Afghan resistance. As then-National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski recalled in an interview: "I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war."
The collapse of the USSR in 1991 created a vacuum in Afghanistan that was eventually filled by the Taliban, a movement that originated among the Islamist fighters financed, armed and trained by the U.S. At the same time, however, the unraveling of the USSR suddenly opened entire new regions for U.S. economic, political and military penetration.
By 1996, the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO, funded by arms manufacturers and staffed by neoconservative policy specialists, was engineering what would become the absorption of the most important former Eastern European satellites of Moscow as well as the three Baltic republics of the USSR.
NATO claimed a new reason for being in its supposed "humanitarian" war on Yugoslavia in 1999, allegedly waged to protect the Albanian minority in Serbia, but in reality to consolidate the alliance for the post-Cold War era. When the U.S. military took control Afghanistan in 2001, NATO troops came in their wake. The justification for this was the attacks of September 11, 2001. The alliance had invoked the article of its charter holding that an attack on any of its members was an attack on all. So if the U.S. deemed Afghanistan responsible for the attacks, NATO had the justification to go all in.
Since then, of course, most NATO allies have proven reluctant to risk much commitment in Afghanistan, forcing the U.S. to continually press them for more money and troops. But the U.S. has succeeded--so far--in compelling its allies to join it on a drive deep into Asia, very far from the Atlantic region that NATO was supposed to protect.
In fact, the U.S. had begun to set the stage for this move years ago. Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, head of Central Command during the 1990s, compared himself to a Roman proconsul as he used his command of U.S. forces in the Middle East and the Gulf to carry out U.S. political aims in that region and beyond. Andrew Bacevich, a retired U.S. colonel turned academic, called this period the "unprecedented militarization of U.S. foreign policy."
In fact, top U.S. military commanders met at NATO headquarters in 1995 to plan ways of "extending Persian Gulf security guarantees" to Central Asia. The effort bore fruit, symbolized in a 1997 high-profile publicity stunt by U.S. Marine Corps Gen. John Sheehan, then head of the U.S. Atlantic Command. Sheehan flew 19 hours from North Carolina with the Army's 82nd Airborne and joined a parachute drop into Kazakhstan, the heart of Central Asia. "The message is there is no nation on the face of the Earth that we cannot get to," he declared.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THIS GROUNDWORK paid off for the U.S. in the aftermath of 9/11. The U.S. immediately set up military "facilities" in the five Central Asian states formerly part of the USSR that would play an important role in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Suddenly, the strongest military on earth had secured a position that greatly furthered its aims--militarily pressuring Iran to the west, and giving the U.S. military a key airbase within short flying times of key cities in both Russia and China.
Certainly, control of proposed oil and gas pipelines is a key part of the equation. But what the U.S. is after is even bigger--limiting Russia's economic, political and military revival, and raising the stakes for China as it attempts to turn its growing economic power into greater political clout.
Achieving these gains for U.S imperialism hasn't been easy. In addition to facing a much more powerful insurgency in Afghanistan than anticipated, the U.S. has had to compete with Russia for influence in the Central Asian states, particularly Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. But even the Russians have been forced to accommodate Washington's agenda in the region, as they view a U.S. occupation of Afghanistan as a lesser evil to a restored Taliban regime--at least for now.
It's for all these reasons that Obama and his military strategists considered Afghanistan a more important war than the "dumb" one in Iraq. In their view, Iraq under Saddam Hussein was weak and contained by sanctions, and the U.S. military's grip on the Persian Gulf was unassailable. By contrast, the new "great game" in Central Asia after 9/11 provided unprecedented opportunities for U.S. imperialism.
Now, Obama is trying to salvage the Afghanistan gambit that Bush bungled. Obama's war plans are packaged differently--so much so that they can be tucked into a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. But the aims remain the same: create a client state with a large and permanent U.S. military presence.
It's the job of the antiwar movement to oppose Obama's war drive for the imperialist venture that it is.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Material on this Web site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd 3.0) [2] license, except for articles that are republished with permission. Readers are welcome to share and use material belonging to this site for non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and SocialistWorker.org.
[1] http://www.antemedius.com/content/tomgram-pepe-escobar-pipelineistan-goes-af-pak
[2] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0
Bob
---------------------------------
http://socialistworker.org/2009/12/14/obama-and-the-great-game
Obama's turn in the "great game"
Lee Sustar examines the military, economic and political agendas driving Barack Obama's war drive in Afghanistan.
December 14, 2009
WHEN BARACK Obama says he wants to "finish the job" in Afghanistan, he's talking about a lot more than smashing al-Qaeda or crushing the Taliban. What he's after is a permanent outpost of U.S. imperialism in Central Asia, one of the most strategically important places on the planet.
Some knowledgeable observers, however, discount the idea that Afghanistan is part of a U.S. grand strategy. "The real goals of the Afghanistan escalation are domestic and electoral," journalist Christian Parenti wrote recently. "Like Lyndon Johnson who escalated in Vietnam, Obama lives in mortal fear of being called a wimp by Republicans."
According to Parenti, one of the leading independent journalists who's reported on the ground in the Afghan war, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was a "trampoline" for George W. Bush's administration to get into Iraq. And it's certainly true that Bush's neocons were eager to get to Iraq. We know now that former Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz argued for an attack on Iraq immediately after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
But in fact, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had--from the perspective of U.S. imperial strategists--its own powerful logic. One key reason, of course, is access to oil and gas resources in the Caspian Sea region and Central Asia. Journalist Pepe Escobar calls the region "Pipelineistan," [1] and sure enough, the U.S. is angling for pipelines to move natural gas out of the Caspian along a corridor that bypasses Russia and Iran:
Yep, it all comes down to black gold and "blue gold" (natural gas), hydrocarbon wealth beyond compare, and so it's time to trek back to that ever-flowing wonderland--Pipelineistan. It's time to dust off the acronyms, especially the SCO or Shanghai Cooperative Organization, the Asian response to NATO, and learn a few new ones like IPI [the Iran-Pakistan India pipeline] and TAPI [the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline].
Above all, it's time to check out the most recent moves on the giant chessboard of Eurasia, where Washington wants to be a crucial, if not dominant, player.
According to Escobar, the U.S. and China are competing to develop the Pakistan port town of Gwadar as the termination point for both proposed pipelines as part of the 21st century revival of the 19th-century "Great Game" in which rival imperial powers competed for influence in Central Asia.
Escobar's analysis is compelling--as far as it goes. He rightly focuses on the maneuvering for the most crucial commodity for modern industrial powers--oil. But even this understates the importance of Central Asia to U.S. imperialism. To understand why, it's helpful to recall U.S. strategic aims following the end of the Second World War in 1945 when the U.S. emerged as the world's dominant imperialist power.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THERE WAS only one clear strategic competitor to the U.S. after 1945--the USSR, which had turned East Germany and the Eastern European states under its military control into satellites. The USSR would go on to eventually roughly match the U.S. in nuclear firepower, establishing mutually assured destruction if one side launched a war against the other.
The U.S. national security doctrine of the late 1940s centered on the USSR's supposedly expansionist "communism." In reality, the U.S. was the driving force in the division of the world, creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to compel Western European powers to irrevocably join Washington's camp. As NATO's first secretary general, Lord Ismay of Britain, put it, NATO's purpose was to "keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down."
During the long Cold War, Washington and Moscow contended for influence the world over, starting with a proxy war on the Korean peninsula, and extending to many corners of the Third World. During most of that time, Central Asia was the most remote from Washington's influence. But Russia's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan to prop up an embattled pro-Moscow government changed all that.
Earlier that year, Washington had been shaken when the Iranian Revolution swept away the regime of the Shah of Iran, a U.S.-backed dictator who helped Washington put pressure on the USSR's southern flank. Fearful of Moscow's possible influence in post-revolutionary Iran, Democratic President Jimmy Carter declared that any attempt by the USSR to move into the Persian Gulf region would be treated as a hostile act directed at the U.S.--a policy soon known as the Carter Doctrine.
But while Washington was sounding the alarm about Moscow's supposed designs on the Gulf, the U.S. was stepping up its aggression in the USSR's sphere of influence by arming the Afghan resistance. As then-National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski recalled in an interview: "I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war."
The collapse of the USSR in 1991 created a vacuum in Afghanistan that was eventually filled by the Taliban, a movement that originated among the Islamist fighters financed, armed and trained by the U.S. At the same time, however, the unraveling of the USSR suddenly opened entire new regions for U.S. economic, political and military penetration.
By 1996, the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO, funded by arms manufacturers and staffed by neoconservative policy specialists, was engineering what would become the absorption of the most important former Eastern European satellites of Moscow as well as the three Baltic republics of the USSR.
NATO claimed a new reason for being in its supposed "humanitarian" war on Yugoslavia in 1999, allegedly waged to protect the Albanian minority in Serbia, but in reality to consolidate the alliance for the post-Cold War era. When the U.S. military took control Afghanistan in 2001, NATO troops came in their wake. The justification for this was the attacks of September 11, 2001. The alliance had invoked the article of its charter holding that an attack on any of its members was an attack on all. So if the U.S. deemed Afghanistan responsible for the attacks, NATO had the justification to go all in.
Since then, of course, most NATO allies have proven reluctant to risk much commitment in Afghanistan, forcing the U.S. to continually press them for more money and troops. But the U.S. has succeeded--so far--in compelling its allies to join it on a drive deep into Asia, very far from the Atlantic region that NATO was supposed to protect.
In fact, the U.S. had begun to set the stage for this move years ago. Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, head of Central Command during the 1990s, compared himself to a Roman proconsul as he used his command of U.S. forces in the Middle East and the Gulf to carry out U.S. political aims in that region and beyond. Andrew Bacevich, a retired U.S. colonel turned academic, called this period the "unprecedented militarization of U.S. foreign policy."
In fact, top U.S. military commanders met at NATO headquarters in 1995 to plan ways of "extending Persian Gulf security guarantees" to Central Asia. The effort bore fruit, symbolized in a 1997 high-profile publicity stunt by U.S. Marine Corps Gen. John Sheehan, then head of the U.S. Atlantic Command. Sheehan flew 19 hours from North Carolina with the Army's 82nd Airborne and joined a parachute drop into Kazakhstan, the heart of Central Asia. "The message is there is no nation on the face of the Earth that we cannot get to," he declared.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THIS GROUNDWORK paid off for the U.S. in the aftermath of 9/11. The U.S. immediately set up military "facilities" in the five Central Asian states formerly part of the USSR that would play an important role in the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Suddenly, the strongest military on earth had secured a position that greatly furthered its aims--militarily pressuring Iran to the west, and giving the U.S. military a key airbase within short flying times of key cities in both Russia and China.
Certainly, control of proposed oil and gas pipelines is a key part of the equation. But what the U.S. is after is even bigger--limiting Russia's economic, political and military revival, and raising the stakes for China as it attempts to turn its growing economic power into greater political clout.
Achieving these gains for U.S imperialism hasn't been easy. In addition to facing a much more powerful insurgency in Afghanistan than anticipated, the U.S. has had to compete with Russia for influence in the Central Asian states, particularly Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. But even the Russians have been forced to accommodate Washington's agenda in the region, as they view a U.S. occupation of Afghanistan as a lesser evil to a restored Taliban regime--at least for now.
It's for all these reasons that Obama and his military strategists considered Afghanistan a more important war than the "dumb" one in Iraq. In their view, Iraq under Saddam Hussein was weak and contained by sanctions, and the U.S. military's grip on the Persian Gulf was unassailable. By contrast, the new "great game" in Central Asia after 9/11 provided unprecedented opportunities for U.S. imperialism.
Now, Obama is trying to salvage the Afghanistan gambit that Bush bungled. Obama's war plans are packaged differently--so much so that they can be tucked into a Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. But the aims remain the same: create a client state with a large and permanent U.S. military presence.
It's the job of the antiwar movement to oppose Obama's war drive for the imperialist venture that it is.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Afghan Women: US intervention in Afghanistan has never been a force for humanitarianism
Listening to Afghanistan
The U.S. intervention has never been and won't become a force for humanitarianism.
Ann Friedman December 22, 2009)
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article+listening_to_afghanistan
In the spring of 2008 I wrote a column, "Listening to Iraq," in which I lamented the lack of access that most Americans had to the voices and opinions of the people most affected by the ongoing war. This made it difficult, I wrote, "for even the best-intentioned anti-war American to see Iraqis as partners, rather than as a political project."
I was reminded of that column after Obama's speech announcing his Afghanistan strategy, In it, he declared, "For the Afghan people, a return to Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance, international isolation, a paralyzed economy, and the denial of basic human rights to the Afghan people -- especially women and girls." But he made very clear that he does not see our involvement in Afghanistan as a humanitarian mission. As the American left debates, I'm struck by a desire to know what Afghan women, who have been living under the U.S. occupation for roughly eight years now, think would be best for their country.
The Afghan politician and activist Malalai Joya has warned that "Obama's military buildup will only bring more suffering and death to innocent civilians." Another woman, who goes by the pseudonym Zoya, has appeared in various U.S. media calling for "withdrawal of the troops immediately." She is a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a Kabul-based political group that has fought for human rights and social justice since 1977. And Sakena Yacoobi, who founded a network of underground schools for Afghan women and girls, says "most foreign troops are not primarily focused on protecting women and children. Their focus is on beating the enemy, which is very different, and ordinary citizens become collateral damage in the process." At least Obama and Yacoobi are in agreement: This mission is not about human rights and democracy. It's about defeating an enemy.
Admittedly, three women do not make for a comprehensive survey of Afghan civilians' attitudes. Still, I can't help but notice how the opinions of these activists, who are all based in Afghanistan, diverge from those of U.S.?based advocates who are clamoring for continued military involvement on behalf of Afghan women. Rather than focusing on Obama's own words on the subject or examining the lessons learned during the past eight years of occupation (namely that women's rights are not a priority for the U.S. military or the Afghan government it supports), they seem to believe activists can convince the president to make this war about human rights.
"When I think of why the U.S. and the world have a moral obligation to the reconstruction of Afghanistan, women are the central issue," Sunita Viswanath, who founded Women for Afghan Women in New York in 2001, recently told my former colleague Dana Goldstein at The Daily Beast. Other non-Afghan leaders, such as Feminist Majority Foundation president Eleanor Smeal, also support continued U.S. involvement.
This debate among people committed to women's rights is as old as the war. Two months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, first lady Laura Bush used the president's weekly radio address to cite the rights of Afghan women as a primary reason for invasion. While this was roundly derided as rank hypocrisy from an administration that only paid lip service to women's rights when there was a war to sell, many feminists were happy to see light shed on the plight of women living under the Taliban. Some remained staunchly anti-war, where others went so far as to cheer the invasion.
Eight years later, the consensus is that the current regime has not been markedly better for women than the former Taliban rulers were -- especially outside of Kabul. President Hamid Karzai signed a law this summer that legalized marital rape and required women to get permission from their husbands to work. In November UNICEF declared Afghanistan the worst country in the world in which to be born. Women and girls still face daily oppression and epidemic levels of violence.
The difference between the pro-intervention feminists like Viswanath and Smeal and the pro-withdrawal Afghan women like Joya, Zoya, and Yacoobi is not their level of commitment to women's rights. It's their faith in military intervention as a means of securing them. As Prospect senior correspondent Michelle Goldberg put it recently, one's view of whether a continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan will improve the situation for women "depends on whether one believes that the American military can be a force for humanitarianism."
To me, the answer is tragically apparent: It doesn't matter whether U.S. military intervention can be a force for humanitarianism because, in Afghanistan, it never has been and won't become one.
(c)2009 by the American Prospect
The U.S. intervention has never been and won't become a force for humanitarianism.
Ann Friedman December 22, 2009)
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article+listening_to_afghanistan
In the spring of 2008 I wrote a column, "Listening to Iraq," in which I lamented the lack of access that most Americans had to the voices and opinions of the people most affected by the ongoing war. This made it difficult, I wrote, "for even the best-intentioned anti-war American to see Iraqis as partners, rather than as a political project."
I was reminded of that column after Obama's speech announcing his Afghanistan strategy, In it, he declared, "For the Afghan people, a return to Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance, international isolation, a paralyzed economy, and the denial of basic human rights to the Afghan people -- especially women and girls." But he made very clear that he does not see our involvement in Afghanistan as a humanitarian mission. As the American left debates, I'm struck by a desire to know what Afghan women, who have been living under the U.S. occupation for roughly eight years now, think would be best for their country.
The Afghan politician and activist Malalai Joya has warned that "Obama's military buildup will only bring more suffering and death to innocent civilians." Another woman, who goes by the pseudonym Zoya, has appeared in various U.S. media calling for "withdrawal of the troops immediately." She is a member of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, a Kabul-based political group that has fought for human rights and social justice since 1977. And Sakena Yacoobi, who founded a network of underground schools for Afghan women and girls, says "most foreign troops are not primarily focused on protecting women and children. Their focus is on beating the enemy, which is very different, and ordinary citizens become collateral damage in the process." At least Obama and Yacoobi are in agreement: This mission is not about human rights and democracy. It's about defeating an enemy.
Admittedly, three women do not make for a comprehensive survey of Afghan civilians' attitudes. Still, I can't help but notice how the opinions of these activists, who are all based in Afghanistan, diverge from those of U.S.?based advocates who are clamoring for continued military involvement on behalf of Afghan women. Rather than focusing on Obama's own words on the subject or examining the lessons learned during the past eight years of occupation (namely that women's rights are not a priority for the U.S. military or the Afghan government it supports), they seem to believe activists can convince the president to make this war about human rights.
"When I think of why the U.S. and the world have a moral obligation to the reconstruction of Afghanistan, women are the central issue," Sunita Viswanath, who founded Women for Afghan Women in New York in 2001, recently told my former colleague Dana Goldstein at The Daily Beast. Other non-Afghan leaders, such as Feminist Majority Foundation president Eleanor Smeal, also support continued U.S. involvement.
This debate among people committed to women's rights is as old as the war. Two months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, first lady Laura Bush used the president's weekly radio address to cite the rights of Afghan women as a primary reason for invasion. While this was roundly derided as rank hypocrisy from an administration that only paid lip service to women's rights when there was a war to sell, many feminists were happy to see light shed on the plight of women living under the Taliban. Some remained staunchly anti-war, where others went so far as to cheer the invasion.
Eight years later, the consensus is that the current regime has not been markedly better for women than the former Taliban rulers were -- especially outside of Kabul. President Hamid Karzai signed a law this summer that legalized marital rape and required women to get permission from their husbands to work. In November UNICEF declared Afghanistan the worst country in the world in which to be born. Women and girls still face daily oppression and epidemic levels of violence.
The difference between the pro-intervention feminists like Viswanath and Smeal and the pro-withdrawal Afghan women like Joya, Zoya, and Yacoobi is not their level of commitment to women's rights. It's their faith in military intervention as a means of securing them. As Prospect senior correspondent Michelle Goldberg put it recently, one's view of whether a continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan will improve the situation for women "depends on whether one believes that the American military can be a force for humanitarianism."
To me, the answer is tragically apparent: It doesn't matter whether U.S. military intervention can be a force for humanitarianism because, in Afghanistan, it never has been and won't become one.
(c)2009 by the American Prospect
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Obama echos Bush in identifying enemies as "evil" - and us as "good"
The Fallacy of Good vs. Evil in Afghanistan
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_fallacy_of_good_vs_evil_in_afghanistan_20091217/
Posted on Dec 17, 2009
By William Pfaff
When they heard Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech, a shiver of astonishment went through conservative circles in the United States that this man, whom they identify as a prototypical liberal, should have mentioned the existence of evil. I would imagine this is because it has become an easy assumption that liberals blame society for evil, and regard the word itself as an outmoded term used only by people such as former President George W. Bush and his Christian right supporters.
Yet they also knew that Obama is a Christian—his relations with the Christian preacher who converted him to religion were a major subject of news and comment during the presidential primary campaign in 2008. It’s hard to become a Christian without hearing something about sinners and evil.
Bush’s religious statements constantly reflected a conviction that good is identified with the United States and evil with its enemies. His final speech to the nation said: “America must maintain our moral clarity. I have often spoken to you about good and evil. This has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in the world and between the two there can be no compromise.”
True enough in principle, but there is in this a trace of something of which any good Christian should be aware, the parable of the Pharisee and the poor man. The poor man took his place in the back of the synagogue, said to God that he was a sinner, and asked forgiveness. The Pharisee placed himself in the front row and reminded God of all the good things he had done, and his rich gifts to the temple, saying that he thanked God that he was not like other men.
Both Obama and Bush were saying in different ways that we Americans are good and Taliban or jihadists are bad. But the reason we are good is that we are we, and we are justified in punishing them because they are they. But the practicalities of the matter are a little different. Americans are the avengers of the fact that the Taliban before 2001 gave hospitality to Osama bin Laden and his people, who had been driven out of Sudan by American demands on the Sudan government.
The Taliban government in Afghanistan had no grievances against the United States until Washington attacked Afghanistan in 2001 because the Taliban were observing what they considered their code of honor, to give hospitality and protection. Today they are trying to seize back control of their country from the rival Tajik people (of the old Northern Alliance), to whom the United States in 2002 had awarded Afghanistan, in return for their help in taking it away from the Taliban.
Barack Obama doesn’t like the Taliban because they oppress women and attack American invaders. I don’t know what the theologians would make of justice in all this, but it strikes me as a huge, mutually culturally ignorant, self-righteous, fanatically nationalist and ideological clash of societies, instead of any war between good and evil.
David Brooks of The New York Times has written on Obama’s having revived the thought of the great modern Christian realist Reinhold Niebuhr, who rescued the American Protestant church in the 1930s to 1950s from the confusions produced by the coexistence of the biblical counsels of pacifism (“turn the other cheek”) and the exigencies of fighting aggressive totalitarian movements (“take up your sword”).
The contemporary error is much simpler. It is that of the proud Pharisee. We Americans wage “just wars” because we are good and righteous people who therefore have the right to use our overwhelming armies, its bombers, rockets, drones and mines, to strike and awe people, invade their countries, whom we know to be bad because they use insurrection, conspiracy and terrorism to resist us, and continue religious practices that displease us.
The problems of just war are not new. In the Western Christian tradition they go back to the theologians Aquinas and Suarez. They said that to be just, a war’s cause must be to vindicate an undoubted and internationally recognized crime; all peaceful means (negotiations) must have been tried in vain; the good to be done must clearly outweigh the evil that will be done by the war; there must be reasonable hope that in the end justice can be achieved for both sides; the means are licit (weapons must be limited and legitimate); and international law must be observed. By these criteria, I don’t see any just wars anywhere these days.
Visit William Pfaff’s Web site at www.williampfaff.com.
© 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_fallacy_of_good_vs_evil_in_afghanistan_20091217/
Posted on Dec 17, 2009
By William Pfaff
When they heard Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech, a shiver of astonishment went through conservative circles in the United States that this man, whom they identify as a prototypical liberal, should have mentioned the existence of evil. I would imagine this is because it has become an easy assumption that liberals blame society for evil, and regard the word itself as an outmoded term used only by people such as former President George W. Bush and his Christian right supporters.
Yet they also knew that Obama is a Christian—his relations with the Christian preacher who converted him to religion were a major subject of news and comment during the presidential primary campaign in 2008. It’s hard to become a Christian without hearing something about sinners and evil.
Bush’s religious statements constantly reflected a conviction that good is identified with the United States and evil with its enemies. His final speech to the nation said: “America must maintain our moral clarity. I have often spoken to you about good and evil. This has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in the world and between the two there can be no compromise.”
True enough in principle, but there is in this a trace of something of which any good Christian should be aware, the parable of the Pharisee and the poor man. The poor man took his place in the back of the synagogue, said to God that he was a sinner, and asked forgiveness. The Pharisee placed himself in the front row and reminded God of all the good things he had done, and his rich gifts to the temple, saying that he thanked God that he was not like other men.
Both Obama and Bush were saying in different ways that we Americans are good and Taliban or jihadists are bad. But the reason we are good is that we are we, and we are justified in punishing them because they are they. But the practicalities of the matter are a little different. Americans are the avengers of the fact that the Taliban before 2001 gave hospitality to Osama bin Laden and his people, who had been driven out of Sudan by American demands on the Sudan government.
The Taliban government in Afghanistan had no grievances against the United States until Washington attacked Afghanistan in 2001 because the Taliban were observing what they considered their code of honor, to give hospitality and protection. Today they are trying to seize back control of their country from the rival Tajik people (of the old Northern Alliance), to whom the United States in 2002 had awarded Afghanistan, in return for their help in taking it away from the Taliban.
Barack Obama doesn’t like the Taliban because they oppress women and attack American invaders. I don’t know what the theologians would make of justice in all this, but it strikes me as a huge, mutually culturally ignorant, self-righteous, fanatically nationalist and ideological clash of societies, instead of any war between good and evil.
David Brooks of The New York Times has written on Obama’s having revived the thought of the great modern Christian realist Reinhold Niebuhr, who rescued the American Protestant church in the 1930s to 1950s from the confusions produced by the coexistence of the biblical counsels of pacifism (“turn the other cheek”) and the exigencies of fighting aggressive totalitarian movements (“take up your sword”).
The contemporary error is much simpler. It is that of the proud Pharisee. We Americans wage “just wars” because we are good and righteous people who therefore have the right to use our overwhelming armies, its bombers, rockets, drones and mines, to strike and awe people, invade their countries, whom we know to be bad because they use insurrection, conspiracy and terrorism to resist us, and continue religious practices that displease us.
The problems of just war are not new. In the Western Christian tradition they go back to the theologians Aquinas and Suarez. They said that to be just, a war’s cause must be to vindicate an undoubted and internationally recognized crime; all peaceful means (negotiations) must have been tried in vain; the good to be done must clearly outweigh the evil that will be done by the war; there must be reasonable hope that in the end justice can be achieved for both sides; the means are licit (weapons must be limited and legitimate); and international law must be observed. By these criteria, I don’t see any just wars anywhere these days.
Visit William Pfaff’s Web site at www.williampfaff.com.
© 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
What does the US government owe the Afghan people and why this debt will go unpaid while the occupation continues?
Regarding Afghanistan, Jon Wiener offers his views below on what the US government can do to make up for the devastation and human losses for which it is directly and indirectly responsible over the last three decades. There are three parts of his proposal, namely, that we support a democratic government, fight a different kind of war, and stay in the country for an indefinite number of years. By "a different kind of war," he means that "we stop killing civilians, work locally, disown corrupt officials, emphasize social and economic construction."
Wiener says we are not achieving any of what he would like to see us achieve, with the implication that we are failing the Afghan people, likely to continue to fail them, as the mis-conceived and mis-directed US-led occupation compounds the damage. He emphasizes that we have been working with a corrupt, undemocratic government, fighting a war that kills and maims civilians and that spends far more on the military occupation than on re-building the social and economic structures of local villages.
On this blogsite, we have taken the position, given the circumstances, that the Afghan people can best be served by the withdrawal of US troops and an end of the occupation. Malalai Joya and many other authors whose articles we have printed call for a withdrawal of foreign troops as well. The thrust of how we differ from Wiener is that the reconstruction of Afghan should not be expected from US leadership but should come from regional governments, international support through the UN, and from some experienced NGO and independent efforts on the ground. Most importantly, however, is that the Afghan people in the villages and towns that criss-cross Afghanistan play the major role in defining the specific reconstruction that is undertaken in their various parts of the country. None of this now seems likely.
Thus, we hold to the position that the war in and occupation of Afghanistan should be stopped, hopefully while plans are developed with true Afghan leaders that will support the reconstruction goals and improve the lives of the Afghan people themselves.
Bob
----------------------------------
The Best Argument for the Afghan War - and What's Wrong with It
posted by Jon Wiener on 12/17/2009 @ 10:40pm
http://www.thenation.com/notion/507353/
For those of us on the left, the best argument in favor of the Afghan war is not Obama's claim that we need to stop Al Qaeda from returning to its bases in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda doesn't need to be in Afghanistan, the 9-11 plot was hatched by Saudis in Hamburg and Miami, and they can relocate to Somalia or Yemen or someplace else if they need to. (They have already relocated to Pakistan.)
The best argument is that we have an obligation to the Afghan people – especially to the feminists, secular teachers, labor organizers, health workers, democrats, all those working to build a secular, civil society. We encouraged them to help create a real alternative to religious fundamentalism. It would be wrong now to abandon them to the Taliban.
That argument is made by Michael Walzer at the Dissent magazine website, where he writes that "a version of democratic politics has emerged" in Afghanistan -- "radically incomplete but valuable still. And all the people involved in these different activities would be at risk--at risk for their lives--if the United States simply withdrew."
That is an argument that Obama did not make.
If we accept the argument that we have incurred an obligation to protect democratic activists in Afghanistan, what exactly do we owe them? First of all, we owe it to them not to support an undemocratic government there. The Karzai government exists only because the US created and sustained it, despite massive election fraud, monumental corruption, and myriad failures to win popular support.
If we accept the obligations argument, we also owe it to the Afghans to fight a different kind of war – to stop attacking and killing large numbers of civilians. The way we have been fighting the war creates more enemies than are killed. Walzer is hopeful that Obama has "replaced the people who did everything wrong with people who are trying to do everything right." That means the US military must "stop killing civilians, work locally, disown corrupt officials, emphasize social and economic reconstruction." They have not been doing this for nine years, partly because that kind of careful, close-in fighting creates more American casualties than bombing suspected enemy locations.
And this commitment to Afghan democrats is not going to end in July 2010; it is open-ended. As long as the Afghan army and police are unable to protect teachers, feminists, health care workers, etc., we seem to have obligation to protect them – for as long as the Taliban fights to create their own Islamic state.
So: we owe it to the Afghans to support a democratic government, to fight a different kind of war, and for an indefinite number of years.
"One of the key criteria of a just war," Walzer writes, "is that there be a realistic possibility of achieving a just peace." He knows that "it may be too late" for that. But we need to ask: Is there a realistic possibility the US will abandon Karzai in favor of a democratic government? that the US military will fight the right kind of war? That the American people will be willing to keep paying for this war for many more years? What's wrong with the obligations argument is that the answer to each of these questions is "no."
Wiener says we are not achieving any of what he would like to see us achieve, with the implication that we are failing the Afghan people, likely to continue to fail them, as the mis-conceived and mis-directed US-led occupation compounds the damage. He emphasizes that we have been working with a corrupt, undemocratic government, fighting a war that kills and maims civilians and that spends far more on the military occupation than on re-building the social and economic structures of local villages.
On this blogsite, we have taken the position, given the circumstances, that the Afghan people can best be served by the withdrawal of US troops and an end of the occupation. Malalai Joya and many other authors whose articles we have printed call for a withdrawal of foreign troops as well. The thrust of how we differ from Wiener is that the reconstruction of Afghan should not be expected from US leadership but should come from regional governments, international support through the UN, and from some experienced NGO and independent efforts on the ground. Most importantly, however, is that the Afghan people in the villages and towns that criss-cross Afghanistan play the major role in defining the specific reconstruction that is undertaken in their various parts of the country. None of this now seems likely.
Thus, we hold to the position that the war in and occupation of Afghanistan should be stopped, hopefully while plans are developed with true Afghan leaders that will support the reconstruction goals and improve the lives of the Afghan people themselves.
Bob
----------------------------------
The Best Argument for the Afghan War - and What's Wrong with It
posted by Jon Wiener on 12/17/2009 @ 10:40pm
http://www.thenation.com/notion/507353/
For those of us on the left, the best argument in favor of the Afghan war is not Obama's claim that we need to stop Al Qaeda from returning to its bases in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda doesn't need to be in Afghanistan, the 9-11 plot was hatched by Saudis in Hamburg and Miami, and they can relocate to Somalia or Yemen or someplace else if they need to. (They have already relocated to Pakistan.)
The best argument is that we have an obligation to the Afghan people – especially to the feminists, secular teachers, labor organizers, health workers, democrats, all those working to build a secular, civil society. We encouraged them to help create a real alternative to religious fundamentalism. It would be wrong now to abandon them to the Taliban.
That argument is made by Michael Walzer at the Dissent magazine website, where he writes that "a version of democratic politics has emerged" in Afghanistan -- "radically incomplete but valuable still. And all the people involved in these different activities would be at risk--at risk for their lives--if the United States simply withdrew."
That is an argument that Obama did not make.
If we accept the argument that we have incurred an obligation to protect democratic activists in Afghanistan, what exactly do we owe them? First of all, we owe it to them not to support an undemocratic government there. The Karzai government exists only because the US created and sustained it, despite massive election fraud, monumental corruption, and myriad failures to win popular support.
If we accept the obligations argument, we also owe it to the Afghans to fight a different kind of war – to stop attacking and killing large numbers of civilians. The way we have been fighting the war creates more enemies than are killed. Walzer is hopeful that Obama has "replaced the people who did everything wrong with people who are trying to do everything right." That means the US military must "stop killing civilians, work locally, disown corrupt officials, emphasize social and economic reconstruction." They have not been doing this for nine years, partly because that kind of careful, close-in fighting creates more American casualties than bombing suspected enemy locations.
And this commitment to Afghan democrats is not going to end in July 2010; it is open-ended. As long as the Afghan army and police are unable to protect teachers, feminists, health care workers, etc., we seem to have obligation to protect them – for as long as the Taliban fights to create their own Islamic state.
So: we owe it to the Afghans to support a democratic government, to fight a different kind of war, and for an indefinite number of years.
"One of the key criteria of a just war," Walzer writes, "is that there be a realistic possibility of achieving a just peace." He knows that "it may be too late" for that. But we need to ask: Is there a realistic possibility the US will abandon Karzai in favor of a democratic government? that the US military will fight the right kind of war? That the American people will be willing to keep paying for this war for many more years? What's wrong with the obligations argument is that the answer to each of these questions is "no."
Monday, December 21, 2009
US-led war in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) is illegal, from response to 9/11 through the entire occupation
Marjorie Cohn, a well-known lawyer, writer, and activist, reviews some of the reasons why the war in Afghanistan (spilling over into Pakistan) is illegal according to widely and long accepted international legal agreements. She raises questions about the validity of a "war on terrorism" focused on Al Qaeda or Muslim extremism. 9/11 does not justify either the war in Iraq or the war now being escalated in Afghanistan. Cohn reminds us that there specific and limiting rules that permit military attacks on other nations and that peaceful resolution is always preferred. She also emphasizes that international treaties rule out the use of certain weapons, especially when civilians are likely to be among the victims. Her points on drones as strike weapons are eye-opening and dismaying.
Why the Af/Pak War is Illegal
By MARJORIE COHN
http://counterpunch.org/ December 21, 2009
President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize nine days after he announced he would send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. His escalation of that war is not what the Nobel committee envisioned when it sought to encourage him to make peace, not war.In 1945, in the wake of two wars that claimed millions of lives, the nations of the world created the United Nations system to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”
The UN Charter is based on the principles of international peace and security as well as the protection of human rights. But the United States, one of the founding members of the UN, has often flouted the commands of the charter, which is part of US law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.
Although the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was as illegal as the invasion of Iraq, many Americans saw it as a justifiable response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. The cover of Time magazine called it "The Right War." Obama campaigned on ending the Iraq war but escalating the war in Afghanistan. But a majority of Americans now oppose that war as well.
The UN Charter provides that all member states must settle their international disputes by peaceful means, and no nation can use military force except in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. After the 9/11 attacks, the council passed two resolutions, neither of which authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan.“Operation Enduring Freedom” was not legitimate self-defense under the charter because the 9/11 attacks were crimes against humanity, not “armed attacks” by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the United States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers hailed from Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the United States after 9/11, or President Bush would not have waited three weeks before initiating his October 2001 bombing campaign. The necessity for self-defense must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” This classic principle of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and the UN General Assembly.
Bush's justification for attacking Afghanistan was that it was harboring Osama bin Laden and training terrorists, even though bin Laden did not claim responsibility for the 9/11 attacks until 2004. After Bush demanded that the Taliban turn over bin Laden to the United States, the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan said his government wanted proof that bin Laden was involved in the 9/11 attacks before deciding whether to extradite him, according to the Washington Post. That proof was not forthcoming, the Taliban did not deliver bin Laden, and Bush began bombing Afghanistan.Bush’s rationale for attacking Afghanistan was spurious. Iranians could have made the same argument to attack the United States after they overthrew the vicious Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979 and the U.S. gave him safe haven. If the new Iranian government had demanded that the U.S. turn over the Shah and we refused, would it have been lawful for Iran to invade the United States? Of course not.
When he announced his troop “surge” in Afghanistan, Obama invoked the 9/11 attacks. By continuing and escalating Bush’s war in Afghanistan, Obama, too, is violating the UN Charter. In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama declared that he has the "right" to wage wars "unilaterally.” The unilateral use of military force, however, is illegal unless undertaken in self-defense.Those who conspired to hijack airplanes and kill thousands of people on 9/11 are guilty of crimes against humanity. They must be identified and brought to justice in accordance with the law. But retaliation by invading Afghanistan was not the answer. It has lead to growing U.S. and Afghan casualties, and has incurred even more hatred against the United States.
Conspicuously absent from the national discourse is a political analysis of why the tragedy of 9/11 occurred. We need to have that debate and construct a comprehensive strategy to overhaul U.S. foreign policy to inoculate us from the wrath of those who despise American imperialism. The "global war on terror" has been uncritically accepted by most in this country. But terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy. One cannot declare war on a tactic. The way to combat terrorism is by identifying and targeting its root causes, including poverty, lack of education, and foreign occupation.
In his declaration that he would send 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, Obama made scant reference to Pakistan. But his CIA has used more unmanned Predator drones against Pakistan than Bush. There are estimates that these robots have killed several hundred civilians. Most Pakistanis oppose them. A Gallup poll conducted in Pakistan last summer found 67% opposed and only 9% in favor. Notably, a majority of Pakistanis ranked the United States as a greater threat to Pakistan than the Taliban or Pakistan’s arch-rival India.
Many countries use drones for surveillance, but only the United States and Israel have used them for strikes. Scott Shane wrote in the New York Times, “For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for targeted killings in a country where the United States is not officially at war.”
The use of these drones in Pakistan violates both the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit willful killing. Targeted or political assassinations—sometimes called extrajudicial executions—are carried out by order of, or with the acquiescence of, a government, outside any judicial framework. As a 1998 report from the UN Special Rapporteur noted, “extrajudicial executions can never be justified under any circumstances, not even in time of war.” Willful killing is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, punishable as a war crime under the U.S. War Crimes Act. Extrajudicial executions also violate a longstanding U.S. policy. In the 1970s, after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence disclosed that the CIA had been involved in several murders or attempted murders of foreign leaders, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order banning assassinations. Although there have been exceptions to this policy, every succeeding president until George W. Bush reaffirmed that order.
Obama is trying to make up for his withdrawal from Iraq by escalating the war on Afghanistan. He is acting like Lyndon Johnson, who rejected Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s admonition about Vietnam because LBJ was “more afraid of the right than the left,” McNamara said in a 2007 interview with Bob Woodward published in the Washington Post.
Approximately 30% of all U.S. deaths in Afghanistan have occurred during Obama’s presidency. The cost of the war, including the 30,000 new troops he just ordered, will be about $100 billion a year. That money could better be used for building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and creating jobs and funding health care in the United States.
Many congressional Democrats are uncomfortable with Obama’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. We must encourage them to hold firm and refuse to fund this war. And the left needs to organize and demonstrate to Obama that we are a force with which he must contend.
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and immediate past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is a member of the Bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her latest book is Rules of Disengagement.
Why the Af/Pak War is Illegal
By MARJORIE COHN
http://counterpunch.org/ December 21, 2009
President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize nine days after he announced he would send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. His escalation of that war is not what the Nobel committee envisioned when it sought to encourage him to make peace, not war.In 1945, in the wake of two wars that claimed millions of lives, the nations of the world created the United Nations system to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”
The UN Charter is based on the principles of international peace and security as well as the protection of human rights. But the United States, one of the founding members of the UN, has often flouted the commands of the charter, which is part of US law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.
Although the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was as illegal as the invasion of Iraq, many Americans saw it as a justifiable response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. The cover of Time magazine called it "The Right War." Obama campaigned on ending the Iraq war but escalating the war in Afghanistan. But a majority of Americans now oppose that war as well.
The UN Charter provides that all member states must settle their international disputes by peaceful means, and no nation can use military force except in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. After the 9/11 attacks, the council passed two resolutions, neither of which authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan.“Operation Enduring Freedom” was not legitimate self-defense under the charter because the 9/11 attacks were crimes against humanity, not “armed attacks” by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the United States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers hailed from Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the United States after 9/11, or President Bush would not have waited three weeks before initiating his October 2001 bombing campaign. The necessity for self-defense must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” This classic principle of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and the UN General Assembly.
Bush's justification for attacking Afghanistan was that it was harboring Osama bin Laden and training terrorists, even though bin Laden did not claim responsibility for the 9/11 attacks until 2004. After Bush demanded that the Taliban turn over bin Laden to the United States, the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan said his government wanted proof that bin Laden was involved in the 9/11 attacks before deciding whether to extradite him, according to the Washington Post. That proof was not forthcoming, the Taliban did not deliver bin Laden, and Bush began bombing Afghanistan.Bush’s rationale for attacking Afghanistan was spurious. Iranians could have made the same argument to attack the United States after they overthrew the vicious Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979 and the U.S. gave him safe haven. If the new Iranian government had demanded that the U.S. turn over the Shah and we refused, would it have been lawful for Iran to invade the United States? Of course not.
When he announced his troop “surge” in Afghanistan, Obama invoked the 9/11 attacks. By continuing and escalating Bush’s war in Afghanistan, Obama, too, is violating the UN Charter. In his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama declared that he has the "right" to wage wars "unilaterally.” The unilateral use of military force, however, is illegal unless undertaken in self-defense.Those who conspired to hijack airplanes and kill thousands of people on 9/11 are guilty of crimes against humanity. They must be identified and brought to justice in accordance with the law. But retaliation by invading Afghanistan was not the answer. It has lead to growing U.S. and Afghan casualties, and has incurred even more hatred against the United States.
Conspicuously absent from the national discourse is a political analysis of why the tragedy of 9/11 occurred. We need to have that debate and construct a comprehensive strategy to overhaul U.S. foreign policy to inoculate us from the wrath of those who despise American imperialism. The "global war on terror" has been uncritically accepted by most in this country. But terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy. One cannot declare war on a tactic. The way to combat terrorism is by identifying and targeting its root causes, including poverty, lack of education, and foreign occupation.
In his declaration that he would send 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, Obama made scant reference to Pakistan. But his CIA has used more unmanned Predator drones against Pakistan than Bush. There are estimates that these robots have killed several hundred civilians. Most Pakistanis oppose them. A Gallup poll conducted in Pakistan last summer found 67% opposed and only 9% in favor. Notably, a majority of Pakistanis ranked the United States as a greater threat to Pakistan than the Taliban or Pakistan’s arch-rival India.
Many countries use drones for surveillance, but only the United States and Israel have used them for strikes. Scott Shane wrote in the New York Times, “For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for targeted killings in a country where the United States is not officially at war.”
The use of these drones in Pakistan violates both the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit willful killing. Targeted or political assassinations—sometimes called extrajudicial executions—are carried out by order of, or with the acquiescence of, a government, outside any judicial framework. As a 1998 report from the UN Special Rapporteur noted, “extrajudicial executions can never be justified under any circumstances, not even in time of war.” Willful killing is a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, punishable as a war crime under the U.S. War Crimes Act. Extrajudicial executions also violate a longstanding U.S. policy. In the 1970s, after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence disclosed that the CIA had been involved in several murders or attempted murders of foreign leaders, President Gerald Ford issued an executive order banning assassinations. Although there have been exceptions to this policy, every succeeding president until George W. Bush reaffirmed that order.
Obama is trying to make up for his withdrawal from Iraq by escalating the war on Afghanistan. He is acting like Lyndon Johnson, who rejected Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s admonition about Vietnam because LBJ was “more afraid of the right than the left,” McNamara said in a 2007 interview with Bob Woodward published in the Washington Post.
Approximately 30% of all U.S. deaths in Afghanistan have occurred during Obama’s presidency. The cost of the war, including the 30,000 new troops he just ordered, will be about $100 billion a year. That money could better be used for building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and creating jobs and funding health care in the United States.
Many congressional Democrats are uncomfortable with Obama’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. We must encourage them to hold firm and refuse to fund this war. And the left needs to organize and demonstrate to Obama that we are a force with which he must contend.
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and immediate past president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is a member of the Bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her latest book is Rules of Disengagement.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
War generates enormous quantities of greenhouse gases and other irresponsible costs
Fight Climate Change, Not Wars
By Naomi Klein - December 10th, 2009
Posted on EnviroNation
http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2009/12/fight-climate-change-not-war
In the U.S. plenty of bloggers have pointed to the irony of Barack Obama collecting the Peace Prize while he launches a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan.
Here in Copenhagen, the Nobel – which was awarded in part because of Obama’s reengagement with the climate change negotiations -- carries a special set of ironies. The figure U.S. negotiators are floating for how much Washington will contribute to an international climate change fund is a paltry $1.4-billion.Meanwhile, the cost of the “surge” in Afghanistan is estimated at $30-40-billion. Yesterday I interviewed Kumi Naidoo, the new director of Greenpeace International, and he made this point forcefully:
And the issue is not only that wars hog money that could be spent helping countries adapt to climate change and shift to green energy. Those wars also deepen the climate crisis because they are themselves major sources of greenhouse gasses.
So, in honor of Obama’s Nobel, Stephen Kretzmann of Oil Change International, who is also here in Copenhagen, has pulled together this scary breakdown of the links between war and climate change.
Take a look -- it's just one more reason to bring the troops home.
War and Warming
by Stephen Kretzmann
The connections between war and warming go deeper than as Alan Greenspan put it, the "politically inconvenient" [fact that] “everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil". When we choose to go to war, that choice means money is no longer available for other things, such as clean energy or funding for communities vulnerable to climate impacts around the world. And the war itself, with all its planes, trucks, missiles, and ships, emits huge amounts of greenhouse gases – that no one tracks.
Fighting wars is mind-bendingly expensive, exceeding the costs of even the bank bailout money. Some key figures:
-Projected Total Cost Iraq War: at least $3 trillion
-Total Obama Admin (FY2010) Defense Budget request: $687 billion
-Additional amount estimated for Obama's Afghan surge: $40 billion
The fact that the Obama administration has already chosen to invest further in war has a rather steep opportunity cost, in addition to its actual cost.
The money that has been spent this decade by the American taxpayer on war could instead, had we wanted it to, funded all the needed global investments in clean energy out to 2030.
The sums being discussed here in Copenhagen are actually much more modest than the trillions spent recently on war. The United Nations recently estimated that $500 billion would be needed (from all the developed world – not just the US) to help build a global clean energy economy and to help vulnerable communities adapt to the impacts of climate change. Oxfam puts it at $200 billion.
Sadly, even these sums aren’t on the table. There is an ongoing discussion of just $10 billion in so-called "fast track funding", and of that, the US has pledged “its fair share. Jonathan Pershing, Obama’s Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change, seems to be arguing that this is only $1.5 billion.
That’s right, that would be half of what the Administration just gave Exxon, and a fraction of its ongoing subsidies to fossil fuels.
There is currently nothing, nada, zip on the table for long term climate finance.
Obama to World: Drop Dead.
Turns out that money doesn’t actually grow on trees – it’s manufactured in weapons factories.
Emissions from war are more difficult to quantify. On the fifth anniversary of the war, Oil Change International published A Climate of War, a report that quantified the emissions of the war from March 2003 through until December 2007. We used very conservative estimates and left many things out when we couldn't get reliable numbers, and still the number was staggering.
The Iraq war was responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) from March 2003 through December 2007. To put that into perspective, if the US military operations in Iraq were ranked as a country in terms of emissions, it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world’s nations do annually. Falling between New Zealand and Cuba, the war emits more than 60% of all countries.
This was a difficult report to write – because this information is not readily available. The reason the information is not available is because military emissions abroad are exempt from national reporting requirements under US law and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
All these emissions need to be counted, because the atmosphere doesn't care if you're looking for weapons of mass destruction or terrorists, or even fighting the good fight (not that we’ve seen much of that recently). These are currently completely uncounted emissions. It’s a loophole big enough to drive a tank through.
So while President Obama is receiving his Peace Prize for whatever it is he might do someday on climate change, perhaps someone should ask if the emissions from the Afghan surge will swamp the meager reductions that the US has on the table in Copenhagen. But that’s not really a politically convenient question, now is it?
-Steve Kretzmann is Director of Oil Change International.
Research support for Naomi Klein's reporting from Copenhagen was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
By Naomi Klein - December 10th, 2009
Posted on EnviroNation
http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2009/12/fight-climate-change-not-war
In the U.S. plenty of bloggers have pointed to the irony of Barack Obama collecting the Peace Prize while he launches a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan.
Here in Copenhagen, the Nobel – which was awarded in part because of Obama’s reengagement with the climate change negotiations -- carries a special set of ironies. The figure U.S. negotiators are floating for how much Washington will contribute to an international climate change fund is a paltry $1.4-billion.Meanwhile, the cost of the “surge” in Afghanistan is estimated at $30-40-billion. Yesterday I interviewed Kumi Naidoo, the new director of Greenpeace International, and he made this point forcefully:
And the issue is not only that wars hog money that could be spent helping countries adapt to climate change and shift to green energy. Those wars also deepen the climate crisis because they are themselves major sources of greenhouse gasses.
So, in honor of Obama’s Nobel, Stephen Kretzmann of Oil Change International, who is also here in Copenhagen, has pulled together this scary breakdown of the links between war and climate change.
Take a look -- it's just one more reason to bring the troops home.
War and Warming
by Stephen Kretzmann
The connections between war and warming go deeper than as Alan Greenspan put it, the "politically inconvenient" [fact that] “everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil". When we choose to go to war, that choice means money is no longer available for other things, such as clean energy or funding for communities vulnerable to climate impacts around the world. And the war itself, with all its planes, trucks, missiles, and ships, emits huge amounts of greenhouse gases – that no one tracks.
Fighting wars is mind-bendingly expensive, exceeding the costs of even the bank bailout money. Some key figures:
-Projected Total Cost Iraq War: at least $3 trillion
-Total Obama Admin (FY2010) Defense Budget request: $687 billion
-Additional amount estimated for Obama's Afghan surge: $40 billion
The fact that the Obama administration has already chosen to invest further in war has a rather steep opportunity cost, in addition to its actual cost.
The money that has been spent this decade by the American taxpayer on war could instead, had we wanted it to, funded all the needed global investments in clean energy out to 2030.
The sums being discussed here in Copenhagen are actually much more modest than the trillions spent recently on war. The United Nations recently estimated that $500 billion would be needed (from all the developed world – not just the US) to help build a global clean energy economy and to help vulnerable communities adapt to the impacts of climate change. Oxfam puts it at $200 billion.
Sadly, even these sums aren’t on the table. There is an ongoing discussion of just $10 billion in so-called "fast track funding", and of that, the US has pledged “its fair share. Jonathan Pershing, Obama’s Deputy Special Envoy for Climate Change, seems to be arguing that this is only $1.5 billion.
That’s right, that would be half of what the Administration just gave Exxon, and a fraction of its ongoing subsidies to fossil fuels.
There is currently nothing, nada, zip on the table for long term climate finance.
Obama to World: Drop Dead.
Turns out that money doesn’t actually grow on trees – it’s manufactured in weapons factories.
Emissions from war are more difficult to quantify. On the fifth anniversary of the war, Oil Change International published A Climate of War, a report that quantified the emissions of the war from March 2003 through until December 2007. We used very conservative estimates and left many things out when we couldn't get reliable numbers, and still the number was staggering.
The Iraq war was responsible for at least 141 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MMTCO2e) from March 2003 through December 2007. To put that into perspective, if the US military operations in Iraq were ranked as a country in terms of emissions, it would emit more CO2 each year than 139 of the world’s nations do annually. Falling between New Zealand and Cuba, the war emits more than 60% of all countries.
This was a difficult report to write – because this information is not readily available. The reason the information is not available is because military emissions abroad are exempt from national reporting requirements under US law and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
All these emissions need to be counted, because the atmosphere doesn't care if you're looking for weapons of mass destruction or terrorists, or even fighting the good fight (not that we’ve seen much of that recently). These are currently completely uncounted emissions. It’s a loophole big enough to drive a tank through.
So while President Obama is receiving his Peace Prize for whatever it is he might do someday on climate change, perhaps someone should ask if the emissions from the Afghan surge will swamp the meager reductions that the US has on the table in Copenhagen. But that’s not really a politically convenient question, now is it?
-Steve Kretzmann is Director of Oil Change International.
Research support for Naomi Klein's reporting from Copenhagen was provided by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
Friday, December 18, 2009
Number and functions of private contractors in Afghanistan escalate
Published on Friday, December 18, 2009 by Rebel Reports
Stunning Statistics About the War Every American Should Know
Contrary to popular belief, the US actually has 189,000 personnel on the ground in Afghanistan right now—and that number is quickly rising.
by Jeremy Scahill
A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill's Contract Oversight subcommittee [1] on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense's total workforce, "the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history." That's not in one war zone-that's the Pentagon in its entirety.
In Afghanistan, the Obama administration blows the Bush administration out of the privatized water. According to a memo [2] [PDF] released by McCaskill's staff, "From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan. During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000."
At present, there are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors in Afghanistan. According to a report this week from the Congressional Research Service, as a result of the coming surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, there may be up to 56,000 additional contractors deployed. But here is another group of contractors that often goes unmentioned: 3,600 State Department contractors and 14,000 USAID contractors. That means that the current total US force in Afghanistan is approximately 189,000 personnel (68,000 US troops and 121,000 contractors). And remember, that's right now. And that, according to McCaskill, is a conservative estimate. A year from now, we will likely see more than 220,000 US-funded personnel on the ground in Afghanistan.
The US has spent more than $23 billion on contracts in Afghanistan since 2002. By next year, the number of contractors will have doubled since 2008 when taxpayers funded over $8 billion in Afghanistan-related contracts.
Despite the massive number of contracts and contractors in Afghanistan, oversight is utterly lacking. "The increase in Afghanistan contracts has not seen a corresponding increase in contract management and oversight," according to McCaskill's briefing paper. "In May 2009, DCMA [Defense Contract Management Agency] Director Charlie Williams told the Commission on Wartime Contracting that as many as 362 positions for Contracting Officer's Representatives (CORs) in Afghanistan were currently vacant."
A former USAID official, Michael Walsh, the former director of USAID's Office of Acquisition and Assistance and Chief Acquisition Officer, told the Commission that many USAID staff are "administering huge awards with limited knowledge of or experience with the rules and regulations." According to one USAID official, the agency is "sending too much money, too fast with too few people looking over how it is spent." As a result, the agency does not "know ... where the money is going."
The Obama administration is continuing the Bush-era policy of hiring contractors to oversee contractors. According to the McCaskill memo:
In Afghanistan, USAID is relying on contractors to provide oversight of its large reconstruction and development projects. According to information provided to the Subcommittee, International Relief and Development (IRD) was awarded a five-year contract in 2006 to oversee the $1.4 billion infrastructure contract awarded to a joint venture of the Louis Berger Group and Black and Veatch Special Projects. USAID has also awarded a contract Checci and Company to provide support for contracts in Afghanistan.
The private security industry and the US government have pointed to the Synchronized Predeployment and Operational Tracker(SPOT) as evidence of greater government oversight of contractor activities. But McCaskill's subcommittee found that system utterly lacking, stating: "The Subcommittee obtained current SPOT data showing that there are currently 1,123 State Department contractors and no USAID contractors working in Afghanistan." Remember, there are officially 14,000 USAID contractors and the official monitoring and tracking system found none of these people and less than half of the State Department contractors.
As for waste and abuse, the subcommittee says that the Defense Contract Audit Agency identified more than $950 million in questioned and unsupported costs submitted by Defense Department contracts for work in Afghanistan. That's 16% of the total contract dollars reviewed.
© 2009 Jeremy Scahill
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/18-2
Stunning Statistics About the War Every American Should Know
Contrary to popular belief, the US actually has 189,000 personnel on the ground in Afghanistan right now—and that number is quickly rising.
by Jeremy Scahill
A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill's Contract Oversight subcommittee [1] on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense's total workforce, "the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history." That's not in one war zone-that's the Pentagon in its entirety.
In Afghanistan, the Obama administration blows the Bush administration out of the privatized water. According to a memo [2] [PDF] released by McCaskill's staff, "From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan. During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000."
At present, there are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors in Afghanistan. According to a report this week from the Congressional Research Service, as a result of the coming surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, there may be up to 56,000 additional contractors deployed. But here is another group of contractors that often goes unmentioned: 3,600 State Department contractors and 14,000 USAID contractors. That means that the current total US force in Afghanistan is approximately 189,000 personnel (68,000 US troops and 121,000 contractors). And remember, that's right now. And that, according to McCaskill, is a conservative estimate. A year from now, we will likely see more than 220,000 US-funded personnel on the ground in Afghanistan.
The US has spent more than $23 billion on contracts in Afghanistan since 2002. By next year, the number of contractors will have doubled since 2008 when taxpayers funded over $8 billion in Afghanistan-related contracts.
Despite the massive number of contracts and contractors in Afghanistan, oversight is utterly lacking. "The increase in Afghanistan contracts has not seen a corresponding increase in contract management and oversight," according to McCaskill's briefing paper. "In May 2009, DCMA [Defense Contract Management Agency] Director Charlie Williams told the Commission on Wartime Contracting that as many as 362 positions for Contracting Officer's Representatives (CORs) in Afghanistan were currently vacant."
A former USAID official, Michael Walsh, the former director of USAID's Office of Acquisition and Assistance and Chief Acquisition Officer, told the Commission that many USAID staff are "administering huge awards with limited knowledge of or experience with the rules and regulations." According to one USAID official, the agency is "sending too much money, too fast with too few people looking over how it is spent." As a result, the agency does not "know ... where the money is going."
The Obama administration is continuing the Bush-era policy of hiring contractors to oversee contractors. According to the McCaskill memo:
In Afghanistan, USAID is relying on contractors to provide oversight of its large reconstruction and development projects. According to information provided to the Subcommittee, International Relief and Development (IRD) was awarded a five-year contract in 2006 to oversee the $1.4 billion infrastructure contract awarded to a joint venture of the Louis Berger Group and Black and Veatch Special Projects. USAID has also awarded a contract Checci and Company to provide support for contracts in Afghanistan.
The private security industry and the US government have pointed to the Synchronized Predeployment and Operational Tracker(SPOT) as evidence of greater government oversight of contractor activities. But McCaskill's subcommittee found that system utterly lacking, stating: "The Subcommittee obtained current SPOT data showing that there are currently 1,123 State Department contractors and no USAID contractors working in Afghanistan." Remember, there are officially 14,000 USAID contractors and the official monitoring and tracking system found none of these people and less than half of the State Department contractors.
As for waste and abuse, the subcommittee says that the Defense Contract Audit Agency identified more than $950 million in questioned and unsupported costs submitted by Defense Department contracts for work in Afghanistan. That's 16% of the total contract dollars reviewed.
© 2009 Jeremy Scahill
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/18-2
Thursday, December 17, 2009
$30 billion for surge: what does it mean and better alternatives
Published on Thursday, December 17, 2009 by TomDispatch.com
Afghanistan: $57,077.60 - Surging by the Minute
by Jo Comerford [See short bio at the end of the article.]
$57,077.60. That’s what we’re paying per minute. Keep that in mind -- just for a minute or so.
After all, the surge is already on. By the end of December, the first 1,500 U.S. troops will have landed [1] in Afghanistan, a nation roughly the size of Texas, ranked [2] by the United Nations as second worst in the world in terms of human development.
Women and men from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, will be among the first to head out. It takes an estimated $1 million [3] to send each of them surging into Afghanistan for one year. So a 30,000-person surge will be at least $30 billion, which brings us to that $57,077.60. That’s how much it will cost you, the taxpayer, for one minute of that surge.
By the way, add up the yearly salary [4] of a Marine from Camp Lejeune with four years of service, throw in [5] his or her housing allowance, additional pay for dependents, and bonus pay for hazardous duty, imminent danger, and family separation, and you’ll still be many thousands of dollars short of that single minute’s sum.
But perhaps this isn’t a time to quibble. After all, a job is a job, especially in the United States, which has lost [6] seven million jobs since December 2007, while reporting record-high numbers of people seeking assistance to feed themselves and/or their families. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 36 million Americans, including one out of every four children, are currently on food stamps.
On the other hand, given the woeful inadequacy of that “safety net,” we might have chosen to direct the $30 billion in surge expenditures toward raising the average individual monthly Food Stamp allotment by $70 for the next year; that's roughly an additional trip to the grocery store, every month, for 36 million people. Alternatively, we could have dedicated that $30 billion to job creation. According to a recent report [7] issued by the Political Economy Research Institute, that sum could generate a whopping 537,810 construction jobs, 541,080 positions in healthcare, fund 742,740 teachers or employ 831,390 mass transit workers.
For purposes of comparison, $30 billion -- remember, just the Pentagon-estimated cost of a 30,000-person troop surge -- is equal to [8] 80% of the total U.S. 2010 budget for international affairs, which includes monies for development and humanitarian assistance. On the domestic front, $30 billion could double the funding (at 2010 levels [8]) for the Children's Health Insurance Program and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
Or think of the surge this way: if the United States decided to send just 29,900 extra soldiers to Afghanistan, 100 short of the present official total, it could double the amount of money -- $100 million -- it has allocated [9] to assist refugees and returnees from Afghanistan through the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.
Leaving aside the fact that the United States already accounts for 45% of total global military spending, the $30 billion surge cost alone would place us [10] in the top-ten for global military spending, sandwiched between Italy and Saudi Arabia. Spent instead on “soft security” measures within Afghanistan, $30 billion could easily build, furnish and equip [11] enough schools for the entire nation.
Continuing this nod to the absurd for just one more moment, if you received a silver dollar every second, it would take you 960 years to haul in that $30 billion. Not that anyone could hold so much money. Together, the coins would weigh nearly 120 tons, or more than the poundage of 21,000 Asian elephants, an aircraft carrier, or the Washington Monument. Converted to dollar bills and laid end-to-end, $30 billion would reach 2.9 million miles or 120 times around the Earth.
One more thing, that $30 billion isn’t even the real cost of Obama’s surge. It’s just a minimum, through-the-basement estimate. If you were to throw in [12] all the bases being built, private contractors hired, extra civilians sent in, and the staggering costs of training a larger Afghan army and police force (a key goal of the surge), the figure would surely be startlingly higher. In fact, total Afghanistan War spending for 2010 is now expected to exceed $102.9 billion, doubling last year's Afghan spending. Thought of another way, it breaks down to $12 million per hour in taxpayer dollars for one year. That’s equal to total annual U.S. spending on all veteran's benefits, from hospital stays to education.
In Afghan terms, our upcoming single year of war costs represents nearly five times that country’s gross domestic product or $3,623.70 for every Afghan woman, man, and child. Given that the average annual salary for an Afghan soldier is $2,880 and many Afghans seek employment in the military purely out of economic desperation, this might be a wise investment -- especially since the Taliban is able to pay considerably more for its new recruits. In fact, recent increases in much-needed Afghan recruits appear to correlate [13] with the promise of a pay raise. [13]
All of this is, of course, so much fantasy, since we know just where that $30-plus billion will be going. In 2010, total Afghanistan War spending since November 2001 will exceed $325 billion, which equals [10] the combined annual military spending of Great Britain, China, France, Japan, Germany, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. If we had never launched an invasion of Afghanistan or stayed on fighting all these years, those war costs, evenly distributed in this country, would have meant a $2,298.80 dividend per U.S. taxpayer.
Even as we calculate the annual cost of war, the tens of thousands of Asian elephants in the room are all pointing to $1 trillion in total war costs for Iraq and Afghanistan. The current escalation in Afghanistan coincides with that rapidly-approaching milestone. In fact, thanks to Peter Baker’s recent New York Times report [14] on the presidential deliberations that led to the surge announcement, we know that the trillion-dollar number for both wars may be a gross underestimate. The Office of Management and Budget sent President Obama a memo, Baker tells us, suggesting that adding General McChrystal’s surge to ongoing war costs, over the next 10 years, could mean -- forget Iraq -- a trillion dollar Afghan War.
At just under one-third of the 2010 U.S. federal budget, $1 trillion essentially defies per-hour-per-soldier calculations. It dwarfs all other nations' military spending, let alone their spending on war. It makes a mockery of food stamps and schools. To make sense of this cost, we need to leave civilian life behind entirely and turn to another war. We have to reach back to the Vietnam War, which in today's dollars cost $709.9 billion -- or $300 billion less than the total cost of the two wars we're still fighting, with no end in sight, or even $300 billion less than the long war we may yet fight in Afghanistan.
Copyright 2009 Jo Comerford
Jo Comerford is the executive director of the National Priorities Project. Previously, she served as director of programs at the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and directed the American Friends Service Committee's justice and peace-related community organizing efforts in western Massachusetts.
[Note: Jo would like to acknowledge the analysis and numbers crunching of Chris Hellman and Mary Orisich, members of the National Priorities Project's research team, without whom this piece would not have been possible.]
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/17-5
Afghanistan: $57,077.60 - Surging by the Minute
by Jo Comerford [See short bio at the end of the article.]
$57,077.60. That’s what we’re paying per minute. Keep that in mind -- just for a minute or so.
After all, the surge is already on. By the end of December, the first 1,500 U.S. troops will have landed [1] in Afghanistan, a nation roughly the size of Texas, ranked [2] by the United Nations as second worst in the world in terms of human development.
Women and men from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, will be among the first to head out. It takes an estimated $1 million [3] to send each of them surging into Afghanistan for one year. So a 30,000-person surge will be at least $30 billion, which brings us to that $57,077.60. That’s how much it will cost you, the taxpayer, for one minute of that surge.
By the way, add up the yearly salary [4] of a Marine from Camp Lejeune with four years of service, throw in [5] his or her housing allowance, additional pay for dependents, and bonus pay for hazardous duty, imminent danger, and family separation, and you’ll still be many thousands of dollars short of that single minute’s sum.
But perhaps this isn’t a time to quibble. After all, a job is a job, especially in the United States, which has lost [6] seven million jobs since December 2007, while reporting record-high numbers of people seeking assistance to feed themselves and/or their families. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 36 million Americans, including one out of every four children, are currently on food stamps.
On the other hand, given the woeful inadequacy of that “safety net,” we might have chosen to direct the $30 billion in surge expenditures toward raising the average individual monthly Food Stamp allotment by $70 for the next year; that's roughly an additional trip to the grocery store, every month, for 36 million people. Alternatively, we could have dedicated that $30 billion to job creation. According to a recent report [7] issued by the Political Economy Research Institute, that sum could generate a whopping 537,810 construction jobs, 541,080 positions in healthcare, fund 742,740 teachers or employ 831,390 mass transit workers.
For purposes of comparison, $30 billion -- remember, just the Pentagon-estimated cost of a 30,000-person troop surge -- is equal to [8] 80% of the total U.S. 2010 budget for international affairs, which includes monies for development and humanitarian assistance. On the domestic front, $30 billion could double the funding (at 2010 levels [8]) for the Children's Health Insurance Program and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
Or think of the surge this way: if the United States decided to send just 29,900 extra soldiers to Afghanistan, 100 short of the present official total, it could double the amount of money -- $100 million -- it has allocated [9] to assist refugees and returnees from Afghanistan through the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.
Leaving aside the fact that the United States already accounts for 45% of total global military spending, the $30 billion surge cost alone would place us [10] in the top-ten for global military spending, sandwiched between Italy and Saudi Arabia. Spent instead on “soft security” measures within Afghanistan, $30 billion could easily build, furnish and equip [11] enough schools for the entire nation.
Continuing this nod to the absurd for just one more moment, if you received a silver dollar every second, it would take you 960 years to haul in that $30 billion. Not that anyone could hold so much money. Together, the coins would weigh nearly 120 tons, or more than the poundage of 21,000 Asian elephants, an aircraft carrier, or the Washington Monument. Converted to dollar bills and laid end-to-end, $30 billion would reach 2.9 million miles or 120 times around the Earth.
One more thing, that $30 billion isn’t even the real cost of Obama’s surge. It’s just a minimum, through-the-basement estimate. If you were to throw in [12] all the bases being built, private contractors hired, extra civilians sent in, and the staggering costs of training a larger Afghan army and police force (a key goal of the surge), the figure would surely be startlingly higher. In fact, total Afghanistan War spending for 2010 is now expected to exceed $102.9 billion, doubling last year's Afghan spending. Thought of another way, it breaks down to $12 million per hour in taxpayer dollars for one year. That’s equal to total annual U.S. spending on all veteran's benefits, from hospital stays to education.
In Afghan terms, our upcoming single year of war costs represents nearly five times that country’s gross domestic product or $3,623.70 for every Afghan woman, man, and child. Given that the average annual salary for an Afghan soldier is $2,880 and many Afghans seek employment in the military purely out of economic desperation, this might be a wise investment -- especially since the Taliban is able to pay considerably more for its new recruits. In fact, recent increases in much-needed Afghan recruits appear to correlate [13] with the promise of a pay raise. [13]
All of this is, of course, so much fantasy, since we know just where that $30-plus billion will be going. In 2010, total Afghanistan War spending since November 2001 will exceed $325 billion, which equals [10] the combined annual military spending of Great Britain, China, France, Japan, Germany, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. If we had never launched an invasion of Afghanistan or stayed on fighting all these years, those war costs, evenly distributed in this country, would have meant a $2,298.80 dividend per U.S. taxpayer.
Even as we calculate the annual cost of war, the tens of thousands of Asian elephants in the room are all pointing to $1 trillion in total war costs for Iraq and Afghanistan. The current escalation in Afghanistan coincides with that rapidly-approaching milestone. In fact, thanks to Peter Baker’s recent New York Times report [14] on the presidential deliberations that led to the surge announcement, we know that the trillion-dollar number for both wars may be a gross underestimate. The Office of Management and Budget sent President Obama a memo, Baker tells us, suggesting that adding General McChrystal’s surge to ongoing war costs, over the next 10 years, could mean -- forget Iraq -- a trillion dollar Afghan War.
At just under one-third of the 2010 U.S. federal budget, $1 trillion essentially defies per-hour-per-soldier calculations. It dwarfs all other nations' military spending, let alone their spending on war. It makes a mockery of food stamps and schools. To make sense of this cost, we need to leave civilian life behind entirely and turn to another war. We have to reach back to the Vietnam War, which in today's dollars cost $709.9 billion -- or $300 billion less than the total cost of the two wars we're still fighting, with no end in sight, or even $300 billion less than the long war we may yet fight in Afghanistan.
Copyright 2009 Jo Comerford
Jo Comerford is the executive director of the National Priorities Project. Previously, she served as director of programs at the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts and directed the American Friends Service Committee's justice and peace-related community organizing efforts in western Massachusetts.
[Note: Jo would like to acknowledge the analysis and numbers crunching of Chris Hellman and Mary Orisich, members of the National Priorities Project's research team, without whom this piece would not have been possible.]
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/17-5
New government study: tens of thousands of contractors to accompany additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan
From Democracy Now! headlines from the program on December 17, 2009
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/17/headlines#8
Study: Up to 56,000 Contractors for Afghan Escalation
A new congressional study, meanwhile, says the escalation of the Afghan war will require tens of thousands of new contractors. The Congressional Research Service says it expects the Obama administration to send between 26,000 to 56,000 contractors along with the additional troops.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/17/headlines#8
Study: Up to 56,000 Contractors for Afghan Escalation
A new congressional study, meanwhile, says the escalation of the Afghan war will require tens of thousands of new contractors. The Congressional Research Service says it expects the Obama administration to send between 26,000 to 56,000 contractors along with the additional troops.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Profits from drugs not main source of money for Taliban
UN Report Misleading on Afghanistan's Drug Problem
December 15, 2009 By Julien Mercille Source: Foreign Policy In Focus
It's important to address the drugs problem in Afghanistan because narcotics fund the Taliban insurgency, the argument goes. That's what is suggested by a report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), entitled "Addiction, Crime, and Insurgency: The Transnational Threat of Afghan Opium," released in October. But in fact, the United States and its Afghan allies bear a large share of responsibility for the drug industry's dramatic expansion since the invasion. Also, to imply that drugs are the main reason why the Taliban are gaining in strength absolves the United States and NATO of their own responsibility in fomenting the insurgency. Buried deep in the report, its authors admit that reduced levels of drug production would have little effect on the insurgency's vigor.
The following annotation rebuffs some of the report's main assertions, puts in perspective the Taliban's role in the opium economy, and highlights U.S./NATO responsibility for its expansion and potential reduction.
"Taliban insurgents draw some US$ 125 million annually from drugs, which is more money than ten years ago, [and as a result] the perfect storm of drugs and terrorism, that has struck the Afghan/Pakistani border for years, may be heading towards Central Asia. A big part of the region could be engulfed in large-scale terrorism, endangering its massive energy resources."
These claims are supposed to make us shudder in the face of an impending narco-terrorist seizure of a large chunk of the world's energy resources. UNODC states that a decade ago the Taliban earned $85 million per year from drugs, but that since 2005 this figure has jumped to $125 million. Although this is pitched as a significant increase, the Taliban play a more minor role in the opium economy than UNODC would have us believe and drug money is probably a secondary source of funding for them. Indeed, the report estimates that only 10-15% of Taliban funding is drawn from drugs and 85% comes from "nonopium sources."
The total revenue generated by opiates within Afghanistan is about $3.4 billion per year. Of this figure, according to UNODC, the Taliban get only 4% of the sum. Farmers, meanwhile, get 21%.
And the remaining 75%? Al-Qaeda? No: The report specifies that it "does not appear to have a direct role in the Afghan opiates trade," although it may participate in "low-level drugs and/or arms smuggling" along the Pakistani border.
Instead, the remaining 75% is captured by government officials, the police, local and regional power brokers and traffickers — in short, many of the groups now supported (or tolerated) by the United States and NATO are important actors in the drug trade.
The New York Times recently revealed that Ahmed Wali Karzai, President Hamid Karzai's brother, has long been on the CIA payroll, in addition to his probable shady dealings in drugs. But this is only the tip of the iceberg, as U.S. and NATO forces have long supported warlords, commanders, and illegal militias with a record of human rights abuses and involvement in narcotics. A former CIA officer said that "Virtually every significant Afghan figure has had brushes with the drug trade." According to a New York University report, General Nazri Mahmad, a warlord who "control[s] a significant portion of the province's lucrative opium industry," has the contract to provide security for the German Provincial Reconstruction Team.
UNODC insists on making the Taliban-drugs connection front-page news while not chasing with the same intensity those supported by Washington. The agency seems to be acting as an enabler of U.S./NATO policies in Afghanistan.
When I asked the UNODC official who supervised the report what percentage of total drug income in Afghanistan was captured by government officials, the reply was quick: "We don't do that, I don't know."
Instead of pointing a finger directly at the U.S./NATO-backed government, the report gives the impression that the problem lies mostly with rotten apples who threaten an otherwise well-intentioned government.
But the roots of Afghanistan's upsurge in drug production since 2001 are directly related to U.S. policies and the government that was installed in the wake of the invasion. The United States attacked Afghanistan in 2001, in alliance with anti-Taliban warlords and drug lords, showering them with millions of dollars and other forms of support. The empowerment and enrichment of the warlords with whom the U.S. allied itself enabled them to tax and protect opium traffickers, leading to the quick resumption of opium production after the hiatus of the 2000 Taliban ban.
To blame "corruption" and "criminals" for this state of affairs is to ignore the direct and predictable effects of U.S. policies, which historically have tolerated and empowered local drug lords in the pursuit of broader foreign policy objectives, as Alfred McCoy and others have documented in detail.
Impunity for drug lords and warlords continues: a U.S. Senate report noted in August that no major traffickers have been arrested in Afghanistan since 2006, and that successful prosecutions of significant traffickers are often overturned by a simple bribe or protection from above, revealing counternarcotics efforts to be deficient at best.
Identifying drugs as the main cause behind Taliban advances absolves the U.S./NATO of their own responsibility in fomenting the insurgency: their very presence in the country, as well as their destructive attacks on civilians account for a good deal of the recent increase in popular support for the Taliban.
In fact, buried deep in the report, its authors admit that reducing drug production would have only "minimal impact on the insurgency's strategic threat." The Taliban receive "significant funding from private donors all over the world," a contribution which "dwarfs" drug money. Although the report will be publicized by many as a vindication of calls to target the opium economy in order to weaken the Taliban, the authors themselves are not convinced of the validity of this argument.
"Of the $65 billion turnover of the global market for opiates, only 5-10% ($3-5 billion) is estimated to be laundered by informal banking systems. The rest is laundered through legal trade activities and the banking system."
This is an important claim that points to the enormous amounts of drug money swallowed by the world financial system, including Western banks.
The report says that over the last seven years (2002-2008), the transnational trade in Afghan opiates resulted in worldwide sales of $400-$500 billion (retail value). Only 5-10% of this is estimated to be laundered by informal banking systems (such as hawala). The remainder is laundered through the legal economy, and importantly, through Western banks.
In fact, Antonio Maria Costa was quoted as saying that drug money may have recently rescued some failing banks: "interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities," and there were "signs that some banks were rescued in that way." "At a time of major bank failures, money doesn't smell, bankers seem to believe," he wrote in UNODC's 2009 World Drug Report (emphasis in original). The Observer reported that $352 billion of drugs money has been laundered by financial institutions at the height of the present global crisis.
"Afghanistan has the world monopoly of opium cultivation (92%), the raw material for the world's deadliest drug — heroin, [which is] causing up to 100,000 deaths per year."
Tobacco is the world's deadliest drug, not heroin. The former kills about 5 million people every year. According to the WHO, if present tobacco consumption patterns continue, the number of deaths will increase to 10 million by the year 2020. Some 70% of these will be in developing countries, which are the main target of the tobacco industry's marketing ploys. So why does the Taliban get more flak than tobacco companies?
The report estimates there are 16 million opiate users across the world, with the main consumer market being Europe, valued at $20 billion. Europeans are thus the main source of funding for the Afghan drug industry and their governments share a significant part of responsibility for failing to decrease demand and provide more treatment services within their own borders. Lowering drug use in Europe would contribute significantly to reducing the scale of the problem in Afghanistan.
Moreover, the report notes that NATO member Turkey is a "central hub" through which Afghan opiates reach Europe. Perhaps NATO should direct its efforts towards its own members before targeting the Taliban.
"Some Taliban networks may be involved at the level of precursor procurement. These recent findings support the assertion that the Taliban network is more involved in drug trafficking than previously thought."
Yes, the Taliban surely take a cut out of the precursor trade (the chemicals needed to refine opium into products like heroin and morphine).
However, Western countries and some of their allies are also involved: The report identified "Europe, China, and the Russian Federation" as "major acetic anhydride sources for Afghanistan." For instance, 220 liters of acetic anhydride were intercepted this year at Kabul airport, apparently originating from France. In recent years, chemicals have also been shipped from or via the Republic of Korea and UNODC's 2008 Afghan Opium Survey pointed to Germany as a source of precursors.
It is unclear what the total value of the Afghan trade in chemical precursors is, but from the report's data it can be inferred that the retail value of just one precursor, acetic anhydride, was about $450 million this year. Part of that money goes back to Western chemical corporations in the form of profits. Tighter safeguards should be in place on these products.
"Areas of opium poppy cultivation and insecurity correlate geographically. In 2008, 98% of opium poppy cultivation took place in southern and western Afghanistan, the least secure regions."
UNODC associates drugs with the Taliban by pointing to the fact that most poppy cultivation takes places in regions where the Taliban are concentrated. Maps show "poppy-free" provinces in the north and a concentration of cultivation in the southern provinces, linking the Taliban with drugs.
It is true that cultivation is concentrated in the south, but such maps obscure the fact that there is plenty of drug money in the north, a region over which the Afghan government has more control. For instance, Balkh province may be poppy-free, but its center, Mazar-i Sharif, is awash in drug money. Nangarhar was also poppy-free in 2008, although it still remains a province where a large amount of opiates is trafficked.
Some Western officials are now implying that political elites in northern Afghanistan are engaging in successful counternarcotics while the southern drug economy expands. But the fact is that although the commanders who control northern Afghanistan today may have eliminated cultivation, not many have moved against trafficking. Most of them continue to profit from it, and some are believed to have become millionaires.
Foreign Policy In Focus contributor Julien Mercille is lecturer at University College Dublin, Ireland. He specializes in U.S. foreign policy and geopolitics. He can be reached at jmercille[at]gmail[dot]com.
December 15, 2009 By Julien Mercille Source: Foreign Policy In Focus
It's important to address the drugs problem in Afghanistan because narcotics fund the Taliban insurgency, the argument goes. That's what is suggested by a report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), entitled "Addiction, Crime, and Insurgency: The Transnational Threat of Afghan Opium," released in October. But in fact, the United States and its Afghan allies bear a large share of responsibility for the drug industry's dramatic expansion since the invasion. Also, to imply that drugs are the main reason why the Taliban are gaining in strength absolves the United States and NATO of their own responsibility in fomenting the insurgency. Buried deep in the report, its authors admit that reduced levels of drug production would have little effect on the insurgency's vigor.
The following annotation rebuffs some of the report's main assertions, puts in perspective the Taliban's role in the opium economy, and highlights U.S./NATO responsibility for its expansion and potential reduction.
"Taliban insurgents draw some US$ 125 million annually from drugs, which is more money than ten years ago, [and as a result] the perfect storm of drugs and terrorism, that has struck the Afghan/Pakistani border for years, may be heading towards Central Asia. A big part of the region could be engulfed in large-scale terrorism, endangering its massive energy resources."
These claims are supposed to make us shudder in the face of an impending narco-terrorist seizure of a large chunk of the world's energy resources. UNODC states that a decade ago the Taliban earned $85 million per year from drugs, but that since 2005 this figure has jumped to $125 million. Although this is pitched as a significant increase, the Taliban play a more minor role in the opium economy than UNODC would have us believe and drug money is probably a secondary source of funding for them. Indeed, the report estimates that only 10-15% of Taliban funding is drawn from drugs and 85% comes from "nonopium sources."
The total revenue generated by opiates within Afghanistan is about $3.4 billion per year. Of this figure, according to UNODC, the Taliban get only 4% of the sum. Farmers, meanwhile, get 21%.
And the remaining 75%? Al-Qaeda? No: The report specifies that it "does not appear to have a direct role in the Afghan opiates trade," although it may participate in "low-level drugs and/or arms smuggling" along the Pakistani border.
Instead, the remaining 75% is captured by government officials, the police, local and regional power brokers and traffickers — in short, many of the groups now supported (or tolerated) by the United States and NATO are important actors in the drug trade.
The New York Times recently revealed that Ahmed Wali Karzai, President Hamid Karzai's brother, has long been on the CIA payroll, in addition to his probable shady dealings in drugs. But this is only the tip of the iceberg, as U.S. and NATO forces have long supported warlords, commanders, and illegal militias with a record of human rights abuses and involvement in narcotics. A former CIA officer said that "Virtually every significant Afghan figure has had brushes with the drug trade." According to a New York University report, General Nazri Mahmad, a warlord who "control[s] a significant portion of the province's lucrative opium industry," has the contract to provide security for the German Provincial Reconstruction Team.
UNODC insists on making the Taliban-drugs connection front-page news while not chasing with the same intensity those supported by Washington. The agency seems to be acting as an enabler of U.S./NATO policies in Afghanistan.
When I asked the UNODC official who supervised the report what percentage of total drug income in Afghanistan was captured by government officials, the reply was quick: "We don't do that, I don't know."
Instead of pointing a finger directly at the U.S./NATO-backed government, the report gives the impression that the problem lies mostly with rotten apples who threaten an otherwise well-intentioned government.
But the roots of Afghanistan's upsurge in drug production since 2001 are directly related to U.S. policies and the government that was installed in the wake of the invasion. The United States attacked Afghanistan in 2001, in alliance with anti-Taliban warlords and drug lords, showering them with millions of dollars and other forms of support. The empowerment and enrichment of the warlords with whom the U.S. allied itself enabled them to tax and protect opium traffickers, leading to the quick resumption of opium production after the hiatus of the 2000 Taliban ban.
To blame "corruption" and "criminals" for this state of affairs is to ignore the direct and predictable effects of U.S. policies, which historically have tolerated and empowered local drug lords in the pursuit of broader foreign policy objectives, as Alfred McCoy and others have documented in detail.
Impunity for drug lords and warlords continues: a U.S. Senate report noted in August that no major traffickers have been arrested in Afghanistan since 2006, and that successful prosecutions of significant traffickers are often overturned by a simple bribe or protection from above, revealing counternarcotics efforts to be deficient at best.
Identifying drugs as the main cause behind Taliban advances absolves the U.S./NATO of their own responsibility in fomenting the insurgency: their very presence in the country, as well as their destructive attacks on civilians account for a good deal of the recent increase in popular support for the Taliban.
In fact, buried deep in the report, its authors admit that reducing drug production would have only "minimal impact on the insurgency's strategic threat." The Taliban receive "significant funding from private donors all over the world," a contribution which "dwarfs" drug money. Although the report will be publicized by many as a vindication of calls to target the opium economy in order to weaken the Taliban, the authors themselves are not convinced of the validity of this argument.
"Of the $65 billion turnover of the global market for opiates, only 5-10% ($3-5 billion) is estimated to be laundered by informal banking systems. The rest is laundered through legal trade activities and the banking system."
This is an important claim that points to the enormous amounts of drug money swallowed by the world financial system, including Western banks.
The report says that over the last seven years (2002-2008), the transnational trade in Afghan opiates resulted in worldwide sales of $400-$500 billion (retail value). Only 5-10% of this is estimated to be laundered by informal banking systems (such as hawala). The remainder is laundered through the legal economy, and importantly, through Western banks.
In fact, Antonio Maria Costa was quoted as saying that drug money may have recently rescued some failing banks: "interbank loans were funded by money that originated from drug trade and other illegal activities," and there were "signs that some banks were rescued in that way." "At a time of major bank failures, money doesn't smell, bankers seem to believe," he wrote in UNODC's 2009 World Drug Report (emphasis in original). The Observer reported that $352 billion of drugs money has been laundered by financial institutions at the height of the present global crisis.
"Afghanistan has the world monopoly of opium cultivation (92%), the raw material for the world's deadliest drug — heroin, [which is] causing up to 100,000 deaths per year."
Tobacco is the world's deadliest drug, not heroin. The former kills about 5 million people every year. According to the WHO, if present tobacco consumption patterns continue, the number of deaths will increase to 10 million by the year 2020. Some 70% of these will be in developing countries, which are the main target of the tobacco industry's marketing ploys. So why does the Taliban get more flak than tobacco companies?
The report estimates there are 16 million opiate users across the world, with the main consumer market being Europe, valued at $20 billion. Europeans are thus the main source of funding for the Afghan drug industry and their governments share a significant part of responsibility for failing to decrease demand and provide more treatment services within their own borders. Lowering drug use in Europe would contribute significantly to reducing the scale of the problem in Afghanistan.
Moreover, the report notes that NATO member Turkey is a "central hub" through which Afghan opiates reach Europe. Perhaps NATO should direct its efforts towards its own members before targeting the Taliban.
"Some Taliban networks may be involved at the level of precursor procurement. These recent findings support the assertion that the Taliban network is more involved in drug trafficking than previously thought."
Yes, the Taliban surely take a cut out of the precursor trade (the chemicals needed to refine opium into products like heroin and morphine).
However, Western countries and some of their allies are also involved: The report identified "Europe, China, and the Russian Federation" as "major acetic anhydride sources for Afghanistan." For instance, 220 liters of acetic anhydride were intercepted this year at Kabul airport, apparently originating from France. In recent years, chemicals have also been shipped from or via the Republic of Korea and UNODC's 2008 Afghan Opium Survey pointed to Germany as a source of precursors.
It is unclear what the total value of the Afghan trade in chemical precursors is, but from the report's data it can be inferred that the retail value of just one precursor, acetic anhydride, was about $450 million this year. Part of that money goes back to Western chemical corporations in the form of profits. Tighter safeguards should be in place on these products.
"Areas of opium poppy cultivation and insecurity correlate geographically. In 2008, 98% of opium poppy cultivation took place in southern and western Afghanistan, the least secure regions."
UNODC associates drugs with the Taliban by pointing to the fact that most poppy cultivation takes places in regions where the Taliban are concentrated. Maps show "poppy-free" provinces in the north and a concentration of cultivation in the southern provinces, linking the Taliban with drugs.
It is true that cultivation is concentrated in the south, but such maps obscure the fact that there is plenty of drug money in the north, a region over which the Afghan government has more control. For instance, Balkh province may be poppy-free, but its center, Mazar-i Sharif, is awash in drug money. Nangarhar was also poppy-free in 2008, although it still remains a province where a large amount of opiates is trafficked.
Some Western officials are now implying that political elites in northern Afghanistan are engaging in successful counternarcotics while the southern drug economy expands. But the fact is that although the commanders who control northern Afghanistan today may have eliminated cultivation, not many have moved against trafficking. Most of them continue to profit from it, and some are believed to have become millionaires.
Foreign Policy In Focus contributor Julien Mercille is lecturer at University College Dublin, Ireland. He specializes in U.S. foreign policy and geopolitics. He can be reached at jmercille[at]gmail[dot]com.
Obama - another war president
Exceptional or Exceptionalism?
Edited by John Feffer, December 15, 2009
http://www.fpif.org/articles/exceptional_or_exceptionalism
Back in 2003, when Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) put together the collection of essays Power Trip on the emerging foreign policy of the Bush administration, our big debate was over continuity versus change. Was the aggressive unilateralism of George W. Bush and his cohort a wholly new creation? Or was it simply business as usual for the most powerful country in the world?
While acknowledging the sharp right-turn executed by the Bush administration, I emphasized the continuity of unilateralism in U.S. foreign policy. “No administration, however radical its intentions or substantial its political capital, can escape history,” I wrote in the book’s introduction. The Clinton administration, which began with a much-heralded appeal to multilateralism in the wake of the Cold War’s demise, ended up by rejecting key international treaties, undertaking military actions in Iraq and Kosovo without UN approval, pushing hard on military exports, and, in general, insisting that the United States was, as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it, an “indispensable nation.” Clinton was contributing to a long tradition stretching back through Reagan, Johnson, and Truman. The Bush administration built on this ample foundation.
In Oslo, during his Nobel acceptance speech last week, President Barack Obama demonstrated that he, too, cannot step outside of history. I’m not talking about the history outlined by Howard Zinn in his book A People’s History of the United States and brought to life by Matt Damon and other actors in The People Speak, on television last Sunday. Obama did, of course, refer to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi in his Nobel speech. But he devoted most of his remarks to defending war in general and the Afghanistan conflict in particular.
“We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes,” the president said. “There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.” Wars are morally justified, he noted, if they are conducted in self-defense or as a last resort, if the force employed is proportional, and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared violence.
The problem with the president’s interpretation of just-war theory is that the conflict in Afghanistan — the issue that most threatens to undercut the legitimacy of his prize — doesn’t fit the bill. It is difficult to claim the war is still in self defense, not when the Taliban pose no threat to the United States and al-Qaeda has been reduced to a few fragments that could relocate elsewhere. The force is far from proportional, given that the most powerful country in the world is bombing one of the poorest and weakest. And civilians have surely not been spared violence. Stephen Walt calculates that the United States has killed 12,000-32,000 civilians in Afghanistan since the war’s outbreak. That compares to fewer than 1,000 U.S. casualties. In short, the Afghanistan War is an exception and, for national security reasons, the United States makes such exceptions.
No one can fault the president for not giving a well-crafted speech. Indeed, his muscular defense of U.S. military actions has drawn praise from across the political spectrum. “Barack Obama signaled that the world had better get ready for a tougher, less forgiving, more quintessentially American approach from a man who certainly gave the soft touch a try,” writes Robert Kagan. E. J. Dionne praises the president’s tough-minded idealism; David Broder acknowledges that “you can learn a lot from listening to this man.”
It is indeed a special talent of the president’s to be a man for all political seasons. At Oslo, he reassured the Europeans that the United States would no longer fly off the handle. “America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves,” he said. “For when we don't, our action can appear arbitrary, and undercut the legitimacy of future intervention — no matter how justified.” He upheld the struggle for human rights around the world, and yet also argued that “condemnation without discussion” can often lead nowhere.
Politicians who tread the fine line often end up satisfying no one. For now, Obama has managed the political trick of satisfying many. He offers nuclear disarmament (but not too fast), closing Guantánamo (almost), a surge in Afghanistan (but with limits), an uptick in military spending (but not huge), some movement forward on climate change (but not too much), and a ban on torture (but not rendition). With something for everyone, he is a Santa Claus for our recessionary times: rich in his eloquence but austere in his handouts.
But one thing the president won’t do, no matter how many petitions we send in his direction, is push a restart button on U.S. foreign policy. Consider his new overture to the Muslim world. In Cairo, Obama called for a new beginning in relations between the United States and Muslim peoples. “But even within his speech, he undercut his message for a new beginning when he spoke about widening the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” writes FPIF contributor Farrah Hassen in The Cairo Detour. “He didn’t acknowledge the growing civilian casualties — not limited to but certainly increased by drone attacks, ostensibly aimed at dismantling the Taliban and al-Qaeda. These casualties have increased the risk of blowback against the United States rather than win the hearts and minds of Afghans, Pakistanis, and Muslims throughout the world.”
The Nobel speech was yet another reminder that whatever virtues he might have as a person, a thinker, and a former activist, Barack Obama must now perform a different role as an American president. He must represent U.S. national interest as defined by the presidents who came before him and as shaped by the requirements of a military superpower. He reserves the right to act unilaterally, to intervene militarily, to make exceptions, to lead the world. Multilateralism when we can, Bill Clinton declared, unilateralism when we must: This, too, is the Obama doctrine. There is some wiggle room as we saw in his speeches in Cairo and Prague. But, as the brilliant style and problematic content of his Nobel speech demonstrated, he remains an exceptional politician working in an exceptionalist tradition.
Edited by John Feffer, December 15, 2009
http://www.fpif.org/articles/exceptional_or_exceptionalism
Back in 2003, when Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) put together the collection of essays Power Trip on the emerging foreign policy of the Bush administration, our big debate was over continuity versus change. Was the aggressive unilateralism of George W. Bush and his cohort a wholly new creation? Or was it simply business as usual for the most powerful country in the world?
While acknowledging the sharp right-turn executed by the Bush administration, I emphasized the continuity of unilateralism in U.S. foreign policy. “No administration, however radical its intentions or substantial its political capital, can escape history,” I wrote in the book’s introduction. The Clinton administration, which began with a much-heralded appeal to multilateralism in the wake of the Cold War’s demise, ended up by rejecting key international treaties, undertaking military actions in Iraq and Kosovo without UN approval, pushing hard on military exports, and, in general, insisting that the United States was, as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it, an “indispensable nation.” Clinton was contributing to a long tradition stretching back through Reagan, Johnson, and Truman. The Bush administration built on this ample foundation.
In Oslo, during his Nobel acceptance speech last week, President Barack Obama demonstrated that he, too, cannot step outside of history. I’m not talking about the history outlined by Howard Zinn in his book A People’s History of the United States and brought to life by Matt Damon and other actors in The People Speak, on television last Sunday. Obama did, of course, refer to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi in his Nobel speech. But he devoted most of his remarks to defending war in general and the Afghanistan conflict in particular.
“We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes,” the president said. “There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.” Wars are morally justified, he noted, if they are conducted in self-defense or as a last resort, if the force employed is proportional, and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared violence.
The problem with the president’s interpretation of just-war theory is that the conflict in Afghanistan — the issue that most threatens to undercut the legitimacy of his prize — doesn’t fit the bill. It is difficult to claim the war is still in self defense, not when the Taliban pose no threat to the United States and al-Qaeda has been reduced to a few fragments that could relocate elsewhere. The force is far from proportional, given that the most powerful country in the world is bombing one of the poorest and weakest. And civilians have surely not been spared violence. Stephen Walt calculates that the United States has killed 12,000-32,000 civilians in Afghanistan since the war’s outbreak. That compares to fewer than 1,000 U.S. casualties. In short, the Afghanistan War is an exception and, for national security reasons, the United States makes such exceptions.
No one can fault the president for not giving a well-crafted speech. Indeed, his muscular defense of U.S. military actions has drawn praise from across the political spectrum. “Barack Obama signaled that the world had better get ready for a tougher, less forgiving, more quintessentially American approach from a man who certainly gave the soft touch a try,” writes Robert Kagan. E. J. Dionne praises the president’s tough-minded idealism; David Broder acknowledges that “you can learn a lot from listening to this man.”
It is indeed a special talent of the president’s to be a man for all political seasons. At Oslo, he reassured the Europeans that the United States would no longer fly off the handle. “America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves,” he said. “For when we don't, our action can appear arbitrary, and undercut the legitimacy of future intervention — no matter how justified.” He upheld the struggle for human rights around the world, and yet also argued that “condemnation without discussion” can often lead nowhere.
Politicians who tread the fine line often end up satisfying no one. For now, Obama has managed the political trick of satisfying many. He offers nuclear disarmament (but not too fast), closing Guantánamo (almost), a surge in Afghanistan (but with limits), an uptick in military spending (but not huge), some movement forward on climate change (but not too much), and a ban on torture (but not rendition). With something for everyone, he is a Santa Claus for our recessionary times: rich in his eloquence but austere in his handouts.
But one thing the president won’t do, no matter how many petitions we send in his direction, is push a restart button on U.S. foreign policy. Consider his new overture to the Muslim world. In Cairo, Obama called for a new beginning in relations between the United States and Muslim peoples. “But even within his speech, he undercut his message for a new beginning when he spoke about widening the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” writes FPIF contributor Farrah Hassen in The Cairo Detour. “He didn’t acknowledge the growing civilian casualties — not limited to but certainly increased by drone attacks, ostensibly aimed at dismantling the Taliban and al-Qaeda. These casualties have increased the risk of blowback against the United States rather than win the hearts and minds of Afghans, Pakistanis, and Muslims throughout the world.”
The Nobel speech was yet another reminder that whatever virtues he might have as a person, a thinker, and a former activist, Barack Obama must now perform a different role as an American president. He must represent U.S. national interest as defined by the presidents who came before him and as shaped by the requirements of a military superpower. He reserves the right to act unilaterally, to intervene militarily, to make exceptions, to lead the world. Multilateralism when we can, Bill Clinton declared, unilateralism when we must: This, too, is the Obama doctrine. There is some wiggle room as we saw in his speeches in Cairo and Prague. But, as the brilliant style and problematic content of his Nobel speech demonstrated, he remains an exceptional politician working in an exceptionalist tradition.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
China builds a natural gas pipeline in Central Asia, while US wages war
Juan Cole updates issues that reflect China's interests in Central Asia and how, among other projects, it is building a natural gas pipeline in the region. This is something the US and a corporation Unicol had in mind back in the 1990s. In the meantime, the US is becoming further embroiled in a complex, seemingly futile "war," with great harm to the Afghan people and the loss of and injury to US troops, while China extends its economic power and control over regional gas and oil resources. This is not to say that we prefer Chinese imperialism over US imperialism. It would be better for the people of the region if they were not dominated by tyrannical governments and if there were alternatives that advanced the interests of the people. Nevertheless, Cole's commentary helps to remind us that Afghanistan is part of a region of the world that has gas and oil resources and that as a result is the center for competition among big powers for control of these resources. At this level, it has nothing to do with democracy. It is rather what Michael Klare analyzes as a manifestation of intensifying or incipient resource wars.
Bob
----------------------------------
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
China wins struggle for Pipelinestan
A common explanation for the US presence in Afghanistan is Washington's interest in Central Asian fuel sources-- natural gas in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and petroleum in Kazakhstan. The idea of Zalmay Khalilzad and others was to bring a gas pipeline down through Afghanistan and Pakistan to energy-hungry India. Turkmenistan became independent of Moscow in 1991, making the project plausible. For this reason some on the political Right in the US actually supported the Taliban as a force for law and order.
If that was the plan, it has failed. Instead, China has landed the big bid to develop a major gas field in Turkmenistan, along with a pipeline to Beijing. Turkmenistan had strongly considered piping the gas to Moscow instead, but developed conflicts with Gazprom.So the US is bogged down in an Afghanistan quagmire, and China is running off with the big regional prize.
On Tuesday, radical guerrillas deployed a bomb to kill 8 persons and wound 40 in an upscale area of Kabul where foreigners, including Indian aid workers, live-- in another sign of the deterioration of security in Afghanistan's capital. It is obvious how long a gas pipeline would last under these circumstances.
I'm not sure very many politicians in Washington were ever really so interested in the gas pipeline. For someone like then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, making Afghanistan a US base may have aimed at surrounding and weakening Russia and keeping it from reemerging as a peer (a la the attempted push of NATO into places like Georgia.) Some US leaders, however, were pushing for it. In recent years a Turkmenistan pipeline was seen as a way of forestalling India from breaking the embargo on Iran. And I remember that in fall 2001, when congressmen asked Colin Powell how the Afghanistan war would be paid for, he replied that the region is rich in resources. Since Afghanistan is not, he must have been speaking of places like Turkmenistan.
In any case the Chinese just demonstrated that you don't need war to get resources. Avoid costly adventurism and grow your economy like hell, and it all falls into your lap.
Bob
----------------------------------
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
China wins struggle for Pipelinestan
A common explanation for the US presence in Afghanistan is Washington's interest in Central Asian fuel sources-- natural gas in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and petroleum in Kazakhstan. The idea of Zalmay Khalilzad and others was to bring a gas pipeline down through Afghanistan and Pakistan to energy-hungry India. Turkmenistan became independent of Moscow in 1991, making the project plausible. For this reason some on the political Right in the US actually supported the Taliban as a force for law and order.
If that was the plan, it has failed. Instead, China has landed the big bid to develop a major gas field in Turkmenistan, along with a pipeline to Beijing. Turkmenistan had strongly considered piping the gas to Moscow instead, but developed conflicts with Gazprom.So the US is bogged down in an Afghanistan quagmire, and China is running off with the big regional prize.
On Tuesday, radical guerrillas deployed a bomb to kill 8 persons and wound 40 in an upscale area of Kabul where foreigners, including Indian aid workers, live-- in another sign of the deterioration of security in Afghanistan's capital. It is obvious how long a gas pipeline would last under these circumstances.
I'm not sure very many politicians in Washington were ever really so interested in the gas pipeline. For someone like then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, making Afghanistan a US base may have aimed at surrounding and weakening Russia and keeping it from reemerging as a peer (a la the attempted push of NATO into places like Georgia.) Some US leaders, however, were pushing for it. In recent years a Turkmenistan pipeline was seen as a way of forestalling India from breaking the embargo on Iran. And I remember that in fall 2001, when congressmen asked Colin Powell how the Afghanistan war would be paid for, he replied that the region is rich in resources. Since Afghanistan is not, he must have been speaking of places like Turkmenistan.
In any case the Chinese just demonstrated that you don't need war to get resources. Avoid costly adventurism and grow your economy like hell, and it all falls into your lap.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Women's Rights Groups differ on Afghan policy
The view expressed consistently on this blog is that the US-led occupation of Afghanistan is bad for the Afghan people, and that Afghan women and children are among the greatest victims. We think it is also about larger structural dynamics that are rooted in an imperialistic agenda that gives priority to US geo-political interests in the region. Therefore, out of ethical and analytical reasons, we have supported an end to the occupation.
The following article by Alison Cross for the Vancouver Sun newspaper identifies both some women's rights group who favor a continuation of the occupation out of fear that the Talibon will take over the country again, as well as Afghan women who want the occupation to end. We have been much influenced by Malalai Joya, who wants foreign troops out of Afghanistan. Joya maintains that much of the country, outside of southern provinces that are dominated by Taliban groups, are dominated by warlords. With support from US funds, often from drug money and various corrupt activities, the non-Taliban warlords are just as mysoginistic and authoritarian as the Taliban.
This is a worrisome debate, but the evidence that we have compiled indicates that the occupation has done more harm than good and has been largely ignorant of innovative options that would promote Afghan development, human rights, and democracy. Malalai Joya makes a point that sways us, namely, that it will be easier for women to join and help marshal democratic forces within the country when the US-led occupation is ended and the warlords have one less major source of support.
Bob
---------------------------------
Published on Monday, December 14, 2009 by Vancouver Sun
Women's Rights Advocates Square Off over Status of Afghan Women
by Allison Cross
Women's rights groups in Canada and the United States are butting heads over the planned withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, and whether it will benefit the women of the war-torn country or will simply intensify their pain and suffering.
An Afghan woman worker watches as she sorts pomegranates at a juice factory in Kabul on December 7. A leading rights group Monday accused the Afghan government of failing to protect women from endemic violence such as rape and murder and from discrimination, warning that their plight risks getting worse. (AFP/Shah Marai)Some advocates have come forward to express their support for a continued military presence - a departure from the anti-war stance often expressed by feminist groups.
``This is not an issue of security for the United States and Canada. We have 15 million women in (Afghanistan). If they are not secured, there will be a humanitarian catastrophe of immense proportions. It will be a terrible mistake and these countries will live to regret it,'' said Esther Hyneman, a board member for the New York-based group Women for Afghan Women.
The group, which runs guidance and children's centres in three regions of Afghanistan, has previously called for an increase in the number of U.S. troops and an extension of their mission. Without it, Hyneman says, she believes the country will fall easily back into the hands of the Taliban, which will destroy any progress made in improving the lives of women.
The planned withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan is set for 2011. U.S. President Barack Obama announced earlier this month he would inject 300, 000 more troops into the country before also initiating a pullout at the same time as Canada.
``We would have to pull out (of the country) too,'' Hyneman said. ``Our local staff, about 100 local Afghans, will be in serious danger. I don't know how they'll protect themselves if these cities and provinces fall to the Taliban.''
A Canadian military presence helps maintain a level of security that gives organizations the freedom to operate schools and increase access to health care, said Lauryn Oates.
``In essence, we think the military should definitely be there,'' said Oates, a program director for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan. ``If there are no international troops, there would be a civil war on a much bloodier scale than what we're seeing now.''
A toppling of the Afghan government could see women return to the conditions they experienced under the Taliban in the 1990s, Oates said, which included a ban on women working outside the home, a ban on education for girls and forced marriages.
She said she is confident conditions have improved for some women in Afghanistan.
But Judy Rebick, a Ryerson University professor and social justice advocate, said life couldn't get much worse for women in Afghanistan and it's time for the troops to leave.
``Even though women have more access to school and there are women in parliament, the level of violence against women is much higher and the unpredictability of it is much worse,'' Rebick said. ``Women are just as oppressed now by the warlords in some places. My view is that you don't liberate people by occupation.''
Rebick said she listens most to Malalai Joya, a female Afghan MP who was exiled from the country and recently visited Canada on a book tour.
Joya co-wrote a book about Afghanistan with Derrick O'Keefe, a Canadian activist and co-founder of StopWar.ca, and in it calls for the end of the military presence in Afghanistan.
``The war was always waged under false pretences,'' O'Keefe said. ``It's never been about women's rights. The longer we stay in Afghanistan, the worse the eventual situation is going to be for women and people . . . in general.''
The NATO-backed government led by Afghan President Hamid Karzai is misogynist, he said.
``Karzai himself signed a law legalizing marital rape and denying rights to Shia women in Afghanistan,'' he said.
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, established in 1977, is also strongly opposed to the occupation by foreign troops.
© 2009 Canwest News Service
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/14-1
The following article by Alison Cross for the Vancouver Sun newspaper identifies both some women's rights group who favor a continuation of the occupation out of fear that the Talibon will take over the country again, as well as Afghan women who want the occupation to end. We have been much influenced by Malalai Joya, who wants foreign troops out of Afghanistan. Joya maintains that much of the country, outside of southern provinces that are dominated by Taliban groups, are dominated by warlords. With support from US funds, often from drug money and various corrupt activities, the non-Taliban warlords are just as mysoginistic and authoritarian as the Taliban.
This is a worrisome debate, but the evidence that we have compiled indicates that the occupation has done more harm than good and has been largely ignorant of innovative options that would promote Afghan development, human rights, and democracy. Malalai Joya makes a point that sways us, namely, that it will be easier for women to join and help marshal democratic forces within the country when the US-led occupation is ended and the warlords have one less major source of support.
Bob
---------------------------------
Published on Monday, December 14, 2009 by Vancouver Sun
Women's Rights Advocates Square Off over Status of Afghan Women
by Allison Cross
Women's rights groups in Canada and the United States are butting heads over the planned withdrawal of NATO troops from Afghanistan, and whether it will benefit the women of the war-torn country or will simply intensify their pain and suffering.
An Afghan woman worker watches as she sorts pomegranates at a juice factory in Kabul on December 7. A leading rights group Monday accused the Afghan government of failing to protect women from endemic violence such as rape and murder and from discrimination, warning that their plight risks getting worse. (AFP/Shah Marai)Some advocates have come forward to express their support for a continued military presence - a departure from the anti-war stance often expressed by feminist groups.
``This is not an issue of security for the United States and Canada. We have 15 million women in (Afghanistan). If they are not secured, there will be a humanitarian catastrophe of immense proportions. It will be a terrible mistake and these countries will live to regret it,'' said Esther Hyneman, a board member for the New York-based group Women for Afghan Women.
The group, which runs guidance and children's centres in three regions of Afghanistan, has previously called for an increase in the number of U.S. troops and an extension of their mission. Without it, Hyneman says, she believes the country will fall easily back into the hands of the Taliban, which will destroy any progress made in improving the lives of women.
The planned withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan is set for 2011. U.S. President Barack Obama announced earlier this month he would inject 300, 000 more troops into the country before also initiating a pullout at the same time as Canada.
``We would have to pull out (of the country) too,'' Hyneman said. ``Our local staff, about 100 local Afghans, will be in serious danger. I don't know how they'll protect themselves if these cities and provinces fall to the Taliban.''
A Canadian military presence helps maintain a level of security that gives organizations the freedom to operate schools and increase access to health care, said Lauryn Oates.
``In essence, we think the military should definitely be there,'' said Oates, a program director for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan. ``If there are no international troops, there would be a civil war on a much bloodier scale than what we're seeing now.''
A toppling of the Afghan government could see women return to the conditions they experienced under the Taliban in the 1990s, Oates said, which included a ban on women working outside the home, a ban on education for girls and forced marriages.
She said she is confident conditions have improved for some women in Afghanistan.
But Judy Rebick, a Ryerson University professor and social justice advocate, said life couldn't get much worse for women in Afghanistan and it's time for the troops to leave.
``Even though women have more access to school and there are women in parliament, the level of violence against women is much higher and the unpredictability of it is much worse,'' Rebick said. ``Women are just as oppressed now by the warlords in some places. My view is that you don't liberate people by occupation.''
Rebick said she listens most to Malalai Joya, a female Afghan MP who was exiled from the country and recently visited Canada on a book tour.
Joya co-wrote a book about Afghanistan with Derrick O'Keefe, a Canadian activist and co-founder of StopWar.ca, and in it calls for the end of the military presence in Afghanistan.
``The war was always waged under false pretences,'' O'Keefe said. ``It's never been about women's rights. The longer we stay in Afghanistan, the worse the eventual situation is going to be for women and people . . . in general.''
The NATO-backed government led by Afghan President Hamid Karzai is misogynist, he said.
``Karzai himself signed a law legalizing marital rape and denying rights to Shia women in Afghanistan,'' he said.
The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, established in 1977, is also strongly opposed to the occupation by foreign troops.
© 2009 Canwest News Service
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/12/14-1
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