Posted on 07/31/2002 by Juan Cole
A Bluff on Iraq?
The article by Mary Dejevsky in the Independent on the talk about an Iraq campaign being a “bluff” is foolish. There is not any doubt that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz intend to go to war against Baghdad, and the signs I’ve seen are that they have convinced President George W. Bush to do it. Apparently the top officers in the US armed forces are unanimous in not wanting this war, but then Colin Powell initially opposed the first Gulf War, as well. Who wants to be dragged into an uncertain operation that might make you look bad? Nevertheless, if Bush orders the war, it will happen.
The varying Pentagon war plans being leaked are not a sign of unseriousness. They are a sign that different factions within the Pentagon want to do the war in different ways, and they are jockeying for position by releasing their opponents’ plans with a negative spin on them. War departments always have varying scenarios for fighting a war, and often only in the actual event are the hard choices made. Those with good memories may remember that the geniuses over at The New Republic were insisting on putting 100,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan last October, and apparently there were some in the Pentagon who agreed that might be necessary (what a recipe for disaster) before the Taliban collapsed so startlingly.
The Senate and the House don’t appear to be opposed to the project. And, the drumbeat of the intellectually dishonest members of the war party, such as former CIA director James Woolsey, intimating that perhaps maybe somewhere there is not impossibly a possibility that it is not unthinkable that there is an Iraq-al-Qaida connection appears to be being bought by the naive. (Of course, there is no such evidence).
The lack of enthusiasm for such a war on the part of the militarily important Powers in continental Europe, in Russia, and in the Arab World, does not mean it cannot be done, I’ve decided. It simply means that the U.S. will be acting almost unilaterally. Since it will need Saudi or Jordanian air space, which won’t be on offer, it is entirely possible that the US will simply use it anyway, on the theory that there is nothing that the Saudis or Jordanians can do about it.
While it seems likely that Bush will go to war, the outcome of such an action is very much in doubt and could haunt him (and us) in the future. The negative possibilities include:
1) Iraq could be destabilized, with ethnic forces becoming mobilized and squabbling over resources, as happened in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion.
2) Iraq could be reconstituted as an unpopular American-backed dictatorship, as happened in Iran in the 1950s. So far, close US allies in the War on Terror in the Middle East include Egypt, which is a military dictatorship that just jailed Saad Eddin Ibrahim for human rights work; Pakistan, a military dictatorship whose leader is attempting to manipulate the fall elections to keep himself in power; Saudi Arabia (nuff said); and other countries with extremely bad human rights records or which are involved in imperial occupations. A Pinochet in Iraq would potentially harm the US diplomatically for decades to come.
2) The loss of civilian life will be significant, further turning much of the world against the United States and losing any sympathy generated by September 11.
3) Recruitment of terrorists to strike the U.S. in the Muslim world may well be easier in the aftermath of a bloodbath in Iraq.
4) The unilateral nature of the action may well provoke Europe, Russia, China and India to begin trying to find ways to unite against the U.S. on such issues in the future, so as to offset its massive military superiority by isolating it on the Security Council and in other international venues. Europe’s relative economic clout could grow if war uncertainties keep the US economy weak.
5) The Bush First Strike doctrine may well be emulated by other nations who fear their neighbors, producing copy cat wars that destabilize entire regions.
It should be remembered that the German army in 1914 had a first strike doctrine, which dragged Europe into an unnecessary and highly destructive maelstrom.
6) There may be no dividend to an Iraq war in the form of lower petroleum prices in the long run. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait both have significant excess capacity, and OPEC always has an incentive to pump less oil for higher prices, as they have done in the past. Even if Iraq could pump 5 million barrels a day instead of 2, OPEC can just reduce its output by 3 mn. barrels a day and put the price back up. They would have every incentive to do so since they could get about the same amount of income from less oil, benefiting them over time.
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Posted on 07/30/2002 by Juan Cole
A car bomb that the driver intended to use to blow up government ministers in Kabul was intercepted when it had a collision. It is not clear if President Karzai was among the intended victims.
Political parties in Pakistan are continuing to buck President Musharraf. There may well be a substantial confrontation between them and his military government. The Pakistan People’s Party has insisted on electing Benazir Bhutto as its head in the first intra-party elections, mandated by Pakistan’s new election laws. Musharraf’s government has declared her ineligible to run, both because she faces corruption charges and because of term limits it has recently instituted. The Muslim League (N), which is still loyal to deposed Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, intends to elect either his son or daughter to lead the party. It is hard to see how Musharraf as president could cohabit with a Sharif as prime minister. In the meantime, the smal religious parties have decided to run under separate tickets rather than as a coalition, which almost guarantees that they will pick up few seats in parliament. Musharraf is under enormous pressure to hold free and fair elections in fall of 2002, but the parties are not cooperating in his call for new leadership. At some point he may jail Benazir or bar one of the Sharif children from the country, which will make him look more and more like the military dictator he is.
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Posted on 07/27/2002 by Juan Cole
Ethnic conflict is on the rise in Afghanistan, as evidenced by a number of incidents that do not appear to have been reported in the major U.S. media, though the brave and diligent wire service reporters on the ground have been filing them. These conflicts may well draw the United States military into one side or the other, with the potential for alienating entire regions.
As reported on 7/25 below, Ismail Khan’s Tajik forces, based in Herat city and its environs, clashed on Sunday and Monday with ethnic Pushtun forces led by Amanu’llah Khan. The source of the conflict is now said (by AP) to be that both sides were setting up more security posts around an airport at Shindand in the south of Herat province (the south has more Pushtuns). In short, Ismail Khan and his Pushtun opponents appear to be jockeying for position. Will airport taxes and tolls on goods brought in that way stay among local Pushtuns or go north to Herat city, to benefit the Tajiks? The clashes that broke out are now said to have left a dozen persons dead by Monday. A ceasefire was reached late Monday with central government officials acting as mediators.
Karzai on Friday pronounced himself very happy with the tariff income forwarded by Herat and Balkh provinces. For a long time the provinces have not remitted monies to the center.
On Friday, 3000 Pushtuns demonstrated in Jalalabad, protesting the failure of the Kabul government to make any arrests in the assassination of Vice President Abdu’l-Qadir. They also protested Tajik dominance of the government. Abdu’l-Qadir’s brother summarily announced himself his successor as governor of Nangarhar Province. Karzai confirmed the appointment on Friday, but this appears more acquiescence than executive action.
Although the wire services reported Friday that the cease-fire was holding between the Tajiks and the Pushtuns in Herat province, the Pakistani newspaper *Dawn* reported on Saturday morning that the Pushtun chiefs have demanded that Karzai dismiss Ismail Khan. They threatened to mount a military insurgency against him if Karzai refused to act.
Karzai is unlikely to dismiss Ismail Khan at this point, since he needs him and since he just sent the central government the first provincial revenue it has had in more than a decade. If the Pushtuns of southern Herat province do turn violent, the US may be tempted to intervene. If the Pushtuns perceive McNeill to be taking the side of the Tajiks, however, this perception could cause political problems for the US military throughout southern Afghanistan.
One elegant solution would be for Karzai to call upon Pushtun chieftains loyal to him to intervene against Amanu’llah Khan if he rebels, thus transforming the fight into an intra-Pushtun affair. By governing only loosely from the center and allowing tribal mechanisms in the provinces to keep what order they can, Karzai’s government might be able to survive the years it will need to become powerful enough to intervene directly in such security issues. Still, as a last resort, the need for US intervention cannot be ruled out. Its consequences, however, might be long term and parlous.
Given the potential size of the security problems the US and the US-backed Afghan government face in the next year, it seems to me particularly foolish for the Pentagon to be planning further big wars. There may yet be a battle of Shindand to be fought, with parlous consequences throughout the country.
(For Shindand airport see the interesting Web site: http://www.wapf.com/world/AF75939.html.
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Posted on 07/26/2002 by Juan Cole
The Russian Deputy Foreign Minister (Igor Ivanov) is in Iraq, and reiterated his government’s opposition to a US strike on that country. He implied that the US has been lobbying the other members of the UN Security Council to go along. (France is also opposed, so far). Ivanov did, however, urge Iraq to bring back the UN weapons inspectors, as a step to resolving the problem. Russia has long-term ties to Iraq and is owed $9 bn. by Baghdad.
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Posted on 07/25/2002 by Juan Cole
McNeill meets Ismail Khan; and Development Aid
The fighting between ethnic Tajiks (Sunni Persian speakers) around the northwestern city of Herat with ethnic Pushtuns brought a visit from the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Dan K. McNeill. He met with Herat’s governor/ warlord Ismail Khan, offering US good offices in ending the regional fighting. Ismail Khan denied there was much of a problem, and branded the Pushtuns against which the Tajiks were fighting as “Taliban.” Pushtuns throughout northern Afghanistan have faced reprisals and collective punishment because they were identified with the largely Pushtun Taliban. It seems a little unlikely that the Pushtuns around Herat are actually Taliban, and this appears to be an ethnic conflict.
Sunday and Monday Tajik fighters had battled Amanullah Khan’s Pushtun forces, leaving perhaps 25 or so dead and more wounded. A ceasefire was reached late Monday with central government officials acting as mediators.
The subtext of McNeill’s visit is surely not only an offer of help but an implicit threat of US involvement if Ismail Khan does not resolve the situation himself. It also appears to have been a way of pressuring him to greater deference to Kabul. He was careful to proclaim his allegiance to President Karzai, and affirmed that he would send more money to the center if they needed it. This phraseology cannot be very assuring to the Karzai government. It is rather as though Gov. Engler of Michigan should pledge that he would consider remitting to the Federal government Michigan’s Federal tax receipts “if W. needed it.” On the other hand, AP reports that the Herat region is possibly the best governed in the country, with kept-up paved roads, schools, and even gas stations. In contrast, US troops and Afghan allies discovered a big cache of anti-aircraft weapons near Khost in the southeast, and apprehended 5 persons, though whether these were Taliban or al-Qaida was not specified.
Meanwhile, some Afghan cabinet members met with US officials in Washington, D.C., pleading for more of the $4.5 bn. aid pledged at Tokyo by the industrialized nations to be released (only $1 bn. has come in, and about half of that had to be spent on food and humanitarian activities.) US AID reported that it has rebuilt 70,000 homes and 30 schools, which seems to me a goodwill story that has not been sufficiently reported in the press. In particular, the agricultural sector needs to be revived if Afghanistan is to get back on its feet after 20 years of war and 3 years of drought.
The buzz about Afghanistan’s continued instability strikes me as overdrawn. What is amazing is that a country that has undergone such a major revolution in governance in the past year has as much order as it does. Older tribal mechanisms have clearly been resurrected. These work well enough when they do not devolve into major feuds. Afghanistan has not done well under extremely centralized governments, such as those of the Communists or the Taliban.
The the virtual autonomy of an Ismail Khan is probably not a pressing issue at the moment. Eventually the warlords will have to be integrated more effectively into a new Afghan state. That cannot come until the Kabul bureaucracy and army is capable of asserting itself. But Ismail Khan should be made to understand that his forces must give up any vendetta against the Pushtuns, or risk military intervention at Karzai’s orders. Ethnic strife among the winners is the one thing that could destabilize the country again in a major way. The nightmare is that Afghanistan will return to the chaos of the mid-1990s. Karzai must not let that happen, but his major military force, the old army of the Northern Alliance, is Tajik and it may not be willing to intervene against other Tajiks. He may have to appeal for US help, and McNeill was surely attempting to gauge whether such a US intervention is warranted.
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Posted on 07/24/2002 by Juan Cole
A Bush Appointee Brings up Concentration Camps for American Muslims
The comments of Peter Kirsanow, a Bush appointee to the US Civil Rights commission, in Detroit over the past weekend are beyond belief. He openly brought up the possibility that if there were another big al-Qaida strike on the US, Muslim Americans could be put in camps. He was quick to say he did not favor such a move, only that the public would certainly demand it. “If there’s a future terrorist attack in America “and they come from the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center, you can forget about civil rights,” he said.
In a hearing in which Arab Americans from Dearborn complained about infractions against their civil rights since September 11, Kirsanow was openly dismissive of these concerns.
The Bush administration was quick to distance itself from Kirsanow. It should distance itself even further by firing the man. No one is so naive as to believe he wasn’t deliberately raising the camps issue as a way of putting it on the public agenda. The world has changed since World War II and so has the United States. The public values of this country do not allow us at this point in the Republic’s history to impose collective punishment on a whole population because of the deeds of a handful of persons. Muslim Americans are extremely diverse, and there are probably 3 million of them. They are from Malaysia and Morocco, India and Egypt. They are Sunnis and Shiites and Ismailis. The vast majority of them would feel no kinship with radical fundamentalists like Bin Laden and Muhammad Atta. US authorities have estimated that there are no more than 100 persons in the United States who have sworn allegiance to al-Qaida, and no more than 5,000 sympathizers. In a population of three million, this is a tiny, tiny fringe. Most of the al-Qaida operatives we know about have come recently from Europe or the Middle East and only a handful have been American citizens.
Kirsanow should not have brought this nightmarish issue up. As a member of the Civil Rights Commission, he should be defending human rights, not dismissing them. Bin Laden has openly said that he desired to steal Americans’ freedom from them. He wants them to know what it is like to live in the authoritarian Middle East. Kirsanow appears to have fallen for Bin Laden’s trap. The rest of us should not.
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Posted on 07/23/2002 by Juan Cole
Al-Qaida Continues to Recruit
The Sunday Times reported on 7/21 that British intelligence now estimates that some 4,000 Muslims with British citizenship passed through al-Qaida training camps, many of them having fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya or the Balkans before returning to the UK. Previous estimates had been 80 or so. If true, this report indicates that British security forces have a much more difficult task in fighting terrorism than previously thought.
On 7/22 USA Today reported that Peter Gridling, an Austrian who took control this month of Europol’s counterterrorism unit. Europol, is convinced that al-Qaida continues to be active in virtually every country in Europe and continues successfully to recruit members and to maintain contact among cells. Roland Jacquard, Roland Jacquard, president of the Paris-based International Observatory on Terrorism, is said by the report to have estimated that over 200 al-Qaida suspects have been rounded up in Western Europe since September 11, but he remains pessimistic about the possibility of cracking the organization altogether.
Asharq al-Awsat reported Tuesday that Salim Zarda, 32, who was deported from the US to Tunisia in May, will be tried there by a military court. Zarda was apprehended last fall in San Antonio on charges of entering the US illegally and suspicion of belonging to al-Qaida. He went to Germany in 1996 and was given political asylum there. He made a number of trips to Afghanistan and Bosnia. He denies any connection to Usama Bin Laden. The military court in Tunisia has already imprisoned 4 persons on similar charges, for terms ranging from 8 to 20 years, and has sentenced another 30 in absentia, including some in the Milan group busted by Italian security.
The same source says that 8 of prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay in Camp X-Ray are Tunisian nationals, one of which also has French citizenship. They include Bilal al-Tunisi, Hamza al-Tunisi, Abu `Abdu’llah (the one with French citizenship) and Abu Shu`ayb al-Tunisi. Most appear to have been caught by the Pakistani security forces, some just after the Tora Bora battle, from which they appear to have been fleeing. It said that fair numbers of Tunisians were killed fighting in Afghanistan for al-Qaida against the U.S.
The Tunisian contingent in al-Qaida is a sign of how effective the virtual police state of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, president of Tunisia, has been in cracking down on Islamists and forcing those who insisted on remaining activists to go abroad. (Ben Ali gets 99% of the vote every time he runs.) Although his human rights record is abysmal, it is also true that the radical Islamists in Tunisia were highly intolerant of others and would have established a totalitarian state if given the chance. The interest of these Tunisian radicals in al-Qaida, however, poses a security concern in Europe, where there are large (mostly peace-loving and secular-minded) Tunisian expatriate communities. A poll done in the 1980s showed that 20% of Tunisians, when asked their religion, replied that they were not religious. In the US only 8% of the population gives that reply. Nevertheless, among the other 80% of Tunisians there are obviously some radical fundamentalists. German intelligence is convinced that Tunisian affiliates of al-Qaida carried out the bombing of the Djerba synagogue in April 2002, which killed 19 persons, including 14 German tourists.
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