вторник, 8 мая 2012 г.
пятница, 4 мая 2012 г.
среда, 2 мая 2012 г.
What Does the Taliban Attack on Kabul Portend? (I)
When one examines the details of the Taliban attack what emerges is that the Taliban occupied buildings in the most closely guarded part of Kabul for more than 18 hours but did little material damage. On the government side the loss of life was limited to 8 members of the Afghan Security Forces and some 4 civilians. 36 Taliban, on the other hand lost their lives. The Taliban spokesman could term these admittedly well-coordinated attacks as a “remarkable achievement” but the government and NATO could even more validly claim that the response of the Afghan forces showed that they had acquired the professionalism to handle such attacks and defeat them with minimum loss of life. By and large this assertion could be accepted even though it is clear that the Afghan forces needed to rely on NATO helicopters and their weaponry to finally dislodge the insurgents from their vantage points.
There are some who would also point to the plea posted on a Taliban website appealing for financial assistance as evidence of the fact that the Taliban have really been hurt by the NATO offensives in the South and need fresh sources of money to garner fresh recruits. Perhaps this is too optimistic a reading of the purport of the Taliban plea. After all we are told to believe that much of the financing for Taliban operations comes from taxing Opium cultivations and from contributions that drug traffickers make as “protection money. The truth however is that much of the illicit money made from opium cultivation and drug trafficking lands up in the pockets of corrupt officials- the job of a police chief in a drug transiting province is said to be available only if a bribe of $60,000 is paid and even a district police chief has to pay $25000 for his job and then be prepared to provide monthly benefit to his bosses. In the areas that they control the Taliban levy a tax equal to 10% of the crop but this does not yield the sort of revenue that western sources suggest.
Where is the big opium money? On a recent visit to Kabul one was shown house after house, garish but clearly expensive, almost all owned by beneficiaries of the opium trade and the revenues it generated for politicians and officials and equally importantly for the warlords who had carved out their fiefdoms along the drug trafficking routes. A recent story in the “Economist” magazine about the state of affairs in Tajikistan was revealing. It said that “The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that some 30% of Afghan opiates—including 90 tonnes of heroin a year—pass through Central Asia on their way to Russia, most of them through Tajikistan” and that “researchers believe the industry is equivalent to 30-50% of Tajikistan’s GDP.” Clearly the principal beneficiaries of the opium trade are not the Taliban.
Separately it has been reported that the US Treasury designated Gen. Gholamreza Baghbani, who runs the Revolutionary Guards' Quds force office in Zahedan near the Afghan border, as a narcotics "kingpin" for facilitating Afghan drug runners. Iran is a major consumer of opium itself with some 4 million users and is said to be the conduit for 55% of the Afghan opium crop. The Afghans perhaps share the American belief that the money earned for facilitating the drug trade is also used to finance arms shipments into Afghanistan.
Whatever the Taliban earn from drug trafficking may be insubstantial but opium is a problem for Afghanistan in another sense. At the basic level it provides income for the poor farmer who has not other comparably profitable crop. This is why the UNODC survey shows that the area under opium has grown this year. 15 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces remained poppy free this year but none of the 5 that lost this status in 2011 has regained that status. Little success has attended NATO and American efforts to curb the cultivation of opium. In Helmand and Kandahar, where the “surge” of American troops has chased the Taliban out of many key areas there has been little or no resultant reduction in poppy cultivation this year. The UNODC survey shows that over 63,000 hectares in Helamand and almost 22000 hectares in Kandahar have been cultivated this year reflecting only a marginal change over 2010. Elsewhere there have been substantial increases in poppy cultivated areas in provinces like Nangarhar.
On the other hand it is now evident that opium and heroin addiction has grown in Afghanistan with a million or more users most of them addicts. It can be anticipated that as economic activity slows down following the foreign troop withdrawal, the need for poppy as a cash crop will increase, and with it the number of addicts in Afghanistan and all its neighbouring countries.
This should be the source of genuine apprehension for the Afghan people since, along with indiscriminately spent foreign aid, drug trafficking has been the principal driver of corruption and of the poor governance that more than any other factor has contributed to the present instability in Afghanistan.
A second point of concern should be the planned reduction in the size of the Afghan national Security Forces (ANSF) from the level of 352,000, which will be reached before the end of this year, to 230,000. This will mean a reduction in the cost of maintaining the force from about $6-7 billion a year to about 4.1 billion, which, the Americans say, should be met by a $500 million contribution from Afghanistan, $2.3 billion from America and another $1.3 billion from NATO and other countries. At the recent NATO meeting in Brussels despite the presence of both Secretary Clinton and Secretary Panetta, the only firm pledge came from the UK whose representative committed to providing S110 million from 2015 onwards. Brave words have been spoken about the fact that firm pledges will come before the May 21st Conference in Chicago but so uncertain is the prospect that the NATO Secretary General has already appealed to Russia and China to contribute.
President Karzai himself is so uncertain about the prospect that he has called for the Americans to reduce to writing whatever amount they will provide for the Security forces arguing that even if the amount is lower than the amount the Americans are currently talking about he wanted a written commitment. This, the Americans have rejected with Secretary Panetta explaining that the administration could not make such commitments since appropriating money remained the prerogative of Congress.
This disagreement and the war weariness of the NATO countries suggests that this pledge of $4.1 billion a year for the 2014-2024 period will not be met and an even more drastic reduction in the ANSF will become necessary. But even if this pledge is met it seems difficult to understand how the extra 2-3 billion annually that will be needed to allow for the reduction to take effect gradually until 2017 will be catered for. Some have suggested that the Americans will have no choice but to pick up the slack. The Afghans must worry about whether this will happen.
But even more they must worry about what happens when some 120,000 ANSF personnel knowing little other than how to fire a gun will be accommodated in a shrinking economy. A senior British officer is reported to have said, "Do we really want 120,000 disaffected men – trained to use arms – made unemployed, out on the streets, in an economy highly unlikely to find them other jobs?"
In my next article, I will try to detail the other concerns which, put together, dwarf in every substantive way the apprehensions that may been caused by the Taliban attacks or what is said to be their source.
(To be continued)
воскресенье, 29 апреля 2012 г.
Are the Limits of American Power Closer Than We Think?
APR 23 2012, 12:22 PM
It's getting tougher for the U.S. to impose its will, but we can still lead the world -- the trick is convincing the world to follow.
President Barack Obama speaks in Washington. Reuters
Here are a few of the big, global problems that the U.S. has recently tried and failed to resolve:
North Korea's recent test-launch of a long-range missile, which U.S. diplomacy and threats couldn't deter.
A new war between the Sudans, breaking a short-lived peace that the U.S. spent years building.
Syria's continuing massacre of civilians, for which neither American diplomats nor American generals can find an acceptable solution.
Egypt's tightening military rule, which has gotten so bad that the U.S. spent weeks just to extricate some detained American NGO workers.
Israel's settlement growth in Palestinian territory, which the U.S. opposes as a barrier to Middle East peace.
The Yemeni president's refusal to abdicate power, despite a U.S.-brokered pledge that he would step down.
Afghanistan's unceasing war with itself, to which ten years of American-led war have not brought peace.
Iran's nuclear development, which looks to be continuing despite U.S. sanctions and recent U.S.-led disarmament talks.
The U.S. isn't powerless. It's significantly alleviated most of these conflicts, and it's taken the international lead on all of them. But the pattern is unmissable. It is a big, complicated world in which the U.S. can only do so much. We're the most powerful country in the world by far, but that doesn't always make us the bosses. This might seem obvious, but American domestic discourse -- not to mention foreign discourses -- often seem to assume a strength of American hegemony that just doesn't exist.
President Obama's major foreign policy addresses, like those of the presidents before him, take American dominance in world affairs as both necessary and absolute. There's nothing wrong with declaring that Iran will not be allowed to build a nuclear weapon or that democracy will come to the Middle East. And there's nothing wrong with the American leader discussing those issues from an American perspective. After all, the U.S. is the strongest and richest country in the world, which also makes it the best positioned to help. But there's a difference between helping and solving, just as there's a difference between offering leadership and having others follow. We seem to assume the latter (as do many non-Americans, for example in Egypt, where it's common to assume "foreign hands" guide Egyptian politics when in fact the U.S. seems to have less influence there every day), imagining American power extends far beyond its actual limits.
Part of this is domestic politics. Mitt Romney was probably making a smart political move to jump on Obama's hot mic comments to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev about how the U.S. couldn't make another nuclear arms reduction deal until after the election. Reducing American might is politically unpopular (even though we don't actually need those thousands of nuclear warheads) as is the idea of offering concessions to another, not-so-friendly country. It would be bad politics for Obama to enter tough and maybe even painful negotiations with a competing nation, probably because this conflicts with the Reagan-era idea that America's inherent strength and goodness means that we dictate terms to the world. But even Reagan compromised and horse-traded with Moscow, though he also had the good sense not to do it during an election.
This is the big conflict between how U.S. leaders negotiate American politics and American foreign policy: the former requires confidence, the latter humility. But the two are not inseparable. Maybe because our political system promotes leaders who believe most strongly in American power, or maybe because it pressures those leaders to exercise more power than they might actually have, it can often seem that the U.S. is constantly falling short of our ambitions. We can't stop Israeli settlement growth, Iranian nuclear development, Sudanese civil war, AIDS in Africa, or terrorism in Pakistan, even though Americans presidents keep insisting that we will.
There was a time when we seemed to have more influence on how other countries behaved. In this 1980 map of Cold War alliances, the "blue" countries would reliably, if not always, follow U.S. leadership. Part of that was because we had easier requests then; it's one thing to tell Pakistani generals to train anti-Soviet fighters, quite another to ask them to give up power to democratic institutions. But the threat of Soviet domination gave us a common mission that made cooperation more attractive and American leadership more desirable. There's no more great red menace to unify the majority of the world under American leadership. Other countries don't need us in the way that they used to.
The good news is that American and global interests still tend to line up pretty frequently. That's not a coincidence. The U.S. does more than any other country at maintaining global peace, cooperation, and free trade. The rest of the world might not depend on American protection from the Soviet Union, but it depends on the U.S.-enforced political and economic order. That's the new American leadership. When China slashed its Iranian oil imports by half -- a big blow to Tehran and a boost to the U.S.-led effort to isolate Iran -- it wasn't because Obama called up Chinese President Hu Jintao and told him to do it. The U.S., through a lot of difficult and sometimes painful diplomatic and economic maneuvering, found a way to line up American and Chinese interests.
This sort of power makes the U.S. good at promoting democracy, cooperation, and free trade -- Burma's opening, for example, or China's remarkably peaceful rise -- but less effective at stopping civil wars or convincing dictators to do things that might threaten their own rules (or lives). If Iranian leaders believe they need a nuclear program to save themselves from a U.S. invasion, they're going to keep it. And the logic of ethnic conflict or religious terrorism can't really be refuted by, say, American trade incentives.
When U.S. interests line up with global interests, we suddenly become very effective at leading the world: isolating Iran, convincing Sudan to allow its southern third to secede, or curbing Chinese trade abuses, for example, would probably all have been impossible on our own. But they also wouldn't have happened without the U.S. taking the lead. That means that U.S. leadership is becoming more about finding opportunities for cooperation and compromise than it is about, say, the strength of our military or force of our ideas, although those help too. Sometimes the U.S. president has to tell his Russian counterpart that he'll offer some concessions in exchange for, say, dismantling Soviet-era nuclear weapons or reducing arms sales to Syria. That's not a particularly jingoistic vision of American leadership, and it's not likely to play well in a political campaign. But that's the world we live in.
more
President Barack Obama speaks in Washington. Reuters
Here are a few of the big, global problems that the U.S. has recently tried and failed to resolve:
North Korea's recent test-launch of a long-range missile, which U.S. diplomacy and threats couldn't deter.
A new war between the Sudans, breaking a short-lived peace that the U.S. spent years building.
Syria's continuing massacre of civilians, for which neither American diplomats nor American generals can find an acceptable solution.
Egypt's tightening military rule, which has gotten so bad that the U.S. spent weeks just to extricate some detained American NGO workers.
Israel's settlement growth in Palestinian territory, which the U.S. opposes as a barrier to Middle East peace.
The Yemeni president's refusal to abdicate power, despite a U.S.-brokered pledge that he would step down.
Afghanistan's unceasing war with itself, to which ten years of American-led war have not brought peace.
Iran's nuclear development, which looks to be continuing despite U.S. sanctions and recent U.S.-led disarmament talks.
The U.S. isn't powerless. It's significantly alleviated most of these conflicts, and it's taken the international lead on all of them. But the pattern is unmissable. It is a big, complicated world in which the U.S. can only do so much. We're the most powerful country in the world by far, but that doesn't always make us the bosses. This might seem obvious, but American domestic discourse -- not to mention foreign discourses -- often seem to assume a strength of American hegemony that just doesn't exist.
President Obama's major foreign policy addresses, like those of the presidents before him, take American dominance in world affairs as both necessary and absolute. There's nothing wrong with declaring that Iran will not be allowed to build a nuclear weapon or that democracy will come to the Middle East. And there's nothing wrong with the American leader discussing those issues from an American perspective. After all, the U.S. is the strongest and richest country in the world, which also makes it the best positioned to help. But there's a difference between helping and solving, just as there's a difference between offering leadership and having others follow. We seem to assume the latter (as do many non-Americans, for example in Egypt, where it's common to assume "foreign hands" guide Egyptian politics when in fact the U.S. seems to have less influence there every day), imagining American power extends far beyond its actual limits.
Part of this is domestic politics. Mitt Romney was probably making a smart political move to jump on Obama's hot mic comments to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev about how the U.S. couldn't make another nuclear arms reduction deal until after the election. Reducing American might is politically unpopular (even though we don't actually need those thousands of nuclear warheads) as is the idea of offering concessions to another, not-so-friendly country. It would be bad politics for Obama to enter tough and maybe even painful negotiations with a competing nation, probably because this conflicts with the Reagan-era idea that America's inherent strength and goodness means that we dictate terms to the world. But even Reagan compromised and horse-traded with Moscow, though he also had the good sense not to do it during an election.
This is the big conflict between how U.S. leaders negotiate American politics and American foreign policy: the former requires confidence, the latter humility. But the two are not inseparable. Maybe because our political system promotes leaders who believe most strongly in American power, or maybe because it pressures those leaders to exercise more power than they might actually have, it can often seem that the U.S. is constantly falling short of our ambitions. We can't stop Israeli settlement growth, Iranian nuclear development, Sudanese civil war, AIDS in Africa, or terrorism in Pakistan, even though Americans presidents keep insisting that we will.
There was a time when we seemed to have more influence on how other countries behaved. In this 1980 map of Cold War alliances, the "blue" countries would reliably, if not always, follow U.S. leadership. Part of that was because we had easier requests then; it's one thing to tell Pakistani generals to train anti-Soviet fighters, quite another to ask them to give up power to democratic institutions. But the threat of Soviet domination gave us a common mission that made cooperation more attractive and American leadership more desirable. There's no more great red menace to unify the majority of the world under American leadership. Other countries don't need us in the way that they used to.
The good news is that American and global interests still tend to line up pretty frequently. That's not a coincidence. The U.S. does more than any other country at maintaining global peace, cooperation, and free trade. The rest of the world might not depend on American protection from the Soviet Union, but it depends on the U.S.-enforced political and economic order. That's the new American leadership. When China slashed its Iranian oil imports by half -- a big blow to Tehran and a boost to the U.S.-led effort to isolate Iran -- it wasn't because Obama called up Chinese President Hu Jintao and told him to do it. The U.S., through a lot of difficult and sometimes painful diplomatic and economic maneuvering, found a way to line up American and Chinese interests.
This sort of power makes the U.S. good at promoting democracy, cooperation, and free trade -- Burma's opening, for example, or China's remarkably peaceful rise -- but less effective at stopping civil wars or convincing dictators to do things that might threaten their own rules (or lives). If Iranian leaders believe they need a nuclear program to save themselves from a U.S. invasion, they're going to keep it. And the logic of ethnic conflict or religious terrorism can't really be refuted by, say, American trade incentives.
When U.S. interests line up with global interests, we suddenly become very effective at leading the world: isolating Iran, convincing Sudan to allow its southern third to secede, or curbing Chinese trade abuses, for example, would probably all have been impossible on our own. But they also wouldn't have happened without the U.S. taking the lead. That means that U.S. leadership is becoming more about finding opportunities for cooperation and compromise than it is about, say, the strength of our military or force of our ideas, although those help too. Sometimes the U.S. president has to tell his Russian counterpart that he'll offer some concessions in exchange for, say, dismantling Soviet-era nuclear weapons or reducing arms sales to Syria. That's not a particularly jingoistic vision of American leadership, and it's not likely to play well in a political campaign. But that's the world we live in.
more
Legalization for All Immigrants Now! Jobs, Education & Peace for All! Tuesday, May 1, 1pm Gather at Olympic & Broadway, LA (5 blocks from Pershing Square metro stop)
It is time to hit the streets with tens of thousands of immigrants and working families of all backgrounds. We are fighting for justice and equality. We are fighting for immigrant and all workers' rights.
Join thousands of people in downtown LA on International Workers' Day for a Mass March & Rally. We are marching for justice and equality. We are marching for immigrant and all workers' rights. An injury to one is an injury to all!
Click here to endorse the May Day Mass March & Rally in LA!
Initiated by May Day 2012 Coalition: Full Rights for Immigrants Coalition, CHIRLA, Hermandad Mexicana, ANSWER Coalition, Vamos Unidos USA, MIWON, NDLON, COFEM, Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, KIWA, SEIU-ULTCW, Clean Carwash Campaign, National Lawyers Guild, May Day Queer Contingent, Dream Team LA, SEIU-USWW, AF3IRM, March Forward!, IDEPSCA, Pilipino Workers Center, Alliance Philippines, CBO, Bantay Filipinas, KmB Pro-People Youth, Communities United for Justice, Students Fight Back, PSL, Resistencia, Ya Basta!, and others.
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суббота, 28 апреля 2012 г.
Cuba Denounces Use of TICS to Subvert Goverments
United Nations, Apr 24 (Prensa Latina) Cuba denounced today the illegal practice of using information technologies to subvert the political systems of other countries and violates their sovereignty through interference in their internal affairs.
They also repudiated daily radio and TV aggressions from the US government violating international laws and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) norms and rules.
Alternate Permanent Representative at the UN Oscar Leon Gonzalez exposed the violations at the General Assembly Information Committee adding that the World Conference of Radio-communications and the ITU pay attention to the US illegal actions.
The diplomat reminds that in spite numerous ITU requests, the US Administration did not halt their damaging interference with its more than 2,000 hours weekly anti-Cuba radio and TV broadcast through more than 30 different mid-wave, short wave and FM frequencies.
They twist history and reality, encourage ilegal emigration and feed violence, crime and terrorism.
In 2011 Cuba was target of 26, 320 hours of radio and TV programs and two new short wave stations were activated, he added.
He stressed that several such stations give services to terrorists linked to certain organizations and still act against Cuba from the US with Federal government complicity.
At the same time, the US Congress annual budget for these activities exceed more than $30M rising to $600M the expenses for these actions.
The Cuban diplomat warned that unequal access to communications and information technology expands the gap between North and South countries and worsens inequality and social justice.
Access to Internet in 2011 in developing countries is just 15 percent compared to 70 percent for their industrialized competitors.
Multiple social networks help promote different issues but 793 million illiterate adults and 139 million children and teens are denied the right to education, he warned.
The developed countries monopolize information services and manipulate many more, “imposing lies and slants, giving discrimination a legal status violatory of freedom of speech and information.
In view of such reality, the diplomat urged for ways allowing for those technologies to be properly used, as to close both the technical and social gaps.”
They also repudiated daily radio and TV aggressions from the US government violating international laws and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) norms and rules.
Alternate Permanent Representative at the UN Oscar Leon Gonzalez exposed the violations at the General Assembly Information Committee adding that the World Conference of Radio-communications and the ITU pay attention to the US illegal actions.
The diplomat reminds that in spite numerous ITU requests, the US Administration did not halt their damaging interference with its more than 2,000 hours weekly anti-Cuba radio and TV broadcast through more than 30 different mid-wave, short wave and FM frequencies.
They twist history and reality, encourage ilegal emigration and feed violence, crime and terrorism.
In 2011 Cuba was target of 26, 320 hours of radio and TV programs and two new short wave stations were activated, he added.
He stressed that several such stations give services to terrorists linked to certain organizations and still act against Cuba from the US with Federal government complicity.
At the same time, the US Congress annual budget for these activities exceed more than $30M rising to $600M the expenses for these actions.
The Cuban diplomat warned that unequal access to communications and information technology expands the gap between North and South countries and worsens inequality and social justice.
Access to Internet in 2011 in developing countries is just 15 percent compared to 70 percent for their industrialized competitors.
Multiple social networks help promote different issues but 793 million illiterate adults and 139 million children and teens are denied the right to education, he warned.
The developed countries monopolize information services and manipulate many more, “imposing lies and slants, giving discrimination a legal status violatory of freedom of speech and information.
In view of such reality, the diplomat urged for ways allowing for those technologies to be properly used, as to close both the technical and social gaps.”
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