The Mound of Sound

Tony Blair hasn’t been officially annointed Special Envoy to the Middle East but the unfinished formalities aren’t preventing his skeptics from speaking out. Even the Times of London has some serious doubts:

“It is the haste with which Tony Blair has scripted his own sequel as the world’s envoy to the Middle East that gives the impression of self-absorption. The rush by his team to try to announce some kind of role by today, the last day of his premiership, seems designed to ease the sting of surrendering high office more than to solve the problems of the Middle East.

“It is not that the idea is ludicrous, if you take a long step around Blair’s role as one of the architects of the Iraq invasion, and his support of Israel’s military action in Lebanon. Many Arabs loathe him just for that, and in a region that sustains grudges so easily for hundreds of years, the grievances of the past decade are hardly going to be set aside. But Blair’s passion for tackling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is beyond dispute.

“But the problem with any role for Blair is that it is impossible to define while the political route ahead remains so unclear, and that won’t be sorted out by a few hours of talks about what he is supposed to do. The speed with which Blair’s role has been written has left ambassadors and senior Foreign Office officials speechless in the past five days, gesturing with their canapés at garden parties to make up for an absence of words.

“The US-Israeli plan is now to pour resources into the West Bank, and to shore up Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, to make the contrast with Gaza as great as possible. But the hazards are huge. Abbas will not want to abandon the 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza (nor to seem like a US-Israeli pawn). Any revival of the West Bank economy would depend on Israel relaxing control of Palestinian movement, as argued in a World Bank report last month that was highly critical of Israeli policy. Yet Israel can say that this would expose it to insupportable security threats; Hamas has a significant presence on the West Bank and it is not going away.”

It remains to be seen whether Blair will have any credibility left in the Middle East after Afghanistan and Iraq. He starts out with the reputation of being George Bush’s poodle. If he fails to engage Hamas constructively, he’ll likely be written off as Washington’s stooge.

In the campaign to fight global warming, Asia is becoming a real troublespot.

Asian nations, and particularly China and India, are undergoing an industrial metamorphosis as once-Western multinationals pack up shop and relocate to their part of the world in search of cheap labour and relaxed or non-existant regulation. To Asians it’s seen as a long-overdue, economic miracle and one they’re not keen on seeing restrained.

That’s why several Asian nations are becoming quite vocal about the West’s fledgling movement to arrest global warming by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. They don’t like what they see coming and they’re waging their own pre-emptive strikes.

Asian business and government leaders have accused rich countries of hypocrisy, saying they run polluting industries with cheap labour in China and then blame the country for worsening climate change.

Malaysia’s deputy finance minister, Nor Mohamed Yakcop, is the latest to weigh in, accusing the West of “green imperialism.” The thinking goes that Western countries are hypocritical because they run polluting industries with cheap labour in Asia and then blame the Asian countries for worsening global warming.

The flaw in this logic is that it assumes Western states “run” the multinationals. In reality, we stopped running them when we adopted the mantra of free trade, the free flow of capital unfettered by tariffs. By surrendering most of our ability to control access to our markets, we surrendered a great deal of our sovereignty to globalization and the multinationals.

The Asians do have a perfectly legitimate claim that, per capita, our emissions are already several times higher than theirs but that’s an argument that can only be entertained in a more perfect world in better circumstances.

We need to come up with a means of compelling Asian co-operation in the GHG battle and we have one very powerful tool at our disposal – access to our markets. The wealth that is accruing to Asia from their industrial revolution is in no small part dependent on the ability of the multinationals to sell their manufactured goods in our market. Restrict those markets and Asia’s economic miracle wilts.

The fall of the Taliban seemed to happen so fast that most people never got to know the other guys, our allies – the Northern Alliance. When I ask people today they have no idea what this group, whose leaders have insinuated themselves into the top ranks of the Karzai government, really did beyond battling the Taliban.

It strikes me that we ought to know, given that we’re asking our soldiers to give their lives to support a government made up of these thugs. And I can’t think of a better way to shed light on them than to reproduce the following press backgrounder from Human Rights Watch, October, 2001:

What Is the United Front/Northern Alliance?

In 1996, when the Taliban captured the Afghan capital, Kabul, the groups opposed to the Taliban formed an alliance called the National Islamic United Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, commonly known as the United Front. The United Front supports the government ousted by the Taliban, the Islamic State of Afghanistan (ISA). The president of the ousted government, Burhanuddin Rabbani, remains the president of the ISA and is the titular head of the United Front. For the past year his headquarters have been in the northern Afghan town of Faizabad. The real power was, until his assassination in September 2001, the United Front’s military leader, Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was also the ISA’s minister of defense. The precise membership of the United Front has varied from time to time, but includes:

Jamiat-i Islami-yi Afghanistan (hereinafter known as Jamiat-i Islami). Jamiat-i Islami was one of the original Islamist parties in Afghanistan, established in the 1970s by students at Kabul University where its leader, Burhanuddin Rabbani, was a lecturer at the Islamic Law Faculty. Although Rabbani remains the official head of Jamiat-i Islami, the most powerful figure within the party was Ahmad Shah Massoud. Massoud’s forces have received significant military and other support from Iran and Russia, in particular.

Hizb-i Wahdat-i Islami-yi Afghanistan (Islamic Unity Party of Afghanistan, hereinafter known as Hizb-i Wahdat). The principal Shi’a party in Afghanistan with support mainly among the Hazara ethnic community, Hizb-i Wahdat was originally formed by Abdul Ali Mazari in order to unite eight Shi’a parties in the run-up to the anticipated collapse of the communist government. Its current leader is Muhammad Karim Khalili.

Junbish-i Milli-yi Islami-yi Afghanistan (National Islamic Movement of Afghanistan, hereinafter known as Junbish). Junbish brought together northern, mostly ethnic Uzbek, former militias of the communist regime who mutinied against President Najibullah in early 1992. Its founder and principal leader was Abdul Rashid Dostum, who rose from security guard to leader of Najibullah’s most powerful militia. One of Dostum’s principal deputies was Abdel Malik Pahlawan.

Harakat-i Islami-yi Afghanistan (Islamic Movement of Afghanistan). This is a Shi’a party that never joined Hizb-i Wahdat, led by Ayatollah Muhammad Asif Muhsini, and which was allied with Jamiat-i Islami in 1993-1995. Its leadership is mostly non-Hazara Shi’a. Its most prominent commander is General Anwari. The group has received support from Iran.

Ittihad-i Islami Bara-yi Azadi Afghanistan (Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan). This party is headed by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. During the war against the Soviet occupation, Sayyaf obtained considerable assistance from Saudi Arabia. Arab volunteers supported by Saudi entrepreneurs fought with Sayyaf’s forces.

The United Front’s Human Rights Record

Throughout the civil war in Afghanistan, the major factions on all sides have repeatedly committed serious human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law, including killings, indiscriminate aerial bombardment and shelling, direct attacks on civilians, summary executions, rape, persecution on the basis of religion or ethnicity, the recruitment and use of children as soldiers, and the use of antipersonnel landmines. Many of these violations can be shown to have been “widespread or systematic,” a criterion of crimes against humanity. Although committed in an internal armed conflict, violations involving indiscriminate attacks or direct attacks on civilians are increasingly being recognized internationally as amounting to war crimes.

Abuses committed by factions belonging to the United Front have been well documented. Many of the violations of international humanitarian law committed by the United Front forces described below date from 1996-1998 when they controlled most of the north and were within artillery range of Kabul. Since then, what remains of the United Front forces have been pushed back into defensive positions in home territories in northeastern and central Afghanistan following a series of military setbacks. There have nevertheless been reports of abuses in areas held temporarily by United Front factions, including summary executions, burning of houses, and looting, principally targeting ethnic Pashtuns and others suspected of supporting the Taliban. Children, including those under the age of fifteen, have been recruited as soldiers and used to fight against Taliban forces. The various parties that comprise the United Front also amassed a deplorable record of attacks on civilians between the fall of the Najibullah regime in 1992 and the Taliban’s capture of Kabul in 1996.

Violations of international humanitarian law committed by United Front factions include:
Late 1999 – early 2000: Internally displaced persons who fled from villages in and around Sangcharak district recounted summary executions, burning of houses, and widespread looting during the four months that the area was held by the United Front. Several of the executions were reportedly carried out in front of members of the victims’ families. Those targeted in the attacks were largely ethnic Pashtuns and, in some cases, Tajiks.

September 20-21, 1998: Several volleys of rockets were fired at the northern part of Kabul, with one hitting a crowded night market. Estimates of the number of people killed ranged from seventy-six to 180. The attacks were generally believed to have been carried out by Massoud’s forces, who were then stationed about twenty-five miles north of Kabul. A spokesperson for United Front commander Ahmad Shah Massoud denied targeting civilians. In a September 23, 1998, press statement, the International Committee of the Red Cross described the attacks as indiscriminate and the deadliest that the city had seen in three years.

Late May 1997: Some 3,000 captured Taliban soldiers were summarily executed in and around Mazar-i Sharif by Junbish forces under the command of Gen. Abdul Malik Pahlawan. The killings followed Malik’s withdrawal from a brief alliance with the Taliban and the capture of the Taliban forces who were trapped in the city. Some of the Taliban troops were taken to the desert and shot, while others were thrown down wells and then blown up with grenades.

January 5, 1997: Junbish planes dropped cluster munitions on residential areas of Kabul. Several civilians were killed and others wounded in the indiscriminate air raid, which also involved the use of conventional bombs.

March 1995: Forces of the faction operating under Commander Massoud, the Jamiat-i Islami, were responsible for rape and looting after they captured Kabul’s predominantly Hazara neighborhood of Karte Seh from other factions. According to the U.S. State Department’s 1996 report on human rights practices in 1995, “Massood’s troops went on a rampage, systematically looting whole streets and raping women.”

On the night of February 11, 1993 Jamiat-i Islami forces and those of another faction, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf’s Ittihad-i Islami, conducted a raid in West Kabul, killing and “disappearing” ethnic Hazara civilians, and committing widespread rape. Estimates of those killed range from about seventy to more than one hundred.

In addition, the parties that constitute the United Front have committed other serious violations of internationally recognized human rights. In the years before the Taliban took control of most of Afghanistan, these parties had divided much of the country among themselves while battling for control of Kabul. In 1994 alone, an estimated 25,000 were killed in Kabul, most of them civilians killed in rocket and artillery attacks. One-third of the city was reduced to rubble, and much of the remainder sustained serious damage. There was virtually no rule of law in any of the areas under the factions’ control. In Kabul, Jamiat-i Islami, Ittihad, and Hizb-i Wahdat forces all engaged in rape, summary executions, arbitrary arrest, torture, and “disappearances.” In Bamiyan, Hizb-i Wahdat commanders routinely tortured detainees for extortion purposes.

So, now that you know, is it any wonder that the new Afghan parliament’s most significant legislative accomplishment to date has been to grant themselves amnesty for all of this?

This is what we’re fighting for in Afghanistan and, on balance, it ain’t much.

There you have it. Bandana, no helmet, sleeveless tunic, tatoo, grenade bandolier, the whole deal. The soldier was involved with a surge mission in Baquba, Iraq.