The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People
Nov.29.2006
The 29th of November marks the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people. This anniversary is commemorated ever year by the United Nations, the very same organization that was pressurized by the imperialist forces, namely the United Sates of America, into partitioning Palestine on Novemebr.29.1947
In declaring this day a day of solidarity with the Palestinian people, the UN expressed its regret for this unjust and unjustifiable resolution which was taken regardless of the tremendous pain and horror it caused to the Palestinian people. And which led to the creation of a new entity, namely Israel, at the expense and on the soil of the Palestinian people.
Ever since 1948 Israel has been exercising a policy of ethnic cleansing, massacres, sieges, collective punishment, building settlements and apartheid walls, expropriating more lands and waging genocidal wars against the armless refugees of Palestine. In the last four months alone, Israel has committed a series of massacres in which whole families were eliminated in cold blood. More than 450 Palestinians, mostly children and women, were killed and 4500 injured.
In commemorating this day, the Palestinian people pledge to continue the struggle by all means till the liberation of Palestine and the establishment of a democratic state on its soil for all of its citizens regardless of religion, race or sex.
University Teachers’ Association-Palestine
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Afghan Autopsy
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Posted on Nov 28, 2006
Posted on Nov 28, 2006
By Christian Parenti
Editor’s note: America began its so-called war on terror with the intention of driving the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Five years later, the Taliban is back, Osama bin Laden is still alive, and insurgent fighters cite the U.S. presence in the country as their main wellspring of rage. How did it come to this?
Truthdig contributor Christian Parenti, just back from Afghanistan, reports.
Something significant happened in Kabul on Sept. 8 when a Toyota station wagon packed with explosives rammed two U.S. Humvees at the gates of the American embassy, setting off a massive blast.
The Taliban claimed credit for the bombing, as if to say: We can now strike anywhere. When I interviewed eyewitnesses a few days after the blast, shreds of clothing and a shoe still hung from the branches of a nearby tree. Local shopkeepers described the suicide bomber as “very clean,” “dressed in white” and “wearing eyeliner.” They said he paid $100 for a cigarette just before parking in the spot from which he launched his attack against two American Humvees.
After a month traveling around Afghanistan this autumn, I was forced to a grim conclusion: This project is lost, and nothing very good will likely replace it. The reasons for the international community’s failure here are several. First, there are the immediate blunders of the occupiers who, despite extensive European involvement, are led by the Americans. Next are deeper historical dynamics dating back to the U.S. role in the anti-Soviet jihad. And finally there are much older cultural, political and economic facts about Afghanistan that have long made this a wild, lawless place, impervious to conquest and even resistant to the modernizing efforts of its urban middle classes.
The stated goal of this latest occupation has been to create a functioning state where none had existed. Thus, if Afghan institutions fail, so too does the West’s project there.
“You can’t have development without security,” says the waxy NATO spokesman in Kabul, Mark Laity. “And security without development won’t last.” Alas, neither obtains in Afghanistan.
The West, led by the U.S., militarily overmatches its adversaries. But in Afghanistan, that is not the issue. As Bernard Fall said of Vietnam, a war can be militarily unlosable yet politically unwinnable.
Consider again the contours of this crisis: Half of Afghanistan is under effective insurgent control; scores of international troops have been killed this year. Between January and Oct. 8 of this year, there were 78 suicide bombings, killing nearly 200 people. Last year saw only 17 suicide attacks. In the last six months, several previously stable provinces have slipped into chaos. A few dissident British soldiers have accused NATO and U.S. forces of bombing and strafing villages. Despite, or more likely because of this firepower, the situation in key southern provinces like Helmand and Kandahar has deteriorated badly. The British were recently forced to negotiate a withdrawal from one of their southern bases in Masa Qala, essentially surrendering the area to the Taliban.
By late summer, the military crisis in southern Afghanistan was so bad that NATO’s top U.S. commander, Gen. James Jones, was begging for 2,500 extra troops to join the fight in Afghanistan’s deep south. Few extra soldiers were forthcoming. France was asked to move the 2,000 NATO troops under its command in Kabul south but refused, claiming they were needed in the capital.
The resurgent Taliban now control districts just outside Kabul, in Lowgar and Wardak provinces, and are even launching attacks on NATO troops in and around Kabul. In September, Mullah Dadullah, head of the Taliban forces, claimed he had 12,000 fighters, including 500 suicide bombers, and promised escalating violence next spring. Cut those numbers in half or more and the Taliban are still a formidable force.
To find out how the insurgents have crept so close to the capital, a colleague and I head south into Taliban controlled sections of Lorag. As is often the case in guerrilla warfare, the landscape appears normal: The sun shines. The crops, including patches of shaggy green cannabis, survive despite an eighth year of drought. The traffic looks nonthreatening: Toyota Corollas roll past, packed with Afghan families, the women shrouded in blue burqas. So, too, do overloaded “jingle trucks” their sides brightly painted, bumpers trimmed with skirts of dangling tin chains and black tassels in imitation of the pretty elephants that once hauled cargo in these parts. But appearances can be deceptive in Afghanistan.
To appear a bit more like locals, my traveling companion and I are dressed in traditional salwar kameez. My blond colleague, the filmmaker Ian Olds, has his head wrapped in a scarf. At paramilitary police checkpoints, he plays the role of a sleeping sick man. It all seems a bit ridiculous—how could the Taliban really operate this close to the city?
But once we reach our destination—some villages just off the main road—the tension grows palpably thicker. People in Lowgar say that the insurgents have been operating here for about a year. They began with organizers who infiltrated from Pakistan to stir up dissatisfaction and reactivate former fighters.
The guerrillas here got a major boost when the extremist and pathologically ruthless commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar pledged the support of his Hezb-i-Islami, an old mujahedeen party, to Al Qaeda and made peace with the Taliban. A youth from Lowgar explains: “Every family has to give one man to the Taliban.”
The Taliban pay their fighters more that the Afghan military, which only pays $70 a month, but the fighters have local grievances that motivate them as well. A man in Lowgar complains: “There are no jobs, no development. The government is corrupt.”
To the northeast of Kabul, in Kunnar and Nuristan, one finds a different ecology of insurgents: the networks of foreign fighters of Al Qaeda. There, the radio traffic reveals Kandahari Taliban fighters overlapping with Pakistanis and Arabs. Two Afghan journalists who know this scene well describe the Al Qaeda networks along the Pakistani border east of Kabul as supplying expertise and consultative guidance to the Taliban and Hezb-i-Islami.
“When I went there, they made me take out the battery and chip from my phone. They brought in an Arab who went over the camera and then disappeared,” said one of these Afghan journalists with Al Qaeda contacts. “The Arab wouldn’t be interviewed. They had Pashtun from Kandahar who had been to Kashmir. They are very smart guys.”
These Al Qaeda networks in the east are small and do not mount large ground offensives like their two allied forces—the southern Taliban and Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami. Combat in Kunar and Nuristan is rarely as fierce as it is further south. But Al Qaeda clearly plays an important technical and media role in the overall Afghan jihad.
An intelligence contractor speculated that the Kabul bombings were more likely Al Qaeda types than country bumpkin Kandaharis. “The checkpoints of the national police are all Northern Alliance troops,” he said. “And they harass all Pashtun males. The suicide cells in Kabul are probably more sophisticated types.”
Not all the foreign fighters of the anti-Soviet jihad went home when it was over. Early this year, Al Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri urged followers not to forget the jihad in Afghanistan in their fixation on Iraq. Some of the earliest suicide bombers were said to be Pakistani, (though now most are believed to be Afghans). So there is still a role played by foreign fighters in Afghanistan.
The home-grown Taliban who make up the bulk of the insurgency have a simple cause: They fight to remove foreign troops and impose sharia, Islamic law. When I interviewed a group of fighters in a canyon in Zabul Province in February, the presence of foreign “non-believing” troops was their main grievance. They wanted their watan or homeland under Afghan control.
They talked about U.S. torture and arrests, criticized the government as corrupt and said they wanted a “truly Islamic government.” When pressed on what that was, they ducked any specific description. They claimed that they burned schools only because they opposed the mixing of boys and girls. The fighters were local southern Pashtuns. They laid out a clear critique of President Hamid Karzai and his NATO backers. But their alternative was a rather conservative and underdeveloped ideology, long on fatalism and moralism, short on specifics.
In January, Karzai, looking for a last chance to make peace, offered to negotiate with the Taliban’s spiritual leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar. The Taliban rejected the offer and several months later the Taliban’s top military commander, Mullah Dadullah, said that only once all Western troops had vacated Afghanistan would his movement parlay with the Karzai administration.
Despite the ample evidence of failure, many U.S. pundits still see Afghanistan as a bright spot in the war On terror. In July, Jamie Rubin wrote a New York Times op-ed piece arguing that the Democrats should turn from Iraq and invest themselves in saving Afghanistan. Peter Bergin visited Afghanistan this fall after a few years’ absence and declared: “What we are seeing in Afghanistan is far from perfect, but it’s better than so-so.”
More, recently the Washington Post’s Jim Hoaglan, invoking the Taliban’s “savagely misogynistic” ways, cited the dubious number of 2 million girls in school in Afghanistan since 2000 to spin the occupation there as “a stunning accomplishment.” But his idea of “winning Afghanistan” has little to do with reality on the ground.
The situation with education in Afghanistan is actually quite abysmal.
On Oct. 2, Deputy Education Minister Mohammad Sadiq Fatman said: “More than 200,000 students are shut out of schools across the country because of school closures due to fear of attacks.”
When CorpWatch looked into the issue of schools constructed by the Louis Berger Group, it found shoddy work and empty buildings. Teachers in Nagahar and elsewhere complained to me of no supplies, late payment of wages, too many students and too few teachers.
The national university is a shambles. “The professors take bribes or just pass you if you are Pashtun or Tajik like them,” says Hasmat, who was studying in Kabul.
“I will be a great butcher,” says Habib, who has studied medicine for six years but calls his Kabul degree worthless.
A professor who is now the Afghan ambassador to Germany says that many female students are dropping out for fear of being abducted while traveling to Kabul University.
Education is only one barometer of failure.
The harsh truth is that the West, led by the U.S., has been defeated in Afghanistan. It is only a matter time - probably three to five more bloody years—before international troops are forced to leave and a new government, or several governments, or a civil war takes hold. The country could likely divide along ethnic lines: a Pashtun south and a Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek north.
Perhaps history doomed this project from the start. For 130 years or more, Kabul has been fighting a losing battle to subjugate the wild Afghan tribes. Sometimes the great powers aid Kabul, sometimes they undermine it by aiding the restive tribes.
Kabul’s struggle to tame rural Afghan society began in earnest with the Iron Emir, Abdur Rahman. Victorious over the British but sustained by their grants from 1880 to 1901, Rahman momentarily broke the Pashtun tribes of the south and began to construct a civil service and modern army, starting with a ledger and less than a dozen civil servants. His son, Habibullaha, was weak and under him Kabul’s power waned. Then the grandson, Amanullah, ejected the British in 1919 (and likely had his father assassinated). Once in power, Amanullah launched a reasonably effective modernization plan that emulated Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Turkey and Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran.
But Amanullah pushed his reforms too far, too fast: Creating girls schools provoked a backlash from the country’s imams and tribal leaders. When his beautiful Syrian wife Soraoiya appeared unveiled in public, the dam broke. The Pashtun lashkars, or tribal armies, went back to war. When Amanullah fled Kabul, a Tajik brigand from the north, named Bacha-i-Saqao ("Son of a Water Carrier") took over to rule and sack the capital for nine months.
Even during the developmentalist golden era of the early Cold War, the Afghan state was weak. From the early 1950s until 1978, Soviet and U.S. aid flowed in to compete at building roads, airports, power stations and irrigation projects. The process was presided over by a strongman, Daud Khan, who served first as prime minister under the king Zahir Shah, then, after a republican coup d’etat in 1973, as president. Daud was a modernizer, but he faced small Islamic insurgencies supported by Pakistan. And though he got some infrastructure built, Daud was never capable of extending Kabul’s writ deep into the countryside.
The Afghan communists of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan took over in 1978 with dreams of jump-starting modernization and development in their deeply backward nation of mountain villages, nomads and dirt roads. Instead, they triggered immediate crisis. The communists of the PDPA favored expanding education, gender equality and land reform, but their doctrinal cleavages led to almost immediate internecine warfare within the party. In 1967, the PDPA had split into two groups—the Khalq and Parcham—but there was violent rivalry even within the Khalq faction.
The new government succeeded in alienating Afghanistan’s largely autonomous tribal leaders. Scattered rebellions soon erupted. By April, 1979, whole units of the Afghan army were defecting to the rebels. As early as March 30, 1979, Robert Gates, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, attended a meeting at which Under Secretary of Defense Walter Slocumbe asked whether there was “value in keeping the Afghan insurgency going, [and] sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire.”
As former national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, explained in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, the U.S. began aiding the tribalist and Islamic uprisings as early as July 1979. By early autumn, the Afghan army had collapsed and the USSR, fearing that Islamic rebellion in Afghanistan would quickly spread to its Central Asian republics, invaded on Dec. 24, 1979.
Soviet Special Forces, or Spetnaz, commandos killed one communist leader, Hafizullah Amin, who had earlier killed Nur Mohammed Taraki, and replaced Amin with the more agreeable Babrak Karmal. For the next eight years, the Soviet Union bled into the Hindu Kush mountains, sending in war material and fresh troops only to bring out zinc caskets and heroin-addicted vets. As the war progressed, the Red Army’s tactics devolved: mines were dropped indiscriminately from planes and civilian populations bombed.
The U.S. effort in this conflict was also massive, described by Fred Halliday as “the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA.”
From 1979 to 1992, America channeled a minimally estimated $3 billion to the various mujahedeen factions fighting the Russians and then the Najibullah regime. The Saudi dynasty sent an equal amount, while additional aid flowed from China, Iran, assorted Islamic charities, drug-running operations, privatized CIA funding sources (such as the collapsed Bank of Commerce and Credit International) and various Arab millionaires (such as Osama bin Laden).
Most of the arms were Soviet hand-me-downs purchased from the increasingly Western-oriented Egypt. Running the pipeline of arms, training, money, information and drugs in and out of Afghanistan was the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Described as a state within a state, the ISI almost doubled in size during the war and became the most religiously politicized apparatus of the Pakistani government.
Throughout the Reagan years, U.S. funding for the mujahedeen steadily increased. Facilitated by innocuously named lobbying groups like the Afghan American Educational Fund, above-board appropriations for the largely secret campaign reached $250 million annually by 1985. Much more issued from the CIA’s black budget. Fully a third of U.S. monies went to the religious zealot and Pashtun Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Now this feverishly anti-American warlord has joined forces with the Taliban.
Among the many volunteers who joined the jihad was the young Osama bin Laden. Another was his now close comrade, the Egyptian surgeon-turned-terrorist, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Charged with conspiracy in the assassination of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, Zawahiri was arrested, tortured and, upon release, fled to Afghanistan. Known as “Afghan Arabs,” these foreign fighters also included Pakistanis, Filipinos, Chinese, Indonesians and Malaysians.
By the time the Afghan communists were vanquished and the mujahedeen were victorious, Afghanistan was devastated. In place of a state, it had seven competing guerrillas parties. Civil war and banditry consumed the next decade and from this emerged the Taliban—a messianic, largely illiterate, vigilante force that sought to impose Muslim law and order upon Afghanistan’s anarchic state of war.
For the U.S. to have succeeded after ousting the Taliban would have taken Herculean effort, single-minded dedication, enormous sums of money, a deft cultural and historical expertise, wise political balancing between rival Afghan factions and ethnic groups and a careful vetting of Afghan allies.
Instead, the American-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was marked by carelessness, parsimonious budgeting and a deep cultural ignorance rooted in a sense of technology-based omnipotence.
Central to the Afghan failure was the Bush administration’s obsession with Iraq—the land of oil, cornerstone of Arab nationalism, strategic linchpin to a globally crucial region. In the Bush imperial scheme, Afghanistan served as a stepping-stone to Iraq and a political prop with which to sell and justify the more nebulous war on terror. As a project in and of itself, Afghanistan was always a sloppily handled sideshow.
Consider again the salient facts: Well before 9/11, the Bush team’s earliest cabinet meetings touched on regime change in Iraq. Days after 9/11, then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz suggested that the U.S. skip an invasion of Afghanistan and proceed directly to Iraq. His boss, Donald Rumsfeld, complained that there were no good targets in Afghanistan. But the Afghan invasion had to happen for U.S. foreign policy to have any credibility. As it happened, the Afghan war was an advertisement for Rumsfeld’s goal of “military transformation” and his theory of light, fast warfare.
Once the Afghan occupation began, the political process was rushed. Warlords were allowed to take over the government. The loya jirga, the constitution, the presidential elections, and the parliamentary elections were all rushed processes, designed to meet U.S. political deadlines. This was the quickest way to create the short-term appearance of stability and success and thus was the quickest way to Iraq. But this process created a hopelessly dysfunctional, intensely corrupt Afghan government, and that foreordained Western failure. After all, who would stand up as the West stood down?
The international community’s military spending in Afghanistan has outpaced development spending by 10 to 1. This is a core mistake in a war that is fundamentally political. Despite the disproportionate military spending, the U.S. deployed only 9,000 troops to hunt Osama bin Laden during the first two years. The ratio of support troops to combat soldiers in the U.S. military is such that a force of 9,000 translates into little more than 800 or 900 soldiers actually in the field at any one time.
On the economic front, things were even worse. The Bush administration actually forgot to request any money for Afghan reconstruction in its initial 2002 budget. The final budget did allot $300 million to development, but for a population of 28 million people with such a devastated infrastructure, that was hardly a start.
Another key mistake in forming the Afghan state was the U.S. agreement to “pay the army.” Unlike Iraq—which had a real army but which Paul Bremmer foolishly fired—Afghanistan had only warlord militias. Once the U.S. agreed to maintain these armed bodies, graft ran wild: the number of alleged troops controlled by each Northern Alliance “commander” accelerated rapidly.
“Suddenly [former Defense Minister Mohammad Qasim] Fahim was claiming that he had 20,000 and then, no, it was 50,000, or 70,000, or whatever number you could come up with,” said a British intelligence contractor. “That became an awful lot of $30 a month per man going into somebody’s pocket. And you can be damned sure the boys with the [AK-47s] weren’t getting much of it.”
Ridiculous shakedown schemes like that set the tone and soon the Afghan government had 32 huge dysfunctional ministries—all-subsisting on foreign aid. In fact, these ministries are so dysfunctional that despite all the graft and theft and leakage of funds, many ministries actually have 30 percent of their funds unspent. In other words, the chaos at the ministries is so deep they can’t even steal their full allotment of aid money.
But why blame the Afghans? After all, they take their cues from their overlords. The Defense Department has admitted that it cannot keep track of the billions of dollars it has spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Government Accountability Office concluded that the U.S. seemed to have little idea of how many contractors were in the two countries or what they were doing.”
Corruption is only part of the issue—the warped political theater of the Bush administration misshaped what development did happen.
“Ambassador [Zalmay] Khalilzad screwed it up,” says Mary Louise Vitelli, a U.S. consultant to the Ministry of Mines and Industry (one of the five Afghan government ministries that control power generation). “Instead of rebuilding Kabul’s three hydro plants, he wanted 500 girls schools, because that looks good. So now Kabul is still without power.” Also, Kabul’s power stations were Soviet built, so their repair would have mostly likely meant contracting Russian firms— not something Team Bush likes to do.
True, Coca-Cola has opened a bottling plant in Kabul and the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development has erected a largely unused five-star hotel in the capital. But in more important ways, Afghanistan’s reconstruction is stalled out. The result has been joblessness, hunger and growing political rage that is now being harnessed by an array of Islamic guerrillas.
The connective tissue for all the Afghan guerrilla groups is Pakistan, its radical Islamist parties and its intelligence services. While the insurgents are fueled by internal dynamics, they also receive external stimulus from across the border. One reason Pakistan aids the Afghan insurgents is that Political Islam - a view of Islam as a revolutionary political vehicle and sharia as a solution to social problems - has considerable traction in Pakistan. In 2002, a coalition of six Islamist parties, the Mutahidda Majlis-i-Amal (MMA), became the second-largest group in Pakistan’s Parliament. The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency is heavy with Islamist fellow travelers who have long-standing personal and political links to the Taliban, Hezb-i-Islami and Al Qaeda. Since June, Pakistan has had a de facto truce with pro-Taliban tribal forces on the Pakistan side of the border.
A formal truce was signed on Sept. 5, which allowed Afghan insurgents to continue using Pakistan as a base. A month later, U.S. military spokesman Col. John Paradis announced that insurgent attacks had tripled in eastern Afghanistan along its border with Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal agency.
Pakistan continues to destabilize Afghanistan for several reasons: part of the issue is ethnic politics. In 1893, Afghanistan agreed to a frontier with British India called the Durand Line, after Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, who forced it upon Abdur Rahman, the so-called “Iron Emir” of Afghanistan. The Durand Line’s main political impact has been to divide “Pashtunistan,” leaving what is now a population of 28 million Pashtun speakers dispersed between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In Afghanistan, the Pashtuns make up 40 percent of the population and have ruled the country ever since its creation in 1749. In Pakistan, Pashtuns are a large and poor minority. The last thing Pakistan wants is for the Pashtun minority within its borders to link up with or become the tools of a strong neighboring Afghanistan ruled by Pashtuns.
The other factor in Pakistani thinking about Afghanistan is India. As long as massive India threatens Pakistan, Pakistan wants Afghanistan to remain pliable so as to provide “strategic depth” or fallback room in case of a major land war with India.
Pakistan’s support for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar dates back to 1975 when the ISI supported the young radical against the nationalist government of Daud Khan. With the Communist coup in 1978 and Soviet invasion of 1979, Pakistan’s support for Hekmatyar and other Afghan guerrillas increased: CIA and Saudi money was managed by the Pakistani ISI. After the mujahedeen finally took Kabul in 1992, the country went into meltdown after four years of chaos and warfare. Pakistan backed the Taliban, who managed to subdue most of Afghanistan by 1996.
With the attacks of 9/11, discussion of Pakistan-Taliban relations turned on how Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf would soon be forced to ditch his Pashtun clients so as to serve the new U.S. agenda. Such a change of course would gain the general many concessions, but it would undermine the perpetual structural agenda of keeping Afghanistan weak.
So after 9/11, Musharraf played two seemingly contradictory roles: one as America’s indispensable ally, the local broker in the war on terror. The other was the traditional role of destabilizing and dominating Afghanistan.
In the face of this gathering storm, the West is getting increasingly aggressive about opium poppy eradication— trying to douse the fires of insurrection.
For several years, the U.S. occupiers had the sanity to ignore opium, but in 2003, Republican Congressman Henry Hyde sent a letter to Donald Rumsfeld, expressing his “growing concerns about Afghanistan and the impact of illicit drugs on the fight against global terrorism.” The next year, Rumsfeld called the drug problem in Afghanistan “too serious to be ignored.” Opium is now seen as the linchpin to the counterinsurgency: kill the poppies and you kill the rebels.
Finally, in 2005, there was some success in poppy eradication - a reported 21 percent drop in production - but that coincided with (and possibly caused) an upsurge in guerrilla activity.
This year, production bounced back to a record high of 6,100 tons of opium and U.S. officials in Kabul and Washington are pushing for more robust eradication. Some officials even want to start aerial spraying. Among them is the freelance drug warrior retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who told the AP: “We know exactly where these fields are. They’re absolutely vulnerable to eradication. And it is immeasurably more effective to do it with an airplane.” He calls the war on opium a matter of national security
“I’ve been telling the Pentagon, if you don’t take on drug production, you’re going to get run out of Afghanistan,” he said.
Leveler heads— including many in the NATO forces—readily admit that nothing could be more destabilizing. Even the NATO spokesman Mark Laity, a Brit, privately disparaged U.S. domestic pressure for robust anti-drug policy in Afghanistan as a “short-sighted, moralistic policy nostrum” that he wished U.S. voters would stop supporting.
Opium cultivation and trafficking makes up more than half the Afghan economy --amounting to $3 billion annually, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. Poppy cultivation employs an estimated 2.9 million people and Afghanistan now supplies 92 percent of the world’s heroin.
What that means in practical terms is that many key players in the Afghan government are heavily involved in drug trafficking—including Karzai’s younger brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, an influential leader of the Popalzai clan of the Kandahari Pashtun.
One motive behind stepped-up eradication has been to consolidate power in Kabul. The private intelligence firm Stratfor correctly noted that “the poppy eradication plan’s main objective is to begin eliminating the smaller, more easily managed and often more reckless warlords in the area. Little-known provincial players will be the first warlords targeted by the government.”
More often than not, eradication does the opposite: It becomes another chance for local officials to demand bribes from poor farmers or for local warlords to stand up successfully against Kabul. According to some farmers I have interviewed, eradication when thwarted (as it usually is) strengthens local commanders—as threatened farmers turn to the gunmen for help.
“We are facing a lot of problems. Only security has improved,” say Ghulam Hazrat, a teacher and farmer in the Derazi village of the Kuma district. Farmers in Kuma are among the few who have been forced to seriously scale back their poppy cultivation. “We have no paper or books in the school. The road is bad. There is no clinic.” He says there are only four teachers for 350 students in this group of villages. And the teachers have not been paid for three months.
“With no poppy, lots of people have had to leave to find work. The government promised each farmer $350 not to plant poppy. But the money was stolen. Only some farmers got $150. Maybe we will plant this year. If we don’t plant, we will suffer and when people suffer, people fight.”
Eradicate the opium poppy - half the economy - and Afghanistan’s 28 million people could plunge back into all-out civil war, with the country eventually disintegrating into two or three pieces: the Pashtun south becoming a de facto extension of heavily Pashtun Pakistan, and the more ethnically diverse north and west around Herat being pulled into the orbits of the more developed economies of Central Asia and Iran.
One of the key elements in the poppy eradication strategy is judicial reform. To see how the courts work, I asked to see a trial. I was put off for a week. But then, after pressing hard, the provincial court in Kabul relented.
It was a murder trial. The accused stood impassively as the agreements were delivered rather haphazardly. It all seemed a bit odd. Then a death sentence was delivered and the defendant walked out of court.
What?
It turned out the whole thing was staged for my benefit. The court faked a trial (rather sloppily) so as to keep me away from the real sham of justice as it is actually practiced in Afghanistan. “They can’t show us real trials because they are so bad,” says my interpreter.
The hopelessness of an American victory in Afghanistan seems to be sinking in among some politicians. Senate leader Bill Frist recently called for negotiations with the Taliban, though he was forced to later back off his statement. So, too, has British Deputy Foreign Secretary Kim Howell suggested talks with the enemy. Meanwhile, the top NATO commander on the ground, Lt. Gen. David Richards of the UK, has warned that if the international forces and Kabul government cannot improve the economic and security environment within the next six months, most Afghans in the south will likely switch to active support of the Taliban. For a career military man, that sort of warning is quite an admission.
In the meantime, NATO’s growing desperation has driven it to use ever more aerial bombardment and strafing. This serves merely to lose the battle for Afghan “hearts and minds.”
NATO’s aggressive military operations are creating an intensified solidarity among Pashtuns, which means greater support for the Taliban. Now the fight has entered Kabul, the rising violence even lapping at the gates of the U.S. embassy compound.
Overall, the situation remains stalemated. But here is a prediction: The West will eventually tire of the expense, casualties and futility of it all. Then, after face-saving negotiations, the West will once again quit Afghanistan.
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Why the U.S. is to blame for Iraq’s nightmare
Escalating violence marks tragic new chapter in the occupation
December 1, 2006 | Page 3
A HORRIFIC attack on Sadr City, the sprawling Shiite neighborhood on the edge of Baghdad, has unleashed a cycle of sectarian retaliation and counter-retaliation that marks a tragic new chapter in the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
The fury and speed with which Shiite militias lashed out following the November 23 attack, targeting Sunni homes and mosques with mortars and machine guns to exact revenge, are telling signs of the degree to which sectarian violence is gripping Iraq.
The sheer scale of the bloodshed has reached the highest levels since the U.S. invasion, according to United Nations (UN) statistics that are based on morgue reports. The October death toll marked an 11 percent increase over September, according to the UN, and November’s is certain to be higher still.
The character of the violence has taken an alarming turn, as well. “Sixty-five percent of all deaths in Baghdad were categorized as unidentified corpses,” according to the New York Times, “the signature of militias, who kidnap, kill and throw away bodies at a rate that now outstrips the slaughter inflicted by suicide bombers.”
U.S. politicians chastise Iraqis for “failing to clamp down on the violence,” “turning their backs on democracy” or some variation on these themes. But the blame for this nightmare lies squarely with the occupiers.
Historically, divisions between Shia and Sunni Muslims had less meaning in Iraq than almost any other country in the region.
It was U.S. occupation forces, not Iraqis, who imposed a sectarian logic on the division of political power in Iraq after the fall of the Saddam Hussein government. Washington’s approach of parceling out power to the leaders of Iraq’s three main ethno-religious groups--Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds--simultaneously allowed the U.S. to play the sides against one another and unleashed a sectarian dynamic that has now taken on a life of its own.
“There was no civil war in Iraq until we got there,” journalist Nir Rosen told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! “And there was no civil war in Iraq, until we took certain steps to pit Sunnis against Shias... “What we’ve managed to do is not only destabilize Iraq, but destabilize Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran. This is going to spread for decades. The region won’t recover from this for decades--and Americans are responsible.”
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THAT’S WHY in spite of the conflicts and violence, there is one demand that the vast majority of Iraqis agree on--that U.S. forces should leave Iraq, and sooner rather than later.Seven out of 10 Iraqis want U.S. troops out within a year, according to a September opinion poll conducted by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (immediate withdrawal was not included as a possible response).
Among Baghdad’s Shiites, who have generally held a more positive view of U.S. forces, not a single one surveyed in this latest poll wanted the U.S. to stay “until the security situation improves.” At the beginning of this year, more than half of Baghdad’s Shiites said yes to this option.
In the face of ever-increasing hostility to U.S. forces, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki finds himself walking a tightrope.
Maliki was scheduled to meet George W. Bush in Jordan this week, but Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who controls one of the largest blocks of seats in the Iraqi parliament, has issued an ultimatum--that if Maliki goes ahead with the meeting, Sadr will withdraw his support for the government in parliament.
That could well lead to the collapse of Maliki’s administration--and potentially turn Sadr’s powerful Mahdi Army militia from a prop upholding the Iraqi government into one of its most powerful foes.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
DESPITE THE clear rejection of the Iraq war by U.S. voters in the midterm congressional elections, the Bush administration still talks about finding a way to “win” in Iraq--including the possibility of a “surge option” that would increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq by 20,000.No less than three separate strategy evaluations are underway--a Pentagon review, a National Security Council study and the deliberations of the Iraq Study Group headed by Bush family fixer James Baker and Democrat Lee Hamilton.
It’s obvious why U.S. war planners want to stay--oil. Years of scheming are coming to a head in December with the deadline for new legislation to govern Iraq’s oil sector.
“The whole point is a new oil law--which is in fact a debt-for-oil program concocted and imposed by the International Monetary Fund,” reports Asia Times commentator Pepe Escobar. “This is the point of the U.S. invasion--a return on investment on the hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayers’ money spent. It’s not war as politics by other means; it’s war as free-market opening by other means--full U.S. access to the epicenter of the energy wars and the perfect geostrategic location for ‘taming,’ in the near future, both Russia and China.”
The U.S. agenda for Iraq has always centered on this goal, and the Democratic Party, though it benefited this election from the strategic blunders of the Bush administration, has always shared the commitment to that agenda.
That’s why Sen. Barack Obama’s recent proposal for an “exit strategy,” on closer inspection, doesn’t sound like an exit strategy at all.
Obama called for “a phased redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq on a timetable that would begin in four to six months.”
But he stressed that the timetable shouldn’t be “overly rigid,” that the U.S. “should be willing to adjust to realities on the ground,” that “redeployment could be temporarily suspended if the parties in Iraq reach an effective political arrangement that stabilizes the situation and they offer us a clear and compelling rationale for maintaining certain troop levels,” and that “it could be suspended if at any point U.S. commanders believe that a further reduction would put American troops in danger.”
In other words, Obama includes enough qualifications in his “exit strategy” to keep the U.S. in Iraq indefinitely.
Whether it is pushed by a liberal Democratic star like Obama or a centrist Democrat like Rep. John Murtha, redeployment isn’t designed to end U.S. intervention in Iraq or the rest of the Middle East, but to find ways to continue intervention from a safe distance--safe, that is, for U.S. troops.
In fact, one little-noted aspect of the various redeployment plans is increased reliance on U.S. airpower in Iraq itself--a surefire recipe for many more Iraqi casualties, not fewer.
Every day that the occupation continues means more violence, a greater threat of civil war and worsening conditions for ordinary Iraqis. The U.S. has to get out of Iraq--immediately and unconditionally.
This is the demand that the antiwar movement needs to champion in order to connect with the sentiment of large numbers of Iraqis and Americans alike.
The plans for a national antiwar mobilization in Washington, D.C., on January 27 will be a welcome opportunity for everyone opposed to the occupation to take a public stand. Opponents of the war can start to mobilize for January 27 now--and begin to reach out to a new audience with local organizing initiatives.
The politicians of both parties want to come up with a “new course” in Iraq that won’t end the occupation, but repackage it. Our stand has to be for the U.S. to get out of Iraq now--not in a year, not in six months, but now.
Step Away From The Constitution, Mr. Gingrich, And Put Your Hands Where We Can See Them
Ol' Newt has a Contract on America.
---Gingrich: Free Speech Should Be Curtailed To Fight Terrorism
<>By JOSH GERSTEINStaff Reporter of the Sun
November 29, 2006
A former House speaker, Newt Gingrich, is causing a stir by proposing that free speech may have to be curtailed in order to fight terrorism.
"We need to get ahead of the curve rather than wait until we actually literally lose a city, which I think could literally happen in the next decade if we're unfortunate," Mr. Gingrich said Monday night during a speech in New Hampshire. "We now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of if it weren't for the scale of the threat."
Speaking at an award dinner billed as a tribute to crusaders for the First Amendment, Mr. Gingrich, who is considering a run for the White House in 2008, painted an ominous picture of the dangers facing America.
"This is a serious, long-term war," the former speaker said, according an audio excerpt of his remarks made available yesterday by his office. "Either before we lose a city or, if we are truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people."
Mr. Gingrich acknowledged that these proposals would trigger "a serious debate about the First Amendment." He also said international law must be revised to address the exigencies posed by international terrorists.
"We should propose a Geneva Convention for fighting terrorism, which makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who would target civilians are, in fact, subject to a totally different set of rules that allow us to protect civilization by defeating barbarism before it gains so much strength that it is truly horrendous," he said.
The former speaker also pointed approvingly to England, where suspects in terrorism cases can be detained for several weeks without charge. Some of Mr. Gingrich's remarks about balancing freedom and terrorism were reported by the Associated Press on Monday and the Union Leader of Manchester yesterday.
In the same speech Monday, the former speaker expressed a more expansive view of First Amendment rights in the American political arena. Mr. Gingrich picked a fight of sorts with a potential rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Senator McCain of Arizona, by branding as a failure the campaign finance restrictions known as McCain-Feingold. The former speaker said the limitations have not stemmed the flow of money into politics and failed to curtail negative political advertising.
Mr. Gingrich has been traveling to politically important states, like New Hampshire, but said Monday he would not decide on a White House bid until September 2007
http://www.nysun.com/article/44302Goverment Civil Liberties Board Impressed With NSA Spying
The NSA protects your privacy. Feel better now?
---
Oversight board briefed on NSA program
By JOHN SOLOMON, Associated Press Writer Tue Nov 28, 2:30 PM ET
Several members of a government board appointed to guard privacy and civil liberties during the war on terror say they're impressed with the protections built into the Bush administration's electronic eavesdropping program.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board received a long-awaited briefing on the secret program last week by senior members of the National Security Agency.
Two of the five board members told The Associated Press on Monday they were impressed by the safeguards the government has built into the NSA's monitoring of phone calls and computer transmissions and wished the administration could tell the public more about them to ease distrust.
"If the American public, especially civil libertarians like myself, could be more informed about how careful the government is to protect our privacy while still protecting us from attacks, we'd be more reassured," said Lanny Davis, a former Clinton White House lawyer.
Alan Raul, a former Reagan White House lawyer and the board's vice chairman, said the group "found there was a great appreciation inside government, both at the political and career levels, for protections on privacy and civil liberties."
"In fact, I think the public may have an underappreciation for the degree of seriousness the government is giving these protections." said Raul, author of a book on privacy and civil liberties in the digital age.
The briefing had been delayed for over a year because President Bush was concerned — after several press leaks — about widening the circle of people who knew the exact details of the eavesdropping program.
A breakthrough was reached in recent days and the five board members were briefed during Thanksgiving week.
The board members are prohibited from discussing any specific protections or tactics because the NSA program remains classified.
But Davis said he believes the administration could tell the public more about the program's protections without compromising national security.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V, set to become chairman of the Intelligence Committee in January, wants Congress to be given more information about the NSA eavesdropping and CIA interrogation programs as well. In September, he urged colleagues not to vote for legislation formally legalizing the program until Congress got more answers.
"We must insist on full access to the NSA warrantless surveillance program and the CIA detention and interrogation program. Only then, can we conduct thorough oversight of these programs and determine whether they are legal, appropriate, and effective and what, if any, legislative action must be taken," he said this month.
The board was created as a compromise between Congress and the White House amid growing public and congressional concerns about the government's tactics in the war on terror and their impact on civil rights.
Those concerns were fueled in part by news leaks that divulged the existence of the NSA's eavesdropping program, a similar terrorist finance tracking system and secret CIA prisons where high-value targets have been interrogated.
Democrats, who are about to take over Congress in January, have been concerned the board doesn't have enough independence because the political compromise struck in late 2004 left the board under the authority of the president.
Some have discussed elevating the board to an independent body like the Sept. 11 review commission.
After meeting in private 16 times over the last year to discuss classified matters and to be briefed by every major U.S. intelligence agency, the board has scheduled its first public hearing Dec. 5 to solicit testimony from nongovernment privacy experts.
The forum, to be held at Georgetown University, will hear from some of the administration's privacy critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, as well as conservative and academic voices.
JOHN DUGARD, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 'APARTHEID -- Israelis adopt what South Africa dropped'
APARTHEID
Israelis adopt what South Africa droppedPublished on: 11/29/06
Former President Jimmy Carter's new book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," is igniting controversy for its allegation that Israel practices a form of apartheid.
As a South African and former anti-apartheid advocate who visits the Palestinian territories regularly to assess the human rights situation for the U.N. Human Rights Council, the comparison to South African apartheid is of special interest to me.
 |
| John Dugard is a South African law professor teaching in the Netherlands. He is currently Special Rapporteur (reporter) on Palestine to the United Nations Human Rights Council. |
On the face of it, the two regimes are very different. Apartheid was a system of institutionalized racial discrimination that the white minority in South Africa employed to maintain power over the black majority. It was characterized by the denial of political rights to blacks, the fragmentation of the country into white areas and black areas (called Bantustans) and by the imposition on blacks of restrictive measures designed to achieve white superiority, racial separation and white security.
The "pass system," which sought to prevent the free movement of blacks and to restrict their entry to the cities, was rigorously enforced. Blacks were forcibly "relocated," and they were denied access to most public amenities and to many forms of employment. The system was enforced by a brutal security apparatus in which torture played a significant role.
The Palestinian territories — East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza — have been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. Although military occupation is tolerated and regulated by international law, it is considered an undesirable regime that should be ended as soon as possible. The United Nations for nearly 40 years has condemned Israel's military occupation, together with colonialism and apartheid, as contrary to the international public order.
In principle, the purpose of military occupation is different from that of apartheid. It is not designed as a long-term oppressive regime but as an interim measure that maintains law and order in a territory following an armed conflict and pending a peace settlement. But this is not the nature of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Since 1967 Israel has imposed its control over the Palestinian territories in the manner of a colonizing power, under the guise of occupation. It has permanently seized the territories' most desirable parts — the holy sites in East Jerusalem, Hebron and Bethlehem and the fertile agricultural lands along the western border and in the Jordan Valley — and settled its own Jewish "colonists" throughout the land.
Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories has many features of colonization. At the same time it has many of the worst characteristics of apartheid. The West Bank has been fragmented into three areas — north (Jenin and Nablus), center (Ramallah) and south (Hebron) — which increasingly resemble the Bantustans of South Africa.
Restrictions on freedom of movement imposed by a rigid permit system enforced by some 520 checkpoints and roadblocks resemble, but in severity go well beyond, apartheid's "pass system." And the security apparatus is reminiscent of that of apartheid, with more than 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons and frequent allegations of torture and cruel treatment.
Many aspects of Israel's occupation surpass those of the apartheid regime. Israel's large-scale destruction of Palestinian homes, leveling of agricultural lands, military incursions and targeted assassinations of Palestinians far exceed any similar practices in apartheid South Africa. No wall was ever built to separate blacks and whites.
Following the worldwide anti-apartheid movement, one might expect a similarly concerted international effort united in opposition to Israel's abhorrent treatment of the Palestinians. Instead one finds an international community divided between the West and the rest of the world. The Security Council is prevented from taking action because of the U.S. veto and European Union abstinence. And the United States and the European Union, acting in collusion with the United Nations and the Russian Federation, have in effect imposed economic sanctions on the Palestinian people for having, by democratic means, elected a government deemed unacceptable to Israel and the West. Forgotten is the commitment to putting an end to occupation, colonization and apartheid.
In these circumstances, the United States should not be surprised if the rest of the world begins to lose faith in its commitment to human rights. Some Americans — rightly — complain that other countries are unconcerned about Sudan's violence-torn Darfur region and similar situations in the world. But while the United States itself maintains a double standard with respect to Palestine it cannot expect cooperation from others in the struggle for human rights.
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2006/11/29/1129edcarter.html
Human Rights Watch Must Retract Its Shameful Press Release
updated Nov. 29, 2006 12:40pm
A comment by Norman G. Finkelstein
11.29.2006
Even by the grim standards of Gaza, the past five months have been cruel ones.
Some four hundred Palestinians, mostly unarmed civilians, have been killed during Israeli attacks. (Four Israeli soldiers and two civilians have been killed.) Israel has sealed off Gaza from the outside world while the international community has imposed brutal sanctions, ravaging Gaza's already impoverished economy.
"Gaza is dying," Patrick Cockburn reported in The Independent, "its people are on the edge of starvation….A whole society is being destroyed….The sound that Palestinians most dread is an unknown voice on their cell phone saying they have half an hour to leave their home before it is hit by bombs or missiles. There is no appeal."
"Gaza is in its worst condition ever," Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz. "The Israel Defense Forces has been rampaging through Gaza – there's no other word to describe it – killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately....This is disgraceful and shocking collective punishment."
Predictably Gaza teetered on the precipice of civil war. "The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other," Amira Hass wryly observed in Haaretz, "They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called ‘what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens.'"
It is at times like this that we expect human rights organizations to speak out.
How has Human Rights Watch responded to the challenge?
It criticized Israel for destroying Gaza's only electrical plant, and also called on Israel to "investigate" why its forces were targeting Palestinian medical personnel in Gaza and to "investigate" the Beit Hanoun massacre.
On the other hand, it accused Palestinians of committing a "war crime" after they captured an Israeli soldier and offered to exchange him for Palestinian women and children held in Israeli jails. (Israel was holding 10,000 Palestinians prisoner.) It demanded that Palestinians "bring an immediate end to the lawlessness and vigilante violence" in Gaza. (Compare Amira Hass's words.) It issued a 101-page report chastising the Palestinian Authority for failing to protect women and girls. It called on the Palestinian Authority to take "immediate steps to halt" Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel.
Were this record not shameful enough, HRW crossed a new threshold at the end of November.
After Palestinians spontaneously responded to that "unknown voice on a cell phone" by putting their own bare bodies in harm's way, HRW rushed to issue a press release warning that Palestinians might be committing a "war crime" and might be guilty of "human shielding." ("Civilians Must Not Be Used to Shield Homes Against Military Attacks")
In what must surely be the most shocking statement ever issued by a human rights organization, HRW indicted Palestinian leaders for supporting this nonviolent civil disobedience:
Is it a war crime to protect one's home from collective punishment?
Is it human shielding if a desperate and forsaken populace chooses to put itself at deadly risk in order to preserve the last shred of its existence?
Indeed, although Israeli soldiers have frequently used Palestinians as human shields in life-threatening situations, and although HRW has itself documented this egregious Israeli practice, HRW has never once called it a war crime.
It took weeks before HRW finally issued a report condemning Israeli war crimes in Lebanon. Although many reliable journalists were daily documenting these crimes, HRW said it first had to conduct an independent investigation of its own.
But HRW hastened to deplore the nonviolent protests in Gaza based on anonymous press reports which apparently got crucial facts wrong.
Why this headlong rush to judgment?
Was HRW seeking to appease pro-Israel critics after taking the heat for its report documenting Israeli war crimes in Lebanon?
After Martin Luther King delivered his famous speech in 1967 denouncing the war in Vietnam, mainstream Black leaders rebuked him for jeopardizing the financial support of liberal whites. "You might get yourself a foundation grant," King retorted, "but you won't get yourself into the Kingdom of Truth."
HRW now also stands poised at a crossroads: foundation grants or the Kingdom of Truth?
A first step in the right direction would be for it to issue a retraction of its press release and an apology.
HRW executive director Kenneth Roth "commended" Israel during its last invasion for warning people in south Lebanon to flee - before turning it into a moonscape, slaughtering the old, infirm and poor left behind. It would seem that Palestinian leaders and people, too, merit some recognition for embracing the tactics of Gandhi and King in a last desperate bid to save themselves from annihilation.
(Many HRW staffers have reportedly been appalled by the press release. Your letter of protest can make a difference. Email HRW Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson: whitsos@hrw.org - and HRW executive director Kenneth Roth--RothK@hrw.org.)
NEW: Reader letters
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=705
A comment by Norman G. Finkelstein
11.29.2006
Even by the grim standards of Gaza, the past five months have been cruel ones.
Some four hundred Palestinians, mostly unarmed civilians, have been killed during Israeli attacks. (Four Israeli soldiers and two civilians have been killed.) Israel has sealed off Gaza from the outside world while the international community has imposed brutal sanctions, ravaging Gaza's already impoverished economy.
"Gaza is dying," Patrick Cockburn reported in The Independent, "its people are on the edge of starvation….A whole society is being destroyed….The sound that Palestinians most dread is an unknown voice on their cell phone saying they have half an hour to leave their home before it is hit by bombs or missiles. There is no appeal."
"Gaza is in its worst condition ever," Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz. "The Israel Defense Forces has been rampaging through Gaza – there's no other word to describe it – killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately....This is disgraceful and shocking collective punishment."
Predictably Gaza teetered on the precipice of civil war. "The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other," Amira Hass wryly observed in Haaretz, "They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called ‘what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens.'"
It is at times like this that we expect human rights organizations to speak out.
How has Human Rights Watch responded to the challenge?
It criticized Israel for destroying Gaza's only electrical plant, and also called on Israel to "investigate" why its forces were targeting Palestinian medical personnel in Gaza and to "investigate" the Beit Hanoun massacre.
On the other hand, it accused Palestinians of committing a "war crime" after they captured an Israeli soldier and offered to exchange him for Palestinian women and children held in Israeli jails. (Israel was holding 10,000 Palestinians prisoner.) It demanded that Palestinians "bring an immediate end to the lawlessness and vigilante violence" in Gaza. (Compare Amira Hass's words.) It issued a 101-page report chastising the Palestinian Authority for failing to protect women and girls. It called on the Palestinian Authority to take "immediate steps to halt" Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel.
Were this record not shameful enough, HRW crossed a new threshold at the end of November.
After Palestinians spontaneously responded to that "unknown voice on a cell phone" by putting their own bare bodies in harm's way, HRW rushed to issue a press release warning that Palestinians might be committing a "war crime" and might be guilty of "human shielding." ("Civilians Must Not Be Used to Shield Homes Against Military Attacks")
In what must surely be the most shocking statement ever issued by a human rights organization, HRW indicted Palestinian leaders for supporting this nonviolent civil disobedience:
Prime Minister Haniyeh and other Palestinian leaders should be renouncing, not embracing, the tactic of encouraging civilians to place themselves at risk.
The international community has for decades implored Palestinian leaders to forsake armed struggle in favor of nonviolent civil disobedience. Why is a human rights organization now attacking them for adopting this tactic?Is it a war crime to protect one's home from collective punishment?
Is it human shielding if a desperate and forsaken populace chooses to put itself at deadly risk in order to preserve the last shred of its existence?
Indeed, although Israeli soldiers have frequently used Palestinians as human shields in life-threatening situations, and although HRW has itself documented this egregious Israeli practice, HRW has never once called it a war crime.
It took weeks before HRW finally issued a report condemning Israeli war crimes in Lebanon. Although many reliable journalists were daily documenting these crimes, HRW said it first had to conduct an independent investigation of its own.
But HRW hastened to deplore the nonviolent protests in Gaza based on anonymous press reports which apparently got crucial facts wrong.
Why this headlong rush to judgment?
Was HRW seeking to appease pro-Israel critics after taking the heat for its report documenting Israeli war crimes in Lebanon?
After Martin Luther King delivered his famous speech in 1967 denouncing the war in Vietnam, mainstream Black leaders rebuked him for jeopardizing the financial support of liberal whites. "You might get yourself a foundation grant," King retorted, "but you won't get yourself into the Kingdom of Truth."
HRW now also stands poised at a crossroads: foundation grants or the Kingdom of Truth?
A first step in the right direction would be for it to issue a retraction of its press release and an apology.
HRW executive director Kenneth Roth "commended" Israel during its last invasion for warning people in south Lebanon to flee - before turning it into a moonscape, slaughtering the old, infirm and poor left behind. It would seem that Palestinian leaders and people, too, merit some recognition for embracing the tactics of Gandhi and King in a last desperate bid to save themselves from annihilation.
(Many HRW staffers have reportedly been appalled by the press release. Your letter of protest can make a difference. Email HRW Middle East director Sarah Leah Whitson: whitsos@hrw.org - and HRW executive director Kenneth Roth--RothK@hrw.org.)
NEW: Reader letters
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=705
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