As the year winds down and Hollywood gets busy creating Oscar buzz, one unlikely contender is The Hurt Locker, the widely praised Iraq movie that premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year and was released in the U.S. in June 2009.

“Just when I thought I’d seen enough of Iraq war movies, along comes (Hurt Locker),” an Access Hollywood film critic told USA Today in September. “If any movie about Iraq is going to break through to the academy, this is it.”

Indeed, the “megabuzz-spawning film” (to quote the Modesto Bee) was nominated for its first official honor last month, by the prestigious (if relatively obscure) New York-based Independent Filmmaker Project, which tapped it for Best Feature. According to the Los Angeles Times, which has started tracking Oscar favorites, The Hurt Locker has been tapped by no fewer than 16 leading film pundits as a serious Academy Award contender.

Even if it skipped your radar, you’ve probably heard some beaming reviews about The Hurt Locker by now.

The almost unanimous acclaim it attracted from mainstream reviewers focused mainly on director Kathryn Bigelow’s suspenseful action scenes, which make up the majority of the film’s run time, and prominent reviewers agree that it’s a masterfully crafted American combat epic about three deceptively simple-looking and courageous American men making sacrifices for their country while in unfamiliar, hostile territory.

At least partially thanks to clever marketing, the film produced over $12 million in box office revenue, making it the most successful movie made about the U.S. war on Iraq and its so-called war on terror to date. (Compare to films like Redacted, which earned $25,628, or Rendition’s $9.6 million.)

But there are some curious contradictions in the praise Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal have received for their work.

Reviewers cite Boal’s brief stint as an embedded journalist following a bomb-disposal unit in Iraq as supporting evidence for the film’s alleged accuracy. But they fail to consider the inevitable bias of such a narrow perspective.

Would reviewers have lauded the accuracy of a story based on the experiences of a journalist who had been embedded with the “other” side — particularly if the portrayal of American soldiers had not been positive?

Some reviewers have praised Bigelow for allegedly not incorporating a political stance into the film. This is simply ridiculous: It’s being endorsed by military-recruitment sites as we speak. A link to military.com, the largest military organization in the United States, appears on the front page of the film’s official Web site.

A Realistic Portrayal of Iraq?

Filmed in Jordan, The Hurt Locker is supposed to have taken place in Iraq in 2004, where an American bomb-dismantling team visits various danger spots in unfriendly neighborhoods.

The first scene, ironically, opens with a quote from award-winning anti-war journalist and author, Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction for war is a drug.” Cue screen fade.

The display re-emerges from within the lens of a remote-controlled robot making its way across a rocky road toward a suspicious-looking pile of sacks laid out on the ground near an old railway track. The audience catches brief glimpses of destruction from this unsteady viewpoint, as well as a shaky camera (through which most of the film is viewed) that narrows in and out on people and objects, as though they are all targets.

From these two perspectives, we see old blown-up cars and destroyed buildings juxtaposed beside the U.S. presence, shown here through the existence of a crushed Pepsi can and U.S. military men. A man’s voice sounds in the background while Iraqi civilians are told to evacuate. Cars continue to drive down a road very nearby. The civilians are either frantic or annoyed that they are being asked to exit the area.

Other Iraqis are also portrayed as disaffected, their blank, suspicious faces watching from balconies, windows, stores. Shots of expressionless or menacing Iraqis staring at American soldiers appear throughout, especially during action scenes that make up the majority of this film.

The Hurt Locker may be winning critical acclaim for its cinematic artistry, but it’s Web site suggests a different target audience. The site bares striking similarity to shoot ‘em-up video game Web sites like Call of Duty and Halo.

Complete with eerie, adrenaline-inspiring sound effects, flash clips and graphics taken from the film, the Web site caters to thrill-seeking, pro-military, weapons enthusiasts who want to see destruction and the technology and methods that breed it.

Boal, whose work on In the Valley of Elah was superior in its depth and complexity, apparently spent two weeks embedded with an explosives-ordnance-disposal team (EOD) team in Iraq. (Thus the repeated claims that the film is a fair and realistic portrayal of the situation in Iraq.)

But Guy Marot, a former bomb-disposal officer who also served in southern Iraq, points out in the Guardian, the film is full of “numerous glaring inaccuracies,” not the least of which is Jeremy Renner’s character, an impulsive, thrill-seeking team leader who endangers himself and everyone else on his team several times throughout the story:

Staff Sgt. William James … is basically insane. He’s supposed to have dealt with some 870 devices, which is completely unbelievable — it would mean dealing with three improvised explosive devices a day — and he just rocks up near a device and puts on a bomb suit.

If a bomb-disposal officer started behaving like this, he or she would be shipped home in minutes. James makes us look like hot-headed, irrational adrenaline junkies with no self-discipline. It’s immensely disrespectful to the many officers who have lost their lives.

When asked indirectly whether he thought his screenplay was narrow in perspective, during an interview in Vanity Fair, Boal was somewhat defensive:

I take a tiny issue with the premise of your question. I think the film investigates an awful lot. The IEDs [improvised explosive devices] are the central feature of the war. It’s a war of bombs. They are the key tactic of the insurgency; the success or failure of entire Iraq war depends on the ability to deal with IEDs. The movie is about the guys that deal with IEDs. So to me there couldn’t be a more topical, down-the-middle-of-the-plate look at the war.

While Boal is correct that IEDs are the cause of more than half of U.S. casualties in Iraq, his claim that “the success or failure of the entire Iraq war depends on the ability to deal with IEDs” is simplistic and confused (not unlike like some of the justifications given to launch the war in the first place).

In fact, Bigelow and Boal, like the characters in the film, never factor into the movie the question of why Iraq was invaded and occupied by the U.S. More importantly, they also never define what success or winning involves. This lack of context explains why the few non-action scenes in the movie seem misplaced or forced, like they were sloppily incorporated just for the sake of it.

Time reviewer Richard Corlisse concurs:

Except for a few digressive scenes — a solo sortie of personal vengeance, a conversation about what it all means — that could easily be cut from the 2-hour, 11-minute running time, The Hurt Locker is a near-perfect movie about men in war, men at work.

Indeed, the film only provides the perspectives of three American men working in a very dangerous military unit, with the lead character being the most unrealistic character of them all — an assessment even lead actor Renner agrees with:

“I got to spend a lot of time with the guys at Fort Irwin, and off base as well — to get in their heads a little bit, get to know them personally, which was even more important. I had to learn all the rules so I’d know how to break them. That was one of the toughest things when I was hanging out with these guys. There’s no one really like the character of James.”

But if the lead character is unrealistic, then what was realistic about the film? Certainly the anxiety portrayed by supporting actor Brian Geraghty, playing the young and inexperienced Spc. Owen Eldrige, is closer to real solders’ testimonies. The trauma Eldrige suffers after losing his first team leader enhances the fear he experiences every day of losing his own life.

Less realistic perhaps, in contrast to the “insane” but nevertheless endearing, altruistic and deeply caring James who is Caucasian, is that the most racist character in the film is the African American Sgt. J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), who refers to James as a “redneck piece of trailer trash.”

Unlike Sanborn, James actually cares about the Iraqis and risks his own life many times to save theirs. He even goes on a rampage after he mistakenly thinks that an Iraqi boy who he had gone out of his way to befriend was savagely murdered by insurgents and made into a human bomb. His quest to find answers takes him into an Iraqi professor’s home where he is greeted with joy: “I am very pleased to see CIA in my home,” after his unexpected presence is discovered in the house.

Is this supposed to be another realistic portrayal of the situation in Iraq? Are we to believe that Iraqis welcome the presence of the CIA in their country?

In another scene, which was the most implausible event in the entire film, James risks his life until the very last minute trying to help an Iraqi man who somehow made it through U.S. security checkpoints alive while frantically yelling that he had multiple bombs attached to his body. (This is in direct contrast to Sanborn, who always only does the minimum and even hints that he would be willing to kill the unpredictable James and make it look an accident, since all he wants to do is finish his tour and go home alive.)

Racial misrepresentations are however most easily observed in the film’s portrayals of Iraqis. Aside from the Iraqi boy James becomes smitten with (even he is Westernized to the extent that he sells American DVDs and introduces himself as “Beckham,” after the British soccer player), there is no Iraqi that is given any meaningful character development in the film. They are either the anonymous, sneering or menacing Arabs who watch the American soldiers while they are in high-stress situations, the victims of other evil Iraqis who murder young boys to put bombs inside their bodies, or the voiceless snipers and aiders of those determined to harm Americans and other Iraqis.

That a film that does not include a single Iraqi perspective is being hailed as an accurate portrayal of the situation in Iraq is either indicative of the blatant bias and possibly hidden intentions of the film’s creators and reviewers, or representative of the flawed view that continues to resonate within people’s minds about the war in Iraq.

These views, are, in case they need repeating: that this war was waged with good intentions, that the continued U.S. presence is actually beneficial to the Iraqis, that Iraqis are either idiots or savages, and that the American presence there is composed of lost or lonely soldiers who are just trying to live another day.

This after a reported 1 million Iraqis are now dead, and after we have seen such atrocities committed by U.S. troops as the torture at Abu Gharib, the Al-Mahmudiyah killings and the Haditha slayings.

On The Hurt Locker Web site’s “Acclaim” section, the following quote is attributed to The New Yorker: “Quite a feat. A classic of tension, fear and bravery that will be studied 20 years from now.”

If this proves to be true, what a sad prediction it would make. Ironically, a different quote, taken from a review of the film on military.com, is actually far more honest:

“The Hurt Locker is both a gripping portrayal of real-life sacrifice and heroism, and a layered, probing study of the soul-numbing rigors and potent allure of the modern battlefield.”

Pay attention to the last part of that statement. Listening to the young men in front of me discuss it after watching the film for the third time in the theater, I’m also confident that many like them left with the impression that while war may not be pretty, it sure can be fun.

When the film ends with James marching defiantly toward yet another bomb in slow motion, one can practically hear the parody song, “America, Fuck Yeah!” playing in the background.

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

— Voltaire

Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?

Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.

Somalian civil society and court system are so devastated from decades of war that one wouldn’t expect its citizens to have the means to raise serious legal challenges to Washington’s apparent belief that it can drop bombs on that sad land whenever it appears to serve the empire’s needs. But a group of Pakistanis, calling themselves “Lawyers Front for Defense of the Constitution,” and remembering just enough of their country’s more civilized past, has filed suit before the nation’s High Court to make the federal government stop American drone attacks on countless innocent civilians. The group declared that a Pakistan Army spokesman claimed to have the capability to shoot down the drones, but the government had made a policy decision not to.¹

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, behaves like the world is one big lawless Somalia and the United States is the chief warlord. On October 20 the president again displayed his deep love of peace by honoring some 80 veterans of Vietnam at the White House, after earlier awarding their regiment a Presidential Unit Citation for its “extraordinary heroism and conspicuous gallantry.”² War correspondent Michael Herr has honored Vietnam soldiers in his own way: “We took space back quickly, expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality. Our machine was devastating. And versatile. It could do everything but stop.”³

What would it take for the Obamaniacs to lose any of the stars in their eyes for their dear Nobel Laureate? Perhaps if the president announced that he was donating his prize money to build a monument to the First — “Oh What a Lovely” — World War? The memorial could bear the inscription: “Let us remember that Rudyard Kipling coaxed his young son John into enlisting in this war. John died his first day in combat. Kipling later penned these words:

    “If any question why we died,
    Tell them, because our fathers lied.”

“The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the legislature.” — James Madison, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 2, 1798.

A wise measure, indeed, but one American president after another has dragged the nation into bloody war without the approval of Congress, the American people, international law, or world opinion. Millions marched against the war in Iraq before it began. Millions more voted for Barack Obama in the belief that he shared their repugnance for America’s Wars Without End. They had no good reason to believe this — Obama’s campaign was filled with repeated warlike threats against Iran and Afghanistan — but they wanted to believe it.

If machismo explains war, if men love war and fighting so much, why do we have to compel them with conscription on pain of imprisonment? Why do the powers-that-be have to wage advertising campaigns to seduce young people to enlist in the military? Why do young men go to extreme lengths to be declared exempt for physical or medical reasons? Why do they flee into exile to avoid the draft? Why do they desert the military in large numbers in the midst of war? Why don’t Sweden or Switzerland or Costa Rica have wars? Surely there are many macho men in those countries.

“Join the Army, visit far away places, meet interesting people, and kill them.”

War licenses men to take part in what would otherwise be described as psychopathic behavior.

“Sometimes I think it should be a rule of war that you have to see somebody up close and get to know him before you can shoot him.” — Colonel Potter, M*A*S*H

“In the struggle of Good against Evil, it’s always the people who get killed.” — Eduardo Galeano

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a Taliban leader declared that “God is on our side, and if the world’s people try to set fire to Afghanistan, God will protect us and help us.”⁴

“I trust God speaks through me. Without that, I couldn’t do my job.” — George W. Bush, 2004, during the war in Iraq.⁵

“I believe that Christ died for my sins and I am redeemed through him. That is a source of strength and sustenance on a daily basis.” — Barack Obama.⁶

Why don’t church leaders forbid Catholics from joining the military with the same fervor they tell Catholics to stay away from abortion clinics?

God, war, the World Bank, the IMF, free trade agreements, NATO, the war on terrorism, the war on drugs, “anti-war” candidates, and Nobel Peace Prizes can be seen as simply different instruments for the advancement of US imperialism.

Tom Lehrer, the marvelous political songwriter of the 1950s and 60s, once observed: “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.” Perhaps each generation has to learn anew what a farce that prize has become, or always was. Its recipients include quite a few individuals who had as much commitment to a peaceful world as the Bush administration had to truth. One example currently in the news: Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres which won the prize in 1998. Kouchner, now France’s foreign secretary, has long been urging military action against Iran. Last week he called upon Iran to make a nuclear deal acceptable to the Western powers or else there’s no telling what horror Israel might inflict upon the Iranians. Israel “will not tolerate an Iranian bomb,” he said. “We know that, all of us.”⁷ There is a word for such a veiled threat — “extortion”, something normally associated with the likes of a Chicago mobster of the 1930s … “Do like I say and no one gets hurt.” Or as Al Capone once said: “Kind words and a machine gun will get you more than kind words alone.”

The continuing desperate quest to find something good to say about US foreign policy

Not the crazy, hateful right wing, not racist or disrupting public meetings, not demanding birth certificates … but the respectable right, holding high positions in academia and in every administration, Republican or Democrat, members of the highly esteemed Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s Joshua Kurlantzick, a “Fellow for Southeast Asia” at CFR, writing in the equally esteemed and respectable Washington Post about how — despite all the scare talk — it wouldn’t be so bad if Afghanistan actually turned into another Vietnam because “Vietnam and the United States have become close partners in Southeast Asia, exchanging official visits, building an important trading and strategic relationship and fostering goodwill between governments, businesses and people on both sides. … America did not win the war there, but over time it has won the peace. … American war veterans publicly made peace with their old adversaries … A program [to exchange graduate students and professors] could ensure that the next generation of Afghan leaders sees an image of the United States beyond that of the war.”⁸ And so on.

On second thought, this is not so much right-wing jingoism as it is … uh … y’know … What’s the word? … Ah yes, “pointless.” Just what is the point? Germany and Israel are on excellent terms … therefore, what point can we make about the Holocaust?

As to America not winning the war in Vietnam, that’s worse than pointless. It’s wrong. Most people believe that the United States lost the war. But by destroying Vietnam to its core, by poisoning the earth, the water, the air, and the gene pool for generations, the US in fact achieved its primary purpose: it left Vietnam a basket case, preventing the rise of what might have been a good development option for Asia, an alternative to the capitalist model; for the same reason the United States has been at war with Cuba for 50 years, making sure that the Cuban alternative model doesn’t look as good as it would if left in peace.

And in all the years since the Vietnam War ended, the millions of Vietnamese suffering from diseases and deformities caused by US sprayings of the deadly chemical “Agent Orange” have received from the United States no medical care, no environmental remediation, no compensation, and no official apology. That’s exactly what the Afghans — their land and/or their bodies permeated with depleted uranium, unexploded cluster bombs, and a witch’s brew of other charming chemicals — have to look forward to in Kurlantzick’s Brave New World. “If the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan eventually resembles the one we now have with Vietnam, we should be overjoyed,” he writes. God Bless America.

One further thought about Afghanistan: The suggestion that the United States could, and should, solve its (self-created) dilemma by simply getting out of that god-forsaken place is dismissed out of hand by the American government and media; even some leftist critics of US policy are reluctant to embrace so bold a step — Who knows what horror may result? But when the Soviet Union was in the process of quitting Afghanistan (during the period of May 1988-February 1989) who in the West insisted that they remain? For any reason. No matter what the consequences of their withdrawal. The reason the Russians could easier leave than the Americans can now is that the Russians were not there for imperialist reasons, such as oil and gas pipelines. Similar to why the US can’t leave Iraq.

Washington’s eternal “Cuba problem” — the one they can’t admit to

“Here we go again. I suppose old habits die hard,” said US Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, on October 28 before the General Assembly voted on the annual resolution to end the US embargo against Cuba. “The hostile language we have just heard from the Foreign Minister of Cuba,” she continued, “seems straight out of the Cold War era and is not conducive to constructive progress.” Her 949-word statement contained not a word about the embargo; not very conducive to a constructive solution to the unstated “Cuba problem,” the one about Cuba inspiring the Third World, the fear that the socialist virus would spread.

Since the early days of the Cuban Revolution assorted anti-communists and capitalist true-believers around the world have been relentless in publicizing the failures, real and alleged, of life in Cuba; each perceived shortcoming is attributed to the perceived shortcomings of socialism — It’s simply a system that can’t work, we are told, given the nature of human beings, particularly in this modern, competitive, globalized, consumer-oriented world.

In response to such criticisms, defenders of Cuban society have regularly pointed out how the numerous draconian sanctions imposed by the United States since 1960 have produced many and varied scarcities and sufferings and are largely responsible for most of the problems pointed out by the critics. The critics, in turn, say that this is just an excuse, one given by Cuban apologists for every failure of their socialist system. However, it would be very difficult for the critics to prove their point. The United States would have to drop all sanctions and then we’d have to wait long enough for Cuban society to make up for lost time and recover what it was deprived of, and demonstrate what its system can do when not under constant assault by the most powerful force on earth.

In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for economic losses and loss of life during the first 39 years of this aggression. The suit held Washington responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and the wounding and disabling of 2,099 others. In the ten years since, these figures have of course all increased. The sanctions, in numerous ways large and small, make acquiring many kinds of products and services from around the world much more difficult and expensive, often impossible; frequently, they are things indispensable to Cuban medicine, transportation or industry; simply transferring money internationally has become a major problem for the Cubans, with banks being heavily punished by the United States for dealing with Havana; or the sanctions mean that Americans and Cubans can’t attend professional conferences in each other’s country.

These examples are but a small sample of the excruciating pain inflicted by Washington upon the body, soul and economy of the Cuban people.

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah.” We don’t hear much of that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the General Assembly on the resolution, which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”. This is how the vote has gone:

How it began, from State Department documents: Within a few months of the Cuban revolution of January 1959, the Eisenhower administration decided “to adjust all our actions in such a way as to accelerate the development of an opposition in Cuba which would bring about a change in the Cuban Government, resulting in a new government favorable to U.S. interests.”⁹

On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”¹⁰ Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo.

1. The Nation (Pakistan English-language daily newspaper), October 10, 2009.
2. Washington Post, October 20, 2009.
3. Michael Herr, Dispatches (1991), p.71.
4. New York Daily News, September 19, 2001.
5. Washington Post, July 20, 2004, p.15, citing the New Era (Lancaster, PA), from a private meeting of Bush with Amish families on July 9. The White House denied that Bush had said it. (Those Amish folks do lie a lot you know.)
6. Washington Post, August 17, 2008.
7. Daily Telegraph (UK), October 26, 2009.
8. Washington Post, October 25, 2009.
9. Department of State, “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba” (1991), p.742.
10. Ibid., p.885

Al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and the Taliban’s Mullah Muhammad Omar — Washington’s principal enemy leaders in the Afghan war — are not only alive, free and still taunting the White House after all these years, but appear to believe they now have the upper hand in Afghanistan.

Bin-Laden’s purpose has always been to draw the United States ever deeper into armed conflict with Islamic society in order to degrade America’s image, undermine its economy, and gain recruits. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan played directly into al-Qaeda’s hands, as will Washington’s effort to widen the Afghan conflict, especially as it stabs into Pakistan and alienates its masses of people in the process.

So far the two wars launched by President George W. Bush have cost the U.S. the antagonism of much of the Muslim world, serious erosions of its own democracy and reputation, and over a trillion dollars. Even if the wars end soon, says Nobel Prize economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, the overall expenditure — including everything from long term care for severely injured troops to interest on the war debt — will exceed $3 trillion, enough to end world poverty and hunger.

Speaking about Afghanistan this summer, President Barack Obama declared: “This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.” Many war opponents argue that it is indeed a war of choice, and that international police work would have been far more successful and just.

We’ll discuss this later in the article, along with the fact that the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, and for that matter the Sept. 11, 2001, tragedy, need not have occurred had Washington taken less warlike actions in the key year of 1978, as well as 2001 and 2003. The fact that the U.S. has intervened deeply and for long periods over the past 31 years in a civil war in poverty-stricken, virtually pre-industrial Afghanistan, is probably not understood by many Americans.

Upon assuming office, President Obama instructed the Pentagon to devise a winning strategy for Afghanistan. Within weeks the White House agreed to a new war plan submitted by Gen. Stanley McChrystal that was supposed to lead to a U.S. victory. In March, Obama expanded the Afghan war when he heeded a Pentagon request and ordered 21,000 more U.S. troops to join the battle.

Several months later, however, McChrystal reported that the situation has deteriorated to the point where the war — ever more clearly displaying its neocolonial aspect — “will likely result in failure” within a year unless his forces increase by a minimum of 45,000 troops and a maximum of 80,000.

Obama has been engaged in “rethinking” war strategy since receiving the general’s verdict several weeks ago. He is expected to soon decide whether to deploy a larger number of additional troops to join 68,000 American fighters already scheduled for Afghanistan and about 50,000 NATO soldiers. This total presumably includes the 13,000 troops Obama also deployed without informing the American people, until the Washington Post broke the story in mid-October.

The White House is investigating two options for continuing the conflict — both of which would intensify the war and spread it more deeply into Pakistan. As briefly summarized by The Economist Oct. 17 they are “manpower-intensive counter-insurgency (COIN), which aims to win over the Afghan population and build a stable government; and counter-terrorism, which seeks to deal narrowly with threats to the West, mainly through air strikes or raids by Special Forces.”

McChrystal, who appears to be supported by top Pentagon brass, backs COIN, which includes a counter-terrorism aspect as well as “winning the hearts and minds” of the Afghan people, an effort that utterly failed when tried in Vietnam, and will fail in Afghanistan. Vice President Joseph Biden and some other administration advisers back the lower intensity counter-terrorism option without greatly expanding the number of troops or engaging in “nation building.”

If McChrystal’s minimum request is accepted it means a combined U.S.-NATO force of over 160,000 troops, not including scores of thousands of “contractors” doing duties previously performed by soldiers until recent years.

Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector who testified before the war that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, had this to say about McChrystal’s request for more troops in a Truthdig.com article Oct. 29:

McChrystal operates under the illusion that American military power can provide a shield from behind which Afghanistan can remake itself into a viable modern society. He has deluded himself and others into believing that the people of Afghanistan want to be part of such a grand social experiment, and furthermore that they will tolerate the United States being in charge. The reality of Afghan history, culture and society argue otherwise. The Taliban, once a defeated entity in the months following the initial American military incursion into Afghanistan, are resurgent and growing stronger every day. The principle source of the Taliban’s popularity is the resentment of the Afghan people toward the American occupation and the corrupt proxy government of Hamid Karzai. There is nothing an additional 40,000 American troops will be able to do to change that basic equation.

At this stage the U.S, NATO and their Afghan forces enjoy at least a 12-1 advantage in troop strength against the opposing forces, not to mention air power, drone attacks and an enormous technological, logistics and communications advantage. This increases to 20-1 if McChrystal’s minimum kicks in — and that’s evidently still not enough to defeat the insurgency. The latest word from the White House and Pentagon is that the new strategy may devolve to holding Afghanistan’s 10 largest cities and leaving the countryside to fend for itself, except for air strikes.

Our guess is that Obama will view the issue politically, as well as militarily, and being an inveterate centrist will try to merge both positions, increasing the number of troops but fewer than McChrystal desires. No one knows for sure, but he is intentionally creating suspense to magnify the importance of his eventual plan.

The Washington Post reported Oct. 26 that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently conducted theoretical war games to examine “the likely outcome of inserting 44,000 more troops into the country to conduct a full-scale counterinsurgency effort aimed at building a stable Afghan government that can control most of the country. It also examined adding 10,000 to 15,000 more soldiers and Marines as part of an approach that the military has dubbed ‘counterterrorism plus.’”

Complicating the situation, Washington’s hand-picked Afghan leader, President Hamid Karzai, is presiding over a thoroughly corrupt government and an alienated population. His brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is a drug lord and wheeler-dealer extraordinaire, who has been on the CIA’s payroll since the beginning of the war, along with innumerable warlords and disreputable officials. The UN has ascertained that last August’s elections were so fraudulent, mainly by far from Karzai’s side, the a run-off election was set for Nov. 7 between the incumbent and his independent rival, Abdullah Abdullah, M.D., who won 30.5% of the vote.

On Nov. 1, Abdullah — who had long been associated with the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance, for which he was a deputy foreign minister at one time — announced his withdrawal from the second round voting. He attributed his decision to the refusal by the government and election commission to accept his recommendations for changing balloting rules to prevent foul play.

The Obama Administration has been far more critical of Karzai than Bush, and it is said to have preferred a Karzai-Abdullah power-sharing arrangement to Karzai alone. Since Abdullah withdrew without calling for an election boycott or public demonstrations on his own behalf, he may yet end up associated with the new government in some fashion.

Even though the election affair has not transpired precisely the way Washington wished, it will have little impact on White House war plans. President Obama, who heretofore identified Afghanistan as the main danger, not Iraq, now says the danger has spread to Pakistan as well — an unanticipated but logical result of the Bush wars. The tribal areas of Pakistan are the target of increased U.S. air power, missile attacks, pilotless drones, and Special Forces engagements.

The Obama Administration is exerting heavy pressure on the Islamabad government of President Asif Ali Zardari, and investing another $7.5 billion in new aid, to intensify efforts to crush al-Qaeda, the Pakistan Taliban (which was only formed in 2007) and other groups in the mountainous western section of the country. This has created increasing anti-American sentiment among the masses of people in Pakistan who think Zardari is a virtual puppet of Washington. In a public opinion poll last August, some 60% of the Pakistani people view the U.S. as the greatest threat to their country compared to India or al-Qaeda.

In order to prevail in Afghanistan — or in Af-Pak, as the two-front war is described — President Obama evidently is considering a major compromise with the Taliban. Associated Press reported Oct. 9 that “President Obama is prepared to accept some Taliban involvement in Afghanistan’s political future,” both locally and in the central government. In addition the White House and Pentagon will seek to bribe the Taliban to stop attacking U.S. troops, as was done with the Sunni resistance in Iraq, by inducing former opponents to get on Washington’s payroll. The Pentagon is putting aside $1.3 billion to pay Taliban effectives who wish to “reintegrate into Afghan society.”

Most Americans have little understanding of what’s going on in Afghanistan, and no knowledge of the complex events that led up to President Bush’s bombardment and invasion in October 2001, weeks after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. The fact is that today’s war in Afghanistan is one of several disastrous consequences of U.S. interference in Afghanistan starting in 1978.

Land-locked, rugged, Texas-sized with a population of about 29 million, and strategically located where the rich geopolitical resources of the Middle East and Central Asia converge, Afghanistan gained independence from colonial Great Britain in 1919. A monarchy was established in this desperately poor country until overthrown by a military coup in 1973. Another coup took place in April 1978, this time led by left forces and military officers determined to enact reforms to “bring Afghanistan into the 20th century.”

The resulting ruling group, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), set about introducing modernizing reforms, including laws conferring equality upon the country’s oppressed women, and improving the lot of working people and subsistence farmers. The law granting rights to women was observed in Kabul and some big cities, but usually ignored elsewhere in territory controlled by the warlords and Islamic fundamentalists.

The PDPA’s immediate establishment of closer relations with the neighboring Soviet Union set off alarm bells in Washington, which feared Moscow would gain an important pawn in the Cold War geopolitical chess game. Within months President Jimmy Carter and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski decided to subvert the new leftist regime by “secretly” aiding right-wing warlords and ultra-orthodox religious groups who were beginning an armed struggle to overthrow the PDPA government.

The planning was fully operational by mid-1979. Working with the Pakistani intelligence agency over the years, the CIA poured a minimum of $8 billion into the coffers of warlords and fundamentalist fighting groups. By early 1979, CIA operatives started training the mujahedeen (the collective name of the Muslim fighters) at camps it set up in Pakistan, then in Afghanistan itself. The U.S. also supplied them with sophisticated arms (such as Stinger antiaircraft missiles), military advisers, and logistical information for the next decade.

Writing in Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, journalist-author Ahmed Rashid said the training camps “became virtual universities for future Islamic radicalism.” In the words of William Blum in his book, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, “The war had been a rallying point for Muslim zealots from throughout the world…. Thousands of veterans of the war… dispersed to many lands to inflame and train a new generation of terrorists ready to drink the cup of martyrdom.”

Among the recipients of U.S. largess and support in the mid-1980s was Osama bin-Laden and his new group of mostly foreign fighters in Afghanistan that by 1988 was formally titled al-Qaeda. (The name means, “the Base,” a reference to their training camp.) Bin Laden — the scion of a wealthy Saudi Arabian family — also received support from Pakistan and from sources in Saudi Arabia.

By the summer of 1979, the right wing rebel forces were becoming a serious threat to the Kabul regime, which eventually requested that Moscow send troops to defend the regime. One year and nine months after the PDPA took power, the Red Army began arriving in December 1979. (We specify the exact time period because the Western mass media often suggest that deep U.S. involvement began after, not at least a half year or more before, the arrival of Soviet troops, and rarely mention their presence was requested by the Kabul government.

As Brzezinski bragged many years later, Washington’s plan from the beginning was to create conditions that would oblige the Soviet Union to become militarily involved in Afghanistan’s civil war, and suffer the same fate as the U.S. in Vietnam in the earlier 1970s. It worked. In time the Red Army found itself sinking in the quagmire that earned Afghanistan the title “Graveyard of Empires.”

For the next several years following the arrival of Soviet troops, the White House — now occupied by the rightist Reagan administration — continued to build up the rebel forces, many of which had fought each other before the 1978 coup. In time they were joined by up to 40,000 jihadist recruits from over 40 countries in the Muslim world. During the mid-1980s, President Ronald Reagan began to cynically describe the warlords and fundamentalist armies as “freedom fighters.”

Moscow began to withdraw in 1987 and completed the project by early 1989. The left wing government held on until it was brutally crushed in 1992. The subsequent four years of civil war between the various rebel forces — in which up to 65,000 people were killed in Kabul — resulted in a Taliban victory in 1996. The earlier reforms were quickly abolished, particularly those freeing women, and a draconian form of Islam was imposed throughout the country. The Taliban — which is a national organization as opposed to international al-Qaeda, was formed in 1994 by Mullah Omar and consisted of the most orthodox Afghan jihadists. The name Taliban means “religious students.”

The consequences of the Carter/Reagan intervention in Afghanistan made it possible for 19 Al-Qaeda operatives armed with box cutters to hijack four airliners to attack symbols of U.S. military and financial power in Washington and New York in the late summer of 2001.

The political reasons behind 9/11 included opposition to America’s support for the suppression of the Palestinians; anger over the 1991-2003 U.S.-UN sanctions that caused over a million Muslim deaths in Iraq, half of them children; Washington’s manipulative intervention in Middle East since the end of World War II; and the Pentagon’s stationing of troops in Muslim countries, particularly Saudi Arabia.

Even after the 9/11 tragedy, the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan need never have occurred. It was a result of Bush’s bizarre decision to define the attack as a declaration of war against the United States instead of a gross criminal act by a small non-state organization of perhaps up to 1,000 active adherents only partially based in Afghanistan and largely composed of non-Afghans.

The rational alternative — worldwide police work, sanctions, homeland defense and other stringent measures — would certainly have been more successful against al-Qaeda, and far less costly for the United States, than eight years of fruitless war. Bush spurned this alternative not because war was a “necessity,” as the Obama Administration alleges, but to pursue neoconservative imperialist objectives for obtaining hegemony in the region under Bush’s banner of an endless “global war on terrorism.”

Further, just before the invasion, Taliban leader Omar told the U.S. he would turn over bin-Laden to a third country if Washington didn’t attack Afghanistan, as Bush was about to do. Mullah Omar had one condition: he asked the White House to provide evidence that the al-Qaeda leader was actually guilty. Bush’s response: “There’s no need to negotiate…. There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty.”

As the American attack started, CIA teams were already on the ground in Afghanistan, once again paying off their old retainers, the warlords, with thick packages of $100 bills to intensify the civil war against the Taliban in concert with the invading Americans. At least $70 million was distributed in the first months of the war, mostly to the Northern Alliance, the big loser for power in Kabul in the ’90s.

Bush followed the Afghan adventure with a second war of choice in March 2003 — the transparently unjust and illegal invasion of Iraq. It turned into a costly stalemate but 120,000 U.S. troops remain in the country, and the Iraqi people continue to suffer mass privation and pain.

Afghanistan is not Washington’s “good war,” though it is now characterized in that fashion not only by the Republican right wing but by President Obama and many Democrats who were critical of “Bush’s” Iraq war. These are often the same “peace” Democrats who supported their own party’s unjust three-month bombardment of Yugoslavia (Serbia) in 1999. Obama was viewed as a peace candidate in the elections because he was critical of the Iraq war, though he nonetheless always voted as a senator to fund both wars, and made it clear he wanted to fight in Afghanistan.

Now that a Democratic president is directing the war, Bush’s campaign against Afghanistan for regime-change and long-term U.S. occupation has become a new type of “humanitarian intervention.” This has gravely weakened the American antiwar movement, which is largely based on Democratic voters, but may not be permanent. Many Democrats of the Vietnam era eventually turned on President Lyndon Johnson after two or three years to the extent that he could not run for reelection. Then, again, that was during a decade-long period of mass movements for social change in America, as opposed to the conservative reaction that has basically continued for some 30 years.

In our view, as we wrote in 2001 just after the invasion: “If any brutal right-wing regime deserved to be overthrown by its own people, the Taliban is the perfect choice. But for the imperial superpower to arrogate the task to itself, with its planes, missiles, self-interest and hypocrisy, bodes ill for the long-suffering Afghan masses and the region in general. Indeed, this projection of U.S. military power deeper into strategically important Central Asia brings Washington closer to its goal of hegemony over the neighboring Islamic former Soviet republics, now discovered to be awash in oil and gas reserves.”

Afghanistan is now Obama’s war. Speaking to a military audience recently, he sounded rather like his predecessor when he declared that fighting the war was necessary because “those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again.” So far, Obama’s troop buildup has inspired more attacks from the Taliban and other oppositional forces in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the situation can only get worse in proportion to the number of U.S. troops sent to the region.

What is Washington’s actual mission in the Af-Pak war? In a statement May 19, Gen. David Petraeus, who heads the U.S. Central Command, declared that “The mission is to ensure that Afghanistan does not again become a sanctuary for al-Qaeda and other transnational extremists.”

This evidently is why President Obama is widening the war in Afghanistan and western Pakistan. But is this necessary? The White House acknowledges that there are at most 100 members of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan at this point, but indicates that more have been driven across the border to Pakistan, without specifying how many.

Is it up to 500 perhaps? Could it be high as 1,000 adherents to al-Qaeda and other “transnational” extremists? For some reason the Pentagon doesn’t say, though it certainly must have a good estimate. In Afghanistan there are many thousands who are associated with the Taliban and similar groups, but these organizations operate strictly within their own borders, as does the Pakistani Taliban, and in no way have threatened to attack the United States.

Does it really require the killing of many hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, trillions of American dollars, and the fixated attention of our entire society to deny al-Qaeda a possible safe haven where they can plot to attack the United States? Wouldn’t it be better and far less costly to rely upon international police work, high technology surveillance, tight homeland security, sanctions if absolutely needed, and other means short of war, fair and foul, at Washington’s disposal?

Can it plausibly be denied that this would have been the better alternative in 2001, given the disastrous failure of Bush’s wars? In our opinion the answer is of course not, and it’s the better alternative in 2009 as well. What’s to prevent the Obama Administration from accepting this non-military alternative today, now that the neoconservatives are out of power? Two reasons present themselves: politics and international policy.

In terms of politics: Obama and the Democratic Party would rather wage these self-defeating wars than to be accused by the know-nothings of “cutting and running,” of being “weak on defense,” and of “lacking patriotism.” They fear these right-wing attacks will cost them elections in today’s highly conservative America, so instead of fighting back politically they bend the knee further to militarism and war.

In terms of international policy: Since the end of World War II — and particularly after the implosion of the USSR and the socialist camp two decades ago — the U.S. has functioned as the world’s dominating hegemon based on its willingness to use overwhelming military strength to extend its economic and political parameters throughout the world. A large number of Americans have been duped into believing it’s all being done to spread democracy and to keep people safe from the terrorists.

What has this gotten America lately? The U.S. is a declining superpower in deep economic difficulties. The recession, foreclosures and unemployment are crushing tens of millions of American families. Even without a recession, economic inequality is rampant; government social services are primitive; the civil infrastructure is becoming a shambles; the healthcare system remains a wreck, although a relative improvement may be forthcoming; and our political system, where the choices are confined to the right and center, needs an overhaul.

Meanwhile Washington’s wasting a trillion dollars a year on past, present and future wars “to save the world” (the $680 billion Pentagon budget Obama just signed is only part of it).

Antiwar critic Andrew Bacevich, a fairly conservative former Army officer and currently a professor and author of several important books on the military and U.S. policy, wrote an article in Commonweal Aug. 15 that contained a couple of paragraphs that fit in here:

“If the United States today has a saving mission, it is to save itself. Speaking in the midst of another unnecessary war back in 1967, Martin Luther King got it exactly right: ‘Come home, America.’ The prophet of that era urged his countrymen to take on ‘the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.’

“Dr. King’s list of evils may need a bit of tweaking — in our own day, the sins requiring expiation number more than three. Yet in his insistence that we first heal ourselves, King remains today the prophet we ignore at our peril. That Barack Obama should fail to realize this qualifies as not only ironic but inexplicable.”

We profoundly agree with this quote except for “inexplicable.” Obama has a number of attractive qualities, but he is a centrist in a political party of the center/center-right — an improvement over the competing mass party of the right/neocon-right/far-right, but hardly the politician to lead the struggle Bacevich suggests. Just getting him to avoid widening the unnecessary Af-Pak war any further, much less ending it, is daunting enough.

A majority of the American people want an end to the war, including a large majority of Democratic Party voters — and Obama says he is susceptible to public pressure. The problem is that the Democrats, who constitute the base of the U.S. peace constituency, left the movement in droves after their party won the elections. They don’t want to publicly protest Obama’s actions when he is under continual Republican attack on everything but the war.

This could change as the war continues and casualties mount, but it will have to be a major change with millions of people out in the streets demanding peace. Until then, the informal coalition of Republicans who vigorously uphold the war and “peace” Democrats who won’t stand against it will provide the White House with the public support it needs to continue the war indefinitely.

The U.S. decision to support the Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan in 1978 ultimately changed history in ways very costly to the peoples of the region and the United States. We dread to imagine the unintended consequences that will emerge from President Obama’s continuing display of American imperial hubris in the Af-Pak war.

Doppelganger theorists point out that Kim suffered a serious stroke in 2008. But since then, North Korean media reported 122 official visits he made to “factories, state-run farms, military bases and the rest… to prove, presumably, that Mr. Kim was alive and well and very much in charge.”

Which possibility is less likely? That Kim made a miraculous recovery and adopted a grueling ceremonial schedule? Or that a stand-in cut the ribbons and took the bows? Cynics point out that Mr. Clinton himself has not been real since sometime in the 1980s, when he was replaced by an unprincipled testosterone-driven opportunist.

We should not be surprised that international diplomacy is now the practice of surrogates. Many of our military functions are subcontracted to Blackwater, Halliburton and other branches of Murder, Inc. We outsource torture and invade countries with (often mis) guided missiles. We live in the wondrous age of clones and drones.

Our political discourse is as synthetic as the foods we eat, driven by a demagogic logic that bears scant relation to reality. Our print and broadcast pundits prefer to generate outrageous headlines for a quick ratings spike than to craft helpful or thoughtful commentary. Hence the (oxy)moronic “Fox News” network. Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly are as authentic and toxic as Kim Jong-il, alive or dead.

Television substitutes for millions of “personal” lives. Celebrities act as stand-ins for those who would rather watch than live. Sports and movie stars are grotesquely overpaid because mass audiences find it easier and more comforting to cheer and jeer for designated others than to puzzle out their own, less predictable, existences.

Our addictions to chemical additives and fast food in lieu of natural nutrients make us fat. Our addictions to trash talk and the mindless incitements of half-educated pundits and politicians degrade our mental and emotional functions. We are increasingly unable to differentiate garbage calories from natural energy or malignant chat from substantive civil discourse.

Advertisements once cautioned us to “Accept no substitutes.” But substitutes are mostly what we have now. Was the man who ran for president on a platform of positive change and moral responsibility abducted during his pre-inaugural trip to Hawaii? Was he replaced by the business-as-usual guy now in the White House, who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Barack Obama?

Birthers who obsess about Obama’s citizenship are sniffing at the wrong fireplug. It’s not where Obama was born that matters, but where he went.

Alexis de Tocqueville warned in the 1830s that a standing army was a threat to democratic society. We now have one of the largest standing armies in world history. Military priorities supersede our increasingly critical social and civic needs. We squander our resources and terrorize innocent human beings by bombing Afghan villages instead of building schools and highways in our own country or providing health care for our citizens.

War is not a valid substitute for rational foreign or domestic policies. Where is the president, the politician or the pundit who will say so?

In a world of surrogates, substitutes and clones, a body-double for Kim Jong-il is not so scandalous. The original dictator – son of another dictator – did not seem all that fabulous a fellow anyway. So it’s hard to mourn his passing, or lament that phonies may be impersonating him.

In fact, maybe whoever’s pulling the strings could design a more humane model of Kim for the coming decades. Then we could follow their lead and improve all the ersatz bull dada which rules our own culture and our own lives.

The Monster returns. He’s unconventional, though. Not with the horns and the fangs and all. But with dark circles, the sunken, dimmed eyes, the creased-up face with his advancing years, the silver in his hair. Sun-beaten, sun-worn, threadbare — my definition of the Monster. The definers have hammered the definition on me with authoritative finality. I succumb — like everybody else. I ought to believe he is dangerous. I am supposed to condemn him, get frightened of him, loathe him, spit in his face, and righteously pronounce him horrendously sinful, perverted, hideous, damned, hell-bound, with all the wealth of jingoistic and religious rhetoric at my disposal. I cannot but obey. I join the chorus. Like everybody else.

And I kill me softly. I stifle the human essence, the still small voice that resists. The voice that questions. The militant voice — always politically incorrect. It questions ‘why?’ It does not allow me the comfort of following the crowd and biding my time. It discomforts me with the instinct to seek out the answers for myself. It makes me wonder why I have to buy the definition and believe that the pathetic grey man was a vile monster. It makes me wonder why, after all, he was a monster, perhaps — or so it seems?

I do not judge. I do not allow myself the terrible privilege. I just wonder, and want my right to ask questions. I want my right to feel, to understand. I want my right to be and stay human. And I simply wonder what went wrong…

In 2001, when the United States pounded Afghanistan with their firepower just across the border on a flimsy pretext, my people here in Pakistan were hurt too, because the national boundary running through the northern tribes does not cut across eon-old tribal affiliation. With the Pashtuns on the other side of the Durand Line under occupation, the Pashtuns on this side considered it a tribal obligation and religious duty to assist. That is the ethic running in the blood of the Pathans — the ethic they grow up with, just as their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers had grown up with it. You cannot hope to extort it from the hearts of men. The freedom they prize is a treasure they would not give up for the world. This fierce defence of their freedom is something you simply cannot hope to extricate. Not with all your arsenal, your marines armed to the teeth.

The United States and its ‘non NATO ally’ failed to understand this simple truth. Afghanistan bled, and Pakistani tribesmen, those once-upon-a-time heroic sons of the soil suffered with it. Yet we did not fall to brutalizing each other. The myths, on the other hand — Terrorism, Extremism, Fanaticism, Fundamentalism, Enlightened Moderation — continued to proliferate, and the Great Fiction encroached upon sanities. Yet we did not fall to brutalizing each other.

Till, a couple of years down the line, the Former General imperiously ordered an operation in Waziristan. It came to pass. In the thick of the darkness, in the hush of the night. The country taken by surprise. In clandestine moves, the trigger-happy military men advanced and we waited with bated breath. The usual collateral damage. Men, women, children, masjids, madrassas, schools, earthen huts. With a fell sweep, on orders of a Dictator. We still did not fall to brutalizing each other.

Things took their logical course and the resistance began. A Pashtun resistance. Earlier, aggravated by their country’s alliance with the US and the establishment of American military bases in the north to assist the NATO-sponsored slaughter and occupation in Afghanistan, the Pashtuns had expressed resentment. Their government had refused to budge. Now, they were cannon fodder, officially. And for Somebody Else’s interests.

Faced with a guerrilla resistance in a rugged terrain by ruddy mountain dwellers imbued with the tribesman’s fighting spirit, the khakis were in a quagmire soon enough. To save face, and the little that was left, they sought reconciliation with the irate tribesmen. It materialized, with pledges on both sides — the tribesmen agreeing to put down arms and let go the foreign militants (stationed in Pakistan ‘officially,’ and by Washington’s invitation, since the Soviet-Afghan war); and the Army agreeing to end the operation. We dared to hope.

Till the drone zeroed in on what we call Sovereignty. And on human lives — madrassas, schools, wedding parties, followed by official apologies for ‘misguided missiles’ or ‘intelligence failure.’ Collateral Damage. Full Stop.

In 2006, before the TTP (Tehreek Taliban Pakistan) was ever heard of, right after a successful settlement between the government and the tribal leaders which promised a durable peace in the restive north, American UAV ‘drones’ battered a village searching ‘militants’, leading to several civilian deaths. And so the talks derailed, the guns were picked up again. With blessings from Washington. The TTP raised its head shortly afterwards — a group much more militant and even violent in character than the original Afghan Taliban of yore who do not very proudly profess association with these Pakistani neo-Taliban. The TTP was a child begotten of the vicious cycle of violence and injustice.

The Pakistan govenment’s complicity in the intermittent and incessant drone attacks is poorly disguised by pathetic foreign office spokespeople. First there were the official apologies. Then, the flabbergasted attempts to explain the bloody ‘deal’. And soon enough there were none. Just the raining missiles and the human mincemeat. And handshakes and high-profile visits.

But the victims do not forget their dead. They are not taken in with prettily phrased official apologies which cannot bring their dead back. The hurt festers. It turns poison. It maddens. It dehumanizes. It turns men into suicide bombs. It makes life pointless, worthless. It makes the world a cruel, hateful place. It ignites the sense of honour and incites a burning revenge. And it makes my maddened countrymen, brutalized by unashamed tyrants, fall to brutalizing one another.

And it is as simple as that.

Blending into the chorus, soaking up the definitions, the headlines, the jingoism and the propaganda, the simple fact gets lost somewhere in the morass of our sensibilities. We righteously condemn, we judge, we toss our heads from side to side with disapproval and nod it up and down in assent. Just where and when we are wanted to. And we harden up to this simple fact, failing to understand. Failing to question. Dehumanizing ourselves.

Journalist Hamid Mir recounted his firsthand experience of visiting the injured in a primitive hospital in Waziristan after a US airstrike. A young boy, having lost his limbs, informed that his mother too had died in a similar attack, and that, in her dying moments, she had instructed him to avenge in Islamabad — where the decisions to maim and kill are made — what was done to her in Bajaur. Years later, his elder brother was caught in Islamabad attempting to blow himself up in a high-security area.

It is as simple as that. It is, plainly, human nature distorted brutally out of shape. It is, plainly, the work of our own hands. And it shall come to pass.

A ‘Winter Soldier’ working for the US Army in Iraq decided to quit the job, among several others like him. Addressing a meeting of the Iraq Veterans Against the War, he said: ‘Let me reverse the equation for a while. Let me ask you, that if a foreign force was to land in America on the excuse of democracy or freedom or whatever it may be, would not every patriotic American come out of his house with a shotgun? Would we not resist? What would you do?’ His voice trailed off in the midst of uproarious applause.

It is as simple as that. It is about being able to reverse the equation, and asking oneself ‘what would anyone do?’ It is about overturning the definitions and refusing to buy the propaganda. It is about refusing the official amnesia imposed on us all.

And it is not about Islam. It is not about an ‘Extremist Ideology’ out there to take you over by storm. It is not about monsters and demons. It is not about bloodthirsty suicide bombers with an inbuilt genetic drive to bomb the hell out of you. It is about human beings like you and me. It is about human beings horribly gone wrong. It is about the sinned-against who become sinning in this dreadful mire of poverty, disease, lawlessness, corruption. It is about naked, barbaric injustice and oppression. It is about human beings being made ‘as flies to the wanton boys.’

And it is as simple as that. As simple as Newton’s third law of motion. An equal and opposite reaction. To every action of ours.

So I refuse to sit in judgement. I refuse to self-righteously condemn. I refuse to sing along. And I demand my humanity, my right to think for myself, my right to question, my right to reclaim the Truth. ‘And if anyone of you would punish and lay the axe on the evil tree, let him see to its roots. What judgement would you pronounce on him who slays in the flesh and yet is slain in the spirit? And how persecute you him who is a deceiver and oppressor and yet in himself is aggrieved and outraged?’ (Kahlil Gibran).

I stand the risk of being misunderstood and misjudged. I do not condone the ongoing violent attacks in civilian areas all over Pakistan which victimize innocents. I cannot possibly justify them, nor can any human being in his right mind. But I think I can understand why. I can dare just that much.

And this understanding is important. Because it is through understanding that you reach the heart of the matter, and it is reaching the heart of the matter that you find the solution and begin the healing process. And the heart of the matter is the simple truth about human nature. The heart of the matter is to understand. The heart of the matter is looking to the roots. It is as simple as that.

To begin the healing, we need to set the record straight that this war never was ours, and that the critical transition from ‘theirs’ to ‘ours’ is the triumph of the mighty empire that seeks to export its wars to lands it can buy over with a few billion dollars. We need to face the wrongs we have done. We need to realize that there is no profit in the billions made out of the blood of innocents. We need to realize that violence begets violence. We need to realize that we willed this all, and that ending this vicious cycle of violence is our responsibility, because ‘a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent assent of the whole tree. So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong but with the secret will of you all.’ (Kahlil Gibran).

We need to realize that armies and weaponry can never win this war — just like it never could in Vietnam, or in Iraq, or even in Afghanistan. And we need to realize that it is never too late or too impossible to sit down and talk things out with your own people, no matter how alienated they are. The troops must be withdrawn, the operation must end and we must get talking. These aren’t monsters, these were my countrymen, and it is never too late to get talking — only my enemy would tell me otherwise.

There isn’t another way. The other option is to let this madness go on, making madmen of us all. The other option is the madness turning visible in all the horrors of spiraling violence — bombs going off in the midst of my thriving cities, the gored flesh and the pools of blood, the gripping fear, the haunted, deserted roads. Just like the death and destruction reigning the dirt-streets of some unnamed village in Waziristan. It comes full circle.

Every bomb going off adds to the horrible, crippling Terror that sinks into my bones. The fear and hysteria is of far more import than the death and destruction. When I am frightened to hell, I am easily manipulated, and when I am easily manipulated, I am owned, controlled, made to do what Somebody requires of me. I lose my sovereignty, my identity, my everything. I become the etherized patient spread over the operating table. Somebody Else’s operating table.

And every bomb going off strengthens the case of the Somebody Else who tries to tell us their war is ours, and that we must do their dirty work and shut up with the billions of dollars of aid doled out. Every bomb going off will be quoted in Somebody’s speeches, telling us with triumphalism and authority how terribly important it is for us to stay the course, to keep on this self-destructive path. It will keep us terrorized so Somebody can promise us security with his Blackwaters and Dynacores. It will keep us impoverished so Somebody can win us with promises of aid. It will keep us enslaved so Somebody can convince us only they can truly liberate. And it will keep us repeating the old refrain: ‘Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, and War is Peace.’

It is as simple as that.

U.S. and other NATO military contingents operating in the provinces of Afghanistan’s predominantly Pashtun south and east have been hiring private militias controlled by Afghan warlords, according to these sources, to provide security for their forward operating bases and other bases and to guard convoys.

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has acknowledged that U.S. and NATO ties with warlords have been a cause of popular Afghan alienation from foreign military forces. But the policy is not likely to be reversed anytime soon, because U.S. and NATO officials still have no alternative to the security services the warlords provide.

A report published by the Center on International Cooperation at New York University in September notes that U.S. and NATO contingents have frequently hired security providers that are covertly owned by warlords who have “ready-made” private militias which compete with state institutions for power.

The report cites examples of major warlords or their relatives or allies who have been contracted for security services in four provinces.

In Uruzgan province, both U.S. and Australian Special Forces have contracted with a private army commanded by Col. Matiullah Khan, called Kandak Amniante Uruzgan, with 2,000 armed men, to provide security services on which their bases there depend. That case was reported in detail in April 2008 by two reporters for The Australian, Mark Dodd and Jeremy Kelly.

Col. Khan’s security force protects NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) convoys on the main road from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt, where more than 1,000 Australian troops are based at Camp Holland, according to the The Australian in April 2008.

Col. Khan gets 340,000 dollars per month — nearly 4.1 million dollars annually — for getting two convoys from Kandahar to Tarin Kowt safely each month. Khan, now police chief in Uruzgan province, evidently got his private army from his uncle Jan Mohammad Khan, a commander who helped defeat the Taliban in Kandahar in 2001 and was then rewarded by President Karzai by being named governor of Uruzgan in 2002.

The Australian Defence Force claimed to The Australian that Col. Khan is paid by the Afghan Ministry of Interior to provide security on the main highways of Uruzgan province. The Australian military had previously refused to confirm or deny Australian payments to Col. Khan.

CanWest News Service’s Mike Blanchfield and Andrew Mayeda reported in November 2007 that the Canadian military had hired a “General Gulalai” to provide security for an undisclosed forward operating base. Gulalai is a warlord in southern Afghanistan who drove the Taliban out of Kandahar in 2001.

The same reporters revealed that Col. Haji Toorjan, a local warlord allied with Kandahar governor and major warlord Gul Agha Sherzai, was hired to provide security for Camp Nathan Smith in Kandahar City, where Canada’s provincial construction team is located.

Blanchfeld and Mayeda found that the Canadian military had given 29 contracts worth 1.14 million dollars to a company identified as “Sherzai”, suggesting strongly that the former governor of Kandahar, who had become governor of Nangarhar province, was the owner.

The Canadian military refused to confirm whether Gul Agha Sherzai is indeed the owner.

In Badakhshan province, Gen. Nazri Mahmed, a warlord who is said to “control a significant portion of the province’s lucrative opium industry”, has the contract to provide security for the German Provincial Reconstruction Team, according to the NYU report.

The report suggests that the U.S. and NATO contingents are spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on contracts with Afghan security providers, most of which are local power brokers guilty of human rights abuses.

In addition to Ahmed Wali Karzai, it names Hashmat Karzai, another brother of President Karzai, and Hamid Wardak, the son of Defence Minister Rahim Wardak, as powerful figures who control private security firms that have gotten security contracts without registering with the government.

Two anonymous United Nations sources cited in the report estimate that 1,000 to 1,500 unregistered armed security groups have been “employed, trained, and armed by ISAF” and “Coalition Forces” for security services. As many as 120,000 armed individuals are estimated by the U.N. sources to belong to about 5,000 private militias in Afghanistan.

Most Afghan warlords are widely reviled, mainly because the private armies they continue to control carry out theft and violence against civilians without any accountability.

In his initial assessment last August, Gen. McChrystal referred to “public anger and alienation” toward ISAF, of which he is commander, as a result of the perception that ISAF is “complicit” in “widespread corruption and abuse of power”.

That remark suggests that McChrystal, who had carried out the Special Forces’ policy of relying on Afghan warlords for security in the past, was now expressing concern about its political consequences.

Jake Sherman, a co-author of the NYU report, was a United Nations political officer involved in the effort to disarm warlords from 2003 to 2005. He is sceptical that U.S. policy ties with the warlords will be ended.

“I don’t see how U.S. and other contingents could sustain forward operating bases without paying these guys,” said Sherman in an interview with IPS.

Beyond their continuing dependence on the warlords for security services, Sherman sees another reason for keeping them on the payroll. If the U.S. and NATO military commanders tried to cut their ties with the private militias, Sherman said the warlords “would actually become a security threat”.

Sherman recalled that during his period working for the United Nations in northern Afghanistan, local police were hired to guard a World Food Programme warehouse in Badakhshan. After a rocket attack on the warehouse, an investigation quickly turned up the fact that the police themselves had carried out the attack to pressure the U.N. to hire more guards.

The present U.S. and NATO dependence on warlord armies is rooted in the policy of the George W. Bush administration in the early years after the ouster of the Taliban regime in late 2001.

The Central Intelligence Agency put the commanders of the forces who had defeated the Taliban on the payroll and gave them weapons and communications equipment to help U.S. counterterrorism squads locate any al Qaeda remnants in Afghanistan.

The commanders used the U.S. support to consolidate their political control over different provinces or sub-provincial areas. Human Rights Watch observed in a June 2002 report on the new relationships forged between the United States and the warlords, “While the U.S. government does not view this policy as actively supporting local warlords, the distinction is often lost on Afghan civilians who see coalition forces openly interacting with the warlords.”

Larry Goodson of the National War College, who participated in the 2002 process called the Loya Jirga under which the first post-Taliban Afghan government was established, told IPS he had recommended from the beginning a “de-warlordisation” process, in which “we took nasty, sleazy characters and turn them into less nasty, sleazy bosses.”

But the warlords were kept on the payroll, Goodson recalls, mainly because the troops controlled by the former commanders were seen as “force multipliers”, in a situation where foreign troops were in short supply.

To do this, it expanded rapidly in the past decade, and now has a Partnership for Peace with ex-Soviet hopefuls. It also has a Mediterranean Dialogue with Western-oriented Muslim states and Israel (of them, Morocco and Israel are further blessed as “major non-NATO allies”) and the GCC+2 — the Gulf Cooperation Council plus Egypt and Jordan. GCC+2 has been optimistically dubbed the “NATO of the Middle East” in Western media, but then once-upon-a-time so was the ill-fated Baghdad Pact, originally called the Middle East Treaty Organisation (METO). The real “NATO of the Middle East” is of course US+1.

Whatever the US/NATO schemes and their pretexts, the results in recent years have been less than impressive. The communist hordes were soon replaced by the Russian and/or Muslim ones, and, despite the Mediterranean Dialogue and the GCC+2, the Muslim ones are multiplying daily. Even NATOphiles realise something is amiss. The newly appointed secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was so eager to transform the organisation he gave up his job as prime minister of Denmark, making him the highest ranking politician to take over NATO. “I want to modernise, transform and reform so that NATO adapts to the security environment of the 21st century.”

Rasmussen points to the bloated bureaucracy, with its more than 300 committees — all requiring decisions by consensus, and 13,000 personnel scattered across Western Europe at NATO’s many military bases. With France rejoining the integrated military structure in April, it had to send 900 military staff to the various NATO commands. “In a rapidly changing security environment, we have to make sure that NATO is able to make rapid moves,” asserts Fogh Rasmussen wistfully.

But his biggest move so far to reform the dinosaur was to appoint an “outsider”, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, to lead a group of 12 experts to work out a new strategic concept. Albright is hardly an outsider, being a key actor in the NATO bombing of Serbia which led to the creation of the first NATO satellite — Kosovo, touted as a great success by NATOphiles, but as a violation of international law and relations by just about everyone else. It remains a basket-case, shunned by the likes of China, India and Russia. So don’t hold your breath that Albright will spearhead a radical reinvention of NATO.

NATOphiles ignore the obvious question about the organisation: why didn’t it just disband when its mission to crush Communism was successful and the Warsaw Pact was dissolved? They also don’t seem to feel it necessary to explain why a northern Atlantic organisation should expand into Eurasia and fight wars in Central Asia; why the UN is not the more appropriate forum for world security issues. The UN, famous for its own bureaucracy, has undergone considerable reform in the last decade and is certainly no more dysfunctional than NATO. It also has the advantage of bringing North, South, East and West together, guaranteeing a modicum of world consensus for any military action.

There is no hint within the NATO fortress that such questions will worry Albright’s experts, or that they will reach consensus towards anything other than making NATO an even greater threat to the diplomatic resolution of world problems.

Others are not twiddling their thumbs, however. The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on. Russia has been picking up the pieces in its foreign affairs since the regional alliance of Soviet days broke up and its place in the world as a counterweight to American diktat was lost. The Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) was formed in 2002, bringing together Russia, Central Asian states Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, as well as Armenia and Belarus, and has been picking up steam in the past year, despite the difficulty of dealing with unpredictable member-dictators.

It is truly a regional pact with a legitimate reason for existing, unlike NATO. It was recognised by both the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the UN as such in 2007, and there has been talk of it becoming the genesis of a defence arm for the SCO. NATO’s battering in Afghanistan has reduced it to asking for Russia’s — really the CSTO’s — participation in the Afghanistan operation, most obviously as the “northern corridor” transport route from Europe to Northern Afghanistan via CSTO member-states.

The CSTO is now working openly on a UN cooperation declaration similar to the one passed in September 2008 with NATO — behind UN members’ backs — to work together against terrorism, drug and arms trafficking, and as part of peacekeeping missions under UN command. In addition to the UN, the CSTO has relations with the EU and the OSCE.

There is even talk of squaring the circle between the CSTO and NATO. Says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, “Compared to the previous situation, when NATO did not want even to hear about the OSCE, now many officials and experts say that the CSTO can be a very useful partner.” CSTO Secretary General Nikolai Bordiuzha is less naive: “We proposed to NATO to cooperate in several spheres, including those regarding fighting illegal drug trafficking, but NATO has its own position.” Ironically, NATO’s Partnership for Peace includes all CSTO countries, so NATO has been cooperating with the CSTO by default all along, whether it likes it or not.

In addition to this startling outcome of NATO’s failure in Afghanistan, there are several interesting developments percolating that will soon provide a window into just which direction NATO will go in its latest mutation. Ukraine and Georgia are committed to join NATO, both with leaders swept into power by carefully orchestrated Western-backed campaigns but who are now widely reviled. Does NATO still have the will and the way to snatch them up?

Another development is the recent mutual recognition of Turkey and Armenia, long-time foes. This reconciliation finessed their outstanding differences — Armenia’s occupation of almost 20 per cent of Turkey’s natural ally Azerbaijan, and Turkey’s refusal to accept greater responsibility for the tragedy of ethnic Armenians who died fleeing civil war in 1915-17.

The EU took the credit for bringing the two sides together and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to the signing ceremony, but it is far from clear which “side” will benefit most. Will NATO-member Turkey help usher CSTO-member Armenia into the Western fold? Or will Russia-friendly Armenia draw Turkey the other way? Will the EU’s spurning of Muslim Turkey and its desire to snag tiny Christian Armenia widen the growing rift between an increasingly independent and pro-Muslim Turkey and the West? Will Azerbaijan join NATO in a huff? Will Turkey dust off its Ottoman past and reinvent itself as a major regional power? The situation is far too complex to make any firm predictions.

Russia’s staunch defence of Iran in the face of Western threats and its increasing assertiveness in the face of NATO expansion are widely admired in the Muslim world, Turkey being no exception. Last year Moscow embraced Ankara ’s proposal for a Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Platform as a mechanism for political dialogue, stability and crisis management in a region covering Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia. Russia noted Turkey’s refusal to assist the US in invading Iraq or to allow a US warship into the Black Sea following Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia last year. Early this year, a Turkish mission visited Abkhazia.

During a state visit to Moscow by Turkish President Abdullah Gul in February, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev made a straightforward proposal to set up a Russian-Turkish axis. “The August crisis showed that we can deal with problems in the region by ourselves, without the involvement of outside powers,” Medvedev told a joint press conference. The Turkish leader effectively agreed, pointing to “substantially close or identical positions” the two countries took on “an absolute majority” of international issues.

But world politics is not all win-lose. Both Russia and the US, as members of the Minsk Group founded by the OECD to resolve the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, want to see that stand-off resolved peacefully. Making it happen would be a feather in US President and Nobel laureate Barack Obama’s cap and a concrete step in improving relations with Russia. A truly win-win situation.

As NATO continues to flounder and power continues to shift away from the US towards BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and the SCO, issues like the above will be shaped by a complex of forces, and their outcomes will not be enforced by any one diktat. Just as NATO’s Cold War nemesis unravelled with unpredicted speed, the seemingly immutable Western military alliance could find itself paralysed not only by its infamous bureaucracy, but by countervailing forces on the ascendant outside of its orbit.

All the Kosovos, Georgias and Azerbaijans, all the GCC+2s, Dialogues and Partnerships in the world won’t be able to stave off the inevitable. Indeed, they can only act as a millstone, pulling NATO deeper into the quagmire it itself created during its short post-Cold War life as world policeman.

The Iranian decision to withdraw from the earlier agreement with the IAEA was prompted, moreover, by the campaign of threats to Iran’s nuclear facilities mounted by the George W. Bush administration in early 2007, as a reconstruction of the sequence of events shows.

A senior administration official who briefed reporters Sep. 25 said, “We know construction of the facility began even before the Iranians unilaterally said they did not feel bound by that [IAEA] obligation.”

The U.S. intelligence assessment of the period, however, makes it clear that Iran did not begin construction on the Qom enrichment facility until long after its public change of policy on informing the IAEA.

The published key judgments of the November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran’s nuclear programme contained a little-noticed statement that the intelligence community judged that Iran’s “covert” uranium conversion and enrichment activity had “probably been halted in response to the fall 2003 halt”, and “probably had not been restarted through at least mid-2007″.

That clearly implied that U.S. intelligence had found no evidence of any undeclared covert enrichment facility.

An intelligence source familiar with the text of the full unpublished NIE has confirmed to IPS that the estimate does not refer to any evidence of a second enrichment site, even though it discusses the central importance of covert enrichment in any Iranian nuclear breakout scenario.

The estimate made no mention of such evidence despite the highly publicised fact that that the Qom site was one of many which were under constant surveillance by U.S. intelligence because of the tunneling system already dug into the side of the mountain.

Despite the claim that construction on the Qom facility began before April 2007, the senior administration official conceded in the Sep. 25 briefing that it was only in early 2009 that U.S. intelligence had seen construction activity consistent with an enrichment facility.

That is consistent with the statement by the Iranian vice president and head of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, Al Akbar Salehi, that his agency took over a military ammunition dump in 2008 and only then began construction on an enrichment facility.

The Iranian decision to withdraw from the “subsidiary agreement” to which it had agreed in February 2003 requiring it to inform the IAEA of any new nuclear facilities as soon as the construction decision was made occurred in the context of a series of moves by the Bush administration to convince Iran that an attack on its nuclear facilities was a serious possibility.

In December 2006, major U.S. news media reported that a second U.S. carrier task group was being sent to the Persian Gulf to send a message to Iran.

The U.S. campaign of threats intensified in January, when Bush accused Iran and Syria of “allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq” and charged Iran was “providing material support for attacks on American troops”. That formulation appeared to be aimed at establishing a legal basis for an eventual U.S. attack on Iranian territory.

The Guardian reported Jan. 31, 2007, “Senior European policy-makers are increasingly worried that the U.S. administration will resort to air attacks against Iran to try to destroy its suspect nuclear programme.”

Then the Washington Post reported Feb. 11 that a foreign diplomat had been told by Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security adviser John Hannah that a U.S. attack on Iran was “a real possibility” in 2007.

A few days later Newsweek reported that it was “likely” a third carrier task group would overlap for a period of months with the two existing task forces. The story recalled that the presence of three carrier task groups in the Gulf simultaneously was the same level of U.S. striking power as the administration had in place during the air campaign against Iraq in 2003.

Finally, on Mar. 27, the United States began a naval exercise in the Gulf involving both aircraft carriers and a dozen more warships already in the Gulf, along with about 100 aircraft. The exercise, which took several days to complete, was the first joint naval and air operation since the air campaign against the Saddam Hussein regime.

A front-page article in the New York Times called it a “calculated show of force” which was “part of a broader strategy to contain Iranian power in the region”.

Just two days later, on Mar. 29, Iran notified the IAEA that it was suspending its implementation of the modified version of its “subsidiary arrangement” with the IAEA, signed in February 2003, which required that it provide “preliminary design information” to the agency as soon as the decision to construct a nuclear facility has been taken.

Instead, Iran said, it was reverting to its commitment under the older version of the subsidiary arrangement. That called for Iran to inform the agency of any new nuclear facility no less than 180 days before the introduction of nuclear material into the facility.

Iran was evidently determined to leave no ambiguity about why it was making that change. On Apr. 3, the chief of staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Maj. Gen. Hassan Firoozabadi, predicted publicly that the United States and Israel would launch a massive attack on the region that summer.

And that same day, Hamidreza Taraghi, the international affairs chief of the Islamic Coalition Party, which was part of the pro-government coalition of the conservative parties, explicitly linked the Iranian shift on its IAEA agreement with the heightened threat from the U.S. military.

U.S. military deployments in the Persian Gulf were “very similar to those before the Iraq invasion”, said Taraghi, and therefore, “We should not volunteer information regarding our nuclear sites, as they may be misused by the Americans.”

Taraghi was referring to the fact that any design information on Iranian nuclear facilities would help the U.S. and Israeli air forces prepare for an attack on those targets.

On Apr. 13, Iran sent another letter to the IAEA rejecting the agency’s right to verify design information previously provided on the IR-40 heavy water reactor at Arak.

The sequence of events surrounding the Iranian policy change and the subsequent beginning of construction on a second enrichment facility suggests that Iran was hedging its bets against a U.S. air attack, while retaining the obligation to provide detailed information six months before the introduction of nuclear material – if the threat of an attack were to subside.

The Iranian decision to inform the IAEA of the existence of the Qom site in September appears to reflect a much lower perception of threat of an U.S. attack compared with the perception in early 2007.

News coverage of the Qom site was dominated by the story told by the senior U.S. official at the Sep. 25 briefing that Iran had decided to inform the IAEA of the Qom site on Sep. 21 only because it knew the site had been discovered by U.S. intelligence.

In fact, however, U.S. intelligence was in the dark about why Iran had done so.

An unclassified set of Questions and Answers on the Qom enrichment facility issued by the U.S. government the same day as the press briefing, and later published on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security, included the following:

Q: Why did the Iranians decide to reveal this facility at this time?

A: We do not know.

Like an acquaintance of mine who helped organize the Moratorium in College Park, MD wrote in an email yesterday: who today wouldn’t take massive liberal anti war demos? Indeed. Reports this morning (October 15, 2009) from Washington indicate that Barack Obama is going to send 45,000 more US troops to Afghanistan. At this point it is not clear if this is the entire number or if it is just the number of combat forces. As the Washington Post revealed earlier in the week of October 11th, 2009, when Washington sent some 20,000 troops into Afghanistan earlier this year it did not announce that another 13,000 support troops were also sent over. If this ratio holds true that would mean that there would be closer to 70,000 more US troops in Afghanistan by the time this latest escalation is completed. These numbers would put the total amount of troops involved in the occupier’s forces euphemistically called the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) very close to 200,000.

200,000 heavily armed invaders on the ground. Untold numbers flying planes and dropping bombs. More sitting in bunkers in the North American desert launching drones aptly named Predator that kill fighters and civilians alike without an ounce of moral hesitation. An unknown number of mercenaries working under the title of contractor. Yet, there is barely a peep from the people of the nations whose men and women wage this pointless and immoral war. With the exception of a few protesters in DC and other big cities and a few thousand college students on twenty six college campuses around the United States, recent calls for protests against the war in Afghanistan and the continued occupation of Iraq went unheeded. The sight of young men and women in military camouflage and crewcuts wearing ISAF patches is becoming overly familiar to travelers in US airports. Yet, there is hardly a peep. The sight of parents crying on the television while their children are buried in caskets covered with the red, white and blue is not uncommon. If the news reports are true and at least 45,000 soldiers are preparing for their assignment to Afghanistan, these displays designed to inspire more such deaths will increase in frequency. All the while families tell themselves their children died for something like freedom when most of us know deep inside that no one but those who send them over there really know why the US military is even over there. When we the people are honest with ourselves we know it has to do with empire and conceit, but those reasons do o not make us feel good.

And there’s barely a peep. Liberals and rightwingers in Congress line up behind the Obama who lines up behind the Pentagon and the industry of war. With the exception of a very few, the consensus is that the death and destruction must continue. The comfort of the empire’s citizens must not be disturbed. It can not be said enough, the time to speak up is now. The orgy of death is set to increase. One can not add 50,000 more troops whose job is to kill and expect anything else.

In a 63-page paper representing his personal views, but reflecting conversations with other officers who have served in Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis argues that it is already too late for U.S. forces to defeat the insurgency.

“Many experts in and from Afghanistan warn that our presence over the past eight years has already hardened a meaningful percentage of the population into viewing the United States as an army of occupation which should be opposed and resisted,” writes Davis.

Providing the additional 40,000 troops that Gen. McChrystal has reportedly requested “is almost certain to further exacerbate” that problem, he warns.

Davis was a liaison officer between the Combined Forces Command – Afghanistan (CFC-A) and the Central Command in 2005, just as the Afghan insurgency was becoming a significant problem for the U.S. military. In that assignment he both consulted with the top U.S. officers and staff of the CFC-A and traveled widely throughout Afghanistan visiting U.S. and NATO combat units.

He also commanded a U.S. military transition team on the Iraqi border with Iran in 2008-09.

In the paper, Davis suggests what he calls a “Go Deep” strategy as an alternative to the recommendation from McChrystal for a larger counterinsurgency effort, which he calls “Go Big”.

The “Go Deep” strategy proposed by Davis would establish an 18-month time frame during which the bulk of U.S. and NATO combat forces would be withdrawn from the country. It would leave U.S. Special Forces and their supporting units, and enough conventional forces in Kabul to train Afghan troops and police and provide protection for U.S. personnel.

The forces that continue to operate in insurgent-dominated areas would wage “an aggressive counterterrorism effort” aimed in part at identifying Taliban and al Qaeda operatives. The strategy would also provide support for improved Afghan governance and training for security forces.

Davis argues that a large and growing U.S. military presence would make it more difficult to achieve this counterterrorism objective. By withdrawing conventional forces from the countryside, he suggests, U.S. strategy would deprive the insurgents of “easily identifiable and lucrative targets against which to launch attacks”.

Typically insurgents attack U.S. positions not for any tactical military objective, Davis writes, but to gain a propaganda victory.

The “Go Deep” strategy outlined in the paper appears to parallel the shift in strategy from counterinsurgency to counterterrorism being proposed by some officials in discussions in the White House in recent weeks.

After reading Davis’s paper, Col. Patrick Lang, formerly the defence intelligence officer for the Middle East, told IPS he regards the “Go Deep” strategy as “a fair representation of the alternative to the one option in General McChrystal’s assessment”.

Lang said he doubts that those advising Obama to shift to a counterterrorism strategy are calling specifically for the withdrawal of most combat troops, but he believes such a withdrawal “is certainly implicit in the argument”.

Davis told IPS he was surprised to hear from one official in a high position in Washington whose reaction to his paper was that what he is proposing in place of the “Go Big” option is still “too big”.

Davis said his views on U.S. strategy in Afghanistan have been shaped both by his personal experiences traveling throughout Afghanistan during his 2005 tour of duty and by conversations with U.S. military officers who have recently returned from Afghanistan.

“Mostly it was guys who’ve been out there in the field,” said Davis. “They have a different view from those who work in the headquarters.”

“I think there’s a whole lot of folks out there who agree with this,” he said.

He was flown out of Iraq for medical treatment in early June after suffering a partial loss of vision, and has been temporarily reassigned to the Defence Intelligence Agency. However, Davis said he was not assigned to work on Afghanistan and did the work on his Afghanistan strategy paper entirely on his own.

Davis said he had received permission from his immediate supervisor at DIA to circulate his personal analysis and recommendations on Afghanistan on the condition that he used only unclassified, open source information.

In the paper, Davis argues that the counterinsurgency strategy recommended by McChrystal would actually require a far larger U.S. force than is now being proposed. Citing figures given by Marine Corps Col. Julian Dale Alford at a conference last month, Davis writes that training 400,000 Afghan army and police alone would take 18 brigades of U.S. troops – as many as 100,000 U.S. troops when the necessary support troops are added.

The objective of expanding the Afghan security forces to 400,000, as declared in McChrystal’s “initial assessment”, poses other major problems as well, according to Davis.

He observes that the costs of such an expansion have been estimated at three to four times more than Afghanistan’s entire Gross Domestic Product. Davis asks what would happen if the economies of the states which have pledged to support those Afghan personnel come under severe pressures and do not continue the support indefinitely.

“It would be irresponsible to increase the size of the military to that level,” he writes, “convincing hundreds of thousands of additional Afghan men to join, giving them field training and weapons, and then at some point suddenly cease funding, throwing tens of thousands out of work.”

The result, he suggests, would be similar to what followed the U.S. failure to reassemble the Iraqi Army after the invasion of March 2003.

Davis also cites “growing anecdotal evidence” that popular anger at the abuses of power by the Afghan National Police has increased support for the insurgency.

He calls for scaling back the increase in Afghan security forces to the original targets of 134,000 Army troops and 80,000 national police. The crucial factor in determining the future of the country, he argues, is not the numbers of security personnel but whether they continue to abuse the population.

If that pattern of behaviour were to change dramatically, Davis says, “the number of Taliban fighters will dwindle to manageable numbers as those presently filling their ranks will no longer be motivated to fight”.

Davis challenges two arguments now being made in support of the counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan based on the Iraq experience: that a troop surge would help establish security and that the U.S. military can reduce insurgency by replicating the “Sons of Iraq” programme of bringing insurgents into militias that oppose their former allies.

The “surge” in Iraq was successful for a variety of reasons peculiar to Iraq and not duplicated in Afghanistan, Davis argues. And the “Sons of Iraq” was primarily the result of the alienation of the Sunni population by al Qaeda, which trumped Sunni opposition to the U.S. presence.

“[T]here is little to suggest,” he writes in reference to the areas where the Taliban has gained power, “that the population as a whole has reached a tipping point whereby they are ready to support the coalition against the Taliban.”

Challenging the argument of supporters of a larger war effort that it is necessary to avoid an increased risk of new terrorist attacks, Davis argues that being “myopically focused” on Afghanistan “at the expense of the rest of the world” increases the likelihood of an attack.

The present level of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan, he writes, will “make it more likely that terrorist organizations will take advantage of the opportunity to plan and train elsewhere for the next big attack.”

Journalists who criticise powerful interests can be attacked for their ‘bias’, for revealing their prejudices. On the other hand, as we will see in the examples below, almost no-one protests, or even notices, the lack of balance in patriotic articles reporting on the experience of British troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, on the credibility of British and American elections, or on claims that the West is spreading democracy across the Third World. Then, notions of patriotism, loyalty, the need to support ‘our boys’, make ‘balance’ seem disloyal, disrespectful; an indication, in fact, that a journalist is ‘biased.’

The media provide copious coverage of state-sponsored memorials commemorating the 50th, 60th, 65th anniversaries of D-Day, the Battle of Britain, the Battle of Arnhem, the retreat from Dunkirk, the Battle of the Atlantic, the 25th anniversary of the Falklands War, and so on. Even the 200th anniversary of The Battle of Trafalgar was a major news item. Remembrance Sunday, Trooping The Colour, Beating The Retreat, the Fleet Review are all media fixtures. The military is of course happy to supply large numbers of troops and machines for these dramatic flypasts, parades and reviews.

On June 11, 2005, senior BBC news presenter, Huw Edwards, provided the commentary for Britain’s Trooping The Colour military parade, describing it as “a great credit to the Irish Guards”. Imagine if Edwards had added:

“While one can only be impressed by the discipline and skill on show in these parades, critics have of course warned against the promotion of patriotic militarism. The Russian novelist Tolstoy, for one, observed:

The ruling classes have in their hands the army, money, the schools, the churches and the press. In the schools they kindle patriotism in the children by means of histories describing their own people as the best of all peoples and always in the right. Among adults they kindle it by spectacles, jubilees, monuments, and by a lying patriotic press.” (Tolstoy, Government is Violence — Essays on Anarchism and Pacifism, Phoenix Press, 1990, p.82)

Edwards would not have been applauded for providing this ‘balance’. He would have been condemned far and wide as a crusading crackpot, and hauled before senior BBC management.

When the Archbishop of Canterbury recently offered the mildest of criticisms of the invasion of Iraq in a sermon in St Paul’s Cathedral, the Sun newspaper responded: ‘Archbishop of Canterbury’s war rant mars troops tribute.’ It added:

“The Archbishop of Canterbury yesterday hijacked a service honouring the sacrifice of British troops in Iraq – to spout an anti-war rant.”

The Archbishop’s crime was heinous indeed, as the Sun explained:

“In an astonishing breach of convention, he then accused politicians of failing to think enough about the war’s human cost.

“Speaking from the pulpit of St Paul’s, Dr Williams said:

It would be a very rash person who would feel able to say without hesitation, this was absolutely the right or the wrong thing to do, the right or the wrong place to be. The conflict in Iraq will, for a long time yet, exercise the historians, the moralists, the international experts. Reflecting on the years of the Iraq campaign, we cannot say that no mistakes were ever made.”

We would be interested to see Williams’ case for arguing that invading Iraq might have been the +right+ thing to do. It could hardly be more obvious that invading was “the wrong thing to do” — it resulted in the virtual destruction of an entire country. It was also a monumental crime and not a mistake.

The Sun’s article was archived under “news/campaigns/our_boys”. As Tolstoy would have understood, the Sun is in fact a bitter class enemy of “our boys”. It is a rich man’s propaganda toy parading as a trusty pal of ‘ordinary people’. We wrote to Williams on October 12:

Dear Rowan Williams

In your October 9 sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral, you spoke movingly of the cost paid in Iraq by British servicemen and women, and their families:

“Justice does not come without cost. In the most obvious sense, it is the cost of life and safety. For very many here today, that will be the first thing in their minds and hearts – along with the cost in anxiety and compassion that is carried by the families of servicemen and women.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/oct/09/rowan-williams-iraq-war-sermon)

But you made no mention of Iraqi civilian or military suffering. According to an October 2006 report published in the Lancet medical journal, the US-UK invasion had by then caused some 655,000 excess deaths. In February 2007, Les Roberts, co-author of the report, argued that Britain and America might have triggered in Iraq “an episode more deadly than the Rwandan genocide”, in which 800,000 people were killed. (Roberts, ‘Iraq’s death toll is far worse than our leaders admit,’ The Independent, February 14, 2007; http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2268067.ece)

Later that year, the BBC reported:

“More than a million Iraqis have been killed since the invasion in 2003, according to the British polling company ORB.” (Newsnight, BBC2, September 14, 2007)

Why did you make no mention of these death tolls and of the truly awesome suffering of the Iraqi population?

Best wishes

David

We have received no reply.

My Pal Stan — Justin Webb And The General (And The Guidelines)

On October 7, the BBC published new draft editorial guidelines. It is worth paying close attention to section 4.4.13:

Presenters, reporters and correspondents are the public face and voice of the BBC — they can have a significant impact on perceptions of our impartiality. Journalists and presenters, including those in news and current affairs, may provide professional judgements, rooted in evidence, but may not express personal views on public policy, on matters of political or industrial controversy, or on ‘controversial subjects’ in any other area.

Our audiences should not be able to tell from BBC programmes or other BBC output the personal prejudices of our journalists and presenters on such matters. This applies as much to online content as it does to news bulletins: nothing should be written by journalists and presenters that would not be said on air.

The Guardian noted that some industry observers are already referring to the last phrase as the “Jeremy Bowen clause”. In April, the BBC Trust partly upheld complaints over accuracy and impartiality made against Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor.

Bowen was censured for a piece he wrote for the BBC website in June 2008 on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He referred to “Zionism’s innate instinct to push out the frontier”. He wrote that Israel showed a “defiance of everyone’s interpretation of international law except its own” and that its generals felt that they were dealing with “unfinished business”, left over from 1948. (‘Bowen “breached rules on impartiality,”’ The Independent, April 16, 2009)

A BBC committee ruled that Bowen’s reporting had partially breached the BBC’s rules on accuracy and impartiality. In reality, he was stating indisputable facts. Bowen was criticised for his “loose phrasing”, but the point we are making is that, if Bowen had made comparable comments about official enemies like Iran, Syria, Venezuela and North Korea, no BBC executive would have given a thought to any lack of balance. Such reports continuously pass completely unnoticed. The truth is that media balance is a function of power. Indeed it might properly be termed the balance of power.

In the October 4 edition of the Mail on Sunday, Justin Webb, presenter of the BBC’s Today programme, wrote about the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, in an article titled:

‘Why my pal Stan has a terrorist’s false arm on his wall.’

To be clear, the title described the US commander waging this controversial and bloody war as Webb’s “pal”. Just this single sentence clearly contravenes the BBC’s guidelines on balance. And notice that it is inconceivable that a BBC journalist could pen an article with the title:

‘Why my pal Osama has a US soldier’s false arm on his wall.’

Webb explained the arm on the wall:

“The severed arm, I should say, is sticking out of the kind of ornate frame you might choose for a watercolour. The arm looks real but is actually a prosthetic limb. On closer inspection the oddity is compounded: the hand is clutching a mobile phone.

“The General enters the room and provides the explanation.

“‘The guys were fooling around,’ he says. ‘We went out to kill a sheik who had only one arm and we ended up getting the false arm but nothing else.’

“’That’s not it,’ the General adds, with a slight hint of wistfulness. ‘They just mocked that up for the joke. The phone was what gave his position away.’”
(the online title has been altered from the print original)

We wrote to Webb on October 13:

Dear Justin Webb

Doesn’t the title of your recent article in the Mail on Sunday (October 4, 2009) contravene [the latest draft BBC editorial] guidelines:

‘Why my pal Stan has a terrorist’s false arm on his wall’?

You wrote of the US commander in Afghanistan:

“Stanley McChrystal is a character. In some respects he straight is out of central casting: big, with fierce eyes and weather-beaten skin. He looks every bit as fit as a Hollywood version of a special forces soldier. Yet he eats only one meal a day.”

You even joked about the collecting of trophies from Afghan war dead:

“One-armed Taliban fighters should still be wary, though. When Stanley McChrystal comes home, he’ll want something for the other walls.”

You made reference to allegations of torture by American forces serving under McChrystal in Iraq, but there was no mention of the serious legal and human rights concerns surrounding Nato’s war in Afghanistan. Wasn’t this article in fact profoundly biased in favour of Nato’s war?

Sincerely

David

Webb also referred in passing to a particularly gruesome Nato attack:

“When German troops in Afghanistan called in an air attack on stolen oil-filled tankers last month, killing a number of civilians in the process, McChrystal had trouble raising some of his European colleagues on the phone.”

Presumably the number of civilians burned alive was unworthy of mention. Al Jazeera reported:

“Thirty Afghan civilians were among nearly 100 people killed after Nato aircraft destroyed two stolen oil tankers in the north of the country earlier this month, an Afghan government investigation has concluded.”

Webb replied on October 13:

David hello — and yes the title was unfortunate I agree. The entire piece was approved by the BBC but the sub editors then came up with that introduction. Having said that I certainly don’t agree that the piece supported any war or any individual — merely pointed out that he is a character, which he is. I expressed no personal view on the Afghan conflict, nor could you guess from the piece what my personal view is!

best jw

It says everything that the piece was approved by the BBC, which presumably perceived no lack of balance. Again, Tolstoy offered an example of the kind of thinking that is far beyond the pale for BBC journalism:

“Above all, they inflame patriotism in this way: perpetrating every kind of injustice and harshness against other nations, they provoke in them enmity towards their own people, and then in turn exploit that enmity to embitter their people against the foreigner.” (Tolstoy, ibid., p.82)

Comments that offer a penetrating insight into the disaster that is US-UK strategy in Afghanistan, both past and present.

Part 2 will follow shortly…

What is this ingenious program, you ask?

Enlisting the Girl Scouts to help fight terrorism!

Believe it or not, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is organizing Girl Scouts throughout the USA to “combat hurricanes, pandemics, terror attacks and other disasters.”

This campaign is part of a government effort to make Americans better able to cope with natural and man-made disasters.

As DHS head Janet Napolitano explained, “As a former Girl Scout, I know the ‘Be Prepared’ motto well, and I look forward to working with the Girl Scouts to spread the preparedness message to all of our nation’s citizens.”

One longs for the good old days when the Girl Scouts were better known for hawking their overpriced but tasty cookies.

In conjunction with Girls Scouts USA, Homeland Security has even designed a new “preparedness badge” that girls can earn while defending the American Fatherland.

It will probably resemble some of current badges worn by Girls Scouts like in the picture below:

What patriotic American girl wouldn’t be proud to rock a kewl new Preparedness Patch?

The Preparedness Patch program itself was developed jointly by the Girls Scouts Council of Washington DC and FEMA (yes, the same FEMA that performed so admirably during Hurricane Katrina). The Council’s website describes some of the important skills that Girl Scouts are required to master like being able to:

• Identify local risks and potential emergencies
• Connect with local community service agencies
• Understand hazards and appropriate protective actions
• Learn local alerts and warning systems
• Prepare themselves and their family
• Deal with emotional responses to an emergency
• Discover how to get trained and become involved in community emergency planning
• Explore additional resources

There is no mention if other requirements for earning this Preparedness Badge include spying on antiwar protestors or providing FEMA-style rescue and relief “help” for hurricane survivors.

As documented on the DHS and Girl Scouts USA websites, this is part of a greater institutional alliance between the US Government’s Citizen Corps program and the Girl Scouts “to advance community preparedness nationwide.” Indeed, there is even a formal statement of affiliation between Homeland Security and Girl Scouts USA.

Ultimately, you have to ask what is the significance of this development and what is it really about?

Why would the Department of Homeland Security be working with the Girl Scouts USA in the first place?

Isn’t the very idea of this collaboration strange? It would be analogous to the Central Intelligence Agency establishing a program with the Cub Scouts!

As I see it, this partnership between Homeland Security and the Girl Scouts is reflective of the broader militarization of American society.

This militarization is often couched behind the idea of national service, which involves not only things like Americorps or Teach for America but also the possible mobilization of the populace for war crises.

There have even been suggestions that the recent Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education Act (or GIVE Act) is a step towards instituting a mandatory national service requirement with decidedly militaristic overtones:

The GIVE Act views military-style regimentation as a model for the nation. Its National Civil Community Corps would seek to “combine the best practices of civilian service with the best aspects of military service.” This reminds some critics of Obama’s declaration last July: “We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that is just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded as the military.”

This is the larger political context from which the Girl Scout Preparedness program emerges.

As one blogger put it, “It’s nice to know that the United States now has its own version of Hitler’s League of German Girls program.”

All we need now is an Obama Youth Brigade.

It’s getting to the point that it’s hard to tell who is the biggest opponent of Obama’s plans to bring peace to AfPak: the Taliban, the Pakistani government, or the Nobel committee. Oh yes, or virtually the entire world beyond the Washington beltway.

As the world marked the eighth anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October, the Taliban were stronger than ever – their forces have increased nearly fourfold since 2006. “We fought against the British invaders for 80 years,” Mullah Mohammad Omar reminded the world on the Taliban’s website. “If you want to colonise the country of proud and pious Afghans under the baseless pretext of a war on terror, then you should know that our patience will only increase and that we are ready for a long war.” A statement from the leadership insists, “We had and have no plan of harming countries of the world, including those in Europe. Our goal is the independence of the country and the building of an Islamic state.” They call for the immediate withdrawal of foreign troops as the only solution.

So far, there is no hint that Obama is even considering this no-brainer. On the contrary, the war is now being fought on two fronts, with the US and Britain starting an extensive training programme for Pakistan ’s Frontier Corps (FC) in Baluchistan, the new battleground.

It is part of the Obama administration’s massive military aid package to AfPak – Pakistan will get $2.8 billion over the next five years in addition to $7.5 billion in civilian aid, but only if it satisfies US benchmarks by making progress in “anti-terrorism and border control”. The Pakistani government and army are furious, not to mention the 60 per cent of Pakistanis who see the US as the greatest threat to Pakistan – with good cause. In the past few months, US forces have stepped up their aerial bombardments of villages in the northern tribal areas. According to the Pakistani press, of the 60 cross-border US drone strikes between January 2006 and April 2009, only 10 were able to hit their targets, killing 14 Al-Qaeda leaders and 687 civilians. Even official US policy (to kill no more than 29 civilians for every “high-value” person) is being violated. At least 23 Al-Qaeda leaders should have been killed, nine more than the actual 14. This assassination campaign is a more ruthless version of Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, and can only spur the Taliban and Al-Qaeda’s recruitment efforts.

True, Taliban control of the Pakistan frontier province SWAT was brought to a brutal end during the past six months by the Pakistani army, though civilian corpses continue to be dumped, with accusations of revenge and official terror labelled at the army. And the almost complete lack of reconstruction aid by the Pakistan government – with winter approaching – means the Taliban will probably regain SWAT. Local opposition to the war against both Afghanistan and Pakistan’s frontier region, especially Baluchistan, continues to grow, with the long-simmering Baluchi campaign for independence gaining new life daily.

Obama’s war plans have reached a critical stage. In an arrogant gamble, much like General MacArthur’s challenge to president Harry Truman in 1951 over the Korean war, General Stanley McChrystal recently demanded publicly that Obama provide 60,000 more troops for Afghanistan, boldly stating the war would be lost without them. Faced with a similarly outspoken MacArthur, Truman just as publicly fired him.

McChrystal is said to have offered the Commander in Chief several alternatives “including a maximum injection of 60,000 extra troops”, 40,000 and a small increase. Common in military planning is to discuss three different scenarios in order to illustrate why the middle option is preferable, though this is usually done privately. But the Obama administration faces growing hurdles within his Democratic Party if he decides to go with even the middle option.

Obama’s review of AfPak is now centring on preventing Al-Qaeda’s return to Afghanistan – a narrower objective that could require fewer, if any, new American troops. Obama-Biden no longer see the primary mission in Afghanistan as completely defeating the Taliban or preventing its involvement in the country’s future, a policy strongly opposed by Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Gates-Clinton have a point: once the Taliban are acknowledged as legitimate players who are of no strategic danger to the US, then the horror of the past eight years becomes excruciatingly clear. The defeat of the whole criminal project becomes inevitable and will be just as devastating for the US as the Soviet defeat was for the USSR.

But the Gates-McChrystal super-surge is just about impossible in any case. The Institute for the Study of War reported recently that the US military has only limited troops ready for deployment, meaning that forces might not reach the warzone until the summer of 2010. There are only three Army and Marine brigades – 11,000-15,000 troops – capable of deploying to Afghanistan this year. Troops are plagued by a severe lack of helicopters and all-terrain vehicles.

Whatever Obama decides – 60,000, 40,000 or 2 – the troops will have little time after they arrive to turn things around. Even super-loyal Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper just reaffirmed that Canadian troops will under no circumstances stay in Afghanistan after 2011. Any plans for the indefinite occupation of Afghanistan as touted by some NATO and US officials are fantasy; Canada’s retreat will be part of a flood. Canadian government support for the war, like that of its bigger brothers the US and Britain, has all along been motivated by Afghanistan’s untapped resource potential. The TAPI gas pipeline – so named for its 1680 kilometre path from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan, Pakistan, and eventually India – is slated to be constructed starting next year on the very soil that Canadian and US troops now occupy in southern Afghanistan.

Harper’s best-case scenario is for the pipeline to go ahead with Canadian participation and for a miracle to occur – the Taliban’s sudden and unexpected defeat, allowing Canadian troops to come home, the pipeline and other resource deals signed, and assuring him of a Conservative majority in the next election.“ Canada has the potential to beat rivals because it has such an uncheckered history in that part of the world,” argues Rob Sobhani, president of Caspian Energy Consulting. “People like Canadians, Canadians are apolitical.” Even if the miracle doesn’t happen and the pipeline deal collapses, Harper realises his political goose is cooked unless the troops come home, so he is forced to wash his bloody hands of this betrayal of Canada’s traditional international role of peacekeeper.

Obama needn’t rely on the Taliban as advisers on how to end the war. Deputy-general of the China Council for National Security Policy Studies Li Qinggong reflected official Chinese thinking on 28 September in Xinhua: The United States should first put an end to “the anti-terror war” and “end its military action. The war has neither brought the Islamic nation peace and security as the Bush administration originally promised, nor brought any tangible benefits to the US itself. On the contrary, the legitimacy of the US military action has been under increasing doubt.” Obama should take advantage of international opinion to withdraw troops immediately. This is no doubt also the hope of the Nobel committee that put its own credibility on the line by awarding him the Peace Prize. The UN Security Council permanent members should “draft a roadmap and timetable”, including deployment of an international peacekeeping mission.

The delicious irony of the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan (and Iraq) is that it is China, the US ’s real international rival, that has benefited most. Chinese investments (and workers) have been pouring in to both US warzones. The main effect of George W Bush’s two wars and Obama’s AfPak has been to promote Chinese business interests, leaving the US bankrupt and its army in tatters.

The debate has revealed a deep division over the causes and remedies, with Anglo-Franco American (AFA) politicians, columnists and economists on one side and their Asian-German (AG) counterparts on the other. In general terms the AFA spokespeople put the blame for the crises on external factors, or more specifically they point their finger at the positive trade surpluses, dynamic export sectors and high investment rates in productive sectors and low levels of consumption in the AG countries as the cause of ”unbalances” or “disequilibrium” in the world economy.¹

In contrast, the AG countries reject this argument which speaks to prejudicial external practices. They emphasize the internal “imbalances” within the AFA countries, which has weakened their international, commercial and financial position.

In this paper, I am going to argue that both internal economic policies and external empire building strategies of the AFA countries have been the driving force for global imbalances. The structural differences between the two regions and the differences in class structure and economic configurations in each bloc precludes any easy or immediate solution. On the contrary, for the foreseeable future, the conflict between dynamic emerging export powers and the declining western bloc is likely to intensify, leading to greater trade conflicts and possible military confrontations.

The AFA charges against China’s commercial ‘imbalances’ conflates trade with the West with Beijing’s relations with the rest of the world. China has balanced trade or even trade deficits with Asian, African, Middle Eastern and Latin American countries. Moreover, the AFA countries have trade imbalances with other regions including the Middle East and Germany. Even if the AFA countries curtailed imports from China, it is most likely that other Asian countries would replace them, including Vietnam, South Korea, Taiwan, Bangladesh and India. The resulting trade deficits of the AFA would remain about the same.

The AFA countries blame China’s “undervalued” currency, and claim that Beijing authorities manipulate the exchange rate to under price exports and beat out competitors (namely producers within the AFA). Yet China’s currency has been revalued steadily upward over 20% the past five years, and yet the AFA still run a deficit, suggesting that their domestic producers have still not been able to compete with Chinese manufacturers.² More recently AFA writers have complained about low interest rates set by the Chinese government as a “subsidy” to its exporters. Yet AFA interest rates are at zero percent or even negative, to no avail. Moreover, the AFA have provided over 1.5 trillion in bailout funds and over 1.3 billion in stimulus spending – a subsidy five times greater than China’s stimulus package, without improving their trade balance. What is telling, given the sectoral allocations, of each regime’s bailout – subsidy – stimulus packages, China has fully recovered and is growing at 8% by mid 2009, while the AFA continue to wallow in negative territory and continue running up trade deficits. This points to the centrality of internal factors, namely, the economic sectors which receive the state subsidies and how they invest it and as a result how their decisions affect trade balances.

The AFA charge that China’s low cost labor, its exploitation of workers accounts for trade imbalances. Yet an increasing percentage of China’s exports are based on technological advances, not cheap labor. This is because low labor cost competitors are emerging in Asia.

The AFA complain that China over emphasizes its ‘export’ strategy at the expense of producing for the domestic market. Yet nearly half of China’s exports to the US are made by US owned multi-nationals who have invested, subcontracted and co-produced with Chinese counterparts. In other words, US internal policy, the deregulation of capital flows, has facilitated the movement of US manufactures abroad resulting in a decline of local production, an increase in imports and greater trade deficits.

Internal Causes of Trade Deficits (and Unbalanced World Economy)

The most obvious and striking correlation with the growth of AFA trade imbalances is the growth and dominance of the financial sector.³ The financialization of the AFA economies and Wall Street’s CEOs dominant role in the strategic economic positions of the state is transparent to the mass of the people and has even been acknowledged by most private economists and academics. Trade deficits increased in direct proportion to the growing political and economic power of the financial sector. In large part, this was due to the transfer of capital from manufacturing to financial services, leading to the decline of the manufacturing sector’s investments in innovations and competitive management strategies. The financial sector’s, high salaries, bonuses and quick returns attracted most of self-styled “best and the brightest”. MBA graduates multiplied while advanced engineering school graduates diminished. Advanced skilled worker training programs disappeared while low skill retail sales recruitment grew.

The problem was that financial services did not, could not replace the overseas earnings which formerly accrued to the country through manufacturing sales. Least of all in the highly regulated financial markets of China, Japan, India and the rest of Asia, where banking was subordinated to the expansion of manufacturing — namely financing industries targeted by state officials. The dominance of finance capital and the related sectors of real estate and insurance, led to a highly polarized class structure: in which billionaire and millionaire investment bankers presided at the top and an army of low paid service workers (retail employees, cleaners and sweepers, etc.) immigrant and non-union workers occupied the bottom. Presently income inequalities in the US exceed those of any other “advanced” capitalist country. The inequalities in Manhattan exceed those of Guatemala. The growing concentration of wealth is accompanied by decline of median wages over the past three decades. As a result the purchasing power of US workers is declining, thus reducing the demand for locally produced quality goods. The purchase of imported cheap textiles, shoes and other accessories results. The result was a decline in local saving and domestic investment in manufacturing leading to a decline in competitiveness. Moreover, the competition among financial lenders furthered consumer spending and greater individual indebtedness at a time when manufacturing exports were declining, starved of investments.

Most manufacturing firms transformed themselves into financial corporations, channeling investment funds in sectors not earning foreign exchange. Worst of all in pursuit of higher profits, manufacturers turned into commercial vendors, closing down plants and sub-contracting production to China and other Asian countries and importing final products into the US creating the trade imbalances. The large scale relocation of US multi-nationals abroad further exacerbated the trade imbalances.

The key role of the state in creating domestic imbalances leading to global disequilibrium is a result of the financial sector’s takeover of the state,and the deregulation of financial markets. The result was the long term promotion of an economic policy, in which the central bank (the Federal Reserve) and Treasury encouraged the growth of finance ,real estate and insurance sectors over manufacturing. The finance based strategy was justified by a large army of academics and publicists who spoke of a “post industrial”, or “service” or “information” economy as a “higher stage”, rather than a perversely unbalanced, unsustainable and unjust economy.

Financial supremacy coincided with the growing militarization of US foreign policy. Throughout the last thirty years, US overseas economic expansion was gradually eclipsed by the growing reliance on military intervention, and the build-up of military bases in hundreds of sites. As financialization weakened the productive capacity of US manufacturing exporters’ efforts to capture markets, US policymakers increased their reliance on the supremacy of military power. The channeling of billions into military spending drained resources from efforts to upgrade the competitiveness of US civilian industry and was a major factor-in its declining share of export markets. The end result of militarization was a loss of export earnings and the growth of trade deficits.

If we combine the three great internal imbalances in the AFA economics, but especially in the US, the financialization of the economy, the militarization of foreign policy and the concentration of wealth at the top, we can best understand why the US has such a huge and growing trade deficit.

China Export Driven Strategy

China’s emphasis on an export driven strategy and the resultant growing class inequalities is largely a result of the class composition of the state and its social structure. In other words internal factors are the driving force of its pursuit of trade surpluses. What is ironic is that some of the AFA critics, who rightly point to the internal ‘imbalances’ in China, overlook similar problems in the West. Namely, no mention is made of the absence of a national health plan in the US, the growth of inequalities and declining mass purchasing power – even as they point to these deficiencies in China. What Western advocates of greater social welfare in China do not discuss, is the capitalist class power, privilege and profits which hinder greater mass consumption. Least of all do they discuss the motor force for lifting working class and peasant living conditions, namely the class struggle. Instead they rely on technocratic appeals to Chinese elites for greater social spending.

The Chinese state has evolved into a powerful machine for manufacturing goods and billionaires. Today China has the highest growth, the highest rate of exploitation and the greatest class inequalities in Asia. Increasing wages to stimulate local consumption means reducing profits, anathema to all capitalists including Chinese. Increasing public spending on universal health coverage especially for the 700 million uninsured peasants and rural workers means higher taxes on the rich, including the families and colleagues of the governing elite. In contrast, producing for export markets does not require increasing domestic consumer power, on the contrary it requires lower wages.

A shift from an export-driven to a domestic market driven strategy, requires not only a ‘change in policy’ but a deep shift in class power, from the current capitalist class and its state backers to the workers and peasants. To realize large scale, long term commitments of public revenues to social services for the rural poor and higher wages for exploited workers requires sustained popular mobilizations, uprisings, strikes to secure the independent trade unions and peasant associations necessary to secure a shift in state allocations toward domestic consumption.

China’s “imbalances” are largely internal, social and political. An imbalance of social power between an all powerful capitalist state and a repressed powerless mass of workers and peasants; an imbalance in income between a super-rich banking, real estate, manufacturing export elite and a low paid working class and subsistence peasantry;an imbalance between a highly organized state linked by family, ideology and economic interests to the capitalist class and a dispersed, fragmented and isolated mass of working people.

China’s ruling class, its outward billion dollar investments in western capitalist enterprises via its sovereign wealth funds, its billion dollar investments in overseas extractive enterprises, is driven by the mass of capital accumulated that is extracted via intense levels of labor exploitation and the elimination of state funded pensions, health plans and education. China’s role as an emerging imperial power is rooted in the imbalance between global power and social welfare decay.

The fact that western capitalist writers, policymakers and their academic camp followers point to the same social imbalances in China as its domestic working class critics should not obscure a basic point. The Wall Street critics are defending the AFA financial elite against China’s export industrialists’ greater productivity; while the domestic working class critics are criticizing the capitalists and the state for their high rates of exploitation and concentration of wealth.

The key to reducing imbalances in world trade is reducing socio-economic inequalities within each region. The US requires a profound shift from a finance dominated economy to a manufacturing economy, where finance, high tech and higher education is directed to creating a competitive, productive economy based on skilled labor. The link at the top between Wall Street and the Pentagon must be replaced by a link from below between the industrial working class, low paid service workers and public sector employees and professionals.

The structural transformation of the US economy is necessary but not sufficient. If US efforts to pursue a military driven empire persist, this will divert resources away from domestic and overseas economic priorities. Military driven empires alienate trading partners, have high costs and low returns, isolate economic investors and traders from productive partnerships and are destructive of domestic and overseas civilian productive facilities.

The way out of the massive imbalances is for the US to engage in a large scale, long term domestic structural transformations – namely de-financialization and de-militarization. But the political and economic forces benefiting from the current configuration are deeply entrenched, in control of both major parties and dominate the mass media and its message. Yet, despite their profound institutional power they suffer several fatal flaws. In the first instance they have created unsustainable global imbalances, which will sooner or later lead to a collapse of the dollar and renewed and more virulent and costly financial bubbles. Secondly, the free market which is the main ideological prop of the deregulated financial power elite is totally discredited as evidenced by the single digit support and trust of Wall Street. Thirdly, military driven empire building has run its course: after nine years of war in Afghanistan the vast majority of the US public has sent a message to the political elite of both parties, the White House and Congress, that its time to shift from funding failed overseas adventures to solving the problem of 20% under and unemployed Americans (30 million), the 100 million or 33% of Americans with no or costly and inadequate health coverage. No amount of media and political pundit scapegoating of China for our own self-induced “imbalances” can divert American opinion from their direct experiences with our own internal inequalities and policy failures.

1. Martin Wolf, “Why China must do more to rebalance its economy” Financial Times, September 23, 2009, p 11. See also Financial Times, October 3, 4, 2009. p 3 and Financial Times, September 21, 2009 p 9.
2. Financial Times, October 9, 2009 p 1.
3. Gerald Davis, Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America (New York: Oxford University Press 2009).

But two former senior intelligence analysts who have long followed the issue of al Qaeda’s involvement in Afghanistan question the alleged new intelligence assessments. They say that the Taliban leadership still blames Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda for their loss of power after 9/11 and that the Taliban-al Qaeda cooperation is much narrower today than it was during the period of Taliban rule.

The nature of the relationship between al Qaeda and the Taliban has been a central issue in the White House discussions on Afghanistan strategy that began last month, according to both White House spokesman Robert Gibbs and National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones.

One of the arguments for an alternative to the present counterinsurgency strategy by officials, including aides to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, is that the Taliban wouldn’t allow al Qaeda to reestablish bases inside Afghanistan, The Wall Street Journal reported Oct. 5. The reasoning behind the argument, according to the report, is that the Taliban realises that its previous alliance with al Qaeda had caused it to lose power after the Sep. 11 attacks.

Officials in national security organs that are committed to the counterinsurgency strategy have now pushed back against the officials who they see as undermining the war policy.

McClatchy newspapers reported Sunday that officials have cited what they call “recent U.S. intelligence assessments” that the Taliban and other Afghan insurgent groups have “much closer ties to al Qaida now than they did before 9/11″ and would allow al Qaeda to re-establish bases in Afghanistan if they were to prevail.

McClatchy reporters said 15 mid-level or senior intelligence, military and diplomatic officials they interviewed had agreed with the alleged intelligence assessments.

But John McCreary, formerly a senior analyst at the Defence Intelligence Agency, wrote last week on NightWatch, an online news analysis service, that the history of Taliban-al Qaeda relations suggests a very different conclusion. After being ousted from power in 2001, he wrote, the Taliban “openly derided the Arabs of al Qaida and blamed them for the Taliban’s misfortunes”.

The Taliban leaders “vowed never to allow the foreigners – especially the haughty, insensitive Arabs – back into Afghanistan,” wrote McCreary. “In December 2001, [Mullah Mohammad] Omar was ridiculed in public by his own commanders for inviting the ‘Arabs’ and other foreigners, which led to their flight to Pakistan.”

McCreary concluded, “The premise that Afghanistan would become an al Qaida safe haven under any future government is alarmist and bespeaks a lack of understanding of the Pashtuns on this issue and a superficial knowledge of recent Afghan history.”

The Central Intelligence Agency’s former national intelligence officer for the Middle East, Paul Pillar, expressed doubt that the Taliban’s relations with al Qaeda are tighter now than before the Taliban regime was ousted.

“I don’t see how you can say that,” Pillar told IPS. “If you look at the pre-9/11 relationship between the Taliban and al Qaeda, in many ways it was far more extensive.”

In the civil war between the Taliban regime and its Northern Alliance foes from 1996 through 2001, Pillar observed, “bin Laden’s Arabs and money” represented a far bigger role in supporting the Taliban than the one al Qaeda is playing now.

“You can say that there are more groups which have relationships with al Qaeda now, but I don’t see any as close as that which existed before 9/11,” said Pillar.

The role played by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda in the Taliban’s struggle against its rival the Northern Alliance from 1996 to 2001 has been documented by journalist Roy Gutman, now foreign editor of McClatchy newspapers, and other sources.

As early as 1997, 300 Arab troops trained by bin Laden troops were fighting alongside the Taliban on the front line north of Kabul, according to Gutman’s book, How We Missed the Story, published in 2008. Later, they were reported to have taken over large sections of that front line.

Bin Laden’s military and financial support became an even more important crutch for the Taliban regime in its final years in power. Gutman says the Taliban’s mid-summer 1998 offensive in northern Pakistan was largely financed by bin Laden.

In the last stage of the conflict, Gutman writes, al Qaeda troops consisted of 1,500 to 2,500 Arabs and Central Asian “Frontline fighters,” and Ahmed Shah Massoud, the commander of the Northern Alliance forces seeking to overthrow the Taliban, regarded them as his toughest and most committed opponents.

Gutman quotes Massoud telling CIA operative Gary Schroen, “Every time I fight the Taliban, the glue that holds them together is the Arab units.”

Osama bin Laden also financed Taliban military equipment and operations, according to Gutman’s account. A summer 1998 Taliban offensive was fought with hundreds of new Japanese pickup trucks — Massoud claimed a total of 1,200 vehicles — bought with bin Laden’s money.

Today, however, al Qaeda is cash-strapped and has very few foreign fighters in Afghanistan, whereas the Taliban appear to be well-financed.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s expert on terrorist financing, David Cohen, said al Qaeda is “in its weakest financial position in several years” and “its influence is waning”, the BBC reported Tuesday.

Gen. Jones told CNN interviewer John King Oct. 4 the presence of al Qaeda in Afghanistan today is “minimal,” adding the “maximum estimate” is 100 foreign fighters. One official critical of the White House position quoted in the McClatchy story suggested the number might be as high as 200 or 250.

Both figures appears to be consistent with the estimate by Western officials of a total of only 100 to 300 foreign fighters in Afghanistan cited in the New York Times Oct. 30, 2007.

Of that total, however, only “small numbers” were Arabs and Chechens, Uzbeks or other Central Asians, who are known to have links with al Qaeda, Seth Jones of the Rand Corporation told Voice of America the following month.

The bulk of the foreign fighters in Afghanistan are Pashtuns from across the border in Pakistan. Those Pashtun fighters are recruited from religious schools in Pakistan, but there is no evidence that they are affiliated with al Qaeda.

Just this month, U.S. intelligence has increased its estimate of Taliban armed insurgents to 17,000, compared with 10,000 in late 2007. Even if all foreign fighters were considered as al Qaeda, therefore, 250 of them would represent only 1.5 percent of the estimated total.

From the wholesale use of informants and provocateurs to stifle political dissent, to Wi-Fi hacking and viral computer spyware to follow our every move, the FBI has turned massive data-mining of personal information into a growth industry. In the process they are building the surveillance state long been dreamed of by American securocrats.

A chilling new report by investigative journalist Ryan Singel provides startling details of how the FBI’s National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) is quietly morphing into the Total Information Awareness (TIA) system of convicted Iran-Contra felon, Admiral John M. Poindexter. According to documents obtained by Wired:

A fast-growing FBI data-mining system billed as a tool for hunting terrorists is being used in hacker and domestic criminal investigations, and now contains tens of thousands of records from private corporate databases, including car-rental companies, large hotel chains and at least one national department store. (Ryan Singel, “FBI’s Data-Mining System Sifts Airline, Hotel, Car-Rental Records,” Wired, September 23, 2009)

Among the latest revelations of out-of-control secret state spookery, Wired disclosed that personal details on customers have been provided to the Bureau by the Wyndham Worldwide hotel chain “which includes Ramada Inn, Days Inn, Super 8, Howard Johnson and Hawthorn Suites.” Additional records were obtained from the Avis rental car company and Sears department stores.

Singel reports that the Bureau is planning a massive expansion of NSAC, one that would enlarge the scope, and mission, of the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force (FTTTF) and the file-crunching, privacy-killing Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW).

“Among the items on its wish list,” Singel writes, “is the database of the Airlines Reporting Corporation–a company that runs a backend system for travel agencies and airlines.” If federal snoops should obtain ARC’s data-sets, the FBI would have unlimited access to “billions of American’s itineraries, as well as the information they give to travel agencies, such as date of birth, credit card numbers, names of friends and family, e-mail addresses, meal preferences and health information.”

The publication reports that the system “is both a meta-search engine–querying many data sources at once–and a tool that performs pattern and link analysis.” Internal FBI documents reveal that despite growing criticism of the alleged “science” of data-mining, including a stinging 2008 report by the prestigious National Research Council, for all intents and purposes the Bureau will transform NSAC into a low-key version of Adm. Poindexter’s Information Awareness Office. An internal FBI document provides a preview of the direction NSAC will take.

According to the General Accounting Office (GAO) May 2004 report on federal data mining efforts, the GAO defined data mining as “the application of database technology–to uncover hidden patterns and subtle relationships in data and to infer rules that allow for the prediction of future results” (GAO-05-866, Data Mining p. 4). There are a number of security and privacy issues that government and private industry must address when contemplating the use of technology and data in these ways. While the current activities and efforts of the IDW and FTTTF programs do not provide NSB [National Security Branch] users with the full level of data mining services as defined above it is the intention of the NSAC to pursue and refine these capabilities where permitted by statute and policy. The implementation and responsible utilization of these services will advance the FBI’s ability to address national security threats in a timely fashion, uncover previously unknown patterns and trends and empower agents and analysts to better “hunt between the cases” to find those persons, places or things of investigative and intelligence interest. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Fiscal Year (FY) 2008, Internal Planning & Budget Review, Program Narrative for Enhancements/Increases,” p. 5, emphasis added)

Unsurprisingly, in their quest for increased funding FBI officials failed to mention that the 2004 GAO report raised significant and troubling questions glossed over by securocrats. To wit, GAO investigators averred:

Privacy concerns about mined or analyzed personal data also include concerns about the quality and accuracy of the mined data; the use of the data for other than the original purpose for which the data were collected without the consent of the individual; the protection of the data against unauthorized access, modification, or disclosure; and the right of individuals to know about the collection of personal information, how to access that information, and how to request a correction of inaccurate information. (General Accounting Office, Data Mining: Federal Efforts Cover a Wide Range of Uses, GAO-04-548, May 2004)

Despite these concerns, an FBI budget document released to Wired baldly states:

The NSAC will provide subject-based “link analysis” through utilization of the FBI’s collection data sets, combined with public records on predicated subjects. Link analysis uses these data sets to find links between subjects, suspects, and addresses or other pieces of relevant information, and other persons, places, and things. This technique is currently being used on a limited basis by the FBI; the NSAC will provide improved processes and greater access to this technique to all NSB components. The NSAC will also pursue “pattern analysis” as part of its service to the NSB. “Pattern analysis” queries take a predictive model or pattern of behavior and search for that pattern in data sets. The FBI’s efforts to define predictive models and patterns of behavior should improve efforts to identify “sleeper cells.” Information produced through data exploitation will be processed by analysts who are experts in the use of this information and used to produce products that comply with requirements for the proper handling of the information. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, “National Security Branch Analytical Capabilities,” November 12, 2008)

Four years after the GAO report cited the potential for abuse inherent in such techniques, The National Research Council’s exhaustive study criticized the alleged ability of data-miners to discover hidden “patterns” and “trends” among disparate data-sets “precisely because so little is known about what patterns indicate terrorist activity; as a result, they are likely to generate huge numbers of false leads.”

False leads that may very well land an innocent person on a terrorist watch-list or as a subject of a wide-ranging and unwarranted national security investigation. But as with all things relating to “counterterrorism,” the guilt or innocence of the average citizen is a trifling matter while moves to “empower agents” to “find those persons, places or things of investigative and intelligence interest,” is the paramount goal. “Justice” under such a system becomes another preemptive “tool” subject to the whims of our political masters.

The use of federal dollars for such a dubious and questionable enterprise has already had real-world consequences for political activists. Just ask RNC Welcoming Committee activists currently under indictment in Minnesota for their role in organizing legal protests against the far-right Republican National Convention last year in St. Paul.

As Antifascist Calling revealed earlier this year, one private security outfit, the now-defunct Highway Watch which worked closely with the FBI, used “social network theory” and “link analysis,” and cited the group’s legal political organizing, including “increased membership via the internet” and “public appearances at various locations across the US,” as a significant factor that rendered the group a “legitimate” target for heightened surveillance and COINTELPRO-style disruption.

Singel also disclosed that NSAC shared data “with the Pentagon’s controversial Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office, a secretive domestic-spying unit which collected data on peace groups, including the Quakers, until it was shut down in 2008. But the FBI told lawmakers it would be careful in its interactions with that group.”

As journalists and congressional investigators subsequently revealed however, CIFA’s dark heart–the office’s mammoth databases–were off-loaded to other secret state security agencies, including the FBI.

CIFA: Closed Down or Farmed Out?

When CIFA ran aground after a series of media disclosures beginning in 2004, some critics believed that was the end of that. “From the beginning of its existence,” investigative journalist Tim Shorrock revealed in Spies For Hire, “CIFA had extensive authority to conduct domestic counterintelligence.”

Indeed, one CIFA official “was the deputy director of the FBI’s multiagency Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force,” Shorrock wrote, “and other CIFA officials were assigned to more than one hundred regional Joint Terrorism Task Forces where they served with other personnel from the Pentagon, as well as the FBI, state and local police, and the Department of Homeland Security.”

Several investigative reports in Antifascist Calling have documented the close interconnections among Pentagon spy agencies, the FBI, DHS, private contractors, local and state police in what have come to be known as fusion centers, which rely heavily on extensive data-mining operations.

Their role as clearinghouses for domestic intelligence will expand even further under President Obama’s purported “change” administration.

Federal Computer Week revealed September 30, that DHS “is establishing a new office to coordinate its intelligence-sharing efforts in state and local intelligence fusion centers.”

According to the publication, a “new Joint Fusion Center Program Management Office will be part of DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis, [DHS Secretary Janet] Napolitano told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Napolitano said she strongly supports the centers.”

Though little reported by the corporate media, domestic spying had become big business with some very powerful constituencies.

Take CIFA, for example. Ostensibly a Defense Department agency, the secretive office which once had a multi-billion dollar budget at its disposal, was a veritable cash cow for enterprising security grifters. Much has been made of the corrupt contracts forged by disgraced Pentagon contractor Mitchell Wade and his MZM corporation, caught up in the “Duke” Cunningham scandal that landed the San Diego Republican congressman an eight-year federal prison term in 2006. Untouched however, by the outcry over domestic Pentagon spying were top-flight defense and security firms who lent their considerable resources–at a steep price–to the office.

Among the corporations who contracted out analysts and operatives to CIFA were heavy hitters such as Lockheed Martin, Carlyle Group subsidiary U.S. Investigations Services, Analex, Inc., an intelligence contractor owned by the U.K.’s QinetiQ, ManTech International, the Harris Corporation, SRA International, as well as General Dynamics, CACI International and the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). All told, these corporations reap tens of billions of dollars annually in federal largesse.

As Shorrock revealed, by 2006 CIFA “had four hundred full-time employees and eight hundred to nine hundred contractors working for it.” Many were military intelligence and security analysts who jumped ship to land lucrative six-figure contracts in the burgeoning homeland security market, as the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks revealed in July when they published a massive 1525-page file on just one fusion center.

Information illegally obtained on American citizens by CIFA came to reside in the office’s Threat And Local Observation Notice (TALON) system and a related database known as CORNERSTONE.

In 2007, the National Security Archive published Pentagon documents outlining U.S. Northern Command’s (USNORTHCOM) extensive surveillance activities that targeted legal political protests organized by antiwar activists. In April 2007, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Lt. General James Clapper, “reviewed the results of the TALON program” and concluded “he did not believe they merit continuing the program as currently constituted.”

Despite revelations that CIFA and USNORTHCOM had illegally conducted prohibited activities in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which restricts the military from carrying out domestic law enforcement, not a single operative or program manager was brought to book. According to The National Security Archive:

In June 2007, the Department of Defense Inspector General released the results of his review of the TALON reporting program. Its findings included the observation that CIFA and the Northern Command “legally gathered and maintained U.S. person information on individuals or organizations involved in domestic protests and demonstrations against DOD”–information gathered for law enforcement and force protection purposes as permitted by Defense Department directive (5200.27) on the “Acquisition of Information Concerning Persons and Organizations Not Affiliated with the Department of Defense.” However, CIFA did not comply with the 90-day retention review policy specified by that directive and the CORNERSTONE database did not have the capability to identify TALON reports with U.S. person information, to identify reports requiring a 90-day retention review, or allow analysts to edit or delete the TALON reports.

In August the Defense Department announced that it would shut down the CORNERSTONE database on September 17, with information subsequently collected on potential terror or security threats to Defense Department facilities or personnel being sent to an FBI data base known as GUARDIAN. A department spokesman said the database was being terminated because “the analytical value had declined,” not due to public criticism, and that the Pentagon was hoping to establish a new system–not necessarily a database–to “streamline” threat reporting, according to a statement released by the Department’s public affairs office. (Jeffrey Richelson, “The Pentagon’s Counterspies: The Counterintelligence Field Activity,” The National Security Archive, September 17, 2007)

Last year Antifascist Calling reported that when CIFA was shut down, that organization’s TALON database was off-loaded to the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center and the FBI’s GUARDIAN database that resides in the Bureau’s Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW).

The IDW is a massive repository for data-mining. As I reported in May, citing the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s revelations, the IDW possesses something on the order of 1.5 billion searchable files. In comparison, the entire Library of Congress contains 138 million unique documents.

EFF has called the IDW “the FBI’s single largest repository of operational and intelligence information.”

In 2005, FBI Section Chief Michael Morehart said that “IDW is a centralized, web-enabled, closed system repository for intelligence and investigative data.” Unidentified FBI agents have described it as “one-stop shopping” for FBI agents and an “uber-Google.” According to the Bureau, “[t]he IDW system provides data storage, database management, search, information presentation, and security services.”

As the Wired investigation reveals, NSAC intends to expand these data-mining capabilities. Currently, NSAC employs “103 full-time employees and contractors, and the FBI was seeking budget approval for another 71 employees, plus more than $8 million for outside contractors to help analyze its growing pool of private and public data.” Long-term, according to a planning document, the FBI “wants to expand the center to 439 people.”

While John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program may have disappeared along with the Bush administration, it’s toxic heart lives on in the National Security Branch Analysis Center.

TIA, IDW, NSAC: What’s in an Acronym? Plenty!

When the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) stood up the Information Awareness Office in 2002, the office’s stated mission was to gather as much information on American citizens as possible and store it in a centralized, meta-database for perusal by secret state agencies.

Information included in the massive data-sets by IAO included internet activity, credit card purchase histories, airline ticket purchases and travel itineraries, rental car records, medical histories, educational transcripts, driver’s licenses, social security numbers, utility bills, tax returns, indeed any searchable record imaginable.

As Wired reported, these are the data-sets that NSAC plans to exploit.

When Congress killed the DARPA program in 2004, most critics believed that was the end of the Pentagon’s leap back into domestic intelligence. However, as we have since learned, the data-mining portion of the program was farmed out to a host of state agencies, including the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the FBI.

Needless to say, private sector involvement–and lucrative contracts–for TIA projects included usual suspects such as Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, The Analysis Group and SAIC, as well as a number of low-key firms such as 21st Century Technologies, Inc., Evolving Logic, Global InfoTech, Inc., and the Orwellian-sounding Fund For Peace.

These firms, and many more, are current NSAC contractors; to all intents and purposes TIA now resides deep inside the Bureau’s Investigative Data Warehouse and NSAC’s Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force.

While the FBI claims that unlike TIA, NSAC is not “open-ended” and that a “mission is usually begun with a list of names or personal identifiers that have arisen during a threat assessment, preliminary or full investigation,” Wired reports that “the FBI’s pre-crime intentions are much wider that the bureau acknowledged.”

This will inevitably change–and not for the better–as NSAC expands its brief and secures an ever-growing mountain of data at an exponential rate. In this endeavor, they will be aided by the U.S. Senate.

With three provisions of the draconian Patriot Act set to expire at years’ end, the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VI) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a member of the committee and chairwoman of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee, stripped-away privacy protections to proposed legislation that would extend the provisions.

Caving-in to pressure from the FBI which claims that protecting Americans’ privacy rights from out-of-control spooks would jeopardize “ongoing” terror investigations, Leahy gutted the safeguards he had espoused just last week!

Claiming that his own proposal might hinder open-ended “terror” investigations Leahy said at the hearing, “I’m trying to introduce balances on both sides.” The original amendment would have curtailed Bureau fishing expeditions and would have required an actual connection of investigated parties to terrorism or foreign espionage.

Leahy was referring to Section 215 of the Patriot Act that allows the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to authorize broad warrants for nearly any type of record, including those held by banks, libraries, internet service providers, credit card companies, even doctors of “persons of interest.”

An amendment offered by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) to repeal the Leahy-Feinstein amendment was defeated in committee by a 4-15 vote. As the Senator from the FBI, Feinstein said that the Bureau did not support Durbin’s amendment. “It would end several classified and critical investigations,” she said. Or perhaps Durbin’s amendment would have lowered the boom on a host of illegal programs across the 16-agency U.S. “Intelligence Community.”

As Antifascist Calling reported in July, a 38-page declassified report by inspectors general of the CIA, NSA, Department of Justice, Department of Defense and the Office of National Intelligence collectively called the acknowledged “Terrorist Surveillance Program” and cross-agency top secret “Other Intelligence Activities” the “President’s Surveillance Program,” PSP.

The IG’s report failed to disclose what these programs actually did, and probably still do today under the Obama administration. Shrouded beneath impenetrable layers of secrecy and deceit, these undisclosed programs lie at the dark heart of the state’s war against the American people.

The Department of Justice’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) described FBI participation in the PSP as that of a passive “recipient of intelligence collected under the program” and efforts by the Bureau “to improve cooperation with the NSA to enhance the usefulness of PSP-derived information to FBI agents.”

The OIG goes on to state that “further details about these topics are classified and therefore cannot be discussed here.” As The New York Times revealed earlier this year in April and June, the NSA’s STELLAR WIND and PINWALE internet and email text intercept programs are giant data-mining meta-databases that sift emails, faxes, and text messages of millions of people in the United States.

Far from being mere passive spectators, the FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse continues to be a major recipient of NSA’s STELLAR WIND and PINWALE programs. As Marc Ambinder reported in The Atlantic PINWALE is “an unclassified proprietary term used to refer to advanced data-mining software that the government uses. Contractors who do SIGINT mining work often include a familiarity with Pinwale as a prerequisite for certain jobs.”

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s report on the IDW revealed, the FBI closely worked with SAIC, Convera and Chiliad to develop the project. Indeed, as EFF discovered “The FBI set up an Information Sharing Policy Group (ISPG), chaired by the Executive Assistant Directors of Administration and Intelligence, to review requests to ingest additional datasets into the IDW, in response to Congressional ‘privacy concerns that may arise from FBI engaging in ‘data mining.’ In February 2005, the Counterterrorism Division asked for 8 more data sources.” The names of the data sources were redacted in three of the eight datasets reviewed by EFF while three came from the Department of Homeland Security.

All of which begs the question: what is the FBI hiding behind it’s reorganization of the FTTTF and IDW into the National Security Branch Analysis Center? What role does the National Security Agency and private contractors play in standing-up NSAC? And why, as EFF disclosed, is the Bureau fearful of including Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) that might raise “congressional consciousness levels and expectations” in the context of Bureau “national security systems”?

Indeed, as the American Civil Liberties Union stated, “once again, the FBI has been found to be using invasive ‘counterterrorism’ tools to collect personal information about innocent Americans,” and it “appears that the FBI has continued its habit of gathering bulk amounts of personal information with little or no oversight.”

Not that congressional grifters and their corporate cronies, who have much to gain from billions of federal dollars pumped into these intrusive programs, actually care to explore what becomes of data illegally collected on innocent Americans by NSAC.

The civil liberties watchdog concludes they have “long suspected that the congressional dissent over and public demise of the Pentagon’s TIA program would result in a concealed and more invasive version of the program.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Somewhere near Washington Admiral Poindexter is leaning back in his chair, filling his pipe and smiling…

The American agenda for Pakistan is not a state-secret. Rather, it is only thinly disguised as perpetually fighting the “insurgents” in a lifetime of war, the World War IV. Whereas, in reality, both the “insurgency”, and the “counter-insurgency”, are entirely designed and fabricated in the USA as part of the evolving tactics of Hegelian Dialectics. They are enacted on the ground by various two-bit errand boys and expert trigger pullers. The already well-known existence of black-ops assassination squads in Pakistan/Afghanistan, known to the local peoples for years as the real prime-movers behind the heinous local terrorist acts, belatedly confirmed by NYT, WP, and NYT, in August 2009. See these two December 2008 reports on the Mumbai terrorist Act as reportedly orchestrated by Ali Baba from his perch in the Hindu Kush. The arrival of the black-ops in the region is not recent, albeit the public disclosures might be.

Starting in the immediate aftermath of 911, and perhaps even earlier, Pakistan may well have become the largest deployment region for the CIA in modern times, both covert (unknown to Pakistani government and secretly working to destabilize Pakistan), and overt (with Pakistani military’s aiding and abetting, in full view of the world, ostensibly fighting the “insurgents”, “Bin Laden”, “Al-Qaaeda”, but in the process mainly “tickling” its own innocent civilians in many a barbaric way).

And since Jundallah got launched to destabilize Iran, Baluchistan along with the Pak-Afghan regions have been awash with black-ops, and obviously of course, also with officially recognized US soldiers manning American military bases on Pakistani soil. But these soldiers of freedom were rarely spotted in the streets of major cities before. The below video report of September 08, 2009, portends of ominous whirlwinds imminently engulfing Pakistan:

The multimodal approaches to destabilizing, and consequently balkanizing Pakistan are so transparent that today, many a retired con-fession artist are getting in on the act to claim the flag of patriotism. Going for hajj after having eaten 900 mice is the favorite pastime of Pakistani praetorian guards. I am only waiting for any sitting Pakistani General to rise to that occasion, if it’s not already too late! But I am afraid it probably is – see here, here, here, and here. The decapitation of Pakistan by Pakistan’s finest. The shameful and criminal dislocation of up to 2.4 million civilians in May of this year was rightly described as “an exodus that is beyond biblical.”

Just as from the USSR’s point of view in yesteryear, the “insurgency” against them in Afghanistan was foreign inculcated, entirely fabricated in the USA (as we know today but held as a closely guarded secret then), which thus forced the Soviets to apply counter-insurgency measures, and subsequently, an outright invasion of Afghanistan (read Brzezinski’s own statements in Saving Pakistan cited below, and watch Brzezinski speak in the video clip devilishly crafting the “insurgency” for the Russians on the Pak-Afghan border); the so called “insurgency” in Pakistan is also calculatingly fabricated, ab initio, in the USA through covert intervention and black-ops. Subsequently, with sufficient “tickling,” and by astutely harvesting all the natural cracks and lacunae of the people, the “insurgency” acquires a life of its own. That latter stage is Machiavellianly projected in the news media, by the native informants, and the Mighty Wurlitzer, as justification for barbaric counter-insurgency operations, thus creating a self-sustaining destabilization.

The innocent Pakistan military, not too well-versed in political science or Hegelian Dialectics based Machiavellian state-craft (I presume), is similarly being compelled to take real counter-insurgency measures like the Soviets. Aided and abetted of course by high ranking traitors from within their own ranks, and by their foreign paymasters’ militaries (NATO, Blackwater now renamed Xe, and other un-named foreign divisions operating within Pakistan which I call “Jundallah-plusplus” to distinguish them from “Jundallah” which is apparently targeting Iran from Pakistani soil). The simple fact that Pakistan is supplying all the drinking water (bottled by Nestle), and full logistics channel for war-making supplies to NATO in Afghanistan is telling in and of itself. With the US, Pakistan is co-equally responsible for destroying the Afghan society, the Afghan people, and there is no less spilled-blood of innocent Afghani Muslims upon Pakistan’s hands over the past 30 years than upon the United States’ hands.

The Pakistani military helped destroy Afghanistan, and they are now helping to destroy Pakistan. No Pakistani civilian I know, including myself, ever authorized the Pakistani military to destroy Afghanistan, or aid the United States in its own hegemonic plans on the Grand Chessboard. Do you know anyone? So from where did they get their mandate? I would rather have clean drinking water in my tap, damn it! What good are the bloody nukes when they become the raison d’être for our very destruction in this manner without ever firing a single missile at the drones that are killing our own peoples?

It gives me no pleasure to repeatedly rehearse this footnote to history. What is not already obvious to the Pakistanis? It must surely still occur to many a reasonable military man serving with genuine zeal and honor in the real pivot of power in Pakistan that the end is drawing near. What are they doing idly watching the battle of their lives from the sidelines – when they are not shooting or displacing their own peoples that is? As quoted from a Dawn newspaper column, “THIS article poses two questions: on the day after US/Nato forces invade and occupy some of Balochistan and Waziristan, what will we say we should have done, and why aren’t we doing it now? Is this far-fetched? … One hopes that a small group of patriotic officers in Pakistan are also asking themselves what can be done, and why aren’t we doing it now.”

But NATO (aka the United States) can take satisfaction in the fact that the Germans have put their silly pacifism aside and acted like real men, trained military killers; although prior to this incident the Germans had engaged in some aerial and ground combat, there hadn’t been such a dramatic and publicized taking of civilian lives. Deutschland now has more than 4,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, the third largest contingent in the country after the US and Britain, and at home they’ve just finished building a monument to fallen members of the Bundeswehr (Federal Armed Forces), founded in 1955; 38 members (so far) have surrendered their young lives in Afghanistan.

In January 2007 I wrote in this report about how the US was pushing Germany in this direction; that circumstances at that time indicated that Washington might be losing patience with the pace of Germany’s submission to the empire’s needs. Germany declined to send troops to Iraq and sent only non-combat forces to Afghanistan, not quite good enough for the Pentagon warriors and their NATO allies. Germany’s leading news magazine, Der Spiegel, reported the following:

At a meeting in Washington, Bush administration officials, speaking in the context of Afghanistan, berated Karsten Voigt, German government representative for German-American relations: “You concentrate on rebuilding and peacekeeping, but the unpleasant things you leave to us.” … “The Germans have to learn to kill.”

A German officer at NATO headquarters was told by a British officer: “Every weekend we send home two metal coffins, while you Germans distribute crayons and woollen blankets.” Bruce George, the head of the British Defence Committee, said “some drink tea and beer and others risk their lives.”

A NATO colleague from Canada remarked that it was about time that “the Germans left their sleeping quarters and learned how to kill the Taliban.”

And in Quebec, a Canadian official told a German official: “We have the dead, you drink beer.”¹

Ironically, in many other contexts since the end of World War II the Germans have been unable to disassociate themselves from the image of Nazi murderers and monsters.

Will there come the day when the Taliban and Iraqi insurgents will be mocked by “the Free World” for living in peace?

The United States has also engaged in a decades-long effort to wean Japan away from its post-WW2 pacifist constitution and foreign policy and set it back on the righteous path of again being a military power, only this time acting in coordination with US foreign policy needs.

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.

In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized. — Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution, 1947, words long cherished by a large majority of the Japanese people.

In the triumphalism of the end of the Second World War, the American occupation of Japan, in the person of General Douglas MacArthur, played a major role in the creation of this constitution. But after the communists came to power in China in 1949, the United States opted for a strong Japan safely ensconced in the anti-communist camp. It’s been all downhill since then. Step by step … MacArthur himself ordered the creation of a “national police reserve”, which became the embryo of the future Japanese military … Visiting Tokyo in 1956, US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told Japanese officials: “In the past, Japan had demonstrated her superiority over the Russians and over China. It was time for Japan to think again of being and acting like a Great Power.”² … various US-Japanese security and defense cooperation treaties, which, for example, called on Japan to integrate its military technology with that of the US and NATO … the US supplying new sophisticated military aircraft and destroyers … all manner of Japanese logistical assistance to the US in its frequent military operations in Asia … repeated US pressure on Japan to increase its military budget and the size of its armed forces … more than a hundred US military bases in Japan, protected by Japanese armed forces … US-Japanese joint military exercises and joint research on a missile defense system … the US Ambassador to Japan, 2001: “I think the reality of circumstances in the world is going to suggest to the Japanese that they reinterpret or redefine Article 9.”³ … under pressure from Washington, Japan sent several naval vessels to the Indian Ocean to refuel US and British warships as part of the Afghanistan campaign in 2002, then sent non-combat forces to Iraq to assist the American war as well as to East Timor, another made-in-America war scenario … Secretary of State Colin Powell, 2004: “If Japan is going to play a full role on the world stage and become a full active participating member of the Security Council, and have the kind of obligations that it would pick up as a member of the Security Council, Article Nine would have to be examined in that light.”⁴ …

One outcome or symptom of all this can perhaps be seen in the 2005 case of Kimiko Nezu, a 54-year-old Japanese teacher, who was punished by being transferred from school to school, by suspensions, salary cuts, and threats of dismissal because of her refusal to stand during the playing of the national anthem, a World War II song chosen as the anthem in 1999. She opposed the song because it was the same one sung as the Imperial Army set forth from Japan calling for an “eternal reign” of the emperor. At graduation ceremonies in 2004, 198 teachers refused to stand for the song. After a series of fines and disciplinary actions, Nezu and nine other teachers were the only protesters the following year. Nezu was then allowed to teach only when another teacher was present.⁵

Which brings us to Italy, the remaining member of the World War Two Tripartite, or Axis. Article 11 of the 1948 Italian Constitution says in part: “Italy rejects war as a means for settling international controversies and as an instrument of aggression against the freedoms of others peoples.”⁶

But Washington laid claim early to Italy’s post-war soul. In 1948 the United States all but took over the Italian election campaign to insure the Christian Democrats (CD) defeat of the Communist-Socialist candidate. (And the US remained an electoral force in Italy for the next three decades maintaining the CD in power. The Christian Democrats, in turn, were loyal Cold-War partners.)⁷ In 1949, the US saw to it that Italy became a founding member of NATO. This was not seen as a threat to Article 11 because NATO has always painted itself as a “defensive” organization, even in 1999 when it carried out a 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia as both Italy and Germany supplied military aircraft and a NATO air base at Aviano, Italy served as the main hub for the daily bombing runs. For decades, Italy has been the home of US military bases and airfields used by Washington in one military adventure after another from Europe to Asia.

There are now some 3,000 Italian soldiers in Afghanistan performing a variety of services which enables the United States and NATO to engage in their bloody warfare. And 15 Italian soldiers have also lost their lives in that woeful land. The pressure on Italy, as on Germany, to become full-fledged combatants in Afghanistan and elsewhere is unrelenting from their NATO comrades.⁸

The Berlin Wall — Another Cold War Myth

Within a few weeks many of the Western media can be expected to turn on their propaganda machines to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, November 9, 1989. All the Cold War clichés about The Free World vs. Communist Tyranny will be trotted out and the simple tale of how the wall came to be will be repeated: In 1961, the East Berlin communists built a wall to keep their oppressed citizens from escaping to West Berlin and freedom. Why? Because commies don’t like people to be free, to learn the “truth”. What other reason could there have been?

First of all, before the wall went up thousands of East Germans had been commuting to the West for jobs each day and then returned to the East in the evening. So they were clearly not being held in the East against their will. The wall was built primarily for two reasons:

   1. The West was bedeviling the East with a vigorous campaign of recruiting East German professionals and skilled workers, who had been educated at the expense of the Communist government. This eventually led to a serious labor and production crisis in the East. As one indication of this, the New York Times reported in 1963: “West Berlin suffered economically from the wall by the loss of about 60,000 skilled workmen who had commuted daily from their homes in East Berlin to their places of work in West Berlin.”⁹

   2. During the 1950s, American coldwarriors in West Germany instituted a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany designed to throw that country’s economic and administrative machinery out of gear. The CIA and other US intelligence and military services recruited, equipped, trained and financed German activist groups and individuals, of West and East, to carry out actions which ran the spectrum from terrorism to juvenile delinquency; anything to make life difficult for the East German people and weaken their support of the government; anything to make the commies look bad.

It was a remarkable undertaking. The United States and its agents used explosives, arson, short circuiting, and other methods to damage power stations, shipyards, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, public transportation, bridges, etc; they derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others; used acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slow-downs in factories; killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy through poisoning; added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools; were in possession, when arrested, of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin with which it was planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans; set off stink bombs to disrupt political meetings; attempted to disrupt the World Youth Festival in East Berlin by sending out forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations, etc.; carried out attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment; forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards to cause confusion, shortages and resentment; sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions … all this and much more.¹⁰

Throughout the 1950s, the East Germans and the Soviet Union repeatedly lodged complaints with the Soviets’ erstwhile allies in the West and with the United Nations about specific sabotage and espionage activities and called for the closure of the offices in West Germany they claimed were responsible, and for which they provided names and addresses. Their complaints fell on deaf ears. Inevitably, the East Germans began to tighten up entry into the country from the West.

Let’s not forget that Eastern Europe became communist because Hitler, with the approval of the West, used it as a highway to reach the Soviet Union and wipe out Bolshevism forever. After the war, the Soviets were determined to close down the highway.

In 1999, USA Today reported: “When the Berlin Wall crumbled, East Germans imagined a life of freedom where consumer goods were abundant and hardships would fade. Ten years later, a remarkable 51% say they were happier with communism.”¹¹

About the same time a new Russian proverb was born: “Everything the Communists said about Communism was a lie, but everything they said about capitalism turned out to be the truth.”

Health care: ignoring the huge red elephant in the room

In the frenzied search of recent months for a better way of delivering health care to the American people, the American media has often discussed health-care systems in other countries, particularly Europe. Usually, little, if anything, is mentioned about Cuba’s system, where everyone is covered, for everything, where pre-existing conditions do not matter, and no patient pays for anything; i.e., nothing at all. The reason the Cuban system is seldom mentioned in the mass media is probably that it’s kind of embarrassing that this otherwise poor country, laboring under the awful yoke of (choke, gasp) socialism, can deliver health care that most Americans can only dream of.

Now we have a new book by T.R. Reid, former correspondent for the Washington Post and commentator for National Public Radio. It’s called “The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care.” Reid does not avoid giving some credit to the Cuban system, but he makes sure that the reader knows that he’s not taken in by any commie propaganda. He refers to the Cuban government as “a totalitarian Communist fiefdom”, and adds: “In every country (except, perhaps, a police state like Cuba) there is one group of citizens who are not bound by the unified health care system: the rich.”¹² Thus, the fact that Cuba has an egalitarian health care system is made to seem like something negative, something one could expect to find only in a police state.

In discussing the World Health Organization’s giving Cuba high marks for fairness in its system, Reid points out: “Of course, fairness and equal treatment extend only so far; when Fidel Castro himself fell ill in 2007, medical experts were flown in from Europe to treat him.”¹³ Aha! I knew it! Americans, and not just the right-wing crazies, would never accept a medical system where everyone got completely free care for all ailments if the president ever got any kind of special treatment. Would they? We could at least ask them.

Speaking of the right-wing crazies, there was a report in the New York Times which said: “Tomorrow night, getting right into the thick of the battle,” the president will “carry his message to the people in a nationwide television and radio speech” fighting for enactment of his health reform bill, which opponents tagged as “socialized medicine” and “an entering wedge for the takeover of private medicine by the federal government.” The president was John F. Kennedy, the program was Medicare, the Times story was published on May 20, 1962. Despite the speech, the effort failed until passage in 1964.¹⁴

And speaking of the totalitarian communist socialist fascist Cuban police-state dictatorship, Mr. Reid and others might be interested in an article I wrote which demonstrates that during the period of its revolution, Cuba has enjoyed one of the very best human-rights records in all of Latin America.

But how to get past a lifetime of conditioning and reach the American mind with that message? At the recent convention of the AFL-CIO, the country’s leading labor organization, there was a very progressive resolution put forth calling for the right of all Americans to travel to Cuba and for an end to the US embargo against the island nation. But at the end of the resolution the authors reminded us that they’re Americans, calling upon Cuba “to release all political prisoners.”¹⁵

To appreciate what’s wrong with that resolution one must understand the following: The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. Since the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba greater damage and greater loss of life than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Cuban dissidents typically have had very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to American government officials, particularly in Havana through the United States Interests Section. Would the US government ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and/or engaging in repeated meetings with known leaders of that organization? In the past few years, the American government has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad solely on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba has had with its dissidents’ ties to the United States, evidence gathered by Cuban double agents. Virtually all of Cuba’s “political prisoners” are such dissidents.

1. Der Spiegel (Germany), November 20, 2006, p.24
2. Los Angeles Times, September 23, 1994
3. Washington Post, July 18, 2001
4. BBC, August 14, 2004
5. Washington Post, August 30, 2005
6. Wikipedia: “Article 11 of Italian Constitution“
7. William Blum, Killing Hope, chapters 2 and 18
8. For further discussion of US opposition to Post-WW2 Axis pacifism, see “Former Axis Nations Abandon Post-World War II Military Restrictions“
9. New York Times, June 27, 1963, p.12
10. See Killing Hope, p.400, note 8, for a list of sources for the details of the sabotage and subversion
11. USA Today, October 11, 1999, p.1
12. p.234 of Reid’s book
13. Ibid., p.150-1
14. Washington Post, September 9, 2009
15. PDF of resolution

And at the United Nations we saw the process swing into action as Netanyahu tried to whip up support for another Middle East war for Israel’s benefit.

“Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium… To those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?”

Who with a speck of decency would have given Netanyahu a hearing after the atrocities of the Gaza blitzkrieg and the Goldstone Report condemning Israel’s war crimes?

“This Iranian regime is fueled by an extreme fundamentalism… anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated.”

Netanyahu could be describing the Israeli regime.

“…The greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction.”

He should know. Israel is bristling with both.

“The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

That would be nice for the warmongers in Tel Aviv, who already have them.

“Will the international community thwart the world’s most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of terrorism?”

I do hope so. But are we all agreed who they are?

“Rather than condemning the terrorists and their Iranian patrons, some here have condemned their victims. That is exactly what a recent UN report on Gaza did, falsely equating the terrorists with those they targeted.”

Substitute American for Iranian and it begins to make sense.

“In 2005, hoping to advance peace, Israel unilaterally withdrew from every inch of Gaza… We didn’t get peace. Instead we got an Iranian backed terror base fifty miles from Tel Aviv. Life in Israeli towns and cities next to Gaza became a nightmare. You see, the Hamas rocket attacks not only continued, they increased tenfold. Again, the UN was silent.”

Defenceless Gazans know all about nightmares. Israel, camped on their doorstep and still occupying Gaza’s airspace and coastal waters, lobs high explosives into the tiny enclave’s 1.5 million starving civilians, and there’s no escape.

“There is only one example in history of thousands of rockets being fired on a country’s civilian population. It happened when the Nazis rocketed British cities during World War II. During that war, the allies leveled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties.”

The Nazis launched sophisticated rockets with huge destructive power at London and Southern England from territory they had invaded and occupied. They weren’t firing makeshift missiles built in a garden shed to defend their homeland.

“Israel… tried to minimize casualties by urging Palestinian civilians to vacate the targeted areas. We dropped countless flyers over their homes, sent thousands of text messages and called thousands of cell phones asking people to leave. Never has a country gone to such extraordinary lengths to remove the enemy’s civilian population from harm’s way.”

How considerate. But where were Gaza’s terrified civilians supposed to run to? Into the sea? Bombing their homes was the ultimate terror act. There’s no excuse.

“…If Israel is again asked to take more risks for peace, we must know today that you will stand with us tomorrow. Only if we have the confidence that we can defend ourselves can we take further risks for peace.”

What exactly are these “risks for peace” Israel has so bravely taken? In 61 years what peace dividends has Israel’s risk-taking delivered?

The pot calls the kettle black

Netanyahu has a rare genius for irony, except that he himself doesn’t see it. That’s what makes him such a comedian. The irony of what he says is totally lost on him. Nearly every offensive remark he makes about Iran and Palestine can be flung back in his face because Israel is no better and in most respects far worse. Netanyahu’s speech to the UN was the most hilarious example in history of the pot calling the kettle black.

His scriptwriters evidently feed off the Zionists’ propaganda training manual, which teaches the art of lying and distortion and how to sugar-coat it all for easy swallowing by gullible audiences. Notice how everything Israel dislikes, and everything that thwarts their lust for domination, is now labeled “Iranian-backed”… and how everyone else, too, is in mortal danger from Iran and must therefore huddle together in Israel’s axis of aggression. Also note how situations are defined in language that suit only Israel’s case.

Less amusing is Netanyahu’s arrogant rejection of the UN Human Rights Council’s Goldstone report condemning Israel’s conduct.

By these twisted standards… [they] would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth. What a perversion of justice… Will you accept this farce? If this body does not reject this report, it would send a message to terrorists everywhere: Terror pays; if you launch your attacks from densely populated areas, you will win immunity. And in condemning Israel, this body would also deal a mortal blow to peace. Here’s why.

When Israel left Gaza, many hoped that the missile attacks would stop. Others believed that at the very least, Israel would have international legitimacy to exercise its right of self-defense. What legitimacy? What self-defense?

The same UN that cheered Israel as it left Gaza and promised to back our right of self-defense now accuses us — my people, my country — of war crimes? And for what? For acting responsibly in self-defense. What a travesty!

Israel justly defended itself against terror. This biased and unjust report is a clear-cut test for all governments. Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists?

The false choice in that last sentence is a propaganda favourite. Why would anyone with any sense wish to stand alongside either?

And how dare Netanyahu equate Roosevelt and Churchill’s epic struggle against the rampaging Nazis with Israel’s brutal crushing of Palestinian resistance against the illegal occupation of the Holy Land?

What has the UN come to when a regime that is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and not even a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty can call on the world’s nations to gang up against another country for starting its own nuclear programme? Israel itself refuses to submit to inspection and poses an alarming nuclear threat. It hasn’t signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention either, nor the Chemical Weapons Convention.

And is it not an insult to everyone’s intelligence to hear the UN being lambasted by the leader of a regime that is in open defiance of international law and countless UN resolutions?

The UN Human Rights Council is due to debate the Goldstone report today, when a vote will be taken on how its recommendations should be acted on. There are fears that the British government plans to reject the report’s key recommendations. If that’s the case and others follow suit, Israel will be let off the hook and allowed to continue its crime spree.

It will hand Israel’s comic genius a personal triumph. The Zionist network will no doubt show their gratitude in the usual way.

Though no official statistics are available, an estimated 3,000 of Israel’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens have broken one of their society’s biggest taboos and are currently serving, often as combat troops on the front line of the conflict with their Palestinian kin, in the occupied territories.

These Palestinians — nearly a fifth of Israel’s population — are the descendants of Palestinians who managed to avoid being expelled when the Jewish state was established in 1948. Unlike Palestinians in the occupied territories, who are ineligible to serve in the armed forces, they have Israeli citizenship.

In calling for mandatory national service, Gen Gabi Ashkenazi observed that those Israelis who refused to serve could not expect “civil equality”.

His comment echoed those of politicians who have been calling on Israel’s Palestinian minority to prove its loyalty in the wake of the winter attack on Gaza, in which some 1,400 Palestinians were killed, most of them civilians. Hundreds of Palestinian citizens were arrested for participating in protests during the operation.

Israel’s education minister, Gideon Saar, announced this summer that school budgets will in future be based on the number of pupils who enlist in the army or agree to do an alternative civilian programme of national service.

Although most Palestinian citizens oppose their rights being conditional on national service, a small group of Palestinians appears more open to the idea.

S, who spent two years in the army patrolling the borders to prevent Palestinian “infiltration” at the start of the second intifada, agreed to talk to The National on condition of strict anonymity.

He believes it is reasonable for the state to connect citizenship rights to military service: “After all, we are citizens of this country. True, we’re also Arabs but this is our state and there is no way we can avoid that.”

Asked if he felt any conflict between being a Palestinian and serving the Israeli army, he replied: “Sure, and it’s for that reason I believe strongly that Israel should be pursuing peace.”

Soldiers like S are extremely wary of speaking publicly, as Rhoda Kanaaneh, a Middle East expert at New York University, discovered when she began the first study of the group a decade ago. Her findings were published this year as a book, Surrounded, published by Stanford University Press.

She interviewed 72 Palestinian soldiers and policemen, as well as three women, whose trust had to be won slowly by intermediaries, including relatives, former classmates and friends. Many more, however, refused to talk, and those who did required anonymity and would often “just give yes-no answers”.

Dr Kanaaneh, who was raised in the Palestinian village of Arrabeh in northern Israel before her move to the US, said none of the soldiers was prepared to go into detail about what they did during their service. She suspects that this reflects in large part feelings of shame associated with their role enforcing the occupation.

Participating in the Israeli army is regarded by many in the minority as tantamount to treason, given that Israel is still engaged in a war against the wider Palestinian people and neighbouring Arab states.

S was quick to justify his time in the army, saying he had worked hard to treat the Palestinians well, sharing sweets and his food rations with local children.

Although Palestinian soldiers are excluded from the elite combat units, they have traditionally carried out some of the army’s most dangerous work and been stationed in some of the toughest locations.

Bedouin soldiers, for example, who are usually recruited as trackers, have to search for mines and booby-traps. Last year, a 28-year-old Bedouin man was blown up by a roadside bomb along the perimeter fence around Gaza as he went ahead of soldiers from the Givati brigade. Unlike Jewish soldiers killed in action, his family did not want his name published.

It is also certain that Palestinian soldiers were among the troops involved in the ground assault in Gaza, though none are likely to admit publicly to participating.

Most Israeli Jews, apart from those who dedicate themselves to religious study, are conscripted — three years for men and two years for women — when they leave school. Men continue to do a month of reserve duty each year until their 40s.

The decision to exempt Palestinian citizens from military service was taken at the state’s creation, said Dr Kanaaneh. Then, as now, the authorities were worried about arming on a large scale a potentially hostile Palestinian minority.

The only exception was the small Druze community, today numbering about 100,000, whose leaders agreed in the 1950s to their sons’ conscription.

Nonetheless, a small number of Palestinian citizens from the country’s Muslim and Christian communities have chosen to join the army. Dr Kanaaneh says the figure of 3,000 is her best estimate after many failed attempts to get the military to provide precise numbers.

She offers a possible reason why.

“The statistic people would really like to have is the ratio of deaths in service to the number of soldiers from each community. For example, there are claims that the Druze have a higher casualty rate than Jewish soldiers because they are sent on more dangerous operations. If such a statistic were confirmed, it would be powerful one and maybe that’s why they want to make sure it doesn’t get out.”

“Minority soldiers”, as the state refers to them, mainly came to public notice during the second intifada when they were reported killing Palestinians or foreigners in dubious circumstances.

The most high profile cases are Taysir Hayb, a Bedouin soldier who shot dead the British activist Tom Hurndall in Gaza in 2003; and a high-ranking Druze officer, known only as Captain R, who was put on trial after junior soldiers revealed he had fired many bullets into a 13-year-old girl in Gaza in 2004.

This has encouraged a view that Palestinian soldiers are the “bad apples” in the army. Dr Kanaaneh is unpersuaded.

“My impression — and that of the Palestinian soldiers too — was that they were being used to set an example and to show that rules were enforced. In other cases where Jewish soldiers were suspected of using brutality, inquiries were made but things were smoothed over and nothing came of it.”

She notes that Sgt Hayb, who received an eight-year jail term, was the first soldier to be given a lengthy sentence for an intifada-related killing since the 1980s.

There has also been little attempt to integrate Palestinian soldiers, Dr Kanaaneh said. Segregation between Israel’s Palestinian and Jewish soldiers was strictly enforced until the 1970s and is still the norm. In addition, the air force and elite combat units continue to exclude Palestinian soldiers.

Dr Kanaaneh said the refusal to allow even one Palestinian citizen to become an air force pilot illustrates the army’s continuing view that these volunteers cannot be trusted. “The fear,” she said, “is that a pilot can make independent decisions and wreak quite a bit of damage, unlike a soldier in a combat unit.”

Incorporating a small number of Palestinian soldiers into the army is good public relations for Israel, said Dr Kanaaneh, but arming most Palestinian young men is not something Israel wants.

Equally she regards as disingenuous the comments of Gen Ashkenazi, and similar ones from Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, linking civic equality to national service, typically involving volunteer work in schools and state institutions.

“National service is not as valued as military service in Israeli society — it is very clearly regarded as inferior service. So the idea that performing national service will make you equal to Jewish citizens who do military service is fundamentally a flawed logic.”

A significant proportion of Palestinian soldiers, she said, justify their decision to join by claiming that it is the best way both to overcome the institutional discrimination they face as members of the Palestinian minority and to gain some of the material rewards reserved for soldiers.

Many rights and benefits in Israel are tied to military service and therefore claimed mostly by the Jewish population, including a wide variety of jobs, entitlement to state-controlled land and economic privileges such as cheap loans, government allowances and tax breaks. The noted Israeli jurist David Kretzmer has called this a policy of “covert discrimination” against the Palestinian minority.

Certainly S, aged 29 and married with two children, said the chief reason he joined was to receive benefits such as higher child allowance, a lump sum on his release from the army and, most importantly, a heavily discounted parcel of land on which to build a home.

In Palestinian communities, where most of the land has been confiscated by the state and where new houses are often classified as illegal and subject to demolition, the offer of land is a powerful incentive.

Dr Kanaaneh points out that these financial perks and the possibility of a later career in “security jobs” such as the police force or as a prison warden are attractions for young men who often struggle to find work.

But, while there are benefits that individual soldiers can gain, Dr Kanaaneh says they are often nullified by larger discriminatory policies, such as house demolitions, directed towards the minority as a whole or against specific communities like the Bedouin. There have been several reports of former Bedouin soldiers having their homes destroyed by the state.

Equally, says Dr Kanaaneh, it is apparent to even the casual visitor to Druze villages in Israel that they suffer from the same overcrowding and lack of infrastructure common to other Palestinian communities, despite conscription among the Druze.

Even at the individual level, she adds, it is a gamble whether the connections made during army service help further a Palestinian soldier’s career and opportunities after he is demobiliised.

A comment she heard from several soldiers was: “Once your uniform is off, you’re a dirty Arab again.”

Dr Kanaaneh is also dismissive of the view that military service allows Palestinian soldiers to integrate fully into Israeli society.

“A surprising number I interviewed tried to compare themselves to Muslim-Americans or African-Americans serving in the US military. They said that through army service they expected to become Israeli like other Israelis.”

Dr Kanaaneh says this promise of integration never materialises. In her book she reaches a harsh conclusion: “In the end, the military, like all other [Israeli] state institutions, is a tool the dominant majority wields to preserve Jewish privilege.”