Is the End Near for the Right-Wing's Vice Grip on U.S. Israeli Policy?

J-Street, vilified by the right and the Right Wing-Nut Christian dominionists who are trying to provoke Armageddon, the peace and reconciliation focused lobby for younger moderate to progressive American Jews goes center stage with Obama's National Security Advisor giving the keynote. Yes, things not the same in the relationship between Israel and the US today. No more Israeli and Iranian spies sneaking around the White House.

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This week, retired Marine Corps Gen. Jim Jones, Barack Obama's national security adviser, will keynote the inaugural J Street Conference, billed as a gathering of "progressive pro-Israel, pro-peace" activists.

The event marks the emergence of the moderate Jewish advocacy group that aspires to be a counterweight to the voices of the traditionally hawkish "pro-Israel" lobby in Washington.

The White House's decision last week to send Jones to address the event was a small move that might have a significant impact on the overheated politics of the Middle East.

In the months before, a full-throated "swift boat" campaign had been launched against J Street in an attempt to vilify and delegitimize the group as belonging to the fringe, despite its advocacy of a moderate, or at most slightly left-of center, approach to U.S. policy in the Middle East.

The conservative media offered a steady drumbeat of dubious charges, and a campaign had been under way to warn members of Congress away from the event. And it appeared to be having some impact as several members of Congress pulled out of the conference in the weeks leading up to the event (a total of 10 reportedly dropped out, according to reports, but not all in response to outside pressure).

It was an attempt to nip J Street in the bud and preserve the hegemony established lobbying groups like American Israel Public Affairs Committee have long enjoyed in the halls of Congress.

At stake was not only the definition of what it means to be "pro-Israel" -- long synonymous with supporting the more hawkish end of Israel's political spectrum (despite American Jews' general tendency to lean left) -- but also, and more importantly, the ability of established lobbying groups to claim to speak for the American Jewish community as a whole.

More via Is the End Near for the Right-Wing's Vice Grip on U.S. Israeli Policy? | | AlterNet.

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Are the Haqqanis next on Pakistan's hit list?

The ISI, Pakistan's intelligence agency continues to be a controversial force. It appears to be getting a free pass in North Waziristan while it attacks the Pakistan Taliban in South Waziristan. Pakistan still sees the appeal of the Afghan Taliban while it seeks influence in the events in both Afghanistan and Kashmir.

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Are the Haqqanis next on Pakistan's hit list? | FP Passport.

New York Times journalist David Rohde's account of his kidnapping and subsequent escape from Taliban militants affiliated with the Haqqani network in North Waziristan region of Pakistan makes for riveting reading. It's an amazing story, and one has to admire Rohde's fortitude and survival instincts during his seven-month ordeal.

Read all of it, but I just have one comment about this bit from the epilogue:

My suspicions about the relationship between the Haqqanis and the Pakistani military proved to be true. Some American officials told my colleagues at The Times that Pakistan's military intelligence agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, turns a blind eye to the Haqqanis' activities. Others went further and said the ISI provided money, supplies and strategic planning to the Haqqanis and other Taliban groups.

Pakistani officials told my colleagues that the contacts were part of a strategy to maintain influence in Afghanistan to prevent India, Pakistan's archenemy, from gaining a foothold. One Pakistani official called the Taliban "proxy forces to preserve our interests."

Meanwhile, the Haqqanis continue to use North Waziristan to train suicide bombers and bomb makers who kill Afghan and American forces. They also continue to take hostages.

We'll see how long this relationship holds, but if you need any convincing that the ISI at least tacitly allows the Haqqani folks to do their thing unmolested, consider this: To get to South Waziristan, where the Pakistani Army is engaged in a fierce battle with the Pakistani Taliban around the Makin area, which is dominated by the Mehsud tribal grouping, some units had to drive through North Waziristan. In fact, they drove right through the center of Miram Shah, the regional capital and Haqqani stronghold where Rohde made his escape -- and there was just one isolated IED attack along the way.

What does that tell us? At a minimum, it tells us that the powers that be in North Waziristan are being very cooperative and not coming to the Mehsuds' aid. And supposedly, the Haqqanis and their local allies, led by another Pakistani Taliban leader named Hafiz Gul Bahadar, have explicitly pledged not to interfere. The Pakistani military has struck a number of much-criticized peace deals with Bahadar over the last few years, and some say the security establishment in Rawalpindi is all too happy to keep this relationship alive so long as the Haqqanis and Bahadar only launch attacks in Afghanistan, not at home.

American officials have been hinting in recent weeks, however, that the Pakistani military is simply tackling one challenge at a time -- the Mehsuds -- and the Haqqanis may be next on their hit list. That's certainly what AfPak envoy Richard Holbrooke and Amb. Ann Patterson seem to be telling Frontline, though one can detect a little daylight between the two U.S. diplomats. In Holbrooke's words, the Pakistanis "are quite clear in their own minds that Haqqani poses a threat to both Afghanistan and Pakistan." Patterson says, "[W]e're working with them on these, and I think they increasingly see these [other] groups as a threat as well" -- but Pakistan is not willing to turn on them yet.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is still conducting airstrikes in North Waziristan, which is still teeming with foreign militants and where it's widely thought that Osama bin Laden has hidden out at one point or another during the last few years. This is definitely a story to watch.

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US's 'arc of instability' just gets bigger

Pepe Escobar, the author of this article, writes his convictions. Truly his Chinese employers see their agenda served, but in this case, it would appear both Pepe and China have a point. The US has taken on the traditional role of Great Britain. The Brits maintained their dominance of the world by playing divide and conquer. The US is doing the same. Except, it would appear, the availability of information via the internet is undermining the US effectiveness.

Has Obama simply filled Bushes shoes as the world's bully? At this point I'm thinking this is an engine independent of government. Is it a "rogue" CIA operation blacked out to even Obama? Totally blacked out, probably not, but buried in piles and piles of similar operations with few directors and no accountability to maintain plausible denial ability and accessible to the new president only with time and focus. Do you thing Obama has enough on his plate?

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Asia Times Online

The New Great Game is not only focused on the face-off between the United States and strategic competitors Russia and China - with Pipelineistan as a defining element.

The full spectrum dominance doctrine requires the control of the Pentagon-coined "arc of instability" from the Horn of Africa to western China. The cover story is the former "global war on terror", now "overseas contingency operations" under the management of President Barack Obama's administration.

Most of all, the underlying logic remains divide and rule. As for the divide, Beijing would call it, without a trace of irony, "splittist". Split up Iraq - blocking China's access to Iraqi oil. Split up Pakistan - with an independent Balochistan preventing China from

accessing the strategic port of Gwadar there. Split up Afghanistan - with an independent Pashtunistan allowing the building of the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline bypassing Russia. Split up Iran - by financing subversion in Khuzestan and Sistan-Balochistan. And why not split up Bolivia (as was attempted last year) to the benefit of US energy giants. Call it the (splitting) Kosovo model.

Kosovo, incidentally, is known as the Colombia of the Balkans. What Washington calls the "Western hemisphere" is a sub-section of the New Great Game. The linkage between the recent military coup in Honduras, the return of the living dead - that is, the resurrection of the US Navy's Fourth Fleet in July 2008 - and now the turbo-charging of seven US military bases in Colombia is not to be blamed merely on continuity from president George W Bush to Obama. Not really. This is all about the internal logic of Full Spectrum Dominance.

via Asia Times Online :: South Asia news, business and economy from India and Pakistan.

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Clinton: It Is a "Great Regret" the US Is Not in International Criminal Court

Hillary Clinton has signalled a significant shift by the US in favour of the international criminal court, the world body that pursues war criminals but was strenuously opposed by the Bush administration.

In the most public expression of support yet from Barack Obama's administration, the US secretary of state expressed regret that the US has not yet joined the ICC.

The court, set up in 2002, has pursued dictators, mainly from Africa, who are alleged to have been engaged in genocide and other war crimes.

The US is at present not only not a member but government officials are theoretically banned from any engagement with the ICC whatsoever. An administration official predicted there will be increased US cooperation with the ICC but cautioned against expecting early entry.

Clinton, speaking at a public meeting in Kenya, the first leg of an African tour, indicated she hoped this would come sooner rather than later: "This is a great regret that we are not a signatory. I think we could have worked out some of the challenges that are raised concerning our membership. But that has not yet come to pass."

There is a divide in the Obama administration over entry. Clinton and some other senior figures at the White House and state department are passionately in favour, while others advocate caution, saying the president can afford not to rush membership and should wait to see how the ICC evolves.

Supporters of the ICC, including the UK, which is a member, have long advocated the US joining, saying this would immensely strengthen the body.

But President George Bush blocked American membership, expressing fears that US officials could be open to arrest for alleged war crimes. The Pentagon was concerned that US soldiers might end up in court in The Hague.

In December 2000, just before he left office, the former president Bill Clinton signed up to the ICC. But Bush two years later announced that the US would not be joining and a bill ratifying membership failed to get through Congress.

via t r u t h o u t.

He who is afraid of the justice of his peers is guilt of crimes.

The Launching of U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM).

Globalresearch.ca

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates signed a memorandum on June 23 that announced the launch of U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM). A scheme by securocrats in the works for several years, the order specifies that the new office will be a "subordinate unified command" under U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM).
According to the memorandum, CYBERCOM "will reach initial operating capability (IOC) not later than October 2009 and full operating capability (FOC) not later than October 2010."
Gates has recommended that this new Pentagon domain be led by Lt. General Keith Alexander, the current Director of the ultra-spooky National Security Agency (NSA). Under the proposal, Alexander would receive a fourth star and the new agency would be based at Ft. Meade, Maryland, NSA's headquarters.
Gates' memorandum specifies that CYBERCOM "must be capable of synchronizing warfighting effects across the global security environment as well as providing support to civil authorities and international partners."
Ostensibly launched to protect military networks against malicious cyberattacks, the command's offensive nature is underlined by its role as STRATCOM's operational cyber wing. In addition to a defensive brief to "harden" the "dot-mil" domain, the Pentagon plan calls for an offensive capacity, one that will deploy cyber weapons against imperialism's adversaries.
One of ten Unified Combatant Commands, STRATCOM is the successor organization to Strategic Air Command (SAC). Charged with space operations (military satellites), information warfare, missile defense, global command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), as well as global strike and strategic deterrence (America's first-strike nuclear arsenal), it should be apparent that designating CYBERCOM a STRATCOM branch all but guarantees an aggressive posture.
As Antifascist Calling reported in May, the Pentagon's geek squad, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently building a National Cyber Range (NCR), a test bed for developing, testing and fielding cyber weapons.
In conjunction with "private-sector partners," the agency averred in a January 2009 press release that NCR promises to deliver "'leap ahead' concepts and capabilities."
The Armed Forces Press Service reported June 24, that Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell told journalists that CYBERCOM is "not some sort of new and necessarily different authorities that have been granted." Obfuscating the offensive role envisaged for the command, Morrell told reporters: "This is about trying to figure out how we, within this department, within the United States military, can better coordinate the day-to-day defense, protection and operation of the department's computer networks."
Others within the defense bureaucracy are far more enthusiastic, and forthright, when it comes to recommending that cyber armaments be fielded as offensive weapons of war. Indeed, Armed Forces Journal featured a lengthy analysis advocating precisely that.
The world has abandoned a fortress mentality in the real world, and we need to move beyond it in cyberspace. America needs a network that can project power by building an af.mil robot network (botnet) that can direct such massive amounts of traffic to target computers that they can no longer communicate and become no more useful to our adversaries than hunks of metal and plastic. America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack. (Col. Charles W. Williamson III, "Carpet Bombing in Cyberspace," Armed Forces Journal, May 2008)
We have heard these Orwellian arguments before; one can take it for granted that when militarists pontificate on the need for a "deterrent," the bombers are preparing for take off.
As with other Pentagon schemes, the technological quick fix may prove as deadly as the alleged threat, particularly where botnets are concerned.
A botnet is a collection of widely dispersed computers controlled from one or more central nodes. Often built by cyber criminals to implant malicious programs or code, steal passwords and other encrypted data from targeted systems, botnets are the bane of the Internet.
In these endeavors, sophisticated hackers are aided and abetted by the miserable security code or lax practices of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) more concerned with facilitating commerce--and the bottom line--than in providing adequate protection against criminals.
Indeed in March, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) urged the Federal Trade Commission "to shut down Google's so-called cloud computing services, including Gmail and Google Docs, if the web giant can't ensure the safety of user data stored by these online apps," The Register reported.
EPIC's petition in part, was sparked "by a Google snafu that saw the company inadvertently share certain Google Docs files with users unauthorized to view them. Google estimates that the breach hit about 0.05 per cent of the documents stored by the service," according to The Register.
Infected computers are referred to as "zombies" that can be controlled remotely from any point on the planet by "master" machines. Unwary users are often "spoofed" by hackers through counterfeit e-mails replete with embedded hyperlinks into "cooperating" with the installation of malicious code.
While criminals employ botnets to generate spam or commit fraudulent transactions, draining a savings account or running-up credit card debt through multiple purchases for example, botnets also have the capacity to launch devastating distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against inadequately defended computers or indeed, entire networks.
As many commentators have warned, the best defense is to write better security programs and exercise a modicum of common sense when using the Internet. The Pentagon however, has something else in mind.
Col. Williamson proposes to transform the Air Force's high-speed intrusion-detection systems into an offensive botnet by enabling "the thousands of computers the Air Force would normally discard every year for technology refresh, removing the power-hungry and heat-inducing hard drives, replacing them with low-power flash drives, then installing them in any available space every Air Force base can find." In other words, creating thousands of zombie machines.
"After that," Col. Williamson avers, "the Air Force could add botnet code to all its desktop computers attached to the Nonsecret Internet Protocol Network (NIPRNet). Once the system reaches a level of maturity, it can add other .mil computers, then .gov machines."
Underscoring the risks posed by out-of-control military hackers to hold America's, or any other nations' communications infrastructure hostage to a militarized state, Williamson suggests that in order to "generate the right amount of power for offense, all the available computers must be under the control of a single commander, even if he provides the capability for multiple theaters. While it cannot be segmented like an orange for individual theater commanders, it can certainly be placed under their tactical control." (emphasis added)
In other words, should an "individual theatre commander" desire to suddenly darken a city or wreck havoc on a nation's electrical infrastructure at the behest of his political masters then by all means, go right ahead! A proposal such as this, should it ever be implemented, would in essence, be a first-strike weapon.
Other plans for "defending" Pentagon computer networks are even more extreme.
STRATCOM commander Gen. Kevin Chilton has even suggested that "the White House retains the option to respond with physical force--potentially even using nuclear weapons--if a foreign entity conducts a disabling cyber attack against U.S. computer networks," according to a disturbing report published by Global Security Newswire. During a Defense Writers Group breakfast in May, Chilton told journalists:
"I think you don't take any response options off the table from an attack on the United States of America. Why would we constrain ourselves on how we respond?" ...
Should the breaches evolve into more serious computer attacks against the United States, Chilton said he could not rule out the possibility of a military salvo against a nation like China, even though Beijing has nuclear arms. He rejected the idea that such a conflict would necessarily risk going nuclear.
"I don't think that's true," Chilton said.
At the same time, the general insisted that all strike options, including nuclear, would remain available to the commander in chief in defending the nation from cyber strikes.
"I think that's been our policy on any attack on the United States of America," Chilton said. "And I don't see any reason to treat cyber any differently. I mean, why would we tie the president's hands? I can't. It's up to the president to decide." (Elaine M. Grossman, "U.S. General Reserves Right to Use Force, Even Nuclear, in Response to Cyber Attack," Global Security Newswire, May 12, 2009)
While Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told The New York Times that CYBERCOM's launch "is not about the militarization of cyber," how else can it be characterized?
Indeed, Whitman went on to say that CYBERCOM "is focused only on military networks to better consolidate and streamline Department of Defense capabilities into a single command."
How then, should one interpret moves by the Pentagon to "consolidate and streamline" DoD "capabilities" under the purview of STRATCOM? Obviously, an entity defined as a "Unified Combatant Command" as clearly stated by General Chilton's avowal to "leave all options on the table," would combine cyber "defense" with STRATCOM's global strike mission.
Antifascist Calling revealed last year, citing a U.S. Air Force planning document, that preparations are already underway to transform cyberspace into an offensive military domain. Indeed, Air Force theorists averred:
Cyberspace favors offensive operations. These operations will deny, degrade, disrupt, destroy, or deceive an adversary. Cyberspace offensive operations ensure friendly freedom of action in cyberspace while denying that same freedom to our adversaries. We will enhance our capabilities to conduct electronic systems attack, electromagnetic systems interdiction and attack, network attack, and infrastructure attack operations. Targets include the adversary's terrestrial, airborne, and space networks, electronic attack and network attack systems, and the adversary itself. As an adversary becomes more dependent on cyberspace, cyberspace offensive operations have the potential to produce greater effects. (Air Force Cyber Command, "Strategic Vision," no date, emphasis added)
Echoing Air Force strategy, SecDef Gates memo clearly states, since "cyberspace and its associated technologies ... are vital to our nation's security," the United States will "secure freedom of action in cyberspace" by standing-up a unified command "that possesses the required technical capability and remains focused on the integration of cyberspace operations."
Simply put, the Pentagon intends to build an infrastructure fully-capable of committing high-tech war crimes.
Under NSA's Operational Control
Meanwhile in the heimat, CYBERCOM will effectively be under the day-to-day control of the National Security Agency. This is hardly good news when it comes to civil liberties.
Leaving aside considerations of bureaucratic trench warfare with the Department of Homeland Security, charged with defending the state's .gov and .com domains, the unprecedented power of CYBERCOM to conduct offensive military and surveillance operations within the United States itself is underlined by the preeminent role NSA will assume.
Authorized by the criminal Bush regime to carry out massive electronic surveillance of Americans' private communications in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, various driftnet spying operations continue under Obama's purported "change" administration. As Antifascist Calling has averred many times, the only "change" that's come to the White House has been the color of the drapes hanging in the Oval Office.
The New York Times revealed June 17, that the "National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged." According to the Times, "The agency's monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, the officials said."
I take issue with the Times' characterization that such a breach of constitutional norms merely represent "logistical difficulties." As with a Times' report in April which alleged that NSA's driftnet spying under Obama was simply a problem of "overcollection," far from being mere technical issues, first and foremost, these violations represent political decisions made at the highest levels of the national security state itself.
Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency's ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans' e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation. (James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, "E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress," The New York Times, June 17, 2009)
Last year, congressional Democrats, including Senator now President, Obama, handed the NSA virtually unchecked power to spy on the private communications of Americans. In addition to granting retroactive immunity to telecom grifters who profited from their conspiracy to illegally spy on citizens for the state, the despicable FISA Amendments Act (FIA) gave NSA the legal cover to intercept Americans' communications "so long as it was done only as the incidental byproduct of investigating individuals 'reasonably believed' to be overseas," as the Times delicately put it.
CYBERCOM's brief, and its deployment inside NSA with full access to the agency's powerful computing assets, and with a mission to conduct global Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) at the behest of their STRATCOM masters, mean that despite bromides about "privacy concerns," the Pentagon will most assuredly be interested in developing an attack matrix that can just as easily be turned inward. After all as General Chilton asserts, "it's up to the president to decide."
"One thing that is pretty clear," Wired reports, "NSA will be leading this emerging command." Indeed, NSA "may also come to dominate the wider government cyber defense effort, as well." As The Wall Street Journal revealed, the Defense Department's 2010 budget "envisions training and graduating more than 200 cyber-security officers annually." In contradistinction to DoD, "the Department of Homeland Security has 100 employees dedicated to civilian cyber security, with plans to reach 260 next year," the Journal reports.
In other words, right from the get-go NSA will be assuming operational control of CYBERCOM. This is driven home by the fact that the Pentagon is already receiving the vast majority of appropriations for state cybersecurity initiatives and have thousands of cyberwarriors across all branches of the military, including outsourced private contractors who labor for DoD, ready, willing and able to staff the new command.
As Antifascist Calling revealed in April, with billions of dollars already spent on a score of top secret cyber initiatives, including those hidden within Pentagon Special Access or black programs, the issue of oversight is already a moot point.
Defense analyst William M. Arkin in his essential book, Code Names, described some three dozen cyberwar programs and/or exercises, currently being pursued by the Pentagon. Since the book's 2005 publication, many others undoubtedly have come on-line.
While NSA Director Alexander has explicitly stated that he does "not want [NSA] to run cybersecurity for the United States government," CYBERCOM's stand-up, and Alexander's near certain appointment as commander, all but guarantees that the agency will be a ubiquitous and silent gatekeeper answerable to no one.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press and the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.

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The Dark Side of Plan Colombia: How the U.S. is Subsidizing Death and Drug Trafficking on Stolen Lands

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AlterNet

As Congress prepares to debate new Plan Colombia funding, it's time to investigate how money for biofuels is linked to violence and bloodshed.
Research support for this article was provided by the Puffin Foundation Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, with additional support from Project Word, a Massachusetts-based media nonprofit organization.
On May 14 Colombia's attorney general quietly posted notice on his office's website of a public hearing that will decide the fate of Coproagrosur, a palm oil cooperative based in the town of Simití in the northern province of Bolívar. A confessed drug-trafficking paramilitary chief known as Macaco had turned over to the government the cooperative's assets, which he claims to own, as part of a victim reparations program.
Macaco, whose real name is Carlos Mario Jiménez, was one of the bloodiest paramilitary commanders in Colombia's long-running civil war and has confessed to the murder of 4,000 civilians. He and his cohorts are also largely responsible for forcing 4.3 million Colombians into internal refugee status, the largest internally displaced population in the world after Sudan's. In May 2008, Macaco was extradited to the United States on drug trafficking and "narco-terrorism" charges. He is awaiting trial in a jail cell in Washington, DC.
Macaco turned himself in to authorities in late 2005 as part of a government amnesty program that requires paramilitary commanders to surrender their ill-gotten assets -- including lands obtained through violent displacement. Macaco offered up Coproagrosur as part of the deal.
But the attorney general's notice made no mention that Coproagrosur had received a grant in 2004 from the US Agency for International Development (USAID). That grant -- paid for through Plan Colombia, the multibillion-dollar US aid package aimed at fighting the drug trade -- appears to have put drug-war dollars into the hands of a notorious paramilitary narco-trafficker, in possible violation of federal law. Colombia's paramilitaries are on the State Department's list of foreign terrorist organizations. USAID's due diligence process "did not fail," according to an official response from the US embassy there, because Macaco was not officially listed among Coproagrosur's owners.
Since 2002 Plan Colombia has authorized about $75 million a year for "alternative development" programs like palm oil production. These programs provide funds for agribusiness partnerships with campesinos in order to wean them from cultivating illicit crops like coca, which can be used to make cocaine. These projects are concentrated in parts of northern Colombia that were ground zero for the mass displacement of campesinos.
USAID officials say the projects provide an alternative to drug-related violence for a battle-scarred country. They insist that the agency screens vigilantly for illegal activity and has not rewarded cultivators of stolen lands. But a study of USAID internal documents, corporate filings and press reports raises questions about the agency's vetting of applicants, in particular its ability to detect their links to narco-paramilitaries, violent crimes and illegal land seizures.
In addition to the $161,000 granted to Coproagrosur, USAID also awarded $650,000 to Gradesa, a palm company with two accused paramilitary-linked narco-traffickers on its board of directors. A third palm company, Urapalma, also accused of links with paramilitaries, nearly won approval for a grant before its application stalled because of missing paperwork. Critics say such grants defeat the antidrug mission of Plan Colombia.
"Plan Colombia is fighting against drugs militarily at the same time it gives money to support palm, which is used by paramilitary mafias to launder money," says Colombian Senator Gustavo Petro, an outspoken critic of the palm industry. "The United States is implicitly subsidizing drug traffickers."
Land Theft and the Biofuel Boom
Brig. Gen. Pauxelino Latorre led an elderly farmer through a maze of concrete hallways, past a series of harshly lit rooms overlooking banana plantations and deep into the barracks of the Colombian army's Seventeenth Brigade in Carepa, a town in northwestern Colombia. Soldiers saluted stiffly as the general barreled by. The farmer -- Enrique Petro -- poor, in his late 60s, shuffled a few steps behind, trying to avoid eye contact.
Petro was understandably anxious. Criminal investigations had repeatedly linked the Seventeenth Brigade to illegal paramilitary groups that had brutally killed thousands, including Petro's brother and teenage son. As he walked deeper into the barracks, Petro had a sense of foreboding. Latorre opened a door into a building at the back of the base, where Javier Daza, then head of Urapalma, was waiting. In the ensuing encounter, Daza and the general did most of the talking.
It was August 2004. A few days earlier, Petro had complained to the general that Urapalma was growing oil palms on land paramilitaries had stolen from him in 1997, in the nearby province of Chocó. In response, the general had suggested a meeting at the base, and Petro, supposing he had little to lose, had agreed. By the end of the brief sit-down, Petro says, Daza and Latorre had intimidated him into legally validating the seizure of his land. With Latorre's signature on the contract as a witness, Petro lost 85 percent of his 370-acre farm -- for which, nearly five years later, he has yet to receive the meager payment.
Petro is one of the lucky ones; he is still alive. According to reports by the Colombian government and nongovernmental organizations, Urapalma has illegally claimed more than 14,000 acres of dense tropical land in Chocó -- land seized with the help of people like Latorre and his paramilitary collaborators. Latorre, a graduate of the US Army training academy known as the School of the Americas, was charged last year with laundering millions of dollars for a paramilitary drug ring, and prosecutors say they are looking into his activities as head of the Seventeenth Brigade. Another general, Rito Alejo Del Río, who led the Seventeenth Brigade at the time of Petro's displacement, is in jail on charges of collaborating with paramilitaries; he, too, received training at the School of the Americas.
Government reports, legal documents and testimony from human rights groups show that drug-fueled paramilitaries -- often in cooperation with the US-funded military -- forcibly displaced thousands of Chocó's farmers in the late 1990s, killing more than a hundred. Since 2001 Urapalma and a dozen other palm companies have seized at least 52,000 acres of the depopulated land in Chocó, most of it held collectively by Afro-Colombian farmers like Petro.
The damage may be just beginning. In 2005 Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, citing surging markets in food and biofuels, urged the country to increase palm production from 750,000 acres to 15 million acres -- an area the size of West Virginia. Critics point out that many of the new palm growing regions exhibit patterns of narco-trafficking and paramilitary violence similar to that in Chocó, including massacres and forced displacement. A report by the international organization Human Rights Everywhere found violent crimes related to palm cultivation in five separate regions -- all of which fall within Uribe's initiative. Almost all of these regions have also been targeted for palm cultivation support by USAID.
The US agency administers Plan Colombia's alternative development program from its headquarters in the massive bunkerlike compound of the US Embassy, on one of Bogotá's busiest streets. Oil palm, or African palm, is one of the few aid-funded crops whose profits can match coca profits. Since 2003 USAID's alternative development contracts have provided nearly $20 million to oil palm agribusiness projects across the country.
Almost half the palm oil produced in Colombia is exported each year -- mostly to Europe but also to the United States. The government now has its sights on the stalled US-Colombia free trade agreement, whose passage by Congress--seen as likely, with President Obama's explicit support -- would allow Colombian palm oil to enter US markets duty-free. Although the oil finds its way into various US food imports, Colombia is banking on the burgeoning market for biofuels.
"We are at the dawn of a grand new development in energy: biodiesel production from African palms," president Uribe said in 2005 as he announced the initiative. The country has roughly doubled its acreage planted in palms since 2001, the year Colombia became the world's fourth-largest exporter of palm oil -- and the year palm companies arrived in Chocó.
Human rights groups have long accused palm companies in Colombia--Urapalma in particular--of cultivating stolen lands. Jens Mesa, president of Fedepalma, the national palm growers' federation, says these charges are grossly overblown. Mesa complains that the Chocó companies, which are not in the federation, are exceptions that have unfairly stigmatized the industry.
Nonetheless, the Congressional Black Caucus has frequently expressed its concerns about the palm industry, which is concentrated in areas with large Afro-Colombian populations, to the Uribe administration. Worried that Congress will withhold Plan Colombia funds or block the trade deal, the Colombian government has begun to take these charges more seriously. In late 2007, Attorney General Mario Iguarán announced an investigation into allegations that twenty-three palm company representatives in Chocó, including Urapalma's, worked with paramilitaries to seize community-owned land. Around the same time, Senator Patrick Leahy attached an amendment to Plan Colombia funds that prohibits the financing of palm projects that "cause the forced displacement of local people." Congress will soon debate Plan Colombia funding for 2010, the first foreign appropriations budget penned by the Obama team. In the bill's current draft, Leahy's amendment is marked for deletion.
Sean Jones, until mid-May USAID's director for alternative development in Colombia, recognizes that the country's palm oil industry has "two faces." One is the law-abiding companies, he says, but "there is this ugly face of African palm, too, where you have some really nasty players out there."
Paramilitaries and La Violencia
Even in Colombia, with its tremendous geographical and cultural diversity, the jungle province of Chocó is considered exotic. Chocó's tropical rainforests, wedged into the northwest corner of the country where South America joins Panama, are among the most biodiverse on the planet. But most Colombians still see it as a violently contested backwater. Torrential downpours nourish low-lying mountain ranges, which feed hundreds of rivers and swamps that stretch veinlike across the landscape. Most of these waterways flow into the large Atrato River, which snakes its way north through the rainforest until its delta empties into the Caribbean gulf. Locals call this area Urabá.
The farmers of Urabá most affected by the palm business live near two lush tributaries: the Curvaradó and Jiguamiandó river basins. In 2000 the government's rural land management agency, Incoder, awarded collective title to 250,000 acres here to slave-descended black communities, who enjoy the same territorial rights as indigenous peoples under Colombia's Constitution.
But the government, in an effort to attract global investors, has also branded Urabá "the best corner of the Americas." And in recent years, palm companies have taken more than 20 percent of the land fronting the two rivers -- the most habitable and agriculturally viable part of the territory.
In the late 1980s this part of Colombia became a base for paramilitary groups, or "paras," founded by three brothers from the Castaño family: Fidel, Vicente and Carlos, who came up through the ranks of the infamous Medellín cartel of Pablo Escobar. The Castaños received generous logistical and financial support from businessmen, wealthy landowners, drug traffickers and members of the army. They collaborated so closely with the Colombian military's dirty war against guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) that a 2001 report by Human Rights Watch referred to them as the army's "sixth division." Fueled by zealous anticommunism, warlords like the Castaños slaughtered thousands of innocents accused of harboring guerrilla sympathies.
By the mid-1990s, human rights reports show, the paras turned their violence to an economic purpose: gaining lands and businesses, eliminating opponents and protecting their most lucrative activity, drug trafficking. The Castaños and their allies became Colombia's undisputed cocaine barons, earning them top spots on the U.S. government's most-wanted lists. The warlords began a bloody march into Urabá.
First, leaflets appeared warning all guerrilla collaborators to leave, and towns were riddled with paramilitary graffiti. Uriel Tuberquia, one of Enrique Petro's campesino neighbors, recounts that in the months before the paras arrived, rumors coursed through the community that the mochacabezas (decapitators) were coming, a reference to the gruesome way paramilitaries would dismember the bodies of their victims.
When the paras finally came, they killed Tuberquia's father as he grazed his cattle. "They shot him from behind, at long range," says Tuberquia, staring into the palm fields. "My dad never got a proper burial. He's just buried there, somewhere, underneath all that palm."
In October 1996 the paras had a macabre coming-out party in Chocó, with the murder of eight campesinos in the tiny town of Brisas on the Curvaradó River, an hour's walk from Petro's farm. What followed was a crescendo of terror locals simply call la violencia. In February 1997 the military, backed that year by $87 million in U.S. support, teamed up with its "sixth division" to hammer northern Chocó. Army helicopters and fighter jets rained bombs and high-caliber gunfire on the jungle communities, while the paras "cleaned up" behind them. Military and paramilitary roadblocks cropped up everywhere. International human rights groups documented massacres, torture, murders and rapes. Paramilitaries capped off the year by slaughtering thirty-one campesinos a week before Christmas.
According to the UN Refugee Agency, the 1997 offensive forced some 17,000 people from their homes. In the Curvaradó and Jiguamiandó basins alone, 140 farmers have been confirmed killed or disappeared, all but four by soldiers or paramilitaries. By 1997 Petro had already lost his brother and two sons to la violencia -- one killed by the FARC. Paramilitaries repeatedly warned him he'd be killed if he didn't leave his farm. He tried to stay on, but after another son left, Petro abandoned the land.
"They said they came here to clean out the guerrillas," recalls Petro, "but it was us, the campesinos, they cleaned out." In interviews, several survivors tell me that when the violence began, paras came to their farms with the same chilling offer: "Sell us your land, or we'll negotiate with your widow."
By 2001, when the paras announced they had gained definitive control of Urabá, Petro and the other campesinos were scattered. Some were hiding out in the jungle; others had left Chocó entirely. Though paras prevented them from visiting their farms, the campesinos heard rumors that their lands were being planted with palm.
Gustavo Duncan, a security analyst at the University of the Andes, in Bogotá, says the paramilitaries' turn to palm was the obvious business decision: "Palm was a perfect way to consolidate their militarized social control over a territory and invest capital accumulated from drugs into a profitable business." According to an affidavit by a former Urapalma employee who cooperated with the attorney general's investigation, the main bridge between the Castaños and investors was Hernán Gómez, an early ideological mentor of the Castaño brothers and husband of Urapalma's current CEO. The affidavit states that Gómez, who did not return multiple calls to his home, helped the Castaños recruit wealthy narcos with experience in the palm business to invest in Urapalma.
As farmers began trickling back to their homes after 2001, many found their lands razed and planted with palm saplings. Companies like Urapalma had posted signs on the land with big block letters: Private Property. A permanent paramilitary presence terrorized the area.
Petro spent five years without seeing his farm, taking refuge in the nearby town of Bajirá. He returned only in 2002, to a devastating sight. "All the work of my youth was gone," he says. "One hundred ten head of cattle, nine horses, my wife had tons of chickens, pigs ... everything gone." Urapalma had plowed his pastures for palms. A year after his arrival, he says, shortly after he began working his land again, "the paramilitaries came to kill me." Petro had left for town that morning, and so he avoided harm. But he returned to find his home ransacked and covered in graffiti. The paras' slogans are still visible on the walls of his dilapidated house.
USAID and Palm
Three months after the paras vandalized Petro's home, Urapalma submitted a grant application to the Bogotá offices of ARD Inc., a thirty-year-old rural development contractor based in Burlington, Vermont, with offices in forty-three countries. On its website ARD describes itself as guided by "Vermont's ideals of leadership in environmental affairs and local participation in government." USAID, a major source of ARD's revenue, has $330 million in active contracts with the company.
In January 2003, ARD began administering $41.5 million for USAID's Colombia Agribusiness Partnership Program (CAPP). Urapalma was one of the first palm companies to send an application; the Macaco-linked Coproagrosur received its $161,000 grant the following year (a third of which was returned, unspent). ARD's quarterly reports show that Urapalma requested $700,000 in financing to cover the planting of palm on some 5,000 acres in Urabá -- the epicenter of stolen land. The grant application began working its way through ARD's process.
USAID officials refer to Urapalma's proposed project as a "strategic alliance" and typically call such efforts "community driven." "Without our support," said an embassy official, "farmers would have a weaker ability to negotiate fair alliances with the industrial processors." But according to documents from the Colombian attorney general's 2007 investigation, obtained by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, palm companies in Chocó set up these partnerships to legitimize illegal land acquisitions after the fact -- often through fraud and coercion.
The investigation files include an affidavit by Pedro Camilo Torres, a former Urapalma employee who from 1999 to 2007 handled the company's loan applications, including the USAID grant proposal. His affidavit charges that Urapalma created campesino "front" organizations to secure phony land titles and gain access to public funds.
The most notorious case of fraud involves Lino Antonio Díaz Almario, who allegedly in 2000 acquired 14,645 acres -- an impossible fortune for a poor campesino -- and immediately sold these lands to the Association of Small Palm Oil Producers of Urabá, an organization started by Urapalma. But Díaz had been dead since 1995, when he drowned in the Jiguamiandó.
Urapalma's proposed USAID project, as summarized in an ARD report, referred to "Afrocolombian Associations." According to Torres's affidavit and eyewitnesses cited by the attorney general, all of Urapalma's campesino organizations were set up by Teresa Gómez, whom the U.S. Treasury identifies as the "financial manager" of the Castaños' vast narco-paramilitary federation. She managed at least two other paramilitary-affiliated NGOs and is wanted for the murder of a campesino leader in Córdoba province who had clamored for lands seized by the Castaños. Phone calls and messages left with Urapalma's staff over months were not returned.
Urapalma never received the grant money in question, an outcome that Susan Reichle, USAID-Colombia's mission director, says vindicates the agency's "due diligence." Reichle says her team has developed a "land protocol and a whole process to really ensure, to the best of our abilities and through several layers of investigation, that this land is clean land." But, she admits, "unfortunately, you'd love to say it's 100 percent -- you're never going to be." Sean Jones, who became head of USAID's alternative development programs in Colombia in 2006, contradicts Reichle, pointing out that Urapalma's application stalled because the company failed to submit paperwork on land titles.
According to CAPP's quarterly reports, a joint USAID-ARD "review committee" had advanced the Urapalma proposal as far as the penultimate stage of the process -- the last step before awarding money -- by January 2005. Roberto Albornoz, who has headed ARD's agribusiness program in Colombia since the inception of the USAID contract, says his staff conducted due diligence but never turned up evidence of suspicious activities. He confirms that the project was "put on hold" in April 2005 only after Urapalma stopped submitting documentation. Albornoz says his staff did not learn of Urapalma's questionable past until they came across a magazine article published five months after the proposal was put on hold. When pressed as to why ARD screeners failed to suspect the company of illegal activity, Jones echoes Albornoz: "The allegations around Urapalma weren't coming up in the press at that point."
But the forced displacements and massacres in Urabá were already in the public record. In July 2003, a month before Urapalma's USAID application, the national daily El Tiempo reported that "the African palm projects in the southern banana region of Urabá are dripping with blood, misery and corruption." The Washington Post picked up the story two months later.
In declassified cables from the U.S. Embassy, U.S. officials in Bogotá sounded the alarm about the paramilitaries' stranglehold on Urabá as early as 1996. A cable from that year states, "The Castaños have profited greatly from their activities, reportedly acquiring thousands of acres of land in northern Colombia." The cable refers to growing paramilitary control of entire regions and specifically mentions Urabá.
In 2003, five months before Urapalma's grant request, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights singled out Urapalma for collusion with paramilitaries in Urabá: "Since 2001, the company Urapalma SA has initiated cultivation of the oil palm on approximately 1,500 hectares of the collective land of these communities, with the help of 'the perimetric and concentric armed protection of the Army's Seventeenth Brigade and armed civilians'" -- i.e., paras. Soldiers and paras undertook armed incursions, the court concluded, to "intimidate" communities into "join[ing] in the production of oil palm or evacuat[ing]."
Albornoz says ARD's screeners cross-referenced company records with Colombian and U.S. government databases of people linked to the drug trade. But the company had evident narco links: in its corporate registration papers, Urapalma lists as its founding investors two brothers from the Zúñiga Caballero family, which Colombian authorities charge is a paramilitary-connected clan with links to the Medellín and Cali drug cartels.
Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars
While USAID eventually tabled Urapalma's proposal, the agency awarded one grant to Coproagrosur, the company surrendered by Macaco, and another to Gradesa, which refines palm oil for domestic consumption and export -- much of it to the United States. According to ARD reports and USAID documents, the agency's grant to Gradesa helped support a project in Belén de Bajirá, Chocó, the Urabá municipality that is home to Urapalma -- and to the land formerly farmed by Enrique Petro. USAID appears to have supported Gradesa's involvement in refining palm oil from the Chocó killing fields.
USAID insists it has never funded a palm project in Chocó. Representatives from USAID, Gradesa and ARD deny that the Gradesa project was based in Belén de Bajirá, despite three years of references to the town in internal and public documents. USAID representatives say that the locale was referenced erroneously after Gradesa mistakenly mentioned it in a status report. "The error went unnoticed," USAID's press attaché explained by e-mail, "because our main interest centers on information related to hectares, families, employment and budget invested."
In any case, at the time USAID awarded Gradesa a $257,000 grant on December 19, 2003, corporate filings show that the same two Zúñiga brothers who'd invested in Urapalma, Antonio and Carlos, also sat on Gradesa's board. (Carlos appears on a Colombian government list of narco-traffickers as early as 1987.) In March 2005, Colombia's attorney general announced that he was seizing the Zúñigas' stake in the firm and filed criminal charges against the brothers for using Gradesa to launder narco-dollars. According to a Colombian narcotics official, that stake was 50 percent; a recent interview with Gradesa's CEO revealed that the brothers had owned this stake since the early 1990s, long before the USAID grant. The attorney general's case is now plodding its way through Colombian courts, the government's fifth attempt to pin drug-laundering charges on the Zúñigas.
Despite this pending legal action, USAID approved a second Gradesa grant in 2007, this one for $400,000 -- monies from a new five-year, $182 million contract with ARD. In a written response, a U.S. embassy official said that since USAID received no formal notice of the case against the Zúñigas, "there was no way that USAID could have been aware of the link between Gradesa and the Zúñiga investigation." The official said "no red flags were raised" in the due diligence process for Gradesa's second grant and that as the Zúñigas were no longer "shareholders, investors or managers" they did not qualify as "recipients."
Permanent Displacement
Life has not improved much for Petro or his fellow refugees. In April the government returned 3,200 acres -- just 6 percent of the stolen land -- to some farmers along the Curvaradó River. Twelve years after they were forced to flee, the rest remain displaced. The government says it is pressing the palm companies to return the remainder of the lands voluntarily, but locals have heard such promises before. Meanwhile, the companies are shipping out palm kernels by the truckload. Petro has only a fraction of his farm left, part of which he turned into a makeshift "humanitarian zone," a village of wooden shacks called Caño Claro, populated in recent years by as many as a dozen displaced families at a time.
More than 2,500 people still scrape by in a handful of these humanitarian zones, which dot the Curvaradó and Jiguamiandó river basins, though none enjoy legal recognition by the government. In some cases, all that separates these refugees from their palm-covered former farms is a cratered dirt road patrolled by paramilitaries, now in civilian clothing, and army soldiers. Children scamper around the camps with bloated bellies from illness and malnutrition, their families torn from their source of subsistence. Of late, reprisals and violent threats toward those demanding the return of their lands have increased.
One day last October campesino leader Walberto Hoyos was shot and killed execution-style near the Curvaradó River, his neck and face pumped with bullets by a paramilitary gunman. The next morning, the residents of Urabá woke up to find their towns riddled with fresh graffiti and leaflets announcing the formation of a new paramilitary group, an eerie reprise of events leading up to la violencia.

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Israeli settlers evicting Palestinians from Jerusalem

Image by Minamie's Photo via Flickr

The Daily Star

Israeli settlers are waging court battles to evict dozens of Palestinians from homes in an Occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood, a move threatening to widen Israel's rift with US President Barack Obama over settlements. They are trying to reclaim plots of land in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood which they say were owned by Jews before Israel's creation in 1948. They have already won property rights to six Arab homes, whose residents were subsequently evicted.
Palestinians and an Israeli rights group say settlers are trying to evict a further 27 Arab families from 28 buildings.
"Stop ethnic cleansing," reads a sign erected outside the home of Maher Hanun, a 51-year-old father of three, who faces a July 19 deadline to evacuate the structure in Sheikh Jarrah, near the walled Old City of Occupied Jerusalem.
Such acts could cloud Israel's relations with its main ally, the United States.
Obama, who is to address the Muslim world in a speech in Egypt on Thursday, renewed a call for a halt to settlement activity during talks last week with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Settlers have moved into six Arab buildings in Sheikh Jarrah, home to consulates and trendy restaurants. Armed men guard the buildings where settlers have hoisted Israeli flags to assert Jewish dominance.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed not to accept limits on building of Jewish enclaves within Occupied Jerusalem, including the Arab east. He has also rebuffed US calls for a full settlement freeze in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Abbas has said Occupied East Jerusalem will be the capital of a future Palestinian state he wants to establish alongside Israel in the Occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East War and has occupied the area in contravention of international law ever since.
"Why should we be evicted from homes in which we and our children were born, only to give way to more Jewish settlements?" asked Hanun, whose family has been living in the house since 1956.
Settlers have unsuccessfully sought permission from Israel's Occupied Jerusalem municipality to raze 28 Palestinian homes in the area surrounding Hanun's house, to make way for 200 housing units and a public garden, the municipality's online archives show.
But they are winning legal battles in Israeli courts which recognize documents from the Ottoman and British mandate eras showing that Jews owned plots of land in Occupied East Jerusalem where Arabs built homes.
An Arab family was evicted in November and the Hanuns and their neighbors have until July 19 to leave or face eviction and hefty fines.
"These developments strengthen Israeli control of this area and thwart the feasibility of future agreed-upon borders for [Occupied] Jerusalem," the Israeli Ir Amim, or City of Nations, rights group, founded in 2004 to advocate equality in Occupied Jerusalem, said in a report.
It said that Israeli courts do not accept similar Arab claims to land and property in Jewish West Jerusalem. The high-end neighborhood of Talbieh is abundant with old white-stone houses whose Palestinian owners fled or were forced to leave during the 1948 war over Israel's creation.
Some 260,000 Arabs, most of them Muslim, live in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. They carry Israeli identity cards, giving them access to welfare and health services, and freedom of movement denied to Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank. But few have taken up the possibility of full Israeli citizenship.
They say Israel's policies toward Arabs in the city as well as a barrier it is building in and around Occupied East Jerusalem are designed to drive them out. - With The Daily Star

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What's Not Being Said About the Obama-Netanyahu Talks

Image via Wikipedia

Haaretz Via The LA Progressive

Ever since East Jerusalem was annexed to the State of Israel, Jerusalem Day, which is celebrated today, has turned into a festival of clichéd slogans - such as 'the united capital of Israel for all eternity.''From year to year, the gap between the flowery words of the politicians and the sad reality in the divided city widens. The day after the festival, officials return to supporting discrimination against the Palestinian minority, who make up a third of the city's population. Forty-two years after Israel declared that Jerusalem had been reunited, it is simple to draw a clear line between the two peoples who have been compelled to live under one national and municipal roof. According to data gathered by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, two-thirds of the Palestinians in the city live below the poverty line; more than one-third of their lands have been expropriated since 1967; since there are no approved plans, 160,000 of them are living in homes that were built without permits, and can expect demolition and eviction orders; tens of thousands live without proper sewage systems or regular water supplies; their sanitation conditions are inferior; and there are too few social workers to care for them and too many Border Policemen.
Half of the Palestinian children of school-going age do not have a place in the state educational system, and some 9,000 of them do not receive any education at all. At the same time the separation fence pushes the Palestinians out of the city limits, the Israeli establishment is abetting the extreme right-wing organizations that take up residence in the Arab neighborhoods, sow discord and bring about the eviction of Palestinian families from their homes.
It is not conceivable that there will be a peace agreement that will leave Israel with total sovereignty over Muslim holy places," the editorial continued. "Without a final status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, the countries of the world will not recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and they will continue to keep their embassies elsewhere. Unless the Muslim world is made a partner to sovereignty on the Temple Mount, there is no point in discussing normal relations between Israel and its neighbors.
Now, as U.S. President Barack Obama prepares to launch his peace plan, it would be wise for Israel's leaders to exchange their empty slogans for practical plans for a logical and just arrangement for Jerusalem.

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Taliban on the run in Swat

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Asia Times Online
By Syed Saleem Shahzad

Following a barrage of American pressure, Pakistan abruptly abandoned all its existing plans to thwart insurgents and, in a televised speech by Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani, promptly declared all-out war against the Pakistani Taliban.
Within hours, Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff, General Pervez Ashfaq Kiani, launched an aggressive military operation - supported by gunship helicopters, heavy artillery and fighters jets - into northern North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), ransacking Taliban sanctuaries in Swat and other areas. Interior Minister Rehman Malik told the BBC that an estimated 200 militants were killed over the weekend, bringing the total killed in fighting in the region to 700.
Water, electricity and lines of communications were completely cut; the Taliban had no option but to flee. An exodus of the local population also began, with hundreds of thousands of residents leaving their homes. In the most affected districts of Swat, Buner and Shangla, some 70% of the population has fled for their lives. The number may soar to 1.5 million in the weeks ahead.
Elsewhere, the government sponsored anti-Taliban conferences across the country in which Shi'ite and Sufi clerics declared the Taliban rebels heretics and called for their destruction. All four of Pakistan's major political parties - including the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party and the largest opposition party, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz - released statements in support of the military strike.
This was how the situation unfolded over the past week in Pakistan - a situation envisioned by the administration of former United States president George W Bush more than two years ago. The events are a culmination of years of political deals cut with Islamabad to form a consensus government and provide popular support for Washington's "global war on terror".
But the essential question remains: will Pakistan win this American war against the Taliban? Neither Islamabad nor Washington has the answer, but both realize this will be a very long war. Even if the Taliban can be routed, the force and scope of the operation will undoubtedly pit different segments of society against each other.
This is the exact situation that al-Qaeda has been waiting for.
On the ground
Seven years of war in Afghanistan have shown that no matter how much bad press the Taliban receives, they are still the representatives of Pashtun tribal culture and nothing is going to change this.
Even as the new drama was unfolding in Islamabad, the Taliban issued warnings to all doctors in the NWFP that if they didn't abandon Western pants and shirts and begin wearing Pakistani shalwar kameez, or "proper clothing", they would be attacked by the Taliban.
The NWFP department of health responded by asking doctors to comply and don the Taliban's preferred attire. Despite the powerful military push, many officials still do not have the heart to resist the Taliban.
The military campaign is not universally popular in Islamabad, either. At a dinner held on Sunday at the elite Islamabad Club, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the former chief of the fundamentalist party Jamaat-e-Islami, lambasted Pakistan's Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Dr Babar Awan over the operation, claiming that it looked like a war against the people of Swat, not against the militants. Qazi Hussain Ahmed demanded to know why the plan was not approved by the parliament and the cabinet.
The federal minister initially avoided the answer and said that he respects Qazi Hussain Ahmed as a very senior politician. But when Qazi Hussain Ahmed continued his arguments, his patience ran out.
As witnessed by Asia Times Online, Dr Babar Awan said: "Sir, have you seen the footages shown by some international TV channels about how a senior official of the administration was informing the Taliban to leave the places as the security forces are set to enter in Buner? Sir, we did discuss the issues in the closed-door sessions of parliament, but what can we do when our parliamentarians leak the information to the militants? Even a minister leaked very crucial information to the militants. Now, tell me what [other] option [was there] except unleashing the military operation secretly?"
Qazi Hussain Ahmed countered by saying the regional curfew should be relaxed so ordinary civilians could leave instead of being bombed or starved. Some believe that should the humanitarian crises worsen, it would justify direct American interventions deep inside Pakistan.
Influential US military minds, such as retired Colonel Douglas Macgregor, have been highlighting this possibility. Macgregor believes that the US should make Pakistan its focus rather than Afghanistan. But in Pakistan nobody is ready to accept this scenario. In fact, no Pakistani decision-maker could have foreseen that one day the entire world would consider the whole area of Afghanistan and Pakistan as the same conflict zone.
From the eyes of al-Qaeda
The militants did not anticipate such a quick operation in the area and were caught completely unprepared. The numbers of casualties for the security forces are minimal. In most areas, either the militants are on the run or under siege by the security forces. In some cases, they are using the civilian population as human shields.
According to the local people, transporters have raised the bus fares for a single seat from 700 rupees (US$8.70) to 7,000 rupees. People have left their belongings and homes abandoned as they fled to other cities for shelter. Such a mass exodus has not been seen in the region since the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in late 1970s.
Now, for financially battered Pakistan, the biggest challenge is the management of the refugees. So far, no political party has been seen in the affected areas. The only NGO, which is active for the relief operation is Al-Khidmat, a wing of the Islamic party, the Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan. The number of displaced people is likely to grow to as many as 1.5 million in coming days. The total funds the government has allocated so far is 200 million rupees (out of total 1 billion rupees announced by the prime minister). This means roughly 133 rupees for each person, hardly enough for one day's food.
The complaints have already started, and in the weeks ahead the situation is likely to get worse. As in the past, people may blame the government for the situation, not the Taliban.
Taliban may simply flee from Swat, as they did in late 2007, and regroup in different places to exploit the chaotic situation. Gaining several thousands of new recruits should not be a problem, especially when they are lured by monthly stipends and other benefits. The Taliban can easily generate resources from robberies and ransoms. Within a few months, the Taliban will be able to raise new brigades of guerrillas.
With large numbers of people travelling to destinations like Islamabad and Lahore, ethnic tensions will flare up as people in Punjab are already wary of the Taliban and have started treating all Pashtuns with suspicion.
Amid the military strikes, an anti-Taliban religious segment is amplifying its grudge against the militants. When the Taliban regroup they are likely to strike back, killing their opponents as they have done in the past. If that happens, neither the Sufis nor Shi'ites will have much support - neither from their frightened constituencies nor from the military establishment.
This is the situation al-Qaeda has desired for a very long time. Al-Qaeda carried out sectarian attacks on Shi'ite mosques, allegedly assassinated former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, and bombed bombed public places. But they failed to rupture the national fibre of the country or create enough chaos in Pakistan to draw security forces to multiple fronts.
Now the government has done this for them. Islamabad has sponsored a military campaign that will push an isolated situation to the other parts of the country. The previous fear of the "Talibanization" of Pakistan could possibly become reality.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Asia Times Online's Pakistan Bureau Chief. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

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