Angus Stickler writes at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism:
British troops have been banned from transferring suspected Taliban prisoners to the Afghan authorities because of claims of torture by local forces.
The move, which follows a ruling by the British High Court, is a blow to Nato countries that want to formalise their detainee transfer process, and potentially throws the UK’s strategy for leaving Helmand by the end of 2014 into disarray.
It is a breach of international law to transfer prisoners to the custody of another state where they may face a risk of torture. To date, NATO forces have attempted to comply with their human rights obligations by obtaining written assurances from the Afghan government that torture will not take place. These assurances are known as memorandums of understanding, or MOUs.
The High Court banned transfers to the Afghan National Directorate of Security in Kabul following claims of systematic abuse.
Last year a joint investigation by the Bureau and the New Statesman magazine revealed that despite condemnation by the UN that such MOUs are ‘utterly meaningless’, the world’s most powerful military nations were attempting to undermine 60 years of the Geneva Convention and codify the use of MOUs under international law.
Since signing an MOU in 2006 the British government has continued to transfer detainees in Afghanistan despite an overwhelming body of evidence that torture is rife.
But now, the British High Court has ruled that an Afghan detainee who alleges he was subjected to torture can challenge the legality of his transfer. In a highly embarrassing about-turn, the defence secretary Philip Hammond has stopped all transfers of detainees.
Serdar Mohammed, 24, was given leave to seek judicial review by Mr Justice Collins, sitting at the High Court in London. His lawyers told the court he signed a confession stating that he was a member of the Taliban following torture by the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghanistan intelligence service. The ill-treatment including being hung by handcuffs from bars, and beatings with sticks and electric cables when he fell asleep.
The judge ruled that the father of two, who was jailed for six years, had ‘an arguable case’ that should go to a full hearing, but stressed his decision did not guarantee the challenge would succeed.
Serdar Mohammed’s barrister, Ben Jaffey, argued that his situation was particularly relevant because his transfer came in 2010 – immediately after British courts demanded safeguards for detainees following another case brought by peace activist Maya Evans two years ago.
The Evans case exposed the fundamental failings of the British government’s MOU with the Afghan authorities, but was only a partial victory. The High Court banned transfers to the NDS in Kabul following claims of systematic abuse. However it ‘hesitantly’ allowed prisoners to be sent to the Afghan facility in Lashkar Gah, as long as there were safeguards that it would be monitored.
In the new case of Serdar Mohammed, the court heard evidence that the Afghan NDS operated an underground interrogation chamber near the British headquarters in Lashkar Gah and that ‘torture was entrenched’ in the organisation.
The judge said that in part as a result of the case, defence secretary Philip Hammond had now stopped all transfers of detainees from British forces to the Afghan authorities ‘as part of an ongoing review’.
Mr Justice Collins also gave Evans permission to bring a linked legal challenge. Both cases are being brought on legal aid. The judge rejected Ministry of Defence submissions that the twin challenge was too costly for the public purse and that only one case should have been given the go-ahead.
An MoD spokesman said: ‘Detention operations are an important part of our force protection measures protecting our people, our allies and partners, and the Afghan civilian population. They also directly contribute to the success of the NATO ISAF mission in Afghanistan and ultimately to UK national security.
‘In response to a recent UK inspection there is a temporary hold on transfers while we assure ourselves that UK detainees are not at risk of serious mistreatment or torture.’
Highlighting the dilemma faced by the British military, Mr Justice Collins said: ‘If our troops are attacked by the Taliban insurgents and there is the capture of some rather than being killed, then after 96 hours they have to go free. That is a somewhat worrying situation to say the least.’
However, he added an equally serious issue was that the UK could not be seen to be complicit in torture or mistreatment.
As Nato-led forces plan to withdraw from Afghanistan, the focus on how western armies can hand over detainees without breaching international law will intensify.
President Barack Obama sneaked in and out of Afghanistan by the cover of night, his advance security team clearly too worried about the situation in Kabul to allow him to appear in public by day. And they would have been right, since shortly after Obama departed, Taliban hit a foreign workers’ guest house (which was very secure) and killed 6 people (some reports say 17), announcing that Obama is not welcome in Afghanistan.
The ostensible purpose of the trip was to sign a [pdf] Strategic Partnership Agreement with Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai. The SPA is essentially an executive order, not a treaty, since Obama did not take it to Congress. On the Afghan side, I think it is also an executive order and was not approved by the Afghanistan parliament. Although the White House assures us that it has the force of law, it clearly falls short of being a binding treaty.
The agreement designates “The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan” as a major non-NATO ally of the United States, the same status as is enjoyed by Egypt, Kuwait, Pakistan and a handful of other countries.
The document speaks of commitment to democracy, but Karzai stole the last presidential election, and there were serious allegations of irregularities in the most recent parliamentary elections, as well.
The document pledges that the US will have no permanent bases in Afghanistan, but the issue won’t even come up again for discussion until a decade or a decade and a half. There are roughly 88,000 US troops in Afghanistan, but that will come down to some 69,000 by September, and then most of those will leave by the end of 2013.
In the meantime, the US will have access to Afghanistan bases and will provide special forces for the continued fight against “Taliban” (most of the ones we call that aren’t), as well as continuing to train the Afghan army.
And more importantly to pay for it (roughly $4 billion a year). Afghanistan cannot afford the enormous army being created for it, so it will go on being supported by ‘strategic rent’ from outside powers or it will collapse.
Obama’s four-fold strategy for Afghanistan is sickly if not dead. It consisted of:
1. Finding a way to replace the eratic and undependable Hamid Karzai with someone else (perhaps Abdullah Abdullah, former foreign minister of the Northern Alliance).
But Karzai stole the last presidential election and is still there, and Obama had to grin and bear it.
2. Conduct a massive counter-insurgency strategy, rooting out the Taliban and winning the hearts and minds of the Afghans for a new political order.
I don’t think there is any reason to believe that ‘counter-insurgency’ succeeded. The hearts and minds were un-won by night raids (sometimes with a mistaken target), peeing on corpses of dead Taliban, burning Qur’ans at Bagram base, etc., etc.
3. Train up a capable new Afghanistan National Army.
The army, now 187,000 strong, suffers from being 86% illiterate, and from being disproportionately Tajik (Dari Persian-speaking Sunnis not respected by the majority Pashtuns), and from having almost no buy-in from Qandahar and Helmand provinces (Taliban strongholds). It loses the equivalent of counties in the east to the Taliban and can’t seem to fight independently of US troops. Only one ANA military unit is assessed as able to fight independently, out of nearly 100). It is bloated, over-equipped, but under-trained and lacking in initiative and apparently esprit de corps. That this army can defeat the Taliban or even just keep Karzai from being hanged when the US and NATO depart is not at all a sure thing.
4. Use drone strikes to hit al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders in the tribal belt of Pakistan, while pressuring Pakistan finally to step up and help defeat the Taliban.
Actually the drone strikes have created a strong backlash in the Pakistani public, jealous of their national sovereignty. When the US air force inadvertently hit 24 Pakistani troops in December, the Pakistani parliament stopped NATO supply trucks from using the Pakistan route from Karachi to the Khyber pass, marooning thousands of tons of military equipment intended for the Afghanistan National Army. Parliament is recommending against letting the US ship military goods through Pakistan, and against allowing further drone strikes.
Ordinarily foreign policy is an executive prerogative, but the executive in Pakistan is paralyzed by a constitutional crisis, with the Supreme Court holding the Prime Minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani, in contempt because he hasn’t moved against President Asaf Ali Zardari for corruption.
Obama just disregarded the parliamentary report and used drones again in Pakistan, to public dismay.
Pakistan is not going well, and neither, really, is Afghanistan.
So, Mitt Romney, who is jumping up and down like a little boy in the background, shouting ‘Me, too!’, ‘Me, too!’, seems unaware that he is me-tooing a policy that is in deep trouble with the exception of the killing of Bin Laden last year.
Obama told the US troops there that everyone over here knows of their sacrifices and deeply appreciates them. Alas, I fear few Americans are paying attention to Afghanistan. The war is unpopular now with the part of the public that does know about it, including even Republicans (so Mitt has little chance of picking up leverage here). I seldom see it reported on on television, and even a lot of newspapers are basically ignoring it. You wouldn’t know we had nearly 90,000 troops fighting and dying abroad.
So although Afghanistan and Pakistan have not gone well for Obama, there is likely no US political gain to be had on either side from the misery of those two countries.
This sort of tactic makes a lot of noise, but typically has no practical benefit for a guerrilla movement. The Sunni Arab Islamic State of Iraq has been blowing up Baghdad regularly but we’ve seen no sign of it interfering with the consolidation of power by PM Nouri al-Maliki. Perhaps it has even backfired and created momentum for al-Maliki.
One local Afghan newspaper was left puzzling as to the purpose of these attacks, which, like those in Baghdad, likely have not hope of tactical success. The article speculates that the Taliban are trying to keep the US boots on the ground, just as President Hamid Karzai is, so as to extract strategic rent from the ongoing Western presence in Afghanistan. That is, some allege that the attacks in Kabul were motivated by a desire to draw the US into a longer-term occupation, so that the Taliban can be assured of having someone to fight. (Seems unlikely to me, but interesting that it appeared in the Afghan press. And, I don’t think it would work. Most Americans, even Republicans, want out, and I think most US troops will be out by 2014…)
The USG Open Source Center translated an article from Pashto in the Islamic press about the attacks:
”
Afghan ministry says 17 militants killed in Kabul attacks
Afghan Islamic Press
Monday, April 16, 2012 …
Document Type: OSC Translated Text . . .
Text of report by private Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press news agency
Kabul, 15 April: Ministry of Interior: 17 militants have been killed in Sunday’s attacks.
The Afghan Ministry of Interior in their latest statement on Sunday, 15 April, said that 17 militants have been killed in today’s attacks and two others have been arrested.
The statement, which AIP received late in the evening, says that the militants targeted three areas in Kabul city in which four militants have been killed.
The statement further adds that 11 police soldiers and five civilians have sustained injures in this incident.
The Ministry of Interior has not confirmed any other casualties except for the killing of the terrorists only.
The statement also adds that four other terrorists have been gunned down in shoot-out between the militants and security guards of PRT in Jalalabad and also adds that three people have been killed as a result of a car explosion.
According to the statement, a terrorist who tried to flee the area was detained by the security forces.
The Ministry of Interior confirms the injury of four civilians in Jalalabad incident.
The statement also says that three assailants have been killed in Sunday’s attack that took place in Gardez city capital of Paktia Province and adds that three policemen and five civilians have been wounded in this attack.
The statement also reported about another incident in Logar Province in which three attackers were killed in Pol-e Alam area of the Province and adds that another terrorist have been arrested. The statement also confirms the injury of only three policemen in this incident.
Although the Ministry of Interior did not report killing of any one from the security forces, Zabihollah Mojahed, the Taleban spokesman, claims killing tens of policemen, army soldiers and a number of foreigners in today’s attacks. Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) has not received any confirmation from independent sources.
(Description of Source: Peshawar Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto — Peshawar-based agency, staffed by Afghans, that describes itself as an independent “news agency” but whose history and reporting pattern reveal a perceptible pro-Taliban bias; the AIP’s founder-director, Mohammad Yaqub Sharafat, has long been associated with a mujahidin faction that merged with the Taliban’s “Islamic Emirate” led by Mullah Omar; subscription required to access content; http://www.afghanislamicpress. com)
Chris Woods writes at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism:
Scholars Alex Strick van Linschoten, 28, and 32 year old Felix Kuehn have swapped the musty libraries of London for the dusty streets of Kandahar, spiritual home of the Taliban. There the two have lived for almost five years, engaging with those many call the enemy in an effort to further understanding.
Their research has resulted in two outstanding books. An Enemy We Created: The Myth of the Taliban/ Al Qaeda Merger challenges the orthodoxy that the two militant organisations are much alike. Understanding any distinction may be critical if tentative peace moves with the Taliban are to have any chance of success.
Next month the duo is also publishing Poetry of the Taliban, containing more than 250 translated poems written by Afghan Taliban fighters which presents them in a rarely-glimpsed cultural context.
The Bureau recently met up with Alex and Felix to discuss their work, and how drones are viewed by the Afghan Taliban. We began by asking them about their forthcoming collection of poems.
Alex: The whole point was to present things which you wouldn’t normally read, just the usual stuff that gets translated into English. I was on the Taliban’s website looking at its navigation bar. First place is a link to news, you know, ’30 infidels were killed in Sangin today’. Second is opinion pieces. Then the number three button is the songs. We thought, this is interesting, page after page of poems.
And then I went to to the SITE analysis group, and to all of these people who get paid millions by the Ministry of Defence and the Pentagon in the US, to translate Taliban propaganda, and none of them were translating the poems. Obviously the poems don’t have operational details. But you would think that given the Taliban accord the poems such prominence, there might be something in there. So we started having them translated, and we kept on doing it. And then I mentioned it to my publisher, we’ve got 200 or 300 Taliban poems, and they were, ‘Right, let’s publish it!’
Q: That’s something we’ve not seen in the west, the idea of a cultural Taliban.
Felix: Not a lot of people pay attention to this. And one of the interesting things is that everything else is tailored messaging, very strong propaganda at which they’ve become very good, who is your target audience and tightly structuring your messages. But this is just really guys who write poetry and are Taliban, and then talk about issues they relate to, in sometimes very artistic fashion, in sometimes very simple language. And on a very wide range of subjects. I think also that the Taliban poetry thing had a very different quality when we moved down from Kabul to Kandahar. Because even though a lot of our friends aren’t pro-Talib at all, they would have these tapes with these songs, and would listen to it all the time and it would be on always.
Q: Do people still listen on tapes, is it the older technology?
Felix: There are still tapes sold, for the taxi drivers. Though many have upgraded to MP3 players now. But still the same poetry on them.
Alex: It’s all part of this cultural or aesthetic element of who the Taliban are. Normally we think of the Taliban as a religious group, or a political or military group. But going back to the 1980s and 1990s, this was part of who they are. And people associated it with them quite closely. It’s definitely one of the things I think about, the ways I try to understand who these people are. If you’re not reading this stuff you’re missing a big part of them. They’re guys who sit around and talk and joke and have conversations. It’s a different aspect of their identity.
Felix: I’m often reading these reports by people who have massive access and financial resources, and get all of this stuff translated, and you can find lots of interesting facts in there. But then you re-analyse this and it often lacks a certain understanding I feel of these people they’re talking about.
Alex: The reality of their lives
If you’re not reading this stuff you’re missing a big part of them. They’re guys who sit around and talk and joke and have conversations. It’s a different aspect of their identity.
Felix: Right, the substance. Something we see or have seen a lot on a daily basis living in the south and going to the villages and attending tribal shuras and all these little bits of conflict and social life and fabric, you get a feel for it which informs everything you read afterwards. When I read a story about something that happens in southern Afghanistan, I’ll read it completely differently from how I would five or six years ago. When I didn’t understand that things can be far more complicated than you see on the surface. And I think that the poetry, for a lot of people, will be a really interesting experience because they’ll be forced to identify more with the people, even though they may naturally have an anti-Taliban, this-is-our-enemy sort of approach. They’ll see that it’s not just the super-fanatics who are always just about jihad.
Q: How are drones viewed in Kandahar, how do they affect peoples’ understanding of the conflict, and how are they perceived?
Alex: In the south they have, at least up until I was last there in October 2011, a far less… It’s not like the east where you really feel them as a presence, where everyone will have a photo on their cellphone of a drone they took last week. There’s just not the traffic, at least in the city, and I don’t think in the districts as well from what I hear, compared to the east or compared to FATA. It’s not that visceral a thing really, not a big discussion topic. Sometimes you’ll be sitting outside and there’ll be a drone flying over and it’s ‘Oh yes, there’s the drone, fine‘.
There is also this big blimp over Kandahar, and when it first went up no-one would let their wives sleep outside, ‘It’s the Americans trying to view our naked wives’.
Selling the Faith
Decisions are made there, above in the sky,
No one can be blamed for what happens.
Everyone’s fate is separate,
Each man is passing through a time of testing.
One person is granted wealth and selfishness,
One is hopeless from poverty.
Some have sold their faith for money;
They accompany the non-believers elsewhere.
Pious God!
Eliminate their hypocrisy!
Grant a little modesty and zeal to Muslims.
Halim sitting and praying asks that
Muslims be granted dignity in all things.
Abdul Halim
December 16, 2007
Felix: There’s not too much discussion about it although there is quite a presence, specifically over the city. If we sleep outside there’s always a drone flying, but they’re surveillance drones, not armed Reapers.
Alex: They do conduct drone strikes in the south.
Felix: For example the time one of our friends salvaged one, in 2007 or something, there were a whole bunch of pictures, a barrel full of parts which I think they sold back to the Canadians. You can definitely see drones on the US airbase. I remember seeing the first drone there and being excited, looking out of the airplane, there were maybe two or three in one corner. And now you drive by and they have maybe fifty? Every time I land at Kandahar there’s a drone landing before or after us.
As to strikes: when troops call in air support and it’s a Reaper, I’m not sure those on the ground would really notice the difference. It’s just ‘the air strike’. So there’s probably far more of this going on than people realise, they’re just getting used to it.
Q: And is there an empathy with what’s going on in FATA, is it in the poems, or is this really just a Pakistan thing?
Alex: I’ve been through the poems looking for references and it doesn’t really come up. The cultural universes of Taliban poems, the songs of the Pakistan Taliban, they’re far more tightly controlled. Interestingly this is another argument to support their being different groups, because the way they go about the songs is different operationally. In Pakistan it goes through a strict production factory, more or less, to make sure the poems properly represent the line they want to take. It’s much more a propaganda product than the stuff that the Afghans come up with. And in the 260 poems we have in our collection there’s not a single mention of drones, and these are poems taken from the south east as well as the south [of Afghanistan].
In the 260 poems we have in our collection there’s not a single mention of drones.
The only thing which comes up and does so twice is the image of Ababil, the green bird, which is a Koranic metaphor for when Abraham is fighting against Nimrud and God sent the green birds to support him. This, I know from talking to Pakistani journalist friends of mine, comes up quite a lot in the drone literature of the Pakistan side, the green birds. The two are often paired together in curious ways. But it’s not really used that way in Afghanistan… Drones don’t really feature in the cultural or aesthetic. Obviously in the videos which come out, which are coming from the east, you’ll have the drone animations and things like that. But that’s coming from the contact with the Pakistanis.
The Afghan Syndrome
Vietnam Has Left Town, Say Hello to the New Syndrome on the Block
By Tom Engelhardt
Take off your hat. Taps is playing. Almost four decades late, the Vietnam War and its post-war spawn, the Vietnam Syndrome, are finally heading for their American grave. It may qualify as the longest attempted burial in history. Last words — both eulogies and curses — have been offered too many times to mention, and yet no American administration found the silver bullet that would put that war away for keeps.
Richard Nixon tried to get rid of it while it was still going on by “Vietnamizing” it. Seven years after it ended, Ronald Reagan tried to praise it into the dustbin of history, hailing it as “a noble cause.” Instead, it morphed from a defeat in the imperium into a “syndrome,” an unhealthy aversion to war-making believed to afflict the American people to their core.
A decade later, after the U.S. military smashed Saddam Hussein’s army in Kuwait in the First Gulf War, George H.W. Bush exulted that the country had finally “kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” As it turned out, despite the organization of massive “victory parades” at home to prove that this hadn’t been Vietnam redux, that war kicked back. Another decade passed and there were H.W.’s son W. and his advisors planning the invasion of Iraq through a haze of Vietnam-constrained obsessions.
W.’s top officials and the Pentagon would actually organize the public relations aspect of that invasion and the occupation that followed as a Vietnam opposite’s game — no “body counts” to turn off the public, plenty of embedded reporters so that journalists couldn’t roam free and (as in Vietnam) harm the war effort, and so on. The one thing they weren’t going to do was lose another war the way Vietnam had been lost. Yet they managed once again to bog the U.S. military down in disaster on the Eurasian mainland, could barely manage to win a heart or a mind, and even began issuing body counts of the enemy dead.
“We don’t do body counts,” General Tommy Franks, Afghan War commander, had insisted in 2001, and as late as November 2006, the president was still expressing his irritation about Iraq to a group of conservative news columnists this way: “We don’t get to say that — a thousand of the enemy killed or whatever the number was. It’s happening. You just don’t know it.” The problem, he explained, was: “We have made a conscious effort not to be a body count team” (à la Vietnam). And then, of course, those body counts began appearing.
Somehow, over the endless years, no matter what any American president tried, The War — that war — and its doppelganger of a syndrome, a symbol of defeat so deep and puzzling Americans could never bear to fully take it in, refused to depart town. They were the ghosts on the battlements of American life, representing — despite the application of firepower of a historic nature — a defeat by a small Asian peasant land so unexpected that it simply couldn’t be shaken, nor its “lessons” learned.
National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was typical at the time in dismissing North Vietnam in disgust as “a little fourth rate power,” just as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Thomas Moorer would term it “a third-rate country with a population of less than two counties in one of the 50 states of the United States.” All of which made its victory, in some sense, beyond comprehension.
A Titleholder for Pure, Long-Term Futility
That was then. This is now and, though the frustration must seem familiar, Washington has gotten itself into a situation on the Eurasian mainland so vexing and perplexing that Vietnam has finally been left in the dust. In fact, if you hadn’t noticed — and weirdly enough no one has — that former war finally seems to have all but vanished.
If you care to pick a moment when it first headed for the exits, when we all should have registered something new in American consciousness, it would undoubtedly have been mid-2010 when the media decided that the Afghan War, then 8½ years old, had superseded Vietnam as “the longest war” in U.S. history. Today, that claim has become commonplace, even though it remains historically dubious (which may be why it’s significant).
Afghanistan is, in fact, only longer than Vietnam if you decide to date the start of the American war there to 1964, when Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (in place of an actual declaration of war), or 1965, when American “combat troops” first arrived in South Vietnam. By then, however, there were already 16,000 armed American “advisors” there, Green Berets fighting there, American helicopters flying there. It would be far more reasonable to date America’s war in Vietnam to 1961, the year of its first official battlefield casualty and the moment when the Kennedy administration sent in 3,000 military advisors to join the 900 already there from the Eisenhower years. (The date of the first American death on the Vietnam Wall, however, is 1956, and the first American military man to die in Vietnam — an American lieutenant colonel mistaken by Vietnamese guerrillas for a French officer — was killed in Saigon in 1945.)
Of course, massive U.S. support for the French version of the Vietnam War in the early 1950s could drive that date back further. Similarly, if you wanted to add in America’s first Afghan War, the CIA-financed anti-Soviet war of the mujahideen from 1980 to 1989, you might once again have a “longest war” competition.
The essential problem in dating wars these days is that we no longer declare them, so they just tend to creep up on us. In addition, because undeclared war has melded into something like permanent war on the American scene, we might well be setting records every day on the Eurasian mainland — if, for instance, you care to include the First Gulf War and the continued military actions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq which, after 2001, blended into the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror, its invasion of Afghanistan, and then, of course, Iraq (again).
For those who want a definitive “longest,” however, the latest news is promising. Obama administration negotiations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government are reportedly close to complete. The two sides are expected to arrive at a “strategic partnership” agreement leaving U.S. forces (trainers, advisors, special operations troops, and undoubtedly scads of private contractors) ensconced on bases in Afghanistan well beyond 2014. If such official desire becomes reality, then the Vietnam record might indeed be at an end.
What’s important, however, isn’t which war holds the record, but that media urge in 2010 to anoint Afghanistan the titleholder for pure long-term futility. In retrospect, that represented a changing-of-the-guard moment.
Now, skip ahead almost two years and consider what’s missing in action today. After all, dealing with the Afghan War in Vietnam-analogy terms right now would be like lining up ducks at a shooting gallery. Just take a run through the essential Vietnam War checklist: there’s “quagmire” (check!); dropping the idea of winning “hearts and minds” (check!); the fact that we’ve entered the “Afghanization” phase of the war, with endless rosy prognostications about, followed by grim reports on, the training of the Afghan army to replace U.S. combat troops (check!).
Apparently this video was leaked, and we don’t hear about woundings, crashes and other negative news in the US military in Afghanistan, only actual deaths. Unfortunately, our press doesn’t report much on even those deaths, and most Americans seem not to know or care that the US is at war in Afghanistan.
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.
