Liberal Dems Say No to Deal on Health Care Reform

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It's about time someone stood up for the little guy.
Mother Jones

This could be a big deal. Fifty-seven liberal House Democrats sent a letter on Thursday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Henry Waxman, the chair of the House energy and commerce committee, saying they cannot vote for the deal Waxman cut with the Blue Dog Dems, citing the compromise's weak public option provision. It's a short note, but a possible big monkey wrench. Without these votes, the Democrats are far short of a majority.
The letter:

We write to voice our opposition to the negotiated health care reform agreement under consideration in the Energy and Commerce Committee.
We regard the agreement reached by Chairman Waxman and several Blue Dog members of the Committee as fundamentally unacceptable. This agreement is not a step forward toward a good health care bill, but a large step backwards. Any bill that does not provide, at a minimum, for a public option with reimbursement rates based on Medicare rates - not negotiated rates - is
unacceptable. It would ensure higher costs for the public plan, and would do nothing to achieve the goal of "keeping insurance companies honest," and their rates down.
To offset the increased costs incurred by adopting the provisions advocated by the Blue Dog members of the Committee, the agreement would reduce subsidies to low-and middle-income families, requiring them to pay a larger portion oftheir income for insurance premiums, and would impose an unfunded mandate on the states to pay for what were to have been Federal costs.
In short, this agreement will result in the public, both as insurance purchasers and as taxpayers, paying ever higher rates to insurance companies.
We simply cannot vote for such a proposal.

Back to you, Waxman.

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Armageddon at the Top of the World: Not!

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Mother Jones
This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

WHAT, what, what,
What's the news from Swat?
Sad news,
Bad news,
Comes by the cable led
Through the Indian Ocean's bed,
Through the Persian Gulf, the Red
Sea and the Med-
Iterranean -- he 's dead;
The Ahkoond is dead!
-- George Thomas Lanigan
Despite being among the poorest people in the world, the inhabitants of the craggy northwest of what is now Pakistan have managed to throw a series of frights into distant Western capitals for more than a century. That's certainly one for the record books.
And it hasn't ended yet. Not by a long shot. Not with the headlines in the U.S. papers about the depredations of the Pakistani Taliban, not with the CIA's drone aircraft striking gatherings in Waziristan and elsewhere near the Afghan border. This spring, for instance, one counter-terrorism analyst stridently (and wholly implausibly) warned that "in one to six months" we could "see the collapse of the Pakistani state," at the hands of the bloodthirsty Taliban, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the situation in Pakistan a "mortal danger" to global security.
What most observers don't realize is that the doomsday rhetoric about this region at the top of the world is hardly new. It's at least 100 years old. During their campaigns in the northwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British officers, journalists and editorialists sounded much like American strategists, analysts, and pundits of the present moment. They construed the Pashtun tribesmen who inhabited Waziristan as the new Normans, a dire menace to London that threatened to overturn the British Empire.
The young Winston S. Churchill even wrote a book in 1898, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, about a late-nineteenth-century British campaign in Pashtun territory, based on his earlier journalism there. At that time, London ruled British India, comprising all of what is now India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, but the British hold on the mountainous northwestern region abutting Afghanistan and the Himalayas was tenuous. In trying to puzzle out -- like modern analysts -- why the predecessors of the Pakistani Taliban posed such a huge challenge to empire, Churchill singled out two reasons for the martial prowess of those Pashtun tribesmen. One was Islam, of which he wrote, "That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword -- the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men -- stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism."
Churchill actually revealed his prejudices here. In fact, for the most part, Islam spread peacefully in what is now Pakistan, by the preaching and poetry of mystical Sufi leaders, and most Muslims have not been more warlike in history than, for example, Anglo-Saxons.
For his second reason, he settled on the environment in which those tribesmen were supposed to thrive. "The inhabitants of these wild but wealthy valleys" are, he explained, in "a continual state of feud and strife." In addition, he insisted, they were early adopters of military technology, so that their weapons were not as primitive as was common among other "races" at what he referred to as "their stage" of development. "To the ferocity of the Zulu are added the craft of the Redskin and the marksmanship of the Boer," he warned.
In these tribesmen, he concluded, "the world is presented with that grim spectacle, 'the strength of civilization without its mercy.'" The Pashtun were, he added, excellent marksmen, who could fell the unwary Westerner with a state-of-the-art breech-loading rifle. "His assailant, approaching, hacks him to death with the ferocity of a South-Sea Islander. The weapons of the nineteenth century are in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age."
Ironically, given Churchill's description of them, when four decades later the Pashtuns joined the freedom movement against British rule that led to the formation of independent Pakistan and India in 1947, politicized Pashtuns were notable not for savagery, but for joining Mahatma Gandhi's campaign of non-violent non-cooperation.
Nevertheless, the Churchillian image of primitive, fanatical brutality armed with cutting edge technology, which singled Pashtuns out as an extraordinary peril to the West, survived the Victorian era and has now made it into the headlines of our own newspapers. Bruce Riedel, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst, was tasked by the Obama administration to evaluate security threats in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Arnaud de Borchgrave of the Washington Times reported breathlessly on July 17th that Riedel had concluded:
"A jihadist victory in Pakistan, meaning the takeover of the nation by a militant Sunni movement led by the Taliban... would create the greatest threat the United States has yet to face in its war on terror... [and] is now a real possibility in the foreseeable future."
The article, in true Churchillian fashion, is entitled "Armageddon Alarm Bell Rings."
In fact, few intelligence predictions could have less chance of coming true. In the 2008 parliamentary election, the Pakistani public voted in centrist parties, some of them secular, virtually ignoring the Muslim fundamentalist parties. Today in Pakistan, there are about 24 million Pashtuns, a linguistic ethnic group that speaks Pashto. Another 13 million live across the British-drawn "Durand Line," the border -- mostly unacknowledged by Pashtuns -- between Pakistan and southern Afghanistan. Most Taliban derive from this group, but the vast majority of Pashtuns are not Taliban and do not much care for the Muslim radicals.
The Taliban force that was handily defeated this spring by the Pakistani army in a swift campaign in the Swat Valley in the North-West Frontier Province, amounted to a mere 4,000 men. The Pakistani military is 550,000 strong and has a similar number of reservists. It has tanks, artillery, and fighter jets. The Taliban's appeal is limited to that country's Pashtun ethnic group, about 14% of the population and, from everything we can tell, it is a minority taste even among them. The Taliban can commit terrorism and destabilize, but they cannot take over the Pakistani government.
Some Western analysts worry that the Taliban could unite with disgruntled junior officers of the Pakistani Army, who could come to power in a putsch and so offer their Taliban allies access to sophisticated weaponry. Successful Pakistani coups, however, have been made by the chief of staff at the top, not by junior officers, since the military is quite disciplined. Far from coup-making to protect the Taliban, the military has actually spent the past year in hard slogging against them in the Federally Administered Tribal Area of Bajaur and more recently in Swat.
Today's fantasy of a nuclear-armed Taliban is the modern equivalent of Churchill's anxiety about those all-conquering, ultramodern Pashtun riflemen with the instincts of savages.
Frontier Ward and Watch
On a recent research trip to the India Office archives in London to plunge into British military memoirs of the Waziristan campaigns in the first half of the twentieth century, I was overcome by a vivid sense of déjà vu. The British in India fought three wars with Afghanistan, losing the first two decisively, and barely achieving a draw in the third in 1919. Among the Afghan king Amanullah's demands during the third war were that the Pashtun tribes of the frontier be allowed to give him their fealty and that Britain permit Afghanistan to conduct a sovereign foreign policy. He lost on the first demand, but won on the second and soon signed a treaty of friendship with the newly established Soviet Union.
Disgruntled Pashtun tribes in Waziristan, a no-man's land sandwiched between the Afghan border and the formal boundary of the British-ruled North-West Frontier Province, preferred Kabul's rule to that of London, and launched their own attacks on the British, beginning in 1919. Putting down the rebellious Wazir and Mahsud tribes of this region would, in the end, cost imperial Britain's treasury three times as much as had the Third Anglo-Afghan War itself.
On May 2, 1921, long after the Pashtun tribesmen should have been pacified, the Manchester Guardian carried a panicky news release by the British Viceroy of India on a Mahsud attack. "Enemy activity continues throughout," the alarmed message from Viceroy Rufus Isaacs, the Marquess of Reading, said, implying that a massive uprising on the subcontinent was underway. In fact, the action at that point was in only a small set of villages in one part of Waziristan, itself but one of several otherwise relatively quiet tribal areas.
colecover.gifOn the 23rd of that month, a large band of Mahsud struck "convoys" near the village of Piazha. British losses included a British officer killed, four British and two Indian officers wounded, and seven Indian troops killed, with 26 wounded. On the 24th, "a picket [sentry outpost] near Suidgi was ambushed, and lost nine killed and seven wounded." In nearby Zhob, the British received support from friendly Pashtun tribes engaged in a feud with what they called the "hostiles," and -- a modern touch -- "aeroplanes" weighed in as well. They were, it was said, "cooperating," though this too was an exaggeration. At the time, the Royal Air Force (RAF) was eager to prove its colonial worth on the imperial frontiers in ways that extended beyond simple reconnaissance, even though in 1921 it maintained but a single airplane at Peshawar, the nearest city, which had "a hole in its wing." By 1925, the RAF had gotten its wish and would drop 150 tons of bombs on the Mahsud tribe.
On July 5, 1921, a newspaper report in the Allahabad Pioneer gives a sense of the tactics the British deployed against the "hostiles." One center of rebellion was the village of Makin, inhabited by that same Mahsud tribe, which apparently wanted its own irrigation system and freedom from British interference. The British Indian army held the nearby village of Ladka. "Makin was shelled from Ladka on the 20th June," the report ran.
The tribal fighters responded by beginning to move their flocks, though their families remained. British archival sources report that a Muslim holy man, or faqir, attempted to give the people of Makin hope by laying a spell on the 6-inch howitzer shells and pledging that they would no longer explode in the valley. (Overblown imperial anxiety about such faqirs or akhonds, Pashtun religious leaders, inspired Victorian satirists such as Edward Lear, who began one poem, "Who, or why, or which, or what, Is the Akond of Swat?")
The faqir's spells were to no avail. The shelling, the Pioneer reported, continued over the next two days, "with good results." Then on the 23rd, "another bombardment of Makin was carried out by our 6-inch howitzers at Ladka." This shelling "had a great moral effect," the newspaper intoned, and revealed with satisfaction that "the inhabitants are now evacuating their families." The particular nature of the moral effect of bombarding a civilian village where women and children were known to be present was not explained. Two days later, however, thanks to air observation, the howitzers at Ladka and the guns at "Piazha camp" made a "direct hit" on another similarly obscure village.
Such accounts of small, vicious engagements in mountainous villages with (to British ears) outlandish names fit oddly with the strange conviction of the elite and the press that the fate of the Empire was somehow at stake -- just as strangely as similar reports out of exactly the same area, often involving the very same tribes, do in our own time. On July 7, 2009, for instance, the Pakistani newspaper The Nation published a typical daily report on the Swat valley campaign which might have come right out of the early twentieth century. Keep in mind that this was a campaign into which the Obama administration forced the Pakistani government to save itself and the American position in the Greater Middle East, and which displaced some two million people, risking the actual destabilization of the whole northwestern region of Pakistan. It went in part:
"[T]he security forces during search operation at Banjut, Swat, recovered 50 mules loaded with arms and ammunition, medicines and ration and also apprehended a few terrorists. During search operation at Thana, an improvised explosive device (IED) went off causing injuries to a soldier. As a result of operation at Tahirabad, Mingora, the security forces recovered surgical equipment, nine hand grenades and office furniture from the house of a militant."
The unfamiliar place names, the attention to confiscated mules, and the fear of tribal militancy differed little from the reports in the Pioneer from nearly a century before. Echoing Viceroy Rufus Isaacs, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on July 14th, "Our national security as well as the future of Afghanistan depends on a stable, democratic, and economically viable Pakistan. We applaud the new Pakistani determination to deal with the militants who threaten their democracy and our shared security."
As in 1921, so in 2009, the skirmishes were ignored by the general public in the West despite the frenzied assertions of politicians that the fate of the world hung in the balance.
A Paranoid View of the Pashtuns, Then and Now
On July 21, 1921, a "correspondent" for the Allahabad Pioneer -- as anonymous as he was vehement -- explained how some firefights in Waziristan might indeed be consequential for Western civilization. He attacked "Irresponsible Criticism" of the military budget required to face down the Mahsud tribe. He asked, "What is India's strategical position in the world today?" It was a leading question. "Along hundreds of miles of her border," he then warned darkly in a mammoth run-on sentence, "are scores of thousands of hardy fighters trained to war and rapine from their very birth, never for an instant forgetful of the soft wealth of India's plains, all of whom would descend to harry them tomorrow if they thought the venture safe, some of whom are determinedly at war with us even now."
Note that he does not explain the challenge posed by the Pashtun tribes in terms of typical military considerations, which would require attention to the exact numbers, training, equipment, tactics and logistics of the fighters, and which would have revealed them as no significant threat to the Indian plains, however hard they were to control in their own territory. The "correspondent" instead ridicules urban "pen-pushers," who little appreciate the "heavy task" of "frontier ward and watch."
Not only were the tribes a danger in themselves, the hawkish correspondent intoned, but "beyond India's border lies a great country [Afghanistan] with whom we are not even yet technically at peace." Nor was that all. The recently-established Soviet Union, with which Afghanistan had concluded a treaty of friendship that February, loomed as the real threat behind the radical Pashtuns. "Beyond that again is a huge mad-dog nation that acknowledges no right save the sword, no creed save aggression, murder and loot, that will stay at nothing to gain its end, that covets avowedly a descent upon India above all other aims."
That then-Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, who took an extremely dim view of colonialism and seriously considered freeing the Central Asian possessions of the old tsarist empire, was then contemplating the rape of India is among the least believable calumnies in imperial propaganda. The "correspondent" would have none of it. Those, he concludes, who dare criticize the military budget should try sweet-talking the Mahsud, the Wazir and the Bolsheviks.
In our own day as well, pundits configure the uncontrolled Pashtuns as merely the tip of a geostrategic iceberg, with the sinister icy menace of al-Qaeda stretching beneath, and beyond that greater challenges to the U.S. such as Iran (incredibly, sometimes charged by the U.S. military with supporting the hyper-Sunni, Shiite-hating Taliban in Afghanistan). Occasionally in this decade, attempts have even been made to tie the Russian bear once again to the Pashtun tribes.
In the case of the British Empire, whatever the imperial fears, the actual cost in lives and expenditure of campaigning in the Hindu Kush mountain range was enough to ensure that such engagements would be of relatively limited duration. On October 26, 1921, the Pioneer reported that the British government of India had determined to implement a new system in Waziristan, dependent on tribal mercenaries.
"This system, which was so successfully inaugurated in the Khyber district last year," the article explained, "is really an adaptation of the methods in vogue 40 years ago." The tribal commander provided his own weapons and equipment, and for a fee, protected imperial lines of communication and provided security on the roads. "Thus he has an interest in maintaining the tranquility of his territory, and gives support to the more stable elements among the tribes when the hotheads are apt to run amok." The system would be adopted, the article says, to put an end to the ruinous costs of "punitive expeditions of merely ephemeral pacificatory value."
Absent-minded empire keeps reinventing the local tribal levy, loyal to foreign capitals and paid by them, as a way of keeping the hostiles in check. The U.S. Council on Foreign Relations reported late last year that "U.S. military commanders are studying the feasibility of recruiting Afghan tribesmen... to target Taliban and al-Qaeda elements. Taking a page from the so-called 'Sunni Awakening' in Iraq, which turned Sunni tribesmen against militants first in Anbar Province and then beyond, the strategic about-face in Afghanistan would seek to extend power from Kabul to the country's myriad tribal militias." Likewise, the Pakistani government has attempted to deploy tribal fighters against the Taliban in the Federally Administered areas such as Bajaur. It remains to be seen whether this strategy can succeed.
Both in the era between the two world wars and again in the early twenty-first century, the Pashtun peoples have been objects of anxiety in world capitals out of all proportion to the security challenge they actually pose. As it turned out, the real threat to the British Isles in the twentieth century emanated from one of what Churchill called their "civilized" European neighbors. Nothing the British tried in the North-West Frontier and its hinterland actually worked. By the 1940s the British hold on the tribal agencies and frontier regions was shakier than ever before, and the tribes more assertive. After the British were forced out of the subcontinent in 1947, London's anxieties about the Pashtuns and their world-changing potential abruptly evaporated.
Today, we are again hearing that the Waziris and the Mahsuds are dire threats to Western civilization. The tribal struggle for control of obscure villages in the foothills of the Himalayas is being depicted as a life-and-death matter for the North Atlantic world. Again, there is aerial surveillance, bombing, artillery fire, and -- this time -- displacement of civilians on a scale no British viceroy ever contemplated.
In 1921, vague threats to the British Empire from a small, weak principality of Afghanistan and a nascent, if still supine, Soviet Union underpinned a paranoid view of the Pashtuns. Today, the supposed entanglement with al-Qaeda of those Pashtuns termed "Taliban" by U.S. and NATO officials -- or even with Iran or Russia -- has focused Washington's and Brussels's military and intelligence efforts on the highland villagers once again.
Few of the Pashtuns in question, even the rebellious ones, are really Taliban in the sense of militant seminary students; few so-called Taliban are entwined with what little is left of al-Qaeda in the region; and Iran and Russia are not, of course, actually supporting the latter. There may be plausible reasons for which the U.S. and NATO wish to spend blood and treasure in an attempt to forcibly shape the politics of the 38 million Pashtuns on either side of the Durand Line in the twenty-first century. That they form a dire menace to the security of the North Atlantic world is not one of them.
Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He has written, edited, or translated 15 books, and authored 65 journal articles and chapters on Middle East affairs. He has a regular column at Salon.com and is the proprietor of the Informed Comment blog.

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Pentagon Furious at Fox News Analyst for Calling For Execution of Captured Soldier

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AlterNet

Fox News analyst Ralph Peters said on July 19 that the Taliban should murder 23-year-old Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl.
According to NBC's top Pentagon correspondent, the Department of Defense is furious with Fox News analyst Ralph Peters, who said on July 19 that the Taliban should murder 23-year-old Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl, captured after he strayed from his post, to save the Army "legal hassles and legal bills."
Peters, a well-known Neoconservative and frequent Fox News guest, attempted to clarify his shocking statement on Tuesday night's O'Reilly Factor, telling right-wing host Bill O'Reilly he believes that Bergdahl had "deserted" his unit and deserved no sympathy. He did not apologize. O'Reilly added that Bergdahl must be "crazy."
However, Wednesday night MSNBC's Rachel Maddow fired back, interviewing Jim Miklaszewski, NBC's top Pentagon correspondent, who said the Department of Defense is furious with Peters and Fox News, adding there is no evidence that Bergdahl is a deserter.
Peters' and O'Reilly's insidious comments drew a sharp reaction from a bipartisan group of 22 veteran members of Congress, who all signed a letter demanding Fox News CEO Roger Ailes apologize to Bergdahl's family for allowing a guest on his network to provide "aid and comfort" to America's enemies.
"Mr. Peters' indefensible comments call into question, without any supporting evidence whatsoever, PFC Bergdahl's patriotism and commitment to his country, and suggest in a non-subtle way that he deserved to be captured," they wrote. "The truth is that Mr. Peters' words give more aid and comfort to the enemy...and put PFC Bergdahl at additional risk of harm."
Congressman Eric Massa (D-NY), a former Navy commander who joined the 22 members of Congress in signing the letter, went a step further and called on Fox News to fire both O'Reilly and Peters.
"Their comments aid and abet our enemies during a time of war and the burden is on Fox News to prove that they reject this by taking the tangible action of issuing an apology and firing both of them," he wrote.
Jim Miklaszewski, NBC's Pentagon correspondent, told Maddow on Wednesday night that Bergdahl "came off patrol on June 30th, dropped off his weapon, his body armor, grabbed up a bottle of water, a compass and a knife and took off out on his own. It was sometime after that, apparently, that some local militants grabbed him and turned him over to the Taliban."
"Should he have left the post alone?" Miklaszewski asked. "Of course not. But that doesn't make him a deserter."
He continued: "Military officials I talked to are quite outraged at Peters' comments, not just the idea perhaps that he suggested that the Taliban should execute Bergdahl, but because it's totally irresponsible. Here you have a kid, 23-years-old, in custody. He's got to be terrified. And now, these Peters comments could actually be used by his captors to get even deeper inside Bergdahl's mind and further erode any confidence that he may have that he will ever come out alive."
"I suspect my fellow Americans might really bail out of the FOX viewership over this one," opined former war reporter and photographer Tim King, who edits Oregon-based Web site Salem-News.
"If this insolent wicked little man named Peters at FOX manages to turn people against this American who volunteered to serve in the military, fully aware that almost anyone in the Army can be deployed overseas, he should be arrested and tossed in prison," King continued. "When does FOX News cross the line? This is a new age, a new time, and there is no way in Hell that Peters or FOX can cry 'free speech' now."

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Iran and Russia, scorpions in a bottle

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Asia Times Online

Things get curiouser and curiouser in the Iranian wonderland. Imagine what happened last week during Friday prayers in Tehran, personally conducted by former president Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, aka "The Shark", Iran's wealthiest man, who made his fortune partly because of Irangate - the 1980s' secret weapons contracts with Israel and the US.
As is well known, Rafsanjani is behind the Mir-Hossein Mousavi-Mohammad Khatami pragmatic conservative faction that lost the most recent battle at the top - rather than a presidential election - to the ultra-hardline faction of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei-Mahmud Ahmadinejad-Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps. During prayers, partisans of the hegemonic faction yelled the usual
"Death to America!" - while the pragmatic conservatives came up, for the first time, with "Death to Russia!" and "Death to China!"
Oops. Unlike the United States and Western Europe, both Russia and China almost instantly accepted the contested presidential re-election of Ahmadinejad. Could they then be portrayed as enemies of Iran? Or have pragmatic conservatives not been informed that obsessed-by-Eurasia Zbig Brzezinksi - who has US President Barack Obama's undivided attention - has been preaching since the 1990s that it is essential to break up the Tehran-Moscow-Beijing axis and torpedo the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)?
On top of it, don't they know that both Russia and China - as well as Iran - are firm proponents of the end of the dollar as global reserve currency to the benefit of a (multipolar) basket of currencies, a common currency of which Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had the gall this month to present a prototype at the Group of Eight (G-8) meeting in Aquila, Italy? By the way, it's a rather neat coin. Minted in Belgium, it sports the faces of the G-8 leaders and also a motto - "Unity in diversity".
"Unity in diversity" is not exactly what the Obama administration has in mind as far as Iran and Russia are concerned - no matter the zillion bytes of lofty rhetoric. Let's start with the energy picture.
Iran is world number two both in terms of proven oil reserves (11.2%) and gas reserves (15.7%), according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2008.
If Iran ever opted towards a more unclenched-fist relationship with Washington, US Big Oil would feast on Iran's Caspian energy wealth. This means that whatever the rhetoric, no US administration will ever want to deal with a hyper-nationalist Iranian regime, such as the current military dictatorship of the mullahtariat.
What really scares Washington - from George W Bush to Obama - is the perspective of a Russia-Iran-Venezuela axis. Together, Iran and Russia hold 17.6% of the world's proven oil reserves. The Persian Gulf petro-monarchies - de facto controlled by Washington - hold 45%. The Moscow-Tehran-Caracas axis controls 25%. If we add Kazakhstan's 3% and Africa's 9.5%, this new axis is more than an effective counter-power to American hegemony over the Arab Middle East. The same thing applies to gas. Adding the "axis" to the Central Asian "stans", we reach 30% of world gas production. As a comparison, the whole Middle East - including Iran - currently produces only 12.1% of the world's needs.
All about Pipelineistan
A nuclear Iran would inevitably turbo-charge the new, emerging multipolar world. Iran and Russia are de facto showing to both China and India that it is not wise to rely on US might subjugating the bulk of oil in the Arab Middle East. All these players are very much aware that Iraq remains occupied, and that Washington's obsession remains the privatization of Iraq's enormous oil wealth.
As Chinese intellectuals are fond of emphasizing, four emerging or re-emerging powers - Russia, China, Iran and India - are strategic and civilizational poles, three of them sanctuaries because they are nuclear powers. A more confident and assertive Iran - mastering the full cycle of nuclear technology - may translate into Iran and Russia increasing their relative weight in Europe and Asia to the distress of Washington, not only in the energy sphere but also as proponents of a multipolar monetary system.
The entente is already on. Since 2008, Iranian officials have stressed that sooner or later Iran and Russia will start trading in rubles. Gazprom is willing to be paid for oil and gas in roubles - and not dollars. And the secretariat of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has already seen the writing on the wall - admitting for over a year now that OPEC will be trading in euros before 2020.
Not only the "axis" Moscow-Tehran-Caracas, but also Qatar and Norway, for instance, and sooner or later the Gulf Emirates, are ready to break up with the petrodollar. It goes without saying that the end of the petrodollar - which won't happen tomorrow, of course - means the end of the dollar as the world's reserve currency; the end of the world paying for America's massive budget deficits; and the end of an Anglo-American finance stranglehold over the world that has lasted since the second part of the 19th century.
The energy equation between Iran and Russia is much more complex: it configures them as two scorpions in a bottle. Tehran, isolated from the West, lacks foreign investment to upgrade its 1970s-era energy installations. That's why Iran cannot fully profit from exploiting its Caspian energy wealth.
Here it's a matter of Pipelineistan at its peak - since the US, still during the 1990s, decided to hit the Caspian in full force by supporting the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline and the Baku-Tblisi-Supsa (BTS) gas pipeline.
For Gazprom, Iran is literally a goldmine. In September 2008, the Russian energy giant announced it would explore the huge Azadegan-North oilfield, as well as three others. Russia's Lukoil has increased its prospecting and Tatneft said it would be involved in the north. The George W Bush administration thought it was weakening Russia and isolating Iran in Central Asia. Wrong: it only accelerated their strategic energy cooperation.
Putin power play
In February 1995, Moscow committed to finishing construction of a nuclear reactor at Bushehr. This was a project started by that erstwhile, self-proclaimed "gendarme of the Gulf" for the US - the shah of Iran. The shah engaged KWU from Germany in 1974, but the project was halted by the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and hit hard between 1984 and 1988 by Saddam Hussein's bombs. The Russians finally entered the picture proposing to finish the project for $800 million. By December 2001, Moscow also started to sell missiles to Tehran - a surefire way of making extra money offering protection for strategic assets such as Bushehr.
Bushehr is a source of immense controversy in Iran. It should have been finished by 2000. As Iranian officials see it, the Russians seem never to be interested in wrapping it up. There are technical reasons - such as the Russian reactor being too big to fit inside what KWU had already built - as well as a technology deficit on the part of Iranian nuclear engineers.
But most of all there are geopolitical reasons. Former president Vladimir Putin used Bushehr as a key diplomatic peon in his double chessboard match with the West and the Iranians. It was Putin who launched the idea of enriching uranium for Iran in Russia; talk about a strategic asset in terms of managing a global nuclear crisis. Ahmadinejad - and most of all the Supreme Leader - gave him a flat refusal. The Russian response was even more foot-dragging, and even mild support for more US-sponsored sanctions against Tehran.
Tehran got the message - that Putin was not an unconditional ally. Thus, in August 2006, the Russians landed a new deal for the construction and supervision of two new nuclear plants. This all means that the Iranian nuclear dossier simply cannot be solved without Russia. Simultaneously, by Putin's own framework, it's very clear in Moscow that a possible Israeli strike would make it lose a profitable nuclear client on top of a diplomatic debacle. Medvedev for his part is pursuing the same two-pronged strategy; stressing to Americans and Europeans that Russia does not want nuclear proliferation in the Middle East while stressing to Tehran that it needs Russia more than ever.
Another feature of Moscow's chessboard strategy - never spelled out in public - is to keep the cooperation with Tehran to prevent China from taking over the whole project, but without driving the Americans ballistic at the same time. As long as the Iranian nuclear program is not finished, Russia can always play the wise moderating role between Iran and the West.
Building up a civilian nuclear program in Iran is good business for both Iran and Russia for a number of reasons.
First of all, both are military encircled. Iran is strategically encircled by the US in Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and by US naval power in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Russia has seen the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) gobbling up the Baltic countries and threatening to "annex" Georgia and Ukraine; NATO is at war in Afghanistan; and the US is still present, one way or another, across Central Asia.
Iran and Russia share the same strategy as far as the Caspian Sea is concerned. They are in fact opposed to the new Caspian states - Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan.
Iran and Russia also face the threat of hardcore Sunni Islam. They have a tacit agreement; for instance, Tehran has never done anything to help the Chechens. Then there's the Armenian issue. A de facto Moscow-Tehran-Erevan axis profoundly irks the Americans.
Finally, in this decade, Iran has become the third-largest importer of Russian weapons, after China and India. This includes the anti-missile system Tor M-1, which defends Iran's nuclear installations.
What's your axis?
So thanks to Putin, the Iran-Russia alliance is carefully deployed in three fronts - nuclear, energy and weapons.
Are there cracks in this armor? Certainly.
First, Moscow by all means does not want a weaponized Iranian nuclear program. This spells out "regional destabilization". Then, Central Asia is considered by Moscow as its backyard, so for Iran to be ascendant in the region is quite problematic. As far as the Caspian goes, Iran needs Russia for a satisfactory juridical solution (Is it a sea or a lake? How much of it belongs to each border country?)
On other hand, Iran's new military dictatorship of the mullahtariat will react savagely if it ever had Russia fully against it in the UN Security Council. That would spell a rupture in economic relations - very bad for both sides - but also the possibility of Tehran supporting radical Islam everywhere from the southern Caucasus to Central Asia.
Under these complex circumstances, it's not so far-fetched to imagine a sort of polite Cold War going on between Tehran and Moscow.
From Russia's point of view, it all comes back to the "axis" - which would be in fact Moscow-Tehran-Erevan-New Delhi, a counter-power to the US-supported Ankara-Tblisi-Telaviv-Baku axis. But there's ample debate about it even inside the Russian elite. The old guard, like former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov, thinks that Russia is back as a great power by cultivating its former Arab clients as well as Iran; but then the so-called "Westernizers" are convinced that Iran is more of a liability.
They may have a point. The key of this Moscow-Tehran axis is opportunism - opposition to US hegemonic designs. Is Obama - via his "unclenched fist" policy - wily enough to try to turn this all upside down; or will he be forced by the Israel lobby and the industrial-military complex to finally strike a regime now universally despised all over the West?
Russia - and Iran - are fully committed to a multipolar world. The new military dictatorship of the mullahtariat in Tehran knows it cannot afford to be isolated; its road to the limelight may have to go through Moscow. That explains why Iran is making all sorts of diplomatic efforts to join the SCO.
As much as progressives in the West may support Iranian pragmatic conservatives - who are far from reformists - the crucial fact remains that Iran is a key peon for Russia to manage its relationship with the US and Europe. No matter how nasty the overtones, all evidence points to "stability" at this vital artery in the heart of the New Great Game.
Next: Iran, China and the New Silk Road
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

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Pakistan - US plan falls into place

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Asia Times Online

The seamless friendship between the chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, and Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani, has cemented the relationship between the military establishments of the two countries to levels not seen since the 1950s, when Pakistan was a frontline state against communism.
The result is that Islamabad and Washington are in a position to implement coordinated, long-term policies in the region, which include action against militants, moves to improve ties between Pakistan and India, especially their dispute over divided Kashmir, and the evolution of a broad-based, stable civilian government in Pakistan.
However, just as the US and Pakistan have forged a united front, so too have the previously splintered militants and groups that oppose them in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, setting the stage for a struggle of unprecedented proportions.
The new relationship between the US and Pakistan, supported by a host of American advisors based in the capital Islamabad, is expected to play out on two main fronts.
First, Pakistan will launch a comprehensive battle against all Taliban groups in the country, irrespective of whether they are perceived as good or bad. Over the years, there have been numerous attempts to split the Taliban by making deals with the good ones, that is, those seen as more moderate, to bring them into a peace process.
Second, an initiative will be made by the Pakistani government, supported by the country's Western allies, for better relations with India, strongly mediated by the Pakistan army. The aim will be to reopen the dialogue process on Kashmir which was stalled following the Pakistani-linked terror attack on the Indian city of Mumbai last November in which 166 people were killed. This could also help in building a joint mechanism for cooperation between India and Pakistan with the US in fighting terror.
Militants reorganize
In recent months, different militant groups located in the North Waziristan and South Waziristan tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan have united. At the same time, an al-Qaeda group led by Abdullah Saeed is participating in the belated spring offensive in Afghanistan - it marked this by shooting down a US aircraft in Paktia province last week.
The powerful Haqqani network is also flexing its muscles - it is behind the capture of a US soldier who appears on a recently released video that has caused outrage in the US over the abuse of prisoners of war. The prisoner is believed to be at a Haqqani base in North Waziristan. The group is beefing up its military presence in and around the two Waziristans in an area said to be the headquarters of three powerful networks that have allied.
The networks are that of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan, al-Qaeda's at the crossroads of the two Waziristans and Sirajuddin Haqqani's group in North Waziristan.
Asia Times Online has learnt that Pakistan has gradually moved its forces into Bannu, the principal city of Bannu district in North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and Dera Ismail Khan, another city in NWFP. It has also stationed troops in the Waziristans. Tension is rising there, with the Taliban having disrupted the supply lines of troops based in North Waziristan.
The deadline for the beginning of an all-out operation is not known. It will be the first time that all Taliban groups are targeted - the Sirajuddin network has traditionally been pro-establishment.
The good and now the bad
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), US intelligence and Arab states have for many years maintained excellent relations with Jalaluddin Haqqani, the legendary Afghan commander against the Soviets in the 1980s. Haqqani, now seriously ill, supported the Taliban movement in the mid-1990s on the instructions of the ISI. But the Taliban never considered him a part of the movement, more as a warlord who had allied with them.
As a result, Haqqani was never given any significant position in the Taliban regime. When the Taliban abandoned Kabul in the face of the US-led invasion in late 2001, Islamabad tried hard to get him to abandon Taliban leader Mullah Omar and become the next head of the Afghan government. He flatly refused the proposal and went to a base in North Waziristan.
In 2006, he was elevated by the Taliban to the number one commander in Afghanistan. Pakistan was not too concerned as Haqqani had never meddled in the internal affairs of Pakistan, never allied with a Pakistani political party or group and he had never supported any mutiny in Pakistan.
But now that Haqqani is ill and bed-ridden, his power has been handed to his son Sirajuddin. Siraj's strength, like his father's, is his Punjabi comrades, but his friendship with al-Qaeda's Arab ideologues has influenced him.
Unlike his father, Siraj is close to Pakistan militants hostile to the establishment. The intelligence apparatus was prepared to overlook this, but not any more.
Some while ago, Siraj's brother, Dr Naseer Haqqani, was arrested while attending a meeting that included several wanted people. To the surprise of the security forces, Baitullah Mehsud negotiated for his release, agreeing to swap a few Pakistani soldiers for the detained man. Subsequently, Baitullah and Sirajuddin became close.
This explains the failure of the recent operation to get Baitullah. It depended on the cooperation of local anti-Baitullah tribes who happened to be Taliban, such as those of Mullah Nazir and Gul Bahadur and the now slain Qari Zainuddin Mehsud. Sirajuddin quickly sent messages for all commanders to unite in support of Baitullah, and their compliance ended any hope of him being isolated.
It also explains why the Haqqani network is now in the sights of the military as it prepares for a renewed battle against militants.
On the domestic front, the friendship of Kiani and Mullen has led to the acknowledgement that if military goals are to be achieved, the country needs a stable democratic government.
This explains President Asif Zardari's recent visit to opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, the chief of the Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N), at his residence near Lahore. Zardari proposed to bring the PML-N into the ruling coalition government, possibly with Sharif as prime minister.
Sharif's reservations over extensive presidential powers are the main stumbling block. But whether or not Sharif accepts cabinet portfolios for his party or the premiership for himself, his party is completely onboard with the government's national and international policies.
"In principle, Pakistan has agreed on a stable government, cordial ties with India and support of the war on terror. But for the first time, Admiral Mike Mullen and Ashfaq Parvez Kiani have made a joint initiative to implement this principle under a set mechanism so that there can be no deviations," a senior Pakistani diplomat told Asia Times Online on condition of anonymity.
The militants, too, have their mechanisms in place, and they too don't plan to deviate. A mighty collision is inevitable.
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Jihadi confession rocks India, Pakistan

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Asia Times Online

Just hours after the visiting United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had praised the "sincerity" of Islamabad's anti-terrorism policies, a Pakistani dramatically confessed to taking part in one of the worst terror attacks in India, that in Mumbai last November.
Mohammad Ajmal Amir "Kasab", the lone surviving gunman of the 10 that killed 166 people in a three-day rampage across the city, on Monday after 65 days on trial for among other things murder and waging war against India suddenly reversed his not-guilty plea with the words, "Mujhe gunha kabool hai." (I admit to the crime). "I want to confess," the 21-year-old said to a stunned courtroom.
The Mumbai attack, which from the outset India blamed on Pakistanis, severely strained relations between the two countries, especially as Islamabad initially refused to acknowledge any Pakistan connection. Delhi froze peace talks that were at the time underway between the fractious, nuclear-armed neighbors.
However, last week the Pakistan government handed over a dossier to India providing evidence of the role in the attack played by the banned militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, and also named Kasab as a participant.
Kasab said on Monday he had decided to change his plea - even his lawyers did not know he was going to - as a result of this development, "Please accept my confession, close the case and give the sentence," he said, clearly feeling betrayed by his country.
The strange twist in the case will certainly ease tension between Delhi and Islamabad. The former will feel vindicated in its early finger-pointing, while the latter can use its cooperation as an example of what Clinton described as Pakistan's "commitment to fighting terrorism that permeates the entire government".
Judge M L Tahilyani adjourned the case to allow prosecutors time to study the confession. The charges carry the death sentence.
Following the confession, in a chilling account, Kasab told of his part in the attack that targeted two luxury hotels, a Jewish center, a restaurant popular with tourists, a hospital and the main railway terminal. The men carried automatic guns, grenades and explosives.
Kasab and a partner (Abu Ismail) had been assigned to kill people in and around the railway station. "I was firing and Abu was hurling hand grenades ... I fired at a policeman after which there was no firing from the police side," Kasab said.
From the railway station, where they killed more than 50 people, the two went to Cama Hospital, killing more. They then went to Chowpatty beach, where Abu was killed and Kasab was captured after a shootout with police.
Kasab also named four members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba whom he said saw off the gunmen from the Pakistani port city of Karachi. Among them was Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, chief of operations for Lashkar-e-Taiba. Lakhvi had been identified by India as the attack's chief plotter.
Kasab said it was his desire to get rich quickly as a trained robber that took him down the path of terrorism as he was introduced to jihadis in his quest to receive "specialist" training.
No sooner had Kasab confessed than the media and pundits were abuzz with theories about his sudden decision. According to one theory, the admission was the result of a hush-hush meeting with a senior Maharashtra state minister who told him that it was futile to fight the case as Pakistan had disowned him and his family. According to this theory, when the minister asked Kasab why he had become a terrorist, he stated, "Our leaders in Pakistan kept telling us that Indians were responsible for the blasts in our country, and so we had to take revenge."
According to another theory, Kasab preferred death in India as he was shocked by Pakistan's decision to prosecute five alleged accomplices.
Public prosecutor Ujjwal Nikam reacted by calling Kasab's confession a "ploy" because, according to him, at this late stage - eight months after the attack and 65 days into the trial - the gunman has forfeited his right to plead guilty.
Questions will also be asked over any possible coercion. Soon after being captured, he admitted to the attacks, then he changed his mind, saying he had been pressured.
Pakistan's Defense Minister Chaudhary A Mukhtar told an Indian TV channel, "The statements are one-sided and they were made by a person who is under the custody of Indian jail authorities. If he has stood up and given this statement, I don't know under what pressure he was."
Despite these reservations, the acrimony between Pakistan and India caused by the case may be laid to rest and the trial can come to a speedy conclusion, leaving the door open for the countries to move forward and get back to the peace talks that were so sensationally disrupted last November.
Neeta Lal is a widely published writer/commentator who contributes to many reputed national and international print and Internet publications.
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

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How Dennis Kucinich May Save the Health Reform Battle

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AlterNet

On Friday, an amendment he authored was added to the House bill that allows states to create their own single-payer systems instead of adopting the federally-run exchange system. The original bill allowed states only to enact their own exchange system -- it was a nod to federalism -- with the proviso that if a state (think a deep red one in the South) refused to adopt the plan, the feds could step in and set it up.
The Kucinich amendment is really key. If it were to survive the legislative sausage-making and be enacted into law, the we might expect a progressive state to take advantage of the opportunity and enact a single-payer system in the coming years. And, if those of us who have been pushing such an arrangement are correct, the result will be greater access and better outcomes at a lower price tag for that state's residents.
And then we can move from an often ill-informed argument over the Canadian or British systems to a debate in which we can hold up a model in which millions of real Americans see very tangible benefits from an actual single-payer system in action.

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Walter Cronkite: Definitional Journalist Saw Big Media's Flaws

The Nation

The most trusted name in news worried a great deal in the last years of his life about the collapse of journalistic responsibility that came with the increasing dominance of American media by a handful of corporations.
"I think it is absolutely essential in a democracy to have competition in the media, a lot of competition, and we seem to be moving away from that," Walter Cronkite told me the last time we spoke about media issues.
The definitional CBS News anchorman, who has died at age 92, recognized that Americans needed diverse and competing media outlets, with the resources and the skills to examine issues from a variety of perspectives -- and to challenge entrenched power.
Cronkite was, almost by definition, an "old-media" man. He covered World War II, the Nuremberg trials, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the space race and the first moon landing and Watergate in a career that his successor in the CBS anchor chair, Dan Rather, said was defined by a passion for reporting and journalism.
Yet, in his last years, Cronkite made common cause with media reformers who objected to corporate monopolies and the dumbed-down discourse fostered by big media outlets that were more concerned with commerce and entertainment than with civics and democracy.
Speaking of the relationship between media and democracy, Cronkite told me several years ago: "The way that works is to have multiple owners, with the hope that the owners will have different viewpoints, and with the hope that the debate will help to air all sides, or at least most sides of the issues. But right now I think we're moving away from that approach."
The reporter, editor and anchorman from 1962 to 1981, whose name remained synonymous with American journalism to the day he died, fretted in particular about a 2003 move by the Federal Communications Commission to relax media ownership rules. After the commission approved proposals that would permit a single media company to own television stations that reach up to 45 percent of American households, and that would permit a single media company to own the daily newspaper, several television stations and up to eight radio stations in the same community, Cronkite said, "I think they made a mistake, I do indeed. It seems to me that the rule change was negotiated and promulgated with the goal of creating even larger monopolies in the news-gathering business."
The veteran television journalist was especially concerned about monopolies developing at the local level.
"We are coming closer to that (monopoly situations) today, even without the relaxation of the rules," Cronkite said. "In many communities, we have seen a lot of mergers already and that is disturbing. We have more and more one-newspaper towns, and that troubles me. I think that the failure of newspaper competition in a community is a very serious handicap to the dissemination of the knowledge that the citizens need to participate in a democracy."
Cronkite stepped down as the CBS anchor in 1981. But he remained active as a journalist well into the 21st century, writing a nationally syndicated column that appeared weekly newspapers across the country until just a few years ago.
It was as he was preparing that column that Cronkite and I got to know one another and began an ongoing conversation about the state of the media.
Much had changed since his days at the anchor desk, Cronkite said. And while he shied away from suggesting that everything was better in the good old days, he admitted that he was deeply troubled by the timidity of broadcast media when it came to questioning those in power.
In 1968, Cronkite stunned the nation when, after reporting from Vietnam on the Tet offensive and events that followed it, he went on air and openly questioned whether the U.S. military would ever prevail in that conflict.
"It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate,"Cronkite told his national audience. The anchorman went on to call for the government to open negotiations with the North Vietnamese.
Bill Moyers, who was President Lyndon Johnson's press secretary, has speculated that Cronkite's blunt assessment of the war contributed significantly to Johnson's decision to propose negotiations and to drop out of the 1968 presidential race. (Moyers and Cronkite tangled in the 1960s, when the younger man was President Lyndon Johnson's press secretary. But they eventually became so close that, when Moyers was honored for his lifetime of achievement as a broadcaster at the 2006 Emmy Awards, it was Cronkite who led the cheers.)
As the war in Iraq went horribly awry, I asked Cronkite whether a network anchorman would dare speak out in the same way that he had?
"I think it could happen, yes. I don't think it's likely to happen," he said with an audible sigh. "I think the three networks are still hewing pretty much to that theory. They don't even do analysis anymore, which I think is a shame. They don't even do background. They just seem to do headlines, and the less important it seems the more likely they are to get on the air."
In an era of increasing globalization and speed of communications, Cronkite frequently suggested in our conversations that the networks should be airing hour-long evening news programs. "For a country this big and this powerful and this diverse, a full hour is necessary," he explained. "To try to cover that in 19 minutes is simply impossible."
Cronkite also argued that the networks needed to get more comfortable with criticism. He believed that, after years of battering by conservative media critics, the networks were too averse to taking risks. During the discussion about whether a network anchor might question the wisdom of the Iraq war, he said, "If they (the networks) didn't do it, I think it would be because they are afraid to get in an ideological fight - or that doing so might lose them some viewers. ... I think that is a bad thing, a bad way to decide how to approach a story."
But what about Cronkite? Did he think that, if he were an anchorman today, he would have spoken out against the Iraq war?
"Yes, yes I do. I think that right now it would be critical to do so," he told me a few months after the invasion in 2003. "I think that right now we are in one of the most dangerous periods in our existence. Not since the Civil War has the state of our democracy been so doubtful. Our foreign policy has taken a very strange turn. And I do think I would try to say something about that."
What exactly would Cronkite have told America from the CBS anchor desk?
He said he would have suggested that the Bush administration had "confused" aggressive with defense and force with democracy.
"The policy we're following has involved us in a very expensive set of projects trying to export democracy at the end of a bayonet," he said. "That has caused a great deal of concern around the world and I think Americans need to understand this."
In particular, Cronkite said, he would have bluntly discussed his concerns about Bush's view of when it is appropriate to make war.
"Preventive war is a theory, a policy, that was put forth by the president in his policy address," Cronkite observed. "It upsets all of our previous concepts about the use of power. It is particularly worrying when our power is almost unchallenged around the world. It seems to me that this preventive action is a terrible policy to put forth to other nations. If we are viewed as a pacesetter by other nations, this is a policy that could lead to eternal war around the world. If every small nation with a border dispute believes they can go ahead and launch a pre-emptive war and that it will be approved by the greatest power, that is a very dangerous thing."
To Cronkite's view, Bush was a distinctly aggressive president. "I actually knew Herbert Hoover, believe it or not. And my time as a journalist goes back to Franklin Roosevelt. In my time, I don't think we have had any president as aggressive, except possibly Roosevelt. With Roosevelt, there was in his time a call for leadership, which he gave us. With this White House, they are aggressive on all fronts, whether there is a call for leadership or not."
At the same time, Cronkite said, the U.S. Congress had grown too pliant. Asked about the congressional debate on the Iraq war, he asked rhetorically, "What debate?"
Cronkite was heartened as the years passed and more members of Congress challenged the executive branch. He delighted when younger journalists, many of them working in new media, began to ask tougher questions and make blunter statements. He appreciated bloggers and independent media producers who used documentaries and YouTubes to hold the powerful to account.
Still, he recognized the lingering power of television in our society. And Cronkite continued to worry that broadcast news -- his medium -- had grown too deferrent to power, too stenographic, too consolidated.
"I don't know if I am in a position to encourage Congress one way or another," the old anchorman said. "However, if I were going to offer my opinion on the thing, I would certainly express my feeling that it would be better to have multiple ownership."
Walter Cronkite said he would, as well, remind the powerful that the role of journalism is not to tell Americans what they want to hear but what they need to know as citizens -- because, he said, "journalism is what we need to make democracy work."

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Kashmir: Ground zero of global jihad

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Asia Times Online

Arif Jamal is arguably the leading Pakistani expert on the jihad in Kashmir. He is the author of Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir [1], a groundbreaking, gripping account of the interminable, key conflict between India and Pakistan, based on interviews with hundreds of militants over the years.
The book is essential reading for understanding, among other issues, how the United States-friendly Pakistani army trained nearly half a million jihadis; how United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) money ended up financing the jihad in Kashmir; and how closely interconnected is the situation in Kashmir with the endless turmoil in Afghanistan and the global jihad.
Along with other foreign correspondents from the US, France and Canada, this correspondent recently shared Jamal's knowledge on the ground - in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, as well as in the Pashtun tribal areas of Pakistan. Lately, Jamal has been a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University and is currently associated with New York University.
In an extensive interview, Jamal discusses the origins of jihad, evolving from subversion to guerrilla war and to "privatization"; and how Pakistan's army kept supporting jihadis in Kashmir and the Taliban in Afghanistan even after September 11, 2001, attack s on the US. He sheds light on what really happened in the recent Swat Valley operations in Pakistan against militants - which captured global headlines; on the "Pakistani chapters" of al-Qaeda; and draws a sharp distinction between "historic" al-Qaeda and the new, Pakistani-dominated Jihad International Inc.
He also examines the crucial, myriad links - and ominous implications - involving Afghanistan and Kashmir, rarely addressed by Western media ("the two jihads have always been two sides of the same coin"). His analysis is guaranteed to provide US President Barack Obama's AfPak planners countless white nights.
Pepe Escobar: Pakistan's army leaders have been masters of the double game since the 1980s. Could you briefly describe how they deploy their stealth?
Arif Jamal: Actually, the strategy of playing a double game is as old as the country. When British India was partitioned into two dominions in 1947, Pakistan faced an enemy in India which was several times bigger, more populated, resourceful and most importantly militarily more powerful. It was not good sense to take on a far more powerful enemy in a conventional military way.
Pakistani military strategist Colonel Akbar Khan conceived the concept of jihad to offset the lack of military balance between the two emerging enemies. Akbar Khan's concept of jihad was no more than subversion in the enemy country, but it was couched in jihadi terms. He himself took over the grand-sounding name of a Muslim conqueror as his nom de guerre.
From that time onwards, the Pakistani military leaders kept inciting the local Muslim population in the Indian-controlled state of Jammu and Kashmir to subversion and turning subversion into a guerrilla war until 1980, when they decided to wage a real jihad in Afghanistan [against the Soviets]. At the same time, Pakistan never abandoned the diplomatic option of resolving its conflicts with India. The Pakistan army supported a full-scale anti-Soviet jihad or subversive guerrilla war in Afghanistan. Publicly, Pakistan denied any support to the Afghan mujahideen. The only time Pakistan claimed responsibility for subversion in a neighboring country was when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan [in 1989]. It was a victory for the jihad policy.
Pakistan intensified its military and financial support to Kashmiri jihadis at the end of the 1980s and kept supporting the Afghan mujahideen even after the withdrawal of the Soviets, but never admitted doing so. Pakistan continued the same policy even after the 9/11 terrorist attacks [in the US]. On the one hand, it joined the US-led anti-terror coalition and on the other hand it kept supporting the jihadis in Kashmir and the Taliban in Afghanistan. At best, under [President] General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's actions against terrorists were selective.
PE: Was the operation in Swat Valley [this year] nothing but a big show put up by the army for the benefit of Washington - of course, with the "collateral damage" of displacing 3.4 million people?
AJ: It appears so more and more with the passage of time. In the beginning, it appeared they were serious in eliminating the terrorists there. However, knowingly or unknowingly, they gave enough time to top terrorists like Sufi Mohammad and Maulana Fazlullah and their followers to escape. As a result, the terrorists disappeared from Swat Valley but re-emerged elsewhere.
Parts of Swat Valley and other areas where the TNSM [the banned pro-Taliban Tehrik-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Mohammadi - Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Laws] had established its control may have fallen back to the military, but the terrorists can always come back. Swat Valley is not in the tribal areas. It would have made a lot of sense if they had quietly encircled Swat Valley before the operation so that nobody could escape.
The Swat operation has created such a huge refugee problem that it may defeat every sincere effort to smash terrorism. I do not know whether the military created this crisis knowingly as part of their double game or because of a bad counter-terrorism strategy. If they let that happen unknowingly, it is still more dangerous. This would mean that they are not capable of carrying out anti-terrorist operations even if they are willing to.
PE: Can you expand on the strategic importance of Swat as a corridor linking Pakistani Kashmir and Afghanistan?
AJ: Swat's strategic importance is that it lies somewhere between the borders of Afghanistan and Kashmir. If the "Taliban" get entrenched here, they can spread from there in every direction, ultimately linking Afghanistan and Kashmir through one or more corridors. The terrorists from Kashmir and Afghanistan would be able to freely move between the two. The differences between the jihadis in Afghanistan and those in Kashmir would go and they would unite under one jihadi command. Muslim extremists would emerge a lot stronger as a result. The Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan would establish new sanctuaries in the Himalayas from where they would carry out attacks on Western forces in Afghanistan and elsewhere. It would be a lot more difficult to fight and dislodge them from the Himalayas than from Afghanistan.
PE: Whoever was responsible for the recent bombing in Lahore of an Inter-Services Intelligence facility had very good on-the-ground intel on the ISI - not surprisingly, considering the Taliban were "invented" by the ISI in the first part of the 1990s. It has been speculated that the bombing was planned and financed by al-Qaeda, with logistical support by Kashmiri guerrillas and with Pakistan Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud's TTP [Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan] group contributing with suicide bombers. Sounds like a CIA fantasy scenario. Any truth to it?
AJ: We do not know and probably will never know for sure who carried out the recent bombing in Lahore in which an important Brelvi cleric, Sarfraz Naeemi, died. The investigating agencies in Pakistan rarely finish the investigations in such cases. One or more Pakistani chapters of al-Qaeda may have been behind it. The Pakistani chapters of al-Qaeda such as the Jaish-i-Mohammad and different factions of the former Harakatul Ansaar have operated in Pakistan freely even after 9/11.
General Musharraf's regime never took any action against them under the false pretext that they were not fighting in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the West also did not consider them part of al-Qaeda because they were primarily engaged in the jihad in Kashmir. The reality was that the Pakistani Deobandi jihadis, such as Maulana Masood Azhar and Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, were the human links between the jihad in Kashmir and the jihad in Afghanistan. The two jihads have always been two sides of the same coin.
PE: Baitullah Mehsud seems to have been converted into the new Osama bin Laden. What's fact and fiction? Is he really the new emir of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas [FATA]? Is he really the top "al-Qaeda facilitator", according to CIA spin? What sort of "Kashmiris" are collaborating with him? What does he really want?
AJ: Jihad International Inc continuously needs a figurehead. Baitullah Mehsud was catapulted into the new Bin Laden role a couple of years ago because Jihad International Inc appeared to be losing the war in the absence of a figurehead such as Bin Laden. The ISI had fielded him to counter the growing influence of Abdullah Mehsud, who was spinning out of ISI control. Abdullah Mehsud had deviated from the given script by kidnapping Chinese citizens in Pakistan.
Now, Baitullah Mehsud also seems to have spun out of their control. Hence, he also has to be eliminated, and be replaced. Baitullah Mehsud won the first battle against the ISI by having another terrorist, Qari Zainuddin, murdered, who had been propped up by the ISI to take the place of Baitullah Mehsud. This is a flawed policy. Every terrorist has the tendency to spin out of control. If Qari Zainuddin had succeeded, he would have emerged a more dreaded terrorist and would have spun out of his handlers' control. To answer the last part of your question, I would say that many Pakistani jihadi groups have joined Baitullah Mehsud and others have established links with his organization.
PE: Is al-Qaeda using Kashmiris in FATA and North-West Frontier Province [NWFP]?
AJ: Al-Qaeda in the shape of the Jaish-i-Mohammad, Harakatul Jihad Islami and Harakatul Mujahideen has been operating in Pakistan despite formal bans. They were allowed to operate because they also waged jihad in Kashmir as well. As support for militancy dwindled in Kashmir, they went to the FATA to wage jihad against the state of Pakistan. "Kashmiris" from the Valley of Kashmir are mostly not interested in international jihad. Their jihad is aimed at liberating their state from India. The only Kashmiri group from the valley interested in global jihad is the Hizbul Mujahideen.
PE: According to your best estimates, how many Saudi jihadis are roaming around FATA? And what about Uzbek and Chechen
gun experts? Is "historic" al-Qaeda, with Bin Laden dead or not dead, now playing a sort of very long-range, behind-the-scenes, "wiser" advisory role?
AJ: They are probably in the hundreds. They keep coming and going. But, that is surely not the question. They are not playing leading parts. It is the Pakistani jihadis who are assuming leadership roles.
The historic al-Qaeda may or may not be dead, but it has definitely gone in the background. The new Jihad International Inc appears to be aiming at Pakistan rather than at the West. It seems to be trying to take over Islamabad and to turn it into a springboard for global jihad. The difference between the "historic" al-Qaeda and the new Jihad International Inc is that the latter is dominated by Pakistani jihadis while the former was Arab-oriented with an Arab, Bin Laden, at the top. The other difference is that new Jihad International Inc is aiming at India as a primary target while al-Qaeda under Bin Laden wanted to destroy America.
PE: What's the potential for the TTP to really threaten Peshawar [capital of NWFP], considering that Peshawar is not Talibanized, and mostly voted for a Pashtun nationalist party last year?
The TTP has a lot of potential for destruction in Pakistan, but cannot occupy any part of it without the support from rogue elements in the state. After all, they do not take over territory through elections. Khyber Agency was very liberal before the ISI started supporting the Lashkar-i-Islam led by Mufti Shakir and Mangal Bagh. Khyber Agency had returned a very liberal lawmaker, Lateef Afridi, to parliament. When the TTP thought it right to take over Peshawar, the ANP [Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party] would simply evaporate in the air. The ANP leaders are already living in virtual hiding. But this would not happen without active support from rogue elements in the state.
PE: The Taliban in Pakistan are a social movement as well. They seem to strike a chord with the general population when they portray Islamabad as a puppet of US imperialism and Zionism. But if Islamabad manages to portray the Pakistani Taliban as merely a terrorist group, do you think that would be enough to win the battle for Pakistanis' hearts and minds?
AJ: The Zardari-Gillani government [President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gillani] won the hearts and minds of the people when they won elections [last year]. The propaganda against the democratically elected government comes from sympathizers of the Taliban in the media and politics. These Islamists feel more comfortable under military rule. The vast majority of Pakistanis never supported terrorism in any form.
PE: What's substantially wrong with US President Obama's AfPak strategy? Did he get his priorities right? How come he doesn't even mention Kashmir?
AJ: The Obama administration is not striking very hard on the source of global jihad, which is the jihad in Kashmir. My sense is the Obama administration understands the issue of terrorism more than the [George W] Bush administration. But, it seems to have accepted pressure from India, and is not mentioning the Kashmir conflict. The earlier idea of appointing a special envoy to Kashmir was a brilliant idea and abandoning it, I think, is the biggest mistake they are making. The Pakistani military will not stop supporting jihad in Kashmir without the resolution of the Kashmir conflict. Pakistan and India cannot resolve the Kashmir conflict without active involvement of America. Meanwhile, the jihad in Kashmir will keep giving birth to global jihadis.
PE: To what measure are the US Predator drone war on FATA, the heaps of "collateral damage", the contemptuous Pentagon denials, the connivance of Zardari's government, Pakistan's "national sovereignty" in tatters, leading towards either Talibanization or at least a movement for the emergence of Pashtunistan? Will Pakistan eventually break up?
AJ: I do not think that the drone attacks are leading to more "Talibanization" or a nationalist movement for Pashtunistan. But, unfortunately, they are not helping to curb the rise of extremism either. They are at best a short-term solution to stop Taliban attacks inside Afghanistan from Pakistani territory. They are not a long-term solution either. It is only the sympathizers of the Taliban who pose as liberals who are spreading this false theory. This theory ignores the reality that Talibanization pre-existed the drone attacks.
Islamic extremism or what they mistakenly call Talibanization in the West is directly opposed to Pashtun nationalism. It is eroding Pashtun nationalism in a big way. The most favorite targets of the "Taliban" include symbols of Pashtun nationalism, like the tomb of saint-poet Rehman Baba, which they have bombed out, as well as schools, artists' houses, etc.
I do not even think that the drones are attacks on Pakistan's sovereignty. The Americans are carrying out drone attacks in the Pakistani tribal belt with the knowledge and support of the Pakistani government, especially the military. They should be considered joint operations. It is another kind of double game Pakistan is playing; helping the Americans to carry out drone attacks secretly and denying it publicly.
Contrarily, it is the rise of Islamic extremism that is eroding the sovereignty of Pakistan. Many parts of the country are directly under the control of the extremists, where they apply sharia law. Is this not erosion of sovereignty? In reality, the state is continuously receding in the background. When the Taliban send a letter to an audio-video market in Lahore, the traders come out and make a bonfire of "un-Islamic" videotapes" to avoid Taliban attacks. Is this not erosion of Pakistani sovereignty? On the call of the Taliban, the banks in Peshawar ask their employees to stop wearing Western dresses because it is un-Islamic. Where is Pakistan's so-called sovereignty in this case? The Taliban are asking non-Muslim minorities like Sikhs and Hindus to pay jyzia, an Islamic tax, in some parts of the country. That is the real attack on Pakistan's sovereignty.
PE: You see jihad expanding to the borders of Jammu and Kashmir in India, in the east, and Afghanistan in the west. The outcome of all this would mean jihadis moving freely between Kashmir and Afghanistan. Is this plan A for the ISI and the Pakistani army, with no plan B?
AJ: The ISI is very good at adapting to emerging situations. Most of their plans do not work as intended. It is neither plan A, nor plan B. I think it is an unintended result of the privatization of jihad. The Pakistani military had been privatizing jihad in Kashmir from the very beginning, and later in Afghanistan in the 1980s. After 9/11, the ISI further privatized jihad and outsourced it to former ISI officers.
Parts of NWFP like the Khyber Agency were outsourced to a former ISI officer, Major Amir (retired), who came into limelight when he tried to destabilize the first Benazir Bhutto government in 1989-90. Under ISI pressure, he was retired but not punished. He again came into the limelight when the Nawaz Sharif government unearthed an ISI plot, known as Midnight Jackals, to destabilize his government.
Major Amir is the brother of Maulana Mohammad Tayyab, who heads an extremist Takfiri group, Jamat Ishaat Al Tauheed Wal Sunnah, popularly known as Panjpiris. This group was deeply involved in the rise of the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan and the TNSM. The group seems to be working at joining the two jihads. The two brothers played important roles in the formation of the TTP and the radicalization of the TNSM. TTP leader Maulana Faqir Mohammad is their follower and studied in their madrassa [Islamic seminary] in Swabi [in NWFP]. The conclusion is that even former ISI officers tend to deviate from the given script and spin out of control.
PE: Is there any support left - by people living on both sides of the Line of Control [LoC] that separates Indian-administered Kashmir and Pakistan-administered Kashmir - for jihad? Or will this continue to be just an ISI obsession?
AJ: Unfortunately, there is still a lot of support for jihad on both sides of the LoC. The ISI has been exploiting this support and will continue to do so until the Kashmir conflict is resolved for good.
PE: What's the ultimate solution for Kashmir? What does the majority, on both sides of the LoC, really want? And who's more flexible, those living in India or in Pakistan?
AJ: It is too premature to talk of an ultimate solution. The Kashmir conflict is too complex to talk about in just an interview. The real issue is that India is not ready to deviate from its position and Pakistan is not ready to accept the status quo as the solution. Once both countries are ready for a solution, finding a solution will not be a problem. There are a few dozen of them. The majority of the people in the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir may want to join Pakistan, but that would not be fair to the large majority of people in the Jammu and Ladakh regions. The two states should resolve their territorial conflict in a diplomatic way. Religion should not be allowed to determine the international borders once again, after 62 years.
Note
1. Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir (Hardcover) by Arif Jamal, Melville House (May 19, 2009). ISBN-10: 193363359X. Price US$26.95, 352 pages.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

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