November 2007
Monthly Archive
November 28, 2007
“When planning a military expedition into Pashtun tribal areas, the first thing you must plan is your retreat. All expeditions into this area sooner or later end in retreat under fire.”
So wrote British general, Andrew Skeen, in the early 1900s in his guide to military operations in the Pashtun tribal belt.
While NATO and the US are fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, so is the Pakistani army in the tribal lands of North and South Waziristan along the Afghan border. Taking the fight to the Pakistani Taliban is of critical importance to NATO. It’s about the only means of denying the Afghan Talibs safe sanctuary to muster their forces and support operations in Afghanistan. So, how is the Pakistani army making out? According to the New York Times, about as well as one might expect:
The only consistent reports of offensive action by the Pakistani Army involve the use of helicopter gunships and artillery to attack militant compounds. Aerial assaults, when carried out without support from “boots on the ground,” serve but one purpose: they help sustain the illusion that the Pakistani government is taking effective action.
The truth is that the soldiers have lost the will to fight. Reports in the Indian press, based on information from the very competent Indian intelligence agencies, describe a Pakistani Army in disarray in the tribal areas. Troops are deserting and often refusing to fight their “Muslim brothers.”
Nothing illustrated this apathy more clearly than the capture of hundreds of troops in August by the Taliban warlord Baitullah Mehsud with nary a shot fired in resistance.”
So, what are the options? Throw more money at Islamabad? If money would do the trick it would have worked by now. Stop throwing money at Islamabad? No one’s sure how that would turn out. Invade Pakistan? Please, we can’t handle the job in Afghanistan. We’re already grossly understrength. Where would we find the tens of thousands of soldiers that would be needed to repeat the Victorian British blunders in the Khyber?
That’s what we’re up against, seemingly insoluble challenges. It’s not that the Taliban are better fighters than our troops, they’re not. Our soldiers are better, they’ve got vastly better weapons and support technologies, they have better communications and total air superiority, better mobility. So why can’t we just mop the floor with these backward warriors?
The Taliban have a number of advantages we’ve not been able to neutralize. One of them is in recruiting. Afghanistan is dirt poor but the insurgents have access to narco-bucks from the country’s booming opium trade. This allows them to “hire” recruits. However there’s another way they get support and that draws on their fiercely-held tribal code of Pashtunwali, particularly Mla Tarr. This requires all members of a man’s family capable of carrying a gun to rise up when he’s attacked. It’s sort of a “kill one, get three free” plan.
The insurgents also have the “home turf” advantage. They have nowhere else to go, nothing else to fight for and, in fact, they’re fighting for everything they have, their homeland. For the Pashtun, whether it’s the half in Pakistan or the half in Afghanistan, the Taliban are the home team. Even Karzai, the country’s president and himself a Pashtun, knows it.
We have the tactical advantage in firepower and technology – useful for fighting a tactical battle. The insurgents have the strategic advantage of time, as much time as it takes to keep wearing us down until we get tired and frustrated enough to leave. Put simply, their strategic advantage trumps our tactical advantage in the long run.
So General Skeen knew a century ago what our leaders have yet to understand. We can kill these people until we can’t find any more bullets and then we leave. If the powerful Pakistani army can’t control the Pashtun of Waziristan, all we’re doing in Afghanistan is blowing smoke.
November 28, 2007
NATO warplanes in the Afghan province of Nuristan bagged 14-reconstruction workers.
The victims were labourers for an Afghan company contracted by the Americans to do roadwork. They were asleep in their tents when the bombs arrived.
“We just collected pieces of flesh from our tired workers and put them in 14 coffins.” – Nurullah Jalali, the executive director of the construction company.
NATO says – and this will surprise you – they thought the workers were Taliban. Ya think?
Talk about killing two birds with one bomb – wiping out a reconstruction team and sending the victims’ relatives directly to their nearest Taliban recruiting office.
November 28, 2007
Stephen Harper may hope Canadians are dumb enough to believe he’s sincere in working for global warming solutions but he’s not fooling the folks at the United Nations.
Stevie’s been outed. From CanWest:
“Canada has a long history of global leadership on global atmospheric environmental issues, from acid rain to ozone depletion and climate change,” said the UN’s Human Development Report. “Maintaining this tradition will require tough decisions.”
The UN report said Canada could achieve greater reductions in carbon dioxide emissions than the goals set by the government, “but not with current policies.”
November 28, 2007
52-year old Deborah Shank won’t be having much of a Christmas this year. She’s just been Scrooged by her former employer, Wal-Mart.
Shank used to work for the retail giant at its store in Cape Girardieu, Mo., until seven years ago when the car she was driving was broadsided by a tractor-trailer. The accident left Shank with permanent brain damage, unable to walk or even communicate with her family.
Wal-Mart’s employee health insurance plan picked up the woman’s medical expenses – until – until, that is, her family settled with the trucking company involved for a not-so-whopping $417,000. Wal-Mart, which had paid about $470,000 for Shank’s medical care demanded the money, all of it, and a federal court judge agreed. Update – On March 18th, 2008, the United States Supreme Court crushed the Shanks’ last hope, dismissing, without reasons, their final appeal. A local paper in their state called the situation “Dickensian.”
No question about it. Wal-Mart was legally entitled to scoop Shank’s entire settlement, every last dime of it. And so it did.
Of course the Shanks didn’t have this problem front and centre on their minds for very long. Shortly after Wal-Mart won its case their son Jeremy was killed in Iraq. The Los Angeles Times summed up Wal-Mart’s greed quite succinctly:
Doing what the law allows isn’t the same as doing the right thing, however. The company made itself whole at the expense of a helpless former employee who will never be whole again. Instead of having some resources to improve her care, Shank will receive only the basic services afforded her by Medicaid and Social Security. Nor will the trust fund be in a position to reimburse Medicaid (i.e., taxpayers), which stood to collect any unspent money upon Shank’s death.
Wal-Mart has spent the last few years working hard to rebut health care reformers, labor unions, anti-globalization groups and other critics who’ve argued that it puts profits ahead of humanity. While its advertising campaigns try to put a friendlier spin on the company, its behavior toward Shank tells a different story. If Wal-Mart can’t restrain itself, perhaps Congress should prevent health plans from draining settlements won by injured workers with more bills to pay.
Do yourself and the rest of us a favour this Christmas. Stop shopping yourself or your neighbour out of a job – just say no to Scrooge, shun Wal-Mart.
November 27, 2007
A growing number of credible scientists are reporting on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They exist and they’ve been used, widely it seems. The WMDs they refer to weren’t built by Saddam. They were American and British.
The WMDs are in the form of radiation contamination caused by the widespread use of depleted uranium shells.
So much ammunition containing depleted uranium(DU) has been fired, asserts nuclear authority Leuren Moret, “The genetic future of the Iraqi people for the most part, is destroyed.”
“More than ten times the amount of radiation released during atmospheric testing (of nuclear bombs) has been released from depleted uranium weaponry since 1991,” Moret writes, including radioactive ammunition fired by Israeli troops in Palestine.
Moret is an independent U.S. scientist formerly employed for five years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and also at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, both of California.
Adds Arthur Bernklau, of Veterans For Constitutional Law, “The long- term effect of DU is a virtual death sentence. Iraq is a toxic wasteland. Anyone who is there stands a good chance of coming down with cancer and leukemia. In Iraq, the birth rate of mutations is totally out of control.”
Moret, a Berkeley, Calif., Environmental Commissioner and past president of the Association for Women Geoscientists, says, “For every genetic defect that we can see now, in future generations there are thousands more that will be expressed.”
She adds, “the (Iraq) environment now is completely radioactive.”
I hope these experts are wrong, flat out wrong. I hope they’re just making this stuff up to advance some scurrilous hidden agenda. I hope this is all some vast, loonie left conspiracy. But, if it is, it’s a conspiracy involving a lot of prominent scientists:
Dr. Helen Caldicott, the prominent anti-nuclear crusader, has written: “Much of the DU is in cities such as Baghdad, where half the population of 5 million people are children who played in the burned- out tanks and on the sandy, dusty ground.”
“Children are 10 to 20 times more susceptible to the carcinogenic effects of radiation than adults,” Caldicott wrote. “My pediatric colleagues in Basra, where this ordnance was used in 1991, report a sevenfold increase in childhood cancer and a sevenfold increase in gross congenital abnormalities.”
Because of the extremely long half-life of uranium 238, one of the radioactive elements in the shells fired, “the food, the air, and the water in the cradle of civilization have been forever contaminated,” Caldicott explained.
Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, writes in his “The Sorrows of Empire”(Henry Holt and Co.) that, given the abnormal clusters of childhood cancers and deformities in Iraq as well as Kosovo, the evidence points “toward a significant role for DU.”
By insisting on its use, Johnson adds, “the military is deliberately flouting a 1996 United Nations resolution that classifies DU ammunition as an illegal weapon of mass destruction.”
Moret calls DU “the Trojan Horse of nuclear war.” She describes it as “the weapon that keeps killing.” Indeed, the half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5-billion years, and as it decays it spawns other deadly radioactive by-products.
Radioactive fallout from DU apparently blew far and wide. Following the initial U.S. bombardment of Iraq in 2003, DU particles traveled 2,400 miles to Great Britain in about a week, where atmospheric radiation quadrupled.
November 27, 2007
Chris Hedges is one of the most clear-headed writers in America today. A minister’s son with a doctorate in divinity from Harvard, Hedges has worked as a war correspondent covering just about every American conflict since Grenada. In a column first published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Hedges laments the end of America’s greatness:
“The most damning indicators of national decline are upon us. We have watched an oligarchy rise to take economic and political power. The top 1 percent of the population has amassed more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, creating economic disparities unseen since the Depression. If Hillary Rodham Clinton becomes president, we will see the presidency controlled by two families for the last 24 years.
Massive debt, much of it in the hands of the Chinese, keeps piling up as we fund absurd imperial projects and useless foreign wars. Democratic freedoms are diminished in the name of national security. And the erosion of basic services, from education to health care to public housing, has left tens of millions of citizens in despair. The displacement of genuine debate and civil and political discourse with the noise and glitter of public spectacle and entertainment has left us ignorant of the outside world, and blind to how it perceives us. We are fed trivia and celebrity gossip in place of news.
An increasing number of voices, especially within the military, are speaking to this stark deterioration. They describe a political class that no longer knows how to separate personal gain from the common good, a class driving the nation into the ground.
“There has been a glaring and unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders,” retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former commander of forces in Iraq, recently told the New York Times, adding that civilian officials have been “derelict in their duties” and guilty of a “lust for power.”
The American working class, once the most prosperous on Earth, has been politically disempowered, impoverished and abandoned. Manufacturing jobs have been shipped overseas. State and federal assistance programs have been slashed. The corporations, those that orchestrated the flight of jobs and the abolishment of workers’ rights, control every federal agency in Washington, including the Department of Labor. They have dismantled the regulations that had made the country’s managed capitalism a success for ordinary men and women. The Democratic and Republican Parties now take corporate money and do the bidding of corporate interests.
Nothing makes these diseased priorities more starkly clear than what the White House did last week. On the same day, Tuesday, President Bush vetoed a domestic spending bill for education, job training and health programs, yet signed another bill giving the Pentagon about $471 billion for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. All this in the shadow of a Joint Economic Committee report suggesting that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been twice as expensive than previously imagined, almost $1.5 trillion.
The decision to measure the strength of the state in military terms is fatal. It leads to a growing cynicism among a disenchanted citizenry and a Hobbesian ethic of individual gain at the expense of everyone else. Few want to fight and die for a Halliburton or an Exxon. This is why we do not have a draft. It is why taxes have not been raised and we borrow to fund the war. It is why the state has organized, and spends billions to maintain, a mercenary army in Iraq. We leave the fighting and dying mostly to our poor and hired killers. No nationwide sacrifices are required. We will worry about it later.”
November 27, 2007
One way often cited to improve energy conservation is by increasing energy efficiency. It sounds perfectly logical, in theory.
In practice, however, improved energy efficiency can actually backfire. From the Toronto Star:
A paper by CIBC World Market economist Jeff Rubin argues that, historically, improvements in efficiency that were meant to reduce the consumption of a commodity have increased usage as it became cheaper.
The result is that energy intensity strategies may not work in the battle to cut down the use of oil and gas, as well as carbon emissions believed to cause global climate change.
Rubin says the only sure-fire way of reducing energy consumption and, by extension, cut down greenhouse emissions is to shrink the economy, an unpalatable proposition to governments and industry.
While this is not an argument against attempting to increase energy efficiency in the economy, Rubin says that for greater efficiency to reduce usage, it will be necessary to ensure that consumers don’t see lower prices.
Whew, I’m glad this bit of wisdom came from a bank economist, not Greenpeace. Rubin’s findings and conclusions may come as a shock to many but they’re anything but new.
It’s going to take a lot of adjustment and an awful lot of convincing skeptics, but the growth model on which we’ve based our national and global economies is over. It’s not just climate change. It’s resource depletion, species extinction, desertification, freshwater exhaustion, water and soil contamination, air pollution, chemical toxicities, overpopulation – you name it.
It may take a decade, maybe two, but we will gradually come to understand the need to shrink our economies. We’ll do it not because we don’t want wealth but because we want to survive even more. We’re finding it extremely difficult, perhaps even impossible, to get the necessary consensus to implement meaningful action on global warming. That’s just one problem of many that we need to address, simultaneously.
The notion of shrinking economies has already been examined at length. The scientist, James Lovelock, has coined a term for it, “sustainable retreat.” He uses that term to describe getting smaller but doing it as affordably and comfortably as possible. In other words, this process doesn’t have to resemble a scene from some post-apocalyptic movie, the image the global warming deniers like to use to scare the public. In some ways it’s as easy as doing a lot more of a bit less.
November 27, 2007
Stephen Harper, the great snake oil salesman of global warming, says he’s all in favour of binding emission targets just so long as they’re applied equally across the board. Steve isn’t being realistic. He knows that. He’s posturing, knowing full well that will let him sound engaged on the greenhouse gas problem while ensuring that no effective action will be taken. He’s not just selling snake oil, he’s making it.
Back in the reality-based world, the United Nations warns we’ve got less than ten years to abruptly change course if we’re to avoid “irreversible ecological catastrophe“. Two words there that should sort of grab your attention: “irreversible” and “catastrophe”. Think of yourself in a canoe in rough water. If you’re not careful, your boat can tip so far over that you won’t be able to stop it from capsizing. It reaches its tipping point, its point of no return, even before water begins pouring over the gunwales. That’s what irreversible ecological catastrophe means.
Ten years as in ten years max. It could be less than ten years. It could be a lot less than ten years. Look at the IPCC’s predictions. Almost all of them have been understated. Things they told us were coming in thirty years appear in five or ten. With that record, it’s only prudent to consider this warning as ten years at the outside.
This from The Guardian:
” …the 400-page [UN Human Development programme] report said that simply ignoring climate change would lead to unprecedented reversal in human development in our lifetime, and acute risks for our children and their grandchildren.
“The poorest countries and most vulnerable citizens will suffer the earliest and most damaging setbacks, even though they have contributed least to the problem,” the report says.
“Looking to the future, no country – however wealthy or powerful – will be immune to the impact of global warming.”
The panel says the greatest financial responsibility lies with the US and the other well-developed countries most responsible for the rising levels of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, mainly from the use of coal, oil and other fossil fuels.
As the world’s richest countries bear the greatest responsibility, the UN Development Programme called on them to bear the largest burden in cutting emissions and in providing financial aid to the poor.
Developed countries, the UN said, should cut emissions by at least 30% by 2020 and by 80% by 2050. Developing nations should cut emissions by 20% by the year 2050.”
This is the bullet that Harpo and Bush are struggling so hard to dodge – taking responsibility for having brought the planet to the perilous state that today confronts mankind. They have bottomless purses when it comes to (sort of) fighting Islamist fundamentalism but would prefer to do bugger all when it comes to a problem that poses a much greater threat to their nations and their people.
Summon the villagers, light the torches, get the pitchforks.
November 27, 2007
It’s a firm he’s worked for since 1964, the Pakistani Army. Like Zia before him, Musharraf rose to the top in his military and then took over the government to boot. Now, under intense pressure at home and from the US, the Pakistani President is about to resign his command – or so we’re told.
What I can’t figure out is just how a head of state, a nation’s very commander in chief, can ever actually resign as commander of his military. After all, President Musharraf was supposed to be General Musharraf’s boss, wasn’t he?
Then there’s the question of succession. The man Musharraf has appointed as his successor, General Ashfaq Kayani, a former chief of the country’s powerful intelligence service, is expected to take charge tomorrow. Kayani headed the ISI, Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Service Intelligence agency, a hotbed of Islamist radical power within the Pakistani military. It was this same outfit that literally created the Taliban. Couldn’t Mushie have found some stooge from the artillery or maybe the catering service?
It might be unwise to read too much into Musharraf’s change of wardrobe. Even if this is a step ahead for democracy in Pakistan, it’s not a very big step.
November 27, 2007
American troops will be staying in Iraq indefinitely and American companies are going to get a leg up on the country’s vast wealth, er oil. Hold on, this’ll get your head spinning so fast it might just explode.
From The New York Times:
General Lute predicted that the agreement to negotiate formal bilateral relations would contribute to regional stability by proving America’s long-term commitment not just to Iraq, but also to the broader Persian Gulf area. A recurring message of senior Bush administration officials, intended in large part to deter what they see as Iranian mischief in the region, is to reassure Persian Gulf allies of a continued American presence there.
The United States also pledged to support Iraq’s economic development and to provide financial and technical assistance. Significantly, the document committed the United States to support Iraq in receiving “preferential trading conditions,” including joining the World Trade Organization and receiving most-favored-nation trading status with Washington.
Stripped of the Bushit, it means that upwards of 50,000 American troops will be permanently based in Iraq, a respectable Legion even by Caesar’s standards. Better yet, American companies will get first dibs on Iraq’s oil wealth – all in the name of supporting Iraqi’s economic development, of course.
What remains to be seen is whether Maliki can sell this scam to his legislators and the Iraqi people and whether Bush’s successor will be able to keep the American people onside for another adventure in imperialism.
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