35 Killed, 56 Wounded in Qandahar Bombings

The Old Taliban of Mullah Omar hit Qandahar late Saturday with the largest coordinated bombing campaign since 2001, killing at least 35 persons and wounding 56. A spokesman said that the movement had targeted Qandahar on hearing the plans of Gen. Stanley McChrystal pledge that the US will mount a major campaign to clear Qandahar of the Taliban. He said they had showed that they could strike at will anywhere.

The governor of the province, Ahmad Wali Karzai (the brother of President Hamid Karzai), said that the attacks had targeted the prison, which houses many captured Taliban.

Aljazeera English reports on the Afghan Talibans' plans for expansion:



Some observers in Pakistan believe that as most Taliban cells disassociate themselves from al-Qaeda, those that remain militant hare bombing Lahore (and now Qandahar).


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Bombings in Swat, Punjab likely to backfire on Taliban

The run-up to the Ides of March in Pakistan has been characterized by numerous horrific bombings, credit for which has been claimed by the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (TTP) or Taliban Movement of Pakistan. After a string of bombings in Lahore on Friday, on Saturday morning, a suicide bomber detonated his payload at a checkpoint station outside the city of Mingora in Swat, killing 10 persons, including two members of the security forces. Last summer, the Pakistani military expelled the Pakistani Taliban from Swat, before moving on to attack their bases and safe houses (or safe caves) in South Waziristan.

On Friday, bombing attacks on a military cantonment and on Iqbal Town and Samnabad in Lahore left 50-60 persons dead and 120 wounded. Some of the attacks targeted the Pakistani military, but the deadly bombing of a market inflicted severe damage on innocent civilians.

Aljazeera English reports on the Lahore bombings:



The Pakistani Taliban mostly hail from the Pashtun ethnic group in Pakistan's northwest, though they do have some tiny fringe Punjabi associates, such as the Lashkar-i Tayyiba. Their attempt to impress on the Pakistani military and public that they are still capable of fighting back through such bombings of soft targets will likely backfire in a major way. As long as the TTP was primarily attacking NATO and US troops or the Afghan National Army across the border in Afghanistan, the Pakistani military and public could largely ignore them, or even configure them as a generally anti-imperialist force that admittedly was a little extreme.

But if they are going to blow up Lahore, the capital of Punjab Province, the TTP is going to have to be finished off. Punjabis are 55 percent of Pakistan, and the wealthiest and most powerful part. They are 80% of the army. Now, editorials are widely and bitterly complaining that the government has not dismantled the 'infrastructure of hate.' Some Karachi observers are calling on Punjabis to wake up to the threat. The subtext here is that Punjabi officers and politicians in the 1980s and 1990s fostered the Mujahidin and then the Taliban and small terrorist groups in hopes of using them to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan and the Indians out of Kashmir. But relationships change, and Punjabis are in fact likely to wake up.

I would make an analogy to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which launched a massive bombing campaign inside Saudi Arabia 2003-2006, causing the Saudi security and intelligence forces to take them seriously as an internal threat and to institute a thoroughgoing crackdown on them that largely succeeded inside the kingdom. Before it was Riyadh and Jidda that were being bombed, the Saudis seemed to see radical terrorism as someone else's problem, however regrettable. After that the kingdom suddenly became much more integrated into the war on terrorism.

In the same way, this week's bombings in Pakistan are likely to stiffen the resolve of the Pakistani elite to wipe out the TTP and the Afghan Old Taliban of Mulla Omar. It has already captured about half of the Quetta Shura or the Old Taliban shadow government based formerly in Quetta but increasingly now in Karachi (where they appear lately to have been assassinating rival Sunni clerics)

Guerrilla movements win by winning hearts and minds over time and successfully positioning themselves as the true champions of national or communal interests. The Pakistani Taliban are just flailing around making themselves more and more hated, and that by the most powerful ethnic group in the country.

If I am right, the Obama administration is continuing to benefit in its own attack on the Taliban and al-Qaeda from the stupidity of the latter two, insofar as they are alienating the Pakistani public, which had earlier been somewhat sympathetic to them.

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Maliki ahead in Key Shiite Privinces

Al-Sharq al-Awsat [The Middle East] reports in Arabic that the Independent High Electoral Commission in Iraq has released some information on the performance of the major political coalitions in two southern Shiite provinces, based on a count so far of about a third of the vote.

The big news is that prime minister Nuri al-Maliki's coalition defeated the alliance of other Shiite religious parties even in the pious provinces of Najaf and Babil. Since Shiites are 60% of the population, if this showing is repeated in Baghdad and in the South, Maliki would be in a good position to remain prime minister. He would likely have the biggest bloc in parliament, and would be asked to form the government.

The other possibility raised by the initial results is that Iyad Allawi's Iraqiya list is turning into a party for secular Sunnis, the majority in that community. But since Sunni Arabs are perhaps 18% of the population, that base will not carry Allawi into the prime minister's mansion. Based on these partial results from five provinces, some press reports are putting al-Maliki at 22% of seats and Allawi at 20%. But this closeness is illusory. At the moment, al-Maliki is way ahead if you extrapolate out the Shiite vote.

But al-Sharq al-Awsat says that there are reports that Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi Naitonal Congress and a candidate in the National Iraqi Alliance (which groups the Shiite religious parties) attempted to enter a hall where the electoral commission was counting the votes and was turned away. Likewise, there was allegedly an attempt by a member of the State of Law coalition of al-Maliki to enter false data. The combination of Chalabi's presence in the building and the continued postponement of the announcement of results based on partial counts of the votes has raised questions in the minds of some as to whether the election results are being tampered with.

WaPo reports some of the preliminary results announced Thursday, based on counts of from 17% to 30% of the votes in 5 provinces. In two southern Shiite provinces, this was the leading party:

Babil: State of Law (Nuri al-Maliki) 42%
Najaf: State of Law 47%

In contrast, the State of Law received 16% in Najaf in the provincial elections of early 2009, and 12.5% in Babil. These religious Shiite populations seem to be forsaking the National Iraqi Alliance of fundamentalist, generally pro-Iran parties.

The Iraqi National Alliance (Shiite fundamentalist parties) came in second in both provinces, with Iyad Allawi's secular-leaning National Iraqi List coming in third.

In Diyala and Salahuddin, Sunni-majority provinces, Alawi's National Iraqi List came in first, with al-Maliki trailing.




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Fathollah-Nejad: "Why 'Smart Sanctions' on Iran are Actually Stupid

Ali Fathollah-Nejad writes in a guest editorial for Informed Comment:

Collateral Damages of Smart Sanctions on Iran
The prospects for democracy, socio-economic development and conflict resolution will suffer if the West continues to rely on punitive measures

By Ali Fathollah-Nejad*


This time, the war-mongers' silly season found its apogee in U.S. neo-conservative Daniel Pipes’ advice to Obama to "bomb Iran", which appeared shortly after Tony Blair, having outlined why he helped invade Iraq, remarked ominously, “We face the same problem about Iran today”.

The Chilcot Inquiry in the United Kingdom on how the Iraq War was launched, ironically coincided with a considerable military build-up in the Persian Gulf region. All this occurred amidst the continued struggle of Iran’s civil rights movement and proclamations of Western leaders to be in support of the latter’s efforts. But is there any evidence for this?
In contradistinction to war, sanctions are widely portrayed as necessary, almost healthy medicine to bring about change in the opponent’s policies. However, as the history of the West–Iran conflict proves, sanctions have rather the state of crisis alive than contributed to its resolution. Nonetheless, Western governments do not seem to have lost their dubious fascination for them.


As the call for “crippling sanctions” became morally questionable when last summer the impressive Green wave shook the streets of Tehran for fear of wrecking the same, today the benign sounding “smart” or “targeted” sanctions are on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Yet, a close look reveals a great deal of wishful thinking as to the effects of such sanctions.


Gigantic dimensions of “smart sanctions”


“Smart sanctions”, it is claimed, are a magic wand with which to decapitate evil. In the Iranian case, evil is being identified with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Originally a defense organization erected to counter Iraqi aggression in the 1980s, the Guardians have developed into an expansive socio-politico-economic conglomerate which is believed to possess unrivalled economic and political power in today’s Islamic Republic.


As we are told, “smart sanctions” shall target the Guardians’ grip on the Iranian power structure. The much neglected difficulty here is while it is widely acknowledged that the bulk of Iranian economy is now in the hands of the Guardians, in the end millions of civilians connected to these wide-ranging sectors will be affected. In this view, the gigantic dimension of these alleged “smart sanctions” comes to the fore.
So-called “crippling sanctions” that target petrol supply to Iran are en route. In anticipation of those U.S. unilateral sanctions, the world’s largest insurance companies have announced their retreat from Iran

. This concerns both the financial and shipping sectors, and affects petrol supplies to Iran which imports 40 percent of its needs. Also three giant oil traders ended supplies to Iran, which amounted to half of Tehran’s imports. Needless to say, such sanctions ultimately harm the population. To add, a complete implementation thereof – i.e. preventing Asian competitors to step in – would require a naval blockade which amounts to an act of war.


Crippling the ordinary population
As stressed by civil society figures and economists, the price of sanctions is being paid by the Iranian population at large. The Iranian economy – manufacturing, agriculture, bank and financial sectors etc. – has been hurt from almost three decades of sanctions. Even today, businesses cannot easily obtain much needed goods on the international market to continue production and must often pay above-standard prices. Moreover, the scientific community has faced discrimination in areas of research as has Iran’s technological advances been slowed down. Also, reflecting the dangers sanctions pose to the Green Movement, last fall Mir-Hossein Mousavi stated: “We are opposed to any types of sanctions against our nation.” The same was recently uttered by his fellow opposition leader Mehdi Karroubi in an interview with Corriere della Serra.


Meanwhile a more fundamental problem remains – hardly acknowledged by many proponents who succumb to the adventurous illusion of having a say in the design and implementation of sanctions: They are mainly designed by the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), introduced to the U.S. Congress and finally implemented by the Treasury Department’s Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey – an AIPAC confidant. Along this process, the potential suffering by Iran’s civil society is hardly playing a role.
Sanctions – either “crippling” or “smart” – ultimately harm ordinary citizens. “Smart sanctions” are as an oxymoron as “smart weapons” which supposedly by “surgical strikes” only take out evil components. Indeed, much like its militaristic brother-in-sprit, at the end the “collateral damages” of “smart sanctions” remain dominant.


A futile political instrument in today’s world
More generally, in an increasingly multipolar globalized world and imposed upon energy-rich countries, sanctions as an effective policy tool are basically futile. Too numerous are business-driven actors that are only too happy to jump in. Thus, Chinese, Russian, and even U.S. companies (acting via Dubai) have hugely benefitted from the European, U.S.-pressured withdrawal from the Iranian market.
Thus, sanctions – a medicine with which Western policy-circles are so obsessed with – is not a cure but a slow poison applied to the civil society and thus the civil rights movement. Sanctions as prototype of economic warfare in concert with the seasonal flaring-up of war-mongering are a dangerous mix. The deafening “drums of war” continue to bang upon the beating heart of Iran’s civil society.
Sanctions and threats of war: A poisonous for democratic development


All this suggests that sanctions are perhaps a fig leaf for other agendas. For, in contrast to Western proclamations, sanctions do harm the civil society while cementing the position of hardliners. Iran’s middle class as a result will be affected by this further isolation of the country as sanctions punish honest traders and reward corrupt ones. The Guardians with their assumed 60 harbors at the Persian Gulf control the bulk of imports and sanctions will only bolster the trend of flourishing “black channels”.


One might indeed argue that the not-so-unconscious “collateral damage” of never-ending sanctions is a de facto undermining of any meaningful transition to more democracy in Iran – a prospect which would set an uncomfortable precedent for the West’s authoritarian friends in the region.


What next: “Surgical strikes” or serious diplomacy?
At the very least, the unending story of sanctions bears testimony to Western leaders’ commitment to uphold “credibility” in the face of adverse conditions as to coercing their will on Iran. A futile exercise – even a dangerous one – if one begins to contemplate about the aftermath of “smart sanctions” being imposed: Will the next desperate move entail “surgical strikes”?


Instead of go on believing that sanctions will one day develop their desired effects, it is high time to put the brakes. Hence, the only way forward would be to adopt a set of policies that would disarm hardliners of all sides whose business flourishes in the vicious cycle of enmity. It is only by détente that grist to the mills of radicalism can be halted – and a sustainable de-militarization of Iranian politics attained. Revoking existing sanctions on goods for civilian use could work wonders that would shake the very fundaments of confrontational postures.


Despite all frivolous claims, the diplomatic route has not been exhausted. Indeed, we are far from it. Since the core problem remains the “security dilemma” in the region, it would be wise for the West to call upon Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The transatlantic “coercive strategy” vis-à-vis Iran – as it is accurately described in Diplomatic Studies – must be suspended for it undermines prospects for peace and development towards democracy.
* * *

11 March 2010


*Ali Fathollah-Nejad is a German–Iranian political scientist; Ph.D. researcher in International Relations at the universities of Münster (Germany) and London (School of Oriental and African Studies); currently a Visiting Lecturer in globalization and development at the University of Westminster, London; author of The Iran Conflict and the Obama Administration: Old Wine in New Skins? (in German, Potsdam University Press, 2010); homepage: fathollah-nejad.com.





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The Mahmoud and Robert Show comes to Afghanistan

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates traded insults on Wednesday in Kabul. Gates accused Iran of claiming to support the Karzai government in Kabul but of playing a 'double game' and secretly giving aid to the Taliban. Ahmadinejad complained that the US fostered Sunni radicalism in the 1980s as part of its struggle to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan, and now had no right to complain about radicalism and terrorism in the region.

In this exchange, Ahmadinejad surely won on points. Gates's allegation of substantial Iranian support for the hyper-Sunni Shiite-killing Taliban is implausible on the face of it, and makes Gates look silly in regional eyes.

Russia Today reports on the tiff:



The dispute is particularly unfortunate, since the US and Iran largely have the same goals and friends in Afghanistan, and the Obama administration should have been talking to Iran all along about their overlapping interests in that country.

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Abbas Reported to have Withdrawn from Israeli-Palestinian talks; Obama Mideast Policy Sabotaged by Netanyahu

Obama's Mideast policy lies in tatters this morning and US credibility as a broker of any future settlement was deeply wounded.

Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League, announced Wednesday that he had been informed by Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas that the latter has pulled out of indirect talks with Israel. Late Wednesday, the Arab League itself reversed its earlier cautious endorsement of the proximity talks, recommending that that support be dropped.

Israeli colonization of Palestinian territory lies at the heart of the Mideast conflict. It isn't a complicated issue in the law, since Israel's actions are clearly illegal and unethical to boot. But might makes right and Israel is the most powerful country in the Middle East, so all the protests on legal and humanitarian grounds have amounted to nothing.

The talks were likely deliberately sabotaged by Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who had his Interior Minister announce the construction of 1600 new households in Occupied East Jerusalem the day before they were scheduled to begin. In fact, Israel is actively planning 50,000 further housing units on occupied Palestinian territory. US Vice President Joe Biden had come to kick off the process with visits to Netanyahu and Abbas, but he has now been sent home empty-handed by Netanyahu's sheer effrontery.

Netanyahu's far rightwing coalition includes many members of the Knesset or Israeli parliament who are bound and determined to colonize every last inch of the Palestinian West Bank and to reduce the Palestinians to landless beggars. Were the prime minister to make too many concessions to the Obama administration, some of them might well pull out of his government, and it could easily fall. Netanyahu is convinced that the Clinton administration undermined him the last time he was prime minister, and he is determined not to allow that to happen again. So acted as though he was complying with US demands for a settlement freeze, but exempted part of Palestinian territory from the freeze. Then shortly before proximity talks were to begin he had his Interior Ministry announce further colonization, knowing that it would complicate or (better) nix the talks. Netanyahu knew that if he was pressed on the announcement, he could get himself off the hook by apologizing for his flat-footed minister's poor timing. Biden did not buy this lame shadow play and neither will anyone else with any common sense.

Since 1949, the US has given Israel over $100 billion in direct aid, and the indirect forms of aid are orders of magnitude greater. That the vice president of the United States (and therefore the president himself) were ambushed by the prime minister in this arrogant and nearly sadistic manner raises the severest questions about why US taxpayer money should flow in such enormous amounts to a country that is actively and on a massive scale violating the Hague Agreement of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 on the treatment of populations by occupiers. And this at a time when the US budget deficit is ballooning and there is not enough government money to take care of the needs of US citizens. The argument that Israel is a security asset for the United States is undermined if the Israelis are provoking enmity toward the United States among 1.5 billion Muslims by their inexorable annexation of Palestinian land and daily oppression of the Palestinian people.

Biden took small bits of revenge on Netanyahu, such as going on Aljazeera English from the Occupied West Bank and denouncing the Netanyahu government's plans to expand its colonies on Palestinian territory as "destabilizing."



Obama is in real danger of seeing his allies lose respect for the United States once they see that Israel can treat him in this humiliating way with impunity. The security implications for the US are enormous. Many European allies feel strongly that Israel is an aggressor state in the region, and when Obama asks them for help in the fight against al-Qaeda, they may feel that Washington's coddling of Israeli colonialism produced much of the radicalism that they are now asked to spend blood and treasure combating. Moreover, many leaders may be emboldened to treat Obama and Biden just as Netanyahu did, if the latter faces no consequences for his impudence.

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Israel Humiliates Biden, Announces Further Colonization on Eve of US-Brokered Talks

The far rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu in Israel majorly sandbagged Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday, demonstrating once again that it has not the slightest interest in pursuing a just peace with the Palestinian people or in trading a cessation of its colonization of the Palestinian West Bank for a comprehensive peace with the Arab world.

Biden went to the Mideast to kick off negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and reassured the latter of undying US support for them. On Chris Matthews' Hardball, Biden explained that when you marry someone, you tell them you love them, but that does not remove the obligation to keep saying it years later. Apparently, however, Washington is henpecked by Tel Aviv to the point almost of being a battered spouse. In response to Biden's loyal support for Israel over decades, the Likud-led government kicked him in the teeth. Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai abruptly announced that he would build 1600 new households (for 8,000 people?) in a part of the Occupied West Bank that the Israeli government had annexed to Jerusalem District. It was precisely such new and increasing Israeli building on Palestinian territory that had led Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to reject negotiations and to threaten to resign. The announcement put in doubt whether the negotiations would go forward, and made Biden and the United States government look like fools.

Joe Biden should have turned around and left the country. Instead, he showed up 90 minutes late to a state dinner hosted by Netanyahu and dared actually directly complain about the way he was treated, "I condemn the decision," he said, calling it "precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I've had here in Israel."

Aljazeera English reports on Biden's visit and the Israeli announcement of new colonization measures:



The Netanyahu government had announced a settlement freeze in much of the West Bank for 8 months, but does not include the areas it unilaterally annexed to the district of Jerusalem as West Bank territory. Nor is the 'settlement freeze' really any such thing, since there are plans to expand housing in existing colonies on the West Bank.

This controversy comes on the heels of demonstrations in al-Khalil/ Hebron and Jerusalem by Palestinians outraged by the unilateral Israeli designation of the Tombs of the Patriarchs and the tomb of Rachel, in Palestinian West Bank territory, as Israeli heritage sites. In Palestinian experience, such Israeli claims often precede Israeli annexation. While US mass media did not cover the demonstrations in any detail (much reporting from Israel in US media is by dual citizens or by reporters who have served or have children serving in the Israeli army), they are a big story in the Middle East, and the creeping Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from East Jerusalem is guaranteed to enrage the world's 1.5 billion Muslims and result in violence.

The Obama administration came into office determined to restart the negotiations between Abbas and the Israelis, with the aim of achieving a two-state solution. After over a year of meetings and carrying messages and cajoling, the patient-as-Job special envoy George Mitchell finally convinced Mahmoud Abbas to agree to indirect negotiations with Israel. For the past year, Abbas had refused to talk, on the grounds that the Israelis were actively colonizing the West Bank and so taking away the very territory that was subject to negotiation. How do you parlay with someone who is stealing from you at that very moment?

The Oslo process of the 1990s, initiated by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, had aimed at establishing two states side by side, Israel and Palestine. Neither the Likud Party of Netanyahu nor Hamas among the Palestinians wanted to see that process succeed. Likud wanted all of the former British Mandate of Palestine to be permanently under Israeli control, including the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which Israel occupied in 1967 and which have a stateless, rights-less Palestinian population of over 4 million persons. The Israelis have steadily and determinedly usurped Palestinian territory throughout the last nearly a century, and by now it is highly unlikely that what is left of the Palestinian West Bank and the besieged, half-starving Gaza Strip can plausibly be cobbled together into a 'state.'



In my view, it doesn't really matter if Netanyahu's slap in the face to Biden derails the proposed indirect talks. The Likud-led government has no intention of allowing a Palestinian state, and there is now no place to put one. Israel-Palestine has unalterably entered the era of Apartheid (actually something worse), and it will spell both the end of dreams of peace in our generation, and probably over time the end of Israel as Netanyahu's generation knew it. The Palestinians cannot be left stateless (the legal estate of slaves as well as of Jews under Nazi rule, i.e. people with no legal rights) forever. If they can't have Palestinian citizenship, then they'll have to have Israeli citizenship. The future of Israel-Palestine is likely to become a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state like Lebanon. Ironically, it is Netanyahu who is in no small measure responsible for this likely outcome, the opposite of the one he aspires to.

Israelis claim a 'birthright' to do things like colonize Palestinian territory, based on romantic-nationalist reworkings of biblical narratives. But Canaan was populated for millenia before some Canaanite tribes adopted the new religion of Judaism, and it was also ruled, as Palestine, for centuries by Romans and Greeks, and for 1400 years by Muslims. The Palestinian Jews converted to Christianity and then to Islam, so they are cousins of the European Jews (who appear to have gone to Europe voluntarily as male merchants around 800 CE,, where they took local wives). European Jews are about half European by parentage and all European by cultural heritage, and it is no more natural that they be in geographical Palestine than that they be in Europe (where nearly two-thirds of their mothers were from and about a third of their fathers). From a Middle Eastern point of view, European Jews planted in British Mandate Palestine by the British Empire were no different from the million colons or European colonists brought to Algeria while it was under French rule from 1830-1962. (Algeria had been ruled in antiquity by Rome, and the French considered themselves heirs of the Roman Empire, so it was natural that people from Marseilles should return to 'their' territory. Romantic nationalism, whether French or Zionist, always has the same shape). I don't predict the same fate for Jewish Israelis as befell the French colons. Rather, I think they are likely to more and more resemble in their position the Maronite Catholics of Lebanon-- i.e. powerful and formerly dominant population-wise, but increasingly challenged by other rising communities.



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