The Fox Guarding the Chicken Coop

The Fox Guarding the Chicken Coop

Dennis Ross and Iran

By Sasan Fayazmanesh

February 27, 2009 “Counterpunch” — – In October 2008 I presented a paper, entitled “What the Future has in Store for Iran,” at a conference on Middle East Studies. The paper, which was subsequently posted at Payvand.com , examined what the US policy toward Iran might look like if either Barack Obama or John McCain came to office. The conclusion of my essay, stated in its last two lines, was: “In the case of McCain, the war [waged against Iran] might come sooner than later. In Obama’s case, one might see a period of ‘tough’ or ‘aggressive diplomacy’ before hostilities begin.”

My conclusion was based on the argument that the US foreign policy toward the Middle East has become institutionalized and it makes very little difference who is the president. The starting point of the argument was an analysis that appeared in The Jerusalem Post just before the Bush Administration took office, predicting that the US Middle East policy would be made more by the neoconservative forces within the new administration than anyone else. In one essay, on December 8, 2000, The Jerusalem Post wrote that both Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz “are the type of candidates the pro-Israel lobby is pushing.” In another article on January 19, 2001, entitled “All the president’s Middle East men,” The Jerusalem Post expressed how the “Jewish and pro-Israel communities are jumping for joy,” knowing that people like Wolfowitz will be in the new administration. The essay predicted: “What you will have are two institutions grappling for control of policy.” It then added: “It is no secret in Washington–or anywhere else for that matter–that the policies will be determined less by Bush himself and more by his inner circle of advisers.”

The message of the Israeli analysts was clear: the Middle East foreign policy of the US has become institutionalized; and rather than watching the US president, one has to watch the institutions that would make the policy. Given this message, my analysis of what the future has in store for Iran concentrated on a few neoconservative institutions and individuals. In particular, I predicted that if Obama were to be elected, the US policy on Iran would be made mostly by Dennis Ross, the “consultant” to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP or simply Washington Institute), a “think tank” affiliate of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). That prediction has now come true. On February 23, 2009, it became official that Dennis Ross is the “Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for the Gulf and Southwest Asia.” [1] The title, as will be explained below, is not what Ross had hoped for, but he would still be in a position to influence the US policy toward Iran.

Who is Dennis Ross, what does he advocate, how was he positioned to become the adviser on Iran in the Obama Administration and what will he do to Iran if he gets the chance? Let me briefly review the case.

Dennis Ross is best known as the dishonest broker who led the so-called negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians during the Clinton Administration. He was “Israel’s lawyer,” to use Aaron David Miller’s apt description of the role that Ross’s “negotiating team” played in the Clinton era, particularly in 1999-2000. [2]

Ross, along with Martin Indyk—who was Clinton’s national security advisor and the US Ambassador to Israel—is a cofounder of the Washington Institute. [3] After leaving office in 2000, Ross became the director of the WINEP. Once the 2008 presidential election approached, Ross jockeyed for a position, left his directorship job and became a “Consultant” to the institute.[4] Originally, Ross and Indyk represented one wing of the WINEP, a wing which appeared to be close to the Israeli Labor Party. Another wing, closer to the Likud Party, and particularly Benjamin Netanyahu, consisted of individuals such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, individuals who played a pivotal role in planning the invasion of Iraq. [5] The difference between the Likud and the Labor wing of the Washington Institute was mostly one of the means employed rather than the end sought. [6] Both wings of the WINEP, similar to Kadima, strove toward a “Greater Israel” (Eretz Yisrael) that includes all or most of “Judea and Samaria.” They both saw Iran’s support for the Palestinian resistance as the biggest obstacle in achieving that goal.  As such, the charge that Iran is developing nuclear weapons and posing an “existential threat” to Israel became a convenient tool for “containing” Iran and stopping its support for the Palestinians. [7] What separated the two sides was that the Labor wing believed that sanctions will eventually bring Iran to its knees, cause either a popular uprising to overthrow the Iranian “regime” or make Iran ripe for a US invasion. The Likud wing, however, had very little patience for sanctions. It wanted an immediate result, a series of military attacks against Iran, replacing the Iranian “regime” with a US-Israeli friendly government, as was done in Iraq. With the emergence of the Kadima Party in Israel in 2005, which brought together the likes of the Likud Party member Ariel Sharon and Labor Party member Shimon Peres, the differences between the two wings of the Washington Institute has mostly disappeared. Clinton’s Middle East men, such as Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk and Richard Holbrooke, are hardly distinguishable from Bush’s men, such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. But since the latter group is temporarily out of office, the former is filling in. Ross has become the designated senior Israeli lobby man in Obama’s Administration. He has no expertise when it comes to Iran. But he knows that for the cause of Eretz Yisrael Iran must be contained; and given this goal, he knows how to recite, ad nauseum, all the usual lines of Israel and its lobby groups against Iran.

After breaking the back of the Palestinians and pushing for the invasion of Iraq, the Israeli lobby groups concentrated their forces to contain Iran. Given the Iraq fiasco and the neoconservatives falling from grace, the Israeli lobby groups settled on Dennis Ross, “Israel’s lawyer,” to lead the task of containing Iran.  Since Ross has no knowledge of Iran, other members of the lobby, particularly their Iran “experts,” have been assisting Ross in his new role. Among these is the ex-Trotskyite, neoconservative Patrick Clawson, WINEP’s “deputy director for research” and an anti-Iran zealot who has been obsessed for decades with the containment of Iran and Iraq. [8] Over the years, with the help of these individuals Ross has developed a strategy to contain Iran. The strategy consists of arguing that: 1) Iran is developing nuclear weapons; 2) Iran is a threat to the US and an existential threat to Israel, and Israel will not tolerate “mullahs with nukes” (Sydney Morning Herald, October 16, 2004); 3) “nuclear deterrent rules that governed relations between the United States and the Soviet Union” do not hold when it comes to Iran, since Iranians, especially their president, are irrational and believe in the “coming of the 12th Imam” (The Washington Post, May 1, 2006); 4) Iran’s nuclear ambitions will start a nuclear arms race in the Middle East; 5) the Bush Administration’s policy of dealing with Iran did not work, because it did not have enough sticks or carrots; 6) the US should push for a direct, but “tough” or aggressive diplomacy to stop Iran from enriching uranium and supporting “terrorism” (Newsweek, December 8, 2008) [9]; 7) the aggressive diplomacy should include pressuring the Europeans, as well as the Chinese and Russians, to stop trading with Iran; 8) the prohibition of trade should include preventing Iran from importing refined oil products and, ultimately, blockading Iran; and 9) once this tough and aggressive diplomacy fails and Iran does not change its “behavior,” then the US could legitimately launch military attacks against Iran, arguing that the it did everything in its power to resolve the situation peacefully.

The above arguments were summarized on March 13, 2008, in a news report in The Jerusalem Post, entitled “Visiting Obama Middle East adviser: He’d be great for Israel.”  According to this report, Mel Levine—a “staunchly pro-Israel” former congressman from Los Angeles and, along with Dennis Ross, “one of Obama’s seven Middle East advisers”—told The Jerusalem Post during a visit to Israel that Obama believes that “the way to stop Iran was with a combination of carrots and sticks.” Levine was further quoted as saying:  “He believes that if you use carrots and sticks and engage in multilateral aggressive diplomacy then if you need to use the military option or do anything that needs to be done you are much more likely to get support of allies, more international support and broader American support.” Mr. Levin had cut to the chase and stated clearly what Dennis Ross had been advocating for years, but in a more convoluted and diplomatic language. The “tough” and “aggressive diplomacy,” as Mr. Levin had made clear, was nothing but a series of motions that would set the stage for military action against Iran.

Ross’s arguments are often devoid of any factual content, as I have shown in “What the Future has in Store for Iran.” For example, in June 2008 the Washington Institute published a “Presidential Study Group Reports” entitled “Strengthening the Partnership: How to Deepen U.S.-Israel Cooperation on the Iranian Nuclear Challenge.” [10] One of the two “co-convenors” of the report was Dennis Ross. [11] Subsequently, the advisors to both presidential candidates endorsed the report. [12] As I argued in my October essay, this 6-page WINEP report—which was funded by a foundation supporting neoconservative causes, and was drafted in consultation with the WINEP’s “Israeli counterparts”—contains almost nothing factual and, indeed, in several places contains errors.  For example, like much of Ross’s other writings, this report tries to give the reader the false impression that Iran is building nuclear weapons. Yet, anyone familiar with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s reports knows that after many years of inspection, the IAEA has been unable to show any evidence of diversion of nuclear material in Iran. Or the report claims that the UN Security Council resolutions calling on Iran to suspend its enrichment program have been “unanimous.” As I have stated in my essay, even a cursory look at the news would reveal that this claim is false.  For example, the third UN Security Council resolution, Resolution1803, did not pass unanimously. Indonesia abstained during the vote. [13] Furthermore, as most news sources pointed out, “Libya, South Africa and Vietnam joined Indonesia in expressing reservations [about the resolution]” (AFP, March 3, 2008). Ross’s arguments, as I have shown in my October essay, are also often quite illogical. It is, for example, not at all clear why Iran’s nuclear ambitions will start a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, while Israel’s decades-old possession of nuclear weapons has not led to such an arms race. Similarly, it is not clear why Iranians, who might have certain religious beliefs, are irrational, but Israelis, who justify the existence of Israel on religious grounds, are rational.

After the June 2008 “Presidential Study Group Reports,” which was endorsed by Obama’s and McCain’s advisors, Ross and company wrote the September 2008 “report of an independent task force sponsored by the bipartisan policy center” on “U.S. policy toward Iranian Nuclear Development.” [14] In this report they put forward the same falsehoods and illogical arguments. At the same time a neoconservative campaign was launched, under the title “United Against Nuclear Iran” (UANI), in which Ross played a prominent role as the “Co-Founder and Co-Chairman.” The “Advisory Board” of UANI included, beside Ross, such notable figures as the neoconservative Mark Wallace, the President of UANI, advisor to Sarah Palin and a John Bolton recruit for a position at the UN; R. James Woolsey the neoconservative and member of the advisory board of The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs; Henry Sokolski the neoconservative signatory of the “Project for the New American Century signatory”; and Richard C. Holbrooke, another “Co-Founder and Co-Chairman” of UANI. [15] The neoconservative campaign included a slick and scary video advertisement, which is still available on the web. [16] The video started with the message “Stop Terrorism, Stop Human Rights Abuses, Stop Nuclear Iran.” Small prints at the bottom of the message read “Paid for by the American Coalition Against Nuclear Iran, Inc.” Following the introduction six hands appeared, black and white, joining in a circle around a map of Iran. The viewer was asked to “join the cause” by clicking on the video. If followed, a note would appear that read: “Send a message to the nation that Iran’s nuclear program is unacceptable. Join United Against Nuclear Iran today and receive news updates and event reminders.” Then the viewer was asked for name and email address. This was followed by an ominous video about Iran’s alleged development of nuclear weapons, repeating the same falsehoods and illogical arguments put forward by Dennis Ross and company on behest of the Israeli lobby groups.

After President Obama took office, the media was filled with the news of the impending appointment of Dennis Ross as Iran envoy. Yet the appointment appeared to be postponed. Various explanations appeared in the media for the postponement. Some reasoned that the postponement was at least partly due to Ross’s close ties with Israel. For example, on February 3, 2009, Robert Naiman wrote in the Huffington Post that “allegation of ‘dual loyalty’ is being raised against Dennis Ross.” He further mentioned that Ross is “still chair of the board of the Jerusalem-based ‘Jewish People Policy Planning Institute,’ as indicated by that organization’s website.” [17] Others emphasized the fact that as far as Iran is concerned Ross’s appointment might kill any chance of rapprochement between Iran and the US.  For example, The Christian Science Monitor reported on February 5, 2009, that from an Iranian perspective Ross is the “pioneer of the American-Zionist lobby” and under his leadership during the Clinton years the US policy was “not one millimeter different from Israeli policy.” The report quoted a “Western diplomat” as saying: “There is no doubt they [Iranians] are all going to look at Ross as an Israeli proxy.”

Some of the explanations given for the postponement of Ross’s appointment also explain his vague and broad job title, “Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for the Gulf and Southwest Asia.” Before the end of the 2008 presidential election there were rumors that Ross might be considered for the position of the Secretary of State (Haaretz, October 24, 2008). Once Obama was elected, and Hilary Clinton became Secretary of State, Ross apparently hoped to become at least the “special envoy to Iran.” But given his close ties with Israel and the fact that his containment plans were well known to the Iranians, he had to settle for a less provocative title. Needless to say that the new title, “Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for the Gulf and Southwest Asia,” is still quite provocative as far as Iran is concerned, since changing the name of the Persian Gulf to simply “Gulf” is offensive to many Iranians.

Whatever the reason for the postponement of Ross’s appointment and change of title, one thing is clear: the sly fox is now guarding the chicken coop. As Mel Levine said about Ross: “He’d be great for Israel.” With the help of Richard Holbrooke, Stuart Levey—Bush’s Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, who is now in Obama’s Administration—and all the other “president’s Middle East men,” Dennis Ross might be able to finish the unfinished business of the neoconservatives, the containment of Iraq and Iran. The Israelis and pro-Israel communities must be jumping with joy once again!

Sasan Fayazmanesh is Professor of Economics at
California State University, Fresno. He can be reached at: sasan.fayazmanesh@gmail.com

Notes

1. See Daily Press Briefing, The U.D. Department of States: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2009/02/119730.htm or  The Washington Post.

2. See “Israel’s Lawyer,” The Washington Post, May 23, 2005.

3. See Swisher, Clayton E., 2004, The truth about Camp David: the untold story about the collapse of the Middle East peace process, New York: Nation Books, p.35.

4. See: http://www.washingtoninstitute.org

5. The name of these individuals appears on the “Board of Advisors.” See “About the Institute,” available at: http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/.

6. Ross, for example, supported the invasion of Iraq, even though he was critical of some of the post-invasion policies of the Bush Administration (see “Obama’s Conservative Mideast Pick,” Time, July16, 2008).

7. For different meanings of “containment” see my book: The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment, Routledge, 2008.

8. For Clawson’s relentless attempt to contain Iran see The United States and Iran Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment Routledge, 2008.

9. Dennis Ross, “Iran: Talk Tough With Tehran”: http://www.newsweek.com/id/171256/output/print

10. The report’s title was: “2008 Presidential task Forces: Task Force on the Future of U.S.-Israel Relations: Strengthening the Partnership: How to Deepen the US-Israel Cooperation on The Iranian Nuclear Challenge.”

11. The other “co-convenors” was Robert Satloff. The two Washington Institute participants, who apparently wrote the piece, were the neoconservatives Patrick Clawson, “deputy director of research,” and David Makovsky, “senior fellow and director, Project on the Middle East Peace Process.”

12. On behest of Obama Anthony Lake and Susan Rice endorsed it, and on behalf of McCain former congressman Vin Weber and the neoconservative R. James Woolsey signed the document.

13. See Security Council Resolution 1803, March 3, 2008.

14. See “Meeting the Challenge: U.S. Policy Toward Iranian Nuclear Development”.

15. See “Leadership” of “United Against Nuclear Iran”:

16. See http://www.unitedagainstnucleariran.com/video/view/4.

17. http://www.jpppi.org.il/ and http://www.jpppi.org.il/JPPPI/

Return of the War Party

Return of the War Party

By Patrick J. Buchanan

February 27, 2009 “The American Conservative” — -“Real men go to Tehran!” brayed the neoconservatives after the success of their propaganda campaign to have America march on Baghdad and into an unnecessary war that has forfeited all the fruits of our Cold War victory.

Now they are back, in pursuit of what has always been their great goal: an American war on Iran. It would be a mistake to believe they and their collaborators cannot succeed a second time. Consider:

On being chosen by Israel’s President Shimon Peres to form the new regime, Likud’s “Bibi” Netanyahu declared, “Iran is seeking to obtain a nuclear weapon and constitutes the gravest threat to our existence since the war of independence.”

Echoing Netanyahu, headlines last week screamed of a startling new nuclear breakthrough by the mullahs. “Iran ready to build nuclear weapon, analysts say,” said CNN. “Iran has enough uranium to make a bomb,” said the Los Angeles Times. Armageddon appeared imminent.

Asked about Iran’s nukes in his confirmation testimony, CIA Director Leon Panetta blurted, “From all the information I’ve seen, I think there is no question that they are seeking that capability.”

Tuesday, Dennis Ross of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a front spawned by the Israeli lobby AIPAC, was given the Iranian portfolio. AIPAC’s top agenda item? A U.S. collision with Iran.

In the neocon Weekly Standard, Elliot Abrams of the Bush White House parrots Netanyahu, urging Obama to put any land-for-peace deals with the Palestinians on a back burner. Why?

“The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now part of a broader struggle in the region over Iranian extremism and power. Israeli withdrawals now risk opening the door not only to Palestinian terrorists but to Iranian proxies.”

The campaign to conflate Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria as a new axis of evil, a terrorist cartel led by Iranian mullahs hell-bent on building a nuclear bomb and using it on Israel and America, has begun. The full-page ads and syndicated columns calling on Obama to eradicate this mortal peril before it destroys us all cannot be far off.

But before we let ourselves be stampeded into another unnecessary war, let us review a few facts that seem to contradict the war propaganda.

First, last week’s acknowledgement that Iran has enough enriched uranium for one atom bomb does not mean Iran is building an atom bomb.

To construct a nuclear device, the ton of low-enriched uranium at Natanz would have to be run through a second cascade of high-speed centrifuges to produce 55 pounds of highly enriched uranium (HUE).

There is no evidence Iran has either created the cascade of high-speed centrifuges necessary to produce HUE or that Iran has diverted any of the low-enriched uranium from Natanz.
And the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors retain full access to Natanz.

And rather than accelerating production of low-enriched uranium, only 4,000 of the Natanz centrifuges are operating. Some 1,000 are idle. Why?

Dr. Mohamed El-Baradei, head of the IAEA, believes this is a signal that Tehran wishes to negotiate with the United States, but without yielding any of its rights to enrich uranium and operate nuclear power plants.

For, unlike Israel, Pakistan and India, none of which signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and all of which ran clandestine programs and built atom bombs, Iran signed the NPT and has abided by its Safeguards Agreement. What it refuses to accept are the broader demands of the U.N. Security Council because these go beyond the NPT and sanction Iran for doing what it has a legal right to do.

Moreover, Adm. Dennis Blair, who heads U.S. intelligence, has just restated the consensus of the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran does not now possess and is not now pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

Bottom line: Neither the United States nor the IAEA has conclusive evidence that Iran either has the fissile material for a bomb or an active program to build a bomb. It has never tested a nuclear device and has never demonstrated a capacity to weaponize a nuclear device, if it had one.

Why, then, the hype, the hysteria, the clamor for “Action This Day!”? It is to divert America from her true national interests and stampede her into embracing as her own the alien agenda of a renascent War Party.

None of this is to suggest the Iranians are saintly souls seeking only peace and progress. Like South Korea, Japan and other nations with nuclear power plants, they may well want the ability to break out of the NPT, should it be necessary to deter, defend against or defeat enemies.

But that is no threat to us to justify war. For decades, we lived under the threat that hundreds of Russian warheads could rain down upon us in hours, ending our national existence. If deterrence worked with Stalin and Mao, it can work with an Iran that has not launched an offensive war against any nation within the memory of any living American.

Can we Americans say the same?

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC

NATO Forces Enter Local Mosque, Harass Religious Leaders

Terrible transformations ahead?

—Rafia Zakaria

No one is untouched and no one is clean. All political contenders from the president to the deposed judges to the opposition leaders all have their own histories of inside deals, corruption and surreptitious self-serving agreements with military generals or Saudi princes

When the men in long black robes descended on Iran several decades ago, the world was stunned. Few knew what to expect, the dénouement of the revolution was swift: within a short span of time, the cosmopolitan Persia envisioned by the Shah had been transformed into the grim Islamic Republic. Women slid under black chadors, television showed only religious programmes and morality became the province of law enforcement over individual conscience.

Ensconced as we are in particular historical eras, it is trying and perhaps impossible to go beyond our faith in normalcy and evaluate the incremental changes taking place around us. As many historical records and memoirs now show, the days leading up to the Iranian Revolution were marked by a similar obstinacy as people continued to believe that after the demonstrations had ceased and the Shah had left, life would return to a familiar normal.

There would be dance parties, women would go to work, drinks would be poured and poetry and art exhibited. Indeed, at our smug end of history, it is possible to see how misplaced this belief in the constancy of the present was at the time. There was of course no return after 1979, the course of politics had changed and Iran was altered forever. The mullahs assumed to be archaic, medieval and generally incapable of governance not only took over the state but transformed it into something nearly unrecognisable from its liberal constitutional predecessor.

There are many differences between Iran in the 1970s and the condition of Pakistan in this first decade of the new millennium. The Islamist movement that roars at our footsteps has many marked differences from the one that wracked Iran decades ago. Indeed, the Taliban, with their shaggy beards and their cave-based militarism, are not the erudite mullahs of Qom, and Mullah Omar bears not even a scant resemblance to the Ayatollah.

But marking as we are several years of an insurgency that only grows in fervour and a political and legal system that is all but collapsed, it is perhaps pertinent to question whether we are indeed as duped in believing in the unchanging constancy of the present as the Iranians were at the precipice of the 1979 Revolution.

One argument that substantiates the above is our preoccupation with genealogy, which insists that the Taliban, being a creation of the Cold War, have nothing substantive to offer in terms of an attractive moral ideology. While sociological, economic and geopolitical explanations of the rise of the Taliban are important, the ascription of these factors as the sole basis for the ascendancy of the group may well be misguided.

It is indeed true that the rise of the Taliban is symptomatic of a cornucopia of failures: of the state to provide security; of legal institutions; and of civilian political institutions to exercise control over the intelligence apparatus of the country.

However, there is also something substantive in the moral ideology offered by the group. While admittedly repugnant to the country’s liberal elite, the stark clarity of an unassailable moral code that very literally allows no dissent, the elimination of all criminality by threat of the most draconian punishment, the elimination of temptation of any form and most notably of all the deliberately designed and very visible anti-modernism, all present a platform designed quite specifically to respond to key confusions within the Pakistani psyche.

In doing so, they represent a substantive post-modern reconstruction of a pre-colonial era, with an invented brand of sharia that is pristine in its simplicity and accessible to even the most barely educated mullah, and an anti-intellectual vitriol that is violently anti-Western. They have made an effective pitch at presenting what an authentic Pakistan rid of corruption, elitism and Western pandering would look like and in their success lies the tragedy confronting the Pakistani nation.

And then there are the seemingly endless political opportunities provided by the weakening of the Pakistani state apparatus in Islamabad. Plagued as it is by illegitimacy, and harassed and cornered by political actors loath to giving up any opportunity to subvert state power, the Pakistani state has lost ground not simply to the Taliban but also to the political forces operating within the democratic mainstream.

The most recent cataclysm, exposing once again the illegitimacies of the NRO that begot the current government and the inability of sustaining its fledgling power against political enemies wanting their own turn at extorting resources from the state, presents precisely the kind of breakdown of constitutionalism that makes the macabre “otherness” of the Taliban look like a departure from the corruption and general moral depravity of Islamabad.

No one is untouched and no one is clean. All political contenders from the president to the deposed judges to the opposition leaders all have their own histories of inside deals, corruption and surreptitious self-serving agreements with military generals or Saudi princes.

In the midst of such moral degeneracy, ordinary people on the streets of Quetta and Lahore are left to wonder whether a packed court that curries favour with particular governments is really better than a stadium where barely educated mullahs hack off hands and hand out whippings to alleged criminals.

So while bands may play in Karachi and Lahore and weddings may continue and resilient school children may continue to study for exams, the devolution of the state and the march of anarchy in Pakistan continue. There was a time when the army was the only usurping force waiting in the murky shadows to capture the reigns of power.

With the arrival of the Taliban, the increasing extension of their territorial power from the tribal areas to Swat and even the villages around Peshawar suggests the beginning of a new game that promises to be far bloodier and a far greater challenge than the civil-military jousts of old.

Perhaps a decade hence, Pakistanis too may look back at these days and wonder how and when we could have been able to predict the terrible and tremendous transformation ahead.

Rafia Zakaria is an attorney living in the United States where she teaches courses on Constitutional Law and Political Philosophy. She can be contacted at rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

The Swat deal is wrong

—Shaukat Qadir

The Swat deal amounts to the opening of a Pandora’s Box: where will it stop? The other chapters of the Taliban are only waiting to ask for their own ‘Islamic’ government. Is this the beginning of the real Talibanisation of the NWFP?

The Taliban in Pakistan are far from a monolithic structure. There is, at best, a loose union with a disputed leadership and undefined hierarchy. However, the undisputed Taliban leader in Swat is Fazlullah. Pakistan has attempted to strike a peace deal with the Swat Taliban, in return for the imposition of sharia — Islamic law — in Swat. The attempt has been heralded by some, viewed sceptically by others, and condemned by a few. Let us attempt to examine what is wrong with this deal.

To begin with, the government’s deal has been brokered with Sufi Muhammed, Fazlullah’s father-in-law, not with Fazlullah who, despite their relationship (or because of it), is not on the best of terms with Sufi. If Fazlullah accepts Sufi’s terms, it might result in Sufi becoming more powerful; else the endeavour could deteriorate to an internecine battle for turfs, doomed to fail from the outset.

If one vectors into this equation that the Taliban are hated by the population for all that they stand for and can rule only by force, it is obvious that the deal can, at best, offer a breather and no more.

The provincial government, having announced that it is prepared to go the extra mile to ensure the success of this deal, has now announced its intention of arming the local population to fight against the Taliban and that ‘arms not being used against the Taliban would be withdrawn’. How that will be discovered or how the arms, once given, will be recovered remains a mystery. The central government is having second thoughts anyway.

However, irrespective of whether it works or not, this deal is a recipe for disaster, unless we are prepared to hand Islam over to the Taliban and allow them to legalise their violation of every law of the land and every tenet of Islam.

The Quran states again and again that Islam is progressive; even Saudi Arabia that had been living with its archaic laws is attempting to change. Pakistan is, on the other hand, prepared to allow itself to be held hostage to these self-styled saviours of Islam.

I have persistently numbered among those who advocate negotiating with terrorists, though from a position of strength, and that the use of force alone is not the answer. I have continued to quote the IRA and Sein Fenn as an example of erstwhile terrorists who are today negotiating the fate of Ireland with the British government.

However, there is a line beyond which it is not possible for any state to cede its authority. While it is possible to negotiate a mutually acceptable form of government that reflects the aspirations of the people, no state should be prepared to accept a state within a state, which is governed by force, irrespective of the wishes of the governed.

One meaning of the word ‘Islam’ is peace; the Quran forbids its followers to kill innocent people or to take their own lives. However, the Taliban preach that to take one’s own life as a suicide bomber is not only the path to heaven for the bomber, but that he/she is also doing a favour to those killed for, unknowingly, they too will have died in the cause of Allah and will thus go to heaven.

Hazrat Bibi Khadija RA asked the Prophet PBUH for his hand in marriage. Islam permits each woman to choose her mate and seek divorce if unhappy, just as to the male. Yet the Taliban find justification for ‘honour killing’; the killing of disobedient female offspring, and women who choose their own mate or seek divorce against their parents’ wishes.

Islam asks its followers to seek knowledge and educate themselves; one of the most famous sayings of the Prophet PBUH is ‘seek knowledge, even if you have to travel to China for it’. Yet the Taliban condemn knowledge as being un-Islamic: they burn girls’ schools, throw acid on the faces of girls who defy them in persisting to seek knowledge, and murder persistent teachers.

Even if schools in Swat resume classes, what will they teach? If they have their own courts, what justice will they offer? Will not the next generation of Swatis be condemned to become Taliban?

They forget history and declare democracy to be un-Islamic. The first Caliph, Hazrat Abu Bakr RA was deemed to have been nominated by the Prophet PBUH, since he was asked by the Prophet PBUH to lead the Friday prayers when He fell ill. Yet, Abu Bakr RA did not assume his office until the Friday congregation following the death of the Prophet PBUH, when he was accepted unopposed and unanimously by the congregation. The same occurred following the death of Hazrat Abu Bakr RA when Hazrat Omer RA became Caliph. Following Hazrat Omer’s death, Hazrat Ali RA decided to contest the nomination of Hazrat Osman RA, but withdrew when he realised that Hazrat Osman RA was likely to win. What else is an election or democracy?

In fact, Islam is the first democracy in which not only was the Caliph appointed in accordance with the wishes of the people, he was accountable to the people during his rule. Numerous instances are recorded in history when common people challenged ruling Caliphs and had to be satisfied.

Finally, the Swat deal amounts to the opening of a Pandora’s Box: where will it stop? The other chapters of the Taliban are only waiting to ask for their own ‘Islamic’ government. Is this the beginning of the real Talibanisation of the NWFP?

If so, does no one realise that if they are permitted to take over a province, they will find time to consolidate and, some day in the not too distant future, threaten Islamabad, something they are incapable of doing, now or ever, unless the state gives them such an opening in Swat.

This article is a modified version of one originally written for the National

In Major Reversal of Bush Af/Pak Policy Obama Invites Chinese Aid

U.S. looks to China for support on Afghanistan: Pentagon

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING (Reuters) – The United States is looking to stronger Chinese cooperation on Afghanistan, piracy, and other international troubles, a Pentagon official said on Saturday after talks that he said also addressed strains over Taiwan.

The U.S. official, David Sedney, said China’s opposition to Washington’s arms sales to the disputed island of Taiwan came up in the two days of discussions in Beijing, but did not overwhelm an agenda that also covered Central Asia, China’s contribution to fighting piracy off the Somali coast, and nuclear weapons.

“The focus was not at all on obstacles. The focus was on how we can move forward,” Sedney, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, told a news briefing after the talks.

“We both understand that it really is a new strategic environment that we’re in here, with China playing the role that it does,” he said.

The talks marked the first defense policy dialogue between the United States and China under the new Obama administration.

Sedney cast them as a promising start but avoided specifics.

Asked if the two sides discussed North Korea and its possible launch of a missile, he said that the two sides had talked about security in northeast Asia.

President Barack Obama has said he will increase forces in Afghanistan by 17,000 in a bid to quell worsening insurgent violence. Sedney said Washington would welcome Chinese help there and in neighboring Pakistan.

“This is an area where we’re looking to see more contributions from the international community — and of course … this means China — to assist in the many, many needs that are in Afghanistan,” Sedney said.

He raised health, education and trade as examples of areas where China could help in Afghanistan, but did not specify security forces as among them. But he said Chinese military officials were interested in U.S. plans there.

“As they pointed out, Afghanistan and Pakistan are both neighbors of China,” Sedney said.

These latest U.S.-China Defense Policy Coordination Talks came after Beijing curtailed many bilateral military contacts in November to show its anger over the Bush administration’s decision to sell $6.5 billion of arms to Taiwan.

Beijing says Taiwan is an illegitimate breakaway province that must accept reunification, by force if necessary, and it has been angered by the military sales. Washington says the sales are justified by U.S. law as designed to help Taiwan defend itself.

Sedney said the two delegations’ discussion of Taiwan was frank but did not mark a shift in long-standing positions.

He praised China’s sending of warships to help NATO and other forces fight pirates who use Somalia as a base to menace the Gulf of Aden.  Continued…

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Are The Jews God’s Chosen People?

Friday, 27 February 2009 08:12 Andrew Winkler, The Rebel Media Group

One misunderstanding that often confuses pious Christians and Judaics alike is the Judaic claim to be God’s ‘Chosen People’. The implied meaning is that the God Christians and Judaics share favours Judaics over all other human beings, giving them a privileged position.

The question I always ask, when confronted with that claim, is how that alleged favouritism is transferred from Biblical times’ Judaics to modern days Jews. Is it race or religion? This distinction is important because only a very small minority of modern days Jews, the so-called Oriental Jews, are the direct descendants of Biblical times’ Judaics. The majority of the descendants are today’s Palestinians. So if the ‘Chosen People’ status is transmitted genetically, then it is the Palestinians and not the Jews who are the chosen ones.

No, no, that’s impossible, is usually the shocked response to such ‘heretic’ thoughts. Imagine the consequences! It is, of course, the ‘Covenant’ between God and the Judaics, that makes them his ‘Chosen People’. In this religious contract the Judaics have undertaken to follow God’s law as layed down in what Christians call the Old Testament (OT).

My next question then is how God would feel if his Chosen People introduced thousands of new rules and exemptions to an extent that God’s original rules are no longer followed. Wouldn’t that break the ‘Covenant’ and make the Judaics loose their favourite status?

Of course, it would. Judaism has rejected the covenant by introducing the so-called oral tradition which was codified in form of the Babylonian Talmud after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. Anyone who has studied Judaism is aware of the fact that

• the Talmud has absolute priority over the OT,
• the Talmud is the most perverted and racist piece of hate literature ever written in human history,
• the Talmud systematically reinterprets the OT to an extent that what the OT ‘really means’, according to the rabbis’ teachings, and what Christians and Muslims believe have no resemblance what so ever, and
• that rabbis during their training spend more than 90% of their time studying the Talmud, and the rest is reserved for things like the sex-crazy black magic classic of the Cabala. The OT is only studied through the angle of what the Talmud teaches how to understand the OT.

According to traditional Christian teachings, the Judaics have lost their status as the Chosen People by rejecting God’s word in form of the OT in favour of the oral teachings of the rabbis which – most of the time – are in complete contradiction to what the OT says. Jesus got killed by the Judaics – either, as the Talmud describes in most gruesome detail, by the rabbis themselves, or by bullying the Romans into killing him – for rejecting the oral teachings of the rabbis.

If we follow the theory that the Chosen People is transferred via adherence to the Covenant, God’s law, Biblical times’ Judaics have lost the favourite status. By rejecting the oral tradition and refocusing on God’s law, the Christians have taken the place of the Judaics as the Chosen People. If modern days’ Jews want to regain God’s good-will, they have to reject the racist and pornographic oral traditions codified in the rabbinic concoctions of the Talmud and Cabala.

Andrew Winkler is the founder and editor/publisher of dissident blog ZioPedia.org and independent news site RebelNews.org. You can read more of his writings in the editorial section of ZioPedia.org. Andrew can be contacted on
andrew@therebel.org

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Source: ZioPedia.org

Israel’s eternal impunity

To justify itself, state terrorism creates terrorists: it sows hatred and harvests alibis. Everything indicates that the bloodbath in Gaza, which its creators claim was designed to eliminate terrorists, will result in a proliferation of them. Since 1948 Palestinians have lived in perpetual humiliation. They can’t breathe without permission. They have lost their country, their land, their water, their freedom, their everything.

They don’t even have the right to elect their own leaders: when they vote for someone they aren’t supposed to vote for, they are punished. Gaza is being punished. It has been transformed into a rat’s nest without an exit since Hamas fairly won the 2006 elections. Something similar occurred in 1932 when the Communist Party won in El Salvador. Drenched in blood, Salvadoreans paid for their misbehaviour and since that time have lived under military dictatorships. Democracy is a luxury that not all peoples deserve.

***

The homemade rockets that the militants of Hamas blindly launch into land that used to be theirs and was usurped by the Israeli occupation, are the offspring of impotence. And desperation, bordering on suicidal madness, is the mother of the futile boasting that denies the existence of the state of Israel – while an extremely efficient war of extermination has been denying Palestine’s right to exist for years.

Little of Palestine remains. Bit by bit Israel is erasing it from the map.

The settlers invade, accompanied by soldiers who correct the borders as they go. Bullets sanctify the pillage, in legitimate defence.

There is no war of aggression that doesn’t claim to be a defensive war. Hitler invaded Poland to prevent Poland from invading Germany. Bush invaded Iraq to keep Iraq from invading the world. In each of its defensive wars, Israel swallows up another piece of Palestine and the snacking continues. This process is justified with land deeds granted by the Bible, by the 2000 years of persecution that the Jewish people suffered and the panic generated by the sight of Palestinians lying in ambush.

***

Israel is the country that has never complied with UN resolutions or recommendations, never abides by judgements of international courts and mocks international law. It is also the only country that has legalized the torture of prisoners.

What gives them the right to deny the rights of others? Who is granting them the impunity with which they are carrying out the slaughter of Gaza? The Spanish government couldn’t bomb the Basque region to wipe out ETA, or Britain invade Ireland to liquidate the IRA, with impunity. Perhaps the tragedy of the Holocaust introduced a policy of eternal impunity? Or is it the all-powerful US that gave the green light and has in Israel the most unfailing of vassals.

***

The Israeli army, the most sophisticated and modern in the world, knows whom to kill. It doesn’t kill by error. It kills for horror. The civilian victims are referred to as ‘collateral damage’, according to the dictionary of other imperial wars. In Gaza, three of every ten instances of collateral damage are children. Then there are thousands of wounded and disabled, victims of the technology of human butchery that the military industry is successfully applying in this operation of ethnic cleansing.

And as usual – it is always this way – in Gaza for every hundred Palestinians killed one Israeli is killed.

‘These Palestinians are dangerous people’ is the message rained down by the other parallel bombardment, by the mass media of manipulation, which would have us believe that one Israeli life is worth that of one hundred Palestinians. These media would also have us believe that Israel’s 200 atomic bombs are humanitarian and that it was a nuclear power named Iran that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

***

Does the so-called ‘international community’ exist?

And if so is it anything more than merchants, bankers and warriors? Is it anything more than an artistic name the US uses on the world stage?

In the face of the tragedy of Gaza world hypocrisy shines once again. As usual, indifference, empty speeches, vapid declarations, high-sounding rhetoric, ambiguous positions pay tribute to sacred impunity.

In the face of the tragedy of Gaza the Arab countries wash their hands – as usual. And as usual the European countries wring their hands.

Old Europe, with such a gift for beauty and perversity, weeps one tear after another, while secretly celebrating this masterful game. Because hunting Jews was always a European custom, though for half a century now the Palestinians have been paying the price for this historic crime. The Palestinians, who are also Semites but who were never, and are not, anti-semitic, are paying in their own blood and money some else’s debt.

© IPS

Sermon from the Corporate Church

Sermon from the Corporate Church

By: Peter Chamberlin

Hurricane winds pound at the gates of Fortress America and our leaders send out the order for more straw and sand to pound into the widening cracks. The harder the winds of change blow the more apparent it becomes that our “leaders” cannot lead, when they themselves await orders from above. As our house of cards flies apart at the seams, the master planners send their minions scrambling to salvage their disintegrating investments, worrying only about their “property,” caring less about the human life that is huddled in fear within.

This belief, that property is more valuable than human life itself, is the basis of humanity’s current problems. Capitalism, the embodiment of this belief, is in its death throes. The multiple crises which proponents of the capital faith have engineered were not unanticipated events; in fact, they were foreseen very clearly, as they have always been key elements of the planned grand finale to be implemented. The plan has always been to turn the coming catastrophe into the grandest opportunity of all time for men with no souls, having been consumed by greed.

Human nature itself has become the enemy of the master class. Only the indomitable human spirit and the eternal will to resist stands in the way of the global empire which promises limitless potential profits for a handful of the most heartless individuals. The most powerful of this select few foresee the coming opportunity and its dreadful unimaginable cost of the elimination of a sizeable portion of the human race, and yet, they remained undisturbed by its inhumanity and malevolence. The master planners do not believe it is possible to save the whole human race, so why waste resources (money) on those who cannot survive on their own. To try to do more would surely doom the system, the cornerstone of the religion of avarice. In their minds, preserving the fittest, most successful individuals is the best way to ensure the survival of the faith and the species.

Faith in the infallibility of capitalism and the belief that it is the answer to mankind’s problems permeates American culture, wherever it has taken root around the world. It is extremely unnerving to suggest to a true believer that capitalism is a doomed religion or that it is intrinsically harmful to mankind, comparable to cursing God to a faithful Muslim or Christian. But the hard truth is that trying to save capitalism from its own contradictions is an impossible task that will waste all the money spent trying, while the world reels from the multiple crises spun-off by the imposter “god” in its death throes.

The masters of deception have interwoven faith in capital with patriotic belief, while painting critics of either with the same brush of “communist.” Following their pseudo logic, all those who resist the plan for a global empire built on the graves of billions of “useless eaters” are considered to be enemies of mankind, no better than communists, terrorists, or other common criminals. Even though resistance to a plan of mass genocide is obviously an act of self-defense, those who dare to do so are marked as extremists and terrorists, targeted for death or incarceration in the war on terror. In the end, real patriots will seethe with righteous anger when they realize that America itself is the final target marked for destruction in the envisioned New Order. The destruction of the banks is a planned event, as was the elimination of American industry.

The wise men who plan the wars and move the grand chess pieces for their imaginary humanitarian reasons have developed their own scientific methods for persuading the human race into accepting their master plan. In their cold calculations they have arrived at a working hypothesis, whereby they have concluded that they only have to manipulate a small portion of the human race located in America, in key Western countries and in the Middle East, which stands in the way of their plans of conquest. All available resources are focused on this small segment of humanity, especially upon the leadership of this small select group, seeking to persuade them by the power of the purse or through sheer fear of military force to accept the takeover.

The leadership in every zone of conflict (including potential leaders) is assessed and targeted to either co-opt or to destroy. Group leadership manipulation techniques are used to build-up the useful groups who will accept the corporate domination, while tearing-down those that are thought to be impediments to the conquest. This process has advanced the empire’s agenda all over the planet, while strewing a trail of human wreckage in its wake. Entire countries have been destabilized and laid to waste in the service of the empire’s grand design. For the most part, the targeted individuals do not realize that they are being manipulated by forces hostile to their own desires or agendas. The fortunate few who do understand the forces allayed against the human race are effectively quarantined by corporate constrictions placed on all available mediums of communication, thereby limiting their ability to spread their infectious knowledge (truth) to others.

The infectious truth is that there exists a small powerful group of men who consider themselves to be gods, intent upon ruling the world. The global economic collapse is a product of their machinations, as is the “war on terror” we wage to save the global economy. We have decimated Afghanistan and Iraq as part of their plan to save capitalism and avert their eventual total ruin. We savage these countries thinking that we are saving our own country, which these men have sacrificed on the altar of “globalism” for their own enrichment. In the end, nothing is being saved, as the economic order is collapsing and our military begins to escalate the resource war in Asia. Our sons fight and die to finalize the world takeover for these false gods.

The Afghan/Pakistani quagmire, the focus of this plan, has been made worse by the sheer ignorance, neglect and brutality of the previous American administration. This policy was custom made for driving entire populations into taking-up arms in self-defense, with the only other path to “victory” given serious consideration being the complete decimation of those targeted populations. There is no room at the top for discussions of possible solutions of the impending intersecting world crises that involve moving resources from the accounts of the master class into the hands of the suffering masses. I was recently very surprised to hear one of the master strategists of the empire, adviser to President Obama, Zbigniew Brzezinski, advocating just that in an interview, when he called for creation of a National Solidarity Fund.

Another of Obama’s advisers, Richard Holbrooke, recently explained that the idea in Afghanistan/Pakistan was to separate the “reconcilables from the irreconcilables,” a call taken-up by Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi. The “reconcilables” (those who will submit and become collaborators to the empire) could either be bought or brought into submission by a process of coercion. In the grand design those who prove to be immune to the fear tactics are coerced by more lethal persuasion. Surely Obama himself is in the dark about the depth of the depravity of the plan he has been hand-picked to administer.

The actual cost of the truly extremist “plan-to-takeover-the-world” is not to be measured in dollars, but in innocent lives claimed. The price tag for saving the collapsing capitalist system is much greater than the trillions of dollars now being cited in descriptions of the continuing bailout; it will be remembered simply as world war III, which claimed billions of lives. The horror that has been planned for us has been described best as the apocalypse or “Armageddon (a period of upheaval marked by famine and war of such ferocity that divine intervention will be required to save a remnant of the human race) by the ancient prophets who foresaw our era of false gods, describing the economic empire created as “The Beast”.

It is not possible to save the super-capitalists from the world crisis that they have brought on themselves. No amount of money poured down the drain, nor sacrifice of innocent multitudes will save the personal fortunes of the world’s richest most powerful men, but the correct expenditure of their massive fortunes would turn the situation around, saving the entire human race and setting the foundations for a new humane economic order. Obama must realize when the time comes that under the emergency powers of his office he not only has the authority to seize our assets, but he also has access to all the assets of America’s richest men for meeting those emergencies that threaten the common good.

Very soon it will become obvious to all that the national emergency that we have begun to enter truly threatens everything. Let capitalism pass away peacefully. Prepare to embrace a new humane economic order. If it is inevitable that the people must bailout the banks to preserve some semblance of the American way of life, then shouldn’t the people then own the banks? If, in the end, a choice must be made between a few men owning everything at the people’s expense, or the people owning their own means of production, then we all must choose to be our own masters.

peter.chamberlin@yahoo.com

A Planet at the Brink

Food riots were but one form of economic violence that made its bloody appearance in 2008. As economic conditions worsened, protests against rising unemployment, government ineptitude, and the unaddressed needs of the poor erupted as well, notes Michael T. Klare.
Will Economic Brushfires Prove Too Virulent to Contain?

The global economic meltdown has already caused bank failures, bankruptcies, plant closings, and foreclosures and will, in the coming year, leave many tens of millions unemployed across the planet. But another perilous consequence of the crash of 2008 has only recently made its appearance: increased civil unrest and ethnic strife. Someday, perhaps, war may follow.

As people lose confidence in the ability of markets and governments to solve the global crisis, they are likely to erupt into violent protests or to assault others they deem responsible for their plight, including government officials, plant managers, landlords, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. (The list could, in the future, prove long and unnerving.) If the present economic disaster turns into what President Obama has referred to as a “lost decade,” the result could be a global landscape filled with economically-fueled upheavals.

Indeed, if you want to be grimly impressed, hang a world map on your wall and start inserting red pins where violent episodes have already occurred. Athens (Greece), Longnan (China), Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Riga (Latvia), Santa Cruz (Bolivia), Sofia (Bulgaria), Vilnius (Lithuania), and Vladivostok (Russia) would be a start. Many other cities from Reykjavik, Paris, Rome, and Zaragoza to Moscow and Dublin have witnessed huge protests over rising unemployment and falling wages that remained orderly thanks in part to the presence of vast numbers of riot police. If you inserted orange pins at these locations — none as yet in the United States — your map would already look aflame with activity. And if you’re a gambling man or woman, it’s a safe bet that this map will soon be far better populated with red and orange pins.

For the most part, such upheavals, even when violent, are likely to remain localized in nature, and disorganized enough that government forces will be able to bring them under control within days or weeks, even if — as with Athens for six days last December — urban paralysis sets in due to rioting, tear gas, and police cordons. That, at least, has been the case so far. It is entirely possible, however, that, as the economic crisis worsens, some of these incidents will metastasize into far more intense and long-lasting events: armed rebellions, military takeovers, civil conflicts, even economically fueled wars between states.

Every outbreak of violence has its own distinctive origins and characteristics. All, however, are driven by a similar combination of anxiety about the future and lack of confidence in the ability of established institutions to deal with the problems at hand. And just as the economic crisis has proven global in ways not seen before, so local incidents — especially given the almost instantaneous nature of modern communications — have a potential to spark others in far-off places, linked only in a virtual sense.

A Global Pandemic of Economically Driven Violence

The riots that erupted in the spring of 2008 in response to rising food prices suggested the speed with which economically-related violence can spread. It is unlikely that Western news sources captured all such incidents, but among those recorded in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal were riots in Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, and Senegal.

In Haiti, for example, thousands of protesters stormed the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince and demanded food handouts, only to be repelled by government troops and UN peacekeepers. Other countries, including Pakistan and Thailand, quickly sought to deter such assaults by deploying troops at farms and warehouses throughout the country.

The riots only abated at summer’s end when falling energy costs brought food prices crashing down as well. (The cost of food is now closely tied to the price of oil and natural gas because petrochemicals are so widely and heavily used in the cultivation of grains.) Ominously, however, this is sure to prove but a temporary respite, given the epic droughts now gripping breadbasket regions of the United States, Argentina, Australia, China, the Middle East, and Africa. Look for the prices of wheat, soybeans, and possibly rice to rise in the coming months — just when billions of people in the developing world are sure to see their already marginal incomes plunging due to the global economic collapse.

Food riots were but one form of economic violence that made its bloody appearance in 2008. As economic conditions worsened, protests against rising unemployment, government ineptitude, and the unaddressed needs of the poor erupted as well. In India, for example, violent protests threatened stability in many key areas. Although usually described as ethnic, religious, or caste disputes, these outbursts were typically driven by economic anxiety and a pervasive feeling that someone else’s group was faring better than yours — and at your expense.

In April, for example, six days of intense rioting in Indian-controlled Kashmir were largely blamed on religious animosity between the majority Muslim population and the Hindu-dominated Indian government; equally important, however, was a deep resentment over what many Kashmiri Muslims experienced as discrimination in jobs, housing, and land use. Then, in May, thousands of nomadic shepherds known as Gujjars shut down roads and trains leading to the city of Agra, home of the Taj Mahal, in a drive to be awarded special economic rights; more than 30 people were killed when the police fired into crowds. In October, economically-related violence erupted in Assam in the country’s far northeast, where impoverished locals are resisting an influx of even poorer, mostly illegal immigrants from nearby Bangladesh.

Economically-driven clashes also erupted across much of eastern China in 2008. Such events, labeled “mass incidents” by Chinese authorities, usually involve protests by workers over sudden plant shutdowns, lost pay, or illegal land seizures. More often than not, protestors demanded compensation from company managers or government authorities, only to be greeted by club-wielding police.

Needless to say, the leaders of China’s Communist Party have been reluctant to acknowledge such incidents. This January, however, the magazine Liaowang (Outlook Weekly) reported that layoffs and wage disputes had triggered a sharp increase in such “mass incidents,” particularly along the country’s eastern seaboard, where much of its manufacturing capacity is located.

By December, the epicenter of such sporadic incidents of violence had moved from the developing world to Western Europe and the former Soviet Union. Here, the protests have largely been driven by fears of prolonged unemployment, disgust at government malfeasance and ineptitude, and a sense that “the system,” however defined, is incapable of satisfying the future aspirations of large groups of citizens.

One of the earliest of this new wave of upheavals occurred in Athens, Greece, on December 6, 2008, after police shot and killed a 15-year-old schoolboy during an altercation in a crowded downtown neighborhood. As news of the killing spread throughout the city, hundreds of students and young people surged into the city center and engaged in pitched battles with riot police, throwing stones and firebombs. Although government officials later apologized for the killing and charged the police officer involved with manslaughter, riots broke out repeatedly in the following days in Athens and other Greek cities. Angry youths attacked the police — widely viewed as agents of the establishment — as well as luxury shops and hotels, some of which were set on fire. By one estimate, the six days of riots caused $1.3 billion in damage to businesses at the height of the Christmas shopping season.

Russia also experienced a spate of violent protests in December, triggered by the imposition of high tariffs on imported automobiles. Instituted by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to protect an endangered domestic auto industry (whose sales were expected to shrink by up to 50% in 2009), the tariffs were a blow to merchants in the Far Eastern port of Vladivostok who benefited from a nationwide commerce in used Japanese vehicles. When local police refused to crack down on anti-tariff protests, the authorities were evidently worried enough to fly in units of special forces from Moscow, 3,700 miles away.

In January, incidents of this sort seemed to be spreading through Eastern Europe. Between January 13th and 16th, anti-government protests involving violent clashes with the police erupted in the Latvian capital of Riga, the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, and the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. It is already essentially impossible to keep track of all such episodes, suggesting that we are on the verge of a global pandemic of economically driven violence.

A Perfect Recipe for Instability

While most such incidents are triggered by an immediate event — a tariff, the closure of local factory, the announcement of government austerity measures — there are systemic factors at work as well. While economists now agree that we are in the midst of a recession deeper than any since the Great Depression of the 1930s, they generally assume that this downturn — like all others since World War II — will be followed in a year, or two, or three, by the beginning of a typical recovery.

There are good reasons to suspect that this might not be the case — that poorer countries (along with many people in the richer countries) will have to wait far longer for such a recovery, or may see none at all. Even in the United States, 54% of Americans now believe that “the worst” is “yet to come” and only 7% that the economy has “turned the corner,” according to a recent Ipsos/McClatchy poll; fully a quarter think the crisis will last more than four years. Whether in the US, Russia, China, or Bangladesh, it is this underlying anxiety — this suspicion that things are far worse than just about anyone is saying — which is helping to fuel the global epidemic of violence.

The World Bank’s most recent status report, Global Economic Prospects 2009, fulfills those anxieties in two ways. It refuses to state the worst, even while managing to hint, in terms too clear to be ignored, at the prospect of a long-term, or even permanent, decline in economic conditions for many in the world. Nominally upbeat — as are so many media pundits — regarding the likelihood of an economic recovery in the not-too-distant future, the report remains full of warnings about the potential for lasting damage in the developing world if things don’t go exactly right.

Two worries, in particular, dominate Global Economic Prospects 2009: that banks and corporations in the wealthier countries will cease making investments in the developing world, choking off whatever growth possibilities remain; and that food costs will rise uncomfortably, while the use of farmlands for increased biofuels production will result in diminished food availability to hundreds of millions.

Despite its Pollyanna-ish passages on an economic rebound, the report does not mince words when discussing what the almost certain coming decline in First World investment in Third World countries would mean:

“Should credit markets fail to respond to the robust policy interventions taken so far, the consequences for developing countries could be very serious. Such a scenario would be characterized by… substantial disruption and turmoil, including bank failures and currency crises, in a wide range of developing countries. Sharply negative growth in a number of developing countries and all of the attendant repercussions, including increased poverty and unemployment, would be inevitable.”

In the fall of 2008, when the report was written, this was considered a “worst-case scenario.” Since then, the situation has obviously worsened radically, with financial analysts reporting a virtual freeze in worldwide investment. Equally troubling, newly industrialized countries that rely on exporting manufactured goods to richer countries for much of their national income have reported stomach-wrenching plunges in sales, producing massive plant closings and layoffs.

The World Bank’s 2008 survey also contains troubling data about the future availability of food. Although insisting that the planet is capable of producing enough foodstuffs to meet the needs of a growing world population, its analysts were far less confident that sufficient food would be available at prices people could afford, especially once hydrocarbon prices begin to rise again. With ever more farmland being set aside for biofuels production and efforts to increase crop yields through the use of “miracle seeds” losing steam, the Bank’s analysts balanced their generally hopeful outlook with a caveat: “If biofuels-related demand for crops is much stronger or productivity performance disappoints, future food supplies may be much more expensive than in the past.”

Combine these two World Bank findings — zero economic growth in the developing world and rising food prices — and you have a perfect recipe for unrelenting civil unrest and violence. The eruptions seen in 2008 and early 2009 will then be mere harbingers of a grim future in which, in a given week, any number of cities reel from riots and civil disturbances which could spread like multiple brushfires in a drought.

Mapping a World at the Brink

Survey the present world, and it’s all too easy to spot a plethora of potential sites for such multiple eruptions — or far worse. Take China. So far, the authorities have managed to control individual “mass incidents,” preventing them from coalescing into something larger. But in a country with a more than two-thousand-year history of vast millenarian uprisings, the risk of such escalation has to be on the minds of every Chinese leader.

On February 2nd, a top Chinese Party official, Chen Xiwen, announced that, in the last few months of 2008 alone, a staggering 20 million migrant workers, who left rural areas for the country’s booming cities in recent years, had lost their jobs. Worse yet, they had little prospect of regaining them in 2009. If many of these workers return to the countryside, they may find nothing there either, not even land to work.

Under such circumstances, and with further millions likely to be shut out of coastal factories in the coming year, the prospect of mass unrest is high. No wonder the government announced a $585 billion stimulus plan aimed at generating rural employment and, at the same time, called on security forces to exercise discipline and restraint when dealing with protesters. Many analysts now believe that, as exports continue to dry up, rising unemployment could lead to nationwide strikes and protests that might overwhelm ordinary police capabilities and require full-scale intervention by the military (as occurred in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989).

Or take many of the Third World petro-states that experienced heady boosts in income when oil prices were high, allowing governments to buy off dissident groups or finance powerful internal security forces. With oil prices plunging from $147 per barrel of crude oil to less than $40 dollars, such countries, from Angola to shaky Iraq, now face severe instability.

Nigeria is a typical case in point: When oil prices were high, the central government in Abuja raked in billions every year, enough to enrich elites in key parts of the country and subsidize a large military establishment; now that prices are low, the government will have a hard time satisfying all these previously well-fed competing obligations, which means the risk of internal disequilibrium will escalate. An insurgency in the oil-producing Niger Delta region, fueled by popular discontent with the failure of oil wealth to trickle down from the capital, is already gaining momentum and is likely to grow stronger as government revenues shrivel; other regions, equally disadvantaged by national revenue-sharing policies, will be open to disruptions of all sorts, including heightened levels of internecine warfare.

Bolivia is another energy producer that seems poised at the brink of an escalation in economic violence. One of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, it harbors substantial oil and natural gas reserves in its eastern, lowland regions. A majority of the population — many of Indian descent — supports President Evo Morales, who seeks to exercise strong state control over the reserves and use the proceeds to uplift the nation’s poor. But a majority of those in the eastern part of the country, largely controlled by a European-descended elite, resent central government interference and seek to control the reserves themselves. Their efforts to achieve greater autonomy have led to repeated clashes with government troops and, in deteriorating times, could set the stage for a full-scale civil war.

Given a global situation in which one startling, often unexpected development follows another, prediction is perilous. At a popular level, however, the basic picture is clear enough: continued economic decline combined with a pervasive sense that existing systems and institutions are incapable of setting things right is already producing a potentially lethal brew of anxiety, fear, and rage. Popular explosions of one sort or another are inevitable.

Some sense of this new reality appears to have percolated up to the highest reaches of the US intelligence community. In testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 12th, Admiral Dennis C. Blair, the new Director of National Intelligence, declared, “The primary near-term security concern of the United States is the global economic crisis and its geopolitical implications… Statistical modeling shows that economic crises increase the risk of regime-threatening instability if they persist over a one to two year period” — certain to be the case in the present situation.

Blair did not specify which countries he had in mind when he spoke of “regime-threatening instability” — a new term in the American intelligence lexicon, at least when associated with economic crises — but it is clear from his testimony that US officials are closely watching dozens of shaky nations in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Central Asia.

Now go back to that map on your wall with all those red and orange pins in it and proceed to color in appropriate countries in various shades of red and orange to indicate recent striking declines in gross national product and rises in unemployment rates. Without 16 intelligence agencies under you, you’ll still have a pretty good idea of the places that Blair and his associates are eyeing in terms of instability as the future darkens on a planet at the brink.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Metropolitan Books).

Zardari Lights Match, Pakistan Ready to Burn

Protests break out across Pakistan, slam Sharifs’ ban

Protests took place in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Quetta, Muzaffarabad and several other cities. — Reuters

RELATED TO THIS:

Punjab in a federation

ISLAMABAD: Police fired tear gas and rounded up protesters in Islamabad Friday, with the nuclear-armed nation in turmoil since a court banned the top opposition leader from contesting elections.

The cabinet met to discuss the crisis and paramilitaries went on alert as thousands rallied, one day after the country marked the biggest protests yet against President Asif Ali Zardari, who took office last September.

Protesters are heeding a call from former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who leads the second largest party in Pakistan, to rise up after the Supreme Court Wednesday barred him and his brother from holding public office.

Zardari and Sharif are at loggerheads over the future of Pakistan, a key US ally in the fight against Taliban and al-Qaeda militancy which has been teetering under financial crisis, extremism and weak government.

Analysts say Pakistan, reeling from extremist attacks that have killed more than 1,600 people in less than two years, can ill afford a showdown on top of international pressure to bring to justice those behind the Mumbai attacks.

In Islamabad, police fired tear gas shells to disperse stone throwers and dozens of protesters shouting slogans against the government on a key road leading to the international airport, an AFP photographer said.

Riot police, armed with batons, charged into the mob, beating demonstrators and rounding up around 25 protesters into vans, the photographer said.

A senior government official said Friday’s weekly cabinet meeting focused on ‘the situation arising after the Supreme Court decision.’

In Lahore, the capital of Punjab province, ousted chief minister Shahbaz Sharif addressed more than 1,000 lawyers and activists while another 500 people rallied outside the regional parliament, an AFP reporter said.

Waving green party flags and portraits of Nawaz Sharif, around 100 provincial lawmakers also shouted ‘Go Zardari Go,’ an AFP photographer said.

Shahbaz, Nawaz Sharif’s brother, lost his post in Punjab, the country’s political heartland, where the government suspended the provincial parliament.

The protestors in Lahore also torched tyres.

Hundreds more protested in Rawalpindi, Quetta and in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir.

Twice a former prime minister, 59-year-old Nawaz Sharif has tapped into widespread public discontent with Zardari, crowning his status as a key player in Pakistani politics since a seven-year exile in Saudi Arabia.

His Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) demands the reinstatement of constitutional court judges sacked when former military ruler Pervez Musharraf declared emergency rule in 2007.

‘On the request of the Punjab government we have deployed (put on alert) paramilitary forces to maintain law and order,’ interior ministry spokesman Shahidullah Baig told AFP.

‘The situation is under control,’ he added.

Police said complaints had been filed against hundreds of PML-N workers and three local leaders in connection with unrest and property damage on Thursday.

Sharif’s two terms as prime minister in the 1990s were marred by corruption claims and efforts to introduce Islamic sharia law.

The Supreme Court confirmed a lower court verdict in Lahore last June that he was ineligible to stand in a by-election due to past convictions.

Taliban not the only problem in Afghanistan

Afghanistan, the ancient junction point of Asia, has been suffering the traumas of civil war and occupation for the last 30 years and is again among the main points of the world’s agenda following the regime change in the United States.

And despite the 65,000-strong NATO force under American leadership, stability and security in the country remain elusive. Amidst elections campaigning, Barack Obama had said Afghanistan would be his number-one foreign policy priority, and, now president, he is trying to determine an exit strategy for the region. Obama is sending 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. Some news reports suggest the US has requested additional Turkish troops as well. As an assessment of the state of affairs goes on in Washington, the special Pakistan-Afghanistan envoy is establishing contacts in the region to sound out the situation. As a doubling of the US forces in the country is planned, to bring the total to 60,000, ahead of a critical NATO meeting in April, there are efforts to convince alliance members to up their own contributions there. Delivery of Turkish aid packages It’s unknown what sort of commitments are being made in the deliberations going on behind closed doors, but one thing that is for certain is that as far as the US and NATO go, a view is gaining currency: that stability in Afghanistan cannot be ensured through only military means but that such action absolutely must be paralleled by political, economic and social development. As part of a journalism program organized by the US Department of State, officials (from NATO and elsewhere) came together in Brussels and Kabul and asserted that the only exit strategy capable of success would be to build a self-sufficient Afghan state. Gen. David D. McKiernan What the Afghan people want immediately is a nation that can stand on its own two feet. Nimatullah Wasik, an English teacher in Kabul, summarizes this desire by saying that instead of giving Afghanistan a fish every day, the international community should teach it how to fish. “More foreign soldiers will not bring stability to this country. We import everything from abroad. Kabul’s electricity comes from Uzbekistan. What if they cut it off one day? This is why we need education and technology. Let the West obtain this for us.” The International Security Assistance Force’s (ISAF) establishment of provincial reconstruction teams (PRT) across the country is of key importance in this regard. The 26 PRTs, 12 of them under US leadership, construct things like roads, water canals, schools, clinics and police stations, and create projects in fields like security, education, health and management to provide technical and logistical support for development and security. An example is the Afghanistan Technical and Vocational Institute the US opened in Kabul, which is training students to meet the need for qualified workers. PRTs have completed 126 projects, with 268 still ongoing. Another 284 proposed projects are waiting in line. AFGHANISTAN IN NUMBERS The population of Afghanistan is nearly 30 million. Ninety percent of the population is Sunni, and 10 percent Shiite. In Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest nations, 70-75 percent of the population is illiterate. Seventy percent of the people live in rural areas. Forty-one percent of the people are destitute. Five million depend on charity for their basic nutritional needs. Unemployment in the country is at a rate of 40 percent; 82 percent of the employed make a living from agriculture, while 6 percent work in industry. The standing NATO international forces in the country number 65,000. The US has 37,000 soldiers in Afghanistan and is planning to double this number. Civilian deaths have doubled since 2006. According to the UN, 2,100 civilians were killed in the country, with NATO forces responsible for 40 percent of these deaths. Afghan security forces number 160,000, but only 30 percent of the army and 3 percent of the police are classed as “good” or “very good.” In the first five years after 2001, the US lost an average of 50 soldiers a year, while this number increased to 100 in 2006, 120 in 2007 and 155 in 2008. The number of foreign troops killed in Afghanistan since 2001 has surpassed 1,000. At least 600 of these were Americans. The US has spent $33.37 billion on rebuilding the country. Six-hundred and eighty schools have been constructed, and following the Taliban’s fall from power 4.2 million students returned to school. Of the nearly 6 million students, 35 percent are females. While 670 health clinics were built, 10,000 health professionals were trained. Seventy percent of children are vaccinated, but in the nation where the life expectancy is an average 45 years, one of every five children dies before reaching the age of 5. The nation’s economy has grown by 10 percent annually since the fall of the Taliban. The gross domestic product (GDP) has doubled, but the GDP is only $11 billion. Of the 34 provinces, 18 no longer produce opium, but Afghanistan still provides 93 percent of the world’s opium. Fifteen percent of the public are involved in the opium trade. Since 2001, over 4 million refugees have returned home to Afghanistan, but in Pakistan and Iran another 2.8 million refugees have yet to return home. Public disappointed But the serious security problem in Afghanistan, where the Taliban is even able to carry out bold attacks on ministry buildings in the capital, is weakening rebuilding activities. Even top-level NATO and US officials admit this openly. The number-one military commander in the country, American Gen. David D. McKiernan, described this reality thusly: “Seven years after the fall of the Taliban, we’re not where we want to be. Security is insufficient in the country’s eastern and southern provinces. The public is disappointed with regards to security.” Among the State Department’s prominent ranks is US Ambassador to Afghanistan William Wood, who admits that the US was wrong in thinking that following the Taliban’s 2001 fall a small force would be able to rebuild Afghanistan. “But in the 2003-4 period the Taliban regained strength. Opium production took a leap. … People feel less safe than they did two or three years ago. From a number of perspectives, the situation is more difficult than it was in 2003,” he says. Last year saw a 35 percent increase in violent attacks over 2007. Last year, NATO lost more soldiers than in any other year. According to UN figures, civilian deaths rose by 40 percent to exceed 2,100. A high-level Western official summarizes the situation on the field by saying, “NATO isn’t winning, but it isn’t losing; the Taliban isn’t losing, but it isn’t winning.” But there have been adamant denials of news reports that the Taliban has gained strength in the past two years and expanded its sphere of influence. Asserting that the country’s north and west are relatively safer than in previous years, authorities defend that violent incidents increased in the south because there are more soldiers in the field there. Pakistan’s not paying enough attention to its border because of internal unrest also plays a big part in this and the increase in cross-border infiltrations. Gen. McKiernan describes news reports that the Taliban is gaining power as myths, saying that violence in the nation does not stem from the Taliban alone, but also clan rivalry, battles between drug kingpins and ordinary crime, asserting that these are also important factors contributing to incident rates. As Wood discusses violence, he is particularly careful to avoid using the word Taliban, instead using terms like “illegal power centers,” drug traders, warlords and bandits to describe those threatening the administration. Army fighting an uphill battle on many fronts The ISAF’s top priority is to bring the Afghan military to operational status and to ensure peace and stability. It holds the view that in the fight against the Taliban, the Afghan forces will be more successful because they know the country’s geography, culture and who the Taliban is. An Afghan police officer, Kami Ahmad, says: “It’s not possible for foreign forces to bring security to Afghanistan. Remember Russia’s experience.” The ISAF aims to be a force that supports the Afghan security forces’ own management of field operations. There are 86,000 Afghan troops and the goal is to train a force of 134,000 that is capable of carrying out its own operations. Currently, only 25 percent of troops carrying out security operations are Afghan. The lack of sufficient numbers of instructors, equipment and financing are slowing the process of building up the Afghan military. Another stumbling block is presented by the high illiteracy rates among those applying to join the army. One Afghan military official says, “If you can read and write, you’re automatically an officer.” Afghan Defense Ministry spokesperson Gen. Zahir Azimi complains in particular of insufficient heavy arms supplies, such as tanks and cannons, and the country’s lack of an air force. Speaking with Today’s Zaman, the spokesman said that within a year the American government was to give them Italian-manufactured C-27 planes. But the other major problem for the Afghan military is financing. The general, a veteran of the Afghan battle against the Soviets, says: “Our soldiers are paid below market prices. This lowers the number of volunteers. We give our soldiers $100 a month. This is half of what Taliban fighters get. According to our intelligence, the Taliban gives its fighters $200 a month.” However, the general says the US has promised that within three years it will provide $20 billion for the Afghan security forces. The Afghan military is also careful that its forces reflect the ethnic makeup of the country. According to defense officials, the military’s ethnic distribution is as follows: 40-45 percent Pashtun, 30-35 percent Tajik, 10-12 percent Hazara and roughly 10 percent other. Another important constituent in terms of the country’s security and development is the police force. Only 82,000 Afghan police officers have been trained at this point. The ISAF is struggling in developing and expanding the police force because of a lack of instructors and training centers. Corruption, low salaries and equipment and weapons deficits plague the police forces — in addition to heavy losses in Taliban attacks. In a country where violence has run unchecked for 30 years, there is no working legal system. There is no tradition of a police force in the modern sense, which is a big obstacle for the Afghan administration. It’s not possible to speak of a police structure outside of Kabul and a handful of other big cities. In the province of Wardak, for instance, there are only 300 police officers. In a country where the clan system reigns, people are unwilling to apply the rules that the state has instated or punish those who do not follow the law. On the other hand, at the Pentagon, plans to send additional troops to Afghanistan are in their final phase. In the plan to be presented to Obama soon, 20-30,000 American soldiers will be deployed to the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar and along the border with Pakistan. The first batch of deployments has already taken place and the rest will be sent by the summer, according to the plan. With the arrival of the reinforcements, the US will focus on fighting the drug trade and preventing infiltrations across the border with Pakistan. 2009 will also be a bloody affair for Afghanistan Afghan and American officials do not expect a decrease in violent events for 2009. Gen. Azimi predicts: “The enemy will resort to tactics like roadside bombings, suicide attacks, ambushes and kidnappings, focusing on soft targets like logistics convoys. 2009 will be as bloody a year as last year.” American Gen. McKiernan also says that this year will be difficult, but takes a more optimistic stance, asserting that the sun also rises and after the waves of violence will follow a lasting stability. Afghanistan important for NATO legitimacy The US toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan on the premise of aiding and harboring the terrorists who organized the Sept. 11 attacks. The reasoning behind the Afghanistan operation was to prevent the country from serving any longer as a haven for terrorists. But Western officials, noting that 2009, when NATO will mark 60 years since its establishment, will be a critical year for the alliance’s “off-site” Afghanistan operation, have said that for NATO to bear any legitimacy after the Cold War period, success in Afghanistan is imperative. Another reason Afghanistan is so important was expressed by US Ambassador Wood, who notes that Afghanistan, sharing borders with Pakistan, Iran and China, is in a complicated geographical position, located in a region where Russia and India also have interests. “Four of its neighbors are nuclear powers, and Iran also wants nuclear power. These five countries are in a phase of self-identification and their relationships with one another will constitute a big piece of the history of the 21st century. And Afghanistan is right in the middle. Afghanistan can either be a source of stability for these very important countries or, as it has been for the last 30 years, be a source of instability. For all of us and for world geopolitics, there are huge security stakes here.” A Turkish high school Turkey planting seeds of peace, development in Afghanistan On the topic of rebuilding Afghanistan and securing its socioeconomic development, ISAF PRTs play a major role. There are PRTs in 26 of the country’s 34 provinces. The Turkish PRT serving in Wardak, 25 kilometers outside Kabul, stands out from the pack in its close communication with the people and its civilian structure. The Turkish PRT deployed in November 2006 and is the only civilian-run PRT in the country. The Turkish PRT encompasses a total of 75 civilians, including Afghans. Among the many accomplishments of the Turkish-led PRT are the successful projects they’ve led: In Wardak, which is split into nine regions, to date they have built seven schools, one medical center, two deep freezer facilities, two water reservoirs, a fruit drying facility, 10 wells, a police training center, a police station, a gymnasium and a mosque. Turkey’s positive contributions in the region have brought it the accolades of the international community working in Afghanistan. Western diplomatic and military officials gathering in Kabul speak highly of the developments in Wardak, all praising the Turkish PRT’s tangible effectiveness in the region, in the words of Gen. McKiernan. “PRTs, which work with different elements in the provinces along with international forces, regional administrations and the people, make the biggest contribution. And we see this cooperation in Wardak,” he said, also emphasizing that the Turkish PRT was a model for the other PRTs throughout Afghanistan.

27 February 2009, Friday

NAMIK KEMAL PARLAK KABUL

Ukrainian Economic Dilemma Creates European Gas Bottleneck Once Again

Kommersant: Gazprom may cut gas to Ukraine over non-payments

Russian energy giant Gazprom could cut gas deliveries to Ukraine from March 8 if Naftogaz does not pay for supplies received in February, Russian business daily Kommersant reported on Thursday.

The newspaper said Naftogaz does not have the money to pay for the gas.

A week ago Naftogaz warned it might face problems paying for gas supplied by Russia’s gas monopoly as non-payments by Ukrainian utilities were leaving the national energy company short of funds. The issue was discussed at a Gazprom board meeting on Tuesday.

“If $400 million is not forthcoming by March 7, it will be necessary once again to cut off Ukraine,” Andrei Kruglov was quoted as saying by an unidentified participant in the meeting. Kommersant said a senior Gazprom official confirmed such a plan is being developed.

“The company will carry out its obligations to consumers and transport gas at previous volumes. But the volume of gas delivered to Ukraine will be reduced – fuel will not be supplied to Naftogaz free of charge,” the source said.

Gazprom suspended gas deliveries to Ukraine on January 1 over non-payments and the two sides’ failure to agree a delivery contract for 2009. A week later, Gazprom accused Ukraine of stealing gas intended for EU consumers and cut off gas deliveries to the European Union via the country, prompting two weeks of major gas shortages across much of Eastern Europe.

The standoff was resolved after negotiations between Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart, Yulia Tymoshenko. The gas supply and transit contract signed on January 19 by Gazprom and Naftogaz stipulates that the Russian energy giant can switch to 100% prepayments if payments are not received on time.

Naftogaz spokesman Valentin Zemlyansky on Wednesday told Kommersant that the company hoped “to collect the necessary sum of money by March 7 and to make the payment.”

Another company source said Naftogaz could find $100-$160 million, but did not say where the remaining funds would come from.

Pakistani President Zardari Lets Past Conflicts Trouble Nation’s Present

Pakistan faces new political crisis as Nawaz Sharif banned from office

Pakistan has been plunged back into political crisis after its Supreme Court banned its former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, from holding political office.

By Dean Nelson in New Delhi and Javed Siddiq in Islamabad

Former Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif (R) and his brother Shahbaz Sharif Photo: EPA

The court also ousted Mr Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League from power in Punjab province, where his brother Shahbaz was chief minister.

The ruling upheld a move by the country’s election commission to ban the Sharif brothers from contesting elections because of past criminal convictions. But Mr Sharif accused President Asif Ali Zardari of orchestrating the ruling.

The ban on Shahbaz Sharif led to the immediate collapse of the state government in Punbjab. President Zardari immediately appointed Punjab’s governor Salaman Taseer – a long-term opponent of the Sharif brothers – to run the provincial government as chief executive for the next two months pending the formation of a new administration.

Mr Zardari is also expected to try to persuade some of Nawaz Sharif’s opposition assembly members to desert him and join a new coalition led by the ruling Pakistan People’s Party.

Shares in Islamabad plunged five per cent amid fears of a return to the political instability of the 1990s when Mr Nawaz’s PML party and the PPP of Mr Zardari’s assassinated wife Benazir Bhutto persecuted each other and their supporters.

Those fears were heightened by a series of large protests in Lahore and other cities in Punjab, and also by calls by Mr Sharif for mass demonstrations to unite the opposition towards the ban.

Mr Sharif alleged that Mr Zardari had prompted the verdict because he and his brother had rejected a “business deal” under which the Sharif brothers would be ruled eligible to hold political office if they agreed to extend the term of the country’s chief justice, Abdul Hamid Dogar.

Mr Sharif and his brother have consistently campaigned for Chief Justice Dogar to be sacked and for his predecessor, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who was ousted by the former president Pervez Musharraf when he imposed emergency rule in 2007, to be reinstated.

Mr Zardari is said to fear that if he reinstated Mr Chaudhry, the independent-minded former chief justice might strike down Mr Musharraf’s National Reconciliation Ordinance, under which corruption charges against Mr Zardari were dropped and he was allowed to hold office.

Mr Zardari denies all wrongdoing.

Nawaz Sharif claimed: “Zardari invited him [Shahbaz Sharif] for lunch and said he was offering him a business deal under which he could remain the chief minister in return for our help in securing an extension for Chief Justice Abdul Hamid Dogar.

“When Shahbaz promptly shot down the suggestion, Zardari told him: ‘I am offering you a business deal, a trade off’. We decided to put the interests of Pakistan first’.”

He called for Pakistanis to join planned protests led by the country’s lawyers’ movement campaigning for the judges sacked by Mr Musharraf to be reinstated.

“The nation should rise against this unconstitutional decision and this nefarious act of Zardari. He opposed rioting, he said, but warned:”If the people want to show their anger, who can stop them?”

Mr Sharif is regarded as Pakistan’s most popular politician and his stock has risen since last year’s elections when his PML defied expectations to win comfortably in Punjab. He remains influential and is regularly courted by visiting US officials who believe he could yet return to power.

Yes we are raging – against a Government that spies on its citizens while ignoring the crimes of greedy bankers

By James Slack

Today one of Britain’s most senior police officers with responsibility for public order raises the spectre of a ‘summer of rage’, with victims of the increasingly bitter recession taking to the streets in possibly violent protest.

Superintendent David Hartshorn, who heads the Metropolitan police’s public order branch, warned that law-abiding middle-class individuals who would never have considered joining demonstrations may now seek to vent their anger through protests this year.

Thousands of workers demonstrated in Dublin on Saturday. Police fear the worsening economic situation will lead to mass street protests in the UK

Many will consider such a scenario unlikely, or point out this has not been the ‘British way’ over the past two decades.

Violent protests take place in Europe – in recent weeks Greek farmers have blocked roads over falling agricultural prices, a million workers in France took to the streets to demand greater protection for their jobs and wages and Icelandic demonstrators have clashed with police in Reykjavik – but not here.

But can we really be so sure? The public’s rage with the banks and the Government is growing by the day.

Thousands are losing their jobs through no fault of their own because bankers who made millions during the good times are calling in the loans which their employers need to stay afloat.

Homes are being repossessed across the country, but not the penthouse flats and country piles of bank bosses who thought nothing of taking home vast seven-figure bonuses, and consider £1 million a year a modest income.

The innocent are being punished while the guilty continue to lead affluent lives.

As Ken Macdonald, the former Director of Public Prosecutions says today: ‘If you mug someone in the street and you are caught, the chances are that you will go to prison. In recent years, mugging someone out of their savings or their pension would probably earn you a yacht.’

Add to this a second issue highlighted by Sir Ken: the march of the surveillance state.

Ministers have been spending their time focussing on eroding our most treasured individual freedoms, while doing little or nothing to curb criminal behaviour by the banks.

The DNA database containing the samples of hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent people…the largest number of CCTV cameras in the world…anti-terrorist powers being deployed against dog foulers…restrictions on telling religious jokes…

All of these intrusive, liberty-sapping polices were developed while the banks were blowing billions on reckless sub-prime lending.

How much better a place Britain would be today if Labour had focussed on regulating the banks and getting a grip on the shambolic, toothless Financial Services Authority, rather than building a surveillance state.

That the public is being watched by Big Brother at every turn is deeply  alarming. That the innocent were being tracked going about their every day lives while a blind eye was being turned to a financial sector apparently hell-bent on destruction is unforgivable.

Thus, the idea of the ‘summer of rage’ may not be as far-fetched as it first appears.

Superintendent Hartshorn talks of the banks, particularly those that still pay large bonuses despite receiving billions in taxpayer money, becoming ‘viable targets’. Likewise, the headquarters of multinational companies and other financial institutions in the City which are being blamed for the financial crisis.

It is to their eternal shame that our banks should find themselves in such a position, and that Labour – while eroding the civil liberties Britain has fought so hard to defend over the centuries – was prepared to sit back and allow it to happen.

News From England, Test Lab For Global Police State

It is time to resist

David Omand’s national security strategy report shows us we have a very short time to save society from tyranny

“Once an individual has been assigned a unique index number, it is possible to accurately retrieve data across numerous databases and build a picture of that individual’s life that was not authorised in the original consent for data collection,” says Sir David Omand in a report for the Institute for Public Policy research.

This is not some wild fantasy. It is the world that we are about to move into and which Jack Straw’s coroners and justice bill, the ID Cards Act, RIPA laws and the EBorders scheme have patiently constructed while we have been living in an idiots’ paradise of easy money.

We have a choice: either we can believe that the British state is peculiarly immune to tyrannical instincts that are beginning to show in this government or we can now start to oppose what is going on. We have a very short time to save our society from this nightmare, as has been made clear by Sir Ken Macdonald, the former DPP, Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5, and the House of Lord constitutional committee.

Omand is not the first civil servant to describe this world to us. In 2006 Sir David Varney, the head of Transformational Government predicted that the state would know “a deep truth about the citizen based on their behaviour, experience, beliefs, needs or desires”. The report from the IPPR merely fills in the gaps of this statement and shows us how it will be done.

Omand is a “securicrat” par excellence. He is the former intelligence and security adviser to Tony Blair; he speaks from the heart of the surveillance bureaucracy; and his views are those of GCHQ, which has lobbied for the measures in the coroners and justice bill. His paper is presented by some as a warning – which it is to all of us – but having met the man and debated him, I am pretty sure that this represents his heart’s desire. Either way, the important point is that we now have a very clear picture of what is about to happen, and it is for us to respond by fashioning a society where the powers that technology grants our rulers are controlled.

You may wonder why parliament has not alerted us to these dangers. That is because it is because part of the project, and Labour ministers continue to shelter behind the Human Rights Act, which offers no protection to the British public whatsoever. What we need is entrenched legislation that controls the executive and makes sure that no British citizen will ever be assigned a number so that the state may conveniently watch his or her every move.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is time to resist for we cannot rely, as Omand asks us, on the “essential reasonableness of the UK police, security and intelligence agency activity”.

Tomorrow week the Commons committee meets to discuss Jack Straw’s data-sharing proposal in the coroners and justice bill. If this measure goes through we are lost.

California’s Newly Poor Push Social Services to Brink

By Vivien Lou Chen

Feb. 26 (Bloomberg) — In California’s Contra Costa County, 40,000 families are applying for just 350 affordable-housing vouchers. Church-operated pantries are running out of food. Crisis calls have more than doubled in the city of Antioch, where the Family Stress Center occupies the site of a former bank.

The worst financial crisis in seven decades is forcing thousands of previously middle-income workers to seek social services, overwhelming local agencies, clinics and nonprofits. Each month 16,000 people, including many who were making $60,000 to $100,000 annually just a few years ago, fill four county offices requesting financial, medical or food assistance.

“Unless we do things differently, not only will we continue to be on life support, but the power to the machine is going to die,” said county Supervisor Federal Glover, who represents Antioch and the cities of Pittsburg and Oakley about 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of San Francisco.

Contra Costa, an East Bay suburban region of more than 1 million, turned thousands of farmland acres into housing in the past two decades, becoming an affordable alternative to San Francisco. Now, the area is being hit by a double whammy, as rising unemployment increases demand for social services, while plunging home values shrink tax revenue and squeeze agency budgets.

County officials made $90 million in cuts during the current fiscal year, and plan to reduce another $56 million, out of a $1.2 billion general-fund budget, in the coming year. County administrator David Twa said he doesn’t expect to see a “gradual recovery” in property taxes until 2012 or 2013.

Safety Net

The social safety net is being stretched “all over the country,” said Jacqueline Byers, research director for the National Association of Counties in Washington. “The formerly middle class who lost jobs, homes, or both suddenly are requesting assistance for the first time.”

Nationwide, demand for food stamps, one of the first benefits that new applicants for services qualify for, has mushroomed since the recession began in December 2007. About 31.1 million people received food stamps in November, an increase of 13 percent from the end of 2007, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department, which administers the program.

A record 5.11 million Americans were collecting unemployment benefits in the week ended Feb. 14. The jobless rate in Contra Costa, currently at 9.3 percent compared with a U.S. rate of 7.6 percent, is likely to reach as high as 12 percent, Twa said. Among local employers that have cut jobs or forced workers to take unpaid leave are USS-Posco Industries, a joint venture of U.S. Steel Corp. and Posco of South Korea, and newspaper publisher MediaNews Group Inc.

“We are in a critical situation and it’s not likely to get better over the next several years,” Twa said.

Therapy for Staff

Lines snake out the door of Contra Costa County’s employment and human services office in Antioch. At the Richmond office, the applicants’ stories of foreclosures and repossessed cars are “weighing” on staffers, who are offered therapy, said division manager Renee Giometti.

“People are physically going through a slow death,” said Karen Stewart, an area real-estate agent who earned about $80,000 a year just three years ago and is now down to her last $700. “You don’t have any support and the support systems that were in place before aren’t in place anymore.”

Recently separated, Stewart, 45, said she has been without a steady income since 2006 and is living on a county-issued food- debit card. The five-bedroom house in Brentwood she and her husband had purchased for $500,000 went into foreclosure in January. She said she hasn’t ruled out moving into her Lexus sedan and sending her 12-year-old son to live with a relative on the East Coast.

‘On the Edge’

Shelley Bowen, a 35-year-old stay-at-home mom from Antioch, said she and her husband Jason are “teetering on the edge,” as they face slowing sales of his art work and a $2,500 monthly mortgage that will go up by $1,000 in April.

Even though Jason makes $90,000 to $95,000 a year as an oil painter and instructor, “we’re kind of holding our breath, hoping nothing else happens,” Bowen said. If necessary, the couple would turn to family and friends, then church-welfare services and government assistance, she said.

“It’s a combination of a housing crisis and unemployment crisis like we’ve never seen before,” said Antioch realtor Kay Trail, a former city-planning commissioner. “Instead of being a bedroom community where people could live a certain lifestyle for an affordable price, now there’s quiet dread.”

Homeowners Default

The county’s median house price has plummeted 53 percent to $220,000 from $463,000 in a year, according to MDA Dataquick in San Diego. In the fourth quarter, 3,135 notices of default representing the first stage of foreclosure were filed against county homeowners, the firm said. That’s more than 10 times the number in San Francisco.

In Antioch’s old-town district, the Peacock Expressions art gallery, More to Love clothing store, and Rivertown Cafe are gone, replaced by empty storefronts.

About five miles away, signs reading “bank-owned home” are scattered throughout neighborhoods. Single-family properties built by KB Home are offered for less than $300,000. At the County East Mall, TJX Cos.’ Marshalls and Gottschalks Inc. stores were almost empty.

The county’s Housing Authority has a five-year wait for affordable-housing vouchers, said executive director Joseph Villarreal. Requests for homeless assistance statewide were up 26 percent in September over a year earlier, according to the California State Association of Counties in Sacramento.

Suicide Threats

“There’s always a level of desperation” in applicants, Villarreal said. “But the degree and depth of it now I’ve never seen: I’m not used to getting calls from clients saying they’ll kill themselves if they don’t get on the wait list.”

California’s 58 counties are $1 billion short of the amount needed to administer social-service programs in the current fiscal year that ends in June, said Paul McIntosh, executive director of the statewide group of counties. The local-government crisis was aggravated by state Controller John Chiang’s move earlier this month to start delaying almost $270 million in payments to counties for social services.

Neither the California legislature’s new budget package approved on Feb. 19 nor President Barack Obama’s $787 billion federal stimulus plan signed into law two days earlier will be enough to completely or immediately help counties, said McIntosh and Glover. Counties will still fall short of what they need even if Chiang releases previously withheld funds, they said.

“Contra Costa is near the front of the pack” among counties with the deepest financial woes, McIntosh said. “But the pack is tightly bunched and all headed in the same direction: off a cliff.”

Dostoevsky & The Jewish Bankers

Dostoevsky & The Jewish Bankers

DOSTOEVSKY & THE JEWISH BANKERS
By Brother Nathanael Kapner, Copyright 2009

FEODOR DOSTOEVSKY LEFT US A “PROPHECY” of the threat to Christian civilization by emancipated Jewry.

In his book, Diary Of A Writer, published in 1877, Dostoevsky penned a journal entry, entitled, The Jewish Question. With alarming and frightening foresight, (by which he penetrated into today’s events), Dostoevsky predicted a growing domination over social and political affairs by the Jews with their newly acquired rights:

“The Jews look forward to world domination. This requires them to maintain their own close-knit identity. If the Jews are given equal legal rights in Russia, but are allowed to keep their ‘State within a State,’ they would be more privileged than the Russians. The consequences of this situation are already clear in Europe.” View Entire Article Here.

Expressing his concern regarding Jewry’s agenda for world domination, Dostoevsky demonstrated how Jewish bankers had taken over Europe by the mid 1800’s:

“It is not for nothing that everywhere in Europe the Jews are reigning over the stock exchanges, not for nothing that they control capital, not for nothing that they are masters of credit, and not for nothing, I repeat, that they are the masters of all international politics.

What is coming is the complete triumph of Jewish ideas, before which, sentiments of humanity, the thirst for truth, Christian feelings, and the national and popular pride of Europe must bow.

And what will be in the future is known also to the Jews themselves: Their reign is approaching, their complete reign!” View Entire Article Here.

IN LIGHT OF JEWRY’S CONTROL of Europe’s financial & social sphere, Dostoevsky then voiced his fears regarding Jewry’s threat to Russia:

“What if there were only three million Russians and there were eighty million Jews? How would they treat Russians and how would they lord it over them? What rights would Jews give Russians?

Wouldn’t they turn them into slaves? Worse then that, wouldn’t they skin them altogether? Wouldn’t they slaughter them to the last man, to the point of complete extermination?” View Entire Article Here.

DOSTOEVSKY BROUGHT HIS PROPHECY to a head by predicting that Jewry’s religious dictates, coupled with the control of the “Yid and his bank,” would bring the Gentiles into complete subjugation:

“It is impossible to conceive of a Jew apart from his religion. They are all waiting for their messiah, all of them, from the lowest Yid to the highest and most learned philosopher and rabbi-Kabalist. They all believe that their messiah will unite them in Jerusalem and bring by his sword, all nations to their feet.

The Yid and his bank are now ruling over everything: over Europe, education, civilization, socialism, especially socialism, for he will use it to uproot Christianity and destroy its civilization. And when only anarchy remains, the Yid will be in command of everything.

For while the Jew goes about preaching socialism, he will stick together with his own, and after all the riches of Europe have been wasted, the Yid’s bank will still be there.” View Entire Quote Here & Here.

Scary, Isn’t it? And, Very Much Up To Date Is It Not?
… Brother Nathanael Kapner, A Former Jew, Reporting …
___________________________________
For More See: Jewry’s Scheme For World Domination Click Here

And: The ‘Jewish Question’ Now A Global Issue Click Here

And: Federal Reserve: A Private Jew Bank Strangling America! Click Here

And: Putin’s Purge Of The Rothschild Money Changers Click Here

And: Solzhenitsyn & The Jews Click Here

Taliban call for peace with Afghans

Sayed Salahuddin, Reuters

Oleg Popov/ReutersU.S. soldiers with Alpha Company, 32nd Infantry Regiment walk in a line during a patrol at Mullagora village, close to the border with Pakistan in Kunar Province, Afghanistn, Feb. 24, 2009.

KABUL — The Taliban are willing to work with all Afghan groups to achieve peace, but the problems of Afghanistan can only be solved if foreign troops withdraw from the country, a senior insurgent leader said.

The Taliban have made a strong come-back in the last three years, extending the scale and scope of their insurgency across the south and east and up to the fringes of the Afghan capital.

U.S. officials admit they are not winning the war but, they say, neither are the Taliban. A stalemate has been reached with insurgents unable to overcome NATO’s military might and foreign troops unable to stop Taliban roadside and suicide bombs.

Repeated calls from Afghan President Hamid Karzai for talks with the Taliban have been rejected by the militants, but the statement from the senior Taliban commander signals a slightly softer stance towards the government while maintaining the customary hard line against the international troop presence.

“We would like to take an Afghan strategy that is shared and large-scale, in consultation with all the Afghan groups, to reach positive and fruitful results,” Mullah Mutassim, a former Taliban finance minister and member of the group’s political council, told al-Samoud magazine in an interview conducted on Feb. 25.

But, he said, the United States “has to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan as soon as possible, because the real starter of crises and complication of matters is the presence of foreign forces in the country.

“If these forces leave, the problem will be over, the question will be finished, and peace will prevail,” he was quoted as saying in the interview translated by the U.S.-based Site Intelligence Group which monitors jihadi web sites.

Mutassim is regarded as close to fugitive Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar.

The United States has some 38,000 troops in Afghanistan alongside some 30,000 troops from 40 other mostly NATO nations.

President Barack Obama last week ordered another 17,000 U.S. troops deployed to try to break the stalemate and has pledged a new strategy in Afghanistan to increase development and at the same time ease regional tensions that contribute to the war.

Mutassim said the armed struggle was the only way to drive out foreign forces and if the United States sent more troops to Afghanistan that would just lead to more soldiers being killed.

“Obama’s taking this unreasonable strategy indicates the plan of his bloody and fierce war strategy which will cause the death of many of his arrogant troops in the face of the holy Afghan jihad,” he said.

Despite his harsh words for the West, Mutassim only had praise for the government of Saudi Arabia which is often scorned by hardline Islamists for its close ties with the United States.

Saudi Arabia, one of only three states to recognise the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, has hosted tentative talks between former Taliban and Afghan government officials aimed at exploring ways toward peace.

But, Mutassim said, the Taliban were not for a share in power.

“The Islamic Emirate demands to rule the country so as to establish an … Islamic system in it, not in order to occupy high positions in the agent government,” he said.

Mutassim denied the austere Islamists movement had been against women’s education while they were in power, but said the ravages of war had not allowed girls to be schooled.

“I say that educating women is as necessary as educating men,” he said.

The Taliban have eased a number of their hard line edicts against such things as television and music in the areas they control making them, Mutassim said, more popular now than when they were in power.

© Thomson Reuters 2009

“For This I Blame America”

Afghanistan: Chaos Central

By Chris Sands

February 26,2009 “Counterpunch” — As the summer of 2005 began its slow fade into autumn, a piece of newspaper wrapped around a kebab said Osama bin Laden had moved to Iraq. It seemed everyone had forgotten there was a war on here. American soldiers used those remaining days of sunshine to buy carpets in Kabul’s Chicken Street bazaar, not caring when they were charged over the odds. Elsewhere, mercenaries downed cheap Russian vodka in phoney restaurants before wandering up a few stairs to sleep with Chinese prostitutes whose pimps bribed local government officials. The brothels were often in the same neighborhoods as the mansions that militia commanders were building themselves with CIA funds and drug money.

Back then, this beautiful city was the ideal place for a bit of post-conflict profiteering. Hastily-created NGOs continued to flood in, eager for a slice of the action. So did journalists determined to write about democracy, the suave English-speaking president and the local golf course. It was the calm before the storm. Victory had been declared and, while Afghans were starting to feel the weight of its baggage, the rest of the world was still having fun at their expense.

But the decadence and ignorance were never going to be allowed to last for long, and the Taliban knew their time was coming again. The warning signs were around for anyone who cared to look.

I’d been in Afghanistan less than a week when aid groups revealed that deteriorating security had put their projects under threat. They feared they had become targets for the insurgency. A little while afterwards, the governor of Maidan Wardak, a province bordering Kabul, told me all was okay there. Then the PR finished and he cut loose. A new generation of militants had shown its face, he said. They were young men disillusioned with the occupation and some were trained in Pakistan. Trouble was also evident near the eastern city of Jalalabad, where a villager complained that his cousin had vanished since being arrested by the Americans roughly three years earlier. We talked in a dirt yard full of kids and I think they were the only ones who expected his return.

The south, though, was where the pieces of the jigsaw began to fit together. Kandahar is the spiritual heartland of the Taliban and in late 2005 the movement was again drawing strength from its birthplace. There, for the first time, I caught sight of a reality our politicians had made us believe did not exist.

A man working at the football stadium reminisced fondly about the old days when executions happened on the pitch. If capital punishment was still common, he said, the new government wouldn’t be so crooked. This was something I would hear repeatedly, until eventually it was said by Afghans across the country. The police were the worst offenders, looking for bribes at every opportunity to supplement their low wages. Another Kandahari had joined the Taliban as a teenager in the 1990s. “At that time we were very happy,” he said. “It was like we were very poor and had suddenly found a lot of money.” Talibs are good people and they can never be beaten, he continued. Now they have no choice but to fight because otherwise the Americans will send them to Guantanamo Bay. Most importantly for the future, he revealed that a number of local religious clerics had just declared a jihad.

Insurgent attacks and violent crime were already a problem in Kandahar by then. It was like “living under a knife” said a 53-year-old in the city. Yet even as civilians died, the Taliban were rarely the subject of people’s fury. Directly or indirectly, they blamed the government and its allies.

Taliban on the Rise

In the spring of 2006 Kabul’s imams decided to speak out against all this and more. Officials were lining their own pockets and alcohol was easily available, they said. They were also angry at the house raids conducted by foreign soldiers in rural areas and accused them of molesting women during the searches. Most said the time for jihad was approaching and one announced that armed resistance was now the answer.

So when rioters tore through the capital on  May 29, it was no big surprise. The spark for that particular day of unrest was a fatal traffic accident involving US troops, but the explosion had been primed long before. Protesters shouted “Death to America” and by the end of the anarchy at least 17 people had lost their lives. The situation was now ripe for the Taliban to harness national discontent and kick-start a major revolt, and this is exactly what they did.

When British troops had first arrived in Helmand that February, they had come ostensibly to allow reconstruction. The then defense minister John Reid said he would be “perfectly happy” if they did not have to fire a single shot. Instead, they soon found themselves bogged down in some of their worst fighting since the Second World War, at times being drawn into hand-to-hand combat. Over 100 have died in the ensuing years.

The Taliban’s remit also grew stronger in areas close to Kabul and two hours from the capital people were warning that the government might collapse. I couldn’t find anyone in Ghazni who admitted to taking the insurgents’ side: they usually said poverty and a lack of reconstruction were causing people to rebel. Looking at the broken roads and crumbling homes, it wasn’t hard to understand what they meant.

Not long before, police in one of the province’s districts had tried to stop the Taliban’s favorite mode of transport by banning the use of motorbikes. The militants responded by imposing travel restrictions on the whole of that area’s population. At night they would go to mosques and tell worshippers not to drive to the provincial capital. “They say ‘if you don’t cooperate with us we will kill you’,” was how one man described their tactics. “What would be the natural human response to that? Of course you will cooperate.”

An emerging pattern

A pattern was emerging. The more the Taliban turned to violence, the more they came to be regarded as an omnipresent force that could not be stopped. The bloodshed made people long for the stability of the old regime, if not its repressive laws. Villagers across the south and east had gained almost nothing from the US-led invasion and, in fact, many had lost the little they previously had: good security. Among people in Logar, another of those sad provinces bordering Kabul, the anger was palpable. “Our biggest problem is with the foreigners – we just hate them. Our families, our children, our women – everyone hates them,” said an elder. “Let’s pretend I’m a young man,” said someone else. “I have graduated from school but I can’t go to university and there is no factory to work in. So how can I feed myself? I can just join the insurgents – it’s easy.”

The Taliban first rose up in 1994 when Afghanistan was controlled by warlords still high from the CIA support they had been receiving a few years earlier. A similar thing was happening again and the movement’s original members were quick to see that.

Mullah Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil lost his father during the Soviet occupation and joined the Taliban, he said, “to give the country freedom”. He went on to become Mullah Omar’s spokesman and later his foreign minister. We talked on a freezing January morning in 2007 when Mutawakil was being kept under watch in Kabul. He knew his government had made mistakes, particularly in letting jihadis from across the world train and fight here. But he was adamant that the international community’s decision to isolate the regime had only made it more extreme. “The interesting thing from that time, and lots of people are remembering this now, is the tight security,” he said.

Kandahar was frightening that spring of 2007. The police were accused of carrying out kidnappings and robberies, and the scars of suicide bombings pockmarked the streets. There was a lot of anger, despair and black humor around. Residents expressed a grudging admiration for the old ways of the Taliban simply because the alternatives had come to appear so dire. To them, democracy meant virtual anarchy and, in the villages, a brutal occupation. “If I sit at a table with an American and he says he has brought us freedom, I will tell him he has fucked us,” said a father-of-two. He had fled Kandahar during the Taliban government because he was against its restrictions on education. “But I was never worried about my family,” he added. “Every single minute of the last three years I have been very worried.”
Comments like this came thick and fast, mixed in with jokes. Some of the men insulted the president, Hamid Karzai, and his wife, laughing and swearing as they did so. A woman I met was sure the city had been better under the Taliban. “If we did not have a full stomach we could at least get some food and go to sleep,” she said.

Slipping into Chaos

On and on it went, a litany of complaints and stories that portrayed a nation slipping deep into chaos. A religious leader from the district of Panjwayi described how 18 of his relatives had been killed in an air strike. Then three Talibs from Helmand defended the insurgency as being a natural reaction to events. Basically, they felt they had nothing to lose.

Reports of civilians getting bombed from above came regular as clockwork that spring and summer. First some villagers or local officials would say innocent people were dead and the Nato or US-led coalition would deny it. Then all parties would agree civilian blood had been spilt, but argue over casualty figures. Hamid Karzai kept demanding that the carnage stop, but it never did.

In Kabul, a senator from Helmand said it was killing the entire country. He was among members of parliament’s upper chamber who had called for a ceasefire and negotiations with insurgent groups. They had also said a date should be set for the withdrawal of foreign forces. By then the parliament, supposedly the shining light of a new democracy, was actually a symbol of the Taliban’s resurgence. Police in riot gear stood watch and the building was falling to pieces, with paint flaking away and the walls starting to crack. Not only was there sympathy for the militants inside, there were also men whose viciousness had caused the movement to form in the first place. Most Afghans wanted the warlords brought to justice, but instead the international community had let them stand for election, and here they were showing off their power yet again.

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef knew the impact that was having. He used to serve as the Taliban’s ambassador to Pakistan and, after initially being sent to Guantanamo, he was another of the old guard now living under constant surveillance in Kabul. He refused to talk about his stint in US custody, but he was quick to highlight that men with blood on their hands were now the West’s great hope. “At the time of the Taliban if someone killed another person it was possible to capture him, send him to court, punish him and execute him. Today, if someone goes to a village and kills 100 people, tomorrow he is given more privileges by the government,” he told me. “The Americans and the world community brought the warlords to power. They are supporting them for their benefit against the Taliban, but they know these people are not liked.”

By summer 2007 the horror could not be ignored, even in Kabul. Suicide bombings were the main weapon of choice and they struck fear into Afghans like nothing else, having been unheard of during the Soviet occupation.

For all their rhetoric about fighting for freedom, justice and the Almighty, it was also obvious that some in the Taliban were willing to murder anyone to achieve their aim.

This was clear in the pieces of charred flesh and hair that lay scattered in the dust after a bus was blown up near a police headquarters in the city on  June 17. And it was evident amidst the smell of shit that filled Pul-e-Charkhi jail, where a prisoner was quick to declare his intentions. “I tell you, when I get out of here the first thing I will do is kill journalists and infidels,” he said. “I will kill journalists because they are all spies.”

‘For this I blame America’

As 2007 drew to an end, men who hated the Taliban were starting to resemble them. A former Northern Alliance commander from the province of Badakhshan summed it up nicely: “Now when any foreigner is killed every Afghan says ‘praise be to God’,” he told me. We were chatting at his home in an area of Kabul where the poor had been forced out so warlords and foreign contractors could move in. He owned a small house and, in front of that, a half-built mansion that he could not afford to finish off. Possibly, the only optimists left were the American ambassador and the locals who had the money to take long holidays in Dubai.

Afghanistan’s Sikh and Hindu community had been about 50,000 strong before 1992. Now it was down to 5,000. The exodus had been instigated by the Mujahideen, not the Taliban. With the same old faces back in power again, no one was happy. “The Taliban told us we had to do all our religious ceremonies in private, but they did not stop us from doing them. It was a government that was not recognised by the world, but it was better than now,” said a Sikh.

Even the section of society that should have benefited most from the US-led invasion was full of sorrow. Female MPs told me they felt ashamed for not being able to help their constituents. One said she was sure the time was approaching when she would be a prisoner in her own home again. “For all this I blame America. When the Russians were here the people picked up guns to fight them. Now people are picking up guns to fight the Americans,” she said. “Soon my daughter will finish school and then she wants to start private education,” said another. “But I cannot let her because I cannot give her a bodyguard.”

‘Everything is screwed up’

In January 2008 the streets were a bleak monochrome and the graveyards that dominate Kabul’s landscape gave me a glimpse of the future. I interviewed a judge at the Supreme Court who admitted what everyone already knew: certain people here are above the law. He was too scared to name names, but he described the control warlords have over his colleagues as “totally ordinary”. Barely had he spoken and the Taliban attacked a luxury hotel in the city. Foreigners were shocked. Afghans just shrugged.

Kandahar was so bad I felt sick before returning there in early spring. Luckily, a friend of mine reassured me that, as a Pashtun, he would offer unconditional protection. “Mullah Omar destroyed Afghanistan because of Osama bin Laden, but he didn’t give him up,” he said. A day later a Taliban commander from Helmand described how the resistance had struggled to find support in the early years. But after innocent people had been detained or killed the jihad had burst into life. Now even the Afghan army secretly gave them bullets and treated their wounded.

The story of the insurgency, though, no longer needed a great deal of travelling. In April I took the short drive from Kabul city to Paghman and all I found where the offices of Zafar Radio used to be was a pile of burnt trash. Masked men had torched the premises for being “un-Islamic”.

In the summer, it got worse. I met an Afghan American who said that “everything is screwed up”. Then on  July 7, a car bomber attacked the Indian embassy. The huge explosion left corpses scattered around and the wounded dazed and bloodied. By the next morning people were venting their anger at the government, saying it was unable to provide security. When Barack Obama arrived during his presidential campaign, optimism was hard to find. In an area of the capital where Hamid Karzai had narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in the spring, a qualified doctor sold samosas from a roadside stall because it was the only job he could get. “The politics will not change,” he said.
2008 was the grimmest year since the invasion. On the seventh anniversary of 9/11, the annual death toll for US troops here had reached new heights: the 113 killed up to September were two more than for the whole of 2007.

Civilians are paying a heavier price. Caught between a rapidly developing insurgency and an occupation force over-reliant on air strikes, they are dropping like flies: according to the UN, 1,445 were killed from January to August 2008 alone.

The Taliban’s strength is growing on Kabul’s doorstep, in the provinces of Maidan Wardak and Logar. The main highway south is a turkey shoot that no one sensible travels along. In the east of the country, the rebels have taken new ground as they move freely across the border. In the north, warlords are reasserting their dominance – raping and beheading at will. The violence affects us all. Kabul is a claustrophobic, paranoid place. Rockets occasionally land in the streets, ugly concrete barriers have appeared and Afghans kidnap each other for ransom. Last autumn, on a bright October morning, a British aid worker was murdered in a part of the city regarded as safe.

More foreign troops are due to be sent. But they risk the kind of backlash experienced by the Soviets, and the long-term aim is unclear. After all these years, there are no firm ideas about the way forward. For now the bitter cold has brought the usual lull. But how much more violence will come this spring?

Chris Sands is a British freelance journalist, and frequent contributor to CounterPunch, who has been working independently in Afghanistan since August 2005. This article appears in the February edition of this excellent monthly, whose English language edition can be found at mondediplo.com. This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features two or three articles from LMD every month.

Hepatitis Plight of India’s Untouchables?

10,000 kg of used syringe seized, 15 docs booked

Joydeep Ray

Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation has sealed 15 clinics of private doctors and recovered over 10,000 kgs of used syringe from raids on Friday morning.

Fifteen doctors have been booked under various provisions of Indian Penal Code by Ahmedabad city police.

No formal arrests have been made so far, but the doctors may be arrested after investigation.

PTI adds: The district health officials also raided godowns of scrap dealers across the city and sealed five godowns from where large quantity of used syringes, needles and bio-medical waste were found.

According to health officials, these scrap dealers used to purchase used syringes and biomedical waste from those dealers in hepatitis-hit Modasa town, who were booked on Wednesday night by the police.

“We have sealed five godowns, which contained large quantity of bio-medical waste, used syringes and needles,” Chief District Health Officer (CDHO), Ahmedabad, Dr R R Vaidya
said.

“Three godowns have been sealed in Saijpur Bogha area and two in Asarwa area,” Vaidya said, adding that the owners of the godown are being questioned, and they are in the process of filing an FIR.

He said that the operation was jointly carried out by district health officials, Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation officials and police.

Rethink Afghanistan (full video)

Gaza: Death`s Laboratory

By Conn Hallinan Feb 27, 2009, 04:03

Erik Fosse, a Norwegian cardiologist, worked in Gaza hospitals during the recent war.`It was as if they had stepped on a mine,` he says of certain Palestinian patients he treated. `But there was no shrapnel in the wound. Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been to war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before.`

Dr. Fosse was describing the effects of a U.S. `focused lethality` weapon that minimizes explosive damage to structures while inflicting catastrophic wounds on its victims. But where did the Israelis get this weapon? And was their widespread use in the attack on Gaza a field test for a new generation of explosives?

DIMEd to Death

The specific weapon is called a Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME). In 2000, the U.S. Air Force teamed up with the University of California`s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The weapon wraps high explosives with a tungsten alloy and other metals like cobalt, nickel, or iron in a carbon fiber/epoxy container. When the bomb explodes the container evaporates, and the tungsten turns into micro-shrapnel that is extremely lethal within a 13–foot radius. Tungsten is inert, so it doesn`t react chemically with the explosive. While a non-inert metal like aluminum would increase the blast, tungsten actually contains the explosion to a limited area.

Within the weapon`s range, however, it`s inordinately lethal. According to Norwegian doctor Mad Gilbert, the blast results in multiple amputations and `very severe fractures. The muscles are sort of split from the bones, hanging loose, and you also have quite severe burns.` Most of those who survive the initial blast quickly succumb to septicemia and organ collapse. `Initially, everything seems in order…but it turns out on operation that dozens of miniature particles can be found in all their organs,` says Dr. Jam Brommundt, a German doctor working in Kham Younis, a city in southern Gaza. `It seems to be some sort of explosive or shell that disperses tiny particles…that penetrate all organs, these miniature injuries, you are not able to attack them surgically.` According to Brommundt, the particles cause multiple organ failures.

If by some miracle victims resist those conditions, they are almost certain to develop rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS), a particularly deadly cancer that deeply embeds itself into tissue and is almost impossible to treat. A 2005 U.S. Department of health study found that tungsten stimulated RMS cancers even in very low doses. All of the 92 rats tested developed the cancer.

While DIMEs were originally designed to avoid `collateral` damage generated by standard high-explosive bombs, the weapon`s lethality and profound long-term toxicity hardly seem like an improvement.

It appears DIME weapons may have been used in the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, but not enough to alarm medical workers. But in Gaza, the ordinance was widely used. Al-Shifta alone has seen 100 to 150 victims of these attacks.
Gaza as Test

Dr. Gilbert told the Oslo Gardermoen, `there is a strong suspicion…that Gaza is now being used as a test laboratory for new weapons.`

Marc Garlasco, Human Rights Watch`s senior military advisor, says `it remains to be seen how Israel has acquired the technology, whether they purchased weapons from the United States under some agreement, or if they in fact licensed or developed their own type of munitions.`

In fact, Congress approved the $77 million sale of 1,000 GBU-39s to Israel in September 2008, and the weapons were delivered in December. Israel was the first foreign recipient of the DIMES.

DIME weapons aren`t banned under the Geneva Conventions because they have never been officially tested. However, any weapon capable of inflicting such horrendous damage is normally barred from use, particularly in one of the most densely populated regions in the world.

For one thing, no one knows how long the tungsten remains in the environment or how it could affect people who return to homes attacked by a DIME. University of Arizona cancer researcher Dr. Mark Witten, who investigates links between tungsten and leukemia, says that in his opinion `there needs to be much more research on the health effects of tungsten before the military increases its usage.`
Beyond DIMEs

DIMEs weren`t the only controversial weapons used in Gaza. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) also made generous use of white phosphorus, a chemical that burns with intense heat and inflicts terrible burns on victims. In its vapor form it also damages breathing passages. International law prohibits the weapon`s use near population areas and requires that `all reasonable precautions` be taken to avoid civilians.

Israel initially denied using the chemical. `The IDF acts only in accordance with what is permitted by international law and does not use white phosphorus,` said Israel`s Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi on January 13.

But eyewitness accounts in Gaza and Israel soon forced the IDF to admit that they were, indeed, using the substance. On January 20, the IDF confessed to using phosphorus artillery shells as smokescreens, as well as 200 U.S.-made M825A1 phosphorus mortar shells on `Hamas fighters and rocket launching crews in northern Gaza.`

Three of those shells hit the UN Works and Relief Agency compound on January 15, igniting a fire that destroyed hundreds of tons of humanitarian supplies. A phosphorus shell also hit Al-Quds hospital in Gaza City. The Israelis say there were Hamas fighters near the two targets, a charge that witnesses adamantly deny.

Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International said: `Such extensive use of this weapon in Gaza`s densely-populated residential neighborhoods…and its toll on civilians is a war crime.`

Israel is also accused of using depleted uranium ammunition (DUA), which a UN sub-commission in 2002 found in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the International Convention Against Torture, the Conventional Weapons Convention, and the Hague Conventions against the use of poison weapons.

DUA isn`t highly radioactive, but after exploding, some of it turns into a gas that can easily be inhaled. The dense shrapnel that survives also tends to bury itself deeply, leaching low-level radioactivity into water-tables.
War Crimes?

Other human-rights groups, including B`Tselem, Gisha, and Physicians for Human Rights, charge that the IDF intentionally targeted medical personal, killing over a dozen, including paramedics and ambulance drivers.

The International Federation for Human Rights called on the UN Security Council to refer Israel to the International Criminal Court for possible war crimes.

Although the Israelis dismiss the war-crimes charges, the fact that the Israeli cabinet held a special meeting on January 25 to discuss the issue suggests they`re concerned about being charged with `disproportionate` use of force. The Geneva Conventions require belligerents to at `all times` distinguish between combatants and civilians and to avoid `disproportionate force` in seeking military gains.

Hamas` use of unguided missiles fired at Israel would also be a war crime under the Conventions.

`The one-sidedness of casualty figures is one measure of disproportion,` says Richard Falk, the UN`s human rights envoy for the occupied territories. A total of 14 Israelis have been killed in the fighting, three of them civilians killed by rockets, 11 of them soldiers, four of the latter by `friendly fire.` Some 50 IDF soldiers were also wounded.

In contrast, 1,330 Palestinians have died and 5,450 were injured, the overwhelming bulk of them civilians.

`This kind of fighting constitutes a blatant violation of the laws of warfare, which we ask to be investigated by the Commission of War Crimes,` a coalition of Israeli human rights groups and Amnesty International said in a joint statement. `The responsibility of the state of Israel is beyond doubt.`
Enter the Hague?

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann would coordinate the defense of any soldier or commander charged with a war crime. In any case, the United States would veto any effort by the UN Security Council to refer Israelis to the International Court at The Hague.

But, as the Financial Times points out, `all countries have an obligation to search out those accused of `grave` breaches of the rules of war and to put them on trial or extradite them to a country that will.`

That was the basis under which the British police arrested Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998.

`We`re in a seismic shift in international law,` Amnesty International legal advisor Christopher Hall told the Financial Times, who says Israel`s foreign ministry is already examining the risk to Israelis who travel abroad.

`It`s like walking across the street against a red light,` he says. `The risk may be low, but you`re going to think twice before committing a crime or traveling if you have committed one.`

Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist.

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5862

A people abandoned

By Serge Halimi Feb 27, 2009, 04:07

By 14 January Israeli troops had killed more than a thousand Palestinians confined to a narrow strip of land and subjected to land, sea and air bombardment by one of the most formidable armies in the world. A Palestinian school converted into a United Nations refuge had been bombed (1), a resolution – issued by the only organisation that really represents the “international community” people are so fond of talking about – had called in vain for a halt to the military operations in Gaza. So, on 14 January, the European Union showed just how firmly it was prepared to react to this mixed display of violence and arrogance. It decided to suspend the process of rapprochement with Israel! But to lessen the impact of what might, even so, have been seen as gentle reproach to Tel Aviv, it explained that this was a “technical”measure, not a “political”one. And that the decision was taken by “both parties”.

Israel is free to do as it likes. Its army had already destroyed most of the Palestinian infrastructure funded by the EU and there had been little or no reaction, no legal action, no call for reparations (2). It then imposed a blockade on people already living in poverty, with no water, food or medical supplies. Still no response, only endless admonitions and a general refusal to become involved in the argument, on the pretext that violence of the strong is not always accompanied by submission of the weak. So why should Israel suppose that it cannot continue to act with impunity?

Twenty years ago, the Jewish state took the precaution of encouraging the rise of Hamas against the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Hamas was a dream adversary, with a medieval charter, doubtful military potential and no inclination to “communicate” with western public opinion. Having no “partner for peace”is a perfect excuse to bomb and colonise ad lib. But even now, there are still newspaper editors in Europe complaining that Israel one day lose the moral high ground” (3).

The United States too has nothing against the Tel Aviv government’s plans. On 9 January, the House of Representatives passed a resolution recognising Israel’s “right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza”. A few hours earlier the Senate had “reaffirmed the United States’ strong support for Israel in its battle with Hamas”. Perhaps with the idea of striking some sort of “balance”, the House of Representatives resolution also expresses to innocent Israeli and Palestinian victims and their families”. That resolution was adopted by 390 votes to five. The Senate resolution was adopted unanimously. The US executive also held firm: a few hours after announcing a unilateral ceasefire, Ehud Olmert rang the US president to thank him for his support. Support also includes non-refundable aid amounting to $3 billion a year, which no-one including Obama has thought of questioning.

With this sort of backing, the main Israeli parties’ aim seems to be clear: to destroy any prospect of achieving the internationally recognised aim of establishing a genuine Palestinian state. The West Bank will continue to be an amorphous collection of homelands, criss-crossed with walls and roadblocks, dotted with settlements, and drip-fed by the European Union. And Gaza will be bombed whenever its neighbour has a mind to unleash a disproportionate “response” to rocket or other attacks. In fact, after 60 years of defeat, humiliation, exile, violation of signed agreements, colonisation and internecine feuding, after governments all over the world have abandoned them to their fate and allowed international law, including international humanitarian law, to be ridden over roughshod, it is nothing short of a miracle that the Palestinians are still determined to assert their national identity in real terms.

If they succeed, it will not be thanks to the Europeans, or to the Americans or to most Arab states. In Gaza, these powers have all conspired once again in the interminable spoliation of a nation.

http://mondediplo.com/2009/02/01abandoned

Fueling the Cycle of Hate

By YIGAL BRONNER and NEVE GORDON Feb 27, 2009, 04:13

Israeli soccer matches were suspended during the assault on Gaza. When the games resumed last week, the fans had come up with a new chant: `Why have the schools in Gaza been shut down?` sang the crowd. `Because all the children were gunned down!` came the answer.

Aside from its sheer barbarism, this chant reflects the widespread belief among Israeli Jews that Israel scored an impressive victory in Gaza – a victory measured, not least, by the death toll.

Israeli pilots and tank commanders could not really discriminate between the adults and the children who hid in their homes or huddled in the UNRWA shelters, and yet they chose to press the trigger. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that the lethal onslaught left 1,314 Palestinians dead, of which 412 – or nearly one third of all of the casualties – were children.

This latest assault underscores that Israel, not unlike Hamas, readily resorts to violence and does not distinguish between civilians and combatants (only the weapons at Israel`s disposal are much more lethal). No matter how many times the Israeli government tries to blame Hamas for the latest Palestinian civilian deaths it simply cannot explain away the body count, especially that of the children. In addition to the dead, 1,855 Palestinian children were wounded, and tens of thousands of others have likely been traumatised, many of them for life.

Every child has a story. A Bedouin friend recently called to tell us about his relatives in Gaza. One cousin allowed her five-year-old daughter to walk to the adjacent house to see whether the neighbours had something left to eat. The girl had been crying from hunger. The moment she began crossing the street a missile exploded nearby and the flying shrapnel killed her. The mother has since been bedridden, weeping and screaming, `I have let my girl die hungry`.

As if the bloody incursion was not enough, the Israeli security forces seem to be keen on spreading the flames of hatred among the Arab population within Israel. Hundreds of Palestinian citizens of Israel have been arrested for protesting at the Israeli assault and more than 200 of them are still in custody. One incident is enough to illustrate the psychological effect these arrests will likely have on hundreds more children.

A few days after the ceasefire, several men wearing black ski masks stormed the home of Muhammad Abu Humus. They came to arrest him for protesting against the killings in Gaza. It was four in the morning and the whole family was asleep when the men banged on the door. After entering the house, they made Abu Humus`s wife Wafa and their four children Erfat (12), Shahd (9), Anas (6) and Majd (3) stand in a corner as they searched the house, throwing all the clothes, sheets, toys, and kitchenware on the floor. With tears in their eyes, the children watched as the armed men then took their father away and left.

Chance would have it that Abu Humus, a long-time peace activist and member of the Fatah party, is a personal friend of ours. In 2001, he joined Ta`ayush Arab-Jewish Partnership, and since then has selflessly organized countless peace rallies and other joint activities. During the past eight years, we have spent many hours at each other`s homes and our children have grown up respecting and liking one other. It is hard to believe that just one month ago he attended the Bar Mitzvah of Yigal`s son in a Jerusalem synagogue.

Muhammad and Wafa Abu Humus have tried over the years to instill in their children a love and desire for peace, and while the security forces may not have destroyed this, the hatred they have generated in one night cannot be underestimated. Indeed, what, one might ask, will his children think of their Jewish neighbours? What feelings will they harbour? And what can we expect from those children in Gaza who have witnessed the killing of their parents, siblings, friends and neighbours?

We emphasize the Palestinian children because so many of them have been killed and terrorized in the past month. Yet it is clear that Israeli children are suffering as well, particularly those who have spent long periods in shelters for fear of being hit by rockets.

The one message that is being conveyed to children on both sides of this fray is that the other side is a bloodthirsty monster. In Israel, this was instantly translated into gains for the hate-mongering Yisrael Beytenu party headed by the xenophobic Avigdor Lieberman, who is now the frontrunner in mock polls being held in many Jewish high schools, with the hawkish Binyamin Netanyahu coming in second.

Hatred, in other words, is the great winner of this war. It has helped mobilise racist mobs, and as the soccer chant indicates it has left absolutely no place for the other, undermining even basic empathy for innocent children. Israel`s masters of war must be happy: the seeds of the next wars have certainly been sown.

Yigal Bronner teaches in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.

Neve Gordon is chair of the department of politics and government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and author of Israel’s Occupation (University of California Press, 2008).

http://www.counterpunch.org/gordon01272009.html

Israel Planning Mass Expansion of W.Bank Settlement Bloc

Readers Number : 52

27/02/2009 Despite the Israeli formal commitment not to expand West Bank settlements, a government agency has been promoting plans over the past two years to construct thousands of housing units east of the Green Line, Israeli daily Haaretz has reported. The plans, which have not yet been approved by the Israeli government, were drawn up by the Civil Administration, the government agency responsible for nonmilitary matters in the West Bank. Details of the plans appear in the minutes of the agency’s environmental subcommittee, which were obtained by the B’Tselem organization under the Freedom of Information Act. The plans propose the initial construction of 550 apartments in Gva’ot, located near Alon Shvut in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, followed by construction of another 4,450 units at a later stage. Rimonim will get another 254 apartments if the plans are approved, and expansion plans are also in the works for Einav and Mevo Dotan. All three of these settlements are east of the separation fence. Ma’aleh Adumim has included planned construction in the E-1 corridor in its sewage treatment plans. That corridor, which links Ma’aleh Adumim to occupied Jerusalem, is eventually slated to hold some 3,500 apartments. Nearby Kfar Adumim’s sewage treatment plan predicts that the settlement will double its population “in the coming years,” to 5,600 inhabitants. And in Eshkolot, the Civil Administration instructed the settlement to draw up a sewage plan adequate for a population five times its current one. A Civil Administration spokesman said that its “environmental subcommittee does not discuss approval for housing units at all, but deals with the professional aspects of the area’s environmental needs, sometimes at the theoretical level.”

Hezbollah Condemns Israeli Offense Against Prophet Mohamad (pbuh)

Hussein Assi Readers Number : 631

26/02/2009 … And the Israeli “malice” and “spite” continues, always in its worst forms! Day after day, the Zionist entity insists on proving to the whole world its proficiency in bad faith and misconduct, uncovering more “vicious surprises.” Day after day, this same Zionist entity proves to the whole world that it disrespects and undermines all values, beliefs, and convictions in what has become an Israeli “profession” or “expertise” amid suspicious international silence.. Indeed, and only a few days following its condemned and rejected offense against Christianity, Jesus (pbuh) and his mother Mary (pbuh), Israel decided to progress in its war against religions and the Messengers of God… After Christianity, came the turn of Islam with the same Israeli channel 10 insulting Prophet Mohamad (pbuh).. HEZBOLLAH CONDEMNS, CALLS FOR ACTION Hezbollah issued on Thursday a statement in which it vehemently condemned the insult committed by the disgraceful Zionist enemy on Channel 10 against the Prophet Mohamad (pbuh) which comes only days after the same channel’s insult of one of the great Prophets of God, Jesus Christ, the son of pure holy Mary peace be upon them, considered sacred in the Bible and the holy Qura’an, by Muslims, Christians and all believers in God’s messages across the world. Hezbollah’s statement noted that the enemy’s persistence in its criminal policy through wars and crimes and offending holy sites and icons was another reflection of its malice, hatred and racism. The Resistance party recalled that the Zionist entity was actually built and founded on aggression and assault. Hezbollah renewed condemnations for all Israeli crimes committed recurrently against religions and called on all concerned parties to immediately take action to prevent this entity from going too far in committing such sins. It called on all human bodies, world governments and leaders to firmly face the non-stop Zionist insults.

More Crap From Zionist-sponsored “Al Qaida” Clearinghouse, Home of Fake Bin Laden Videos

CAN’T CIA/MOSSAD CREATE MORE ORIGINAL FAKE NAMES?

Al-Qaida offshoot claims Algeria attacks

15 hours ago

ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) — Al-Qaida’s North African offshoot claimed responsibility Thursday for the killing of nine security guards near an Algerian power facility, as well as eight other deadly attacks this month.

The bombing and mortar attack Monday in the Jijel area 215 miles (350 kilometers) east of Algiers, the capital, targeted the housing compound of security guards working on an electricity dam operated by Sonelgaz, Algeria’s national provider.

Al-Qaida in Islamic North Africa said in a statement posted on the Internet that it had killed 10 guards, though authorities have only confirmed nine deaths.

“In its war to exhaust the capabilities of the apostates” the group’s fighters also blew up a train transporting goods to the west of the country, the group claimed in the statement posted on Internet sites frequently used by Islamist militants.

The authenticity of the statement, carried by the U.S.-based SITE intelligence group that monitors extremist messages, could not be independently verified.

Militants claimed eight other attacks this month, including one at a fake checkpoint during which three soldiers were reportedly executed at point blank range and the roadside bombing of a military convoy in a coastal zone west of Algiers.

The group claimed it killed or injured 47 people in the various attacks — significantly more than what authorities have acknowledged or Algerian media reported.

Violence has increased in Algeria after a monthlong lull as the North African country braces for presidential elections in April with President Abdelaziz Bouteflika seeking a third term.

The North African affiliate of al-Qaida is a reborn version of an Islamist insurgency group that was among extremists who battled security forces since 1992. The violence has killed up to an estimated 200,000 people, civilians, soldiers and Islamic extremists.

The group officially merged with al-Qaida in 2006.

Homeland security USA: guilty until proven innocent! Part 3

Military technology joining law enforcement.

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