The news in the US is about several terrorist plots, some by Christians and some by Muslim expatriates, which have been averted by good police work, by the FBI and its local colleagues.
In Pakistan, the news is about a terrorist plot that was not averted.
A bomb blast shook the commercial district of the northern city of Peshawar on Saturday morning, killing at least 7 persons and wounding 50. Peshawar is an important forward staging ground for NATO materiel and equipment, intended to go across the Khyber Pass into Pakistan. The guerrillas figure if they can ratchet up the pressure they can impede further US operations in Afghanistan proper.
Usama Bin Laden’s latest screed on the Western evacutation from Afghanistan is the height of hypocrisy, since Bin Laden actively connived at getting Western troops to go there. Abdel Bar Atwan is a prominent Arab journalist and intellectual. Here what he said about his meeting with Bin Laden in 1996:
‘ Osama Bin Laden told me when I interviewed him in November 1996, “I can’t fight the Americans on the American mainland. It is too far. But if I succeed in bringing the Americans where I can find them, where I can fight them on my own terms, on my turf, on my own ground, this will be the greatest success.”’
The USG Open Source Center translated Bin Laden’s newly-released message to Europe on withdrawing from Afghanistan from the German subtitles.
Bin Ladin Sends Message to ‘People of Europe,’ Urging Withdrawal From Afghanistan Jihadist websites — OSC Summary Friday, September 25, 2009 Document Type: OSC Summary
On 25 September, a forum participant posted to a jihadist website links to download an audio statement from Al-Qa’ida leader Usama Bin Ladin. The statement, entitled “A Message From Shaykh Usama Bin Ladin to the People of Europe,” is 4 minutes, 47 seconds in length, and in Arabic with German and English subtitles available. The video shows as still photograph of Bin Ladin.
The following is a translation of the German subtitles:
(Insert) Say to those who disbelieve, if they desist, that which is past shall be forgiven to them; and if they return, then what happened to the ancients has already passed. (8:38)
(Subtitles) All praise be to Allah, who forbade himself injustice and forbade it us (people).
To the European people: Peace to those who follow the path of righteousness. You know that violations bring down their originators and that injustice has deadly consequences. And killing people is an enormous injustice. This is precisely what your governments and soldiers are doing in Afghanistan under the cover of NATO.
They kill children, women, and the elderly, because Bush was angry with them. Even though you know that they were in no way aggressive against Europe nor had any connections with the events in the United States. So why do you violate values that you consider sacred, such as justice and human rights? Cont’d (click below or on “comments”)
Thus, would it not be appropriate to thoroughly think about this matter and to ask the people of reason and sensibility?
Not much longer, and the war in Afghanistan will be over. Afterwards not even a trace of the Americans will be found there. Much rather, they will retreat far away behind the Atlantic, if Allah so wishes. Then only we and you will be left.
Then, whoever was done an injustice, will revenge himself on that person who did him an injustice.
You are learning a lesson in Georgia, a state that is close to you. Its inhabitants were bombed and humiliated. They asked the Americans for help, to regain their sovereignty over what they had lost. But the Americans had only empty words for them. When they then screamed for help loudly, the American warships came. However, they did not come to reestablish sovereignty over Ossetia and Abkhazia, but to offer them something they do not need: some tents, a bit of food, and detergent.
Therefore, think about this very thoroughly, because a sensible person does not waste his children and his property in the interest of a gang in Washington. It is a disgrace for a person to be a member of an alliance, whose greatest leader does not care about the blood of the people and deliberately bombs villagers from the air. And I am one of the witnesses to this!
Then come the Humvees, and when the crew realize that the casualties were children, they let American generosity pour out and give the relatives of the victims $100 for every child they killed. This is a sad fact.
Is it possible to buy a sheep for $100 in Europe? This is what the lives of our innocent children are worth in the eyes of Washington and its allies!
So, what do you think our reaction will be? If you had seen how your American allies and their helpers gathered thousands of Taliban in containers, cramming them in like sardines, then kept them imprisoned until they died or threw them into rivers, then you would have understood the bloody events of Madrid and London.
When the United Nations initiated an investigations of the crimes of the north, the Bush administration put pressure on it and stopped the investigation. This is what American justice is like.
In summary: We demand neither something unjust nor absurd; and it is certainly part of justice for you to stop your injustice and withdraw your soldiers. It would also be sensible not to treat your neighbors badly. When Europe suffers from an economic crisis today, when its center is no longer topping the list of the world’s export nations, and the United States has started to sway strongly because of the bloodletting caused by the economic war, then what will it be like for you after the withdrawal of the Americans — God willing — when we decide to revenge ourselves for the oppression on the oppressor?
Happy is whoever learns a lesson from the mistakes committed by others. Modest precautions are better than expensive follow-up care. Returning to truth is better than insisting on falsehood. And peace be upon those who follow the path of righteousness.
(Insert) And if they incline to peace, then incline to it and trust in Allah; surely He is the Hearing, the Knowing. (8:61) End/ (Not Continued)
So I did this posting on Thursday night, below, on how I perceive President Obama to be maneuvering Iran into a box, wherein it faced increasing chances of the ratcheting up of sanctions by the United Nations Security Council. Then I went to bed and got on a plane the next morning and checked in late Friday to find that Obama had announced that Iran had informed the International Atomic Energy Agency that they had begun construction on a second nuclear enrichment facility inside a mountain near the holy city of Qom not far from the capital of Tehran.
Obama alleged that Iran had declined to honor its commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to inform the IAEA immediately when it began such construction, and that the facility was of a size (3000 centrifuges) that it could not plausibly be intended for the peaceful enrichment of uranium to run reactors for electricity generation. (50,000 centrifuges enriching to 2-5% or so would be required for the latter). On the other hand, if you were intensively enriching to make a bomb, 3000 if used over and over again on the same uranium stock could get it up to the 90% enriched level typically nowadays needed for a proper nuclear warhead.
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shot back that no nuclear enrichment has been carried out at Qom and that Iran is only required by the NPT to inform the IAEA 6 months before such a site goes operational, which is precisely what he alleges Iran has done. He underlined that Iran was the one who told the IAEA about the facility, and fully intended that it should be inspected by UN inspectors. He denied that the facility’s size said anything about its intended function. As an engineer and mathematician himself, he taunted Obama, saying that the American president had no idea what he was talking about in relating size to function.
Julian Borger and Patrick Wintour of the Guardian report that Iran was forced to acknowledge the site because Western intelligence had picked it up in satellite photographs and then gathered information on it by other means. Ahmadinejad is correct in saying that by the letter of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has not done anything illegal, insofar as the site has not gone operational and Iran is giving 6 months notice. However, the Iranian government had additionally pledged to the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2006 that it would alert the UN to any new new nuclear facility immediately. So Iran may not have broken the law but it has broken its word.
For Iran to break its word on this matter is, moreover, as serious as for it to break the law. (This self-destructive and overly cocky way of proceeding in Tehran was the subject of my column for Salon this week, asking if Ahmadinejad is intent on turning his country into an international pariah.) Iran’s enemies, who want it put under severe economic sanctions of the sort that turned Iraq into a fourth-world country, and ideally would like to see the regime in Tehran overthrown– if necessary by military means– will point to the secret development of a new enrichment site as a sign of Tehran’s essential deviousness. It will be alleged that if there is one secret site there may be more. It will be alleged that you cannot trust anything Tehran says, and so its denials should be disregarded and action should be taken.
The thrust of my piece Friday morning was that Obama was tightening the noose on Iran. I was able to see that without knowing exactly why. I had wondered whether it had to do with the regime’s neo-authoritarian direction as of the contested elections in June.
The revelations on Friday do not change everything, though Neoconservatives will hype them as though they do. Iran has been less than forthcoming, not for the first time, but it may just be within the letter of the law. And, if it allows thorough inspections of the Qom site, it is hard to see how it could produce tons of U-235 there surreptitiously (the inspectors would immediately detect that). I share President Obama’s puzzlement as to what in the world they want a 3000- centrifuge site for.
But the law and the facts of the matter are less important than the determination of Europe and the US that Iran not develop even the Japan option. And this Qom facility and the delay in notification are powerful political arrows in the sanctions quiver. You wonder if Russia’s Putin and China’s Hu might not now acquiesce in tightened sanctions.
Since some of my readers appear not to know my record of writing on these matters and seem to confuse analysis with punditry, I should say that I am personally opposed to further sanctions on Iran unless they are very carefully targeted so as not to harm ordinary people. Regimes running oil states are not very vulnerable to sanctions. Moreover, sanctions against Iran are deeply unfair if Israel, India and Pakistan are held harmless for ignoring the NPT altogether and for developing their bombs. In fact, the way the UNSC is proceeding against Iran is such as to destroy the NPT, because any country in its right mind would prefer to withdraw from it and just do as it pleases, a la Israel, than to submit to it and have that submission be a pretext for sanctions, even where the signatory country had done nothing contrary to the letter of the law.
Finally, I leave readers with a caveat. There may be less to the Qom plant than meets the eye. Beware the Hype.
President Obama is slowly putting Iran in a box. His cancellation of the useless and expensive so-called “missile shield” program in eastern Europe, which had needlessly antagonized Russia, has been rewarded with greater Russian cooperativeness on Iran. The US right wing accused Obama of a failure of nerve. But in fact his move was shrewd and gutsy, since he predisposed Russia to increased cooperation with the US in regard to Iran’s nuclear research program. Obama’s full court press for a United Nations Security Council resolution on nuclear disarmament also pulled the rug out from under Iran’s previous grandstanding tactics, whereby it accused the US and its allies of only wanting nuclear dominance, not the abolition of nukes.
Obama chaired the UN Security Council at the summit level on Thursday, and managed to get through an important resolution on nuclear disarmament.
The BBC notes that there are increasing fears that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is breaking down. It was originally pitched as a bargain between the nuclear powers and the rest of the world, such that the countries with nukes would gradually get rid of them, while sharing expertise in nuclear energy-generation, while the other countries would agree not to acquire them.
Israel was the first non-European country to refuse to sign and then to go on to develop nuclear weapons by the early 1970s, with French and British help.
Last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency censured Israel for its estimated 200 warheads, acquiescing in a resolution introduced by Arab states. The vote was another sign, in the wake of the damning Goldstone report on Israeli atrocities in Gaza, that the international community is fast losing patience with unilateral Israeli policies.
In the 1990s, India and Pakistan got the bomb (India had done some low-yield test as early as the 1970s). More recently, North Korea has. Many countries have or seek what is called the “Japan option.” It is generally thought that Japan could construct a nuclear weapon very rapidly if it felt threatened enough. This emergency capacity is also thought to be sought by Iran, which denies that it currently has a weapons research program.
Medvedev’s flexibility comes in the wake of the Obama administration’s cancellation of plans for missile shield installations in eastern Europe. Although both countries deny that there is any quid pro quo, it seems obvious that Obama’s good will gesture has yielded positive results in Moscow with regard to Iran policy.
Washington’s earlier push at the United Nations against the Iranian nuclear research program foundered when Iran charged hypocrisy on the part of the nuclear powers and insisted that its program is solely peaceful (an allegation that as far as US intelligence can tell is probably true). Obama’s stress on new nuclear disarmament agreements is in part intended to blunt any further Iranian diplomatic campaign and to put Iran in the position of looking obstreperous if it is not forthcoming in the upcoming negotiations with the 5 permanent UNSC members plus Germany.
Brown erred in charging Iran with having a nuclear weapons program, which US intelligence can find no evidence for. But because it is using centrifuge technology that is open-ended and could be suitable for dual use, Western leaders such as Brown are suspicious that the program has weapons implications down the road.
China disagreed with Brown’s stance, and is opposed to further sanctions on Iran. But China has a doctrine of “Harmonious Development,” which prescribes that it stays out of the way of the other great powers and avoid political adventurism while it grows its economy. The Chinese might well be susceptible to US and UK pressure to move against Iran if the outcome of the forthcoming 5 + 1 talks is disappointing.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s appearance at the UN was decried by Israeli liberals as clownish. He seemed to take Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s bait by trying to offer documentary proof of the Holocaust (the event is not in doubt and doesn’t need to be proven) and then by referring to little Hamas in Gaza (pop. 1.5 mn.) as Nazis. Isn’t there a rule that if you make an analogy to the Nazis in your argument, you automatically lose? And since Israel declined to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has a couple hundred warheads, and has occasionally brandished them against other countries, Netanyahu altogether lacks credibility as a critic of Iran’s peaceful civilian nuclear research program.
‘ President Ahmadinejad, who began his address thanking Almighty God for having granted him the chance to attend the “important global assembly”, said that he had already spoken to world leaders about the major challenges with which the world nations have been entangled during the past four years. . .’
“I have also reiterated the need for a drastic change in type of viewing and dealing with the human beings and the world developments and to establish new justice seeking and humane systems aimed at constructing a bright future . . .”
‘Ahmadinejad said that “today” he wished to continue that discussion. “It goes without saying that continuation of the status quo of the world is quite impossible. The present unsatisfactory unilateral conditions are against the innate nature of the human beings and in direct contrast against the goal behind the creation of the human beings and the universe.. . “It is no longer possible to increase wealth artificially by printing paper money, amounting up to tens of billion dollars without real baking for it, and to inject it into the veins of the world economy and to transfer severe budget deficits into the other countries’ economies by transferring their wealth to certain countries. . . “The unleashed economy machine of capitalism that had been unjustly set has now reached the end of its way and is now out of order and this unilateral equation does not work any longer.”’
But contrast:
AP reported this spring: ‘Iran’s leading reformist presidential candidate attacked hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s handling of the economy, accusing him of mismanagement and driving a once rich Iran into poverty. Mir Hossein Mousavi . . . hit Ahmadinejad hard on the economy, one of his most vulnerable points with voters hurting from rising unemployment and 25 percent inflation . . . His populist policies — including handouts to millions of citizens — have also been blamed for driving up prices, and candidates have accused him of using such payments to buy votes. “Gross national product has fallen in the past four years. This means people have become poorer. This must change,” Mousavi said.’
Ahmadinejad said on Thursday at the UN
“Time is now over for some people to present their own definitions of democracy and freedom and to consider themselves as the meter sticks for the authenticity of such definitions, under such conditions that they themselves are breaching the same norms before anyone else. They play the roles of the judge, the prosecutor and the executioner all by themselves and meanwhile they act against the countries where true democracy is observed.” . . .
Ahmadinejad continued:
“The second point; “Changes and evolutions need to take place both at theoretical sphere and in practice, in structures and in methods, basically and at grass-root level. “The hegemonic liberalist and capitalist mentalities that detach the human beings from their ethical systems and from the heaven, not only present them no salvation, but also lead them towards misery, including wars, poverty and various types of deprivation.’ . . .
‘ “The Iranian nation has left behind a very glorious, totally free election, and marked a new chapter of national blossoming and broad global interactions with their landslide votes, putting the heavy weigh of responsibility on my shoulders.” ‘
Ido Oren and Ty Solomon write in a guest op-ed for IC:
Five years ago, Charles Duelfer, Head of the Iraq Survey Group, presented to Congress the final report of his 1200 member team, which concluded that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction when it was invaded by the United States in 2003. Because the danger posed by WMD was the Bush Administration’s chief justification for the Iraq war, the failure to discover the illicit arms provoked a fiery political scandal. The ensuing debate revolved around the following question: did the Bush Administration intentionally distort the truth about Iraq’s WMD, as the administration’s harsh critics charged, or did the WMD fiasco result from an unintentional if grave “intelligence failure,” as the administration’s more moderate critics would have it? Alas, the debate sidestepped another equally important question: what role did the use of the phrase “weapons of mass destruction”—a phrase that few Americans were familiar with prior to 2002—play in the successful marketing of the war to the American people? Did this ominous phrase merely describe an Iraqi threat or did its incantation rather create and magnify the threat?
Consider the following excerpt from a speech delivered by President Bush in Fort Hood, Texas, on January 3, 2003:
“The Iraqi regime has used weapons of mass destruction. They not only had weapons of mass destruction, they used weapons of mass destruction. They used weapons of mass destruction in other countries, they have used weapons of mass destruction on their own people. That’s why I say Iraq is a threat, a real threat.”
This statement illustrates two key features of the way in which “weapons of mass destruction” was used to mobilize public support for the Iraq war.
First, note that the specific weapon the Iraqi regime actually used “in other countries” (Iran) and “on their own people” was poison gas; yet the president employed the more abstract term WMD—an expression that in the public’s mind was commonly associated with that ultimate weapon of terror: the nuclear bomb. Although the president’s usage of the term to allude to chemical weapons was technically in accord with a definition of WMD adopted by the United Nations in 1948 (WMD = atomic, chemical, biological, and radiological weapons), it was largely inconsistent with the typical usage of this phrase—to the extent that it has been used at all—by the American media. From the 1950s to the 1980s the media used “WMD” rather infrequently; on those occasions in which it has appeared in the press, the phrase has only rarely been associated with weapons other than nuclear arms. Neither the poison gas employed by the Egyptian army in Yemen in the 1960s nor the “Agent Orange” widely used by the United States in Vietnam was depicted as “weapons of mass destruction.” Most significantly, in contrast to the Bush Administration’s rhetoric in 2002–03, in the 1980s the American press did not employ the term WMD in its reporting on Iraq’s chemical warfare against Iran and the Kurds. Although the frequency of “weapons of mass destruction” in the press rose somewhat after the phrase was inserted into the 1991 UN resolution that established the weapons’ inspection regime in Iraq, familiarity with this term remained largely confined to specialists. Only during the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq did this expression become a household phrase.
Because chemical weapons are nowhere nearly as destructive as nuclear arms (which Iraq never had or used), and because the American public, to the extent that it heard the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” before 2002, typically associated it with nuclear arms, the administration’s frequent declarations that Iraq had, or used, “weapons of mass destruction” rhetorically magnified the Iraqi threat.
The second feature of the rhetoric of WMD illustrated by the president’s Fort Hood speech was its repetitiousness. Beginning with the January 2002 State of the Union address, the president and senior administration officials uttered this term multiple times in most of their public appearances. The U.S. media echoed and amplified the administration’s WMD rhetoric—in the twelve months preceding the war, the frequency of the term’s appearance in the press had increased almost tenfold. Even the acronym WMD has become so ubiquitous that by the time the war broke out many journalists no longer felt compelled to spell it out. The American Dialect Society selected “weapons of mass destruction” as its 2002 “word of the year.”
The incessant incantation of “weapons of mass destruction” by the Bush Administration and the ricocheting of this phrase through the echo chamber of the mass media emptied it of any specific meaning. Just as the repetitive structure of many liturgical texts serves to divert the worshipper’s mind from his worldly situation and to affirm the axioms of his belief, so did the ceaseless incantation of “weapons of mass destruction” make Americans take the existence of these weapons as an article of faith, distracting the American mind from the realities of the Middle East. And just as the chanting of a mantra lifts the chanter above material reality and promotes the actualization of the idea being uttered, so did the chant “weapons of mass destruction” create the Iraqi threat as much as it described such a threat.
The NYT says that President Barack Obama is reconsidering his plan to greatly increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan, and to be suffering “buyer’s remorse” for sending 21,000 more troops there soon after his inauguration and before a proper policy review. The article suggests a stark difference of opinion between vice president Joe Biden (who has the most foreign policy experience of anyone in the administration) and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Biden is said to favor fewer US troops and a focus on al-Qaeda in the Pakistani badlands. Clinton is afraid the Taliban will take back over Afghanistan and invite al-Qaeda back in there.
At the moment, US policy toward Afghanistan consists of several levels:
development aid
state-building and giving the Kabul government greater bureaucratic capacity
This includes working to improve the civilian bureaucracy As well as training up 400,000 military troops and police
counter-insurgency– defeating the guerrilla groups of Gulbadin Hikmatyar, Jalaluddin Haqqani, and Mulla Omar, in the eastern and southern Pashtun regions
counter-terrorism — destroying the small Arab terrorist cells that exist in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, which security analysts fear are directing plots in London, New York, and so forth.
This multi-level approach is a disaster. You can’t do development aid very effectively in a country beset by guerrilla violence. Moreover, counter-insurgency requires a legitimate, effective Afghan partner that can compete with the Taliban and their allies for Afghan hearts and minds. And, if counter-terrorism is really the goal, then you don’t need a 60,000-man army in a country notoriously inhospitable to foreign armies.
The Obama administration seems to be considering whether these four levels can be usefully unentangled.
In particular, incumbent president Hamid Karzai’s clumsy attempt to steal the election and his continued seeming inability really to take charge in the country he de jure rules, appears to have provoked the Obama team to wonder whether they could in fact work with Karzai.
Personally, I think Biden is right and that if the administration will bet on him, they’d put us 2 or 3 years ahead of the curve.
I have for some time been saying that I can’t imagine that what most Pashtuns really want is to have more US troops patrolling their villages.
Welcome to Informed Comment, where I do my best to provide an independent and informed perspective on Middle Eastern and American politics.
Informed Comment is made possible by your support. If you value the information and essays, I make available and write here, please take a moment to contribute what you can.
