As Admin Preps ‘Enduring Presence’ in Afghanistan, Peace Activists Build Ties to War Victims
Amanda Rae
Published: Saturday 15 December 2012
“Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has made an unannounced visit to Afghanistan to discuss the Obama administration’s plans for its troop presence over the next several years.”

While the U.S. military is preparing to extend what is already the nation’s longest war, new ties are emerging between the peace movement here and in Afghanistan. The group "Afghan Peace Volunteers" recently invited international peace activists to help launch a campaign called "2 Million Friends for Peace in Afghanistan," a nod to the number of Afghans killed in the last four decades of war and occupation. We’re joined by two U.S. peace activists recently back from Afghanistan: Ann Wright, a retired Army colonel and former U.S. diplomat who helped oversee the reopening of the U.S. embassy in Afghanistan in 2001; and John Dear, a Catholic priest and longtime peace activist who was recently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Transcript:

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has made an unannounced visit to Afghanistan to discuss the Obama administration’s plans for its troop presence over the next several years. The White House has long billed its 2014 withdrawal deadline as an end to the Afghan War, but reports have recently surfaced it plans to keep some 10,000 troops in Afghanistan well beyond that date. Panetta explained what role the U.S. will play in Afghanistan after the NATO READ FULL POST 2 COMMENTS

Obama Warns Syria Over Chemical Weapons
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 4 December 2012
Ending the US War in Afghanistan? It Depends on the Meaning of the Word ‘War’
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 30 November 2012
“This past weekend, it was reported that Obama and the generals at the Pentagon are planning on keeping at least 10,000 US troops stationed in Afghanistan indefinitely after that 2014 deadline for ending the war and withdrawing from that war-torn land.”

 

It is amazing to watch politicians trying to weasel their way around their promises. President Obama is providing us with a good illustration of the art.

During the latest presidential campaign and in the final televised debates, both Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were adamant in asserting that the US would be leaving Afghanistan and ending the war in that country at the end of 2014--a goal most Americans profoundly want. Biden, in a heated debate with his Republican opponent Paul Ryan, said the US would “absolutely” be “out” of Afghanistan at the end of 2014. Obama, a week later, said, “By 2014, this process of transition will be complete and the Afghan people will be responsible for their own security."

I’m reminded of President Clinton, a lawyer who, when pressed under oath by a special prosecutor hounding him over the details of whether he had had sex with a young White House intern, said that the answer hinged on “what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”

This past weekend, it was reported that Obama and the generals at the Pentagon are planning on keeping at least 10,000 US troops stationed in Afghanistan indefinitely after that 2014 deadline for ending the war and withdrawing from that war-torn land.

Just to make it clear what we’re talking about here, 10,000 troops would represent an army half the size of the entire army of either the Netherlands or Denmark, two countries which currently have troops assigned to the NATO forces posted in Afghanistan as allies in the 12-year-long US war there.

The notion that these 10,000 post-2014 soldiers would just be “training” the Afghan military is simply absurd. Parris Island, the famed boot camp in South Carolina for the US Marine Corps, which boasts what ...

The Alliance from Hell
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 19 October 2012
“At the heart of this acerbic relationship, however, is Pakistan’s arsenal of 110 nuclear bombs which, if the country were to disintegrate, could fall into the hands of Islamist militants, possibly from inside its own security establishment.”

 

 

The United States and Pakistan are by now a classic example of a dysfunctional nuclear family (with an emphasis on “nuclear”). While the two governments and their peoples become more suspicious and resentful of each other with every passing month, Washington and Islamabad are still locked in an awkward post-9/11 embrace that, at this juncture, neither can afford to let go of.

Washington is keeping Pakistan, with its collapsing economy and bloated military, afloat but also cripplingly dependent on its handouts and U.S.-sanctioned International Monetary Fund loans.  Meanwhile, CIA drones unilaterally strike its tribal borderlands.  Islamabad returns the favor. It holds Washington hostage over its Afghan War from which the Pentagon won’t be able to exit in an orderly fashion without its help. By blocking U.S. and NATO supply routes into Afghanistan (after a U.S. cross-border air strike had killed 24 Pakistani soldiers) from November 2011 until last July, Islamabad managed to ratchet up the cost of the war while underscoring its indispensability to the Obama administration.

At the heart of this acerbic relationship, however, is Pakistan’s arsenal of 110 nuclear bombs which, if the country were to disintegrate, could fall into the hands of Islamist militants, possibly from inside its own security establishment. As Barack Obama confided to his aides, this remains his worst foreign-policy nightmare, despite the decision of the U.S. Army to

Obama Picks New Afghan Commander
Taylor
Published: Thursday 11 October 2012
Are Drones Keeping Us in a Losing Cause Longer?
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 28 September 2012
“Put bluntly, are they helping us to win wars, or are they essentially prolonging wars that are ultimately unwinnable?”

 

There's little question that unmanned aerial vehicles or drones are helping to save the lives of U.S. and NATO troops in places like Afghanistan while aiding in the killing of terrorist suspects in regions largely inaccessible to ground troops.

But the bigger question is whether drones are in any way decisive to the war effort. Put bluntly, are they helping us to win wars, or are they essentially prolonging wars that are ultimately unwinnable?

So far, it appears that drones aren't decisive. They're merely instrumental. They're instrumental in keeping us in a losing cause. They keep our military's casualty rate at a "sustainable" level, low enough so as not to rankle the folks back home, while they give us an illusion of progress in the sense of a body count of suspected militants killed.

But is sustainability a good thing if you're sinking deeper and deeper into a quagmire? Is killing "militants" a good thing if in the process you alienate and terrorize the people, turning them against you and sowing the dragon's teeth of further militant action and more war?

Think here of the Vietnam War. Had we had drones in the skies over the Ho Chi Minh trail, surely we'd have seen with greater clarity the Viet Cong (VC) and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) coming. Surely we'd have killed more VC while losing fewer U.S. troops, at least in the short term. But would ...

Where Obama and Romney Stand on the War in Afghanistan
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 24 September 2012
“Both candidates basically endorse a 2014 withdrawal, though Romney allows that conditions on the ground could change that.”

 

Despite trading barbs on the campaign trail, President Obama and his challenger Mitt Romney don’t differ that much on U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.

Both candidates basically endorse a 2014 withdrawal, though Romney allows that conditions on the ground could change that. Both emphasize strengthening the Afghan military and governing institutions. Of course, during Obama’s time in office violence in Afghanistan has continued, and turning over more control to the Afghan government has proven difficult. We break down what the candidates have said on some of the war’s pressing issues.

Withdrawal Date

Obama famously campaigned in 2008 on his early and vocal opposition to the war in Iraq. By contrast, he dubbed Afghanistan “the War We Need to Win” and pledged to —and did— increase troop levels in Afghanistan. At the same time, he committed to fixed withdrawal dates.

In a December 2009 speech, Obama simultaneously announced a “surge” of 30,000 soldiers and a pledge to begin the withdrawal of U.S. troops by July 2011. A year later, the administration backed away from that date, and agreed to a framework with other NATO members to turn over control to Afghan forces by 2014.

In June of last year, Obama

Taliban Outflank U.S. War Strategy with Insider Attacks
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 21 September 2012
Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta sought to minimize the crisis in U.S. war strategy Tuesday by calling the inside attacks on NATO troops the “last gasp” of a Taliban insurgency that has been “unable to regain any of the territory that they have lost.”

 

Sharply increased attacks on U.S. and other NATO personnel by Afghan security forces, reflecting both infiltration of and Taliban influence on those forces, appear to have outflanked the U.S.-NATO command’s strategy for maintaining control of the insurgency.

The Taliban-instigated “insider attacks”, which have already killed 51 NATO troops in 2012 – already 45 percent more than in all of 2011 – have created such distrust of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and national police that the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) command has suspended joint operations by NATO forces with Afghan security units smaller than the 800-strong battalion of Kandak and vowed to limit them in the future.

ISAF had intended to carry out intensive partnering and advising of ANA and police units below battalion level through 2012 to get them ready to take responsibility for Afghan security. Now, however, that strategy appears to have been disrupted by the insider attacks, and Afghan military and civilian officials are seriously concerned.

Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta sought to minimize the crisis in U.S. war strategy Tuesday by calling the inside attacks on NATO troops the “last gasp” of a Taliban insurgency that has been “unable to regain any of the territory that they have lost.” The “last gasp” phrase recalls then Vice-President Dick Cheney’s infamous 2005 claim that the Iraqi insurgency was “in its last throes”.

But Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has no apparent personal stake in touting the existing strategy in Afghanistan, called the attacks “a very serious threat to the campaign” in an interview on Saturday.

“You can’t whitewash it,” said Dempsey. “We can’t convince ourselves that we just have ...

NATO to Reduce Afghan Operations
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 18 September 2012
Afghanistan’s Base Bonanza
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 4 September 2012
Total Tops Iraq at That War’s Height

Afghanistan may turn out to be one of the great misbegotten “stimulus packages” of the modern era, a construction boom in the middle of nowhere with materials largely shipped in at enormous expense to no lasting purpose whatsoever.  With the U.S. military officially drawing down its troops there, the Pentagon is now evidently reversing the process and embarking on a major deconstruction program.  It’stearing up tarmacs, shutting down outposts, and packing up some of its smaller facilities.  Next year, the number of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) coalition bases in the southwest of the country alone is scheduled to plummet from 214 to 70, according to the New York Times.

But anyone who wanted to know just what the Pentagon built in Afghanistan and what it is now tearing down won’t have an easy time of it.

At the height of the American occupation of Iraq, the United States had 505 bases there, ranging from small outposts to mega-sized air bases.  Press estimates at the time, however, always put the number at about 300. ...

More Soldiers Killed in Helmand Province, Afghanistan
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 10 August 2012
In Hiroshima’s Shadow
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 3 August 2012
This year’s Aug. 6 memorials have special significance. They take place shortly before the 50th anniversary of “the most dangerous moment in human history,” in the words of the historian and John F. Kennedy adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., referring to the Cuban missile crisis.

 

Aug. 6, the anniversary of Hiroshima, should be a day of somber reflection, not only on the terrible events of that day in 1945, but also on what they revealed: that humans, in their dedicated quest to extend their capacities for destruction, had finally found a way to approach the ultimate limit.

This year’s Aug. 6 memorials have special significance. They take place shortly before the 50th anniversary of “the most dangerous moment in human history,” in the words of the historian and John F. Kennedy adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., referring to the Cuban missile crisis.

Graham Allison writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs that Kennedy “ordered actions that he knew would increase the risk not only of conventional war but also nuclear war,” with a likelihood of perhaps 50 percent, he believed, an estimate that Allison regards as realistic.

Kennedy declared a high-level nuclear alert that authorized “NATO aircraft with Turkish pilots ... (or others) ... to take off, fly to Moscow, and drop a bomb.”

None were more shocked by the discovery of missiles in Cuba than the men in charge of the similar missiles that the U.S. had secretly deployed in Okinawa six months earlier, surely aimed at China, at a moment of elevated regional tensions.

Kennedy took Chairman Nikita Khrushchev “right to the brink of nuclear war and he looked over the edge and had no stomach for it,” according to Gen. David Burchinal, then a high-ranking official in the Pentagon planning staff. One can hardly count on such sanity forever.

Khrushchev accepted a formula that Kennedy devised, ending the crisis just short of war. The formula’s boldest element, Allison writes, was “a secret sweetener that promised the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey within six months after the crisis was ...

Mission Failure: Afghanistan
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 31 July 2012
A Message Written in Blood That No One Wants to Hear

 

Imagine for a moment that almost once a week for the last six months somebody somewhere in this country had burst, well-armed, into a movie theater showing a superhero film and fired into the audience. That would get your attention, wouldn’t it? James Holmes times 21?  It would dominate the news.  We would certainly be consulting experts, trying to make sense of the pattern, groping for explanations. And what if the same thing had also happened almost once every two weeks in 2011? Imagine the shock, imagine the reaction here.

Well, the equivalent has happened in Afghanistan (minus, of course, the superhero movies).  It even has a name: green-on-blue violence. In 2012 -- and twice last week -- Afghan soldiers, policemen, or security guards, largely in units being trained or mentored by the U.S. or its NATO allies, have turned their guns on those mentors, the people who are funding, supporting, and teaching them, and pulled the trigger. 

It’s already happened at least 21 times in this half-year, resulting in 30 American and European deaths, a 

More U.S. Folly in Afghanistan
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 8 July 2012
When the United States finally tired of the corruption and waste of Vietnam, we pulled out our props, only to witness the unviability of our client state without massive U.S. aid.

Two New York Times stories this week capture the persistence of U.S. folly in Afghanistan. The first highlights the persistence of corruption in Afghanistan and our country's key role in funding it. The second showcases the enormous expense of providing U.S. air power as a "force multiplier" to prevent the Taliban and other anti-coalition forces from prevailing. The subtext of both articles is that without massive funding and aid from the United States, and without profligate expenditure of money and munitions by American air assets, the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai would almost certainly collapse.

Haven't we seen this before? Think Vietnam in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The United States spent enormous sums of money, and used air power in even more profligate ways, to prop up the corrupt and ultimately illegitimate government of South Vietnam. Prodigious expenditures of money fed the corruption of Vietnamese officials while profligate expenditure of munitions kept the North Vietnamese enemy from prevailing (as in our ability to thwart the North Vietnamese Army's Spring Offensive of 1972), even as a suspect South Vietnamese army (ARVN) became dependent on that same U.S. air power.

When the United States finally tired of the corruption and waste of Vietnam, we pulled out our props, only to witness the unviability of our client state without massive U.S. aid.

What happens when we finally tire of Afghanistan? Though we won't witness a massive conventional military assault that ended in the chaos of Saigon in 1975, it is likely that the corrupt government of Karzai and the

Afghanistan as a ‘Major Ally’
Amanda Rae
Published: Saturday 7 July 2012
Taliban Assault Leaves 18 Civilians Dead
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 22 June 2012
Occupy Will be Back
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 19 June 2012
“The Occupy movement is not finally about occupying. It is, as Zeese points out, about shifting power from the 1 percent to the 99 percent.”

 

In every conflict, insurgency, uprising and revolution I have covered as a foreign correspondent, the power elite used periods of dormancy, lulls and setbacks to write off the opposition. This is why obituaries for the Occupy movement are in vogue. And this is why the next groundswell of popular protest—and there will be one—will be labeled as “unexpected,” a “shock” and a “surprise.” The television pundits and talking heads, the columnists and academics who declare the movement dead are as out of touch with reality now as they were on Sept. 17 when New York City’s Zuccotti Park was occupied. Nothing this movement does will ever be seen by them as a success. Nothing it does will ever be good enough. Nothing, short of its dissolution and the funneling of its energy back into the political system, will be considered beneficial.

Those who have the largest megaphones in our corporate state serve the very systems of power we are seeking to topple. They encourage us, whether on Fox or MSNBC, to debate inanities, trivia, gossip or the personal narratives of candidates. They seek to channel legitimate outrage and direct it into the black hole of corporate politics. They spin these silly, useless stories from the “left” or the “right” while ignoring the egregious assault by corporate power on the citizenry, an assault enabled by the Democrats and the Republicans. Don’t waste time watching or listening. They exist to confuse and demoralize you.

READ FULL POST 8 COMMENTS

U.S.-Pakistan Talks on NATO Supply Lines Stopped
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 12 June 2012
Six weeks of talks between Pakistan and the United States have been halted, a Defence Department official stated on Monday.

“A decision was reached that it was time to bring the (negotiations) team home,” Pentagon spokesperson George Little said, noting that the move was based on a U.S. decision. 

Little suggested that the negotiators were simply in need of a rest, and added that they “are prepared to return to Islamabad at any moment to continue discussions in person”. 

The news comes just days after the U.S. assistant secretary of defence, Peter Lavoy, arrived in Islamabad in an attempt to shore up the flagging talks process, aimed at re-opening critical supply routes for international military forces in Afghanistan. According to reports, the head of the Pakistan Army, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, refused to meet Lavoy. 

The supply routes have been closed since November, when a U.S. missile killed 24 Pakistani soldiers at Salala, along the Pakistan- Afghanistan border. 

Since that time, the Islamabad government, backed by a unanimous Parliament resolution, has called for an unconditional apology for the attack as well as a cessation of U.S.-controlled drone strikes within Pakistani territory. While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has expressed regret for the soldiers' deaths, the United States has refused apologise. 

Prior to November, some 5,000 NATO trucks used the Pakistan route every month. ...

U.S. Military Admits Major War Mistakes
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 11 June 2012
The efforts were marked by a “failure to adequately plan and resource strategic and operational” shifts from one phase of the conflicts to the next.

 

When President Obama announced in Aug. 2010 the end of U.S. combat operations in Iraq, he complimented the soldiers who had served there for completing “every mission they were given.” But some of military’s most senior officers, in a little-noticed report this spring, rendered a harsher account of their work that highlights repeated missteps and failures over the past decade, in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

There was a “failure to recognize, acknowledge and accurately define” the environment in which the conflicts occurred, leading to a “mismatch between forces, capabilities, missions, and goals,” says the assessment from the Pentagon’s Joint Staff. The efforts were marked by a “failure to adequately plan and resource strategic and operational” shifts from one phase of the conflicts to the next.  

From the outset, U.S. forces were poorly prepared for peacekeeping and had not adequately planned for the unexpected. In the first half of the decade, “strategic leadership repeatedly failed,” and as a result, U.S. military training, policies, doctrine and equipment were ill-suited to the tasks that troops actually faced in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These self-critical conclusions appear in the first volume of a draft report titled “Decade of War” — part of a multi-volume survey of “enduring lessons” from the past ten years of conflict. When completed, “it will be used by senior leaders” to develop U.S. military forces for the future, according to Navy Lt. Cmdr. Cindy Fields, a Joint Staff spokeswoman.

Fields said the 36-page, May 2012 report remains an internal document and is not available to the public, but a copy was posted Thursday on the website of a trade publication called "Inside ...

The NATO Afghanistan War and US-Russian Relations: Drugs, Oil, and War
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 10 June 2012
“A key example of such broken promises was the assurance that NATO would not take advantage of détente to expand into Eastern Europe.”

 

I delivered the following remarks at an anti-NATO conference held in Moscow on May 15, 2012. I was the only North American speaker at an all-day conference, having been invited in connection with the appearance into Russian of my book Drugs, Oil, and War. As a former diplomat worried about peace I was happy to attend: as far as I can tell there may be less serious dialogue today between Russian and American intellectuals than there was at the height of the Cold War. Yet the danger of war involving the two leading nuclear powers has hardly disappeared.

 

Unlike other speakers, my paper urged Russians -- despite the aggressive activities in Central Asia of the CIA, SOCOM (US Special Operations Command), and NATO -- to cooperate under multilateral auspices with like-minded Americans, towards dealing with the related crises of Afghan drug production and drug-financed Salafi jihadism.

Since the conference I have continued to reflect intensely on the battered state of US-Russian relations, and my own slightly utopian hopes for repairing them. Although the speakers at the conference represented many different viewpoints, they tended to share a deep anxiety about US intentions towards Russia and the other former states of the USSR. Their anxiety was based on shared knowledge of past American actions and broken promises, of which they (unlike most Americans) are only too aware.

A key example of such broken promises was the assurance that NATO would not take advantage of détente to expand into Eastern Europe. Today of course Poland and other former Warsaw Pact members are members of NATO, along with the former Baltic Soviet Socialist Republics. And there are still proposals on the table to expand NATO into the Ukraine – i.e. the very heart of the former Soviet Union. This push was matched by U.S. joint activities and operations – some of them under NATO auspices ...

The Intervention Dilemma
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 9 June 2012
The idea of a “responsibility to protect” (R2P) was adopted unanimously at the UN’s World Summit in 2005, but subsequent events showed that not all member states interpreted the resolution the same way.

 

When should states intervene militarily to stop atrocities in other countries? The question is an old and well-traveled one. Indeed, it is now visiting Syria.In 1904, US President Theodore Roosevelt argued that, “there are occasional crimes committed on so vast a scale and of such peculiar horror” that we should intervene by force of arms. A century earlier, in 1821, as Europeans and Americans debated whether to intervene in Greece’s struggle for independence, President John Quincy Adams warned his fellow Americans about “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

 

More recently, after a genocide that cost nearly 800,000 lives in Rwanda in 1994, and the slaughter of Bosnian men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, many people vowed that such atrocities should never again be allowed to occur. When Slobodan Milošević engaged in large-scale ethnic cleansing in Kosovo in 1999, the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution recognizing the humanitarian catastrophe, but could not agree on a second resolution to intervene, given the threat of a Russian veto. Instead, NATO countries bombed Serbia in an effort that many observers regarded as legitimate but not legal.

 

In the aftermath, then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan created an international commission to recommend ways that humanitarian intervention could be reconciled with Article 2.7 of the UN Charter, which upholds member states’ domestic jurisdiction. The commission concluded that states have a responsibility to protect their citizens, and should be helped to do so by peaceful means, but that if a state disregarded that responsibility by attacking its own citizens, the international community could consider armed intervention.

The idea of a “responsibility to protect” (R2P) was adopted unanimously at the UN’s World Summit in ...

Obama Resists Growing Pressure to Intervene in Syria
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 8 June 2012
“For now, however, the administration, concerned about the possibility of being drawn into yet another Middle East quagmire and worried that further militarizing the conflict risks destabilizing Syria's neighbors, is firmly resisting such advice.”

Citing the increased violence, neo-conservatives and other hawks have been pressing their case for Washington to arm opposition forces and aid Turkey and Jordan in creating and enforcing "safe zones" for civilians along their borders with Syria, at the very least. 

 


"In addition, the U.S. and our NATO allies could strengthen sanctions on Syria by mounting a naval blockade of the Syrian coastline," according to Max Boot, a prominent neo-conservative at the Council on Foreign Relations, this week. 


"This would make it more difficult for Syria's principal supporters, Russia and Iran, to provide arms to the regime," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times, noting that airstrikes to take out the regime's key military assets - as they did in Libya - should also be considered. 

For now, however, the administration, concerned about the possibility of being drawn into yet another Middle East quagmire and worried that further militarizing the conflict risks destabilizing Syria's neighbors, is firmly resisting such advice. 


While expressing growing skepticism about efforts by U.N.-Arab League Envoy Kofi Annan to implement a ceasefire and a transition plan that would eventually remove President Bashar al-Assad from power, the administration is standing by the former U.N. secretary-general, who will meet with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton here Friday. 

Citing reports of a massacre of 78 civilians in a village in central Hama province Wednesday, Clinton toughened her rhetoric in an appearance with her Turkish counterpart in Istanbul Thursday. Assad, she said, has "doubled down on his brutality and duplicity". 


"Syria will not, cannot, be peaceful, stable or certainly democratic until Assad goes," she declared, stressing that Washington intends to intensify economic and diplomatic sanctions against the ...

New US Leverage Seen in Talks with Pakistan
Taylor
Published: Thursday 7 June 2012
Afghan Civilian Deaths have NATO to Blame
Satra Kit
Published: Wednesday 6 June 2012
What if #noNATO Protesters had Been More Nonviolent?
Taylor
Published: Tuesday 5 June 2012
“There are many lessons to be learned, strategies to be tweaked and tactics to be re-worked, but — for a moment — let’s celebrate the pivotal moment that the #noNATO protests were for anti-militarism movements and struggles for economic justice. ”

 

It was my mother’s first protest, and we were both moved to tears as, one by one, the veterans threw back their medals to the generals and politicians meeting behind the militarized police lines and high perimeter fencing under the no-fly zone of the NATO summit. As thunderclouds began to roll in, I glanced at my phone and told my mom that she should probably start moving toward the outside of the protest zone because I didn’t know what was going to happen once the permitted rally ended. It’s a good thing she did.

There are many lessons to be learned, strategies to be tweaked and tactics to be re-worked, but — for a moment — let’s celebrate the pivotal moment that the #noNATO protests were for anti-militarism movements and struggles for economic justice. Let’s celebrate the fact that 15,000 people took to the streets to protest against austerity and war, in spite of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s and the Chicago Police Department’s fear-mongering. Let’s celebrate the courage of the 45 veterans who threw back their medals as a sign of peace and healing. Let’s celebrate that a few hundred occupiers were able to nonviolently shut down the Boeing Corporation. Then, let’s do the hard work of reflecting on where we’re at and where we’re headed.

Predictably, a number of critiques and defenses of Black Bloc-style tactics have begun to circulate. The question of tactics must not devolve into the tired debate of diversity of tactics that tends to get mired by ideological frames. Rather, tactics should be informed by a ...

Auctioning Off the Presidency From the Pentagon Battlements
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 2 June 2012
“In 2009, the Obama administration stunned two NATO allies — Poland and the Czech Republic — with a surprise withdrawal from an agreement to station missile defense sites on their territories, an agreement they signed in the face of Russian threats.”

 

Let me whisk you to 1980 on one of Obama's miracle drones.

In the right-center we had incumbent President Jimmy Carter, derided as a man of peace, el wimpo.

True, his top foreign policy man was an unreconstructed Polish Cold War warrior burning to bring the Soviet Union to its knees. True, the two had launched the largest covert operation in the CIA's history — $3.5 billion - against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

True, he was financing Argentinian torturers to impart their skills to the Nicaraguan contras.

True, his out-year military budgets actually outstripped those of his opponent.

On the far right was Ronald Reagan. His candidacy crowning almost a decade's worth of propaganda for the New Cold War from outfits such as Paul Nitze's Committee on the Present Danger. Nitze used to go on speaking tours with a rack of missiles. On one side were America's trim little intercontinental ballistic missiles. On the other, was their mighty, albeit technically somewhat backward, Soviet counterparts.

The Reaganites derided all treaties as traps, depicting Uncle Sam as, in military terms, down to his underwear, with a peashooter in his holster. Every Pentagon wish received a cordial welcome.

Here we are today. On our center-right, Obama, derided as a man of peace, el wimpo, though his relations with the Pentagon have been intimate and he himself ductile to their demands.

True, he's been waging war on ... how many fronts? Five, six, with probably more on a covert, semi-privatized basis. True, he has given the finger to all positive developments in Latin America and presided over a bloody coup in Central America.

True, he has been Israel's serf and hast humped the drum against China and Russia.

True, his secretary of state has been a fountain of bellicose bully-swaggering.

And on the far right here's Romney. The Pentagon auctioneers await the next bid. Up goes ...

NATO Says al-Qaeda Second-in-Command has Been Killed
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 29 May 2012
Planting Evidence to Sow Fear: Chicago Cops are the Terrorists
Amanda Rae
Published: Saturday 26 May 2012
“This kind of entrapment and official deceit by police should alarm every American. It’s bad enough when police plant evidence and lie about evidence in order to win convictions, since it means innocent people will be sent to prison or worse.”

It seems pretty clear by now that the three young “domestic terrorists” arrested by Chicago police in a warrantless house invasion reminiscent of what US military forces are doing on a daily basis in Afghanistan, are the victims of planted evidence -- part of the police-state-style crackdown on anti-NATO protesters in Chicago last week.

The Chicago Police clearly realized that it would be hard to convince a jury that the homemade beer-making equipment in the house was some dreaded bio-terror weapon, so for good measure they apparently dropped off some glass jars with gas in them and tried to make out that the kids were preparing molotov cocktails. That’s the word from National Lawyers Guild attorneys representing the men. They say their clients and others like them coming into Chicago from out of town to join in protests against the NATO summit were “befriended” by police informants and undercover Chicago Police, who then offered to obtain gasoline or explosive materials like toy rocket motors, and who proposed actions like firebombing police stations.

This kind of entrapment and official deceit by police should alarm every American. It’s bad enough when police plant evidence and lie about evidence in order to win convictions, since it means innocent people will be sent to prison or worse. But with the new post 9-11 terrorism laws, like the state terrorism statutes in Illinois being applied in these cases, it becomes far more difficult for a victim of such police and prosecutorial misconduct ...

NATO Protests Reveal Need for Nonviolent Discipline
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 25 May 2012
“This was based on the experience some of us had had in Seattle in 1999 at the World Trade Organization meeting, where 200 peacekeepers had been an inadequate number.”

 

Memorial Day: Honor the Dead, Heal the Wounded, Stop the Wars
Taylor
Published: Thursday 24 May 2012
Leading thousands of protesters in a peaceful march against NATO’s wars, each veteran climbed to the makeshift stage outside the fenced summit, made a brief statement and threw his or her medals at the gate.

 

Gen. John Allen, commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan, spoke Wednesday at the Pentagon, four stars on each shoulder, his chest bedecked with medals. Allen said the NATO summit in Chicago, which left him feeling “heartened,” “was a powerful signal of international support for the Afghan-led process of reconciliation.” Unlike Allen, many decorated U.S. military  veterans left the streets of Chicago after the NATO summit without their medals. They marched on the paramilitarized convention center where the generals and heads of state had gathered and threw their medals at the high fence surrounding the summit. They were joined by women from Afghans for Peace, and an American mother whose son killed himself after his second deployment to Iraq.

Leading thousands of protesters in a peaceful march against NATO’s wars, each veteran climbed to the makeshift stage outside the fenced summit, made a brief statement and threw his or her medals at the gate.

As taps was played, veterans folded an American flag that had flown over NATO military operations in Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Afghanistan and Libya and handed it to Mary Kirkland. Her son, Derrick, joined the Army in January 2007, since he was not earning enough to support his wife and child as a cook at an IHOP restaurant. During his second deployment, Mary told me, “he ended up putting a shotgun in his mouth over there in Iraq, and one of his buddies stopped him.” He was transferred to Germany then back to his home base of Fort Lewis, Wash.

“He came back on a Monday after two failed suicide attempts in a three-week period. They kept him overnight at Madigan Army Medical Center at Fort Lewis. He met with a psychiatrist the next day who deemed him to be low to moderate risk for ...

NATO Endorses Strategy to End Afghan War
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 22 May 2012
Attorney: “NATO 3” Activists Detained on Terror Charges Are Victims of Police Entrapment
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 22 May 2012
“Following a weekend that saw nearly 100 arrests of protesters at the NATO summit in Chicago, two are accused of attempted possession of explosives or incendiary devices, and three more are accused of conspiracy to commit terrorism, material support for terrorism and possession of explosives.”

Following a weekend that saw nearly 100 arrests of protesters at the NATO summit in Chicago, we speak with National Lawyers Guild attorney Sarah Gelsomino, who represents one of the five activists charged with terror-related crimes. Two are accused of attempted possession of explosives or incendiary devices, and three more are accused of conspiracy to commit terrorism, material support for terrorism and possession of explosives. Gelsomino says the so-called "NATO Three" were set-up by government informants who planted the explosives. “Our clients who are facing the most serious charges of terrorism are actually in solitary confinement right now, we just learned,” Gelsomino says. “A very top priority this week is to get them out of that extremely punitive and extremely dangerous condition that they’re in right now.”

Occupy G8: Protest Confronts World Leaders at Camp David, Urging Action on Poverty, Hunger
Amanda Rae
Published: Monday 21 May 2012
“Activists are urging G8 leaders to build on their previous commitments and partner with developing countries to urgently tackle hunger.”

World leaders are convening at the heavily guarded Camp David in Maryland today for the G8 Summit. Leading nonprofits such as Save the Children and Oxfam are urging G8 leaders to live up to a 2009 pledge of $22 billion towards food security in developing nations of which only a quarter has been met. Activists are also urging G8 leaders to build on their previous commitments and partner with developing countries to urgently tackle hunger. We’re joined by Raymond Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, and Dr. Margaret Flowers, a physician and organizer with the Occupy G8 Peoples’ Summit.

Transcript:

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: World leaders are convening at the heavily guarded Camp David in Maryland today for the G8 summit. The G8 comprises eight world leaders who meet face-to-face annually at a summit that has become a focus of media attention and protest action. The focus of this year’s summit will be the European economic crisis. But, other topics on the agenda include the conflict in Syria, nuclear non-proliferation and global food security. President Obama will kick off the weekend with a speech in Washington, outlining his plans for helping developing countries. He is expected to promote private-sector investments rather than public sector solutions. The G8’s new food security initiative is facing some criticism because it includes no financial pledges. Leading nonprofits such as Save The Children and Oxfam are urging ...

The Pinkertons Head to Occupy Wall Street
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 21 May 2012
“Banks are preparing for Occupy demonstrations at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) Chicago summit on May 20 and 21 by sharing information from video surveillance, robots and officers in buildings.”

 

On April 25, roughly a week before the Occupy movement’s May 1 general strike action, Bloomberg News reported that the big banks and other Wall Street firms had hired a private security firm named Securitas AB to track down activist “wolves” deemed a “business disruption” on Occupy’s May Day action, as well as during the upcoming NATO Summit protests in Chicago.

 

“The world’s biggest banks are working with one another and police to gather intelligence as protesters try to rejuvenate the Occupy Wall Street movement with May demonstrations,” explained Bloomberg. “Banks are preparing for Occupy demonstrations at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) Chicago summit on May 20 and 21 by sharing information from video surveillance, robots and officers in buildings.”

 

Securitas AB is a Sweden-based firm with a subsidiary named Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations, which was once Pinkerton National Detective Agency — the famed strikebreakers and union-busters behind such historical labor events as the Haymarket Affair of 1886, the Homestead Strike of 1892 and the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.

 

Since its formation in 1852, Pinkerton has been one of the go-to bodyguards and detectives of the 1-percent. So, perhaps it is only appropriate that they have resurfaced in the attempt to co-opt and repress the Occupy movement.

 

Today, Pinkerton is a private sector espionage firm, with services including general surveillance, cybersurveillance, executive protection, event management, crisis management and undercover operations. Its modus operandi has stood the test of time: ...

NATO Seeks to Hand Combat Role to Afghans as a Way Out of War
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 21 May 2012
World Leaders to Plan for Afghanistan’s Future
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 20 May 2012
Terror Charges to Individuals That Were to Participate in May Day Protests
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 20 May 2012
National Lawyers Guild Condemns Preemptive Police Raids & Unlawful Searches
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 20 May 2012
“According to witnesses in Bridgeport, police broke down a door to access a 6-unit apartment building near 32nd & Morgan Streets without a search warrant. ”

 

The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) condemns a preemptive police raid that took place at approximately 11:30pm Wednesday in the Bridgeport neighborhood, and instances of harassment on the street, in which Chicago police are unlawfully detaining, searching, and questioning NATO protesters. The Bridgeport raid was apparently conducted by the Organized Crime Division of the Chicago Police Department and resulted in as many as 8 arrests.

According to witnesses in Bridgeport, police broke down a door to access a 6-unit apartment building near 32nd & Morgan Streets without a search warrant. Police entered an apartment with guns drawn and tackled one of the tenants to the floor in his kitchen. Two tenants were handcuffed for more than 2 hours in their living room while police searched their apartment and a neighboring unit, repeatedly calling one of the tenants a "Commie faggot." A search warrant produced 4 hours after police broke into the apartment was missing a judge's signature, according to witnesses. Among items seized by police in the Bridgeport raid were beer-making supplies and at least one cell phone.

"Preemptive raids like this are a hallmark of National Special Security Events," said Sarah Gelsomino with the NLG and the People's Law Office. "The Chicago police and other law enforcement agencies should be aware that this behavior will not be tolerated and will result in real consequences for the city."

In another incident, 3 plainclothes police officers unlawfully stopped, handcuffed, and searched a NATO protester on Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive at approximately 2pm today. According to the protester, he did not consent to a search and there was no probable cause to detain him. The police also photographed and questioned him about where he was from, how he got to Chicago, how long it took, what he was doing here, where he was staying, who he was with, and how long he was planning to ...

Globalizing NATO
Satra Kit
Published: Sunday 20 May 2012
Today, NATO is becoming, in the words of its secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, “a hub of a network of security partnerships and a center for consultation on global security issues.”

 

Next week, NATO’s 28 members will meet in Chicago for their annual summit. Sixty-two years after the North Atlantic Treaty was signed, binding the United States, Canada, and ten European states to consider an attack on one an attack on all, NATO is transforming itself into a twenty-first-century global security organization. The result will be a safer world.

In 1949, the world was rapidly dividing into two principle political-military blocs, East and West, alongside a large “non-aligned movement.” NATO faced off against the Warsaw Pact, created by the Soviet Union and its allies in 1955. Within both blocs, smaller powers clustered around the superpower. No flexibility existed within either bloc for smaller groups of members to deploy alliance assets.

Today, NATO is becoming, in the words of its secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, “a hub of a network of security partnerships and a center for consultation on global security issues.” It is a “globally connected institution,” with more than 40 individual country partners and growing ties to other international organizations.

 

Follow Project Syndicate on Facebook or Twitter. For more from Anne-Marie Slaughter, click here.

Indeed, the country partners include all of Europe’s non-NATO countries, such as Austria, Switzerland, Finland, and Sweden, and aspiring and possible NATO members such as Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Ukraine, Belarus, and even Russia. Virtually all of the Central Asian countries – from Turkmenistan to Kazakhstan, as well as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan – are partners, as ...

Terror Conspiracy Charges for 3 NATO Protesters
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 19 May 2012
Nurses’ Rally Expected to Draw Thousands
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 19 May 2012
National Nurses United: Still We March
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 18 May 2012
“Organizers and counsel decided to pursue legal avenues to assert their right to protest, but would rally in Grant Park if their legal challenge failed.”

 

The past couple of weeks have been something of a roller-coaster for National Nurses United and it all culminates this Friday morning with the first major march and rally in what is expected to be a weekend of protest in Chicago. But it was a fight to get even there. Last Tuesday, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his administration announced that the National Nurses United (NNU) protest against austerity measures that benefit NATO, the G8, and other elites would to end its May 18 rally in Daley Plaza. The anti-NATO-G8 protest—billed as “a rally to tax Wall Street and heal America” — will likely draw thousands into the Loop on a workday afternoon and, as such, was threatened to be marginalized to Grant Park’s Butler field, according to NNU organizers.

NNU Midwest Director, Jan Rodolfo, RN, speaking at a press conference last Thursday morning, spoke on the union’s plans to file for injunctive relief in federal court rather than succumb to the city’s demands of either to accept the permit changes to the route or have it rescinded entirely. The city gave the union two days to make a decision. Organizers and counsel decided to pursue legal avenues to assert their right to protest, but would rally in Grant Park if their legal challenge failed.

“The city wants to push us aside to Petrillo Bandshell, [in Grant Park],” said Rodolfo, “rather than have us march into the heart of downtown Chicago to Daley Plaza, clearly a center of symbolic protest. We will not be silent. We did not cancel our event when the G8 decided to hide at Camp David. We are not going to cancel our event now.”

Amidst the widespread outcries and protests on behalf of the NNU, the city reversed its decision earlier this week.

National Nurses United, with more than 170,000 registered nurses, is the largest nursing union ...

Protesters Arrested at Obama Chicago Office
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 14 May 2012
Reinventing NATO
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 11 May 2012
“The revolutions in the Arab world and NATO’s military intervention in Libya have refocused the alliance’s attention on the Middle East and Northern Africa.”

This month, NATO will hold its next summit in Chicago. Unlike European Union summits, which take place almost monthly, NATO’s are infrequent. This helps to explain the inflated rhetoric that surrounds them: the November 2010 summit in Lisbon, for example, was described as nothing less than “the most important in NATO’s history.” Will the Chicago summit prove to be an exception to this rule?

For a while, that seemed likely, with the meeting initially billed as an “implementation summit,” at which NATO’s political leaders would focus on assessing the progress of the ambitious agreements reached in Lisbon. But four political developments that have modified the international security agenda are likely to transform Chicago into a high-profile summit in its own right.

First, the revolutions in the Arab world and NATO’s military intervention in Libya have refocused the alliance’s attention on the Middle East and Northern Africa. Second, the international financial crisis will have an immense impact on NATO members’ defense budgets. Third, in a speech last June, outgoing US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates revived the debate on transatlantic burden-sharing and solidarity within the alliance.

Finally, the first NATO summit to be held in the United States in 13 years is taking place not only in an election year, but also in President Barack Obama’s hometown. The Obama administration is therefore particularly interested in summit “deliverables” – outcomes that can be announced as major successes.

The foremost item on the agenda for Chicago will certainly be Afghanistan, from which NATO has decided to withdraw its combat forces by 2014. The alliance needs to train enough Afghan military and police forces to take over full responsibility for stability in the country when it leaves. At the same time, it must convey the message that its long-standing mission there ...

Mali’s Struggle: Not Simply of Their Own Making
Amir Gholi
Published: Thursday 10 May 2012
“Rather than responding violently to the coup, thousands of Malians in Bamako and elsewhere took to the streets demanding a return to democracy.”

In examining the political crises which have gripped Mali in recent months, it is important not to fall into simplistic analyses of dysfunctional or "failed" African states. Indeed, the Malian people have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to mobilize civil society and build stable democratic governance despite a history of enormous poverty, ethnic divisions, and foreign intervention.

In 1991, more than two decades prior to similar pro-democracy uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, Malians engaged in a massive nonviolent resistance campaign that brought down the dictatorship of Mousa Traoré. A broad mobilization of trade unionists, peasants, students, teachers, and others -- supported by griots (traditional singing storytellers) who would sing allegorical songs regarding historical freedom struggles -- created a mass movement throughout the country. Despite the absence of Facebook or the Internet, virtually no international media coverage, and the massacre of hundreds of peaceful protesters, this popular civil insurrection succeeded not only in ousting a repressive and corrupt regime, but ushered in more than two decades of democratic rule.

Despite corruption, poverty, and a weak infrastructure, Mali was widely considered to be the most stable and democratic country in West Africa. In order to educate and promote the rights and duties of its citizens, the government implemented a program called the "Decentralization Mission" in 1993 to encourage popular participation in local and regional elections. Independent radio stations and newspapers emerged and the country experienced lively and open political debate.

The events surrounding the nonviolent revolution of 1991 were regularly commemorated, with the anniversary of the March 26 massacre a national holiday. A series of monuments in the capital of Bamako also commemorate the pro-democracy struggle.

In the years since the 1991 revolution, even contentious ...

A May to Remember
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 5 May 2012
In the month of May, one million South Africans demonstrated against apartheid (1986); 1,400 people were arrested protesting the construction of a nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire (1977).

 

April may be the cruelest month, as T.S. Eliot once claimed, but May is the month of exuberant mass action. We’re currently in the thick of the latest iteration of May mobilizations for justice and peace, with the worldwide protests that got rolling on May 1 and the actions that will take place later this month in Chicago focused on the NATO summit. May actions are a venerable tradition, reaching back to Emancipation Day in 1886 when — also in Chicago — 340,000 workers went on strike demanding an 8-hour workday. Since then, by design or coincidence, numerous May protests — perhaps egged on by the feisty vitality of spring and its alluring promise of rejuvenation — have been momentous.

In the month of May, one million South Africans demonstrated against apartheid (1986); 1,400 people were arrested protesting the construction of a nuclear power plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire (1977); the Riders challenged racial discrimination in interstate travel (1961); hundreds of schoolchildren were arrested during the civil rights movement’s historic Birmingham campaign (1963); the Poor People’s Campaign challenged economic inequality (1968); a general strike spread across France calling for social change, eventually mobilizing ten million people (1968); and millions protested U.S. immigration policy across the nation (2006). These, as the invaluable This Week in History attests, are only a small fraction of the many historic social struggles that have been launched in the month of May.

Here is one of the ...

Wars of Attrition
Amir Gholi
Published: Tuesday 24 April 2012
“Green Zones of the Mind, Guerrillas, and a Technical Knockout in Afghanistan.”

Recently, after insurgents unleashed sophisticated, synchronized attacks across Afghanistan involving dozens of fighters armed with suicide vests, rocket-propelled grenades, and small arms, as well as car bombs, the Pentagon was quick to emphasize what hadn’t happened. “I’m not minimizing the seriousness of this, but this was in no way akin to the Tet Offensive,” said George Little, the Pentagon’s top spokesman. “We are looking at suicide bombers, RPG [rocket propelled grenade], mortar fire, etcetera. This was not a large-scale offensive sweeping into Kabul or other parts of the country.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta weighed in similarly. “There were,” he insisted, “no tactical gains here. These are isolated attacks that are done for symbolic purposes, and they have not regained any territory.” Such sentiments were echoed by many in the media, who emphasized that the attacks “didn’t accomplish much” or were “unsuccessful.”

Even granting the need to spin the assaults as failures, the official American reaction to the coordinated attacks in Kabul, the Afghan capital, as well as at Jalalabad airbase, and in Paktika and Logar Provinces, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of guerrilla warfare and, in particular, of the type being waged by the Haqqani network, a crime syndicate transformed by the conflict into a leading insurgent group. Here’s the “lede” that should have run in every newspaper in America: More than 40 years after the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive, after more than a ...

Photos of Soldiers With Afghan Corpses the Latest Outrage for U.S. Occupation of Afghanistan
Amanda Rae
Published: Thursday 19 April 2012

We get reaction to two photographs published by the Los Angeles Times that show U.S. soldiers posing with the corpses and body parts of dead Afghans. "I think (the photos) shock us actually more than they shock Afghans," says journalist Anand Gopal. "From the Afghan perspective, we’ve had troops urinating on corpses, a massacre of 17 civilians, air strikes, night raids, troops cutting off fingers for sport, and so, for Afghans, this is part and parcel of the experience of being in war." Meanwhile, several NATO allies have promised to underwrite Afghanistan’s armed forces after foreign troops depart. The United States and other nations plan to retreat from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 and hand the security issue over to Afghan security forces. "If we don’t address the agreements that the U.S. and Australian governments and other governments are making for a long-term war strategy in Afghanistan, we are heading for an increase in violence in this part of the world … more serious than the Kabul attacks," says Hakim, coordinator for Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, based in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Transcript:

JUAN GONZALEZ: The Los Angeles Times has published two photographs that show U.S. soldiers posing with the corpses and body parts of dead Afghans. In one ...

Taking Uncle Sam for a Ride
Amir Gholi
Published: Thursday 19 April 2012
How Pakistan Makes Washington Pay for the Afghan War

The following ingredients should go a long way to produce a political thriller. Mr. M, a jihadist in an Asian state, has emerged as the mastermind of a terrorist attack in a neighboring country, which killed six Americans. After sifting through a vast cache of intelligence and obtaining a legal clearance, the State Department announces a $10 million bounty for information leading to his arrest and conviction. Mr. M promptly appears at a press conference and says, “I am here. America should give that reward money to me.”

A State Department spokesperson explains lamely that the reward is meant for incriminating evidence against Mr. M that would stand up in court. The prime minister of M’s home state condemns foreign interference in his country’s internal affairs. In the midst of this imbroglio, the United States decides to release $1.18 billion in aid to the cash-strapped government of the defiant prime minister to persuade him to reopen supply lines for U.S. and NATO forces bogged down in the hapless neighboring Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

Alarmingly, this is anything but fiction or a plot for an upcoming international sitcom. It is a brief summary of the latest development in the fraught relations between the United States and Pakistan, two countries locked into an uneasy embrace since September 12, 2001.

Mr. M. is Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, a 62-year-old former academic with a tapering, hennaed beard, and the founder of the Lashkar-e Taiba (the Army of the Pure, or LeT), widely linked to several outrageously audacious terrorist attacks in India. The LeT was formed in 1987 as the military wing of the ...

Chicago Spring in Full Bloom
Satra Kit
Published: Friday 13 April 2012
A total of 11 neighborhood actions were held by neighborhood occupations and community organizations before converging on Lasalle and Jackson — the place where it all started for Occupy Chicago last fall.

Eager Occupiers — with flowers, signs, costumes and high spirits — descended into downtown Chicago from all directions of the city and suburbs for the April 7 Chicago Spring kickoff. The Occupy Chicago event marks the re-emergence of the economic and political justice movement that was mostly dormant over the winter. On Saturday, though, Chicagoans came out in droves for speakers, workshops, concerts, teach-ins and community-building events that took place all over the city.

In the morning, 50 or so people from Occupy the Northwest Side held a public auction in Logan Square, selling off the neighborhood’s iconic statues and city streets to the highest bidder to protest the privatization of public goods. Meanwhile, Occupy el Barrio — from Pilsen — marched throughout the barrio in carnivalesque fashion complete with “re-distributive pinatas” to break open and share and, representing capitalism, a gigantic “foam skewered pig.” Occupy the Southside announced the beginning of their Stop the American Genocide Campaign and Occupy Rogers Park hosted a community art project. A total of 11 neighborhood actions were held by neighborhood occupations and community organizations before converging on Lasalle and Jackson — the place where it all started for Occupy Chicago last fall.

Rachael Perrotta, from Occupy Chicago Press Relations, called April 7 a community day to connect the struggles of the 99 percent across the city. Emphasizing how Occupy Chicago has intentionally focused on community organizing as a way to build the broad-based movement needed to confront the concentrations of wealth and power in the 1 percent, Perrotta called Occupy Chicago glue that is trying to unite activists, unions, and community groups across various campaigns.

The Twitter hashtag ...

Obama Puts Missile Defense on the Back Burner Until After November Elections
Satra Kit
Published: Monday 26 March 2012
Occupy Leaders Congregate to Plan NATO Demonstration
Amir Gholi
Published: Monday 19 March 2012
“Barack Obama’s decision to drop plans for holding the Group of 8 economic summit in Chicago the same weekend as NATO was a victory that should encourage even more demonstrators to show up in May.”

After a long weekend of protesting aimed at reinvigorating their movement, Occupy leaders from around the country set their sights on their biggest target of the spring - the NATO summit in Chicago.

Meeting in a sunny city park Sunday, they echoed the rallying cry of other protest groups: President Barack Obama's decision to drop plans for holding the Group of 8 economic summit in Chicago the same weekend as NATO was a victory that should encourage even more demonstrators to show up in May.

"G-8 left, I think, directly out of fear," said Brian Bean, a Chicago demonstrator who came to St. Louis to organize people for the NATO summit.

"What they are worried about is that, in an election year, the possibility that there's actually working-class resistance in the United States and globally and what that would look like in Obama's home city."

In between protests targeting agri-business giant Monsanto Co. and the foreclosure practices of Wells Fargo & Co., organizers from Chicago encouraged movement leaders from nearly 20 other cities to talk up the NATO summit when they return home. They also compared notes on the nuts-and-bolts of protest practices.

"We're trying to plan a summit, and we're trying to learn everything really fast," said Zoe Sigman, 22, who lives in Chicago.

Sitting at a picnic table under the Tower Grove Park cupola, Sigman and Bean asked for ideas from the crowd about how to coordinate housing and transportation to Chicago.

Bean said Chicago police have been "training for urban warfare," making it unlikely Occupiers were going to be successful in any effort to camp in public spaces.

Eli Silva from Tulsa, Okla., agreed, saying that conflicts over camping in parks - like one Thursday in St. Louis that resulted in 15 arrests - served only to distract public attention from the political message of the demonstrators.

Instead, Sigman ...

The Lost-Cause War in Afghanistan
Satra Kit
Published: Saturday 17 March 2012
“The U.S. war in Afghanistan was lost a long time ago.”

In the wake of the lethal rampage by a U.S. sergeant who killed 16 Afghans in the early hours of March 11, the Taliban have put a halt to talks with the Americans and President Hamid Karzai, who has demanded that NATO troops pull out of the villages and return to their camps.

As with the burning of the Qurans last month, the Pentagon has been groveling in contrition. The acting commander of the U.S.-led coalition, Lt. Gen. Adrian Bradshaw, expressed "deep regret and sorrow at this appalling incident. 'I cannot explain the motivation behind such callous acts, but they were in no way part of authorized ... military activity.'"

Afghans could be forgiven for suffering "massacre fatigue," precisely because "authorized military activity" by U.S. troops and Special Forces in Afghanistan has long since degenerated into a lethal culture of assassination, "revenge" sorties, desecration of bodies, and the harvesting of trophies such as severed fingers, ears and the like. In the recent past, Afghans have also been able to study photographs of laughing American soldiers pissing on the bodies of dead Afghans.

Back in April of 2010, after furiously denying responsibility for the deaths of three Afghan women in a messed-up Special Forces night-time raid, the U.S. commander in Kabul admitted U.S. forces had indeed ...

More Bad News on the Afghan Front
Amanda Rae
Published: Tuesday 13 March 2012
“A new Washington Post/ABC public opinion poll released Sunday found that 60 percent of respondents now believe the Afghan war was not worth fighting, close to an all-time high in the decade-long war.”

While U.S. officials insisted their counterinsurgency strategy is still working, Sunday's pre-dawn massacre by a U.S. staff sergeant of 16 people, including nine children, in their homes in Kandahar province has dealt yet another body blow to Washington's hopes to sustain a significant military presence in Afghanistan after 2014.
 

The massacre was perpetrated by one individual acting entirely on his own, the Pentagon said Monday. But it was the latest in a series of recent incidents, including the dissemination on the Internet of a video showing four U.S. soldiers urinating on the corpses of dead Afghans and the apparently inadvertent burning of copies of the Quran outside a U.S. military base, that have stoked popular outrage against U.S. and other foreign troops. 
 

It also took place amid indications that the U.S. electorate and Congress are increasingly disillusioned with what last year had already become the longest war in U.S. history. 
 

A new Washington Post/ABC public opinion poll released Sunday found that 60 percent of respondents now believe the Afghan war was not worth fighting, close to an all-time high in the decade-long war. 
 

Moreover, only 30 percent of respondents said they believed most Afghans support U.S. and NATO efforts in their country; 55 percent said they believed that most Afghans oppose the foreign presence. 
 

The massacre also took place just after Washington and the government of President Hamid Karzai had finally agreed on one of two key points of contention that have stood in the way of the signing of a strategic partnership agreement that would permit Washington to retain a substantial military advisory force and possibly access to several key bases after 2014, the deadline by which foreign combat troops are to have left Afghanistan. 
 

The two sides reached an agreement last week on transferring ...

Green on Blue
Amanda Rae
Published: Thursday 8 March 2012
“Civilians live in dread of the legacy of the Obama strategy: the presence of half a million gunmen on the loose, in search of a sponsoring khan.”

Recent weeks have brought yet another sad chance to watch badly laid plans in Afghanistan go haywire.  In three separate incidents, allies, most from the Afghan National Army (ANA), allegedly murdered six Americans -- two of them officers in the high-security sanctum of Kabul’s Interior Ministry.  Marine General John R. Allen, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, even briefly withdrew NATO advisors and trainers from all government ministries for their own protection.

Trained in their hundreds of thousands over the past 11 years by a horde of dodgy private security contractors, as well as U.S. and NATO troops, the Afghan National Army is supposed to replace coalition forces any day now and defend its own country.

This policy has been the apex of Washington’s Plan A for some time now.  There is no Plan B.

But what to make of the murders in the Ministry?  An AP article 

Two More Americans Killed by Afghan Gunman, Officials Say
Satra Kit
Published: Thursday 1 March 2012
The escalating attacks - so-called green-on-blue shootings - have called into question whether an ambitious NATO effort to train Afghan forces to take over responsibility for safeguarding the country can move forward.

Two American soldiers were killed Thursday by a civilian employee of the Afghan army, according to Afghan officials - the latest in a concerted series of attacks in which Afghan soldiers, police or government workers have turned their guns on Western allies.

The NATO force confirmed the shooting deaths of two coalition soldiers, saying the attack was carried out by a man believed to be an Afghan soldier and a second Afghan in civilian clothing.

The escalating attacks - so-called green-on-blue shootings - have called into question whether an ambitious NATO effort to train Afghan forces to take over responsibility for safeguarding the country can move forward. Handing over security responsibility to the Afghan police and army is central to NATO's exit strategy.

Four Americans died in two such assaults last week - two troops shot by an Afghan soldier at a U.S.-run base in eastern Afghanistan while riots raged outside, and two military officers shot execution-style inside a tightly guarded government ministry in the capital, Kabul.

Niaz Mohammad Sarhadi, the chief of Kandahar's Zhari district, said the attack took place before dawn at a joint coalition-Afghan outpost in the village of Sangisar. He identified the assailant as a civilian working for the Afghan military as a literacy tutor, and said the ...

Blown Away
Anna Gilliam
Published: Wednesday 29 February 2012
“How the U.S. fanned the flames in Afghanistan”

Is it all over but the (anti-American) shouting -- and the killing?  Are the exits finally coming into view?

Sometimes, in a moment, the fog lifts, the clouds shift, and you can finally see the landscape ahead with startling clarity.  In Afghanistan, Washington may be reaching that moment in a state of panic, horror, and confusion.  Even as an anxious U.S. commander withdrew American and NATO advisors from Afghan ministries around Kabul last weekend -- approximately 300, military spokesman James Williams tells TomDispatch -- the ability of American soldiers to remain on giant fortified bases eating pizza and fried chicken into the distant future is not in doubt. 

No set of Taliban guerrillas, suicide bombers, or armed Afghan “allies” turning their guns on their American “brothers” can alter that -- not as long as Washington is ready to bring the necessary supplies into semi-blockaded Afghanistan at staggering cost.  But sometimes that’s the least of the matter, not the essence of it.  So if you’re in a mood to mark your calendars, late February 2012 may be the moment when the end game for America’s second Afghan War, launched in October 2001, was initially glimpsed. 

Amid the reportage about the recent explosion of Afghan anger over the torching of Korans in a burn pit at Bagram Air Base, there was a tiny news item that caught the spirit of the moment.  As anti-American protests (and the deaths of protestors) ...

The Afghan War’s Nine Lives
Anna Gilliam
Published: Thursday 16 February 2012
“The number of U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan approaches 2,000, which is about the number of civilians killed there annually.”

Eight youths, tending their flock of sheep in the snowy fields of Afghanistan, were exterminated last week by a NATO airstrike. They were in the Najrab district of Kapisa province in eastern Afghanistan. Most were reportedly between the ages of 6 and 14. They had sought shelter near a large boulder, and had built a fire to stay warm. At first, NATO officials claimed they were armed men. The Afghan government condemned the bombing and released photos of some of the victims. By Wednesday, NATO offered, in a press release, “deep regret to the families and loved ones of several Afghan youths who died during an air engagement in Kapisa province Feb. 8.” Those eight killed were not that different in age from Lance Cpl. Osbrany Montes De Oca, 20, of North Arlington, N.J. He was killed two days later, Feb. 10, while on duty in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. These nine young, wasted lives will be the latest footnote in the longest war in United States history, a war that is being perpetuated, according to one brave, whistle-blowing U.S. Army officer, through a “pattern of overt and substantive deception” by “many of America’s most senior military leaders in Afghanistan.”

Those are the words written by Lt. Col. Danny Davis in his 84-page report, “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort.” A draft of that report, dated Jan. 27, 2012, was obtained by Rolling Stone magazine. It has not been approved by the U.S. Army Public Affairs office for release, even though Davis writes that its contents are not classified. He has submitted a classified version to members ...

Army Officer’s Leaked Report Rips Afghan War Success Story
Brian Walker
Published: Sunday 12 February 2012
Both in his longer report and in an article for Armed Forces Journal published online Feb. 5, Davis recounts his experience at an Afghan National Police station in Kunar province in January 2011.

An analysis by Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, which the U.S. Army has not approved for public release but has leaked to Rolling Stone magazine, provides the most authoritative refutation thus far of the official military narrative of success in the Afghanistan War since the troop surge began in early 2010.

In the 84-page unclassified report, Davis, who returned last fall after his second tour of duty in Afghanistan, attacks the credibility of claims by senior military leaders that the U.S.-NATO war strategy has succeeded in weakening the Taliban insurgent forces and in building Afghan security forces capable of taking primary responsibility for security in the future.

The report, which Davis had submitted to the Army in January for clearance to make it public, was posted on the website of Rolling Stone magazine by journalist Michael Hastings Friday. In a blog for the magazine, Hastings reported that "officials familiar with the situation" had said the Pentagon was "refusing" to release the report, but that it had been making the rounds within the U.S. government, including the White House.

Hastings wrote that he had obtained it from a U.S. government official.

Contacted by IPS Friday, Davis would not comment on the publication of the report or its contents.

Writing that he is "no Wikileaks guy Part II", Davis reveals no classified information in the report. But he has given a classified version of the report, which cites and quotes from dozens of classified documents, to several members of the House and Senate, including both Democrats and Republicans.

"If the public had access to the classified reports," Davis writes, "they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is true behind the scenes."

Davis is in a unique position to assess the real ...

Will Occupy Embrace Nonviolence?
Anna Gilliam
Published: Friday 10 February 2012
“The Occupy movement has till now been a seedbed of creativity. Now it needs to amp up its declaration of values.”

This past fall, Occupy transformed the political landscape by seizing a moment, wedding righteous anger to high spirits—by existing and enduring in public places. The occupations cleared spaces for public life, for mutual education and controversy. From them came all kinds of direct actions that carried symbolic weight. From them also came the marches of tens of thousands where the inner movement of the encampments was joined by the outer movement of the membership organizations—the unions, progressive groups and so on. That was when the movement broke through to the larger public—by looking like the 99 percent.

Then, in house occupations and anti-foreclosure actions, the movement began to deliver palpable results—putting real families in real homes, preventing evictions. And despite ample provocation by paramilitarized police, the movement occupied the moral high ground by staying almost wholly nonviolent. Now, ready or not, here comes the election cycle of 2012, putting pressure on the movement to keep up a vital tension between self-maintenance and growth, between challenging the whole plutocratic political economy and upping the odds of reforms that can arrest and reverse it.

And, right on cue, here come the city governments of Chicago, Tampa and Charlotte, readying noxious rules and massive armament to corral the likely thousands of demonstrators who will gather, in the Occupy spirit—though not necessarily with any official imprimatur—to greet the G-8 and NATO in May, the Republicans in August and the Democrats in September, respectively.

In Chicago, at the behest of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the City Council on January 18 passed a stupendous ordinance, requiring, among other things, that all applicants for demonstration permits (1) supply at the time of application “a description of the size and dimension of any sign, banner or other attention-getting device that is too large to be carried by one ...

U.S. Combat in Afghanistan Will End Next Year, Panetta Says
Amanda Rae
Published: Thursday 2 February 2012
U.S. Combat will end in Afghanistan, but U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan at least through 2014, when all NATO combat forces are scheduled to withdraw from the country.

The U.S. military plans to change the focus of its Afghanistan mission from combat to training local forces by the end of 2013, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Wednesday, apparently accelerating the timeline for Afghan forces to take over security responsibilities from NATO troops.

Panetta's comments to reporters traveling with him to Brussels — where he was scheduled to attend a meeting of NATO defense chiefs beginning Thursday — marked the first time that a top Pentagon official had stamped an earlier end date on the decade-old U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan. However, U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan at least through 2014, when all NATO combat forces are scheduled to withdraw from the country.

"Hopefully by the mid- to latter part of 2013, we'll be able to make a transition from a combat role to a training, advise and assist role," Panetta said. He added that this "doesn't mean we're not going to be combat-ready," but rather that the U.S. and other international forces will no longer be in "the formal combat role we're in now."

The announcement appeared to be an effort to assure a war-weary American public — in an election year — that the Obama administration was charting a clear exit from Afghanistan. But it was also about semantics: By calling the U.S. troops deployed in Afghanistan trainers, not combat forces, it suggests that their mission will involve less fighting and the U.S. will suffer fewer casualties.

Of course, commanders will point out that there's no such thing as a non-combat soldier, and U.S. troops continued to suffer loses in Iraq when the mission there switched from combat to what the Pentagon dubbed an "advise and assist" role.

It wasn't immediately clear whether the announcement would lead to an accelerated withdrawal of U.S. forces. From the 90,000 U.S. troops currently stationed in Afghanistan, the ...

The Myth of “Isolated” Iran
Brian Walker
Published: Wednesday 18 January 2012
“Following the Money in the Iran Crisis”

Let's start with red lines. Here it is, Washington’s ultimate red line, straight from the lion’s mouth.  Only last week Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said of the Iranians, “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No. But we know that they're trying to develop a nuclear capability. And that's what concerns us. And our red line to Iran is do not develop a nuclear weapon. That's a red line for us.”

How strange, the way those red lines continue to retreat.  Once upon a time, the red line for Washington was “enrichment” of uranium. Now, it’s evidently an actual nuclear weapon that can be brandished. Keep in mind that, since 2005, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has stressed that his country is not seeking to build a nuclear weapon. The most recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran from the U.S. Intelligence Community has similarly stressed that Iran is not, in fact, developing a nuclear weapon (as opposed to the breakout capacity to build one someday).

What if, however, there is no “red line,” but something completely different? Call it the ...

Analysts: U.S., Pakistan Collaborating Again on Drone Strikes
Anna Gilliam
Published: Tuesday 17 January 2012
“Security analysts said the selective targeting suggested that Pakistani security authorities had sanctioned the strikes, despite a Foreign Ministry statement Thursday that drone intrusions into Pakistan’s airspace ‘cannot be condoned.’”

Two apparent U.S. drone attacks last week on militant targets in Pakistani tribal areas bordering Afghanistan very likely signal the resumption of joint counterintelligence operations by the CIA and Pakistan's military spy agency, security analysts here said Monday.

The reported strikes would be the first in Pakistan since U.S.-led NATO forces killed 25 Pakistani soldiers in a "friendly fire" incident on the border in November, which drove relations between Washington and Islamabad to a new low.

News reports over the weekend quoted anonymous Pakistani military officials as saying that radio chatter among militants suggested that the chief of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, was among four insurgents who were killed Thursday in the second of the drone strikes in the North Waziristan tribal area.

A spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban denied Mahsud's death, however, saying he wasn't in the area at the time. Members of rival militant factions told McClatchy that they'd received no news of his death.

"The signs are that the U.S. has revisited intelligence cooperation with Pakistan, and the two sides have returned to the early stages, when drone attacks were initiated under a covert joint mandate," said Simbal Khan, the director of research at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad, a research center funded by Pakistan's Foreign Ministry.

In the first of the strikes, last Tuesday, four al Qaida fighters from the gas-rich central Asian republic of Turkmenistan were killed, analysts said.

However, the drones didn't target the Haqqani network, an Afghan Taliban faction that draws hundreds of fighters from Hafiz Gul Bahadur, the top militant commander in North Waziristan.

Security analysts said the selective targeting suggested that Pakistani security authorities had sanctioned the strikes, despite a Foreign Ministry statement Thursday that drone intrusions into ...

Recognizing the ‘Unpeople’
Brian Walker
Published: Sunday 8 January 2012
“Palestinians are prototypical unpeople, as we see regularly.”

On June 15, three months after the NATO bombing of Libya began, the African Union presented to the U.N. Security Council the African position on the attack – in reality, bombing by their traditional imperial aggressors: France and Britain, joined by the U.S., which initially coordinated the assault, and marginally some other nations.

It should be recalled that there were two interventions. The first, under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1973, adopted on March 17, called for a no-fly zone, a cease-fire and measures to protect civilians. After a few moments, that intervention was cast aside as the imperial triumvirate joined the rebel army, serving as its air force.

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Isolationism Redux Via Ron Paul
Brian Walker
Published: Saturday 7 January 2012
“America is weary of war, especially weary of those, in retrospect, that had no real purpose — the one in Iraq, above all.”

The blogger Andrew Sullivan, typing faster than he could think, endorsed Ron Paul for the Republican presidential nomination. (He took it back, but we’ll get to that later.) Sullivan is British-born, Oxford-taught and, like so many from that sceptered isle, gifted in print and speech. Still, he somehow did not realize that if someone like Paul had been president in the 1940s, his homeland might have succumbed to Nazi Germany while America, maddeningly isolationist, sat out the war. No doubt, curriculum changes would have been made at Oxford.

Paul opposes just about all international treaties and organizations. He would have the United States pull out of the United Nations and NATO. He would do away with foreign aid, abolish the CIA and essentially turn his back on the rest of the world. This is pretty much what used to be called isolationism, and it allowed Hitler to presume, quite correctly as it turned out, that America would not interfere with his plans to conquer Europe, Britain included. It took Germany’s declaration of war on the United States, not the other way round, to get Uncle Sam involved.

The isolationism of the 1930s and early ’40s has come roaring back — in the person of Paul, I am tempted to write, but that is not exactly the case. The old isolationism was deeply conservative, both ...

NATO Ends Iraq Mission as Drama Unfolds in Green Zone
Elizabeth
Published: Saturday 17 December 2011
In a sign that Iraq’s political dysfunction was worsening just days after American forces formally ended their mission in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Qasim Atta, spokesman for the Baghdad operations command, was expected to make an announcement that implicated the politicians in the bombing.

As U.S. troops prepared their final departure from Iraq, NATO regretfully closed down its small but highly effective training mission here Saturday after negotiations over extending the mission stalled over Iraq granting foreign military personnel immunity from prosecution.

Even as the last vestiges of the international military presence here were leaving, there was high drama in Baghdad's international zone, as troops and tanks surrounded the homes of three prominent Sunni politicians — Vice President Tariq al Hashimi, Finance Minister Rafie al-Essawi and Ayad Samarraie, a former speaker of the Parliament, eyewitnesses said.

Three members of Hashimi's security detail were arrested in recent days on suspicion of involvement in a November suicide bomb attack on the Iraqi parliament, according to an aide to Hashimi.

In a sign that Iraq's political dysfunction was worsening just days after American forces formally ended their mission in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Qasim Atta, spokesman for the Baghdad operations command, was expected to make an announcement that implicated the politicians in the bombing, according to western diplomats.

Osama Nujaifi, the Sunni speaker of the parliament and ostensibly the target of the bombing, had pleaded with the government to postpone any public airing of its evidence, according to an official in the interior ministry.

Earlier Saturday, the Iraqiya party, headed by Ayad Allawi, a political rival who shares power with Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, walked out of the parliament but said it was not quitting the government.

The U.S. Embassy Saturday night urged the Iraqi government to conduct its investigation into the allegations "in a transparent manner in accordance with Iraqi law."

As the political drama was unfolding, NATO and Iraqi officials said that the legal issue in extending the seven-year NATO mission was whether the Iraqi parliament would have to approve a ...

Is Killing Taliban a Good Idea?
Anna Gilliam
Published: Tuesday 13 December 2011
The reality is that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, yet many people in the West still believe that killing Taliban fighters keeps up military pressure that might eventually lead to a negotiated outcome.

Ten years ago, a conference in the German city of Bonn agreed on a roadmap – the Bonn Agreement – for the creation of a post-Taliban administration in Afghanistan. Taliban were excluded from participation and subsequent Afghan governments were strongly dominated by Taliban’s former foes. Ten years later, Taliban were once again absent at this week’s second Bonn conference, which was boycotted by Pakistan in protest against an American air strike inside Pakistan that killed twenty-four Pakistani soldiers. All the main speakers emphasized the need for peacemaking with the Taliban.

The reality is that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable. Yet many people in the West still believe that killing Taliban fighters keeps up military pressure that might eventually lead to a negotiated outcome. For their own reasons, the Taliban also see military pressure as sound strategy. Both sides are probably wrong. The escalated military contest is likely to be as unwinnable as the war.

The side that reaches this conclusion first and declares a temporary ceasefire – a ceasefire that becomes permanent if the other side reciprocates – will have a considerable advantage. Not only would it be good strategy for the United States or the Taliban to make the first move, it would also be smart for Pakistan to change course and advocate such a move, regardless of who moves first.

Despair grows in Afghanistan. Obama’s surge increased the killing and capture of Taliban, but killings by the Taliban have surged even more steeply. The 2011 fighting season is the worst the war has seen, especially for civilians. Meanwhile, the government of Afghanistan enjoys less legitimacy than ever and is edging towards becoming a narco-state. Opium production is expected to rise further in 2012 to supply more than 90 per cent of the world’s illicit trade.

It is hard to be sure whether President Hamid Karzai’s administration is ...

The Pressure Is Now on Central Asian Supply Route
Amanda Rae
Published: Friday 9 December 2011
“The closure of the Pakistani route through the Khyber Pass presents a financial windfall for the commercial carriers currently working on the NDN, and to the Central Asian states hosting it.”

The Northern Distribution Network, the key re-supply route for U.S. and NATO forces fighting in Afghanistan, is set to experience a spike in traffic due to the closure of the Pakistani-Afghan border. But it will take several weeks for the United States and NATO to work out the logistics of rerouting cargo.
 

Islamabad closed border crossings to Afghanistan in late November in response to a NATO attack on a frontier post that left 24 Pakistani soldiers dead. The Northern Distribution Network (NDN) is already a vital link in Afghanistan's supply chain. But to date it has not operated at maximum capacity. Contracted logistics firms, already on standby to start moving goods out of Afghanistan, are preparing for an imminent "all systems go" test of their capabilities, a commercial source told Eurasianet.org. 
 

"It doesn't happen overnight: they have to start re-routing their vessels from Houston/Eastern United States and possibly Karachi back up to the Baltic ports and only then will the volume on the NDN become real and apparent, so maybe in a few weeks we could see actual spiked volumes because of this," the source said. 
 

The closure of the Pakistani route through the Khyber Pass presents a financial windfall for the commercial carriers currently working on the NDN, and to the Central Asian states hosting it. The NDN has seen a steady increase in traffic since its inception in 2009, and the volume of two-way traffic could increase by as much as 300 percent as the drawdown of U.S. troops begins. 
 

U.S. Air Force carriers are already airlifting supplies to Afghanistan, but their use, at this stage, is "imperceptible" given the 14,000-dollar-per-tonne cost of moving goods this way, according to a U.S. government source. 
 

The NDN was designed by the U.S. Department of Defense to be a safer re-supply option than trucking ...

Are 24 Pakistani Soldiers Dead Because of the “Fog of War” or a Calculated Strike?
Brian Walker
Published: Sunday 4 December 2011
“For all the talk of ‘precision weapons’ and ‘surgical strikes,’ drones have inflicted hundreds of civilian deaths and 500 lb. bombs have very little in common with operating rooms.”

In the aftermath of the Nov. 26 NATO attack on two border posts that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, the question being asked is whether the assault was a “fog of war” incident or a calculated hit aimed at torpedoing peace talks in Afghanistan? Given that the incident has plunged relations between Washington and Islamabad to a new low at a critical juncture in the 10-year war, the answer is vitally important.

According to NATO, U.S. and Afghan troops came under fire from the Pakistani side of the border and retaliated in self-defense. American officials have suggested that the Taliban engineered the incident in order to poison U.S.-Pakistani relations. But there are some facts suggesting that the encounter may have been more than a “friendly fire” encounter brought on by a clever foe, an ill-defined border, and the normal chaos of the battlefield.

Afghan Taliban commander Mullah Samiullah Rahmani denies they were even in the area—and the insurgent group is never shy about taking credit for military engagements (of course, if deception was involved that is what the Taliban would say). However, this

Arab Revolutions and the Power of Nonviolent Action
Brian Walker
Published: Sunday 4 December 2011
“This has not come, in most cases, from a moral or spiritual commitment to nonviolence per se, but simply because it works.”

While sitting in a Cairo café just a couple blocks from Tahrir Square a couple months ago, I couldn't help but notice the television in the corner broadcasting the evening news. Traditionally, TV news in Egypt and other Arab countries has consisted of the president (or king) giving a speech, greeting a foreign visitor, visiting a factory, or engaging in some other official function. This evening, however, the news was about a labor strike in Alexandria, relatives of those killed during the February revolution protesting outside the Interior Ministry, and ongoing developments in the pro-democracy struggles in Yemen and Syria.

Nothing could better illustrate the profound change in the Arab world over the past year: It is no longer simply the leaders who were the newsmakers. It is Arab peoples themselves.

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He was 22... She was 12...
Moderator
Published: Friday 2 December 2011
“He was 22, a corporal in the Marines from Preston, Iowa, a ‘city’ incorporated in 1890 with a present population of 949.”

He was 22, a corporal in the Marines from Preston, Iowa, a “city” incorporated in 1890 with a present population of 949.  He died in a hospital in Germany of “wounds received from an explosive device while on patrol in Helmand province [Afghanistan].”  Of him, his high school principal said, “He was a good kid.” He is survived by his parents.

He was 20, a private in the 10th Mountain Division from Boyne City, population 3,735 souls, which bills itself as “the fastest growing city in Northern Michigan.”  He died of “wounds suffered when insurgents attacked his unit with small-arms fire” and is survived by his parents.

These were the last ...

Dealing with Pakistan: No Alternative
Moderator
Published: Monday 28 November 2011
The United States has to recognize that when and if the war ends Pakistan will be the dominant player in Afghanistan.

The so-called “friendly fire” incident this weekend, in which U.S. forces killed more than two dozen Pakistani soldiers at a border post near Afghanistan, is only the latest in a long string of incidents that have inflamed U.S.-Pakistan relations. But this one may be the most serious of all. Already, Pakistan has closed two critical border crossing that provide about half of the American and NATO re-supply effort for the war in Afghanistan, and Pakistani officials are saying that the closing is permanent this time. (They’ve closed them previously, only to reopen them after a cooling off period.)

The closing may yet be reversed, but it’s a sign of Pakistan’s ability to undermine or even shut down the U.S. war effort. (It’s not really possible to supply U.S. forces by using the so-called northern route through Russia and the ‘Stans, not is it possible to airlift supplies such as fuel, heavy machinery, and construction equipment in sufficient quantities.) As always, Pakistan has the United States over a barrel.

Worse, the Pakistan government is threatening to boycott the December 5 international conference on Afghanistan, at which 1,000 delegates from 50 countries are scheduled to convene in Germany to discuss plans to wind down the war. As everyone who’s paying attention knows, winding down the war – removing 30,000 American troops in 2012 and taking out the rest by 2014 – means getting Pakistan and its cats-paw, the Taliban, to the bargaining table. If Pakistan doesn’t play, it’s game over.

The most intelligent comment on the crisis comes from Vali Nasr,  a regional expert who served as a consultant to the late ...

U.S., Pakistan Offer Different Versions of Attack on Border Post
Moderator
Published: Monday 28 November 2011
Pakistan announced Saturday that it would “review” all military, intelligence and diplomatic co-operation with the United States and ISAF forces in response to the incident.

Tension between Pakistan and the United States over a U.S. air strike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers grew Sunday as the two sides offered widely disparate accounts of what might have taken place.

NATO officials said Afghan and U.S. troops operating inside Afghanistan early Saturday had been fired on from the Pakistani side of the border and had requested close air support to help defend themselves. What happened next is still under investigation, officials said.

But Pakistan's chief military spokesman said he did not believe that there had been any fire directed at the Americans from Pakistan and said he did not believe the attack could have been inadvertent.

Major Gen. Athar Abbas said the military outpost on a mountain top at Salala in the Mohmand part of Pakistan near the Afghan border was well marked on maps that both Pakistan and NATO have and that the U.S. air assault lasted for more than an hour.

"I cannot rule out the possibility that this was a deliberate attack by ISAF," Abbas said, referring to NATO's International Security Assistance Force by its acronym. "If ISAF was receiving fire, then they must tell us what their losses were."

No NATO casualties ...

Pakistan Targets U.S. Troop Supplies, Drone Base After NATO Kills 24
Taylor
Published: Sunday 27 November 2011
Pakistan announces retaliation after NATO attack on Pakistani border outpost.

Pakistan on Saturday blocked supply routes for U.S.-led troops in Afghanistan and announced it would end American use of a Pakistani airbase by American forces in retaliation for a NATO attack on a Pakistani border outpost that officials said killed at least 24 soldiers and injured another 13.

American forces were given 15 days to vacate the remote Shamsi airbase, which was secretly turned over to them after the 9/11 attacks. The decision to order the Americans out followed an emergency meeting of Pakistan's top civilian and military leadership late Saturday to decide how to respond to the deaths of the soldiers.

Shamsi was used for launching the war in Afghanistan in late 2001, then later served as the base for the U.S. drone program targeting militants. Set in desert in sparsely populated Baluchistan province in Pakistan's west, the airbase became highly controversial within Pakistan for its association with drone strikes, which Pakistan officially condemns.

The decision to expel the Americans, made by the country's leadership meeting as the Defense Committee of the Cabinet, was an admission that Shamsi remains in American use.

The committee also announced that the government would "revisit and undertake a complete review of all program, activities and cooperative arrangements" with the United States and U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, "including diplomatic, political, military and intelligence".

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As Gaddafi is Buried, a Look Back at the Complexities and Contradictions of the Libya Mission
Taylor
Published: Sunday 30 October 2011
“With Muammar Qaddafi now dead in Libya and NATO tentatively winding down its mission there by the end of the month, the Obama administration has claimed another foreign policy victory”

With Muammar Qaddafi now dead in Libya and NATO tentatively winding down its mission there by the end of the month, the Obama administration has claimed another foreign policy victory, touting the fact that “we achieved our objectives” without putting ground troops in Libya.

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Libya and Iraq: Mirror Images in the Grip of Big Oil
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 25 October 2011
“Just as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were focused on securing Iraq’s oil for their Big Oil cronies, U.S. and NATO forces attacked Libya to take out Muammar Gaddafi, who preferred to sell his oil to Russia and China.”

The U.N. Security Council’s mandate, which authorized NATO’s military operations to “protect civilians” in Libya, was just as specious as the one that allowed the Bush administration to invade Iraq to destroy stockpiles of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. Just as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were focused on securing Iraq’s oil for their Big Oil cronies, U.S. and NATO forces attacked Libya to take out Muammar Gaddafi, who preferred to sell his oil to Russia and China.
 

In the wake of Saddam Hussein’s killing, Baghdad was left defenseless to be viciously looted, save for a well-protected oil ministry. In the immediate aftermath of Gaddafi’s fall, amid all of the chaos, the only clear move was made by Tripoli to favor NATO allies as the new customers for Libyan oil.
 

Today, NATO gloats of “no collateral damage” in its Libyan operations. Yet, an estimated 10,000 mostly civilians it meant to protect are dead, while entire cities lie in ruin.
 

After nine years of U.S. occupation, Iraq’s economy remains in shambles amid rampant official corruption, with every sign of greater instability when the last of the U.S. troops are gone. Libya will likely remain a near-failed state for the foreseeable future as competing political and tribal forces fight for ascendancy.


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What’s Next for U.S.-Libyan Relations?
Moderator
Published: Monday 24 October 2011
“After Muammar Gadhafi’s demise, the future of Libya’s relationship with the United States remains uncertain.”

After Muammar Gadhafi's demise, the future of Libya's relationship with the United States remains uncertain.

Libya ousted its longtime leader in essentially a civil war in which the U.S. and NATO backed one side. This is a stark contrast with the independent and largely nonviolent revolutionary processes that led to the ouster of dictators in Egypt and Tunisia, and are still underway in much of the Arab world.

But Washington wasn't the NATO intervention's original instigator. That role lay in Europe, starting with France, whose president was still smarting from political attacks for his too-little-too-late response to the Tunisian uprising. It set the stage for Europe to exert special influence in Libya's new government, which will probably also give Europe privileged access to Libya's oil.

Ironically, Europe and the United States didn't really need a war to create good relations with Libya — they already had them. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when the Bush administration was eager to round up new recruits for its "global war on terror," it sent emissaries to make nice with the long-excoriated Libyan leader.

Soon, Gadhafi was brought in from the cold. He agreed to dismantle Libya's nascent nuclear program and offered compensation to families of the Lockerbie bombing. He even resumed normal diplomatic relations with the United States and Western Europe, his once-and-future enemies. Within a few years, U.S. and European oil companies were inking contracts. By 2007, photos of Gadhafi arm-in-arm with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi — as well as George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and, famously, Condoleezza Rice — were commonplace.

For the United States in 2011, the strategic interest in turning on Gadhafi, despite these newfound chummy relations, was primarily rooted in the fear of losing control. ...

Gadhafi Was Captured Alive; How He Died Is in Dispute
Moderator
Published: Friday 21 October 2011
A doctor who was part of the medical team that accompanied Gadhafi’s body in an ambulance and examined it told the Associated Press that Gadhafi had died from two bullet wounds, to the head and chest.

In one, a khaki-clad man identified as Gadhafi appears wounded, splayed out on the hood of a truck. He’s wounded, his shirt bloody. Revolutionary fighters haul him to a standing position, then surround him, pushing him away from the camera before he turns and seems to gesture.

“We want him alive,” one man can be heard saying.

Another clip, obviously shot later, shows a man who appears to be the now dead deposed leader lying in the street, stripped half-naked and splattered with blood. Bystanders chanting, “God is great!” can be seen kicking him.

In yet another video, Gadhafi’s battered face, his eyes partially closed in death, is held up to the camera for a close-up before the camera operator pans away to show about a dozen revolutionary fighters shouting and flashing victory signs as they jostled for positions in the picture.

The short videos instantly became iconic images for the Arab Spring protests: a despotic Middle Eastern ruler forced out of power and killed by his people in a popular uprising that turned into an armed rebellion. The image of Gadhafi’s bloody face is sure to send chills among other embattled Middle Eastern leaders such as Syria’s Bashar Assad and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh.

“This is the end of the war and the emancipation proclamation of Libya,” said Fatima Ben Massoud, 30, a schoolteacher in Tripoli.

There was no definitive version of Gadhafi’s last day, however. Instead, bits and pieces emerged from eyewitness accounts and video footage that gave a sense of what took place, but with many questions still to be answered.

A doctor who was part of the medical team that accompanied Gadhafi’s body in an ambulance and examined it told the Associated Press that Gadhafi had died from two bullet wounds, to the head and chest.

Al Arabiya reported that the fatal shots were fired by an 18-year-old revolutionary fighter ...

#OccupyWallStreet: A Radical Perspective (Part 1)
Moderator
Published: Saturday 8 October 2011
On October 1, The New York General Assembly—the “official” spokesgroup of #OccupyWallStreet—released a document, “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City,” naming its reasons for the occupation.

“I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence”

To be radical—stemming from the Latin radix meaning root—suggests that it is about getting at the heart of a matter. Dr. King cut right through to the source of injustice and over forty-five years later, are we witnessing the rebirth of a radical revolution of values that Dr. King prophesied? Is #OccupyWallStreet and its comrades nationwide “on the right side of the world revolution?” In that bold speech Dr. King gave a year before his death, publicly breaking from the civil rights movement’s acquiescence to the status quo support of American involvement in Vietnam, King warned that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense that on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Has the United States, by spending upwards of $3 trillion-dollars on wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Libya and maintaining over 1,000 overseas military bases in more than 50 countries, reached a moral, economic, political and spiritual tipping point?

#OccupyWallStreet is well into its third week of camping out at Liberty Plaza. On October 1, The New York General Assembly—the “official” spokesgroup of #OccupyWallStreet—released a document, 

The Economics of Peace in Afghanistan
Elizabeth
Published: Saturday 17 September 2011
The economics of what an Afghanistan at peace would look like must be a critical part of any negotiations, but what does the economics of peace entail, and why is it so important?

Suicide bombings, assassinations of top Afghan leaders, brutal attacks on Charikar and other places close to Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, and a rapid increase in civilian deaths from drone attacks are jeopardizing the withdrawal of American and NATO forces from the country. So pervasive has the violence become that Ahmed Rashid, the renowned expert on the Taliban, has concluded that speeding up the peace process through dialogue with the insurgents is the only option.

The economics of what an Afghanistan at peace would look like must be a critical part of any negotiations. But what, precisely, does the economics of peace entail, and why is it so important?

"Follow Project Syndicate on Facebook or Twitter. For more from Graciana del Castillo, click here."

One main objective should be to transform Afghanistan’s vast underground economy, which has thrived, despite the large number of NATO forces, by creating profitable opportunities for Taliban and other groups involved in the fighting. To reintegrate these fighters into the productive economy will require a change in policies, including a rapid reactivation of rural development schemes and the promotion of local entrepreneurship, public works, and other legal activities.

In particular, the United States, together with other donors and NATO troop contributors, should heed “Ten Commandments” during and after the negotiations.

First, apply the dictum of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) that it is better to let “them” do it than it is to try to “do it better” for them. Thus, let national negotiators, local leaders, and communities determine what ...

9/11 Legacy - An AK-47 in Every Home
Moderator
Published: Sunday 11 September 2011
“The fact that every household in the FATA possesses firearms means that they are used to settle even petty issues, resulting in a large number of avoidable deaths and injuries.”

The United States-led war-on terror, unleashed on Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, has utterly destabilized the neighboring Pashtun-dominated tribal areas of Pakistan and reduced them to a state of utter lawlessness.

For a start, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the adjacent province of Khyber Paktunkhwa, of which Peshawar is capital, are now awash with small arms, with every household owning at least one of the iconic AK-47 rifles.

"Weapons manufactured in the FATA or smuggled in from Afghanistan have flooded the entire country and resulted in endless bloodshed all the way to Karachi," says Naveed Shinwari, chief of the Community Appraisal Motivation Program (CAMP), which campaigns against small arms proliferation.

Shinwari says the fact that every household in the FATA possesses firearms means that they are used to settle even petty issues, resulting in a large number of avoidable deaths and injuries.

"The situation here before 9/11 was peaceful, but over the past five years 35,000 civilians and 3,000 soldiers have died with bombings, shootings and suicide attacks becoming the order of the day," says Mian Iftikhar Husain, information minister in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

As U.S. and NATO forces invaded Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in 2001, the leaders of the ‘Islamic scholars’ and the international Al-Qaeda fled over the border into Pakistan’s FATA and lost little time in extending their activities to adjacent Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

"About 200,000 of FATA’s eight million people live in camps due to the military operations there. Of the seven tribal agencies of FATA, military action is in progress in six, making the lives of the residents miserable," Husain told IPS in an interview.

Of the 52,000 students enrolled at the University of Peshawar, 10,000 are from FATA and who now find it unable to visit their native towns and ...

Truck Bomb Injures Scores at U.S. Base in Afghanistan
Moderator
Published: Sunday 11 September 2011
Forty Americans were among the wounded, according to officials in Washington, where word of the Saturday afternoon attack broke as the United States was preparing for a day of solemn ceremonies commemorating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

A suicide bomber detonated a truck loaded with explosives at a U.S. military outpost in Wardak province on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, wounding 77 NATO soldiers and about two dozen Afghan civilians, NATO announced Sunday. Two Afghans were killed.

Forty Americans were among the wounded, according to officials in Washington, where word of the Saturday afternoon attack broke as the United States was preparing for a day of solemn ceremonies commemorating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

NATO downplayed the impact of the explosion at Combat Outpost Sayed Abad, emphasizing in its announcement that none of the wounded had suffered life-threatening injuries and that most of the injured were expected to return to duty "shortly." NATO said the force of the blast had been absorbed by protective barriers and that damage was limited to the perimeter wall and a "maintenance facility."

But the statement offered no details on how large the explosion had been, and accounts from Afghan officials suggested that a catastrophe had been narrowly averted.

Alam Gul, a local council chief who lives about six miles from the site of the explosion, said he was at home when he heard the blast.

"The houses which were located near the base have been badly damaged," he said.

Gul said the truck's explosive cargo had been hidden beneath a load of firewood. Shahidullah Shahid, a spokesman for the Wardak governor, said officials did not know how much explosive the truck was carrying.

NATO said the attack took place at around 5:30 p.m. Saturday.

The Taliban took responsibility for the attack in a statement posted on their website, claiming they had killed 50 U.S. soldiers — an exaggeration typical of Taliban announcements.

Wardak province, west of Kabul, the nation's capital, has witnessed growing Taliban activity in the last two years. The Sayed Abad district was ...

Dennis Kucinich to Congress: “Come Home, America”
Moderator
Published: Thursday 8 September 2011
“I believe the American people have the capacity to ‘undergo a mental and spiritual change’ that Dr. King spoke about. People are about that work in their own private lives everyday. The question is does our government and those who lead it have that capacity.”

Good evening.

Tonight I wish to speak to this Congress and to my fellow Americans about international policy and its relation to the domestic economy. I will advocate a new direction America must take in the world so that we can meet the needs of our people here at home.

For the past decade we have relied on the force of our arms to make America secure while our economy has rotted from within. America has lost its focus. America has spent more time concentrating on reshaping the world than on reshaping our economy.

We have created hundreds of thousands of jobs for military contractors all over the world, while we just learned that we created zero jobs here in the United States in the month of August as unemployment continues to stay above 9%.

Come home America. We must begin to focus on things here at home and stop roaming the world looking for dragons to slay. We have a right and an obligation to defend our nation. That includes working for peace abroad and seeking peaceful resolution of conflict, a capacity that, at our peril, we have not fully developed: I call it strength through peace. It involves the pursuit of what President Franklin Roosevelt called the “Science of Human Relations,” actually engaging those with whom we disagree most to attempt to find a way to co-exist peacefully. As Dr. Martin Luther King said at a commencement address at Oberlin College in 1965:

      “We must find some alternative to war and bloodshed... I do not wish to minimize the complexity of the problems to be faced in achieving disarmament and peace. But we shall not have the courage, the insight, to deal with such matters unless we are prepared to undergo a mental and spiritual change. It is not enough to say we must not wage war. We ...

10 Years of 9/11 Wars Is Enough
Moderator
Published: Monday 5 September 2011
Even if the White House withdraws troops according to its proposed schedule, by 2012 the number of U.S. troops still fighting that war will be higher than when Obama took office

The 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is sure to bring televised images of somber reflection. Looking back is, in some ways, easier for commentators and pundits than wrestling with the current state of Washington's so-called "war on terror."

The United States is mired in two major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with undeclared drone bombing campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Launching these wars was fairly easy for the White House, with or without congressional approval. How any of them ends, though, remains unclear. Even the NATO war in Libya, which by many accounts has "ended," could become more chaotic and bloodier in the very near future.

The shift from Washington's time-limited military adventures that followed the Vietnam War — the relatively brief conflicts in Grenada, Panama, Somalia, and Kosovo, for example — to today's seemingly interminable and endlessly multiplying military commitments is one of the most notable, yet little noted, features of the post-9/11 landscape. Regrettably, too many mainstream journalists seem all too willing to encourage Washington's new "permanent war" footing.

The Iraq War, we've been led to believe, is the one that's ending, if it's not already over. Last summer's withdrawal of combat troops was treated in the press as the conclusion of a very long war. But this summer the news tells a different story: Obama administration officials are lobbying the Iraqi government to hammer out an agreement that would allow U.S. troops to stay beyond the end of the year.

One newspaper called this a "vexing problem" for President Barack Obama, since he'll have to explain why he's extending a war he vowed to end. And recent upticks in bombings in Iraq inevitably trigger worry about how dangerous it will be for U.S. troops to leave. This is a strange conclusion, given that this violence is happening while ...

Lessons and False Lessons from Libya
Moderator
Published: Thursday 1 September 2011
One of the problems of armed revolutionary struggle compared to unarmed revolutionary struggle is the dependence upon foreign supporters, which can then be leveraged after victory.

The downfall of Muammar Gaddafi's regime is very good news, particularly for the people of Libya. However, it is critically important that the world not learn the wrong lessons from the dictator's overthrow.

It is certainly true that NATO played a critical role in disrupting the heavy weapons capability of the repressive Libyan regime and blocking its fuel and ammunition supplies through massive airstrikes and by providing armaments and logistical support for the rebels. However, both the militaristic triumphalism of the pro-intervention hawks and the more cynical conspiracy mongering of some on the left ignore that this was indeed a popular revolution, which may have been able to succeed without NATO, particularly if the opposition had not focused primarily on the military strategy. Engaging in an armed struggle against the heavily armed despot essentially took on gaddafi where he was strongest rather than taking greater advantage of where he was weakest - his lack of popular support.

There has been little attention paid to the fact that the reason the anti-Gaddafi rebels were able to unexpectedly march into Tripoli last weekend with so little resistance appears to have been a result of a massive and largely unarmed civil insurrection which had erupted in neighborhoods throughout the city. Indeed, much of the capital had already been liberated by the time the rebel columns entered and began mopping up the remaining pockets of pro-regime forces.

As Juan Cole noted in an August 22 interview on ...

Applying the Libya “Model” to Syria and Iran
Moderator
Published: Monday 29 August 2011
“President Obama is not President Bush, and I don't think that for a moment that Obama is seeking excuses to bomb and invade Middle East countries, as Bush was.”

Muammar Gaddafi is (pretty much) gone, and right on cue there’s increasing talk about applying the Libya “model” to Syria. Meanwhile, I’m more worried that eventually they’ll get around to applying that “model” to Iran.

 
The New York Times carries a piece titled: “U.S. Tactics in Libya May Be a Model for Other Efforts.” By model, of course, they mean the mobilization of lethal force, including coordinated bombing attacks and precision missile strikes, tied closely to rebel military tactics, jointly run by the United States and NATO. In it, President Obama’s advisers – including Ben Rhodes, the humanitarian interventionist hawk who supported the U.S. war in Libya – suggest that the Libyan action might easily be applied elsewhere. “How much we translate to Syria remains to be seen,” says one adviser, anonymously. And the Times notes:

 
“The very fact that the administration has joined with the same allies that it banded with on Libya to call for Mr. Assad to go and to impose penalties on his regime could take the United States one step closer to applying the Libya model toward Syria.”


Meanwhile, the Washington Post 

Obama Can’t Win For Winning In Libya
Elizabeth
Published: Thursday 25 August 2011
“The United States has no troops in Libya, which means our men and women in uniform do not find themselves at the center of — or responsible for — what will inevitably be a messy and possibly dangerous aftermath.”

You have to ask: If unemployment were at 6 percent, would President Obama be getting pummeled for not having us back to full employment already?

The question comes to mind in the wake of the Libyan rebels’ successes against Moammar Gaddafi. It’s remarkable how reluctant Obama’s opponents are to acknowledge that despite all the predictions that his policy of limited engagement could never work, it actually did.

 
 

Let it be said upfront that the rout of Gaddafi was engineered not by foreign powers but by a brave rebellion organized in Libya by its people. But that is the point. The United States has no troops in Libya, which means our men and women in uniform do not find themselves at the center of — or responsible for — what will inevitably be a messy and possibly dangerous aftermath. Our forces did not suffer a single casualty. The military action by the West that was crucial to the rebels was a genuine coalition effort led by Britain and France. This was not a made-by-America revolution, and both we and the Middle East are better for that.

What NATO and its allies did do, as Karen DeYoung and Greg Miller reported in The Post, was to help the rebels “mount an aggressive ...

Rebels Overrun Gaddafi's Compound; He Calls Retreat ‘Tactical’
Elizabeth
Published: Wednesday 24 August 2011
“Gaddafi did not say where he was speaking from, only that he vowed “martyrdom” or victory in his fight against NATO.”

Even as images of gleeful rebels overrunning Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi's main military compound saturated television screens Tuesday, questions still loomed over Gaddafi's whereabouts, the status of pro-regime holdouts and NATO's role in the effort to secure the country.

Early Wednesday, Gaddafi, speaking on a local Tripoli radio station, which was reported by Al Orouba television and Reuters, said that his withdrawal from Bab al Aziziya, the dictator's main compound and a key symbol of his power, was a "tactical move." The compound had been leveled by 64 NATO air strikes, he said.

Gaddafi did not say where he was speaking from. He vowed "martyrdom" or victory in his fight against NATO.

Al Arabiya television reported early Wednesday that forces loyal to Gaddafi were attacking the city of Ajelat, west of Tripoli, with missiles and tanks, and that dozens of missiles had hit Tripoli near Bab al Aziziya.

On Tuesday, in scenes reminiscent of the days after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, rebels looted Bab al Aziziya, clambering onto and giddily spray-painting iconic buildings and statues.

"Oh my God. I was in Gaddafi's room. Oh my God. I'm gonna take this," said a man as he donned a hat and gold chain that purportedly belonged to Gaddafi, in images captured by Britain's Sky News.

The capital remained chaotic and violent, with both rebels and pro-Gaddafi forces claiming control amid ongoing fears of reprisal attacks. Rebels appeared to be consolidating their grip, but the surprise appearance of Gaddafi's son and onetime heir, Saif al Islam, outside a Tripoli hotel early Tuesday morning raised skepticism of the claims of the rebels, who had said they'd captured the son.

Libyan rebels told Al Arabiya on Wednesday that more than 400 people were killed and at least 2,000 were injured in the fight for Tripoli.

Briefing reporters in ...

Time to End NATO's War in Libya
Moderator
Published: Monday 22 August 2011
“The $1bn for an intervention that Americans were told would last "days not weeks" could only be explained by looking at the war as an investment, and at control over Libya's wealth as an opportunity to make a return on that investment.”

In March of this year, the US, France, Britain and their North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) allies launched military operations in Libya under the guise of a "humanitarian intervention". US diplomats and world leaders carelessly voiced unsubstantiated claims of an impending massacre in Benghazi. You hear no such appeals to humanity while Nato, in the name of the rebels (whoever they are), prepares to lay siege to Tripoli, a city of nearly 2 million people.

Libyan rebels are now advancing on the capital city of Tripoli with the aid of Nato strikes; this is sure to result in a real bloodbath, as opposed to the one that was conjured in Benghazi this past winter. Nato is assisting rebels who are blocking food, water and medical supplies from coming into the capital city, and is stopping those who need advanced medical care from travelling to Tunisia to access it. Nato is bombing power stations, creating blackouts, and using Apache helicopters to attack Libyan police checkpoints to clear roads for rebels to advance.

Regardless of whether Muammar Gaddafi is ousted in coming days, the war against Libya has seen countless violations of United Nations security council resolutions (UNSCRs) by Nato and UN member states. The funnelling of weapons (now being air-dropped) to Libyan rebels was, from the beginning of the conflict, in clear violation of UNSCR 1970. The use of military force on behalf of the rebels, in an attempt to impose ...

Lybian Rebels State Airstrike Killed Gaddafi's Son
Moderator
Published: Friday 5 August 2011
Libya Paralyses Security Council on Syria
Moderator
Published: Tuesday 2 August 2011
"The people of Syria should not be forced to pay the price by those concerned that the Security Council overstepped on Libya," Peggy Hicks noted.

The U.N. Security Council has continued to remain politically paralysed on the indiscriminate killings of civilians in Syria, and that paralysis, according to U.N. diplomats, has been triggered ironically by the ongoing turmoil in another Arab nation - Libya.

The devastation caused by Western military forces in Libya - justified under the guise of protecting civilian lives - is deterring at least two veto-wielding permanent members of the Council, namely Russia and China, from supporting any strong action against Syria.

The Chinese and the Russians believe, one U.N. diplomat told IPS, that "Western countries are likely to misinterpret any resolution against Syria and then unleash military attacks on Damascus - as they did with Libya."

Peggy Hicks, global advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, told IPS the reluctance by some member states, particularly the global south leaders, seems motivated by concern over Libya.

But it is high time for those issues to be overcome by the urgent need for the Security Council to speak out about Syria, she added.

"The people of Syria should not be forced to pay the price by those concerned that the Security Council overstepped on Libya," Hicks noted.

The resolution on Libya, adopted last May by a vote of 10:0, authorised member states to "take all necessary measures" - a code word for military intervention - to protect civilians and civilian- populated areas under threat of attack from Gaddafi's forces.

The result: continued bombing of Libya by military forces from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) on the pretext of "protecting civilians".

But five countries in the 15-member Security Council decided to abstain on that resolution: China, Russia, India, Brazil and Germany.

At least four of those five countries are now resisting any condemnation of Syria.

Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism ...

Media Rushed To Suggest Radical Muslims Might Have Been To Blame For Norway Terrorism
Moderator
Published: Monday 25 July 2011
"With no evidence, the conservative media blamed the attacks on radical Islam."

Before there was any evidence of who was responsible for the terrorist bombing and shooting in Norway, mainstream media outlets rushed to finger Muslims and Muslim groups as potential perpetrators and listed grievances that radical Muslims had against the country. Norwegian officials have since said that a non-Muslim was responsible for the terrorist acts.

Right-Wing Media Figures Instantly Pinned Blame For Norway Attacks On Muslims

Right-Wing Media Immediately Blamed Muslims For Norway Attacks. With no evidence, the conservative media blamed the attacks on radical Islam. Those who participated in the rush to judgment included Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, CNN contributor Erick Erickson, and Andrew Breitbart's BigPeace.com. The Breitbart website surmised that ...

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