US failure in Afghanistan

S P SETH

Now that the US-led Afghan operations are winding down substantially with about 13,000 troops still to remain in a largely advisory and training role, there is no doubt that the west has failed disastrously even after 13 years of high intensity warfare in a country where the enemy was anywhere and everywhere; but with nowhere near the military capability and weaponry wielded and used by the allied forces. It raises an important question, which is:  why is it that the US-led operations in Afghanistan failed so miserably? After the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US linked to the al Qaida organization in Afghanistan under the leadership of Osama bin Laden, the US launched the global war on terrorism with Afghanistan as its epicenter where al Qaeda was based under the protection of its Taliban regime. Not surprisingly, with the deployment of massive US military power the al Qaeda in Afghanistan was soon in disarray and retreat, and the Taliban leadership running for cover finally found a home of sorts in Pakistan. The US was able to install Hamid Karzai as the country’s president. The process was given some legitimacy through a constitution and follow up elections that returned Karzai, though the whole process was flawed and rigged by the Karzai administration. And this has continued to this day, though there is now a new president of the country.

From this flowed much of the country’s manifold problems. The new government appointed its own provincial and local administrative agencies and officials. And with so much money available from the central coffers filled by foreign ‘development’ funds, there was lot more scope for corruption at all levels from top to bottom. With new government, new funds and new powers, there was lot of misuse in all sorts of ways to pursue old vendettas against tribal, regional and sectarian enemies, some of them ending up in Guantanamo Bay reported to the Americans by their local enemies as top notch terrorists. The corruption became so rife that some American contractors too became enmeshed, and the projects they and their local collaborators were entrusted with often remained either half-finished or simply vanished along with the funds allocated for them. In other words, it was a free for all and there was nothing much to show by way of real development benefitting the people.

And the beneficiary of this, in a perverse sort of way, were the Taliban not because they were popular, indeed their own administration was pretty horrific, but because the new order—rather disorder—was making them look not so bad. And they started to gain ground in some regions. The counter-insurgency operations against them were designed to achieve three objectives: protecting the population, improving governance and developing the country. In neither of these areas, there was any significant advance, thus facilitating or forcing local elements to either make peace with the Taliban, or be coopted into their game plan. In other words, even though the Taliban might have lain low for a while after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, they were never out. And this was greatly helped when its leadership was able to operate from across the border in Pakistan under the quiet patronage of the Pakistani military intelligence services, ISI.

It would appear, however, that Pakistan was not aware precisely of what was cooking in the al Qaeda pot just across the border in Afghanistan when the 9/11 happened. But after it happened Pakistan was sucked into the US anti-terror campaign, trying to strike a balance between maintaining ties with the Taliban leadership in its backyard and, at the same time, cooperating with the US and ending up as a vast base for US operations. Which brought it into conflict with the tribal leaders and jihadist elements operating from Waziristan. In the midst of all these currents and cross currents of rebel and terrorist activities there emerged the TTP and other associated militant groups lunging into some of the settled areas and almost succeeded in carving out, what looked like, a mini-Islamic state as a base for further incursions against the Pakistani state. Which led the army into large scale military operations successfully launched against these forces.

At the same time, the situation in North Waziristan was becoming increasingly worrisome, engaging the army into large-scale operations against such elements. In other words, Pakistan’s ambiguous, though quietly supportive relationship with the Taliban leadership in Pakistan hemmed it in with some confusion about its medium and long-term strategy. While it went after the TTP, it continued to support some other militant groups with much of the same Islamic agenda as the former. The upshot of it all has been that this has generally aided the Taliban in Afghanistan, with border crossings back and forth between Pakistan and Afghanistan and its top leadership sheltering in Pakistan. It must be said though that it has done immense harm to Pakistan by turning its body politic and society upside down. At the same time, it harmed the allied forces’ operations against the Taliban in Afghanistan, thus contributing to their failure in Afghanistan.

Another contributing factor for the US and NATO failure has been that many Afghans saw them as a foreign invading force, which Taliban played to the hilt in their propaganda. Adding to this was a lack of knowledge and understanding of the Afghan society by the US and NATO forces with its intricate mix of tribal traditions, sectarian and regional divide and so on. In the absence of such understanding and knowledge it was not surprising that they thought it their mission to impose western values and governance on a society that had its own code of honour, tribal hierarchy and no real tradition of governance from a central power structure, as with Karzai as the country’s president.

Therefore, there was an inbuilt contradiction between the western system the Afghans were offered and their own way of managing their affairs. And their experience of British invasion twice in the 19^th century was enshrined in the Afghan psyche as an example of foreign intervention, which in any case didn’t go well for the British. It should have been a salutary lesson for the US and NATO but they apparently ignored it, as part of their general lack of interest in Afghan history and tradition. And as they exit Afghanistan, keeping a presence of about 13,000 troops down from about 140,000 at the peak of the military operations, the prospects for Afghanistan do not look bright, to put it mildly. 

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au 

Israeli occupation: an Orwellian nightmare

S P SETH

Israel is in a class by itself. Its actions, however grotesque and devoid of basic humanity, do not seem to evoke enough international outrage. It was, therefore, not surprising that the proposed bill, recently approved by the cabinet, to designate Israel as the “nation state” of the Jewish people didn’t evoke much critical response internationally. The proposed bill, when passed, will reduce the country’s about 2 million Arab citizens living in Israel proper into second-class citizens, having to prove their loyalty time and again to the Jewish state. Apart from other things, this is clearly in contravention of the Israeli boast that it is the only democratic state in the Middle East. Israeli minorities are already in effect second-class citizens. But the proposed bill would have the effect, more of less, of formalizing their second-class status in law. For instance, its provisions such as the elimination of Arabic as an official language, and to make Jewish religious law to take precedence, might turn it into a virtual theocracy.

This is part of a continuing process of making irreversible the exclusionary character of an expanding Jewish state, with its creeping annexation of West Bank and East Jerusalem, with Gaza Strip as its outer enclave subject to periodic raids and blockade. Indeed, Israel’ new President Reuven (Ruvi) Rivlin doesn’t have any time and patience for those who advocate a Palestinian state. According to David Remnick of the New Yorker, “ [the new President] is ardently opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state. He is instead a proponent of Greater Israel, one Jewish state from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean Sea.” And: “He professes to be mystified that anyone should object to the continued construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.” Ruvi’s view is that: “It can’t be ‘occupied territory’ if the land is your own.”

With such views at the highest level of the Israeli government, and this includes Prime Minister Netanyahu though he might not now openly expound or support Greater Israel, the tragedy of the Palestinian people condemned to Israeli occupation and all that follows from it, appears to be never-ending. It is, therefore, odd that President Ruvi simultaneously supports the civil rights of the Palestinians, as portrayed in Remnick’s article, while dismissing the existence of their homeland.

It is this sort of self-righteousness that tends to elevate every Israeli act of violence as a morally defensive measure. For Instance, take the case of the recent killing by two Palestinian youth of five Jews in a Jerusalem synagogue and their subsequent death in shooting by Israeli security forces. The retribution for the Israelis killed in the synagogue attacks didn’t end with the two young killers shot dead on spot. Such punishment would need to be exemplary, in the Israeli view, and carry even greater deterrence by punishing their family and relatives by demolishing their homes. According to the Sydney Morning Herald correspondent, Ruth Pollard, who met the 70-year old father of the one of the young men who was shot on the spot, he had no clue that his son and his cousin would be involved in the killing of five Israelis in a synagogue. He said, “My son was not religious, he did not go to the mosque to pray-- I cannot believe my child would do such a thing.”

Having agonized and reflected over it for some days, Mohamed Abu Jamal, father of Ghassan, one of the killers at the synagogue, had an explanation of sorts which goes to the heart of all the violence and counter-violence which plagues Palestine. According to Abu Jamal, “When an external force [Israeli policy] exerts such pressure on a person and makes it impossible for him to live, to earn his daily bread, when you increase the psychological pressure on people, when you add the Gaza war and all those who we saw die, you can feel such despair.” He added, “All of this combined with his financial difficulties led to this moment... they [the Netanyahu government] forced him into a corner, he was suffocating.”

Continuing, the father said, “ Even now they are still pushing, they have yet to return the bodies of my son or his cousin. They cannot commit a crime when they are already dead, so why is the [Israeli] choosing to punish us?”, including ordering the demolition of our houses. While crying quietly, Abu Jamal says plaintively, “I believe in peace. I believe in a two-state solution for my people but I also believe in dignity for my people, and there is no dignity here.” This, in a nutshell, is the genesis of the Palestinian question.

But as David Shulman writes in the New York Review of Books, “One has to bear in mind that Israelis live in a largely mythic world… in which Israelis are by definition innocent victims of dark, irrational forces operating against them, heroic death in war always makes sense, and violent coercion is the option both of necessity and of choice.” And he quotes the Hebrew proverb that says, “If force doesn’t work, use more force.” Israel is a great practitioner of this precept, making any peaceful settlement of the Palestinian issue virtually impossible. We have seen the use of force time and again and more recently in Gaza on an industrial scale killing more than 2000 Palestinians and destroying its infrastructure, heaping even more misery on this Palestinian enclave that is already blockaded by Israel from all sides. The periodic bombing of Gaza is amusingly called the ‘mowing’ of grass, making death and destruction a routine but ‘necessary’ chore.

Such blatant violence on the Palestinians, including the death of a Palestinian cabinet minister in a peaceful protest, is only part of the story. A much more insidious exercise of control and coercion of the civilian population is revealed in a September 12 letter by a group of 43 officers and soldiers from Unit 8200, “the cream of Israeli intelligence”. In their letter to to the Israeli prime minister and the chief of staff, they said that they were refusing to serve and do the things that their conscience apparently doesn’t permit. They said, (as quoted by David Shulman in his article) “The Palestinian population under military rule is completely exposed to espionage and surveillance by Israeli intelligence… There’s no distinction between Palestinians who are, and are not, involved in violence. Information that is collected and stored harms innocent people. It is used for political persecution and to create divisions within Palestinian society by recruiting collaborators and driving parts of Palestinian society against itself…. “

It went on, “Intelligence [thus collected] allows for continued control over millions of people through thorough and intrusive supervision and invasion of most areas of life.”

In other words, all of Palestine is a vast jail that might have been envisioned by George Orwell. But, who cares: it is only Palestine and in any case, as Israel would say, ‘they are just terrorists’.

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au

Iran: will there be a nuclear deal?

S P SETH

The good news is that the November 20 deadline for working out a long-term nuclear deal between Iran and the 5-plus-1 powers that include the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (US, UK, France, China and Russia) and Germany has been extended for 7 months to June 30 next year. The bad news, though, is that there are still serious gaps between the two sides, with the US and other dialogue partners wanting to curb Iran’s nuclear capability to suddenly “breakout” into making an atomic bomb. How and weather these gaps will be bridged during the extended period will be a difficult, if not an improbable, exercise. The opening premise of the negotiations in which Iran is considered a culprit of sorts pursuing a nuclear weapons programme in contravention of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), is seriously challenged by Tehran. Iran maintains that its nuclear research and technology programme is for peaceful purposes as per the NPT charter. The one-year interim agreement signed last year, which virtually froze Iran’s nuclear programme , was a stopgap arrangement to curtail Iran’s nuclear capability until a long-term arrangement was worked out. In return, Iran was given, limited, relief from some of the sanctions imposed on it.

The US intelligence on Iran’s nuclear capability didn’t detect that Tehran was working on a nuclear bomb, which enraged Israel. It is quite clear that, despite all the sanctions it has suffered and is suffering for many years, Iran insists that it will not give away its ‘peaceful’ nuclear programme as it is a matter of national sovereignty. Even if it were to accept low level of enrichment capability at 10 per cent or below, an unlikely prospect, it still wouldn’t be acceptable to the  Zionist lobby in the US which, with Israel, has a veto of sorts when it comes to Iran’s nuclear programme. They are unlikely to let it get through, with threats of more sanctions. For them, the only real solution is the dismantling/destruction of Iran’s nuclear capability because Tehran cannot be trusted to abide by any agreement.  

Israel is simply dead set on stopping Iran from a nuclear path, peaceful or otherwise. It believes that Tehran will use its nuclear capability against Israel. Therefore, it has sought to subvert it by all sorts of subterfuges. For instance, it infected the programme with a computer virus targeted at Iran’s nuclear centrifuges to enrich uranium, possibly with US help/involvement. In the process, it was reported to have, at the time, ruined almost one-fifth of the centrifuges thus seriously complicating and slowing the programme. But Iran apparently was able to fix up the damage. Israel has also been reportedly behind the killing of some of Iran’s nuclear scientists. Israel had reportedly tried hard to persuade the Bush administration to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities but it didn’t succeed as they were already bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, and didn’t have the stomach to buy into another adventure with all sorts of unpredictable consequences. Israel would have liked to do it on its own but wanted US help and backing that was not forthcoming. The US, however, made it clear that all options, including military action, were on the table if Iran acquired nuclear weapons. But Israel is not satisfied with such assurances. One thing, though, is clear. Whether or not Iran’s nuclear programme is legitimate, Israel certainly doesn’t have any political/moral case to oppose it, being the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the region and is said to have an arsenal of a few hundred bombs.

Israel is not the only regional country strongly opposed to Iran’s nuclear programme. Among the Arab countries, Saudi Arabia is in the vanguard of such opposition, though it doesn’t seem coordinated with Israel. It is rather part of the larger sectarian conflict in the Muslim world between the Sunnis and Shias and the attendant geopolitical rivalry. Iran is believed to have ambitions to destabilize the Arab world and establish its dominance. One way to do would be to stir up and support Shias in Arab countries, like in Bahrain with a majority Shia population ruled by a Sunni monarch, in the restive Saudi oil producing eastern province with Shia majority, and in Yemen. Iran’s nuclear status apparently would enhance its regional position and might further stir up the Shias in Arab countries, with direct or indirect support from Iran. Saudi Arabia and its Gulf partners are, therefore, strongly opposed to any US nuclear deal with Iran.

Of course, the US has no intention of facilitating an Iranian nuclear programme. That is why there are so many obstacles to doing a deal. It has to be so foolproof that Iran wouldn’t be able to “breakout” into making a bomb through its existing nuclear facilities. Hence, the need for the US to keep Iran’s capability to enrich uranium to the lowest possible level and to keep its nuclear facilities under strict and widest scrutiny and surveillance. While Iran is willing to accept reasonable curbs and be transparent about its programme, it is not willing to let international inspectors from IAEA or wherever roaming anywhere and everywhere to demand instant inspections and interview its scientists. In return for accepting curbs on its nuclear programme, Iran wants economic sanctions lifted substantially, if not completely. The US, on the other hand, would like any lifting of sanctions to be limited both in scope and time to Iran’s compliance to Washington’s satisfaction, thus keeping it on life support. It is, therefore, not difficult to see what a maze the nuclear dialogue is between Iran and its six dialogue partners, particularly the US and UK, France and Germany.

However, the last year’s interim agreement was a breakthrough of sorts between Iran and the US, though a limited one. John Kerry admitted that some progress was made in recent negotiations but not enough to clinch a deal. Serious gaps remain in their respective position. The extended time schedule is meant to iron out and bridge those gaps, which is a big task. One thing, though, is clear that without Iran’s constructive involvement, the Middle Eastern region is likely to remain volatile, even more so after the run away success of the Islamic State (of Iraq and Levant). There is considerable scope for the US and Iran for cooperation against the IS, and some of it is already happening informally in Iraq. Indeed, John Kerry described recent recent Iranian aerial sorties against the IS as “positive.”

Although Saudi Arabia remains opposed to Iranian involvement and/or any cooperation between it and the US, Riyadh wouldn’t be unaware of the serious threat IS poses to the Saudi regime by seeking to destabilize and/or overthrow the monarchy. The threat would probably have to be more concrete before Riyadh would consider any opening with Iran. However, for Iran to become part of the Middle Eastern geopolitical solution against IS and a range of other issues, a deal with Iran on its nuclear programme is imperative.

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au

Arab Spring: from hope to despair

S P SETH

With the Arab world plunged in an orgy of mindless violence, the hopeful Arab Spring of, what looks like only yesterday, is now a distant memory. That inspirational people’s revolution, which brought down tyrants and dictators like Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, has turned into a nightmare. Its transformation in Syria from an uprising against the Assad regime is now a hodge-podge of terrorist groups, with the so-called Islamic State (of Iraq and Levant) declared as a caliphate. While Tunisia remains relatively stable with its secular and Islamic components trying out an unsteady coexistence, Libya is tearing itself apart into warring militias with no one in charge of the country. In Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country and, in some ways, its cultural centre, it looks like the Mubarak era is reborn with another military dictator in a civilian garb taking charge of the country. Its new President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has declared war on the Muslim Brotherhood, having overthrown President Morsi and throwing its leadership and a good number of its supporters into jail, sentenced to death or to serve long  sentences. They are now a banned terrorist organization. At the same time, the government has demolished 800 houses along its border with Gaza to create a buffer zone to prevent infiltration of militants from across the border after a suicide bomber killed 30 soldiers in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

It obviously raises questions about how the Arab Spring changed from hope into a recurring nightmare? In all such cases of social and political turmoil, there are no definite answers but researchers and analysts are all the time grappling to make some sense out of it. The first question to ask is how did the people’s revolution start in a region that had been the plaything of dictators? And the answer to this is the first extensive use of social media to mobilize people and thereby largely bypass the vast reach of the dreaded intelligence and security agencies.  The resultant popular protests and demonstrations at Tahrir Square in Cairo and elsewhere tended to create a sense of camaraderie among the crowds gathered there. It also created a sense of security in numbers when faced with early police repression.  

Another factor cited by some analysts is the rising proportion of youthful population of the Arab world, where in some countries the median age is said to be twenty-four. The use of social media, combined with rising level of education among youth, had a radicalizing effect making them the frontline of the revolution. At another level, many of the young and even older people had come to believe that, after the long torpor and repression of the likes of Ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Qaddafi, a new popular revolution might be the only way to create a new social, economic and political order. And the hope for a new future didn’t seem all that illusory when almost all strata of society, including the Muslim Brotherhood, secular and liberal youth, Christians and many others joined together in what looked like a common cause to overthrow the repressive regimes. And in Egypt when the Muslim Brotherhood undertook not to contest the presidency, which turned out to be false, it seemed that for the first time Islamic ideology was not being pushed as the only or dominant foundation of a new society. There were variations of this theme in other countries experiencing Arab Spring but the general trend seemed, to start with, one of accommodation between Islamic, liberal and secular elements. Syria (and now Iraq) remains in a class by itself where Islamic State jihadists have hijacked the project, for the present at least.

But the signs of a new beginning in the new decade turned into a comprehensive disaster. In Egypt, the coalition of Muslim Brotherhood and the liberal/secular pioneers of the revolution started to fray when the former decided to contest the presidency bringing back fears of a revivalist Islamist agenda. And that seemed validated after the Brotherhood’s Mohammad Morsi was elected the country’s president pushing forward a new constitution with Islamist overtones against considerable opposition from secular/liberal elements. The Brotherhood even sought to use emergency powers and their governance of the country increasingly started to resemble more and more like Hosni Mubarak’s regime by jailing dissidents and journalists. Which ruptured the national coalition and broad consensus forged during the successful revolution to overthrow Mubarak. Who would have thought that so soon after Mubarak’s overthrow, in which the army sought to play a neutral but essentially supportive role, crowds would again throng Tahrir Square and in much larger numbers supporting and urging the army to get rid of President Morsi and the Brotherhood! Many of the youthful secular/liberal pioneers of the anti-Mubarak revolution made a common cause with the army, not realizing that the same army junta, now under former General (turned-president) Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, would turn on them as well. In other words, Egypt has turned full circle from the army-backed Mubarak dictatorship, punctuated with an interlude of Brotherhood rule, to revived military-backed dictatorship of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, as if the Arab Spring had just passed by without creating the bloom that was highly anticipated and expected.

Some analysts have argued that the expectations about the Arab Spring were highly exaggerated, if not unfounded. According to Robert F. Worth, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars who is working on a book on the 2011 Arab uprisings, “The broader point is this: the educated youth who kicked off the revolutions of 2011 are not necessarily the vanguard of a new and more secular Middle East. They are one party in a bitter conflict over fundamental issues of identity and social order, a conflict whose outcome is far from certain.” He doesn’t believe that the Arab youth are necessarily progressive in the sense we in the west understand and expect them to be. As he puts it in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, “Many of the young Gulf Arabs I know view the uprisings of 2011 with horror, and have become more convinced in their belief that the region is not ready for democracy anytime soon.” Furthermore: “Many of them are also just as passionately sectarian as their parents.” If that is true, and the ISIL crusade against Shias and other minorities, now joined passionately by many Sunni Muslim youth, would seem to give it some credence, the so-called Arab Spring that we witnessed briefly was a false dawn.                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au