Regaining Baloch Sovereignty

Borders And Disorder

2011-04-22T03:59:00.000-07:00

In dealing with fractured states, particularly those of which are torn apart by ethno-national conflicts, the society of states often overlooks a fundamental issue, the one that lies at the root of such conflicts: Arbitrary nature of international boundaries.

Drawn by war victors and colonial powers in South Asia, Middle East and Africa, in a protracted period beginning in the wake of the First World War up until the end of the decolonisation of 1960s, these artificial boundaries have remained to be one of the major sources of intra-state violence – not to mention various inter-state border wars. Indeed, these boundaries are not social but political constructs; they do not reflect cultural, national and historical realities.

And yet, ironically, they are deemed essential for maintenance of order and stability.

What was the prime motive that drove the European powers to fiddle with centuries-old cultural frontiers is an inquisitive subject that, of course, requires thorough investigation. What became clear, however, in the wake of decolonisation was that both former colonial powers of Europe and the successor states in Africa and Asia were seen determined to defend these unjust arrangements.

In spite of their mutual differences on a host of international issues, such as trade and aid imbalances as well as equal representation in international institutions, both groups of states were, nonetheless, united in preservation of newly established status quo ante: The present international boundaries must remain intact.

Conscious of their legally protected status within international law as “sovereign entities,” the elite of each newly independent state embarked on an aggressive path to create a unitary state, often crushing not only the customs and traditions of small nationalities but also, in some cases, pushing for new settlements in their territories in order to change the demographic facts in the pretext of developments and economic progress. Xingjian in China and Balochistan in Iran and Pakistan are obvious cases in this regard.

Faced with criticism on the foreign front, a series of resolutions were passed by these quasi states (to borrow a term from Robert Jackson) during the 1970s in UN General Assembly, soon, followed by another set of resolutions from African Union: defending the legal norm of non-interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. When questions raised by the former colonial powers over their repressive treatment of minority groups, the leadership of quasi states were quick to invoke international legal norms. Hence, any criticism on their abusive conducts was tantamount to intervention in state sovereignty.

But, as the Cold War came to a dramatic end, so did the myth of inviolability of international borders. From the breakup of Yugoslavia in early 1990s to the recent independence of South Sudan, and the ongoing crisis in Libya, it has increasingly become clear that the legal norms, such as non-interference and respect of state sovereignty, are not applicable when it comes to abusive behaviour of dominant groups, rogue armies or regimes within the quasi states. Sovereignty, indeed, comes with responsibilities.

The following articles reflect major changes underway in international arena. In the past, state sovereignty of a quasi state was seen as a sacred norm by the international society, often overlooking their artificial makeup. But, over recent years that perception has changed; the logic behind this shift is simple: if the status quo ante is not sustainable, it won’t be sustained.

– Belaar –

Breaking Up Is Good to Do
Southern Sudan is just the beginning. The world may soon have 300 independent, sovereign nations ... and that's just fine.

By Parag Khanna

This year will almost certainly see the birth of a new country named Southern Sudan. It might also witness the creation of an independent Palestine, as Palestinian leaders push for unilateral recognition of their national sovereignty within their country's 1967 borders. And within a couple of years, a sovereign Kurdistan might emerge from a still-brittle Iraq. We could be entering a new period of mass state birth: Imagine an independent South Ossetia, Somaliland, and Darfur too. The trend is nothing new, but it's picking up steam again. The most recent sovereign entrant was in 2008, when Kosovo emerged from the breakup of Yugoslavia; nine years earlier, in 1999, it was East Timor gaining independence from Indonesia.

Because of this wave of self-determination culminating in sovereignty, there are today more autonomous political units in the world than at any time since the Middle Ages of a millennium ago. Within a few decades, we could easily have 300 states in the world. Moreover, we are gradually returning to the medieval world of thousands of multilayered communities ranging from the supranational European Union to the magnetic city-states of the Persian Gulf to the indigenous communities of the Inuit of Canada and Greenland.

This instability is the cartographic expression of an underlying geopolitical phenomenon afflicting much of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia: post-colonial entropy. Except for a few, rare cases, many of the colonies that gained their independence a half-century ago have since experienced unmanageable population growth, predatory and corrupt dictatorship, crumbling infrastructure and institutions, and ethnic or sectarian polarization.

Whether or not Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo technically qualify as "failed states," their fates are sealed by their colonial inheritance. Indeed, it's often their borders that are the deepest cause of their conflicts. Many of these national borders are in desperate need of adjustment, and the rest of the world should show more flexibility in allowing them to do so. Europe messed it up the first time, but now the West can support the right regional bodies to adjudicate these new borders -- helping others help themselves in the process.
By this logic, today's hot spots such as Iraq and Afghanistan are not simply "America's Wars." Rather, they are to some extent the unexploded ordinance left over from old European wars, with their fuses lit on slow release. Indeed, the United States had nothing to do with the Sykes-Picot and other agreements that parceled the Levant into French- and British-allied monarchies, or the Congress of Berlin, which drew suspiciously straight lines on Africa's map. Some of these haphazard agreements created oversized or artificial agglomerations like Sudan, which threw together heretofore independent groups of Arabs, Africans, Christians, and Muslims into a country one-fourth the size of the United States but lacking any common national ethos or adequate distribution of resources to sustain commitment to unity. Others did the opposite, like the British officer Henry Mortimer Durand, whose infamous line divided the Pashtun nation between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This growing cartographic stress is not just America's challenge. All the world's influential powers and diplomats should seize a new moral high ground by agreeing to prudently apply in such cases Woodrow Wilson's support for self-determination of peoples. This would be a marked improvement over today's ad hoc system of backing disreputable allies, assembling unworkable coalitions, or simply hoping for tidy dissolutions. Reasserting the principle of self-determination would allow for the sort of true statesmanship lacking on today's global stage.

In Sudan, the United States has certainly placed itself on the right side of this trend. It has been a key architect of the internationally sanctioned referendum that will likely result in Southern Sudan's independence, making clear that the eventual split is not a U.S.-led conspiracy to hack apart the Arab-Muslim world. Such a legitimate process has given cover to China to reorient its policy as well, balancing its staunch support for the regime of Omar Hassan al-Bashir in Khartoum with upgraded relations with the Southern government in Juba, which has in return promised to honor the China National Petroleum Corp.'s contracts. (Sixty percent of Sudan's oil exports currently go to China.)

But there is more to ushering new nations into existence than preventing neighboring antagonists from invading one another (as fundamentally important as that is). All three of the world's current quasi-states -- Southern Sudan, Palestine, and Kurdistan -- will be effectively landlocked and vulnerable unless they are provided with viable infrastructure to connect to external markets. In addition to the existing Sudanese north-south pipelines, Southern Sudan needs a new pipeline across Kenya to the Indian Ocean to export oil through additional routes. Likewise, Kurdistan needs pipelines via Turkey and Syria to Europe and the Mediterranean Sea, and Palestine needs the Rand Corp.'s proposed "Arc" of road and rail corridors to link the West Bank and Gaza into an integrated unit. These linkages to the outside world are insurance policies against dependence on and domination by neighbors, whether Sudan, Iraq and Turkey, or Israel, respectively. While the White House remains obsessed with "security guarantees" for Israel that rest on empty or short-lived gestures of goodwill, it is infrastructure, rather, that is the prerequisite to peaceful coexistence. Nation-building is as much physical as institutional; independence without infrastructure is impossible.

The entropy afflicting the post-colonial world will not stop anytime soon. States like Congo, Nigeria, and Pakistan, which are internally diffuse and often intentionally unevenly developed, will soon be too large to manage themselves. It is less likely that they will gather the competence, capacity, and will to become equitable modern states than that they will continue to inspire resistance to the legacies of centralized misrule.

The coming partitions must be performed with a combination of scalpel and ax, soft and hard power. Above all, the world must recognize that these partitions are inevitable. Our reflex is to fear changes on the map out of concern for violence or having to learn the names of new countries. But in an age when any group can acquire the tools of violent resistance, the only alternative to self-determination is perpetual conflict. After genocidal campaigns such as Saddam Hussein's gassing of the Kurds and Serbia's brutal repression of the Kosovars, it is impossible to imagine those groups again living under one government. Rather than delay, the emphasis should be on diplomatic efficiency: Speedy partitions can lead to more amicable outcomes, such as the "velvet divorce" between the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993. Both are now members of the European Union, within which they respect one another's borders even as such borders have largely become irrelevant.

Finally, we must be weary of status quo conservatism motivated by selfish concerns. Russia and China staunchly opposed Kosovo's independence for the sake of their own quasi-imperial possessions, but did a sovereign government in Pristina really undermine Russia's ironclad rule over Chechnya or China's grip on Tibet?

Each territorial conflict has a particular mix of historical, geographic, and diplomatic conditions that will breed unique solutions. But one thing is certain: The way to create a peaceful and borderless world is, ironically, by allowing ever more nations to define themselves and their borders. Then, and only then, will they seek openness and integration with the rest of the world. Breakups are sometimes the path to better friendships.

F.P
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/13/breaking_up_is_good_to_do

To Partition or Not to Partition?

By Ted Galen Carpenter

The recent referendum [3] in southern Sudan endorsing the secession of that region will produce a newly independent country. And it appears that the central government in Khartoum will peacefully accept [4] the loss of more than a third of its territory—something that it violently opposed over the past several decades.

The outcome in southern Sudan suggests that, contrary to the long-standing bias of current governments in the international system, partition can sometimes be a solution—perhaps the only solution—to irreconcilable differences between ethnic or religious groups within a country. Admittedly, one can point to cases in which the strategy has not worked well, for example Britain’s decision to divide its South Asian colony between the newly independent states of predominantly Hindu India and predominantly Muslim Pakistan. A few cases have even produced disastrous results (the division of Palestine being the premier example). But it is equally possible to cite examples in which the results have been positive, and were certainly better than the alternative. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia’s “velvet divorce” are clear instances of that outcome.

As I suggest here [5], chronically dysfunctional Bosnia-Herzegovina ought to be considered a prime candidate for partition. Despite the utter failure of that artificial entity to forge anything even faintly resembling national cohesion—much less a competent government and functioning economy—in the more than 15 years since the Dayton Accords ended a violent civil war, U.S. and European leaders still [6] insist [7] on keeping Bosnia intact, even if it must remain indefinitely on life support from international agencies. That is an appallingly short-sighted strategy.

Western policy makers grasp at ever more fragile straws to make their case that Bosnia will eventually turn out to be a success story. The favorite recent panacea [8] is that once Bosnia joins the European Union, the petty ethnic quarrels among the country’s Serb, Croat, and Muslim communities will become irrelevant.Not only does that assumption underestimate the depth of the continuing ethnic hatreds, it is wildly optimistic about the probability of the EU admitting Bosnia anytime soon.

There is more and more grumbling within the major EU states about some of the existing smaller and weaker members. That is especially true in Germany, which has had to shoulder primary responsibility for the financial bailouts of some of those members. The EU already has to deal with such members states as Greece, Portugal, and Ireland that have severe economic problems. It already has one member (Cyprus) that has a huge, unresolved territorial issue (with Turkish troops occupying the northern 37 percent of the country) and another member (Spain) with two simmering secessionist issues. EU governments are likely to be very reluctant about acquiring Bosnia as a member when the country has both political and economic defects that are intractable.

Both the United States and the EU should accept the manifest [9] desire [10] of the Serb minority (some one-third of Bosnia’s population, and one that inhabits a reasonably compact territory) to secede and either form an independent country or merge with Serbia. The United States and its NATO allies have tried to dictate policy in Bosnia for far too long. Their meddling has produced a festering, unsustainable situation. They need to change course and approve a political transition based on partition. Their sole goal should be to orchestrate that process to maximize the probability that it will be peaceful.

T.N.I
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/partition-or-not-partition-4948

Avoiding a U.S.-China cold war

2011-01-14T19:57:00.000-08:00

By Henry A. Kissinger
Friday, January 14, 2011;

The upcoming summit between the American and Chinese presidents is to take place while progress is being made in resolving many of the issues before them, and a positive communique is probable. Yet both leaders also face an opinion among elites in their countries emphasizing conflict rather than cooperation.

Most Chinese I encounter outside of government, and some in government, seem convinced that the United States seeks to contain China and to constrict its rise. American strategic thinkers are calling attention to China's increasing global economic reach and the growing capability of its military forces.

Care must be taken lest both sides analyze themselves into self-fulfilling prophecies. The nature of globalization and the reach of modern technology oblige the United States and China to interact around the world. A Cold War between them would bring about an international choosing of sides, spreading disputes into internal politics of every region at a time when issues such as nuclear proliferation, the environment, energy and climate require a comprehensive global solution.

Conflict is not inherent in a nation's rise. The United States in the 20th century is an example of a state achieving eminence without conflict with the then-dominant countries. Nor was the often-cited German-British conflict inevitable. Thoughtless and provocative policies played a role in transforming European diplomacy into a zero-sum game.

Sino-U.S. relations need not take such a turn. On most contemporary issues, the two countries cooperate adequately; what the two countries lack is an overarching concept for their interaction. During the Cold War, a common adversary supplied the bond. Common concepts have not yet emerged from the multiplicity of new tasks facing a globalized world undergoing political, economic and technological upheaval.

That is not a simple matter. For it implies subordinating national aspirations to a vision of a global order.

Neither the United States nor China has experience in such a task. Each assumes its national values to be both unique and of a kind to which other peoples naturally aspire. Reconciling the two versions of exceptionalism is the deepest challenge of the Sino-American relationship.

America's exceptionalism finds it natural to condition its conduct toward other societies on their acceptance of American values. Most Chinese see their country's rise not as a challenge to America but as heralding a return to the normal state of affairs when China was preeminent. In the Chinese view, it is the past 200 years of relative weakness - not China's current resurgence - that represent an abnormality.

America historically has acted as if it could participate in or withdraw from international affairs at will. In the Chinese perception of itself as the Middle Kingdom, the idea of the sovereign equality of states was unknown. Until the end of the 19th century, China treated foreign countries as various categories of vassals. China never encountered a country of comparable magnitude until European armies imposed an end to its seclusion. A foreign ministry was not established until 1861, and then primarily for dealing with colonialist invaders.

America has found most problems it recognized as soluble. China, in its history of millennia, came to believe that few problems have ultimate solutions. America has a problem-solving approach; China is comfortable managing contradictions without assuming they are resolvable.

American diplomacy pursues specific outcomes with single-minded determination. Chinese negotiators are more likely to view the process as combining political, economic and strategic elements and to seek outcomes via an extended process. American negotiators become restless and impatient with deadlocks; Chinese negotiators consider them the inevitable mechanism of negotiation. American negotiators represent a society that has never suffered national catastrophe - except the Civil War, which is not viewed as an international experience. Chinese negotiators cannot forget the century of humiliation when foreign armies exacted tribute from a prostrate China. Chinese leaders are extremely sensitive to the slightest implication of condescension and are apt to translate American insistence as lack of respect.

North Korea provides a good example of differences in perspective. America is focused on the proliferation of nuclear weapons. China, which in the long run has more to fear from nuclear weapons there than we, in addition emphasizes propinquity. It is concerned about the turmoil that might follow if pressures on nonproliferation lead to the disintegration of the North Korean regime. America seeks a concrete solution to a specific problem. China views any such outcome as a midpoint in a series of interrelated challenges, with no finite end, about the future of Northeast Asia. For real progress, diplomacy with Korea needs a broader base.

Americans frequently appeal to China to prove its sense of "international responsibility" by contributing to the solution of a particular problem. The proposition that China must prove its bona fides is grating to a country that regards itself as adjusting to membership in an international system designed in its absence on the basis of programs it did not participate in developing.

While America pursues pragmatic policies, China tends to view these policies as part of a general design. Indeed, it tends to find a rationale for essentially domestically driven initiatives in terms of an overall strategy to hold China down.

The test of world order is the extent to which the contending can reassure each other. In the American-Chinese relationship, the overriding reality is that neither country will ever be able to dominate the other and that conflict between them would exhaust their societies. Can they find a conceptual framework to express this reality? A concept of a Pacific community could become an organizing principle of the 21st century to avoid the formation of blocs. For this, they need a consultative mechanism that permits the elaboration of common long-term objectives and coordinates the positions of the two countries at international conferences.

The aim should be to create a tradition of respect and cooperation so that the successors of leaders meeting now continue to see it in their interest to build an emerging world order as a joint enterprise.

The writer was secretary of state from 1973 to 1977.

W.P
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/13/AR2011011304832.html

Interview: Pakistan's Road to Disintegration

2011-01-12T13:00:00.000-08:00

Interviewee: Stephen P. Cohen, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor
January 6, 2011

In the first few days of this year, Pakistan's coalition government was thrust into crisis after losing a coalition partner, and then a top politician--Punjab Governor Salman Taseer--was assassinated. A leading expert on the country, Stephen P. Cohen, says these incidents are symptoms of the profound problems tugging the country apart. "The fundamentals of the state are either failing or questionable, and this applies to both the idea of Pakistan, the ideology of the state, the purpose of the state, and also to the coherence of the state itself," Cohen says. "I wouldn't predict a comprehensive failure soon, but clearly that's the direction in which Pakistan is moving." On a recent trip, he was struck by the growing sense of insecurity in Pakistan, even within the military, and the growing importance of China.
What's the situation in Pakistan these days, given a key partner's withdrawal from the coalition government, and the assassination of a leading member of the ruling coalition, who opposed the blasphemy law which has support among the country's Muslim population?
These are symptoms of a deeper problem in Pakistan. There is not going to be any good news from Pakistan for some time, if ever, because the fundamentals of the state are either failing or questionable. This applies to both the idea of Pakistan, the ideology of the state, the purpose of the state, and also to the coherence of the state itself. Pakistan has lost a lot of its "stateness," that is the qualities that make a modern government function effectively. So there's failure in Pakistan on all counts. I wouldn't predict a comprehensive failure soon but clearly that's the direction in which Pakistan is moving.
Given Pakistan's possession of nuclear weapons and its strategic location between Afghanistan and India, for the United States this is a looming crisis, isn't it.

All U.S. policies toward Pakistan are bad, and some are perhaps worse than others. We don't know whether leveling with Pakistan is going to improve things or make it worse. Ideally, we would own a time machine in which we could roll back history and reverse a lot of decisions we made in the past. Hopefully, we won't make any more fundamentally wrong decisions in the future, but that may not prevent Pakistan from going further down the road to disintegration. Someone in the State Department was quoted in a WikiLeaks document [as saying] that if it weren't for nuclear weapons, Pakistan would be the Congo. I would compare it to Nigeria without oil. It wouldn't be a serious state. But the nuclear weapons and the country's organized terrorist machinery do make it quite serious.
If it is anybody's problem in the future, it is going to be China's problem. I just spent several weeks in Pakistan. One thing I discovered was the country insecurity in a way I had never seen it, even in military cantonments. The other was that China's influence in Pakistan was much greater and deeper than I had imagined it to be. In a sense that's India's problem, but in the long run, it will be China's problem.
Describe China's influence.
China is Pakistan's major military supplier. Of course, they supplied military technology and probably put Pakistanis in touch with the North Koreans for missile technology. The Chinese have one concern in Pakistan and that is the training of Chinese militants and extremists inside of Pakistan. The Chinese have no problem with the Tiananmen Square-type of crowd control. When the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) was blown up in Islamabad in 2007, it came after some ten Chinese were kidnapped and the Chinese complained publicly. The Pakistanis had ignored our protests about the Mosque for many years. But they moved quickly when the Chinese protested, killing many women and children in the process. That was one of the turning points in President Pervez Musharraf's career, because that turned many militants against him. Before that time, he had either ignored or supported them, but after Lal Masjid, they became his enemy.
How important are the militants or terrorists? Can they control the state?
Militants--whether you call them anti-American, anti-liberal, or anti-secular--seem to have a veto over politics in Pakistan, but they can't govern the state. The parties control the elections but they can prevent others from governing, and they may prevent the military from governing as well.
Some people have been hoping for a military coup, but you don't think that will happen?
We have to do what we can do and prepare for the failure of Pakistan, which could happen in four or five or six years.
I don't think the military wants to be in that position now. I don't think the military chief Ashfaq Kayani has such a game plan. He is as smart and calculating as President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq [military president from 1977 until his assassination in 1988] was. He is quite different from Musharraf--not an Islamist himself, but he has certainly supported them in the past. I know the Pakistan military cannot govern Pakistan. They've tried it three times in the past and each time failed. This time they would have to deal with more active militants. The liberal forces are in retreat, and I don't see the army supporting the liberal forces in Pakistan.
Talk about the anti-American feeling. How did it develop into such a strong national sentiment?
Historically, the Pakistani elite have created a narrative of U.S.-Pakistan relations which always shows the United States letting Pakistan down. A turning point was the Iranian revolution of 1979, [which] showed a lot of Pakistanis that standing up to the Americans, embarrassing the Americans, humiliating the Americans felt good. Whether they were Sunnis or Shiites in Pakistan, it felt good. It all goes back to everyone in Pakistan concerned about American policy toward Israel and the Middle East. They seem to care more about Israel and Palestine than they do about themselves. The irony of Pakistan is that their major foreign policy obsessions are ones that they can't do anything about, including Israel and Palestine. When the U.S. and NATO forces moved into Iraq and Afghanistan, that was seen as a direct threat to Pakistan. They feared that the Islamist states were being knocked off one after another, beginning with Iraq, and going on to Afghanistan, and winding up with Pakistan. Most of that is imagined, but many Pakistanis believe it is true.
We've had a breakup of the coalition government, which happens all the time around the world, but why was so much gloom and doom expressed in Pakistan?
It's the incapacity of the Pakistani state to educate its own people in a modern fashion; it's the failure of the Pakistani economy to grow at all. If this was an American analogy, you would say Pakistan is a house under water. Except for its territory, which is strategically important, there is not much in Pakistan that is of benefit to anyone. They failed to take advantage of globalization. They use terrorism as an aspect of globalization, which is the negative side of globalization. Go down the list of factors, they are almost all negative. There is not one that is positive. They need outsiders for economic help. The conflict with India drains most of their budget. They can't resolve foreign policy differences with India. They have quarrels with us over Afghanistan, although they are probably right that we don't understand the Afghanis either. The question in my mind is whether these are irreversible so that Pakistan can become a normal state.
Militants--whether you call them anti-American, anti-liberal, or anti-secular--seem to have a veto over politics in Pakistan, but they can't govern the state.
What do you think?
Hope is not a policy, but despair is not a policy either. We have to do what we can do and prepare for the failure of Pakistan, which could happen in four or five or six years.
Talk about the terrorists.
There has been an accommodation with the government. Terrorist attacks are down. There seems to be an agreement by the security forces to accommodate the terrorist groups. I don't see the government regaining its position in the frontiers. The Pakistani Taliban is a designated enemy, but the army cannot move against them. The army is worried about its integrity itself.
Discuss Taseer's assassination.
He was like Sherry Rehman, a close associate of Benazir Bhutto. Rehman had introduced a private member's bill to repeal the blasphemy law, and [Taseer] backed her, and that apparently led to his guard killing him. The blasphemy law makes the medieval Catholic Church look liberal. Anyone who stands up and criticizes the law has his life in danger. Rehman is prominently mentioned in press coverage. I don't think she will back down. She is a lady of strong principles, like Benazir.
Is the fear of India genuine?
It is genuine, because it goes back to the identity of Pakistan. They can't figure out how to reconcile their strategic necessity of accommodation with India. Of course, India takes a hard line on a lot of issues, not just Kashmir. India has allowed China to acquire Pakistan as a strategic asset. It is now a trilateral game between the Chinese and Indians with the Pakistanis on the Chinese side.

C.F.R
http://www.cfr.org/publication/23744/pakistans_road_to_disintegration.html

Please, not again

2011-01-11T18:49:00.000-08:00

Without boldness from Barack Obama there is a real risk of war in the Middle East
The United States, Israel and the Arabs

Dec 29th 2010 Leader
NO WAR, no peace, is the usual state of affairs between Israel and its neighbours in the Middle East. But every time an attempt at Arab-Israeli peacemaking fails, as Barack Obama’s did shortly before Christmas, the peace becomes a little more fragile and the danger of war increases. Sadly, there is reason to believe that unless remedial action is taken, 2011 might see the most destructive such war for many years.

One much-discussed way in which war might arise stems from the apparent desire of Iran to acquire nuclear weapons at any cost, and Israel’s apparent desire to stop Iran at any cost. But fear of Iran’s nuclear programme is only one of the fuses that could detonate an explosion at any moment. Another is the frantic arms race that has been under way since the inconclusive war in 2006 between Israel and Hizbullah, Iran’s ally in Lebanon. Both sides have been intensively preparing for what each says will be a “decisive” second round.

Such a war would bear little resemblance to the previous clashes between Israel and its neighbours. For all their many horrors, the Lebanon war of 2006 and the Gaza war of 2009 were limited affairs. On the Israeli side, in particular, civilian casualties were light. Since 2006, however, Iran and Syria have provided Hizbullah with an arsenal of perhaps 50,000 missiles and rockets, many with ranges and payloads well beyond what Hizbullah had last time. This marks an extraordinary change in the balance of power. For the first time a radical non-state actor has the power to kill thousands of civilians in Israel’s cities more or less at the press of a button.

Related itemsAmerica and the Middle East: Great sacrifices, small rewardsDec 29th 2010
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Related topicsHezbollahIranDiplomacyInternational relationsPeace Talks
In that event, says Israel, it will strike back with double force. A war of this sort could easily draw in Syria, and perhaps Iran. For the moment, deterrence keeps the peace. But a peace maintained by deterrence alone is a frail thing. The shipment to Hizbullah of a balance-tipping new weapon, a skirmish on the Lebanese or increasingly volatile Gaza border—any number of miscalculations could ignite a conflagration.

From peace process to war process

All of this should give new urgency to Arab-Israeli peacemaking. To start with, at least, peace will be incomplete: Iran, Hizbullah and sometimes Hamas say that they will never accept a Jewish state in the Middle East. But it is the unending Israeli occupation that gives these rejectionists their oxygen. Give the Palestinians a state on the West Bank and it will become very much harder for the rejectionists to justify going to war.

Easy enough to say. The question is whether peacemaking can succeed. After striving for almost two years to shepherd Israeli and Palestinian leaders into direct talks, only for this effort to collapse over the issue of settlements, Mr Obama is in danger of concluding like many presidents before him that Arab-Israeli diplomacy is a Sisyphean distraction. But giving up would be a tragic mistake, as bad for America and Israel as for the Palestinians. The instant the peace process ends, the war process begins, and wars in this energy-rich corner of the world usually suck in America, one way or another. Israel will suffer too if Mr Obama fails, because the Palestinians have shown time and again that they will not fall silent while their rights are denied. The longer Israel keeps them stateless under military occupation, the lonelier it becomes—and the more it undermines its own identity as a liberal democracy.

Don’t mediate. Legislate

Instead of giving up, Mr Obama needs to change his angle of attack. America has clung too long to the dogma that direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians are the way forward. James Baker, a former secretary of state, once said that America could not want peace more than the local parties did. This is no longer true. The recent history proves that the extremists on each side are too strong for timid local leaders to make the necessary compromises alone. It is time for the world to agree on a settlement and impose it on the feuding parties.

The outlines of such an agreement have been clear since Bill Clinton set out his “parameters” after the failure of the Camp David summit a decade ago. The border between Israel and a new Palestine would follow the pre-1967 line, with adjustments to accommodate some of the bigger border-hugging Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and land-swaps to compensate the Palestinians for those adjustments. But there is also much difficult detail to be filled in: how to make Jerusalem into a shared capital, settle the fate of the refugees and ensure that the West Bank will not become, as Gaza did, an advance base for war against Israel after Israeli forces withdraw.

Mr Clinton unveiled his blueprint at the end of a negotiation that had failed. Mr Obama should set out his own map and make this a new starting point. He should gather international support for it, either through the United Nations or by means of an international conference of the kind the first President Bush held in Madrid in 1991. But instead of leaving the parties to talk on their own after the conference ends, as Mr Bush did after Madrid, America must ride herd, providing reassurance and exerting pressure on both sides as required.

The pressure part of this equation is crucial. In his first round of peacemaking, Mr Obama picked a fight with Israel over settlements and then backed down, thereby making America look weak in a region where too many people already believe that its power is waning (see article). This is a misperception the president needs to correct. For all its economic worries at home and military woes in Iraq and Afghanistan, America is far from weak in the Levant, where both Israel and the nascent Palestine in the West Bank continue to depend on it in countless vital ways.

The Palestinians have flirted lately with the idea of bypassing America and taking their cause directly to the UN. Going to the UN is well and good. But the fact remains that without the sort of tough love that America alone can bestow, Israel will probably never be able to overcome its settler movement and make the deal that could win it acceptance in the Arab world. Mr Obama has shown in battles as different as health reform and the New START nuclear treaty with Russia that he has the quality of persistence. He should persist in Palestine, too.

The Economist
http://www.economist.com/node/17800151?fsrc=scn/tw/te/notagain

Moving Forward in Sudan

2011-01-11T16:41:00.000-08:00

Author: John Campbell, Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow for Africa Policy Studies

The people of south Sudan began voting January 9 on a referendum to separate from the north. Polls will remain open until January 15, with the final results announced February 6 at the earliest. The electoral law's requirement that 60 percent of registered voters participate will likely be easily met. Though there are already reports of violence involving Khartoum's soldiers and southern civilians, and there will probably be irregularities, the margin of votes favoring independence will be so huge there will be little doubt as to the intention of the southern Sudanese. In the week before the referendum, Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, an indicted war criminal, stated publicly that he would abide by the results. But as the Cote d'Ivoire standoff between Laurent Gbagbo and Alassane Ouattara reminds, a credible vote does not always resolve the underlying issues.
South Sudan has been semi-autonomous since 2005's internationally brokered Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) ended a twenty-year civil war between north and south that had acquired a religious and ethnic coloration and killed an estimated two million people, mostly southerners, and displaced an additional four million. South Sudan now has an organized government based in Juba derived from the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM) that led the south during the civil war.
The many unresolved issues between the north and a fully independent south include division of the oil revenue, citizenship, and the boundary between the two states. The CPA anticipated such issues being negotiated in the run-up to the referendum. That did not happen, however, with Khartoum dragging its feet and the south unwilling to jeopardize the January 9 start date for the referendum.
The oil-rich province of Abyei has already proven to be a flashpoint and will likely continue to be. Here, as in other troubled parts of Africa, ethnic, religious, and economic boundaries coincide, and there is space for outsiders to stir the pot. Both northern and southern politicians claim the territory, an area where nomadic pastoralists, the Messiria, and farmers, the Ngok Dinka, collide. The former are predominately Muslim with ties to Khartoum; the latter are Christians and Animists who look to Juba. The International Tribunal at The Hague divided the province, but al-Bashir has not accepted its judgment, and some southern politicians are insisting the entire province should become part of southern Sudan.
Even if he shows good faith over the referendum, al-Bashir will need to watch his back in Khartoum against forces upset with the apparent softening of his stance. Just before the referendum, the Sudanese Comprehensive Conference, an umbrella of opposition parties to al-Bashir's ruling National Congress, publicly accused the president of failing to maintain national unity. International Muslim opinion will also impact Khartoum's response to south Sudan's secession. Thus far, however, the Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Arab League have been largely silent.
Despite the challenges, a credible referendum vote will be a foreign policy success for the Obama administration, which has been heavily committed to supporting the CPA. Looking ahead, the unresolved issues will require the administration to continue its intense engagement to manage the potential flashpoints that could reverse the significant progress that has been made. Already there are reports that over a hundred thousand southerners living in the north are trekking south, some out of fear of the unknown and others with enthusiasm for their new homeland. But the Juba government is ill-equipped to meet their needs for food, water, and shelter. It is likely that the international community led by the United States will be required to respond to forestall a humanitarian disaster.
C.F.R
http://www.cfr.org/publication/23765/moving_forward_in_sudan.html

Five myths about why the South seceded

2011-01-11T16:06:00.000-08:00

By James W. Loewen
Sunday, January 9, 2011; 12:00 AM

One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War began, we're still fighting it -- or at least fighting over its history. I've polled thousands of high school history teachers and spoken about the war to audiences across the country, and there is little agreement even on why the South seceded. Was it over slavery? States' rights? Tariffs and taxes?

As the nation begins to commemorate the anniversaries of the war's various battles -- from Fort Sumter to Appomattox -- let's first dispense with some of the more prevalent myths about why it all began.

1. The South seceded over states' rights.

Confederate states did claim the right to secede, but no state claimed to be seceding for that right. In fact, Confederates opposed states' rights -- that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.

On Dec. 24, 1860, delegates at South Carolina's secession convention adopted a "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union." It noted "an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery" and protested that Northern states had failed to "fulfill their constitutional obligations" by interfering with the return of fugitive slaves to bondage. Slavery, not states' rights, birthed the Civil War.

South Carolina was further upset that New York no longer allowed "slavery transit." In the past, if Charleston gentry wanted to spend August in the Hamptons, they could bring their cook along. No longer -- and South Carolina's delegates were outraged. In addition, they objected that New England states let black men vote and tolerated abolitionist societies. According to South Carolina, states should not have the right to let their citizens assemble and speak freely when what they said threatened slavery.

Other seceding states echoed South Carolina. "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery -- the greatest material interest of the world," proclaimed Mississippi in its own secession declaration, passed Jan. 9, 1861. "Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. . . . A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization."

The South's opposition to states' rights is not surprising. Until the Civil War, Southern presidents and lawmakers had dominated the federal government. The people in power in Washington always oppose states' rights. Doing so preserves their own.

2. Secession was about tariffs and taxes.

During the nadir of post-civil-war race relations - the terrible years after 1890 when town after town across the North became all-white "sundown towns" and state after state across the South prevented African Americans from voting - "anything but slavery" explanations of the Civil War gained traction. To this day Confederate sympathizers successfully float this false claim, along with their preferred name for the conflict: the War Between the States. At the infamous Secession Ball in South Carolina, hosted in December by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, "the main reasons for secession were portrayed as high tariffs and Northern states using Southern tax money to build their own infrastructure," The Washington Post reported.

These explanations are flatly wrong. High tariffs had prompted the Nullification Crisis in 1831-33, when, after South Carolina demanded the right to nullify federal laws or secede in protest, President Andrew Jackson threatened force. No state joined the movement, and South Carolina backed down. Tariffs were not an issue in 1860, and Southern states said nothing about them. Why would they? Southerners had written the tariff of 1857, under which the nation was functioning. Its rates were lower than at any point since 1816.

3. Most white Southerners didn't own slaves, so they wouldn't secede for slavery.

Indeed, most white Southern families had no slaves. Less than half of white Mississippi households owned one or more slaves, for example, and that proportion was smaller still in whiter states such as Virginia and Tennessee. It is also true that, in areas with few slaves, most white Southerners did not support secession. West Virginia seceded from Virginia to stay with the Union, and Confederate troops had to occupy parts of eastern Tennessee and northern Alabama to hold them in line.

However, two ideological factors caused most Southern whites, including those who were not slave-owners, to defend slavery. First, Americans are wondrous optimists, looking to the upper class and expecting to join it someday. In 1860, many subsistence farmers aspired to become large slave-owners. So poor white Southerners supported slavery then, just as many low-income people support the extension of George W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy now.

Second and more important, belief in white supremacy provided a rationale for slavery. As the French political theorist Montesquieu observed wryly in 1748: "It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures [enslaved Africans] to be men; because allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians." Given this belief, most white Southerners -- and many Northerners, too -- could not envision life in black-majority states such as South Carolina and Mississippi unless blacks were in chains. Georgia Supreme Court Justice Henry Benning, trying to persuade the Virginia Legislature to leave the Union, predicted race war if slavery was not protected. "The consequence will be that our men will be all exterminated or expelled to wander as vagabonds over a hostile earth, and as for our women, their fate will be too horrible to contemplate even in fancy." Thus, secession would maintain not only slavery but the prevailing ideology of white supremacy as well.

4. Abraham Lincoln went to war to end slavery.

Since the Civil War did end slavery, many Americans think abolition was the Union's goal. But the North initially went to war to hold the nation together. Abolition came later.

On Aug. 22, 1862, President Lincoln wrote a letter to the New York Tribune that included the following passage: "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union."

However, Lincoln's own anti-slavery sentiment was widely known at the time. In the same letter, he went on: "I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free." A month later, Lincoln combined official duty and private wish in his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

White Northerners' fear of freed slaves moving north then caused Republicans to lose the Midwest in the congressional elections of November 1862.

Gradually, as Union soldiers found help from black civilians in the South and black recruits impressed white units with their bravery, many soldiers -- and those they wrote home to -- became abolitionists. By 1864, when Maryland voted to end slavery, soldiers' and sailors' votes made the difference.

5. The South couldn't have made it long as a slave society.

Slavery was hardly on its last legs in 1860. That year, the South produced almost 75 percent of all U.S. exports. Slaves were worth more than all the manufacturing companies and railroads in the nation. No elite class in history has ever given up such an immense interest voluntarily. Moreover, Confederates eyed territorial expansion into Mexico and Cuba. Short of war, who would have stopped them - or forced them to abandon slavery?

To claim that slavery would have ended of its own accord by the mid-20th century is impossible to disprove but difficult to accept. In 1860, slavery was growing more entrenched in the South. Unpaid labor makes for big profits, and the Southern elite was growing ever richer. Freeing slaves was becoming more and more difficult for their owners, as was the position of free blacks in the United States, North as well as South. For the foreseeable future, slavery looked secure. Perhaps a civil war was required to end it.

As we commemorate the sesquicentennial of that war, let us take pride this time - as we did not during the centennial - that secession on slavery's behalf failed.

jloewen@uvm.edu

Sociologist James W. Loewen is the author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me" and co-editor, with Edward Sebesta, of "The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader."

Test yourself to find out how much you know about the Civil War.

W.P
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/07/AR2011010703178.html?wpisrc=nl_pmheadline

The Myth of Defensible Borders

2011-01-11T13:52:00.000-08:00

Omar M. Dajani and Ezzedine C. Fishere

OMAR M. DAJANI is Professor of Law at Pacific McGeorge School of Law and was a legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team during peace talks with Israel. EZZEDINE C. FISHERE is Professor of Politics at the American University in Cairo and a former adviser to the United Nations and the Egyptian foreign minister.
In her December 10 Middle East policy speech, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reiterated the United States' commitment to a negotiated peace between Israelis and Palestinians, calling for an agreement that would enable Palestinian leaders "to show their people that the occupation will be over" while allowing Israeli leaders to "demonstrate to their people that the compromises needed to make peace will not leave Israel vulnerable."

Although Clinton suggested that these aims are compatible, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed a different view. Demanding the establishment of what Israeli officials call "defensible borders," Netanyahu's government seeks to annex or exercise security control over large blocs of West Bank territory -- along the Jordan River in the east and along Israel's border in the west, from the north-central settlement of Ariel to the Gush Etzion settlements south of Bethlehem.

In addition, it seeks to operate early-warning stations on high ground near the Palestinian cities of Nablus, Ramallah, and Hebron and maintain a military presence in the Jordan Valley for decades to come. This package of arrangements would create, in the words of Israeli negotiators, a "protection envelope" surrounding the new Palestinian state.

Such arrangements, however, will do little to respond to the real security challenges faced by Israelis, the Palestinians, and others in the region. As WikiLeaks recently revealed, other governments in the region are no less concerned than Israel about nuclear proliferation, the destabilizing role of nonstate actors, and the threat of cross-border missile attacks.

A U.S. peace plan built on the notion of defensible borders will neither address the threats perceived by Israel's neighbors nor win the support of their domestic constituencies, who demand faithful implementation of the Arab Peace Initiative. A different approach is needed, one that situates Israeli-Palestinian security arrangements within a regional security framework -- involving the Arab states, Turkey, and eventually Iran -- that can facilitate durable responses to the threats faced by the peoples of the Middle East.

Israeli security orthodoxy has long been built on two related premises: first, that Arab and Muslim hostility toward Israel is both inexorable and irrational -- so neither withdrawal nor peace is likely to offer Israelis major security dividends -- and second, that foreign powers and international institutions cannot be trusted to protect Israel.

To be sure, Israel's leaders have at times questioned the continuing relevance of these premises. Indeed, when seeking the Knesset's support for the Oslo agreement in 1993, the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin declared, "No longer are we necessarily 'a people that dwells alone,' and no longer is it true that 'the whole world is against us.'"

Over the last decade, however, widespread disillusionment with the Oslo process, and the sense that their unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip served to embolden, rather than placate, enemies such as Hezbollah and Hamas, have led many Israelis to conclude that genuine peace is an elusive dream. Moreover, they cite the perceived failure of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon and the European Union Border Assistance Mission in Gaza to prevent rocket attacks on Israel as evidence that when the going gets tough, Israelis can rely only on themselves for security. Presented with this bleak security picture, many Israelis see the retention of West Bank territory -- i.e., the concept of defensible borders -- as not only politically desirable but also a strategic necessity.

Israelis have learned the wrong lessons from the wars of the last decade. Although defensible borders would preserve Israel's latitude to act independently in the short run, it would undermine, rather than promote, its long-term security. Israel's refusal to relinquish territory occupied in 1967 would give its enemies increased motivation to attack -- and bolster the perceived legitimacy of violence among Arabs disillusioned with the international community's failure to make good on the promise to deliver land for peace. And it would only marginally limit the capacity of Israel's enemies to inflict damage: Israel's efforts to shift its population away from its crowded coastline, along with steady advances in the range of missiles and rockets possessed by militant groups and nearby states, will leave Israelis vulnerable regardless of where the state's borders are drawn. And as the international community presses further toward accountability for war crimes, Israel will find it increasingly costly, legally and politically, to use overwhelming military force to deter attacks.

A policy of defensible borders would also perpetuate the current sources of Palestinian insecurity, further delegitimizing an agreement in the public's eyes. Israel would retain the discretion to impose arbitrary and crippling constraints on the movement of people and goods, and Palestinians would remain vulnerable to harassment by Israeli extremists and attacks by the Israel Defense Forces, whether unprovoked or in retaliation for the acts of Palestinian militants. For these reasons, Palestinians are likely to regard defensible borders as little more than occupation by another name.

If the Obama administration is genuinely committed to achieving a Middle East peace agreement that provides effective and durable responses to the risks and threats confronting both Israelis and Palestinians, it should pursue peace within a regional security framework that is built upon four pillars: the establishment of a regional security apparatus; the deployment of a multinational peace-implementation mission in Palestine; the integration of Hamas into Palestine's national political and security institutions; and Israel's full withdrawal behind the 1967 line, as revised pursuant to equitable, mutually agreed-upon land exchanges.

The first pillar -- a new regional security apparatus coordinated initially by the United States -- could integrate existing early-warning and missile-defense infrastructure in Israel and the Gulf and link it with future systems in eastern Turkey and Jordan, permitting more effective detection, tracking, and disabling of long-range missiles from the east. In addition, such an apparatus could provide a vehicle for intelligence sharing among the governments in the region. It could also help deter Iranian nuclear ambitions and provide a forum for arms control negotiations, allowing contentious nuclear proliferation issues to be addressed in tandem with conventional arms reductions.

Israel's participation in such a regime would enable it to strengthen its cooperation with Egypt and Jordan, rebuild its relationship with Turkey, and develop formal security relations with the Gulf states, rather than the tenuous and unofficial contacts it currently maintains. Embedding Israeli-Palestinian security relations within a regional framework could also help resolve issues that have divided the parties in the past. Israel could achieve far greater strategic depth by partnering with Jordan, Turkey, and the Gulf states in the realms of air security, early warning, and missile defense than it ever could by installing radar stations and a standing force in the West Bank.

Second, a multinational peace-implementation mission could be deployed to continue the process of training Palestinian security forces, supervise the withdrawal of Israeli forces, mobilize rapid-reaction forces in areas of strategic importance, and monitor and verify compliance with security provisions of a peace agreement. An international mission would complement the regional security apparatus by bolstering the Palestinians' growing capacity to prevent smuggling, infiltration, and short-range rocket fire.

Several features would differentiate such a mission from the failed efforts of the past. It would be charged with reinforcing and facilitating the implementation of a peace agreement, rather than stabilizing the situation in the absence of one; it would have the authority and capacity to use force to implement its mandate, which would expire only with the consent of both Israel and Palestine; and it would operate under U.S. leadership while also drawing on the assistance of other nations. The unblemished record of the Multinational Force and Observers in the Sinai makes clear that international missions can be successful even in the Middle East if they have the proper mandate, the right force composition, and the support of both sides.

Third, integrating Hamas into Palestine's political and security institutions would bolster the durability of a peace agreement, reduce the risk of conflict, and substantially strengthen Israel's security. Israeli analysts have acknowledged that it is far easier to deter governments than militant groups -- a lesson that Israel recently learned in both Gaza and Lebanon -- while the continuing isolation of Hamas would give it every incentive to undermine political progress, making reaching a peace agreement difficult and implementing one impossible.

Hamas officials have dismissed the Quartet's call to recognize Israel. But Hamas has demonstrated that it will not be forced off the scene by either Israel or the Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank. And in a series of recent statements, the movement's Gaza leadership has made clear that it would accept an agreement embraced by the Palestinian public. If Hamas leaders are convinced that a peace agreement establishing a Palestinian state on the territory occupied by Israel since 1967 is imminent, they are more likely to seek a role in implementing it than to risk estranging public opinion by standing in its way.

Fourth, Israel's full withdrawal of its armed forces behind the 1967 line -- with minor and mutually agreed upon territorial exchanges -- would establish the political legitimacy of a peace deal across the Arab world, ensuring that the agreement can actually be implemented.

Securing the agreement of all relevant stakeholders to a framework of this kind will obviously present many challenges. However, the fragility of the current situation and the proven inadequacy of piecemeal approaches suggest that a regional approach is vital. The foundation for such a regime is already in place. The United States is pursuing a missile shield in eastern Turkey under the auspices of NATO and has invested heavily in early-warning and missile-defense systems in the Gulf states, and its allies in the area are seeking both to upgrade their own systems with U.S. technology and establish stronger cooperation. The United States can also draw on the important lessons learned by peacekeeping missions over the last decade by immediately convening a planning forum to ensure that an international mission can be operational the day after a peace agreement is signed.

Discarding the dead-end concept of defensible borders and pursuing a regional security strategy would give the next phase of the Obama administration's Israeli-Palestinian peace effort much-needed focus and credibility. And it would give the United States a leadership role in erecting a security framework that is good not only for Israel but also for the Palestinians and other U.S. allies in the Middle East.

F.A
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/node/67171

Behind Sudan's Secession

2011-01-11T12:09:00.000-08:00

By Ann Mosely Lesch
Spring 1987

Although the Sudanese people threw off the autocratic rule of Jaafar al-Nimeiri two years ago, they are still struggling to undo the economic and political damage that he wrought and to reorient their foreign policy in a way that will enhance their flexibility and credibility in the international arena.

In the quest for badly needed aid and support for ending the debilitating civil war in the south, the current prime minister, Sadiq al-Mahdi, has articulated a foreign policy of non-alignment, in contrast to the close relationship Nimeiri had with the United States. In Mahdi’s view, Sudan should neither become entangled in the East-West rivalry nor take sides in regional conflicts. His desire for amicable relations with all of Sudan’s neighbors and the significant external powers makes sense, given the location and social complexion of the country. But the government is already discovering that the policy is not easy to implement. The major internal priorities of the new democratic government are to end the war, resolve the country’s staggering economic problems, and chart a constitutional course that will balance the varied religious and political interests in order to stabilize parliamentary rule. Diplomatic priorities are closely linked to those domestic concerns.

Sudan is the largest country in Africa, covering a million square miles. Its pivotal location astride the river Nile links the Arab world and sub-Saharan Africa and borders the vital international shipping lane that passes through the Red Sea. The country is vulnerable, unable to police its borders with eight states, and open to pressure and influence from all sides. Sudan is at present impoverished, heavily indebted to foreign governments and international funds, and unable to realize the potential offered by its agricultural and mineral resources. Its economic problems derive in part from the harsh climate and difficult soil and in part from ill-conceived and poorly executed government policies that have burdened rather than improved the lot of the people.

The Sudanese population is heterogeneous, a combustible mix of ethnic groups and religions. The majority of the 22-million population are Arabic-speaking Muslims, but at least a third belong to non-Arab ethnic groups with diverse languages and Christian or traditional African beliefs. The fact that the non-Arab, non-Muslim third lives largely in the southern part of the country creates a persistent cleavage with the politically and culturally dominant north. During the bitter 1955-72 civil war, southern rebels sought independence or at least autonomy. The new rebellion that began in 1983 under the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) is not secessionist but demands that a fair share of power in the central government be allocated to all Sudanese, regardless of ethnic identity.

II

Sudan’s internal problems and their external complications are serious concerns to the United States. Its geostrategic location means that changes in Sudanese political orientations have repercussions on the entire African continent and the Red Sea littoral. American strategy must take into account the implications of shifting Sudanese relations with Egypt and Libya, the contending powers to the north, and with Ethiopia, the key African state to the southeast. In this volatile region, the United States is seeking to preserve its strategic interests and to ensure that Sudan’s nonalignment is not transformed into realignment against Washington.

U.S. relations with Sudan today are especially complicated because Washington had strongly supported Nimeiri through much of his 16-year autocracy, in the belief that he was a vital regional ally. After resuming diplomatic relations with the United States in 1971 (broken after the 1967 Middle East war), Nimeiri provided support for Egypt and later a counterweight to Ethiopia. At a time when most Arab and African states were keeping a discreet distance from the United States, Nimeiri was eager to advance American interests in the Arab world and the Horn of Africa. In return, he received substantial aid, which he hoped would transform Sudan into the regional breadbasket and a major actor on the African continent.

Khartoum became closely aligned with Egypt, its powerful neighbor along the Nile and historically the Afro-Arab country with the greatest influence over Sudan. Nimeiri and Anwar al-Sadat signed an integration pact in 1974 and a military defense alliance in 1976. Nimeiri was virtually the only Arab ruler to support Sadat’s peace initiative with Israel and to retain diplomatic relations with Cairo after March 1979. Ties were further consolidated by a comprehensive integration charter in 1982, signed by Sadat’s successor Hosni Mubarak. Khartoum also provided Egypt with a rear base for its air force, the guarantee of a friendly regime on the vital Nile and Red Sea, and a balance against the increasingly hostile Libyan government.

U.S. officials perceived an enhanced importance in Sudan after the overthrow of the longtime American ally, Emperor Haile Selassie, in Ethiopia in 1974 and the installation of a pro-Soviet Marxist regime there. Sudan provided sanctuary for more than a half-million refugees from Eritrea, Tigre and Oromo, allowed their liberation movements to maintain offices in Khartoum, and closed its eyes to arms that entered Sudanese harbors on the Red Sea and were transported across the border by the secessionist forces. Sudanese involvement was occasioned in part by religious and ethnic ties with some of the Eritreans, but also by a desire to support conservative Muslim regimes like Saudi Arabia that funded some Eritrean groups in order to weaken the radical forces in Addis Ababa.

Yet Nimeiri paid a price: the Sudan-Egypt axis harmed his image in the Arab world, exacerbated his tensions with Muammar al-Qaddafi’s Libya and damaged his standing internally. Ethiopian and Libyan involvement in attempted coups in Sudan further reinforced Nimeiri’s dependence on Washington—and on Egypt, which helped foil coup attempts against him in the 1970s. A siege mentality grew in Khartoum, as Nimeiri’s fears of encirclement and subversion by his neighbors escalated. The Libyan invasion of Chad in 1980-81 threatened to expose Sudan to attack along its western border. Two years later, Qaddafi joined with Ethiopian leader Haile Mengistu in aiding the rebellion in southern Sudan. The alliance of Libya, Ethiopia and South Yemen, formed to counterbalance Egypt and Sudan, completed Nimeiri’s sense of encirclement and superimposed the Soviet-American rivalry on the regional conflicts.

Meanwhile, Nimeiri’s problems at home were growing. He clamped down successively on the Sudanese Communist Party, Islamic groups and secular politicians, and provoked many southerners by canceling the region’s special status in June 1983. He angered a wide range of Sudanese by decreeing his version of Islamic law in September 1983. Businessmen were also alienated by the regime’s corrupt practices, and military officers resented Nimeiri’s frequent, politically motivated purges of the officer corps. By April 1985, Nimeiri had offended nearly all the political and military forces in Sudan.

Despite massive American aid programs, the Sudanese economy was in a shambles. The United States was providing more aid to Sudan than to any other African country except Egypt. In 1983 and 1984 nonmilitary aid totaled $375 million. The government piled up huge debts to international, Western and Arab creditors. By the 1980s the debt burden was growing by almost $1 billion yearly, inflation was running at more than 25 percent annually, and foreign currency receipts from exports covered only half of the import bill.

Moreover, Sudan was hit by severe drought that further damaged the economy and dislocated millions of persons in the east and west of the country. In late 1984, when the government finally admitted the seriousness of the drought, donors began to supply substantial food aid, with the United States providing nearly 80 percent. But the Sudanese public increasingly viewed U.S. aid as principally aimed at keeping Nimeiri in power to guarantee American interests.

Nimeiri’s downfall came during his April 1985 visit to Washington. By then residents of Khartoum had taken to the streets to protest his economic policies and to denounce his harsh rule. A general strike paralyzed the capital, and virtually all the political forces and unions joined together to formulate a Charter of National Salvation calling for the removal of Nimeiri and the restoration of democratic rule. Nimeiri delayed returning, inadvertently giving the political forces time to convince the armed forces to throw their weight behind the popular movement. The high command closed the air space, leaving Nimeiri stranded at the Cairo airport on his way home. The officers then formed a Transitional Military Council (TMC) to serve as head of state for one year and to rule in conjunction with a civilian Council of Ministers.

III

The transitional government was unique in the annals of the Third World: it involved a genuine sharing of power between the military and civilians, and its term ended after one year, exactly as the officers had pledged. The transitional government’s most notable achievement was to reestablish parliamentary processes and preside over free multiparty elections in April 1986.

In these elections, the two major political parties, Umma and Democratic Unionist (DUP), gained two-thirds of the seats in the constituent assembly. Although the DUP had been the largest party in the 1950s and 1960s, it came in a distant second in 1986, with 24 percent of the votes, to Umma’s 39 percent. Umma’s base is the Ansar religio-political movement that is heir to the militant nationalist and Islamic Mahdiyya movement of the late nineteenth century. The DUP, based on the Khatmiyya Sufi order, is currently more conservative in its religious and economic orientations than Umma, and is closely aligned with Egypt. The other parties are ideologically or ethnically oriented. The National Islamic Front (NIF), which espouses a revivalist Islam and had supported Nimeiri’s Islamicist policies, gained 20 percent of the parliamentary seats. The Communist Party and other small ethnic parties, including five in the south, together gained only 15 percent of the seats.

The war prevented candidates from standing for election in the majority of the southern districts. Furthermore, due to peculiarities in the electoral law and splits in the Umma and DUP, most observers believe that the NIF won twice as many seats as its real popular strength warranted. As a result, the assembly overrepresents Islamic forces and underrepresents the south.

Sadiq Mahdi, great-grandson of the Mahdi who ousted the Turkish-Egyptian forces from Khartoum in 1885, was elected prime minister by the constituent assembly on May 6, 1986. Mahdi, educated at Oxford University, had served as prime minister in 1966 when he was only 31 years old. When Nimeiri seized power in 1969 he turned against the Ansar and forced Mahdi into exile. Mahdi was detained in Cairo, and later used England and Libya as bases from which he helped to organize political opposition and tried to overthrow Nimeiri. He criticized the alignment with Egypt and the United States as inviting attack from pro-Soviet neighbors and restricting Sudan’s diplomatic freedom. Although Mahdi returned to Khartoum in 1978, his reconciliation with Nimeiri was short-lived. He continued to oppose one-man rule and denounced the religious laws. This was such a serious challenge that Nimeiri jailed him for 15 months.

Following the April 1985 uprising, Mahdi wanted the Umma Party to occupy the moderate center as an umbrella that would cover a wide range of ideologies and ethnic groups. But when it failed to win at least half the seats in the assembly in the 1986 elections, Umma had to share power. Mahdi conceded to the conservative DUP not only the plum foreign affairs and interior portfolios but also the presidency of the five-member Council of State, the body that ratifies government decisions. Residual cabinet posts went to the southern parties. Umma’s authority was also circumscribed by the NIF, which formed a tough, articulate and well-financed opposition bloc that presses for a full-fledged Islamic constitution and opposes concessions to the SPLA.

The composition of the parliament and government thus reflects the reemergence of traditional political forces, the strength of the Islamic movement, and the marginality of and divisions in the southern groups in Khartoum. This fragmentation and polarization is not auspicious for tackling the twin problems of the war in the south and the economic collapse.

IV

The fighting in the south has proved the most politically intractable problem facing the government. The Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), of which the SPLA is the military arm, was formed by Colonel John Garang de Mabior, who holds a doctorate in agricultural economics from Iowa State University. Spokesmen emphasize that the SPLM wants to eliminate religious and racial discrimination by reinstituting a secular political system. The SPLM maintains that the rebellion was launched not merely against Nimeiri but against the system as a whole, which they perceive as heavily dominated by northern Muslim and Arab political forces.

The transitional government failed to understand this and assumed, rather naïvely, that the SPLM would stop fighting as soon as Nimeiri was removed. Moreover, the TMC did not fulfill the two principal conditions laid down by Garang: first, that the government reinstate the secular penal code and constitution and, second, that it convene a constitutional conference that would restructure the national institutions and not just concern itself with the south.

Nearly a year after Nimeiri’s ouster, in March 1986, professional and political groups—not the government—organized a week-long conclave in Ethiopia. The Koka Dam declaration that emerged from this gathering stated explicitly that the Islamic laws should be repealed and the secular constitution of 1956 reinstated. Because the Umma Party (though not the DUP and NIF) signed the declaration, it appeared to lay the groundwork for post-election conciliation efforts. In the meantime, however, the situation on the ground in the south deteriorated markedly for the government forces. The SPLA controlled much of the countryside, pinned down the army in isolated garrisons and prevented food from being supplied to government-held towns. The SPLA even pressed north toward the Blue Nile, where vital hydroelectric and agricultural projects are located.

As soon as he took office, Mahdi articulated a three-pronged approach to end the war: he would deal with the fundamental issues underlying the rebellion by convening a constitutional conference, while simultaneously strengthening the armed forces and seeking an agreement with Ethiopia to persuade the SPLM to negotiate. In essence, he would offer the carrot of negotiations and the stick of military and diplomatic pressure in order to convince the SPLM to talk.

It remains questionable whether this approach will succeed. During the summer of 1986, the SPLA continued to gain ground militarily, taking advantage of the rainy season, and paralyzed air transport by shooting down a civilian airliner. By midwinter the armed forces had regained the initiative, due to easier transportation during the dry season and to a reorganized high command and reinforced armed guards that accompanied food convoys through the war zone. Nevertheless, the war cannot be won by either side; the army faces severe difficulties combating guerrilla forces in the swamps and forests of the south, and the SPLA has trouble attacking and administering towns. The war is also a heavy drain on the national treasury: the 1986-87 budget allocated 30 percent of current expenditure for defense and security.

At the political level, a breakthrough appeared possible when Mengistu arranged a meeting between Mahdi and Garang in Addis Ababa on July 31, 1986. But the meeting ran aground on the key issue of Islamic law. Garang insisted that the government adhere to the Koka Dam declaration and cancel the Islamic decrees of 1983. Although Mahdi said that he would cancel the decrees, he maintained that new Islamic laws would be legislated that would take the rights of non-Muslims into account. Garang stated that any religiously based system was unacceptable since it would perpetuate religious discrimination and inequality. A profound philosophical gap was evident.

The gap widened when the SPLA shot down a civilian airliner in August. Mahdi responded bitterly, calling the SPLA a terrorist organization and a puppet of Ethiopia. He accused Mengistu of seeking to set up a communist regime in Sudan and vetoing peace efforts. The prime minister asserted that he would only resume contact with Garang if he renounced violence and proved that he was independent of Addis Ababa. Mahdi’s stance received widespread support in the north, and groups sympathetic to SPLM goals were placed on the defensive. The government’s saber-rattling peaked in early December when Mahdi stated that he was now actively supporting Eritrean rebel groups and the foreign minister threatened to retaliate after Ethiopian planes raided Sudanese villages in pursuit of Eritrean forces.

Ethiopian assistance to the SPLA is substantial: logistical support, sophisticated arms (including SA-7 missiles), and military training as well as a powerful radio station on its soil and a political headquarters in the capital. Mengistu originally backed the SPLA for three main reasons: in retaliation for Sudanese support for Eritrean rebels, as a means to destabilize Nimeiri’s regime, and as part of the radical alignment’s opposition to the Egypt-Sudan-U.S. axis.

Today the motives are less clear. In part, Ethiopia has built up an investment in the SPLA that it does not want to relinquish before obtaining major political gains. In addition, Addis Ababa distrusts Khartoum because, it maintains, past governments have failed to implement bilateral accords. Moreover, as Mahdi argues, Mengistu probably distrusts the freewheeling political life in Khartoum and cannot tolerate a democratic neighbor. Finally, the issue of Eritrea complicates relations. Some Sudanese believe that Mengistu will not allow a political settlement in the south without a simultaneous accord on Eritrea, although Sudan does not have as much leverage over the Eritrean secessionists as Ethiopia has over the SPLM.

The SPLM has clearly become more dependent on Ethiopia since the fall of Nimeiri. Before, it also obtained financial support and arms from Libya and had sanctuaries in neighboring Kenya and Uganda. Nevertheless, it is an exaggeration to claim that Ethiopia controls the SPLM. Its support has enabled the SPLA to mount more sophisticated military operations, but the causes of the war are internal to Sudan. Even if Ethiopian support were withdrawn, widespread guerrilla warfare would continue in the south.

Khartoum and Addis Ababa have backed off from direct confrontation at present, although some fear that Sudan might be tempted to raid SPLA sanctuaries inside Ethiopia. This could invite retaliatory raids that would be costly for Sudan, since its dams and agricultural projects are within striking distance of the Ethiopian air force. There are hints that Mahdi is willing to reopen contacts with Garang, but obstacles to a negotiated settlement remain. Mahdi fuels division by not only using heated rhetoric but also arming Arab and southern tribes against the SPLA. Moreover, his appeal to Islamic states for arms and funds to prosecute the war adds a religious and racial dimension to the strife.

Most important, Mahdi has failed to act internally to tackle the causes of the rebellion. He has delayed confronting the issue of the legal basis of rule. His proposed amendment to the constitution, which would place Islam, Christianity and traditional beliefs on a par, satisfies no one. The NIF opposes the elevation of the status of non-Muslims, and secular and southern politicians object to making religion the basis of the legal code. They threaten to walk out of the assembly and to refuse to apply Mahdi’s amendment if it is passed. Although public revulsion against the Islamic decrees is widespread, Mahdi, like the transition government before him, has feared that outright cancellation would be criticized by influential conservative forces as undermining Islam. His vacillation on this issue has reduced his credibility and can only increase suspicions on the part of the SPLM leadership.

In sum, Mahdi’s three-pronged approach remains far from succeeding. He has neither resolved the fundamental issues underlying the rebellion nor found the basis for an accord with Ethiopia to reduce the strife. His military gains lend enhanced credibility to the government, but are only useful if they are utilized strategically to place the government in the best position for negotiations. The constitutional conference is unlikely to be convened before the summer, and the participation of the SPLM remains problematic. Because prolongation of the war damages the economy, weakens democratic processes and complicates relations with neighboring countries, failure to end it could undermine all of the government’s plans.

V

The bleak economic situation inherited by the transitional government forced it to seek emergency aid to contain the famine, and oil to keep the infrastructure functioning. The United States and Western Europe provided massive food aid during summer 1985, and Arab states shipped tons of free oil to Port Sudan. Although the major Arab funds and bilateral donors resumed some of their loans and rescheduled part of the debt in order to give the fledgling government a fair chance to correct the mistakes of the past, negotiations with the International Monetary Fund proved complex. During autumn 1985 Khartoum tried to meet some of its terms by reforming the currency, limiting wage increases in the public sector, and paying back a small portion of the service charge. But it could not agree to all the IMF terms, and in February 1986 the IMF declared Sudan in default.

Over the past two years, key areas of the economy have deteriorated. Inflation soared to nearly 40 percent annually, remittances from workers abroad declined sharply, and exports remained low. Earnings on cotton in 1985-86 dropped to $125 million, less than half the usual sum, due to crop damage from disease and low world prices. Shortages caused the government to ban meat and livestock exports and even to import some meat and sugar. Only food crops registered a surplus. In autumn 1986 a bumper crop of sorghum was harvested, enabling the government to stockpile a million tons in case the rains fail this summer and to arrange to export more than a million tons to Saudi Arabia, Iran and Libya in barter deals. Sesame and groundnut production also increased.

The country remains totally dependent on oil imports of nearly 100,000 tons a month. Libya has pledged 50,000 tons monthly, and Sudan seeks similar pledges from the Arab Gulf states and Iran. Nevertheless, the fundamental budgetary situation remains untenable. With revenues only half its expenditures, the government must either resort to inflationary borrowing from the central bank or rely on massive infusions of foreign aid.

Considerable social tension has built up as a result of these economic difficulties. Food riots in the west in September 1986 were followed by violent demonstrations in Khartoum in November. At first the government blamed the troubles on Nimeiri’s supporters and then on the NIF, which, it argued, were trying to destabilize and undermine the new government.

The Mahdi government has had difficulty formulating a coherent economic policy, but it has taken a bold approach to creditors and particularly the IMF. In his speech to the U.N. General Assembly in October 1986, Mahdi declared that Sudan would follow the lead of Peru and link repayment of external debt to its export earnings. Moreover, it would keep in mind its social obligations at home in calculating the rate of repayment. The finance minister subsequently clarified that the government was considering paying a maximum of ten percent of its annual export earnings toward debt repayments. He noted that the government was negotiating with some creditors to cancel certain debts and transfer others to local currency.

Mahdi even argued that some loans could never be repaid, since these were illegal debts contracted by Nimeiri. Officials in the Finance Ministry doubt that the government can legally cancel such debts, but they maintain that the country needs a debt repayment freeze of at least a decade if it is to recover from the economic collapse. In any event, the government has budgeted only $200 million for FY 1987 to service its debts. That is a third of anticipated export receipts, but only a small fraction of the interest due. Nearly 100 percent of export earnings would be required to meet all the outstanding debt obligations. The government has not even budgeted a payment on the $400 million owed on its $2-billion debt to the IMF. Thus, discussions with the IMF are conducted in a low key, with neither party anticipating an accord, much less a standby agreement, in the near future.

VI

The search for aid and oil has formed an important part of Sudan’s diplomatic efforts and has underlined the shift in foreign policy orientation asserted by post-Nimeiri Sudan. In less than a year in office, the prime minister, the president of the Council of State and key cabinet members have visited all the major donor countries and the significant Arab and African capitals.

Mahdi stressed his neutrality in regional conflicts and non-involvement in the superpower rivalry by visiting Moscow prior to his trip to Washington, exchanging visits with Qaddafi while postponing his call on Mubarak in Cairo, and traveling to Iran a month after the president of the Council of State visited Iraq. Throughout these travels Mahdi asserted that Sudan was no longer tied to the American-Egyptian axis internationally or to the pro-Iraq camp regionally. He emphasized that Sudan would not subordinate its interests to others’ priorities, and would not be anyone’s client state.

The complications involved in balancing relations with mutually antagonistic countries are particularly evident in Sudanese ties with the United States, Libya and Egypt, but also with Iran and Iraq. The rapprochement with Libya, for example, worries Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United States; contacts with Tehran concern the major Arab capitals at this critical period in the Iran-Iraq war. Some Sudanese fear that Mahdi’s attempt to be friends with everyone may result in his being friends with no one.

Moreover, Mahdi’s effort to pursue this line is complicated by the lack of coherent foreign policy making processes and by disagreements between Umma and DUP over regional alignments. The Foreign Ministry, for example, has not been utilized for policymaking, and Mahdi’s views on international issues differ in important respects from those of the president of the Council of State and the foreign minister, who are senior members of the DUP. This has caused confusion abroad and has made some observers question whether Khartoum has a clear sense of its foreign policy goals.

The American-Sudanese relationship was clearly put at risk with the fall of Nimeiri, but both sides have sought to maintain essential contacts. Sudan did not want to lose vital economic aid and Washington wanted to dampen the backlash in Khartoum. Washington continued to provide the nearly half-billion dollars in economic and military aid that it had committed to Nimeiri for the 1985 fiscal year. Khartoum welcomed the massive infusion of emergency aid from the United States but distanced itself from the military dimensions of the relationship. The transitional government emphasized that it would not provide military bases for the United States, and joint military maneuvers that had been scheduled for summer 1985 were canceled by mutual agreement.

Despite these conciliatory gestures, two emotional issues heightened tension during winter 1985-86. The first involved the 1984-85 airlift of Ethiopian Jews to Israel from Sudanese soil. Although Americans generally perceived the airlift as a humanitarian act, most Sudanese felt that it was a slap in the face to Arab sensitivities and betrayed their solidarity with the Arab struggle against Israel. In late 1985 Nimeiri’s vice president was put on trial for treason and accepting bribes for facilitating the CIA-funded operation. The trial was televised daily and received wide press coverage. The American embassy complained about the coverage and criticized the charges, causing a decided backlash. Once again, Washington seemed to be treating Khartoum as a client.

The second, more fundamental issue was Sudanese-Libyan relations. When Sudan signed a military protocol with Libya in July 1985, spokesmen in Washington expressed grave concern and even hinted that the protocol could jeopardize future U.S. aid. The U.S. embassy in Khartoum also reduced its staff in the autumn and Americans were warned not to travel to Khartoum on the grounds that Libyan subversives were residing there. The transitional government resented these public expressions of non-confidence but quietly expelled some Libyan envoys.

Relations might have been smoothed over if the United States had not bombed Libya in April 1986. The air strikes coincided with the heated Sudanese election campaign, in which politicians competed to voice solidarity with Arab and African causes and to vent frustration at foreign influence. In that volatile atmosphere, the American raids brought angry anti-American demonstrators to the streets of Khartoum. When an embassy employee was wounded the same night, the ambassador ordered the evacuation of most of the staff and all dependents. Letting its concern over terrorism drive its policy, Washington temporarily played into Qaddafi’s hands by reducing the American presence in Sudan. The evacuation sent a pointed message to the government that American patience had its limits and that normal relations and aid would not be restored until security was tightened and the government adopted a more cautious stance toward Tripoli.

As soon as Mahdi became prime minister he stressed that U.S.-Sudanese relations should resume a positive course; he had no desire to antagonize unnecessarily a superpower with extensive interests in the region, and he wanted to ensure that American aid would continue. Nevertheless, the 1986 level of aid turned out to be $126 million, only a third that of the previous year; military support funds were reduced from $45 million to $19 million. The reduction reflected in part the end of the famine and in part the cool bilateral relationship.

But Mahdi recognized that the Soviet Union was not a viable alternative source of economic aid and diplomatic support. Although Sudanese officials were close-mouthed after Mahdi’s visit to Moscow in August, the results were apparently disappointing. The Soviets seemed wary of Sudanese policy and unready to commit themselves to the new regime, either by trying to persuade Mengistu to reduce his commitment to the SPLM or by providing substantial infusions of aid. In February 1987, however, Sudan and the Soviet Union signed a three-year barter pact that called for trade of $100 million a year. Nevertheless, Sudan still needed to restore normal relations with the United States.

When Mahdi visited Washington in October 1986, he emphasized that political values in Sudan closely resembled those of America. The United States, he maintained, should help the Sudanese entrench their democratic institutions rather than let economic problems overwhelm the fragile new parliamentary structures. The United States was responsive to Mahdi’s overtures: the ambassador expressed strong support for Sudan’s democracy, U.S. Agency for International Development personnel returned in the autumn, and new assistance programs were discussed. Nevertheless, drastic cutbacks in all U.S. foreign aid meant relatively small sums for Sudan. For 1987, Khartoum was slated to receive only $5 million in military support funds and approximately $65 million in economic aid, two-thirds the 1986 level. Tentative projections for 1988 call for about the same level.

U.S. embassy officials recognize that the diminution in aid makes for an embarrassing comparison with the largesse bestowed on Nimeiri. Nevertheless, they feel that higher levels cannot be justified until the Sudanese government outlines and implements a coherent economic strategy that would include dismantling some state controls, altering the exchange rate and reducing the rate of inflation. Despite lingering mutual suspicions and less aid, however, a more realistic and balanced relationship has begun to be worked out. But the balance remains tenuous, and could be jeopardized by renewed American-Libyan hostilities or too warm an embrace by Khartoum and Tripoli.

VII

The transitional government reestablished relations with Libya as a visible way to signal a change in diplomatic orientation as well as to obtain valuable economic aid. Qaddafi was quick to take advantage of the shift; he was the first head of state to visit Khartoum after Nimeiri’s fall. He stopped aiding the SPLA, shipped free oil to Port Sudan, and promised emergency and development assistance, particularly to the western province of Darfur that adjoins Libya and Chad. Libya advertised widely the military protocol of July 1985, although it consisted of only modest matériel and training. In March 1986 Qaddafi even loaned two bombers to raid the south in support of the Sudanese army and stationed nearly a thousand Libyan soldiers in Darfur.

Sudanese officials soon realized that Qaddafi was difficult to manage. They were embarrassed by his self-invited visit and his publicity of the military protocol, and annoyed by his criticism of multiparty rule and his persistent calls for Libyan-Sudanese union. When he took office, Mahdi faced a particularly delicate situation, since he had obtained crucial support from Libya while in exile in the early 1970s.

Nevertheless, Mahdi was concerned by the growing and open access of Libyans to Sudan, both because of the potential for internal subversion and because of its international repercussions. The French government, for example, complained that the Libyans stationed in Darfur could serve as an advance guard to attack Chad from the east. Mahdi also wanted to preserve Sudanese territorial integrity and support the unity of Chad under Hissene Habre. Therefore, during his visit to Tripoli in August 1986, Mahdi insisted that Qaddafi withdraw most of the Libyan forces from Darfur and underlined that he could not accept Libyan objectives in Chad.

Mahdi was also embarrassed by Qaddafi’s visit to Khartoum in September 1986, during which he not only reiterated his call for unity but also urged the overthrow of Mubarak and acts of violence against Americans. Mahdi was anxious that Qaddafi’s visit not jeopardize his contacts with Saudi Arabia and the United States, which he was scheduled to visit a few weeks later.

The government finds itself in a quandary. Sudan requires a steady supply of oil from Libya and needs to keep Qaddafi from reverting to political subversion. But achieving a balanced relationship will be difficult, given Qaddafi’s mercurial nature. Qaddafi may already realize that he is not gaining the expected political dividends: his call for unity has been rejected, his troops have been largely sent home, and his pressure on Khartoum to break relations with Washington and Cairo has been ignored. Observers do not expect Qaddafi to jeopardize the basic relationship by rash acts, such as renewed attacks on Americans, but he may be less liberal with his economic aid. Mahdi does not want to provoke Qaddafi’s open hostility, since he recognizes Libya’s potential for subversive action. Finding the optimal balance of good-neighborliness and distance will remain a difficult task.

In contrast with the opening to Libya, relations with Egypt have been tense. The inevitable backlash against the special ties during Nimeiri’s rule is compounded by Nimeiri’s presence in Cairo. Mubarak has been adamant that Nimeiri will not be deported to stand trial in Khartoum, on grounds that Egypt traditionally provides haven for political exiles. Even were Nimeiri not in Egypt, the Sudanese would have insisted on a major restructuring of the bilateral relationship. They believed that the numerous political, economic and military accords were designed by Nimeiri to keep himself in power rather than to benefit the country. Furthermore, many Sudanese suspect that Egypt harbors colonialist inclinations in the guise of promoting unity of the Nile valley.

Consequently, the transitional government froze the integration plans and unilaterally dissolved its bureaucratic structures. Khartoum also distanced itself from the military defense pact and sought to renegotiate the bilateral trade protocol. In fact integration had been more symbolic than real, but the abruptness of the Sudanese action angered Egypt, particularly as it coincided with the signing of friendship accords and the acceptance of military aid from Libya, Cairo’s sworn enemy.

Cairo apparently hoped that the DUP would carry the Sudanese elections, since its leaders publicly advocated the resumption of friendly ties with Egypt. The Umma, in contrast, had long been critical of special relations with Egypt. Thus, even though ministers from the DUP trooped to Cairo to assert their support for ties with Egypt, Prime Minister Mahdi maintained a reserved stance. Relations reached their nadir during the summer of 1986, when Egypt suspended bilateral trade, the Sudanese government filed a legal case in Cairo for Nimeiri’s extradition, and Mahdi and Mubarak met in a tense encounter at the summit conference of the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa. According to observers, neither man was impressed by the other’s leadership qualities.

The two sides did not reassess their positions until late November, when they exchanged high-level ministerial visits. The Egyptian government expressed willingness to resolve the trade dispute to Sudan’s satisfaction, but the Cairo court continued to postpone hearings on Sudan’s demand that Nimeiri be stripped of his right to asylum. Egypt wants to secure at least the neutrality of its southern neighbor, as it is worried that Libyan troops might return to Darfur in force. Some observers believe that Cairo would invoke the bilateral defense pact—even unilaterally—if Sudan allowed Libya to place a significant military presence astride the Nile.

Since November, Mahdi has begun to perceive Egypt as a potential balance to Qaddafi. He finally visited Cairo in mid-February, and signed a Brotherhood Charter, which he declared supersedes and replaces the integration accords undertaken by Nimeiri. Nonetheless, the legacies of the past weigh heavily on the present attitudes, and formulation of a new relationship based on equality, while possible, may prove complex.

Finally, Sudan’s new approach to Iran and Iraq has caused concern. Nimeiri had strongly supported Iraq, which provided significant oil supplies at concessional prices; he broke diplomatic relations with Iran and even sent volunteer fighters to assist Iraq. The new government has restored relations with Tehran, negotiated the return of some Sudanese prisoners of war, and stressed its neutrality in the Iran-Iraq war. In December 1986 Mahdi visited Tehran, where he offered to mediate between the two countries and expressed sympathy for Iran as a revolutionary Islamic state. He also negotiated the terms of Sudan’s $60-million bilateral debt, which canceled the interest due and spread out the remainder for ten years; and he signed new accords to barter sorghum for petroleum and educate Sudanese students at Iranian universities. Mahdi hailed these accords as normalizing relations with a major Islamic country, promoting Sudan’s economic interests, and fostering diplomatic resolution of the Gulf war.

Though it paid some economic dividends, the opening to Iran was controversial internally as well as abroad. Southern and secular political forces resented Mahdi’s emphasis on the common Islamic bases of the two societies and feared that he might seek to emulate Tehran’s Islamic constitution. The NIF expressed concern that the Shia version of fundamentalism might be introduced into Sudan, in competition with its own Sunni beliefs. The DUP criticized the relationship for unnecessarily irritating Iraq and causing anxiety in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

VIII

Sudan is still searching for a formula for its foreign relations that will minimize the risk of external intervention across its borders and reduce the possibilities of destabilization at home. The new government’s emphasis on nonalignment and good-neighborliness has won significant international support, but it has also encountered problems in implementation. These derive from its severe internal difficulties: the festering strife in the south and the economic collapse.

Until Khartoum articulates and implements a comprehensive political program to resolve the underlying causes of the civil war, Addis Ababa cannot be expected to reassess its bilateral relationship and reduce its support for the SPLM. Sudan can pressure Ethiopia by aiding Eritrean secessionists and confronting the SPLA militarily. Nevertheless, the critical internal issues need to be resolved; they call for international mediation, not intervention.

Overcoming the economic problems also requires a rethinking of external relationships. Sudan’s economic future was mortgaged by Nimeiri, and the difficulties will not be surmounted simply by new loans and grants. Finding means to forgive or reschedule significant parts of the debt burden is essential.

The government, in turn, needs to devise a serious program to restructure key sectors of the economy and to balance government revenue and expenditure. To date it has focused on short-term palliatives such as barter deals to obtain oil, appeals to the goodwill of donors to reschedule debts, and the windfall of an ample grain crop. These palliatives will not last. Regional donors and oil suppliers will expect political dividends on their investment. Libya can withhold oil and aid if it is displeased with Sudan’s continuing relationship with the United States and the thaw with Egypt. Saudi Arabia can do the same to express its concern about Khartoum’s rapprochement with Tripoli and Tehran. Thus, the government risks being buffeted by the conflicting interests of its major donors.

Furthermore, if the IMF and Sudan fail to reach an accommodation, international confidence in Khartoum’s economic policies will drop even lower and the prospect for external support will further diminish. This, in turn, will reduce the government’s ability to handle internal social conflict and revive the economy, thereby putting the democratic experiment at risk.

Despite these dangers, Sudan has achieved a degree of balance in its external relations. The honeymoon with Libya is over, tension with Egypt has abated, and relations with the United States are relatively even. Diplomatic contacts with African neighbors such as Chad and Uganda have reduced friction over border incursions and paved the way for constructive relations. And the political implications of the rapprochement with Tehran should prove possible to contain, given Sudan’s distance from the battlefield.

The United States is watching these developments cautiously. The days of heavy-handed intervention are past. A new relationship is evolving that is based on respect for Sudanese national sovereignty and recognition that the Sudanese will not be anyone’s client. The United States can help ease the debt burden, encourage a negotiated resolution of the war and support the democratic process by judicious economic aid and debt relief as well as by opposing renewed polarization in the region. In the long run Washington would gain more by such a balanced posture than by seeking a special relationship with the politically fragile and strategically located Sudan.

F.A
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/42028/ann-mosely-lesch/behind-sudans-secession

Geopolitical Analysis: A Tale of Two Ports

2011-01-11T10:19:00.000-08:00

A common strategy in geopolitical rivalries is to accrue alliances, strengthen positions and counter competitors. Of course, Asia is rich with historic rivalries: India and China, Pakistan and India, Iran and Pakistan, Iran and the US, the US and China. Two ports in the Arabian Sea, one in Iran and another Pakistan, demonstrate an emerging contest for power in the Arabian Sea, explains Christophe Jaffrelot, senior research fellow with the Centre for International Studies and Research, Sciences Po/CNRS. China helps Pakistan with its port at Gwadar while India assists Iran with the port at Chabahar. The development entails rail lines, highways and other massive construction projects and signals that the emerging Asian giants seek connections while resisting encirclement by rivals. Some of the new alliances make for strange bedfellows and, depending on political or military events, may not last for long. – YaleGlobal

A Tale of Two Ports

Gwadar and Chabahar display Chinese-Indian rivalry in the Arabian Sea

Christophe Jaffrelot
7 January 2011

The Great Game redux: China and India maneuver over Arabian Sea ports, Gwadar (top) and Chabahar (below)
PARIS: Sino-Indian rivalry in the Indian Ocean and India’s naval cooperation with the US draw the world’s attention. But quietly, out of sight, a contest has been building in the Arabian Sea centered between two ports, one based in Pakistan and the other in Iran. The first is backed by China, the second by India. The first, located in Gwadar, is intended to give China access to the Indian Ocean; the second, Chabahar, is supposed to connect India to Afghanistan and counter the first. The two ports represent longstanding rivalries in the region and anticipation for intense geo-strategic competition.

Gwadar, with its proximity to the vital sea lane between the Middle East and China, has strategic importance for China, especially for oil trade. If China wants to emancipate itself from transportation or military problems along Asia’s southern coastline, direct access to the Indian Ocean may be the solution.

Direct access to the India Ocean would give China a strategic post of observation and a key location for its navy. While Myanmar and Sri Lanka can offer substantial support, the country that can best help Beijing is Pakistan because of its location and long-time friendship.

India, feeling encircled, reacted to this development. In his recent book on the Indian Ocean, journalist Robert Kaplan writes that “the Indians’ answer to Sino-Pakistani cooperation at Gwadar was a giant new $8 billion naval base at Karwar, south of Goa on India’s Arabian coast, the first phase of which opened in 2005.”

Map of Gwadar, Chabahar & Karwar.
Karwar was only one part of the response to Gwadar. The other one is Chabahar. In 2002 India helped Iran to develop the port of Chabahar, located 72 kilometers west of Gwadar, soon after China began work at Gwadar.

Chabahar should provide India with access to Afghanistan via the Indian Ocean. India, Iran and Afghanistan have signed an agreement to give Indian goods, heading for Central Asia and Afghanistan, preferential treatment and tariff reductions at Chabahar.

Gwadar is located on the Gulf of Oman, close to the entrance of the Persian Gulf. Until 1958 it belonged to Oman, which gave this land to Pakistani rulers who expected that the location would contribute to what Kaplan calls “a new destiny.”

When President Richard Nixon visited Pakistan in 1973, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto sought US help to construct a new port at Gwadar, and reportedly offered the US Navy use of the facility. He was unsuccessful, and Pakistan then turned to China for help. Work started in 2002, and China has invested $200 million, dispatching 450 personnel for the first phase of the job completed in 2006 and resulting in a deep-sea port. [2]

Direct access to the India Ocean, with Gwadar, would give China a strategic post of observation and a
key location for its navy.

The Port of Singapore Authority was selected to manage Gwadar in 2007. But it did not invest much money, and Pakistan decided to transfer port management to another institution, not yet selected but which will probably be Chinese. On 6 November 2010 the Supreme Court of Pakistan asked the Gwadar Port Authority to seek cancellation of the concession agreement with the Port of Singapore Authority.

At the same time, Pakistan and China contemplate developing the Karakorum Highway to connect China’s Xinjiang and Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan. In 2006, a memorandum of understanding was signed between both countries to upgrade this road and connect Kashgar and Abbottabad. But the Karakorum Highway, the highest point of which passes at 4,693 meters, can open between May and December. It’s also vulnerable to landslides, so large trucks may not use it easily.

Pakistan and China also discussed building a 3,000-kilometer rail line between Kashgar and Gwadar, during President Asif Ali Zardari’s July 2010 visit with President Hu Jintao in Beijing. The cost would be enormous, up to $30 million per kilometer in the highest mountains.

In addition, Baluchistan is one of Pakistan’s most unstable provinces today because of the development of a nationalist movement with separatist overtones. Insurgents have already kidnapped and killed Chinese engineers in Gwadar.

Soon after China began work at Gwadar, India helped Iran to develop the port of Chabahar, located 72 kilometers west of Gwadar.

But China persists. More than a gateway to the Indian Ocean, Gwadar, at least, will provide Beijing with, first, a listening post from where the Chinese may exert surveillance on hyper-strategic sea links as well as military activities of the Indian and American navies in the region, and second, dual-use civilian-military facilities providing a base for Chinese ships and submarines.

For the Indians, this is a direct threat. The Delhi-based Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis recently published a report on Pakistan: the “Gwadar port being so close to the Straits of Hormuz also has implications for India as it would enable Pakistan to exercise control over energy routes. It is believed that Gwadar will provide Beijing with a facility to monitor US and Indian naval activity in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea, respectively, as well as any future maritime cooperation between India and the US.”

India responded by helping Iran with the port of Chabahar. Work on the Chabahar-Milak-Zaranj-Dilaram route from Iran to Afghanistan is in progress. India has already built the 213-kilometer Zaranj-Dilaram road in Afghanistan’s Nimroz province and helps Iran to upgrade the Chabahar-Milak railroad. Developing railroads and port infrastructure near the border of Afghanistan could strengthen Iranian influence in Afghanistan, especially among the Shia and non-Pashtun ethnic groups.

In developing Chabahar, India must factor in US attempts
at isolating Iran because of Tehran’s nuclear policy.

However, this Indo-Iranian project is bound to suffer from two problems:

First, politically, Afghanistan is unstable and may not oblige Iran and India if the Taliban or any Pakistan-supported government is restored. Chabahar is also part of one of Iran’s most volatile regions where anti-regime Sunni insurgents have launched repeated attacks.

Secondly, the work is far behind schedule. In July 2010, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohd Ali Fathollahi said the port was functional, but has a capacity of only 2.5 million tons per year, whereas the target was 12 million tons. Speeding work on the port was urged during the 16th Indo-Iranian Joint Commission meeting, attended by Iranian Finance Minister Seyed Shamseddin Hosseini and India’s External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna, who pointed out that “Iran’s assistance in developing the Chabahar port has been slow ‘til now.”

The connection between Gwadar and China remains distant, but could be the Suez Canal of the 21st century. At the minimum, this deep-sea port should provide Beijing with a strategic base soon.

The Chinese move prompted India to react – hence the development of Chabahar. But in developing this port, New Delhi must factor in US attempts at isolating Iran because of Tehran’s nuclear policy. How far the Indo-Iranian rapprochement is compatible with the growing Indo-American alliance remains to be seen.

The US and India may agree on the need to counter growing Chinese influence in Gwadar, but may also disagree on the policy India wants to pursue by joining hands with Iran.

Iran itself may not want to take any risk at alienating China, a country which has supported Tehran, including its nuclear policy, until recently.

Christophe Jaffrelot is a senior research fellow with the Centre for International Studies and Research, Sciences Po/CNRS.

Yale Global Online

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/tale-two-ports

U.S. efforts fail to convince Pakistan's top general to target Taliban

2011-01-11T10:15:00.000-08:00

In spite of its compliance with the U.S. demands, on tactical level, Pakistan army is unwilling to abandon its proxy forces even in the face of U.S. pressure. It does so for right reason: that, in the end, the United States will withdraw from the region. And, given the growing opposition towards the Afghan war inside Washington D.C beltway -- especially among the realist policy-makers as well as the traditional anti-war left -- it is increasingly becoming apparent that the United States would wind up the war sooner rather than later. Thus, it is the notion of U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan that gives motivation to Pakistani military establishment to stay on course, i.e., keep on arming jihadi groups.

Still, Washington continues its carrot-wielding policy towards Pakistan. Why so?

Because the stakes in Afghan war, for the Americans, are not high enough so they could introduce stick in order to put inense pressure on Pakistani military. Long-term geopolitical interest in the region aside, the United States' immediate national security interests will triumph over any other catagory of interest. Thus, the main goal is to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for jihadists.

With Taliban movement on a back foot, at least for now, the Americans are not interested in escalating this conflict beyond Afghanistan's borders and, therefore, neither are they interested in holding Pakistani military into account for its policy of deception and denial -- unless there is a major attack on American soil, which will surely alter the U.S. policy towards Pakistan dramatically.

The following report from the Washington Post shows how Pakistani military chief feels insecure, and even becomes paranoid, about Washington's "ultimate goal": depriving Pakistani state from its nuclear weapons. Also, his extreme resentment towards India does make strategic sense: that any opening up to a giant like India will, ultimately, undo the whole project of Pakistan -- overwhelming its fictitious national identity as well as making it permanently dependent on a much superior Indian economy.

– Belaar –

U.S. efforts fail to convince Pakistan's top general to target Taliban

By Karin Brulliard and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, December 31, 2010; 8:37 PM

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN - Countless U.S. officials in recent years have lectured and listened to Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the man many view as the most powerful in Pakistan. They have drunk tea and played golf with him, feted him and flown with him in helicopters.

But they have yet to persuade him to undertake what the Obama administration's recent strategy review concluded is a key to success in the Afghan war - the elimination of havens inside Pakistan where the Taliban plots and stages attacks on coalition troops in Afghanistan.

Kayani, who as Pakistan's army chief has more direct say over the country's security strategy than its president or prime minister, has resisted personal appeals from President Obama, U.S. military commanders and senior diplomats. Recent U.S. intelligence estimates have concluded that he is unlikely to change his mind anytime soon. Despite the entreaties, officials say, Kayani doesn't trust U.S. motivations and is hedging his bets in case the American strategy for Afghanistan fails.

In many ways, Kayani is the personification of the vexing problem posed by Pakistan. Like the influential military establishment he represents, he views Afghanistan on a timeline stretching far beyond the U.S. withdrawal, which is slated to begin this summer. While the Obama administration sees the insurgents as an enemy force to be defeated as quickly and directly as possible, Pakistan has long regarded them as useful proxies in protecting its western flank from inroads by India, its historical adversary.

"Kayani wants to talk about the end state in South Asia," said one of several Obama administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the sensitive relationship. U.S. generals, the official said, "want to talk about the next drone attacks."

The administration has praised Kayani for operations in 2009 and 2010 against domestic militants in the Swat Valley and in South Waziristan, and has dramatically increased its military and economic assistance to Pakistan. But it has grown frustrated that the general has not launched a ground assault against Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries in North Waziristan.

Kayani has promised action when he has enough troops available, although he has given no indication of when that might be. Most of Pakistan's half-million-man army remains facing east, toward India.

In recent months, Kayani has sometimes become defiant. When U.S.-Pakistani tensions spiked in September, after two Pakistani soldiers were killed by an Afghanistan-based American helicopter gunship pursuing insurgents on the wrong side of the border, he personally ordered the closure of the main frontier crossing for U.S. military supplies into Afghanistan, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.

In October, administration officials choreographed a White House meeting for Kayani at which Obama could directly deliver his message of urgency. The army chief heard him out, then provided a 13-page document updating Pakistan's strategic perspective and noting the gap between short-term U.S. concerns and Pakistan's long-term interests, according to U.S. officials.

Kayani reportedly was infuriated by the recent WikiLeaks release of U.S. diplomatic cables, some of which depicted him as far chummier with the Americans and more deeply involved in Pakistani politics than his carefully crafted domestic persona would suggest. In one cable, sent to Washington by the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad last year, he was quoted as discussing with U.S. officials a possible removal of Pakistan's president and his preferred replacement.

On the eve of the cable's publication in November, the normally aloof and soft-spoken general ranted for hours on the subject of irreconcilable U.S.-Pakistan differences in a session with a group of Pakistani journalists.

The two countries' "frames of reference" regarding regional security "can never be the same," he said, according to news accounts. Calling Pakistan America's "most bullied ally," Kayani said that the "real aim of U.S. strategy is to de-nuclearize Pakistan."

The general's suspicions

Kayani was a star student at the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., in 1988, writing his master's thesis on "Strengths and Weaknesses of the Afghan Resistance Movement." He was among the last Pakistanis to graduate from the college before the United States cut off military assistance to Islamabad in 1990 in response to Pakistan's suspected nuclear weapons program. Eight years later, both Pakistan and India conducted tests of nuclear devices. The estrangement lasted until President George W. Bush lifted the sanctions in 2001, less than two weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Kayani is far from alone in the Pakistani military in suspecting that the United States will abandon Pakistan once it has achieved its goals in Afghanistan, and that its goal remains to leave Pakistan defenseless against nuclear-armed India.

Kayani "is one of the most anti-India chiefs Pakistan has ever had," one U.S. official said.

The son of a noncommissioned army officer, Kayani was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1971. He was chief of military operations during the 2001-2002 Pakistan-India crisis. As head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency from 2004 to 2007, he served as a point man for back-channel talks with India initiated by then-President Pervez Musharraf. When Musharraf resigned in 2008, the talks abruptly ended.

The Pakistani military has long been involved in politics, but few believe that the general seeks to lead the nation. "He has stated from the beginning that he has no desire to involve the military in running the country," said Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council. But that does not mean Kayani would stand by "if there was a failure of civilian institutions," Nawaz said. "The army would step in."

Kayani remains an enigmatic figure, chiefly known in Pakistan for his passion for golf and chain-smoking. According to Jehangir Karamat, a retired general who once held Kayani's job, he is an avid reader and a fan of Lebanese American poet Khalil Gibran.

'Mind-boggling'

Even some Pakistanis see Kayani's India-centric view as dated, self-serving and potentially disastrous as the insurgents the country has harbored increasingly turn on Pakistan itself.

"Nine years into the Afghanistan war, we're fighting various strands of militancy, and we still have an army chief who considers India the major threat," said Cyril Almeida, an editor and columnist at the English-language newspaper Dawn. "That's mind-boggling."

Kayani has cultivated the approval of a strongly anti-American public that opinion polls indicate now holds the military in far higher esteem than it does the weak civilian government of President Asif Ali Zardari. Pakistani officials say the need for public support is a key reason for rebuffing U.S. pleas for an offensive in North Waziristan. In addition to necessitating the transfer of troops from the Indian border, Pakistani military and intelligence officials say such a campaign would incite domestic terrorism and uproot local communities. Residents who left their homes during the South Waziristan offensive more than a year ago have only recently been allowed to begin returning to their villages.

Several U.S. officials described Kayani as straightforward in his explanations of why the time is not right for an offensive in North Waziristan: a combination of too few available troops and too little public support.

The real power broker

Pakistani democracy activists fault the United States for professing to support Pakistan's civilian government while at the same time bolstering Kayani with frequent high-level visits and giving him a prominent role in strategic talks with Islamabad.

Obama administration officials said in response that while they voice support for Pakistan's weak civilian government at every opportunity, the reality is that the army chief is the one who can produce results.

"We have this policy objective, so who do we talk to?" one official said. "It's increasingly clear that we have to talk to Kayani."

Most of the talking is done by Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In more than 30 face-to-face meetings with Kayani, including 21 visits to Pakistan since late 2007, Mullen has sought to reverse what both sides call a "trust deficit" between the two militaries.

But the patience of other U.S. officials has worn thin. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, has adopted a much tougher attitude toward Kayani than his predecessor, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, had, according to several U.S. officials.

For his part, Kayani complains that he is "always asking Petraeus what is the strategic objective" in Afghanistan, according to a friend, retired air marshal Shahzad Chaudhry.

As the Obama administration struggles to assess the fruits of its investment in Pakistan, some officials said the United States now accepts that pleas and military assistance will not change Kayani's thinking. Mullen and Richard C. Holbrooke, who served as the administration's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan until his death last month, thought that "getting Kayani to trust us enough" to be honest constituted progress, one official said.

But what Kayani has honestly told them, the official said, is: "I don't trust you."

W.P

Essay: Zoroaster and the Ayatollahs

2011-01-11T10:11:00.000-08:00

Of all socio-political forces – which play an important role in shaping peoples’ lives and even determine the fate of nations – both culture and ideology (or religion) tend to be the most powerful ones. In the past centuries, those who employed these forces, effectively, built vast empires while others, despite series of conquests and acquisition of territories, utterly failed in their bid to establish a lasting polity let alone an empire: because they failed to foster dynamic cultures and, hence, failed to project ideological appeal.

The case in point is the Mongolian imperial control of much of the Eurasian landmass by 1280. Genghis Khan and his successors, by adopting brilliant and ruthless tactics, achieved spectacular victories, thereby, occupying much of China in the east, Anatolia and Persia in the southwest, Central Europe in the northwest. They established an impressive territorial empire through military power.

However, in the end, they failed to consolidate the empire they had achieved through hard work. The absence of an assertive culture, as well as lack of a subjective sense of ethnic superiority, undermined the confidence of the Mongol elite. Consequently, they quickly assimilated into more advanced cultures: one grandson of Genghis Khan, who was the ruler of China, embraced Confucianism; another became devout Muslim, the sultan of Persia; while the third one adopted Persian cultural values and became the ruler of the Great Steppe.

By contrast, the Roman and Chinese empires sustained remarkably well. Indeed, the Roman Empire was the most dynamic one.

Although, the early Pagan-worshiping Romans laid the foundation of the Empire in the republican era, it was, nonetheless, a Rome equipped with Christian faith that expanded further afield, stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia. Civis Romanus sum (I am a Roman citizen) was a source of pride while Christianity became the official faith that provided the moral cover. Ironically, according to Edward Gibbon, Christianity became one of the causes of its decline and fall too.

While, from the Arab-Islamic Empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the story of Islam has been dominated by the imperial dreams. Islam as a potent ideology used by the Arabs for regional, if not the world mastery. Their political ambitions cloaked by religious aura and constantly expanded the empire: stretching from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to northern Syria under the banner of Islam – one of the most remarkable examples of empire building in history. Unlike European imperial statecraft, which marked a clear dividing line between master and subject, the Islamic empires were land based system: the distinction between ruled and ruling classes became increasingly blurred through extensive colonisation and assimilation.

Thanks to this rigorous imperial epoch (conquer and assimilate) the widely diverse ethnic groups in the Middle East, today, share same language and religion, hence, a unified Arabic culture. But some groups, despite being conquered and converted into Islam hereafter, succeeded in preserving their core cultural values. Reason: perhaps such values are deeply rooted in their society. They are, indeed, proved to be most resilient ones, that is why they often withstood in the face of socio-political upheavals such as invasion, revolution and occupation.

The following essay, authored by Abbas Milani of Stanford University, presents an interesting case: while Shiite dogmas, centrally imposed by Islamic regime, are aimed to crush the ancient values as well as subdue the cultural values of other nationalities in Iran, the ancient cultural influences tend to resist social engineering and are still embedded in peoples psyche and characters. It is not an easy task to remove such values through forceful indoctrination.

Zoroastrian, one of the oldest religions in our region, is believed to have some kind of connection with our ancestors. Nawab Akbar Bugti always relished the fact that Baloch heritage contains strong Zoroastrian attributes.

However, in this case study, Mr Milani attempts to analyse different socio-cultural paradigms that have emerged in contemporary Iranian society and shows how these social forces interact – often clash to one another – in different political settings.

This piece truly deserves attention of those who are interested in cultural and historical discourses.

– Belaar –

Zoroaster and the Ayatollahs

December 16, 2010
Abbas Milani

CULTURE IS hard to define and even harder to change. Beneath the surface solemnities of politics and the exigencies of economics lurks the intricate web of habits and rituals, practices and privileges, that we call culture. In its overt manifestations, culture may seem a docile tool, or perhaps an efficient vehicle for political change. In reality, culture has the capacity not only to survive upheaval in the halls of power but also to gradually and inexorably alter the nature of governance, molding politics in its enduring patterns. More than once in Iran’s history, after the country was vanquished by outsiders—from Arabs to Mongols—the culture of the conquered survived and eventually molded the customs of the victors to its own pattern. It is hard to imagine that the 1979 revolution will be an exception to this enduring reality.
In that upheaval of some thirty years ago, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini surprisingly emerged as the leader of the unwieldy and incongruent coalition of cultural forces that united to overthrow the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In the months leading up to the revolution, Khomeini used remarkable discipline to conveniently hide his true theocratic, antimodern cultural paradigm, feigning instead support for the democratic, nationalist and leftist values and aspirations that defined the demands of the 1979 revolution. Once ensconced in power, however, Khomeini famously declared that the revolution was not carried out for economic gains but for pious ends. The economy, he said, “is for donkeys.” Creating a new Islamic society, fashioning new men and women based on an Islamic model that had been perfected in the prophetic era of Muhammad some fourteen centuries earlier, finally discarding the cultural values of modernity was, he now claimed, the real goal of the revolution.

Now even regime stalwarts concede that this project of cultural remodeling has failed miserably. And the failure, along with its incumbent cultural fluidity and political instability, is in no small measure the result of the resilient societal ethos dominant in Iran on the eve of the revolution.

IT HAS become something of a commonplace to say that for more than a thousand years Iran has been defined by a bifurcated, tormented, even schizoid cultural identity: pre-Islamic, Persian-Zoroastrian elements battling with forces and values of an Arab Islamic culture. The paisley, easily the most recurrent image in the Persian iconographic tradition, is said to capture this tormented division. It represents the cedar tree that Zoroaster planted in heaven which was bent by the winds of Islamic hegemonic culture. Adapting in this way has been the key to the ability of Iranian culture to survive marauding tribes and invading armies. But Iran and its heavenly cedar bend only to lash back to their upright gait when immediate danger has passed and occasion for reasserting traditional values has arisen.

Some scholars have gone so far as to argue that even Shiism—since the sixteenth century the dominant and “official” religion of Iran—is in its fundamental structure nothing but a form of Iranian nationalism. Recent remarks by Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, that Iran’s leaders in the last thirty years are all, in fact, Arabs and that their claims of being descendants of the prophet (symbolized by the black turbans they wear) reassert their Arab blood show clearly the continuing tensions between Persian identity and the Islamism of the rest of the Shia Middle East. Nasrallah needs to convince his followers thus that these Arab brothers have left nothing of a “Persian culture” to survive. These controversial comments indicate both the prevalence among ordinary Arabs of this view that Shiism might be an “un-Islamic invention”—and Iranian in origin. To justify his fealty to the country’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Nasrallah had to first make him an Arab.

For much of the twentieth century, these two cultural elements have been at war for domination in Iran. In power from 1925 until 1979, Reza Shah Pahlavi and then his son Mohammad Reza Shah tried to accentuate the pre-Islamic component of the country’s heritage and dilute the Islamic element. The shah’s infamously lavish celebration of two thousand five hundred years of monarchy in 1971—the international glitterati were invited, food was flown in from Maxim’s de Paris, and the ruins of Persepolis were used as a backdrop and a reminder of days of glory gone by—was more than anything intended to accentuate this imperial, pre-Islamic past. Even the country’s calendar was changed. The year 1355 in Iran’s Islamic calendar (or 1976 CE) suddenly became 2535. The beginning of the Islamic calendar went back to the journey of Islam’s prophet, Muhammad, from Mecca to Medina, while the new imperial time sought its genesis in the alleged birthday of Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire. As the tumult of the revolution began only two years later, in a gesture of concession to the opposition, the calendar was changed yet again. But neither the hubris of retuning the clock on a whim—earlier tried by the likes of Maximilien de Robespierre in France and Vladimir Lenin in the Soviet Union—nor hackneyed concessions to the opposition could alter the stubborn realities of Iran’s bifurcated culture, formed and ingrained over centuries.

No sooner had Ayatollah Khomeini and his clerical allies seized power than they not only began to reverse the pre-Islamic ardor of the Pahlavi era but they also moved to the other extreme, trying to dilute, diminish and at times altogether erase from cultural memory evidence of Iran’s non-Islamic past. Jahiliyyah, or the age of darkness, has long been a concept used by Islamist historians and ideologues to derisively describe what exists in a society before the advent of Islam. Now some fifteen hundred years of Iran’s imperial era was disparaged and diminished as jahiliyyah. In the early days of the revolution, some of the more ardent new Islamist victors moved to destroy Persepolis (and were forced to cease their destructive plans only in the face of stiff opposition both domestically and internationally), while one of Khomeini’s closest confidants, Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, the man infamously known as the “hanging judge”—a title he had deservedly earned for his role in the judicial murder of hundreds of ancient-regime leaders and the new-regime opponents—dismissed Cyrus as a sodomite Jew, hardly worthy of veneration by a pious nation. Even today, thirty years after the victory of the revolution, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s zealots are taking their ideological hammer to the texts taught in Iranian schools, hoping to erase from the annals of history any sign of pagan “royal historiography.”

The clerics even tried to fight some of the most venerable rites and rituals of the nation. For a time, they focused their attention on eliminating, or at least diminishing in value, the ancient Persian habit of celebrating the vernal equinox as their new year (Nowruz). In retrospect, this anti-Nowruz crusade began even before the 1979 revolution, when in the sixties and seventies religious forces made a concerted effort to replace Nowruz with other religious holidays and feasts. While in those days many in society participated in these religious ceremonies only to spite the regime, since 1979 the tables have turned. Now, celebrating Nowruz is an easy way to show your sentiments about the ruling clerics. The clerical leaders have apparently reconciled themselves to the reality that they have failed in their crusade against the celebration. But their quixotic efforts at delegitimizing Persian habits have not ended. For the last three decades, they have also tried to dissuade the Iranian people from their ritualistic habit of jumping over fires on the last Wednesday of each year—said to symbolize the hope and desire to burn away the past twelve months’ troubles and travails. Even as late as 2010, Khamenei issued a new fatwa declaring the practice heresy and a form of fire worship. Yet both traditions are more alive and celebrated today than ever before. When a regime politicizes all cultural and personal practices, as do the clerics in Iran, then every facet of the culture, every gesture of personal behavior, every sartorial statement (from women’s defiant refusal to wear the forced veil to men’s insistence on wearing ties or shaving their faces) becomes a form of dissent and resistance.

The Persian language, spoken by a majority of Iran’s multiethnic society, and long considered a bastion of Iranian nationalism, has not been immune from the vicissitudes of this culture war either. While much was made of cleansing the Persian language of any Arabic words and influence during the Pahlavi era, Ayatollah Khomeini and his allies made an equally concentrated and futile attempt to infuse the language with more and more Arabic words, phrases and even grammatical structures. For them, Arabic is the language of God and of the Koran, while to the Iranian nationalists it is a detested tool of Arab and Islamic cultural invasion. Just as the effort to create a new “Islamic society” has failed, the attempt to introduce Arabic into the Persian language has also been unsuccessful. Not only is the Persian vernacular today replete with new, cleverly constructed Persian words, but a whole generation of parents are increasingly moving away from naming their children after religious figures, opting instead for names from Iran’s mytho-history, or newly minted names conjured or coined from the Persian vocabulary. In this sense, then, the 1979 revolution was only a moment in the centuries-old culture war to define the soul of Iran; yet another attempt in the long line of efforts to eliminate or diminish in influence certain components of the country’s bifurcated identity.

ADDING TO the complexity of this cultural dualism has been the temptation of modernity. For more than a century, Iran has faced the challenges of an increasingly global modernity—an interrelated set of changes that radically alter a society’s notions of self, identity, politics, economy, spirituality and aesthetic. Culture became the arena in which these battles were most intensely fought. Every discursive realm, from poetry and painting to sermons and stories, turned into at once “instruments” and loci of contention in a culture war between different narratives of selfhood and individual and collective identity.

In response to these formidable challenges, four starkly different cultural and political paradigms, each supporting or rejecting modernity from its own prism and based on its own set of axioms and ideals, emerged. All were vying for domination on the eve of the 1979 revolution. In a sense, the shah was “unkinged” by the very cultural forces he helped to create. He was himself an advocate of Western modernization, even modernity. He supported a woman’s right to vote and the right of religious minorities to practice their faiths (affording unprecedented assistance to Iran’s Jews and Baha’is in particular). He facilitated increased contact with the West, and the training of a large technocratic class, and finally offered patronage and support for experimentation with forms of art, all of course predicated on the society’s acceptance of his patriarchic, authoritarian personal rule.

In the last decade of his reign, inspired by the cultural sensibilities of his wife, Farah Pahlavi, a student of architecture before becoming queen, the shah’s stern political paradigm was accompanied by a well-supported effort to preserve hitherto-ignored elements of Iran’s cultural tradition. Everything from establishing an office entrusted with the task of finding and preserving classics of Persian music to attempts to renovate or preserve gems of Persian architecture flourished under the queen’s patronage and support.

Throughout the seventies, in the Shiraz Arts Festival, some of the most cutting-edge thespians and playwrights in the world put on radical and innovative shows. British director Peter Brook and his Polish contemporary Jerzy Grotowski brought their new experimental productions to the city. Conservative clergy attacked these performances as lewd and lascivious, intended to undermine “Islamic moral values,” yet they were not the only critics of this display. On the other side, the democratic and leftist opposition (which embraced modernity’s values through its support of the “rights of man”) dismissed the festival as the futile and expensive facade of tolerance created by an oppressive regime. For them, the shah’s authoritarianism, his “dependence” on the West and his “original sin” of participating in the 1953 CIA-backed removal of then–Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh from power, trumped in value any cultural freedoms his regime offered or supported.

While the leftist, centrist and clerical opposition to the shah “overdetermined” politics to the detriment of cultural freedoms, the ruler, for his part, failed to understand what increasingly became the clear iron law of culture: men (and women) do not live by bread alone, and when a society is introduced into the ethos of modernity—from the rule of reason and women’s suffrage to the idea of natural rights of citizens and the notion of a community joined together by social contract and legitimized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s popular will—then it will invariably demand its democratic rights. That society will not tolerate the authoritarian rule of even a modernizing monarch capable of delivering impressive economic development. The shah tried to treat the people of Iran as “subjects” and expected their gratitude for the cultural freedoms and economic advancement he had “given” them. But he, and his father (and before them, the participants in the Constitutional Revolution at the turn of the twentieth century), had helped develop a new cultural disposition by creating a parliament and a system of law wherein the people considered themselves citizens and thought of these liberties as their right—not as gifts benevolently bestowed upon them.

FOR IF cultural and economic modernity, minus democracy, was the essence of the shah’s paradigm, the second-most-powerful cultural model of modernity was advocated by a disproportionately large segment of the Iranian intelligentsia. Though divided in aspects of their aesthetic and cultural sensibilities, advocates of this second paradigm included a wide variety of poets, scholars and historians who championed the idea of citizenship in a modern, democratic polity where rule of law was to be the only mode of adjudicating differences. Identity was, in this system, at once both individual and national. They advocated a modernity that was invariably “Westophile” in its disposition, looking to the Enlightenment, modernism and other Western aesthetic developments for at least part of their inspiration. They were thus culturally more or less on the same side of history as the shah and his modernizing efforts. Yet, steeped as many of these artists and scholars were in what Isaiah Berlin called the Russian concept of intelligentsia, and thereby believing that the necessary posture of an artist was criticism of the status quo, they saw the shah and his regime as an obstacle to, if not an enemy of, progress. The literary and scholarly efforts of this group cemented a sense of Iranian cultural identity. But they were often dismissed and at times harassed by the Pahlavi regime. Limits on their creativity, begot by the shah’s authoritarianism, only added to the schism between advocates of this paradigm and the Iranian ruler.

And within this paradigm was forged the uneasy relationship with the West still present in the battle to reconcile Iranian identity—particularly the pre-Islamic elements—with Enlightenment values. It may be masked beneath the heavy shroud of the current theocratic regime, but it lies in wait. Montesquieu might well have been the first to recognize the inherent difficulties of this sort of resolution when, in his Persian Letters, he asked how one can be at once modern and Persian. Indeed, among the advocates of a democratic polity—no less influential but far less famous—were the often self-effacing scholars, poets, historians, writers and musicians who in those years worked hard to discover, preserve, publish and display critical, often-ignored elements of Iran’s imperial era as well as its post-Islamic cultural heritage. Their efforts were indispensable to the emergence of a new form of Iranian cultural modernity that was less awed and intimidated by the West and more inclined to infuse into their work usable elements of Iran’s own tradition. From music and architecture to painting and poetry, there was initially a rush to reproduce in Iran the styles and forms that were popular in the West. But by the late sixties and early seventies, something fundamental happened to many advocates of this Westophile modernity; they forsook their earlier attempts at simply imitating the works of Western masters and began an eventful age of the “return” to native roots. Transcending the tradition of old and incorporating it into the best the West had to offer, rather than simply emulating the Western way of life, became the motto of this new Iranian ethos.

Many cultural fields witnessed this profound process of looking inward while innovating. Actor Parviz Sayyad and filmmaker Bahram Beizai, for example, took the traditional forms of Ta’ziyeh—religious musical pageantry and passion plays—and fashioned out of them a modernist interpretation that attracted the attention of many of the theater world’s most inventive directors and playwrights. Sayyad not only worked hard to preserve these traditional plays but also created for television some of the most memorable characters of modern Persian media. His Samad—a guileful peasant, ill at ease in his new urban surroundings but more than willing to milk his situation for all he could—was uncanny in capturing the pathos and pathologies in the “drama of modernization” that social scientists have long written about. And the cinematic displays of the likes of Ebrahim Golestan’s Asrar ganj dareheye jenni,or Mysteries of the Treasure at Ghost Valley (describing the destructive transformations in the life of a man who suddenly discovers a wealth of artifacts buried under his field), were prescient in anticipating the revolution and underscoring the cultural dislocations that defined Iran on the eve of the uprising. Golestan’s “man,” and his tragicomic effort to “modernize” his house by simply buying the accoutrements of a contemporary life, was an unmistakable allusion to the shah’s inability to wisely manage the sudden surge of income.

After the revolution, more than once, artists and intellectuals have similarly used myths and metaphors to underscore the implied, but now abrogated, contract between the clergy and the people. Khomeini had promised to go to a seminary once the shah was overthrown, thereby relinquishing any role in ruling Iran. He also promised to prevent any clergy from seizing the levers of power. But once the revolution was won, he breached that contract. Today, every post of importance is divided between some three hundred top clerics in the country. The Sufi tale of Sheikh Sanaan was cleverly used by one assaying to describe and deride this abrogation. In the original story, the sheikh fell in love with the Christian daughter of a pig farmer—something that should have been anathema to him as a Muslim. In the revived and revised account, the sheikh falls in love with Power—and her temptations lead him to forget every one of his promises.

Much the same can be said of a whole genre of “film-farsi” that developed in the seventies. These movies were known for the crass and primitive quality of their production, the archetypal simplicity of their stories—rich girl meets poor boy, family objects, problems arise and then a happy ending follows. Within a few years, even some of these popular films were beginning to delve into “social issues,” showing a culture of vigilantism and at times even nascent hints of newly assertive religiosity. Since the revolution, the enormous popularity of these “film-farsi” among the urban poor has made them into one of the favorite vehicles for pedagogy in the hands of the clerical regime. Hundreds of films, extolling “martyrdom” and describing the stories of war, have been made in the last two decades. The great divide between these highly popular but aesthetically crass movies and the tradition of art-house productions was in fact one aspect of the chasm that divided the preoccupations of the intelligentsia and the cultural habits of the masses under the shah. Today, too, serious Iranian filmmakers—from Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Jafar Panahi to Abbas Kiarostami and Tahmineh Milani—are creating works that are often only shown in international film festivals and deftly defy and transcend the pious shibboleths promoted by the regime’s own sanctioned cinema.

INDEED, ALONG with these aesthetic and intellectual developments, the needs of the “ordinary” Iranian have also long vied for dominance in Iran’s complicated encounter with modernity. In a country whose modernization was fashioned with petrodollars and controlled by the elites, it is no surprise then that Marxism should find itself as the third paradigm of modernity. Though by the mid-seventies there were numerous small groups and sects with varying versions of Marxism as their mottoes, the clearly dominant form was Stalinism, with its emphasis on a “statist” economy run by a totalitarian party and inclined not toward the West but the Soviet empire. Like Stalin, these Iranian Marxists also believed that culture was an auxiliary of the economy. Change the economic base, Stalin had opined, and the culture will change with it. Moreover, inspired by the same Russian tradition of “social criticism” and “committed art,” Iranian Marxists too believed that all cultural productions were nothing but instruments of the class struggle. Form was subservient to content; simple, even simpleminded cultural artifacts, supposedly understandable to the masses, were preferred over “decadent” bourgeois productions that privileged form and aesthetic excellence.

The animosity of most of these Marxists toward the shah was driven as much by dictates of theory—the discourse of imperialism and colonialism, and the shah as their “lackey” if not “client”—as by exigencies of their “big brother,” the Soviet Union. Their surprising support for Khomeini had the same roots. They saw in the religious leader an Aleksandr Kerensky, who lost his leadership to Lenin, and believed they would inherit or grab the power Khomeini would prove incapable of managing. Moreover, toppling the shah was seen by the Soviet Union as a first step in curtailing America’s influence in the region. Finally, striking structural similarities between Khomeini’s Shiism and this form of Marxism—their belief in a messiah, their claim to a monopoly on truth, their willingness to sacrifice the individual for the greater good, their eschatological view of history, their belief that the truly pious or revolutionary are invariably in the minority, their disparagement of liberal democracy, their Machiavellian willingness to use any means necessary to achieve their ends, their peculiar epistemology where a quote from sacred texts is used in lieu of rational arguments—created a cultural consanguinity between radical Shiism and Stalinist Marxists. Politics, they say, makes strange bedfellows; authoritarian politics, like the reality of Iran in the seventies, begets monstrously ill-conceived alliances to achieve the superficially common goal of ending despotism. And thus it was that advocates of the Marxist and the secular-democratic cultural paradigms of modernity formed an alliance against the shah, who advocated his own iteration of the same paradigm. Even more strangely, this incongruent coalition chose as its leader Ayatollah Khomeini, easily the most fervent enemy of modernity in contemporary Iran.

FACED WITH the inexorable challenge of modernity, Shiism in the twentieth century in fact split into two different camps, some trying to reconcile it with democracy and rationalism, while others, led by Khomeini, rejected nearly every cultural component of modernity as a colonial construct. In a sense, this was the fourth critical cultural paradigm in Iran’s encounter with modernity. The other three offered different ways of embracing change, while this version provided reasons why the whole temptation of the progressive era should be ignored and overcome. Ayatollah Khomeini and his small band of cohorts criticized nationalism and denigrated individualism as a ploy of colonialism. Instead, they advocated “brotherhood” in an internationalist “ummah,” or spiritual community of the believers. As early as 1944, with the publication of his book Kashf al-Asrar (Solving Mysteries), Khomeini offered a paradigm of politics and culture that not only dismissed modernity and much of the modernization project, but fought on two religious fronts as well. On the one hand, he took issue with clerics who advocated a “quietist” interpretation of Shiism like his mentor and teacher, Ayatollah Hairi, and Ayatollah Kazem Shariat-Madari (easily the most influential and senior cleric inside Iran in 1978) who believed the clergy must limit their interventions in politics and instead attend to the spiritual demands of the flock. At the same time, Ayatollah Khomeini fought against Islamist reformists—most notably Ali Shariati and his attempt to eclectically mix Marx, Freud, Sartre, Fanon, Che and Islam—who wanted Shiism stripped of its superstition and anachronistic rituals.

While the shah was busy fighting the cultural influence of the Left, and while the Left, ever self-congratulatory in its exaggeration of its own importance and influence, flirted with the clergy as “allies” in the anti-imperialist struggle, Khomeini and his cohorts worked quietly to enhance their own influence and strengthen their labyrinthine network of groups, mosques, neighborhood “mourning” committees and even professional organizations. They used this vast network to dominate the democratic movement that emerged in 1978 in Iran. Khomeini’s concealment of his true intentions just before the revolution, as well as his ability to portray himself both to the majority in Iran and even to the American embassy in Tehran as a proponent of democracy, allowed for the formation of the unwieldy alliance of advocates and foes of modernity against the shah’s authoritarianism.

THE COALITION that overthrew the shah brought together technocrats and merchants of the bazaar, members of the urban middle class and much of the working classes, along with the women’s movement, labor unions, students, forces of the Left and the clergy. Yet no sooner had Khomeini come to power than the coalition broke apart; the clergy successfully sidelined secular leftist and centrist factions. With Khomeini’s seizure of control, and with clerical despotism increasing its total grip on power, Iran entered a period of political strife and instability. Since 1979, disillusioned advocates of democracy and modernity have continued their sometimes overt, other times covert struggle to realize the democratic dream. For in this theocratic version of Iran, the cultural influences of its Persian past and its adaptation of those influences with the political and economic rights of man have been subsumed by the Arab Islamism foreign to the vibrant intellectual struggle of this nation to free itself of monarchical and autocratic forces. But this culture war continues to play out in the background of politics—the ethos of the “conquered” people working quietly but relentlessly to subvert, change and eventually replace the alien culture of their usurping rulers.

And this current manifestation was clear during the June 2009 uprising. Once again, that same democratic coalition that formed a foolhardy alliance with the clerical regime—and now numerically stronger than ever but still denied a chance to organize itself politically—came together to invigorate what Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his conservative allies hoped would be an anemic presidential campaign by a dour, uncharismatic Mir Hussein Moussavi. But the remarkable surge of social energy in support of Moussavi forced the conservatives to steal the election for Ahmadinejad. And then suddenly, the country’s seemingly docile population rose up around a beguilingly simple slogan: Where is my vote? In Tehran alone, 3 million people marched in remarkable discipline to demand their democratic rights. Their slogan pithily captured in a mere four words the hundred-year-old dream of modernity and democracy in Iran. Using thugs and guns, prison and torture, the ayatollah has so far succeeded in intimidating the people back into their homes. But a critical look at the past shows the bleak future of Khamenei and other champions of despotism. Violence can only delay but not destroy the rights of man in a nation that has embraced the cultural ethos of modernity. The hushed, brutalized quiet of today is at best a prelude to the liberating storms of tomorrow.

Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, where he is also the codirector of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. His book, The Shah, was published in January 2011 by Palgrave Macmillan.

TNI

http://nationalinterest.org/article/zoroaster-the-ayatollahs-4580

Pakistan Faces a Divide of Age on Muslim Law

2011-01-11T10:08:00.000-08:00

By CARLOTTA GALL
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Cheering crowds have gathered in recent days to support the assassin who riddled the governor of Punjab with 26 bullets and to praise his attack — carried out in the name of the Prophet Muhammad — as an act of heroism. To the surprise of many, chief among them have been Pakistan’s young lawyers, once seen as a force for democracy.

Their energetic campaign on behalf of the killer has caught the government flat-footed and dismayed friends and supporters of the slain politician, Salman Taseer, an outspoken proponent of liberalism who had challenged the nation’s strict blasphemy laws. It has also confused many in the broader public and observers abroad, who expected to see a firm state prosecution of the assassin.

Instead, before his court appearances, the lawyers showered rose petals over the confessed killer, Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, a member of an elite police group who had been assigned to guard the governor, but who instead turned his gun on him. They have now enthusiastically taken up his defense.

It may seem a stark turnabout for a group that just a few years ago looked like the vanguard of a democracy movement. They waged months of protests in 2007 and 2008 to challenge Pakistan’s military dictator after he unlawfully removed the chief justice.

But the lawyers’ stance is perhaps just the most glaring expression of what has become a deep generational divide tearing at the fabric of Pakistani society, and of the broad influence of religious conservatism — and even militancy — that now exists among the educated middle class.

They are often described as the Zia generation: Pakistanis who have come of age since the 1980s, when the military dictator, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, began to promote Islam in public education and to use it as a political tool to unify this young and insecure nation.

Today, the forces he set loose have gained such strength that they threaten to overwhelm voices for tolerance in Pakistan’s feeble civilian government. They certainly present a nagging challenge for the United States.

Washington has poured billions of dollars into the Pakistani military to combat terrorism, but has long neglected a civilian effort to counter the inexorable pull of conservative Islam. By now the conservatives have entered nearly every part of Pakistani society, even the rank-and-file security forces, as the assassination showed. The military, in fact, has been conspicuously silent about the killing.

“Over time, Pakistani society has drifted toward religious extremism,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a political and defense analyst from Lahore. “This religious sentiment has seeped deep into government circles and into the army and police at lower levels.”

“The lower level are listening to the religious people,” he said.

Indeed, the Pakistan of today, and the brand of Islam much of the nation has embraced, is barely recognizable even to many educated Pakistanis older than the Zia generation. Among them is Athar Minallah, 49, a former cabinet minister and one of the leaders of the lawyers’ protest campaign against Gen. Pervez Musharraf in 2007 and 2008.

Mr. Minallah studied law at Islamic University in Islamabad from 1983 to 1986, and the first lesson any student learned in his day was that the preservation of life was a pillar of Islamic law, he said.

But under General Zia in the 1980s, the government began supporting Islamic warriors to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the Indian control of Kashmir, and the syllabus was changed to encourage jihad. The mind-set of students and graduates changed along with it, Mr. Minallah said.

That change is now no more apparent than among the 1,000 lawyers from the capital, Islamabad, and the neighboring city of Rawalpindi, who have given their signed support for the defense of Mr. Qadri, who has been charged with murder and terrorism.

Their leader is Rao Abdur Raheem, 30, who formed a “lawyers’ forum,” called the Movement to Protect the Dignity of the Prophet, in December. The aim of the group, he said, was to counter Mr. Taseer’s campaign to amend the nation’s strict blasphemy laws, which promise death for insulting the Prophet Muhammad.

In interviews, Mr. Raheem and six of his colleagues insisted they were not members of any political or religious party, and were acting independently and interested only in ensuring the rule of law.

All graduates of different Pakistani universities, they insisted they were liberal, not religious conservatives. Only one had religious training. They said they had all taken part in the lawyers’ protest campaign in 2007 and 2008, and that they were proud that the movement helped reinstate the chief justice.

Yet they forcefully defended Mr. Qadri, saying he had acted on his own, out of strong religious feeling, and they denied that he had told his fellow guards of his plans in advance. He was innocent until proved guilty, they said. They have already succeeded in preventing the government from changing the court venue.

In their deep religious conviction, and in their energy and commitment to the cause of the blasphemy laws, they are miles apart from the older generation of lawyers and law enforcement officials above them.

“I felt this is a different society,” said one former law enforcement official when he saw the lawyers celebrating Mr. Qadri. “There is a disconnect in society.”

The former security official, who has worked in fighting militancy and who requested anonymity because of his work, said that within just four hours of the killing, 2,500 people had posted messages supporting Mr. Qadri on Facebook pages.

Mass rallies championing him and the blasphemy laws have continued since then.

This conservatism is fueled by an element of class divide, between the more secular and wealthy upper classes and the more religious middle and lower classes, said Najam Sethi, a former editor of The Daily Times, a liberal daily newspaper published by Mr. Taseer. As Pakistan’s middle class has grown, so has the conservative population.

Besides his campaign against the blasphemy laws, it was Mr. Taseer’s wealth and secular lifestyle that made him a target for the religious parties, Mr. Sethi said.

“Salman had an easygoing, witty, irreverent, high-life style,” he said, “so the anger of class inequality mixed with religious passion gives a heady, dangerous brew.”

Government officials, analysts and members of the Pakistan Peoples Party, the secular-leaning party to which Mr. Taseer belonged, blame the religious parties and clerics who delivered speeches and fatwas against Mr. Taseer for inciting the attack. On Monday, Mr. Qadri, who confessed to the killing, provided a court with testimony saying he was inspired by two clerics, Qari Hanif and Ishtiaq Shah.

The police say they are now seeking the clerics for questioning, but with the growing strength of the conservative movement on the streets, religious leaders — even those who incite violence and terrorism — are nearly untouchable to the authorities and are almost never prosecuted.

The blasphemy law has been condemned by human rights groups here, who say it has been used to persecute religious minorities, like Christians, and on Monday, Pope Benedict XVI called on Pakistan to undo the law. But the law has become an opportunity for religious parties looking to whip up public sentiment, Mr. Sethi said.

A dark presence in the background is the military establishment, which has sponsored the religious parties for decades, using them as tools to influence politics and as militant proxies abroad. The military also has a heavy influence on much of Pakistan’s brash media, which fanned the flames of the blasphemy issue with sensationalist coverage.

“Democracy has brought us a media that is extremely right-wing, conservative,” Mr. Sethi, 62, said. “Most are in their 30s and are a product of the Zia years, of the textbooks and schools set by the Zia years, which are not the sort of things that we were taught.”

“The silence of the armed forces is ominous,” Mr. Sethi added.

Indeed, whether on the military or civilian side, the government has failed to act forcefully on the case at every stage, the former security official said. Whether through fear or lack of policy, it has done little to challenge the ideology behind the attack or the spreading radicalism in Pakistani society.

“The entire state effort has been on the capture and kill approach: how many terrorists can you arrest and how many can you kill,” the former security official said. “Nothing has been done about the breeding ground of extremism.

“Unless the government does something serious and sustained,” the official warned, “we are on a very dangerous trajectory.”

Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, and Waqar Gillani from Lahore, Pakistan.

N.Y.T
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/world/asia/11pakistan.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha22

Strategic Comments: South Asia still beset by violent extremism

2011-01-11T10:03:00.000-08:00

As a major focus of jihadist activity, threatening not just the states of the region but also Europe and increasingly the United States, South Asia has endured high levels of violent extremism over the past year. The assassination of the governor of Pakistan's Punjab province in January 2011 revealed growing support in that country for radical views. While India recorded counter-terrorism successes, the key to regional stability is the India–Pakistan relationship, which remains tense. In 2010 US Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned of a 'syndicate' of terrorist groups, operating under the umbrella of al-Qaeda and working to destabilise South Asia by provoking a war between India and Pakistan. The evidence is unclear, but relationships between militant groups do appear to have grown closer. And while improved regional intelligence cooperation has begun to have an impact on the activities of jihadists, it is still in its infancy.

India: ISI moratorium brings relative calm

India to some extent bucked the regional trend with only one major act of jihadist violence during 2010 (though it was still plagued by high levels of Naxalite violence in the north, and there were renewed troubles in Kashmir). This was a bomb attack in February in Pune on a bakery popular with foreign visitors, which killed 17 people. Lashkar-e-Tayiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based group behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks, claimed responsibility. But a much-anticipated spate of attacks in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games, held in Delhi in October, did not materialise. This may reflect an improved performance on the part of India's security and intelligence agencies, aided by much-enhanced levels of US assistance, with 13 jihadist plots having been disrupted during the course of the year. It may also reflect efforts on the part of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to discourage further anti-Indian activity by LeT.

Interrogations by the US and India of David Coleman Headley (also known as Daoud Gilani), a US national of part-Pakistani parentage arrested by the FBI in late 2009, have offered important insights into the origins of the Mumbai attacks, in particular the extent of Pakistani official complicity. Headley had been involved in extensive reconnaissance of Mumbai targets on behalf of LeT and has told his interrogators that, at an operational level, ISI had advance knowledge of the operation.

According to Headley, who has pleaded guilty to the charges against him and is cooperating with the FBI, the ISI had seen the Mumbai attacks as a means of restoring the jihadist credentials of LeT. Many of LeT's members, frustrated by the restrictions imposed on them by ISI, had been leaving to join more extreme Pakistani jihadist groups which, in contrast to LeT, had turned against the Pakistani state. However, Headley's account suggests that the top leadership of ISI were not aware of the operation, indicating that ISI's command structure may be less efficient than has been supposed. According to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, the ISI's chief, Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, admitted to then-CIA Director Mike Hayden that at least two retired Pakistani Army officers had been involved in planning the Mumbai attack. This is hardly reassuring given that ISI's 'S Wing', the department responsible for relations with jihadist groups and for operations outside Pakistan, is known to consist solely of retired military officers so that the government can deny responsibility for its actions. Shuja Pasha reportedly told Hayden: 'It was rogue … There may have been people associated with my organisation who were associated with this. That's different from authority, direction and control'.

The wealth of detail that has emerged about the Mumbai operation may have created pressure on ISI to impose a tighter moratorium on further such operations – though in late December 2010 the Indian government issued an alert relating to threats from LeT elements which had supposedly already infiltrated the country.

However, LeT does not appear to have been involved in an increase in violence in Kashmir, which for some years had been in an uneasy state of relative calm guaranteed by a pervasive Indian security presence. In June 2010 the death of a teenager in one of a series of stone-throwing confrontations with security forces led to rioting, which brought the Indian army out of their barracks and onto the streets. A curfew was reimposed. Although Indian Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram initially accused LeT of fomenting unrest, the government has since acknowledged that the violence, which resulted in more than 60 civilian deaths, was in effect a popular uprising with no structure or leadership. The real causes of the unrest are both political and economic – an unrequited desire for independence and frustration with heavy security measures and alleged human-rights abuses, coupled with high levels of youth unemployment. The Indian government has partially acknowledged the validity of some grievances and has sought to minimise the use of force in controlling demonstrations.

Afghanistan: the key link
One reason for the relative lack of jihadist activity inside India may be that jihadism has moved westward, with many Pakistani extremist groups now increasingly focusing their efforts either on operations inside Afghanistan or against the Pakistani state, both in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or the settled areas, including Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Islamabad.

This shift is part of a complex series of moves in anticipation of an endgame in Afghanistan, which is widely expected at some point to involve a negotiation between the Afghan government and the main insurgent groups. Pakistan has sought to insert itself into any such negotiation by manipulating its relationships with some key jihadist groups: the Afghan Taliban, also known as the 'Quetta Shura'; the Haqqani network; Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami; as well as LeT. According to General Michael T. Flynn, the senior US military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, LeT operatives are coming to Afghanistan in increasing numbers to gain combat experience and are active in eight Afghan provinces. Much of the focus of these groups, in particular the Haqqani network, has been on countering an Indian presence in Afghanistan which represents a constant source of strategic concern for Pakistan. Indeed, Pakistani politicians have begun to talk about the resolution of the Afghan conflict as more important than Kashmir in terms of defining their country's relations with India.

Pakistan's ultimate aim is a reasonably stable Afghanistan not inimical to Pakistan and in which Indian influence is limited to a point where it presents no strategic threat. Pakistani political leaders appear to have modified their position to a point where they talk publicly of not wishing to 'repeat the mistakes of the 1990s' – a reference to Pakistan's role in enabling the Taliban to assume power in 1996. Pakistani Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kayani has been increasingly open in discussing with US counterparts Pakistan's interests and ability to help achieve a negotiated settlement. At the same time, Pakistan has shown itself ready to act forcefully to ensure a seat at the negotiating table for itself, as demonstrated by its arrests of a number of high-ranking members of the Quetta Shura – including Taliban military commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar – who were suspected of pursuing negotiations with the Afghan government independently of Pakistan.

Referring to it as a 'national interest', Pakistan has also been more ready to acknowledge the nature of its relationship with the Haqqani network, an organisation with close links to al-Qaeda that has been at the forefront of attacks against both the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Indian interests in Afghanistan. Pakistan's increasingly thinly disguised support for the Haqqani network represents a source of increasing frustration to ISAF commanders, who have determined until now that hot-pursuit operations inside Pakistani territory would prove counterproductive. The nearest ISAF has come to such operations was in September 2010 when US forces killed two Pakistani border guards who were providing covering fire for Haqqani fighters escaping back from Afghanistan into Pakistan. This incident led Pakistan temporarily to close the Torkham Gate border crossing in Khyber Agency through which 1,000 trucks, carrying 25% of ISAF non-lethal supplies, cross each day into Afghanistan, and served as a reminder of ISAF's dependence on Pakistan's goodwill.

Lashkar al-Zil: alliance of jihadist groups

Meanwhile, links between a variety of jihadi groups spanning both sides of the Afghanistan–Pakistan border appear to have grown closer. In 2009, ISAF sources in Afghanistan began to talk of the emergence of a new umbrella group, known as 'Lashkar al-Zil' – Shadow Army – comprising al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has been waging war against the Pakistani state in Pakistan's tribal areas and Swat. The commander of Lashkar al-Zil is reported to be Ilyas Kashmiri, a senior commander in the Pakistani jihadist group Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), who is also thought to have replaced Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, killed in a CIA drone strike in May 2010, as al-Qaeda's military chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Kashmiri has also been identified as the driving force behind a number of recent al-Qaeda plots aimed at Western European targets.

Characterised as a replacement for al-Qaeda's Afghan-based guerrillas known as 'Brigade 055', it is far from clear how structured this new entity is. But ISAF commanders have cited evidence of increasing collaboration between jihadist groups which until recently had pursued their own agendas. Meanwhile, senior US officials have claimed that al-Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan is now limited to as few as 100 fighters. Its leadership in Pakistan's tribal areas has been subject to a ferocious campaign of attrition by means of CIA drone strikes. Lashkar al-Zil may, therefore, enable al-Qaeda to have a greater impact in Afghanistan than the small numbers quoted might suggest. But it is clear that an exclusive focus on al-Qaeda as an organisation may be increasingly meaningless as other related groups take up the al-Qaeda baton.

Al-Qaeda's leadership recently received a shot in the arm when an undetermined number of its senior figures, as well as members of the family of fugitive leader Osama bin Laden, were released after being detained in Iran since 2002. According to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Watan, their release was brokered by Sirajuddin Haqqani, de facto leader of the Haqqani network, as part of negotiations that included the release of Heshmetollah Attarzadeh, an Iranian diplomat kidnapped in Peshawar in late 2008. The same report suggested that Haqqani secured a supply of anti-aircraft weapons as part of the deal.

In addition to holding a number of al-Qaeda leaders under house arrest, Iran has for some time been supplying training, weapons and money to the Afghan Taliban as a relatively low-risk way of sustaining pressure on the US. The release of leaders as significant as Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian military officer, and Suleiman abu Ghaith, a Kuwaiti former al-Qaeda spokesman, suggests that Iran may have decided the moment has come to up the ante. Although experience suggests that any of the al-Qaeda leaders who make their way from Iran to Afghanistan or Pakistan will be targeted by CIA drone strikes, the return to battle of some experienced fighters with good strategic skills is bound to have an impact at least in the short term.

Continuing violence in Pakistan

Within Pakistan itself, levels of jihadist violence remained high throughout 2010, though the total number of fatalities, at 7,199, was markedly lower than the 2009 figure of 11,704, possibly reflecting the slowdown in military operations in Pakistan's tribal areas. Following the operations in 2009 to clear the TTP out of Swat and South Waziristan, the Pakistani Army now has a presence in six of the seven tribal agencies with the majority of insurgents now bottled up in North Waziristan, which was the target of 104 of the 118 drone strikes launched by the CIA in 2010.

According to US Defense Secretary Gates, the Pakistani Army has transferred the equivalent of six divisions from the border with India, representing a significant departure from its previous preoccupations. It has so far resisted US pressure to move against militant groups in North Waziristan, citing the need to consolidate existing gains in the other tribal agencies and to allow its forces to rest and recuperate – a genuine necessity given the high level of casualties suffered during the 2009 operations.

Meanwhile within the settled areas, Pakistan has continued to see high levels of jihadist violence both against its security forces and other government targets, and against minority Shia and Ahmadiyah communities. Much of this violence has been perpetrated by groups such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jaish-e-Mohammed, HUJI and Harkat-ul-Mujahedin which, together with LeT, are collectively known as the 'Punjab Taliban', a term which reflects their growing alignment with the TTP and Afghan Taliban. That such groups pose a serious threat to the Pakistani state is no longer in doubt and reflects the degree to which jihadism in Pakistan has become a double-edged sword. The growing culture of radicalisation within Pakistan was exemplified by the assassination on 4 January 2011 of Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer by a member of his security detail. The assassin, who was allegedly under investigation for his extremist links, was motivated by a desire to punish Taseer for seeking amendments to Pakistan's harsh blasphemy laws. It is unclear whether he was linked to any specific group. The high level of public support for Taseer's murder, including among Pakistan's Islamic clergy, is indicative of the degree to which radical views have entered Pakistan's mainstream.

Green shoots?
Although South Asia remains a major focus of jihadist activity, the news from the region is not unremittingly bad. Intelligence cooperation between South Asian states has seen some cautious improvements over the past two years, notably between Pakistan and Afghanistan where intelligence relationships, though still suffering from high levels of mistrust, are starting to become institutionalised. There are faint signs that South Asian states see the need to take a more direct role in resolving regional differences, with Afghanistan possibly serving as a test case should conditions on the ground reach the point where a political negotiation is a realistic possibility. But in the long term the relationship between India and Pakistan remains the key determinant of regional stability. And for as long as the two states remain locked in an intelligence war, with India supporting Baluch separatist groups, and the TTP and Pakistan continuing to see jihadism as an asymmetric tool against India, a significant drop in violent extremism seems a remote prospect.

IISS
http://www.iiss.org/publications/strategic-comments/past-issues/volume-17-2011/january/south-asia-still-beset-by-violent-extremism/

Clinton asks Arabs to help undermine Iran's nuclear plans

2011-01-11T10:01:00.000-08:00

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 11, 2011; A12

ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton lobbied Arab governments on Monday to help tighten the screws on their Iranian neighbor, saying that sanctions and other measures are hurting Tehran and undermining its ability to acquire components for its nuclear program.

Clinton, in the Middle East for four days of talks, also pushed oil-rich Persian Gulf states to do more to back fragile governments in the West Bank and Iraq to create stability in a region that has so frequently veered into war.

The top U.S. diplomat expressed solidarity with Arabs in battling against domestic extremists, citing Saturday's attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) as an example of extremist-inspired violence in the United States.

"That is not who you are, and that is not who we are," Clinton said in a television talk show in which she took questions from audience members. "We have to make clear that this does not represent either Arabs or Americans."

Repeating a theme she has sounded frequently in trips to the region, Clinton warned that a nuclear-armed Iran would trigger an "extremely dangerous" arms race, and she said Arabs should show common cause with Western powers by helping enforce economic sanctions. She said current sanctions already were having a significant effect, echoing claims made by other administration officials in testimony in recent weeks.

"Sanctions have been working," Clinton said. "They have made it much more difficult for Iran to pursue its nuclear ambitions."

Iran also is having unspecified "technological problems" that have made it slow down its timetables, Clinton said, a possible reference to technical glitches believed to have been caused by a computer virus. "But the real question is, how do we convince Iran that pursuing nuclear weapons will not make it safer and stronger, but just the opposite?" she asked.

Clinton also brought up Iran in private sessions with the United Arab Emirates' president, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan, and with Dubai's ruler, Prime Minister Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum. She is expected to travel to Oman and Qatar later in the week before returning to Washington.

Clinton made her public comments on the set of a popular women's television show, "Soft Talk" - the United Arab Emirates' equivalent of "The View" - where she chatted with the hosts on subjects ranging from her political career to her husband's saxophone playing. The hosts and questioners from the audience asked polite but pointed questions about the prospects for war in the Middle East and why the United States tolerated nuclear weapons for Israel but not for Iran. On the latter question, Clinton said the Obama administration supports the idea of a nuclear-free Middle East, eventually.

The Giffords shooting came up when a young woman in the audience asked why Americans seem to blame all Muslims for the actions of the handful of radicals responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Clinton assured the audience that most Americans are not anti-Muslim, but she explained that extremist voices are amplified because they command media attention.

Asked repeatedly about the foundering Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Clinton reiterated the Obama administration's support for an independent Palestine, but she also called on the gulf states to do more to foster economic stability in the West Bank to create conditions that could lead eventually to a prosperous, independent Palestinian state. Ultimately, to achieve peace, Israelis and Palestinians will have to want an accord badly enough to agree to painful compromises, she said. But in the meantime, there is "an essential role for outsiders," Clinton said.

W.P
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/10/AR2011011006157.html

In Sudan, an Election and a Beginning

2011-01-08T18:33:00.000-08:00

By BARACK OBAMA
Washington

NOT every generation is given the chance to turn the page on the past and write a new chapter in history. Yet today — after 50 years of civil wars that have killed two million people and turned millions more into refugees — this is the opportunity before the people of southern Sudan.

Over the next week, millions of southern Sudanese will vote on whether to remain part of Sudan or to form their own independent nation. This process — and the actions of Sudanese leaders — will help determine whether people who have known so much suffering will move toward peace and prosperity, or slide backward into bloodshed. It will have consequences not only for Sudan, but also for sub-Saharan Africa and the world.

The historic vote is an exercise in self-determination long in the making, and it is a key part of the 2005 peace agreement that ended the civil war in Sudan. Yet just months ago, with preparations behind schedule, it was uncertain whether this referendum would take place at all. It is for this reason that I gathered with leaders from Sudan and around the world in September to make it clear that the international community was united in its belief that this referendum had to take place and that the will of the people of southern Sudan had to be respected, regardless of the outcome.

In an important step forward, leaders from both northern and southern Sudan — backed by more than 40 nations and international organizations — agreed to work together to ensure that the voting would be timely, peaceful, free and credible and would reflect the will of the Sudanese people. The fact that the voting appears to be starting on time is a tribute to those in Sudan who fulfilled their commitments. Most recently, the government of Sudan said that it would be the first to recognize the south if it voted for independence.

Now, the world is watching, united in its determination to make sure that all parties in Sudan live up to their obligations. As the referendum proceeds, voters must be allowed access to polling stations; they must be able to cast their ballots free from intimidation and coercion. All sides should refrain from inflammatory rhetoric or provocative actions that could raise tensions or prevent voters from expressing their will.

As the ballots are counted, all sides must resist prejudging the outcome. For the results to be credible, the commission that is overseeing the referendum must be free from pressure and interference. In the days ahead, leaders from north and south will need to work together to prevent violence and ensure that isolated incidents do not spiral into wider instability. Under no circumstance should any side use proxy forces in an effort to gain an advantage while we wait for the final results.

A successful vote will be cause for celebration and an inspiring step forward in Africa’s long journey toward democracy and justice. Still, lasting peace in Sudan will demand far more than a credible referendum.

The 2005 peace agreement must be fully implemented — a goal that will require compromise. Border disputes, and the status of the Abyei region, which straddles north and south, need to be resolved peacefully. The safety and citizenship of all Sudanese, especially minorities — southerners in the north and northerners in the south — have to be protected. Arrangements must be made for the transparent distribution of oil revenues, which can contribute to development. The return of refugees needs to be managed with extraordinary care to prevent another humanitarian catastrophe.

If the south chooses independence, the international community, including the United States, will have an interest in ensuring that the two nations that emerge succeed as stable and economically viable neighbors, because their fortunes are linked. Southern Sudan, in particular, will need partners in the long-term task of fulfilling the political and economic aspirations of its people.

Finally, there can be no lasting peace in Sudan without lasting peace in the western Sudan region of Darfur. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Darfuris — and the plight of refugees like those I met in a camp in neighboring Chad five years ago — must never be forgotten. Here, too, the world is watching. The government of Sudan must live up to its international obligations. Attacks on civilians must stop. United Nations peacekeepers and aid workers must be free to reach those in need.

As I told Sudanese leaders in September, the United States will not abandon the people of Darfur. We will continue our diplomatic efforts to end the crisis there once and for all. Other nations must use their influence to bring all parties to the table and ensure they negotiate in good faith. And we will continue to insist that lasting peace in Darfur include accountability for crimes that have been committed, including genocide.

Along with our international partners, the United States will continue to play a leadership role in helping all the Sudanese people realize the peace and progress they deserve. Today, I am repeating my offer to Sudan’s leaders — if you fulfill your obligations and choose peace, there is a path to normal relations with the United States, including the lifting of economic sanctions and beginning the process, in accordance with United States law, of removing Sudan from the list of states that sponsor terrorism. In contrast, those who flout their international obligations will face more pressure and isolation.

Millions of Sudanese are making their way to the polls to determine their destiny. This is the moment when leaders of courage and vision can guide their people to a better day. Those who make the right choice will be remembered by history — they will also have a steady partner in the United States.

Barack Obama is the president of the United States.

NYT

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/opinion/09obama.html?_r=1

Southern Sudan on cusp of independence as voters heads to polls Sunday

2011-01-08T18:30:00.000-08:00

IN JUBA, SUDAN Millions of southern Sudanese head to the polls Sunday to decide whether to secede from the north in a historic vote that is widely expected to create the world's newest nation.

After a long and bloody civil war, and after decades of sectarian and ethnic animosities, the mood in this southern capital was electric.

Banners on street corners urged people to vote for secession. Cars carried southern Sudanese flags and bumper stickers that declared "Separation." People danced and sang at rallies and spontaneous celebrations, shouting their support for independence.

"This vote is about gaining our freedom. It's about gaining our dignity," said Kur Ayuen Kou, 32, who had returned to southern Sudan from Australia. He was one of 4 million people displaced by the conflict. "It's about ending our slavery."

But the week-long referendum, the last stage in a U.S.-backed peace process that ended the war, will take place under a cloud of uncertainty.

Many issues that will determine the relationship between the north and south remain unresolved, key among them citizenship rights, contentious border areas and the sharing of Sudan's massive oil reserves after the referendum, the majority of which lie in the south.

The tensions have triggered fears that conflict could erupt again in the months ahead, destabilizing a region where the United States is fighting the rise of Islamic radicalism.

A day before voting began, six people were killed in clashes between southern Sudan's army and rebel militias in an oil-producing region.

An independent southern Sudan would become one of the world's least developed countries, its population among the poorest and most vulnerable, despite receiving nearly $10 billion in oil revenue since 2005. But the region, which is roughly the size of Texas, has few schools, hospitals and paved roads. Illiteracy and malnutrition remain high.

A peaceful vote, and an outcome accepted without dispute, could lay the groundwork for one of the Obama administration's most significant policy successes in Africa. Activists and aid groups have criticized the administration for not being more engaged on the continent and lacking a cohesive policy, especially for Sudan.

On Saturday, U.S. officials arrived in Juba, the southern region's capital, to support the referendum and offer assurances that the United States is committed to southern Sudan's future.

"President Obama has personally invested in Sudan. . . . He's briefed every day on what happens here," J. Scott Gration, the U.S. special envoy to Sudan, told reporters. "That same commitment will continue after the referendum."

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), standing next to Gration, added, "The stability of Sudan is important for all us, for a world that is becoming increasingly more complicated, increasingly more volatile, increasingly more extreme in various places."

More than 2 million people died in the 22-year-long civil war, which pitted Arab Islamic rulers in the north against the south's animist and Christian rebels.

Since 2005, when a peace treaty was signed, the south has been semiautonomous, ruled by the former rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement. As a condition of the peace deal, brokered by the George W. Bush administration, the south was guaranteed a vote on independence.

Nearly 3.9 million people have registered to vote, and a turnout of 60 percent is needed for the results to be valid. Tens of thousands of southerners have arrived here from northern Sudan and from around the world to participate, some carrying all their possessions and hoping to resettle in the south.

The killing in southern Sudan, though, hasn't stopped. Last year, at least 900 people died in tribal fighting and 215,000 were displaced, aid groups say. Weapons are widely available, and militias are abundant. Clan rivalries and corruption are rife. And the gulf between light-complexioned Arabs and darker-skinned Africans remains wide.

Only a few months ago, it was unclear whether the referendum would take place as scheduled. Nearly 80 percent of Sudan's oil is in the south, and few believed Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir would ever allow the south to gain independence. Southern leaders and U.S. officials accused Bashir and his ruling National Congress Party of arming militias to destabilize the south in order to delay the vote. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called south Sudan "a ticking time bomb."

Four months ago, the Obama administration stepped up its engagement with Bashir, offering him incentives, including the possibility that the United States would remove Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terrorism if a timely referendum took place.

Bashir, who came to power in a bloodless military coup in 1989, is facing pressure from outside and inside Sudan. The International Criminal Court has indicted him on genocide charges, accusing him of orchestrating ethnic cleansing in the western region of Darfur. Both Washington and the United Nations have imposed economic sanctions on Sudan. Clashes between Bashir's army and rebels in Darfur have intensified in recent months.

But Bashir and other senior officials appear to have accepted that the south's secession is unavoidable, breaking from party hard-liners who want to keep the south at any cost. Last week, Bashir declared he would be "the first to recognize the south" if voters chose to create their own country.

In an interview Saturday, Kerry said he believes the likelihood of conflict, while still a concern, has diminished.

An independent and mostly Christian south Sudan would also allow Bashir to fulfill a long-held vision of enshrining Islamic sharia law in the constitution, making Islam the north's official religion and Arabic its official language.

One core flash point is the oil-producing border region of Abyei. The south claims it as its own, but the north wants part of it. Tribal militias aligned with both sides live in a tense coexistence, tussling over land, water and grazing areas.

"If you don't resolve Abyei and you don't have some kind of a solution for the border, you risk continuing a sort of low-intensity conflict along the border, which could spiral out of control," said Zach Vertin, Sudan analyst for the International Crisis Group think tank.

A separate referendum for Abyei on whether to join the north or the south has been postponed as leaders work on reaching a compromise.

Nationality is also an issue. It is unclear whether dual citizenship will be allowed between the north and south. If not, many analysts fear that northerners living in the south and southerners living in the north could face targeted attacks or be stripped of their citizenship. That could trigger displacements that would add more stress on poor communities already facing shortages of food, water and medicine.

"We have an unfolding humanitarian crisis layered on top of an existing and forsaken one," said Susan Purdin, the southern Sudan director for the International Rescue Committee, an American relief agency. "And then there's the potential for mass displacement, an upsurge in political and ethnic violence and a larger-scale humanitarian emergency."

Despite its vast oil revenue, southern Sudan has less than 40 miles of paved road. An estimated 80 percent of adults cannot read or write. Less than half the population has access to clean water; one in 10 children die before their first birthday. The police force is poorly trained, and the judicial system is weak.

"We face many challenges ahead of us," said Zachariah Peter Champail, 40, a teacher. "Tribal rivalries is the fatal disease that could kill us in the south. I hope, by the mercy of God, we can overcome this. We have to sing together in unity."

W.P
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/08/AR2011010803388.html?wprss=rss_world

Southern Sudan Feels Freedom Close at Hand

2011-01-08T18:27:00.000-08:00

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

JUBA, Sudan — Philip Geng Nyuol started fighting for independence with his hands.

He eventually graduated to a machete, then Molotov cocktails, then a gun.

“I crossed rivers full of crocodiles,” he said. “And slept in camps in Congo. And ate wild fruits in the bush.”

That was nearly 50 years ago — Mr. Nyuol was on the ground floor of southern Sudan’s independence struggle, before the rebels even had proper weapons. The memories come flooding back to him, bright but patchy, like sun streaming through the trees.

On Sunday, after decades of war and more than two million lives lost, southern Sudan will get the moment it has been yearning for, a referendum on independence. All signs point to the people here voting overwhelmingly for secession, and the largest country on the continent will then begin the delicate process of splitting in two.

The United States government has played a pivotal role in bringing this moment to fruition, pushing the northern and southern Sudanese to sign a peace treaty in 2005 that set the referendum in motion. A proud, new African country is about to be born, but it will step onto the world stage with shaky legs. As it stands now, southern Sudan is one of the poorest places on earth.

Most people here scrape by on less than 75 cents a day. More than three-quarters of adults cannot read. Decades of civil war and marginalization have left the economy so crushed that just about everything is imported, down to eggs. According to Oxfam, a teenage girl has a higher chance of dying in childbirth than finishing elementary school.

Tens of thousands have flocked back to take part in the referendum, and some analysts, possibly reinforcing stereotypes of Africa as always teetering on the edge, warn south Sudan could be the next Somalia, awash in violence. Already, aid agencies are ringing the alarm about a lack of food, water, health care and sanitation.

“We have an unfolding humanitarian crisis, layered on top of an existing and forsaken one,” said the International Rescue Committee, an American aid organization that works in Sudan.

But this is a land of shared sacrifice, and that may be a cohesive force that helps hold southern Sudan together. After all the years of guerrilla warfare and hardship, oppression and persecution at the hands of the Arabs who rule Sudan, people here are deeply invested in holding a peaceful referendum and building the world’s newest nation.

“We are underdeveloped, yes, but we will do it,” said Gideon Gatpan Thoar, the information minister of Unity State, near the north-south border.

United Nations officials here say something remarkable has already happened. In 2009, ethnic fighting swept the south, with several thousand people killed in military-grade attacks, fueled by longstanding ethnic rivalries and a sudden, suspicious increase in high-powered weaponry. Many southerners suspected that the government in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, was instigating the violence, just as it had in the past when Khartoum fomented a civil war within a civil war.

But in the past six months, there has been almost no major ethnic violence. One of the last holdouts, a renegade general who had been leading a revolt deep in the bush, recently agreed to a cease-fire. “What we are seeing is a real effort for reconciliation,” said a United Nations official in Juba, who was not authorized to speak to the news media and spoke anonymously. “All eyes are on the referendum. They’re all trying to get along now.”

But the official added, “Everybody knows these issues will come up in the future.”

Many northern Sudanese who work in the south are now fleeing. Stocks of goods are going down; prices are going up. People are still talking about what-ifs and the possibility of war, because even after the referendum, some very thorny issues need to be carefully handled before the south can peacefully break off. (The actual declaration of independence is scheduled for July.).

The south produces around 75 percent of Sudan’s oil, but it is landlocked, so some arrangement will have to be struck for southern oil to keep flowing through the pipeline in the north. The border will also have to be demarcated, including the tinderbox Abyei area, where Arab nomads historically have crossed back and forth. Billions of dollars of debt will have to be shared.

But most southerners are not thinking of technicalities. This is not simply a political moment, a time for a new line on the map or a new seat at the United Nations.

“This is a dream,” Mr. Nyuol said, “a dream we always hoped would come true, even if it took one thousand years.”

All over the streets of Juba, the capital of the south, brightly colored banners flaunt images of a single open hand, the ballot symbol that stands for secession. In towns across the south, loudspeakers blast messages of freedom. And salvation.

“We are going, we are going, we are going to the promised land,” sang a preacher in Yei, about 100 miles southwest of Juba.

The south is filled with people who have paid for this referendum with their own blood. Amputees hobble down the street in Juba with barely a glance up at the new ministries that their lost limbs helped bring to reality.

Veterans are everywhere, reflective of a society in which men, women and children were all mobilized to fight for independence.

Rose Hawa Simon, a copper-skinned woman with a million-dollar smile, never thought she would see this day, or even that she would be alive right now. She was one of the few female tank drivers for the southern rebels, and in March 1997 her tank was hit and she was shot twice fleeing the flaming wreckage. She does not question the sacrifice.

“Our people were suffering, our people were killed,” she said. “I said: ‘Let me join. Let me go.’ I started training on that tank, because my heart was broken.”

Alex Taban is another former bush fighter. His son, Jackson, followed in his footsteps and joined the rebellion. Jackson was killed in 1997 and buried on the battlefield. As the referendum approaches, Mr. Taban said, “The thoughts are there.”

The British colonizers planted a political minefield in the 1920s when they drew a line across the bottom third of Sudan and declared that northern and southern Sudanese should remain separate. Part of the reason was to check the spread of Islam. To this day, the upper part of Sudan is mainly Muslim and controlled by Arabs; the lower third is mostly animist and Christian, linguistically and culturally more in tune with Kenya, Uganda and central Africa..

A group of southern soldiers mutinied in 1955, a year before Sudan was granted independence. The civil war had begun.

By 1958, Mr. Nyuol, who is in his 70s (though he is not sure of his exact age), was organizing protests at his high school.

“Even then, we could tell what was happening,” he said. “They wanted to Islamize us. They were building mosques all over the place. They wanted us to change our names.”

He went to the forest in 1963. He laid ambushes. He firebombed the cars of Arabs. In the 1980s, after working as a high school math teacher, he ran underground cells to send food and matériel into the bush.

He plans to show up at the polls at dawn on Sunday, even though voting will continue for one week to allow people in far-flung areas to cast their ballots. He will vote for the open hand, for secession, he said.

“We have waited for this, we have fought for it,” he said.

And when the voting is over, he will return to his work building an archive of old pictures of his comrades who died in the 1960s.

Josh Kron contributed reporting.

NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/world/africa/09sudan.html?src=twt&twt=nytimes

Officials Optimistic About Sudan Vote

2011-01-08T18:25:00.000-08:00

By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: January 8, 2011

JUBA, Sudan — Sudanese and American officials said that Sudan appeared well prepared for a historic vote on Sunday on southern Sudan’s independence.

J. Scott Gration, President Obama’s special envoy to Sudan, complimented the country’s preparations for an “on-time, peaceful and transparent referendum.”

A few months ago, United States officials voiced concern that Sudan could revert to civil war if the referendum was mishandled.

But on Saturday, Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, who is visiting Sudan to monitor the election, said those risks had been very significantly reduced.

News agency reports said that at least six people were killed Friday and Saturday in fighting between southern Sudan’s army and a rebel militia.

NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/world/africa/09juba.html?src=twt&twt=nytimes

The Classics Rock

2010-04-05T09:41:00.000-07:00

BY JAKUB GRYGIEL
Is the study of classical history pointless? What useful knowledge will I glean from reading about some dead Roman governor of Britain? How will studying what the Delphic oracle had to say about the Persian advance into Greece help me in my future job at the State Department?

I hear such questions often in my seminar on Thucydides and other classical writers, which I teach at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. My students -- future policymakers, pundits, and managers -- approach the class with a good dose of skepticism about the value (aside from mere amusement) of reading about ancient times. Thucydides's history of the Peloponnesian War -- in particular the Melian Dialogue, a quintessential tale of the small, neutral Melians defending themselves against the strong Athenians -- is relatively common reading among budding wonks. But Tacitus, Herodotus, Julius Caesar, Plutarch? Most students favor the latest tome on the rise of China over the insights of these long-dead writers.

My students' predilections reflect a wider skepticism about the present-day relevance of old texts. For modern academics and policy analysts, ancient authors are guilty of adopting an unscientific approach, relying on anecdotes, and showing a primitive fear of natural events. What good does it do the reader to know that before battle the Romans often consulted a pullarius, a chicken-feeding augur? Such texts say nothing about modern life, critics say, and certainly will not help one get a job at Goldman Sachs or the Pentagon. The ancients were not worried about the movement of the IS and LS curves.

But that's precisely the point. Reading Thucydides's description of the revolution in Corcyra, Tacitus's praise of Agricola, or Julius Caesar's tale of Vercingetorix's uprising is refreshing because these works do not simplify human affairs to logical models. These books are full of contrasts and contradictions, showing above all that not everything can be understood. Human affairs cannot be fully understood through a single lens, whether politics or economics; we are often at the mercy of incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces. Events can sometimes only be appreciated when taken as they are.

With that understanding, let me relate 11 ancient lessons relevant to today's world.

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1. Superstition bests logic. Today's leaders, like those of ancient times, do not think exclusively in terms of gains and losses, balance sheets, costs and benefits, and legal constraints. Rather they are moved by hearsay, superstitions, and dreams. Consider, for instance, the Athenian general Nicias, who spent more time in divination than pondering how to extricate his troops from Sicily. He took a fateful decision to stay at Syracuse because of a nocturnal eclipse of the moon and ended up being executed by the Sicilians.

2. Theology is far more important than economics. People are humans, not cash registers. And humans, even today, tend to hold strong beliefs about the Supreme Being, eternity, and what happens when you drink the waters of the Lethe River. They act here and now on the basis of those beliefs. Many will be led to great sacrifices, incomprehensible to those without an appreciation for the divine, in defense of their faith. Witness the Jews who refused to allow Caligula's statue in the Temple and were spared his full wrath only by his timely and violent demise. Others, notably the early Christians in Rome, were not so lucky, and their bodies littered imperial streets and stadia.

3. Political leaders care about public opinion, but they also care about history and their place in it. They might be willing to trade present public support and admiration -- or even the survival of their city or army -- for a shot at immortality and a place in history books. As a British rebel put it to encourage his men to fight the Roman legions, "Think of those that went before you and of those that shall come after!" Well, they lost, and, in Tacitus's description, an "awful silence reigned everywhere." But he fought not as much for that day as for the past and the future. People engage in politics and war sub specie aeternitatis, with all of its consequences.

4. Money is not the sinews of war. Men are. Wealth is nice, but an enemy's center of gravity is his soul, character, mind, and faith, not his arms or his cities. As Xenophon wrote, "It is not numbers or strength that bring victories in war. No, it is when one side goes against the enemy with the gods' gift of a stronger morale that their adversaries, as a rule, cannot withstand them." On another occasion, the Persians ate on tables of gold and still had a hard time defeating 300 Spartans who ate porridge. Persia's large reservoirs of money and manpower could not bend the Greeks' disdain for the Medes and love of independence. The Greeks never surrendered.

5. Thus, to conquer an enemy, change him. Julius Caesar, when expanding the Roman Empire across Gaul and Britain, knew he needed to sap his new and unwilling constituents' desire to rebel. Calgacus in Caledonia and Vercingetorix in Gaul could be defeated on the battlefield, but the Romans had to assimilate the British and Gauls to rule. Thus, Caesar made the enemies into Romans, providing them with things like schools. Tacitus described the result: "The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as 'civilization,' when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement."

6. Fear is powerful, but love can overcome it. Our modern understanding is that fear motivates individuals and states. (Thank you, Thomas Hobbes!) Politics is then the attempt to calibrate fear to achieve stability, deterrence, or whatever other desired outcome. Yet the ancients teach that love of one's brother in arms, family, city, nation, honor, prestige, justice, and god will make one do things deemed impossible or even suicidal. For instance, the Melians' faith in justice and their gods led them to naively believe that Sparta would help them against Athens.

7. States are fragile, no matter how wealthy, strong, or cohesive. The "school of Hellas," Athens, collapsed into a whirlwind of violence when the plague struck its people. The Athenians ceased to fear their gods and respect the law and "coolly ventured on what they had formerly done in a corner," as Thucydides wrote. In fact, even families, the rock of societies, can fall apart. In the "bloody march of the revolution" in Corcyra, as Thucydides put it, fathers killed their sons, and there "was no length to which violence did not go." Polities may break up unexpectedly, and the beastly state of nature is always around the corner.

8. Expect the unexpected; not everything makes sense all the time. A respected, beloved, and experienced general can be, in a key moment, a pusillanimous and superstitious leader whose actions border on the treasonous. The Athenian general Nicias, mentioned earlier, refused to retreat speedily at the end of the siege of Syracuse -- for no clear reason at all. Much cannot be understood. The ability to comprehend is limited. Live with it.

9. For some, war is not a means to an end, but a goal in and of itself. Some fight because they love the glory of the battlefield, the pleading of the defeated, the plunder, the women, the gold, and the social cohesion of the battalion. For some, war is a way of life and peace the beginning of the end. Take, for instance, Julius Caesar, who loved the Germanic soldiers who fought on his side even though their fellow tribes were threatening Roman imperial interests from across the Rhine. They simply enjoyed a good fight. Similarly, Tacitus describes a Roman officer who "exulting less in the prizes that danger wins than in danger for its own sake, ... sacrificed the assured gains of the past to a novel and hazardous gamble." Or, as Achilles put it in The Iliad, "What I really crave is slaughter and blood and the choking groans of men."

10. Technology extends man's power over nature, but nature is powerful too. An earthquake stopped a Spartan invasion of Attica; a plague devastated Athens and upset its political order; and Julius Caesar barely made it back from Britain to Gaul across the British Channel. Nature can redirect history in unexpected and uncontrollable ways.

11. Success is elusive. Sometimes naiveté, arrogance, and dumb luck turn the most powerful into a loser. (Looking for a Ph.D. dissertation topic? "Stupidity as an independent variable in international relations" would be useful and rare.) Accept this as a tragedy of the human condition. You will never engineer the perfect political administration. Often a group of brilliant generals can lead to a disaster, as the Athenians found out in Sicily.

In the end, we will never fully comprehend power, war, or life. The biggest danger for modern leaders and students of politics is that we think we know more than we do and that we can play with political realities as if they were hard sciences. Reading these classical texts is a good antidote to modern arrogance. Politics is an art, after all.
F.P
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/02/the_classics_rock?page=0,1

Iran says sanctions will not stop nuclear programme

2010-04-02T04:37:00.000-07:00

Matthew Weaver
International sanctions will not stop Iran's nuclear programme, Tehran's most senior nuclear negotiator has said in the face of growing pressure from China and the US over Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Following talks in Beijing with Yang Jiechi, China's foreign minister, Saeed Jalili said China agreed that sanctions were "not effective", Reuters reported.

Earlier this week China had signalled that it would back US calls for a draft UN resolution to impose sanctions against Tehran.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said: "China expresses its serious concern about the Iran nuclear issue situation. China is in close contact with relevant parties and is striving for a proper settlement of the issue through diplomatic means."

The defiant message from Iran's negotiator came as Barack Obama stepped up his efforts to secure Beijing's backing for sanctions with an hour-long phone call to the Chinese president, Hu Jintao. During the call Obama "underscored the importance of working together to ensure that Iran lives up to its international obligations", a White House statement said.

China has a veto on the UN security council and its support would be vital to passing a resolution against Iran. Tehran insists its nuclear programme is only for peaceful power generation.

China traditionally opposes sanctions as it depends on Iran for 11% of its energy needs. But there is speculation that Beijing is willing to drop its opposition in return for US officials not citing China for undervaluing its currency in an annual report due on 15 April, days after Hu's visit.

US officials say a Chinese representative made a commitment in a phone call on Wednesday to discuss the specifics of a potential security council resolution.

The Obama administration is hoping to get a UN resolution on Iran passed by the end of this month.
Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr/02/iran-sanctions-nuclear-us-china

Afghan President Rebukes West and U.N.

2010-04-02T04:33:00.000-07:00

By ALISSA J. RUBIN
KABUL, Afghanistan — Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, delivered extraordinarily harsh criticism on Thursday of the Western governments fighting in his country, the United Nations, and the British and American news media, accusing them of perpetrating the fraud that denied him an outright victory in last summer’s presidential elections.

Just days after meeting with President Obama, Mr. Karzai, who has increasingly tried to distance himself from his American backers, said the coalition troops risked being seen as invaders rather than saviors of the country.

The speech, later broadcast on local television, seemed a measure of Mr. Karzai’s mood in the wake of Mr. Obama’s visit, in which Mr. Obama rebuked the Afghan president for his failure to reform election rules and crack down on corruption. At points in the speech, Mr. Karzai used inflammatory language about the West.

“There is no doubt that the fraud was very widespread, but this fraud was not committed by Afghans, it was committed by foreigners,” Mr. Karzai said. “This fraud was committed by Galbraith, this fraud was committed by Morillon and this fraud was committed by embassies.” Mr. Karzai was referring to Peter W. Galbraith, the deputy United Nations special representative to Afghanistan at the time of the election and the person who helped reveal the fraud, and Philippe Morillon, the chief election observer for the European Union.

Later in the speech he accused the Western coalition fighting against the Taliban of being on the verge of becoming invaders — a term usually used by insurgents to refer to American, British and other NATO troops fighting in Afghanistan.

“In this situation there is a thin curtain between invasion and cooperation-assistance,” said Mr. Karzai, adding that if the perception spread that Western forces were invaders and the Afghan government their mercenaries, the insurgency “could become a national resistance.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Karzai suffered a political defeat when the lower house of Parliament rejected a revision of the election law that would have allowed him to appoint all the members of the agency that investigates election irregularities. Currently the United Nations appoints three of the five members.

The American Embassy and the United Nations mission in Kabul had no comment on Mr. Karzai’s speech. Both, along with other Western governments, are trying to persuade Mr. Karzai to make election reforms that better safeguard against a repeat of the fraud, since without changes Western countries are unlikely to want to help pay for the parliamentary elections scheduled for September.

Mr. Galbraith, who was dismissed by the United Nations after the disputed election, called Mr. Karzai’s speech “so absurd that I considered it an April Fools’ Day joke.” He also said Mr. Karzai’s speech “underscores how totally unreliable this guy is as an ally.”

Mr. Morillon could not immediately be reached.

Mr. Karzai also sharply criticized The New York Times, the BBC, The Times of London and CNN, all of whom he accused of spreading the accusations of fraud. “They know the election was right, but on a daily basis they are call me a fraudulent president in order to pressure me,” he said.

He further singled out The Times for criticism. “Every day my dignity as a president of this country is being attacked. The New York Times and their papers, though, they know the election was right, but on a daily basis they call me a fraudulent president in order to pressure me and put mental pressure on me,” he said.

At times Mr. Karzai almost seemed to be having a conversation with himself, saying that he needed to let go of his anger over the election, but then was unable to do so. “We have our national interest, and by confronting the foreigners our national interest will be damaged,” he said.

“We should put the reality and the interests of our people before us and go forward towards the future. But we have a knot in our heart; our dignity and bravery has been damaged and stepped on,” he said.

One motive for the angry speech might be an attempt to protect himself politically, since it is probable that he will have to accede to Western demands that he remove the officials on the election commission who were seen as most complicit in the fraud. For months the United States, other Western countries and the United Nations have quietly urged him both to change the leadership of the commission and the system of appointing the commission’s members. Mr. Karzai currently appoints the commission’s chairman, which heightens suspicions about its independence.

“These foreigners came to me several times asking me to bring reform. When I asked what reform means, it means to sack Mr. Ludin and Mr. Najafi,” said Mr. Karzai, referring to Azizullah Ludin, the commission’s chairman, and Daoud Ali Najafi, the head of the commission’s secretariat, who were present at the speech and whom he lionized several times over, lauding their patriotism and courage.

He went on to say that he might be forced to comply with the demand, but he promised that the two men “will go to other major national posts.”

Mr. Karzai appeared about to agree to the West’s demands to change the election process because, he said, if he did not, Western donors would withhold the money Afghanistan needs to hold the parliamentary elections.

“He wants to portray himself as a national figure who stands against the foreigners,” said Ahmed Wali Massoud, a strong supporter of Abdullah Abdullah, the candidate who ran closest to Mr. Karzai in last summer’s election.

Diplomats quietly worried about another problem: that the anger toward the West would be used by antiwar advocates in countries with troops here to bolster their arguments for withdrawal. “People will hear this and say ‘Why are we helping this man?’ ” said a Western diplomat in Kabul.

Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting.
N.Y.T
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/02/world/asia/02afghan.html?th&emc=th

Iran Plays Host to Delegations After Iraq Elections

2010-04-02T04:30:00.000-07:00

BAGHDAD — Iran may seem an unlikely place to turn for guidance when it comes to putting together a democratic government, but that is exactly what most of Iraq’s political class did immediately after last month’s parliamentary elections.

The ink was hardly dry on the polling results when three of the four major political alliances rushed delegations off to Tehran. Yet none of them sent anyone to the United States Embassy here, let alone to Washington.

Nor has Washington tried to intervene. Even Ayad Allawi, the secular candidate whose Iraqiya coalition won the most seats — and renounced Iranian support in seeking a parliamentary majority — has heard nothing from the Americans.

“Maybe they don’t like my face, I don’t know,” he joked, then added more seriously, “I think they don’t want to be associated with any visit, so they wouldn’t be seen as siding with one against the other.”

The Iranians, however, have shown no such qualms, publicly urging the Shiite religious parties to bury their differences so they can use their superior numbers to choose the next prime minister. Their openness, and Washington’s reticence, is a measure of the changed political dynamic in Iraq. Even though more than 90,000 American troops remain in Iraq, no one seriously doubts they are leaving, taking a slice of America’s political influence with them.

Before the full results were announced here, President Jalal Talabani, from the Kurdistan Alliance, and Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi, from the Shiite-dominated Iraqi National Alliance, flew to Tehran on Saturday, ostensibly to attend celebrations of the Persian New Year, which had actually begun weeks earlier. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who ran a close second to Mr. Allawi, sent a delegation from his State of Law alliance at the same time.

“Iraqiya is the only one who doesn’t flock to Iran,” said Rend al-Rahim, an Iraqiya candidate. “They think Iran is an arbiter and broker in Iraqi politics and that they need Iran to put their house in order.”

Mr. Allawi himself said he had no intention of making that pilgrimage. “I don’t think it’s wise to do so,” he said. “I don’t think it’s in the interest of Iraq, nor in the interest of Iran, to go and discuss the formation of a government.”

When Mr. Allawi, whose party was propelled by millions of Sunni Arab voters, toured neighboring Arab states during the election campaign, his Shiite opponents cried foul, accusing him of encouraging Arab meddling in Iraq’s electoral affairs. Some noted that he spent more time in Saudi Arabia than he did at campaign appearances in Iraq.

Entifadh Qanbar, a senior aide to a leading Shiite politician, Ahmad Chalabi, and a spokesman for the Iraqi National Alliance, said the official visits were simply for celebrations of the Persian New Year, or Nowruz, and were not an attempt to win Iranian backing for Iraqi political groupings.

“It’s very mutual,” he said. “Iran has influence inside Iraq and Iraq has influence inside Iran, we have the Marjiya here for instance.” The Marjiya, Shiite Islam’s highest religious authority, is located in Najaf, Iraq.

“Allawi goes on a tour of Arab countries, and they accuse the Arabs of meddling in Iraqi politics,” said Ms. Rahim of Iraqiya. “When half of the Iraqi politicians rush to Tehran, nobody comments.”

“The border with Iran is a continuous stretch of history and civilization,” Mr. Qanbar said, “while the border with Arab countries is a desert.”

But Iran and Iraq have their differences as well. While Iranians are overwhelmingly Shiite, they are Persians, while Iraq’s Shiites are mostly Arabs, and make up only 60 percent of its population.

The Shiite religious parties dominate two of Iraq’s four biggest electoral alliances. Mr. Maliki’s Dawa Party is the major component of his State of Law alliance, which won 89 seats to Iraqiya’s 92. In the Iraqi National Alliance, the largest grouping belongs to followers of the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, who has been living in Iran since 2007. Sadrists account for about 40 of the I.N.A.’s 70 seats in the next Parliament. Most of the rest belong to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, formerly the largest Shiite party.

In the months leading up to Iraq’s March 7 election, Iranian diplomats were openly pushing for Mr. Maliki to join the I.N.A. But the Sadrists — who blame Mr. Maliki for a military crackdown that destroyed their militia’s power — blocked any agreement that would have made him their candidate for prime minister. So Mr. Maliki decided to start his own alliance.

Together, the two Shiite-dominated alliances would easily have bested Mr. Allawi’s, though they may still have needed support from Kurds or other parties to make a majority — 163 of the 325 seats in Parliament.

Some see that as evidence that Iran’s role in Iraq is weakening, or at least being limited. Brett H. McGurk, who worked in Iraq for the National Security Council during the Bush and early Obama administrations and is now at the Council on Foreign Relations, says Iran will remain influential but not decisively so.

“Iraq, ironically, is the one place in the Middle East where people are pushing back against the Iranians, and succeeding,” Mr. McGurk said. “Maliki broke away at great personal courage, and under tremendous pressure from Tehran. Now, they will try to bring Maliki and the I.N.A. back together. But at best it’s a Humpty Dumpty alliance, fragile and fractious as ever.”

Many analysts say Mr. Allawi can hope to win over enough Shiite and Kurdish supporters from the other blocs only if he gets some support from Iran.

“I don’t have any relations with Iran, basically, which is regrettable,” Mr. Allawi said.

“I don’t think there’s any opportunity for Allawi to win the support of Iran,” said Jabir Habib Jabir, an expert in Iraqi politics at Baghdad’s Mustansiriya University. “It’s been years, he cannot undo it in days.”

Within days, though, there were signs that Mr. Allawi might be trying to do so. Iraq’s deputy prime minister, Rafie al-Issawi, who is with Mr. Allawi’s Iraqiya alliance and in charge of leading his negotiations toward forming a governing coalition, met with Iran’s ambassador Wednesday.

“The formation of the next government is an internal Iraqi issue,” Mr. Issawi said afterward.

The Iranian ambassador, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, was equally circumspect. “Just as we do not accept any interference in our internal affairs, we do not allow ourselves to interfere in the affairs of others,” he said.

Nonetheless, the two officials talked for three hours. And when President Talabani returned from Iran on Wednesday, his first official visit was a private one to Mr. Allawi’s home.
By ROD NORDLAND
N.Y.T
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/02/world/middleeast/02iraq.html?th&emc=th

Roots of Copenhagen Failure: Nature Does Not Recognize Nations

2010-03-26T09:51:00.000-07:00

Bo Ekman
STOCKHOLM: On the evening of December 18, 2009, an increasingly shaky world order came to the end of the road. Seventeen years of climate negotiations – via Kyoto – had collapsed. The photographs documented the leaders’ despair, tormented by their inability to deliver the deal they knew the world needed. The so-called “deal” reached by the US and five developing nations was a fig leaf to cover the collapse – an impossible political solution to a geophysical problem. Unless the interconnected, systemic nature of the challenge we face is recognized, there will be no turning back from the disaster.

In my view, the Copenhagen process had no chance of success. If historian Barbara Tuchman were alive today she would have added another chapter to her book, "The March of Folly," on humanity’s capacity for collective follies throughout history. Copenhagen provides yet more evidence that the current constitutional regimes are incapable of resolving global problems. The financial crisis showed this, as did the failure of the biodiversity conference, Doha trade round and the whole host of issues.

Unless the interconnected, systemic nature of the challenge we face is recognized, there will be no turning back from the disaster.

The world today works as tightly interwoven, interactive and trans-boundary systems with power organized piecemeal, split among individual nations, emerging through historical accidents and political developments. The continual struggle of nations to assert their own interests ends up hurting common interest. We presume that conflicts are to be resolved in negotiations, which are ultimately based on sovereignty postulates. It was the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that gave birth to the order built on the principle of national sovereignty. But no world order lasts forever. Its legitimacy lasts only as long as it delivers a balance of power, growth, and is good at solving problems. The current regime, formulated after World War II, has proved ineffective as globalization moved some of the prerequisites for solutions to the supranational level.

In no other area is this clearer than on the environment and climate change. The biosphere is itself a planetary, adaptive, interactive, constantly changing and self-regulating system. It is an indivisible whole. Nature does not logically divide into nations. You cannot fix the seas alone, the forests on their own or the atmospheric CO2 balance, or the interaction between biodiversity and ecosystem productivity on their own.

Nature does not logically divide into nations.

The negotiating process on climate issue, shaped by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), had the impossible task of finding a solution to an extremely complex geophysical and ecological problem by getting 192 nations to agree, based on everyone's own national interests, goals, means and to share responsibilities for actions for years to come. But had 192 nations reached the "perfect agreement," it would have lacked the financial supervisory authority, or powers of enforcement over those nations in case of their non-compliance. Instead the negotiators tried to solve the wrong problem: to reach the political compromises which would primarily secure the hegemonic interests of the major powers. But to avert climate change, actions must be taken based on the ecological system conditions, not according to the relative bargaining power of nation.

In fact all of the UN environmental conferences and conventions have demonstrated the ineffectiveness of the current approach to solving global systemic problems. Kyoto became a paper tiger, torn apart by short-sighted lack of mutual solidarity among nations. Of some 500 international agreements, only a handful are followed to the letter. A nearby example for Sweden is the Baltic Sea, a drainage basin fed by the waters of fourteen countries. Four international treaties are in force to protect the sea from oxygen depletion caused by runoff from agriculture and pollutants from shipping and other sources, though with mixed result from the late intervention.

The problem is more fundamental. For a couple of centuries, science and learning have been characterized by a reductionist method. Man has sought to know more about increasingly narrower and fragmented phenomenon. That’s why we say that the devil is in the details. But the financial crisis and environmental crisis revealed that the real devil is in the system. Most important is to understand the whole picture, how things are interconnected. It is only then that we can shape or repair the system for safety and resilience.

But the financial crisis and environmental crisis revealed that the real devil is in the system.

It is thus an absurdity that leaders should rely on their very own national scientific advisers. Ecosystems are not national, but a large part of the research is. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) consisting of thousands of scientists from all over the world (set up in 1988) was a promising initiative. But its scientific credibility has been questioned along with its political neutrality. The recent decision by the United Nations and IPCC to establish an independent review by the Netherlands-based group of fifteen national academies, the InterAcademy Council, is a welcome attempt to restore the panel’s scientific integrity. This international scientific review will likely uncover a number of deletions from the original Summary for Policymakers at the insistence of non-scientist governmental officials. But it should also show the recent sensationalized irregularities in the 2007 report, such as the conclusions on the Tibetan glaciers that did not source back to peer-reviewed research, were discovered by IPCC scientists themselves, an indication of a well-functioning, ongoing scientific inquiry.

The reality of an interconnected and interdependent world has rendered current constitutional maps outmoded. The world does not have the mechanisms needed to solve today's major challenges. Therein lies the growing danger for conflicts and war. In the field of economics, the financial crisis showed that current institutions and regulatory frameworks were not sufficient to predict or manage the financial risks that the intensification of global dependencies had created. The political grouping, the G8, became the G20. But it is an informal grouping, not rooted in democratic foundations, comprised of the twenty most important industrial and emerging-market countries. The G20 does not have close contact with an electorate or local opinion. The G20 also sees the problem only from one, but of course, very important point of view, namely to foster cooperation on global economic stability and to strengthen the international financial architecture.

The reality of an interconnected and interdependent world has rendered current constitutional maps outmoded.

National boundaries inevitably set limits for political solidarity. If the world were a single country, it could never operate politically with the gaps, inequalities, exploitation of man and nature which are today’s reality. The international system's imperfection in relation to today's reality is at the heart of tomorrow's conflicts. This came to the surface in Copenhagen.

President Roosevelt convened his closest confidants the week after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941. He asked them to begin thinking immediately about how the world should be structured for peaceful coexistence in the peace to come. He took a pro-active responsibility for the future. Therefore, the debacle in Copenhagen should be taken for what it actually is, the collapse of already bygone institutions and mechanisms to reach agreement. The world now needs new configurations that secure economic growth, social stability and ecological re-stabilization in a relentlessly, globalizing world. The task is enormous. And one that no nation can do alone.The important question to ask is not what went wrong in Copenhagen, but how a democratically grounded order will be formed in this new world. It is time for answers to the question: How on earth can we live together with nature?

Bo Ekman is Founder and Chairman Tällberg Foundation. This essay is translated and adapted from the piece first published in Dagens Nyheter.
Yaleglobal Online
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/roots-copenhagen-failure-nature-does-not-recognize-nations

Pakistan and the Afghanistan End Game – Part II

2010-03-20T15:42:00.000-07:00

Ashley J. Tellis
WASHINGTON: As the search for stability in Afghanistan intensifies, the threat of violence and a wider conflagration is growing. In an effort to secure a dominant position in Afghanistan and blunt India’s rise, Pakistan has mobilized militants and terrorists on both sides of its borders. While the Afghan Taliban fighting US and NATO forces continue to enjoy Pakistan’s support, Islamabad has exchanged its previous policy of supporting anti-Indian insurgencies with that of supporting terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which mounted the deadly assault on Mumbai in 2008. With tension persisting between the two South Asian rivals, this tactic not only increases the prospect of major war between New Delhi and Islamabad, but, given Lashkar’s growing reach, could have global consequences.

The disruption of the India-Pakistan peace process, which has remained frozen since the Mumbai attack, is due principally to Pakistan’s unwillingness to bring to justice the Lashkar leadership, which has enjoyed the support of the country’s powerful intelligence organization – Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). After almost two decades of punting, many Pakistanis today – academics, policy analysts, and even officials – concede that fomenting insurgencies within India has been a main component of Pakistan’s national strategy. But that late admission comes long after Pakistan’s military establishment moved to replace its failed strategy of encouraging insurgencies with the more lethal device of unleashing terrorism.

The disruption of the India-Pakistan peace process is due principally to Pakistan’s unwillingness to bring to justice the Lashkar leadership.

Since its formation in 1947, Pakistan has sought to stir up insurgencies within India. The earliest efforts in 1947-48 centered on provoking insurrections in Jammu and Kashmir in hopes that an internal rebellion would permit the seizure of this disputed state. These efforts failed miserably: through three major conflicts with India, the people of Kashmir stayed loyal to New Delhi. After Pakistan’s defeat in the 1971 war, Islamabad attempted to stoke other secessionist movements, this time not for any territorial gains but merely to avenge its humiliation. But this effort too was beaten back by the Indian state. Finally, in 1989, when the first genuinely Kashmiri uprising against New Delhi broke out, Islamabad quickly threw its support behind the insurgents who were led by the secular Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). This revolt, however, was quickly overpowered by the Indian Army by 1993 – and the defeat forced the momentous change in Islamabad’s strategy.

Flushed with confidence flowing from the success of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan during the 1980s, Pakistan sought to replicate in the east what it had managed in the west, namely, the defeat of a great power larger than itself. Using the same instruments as before – radical Islamist groups that had sprung up throughout Pakistan – Pakistan’s ISI pushed into Jammu and Kashmir for the first time in 1993 with combat-hardened aliens tasked to inflict large-scale murder and mayhem.

Through this act, Pakistan’s traditional strategy of fomenting insurgencies finally gave way to a new approach, namely, fomenting terrorism (an instrument that most Pakistanis still refuse to acknowledge). No longer would Pakistan rely on dissatisfied indigenous populations to advance Islamabad’s interests; rather, vicious bands of Islamic terrorists, most of whom had little or no connection to any existing grievances with India, would be unleashed indiscriminately to kill large numbers of civilians.

Flushed with confidence flowing from the success of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan during the 1980s, Pakistan sought to replicate in the east what it had managed in the west.

From 1996, these attacks were deliberately extended at ISI’s behest throughout India and of all the myriad terrorist organizations involved, none enjoyed greater state support than Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). LeT has now sprung to international attention because of the bloodbath in Mumbai in November 2008, but the group has been active in South Asia since 1987, first in Afghanistan and thereafter in India.

Of all the terrorist groups ISI has sponsored over the years, LeT has been especially favored because its dominant Punjabi composition matched the primary ethnicity of the Pakistani Army and ISI; and its puritanical Salafism undergirded its willingness to engage in risky military operations throughout India. Many in ISI are deeply sympathetic to LeT’s vision of recovering “lost Muslim lands” in Asia and Europe and resurrecting a universal Islamic Caliphate through the instrument of jihad.

Although Pakistani propaganda often asserts that LeT is a Kashmiri organization moved by the Kashmiri cause, it is nothing of the kind. The 3,000-odd foot soldiers who man its fighting ranks are drawn primarily from the Pakistani Punjab. Indian intelligence today estimates that LeT maintains some kind of presence in twenty-one countries worldwide with the intention of supporting or participating in what its leader Hafeez Saeed has called the perpetual “jihad against the infidels.” Consequently, LeT’s operations in and around India, which often receive the most attention, are only part of a large pastiche that has taken LeT operatives and soldiers as far afield as Australia, Canada, Chechnya, China, Eritrea, Kosovo, Oman, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and even the US.

Washington has now reached the conclusion that LeT represents a threat to America’s national interests second only to Al Qaeda and in fact exceeds the latter by many measures.

Given the organization’s vast presence, its prolific capacity to raise funds worldwide, and its ability to conduct militant activities at great distances from its home base, LeT has become ISI’s preferred instrument for its ongoing covert war with India. This includes the campaign that Pakistan is currently waging against the Indian presence in Afghanistan and against US counterinsurgency efforts in that country. Active LeT operations in Pakistan’s northwestern border areas involve close collaboration with Al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network, and Jamiat al-Dawa al-Quran wal-Sunna. Thanks to these activities and others worldwide, Washington has now reached the conclusion that LeT represents a threat to America’s national interests second only to Al Qaeda and in fact exceeds the latter by many measures.

Based on this judgment, President Barack Obama has told Pakistan’s President Asif Zardari that targeting LeT would be one of his key conditions for a renewed US strategic partnership with Pakistan. Thus far, however, the Pakistani military, which still rules Pakistan even though it does not formally govern, has been non-responsive, preferring instead to emphasize the threat India supposedly poses to Pakistan – thereby implicitly justifying ISI’s continued reliance on terrorism – while demanding further US assistance. Such a demand is intended to inveigle the US into Pakistan’s relentless competition with India. The military’s dismissal of Obama’s injunctions regarding LeT are driven at least partly by its belief that all US warnings are little other than special pleading on the behalf of India.

The Pakistani military has no interest in dismantling any terrorist assets that it believes serve it well.

Since assaulting India has become a quite satisfying end in itself, the Pakistani establishment has no incentive whatsoever to interdict this group. To the degree that ISI has attempted to control LeT, it is mainly to prevent excessive embarrassment to its sponsors or serious crises leading to war. But outside of these aims, the Pakistani military has no interest in dismantling any terrorist assets that it believes serve it well.

Military leaders in Rawalpindi have thus not only failed to understand that American concerns about LeT derive fundamentally from its own growing conviction that the group’s activities worldwide make it a direct threat to the US, but they also continue to harbor the illusion that their current strategy of unleashing terrorism will enervate India, push it out of Afghanistan, and weaken US stabilization efforts there. Such a strategy is designed to make Islamabad the kingmaker in determining Kabul’s future. This too promises to become one more in the long line of cruel illusions that has gripped Pakistan since its founding.

Ashley J. Tellis is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of “Reconciling with the Taliban? Toward an Alternative Grand Strategy in Afghanistan.”
Yale Global Online
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/pakistan-and-afghanistan-end-game-%E2%80%93-part-ii

Taliban Arrests Have Halted Early Talks, Former Envoy Says

2010-03-20T04:20:00.000-07:00

By ALISSA J. RUBIN
KABUL, Afghanistan — The former top United Nations official in Afghanistan said that recent arrests of high-ranking Taliban figures by Pakistan had severed important secret communications between the Taliban and the West meant to foster peace negotiations.

Kai Eide, the former special representative in Afghanistan for the United Nations secretary general, told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Friday that, for the past year, the United Nations had been quietly involved in early discussions with the Taliban in Dubai. He said those talks were upended by the arrests of senior Taliban leaders, including the group’s second in command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in February.

Mr. Eide, who stepped down earlier this month, said the arrests undermined efforts to start talks and to build trust that are necessary for substantive peace negotiations.

“The Pakistanis did not play the role that they should have played,” he said in the interview, which he confirmed to The New York Times.

There has been a swirl of often contradictory reports about the arrest of Mullah Baradar, and a wide range of American and international reactions to it. Some American officials have welcomed Pakistan’s new enthusiasm for hunting down Taliban leaders. Others have questioned Pakistan’s motivations in detaining Mullah Baradar, who was open to early discussions about peace negotiations.

On Friday, the spokesman for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, Abdul Basit, said Pakistan was committed to an Afghan-led process of reconciliation with the Taliban, according to Reuters. “Any other contentions, we believe, are a misrepresentation,” he said.

Mr. Eide’s emphasis on talks with the Taliban seems to underscore growing differences between the United States and some of its allies over the timing of negotiations.

The United Nations and Western European countries increasingly agree that ending the war in Afghanistan will require internationally supported agreements with the Taliban and that discussions need to start immediately. The Americans support negotiations on a slower timetable that would enable military operations to weaken the Taliban so they would be more vulnerable at the bargaining table.

The clearest enunciation of the European view was made by the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, who laid out a road map to negotiations with the Taliban in a speech earlier this month at M.I.T. He said the United Nations could serve as a neutral meeting ground for parties who distrusted one another.

Mr. Miliband did not eschew military efforts, but suggested focusing instead on setting conditions for negotiations. Mr. Eide’s overtures, which he described in the BBC interview as “talks about talks,” were an initial step in that direction.

Although Mr. Miliband ruled out discussions with those committed to Al Qaeda’s brand of militancy, he strongly endorsed an effort to reach out to almost everyone else, and without any preconditions. “Dialogue is not appeasement,” he said.

Mr. Eide and others said that Afghan government figures had already reached out to the Taliban. Other interlocutors have also been involved, including Saudi Arabia, which has hosted some initial discussions, according to senior members of the Karzai government.
N.Y.T

US general: Gay Dutch soldiers caused Srebrenica massacre

2010-03-20T04:16:00.001-07:00

Ian Traynor, Europe correspondent
A senior US officer and former Nato commander sparked outrage in the Netherlands today by declaring that gay soldiers in the Dutch military were one of the reasons for the Srebrenica massacre, the worst act of mass murder in Europe committed since the second world war.

The Dutch government and military responded with anger and contempt after General John Sheehan, a retired marine corps officer who was Nato's supreme commander at the time of the 1995 atrocity, told a US Senate hearing that gay soldiers in the military could result in events like Srebrenica.

In July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces overran the Bosnian Muslim enclave under the protection of Dutch UN peacekeepers and killed 8,000 Muslim males, making the event a traumatic national disgrace for the Dutch.

Following recent remarks from Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, that Europeans had gone soft, Sheehan argued that changes after the end of the cold war had reduced Europe's appetite for combat.

"They declared a peace dividend and made a conscious effort to socialise their military – that includes the unionisation of their militaries, it includes open homosexuality. That led to a force that was ill-equipped to go to war," he said.

"The case in point that I'm referring to is when the Dutch were required to defend Srebrenica against the Serbs. The battalion was under-strength, poorly led, and the Serbs came into town, handcuffed the soldiers to the telephone poles, marched the Muslims off, and executed them. That was the largest massacre in Europe since world war two."

He added that the Dutch chief of staff had told him that having gay soldiers at Srebrenica had sapped morale and contributed to the disaster.

"Total nonsense," said General Henk van den Breemen, the Dutch chief of staff at the time. The Dutch embassy in Washington dismissed the US officer's argument as worthless, Maxime Verhagen, the Dutch foreign minister said that it was not worth commenting on, and the Dutch defence ministry voiced incredulity.

"It is unbelievable that a man of this rank is stating this nonsense, for that's what it is," said the ministry.

"Scandalous and not worthy of a soldier," added Eimert van Middelkoop, the Dutch defence minister.

The UN war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia in The Hague – where the Dutch government sits – has found that the mass murder in Srebrenica was an act of genocide, the only one in Europe since the Holocaust.

Sheehan argued that openly allowing homosexuals in the military was part of a post-cold war "socialisation" process in Europe that had concentrated on peacekeeping in the belief that Germany would not attack again and that Russia was no longer a threat.
the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/19/gay-dutch-soldiers-srebrenica

Pakistan and the Afghanistan End Game – Part I

2010-03-14T05:55:00.000-07:00

Ahmed Rashid
LAHORE. After the failure of high level talks between India and Pakistan over their long running disputes, both countries are now locked in an escalating proxy war in Afghanistan. If no solution is found to reconcile Pakistani and Indian interests in Afghanistan, the coming months might see stepped up terrorist attacks against Indians in Kabul and the return of militants infiltrating Indian Kashmir from Pakistan. The fact that in recent weeks a large number of Taliban operatives have been captured in Pakistan signals an intensified struggle over the fate of Afghanistan rather than a winding down of the conflict.

With Afghan President Hamid Karzai seeking negotiations with the Taliban, some of whom Pakistan distrusts, along with India increasingly concerned about the Pakistan-backed Taliban coming to power in Kabul, the conflict is reaching a new stage of intensity. Even as an intensive US and NATO military offensive against the Taliban is underway in southern Afghanistan, neighboring states are already considering the Americans as good as gone and preparing for an end game scenario with old rivalries renewed.

The fact that in recent weeks, a large number of Taliban operatives have been captured in Pakistan signals an intensified struggle over the fate of Afghanistan.

While Pakistan charges India with undermining Pakistani influence in Afghanistan, India fears that Pakistan is preparing the ground for pro-Pakistan elements from the Taliban to negotiate with Kabul, in an attempt to force India out of Afghanistan after US forces start a slow withdrawal in July 2011. Meanwhile, a year after Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) carried out Mumbai attack they are yet to be brought to justice. Against this backdrop, Indian and Pakistani Foreign Secretaries met in New Delhi (25 February ) but failed to make any progress. Just a day later a suicide squad in Kabul hit two hotels, killing 16 people including 7 Indian civilians and two Indian army majors. Three days later the Afghan government accused LeT of being responsible for the Kabul attack.

In a series of briefings to the Pakistani and foreign media, Pakistani generals have portrayed India as seriously threatening Pakistan, using its embassy and consulates in Afghanistan to harbor, train and fund Baloch separatists who are waging an insurgency in Balochistan province, trying to undermine Pakistan’s influence in Afghanistan and even for backing elements of the Pakistani Taliban. Tensions heightened after four Pakistani workers were gunned down in Kandahar in early March by unknown assailants. The Pakistani media has accused the Indian consulate in Kandahar of organizing the attack.

Pro-military commentators have risen to the occasion demanding that as Pakistan now faces a two front situation, India should be pushed out of Afghanistan by the Taliban or as a pre-condition which the US must accept, if and when peace talks between the Taliban and the Kabul government are held.

India was seriously rattled when the US and NATO agreed at the January 28 London conference on Afghanistan to begin “re-integrating” Taliban fighters.

India was seriously rattled when the US and NATO agreed at the January 28 London conference on Afghanistan to begin “re-integrating” Taliban fighters and field commanders and lavishly funding a peace package for them. President Karzai went much further by demanding ‘reconciliation’ with the mainstream Taliban led by Mullah Mohammed Omar. India was aghast at the unanimity of the international community which is tiring of the war in Afghanistan, as India has vociferously opposed any dialogue with the Taliban.

India sees the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda working closely with anti-Indian groups based in Pakistani Punjab, such as LeT who have begun to re-infiltrate into Indian Kashmir to restart the guerrilla war which has been dormant since 2004. Even US officials say that Punjabi militants are increasingly fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Although Karzai has declared that “Afghanistan does not want proxy war between India and Pakistan,” India’s real concern is that Pakistan appears determined to position itself center stage of any dialogue between the Taliban and Kabul. The ISI recently arrested key Afghan Taliban leaders who have been engaged in talks with representatives of the Karzai administration without Pakistan’s ISI being involved.

Senior US officials in Washington say the initial arrest of the powerful second in command Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Karachi in early February was accidental – after the CIA discovered the location of a meeting of Taliban commanders where Barader was found. The ISI arrested him and then decided to bring in all his supporters resulting in more arrests. Kabul’s request that Barader be extradited was refused. Despite repeated requests, US officials have been given only limited access to question Barader and even less access to question other arrested Taliban.

India’s real concern is that Pakistan appears determined to position itself center stage of any dialogue between the Taliban and Kabul.

However despite his significant sanctuary in Pakistan, Barader was at odds with the ISI talking independently to Karzai’s representatives without taking the ISI into confidence and instead enlisting the help of Saudi Arabia. Over the past twelve months Saudi Arabia has been intermittently involved in helping the two sides hold informal talks that so far have not led to real negotiations, although they have the potential to do so. The Saudis, although close allies of Pakistan, had also appeared willing to keep the ISI out of the dialogue.

The Obama administration is still far from accepting the idea of negotiating with the Taliban leadership and US officials were annoyed with Karzai after the London conference for raising the issue, but the ISI and the military are now forcing the pace to have a three way dialogue between Kabul, Islamabad and the Taliban, while also pushing the US administration to accept such a dialogue and agree to a major role for the ISI.

India has now embarked on a diplomatic offensive to counter Pakistan’s growing role, sending National Security Adviser Shivsankar Menon to Kabul in early March and the Foreign Minister S.M.Krishna to Iran in coming weeks. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s hastily arranged trip to Afghanistan this week underlined Tehran’s keen interest in the Afghanistan endgame. India has asked Karzai about his secret negotiations with the Taliban and how India can play a role. At the same time India appears to be wanting to rebuild the alliance with Iran, Russia and the Central Asian Republics that opposed the Taliban in the 1990s and supported the non-Pashtun Northern Alliance.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s hastily arranged trip to Afghanistan this week underlined Tehran’s keen interest in the Afghanistan endgame.

Missing as yet from this complicated maneuvering is the US administration which will have to decide soon on supporting Kabul-Taliban talks, if it is not to see its military and economic development offensives in Afghanistan be undermined by growing regional rivalries. Also missing from the equation is Pakistan’s civilian government which has been bypassed in the foreign policy decision making by the military and the ISI. It is well known that the much weakened President Asif Zardari would like to improve relations with India and Afghanistan and encourage trade and investment, rather than foment a new set of regional tensions.

However a too overt Pakistani role is likely to be rejected by Karzai, by Afghanistan’s non-Pashtuns and civil society and even by many Taliban who are tired of fighting and would like to end their dependence on Pakistan.

Any sign of excessive Pakistani influence in Afghanistan would immediately prompt a reaction from India, Iran, China and the Arab Gulf states, which could include backing anti-Pakistan proxies in Afghanistan making it even more difficult for Afghanistan to achieve peace and stability.

Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist and author, most recently of "Descent into Chaos: The US and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia."
Yaleglobal Online
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/pakistan-and-afghanistan-end-game-part-i

Man Versus Afghanistan

2010-03-13T06:00:00.000-08:00

By Robert D. Kaplan
We were there to fight, to do PT, to eat, to sleep, then to fight again. There was no big-screen TV or other diversion in the barracks. It was a world of concrete, plywood, and gun oil, and it was absolutely intoxicating in its intensity and unlike anything that existed in the British military.” So recollected retired Lieutenant Colonel Richard Williams of the elite British Special Air Service, concerning the worst days in Iraq. In December 2006, Williams told me, there were more than 140 suicide bombings in Baghdad, a level of violence that he likened to the Nazi Blitz on London. In December 2007, there were five. “General McChrystal delivered that statistic,” a feat that not even the recent bombings in Baghdad can detract from. In Iraq, he went on, General Stanley A. McChrystal raised the “hard, nasty business” of counterterrorism—of “black ops”—to an industrial scale, with 10 nightly raids throughout the city, 300 a month, that McChrystal, now 55, regularly joined.

Williams did not discount the decisive Sunni Awakening, the surge of 20,000 extra troops into Iraq, or the deployment of troops outside the big Burger King bases and deep into the heart of hostile Iraqi neighborhoods. But he insisted that the work of the special operators commanded by McChrystal was also pivotal.

And, Williams added, there was never any question that they would succeed.

“Doubt,” T. E. Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), is “our modern crown of thorns.” The Special Operations forces that McChrystal led in Iraq were not so afflicted, despite a home front—especially a policy nomenklatura in Washington—that by 2006 had given up on the war. McChrystal, whom Williams called “the singularly most impressive military officer I ever served with,” has never submitted to fate. His oft-documented physical regimen—running eight miles a day, eating one meal a day, and sleeping four hours a night—itself expresses an unyielding, almost cultic determination.

Last December, in a spare, homely office in Kabul that felt like the business-class lounge of a bad airline, McChrystal recalled his Iraq experience for me: “I remember”—he pauses—“we had a meeting in Balad [an air base north of Baghdad] in the spring of 2006, where we asked ourselves, ‘Have we already lost, and are too stubborn to admit it?’ After all, the military is hard-wired to be optimistic, so there is a danger of not being realistic. Well, we decided that we hadn’t lost. By then we had [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi in our sights. We could smell him. We also felt, in those dark days, that we could break and implode alQaeda. We in JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] had this sense of … mission, passion … I don’t know what you call it. The insurgents,” McChrystal went on, “had a real cause, and we had a counter-cause. We had a level of unit cohesion just like in The Centurions and The Praetorians,” 1960s novels by Jean Lartéguy about French paratroopers in Indochina and Algeria. “It was intense,” McChrystal said, scrunching his already deeply carved face. “We were hitting alQaeda in Iraq like Rocky Balboa hitting Apollo Creed in the gut.”

I asked whether the situation in Iraq in 2006 was bleaker than Afghanistan now.

“Look, this isn’t easy,” he sighed. “Afghanistan for years got worse and worse, and the coalition sometimes lagged behind the reality of the situation.” Because the country is so decentralized, he explained, it is extraordinarily complex, with a different tribal and sectarian reality in each district. But then he ticked off ways the war could be won. “The insurgency is only fundamentally effective in the Pashtun belt. The critical part of the population is where the water and the roads are. People near water are more important economically: along the Helmand and Kabul rivers. You secure these areas, and you take the oxygen out of the insurgency.” He continued, talking about developing a corps of Afghan-area experts within the United States military akin to the American “China hands” of the early and mid-20th century, and “British East India Company types” who went out for years and learned the local languages. His command sergeant major, Mike Hall of Avon Lake, Ohio, said that when McChrystal selected his team of generals and colonels to come with him to command the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in June 2009, he more or less told them to “get out of the deployment mentality—that they would be in-country for 18 months, two and a half years, for the duration, however long it took to win.”

McChrystal believes that the “ideological piece” of alQaeda is “truly scary”: that a new brand of totalitarianism—alQaeda the franchise—is running amok and motivating small secretive groups around the world, and that victory in Afghanistan is necessary to deliver a “huge moral defeat” to it.

McChrystal’s resolve is part of a larger, deeper story. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has repeatedly employed its military, wisely and unwisely, as a weapon against fate and inevitability. In that capacity, the military has become the principal protagonist in an intellectual debate, raging since antiquity, that pits individual moral responsibility against determinism—the belief that historical, cultural, ethnic, economic, and other antecedent forces determine the future of men and nations. McChrystal, the commander of American and NATO troops in an Afghanistan that is tottering on the edge of chaos, is both the supreme and most recent symbol of that struggle.

The ur-text for a philosophical discussion of the role of the U.S. military in the post–Cold War era is Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 Oxford lecture, “Historical Inevitability,” in which he condemns as immoral and cowardly the belief that vast impersonal forces such as geography, environment, and ethnic characteristics determine the direction of world politics. Berlin reproaches Arnold Toynbee and Edward Gibbon for seeing “nations” and “civilizations” as “more concrete” than the individuals who embody them, and for seeing abstractions like “tradition” and “history” as “wiser than we.”

In the 1990s, the Balkans were a classic case of setting determinists and realists, who were dissuaded from military intervention because of Yugoslavia’s often bloody history and its questionable strategic importance, against liberal internationalists and neoconservatives, who favored intervention because they opposed giving Yugoslavia up to fate, especially in light of the Holocaust. My own book, Balkan Ghosts, was attacked as deterministic, and was misused as an argument against intervention in 1993, when it first appeared, even as I supported intervention in print and on television. The fact that I wrote a book about a bloody ethnic history and favored intervention was no contradiction: only the most difficult human landscapes require intervention in the first place, and when one does intervene militarily, one should always do so without illusions. Winston Churchill’s geographical and cultural portrait of Sudan in The River War (1899), which was next on McChrystal’s reading list when I saw him, is full of determinism, yet Churchill nevertheless favored intervention there.

The Balkan interventions, however belated, stopped the ethnic cleansing, did not lead to military quagmires, paid strategic dividends, and in so doing appeared to justify the idealistic approach to foreign policy. Indeed, the 1995 humanitarian intervention in Bosnia changed the debate from “Should NATO exist?” to “Should NATO expand?” Our 1999 war in Kosovo, as much as the attacks of September 11, 2001, allowed for the expansion of NATO to the Black Sea. It also led to the toppling of the Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milošević. In the aftermath, realists and determinists seemed vanquished; to be called either one back then was practically an insult.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq, to which I subscribed, had Balkan antecedents. In fact, some intellectuals agitating for intervention in the Balkans had earlier railed against President George H. W. Bush for not sending U.S. troops the extra few hundred kilometers to Baghdad in 1991 to depose Saddam Hussein. For those Gulf War idealists, finishing the job in Iraq against a regime that had killed, directly and indirectly, several times more people than would Milošević’s, was in keeping with the Balkan passions of the era. In 2003, the idea of regime change in Iraq appealed to those willing to do anything to defeat the deterministic forces of geography and ethnic and sectarian differences, and to those who thought that the American military power evident in the Balkans, particularly air power, had rendered such forces moot, paving the way for universalist ideas to triumph over terrain and history.

So what began in the mid-1990s with a limited, American-dominated air-and-land campaign in the western, most-developed part of the former Ottoman Empire led less than a decade later to a mass infantry invasion in its eastern, least-developed part. In March 2004, I found myself in Camp Udairi, in the midst of the Kuwaiti desert. I had embedded with a Marine battalion that, along with the rest of the First Marine Division, was about to begin the overland journey to Baghdad and western Iraq, replacing the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division there. Lines of seven-ton trucks and Humvees stretched across the horizon, all headed north. A sandstorm had erupted. An icy wind was blowing. Rain threatened. Vehicles broke down. And we hadn’t even begun the several-hundred-kilometer journey to Baghdad that, a few short years earlier, had been dismissed as easy to accomplish by those who thought of toppling Saddam Hussein as merely an extension of toppling Slobodan Milošević. In that environment, only a fool would suggest that deterministic elements like geography no longer mattered.

And on February 22, 2006, when Sunni alQaeda extremists blew up the Shiite alAskari Mosque at Samarra and unleashed a fury of intercommunal atrocities, American troops seemed powerless before primordial hatreds. The myth of an omnipotent U.S. military—born in the Gulf War, battered in Somalia, then repaired and burnished in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo—was for the moment undone, along with the idealism that went with it. Ethnic and sectarian differences in far-off corners of the world, seen in the 1990s as obstacles that good men should strive to overcome, now loomed as factors that should have warned us away from military action.

The debate does not end there. In late 2006 and early 2007, as Iraq was crumbling and ethnic atrocities reached Balkan dimensions and threatened to rise to those of Rwanda, much of the Washington establishment, especially the realists, called for scaling back or withdrawing our military mission. President George W. Bush did the opposite. He did not succumb to fate. Those supporting him were few, but they included neoconservatives, who essentially argued that human agency—more troops and a new strategy—could triumph over vast impersonal forces, in this case those of sectarian madness. Part of that new strategy, which worked beyond all expectations, was, as we know, McChrystal’s industrial-level approach to counterterrorism. Yet that is not to say the struggle against fate in Iraq was worth it. The ultimate cost—in more than 100,000 American and Iraqi lives (and perhaps many more), more than a trillion taxpayer dollars, and untold amounts of squandered diplomatic capital—is a strong argument in favor of less zeal and more determinism. Some may say that President Bush could have changed his strategy and his generals earlier than he did and incurred fewer casualties as a result. But one can play the counterfactual game to no end, and still be stuck with how the war has actually turned out.

To treat every country as an empty slate full of hopeful possibilities is risky: what is doable in one place may not be in another. As the philosopher Raymond Aron suggests, we must pursue an ethic rooted in a hesitant determinism. We need to recognize obvious developmental differences between peoples and regions, but not oversimplify, and leave our options open. We cannot in every instance struggle unconditionally against fate, even though we have a military that will do so if so ordered.

And thus we confront Afghanistan: a country whose citizens have a life expectancy of 44 years and a literacy rate of 28 percent (far lower among women), and only a fifth of whose population has access to clean drinking water. Out of 182 countries, Afghanistan ranks next to last on the United Nations’ Human Development Index (just ahead of Niger). Iraq, on the eve of the U.S. invasion, was ranked 126th; its literacy rate hovered around 70 percent. Afghanistan’s problems on a developmental level are not only more profound than Iraq’s, but vaster in scope, as Afghanistan encompasses 30 percent more land. Consider, also, that 77 percent of Iraqis live in urban areas (concentrated heavily in Baghdad), so reducing violence in Greater Baghdad had a calming effect on the entire country; in Afghanistan, urbanization stands at only 30 percent, and so counterinsurgency efforts in one village may have no effect on another.

Moreover, whereas Mesopotamia, with large urban clusters across a flat landscape, is conducive to military occupation, Afghanistan is, in geographical terms, hard to even hold together. Cathedral-like mountain ranges help seal divisions between Pashtuns and Tajiks and other minorities, even as comparatively few natural impediments separate Afghanistan from Pakistan, or from Iran. Looking at a relief map, one could easily construct a country called Pashtunistan—home to the world’s 52 million Pashtuns—lying between the Hindu Kush mountains and the Indus River and overlapping with the Afghan-Pakistani frontier. The Afghanistan-Pakistan border is in reality no border at all but, in the words of Sugata Bose, a Harvard historian, “the heart … of an expansive Indo-Persian and Indo-Islamic economic, cultural, and political domain that [has] straddled Afghanistan and Punjab for two millennia.”

Afghanistan emerged as a country of sorts only in the mid-18th century, and a case can be made that with the slow-motion dissolution of the former Soviet empire in Central Asia, and the gradual weakening of the Pakistani state, a historic realignment is now taking place that could see Afghanistan disappear on the political map: in the future, for example, the Hindu Kush could form a border between Pashtunistan and a Greater Tajikistan. The Taliban—the twisted result of Pashtun nationalism, Islamic fervor, drug money, corrupt warlords, and, now, hatred of the American occupation—may be, in the view of Selig Harrison, the director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy, merely the vehicle for a grand transition that a foreign military run by impatient civilians back in Washington can do little to deter.

Yet another reality points to an entirely different conclusion. The dispersal of Afghanistan’s larger population over greater territory than Iraq’s is basically meaningless, British Army Major General Colin Boag told me: because 65 percent of the population lives within 35 miles of the main road system, which approximates the old medieval caravan routes, only 80 out of 342 districts are really key to military success. Afghanistan is not some barbaric back-of-beyond, but the heart of a cultural continuum connecting the cosmopolitan centers of Persia and India. In fact, Afghanistan has been governed from the center since the 18th century: Kabul, if not always a point of authority, has been at least a point of arbitration. Especially between the early 1930s and the early 1970s, Afghanistan experienced moderate and constructive government under the constitutional monarchy of Zahir Shah. A highway system on which it was safe to travel united the major cities, while estimable health and development programs were on the verge of eradicating malaria. Toward the end of this period, I hitchhiked and rode buses across Afghanistan. I never felt threatened, and I was able to send books and clothes back home through functioning post offices.

There was, too, a strong Afghan national identity distinct from that of Iran or Pakistan or the Soviet Union. Pashtunistan might be a real enough geographic construct, but so, very definitely, is Afghanistan. As Ismail Akbar, a writer and analyst in Kabul, told me: “Thirty years of war and Pakistani interference have weakened Afghan national identity from the heights of the Zahir Shah period. But even the mujahideen civil war of the early 1990s, in which the groups were split along ethnic lines, could not break up Afghanistan. And if that couldn’t, nothing will.”

Afghans were so desperate for a reunited country after the internecine fighting of the mujahideen era that they welcomed the Taliban in Kandahar in 1994 and in Kabul in 1996, as a bulwark against anarchy and dissolution. Afghanistan, frail and battered over the years, is nevertheless surprisingly sturdy as a concept and as a cynosure of identity.

Stanley McChrystal’s job is to serve as the deus ex machina for the rebirth of that modestly well-functioning mid-20th-century Afghan state, and for Afghanistan’s fade-out from the front pages—the definition of victory in our imperfect world. McChrystal, the hybrid product of the übermacho Rangers and Special Forces subcultures within the U.S. Army, is now the philosopher’s weapon against those vast impersonal forces of history and geography, and, I might add, the agent of deliverance from our post-9/11 mistakes in Afghanistan. Because by our own disastrous actions—by our own agency, in other words—we ourselves, in a process Tolstoy explains well in War and Peace, have helped contribute to fate. Not that McChrystal sees himself as fitting into the “great man” theory of history—another form of determinism, it can be argued. He told me that he merely sees opportunities where others don’t.

“Afghanistan was a cakewalk in 2001 and 2002,” says Sarah Chayes, former special adviser to McChrystal’s headquarters. “We started out with a country that hated the Taliban and by 2009 were driving people back into the arms of the Taliban. That’s not fate. That’s poor policy.” We enabled an administration, led by Hamid Karzai, that is less a government than a protection racket, in which bribery is the basis of a whole chain of transactions, from small sums paid to criminals at roadblocks in the south of the country to tens of millions of dollars smuggled out of the Kabul airport by government ministers. The myth is that the absence of governance in Afghanistan creates a vacuum in which the Taliban thrive. But the truth, as Chayes explains, is the opposite. Karzai governs everywhere in the revenue belt, synonymous with Pashtunistan, in the south and east of the country: the Taliban succeed in these very places, not because of no governance but because of corrupt and abusive governance.

Referring to the evolution of the former mujahideen commanders into gangster-oligarchs under Karzai, an Afghan analyst, Walid Tamim, told me: “Warlords like Rabbani, Fahim, Sayyaf, and Dostum have all been empowered by Karzai and the U.S. government. Why is [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar any worse than these guys?” Ashraf Ghani, the country’s finance minister from 2002 to 2004, explained: “The core threat we all face is the Afghan government itself. About two-thirds of revenue is lost to abuse. This isn’t like corruption in Indonesia, where money is stolen but things still get built; here it is all looted, because the warlords are insecure about what may come next in Afghan politics.” Even as American officers talk publicly in bland clichés about partnering with and improving the performance of the Karzai government, the grim reality of Afghan public life is distinguished by corruption, criminality, and poverty.

I knew and wrote about Karzai in the 1980s, when he was a representative in Peshawar of the pro-Western mujahideen faction of Sibghatullah Mojaddedi. Mojaddedi had very little military presence inside Afghanistan; he and Karzai were no threat to anybody. Karzai had impressed me as personable, enlightened, sensitive, and, now that I think about it over the distance of time, weak. I genuinely liked him. But alas, he is said to be bored by actual governance. As Ghani points out, “He is not an organization man with the requisite management abilities,” and thus he lacks the skill to build a popular power base like the one the late Afghan Communist leader Babrak Karmal was able to build in the late 1970s and early 1980s, or even like the one the Soviet puppet Najibullah built later on. And without a power base of his own, and with the Americans distracted since 2003 by Iraq, Karzai has had few others to rely on but the warlords and his own knee-deep-in-graft family.

The Soviets may have been occupiers, but they were truly interested in Afghan governance in terms of the advice they gave and the puppets they chose—unlike the United States, obsessed as we have been with hunting alQaeda. Karzai is “unsalvageable,” according to a senior Western official I talked to. Moreover, Afghanistan is so “broken and shattered,” as he put it, with no human capital to staff the ministries, and with the worst accretion of bureaucratic habits from the Soviet, mujahideen, and Taliban eras, that if this were the 1920s, Afghanistan, with all its history of unruly independence, would be an obvious candidate for trusteeship, with a great Western power being granted a mandate for it. But this is the early 21st century, and so we have to accept the myth of Afghan sovereignty. Thus, our imperial-like burden is coupled with the absurd (by 1920s standards) task of showing demonstrable results by the planned drawdown in 15 months, in order to legitimize what will be, in effect, a long-term trusteeship.

To accomplish this gargantuan mission, we have stood up the doctrine of counterinsurgency, the rough military equivalent of liberal internationalism, moral interventionism, and nation-building rolled into one. Counterinsurgency’s core goal is to protect and nurture the civilian population—the center of gravity in postmodern war—and psychologically and physically separate it from the insurgents. Culturally sensitive troops build schools and dig wells for the villagers, even as they train and mentor local forces to fight the enemy, and strive to monopolize the use of force in a given space.

Counterinsurgency is not new to the U.S. military—indeed, it dates back at least to the Philippine War more than a century ago—but its lessons were repeatedly forgotten by the U.S. Army over the course of the 20th century. To make sure that doesn’t happen again, the Army and Marines cooperated on a Counterinsurgency Field Manual, published three years ago. Remarkably, its introduction was written by a former director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Sarah Sewall. In it, she notes that the manual “challenges much of what is holy about the American way of war,” for it directs U.S. forces to “make securing the civilian, rather than destroying the enemy, their top priority.” But what is the counterinsurgent to do, given that in an era of total war as waged by radical Islamists, distinguishing between combatant and noncombatant is often impossible? The answer, according to Sewall, is to “assume more risk.”

In order to be a more effective weapon of war, American ground forces are therefore becoming more like armed relief workers. They will still train to kill, they will continue to kill in counterterrorism operations, and they will be prepared to kill in more-traditional kinds of interstate war that might erupt in the course of the new century. For the moment, however, American troops will incur more casualties in the service of idealist interventionism, in a place far less developed than either the Balkans or Iraq.

But just as some liberal idealists supported intervention in the Balkans but opposed it in Iraq (correctly, as it turned out), some liberal idealists are skeptical of the mission in Afghanistan. Probably the most incisive critique of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan was written by Rory Stewart last July in the London Review of Books. Stewart is the former director of Harvard’s Carr Center and a prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate in the United Kingdom. He has run a nongovernmental organization in Kabul, and is the author of the masterful travel work The Places in Between (2004), about walking across Afghanistan. He is both a humanitarian and an Afghan-area expert. Yet he feels that the professed U.S. mission in Afghanistan, which assumes counterinsurgency as a “moral obligation,” is itself a form of determinism: we automatically assume a solution in a wickedly diverse and complicated country where no solution of the kind we foresee is likely to be had. As he put it,

There are no mass political parties in Afghanistan and the Kabul government lacks the base, strength or legitimacy of the Baghdad government. Afghan tribal groups lack the coherence of the Iraqi Sunni tribes and their relation to state structures … Afghans are weary of war but the Afghan chiefs are not approaching us, seeking a deal. Since the political players and state structures in Afghanistan are much more fragile than those in Iraq, they are less likely to play a strong role in ending the insurgency.

Meanwhile, Stewart goes on, “the Taliban can exploit the ideology of religious resistance that the West deliberately fostered in the 1980s to defeat the Russians.” But at the same time, he says, the ethnic-Pashtun Taliban are unpopular, even as the ethnic-Hazara, -Tajik, and -Uzbek populations are wealthier and more powerful than they were in the 1990s and will resist Taliban attempts to take over their areas. Even if the Taliban did overrun a major city, they are unlikely to repeat the mistake of the 1990s and shelter alQaeda. In short, the Taliban are neither as easily defeated nor as dangerous as we like to think. Forget about state-building or counterinsurgency, he implies, which remains “the irresistible illusion.”

McChrystal and his team are burdened by Stewart’s misgivings. Contemplating failure for a moment, McChrystal told me, “We’ll know it when we won’t be able to move our troops around.” McChrystal had Stewart to dinner to talk about his article. “He’s got a different point of view,” McChrystal said, uncharacteristically struggling for words. “I just think that Afghanistan has been a country and that the pieces can be put in place to make it work.”

“Look,” said Sir Graeme Lamb, a former British Special Air Service commander and McChrystal adviser, “we don’t have a grand design [as Stewart thinks]. We’ve been doing this kind of thing in Iraq, the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Africa, and other places for a long time, and we’re comfortable in these thresholds of complexity and chaos. We’re the men ‘in the arena,’ to take a line from Theodore Roosevelt. We will adjust the positions of authority on the battlefield in 2010 so that good things can naturally emerge.”

Furthermore, McChrystal’s team has problems with Stewart’s analysis. Major General Michael Flynn, McChrystal’s intelligence chief, views the Taliban less benignly:

“Like the rest of us,” Flynn told me, “Mullah Omar is a decade older and wiser than he was on 9/11. He has restructured his political organization to give it more staying power, if in fact it gets back into power. In the meantime, they are killing us with IEDs [improvised explosive devices] the way the mujahideen killed the Soviets with our Stinger missiles. This is a vastly harder enemy than in 2001. They’re better than even the Eritreans were [in the 1970s and 1980s]. They absolutely know insurgency doctrine and are spread throughout the country, including the north, in order to disperse us, which they are succeeding at.” Unlike Stewart, Flynn believes that if we left Afghanistan, the Taliban might well be able to triumph over non-Pashtun groups.

Not only are McChrystal and his team determined to battle against fate in the form of the Taliban, but they do so in the firm belief that they will get Afghanistan onto the crooked and murky path of development. “We know what success tastes like, from Iraq; we’re a team that has won national championships,” declared Flynn, who was with McChrystal in JSOC. In The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898), about the struggle to stabilize what is today the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderland, Winston Churchill posits that a great nation has three choices: to turn a country like Afghanistan into a replica of British parliamentary democracy, which he says is clearly impossible; to withdraw completely, which he says is also impossible; or to work with the tribes and the material at hand through a variety of means. McChrystal, who told me he was halfway through the book, agreed that the third choice—Churchill’s choice—is really the only one we have.

What does it mean to work with the tribes, Churchill-style; what does it take to overcome the geographical and human terrain here? The story of Colonel Chris Kolenda, of Omaha, Nebraska, is instructive. Kolenda, a West Point graduate with the sharp-eyed, comforting manner of a family physician, commanded the 1st Squadron of the 91st Cavalry from May 2007 to July 2008 in northeastern Afghanistan, on the border with Pakistan. When Kolenda’s 800-soldier battalion arrived, armed violence was endemic. Coalition headquarters in Kabul blamed a Pakistan-based insurgency. “The conventional wisdom was wrong,” Kolenda told me. “Almost all of the insurgents were locals who fought for a whole variety of reasons: they were disgusted with ISAF, as well as the government in Kabul; their fathers had fought the Soviets and now the sons were fighting the new foreigners.”

Then there was the “psychodrama of interethnic and clan frictions,” abetted by the fractured mountainous landscape. The area was populated by Nuristanis, Kohistanis, and Pashtuns, all of whom harbored disdain for the Gujars, migrant farm workers from over the border, who, in their eyes, were “not real Afghans.” (So much for the argument that there is no Afghan national identity.) The Nuristanis, in turn, were divided into the Kata, Kom, Kushtowz, and Wai clans. The Kom were split into hostile and well-armed groups whose current divisions stemmed from the war against the Soviets in the 1980s, when some of the Kom backed the radical forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, known as the HIG, or Hezb-i-Islami-Gulbuddin, and other Kom sub-clans were loyal to the moderate National Islamic Front of Afghanistan. The Kata, meanwhile, were generally loyal to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (“Army of the Righteous”), which carried out major attacks against India from bases in Pakistan. The Pashtuns themselves were divided in some cases, on account of blood feuds, into five elements.

Kolenda apologized to me for “getting down in the weeds,” but explained that until he’d learned who was who, and who was fighting whom, his battalion couldn’t make progress and escape the cycle of ferocious firefights that had characterized the first three months of its deployment. “People were often giving us tips about bad guys who weren’t really bad guys, but simply people from another faction with whom the tipster had a score to settle.”

Overlying all of these divisions was a society atomized by three decades of warfare: indeed, because of Afghanistan’s short life expectancy, most people in Kolenda’s area of responsibility had known nothing but fighting all their lives. The landed aristocracy of elders that once functioned as the social glue had dissolved; in its place came a violent lower class of young men, disaggregated by clan and ethnicity, battling for a hazy idea of justice. The Taliban had been gone from power for seven years. The 17-year-old fighters here barely remembered their benighted rule, and now saw anti-government groups as the good guys against the foreign occupiers.

Finding the right elders and providing them with seed money that would help them regain control of their young men was painstaking labor. You couldn’t just build a school or dig a well: a new school in one valley could enrage people in the next. Money was often doled out only after violence by the locals stopped. “Then they built the school,” Kolenda said, repeating an Afghan proverb: “If you sweat for it, you’ll protect it.”

With a little peace and development, the hard core of the hydra-headed insurgency, including elements of the HIG and the Taliban, could no longer hide in plain sight, and “we nailed them,” Kolenda said. You couldn’t afford to lose one firefight. Yet when you were not eyes-on-target, you had to show restraint. Kolenda told me about one junior noncommissioned officer who made sure his soldiers did not step on a farmer’s field once they had spread out on open ground. This sounds easy, but such mundane yet critical actions go completely against the grain of high-testosterone young soldiers bred on hunting and chewing tobacco and wanting to be an Army ranger all their lives in order to fight.

By the time Kolenda’s battalion was redeployed out of Kunar and Nuristan, violence had dropped by 90 percent. His battalion didn’t need a Dairy Queen or other amenities to keep their spirits up. As Sergeant Major Mike Hall told me, “If you’re down-range and focused, time goes fast. That is what good morale is all about.”

The measures that Kolenda told me about were not the gold standard. They were merely the minimum required to overcome the forces of geography and history; and they had to be replicated throughout southern and eastern Afghanistan, where each battalion encountered a different mix of clan and sub-clan rivalries.

The coordination of more than a score of such battalions, not to mention 45 Army Special Forces A-teams, Marine special-ops units, and so on, all involved in some aspect of counterinsurgency, is less the job of McChrystal than that of Lieutenant General David M. Rodriguez, like McChrystal and Kolenda a West Point graduate, who heads the ISAF Joint Command. If the military coalition in Afghanistan were a newspaper, think of McChrystal as the editor in chief and Rodriguez as the managing editor. McChrystal, atop ISAF, is, as he said, focused “up and out,” dealing with big-think strategic planning, daily interactions with NATO and other members of the 44-country coalition in Afghanistan, the United Nations, the Afghan National Army and National Police, President Karzai, and the ministers of interior and defense, as well as with training indigenous forces and restructuring detainee procedures—that is, exploiting captured Taliban sources, while not mistreating them, and gradually getting America out of the detainee business altogether. Above all, McChrystal has the task of military coordination with Pakistan in the hunt for high-value targets in the borderlands.

Rodriguez, meanwhile, is focused “down and in,” on the day-to-day operations of ISAF, on the deputies of the relevant ministries, the district governors, provincial councils, border police, individual Afghan army units, and so on. Rodriguez, a six-foot-four-inch, gangly, gentle giant with a shock of short salt-and-pepper hair, is the real implementer of President Obama and McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy.

The shame is that Rodriguez’s three-star command didn’t even come into existence until late 2009: before that, previous commanders such as Generals David McKiernan and Dan McNeill had to combine the two jobs. As a result, neither job got done as well as it should have. Given the demands of both positions, McChrystal isn’t the only one who sleeps just four hours a night; the same could be said for Rodriguez, and for Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry. Flying to Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif with Eikenberry and Rodriguez, respectively, I noticed how they sleep on planes because they essentially have two back-to-back workdays in each 24-hour period: the line-up of briefings and meetings all day long and the tsunami of emails that arrive after dark once Washington, nine and a half hours behind, gets to work.

Rodriguez flew up to Mazar-e-Sharif to listen to Afghan security forces report on what they had been doing for the past few months. In his quiet, unassuming manner, Rodriguez relentlessly questioned the Afghan officers about the Taliban’s shadow governments and justice system, the integration of local militias into the security forces, improvements on the ring road connecting Mazar-e-Sharif with Herat in the west and Kabul in the east, and the threat level in Kunduz and Baghlan. The Afghans responded with briefs about the extortion of farmers by the HIG in Baghlan and by the Taliban in Kunduz, and about how the enemy was able to attack highways and supply lines coming from Central Asia and erect an alternative tax system, even though it had no permanent bases. Because of problems with translation from Dari to English, the meeting went on for hours.

“This process is slow and painful,” Rodriguez admitted to me afterward. “If we did everything ourselves, it would be quicker, but we wouldn’t leave a legacy. Because the Afghans are deeply involved in all these operations, they own it. For a Soviet-inspired army to talk about rural redevelopment as they did in that meeting is an incredible thing.” Rodriguez told me he constantly flies around to the regional commands for such briefs, bringing with him a train of high-ranking American and Afghan officers and Kabul ministry officials. On this trip, Rodriguez immersed himself with two key Afghans: army Chief of Staff Bismullah Khan and Lieutenant General Sher Mohammad Karimi, head of army operations. (Karimi is from Khost, by the Pakistan border, the lair of the insurgent leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, and so for very personal reasons, he wants Haqqani “eliminated.”)

The idea is to put the American and Afghan military leaders, as well as low-ranking commanders, down-range together socially, and create a flat, fast organization. As with a similar effort in Iraq, top-down guidance from high-ranking officers gets bottom-up refinement from captains and sergeants. To wit, Rodriguez’s operations center is a vast hangar-like building with no walls or partitions, very much evoking a newsroom environment. “It is an atmosphere in which you error towards sharing what you know,” said Navy Commander Jeff Eggers, a McChrystal adviser.

“I learned at JSOC,” McChrystal explained, “that any complex task is best approached by flattening hierarchies. It gets everybody feeling like they’re in the inner circle, so that they develop a sense of ownership. The more people who believe that they are part of the team and are in the know, the more you don’t have to do it yourself.” As Brigadier General Scott Miller, who runs the Afghanistan-Pakistan Coordination Cell at the Pentagon, told me about McChrystal and Rodriguez’s philosophy: “Decentralize until you’re uncomfortable, then scrutinize, fix, and push down and out even further, to the level of the sergeants.” Precisely because of the commander’s ability to reach down to the junior noncommissioned officers, a flat military organization puts—in the words of one admiral I interviewed—“performance pressure on everybody.”

This show of organizational dynamism points to a ground truth: despite the awful toll of casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the near-breaking of the Army through the strain on soldiers and their families because of long and dangerous deployments, American ground troops are emerging nearly a decade after 9/11 as a force that is even more organizationally and intellectually formidable than it was after the Berlin Wall collapsed, when the United States was the lone superpower. Army and Marine Corps company commanders, for example, can lead in a conventional fight and, as Kolenda’s experience showed, also bring order to chaotic tribal and ethnic messes, all while they communicate effectively up the bureaucratic chain (a skill they began to hone before 9/11, in the Balkans). And these officers have mastered what is, in fact, the colonial technique of partnering with indigenous forces molded in their own image. Rodriguez’s command is a culmination of this whole experience.

But the very dominance of the U.S. military can lead to a dangerous delusion. For the time being, the American media and policy elite are focused on whether U.S. forces can achieve substantial results in 15 months, even though it is a truism of counterinsurgency that there are few shortcuts to victory and you shouldn’t rush to failure. Nevertheless, U.S. forces quite possibly will have quelled some significant part of the anarchy in southern Afghanistan by then: this is the sort of challenge our troops have become expert in. Yet that might only lead to mistaking artificial progress for lasting governance. The very prospect of some success by July 2011 increases the likelihood that U.S. forces will be in Afghanistan in substantial numbers for years. In effect, the proficiency of the American military causes it to be overextended. British Major General Richard Barrons, a veteran of the Balkans and Iraq now serving in Afghanistan, told me he learned during the most depressing days in Baghdad that “the long view is the primary weapon against fate.” If you are willing to stay, you can turn any situation around for the good. But that is an imperial mind-set, with its assumption of a near-permanent presence, which today’s Washington cannot abide, even as its own strategy drives toward that outcome.

At the core of a withdrawal strategy is the building of the Afghan army and police force. In charge of this effort is Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell, who, like McChrystal and Rodriguez, is a 1976 graduate of West Point, and like them was transformed by the “band of brothers” belief system forged in Iraq. There, as a spokesman, Caldwell “saw us go from the depths of despair to ‘this is going to work.’” He added, “I have a young family, and this will be the third of five Christmases I will be away from them. I did not have to be here, but I absolutely believe in this mission with Stan.”

I challenged Caldwell about reports of 90 percent illiteracy in the Afghan security forces. He answered: “The recruits may not know how to read, but they are incredibly street-smart. They’re survivalists. Basic soldiering here does not require literacy. We give them a course in how to read and issue them pens afterwards. They take tremendous pride in that. In Afghanistan, a pen in a shirt pocket is a sign of literacy. We’re three or four years behind Iraq in building an army, but if the ground situation improves, like in Iraq, political and media pressure will dissipate, and that will buy time.”

A deal with the insurgents constitutes another part of a withdrawal strategy. While becoming more organizationally formidable since 9/11, the Taliban have also modified their behavior. Mullah Omar has sent out a directive banning beheadings and unauthorized kidnappings as well as other forms of violent and criminal activity, according to both Al-Jazeera and ISAF officials. “In a way, we’re seeing a kinder, gentler Taliban,” said both Commander Eggers and General Flynn. Moreover, in working with the tribes in the spirit of Churchill’s Malakand Field Force, Flynn, the intelligence chief, went so far as to suggest that the insurgent leaders Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar are both “absolutely salvageable.” “The HIG already have members in Karzai’s government, and it could evolve into a political party, even though Hekmatyar may be providing alQaeda leaders refuge in Kunar. Hekmatyar has reconcilable ambitions. As for the Haqqani network, I can tell you they are tired of fighting, but are not about to give up. They have lucrative business interests to protect: the road traffic from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to Central Asia.” Lamb, the former SAS commander, added: “Haqqani and Hekmatyar are pragmatists tied to the probability of outcomes. With all the talk of Islamic ideology, this is the land of the deal.”

Again, the resemblance to the 1980s is telling, with leading anti-Soviet combatants like Haqqani and Hekmatyar central to the military equation, and a partially irrelevant Karzai: today ISAF officials talk quietly about working around Karzai by dealing directly with the ministries of interior and defense, and with the offices of the provincial governors, all of which they are fortifying with Western advisers.

The possibility of reaching an accommodation with some insurgents against others, as elusive as it may be, suggests how nonlinear the future is, and how deterministic a linear perspective can be. As in Iraq, surprises lie in store, and they might even be good ones: in so many places in Afghanistan, I saw the raw potential of this country. Despite a deadly, intimidating geography of steep and icy peaks that seem to stretch into infinity when seen from the air, in Afghanistan’s cities I encountered many an intellectual in a cold room with boxy furniture, passionately seeking to move beyond ethnic politics to a democratic, liberal universalism. They reminded me of the civil-society types I had met in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, in cities that, like Kabul, stank of lignite in winter. Then there was Herat, an old Silk Road nexus in western Afghanistan, which, despite 30 years of war, had changed remarkably for the better since I had last seen it, as a backpacker in 1973. Back then it was a ramshackle, Wild West town with barely a paved road. Now it is a sprawling, bustling city with malls, on the same level of development as many places in central Turkey that I knew from the 1980s: an improvement replicated in Mazar-e-Sharif, Jalalabad, and other urban areas here, with Kandahar being the striking exception. “Despite 30 years of war,” McChrystal said, in his office, rubbing his eyes from lack of sleep, “civilization grows here like weeds.”

Now the American military is about to bear down hard on Greater Kandahar, where Taliban- and Karzai-affiliated warlords hold considerable sway. “We will get to about 33 percent of the Afghan landmass in the next 15 months or so, affecting 60 percent of the population,” Rodriguez assured me. Once again, we might be poised to overcome the vast, impersonal forces of fate, even as we contribute to our own troubled destiny as a great power.

the Atlantic

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/man-versus-afghanistan/7983/

Afghan Tribal Rivalries Bedevil a U.S. Plan

2010-03-12T03:45:00.000-08:00

By ALISSA J. RUBIN
JALALABAD, Afghanistan — Six weeks ago, elders of the Shinwari tribe, which dominates a large area in southeastern Afghanistan, pledged that they would set aside internal differences to focus on fighting the Taliban.

This week, that commitment seemed less important as two Shinwari subtribes took up arms to fight each other over an ancient land dispute, leaving at least 13 people dead, according to local officials.

The fighting was a setback for American military officials, some of whom had hoped it would be possible to replicate the pledge elsewhere. It raised questions about how effectively the American military could use tribes as part of its counterinsurgency strategy, given the patchwork of rivalries that make up Afghanistan.

Government officials and elders from other tribes were trying to get the two sides to reconcile, but given the intensity of the fighting, some said they doubted that the effort would work. At the very least, the dispute is proving a distraction from the tribe’s commitment to fight the Taliban, not each other.

In return for the tribe’s pledge, the Americans are offering cash-for-work programs to employ large numbers of young people from the tribe as well as small-scale development projects, according to Maj. T. J. Taylor, a public affairs officer.

The one initial worry was that the Taliban might try to drive a wedge between different factions within the tribe, which includes about 400,000 people. The land dispute may have done that work for the insurgents.

Questions for Shinwari tribal elders this week about whether the pact against the Taliban still stood went unanswered as the elders turned the conversation to their intratribal struggle.

“We promised to work with the government to fight the Taliban,” said Hajji Gul Nazar, an elder from the Mohmand branch of the Shinwari tribe. He added, “Well, the government officials should have taken care of this argument among us before the shooting started.”

“We are the same tribe, and we are not happy killing each other,” he said. “The provincial police chief and the governor should have taken care of this issue.”

The dispute began about 10 days ago when the Alisher subtribe of the Shinwari laid a claim to land also claimed by another branch of the tribe called the Mohmand. The disputed area covers about 22,000 acres near the Pakistani border and about 20 miles from Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar Province.

Staking their claim, the Mohmand set up tents on the land, according to tribal elders. The government called on both sides to hold a peaceful discussion among tribal elders, known as a shura.

The Alisher repeatedly asked the Mohmand to remove their tents from the disputed land. After more than a week of discussion and no sign that the Mohmand were budging, the Alisher called the police.

The police arrived and began to remove the tents, infuriating the Mohmand, who became even more infuriated when the Alisher began to help the police knock down the tents. When some members of the Alisher began to burn the tents, the Mohmand attacked the Alisher, firing rocket-propelled grenades, mortar launchers, machine guns and AK-47 semiautomatic rifles, according to local commanders and Afghan border police officers, who did not wish to be quoted by name.

Several Alisher elders alleged that the police had helped the Mohmand.

“We heard that Gov. Gul Agha Shirzai and the local police chief gave arms to the Mohmand,” said Babarzai, a well-known Alisher poet in the area, who, like many Afghans, uses only one name. “We spent all of yesterday burying our dead. Now there are many widows in our tribe.”

The government of Nangarhar Province denied the accusation. “Gov. Gul Agha Shirzai would never do anything like that,” said his spokesman, Ahmadzia Abdulzai. “Our goal is always to bring the tribes together.”

A deputy interior minister arrived from Kabul on Thursday with several other dignitaries from the capital to attend funerals for those who were killed and to encourage peace.

Elders from the Khogyani, another local tribe, met with 100 elders from each of the feuding subtribes to participate in a a peace shura to defuse tensions.

“I don’t think the shura will work,” said Hajji Gul Nazar, a Mohmand elder who was not able to attend the shura. “The Alisher have lost people and have so many wounded, and lots of their tents were burned by our people, and motorcycles were burned, and cars. They must be waiting to take revenge on us.”

A NATO service member was killed by the explosion of an improvised explosive device on Thursday in southern Afghanistan, according to a NATO statement.

In Khost Province in eastern Afghanistan, Taliban fighters ambushed a security detail for a road construction project between Khost and Gardez, killing a South African security guard and his Afghan driver, said Sakhi Jan, an Afghan in charge of the project. A South African and an Afghan were also injured.

Afghan employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Jalalabad and Khost, Afghanistan.

N.Y.T
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/world/asia/12afghan.html?th&emc=th

Pipe Dreams Come True

2010-03-01T12:50:00.000-08:00

Energy: New oil and gas routes spell the end of post-Soviet political wrangling

Cold War tensions between Russia and Europe will persist as long as the Cold Warenergy infrastructure stays in place. However, a lattice of new pipelines should make relationships more civlilized.

Cold War pipelines are still in place, but a raft of energy infrastructure deals and the launch of several important new routes signal major shifts in thepost-Sovietoil and gasnetwork.Russia’s imperialistic hold over producers in Central Asia—inherited from the Soviet Union in the form of oil and gas pipelines—has been broken. A new gas pipeline running from the gas-rich republic of Turkmenistan to China is a game changer and joins an oil pipeline snaking from oil-rich Kazakhstan to China that is already in operation.

The Kremlin’s response has been to build more pipelines, also headed east. The result of this emerging lattice of pipelines is that energy relations in the regionwill become more civilized as competing routes will force both buyer and seller to put market interests first and politics a definite second.

On December 14, 2009, China's President Hu Jintao joined his Turkmen counterpart, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, toinaugurate the new TransAsian pipelinethat allowsenergy-hungry China to tap Central Asia's copious supplies of gas.

“The new pipeline marks an economic power shift to the benefit of three Central Asian countries and China and to the detriment of Russia,” said Philip H. de Leon, the publisher of OilPrice.com.

The TransAsian pipeline cost $6.7 billionto build and is the first gas pipeline out of the Caspian Region that runs east, linking Turkmenistan’s massive gas basin with China’s West-East Gas Pipeline. The pipeline will carry up to 40 billion cubic meters (bcm)of gasby 2013, accounting for half of China’s gas needs.

China’s growing importance in the region has gotten the attention ofthe Kremlin: Prime MinisterVladimir Putin signed a deal that promises to deliver 68 bcm a year to China through two new pipelines starting in Siberia.These pipelineswill provide China with the other half of the gas it needs. The Russian deal represents an abrupt about-face for the Kremlin, which has traditionally been very wary of its eastern neighbor.

Pipelines are intensely political beasts when they are in the planning stage, but once constructed they are the geopolitical equivalent of marriage.

The Turkmen gas pipeline follows on the heels of a new Kazakh oil pipeline to China that rounds out the new eastward-looking energy transport infrastructure. The first phase of the Kazakh oil pipeline went into operation in July last year and a second phase will link Kazakhstan’s rich Caspian oil resources to China.

The two Chinese pipelines have raised the ante in the energy game for Russia and broken its monopoly on the transport of oil and gas to customers out of the region in Western Europe. However, the Kremlin is striking back by beefing up its own energy transport infrastructure.

Underpinning the annual clash between Russia and Ukraine is the fact that Russia is forced to send about 80 percentof its gas to Western European customers through Ukraine.

Russia has proposed two new routes that run to the north and south of Ukraine to diversify the supply routes: The Nord Stream runs from Northwest Russia to Germany and the South Stream runs from Southern Russia under the Black Sea to Turkey. Much of Western Europe was cut off from crucial gas supplies when Russia clashed with Ukraine over unpaid gas bills. Futurebattles with Ukraine over money will be just that and 2009 should be the last time European countries faced the prospect of being cut off from their gas heating in the depths of winter.

With the gas transport problems well in hand, the Kremlin has turned its attention to rounding out the oil pipeline infrastructure. Like the Russian gas pipes that will now run both east and west, Putin relaunched a new and ambitious Eastern Siberia–Pacific Ocean (ESPO) oil pipeline that will run from Siberia to Russia’s Pacific coast.

The 4857-kilometer ESPO pipeline is by far the longest and most expensive of all the pipeline plans. Strategically it will allow Russia to deliver oil directly to the whole of the Pacific Rim and significantly diversify Russia’s customer base. Construction of this anaconda of a pipe was begun in April 2006, but the project has only recently regained momentum.

The success of the pipeline will depend on the currently untouched oil resources thought to exist in Eastern Siberia; serious exploration of the region will begin this year.
W.P
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/advertisers/russia/articles/business/20100223/pipe_dreams_come_true.html

C.I.A. and Pakistan Work Together, Warily

2010-02-25T13:20:00.000-08:00

By MARK MAZZETTI and JANE PERLEZ
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Inside a secret detention center in an industrial pocket of the Pakistani capital called I/9, teams of Pakistani and American spies have kept a watchful eye on a senior Taliban leader captured last month. With the other eye, they watch each other.

The C.I.A. and its Pakistani counterpart, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, have a long and often tormented relationship. And even now, they are moving warily toward conflicting goals, with each maneuvering to protect its influence after the shooting stops in Afghanistan.

Yet interviews in recent days show how they are working together on tactical operations, and how far the C.I.A. has extended its extraordinary secret war beyond the mountainous tribal belt and deep into Pakistan’s sprawling cities.

Beyond the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, C.I.A. operatives working with the ISI have carried out dozens of raids throughout Pakistan over the past year, working from bases in the cities of Quetta, Peshawar and elsewhere, according to Pakistani security officials.

The raids often come after electronic intercepts by American spy satellites, or tips from Pakistani informants — and the spies from the two countries then sometimes drive in the same car to pick up their quarry. Sometimes the teams go on lengthy reconnaissance missions, with the ISI operatives packing sunscreen and neon glow sticks that allow them to identify their positions at night.

Successful missions sometimes end with American and Pakistani spies toasting one another with Johnnie Walker Blue Label whisky, a gift from the C.I.A.

The C.I.A.’s drone campaign in Pakistan is well known, which is striking given that this is a covert war. But these on-the-ground activities have been shrouded in secrecy because the Pakistani government has feared the public backlash against the close relationship with the Americans.

In strengthening ties to the ISI, the C.I.A. is aligning itself with a shadowy institution that meddles in domestic politics and has a history of ties to violent militant groups in the region. A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article.

Officials in Washington and Islamabad agree that the relationship between the two spy services has steadily improved since the low point of the summer of 2008, when the C.I.A.’s deputy director traveled to Pakistan to confront ISI officials with communications intercepts indicating that the ISI was complicit in the bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.

The spy agencies have built trust in part through age-old tactics of espionage: killing or capturing each other’s enemies. A turning point came last August, when a C.I.A. missile killed the militant leader Baitullah Mehsud as he lay on the roof of his compound in South Waziristan, his wife beside him massaging his back.

Mr. Mehsud for more than a year had been responsible for a wave of terror attacks in Pakistani cities, and many inside the ISI were puzzled as to why the United States had not sought to kill him. Some even suspected he was an American, or Indian, agent.

The drone attack on Mr. Mehsud is part of a joint war against militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where C.I.A. drones pound militants from the air as Pakistani troops fight them on the ground.

And yet for two spy agencies with a long history of mistrust, the accommodation extends only so far. For instance, when it comes to the endgame in Afghanistan, where Pakistan hopes to play a significant role as a power broker, interviews with Pakistani and American intelligence officials in Islamabad and Washington reveal that the interests of the two sides remain far apart.

Even as the ISI breaks up a number of Taliban cells, officials in Islamabad, Washington and Kabul hint that the ISI’s goal seems to be to weaken the Taliban just enough to bring them to the negotiating table, but leaving them strong enough to represent Pakistani interests in a future Afghan government.

This contrasts sharply with the American goal of battering the Taliban and strengthening Kabul’s central government and security forces, even if American officials also recognize that political reconciliation with elements of the Taliban is likely to be part of any ultimate settlement.

Tensions in the relationship surfaced in the days immediately after Mullah Baradar’s arrest, when the ISI refused to allow C.I.A. officers to interrogate the Taliban leader. Americans have since been given access to the detention center. On Wednesday, Pakistani and Afghan officials meeting in Islamabad said that a deal was being worked out to transfer Mullah Baradar to Afghan custody, which could allow the Americans unrestrained access to him.

Besides Mullah Baradar, several Taliban shadow governors and other senior leaders have been arrested inside Pakistan in recent weeks.

A top American military officer in Afghanistan on Wednesday suggested that with the arrests, the ISI could be trying to accelerate the timetable for a negotiated settlement between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

“I don’t know if they’re pushing anyone to the table, but they are certainly preparing the meal,” the officer said.

In the three decades since the C.I.A. and the ISI teamed up to funnel weapons to Afghan militias fighting the Soviets, the two spy services have soldiered though a co-dependent, yet suspicious relationship. C.I.A. officers in Islamabad rely on the Pakistani spy service for its network of informants. But they are wary of the ISI’s longstanding ties to militants like the Taliban, which Pakistani spies have seen as a necessary ally to blunt archrival India’s influence in Afghanistan.

The ISI gets millions of dollars in United States aid from its American counterpart (which allowed the Pakistan spy service to develop a counterterrorism division), yet is suspicious that the Americans and the Indians might be playing their own “double game” against Pakistan.

In Islamabad, officials are nervous about the intensification of the C.I.A.’s drone campaign in North Waziristan against the network run by Sirajuddin Haqqani, whom the ISI for years has used as a force to carry out missions in Afghanistan that serve Pakistani interests.

C.I.A. officials believe that Mr. Haqqani’s group played a role in the killing of seven Americans in Khost, Afghanistan, in late December, and since then have carried out more than a dozen drone strikes in the Haqqani network’s enclave in North Waziristan.

The ISI, an institution feared by most Pakistanis, is used to getting its way. It meddles in domestic politics and in recent months has been suspected by Western embassies in Islamabad of planting anti-American stories in Pakistani newspapers.

It has also been criticized in reports by international human rights organizations of using brutal interrogation tactics against its prisoners, though the same could certainly be said of the C.I.A. in the period of 2002 to 2004. The annual human rights report of the State Department in 2007 said “there were persistent reports that security forces, including intelligence services, tortured and abused persons.”

The head of the Pakistani military, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, said in a recent briefing that it was doubtful that a centralized government would work in post-conflict Afghanistan, making it more important for Pakistan to continue to influence the Taliban in the years to come.

As a result there remains a belief among American intelligence officials that Pakistan will never completely abandon the Taliban, and officials both in Washington and Kabul admit that they are almost completely in the dark about Pakistan’s long-term strategy regarding the Taliban.

“We have a better level of cooperation,” said one top American official who met recently in Islamabad with General Kayani. “How far that goes, I can’t tell yet. We’ll know soon whether this is cooperation, or a stonewall and kind of rope a dope.”
N.Y.T
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/world/asia/25intel.html?th&emc=th

Iran arrests most wanted man after police board civilian flight

2010-02-25T13:14:00.000-08:00

By Richard Spencer in Dubai, Andrew Osborn in Moscow and Bruno Waterfield in Brussels
Abdol Malek Rigi, Iran's most wanted man, was shown by television cameras being hauled off a jet in handcuffs by four men wearing balaclavas.

Officials were vague about the details of the arrest, but state media said Rigi had been on board a flight from Dubai to Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, after visiting a US military base in Afghanistan.

'Bishkek airport confirmed that Kyrgyzstan Airways flight QH454 from Dubai had arrived several hours late yesterday after being told to land by Iran.

Iran's intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, claimed that Rigi, the leader of the Sunni terror group Jundullah, had been at the US base 24 hours before his arrest.

At a dramatic press conference he flourished a photograph which he said showed Rigi outside the base with two other men, though he gave no details of where the base was, or how or when the photograph was obtained.

The photograph itself gave no clues as to the location. Photographs were also shown of an Afghan passport and identity card said to have been given by the Americans to Rigi.

Mr Moslehi also alleged that Rigi had met the then Nato secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, in Afghanistan in 2008, and had visited European countries.

He said agents had tracked Rigi's movements for five months, calling his arrest "a great defeat for the US and UK".

Iran has repeatedly claimed that Jundullah, which has carried out a series of bombings in support of demands for better treatment for the border region of Balochistan, is backed directly by Pakistan but also by Britain, Israel and America.

It has also been alleged by western media, including The Sunday Telegraph, that in 2007 CIA provided funding and weapons to Jundullah.

The group's most serious attack, in October last year, killed two generals of the Revolutionary Guard along with more than 40 of their men and tribal chiefs whom they were meeting in a town in Balochistan near the border with Pakistan.

Previously, it blew up a Shia mosque killing 25 people in May, following which 18 members of the group were executed. Rigi's brother, Abdol Hamid Rigi, was reprieved at the last moment after agreeing to give evidence against his brother, who he said had received money from the United States.

According to one report yesterday, Rigi was arrested "outside the country", according to another, in Pakistan. A third version said the plane landed in Sistan-Balochistan itself.

Pakistan is said to have been co-operating with Iran recently in arresting Jundullah members.

"This is another disgrace for countries who claim human rights," the Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, said.

American involvement was denied by a US official. "This is of course a totally bogus accusation," the official said. A Foreign Office spokesman said it did not comment on intelligence matters.

A spokesman for Nato "flatly denied" that any meeting had taken place between Mr Scheffer and Rigi, although Mr Scheffer did visit Afghanistan in 2008.

Asked whether Rigi could have met an ISAF officer, the spokesman said: "It is the first I have ever heard of any Nato officials meeting people like that."

The Iranian operation is another example of foreign intelligence agents using Dubai's open border policy to follow a "target", shortly after the assassination in the emirate of a senior Hamas official.

Dubai has long had close ties to Iran, but has been under considerable pressure to rein them in. There was a hint of Iran's annoyance at this change of policy in Mr Moslehi's press conference.

"He was arrested on a flight from Dubai to Kyrgyzstan," Mr Moslehi said. "It is such a scandal for Dubai in this incident, which shows that the Zionist regime, by using the US and Europe, is seeking to turn the region into a haven for terrorists.

"This scandal cannot be covered up."

The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/7300767/Iran-arrests-most-wanted-man-after-police-board-civilian-flight.html

In Praise of Aerial Bombing

2010-02-25T13:11:00.000-08:00

BY EDWARD LUTTWAK
Ever since the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey cast doubt on the efficacy of aerial bombardment in World War II, and particularly after its failure to bring victory in the Vietnam War, air power has acquired a bad reputation. Nowadays, killing enemies from the skies is widely considered useless, while its polar opposite, counterinsurgency by nation-building, is the U.S. government's official policy. But it's not yet time to junk our planes. Air power still has a lot to offer, even in a world of scattered insurgencies.

Military aviation started off splendidly in 1911, when the Italians pioneered aerial bombing in Libya. But since then it has often been a great disappointment because the two overlooked conditions of success in 1911 have been absent: the barrenness of the Libyan desert, which allowed aviators to see their targets very clearly, and the total lack of an enemy air force or anti-aircraft weapons that could interfere with their attacks.

Through all the wars since, the 1911 rules have held. Aerial bombing works very well, but only if the enemy must move in open, arid terrain and has no air force or effective anti-aircraft weapons. These conditions emphatically did not apply to World War II until the very end. And Vietnam was full of trees, as well as brave men: hence the failure of tactical bombing in the south, while the strategic bombing of the north was strongly resisted and there were too few good targets anyway.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peak Insurgency
Why Irregular Warfare May Be a Thing of the Past.
By Joshua E. Keating

But the supposed lessons of Vietnam have clearly been overlearned. Back in 2006, while the Israeli Air Force was bombing down its target list in Lebanon, assorted experts were almost unanimous in asserting that the campaign would fail. As a defiant Hezbollah continued to launch rockets into Israeli territory day after day, the consensus was seemingly proven right. And because television and photographers in Lebanon kept feeding pictures of dead babies or at least broken dolls to world media while withholding images of Hezbollah's destroyed headquarters and weapons, Israel was paying a very high political price for its bombing. In any case, it was running out of targets: There were only so many bridges and viaducts in Lebanon. Even its friends could only regretfully agree that Israel seemed to be failing.

But that is not at all how it turned out. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah admitted immediately after the war that he would never have ordered the original deadly attack on an Israeli border patrol had he known that Israel would retaliate with such devastating effect. Before the 2006 war, Hezbollah launched rockets into northern Israel whenever it wanted to raise tensions. Since the Aug. 14, 2006, cease-fire, Hezbollah has rigorously refrained. Whenever rockets are nonetheless launched, Nasrallah's spokesmen rush to announce that Hezbollah had absolutely nothing to do with it. Evidently, Israel's supposedly futile bombing did achieve its aim.

Nevertheless, less than three years later, during Israel's systematic campaign of aerial bombing during the Gaza war, the same doubters repeated their assertions -- only to be proven wrong again. As in 2006, many civilians were killed and injured in the bombing, and not only because of accidental proximity: Hamas commanders worked to maximize civilian casualties on their own side, routinely launching rockets from apartment courtyards to provoke artillery fire, in order to raise the political costs for Israel.

These costs were real. And the 1,300 Palestinian civilians killed suggest why airstrikes can never be called "surgical." But when the 1911 rules apply, such tactics can at least achieve material results. In 2008, 3,278 projectiles from Gaza landed in Israel, including 1,553 rockets. Last year, the total went down to 248, making 2009 the most peaceful year Israel has enjoyed in recent memory, with no suicide bombings and only 15 Israelis killed by all forms of attack.

What about Afghanistan? Do the 1911 rules work there? The expert consensus again seems to be no. And yet the Taliban, for all their martial virtues, are still a few centuries removed from having an air force capable of engaging U.S. fighter-bombers -- which fly too high for hand-held anti-aircraft weapons -- and even in that most mountainous of countries, Taliban fighters must cross open, arid terrain to move from one valley to the next.

Most unfortunately, having so often greatly overestimated air power in the past, the United States is now disregarding its strategic potential, using it only tactically to hunt down individuals with remotely operated drones and to support ground operations, mostly with helicopters, which are the only aircraft the Taliban can shoot down. Commanding Gen. Stanley McChrystal, understandably concerned about the political blowback from errant bombings widely condemned both inside and outside Afghanistan, has put out the word that air power should be used solely as a last resort. He intends to defeat the Taliban by protecting Afghan civilians, providing essential services, stimulating economic development, and ensuring good government, as the now-sacrosanct Field Manual 3-24 prescribes. Given the characteristics of Afghanistan and its rulers, this worthy endeavor might require a century or two. In the meantime, the FM 3-24 way of war is far from cheap: President Barack Obama is now just about doubling the number of U.S. troops by sending another 30,000, at an average cost of $1 million per soldier per year, to defeat perhaps 25,000 full-time Taliban.

The better and much cheaper alternative would be to resurrect strategic bombing in a thoroughly new way by arming the Taliban's many enemies to the teeth and replacing U.S. troops in Afghanistan with sporadic airstrikes. Whenever the Taliban concentrate in numbers to attack, they would be bombed. This would be a most imperfect solution. But it would end the costly futility of "nation-building" in a remote and unwelcoming land. Eventually, after trying everything else, Obama will probably get there.
F.P
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/22/in_praise_of_aerial_bombing

Take Me Back to Constantinople

2010-02-25T13:01:00.000-08:00

BY EDWARD LUTTWAK
Economic crisis, mounting national debt, excessive foreign commitments -- this is no way to run an empire. America needs serious strategic counseling. And fast. It has never been Rome, and to adopt its strategies no -- its ruthless expansion of empire, domination of foreign peoples, and bone-crushing brand of total war -- would only hasten America's decline. Better instead to look to the empire's eastern incarnation: Byzantium, which outlasted its Roman predecessor by eight centuries. It is the lessons of Byzantine grand strategy that America must rediscover today.

Fortunately, the Byzantines are far easier to learn from than the Romans, who left virtually no written legacy of their strategy and tactics, just textual fragments and one bookish compilation by Vegetius, who knew little about statecraft or war. The Byzantines, however, wrote it all down -- their techniques of persuasion, intelligence gathering, strategic thinking, tactical doctrines, and operational methods. All of this is laid out clearly in a series of surviving Byzantine military manuals and a major guidebook on statecraft.

I've spent the past two decades poring over these texts to compile a study of Byzantine grand strategy. The United States would do well to heed the following seven lessons if it wishes to remain a great power:

I. Avoid war by every possible means, in all possible circumstances, but always act as if war might start at any time. Train intensively and be ready for battle at all times -- but do not be eager to fight. The highest purpose of combat readiness is to reduce the probability of having to fight.

II. Gather intelligence on the enemy and his mentality, and monitor his actions continuously. Efforts to do so by all possible means might not be very productive, but they are seldom wasted.

III. Campaign vigorously, both offensively and defensively, but avoid battles, especially large-scale battles, except in very favorable circumstances. Don't think like the Romans, who viewed persuasion as just an adjunct to force. Instead, employ force in the smallest possible doses to help persuade the persuadable and harm those not yet amenable to persuasion.

IV. Replace the battle of attrition and occupation of countries with maneuver warfare -- lightning strikes and offensive raids to disrupt enemies, followed by rapid withdrawals. The object is not to destroy your enemies, because they can become tomorrow's allies. A multiplicity of enemies can be less of a threat than just one, so long as they can be persuaded to attack one another.

V. Strive to end wars successfully by recruiting allies to change the balance of power. Diplomacy is even more important during war than peace. Reject, as the Byzantines did, the foolish aphorism that when the guns speak, diplomats fall silent. The most useful allies are those nearest to the enemy, for they know how best to fight his forces.

VI. Subversion is the cheapest path to victory. So cheap, in fact, as compared with the costs and risks of battle, that it must always be attempted, even with the most seemingly irreconcilable enemies. Remember: Even religious fanatics can be bribed, as the Byzantines were some of the first to discover, because zealots can be quite creative in inventing religious justifications for betraying their own cause ("since the ultimate victory of Islam is inevitable anyway …").

VII. When diplomacy and subversion are not enough and fighting is unavoidable, use methods and tactics that exploit enemy weaknesses, avoid consuming combat forces, and patiently whittle down the enemy's strength. This might require much time. But there is no urgency because as soon as one enemy is no more, another will surely take his place. All is constantly changing as rulers and nations rise and fall. Only the empire is eternal -- if, that is, it does not exhaust itself.
F.P
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/19/take_me_back_to_constantinople?page=full

The New Rules of War

2010-02-22T18:47:00.000-08:00

BY JOHN ARQUILLA
Every day, the U.S. military spends $1.75 billion, much of it on big ships, big guns, and big battalions that are not only not needed to win the wars of the present, but are sure to be the wrong approach to waging the wars of the future.

In this, the ninth year of the first great conflict between nations and networks, America's armed forces have failed, as militaries so often do, to adapt sufficiently to changed conditions, finding out the hard way that their enemies often remain a step ahead. The U.S. military floundered for years in Iraq, then proved itself unable to grasp the point, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, that old-school surges of ground troops do not offer enduring solutions to new-style conflicts with networked adversaries.

So it has almost always been. Given the high stakes and dangers they routinely face, militaries are inevitably reluctant to change. During World War I, the armies on the Western Front in 1915 were fighting in much the same manner as those at Waterloo in 1815, attacking in close-packed formations -- despite the emergence of the machine gun and high-explosive artillery. Millions were slaughtered, year after bloody year, for a few yards of churned-up mud. It is no surprise that historian Alan Clark titled his study of the high command during this conflict The Donkeys.

Even the implications of maturing tanks, planes, and the radio waves that linked them were only partially understood by the next generation of military men. Just as their predecessors failed to grasp the lethal nature of firepower, their successors missed the rise of mechanized maneuver -- save for the Germans, who figured out that blitzkrieg was possible and won some grand early victories. They would have gone on winning, but for poor high-level strategic choices such as invading Russia and declaring war on the United States. In the end, the Nazis were not so much outfought as gang-tackled.

Nuclear weapons were next to be misunderstood, most monumentally by a U.S. military that initially thought they could be employed like any other weapons. But it turned out they were useful only in deterring their use. Surprisingly, it was cold warrior Ronald Reagan who had the keenest insight into such weapons when he said, "A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."

Which brings us to war in the age of information. The technological breakthroughs of the last two decades -- comparable in world-shaking scope to those at the Industrial Revolution's outset two centuries ago -- coincided with a new moment of global political instability after the Cold War. Yet most militaries are entering this era with the familiar pattern of belief that new technological tools will simply reinforce existing practices.

In the U.S. case, senior officials remain convinced that their strategy of "shock and awe" and the Powell doctrine of "overwhelming force" have only been enhanced by the addition of greater numbers of smart weapons, remotely controlled aircraft, and near-instant global communications. Perhaps the most prominent cheerleader for "shock and awe" has been National Security Advisor James Jones, the general whose circle of senior aides has included those who came up with the concept in the 1990s. Their basic idea: "The bigger the hammer, the better the outcome."

Nothing could be further from the truth, as the results in Iraq and Afghanistan so painfully demonstrate. Indeed, a decade and a half after my colleague David Ronfeldt and I coined the term "netwar" to describe the world's emerging form of network-based conflict, the United States is still behind the curve. The evidence of the last 10 years shows clearly that massive applications of force have done little more than kill the innocent and enrage their survivors. Networked organizations like al Qaeda have proven how easy it is to dodge such heavy punches and persist to land sharp counterblows.

And the U.S. military, which has used these new tools of war in mostly traditional ways, has been staggered financially and gravely wounded psychologically. The Iraq war's real cost, for example, has been about $3 trillion, per the analysis of Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes -- and even "official" figures put expenditures around $1 trillion. As for human capital, U.S. troops are exhausted by repeated lengthy deployments against foes who, if they were lined up, would hardly fill a single division of Marines. In a very real sense, the United States has come close to punching itself out since 9/11.

When militaries don't keep up with the pace of change, countries suffer. In World War I, the failure to grasp the implications of mass production led not only to senseless slaughter, but also to the end of great empires and the bankruptcy of others. The inability to comprehend the meaning of mechanization at the outset of World War II handed vast tracts of territory to the Axis powers and very nearly gave them victory. The failure to grasp the true meaning of nuclear weapons led to a suicidal arms race and a barely averted apocalypse during the Cuban missile crisis.

Today, the signs of misunderstanding still abound. For example, in an age of supersonic anti-ship missiles, the U.S. Navy has spent countless billions of dollars on "surface warfare ships" whose aluminum superstructures will likely burn to the waterline if hit by a single missile. Yet Navy doctrine calls for them to engage missile-armed enemies at eyeball range in coastal waters.

The U.S. Army, meanwhile, has spent tens of billions of dollars on its "Future Combat Systems," a grab bag of new weapons, vehicles, and communications gadgets now seen by its own proponents as almost completely unworkable for the kind of military operations that land forces will be undertaking in the years ahead. The oceans of information the systems would generate each day would clog the command circuits so that carrying out even the simplest operation would be a terrible slog.

And the U.S. Air Force, beyond its well-known devotion to massive bombing, remains in love with extremely advanced and extremely expensive fighter aircraft -- despite losing only one fighter plane to an enemy fighter in nearly 40 years. Although the hugely costly F-22 turned out to function poorly and is being canceled after enormous investment in its production, the Air Force has by no means given up. Instead, the more advanced F-35 will be produced, at a cost running in the hundreds of billions of dollars. All this in an era in which what the United States already has is far better than anything else in the world and will remain so for many decades.

These developments suggest that the United States is spending huge amounts of money in ways that are actually making Americans less secure, not only against irregular insurgents, but also against smart countries building different sorts of militaries. And the problem goes well beyond weapons and other high-tech items. What's missing most of all from the U.S. military's arsenal is a deep understanding of networking, the loose but lively interconnection between people that creates and brings a new kind of collective intelligence, power, and purpose to bear -- for good and ill.

Civil society movements around the world have taken to networking in ways that have done far more to advance the cause of freedom than the U.S. military's problematic efforts to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan at gunpoint. As for "uncivil society," terrorists and transnational criminals have embraced connectivity to coordinate global operations in ways that simply were not possible in the past. Before the Internet and the World Wide Web, a terrorist network operating cohesively in more than 60 countries could not have existed. Today, a world full of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallabs awaits -- and not all of them will fail.

But the principles of networking don't have to help only the bad guys. If fully embraced, they can lead to a new kind of military -- and even a new kind of war. The conflicts of the future should and could be less costly and destructive, with armed forces more able to protect the innocent and deter or defend against aggression.

Vast tank armies may no longer battle it out across the steppes, but modern warfare has indeed become exceedingly fast-paced and complex. Still, there is a way to reduce this complexity to just three simple rules that can save untold amounts of blood and treasure in the netwar age.

Rule 1: "Many and Small" Beats "Few and Large."

The greatest problem traditional militaries face today is that they are organized to wage big wars and have difficulty orienting themselves to fight small ones. The demands of large-scale conflicts have led to reliance on a few big units rather than on a lot of little ones. For example, the Marines have only three active-duty divisions, the U.S. Army only ten. The Navy has just 11 carrier strike groups, and the Air Force about three dozen attack aircraft "wings." Almost 1.5 million active service members have been poured into these and a few other supporting organizational structures.

It is no wonder that the U.S. military has exhausted itself in the repeated deployments since the 9/11 attacks. It has a chronic "scaling problem," making it unable to pursue smaller tasks with smaller numbers. Add in the traditional, hierarchical military mindset, which holds that more is always better (the corollary belief being that one can only do worse with less), and you get massive approaches to little wars.

This was the case during the Vietnam War, too, when the prevailing military organizational structure of the 1960s -- not much different from today's -- drove decision-makers to pursue a big-unit war against a large number of very small insurgent units. The final result: 500,000-plus troops deployed, countless billions spent, and a war lost. The iconic images were the insurgents' AK-47 individual assault rifles, of which there were hundreds of thousands in use at any moment, juxtaposed against the U.S. Air Force's B-52s, of which just a hundred or so massed together in fruitless attempts to bomb Hanoi into submission.

The same problem persists today, the updated icons being the insurgents' thousands of improvised explosive devices and the Americans' relative handful of drones. It is ironic that the U.S. war on terrorism commenced in the Afghan mountains with the same type of B-52 bombers and the same problematic results that attended the Vietnam War.

The U.S. military is not unaware of these problems. The Army has incrementally increased the number of brigades -- which typically include between 3,000 and 4,000 trigger-pullers -- from less than three dozen in 2001 to almost 50 today. And the Marines now routinely subdivide their forces into "expeditionary units" of several hundred troops each. But these changes hardly begin the needed shift from a military of the "few and large" to one of the "many and small."

That's because U.S. military leaders have not sufficiently grasped that even quite small units -- like a platoon of 50 or so soldiers -- can wield great power when connected to others, especially friendly indigenous forces, and when networking closely with even a handful of attack aircraft.

Yet the evidence is there. For example, beginning in late 2006 in Iraq, the U.S. command shifted little more than 5 percent of its 130,000 troops from about three dozen major (i.e., town-sized) operating bases to more than a hundred small outposts, each manned by about 50 soldiers. This was a dramatic shift from few-large to many-small, and it soon worked wonders in reducing violence, beginning well before the "surge" troops arrived. In part this happened because the physical network of platoon-sized outposts facilitated social networking with the large numbers of small tribal groups who chose to join the cause, forming the core of the "Awakening" movement.

The Pentagon's reluctance to see the new possibilities -- reflected in the shrilly repeated calls for more troops, first in Iraq, then in Afghanistan -- stems in part from the usual generalized fear of change, but also from concern that a many-and-small force would have trouble against a traditional massed army. Say, like North Korea's.

Then again, perhaps the best example of a many-and-small military that worked against foes of all sizes was the Roman legion. For many centuries, legionary maniples (Latin for "handfuls") marched out -- in their flexible checkerboard formations -- and beat the massive, balky phalanxes of traditional foes, while dealing just as skillfully with loose bands of tribal fighters.

Rule 2: Finding Matters More Than Flanking.

Ever since Theban general Epaminondas overloaded his army's left wing to strike at the Spartan right almost 2,400 years ago at Leuctra, hitting the enemy in the flank has been the most reliable maneuver in warfare. Flank attacks can be seen in Frederick the Great's famous "oblique order" in his 18th-century battles, in Erwin Rommel's repeated "right hooks" around the British in North Africa in 1941, and in Norman Schwarzkopf's famous "left hook" around the Iraqis in 1991. Flanking has quite a pedigree.

Flanking also formed a basis for the march up Mesopotamia by U.S. forces in 2003. But something odd happened this time. In the words of military historian John Keegan, the large Iraqi army of more than 400,000 troops just "melted away." There were no great battles of encirclement and only a handful of firefights along the way to Baghdad. Instead, Iraqis largely waited until their country was overrun and then mounted an insurgency based on tip-and-run attacks and bombings.

Thus did war cease to be driven by mass-on-mass confrontation, but rather by a hider-finder dynamic. In a world of networked war, armies will have to redesign how they fight, keeping in mind that the enemy of the future will have to be found before it can be fought. To some extent this occurred in the Vietnam War, but that was a conflict during which the enemy obligingly (and quite regularly) massed its forces in major offensives: held off in 1965, defeated in 1968 and 1972, and finally winning in 1975.

In Iraq, there weren't mass assaults, but a new type of irregular warfare in which a series of small attacks no longer signaled buildup toward a major battle. This is the path being taken by the Taliban in Afghanistan and is clearly the concept of global operations used by al Qaeda.

At the same time, the U.S. military has shown it can adapt to such a fight. Indeed, when it finally improved its position in Iraq, the change was driven by a vastly enhanced ability to find the enemy. The physical network of small outposts was linked to and enlivened by a social network of tribal fighters willing to work with U.S. forces. These elements, taken together, shone a light on al Qaeda in Iraq, and in the glare of this illumination the militants were easy prey for the small percentage of coalition forces actually waging the campaign against them.

Think of this as a new role for the military. Traditionally, they've seen themselves largely as a "shooting organization"; in this era, they will also have to become a "sensory organization."

This approach can surely work in Afghanistan as well as it has in Iraq -- and in counterinsurgency campaigns elsewhere -- so long as the key emphasis is placed on creating the system needed for "finding." In some places, friendly tribal elements might be less important than technological means, most notably in cyberspace, al Qaeda's "virtual safe haven."

As war shifts from flanking to finding, the hope is that instead of exhausting one's military in massive expeditions against elusive foes, success can be achieved with a small, networked corps of "finders." So a conflict like the war on terror is not "led" by some great power; rather, many participate in it, with each adding a piece to the mosaic that forms an accurate picture of enemy strength and dispositions.

This second shift -- to finding -- has the potential to greatly empower those "many and small" units made necessary by Rule 1. All that is left is to think through the operational concept that will guide them.

Rule 3: Swarming Is the New Surging.

Terrorists, knowing they will never have an edge in numbers, have pioneered a way of war that allows them to make the most of their slender resources: swarming. This is a form of attack undertaken by small units coming from several directions or hitting many targets at the same time. Since 9/11, al Qaeda has mounted but a few major stand-alone strikes -- in Bali, Madrid, and London -- while the network has conducted multiple significant swarming campaigns in Turkey, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia featuring "wave attacks" aimed at overloading their targets' response capabilities. Such attacks have persisted even in post-surge Iraq where, as Gen. David Petraeus noted in a recent speech, the enemy shows a "sophistication" among the militants "in carrying out simultaneous attacks" against major government targets.

Perhaps the clearest example of a terrorist swarm was the November 2008 attack on Mumbai, apparently mounted by the Lashkar-e-Taiba group. The assault force consisted of just 10 fighters who broke into five two-man teams and struck simultaneously at several different sites. It took more than three days to put them down -- and cost the lives of more than 160 innocents -- as the Indian security forces best suited to deal with this problem had to come from distant New Delhi and were configured to cope with a single threat rather than multiple simultaneous ones.

In another sign of the gathering swarm, the August 2008 Russian incursion into Georgia, rather than being a blast from the Cold War past, heralded the possibility that more traditional armies can master the art of omnidirectional attack. In this instance, Russian regular forces were augmented by ethnic militias fighting all over the area of operations -- and there was swarming in cyberspace at the same time. Indeed, the distributed denial of service attack, long a staple of cyberwarriors, is a model form of swarming. And in this instance, Georgian command and control was seriously disrupted by the hackers.

Simultaneous attack from several directions might be at the very cutting edge in conflict, but its lineage is quite old. Traditional tribal warfare, whether by nomadic horse archers or bush fighters, always featured some elements of swarms. The zenith of this kind of fighting probably came with the 13th-century Mongols, who had a name for this doctrine: "Crow Swarm." When the attack was not carried out at close quarters by charging horsemen, but was instead conducted via arrows raining down on massed targets, the khans called it "Falling Stars." With such tactics, the Mongols carved out the largest empire the world has ever seen, and kept it for a few centuries.

But swarming was eclipsed by the rise of guns in the 15th century, which strongly favored massed volley fire. Industrial processes encouraged even more massing, and mechanization favored large flank maneuvers more than small swarms. Now again, in an age of global interdependence replete with advanced information technologies, even quite small teams of fighters can cause huge amounts of disruption. There is an old Mongol proverb: "With 40 men you can shake the world." Look at what al Qaeda did with less than half that number on Sept. 11, 2001.

This point was made by the great British strategist B.H. Liddell Hart in his biography of T.E. Lawrence, a master of the swarm in his own right. Liddell Hart, writing in 1935, predicted that at some point "the old concentration of force is likely to be replaced by an intangibly ubiquitous distribution of force -- pressing everywhere, yet assailable nowhere."

Now, swarming is making a comeback, but at a time when few organized militaries are willing or able to recognize its return. For the implications of this development -- most notably, that fighting units in very small numbers can do amazing things if used to swarm -- are profoundly destabilizing. The most radical change is this: Standing armies can be sharply reduced in size, if properly reconfigured and trained to fight in this manner. Instead of continually "surging" large numbers of troops to trouble spots, the basic response of a swarm force would be to go swiftly, in small numbers, and strike the attackers at many points. In the future, it will take a swarm to defeat a swarm.

Almost 20 years ago, I began a debate about networks that blossomed into an unlikely friendship with Vice Adm. Art Cebrowski, the modern strategic thinker most likely to be as well remembered as Alfred Thayer Mahan, the great American apostle of sea power. He was the first in the Pentagon power structure to warm to my notions of developing fighting networks, embracing the idea of opening lots of lateral communications links between "sensors and shooters." We disagreed, however, about the potential of networks. Cebrowski thought that "network-centric warfare" could be used to improve the performance of existing tools -- including aircraft carriers -- for some time to come. I thought that networking implied a wholly new kind of navy, one made up of small, swift vessels, many of them remotely operated. Cebrowski, who passed away in late 2005, clearly won this debate, as the U.S. Navy remains heavily invested in being a "few-large" force -- if one that is increasingly networked. In an implicit nod to David Ronfeldt's and my ideas, the Navy even has a Netwar Command now.

Swarming has also gained some adherents. The most notable has been Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who famously used swarm tactics in the last great Pentagon war game, "Millennium Challenge 2002," to sink several aircraft carriers at the outset of the imagined conflict. But rather than accept that something quite radical was going on, the referees were instructed to "refloat" the carriers, and the costly game -- its price tag ran in the few hundred millions -- continued. Van Riper walked out. Today, some in the U.S. military still pursue the idea of swarming, mostly in hopes of employing large numbers of small unmanned aerial vehicles in combat. But military habits of mind and institutional interests continue to reflect a greater audience for surges than swarms.

What if senior military leaders wake up and decide to take networks and swarming absolutely seriously? If they ever do, it is likely that the scourges of terrorism and aggression will become less a part of the world system. Such a military would be smaller but quicker to respond, less costly but more lethal. The world system would become far less prone to many of the kinds of violence that have plagued it. Networking and swarming are the organizational and doctrinal keys, respectively, to the strategic puzzle that has been waiting to be solved in our time.

A networked U.S. military that knows how to swarm would have much smaller active manpower -- easily two-thirds less than the more than 2 million serving today -- but would be organized in hundreds more little units of mixed forces. The model for military intervention would be the 200 Special Forces "horse soldiers" who beat the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan late in 2001. Such teams would deploy quickly and lethally, with ample reserves for relieving "first waves" and dealing with other crises. At sea, instead of concentrating firepower in a handful of large, increasingly vulnerable supercarriers, the U.S. Navy would distribute its capabilities across many hundreds of small craft armed with very smart weapons. Given their stealth and multiple uses, submarines would stay while carriers would go. And in the air, the "wings" would reduce in size but increase in overall number, with mere handfuls of aircraft in each. Needless to say, networking means that these small pieces would still be able to join together to swarm enemies, large or small.

Is such a shift feasible? Absolutely. Big reductions in the U.S. military are nothing new. The massive demobilization after World War II aside, active forces were reduced 40 percent in the few years after the Vietnam War and by another third right after the end of the Cold War. But the key is not so much in cutting as it is in redesigning and rethinking.

But what happens if the status quo prevails and the potential of this new round of changes in strategic affairs is ignored or misinterpreted? Failure awaits, at ruinous cost.

The most likely form catastrophe could take is that terrorist networks would stay on their feet long enough to acquire nuclear weapons. Even a handful of warheads in Osama bin Laden's hands would give him great coercive power, as a network cannot be targeted for retaliation the same way a country can. Deterrence will lie in tatters. If there is ever to be a nuclear Napoleon, he will come from a terrorist network.

Within the U.S. military, the danger is that senior commanders will fall back on a fatalism driven by their belief that both congressional and industrial leaders will thwart any effort at radical change. I have heard this objection countless times since the early 1990s, repeated mantra-like, all the way up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thus the mighty U.S. war machine is like a Gulliver trussed up by Lilliputian politicians and businessmen.

The irony, however, is that the U.S. military has never been in a better position to gain acceptance for truly transformational change. Neither party in Congress can afford to be portrayed as standing in the way of strategic progress, and so, whatever the Pentagon asks for, it gets. As for defense contractors, far from driving the agenda, they are much too willing to give their military customers exactly what they demand (rather than, perhaps, something better). If the U.S. armed forces call for smaller, smarter weapons and systems to support swarming, they will get them.

Beyond the United States, other countries' security forces are beginning to think along the lines of "many and small," are crafting better ways to "find," and are learning to swarm. Chinese naval thought today is clearly moving in this direction. Russian ground forces are, too. Needless to say, terrorist networks are still in the lead, and not just al Qaeda. Hezbollah gave quite a demonstration of all three of the new rules of war in its summer 2006 conflict with Israel, a virtual laboratory test of nation versus network -- in which the network more than held its own.

For the U.S. military, failing a great leap forward in self-awareness of the need for radical change, a downward budgetary nudge is probably the best approach -- despite President Barack Obama's unwillingness to extend his fiscal austerity program to security-related expenditures. This could take the form of a freeze on defense spending levels, to be followed by several years of, say, 10 percent annual reductions. To focus the redesign effort, a moratorium would be declared on all legacy-like systems (think aircraft carriers, other big ships, advanced fighters, tanks, etc.) while they are subjected to searching review. It should not be assumed that the huge sums invested in national defense have been wisely spent.

To most Americans who think that being strong on defense means devoting more resources and building bigger systems, this suggestion to cut spending will sound outrageous. But being smarter about defense might lower costs even as effectiveness improves. This pattern has held throughout the transformations of the last few decades, whether in farming or in industry. Why should the military be exempt?

There's real urgency to this debate. Not only has history not ended with the Cold War and the advent of commerce-driven globalization, but conflict and violence have persisted -- even grown -- into a new postmodern scourge.

Indeed, it is ironic that, in an era in which the attraction to persuasive "soft power" has grown dramatically, coercive "hard power" continues to dominate in world affairs. This is no surprise in the case of rogue nations hellbent on developing nuclear arsenals to ensure their security, nor when it comes to terrorist networks that think their essential nature is revealed in and sustained by violent acts. But this primary reliance on coercive capabilities is also on display across a range of countries great and small, most notably the United States, whose defense policy has over the past decade largely become its foreign policy.

From the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to simmering crises with North Korea and Iran, and on to longer-range strategic concerns about East Asian and Central European security, the United States today is heavily invested in hard-power solutions. And it will continue to be. But if the radical adjustments in strategy, organization, and doctrine implied by the new rules of war are ignored, Americans will go on spending more and getting less when it comes to national defense. Networks will persist until they have the capability to land nuclear blows. Other countries will leapfrog ahead of the United States militarily, and concepts like "deterrence" and "containment" of aggression will blow away like leaves in the wind.

So it has always been. Every era of technological change has resulted in profound shifts in military and strategic affairs. History tells us that these developments were inevitable, but soldiers and statesmen were almost always too late in embracing them -- and tragedies upon tragedies ensued. There is still time to be counted among the exceptions, like the Byzantines who, after the fall of Rome, radically redesigned their military and preserved their empire for another thousand years. The U.S. goal should be to join the ranks of those who, in their eras, caught glimpses of the future and acted in time to shape it, saving the world from darkness.
F.P
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/22/the_new_rules_of_war?page=0,3

Afghan Push Went Beyond Traditional Military Goals

2010-02-20T17:34:00.000-08:00

By THOM SHANKER
WASHINGTON — Before 10,000 troops marched through central Helmand Province to wrest control of a small Afghan town from a few hundred entrenched Taliban fighters, American officials did something more typical of political than military campaigns: they took some polls.

Perhaps no other feature of the offensive now under way in and around the town, Marja, speaks so clearly to its central characteristic: it is a campaign meant to shift perceptions as much as to alter the military balance, crush an enemy army or seize some vital crossroads.

The polling was aimed at understanding what local residents wanted; how they viewed local security; what they thought of the Americans, the Taliban and the foreign jihadis fighting for local control; and what might give them confidence in the central government in Kabul.

Whatever the limitations of this opinion sampling — what is the margin of error when there are whole neighborhoods where it is deadly to knock on doors? — what the commanders learned helped shape the entire campaign. Among other things, those living in the area still harbor some friendly feelings for the Americans, remembering how years ago they built dams in the region, and strongly favor an effort to oust the Taliban.

That gave the military extra confidence as they mounted a counterinsurgency operation that stands out in many ways.

Notably, this was the first time that the Americans took pains to involve the central government of President Hamid Karzai in such a significant operation, let alone a multiphase campaign that included the military, government and economic stability. Aside from contributing thousands of troops, Mr. Karzai and his aides, with significant help from the Americans, basically built a government in waiting. The aim is for the Afghan government to carry out programs in education, health and employment as soon as the area is secured, according to a senior American officer.

The size of the onslaught was a departure from past practice, too. The allied force is so large as to be described by one senior American adviser as “overwhelming to the point of saturation.”

And the operation was advertised, almost in neon lights, so far in advance and in such detail that there was none of the element of surprise that combat commanders usually prize.

All of those characteristics are explained by the psychological goal of this campaign, a shift of perceptions among the fence-sitters and the fearful among the Afghan people.

Even domestically, the operation is supposed to show Americans that the buildup ordered by President Obama can have swift and positive results. The White House is not declaring victory, though; after Mr. Obama was briefed by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, his field commander, on Tuesday, the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said only that the campaign was “highly planned and orchestrated.”

The project was set in motion six months ago, when General McChrystal reported to President Obama that the Taliban, despite its relatively light forces, had seized the initiative largely through adroit exploitation of the tools of psychological warfare. Insurgent leaders had become more nimble at exploiting even small victories — and retelling even their battlefield defeats as successes through a propaganda network of radio broadcasts, Web postings and threatening, hand-delivered “night letters” to Afghan villages.

The problem was how a foreign army, no matter how much it built up, could drown out the Taliban message and try to recast the Afghan government and its coalition partners as winners. Combat operations measured by industrial-age standards of captured terrain and enemy dead had to be replaced by another standard adapted to the information era: whether the operation can win the trust of the local people.

“The biggest thing is in convincing the Afghan people,” General McChrystal said in Istanbul, where he joined Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to brief NATO allies just before the offensive began.

“This is all a war of perceptions,” General McChrystal said. “This is not a physical war in terms of how many people you kill or how much ground you capture, how many bridges you blow up. This is all in the minds of the participants.”

Senior Pentagon and military officers also point out that the troop ratio reverses several years in which planners sought to capitalize on new technologies and new theories of military reform to fight in both Iraq and Afghanistan with the smallest possible forces. “The number of the enemy did not drive the equation,” said one senior American officer involved in the Marja effort. “It was a calculation based on how much ground we wanted to cover with a security blanket to reassure the population.”

The senior officer and other military officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the operation.

Although it is a battle for public support, it is by no means a phony war. The bullets, bombs and booby traps are real, putting everyone in the area, including civilians, at real risk.

The leaflets scattered over the region persuaded some of the Taliban to flee in the face of the onslaught, but others dug in and laid down mines.

It was a risk that the commanders accepted, hoping that civilians, at least, would be able to stay relatively safe. They knew that one of the principal dangers to their psychological war would be the anger stirred if civilian casualties were high.

They are hoping the campaign will be short. Officers say the major combat portion of the offensive should be over within a month or so.

Then political and economic development advisers, now standing by, will move in behind the combat force, along with two thousand Afghan police officers.

On Thursday, the British commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, told reporters at the Pentagon that it would take months to judge whether the local residents were satisfied.

“We probably won’t know for about 120 days whether or not the population is entirely convinced by the degree of commitment that their government is showing to them,” General Carter said.
N.Y.T
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/world/20military.html?th&emc=th

In Pakistan Raid, Taliban Chief Was an Extra Prize

2010-02-19T11:29:00.000-08:00

By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON — When Pakistani security officers raided a house outside Karachi in late January, they had no idea that they had just made their most important capture in years.

American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications saying militants with a possible link to the Afghan Taliban’s top military commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, were meeting. Tipped off by the Americans, Pakistani counterterrorist officers took several men into custody, meeting no resistance.

Only after a careful process of identification did Pakistani and American officials realize they had captured Mullah Baradar himself, the man who had long overseen the Taliban insurgency against American, NATO and Afghan troops in Afghanistan.

New details of the raid indicate that the arrest of the No. 2 Taliban leader was not necessarily the result of a new determination by Pakistan to go after the Taliban, or a bid to improve its strategic position in the region. Rather, it may be something more prosaic: “a lucky accident,” as one American official called it. “No one knew what they were getting,” he said.

Now the full impact of Mullah Baradar’s arrest will play out only in the weeks to come.

Relations between the intelligence services of the United States and Pakistan have long been marred by suspicions that Pakistan has sheltered the Afghan Taliban. The Pakistanis have long denied it.

The capture of Mullah Baradar was followed by the arrests of two Taliban “shadow governors” elsewhere in Pakistan. While the arrests showed a degree of Pakistani cooperation, they also demonstrated how the Taliban leadership has depended on Pakistan as a rear base.

Jostling over the prize began as soon as Mullah Baradar was identified. Officials with the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s military spy agency, limited American access to Mullah Baradar, not permitting direct questioning by Central Intelligence Agency officers until about two weeks after the raid, according to American officials who discussed the issue on the condition of anonymity.

“The Pakistanis are an independent partner, and sometimes they show it,” said one American official briefed on the matter. “We don’t always love what they do, but if it weren’t for them, Mullah Baradar and a lot of other terrorists would still be walking around killing people.”

Bruce Riedel, an expert on Afghanistan at the Brookings Institution, who advised the Obama administration on Afghan policy early last year, said the tensions surrounding Mullah Baradar were inevitable. “The Pakistanis have a delicate problem with Baradar,” Mr. Riedel said. “If I were in their shoes, I’d be worried that he might reveal something embarrassing about relations between the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani government or Inter-Services Intelligence.”

A Pakistani official expressed impatience with questions about past conflicts over the Afghan Taliban, saying, “It’s high time now that we move beyond that.”

Mullah Baradar is talking a little, though he is viewed as a formidable, hard-line opponent whose interrogation will be a long-term effort, according to American and Pakistani officials.

Despite the tensions, interviews with Pakistani military and intelligence officials suggested that the Taliban leader’s capture could alter Pakistan’s calculus about the volatile region.

Taking him off the battlefield, and exploiting the information he might provide, could deal a blow to the Taliban’s military capacity. In the long run, in any discussions of the future governance of Afghanistan, Mullah Baradar could become a bargaining chip and, conceivably, a negotiator.

In interviews on Thursday, Pakistani officials said an aggressive strategy to weaken the Taliban’s leadership might cripple the movement enough to bring it to the negotiating table.

“Maybe Mullah Baradar’s capture gives us a breakthrough in terms of reconciliation,” said one Pakistani intelligence official in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, who spoke on condition that he not be named. But the official said such a strategy ran the risk of making the Taliban “more hostile” or possibly of giving a Taliban hard-liner too much influence in negotiations.

Mr. Riedel, of the Brookings Institution, said the tensions surrounding Mullah Baradar were minor compared with the value of having captured him. He said Pakistan’s cooperation could be a sign that official attitudes there, which have favored the Afghan Taliban while condemning the Pakistani Taliban, are changing.

“I believe the Pakistanis have finally concluded that the Afghan Taliban and Pakistan Taliban were cooperating against them in Waziristan and elsewhere,” Mr. Riedel said, referring to links among various militant groups in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

An Obama administration official sounded a more cautious note about the recent arrests. “All this is not necessarily related to a rational decision at the top of the Pakistani military to see things our way,” the official said. “I don’t see any big shift yet.”

The likely impact of Mullah Baradar’s detention on prospects for talks with the Taliban, which have been the subject of intense speculation in recent months, is in dispute.

Alex Strick van Linschoten, a Dutch researcher who has lived for several years in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, said Taliban representatives reacted with fury to Mullah Baradar’s arrest and were unlikely to be amenable to political approaches any time soon.

“This ends all that,” said Mr. Strick van Linschoten, who helped a former Taliban official, Abdul Salam Zaeef, write a memoir published last month in English, “My Life With the Taliban.”

Mr. Strick van Linschoten said the killing and detention of an older generation of Taliban, including Mullah Baradar, who fought Soviet troops in the 1980s, might leave a younger, decentralized force of militants who were less interested in and less able to conduct negotiations.

“On a local level in Afghanistan, Taliban fighters operate fairly independently,” he said. “They’re self-sustaining, by taxing the drug trade or taxing construction projects, and they’ll just keep fighting.”

Mullah Baradar, who is in his early 40s and is said by most officials to belong to the same Popalzai tribe as Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, is believed to be one of a handful of Taliban leaders in periodic contact with Mullah Muhammad Omar, the reclusive, one-eyed founder of the Taliban.

Their leadership council is known as the Quetta shura, and they are believed to have operated around the Pakistani city of Quetta since the Taliban government in Kabul, the Afghan capital, fell in 2001. But Mr. Strick van Linschoten said he heard in Kandahar that Taliban leaders were feeling increasingly vulnerable in Quetta.

As a result, Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to have been spending more time in Karachi, Pakistan, a sprawling port city of more than 15 million, where they believed that they would be harder to find.

Mark Mazzetti and Jane Perlez contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Dexter Filkins from Kabul, Afghanistan.

N.Y.T
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/world/asia/19intel.html?th&emc=th

Pakistan is winning its risky games

2010-02-19T11:24:00.000-08:00

Eric Randolph
There has been plenty of tub-thumping over this week's capture of Taliban commander Mullah Baradar, but all it really signifies is that Pakistan holds all the cards in the strategic game being played out across central and southern Asia.

President Barack Obama is well-known for his love of poker. It is a comforting image for the rest of the world: the stony-faced thinker, calculating the odds, in the game for the long haul. But when it comes to the bluff, no one can touch Pakistan's military establishment. Consider the complexity of the game it is playing.

America's enemies are based in their country, but they can still wring $7.5bn in aid from Washington. Their population hates the idea of colluding with the Americans, but Pakistan quietly allows US drones, platoons of marines and CIA agents to operate in its territory. It fights its own insurgency with some parts of the Pakistani Taliban while doing deals with its affiliates. Known terrorists are free to hold public rallies in broad daylight calling for attacks on India, and yet India still finds itself pressured into holding a new round of peace talks.

While India spends billions of dollars in development aid and construction projects in Afghanistan, Pakistan bides its time and then demands that India pack its bags and head home as the price of its cooperation with the US. And who can blame it? After all the bloodshed Pakistan has suffered in the past nine years, should it really have to stomach its sworn enemy setting up camp on the western flank?

Meanwhile, the west has one priority – getting out of Afghanistan before it drags all their governments into the gutter. In its obsessive focus on every detail of Operation Moshtarak and the Afghan surge, Mullah Baradar's arrest looks like a big tactical victory. But for Pakistan it will barely muster a footnote in the much broader narrative.

There are a tonne of theories as to what motivated Pakistan's shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence agency to suddenly co-operate in handing over an old ally. Were they making sure he did not make a deal behind their back? Were they buying some influence with the Americans? Or was it a stern warning to the Afghan Taliban to stay in line?

In the end, the truth is unimportant. Baradar was dispensable and he was dispensed with. The Pakistani establishment can sell his arrest to the Americans as a sign they are co-operating, sell it to Mullah Omar and Kabul as a reminder of who's boss, and it can brush the whole thing under the carpet to its own citizens. Is it a change of strategy, or just a bluff? We are unlikely to ever know for sure.

Compare that with the game being played by the Americans. They, too, know that everything comes down to perceptions. That has been the mantra ever since Stan McChrystal took over as US commander in Afghanistan last summer. But look at the task he faces: selling to voters back home that an end is in sight (while President Hamid Karzai says he needs another 10-15 years to finish the job), selling to civilians in the war zone that they can be protected (despite the inevitable civilian casualties), selling to the Taliban that their butts will be kicked (if only we knew where they were).

Is anyone buying? No. It is not the fault of the troops on the ground, who are now thoroughly versed in the intricacies of counter-insurgency. But playing the game of perceptions is difficult in a country shot through with "ethnic paranoia, national self-doubt and conspiracy theories".

And if you are trying to play a tense game of high-stakes poker, it is probably best if you don't show everyone your cards before you start. By telling the world that the troops would start shipping out in mid-2011, that is exactly what Obama did.

It is not his fault, of course. He had to offer a sop to the anti-war contingent. Plus, the US has none of the advantages available to the Pakistanis. They have known all the players in this game for decades. They know how they think, what they are planning, who can be trusted and who needs to be kicked off the table.

At the same time, they are also engaged in a game with India, one which is ultimately far more important to them. If you want a clear statement of the futility of America's current surge in Afghanistan, take this line from a recent editorial: "The war on the western front will not be solved if Pakistan's army continues to regard India's army on the eastern front as the major threat." If that is true, then the west might as well pack up and go home today.

Sure, there are talks planned between India and Pakistan next week. But you would be hard-pressed to find a single person on this side of the world who thinks any progress whatsoever is going to be made. It has been 63 years since they started arguing and fighting over Kashmir, and so far neither side has shown any interest in budging from its original stance.

Whatever glimmers of hope might have existed when the talks were announced earlier this month evaporated when the explosion ripped through the German Bakery in Pune at the weekend. Now all the Indians want to talk about is terrorism, and Pakistan can stick to the line that it does not the support the jihadists in its midst.

There is huge risk in the games Pakistan plays. It has lost of hundreds of lives to its own Taliban insurgency and its intelligence agencies could easily lose control of a jihadist front in Kashmir that has its own agenda and its own momentum. India has the fortitude to withstand only so much, and another series of terrorist strikes like it experienced in 2007 and 2008 may well prove more than it can stand.

While Pakistan remains in some semblance of control, there is hope that some form of compromised stability might be achieved across the region. But if its handle on the situation slips even slightly, the whole pack of cards could very quickly collapse.

The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/19/pakistan-risky-games-mullah-capture

Afghanistan offensive: Why Barack Obama is boxed in

2010-02-15T03:08:00.000-08:00

Editorial
It is difficult to have confidence in a general who sets himself up so obviously for a fall. Among the many nonsenses uttered about the long-heralded offensive against the walled town of Marjah in Helmand yesterday was the claim by the US commander, General Stanley McChrystal, that he had an Afghan administration that would be brought to life in the newly liberated areas "in a box, ready to roll in". From the army that gave us meals ready to eat, comes a new product. It is called governments ready to govern. All you do is add water. If such a thing did exist, it has got unlimited potential in a global market of failed states.

But take Gen McChrystal at his word and examine what is in his tuck box. The Taliban has retreated many times before in the last nine years of warfare when faced with overwhelming odds, but it has returned each time. To the counter-insurgency formula of "clear, hold and build" has now been added a fourth injunction: return to Afghan authority. So the contents of the general's box are important, because they are the only fresh elements to this campaign. The numbers of troops being applied may have a military effect in clearing the area of IEDs and booby traps. But those numbers are not permanent and they will not stop the Taliban infiltrating after foreign troops leave and the spotlight of international attention moves elsewhere. Civilian programmes, not helicopter landings, will determine the winner.

So what is in the box? Once the fighting has ended, Isaf has dedicated "district development teams" to move into Marjah. A US team is working alongside a group of Afghan civil servants which the Karzai government is allegedly meant to deploy. To encourage them to serve in what must be a highly risky secondment, their average monthly salary is being quintupled to about $300. Once all this is done, the plan is for the US Agency for International Development to help farmers plant crops by opening up the canal network, a project started by the US half a century ago, but which it has yet to complete. As if that were not enough, Hanif Atmar, the Afghan interior minister, urged elders from Marjah's main tribes to give him their sons so that he can recruit 1,000 local police officers, whose job will be to keep the Taliban out.

Even in peacetime, this plan is ambitious. It is bolder still when a full-scale guerilla war is raging in the countryside around. So the test of this strategy will come when Isaf starts to withdraw, as it must, in the months ahead and we find out what sort of town it has transferred to Afghan authority. It has happened repeatedly in Musa Qala before and each time the withdrawal is sotto voce and when the spotlight of the world's media has been turned off. To follow Gen McChrystal's argument to its logical conclusion, the withdrawal of Isaf forces from Marjah will be more significant than their insertion. If this operation is designed to be as important to the Afghan surge as the capture of Falluja was for the Iraq campaign, then the objective is not to kill the insurgents so much as make it impossible for them to come back.

Last night that objective was already slipping, when Nato confirmed that two of its rockets had struck a house in Nad Ali killing 12 civilians sheltering from the fighting, 10 from the same family. They will not be the last civilian casualties. As the operation's US commander, Brigadier General Larry Nicholson, said yesterday, it could take a month to make the whole area safe. For there is one commodity which the Taliban has in abundance and that Gen McChrystal lacks. It is called time, years of it, if need be. The longer the Taliban can string the battle out, the sooner the west will tire and Barack Obama will see the fatal flaw of his exit strategy: that Afghan dependency is built into it. Not least in the figure of Hamid Karzai himself, whose government would collapse if the US pulled out and who has no interest in seeing that happen.
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/15/afghanistan-offensive-obama-strategy-flawed

New Model for Afghan War: ‘Population Is the Prize’

2010-02-12T13:47:00.000-08:00

By DEXTER FILKINS
KABUL, Afghanistan — For all the fighting that lies ahead over the next several days, no one doubts that the American and Afghan troops who will swarm into the Taliban redoubt of Marja will ultimately clear it of insurgents.

And that’s when the real test will begin.

For much of the past eight years, American and NATO forces have mounted other large military operations to clear towns and cities of Taliban insurgents. And then, almost invariably, they have cleared out, never leaving behind enough soldiers or police to hold the place on their own.

And so, almost always, the Taliban returned — and, after a time, so did the American and NATO troops, to clear the place all over again.

“Mowing the grass,” the soldiers and Marines derisively call it.

Now American and Afghan troops are poised to take Marja, a Taliban-held town in southern Helmand province. It is not clear when the battle will begin, but this time commanders say they will do something they have never done before: bring in an Afghan government and police force behind them. American and British troops will stay on to support them.

“We’ve got a government in a box, ready to roll in,” said Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander here.

Indeed, Marja is intended to serve as a prototype for a new type of military operation, based on the counter-insurgency thinking propounded by General McChrystal in the run-up to President Obama’s decision in December to boost the number of American troops here to nearly 100,000.

More than at any time since 2001, American and NATO soldiers will focus less on killing Taliban insurgents than on sparing Afghan civilians and building an Afghan state.

“The population is not the enemy,” Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, the commander of the Marines in southern Afghanistan, told a group of troops this week. “The population is the prize — they are why we are going in.”

To realize their goals, the Americans and their allies want to capture the area with a minimum amount of violence. American commanders say the attack on Marja is intended to be nothing like the similarly sized assault on the city of Falluja, Iraq, in November 2004. In that case, Falluja, under the control of hundreds of insurgents, was largely destroyed. The Americans killed plenty of guerrillas, but they did not make any friends.

“We don’t want Falluja,” General McChrystal said in an interview this week. “Falluja is not the model.”

Sparing civilian life may not be easy, especially in the close-quarters combat that lies ahead. Hundreds of Taliban fighters are believed to be in the area. And the American-led force may yet get bogged down — by the network of irrigation canals, built by the United States in the 1950s, or by the hundreds of homemade bombs that Taliban fighters have planted in the roads and trails.

The chief worry among both American and Afghan commanders is that if a large number of civilians are killed, the Afghan government — including its sometimes erratic president, Hamid Karzai — could withdraw its support.

The Americans are hoping, too, that the largely Afghan composition of the invading force — about 60 percent of the total — will give Mr. Karzai’s government sufficient cover if anything goes wrong.

But at some point the operation will end, and when it does General McChrystal has set goals for the Americans and the Afghans that are less dramatic, but far more ambitious, than fighting.

For the first time, NATO and Afghan officials have assembled a large team of Afghan administrators and an Afghan governor that will move into Marja the moment the shooting stops. More than 1,900 police are standing by.

Setting up a government in this impoverished country is no small task. Across Afghanistan, the Afghan government and its police are reviled for their inefficiency and corruption.

“We want to show people that we can deliver police, and services, and development, said Lt. Gen. Sher Mohammed Karimi, the deputy chief of staff of the Afghan National Army. “We want to convince the Afghans that the government is for them.”

At a broader level, the attack on Marja is the first move in an ambitious effort to break the Taliban in their heartland. Over the next several months, the Americans are hoping to secure a 200-mile long horseshoe shaped string of cities that runs along the Helmand River, through Kandahar and then on to the Pakistani border. The ribbon holds 85 percent of the population of Kandahar and Helmand Provinces, the Taliban’s base of support. In the next several months, the Americans and Afghans are planning to pour thousands of troops there.

“We are trying to take away any hope of victory,” General McChrystal said.

That would set the stage for a political settlement that General McChrystal believe is the only way the war will end.

The risks in the strategy are obvious enough. Eight years after being expelled from Kabul, the Taliban are fighting more vigorously, and operating in more places, than at any point since the American-led war began here in 2001. The Taliban have “shadow governors” in every province but Kabul itself. Twice the number of Americans soldiers were killed last year as the year before.

And there is some chance, even after the offensive, that the insurgents will simply flee to another part of the country. They’ve done it before; many of the fighters now inside Marja once operated in other Helmand towns.

Finally, there is only so much the Americans and their NATO partners can do. The rest is up to the Afghans themselves. Despite years of work, the Afghan Army cannot sustain itself in the field, the police are loathed in nearly every place they work, and the government of President Hamid Karzai has only a few serious worldwide rivals in corruption and graft.

In a conversation this week, a senior American official in Kabul said that his greatest worry was not the Taliban, or even that the Marja operation would fail. “What do I worry about?” he said, “Dependency.” That is, the fear that Afghanistan’s leaders and people will not, in the end, stand up for themselves.

In that sense, who emerges as the victor in Marja may not be clear for many months.

N.Y.T
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/world/asia/13kabul.html?hp

No Heads Are Better Than Two

2010-02-11T05:36:00.000-08:00

BY NINA L. KHRUSHCHEVA
As Russia teeters between democracy and autocracy, modernity and a return to its Stalinist past, the tentative liberalism represented by President Dmitry Medvedev and the repression represented by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, one symbol describes the country's split personality particularly well: the double-headed eagle, Russia's emblem for much of the time since the 15th century.

Throughout ancient history, eagles -- with one head -- were a universal symbol of empire, from Persia, Turkey, and South India to Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Rome. Napoleon adopted the noble bird as his coat of arms in the early 1800s. In modern times, the eagle has lived on, though it has shed some of its domineering symbolism. Countries such as the United States, Egypt, Iraq, Mexico, Poland, and Romania have adopted the eagle more as a sign of national greatness than of conquest.

Add a head, however, and the equation shifts. In Byzantium, the "Second Rome" of the first millennium, the two-headed eagle came to signify the empire's doubly powerful domination over the world: One head looked over the West, the other ruled the East. Not to be outdone, the Holy Roman Empire starting in the 900s also insisted on two heads. After that empire dissolved in 1806, its successors in the German Confederation and Austria-Hungary held on to the double heads, at least until modernity hit and that second one began to look too 10th-century. Germany discarded its second eagle's head in 1866, while Austria's lasted until 1918.

The Russian czars, soon after Byzantium's collapse in 1453, also adopted the double eagle as a symbol of their power. After dumping the czars centuries later, the Soviets sought to eliminate all trace of the imperial emblem, going to such lengths as painting red stars over the double-headed eagle on the side of official teacups. But President Boris Yeltsin brought it back after the Soviet collapse in 1991 to replace the hammer and sickle as the state symbol, explaining that the eagle's three crowns no longer had imperialist overtones but referred to the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the government. The double-headed eagle he chose evoked the seal of Peter the Great, the legendary reformer to whom Yeltsin liked to compare himself.

But no one stopped to argue that maybe what Russia really needed was only one eagle with a clear mission -- not two heads, or three crowns. And now it's just Russia and the Balkan states of Serbia, Albania, and Montenegro that still cling to the double eagle.

At first, Yeltsin's move seemed to be about resurrecting a pre-Soviet relic. But over the last decade the eagle's implicit message -- Russia's superiority over both Europe and Asia -- has become more and more central to Russian identity. Today you'll find the emblem everywhere: on Russia's official coat of arms, on its police insignia, as the symbol for Kremlin announcements on television, in the Ministry of Internal Affairs logo, and so forth. Byzantium and its twin-headed icon are discussed on talk shows, their imperial grandeur cited as an example for Russia's future glory. Russian Orthodox priests deliver sermons on the lessons Russia must learn from its Byzantine past.

Putin himself often invokes a mythic version of this history to explain why the country is so great. "'All peoples are equal before God' is at the foundation of Russian statehood," he said upon assuming the presidency in 2000. "Unlike in the West, Russian Orthodox culture had always insisted upon the equality of all peoples.

But the double-headed eagle that serves as a constant reminder of Russia's glorious Byzantine roots isn't just an ill-conceived imperial throwback; it's a stand-in for the schizophrenia that describes every aspect of Russian life today. With Putin and Medvedev, for instance, we get the ultimate push-me-pull-you double-headed monster. Putin has accused the United States of bringing the world "to the abyss of one conflict after another," making political compromise impossible. Yet, congratulating U.S. President Barack Obama on his Nobel Peace Prize, Medvedev hailed the "principles of equality, mutual respect to the benefit of global peace, and stability" shaping the U.S.-Russia relationship.

In Medvedev's presidential state of the union address in November, he seemed to distance himself from his other head, saying that the government must admit fault for the hardships of the economic crisis and calling for a less blustering foreign policy. It will be a cold day in hell when Putin -- who sat pouting in the front row throughout Medvedev's speech -- permits any of Medvedev's recommendations to go through the Kremlin.

But it's not just Russia's leaders who aren't rowing in the same direction. We Russians are divided about our history, especially our Stalinist past. Last year, the liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta reproduced some of the recently declassified execution orders signed by Stalin; now his grandson Yevgeny Dzhugashvili has brought the journalists to court for lying about the memory of the great leader. In 2007 a textbook that defended Stalin's rationalism in killing millions was published as a teaching guide in Russian schools; in 2009 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, an account of the inhumane horrors of Stalin's rule, was assigned to those same schoolchildren. Double-headed schizophrenia in action: In first period kids learn Stalin was an "efficient manager" who was a good "guardian" of his people; in second period they find out he committed crimes against these very people. No wonder that 51 percent of Russians think that Stalin was a wise leader, and 56 percent think he accomplished more good than bad, according to a 2005 Levada Center poll.

So which eagle is it? Is Russia the innovative, modernizing giant of post-post-Cold War industry that Medvedev seems to think it can be, confronting its demons in a sane way and moving forward? Or is it Putin's hidebound, bankrupt, and desperate punching bag of the West, the society preoccupied with reliving the glories of its past and whitewashing the evils?

There's only one solution to this double-headed problem, and it's one even Stalin could appreciate: Off with one head.

F.P
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/04/no_heads_are_better_than_two?page=full