Police in the eastern Afghan province of Nuristan have called for help after fierce clashes with hundreds of Taliban fighters belong to Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Seven Taliban and two policemen have been killed in the fighting so far, the Afghan interior ministry says. Officials say nearly 300 insurgents led by Pakistani Taliban leader Maulana Fazlullah entered the area this week.”
Insurgents are said to have taken over the province after the US withdrew from distant outposts there in response to bold attacks on them.
He is known to have fled Pakistan in the wake of the Swat campaign in spring-summer of 2009. (His Taliban had increasing taken over Swat, provoking a backlash from the locals and from the Pakistani government, which sent in troops to take it back from the insurgents.)
The Iranian newspaper Tabnak reports that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in a speech on Wednesday, took a hard line with Russia and also pressured the US to accept the deal brokered by Turkey and Brazil on Iranian low enriched uranium (the “Tehran Declaration.”)
Ahmadinejad, speaking in the city of Kerman, said that Iran and Russia had been friends for centuries. He addressed Dimitry Medvedev, president of the Russian Federation, saying that there was some danger if Russia continued on its present path that Iranians would switch, and begin considering Russia a historical enemy. He added, “We are both neighbors, and two neighbors cannot but be friends with one another. But this friendship has prerequisites. The first prerequisite is honoring reciprocal rights, and defense of them, and mutual respect.”
He continued, “Today, explaining the behavior of Medvedev toward the nation of Iran is very difficult for us . . . The people of Iran do not know if the Russians are our friends or are against us.” He advised President Medvedev to speak with more caution and forethought about such a large and capable nation as Iran.
“We must not perceive that our neighbor, on sensitive positions, has taken the side of those [the United States] who have for 30 years with all their might acted with enmity toward the nation of Iran . . . This matter is unacceptable. The Tehran Declaration is the greatest opportunity and there is no longer any pretext.” He said that if, before, the Russians could say that the West was putting pressure and wanted to see Iran take some significant step and make an important announcement, well, it had now done so.
He said, “We are also under pressure. But can we, just because of that pressure, act against the Russian nation?”
He warned, “They must not permit the Iranian nation to begin considering them as being on the level of historical enemies.”
Ahmadinejad went on to warn President Barack Obama of the US that the Tehran Declaration represents a “historic opportunity for him” should he genuinely want “change,” — an opportunity to begin respecting the rights of other nations and to abandon wrong and inhumane policies, treating other countries instead with justice and fairness.
Ahmadinejad’s blunt comments on Russia brought rebukes from that country. According to Interfax, May 26, 2010, as translated by the USG Open Source Center, Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the International Affairs Committee in the Russian parliament, said he was “disappointed by today’s quite harsh statement by Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad about the Russian and US presidents.”
The report continues,
‘ “I am quite disappointed that Mr Ahmadinejad resorted to the megaphone diplomacy method instead of relying on a substantial and constructive conversation on an expert level,” Kosachev told Interfax.
“I leave on the conscience of the Iranian leaders their belief that Russia is supporting forces hostile to Iran, but I would like to emphasize that there are very few counties which sought the observance of all norms of international law with respect to Iran’s nuclear programme as consistently as Russia,” Kosachev said, adding that “Russia has always been and will be committed to this position”.
The Russian MP said he was pleased that the Iranian authorities had finally, although after a long delay, sent the agreement on further enrichment of Iran’s nuclear fuel reached with Turkey and supported by Brazil to the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] for assessment. “We can only welcome the fact that the day before yesterday the Iranian authorities sent this document to the IAEA for assessment. However, one cannot but regret that this was not done earlier,” Kosachev said.’
Turkey and Brazil negotiated the agreement announced early last week whereby Iran would send over half of its low enriched uranium to Turkey to be held in escrow and would receive from the international community uranium enriched to 19.75% to run its medical reactor, which produces cancer-fighting isotopes. Both Turkey and Brazil are lobbying for United Nations acceptance of the Tehran Declaration.
Brazilian President Lula da Silva is putting pressure on President Obama to accept the agreement and to back off imposing further sanctions on Iran. Brazil is a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council at the moment and its positions have some weight with other non-permanent members.
The USG Open Source Center translated the following news report on Lula’s lobbying of Obama, from the Portuguese press. The article reveals that Obama is insisting that Iran completely cease its uranium enrichment program if it wants to see sanctions lifted and rejoin the international community.
‘ Brazil’s Lula Urges President Obama To Reconsider Iran Sanctions
Report by Denise Chrispim Marin: “Lula Sends Obama Letter To Avoid Sanctions on Iran”
O Estado de Sao Paulo digital
Wednesday, May 26, 2010 …
Document Type: OSC Translated Text …
Brasilia – In a letter sent by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to his US counterpart Barack Obama, the Brazilian leader cautions that new UN Security Council sanctions on Iran could provoke the loss of the opportunity created by the Tehran Declaration to reach a negotiated solution to the Iranian nuclear issue. Taking the precaution of not using the word “sanction,” Lula insisted on stating in his letter that the declaration elicited support from high-ranking leaders.
Lula sent the above letter in response to one sent to him by Obama late in April in which the US President made it clear that he would not give up its demand for sanctions, unless Iran discontinued its uranium enrichment activities immediately. This warning was not contained in excerpts of the letter leaked to Reuters on Friday.
Lula’s letter suggests between the lines that the United States give a truce to Iran before putting new sanctions to a vote at the UN Security Council. The letter focused on the progress made through the agreement signed by Brazil and Turkey with Iran on 17 May on exchanging slightly enriched uranium with nuclear fuel.
Lula pointed out in his letter that, by signing the Tehran Declaration, the Iranian Government agreed “in writing” to points it had rejected earlier. Lula also emphasized the Iranian decision to notify the agreement to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on 24 May within the established deadline.
Lula’s letter to Obama is part of new efforts by the Brazilian Government to prevent a UN draft resolution imposing new sanctions on Iran from being voted and approved. According to the Itamaraty press office, Lula sent similar letters yesterday to Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev and to French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Within the next few days, Lula will also send letters to Mexican President Felipe Calderon — whose country, like Brazil, is a nonpermanent member of the UN Security Council — and to South American leaders. ‘
By the way, Arizona, just a note. Now might not have been an opportune time to anger the Mexicans, if you wanted their support on Iran.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu called on the Israelis to lift their siege of Gazan civilians and warned them not to block the aid flotilla. Turkey had for decades been close to Israel, its secular generals preferring Tel Aviv to the Arab powers. But the ruling AK Partisi is imbued with more respect for Islam and for popular opinion than was common with most Turkish governments. Since two of the 8 ships in the flotilla are Turkish-sponsored, any naval confrontationof Turkey’s vessels by an Israeli warship could turn ugly in the diplomatic realm.
The 1.6 million people of the Gaza Strip, half of them children, have become trapped by history between a hostile Israel on one side, cutting them off from their traditional hinterland of Arab markets, and the Mediterranean on the other. Since 2007, the Israelis have imposed on Gaza a thoroughgoing blockade, in hopes of unseating the Hamas party-militia that gained control in the January, 2006 parliamentary elections. The blockade has deeply harmed the health and economic well-being of the Gazans, but it has had zero impact on Hamas hegemony.
Although Israeli officials propagandistically claim that they allow large amounts of aid through every week, what they don’t say is that they aren’t allowing enough aid in. Saying that you give someone you keep tied up in your basement a whole 400 calories a day is just a way of saying you are starving him, since he needs roughly 2000 calories a day. Focusing on what is let through as opposed to what is kept out is just misdirection, as when a stage magician gets you to glance somewhere else other than at the elephant he brought in. After the brutal war it launched on Gaza in December- January 2008-2009, Israel banned the import of building materials that would have allowed most buildings and residences to be repaired.
“In Gaza, Israel’s blockade is debilitating the healthcare system, limiting medical supplies and the training of medical personnel and preventing serious medical cases from travelling outside the Strip for specialized treatment.”
“Israel’s 2008-2009 military operation damaged 15 of the Strip’s 27 hospitals and damaged or destroyed 43 of its 110 primary health care facilities, none of which have been repaired or rebuilt because of the construction materials ban.”
“Some 15-20 percent of essential medicines are commonly out of stock and there are shortages of essential spare parts for many items of medical equipment . . . ”
In Late 2008, nearly 1 in 5 Palestinians lived in “extreme poverty.” Over half lived below the poverty line.
“In the second half of 2008, one third of West Bank households and 71 percent of Gaza households received food assistance, with food accounting for roughly half total household expenditures – making families highly vulnerable to food price fluctuations.”
“In May 2008, 56 percent of Gazans and 25 percent of West Bank residents were deemed food insecure by the UN.”
“Chronic malnutrition has risen in Gaza over the past few years to reach 10.2 percent.” [This is especially true among children in Gaza).
Lara Hart notes that Gaza needs 100 new schools to meet the needs of the burgeoning population of children. Israel’s self-defeating refusal to allow these schools to be built will consign a generation of Palestinian children to ignorance, making them easy marks for violent recruiters.
This horrible siege of a whole civilian population would be bad enough, but the Israelis who carry it out have managed to hide from themselves what they are doing to the Palestinians. They have convinced themselves that it is dangerous to Israelis for the Palestinians to have so much as concrete. But what they are doing constitutes a war crime in international law. The Occupying power can’t arbitrarily and randomly punish innocent ordinary people to “encourage the others.” Such techniques were used by the most unsavory of the mass authoritarian states of the interwar period, and the victors of WW II aimed to put an end to these cruel techniques of governing occupied populations through instruments such as the Geneva Conventions.
Anyone not so blinkered will naturally sympathize with the aid flotilla and hope that it gets through. For the sake of the children.
Critics worry that the order blurs the line between combat soldiers and spies and weakens the claim of all soldiers to humane treatment under the Geneva Conventions.
My own view is that the United States was founded as a government of laws, not men, and that the siren call of covert operations is steadily undermining the rule of law. Blurring the line between military action and spying makes it impossible to talk about the covert missions, since they are typically classiified. The same is true for predator drone strikes.
Military action such as launching drones should be carried out by the uniformed military, not by CIA operatives or, worse, contractors. The former action would allow us to discuss the campaigns as free citizens of a republic. As it is now, often civilian contractors are piloting drones long-distance and we cannot so much as get a straight answer out of the elected officials. Where the US is striking at friendly countries, there should be a Status of Forces agreement to provide a legal framework for the actions.
And intelligence gathering should be carried out by the civilian such agencies. The more you make elements of the military actually intelligence assets, the more likely it is that the lines between them will get strained. That blurring could be bad for all troops. There is already a tendency in the ME for locals to see all Americans as CIA, and giving troops a lot of covert missions will reinforce these views.
We still can be a country of laws, not men, can’t we? It isn’t too late?
A suppressed historical episode has emerged into the light of day in such a way as to deeply embarrass Israel and the United States in their campaign against Iran’s peaceful nuclear enrichment program at Natanz near Isfahan.
Such Israeli eruptions of outrage about Iran depend on a key bit of misdirection, including denial of Israel’s own small arsenal of nuclear warheads. But it used to be difficult to prove Israel’s arsenal exists. No longer.
Iran appears not to have a nuclear weapons program, according to US intelligence, and its civilian nuclear research program is permitted under the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The UN Security Council, however keeps insisting that Iran cease enrichment, though it is unclear why that body thinks it has the authority to amend the NPT ex post facto in that way. It is true that Iran did not inform the UN as it was required to when it began trying to enrich uranium in the late 1990s. And it is also true that Iran is not today as transparent with the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors as that organization would like.
For their parts, , Iranian political figures such as speaker of the house Larijani and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have threatened to withdraw from the agreement reached last week with Turkey and Brazil whereby it would send a substantial amount of its stock of low enriched uranium to Turkey to be held in escrow, in return for the international community providing fuel enriched to 19.75 percent for the reactor that produces medical isotopes.
The implication, that Iran must be stopped because it would proliferate to neighbors, may come back to haunt pro-Israeli propagandists, given Tel Aviv’s own secret role in attempting to proliferate nukes to South Africa.
Netanyahu instanced the peculiar danger of Iran, but surely few regimes were as brutal and cruel or as threatening to their neighbors as Apartheid South Africa, which demonstrably wanted nuclear weapons in a way that cannot be equally well proven regarding Iran.
The White South African government appears to have wanted to buy Israeli nuclear-tipped missiles for potential use against Black African neighbors such as Angola, Botswana, Zambia and (at certain points) Mozambique– countries against which the rogue regime often launched cross-border raids.
It is worth remembering what kind of pariah, racist and repressive regime Apartheid South Africa really was. Non-binding UN Security Council resolutions starting in the 1960s discouraged conventional arms sales to the regime, much less nuclear weapons! (The UN-imposed arms sale ban became mandatory on member states in 1977, shortly after the Israeli offer had been made). The impact of officially imposed white supremacism on the wealth and health of the population of was clear by 1978:
The embarrassment is compounded by the increasing similarities between South African policies toward Black Africans and Israeli policies toward Palestinians. There is a sense in which Gaza and the West Bank have become much like the “homelands” created for denaturalized South Africans, making them foreigners in their own country and requiring that they carry papers at all times.
Whether it was intentional or not, the double standard in the UNSC concerning Israel’s nuclear weapons (including the recklessness with which its leaders have hinted they would use them, and the willingness to proliferate) and Iran’s civilian enrichment program, which may well never lead to a bomb has been underlined by Polakow-Suransky’s revelations. The research discoveries make it at least a little more difficult for the US and Israel to persuade other UNO states that Iran is a rogue and needs special intervention, while Israel is held harmless.
Guerrillas fired mortar shells and used small arms to attack the major US military base in south Afghanistan, Qandahar Airfield, on Saturday. The operation was the third major attack by insurgents during the past week. They had also attacked a NATO convoy in the capital, Kabul, and had attacked Bagram Base north of Kabul. The seven hours long assault on Bagram was a by a platoon-sized unit of some 30 armed men, who managed to kill a contractor and wound 9 US or NATO troops, while 16 of them were killed in heavy fighting. The attacks have pushed the death toll for US troops in Afghanistan past the 1000 mark.
The bold attacks come as President Barack Obama addressed West Point cadets, declaring victory in Iraq and predicting a similar positive outcome in Afghanistan. Obama alleged that the US was withdrawing from a now-democratic Iraq that would not be a platform for attacking the US, implying that Afghanistan would be brought to a similar end-state. But Iraq is highly unstable, has not formed a new government more than two months after the March 7 elections, and cannot exactly be called either democratic or secure and stable. If Iraq is Obama’s measure of success in Afghanistan, he has very low expectations.
At the same time, US and NATO troops began a sweep of a Qandahar neighborhood. The 200 US troops and about 200 – 250 Afghanistan National Army troops conducted door to door searches. The operation is seen as a dry run for a huge push on Qandahar by NATO this summer. This province is, along with Helmand, a major center of poppies-grown for opium and ideologically tends to support or at least think well of the old Taliban of Mulla Omar. Karen DeYoung of WaPo reports on the doubts even in the Pentagon that a ‘clearing campaign’ targeting Taliban in Qandahar can succeed.
Meanwhile, a long-running feud between the lower house of parliament and the Karzai government came to a boil on Saturday as the MPs went on strike, according to Pajhwok News Agency. President Karzai had missed the deadline for presenting to parliament his nominations for the 11 remaining cabinet posts in his government. In reaction, the lower house went on strike.
Pajhwok writes, “Chairman Muhammad Younus Qanuni said no session of any commission would be held until the ministers were introduced. An MP from the western Badghis province, Azita Rafat, said the delay in introducing the remaining cabinet members had worsened relations between parliament and the government. “The government neither respects the votes of the nation nor us,” she said.”
Speaker Yunus Qanuni is a Tajik former member of the Northern Alliance and is close to Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s main rival in last summer’s presidential election. Since Abdullah’s supporters generally believe that Karzai stole the election, it is now difficult for him to achieve better relations with parliament. That any resolution of the crisis in Afghanistan will ultimately have to be political in character is widely recognized. But how to get a political settlement when the executive and the legislature are themselves at daggers drawn is not clear.
The Pakistani Urdu newspaper Jasarat, as translated by the USG Open Source Center, reported on May 21, 2010 that there were student protests against Facebook throughout Pakistan on Friday and that:
‘students from different educational institutions in Islamabad declared to stage a protest march toward the US Embassy on May 20 and said that the students were awake and those who insulted the prophet would face serious consequences. . .
These views were expressed by speakers at the protest rally, which was held in Federal Urdu University Islamabad Campus on May 18 and was organized by Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba to protest against the publication of defamatory caricatures. Students of Federal Urdu University staged a protest rally. The students chanted slogans saying; “We are slaves of the prophet; we are ready to die in prophet’s slavery; life is worthless without love for the prophet; our leader and guide is the prophet; our last prophet is Prophet (Muhammad); boycott of Facebook.” The students carried placards, which carried slogans that they would sacrifice their lives for the sake of honor of the prophet . . .”
The rallies were called for and planned by the fundamentalist Jama’at-i Islami and its student wing. One such demonstration, in Peshawar, called for a Pakistani boycott of all ‘countries’ where the offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad existed, suggesting that he thought of a Facebook page as sort of like a newspaper with a physical edition.
The bans of entire sites, services and devices raises many questions about the future of Pakistan. The Pakistani government professed itself dismayed by the breadth of the ban, but said it had no choice but to comply with the court order.
The Lahore High Court seems clearly to have been behaving high-handedly in legislating from the bench this wideranging ban. After decades of kowtowing to governments, the judiciary is now asserting its independence. But there is a danger of a sort of judicial dictatorship if the current trend lines are maintained.
In some ways, the great Facebook affair in Pakistan echoes earlier controversies in China that led to the departure of google from that country.
In turn, the controversies raise the question of whether there are limits to economic and social development in ideological states. Ironically, Pakistan is a parliamentary democracy but its judiciary, earlier a champion of democracy, is in this instance behaving like the authoritarian Communist Party of China.
Facebook, Twitter and Blackberries are not just for fun after all. They are used by businesses and NGOs. The Internet is a distributed information system dependent on interaction and innovation.
Pakistan may be consigning itself to second class citizenship in the world information community with these bans. And, in its competition with India, it may be profoundly handicapping itself. India after all has a robust internet-based business sector. It is not clear that companies such as Infosys could function and survive in a hostile enviornment in which major internet vehicles were routinely banned.
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