“The foreign soldiers, most of them tattooed and bearded, then went on to the main compound. They threw clothes on the floor, smashed dinner plates, and forced open closets. Finally, they found the man they were looking for: Habib-ur-Rahman, a computer programmer and government employee. Rahman was responsible for converting Microsoft Windows from English to the local Pashto language so that government offices could use the software. He had spent time in Kuwait, and the Afghan translator accompanying the soldiers said they were acting on a tip that Rahman was a member of al-Qaeda.
They took the barefoot Rahman and a cousin of his to a helicopter some distance away and transported them to a small American base in a neighboring province for interrogation. After two days, U.S. forces released Rahman’s cousin. But Rahman has not been seen or heard from since.”
Worth a read. Doesn’t sound like winning hearts and minds.
“23.2 percent had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 17.3 percent had an anxiety disorder (other than PTSD or acute stress disorder), and 15.3 percent had depression.
PTSD was more frequently identified in children under age 15, while depression was the main symptom observed in adults. Among children under 15, factors significantly associated with PTSD included being witness to murder or physical abuse, receiving threats, and property destruction or loss. “
Understandably, President Obama concentrated on domestic issues, especially job creation, in his State of the Union address. But there were a few paragraphs toward the end about foreign affairs that I want to talk about. While I thought the speech generally strong, and the flash polls suggest that the public did, as well, I felt that there were significant problems with the foreign policy passages that signal trouble ahead.
‘ In Afghanistan, we are increasing our troops and training Afghan Security Forces so they can begin to take the lead in July of 2011, and our troops can begin to come home. We will reward good governance, reduce corruption, and support the rights of all Afghans – men and women alike. We are joined by allies and partners who have increased their own commitment, and who will come together tomorrow in London to reaffirm our common purpose. There will be difficult days ahead. But I am confident we will succeed.’
This passage was one of the few lauded by Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell in the Republican response. But it is among the weaker parts of the speech.
a. The US has already spent more than $17 bn. since 2001 building the Afghanistan National Army, but without much success.
b. Although the government of President Hamid Karzai claims that the army numbers 100,000 now, in fact some battalions are at half strength and not combat ready. The chance that the ANA can be expanded to 240,000 effective soldiers for another $16 bn. in a year or two is slim to none.
c. If a new Afghan army can be built at all, it will take at least 4 years, and it is not plausible that US troops will withdraw beginning in 2011. Moreover, Memos of US ambassador Karl Eikenberry in Kabul insist that President Hamid Karzai is unreliable and refuses to try to take command of the country, so that he is not deploying the army he already has. The profound divisions within the Obama camp, among the most experienced Afghan hands, make it anything but certain that the counter-insurgency strategy of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, to which Obama committed himself, can succeed.
d. Veteran NBC war correspondent Richard Engel maintains that staff officers work short hours and are corrupt. Only some of the small companies of troops deployed in the countryside can effectively be said to be at war. Even these are 90% illiterate, and some have received only 2 weeks of ‘show and tell’ training. Drug use is rampant among troops, and some 25 percent go AWOL. See Engle on the Rachel Maddow show:
As is often the case, in this paragraph Obama was attempting to please both right and left, with a troop escalation advertised as a mere prelude to withdrawal. But the task, of training an effective 240,000-man AFghanistan National Army is an enormous one and cannot be even partially completed by summer 2011.
He then turned, more sure-footedly, to Iraq.
‘ As we take the fight to al Qaeda, we are responsibly leaving Iraq to its people. As a candidate, I promised that I would end this war, and that is what I am doing as President. We will have all of our combat troops out of Iraq by the end of this August. We will support the Iraqi government as they hold elections, and continue to partner with the Iraqi people to promote regional peace and prosperity. But make no mistake: this war is ending, and all of our troops are coming home.’
Obama sees the Iraq War as irrelevant to the war on terrorism, and is putting all his military eggs in the Afghanistan basket. He is quite clear that the US military is departing Iraq on the timetable worked out with the Iraqi parliament, virtually no matter what. I’ve noted his determination and consistency on the Iraq withdrawal elsewhere. This passage is the strongest on foreign policy, and he sent an unmistakeable message that he in my view has too seldom discussed with the American public.
Obama goes on to pledge to work on nuclear disarmament and maintains that such negotiations (mainly with Russia) will enhance US credibility with the international community in dealing with North Korea and Iran
Doesn’t actually sound very likely to me.
‘ These diplomatic efforts have also strengthened our hand in dealing with those nations that insist on violating international agreements in pursuit of these weapons. That is why North Korea now faces increased isolation, and stronger sanctions – sanctions that are being vigorously enforced. That is why the international community is more united, and the Islamic Republic of Iran is more isolated. And as Iran’s leaders continue to ignore their obligations, there should be no doubt: they, too, will face growing consequences. ‘
Sanctions won’t work on Iran to produce regme change. They can keep a country weak and harm civilians, as we saw in iraq. But they cannot dislodge a ruling elite in an oil country, because oil is too easily smuggled and converted into cash, which can then be squirreled away by the ruling party. Congress’s infatuation with sanctions on Iran is highly unlikely to be productive, especially since China declines to go along with them.
Moreover, Washington’s tightening of sanctions may make it harder for Obama to engage the regime in serious negotiations, as he had earlier pledged to do. This speech is essentially a capitulation to Neoconservative themes on Iran, rather than retaining Obama’s central plank of keeping negotiating lines open to Tehran.
‘ That is the leadership that we are providing – engagement that advances the common security and prosperity of all people. We are working through the G-20 to sustain a lasting global recovery. We are working with Muslim communities around the world to promote science, education and innovation.’
I’m not sure what this last part, about promoting education and innovation in the Muslim world, even means, and cannot think of any practical change in US development policy with regard to the Muslim world in the past year. The big steps toward education and science are being undertaken by Qatar’s government in its Education City and the new Saudi King Abdulaziz University of Science and Technology. It may be that Obama is referring to the planned $7.5 bn. in aid pledged to Pakistan, some of which would go toward education.
In any case, Obama’s reference to relations with the Muslim world was essentially a soft throw-away line. What would improve US relations with Muslims would be a swift movement toward a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine and an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza’s children. A frank acknowledgment that the US has been powerless to make headway on this essential issue would have been welcome. So too would be an acknowledgment by the president of the justice of the letter calling on Israel to desist from its blockade of Gaza circulated by 54 Democratic members of the House of Representatives, in a rare act of defiance toward the powerful Israel lobbies.
This is the final relevant paragraph:
‘ As we have for over sixty years, America takes these actions because our destiny is connected to those beyond our shores. But we also do it because it is right. That is why, as we meet here tonight, over 10,000 Americans are working with many nations to help the people of Haiti recover and rebuild. That is why we stand with the girl who yearns to go to school in Afghanistan; we support the human rights of the women marching through the streets of Iran; and we advocate for the young man denied a job by corruption in Guinea. For America must always stand on the side of freedom and human dignity. ‘
The attempt to position the US military occupation of Afghanistan and the sabre-rattling and threatened sanctions against Iran as somehow beneficial to women in those countries is a continuation of Bush administration rhetoric that is unworthy of Obama. These themes may appeal to the Mavis Leno faction of American feminists, but are unconnected to Afghan and Iranian women’s lived reality. The position of women in Afghanistan is better now than under the Taliban, but the new Afghanistan is still an Islamic republic, and president Karzai pandered for votes among the Shiite Hazaras by allowing Shiite law to operate among them on personal status issues, rather than national law. One implication of this step is that Hazara women are now liable to marital rape. So this is the liberation the Obama administration is bringing Afghan women? Moreover, Obama’s escalation of the war will have a negative impact on women and families caught in the crossfire. It is a foolish argument to make because so easily disproven.
Moreover, many of the female protesters in Iran have been traditionalists in full veil, who support the ideals of the regime but were disappointed that Ahmadinejad stole the election. The idea that the Iranian opposition is made up of people just like Obama and his supporters is an American myth.
These few paragraphs on foreign policy in the speech were among its weakest. The plans for Afghanistan and nuclear disarmament seemed thin and utopian. The threats launched against Iran seemed empty. The use of a kind of ‘imperial feminism’ to justify Obama’s escalation of the Afghanistan war seemed just pandering to some of his constituency without holding much promise of genuine change for Afghan women. As for Iran, further economic sanctions will harm women and families most of all. Only in his express determination to withdraw from Iraq on schedule did Obama achieve the fire and conviction characteristic of much of the rest of the speech.
While it now seems as though the domestic economy and job creation are far more important than these foreign policy issues, the issues of Afghanistan, Pakistan (not mentioned), Iran and Palestine will likely generate among the more important crises in Obama’s presidency, and he needs desperately to get a better handle on them and take control of policy, or his opponents will maneuever him into playing either Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter. Just because he says he would be satisfied with a single term is no reason to let the hawks impose one on him.
Al-Zaman says that a number of high-ranking officers are among the dead, and that some 80 are wounded. Many Iraqi politicians live in Karrada, an upscale Shiite neighborhood. Haydar al-Jurani, a member of parliament in the Islamic Mission Party (Hizb al-Da’wa) to which Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki belongs, was walking near the building and was taken to hospital with a mild head wound.
If the attacks were meant to demoralize, they seem to be succeeding. Al-Zaman reports that many in Baghdad blame the security forces for either being incompetent, or for being actively complicit (e.g. taking bribes to allow cars through checkpoints) in the bombings.
The crime lab, which had been recently renovated with American aid funds, was almost completely destroyed. Obviously, a terrorist group would want to disrupt the forensics capabilities of the Iraqi security forces.
AP’s Brian Murphy also quotes Gen. Ray Odierno, the US commander in Iraq, to the effect that the explosives used in the past two days appear to have been less powerful than in the August and December attacks, but that guerrillas have developed new tactics– having an armed band shoot it out with building security forces, e.g., clearing the way for a car bomb to be driven into the building. The US military suspects that there are bomb-making factories in the semi-rural areas just outside Baghdad, from which the payloads are driven into the capital. The guerrillas’ strategy has also shifted, Odierno, said, from a attempt to mount a popular insurgency to overwhelm the capital [in 2004-2005] to a rearguard set of small terrorist actions aimed at destabilizing the Shiite-dominated government. [Cole would add that the reason for this shift is that the Sunni Arabs have been largely ethnically cleansed from Baghdad, so that it is no longer plausible for them to take over the capital using their old demographic base in e.g. al-Mansur. Thus the spoiler actions of bombing downtown buildings, which cannot change the government but can keep it weak.]
Muhammad A. Salih reports for IPS that the Accountability and Justice Commission, which excluded some 500 candidates from running in the March 7 parliamentary elections, may be softening. It recently reinstated 59 candidates. The ostensible reason given for the exclusions was that the candidates were too closely linked to the banned Baath Party. But among those excluded was Salih al-Mutlak, who had sat in parliament as leader of the 11-seat National Dialogue Bloc and who had left the Baath Party in 1977. I am quoted saying that this move by the committee comes as too little, too late, and that the goal of the exclusions seems to be to make sure that the Shiite religious parties retain control of parliament, whichthey have had since January 2005.
Carnegie has a good overview of the politics of the exclusions. The authors maintain that Shiite ex-Baaithists were also banned, and that most of the 500 were minor political figures, but that the more prominent of them were Sunni Arabs, creating an impression of sectarian bias. The head of the Commission is a fundamentalist Shiite also running for parliament, a situation many have decried as inherently unfair.
The next big security challenge comes this weekend, with the advent of the 40th day commemoration of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at his shrine in the holy city of Karbala south of Baghdad. Some 20,000 army troops, police and other security men have been positioned through the city to forestall bombings of the pilgrims or the shrine, which would have the potential to throw Iraq back into intense ethno-sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. Pilgrims are being forbidden to wear burial shrouds, which some do to symbolize their willingness to be martyred along with Imam Husayn for the truth. I suppose authorities feel that the loose shrouds could too easily hide a belt bomb.
So the political right wing ruled the United States for 8 years, holding all three branches of government during some of the W. era, and the result was a Democratic landslide in 2008. The more the Right is in power, the less it is liked.
But the Right in the US wants its way no matter what, and is constantly anxious that maybe the people will wake up to the scam that is being pulled on them by people who actually represent big corporations but claim to speak for the “people.” Politics nowadays is about fatally crippling Obama and rolling back the Democratic surge, by any means possible.
Thus, you had the Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations to defame at will candidates who don’t kowtow to them, deploying all the billions at their disposal. This overturning of a hundred years of precedent by five far-right Republicans on the court was a deliberate attempt to undo the 2008 Democratic victory.
And now you have a Watergate-style break-in by James O’Keefe and associates at the Louisiana offices of Senator Mary Landrieu, seeking to bug her office.
O’Keefe played a role in attempting to discredit ACORN, an organization that aims at increasing voting rates among the poor (and therefore an object of hatred on the part of the Right, which thinks you shouldn’t feed ‘stray animals,’ much less encourage them to vote.)
Ironically, O’Keefe is now charged with a felony, whereas it was never proven that, despite unprofessional trash talking in O’Keefe’s videotape, the ACORN employees he sought to entrap ever actually did anything illegal.
Dirty tricks are nothing new from the Right, and are necessary, since they don’t offer good governance and their main argument is that the Market will magically take care of everyone if only unscrupulous businessmen are left completely unregulated by the government.
This ideology is what got us into the present mess. So since the platform of the Right is obviously untrue, what is left but scummy attack videos and illegal office break-ins and bugging. The public after all has an extremely short memory or mostly doesn’t much care about politics, so why not try to manipulate them? Maybe you could even convince them in the midst of a Depression that the Market loves them and will put them to work if only the super-rich can be unleashed on their behalf again and the bad Government can be handcuffed.
Why, we should even let Bernie Madoff out of jail to vindicate himself– the pyramid really does work if only you let it go on, you know.
Headline news of the sort on which I concentrate on at Informed Comment is driven by dramatic events, with violence being the most dramatic. But it is also important to fight back against the reduction of Arab culture to stereotypes that have become all too common in the West. So I want to offset some of the gloomier entries with some cultural stories or just pleasant experiences.
One of the more original Arabic music albums of 2009 was Jean-Marie Riachi’s “Belaaks,” a hybrid of jazz, gypsy, Latin American and other influences performed by some of today’s leading Lebanese singers. The CD exemplifies the role of Beirut in not just transmitting culture between east and west but in achieving creative syntheses that underline the more positive side of globalization.
The title single– “Belaaks” [On the Contrary]- Arab jazz from – Jean Marie Riachi Feat. Rami Ayach & Abir Nehme — is an Arabic version of of the 1947 hit, “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás,” by Cuban songwriter Osvaldo Farrés, which has been covered by many artists, including Cole Porter, Doris Day, Celia Cruz, Samantha Fox and the Pussycat Dolls.
“For years, my passion for music changed my life. Some songs are like an old, dependable friend. I’ve always tried to interpret and perform these songs differently: my way. My love for these songs and my passion for music made me create “Belaaks”.
In 2006, I left Beirut and went to Orsay, a southwestern suburb of Paris. I lived in a small inn of 8 rooms and invited musicians to work on the Belaaks project, my very own “timeless” album. Musicians travelled from Brazil, Algeria, France and other parts of Europe. . .
Once I returned to Beirut, I invited many of my friends, Rami, Yara, Jihad Akl, Abir, Sevine and Aline Lahoud to add their Lebanese charm to the album. They were as excited as I was, and brought their own passion to the music.
The title song Belaaks is a version of the classic Quizás, Quizás, Quizás that has been through several interpretations, Riachi’s being the most recent. The track starts with a quarrel between two loved ones about a promise to love each other forever that turned out to be just the opposite, “belaaks, belaaks, belaaks”. However as the song climaxes the couple make up and declare their love for each other.
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