US Airstrike in Pakistan Angers Public;
Afghanistan Aid Plagued by Corruption
A wave of anger has washed over Pakistan because the US hit Pakistani troops along with the Taliban to whom it was giving hot pursuit.
I don't think a lot of the development aid given Afghanistan is reaching its intended objects.
Farideh Farhi at our Global Affairs blog on how Iran's Iraq policy is not being made by one person but is rather a joint production of dozens of officials.
posted by Juan Cole @ 6/13/2008 12:00:00 AM
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CSPAN-1 is running some excellent expert coverage of yesterday's Guantanimo/Supreme Court (in)decision. Hopefully they will have streamable content within a few hours, if you miss their cable TV coverage.
The detainee-habeus corpus/rule of law/torture issue is central to the 7 year failure of US policy in the Afghan and Iraq occupations.
A former Assistant Atty General panelist cited Gen. Taguba's opinion that Abu Ghraib sprang from the executive opinions that set up Guantanimo (and E. Euro CIA prisons) as offshore interrogation, summary justice and perpetual detention centers.
Further, that serving general officers cite credible intel showing Abu Ghraib and Gitmo are the greatest single cause of US casualties, due to their continued brutal effectiveness recruiting arab fighters and suicide teams.
To some up, the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld detention and interrogation/torture policies shot us in the foot, before we ever sent our National Gueardsmen in to occupy Saddam's prisons or palaces.
Allawi's education ministry was afraid to raise standards and pressure students, less the students and their parents got upset—there was an election to win after all.
Muqtada's education ministry (since 2005) prides mediocracy in educational standards.
May I ask what kind of criteria your are using to express such a definitive and negative judgement ?
1) Do you think that any system who is not proposing the same kinds of studies and the same methods as the West is inferior ?
2)Do you think that the evident lack of security can't account for at least a large part of where the educational system of Iraq actually lies ? Where we hear that parents most often don't dare to send their children to school ?
2) What about the waves of assassination aimed at all professionals, both in the health and education system ? Who is targetting them ? As of now, there is no indication concerning the perpetrators, but whose interests is it to suppress all the secularist and nationalists intellectuals ? It is both in the interest of the US and of the Al'Hakim's current.. and what a case, they are allied.. and what a case, the US says in order to fight "terrorism" all means are allowed; if they allow torture, then why don't they allow targetted assassination ? It is only a supposition and I'd add, a possibility, givent that it's not the first time the US would have ressorted to such means (aka the Iran Contra in Nicaragua at the time of Negroponte.. what a case, he was in Iraq too).
The detainee-habeus corpus/rule of law/torture issue is central to the 7 year failure of US policy in the Afghan and Iraq occupations.
To some up, the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld detention and interrogation/torture policies shot us in the foot, before we ever sent our National Gueardsmen in to occupy Saddam's prisons or palaces.
These are all crimes against the humanitary law and I hope that the US will be taken accountable for it and tried by an international court. However I don't think this is the only reason why the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are failing. These two enterprises were wrong from the beginnings and you can't make right something that is wrong. By invading Iraq, the US has broken the UN international chart. If China was invading the US,with or without humanitarian crimes, would you accept it ? Bush and Rumsfeld like historical examples, but most of the time they put things upside down.. if we take the example of WWII, looking for analogies, the US is now playing the part of the Germans, inventing false pretext to invade a country which wasn't a threat to them.
This staing will remain on the history of the US. It won't be easy to erase it from the memories of the rest of the world.
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