Pakistan Supreme Court orders the investigation of President Asif Ali Zardari’s purchase his “home” in London, more trouble ahead for a very weak Pakistani President.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari vows to fight charges; support at all-time low by Pakistani citizens

From Times of India:

LONDON: Troubles for Pakistan president Asif Ali Zardari are getting bigger by the day, as the supreme court has now asked the concerned authorities to investigate as to how he purchased the 365-acre home counties estate in the UK worth £4 million. It is worth mentioning here that Zardari had purchased the mock Tudor Rockwood Park in the 1990s , which was soon termed as “Surrey Mahal” by the then opposition leaders.

Zardari is alleged to have spent more than £300,000 on renovations of the 20-room mansion, including building his own private polo field and an exact copy of the local village pub, the Telegraph reported on Friday. The apex court has ordered officials to ask the Swiss government to reopen an investigation into whether the property was bought with laundered money.

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The Turkish Government has forced the Kurdistan Issue by banning the Kurdish Democratic Society Party from their government and has banned many of the DCP members from participating in government for life. This will cause great rebellion within the Kurdish community throughout the area outside of Turkey also. Over 40,000,000 Kurds do not have a homeland of their own. This might be the final straw that broke the camel’s back. See our Leyla Zana story here.

Kurdish American Community protests Banning of the Democratic Society Party-DTP in Turkey
KurdishMedia.com
Los Angeles, CA, Dec 22 –To protest the Turkish crackdown on the Democratic Society Party-DTP, an elected political party in Turkey, members of the Kurdish Community will hold a demonstration in front of the Turkish consulate between the hours of 1:00 – 3:00 P.M. to denounce the recent Turkish Constitutional Court ruling of DTP closure, followed by arbitrary arrests and banning of DTP officials and members.

A Turkish Constitutional Court ruling has ordered the closure of the Democratic Society Party, DTP—a Kurdish party in the Turkish parliament in 14 years. The closure has outraged Kurdish Community as an intimidating and repressive military atmosphere prevails in Kurdish areas in Eastern Turkey. DTP party members and officials are being targeted and banned from political life. Mr. Ahmet Türk, the co-chair of the DTP, who met President Barack Obama during his official state visit to Turkey on April 6, 2009, and Aysel Tugluk, DTP Member of Parliament, are among those banned from political participation for five years. Despite parliamentary immunity and authority, both are now facing the threat of being imprisoned as five of their colleagues -Selim Sadak, Ahmet Türk, Leyla Zana, Mehmet Hatip Dicle and Orhan Dogan – who have been sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment merely because they have asserted their Kurdish identity. In violation of all civil and constitutional laws and rights, the Turkish State Treasury will confiscate DTP’s assets. Read the rest here.

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War causes death and serious injuries. The United States troops hurt or dead is over 70,000. WHEN IS ENOUGH ENOUGH? End the War(s) NOW.

Read the story here: Last Week: US Iraq Casualties Rise to 72,548 From Voters For Peace By Michael Munk

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Stop the Assassination Drones:. Call Leon Panetta at (703) 482-0623, CIA headquarters, leave a message: No More Drone Assasination attacks, and don’t attack Quetta. End the War(s) NOW.

Call President Obama ALL WEEK LONG. Let’s keep his White House lines busy: Take Action Now ! ! Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.” Say NO to Escalation in Afghanistan. Sign the petition here. No funds from Congress for the troop escalation. Tell them now.

[ Go to this link and join Cindy Sheehan and other Peace Activists new group "Peace of the Action" put your name on the line.]

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Today, please tell your member of Congress and U.S. Senators to End the War in Afghanistan, sign this petition. If you live outside the United States, write to your leaders, End the War Now.

The U.S. Assassination Drones are at work in North Waziristan. Over 50 attacks by Predator or Reaper U.S. Drones have taken place since January 2009. In 2008, there were 36 attacks for the full year. A full list of each attack is located at the bottom of the article below.

U.S. Assassination Drone in flight, a Dawn.com photo

US airstrike kills 8 Punjabi Taliban in North Waziristan By Bill Roggio at The Long War Journal

The US killed eight Islamist terrorists in the third airstrike in two days in Pakistan’s Taliban-controlled tribal agency of North Waziristan.

…The Datta Khel region is a stronghold of both the Haqqani Network and North Waziristan Taliban leader Hafiz Gul Bahadar; they both shelter al Qaeda leaders and fighters. The US has pressured Pakistan to dismantle the Haqqani Network, but has been rebuffed. The Haqqani family is led by Jalaluddin and his son Siraj, who serves as the military commander. The network is based in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, and has the backing of the Pakistani military and its intelligence service. The Haqqanis have strong ties to al Qaeda. Siraj Haqqani is believed to be a member of al Qaeda’s military shura, or council, US intelligence officials have told The Long War Journal.

The US has zeroed in on the Haqqani Network since killing Baitullah Mehsud in an Aug. 5 strike in South Waziristan. Baitullah was the leader of the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, one of several Taliban groups operating in Pakistan. Since the Aug. 5 strike, 14 of the 18 reported airstrikes have taken place in North Waziristan, while the other four were in South Waziristan. Nine of the 14 attacks in North Waziristan occurred in territory administered by the Haqqani Network.

So far this year, the US has carried out 50 airstrikes inside Pakistan. In all of 2008, 36 strikes were carried out. Since the US ramped up cross-border attacks in August 2008, 16 senior al Qaeda and Taliban leaders have been killed. Read the rest here.

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The United States has taken on “corruption” in the Afghanistan Government that they had initiated in 2003 and had watched and partnered with since then. Now as part of a “clean Afghanistan”, the U.S. is forcing President Hamid Kazari of The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to get rid of ministers in his cabinet that are “corrupt”. The story below from Al Jazeera reports on President Hamid Karazi’s new cabinet appointments. You be the judge. Do you think things have changed, or is this “window dressing”?

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has chosen ministers for his cabinet and presented them to parliament for approval.

The list of 23 was read to parliament by Anwar Khan Jigdalik, the minister for parliamentary affairs, on Saturday after a stormy session during which politicians questioned the legality of the process.
Mohammad Qasim Fahim, the Afghan vice-president, told MPs on Saturday that the nominees were being presented to parliament for “votes of confidence”. “The nominees include some former ministers who have shown excellence in their positions in their past term in office,” Fahim said.

Karzai’s choices are seen as the first test of his stated commitment to building a clean and accountable government and eradicating corruption. Key players:

Hashem Ahelbarra, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Kabul, said: “It is a goverment of ‘appeasement’ as was described to me by a member of parliament. “The key players are still there, and there are about 12 new faces who represent most of the power brokers, mujahidin and warlords who endorsed President Karzai during the election. Read the rest here.

[Ed. Note: We are in Afghanistan to secure the Oil and Pipeline routes through Afghanistan and the best hope that these pipelines will be built in the future is if we keep the current Karazi Government in power. We, the United States, is propping up another hand-picked leader of a Failed State, ranked 178th our of 179 countries in "Nations with the worst conditions" listings. Now we have Pakistan attack their own people to "kill the Taliban" that supposedly sneak across the Afghan border and blow up car bombs and people committing suicide with bomb vests.
FOR WHAT? WHEN DOES IT END? WHAT DOES THE END LOOK LIKE? OUT NOW.]

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War causes death and serious injuries. The United States troops hurt or dead is over 70,000. WHEN IS ENOUGH ENOUGH? End the War(s) NOW.

Read the story here: Last Week: US Iraq Casualties Rise to 72,548 From Voters For Peace By Michael Munk

* * *
Stop the Assassination Drones:. Call Leon Panetta at (703) 482-0623, CIA headquarters, leave a message: No More Drone Assasination attacks, and don’t attack Quetta. End the War(s) NOW.

Call President Obama ALL WEEK LONG. Let’s keep his White House lines busy: Take Action Now ! ! Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.” Say NO to Escalation in Afghanistan. Sign the petition here. No funds from Congress for the troop escalation. Tell them now.

[ Go to this link and join Cindy Sheehan and other Peace Activists new group "Peace of the Action" put your name on the line.]

Get your bumpersticker, support Military Famlies Speak Out

You can order bumperstickers at this link.

Today, please tell your member of Congress and U.S. Senators to End the War in Afghanistan, sign this petition. If you live outside the United States, write to your leaders, End the War Now.

Drones (Unmanned Aircraft) are here to stay. Over 35% of all U.S. military aircraft will be Drones in the future. A $29 dollar purchase allows for any computer to see what the Drone is seeing. The computer system has been compromised. What’s next? A PowerPoint Laser Pen brings down a Drone? Here’s some information on the U.S. Drone fleet, which is to grow to 165 Drones in the near future, and increase from there.

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems is maker of the Predator Drone and many other products. View their UAV (Unmanned Aircraft Vehicle) here. andfor more information, go to DefenseTech here. Pentagon to spend $65 Billion to upgrade technology systems.

Predator B (YMQ-9A) General Atomics Photo

Where's my home? After a U.S. Predator Hellifire missile attack in Afghanistan

Grim Reaper, 4 Hellfire Missiles, 2 Sidewinder Air-to-Air Missiles and 2 GBU laser guided bombs

War causes death and serious injuries. The United States troops hurt or dead is over 70,000. WHEN IS ENOUGH ENOUGH? End the War(s) NOW.

Last Week: US Iraq Casualties Rise to 72,548
From Voters For Peace By Michael Munk

US military occupation forces in Iraq under Commander-in-Chief Obama suffered 21 combat casualties in the week ending December 15, 2009 as the official total since the 2003 invasion jumped to at least 72,548. The toal includes 35,080 dead and wounded from what the Pentagon classifies as “hostile” causes and more than 37,458 (as of Dec. 5) dead and medically evacuated from “non-hostile” causes.

The actual total is over 100,000 because the Pentagon chooses not to count as “Iraq casualties” the more than 30,000 veterans whose injuries-mainly brain trauma from explosions – were diagnosed only after they had left Iraq.** In addition, ICC names eight service members who died of wounds after they left Iraq and are not counted by the Pentagon.**

US media divert attention from the actual cost in American life and limb by occasionally reporting only the total killed (4,373 as of Dec 15) but rarely mentioning the 31,603 wounded in combat. To further minimize public perception of the cost, they cover for the Pentagon by ignoring the 36,562* (as of Dec 2)*** military victims of accidents and illness serious enough to require medical air evacuation, although the 4,373 reported deaths include 896 (up three) who died from those same causes, including at least 18 from faulty electrical work by KBR and 197 suicides through Dec 5.***

** The number of wounded is updated weekly (usually Tuesday).
** New York Times, Jan 26, 2009
*** http://siadapp.dmdc.osd.mil/personnel/CASUALTY/oif-total.pdf

Read more from Michael Munk at: www.michaelmunk.com

War Good For the Pakistan Economy? How about government officials ready to be charged?
KARACHI: Foreign investment has fallen since the beginning of the current fiscal year, and collective decline in the first five months was by 25 per cent over last year. Pakistan is on the verge of total collapse. Has the forced attack of its own people caused the dam to break? Would you invest in Pakistan today? Looks like the world financial institutions are saying “NO”. Also, in today’s NY Times, “Pakistan Ministers Are Called Before the Courts”, gives a good overview of the existing problem that could destroy the existing Zardari Government.

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Stop the Assassination Drones:. Call Leon Panetta at (703) 482-0623, CIA headquarters, leave a message: No More Drone Assasination attacks, and don’t attack Quetta. End the War(s) NOW.

Call President Obama ALL WEEK LONG. Let’s keep his White House lines busy: Take Action Now ! ! Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.” Say NO to Escalation in Afghanistan. Sign the petition here. No funds from Congress for the troop escalation. Tell them now.

[ Go to this link and join Cindy Sheehan and other Peace Activists new group "Peace of the Action" put your name on the line.]

Get your bumpersticker, support Military Famlies Speak Out

You can order bumperstickers at this link.

Today, please tell your member of Congress and U.S. Senators to End the War in Afghanistan, sign this petition. If you live outside the United States, write to your leaders, End the War Now.

BBC’s Africa Today (last night) had an interestingly detailed piece about recent violence in the far northeast of Centafrique, while Alex Thurston at the indispensable Sahel Blog continues his well informed plunge southward into Francophone central Africa. I’ve done some recent reading about this, beginning with “Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa” by Brian Titley, which is a decent enough introduction.  Over-personalized and underplaying the continuing institutional hold of the French, I’d still recommend it as a good read and a useful corrective to the colonial fantasy reporting about the famously tyrannical Colonel/President/Emperor’s 1966-1979 rule of the Central African Republic.  More so, I recommend Thomas O’Toole’s 1986 English language history and Pierre Kalck’s similar but more detailed work in French (from which most more recent works draw heavily, but which I’ve only read bits of).  Kalck’s recent update of the Historical Dictionary of the Central African Republic, translated into English by O’Toole, is especially recomended.   Given my recent — if superficial — interest in this under reported nation’s modern history,  I thought I’d chime in with some updates, and a way folks can read more.

The BBC report, including a summary of an interview given by several UFDR leaders describes the recent fighting at Sam Ouandja, where a large refugee camp for Sudanese is located. The UFDR has in the past been accused of being supplied by the Sudanese government, and the area has been home to anti Idriss Déby Chadian rebels.  Chadians have long been involved in the CAR’s politics, notably aiding France in bringing back David Dacko, and providing troops to support François Bozizé in 2001-2003, as they did to aid his predecessor Ange-Félix Patassé in 1997.

The far east of the country is very sparsely populated, and communal conflict between the local Gula people (around Birao in Vakaga) and pastoralists from Sudan and elsewhere is common, as are growing conflicts with Kara to their south. Some of Patassé’s men were holed up here — mostly from Patassé’s own northern Sara ethnic group from well west of Bamingui-Bangoran.  As well Vakaga and Bamingui-Bangoran became a place of exile for some Muslim an northern disaffected soldiers of Bozizé’s rebellion, in a nation long dominated by the M’Baka of the southwest, former president André Kolingba’s tiny Yakoma, and the Gbaya people of the center north, the largest ethnic group in the country. When the Army fought through Vakaga in 2007 with the help of French airpower, the human rights abuses were extreme, and ethnic and religious tensions were inflamed, with reports that southern soldiers especially targeted Gula communities, reinforcing ethnic grievances and an ethnic coloration to the previously more mixed UFDR.

The report last night describes small scale fighting (three killed) between UFCR or former UFCR men of Gula ethnicity and Sudanese from the Sam Ouandja camp. The UFDR claimed that the camp provides cover for rebel groups as well as many criminal gangs. This whole area is plagued by bandits much more than by rebel soldiers. The UFCR is demanding the camp be closed, and this seems to have taken on a rather ethnic vocabulary. The UFCR also complains that there is no camp security to speak of provided by MINURCAT, the French led stabilization force in the northeast. Add into this mix the Chadian rebels, Sudanese rebels, Sudanese government, the CAR army (FACA), a recent history of French bombing Birao to ashes, seminomadic pastoralists competing with farmers for resources, and you can see why this is a mess.

And this leaves aside the recent insurgency and continuing banditry in the northwest, the recent attack on N’Délé by a small rebel splinter faction, the absolutely shattered state, economy, and political culture handed down from particularly brutal colonial and neocolonial regimes, and the aftermath of the 2002 mass murders by the militia of Congo-Brazzaville’s Jean-Pierre Bemba, who surged into the south to support Patassé, Bemba’s subsequent prosecution at the Hague, and Patasse’s recent return from exile.

Once again, I have to recommend the work of the International Crisis Group. I read “Central African Republic: Anatomy of a Phantom State” last week, and it’s the closest thing I can find to an English language history of the troubled recent years of the CAR. The two ICG reports and the HRW report make a good briefing. I’ll save my breath on the 2003-2007 war and it’s multiple regional insurgencies that have never really ended, so you can read better informed sources offered below.

• Human Rights Watch. State of Anarchy Rebellion and Abuses against Civilians, Human Rights Watch, Vol. 19, No. 13(A) (September 2007)
• International Crisis Group (ICG), Central African Republic: Untangling
  the Political Dialogue, Africa Briefing N°55, 9 December 2008
• International Crisis Group (ICG), Central African Republic: Anatomy of
  a Phantom State, Africa Report N°136, 13 December 2007
  • Both are available at the ICG’s Centrafrique Page.
• CAR based Anthropologist Louisa Lombard’s thoughtful and timely blog also provides invaluable source of knowledgeable reflection and current events as an outsider on the ground.
• The Humanitarian and Development Partnership Team (HDPT) of the various agencies on the ground in the CAR has a comprehensive Website. Here’s a site map for the Sam Ouandja area.
  • Their resident photographers maintains an amazing photo pool at Flickr. The shot above of a UFDR soldier protecting airstrip in Sam Ouandja (May 2008) is from their collection.

Image via Wikipedia

• To get a general idea of the geography: Sam Ouandja, where the camp at the center of this recent bloodshed happened, is in Ouadda (Haute-Kotto prefecture). UFDR activity has extended from Bamingui-Bangoran Prefecture (where N’Délé is to the west), through Ouadda Sub Prefecture of Haute-Kotto (south) and all of Vakaga (the northeast of the country). Most of the UFDR activity is in Vakaga (Ouanda Djallé and Birao), while the largest concentration of Gula communities in is Birao (the northern 2/3ds of Vakaga.
• Ethnologue has a detailed Languages of Central African Republic Map.

Other Related Links

• Guerrillas return (news.bbc.co.uk)
• French aid worker seized in Chad (news.bbc.co.uk)
• Uganda pursues rebels into CAR (news.bbc.co.uk)
• CrisisWatch N°74, 1 October 2009 (crisisgroup.org)
• Chad: “No Exit?”, Louise Arbour in Foreign Policy (crisisgroup.org)
• CrisisWatch N°75, 1 November 2009 (crisisgroup.org)

The Pakistan Supreme Court has ruled that the NRO is ‘null and void’. Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari’s days are numbered. Will he resign or hold on and let the country be consumed in prosecutions of many of the high command? Zardari is protected from prosecution while he is President, but the opposition parties in government are calling for his resignation and could be impeached under the Pakistan Constitution. View the video from Al Jazzera.net as it explains the NRO and the ramifications of the Supreme Court action.

Opposition calls on Zardari to quit

Taken from Al Jazeera.net: Pakistan’s main opposition party has called for Asif Ali Zardari, the country’s president, to resign after the supreme court declared void an amnesty deal protecting him from corruption charges.

Following the ruling, officials from the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) said Zardari should be obliged to step down. “On the moral ground, he should realise that in this situation he is no longer able to effectively run the government, run the country, [or] represent Pakistan within Pakistan or outside,” Raja Zafarul-Haq, the chairman of the PML-N, told Al Jazeera. He said that his party was “not in a hurry” to call for Zardari’s impeachment, but warned: “Maybe there will be a public reaction if he decides not to step down.” Earlier, Khawaja Asif, a senior leader PML-N leader, said: “It will be in his own interest, it will be in the interest of his party and it will be good for the system.”

Resignations demanded

Siddiqul Farooq, a spokesman for the party, also called for Zardari to step down, saying the president should “resign on moral grounds” and “not depend upon the crutches of the constitution”. Pakistan’s constitution guarantees Zardari immunity while in office. But the constitution also states that presidential candidates must be pious, honest and truthful and not have been convicted in a criminal case.

The supreme court’s decision on Wednesday declaring the amnesty agreement as being unconstitutional paves the way for corruption cases against Zardari and thousands of other officials covered by the amnesty to be revived. “All the cabinet members must immediately tender their resignations,” Farooq said. Beneficiaries of the amnesty include Pakistan’s interior and defence ministers. A number of cases were pending against Zardari when it was announced by Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan’s president, that he and others would be immune from prosecution under the 2007 National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO).

Amnesty deal

Musharraf declared the NRO while under pressure to hold elections and end eight years of military rule. Although Zardari has spent years in jail over corruption charges, he alleges the charges were politically-motivated and questions hang over whether he was ever actually convicted. Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) won elections in 2008, restoring civilian rule, but the NRO expired at the end of last month and the PPP did not have enough support to renew the ordinance in parliament. Senior figures in the PML-N, led by Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister, have already called on Zardari to give up powers inherited from Musharraf such as those to sack the prime minister and dissolve parliament.

Zardari already faces low public approval ratings and any political trouble in Pakistan is likely to be watched very closely by the West which wants Islamabad to focus on combating Islamist fighters.

Malik, other bigwigs face difficult situation

From Dawn.com: ISLAMABAD: As a result of the Supreme Court judgment scrapping the National Reconciliation Ordinance, Interior Minister Rehman Malik and a number of other bigwigs are likely to lose their posts because they had been convicted by accountability courts. The apex court decision restores the pre-NRO situation and those who had been sentenced in cases withdrawn under the NRO would stand convicted. Mr Malik is one of those who had been convicted for not appearing before the court in corruption cases in 2004. Now, legal experts said the interior minister would have to get bail from a court to retain his office.

Mr Malik was facing two cases in accountability courts – illegal gratification of Rs15 million and illegal detention of a complainant. Both cases were registered in 2004. According to the National Accountability Bureau report submitted before the apex court, the minister was sentenced under section 31-A of the National Accountability Ordinance to three years’ rigorous imprisonment. Talking to reporters here on Wednesday, Mr Malik vowed to resign from his office if corruption charges were proved against him. “I would prefer to be buried in Pakistan instead of escaping,” he said.

Some other beneficiaries of NRO would face a difficult situation. Included among them are former MNA Sardar Mansoor Khan Leghari, Murid Ahmed Baloch, Inamur Rehman Sehri, former MPA Mian Muhammad Rashid, former chairman of the NDFC Maula Bux, former MD of the Utility Stores Corporation Sadiq Ali Khan, former acting manager of the OGDC Raheel J. Qureshi and Nadeem Imtiaz.

The Strings Attached to the U.S. $7.5 Billion USD gift to Pakistan over the next five years

WASHINGTON: The Obama administration sought to reassure US lawmakers this week it would demand ‘maximum accountability’ from Pakistan for $7.5 billion in aid and that it had safeguards to ensure funds did not reach extremists. In a report sent by the State Department to congressional committees late on Monday, the administration outlined its priorities for the aid, including water, agriculture and electricity projects, and laid out a strategy to prevent corruption and misuse of the money.

‘The Secretary (of State) will suspend any government to government assistance to any implementing agency if there is credible evidence of misuse of funds by such agency,’ said the report, obtained by Reuters. The report was mandated by Congress after the $7.5 billion, five-year aid plan passed into law in October. So far, appropriations committees have agreed on nearly $1.5 billion for the first year. Read more here.

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Stop the Assassination Drones:. Call Leon Panetta at (703) 482-0623, CIA headquarters, leave a message: No More Drone Assasination attacks, and don’t attack Quetta. End the War(s) NOW.

Call President Obama ALL WEEK LONG. Let’s keep his White House lines busy: Take Action Now ! ! Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.” Say NO to Escalation in Afghanistan. Sign the petition here. No funds from Congress for the troop escalation. Tell them now.

[ Go to this link and join Cindy Sheehan and other Peace Activists new group "Peace of the Action" put your name on the line.]

Get your bumpersticker, support Military Famlies Speak Out

You can order bumperstickers at this link.

Today, please tell your member of Congress and U.S. Senators to End the War in Afghanistan, sign this petition. If you live outside the United States, write to your leaders, End the War Now.

Today, we are Posting IN FULL Scott Ritter’s viewpoint on the Afghanistan War. This may be the most focused assessment of what is wrong with a SURGE and for the use of U.S. Assassination Drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The conclusion is for you to decide. Here are the facts as presented by Scott Ritter. We have been Posting stories about the use of U.S. Assassination Drones from the early days of this blog. Ritter sums it all up towards the end of the article. The use of Drones must stop.

Our Murderers in the Sky By Scott Ritter Posted at Truthdig.com Scott Ritter was a U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. He is the author of “Target Iran” (Nation Books, 2007).

War is hell, as the saying goes. Murder, on the other hand, is a crime. In this age of the “long war” pitting the United States against the forces of global terror, it is critical that the American people be able to distinguish between the two. The legitimate application of military power to a problem that manifests itself, directly or indirectly, as a threat to the legitimate national security interests of the United States, while horrible in terms of its consequences, is not only defensible but mandatory.

The true test of a society and its leaders is the extent to which every effort is made to both properly define a problem as one worthy of military intervention and then exhaust every option other than the use of force. It is true that President Barack Obama inherited the war in Afghanistan from his predecessor and therefore cannot be held accountable for that which transpired beyond his ability to influence. But the president’s recent decision to “surge” 30,000 additional U.S. military troops into Afghanistan transfers ownership of the Afghan conflict to him and him alone. It is in this light that his decision must be ultimately judged.

In many ways, Obama’s presentation before the Long Gray Line at West Point, in which he explained his decision to conduct the Afghanistan surge, represented an insult to the collective intelligence of the American people. The most egregious contradiction in his speech was the notion that the people of Afghanistan, who, throughout their history, have resisted central authority whether emanating from Kabul or imposed by outside invaders, would somehow be compelled to embrace this new American plan.

At its heart, the strategy requires a fiercely independent people to swear fealty to a man, Hamid Karzai, whose tenure as Afghanistan’s president has been marred by inefficiencies and corruption (even Obama was forced to acknowledge the fraudulent nature of the recent election which secured Karzai’s second term in office). Trying to reverse centuries of adherence to local authority and tribal loyalty with the promise of effective central government would represent a monumental challenge for the most efficient and honest of Afghan leaders. That we are attempting to do so behind the person of Karzai represents the height of folly.

For any military-based solution to have a chance of succeeding, we would need to deploy into Afghanistan an army of social scientists capable of navigating the complex reality of intertribal and interethnic relationships. They would require not only astute diplomatic skills that would enable them to bring together Hazara Shiite and Pashtun Sunni, or Uzbek and Tadjik, or any other combination of the myriad of peoples who make up the populace of Afghanistan, but also an understanding of multiple native languages and dialects. But the reality is we are instead dispatching 20-year-old boys from Poughkeepsie whose skill set, perfected during several months of predeployment training, is more conducive to firing three rounds center mass into a human body.
The nation-building or “civilian strategy” envisioned by President Obama, impossibly ambitious even under the most ideal conditions, simply cannot be achieved with the resources at hand, whether in 18 months or 18 years. That he has chosen to place at risk the lives of even more American troops, and by extension the citizens of Afghanistan and Pakistan, in the pursuit of such unattainable ambition is inexcusable.

The American military is unmatched in its ability to wage war. If the problem of Afghanistan was able to be defined in military terms alone, then perhaps Obama’s surge would provide the basis of a solution. But the Afghan problem has never been a military problem. The United States has, from the very beginning of its Afghanistan misadventure, sought to define the mission within the overall context of a “war on terror.” But the real mission revolves more around bringing to justice the perpetrators of mass murder and building international consensus to help prevent another such crime than it does any variation of closing with and destroying an enemy through firepower, maneuver and shock effect, which is the traditional core of any military operation.

The events of Sept. 11, 2001, created problems best dealt with through diplomacy, law enforcement and intelligence. That the United States chose to define it instead as an act of war means that we have never assembled the tool set necessary to solve the Afghan problem, which explains a recent admission by U.S. military officers that, after eight years of war, America was at “square one” in Afghanistan.

Obama’s characterization of the threat faced by the United States and its allies in the expanded Afghanistan-Pakistan (Af-Pak) theater of operations is as misleading as it is inaccurate. There is no singular, homogeneous enemy to be confronted by a surging U.S. military. The notion that the Afghan Taliban, Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaida fighters operating in both countries are part of an overarching Islamic fundamentalist movement seeking to export violence to the shores of America is fundamentally wrong. While the president may in fact have seen intelligence information (of undetermined veracity) that shows that some individuals or groups operating in the Af-Pak area of operations have in fact plotted such attacks, to characterize these players and their actions as representing a majority (or even significant minority) opinion among the thousands of fighters opposing the United States and its allies is just plain wrong. Yet, having accepted the definition of the Af-Pak problem in military terms, Obama had no choice but to accede to the solutions put forward by such charismatic military leaders as Gen. David Petraeus (the commander of U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM) and Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

It is not just that generals such as Petraeus and McChrystal dominate the public face of military leadership in America today. The real problem is that the organization they represent, CENTCOM, dominates the entire U.S. military—and, by extension, the U.S. military-industrial-congressional complex—as no other unified command has done in U.S. history. Even at the height of the Vietnam War, the demands of the Military Assistance Command-Vietnam (MACV) on the U.S. military establishment had competition from U.S. European Command, U.S. Strategic Command and U.S. Pacific Command, because of the Cold War. Today, the only show in town is CENTCOM, given that its theater of operations encompasses the principal zones of operation in the “war on terror.”

The requirements of CENTCOM drive nearly every aspect of the U.S. military today, including training, procurement and operations. Even strategic nuclear forces have had their work impacted by the need of CENTCOM to strike deep underground targets associated with Iran’s nuclear program. Given the inherently militarized nature of the “war on terror,” CENTCOM has supplanted the Department of State as the “face” of America in terms of official interaction between the United States and the nations of an area of operations ranging from Africa to Pakistan.

CENTCOM therefore dominates issues such as economic assistance and other nation-to-nation interaction not normally associated with military operations. The combined military-diplomatic-economic activity associated with the work of CENTCOM provides it with unmatched leverage at home and abroad. While not intended as a direct result of the “war on terror,” CENTCOM has morphed into a virtual nation-state, operating largely independent of traditional checks and balances associated with the functioning of unified military commands.

Despite the command’s unprecedented power and influence, it would not have been all that difficult for Obama to stand up to the pressures brought to bear by CENTCOM in regard to Afghanistan. He is, after all, the commander in chief. The fact is, Obama opted out of any serious opposition to the plan for the most base of reasons—politics. Any serious effort on the part of Obama to meaningfully contest the CENTCOM-backed surge in Afghanistan would have triggered a contentious political struggle with both the military and Congress at a time when the president is pushing for passage of health care reform, the centerpiece of his domestic policy agenda. The reality is that, yet again, American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines are being sacrificed for the political advantage of an American politician. This was a charge that was all-too-popular during the administration of George W. Bush. That such an accusation can so readily be applied to Barack Obama, after only a year in office, underscores the magnitude of the failure of leadership and imagination he has exhibited when it comes to the Af-Pak surge.

This lack of imagination was most evident in how the president sought to justify the Af-Pak surge. “This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al-Qaida,” he said in his West Point speech. In addition to his gross oversimplification of the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan and its relationship with al-Qaida, Obama felt compelled to press the same fear-induced 9/11 buttons that were the trademark of his predecessor. “It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.”

The continued focus on hunting down Osama bin Laden further underscores the lack of sophistication of his strategy. It is likely that bin Laden was not the central force behind the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States, contrary to popular opinion. That honor goes to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s Egyptian associate whose radical Islamic fundamentalist credentials trump even those of his better-known Saudi Arabian partner, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaida operations chief currently in U.S. custody awaiting trial in New York.

That bin Laden was complicit in the 9/11 attacks, and should be held to account for his crimes, is not a question. But the notion that by somehow “getting” bin Laden the United States would break the back of al-Qaida today is absurd. People should start thinking about the day after bin Laden dies. Al-Qaida cells will continue to function as they did the day before bin Laden died. The biggest measurable change will be the level of popular support for al-Qaida worldwide—it will skyrocket as bin Laden’s myth and demise inspire many thousands to join in a global jihad against the West and encourage fundamentalist Muslims from state and nonstate players alike to contribute countless more millions of dollars to underwriting this effort. There can be no greater boost to bin Laden’s cause than America’s continued singular focus on bringing him in, “dead or alive.” The exclusive militarization of the ongoing “hunt” for bin Laden plays directly into the Saudi terrorist’s game plan.

Revenge is not a defensible motive for a nation like the United States. Justice is. De-linking our hunt for bin Laden from the failed (and flawed) vehicle of the “war on terror” would be a wise move, but one that sadly is not going to happen in the foreseeable future if the rhetoric of Obama at West Point serves as a guide. And, in a nation that continues to be gripped (and manipulated) by the horrors of 9/11, it remains to be seen whether the concept of justice, as defined by American law, ideals and values, can ever be applied to the perpetrators of that crime. The trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will serve as a litmus test in this regard. Given America’s track record to date in handling the alleged 9/11 mastermind (the water-boarding of Mohammed 183 times continues to boggle the mind), it is hard to anticipate his exposure to the American legal system as anything but a kangaroo court.

The “war on terror” has shredded the concept of the rule of law, at least as applied by the United States within the context of this struggle. While Obama has made moves to fix some of the symptoms of the flawed policies of his predecessor, the underlying foundation of American arrogance and exceptionalism from which such policies emerged remains unchanged. There is no more telling example of this than the current program of targeted assassination taking place under the guise of armed unmanned aerial drones (also known as remotely piloted vehicles, or RPVs) operating in the Af-Pak theater of operations.

All pretense of either Afghan or Pakistani sovereignty disappears when these drones take to the air. Ostensibly used for intelligence gathering and lethal direct-action operations against so-called high-value targets (i.e., senior al-Qaida or Taliban leadership), RPV missions have become increasingly popular within the U.S. military and intelligence communities as a risk-free means of bringing maximum harm, in highly discriminatory fashion, to the enemy. Expansion of the United States’ RPV effort in Af-Pak has become a central part of the surge ordered by Obama, complementing the 30,000 combat troops he has ordered deployed to the region. But exactly who is targeted by these RPV operations? While the U.S. military and intelligence community maintains that every effort is made to positively identify a target as hostile before the decision to fire a missile or drop a bomb is made, the criteria for making this call are often left in the hands of personnel ill-equipped to make it.

In the ideal world, one would see the fusion of real-time imagery, real-time communications intercept and human sources on the ground before making such a call. But in reality this “perfect storm” of intelligence intersection rarely occurs. In its stead, one is left with fragmentary pieces of data that are cobbled together by personnel far removed from the point of actual conflict whose motivations are geared more toward action than discretion. Often, the most critical piece of intelligence comes from a human source who is using the U.S. military as a means of settling a local score more than furthering the struggle against terror. The end result is dead people on the ground whose demise has little, if any, impact on the “war on terror,” other than motivating even more people to rise up and struggle against the American occupiers and their Afghan or Pakistani cohorts.

Supporters of the RPV program claim that these strikes have killed over 800 “bad guys,” with a loss of only about 20 or so civilians whose proximity to the targets made them suspect in any case. Detractors flip these figures around, noting that only a score or more kills of “high-value targets” can be confirmed, and that the vast majority of those who have died or have been wounded in these attacks were civilians. In a conflict that is being waged in villages and towns in regions traditionally prone to intense independence and religious fundamentalism, distinguishing good from bad can be a daunting task. Given the U.S. track record, under which tribal gatherings and family functions such as weddings have been frequently misidentified as “hostile” gatherings and thus attacked with tragic results, one is inclined to doubt the official casualty figures associated with the RPV strikes.

Rather than furthering the U.S. cause in the “war on terror,” the RPV program, which President Obama seeks to expand in the Af-Pak theater, in reality represents a force-enhancement tool for the Taliban. Its indiscriminate application of death and destruction serves as a recruitment vehicle, with scores of new jihadists rising up to replace each individual who might have been killed by a missile attack. Like the surge that it is designed to complement, the expanded RPV program plays into the hands of those whom America is ostensibly targeting. While the U.S. military, aided by a fawning press, may seek to disguise the reality of the RPV program through catchy slogans such as “warheads through foreheads,” in reality it is murder by another name. And when murder represents the centerpiece of any national effort, yet alone one that aspires to win the “hearts and minds” of the targeted population, it is doomed to fail.

U.S. Assassination Predator Drone's range of view, and expanding with each new generation

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Stop the Assassination Drones:. Call Leon Panetta at (703) 482-0623, CIA headquarters, leave a message: No More Drone Assasination attacks, and don’t attack Quetta. End the War(s) NOW.

Call President Obama ALL WEEK LONG. Let’s keep his White House lines busy: Take Action Now ! ! Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.” Say NO to Escalation in Afghanistan. Sign the petition here. No funds from Congress for the troop escalation. Tell them now.

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Our first Assassination Drones to be used in Quetta appeared on September 30, 2009″U.S. to attack Quetta, Balochistan with Drones? Pakistan Government will Fail.” Read it here. Our latest Assassination Drone story was Posted on December 12, 2009 ,”U.S. Assassinaton Predator/Raptor Drones must be stopped; Leon Panetta, do not authorize Hellfire Missiles being fired from Drones at Quetta, Balochistan “targets” Read it here. Below, you will find the Los Angeles Times story about the emminent U.S. use of Assassination Drones with targets in Quetta, the capital city of Balochistan, an area of Pakistan. The reason? “If we don’t do this — at least have a real discussion of it — Pakistan might not think we are serious,” said a senior U.S. official involved in war planning. “What the Pakistanis have to do is tell the Taliban that there is too much pressure from the U.S.; we can’t allow you to have sanctuary inside Pakistan anymore.” We have written often about Balochistan being its own country. It was a big victim of the Durand Line of 1898. You can read our Post of September 12, 2009 here: “Balochistan, One of The Pakistan Trouble Areas; Leaders Murdered: Independence or Province?” . The capital of Quetta has over 750,000 residents. Now U.S. Assassination Drones will be dropping 500 pound Hellfire Missiles into neighborhoods to kill “Taliban and al Quaeda leaders”, along with “Collateral Damage”. We’ve said before, “This will be the end of President Zardari’s rein as President and will bring down his government.

U.S. Assassination Predator Drone firing a Hellfire Missile

Drone attacks may be expanded in Pakistan. U.S. officials seek to push CIA drone strikes into the major city of Quetta to try to pressure Pakistan into pursuing Taliban leaders based there. By Greg Miller and Julian E. Barnes December 14, 2009

Reporting from Washington – Senior U.S. officials are pushing to expand CIA drone strikes beyond Pakistan’s tribal region and into a major city in an attempt to pressure the Pakistani government to pursue Taliban leaders based in Quetta.

The proposal has opened a contentious new front in the clandestine war. The prospect of Predator aircraft strikes in Quetta, a sprawling city, signals a new U.S. resolve to decapitate the Taliban. But it also risks rupturing Washington’s relationship with Islamabad.

The concern has created tension among Obama administration officials over whether unmanned aircraft strikes in a city of 850,000 are a realistic option. Proponents, including some military leaders, argue that attacking the Taliban in Quetta — or at least threatening to do so — is crucial to the success of the revised war strategy President Obama unveiled last week.

“If we don’t do this — at least have a real discussion of it — Pakistan might not think we are serious,” said a senior U.S. official involved in war planning. “What the Pakistanis have to do is tell the Taliban that there is too much pressure from the U.S.; we can’t allow you to have sanctuary inside Pakistan anymore.”

But others, including high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials, have been more skeptical of employing drone attacks in a place that Pakistanis see as part of their country’s core. Pakistani officials have warned that the fallout would be severe.

“We are not a banana republic,” said a senior Pakistani official involved in discussions of security issues with the Obama administration. If the United States follows through, the official said, “this might be the end of the road.”

The CIA in recent years has stepped up a campaign against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan, much of it with drone strikes in the rural tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan. The operations have been conducted with the consent of the government of President Asif Ali Zardari, who has proved a reliable ally to America in his first 15 months in office.

Zardari, however, is facing mounting political woes, and the CIA airstrikes are highly unpopular among the Pakistani public, because of concerns over national sovereignty and civilian casualties. If drone attacks now confined to small villages were to be mounted in a sizable city, the death rate of innocent bystanders would probably increase.

Obama has endorsed an expansion of CIA operations in the country, approving the deployment of more spies and resources in a clandestine counterpart to the 30,000 additional U.S. troops being sent into Afghanistan.

But the push to expand drone strikes underscores the limits of the Obama offensive. The administration has given itself 18 months to show evidence of a turnaround in Afghanistan. But progress in Pakistan depends almost entirely on drone strikes and prodding a sometimes reluctant ally, which provides much of the intelligence to conduct the strikes, to do more.

U.S. and Pakistani officials stressed that the United States has stopped short of issuing an ultimatum to Pakistan. “It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to use heavy-handed tactics when you’ve got this kind of relationship,” said a U.S. counter-terrorism official. Like others, he discussed the issue on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Obama alluded to the effort to enlist more Pakistani help on the day his strategy was announced.

“The most important thing we can do in Pakistan is to change their strategic orientation,” Obama said in a meeting with news columnists Dec. 1. The pursuit of Al Qaeda involves a range of activities, he said, “some of which I can’t discuss.”

As Obama deliberated over the strategy for Afghanistan through fall, administration officials consulted with Pakistan in high-level meetings in Islamabad, also using those sessions to pressure the government to do more.

Among those involved were Gen. James L. Jones, Obama’s national security advisor; Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan; and Leon E. Panetta, director of the CIA.

“We have applied enormous pressure,” the senior U.S. official said.

Pakistan is not expected to hand over Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban leader and longtime ally of Osama bin Laden who fled Afghanistan when U.S. forces invaded after the Sept. 11 attacks. Omar is believed to have used Quetta as a base from which to orchestrate insurgent attacks in Afghanistan.

But U.S. officials said they have presented Pakistan with a list of Taliban lieutenants and argued that, with a U.S. pullout scheduled to begin in 18 months, the urgency of dismantling the so-called Quetta shura is greater than at any time in the 8-year-old war.

The senior Pakistani official bristled at the suggestion that Pakistan has been reluctant to target militants in Quetta, saying U.S. assertions about the city’s role as a sanctuary have been exaggerated.

“We keep hearing that there is a shadow government in Quetta, but we have never been given actionable intelligence,” the Pakistani official said.
Pakistan is prepared to pursue Taliban leaders, including Omar, even when the intelligence is imprecise, the official said. “Even if a compound 1 kilometer by 1 kilometer is identified, we will go find him.” But, he added, “for the past two years we haven’t heard anything more.”

Pakistan has launched a series of military operations against Islamic militants over the last year. But those operations have been aimed primarily at Taliban factions accused of carrying out attacks in Pakistan, not the groups directing strikes on U.S. forces across the border.

The CIA has carried out dozens of Predator strikes in Pakistan’s tribal belt over the last two years, relying extensively on information provided by informant networks run by Pakistan’s spy service, Inter-Services Intelligence.

The campaign is credited with killing at least 10 senior Al Qaeda operatives since the pace of the strikes was accelerated in August 2008, but has enraged many Pakistanis because of civilian casualties.

The number of attacks has slowed in recent months. Possible causes include weather disruptions and difficulty finding targets as insurgents get better at eluding the Predator, and larger Reaper, drone patrols.

Of 48 attacks carried out this year, only six have taken place since the end of September, according to data compiled by the website The Long War Journal. The latest attack occurred Friday, in which a senior Al Qaeda operations planner named Saleh Somali is believed to have been killed.

The drone attacks have been confined to territories along Pakistan’s northwestern border, regions essentially self-governed by Pashtun tribes. The province of Baluchistan, however, has a distinct ethnic identity and its own separatist movement. It is one of Pakistan’s main provinces, and strikes against its main city, Quetta, would probably be seen as a violation of the nation’s sovereignty.

A former senior CIA official said he and others were repeatedly rebuffed when proposing operations in Baluchistan or pushing Pakistan to target the Taliban in Quetta. “It wasn’t easy to talk about,” the official said. “The conversations didn’t last a long time.”

Pakistan is working with the CIA to coax certain Taliban lieutenants in Omar’s fold to defect. U.S. officials said contacts have been handled primarily by the Saudi and Pakistani intelligence services. The results of the effort are unclear.

The CIA’s main objective in Pakistan remains the hunt for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates recently said that it had been “years” since any meaningful information had surfaced in that search. You can write the authors at the Los Angeles Timsehere: greg.miller@latimes.com and julian.barnes@latimes.com

From The Long War Journal: Pakistan ignores US requests to tackle the Haqqani Network

Pakistani officials claimed the US timeline on the Afghan ’surge’ and Pakistan’s desire to keep Mullah Omar and the Haqqanis as strategic depth against India and other actors in Afghanistan account for the intransigence. But US military and intelligence officials said Pakistan’s military brass also fears acting against the Haqqanis and Mullah Army will fracture the services.

Read Scott Ritter’s Post at Truthdig.com “Our Murderers in the Sky”

The “war on terror” has shredded the concept of the rule of law, at least as applied by the United States within the context of this struggle. While Obama has made moves to fix some of the symptoms of the flawed policies of his predecessor, the underlying foundation of American arrogance and exceptionalism from which such policies emerged remains unchanged. There is no more telling example of this than the current program of targeted assassination taking place under the guise of armed unmanned aerial drones (also known as remotely piloted vehicles, or RPVs) operating in the Af-Pak theater of operations.

* * *
Stop the Assassination Drones:. Call Leon Panetta at (703) 482-0623, CIA headquarters, leave a message: No More Drone Assasination attacks, and don’t attack Quetta. End the War(s) NOW.

Call President Obama ALL WEEK LONG. Let’s keep his White House lines busy: Take Action Now ! ! Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.” Say NO to Escalation in Afghanistan. Sign the petition here. No funds from Congress for the troop escalation. Tell them now.

[ Go to this link and join Cindy Sheehan and other Peace Activists new group "Peace of the Action" put your name on the line.]

Get your bumpersticker, support Military Famlies Speak Out

You can order bumperstickers at this link.

Today, please tell your member of Congress and U.S. Senators to End the War in Afghanistan, sign this petition. If you live outside the United States, write to your leaders, End the War Now.

We have two stories about the fate of Afghanistan for today’s Post. People question if more troops will make for a different result. Are the troops causing more violence by their presence? What happens when the U.S. finally leaves (whenever that is)? There’s some thought provoking information below. Please pass it along to your friends. We present this to you in the hope of Peace Throughout the World.

President Karazi and President Obama

Obama’s Indecent Interval
Despite the U.S. president’s pleas to the contrary, the war in Afghanistan looks more like Vietnam than ever.
BY THOMAS H. JOHNSON, M. CHRIS MASON | DECEMBER 10, 2009 From Foreign Policy.com

As German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, truth is ridiculed, then denied, and then “accepted as having been obvious to everyone from the beginning.” So let’s start with the obvious: There isn’t the slightest possibility that the course laid out by Barack Obama in his Dec. 1 speech will halt or even slow the downward spiral toward defeat in Afghanistan. None. The U.S. president and his advisors labored for three months and brought forth old wine in bigger bottles. The speech contained not one single new idea or approach, nor offered any hint of new thinking about a conflict that everyone now agrees the United States is losing. Instead, the administration deliberated for 94 days to deliver essentially “more men, more money, try harder.” It sounded ominously similar to Mikhail Gorbachev’s “bloody wound” speech that led to a similar-sized, temporary Soviet troop surge in Afghanistan in 1986.

But the Soviet experience in Afghanistan isn’t what everyone is comparing Obama’s current predicament to; it’s Vietnam. The president knows it, and part of his speech was a rebuttal of those comparisons. It was a valiant effort, but to no avail. Afghanistan is Vietnam all over again.

In his speech, the president offered three reasons why the two conflicts are different. And all are dead wrong. First, Obama noted that Afghanistan is being conducted by a “coalition” of 43 countries — as if war by committee would magically change the outcome (a throwback to former President George W. Bush’s “Iraq coalition” mathematics). The truth is, outside of a handful of countries, it’s basically a coalition of pacifists. In fact, more foreign troops fought alongside the United States in Vietnam than are now actually fighting with Americans today. Only nine countries in today’s 43-country coalition have more than 1,000 personnel there; nine others have 10 (yes, not even a dozen people) — or fewer. And although Australia and New Zealand have sent a handful of excellent special operations troops to Afghanistan, only Britain, Canada, and France are providing significant forces willing to conduct conventional offensive military operations. That brings the coalition’s combat-troop contribution to approximately 17,000. Most of the other 38 “partners” have strict rules prohibiting them from ever doing anything actually dangerous. Turkish troops, for example, never leave their firebase in Wardak province, according to U.S. personnel who monitor it.
Read the rest of the story at Foreign Policy here.

Thomas H. Johnson is research professor of the Department in National Security Affairs and director of the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

M. Chris Mason, a retired Foreign Service officer who served in 2005 as political officer for the provincial reconstruction team in Paktika, is senior fellow at the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies and at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington.

Post-American scenarios in Afghanistan By Ilhan Niaz

After three decades of turmoil, violence and killings, Afghanistan is still at war. A powerful foreign occupation force continues to hold in place a local collaborationist dispensation with few roots and even less demonstrable competence. Democratic development has replaced despotic Islamic rule which earlier replaced a socialist paradigm as the slop of the day dished out for public consumption.

The Islamic warriors who blunted and frustrated the armies of the ‘Evil Empire’ are now the ‘evil doers’. The other great enemies of the ‘Evil Empire’, namely the United States and its allies, once the benefactors of today’s terrorists have replaced the Soviets as the occupying force.

As guns and drugs boom, the writ of what is generously called the Afghan government is practically non-existent outside Kabul. Warlords, mafias and insurgents control 80 per cent of the territory and feed off the presence of the occupation forces. The reality is that a failing occupation is trying to prop up a failed state.

The Obama administration’s new surge-and-exit strategy reflects the exasperation of the western alliance as it struggles to balance the politically feasible with the militarily necessary. At least as far the exit part of the strategy is concerned the US and its allies are condemned to succeed. When it comes to leaving behind a stable, legitimate and semi-functional Afghan state, the alliance is almost certain to fail.

The new strategy is in part driven by domestic compulsions as Obama struggles to rein in US militarism and adjust overseas commitments to political will and economic capacity. The surge is designed to show that Obama is tough and determined. The exit part is meant to placate a war weary public in time for the 2012 elections. Of course, at a declaratory level senior members of the administration, including the secretary of defence Robert Gates, are putting a brave face on the situation and assuring their allies and Karzai that the United States is in it to win.

These assurances are hollow. The fact is that the United States is leaving Afghanistan. Starting in July 2011 the drawdown will begin. For Karzai and his regime the final countdown has now begun and the American exit amounts to a death sentence. All the Taliban have to do is wait another 18 months, lie low and melt into the local population while stockpiling arms, ammunition and funds siphoned off from drugs and Nato contractors in preparation for the re-conquest of their country.

There is no evidence that the Karzai regime, which is now handicapped by a newfound illegitimacy following the fraudulent August 20 elections in addition to its longstanding incompetence, has the ability to rise to the occasion or the will to at least try and set things in order.

If anything, the Karzai regime’s position is analogous to that of the South Vietnamese regime of President Thieu in 1972. Afghanistan’s narco-warlord elite now has an even greater incentive to loot as much as they can before the protective shield of the American and allied militaries evaporates and the Taliban onslaught begins again. Depending on the amount of damage the United States can inflict over the next few months a decent interval between imperial withdrawal and neo-colonial collapse may yet be secured. It is unlikely though that the regime left behind will be able to profit sufficiently from a prospective breather.

At one level, Musharraf’s strategy of hedging Pakistan’s bets in Afghanistan seems to have been based on a fairly realistic appraisal of what was politically and militarily possible for the western alliance. For Pakistan there can be no exit strategy from the Afghan quagmire. The double policy to the extent it could be sustained meant that no matter who won in Afghanistan Pakistan could claim to have helped the winning side. Now that the Americans have served notice that they will start vacating in 18 months Pakistan has every incentive to accelerate its campaign against those militants working against itself while leaving the Afghan Taliban alone. There are a number of post-American scenarios that Pakistan is now compelled to contemplate.

The first and most alarmist scenario is that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan will lead to a fundamental realignment of the regional political and societal equilibrium with Afghanistan and Pakistan going down like dominoes before a reenergized Taliban/Islamist/Jihadist push. This scenario is premised on the notion that it is the United States that has through military and economic exertions been containing a radical avalanche. Once that exertion ceases nature will take its course and fundamentalists and extremists throughout the Muslim world will be heartened by this victory and intensify their struggle for power.

The second scenario signals a return to the 1990s when Afghanistan’s neighbours were fuelling its internal conflicts. Russia, India and Iran would presumably support the Northern Alliance and Karzai. Pakistan may well be induced by residual US pressure to maintain a policy of malevolent neutrality and thus contribute covertly to Taliban resurgence. In this scenario attrition on all sides is likely to be high and Pakistan’s own extremists may well redirect their energies towards helping the Taliban seize control of Kabul and defeat the Northern Alliance. This could well relieve pressure on Pakistan though its rulers may not possess the political will or the administrative capacity to benefit strategically from such a reprieve.

The third scenario is that all the regional and Nato powers are able to work out a negotiated settlement although such attempts in the past have failed miserably. As long as the Afghans are determined to kill each other, there is not much that regional powers can do in diplomatic terms to stop them. Then, Pakistan-India disagreements over Afghanistan constitute a major obstacle. Any serious attempt at negotiating a power-sharing arrangement between the Taliban and the North Alliance is highly improbable to succeed.

The fourth scenario is that the US withdraws ground troops but keeps its drones, air force and special operations in play. Such a strategy would mean aligning with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and containing the latter through air power, limited ground engagements and missile strikes. Thus, the US would almost completely ‘Afghanise’ the conflict and become a permanent party to a long running civil war. The effectiveness of such a strategy is open to question but it would allow the American leadership to defend itself against the charge that it had abandoned Afghanistan. It may also substantially delay the liquidation of the Karzai regime and the defeat of the Northern Alliance warlords.

The fifth scenario is that the US disengagement from Afghanistan and Iraq by 2011-12 will remove the rationale for extremist militancy and enable local powers to deal more pragmatically with such elements. This scenario is based on the premise that it is the West’s own imperialism that is primarily responsible for facilitating the spread of radical Islam which can then project itself as a successful resistance movement. Once the onslaught ceases the logic of resistance will be rendered inoperative. This is perhaps the most optimistic of all the scenarios.

Of course, all five of these scenarios are at this stage mere speculation. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive and a lot can happen in three years though it seems unlikely that there are any good options left to exercise. One can only hope that those in authority are seriously thinking about the post-American post-occupation regional configuration with particular reference to Afghanistan with the aim of at least trying to arrive at a workable and inclusive solution in accordance with enlightened self-interest. Or, Pakistan and other regional powers can wait until the Americans leave and once again plunge into the strategic depths of Afghanistan. In either case a war that began in 1979 and is now in its thirtieth year may well still be raging in 2039.

The writer is an assistant professor of history at the Quaid-i-Azam University and can be reached at niazone80@gmail.com

* * *
Stop the Assassination Drones:. Call Leon Panetta at (703) 482-0623, CIA headquarters, leave a message: No More Drone Assasination attacks, and don’t attack Quetta. End the War(s) NOW.

Call President Obama ALL WEEK LONG. Let’s keep his White House lines busy: Take Action Now ! ! Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.” Say NO to Escalation in Afghanistan. Sign the petition here. No funds from Congress for the troop escalation. Tell them now.

[ Go to this link and join Cindy Sheehan and other Peace Activists new group "Peace of the Action" put your name on the line.]

Get your bumpersticker, support Military Famlies Speak Out

You can order bumperstickers at this link.

Today, please tell your member of Congress and U.S. Senators to End the War in Afghanistan, sign this petition. If you live outside the United States, write to your leaders, End the War Now.

The U.S. won’t pay enough money to keep Assassination Drones at Shamsi Airbase in Balochistan, Pakistan? This was exposed for a different reason.

Here’s today’s story in Dawn. com, followed by a story in The Times, from February 17, 2009 about the CIA having Drones at Shamsi Airbase in Balochistan for a long time. Who is fooling whom? Pakistan lands are being used by the U.S. to attack Afghanistan and villages in Pakistan with Assassination Drones. We are at war in Pakistan. Make that now officially Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, our war fronts, now three of them. The Pakistani population will not stand for foreign troops to be on their lands. This will cause the downfall of President Zardari and his government.
There is a “silent coup” going on in Pakistan.

MMQ1 Assassination Predator Drones at Shamsi Airbase, Feb. 2006 Photo, Google Earth, The Times

From Dawn. com:
US forces using Shamsi airbase in Balochistan

ISLAMABAD: The Shamsi airbase in Balochistan is being used by American forces for logistical purposes but the government is not satisfied with payments for the use of the facility, disclosed the defence minister.

Talking exclusively to DawnNews, Defence Minister Ahmad Mukhtar said that the US was still using the Shamsi airbase, however, the govt is not satisfied with payments for its use. Earlier, the US was also using the Jacobabad Airbase and Pasni for its operations in Afghanistan.

Just a day earlier, the defence minister had also admitted the existence of the Afghan Taliban’s Quetta Shura for the first time but said that the security forces had taken on the Quetta Shura and damaged it to such an extent that it no longer posed any threat.

However, until this admission by the defence minister, the government had so far denied the existence of any Taliban leadership or the Quetta Shura in Balochistan’s capital.—DawnNews

From The Times:
February 17, 2009 Secrecy and denial as Pakistan lets CIA use airbase to strike militants (view video at link)

The CIA is secretly using an airbase in southern Pakistan to launch the Predator drones that observe and attack al-Qaeda and Taleban militants on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan, a Times investigation has found. The Pakistani and US governments have repeatedly denied that Washington is running military operations, covert or otherwise, on Pakistani territory — a hugely sensitive issue in the predominantly Muslim country.

The Pakistani Government has also repeatedly demanded that the US halt drone attacks on northern tribal areas that it says have caused hundreds of civilian casualties and fuelled anti-American sentiment. But The Times has discovered that the CIA has been using the Shamsi airfield — originally built by Arab sheikhs for falconry expeditions in the southwestern province of Baluchistan — for at least a year. The strip, which is about 30 miles from the Afghan border, allows US forces to launch a Drone within minutes of receiving actionable intelligence as well as allowing them to attack targets further afield.

It was known that US special forces used Shamsi during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, but the Pakistani Government declared publicly in 2006 that the Americans had left it and two other airbases. Key to the Times investigation is the unexplained delivery of 730,000 gallons of F34 aviation fuel to Shamsi. Details were found on the website of the Pentagon’s fuel procurement agency.

The Defence Energy Support Centre site shows that a civilian company, Nordic Camp Supply (NCS), was contracted to deliver the fuel, worth $3.2 million, from Pakistan Refineries near Karachi. It also shows the fuel was delivered last year, when the United States escalated drone attacks on Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, allegedly killing several top Taleban and al-Qaeda targets, but also many civilians.

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Stop the Assassination Drones:. Call Leon Panetta at (703) 482-0623, CIA headquarters, leave a message: No More Drone Assasination attacks, and don’t attack Quetta. End the War(s) NOW.

Call President Obama ALL WEEK LONG. Let’s keep his White House lines busy: Take Action Now ! ! Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.” Say NO to Escalation in Afghanistan. Sign the petition here. No funds from Congress for the troop escalation. Tell them now.

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Bad intelligence? Informer getting even with an enemy? Mistaken identity? Cop, Judge, Executioner = Hellfire Missile. Against the Geneva Convention, indiscriminate killing of civilians “Collateral Damage” is a known by-product of a missile being fired from a Predator/Raptor or other named Drone. A Drone is a nice name for an airplane without a human aboard, and guided via the internet from anywhere on earth (most Drones are “piloted” from Nevada, but that is changing also).

Predator Drone at work, cartoon by Jen Sorensen, Slowpoke

A few studies found at The Long War Journal and their Threat Matrix blog:

Predators, Taliban, and civilians By Alexander Mayer October 21, 2009 Read the rest here.

Revenge of the Drones, An Analysis of Drone Strikes in Pakistan By Peter Bergen, Katherine Tiedemann, New America Foundation Published: October 19, 2009 Full report here.

…It is not possible to differentiate precisely between militant and civilian casualties because the militants live among the population and don’t wear uniforms, and because the militants have the incentive to claim that all the casualties were civilians, while government sources tend to claim the opposite. However, of those killed in drone attacks from 2006 through mid-October 2009, between 500 and 700 were described in reliable press reports as militants, or some 66 to 68 percent.
…Based on our count of the estimated number of militants killed, the real total of civilian deaths since 2006 appears to be in the range of 250 to 320, or between 31 and 33 percent.

As stated at The Long War Journal…When taken together, I think our two reports provide a fairly good triangulation on what is most likely the actual number. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the “real” number of civilian deaths was somewhere in the middle (around 18-20 percent).

The Latest News: U.S. Military Joins CIA’s Drone War in Pakistan By Noah Shachtman December 10, 2009 Read it all here.

…On that glowing screen is a digital map of Afghanistan, showing the position of every U.S. Air Force drone, every fighter jet, every bomber and every tanker aircraft with a teal dot. Most of the dots are positioned near the hotspots of the Afghanistan war — places like Kandahar, Helmand and Nangarhar provinces. But there are three dots, representing Air Force unmanned aerial vehicles, that aren’t above Afghanistan at all. These dots have moved to the east of the Afghan border; these drones are flying missions over Pakistan. Over the past year and a half, the United States has stepped up drone strikes against militants in Pakistan — killing as many as a thousand people, by some estimates. Press accounts have largely credited the Central Intelligence Agency with running these missions. Government officials have refused to speak in public about drone attacks, just as they routinely rebuff any attempt to probe into the CIA’s operations. “I’m not going to comment on any particular tactic or technology,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently told a group of Pakistani journalists.

But the U.S. Air Force also plays an important role in the drone missions over Pakistan, according to current and former American military officials, and judging from what I saw at that undisclosed location. The military supplies the aircraft. It monitors the flights in and out of Pakistan. And, on occasion, Air Force pilots remotely fly their own drone missions over Pakistan. On that digital map are the far end of the warehouse, there’s a note reminding troops exactly how much notice they must give before U.S. military planes enter Pakistani airspace.

Also, Leon Panetta ended Blackwater Predator missile-load contract
CIA Director Leon Panetta has canceled a contract with the former Blackwater security firm that allowed the company’s operatives to load missiles on Predator drones in Pakistan. Panetta canceled the contract earlier this year and the work is being transitioned to government personnel, a person familiar with the contract said Friday. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the classified program.Blackwater is now known as Xe Services. A spokesman was not immediately available for comment on the contract cancellation. The New York Times first reported the contract’s existence in August. The CIA’s Predator program targets senior al-Qaida operatives and Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal area along the border with Afghanistan, but the agency has never publicly confirmed its role in the operation.

* * *
Stop the Assassination Drones:. Call Leon Panetta at (703) 482-0623, CIA headquarters, leave a message: No More Drone Assasination attacks, and don’t attack Quetta. End the War(s) NOW.

Call President Obama ALL WEEK LONG. Let’s keep his White House lines busy: Take Action Now ! ! Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.” Say NO to Escalation in Afghanistan. Sign the petition here. No funds from Congress for the troop escalation. Tell them now.

[ Go to this link and join Cindy Sheehan and other Peace Activists new group "Peace of the Action" put your name on the line.]

Get your bumpersticker, support Military Famlies Speak Out

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Today, please tell your member of Congress and U.S. Senators to End the War in Afghanistan, sign this petition. If you live outside the United States, write to your leaders, End the War Now.

A Tribute to Malalai Joya
Watch the Video
Visit her website: http://www.malalaijoya.com/dcmj/
Join her Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Malalai-Joya/169390281270#

Malalai Joya’s story was run on our Blog every day for two weeks. Please buy her book and visit her site.. Read her San Jose Mercury Opinion: “U.S. is doing no good in Afghanistan” here. (UPDATE:Nov. 30) in The Guardian, Malalai Joya wrote “A troop surge can only magnify the crime against Afghanistan”
On Saturday, Nov. 7, Malalai Joya was at a gathering at San Jose State University in California to promote her book “A Woman Among Warlords” and to gather support for her people in Afghanistan. Malalai is a very brave woman to take on her own government and also the U.S. government, the occupiers of her country.

Malalai Joya signing her new book, A Woman Among Warlords, a JB photo

Our story on Malalai Joya can be seen here. Buy a copy of her book, “A Woman Among Warlords” here, or at your favorite bookstore. A great Holiday gift idea. The subtitle is “The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice”. Visit Malalai’s website here for more information on how you can help.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a leader, a voice for those never heard, a human for Peace and Justice.

Times have changed since the Viet Nam war, but Martin Luther King, Jr. laid it all out as what war does to us, the common U.S. citizen and we are posting this video as it directly applies to our Central Asian wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and yes, in Pakistan. Please listen in segments if you don’t have the time to listen in one sitting. Martin moved a nation, we need to pick up his spirit and do it again.

Why I am Opposed to the War in Viet Nam, Martin Luther King, Jr. speech “The greatest purveyer of Violence in the World today, our own Government”

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Call President Obama ALL WEEK LONG. Let’s keep his White House lines busy: Please force Afghanistan and Pakistan to adopt laws to protect women from abuse and give them equal rights under the laws. Remind the President of Martin Luther King’s words.

Say NO to Escalation in Afghanistan. Sign the petition here. No funds from Congress for the troop escalation. Tell them now.

Take Action Now ! ! Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.”

Stop the Assassination Drones:). Call Leon Panetta at (703) 482-0623, CIA headquarters, leave a message: No More Drone Assasination attacks, and don’t attack Quetta. End the War(s) NOW.

[ Go to this link and join Cindy Sheehan and other Peace Activists new group "Peace of the Action" put your name on the line.]

Get your bumpersticker, support Military Famlies Speak Out

You can order bumperstickers at this link.

Today, please tell your member of Congress and U.S. Senators to End the War in Afghanistan, sign this petition. If you live outside the United States, write to your leaders, End the War Now.

“Collateral Damage”, the death of the innocents must stop. Is this all now being done to get the 100 al Quaeda members located somewhere in Afghanistan or in Pakistan? How are they even identified? The budget for the “wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, and yes, Pakistan is over 100 Billion USD. That is One Billion dollars for each al Quaeda member left in the area. This is not believable. A fantasy.

This video from Al Jazerra.net shows a village in Afghanistan where soldiers came in the night and attacked a home with “militants” in it. Twelve family members were killed. The soldiers took four bodies away. The villagers are very upset at President Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize while “innocent” villagers are murdered. What would you think if this was your town and your neighbors home? The war must end as too many innocent civilians are killed in the name of Peace. President Obama, lead us to Peace, bring our troops home and stop the killing.

Poverty and Ruin in Afghanistan
‘There hasn’t been two seconds of intelligent discussion about living standards in Afghanistan’
ASK THIS | December 03, 2009 By John Hanrahan hanrahan@niemanwatchdog.org
The poverty in Afghanistan is almost beyond imagining. Thirty Afghans die from TB every day; life expectancy is 43 years; per capita income is $426; only 13% have access to sanitary drinking water; fewer than one in four are literate; access to electricity is among the lowest in the world. Conditions for women are brutal. If Obama plans to address these issues, he’s pretty much keeping it secret, points out world poverty expert Jeffrey Sachs. But without addressing them, can stepped-up American military involvement succeed? Or is it bound to fail?

Afghan Women beg outside a mosque in Kabul, AP File Photo

Columbia University economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, one of the foremost experts on extreme poverty in underdeveloped nations, says it is past time for the United States to end its war in Afghanistan, the world’s fifth poorest nation. In an interview with Nieman Watchdog in November, Sachs said the United States should reverse its priorities and fund major sustainable development programs, which would not only help reduce Afghanistan’s overwhelming poverty but would be a surer way to help achieve greater U.S. security.

As Sachs wrote last May in The Guardian newspaper of London, U.S. foreign policy “has failed in recent years mainly because the U.S. has relied on military force to address problems that demand development assistance and diplomacy. Young men become fighters in places such as Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan because they lack gainful employment. Extreme ideologies influence people when they can’t feed their families, and when lack of access to family planning leads to an unwanted population explosion.”

This applies particularly to Afghanistan and the neighboring provinces of Pakistan, which “are impoverished regions, with vast unemployment, bulging youth populations, prolonged droughts, widespread hunger and pervasive economic deprivation. It is easy for the Taliban and al-Qaida to mobilize fighters under such conditions.” With improved economic conditions, a major recruiting tool for the Taliban and al-Qaida – as well as extremists’ threats to the United States – would be substantially weakened.

Sachs was interviewed by Nieman Watchdog two weeks before President Obama’s speech Dec. 1 announcing a 30,000 troop increase in Afghanistan. Sachs noted that while the United States was already spending $60 billion a year for military operations in Afghanistan, it was spending only “$2 billion tops” for sustainable development programs there. The addition of 30,000 troops adds another $30 billion a year to the war’s costs, making the ratio of war spending to development even more imbalanced.

Those figures, Sachs said, “must be turned around” in order for the United States to have any positive impact on the people of Afghanistan in the long run. However, Sachs said he had seen little to indicate that the Obama administration had any alternative strategy for specific development programs – such as investments in health, education, jobs, water, sanitation and irrigation – in Afghanistan and nearby Pakistan, where al-Qaida is actually based.
…As Sachs told Nieman Watchdog, the United States bears a major responsibility for the misery that has afflicted Afghanistan since the Soviet Union invaded the country in 1979. In response to the Soviet invasion, the U.S. government through the Central Intelligence Agency secretly provided significant weapon and monetary support for the mujahedeen fighters who opposed – and defeated – the Soviets, who pulled their troops out of the country in 1989. That war killed more than one million Afghans, while another 5 million became refugees in other countries. As one account put it, that war left Afghanistan “with severe political, economic, and ecological problems…Economic production was drastically curtailed, and much of the land laid waste.”

Ultimately, after more vicious internal fighting, the Taliban came to power in 1995, and al-Qaida – made up considerably of mujahedeen fighters and led by Osama bin Laden –established its base in Afghanistan. The United States-led invasion in 2001 ousted the Taliban from power and ultimately drove all but 100 or fewer al-Qaida fighters to the border regions of western Pakistan.

“I believe we [the United States] have had nothing but a devastating effect on Afghanistan since we used it for a proxy war against the Soviet Union,” Sachs told Nieman Watchdog. By supporting the mujahedeen against the Soviets, he said, we helped “create al-Qaida” and destabilized the country further, causing Afghanistan to “end up in rubble” in that earlier destructive war.
PLEASE READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE AND PASS IT TO YOUR FRIENDS.

President Zardari of Pakistan has charges heard at the Supreme Court. Are his days numbered?

ISLAMABAD: President Asif Ali Zardari allegedly gained financial benefits worth billions of dollars when graft cases against him were dropped undera law that has now expired, according to documents submitted by Pakistan’s anti-corruption watchdog to the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

The documents provided by the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) showed that Zardari had been accused of illegally amassing assets worth USD 1.5 billion and Rs 22 billion, mainly during the period when his slain wife Benazir Bhutto was the Premier in the 1990s. Zardari was charged with amassing assets beyond his means of income and these cases were dropped under the controversial National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO), issued by former military ruler Pervez Musharraf two years ago.

NAB submitted the documents in the apex court after a 17-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry sought details of all beneficiaries of the NRO, which expired on November 28 after the government failed to get it endorsed by Parliament within a deadline set by the apex court. The bench yesterday began hearing challenges to the expired law and the amnesty granted under it to over 8,000 people, including Zardari and several of his close aides. The documents provided by NAB further stated that several corruption cases were registered against Zardari for allegedly causing losses to the public exchequer by misusing his authority during his tenure as a minister in his late wife’s Cabinet.

The cases included the alleged misuse of authority to grant concessions to shipping companies and a gold importing firm and to purchase tractors for a government-run scheme, according to the documents. These cases involved alleged losses of hundreds of millions of rupees to the public exchequer, the documents stated. All these cases too were dropped under the NRO.

…Besides Zardari, several of his close aides – including Interior Minister Rehman Malik, Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar and senior Pakistan People’s Party leader Jahangir Badr – benefitted from the NRO. Presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar rejected allegations that Zardari had amassed assets worth billions of dollars, describing them as “no more than a regurgitation of decade-old unproven politically motivated allegations.” None of the charges levelled against former premier Bhutto and Zardari “could be proved in any court of law despite spending hundreds of millions from the public exchequer and relentless witch-hunting spread over countries and continents,” Babar said. The “absurdity and politically motivated nature of these cases” had already been exposed with the exposure in 2001 of tapes of conversations between prosecutors and the judge conducting the trial against Zardari, he said.

* * *
Call President Obama ALL WEEK LONG. Let’s keep his White House lines busy: Please force Afghanistan and Pakistan to adopt laws to protect women from abuse and give them equal rights under the laws.

Say NO to Escalation in Afghanistan. Sign the petition here. No funds from Congress for the troop escalation. Tell them now.

Take Action Now ! ! Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.”

Stop the Assassination Drones:). Call Leon Panetta at (703) 482-0623, CIA headquarters, leave a message: No More Drone Assasination attacks, and don’t attack Quetta. End the War(s) NOW.

[ Go to this link and join Cindy Sheehan and other Peace Activists new group "Peace of the Action" put your name on the line.]

Get your bumpersticker, support Military Famlies Speak Out

You can order bumperstickers at this link.

Today, please tell your member of Congress and U.S. Senators to End the War in Afghanistan, sign this petition. If you live outside the United States, write to your leaders, End the War Now.

Thursday, December 10 is Human Rights Day, commemorating the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. Today, we have three Stories for your viewing:

Women in Jail for Being Raped
Violence against women rooted in Afghan society
Mystery of the ‘Violence Against Women’ bills

Zirdana, right, with her son and Saliha, center, in Lashkar Gah Prison

On the day before HUMAN RIGHTS DAY, there’s two more stories below taken from Dawn.com on the status of women in Afghanistan and Pakistan that were first published last month. There’s much talk about if the United States leaves Afghanistan, the women will be put back under Taliban rule and have no rights except to stay in their homes and not bee seen. The first story deals with the status of women in Afghanistan under President Karazi’s rule, with support from the United States over the past 8 years. The second story deals with laws that were introduced and passed the House in Pakistan, but were held up in the Senate and did not become law due to the Council on Islamic Ideology issuing a statement criticising the bill on the ground that it ‘would fan unending family feuds and push up divorce rates’.

We are at war in Afghanistan and have drafted a Constitution for them that they passed into law. This is how women are being treated under our friends in the Karazi Government in Afghanistan. We are fighting to uphold this government and this society. Let a light be shined on them. Also, our “great ally” the Pakistan Government under President Zardari is no better when it comes to women’s rights. It is the culture of these Central Asian countries to have men rule all and women have babies and cook and clean and are under the rule of their husbands. That is the culture. We are including both stories as they appeared in Dawn.com. We are doing this so the reader can see it all without having to go to the source of the stories.

First, Violence against women rooted in Afghan society

KABUL: Violence against women is widespread and deeply rooted in Afghanistan, where they are becoming less active in public life eight years after the Taliban regime collapsed, the United Nations said Monday. The world body has spearheaded a 16-day campaign to eliminate violence against women, which is due to end on December 10, the anniversary of the universal declaration of human rights.

‘Violence targeting women and girls is widespread and deeply rooted in Afghan society. It is not adequately challenged and condemned by society and institutions,’ said Norah Niland, chief UN human rights officer in Afghanistan.’The space for women in public life is shrinking. The trend is negative,’ she told a Kabul news conference.Banned from public life under the iron fist of the Taliban regime from 1996 until the 2001 US-led invasion, women still struggle for their rights in the impoverished, deeply conservative and war-torn country.

‘No real peace and national development are possible without the elimination of violence against women,’ added Zia Moballegh, acting country director for the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development.’Women who try to advocate for their rights in public life are being subject to violence and physical attacks,’ he said.

Insurgents destroy girls’ schools in Afghanistan and the Afghan parliament has yet to approve a draft law on violence against women.’Elimination of violence against women will not be possible without a national will and also the determination of men,’ Moballegh said.

UN official Niland highlighted the scourge of rape in Afghanistan.’Our field research finds that rape is under-reported and concealed, and a huge problem in Afghanistan. It affects all parts of the country, all communities and all social groups,’ she said. ‘Women risk rape in their homes, villages and detention facilities. Shame is quite often attached to rape victims, not perpetrators. Victims often find themselves prosecuted for the offence of adultery,’ Niland said. Adultery is punishable by jail in Afghanistan and there is no explicit provision in the 1976 Afghan penal code that criminalises rape. Only 12.6 per cent of women over the age of 15 can read and write, and 57 per cent of girls are married off under the legal age of 16, the UN says. The country’s maternal mortality rate is the second highest in the world, with nearly 25,000 deaths per year. Although the constitution stipulates that at least 25 per cent of lawmakers in parliament must be women, there is only one woman cabinet minister in the government, women’s minister Husn Bano Ghazanfar.

Second story by Zubeida Mustafa in Dawn.com Mystery of the ‘Violence Against Women’ bills This story deals with how Pakistan Government under President Zardari deals with women’s rights in their country.

Public memory is proverbially short. But the bills passed on women are too recent an event to be consigned to oblivion. Twice in the last four months the government’s attempts to enact pro-women legislation — one on domestic violence and the other on sexual harassment — have ended in a fiasco. From what some female legislators tell me it is not just the religious lobby, notorious for misogyny, that is to blame. More responsible are the parliamentarians with ‘rigid rightwing positions’ in the ruling party who secretly nurse anti-women sentiments. The bills enjoyed sufficient support to be passed in both houses, but were withheld. We still have many miles to go to counter the legacy of centuries-old patriarchy in our society.

Two laws — rather would-be laws — that were placed in the National Assembly received a lot of acclaim and were adopted without a dissenting vote. The media and human rights activists were thrilled. The excitement was premature.

The bills proved to be stillborn. Each had a different story behind it. The Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Act 2009, which in its statement of objective spoke of ‘zero tolerance for violence against women’, was adopted by the National Assembly on Aug 4. It was widely hailed as for the first time in Pakistan domestic violence was sought to be criminalised.

Providing for punishment for violators through quick court trials, the bill devised a protection mechanism of officers and committees to provide redress to the aggrieved woman. Its significance also lay in its unprecedented sweep. It defined emotional blackmail and economic abuse, apart from the use of physical force, as domestic violence.

The next step was for the Senate to pass the bill before it was placed before the president for his signature to become law. But before that happened the mood changed. The Council of Islamic Ideology fired the first shot. It issued a statement criticising the bill on the ground that it ‘would fan unending family feuds and push up divorce rates’.

This stunned the people. It amounted to condoning violence. The CII came under severe attack. That should have been enough to give the government heart to pilot the bill through the Senate where it would have had easy sailing. But the ruling party chose not to. Now the three-month mandatory period has lapsed within which the Senate is required to adopt a bill passed by the Assembly. We are back to square one. The mediation committee set up to produce a consensus on the bill might meet the same fate as committees do in Pakistan. Gone with the wind!

In a country, where according to Amnesty’s estimate 70 per cent of the women experience domestic violence, and many more are victims of verbal assaults is it surprising that there are far too many wife-beaters around to look with favour on a bill that has the potential of having them dispatched to prison for a year?

The first bill on domestic violence in Pakistan was introduced by PPP MNA, Sherry Rehman, in 2004 but that was not taken up at all. The second took a year to pass through the committee stages, only to meet an unfortunate end.

The second is a more intriguing story of the set of two bills that were widely hailed as a step to free women from the insecurities they face when they step out of their homes. They were the Protection against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act 2009 and the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2009.

The first was the substantive bill that provides a mechanism to be created by employers to investigate complaints by female workers who bring charges of sexual harassment against male colleagues/bosses.

The second bill that introduced changes in the PPC and CCP to strengthen the laws was the subsidiary instrument to give teeth to existing laws on what is euphemistically called ‘eve teasing’. The two bills were to be introduced and adopted together, as was logical.

But strangely this was not done. Instead the second bill that was the less important was tabled and adopted, while the substantive bill was not put up at all. No official explanation has been given for this anomaly.

Bushra Gohar, the chairperson of the National Assembly’s standing committee on women’s development, confirms that both the bills were on the order of the day on the first day of the Assembly’s session in November. They could not be taken up because of the opposition’s demand that the NRO be debated. As per rules legislative business was deferred to the following day.

To Gohar’s surprise only the amendment bill was placed on the order of the day for Nov 4. Although she commends it as ‘a good step forward’, she also expresses her disappointment at the failure of the government to bring up the main bill.

Assurances by the president, the prime minister and the speaker that the bill would be taken up in the same session have come to naught. The Assembly was later adjourned.

So we are left speculating why this happened. While holding ‘some male MNAs from south Punjab’ responsible — they said it would be ‘misused’ — Gohar believes the prime minister was seeking ‘to appease the JUI-F leader’ whose support was needed on the NRO.

For the Domestic Violence Bill, opposition from Maulana Sheerani, a member of the CCI and the Senate, unnerved the PPP that was trying to mobilise support for the Kerry-Lugar Bill.

It is as plain that political expediency won the day.

According to Gohar ‘enough political will has yet to be mustered to take even a small step towards women’s protection and rights’. Moreover, she is angry that a ‘handful can hold the entire Assembly hostage when it comes to progressive legislation on women’. She reminds us how easily women’s issues are compromised to appease a few.

This is a painful reminder today which is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. [you can contact the reporter here:zubeidam@gmail.com]

* * *
Call President Obama ALL WEEK LONG. Let’s keep his White House lines busy: Please force Afghanistan and Pakistan to adopt laws to protect women from abuse and give them equal rights under the laws.

Say NO to Escalation in Afghanistan. Sign the petition here. No funds from Congress for the troop escalation. Tell them now.

Take Action Now ! ! Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.”

Stop the Assassination Drones:). Call Leon Panetta at (703) 482-0623, CIA headquarters, leave a message: No More Drone Assasination attacks, and don’t attack Quetta. End the War(s) NOW.

[ Go to this link and join Cindy Sheehan and other Peace Activists new group "Peace of the Action" put your name on the line.]

Get your bumpersticker, support Military Famlies Speak Out

You can order bumperstickers at this link.

Today, please tell your member of Congress and U.S. Senators to End the War in Afghanistan, sign this petition. If you live outside the United States, write to your leaders, End the War Now.

While PPT hasn’t had an opportunity to read the whole report yet, we want to bring the International Crisis Group’s new report on the south to the attention of readers. From the press release:

Bangkok/Brussels, 8 December 2009: If the Thai government is serious about curbing the deadly southern insurgency, it needs to pursue political solutions, including lifting draconian laws, exploring new governance arrangements and engaging in dialogues with Malay Muslim militants.

Southern Thailand: Moving towards Political Solutions? the latest report from the International Crisis Group, says Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva has failed to make any significant progress in tackling the southern insurgency that has claimed more than 3,900 lives in the last six years. Nearly a year after he pledged on coming into office to shift the focus from a security-oriented approach to development and justice, violence has intensified, harsh laws remain in force, and civilian militias are exacerbating Buddhist-Muslim tensions.

“It is now time to pursue political solutions”, says Rungrawee Chalermsripinyorat, Crisis Group’s Thailand Analyst. “The government needs to think seriously about new governance structures for the South and review its stance of rejecting negotiations with insurgents”.

The problem is lack of political will. Abhisit’s fragile coalition government has been constantly challenged by supporters of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, ousted in a September 2006 coup. It needs the support of the military to suppress anti-government protestors and the top brass has hindered major policy changes towards the South. The armed forces have obstructed efforts to assert civilian control by allowing the civilian-led Southern Border Provinces Administrative Centre to operate independently from the military. The army also opposes the lifting of martial law and emergency decree in force in the three conflict-wracked provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat.

The reliance on the military (and palace) for support is crucial in a range of human rights arenas. At the same time, as we have blogged previously, PPT rejects suggestions that Abhisit is a good man held back. He’s not demonstrated any human rights concerns. Here we distinguish between platitudes and actions.

Say NO to Escalation in Afghanistan. View this video by Rethink Afghanistan, and then sign the petition here. No funds from Congress for the troop escalation. Tell them now.

You think U.S. troops will be coming out in 18 months as President Obama said? Karzai Says “Afghan Army Will Need Help Until 2024.” That’s 14 More Years, most likely much longer.

“For another 15 to 20 years, Afghanistan will not be able to sustain a force of that nature and capability with its own resources,” Mr. Karzai said during a press conference here with Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates. He was referring to the number of Afghan forces needed to provide security for the entire country. Mr. Gates, who was in Kabul on an unannounced visit, acknowledged that there was a “realism on our part that it will be some time before Afghanistan is able to sustain its security forces entirely on its own.” He did not put a timetable on how long he expected the United States and its allies to pay for the Afghan security forces, but he held out the possibility that an improvement in Afghanistan’s finances in the future would allay some of the costs. Read more here.

Hellfire Missile, used on U.S. Assassination Predator and Raptor Drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan

U.S. Assassination Drones back at work: US airstrike kills 3 in North Waziristan From Bill Roggio at The Long War Journal, please read the whole article as Bill puts a lot of information forward that you will not read elsewhere.

The US has killed three Taliban and al Qaeda fighters in its first strike in Pakistan’s tribal areas in two weeks. Unmanned US strike aircraft targeted and hit a vehicle in Pakistan’s Taliban-controlled tribal agency of North Waziristan. Two Hellfire missiles launched from unmanned Predator or Reaper attack aircraft hit the vehicle as it moved in the village of Aspalga, about seven miles southeast of the main town of Miramshah. “A car was hit by two missiles, killing three people and injuring three others,” a Pakistani security official told AFP. “The missiles were fired from a US drone,” another official told the news service. US intelligence officials contacted by The Long War Journal would not disclose the target of the strike nor would they confirm if any senior al Qaeda or Taliban leaders were killed.

The region is a stronghold of the Haqqani Network. The Haqqani family is led by Jalaluddin and his son Siraj, who serves as the military commander. The network is based in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, and has the backing of the Pakistani military and its intelligence service, as well as strong ties to al Qaeda. Siraj Haqqani is believed to be a member of al Qaeda military shura, or council, US intelligence officials told The Long War Journal. US airstrikes inside Pakistan have tapered off since September, which saw six attacks. There were only two airstrikes in October and two in November. No senior al Qaeda or Taliban commanders were reported killed in those attacks.

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Stop the Assassination Drones:). Call Leon Panetta at (703) 482-0623, CIA headquarters, leave a message: No More Drone Assasination attacks, and don’t attack Quetta. End the War(s) NOW.

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The International Crisis Group has just released a new report on Somaliland.  http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=6420

Somaliland’s general election was scheduled for spring 2008 during my tenure in East Africa.  Due to delays in the voter registration process all three political parties were able to agree on a postponement of the election date, but the matter of extending the president’s tenure in office after the expiration of his term was always a bit ambiguous.  A year-and-a-half later, this really needs to be brought to fruition.

I always greatly admired the ability of Somalilanders to pull and keep a meaningful form of governance together with so little to start with, and such little help.  Certainly the economy is hampered in many ways by the isolation resulting from the lack of formal diplomatic recognition.  While I was there it was extremely difficulty to get US permission for official US travelers (for instance, we were unsuccessful in getting US Gov’t permission for USAID consultants sent to Nairobi to evaluate democracy support programming to actually visit the country).  At the same time, the isolation has given them some space to work through their own challenges without some of the pitfalls often seen from international involvement, and a little breathing room in the lee of the winds of a globalized economy.

As a practical matter, it always seemed to me that Somaliland was a country of equal legitimacy and coherence with many others in the general area, whether the diplomatic community was ready to speak in that language or not.  The US always said it was waiting on the AU, and the AU was always going to act in accordance with the interests of its current players.  And of course the Bush Administration was heavily invested in that particular iteration of the TFG in Baidoa at that time.

A follow-up story to yesterday’s Post:

President Obama allows more U.S. Assassination Drone Attacks with Troop Escalation Orders, Predator Drone seen here now in operation in many areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan Border villages

Bombings, drone attacks fuel anti-US sentiment in Pakistan

PESHAWAR: Umar Hayat was among scores of volunteers who worked for days to find survivors after Pakistan’s worst bomb blast in two years, panic rising as he scrambled through scorched rubble. Clawing at debris after a massive bomb pulverised a busy market in Peshawar on October 28, Hayat could find no trace of his eldest son, 11-year-old Mohsin. ‘One after another, we found dead bodies. Soon after burying my brother, I came back to the bomb site. I found my son’s body at midnight. The next day, in the afternoon, we found my nephew’s body,’ Hayat told AFP. ‘My wife is still in shock. I don’t know what to do. She spends the whole time crying and saying ‘bring back my Mohsin’.’ But rather than feeling disgust at Taliban fighters blamed for an attack that killed 125 people, Hayat holds the United States responsible, reflecting a deep-seated distrust felt throughout Pakistan. ‘I appeal to America, please leave us be. Please stop this game, this war on terror. Osama (bin Laden) is just a smokescreen to attack Muslims,’ Hayat said. ‘Stop it. How many more lives will you take in revenge for the World Trade Centre? Do you want to destroy the whole of Pakistan?’

…‘There are strong anti-American sentiments in this region and this is because of American policy and its role in this region since the Russian invasion in Afghanistan,’ Yusufzai said. Fuelling anger are regular US missile strikes targeting Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Pakistan’s northwest. US drone attacks have killed around 625 people in the last 15 months, with Pakistanis seething at the perceived violation of sovereignty and reports of civilian casualties. ‘I’m sure it was a drone attack,’ said Ghulam Ali, looking at his cotton shop, which was damaged in the Peshawar blast. ‘We are fed up. I can’t believe the Taliban are involved in these bombings. I’m sure the troika – America, India and Israel – is doing all this.’

The Unseen Trauma of War, written by Rafai Zakaria, in The Daily Times:

Undoubtedly the immediate needs of survival of the refugees such as emergency healthcare, food and potable water, sanitation and housing must be fulfilled. According to the World Health Organization, 90 percent of the internally displaced people made homeless by the fighting in Northern Pakistan are living in host communities where few life-saving healthcare facilities are available. As has been widely reported, there is a critical gap between the needs of these war-torn communities and the service available to them. Particularly needed are the services of female healthcare workers who can provide for the vast number of displaced women in the area.The delivery of healthcare services in conflict areas has been a long-standing problem. Added to the structural problems of absent infrastructure and lack of facilities that are already present in many rural conflict areas are new and pressing problems of lack of security and the curbing of humanitarian assistance by various political interests. Read More Here. Ms. Zakaria teaches Constitutional Law and Political Philosophy in the United States.

President Zardari isn’t sleeping too well: Supreme Court begins hearing against NRO

ISLAMABAD: Supreme Court of Pakistan began hearing for petitions against the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) in Islamabad on Monday.The process could lead to challenges against the legality President Asif Ali Zardari’s rule just as the Obama administration needs stability in Islamabad to help crack down on militants near the Afghan border.Court official Azhar Hussain said the 17-member bench led by Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry started hearing petitions but gave no other details.The session came two weeks after the expiration of the amnesty ordinance, which had been granted in a deal with former president Pervez Musharraf. Speculation over Zardari’s future has escalated after he was forced to abandon an effort to get Parliament to approve the ordinance, which granted him and more than 8,000 other government bureaucrats and politicians immunity from a host of corruption and criminal charges. Zardari, who has denied any wrongdoing, enjoys general immunity from prosecution as president, but the Supreme Court could choose to challenge his eligibility for the post if the amnesty is declared illegal.

From Bill Roggio at The Long War Journal: Pakistan bars foreign reporters in South Punjab Why? Because they reported that Taliban were using Mosque as training ground.

From the Department of How You Know You’ve Struck A Nerve, via The Hindu:

Pakistani authorities have barred foreign journalists from visiting any seminary or other places in southern Punjab province after the Western media reported on the presence of the Taliban in that area. “All foreign journalists are required to get permission from foreign affairs as well as from interior ministries for visiting any specific place especially in South Punjab,” a senior officer of the Punjab government told PTI. He said in the past foreign journalists had visited different seminaries in the province and published or broadcast “twisted and unfounded” facts. “We have no issue if they follow journalistic ethics and report correctly,” the official said. Giving example of a UK based popular TV channel, Regional Police Officer of Bahawalpur division Mushtaq Sukhera, said that the TV crew requested for filming various seminaries in Bahawalpur including one of Jaish-e-Mohammad’s chief Maulana Azhar Masood. “I was rather shocked to see that the TV channel showed that the seminary of Masood Azhar was used as a training camp of terrorists,” Mr. Sukhera said.

Bill Roggio says: Yes, because we all know that Masood Azhar and his Jaish-e-Mohammed, which incidentally is banned by the Pakistani government, would never train terrorists, in a mosque no less. Perhaps the Pakistani government will now stop retired lieutenant colonels from visiting Southern Punjab and voicing their opinions about the spread of radical madrassas in the Pakistani press as well? Or maybe it will bar the Pakistani press from noting that South Punjab has become a factory for jihad? Visit The Long War Journal for breaking news.

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Take Action Now ! ! Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.”

Stop the Assassination Drones:). Call Leon Panetta at (703) 482-0623, CIA headquarters, leave a message: No More Drone Assasination attacks, and don’t attack Quetta. End the War(s) NOW.

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Many Pakistani citizens have been criticizing their government for fighting for the United States and causing the bombing of civilians in the larger cities as the “Taliban” respond by suicide bombers exploding their bombs, themselves, and all those around them. The Pakistani citizen feel less safe since the Pakistan Military started its artillery shelling, air plane bombings and helicopter attacks of the Swat Valley (2.5 Million citizens displaced) and South Waziristan (300,000 citizens displaced). The U.S. Assassination Drone attacks add to their belief that the U.S. forced the Pakistan Government to attack, and even paid them to do it through the Kerry-Luger 7.5 Billion USD over five years. President Zardari’s popularity is at an all-time low.

Senator Kerry and Senator Lugar co-authors of the $7.5 Billion USD Giveaway to Pakistan

Prime Minister Gilani responds: “This is our own war”

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani has said that Pakistan is fighting the war against terror in its own interest and strongly rejected the notion that it was being carried out on any other country’s behest.‘We are not mercenaries or service providers either, and nobody has to judge our performance,’ the Prime Minister said in an interview with BBC in London before concluding his four-day official visit to the United Kingdom and Germany.‘One thing I tell you, this is our own war and we are fighting it for the interest of our own country,’ said PM Gilani. On US President Barack Obama’s new Afghanistan war strategy, the Prime Minister said he wanted ‘more clarity’ from Americans in this regard before his country could take action on it. Gilani appreciated Obama’s intentions about the security and prosperity of Pakistan, however said his government was studying the US plan to send 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan and also examining its implications on Pakistan.

‘We would likely to see what precisely would be [the policy’s] impact on Pakistan,’ he said. The Prime Minister said he had apprehensions that the surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan’s Helmand province would result in the influx of militants into Balochistan province. ‘But as far as Afghanistan is concerned, yes there has to be an exit strategy,’ the Prime Minister said, while appreciating the building of institutions in Afghanistan as a ‘positive thing’. ‘One thing is clear, we cannot afford losing, because it is our own war and a stable Afghanistan is in the interest of Pakistan,’ he stressed.

The Caspian Sea Pipelines have to go through Afghanistan and Balochistan (Pakistan) See our story “Political Borders does not a Country Make…”

Oil and Gas Pipelines come down Afghanistan and cut across Balochistan to India and down to the the Gulf of Oman, by Bremmer at www.viewzone.com

For a great analysis of President Obama’s speech and its ramifications, read Pepe Escobar’s piece “Vietnam Lite revealed”, in the Asia Times Online here. A taste below:

…For all his lofty rhetoric, Obama is still pulling a Bush, not making any distinction between al-Qaeda – an Arab jihadi outfit whose objective is a global caliphate – and the Taliban – indigenous Afghans who want an Islamic emirate in Afghanistan but would have no qualms in doing business with the US, as they did during the Bill Clinton years when the US badly wanted to build a trans-Afghan gas pipeline. On top of it, Obama cannot admit that the “Pak” neo-Taliban now exist because of the US occupation of “Af”…The myth of al-Qaeda has to be exposed. How could al-Qaeda pull off 9/11 but be incapable of mounting a single significant attack inside Saudi Arabia? That’s because al-Qaeda is essentially a thinly disguised brigade of Saudi intelligence. The US wants to win “the war on terror”? Why not send special forces to Saudi Arabia instead of Afghanistan and knock the Wahhabis – the root of it all – out of power? Obama could at least have noticed what notorious Afghan mujahid, former Saudi protege, former Central Intelligence Agency darling and current American public enemy, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, told al-Jazeera. He stressed, “The Taliban government came to an end in Afghanistan due to the wrong strategy of al-Qaeda.”

* * *
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Take Action Now ! ! Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.”

Stop the Assassination Drones:). Call Leon Panetta at (703) 482-0623, CIA headquarters, leave a message: No More Drone Assasination attacks, and don’t attack Quetta. End the War(s) NOW.

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Guinea junta’s No. 2 returns after president shot

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI (AP) – 2 hours ago

CONAKRY, Guinea — The overnight return to Guinea on Saturday of the No. 2 man in the junta that seized power a year ago makes it more likely that the military clique will be able to hang on to power following an assassination attempt on the president.

Many people, however, fear the army could fracture and plunge the country into further violence.

The head of the presidential guard who is accused of having fired at point-blank range on the president was still at large, and it is unclear how many of the roughly 150 men formerly under his control will stay loyal to him.

The Guinean army is said to be divided into units headed by different military strongmen which act more like private armies and were only loosely held together by Capt. Moussa “Dadis” Camara, who seized control last December.

Gen. Sekouba Konate, the vice president and minister of defense — who is said to be close to the wounded president — arrived overnight Saturday from Lebanon, where he had been when Camara was shot and wounded by his former top aide, said Idrissa Cherif, the spokesman for the National Council for Democracy and Development, or CNDD.

Camara was airlifted Friday in a private plane to a Moroccan hospital for treatment and underwent surgery on Saturday for the head wound, said Cherif.

Cherif, the minister of communication, said the surgery was “a minimal intervention” and that the bullet had only “grazed” his head. But a retired diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the bullet had caused splinters of bone from his skull to penetrate his brain. He said it would likely be weeks before Camara could return — if at all.

Blaise Compaore, the president of neighboring Burkina Faso who sent his private plane to transport Camara to Morocco, said on state radio that his condition “is difficult but not desperate,” citing a doctor.

In sidewalk cafes and on radio talk shows, the constant chatter was about who is now in control? Cherif declined to say that Konate would assume the role of interim president, but said: “The CNDD is in control. Konate is the vice president of the CNDD. So he is the one giving us firm instructions. He coordinates everything. Dadis equals Konate and Konate equals Dadis. They are brothers … He is our boss until our president returns.”

Camara’s departure has left a dangerous void in the country of 10 million where the military has become deeply fractured. It is the first time that the 45-year-old leader has left Guinea since seizing control in a coup last December and he canceled multiple trips abroad, sometimes leading his private plane idling on the tarmac, for fear of a countercoup.

The crisis was exacerbated by Konate’s absence and the fact that Toumba has not been found, although the government on Saturday promised a large ransom to anyone with information and confirmed that four of his top aides had been arrested trying to leave the country.

Konate was rumored to have been one of three officers who could have become president during last year’s military coup, but he ended up bowing out to Camara.

Since then, Konate has became one of Camara’s closest associates and the two were almost always seen together. He is a commanding presence inside the army and is said to have several hundred men that are faithful to him.

A top diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity, in keeping with protocol, said that Konate does not appear to have presidential ambitions, in part because of his private nature as well as a speech impediment which makes it difficult for him to talk in public. Other diplomats confirmed the account, as did two government officials, all of whom requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press.

His return makes it more likely that the clan allied with Camara will be able to hang on to power and reign in the military, although the danger remains that the army is atomized and a group within it could use this as an opportunity to launch a countercoup. Part of the problem is that the army is rarely paid. Troops attach themselves to different commanders in an effort to secure their livelihood.

“The main bulk of the army is hanging around in barracks and not getting paid,” said Richard Moncrieff, the West Africa analyst for the International Crisis Group. “The junta is heavily divided and factionalized — principally on personal lines. There are five to six strongmen, surrounded by their ‘boys’ who follow them around and carry their weapons in return for a little money,” he said.

Guinea has been under military rule for the past 25 years, but only in the last year did the army devolve into near anarchy, with military pickup trucks loaded with armed men speeding through the capital acting as armed gangs.

Numerous businessmen and at least two diplomats have had their SUVs boldly stolen by the military.

In September, Mali’s Ambassador Hassan Barry was driving home when soldiers yanked him out of his diplomatic car, stole his cell phone and drove off, the Malian flag fluttering in the wind.

Ghanaian ambassador Dominic Ezoa Aboagye also had his SUV stolen by soldiers, who took his money as well as his clothes and left him standing in his underwear on the side of the road, said two diplomats, including one inside the Malian Embassy, who were familiar with the matter and who spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with protocol.

In recent months, the military cliques have often turned on each other, with Toumba’s men beating a senior general. And there was increasingly bad blood between Konate and Toumba following a Sept. 28 opposition rally in which the presidential guard opened fire on the unarmed demonstrators and raped female demonstrators.

Diplomats and junta officials say that Konate — who was away from Conakry during the slaughter — demanded that Toumba be arrested, but Camara refused. When Camara was shot by Toumba on Thursday it was allegedly after an argument broke out between them over who would take the blame in front of a U.N. commission now investigating the massacre, which killed at least 157 people.

___

Associated Press writers Brahima Ouedraogo in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and Solana Pyne in Rabat, Morocco, contributed to this report.

(This version CORRECTS Corrects slug, incorporating story sent as BC-AF–Guinea-Uncontrolled Army. UPDATES with return of No. 2 man in junta.)

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

The End of Pakistan Government is Near: When U.S. Assassination Drones hit Quetta, the capital of Balochistan, the government of Pakistan will fall due to the Pakistani citizens denouncing their government for allowing a foreign government to attack its people. About 700,000 Pakistani’s live in Quetta City, the capital of Balochistan. The Baloch people have much to be proud of and a lot of it is in this city. Learn what is about to be attacked by U.S. Drones and their Hellfire 500 lb missiles here. And Here Also. Quetta is a city just like the one you live in. Stop the Assassination Drones:). Call Leon Panetta at (703) 482-0623, CIA headquarters, leave a message: No More Drone Assasination attacks, and don’t attack Quetta. End the War(s) NOW.

U.S. Assassination Drone (pilotless airplane) firing Hellfire Missile, Quetta City Next? A city with 700,000 population, lots of 'Collateral Damage' (dead civilians) will be reported

PESHAWAR: A senior US diplomat on Friday went a step further than restating Washington’s assertion about the presence of Taliban shura in Quetta and insisted that some Al Qaeda leadership could also be there.‘Our intelligence shows that some of the Al Qaeda leadership is in Pakistan,’ Candace Putnam, the US consul-general in Peshawar told a media roundtable here. ‘I don’t know where Osama bin Laden is on any given day, but we do know that some of the leadership is sitting in Quetta and that they travel back and forth from Afghanistan to Pakistan,’ she said. ‘We know that they are there. And I think your government also knows this. Whether they want to say this in public or not but I think they know they are there,’ she added. The latest claim adds a new dimension to the stated US position about the presence of Taliban shura in Quetta, something Pakistan has been strenuously denying.

We wrote about the potential attacks in Balochistan on October 7, read the story here: “Leon Panetta, you can stop the Drone attack of Quetta before it starts. Follow your heart”

The Balochistan Package put forth by the Pakistan Government two weeks ago, was it to appease the Baloch population as the U.S. geared up to attack Quetta? Was it used to placate the population into a false sense of good things are coming? If so, it failed, as the Baloch population didn’t buy into the Package. Read this story as it was happening two weeks ago:

Pakistan Government tries to quell the unrest and separatists movement in Balochistan.The Balochistan Empowerment Package was discussed with Gilani and President Asif Ali Zardari who hopes it will ‘go a long way in redressing the grievances of the people of the province,’ presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar said.

‘The package contains a series of constitutional reforms, economic measures and administrative steps to assuage the hurt feelings of the people of Balochistan,’ Babar told AFP.But Baloch opposition leaders said they would oppose any package that does not address the issue of missing persons or stop military operations.’We shall not accept any package until the issue of hundreds of missing persons is resolved and military operations are halted,’ Ishaq Baloch, vice president of the National Party told AFP in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan.’There have to be solid confidence-building measures before any meaningful dialogue between the central government and Baloch leaders,’ Baloch said. Agha Hassan, a spokesman for the Balochistan National Party said the reform package would be futile because of ‘continued atrocities’ by Pakistani paramilitary forces.
‘The FC (Frontier Corps) have no respect for the privacy of citizens and storm into any home and take away our men. Some six to seven thousand of our men are missing,’ Hassan told AFP.
‘The centre (federal government) has always deceived Baloch people.’

The Balochistan ‘package’ By Sanaullah Baloch, in answer to the Pakistan Government “Balochistan Package”

The Baloch people had hoped that over the past few years the central government would have come to the realisation that the conflict in their province was not merely about financial packages.
In fact, the struggle in the resource-rich but poverty-stricken region is political: it aims at ending Islamabad’s exploitation, oppression and colonial control over Balochistan. The centre’s endless desire to control the province’s natural wealth and its continued suppression of the people through ethnically-structured military and paramilitary forces are the prime reasons behind the uneasy Baloch-Islamabad relations. Since the time Pervez Musharraf took over in 1999 and after, the term ‘Balochistan package’ has been used repetitively to confuse and distract debate and attention away from the province’s genuine political, social and economic issues. If the current regime in Islamabad is sincere, willing and authorised by the establishment to indisputably resolve the prolonged Baloch-Islamabad conflict, then they have to agree to address the crux of the matter: the rulers should come up with a more political and long-lasting solution, rather than packages. However, their silence on the aggravating situation in the province is proof of their aloofness.
In the last six decades the Baloch people have been governed like a subsidiary. Islamabad is ruling Balochistan through a system known as ‘control’. Control is a suppressive and outdated system based on a set of mechanisms used in multi-ethnic states by the dominant ethnic group to contain and keep its control over dissident ethnic minorities. It is based on the idea that one ethnic group takes over the state and its institutions, imposes its culture on society, allocates to itself the lion’s share of resources and takes various measures like military operations, suppression, etc to prevent the non-dominant groups from organising politically for their due rights.

* * *
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Take Action Now ! ! Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.”

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The U.S. Empire Marches On:

Pakistan opposes expanded US drone attacks

Headline from Dawn.com and part of the story here. We wrote about the potential attacks in Balochistan on October 7, read the story here: “Leon Panetta, you can stop the Drone attack of Quetta before it starts. Follow your heart”

As before, the Pakistan Government and Military say they are against the U.S. Drone attacks that kill not only those targeted, but the innocent people around them at the time the Hellfire Missile hits the target. Today’s story in Dawn.com:

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan opposes expanded US drone attacks against militants on its tribal areas, as well as any strikes on Baluchistan, where Washington believes Afghan Taliban leaders are hiding, the foreign ministry said on Friday. The White House has authorised the expansion of the CIA’s drone programme in Pakistan to complement President Barack Obama’s plans to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, the New York Times reported, citing unnamed officials.

We have been following the “Baloch Package” that was put forward last week by the Pakistan Govenment to “take care of the Balochistan problem”. It is a set of statements of what should be done with no mechanism for doing them. The Baloch people have been held down since the formulation of Pakistan. We are Re-Posting this story of October 4, 2009:

Strange modus operandi A story about Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told newsmen on September 23 that his government would soon announce a time frame for resolving the issues relating to Balochistan. The Balochistan “problem” has been going on since 1948. Remember, soon the Pakistan Military, supported by more Drone Hellfire Missiles/bombs will be dropped on Quetta, Balochistan’s capital city. If this happens, you can count on Pakistan Government not surviving. India is licking its chops.

The Balochistan ‘package’ The Baloch people had hoped that over the past few years the central government would have come to the realisation that the conflict in their province was not merely about financial packages. Why is this important? Because the Caspian Sea Oil and Gas has to move through Balochistan to get from the Sea, through Afghanistan, then cut through Balochistan to get to India. If there is no peace there, there will be no pipeline (See Pipelineistan, Control Central Asia Oil and Gas). Take a look at this map.

Existing and "Proposed" Oil and Gas Delivery System for Central Asia

We suggest you Re-Read our Post: Blood Borders: Kurdistan, Pashtunistan, Balochistan, and other Ethnic homelands divided are the problem; Britain ended its military mission in Iraq; Pakistan Poll: “U.S. greater danger than India”

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Call President Obama ALL WEEK LONG. Let’s keep his White House lines busy:
Take Action Now ! ! Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.”

[ Go to this link and join Cindy Sheehan and other Peace Activists new group "Peace of the Action" put your name on the line.]

Get your bumpersticker, support Military Famlies Speak Out

You can order bumperstickers at this link.

Today, please tell your member of Congress and U.S. Senators to End the War in Afghanistan, sign this petition. If you live outside the United States, write to your leaders, End the War Now.

Elections in Iraq due in January. Iraq will not make this deadline, so elections will be postponed in violation of their Constitution (U.S. drafted). There’s disagreement between the three leaders of the Presidential Council. Only one member can veto any proposed law. The Sunni leader Tariq al-Hashemi, had vetoed the law as presented a month ago due to Sunni’s living out of the country could not vote. This has been argued and a new version of the law come back to them, but this issue is not resolved. Also, the Kurdish citizens of Iraq wanted more seats in the election due to the three provinces they control. This took some seats away from the Sunni citizens in the Mosul area. This is a sign that the three factions can not work together and don’t trust each other.

The biggest issue facing the Presidential Council is what to do with Kirkuk, the oil rich area that the Kurds claim as their historical territory. This has not been resolved. The Kurds in Iraq and in Turkey, Syria and Iran comprimise 40,000,000 people of Kurdish heritage and deserve their own country. They are the biggest ethnic population without their own country. This will eventually lead to a three-partition area of what is now called Iraq. We must be prepared for this eventuality. [Ed. note: Read our other Posts under Kurdistan on the right column]

Let’s have an update on our troops in Iraq and see the schedule of the draw-down as it exists today. Demand to see it.

How many U.S. troop have been removed from Iraq since President Obama called for a troop reduction there? How much equipment has been moved out? In February 2009, President Obama said there would be between 35,000 and 50,000 troops remaining in Iraq after August 2010, and all would be out by December 2011. There were 142,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Obama says they will all be out within 19 months. So 9 months have passed. There are only 9 more months to have reduces our troops from 142,000 to 35,000 to 50,000. How many have left Iraq?

This is important as President Obama wants to withdraw troops he has yet to send to Afghanistan within 18 months, that is, begin to draw them down “if ground conditions allow for it”, which means who knows what it will be like then, so maybe a drawdown can not happen.

60,000 troops will have been sent to Afghanistan by President Obama (27,000 all ready authorized and now an additional 30,000 authorized). The War Mongers win again. Bomb makers, and other providers of weapons to the U.S. government win, no one else wins. The Afghanistan people will suffer more civilian casualties (collateral damage) and eventually we will pull out of Afghanistan. Why not pull out now?

* * *
Call President Obama ALL WEEK LONG. Let’s keep his White House lines busy:
Take Action Now ! ! Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.”

[ Go to this link and join Cindy Sheehan and other Peace Activists new group "Peace of the Action" put your name on the line.]

Get your bumpersticker, support Military Famlies Speak Out

You can order bumperstickers at this link.

Today, please tell your member of Congress and U.S. Senators to End the War in Afghanistan, sign this petition. If you live outside the United States, write to your leaders, End the War Now.

Tom Hayden says “It’s time to strip the Obama sticker off my car.”

Peace Activist and Obama Supporter Tom Hayden, Getty Images Michael Buckner

Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan is the last in a string of disappointments. His flip-flopping acceptance of the military coup in Honduras has squandered the trust of Latin America. His Wall Street bailout leaves the poor, the unemployed, minorities, and college students on their own. And now comes the Afghanistan-Pakistan decision to escalate the stalemate, which risks his domestic agenda, his Democratic base, and possibly even his presidency.

The expediency of his decision was transparent. Satisfy the generals by sending 30,000 more troops. Satisfy the public and peace movement with a timeline for beginning withdrawals of those same troops, with no timeline for completing a withdrawal.

…Adding 30,000 to 35,000 US troops will raise the US death toll by over 1,000 by 2011 on Obama’s watch, in addition to the 750 who died under Bush. The numbers of US wounded are rising faster than ever, with 300 counted in the past three months. Civilian casualties are under-reported according to the UN mission in Afghanistan. The budgetary costs are growing to $75 billion annually, and could become another trillion-dollar war.

… The anti-war movement will have to solidify support from the two-thirds of Democratic voters who so far question this war. Continuing analysis from The Nation and Robert Greenwald’s videos have a major role to play. Public opinion will have to become a growing factor in the mind of Congress, where Rep. Jim McGovern’s resolution favoring an exit strategy has 100 co-sponsors and Rep. Barbara Lee’s tougher bill to prevent funding for escalation is now at 23.

…There are alternatives. There is evidence that the Taliban in Afghanistan are seeking a peace settlement without havens for Al Qaeda. There also is an October 11 statement by Gulbaddin Hekmatyer of Hezb-I-Islam Afghanistan, a mujahadeen leader and former prime minister in the 1990s, once funded by the CIA. Never reported in the US media, the letter proposes an honorable exit strategy, including
- relocation of Western troops from Afghan cities, plus a logical and practical time schedule for their withdrawal;
- transfer of power to an interim government independent of the parties currently fighting;
- new elections under an independent election commission;
- release of political prisoners;
- a possible peacekeeping force from neutral Islamic countries;
- and, more importantly for the Obama agenda, the document states: Hezb-I-Islami is prepared to discuss the exit of all foreign fighters (non-Afghan, be it forces of the West, or embedded with the Mujahideen). We assure all sides that we agree that neither the embedded fighters with the Mujahideen nor foreign military forces be allowed to remain or to establish military bases or training camps in Afghanistan. Read more from Tom Hayden at The Nation.

Our thanks to Al Jazeera for covering people protesting the War Escalation in America:

War Escalation by President Obama spawns a New Peace Coalition, join below. In response to President Obama’s pending announcement of a major troop escalation in Afghanistan,Peace Activist, Cindy Sheehan, and other major anti-war groups and activists are announcing the formation of a new Peace Coalition that will seek to actively obstruct “business as usual” in Washington, DC, until Congress and the administration announce troop withdrawals from Iraq/Af-Pak.

“We’ve marched, we’ve signed letters and petitions, helped get candidates elected and called Congress and the White House, until we’re literally blue in the face, and peace is even more elusive now then it was when Bush was president. I believe so strongly in peace and justice for all that I am, once again, uprooting my life, this time to move to our nation’s capital until true change occurs. I am calling on people who love humanity and peace to join me in Peace of the Action, “ Sheehan said from her California home. [Ed. note: Go to this link and join, put your name on the line.]

Also, Military Famlies Speak Out

President Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan by deploying another 30,000 troops has sent the message to military families across the United States that the President is willing to gamble in a no-win situation with the lives of our loved ones and the loved ones of others. President Obama’s surge of U.S. troops will not make the U.S. safer, nor will it bring peace and stability to the Afghan people; it will add more fuel to the fires now raging there. It will mean more deaths of military personnel and of civilians. Sending more troops will not end this war; bringing them home now will.

Get your bumpersticker, support Military Famlies Speak Out

You can order bumperstickers at this link.

* * *
Call President Obama ALL WEEK LONG. Let’s keep his White House lines busy:
Take Action Now ! !

Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.”

Today, please tell your member of Congress and U.S. Senators to End the War in Afghanistan, sign this petition. If you live outside the United States, write to your leaders, End the War Now.

BY DOUGLAS MCGILL

ROCHESTER, MN — I’m going to break one of my own writing rules today.

In the six years that I’ve written about Ethiopian immigrants and politics in Minnesota, I’ve never editorialized directly against the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi.

Instead, I’ve limited myself to reporting on the experiences, outlooks and opinions of Ethiopian immigrants who live in Minnesota, a hub of the global Ethiopian diaspora.

Today I’m making an exception, though, because of what strikes me as the exceptional danger posed by  Meles’ most recent global political moves — a grave danger for Ethiopians and Africans, and possibly far beyond.

For once, I’ll offer my personal view.

I’m talking about Meles’ theft-in-plain-sight of the African leadership role at the United Nations Climate Change Conference that begins in Copenhagen next Monday. As the spokesman for the 52 African nations at the conference, Meles holds potentially enormous disruptive power over agreements reached among the 190 total nations represented in Copenhagen.

Meles has already threatened to lead a walk-out of the African delegation if their demand for hundreds of billions of dollars in compensation payments from developed nations aren’t met.

Arrest and Torture

It’s crazy for one of the world’s bloodiest dictators to hold such global power.

It’s a farce that Meles, whose environmental and human rights polices in Ethiopia are profoundly retrograde, has been given a global platform from which to scold other nations.

Meles runs his own country by a “divide and conquer” strategy and through the  systematic, brutal dispensation of arbitrary arrest and torture – hardly the best model for global collaborative decision-making on the world’s most pressing environmental crisis.

To be more specific, the Meles regime has held its grip on power the past 18 years through the use of genocide, ethnic cleansing, gulag prisons, a sham court system, medieval property laws and the jailing, torture and lawless execution of civilians and political opponents.

Why would Denmark even allow this man to step foot in their country?

Directly to the point of the hypocrisy of Meles’ role as Africa’s chief climate change negotiator, Ethiopia is now facing one of the worst famines in its history as a consequence of his own environmentally disastrous laws and policies.

Absolute Power

These include property laws that prevent farmers from owning their own land; that forbid foreign research and aid groups from entering the country; and a governing system that prevents orderly agriculture and environmentalism, because Meles stays in power by keeping his country mired in a permanent state of war.

The evidence for Meles’ crimes is far too extensive, public, and exhaustively well-documented to summarize in detail here.

Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Genocide Watch, the International Crisis Group, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, countless other aid groups and even the U.S. State Department have all for years now published report after detailed report on Meles’ crimes – reports stuffed with details of collective punishment, prison torture, slaughter of street protestors, on and on.

The picture painted is of a shrewd, pitiless tyrant who stays in power through total control of his country’s political, economic, legal, media and military systems.

The only mystery that remains is why the world appears simply not to notice, to respond, or even to care in the least about the Ethiopia’s abysmal suffering.

Rule of Terror

It’s Rwanda and Darfur all over again. And it has been that way, although getting progressively worse, since 1991, the year that Meles took power in a coup and immediately began ethnic cleansing as a central tactic of his governing style.

Meles’ 18-year rule of terror in Ethiopia has easily earned him a place alongside dictators such as Kim Jong-Il, Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar Qaddafi, Robert Mugabe, Omar al-Bashir, Than Swhe, and Ali Khamenei.

Would any of these despots be welcomed in Copenhagen?

Would any be given the chance to potentially veto a global climate accord?

Of course, Meles won’t do that. What he will do, though, is maximize his leverage through every means possible to further secure what for 18 years he has ruthlessly sought and won in Ethiopia, which is absolute power.

He’d let the world burn to a crisp before he relinquished that.

Copyright @ 2009 The McGill Report

….Tonight, President Barack Obama will stand before us at West Point, the place where we train our future Army leaders, and tell us why he will send more Americans to die for the cause in Afghanistan (and Iraq, and possibly Pakistan) and why he is escalating The Long War. He will tell us how it is in our National Security interests to have many people die while achieving our goal (and tonight, he’ll tell us the Latest goal), the newest reason to be there. It is possible that President Obama learned nothing standing on the tarmac in the early morning hours to greet our returning brave soldiers remains. Or the Nobel Peace Prize he is to receive in a few weeks may have kept him from adding 80,000 soldiers, who knows?

President Obama at Dover Air Force Base salutes the dignified transfer of one of our fallen soldiers returning from Afghanistan, AFP Photo Saul LOEB

The Real Reason We are There: OIL and GAS, and their Pipelines

Today’s NY Times article: Oil Companies Look to the Future in Iraq. This story comes out on the same day President Obama escalates the war in Central Asia. Read the story.

From our Posts on Oil Stories of the past:

“New Great Game”: Eurasia and Pipelineistan. Question: Why are we in Iraq, Afghanistan, and supporting Pakistan Military’s war? TO CONTROL THE WORLD’S OIL SUPPLY
Pablo Escobar spells out great history in his post at Tom Dispatch, read it here.

Charlie Wilson speaks out; Afghan Peace Festival; Troop Morale (No More Troops); Pipelinestan is the reason; End the War. Scroll down for the Pipelinestan Story and Maps of the Oil and Pipeline Routes.

Blood and Oil in Central Asia From Voters for Peace, good outline of history.

So, President Obama, you will be disappointing your far left base tonight, and letting all the American people down by carrying on The Long War. If George W. Bush were still in office today and he did what you are going to announce tonight, there would be many people in the streets protesting the escalation and calls for his Impeachment would be heard. By sending more troops (which you have all ready done since taking office), you are now an accomplice and co-conspirator to the War Crimes having been committed by the United States over the past 9 years in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Pakistan. What Hope and Change do you want to tell us about next week?

Malalai Joya writes in The Guardian: A Troop Surge can only magnify the crime against Afghanistan. Read our Post about Malalai Joya here.

* * *
Call President Obama ALL WEEK LONG. Let’s keep his White House lines busy:
Take Action Now ! !

Call President Obama: To reach the U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121 or 202-225-3121 Leave a message: “You made the wrong decision. I do not support you on this. I feel betrayed.”

Today, please tell your member of Congress and U.S. Senators to End the War in Afghanistan, sign this petition. If you live outside the United States, write to your leaders, End the War Now.