January 2008
Monthly Archive
January 31, 2008
Further proof that the Manley Panel report is a load of political hogwash came today in the release of several reports showing that we’re not winning in Afghanistan but the Taliban is.
The Atlantic Council of the United States, in a report prepared by former Afghanistan NATO commander, retured US general James L. Jones, warns that NATO is, at best, in a “stategic stalemate” as the Taliban expands its influence in the countryside and the Karzai government fails to carry out vital reforms and reconstruction. From the Washington Post:
“Make no mistake, NATO is not winning in Afghanistan,” said the report by the Atlantic Council of the United States. “Afghanistan remains a failing state. It could become a failed state,” warned the report, which called for “urgent action” to overhaul NATO strategy in coming weeks before an anticipated new offensive by Taliban insurgents in the spring.
A second report, by the Afghan Study Group, co-chaired by General Jones and US diplomat Thomas R. Pickering stressed the urgent need for the appointment of a UN High Commissioner to coordinate the international effort, a move that Karzai sabotaged last weekend.
Progress in Afghanistan “is under serious threat from resurgent violence, weakening international resolve, mounting regional challenges and a growing lack of confidence on the part of the Afghan people about the future direction of their country,” said the report by the Afghanistan Study Group.
Wow, we’re not winning? The Taliban’s winning? Odd that our military wunderkind, Rick Hillier, hasn’t been sounding the alarm here at home, isn’t it?
Of course we’re not winning, something the Karzai government all but guarantees. Lest everybody realize how useless he is, Karzai blocks the appointment of Paddy Ashdown as UN super envoy, torpedoing it at the very last moment and setting the whole effort right back on its heels. You’ll know Karzai is serious about salvaging Afghanistan the day he arrests his first drug lord. That’s right, he hasn’t arrested one of them in the past six years and it’s so easy. All he would have to do is start with his own brother Ahmed who’s reported to be in thick with the opium trade.
If there’s to be any hope of saving Afghanistan we have to get rid of Karzai and the warlords and drug lords and common criminals who have insinuated themselves into positions of power in his government. We have to stop pretending that this guy is our guy. He’s not.
Forget the helicopters, forget the extra troops, forget Manley and Harper. That’s all meaningless nonsense until we can establish some sort of decent, functioning governance for Afghanistan. Maybe this is one of those Diem moments. Then again, how well did that turn out?
January 31, 2008
Arnold Schwarzenegger has thrown his endorsement to John McCain. With the Guiliani endorsement locked up the backing of the California governor ramps up McCain’s momentum.
If the last Republican debate before Super Tuesday, the tension between McCain and Romney was palpable. Huckabee and Paul took part but seemed merely a way for the two real contenders to take a break.
Despite his shameless touting to the evangelical right at the outset of his campaign, McCain is clearly the moderate amongst the Republican crowd. He says he’ll keep the Iraq war going until America wins. How he hopes to achieve that in a nation whose people want this war ended will be interesting to watch if he succeeds the man he blames for screwing it up, George w. Bush.
January 30, 2008
It’s up to the Canadian Forces to decide what they will and won’t tell us about their actions in Afghanistan. That came from Blockhead himself, our Furious Leader, Stephen Harper, as he lovingly greased himself up to slip to safety from the detainee controversy. From the
Globe & Mail:
“The military is free to release information about Afghan detainees if it chooses, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said yesterday, as he was criticized for excessive secrecy on how Canadian troops handle their prisoners.
“These are operational matters of the Canadian military. If the Canadian military chooses to reveal that information, that’s their decision. But the government certainly isn’t going to release it on their behalf,” Mr. Harper said in the House of Commons.”
There you have it, hands off from the Cons. Canadian Forces will say what they like, when they like and to whom they like, so don’t blame the Harpies if they’re not up front, blame the military. Wait a second, that doesn’t sound quite right, does it?
It’s not, that is unless Lardo has repealed the gag order he slapped on the Canadian Forces that came to light just two weeks before Christmas. That’s when word got out that the Forces had been told that requests for information and interviews had to be pre-cleared with their political commisars, senior officials from the prime minister’s office.
“The Privy Council directive applies to all matters of “national importance” but is primarily focused on shaping information relating to the war in Afghanistan.”
Oh my goodness, Harper appears to be – lying. Worse, he seems to be hanging the Armed Forces out to dry to give himself political cover. Not Harper, he wouldn’t do that, would he?
(the original story was posted on 10 December, 2007)
January 30, 2008
The New York Times and Associated Press are reporting that third-place Democratic hopeful John Edwards is going to bow out of his party’s presidential nominaton race. Edwards is not expected to endorse either Obama or Clinton – at least not today. It seems he’s waiting to see whether either of them will adopt his anti-poverty platform.
This means that both the Repugs and the Dems go into Super Tuesday with two-horse races. With Giuliani gone, it’s down to McCain/Romney on the right and Obama/Clinton on the left (which is still, to us Canadians, right). Huckabee, of course, remains in the Republican race but that’s now seen as a device to deny evangelical voters to Romney. There’s a lot of speculation he’ll be rewarded, if McCain wins the nomination, by being added as McCain’s running mate.
It will be fascinating to see how the Edwards departure plays out. I expect Hillary is working on her Edwardian makeover even as you read this.
January 29, 2008
Our Furious Leader, Stephen Harper, has been made to look like a manipulative idiot by NATO. Actually, it wasn’t NATO that made Harper look like a manipulative idiot. He sort of did that on his own. Yet a spokesman for the alliance did put Lardo in his place. From CanWest:
“Prime Minister Stephen Harper is engaging in unnecessary, irrelevant and “overheated” speculation when he suggests a Canadian troop pullout from Afghanistan could jeopardize the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a NATO official said here Tuesday.
Canadians have every right to debate the future of Canada’s “key” military role in Afghanistan that has led to a disproportionately high number of Canadian casualties, James Appathurai told reporters.
But he challenged Harper’s grim speculation about the future of NATO, an alliance founded by the U.S., western Europe and Canada in 1949 as a bulwark against the possible military threat from the old Soviet Union.
“I think that making links between this (Canada’s possible withdrawal) and NATO’s credibility are frankly . . . unnecessary,” he said.
“We understand the Canadian position that a thousand more troops are needed in Kandahar. But let’s not link what is a successful mission with 37 countries (or) NATO’s 60-year credibility to this. That simply is not really relevant.”
“This kind of overheated speculation (about NATO being in jeopardy) really needs to be cooled a little bit.”
January 28, 2008
We’re a pretty cheap date. Throw another 1,000 soldiers our way and a few trinkets and we’ll stay in Afghanistan. Our Furious Leader, Stephen Harper, has bought the Manley report – lock, stock and pickle. Now if we don’t get our way, he says, we’ll be gone early next year – gone as in “bye, bye.”
Naturally Harper didn’t let fast changing conditions on the ground in Kabul enter into his deliberations. Not a peep about how Kabul is undermining NATO or Hamid Karzai’s weekend gamesmanship to defy the UN, NATO and the US. Of course it’s easy to ignore all those realities – that put our soldiers’ lives in danger – when you’re busy playing political football.
If you want to weigh Harpo’s bold decision against reality, take a look at the item “Karzai’s Kabul Uprising” posted here earlier today.
January 28, 2008
These are fascinating times and we just may be witnessing a geopolitical power shift of seismic proportions; the decline of the West and the ascendancy of the East. The vehicle for this could be the looming recession.
There’s an excellent analysis of how empires rise and fall in a book I reviewed earlier, “American Theocracy, The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century.” It’s author, a prominent Republican named Kevin Phillips, examined the consistent patterns found in the rise and fall of previous dominant states including the Dutch, the Spanish and the British empires and applied those patterns to his own country to conclude that America was approaching the end of its glory days.
One of Phillips’ key observations was how mighty nations fell into decline when they abandoned their own manufacturing base in favour of offshore production, thus using their wealth to grow another nation’s economy. Sound familiar? Accompanying this phenomenon, Phillips identified the shift from a production-based economy into a financialized economy (see “The Bubble Up Economy – Part Deux” posted here yesterday).
This transition is also discussed by Fareed Zakaria in his latest article in Newsweek entitled “The World Bails Us Out” in which he observes, “The United States is in the beginning of a period of relative decline. This is not defeatism, it’s math.”
“As the American economy slows down, there are no indications that other countries are tumbling. In particular, the fastest-growing big economies in the world – China, India, Brazil—appear set to continue with their robust growth. While a sharp American downturn will surely slow them down somewhat, those emerging markets will all continue to expand—to buy, sell and trade—and this will help the United States.
The quarterly results of many large American multinationals (other than banks) show how. Their profits are growing extremely slowly in the United States—at best a few percent—but are surging by 15 or 20 percent abroad. Adding all these companies together, we can see why America’s trade deficit—which ballooned for decades—has begun shrinking dramatically, by $100 billion over the past year. This trend will accelerate as the U.S. dollar’s decline continues to make American exports more affordable across the world.
The past few years have been very good to the world’s energy-rich lands—Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Norway. Add to the list China and Singapore; they may not be big oil exporters, but they still have huge surpluses. These vast savings have to go somewhere, and sovereign wealth funds—the investment arms of these nations—have provided infusions of cash to otherwise desperate American financial firms. Imagine what the U.S. economy would look like without these investments. Many of its most illustrious banks and financial companies would have gone bankrupt, triggering cascades of gloom and doom across America.
These trends represent a large, ongoing shift in the global economic order. Power is moving away from the traditional centers of the global economy—the Western nations—to the emerging markets. To put it more bluntly: the United States is in the beginning of a period of relative decline. It may not be steep or dramatic, but the fact that it’s happening is clear. Even if one assumes a slowdown, the other big economies will still grow at two and three times the pace of the West.
All this means that the political and economic clout of the West—and centrally of the United States—is waning. You can see this reality in the discussions at Davos, where Indian businessmen, Russian officials, Saudi investment advisers and Chinese academics are moving to center stage.
On the American campaign trail, the candidates talk about a world utterly unrelated to the one that is actually being created on the ground. The Republicans promise to wage war against Islamic extremists and modernize the Middle East. The Democrats deplore the ills of globalization and free trade, and urge tougher measures against China. Meanwhile Middle Eastern fund managers and Asian consumers are quietly keeping the U.S. economy afloat.
January 28, 2008
Hamid Karzai is on the warpath, in revolt, and his antics could have major repercussions for the US, NATO and us too. Over the weekend Karzai shook up his Western benefactors by torpedoing the appointment of Lord Paddy Ashdown who was slotted to become the UN’s super envoy to Afghanistan. It’s a tale of grand intrigue that our media totally missed. Fortunately the story is brilliantly laid out in
Asia Times:
Kabul knew for months about the impending appointment of Ashdown as a key step in a new NATO strategy spearheaded by the US and Britain, aimed at stabilizing the Afghan situation. Karzai knew detailed planning had gone into the move involving NATO, the EU and the United Nations Security Council. But Karzai waited patiently until the eleventh hour before shooting it down publicly on Saturday in a interview with the BBC while attending the World Economic Forum meet in the Swiss resort town of Davos. The move was pre-planned and carried out in a typical Afghan way with maximum effect.
Karzai insists there has been a serious misunderstanding of motives because Kabul had never taken a “decision” on Ashdown’s appointment. He is perfectly right in saying so. But in actuality, Karzai has put on display his proud Afghan temper. He has taken umbrage that Washington and London took the decision on Ashdown’s appointment in consultation with Brussels and thereupon got UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon to execute it, all the time taking Kabul’s agreement for granted.
Karzai anticipated that Ashdown, true to his reputation in the Balkans, would function like a colonial viceroy. Karzai knows that the Western agencies and organizations operating in Afghanistan lack coordination. But a “unified command” under Ashdown would create a counterpoint in Kabul to Karzai’s own authority. Karzai didn’t want that to happen.
The bottom line concerns Karzai’s political future. He sizes up that Ashdown is part of a political package leading toward a post-Karzai era. There has been persistent chatter in recent weeks that Zalmay Khalilzad, US ambassador to the UN – an ethnic Afghan – is in the mix for a run as president of Afghanistan. According to Washington Post columnist Al Kamen, Karzai took the rumor seriously and point-blank asked Khalilzad about it when the two met in London in October, but Khalilzad “didn’t give a Shermanesque response”.
The UN’s capacity to spearhead the political process in Afghanistan now stands seriously impaired. This deprives Washington of a neutral international bridge – but under its control – leading toward the Taliban camp, which is a pre-requisite for commencement of any meaningful intra-Afghan dialogue. Meanwhile, the war hangs perilously on the edge of an abyss.
Almost everyone is talking to the Taliban one way or another. Confusion is near-total. All this is happening at an awkward time when NATO lacks a counterinsurgency strategy. In particular, Britain, which lately assumed a lead role within NATO, has been embarrassed. Karzai singled out British operations in Afghanistan for criticism in an interview with the Times newspaper of London on the eve of his meeting with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Davos on Friday. Karzai alleged that Afghan people “suffered” from the coming of the British. He had little praise for the 7,800 British troops deployed in Afghanistan. He said, “Both the American and British forces guaranteed to me they knew what they were doing and I made the mistake of listening to them. And, when they came in, the Taliban came.”
As The Times commented, “British forces believe that, in many respects, their Afghan allies pose more of a challenge to their mission than the Taliban … It is the Afghan government that is now proving more of an obstacle to stability in an area where a mixture of official corruption, ineptitude and paranoia are stymying British efforts.”
…it remains to be seen how long Washington can keep Karzai away from the reach of the Russia-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Russia and China-dominated Shanghai Cooperation Organization. From the Ashdown saga, Karzai must have realized his capacity to shake up US strategy in the region. In an interview with CNN in Davos on Thursday, Karzai said, “We have opened our doors to them [Iran]. They have been helping us in Afghanistan.” Karzai then insisted that the Bush administration has “wisely understood that Iran is Afghanistan’s neighbor”.
Musharraf will know that his own defiance of Washington’s recent attempts to dictate the nature of the political set-up in Islamabad now enters a conclusive phase. He will know that with such a first-rate mess-up in the war in Afghanistan, Washington is hardly in a position to be intrusive, let alone dictate terms of engagement to him. In a curious way, Karzai has considerably smoothened for him the passage from now until the elections in Pakistan on February 8. In all probability, Pakistan, which has excellent intelligence outfits in Kabul, knew in advance that Karzai was about to give shock-and-awe treatment to Washington. Clearly, Musharraf has begun finger-pointing at anyone who will even remotely suggest the need of deploying US troops on Pakistani soil.
Timely backing from China has also strengthened Musharraf’s hands. In an extraordinary commentary titled “No more turmoil in Pakistan is permissible”, China’s People’s Daily has come out with a whole-hearted endorsement of Musharraf’s leadership. It said, “President Pervez Musharraf has resorted to a host of viable measures … Pakistani government has been making unremitting efforts in defense of the supreme national interests … Some opposition forces at home and a few powers overseas impose pressures or punitive measures against Pakistan in the name of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’ and ‘opposition to terrorism’.
Musharraf must be greatly relieved that Beijing has finally broken its silence and come down unequivocally in support of him at a crucial juncture in his desperate resistance of the US game plan to remove him from power and to disgrace the military by deploying American troops on Pakistani soil.
Increasingly, Karzai and Musharraf find themselves in a somewhat similar predicament. They cannot do without American support, but they do not accept US pressure tactics. They know US regional policies are part of their problem within their own countries and, therefore, they need to differentiate themselves for their political survival. Paradoxically, their attempt is to perpetuate the US’s dependence on them while they work at consolidating a political base of their own, which is independent of US control. In Karzai’s case, the 3-4 million votes that Musharraf can mobilize from the Afghan refugee population in Pakistan will always remain a decisive factor in his re-election as president. Besides, there are regional powers – China and Iran in particular – which are keenly watching the geopolitics surrounding Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Iranian thinking is that there is a concerted US-Israeli plot to destabilize Musharraf’s regime with the twin objective of the US establishing a base in Pakistan for its military intelligence operations directed against Russia and China and at the same time for neutralizing Pakistan’s nuclear capability.
…Both China and Iran are keen on the stability of the Karzai government. Both would like Karzai to continue to explore the parameters of a neutral, independent foreign policy free of US manipulation. Both visualize that Afghanistan can serve as a vital land bridge between them, playing a strategic role in the rapid expansion of Sino-Iranian relations.
Wheels spinning within wheels and we’re stuck debating another thousand soldiers for Kandahar so that we can prop up a guy who is working hard at cross purposes and whose country appears headed in a direction of its own. Astonishing, unbelievable. Are we really so naive, so myopic, maybe even so stupid?
January 28, 2008
It seems some Americans are learning that their gold-plated, private healthcare insurance policies may not be all they bargained for. According to the Washington Post, if you get really ill, you could be in a lot of trouble – financial trouble.
“A small but growing number of American families beset by major medical problems are learning the hard way that simply having health insurance is sometimes not enough.
Those who need organ transplants or who have hemophilia, Gaucher disease or other costly chronic illnesses can easily rack up medical bills that blow through the lifetime benefits cap of $1 million or more that is a standard part of many insurance policies.
That has left some very sick people facing health-care tabs of hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, prompting their families to seek help from the government, or to scramble to change jobs or even divorce for no other reason than to qualify for new health insurance. And it has led some advocates for the chronically ill to plan a new lobbying effort in hopes of persuading Congress to require that insurers increase lifetime caps to as high as $10 million.
Statistics on how many people exceed the lifetime caps are hard to come by, but advocates note that the amount of many caps hasn’t changed in decades, or at least has not kept up with health-care inflation and the sky-high cost of lifesaving new therapies, making it more likely that people will reach the limit.”
January 28, 2008
According to a survey by The Economist Intelligence Unit, Vancouver is the world’s best place to live. From BBC News:
The EIU ranked 127 cities in terms of personal risk, infrastructure and the availability of goods and services.
All the cities that fell into the top “liveability” bracket were based in Canada, Australia and Western Europe.
The Economist’s Top Ten:
TOP TEN
Vancouver
Melbourne
Vienna
Geneva
Perth
Adelaide
Sydney
Zurich
Toronto
Calgary
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