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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What Future has Kurdistan? Regional War?

Kurdistan in Iraq has been relatively peaceful since 1991 except for a brief civil war in the mid-90s. They operate essentially an independent entity aligned in mostly name only to Iraq conducting their own commerce, and providing their own service, as well as maintaining their own independent army, the infamous Peshmerga, known as the most effective fighting force in the region. This article reviews the history of Kurdistan, divided by the peace treaty at the end of WWI between Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. This border divided people represent a major risk for a regional conflict.

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As, over time, the KRG fuses with the once-rival ruling parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), and trade increases rapidly with Turkey and, to a lesser degree, with Iran and Syria, the notion of a sovereign Iraqi Kurdish state becomes more plausible while making the fantasy of reunification of "Greater Kurdistan" much less so.

Kurdistan cannot escape its landlocked geography quadrisected in the ashes of World War I. The roughly 35 million ethnic Kurds are the world's largest ethnic group without their own country. Iraqi Kurdistan's ruling politicians and their corresponding corporate interests are now shuttling between the central government in Baghdad and various regional capitals to feel out which way the winds of change are blowing.

The Kurds have been caught in a web of wildly varying, intolerant nationalisms for most of the post-Ottoman era from which they have not been able to escape. The most significant of these is Turkey's secular and militarist Kemalism. Mustafa Kemal, known as Ataturk the "Father of Turks", replaced the unifying Islam of the dying Ottoman caliphate with so-called "Turkishness".

Millions of Kurds, in what would become the Turkish Republic, were to be absurdly labeled "Mountain Turks". Ataturk insisted on doing away with any cultural practice related to the caliphate, including the tolerance of linguistic and religious minorities under its jurisdiction.

The newly created Turkey, forged in 1923, left no room for "Kurdishness" and Turkey's Kurds began rebelling almost at once. The 1979 Islamic Revolution in neighboring Iran did away with the enforced secularism of the Pahlavi dynasty and enshrined a form of Shi'itism as the state ideology around which the nascent Islamic Republic was formed.

The then-new Iranian regime presented itself to the outside world as a pious Persian Shi'ite monolith, leaving little room for Iran's restive, mostly Sunni Kurdish minority. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's unorthodox interpretation of traditional Shi'itism and the creation of the velayat-e-faqih ("The rule of the jurisprudent" - considered an unwelcome innovation by much of the Shi'ite clerical establishment) left the Kurds of Iran's Kordestan and Western Azerbaijan provinces disaffected even more so.

The takeover of Iraq and Syria by Ba'athists in the 1960s led to the rise of a myopic pan-Arabism in Baghdad and Damascus that left no room for the Kurds' distinct language, culture and traditions. The Cold War Arab socialism of the Ba'ath party was, for the Kurds, simply more ethno-chauvinist demagoguery, that, as in Turkey and Iran, was bent on the destruction of their massive stateless nation.

One of the only identifying factors that these highly divergent ideologies of Kemalism, Khomenism and Ba'athism had in common was their policy of constant Kurdish repression. Internal jingoistic state policies being carried out in their respective Kurdish-majority regions in the name of law and order over the decades have now morphed across borders into external forces of political expediency unifying Turkey, Syria and Iran on the suppression of their respective "Kurdish questions".

Along with all of the external historic forces allied against them, the Kurds themselves are also internally divided by dialect, tribe and clan. In the case of Iraqi Kurdistan, these divisions translated into political allegiances that have now formed the backbone of the KRG.



Save for the very short-lived, Soviet-backed Republic of Mahabad in 1946, the Irbil-based KRG is the closest thing any of the Kurds in Kurdistan's four sectors have to an independent state. As Turkey's hopes for full-scale European Union accession have been fading into the background, Turkey's relations with Iran, Iraq and Syria have greatly improved.

Syria, which for a time once supported PKK insurgents in a petty proxy struggle with Turkey regarding disputes over water usage rights, has long since dropped all known tolerance of Turkish Kurd fighters operating from Syrian territory. Turkey has come to the realization that as much as it has looked Westward from Ataturk's secularist revolution onward, it has no choice but to integrate a higher level of cooperation with its less stable borderlands to the south and east.

Oil flowing north into Turkey from Iraq, and water flowing south into Syria and Iraq, defies Turkey's past isolation from Middle Eastern issues and may slow its Europeanization. Syria's realization that it needs Turkish cooperation on water caused the Bashar al-Assad regime to quickly snuff out its support of the PKK in Syrian Kurdistan, espoused by his late father. In so doing, Damascus has produced a remarkable thaw in Turkish-Syrian relations.

[..]
Turkish warplanes are striking PKK positions from above while Iran is firing Katuysha batteries at PJAK positions over the ridgeline from the Iranian side of the border. The Turkish and Iranian goals in the area appear to be the same and it seems to serve both Ankara and Tehran to conflate the two groups. The PKK rebels have also made statements in the press contradicting what was recently told to this correspondent by the PJAK regarding its operational independence from the PKK.

The United States government has been supplying Turkey with "actionable intelligence" [2] to target PKK outposts in Iraqi territory which the PJAK told Asia Times Online was being shared with the Iranians. Allegations that Turkey is passing on classified US intelligence to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps cannot be going down well at the Pentagon.

Turkey and Iran, at odds since Iran's revolution in 1979 collided with Turkey's rigid secularism, have a common foe in their shared attacks on Kurdish irredentists sheltering in Iraq.

Rojhilat told Asia Times Online that for the two opposing state ideologies, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend", in reference to their dislike of the Kurds in their midst.

Last week, Turkey's parliament ratified a renewal of the mandate allowing its military to continue to strike Iraqi territory [3] and further coordination with Tehran may become the norm. The PJAK states that it seeks to topple the Islamic Republic to replace it with an inclusive, federal democracy - but the group does not maintain secessionist sentiments in the immediate term. The PJAK claims to have broad support among the Kurds of northwestern Iran and the EU's Kurdish diaspora. At least one of the men I met had arrived in Qandil from Finland to take up arms against Iran.

For now, the PKK and the PJAK maintain their hearty guerrilla bases in the Qandil Mountains, while Irbil continues to look the other way. For the stateless Kurdish revolutionaries launching operations out of Iraq's hinterlands, the tolerance of their bases could evaporate as the Kurds of Iraq assert themselves and Baghdad's unstable politics continue to evolve.

The prospect of an internationally recognized Kurdish state carved out of northern Iraq may seem far-fetched at present to many, but Iraqi Kurdish elites are harboring contingencies for such an eventuality. This scenario would make quite a bitter pill for Turkey, Iran and Syria to swallow and the independence of one sector may forever negate the potential for secession of the other three.

So while Iraqi Kurdistan elects its own parliament, forges oil contracts independent of Baghdad and prepares for its future, the "other" Kurdistan still seethes with repression and rage from nation-states that have refused to accept the Kurdish realities existing within their borders.

via Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs.

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Al-Qaeda's guerrilla chief lays out strategy

While Obama administration debates the fate of the US presence in Afghanistan, the Al Qaeda regional war continues to achieve and expand it's objective. One of it's star field commanders, Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri, a veteran of the Kashmiri war with India and past darling of Pakistan ISI, invites a reporter to demonstrate his death has been greatly exaggerated. He gives a fascinating explanation of Al Qaeda's regional strategy without giving anything away.

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Pakistan is at critical juncture, with the armed forces gathered in their largest-ever numbers (almost a corps, as many as 60,000 troops) around South Waziristan to flush out the Pakistan Tehrik-e-Taliban (PTT), al-Qaeda and their allies from the Pakistani tribal areas.

In these tense times, Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri, an al-Qaeda leader who, according to American intelligence is al-Qaeda's head of military operations and whose death they wrongly confirmed in a recent US Predator drone attack in North Waziristan, spoke to Asia Times Online.

He invited this correspondent to a secret hideout in the South Waziristan-Afghanistan border area, where drones regularly fly overhead.

[..]"Saleem! I will draw your attention to the basics of the present war theater and use that to explain the whole strategy of the upcoming battles. Those who planned this battle actually aimed to bring the world's biggest Satan [US] and its allies into this trap and swamp [Afghanistan]. Afghanistan is a unique place in the world where the hunter has all sorts of traps to choose from.

"It might be deserts, rivers, mountains and the urban centers as well. This was the thinking of the planners of this war who were sick and tired of the great Satan's global intrigues and they aim for its demise to make this world a place of peace and justice. However, the great Satan was full of arrogance of its superiority and thought of Afghans as helpless statues who would be hit from all four sides by its war machines, and they would not have the power and capacity to retaliate.

"This was the illusion on which a great alliance of world powers came to Afghanistan, but due to their misplaced conceptions they gradually became trapped in Afghanistan. Today, NATO does not have any significance or relevance. They have lost the war in Afghanistan. Now, when they realized their defeat, they developed an emphasis that this entire battle is being fought from outside of Afghanistan, that is, the two Waziristans. To me, this military thesis is a mirage which has created a complex situation in the region and created reactions and counter-reactions. I would not like to go into the details, to me that was nothing but deviation. As a military commander, the reality is that the trap of Afghanistan is successful and the basic military targets on the ground have been achieved," Ilyas said.

I responded that the relocation of 313 Brigade from Kashmir was itself proof that foreign hands were involved in Afghanistan.

"The entire basis of your argument is wrong, that this war is being fought from outside of Afghanistan. This is just an out-of-context understanding of the whole situation. If you discuss myself and 313 Brigade, I decided to join the Afghan resistance as an individual and I had quite a reason for that. Everybody knows that only a decade ago I was fighting a war of liberation for my homeland Kashmir.

"However, I realized that decades of armed and political struggles could not help to inch forward a resolution of this issue. Nevertheless, East Timor's issue was resolved without losing much time. Why? Because the entire game was in the hands of the great Satan, the USA. Organs like the UN and countries like India and Israel were simply the extension of its resources and that's why there was a failure to resolve the Palestinian issue, the Kashmir issue and the plight of Afghanistan.

"So I and many people all across the world realized that analyzing the situation in any narrow regional political perspective was an incorrect approach. This is a different ball game altogether for which a unified strategy is compulsory. The defeat of American global hegemony is a must if I want the liberation of my homeland Kashmir, and therefore it provided the reasoning for my presence in this war theater.

Ilyas continued, "When I came here I found my step justified; how the world regional powers operate under the umbrella of the great Satan and how they are supportive of its great plans. This can be seen here in Afghanistan." He added that al-Qaeda's regional war strategy, in which they have hit Indian targets, is actually to chop off American strength.

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

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Palestinian leaders warn of 'third intifada' over Jerusalem

The racist Likud government of Israel has signaled it will annex Jerusalem and continue to steal other land on the West Bank. They may be able to argue that they abandoned Gaza and got a war, but now the Palestinians fear past proposals to split East Jerusalem off to allow both to have a piece is now dead. Fatah makes peace and loses East Jerusalem and much of the West Bank, what recourse do they have?

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Palestinian leaders on Thursday called for a one-day general strike and warned of more street protests over Jerusalem, but Israel played down the risk of an uprising despite two weeks of tension in the occupied city. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction made the call for the strike on Friday in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank, and Palestinian leaders warned of the likelihood of a battle ahead of Friday prayers at Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The compound housing the mosque is a holy place for both Muslims and Jews, and has often been a flashpoint. Israeli security forces control access to the area and regularly prohibit young Muslim men from entering the holy site in Jerusalem’s Old City, citing security grounds.

Tensions rose two weeks ago when police and protesters clashed near Al-Aqsa Mosque on the eve of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur. What triggered the incident remains unclear, but the dispute over access to the holy site was at the root of it.

A beefed-up Israeli police presence, and a relatively small turnout of Palestinian protesters, has kept violence under control in ensuing clashes since late September.

Palestinians in senior positions have warned of the risk of a “third intifada,” or general uprising. But Israel has tried to avoid getting involved in any war of words over Jerusalem.

[..] King Abdullah of Jordan, who plays a key part in management of Al-Aqsa, said in an interview with Israel’s Haaretz newspaper that Jerusalem was “a tinderbox” that could explode with reverberations felt throughout the Muslim world. 

Mohammad Dahlan, a leader in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction charged that Israel “has opened the battle of Jerusalem.” Senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat accused Israel of “lighting matches in the hope of sparking a fire.”

via The Daily Star - Politics - Palestinian leaders warn of 'third intifada' over Jerusalem.

An Israeli police source said intelligence assessments showed the commotion in East Jerusalem would not escalate.

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One man's terrorist and State Sponsored Terrorism

India has been the long time one time supporter of the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka. Pakistan created the Taliban to enforce a friendly neighbor in Afghanistan. The US and Saudi Arabia created the precursors of Al Qaeda to help defeat the Russians in Afghanistan. It's all a game of deception and misdirection that needs to stop!

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One's man terrorist is another's freedom fighter. That at least was the comforting logic employed by a multitude of nations to justify their support for insurgents indulging in violence against civilian populations. In the past few months though, enough has happened to justify a more civilized course of action by all countries.

Three of Asia's most-wanted terrorists have been killed over the

course of the past few months alone: Velupillai Prabhakaran of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka in May, Baitullah Mehsud of the Pakistani Taliban in August and Noordin Mohammad Top of the Jemaah Islamiah in September in Indonesia. The apparent trigger for the successes was a change in heart of the terrorists' key sponsors.

Many other terrorists have been either captured or killed, but the stories of these three terrorists point to the use of "irregulars" to do the dirty job of various countries; and particularly in their own neighborhoods.

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

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Health Care Public Option: Did money talk?

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The so-called "public option" component of health care reform died today when the Senate Finance Committee's Health Care Subdivision essentially the entire committee rejected an attempt to include it in legislation the panel is considering. Other bills circulating at the Capitol still have "public option," but Sen. Max Baucus removed it from his bill under pressure from Republicans, who considered it Socialist. The number of Democrats refusing to support the idea pretty much sinks it.The vote was 15-to-8, with Democrats Baucus, Sen. Tom Carper, Sen. Kent Conrad, Sen. Blanche Lincoln, and Sen. Bill Nelson joining all of the committee's Republicans with "no" votes.Most of the Democrats voting against the bill, were among the biggest Democratic recipients of health care cash in campaign fundraising. Coincidence? Who can say? The campaign finance system is such that one can only speculate what role it plays when legislation is considered that affects the campaign contributors. So you have to decide.

via Did money talk? | News Cut | Minnesota Public Radio.

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EU report: Georgian attack started war with Russia

The result of the EU investigation is not surprising. What disturbs me is that Georgia connects with NATO and then starts a war with Russia, a war they can't possibly win. What kind of ally can they be? Clearly they were expecting a rescue from NATO. I hope they were appropriately disappointed, enough so they don't do that again.

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Georgia's attack on its breakaway South Ossetia region marked the start of last year's war with Russia, which retaliated with excessive force, an EU-commissioned report said Wednesday.

The report on the five-day war in August 2008 lay blame on both sides, but cited Georgia as starting the conflict with its night shelling in South Ossetia - an act it said was not justifiable under international law.

The EU report went on to blame Russia for conducting a military campaign deep inside Georgia. "All this cannot be regarded as even remotely commensurate with the threat to Russian peacekeepers in South Ossetia," the report said.

Russia's retaliation went "far beyond the reasonable limits of defense," it said, criticizing the devastating Russian assault on a tiny neighbor that in recent years has moved closer into the West with hopes of joining NATO.

In a first reaction, both sides said the report vindicated them. The Russian Foreign Ministry said "the core conclusion of the report is that the current leadership of Georgia unleashed the aggression."

via EU report: Georgian attack started war with Russia - World News | Tri-City Herald : Mid-Columbia news.

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The girl who silenced the world for 5 minutes

MADAGASCAR: Poverty Forces 2 Million Children into Hard Labour

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It's a sad statement about Earth to find millions of children forced to work for food instead of going to school. What future can they have? How much is this poverty about the world economic crisis and food riots going on all over the 3rd world?

Poverty has increased dramatically in Madagascar since January, when a national protest movement to end the regime of former president Marc Ravalomanana plunged the country into a socio-economic crisis. Since then, the number of child labourers has risen by a whopping 25 percent.Two million children under the age of 15 go to work every day instead of attending school, according to newly published research by the International Labour Office ILO, United Nations children’s fund UNICEF and the National Institute of Statistics known by its French acronym, INSTAT.In Ambalakely, a rural town in the south of the island, more than a hundred children pitch up for physically gruelling work in the local stone quarry. They crush stones alongside their parents to produce rubble for the building industry. Due to widespread poverty and unemployment, day labour under the harshest conditions is their only means of survival.

via MADAGASCAR: Poverty Forces 2 Million Children into Hard Labour - IPS ipsnews.net.

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US Orchestrates Pakistan-India Talks While Kashmir Smolders

The US strong arms the Pakistani and Indian government to back channel talks. But it would appear that this is just an attempt to tamp down the secondary war theater in the region.

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Indian External Affairs Minister S M Krishna and Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi met for over 100 minutes, while their foreign secretaries had met earlier for even longer. The countries - which have fought several wars and which still differ over divided Kashmir - revived a peace initiative in 2004, but it stalled after Pakistan-based militants carried out a deadly raid on the Indian city of Mumbai in November last year.

Speaking after the meeting, Krishna said he rejected a Pakistani proposal to conduct informal talks while they waited for official dialogue to begin. Qureshi described the talks as "frank, positive and honest", saying he had not "minced any words" and that "negotiations are the only way for peaceful resolution of [outstanding] issues between the two countries".

Qureshi continued, "Now the situation in Pakistan is ... against the militants and in favor of peace and dialogue with India. We expect our Indian counterparts to take advantage of this situation and they should also mold public opinion in favor of dialogue."

Despite Krishna ruling out informal talks, the intervention of Washington is making this happen, with Pakistan already assigning Khan as a special envoy. He is a former foreign secretary and a current Pakistan Scholar of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

Asia Times Online has learned that American officials will directly mediate and oversee the process of backchannel negotiations.

Like the billions of dollars annually the United States is giving to Pakistan in non-military and military aid and loans, the negotiations are primarily meant to provide support in the fight against terror.

In a recent report by General Stanley A McChrystal, parts of which were leaked to the press, the top US commander in Afghanistan said that India's political and economic influence in Afghanistan was increasing, including significant development projects and financial investment.

The report said the Afghan government was perceived by Islamabad to be pro-Indian. "While Indian activities largely benefit the Afghan people, increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions and encourage Pakistani counter-measures in Afghanistan or India."

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

Yet all is not in favor of a solution between Pakistan and India. Kashmir looms ominously as a war waiting to happen, in the middle of a region full of powder kegs.

The trouble is that Kashmir sits on the fault lines of a region that is awash in weapons and sliding into chaos. The Kashmiri freedom struggle, with its crystal clear sentiment but fuzzy outlines, is caught in the vortex of several dangerous and conflicting ideologies - Indian nationalism (corporate as well as "Hindu," shading into imperialism), Pakistani nationalism (breaking down under the burden of its own contradictions), US imperialism (made impatient by a tanking economy), and a resurgent medieval-Islamist Taliban (fast gaining legitimacy, despite its insane brutality, because it is seen to be resisting an occupation).

Each of these ideologies is capable of a ruthlessness that can range from genocide to nuclear war. Add Chinese imperial ambitions, an aggressive, reincarnated Russia, and the huge reserves of natural gas in the Caspian region and persistent whispers about natural gas, oil, and uranium reserves in Kashmir and Ladakh, and you have the recipe for a new cold war (which, like the last one, is cold for some and hot for others).

In the midst of all this, Kashmir is set to become the conduit through which the mayhem unfolding in Afghanistan and Pakistan spills into India, where it will find purchase in the anger of the young among India's 150 million Muslims who have been brutalized, humiliated and marginalized. Notice has been given by the series of terrorist strikes that culminated in the Mumbai attacks of 2008.

There is no doubt that the Kashmir dispute ranks right up there, along with Palestine, as one of the oldest, most intractable disputes in the world. That does not mean that it cannot be resolved. Only that the solution will not be completely to the satisfaction of any one party, one country, or one ideology. Negotiators will have to be prepared to deviate from the "party line."

Of course, we haven't yet reached the stage where the government of India is even prepared to admit that there's a problem, let alone negotiate a solution. Right now it has no reason to. Internationally, its stocks are soaring. And while its neighbors deal with bloodshed, civil war, concentration camps, refugees, and army mutinies, India has just concluded a beautiful election. However, "demon-crazy" can't fool all the people all the time. India's temporary, shotgun solutions to the unrest in Kashmir (pardon the pun), have magnified the problem and driven it deep into a place where it is poisoning the aquifers.

Is democracy melting?
Perhaps the story of the Siachen Glacier, the highest battlefield in the world, is the most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times. Thousands of Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been deployed there, enduring chill winds and temperatures that dip to minus 40 degrees Celsius. Of the hundreds who have died there, many have died just from the elements.

The glacier has become a garbage dump now, littered with the detritus of war - thousands of empty artillery shells, empty fuel drums, ice axes, old boots, tents, and every other kind of waste that thousands of warring human beings generate. The garbage remains intact, perfectly preserved at those icy temperatures, a pristine monument to human folly.

While the Indian and Pakistani governments spend billions of dollars on weapons and the logistics of high-altitude warfare, the battlefield has begun to melt. Right now, it has shrunk to about half its size. The melting has less to do with the military standoff than with people far away, on the other side of the world, living the good life. They're good people who believe in peace, free speech, and in human rights. They live in thriving democracies whose governments sit on the United Nations Security Council and whose economies depend heavily on the export of war and the sale of weapons to countries like India and Pakistan. (And Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, the Republic of Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan ... it's a long list.)

The glacial melt will cause severe floods on the subcontinent, and eventually severe drought that will affect the lives of millions of people. That will give us even more reasons to fight. We'll need more weapons. Who knows? That sort of consumer confidence may be just what the world needs to get over the current recession. Then everyone in the thriving democracies will have an even better life - and the glaciers will melt even faster.

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

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FBI Whistleblower says Neocons Negotiated Iraq Invasion with Foreign Agents in Summer 2001

This pretty well documents the Bush White House planning before 9/11 to invade and partition Iraq.  Finally, something close to mainstream media (MSM) is paying attention to Sibel Edmonds and her testimony. I've been writing about this story since 2005 when I first heard about it. So far, few MSM agencies have chosen to give this story much attention.

This has far reaching implications and chronicles a hidden power game within the Bush Administration including illegal espionage activities by key neo-cons. It also gives a glimpse of Bush's conspiracy to sell the invasion of Iraq to the American people based on false information.

Suggested here also is evidence, as I have pointed out before, that Turkish, Iranian and Israeli spies had inappropriate access to the Bush Administration and very likely manipulated Bush towards an invasion of Iraq.

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In an interview with former CIA officer Phillip Giraldi, FBI translator turned whistleblower Sibel Edmonds named Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle as having been wiretapped and recorded discussing plans with the Turkish ambassador in the Summer of 2001 to invade Iraq and occupy the Kurdish region bordering Turkey.

A Department of Justice inspector general’s report called Edmonds’s allegations "credible," "serious," and "warranting a thorough and careful review by the FBI." Ranking Senate Judiciary Committee members Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have backed her publicly. "60 Minutes" launched an investigation of her claims and found them believable. No one has ever disproved any of Edmonds’s revelations, which she says can be verified by FBI investigative files.

via Daily Kos: FBI Whistleblower says Neocons Negotiated Iraq Invasion with Foreign Agents in Summer 2001.

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Obama said Wavering on Troop Escalation in Afghanistan

Juan Cole weighs in on the disaster that is Afghanistan. Apparently, Obama is considering a major change in direction, perhaps withdrawing troops instead of adding more. And Biden is leading that charge. Lets hope that Obama figures out that Biden is his foreign policy expert and defers to his judgment. Hillary is just another neo-con.

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The NYT says that President Barack Obama is reconsidering his plan to greatly increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan, and to be suffering "buyer's remorse" for sending 21,000 more troops there soon after his inauguration and before a proper policy review. The article suggests a stark difference of opinion between vice president Joe Biden who has the most foreign policy experience of anyone in the administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Biden is said to favor fewer US troops and a focus on al-Qaeda in the Pakistani badlands. Clinton is afraid the Taliban will take back over Afghanistan and invite al-Qaeda back in there.

[..]You can't do development aid very effectively in a country beset by guerrilla violence. Moreover, counter-insurgency requires a legitimate, effective Afghan partner that can compete with the Taliban and their allies for Afghan hearts and minds. And, if counter-terrorism is really the goal, then you don't need a 60,000-man army in a country notoriously inhospitable to foreign armies.

The Obama administration seems to be considering whether these four levels can be usefully unentangled.

In particular, incumbent president Hamid Karzai's clumsy attempt to steal the election and his continued seeming inability really to take charge in the country he de jure rules, appears to have provoked the Obama team to wonder whether they could in fact work with Karzai.

Personally, I think Biden is right and that if the administration will bet on him, they'd put us 2 or 3 years ahead of the curve.

via Informed Comment: Obama said Wavering on Troop Escalation in Afghanistan

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Why Haven't Any Wall Street Tycoons Been Sent to the Slammer?

All I will say is find them and then hang them high.

Cover of Citizen Kane (Two-Disc Special Edition)

More than a year into the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression, millions of Americans have seen their home values and retirement savings plunge and their jobs evaporate.

What they haven't seen are any Wall Street tycoons forced to swap their multi-million dollar jobs and custom-made suits for dishwashing and prison stripes.

There are plenty of civil and class-action lawsuits from aggrieved investors angered by the losses in their mortgage bonds, hedge funds or pensions. Regulators have stepped up their vigilance after the fact. But to date, no captain of finance tied to the crisis has walked the plank.

There have been some high-profile arrests and federal convictions of financial giants — such as Ponzi scheme king Bernard Madoff and Stanford Financial Group chairman Robert Allen Stanford. They weren't among the causes of the financial meltdown, however, just poster boys for an era of lax enforcement, weak regulation and devout faith in free markets.

"A lot of people who are responsible (for the crisis) seem to have gotten awfully rich in the process," said Barbara Roper, the director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America.

The absence of what many would call justice stands out all the more because past financial crises always had their villains. The depression-era had electricity and railroad magnate Samuel Insull, who partly inspired the movie "Citizen Kane." The savings and loan crisis of the 1980's had banker Charles Keating. Energy giant Enron Corp.'s spectacular collapse offered the late CEO Kenneth Lay, a Texas crony of President George W. Bush.

Yet there's no such poster child for the Great Recession, as today's crisis is now called.

One may yet emerge. The FBI has more than 580 large-scale corporate fraud investigations under way. At least 40 of them are scrutinizing players in sub-prime mortgage lending, which was the first domino to fall and triggered a global financial crisis.

"The investigations are very complex; it's not something that's going to turn overnight," said Bill Carter, a spokesman at FBI headquarters. "They are labor intensive. They involve a review of records."

via t r u t h o u t | Why Haven't Any Wall Street Tycoons Been Sent to the Slammer?.

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Study links 45,000 U.S. deaths to lack of insurance

It's hard to believe that this country can tolerate this scale of problem without taking action. 45000 died each year due to lack of healthcare. Healthcare debt figures into most every bankruptcy. The time for action is now!

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year -- one every 12 minutes -- in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.

"We're losing more Americans every day because of inaction ... than drunk driving and homicide combined," Dr. David Himmelstein, a co-author of the study and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said in an interview with Reuters.

Overall, researchers said American adults age 64 and younger who lack health insurance have a 40 percent higher risk of death than those who have coverage.

[..]

The Harvard study, funded by a federal research grant, was published in the online edition of the American Journal of Public Health. It was released by Physicians for a National Health Program, which favors government-backed or "single-payer" health insurance.



An similar study in 1993 found those without insurance had a 25 percent greater risk of death, according to the Harvard group. The Institute of Medicine later used that data in its 2002 estimate showing about 18,000 people a year died because they lacked coverage.



Part of the increased risk now is due to the growing ranks of the uninsured, Himmelstein said. Roughly 46.3 million people in the United States lacked coverage in 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau reported last week, up from 45.7 million in 2007.



Another factor is that there are fewer places for the uninsured to get good care. Public hospitals and clinics are shuttering or scaling back across the country in cities like New Orleans, Detroit and others, he said.



Study co-author Dr. Steffie Woolhandler said the findings show that without proper care, uninsured people are more likely to die from complications associated with preventable diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.

via Study links 45,000 U.S. deaths to lack of insurance | U.S. | Reuters.

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