Just Foreign Policy News
March 2, 2010
Support the work of Just Foreign Policy:
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/donate.html
Help Kucinich Use War Powers Act to Force Afghanistan Debate
This week, Representative Kucinich plans to introduce a privileged resolution invoking the War Powers Act to force the President to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan this year. Because it will be a privileged resolution, Congress will be forced to debate the issue of the open-ended U.S. war in and occupation of Afghanistan. Ask your Representative to become an original co-sponsor of Representative Kucinich’s resolution.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/kucinich
NYT video: The Lost Children of Haiti
Even before the earthquake, one "option" for Port-au-Prince’s homeless children was "Restavek," an underground system that some call foster care, and others call child slavery. Now their numbers swell.
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2010/02/25/world/americas/1247467176636/the-lost-children-of-haiti.html
Beverly Bell: A Future for Agriculture, A Future for Haiti
What would it take for hunger to no longer be the norm in Haiti, for the country no longer to depend on imports and hand-outs? According to Haitian peasant organizations, at the core of the solutions is a commitment on the part of the government to support family agriculture. Haiti is the only country in the hemisphere which is still majority rural, yet because of U.S. agricultural dumping and low tariffs pushed by the US and international financial institutions, food imports constitute 57% of what Haitians consume.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/02-8
Is the Afghanistan War Coming to a Primary Near You?
Send press clips like #2 below, documenting debate over the Afghanistan war in the 2010 primary cycle, to naiman@justforeignpolicy.org.
Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) Congress is expected to start considering in mid-April President Barack Obama’s $33 billion request for supplemental war funding to fund the buildup of troops in Afghanistan, Defense Daily reports. The House Appropriations Committee (HAC) is expected to kick off consideration of the measure with a markup session on or around April 15.
2) Connecticut Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Merrick Alpert challenged Richard Blumenthal over his support for the war in Afghanistan in their first televised debate, CTNewsJunkie reports. Blumenthal said he supports Obama’s decision to increase troop levels. Alpert came out strongly against the war, saying it’s not in "our national security interests." He said he rather spend the estimated $4 billion a month in the United States, rather than spending it on a corrupt Afghani government. Blumenthal tried to paint his opponent as someone who doesn’t support the troops; Alpert is a former Air Force Officer.
3) Secretary of State Clinton urged Argentina and Great Britain to work toward a peaceful resolution to their claims for control of the Falkland Islands, the New York Times reports. She encouraged the countries to negotiate and offered to "facilitate" those talks if asked. [Argentina has called for talks while Britain has refused them, so Clinton’s intervention buttressed Argentina’s demand for talks – JFP.]
4) Analysts said that the addition of Argentina to Clinton’s itinerary was a form of damage control, after she was faulted for excluding from her trip countries critical of US policy, the Washington Times reports. Argentina’s President Fernandez said last week that "there were huge hopes for change in Latin America" when Obama took office, but the reality has been a "hard blow on those expectations."
5) The UN has given up on the idea that everyone in Haiti who needs a tent will get one, Radio Netherlands reports. The UN says sheets of canvas are better. But there are nowhere near enough sheets of blue canvas to supply everyone either.
6) Some critics of U.S. trade policy are slamming a move by the Obama Administration to shut down the International Labor Comparisons office in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which publishes data that allow researchers to compare unemployment, wages, and productivity between countries, the Washington Post reports. The unit’s data, they argue, show just how harsh globalization is for the American worker, a reality that may be inconvenient for an administration generally more trade-oriented than the populist rhetoric of Obama’s campaign suggested. "The type of documentation [the unit] is putting out could be detrimental to their efforts" on trade, said John Russo of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University.
Iran
7) Secretary of State Clinton said it could take months for new UN sanctions against Iran, appearing to back away from her contention before the US Senate last week that a new resolution could be obtained in the "next 30 to 60 days," AFP reports.
8) During the Cold War, the US had the ability to land huge military forces anywhere in the world, at any time, whether invited in or not, writes David Wood in Politics Daily. But now the party’s over. The US, Pentagon strategists say, is quickly losing its ability to barge in without permission. China and Iran are working to create ‘no-go’ zones in the maritime areas off their coasts,
Turkey
9) The military in Turkey has been politically defanged and proved unable or unwilling to fight back, the New York Times reports. Dozens of officers were detained last week, and several senior ones were arrested. Top military leaders met and managed to produce only a brief statement, never mind a coup. "What came out of that?" said a professor of international relations at Ankara University. "A big nothing. This is finished. Turkey has crossed the border."
Afghanistan
10) Afghanistan on Monday announced a ban on news coverage showing Taliban attacks, Reuters reports. "Live coverage does not benefit the government, but benefits the enemies of Afghanistan," a government spokesman said. The move was denounced by Afghan journalism and rights groups.
11) The U.S. military is acknowledging that the war in Afghanistan is more against a Pashtun tribal insurgency than against an offshoot of al-Qaeda, writes Afzal Khan in the Baltimore Sun. But the US military campaign is still doomed. America cannot win the hearts and minds of the Pashtuns at the point of the gun.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Hill To Weigh War Supplemental Next Month
Hill To Weigh War Supplemental Next Month
Emelie Rutherford, Defense Daily, March 2, 2010
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/499
Congress is expected to start considering in mid-April President Barack Obama’s $33 billion request for supplemental war funding for the current fiscal year, which is expected to be approved without any major skirmishes. Though Obama pledged to end the Bush administration practice of funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through such emergency appropriations bills, he has requested the $33 billion FY ’10 supplemental to fund a buildup of troops in Afghanistan.
The House Appropriations Committee (HAC) is expected to kick off consideration of the measure with a markup session on or around April 15. That date falls on the week after a two-week congressional recess set to begin on March 27. Until then, the congressional defense committees will continue to be enmeshed in hearings on the Pentagon’s request for a $548.9 billion base budget and $159.3 billion in war funding for FY ’11, which begins Oct. 1. Senate appropriators are also expected to take up the FY ’10 supplemental soon after the congressional recess.
[…] Some lawmakers, including Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), have objected to the practice of funding the war through off-the-books emergency supplemental appropriations. And some liberal politicians have raised concerns about the $33 billion FY ’10 supplemental because they oppose the troop surge in Afghanistan. Still, lawmakers and aides widely say they expect the FY ’10 supplemental to pass Congress with ease.
Army Secretary John McHugh said his service can fund the wars through the end of June or beginning of July, at which point it will need the supplemental funding for the remainder of FY ’10.
[…]
2) Alpert Goes On Offensive, Makes Most of First Debate
Christine Stuart, CTNewsJunkie (Connecticut), Mar 1, 2010
http://www.ctnewsjunkie.com/ctnj.php/archives/entry/alpert_goes_on_offensive_makes_most_of_first_debate/
Longshot U.S. Senate candidate Merrick Alpert came out swinging Monday and at least appeared to have had frontrunner Attorney General Richard Blumenthal on the ropes during their first televised debate.
[…] The hour-long exchange between Democratic U.S. Senate candidates Alpert and Blumenthal took place Monday evening at a half-full theater on the University of Hartford campus.
[…] On the war in Afghanistan, Blumenthal said he wasn’t sure he’d be able to answer the question in two minutes because of the complexity of the issue. He said he supports President Barack Obama’s decision to increase the U.S. troop levels there, then draw them down again in 18 months. He then talked about how he’s attended every National Guard send-off and homecoming in the state.
Alpert came out strongly against the war, saying it’s not in "our national security interests." He said he rather spend the estimated $4 billion a month in the United States, rather than spending it on a corrupt Afghani government.
"I rely on the judgment of our military commanders on the ground," Blumenthal said. "I believe this surge is necessary." Pulling out now would leave the military that’s still there exposed, he said. Toward the end of the debate during a question about the Bush tax cuts, Blumenthal tried to paint his opponent as someone who doesn’t support the troops. Alpert, a former Air Force Officer took such exception to the remark that he interrupted Blumenthal briefly to deny it.
On U.S. policy with Cuba, Blumenthal said the U.S. should move to "normalize relations with Cuba," and once the Castros are gone, help the Cubans establish a more Democratic form of government. He then said he listens to the people of Connecticut and would talk to the Cubans to find out what they want for their country.
Alpert responded by saying Cubans find it abhorrent that the U.S. continues to block aid to their country. He said the policy has been an abysmal failure. "It’s shameful we continue this silliness," Alpert said.
"I believe strongly we will normalize relations to the benefit of both countries," Blumenthal said. "The question is how to get there, working step-by-step."
"Why wait," Alpert asked. "Are you afraid they’ll like us?"
[…]
3) Clinton Urges Talks on the Falkland Islands
Ginger Thompson, New York Times, March 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/world/americas/02clinton.html
Buenos Aires, Argentina – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday urged Argentina and Great Britain to work toward a peaceful resolution to their long-held claims for control of the Falkland Islands, a dispute that resurfaced recently when British oil companies began exploratory drilling in waters near the islands. Mrs. Clinton’s comments came on the first day of a five-day tour of Latin America.
[…] Mrs. Clinton traveled here to Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, on Monday afternoon for meetings with President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, another former first lady who went on to accomplish Mrs. Clinton’s dream of following her husband as president. In recent months, Mrs. Kirchner has been an outspoken critic of the Obama Administration, saying that she and other Latin American leaders had been disappointed by the United States’ positions on trade, climate change and the coup in Honduras last year.
The competing claims to the Falkland Islands have become a source of new tensions, as Latin American countries press the United States to support Argentina while the United States remains determined to stay out of the fight.
During a news conference in Uruguay Mrs. Clinton reiterated the United States’ long-standing position of neutrality in the dispute between Argentina and Great Britain, which drove those two countries to war in 1982.
She encouraged the two countries to negotiate and offered to "facilitate" those talks if asked. But later, Mrs. Clinton clarified those comments, saying that the United States would offer moral support to negotiations, but she also made clear she was not offering to serve as a mediator.
"What we want to do is to facilitate them talking to each other," she said. "We’re not interested and have no real role in determining what they decide between the two of them. But we want them talking and we want them trying to resolve the outstanding issues between them."
[…]
4) Clinton faces critical hosts in Latin America
Nicholas Kralev, Washington Times, March 2, 2010
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/02/hillary-clinton-faces-critical-hosts-latin-america/
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton added a last-minute stop in Argentina on Monday as part of her Latin American tour this week, amid complaints that she was ignoring countries critical of U.S. policies in the region.
The State Department attributed the change to the difficulty of spending the night in Chile, as originally planned, because of the extensive damage caused by Saturday’s 8.8 magnitude earthquake there. Mrs. Clinton, who is bringing satellite telephone equipment to Chile, will make a brief stop in the capital, Santiago, Tuesday morning.
However, diplomats and analysts said, the choice of Argentina was no accident – but not only because of its proximity to Uruguay, where Mrs. Clinton was earlier in the day. Her initial decision to skip Argentina, which was fiercely defended by the Obama administration’s top official for Latin America on Friday, was criticized by Argentine and other officials.
"This is about damage control," said Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank. "And not only in Argentina but in the entire region. People are disappointed that Obama hasn’t paid as much attention to them as he promised and has continued [George W.] Bush’s policies."
One of the administration’s more outspoken critics has been Argentine President Christina Fernandez de Kirchner, who met with Mrs. Clinton on Monday night. Last week, Mrs. Fernandez said "there were huge hopes for change in Latin America" when Mr. Obama took office, but the reality has been a "hard blow on those expectations."
"No one expected a prince on a white horse, but there is a sense of missed opportunities," she said in an interview with CNN.
Mrs. Fernandez also criticized Mr. Obama’s "weak" response to last year’s coup in Honduras, which ousted President Manuel Zelaya. Although the administration opposed the coup, the fact that the initial White House statement failed to condemn it was badly received in the region, Mr. Weisbrot said. Washington also supported Honduras’ November elections, which Buenos Aires opposed, saying they were held under a dictatorship.
[…] Mr. Bush was unpopular in most of Latin America, and many countries repeatedly complained that the United States was not treating them as equals during his presidency. As a candidate, Mr. Obama promised to change that. "We want to have a whole new tone," Arturo Valenzuela, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, said in December. "We want to re-engage with the hemisphere on the basis of mutual respect, of working together to solve common problems, where the United States is being a partner. We want to be able to listen."
However, just days later, the Argentine government and media slammed Mr. Valenzuela for criticizing the country’s judicial system during a visit to Buenos Aires as not being secure enough to attract more foreign investors. Mrs. Clinton will have to repair the damage done by those comments, Mr. Weisbrot said.
Argentine officials and media have also been critical of Washington’s refusal to back the country in its dispute with Britain over the Falkland Islands in the southern Atlantic. Argentina has objected to a British company’s oil exploration in the Falklands, which was the reason for a 1982 war between the two countries won by Britain. On Monday, Mrs. Clinton said the United States stood ready to help them resolve their dispute but will not take sides.
[…]
5) Tents, canvas or a jail cell as rain falls in Haiti
Hans Jaap Melissen, Radio Netherlands, 2 March 2010
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/tents-canvas-or-a-jail-cell-rain-falls-haiti
Too few tents and too much rain, even though the rainy season has yet to begin in earnest. In Haiti there are still major problems providing aid to the people made homeless by the earthquake of 12 January. Many people are soaked to the skin when it rains. Those lucky enough to have a tent often do not know where to pitch it in the overcrowded capital Port-au-Prince.
"Maybe you can find one tent? It would be so good. Maybe one?", asks a young man living in the street in Port-au-Prince. He has stretched some lengths of cloth between a tree and a car in which other people are sleeping. A little further along, other more fortunate souls do have a tent, which they have mounted on a self-made platform around thirty centimetres high so that the rain water can run under it. The rain has been falling with increasing frequency in recent weeks, especially at night.
Around 50 days after Haiti’s earthquake disaster, many people are still without a tent. And the United Nations has abandoned the idea that everyone will get one. The UN says sheets of canvas are better: they are harder wearing and take up less space. "I think the simple truth is that there are not 200,000 tents in the world that are ready to go," admits a UN spokesman. "These things need to be produced." But there are nowhere near enough sheets of blue canvas to supply everyone either.
In the meantime, an increasing number of arguments are being heard against setting up tent camps on a large scale. It is seen as being better for people to return to their own neighbourhoods and to set up their tents or huts there. "But first the rubble needs to be cleared," says one resident of a tent camp that has been established on a golf course in the hills of the capital, once the exclusive preserve of the wealthier Haitians. "If we have people to accommodate us, we can move somewhere else. But until then we just stay here."
For the time being, the tent camps are the preferred abode of many inhabitants, explains Niek de Goeij of the Catholic Relief Services. During the showers it becomes very clear who still has a roof over their head. "You see many people return home when it starts to rain. Those people are living in the tent camps out of fear. They are worried that their homes might not be structurally sound. Besides, in the camps they also receive support in the form of food, water and sanitation."
The indignation at the lack of tents is starting to increase. The anger sometimes reaches such a pitch that the police are forced to intervene. Once such incident occurred in Petit-Goâve, a town west of the capital. A woman who lost her two daughters in the earthquake is sitting in a prison cell. Gripping the bars with both hands, she tells her story. "I was in a tent, but the local authority decided I wasn’t entitled to one. When they tried to take it away from me, I shouted and cursed at the police commissioner."
[…]
6) Controversy over Obama’s plan to close International Labor Comparisons office
Alec MacGillis, Washington Post, Tuesday, March 2, 2010; 12:11 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/02/AR2010030201568.html
Like a scorekeeper for the world, a tiny unit within the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks globalization’s winners and losers, and the results are not always pretty for the United States. Manufacturing jobs here, for example, have fallen faster since 1979 than in Canada, Germany or Japan. Compensation for those jobs dropped here in 2008 but jumped in South Korea and Australia. Soon, however, Americans may be spared the demoralization in these numbers: The White House wants to shutter the unit that produces them.
President Obama’s budget would eliminate the International Labor Comparisons office and transfer its 16 economists to expand the bureau’s work tracking inflation and occupational trends. The White House says the cut, estimated to save $2 million, is one of many difficult decisions the president was forced to make to control spending.
[…] The defenders argue that, given the need to succeed in a global economy, it makes little sense to shut down the office that measures how the country stacks up. There are other sources of foreign data, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the International Labor Organization, but none does as much as the BLS unit to vet and adjust numbers for apple-to-apple comparisons on productivity, unemployment and wage levels, supporters say.
[…] The biggest challenge was China, where reliable statistics are particularly hard to come by. But in 2004, the office contracted with Judith Banister, a former Census Bureau demographer then living in Beijing, who dug up statistical books in local bookstores that helped produce solid data on the Chinese economy. The unit added Brazil to the mix, and in the near future it plans to release its first reports on India. Banister, a freelance researcher, said U.S. manufacturers need to know what they are up against overseas – and, in some cases, whether to move work offshore.
Skeptics of free-trade policies criticize the closure for other reasons – the unit’s data, they argue, show just how harsh globalization is for the American worker, a reality that may be inconvenient for an administration generally more trade-oriented than the populist rhetoric of Obama’s campaign suggested. They question if the unit is being closed solely for the budget savings, noting that $2 million is a relative pittance, less than 1 percent of the BLS budget. "The type of documentation [the unit] is putting out could be detrimental to their efforts" on trade, said John Russo of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University.
[…] The budget proposal says the unit’s statistics are "not widely used." But supporters point out that the unit’s Web site got 1.5 million page views in 2009 – about 4,000 a day. Congress could yet decide to retain the program. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), for one, is concerned about the closure, said his spokeswoman Meghan Dubyak. "He plans on working with the administration and [congressional] leadership to ensure that we still have data to address offshoring and competitiveness issues," she said.
[…]
Iran
7) Clinton appears to extend timeline for Iran sanctions
Lachlan Carmichael, AFP, March 2, 2010
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hiQjABaVFkUQC1-FDU-YPTmjd5Jw
Buenos Aires – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Monday it could take months for new UN sanctions against Iran, as she prepared for talks in Argentina and Brazil about the perceived Iranian nuclear threat. Speaking on the plane to Buenos Aires, the chief US diplomat appeared to back away from her contention before the US Senate last week that a new resolution could be obtained in the "next 30 to 60 days."
"We are moving expeditiously and thoroughly in the Security Council. I can’t give you an exact date, but I would assume sometime in the next several months," she said before landing in the Argentine capital.
[…]
8) China, Iran Creating ‘No-Go’ Zones To Thwart U.S. Military Power
David Wood, Politics Daily, 03/1/10
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/03/01/china-iran-creating-no-go-zones-to-thwart-u-s-military-power/
During the Cold War, the Pentagon built the greatest naval and air forces the world had ever seen, endowing the United States with the superpower ability to land huge military forces anywhere in the world, at any time, whether invited in or not.
[…] But now the party’s over. The United States, Pentagon strategists say, is quickly losing its ability to barge in without permission. Potential target countries and even some lukewarm allies are figuring out ingenious ways to blunt American power without trying to meet it head-on, using a combination of high-tech and low-tech jujitsu.
[…] As Defense Secretary Robert Gates summed up the problem this month, countries in places where the United States has strategic interests – including the Persian Gulf and the Pacific – are building "sophisticated, new technologies to deny our forces access to the global commons of sea, air, space and cyberspace."
Those innocuous words spell trouble. While the U.S. military and strategy community is focused on Afghanistan and the fight in Marja, others – Iran and China, to name two – are chipping away at America’s access to the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, the Persian Gulf and the increasingly critical extraterrestrial realms.
"This era of U.S. military dominance is waning at an increasing and alarming rate," Andrew Krepinevich, a West Point-educated officer and former senior Pentagon strategist, writes in a new report. "With the spread of advanced military technologies and their exploitation by other militaries, especially China’s People’s Liberation Army and to a far lesser extent Iran’s military and Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the U.S. military’s ability to preserve military access to two key areas of vital interest, the western Pacific and the Persian Gulf, is being increasingly challenged."
At present, "there is little indication that China or Iran intend to alter their efforts to create ‘no-go’ zones in the maritime areas off their coasts," writes Krepinevich, president of the non-partisan think tank, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
[…] Iran’s area-denial arsenal includes coastal and inland missile batteries, ballistic missiles to threaten U.S. bases and Arabian oil facilities, mines and shallow-draft missile boats that can quickly swarm around heavy, slow-moving U.S. warships. Iran’s ability to threaten any would-be invaders, or simply to shut off access to the Gulf, would be enhanced if it acquires a nuclear weapons capability, which some analysts believe could happen within President Obama’s current term in office.
[…]
Turkey
9) Army Ebbs, And Power Realigns In Turkey
Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, March 1, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/world/europe/02turkey.html
Istanbul – The detention of top military officers in Turkey last week was nothing less than a quiet piece of history. The military, long considered untouchable in Turkey, was pushed from its political pedestal with startling finality.
[…] Not only has the military been politically defanged, but it has also proved unable or unwilling to fight back. Dozens of officers were detained last week, and several senior ones were arrested. Top military leaders met and managed to produce only a brief statement, never mind a coup. "What came out of that?" said Baskin Oran, a professor of international relations at Ankara University. "A big nothing. This is finished. Turkey has crossed the border."
[…] Last week’s detentions and arrests capped a month of high political drama that began in January, when a small independent newspaper, Taraf, published what it said were military documents from a 2003 meeting describing preparations for a coup. The documents were brought in a suitcase, Taraf’s editors said, and included diagrams of two Istanbul mosques that were to have been bombed, creating an emergency that would justify a military takeover.
The military acknowledged that a meeting had taken place, but said that it was focused only on external threats. The army chief vehemently denied plans for bombings or a coup.
Even so, on Monday of last week, the Turkish authorities began detaining military officers and by the end of the week had more than 60 in custody, including two top retired generals. "Now the army is completely pacified, eliminated as a power from the political scene," said E. Haldun Solmazturk, a retired general. "Now the military is touchable."
That is a profound historical change. Modern Turkey was founded in 1923 by an army general, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who imposed radical changes in language and habits on a largely illiterate, agrarian society. The military, together with the judiciary and state bureaucracy, wielded immense power, guarding Turkish democracy "as if the country was a perpetually immature child," said Halil Berktay, a history professor at Sabanci University in Istanbul. "The military came to acquire a sense of, ‘this is our land, this is our Republic,’ " he said. It deposed elected governments four times, most recently in 1997.
That role began to change with the rise of Mr. Erdogan, a tough-talking Istanbul mayor representing a rising underclass of religious Turks. He was a confounding mix, from a background of political Islam, but with an agenda of bringing Turkey into the European Union, where his supporters did most of their business.
Although he was despised by the secular establishment, his party, Justice and Development, won a national election in a landslide in 2007. The election vastly diminished the military’s role in politics, but that was changing anyway. None of the alleged coup plots cited by prosecutors ever came to pass because the top leadership stopped them.
And the fact that the military has not responded to the arrests – which include a sprawling legal proceeding against 200 people that began in 2007 – reflects a leadership that is opposed to intervention. The current chief of the army, Gen. Ilker Basbug, has spoken out against military meddling and is believed to have had good relations with Mr. Erdogan.
[…] Even those who are happy to see Mr. Erdogan prevail say he is a flawed leader with autocratic tendencies. His biggest critic, Aydin Dogan, a businessman and publisher, was slapped with a giant fine last year, and journalists who work for his newspapers say spunky criticism is dead.
[Soli Ozel, professor of political science at Bilgi University] described Mr. Erdogan’s party as "a democratizing force, but not necessarily a democratic one."
Yildiray Ogur, an editor at Taraf who worked on the exposé that led to last week’s arrests, defended the legal cases, saying today’s Turkey was a slow-motion version of the Soviet Union in 1991, when idols fell and people came out of the woodwork confessing secrets.
For better or worse, Mr. Ozel says, former Islamists like Mr. Erdogan are the only ones engaged in the project of creating a new Turkey, with the secularist party "either incapable or unwilling to be part of the process," routinely blocking legislation required for European Union membership. But Mr. Sener fears this new Turkey will exclude people like him. "They say this is about democracy, but it ends up increasing their hold on power," he said.
Mr. Oran of Ankara University dismisses those fears. Borrowing a thought from Marx, he noted that Mr. Erdogan’s supporters, once Islamist and working class, had grown comfortable, sowing the seeds of the party’s transformation. "It has become bourgeois," Mr. Oran said. "They will always be Muslims, but they won’t be Islamists."
Afghanistan
10) Afghanistan bans coverage of Taliban attacks
Sayed Salahuddin and Hamid Shalizi, Reuters, Tuesday, March 2, 2010; 4:40 AM http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/02/AR2010030200382.html
Kabul – Afghanistan on Monday announced a ban on news coverage showing Taliban attacks, saying such images embolden the Islamist militants, who have launched strikes around the country as NATO forces seize their southern strongholds. The announcement came on a day when the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) fighting the Taliban reported six of its service members had been killed in various attacks.
Journalists will be allowed to film only the aftermath of attacks, when given permission by the National Directorate of Security (NDS) spy agency, the agency said. Journalists who film while attacks are under way will be held and their gear seized. "Live coverage does not benefit the government, but benefits the enemies of Afghanistan," NDS spokesman Saeed Ansari said. The agency summoned a group of reporters to announce the ban.
The move was denounced by Afghan journalism and rights groups, which said it would deprive the public of vital information about the security situation during attacks. "Such a decision prevents the public from receiving accurate information on any occurrence," said Abdul Hameed Mubarez head of the Afghan National Media Union, a group set up to protect Afghan journalists, who often complain of harassment by authorities.
"The government should not hide their inabilities by barring media from covering incidents," said Laila Noori, who monitors media issues for Afghanistan Rights Monitor, the country’s main liberties watchdog. "People want to know all the facts on the ground whenever security incidents take place."
The Afghan government banned reporting violence for a single day during a presidential election last year, but otherwise had not had formal restrictions on filming security incidents. However, journalists have occasionally been beaten by security forces while filming at the scene of incidents in the past.
[…]
11) In Afghanistan, U.S. Is Fighting Tribal Insurgency, Not Jihad
Afzal Khan, Baltimore Sun, March 2, 2010
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.pashtun02mar02,0,7495549.story
[Khan was an editor with the U.S. Information Agency and Jane’s of London, and an analyst with West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center. He is now writing a book on the Pashtuns.]
Finally, after eight years, the U.S. military in Afghanistan is acknowledging the fact that the war there is more against a Pashtun tribal insurgency than against an offshoot of al-Qaeda. In support of this belated realization, there is now evidence of military funding for several research projects aimed at understanding the culture of the Pashtun tribes and what is needed to win them over.
The success, however, of this changed perception will rest on the Obama administration’s flexibility to accept the historical reality that the concept of jihad among Pashtuns, which is fueling this insurgency, is closely tied to external interventions. The U.S. intervention after Sept. 11 is the casus belli for the Pashtun uprising, not a global jihad agaisnt the West.
After centuries of invasions by nomadic Central Asian tribes and the armies of Persian kings and Alexander the Great, rival Pashtun tribes united around the tenets of the Pashtunwali code that governed their independence, and later by the concept of jihad in Islamic times. The Pashtun tribes only converted to Islam in the 10th century, more than 300 years after Islam was founded in Arabia, and they have traditionally followed a nonorthodox Sufi version of the religion.
The U.S. dilemma in trying to win the war in Afghanistan – and in stanching the support of fellow Pashtuns from Pakistan’s tribal areas – arises from not only a failure to learn from history but also ignorance of Pashtunwali code that cherishes freedom from any foreign domination.
These blind spots in U.S. foreign policy have led to three giant missteps. They are:
– The cardinal sin of the invasion of the Pashtun-dominated government of Taliban Afghanistan as U.S. revenge for the Sept. 11 attacks. The Pashtuns saw this revenge as unjust because none of them were physically involved in those attacks. The hijackers were all Arabs. Their only sin was to offer sanctuary to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda cohort because of the tenets of their Pashtunwali code that enjoin protection to those seeking refuge (nanawati) and accompanying hospitality (melmastia).
While bin Laden may have bankrolled the Taliban regime under Mullah Omar, the narrative remains to this day among ordinary rural Pashtuns that the 2001 invasion was a breach of the tenets of their Pashtunwali code. As a result, this breach has generated another tenet of their Pashtunwali code – badal, or revenge – against those who have invaded their country.
– The imposition of a non-Pashtun Tajik-dominated minority government after Sept. 11 in a country that has historically be led by Pashtuns. The Pashtuns are a plurality of at least 45 percent of the population, and the Tajiks are no more than 25 percent. While President Hamid Karzai is a Pashtun, and there are several Soviet-era Pashtun mujahidin warlords in the government and parliament, the vast majority of rural Pashtuns despise them as quislings.
– The knee-jerk support by the United States (and its NATO allies) of this non-representative and corrupt Kabul government at the expense of the rural Pashtuns in eastern and southern Afghanistan. This support is creating an Afghan national army and police force composed of a majority of non-Pashtuns – mostly Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks – who are unwelcome in the Pashtun areas. As a result, the Taliban, who are Pashtuns, have taken over the governance there.
The Obama administration has to wake up to these realities. Its escalation of military might to solve the Afghan-Pakistan problem is doomed to failure. Also, the idea that economic aid can be thrust upon the rural Pashtuns with a foreign military presence will simply not work.
[…] It looks like America cannot win the hearts and minds of the Pashtuns at the point of the gun. The gun has to disappear first before any meaningful aid can be given to transform them from opponents to collaborators to build a viable society both in Afghanistan and the tribal borderland of northwest Pakistan.
–
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
Just Foreign Policy is a membership organization devoted to reforming US foreign policy so it reflects the values and interests of the majority of Americans.