0230 GMT November 30, 2007
No news, so we climb back on some of our fave soap-boxes.
Iraq: Everyone Is Unhappy About The Security Improvement Before we proceed with our rant, can we request people refrain from labeling people who support as "right-wing" and those who oppose as "left-wing"? Wings have nothing to do with it. Plenty of righties oppose Iraq, and while we know very few lefties, we can see that you can be a leftie and still support Iraq. For example, if you are a rabid left socialist but also back Israel, then the Iraq intervention is supportable.
Hokay, back to the rant. The pro-Iraq lot are upset at what they see as the anti-Iraq lot's refusal to admit that security has improved. The anti-Iraq lot are upset at what they see the pro-Iraq's lot refusal to see that (a) had the US not destabilized Iraq, there would be no issue of improving stability, and (b) if security has improved, shouldn't we planning our exit?
While the pro- and anti- crowds stamp around locking horns, let us slip aside and restate our point of view. We care not a whit whether the US is losing or winning. The US has decided, for whatever reasons, that it can maintain only a small army. Thus, the US needs to send ground troops only to the most important conflicts. Afghanistan/Pakistan a much more important conflict than Iraq when we speak of the GWOT. Ergo, take the troops out of Iraq and send them Afghanistan/Pakistan.
If the US is winning, jolly good, pip pip, God Save President Bush, America Forever and so on, now can we stop playing in our sand box and get out into the real world?
if the US is losing, no dishonor, no shame. The US did what it came to do, now it needs to get out instead of continually raising the bar. Lets pat ourselves on the back, and stop playing in our sandbox and get out into the real world.
Nawaz-i-Sharif Organizing Pakistan Poll Boycott according to Pakistan's Frontier Post. He is in touch with all major political parties. He says that the President's resignation from the Army means little and as long as certain conditions are not met, the polls will not be fair.
We should explain that Mr. Sharif is actually the only one who would benefit from a boycott. When General Musharraf sent him off, the General took over Mr. Sharif's political party as his civilian front. That lot has grown fat with the spoils of the land in the last 8 years, and don't want Mr. Sharif back. If a poll boycott is successful, Mr. Sharif gets time to wheel and deal and strengthen his position.
Ms. Benazir Bhutto's party, on the other hand, remained more or less faithful to her during her exile. So she doesn't need to engage in the same shenanigans.
A major political party has already said boycotting the polls will only play into President Musharraf's hands because his stooges will get elected and dominate the provincial assemblies and parliament.
We think this party is correct. We are also getting this feeling that - despite our depictions of President Musharraf as weak and battered - he may actually have played his cards very skillfully and may emerge the champ after all.
For example, Pakistan's political parties can be counted on to destroy each other. That leaves the Prez the last person standing. Another example: Mr. Sharif is not covered by the amnesty extended to Ms. Bhutto. Any minute now a "concerned" citizen can go to the Supreme Court - who are now all pally-wally with the Prez - and demand the government arrest Mr. Sharif and Company on outstanding corruption charges. Bye-bye Mr. Sharif, see you in 10 years.
Similarly, a "concerned" citizen can challenge the amnesty to Ms. Bhutto. The Prez no longer needs her as she tried to stab him in the back when she thought he was going down. So it will be bye-bye Ms. Bhutto, see you in 10 years.
On any case, can we once again ask the west not to insult itself by going on and on about Ms. Bhutto as the savior of Pakistan? Yes, you can say a horribly inept and horribly corrupt civilian leader is better than a modestly corrupt and moderately effective ex-military leader. But then say just that and don't go all dewy-eyed about Ms. Bhutto and democracy.
And if its cooperation in the GWOT, the Prez is still a better bet. He will go 5% of the way with you (that's right, five percent). Ms. Bhutto will talk big, the Army will simply yawn and refuse her orders, and then you won't get even the 5%.
The Pakistan Army still holds all the cards in GWOT cooperation, and Pakistan's interests are absolutely opposed to America's.
President Bush Allegedly Involved In Plame Leak We should have published this a week ago in all fairness to Mr. Richard Cheney who we frequently - but en passant - dumped on re. the Plame case. The President's former press secretary is to publish a book in which he says the President himself was also responsible.
Our response: "So big deal". Ms. Plame was not covert. Ah, say opponents of Mr. Bush/Cheney, but they lied about the matter. They must be impeached.
Look, people, we were angry that Mr. Scooter Libby, the Veep's chief of staff, was convicted of lying to a federal jury investigating the leak, particularly since if he told any lies it was to protect his boss. We don't give a hang about the self-promoting couple of Plame and Wilson - the latter probably also guilty of crimes such as leaking confidential government documents. We don't give a hang what Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney said. Washington is a hardball kind of town. You can't go up against the President and Veep to advance your own agenda and then weep when you get smacked right back. This is not crimes, this is politics.
We believed the impeachment of Mr. Bill Clinton for lying to a jury was wrong. We believed the trial and conviction of Mr. Scooter Libby was wrong. We equally believe any impeachment of the President/Veep would be wrong.
A legal type pointed out to us that the law was the law, and no one is above it, not even the president. If you lie to a jury you strike at the heart of the American judicial system.
Fine. So change the stupid law to separate overtly political matters from criminal matters. The law can be an ass, but why does it have to be an ass's ass?
Saudi Arabia's "Qatif Girl" Independent of UK has managed to get an interview with the married Shia teenager who was repeatedly raped by seven men and then sentenced to 200 lashes. Her sentence was doubled from 90 lashes because her lawyer dared go to the media to protest against her original sentence. He, of course, has been disbarred.
Read this story to understand the kind of slime the US has allied itself with in the name of "energy security" and "Mideast stability".
We completely fail to understand how a people like the Americans who hold the sanctity of individual rights paramount can have any dealings with the Saudis. Everyone and his kid sister has been dumping on President Musharraf of Pakistan for violating human rights. But re. the Saudis, all we get is cautious statements expressing distress, disappointment, and concern. Hey, Washington and America's establishment: how about your ever-so-good buddies the Saudis who everyday commit crimes against you in the form of terrorists and money given to terrorists? You have any time to condemn this sorry lot for human rights violations or are you too busy fighting for crumbs from the table of the Royal House of Saud?
We found the reference to 40% of foreign fighters in Iraq being Saudi http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article3187098.ece The US extensively interrogates captured terrorists and suspected terrorists. So are we to assume that until now the US didn't know till now? Or should we assume the US government knew but has has been blaming Syria - 8% of foreign terrorists - to deflect attention from its best buds, the Saudis?
We have a suggestion: why don't all those who think Saudi Arabia is so great leave America and go live over there? They might change their mind fast.
0230 GMT November 29, 2007
Pakistan Orbat for NWFP/FATA Mandeep Singh Bajwa says that reports saying Pakistan has withdrawn troops from Jammu and Kashmir for the NWFP/FATA are wrong. Orbat.com speculates that the reports, from India, are the result of an inexperienced correspondent misunderstanding what was told to him by his military source.
There are 17 brigades committed to NWFP/FATA as well as almost the entire Frontier Corps. Six of the brigades are from 7 and 9 Divisions, which have their peacetime cantonments in the region. Six brigades are infantry from Army Reserve North. ARN is normally committed to the area between the River Chenab and the River Sutluj as a strike force, it is possible that the Indian media thought troops had been withdrawn from Jammu and Kashmir. Three brigades are from XXX Corps, a holding formation that protects the Pakistan border between Suliemanke and Rahim Yar Khan. One brigade is a corps reserve for IV Corps, which protects Lahore-Kasur. The last brigade is infantry from Army Reserve South.
While reinforcing formations have left their tanks behind, their mechanized infantry is deployed mainly for convoy escort. Integral artillery regiments and the whole of the aviation combat group with ARS has also moved.
In Swat alone there is one division plus 10 wings (battalions) of the Frontier Corps. This is a huge deployment to deal with a small area and 500 insurgents. We are waiting word from Mr. Bajwa as to why Pakistan feels 20,000 regular/paramilitary troops are required for Swat.
Pakistan Army Says Swat Mainly Under Control and that the insurgent leader has abandoned his 2-square-kilometer headquarters and fled with his supporters into the mountains. The Frontier Post of Pakistan says it was unable to to contact the insurgent leader's spokesperson due to a complete breakdown of telecommunications in the Swat valley.
BBC On Improvement In A Baghdad Neighborhood http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7116717.stm
Lebanon Jerusalem Post says that a consensus is emerging to make the Army chief president of Lebanon. He is considered neutral between the pro- and anti-Syria factions, the dispute between whom has left the country without a president.
The newspaper emphasis that this is by no means a done deal. All sides are to meet on November 30 for the fourth attempt to elect a president.
Oil Falls To $92 on rumors of additional OPEC production and a slower than expected drawdown of US stocks.
The World's Five Worst Airports according to Foreign Policy magazine are: Dakar in Senegal; New Delhi in India; Mineralnye Vody in Russia; Baghdad International, Iraq; and Charles de Gaulle in Paris. Congrats, New Delhi! Well done! Of course, we don't know how the list was compiled. The inclusion of CDG Paris is a surprise to us, but then the French, you know...
With the Indians, we suspect, the problem is the opposite. The Indians want to hug you, and squeeze you, and make you theirs forever. If you like to keep a distance between yourself and other human beings, don't go to India. Indians are den animals: they seek comfort in piling up together, and that all may be strangers makes no difference. Personally, your editor thinks its quite charming. By the way, don't read your newspaper on an Indian bus: people will take away pages that you are not immediately reading. Like everything else in India, reading a newspaper in an Indian bus is a communal activity. Think: 1.1-billion people and they all will take you to their collective bosom for endless group sessions of hugs and cuddles. "You Will Never Be Alone" is India's motto.
Venezuela: US Is Right To Stay Hands-Off One of the few points on which we agree with the Administration is its hands-off policy on President Hugo, our favorite dictator - and soon to be our favorite madman, judged by the pace which he is separating from reality. Read the following quoted from CNN and you will see why the US is right to stand aside - the man will destroy himself given time.
In the past few years, the countries have sparred over everything from oil prices to free trade to democracy. But this year, the United States has studiously avoided being drawn into diplomatic disputes with the ally of Cuba and Iran.
In that vacuum, Chavez has focused on other targets.
Earlier on Wednesday, he called for an investigation into the U.S.-based TV network CNN on suspicion it might have subliminally instigated an assassination attempt against him.
Hours later, the former paratrooper also broke off diplomatic ties with Colombia after calling its president a U.S. pawn for canceling his role as a mediator in talks with Colombian rebels aimed at freeing a large number of hostages.
0230 GMT November 27, 2007
Chad Fighting Resumes after a month-long ceasefire expires. The government claims hundreds of rebel dead; the rebel say they have lost 17 men while killing 100 government troops. The clash took place about 15-km from the Sudan/Darfur border.
In September the UN cleared a 3000-troop joint EU-UN force for Chad and the Central African Republic. Its mission would be to protect refugees who have spilled into these two countries as a result of the Dafur war. Several hundred police would provide civil protection to refugees and the force, mainly French with a British general in command, would protect the police as well as refugees from military threats.
Somalia Internally Displaced Persons Approach 1-million Of these, 450,000 have fled Mogadishu's continuing battles between the Islamic Courts Union and the Somalia government which is backed by Ethiopian forces.
The CIA Factbook, which despite its provenance uses open sources, estimated Somalia's 2007 population at 9 million.
Oil Still Holding At $99 We thought the $100 barrier would have been breached by now. Some experts say, however, that this will not happen unless some kind of geopolitical trouble spooks the market. Nonetheless, prices are expected to remain above $80 at least into 2009.
Pakistan Releases 2 Taliban Leaders in exchange for troops held captive by a local Taliban warlord, says Pakistan's Frontier Post http://www.thefrontierpost.com/News.aspx?ncat=ts&nid=630 .
The Frontier Post reports the government as saying its troops control all exit/entry routes in Swat and Shangla Districts. Parachinar town in Swat is said to be back in government hands, and Pakistani forces have taken control of dominating mountain top positions.
We are not going to judge Pakistan's imperatives in this swap. The Taliban have no compunction in executing Pakistani prisoners and it is natural the Pakistan government would want its men back alive.
We are told that we should be careful when talking price to specify which price because there are several. For example, OPEC crude sells in the US at a $2-$3 discount against West Texas Intermediate, which has less than .5% sulfur. There is an OPEC price based on an average of 7 types of crude. Brent crude is often used as the benchmark oil price.
From Feisal Khan Re. Mandeep Singh Bajwa's thoughts on India sending troops to Afghanistan: Even if the Indian government was delusional enough to offer a mountain division to ISAF in Afghanistan, how would the Indians keep it supplied? Do they propose to conquer the Northern Areas and use the road links from there? Use Karachi/Bin-Qasim? Use the US to arm-twist Pakistan into cooperating? How long do you think Musharraf would last then? Or any other Pakistani government that allowed Indian troops into Afghanistan.
If the Indians were to put a division into Afghanistan, it would make the ill-fated IPKF venture in Sri Lanka look like a walk in the park. Every nut-case in the NWFP and Punjab, and there is no shortage of them, would home in on the Indian troops. Of course, I can see why the NATO members want Indian troops there but even Indians can't be stupid enough to want to intervene even if the Pakistanis are going to replace the pro-Indian Tajiks with pro (one hopes!) Pakistani Talibs!
I used to think that no one was as stupid as Pakistani generals day dreaming about liberating Central Asia from the Soviets but if there are actually Indians thinking about intervening in Afghanistan, they take over as the world's worst strategic thinkers. Get used to the fact that India does not matter much outside of South Asia. After/If Pakistan collapses, and you've established a protectorate over Punjab and Sind and fought your way through the Khyber Pass, then consider pacifying Afghanistan.
0230 GMT November 26, 2007
Hezbollah Says US To Blame For Lebanon Impasse says the Jerusalem Post. We absolutely agree it is the US's fault, and we 100% support the US position, which is that at all costs a pro-Syria/Iran president is to be avoided.
We do not object to Syria or Iran having their due share of influence in Lebanon: after all, it's their backyard. We object to their controlling Lebanon to benefit their objectives at the cost of a multi-ethnic democratic Lebanon.
Normally, we'd say it is Lebanon's business what it does. But Lebanon is too weak to stand up for itself in the face of determined Syrian/Iranian assaults on its polity. Lebanon has always been a fragile state because of the need to keep a balance between Christians, Druze, Sunnis, and Shias. Anything that makes more difficult the business of maintaining a balance is to be condemned and the west must do what is neccessary to counter factions that do not contribute to stability in Lebanon.
We fully realize our position leaves us vulnerable to being accused of overlooking Israel's role in destabilizing Lebanon. But we ask readers to remember that we have repeatedly condemned Israel for attacking the whole of Lebanon in 2006 just because Hezbollah had kidnapped two of its soldiers.
Further, like it or not, there is a qualitative difference in Israel's objectives compared to Syria/Iran objectives. Israel does not want to impose its will on Lebanon; it simply wants a neutral state that will not pose a threat. If that were acceptable to Syria/Iran, the US would have no objection to which president runs Lebanon.
The issue of the next president is now to be decided November 30. Failing an agreement, there is a high probability that trouble will erupt, plunging Lebanon back into the chaos it experienced through the 1980s and 1990s.
The outgoing president - anti-Syrian - has declared a state of emergency and asked the army to keep peace. Hezbollah and Company say - correctly we are told - that there is no constitutional authority for an outgoing president to do this.
But we feel no sympathy for Hezbollah/Syria/Iran at the lack of fair play because they are not playing fair either.
Indian Troops To Afghanistan: From Mandeep Singh Bajwa Our readers will recall that in our November 24/25 update we'd posed to Mr. Bajwa how India could send troops to Afghanistan in the face of Pakistani opposition. His reply is below.
The move isn't serious at all. Just kite-flying by some analysts to enrage the Leftists who are everybody's favorite target nowadays. True, the US hasn't asked because of Pakistani objections. But India can't just let Afghanistan go the Taliban way because NATO nations' threshold of casualty-tolerance are very small.
There's too much at stake in the country right now. There are a number of Indian companies working on development projects including the Zaranj-Dilaram highway. The strategic implications are only too obvious. A friendly Afghan Govt will keep Pakistan on the tenter-hooks for all time to come. Then there's the matter of Indian interests in Central Asian oil and gas. India will make vigorous efforts to keep the Taliban and by implication Pakistan away. If that involves sending troops I don't think the Govt will flinch. Public opinion will support any such move.
Oil at $99 in Singapore market this morning. Factors are said to be the colder than normal weather is expected in the US for the next few days and the US dollar keeps weakening.
Your editor is doing his own protest at $3+/gallon heating oil. He is keeping the house thermostat at 10 centigrade day and night. He has to admit this is not as easy in one's sixties as it was in one's fifties, but it has to be done. Budgets have to be adhered to. Normally your editor's maximum temperature tolerance is 18 centigrade, and 15 degrees inside is perfect. No one visits him except his youngest, to whom 10 centigrade means he must wear a light sweater - unbuttoned, of course, and Mrs. Rikhye, who simply keeps her outside wear, boots, hat, and gloves on. So we are all managing well.
Saudi Says Woman Confesses To Affair Readers will recall the case of a Saudi woman who was gang-raped by seven men and was given a sentence of 90 lashes for being in a car with a man not her husband. The punishment was increased to 200 lashes when her lawyer protested the sentence. For protesting he is likely to lose his license. Perhaps he can find work in a Macdonald's or something. Meanwhile, the rapists were given nominal sentences of 2-5 years or so, increased to 3-9 years when the woman's sentence was increased.
Well, Saudi has been quite upset with the unusual attention this matter has received. It has said international criticism is interference in its affairs. Now it has said that the woman confesses to having an affair with the man in whose car she was when attacked.
May be offer Saudi our famous unsolicited Orbat.com advice? Please shut up with the explanations already, because you just make it worse each time.
Strange that the woman did not confess to an affair while on trial. Given the Saudi legal system is completely opaque, and given she no longer has a lawyer, might one suspect a teeny weeny bit of pressure on her to say she was having an affair?
Next, so what if she was having an affair. That makes it okay to be gang-raped by seven men? This attitude is going to infuriate outsiders even more than they are already angry.
Further, as we understand Islam, rape is a crime even worse than murder. So, if your law says she has to be given 200 lashes, the men need to be stoned to death. Orbat.com is objecting to the light sentences the men have been given, not to the sentence given to her.
The thing with Saudi Arabia is that it is always ready to sneer at how immoral the west is given that in most situations men and women do as they want in the privacy of their homes. But here we are faced with an anomaly. We cannot speak for countries other than the US, but in America these men would be looking at 20-years to life for gang-rape. It would not matter that the woman was having an affair. We are not certain that this point would even be allowed into evidence.
So isn't a bit odd that the immoral America takes crimes against women a lot more seriously than the virtuous Saudi Arabia?
We again bring our readers attention to this story because it shows what Saudi Arabia is all about. It is not a society that is acceptable to civilized people. This is not about Islam, but about a bunch of degenerates using Islam to justify their perversities.
If Saudi Arabia were just some insignificant country, we wouldn't bother. But this country is the banker for Terrors Wars all over the world. It is more than a banker: one report we saw the other day and meant to carry said 40% of foreign fighters in Iraq are Saudi. If the US could justify its invasion/occupation of Afghanistan as counter-terrorism, it needs to invade/occupy/breakup Saudi Arabia even more urgently. Afghanistan was not the source of global terror. Saudi Arabia is.
0230 GMT November 24-25, 2007
Apologies for the delayed updates. The editor has been battling allergies/colds/sinus-infections/laryngitis/bronchitis for weeks. The list of ailments sounds impressive, but for some reason, at a guess, about a quarter of the Washington DC region seems to be down with some combination of the above and about one-on-ten seems quite ill.
Theories abound: chief culprit is said to be unseasonably warm October and November which has extended Washington's deadly allergy season - about the longest got a world capital - which normally runs April-September. The editor's theory is that we in Washington have compromised immune systems because of extreme stress.
As a schoolteacher one is particularly vulnerable because one is in close contact with the kids, and you get serial infections: you get sick from a couple of the kids; by the time you and they have recovered another batch of kids is sick. The editor cannot take off because his kids completely fall apart when he is not there.
We are required to following a daily lesson pacing guide; if your classes get behind - as invariably happens with all but the very best substitute teachers - the mess up is so serious that most teachers, unless they are about to die, stagger off to school. Of course, there we play our part in getting everyone sick, but this is America: you have to work regardless of being sick or not. No one is bothered about the low quality of output when teachers and kids alike are passing bugs around left, right, and center.
Dispatch from Mandeep Singh Bajwa
Our South Asia correspondent returned from a visit to Pakistan for a wedding, and this is the unedited communication he sends. Kindly keep in mind he is simply sharing his thoughts; this is not a substitute for a rigorous analysis which he may do if he has time.
We replied to Mr. Bajwa that the Indians had so far not offered troops for ISAF because they hadn't been asked by the Americans. Pakistan considers Afghanistan is bailiwick, moreover, the Taliban is wholly supported by Pakistan. Islamabad will oppose tooth and nail any plan that puts 40,000 Indian troops into its sphere of influence, both because that number would seriously undermine the Taliban's successes as well as Pakistani influence. To support that many troops India would have to utilize Pakistani territory for logistics support; even if it is all done under the ISAF and not an Indian soldier sets foot in Pakistan, we do not see Pakistan agreeing.
Pakistan benefits from ISAF/US related expenditure/military aid and the payoff is marginal because Pakistan does the very least it can to "combat" the Taliban. But if India lands up in Afghanistan in force, the benefits of cooperation with the west are far outweighed by the costs.
Incidentally while this move is very much just private talk, two points are worth noting. First, the ISAF commander will have to be an Indian because India will contribute 2/3rd of ISAF troops. Second, the Government of India will face no domestic political opposition because the deployment will be seen as a big blow to Pakistan.
Re. Iraq, India was willing to send its 17th Mountain Division to Kurdistan before things started heading south in that country. Kurdistan was a very quiet sector and the Indians have good relations with the Kurds as well as with the Iraqis. But even before security began to deteriorate starting February 2006, the opposition within India's ruling coalition and dominant Congress party was so extreme that we wonder how the Government actually warned the division for an Iraq deployment. There was no way in which Indian political parties and people would agree to fight what they believe is Mr. Bush's imperial war against a third world country.
Mr. Bajwa sent his reply to our comments; we will publish them Monday.
A New Take On Mrs. Bhutto and the Pakistani Generals
Benazir Bhutto Behaving Badly is the better title for this post. Kamran Khan is a very experienced Pakistani journalist, Two days ago he provided the best explanation of what is happening with Ms. Bhutto. We'd picked up much the same by way of unconfirmed talk; we were not sufficiently comfortable with our sources to put up the information. To summarize Mr. Kamran's story; our information where it adds to his story is within parentheses.
The Pakistan generals are 100% behind President Musharraf and his declaration of emergency.
(Ms. Bhutto, on returning to Pakistan, immediately reverted to her wildly impulsive and intemperate mode of decision making and speech. Instead of quietly working with President Musharraf as per the agreement brokered by the US/UK and negotiated with Ms. Bhutto by General Kiyani, the Pakistani general of all held in the greatest esteem by the west and Pakistanis alike) Ms. Bhutto immediately began pushing the western agenda by, among other things, calling for the US to suspend military aid to Pakistan. (The reason she did this is that she gave herself over to an inflated sense of her own power and believed, within a very days of landing up, that she didn't need to keep her agreement with the President; she thought with western support she could overthrow him, reign in the military, and rule on her own. This was an amazingly immature and misconceived decision.)
The military, astonished and dismayed by her turning her back on power-sharing agreements so carefully negotiated (and as far as the military was concerned, with an overabundance of compromise from its side) reacted by deciding to make sure Ms. Bhutto did not become Prime Minister of Pakistan. The one thing the military cannot tolerate is a direct attack on its power.
This is a simple proposition that Mr. Kamran puts forth; besides the authenticity conferred by his admirable reputation, it has the virtue of elegantly explaining everything that has been happening in Pakistan.
That the west in general and the western press has remained spectacularly clueless about how quickly Ms. Bhutto threw away her big chance, and that the west is now backing a lame horse, renders 100% irrelevant what anyone in the west has been saying. Ms. Bhutto is yesterday's news.
Now, anyone who knows her and is objective enough not to be taken in by her being a modern, pro-western woman with impeccable liberal credentials - Harvard and Oxford, what else does anyone want, it was obvious from the start she was a weak reed on which to build the west's hopes for a democratic Pakistan. Your editor, for one, has been watching the whole show with much hilarity. But even he did not think Ms. Bhutto would crash and burn so rapidly.
Incidentally, Mr. Kamran says that President Musharraf told the generals he was ready to both retire and to relinquish power if they thought it in the interests of Pakistan. They refused. We've said before we believe any coup contender knows he would be crazy to try and run Pakistan at this juncture; let President Musharraf do the job. If he succeeds, fine, no coup is needed. If he fails, that would be the time to move against him.
Pakistan's generals are tough, disciplined, and experienced in the ways of power. We believed she would be done in ASAP by the generals, who according to what we hear, are completely unprepared to give up power to either of the two ex-PMs, even while they believe the military has outstayed its welcome and that a return to civilian government is needed. We believed they would give her rope to hang herself. We sure as heck didn't figure that they didn't have to give her rope. She wove it herself, mighty quick.
0230 GMT November 23, 2007
We did not update on November 22. 2007
Lebanon The impending crisis over the presidential election has been put off for a few more days. The thrice-postponed vote was to have taken place tomorrow, but there is still no agreement between the pro-west and pro-Syria/Iran factions on who should be president. Both sides have gone to the wire, saying they will elect their own president and run their own government should agreement not be gained.
BBC says observers predict the vote will not come up now till next week. There is a grave danger that Lebanon will again descend into chaos and violence is a solution is not found, and as of this moment no one is hopeful.
Meanwhile, there's the usual recrimination about US policies, with people saying the US should have done this, that, and the other. Has it occurred to anyone the US is horribly overextended all over the world, and even if it were not, given the level of American competence these days, perhaps its best that America is laying low?
People seem to forget Newton's 3rd Law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Each time the US acts, its adversaries react, and the matter escalates. Sometimes its better to let things sort themselves out without the US getting involved, particularly when the US has neither the time or the military force needed to impose a solution on Lebanon.
Pakistan has been suspended by the 53-member Commonwealth, a body consisting of former British colonies, for President Musharraf's failure to meet it's deadlines. It had said the President must become a civilian and lift the state of emergency by yesterday. Personally, we doubt much if the Pakistan president is losing sleep over this: he has his own agenda and the Commonwealth's approval is unlikely to be high on that list.
Robert Kagan, a right-moderate intellectual yesterday showed in a Washington Post op-ed how completely out of touch with reality westerners are re Pakistan. His entire thrust is "America must do this and America must do that" to solve the Pakistan crisis, as if America has that much leverage with Pakistan. Mr. Kagan suggests that the Pakistani generals are unlikely to be willing to do with military aid from the US.
How he has arrived at this conclusion is a mystery to us. Pakistan, Mr. Kagan says, has gotten about $10-billion in various aid packages since 2001. But has it? Look at http://www.publicintegrity.org/docs/CSIS_CSF_paper.pdf and you will see that $5.6-billion has been to reimburse Pakistani costs incurred in supporting US operations in Afghanistan; $1.6-billion for budget support, $0.9-billion for economic assistance; and just $1.8-billion for military aid.
If Mr. Kagan thinks Pakistan's military junta will sell itself to the US for $300-million/year of military aid, he needs to be reminded that Pakistan has a GDP of $160-billion growing at 7%/year, and overseas Pakistanis send twenty times that sum in annual remittances.
Yes, President Musharraf did sell himself to the US for the proverbial pence. But he did so not because of the money, but because the US threatened his country with force if he did not cooperate. The alliance with the US has created massive problems for him inside the country; worse, he is required to reign in the Taliban, which are a key asset for Pakistan's security.
If the US should aid tomorrow, Pakistan can cut all cooperation concerning Afghanistan. Who will be the loser, the US or Pakistan?
Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai says that in the last 7-8 months, the number of contacts with Taliban elements who want to negotiate has greatly increased. Not all Taliban factions are hardline, he says.
Well, President Karzai knows his country better than we do, so we will take his word. But we wonder if there is a relationship between the willingness of some Taliban to talk and the Taliban successes of the past year. Could it be that the people who want to talk with are getting squeezed by the hardliners? Could it also be that the Taliban have created the conditions that would permit them to win a majority in the next election, using popular appeal, guile, and intimidation?
"Experts" say the problem will be resolved only by talks, but that Kabul should negotiate from a position of strength. We agree.
In which case there will never be negotiations, because in one more year Afghanistan should be done for, with government/coalition forces holding Kabul, Kandahar, Ghazni, Herat, and Kunduz - the towns, not the districts, with the rest of the country under the Taliban.
Iraq 300,000 Iraqis have signed a petition asking Iran to cease its interference in Iraq. The problem is that several Iraqi factions themselves need Iranian support in their internal wars, and just because a bunch of concerned citizens have signed a petition is not going to get these factions to tell Iran to mind its own business.
From Mandeep Singh Bajwa Have you seen this amazing book?
Operation Broken
Reed: Truman's Secret North Korean Spy Mission That Averted
World War III
> Boyd, Arthur L.
> Operation Broken Reed: Truman's Secret North Korean
> Spy Mission That Averted World War III.
> Carroll & Graf. Nov. 2007. c.320p. index.
> ISBN 978-0-7867-2086-6. $26.99. HIST
By late 1951,
President Truman had become increasingly concerned about the
possibility that the Soviet and the Chinese Communist forces
were going to get much more involved in the Korean conflict.
According to Boyd, he therefore secretly authorized Operation
Broken Reed, a Special Access Program (or so-called black
operation) that was to traverse Korea in January 1952 and gather
military intelligence. A team of army rangers, air force
officers, navy frogmen, and CIA operatives pretended to be crew
members of a captured
B-29 bomber, who, under the guard of Chinese nationalist
military personnel posing as Chinese Communists, moved in
military vehicles across the North Korean countryside gathering
information about Soviet and Chinese military forces massing
quietly inthe North Korean countryside. Boyd served as a
cryptographer for the operation, signaling information back to
American forces. The Chinese forces ultimately discovered the
true purpose of the small caravan, and all but Boyd were killed.
Sworn to secrecy, Boyd waited over 50 years to tell his amazing
story. There is no official or unofficial record of Operation
Broken Reed, but Boyd believes the work of this small band of
men helped convince Truman that it would be disastrous to expand
the war into North Korea. A chilling story and, if true,
certainly an amazing one in the annals of wartime espionage.
The blurb is unattributed.
0230 GMT November 21, 2007
Goodbye, Afghanistan
Afghanistan is lost and the blame falls squarely first on the US administration and then on NATO.
Reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL2119472620071121 quotes from a report written by the Senlis Council, which has a permanent presence in Afghanistan, that 54% of Afghanistan is under Taliban control. Unless NATO doubles its forces to 80,000, Senlis believes it is not a question of will the Taliban retake Kabul, but when.
Some of our readers may raise an eyebrow at our quoting Senlis. Most of us know it for advocating controlled legalization of opium growing in Afghanistan, and those of us who are hard-liners in the drug wars may be disinclined to give Senlis any credibility. This is a matter we can take up at another time.
But we do not rely on Senlis to tell us how rapidly the Taliban has advanced. Our own correspondent, Major A.H. Amin, sent his estimate the other day. He concluded that if you count areas where the Taliban rules by night, more than three-quarters of the country is in the Taliban's grip. Major Amin is based in Kabul and he combines first hand knowledge with his reportage.
And while Senlis is making a dramatic statement by saying double troops or all is lost, common sense tells us at least a doubling is required.
That means 8 more brigades needed right now, and that is not going to happen. The US is not about to leave Iraq. The US Army is indeed broken despite all the efforts by pro-Administration sources to say the contrary. The troops that will be slowly withdrawn from Iraq cannot be sent to Afghanistan. The Surge, which brought US strength in Iraq to 20 brigades, was really a surge, a high tide that is now ebbing.
As for NATO, here is the latest possible contribution: A French battalion, and even that France has publicly denied, so sensitive is the matter given the European public's opposition to casualties. The European troops matter is, of course, tightly wound with the global hatred - yes, hatred is not too strong a word - of the Bush presidency. Even though the Europeans fully realize Afghanistan must be defended, they would rather see it return to the dogs than support a US-created and US-led initiative.
We have several times said that the US should have worked to persuade India to contribute troops - for India, 40,000 troops, two divisions, is a yawn. But the US, hogtied by Pakistan, could not even begin to think of such an approach.
Afghanistan is irrevocably linked to Pakistan because it is Pakistan that provides sanctuary, money, arms, and casualty replacements for the Taliban. The rise of the Taliban in Pakistan is the mirror image of its resurrection in Afghanistan.
So it is not just that Afghanistan is gone, Pakistan west of the Indus is going and is in danger east of the Indus. US hopes Pakistan will fight the Taliban are simply the opium-dreams of a drug addict: Pakistan is the Taliban.
To us it seems just a matter of time before Pakistan falls to the Taliban. Scoff, if you will, as people did when your editor predicted this 11 years ago. See what is happening in the North West Frontier Province, find out what is happening in Baluchistan, and then try scoffing.
Where does this leave India, who after all has the greatest stakes of any country in Afghanistan/Pakistan? This leaves India up the proverbial creek without the proverbial paddle, and indeed, with less than half a boat.
But the marvelous thing about India is that it is so huge, so enduring, that it is the elephant lazing in the sun, munching sugar cane and bathing in the pond to its heart's content. India was least concerned when Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. When the Americans took Afghanistan, India's reaction was one of extreme indignation - what right did the Americans have to invade? Today the Indo-American strategic understanding is deeper, so India is tolerant of the Americans and has even reasserted itself a little bit in its traditional competition with Pakistan for influence in Afghanistan.
Yet, events in Afghanistan are what events west of the Khyber have been to India since recorded history began: a distant rumor, and not a particularly interesting one at that. Historically, India has been a bit more alert to events west of the Indus, in what is today Baluchistan and the NWFP. But even here, no threat was taken seriously till the barbarians crossed the Indus. India, as it has defined itself for three millennia, begins east of the Indus. Events in today's Baluchistan and NWFP became of interest only in the last 800 years, when Islamic invaders started arriving out of Central Asia. The odd thing about the Islamic invaders is that they too became lotus-eaters, and ignored events west of the Indus, making possible conquests by other Islamic invaders, for example, the Mughuls.
India exercises so fantastic a narcotic effect on people that one reason the British left, more or less willingly, is that they realized the longer they stayed, the more amorphous became their identity, till one day they would have simply become yet another people of India.
So your editor can blow the trumpet as long and as hard as he likes, India is not bothered anymore than the elephant is bothered by a mite.
As for Pakistan: objectively this is the most interesting development of all. From its birth, Pakistan has been regarded as a failed state. One reason India has never bothered to do much about Pakistan is that it has expected for six decades that Pakistan will fall apart one day and be reabsorbed into India without India having to exert itself.
And certainly Pakistan has given every indication that it is failing. Even the west speaks of the dangers a failed Pakistan is/will creating.
Oddly, however, Pakistan is not failing. It has failed as a non-sectarian, multi-party democracy. But it is morphing into a new identity that its founder, the great Jinnah, could never have dreamed of, and that 99.9999% of Indians even today cannot imagine. If things continue as they are, you will find there will be a new Pakistan. It will be much larger because it will encompass almost all of Afghanistan. It will be not called Pakistan, but something else. It will be a hardline fundamentalist state, determined to destroy everything that western humanism - whose values have spread to the whole global - holds inviolable and non-negotiable. It will represent the greatest American foreign policy failure since China became communist, and a far greater danger than China ever presented.
To the ghost of Pakistan's President/General Zia-ul-Haq who seized power from Benazir Bhutto's father in 1977 and died in a plane crash ten years later, and to those Pakistani military men who carried forward the dream which he himself never dared believe was possible, Orbat.com's editor offers nothing but his sincerest congratulations. You are my country's mortal enemy. After 1971, every Indian assumed Pakistan was finished. Alone I disputed that notion when in 1972 I wrote "Pakistan Rearmed", my first book of four that were suppressed by the Indian censor. Of course, no more than anyone else, I had no idea that you, Pakistan, would rearm yourself with the weapons of ideology and not the guns and tanks with which I was familiar.
In my first book that was allowed to be published, though not without the personal intervention of the then head of the Indian Army who would not accept the recommendation of his Directorate of Military Intelligence that the work be suppressed, I had written that in all probability there would be no Fourth Round, that India and Pakistan had likely fought their last war. The 1999 war, incidentally, was a mere border skirmish - and I had partly foretold that scenario in the Fourth Round.
Well, when I wrote the Fourth Round in 1982, I was still familiar only with guns and tanks as the weapons with which wars are fought. I now see that a Fourth Round is very much underway - the Punjab insurgency, the Kashmir insurgency, and the Kargil war were merely opening shots. This new round has snuck up on India without India being aware - and it still is unaware. And this round is being fought with the most primitive of weapons - rifles, machineguns, rocket-launchers, IEDs. But its real weapon is not a material one. It is an ideology.
Thirteen hundred years this ideology originated in one of the most obscure backwaters of the world, and within 140 years it dominated the territory from Spain to the west bank of the Indus River. For those times, 140 years was "overnight". By 1970, that ideology had become a bit of a laughing stock; the Muslims, once the most advanced of human peoples, had become the most backward.
Then came the rise of oil and the patiently laid schemes of the Saudis realized through money and committed cadres. Within 30 years the ideology had revived and become the greatest threat liberal humanism faced since its inception five hundred years ago - the communists do not count because though they established political dictatorships they did not constrain their peoples in any other way; indeed, they valued the gods of atheism, science, equality between the sexes, education and so on even more ardently than the west.
The success of any enemy is the result as much of the adversary's missteps as the enemy's efforts. So it is with Islamic fundamentalism and the Taliban. Since the last 35 years have been America's years, it is the US that must take responsibility for the blunders that have brought us to this pass.
Ultimately, an ideology - the manner in which Islamic is expressed by the extremists - that is so revolting to the human sprit cannot succeed. Islamic fundamentalism will be defeated, not least because it threatens the whole world. But right now the fundamentalists are in the process of winning, and they will continue winning for perhaps 20 more years. Then they will start going down. The fight will be long, and very bloody. Just as the war against fascism and communism destroyed so much of the values that made America the greatest country in the world, this war, too, will adversely impact our values - you can already see the damage. We will become the people we despise, because ultimately fanaticism can be defeated only by a greater fanaticism. But the alternative will be worse, so this a price that must be paid and regarded as collateral damage.
News
Pakistan Starts Freeing Dissidents ahead of the planned January 8, 2008 election. Some 7000 persons recently arrested have either been released or will be released today.
Meanwhile, the Pakistan Supreme Court has cleared the way for President Musharraf to stand for a second term. He is expected to retire from the army this week.
President Musharraf is in talks with Nawaz-i-Sharif, the prime minister he deposed. Mr. Sharif is in exile in the Mideast. He was not permitted to return after the US forced President Musharraf to allow Ms. Benazir Bhutto back so that she could provide a civilian face to the sham democracy she was to co-chair with the President. But now Ms. Bhutto has turned against the President, thinking she can win on her own, without his support. So naturally president Musharraf turns to his old enemy; it is likely the situation can be manipulated into a win for Mr. Sharif.
In other words, it back to the unprincipled principals who have dominated Pakistan for 20 years, and the people of Pakistan will once again be the losers.
Why the US wants to get involved in this mess is beyond us. When it goes bad - and it will as surely as Brittany Spears will get arrested again for driving drunk - the US will be blamed. As if enough Pakistanis are not already blaming the US for the mess in which they find themselves.
China To Invest $4-Billion In Afghan Copper Mine says BBC. That compares to $5-billion total foreign investment since 2001. The project will come on stream in five years, generate 10,000 jobs and $400-million in royalties to the Afghan government. That sum, incidentally, equals a whopping 5% of Afghan GDP, about half of which is opium-related.
Talking of drugs, the Colombia police found a 4-crew-member fiber-glass almost-completed submarine capable of carrying 12-tons of cocaine and traveling the Pacific to Central America, from where the drugs would be shipped to North America and Europe. We also read the other day that Venezuela is becoming the transshipment country of choice for Andean narco-traffickers.
The story in news.com.au says that these submarines are towed along by cargo ships and since 2005 the authorities have found 11.
Colombia produces 600-tons of cocaine a year.
Iran Agrees To Study Saudi N-Proposal says UK Independent http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article3174389.ece The background to this is that Russia had offered to host an enrichment facility for Iran, under safeguards, so that Iran could have the technology/uranium it wanted while satisfying the US it was not up to no good. After all, Iran says it has purely peaceful purposes in mind for its N-program, like, you know, India's Peaceful Nuclear Explosion of 1974. As we all know, India is busy using the technology for Peaceful Nuclear Purposes such as digging seaports and irrigation canals - that was the rationale India gave at that time.
Anyhow, Iran told the Russians "don't be absurd, we aren't having our bluff called by you."
The Saudis, however, revived the proposal and offered to set the plant up in a neutral country like Switzerland. The Iranians have said they will think about it.
View One: The Iranians are simply stalling for time to develop their N-weapons.
View Two: The Iranians realize they have pushed the rhetoric too far and are looking for a face-saving way to pull back.
Yer pays yer money and takes yer choice.
Personally, we say why take chances? Knock off their N-program and just their N-program, forget about grand plans of regime change and so on. Worried about oil? Build multiple pipelines bypassing the Gulf, will take 12-24 months. Stockpile more oil. If Iran blocks Hormuz, let the Gulf States and the world go to the UN saying this is an act of aggression and then clobber Iran with UN sanction.
So what happens when the Iranians rebuild their N-facilities? Well, you'll have bought 10-years, and in that time you'll have much better weapons to wipe-out the new facilities.
Come on, Washington, start thinking out side the box.
Yes, yes, outside the box idea Number One: give Iran assurances against invasion, make it your partner in managing the Mideast.
But geez, that is so wimpy. Its so much more fun to blow things up.
(We are not being sarcastic.)
0230 GMT November 20, 2007
News
Pakistan Sectarian Fighting Continues in the North West Frontier Province's Kurram Agency. Reports cite different figures, but about 90 persons including civilians have been killed in fighting between Sunni and Shia groups. The army is deploying, but at least one source says this is not having any effect.
Meanwhile, Pakistan Army is reported to have made some slight gains in Swat. Insurgents are claiming 45 soldiers killed, which the Government denies. We have found that generally the insurgents' reports tend to be more accurate than the Government's, though the figure of 45 does seem very high.
US Says Violence In Some Iraq Areas Down To Pre-Mid-2005 Levels That is good news if true, but ironically news of US successes only adds to the pressure to pull out.
Meanwhile, another reprise of the Law of Unintended Consequences. It seems as if 2-million of the Iraq refugees are Sunnis. Since there were less than 5-million to begin with, in 2001, we have to soberly face the reality that ethnic cleansing is not a theoretical possibility should the US leave, it has already taken place on a very large scale while the US has been in Iraq in force.
Be that as it may, as security for Sunnis has improved, some are coming home.
And running smack into the same Shias who drove them out, and who now occupy their homes. Not a recipe for peace.
United States Has 1/4th Of The World's Prisoners according to a report in Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN1841666120071119
It has 5% of the world's population.
The prison population has grown 8-times since 1970; population has grown 50%. The study the article cites says there has been no appreciable drop in crime.
Look, people, we love America and think it is
Reader Walter E. Wallis Brings Perspective To The Taser Debate when he reminds us that policemen used to big Irishmen who controlled prisoners with billy clubs and brute force, and only occasionally guns. Thanks to affirmative action, women were inducted into the police. Generally they tend to be smaller than the men. And smaller men also began to be accepted. If you lack the bulk, you cannot afford to close in with an unruly suspect. So you either use your gun, or if you have it, a Taser.
Mr. Wallis's letter led the editor to reflect that when he first came to the US, New York policemen tended to be gigantic. They also traveled in threes in high-risk areas, and they had only to blow a whistle and more police would arrive from a neighboring block. The same was true of Boston. The editor had already reached his full height so this is not a case of mistaking the heights - and breadths - of the police, as might happen to a kid.
Currently the editor sees police in Washington, DC, and Montgomery and Price George's Counties in Maryland. "Sees" is a bit incorrect, as police in the Washington Metro area are rarer than hens teeth. We believe in self-policing, with the predictable result that there is neither policing nor respect for ordinary laws. Be that as it may, the editor is continually struck by how many petite women and small men are on the local police forces.
We read somewhere or the other (how's that for precision - but when you are flipping webpages at high speed you sometimes forget where you saw a particular item) that 150 Taser-related deaths have taken place in the US since mid-2001, and contrary to the Taser manufacturer's claims, their weapon has been implicated in 30 deaths.
0230 GMT November 19, 2007
Afghanistan
An Article By Sarah Chayes in the Washington Post's Outlook section November 18, 2007 tells of the death of hope and the tragedy that is starting to engulf Afghanistan. Ms. Chayes is exceptional because she has spent six years living with villagers; a remarkable achievement for an unmistakably white American woman. Her voice is gentle and muted. She accuses no one, blames no one, is an advocate for no special interests.
Unfortunately, the article has been quickly transferred to the registration only part of the Post. If, unlike the editor, you can stomach registering with the Post, you will learn much. We focus on the issue of civilian casualties because for some reason, this has been bothering your editor immensely for the past few months. Earlier he was completely indifferent to matter: wars result in bad things happening to innocent people. Just as we accept the mayhem caused by drunk drivers and murderers as a small price to be paid for our free and individualistic society, your editor accepted civilian casualties as just another unavoidable cost of war.
In Afghanistan West Kills More Civilians Than The Taliban This point is often made. The reason seems to be that because of a shortage of troops, the west relies more on air support, four times more by one estimate.
Afghanistan has 50% more area than Iraq. In Iraq you not only have 180,000 coalition troops, you have 600,000 Government forces including police, and now 70,000+ Sunni militia as well.
In Afghanistan the coalition has in the vicinity of 50,000 troops; the Afghan government's forces including police seem to number about 100,000.
Even if this were not so, because of the inherent difficulty in separating civilian from militant from the air, and the lethality of air-delivered munitions, air strikes, no matter how precise, usually end up killing more civilians than ground troops do.
In Afghanistan non-US members of the coalition usually blame the US for its excessive reliance on air support, particularly the US tactic of aggressively using small Special Forces teams to smoke out the enemy. Because the SF, when they succeed in initiating contact, are usually heavily outnumbered, they need immediate air support. When you have ten soldiers pinned down by many times their number and in eminent danger of annihilation, you have to forget about the niceties, you have to send in the gunships and the Harriers, A-10s, F-15s, F-16s, sometimes even the B-1s and B-52s, and do so immediately. Minutes count in such situations.
While there is truth to this allegation, other coalition members are just as quick to require air support when their troops get into trouble, so we are unsure as to how fair the allegation is.
Ms. Chayes says civilian casualties are driving recruitment to the ranks of suicide bombers.
Logically this should not be so, because the Taliban deliberately kill civilians whereas NATO not just tries not to, it does everything it can to improve the lot of civilians. The problem is that logic does not apply when your family has blown to pieces by an American 1000-lb bomb. People expect much higher standards from the west than they do from the Taliban, so they are far more critical of western-caused deaths.
In Cambodia, for instance, one school of thought believes that the US bombing of Cambodian villages so angered the populace that they flocked to the Khmer Rouge because the communists promised revenge on the Americans.
During the invasion of Normandy in June 1944, an estimated 10,000 French civilians died in Allied air attacks. The French have never held it against the Allies because first, they were liberated from Nazi occupation, and second, in the larger scheme of things 10,000 dead was a mere punctuation mark. Also, within a few weeks most of the bombing was over and the liberated areas could go back to their life which had been denied them for three years.
By contrast, in counter-insurgency wars, the bombing goes on and on. There is no end in sight, and there is no immediate benefit to be seen.
It is very easy for the insurgents to provoke retaliation by staging incidents and hiding among the civilians. The US response has been pro forma pious statements to the tune of "the insurgents are at fault for using the civilians as cover; we do not target civilians". Such lawyer-like talk infuriates the civilians who expect the US will make them safe, not kill them.
The British experience in Northern Ireland - as is true of all counter insurgencies - is that it is usually better not to return fire if this is at all possible. General Petreaus, to give him his due, makes this a basic tenet of his counterinsurgency doctrine. There is nothing remarkable about his doctrine, it is all standard stuff. What is remarkable is that an American has said these things.
That is because American troops are trained to react with maximum force when threatened. They also cannot fight a defensive war: they have to go looking for the enemy and to provoke a fight. These tendencies are central to the American temperament. We personally believe you can give Americans as much training as you want to the contrary, they will not attain the level of inhuman self-control needed for CI operations.
In this connection we might mention that the British in Northern Ireland, as also the Indians in their several counterinsurgency wars, were fighting not "others", but their own people. It is easier to show control than when fighting "others".
All this said, we do not know what the solution is. But it has to be addressed. Just the other day, for example, the US announced it had killed 24 insurgents in Iraq. Not so, said a Sunni militia. You killed 45 of our men, which is to say of your allies, and you continued killing us for hours despite every effort we made to tell you we were friendlies. First the US stuck to its story, but yesterday American military sources themselves say the militia version is true. It is not a small thing to kill 45 of your allies in a battle-lust so strong you ignore all attempts to get you to stop.
Incidentally, Sarah Chayes makes clear what is causing Afghanistan to be lost to the Taliban is ultimately not so much the civilian casualties or the slow pace of development activities, it is the sustained and spreading corruption of the Afghan authorities at all levels, from President Karazai's brothers down to the lowliest constable. The Taliban were unbelievably brutal if you violated their social edicts. But they were not corrupt.
0230 GMT November 18, 2007
Another Pakistan District Falls To The Taliban
Just for once we'd like to get some straight news from Pakistan. The Pakistan Army has been claiming great success in its offensive against Islamic fundamentalists in Swat District. But now Jang of Pakistan http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=11200 tells us that the Taliban have overrun both subdivisions of Shangla District, which lies to the east of Swat.
Apparently it wasn't much of a fight: the Pakistani authorities simply vacated much of the area and the Taliban walked in to establish its rule.
We are so baffled we are left speechless.
For a focused summary of events read http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2007/11/fighting_intensifies.php
The NWFP has 24 districts, the equivalent of US counties. Of these 7 are in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and have considerable autonomy. FATA borders Afghanistan, and the Taliban basically control or have put the Pakistan government on the defensive in 5 districts. But Swat and Shangla are part of "settled" Pakistan and the writ of the federal government is supposed to run in all matters. The Pakistan Army claims to have defeated Taliban attempts to control two more settled districts last year, Tank and Dera Ismail Khan. But the Taliban are still in control of considerable swaths of these two districts.
The Pakistan Army is 600,000 strong and as such is the third largest in the world after China and India. It is highly trained, reasonably well equipped, and composed of long-term volunteers. In NWFP and Baluchistan, it is backed by the paramilitary Frontier Corps of perhaps 60-70,000 troops.
We absolutely refuse to believe the Pakistan Army cannot defeat 3-4 thousand Taliban particularly as the latter operate in a landlocked area far from any external supply bases. The Taliban has no sanctuary and no nations which back it.
We are very hesitant to create a conspiracy theory - in our experience, such theories turn out to be simply theories. But it is seeming to us, more and more, that fundamentalists in the Pakistan Army, ISI, civilian administration and police are seeking to create a pseudo state from which to launch an assault on all Pakistan.
If we were like Debka, we'd quote "Orbat.com's military sources" for the above theory. In truth, we are making inferences based on a myriad of small, unconnected pieces of evidence.
Is this an impossible scenario? Best to remember that the Taliban was created by Pakistan and within 4-5 years had overrun all of Afghanistan barring a small area in the northwest. At peak perhaps 10,000 Pakistani troops on "leave" backed the Taliban militia, providing trainers, advisors, supply, armor and artillery. The story of the Taliban's emergence from nowhere to control of a large country is one of the most remarkable of our times. We don't think it's too farfetched for us to suspect that the new Taliban is on the move again, this time looking to the east since the US is blocking the west. And the Taliban are not doing at all badly in the west, by the way.
Please Excuse Us, But Hasn't The US Long Since Won The Iraq War?
When you fight a total war, the definition of victory is easy: you win when the adversary is completely ground down, you occupy his territory, he concedes defeat, and willingly cooperates in whatever fate you may have for him and his country.
When you fight a limited war, victory has to be defined by your stated objectives. US's stated objectives were Iraq WMDs, the overthrow of Saddam because he was an evil tyrant, and bringing democracy to Iraq. Whatever you might believe about unstated objectives as might have been held by the so-called neocons, we can all agree that the US absolutely did not envisage an occupation of Iraq. The job was supposed to be a quick in-and-out; if we recall right, Mr. Donald Rumsfeld planned to leave 20,000 US trainers/support personnel in Iraq by the end of 2003.
Okay, so hasn't the US won the war a long time ago? WMDs: weren't any, sorry about that. Saddam: plays the harp with his 72 virgins, which is all he can do since he lacks a physical body. Democracy: established, and while it is nowhere near as functional as the US would define democracy, best to remember that England took several centuries to become really democratic - nine, as we reckon, from the Magna Carta to full voting rights for women. The US, building off what England had done, attained full democracy some 190 years after declaring independence, after the civil rights revolution of the 1960s gave real - as opposed to paper - voting rights to African Americans. In Latin America, depending on which country one considers, democracy took 150 to 200 years after the Bolivarian revolution. Pakistan does not have what the US considers a democracy sixty years after independence, and while Americans are perturbed about this, no one is advocating a US occupation of Pakistan.
Since the US won the Iraq war, why are we still in Iraq? Just thought we'd ask.
We hope no one is going to say "We're there to fight AQ" because as we all now know, there was no AQ in Iraq till the US occupied the country. The Iraqis who allied with AQ did so to fight the US. If the US had left in 2003 or even in 2004, the Iraqis, who may the most xenophobic people in the world, would not have let AQ get a hold. Okay, some will say, that's all past, we need to deal with the present. Well, the Iraqis seem to be doing quite well fighting AQ; they should not need much more than some advisors and money.
We hope no one is going to say "We're there to stop Iran from expanding its influence" because it is the US destruction of Iran's natural enemies, the Sunnis, that has permitted Iran to expand in the Middle East. Further, if we can work with America's natural enemies Russia and China for the sake of stability, why can't we work with Iran?
We hope no one is going to say "We must bring stability to Iraq or the Middle East will blow up," because Iraq was rock stable before we went in and destabilized the place. As to "that was then, we have to think of now", Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon are all creating very serious instability in the Middle East; but we don't see the US rushing to occupy those countries and vowing to stay 50 years or more if neccessary.
News
OPEC Almost Votes To Ditch The Dollar Due to a camera inadvertently remaining active at a session of OPEC in Saudi Arabia, the world learned of an acrimonious debate where Iran and Venezuela among others argued for denominating oil in Euros and not dollars. Saudi Arabia single-handedly held the moves at bay, but only by agreeing to refer the matter to a meeting of OPEC finance ministers.
We are all for denominating oil in Euros. First, the US will pay more for oil and move faster to cut it dependence in oil imports. Second, OPEC will have to buy Euros, pushing the Euro up by anywhere between 10-15%. That will boost US exports, generating more jobs back home.
A delightful explanation for why the US is not already in recession Apparently so much of American consumer purchases come from overseas that the slow down of the US economy is not resulting in American jobs lost, which would start a recessionary spiral. Instead the jobs lost are overseas ones.
In theory that should mean that markets for US goods should shrink, costing American jobs. In practice, the Chinese workers who make shoes for America are not consumers of American exports such as jet engines and Hollywood movies.
Vancouver Taser Death Reader Jim Kayne corrected us on our story: the venue was Vancouver and not Montreal.
We should make clear that we are shocked not just at the behavior of the Canadian police, but of the airport authorities who did nothing to help either the mother or the son locate each other even as she explained her son spoke no English. Apparently it took six hours for the man to clear customs, and he had traveled for 15 hours, not 10. His mother went home after six hours as she could not find out anything from anyone. After clearing customs the man - as nearly as we can gather - was in the high security area for another 4 hours.
Members of the public variously tried to help the man, but it seems that neither the police nor the airport authorities paid any attention to what they had to say.
The mother's lawyer says that going by the videotape taken by a member of the public, the police took 24 seconds after entering the room where the man was to tase him. In other words, a shoot first, ask later policy.
The company that makes tasers has issued an indignant statement saying its equipment does not kill. If the taser was responsible, the man would have died instantly whereas he was alive for - from what we can gather - for two minutes. The company says it has been accused before but has been found not culpable each time. We will leave it to medical experts to say if a person dies from being tased, death is instantaneous. It seems to us, from the little we know, a severe shock to the heart will stop the heart beating, but that doesn't mean the person is instantly dead.
To the credit of the Canadian police, they immediately started an inquiry and a neutral person is on the inquiry team.
We would like to add that we are generally very pro-police. Your editor in particular has direct knowledge of what risks the police run when faced with a violent person. We note that in the case of the South American national who was mistaken for a suicide bomber in London and shot we defended the London police. But this man did not threaten the police officers: he tried to explain what he was about to them; failing, he then walked away with his back to the police before he was shot.
0230 GMT November 17, 2007
Saudi Arabia, We Love You A 19-year old woman is gang-raped fourteen times by 7 men. They get 1-5 years in jail, whereas under strict Islamic law they should have been stoned to death. The victim gets 100 lashes because she was in the vehicle of an unrelated man when the assault took place.
So she appeals, and the good judges double her sentence to 200 lashes, says the BBC. Why? Because, say the judges, she attempted to use the media to influence them. Her lawyer has been suspended from the case and faces action, adds BBC. Just to show how fair-minded they are, the judges doubled the sentences on the men. That makes it 2-10 years.
What a shining bastion of justice and freedom! What a worthy ally of the US! How inspiring are these Saudis, what?
As far as we are concerned, the faster the US breaks up this stinking cesspool, the better. Of course, right now the US couldn't put together four pieces of a Meccano set without fouling things up, so Saudi is quite safe.
Oh, did we mention the woman is a Shia and Saudi is ruled by Sunnis?
US Dollar Dissed Again The Archeological Survey of India manages some 120 important tourist sites in India including 27 on the World Heritage list. BBC says foreigners will no longer be able to pay entrance fees in dollars.
So you'd expect the Indians wants Euros? No no no. They have dissed the dollar so badly they want rupees.
Maybe We Are Becoming Liberal We heard something on National Public Radio that actually made sense. Mark Shields, syndicated columnist, and David Brooks, New York Times, said that the US has little influence in the internal politics of foreign countries. So it is not that President Bush is too weak to get President Musharraf of Pakistan to listen to him, President Musharraf has many other considerations apart from the US. Both commentators agreed that given US influence is limited, it is best for the US to simply take a principled stand and demand the restoration of democracy.
President Musharraf Needs To Read Machiavelli We'd say he needs to read Kautilya, an Indian who wrote his definitive treatise on politics and statecraft almost two thousand years before Machiavelli, but then readers might accuse us of seeking to sabotage the Pakistan president because the editor is Indian.
Machiavelli said that when the leader must act harshly, he should come down like a ton of bricks at once. People get over the shock quickly and life goes on. If the leader stretches out the bad things he must do, opposition builds up.
Well, President Musharraf keeps detaining Benazir Bhutto and then releasing her, at all times allowing her to talk freely to his opponents and western envoys. So whether he is detaining her or releasing her, she gets to blast him coming and going, leaving the population scratching their heads as to why the President has suddenly become so weak.
Then he tells the broadcast media to shut up but allows the print media to attack him left, right, center, upside and downside. So he sends goons to the print media threatening them - and they promptly report every last detail. So the broadcast media is emboldened and starts saying what it wants, so he shuts down offending channels.
He says he is cracking down on militants, then makes peace deals to avoid fighting them.
He arrests a prominent critic who heads Pakistan's human rights body, then releases her.
Does he get any credit for the "good" things? Obviously all he gets is opprobrium for the bad.
Instead of following Churchill's motto "never explain, never apologize" - Mrs. Rikhye is quite Churchillian - the President keeps demanding the west understand his sensitive feelings. He will doff his uniform, he will hold elections, blah blah and blah, anything the west wants.
Come on, guy. Enough already. You wannabe a dictator, arrest anyone who speaks against you, tell western envoys its time they went home, and do what you have to do. Then people hate you, but fear you. The way you are proceeding, you're becoming a laughing stock.
An Air Passenger Arrives After a 10-hour Trip in a foreign country to join his mother. He has never flown before. He cannot find his mother, who is also looking for him, and no airport employee helps either of them. He gets agitated while alone in a room with glass windows in the customs area. He is sweating and breathing heavily. He paces back and forth, throws a couple of things to the floor. Four policemen enter. He turns his back on them. A policeman fires a Taser, shocking the man twice, then he is "restrained" by all four officers as he lies on the floor, with one policeman "restraining" him by pressing his knee down into the man's neck. The man dies almost instantly. The whole thing is captured on video by an onlooker.
So you yawn. Its just those brutal American cops again, you say. Big deal.
Well, actually not. It's Canadian police who did this, in Montreal.
The Canadians really, really, really need to sit back and reflect on what they have become. Since when is it neccessary for four police to tase a man with his back to them? We expect this behavior from American police, where you can get killed because you didn't raise your hands fast enough or you made a move that the officer interpreted as "reaching for a weapon", which can be anything including lowering your hands. We don't expect it of the Canadians.
Did we mention the man spoke no English? And did we mention the officers were told by an onlooker before they entered the room the man spoke only Russian?
Our account is from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7095875.stm You can also read http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/world/5304370.html
0230 GMT November 16, 2007
News
Swat Fighting Continues with the Pakistan Army saying it has killed scores of militants. Locals say some militants and some army personnel have indeed been killed, but the greater number are civilians killed in the Army's artillery bombardments and gunship attacks.
President Musharraf Continues To Make a Hash of his dictatorship. He has now lifted - for a second time - Ms. Bhutto's house arrest. So now she can start her street action to bring about the President's fall.
Even we are becoming concerned that President Musharraf may be at the end of his rule. There has to be a limit to what his generals can tolerate in terms of his incompetence.
Our feeling is if he is deposed, his successor will permit free elections and wait for Ms. Bhutto to bring about her own downfall. Since she will not be able to combat the militants, who represent the greatest threat to Pakistan today, and nor will she able to deliver competent governance, it is just a matter of time before she messes up.
Afghanistan District Retaken We lost the details of which district, but assume it is one of the 3 districts lost to the Taliban in Farah Province in the west.
India has 54 Billionaires according to Forbes, and it is likely that the top three alone have more wealth than China's top 400. India's top 3 have almost $150-billion between them; in November 2006 BBC carried a report giving the richest Chinese citizen <$3-billion and the top 400 about $110-billion.
One reason for this disparity may be that China embarked on capitalism only about 25 years ago. India embarked on capitalism more than 120 years ago. It is just that the Indian government kept capitalists down because it followed a socialist path. When in 1990 or so restrictions began being lifted one after another, Indian capitalists soared because they already had the management infrastructure, financial know how, and strong stock markets.
Don't Harsh My Mellow, Dude
Today started as a bad day. Washington Post says US commanders in Iraq now say the greatest threat is not AQI, not the sectarian militias, but that the Shia majority does not want to reconcile with the Sunni minority. A top US commander says if the Shia don't reconcile by next summer, US will have to find a new strategy.
Okay, first every person with an IQ of greater than 40 predicted that the principal reason given by President Bush for the surge, to create a window for political reconciliation, was bogus. We among others are on record on saying the surge would succeed militarily, but fail politically. Personally, we are not happy with the definition of success the surge has achieved, but fine, that is the way the US is defining the term so we'll let it go.
The point is, why is the US now saying the Iraqis are not reconciling when it was obvious from the start they would not?
Further, what is this business of a new strategy? We know the Administration is committed to staying in Iraq long enough to hand the mess to the next administration, but we never thought the military would start buying into the Administration's political lies. We thought the military would be happy to get out, but apparently the military is complicit in moving the goal posts so that at this rate it will take years more - possibly decades more - before US objectives are achieved. What's going on here? Is the military getting an Iraq addiction, that it cannot imagine life without Iraq?
What is intensely frustrating is that the all elements of the US government, military included, keep behaving as if the Iraqis are puppets and all that is neccessary is for the Iraqis to accept the US version of reality. Iraqi objectives are not, and never were, aligned with US objectives. Each faction in Iraq allied with the US to get what it wanted, but that doesn't mean the factions for a moment bought into US objectives. This is the way the Mideast is - how many times does it have to be repeated? - people make alliances of convenience and then go on to new alliances of convenience.
So the Shias worked with the US when the US objective was to kill Sunnis. Then AQI became a factor, and the US objectives changed so the Sunnis were happy to ally with the US. But neither Shias nor Sunnis have changed their objectives, and within each sectarian group are several subfactions also competing for their objectives. There is no possible way in which the US can impose its agendas on anyone. The Brits figured this out very quickly, which is why they are leaving. So has the rest of the world, which is why the Coalition of the Willing has become the Coalition of the Unwilling. Only the US still refuses to acknowledge reality.
And what is additionally frustrating for us is that it is not as if we are against the US fighting wars overseas. If that is what it takes to establish the American imperia, then we're all for it. We are against the Iraq war because we believe it is not the real war the US should be fighting. We believe the US has suckered itself into an endless war in Iraq to the detriment its national security. Yet we get slammed for being anti-American!
So your editor was in a tres grumpy mood as he set off for work.
But then at lunch he came across an item in this blog http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/ on how the fall of the US dollar is harshing the mellow of Canadian marijuana growers. To begin with we love the phrase, which we had never heard before. Then there was the total inanity of the topic.
Apparently the Canadians grow Super Pot for the American market, and the trade is denominated in US dollars. That makes sense as the customers are American. Now that the Canadian Loonie is worth $1.10 - and no greater indicator of how low the US itself has fallen than that the Loonie is worth more than the Greenback - Canadian growers are bummed out because they feel the US drug trade is not to their economic advantage!
A good laugh does put one in a good mood, doesn't it?
Incidentally,
foreignpolicy.com is floating a most intriguing thesis. To quote:
There’s an
uncomplicated tale many Americans like to tell themselves about
recent U.S. foreign policy. As the story has it, the nation was led
astray by a powerful clique of political appointees and their fellow
travelers in Washington think tanks, who were determined even before
the 9/11 attacks to effect a radical shift in America’s role in the
world. The members of this cabal were known as neoconservatives.
They believed the world was a dangerous place, that American power
should be applied firmly to protect American interests, and that,
for too long, U.S. policy had consisted of diplomatic excess and
mincing half measures. After 9/11, this group gave us the
ill-conceived Global War on Terror and its bloody centerpiece, the
war in Iraq.
This narrative is disturbing. It implies that a small cadre of officials, holding allegiance to ideas alien to mainstream political life, succeeded in hijacking the foreign policy apparatus of the entire U.S. government and managed to skirt the checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution. Perversely, though, this interpretation of events is also comforting. It offers the possibility of correcting course. If the fault simply lies in the predispositions of a few key players in the policy game, then those players can eventually be replaced, and policies repaired.
Unfortunately, though, this convenient story is fiction, and it’s peddling a dangerously misguided view of history. The American public at large is more deeply implicated in the design and execution of the war on terror than it is comfortable to admit.
If any of our readers has a subscription to the magazine, please let us know what the story says. But straightaway we saw a possible answer to why the Democratic presidential nominees seem so unwilling to break with the administration's policies in the event they are elected. If this war was not started by a cabal - we believed Afghanistan was not but Iraq was, and supported the cabal till recently - but is something that has arisen from the collective American consciousness, then why should the Democrats act any differently. And if we collectively are responsible for the Iraq war, then America is indeed in some of the deepest trouble it has ever been.
0230 GMT November 15, 2007
News
Militants Control 3/4ths Of Swat, Pakistan Army now enters fighting. Dawn of Karachi says om a November 13 report that the Pakistan Army has begun operations against the Islamic mullah who now controls three-quarters of the Swat area in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Previously the paramilitary Frontier Corps had launched an offensive to recover 70 villages under control of the mullah; the FC claimed it was close to defeating his 800+ fighters but instead the militants took even more of Swat.
We assume the situation is serious enough the Pakistan Army has decided to intervene. So we will have to wait and see what happens now: the Army's previous offensives have not been particularly successful mainly because the troops don't want to fight the fundamentalists. Indeed, the Army has been very quick to make deals that allow the militants to do as they want.
The Frontier Post in a November 15 report says that heavy fighting is underway and that militants attacked an army vehicle seriously wounding 8 soldiers. http://www.thefrontierpost.com/News.aspx?ncat=ts&nid=551
As with all such news from Pakistan, we caution our readers that reliability is a big problem.
Pakistan Cricketer Turned Politician Arrested We relate this story to illustrate what is happening in Pakistan today. Imran Khan is a wildly popular former cricket player with film star looks. He started a political party. When President Musharraf declared a state of emergency, he went into hiding.
Then he decided to surface at the Lahore campus of Punjab University to energize a student protest against President Musharraf. He was promptly nabbed by Islamic students and handed over to the police.
First, consider this. Lahore is - or at least was - famed for its secularism. In united India it was the heart of the Punjab and the region's unique culture in which, pre-1947, Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs lived amicably together. Even after partition, Lahore remained a secular, liberal bastion.
But an Islamist student party has taken over the 24,000-student campus, banning music and Pepsi Cola, among other things.
Now, the Islamists hate President Musharraf, so why on earth did they kidnap Imran Khan and hand him to the police?
Because, says London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article2872356.ece the Islamists dislike his politics - Imran Khan is westernized and liberal to the point he was at one stage married to the daughter of a British billionaire of Jewish origin. The Times quotes a student as saying they want Allah to rule on the campus. So evil is Imran's liberalism, that the Islamist students would rather help their adversary President Musharraf than allow Imran Khan to garner political support on their campus.
US Defense Department Makes Contingency Plans in case air and surface movement of Afghanistan bound cargo is disrupted. National Public Radio says 75% of military cargo for that country comes via Pakistan.
Oil Back To $92/Bbl as the International Energy Agency says high prices have cut demand by 500,000 barrels/day in the 4th quarter and will reduce demand for 2008 by 300,000 barrels/day. Simultaneously, in October global oil production increased by 1.4-million barrels. It is also thought some speculators have been reducing their positions.
0230 GMT November 14, 2007
We missed updating for November 13, 2007
Iraq
The US may finally getting some important things right That doesn't change our views on the need to pull out and say goodbye to Iraq for the time being. What the US is getting right is stuff over which it has control; in the larger scheme of things this is the small stuff. The big stuff, over which the US has no control is not coming together and nor will it unless the US accepts Iraq for what it is, not what the US wants it to be.
There is a shift in the insurgency because the US has hired, trained, equipped, and paid 70,000 Sunni militia. The Sunnis are doing a good job whacking Al Qaeda and are refraining from settling scores with the Shias. Of course, the Shia government is refusing to have anything to do with this program.
Baghdad security has improved We could sit here till the cows home and argue how/why etc this has happened, the fact is that it has happened. The US cut Baghdad up into little pieces by blocking roads and walling off neighborhoods. As reader Walter E. Wallis has been telling us for over a year and a half, if you cannot control the movement of locals, you cannot control an insurgency.
The Government of Iraq plans to lift the Baghdad state of emergency, the top Iraqi commander for the city plans to reopen 10 of the 80 roads. Of course, the government has its own angle in this. The Americans have defeated both the AQ and the Sunni threat in Baghdad; now the Shias are anxious to see American troops off so they can finish getting the Sunnis out. Moreover, al-Sadr, on whom the government depends, is getting restless. He has been a good boy because he knows he cannot fight the US, but he knows the US is backing his rival the Badr militia, and he is anxious to back at his business, which is killing everyone who doesn't agree with him.
Government agrees in principle Baathists should be rehabilitated and has actually rehabilitated - gasp -70 of them, including school teachers. That leaves probably only 1-2 million who need their jobs back.
Okay, so the government agreed to do this because the US sat on its head, but the important thing here is this time they have at least done a little bit of what the US wants. This program could turn out the way the Sunni militia program has gone: after agreeing to 1600 militia, the government is refusing to accept any more. Nonetheless, this is a step forward.
These are baby steps forward, but they are steps forward. By end-2008 this much progress - or this little progress - would have cost the US $700-billion and 4200 killed, which is why you have to excuse us for not joining the high fives, particularly since the Afghanistan/Pakistan situation has gone to heck and beyond.
Pakistan
President Musharraf and the West Are Competing to who can be a bigger idiot, and right now the race is too close to call.
Here is President Musharraf, the Dictator The opposition is under house arrest, but have no trouble communicating with each other, planning their next moves, and issuing denunciations. The President's goon threaten the print media, but have taken no other steps to stop it from publishing. Three western journos were asked to leave, but scores more have arrived to keep the media circus going. Not a day goes by without an apologetic president trying to explain why he declared an emergency, and promising the west elections will be held on schedule or perhaps a couple of weeks later.
If Pakistan is under dictatorship, its a peculiar kind of dictatorship.
Here is the west daily issuing increasingly hysterical demands that "democracy" be restored. It's a bit odd, isn't it, that Pakistan has not had democracy since 1999, when the good President staged his first coup, but that didn't seem to bother the west overly, particularly after 2001.
So which democracy does the west want restored? The democracy of the military, or the democracy of the civilians?
If it is the latter, all we can do is stand aside and laugh at the west. Take the case of ex-prime minister Nawaz-i-Sharif. He was overthrown by President Musharraf and sent into exile. Now, keeping him outside Pakistan while she cut deals with the president doesn't seem to have bothered Ms. Bhutto. Democracy for her is a must, but democracy for her opponent isn't.
Take the case of the militants. If Pakistan gets true democracy, the militants will advance by leaps and bounds because they will intimidate those who would otherwise never vote for them. We've seen this in the North West Frontier Province.
Of course, you can correctly argue that President Musharraf isn't doing anything about the militants. But at least the west should be clear that its ritual mantra "the only way to deal with the militants is democracy" is pure blather. In Iraq, the first democratic election in decades resulted in a Shia majority that wants to get rid of the Sunni minority. No no no, says America, we decide what is democratic and getting rid of the Sunnis by forcing them back into 4 provinces where they dominate is not democracy. As for Ms. Bhutto doing something about the militants, how does that compute? The army doesn't want to fight the militants, why would they change their mind just because Ms. Bhutto orders them? More likely they'll change Ms. Bhutto if she gets too pesty.
Now take China. Is that country a democracy? No. Is the west issuing daily denunciations? No. Is it embargoing China. On the contrary, there is a non-stop strea, of westerners begging China to take their money.
Now take Venezuela, where the president is taking the last steps to declare himself Prez-for-life. Is that a democracy? No. What is the US reaction? Sensibly, it is "this is a matter for the people of Venezuela to decide."
So how about applying the same formulation to Pakistan? Or is it that failing to bully Burma to do the right thing, President Musharraf has become the west's whipping boy?
Letter
From Guy Dampier: Re
Teddy Bears
Further to your comments as to the joy
derived from four teddy bears I thought you might be interested
in the following article from that most accurate of organs,
Pravda:
http://english.pravda.ru
Should you care to paint your car silver and stick an iPod in the back, though hopefully not playing "Abide With Me", then I am certain we'll see a drying up of geopolitical posts as you become the lothario of D.C.
Editor's Comment Naturally your editor immediately went to Pravda but came away disappointed. Pravda says the Teddy Bears have to be inside the car. This is not possible, as the editor's bears have their own life and their own routine. During the day they sleep in their own bed, during the night, when the editor is asleep, they party. We thank Mr. Dampier for his kind thought, though.
0230 GMT November 12, 2007
Two Irrelevant Reasons Not To Attack Iran First we want to make clear we are not advocating the US attack Iran. We do not see any change in the Washington culture of incompetence. And while the US military has done some good things in Iraq, we are certain it cannot manage the aftermath of an attack on Iran. A few months of doing some things right in Iraq doesn't qualify the US military to take on another venture that is likely fraught with greater post-strike dangers than the US experienced in Iraq post Gulf II invasion.
But if an attack on Iran is to be discussed, there are two completely irrelevant reasons in the "Do Not Attack" side of the ledger. Both these reasons are repeated mindlessly time and again so that they have become gospel, not to be questioned or even to be examined.
Irrelevant Reason Number 1 Iran will close Hormuz, oil will go to $200-barrel and the west will experience catastrophe.
Ues, Iran will close Hormuz, and yes, the west will quickly reopen the oil lanes. We estimate somewhere between 30-60 days might be needed. Yes, the supertankers may not be able to transit till months later, but smaller ships will.
See end of the update for our calculation the US will lose between 1-1.5 million bbl/day while Hormuz is shut down; but the US can ride out any shut down with ease. As for oil reaching $200-bbl, we've said this before: it's not going to happen because the futures market will be shut-down immediately and governments will control oil allocations. Yes, generally the free-market is better at allocating resources, but not in wartime.
Yes, there will be some cost but it will be trivial compared to what happens if Iran puts a couple of N-warheads on Israel or Europe.
Irrelevant Reason Number 2 Iran will make Iraq explode. When we hear this reason, our reaction is to examine our nails to see if they need cutting. If the person with whom we are discussing the matter insists on a reply, our stock answer is "So what?".
Who cares what happens to Iraq when the stakes are so high? What are the Iranians going to do, unleash their militias against US troops? Good luck, and we suggest the Iranians stockpile shrouds because what you are going to see is a lot of dead militia. Anyone remember Najaf 2004?
Are the Iranians going to plant more roadside bombs? So big deal, as if they haven't done their worst already.
Hezbollah is going to attack Israel? So more big deal. So the Israelis will lose a few hundred civilians. Anyone checked lately to see how many Israelis will die if a 50-KT N-warhead lands on Tel Aviv?
We could extend this list, but there's no point. Saying the US should not attack Iran because the Iranians will do X, Y, Z is like saying the US shouldn't have reacted after Pearl Harbor was bombed or that Britain should have sat while Hitler overran the west. The US paid a huge price in World War II, but it was a price that had to be paid because the alternatives were far worse. Ditto Iran.
A More Rational Debate would include questions such as: Given any military option is risky, should we not exhaust every other option first, upto and including giving Iran a no-strike assurance - US has just done this with DPRK - and acknowledging Iran's right to its influence in its neighborhood - we've conceded such rights to China for at least the last 20 years.
Any strike will seriously delay Iran's N-program, but it won't end it for good. So what is the US plan for using the 5-10 year delay - we are using arbitrary figures for discussion to make sure the program is not reactivated?
We are sure readers will have other questions, we're limiting ourselves to two for considerations of space.
Comments always welcome.
US General Says Iran's Influence In Iraq Remains "Extensive" Can someone inform the good general that Iran neighbor's Iraq and that at least since 1979, well before the US occupied Iraq, Iran has sought to increase its influence in Iraq. Is it the general's contention that the US should eliminate Iranian influence in Iraq? If so, good luck. Short of wiping out Iran we don't see how Iran's influence can be eliminated.
Readers should nonetheless read the article http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL1124367020071111?pageNumber=2 because it contains much information on what is going on between Iran and the US in Iraq.
Things To Be Absolutely Avoided Driving into a Washington dusk past the Soldiers Home and Children's Hospital when you are feeling old, useless, exhausted, irrelevant, with "Abide With Me" playing on the radio.
Soldiers Home is full of people who served their country but now have no one to look after them and are counting time to their end of their lives. We accept as inevitable that old people die. Children's Hospital, which is almost adjacent to Soldiers Home, is full of people that are heartbreakingly desperate, because no one can accept that their children can get so sick that they too are going to die.
If on top of all that you are having your sixth existential crisis of the day as to what you are doing in the world now that you have done for your family and the world what you could, and dark is falling, and "Abide With Me" is playing on the radio, even if you are the most optimistic person in the world, you get a bit depressed.
The words to the hymn and its tune, of course, were written by an English Methodist preacher who spent the last 23 years of his 54 year life dying of TB and asthma. He wrote both at the time of his last sermon for which he was so weak he could barely stand.
The British were prone, in generations now past, to sing this hymn as they went down with the ship. Scarcely happy occasions. The hymn is a favorite at funerals, which are also not happy occasions unless one has been left a few million dollars by the deceased, in which case one is shouting "Yes!" inside even as one sheds the obligatory tear. This happens rarely. And for reasons the editor cannot fathom, the then Princess Elizabeth, later Queen Elizabeth II, had the hymn sung at the opening of her wedding. Perhaps she had an inkling of the troubles she would experience thanks to her children.
Luckily the radio switched to "Pie Jesu" before your editor got too depressed. When you have a comfy bed in a warm house, with four soft pillows, four faithful teddy bears, and a stack of excellent books to read, you have to concede, however grudgingly, that life is good.
From George Fescos You should add the Philippines counter-insurgency 1899-1902 to your list of America's 20th Century wars.
Editor Approximately 4100 US soldiers died, about 2/3rds from disease. Philippine military dead are usually estimated at 20,000, and civilian dead all the way to 500,000. The last figure includes a very large number who died due to disease, but whether most or all were the result of the war itself we have to leave to experts to tell us.
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Updated 11.12.2007
US Emergency Oil Vulnerability
US Oil Stocks
US Strategic Petroleum Reserve
Arabian/Persian Gulf Shutdown
Alternatives
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0230 GMT November 11, 2007
Vietnam & Memorial Day
America fought 4 wars in the 20th Century One turned out well. But for America, the 1939-45 war would have turned out badly for democracy. Japan would have established a brutal, exploitive empire in East Asia. Either the Germans would have ruled Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals, or the Soviets would eventually have defeated the Germans and ruled from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Then there was World War I, which ended in a satisfying victory for the US and its allies, but in retrospect it was simply a prelude to World War II and it accomplished nothing. Still, Americans feel good about that war, so perhaps we should count it as a war that turned out well.
One war turned out neither well nor badly. Korea was a bloody stalemate, but South Korea went from a country where in the aftermath of the war people ate leaves, grass, and bark to stay alive, so complete was the destruction of the peninsula to one with the second highest per capita income bar Japan - we ignore Singapore, which is a city state, not a real country. The advance of communism in East Asia was checked.
Vietnam did not turn out well. The scale of the carnage was truly astonishing: North Vietnam/NLF lost 1.1-million dead by Hanoi's own post-war figures; between 1-4 million civilians died, half in the North, 700,000 died in Cambodia, 50,000 in Laos. Near 60,000 Americans died and so did ~200,000 South Vietnamese troops. These figures have to be considered against the approximately 70-million people in Indochina in 1970.
In the end, the Americans tired of a war they had won, and Hanoi won everything it had fought for since the 1940s.
On Memorial Day 2007 the Vietnam War does not arouse the divisive passions it did during its durations. Instead, there is a deep melancholy at the waste, the suffering of American troops, even at the suffering of the Vietnamese North or South, and perhaps even a sense of guilt at the way American soldiers, who were mostly draftees who did not choose to go to Vietnam, were reviled on their return.
Even Second Indochina had some good outcomes. It is now argued that the US intervention bought time that allowed several East Asian states to become strong and democratic. The US and Vietnam reconciled. The US military threw itself into a complete restructuring, the results of which were evident in Gulf I. American foreign policy focused on spreading real democracy all over the world - the results are most evident in Africa and Latin America. And America learned humility, though that did not last long because Gulf I convinced many that America could defeat anyone in the time it took to play a game of football.
As time has passed, however, your editor detects a growing trend of maudlin sentimentality with reference to Vietnam, especially around Memorial Day. Perhaps it is a result of the inevitable media focus on the Wall, which seems to arouse emotions as no other war memorial.
At times such as these, it is best to keep matters in perspective. America in 1970 had a population of 200-million and was increasing at about 2.5-million a year. The Vietnam loss was 9 days of population growth. Compare the 58,000 dead to that to Britain's loss of 20,000 dead on a single day at the Somme, 1916, from a population of about 45-million. That equates to 80,000 people for the US - on a single day.
In the Argonne in World War I, the US lost 26,000 dead in seven weeks. On a population base of 92-million, that equates to 80,000 dead compared to Vietnam/1970 population base.
At Antietam (Sharpsburg) during the US Civil War, the US/CSA together lost 5500 men on a single day. The US population at that time was around 35-million, so the loss equated to ~50,000 in terms of the 1970 population.
During the Civil War, if we count battle deaths alone, the US/CSA lost 200,000 men; that would equate to 1.1-million dead on the 1970 population; in terms of total military deaths - disease being the big killer - that is 3.3-million men lost.
The Republic of Korea sent 2 divisions plus a regiment to Vietnam, about a fifth of what the US deployed at peak. Its 1970 population was 32 million, so its loss of 4100 equated to 25,000 US dead, something that is rarely, if ever, mentioned.
So: mourn Vietnam if you have reason to. But if it is sentiment you want, think Korea, which was a bloody on a per year basis as Vietnam, and which truly was - and remains - America's Forgotten War.
0230 GMT November 10, 2007
News
Iran Religious Leader Says Islam Forbids N-Weapons We're quite baffled by this report from the Iranian News Agency Is Iran trying to reduce tension with the US? There are also reports that Iran has assured Iraq it will not send IEDs into Iraq, and the US says there is a big drop in IED incidents but cautions against making any link as yet between Iran's professions of non-interference and the reduction.
We of course put no credence whatsoever on the good cleric's pronouncements.
First, Islam has no central church and orthodox doctrine: every cleric can interpret as he wants, though theoretically the higher cleric's ruling negates the lower cleric. The problem here is that you will not get an Iranian to agree that a Saudi cleric is higher and so forth.
Second, if we go by profession, Christianity and Islam are religions of complete peace. The reality is different. We accept in the good old days Christians slaughtered far more Muslims than the other way around. But the Muslims killed uncounted tens of millions in Asia, particularly in India. And the Christian record of killing each other and unbelievers is particularly grim. As for the Muslim record in modern Afghanistan and Iraq, less said the better.
But nonetheless, if the Iranian cleric is sending a message - and we presume since it was delivered during Teheran Friday prayers it was cleared at the highest level - then something is definitely brewing.
Royal Marines Renew Shatt-al-Arab
Patrols This time they are backed up US gunboats; a US helicopter
flies over each patrol and fighter support is available. The Marines
have been retrained and reequipped. There have already been
confrontations with the Iranians, but in each case the Iranians have
turned back.
5 Sunni Sheiks Killed In
Diyala by a suicide bomber who attacked the house of the deputy
leader of the Diyala Salvation Council. We are getting no sense of how
these repeated attacks on Sunni leaders cooperating with the US are
affecting cooperation. The usual quote from locals when such an attack
happens goes "we will never bow to the terrorists" and so on, but any
Sunni leader must be thinking twice before openly cooperating with the
Americans.
By the way, is it too much
to ask the US how it plans to keep the Sunni militias under control once
US starts withdrawing troops? And how does the US explain its arming of
the Sunni militias against the express demands of the legal government
of Iraq?
US believes AQI in
Baghdad has been defeated but says hold the celebrations, this is a
dangerous enemy and nothing is certain. The ethnic clensing of Baghdad
has helped: AQI had maximum success when it attacked Shia in mixed
neighborhoods.
Which leads us to say once
again: you want peace in Iraq, partition the country. 80% of the country
- Shias and Kurds - want to go their own way. It's the Sunnis who don't,
because they wont have oil revenue. You can't decide policies on the
basis of what 20% of the population wants.
Brazil's Oil Strike In
Perspective Media is waxing lyrical about Brazil's discovery of 5-8
billion/bbl oil, with talk of Brazil becoming a major oil exporter and
so on. First, good for the Brazilians: the oil is 5000-meters below the
surface, 3000-meters of water followed by 2000-meters of salt. Major
technology is required to extract it.
That said, lets have some
perspective here folks. 8-billion/bbl is about what the US uses in a
year, and by the time the Brazilian field is in full production, the
world will be using 30-35 billion/bbl a year. So from Brazil's
viewpoint, its big: at current prices, that's $8-trillion, spread over
50 years this field alone will bring Brazil, a relatively poor country,
$160-billion in hard currency a year.
From the world's viewpoint,
this is a drop in the bucket.
It will take six years to
get 100,000-bbl/day out of this field.
Now, if the press was saying
something like "this is a big find and its possible if others drill that
deep around the world there may be a sea of oil waiting to be tapped"
then the excitement would make sense. But there is no mention of what
the strike means, if anything, for other parts of the world. A Bear
Stearns analyst quoted by
International Herald Tribune
does casually mention the implications for further discoveries, but the
IHT, like all media today, hates figures. The media thinks readers get
headaches when presented with figures whereas its the media that gets
the headaches.
0230 GMT November 9, 2007
Afghanistan Situation Report
Major A.H. Amin (Retired) in Kabul
(You may quote from this report crediting the author and Orbat.com)
Area Under Taliban Control
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Lines of Communication
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The USA and its NATO allies appear to have the following strategy
News
Oil "Drops" To $95 Theory Number One: the price is falling prior to catching the next wave which will take it past $100. Theory Number Two: fears of a US recession are causing speculators to sell futures.
We were told US gasoline demand fell 0.4-percent - unfortunately we did not catch the period over which this has happened. Last month of last quarter? With gasoline having broken $5/gallon in one California locality, and crude cost increases still to be fully passed to the consumer, it's reasonable to assume demand will fall.
Iraq Interior Ministry: 40,000 Return To Iraq including 3000 families to Baghdad. As Iraqi families tend to the large, it is possible the 3000 families make up most of the returnees. The Ministry does not say how it estimated this. We believe the figure may be true because Shias displaced by Sunnis in 2006-07 may well be returning now that ethnic cleansing is almost done. The Baghdad figure is unlikely to materially affect the refugee/displaced person figure for all Iraq, which has been running at 60,000/month.
A map of Iraq/US forces in Iraq produced by www.longwarsjournal.org shows a brigade of US 82nd Division in South Iraq, in Dhar Qi Province. Previously this was in the UK AOR. We thought the US had decided against sending troops to the south as the UK began its withdrawal.
The map shows 10 brigades committed to the central region (Baghdad and environs), 5 to the north, and 3 to the west. As your editor is partially color blind, he could not make out where the 20th brigade is, unless the one from north of Baghdad scheduled to depart the theatre as the surge is reversed is already in Kuwait. http://www.longwarjournal.org/multimedia/IraqBdeOOB6.php
Mogadishu Fighting Continues as Ethiopians reinforce the capital - it is unclear if the troops have come from Ethiopia or other parts of Somalia. Islamic insurgents are claiming victories against the Ethiopians.
0230 GMT November 8, 2007
Pakistan
Pakistan Offensive In Swat Fails Jang of Pakistan says 70% of the Swat Valley's 94-km length is now in the hands of insurgents. The last report we carried said the security forces were making rapid progress against the militants.
Well, it appears they have just as rapidly made reverse progress. Three town have fallen to the insurgents on Tuesday and Wednesday.
There is now almost no fighting, Pakistan Frontier Corps troops are simply abandoning their posts allowing the insurgents to walk in
We'd warned readers the other day that Pakistan news concerning the insurgents tends to be unreliable, but even we are taken aback by the reported rapid change of fortunes in this offensive.
There are the usual reports that the government has already agreed to return to the live-and-let arrangement it had negotiated with the insurgents. None of this is doing the US/NATO much good as far as Afghanistan is concerned.
We again warn the US to terminate its policy of forcing Pakistan to police its side of the border. The US gambit has failed, and it cannot be replayed. Pakistan never seriously cooperated in the first place because - we have explained rapidly - the Taliban are perceived critical to its national security interests. The army has made clear it has no interest in fighting the militants. If the US goes on sitting on Musharraf and beating him to take action, the end result is going to either that Musharraf is overthrown by his generals, or he turns against the US.
Apparently this realization has not set in for at least one influential American policy person, Mr. Richard Armitage. Read http://ptinews.com/pti%5Cptisite.nsf/$All/5055DE712F8B3FAA6525738C00513171?OpenDocument and his choice of words. Mr. Armitage wants to "hammer" President Musharraf is he does not act on the Taliban etc. We are astonished how far removed from reality is Mr. Armitage. What is the US leverage? Bombing Pakistan? Come on people, the US hasn't been able to do anything about a tinhorn dictator like Castro, does anyone think they can force Pakistan to do its bidding?
We'd laugh except Mr. Armitage's thinking is wholly representative of a very influential segment of the US foreign policy establishment. This is not a new debate, by the way. Its been going on since at least 2005 that we know of.
The US has got to send more troops to Afghanistan - not 1600 more, but 50,000 more, and it has to protect Afghanistan's borders itself. And even that 50,000 might not suffice. If the US is not prepared to forget Iraq, and not prepared to make a major expansion of its ground forces, it had better start forgetting about Afghanistan.
Confusion On Pakistan Elections Jang of Pakistan reports that (a) President Musharraf's political party is divided on holding the elections as scheduled in January 2008, with some saying the schedule should be maintained and others saying elections should be deferred.
(b) that the President is saying he expects the emergency to be short-lived and elections held on time. He has said he will retire from the army before the polls.
(c) that the President is saying emergency will not be lifted till its objectives are met, and he is not going to hold elections on schedules dictated by the US.
So your guess is as good as ours as to the if/when of elections, but please to note the good President has a history of saying one thing and doing another.
Behind The Curve, But Still Useful is Time.com's story on "Talibanstan". This is the name for those areas of Pakistan's North west Frontier Province that have fallen to Islamic fundamentalists. The information in the story is completely outdated, but it's still useful if you need a summary. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1601850,00.html?iid=sphere-inline-bottom
Please note that the article says only about 5% of the locals support the fundamentalists. But the latter have so intimidated the locals by their ruthlessness that the locals feel they have no choice but to go along.
In our opinion, even 2% very determined people can intimidate the 98%. Be that as it may, we want western and Indian analysts to wake up, smell the whatever, and stop telling us stuff like "in the last election only 15% of the voters chose fundamentalist parties." First, that figure is higher now. Second, if the 15% get organized, Pakistan as a moderate Islamic state is as good as finished.
What is true of the NWFP is increasingly true of Pakistan as whole. People are becoming too frightened to oppose the extremists. The government cannot protect them, even if it wished.
0230 GMT November 7, 2007
Success for Whom In Iraq?
First, whatever one's position on Iraq - and we remain opposed because we feel Iraq is peripheral to the GWOT and the troops are needed elsewhere - one has to welcome the drop in US troop deaths. Purely on a human level, any reduction in casualties is good news, however this was achieved and whatever it means.
There can be no doubt, whatever one thinks of the Iraq strategy, that the US military has a usual done a great job under the most trying circumstances. The trying circumstances are not about going into Baghdad's neighborhoods, taking the fight to the enemy is what the military is supposed to do. We speak of the enormous sacrifice the troops are making, or are being made to make, in repeated deployments in what promises to be a very long war.
The Army in particular has not escaped the too-hard usage without costs, but still, its remarkable how high morale and unit effectiveness remains. The Marines' motto "a few good men" now applies equally to the Army; it is way too small for its assigned missions, but it has gone forward without complaint.
Nonetheless, we remain skeptical of figures showing a reduction in violent attacks, because the south is not being counted, and that's where most of the violence is at this time. Moreover, the Iraq government's statistical process is not something that would pass muster in most countries.
We further worry about what happens post-surge. Al-Sadr, who has always been the biggest threat in Iraq, is simply lying low. Once the Americans start to reduce their troops, he will return to centre stage and resume killing Sunnis and rival Shias. He learned in 2004 there is no percentage in going up against US troops, and he has kept quiet, despite every US attack on his militia.
The Iraq government is refusing to hire Sunni militias and police; the US can neither take this horse to water nor make it drink. The US has been paying the various Awakenings. We wonder if Washington sees the irony here. After declaring it will not tolerate militias, and working for years to disarm every militia within sight, the US is creating its own militias.
Be that as it may, those of us who are old enough to recall Vietnam and those of us who kept track of the the last four years in Iraq have a right to urge caution in any declarations of victory. It can take a year, two, even three for the enemy to adapt to changed situations.
But mainly we are concerned because the situation for ordinary Iraqis is terrible, and it continues to deteriorate day by day. The Americans are winning, but the Iraqis are losing.
If you believe the war is about America, the achievements are there for anyone to see - even if we have to qualify them by reminding readers that we still haven't anywhere near fallen in terms of incidents/casualties to pre-Samarra levels.
Of you believe the war is about giving the Iraqis a better life, the Iraqis are losing big time.
Let's construct a matrix, dividing Iraq into four zones: south, west, central (Baghdad), and north. Let's assign a value of 0 for stable to 4 for anarchy.
| Period | South | West | Center | North |
| Pre-2003 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2004 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| 2006 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 2 |
| 2007 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 3 |
Readers can argue the figures and they are welcome to put in their own. We claim no precision, and intend only to broadly sketch trends. From the total 0 (total stability) of Saddam's era Iraq went to 8 in 2004, then to 12 in 2006, and is now at 10. That's better than 2006, it's still pretty horrible if you happen to be an Iraqi.
Pre-2003, Iraq was highly stable. Surely it had crime such as is normal in any country, but as is the case in efficiently totalitarian states, crime was probably low. Unless you got in Saddam's way, life was secure.
2004 saw the rise of violence as people resisted the US occupation, and as criminals exploited the disappearance of government authority including the police.
2006 was the dangerous year: Anbar was slipping out of US control, Baghdad had become an urban battleground of great savagery. The Shia south and the Kurd north remained relatively peaceful.
In 2007, the US managed to get many Sunnis to fight Al-Qaeda, and staged a near doubling of troops in the center. Accordingly, the west and center became stable. But the north began to implode, and the south did implode.
Further, while Anbar is recovering and life returning to some definition of normal, the peace of Baghdad is the peace of the dead. The west was out of control because of Al Qaeda and assorted bad lots of Sunnis, the center was out of control because Shias and Sunnis killed each other without restraint or mercy. It wasn't even so much that the two sects were murdering each other, it was the unprecedented cruelty with which they killed each other.
In the center, particularly in Baghdad, the Sunnis are now in ghettos. The Shias can't get at them because the US Army is standing in the way, and because except for 4 neighborhoods, the Sunnis have been expelled from mixed neighborhoods. But the Government of Iraq does not function in Baghdad: whatever positive gets done is because the US Army does it.
Look at another figure, Displaced Persons (Figures for internal DPs from Iraqi Red Crescent, Washington Post November 6, 2007; A14. Figures for refugees from UNHCR quoted in a Congressional Research Service study in http://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33936.pdf )
Iraq has about 27-million people, no one is quite sure. There are 2.1- to 2.7-million refugees and an estimated 2.3-million internally displaced people. That means one of 8 Iraqis is displaced abroad or in Iraq.
Of the internally displaced, 1.2 were from the Saddam era; 1-million have been displaced since February 2006. The refugees count is of post-Saddam refugees.
The refugee figures understate a great calamity: the Iraqi middle-class which is secular is represented in vast disproportion. Iraq is becoming increasingly sectarian, and the internal refugees represent people fleeing from mixed areas, so that Iraq is now also increasing divided by religion and ethnicity.
Here is another figure The refugee flow has quadrupled since the US began its surge. even as the surge was dramatically forcing down US casualty figures and claimed Iraqi deaths, in September the number of internally displaced Iraqis increased by 16 percent.
If you are American, you conclude we are winning. If you are Iraqi, you can conclude no such thing.
Afghanistan
3 Districts In Farah Province Have Fallen To The Taliban says Reuters quoting Afghan officials.
The scary part is that this has happened in a week. "First, the Taliban captured the Farah district of Gulistan a week ago, then on Wednesday took nearby Bakwa. On Sunday, the insurgents seized Khak-e Sefid without a fight. Khake-e Sefid district fell into Taliban hands yesterday without any resistance from Afghan forces." http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=11018
Now, Farah Province is a wee distance away from Pakistan, in case anyone wants to know. So who is supporting the Taliban here with money, weapons, sanctuary? It can only be Iran.
And will the analysts kindly spare us the blah about the Taliban are Sunnis and so are mortal enemies of the Iranian Shia? We don't know who comes up with this kind of gibberish. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" is an adage that transcends petty considerations of sectarianism. Moreover, the Iranians are canny and sophisticated. They are not Arabs, but think like the Arabs, and the Arabs are experts at switching alliances on the turn of a dime. You can be mortal enemies one day, but join together tomorrow long enough to achieve a common objective, then just as rapidly go back to being enemies.
The US has been encircling Iran; Iran is fighting back.
Meanwhile, NATO bickers while Afghanistan burns.
Oh yes: we forgot to mention - actually we didn't forget, we just didn't have the heart to mention it because the whole thing is so pathetic. The US has threatened NATO it will withdraw 1600 troops from Balkans peacekeeping to send to Afghanistan if NATO will not come up with more troops for Afghanistan.
NATO, of course, is not impressed. Its far easier for the NATO Euros to send 1600 troops to the Balkans than to Afghanistan.
And gosh, 1600 troops! That is so fantastic, such a powerful addition to the west's efforts in Afghanistan.
Why, we are told the Taliban and Iranians are already packing it in and going home at the mere prospect of - gasp! - 1600 fresh troops arriving. Not.
If the Taliban and Iranians are doing anything, it is laughing themselves silly. The world's sole superpower. Sixteen hundred troops is what it can find for Afghanistan. The Washington wants us to believe we are winning the GWOT. The whole thing is enough to make one sick.
0230 GMT November 6, 2007
Oil To Hit $100/bbl; US Yawns
Two years ago when the US started ratcheting up its rhetoric against Iran, some industry sources warned that oil would hit $100/bbl if Persian Gulf supplies were disrupted.
So we did a back of the envelope calculation - click More Energy Facts and then click Fact Number 8 - and determined at $100/bbl, US consumers would pay $3.30 for gasoline, which we thought would not cause much of a commotion.
Well, oil is now $96 and is set to hit $100 because a lot of people with a lot of money have bought futures for $100 and various crises real or imagined are creating jitters.
Oil has quadrupled in price in 4 years, and indeed the US has yawned.
So now people talk of $160+ oil if Persian Gulf is disrupted. What no one seems to write about is that if there is war and a Persian Gulf disruption, world governments will halt futures trading. The free market works best, except in national emergency.
Be that as it may, we have two facts people have sent to us. First, the "real" price of oil as dictated by supply-demand is $70. Speculators have forced the price up to $100. This bubble could burst any time.
Second, free market tells us when price increases, supply increases. Prince have increased 4X in four years, why has supply not increased?
Several reasons. The usual suspects are there: not enough rigs, new oil takes years to develop and so on. But two reasons are probably the most important. One: oil has always been a boom/bust proposition, and the industry fears that if it dramatically jacks up spending for greater production, the price will crash and there will be much weeping an wailing.
The second reason we find fascinating - Washington Post of November 5, 2007 also mentions this. Governments are taxing oil income increases so heavily that even at $100 it's not to the advantage of oil companies to step up exploration/investment/production. The extreme case is Russia, which has imposed a 95% tax rate beyond a price level we could not determine. But if you are producing in Russia, if oil jumps $20, you, who take the risk and do the work, get $1.
The reality is that oil since 1973 has increasingly not been priced by the market. And now all oil producers, US included, see no advantage in lower prices. If you can get $100, why would you agree to any measures that would increase output and bring prices down to $70? And if you can get $100, and the world pays, why not try and jack up the price to $120?
As yet no one is squealing, world economic growth continues, and any US slowdown owes almost everything to the financial crisis, not to oil prices. So you can expect oil to go even higher than $100.
Of course, the poorest countries are getting heavily smacked down, but who cares about them.
Musharraf: Tiger Or Pussycat?
Yesterday we got so positively lyrical about President Musharraf's coup that we completely forgot to add an all-important caveat. If the president continues in his pussycat mode, his coup is going to fail. And from what we see in the first 48 hours of the coup, instead or roaring, he is going "mew".
From the start in 1999, the president has wanted to be loved in preference to being feared. Any dictator who wants to get warm and fuzzy with his peeps is going to become an object of ridicule. As soon as he could he created a civilian facade. He let the press be freer than it has been in Pakistan. He actually allowed the courts, particularly the Supreme Court, to function. He labored mightily to explain himself to the world, particularly to the west. In short, he did everything possible to weaken himself.
He got into this mess because he never did from the start what a dictator should do: make it clear you either support him, or he breaks you.
Now let's look at the past 48 hours Lets pose this as a quiz to see if you can make the cut as a dictator. Right after staging your coup you:
(A) invite 80 foreign diplomats to reassure them you will return to democracy ASAP and become a civilian; or (B) you issue an order that any diplomat who speaks against you will be given four hours to leave the country.
(A) vow that elections will be held on schedule in January 2008; or (B) postpone elections indefinitely.
(A) tell Washington your cooperation on the GWOT is ended because of American interference in your internal affairs, and that from now on you will be guided solely by Pakistan's interests; or (B) beg Washington for its "understanding" and "patience".
(A) start arresting the wives, children, parents of those who oppose you, making clear their well-being depends entirely on your good behavior and singing your praises; or (B) detain key opposition people in comfy house arrest, where they seem to be free to issue all manner of condemnations against you.
(A) impose Section 144, which bans gatherings of more than 5 persons without permission, and issue shoot-to-kill orders if anyone violates the order; or (B) disperse the protesting crowds with a limp wrist, suffering as many casualties to your police as the police are inflicting on the protesters.
(A) round up the top ten persons in every media organization and hold them incommunicado and immediately expel all foreign media; or (B) censor broadcast media but let the print media run around taking photographs of demonstrations - and of journalists getting beaten up, and send your stooges to explain to the foreign media - especially the white media - how you really didn't want to impose this coup but had to for Pakistan's security.
(A) give orders for your known military general officer enemies to be shot; or (B) put your most virulent military critics under house arrest - again with them having no trouble contacting the world.
(A) Arrest opposition politicians, establish special courts to try them on charges of treason and corruption, with an ordnance that the court must render judgment on each case in 24 hours; or (B) take your leading political opponent into your confidence before you stage your coup.
If you answered A to all, you will make a great dictator. If you answered B to all, you are the Mother of All Limp Noodles and deserve to be overthrown by your irate peeps.
President Hugo Chavez has great dictator potential.
Judged by the last 48 hours, President Musharraf wins the MALN Award hands down.
Feel free to draw your own conclusions as to his longevity as dictator.
0230 GMT November 5, 2007
Pakistan
This is a remarkably relaxed coup Agencies say 500 people have been arrested - Pakistan has 170-million people, by the way. Our correspondent Mandeep Singh Bajwa was the first to comment on the remarkable absence of large numbers of troops on the streets; agencies confirm this continues.
Former ISI Chief General Hamid Gul is reported under arrest after he went to the residences of the Supreme Court justices to present them flowers. His intention was to congratulate them for ruling the emergency order illegal.
General Gul is an architect of the Taliban and is virulently anti-American and anti-Indian. He has constantly attacked President Musharraf's cooperation with the US in the GWOT. According to our sources, he has been ineffectively plotting against the President for many years even though Pakistan has moved against the Taliban with the greatest of reluctance and with the deliberate intention to do the elast amount of damage.
We asked our sources if he had been arrested simply because he entered a cordoned-off area or was it that his arrest was planned and the security forces caught up with him as he went to congratulate the judges. Readers can see the two situations have completely different implications.
Our sources say that General Gul may be released after he gives his parole and a promise to keep quiet. They also say that plotting runs in his blood and he is unlikely to remain quiet for long. They expressed no opinion on what happens next except to say that the serving generals would ideally not want him to come to harm because he is, after all, one of them, but at the same time it is likely the generals will understand if President Musharraf moves to silence him because of the threat he presents to the President.
The Australian says the army may not fall in behind the President according to a report by its South Asian correspondent. He says some sections of the army expressed dismay about the move. His source is western diplomats.
We fear that the Australian's editor may have written a sensational headline completely unsupported by the facts. To think that President Musharraf did not get the complete backing of his Praetorian Guard, the corps commanders, for his move is foolish. To further think that any senior Pakistan general has met with western diplomats except on official business sanctioned by the President is also foolish.
Our guess is the diplomats are using information given to them before the emergency was imposed and a big discussion was underway on Will he/Wont he. If you are familiar with South Asians, you know they are most genial and will agree with anything you want to hear because to do otherwise is considered disrespectful to a guest. The Indians are good at this, but the Pakistanis are past masters - ask any American diplomat who has dealt with them.
Press Trust of India quotes a senior official of Ms. Benazir Bhutto's party as saying President Musharraf took her "into confidence" before imposing the emergency. The unnamed official says that President Musharraf had told Ms,. Bhutto while the two were negotiating for her return he could need to impose an emergency. The official condemned her for entering this secret deal with the President and said it would have consequences for her leadership. Ms. Bhutto says her house is not surrounded by troops despite reports that was the case, says BBC.
India has put its Border Security Force on alert because it anticipates that with the emergency Pakistan will crack down on militants and India does not want them slipping into India to escape the pressure. But, says Press Trust of India, the government has refused to send reinforcements to the border as there is no need; the normal deployment of border forces is adequate to meet any problem.
Restrictions have been imposed on broadcast media but newspapers are untouched.
US has threatened to withhold aid but UK Independent voices the consensus that the US is not going to let the emergency get in the way of its GWOT cooperation with Pakistan and that most aid will be continued.
Neither Asahi Shimbun of Japan nor ITAR-Tass of Russia refer to the Pakistan situation in their web editions. Bangladesh media seem only to have a generic account of events such as could be taken from any western news agency.
Analysis
So what is going on? Pakistan is in crisis because of the fundamentalists and the return of Ms. Benazir Bhutto. Push to shove, the people of Pakistan would rather have the army running things at times such as these. They may not like the military to rule, but they fear the civilian politicians more because these are incompetent as well as venal, whereas the Pakistan military is merely corrupt at some minor level.
Does the West have it wrong? First, given a choice and a stable nation, the people of Pakistan want democracy. In this they are no different from any peoples. Second, we'd like the US Secretary of State, in common with other westerners, who is having conniptions about the coup and demanding a roll-back to close her eyes for a moment and visualize this:
West of the Mississippi, the writ of the federal government has ceased to run. In the upper half of the western US, a bunch of fanatical Christians is taking over. They want women to be veiled, not to work, not even to go to the market without a male watching over them. They don't want women to have the vote, or to be educated. They want the men to drop to their knees wherever they are at the appointed time, five times a day, and to pray, and they want the men not to shave. If the men do not comply, they are beaten by the police.
Music, alcohol, and cinema are forbidden; as are any form of entertainment. Alleged women of easy virtue are beheaded, as is anyone opposing the new regime, and you can be beheaded or shot simply for not being fanatical enough.
The lot above is ambushing the US Army at every turn, executing captured soldiers, and attacking any sign of federal authority - government offices, police stations, schools.
In the lower part of the West, the fanatics are not so active because the people are already fundamentalist, but for years they have had no time for the government. They have attempted to secede at least three times in the last 60 years. They too are busy attacking the government if the latter gets in their way.
East of the Mississippi, New York, the commercial capital of the country, has no law or order worth the name except that imposed by an endless array of National Guardsmen, ready to shoot to kill at the slightest excuse. Between New York and Atlanta, there is anarchy by night, and great danger by day.
In Washington DC, the fundamentalist Christians took over Union Station three years ago, preached death to the government each day, defied the government to evict them, and were indeed evicted after a bloody battle. Right after which the US Supreme Court orders Union Station to be returned to the fundamentalists, and the regroup/rearm and resumed their message of hate. Incidentally, the fundamentalists have been freely attacking liquor and video shops in the capital.
Every military base in the US is on high alert because suicide bombers are attacking the bases and killing military personnel.
The US government imposes a state of emergency to cope with the fundamentalists, who are advancing their areas of control/influence with frightening speed.
The foreign ministers of the western countries attack the US government, saying there is no excuse for the emergency and they demand a return to democracy, even though that will mean the weakest of leaders who will be absolutely powerless to resist the fundamentalist advance.
Now, Ms. Rice will you say the western countries are right, and the US should immediately return to democracy so that the fundamentalists can now intimidate voters, gain more control, and continue their advance, or will you wonder how the western nations have gotten so out of touch with reality?
Yes, of course President Musharraf imposed the emergency more to save himself than to fight the fundamentalists who have declared him Public Enemy One for the past several years. But he also declared the emergency because Pakistan is faced with the gravest security situation in 60 years. What happened in 1971 happened in a colony of Pakistan and in no way did it threaten the stability of the west of the country.
In Pakistan, the US is caught in a web of contradictions of its own making. Having insisted the it invaded Iraq with the establishment of democracy as the long term goal, the US threw away the chance to create a proper democracy. When chaos flourishes, democracy cannot. There is no contradiction in the suspension of democracy in times of critical threat. But because of Iraq, and the whole democracy agenda thing, the US cannot be seen as backing authoritarian regimes, so it cannot talk sense on Pakistan.
Can the US force Pakistan back to democracy? In one word, no. Pakistan has reached the stage in its relationship with the US that frankly, my dear, it doesn't give a darn. The US has very little leverage over Pakistan.
Will President Musharraf Survive? He will, unless his corps commanders see fit to send him off. At this stage, with loyalists holding the top positions, and with the situation in Pakistan so chaotic and dangerous, no general in his right mind will risk overthrowing the president. Let him fail if that cannot be avoided, and let him take the blame. Let him succeed if he can, and then let him stay in power - the army already controls all the levers of power, so what is lost by letting him be the public face of the regime.
Will he now fight the fundamentalists? Only to the point they agree to a "live-let-live" compromise. This is where things were before the US started turning the screws on Pakistan to fight its fundamentalists as well as Al-Qaeda. Pakistan broke its truces at America's behest. It has paid the price and it is not a price it wants to pay.
What Ms. Rice should do: follow India's lead India has issued a statement saying "We regret the difficult times that Pakistan is passing through. We trust that conditions of normalcy will soon return permitting Pakistan's transition to stability and democracy to continue."
India is the country most concerned with events in Pakistan. The two nations are mortal enemies. Yet India's response has been quiet, realistic, and non-condemnatory.
There is a lesson in this for Ms. Rice.
What can the US do about Pakistan? No clue. When you arrange US options in order, you start the list with "The least really bad option" and you end with the "really, really, real bad option". We honestly don't see any practical answers.
The long-term solution lies in reintegrating India and Pakistan into a unitary state. India has the will and the staying power to fight fundamentalists for a hundred years if neccessary - it is closing in on 50 years for its first and longest insurgency, Nagaland. There is not the slightest indication India is even breathing a little deeply in its exertions.
Sure, the Islamic fundamentalists are of a different order than Indian insurgents. But the Indian government will not support the fundamentalists with one hand while seeking to control them with the other.
The only thing that will destroy the fundamentalists is Indian secularism.
But how can India and Pakistan become a unitary state again? Well, there are several peaceful ways and there are violent ways. But we want our readers to be very clear on this. For near on 4 decades your editor has agitated for the reunification of the two nations, by any means neccessary. The inevitable response for every one of the years in those decades: "We have our own problems, why do we want more?'
When your editor replies that most of those problems have arisen because the subcontinent was divided, people simply shrug. They don't even bother replying.
So you are saying there is no solution long-term or short-term? Yes. But there is something the US can do. It goes every American instinct - and the editor is American in this respect. But it is the way Indians deal with problems so great that no one can possibly imagine a solution.
Indians simply ignore their problems and get on with their lives and one day the problems just diminish, or mutate into other problems. This is the difference between a masculine country - the US - and a feminine country, India. When men see a problem, they have to, absolutely have to, attack is right away. They go mad if they cannot have at the problem immediately, and they will keep trying, no matter how remote the chance of success - Iraq. When women see a problem, they get together and they talk. And talk. And talk. Its very hard for the editor to say this, because he prides himself on being a person of action: but he has seen it time and again: Just by talking and talking and talking it is possible to outtalk the problem. It really can work. It works for India all the time.
Why not try the Indian approach given the US has neither the will nor the means to take on Pakistan? The US is already heavily overcommitted in the GWOT. This is not the time to add to commitments. Pull all 20 brigades out of Iraq and let Iraq sort itself out. Use the strategy suggested below to deal with Iraq. Then send 10 brigades to Afghanistan, and work with India to have India send 10 divisions. Build a fence along the entire Pakistan border. India did, and it works. Build a sea fence in the south. Leave Pakistan alone and let it figure out what it is doing. Be there always to offer assistance when asked for. Continue to engage Pakistan at all levels and see it is not isolated from the world except in the matter of militants. Talk to the fundamentalists and keep talking. But basically, leave Pakistan alone.
The Pakistanis will rejoice. The hugely toxic effects of the US intervention in Pakistan will be gone. Things will change. Sure they will get worse before they change for the better. But if the US can talk of staying in Iraq 50-75 years, why can't it spend 50-75 years talking and leaving Pakistan alone?
But if you suggest this strategy for Pakistan and Iraq, why not for Iran? You're right. What the heck: lets go for broke.
Come on America, try our prescription Yours hasn't worked.
0230 GMT November 4, 2007
Mandeep Singh Bajwa on the Pakistan Emergency
Editor's note: Mr. Bajwa's dispatch was filed at 1530 GMT
News
Pakistan Ms. Benazir Bhutto has said she opposes the state of emergency. Her party says that the deal with President Musharraf is off and the party will take to the streets to restore democracy. In our opinion, this is all hot air. When security officers arrive to take away political leaders under the new emergency laws, we think the opposition will find it in its heart to say that for the greater good of Pakistan, everyone must work together.
Times London notes that the emergency proclamation was signed by the President in his capacity as Army Chief. It believes this means the military "will run all aspects of the state." We hate to say this to the Times, a paper we admire, but for the last 8 years the military has already been running all aspects of the state. The civilian government was a facade. The real question Times should be asking is: will the military remove the facade and rule openly? We are no experts on Pakistan's internal politics, but we think not. The President has a political party that is loyal to him and that has a popular base. Why take on the opprobrium of military dictatorship?
London Times On Drop In Iraq Violence http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article2797526.ece and http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article2797538.ece For ordinary Iraqis and their lives, try http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/7069943.stm
All what Times says is correct. But what should the baseline be? If you say the baseline is February 2006 then fine, things have improved. If your baseline is February 2003, then its not good.
Moreover Baghdad security has been achieved in significant part because ethnic cleansing is complete in all but a few neighborhoods.
Further, you should read articles on what "normalcy" in Baghdad means. Baghdad is a fourth of the country's population and there is nothing normal there. Even the so-called secure zones, the US Army cannot mount a simple foot patrol without the most complex planning. The Indian Army would not define any area in Baghdad, including the Green Zone, as secure.
1700 GMT Pakistan Under State Of Emergency
President Musharraf has declared a state of emergency in Pakistan. The constitution is suspended and the Chief Justice of the Pakistan Supreme Court has been sacked. Arrests of opponents of the President appear to have begun.
The President has said elected bodies will continue to function. He is expected to obtain cabinet authorization for the emergency.
The US Administration has again made America look like an idiot. Once again its carefully crafted policies regarding one of the two key battlegrounds in the GWOT have failed as anyone could have predicted would happen.
For six years the US tried to work with Pakistan, despite warnings from us, among others, that since the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalism were crucial components of Pakistan's security, no amount of arm twisting would cause Pakistan to suddenly become a true American ally.
Then the US administration got on to its own weird trip of supporting Benazir Bhutto and "democracy" Pakistan as the solution to its problems. The slowest tyro could have told the US administration that in the very unlikely event of Ms. Bhutto becoming the real head of the country, her complete incompetence and lack of standing with the military would further undermine US objectives in the GWOT.
We have zero confidence in the ability of this administration to fight the GWOT. There has been nothing but failure in the last six years, and the brilliant early success of Afghanistan is rapidly coming to naught because this administration is concerned solely to avoid admitting to its mistakes in Iraq. The Iraq war has drained America's resources to fight the GWOT.
We have even less confidence in a probable administration led by Ms. Hilary Clinton to fight the GWOT.
We warn anyone who is listening that if you think things in the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia - to name the main battlefields in the GWOT - are bad now, you 'aint seen nuttin' yet.
US Gulf Naval Deployments
USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75)
USS San Jacinto (CG 56)
USS Hue City (CG 66)
USS Carney (DDG 64)
USS Oscar Austin (DDG 79)
USS Winston S. Churchill (DDG 81)
HMS Manchester (D95)
HMCS Charlottetown (FFH 339)
USNS Artic (T-AOE 8)
USS Montpelier (SSN 765)
Has Orbat.com Become Left Liberal?
Reader Art Mosel Accuses Us of having become left-liberal on the Iraq war. This accusation occasioned a serious attack of the vapors and your editor had to take to his bed. It was only after several infusions of chocolate he was able to emerge.
We are against the Iraq war not because we are left-liberal but because we are right-conservative. And our conversion on the road to wherever was about the last to happen: we hung on supporting the war for longer than anyone who seriously considers what has happened.
It seems apparent to us that the administration never had an Iraq strategy in 2003, and it certainly does not have one now. The war is being continued only because the President doesn't want to be stuck with the blame and is running out the clock. Moreover, by focusing on Iraq the President has brought the US to the brink of failure in the GWOT: Afghanistan/Pakistan are the center of the GWOT and things there are getting so bad it will decades to set them right - if the US leaves Iraq now. If the US hangs around in Iraq for the next 5-10 years, then basically GWOT will be lost.
To say this is not to be liberal. Mr. Bush is hated today by the right wing of his party much more than by his enemies, because he has destroyed the Republican party by his inanities.
Let us say again, as we have said many times before: we believe US global hegemony is not just preferable to any alternative, it is neccessary if the vision of one world is to be realized. We thought the US was going into Iraq to further its position as the global hegemon and that is why we back the the war. Turns out US went to Iraq because a bunch of half-wits couldn't think straight. We believe the US involvement in Iraq has set back the US drive for global hegemony so badly that this administration has hurt America more than enemy could dream of doing. This is not a liberal position, it is an extreme right position.
We have been busy defending the CIA for months now. That is not a liberal position. And we have been mocking Ms. Valerie Plame since the affair became liberal. Also not a liberal position.
Mr. Mosel pointed out to us, correctly we believe, that Mrs. Plame's husband is guilty of leaking government documents and that too to make himself seem important. We haven't taken up this issue because we believe Ambassador Wilson is too minor and too pathetic a person to waste time on. Not only is he not very interesting compared to his wife, we believe he is his wife's puppet. She's the ones with the brain, not him.
But none of this obviates the reality that the Vice President's office wanted Ambassador Wilson discredited - not very difficult and his wife became a collateral casualty. To which she must be saying "Thank you, Lord, you are good" because she has made a heap more money and gotten endless attention, whereas as a former covert agent of lower-to-middling rank she would have lived and died in obscurity.
We have no interest in the Vice President's tactics. We live in Washington, a city/metro with more loonies per square kilometer than any place in the world, and as far as we are concerned, the VP's smears against X, Y, Z are simply not worth commenting on because everyone smears everyone in these parts. In any case, to take pot shots at the VP is not liberal, it's common sense. The man - if he really still exists - and his ideology are completely off the wall and off the planet. He is part and parcel of Washington's culture of incompetence. We'd take pot shots at him, but we simply do not know enough about him to say anything original.
And we don't take more pot shots at the President because we like him. we hope people aren't going to say that we're liberal because he is acknowledged as the greatest gift to the liberals since Richard Nixon. We like the President because he's likeable. There's nothing political about that, one way or the other.
0230 GMT November 2, 2007
Pakistan
Swat (Pakistan) Fighting Continues Please understand all news reporting concerning Pakistan's campaign to bring the North West Frontier Province back under government control is flawed. The government does not give anywhere near a complete picture, and the insurgents have their own obvious reasons for exaggeration. Reports are not allowed into the area, so the Pakistan media is forced to rely on official statements and on satellite phone calls from the insurgents. Keeping that in mind, most of the following is from Pakistan's Frontier Post which is fairly independent.
The government says 70 Taliban have been killed; locals say 125 people are dead, many of them civilians. The insurgents say they have lost 1-2 fighters.
The insurgents say they have captured 40 paramilitary troops; there seems to be an indirect acknowledgement by the government that some are captive and that operations are underway to free the men.
The insurgents imply they are counterattacking Frontier Corps posts. In one incident they claim to have captured a dozen paramilitary troops.
Another Suicide Bombing Directed At Pakistan Military Five Pakistan air Force officers including 4 of squadron-leader rank, plus 4 other persons, were killed when a suicide bomber on a motorcycle hit a PAF bus returning from a Sargodha air base radar station after a shift change.
21 are injured, most critically, and the death toll is expected to rise. Sargodha is Pakistan's biggest air base.
This attack follows one on October 31 where a suicide bomber blew himself up outside the house of a top Pakistan Army commander, killing seven including himself. An injured person has died.
Iraq Defector Lied About Saddam's BW Program
At this point in the Iraq war, with everything having gone to heck and beyond a dozen times, this story does not rise to the level required to pull the American people out of their Iraq-induced-coma. You can get so oversaturated with news that you no longer care.
Reuters reports a journalist has completed a program to be released by CBS this coming Sunday which says the infamous "Curve Ball", the source which the CIA relied on to tell President Bush Saddam was working on biological weapons, was a fraud and a thief. He arrived at a German refugee center in 1999. German intelligence warned the US that while Curve Ball was believable, there was no evidence to back up his allegations.
The man was busted when CIA interrogators were allowed at him. You can read the story at http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN0148202620071101
To us it seems clear that that the CIA director was doing his own thing, producing evidence the White House wanted, and that the professionals were kept from questioning the man. When they were allowed, he was exposed.
Okay, people, so shouldn't there be a congressional inquiry and if the above is true, the former CIA director arrested and put on trial?
We have been saying all along, for years now, rather like the Ancient Mariner to anyone who would listen, the CIA has been unfairly blamed for the Iraq fiasco. The CIA not only said the evidence for Saddam's WMDs was weak, it also warned in multiple ways that the manner in which the US was planning Gulf II would lead to disaster.
When things started to go wrong, the White House (read Vice President of the US) went on a vendetta against the CIA. This is not our story to tell, nor are we particularly interested in the story. The vendetta near destroyed the very top ranks of the Agency.
We don't know how Valerie Plame figures in the vendetta, perhaps it is as she says, but reader should be clear her husband was a bit player in the WMD fantasy.
Ms. Plame and her husband have woven their own fantasy to promote themselves, and we say good luck to them. This is America. Everyone is allowed to lie and exaggerate. There is nothing immoral in what she and her husband did.
As for Ms. Plame, she was never as important as she claimed. She was blown in 1999 and brought back home to a desk job. This was not disagreeable to her because she wanted to start her family and did. She was not a covert operative at the time her name was given to the press, and there was zero chance she could ever return to a covert role. No national security was compromised. But we do not know what the laws are on former covert operatives, and it may be that her name was leaked within the time period where it is considered illegal to reveal true identities.
The man who was punished for revealing her name, the Vice President's Chief of Staff, was wrongly convicted. But that it was his choice, out of loyalty, to take the bullet for his boss. So while we admire the man for his courage, we cannot feel sorry for him because he had the option of clearing himself.
We apologize to our readers for going on and on about the CIA thing but we feel aggrieved because we never got the credit due for being one of the first to say Iraq was not the CIA's fault and Ms. Plame was no longer covert when her name was leaked. Everyone knows our prime CIA source is a person who cleans CIA toilets at Langley, and we feel we have been denied credit because of the nature of our source's job. It doesn't have the same cachet as, say, a deputy director being our source. But folks, everyone knows the toilet cleaner is a far more reliable source than a DD. If you don't know this you don't know the intel biz.
0230 GMT November 1, 2007
Iraq Violence Drops Further though we are still a ways from the pre-February 2006 Samarra bombing.
Of course, the stats are quite wobbly because most are reported by the Iraqi government, and it has no incentive to accurately report violence committed by Shias against Sunnis or, as in the south, by Shias against Shias.
Nonetheless, US troops deaths have declined.
So you have your choice: (a) violence has declined because the bad guys have taken a beating and things will get better; or (b) violence has declined because the bad guys have both taken a beating and decided to hold their hand till the US leaves, and are simply in a wait and see mode.
The $280-million Iraqi Bank Robbery That Wasn't Readers may recall July 2007 stories about a brazen $282-million robbery from a private Baghdad bank.
David Broder, a senior columnist for the Washington Post, says in the November 1 edition that the sum was actually Iraqi Dinars 280-million, which amounts to US$280,000.
Afghanistan & Musa Qila We'd said the other day there have been five battles this year around the Helmand Province town of Musa Qila and that this reflected the resilience of the Taliban. They lose large numbers of men each time a battle erupts, the latest count being 80 dead.
Correction: the Taliban captured Musa Qila in early September and are still there in spite of five battles. This makes it even worse than we suggested. It needs to be said these are not battles involving thousands of NATO troops and lots of assaults. NATO is patrolling in the area and the battles erupt when the Taliban attack a patrol or another small incident triggers battle. The recent one started when the Taliban hit a US special forces patrol.
Meanwhile, the Taliban have seized two villages and NATO says it has 250 Taliban surrounded. Yesterday there was also fighting at Tarin Kot and in Bagdis Province which is in the west.
Marx's Self-Loathing & Alienation Due to Skin Disease says London Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article2773914.ece He apparently suffered from a serious and prolonged condition that produces boil-type eruptions in the armpits and on the groin, and the self-loathing and alienation is part of the psychological effects, and this contributed to the alienation reflected in his writing. The disease, aside from reducing his self-esteem, made it difficult for him to work and this contributed to his poverty.
A reader writes in to the Times to explain Marx's discussion of alienation is about the alienation of the worker from the capital he generates, not a psychological alienation, and that even Marxists get this wrong.
As for the editor, he never got beyond page one of Das Kapital. All his information about Marxist theory comes from other people who probably never got past page 1 either.
Ambani Denies Being World's Richest Man Indian Mukesh Ambani was declared the world's richest man two days ago as the Indian stock market soared to new heights. He was said to be worth $63-billion.
Today his company denied the honor, saying that the estimate included double-counting of his wealth and he was actually worth "only" $50-billion.
That made us get out our fuchsia lace hankies for a good cry. Poor baby. Only $50-bil.
More seriously, Bill Gates' wealth would be higher if he hadn't given away a big chunk to his foundation. Conversely, Ambani has nowhere to go but up. He is just hitting his stride and India is wide open. Mr. Gates' markets have a much lower potential for growth. So perhaps not today, but certainly in a few years, an Indian whose father began work as a pavement hawker will be the world's richest person.