Snuffysmith's Blog

Soaring Unemployment and Double-dip Recession? Blame N.W.O. Larry By Mike Whitney

2009-11-26T21:32:00.000-08:00

Soaring Unemployment and Double-dip Recession?
Blame N.W.O. Larry

By Mike Whitney

Summers assignment is to bring the broader economy to its knees; to crush big labor by keeping unemployment high, to force state and local and governments to privatize more public assets and services, and to generate as much human misery as possible. Continue

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24068.htm

Commentary: Net-centric Cassandras By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE

2009-11-26T19:10:00.000-08:00

Arnaud de Borchgrave does not seem to be in the Thanksgiving mood. Sobering stuff.

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/2009/11/24/Commentary-Net-centric-Cassandras/UPI-56651259073027/

Commentary: Net-centric Cassandras

By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
UPI Editor at Large

WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 (UPI) -- Reputable financial houses, as they are described online, are telling their clients how to prepare for potential "global collapse" over the next two years. France's Societe Generale, according to the London Daily Telegraph's chief investigative reporter, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, is such a house that is now "mapping a strategy of defensive investments to avoid wealth destruction."

A 68-page report, headed by the bank's asset chief, Daniel Fernon, explores forthcoming dangers but does not forecast which of three possible outcomes of the ongoing crisis it sees coming. Under the gloomiest "Bear Case" scenario the dollar would slide further and global equities would retest the March lows. Property prices would tumble again. Oil would fall back to $50 per barrel in 2010 (but could shoot up to $200 or $300 if Israel were to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities).

Fernon writes governments have already shot their fiscal bolts. Even without fresh spending, public debt would explode within two years to 105 percent of GDP in the United Kingdom, 125 percent in the United States and the European Union, and 270 percent in Japan. Thus, worldwide state debt would reach $45 trillion, up two and a half times in a decade.

Inflating debt away might be seen by some governments as the lesser of two evils. If so, says the forecaster, gold would go "up, and up, and up" as the only safe haven from "fiat paper money." Even if the U.S. savings rate stabilizes at 7 percent -- highly doubtful -- and all of it is used to pay down debt, it will take nine years for households to reduce debt/income ratios to the safe levels of the 1980s.

Societe Generale advises "Bear" clients to sell the dollar short and to "short" cyclical equities such as technology, auto and travel to avoid being caught in the "inherent deflationary spiral." Fernon says his report has electrified clients on both sides of the Atlantic as "everybody wants to know what the impact will be. A lot of hedge funds and bankers are worried."

Peter Morici, a professor at the University of Maryland's Business School and a prominent citizen of the Internet, says in his latest contribution, "Bigger than the budget deficit, America has a leadership gap. Despite last February's $787 billion stimulus package, the economic recovery is not creating jobs; unemployment is rising (34 million, including those whose benefits have expired, out of a workforce of 153.9 million); and the president and Congress offer little more than nostrums and platitudes."

Along with oil imports, cheap consumer goods from China account for nearly the entire trade gap, writes this former chief economist at the U.S. International Trade Commission. "China undervalues its currency to boost its U.S. sales, domestic employment and growth. Its economic miracle is engineered by Beijing buying hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars with freshly printed yuan, to keep the currency undervalued and Chinese products inexpensive in U.S. stores. Then China uses those dollars to buy U.S. Treasury securities." And President Obama, afraid China won't buy more U.S. debt, failed to challenge China on currency and trade during his visit there last week.

"The Republicans offer little more than tort reform … and the Democrats," concludes Morici, "fearful that unemployment, stagnant wages and their fiscal follies will result in big electoral losses in 2010, are cooking up another stimulus package. They will call it a … 'jobs initiative.' After both the Bush and Obama stimulus packages failed, it has few prospects of creating lasting jobs. All this calls to mind bread and circuses as in a declining Roman Empire. Those kept the crowds happy while the state was failing."

The conservative Financial Intelligence Report says dollar devaluation is a done deal. "Since taking office almost a year ago," FIR thunders, "the Obama administration has increased the monetary base by a staggering $10 trillion … and doubled the expected annual budget deficit to almost $2 trillion." The Financial Times' Martin Wolf, highly respected the world over, says shady trading activities destroyed the financial system. What Wolf regards as intolerable are huge rewards for those who have been rescued by the state and bear responsibility for the crisis in the first place. "Even more intolerable is that they have devastated the prospect of hundreds of millions of innocents all over the globe," he wrote.

Today's huge bank profits "are in large part the fruit of the free money provided by the central bank," says Wolf, and thus "the state is giving banks a license to print money. In 2006 Goldman Sachs earmarked $16.7 billion for year-end bonuses. One top trader was awarded $70 million (which he deemed insufficient given his superior talents and resigned). Hyper-bonuses are already back: GS's bonus pool at the end of 2009 was $20 billion.

The 1987 Oliver Stone movie "Wall Street," in which Michael Douglas plays Gordon Gekko, now on the lecture circuit as a published financial author after 14 years in the slammer for insider trading and security fraud, is being reprised as "Wall Street II." This time round the same sleazy track, Douglas, playing Gekko, fails in his attempt to warn people about the imminent fall of Wall Street. "Shakedown," the first novel for Wall Street insider Andie Ryan, with 20 years of experience in senior management in major firms, is thinly disguised fiction. "The Sellout: How Three Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System" by former Wall Street Journal reporter Charles Gasparino is climbing the best-seller charts.

Gasparino argues the meltdown -- from 1,125 billionaires to 783 in a year -- is just the latest calamity in a 30-year pattern of executive excesses, unsustainable leverage and unreliable computer models -- and warns risk-takers could be doomed to repeat their errors. Because there is reluctance, bordering on paralysis, to concede what went wrong. And the ever widening gap between rich and poor in America is not seen as an inducement for social upheaval.

It was the criminal predatory lending scams for subprime mortgages in the United States in 2006 that ensnared the entire planet and triggered the worst financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression. The "back to square one" cliche springs to mind with the third-quarter delinquency rate now the highest since records were kept -- up from one in 14 mortgage holders in the last quarter of 2008 to one in seven, or 14 percent in mid-November.

Yet purchases of previously owned homes soared 10.1 percent in October. Go figure.

Pakistan tells US that new Afghanistan strategy has exposed its borders to militants

2009-11-26T19:08:00.000-08:00

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6928926.ece

Pakistan tells US that new Afghanistan strategy has exposed its borders to militants

Jeremy Page, Zahid Hussain and Tom Coghlan

Pakistan has complained to the United States that the strategy in Afghanistan is allowing militants to cross the border more easily, hampering its army’s campaign against Islamists, The Times has learnt.

Pakistani army commanders say that Nato’s recent withdrawal of troops from outposts near the border is undermining the “hammer and anvil” strategy the US has advocated since 2001, whereby militants face Nato and Pakistani troops acting on both sides of the border.

The new policy has impaired the Pakistani army’s offensive against Taleban and al-Qaeda militants in South Waziristan and other tribal areas by allowing some to seek refuge in Afghanistan and others to return to Pakistan to join the fight, they say.

Taleban and anti-Taleban sources on both sides of the border have told The Times that militants have been returning from Afghanistan to Pakistan in the last month to fight in South Waziristan, where 30,000 government troops have been fighting insurgents since last month.

Pakistani commanders are also warning that US plans to send more troops to Afghanistan could drive militants into the southwestern region of Baluchistan while the Pakistani army is preoccupied with the northwest.

They raised the concerns with James Jones, President Obama’s National Security Adviser, when he visited Islamabad this month, according to Pakistani officials and Western diplomats. The US wants Pakistan to target militants in South and North Waziristan who cross the border to attack Nato forces in Afghanistan.

But Pakistan has yet to comply, largely because of its concerns about the new strategy introduced by General Stanley McChrystal. Last month the commander of all Nato forces in Afghanistan pulled troops out of remote outposts as part of a new counter-insurgency doctrine focusing on population centres.

The International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) confirmed that US troops had withdrawn from six frontier outposts, four in Nuristan province and two in Paktika — bordering Waziristan.

A senior Isaf official admitted the timing was unfortunate, but said that there was no evidence of greater militant activity around the border. “The border outpost decision predated the South Waziristan operation,” he said. “If it shows that we allow fighters to move freely in either direction, we would want to stop that. It is an unfortunate conjunction and it is easy to draw the wrong conclusions.”

Isaf insisted that the issue would not affect co-operation between US, Pakistani and Afghan forces, who set up a joint command centre near the Khyber Pass last year and plan to establish five more. Pakistani military officials agreed that the timing was coincidental, but said that the withdrawal was nonetheless hampering their efforts.

Pakistan’s army attacked militants in the Swat Valley in May before turning to South Waziristan last month. Mullah Jan Mohammed, a Taleban commander in Paktika, told The Timesthat Pakistani and other foreign militants there had meanwhile been crossing back into Pakistan. “There used to be lots in our area, but since the South Waziristan operation began, they have all returned to Pakistan,” he said.

Gulfam Hussain, the leader of a Shia anti-Taleban militia in the Pakistani tribal area of Kurram, which borders North Waziristan, also said that militants had been returning to Waziristan from Afghanistan. “It seems they’re going back to fight the Pakistani army,” he said.

Pakistan has been criticised by US officials for not deploying enough troops on its side of the border. Officials in Islamabad are now concerned that an increase in US troops in southern Afghanistan could destabilise Baluchistan, which is already home to a million Afghan refugees and a decades-long separatist insurgency.

“The increase in number of US troops without a clear strategy will have a huge destabilising effect for the region,” said a senior Pakistani military official. “The influx of more refugees will be politically explosive.”

Pugnacious Netanyahu Pushes U.S. to Call for 1967 Borders

2009-11-26T19:03:00.000-08:00

http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2009/11/pugnacious_neta/
Pugnacious Netanyahu Pushes U.S. to Call for 1967 Borders

This is a guest note by Daniel Levy, who served as the lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Initiative and directs the New America Foundation/Middle East Task Force .

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu announced yesterday his cabinet's decision, "To suspend new construction in Judea and Samaria." (Yes, they still call it Judea and Samaria).

The Obama Administration responded within hours with a statement released by Secretary of State Clinton followed by a press briefing from Special Envoy George Mitchell.

On the face of it, this was a step forward by the Israeli government, acknowledged and welcomed (though not blessed) by the US government, and a move that one hopes will facilitate Palestinian agreement to resume negotiations. But if one digs just a little bit deeper, it becomes very evident that it was nothing of the sort. Rather, today's events closed the first chapter in a game of dare being played out between the new leaderships in Washington and Jerusalem.

Today's statements appeared to be part of an elaborate and ongoing dance of suspicion between the two supposed allies.

During his first term as prime minister in the late 90's, Benjamin Netanyahu made an enemy of then US President Clinton and played the Republican congress against the Democrat president. This directly led to the collapse of Netanyahu's government and his fall from office. Judging by today, Netanyahu is keen for a repeat performance albeit under circumstances even less propitious for him politically. The response of the Obama team might be an interesting pointer as to where things might be headed on the peace front.

The Obama administration has been calling on Israel to make good on a settlement freeze commitment dating to the 2003 Bush-era Road Map (and, questionably to the 1993 Oslo DoP).

Netanyahu has been unwilling to do anything of the sort. He sought to codify a set of exemptions to a settlement freeze or in plainer English, guidelines for ongoing settlement expansion, and to have those blessed by Washington. The Obama team refused to become the first ever American government to formally authorize settlement expansion. That is the situation we have reached with today's announcement.

Netanyahu's cabinet clarified its so-called "settlement restraint" policy with today's decision (some have called it a "moratorium" or a "freeze" but as you will see shortly, it is nothing of the sort, and those words are an inappropriate description).

The only apparent restraint in the Israeli cabinet decision was to suspend issuing of new permits or beginning new construction in the West Bank for ten months. The less restrained side of the equation is this: 3000 units already under construction will continue; all public buildings and security infrastructure will continue to be built; no restrictions would apply to occupied East Jerusalem; and construction would resume after ten months.

Netanyahu also repeated the totally (meaningless) commitment of no new settlements or land confiscations (meaningless because since 1993, the official policy is no new settlements yet via expansion, new neighborhoods and outposts, the West Bank settler population has grown from 111,000 then to over 300,000 today, and because although the built-up area of settlements constitutes only 2% of West Bank land, double that amount is slated for growth, and a total of 40% comes under the Settlement Regional Councils, therefore land confiscation issue is a red herring).

While it is technically true that this "restraint" is a new Israeli commitment, its practical relevance is of very limited significance - building 3000 units in ten months neatly dovetails the regular annual settlement construction rates. Moreover, Netanyahu made sure to assertively mention all these caveats in today's announcement - in effect, poking the Obama administration, the international community, and the Palestinians in the eye.

While some claim this was a politically courageous act by Netanyahu, the real litmus test is easy to apply: Has this led to any shakiness, any crisis, any resignations in the most right wing coalition ever in Israel's history? The answer: absolutely not, and resignations in Israeli politics are about as rare as Turkeys on Thanksgiving.

Netanyahu's so-called "restraint package" was so minimalist that it kept his coalition happy while doing nothing to advance a genuine peace effort (Yes, there is some criticism from the far-right, and Netanyahu's supporters will point to it as proof of his bravery, but as I say, the real test is in his coalition - and there: not so much as a wobble).

The interesting development today, indeed the unprecedented development, was in the US response. Yes, Senator Mitchell did pro-forma explain why this is new, why this was progress from the Israeli government.

But the real American response came elsewhere, in Secretary Clinton and Envoy Mitchell's statements. They did not bless the Israeli non-freeze, explaining it fell short and that they expected more, and that "America does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements". (Admittedly they could have explicitly said that after ten months and the 3000 units, their expectation was for not a single new home to be built, they didn't).

The new language came in Secretary Clinton's description of what American expects the outcome of negotiations to be - for an "independent and viable [Palestinian] state based on the 1967 lines". Senator Mitchell quoted Clinton in repeating the call for a Palestinian state "based on the 67 lines."

Every conflict and every situation has its own lingua franca. In the Israeli-Palestinian context, a state based on the 67 lines is the dog-whistle for what constitutes a real, no-B.S. two-state outcome. It is also language that the US has conspicuously avoided using - avoided that is until today.

Previous administrations would speak of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 (but those are interpreted differently by the Israelis and Palestinians); the Clinton Parameters of December 2000 suggested percentages on territory, but never mentioned the 67 lines; in June 2002, President Bush used the phrase, ending the "occupation that began in 1967."

That language was adopted in the 2003 Road Map and used verbatim by President Obama in his September United Nations General Assembly speech. It is language very much open to interpretation. The "1967 lines" language add a far greater degree of clarity - and, as such, is an anathema to the Greater Land of Israel, anti-peace forces (many of whom are represented in today's Israeli government).

Interestingly, Secretary Clinton had begun to play with this language during her recent Middle East trip but had never been so explicit - until today. It is true that this adoption of new language comes late (perhaps too late) in the process and will need to be backed up by more concrete steps. It is though progress.

So the subtext of what went on today - the Obama administration is beginning to up the ante, at least declaratively, in the signals it is sending in response to Netanyahu's stubbornness on settlements, and in setting the table for the next phase of its peace efforts.

The question of course is - what next?

Senator Mitchell gave some hints about that also. He suggested that the US was still pursuing a comprehensive peace effort and notably discussed Syria at some length. He briefly mentioned the option of resuming regional multilateral talks with Israel and various Arab states on issues such as water and energy at an appropriate time. Most interesting perhaps, Senator Mitchell explained that negotiations, "will proceed on a variety of tracks," and while he continued to push for the resumption of direct Israeli-Palestinian talks, he also spoke of parallel talks that the US would conduct with each of the parties.

This combination of back-to-back negotiations - US-Israel and US-Palestinians - combined with the reference to the 1967 lines may signpost the way out of the peace impasse. The US will need to elaborate and put flesh on the bones of its "based on the 1967 lines" parameter and then pursue a conversation, mostly with the Israeli side, on how to implement that, and if necessary go public with a plan and tie incentives/disincentives to its acceptance/rejection.

-- Daniel Levy

The Sun Is Setting on the Two-State Solution by: Peter Marmorek

2009-11-25T20:29:00.000-08:00

http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/2009/11/24/the-sun-has-set-on-the-two-state-solution/?utm_source=Tikkun+Daily+Daily+Digest&utm_campaign=1426b685bb-DAILY_DIGEST_EMAIL&utm_medium=email>

The Sun Is Setting on the Two-State Solution

by: Peter Marmorek on November 24th, 2009

Perhaps recent leaders of Israel might made better choices had they spent more time reading Sherlock Holmes. Of particular use to them might have been The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet in which Holmes says, “It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Then they might have realized that the result of making a two-state solution impossible was to make a one-state solution inevitable. Having worked to weaken Palestine, to undermine all Palestinian leaders, to create – in Sharon’s memorable phrase for the settlements – facts on the ground they are now like a go player who having focused exclusively on a specific battle over territory suddenly looks at the bigger picture and realizes he’s lost the game.

We are now at that point of realization. Almost 10% of Israeli Jews now live in the Territories or in East Jerusalem. It would be impossible for any Israeli government to make a peace offer to Palestinians that would give up those homes and settlements: in Israeli politics, their coalition would instantly disappear. (And it’s unlikely they could do it militarily:the BBC reports that , “An increasing number of Israeli soldiers are publicly objecting, on religious and political grounds, to their role in the evacuation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.”) Similarly, it would not be possible for any Palestinian leader to accept the kind of offer any Israeli leader might realistically make: his support would also disappear. The handful of bantustans offered as a Palestinian country at Oslo might have been the closest to a joint solution ever reached. And if a two-state solution is impossible,as seems increasingly clear, then the only alternative, however improbable, is a one-state solution.

A one state solution means a country open to both Jews and Muslims. This is also called a binational solution, and its supporters “advocate a single state in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with citizenship and equal rights in the combined entity for all inhabitants of all three territories, without regard to ethnicity or religion.” Edward Said called for this, saying “the question is not how to devise means for persisting in trying to separate,” Israelis and Palestinians, “but to see whether it is possible for them to live together as fairly and peacefully as possible. But while this once sounded like an impossible dream, it is increasingly being seen on both sides as inevitable.

Stephen Walt’s recent piece A New Era in the Middle East? Uh-Oh nails it:

Be careful what you wish for. Israel is going to get what it has long sought: permanent control of the West Bank (along with de facto control over Gaza). The Palestinian Authority is increasingly irrelevant and may soon collapse, General Keith Dayton’s mission to train reliable and professional Palestinian security forces will end, and Israel will once again have full responsibility for some 5.2 million Palestinian Arabs under its control. And the issue will gradually shift from the creation of a viable Palestinian state — which was the central idea behind the Oslo process and the subsequent “Road Map” — to a struggle for civil and political rights within an Israel that controls all of mandate Palestine.

Jimmy Carter sees it coming too:

“Many Palestinian leaders are seriously considering acceptance of one state, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea,” Carter wrote.”By renouncing the dream of an independent Palestine, they would become fellow citizens with their Jewish neighbors and then demand equal rights within a democracy,” he added.

The “demographic time bomb”, the higher birth rate of Palestinians than Israelis, and the inexorable rise in the percentage of non-Jewish population in such a state has terrified Israelis. Ehud Olmert played to that fear in an interview in Haaretz, in which he was quoted as saying, “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.” And if you look at the polls, Israelis are overwhelmingly opposed to such a solution. So how can one assert its inevitability?

That question led me to the Electronic Intifada, and a long and fascinating exploration of that very question by Ali Abunimah, a long-time commentator on the Middle East, and proponent of he one-state solution. He compares Israel to South Africa, looking in detail at the attitudes of the white South Africans who were unalterably opposed to giving equal rights to blacks and coloureds, until their government recognized that there was no other possible solution. Abunimah says:

What did change for South Africa, and what all the weapons in the world were not able to prevent, was the complete loss of legitimacy of the apartheid regime and its practices. Once this legitimacy was gone, whites lost the will to maintain a system that relied on repression and violence and rendered them international pariahs; they negotiated a way out and lived to tell the tale. It all happened much more quickly and with considerably less violence than even the most optimistic predictions of the time. But this outcome could not have been predicted based on what whites said they were willing to accept, and it would not have occurred had the ANC been guided by opinion polls rather than the democratic principles of the Freedom Charter.

Zionism — as many Israelis openly worry — is suffering a similar, terminal loss of legitimacy as Israel is ever more isolated as a result of its actions. Israel’s self-image as a liberal “Jewish and democratic state” is proving impossible to maintain against the reality of a militarized, ultra-nationalist Jewish sectarian settler-colony that must carry out frequent and escalating massacres of “enemy” civilians (Lebanon and Gaza 2006, Gaza 2009) in a losing effort to check the resistance of the region’s indigenous people. Zionism cannot bomb, kidnap, assassinate, expel, demolish, settle and lie its way to legitimacy and acceptance.

The same conclusion is explored on “Informed Comment”, Juan Cole’s award winning blog. Cole starts by quoting Saeb Erekat, who heads the PLO steering committee, who recently asked “that Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas should be frank with the Palestinian people and admit to them that there is no possibility of a two-state solution given continued Israeli colonization of the West Bank.” Cole goes on to say:

It is morally and ethically unconscionable to leave millions of Palestinians in a condition of statelessness, in which they have no rights … Therefore, if there isn’t going to be a 2-state solution, there will have to be a one-state solution, in which Israel gives citizenship to the Palestinians.

The implications of Erekat’s statement gets a fine exegesis on CounterPunch, where John Whitbeck observes that, “This statement just might signal a turning point in the long, frustrating search for peace with some measure of justice in Israel/Palestine.”

So is that the end of Israel? Not necessarily. Over at Radical Middle, there’s a fine exploration both of the reasons why a one-state solution is coming and the extent – in the blending of economies, electric grids, aquifers – it’s already here. Here’s a fine quote from that piece:

The former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Meron Benvenisti, nicely sums up this line of thinking when he says, “The question is no longer whether [Israel-Palestine] will be binational, but which [one-state] model to choose.” The one-state solution is more than just a sensible adjustment to the facts, though. As presented by its post-Arafat, post-Zionism-as-religious-statehood advocates, it is both sensible and visionary.

So if, gallingly, there is to be a single state in partes tres (Israel, Palestine, and Gaza) how could Jewish culture, language and religion ever survive? Where is there a model for a minority holding on to such a separate identity? In a recent post on Mondoweiss, Bernard Avishai suggests a possible route:

The reason why I would like to live in a democratic state with a Jewish character is my attachment to the Hebrew language, the challenges of Jewish history, the grandeur of the Torah, the excitement of modern Israel poetry and popular culture – in other words, the same reasons why French Quebecers want a democratic province with a Québeçois character….Could I be happy if Israel were in some larger federation, like Quebecers, or French citizens, for that matter. Yes.

As an anglophone in Québec, I grew up always surrounded by two cultures, and the cultural, linguistic, and spiritual richness of that experience was a great gift, not a hardship. Canada certainly has political challenges, (that’s a different piece!) and there are valid reasons why people of good faith support separatism, but the country has survived by being, in the classic phrase, as Canadian as possible, under the circumstances. At its best that means honouring the different founding cultures, races, and religions. It means there is no one way to be Canadian, so different cultures aren’t expected to melt down into a mythical homogeneous whole, (which is why there’ll never be a House of UnCanadian Activities). Compared to the horrors of an endless war in pursuit of an impossible two-state solution that is somehow acceptable to both sides, a Québec solution doesn’t look so bad.

Tikkun is a bi-monthly English-language magazine, published in the United States, that analyzes American and Israeli culture, politics, religion and history from a progressive Jewish viewpoint, and provides commentary about Israeli politics and Jewish life in North America.

As Obama Decides on Afghanistan, JFK's Vietnam Deliberations Worth Recalling by William Pfaff

2009-11-25T10:08:00.000-08:00

As Obama Decides on Afghanistan, JFK's Vietnam Deliberations Worth Recalling
by William Pfaff

http://original.antiwar.com/pfaff/2009/11/24/as-obama-decides-on-afghanistan/

Dismiss General Casey Ken Blackwell

2009-11-25T09:34:00.000-08:00

Dismiss General Casey
Ken Blackwell
How was it possible for an Army medical officer to openly express treasonous statements and not be court-martialed? More
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/dismiss_general_casey.html

Monarchs, Mosques and Markets by Rami G. Khouri

2009-11-25T09:32:00.001-08:00

Monarchs, Mosques and Markets by Rami G. Khouri
The triad of monarchy, market and mosque is not new. It represents the Arab order from the ancient period before Byzantium and also from the early and middle Islamic eras. What is new is the emerging centrality of the Arab citizen.
more...
http://www.agenceglobal.com/Article.asp?Id=2198

Is Obama Failing in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Iran? by Patrick Seale

2009-11-25T09:30:00.000-08:00

Is Obama Failing in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Iran? by Patrick Seale
Obama’s cautious, conciliatory approach has all too often seemed like dithering -- even at times like a failure of nerve -- especially in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Iran.
more...
http://www.agenceglobal.com/Article.asp?Id=2197

The Root of All Fears Why Is Israel So Afraid of Iranian Nukes? Ariel Ilan Roth

2009-11-24T22:40:00.000-08:00

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

11/24/09

The Root of All Fears

Why Is Israel So Afraid of Iranian Nukes?

Ariel Ilan Roth

The special relationship between Israel and the United States is about to enter perhaps its rockiest patch ever. Israel is growing exasperated with the Obama administration’s effort to use diplomacy to roll back Iran’s growing uranium-enrichment program. Israelis know better than anyone else that the trick to developing a nuclear weapon as a small power is to drag out the process of diplomacy and inspections long enough to produce sufficient quantities of fissionable material. Israel should know: in the 1960s, it deliberately misled U.S. inspectors and repeatedly delayed site visits, providing the time to construct its Dimona reactor and reprocess enough plutonium to build a bomb. North Korea has followed a similar path, with similar results. And now, Israel suspects, Iran is doing the same, only with highly enriched uranium instead of plutonium.

Most observers believe that Israel’s preoccupation with Iran’s nuclear program stems from the fear that Iran would either use a nuclear weapon against Israel or give the bomb to one of its direct proxies, most likely Hezbollah. Given Tehran’s open hostility toward Jerusalem, such foreboding makes sense. But such a scenario is highly improbable.

Tehran’s profound dislike of the Jewish state notwithstanding, it is unlikely to attack Israel with a nuclear weapon because Israel’s atomic arsenal is orders of magnitude larger than whatever infant capability Iran could muster in the foreseeable future. Moreover, Israel is believed to possess a secure submarine-based second-strike capability that could devastate Iran.

Nor would Iran readily supply Hezbollah with atomic weapons. No nuclear state has ever turned over its most prized military asset to a subsidiary actor or surrendered its exclusive control over a weapon that it worked so hard to obtain. More important, if Hezbollah were to acquire and use a nuclear weapon against Israel, there would be no doubt about the weapon’s provenance and Iran would immediately face devastating retaliation. An attack on Israel, in other words, would mean the end of Iran.

Although many analysts question the rationality of the Iranian regime, it is in fact fairly conservative in its foreign policy. Iran has two long-range goals, achieving regional hegemony and spreading fundamentalist Islam, neither of which will be achieved if Iran initiates a nuclear exchange with Israel. Tehran’s expanding influence in Iraq and the fear that it inspires in the Persian Gulf states are already advancing the first goal. Iran needs only to possess nuclear weapons, not to use them, in order to further enhance its international prestige and force adversaries to take it seriously. Likewise, the deterrent power of an unused nuclear capability would allow the regime to spread its ideology without the constant worry of regime change imposed from abroad.

Since it is doubtful that Iran will use nuclear weapons against Israel or surrender control of the ultimate weapon to Hezbollah -- a point made recently by retired General Shlomo Gazit in Ma’arachot, the quarterly journal published by the Israeli military -- one can safely assume that the root of Israel’s Iranian obsession lies elsewhere.

Israel fears that Iran’s nuclear ambitions could undermine its qualitative superiority of arms and its consistent ability to inflict disproportionate casualties on adversaries -- the cornerstones of Israel’s defense strategy. Although some idealists dream of reconciliation in the Middle East based on a genuine and mutual recognition of all parties’ legitimate rights, most Israelis believe the key to enduring peace in the Middle East is convincing Israel’s adversaries that ejecting Israel through force is an impossible task not worth pursuing.

Essential to inducing that sense of despair is Israel’s ability to continuously trounce its enemies on the battlefield and suffer far fewer losses than it inflicts. The Iranian nuclear program threatens Israel’s ability to do this in two ways. First, an Iranian nuclear capability would likely force Israel to restrain itself due to fears that Iran’s nuclear weapons could provide an implied security guarantee to other anti-Zionist forces -- the sort of guarantee that would prevent Israel from causing the massive losses it has in the past, while giving anti-Israel forces the confidence to keep up the fight.

Israeli restraint during a war could take many forms, but it is unlikely that the unmitigated rout of the 1967 Six-Day War or the direct threat posed to Arab capitals at the end of the 1973 Yom Kippur War would have occurred if a nuclear guarantee had been forthcoming from a true regional adversary such as Iran, rather than from a distant superpower such as the Soviet Union, whose chief interest lay in the humiliation of its rival, not the destruction of Israel.

The even greater threat posed by Iran’s nuclear program is its potential to unleash a cascade of proliferation in the Middle East, beginning with Egypt and Saudi Arabia. For both of these states, the idea that Jews and Persians could have a monopoly on nuclear weapons in a region demographically and culturally dominated by Arabs is shameful. For Saudi Arabia, a security motivation will be at play as well, given its physical proximity to Iran and the strategic imperative of deterring any Iranian threat to Saudi Arabia’s oil-production facilities.

The development of nuclear weapons by Egypt or Saudi Arabia would pose a grave danger to the Jewish state, despite the fact that Egypt has signed a peace treaty with Israel. This is because leaders who have reconciled themselves to Israel’s existence -- including those of Egypt, Jordan, and certain segments of the Palestinian national movement -- have done so because they believed Israel was strong but unlikely to endure in the long term. (Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, for example, justified his pursuit of a peace process with Israel by comparing the Israelis to crusaders: strong today, gone tomorrow.) More broadly, as the Palestinian-American political scientist Hilal Khashan’s work on Arab attitudes toward peace has shown, the willingness of Arabs to make peace with Israel is a direct function of their perception of Israel’s invincibility. Just as an Iranian nuclear capability would imply a nuclear guarantee for anti-Zionist proxies, an Egyptian or Saudi nuclear capability would reduce incentives for other Arab states to make peace with Israel because, shielded under an Arab nuclear umbrella, they would no longer fear catastrophic defeat or further loss of territory.

Such developments would shatter the perception of Israeli invincibility on which successive Israeli governments have pinned their hopes for eventual peace in the region. As a result, Israel’s security would be dependent on maintaining a state of perpetual armed readiness and hair-trigger alert that could counter immediate threats but only in an inconclusive manner, as displayed recently in Lebanon and Gaza. The restraint that Israel showed in both conflicts out of deference to U.S. and European concerns would only be magnified by the new fear of crossing an Arab red line. Future operations resembling the 2006 invasion of Lebanon or the January 2009 attack on Gaza are likely to be even more restrained and therefore, by Israel’s own metric, less effective in pushing Arabs toward peace. In fact, such operations may do Israel more harm than good, because as Israel uses less force and causes less damage, the deterrent effect that Israel hopes to bolster through such operations only gets further eroded.

The possibility that Israel may no longer be capable of forcing peace upon those who deny its right to exist is beginning to dawn on many Israelis. Whether Israel attacks Iran’s nuclear infrastructure or not, the time has come for Israel’s defense community to develop a strategic doctrine for long-term coexistence that does not rely on a posture of invincibility. But, given that widespread Arab acceptance of Israel’s right to exist does not appear to be on the horizon, most Israelis, including the current prime minister, insist that Israel’s most urgent strategic objective is to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Doing so would temporarily remove the threat of a regional nuclear cascade and maintain Israel’s superiority of arms. More important, it would hold at bay the suspicion that Israel may never attain true peace. This increasingly widespread fear has a toxic effect on national morale, is an existential threat to the Jewish state, and lies at the root of Israel’s obsession with the Iranian bomb.

ARIEL ILAN ROTH is the Associate Director of National Security Studies at the Johns Hopkins University’s Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

January election in Iraq? Doubtful

2009-11-24T22:39:00.001-08:00

LOS ANGELES TIMES

11/24/09

January election in Iraq? Doubtful

Shiite Muslim and Kurdish wrangling over an election law will probably push the voting to February, violating Iraq's Constitution and jeopardizing Obama's vow to bring U.S. troops home by August 2010.

Liz Sly and Caesar Ahmed
Hopes for a January election in Iraq faded Monday after Shiite Muslim and Kurdish legislators teamed up to vote for a new version of an election law that in effect takes seats away from Sunni Arabs and is almost certain to draw another veto from the country's Sunni vice president.

Parliament then adjourned for a holiday until Dec. 8, leaving in limbo the fate of the law that is needed if the crucial election is to take place by the end of January, as mandated by Iraq's Constitution. The withdrawal of U.S. forces has been pegged to the timing of the poll, and a delay could jeopardize President Obama's promise to bring all combat troops home by August 2010.

The head of Iraq's election commission told the Associated Press that he doubted there was now enough time to hold the poll by January. "Most probably, it might be moved to February," Faraj Haidari said.

Though that would violate the terms of the constitution, lawmakers seemed unconcerned about the prospect of a constitutional crisis.

"Nobody's applying the constitution anyway," said Kurdish legislator Mahmoud Othman, who predicted the election would be delayed. "We are in a mess now, so it doesn't make a lot of difference."

The protracted battle over the election law has again exposed the sectarian fissures that pushed Iraq to the brink of civil war earlier in the decade, in a troubling reminder that the country's factions still have not resolved most of the major differences that divide them.

In a rerun of scenes that were common during the height of the bloodshed in 2005 and 2006, fuming Sunnis stormed out of the parliamentary session, leaving the main Shiite and Kurdish alliances that dominate the legislature to vote overwhelmingly for amendments that will take away seats from Sunni provinces and add them to Kurdish ones.

The amendments did not offer any extra seats to Iraqi refugees, who include many Sunnis, and therefore did not address the complaint that prompted Vice President Tariq Hashimi to veto the original law last week.

Kurds had subsequently threatened to boycott the poll because they didn't like the way seats had been distributed by the election commission. They took advantage of the veto to recast the law, with the help of Shiites, in a way that would give the Kurds a greater portion of seats in an expanded parliament than provided under the version passed last month.

Sam Parker of the Washington-based U.S. Institute of Peace estimated that the new formula will take seven seats from Sunni provinces and give them to Kurdish ones. "This is truly a scandal," he said. "I bet Hashimi is kicking himself."

Iraq's president and two vice presidents have authority to veto legislation.

Sunni lawmakers, enraged that the veto had resulted in a law even more unfavorable to their interests than the previous measure, vowed to reject it.

Lawmaker Osama Nujaifi called on Sunnis to take to the streets to protest the law. Though Shiites and Kurds have enough votes in parliament to override a second veto, the upcoming Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha will push back the process until well into December, leaving little time for preparations for the poll.

The latest revisions also raise the possibility that Iraqis will go into this election as bitterly divided as they were the last time around, when many Sunnis boycotted the balloting, and that the legitimacy of the vote will be challenged.

Afghan Army Turnover Rate Threatens U.S. War Plans By Gareth Porter*

2009-11-24T22:34:00.000-08:00

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49397

Afghan Army Turnover Rate Threatens U.S. War Plans
By Gareth Porter*

Convicted Lockerbie Bomber Probably Not Guilty - So Who Is the Real Criminal? By Andrew I. Killgore

2009-11-24T12:40:00.000-08:00

http://www.wrmea.org/component/content/article/321-2009-november/6359-convicted-lockerbie-bomber-probably-not-guiltyso-who-is-the-real-criminal.html

Special Report

Convicted Lockerbie Bomber Probably Not Guilty - So Who Is the Real Criminal?
By Andrew I. Killgore

Goldman/AIG Conspiracy Theories: There’s a Reason They Won’t Go Away from Naked Capitalism

2009-11-24T06:15:00.000-08:00

Goldman/AIG Conspiracy Theories: There’s a Reason They Won’t Go Away

Posted: 24 Nov 2009 01:30 AM PST

Note: this post is by Thomas Adams, at Paykin Krieg and Adams, LLP, and a former managing director at Ambac and FGIC, with some minor additions by yours truly. This is a significant piece of some puzzles he, some other experts who prefer to remain anonymous, and I have been pushing on for several months.

As we have been reading the latest coverage on the AIG bailout from the SIGTARP report and the Treasury Secretary Geithner’s Congressional testimony, a nagging question remains unresolved: why did AIG get bailed out but the monoline bond insurers did not?

The business that caused AIG to blow up was the same that caused the bond insurers to blow up – collateralized debt obligations backed by sub-prime mortgage bonds (ABS CDOs). This was actually one of the few business that AIG Financial Products had in common with the monolines. AIG didn’t participate in municipal insurance, MBS or other ABS deals, which were all important for the monolines.

Certainly, AIG was larger than any of the bond insurers, but in aggregate, the bond insurers had a tremendous amount of ABS CDO exposure, which at the peak was probably over $300 billion. Despite AIG’s claims to have withdrawn from subprime at the end of 2005, we have identified particular 2006 deals with substantial subprime content that AIG most assuredly did guarantee.

In addition, the monolines had exposure to many other assets classes that AIG did not which created chaos for the holders of those bonds when the monolines were downgraded. The chain reaction risk of the bond insurers was arguably greater, when you throw in the damage to the aucton rate securities market, which was rooted in the muni market. In 2007, MBIA had over $650 billion of par insured, Ambac had about $500 billion, FSA had about $380 billion and FGIC had about $300 billion. Throwing in CIFG and XLCA, the total insured par of the monolines was about $2 trillion – this amount certainly would qualify as large enough to be “systemic risk” if the insurers were allowed to fail.

In contrast, while AIG’s aggregate insured par was greater, the only portion that really presented a systemic risk exposure was the CDS and structured finance exposures, which had an aggregate par exposure of about $400-500 billion. a persuasive argument could be made that the monolines were just as intertwined in the financial system as AIG and, thanks to their municipal exposure, presented as great or greater a systemic risk to the financial markets and the economy.

Yet AIG was bailed out and the monolines were not.

So what happened? How did the monolines get dropped and AIG get rescued? The popular reason given has been that AIG was so big that they affected all segments of the economy, whereas the monolines were only midsized and not critical to the economy. i believe that SIGTARP repeated this version of events last week. I understand that Treasury Secretary Geithner last week repeated this notion and added new information – that he was concerned about the cascading risk of AIG’s non CDS exposure.

While this produces a bigger par exposure for AIG, these other areas did not have the huge risks of loss, have largely remained functional, and did not have the issue of collateral posting. The risk were at the parent level, at AIG FP; the bulk of AIG’s business was written by regulated subsidiaries whose claims-paying ability would not be impaired by an AIG FP failure. So, in my view, this is a fairly weak, after the fact argument. A more plausible case might be made that AIG also had a securities lending business that had sprung a $20 billion leak, but that wee problem hasn’t gotten much mention in the official defenses.

I have a different interpretation. I should note that I am a former employee of a bond insurer, so I admit to a bias. However, I my general perspective had been, until recently, that neither AIG or the bond insurers should have been rescued.

When I was at FGIC, Deutsche Bank, Lehman, Bear and UBS were all over my company with sales coverage for CDO deals. But we never heard much from Goldman. I was actually surprised to see that they were so big with John Paulson’s CDO adventures (as recently disclosed in “The Best Trade Ever”), because I never thought they were that big in the CDO market.

One big reason I didn’t know Goldman was so big in CDOs – they didn’t work with the monolines.

Goldman wanted their counterparties to post collateral so they would have protection against corporate downgrades. The monolines refused to have collateral posting requirements in their CDS contracts. The rating agencies supported them in this position on the argument that maintaining their AAA rating was “fundamental to their business”.

AIG, on the other hand, agreed to collateral posting requirements. in fact, they used this as a competitive advantage – they got more business because of it and marketed their flexibility on this issue to the banks. There were two the key distinctions between the monolines and AIG – first, AIG had other businesses, whose losses could threaten AIG’s financial guarantee business while monolines promised to pay claims first, to protect investors. Second, AIG had a history of negotiating before they paid claims (there is an interesting history with a ABS film receivables deal where AIG refused to pay, while the monolines covered similar deals and did not have the same “out” in their policies. this deal did serious damage to AIG’s reputation in the ABS market and shut them out of many deals). So despite their AAA rating, AIG was not as trusted by the structured finance and CDS market – there was a fear that AIG would wiggle out of their obligations in a way that the monolines would not.

All of the other banks got comfortable with the monolines not having to post collateral for CDS trades because of their AAA ratings. Goldman never did.

Of course, Goldman was one of the few banks that clearly set out to profit from shorting CDOs. They obviously realized that if their CDS counterparty was on the hook for a lot of ABS CDOs that were going to blow up, the insurance provider would likely get downgraded. If the downgrade of the insurer was very likely, the only way the short-CDO strategy worked was if the insurer would post collateral.

So Goldman only used AIG, who would provide protection against their downgrade, which Goldman knew would happen because they were stuffing AIG with toxic ABS CDOs.

The banks that used the monolines for their ABS CDOs were making a major error by taking on the monoline downgrade risk without protection, especially if they knew that the ABS CDOs were toxic. So I suspect that most of the banks did not really know that the ABS CDOs would be as toxic as they turned out to be.

This is, of course, what happened. The ABS CDOs blew up, the bond insurers got downgraded, the banks that used them got crushed because their hedges against their CDO risks were now in jeopardy. A death spiral between the monolines and the banks ensued (the ARS meltdown added to the troubles). Goldman didn’t care, because they had collateral posted by AIG once AIG got downgraded..

All of the banks who faced the monolines had to start considering commutation deals with the monolines because it was obvious the monolines did not have enough capital to cover all of the CDO losses. in these commutations, the banks accepted payments as low as 40 cents on the dollar.

Most of the monoline ratings roubles had unfolded earlier in 2008 – many of them had been downgraded, several commutations had already occurred by the time of the AIG bailout. AIG managed to put off the threat of serious downgrade for a long time, despite the junk in their portfolio (as 2008 progressed, it was a mystery to me and many others why the onolines were being downgraded but AIG was not). While AIG had been downgraded to AA some time earlier, this hadn’t caused much of a disruption because the real trigger for collateral posting was if they went below AA. For a variety of reasons, this wasn’t a threat until September of 2008.

I hate to get sucked into the vampire squid line of thinking about Goldman, but the only explanation i can think of for why AIG got rescued and the monolines did not is because Goldman had significant exposure to AIG and did not have exposure to the monolines.

When it became clear that AIG could face bankruptcy, Goldman’s plan to profit by shorting ABS CDOs was threatened. While they had the collateral posted, thanks to the downgrades, this collateral could be tied up or lost if AIG went bankrupt. This was a real crisis for Goldman – they thought they had outsmarted the subprime market with their ABS CDOs and outsmarted all of the other banks by getting collateral posting from AIG when they got downgraded. But if AIG went away, this strategy would have blown up and cost Goldman billions.

All of this is essentially factual and based, for the most part, on public information.

As a matter of speculation, i believe that Goldman and their helpers deliberately pumped up the media with the threats that the subprime market posed in order to hasten the collapse of the subprime market. this allowed them to realize their gains sooner from shorting ABS CDOs – they had become impatient waiting for it to blow up.

In addition, I believe that Goldman and their helpers – including their many connections with the White House and the Fed – pumped up concerns about the systemic risk that the market was facing from a Lehman and AIG failure, so that they could force the government to step in and bail out AIG. This would also explain why Lehman was not bailed out. Lehman didn’t really matter to Goldman. But the fear created by Lehman’s failure served as a good excuse for why they should rescue AIG.

I have been wondering why the sub-prime market blow up led to such a massive crisis when subprime and structured finance had experienced big problems before without the issue of systemic risk and financial market collapse.
Certainly, the ABS CDOs were toxic and caused big holes, but not so big that it couldn’t be addressed by an RTC type of clearing system. Various analyst reports of the bad subprime deals (and ABS CDOs) makes it pretty clear that the 2006-2007 vintages were the worst and will probably only create about $500-700 million of aggregate losses. Terrible, but not insurmountable.

This leads me to conclude that the bailout was prompted by fear mongering and deliberate strategies and manipulation on the part of Goldman and a few select others, to make sure that AIG would be bailed out to protect their trades in shorting ABS CDOs.

i believe that John Paulson benefited from this bailout, on his $5 billon or so of ABS CDOs with AIG. But not as much as Goldman benefited themselves, via Abacus and, perhaps, other deals.

AIG, Goldman and ABS CDOs were tied together at the center of the crisis. From Goldman’s perspective, all of the other participants were secondary – they had no exposure to the monolines and they were probably hedged against the other banks. The only loose end was the collateral posted by AIG.

The final question that this raises for me: would it have been cheaper for the government and the taxpayer to have bailed out the bond insurers instead of AIG? The total amount of CDOs and credit default swaps that would have needed to be guaranteed would have been smaller. In the number of investors across the market that would have benefited would probably have been larger. The auction rate securities market, the muni market, the investors that held bond insurer exposure to MBS and ABS would have all benefited. None of these markets were aided by AIG’s bailout.

But a bond insurer bailout would not have helped Goldman much and the AIG bailout did.

Yves here. Note I differ with Tom on how much Goldman could or did pump up subprime fears. A lot of people focused on Jan Hatzius’ bearish calls on financial system losses, but quite a few people in a position to know claim that Hatzius is not the sort to take commercially expedient views. But once the asset-backed commercial paper started imploding in August 2007, the officialdom was very much engaged. So if one can connect the dots between Goldman and the fear and loathing that hit the ABCP market (recall all paper was repudiated as in being possibly tainted by subprime), the story becomes very tidy.

Posted: 24 Nov 2009 01:30 AM PST

Note: this post is by Thomas Adams, at Paykin Krieg and Adams, LLP, and a former managing director at Ambac and FGIC, with some minor additions by yours truly. This is a significant piece of some puzzles he, some other experts who prefer to remain anonymous, and I have been pushing on for several months.

As we have been reading the latest coverage on the AIG bailout from the SIGTARP report and the Treasury Secretary Geithner’s Congressional testimony, a nagging question remains unresolved: why did AIG get bailed out but the monoline bond insurers did not?

The business that caused AIG to blow up was the same that caused the bond insurers to blow up – collateralized debt obligations backed by sub-prime mortgage bonds (ABS CDOs). This was actually one of the few business that AIG Financial Products had in common with the monolines. AIG didn’t participate in municipal insurance, MBS or other ABS deals, which were all important for the monolines.

Certainly, AIG was larger than any of the bond insurers, but in aggregate, the bond insurers had a tremendous amount of ABS CDO exposure, which at the peak was probably over $300 billion. Despite AIG’s claims to have withdrawn from subprime at the end of 2005, we have identified particular 2006 deals with substantial subprime content that AIG most assuredly did guarantee.

In addition, the monolines had exposure to many other assets classes that AIG did not which created chaos for the holders of those bonds when the monolines were downgraded. The chain reaction risk of the bond insurers was arguably greater, when you throw in the damage to the aucton rate securities market, which was rooted in the muni market. In 2007, MBIA had over $650 billion of par insured, Ambac had about $500 billion, FSA had about $380 billion and FGIC had about $300 billion. Throwing in CIFG and XLCA, the total insured par of the monolines was about $2 trillion – this amount certainly would qualify as large enough to be “systemic risk” if the insurers were allowed to fail.

In contrast, while AIG’s aggregate insured par was greater, the only portion that really presented a systemic risk exposure was the CDS and structured finance exposures, which had an aggregate par exposure of about $400-500 billion. a persuasive argument could be made that the monolines were just as intertwined in the financial system as AIG and, thanks to their municipal exposure, presented as great or greater a systemic risk to the financial markets and the economy.

Yet AIG was bailed out and the monolines were not.

So what happened? How did the monolines get dropped and AIG get rescued? The popular reason given has been that AIG was so big that they affected all segments of the economy, whereas the monolines were only midsized and not critical to the economy. i believe that SIGTARP repeated this version of events last week. I understand that Treasury Secretary Geithner last week repeated this notion and added new information – that he was concerned about the cascading risk of AIG’s non CDS exposure.

While this produces a bigger par exposure for AIG, these other areas did not have the huge risks of loss, have largely remained functional, and did not have the issue of collateral posting. The risk were at the parent level, at AIG FP; the bulk of AIG’s business was written by regulated subsidiaries whose claims-paying ability would not be impaired by an AIG FP failure. So, in my view, this is a fairly weak, after the fact argument. A more plausible case might be made that AIG also had a securities lending business that had sprung a $20 billion leak, but that wee problem hasn’t gotten much mention in the official defenses.

I have a different interpretation. I should note that I am a former employee of a bond insurer, so I admit to a bias. However, I my general perspective had been, until recently, that neither AIG or the bond insurers should have been rescued.

When I was at FGIC, Deutsche Bank, Lehman, Bear and UBS were all over my company with sales coverage for CDO deals. But we never heard much from Goldman. I was actually surprised to see that they were so big with John Paulson’s CDO adventures (as recently disclosed in “The Best Trade Ever”), because I never thought they were that big in the CDO market.

One big reason I didn’t know Goldman was so big in CDOs – they didn’t work with the monolines.

Goldman wanted their counterparties to post collateral so they would have protection against corporate downgrades. The monolines refused to have collateral posting requirements in their CDS contracts. The rating agencies supported them in this position on the argument that maintaining their AAA rating was “fundamental to their business”.

AIG, on the other hand, agreed to collateral posting requirements. in fact, they used this as a competitive advantage – they got more business because of it and marketed their flexibility on this issue to the banks. There were two the key distinctions between the monolines and AIG – first, AIG had other businesses, whose losses could threaten AIG’s financial guarantee business while monolines promised to pay claims first, to protect investors. Second, AIG had a history of negotiating before they paid claims (there is an interesting history with a ABS film receivables deal where AIG refused to pay, while the monolines covered similar deals and did not have the same “out” in their policies. this deal did serious damage to AIG’s reputation in the ABS market and shut them out of many deals). So despite their AAA rating, AIG was not as trusted by the structured finance and CDS market – there was a fear that AIG would wiggle out of their obligations in a way that the monolines would not.

All of the other banks got comfortable with the monolines not having to post collateral for CDS trades because of their AAA ratings. Goldman never did.

Of course, Goldman was one of the few banks that clearly set out to profit from shorting CDOs. They obviously realized that if their CDS counterparty was on the hook for a lot of ABS CDOs that were going to blow up, the insurance provider would likely get downgraded. If the downgrade of the insurer was very likely, the only way the short-CDO strategy worked was if the insurer would post collateral.

So Goldman only used AIG, who would provide protection against their downgrade, which Goldman knew would happen because they were stuffing AIG with toxic ABS CDOs.

The banks that used the monolines for their ABS CDOs were making a major error by taking on the monoline downgrade risk without protection, especially if they knew that the ABS CDOs were toxic. So I suspect that most of the banks did not really know that the ABS CDOs would be as toxic as they turned out to be.

This is, of course, what happened. The ABS CDOs blew up, the bond insurers got downgraded, the banks that used them got crushed because their hedges against their CDO risks were now in jeopardy. A death spiral between the monolines and the banks ensued (the ARS meltdown added to the troubles). Goldman didn’t care, because they had collateral posted by AIG once AIG got downgraded..

All of the banks who faced the monolines had to start considering commutation deals with the monolines because it was obvious the monolines did not have enough capital to cover all of the CDO losses. in these commutations, the banks accepted payments as low as 40 cents on the dollar.

Most of the monoline ratings roubles had unfolded earlier in 2008 – many of them had been downgraded, several commutations had already occurred by the time of the AIG bailout. AIG managed to put off the threat of serious downgrade for a long time, despite the junk in their portfolio (as 2008 progressed, it was a mystery to me and many others why the onolines were being downgraded but AIG was not). While AIG had been downgraded to AA some time earlier, this hadn’t caused much of a disruption because the real trigger for collateral posting was if they went below AA. For a variety of reasons, this wasn’t a threat until September of 2008.

I hate to get sucked into the vampire squid line of thinking about Goldman, but the only explanation i can think of for why AIG got rescued and the monolines did not is because Goldman had significant exposure to AIG and did not have exposure to the monolines.

When it became clear that AIG could face bankruptcy, Goldman’s plan to profit by shorting ABS CDOs was threatened. While they had the collateral posted, thanks to the downgrades, this collateral could be tied up or lost if AIG went bankrupt. This was a real crisis for Goldman – they thought they had outsmarted the subprime market with their ABS CDOs and outsmarted all of the other banks by getting collateral posting from AIG when they got downgraded. But if AIG went away, this strategy would have blown up and cost Goldman billions.

All of this is essentially factual and based, for the most part, on public information.

As a matter of speculation, i believe that Goldman and their helpers deliberately pumped up the media with the threats that the subprime market posed in order to hasten the collapse of the subprime market. this allowed them to realize their gains sooner from shorting ABS CDOs – they had become impatient waiting for it to blow up.

In addition, I believe that Goldman and their helpers – including their many connections with the White House and the Fed – pumped up concerns about the systemic risk that the market was facing from a Lehman and AIG failure, so that they could force the government to step in and bail out AIG. This would also explain why Lehman was not bailed out. Lehman didn’t really matter to Goldman. But the fear created by Lehman’s failure served as a good excuse for why they should rescue AIG.

I have been wondering why the sub-prime market blow up led to such a massive crisis when subprime and structured finance had experienced big problems before without the issue of systemic risk and financial market collapse.
Certainly, the ABS CDOs were toxic and caused big holes, but not so big that it couldn’t be addressed by an RTC type of clearing system. Various analyst reports of the bad subprime deals (and ABS CDOs) makes it pretty clear that the 2006-2007 vintages were the worst and will probably only create about $500-700 million of aggregate losses. Terrible, but not insurmountable.

This leads me to conclude that the bailout was prompted by fear mongering and deliberate strategies and manipulation on the part of Goldman and a few select others, to make sure that AIG would be bailed out to protect their trades in shorting ABS CDOs.

i believe that John Paulson benefited from this bailout, on his $5 billon or so of ABS CDOs with AIG. But not as much as Goldman benefited themselves, via Abacus and, perhaps, other deals.

AIG, Goldman and ABS CDOs were tied together at the center of the crisis. From Goldman’s perspective, all of the other participants were secondary – they had no exposure to the monolines and they were probably hedged against the other banks. The only loose end was the collateral posted by AIG.

The final question that this raises for me: would it have been cheaper for the government and the taxpayer to have bailed out the bond insurers instead of AIG? The total amount of CDOs and credit default swaps that would have needed to be guaranteed would have been smaller. In the number of investors across the market that would have benefited would probably have been larger. The auction rate securities market, the muni market, the investors that held bond insurer exposure to MBS and ABS would have all benefited. None of these markets were aided by AIG’s bailout.

But a bond insurer bailout would not have helped Goldman much and the AIG bailout did.

Yves here. Note I differ with Tom on how much Goldman could or did pump up subprime fears. A lot of people focused on Jan Hatzius’ bearish calls on financial system losses, but quite a few people in a position to know claim that Hatzius is not the sort to take commercially expedient views. But once the asset-backed commercial paper started imploding in August 2007, the officialdom was very much engaged. So if one can connect the dots between Goldman and the fear and loathing that hit the ABCP market (recall all paper was repudiated as in being possibly tainted by subprime), the story becomes very tidy.

Blackwater's Secret War in Pakistan By Jeremy Scahill

2009-11-23T21:57:00.000-08:00

The Nation.
Blackwater's Secret War in Pakistan
By Jeremy Scahill

November 23, 2009

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help run a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus

Jeremy Scahill: Reps. Jan Schakowsky and Carol Shea-Porter argue that since Adam Hermanson died while working on a Defense Department contract, the DoD is obliged to investigate.
The source, who has worked on covert US military programs for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of Blackwater's involvement. He spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. The source said that the program is so "compartmentalized" that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence.

The White House did not return calls or email messages seeking comment for this story. Capt. John Kirby, the spokesperson for Adm. Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Nation, "We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature." A defense official, on background, specifically denied that Blackwater performs work on drone strikes or intelligence for JSOC in Pakistan. "We don't have any contracts to do that work for us. We don't contract that kind of work out, period," the official said. "There has not been, and is not now, contracts between JSOC and that organization for these types of services." The previously unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program that the agency's director, Leon Panetta, announced he had canceled in June 2009. "This is a parallel operation to the CIA," said the source. "They are two separate beasts." The program puts Blackwater at the epicenter of a US military operation within the borders of a nation against which the United States has not declared war--knowledge that could further strain the already tense relations between the United States and Pakistan. In 2006, the United States and Pakistan struck a deal that authorized JSOC to enter Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden with the understanding that Pakistan would deny it had given permission. Officially, the United States is not supposed to have any active military operations in the country. Blackwater, which recently changed its name to Xe Services and US Training Center, denies the company is operating in Pakistan. "Xe Services has only one employee in Pakistan performing construction oversight for the U.S. Government," Blackwater spokesperson Mark Corallo said in a statement to The Nation, adding that the company has "no other operations of any kind in Pakistan."

A former senior executive at Blackwater confirmed the military intelligence source's claim that the company is working in Pakistan for the CIA and JSOC, the premier counterterrorism and covert operations force within the military. He said that Blackwater is also working for the Pakistani government on a subcontract with an Islamabad-based security firm that puts US Blackwater operatives on the ground with Pakistani forces in counter-terrorism operations, including house raids and border interdictions, in the North-West Frontier Province and elsewhere in Pakistan. This arrangement, the former executive said, allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country. He also confirmed that Blackwater has a facility in Karachi and has personnel deployed elsewhere in Pakistan. The former executive spoke on condition of anonymity.

His account and that of the military intelligence source were borne out by a US military source who has knowledge of Special Forces actions in Pakistan and Afghanistan. When asked about Blackwater's covert work for JSOC in Pakistan, this source, who also asked for anonymity, told The Nation, "From my information that I have, that is absolutely correct," adding, "There's no question that's occurring."

"It wouldn't surprise me because we've outsourced nearly everything," said Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff from 2002 to 2005, when told of Blackwater's role in Pakistan. Wilkerson said that during his time in the Bush administration, he saw the beginnings of Blackwater's involvement with the sensitive operations of the military and CIA. "Part of this, of course, is an attempt to get around the constraints the Congress has placed on DoD. If you don't have sufficient soldiers to do it, you hire civilians to do it. I mean, it's that simple. It would not surprise me."

The Counterterrorism Tag Team in Karachi

The covert JSOC program with Blackwater in Pakistan dates back to at least 2007, according to the military intelligence source. The current head of JSOC is Vice Adm. William McRaven, who took over the post from Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC from 2003 to 2008 before being named the top US commander in Afghanistan. Blackwater's presence in Pakistan is "not really visible, and that's why nobody has cracked down on it," said the source. Blackwater's operations in Pakistan, he said, are not done through State Department contracts or publicly identified Defense contracts. "It's Blackwater via JSOC, and it's a classified no-bid [contract] approved on a rolling basis." The main JSOC/Blackwater facility in Karachi, according to the source, is nondescript: three trailers with various generators, satellite phones and computer systems are used as a makeshift operations center. "It's a very rudimentary operation," says the source. "I would compare it to [CIA] outposts in Kurdistan or any of the Special Forces outposts. It's very bare bones, and that's the point."

Blackwater's work for JSOC in Karachi is coordinated out of a Task Force based at Bagram Air Base in neighboring Afghanistan, according to the military intelligence source. While JSOC technically runs the operations in Karachi, he said, it is largely staffed by former US special operations soldiers working for a division of Blackwater, once known as Blackwater SELECT, and intelligence analysts working for a Blackwater affiliate, Total Intelligence Solutions (TIS), which is owned by Blackwater's founder, Erik Prince. The military source said that the name Blackwater SELECT may have been changed recently. Total Intelligence, which is run out of an office on the ninth floor of a building in the Ballston area of Arlington, Virginia, is staffed by former analysts and operatives from the CIA, DIA, FBI and other agencies. It is modeled after the CIA's counterterrorism center. In Karachi, TIS runs a "media-scouring/open-source network," according to the source. Until recently, Total Intelligence was run by two former top CIA officials, Cofer Black and Robert Richer, both of whom have left the company. In Pakistan, Blackwater is not using either its original name or its new moniker, Xe Services, according to the former Blackwater executive. "They are running most of their work through TIS because the other two [names] have such a stain on them," he said. Corallo, the Blackwater spokesperson, denied that TIS or any other division or affiliate of Blackwater has any personnel in Pakistan.

The US military intelligence source said that Blackwater's classified contracts keep getting renewed at the request of JSOC. Blackwater, he said, is already so deeply entrenched that it has become a staple of the US military operations in Pakistan. According to the former Blackwater executive, "The politics that go with the brand of BW is somewhat set aside because what you're doing is really one military guy to another." Blackwater's first known contract with the CIA for operations in Afghanistan was awarded in 2002 and was for work along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

One of the concerns raised by the military intelligence source is that some Blackwater personnel are being given rolling security clearances above their approved clearances. Using Alternative Compartmentalized Control Measures (ACCMs), he said, the Blackwater personnel are granted clearance to a Special Access Program, the bureaucratic term used to describe highly classified "black" operations. "With an ACCM, the security manager can grant access to you to be exposed to and operate within compartmentalized programs far above 'secret'--even though you have no business doing so," said the source. It allows Blackwater personnel that "do not have the requisite security clearance or do not hold a security clearance whatsoever to participate in classified operations by virtue of trust," he added. "Think of it as an ultra-exclusive level above top secret. That's exactly what it is: a circle of love." Blackwater, therefore, has access to "all source" reports that are culled in part from JSOC units in the field. "That's how a lot of things over the years have been conducted with contractors," said the source. "We have contractors that regularly see things that top policy-makers don't unless they ask."

According to the source, Blackwater has effectively marketed itself as a company whose operatives have "conducted lethal direct action missions and now, for a price, you can have your own planning cell. JSOC just ate that up," he said, adding, "They have a sizable force in Pakistan--not for any nefarious purpose if you really want to look at it that way--but to support a legitimate contract that's classified for JSOC." Blackwater's Pakistan JSOC contracts are secret and are therefore shielded from public oversight, he said. The source is not sure when the arrangement with JSOC began, but he says that a spin-off of Blackwater SELECT "was issued a no-bid contract for support to shooters for a JSOC Task Force and they kept extending it." Some of the Blackwater personnel, he said, work undercover as aid workers. "Nobody even gives them a second thought."

The military intelligence source said that the Blackwater/JSOC Karachi operation is referred to as "Qatar cubed," in reference to the US forward operating base in Qatar that served as the hub for the planning and implementation of the US invasion of Iraq. "This is supposed to be the brave new world," he says. "This is the Jamestown of the new millennium and it's meant to be a lily pad. You can jump off to Uzbekistan, you can jump back over the border, you can jump sideways, you can jump northwest. It's strategically located so that they can get their people wherever they have to without having to wrangle with the military chain of command in Afghanistan, which is convoluted. They don't have to deal with that because they're operating under a classified mandate."

In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA, the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, according to the military intelligence source. Blackwater does not actually carry out the operations, he said, which are executed on the ground by JSOC forces. "That piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don't know if you noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan," he said. "So, did I miss something, did Rumsfeld come back into power?"

Pakistan's Military Contracting Maze

Blackwater, according to the military intelligence source, is not doing the actual killing as part of its work in Pakistan. "The SELECT personnel are not going into places with private aircraft and going after targets," he said. "It's not like Blackwater SELECT people are running around assassinating people." Instead, US Special Forces teams carry out the plans developed in part by Blackwater. The military intelligence source drew a distinction between the Blackwater operatives who work for the State Department, which he calls "Blackwater Vanilla," and the seasoned Special Forces veterans who work on the JSOC program. "Good or bad, there's a small number of people who know how to pull off an operation like that. That's probably a good thing," said the source. "It's the Blackwater SELECT people that have and continue to plan these types of operations because they're the only people that know how and they went where the money was. It's not trigger-happy fucks, like some of the PSD [Personal Security Detail] guys. These are not people that believe that Barack Obama is a socialist, these are not people that kill innocent civilians. They're very good at what they do."

The former Blackwater executive, when asked for confirmation that Blackwater forces were not actively killing people in Pakistan, said, "that's not entirely accurate." While he concurred with the military intelligence source's description of the JSOC and CIA programs, he pointed to another role Blackwater is allegedly playing in Pakistan, not for the US government but for Islamabad. According to the executive, Blackwater works on a subcontract for Kestral Logistics, a powerful Pakistani firm, which specializes in military logistical support, private security and intelligence consulting. It is staffed with former high-ranking Pakistani army and government officials. While Kestral's main offices are in Pakistan, it also has branches in several other countries.

A spokesperson for the US State Department's Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), which is responsible for issuing licenses to US corporations to provide defense-related services to foreign governments or entities, would neither confirm nor deny for The Nation that Blackwater has a license to work in Pakistan or to work with Kestral. "We cannot help you," said department spokesperson David McKeeby after checking with the relevant DDTC officials. "You'll have to contact the companies directly." Blackwater's Corallo said the company has "no operations of any kind" in Pakistan other than the one employee working for the DoD. Kestral did not respond to inquiries from The Nation.

According to federal lobbying records, Kestral recently hired former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega, who served in that post from 2003 to 2005, to lobby the US government, including the State Department, USAID and Congress, on foreign affairs issues "regarding [Kestral's] capabilities to carry out activities of interest to the United States." Noriega was hired through his firm, Vision Americas, which he runs with Christina Rocca, a former CIA operations official who served as assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs from 2001 to 2006 and was deeply involved in shaping US policy toward Pakistan. In October 2009, Kestral paid Vision Americas $15,000 and paid a Vision Americas-affiliated firm, Firecreek Ltd., an equal amount to lobby on defense and foreign policy issues.

For years, Kestral has done a robust business in defense logistics with the Pakistani government and other nations, as well as top US defense companies. Blackwater owner Erik Prince is close with Kestral CEO Liaquat Ali Baig, according to the former Blackwater executive. "Ali and Erik have a pretty close relationship," he said. "They've met many times and struck a deal, and they [offer] mutual support for one another." Working with Kestral, he said, Blackwater has provided convoy security for Defense Department shipments destined for Afghanistan that would arrive in the port at Karachi. Blackwater, according to the former executive, would guard the supplies as they were transported overland from Karachi to Peshawar and then west through the Torkham border crossing, the most important supply route for the US military in Afghanistan.

According to the former executive, Blackwater operatives also integrate with Kestral's forces in sensitive counterterrorism operations in the North-West Frontier Province, where they work in conjunction with the Pakistani Interior Ministry's paramilitary force, known as the Frontier Corps (alternately referred to as "frontier scouts"). The Blackwater personnel are technically advisers, but the former executive said that the line often gets blurred in the field. Blackwater "is providing the actual guidance on how to do [counterterrorism operations] and Kestral's folks are carrying a lot of them out, but they're having the guidance and the overwatch from some BW guys that will actually go out with the teams when they're executing the job," he said. "You can see how that can lead to other things in the border areas." He said that when Blackwater personnel are out with the Pakistani teams, sometimes its men engage in operations against suspected terrorists. "You've got BW guys that are assisting... and they're all going to want to go on the jobs--so they're going to go with them," he said. "So, the things that you're seeing in the news about how this Pakistani military group came in and raided this house or did this or did that--in some of those cases, you're going to have Western folks that are right there at the house, if not in the house." Blackwater, he said, is paid by the Pakistani government through Kestral for consulting services. "That gives the Pakistani government the cover to say, 'Hey, no, we don't have any Westerners doing this. It's all local and our people are doing it.' But it gets them the expertise that Westerners provide for [counterterrorism]-related work."

The military intelligence source confirmed Blackwater works with the Frontier Corps, saying, "There's no real oversight. It's not really on people's radar screen."

In October, in response to Pakistani news reports that a Kestral warehouse in Islamabad was being used to store heavy weapons for Blackwater, the US Embassy in Pakistan released a statement denying the weapons were being used by "a private American security contractor." The statement said, "Kestral Logistics is a private logistics company that handles the importation of equipment and supplies provided by the United States to the Government of Pakistan. All of the equipment and supplies were imported at the request of the Government of Pakistan, which also certified the shipments."

Who is Behind the Drone Attacks?

Since President Barack Obama was inaugurated, the United States has expanded drone bombing raids in Pakistan. Obama first ordered a drone strike against targets in North and South Waziristan on January 23, and the strikes have been conducted consistently ever since. The Obama administration has now surpassed the number of Bush-era strikes in Pakistan and has faced fierce criticism from Pakistan and some US lawmakers over civilian deaths. A drone attack in June killed as many as sixty people attending a Taliban funeral.

In August, the New York Times reported that Blackwater works for the CIA at "hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company's contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft." In February, The Times of London obtained a satellite image of a secret CIA airbase in Shamsi, in Pakistan's southwestern province of Baluchistan, showing three drone aircraft. The New York Times also reported that the agency uses a secret base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to strike in Pakistan.

The military intelligence source says that the drone strike that reportedly killed Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, his wife and his bodyguards in Waziristan in August was a CIA strike, but that many others attributed in media reports to the CIA are actually JSOC strikes. "Some of these strikes are attributed to OGA [Other Government Agency, intelligence parlance for the CIA], but in reality it's JSOC and their parallel program of UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] because they also have access to UAVs. So when you see some of these hits, especially the ones with high civilian casualties, those are almost always JSOC strikes." The Pentagon has stated bluntly, "There are no US military strike operations being conducted in Pakistan."

The military intelligence source also confirmed that Blackwater continues to work for the CIA on its drone bombing program in Pakistan, as previously reported in the New York Times, but added that Blackwater is working on JSOC's drone bombings as well. "It's Blackwater running the program for both CIA and JSOC," said the source. When civilians are killed, "people go, 'Oh, it's the CIA doing crazy shit again unchecked.' Well, at least 50 percent of the time, that's JSOC [hitting] somebody they've identified through HUMINT [human intelligence] or they've culled the intelligence themselves or it's been shared with them and they take that person out and that's how it works."

The military intelligence source says that the CIA operations are subject to Congressional oversight, unlike the parallel JSOC bombings. "Targeted killings are not the most popular thing in town right now and the CIA knows that," he says. "Contractors and especially JSOC personnel working under a classified mandate are not [overseen by Congress], so they just don't care. If there's one person they're going after and there's thirty-four people in the building, thirty-five people are going to die. That's the mentality." He added, "They're not accountable to anybody and they know that. It's an open secret, but what are you going to do, shut down JSOC?"

In addition to working on covert action planning and drone strikes, Blackwater SELECT also provides private guards to perform the sensitive task of security for secret US drone bases, JSOC camps and Defense Intelligence Agency camps inside Pakistan, according to the military intelligence source.

Mosharraf Zaidi, a well-known Pakistani journalist who has served as a consultant for the UN and European Union in Pakistan and Afghanistan, says that the Blackwater/JSOC program raises serious questions about the norms of international relations. "The immediate question is, How do you define the active pursuit of military objectives in a country with which not only have you not declared war but that is supposedly a front-line non-NATO ally in the US struggle to contain extremist violence coming out of Afghanistan and the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan?" asks Zaidi, who is currently a columnist for The News, the biggest English-language daily in Pakistan. "Let's forget Blackwater for a second. What this is confirming is that there are US military operations in Pakistan that aren't about logistics or getting food to Bagram; that are actually about the exercise of physical violence, physical force inside of Pakistani territory."

JSOC: Rumsfeld and Cheney's Extra Special Force

Colonel Wilkerson said that he is concerned that with General McChrystal's elevation as the military commander of the Afghan war--which is increasingly seeping into Pakistan--there is a concomitant rise in JSOC's power and influence within the military structure. "I don't see how you can escape that; it's just a matter of the way the authority flows and the power flows, and it's inevitable, I think," Wilkerson told The Nation. He added, "I'm alarmed when I see execute orders and combat orders that go out saying that the supporting force is Central Command and the supported force is Special Operations Command," under which JSOC operates. "That's backward. But that's essentially what we have today."

From 2003 to 2008 McChrystal headed JSOC, which is headquartered at Pope Air Force Base and Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where Blackwater's 7,000-acre operating base is also situated. JSOC controls the Army's Delta Force, the Navy's SEAL Team 6, as well as the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment and 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and the Air Force's 24th Special Tactics Squadron. JSOC performs strike operations, reconnaissance in denied areas and special intelligence missions. Blackwater, which was founded by former Navy SEALs, employs scores of veteran Special Forces operators--which several former military officials pointed to as the basis for Blackwater's alleged contracts with JSOC.

Since 9/11, many top-level Special Forces veterans have taken up employment with private firms, where they can make more money doing the highly specialized work they did in uniform. "The Blackwater individuals have the experience. A lot of these individuals are retired military, and they've been around twenty to thirty years and have experience that the younger Green Beret guys don't," said retired Army Lieut. Col. Jeffrey Addicott, a well-connected military lawyer who served as senior legal counsel for US Army Special Forces. "They're known entities. Everybody knows who they are, what their capabilities are, and they've got the experience. They're very valuable."

"They make much more money being the smarts of these operations, planning hits in various countries and basing it off their experience in Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia, Ethiopia," said the military intelligence source. "They were there for all of these things, they know what the hell they're talking about. And JSOC has unfortunately lost the institutional capability to plan within, so they hire back people that used to work for them and had already planned and executed these [types of] operations. They hired back people that jumped over to Blackwater SELECT and then pay them exorbitant amounts of money to plan future operations. It's a ridiculous revolving door."

While JSOC has long played a central role in US counterterrorism and covert operations, military and civilian officials who worked at the Defense and State Departments during the Bush administration described in interviews with The Nation an extremely cozy relationship that developed between the executive branch (primarily through Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) and JSOC. During the Bush era, Special Forces turned into a virtual stand-alone operation that acted outside the military chain of command and in direct coordination with the White House. Throughout the Bush years, it was largely General McChrystal who ran JSOC. "What I was seeing was the development of what I would later see in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Special Operations forces would operate in both theaters without the conventional commander even knowing what they were doing," said Colonel Wilkerson. "That's dangerous, that's very dangerous. You have all kinds of mess when you don't tell the theater commander what you're doing."

Wilkerson said that almost immediately after assuming his role at the State Department under Colin Powell, he saw JSOC being politicized and developing a close relationship with the executive branch. He saw this begin, he said, after his first Delta Force briefing at Fort Bragg. "I think Cheney and Rumsfeld went directly into JSOC. I think they went into JSOC at times, perhaps most frequently, without the SOCOM [Special Operations] commander at the time even knowing it. The receptivity in JSOC was quite good," says Wilkerson. "I think Cheney was actually giving McChrystal instructions, and McChrystal was asking him for instructions." He said the relationship between JSOC and Cheney and Rumsfeld "built up initially because Rumsfeld didn't get the responsiveness. He didn't get the can-do kind of attitude out of the SOCOM commander, and so as Rumsfeld was wont to do, he cut him out and went straight to the horse's mouth. At that point you had JSOC operating as an extension of the [administration] doing things the executive branch--read: Cheney and Rumsfeld--wanted it to do. This would be more or less carte blanche. You need to do it, do it. It was very alarming for me as a conventional soldier."

Wilkerson said the JSOC teams caused diplomatic problems for the United States across the globe. "When these teams started hitting capital cities and other places all around the world, [Rumsfeld] didn't tell the State Department either. The only way we found out about it is our ambassadors started to call us and say, 'Who the hell are these six-foot-four white males with eighteen-inch biceps walking around our capital cities?' So we discovered this, we discovered one in South America, for example, because he actually murdered a taxi driver, and we had to get him out of there real quick. We rendered him--we rendered him home."

As part of their strategy, Rumsfeld and Cheney also created the Strategic Support Branch (SSB), which pulled intelligence resources from the Defense Intelligence Agency and the CIA for use in sensitive JSOC operations. The SSB was created using "reprogrammed" funds "without explicit congressional authority or appropriation," according to the Washington Post. The SSB operated outside the military chain of command and circumvented the CIA's authority on clandestine operations. Rumsfeld created it as part of his war to end "near total dependence on CIA." Under US law, the Defense Department is required to report all deployment orders to Congress. But guidelines issued in January 2005 by former Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone stated that Special Operations forces may "conduct clandestine HUMINT operations...before publication" of a deployment order. This effectively gave Rumsfeld unilateral control over clandestine operations.

The military intelligence source said that when Rumsfeld was defense secretary, JSOC was deployed to commit some of the "darkest acts" in part to keep them concealed from Congress. "Everything can be justified as a military operation versus a clandestine intelligence performed by the CIA, which has to be informed to Congress," said the source. "They were aware of that and they knew that, and they would exploit it at every turn and they took full advantage of it. They knew they could act extra-legally and nothing would happen because A, it was sanctioned by DoD at the highest levels, and B, who was going to stop them? They were preparing the battlefield, which was on all of the PowerPoints: 'Preparing the Battlefield.'"

The significance of the flexibility of JSOC's operations inside Pakistan versus the CIA's is best summed up by Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. "Every single intelligence operation and covert action must be briefed to the Congress," she said. "If they are not, that is a violation of the law."

Blackwater: Company Non Grata in Pakistan

For months, the Pakistani media has been flooded with stories about Blackwater's alleged growing presence in the country. For the most part, these stories have been ignored by the US press and denounced as lies or propaganda by US officials in Pakistan. But the reality is that, although many of the stories appear to be wildly exaggerated, Pakistanis have good reason to be concerned about Blackwater's operations in their country. It is no secret in Washington or Islamabad that Blackwater has been a central part of the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that the company has been involved--almost from the beginning of the "war on terror"--with clandestine US operations. Indeed, Blackwater is accepting applications for contractors fluent in Urdu and Punjabi. The US Ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, has denied Blackwater's presence in the country, stating bluntly in September, "Blackwater is not operating in Pakistan." In her trip to Pakistan in October, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dodged questions from the Pakistani press about Blackwater's rumored Pakistani operations. Pakistan's interior minister, Rehman Malik, said on November 21 he will resign if Blackwater is found operating anywhere in Pakistan.

The Christian Science Monitor recently reported that Blackwater "provides security for a US-backed aid project" in Peshawar, suggesting the company may be based out of the Pearl Continental, a luxury hotel the United States reportedly is considering purchasing to use as a consulate in the city. "We have no contracts in Pakistan," Blackwater spokesperson Stacey DeLuke said recently. "We've been blamed for all that has gone wrong in Peshawar, none of which is true, since we have absolutely no presence there."

Reports of Blackwater's alleged presence in Karachi and elsewhere in the country have been floating around the Pakistani press for months. Hamid Mir, a prominent Pakistani journalist who rose to fame after his 1997 interview with Osama bin Laden, claimed in a recent interview that Blackwater is in Karachi. "The US [intelligence] agencies think that a number of Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders are hiding in Karachi and Peshawar," he said. "That is why [Blackwater] agents are operating in these two cities." Ambassador Patterson has said that the claims of Mir and other Pakistani journalists are "wildly incorrect," saying they had compromised the security of US personnel in Pakistan. On November 20 the Washington Times, citing three current and former US intelligence officials, reported that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, has "found refuge from potential U.S. attacks" in Karachi "with the assistance of Pakistan's intelligence service."

In September, the Pakistani press covered a report on Blackwater allegedly submitted by Pakistan's intelligence agencies to the federal interior ministry. In the report, the intelligence agencies reportedly allege that Blackwater was provided houses by a federal minister who is also helping them clear shipments of weapons and vehicles through Karachi's Port Qasim on the coast of the Arabian Sea. The military intelligence source did not confirm this but did say, "The port jives because they have a lot of [former] SEALs and they would revert to what they know: the ocean, instead of flying stuff in."

The Nation cannot independently confirm these allegations and has not seen the Pakistani intelligence report. But according to Pakistani press coverage, the intelligence report also said Blackwater has acquired "bungalows" in the Defense Housing Authority in the city. According to the DHA website, it is a large gated community established "for the welfare of the serving and retired officers of the Armed Forces of Pakistan." Its motto is: "Home for Defenders." The report alleges Blackwater is receiving help from local government officials in Karachi and is using vehicles with license plates traditionally assigned to members of the national and provincial assemblies, meaning local law enforcement will not stop them.

The use of private companies like Blackwater for sensitive operations such as drone strikes or other covert work undoubtedly comes with the benefit of plausible deniability that places an additional barrier in an already deeply flawed system of accountability. When things go wrong, it's the contractors' fault, not the government's. But the widespread use of contractors also raises serious legal questions, particularly when they are a part of lethal, covert actions. "We are using contractors for things that in the past might have been considered to be a violation of the Geneva Convention," said Lt. Col. Addicott, who now runs the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas. "In my opinion, we have pressed the envelope to the breaking limit, and it's almost a fiction that these guys are not in offensive military operations." Addicott added, "If we were subjected to the International Criminal Court, some of these guys could easily be picked up, charged with war crimes and put on trial. That's one of the reasons we're not members of the International Criminal Court."

If there is one quality that has defined Blackwater over the past decade, it is the ability to survive against the odds while simultaneously reinventing and rebranding itself. That is most evident in Afghanistan, where the company continues to work for the US military, the CIA and the State Department despite intense criticism and almost weekly scandals. Blackwater's alleged Pakistan operations, said the military intelligence source, are indicative of its new frontier. "Having learned its lessons after the private security contracting fiasco in Iraq, Blackwater has shifted its operational focus to two venues: protecting things that are in danger and anticipating other places we're going to go as a nation that are dangerous," he said. "It's as simple as that."

China and Africa

2009-11-23T15:13:00.000-08:00

China and Africa
Written by Loro Horta

Africa's poor don't see China as a great power

The second China-Africa summit meeting in Egypt this week, which witnessed a Chinese pledge of US$10 billion in concessional loans to African countries, has again brought to the fore the debate over China's growing profile in the continent.

Is it a boon to Africa as China and many commentators maintain or is it a return to neo-colonial exploitation, as many critics claim? The truth, as usual, may be somewhere between the two.

The debate on China's meteoric rise in Africa has been dominated by two extreme and opposite views. One tends to see China s presence in the continent as generally negative and generating a lot of resentment among Africans. The second view is inclined to see the Chinese presence as largely beneficial providing African states with generous aid in the form of soft loans, major infrastructure programs, but, above all, providing a balance to traditional European and American dominance of the region.

How do Africans see China after all? Based on 163 interviews and over a decade of living in Africa, I shall argue that both views are wrong and right, depending on to what region of Africa and to which group of Africans one is referring.

African elites in general seem to welcome China's new found enthusiasm for the continent. China provides many African governments with generous and large loans, allowing them to develop badly needed infrastructure, expand agriculture, and strengthen their security apparatus. Perhaps most attractive of all, Beijing asks no questions nor imposes any conditionality on such investments, at least for now.

China's so called non-interference policy and its no-strings-attached approach to aid has gained it many friends and admirers among African elites. Moreover, China's model of a strong government and its focus on economic growth is looked upon by many African despots, and even some democratic leaders, as an example to follow. Frustrated with decades of instability and corruption, which many African elites tend to blame on the West and its liberal democratic model, the continent's elites are fast embracing the Chinese model.

Out of the 67 African officials interviewed from six countries across the continent and ranking from junior military officers to a former President, 63 expressed quite positive views about China. In contrast, out of the 98 non-government affiliated people interviewed – among them street sellers, teachers, and small business people – 73 expressed highly negative views about China, some bordering on racism. From this small sample, hailing from Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia, Cape Verde and Zambia, it becomes apparent that African elites clearly welcome the Chinese presence, while the people are growing increasing ambivalent.

These discrepancies result from the different ways in which China touches different sections of African societies. In Angola, where Western companies rely primarily on local labor, Chinese companies bring 70 to 80 percent of their labor from home. For instance, while nearly 90 percent of Chevron's workers are Angolan, including specialized personnel such as engineers and managers, Chinese oil companies employ fewer than 15 percent Angolan labor and usually at the end of the pay scale. For instance, in 2006 at a Portuguese run construction site in Maputo, Mozambique, there were only five Portuguese out of 120 workers. While nearby, a Chinese run site had 78 Chinese workers and only eight locals, three of which were night watchmen.

The influx of thousands of Chinese migrants into Africa is becoming a major source of grievance for the local population. In Angola, Chinese street sellers are fast putting out of business thousands of locals and Malian sellers who have been there for generations. The fact that many Chinese tend to live in isolation with little or no contact with the local population further aggravates the resentment already present. China has also been accused of serious environmental damage in Mozambique, Southern Sudan, and Equatorial Guinea to mention a few. In Southern Sudan, local villages attacked a Chinese oil team, killing its leader, whom they accused of poisoning their land. Chinese workers have also been killed in Ethiopia, and Equatorial Guinea; while in Nigeria, rebels warned Chinese companies to stay away from the oil-rich Niger delta region.

Although African elites and the Chinese government sing the song of friendship and mutually beneficial south-south cooperation, there is growing resentment at the grassroots level that has so far been ignored. It should be mentioned that this resentment is not common or equally acute in all countries. For instance, in Cape Verde, one of the continent's most successful and transparent countries, the government has imposed strict conditions on Chinese investment such has requirements on hiring local labor and environmental standards. A similar situation obtains in Botswana and Namibia.

It should be mentioned that Chinese companies are not the only ones at fault on environmental issues. However, on the hiring of local labor, Chinese companies have by far the worst record. The large influx of Chinese migrants, many of whom are illegal, has caused severe damage to China's image as a great power in the eyes of the Africans. As noted by a Mozambican high school teacher:

"They say China is a great power just like America. But what kind of great power sends thousands of people to a poor country like ours to sell cakes on the street and take the jobs of our own street sellers who are already so poor?"

Unless these issues are addressed, the growing resentment in the lower sectors of African society may erupt into violent incidents and undermine a relationship that could bring great potential benefits for both sides, provided it's wisely managed. To its credit, Beijing has taken some positive steps to address this problem by restricting Chinese textiles exports to certain African countries in order to protect indigenous industries and pledging to employ more Africans in its projects.

However, judging by the record of Chinese companies in their own country, there are great limitations to what the Chinese government may achieve. How could one expect Chinese mining companies in Africa to comply with environmental and safety laws if the mines they operate in China are considered the most dangerous in the world?

Nonetheless, China assisted Africa at a time when many in the West scorned the continent. After the end of the Cold War, Africa was abandoned by the West and the 1990s were marked by great suffering and instability. China's meteoric rise in Africa forced many in the West to re-engage the continent, diminishing its marginalization. Beijing built major infrastructure projects such as mega dams, badly needed roads and telecommunications in the continent that no Western nation was willing to fund. Still, it remains to be seen if in the long run, the benefits will outweigh the many problems caused by the new great power in the African savanna.

Perhaps in the end, the greatest responsibility lies with African elites. Cape Verde and a few others that have shown that with an honest and responsible approach, Sino-African ties can be highly beneficial to both sides.

As noted by a former Mozambican foreign minister: "In the end it's up to us, the Chinese like anyone else have their interest and will plunder us to the extent that we let them. Africa's future is in our hands like it as always been. Let's stop blaming others and wait for people to feel sorry for us."

Loro Horta is a Visiting Fellow with the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He lived in Africa for several years where he worked for humanitarian relief organizations and in law enforcement. This article was published courtesy of YaleGlobal, the magazine of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2154&Itemid=422

Leon T. Hadar Obama, the Teabaggers and Foreign Policy Leon T. Hadar

2009-11-23T15:11:00.000-08:00

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leon-t-hadar/obama-the-teabaggers-and_b_367893.html

Obama, the Teabaggers and Foreign Policy
Leon T. Hadar

Journalist and foreign affairs analyst
Posted: November 23, 2009 01:57 PM

If you have been following what America's right-wing blogers and radio talk-show hosts have been saying about President Barak Obama's just-concluded trip to the Asia-Pacific, you would be under the impression that Obama was not treated by officials in that region as the leader of the world's only remaining superpower and the largest and most advanced economy.

The neo and ultra-conservative pundits recalled the good-old-days when former American presidents were supposedly treated with so much respect in Tokyo, Seoul and Beijing as they used American economic and military might to compel leaders there to bow to Washington's dictates. But as the right-wingers see it, Obama acted as though he was the leader of just another normal nation and not that of the great power that had won the Cold War not so long ago, projecting a certain level of timidity during his East Asian tour which might explain why he was cold shouldered by the East Asians. And that was such a humiliating experience for proud Americans like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.

Indeed, according to these and other nutty loud-mouths, Obama had disgraced his country by having taken a deep bow at the waist while meeting Japan's Emperor Akihito. Hey, remember how former US vice president Dick Cheney, greeted the emperor in 2007 with a firm handshake -- but no bow - just the way a real American Man would conduct himself.

American historians were quick to note that Obama was not the first U.S. President to take a bow, following the rules of diplomatic etiquette when meeting with foreign kings, queens, and other heads of state. In fact, former President Richard Nixon - you know, that lefty peacenik --- bowed to Akihito's father in Japan in 1971. And he was the same Japanese emperor who had led his country to war with the U.S. in 1941.

The notion that Obama didn't get any R-E-S-P-E-C-T in the Asia-Pacific during his visit and that his "wow bow" in Tokyo reflected a supposedly spineless diplomacy of kowtowing to China and capitulating to other rising powers in the region over security and trade issues is probably just another example of the kind of hysterical Obama bashing that has engulfed America's flagging political right since last November.

In the right-wing alternate universe Obama is seen as being responsible for the Great Recession, the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now also for the economic and military rise of China, the changing Japanese attitudes towards America and the other challenges facing American power in East Asia. According to the members of the non-reality-based community the suggestion that the China may be less willing to play ball with Obama has nothing to do with America's real weakened economic and military position in the aftermath of the financial meltdown in Wall Street and the War in Iraq. Nope. It all has to do with the perception of American weakness that has been produced by Obama's more conciliatory approach towards China (dubbed by officials in Washington dubbed as "strategic reassurance"), his willingness continue negotiations with the Japanese over the status of U.S. military bases Okinawa and his engagement with the military regime in Myanmar.

But in reality, this kind of more conciliatory approach that have been embraced by Obama in his dealing with China, Japan and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is part of an effort to adjust American position in the Asia-Pacific in response to the very real changing geo-strategic and geo-economic balance of power, and in particular to the shifting balance of power between America and China.

Indeed, the transformation of the post-Cold War unipolar U.S.-dominated international system into a looser multi-polar system was inevitable. From that perspective it is quite possible that historians in the future would contend that the most important event that had taken in place in 2001 was not the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington but what happened exactly two months later - the accession of China into the World Trade Organization (WTO) which marked the start of its full integration into the global economy.

That this process of diminishing unipolarism and increasing multipolarism has accelerated under Obama's predecessor has to do with the costly policies at home (irresponsible fiscal and monetary policies) and abroad (military unilateralism and the war in Iraq) that have weakened U.S. status around the world, including in East Asia, and provided the Chinese with even more opportunity to exert their economic and diplomatic influence while America continued sinking into the many military quagmires in the Greater Middle East.

Taking into consideration that what Obama has been trying to begin reversing the trend towards American retreat from Asia that took place under President George W. Bush, one could argue his East Asia tour was certainly a good start. America and China are not about to form a permanent "Group of 2" forum. But during the talks in Beijing that covered currency, climate change, tariffs, Iran and Afghanistan - the American and Chinese leaders took the first steps in a long road in which each side will have to provide strategic reassurances to other. It would a process involving reciprocity under which the Americans will not be anymore in a position to deliver sermons and dictate outcomes to the Chinese.

That could be certainly a humbling experience for the right-wing critics and the neoconservatives who seem to operate under the illusion that America is still Number One and that it can still continue cutting taxes, expanding the deficit, fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while defeating terrorism, containing China and Russia, punishing "rogue regimes" and spreading democracy and human rights around the world.

But one of the main reasons why America has less leverage in its dealing with China is fact that the Chinese are playing now the role of America's banker as they continue financing the growing U.S. deficits. And in order to reduce these deficits, Americans will have to cut spending, which should include reductions the same U.S. military commitments abroad that right-wing critics would actually like to see increased.

Indeed, the same teabaggers who in the name of conservative values of limited government and fiscal restraint have been clobbering Obama and the Democrats for expanding the power of the federal government to promote a domestic liberal agenda, including $787 billion economic stimulus and his health-care reform proposals, seemed to have become born-again government interventionists, progressive internationalists and social engineers when it comes to Iraq and Afghanistan and to millions of foreigners and other distant societies whose values are alien to most Americans. Many of our irate anti-statist conservatives want to see the same U.S. government whose power they decry when tries to manage the school system in, say, Lebanon, Ohio, managing lots of stuff in, say, Lebanon. Help build the health care system in Afghanistan -- but not in America.

In fact, according to most public opinion polls the majority of American conservatives support increasing U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. The same teabaggers who are bashing Obama Administration as "socialistic" and "fascistic" seem to be quite enthusiastic about an Obama doing more national building in Afghanistan, which is bound to help raise the U.S. deficit into the stratosphere and expand the power of the federal government.

As Obama and the Democrats contemplate a new strategy for Afghanistan they should consider integrating the conservative values of fiscal discipline and limited government into their decision-making on this central foreign policy issue. After all, reducing and not expanding U.S. military in Afghanistan (and Iraq, and Korea, and Japan, and...) would help control the spending by the federal government and reduce the ballooning deficit. And that, after all, is exactly what our teabaggers are demanding.

Tuna’s Death Spiral

2009-11-23T15:02:00.000-08:00

Tuna’s Death Spiral

Published: November 21, 2009

The international commission that sets catch limits for tuna and other large migratory fish has failed, once again, to do what is necessary to give the prized bluefin tuna in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean a real chance to survive. Meeting in Brazil last week, the commission approved an annual quota of 13,500 metric tons for 2010, well below the present quota of 22,000 tons but not the complete moratorium recommended by the commission’s own scientists.

Scientists say that overharvesting has caused a 72 percent decline over 50 years among adult bluefin in the eastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean, the fish’s primary spawning grounds. The illegal catch sometimes equals the authorized quota. Most marine scientists believe the fishery should be shut down completely until the fish have reached sustainable levels.

The United States recommended what it hoped would be an acceptable interim compromise of 8,000 tons or lower. But American negotiators were outgunned by the Japanese — where bluefin tuna is the source of high-grade sushi — and by the European Union, whose politicians do pretty much what the big commercial fleets in France, Spain, Italy and other Mediterranean countries tell them to do and who apparently won’t really start worrying until the last fish has been caught.

There is only one honorable course left for the United States. That is to join with Monaco and other countries that have proposed listing the bluefin as an endangered species under an international law known as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. The law effectively bars commercial trade in any listed species, and has been helpful in protecting other animals like elephants and whales.

The next meeting of the 175 nations that subscribe to the convention will take place in March 2010 in Doha, Qatar. Earlier this year, the United States expressed support for Monaco’s proposal and said it would change its mind only if the negotiations in Brazil established “responsible science-based quotas.” They did not, and the United States should stick to its guns.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/opinion/21sat4.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Goldman Sachs and US demise

2009-11-23T13:56:00.000-08:00

Goldman Sachs and US demise
Goldman Sachs showed only contempt in offering an annual US$100 million to help small business while setting aside $16.7 billion for bonuses. The US government must stop frightening Americans by saying that the sky will fall if they take action against the financial institutions that have been responsible for the country's economic crisis. - Hossein Askari and Noureddine Krichene
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/KK24Dj06.html

Obama must deal with important questions of the Mideast conflict By Zvi Bar'el

2009-11-22T15:15:00.001-08:00

Haaretz
Obama must deal with important questions of the Mideast conflict
By Zvi Bar'el

For 41 years, Washington turned a blind eye. It protested a bit, scolded a bit, and mostly made do with periodically stating that its policy has not changed - it still opposes settlements in the territories and does not recognize the annexation of East Jerusalem or the Golan Heights. Suddenly, it gave us a resounding slap, but one of the frustrating kind that misses the cheek and flies through empty air. Because the American demand that we freeze construction in the settlements, that "strong message" containing a threat, has become a personal duel between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama, in place of a clear policy presented by the latter.

Obama will win, of course. He can set a meeting with Netanyahu late at night, not answer the prime minister's phone calls, warn him from the Great Wall of China and even order his officials to give Israel's requests the cold shoulder. Obama already has managed to garner international support for his demand that Israel freeze settlement construction, even in Jerusalem, and American public opinion is on his side. If Obama wants to undermine Israel's trust in the United States, or to prove to Netanyahu who is stronger, he does not have to work hard.

The American demand is proper, even if it is very late and unusually aggressive. However, its lack of context is infuriating. Freezing settlements is not a policy. Its entire purpose is to give Mahmoud Abbas, the resigning Palestinian Authority president, a reason to get back to negotiations. But negotiations cannot be a final goal, just as freezing settlements cannot be considered the ultimate achievement. What then? Is Abbas doomed to be a constant negotiator in endless negotiations? Does Washington have a plan for continuing negotiations?

And let's say Israel does freeze construction. What is Washington's policy regarding the 300,000 settlers currently living in the territories, in settlements that no American president was determined enough to stop? If a plan to construct 900 housing units in Gilo bothers Obama, what does he think about the 40,000 Israelis already living there? What is the point in demanding a construction freeze if it does not involves a comprehensive plan that determines the borders between Israel and Palestine, and where Jews can or can't live? After all, that will be the next question in negotiations, to which end Obama has Netanyahu in a pincer grip.

Without a solid American diplomatic plan that will make Israelis, not Netanyahu, understand how to keep negotiations from bogging down a moment after Abbas and Netanyahu start talking; without a clear American position on the Palestinian right of return and the holy places, and whether Washington is for or against Palestinian reconciliation that brings Hamas into the government; the settlement freeze will become an unnecessary test of strength between Netanyahu and Obama. Because if the American president takes the trouble to look into one illegal building in East Jerusalem, and rightly so, he cannot in the same breath say that the really important questions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are none of his business.

Washington can no longer call itself an indifferent mediator who gives the parties the White House phone number and asks that they call when they are ready, as secretary of state James Baker did when George H.W. Bush was president. Washington is a stakeholder, and peace in the Middle East is its strategic interest. As such, it cannot present freezing settlements as a personal power play, an ego contest, insulted that its client state is disobedient.

It is increasingly seeming that the demand for a settlement freeze is no more than a desire to chalk up some sort of achievement, one that does not change the status quo but does grant prestige. That suspicion is based on the fact that the United States has had nothing to say about the Israeli-Syrian conflict. If peace in the Middle East is so important, why is Washington not speaking out about the settlements in the Golan Heights? Why does the United States not call a Syrian-Israeli summit? Are negotiations with Syrian President Bashar Assad less important than those with Abbas? The Arab peace initiative, it should be noted, involves Israeli withdrawal from all the territories.

The freeze in settlement construction is an essential step in a meaningful peace plan. Standing alone, it is a hollow gesture.

Polk: Let America be America, and Depart Afghanistan

2009-11-22T15:05:00.001-08:00

www.juancole.com

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Polk: Let America be America, and Depart Afghanistan

William R. Polk writes in a guest editorial for IC, which he wishes someone would pass on to President Obama, quickly:

In its war in Afghanistan, the United States has come to a crossroads. President Obama will be forced to choose one of four ways ahead. The choices are cruel, expensive and dangerous for our country; so we must be sure that he chooses the least painful, least expensive and safest of the possible choices.

The first possible choice is to keep on doing what we are now doing. That is, fighting the insurgency with about 60,000 American troops and 68,197 mercenaries at a cost of roughly $2,000 a day per person. That is, we now actually have a total complement of over 120,000 people on the public payroll at an overall cost, of roughly $100 billion a year. We can project a loss of a few hundred American soldiers a year and several thousand wounded. Our senior commander in the Central Command, General David Petraeus, tells us that we cannot win that war.

The second possible road ahead would involve adding substantial numbers of new troops. In General Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine, the accepted ratio of soldiers to natives is 20 to 25 per thousand natives.1 Afghanistan today is a country of about 33 million. Even if we discount the population to the target group of Pashtuns, we will must deal with 15 or so million people. So when he and General Stanley McChrystal ask for 40,000, it can only be a first installment. Soon -- as the generals did in Vietnam – they will have to ask for another increment and then another, moving toward the supposedly winning number of 600,000 to 1.3 million. That is just the soldiers. Each soldier is now matched by a supporter, rather like medieval armies had flocks of camp followers, so those numbers will roughly double. Thus, over ten years, a figure often cited, or 40 years, which some of the leading neoconservatives have suggested, would pretty soon, as they say in Congress, involve “talking about real money.” In addition to the Congressionally-allocated outlay, the overall cost to our economy has not yet been summed up, but by analogy to the Iraq war, it will probably amount to upwards of $6 trillion.

Then there are the casualties: we have so far lost about a thousand -- or a quarter as many as in Iraq. Casualties we can count, but the number of seriously wounded keeps growing because many of the effects of exposure to modern weapons do not show up until later. We have no reliable figures yet on Afghanistan. In Iraq at least 100,000 of the one and a half million soldiers who served there suffered severe psychological damage and about 300,000 have reported post-traumatic stress disorder and a similar number have suffered brain injuries. Crassly put, these “walking wounded” will not only be unable fully to contribute to American society but will be a burden on it for many years to come. It has been estimated that dealing with a brain-injured soldier over his remaining life will cost about $5 million. Cancer, from exposure to depleted uranium is, only now coming into full effect. All in all, it is sobering to calculate that 40 percent of the soldiers who served in the 1991 Gulf war – which lasted only a hundred hours – are receiving disability payments. Inevitably, more “boots on the ground” will lead to more beds in hospitals.

General McChrystal has told us that we must have large numbers of additional troops to hold the territory we “clear.” He echoes what the Russian commanders told the Politburo: in a report on November 13, 1986, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev commented that the Russians attempted the same strategy but admitted that it failed. “There is no piece of land in Afghanistan,” he said, “that has not been occupied by one of or soldiers at some time or another. Nevertheless, much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize . . . Without a lot more men, this war will continue for a very, very long time.”

The Russian army fought a bloody, brutal campaign, using every trick or tool of counterinsurgency ever identified. The Russians killed a million Afghanis and turned about 5 million into refugees, but after a decade during which they lost 15,000 soldiers and virtually bankrupted the Soviet Union, they gave up and left. General McChrystal says it may take him a decade or more to “win.” But what “winning” means is unclear.

Third, we could marginally increase our troop strength. That is, adding only between 10,000 and 30,000 troops and a comparable number of mercenaries. Not the full complement that General McChrystal has now demanded. This road, according to Petraeus, McChrystal and their acolytes would lead to “mission failure.”

Not meeting the generals’ demands also brings forward the danger to the Obama administration of being charged with putting our soldiers at risk “with one hand tied behind their backs,” a phrase from the acrimonious aftermath of the Vietnam war which even General James Jones, President Obama’s director of the National Security Council, has recently repeated. The potential ugly campaign, against which even Henry Kissinger has warned us,2 could pose risks to our political culture and even to our legal structure: some military men are already talking about their restiveness in obeying civilian government. “You kind of get used to it after years of service” one Army general said at a convention in Washington last month. Forgetting the constitution, he continued, “We tend to live with it.” Maybe they will or maybe anger will be channeled into a further extension of the military into politics, intelligence and diplomacy.

For the first time that I know of in recent American history, the uniformed military have created what amounts to a pressure group of their own. Generals Petraeus and McChrystal are the leaders but, by influencing or controlling promotions panels, they have fostered the advancement of middle grade and junior officers who agree with them. Some have been brought into a group called “the Colonels’ council.” And numbers of retired senior officers have joined not only in what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” but have become the opinion-makers on foreign policy in the media. Private soldiers and non-commissioned officers have, at the same time, become a major component of the private armies of such groups as Xe (formerly Blackwater) and form an active part of the constituency of the right wing of the Republican Party.

In the dangerous months and years ahead, if this road is taken, we are apt to hear echoes – particularly in the next presidential election --of the post Vietnam rhetoric that the civilians sold out the military. In short, while this option sounds moderate and “business-like” I believe that it is the worst option for President Obama and, more importantly, for the nation.

Or, fourth, we could Get out.

* * *

Since obviously getting out is my preference, I will now describe how it could be done. In doing this, I want to emphasize that I learned as an official policy planner that a plan is of little value unless it incorporates elements that would make it

* attractive or at least politically feasible for a president;
* foresees a specified allocation of funds to effect it;
* provides a timetable;
* makes clear both benefits and dangers; and
* can be shown to be better than other options.

I begin with the reasons why the President should adopt it:

* Other things being equal, reversing decisions and public statements is not an attractive option for a sitting president. But other things are not equal. I have asserted that the other three options endanger the country and could cost President Obama his job.

* Even if he accepts this evaluation, the president must weigh any potential move in the scale of public opinion: what do the people think? Polls indicate a steady deterioration of support for the war.

But, as any politician knows, the public is fickle and substantial numbers of dedicated and influential people are still strongly in favor of “staying the course” or even getting in deeper. This, of course, is, particularly true of the self-proclaimed military-political strategists (and above all the neoconservatives who are active in virtually all of the “think tanks” and write influential columns in most of the press not to speak of Fox News). They speak to the sentiment of the far right of the Republican Party.

The President, who after all is a Democrat, would be unlikely to be able to win over the Republican far right by any sort of compromise. He must hope that the general public will reach the conclusion that “staying the course” is costly, does not work and is pointless. But, if waits until a course of action is completely evident to everyone, it will be probably be too late to implement easily, cleanly and in command of our principal objectives. Thus, a large part of a president’s responsibility is educating the public. If we have a first lady and even a first dog, he must be our “first teacher.” He must, in short, work to create an environment in which reasonable policies will be understood and accepted.

* Consequently, the president must choose the timing of his action with great care and in doing so he would be wise to recognize and be prepared to deal with his Republican foes and Democratic rivals. The best way he can do this is to do the job quickly and get it over with well before the next election.

* Timing will be influenced not only by the pace of domestic politics but also by foreign opportunity. Fortunately for him, the President now has been presented with an opportunity. Although at terrible cost to Pakistan’s society, its army has undertaken a campaign against the Taliban in the Pashtun areas of Swat and both Waziristans. Why is this an opportunity or rather how could it be an opportunity? At first sight the answer seems paradoxical: it is that the campaign is unlikely to be completely successful: the Taliban are unlikely to be so stupid as to stand and fight. The proper tactic of the guerrilla is to hit and run. So, recognizing that they cannot win, the Pakistani military will soon offer a cease fire and the Taliban will accommodate.

The Pakistanis have a long history with the Taliban, know them intimately, have subsidized them and have sought in the Taliban a barrier against Indian infiltration of their backyard, Afghanistan. That long-term interest remains despite the current conflict. And, at base, the Pakistanis share with the Afghanis, religion, a population of nearly 30 million Pashtuns and the desire to preserve their neighborhood from foreign control. Thus, I believe that in the coming months, they will do what neither the Russians nor we have been able to do -- bring the Taliban to the negotiating table. This move would offer a wise American president an opening to begin the process of turning over the war to our ally Pakistan.

To enable such a course of action to become effective and to encompass Afghanistan, we must set a date for ending our part of the war. Before such a date is announced, negotiations are unlikely. But it is important to be clear: It is the setting of the date rather than actually withdrawing that will enable the process to begin.

* * *

Once the date is set, let us say in late 2010 or early 2011, the villages and tribes, particularly in the southern part of Afghanistan but also soon in the center and north, will begin to jockey for position vis-à-vis one another and with whatever larger authority they think likely to affect their lives. This will almost certainly take the form of their holding village assemblies – known in the south as jirgas and in the north as shuras or among the Hazaras as ulus-- to sort out local issues.

Little known or appreciated outside of Afghanistan, neither by the Russians in their time nor by us today, the jirga is the quintessential Afghan means of political action. We need to understand it because, whether we like it or not, it will play a major role in the way the war is brought to a close. I must dilate briefly on it.

The jirga is a very old and common Asian way of settling disputes and legitimating ruling authorities. Among the Mongols and Turks, it was known as a quriltai and similar assemblies were held by the Iranians. Probably few Americans realize that a native American people, the Iroquois, had a similar way of dealing with military and diplomatic affairs.

Is this just a historian’s indulgence in dredging up the obscure and the antique?

Fortunately, not. Jirgas are active at the village level all over Afghanistan today. They are called into being either when village headmen, known as maliks, or respected religious figures cannot resolve a dispute or when a new event calls for change of course. The jirga is thus a transient event, not a standing institution. Its procedure is set by custom. And it does not aim to mandate or to impose penalties; rather it is a process that aims to ventilate grievances, to debate alternatives, to dissipate angers and to affect accommodations until, at the end a consensus is reached. Voting is not a part of the process. But when a consensus is reached, it is considered absolutely binding and further opposition is regarded as treason. To oppose the consensus could result in expulsion from the community which, in a tribal society, amounts often to a death sentence.

Since many of the problems of each village depend on actions beyond its locale, the village elders will press for and participate in tribal meetings. In turn these participants will be drawn into regional meetings. At the end of the process will be a grand national assembly which is known as a loya jirga.

Such meetings have been called on great issues of state for centuries. Three were called in the 1920s to approve fundamental laws, establish the Afghan Muslim orthodoxy and legimate the change of rulers. Another was called in 1949 to void existing treaties and establish the frontier with Pakistan. In 1955, a loya jirga composed of some 360 notables from all over Afghanistan assembled to declare support of an independent “Pashtunistan.” Then in 1964, one was assembled to ratify the constitution. Notably, the constitution proclaimed that the loya jirga is Afghanistan’s ultimate authority, being empowered ““to decide on issues related to independence, national sovereignty, territorial integrity as well as supreme national interests” and designated the loya jirga to be “the highest manifestation of the will of the people of Afghanistan.”3

The Russians were, obviously, opposed to the very concept of the loya jirga and managed to by-pass or suppress it. They did so, however, at great cost because without such a legitimating authority, they could not find an Afghan counterpart with which to negotiate an end to their occupation. The puppet government they set up lacked the imprimatur of the loya jirga and was not regarded by the people as legitimate. So the Russians left with their tail between their legs.

As the current Russian ambassador and long-time KBG expert on Afghan affairs, Zamir N. Kabulov, has commented, there is no mistake the Russians made that has not been copied by the Americans. He was right about the way we approached the jirga. In 2002, nearly 2/3rds of the delegates to a loya jirga signed a petition to make the exiled king, Zahir Shah, president of an interim government to give time for the Afghanis to work out their future. An interim government might have avoided the worst of the problems we have faced in the last seven years. But we had already decided that Hamid Kara was “our man in Kabul” and did not want the Afghanis to interfere with our choice. So, as Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason reported,4 “massive US interference behind the scenes in the form of bribes, secret deals, and arm twisting got the US-backed candidate for the job, Hamid Kara, installed instead. [They] then rode shotgun over a constitutional process that eliminated the monarchy entirely. This was the Afghan equivalent to the 1964 Diem Coup in Vietnam; afterward, there was no possibility of creating a stable secular government.” While an Afghan king could have conferred legitimacy on an elected leader in Afghanistan; without one, as they put it, “an elected president is a on a one-legged stool.” Then, as Selig Harrison wrote in the New York Times,5 our proconsul, Zalmay Khalilzad, “had a bitter 40-minute showdown with the king, who then withdrew his candidacy.”

Among the lamentable results of this policy was that outside of the major cities, few Afghanis think of the government as legitimate. Most regard it as a foreign tyranny.

Not understanding or being willing to deal with the concept of a loya jirga, we have sought to legitimate the men we chose to rule Afghanistan by an election. Doing so has produced a great embarrassment to our government. It isn’t only that the recent presidential election was blatantly fraudulent although that is what the press has focused on. Nor was the trumped up competition between Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah important. As a Tajik, there was no way that Abdullah Abdullah could have been a credible candidate. He was just a straw man, put up to make it look like the election was a choice. But even that was not the fundamental flaw: it was simply that elections – the American way of choosing and legitimating a government – is not the Afghan way.

The Afghan way is a loya jirga.

It is my belief that the holding of a loya jirga is the means that offers the best hope to create a reasonably peaceful, reasonably acceptable and reasonably decent Afghan government.

* * *

So the question is how to convene it. The answer to that question is simple: the Afghans have a traditional way to do so. The central authority, in this case the Parliament, can call for a loya jirga.

Will they do it?

Probably not so long as America is willing to pay them off and protect them. So to get them to act, America must set a timetable for withdrawing. Faced with that deadline and the need to protect themselves, the current members of the Parliament will have an interest in espousing what they will see as the national cause, and they will scramble to call for a loya jirga.

Participation is traditional. It is made up by the upward thrust of recognized leaders from the village level to the provincial level to the national level. We will have little or no influence on this process and it would not be wise for us to attempt to exercise any. But, realistically, we must anticipate that a vast majority of the delegates, particularly in the Pashtun area, will be at least passive supporters of the Taliban. I do not see any way that this can be avoided. Indeed, even today while we are in occupation, qualified observers uniformly point out that, except when a large contingent of our soldiers is physically present, the insurgents are in control. At any given time, they control about 70% of the country. That, as I have pointed out, was also the Russian experience.

* * *

So what are the disadvantages and what are the benefits of the policy I recommend? Let me highlight the potential criticisms:

The first criticism is that the Taliban will emerge from the war as the strongest organization in what at best is a coalition. I do not see any way that this outcome can be avoided – indeed, whether it happens soon or not, it is virtually inevitable in the long run.

The longer we delay the process and the harder we try to prevent it, the more certain it is that the Taliban will dominate. This has been uniformly true of insurgencies for the last two centuries all over the world: those who fought hardest against the foreigners took control.

A really free loya jirga and one held soon is the best hope to create a more balanced national government. This is partly because in the run-up to the national loya jirga, local groups will put forward and struggle to enhance or protect local interests. That will constitute a natural brake on the Taliban which will find itself impelled to compromise. And we should remember that despite all the hype about their early victories, much of the Taliban’s success was the result of negotiation. Today, they enjoy the aura of national defenders against us; once we are no longer a target, that aura will fade.

The second criticism: suppose I am wrong. Suppose the Taliban overawes all the village communities and emerges as the sole arbiter of Afghanistan. What will be the danger to the United States?

Recall that our invasion came about because the Taliban was providing a base – the meaning of the word al-qaida – for Usama bin Ladin and his acolytes. Will they come back? Will Afghanistan be a base for terrorism? I don’t think so, or at least not in the same way.

The terrorists who attacked New York and Washington on September 11, 2001 were partly trained in the United States and were based mainly in Europe. Propaganda emanated from Afghanistan, but the real work was done elsewhere. Terrorists can operate anywhere.

As we, the Taliban and Bin Ladin have discovered, Afghanistan is not a suitable base. It is land-locked, has poor communications, little money to give or lend outsiders and has learned how costly it is to give a free rein to terrorists. True, Usama bin Ladin has been given sanctuary by the Pashtun people and/or by the Taliban. For this, they have paid a heavy price. They will not wish to continue to pay such a price. And, more important, there are ways acceptable within the cultural code of the Pashtun people, the Pashtunwali’s imperative of melmastia (protection or refuge) that Bin Ladin and his band can be protected but disabled. A protected guest cannot be turned over to his enemies but he need not be allowed to endanger his hosts. Pakistan, rather than we, should and can take the lead in bringing about this restraint. Pakistan can, indeed, make it a condition for the ceasefire I have mentioned and the ultimate peace it will find to its interest to achieve.

The third criticism that can be directed at this program is that, focused as it must be on the Pashtun community which is Afghanistan’s largest group, it could split the country with the northern Tajik , Uzbek and Hazara areas withdrawing. The fact is that those areas are already effectively separated from the Pashtun south. They are under the domination of independent warlords whom we were instrumental in installing and maintaining. So the calling of a national assembly will not break up the country; it already is split. But if the jirga process begins, I think it is likely to end with a federation which the tribal structure of Afghanistan has always favored.

Even if a sustainable arrangement is not accomplished in the near term, the danger to American interests would be minimal. Indeed, Afghanistan’s neighbors (Pakistan, China, Russia and Iran and perhaps India) would (or could be induced to) take a hand to push toward a modus vivendi as Henry Kissinger among others has pointed out.6

* * *

If we adopt this policy and allow the process to begin, how can we facilitate it? What will it cost? What will it save? How likely is it to enable us to leave Afghanistan as a viable society? What will be the impact on the danger of terrorism? And, what should we avoid while carrying it out?

The first step, as I have argued, is to set a date for withdrawal. Once this is done, a notable transformation will begin in the psychology of the Afghans. Today, even the non-lethal and beneficial efforts our government and non-governmental organizations make are regarded with suspicion or are rejected. General Petraeus perhaps unwittingly explained why: In describing his counterinsurgency program, he proclaimed that “Money is my most important ammunition in this war.”7

The Afghanis of course realize this. As Andrew Wilder and his team found in some 400 interviews, “Afghan perceptions of aid and aid actors are overwhelmingly negative.”8 And, since they regard all the civic action programs as the “weapons” in the war – as indeed they learned years ago from the Russians who similarly mounted large-scale “beneficial” or civic action programs in Afghanistan9 -- they have often destroyed schools, roads, bridges and even clinics.

But, when the withdrawal pattern is set, the Afghans will have no reason to continue to do so. At that point, aid programs, preferably administered at least in part by other countries or by international agencies will become acceptable and will help smooth the reconciliation process and encourage participation by the local loya jirgas, who after all are concerned with their neighborhoods’ prosperity and health. They will then eagerly seek what they now dramatically destroy. Their needs are evident and urgent. Afghanistan is a poor, land-locked, dry country with few resources. Its people have suffered through virtually continuous war for 30 years. Many are wounded or sick. Their normal passage through schools into jobs and secure lives have been disrupted or derailed. They hurt and are tired. They need help. It will be hard for them to employ outside help beneficially, much can be done to pick up where a reforming government left off in the 1970s. We can and should be a part of this process.

If we are wise, we will do so subtly rather than, as we often manage our aid efforts, with great fanfare. Through the United Nations family of organizations, the World Bank or a coalition of Afghanistan’s neighbors, we can provide money for reconstruction projects. Such ventures as the building of farm-to-market roads, the opening of clinics, a program of disease prevention, subsidy for food-grain crops, electrification, purification of water, disposal of waste, etc. will be perceived by the village loya jirgas as unthreatening and beneficial once it is clear that they are not weapons in a counterinsurgency.

What will this cost? If we participate, as we should in our own interest as well as for moral reasons, in these activities, we might consider offering (hopefully with matching funds from others), say, $5 billion dollars a year for the period the military and their hawkish civilian advisers propose, ten years. That would amount to roughly $50 billion over a decade.

So what will spending that amount of money save us?

At our current level of activity – before the introduction of more troops – we are “burning” as venture capitalists say, about $60 billion a year. Next year, our direct costs will probably rise to at least $100 billion. And even that figure will surely rise in the years to come. So the Congressionally allocated funds in the coming few years under even the most modest form of “staying the course” would amount to a minimum of $600 billion and more likely to much more. On top of that, we are otherwise harming our economy so that over a 5 to 10 year period of our current policy the real costs we would incur would probably amount to between $3 to $6 trillion.

This is money we don’t have and will have to borrow from overseas. Those who have opposed expanding health care because of the costs should note that the venture in Afghanistan will be more expensive with no compensating benefit.

The degradation of our currency is one effect of such an outlay: during the period of the Iraq war, the dollar vis-à-vis the Euro has fallen from 80¢ to $1.50. And currency traders are betting on a further fall. The fall so far means that sovereign funds (notably Japan and China) that have lent us money have lost heavily; a further fall calls into question our ability to borrow at all. Some funds (led by Kuwait) are considering transferring from the dollar to a basket of currencies while others (including South Korea) have stopped buying Treasury notes. If we attempt to make up our shortfall by printing money, inflation is inevitable and will saddle our grandchildren with our debts.

In short, by getting out, our saving would be immense, indeed perhaps, truly vital.

I have argued that if we get out soon and with held for the transition, the Afghans will find their way back to their traditional way of governing themselves. This will not be exactly our way, of course, but they will recreate a viable society. If we look at what has happened in Vietnam in recent years, we have reason to believe in political evolution. Once the horrors of war receed in memory, the joys of peace become powerful forces. And, in any event, at some point, whether now or years from now, the Afghans will face this challenge; my judgment is that the sooner it happens the more likely and the quicker is achievement of an acceptable degree of success.

What about terrorism? As I have pointed out, terrorists can operate anywhere; they do not need Afghanistan. But they do need the support of people wherever they are. So the more we are seen to be enemies of their religion, opponents of self-determination and supporters of oppressive governments, the greater the danger we face. We cannot completely overcome these charges, but we can blunt or avoid the most blatant and the most unpopular. Three stand out: first, we need to work hard to implement the call President Obama has made for us to recognize that we live in a multicultural world where we must respect the right of others to live their own way; second, we need to repudiate the neoconservative-inspired U.S. National Defense Doctrine that asserted our “right” to preëmptively attack any country anywhere at our sole discretion; and, third, we must stop the dangerous and unproductive “James Bond” games of subversion which we have played for years. Otherwise, there will be a continuing incentive for the weak and angry to find means to attack us. This is not to say that we must let down our guard: there are and will continue to be dangerous, deranged and determined malfactors in other countries – just as there are in ours – so we will need to employ a variety of police measures to protect ourselves. But once we are no longer generally seen to be “the enemy,” such pyschopaths will be far less dangerous because no longer popular.

Finally, we should avoid moves to create an overwhelming military and police force in Afghanistan. That is what we are being told is necessary. I think that would be a very dangerous and self-defeating move. Every time we provide weapons, as independent observers constantly tell us, the newly empowered force uses them against the public to extort money or goods or to kidnap people or rape their wives and children. It is highly unlikely that such forces can be disciplined by the existing government (or by us) for years to come. And even if they were disciplined, they contribute little or nothing to the Afghan economy or society. And, of course, they ultimately pose the danger of a military dictatorship since balancing civil institutions are still and will for years will remain weak.

What we should do is to put our emphasis on the creation of a quasi-military force like our Corps of Engineers which could, under proper supervision and with proper funding, make a real contribution to the country. It would also help alleviate the chronic problem of unemployment. The police force should be kept small, only lightly armed, and subject to some supervision by village and tribal jirgas.

* * *

What follows?

We are indeed at a cross-roads in our history. The step the President takes on Afghanistan is a step on a road that could lead either to catastrophe or to a new period of our prosperity, freedom and security.

In one direction, we will move in the direction signposted by the Australian armchair warrior David Kilcullen, the key adviser and ghost writer for Generals Petraeus and McChrystal, and enthusiastically approved by the neoconservatives. They and Petraeus’s and McChrystal’s new acolytes among junior officers – saw Iraq and see Afghanistan as the first steps in America’s crusade, what they have named the “Long War.”

The Long war would truly be a march out into the wild blue yonder. The neoconservatives and the new military leaders believe it will last generations. Fifty years is already under plan at the Pentagon. The cost, even in economic terms, cannot be predicted – numbers lose meaning beyond 15 or 20 trillion dollars. But the ultimate cost will be the end of America’s position as the world’s leading power. Our standard of living will fall; our sources of borrowing will dry up; and we will stand in danger of the kind of economic implosion that destroyed what in the 1920s was arguably Europe’s leading democracy, the Weimar Republic.

While the monetary and general economic costs are the most obvious, my real worry is about the fundamental beliefs and institutions of our country. I confess that I am very emotional about this: I have inherited through my family both a military and a civic tradition that I see being undermined in the name of patriotism. Patriotism is a blunt instrument and can be wielded by dictators – as Herman Göring observed during his trial at Nurenburg -- as often as by democrats. I don’t want to lose the America in which I was born, have served and believe in. So I determined to do what I can to protect and preserve our heritage of freedom, decency and mutual respect. These are the key elements in the social contract you and I share and which we share with our government. To lose that social contact is to descend into chaos. Of course, “it can’t happen here,” but let us not forget the fate of the Weimar Republic.

To the contrary, getting out of Afghanistan, could lead us toward a reassertion of the principles and purposes that have made our country not just respected for its wealth and power but beloved throughout the world. If we make a sincere effort to live up to the message in President Obama’s address in Cairo – that we are willing to live in a multicultural world – much of the fear and danger we perceive today will become a bad memory. Then we can truly turn toward the serious business of educating our children, providing our citizens with adequate health care and again becoming for the world’s peoples “a city on the hill.”

William R. Polk

November 10, 2009

[1] Portside.Org, Sept 11 09 “Foreign Policy in Focus,” Conn Hallinan, “Afghanistan: What are these people thinking?” The field manual on counterinsurgency recommends a ratio of 20 counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents: for Aghanistan, population 33 million, that would be at least 660,000 specially trained soldiers. Also see NYT, Oct 11, 2009, AP “Afghan Outlook Bleak as Taliban Grabs Territory:” " . . .a former top commander there, US. Gen Dan McNeill, said in an interview with NPR last summer that ‘well over 400,000 troops’ are needed to tame the country. He then called it ‘an absurd figure,’ because Afghanistan will never see that many troops . . . More troops would mean more forces driving over increasingly lethal roadside bombs.” The basic government text is The U.S. Army [&] Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007, it has forewords by General David Petraeus and Lt. General James Amos and Lt. Colonel John Nagl.

[2] International Herald Tribune, October 5, 2009, Henry Kissinger, “Afganistan’s cruel options.”

[3] International Herald Tribune, September 16, 2009, Ansar Rahel & Jon Krakauer, “Save Afghanistan, look to its past.” [Rahel, a lawyer, advised King Muhammad Shah’s loya jirga committee.]

[4] Christian Science Monitor, August 20, 09, Thomas H. Johnson(research professor at the Naval Postgrad school in Monterey) and M. Chris Mason (a retired FSO who worked in Paktika province, is a fellow at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington), “Democracy in Afghanistan is wishful thinking.”

[5] August 17, 2009.

[6] The Nation, Nov 17, 2008, Tariq Ali, “Operation Enduring Disaster” and International Herald Tribune, October 5, 2009, Henry Kissinger, “Afganistan’s cruel options.”

[7] United States Army Combined Arms Center, Leavenworth, Kansas, Handbook 09-27 April 2009. “Center for Army Lessons Learned.” Also see the Department of State, Counterinsurgency for U.S. Government Policy Makers: A work in Progress, October 2007, Department of State Publication # 11456.

[8] International Herald Tribune, Sept 17, 2009, Andrew Wilder [research director at Tufts Univ Center] “Squandering hearts and minds.”

[9] Russian ambassador Zamir N. Kabulov pointed out that during their occupation the Russians spent billions on education, building roads, dams and other infrastructure as well as education and programs designed uplift women, “to no avail.” See New York Times, October 20, 2008, John F. Burns, “An Old Afghanistan Hand Offers Lessons from the Past.”

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William R. Polk was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia from 1961 to 1965 and then professor of history at the University of Chicago where he founded the Middle Eastern Studies Center. He was also president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. His most recent book is Understanding Iran: Everything You Need to Know, From Persia to the Islamic Republic, From Cyrus to Ahmadinejad (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, October 27, 2009).

The Fifty-Year War By Jonathan Schell

2009-11-22T12:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091130/schell/single
The Fifty-Year War
By Jonathan Schell
This article appeared in the November 30, 2009 edition of The Nation.

I was about to write that there can be no military solution to the war in Afghanistan, only a political one. But I almost fainted with boredom and had to stop. Who, as President Obama lengthily ponders his decisions regarding the war, wants to repeat a point that's been made 11,000 times before? Is there anyone on earth who doesn't know by now that you can't win a guerrilla war without winning the "hearts and minds" of the people? The American public has known this since the American defeat in Vietnam. The formerly colonized peoples of the Third World, whose hearts and minds were the ones contested, know it. American officialdom knows it. (In a recent New Yorker profile by George Packer of Richard Holbrooke, Obama's envoy to the so-called Af-Pak region, Leslie Gelb, who worked in the Pentagon in the 1960s, recalled, "Changing hearts and minds--all the smart young men thought that.") Today, even the general in charge in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, now asking for 40,000 or more troops, knows it. He can read all about it in the new Army counterinsurgency manual produced by his boss, Centcom commander Gen. David Petraeus. There he can learn that "political factors have primacy in COIN [counterinsurgency]" and that "arguably, the decisive battle is for the people's minds."

But if one has repeated this point anyway (as I have, by a backdoor route), then one must go on to make the rather newer point that there is no political solution that serves the foreign invader either. The problem is structural and fundamental. Like the imperial powers of the past, the United States wants to impose its will on other countries. Yet it is different from those previous powers in at least one respect: it does not aim to rule the countries it invades indefinitely. Conscious that the American public will not support war without end, it means to leave one day. Therefore the art of victory has to be to try to set up a government that can both survive US withdrawal and serve US interests. The circle to be squared is getting the people of a whole country to want what Washington wants. The trouble is that, left to their own devices, other peoples are likely to want what they want, not what we want.

One problem flowing from this dilemma is that the more the United States does to set up such a government, the more the "Afghans themselves" (or the Vietnamese themselves or the Iraqis themselves or the whoevers themselves) are tainted by the association. If the paradox of military engagement in such a conflict is that the more you fight the more you lose, then the paradox of political engagement is that the more you rule the weaker the native component of the government becomes, and the more likely it is to collapse when you leave, as the South Vietnamese government did in 1975. That is scarcely a new point, either. For instance, as far back as 1964, Senator Richard Russell said in a phone conversation with President Lyndon Johnson, "It appears that our position is deteriorating, and it looks like the more we try to do for them, the less they're willing to do for themselves." (Holbrooke reprised the point to Packer when he commented on the Afghan government, "The more help they need, the more dependent they get.... In Vietnam, that's exactly what happened.")

The problem of the missing government is no detail of policy; it is fatal to the whole enterprise. And the absence is even more acute in Afghanistan today than it was in Vietnam. Johnson's defense secretary, Robert McNamara, pointed out in 1965 that the government of South Vietnam was a "non-government." And the same year Under Secretary of State George Ball, an in-house dissenter, wrote, "The 'government' in Saigon is a travesty. In a very real sense, South Vietnam is a country with an army and no government." The difference in Afghanistan in 2009? No army, either. (That's why one difficulty that plagued Vietnam, repeated coups d'état, is one problem the United States does not have in Afghanistan.) After touring the Garmsir District in Afghanistan recently, New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins wrote, "In Garmsir, there is nothing remotely resembling a modern state that could take over if America and its NATO allies left." In January a Defense Department report stated, "building a fully competent and independent Afghan government will be a lengthy process that will last, at a minimum, decades." Yet without such a government, US policy in Afghanistan is not merely destined to fail; it is incoherent. In a sense, it is not a policy at all. There is a lot in Afghanistan that is different from Vietnam, but this much is the same or worse.

Why, when so much was learned at such cost in Vietnam, is it necessary to learn it all again, through additional bitter and futile experience? The story of the deliberations in the mid-'60s leading to the decision to fight in strength in Vietnam can help us to understand. Anyone who lived through that period and examines the record that has been made available since then has to be astonished by how much the policy-makers knew and understood about the reality of the situation even as they made their ruinous decisions. In 1965 and 1966, on the eve of the great public protests of 1967 and 1968, antiwar commentators such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, I.F. Stone, Mary McCarthy and Walter Lippmann defied the conventional wisdom emanating from the government. They articulated the realities reiterated above, as well as others. It took acuity and intellectual courage to do so. It seemed at the time that they were telling officialdom, which denied all this in public, things it did not know. And yet as we can see now, little of it was a surprise to the policy-makers. In their private deliberations, they acknowledged these things. Here, for example, is Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy, one of the architects of the policy, in a memo from October 1964 listing the problems facing the United States:

A bad colonial heritage of long standing, totally inadequate preparation for self-government by the colonial power, a colonialist war fought in half-baked fashion and lost, a nationalist movement taken over by Communism ruling in the other half of an ethnically and historically united country, the Communist side inheriting much the better military force and far more than its share of the talent--these are the facts that dog us today.

Kai Bird, from whose book The Color of Truth this passage is quoted, comments, "In this one long-winded sentence Bundy managed to touch just about all the points I.F. Stone, Bernard Fall or other early critics of the war would make within a year."

Bundy's brother McGeorge, who was national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, was scarcely more hopeful. A believer in the doctrine of credibility, which held that a defeat anywhere in the world for American power would be a devastating and unacceptable defeat for it everywhere, he conceded that the US effort in Vietnam might fail but perversely argued that even an unsuccessful war would "damp down the charge that we did not do all that we could have done," for "this charge will be important in many countries, including our own." Thus to fight and fail was better for credibility--and for winning elections--than not to fight at all. Also available, in June 1964, was a definitive memo by intelligence analyst Sherman Kent debunking the principal rationale for the war, the domino theory (a close cousin of the doctrine of credibility), which held that if South Vietnam fell under the control of the North, noncommunist countries throughout Asia and even elsewhere would fall to communism.

Especially striking is the state of mind of Lyndon Johnson, whose secret belief, so sharply at variance with his public assurances, was that the cause was all but hopeless. In the taped conversations with Senator Russell in May 1964, a year before Johnson embarked on his buildup of combat troops, Russell describes the war as "the damn worst mess I ever saw," and Johnson murmurs agreement. Russell tells the president that if it were up to him he would "get out" rather than expand the war. Johnson asks Russell, "How important is it to us?" Russell answers, "It isn't important a damn bit," and Johnson gloomily says of sending in combat troops, "I just haven't got the nerve to do it, and I don't see any other way out of it." These nearly despairing comments are not those of a man filled with a false optimism about the course he is about to embark on.

We are accustomed to thinking that hard experience in Vietnam taught certain lessons that then, for a while, became cautionary principles. But this record reveals that most of those lessons were known--though not publicly admitted--before the big Vietnam escalation. The difference is important. If the disaster was launched in full awareness of the "lessons," then we shouldn't expect that relearning those lessons will be potent in stopping a similar disaster now. If they didn't prevent the disaster the first time, why should they the second or third time? Some other lessons seem to be needed. Why, we therefore need to ask, did Johnson and his advisers steer the country into a war that even to them was looking more and more like a lost cause, or at best a desperate gamble?

In Bird's book and in a more recent one--Lessons in Disaster by Gordon Goldstein, who helped McGeorge Bundy to prepare a book reconsidering the war--another factor moves into the foreground. Bundy's death prevented completion of that book, but Goldstein makes use of Bundy's notes in his own book. Seeking to understand the origins of the war, Bundy was impressed with the salience of domestic politics. In 1949 the Communist Party had come to power in China, and ever since, Republicans and other right-wingers had been accusing Democrats of "losing" China. The belief that the United States could have prevented the communist victory was a fantasy; yet the charge became one of the principal themes of Senator Joe McCarthy's attacks on Democrats, which sent currents of fear far beyond the government and into society at large, intimidating and paralyzing a generation. The dread of being accused of lacking patriotic toughness--and above all of being accused of losing a military venture--cast a long shadow. Even Kennedy, who according to Goldstein showed remarkable independence in refusing the nearly unanimous advice from his advisers to send large numbers of combat troops to Vietnam, expressed his fear of being called a "communist appeaser." As he said to his aide Kenny O'Donnell in early 1963, "If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I'm re-elected." That re-election, of course, never came.

Johnson was more deeply frightened by the right. Urged by Senator Mike Mansfield to withdraw from Vietnam, he answered that he didn't want another "China in Vietnam." Bundy fueled Johnson's fears. In a 1964 memo he wrote that "the political damage to Truman and Acheson from the fall of China arose because most Americans came to believe that we could and should have done more than we did to prevent it. This is exactly what would happen now if we should seem to be the first to quit in Saigon." In another memo, Bundy outlined a moderated version of the domino theory and went on to argue that neutrality would be viewed by "all anti-communist Vietnamese" as a "betrayal," thus angering a domestic constituency powerful enough "to lose us an election."

Did Bundy and Johnson's other advisers push the country into a disastrous war in order to win an election--or, to be more exact, to avoid losing one? Motivations are never easy to sort out. On the one hand, Johnson, Bundy and the others surely gave sincere credence to the domino/credibility theory, just as Obama probably believes that the war in Afghanistan is "necessary," in his words, "for the defense of our people." (Unfortunately, impossible missions do not become possible because they have been dubbed necessary; on the contrary, they become quagmires.) On the other hand, that theory also meshed with suspicious ease with the perceived domestic political need, always on the president's mind, to appear tough to the domestic audience--to do everything he could to avoid appearing "less of a hawk than your more respectable opponents," in Bundy's retrospective words. After thinking the matter over for thirty years, Bundy would declare the domestic considerations uppermost. In his words describing Johnson's frame of mind at the time, "LBJ is not deeply concerned about who governs Laos, or who governs South Vietnam--he's deeply concerned with what the average American voter is going to think about how he did in the ball game of the Cold War. The great Cold War championship gets played in the largest stadium in the United States and he, Lyndon Johnson, is the quarterback, and if he loses, how does he do in the next election? So don't lose. Now that's too simple, but it's where he is. He's living with his own political survival every time he looks at these questions."

Former Defense Secretary McNamara agreed. Johnson, he said in an interview with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post in 2007, "didn't want to listen" to McNamara's growing doubts about the war. Why? Domestic politics: he was "more afraid of the right than the left. And he was afraid that if he did anything to in any way appear to appease the North Vietnamese, he would be severely criticized by the right wing of American politics. Therefore he didn't do it." Johnson later confided the same. To his biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin he said, "I knew that Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had lost their effectiveness from the day that the communists took over in China. I believed that the loss of China had played a large role in the rise of Joe McCarthy. And I knew that all these problems, taken together, were chickenshit compared to what might happen if we lost Vietnam." Or, as Bundy put it to Goldstein in words that could serve as an epitaph for the era, "For LBJ the domino theory was really a matter of domestic politics."

Are these events too distant from the present to be relevant to Obama's deliberations regarding Afghanistan? On the contrary, what is uncanny about the current debate is precisely the degree to which it displays continuity with the Vietnam debate. The Obama administration knows it. A few months before he became special envoy, Holbrooke, who was an official in Vietnam in the mid-'60s, favorably reviewed the Goldstein book in the Times, praising it for offering "insight into how Bundy, a man of surpassing skill and reputation, could have advised two presidents so badly." We can imagine that Holbrooke would not like this to be said of him a few decades from now. Peter Spiegel and Jonathan Weisman of the Wall Street Journal have revealed that the Goldstein book has become required reading at the White House. Lessons of Vietnam are flowing through other channels as well. Petraeus's counterinsurgency manual, with all its talk of winning hearts and minds, is pure Vietnam. To most Americans, Vietnam taught one big lesson: "Don't do it again!" To today's military, Vietnam has taught a host of little lessons, adding up to "Do it better!" The military has in effect militarized the arguments of the peace movement of the 1960s. Are the hearts and minds of the local people arrayed against the United States? Then be nice to them. (In a Washington Post column supporting a troop increase in Afghanistan, David Ignatius cited the fact that US troops are issued petty cash to buy Afghans soda and other goodies.) Are civilian casualties discrediting the American effort? Cut them to a minimum, as General McChrystal is seeking to do (with mixed success). Is corruption in the client government rampant? "Pressure" it to be honest.

Along the political track, the lessons of the past have also been transmitted down to the present. The experience of Senator George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, was decisive. He proposed to end the war, which by then was unpopular with the public, yet lost the election in a landslide. The defeat seemed to confirm the fears that had haunted Johnson: those who oppose or lose wars lose elections. That lesson instilled in the Democratic Party a bone-deep fear of "McGovernism," which has continued to this day.

And so, hanging over the scene, still, are the political pressures that go back almost fifty years, to Vietnam, or even sixty years, to the myth that the United States lost China. There is an unmistakable continuity that runs from McCarthy's attacks on Truman and his administration for "appeasement" and even "treason" clear down to Dick Cheney's and Karl Rove's and Glenn Beck's refrains assailing Obama for opposing the Iraq War, not to speak of Sarah Palin's charge during the election that he had been "palling around with terrorists." (The Republicans even call Obama a "socialist," as if the cold war had never ended.) We have no internal records of the administration's decision-making, nor of course any thirty-or-forty-years-later rethinking and bean-spilling, so we cannot know how much domestic factors weigh in the deliberations. It might be hard to tell even if we did possess these. Yet it is no secret that Obama's support for the war in Afghanistan served as protection against charges of weakness over his policy of withdrawing from Iraq. (We might go as far as to say that in having a second war to support while opposing the war in Iraq, Obama had a political opportunity never available to Johnson, all of whose eggs were in the Vietnam basket.) In the words of foreign policy old hand Morton Abramowitz to Packer, "Obama...to show he was tough, made Afghanistan his signature issue because he wanted to get out of Iraq."

In short, in strictly political terms, the Vietnam dilemma has been handed down to Obama virtually intact. Now as then, the issue politically is whether the United States is able to fail in a war without coming unhinged. Does the American body politic have a reverse gear? Does it know how to cut losses? Is it capable of learning from experience? Or must it plunge unchecked over every cliff it approaches? And at the heart of these questions is another: must liberals and moderates always bow down before the crazy right when it comes to war and peace? Must presidents behave like Johnson, of whom his attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, later said, "It would not have made any difference what anybody advised him--he would have done what he did [in Vietnam].... It was fear of the right wing." What is the source of this raw power, this right-wing veto over presidents, Congresses and public opinion? The person who can answer these questions will have discovered one of the keys to a half-century of American history--and the forces that, even now, bear down on Obama as he considers what to do in Afghanistan.

Recently Obama paid a night visit to Dover Air Force Base to view the homecoming of the remains of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. The event, as these returns always are, was minutely choreographed, every step and gesture planned in advance, as if molded and slowed by the pressure of death. Obama saluted in slow motion, in unison with four uniformed soldiers, then walked in step with them past the van that had just received the remains from a cargo plane that had brought them home. No one spoke. On the one hand, it seemed that Obama might have been absorbed more deeply into the military, to have been caught in its somber spell. On the other hand, his presence seemed a silent public vow, as he makes his decisions, to keep his mind fixed on matters of life and death, not on the next election. His actions in the weeks and years ahead will tell which it was.

About Jonathan Schell
Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute and teaches a course on the nuclear dilemma at Yale. He is the author of The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger

To succeed in Afghanistan, we must fail The Afghan government must take responsibility for its own survival. Gerard Russell

2009-11-21T18:46:00.001-08:00

LOS ANGELES TIMES

11/19/09

To succeed in Afghanistan, we must fail

The Afghan government must take responsibility for its own survival.

Gerard Russell

Writing From Kabul, Afghanistan -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai's inauguration today will be a somber affair. Gray storm clouds are slowly replacing the blue skies, and the sour tang of charcoal smoke hangs in the air. The mood among the internationals here is similarly gloomy. So many conversations end with the scratching of heads, with the tacit admission that no idea that has come forward has been big enough to reverse the Afghan government's steady loss of control.

This is not because of the flawed elections or the ghastly killing of foreigners. That's all bad, but it's not doomsday. Nearly two years ago, I heard the distant rumbles, like thunder, of the attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul, which killed seven people. The Afghan government's legitimacy was being questioned then too, and urgent reforms demanded -- without practical result. Two elections had already happened and were marred by fraud. We have been here before, and survived.
No, what is depressing about the situation in Afghanistan is not that it has suddenly gotten much worse but that it steadily fails to get better. By the time U.S. forces left Vietnam, the South Vietnamese army had at least proved itself capable of holding ground against its enemy, albeit with massive U.S. air support. In Afghanistan, by contrast, district after district in the country's troubled south is falling, in effect, under Taliban control. Meanwhile, in the Western nations with troops here, public support for the war is waning.
Would 40,000 more troops turn this around? They would buy time, provided the time is well used. But the real currency of counterinsurgency is not military strength but durability. A person will be more eager to be friends with a neighbor who will still be around in 20 years to repay any favor or grudge. The Taliban offers this. The U.S. does not. The Afghan government might.
The struggle in Afghanistan is all about Afghans sizing each other up; foreigners are mainly just bystanders.
Until an equilibrium of power has been reached among Afghans that is generally unchallenged, pulling out foreign troops would precipitate a civil war. It would be a tawdry and selfdefeating end to the intervention in Afghanistan. Yet, for as long as foreign troops are dominating the conflict with the Taliban, and for as long as the U.S. is seen as the final arbiter of Afghan politics, an equilibrium of power cannot be reached.
The U.S. presence is the Afghan government's safety net, protecting it from the need to take responsibility for the fight against the Taliban. Until Karzai's government sees its survival at stake, it will not play its best game.
So let's fail in Afghanistan. Fail in the right way now, and the Afghans will have a chance of succeeding.
The right kind of failure could look like this: The U.S. has fought hard to expand its coalition in Afghanistan, to include nations even if they bring only half a dozen soldiers and at least as many policy differences. Lose this battle. Shrink the coalition to a manageable size.
The coalition has fought to extend the Afghan government's writ to every part of Afghanistan. In doing so, it has put its soldiers in static bases and had them patrol Afghan cities and towns. They are vulnerable, with little room to maneuver. Large parts of the country remain outside the government's writ anyway; it has done little to follow up military successes.
So lose this battle too. By the end of 2010, withdraw forces to impregnable bases from which they can back up Afghan forces in cases of extreme need. Then there will be an end to the perception that Afghans now have: This is a war waged by foreigners in Afghanistan.
Yes, the Afghan forces will suffer. But they will anyway, one day, because foreign forces will not stay forever. Their chances are better now than they will be once the Taliban has irrevocably established itself in even more locations, and when U.S. patience is thinner than now.
We must also lose the fight to give the Afghans a better government than they have had. It is simply not ours to win. Our views of what makes a good minister are not always right by any means. But, even more important, when a government is seen to be imposed by foreign influence, its failures can be blamed on foreigners. Let every pretense be stripped away. Let the failures of the Afghan government be clearly its failures, and let its successes be just as clearly its own. Expose that government, in other words, to the laws of natural selection. It must adapt or die.
Foreign governments can advise. They can set certain conditions for their aid money, which should be simple and apolitical -- an anti-corruption commission, for example. And once they no longer have ownership of the Afghan government, they will be able to enforce those conditions more effectively.
But the Afghan government must be in the lead, clearly in charge, free to make its own political decisions and to learn its own lessons. And that is what the Afghan people must see.
In the long run, rather than the U.S. putting in more troops, it might have a greater effect by putting them out of harm's way. And it might succeed best by failing first.
Gerard Russell, a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, has worked in Afghanistan since 2007, most recently as senior advisor to former U.N. official Peter Galbraith.

To succeed in Afghanistan, we must fail The Afghan government must take responsibility for its own survival. Gerard Russell

2009-11-21T18:46:00.000-08:00

THE RISE OF CHINA'S AUTO INDUSTRY

2009-11-20T09:14:00.000-08:00

THE RISE OF CHINA'S AUTO INDUSTRY

"In recent years, China has become the world's fastest growing automotive producer," according to a new report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service.

"[China's] annual vehicle output has increased from less than 2 million vehicles in the late 1990s to 9.5 million in 2008. In terms of production volume in 2008, China has surpassed Korea, France, Germany, and the United States, trailing only Japan."

"China’s automobile industry has continued to expand despite the global economic downturn. From January to October 2009, more than 10 million vehicles were sold in China. If such growth continues, China is on its way to becoming world’s largest auto market," the CRS said.

See "The Rise of China's Auto Industry and Its Impact on the U.S. Motor Vehicle Industry," November 16, 2009.