By Sami Moubayed
April 29, 2009
Courtesy Of Asia Times Online
DAMASCUS - Last week, one of America's top allies in Lebanon
, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, caused a row when he made remarks - off the record - criticizing his allies in the pro-Western March 14 Coalition. Among other things, Jumblatt scoffed at his patron Saad al-Hariri, the head of the largest bloc in the Lebanese parliament, for having tried - and failed - to combat Hezbollah on the streets of Beirut last May.
Then, Hariri's armed men were round up and disarmed in a matter of minutes by the well-trained Hezbollah fighters. "We have seen the Sunnis in the field, huh!" he said, adding, "They didn't last for more than 15 minutes!” Jumblatt quickly apologized - but the damage was already done.
Shortly afterwards, when landing in Beirut, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not meet the Druze warlord - who had often played host to her predecessor Condoleezza Rice, and been received previously at the Oval Office by George W Bush.
Jumblatt is a symbol of a loud anti-Syrian and anti-Hezbollah stance in Lebanon. The fact that he has lost faith in his own allies - who have bankrolled him for years - and was snubbed by Clinton, are testimony to how much things have changed in Lebanon. This is the same man after all who called for regime change in Damascus, and betted on American and Israeli forces to disarm Hezbollah in 2006.
Jumblatt is a political animal, however, who knows how to get off a ship before it sinks. The US is simply no longer interested in battle, either with Damascus or with Hezbollah. On the contrary, it is trying to find common ground with the Syrians to solve a basket of problems in the region, like Iran's nuclear file, Palestinian reconciliation and the future of Hezbollah.
If March 14 continues to challenge Syria, it should not except much support from the Barack Obama administration. That is why, according to some observers, Jumblatt might be toying with the idea of a u-turn - which from where the Syrians see it, is close to impossible, given the aggressive stance he took against Damascus during the difficult years in Syrian-American relations.
Why would the US continue to support March 14 if it is cooperating fully with the Syrians? March 14 was useful, after all, during the war against Syria in 2005-2008 - mainly to punish the Syrians for having worked against US interests in Iraq.
Jumblatt realizes that for all practical purposes, its only a matter of time until the United States begins dialogue with two arch-enemies of the former Bush White House - Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah. Delaying his own rapprochement with Hezbollah would harm nobody but him.
During the recent Summit of the Americas, Obama said that he would respect the "legitimacy" of all democratically elected governments, even if the US "might not be happy" with the results of any elections. He added that the US “condemns any efforts at a violent overthrow of democratically elected governments, wherever it happens in the hemisphere”. Talks with Hamas have already begun in Europe and it is only a matter of time until they are expanded to include Hezbollah.
Earlier this year, Britain announced that it would commence political dialogue with Hezbollah, much to the displeasure of March 14. In early April, British parliamentarians came to Damascus and met with Hamas political chief Khaled Meshaal. Certain American political figures, like former president Jimmy Carter, also met with the Hamas chief in Syria last December.
According to a January 9 article in The Guardian, "sources close to the [Obama] transition team" will change course via Hamas, and "initiate low-level clandestine approaches". For that to be done, not only would there be a need for a change in US mentality - both in the media level, on the street and in American officialdom - but it would also require changing a 2006 Congressional law banning any kind of assistance to the Islamic group.
Recently, however, Paul Volker, a senior economic advisor to Obama, was among those who authored a letter calling for a more rational approach to dealing with Hamas. Martin Indyk, the former US ambassador to Israel, who is close to Clinton, recently wrote that any peace deal without Hamas was destined to fail.
Additionally, former British prime minister Tony Blair in his capacity as international envoy for the Middle East warned of the dangers of continuing to ignore the Gaza Strip, which effectively is under the command of Hamas. He was quoted saying, "I think it is important to find a way to engage Hamas in dialogue."
Richard Hass, a diplomat under both president George H W Bush and George W Bush, who was earmarked to become Obama's Middle East envoy, also supports low-level contacts with Hamas. James A Baker, former secretary of state now based at the Baker Institute at Rice University in Houston, was quoted in Newsweek as saying that Obama must involve Hamas in any peace process in the Middle East. Baker said, "You cannot negotiate peace with only half the Palestinian polity at the table."
Richard W Murphy, a veteran American diplomat and former ambassador to Syria, added, "I don't think it will happen quickly but I think it is inevitable. Hamas is, in my opinion, a legitimate representative of part of the Palestinian community."
Taking all of that into account, many raised questions about Clinton's weekend visit to Beirut ahead of parliamentary elections in June, which are expected to bring about a smashing victory for Hezbollah. Already, France has said that it will not boycott any Lebanese government, even if it is packed with members of the Islamic group.
With loud voices coming out of Washington calling for engagement with Hezbollah, Obama promising to respect any election, Britain taking the lead in dialogue with non-state players, and the Syrians back in the international arena, times are not good for leftovers of the Bush era in the Middle East.
Decision-makers around the world have reasoned that not talking to Hezbollah or Hamas will not make them disappear. On the contrary, it will only lead them to radicalize.
Looking back at the Hamas tenure in government, everybody realizes that the Bush administration missed a golden opportunity when the Palestinian group said that it was willing to accept a long-term truce with Israel, and abide by the borders of 1967. Israel couldn't get them to disarm by force, clearly demonstrated by the results of the December 2008 war on Gaza.
The United Nations couldn't disarm them, nor could Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat or the United States. The same applies to Hezbollah, which emerged victorious from the war of 2006. Obama, a practical leader by all accounts, realizes that if these groups are voted into power, it would be sheer hypocrisy not to deal with them and repeat what was committed by Bush.
Walid Jumblatt - and anti-Hamas figures in Palestine like President Mahmud Abbas - is among the first to fully grasp this new attitude in Washington.
Sami Moubayed is editor-in-chief of Forward Magazine in Syria.
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.)
Friday, May 01, 2009
The Myth Of Talibanisation
By Pepe Escobar
May 1, 2009
Courtesy Of Asia Times Online
Apocalypse Now. Run for cover. The turbans are coming. This is the state of Pakistan today, according to the current hysteria disseminated by the Barack Obama administration and United States corporate media - from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to The New York
Times. Even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said on the record that Pakistani Talibanistan is a threat to the security of Britain.
But unlike St Petersburg in 1917 or Tehran in late 1978, Islamabad won't fall tomorrow to a turban revolution.
Pakistan is not an ungovernable Somalia. The numbers tell the story. At least 55% of Pakistan's 170 million-strong population are Punjabis. There's no evidence they are about to embrace Talibanistan; they are essentially Shi'ites, Sufis or a mix of both. Around 50 million are Sindhis - faithful followers of the late Benazir Bhutto and her husband, now President Asif Ali Zardari's centrist and overwhelmingly secular Pakistan People's Party. Talibanistan fanatics in these two provinces - amounting to 85% of Pakistan's population, with a heavy concentration of the urban middle class - are an infinitesimal minority.
The Pakistan-based Taliban - subdivided in roughly three major groups, amounting to less than 10,000 fighters with no air force, no Predator drones, no tanks and no heavily weaponized vehicles - are concentrated in the Pashtun tribal areas, in some districts of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and some very localized, small parts of Punjab.
To believe this rag-tag band could rout the well-equipped, very professional 550,000-strong Pakistani army, the sixth-largest military in the world, which has already met the Indian colossus in battle, is a ludicrous proposition.
Moreover, there's no evidence the Taliban, in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, have any capability to hit a target outside of "Af-Pak"(Afghanistan and Pakistan). That's mythical al-Qaeda's privileged territory. As for the nuclear hysteria of the Taliban being able to crack the Pakistani army codes for the country's nuclear arsenal (most of the Taliban, by the way, are semi-literate), even Obama, at his 100-day news conference, stressed the nuclear arsenal was safe.
Of course, there's a smatter of junior Pashtun army officers who sympathize with the Taliban - as well as significant sections of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. But the military institution itself is backed by none other than the American army - with which it has been closely intertwined since the 1970s. Zardari would be a fool to unleash a mass killing of Pakistani Pashtuns; on the contrary, Pashtuns can be very useful for Islamabad's own designs.
Zardari's government this week had to send in troops and the air force to deal with the Buner problem, in the Malakand district of NWFP, which shares a border with Kunar province in Afghanistan and thus is relatively close to US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops. They are fighting less than 500 members of the Tehrik-e Taliban-e Pakistan (TTP). But for the Pakistani army, the possibility of the area joining Talibanistan is a great asset - because this skyrockets Pakistani control of Pashtun southern Afghanistan, ever in accordance to the eternal "strategic depth" doctrine prevailing in Islamabad.
Bring me the head of Baitullah Mehsud
So if Islamabad is not burning tomorrow, why the hysteria? There are several reasons. To start with, what Washington - now under Obama's "Af-Pak" strategy - simply cannot stomach is real democracy and a true civilian government in Islamabad; these would be much more than a threat to "US interests" than the Taliban, whom the Bill Clinton administration was happily wining and dining in the late 1990s.
What Washington may certainly relish is yet another military coup - and sources tell Asia Times Online that former dictator General Pervez Musharraf (Busharraf as he was derisively referred to) is active behind the hysteria scene.
It's crucial to remember that every military coup in Pakistan has been conducted by the army chief of staff. So the man of the hour - and the next few hours, days and months - is discreet General Ashfaq Kiani, Benazir's former army secretary. He is very cozy with US military chief Admiral Mike Mullen, and definitely not a Taliban-hugger.
Moreover, there are canyons of the Pakistani military/security bureaucracy who would love nothing better than to extract even more US dollars from Washington to fight the Pashtun neo-Taliban that they are simultaneously arming to fight the Americans and NATO. It works. Washington is now under a counter-insurgency craze, with the Pentagon eager to teach such tactics to every Pakistani officer in sight.
What is never mentioned by US corporate media is the tremendous social problems Pakistan has to deal with because of the mess in the tribal areas. Islamabad believes that between the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and NWFP, at least 1 million people are now displaced (not to mention badly in need of food aid). FATA's population is around 3.5 million - overwhelmingly poor Pashtun peasants. And obviously war in FATA translates into insecurity and paranoia in the fabled capital of NWFP, Peshawar.
The myth of Talibanistan anyway is just a diversion, a cog in the slow-moving regional big wheel - which in itself is part of the new great game in Eurasia.
During a first stage - let's call it the branding of evil - Washington think-tanks and corporate media hammered non-stop on the "threat of al-Qaeda" to Pakistan and the US. FATA was branded as terrorist central - the most dangerous place in the world where "the terrorists" and an army of suicide bombers were trained and unleashed into Afghanistan to kill the "liberators" of US/NATO.
In the second stage, the new Obama administration accelerated the Predator "hell from above" drone war over Pashtun peasants. Now comes the stage where the soon over 100,000-strong US/NATO troops are depicted as the true liberators of the poor in Af-Pak (and not the "evil" Taliban) - an essential ploy in the new narrative to legitimize Obama's Af-Pak surge.
For all pieces to fall into place, a new uber-bogeyman is needed. And he is TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud, who, curiously, had never been hit by even a fake US drone until, in early March, he made official his allegiance to historic Taliban leader Mullah Omar, "The Shadow" himself, who is said to live undisturbed somewhere around Quetta, in Pakistani Balochistan.
Now there's a US$5 million price on Baitullah's head. The Predators have duly hit the Mehsud family's South Waziristan bases. But - curioser and curioser - not once but twice, the ISI forwarded a detailed dossier of Baitullah's location directly to its cousin, the Central Intelligence Agency. But there was no drone hit.
And maybe there won't be - especially now that a bewildered Zardari government is starting to consider that the previous uber-bogeyman, a certain Osama bin Laden, is no more than a ghost. Drones can incinerate any single Pashtun wedding in sight. But international bogeymen of mystery - Osama, Baitullah, Mullah Omar - star players in the new OCO (overseas contingency operations), formerly GWOT ("global war on terror"), of course deserve star treatment.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.)
May 1, 2009
Courtesy Of Asia Times Online
Apocalypse Now. Run for cover. The turbans are coming. This is the state of Pakistan today, according to the current hysteria disseminated by the Barack Obama administration and United States corporate media - from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to The New York
Times. Even British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said on the record that Pakistani Talibanistan is a threat to the security of Britain.
But unlike St Petersburg in 1917 or Tehran in late 1978, Islamabad won't fall tomorrow to a turban revolution.
Pakistan is not an ungovernable Somalia. The numbers tell the story. At least 55% of Pakistan's 170 million-strong population are Punjabis. There's no evidence they are about to embrace Talibanistan; they are essentially Shi'ites, Sufis or a mix of both. Around 50 million are Sindhis - faithful followers of the late Benazir Bhutto and her husband, now President Asif Ali Zardari's centrist and overwhelmingly secular Pakistan People's Party. Talibanistan fanatics in these two provinces - amounting to 85% of Pakistan's population, with a heavy concentration of the urban middle class - are an infinitesimal minority.
The Pakistan-based Taliban - subdivided in roughly three major groups, amounting to less than 10,000 fighters with no air force, no Predator drones, no tanks and no heavily weaponized vehicles - are concentrated in the Pashtun tribal areas, in some districts of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and some very localized, small parts of Punjab.
To believe this rag-tag band could rout the well-equipped, very professional 550,000-strong Pakistani army, the sixth-largest military in the world, which has already met the Indian colossus in battle, is a ludicrous proposition.
Moreover, there's no evidence the Taliban, in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, have any capability to hit a target outside of "Af-Pak"(Afghanistan and Pakistan). That's mythical al-Qaeda's privileged territory. As for the nuclear hysteria of the Taliban being able to crack the Pakistani army codes for the country's nuclear arsenal (most of the Taliban, by the way, are semi-literate), even Obama, at his 100-day news conference, stressed the nuclear arsenal was safe.
Of course, there's a smatter of junior Pashtun army officers who sympathize with the Taliban - as well as significant sections of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency. But the military institution itself is backed by none other than the American army - with which it has been closely intertwined since the 1970s. Zardari would be a fool to unleash a mass killing of Pakistani Pashtuns; on the contrary, Pashtuns can be very useful for Islamabad's own designs.
Zardari's government this week had to send in troops and the air force to deal with the Buner problem, in the Malakand district of NWFP, which shares a border with Kunar province in Afghanistan and thus is relatively close to US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) troops. They are fighting less than 500 members of the Tehrik-e Taliban-e Pakistan (TTP). But for the Pakistani army, the possibility of the area joining Talibanistan is a great asset - because this skyrockets Pakistani control of Pashtun southern Afghanistan, ever in accordance to the eternal "strategic depth" doctrine prevailing in Islamabad.
Bring me the head of Baitullah Mehsud
So if Islamabad is not burning tomorrow, why the hysteria? There are several reasons. To start with, what Washington - now under Obama's "Af-Pak" strategy - simply cannot stomach is real democracy and a true civilian government in Islamabad; these would be much more than a threat to "US interests" than the Taliban, whom the Bill Clinton administration was happily wining and dining in the late 1990s.
What Washington may certainly relish is yet another military coup - and sources tell Asia Times Online that former dictator General Pervez Musharraf (Busharraf as he was derisively referred to) is active behind the hysteria scene.
It's crucial to remember that every military coup in Pakistan has been conducted by the army chief of staff. So the man of the hour - and the next few hours, days and months - is discreet General Ashfaq Kiani, Benazir's former army secretary. He is very cozy with US military chief Admiral Mike Mullen, and definitely not a Taliban-hugger.
Moreover, there are canyons of the Pakistani military/security bureaucracy who would love nothing better than to extract even more US dollars from Washington to fight the Pashtun neo-Taliban that they are simultaneously arming to fight the Americans and NATO. It works. Washington is now under a counter-insurgency craze, with the Pentagon eager to teach such tactics to every Pakistani officer in sight.
What is never mentioned by US corporate media is the tremendous social problems Pakistan has to deal with because of the mess in the tribal areas. Islamabad believes that between the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and NWFP, at least 1 million people are now displaced (not to mention badly in need of food aid). FATA's population is around 3.5 million - overwhelmingly poor Pashtun peasants. And obviously war in FATA translates into insecurity and paranoia in the fabled capital of NWFP, Peshawar.
The myth of Talibanistan anyway is just a diversion, a cog in the slow-moving regional big wheel - which in itself is part of the new great game in Eurasia.
During a first stage - let's call it the branding of evil - Washington think-tanks and corporate media hammered non-stop on the "threat of al-Qaeda" to Pakistan and the US. FATA was branded as terrorist central - the most dangerous place in the world where "the terrorists" and an army of suicide bombers were trained and unleashed into Afghanistan to kill the "liberators" of US/NATO.
In the second stage, the new Obama administration accelerated the Predator "hell from above" drone war over Pashtun peasants. Now comes the stage where the soon over 100,000-strong US/NATO troops are depicted as the true liberators of the poor in Af-Pak (and not the "evil" Taliban) - an essential ploy in the new narrative to legitimize Obama's Af-Pak surge.
For all pieces to fall into place, a new uber-bogeyman is needed. And he is TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud, who, curiously, had never been hit by even a fake US drone until, in early March, he made official his allegiance to historic Taliban leader Mullah Omar, "The Shadow" himself, who is said to live undisturbed somewhere around Quetta, in Pakistani Balochistan.
Now there's a US$5 million price on Baitullah's head. The Predators have duly hit the Mehsud family's South Waziristan bases. But - curioser and curioser - not once but twice, the ISI forwarded a detailed dossier of Baitullah's location directly to its cousin, the Central Intelligence Agency. But there was no drone hit.
And maybe there won't be - especially now that a bewildered Zardari government is starting to consider that the previous uber-bogeyman, a certain Osama bin Laden, is no more than a ghost. Drones can incinerate any single Pashtun wedding in sight. But international bogeymen of mystery - Osama, Baitullah, Mullah Omar - star players in the new OCO (overseas contingency operations), formerly GWOT ("global war on terror"), of course deserve star treatment.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.)
Behind The Afghan Propaganda
Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story
By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
May 2, 2009
Courtesy of Asia Times Online
Book Reviewed by Anthony Fenton
Nearly 30 years after their first foray into the land-locked buffer state, married couple and journalist-historians Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould could not have chosen a more appropriate time to publish their comprehensive Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story.
Having taken a back seat to Iraq since the drumbeat for war began in the autumn of 2002, the ongoing escalation of the United States-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) counter-insurgency war and occupation have made "AfPak" the center of sustained US media attention for the first time since "shock and awe" temporarily drove the Taliban underground in October 2001.
A chronically disinformed US public should leap at the chance to familiarize themselves with an honest overview of their country's historically scandalous involvement in the region.
Despite Afghanistan's recent return to the spotlight, few among the public realize the full extent of the US's historical meddling in Afghanistan. Sadly, many Americans will believe the version of events that were popularized by George Crile's book-turned-Hollywood film, Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of how the Wildest man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times (New York: Grove Press, 2003).
Crile's account presents an ahistorical blend of fact and fantasy as it romanticizes the largest covert operation in US history during the US-Pakistan-Saudi Arabian-financed and armed proxy war against the Soviet Union from 1979-1989. It is this collective propaganda-imbued blindspot that Fitzgerald and Gould attempt to reveal and counter. As Gould stated in an interview with Asia Times Online, Charlie Wilson's War "is a complete flip flop of the reality".
As such, one of the concerns that Gould and Fitzgerald are seeking to address is the problem that "there are still people in administration positions, in journalistic positions, in academic positions who still believe the fundamentals of Charlie Wilson's War". As Fitzgerald added, "every line cook and bottle washer in and around Washington is now an expert on Afghanistan", reflecting a popular discourse that is "far detached from reality".
As the first Western journalists to gain entry into post-Soviet invasion Afghanistan with CBS News in 1981, Fitzgerald and Gould learned that the reality on the ground was "far from the simplistic portrait of black and white, good against evil, portrayed by the American media". (p 13) When their story aired on anchorman Dan Rather's show on their return, key parts of it that ran counter to the official Washington narrative were left on the cutting room floor. Rather himself would later be accused of airing fake footage of US-backed "freedom fighters" for anti-Soviet propaganda purposes. (p 247-48)
Fitzgerald and Gould returned to Afghanistan in 1983, along with Roger Fisher, the founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project, which was created through his involvement in negotiations surrounding the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979. Fisher's key finding on meeting with Afghan and Soviet leaders was that, far from wishing to expand beyond Afghanistan's borders as purported by the Ronald Reagan administration, the Soviets "wanted out ... in no uncertain terms". (p 188)
The problem was that the US would have none of it. As Gould explained to AToI:
It would take more than 15 years for Fitzgerald and Gould's analysis to be corroborated by the slow trickle of document declassification and the publication of the memoirs of key political and intelligence actors. With a heavy dose of footnotes (over 1,100), Fitzgerald and Gould rely on a mixture of interviews (some conducted during a subsequent trip to the country in 2002), primary source documents, prior historical accounts, and (Chomskyan) "impeccable sources" to flesh out their narrative, which spans three periods: antiquity to the 1960s, the height of the Cold War period up to September 11, 2001, and the period since, up to mid-July of 2008.
The first section lays the groundwork for understanding the 21st century context by tracking the development of Afghanistan as a strategic buffer state, locked between imperial powers. The most fateful development for modern Afghanistan was Britain's creation of the Durand Line in November 1893. This line continues to separate the Pashtun people, who are in the center of the insurgency and counter-insurgency that is being waged today. (p 281)
Fitzgerald and Gould argue that "no border division in the history of colonial conquest could match the ongoing consequences posed" (p 51) by this unilateral demarcation of Britain's western boundaries. As such, any external power that has dealt with Afghanistan since the demarcation can be measured by their countenance toward Pashtun demands for self-determination. Although through a loya jirga (tribal grand council) Afghans themselves "authorized the Afghan government to abrogate all of Afghanistan's treaties with Great Britain regarding the trans-Durand-Pashtuns" in 1948, by 1953 the US under president Dwight D Eisenhower and vice president Richard Nixon had "informed the Afghans that they had no justifiable claim to Pashtunistan". (p 92)
With Pakistan, the British and the rising US empire disposed against Pashtun self-determination, it was only natural that the Afghans would lean toward the Soviets, who expressed sympathy with the Pashtun cause. As the Cold War deepened and the Afghans drew closer to the Soviets, US interest in the country increased proportionately. Afghanistan would soon become a battleground on which the fantasies of Washington's Cold War policy planners would be played out.
Fitzgerald and Gould trace the origins of the post-World War II national security state to National Security Directive 68 (NSC 68) of 1950, which was premised on the "containment" of the Soviets who were said to be bent on "world domination". Accordingly, the policies that flowed from NSC 68 were designed "to foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system", and, conveniently, in order to pursue such policies, the US military needed to be able to project force globally, requiring the entrenchment of a vast military-industrial complex. In turn, justification for NSC 68 was provided by a core of "defense intellectuals" who became "the new seneschals of America's emerging national security and foreign policy intelligentsia". (p 88-90)
Fitzgerald and Gould emphasize the historical role of the "imperial brain trust" and covert war methods of the US during the Cold War, including, most prominently, that of propaganda and mysticism. Chapter 5, "A Background to Cold War Policy", is the longest, most heavily foot-noted, and, arguably, the most important. They also give important space to the role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and CIA-front organizations such as the Asia Foundation (which today still works extensively in and around Afghanistan).
"Large numbers of American intellectuals participated in [Asia] Foundation programs, and they - usually unwittingly - contributed to popularizing of CIA ideas about the Far East. Designed ... as an overseas propaganda operation, the Asia Foundation also was regularly guilty of propagandizing the American people with agency views on Asia." (p 97)
The important propaganda role of CIA-linked, Orwellian-named organizations such as Freedom House, the International Rescue Committee and the Committee for a Free Afghanistan are contextualized, the latter being "an odd assortment of extreme anti-communist right Republican and liberal Democrat". (p 175-79) Together, they "represented the cream of the right-wing, neo-conservative ... defense-intellectual class, controlling public opinion of the Afghan war". (p 190).
Invisible History also shows how covert US meddling began as early as 1973 under president Nixon, following the ouster of King Zahir Shah by Mohammad Daoud. The US had not even extricated itself from its own Vietnam War when such plans were afoot as part of the "Chinese-Iranian-Pakistani-Arabian peninsula Axis" to give the Soviets theirs. (p 123-4)
By fostering the rise of fundamentalist Islam in Afghanistan beginning in the period leading to the Soviet intervention, the US helped "set in motion a series of events that would eventually demolish the country's embryonic infrastructure and political aspirations ... " (p 126) According to a former US political officer in Afghanistan, the conscious intent was "to set back the clock socially on a wide front". All told, this served the interests of both the US's cynical Cold War policies, paralleling US support for fascist regimes and insurgencies in Latin America, as well as the "forward policy" of Pakistan, which included plans "to conquer South Central Asia". (p 308)
Under pressure from the covert hand of external intelligence agencies and their proxies in the mid-1970's, Afghanistan shifted rightward under Daoud, who was overthrown in April 1978, after which the country again drew closer to the Soviets. Although the 1978 coup "was a product of Afghanistan's complex internal dynamics, not the sinister product of the Kremlin's geostrategic planning", nevertheless, "by Cold War definition, the coup automatically became a self-fulfilling prophecy, easily fitting the mantle 'Soviet inspired'." (p 123-4) This was "consistent" with the narrative provided by NSC 68 and the group of Cold War intellectuals and policy planners who would become known as "Team B".
The origins of Team B, traced in another important chapter (p 139-157), are rooted in Nixon's "secretive brain trust", and in former CIA director George H W Bush's opening "an outside door to a small, right-wing corps of like-minded defense intellectuals". Setting about to destroy detente and restore the US's post-Vietnam War "military mythology", Team B was "drawn together by their anti-communism and mutual affiliations" with the military-industrial complex, as they began fostering a false narrative that said "the Soviets were preparing for a 'third world war' and were nakedly expansionist".
The January 16, 1979, overthrow of the US allied Shah of Iran and the February 14 kidnapping and murder of the US ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolf Dubs, were keystone events that "would permanently turn the tide of detente and arms control, and shift the balance of authority toward [Jimmy Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski and Team B, while making Afghanistan a permanent base for holy war”. (p 160) By the time the Soviets entered Afghanistan - at the request of the Afghan government at the time - the pieces were in place to lock them into a protracted counter-insurgency war that they had no desire to wage. As alluded to above, one of the strengths of Invisible History is its overview of the role of propaganda during this period: "Media coverage of the events leading up to the Soviet invasion had been carefully managed to avoid any hint of the plan at work. Vital to maintaining the illusion that the Soviet action was purely the result of Soviet aggression and not in reaction to American subversion, a ring of silence had been prophylactically applied." (p 177)
To this end, Fitzgerald and Gould discuss a revealing if self-congratulatory book about US propaganda methods of the period by former US Information Agency operative Alvin A Snyder, Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the Winning of the Cold War (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1995). Snyder's book is "a cynical account of why the US people never gained an accurate picture of the deluded mind-set driving the decade-long Afghan conflict". (p 206)
As reported by US News and World Report in 1984, during the covert war against the Soviets, the USIA was "transformed from a government backwater into the key weapon in the battle of information and ideas that the Reagan administration [was] waging with Russia". During the period, an unprecedented amount of money was spent on propaganda with the intention of bringing down the Soviets. A significant amount of this propaganda was, in spite of laws prohibiting it, directed at the US public. As Gould told AToI, "The truth was the disinformation actually did end up on American television."
Providing criticism of propaganda's role where Snyder omits it, Fitzgerald and Gould describe how, following the departure of the Soviets, "left unsaid was the overall effect of the Afghan propaganda campaign on the American media, which had allowed themselves to miss the real war and been snowed under by the make-believe struggle of good versus evil ... and an unholy alliance of liberal democrats, neo-conservatives and right-wing Washington insiders". (p 207)
Among other effects of the propaganda of the period following the withdrawal of the Soviets, most people were rendered incapable of understanding the ensuing civil war and the rise of the Taliban, a period which resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths. A chapter covering the fundamental role of Pakistan in the creation and rise of the Taliban, "part of a grand plan" carried out by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and CIA, closes out the second section of Invisible History. Fitzgerald and Gould write:
Placing Pakistan at the heart of the problem, Fitzgerald and Gould contend that the only way for Afghanistan to obtain its real independence is for it to be freed from their domination. As such, they advocate strongly against negotiating with the Taliban:
The problem, as Fitzgerald and Gould note elsewhere, is that the US and its NATO allies have, since the invasion of 2001, played a dual game where they carry out "a policy whereby [Pakistan] pretends to hunt for extremists while the US pretends to believe [them] ", (p 298) while at the same time providing the Pakistani military with billions of dollars in aid. Meanwhile, everyone knows that the ISI continues to provide support to the anti-occupation insurgency.
Some of Invisible History's less than stellar moments appear in the final section, which deals with the post-September 11, 2001, period. By providing the reader with a strong analysis of the role of covert, psychological warfare during the Cold War period, one might be disappointed to find little in-depth analysis of the continuing trajectory of these methods following 9/11 and the subsequent invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
Anyone who is interested in how organizations such as Freedom House and the Asia Foundation (not to mention the many “sister” organizations affiliated with the National Endowment for Democracy) continue to operate, for example, as (overt or covert) functionaries of US foreign policy in today's counterinsurgency wars, may come away disappointed in that this type of analysis was beyond the scope of Invisible History.
Anti-imperialist readers may also take issue with Fitzgerald and Gould's tacit support for the US-led invasion of October 2001, which, with the culmination of the December 2001 international donor's meeting in Bonn, Germany, they say led to "a promising and rational beginning to the formulation of a new Afghanistan". (p 251) Where Fitzgerald and Gould could have challenged the combined "liberal imperialist" and neo-conservative backing of the initial invasion, considered illegal by serious international law experts, instead they appear to justify it.
By omitting a general analysis of the very organizations that the US has used to meddle in the internal affairs of countries all over the globe under the guise of nation-building, civil society building and democracy promotion, Fitzgerald and Gould come off somewhat naively when, in their "recommendations to the next president", (p 315-328) they advocate "counter[ing] the legacy of foreign-supported extremism with an extended commitment to civil society and nation-building". (p 324) While the US should pay reparations as a way to begin compensating for past crimes, sadly no precedent exists for this and the US record of “nation-building” has historically been a problem of imperialism, rather than a solution to it.
Likewise, by supporting the expansion of NATO's footprint in Afghanistan (p 289-90, 305-06, 308) the authors fail to question NATO's otherwise-contested transformation into a global imperial guard. Additionally, Fitzgerald and Gould missed an opportunity to contextualize what can be seen as an emerging "Team B redux" - a continuous flow of reports from prominent US think tanks and "counter-insurgency experts" - arguing for an escalation of the war of the very sort that would be delivered by George W Bush and Barack Obama in mid-2008 and early 2009. (p 304-5) The authors should have known even by July 2008 (the date of their most current footnote) that the Bush administration had already announced an escalation of the war; and likewise, that Bush began implementing Obama's (and John McCain's) campaign promises before the election was even held.
One editorial oversight in the book may contribute to a mild feeling of unfulfilled expectations for the reader. The title of Chapter 18, "What Can President Barack Obama Do?" suggests that the authors will feature an analysis of Obama's position on Afghanistan during the presidential campaign. However, indicating a last-minute change on the part of the publishers, in the footnotes Chapter 18 is more generically named, "What Can the Next US President Do?" Clearly, the manuscript should have been left as it was.
In their interview with AToI, it was clear, however that Fitzgerald and Gould are already disillusioned by the seeming trajectory of Obama's "surge". Said Fitzgerald:
Although providing little analysis of the 21st century "brain trust", they also presciently warn in conclusion, "If our government has no other purpose than to serve the fantasies of its own defense intellectuals in their desire to create new ways of making endless war, then we are in serious trouble and like the Soviet Union, Afghanistan will be our final test." (p 328)
All told, Fitzgerald and Gould provide an important addition to the corpus of accounts of Afghanistan and the Cold War period, which is at the heart of their analysis. They also raise many useful questions for anti-imperialists, progressives, "liberal imperialists" and neo-cons alike to consider as independence and self-determination continue to elude the Afghan and Pashtun people.
As such, it belongs on the bookshelf of anyone seriously interested in the topic. This includes a Canadian audience, where the book is being reviewed. For nearly eight years, the Canadian forces have helped occupy Afghanistan, closely adhering to US strategy. Unlike in the US, Canadian media coverage of the war saw a drastic uptick in mid-2006 when the Canadians took over a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar province in the midst of the growing insurgency. Similar to the US, however, Canadian coverage tends to be propagandistic and ahistorical, and is in dire need of being grounded in the sort of corrective offered by Invisible History.
Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009). ISBN-10: 0872864944. Price US$18.95, 300 pages.
Anthony Fenton is a researcher and journalist in BC, Canada. For the past three years, he's been researching and writing a book about the transformation and integration of Canadian-US foreign policy. Fenton can be reached at fenton@shaw.ca
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.)
By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
May 2, 2009
Courtesy of Asia Times Online
Book Reviewed by Anthony Fenton
Nearly 30 years after their first foray into the land-locked buffer state, married couple and journalist-historians Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould could not have chosen a more appropriate time to publish their comprehensive Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story.
Having taken a back seat to Iraq since the drumbeat for war began in the autumn of 2002, the ongoing escalation of the United States-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) counter-insurgency war and occupation have made "AfPak" the center of sustained US media attention for the first time since "shock and awe" temporarily drove the Taliban underground in October 2001.
A chronically disinformed US public should leap at the chance to familiarize themselves with an honest overview of their country's historically scandalous involvement in the region.
Despite Afghanistan's recent return to the spotlight, few among the public realize the full extent of the US's historical meddling in Afghanistan. Sadly, many Americans will believe the version of events that were popularized by George Crile's book-turned-Hollywood film, Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of how the Wildest man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times (New York: Grove Press, 2003). 
Crile's account presents an ahistorical blend of fact and fantasy as it romanticizes the largest covert operation in US history during the US-Pakistan-Saudi Arabian-financed and armed proxy war against the Soviet Union from 1979-1989. It is this collective propaganda-imbued blindspot that Fitzgerald and Gould attempt to reveal and counter. As Gould stated in an interview with Asia Times Online, Charlie Wilson's War "is a complete flip flop of the reality".
As such, one of the concerns that Gould and Fitzgerald are seeking to address is the problem that "there are still people in administration positions, in journalistic positions, in academic positions who still believe the fundamentals of Charlie Wilson's War". As Fitzgerald added, "every line cook and bottle washer in and around Washington is now an expert on Afghanistan", reflecting a popular discourse that is "far detached from reality".
As the first Western journalists to gain entry into post-Soviet invasion Afghanistan with CBS News in 1981, Fitzgerald and Gould learned that the reality on the ground was "far from the simplistic portrait of black and white, good against evil, portrayed by the American media". (p 13) When their story aired on anchorman Dan Rather's show on their return, key parts of it that ran counter to the official Washington narrative were left on the cutting room floor. Rather himself would later be accused of airing fake footage of US-backed "freedom fighters" for anti-Soviet propaganda purposes. (p 247-48)
Fitzgerald and Gould returned to Afghanistan in 1983, along with Roger Fisher, the founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project, which was created through his involvement in negotiations surrounding the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979. Fisher's key finding on meeting with Afghan and Soviet leaders was that, far from wishing to expand beyond Afghanistan's borders as purported by the Ronald Reagan administration, the Soviets "wanted out ... in no uncertain terms". (p 188)
The problem was that the US would have none of it. As Gould explained to AToI:
There was absolutely no interest on the part of Congress or the mainstream media to really get that out into the public space. As Roger stated on Nightline, "clearly I don't know for sure whether they are going to actually get out but we have to try." This is certainly what anyone with common sense would have thought. And what did we discover but no, there was absolutely no interest in getting them out. The reason being that the actual insurgency that was coming from Pakistan, that was being financed by the United States and by the Saudis; this was exactly the reason that the Soviets were staying in Afghanistan.Having gone to great lengths to draw them into Afghanistan in the first place (beginning as early as 1973, see below), the US wanted the Soviets to stay so that their mujahideen proxies could deliver a mortal blow to the "Evil Empire". As an example of the typical approach of the US media toward the secret war, when Fisher returned to the US to report his findings on ABC's Nightline with Ted Koppel, he was sand-bagged by another guest, "Soviet dissident" Vladimir Bukovsky, who parroted the Reagan administration's fabled line that the Soviets were "moving toward the Persian Gulf". (p 189) Koppel made it clear that any reality-based account such as Fisher's, then, had to be "concealed for the benefits of propaganda".
It would take more than 15 years for Fitzgerald and Gould's analysis to be corroborated by the slow trickle of document declassification and the publication of the memoirs of key political and intelligence actors. With a heavy dose of footnotes (over 1,100), Fitzgerald and Gould rely on a mixture of interviews (some conducted during a subsequent trip to the country in 2002), primary source documents, prior historical accounts, and (Chomskyan) "impeccable sources" to flesh out their narrative, which spans three periods: antiquity to the 1960s, the height of the Cold War period up to September 11, 2001, and the period since, up to mid-July of 2008.
The first section lays the groundwork for understanding the 21st century context by tracking the development of Afghanistan as a strategic buffer state, locked between imperial powers. The most fateful development for modern Afghanistan was Britain's creation of the Durand Line in November 1893. This line continues to separate the Pashtun people, who are in the center of the insurgency and counter-insurgency that is being waged today. (p 281)
Fitzgerald and Gould argue that "no border division in the history of colonial conquest could match the ongoing consequences posed" (p 51) by this unilateral demarcation of Britain's western boundaries. As such, any external power that has dealt with Afghanistan since the demarcation can be measured by their countenance toward Pashtun demands for self-determination. Although through a loya jirga (tribal grand council) Afghans themselves "authorized the Afghan government to abrogate all of Afghanistan's treaties with Great Britain regarding the trans-Durand-Pashtuns" in 1948, by 1953 the US under president Dwight D Eisenhower and vice president Richard Nixon had "informed the Afghans that they had no justifiable claim to Pashtunistan". (p 92)
With Pakistan, the British and the rising US empire disposed against Pashtun self-determination, it was only natural that the Afghans would lean toward the Soviets, who expressed sympathy with the Pashtun cause. As the Cold War deepened and the Afghans drew closer to the Soviets, US interest in the country increased proportionately. Afghanistan would soon become a battleground on which the fantasies of Washington's Cold War policy planners would be played out.
Fitzgerald and Gould trace the origins of the post-World War II national security state to National Security Directive 68 (NSC 68) of 1950, which was premised on the "containment" of the Soviets who were said to be bent on "world domination". Accordingly, the policies that flowed from NSC 68 were designed "to foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system", and, conveniently, in order to pursue such policies, the US military needed to be able to project force globally, requiring the entrenchment of a vast military-industrial complex. In turn, justification for NSC 68 was provided by a core of "defense intellectuals" who became "the new seneschals of America's emerging national security and foreign policy intelligentsia". (p 88-90)
Fitzgerald and Gould emphasize the historical role of the "imperial brain trust" and covert war methods of the US during the Cold War, including, most prominently, that of propaganda and mysticism. Chapter 5, "A Background to Cold War Policy", is the longest, most heavily foot-noted, and, arguably, the most important. They also give important space to the role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and CIA-front organizations such as the Asia Foundation (which today still works extensively in and around Afghanistan).
"Large numbers of American intellectuals participated in [Asia] Foundation programs, and they - usually unwittingly - contributed to popularizing of CIA ideas about the Far East. Designed ... as an overseas propaganda operation, the Asia Foundation also was regularly guilty of propagandizing the American people with agency views on Asia." (p 97)
The important propaganda role of CIA-linked, Orwellian-named organizations such as Freedom House, the International Rescue Committee and the Committee for a Free Afghanistan are contextualized, the latter being "an odd assortment of extreme anti-communist right Republican and liberal Democrat". (p 175-79) Together, they "represented the cream of the right-wing, neo-conservative ... defense-intellectual class, controlling public opinion of the Afghan war". (p 190).
Invisible History also shows how covert US meddling began as early as 1973 under president Nixon, following the ouster of King Zahir Shah by Mohammad Daoud. The US had not even extricated itself from its own Vietnam War when such plans were afoot as part of the "Chinese-Iranian-Pakistani-Arabian peninsula Axis" to give the Soviets theirs. (p 123-4)
By fostering the rise of fundamentalist Islam in Afghanistan beginning in the period leading to the Soviet intervention, the US helped "set in motion a series of events that would eventually demolish the country's embryonic infrastructure and political aspirations ... " (p 126) According to a former US political officer in Afghanistan, the conscious intent was "to set back the clock socially on a wide front". All told, this served the interests of both the US's cynical Cold War policies, paralleling US support for fascist regimes and insurgencies in Latin America, as well as the "forward policy" of Pakistan, which included plans "to conquer South Central Asia". (p 308)
Under pressure from the covert hand of external intelligence agencies and their proxies in the mid-1970's, Afghanistan shifted rightward under Daoud, who was overthrown in April 1978, after which the country again drew closer to the Soviets. Although the 1978 coup "was a product of Afghanistan's complex internal dynamics, not the sinister product of the Kremlin's geostrategic planning", nevertheless, "by Cold War definition, the coup automatically became a self-fulfilling prophecy, easily fitting the mantle 'Soviet inspired'." (p 123-4) This was "consistent" with the narrative provided by NSC 68 and the group of Cold War intellectuals and policy planners who would become known as "Team B".
The origins of Team B, traced in another important chapter (p 139-157), are rooted in Nixon's "secretive brain trust", and in former CIA director George H W Bush's opening "an outside door to a small, right-wing corps of like-minded defense intellectuals". Setting about to destroy detente and restore the US's post-Vietnam War "military mythology", Team B was "drawn together by their anti-communism and mutual affiliations" with the military-industrial complex, as they began fostering a false narrative that said "the Soviets were preparing for a 'third world war' and were nakedly expansionist".
The January 16, 1979, overthrow of the US allied Shah of Iran and the February 14 kidnapping and murder of the US ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolf Dubs, were keystone events that "would permanently turn the tide of detente and arms control, and shift the balance of authority toward [Jimmy Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski and Team B, while making Afghanistan a permanent base for holy war”. (p 160) By the time the Soviets entered Afghanistan - at the request of the Afghan government at the time - the pieces were in place to lock them into a protracted counter-insurgency war that they had no desire to wage. As alluded to above, one of the strengths of Invisible History is its overview of the role of propaganda during this period: "Media coverage of the events leading up to the Soviet invasion had been carefully managed to avoid any hint of the plan at work. Vital to maintaining the illusion that the Soviet action was purely the result of Soviet aggression and not in reaction to American subversion, a ring of silence had been prophylactically applied." (p 177)
To this end, Fitzgerald and Gould discuss a revealing if self-congratulatory book about US propaganda methods of the period by former US Information Agency operative Alvin A Snyder, Warriors of Disinformation: American Propaganda, Soviet Lies, and the Winning of the Cold War (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1995). Snyder's book is "a cynical account of why the US people never gained an accurate picture of the deluded mind-set driving the decade-long Afghan conflict". (p 206)
As reported by US News and World Report in 1984, during the covert war against the Soviets, the USIA was "transformed from a government backwater into the key weapon in the battle of information and ideas that the Reagan administration [was] waging with Russia". During the period, an unprecedented amount of money was spent on propaganda with the intention of bringing down the Soviets. A significant amount of this propaganda was, in spite of laws prohibiting it, directed at the US public. As Gould told AToI, "The truth was the disinformation actually did end up on American television."
Providing criticism of propaganda's role where Snyder omits it, Fitzgerald and Gould describe how, following the departure of the Soviets, "left unsaid was the overall effect of the Afghan propaganda campaign on the American media, which had allowed themselves to miss the real war and been snowed under by the make-believe struggle of good versus evil ... and an unholy alliance of liberal democrats, neo-conservatives and right-wing Washington insiders". (p 207)
Among other effects of the propaganda of the period following the withdrawal of the Soviets, most people were rendered incapable of understanding the ensuing civil war and the rise of the Taliban, a period which resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths. A chapter covering the fundamental role of Pakistan in the creation and rise of the Taliban, "part of a grand plan" carried out by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and CIA, closes out the second section of Invisible History. Fitzgerald and Gould write:
In addition to securing trade routes to and from Central Asia, Pakistan's generals ... saw the Taliban as a means of re-establishing Pashtun dominance in the region, hoping the force would act to permanently neutralize the Durand line issue. (p 223)On this basis, the authors argue that it is futile to negotiate with the Taliban as though they are an independent, Afghan entity. "Never the indigenous force that they claimed to be, by 2001, they had metamorphasized into a well-financed, agenda-driven vanguard of the Pakistani military. Never just 'recruits' from the madrassas ... from the beginning the Taliban were on the payroll of the ISI." (p 308)
Placing Pakistan at the heart of the problem, Fitzgerald and Gould contend that the only way for Afghanistan to obtain its real independence is for it to be freed from their domination. As such, they advocate strongly against negotiating with the Taliban:
Well-meaning peace activists have recommended reviving the practice of parsing between al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Some recommend engaging the Taliban as the [US] engaged the Soviet Union, Communist China ... Aside from not delineating between Pakistani Taliban and Afghan Taliban and that both use terrorist methods, such recommendations ignore the reality that the Taliban were expressly created "as a kind of experimental Frankenstein monster", by the CIA and Pakistani ISI to invade Afghanistan. That mission has not changed. More importantly, such recommendations wrongly paint the Taliban as an indigenous tribal force bent on bringing peace to a troubled land. (p 323)Far from negotiating with the Taliban, "If any negotiations are to be conducted, they must begin with the state within the state sponsors of this Taliban terror, Pakistan's army and its [ISI] branch. It is this institution, which from 1973 on has played the key role in funding and directing first the mujahideen battle plan and then the Taliban ... Nothing can be accomplished without neutralizing them as a subversive influence and turning them toward the task of nation building." (p 324)
The problem, as Fitzgerald and Gould note elsewhere, is that the US and its NATO allies have, since the invasion of 2001, played a dual game where they carry out "a policy whereby [Pakistan] pretends to hunt for extremists while the US pretends to believe [them] ", (p 298) while at the same time providing the Pakistani military with billions of dollars in aid. Meanwhile, everyone knows that the ISI continues to provide support to the anti-occupation insurgency.
Some of Invisible History's less than stellar moments appear in the final section, which deals with the post-September 11, 2001, period. By providing the reader with a strong analysis of the role of covert, psychological warfare during the Cold War period, one might be disappointed to find little in-depth analysis of the continuing trajectory of these methods following 9/11 and the subsequent invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.
Anyone who is interested in how organizations such as Freedom House and the Asia Foundation (not to mention the many “sister” organizations affiliated with the National Endowment for Democracy) continue to operate, for example, as (overt or covert) functionaries of US foreign policy in today's counterinsurgency wars, may come away disappointed in that this type of analysis was beyond the scope of Invisible History.
Anti-imperialist readers may also take issue with Fitzgerald and Gould's tacit support for the US-led invasion of October 2001, which, with the culmination of the December 2001 international donor's meeting in Bonn, Germany, they say led to "a promising and rational beginning to the formulation of a new Afghanistan". (p 251) Where Fitzgerald and Gould could have challenged the combined "liberal imperialist" and neo-conservative backing of the initial invasion, considered illegal by serious international law experts, instead they appear to justify it.
By omitting a general analysis of the very organizations that the US has used to meddle in the internal affairs of countries all over the globe under the guise of nation-building, civil society building and democracy promotion, Fitzgerald and Gould come off somewhat naively when, in their "recommendations to the next president", (p 315-328) they advocate "counter[ing] the legacy of foreign-supported extremism with an extended commitment to civil society and nation-building". (p 324) While the US should pay reparations as a way to begin compensating for past crimes, sadly no precedent exists for this and the US record of “nation-building” has historically been a problem of imperialism, rather than a solution to it.
Likewise, by supporting the expansion of NATO's footprint in Afghanistan (p 289-90, 305-06, 308) the authors fail to question NATO's otherwise-contested transformation into a global imperial guard. Additionally, Fitzgerald and Gould missed an opportunity to contextualize what can be seen as an emerging "Team B redux" - a continuous flow of reports from prominent US think tanks and "counter-insurgency experts" - arguing for an escalation of the war of the very sort that would be delivered by George W Bush and Barack Obama in mid-2008 and early 2009. (p 304-5) The authors should have known even by July 2008 (the date of their most current footnote) that the Bush administration had already announced an escalation of the war; and likewise, that Bush began implementing Obama's (and John McCain's) campaign promises before the election was even held.
One editorial oversight in the book may contribute to a mild feeling of unfulfilled expectations for the reader. The title of Chapter 18, "What Can President Barack Obama Do?" suggests that the authors will feature an analysis of Obama's position on Afghanistan during the presidential campaign. However, indicating a last-minute change on the part of the publishers, in the footnotes Chapter 18 is more generically named, "What Can the Next US President Do?" Clearly, the manuscript should have been left as it was.
In their interview with AToI, it was clear, however that Fitzgerald and Gould are already disillusioned by the seeming trajectory of Obama's "surge". Said Fitzgerald:
I think in many ways we are seeing the second term of the Carter administration; we seem to do this kind of snake-like left-turn, right turn towards the objective, but the objective remains the same. Carter himself was very Obama-esque, promising to alter the whole trajectory of the United States ... And I see a similar kind of thing right now, because these very idealistic democrats get into office, and I sincerely believe that Obama believes what he said he wants to do and the people who voted for him believe that, but there is a machine at work here that was created, that perpetuates itself. Andrew Bacevich calls it a self-licking ice cream cone. There's a machine at work here that fuels itself, that creates incidents; it's this crisis machine.Returning to the strength of their analysis, Fitzgerald and Gould do urge Obama to "re-open the national debate on US identity and its future", arguing that "the roots of this [current] dilemma stem from the reality-creation machine dreamed up by Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Paul Nitze and James Foretal at the beginning of the Cold War." (p 326) And as Fitzgerald warned in the interview, "It's going to dawn on Americans that when we ask our government what exactly are they doing and the solution, once again, is more troops, or a surge, it's not going to be enough of an answer."
Although providing little analysis of the 21st century "brain trust", they also presciently warn in conclusion, "If our government has no other purpose than to serve the fantasies of its own defense intellectuals in their desire to create new ways of making endless war, then we are in serious trouble and like the Soviet Union, Afghanistan will be our final test." (p 328)
All told, Fitzgerald and Gould provide an important addition to the corpus of accounts of Afghanistan and the Cold War period, which is at the heart of their analysis. They also raise many useful questions for anti-imperialists, progressives, "liberal imperialists" and neo-cons alike to consider as independence and self-determination continue to elude the Afghan and Pashtun people.
As such, it belongs on the bookshelf of anyone seriously interested in the topic. This includes a Canadian audience, where the book is being reviewed. For nearly eight years, the Canadian forces have helped occupy Afghanistan, closely adhering to US strategy. Unlike in the US, Canadian media coverage of the war saw a drastic uptick in mid-2006 when the Canadians took over a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar province in the midst of the growing insurgency. Similar to the US, however, Canadian coverage tends to be propagandistic and ahistorical, and is in dire need of being grounded in the sort of corrective offered by Invisible History.
Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould. (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009). ISBN-10: 0872864944. Price US$18.95, 300 pages.
Anthony Fenton is a researcher and journalist in BC, Canada. For the past three years, he's been researching and writing a book about the transformation and integration of Canadian-US foreign policy. Fenton can be reached at fenton@shaw.ca
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved.)
Ideas Before Bullets
By Asim Salahuddin
May 1, 2009
Courtesy Of Asia Times Online
The current crisis of militancy gripping Pakistan is the most serious threat to the integrity of the state since the loss of East Pakistan in the war of 1971 that led to the creation of Bangladesh.
Pakistan today is surrounded by hostile neighbors, is crippled economically and is slowly being crushed under the weight of world public opinion that it is a terrorist state, which is being generated by its supposed ally America. With Balochistan province already rumbling with a separatist insurgency which has not yet thankfully gained popular traction, the armed conflict which is being fought with Taliban forces in Swat, Buner and Dir is threatening to roll back the writ of the Pakistani state to just the provinces of Sindh and Punjab.
A solution must urgently be found to prevent further bloodshed on both sides of this conflict. The problem, however, requires a detailed analysis and also a solution that provides a lasting fix and not just another short-term truce or treaty that will be broken.
The roots of the current conflict between the Pakistani armed forces and Taliban fighters can be traced to the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001. This conflict is a direct spillover from the fighting in Afghanistan against the Americans and a reaction against the support of the Pakistani state for America's war and its actions of bombing and killing its own Pakistani citizens at America's behest.
The opponents of the Pakistani armed forces, the Taliban, are not a coherent or unified group. Made up of various factions known collectively as the Taliban you have Central Intelligence Agency Taliban, Afghan Taliban, Russian Taliban, Punjabi Taliban, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Taliban, Tehrek-e-Taliban and others.
These numerous factions have varying agendas, with some being armed resistance to US occupation, some being armed resistance to Pakistani attacks, others still being those who are funded and equipped by foreign intelligence agencies to create unrest and strife in Pakistan.
Varyingly, apart from those foreign-sponsored groups using the following reasons as cover, these groups are demanding an end to the bombing of Pakistani territory by American and Pakistani armed forces and an end of Pakistani support for the American occupation in Afghanistan. Some groups, failing this, want an end to interference from a Pakistani state which has proven itself incapable of looking after both the needs and security of its people.
In origin, the demands of the Taliban do not constitute a military threat to Pakistan. These groups are not foreign invaders seeking to control land or territory as part of some imperial adventure, as America is in the Muslim world. The principle grievances of these groups are political. The challenge to the Pakistani state therefore is from Pakistanis, civilians who have taken up arms against the nature and policies of the state.
This problem is further being driven by America in collusion with the Asif Ali Zardari government of using force to wipe out any resistance to the American occupation of Afghanistan, as it lost the battle for hearts and minds a long time ago.
It is interesting to note that this is actually a complete continuation of the policies of the General Pervez Musharraf era, and that the popular change which people were expecting with the departure of the military dictator nearly two years ago has not materialized.
America and the Zardari government are actually instrumental in creating and perpetuating this crisis in order to turn Pakistani public opinion in favor of America's imperial campaign in Afghanistan and the wider Muslim world by repackaging this conflict from being America's war to Pakistan's war, as the people have rejected the colonial ambitions of the US and its "war on terror".
This was one of the key sound bites issued by Zardari as he came to power, which was a pledge for Pakistan to adopt America's "war on terror" as Pakistan's own war.
The fact is that this is America's war, not Pakistan's. Pakistan is being pushed into a conflict with its own people and neighbors. Pakistan is being directed towards civil unrest and ultimately breaking point, and this is in accordance with the American plan for Pakistan.
Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Ralph Peters, in his article "Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look" for the US Armed Forces Journal, proposed a new map of the Middle East which showed the breakup of country, with only Sindh and Punjab remaining as Pakistan. It is now well established that both America and Britain are trying to fragment or Balkanize Pakistan for four principle objectives.
# To take control of Balochistan for its immense resources.
# To use the port of Gwadar in Balochistan to establish an economically viable energy corridor from the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan and away from the influence of Russia.
# To remove a strong Pakistan as an obstacle for India so it may act as a true counterweight to China.
# To break up Pakistan to remove the potential of an Islamic ideological threat from Pakistan which it brands as the "Islamist threat".
With this being the true reality of the problem which is manifesting itself as the conflict with the Taliban, tribal areas and Balochi insurgency, how is the Pakistani state equipped to respond to such crises?
It is clear for all to see that the current government is insincere and incapable. The country is now almost openly being run by America. When you have a situation where the military head of a foreign power, Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, is paying regular visits to Pakistan and the fact that the Pakistani armed forces are deployed to Dir when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticizes the Pakistani government for "basically abdicating to the Taliban and the extremists" in the wake of the Swat deal of February, it is a no-brainer that Pakistan is no longer a sovereign state.
This is aside from the regular bombings and killings in Pakistani territory of civilians by US Predator drones. Such a situation is leading to instability in the country as Pakistan participates in America's colonial war. As Pakistan follows a foreign agenda, people are beginning to challenge the legitimacy of the state, questioning its purpose and the use it provides to the people. If the Pakistani state is going to kill its own citizens on the orders of a foreign power, it is clearly not serving its people, by any stretch of the imagination. What then is the nature of this Pakistani state? If it will not look after its people, what is the source of its strength, and from where does it derive its authority?
The Pakistani state is the manifestation of the contradictions embodied by the political classes and a product of external agendas as defined by foreign powers. The Pakistani state has no organic authority from the people; hence it is constantly challenged by the people. These challenges in the past have manifested themselves in various forms, with military coups and the breakup in 1971 being some examples.
The current problem of militancy is the latest incarnation of this challenge to the authority and legitimacy of the Pakistani state. Currently there is one strata of society ruling Pakistan and implementing a system which the people do not respect. Politically, the system has no value as many of the politicians are known to be corrupt, inept or both.
Ideologically, the system has little support from the people as it is simply an imported British product and a relic of the colonial era based on secularism. As democracy loses its facade of providing a mechanism for electing and accounting rulers and reveals itself simply to be a tool for the rich and powerful to change laws as they see fit, the people are shunning the system and apathy is rampant in society.
The ideal of Pakistani nationalism, which the system is supposed to represent and protect, has shown itself to be incredibly weak at binding the various peoples in Pakistan together. Pakistani nationalism is founded on a contradiction, namely that the state of Pakistan was created in response to a popular movement to live according to Islam by the Muslims of India, yet what was yielded was secularism.
As this Islamic ideal was left by the wayside, the only situation in which the people within the borders of Pakistan would come together and bond as Pakistanis would be when faced with an external threat like India. As such, the state, lacking internal domestic support, is propped up by foreign powers that manipulate it for their own ends. The ruling class therefore willingly follows the diktats of those it relies on to stay in power, namely the colonial nations such as America and Britain.
If we look at the response of the Pakistani state to the current Taliban militancy crisis, we can see that it has been one of almost colonial ruler to a conquered people rather than a state dealing with its citizens. Army chief General Ashfaq Kiani declared, "The army will not allow the militants to dictate terms to the government or impose their way of life on the civil society of Pakistan."
Interior Minister Rehman Malik said before the latest operation that "enough is enough", adding that "a handful of militants cannot challenge the writ of the government". For the sake of argument, if Kiani is given the benefit of the doubt for thinking as a military man responding to the threat of violence, no such excuse can be made for Malik. As the civilian authority and representative of the state, Malik's response epitomizes the response of a state that is out of ideas as to how to deal with a population dissatisfied with its performance. By using physical means to put down an uprising which is political in origin, is to stoke the flames of internal unrest and civil war.
If the stick of the government is leading to violence, then the carrot being deployed is leading to the voluntary amputation of the state itself. Nizam-e-Adl, the government bill being implemented in Swat as part of a peace deal with the Taliban where sharia law will allegedly be implemented, is a non-starter as a method of conflict resolution.
The fact that the implementation of a few social rules makes a mockery out of sharia law and a farce of Islamic ruling is only part of the issue at hand. If one goes along with the ridiculous assertion that sharia law is indeed being implemented in Swat, then what you have is a recipe for disaster, as effectively within the borders of one state two legal codes are in operation. This will serve only to entrench separation and division between a group of people and the state as you begin to have two sets of laws running in parallel, which is impractical and inconceivable for any successful and progressive state.
All this is despite the fact that if sharia law was to be sincerely applied, it would not be in the form of a neutered "bill" but as the source of all laws in a state which then defines economic policies, the judicial system, foreign policy, the social system etc. Clearly
then, this is at best a foolish attempt to remedy a deeper ideological problem or at worst an insincere attempt to show the application of sharia law.
Both of these responses show a state which is at a loss for ideas as to how to deal with a population which neither respects its authority nor recognizes its legitimacy. These actions of the Pakistani state are leading to a tremendous loss of life and civil unrest, whilst revealing the nature of the state and its relationship with the people. It is being driven by foreign instructions and threats by America and is attacking the local population, the very people it should be defending. What is then the way out of this quagmire that Pakistan finds itself sinking in?
The solution is not to deploy an increasing amount of armed forces to the region, let alone allow a foreign colonial power to help with an armed operation. The solution is to strengthen the authority and legitimacy of the state in the eyes of the people. The state must regain the initiative by establishing a sovereign authority which derives its support from the people and not from external forces; otherwise the state will always be weak, externally dependent, subject to manipulation by foreign forces and fire-fighting insurgencies constantly.
The core problem that Pakistan faces is that the people are disenfranchised and disillusioned with the state and do not identify with it. The interests of the state now clearly diverge from the interests of the people. Such a situation is not tenable and will sooner rather than later lead to either massive bloodshed or the breakup of the Pakistani state, or both, as was the case in the war of 1971.
This is clearly in the interests of foreign powers like America and part of their plans which are out in the open. The interests of the state must urgently be defined so that the people can be united around these. Nationalism has failed to define the interests and could never succeed in origin. Pakistani nationalism neither has the depth of history to which all the disparate ethnic and tribal groups in Pakistan can lay claim to as being common heritage nor does it have the necessary political depth which can be used to define specific interests. At best, it will result in Pakistani colonialism, as it offers nothing to the people except shallow loyalty to a centralized administration, which is what the people in provinces outside of Punjab are feeling.
There must be one basis on which the interests and all laws of the state are based on. This basis must be the casus belli of the state and the idea for which the state exists to protect, implement and propagate. This basis must serve as the source of all values and ideals in he society which binds people together. This basis must not be confused with opinion, as even if a basis is agreed there could be multiple opinions as to how best to implement this basis. This is not an issue, rather this is healthy.
For example, in Britain you have the Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrats, UKIP and Green parties, while in America you have the Republicans and the Democrats. The key is for a state to adopt one coherent and consistent basis. In the UK and America, this is capitalism and secularism applied in tandem within the democratic ruling system. So while all of these parties may differ in their opinions on policy and indeed engage in heated or bitter debates on specific issues at times, no one contends the basis of the state. The discussion only centers on how best to adhere to this basis and which rules will result in the best application of this basis. The result of this is that regardless of what party comes to power, the nature of the state never changes and the people will obey the laws of the new government, even if they do not agree with all the new laws or policies of the new government.
The problem in Pakistan is that there is no coherent basis on which the state is built. People may form parties and groups and come to power on ideas as varied as secularism, socialism or Islam. In effect, Pakistan has no basis for existence. Laws, regulations and even the constitutions change according to the whims and wishes of every new ruler. The identity of the Pakistani citizen is undefined. Indeed, Pakistan and what it stands for is not defined. As of now, the state of Pakistan stands for nothing.
It is clear then that the basis for the state must urgently be established and it should be something which the people identify with and trust. There is only one idea that has the ability to bring together the various ethnicities and tribes in Pakistan as one and at the same time has the political depth to define very clearly both the interests of the individual and the state in perfect unity. This is Islam.
Islam is the ideology which has a natural resonance with the people and has a track record of success when applied correctly in its entirety and in its true state form. Once Islam is adopted as the coherent and consistent basis, an ideologically strong state will emerge as this state will naturally derive its authority from the people.
This state will have a clear direction as defined by the sharia and the legitimacy to tackle both external threats and internal rebels who seek to implement their own views on the people. The state will then be seen to represent the people and not foreign interests. The current state apparatus is not equipped to support the implementation of Islam. It does not posses the appropriate departmental bodies, courts, ruling structure or economy. The state will thus need to be revamped and re-established in the form of a Khilafah (caliphate). Only the Khilafah state will posses the structure needed to implement Islam as a state ideology.
This is not an administrative issue where one can swap or rename a few departments in the current Pakistani state and implement a few sharia rulings on theft or adultery and be declared Islamic. The new Khilafah structure is needed to reflect the transference of sovereignty away from parliament to the sharia and the investment of authority in an elected Khilafah, not a president, prime minister or military dictator. If one attempts to implement Islam and sharia in the current state structure, then you will produce a circus show of the like that is currently going on with Nizam-e-Adl.
Once this new state structure is set up on a clearly defined and coherent basis with support from the people, the issue then will be to assess the claims of any restless groups such as the Taliban via a due process of law through the appropriate organs of the state (councils, courts etc) and then issue a verdict which will have universal legitimacy. The state will also be able to lead the people the Taliban currently rule to progression.
For instance, education for girls will be enforced; Taliban-like groups can have no objection to such rulings as the curriculum would teach values which are consistent with Islam and the verdict would be handed down by a legitimate Islamic authority. Issues will not be disputed as the Khilafah will adopt public laws which everyone must follow.
Anything not adopted will be the right of individuals to decide on, no compulsion. As with any other ideological state, differences of opinions will be allowed and if people want to lobby the Khilafah for a change in opinion then appropriate channels will exist. Indeed, it will be the responsibility of the Islamic civil society, such as political parties, to account the Khilafah to ensure that the sharia is being followed at all times.
The current system does not provide this. It is the lack of such a legal framework which causes frustration among the various Islamic groups as there is no official mechanism to address their concerns or consider their opinions. This legal process would be the correct method for not only dealing with the Taliban but also any other movement which seeks to be separate from the state or establish an alternative order.
By establishing the Khilafah state, the impracticalities of the Pakistani state will be swept away and the people will be united on a shared intellectual basis rather than a shallow idea of nationalism, which is a colonial construct in origin anyway which serves to divide rather than unite people.
The Khilafah state will not only solve the problem of unity and address any issues of militancy within society, but it will give direction to the whole of society. As the national interests are defined according to Islam, many of the current problems will be solved. The foreign policy of the state will be in line with the wishes of the people as the state will refuse to take part in any colonial adventure with nations such as America.
The security and property of its citizens will protected, as the state will exist to serve the people, not the other way around, as it is currently. Separatist movements will lose legitimacy as the basis for the state will not be divisive nationalism but an inclusive ideology. The economy will be revived as inflation is brought under control with investment in industry and production, a gold standard backed currency, capital flows freed up as interest is removed and the taxation system simplified. Industrialization will occur, leading to a rise in education standards and employment as the state seeks to provide for the people and project the ideological strength and power of Islam globally.
A variety of topics have been addressed briefly in the closing paragraphs, with each topic warranting a lengthy explanation in its own right. However, for the current issue at hand the challenge presented to Pakistan by the internal dissenters and foreign powers is one of challenging the ideological soul of the state, and this has been addressed. This challenge must be met with a barrage of ideas, not bullets or missiles. Islam is capable of meeting this challenge and providing a resounding answer. It is then up to the people of influence in civil society, politics and the military to adopt this call and save the people of Pakistan before it is too late.
Asim Salahuddin is a Pakistani analyst and freelance columnist
May 1, 2009
Courtesy Of Asia Times Online
The current crisis of militancy gripping Pakistan is the most serious threat to the integrity of the state since the loss of East Pakistan in the war of 1971 that led to the creation of Bangladesh.
Pakistan today is surrounded by hostile neighbors, is crippled economically and is slowly being crushed under the weight of world public opinion that it is a terrorist state, which is being generated by its supposed ally America. With Balochistan province already rumbling with a separatist insurgency which has not yet thankfully gained popular traction, the armed conflict which is being fought with Taliban forces in Swat, Buner and Dir is threatening to roll back the writ of the Pakistani state to just the provinces of Sindh and Punjab.
A solution must urgently be found to prevent further bloodshed on both sides of this conflict. The problem, however, requires a detailed analysis and also a solution that provides a lasting fix and not just another short-term truce or treaty that will be broken.
The roots of the current conflict between the Pakistani armed forces and Taliban fighters can be traced to the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001. This conflict is a direct spillover from the fighting in Afghanistan against the Americans and a reaction against the support of the Pakistani state for America's war and its actions of bombing and killing its own Pakistani citizens at America's behest.
The opponents of the Pakistani armed forces, the Taliban, are not a coherent or unified group. Made up of various factions known collectively as the Taliban you have Central Intelligence Agency Taliban, Afghan Taliban, Russian Taliban, Punjabi Taliban, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Taliban, Tehrek-e-Taliban and others.
These numerous factions have varying agendas, with some being armed resistance to US occupation, some being armed resistance to Pakistani attacks, others still being those who are funded and equipped by foreign intelligence agencies to create unrest and strife in Pakistan.
Varyingly, apart from those foreign-sponsored groups using the following reasons as cover, these groups are demanding an end to the bombing of Pakistani territory by American and Pakistani armed forces and an end of Pakistani support for the American occupation in Afghanistan. Some groups, failing this, want an end to interference from a Pakistani state which has proven itself incapable of looking after both the needs and security of its people.
In origin, the demands of the Taliban do not constitute a military threat to Pakistan. These groups are not foreign invaders seeking to control land or territory as part of some imperial adventure, as America is in the Muslim world. The principle grievances of these groups are political. The challenge to the Pakistani state therefore is from Pakistanis, civilians who have taken up arms against the nature and policies of the state.
This problem is further being driven by America in collusion with the Asif Ali Zardari government of using force to wipe out any resistance to the American occupation of Afghanistan, as it lost the battle for hearts and minds a long time ago.
It is interesting to note that this is actually a complete continuation of the policies of the General Pervez Musharraf era, and that the popular change which people were expecting with the departure of the military dictator nearly two years ago has not materialized.
America and the Zardari government are actually instrumental in creating and perpetuating this crisis in order to turn Pakistani public opinion in favor of America's imperial campaign in Afghanistan and the wider Muslim world by repackaging this conflict from being America's war to Pakistan's war, as the people have rejected the colonial ambitions of the US and its "war on terror".
This was one of the key sound bites issued by Zardari as he came to power, which was a pledge for Pakistan to adopt America's "war on terror" as Pakistan's own war.
The fact is that this is America's war, not Pakistan's. Pakistan is being pushed into a conflict with its own people and neighbors. Pakistan is being directed towards civil unrest and ultimately breaking point, and this is in accordance with the American plan for Pakistan.
Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Ralph Peters, in his article "Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look" for the US Armed Forces Journal, proposed a new map of the Middle East which showed the breakup of country, with only Sindh and Punjab remaining as Pakistan. It is now well established that both America and Britain are trying to fragment or Balkanize Pakistan for four principle objectives.
# To take control of Balochistan for its immense resources.
# To use the port of Gwadar in Balochistan to establish an economically viable energy corridor from the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan and away from the influence of Russia.
# To remove a strong Pakistan as an obstacle for India so it may act as a true counterweight to China.
# To break up Pakistan to remove the potential of an Islamic ideological threat from Pakistan which it brands as the "Islamist threat".
With this being the true reality of the problem which is manifesting itself as the conflict with the Taliban, tribal areas and Balochi insurgency, how is the Pakistani state equipped to respond to such crises?
It is clear for all to see that the current government is insincere and incapable. The country is now almost openly being run by America. When you have a situation where the military head of a foreign power, Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, is paying regular visits to Pakistan and the fact that the Pakistani armed forces are deployed to Dir when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticizes the Pakistani government for "basically abdicating to the Taliban and the extremists" in the wake of the Swat deal of February, it is a no-brainer that Pakistan is no longer a sovereign state.
This is aside from the regular bombings and killings in Pakistani territory of civilians by US Predator drones. Such a situation is leading to instability in the country as Pakistan participates in America's colonial war. As Pakistan follows a foreign agenda, people are beginning to challenge the legitimacy of the state, questioning its purpose and the use it provides to the people. If the Pakistani state is going to kill its own citizens on the orders of a foreign power, it is clearly not serving its people, by any stretch of the imagination. What then is the nature of this Pakistani state? If it will not look after its people, what is the source of its strength, and from where does it derive its authority?
The Pakistani state is the manifestation of the contradictions embodied by the political classes and a product of external agendas as defined by foreign powers. The Pakistani state has no organic authority from the people; hence it is constantly challenged by the people. These challenges in the past have manifested themselves in various forms, with military coups and the breakup in 1971 being some examples.
The current problem of militancy is the latest incarnation of this challenge to the authority and legitimacy of the Pakistani state. Currently there is one strata of society ruling Pakistan and implementing a system which the people do not respect. Politically, the system has no value as many of the politicians are known to be corrupt, inept or both.
Ideologically, the system has little support from the people as it is simply an imported British product and a relic of the colonial era based on secularism. As democracy loses its facade of providing a mechanism for electing and accounting rulers and reveals itself simply to be a tool for the rich and powerful to change laws as they see fit, the people are shunning the system and apathy is rampant in society.
The ideal of Pakistani nationalism, which the system is supposed to represent and protect, has shown itself to be incredibly weak at binding the various peoples in Pakistan together. Pakistani nationalism is founded on a contradiction, namely that the state of Pakistan was created in response to a popular movement to live according to Islam by the Muslims of India, yet what was yielded was secularism.
As this Islamic ideal was left by the wayside, the only situation in which the people within the borders of Pakistan would come together and bond as Pakistanis would be when faced with an external threat like India. As such, the state, lacking internal domestic support, is propped up by foreign powers that manipulate it for their own ends. The ruling class therefore willingly follows the diktats of those it relies on to stay in power, namely the colonial nations such as America and Britain.
If we look at the response of the Pakistani state to the current Taliban militancy crisis, we can see that it has been one of almost colonial ruler to a conquered people rather than a state dealing with its citizens. Army chief General Ashfaq Kiani declared, "The army will not allow the militants to dictate terms to the government or impose their way of life on the civil society of Pakistan."
Interior Minister Rehman Malik said before the latest operation that "enough is enough", adding that "a handful of militants cannot challenge the writ of the government". For the sake of argument, if Kiani is given the benefit of the doubt for thinking as a military man responding to the threat of violence, no such excuse can be made for Malik. As the civilian authority and representative of the state, Malik's response epitomizes the response of a state that is out of ideas as to how to deal with a population dissatisfied with its performance. By using physical means to put down an uprising which is political in origin, is to stoke the flames of internal unrest and civil war.
If the stick of the government is leading to violence, then the carrot being deployed is leading to the voluntary amputation of the state itself. Nizam-e-Adl, the government bill being implemented in Swat as part of a peace deal with the Taliban where sharia law will allegedly be implemented, is a non-starter as a method of conflict resolution.
The fact that the implementation of a few social rules makes a mockery out of sharia law and a farce of Islamic ruling is only part of the issue at hand. If one goes along with the ridiculous assertion that sharia law is indeed being implemented in Swat, then what you have is a recipe for disaster, as effectively within the borders of one state two legal codes are in operation. This will serve only to entrench separation and division between a group of people and the state as you begin to have two sets of laws running in parallel, which is impractical and inconceivable for any successful and progressive state.
All this is despite the fact that if sharia law was to be sincerely applied, it would not be in the form of a neutered "bill" but as the source of all laws in a state which then defines economic policies, the judicial system, foreign policy, the social system etc. Clearly
then, this is at best a foolish attempt to remedy a deeper ideological problem or at worst an insincere attempt to show the application of sharia law.
Both of these responses show a state which is at a loss for ideas as to how to deal with a population which neither respects its authority nor recognizes its legitimacy. These actions of the Pakistani state are leading to a tremendous loss of life and civil unrest, whilst revealing the nature of the state and its relationship with the people. It is being driven by foreign instructions and threats by America and is attacking the local population, the very people it should be defending. What is then the way out of this quagmire that Pakistan finds itself sinking in?
The solution is not to deploy an increasing amount of armed forces to the region, let alone allow a foreign colonial power to help with an armed operation. The solution is to strengthen the authority and legitimacy of the state in the eyes of the people. The state must regain the initiative by establishing a sovereign authority which derives its support from the people and not from external forces; otherwise the state will always be weak, externally dependent, subject to manipulation by foreign forces and fire-fighting insurgencies constantly.
The core problem that Pakistan faces is that the people are disenfranchised and disillusioned with the state and do not identify with it. The interests of the state now clearly diverge from the interests of the people. Such a situation is not tenable and will sooner rather than later lead to either massive bloodshed or the breakup of the Pakistani state, or both, as was the case in the war of 1971.
This is clearly in the interests of foreign powers like America and part of their plans which are out in the open. The interests of the state must urgently be defined so that the people can be united around these. Nationalism has failed to define the interests and could never succeed in origin. Pakistani nationalism neither has the depth of history to which all the disparate ethnic and tribal groups in Pakistan can lay claim to as being common heritage nor does it have the necessary political depth which can be used to define specific interests. At best, it will result in Pakistani colonialism, as it offers nothing to the people except shallow loyalty to a centralized administration, which is what the people in provinces outside of Punjab are feeling.
There must be one basis on which the interests and all laws of the state are based on. This basis must be the casus belli of the state and the idea for which the state exists to protect, implement and propagate. This basis must serve as the source of all values and ideals in he society which binds people together. This basis must not be confused with opinion, as even if a basis is agreed there could be multiple opinions as to how best to implement this basis. This is not an issue, rather this is healthy.
For example, in Britain you have the Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrats, UKIP and Green parties, while in America you have the Republicans and the Democrats. The key is for a state to adopt one coherent and consistent basis. In the UK and America, this is capitalism and secularism applied in tandem within the democratic ruling system. So while all of these parties may differ in their opinions on policy and indeed engage in heated or bitter debates on specific issues at times, no one contends the basis of the state. The discussion only centers on how best to adhere to this basis and which rules will result in the best application of this basis. The result of this is that regardless of what party comes to power, the nature of the state never changes and the people will obey the laws of the new government, even if they do not agree with all the new laws or policies of the new government.
The problem in Pakistan is that there is no coherent basis on which the state is built. People may form parties and groups and come to power on ideas as varied as secularism, socialism or Islam. In effect, Pakistan has no basis for existence. Laws, regulations and even the constitutions change according to the whims and wishes of every new ruler. The identity of the Pakistani citizen is undefined. Indeed, Pakistan and what it stands for is not defined. As of now, the state of Pakistan stands for nothing.
It is clear then that the basis for the state must urgently be established and it should be something which the people identify with and trust. There is only one idea that has the ability to bring together the various ethnicities and tribes in Pakistan as one and at the same time has the political depth to define very clearly both the interests of the individual and the state in perfect unity. This is Islam.
Islam is the ideology which has a natural resonance with the people and has a track record of success when applied correctly in its entirety and in its true state form. Once Islam is adopted as the coherent and consistent basis, an ideologically strong state will emerge as this state will naturally derive its authority from the people.
This state will have a clear direction as defined by the sharia and the legitimacy to tackle both external threats and internal rebels who seek to implement their own views on the people. The state will then be seen to represent the people and not foreign interests. The current state apparatus is not equipped to support the implementation of Islam. It does not posses the appropriate departmental bodies, courts, ruling structure or economy. The state will thus need to be revamped and re-established in the form of a Khilafah (caliphate). Only the Khilafah state will posses the structure needed to implement Islam as a state ideology.
This is not an administrative issue where one can swap or rename a few departments in the current Pakistani state and implement a few sharia rulings on theft or adultery and be declared Islamic. The new Khilafah structure is needed to reflect the transference of sovereignty away from parliament to the sharia and the investment of authority in an elected Khilafah, not a president, prime minister or military dictator. If one attempts to implement Islam and sharia in the current state structure, then you will produce a circus show of the like that is currently going on with Nizam-e-Adl.
Once this new state structure is set up on a clearly defined and coherent basis with support from the people, the issue then will be to assess the claims of any restless groups such as the Taliban via a due process of law through the appropriate organs of the state (councils, courts etc) and then issue a verdict which will have universal legitimacy. The state will also be able to lead the people the Taliban currently rule to progression.
For instance, education for girls will be enforced; Taliban-like groups can have no objection to such rulings as the curriculum would teach values which are consistent with Islam and the verdict would be handed down by a legitimate Islamic authority. Issues will not be disputed as the Khilafah will adopt public laws which everyone must follow.
Anything not adopted will be the right of individuals to decide on, no compulsion. As with any other ideological state, differences of opinions will be allowed and if people want to lobby the Khilafah for a change in opinion then appropriate channels will exist. Indeed, it will be the responsibility of the Islamic civil society, such as political parties, to account the Khilafah to ensure that the sharia is being followed at all times.
The current system does not provide this. It is the lack of such a legal framework which causes frustration among the various Islamic groups as there is no official mechanism to address their concerns or consider their opinions. This legal process would be the correct method for not only dealing with the Taliban but also any other movement which seeks to be separate from the state or establish an alternative order.
By establishing the Khilafah state, the impracticalities of the Pakistani state will be swept away and the people will be united on a shared intellectual basis rather than a shallow idea of nationalism, which is a colonial construct in origin anyway which serves to divide rather than unite people.
The Khilafah state will not only solve the problem of unity and address any issues of militancy within society, but it will give direction to the whole of society. As the national interests are defined according to Islam, many of the current problems will be solved. The foreign policy of the state will be in line with the wishes of the people as the state will refuse to take part in any colonial adventure with nations such as America.
The security and property of its citizens will protected, as the state will exist to serve the people, not the other way around, as it is currently. Separatist movements will lose legitimacy as the basis for the state will not be divisive nationalism but an inclusive ideology. The economy will be revived as inflation is brought under control with investment in industry and production, a gold standard backed currency, capital flows freed up as interest is removed and the taxation system simplified. Industrialization will occur, leading to a rise in education standards and employment as the state seeks to provide for the people and project the ideological strength and power of Islam globally.
A variety of topics have been addressed briefly in the closing paragraphs, with each topic warranting a lengthy explanation in its own right. However, for the current issue at hand the challenge presented to Pakistan by the internal dissenters and foreign powers is one of challenging the ideological soul of the state, and this has been addressed. This challenge must be met with a barrage of ideas, not bullets or missiles. Islam is capable of meeting this challenge and providing a resounding answer. It is then up to the people of influence in civil society, politics and the military to adopt this call and save the people of Pakistan before it is too late.
Asim Salahuddin is a Pakistani analyst and freelance columnist
Israel To EU: Criticism Of Government Not Allowed
By Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondent
Last update - 17:07 30/04/2009
Courtesy Of Haaretz NewsPaper
A Foreign Ministry official has been warning European countries that unless they curtail criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu's government, Israel will block the European Union from participating in the diplomatic process with the Palestinians.
The main target of the offensive is EU External Affairs Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who recently called for a freeze in upgrading ties with Israel over its peace process policies.
Several days ago, the deputy director for Europe at the Foreign Ministry, Rafi Barak, began calling European ambassadors in Israel regarding the attitude toward the new government. The first conversations were with France's Jean-Michel Casa, Britain's Tom Phillips and the Charge d'Affaires of the German embassy.
Barak sharply protested the criticism by European ministers and senior EU officials about Israel's government.
Barak singled out Ferrero-Waldner in his rebuke and said her statements were troubling in their form, style and timing.
"For some weeks now, we have been telling everyone in Europe that Israel's government needs time to reformulate policies, and not to begin a war in the press," Barak told the diplomats.
He also noted that the European Union had not made an official decision on freezing the upgrading of ties, and therefore it was unclear what gave Ferrero-Waldner the authority to make her statements.
"We want the European Union to be a partner [in the diplomatic process] but it is important to hold a mature and discreet dialogue and not to resort to public declarations," Barak told the diplomats.
"A public confrontation was created that required Prime Minister Netanyahu, and even opposition head Tzipi Livni, to intervene. We have noted that the large European countries have respected our request and are granting the government time, but it is important that Europe be uniform in this matter," Barak added.
Barak concluded by "warning" that Europe's influence in the area would be undermined by such behavior. "Israel is asking Europe to lower the tone and conduct a discreet dialog," he said. "However, if these declarations continue, Europe will not be able to be part of the diplomatic process, and both sides will lose."
In a telegram to the Israeli missions in Europe, Barak briefed the Israeli diplomats on his conversations and noted that the sole ambassador in Israel who backed Ferrero-Waldner was the French. He was quoted as saying that her statements reflect the European public's feelings.
A political source in Jerusalem noted that Ferrero-Waldner was sharply criticized by European officials, and one European foreign minister said in a private conversation that she "is causing damage to European foreign policy in her attacks on Israel."
Related Articles:
Netanyahu's Mideast policy damaging EU ties
Czech PM: We'll fight EU calls to freeze Israel ties
Livni urges EU: Don't halt EU-Israel relations upgrade
Last update - 17:07 30/04/2009
Courtesy Of Haaretz NewsPaper
A Foreign Ministry official has been warning European countries that unless they curtail criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu's government, Israel will block the European Union from participating in the diplomatic process with the Palestinians.
The main target of the offensive is EU External Affairs Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who recently called for a freeze in upgrading ties with Israel over its peace process policies.
Several days ago, the deputy director for Europe at the Foreign Ministry, Rafi Barak, began calling European ambassadors in Israel regarding the attitude toward the new government. The first conversations were with France's Jean-Michel Casa, Britain's Tom Phillips and the Charge d'Affaires of the German embassy.
Barak sharply protested the criticism by European ministers and senior EU officials about Israel's government.
Barak singled out Ferrero-Waldner in his rebuke and said her statements were troubling in their form, style and timing.
"For some weeks now, we have been telling everyone in Europe that Israel's government needs time to reformulate policies, and not to begin a war in the press," Barak told the diplomats.
He also noted that the European Union had not made an official decision on freezing the upgrading of ties, and therefore it was unclear what gave Ferrero-Waldner the authority to make her statements.
"We want the European Union to be a partner [in the diplomatic process] but it is important to hold a mature and discreet dialogue and not to resort to public declarations," Barak told the diplomats.
"A public confrontation was created that required Prime Minister Netanyahu, and even opposition head Tzipi Livni, to intervene. We have noted that the large European countries have respected our request and are granting the government time, but it is important that Europe be uniform in this matter," Barak added.
Barak concluded by "warning" that Europe's influence in the area would be undermined by such behavior. "Israel is asking Europe to lower the tone and conduct a discreet dialog," he said. "However, if these declarations continue, Europe will not be able to be part of the diplomatic process, and both sides will lose."
In a telegram to the Israeli missions in Europe, Barak briefed the Israeli diplomats on his conversations and noted that the sole ambassador in Israel who backed Ferrero-Waldner was the French. He was quoted as saying that her statements reflect the European public's feelings.
A political source in Jerusalem noted that Ferrero-Waldner was sharply criticized by European officials, and one European foreign minister said in a private conversation that she "is causing damage to European foreign policy in her attacks on Israel."
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Gates: Military Strike Won't Halt Iran Nuke Program
U.S. Defense Chief: Military Strike Won't Halt Iran Nuke Program
By The Associated Press
Last update - 23:13 30/04/2009
Courtesy Of Haaretz NewsPaper
United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday that utilizing the military option in efforts to force Iran to abandon its controversial nuclear program would have merely temporary, ineffective results, and that imposing sanctions against the Islamic Republic made more sense.
Gates told Senate appropriators that a military attack on Iran would merely send the country's nuclear program further underground.
Instead, he said that the United States and its allies must convince Tehran that its nuclear ambitions would spark an arms race that would leave the country less secure.
Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the U.S. should work together with its allies to come up with tougher international sanctions.
The defense secretary also said the U.S. should pursue partnerships with Russia on missile defense programs in the region to further isolate Iran and to give Tehran economic and diplomatic reasons to voluntarily abandon its nuclear interests.
Israel, the United States and other Western nations believe that Iran's nuclear program is aimed at covertly developing atomic weapons. Iran, the world's fourth largest oil producer, insists that the program is for civilian purposes only.
Gates' comments echoed similar remarks by President Shimon Peres, who said Wednesday that attacking Iran would only postpone its ability to build an atom bomb.
"I'm not sure that bombing the nuclear facilities is the best solution. You know, the moment there are centrifuges, you can destroy the centrifuges. You cannot destroy the know-how to create centrifuges. You can postpone," Peres told Channel 10.
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Iran warns Israel not to attack nuclear sites
Ahmadinejad: Iran won't retreat one iota from its nuclear rights
U.S. envoy to visit Gulf over Iran's nuclear program
By The Associated Press
Last update - 23:13 30/04/2009
Courtesy Of Haaretz NewsPaper
United States Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday that utilizing the military option in efforts to force Iran to abandon its controversial nuclear program would have merely temporary, ineffective results, and that imposing sanctions against the Islamic Republic made more sense.
Gates told Senate appropriators that a military attack on Iran would merely send the country's nuclear program further underground.
Instead, he said that the United States and its allies must convince Tehran that its nuclear ambitions would spark an arms race that would leave the country less secure.
Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the U.S. should work together with its allies to come up with tougher international sanctions.
The defense secretary also said the U.S. should pursue partnerships with Russia on missile defense programs in the region to further isolate Iran and to give Tehran economic and diplomatic reasons to voluntarily abandon its nuclear interests.
Israel, the United States and other Western nations believe that Iran's nuclear program is aimed at covertly developing atomic weapons. Iran, the world's fourth largest oil producer, insists that the program is for civilian purposes only.
Gates' comments echoed similar remarks by President Shimon Peres, who said Wednesday that attacking Iran would only postpone its ability to build an atom bomb.
"I'm not sure that bombing the nuclear facilities is the best solution. You know, the moment there are centrifuges, you can destroy the centrifuges. You cannot destroy the know-how to create centrifuges. You can postpone," Peres told Channel 10.
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Kiss The Era Of Human Rights Goodbye
By Karen J. Greenberg and Tom Engelhardt
May 1, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News
By Karen J. Greenberg
May 1, 2009
Courtesy Of Anti-War News
Recently, in a Washington Post op-ed, Mark Danner wrote: "However much we would like the [torture] scandal to be confined to the story of what was done in those isolated rooms on the other side of the world where interrogators plied their arts, and in the air-conditioned government offices where officials devised ‘legal’ rationales, the story includes a second narrative that tells of a society that knew about these things and chose to do nothing." Danner, who did as much as anyone to help uncover what the Bush administration was up to in its secret prisons abroad, should know.
According to the latest Gallup Poll, a bare majority (51%) of Americans now favor some kind of major investigation "into the use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects during the Bush administration." On the other hand, 55% "still believe in retrospect that the use of the interrogation techniques was justified." Of course, who knows what those percentages might have been if Gallup’s pollsters, in their questions, had used the word "torture," rather than — like most of the mainstream — skittering away from it in favor of a variation on the chosen phrase of the Bush administration, "enhanced interrogation techniques."
While Americans remain deeply divided on the use of, investigation of, and prosecution of Bush-era torture practices, at least the subject has now burst into the center of political discussion and debate. In the wake of the Obama administration’s release of yet more documents from a seemingly bottomless archive of Justice Department "torture memos," writing on the subject has been fiery, argumentative, provocative, despairing, or some combination of the above. More important, though, it’s been pouring out in all its variety to remind us that what was done in our name can still be repudiated in a variety of ways.
Just a few suggestions, if you want to plunge in. You might start with international human rights lawyer Scott Horton’s No Comment blog at Harper’s Magazine on-line. The guy’s been all over the subject for a long, long time and his material is unimpeachably on target (and smart). Glenn Greenwald’s Unclaimed Territory column at Salon.com is also always worth a careful look, as is Nieman Watchdog, a site I value that has often focused on both torture and press coverage of it. (The site is run by Dan Froomkin, whose Washington Post column, White House Watch, is a daily must-read.)
At his AfterDowningStreet website, David Swanson has been writing passionately and brilliantly about why a special prosecutor should be appointed and Bush officials, right up to the former president, should be charged with crimes, while over at Truthout, Elizabeth de la Vega, has offered a provocative discussion of why a special prosecutor should not (yet) be appointed. (Both, by the way, have been TomDispatch regulars.) And don’t forget Mark Karlin, who edits Buzzflash.com, and has been penning powerful pieces lately on why Bush and Cheney (et al.) should someday be brought up on actual murder charges. And that’s just to scratch the surface of this explosive subject.
And then there’s Karen Greenberg, TomDispatch regular, Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, and author most recently of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days. In a piece that is part analytic, part confessional, and totally original, she frames the torture debate in a larger way, in terms of the death of the human rights movement. (To catch an audio interview in which she discusses those "torture memos," click here.) Tom
Kiss the Era of Human Rights Goodbye
What Bush Willed to Obama and the WorldBy Karen J. Greenberg
These days, it’s virtually impossible to escape the world of torture the Bush administration constructed. Whether we like it or not, almost every day we learn ever more about the full range of its shameful policies, about who the culprits were, and just which crimes they might be prosecuted for. But in the morass of memos, testimony, op-eds, punditry, whistle-blowing, documents, and who knows what else, with all the blaming, evasion, and denial going on, somehow we’ve overlooked the most significant victim of all. One casualty of the Bush torture policies — certainly, at least equal in damage to those who were tortured and the country whose laws were twisted and perverted in the process — has been human rights itself. And no one even seems to notice.
So let’s be utterly clear: The policies of the Bush administration were not just horrific in themselves or to others, they may also have brought to an end the human rights movement as we know it.
One need only glance at the recently released Justice Department memos, which have caused such a media storm of late, for the story of what has happened to human rights in American hands to become clearer. It is not just, as New York Times columnist Frank Rich recently wrote, that "our government methodically authorized torture and lied about it." No less important, though hardly commented upon, is this fact: the United States succumbed to the exact patterns of abusive state action that the human rights movement was created to outlaw forever. What the Bush administration pursued, after all, was a policy of state-sponsored, legally codified dehumanization designed to torture (and in some cases destroy) individuals, which was to be systematically and bureaucratically implemented in the name of the greater good of the country, however defined.
The documents that the Obama administration and Congress have just released make this conclusion impossible to avoid. These include four memos written by the Office of Legal Council between 2002 and 2005, the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on Interrogation Practices, and the Senate Select Committee Narrative on the Chronology of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) Memos. Added to this must be the publication by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books of a previously secret International Committee of the Red Cross report on abuse at Guantanamo Bay.
As a group, these documents reveal that the pattern of systematic abuse at the hands of the American government during George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror has been a textbook case of human rights violations designed and implemented at the highest levels of government. First, there was the assault on the English language, a necessary initial step in the process of changing the national mindset of a country about to become a first-class human-rights abuser. As Susan Sontag once wrote in a piece about the Bush administration and its pretzeling of language, "Words alter, words add, words subtract."
Creating American-style Torture Techniques and Manuals
Just as the U.S. military at Guantanamo was instructed in January 2002 never to refer to that detention facility as a "prison" and never to call the inmates "prisoners," so the infamous OLC August 1, 2002 "torture memo" that came out of the Justice Department, and was made public in 2004, officially banished torture to the dust heap of history when it came to American actions. It was now to be considered only physical pain of "an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure," or mental pain which produced "lasting psychological harm."
Now, that memo’s twin has just been released, providing more detailed reasoning about the redefinition of torture. This second August 1, 2002 memo gives us an even more comprehensive picture of the rationale behind the insistence of the Justice Department that the techniques being applied to detainees in the War on Terror in no way amounted to torture.
Examining specific techniques of coercive interrogation, all of which would technically violate the U.S. Anti-Torture Statute [18 U.S.C. �� 2340-2340A], Justice Department officials craftily reasoned their way out of old, well-accepted definitions of universally agreed-upon acts of torture. Thanks to creatively worded explanations, this new August 1, 2002 memo declared that neither "the waterboard," "walling," nor being placed in a box amounted to torture. In situation after grim situation, torture, it was explained, just wasn’t the right word.
The focus of the just released memo was the interrogation of al-Qaeda terror suspect Abu Zubaydah. According to the memo, Zubaydah simply wouldn’t feel pain or suffer repercussions as others might have from these redefined acts of torture. Similarly, extreme "stress positions" could be used on him because he "appears to be quite flexible despite his wound," and because he had already proven he could withstand other abuses. "You have orally informed us that you… have previously kept him awake for 72 hours. From which no mental or physical harm resulted." The Justice Department lawyers, informed by the CIA that Zubaydah was in exceptional physical and psychological condition, conveniently reasoned that the techniques in question wouldn’t harm him — and, of course, they would be oh-so-helpful to the longer term torture goals of the Bush administration.
The next step from offering reasons for redefining torture for just one individual — Zubaydah — to a general policy proved easy, despite the fact that Zubaydah’s powers to withstand and recuperate from these techniques were deemed exceptional. The memos assumed that the next detainees to undergo these methods of interrogation were somehow in the same category as the Navy Seals who had experienced them while undergoing training to resist the techniques of torturers from totalitarian or rogue regimes. Repeatedly, that August memo insisted that such techniques, rather than being the property of torturing regimes, really added up to little more than "physical discomfort," to (at worst) only temporary psychological disorientation, rather than a "profound" disruption of one’s psyche. "No prolonged mental harm," the memo asserted, "would result from the use of these proposed procedures."
One by one, then, the techniques were intricately described in ways that repainted them the color of mere "abuse," which sounds so penny ante, rather than torture. When it came to sleep deprivation, for example, the reasoning was that, even if "abnormal reactions" did result, "reactions abate after the individual is permitted to sleep." Likewise, "the goal of the facial slap is not to inflict physical pain that is severe or lasting. Instead the purpose of the facial slap is to induce shock, surprise, and/or humiliation."
The subjects might believe themselves tortured, but they would be wrong. "The idea," as the memo wrote about what’s now called "walling," "is to create a sound that will make the impact seem far worse than it is and that will be far worse than any injury that might result… [whereby] the interrogator pulls the individual forward and then quickly and firmly pushes the individual into the wall. It is the individual’s shoulder blades that hit the wall," but his "head and neck are supported by a rolled towel… to help prevent whiplash."
Even when there is a modest admission that some damage could actually occur — that, for instance, "placement" in "small," "cramped" confinement boxes could "disrupt profoundly the senses" — it was quickly dismissed on the grounds that such confinement wasn’t to extend beyond two hours. And finally, there were those assurances in the matter of waterboarding, or so-called simulated drowning, that "the sensation of drowning is immediately relieved" once the procedure is stopped.
And this, of course, just grazes the surface of these nightmarish documents that should bring to mind the demonic regimes that gave rise to the human rights movement. Among other things, the Justice Department lawyers writing them weren’t just changing the language and redefining torture out of existence, they were offering nothing short of a detailed manual for those about to go to work on actual human beings in just how to perform torture. Take for instance, this description of how to waterboard correctly:
"…[T]he individual is bound securely to an inclined bench, which is approximately four feet by seven feet. The individual’s feet are generally elevated. A cloth is placed over the forehead and eyes. Water is then applied to the cloth in a controlled manner. As this is done, the cloth is lowered until it covers both the nose and mouth. Once the cloth is saturated and completely covers the mouth and nose, air flow is slightly restricted for 20 to 40 seconds…This causes an increase in carbon dioxide level in the individual’s blood… [stimulating] increased effort to breathe… [producing] the perception of ’suffocation and incipient panic,’ i.e. the perception of drowning…"
One day, perhaps soon, much of the rest of the minutiae produced by the Bush administration’s torture-policy bureaucracy will come to light. Procurement lists, for example, will undoubtedly be found. After all, who ordered the sandbags for use as hoods, the collars with chains for bashing detainees’ heads into walls, the chemical lights for sodomy and flesh burns, or the women’s underwear? The training manuals, whatever they were called, will be discovered: the schooling of dogs to bite on command, the precise use of the waterboard to get the best effects, the experiments in spreading the fingers just wide enough in a slap to comport with policy. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s report, released last week, has already begun to identify the existence of training sessions in techniques redefined as not rising to the level of torture.
For now, however, we have far more than we need to know that what the United States started when, in 1948, it led the effort to create the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and became the moral figurehead for human rights concerns worldwide for more than a half-century, has come to an end. Eleanor Roosevelt, who led the commission that drafted that 1948 Declaration, remarked at the time that the United States was "the showcase" for the principles embodied in the declaration. Sixty-one years later, that is no longer true.
The Human Rights Movement Is History
From the very beginning of my own descent into the world of Bush administration torture policy — and, among other things, I was the co-editor of a 2005 collection of documents, already leaking out then, called The Torture Papers — I have resisted associating what U.S. officials were doing with past state atrocities. That was another, far worse realm, I reasoned, one in which countless people were disappeared and millions murdered. After all, the unfolding torture policy didn’t kill (though some detainees certainly did die from maltreatment in U.S. secret and not-so-secret prisons abroad), it only inflicted pain. Others pointed out similarities between such Bush administration outrages and past barbarisms, but I veered away from analogies which, to my mind, undermined the evils of this particular story. So when Scott Horton compared the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Hoess to those who crafted the U.S. torture policy or Susan Sontag compared administration abuses of language to the linguistic perversions that preceded genocidal acts against the Hutus in Rwanda, I recoiled.
Analogies of such an extreme order just didn’t suit me. But what I’ve resisted for five years, since the first Abu Ghraib revelations in the spring of 2004, I now find sadly indisputable. The supposed moral exceptionalism of the most powerful nation on Earth is no more. In its action-packed eight years, the Bush administration ensured that the United States would be the most ordinary of abusing, torturing nations.
Through perverse language, a twisting of the law, and an immersion in the precise details of implementing torture techniques, the United States renounced its position as the leader of the global human rights movement. Abandoned by the country it long considered its greatest ally, that movement now teeters at the edge of its grave. That’s what the torture memos and the present media uproar over torture really mean.
Karen J. Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law, the co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib and the editor of The Torture Debate in America. Her most recent book is The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days. To catch an audio interview in which she discusses the Bush administration "torture memos," click here.
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