Mumbai Attacks Could Chill India-Pakistan Ties

The nuclear-armed rivals have been trying to mend their relationship, but now India suspects Pakistani militants were involved in the rampage.

By Mubashir Zaidi and Laura King
November 29, 2008
read original article at LA Times>>

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Islamabad, Pakistan -- With India casting suspicion on Pakistani militant groups in the Mumbai attacks, analysts and diplomats warned Friday that slowly warming relations between the nuclear-armed rivals could suffer a reversal, with potentially serious repercussions for the entire region.

Pakistani authorities have vehemently denied any involvement in the three-day rampage by groups of gunmen in India's commercial capital, which left at least 150 people dead. But in contrast to bellicose rhetoric in previous times of crisis with its neighbor, Pakistan coupled its denials with conciliatory gestures, including the highly unusual step of agreeing to send a representative of its main spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, to help investigate the attacks.

That move was particularly symbolic because Pakistan's intelligence apparatus itself had been accused of helping Pakistan-based militant groups carry out previous attacks on Indian soil -- most notoriously in the 2001 assault on India's Parliament, which New Delhi blamed on the militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad.

In the first hours of the Mumbai crisis, India used veiled though widely understood language to suggest Pakistani involvement. As investigators began interrogating captured assailants, reportedly finding Pakistani nationals among them, the accusations turned sharper.

"Preliminary evidence . . . indicates elements with links to Pakistan are involved," India's foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, said Friday in New Delhi.

Pakistan responded with fresh protestations of innocence. "Pakistan has nothing to do with this incident, no link with this act," Prime Minister Yusaf Raza Gillani said. "We condemn it."

Pakistan, nudged along by the United States, recently sought rapprochement with India. President Asif Ali Zardari rattled his country's military establishment by asserting that India did not represent a threat to Pakistan, and by offering to repudiate first use of nuclear weapons.

This month, Zardari -- a political neophyte who inherited his leadership role from his assassinated wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto -- astounded his compatriots with a flowery declaration that in every Pakistani's heart there was a bit of India, and in every Indian heart a bit of Pakistan. That came close to heresy in a country where schoolchildren are taught that India is Pakistan's most enduring foe, and where many believe that India represents a greater threat to national security than do militant groups like the Taliban.

The moves to mend their relationship included preliminary talks on the disputed territory of Kashmir.

But relations suffered a setback in July when the Indian Embassy in the Afghan capital of Kabul was bombed, an attack that killed about 60 people. Afghanistan accused the ISI of having aided militants who carried out the bombing, a claim supported by U.S. intelligence.

And many observers contend that if there is even a hint of Pakistani involvement in the bloodshed in Mumbai, relations probably will turn chilly and mistrustful.

"It would certainly complicate everything, put things on hold, make any negotiations harder," said Terry Pattar, a counter-terrorism associate in the Strategic Advisory Services at Jane's Information Group.

Analysts said reverberations from the Mumbai attacks probably would be felt in Afghanistan, long a staging ground for India-Pakistan rivalries. Renewed enmity would jeopardize U.S. hopes that Pakistan can be persuaded to marshal its energies to fight Islamic insurgents in the tribal lands bordering Afghanistan, rather than devote massive military resources to guarding against attack by India.

"Disruption of India-Pakistan ties at this juncture entails serious fallout in Afghanistan," said a commentary Friday in Dawn, a leading English-language newspaper in Pakistan.

"Everyone's kind of holding their breath on this, because it will definitely play out here as well," said a Western diplomat in Kabul, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss implications of the attacks.

Barack Obama's incoming administration has signaled ambitions for a speedy resolution of the Kashmir question. With such an accord in place, tens of thousands of Pakistani troops patrolling the Indian frontier could be deployed to operations against Islamic militants in the tribal areas.

Such a campaign is already taking place in the Bajaur tribal region, where Pakistani government forces say they have killed hundreds of militants in an offensive that began in August. North Atlantic Treaty Organization commanders in Afghanistan say that from their side of the border, they are seeing the positive effects of the Pakistani campaign. But Pakistani military officials are already complaining about the burdens of an unpopular offensive, hinting that it cannot continue indefinitely.

For Pakistan's fledgling civilian government, however, the more immediate concern may be its own uneasy dealings with the ISI, over which it has been trying to assert greater control. Until 2001, the spy agency was the chief patron of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a now-banned militant group created in the 1980s to foment unrest in Kashmir. Some analysts have said the carefully choreographed Mumbai attacks bore some of the group's hallmarks, though no conclusive evidence has emerged.

"It's very likely this group has an involvement at some level, but it's difficult to characterize because of the murky nature of how they operate," said Kamran Bokhari, an analyst at Stratfor, a private intelligence company.

While pressure over the Mumbai attacks has the Pakistani government on edge, the public has been nearly as riveted as if the violence had taken place on home soil. Pakistanis clustered around TV sets as news networks, in cooperation with Indian channels, carried nonstop coverage of the unfolding drama. Newspaper editorials uniformly expressed shock and sympathy.

In another break from the past, the Mumbai attacks generated a near-constant stream of high-level communication between the two countries. On Friday, Zardari reminded Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of his own wife's assassination by suspected Islamic militants, appealing to the Indian leader not to let insurgents set the regional agenda.

"We should not fall into the militants' trap," he said.

Obama's Foreign Policy ABC's

An old friend and traveling buddy, Wess Mitchell, has written a very memorable prescriptive for changing course from the unipolar mindset of the Bush administration:

The United States today faces an unfamiliar and rapidly changing world landscape.

By A. Wess Mitchell
November 23, 2008
Read original article at LA Times>>

When Barack Obama enters the Oval Office as commander in chief for the first time in January, it's not hard to imagine him walking to the globe beside the window, giving it a good spin and running in his mind through the list of global burdens he has inherited from his predecessor. What he will see is unlike anything any American statesman has ever had to confront. Two simultaneous land wars; a rapidly arming Iran; an atomic, post-Musharraf Pakistan; a resurgent, energy-rich Russia; a China that holds 10% of U.S. currency; a $10-trillion public debt; the worst recession since World War II; and a weak dollar.

Reflecting on this list, it may occur to Obama that he faces the most densely packed and danger-fraught international agenda of any American president since Harry S. Truman -- but the weakest hand of any president since Warren G. Harding. To use the prevailing economic terminology, he will inherit a leveraged superpower.

Many have noted the perils of America's wars and recession and have dilated gravely on the courage and creativity they will require of the new president. But few have called attention to the deeper structural significance these challenges collectively hold. For of the many "firsts" that Obama will register in the history books, the most important but most frequently overlooked is that he will be the first American president to have to come to grips with the full-blown psychological reality of global multipolarity.

This is neither the geopolitical straitjacket of bipolarity, with its furrowed map and hair-trigger standoffs, nor is it the permissive strategic environment of unipolarity, with its cooperative center and untamed periphery. Multipolarity has never existed on a global scale. The closest parallel we have to it is late 19th century Europe, with its narrow power differentials and multiple actors jostling for influence in the finely tuned regional balance of power.

The 21st century wasn't supposed to look this way. Only 18 years have passed since Charles Krauthammer proclaimed the advent of the "unipolar moment." The leitmotif of this new era was supposed to be incontestable American strength. Krauthammer acknowledged that new powers might arise at some point, but that, he said, was decades away.

Now, however, the multipolar moment has arrived ahead of schedule. Signs of its advent are everywhere. China continues its peaceful half- century march to superpower status, amassing an economy that will be larger than America's in a decade and a globe-girdling array of Third World client states. Russia, long thought a geopolitical washout, has used a combination of natural-gas wealth and diplomatic braggadocio to expel U.S. influence from Central Asia and reinsert itself into the ranks of the great powers. India, now a member of the nuclear club, is quietly dethroning the U.S. high-tech industry and carving out a geopolitical sphere of influence in South Asia.

Although the U.S. will still be the strongest power in this new system, it will not enjoy the sway it did in the early 1990s.

Talking this way in Washington will earn you the pejorative label of "declinist." Thus, arch-neoconservative Robert Kagan used a recent Washington Post column to warn the new administration against constructing a realist foreign policy template premised on an acceptance of attenuating American strength. By equating American primacy with "optimism" and "limits on our power" with defeatism, Kagan sent an unmistakable political message to the new Democratic president: Persist with the orthodoxy of unipolarity or risk the epithet "declinist" in the Republican Party's 2012 comeback narrative. "The danger of today's declinism," Kagan wrote, "is not that it is true but that the next president will act as if it is."

But the real danger is precisely the opposite -- that America is in a state of relative decline but that the new administration will act as if it is not. The latest forecast from the National Intelligence Council, the strategic forecasting unit of the U.S. intelligence community, depicts, by 2025, a world in which U.S. preeminence is deeply eroded and in which Washington maintains a decisive edge only in military hardware.

This is the world that Obama must equip the nation to navigate. It is imperative that he initiate a fundamental break from the post-Cold War U.S. strategic playbook. He must find a way to be flexible without being perfidious, to be a realist without being cynical, to match American policy ends with American power means. He must not persist, like his immediate predecessor, with a unipolar mind-set and a bipolar tool kit in a multipolar world.

What is an eager but overburdened young president to do? Conventional wisdom holds that the United States is not suited to playing power politics: Realpolitik, it is said, is not in our political DNA. And indeed, we are not a cynical people. But Obama need not reach far to find a shrewd new way to cope with an imposing new world. Embedded in our own domestic political system are the tools he will need. Three concepts, each deeply rooted in American democracy, may prove useful. Think of them as the ABCs of American statecraft for a multipolar world:

A: Allies are the political "base." As Obama knows, successful candidates take care to maintain their links to the party faithful. Lose them, and a politician deals from a position of weakness. In a multipolar world, allies provide the crucial "votes" that America needs to succeed against rivals. The first rule of American politics should be the first rule of American geopolitics: "Tend to your base."

B: Bargains are the coin of the realm. Every American politician understands the importance of trade-offs: Help a rival senator pass a bill, and he'll help you build that new highway back home. It's the same in foreign policy. "Ice NATO expansion," Moscow may tell the new president, "and we'll help you with Iran." As they do in the Senate, these offers force us to weigh values and interests. And as in the Senate, America must beware of cutting deals at the expense of our most precious resource -- our base.

C: Checked power is safe power. The concept of a balance of power is the taproot of American political thought. Congress, courts and the president contain and curtail one another in an elaborate dance that sifts power, protecting the republic. Understanding this separation of powers will equip Obama well for multipolarity. He need not dominate the new system or head off peers, only keep their power in manageable bounds.

The notion that democracies in general, and America in particular, are at a disadvantage in the rough-and-tumble world of geopolitics must be jettisoned. The skills we need are all well known to President-elect Obama. Incorporating these most American of concepts into our foreign policy may offer the new president some surprising advantages for coping with an unfamiliar new world.

America, it turns out, can handle the end of the unipolar moment.

A. Wess Mitchell is co-founder and director of research at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

Oil Price, Not Subprime Loans, Broke US Consumers

by Judith Apter Klinghoffer
Original Article on George Mason University site>>

Last week Tom Friedman urged his readers to go shopping. This week he tells them to eschew restaurant food in favor of a home made tuna fish sandwich. In other words, Friedman suggests that it is time to panic. Why? Because the US is filled with W.M.D. called subprime mortgages. I beg to differ.

Subprime mortgages are a problem but they are not the cause of the collapse. The collapse was caused by an OPEC generated precipitous rise in oil prices. Subprime mortgage buyers could no longer pay their mortgages because too much of their pay check had to go to pay for gasoline. Yes, I know, gas prices have since declined but not before Humpty Dumpty, the American consumer, was broken.

Much of the economic development around the world rested on the willingness and ability of the American consumer to absorb a large portion of the excess global production especially from emerging markets. It was the role of the producing nations to enable the American consumers to fulfill its role, i.e, live above its means, by lending it the needed funds. All subprime loans did was to encourage poor people to join the national spending spree. The hope was that emerging markets consumers will slowly begin to follow in the footsteps of their American brethren enabling a careful rebalancing of the global economy.

Indeed, when Oil rich nations decided to squeeze the American consumer by not only raising oil prices but also by ending or lowering their investment in the American financial markets, they assumed that there were enough new consumers in Asia to replace the American ones. In other word, they assumed that the collapse of the US economy would not lead to the collapse of the global economy, most especially, the Asian one.

They were wrong. Instead of proving that the world no longer needed Americans and their dollars, they ended up proving that the US and its consumers were needed more than ever. Just note the post crisis rise in the value of the dollar and the enormous popularity of US treasury bonds.

So where are we now? OPEC got the American president it wanted but at an exorbitant price. To steady the American economy, oil prices will have to stay low and foreign government will have to buy more American debt than ever. The projected American deficit next year is going to be around a trillion dollars to which a stimulus package of about another half a trillion dollars will probably be added.

If all goes well, the American consumer (excluding its poorest component) will have a short memory and it will renew its reckless spending. If it turns thrifty, the recession will last longer. Either way, the new, less confident developing world consumers are no longer likely to follow suit and the corporate world is going to be much more risk averse. In other words, the era of fast paced global development is probably over and the poor will stay poorer longer.

What is to be done? We must use this crisis to make major strides towards energy independence. A major part of the stimulus package should be spent on investment in our energy resources. This is the time to take a holistic approach. We should do everything, so that never, but never, will energy warlords be in a position to hold us hostage again. As in 1973 and 1979, they have demonstrated yet again that they cannot be trusted. Enough is enough.

Withdrawal, Secrecy and the Imperial President

After posting my mission for this blog as well as a good deal of source material, I feel that today would be a fine time for my first commentary, in this case on the secrecy with which President Bush has treated the recently agreed-upon "security pact" that was negotiated with Iraq.

Yesterday, as noted in an earlier posting, and as reported by Reuters ("Lawmaker accuses Bush over Iraq Deal") and the Boston Globe ("US-Iraq security pact may be in violation, Congress is told"), a Congressional sub-committee heard testimony that the US Constitution may have been breeched in the act of negotiating a security treaty with the nation of Iraq. Yale Law School professor Oona Hathaway, seen here on C-Span in previous testimony on the same subject, notes that, based on Constitutional precepts provided by the Supreme Court in the case of Youngstown, "an agreement entered in by the President on his own authority could not guarantee that we [the US] would come to the defense of Iraq. That is because the President as Commander in Chief does not have the power to declare war, as that is a power granted to Congress."

However, the agreement as approved by the Iraqi cabinet, sets up a "Joint Military Coordination Committee" in Section 23 of the agreement, as below:

The Joint Committee of Ministers will create the Joint Military Operations Coordination Committee (JMOCC) that includes representatives from both sides. The Joint Military Operations Coordination Committee (JMOCC) will be jointly led by both sides.

Problematically, this committee would cede aspects of operational command over the US Armed Forces.

The Bush administration has had earlier conflicts with even the most conservative elements of Congress (as when Attorney General Gonzalez tried to defend the wire-tapping executive orders before Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina) on the same issue of executive overreach. As noted by Creighton University Law Professor Michael Kelly, "Justice Jackson's concurring opinion in Youngstown said that a president's power is at its 'maximum' when he is acting with Congress, but his power moves into a 'twilight zone' when he is acting on his own in the face of Congressional silence, and his power is at its 'lowest ebb' when he is acting on his own against the implied or express will of Congress."

The will of Congress to be brought to the negotiating table has certainly been expressed, as in this Ocotber 29,2008, letter to George Bush from the House Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee Chair Bill Delahunt , which alludes to the troubling aspects of the US Congress and citizenry being shut out of any discussions with Iraq despite long-running requests for consultation by Congress. The letter goes on to discuss the imperative of Congressional Approval of this pact to meet standards of Constitutional legality:

In testimony earlier this year, Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State and the Coordinator for Iraq, Ambassador David M. Satterfield, suggested that the joint congressional resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq gives your administration the authority to engage indefinitely in offensive combat operations in Iraq.

We respectfully disagree. The joint resolution clearly provides you with authority to fight only to "defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq," which no longer exists, as Saddam Hussein's regime has been replaced with a friendly government, and to "enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq." The UN Mandate is all that allows the administration to meet this second criteria, making a continuation of the Mandate, congressional approval of the U.S.-Iraq security pact as a congressional-executive agreement, or approval of the agreement as a treaty by the Senate essential to ensuring that our combat troops are on sound legal ground.

What appears to be George Bush's final major stroke in Iraq, the signing of the US-Iraq Security Pact, resembles, in effect, a peace treaty (or at least the legally binding path to a peace), as it negotiates the halt of US combat operations on Iraqi soil with the government of Iraq. While it should be cause for optimism that the terms of peace have been discussed and laid out, the lack of public oversight in the process is more than just a cause for concern. It is a subversion of the checks and balances that our government is founded on.

Without the Congress to give voice to the people, and the Judiciary to ensure the rule of law, the Executive becomes a voice unto itself, set upon the international body politic with no limits, to make decrees as it might wish. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger introduces this thesis in his work The Imperial Presidency:

"It is chiefly in its foreign relations," as Tocqueville noted long ago, "that the executive power of a nation finds occasion to exert its skill and its strength. If the existence of the American Union were perpetually threatened, if its chief interests were in daily connection with those of other pewerful nations, the executive would assume an increased importance." But the nation that Tocqueville inspected in the 1830s lived in happy isolation from world power conflicts. In consequence, he wrote, "the President of the United States possesses almost royal prerogatives which he has no opoportunity of exercising." In the last half century, international crisis, genuine, contrived or imagined, has at last given Presidents to exercise these almost royal prerogatgives--with the results Tocqueville predicted. This is the story of the imperial Presidency.

The practical implications of allowing the Bush administration free reign to direct the theatre of Iraq have been extraordinarily costly to date in terms of lives, expense to our economy, our standing in the world, and in terms of our security. Rather than allowing Bush to cloak this final act in secrecy (there have been no American press reports of the actual agreement), the Senate should act to debate this issue as a full body, and they should pass a resolution demanding that Congress be consulted; otherwise the issue should go immediately before the courts.

Not only in the United States, the manner of introducing this act before the Iraqi Parliament appears, at the least, to have been polically ill-prepared. Al-Sadr's supporters have been demonstrating en masse with snipers looking down from above, while al-Sistani's neutrality or support for the agreement is yet to be fully confirmed. The Bush administration has claimed that a simple majority of Iraqi Parliament will be required to pass the bill, but if broad consensus is not reached, al-Sistani could voice discontent, leading to mass unrest. In the interests of the American and Iraqi people, this issue deserves the scrutiny of the Congress.

Full Text of Secret Iraq Withdrawal Agreement

Massachusetts Congressman William Delahunt this morning criticized the Bush administration for its policy of secrecy regarding the US-Iraq Security Pact (see below), which stipulates the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces by the end of 2011.

Below follows an excerpt from the text of that secret document, a translation from an Iraqi newspaper, originally published by the Society of Friends (Quakers).

An agreement regarding the withdrawal of the U.S. forces from Iraq and regulating the U.S. activities during its temporary presence, between the United States and the Iraqi government

November 16th, 2008

Foreword

Iraq and the U.S., referred to here as “both sides”, affirm the importance of: supporting their joint security, participating in global peace and stability, fighting terrorism, cooperation in the fields of security and defense, and deterring invasions and threats against Iraq’s sovereignty, security, territorial integrity, and Iraq’s democratic federal constitutional regime.

Both sides affirm that this cooperation is based on mutual respect of both sides’ sovereignty in accordance with the United Nations’ goals and principles.

Both sides want to achieve mutual understanding to support their collaboration, without jeopardizing Iraq’s sovereignty over its land, water, and sky, and based on the mutual guarantees given as equal and independent sovereign partners.

Both sides have agreed on:

Article One
Scope and Goal

This agreement specifies the rules and basic requirements that regulate the temporary presence and activities of U.S. troops and their withdrawal from Iraq.

...

___________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________

...

Article Twenty Three
Implementation

The following entities are responsible of the implementation of this agreement and the settlement of any disputes over its interpretation and application:

1- A Joint Committee of Ministers that includes members with a minister rank chosen by both sides. This committee will deal with the basic issues needed to interpret the implementation of this agreement.

2- The Joint Committee of Ministers will create the Joint Military Operations Coordination Committee (JMOCC) that includes representatives from both sides. The Joint Military Operations Coordination Committee (JMOCC) will be jointly led by both sides.

3- The Joint Committee of Ministers will create a Joint Committee formed by both sides that includes representatives chosen by both sides. This committee will deal with all issues related to this agreement that do not fall under the mandate of Joint Military Operations Coordination Committee (JMOCC); this committee will be jointly led by both sides.

4- The Joint Committee will create subcommittees in all different areas. Subcommittees shall discuss issues related to interpretation and implementation of this agreement each in accordance with its expertise.

Article Twenty Four
Withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq

Recognizing the improvement of the Iraqi security forces and their increased capabilities, and the fact that they are in charge of all security operations, and based on the strong relationship between the two sides, both sides have agreed on the following:

1- All U.S. forces must withdraw from all Iraqi territories no later than December 31st 2011.

2- All U.S. combat forces must withdraw from all cities, towns, and villages as soon as the Iraqi forces take over the full security responsibility in them. The U.S. withdrawal from these areas shall take place no later than June 30th, 2009

3- All withdrawn U.S. combat troops in accordance to paragraph 2 regroup in installations and areas agreed upon located outside cities, towns, and villages. These installations and areas agreed upon will be specified by the Joint Military Operations Coordination Committee (JMOCC) before the date mentioned in paragraph 2 of this article.

4- The U.S. recognizes Iraq’s sovereign right to request a U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq at anytime. The Iraqi government recognizes the United States’ sovereign right to request a U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq at anytime.

5- Both sides agree on creating mechanisms and arrangements to reduce the U.S. forces levels within the specified time period, and both sides must agree on where these forces will be located.

Article Twenty Five
Procedures to end the implementation of chapter 7 on Iraq

Recognizing the Iraqi government’s right in refraining from requesting a renewal of the multi-national forces mandate in Iraq granted by the Security Council resolution 1790 (2007) expiring on December 31st 2008;

Pointing out the letters addressed to the Security Council and attached to resolution 1790: one letter from the Iraqi prime minister and the other from the U.S. secretary of state consecutively dated 7th and 10th of December 2007

Noting the third part of the declaration of principles signed by the Iraqi PM and the U.S. president on November 26 of 2007 in which Iraq requested a final renewal of the U.S. mandate until December 31st of 2008;

Recognizing the important and positive developments in Iraq, and keeping in mind that the situation in Iraq is fundamentally different from that existing at the time the Security Council adopted resolution number 661 (1990), especially that the danger posed to international peace and stability by the former Iraqi government is now gone;

Both sides confirm that after the expiration of the United Nations mandate for the multi-national forces in Iraq on December 31st 2008, Iraq should regain the international and legal position that it used to enjoy before Security Council resolution number 661 (1990). Both sides confirm that the U.S. will make its best effort to help Iraq take the necessary steps to accomplish that by December 31st of 2008.

Read the full text of the agreement here>>

US-Iraq Security Pact Poses Legal Issues in US, Iraq

from the Boston Globe>>
By Jenny Paul Globe Correspondent / November 20, 2008

WASHINGTON - Passage of the US-Iraq security pact under the terms both countries' leaders have advocated could violate the constitutions of both countries, specialists told a congressional subcommittee yesterday.

They instead pressed for an extension of the United Nations mandate authorizing US troop involvement in Iraq, which expires Dec. 31.

American constitutional law scholar Oona Hathaway said she believes the Constitution requires Congress to also approve the agreement. The Bush administration has labeled the pact a "status of forces agreement," which can be implemented without congressional approval.

But Hathaway said the US-Iraqi pact is more comprehensive than previous agreements because it allows US troops to engage in military operations and specifies timetables for military withdrawal.

"These are unprecedented in a standard status of forces agreement, have never been part of a standard status of forces agreement, and extend in my view far beyond what the president can do without obtaining congressional approval," said Hathaway, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Law.

She also dismissed contentions that the administration can continue combat operations in Iraq after Dec. 31 based on the congressional resolution that authorized the 2003 US invasion.

"This was enacted, remember, in 2002, when Saddam Hussein was in power, and we were hearing about weapons of mass destruction, and so it was clear what the threat posed by Iraq was," she said. "It was posed by the government of Iraq. Of course, that government has changed, and those same threats to the United States do not exist."

The hearing was held by the House Foreign Affairs Committee's subcommittee on international organizations, human rights, and oversight.

Its chairman, Representative William Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat, said that he has "serious reservations" about the pact and argued that an extension of the UN mandate would be a viable stopgap measure.

The security agreement, which the Iraqi Cabinet approved on Sunday and the United States and Iraq signed on Monday, requires US troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011. Iraq's parliament must approve the agreement before it takes effect.

Iraqi lawmakers, however, are debating the number of votes needed to pass the agreement. Most of the ruling parties argue that current law requires only a simple majority, while opponents say a provision in the Iraqi constitution calls for a two-thirds majority of the 275-member parliament, said Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi architect who is a consultant to the American Friends Service Committee.

Opponents of the pact introduced a bill Monday that would set a two-thirds standard for approval of agreements like the security pact.

"No one has ever proposed to have a simple majority for this type of agreement," Jarrar said. "Many people think that the new argument of just requiring a simple majority is politically motivated."

Yesterday, opponents of the agreement, including followers of anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, disrupted a second reading of the agreement in parliament.

Jarrar told the House subcommittee a simple-majority approval of the pact could provoke unrest and violence in Iraq.

"Most of the groups who are opposing it in the parliament, have been saying, 'If you wanted to go through some loopholes - not send it to Parliament or pass it through a simple majority - we will quit this political process as a whole, and we will go back to armed resistance,' " he said.

Delahunt said US and Iraqi officials should begin working on a six-month to one-year extension of the UN mandate instead of pushing the security agreement through the Iraqi parliament before it recesses next week.

The extension would allow President-elect Barack Obama and his administration to review and "improve the agreement to meet the campaign promises of Sen. Obama." Obama has advocated a 16-month time frame for US troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Delahunt also berated the Bush administration for refusing to release an official copy of the agreement to the public.

Read this article on the Boston Globe site here>

Principles in the Pipeline: Managing Transatlantic Values and Interests in Central Asia

by ALEXANDER COOLEY

The West’s Central Asian Dilemmas
full article >>

Throughout the 1990s the Central Asian states remained a low foreign policy priority for the United States and Europe. It was not until the next decade that the Euro-Atlantic community developed compelling security and commercial interests in the region. After 9/11 the Central Asian states hosted coalition military bases and became important security partners for operations in Afghanistan.

The rising price of oil and gas, coupled with a renewed western concern about its energy security, made the development and export of Central Asian production a much more pressing commercial and strategic priority for Brussels and Washington than it was in the 1990s. A region that was effectively ignored for over a decade has now become a vital area of transatlantic interest.

Unfortunately, this new period of transatlantic engagement has not been accompanied by positive changes in the quality of Central Asia’s democratic development and internal governance. Mired in post-Soviet legacies of patronage politics, strong presidencies with authoritarian powers, endemic corruption and widespread poverty, the Central Asian states, unlike many of their post-communist counterparts, have failed to make meaningful progress in enacting political and economic liberalization. In fact, while pursuing these new strategic interests the West’s credibility as an agent of political reform has been undercut by a series of mis-steps and concessions made to Central Asia’s authoritarian regimes.

Managing the balance between promoting the interests and the values of the transatlantic community has been rendered all the more difficult by the fact that its most effective mechanisms for encouraging institutional change are not available for engaging with this region. Since the Central Asian states are not, and almost certainly will never be, candidates for membership in the European Union or NATO, they do not have to enact the necessary institutional changes and conditional reforms that helped to transform their post-communist counterparts in East and Central Europe, the Balkans and the Black Sea region. The United States and Europe have not collaborated to formulate a common Central Asian strategy, nor have they advanced a strong common response to the floundering role in the region of international organizations such as the OSCE. The trend of developments has indeed taken quite the opposite direction: many western international and non-governmental organizations that have emphasized a values-based agenda have been criticized and even driven from the region by Central Asian governments that are keen to limit outside interference in their domestic affairs. Supported by Russia’s resurgence and criticism of the West, the Central Asian states have recast the West’s values agenda as a political threat.

Continue reading this article on the German Marshall Fund US website >>

Published in International Affairs 84: 6, 2008

The Afghan Trap: The CIA's Intervention in Afghanistan and the USSR's "Vietnam"

Interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski,

President Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser

Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998
Posted at globalresearch.ca 15 October 2001

---

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

B: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

Translated from the French by Bill Blum

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The URL of this article is:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html

Copyright, Le Nouvel Observateur and Bill Blum. For fair use only.

Andrew Bacevich on Bill Moyers

Part 2>> 3>> 4>> 5>> 6>>

From Bill Moyer's Conversation with Andrew Bacevich:

BILL MOYERS: You say, "U.S. troops in battle dress and body armor, whom Americans profess to admire and support, pay the price for the nation's refusal to confront our domestic dysfunction." What are we not confronting?

ANDREW BACEVICH: The most obvious, the blindingly obviously question, is energy. It's oil. I think historians a hundred years from now will puzzle over how it could be that the United States of America, the most powerful nation in the world, as far back as the early 1970s, came to recognize that dependence on foreign oil was a problem, posed a threat, comprised our freedom of action.

How every President from Richard Nixon down to the present one, President Bush, declared, "We're gonna fix this problem." None of them did. And the reason we are in Iraq today is because the Persian Gulf is at the center of the world's oil reserves. I don't mean that we invaded Iraq on behalf of big oil, but the Persian Gulf region would have zero strategic significance, were it not for the fact that that's where the oil is.

Back in 1980, I think, President Carter, in many respects when he declared the Carter Doctrine, and said that henceforth, the Persian Gulf had enormous strategic significance to the United States and the United States is not going to permit any other country to control that region of the world.

And that set in motion a set of actions that has produced the militarization of U.S. policy, ever deeper U.S. military involvement in the region, and in essence, has postponed that day of reckoning when we need to understand the imperative of having an energy policy, and trying to restore some semblance of energy independence.

BILL MOYERS: And this is connected, as you say in the book, in your first chapters, of what you call "the crisis of profligacy."

ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, we don't live within our means. I mean, the nation doesn't, and increasingly, individual Americans don't. Our saving - the individual savings rate in this country is below zero. The personal debt, national debt, however you want to measure it, as individuals and as a government, and as a nation we assume an endless line of credit.

As individuals, the line of credit is not endless, that's one of the reasons why we're having this current problem with the housing crisis, and so on. And my view would be that the nation's assumption, that its line of credit is endless, is also going to be shown to be false. And when that day occurs it's going to be a black day, indeed.

Full Transcript of Andrew Bacevich on Bill Moyers Journal (original airing 9/26/08)>>

The Limits of Power

This week I picked up the recently-published book on current American policy by realist Andrew Bacevich, entitled The Limits of Power. Among Bacevich's most provocative concepts is his dissection of American National Security ideology, from which the following is an excerpt:

"President Bush's critics and his dwindling band of loyalists share this conviction: that the forty-third president has broken decisively with the past, setting the United States on a revolutionary new course. Yet this is poppycock. The truth is this: Bush and those around him have reaffirmed the preexisting fundamentals of U.S. policy, above all affirming the ideology of national security to which past administrations have long subscribed. Bush's main achievement has been to articulate that ideology with such fervor and clarity as to unmask as never before its defects and utter perversity.

"Four core convictions inform this ideology of national security. In his second inaugural address, President Bush testified eloquently to each of them.

"According to the first of these convictions, history has an identifiable and indisputable purpose. History, the president declared, 'has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author of Liberty.' History's abiding theme is freedom, to which all humanity aspires. Reduced to its essentials, history is an epic struggle, binary in nature, between 'oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.'

"According to the second conviction, the United States has always embodied, and continues to embody, freedom. America has always been, and remains, freedom's chief exemplar and advocate. 'From the day of our Founding,' the president said, 'we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth.' As the self-proclaimed Land of Liberty, the United States serves as the vanguard of history. Revising, refining, and perfecting their understanding of freedom, Americans constantly model its meaning for others around the world. In 1839, the journalist John L. O'Sullivan described the young United States as 'the Great Nation of Futurity.' So it remains today. Within the confines of the United States, history's intentions are most fully revealed.

"According to the third conviction, Providence summons America to ensure freedom's ultimate triumph. This, observed President Bush, 'is the mission that created our Nation.' The Author of Liberty has anointed the United States as the Agent of Liberty. Unique among great powers, this nation pursues interests larger than itself. When it acts, it does so on freedom's behalf and at the behest of higher authority. By invading Iraq, the United States reaffirmed and reinvigorated the nation's 'great liberating tradition,' as the president put it. In so doing, 'we have lit a fire as well--a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.' Only cynics or those disposed toward evil could possibly dissent from this self-evident truth.

"According to the final conviction, for the American way of life to endure, freedom must prevail everywhere. Only when the light of freedom's untamed fire illuminates the world's darkest corners will America's own safety and prosperity be assured. Or as the president expressed it, 'The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.' In effect, what the United States offers to the world and what it requires of the world align precisely. Put simply, 'America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.' This proposition serves, of course, as an infinitely expansible grant of authority, empowering the United States to assert its influence anywhere it chooses since, by definition, it acts on freedom's behalf.

"This line of thinking comes with a rich and ancient pedigree. We can trace its origins back to 1630, when John Winthrop enjoined the first white settlers of Massachusetts Bay to erect a 'city upon a hill,' or to 1776, when Tom Paine declared that it lay within American's power 'to begin the world over again'--sentiments, as we have noted, that Ronald Reagan skillfully resurrected. Time and again during America's ascent to power, variants of this ideology provided the impetus for expansionism. Appearing in 1846 under the guise of Manifest Destiny, it lent moral cover to James Polk's efforts to secure the lebensraum Americans coveted. In 1898, urgent calls to 'liberate' nearby Cuba nudged William McKinley into a war that ended with the United States in possession of a maritime empire that extended all the way to the western Pacific.

"Yet only since World War II has this ideology established itself as the fixed backdrop for policy. Indeed, it derives much of its persuasive power from the way that Americans remember that war, converting the events of the 1930s and 1940s into a parable of universal significance. Hence the inclination to portray almost any heavy not to Washington's liking as another Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin, with the failure to confront that adversary as tantamount to 'appeasement' and with nothing less than the survival of civilization itself at stake."

The Harsh Lesson of Afghanistan: Little has Changed in 200 Years

From yesterday's Times (London):

As President Karzai visits Britain, an account written by the first European to visit his country still has much to teach us

Ben Macintyre

Two hundred years ago this month, in the middle of the Great Indian Desert that separated British India from the uncharted lands to the northwest, British soldiers encountered Afghan warriors for the very first time.

The British force, led by a Scottish diplomat with the splendidly imperial name of Mountstuart Elphinstone, consisted of several hundred near-mutinous sepoy (native Indian) troops, a handful of white officers, 600 camels, and a dozen elephants loaded with gifts.

Elphinstone, the first European diplomatic envoy sent to Afghanistan, had been dispatched from Delhi to coax the “King of Caubul” into an alliance against Napoleon, to explore this terra incognita, and - in the unlikely event that he survived - to report back to London on the “wild and strange” land beyond the mountains.

For a month Elphinstone slogged through the desert wastes, encountering bandits, warring clans and ferocious tribal chiefs off their heads on opium and alcohol who could be spoken to only in the early afternoon, that being the “interval between sobriety and absolute stupefaction”. For guidance, he had to rely on accounts of Alexander the Great's expedition, written more than 2,000 years earlier.

Just inside the border of what is now Pakistan, on November 21, 1808, Elphinstone was met by a body of 150 Afghan mounted troops, riding two to a camel, terrifying bearded figures each carrying a glittering matchlock musket. “Their appearance,” he recorded with fine Scots understatement, “was altogether novel and striking.” No one in his party could understand a word that they were saying.

So began the first formal contact between the British crown and the fractured state of Afghanistan. The latest chapter in that story will be written today, when the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, arrives in Britain for the Prince of Wales's birthday party.

Astonishingly little has changed in the intervening two centuries: the Afghans are still regarded by Britain with a strange mixture of awe and incomprehension. The histories of our two countries are entwined like no other, yet that history has been routinely and tragically ignored or forgotten.

At 29 years old, Mountstuart Elphinstone was absurdly young, entirely fearless and very slightly mad. But he was also highly intelligent, fluent in Persian and Hindi, and profoundly observant. His book about his Afghan adventures - An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul - remains one of the most perceptive surveys of Afghanistan yet written, with such sublime chapter headings as “Rapine - how occasioned”.

In many ways, the society he described has barely changed.

The first meeting between the British diplomat and the Afghan King took place on February 25, 1809, in Peshawar, east of the Khyber Pass. As David Loyn recounts in Butcher and Bolt, an excellent new study of British engagement in Afghanistan, Elphinstone was stunned by the opulence of the Afghan king's outfit - “one blaze of jewels” - and the huge diamond, the cursed Koh-i-Noor, hanging from his wrist.

The British visitor was also intrigued by the Afghans' strenuous fitness regime, and one exercise in particular. “The performer places himself on his hands and toes, with his arms stiff and his body horizontal... he then throws his body forward, and at the same time bends his arms, so that his chest and belly almost sweep the ground.” This special form of exercise torture has been inflicted on soldiers and schoolchildren ever since. Elphinstone had discovered the Afghan press-up.

But he also noted something more profound. For all the finery, Afghanistan was chronically unstable, and about to tear itself apart. He compared it to ancient Scotland, a place of complex tribal animosities, clansmen raised on mountain hardship and bloodshed, riven by untraceable feuds and alliances, where central authority barely extended beyond the royal palace gates.

As so many British observers have been, he was drawn to the Pashtuns, with their fierce code of honour. “Their vices are revenge, envy, avarice, rapacity and obstinacy; on the other hand, they are fond of liberty, faithful to their friends, kind to their dependants, hospitable, brave, hardy, frugal, laborious and prudent.” They spent most of their time fighting each other, but they swiftly combined to repel any outsider and were ever “ready to defend their rugged country against a tyrant”.

Afghanistan, he wrote, could be understood only through its kaleidoscopic tribal structures. “The societies into which the nation is divided possess within themselves a principle of repulsion and disunion too strong to be overcome,” he noted. When the British marched into Afghanistan to bring about regime-change a few years later, Elphinstone, now in retirement, advised that the venture was hopeless.

Sure enough, in 1842, 16,000 British soldiers and camp-followers were slaughtered during the retreat from Kabul, the worst military disaster the Raj had suffered.

Britain's subsequent misadventures in Afghanistan followed a similar pattern, as successive generations of diplomats and soldiers sought to shape policy and impose change from outside without regard to local circumstances. In 2001 the EU representative to Kabul, Francesc Vendrell, candidly admitted that, since democracy had apparently been implanted in the country, “it was not thought necessary for us to understand the tribal system”.

There are small signs that the realities Elphinstone understood two centuries ago may finally be sinking in: General David Petraeus, fresh from Iraq, plans to enlist tribal leaders against the Taleban; a political settlement, John Hutton, the Defence Secretary, insists, is essential to a long-term peace.

Barack Obama has pledged greater commitment to the Afghan conflict, and will soon be making his own perilous journey into the diplomatic and military wilds of Afghanistan. Before he sets off, he might ponder the insights of the very first emissary to that beautiful and benighted place, and the words of an Afghan tribal elder who accosted Mountstuart Elphinstone, two centuries ago, to explain his turbulent world.

“We are content with discord, we are content with alarms, we are content with blood,” the old man said. “But we will never be content with a master.”

Read the Original at Times Online.

Descent Into Chaos: Charlie Rose Interview with Ahmed Rashid

This video from the Charlie Rose show, first aired in June '08 features veteran Pakistani journalist and author Ahmed Rashid (from minute 32) discussing Pakistani and Afghan developments, as well as his book Descent Into Chaos. Among other topics, Rashid touches on the "Talibanization of Pakistan", the threat that offshoots of the Taliban taking shelter in Afghanistan are persuading tribes in Pakistan to fight for the Taliban, and that these tribes are taking on their own agenda of promoting "Taliban values" in Pakistan.

How We Lost the War We Won

From Nir Rosen's account in Rolling Stone, "How We Lost the War We Won":

The highway that leads south out of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, passes through a craggy range of arid, sand-colored mountains with sharp, stony peaks. Poplar trees and green fields line the road. Nomadic Kuchi women draped in colorful scarves tend to camels as small boys herd sheep. The hillsides are dotted with cemeteries: rough-hewn tombstones tilting at haphazard angles, multicolored flags flying above them. There is nothing to indicate that the terrain we are about to enter is one of the world's deadliest war zones. On the outskirts of the capital we are stopped at a routine checkpoint manned by the Afghan National Army. The wary soldiers single me out, suspicious of my foreign accent. My companions, two Afghan men named Shafiq and Ibrahim, convince the soldiers that I am only a journalist. Ibrahim, a thin man with a wispy beard tapered beneath his chin, comes across like an Afghan version of Bob Marley, easygoing and quick to smile. He jokes with the soldiers in Dari, the Farsi dialect spoken throughout Afghanistan, assuring them that everything is OK.

As we drive away, Ibrahim laughs. The soldiers, he explains, thought I was a suicide bomber. Ibrahim did not bother to tell them that he and Shafiq are midlevel Taliban commanders, escorting me deep into Ghazni, a province largely controlled by the spreading insurgency that now dominates much of the country.

Until recently, Ghazni, like much of central Afghanistan, was considered reasonably safe. But now the province, located 100 miles south of the capital, has fallen to the Taliban. Foreigners who venture to Ghazni often wind up kidnapped or killed. In defiance of the central government, the Taliban governor in the province issues separate ID cards and passports for the Taliban regime, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Farmers increasingly turn to the Taliban, not the American-backed authorities, for adjudication of land disputes.

By the time we reach the town of Salar, only 50 miles south of Kabul, we have already passed five tractor-trailers from military convoys that have been destroyed by the Taliban. The highway, newly rebuilt courtesy of $250 million, most of it from U.S. taxpayers, is pocked by immense craters, most of them caused by roadside bombs planted by Taliban fighters. As in Iraq, these improvised explosive devices are a key to the battle against the American invaders and their allies in the Afghan security forces, part of a haphazard but lethal campaign against coalition troops and the long, snaking convoys that provide logistical support.

We drive by a tractor-trailer still smoldering from an attack the day before, and the charred, skeletal remains of a truck from an attack a month earlier. At a gas station, a crowd of Afghans has gathered. Smoke rises from the road several hundred yards ahead.

"Jang," says Ibrahim, who is sitting in the front passenger seat next to Shafiq. "War. The Americans are fighting the Taliban."

Continue (to the article on the Rolling Stone site)

Embedded With the Taliban

I was forwarded the article "How We Lost the War We Won" by my old Journalism professor Robert Jensen. The article, by Nir Rosen, describes his experience while embedded with the Taliban, which he discusses in this video posted to the Rolling Stone site.

If You Can't Drive It, Park It

My dad today passed on a conversation that he and my late grandfather had at some point after the US had decided to move into Iraq. My grandfather, a life-long conservative as well as a retired farmer and local public servant, was typical of his generation in that his actions were marked by a sense of humility. In his good-humored and unassuming manner, he offered his own foreign policy prescription: "If you can't drive it, park it."

It is my goal in this blog to record my exploration of the issues touching American involvement in Afghanistan, and US foreign policy in general. I would like to provide resources to fuel debate and discussion of the proper role of the US in today's world. In a functioning democracy, the free exchange of ideas should be encouraged, especially on matters as grave as war. Hopefully, Park It can serve to encourage the interchange of ideas on peace, the military, American values, morality and self-interest, effective conflict resolution, and the proper course of action for the current American administration.