June 2007
Monthly Archive
June 25, 2007
NatPo’s John Ivison wrote an illuminating piece on Stephen Harper suggesting that, for Harpo, style trumps substance.
“…while Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have proven adept at crafting a long-term strategy, they have looked embarrassingly inept when dealing with events they don’t control.
“Mr. Harper has redefined how politics in Canada is practised by adopting the permanent campaign model elevated to an art form by former U.S. president Bill Clinton — a strategy that blurs the lines between campaigning and governing.
“In his first 17 months as Prime Minister, Mr. Harper racked up 153 public events, 85 of them outside Ottawa, according to his Web site. This works out to nine events a month, more than half of which were on the road.
“By comparison, Paul Martin held 143 events in two years (outside of the 2004 election campaign), of which 39 were out of town. This breaks down to six events a month, fewer than two of which were outside the national capital region.
“Conservatives have been much more adept than their rivals at using marketing techniques to evoke feelings, both positive and negative. They have highlighted Liberal failures, used national symbols such as hockey and micro-targeted swing voters with policies and tax cuts.
“The success of this strategy explains why the Conservatives were nudging 40% support in late March. Yet their numbers have nose-dived since then, and one recent poll had them trailing the Liberals. The most obvious reason has been the inability of Mr. Harper and his immediate circle in the Prime Minister’s Office to react to events beyond their control.
“The plan in crisis situations has been to avoid the media. One MP said the only advice the Prime Minister’s communications director, Sandra Buckler, was able to offer to caucus was the location of the back door.
“A run of bad headlines has turned the Conservatives’ biggest asset — their leader — into a liability. In recent weeks, Mr. Harper has negated much of the natural advantage of governing by taking combative positions, such as his dare to the provinces to sue the federal government over the Atlantic Accords.
“A number of Conservatives say Mr. Harper’s aggressiveness is a cover for fundamental insecurity. ‘He’s the nerd, the chess player, who in his own mind is smarter than the other kids. He’s got a chip on his shoulder that he and the kernel of people around him are against the world and he gets angry very easily,’ said one source.
“This trait wasn’t a problem when he was leader of the Opposition, a job that demanded a vitriol Mr. Harper did not need to contrive. But no prime minister can control all the moving pieces of government and when things go wrong, as they inevitably do, he is the one who has to defend the position. Mr. Harper’s instincts are not defensive — he prefers to get his retaliation in first — with the result that television news clips have regularly shown him looking like an irate hockey coach protesting an unjust penalty.”
June 25, 2007
Only a small minority of Americans approve of the Iraq War. Most want it ended and US troops brought home to safety. The Repugs are terrified of the prospect of having to fight an election on the war.
According to the LA Times, Bush administration officials such as Gates and Khalilzad are hinting that a compromise is in the works. Having forced the Democratic congress to back down once, the Bushies apparently realize that this is one battle they just can’t keep winning. And so, some sort of deal is being thrown together, a political peace offering.
Will the US leave Iraq? Don’t bet on it. The Bush regime may deny that oil was behind their decision to invade but oil certainly is a major factor, perhaps the major factor that will force at least some US military presence to soldier on. It may be smaller than the 150-thousand strong force deployed today (it will have to be) but it will stay on.
It’s all about oil or, rather, the prospect of the Middle East’s oil wealth falling into Shiite control. If you take Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia, you have the lion’s share of Arab oil. Iraq is obviously going to be dominated by Shia just as Iran has always been. Most folks don’t know it but Saudi Arabia’s key oilfields are in areas where that country’s Shiite majority dominate and they’re becoming restless. The prospect of a Shia bloc with its hand on the tap of Middle Eastern oil is more than Washington could bear.
It is Iraq’s very instability that has Washington shoving and pushing, threatening and cajoling the Baghdad government to approve its draft oil law. Ostensibly it’s about establishing an equitable arrangement for distribution of oil wealth among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. That’s the window-dressing. The real significance of the law is that it would vest control of much of Iraq’s oil wealth in foreign, i.e. American, companies. Once American companies have long-term rights to develop, produce and control Iraqi oil, the US government has rights it can protect and enforce, militarily if need be.
And that’s why the United States won’t be leaving Iraq anytime soon.
June 25, 2007
The answer to Iraq’s horrific violence cannot be
an illusory military surge that aims
to bolster the existing political structure
and treats the dominant parties as partners.
– International Crisis Group
In its latest report, the influential International Crisis Group warns that Iraq is on the brink of collapse and that, if the US and Britain want to avoid that, they’ll have to stop backing the same Shia bosses that rule the government in Baghdad.
“Far from building a new state,” their Iraqi partners “are tirelessly working to tear it down,” warns the ICG.
The think tank criticizes the US/UK coalition’s “surge mentality” as counterproductive and points to Basra where British forces first gave it a go. From The Guardian:
“Operation Sinbad was a ‘superficial and fleeting’ success, and ended with British troops being driven off the streets in what was seen as an ignominious defeat by the city’s militias, now more powerful and unconstrained than before. Some British data about its achievements, particularly about improved police performance, ‘defies credibility’, the group notes.
“The key failure in Basra, argues the report, has been the inability to establish legitimate government to redistribute resources, impose respect for the rule of law and ensure peaceful transition at the local level – a lesson it says has to be learnt across Iraq as a whole.
“‘Basra’s political arena remains in the hands of actors engaged in bloody competition for resources, undermining what is left of governorate institutions and coercively enforcing their rule. The local population has no choice but to seek protection from one of the dominant camps. Periods of stability do not reflect greater governing authority so much as they do a momentary – and fragile – balance of interests or of terror between rival militias.’
“‘Should other causes of strife – sectarian violence and the fight against coalition forces – recede, the concern must still be that Basra’s fate will be replicated throughout the country on a larger, more chaotic and more dangerous scale. The lessons are clear. Iraq’s violence is multifaceted, and sectarianism is only one of its sources. It follows that the country’s division along supposedly inherent and homogeneous confessional and ethnic lines is not an answer. It follows, too, that rebuilding the state, tackling militias and imposing the rule of law cannot be done without confronting the parties that currently dominate the political process and forging a new and far more inclusive political compact.'”
From a purely Iraqi perspective it’s hard to disagree with the ICG’s take on these surges. What they don’t mention, however, is that the current surge is as much about Washington politics as Iraqi security. The “surge” was pitched to George w. Bush by the neo-cons such as Kagan as a way of rescuing his legacy and it now must be played out so that the US president can craft a scenario in which he can blame the Maliki government for failure and then withdraw US forces from an “undeserving” Baghdad government. It’s all political theatre but, then, losing a war of this strategic magnitude is bound to be.
June 24, 2007
Has Stephen “Rambo” Harper truly had a change of heart over Canada’s mission to Afghanistan? He recently said he didn’t want to extend our commitment to Kandahar past 2009 without a consensus in parliament and the country.
So what made Harpo stop banging his war drum and has he really decided that Canada has outstayed the course?
Thomas Walkom, writing in the Toronto Star, says “the mission” is all but dead:
“The reasons are twofold and intertwined. First, NATO’s war against Afghan insurgents is not succeeding. Second, there is not enough political support for that war here at home.
“This does not mean Canada will be out of Afghanistan altogether. The Liberals – and even the NDP in some of its statements– say Canada should continue to play an undefined role there. Harper too made reference to that on Friday.
“But whatever that role is, it won’t be the current one. Canadian troops won’t be undertaking search and destroy combat missions in Kandahar. They probably won’t be in Kandahar at all.”
What happened? For starters, Canada suffered a chronic failure of leadership. De Hoop Scheffer, NATO’s Secretary General, turned out to be a bag of stale wind; Harpo failed to persuade Canadians that Afghanistan was remotely worth it; and Generalissimo Rick Hillier acted like an encyclopedia salesman, a pitchman who made grand promises and utterly failed to deliver.
Under NATO’s protection, the Karzai government steadily weakened and the Taliban grew steadily stronger. With our help Karzai had no choice but to reach out to the Taliban for a deal and even the Kabul parliament had to go along.
Sure we built some roads and a number of schools but that was still little more than window dressing for a people on the brink of starvation. The urban populations of Kabul and Kandahar city were better off, but only so long as the barbarians were kept from the gate. The countryside became the fiefdom of insurgents, terrorists, drug lords and common criminals. The narco-economy flourishes and we have utterly failed to come up with an alternative.
This whole, sorry business went wrong from the start, by which I mean the moment at which the Northern Alliance sent the Taliban and al-Qaeda running for the hills. The Bush regime was so unsophisticated and indifferent as to blithely swallow the “my enemy’s enemy” nonsense. The reality was that we stepped into a gang war and helped one bunch of murderous thugs put the boots to their rival gang of murderous religious zealots.
Then we installed Hamid Karzai as boss because we knew he was someone we could work with but we failed to vet the people who would shortly become his lieutenants, the real power in the Karzai government. We told him we didn’t want many of these in his government but completely failed to give him the support he needed to hold them at bay. Not surprisingly the warlords and criminals wasted no time in installing themselves in positions of power in the military and security services.
If you don’t believe this, here’s some proof. One of Karzai’s long running complaints has been that NATO and US forces don’t co-ordinate with their Afghan counterparts before running operations. In other words, we don’t pre-clear our activities with the Afghans. Why do you think that is? Could it be because we know they’re thoroughly infiltrated, hopelessly corrupt and little more than a conduit to the bad guys? We don’t trust them! We have enough problems with ambushes already.
We went over there with token forces to wage a counter-insurgency war. Even NATO officials have admitted the job requires hundreds of thousands of soldiers, troops that don’t exist. That leaves us hunkered down in garrisons and fortified outposts from which we run patrols and occasional search and destroy missions (think France in Indo-China). That, in turn, yields control of the countryside to the insurgents and leaves the villagers unprotected. Worst of all, our lack of numbers leaves us dependent on massive firepower in the form of air strikes and artillery barrages that far too often winds up killing innocent civilians. In other words, “the mission” is tailor-made to the needs of the Taliban. Oh sure we may whack a few of them every now and then but not enough to make an appreciable dent in their capabilities and, worse, we often cause as much, perhaps even more damage to the very government we’re supposed to be defending. We don’t have these guys on the run. They’re bringing the fight to us.
Then there was genuinely awful military leadership from our very own macho-man, Rick Hillier. Remember that he pitched the Kandahar mission on the basis of an opponent he described as “a few dozen …scumbags.” That was the enemy for which he crafted a 2,500-strong force. Since then he’s been on cruise control but never passing up a photo op.
Now we’re facing not Hillier’s “few dozen” but several hundred insurgents who come and go pretty much as they please, who control large parts of “our” Kandahar province and who have seized the initiative. When night time comes, we get our heads down and wait for the dawn. The telling part is that we’re still trying to do the job with the same size force (although with a few tanks that aren’t particularly suited to fighting a guerrilla war anyway).
If General Hillier supports the troops, why hasn’t he been clamouring for an additional 15- 20,000 soldiers? Modern military thinking holds we’d need that number to actually control the 55,000 sq. km. Kandahar province and provide genuine security to its people. Why hasn’t he been raising proper hell about the predicament we’ve dropped our soldiers into? It’s not as though he hasn’t had ample opportunity to speak out.
No, like Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Pace and Harper and O’Connor, Hillier has been stuck in “stay the course” gear, unable to shift into second or even reverse. Meanwhile Karzai is in decline while the Taliban ascends.
Yet another key failure has been our unwillingness or inability to deal with Afghanistan’s narco-economy. We have had to let this flourish even as we knew the opium wealth was filling the Taliban’s coffers to help them wage the war against us and the Kabul government.
You may have played Whack-A-Mole, a carnival game in which the player uses a mallet to try to hit mole-like targets that pop up at random from various holes on the board. The object is to whack them all. We’re playing Whack-A-Mole in Afghanistan but our version is slightly different. We’re only trying to hit one mole out of four. We aim at the Taliban moles but leave untouched the Narco moles and the Warlord moles and the Criminal moles. If you’re only swinging at 25% of the targets it’s mighty hard to win, eh?
So, the smart money seems to predict that Canada will bail out of Kandahar with the mandate lapses in 2009 and seek safer turf, presumably in the north. How much longer the Afghan north will remain safer is unclear. Let’s face it. The warlords and narco-barons and criminals that have ensconced themselves in the Karzai government are there for what they can get out of it. If Karzai gets much weaker, how long before they jump ship and the democracy project is right back to square one, the country back in the direct rule of the warlords?
At the end of the day we’re left with “support the troops.” Just what does that mean? Is it putting a little plastic ribbon on the trunk lid of my car? I suppose but that really doesn’t accomplish much. How about NATO supporting the troops by all those member states that have been dodging “the mission” taking their turn in the cauldron? If they’re not (and they aren’t) then it’s facile to claim that NATO itself is supporting the troops. How about our politicians and our generals supporting the troops by demanding the necessary reforms, resources and commitment to make a lasting difference? They’re not and so it’s ingenuous to say they’re supporting the troops. Just who, then, is supporting the troops? I don’t know. Tell me.
June 23, 2007
He’s had it. With every civilian bombed or shelled into oblivion by NATO air strikes and artillery, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s government gets further undermined. Now, he says, NATO has killed up to 90-Afghan civilians in just the past ten days.
Karzai told reporters about the deaths of 52-Afghans in a NATO artillery barrage:
“In Chora, NATO, coalition forces fired artillery on Chora from Tirin Kot in which according to our latest information … 52 of our countrymen were martyred,” Karzai said, speaking at his palace in the capital.
The president also referred to strikes by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in the southern province of Helmand early Friday that police said killed 25 people, including nine women and three young children.
The president said his repeated calls on the ISAF and US-led coalition to coordinate their operations with Afghan security forces to avoid hurting civilians had gone unheeded.”From now onwards they have to work the way we ask them to work here. That’s the line,” he said.
This was happening because of “the extreme use of force, the disproportionate use of force to a situation and the lack of coordination with the Afghan government,” Karzai said.”You don’t fight a terrorist by firing a field gun 37 kilometres (23 miles) away into a target. That’s definitely, surely bound to cause civilian casualties,” he said.
“…Afghan life is not cheap and it should not be treated as such,” he said, reflecting a feeling among many ordinary Afghans who find the foreign forces arrogant and culturally insensitive.
June 23, 2007
The City of Boston is in the process of setting up a system that could be just the thing for Toronto. It’s a gunshot detection system that’s designed to curb shootings. From the Boston Globe:
“Mayor Thomas M. Menino touted the crime- fighting capabilities of the acoustic sensors that can pinpoint the location of gunfire within 30 feet of its origin and dispatch police to shooting scenes in less than 10 seconds.
“We need more tools in our arsenal to track shootings and have police on the scene within seconds,” the mayor said at the time. “Delays always give criminals a chance to leave the scene.”
Boston hasn’t got the system up and running yet due to contract squabbles with the manufacturer, Shotspotter Inc. The technology is already in use in several US cities including Washington, D.C. The US Army has also bought fixed and mobile versions of the technology.
“The city first began looking at the technology more than a year ago, when Councilor Rob Consalvo asked the mayor and police officials to look at ShotSpotter, which was credited with a 31 percent reduction in violent crime in North Charleston, S.C., and with helping police in Gary, Ind., to catch shooting suspects with guns still in their hands.”
June 22, 2007
It was all an unfortunate accident. That’s the line of bullshit being spewed by NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer to explain away last night’s NATO airstrike that slaughtered 25-Afghan civilians including three babies and nine women.
“If these things happen, they are mistakes, it’s never intentional,” he explained.
“From our point of view, a civilian gets killed and it’s an error,” he said. “But just recall that last week the Taliban killed 35 policemen and civilians in Kabul and they continue to do this. They continue to blow bombs off in their cities with indiscriminate actions. They don’t care who gets killed.”
Let’s see, what was the accident anyway? Were these houses targeted by accident? No. Is it an accident that people sleep in their houses at night? I don’t think so. Did we hit the wrong targets? No, we got the houses we were aiming to take out.
Obviously there was no accident, none whatsoever. We, that being NATO, called in an airstrike on two houses in a village. Past experience, if nothing else, has shown us that when we target villages we usually manage to kill innocent civilians.
The inevitable consequence of bombing village houses in the dark of night is to kill those inside. We are all deemed to intend the logical consequences of our acts. Therefore NATO intended to kill everyone inside those houses knowing there was a good chance they would kill innocents.
I’m not going to get into the laws of war here or the duty to safeguard the lives of civilians but the very legality of targetting residences for precision air strikes is questionable at best.
“From our point of view, a civilian gets killed and its an error.” Damn right that’s his point of view. They’re dead, it’s an error, forget about it. Yeah, but his point of view, NATO’s point of view on this sort of attack is not good enough, not nearly good enough. It was an error but a very intentional one.
If this is the attitude of NATO’s top dog, there’s no reason to believe these killings won’t just go on.
June 22, 2007
The following passages have been excerpted from a speech delivered by Gareth Evans, President, International Crisis Group, to Harvard University Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Conference on Democracy in Contemporary Global Politics entitled “Hypocrisy, Democracy, War and Peace.”
Evans describes some of the many flaws in our Western approach to spreading democracy, particularly hypocrisy:
“…what people most associate with politicians as a class, and most hate about them as a result, is hypocrisy, and all the familiar variations on that basic theme: double-standards, unprincipled inconsistency, saying one thing and doing another.
Hypocrisy and Democracy
“There are quite a few things we’ve learned about democracy promotion over the last few years, and most of them have emerged pretty clearly in course of discussion at this conference, so I will not labour too long over familiar ground.
“First, it is obvious now to just about everyone that democracy – or at least liberal democracy, the only kind that means anything – is about much more than holding elections. Protection of human rights, especially minority rights and those related to freedom of expression, and respect for the rule of law, are indispensable concomitants.
“Secondly, it is rather obvious now to everyone, except perhaps those most capable of doing it, that bombing for democracy – trying to deliver it on the tip of precision guided missiles, as my Crisis Group colleague Chris Patten puts it – is not, on the whole, a very good idea.
“Thirdly, and maybe not so obviously, democracy promotion can be rather bad news for democrats. I am thinking in particular of the cries of anguish we have been hearing recently from civil society and human rights activists in Iran, who have – following the US announcement that large dollops of democracy funding will be headed their way – been subjected to a rapid increase in state repression. …at the very least we should be asking first those in whose interests we are supposed to be acting. Fighting for our principles to the last drop of someone else’s blood is never very edifying.
“The fourth big thing we should have learned about democracy promotion, is that inconsistency is totally counterproductive: it is wholly damaging to the cause to advocate the case for democracy only when you are sure the that democratic process will produce an outcome you like.
“It has not been a pretty sight in this respect to watch the almost universal Western disavowal of Hamas after it won the Palestinian election that the West had so enthusiastically supported. An International Crisis Group report shortly after that election argued strongly that the international community needed to focus on encouraging Hamas to govern responsibly, not to force it out of government or make the government unworkable by imposing conditions that nobody believed could be immediately met, and we summarised the Hamas response as we found it as ‘let us govern or watch us fight’.
“Another less than edifying experience has been the constant wriggling of Western, and in particular U.S. policymakers, in the face of Pervez Musharaff’s continuing authoritarian rule in Pakistan, and in particular the contempt that continues to be expressed by so many of them – more veiled in public, but often quite open in private – toward the democratic parties as they struggle, with signs of growing popular and elite support, to recover ground.
“Of course we have to face the prospect in the Islamic world, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, that if full electoral democracy is introduced there is a prospect that Islamists will be elected – and a risk that cannot be ignored that the first such democratic election might be the last: Hitler was after all democratically elected. But it is absolutely critical to recognize that ‘Islamism‘ or Islamic activism is not a single-stranded phenomenon, and that it is only a small minority of Islamists – which are in turn only a minority of Muslims – that would even be tempted to go down this absolutist path. “
The complete text of the speech can be found here:
http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=4906&l=1
June 22, 2007
Has NATO completely lost its senses in Afghanistan or is it that its commanders and officers just don’t give a shit about innocent Afghans any more?
NINE WOMEN, THREE BABIES and an ELDERLY MULLAH were among 25-villagers wiped out this morning in a NATO airstrike on an Afghan village. And, in case you’re skeptical, that’s the report from the Afghan police chief in Helmand province.
Standard pattern. An inconclusive firefight between Taliban guerrillas and NATO forces. The Taliban fall back into a village. NATO jets arrive and bomb the hell out of the place. Victory – dead villagers everywhere! And let’s face it, the way NATO is going there’s a good chance those babies would have grown up to become insurgents anyway, eh? And those women? Probably just breeders churning out more Taliban, eh? We sure showed those villagers, didn’t we?
NATO spokesman, Lt. Col. Mike Smith reported while an unknown number of innocents may have lost their lives, the fault for that was entirely the enemy’s: “In choosing to conduct such attacks in this location at this time, the risk to civilians was probably deliberate. It is this irresponsible action that may have led to casualties.”
For the record, Smith claims we killed 30-insurgents. Let’s see – 25 dead villagers, five relatives for each vowing revenge on NATO, let’s just round it off at an even hundred new recruits for the other guys.
No Colonel Smith, you cretin, the risk to civilians arose when NATO, that’s our sided butthead, decided to greet the villagers with a display of aerial bombardment.
Why do we keep doing this? The Afghan president has begged us to stop. The country’s parliament has demanded that we stop. The Afghan people are outraged by it and take to the streets in fury over it. They’re coming to hate us for it. The only people who seem to want to do this are us – and, of course, the Taliban. They absolutely love it when they can goad us into doing something this insanely stupid. We’re playing straight into their hands with every bomb and every dead kid.
This is disgusting and it’s happening again and again and again. I’ve had it. There’s no honour in this mission, none at all. It’s a disgrace. Canada should have no part in this. Support the troops? I don’t blame them, this is the doing of the brass and politicians, but I can’t support them either while they’re part of this butchery.
June 22, 2007
A quarter-century of CIA skullduggery is about to be declassified and publicly released next week and, according to CIA Director Michael Hayden, “Most of it is unflattering.”
The documents cover an era that stretched from the 50’s through the 70’s, secrets that are known within the CIA as the “family jewels.” According to the Washington Post these documents ” include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency’s opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of ‘unwitting’ tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs.”
Much of this has been the stuff of rich conjecture for decades.
At the time, Henry Kissinger fretted over the disclosure of these secrets in conversations with then President Gerald Ford. Worried that the disclosures could lead to criminal prosecutions, Kissinger added that “when the FBI has a hunting license into the CIA, this could end up worse for the country than Watergate.”
Director Hayden said the documents, “provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency.”
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