Two reports reveal Afghan War bottom line

Yaroslav Trofimov's October 18 report for the Wall Street Journal on the Taliban gains in Afghanistan's north explains much about the war plan that President Barack Obama approved in November 2009 for ISAF operations in Afghanistan. After providing an outline of the control that the Taliban have established in formerly non-Taliban regions, Trofimov cuts to the bottom line:

The Taliban have consolidated their war gains by tapping into broad disillusionment with the incompetence and venality of Afghan government officials.

"People don't love the Taliban -- but if they compare them to the government, they see the Taliban as the lesser evil," said Baghlan Gov. Munshi Abdul Majid, an appointee of President Hamid Karzai.

As a result, the Taliban are winning support beyond the Pashtun community, their traditional base. In Baghlan, where Pashtuns account for less than one-quarter of the province's 804,000 residents, the insurgency is now drawing ethnic Uzbeks, Tajiks and other minorities previously seen as unsympathetic to the rebel cause. [...]
As they have solidified their grip, the Taliban have imposed governance that reflects the north's more liberal social environment. In the south, Taliban forbid girls' education and routinely blow up schools; insurgents here let schools stay open, officials and teachers say, and limit girls' education to the sixth grade.

The Taliban, who collect the Islamic ushr and zakat taxes across the north's countryside, also brought their mobile courts, much to the relief of the locals who usually have to bribe Afghan officials to lodge a complaint and often wait for years for a verdict from the formal justice system.

Mobile-phone numbers posted in mosques and available from the elders allow anyone to quickly contact Taliban court officials.

An American official familiar with Baghlan noted that the Taliban courts make a special effort not to show any preferential treatment to Pashtuns -- a contrast to government officials, who often favor their own clan or ethnic group.
[...]
"It's clear that the insurgents concentrate their efforts on those areas where they can hope to reach a significant impact," explained Maj. Gen. Hans-Werner Fritz, the German commander of 11,000 coalition troops across Afghanistan's nine northern provinces. "The northern part could become the game-changer for all of Afghanistan."

Baghlan is of strategic importance, Gen. Fritz added, because most supplies from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan pass through, including most of the coalition's fuel. The power line from Uzbekistan, the main source of Kabul's electricity, also runs through here.
[...] (1)

In other words, even if every Taliban group could be destroyed tomorrow, by next month groups that provided the same kind of rough justice would spring up in Afghanistan's rural areas because there is no other criminal justice system there beyond the system of bribes, which few rural peoples can afford.

This explains the war plan that Petraeus and his advisors prepared and that Obama accepted over at least three other submissions. The plan -- one part 'population-centric' counterinsurgency, two parts nation-building, one part bullshit -- takes into account the reality that no matter how much 'security' may be provided by coalition forces, the central and provincial governments aren't capable of mustering even the most rudimentary modern justice system.

Robert Dreyfuss's October 20 report for the U.S.-based journal, The Nation (Can Karzai Cut Pakistan Out of a Deal With the Taliban? No) first addresses rumors, speculation, and eyebrow-raising statements by unnamed officials relating to Karzai's negotiations with the Taliban, and whether Pakistan will have a role in negotiations.

(The Los Angeles Times reporter Alex Rodriguez reported today from Islamabad that a high-level Pakistani official said that up to this point Pakistan had been cut out of the negotiations between Kabul and the Pakistan-based Taliban.)

Then Dreyfuss pulls back the curtain to reveal what's really been going on:

Marvin Weinbaum, a former US intelligence official who is now at the Middle East Institute, is a skeptic. He says that regardless of the current round of contacts, it's very unlikely that the Taliban wants a deal.

"There really isn't the basis for a Grand Bargain," he told me. The Taliban leadership are zealots, he said, who won't succumb to offers of a share of power.

"When you talk to the Taliban, all you are doing is testing their faith," he says.

Even military pressure, of the kind that the United States and its special forces units are putting on the Taliban, won't cause its leaders to compromise, he says. "The military pressure isn't going to work with them."

Weinbaum says that inside Afghanistan the anti-Taliban, non-Pashtun forces in the north and west of the country, including the remnants of the old Northern Alliance (NA) that fought the Taliban in the 1990s, won't easily agree to a deal with the Taliban, either, which is a huge problem for Karzai.

Fearing that the Taliban might make a comeback, the Northern Alliance and its allies are re-arming, securing weapons from Central Asia and other allies, Weinbaum says, in preparation for a potential civil war.

And the ANA, the Afghan army that is being built brick by brick by the United States and NATO, would fragment and fall apart if there's a deal with the Taliban, with many of the ANA troops joining the NA. "If there's a chance that [the Taliban] would return, the army would break up," he says.

Caroline Wadhams, who leads the Afghanistan-Pakistan work at the Center for American Progress, agrees that the non-Pashtun forces in the north are preparing for civil war, if it comes to that. "I've heard about re-arming in the north," she told me.

"Part of it stems from the fear that if everything collapses, regardless of the peace talks, there'd be a return to civil war."

Karzai, she says, is taking a great risk that people in Afghanistan's north and west would oppose the reconciliation with the Taliban that Karzai is trying to bring about.

Both Wadhams and Weinbaum said that Karzai was at pains to name people to the High Peace Council (HPC), including former President Rabbani, who could help persuade northerners that a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan isn't in the cards. Rabbani's job, says Weinbaum, is "to say to the north 'there's not going to be a deal that you can't subscribe to.' "

"By putting Rabbani at the HPC, Karzai's trying to get these people within the process," she says. But many, such as Abdullah Abdullah -- who challenged Karzai in the fraud-marred election last summer -- are refusing to participate, she says.

Some, such as Amrullah Saleh, the former chief of Afghan intelligence, are actively campaigning against Karzai and his talks with the Taliban.
[...]

Just a few weeks ago Trofimov mentioned in a WSJ report that a problem for the Northern Alliance in putting up resistance to negotiations with the Taliban is that they had disarmed at Karzai's insistence. If Dreyfuss's sources are correct then the NA has been busy solving the problem. That would explain why the Obama administration has not contested Iran's participation in the negotiations, a situation that Dreyfuss briefly addresses in his report:

For the first time, Iran took part in talks this week involving more than forty countries involved in Afghanistan. Iran has a lot of influence with Hazara Afghans in the west. Iran's participation in the latest round of discussions over Afghanistan was orchestrated by Michael Steiner, the German ambassador for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
[...]

Tehran is strongly anti-Taliban.

So what to do? Dreyruss urges that it's "critical" for the United States and NATO to involve India in Kabul's negotiations with the Taliban, and as soon as possible:

India isn't opposed to talks between Afghanistan and the Taliban, but they'd go ballistic if Pakistan gets the inside track. So if Obama is serious about jump-starting diplomacy to end the war in advance of the July 2011, deadline he's set for the start of a US drawdown, he'd better concentrate on getting both India and Pakistan on board.

And thus, Obama's upcoming three-day visit to India and his heaping more aid on Pakistan's military.

As for NATO, Dreyfuss notes:

More and more, it appears that the Europeans just want out. The upcoming NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal, will focus almost exclusively on what NATO calls "transition," that is, the transfer of security responsibility from NATO to the Afghans themselves (which is German for "we're gettin' outta here").

Or, as Steiner put it more diplomatically, "What we expect from Lisbon is a kickstart for next year starting this transition process."

The rough timetable for NATO is not too different from Obama's: start withdrawing foreign forces in 2011 and finish by 2014, leaving behind a far smaller number of trainers and advisers.

As to whether India's defense establishment is willing to play the fool for Washington, Obama is going to India prepared to offer as many trade concessions as he can. But Dreyfuss's report makes no mention of the Saudis in the struggle for control of Afghanistan, and neither does Trofimov's.

Somewhere among the reports about the war I've got stacked up there's one that claims the Saudis are working to destabilize India. According to the report they're funding the establishment of Wahhabist madrassas in India so they can crank out the same zombies that Saudi-funded madrassas produced in Pakistan.

If the report is accurate, both Indian and U.S. intelligence agencies know about the Saudi activities in India. And India's defense establishment knows that the United States of America is joined at the hip to Saudi Arabia. They also know that the U.S. military and civilian administrations continue in the attempt to placate Rawalpindi.

1) The report contains additional valuable data so I'd recommend reading it in its entirety.

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Newshoggers on Pakistan and U.S. "Military-Industrial Welfare"

Steve Hynd at Newshoggers coined the term while describing the self-defeating practice of the U.S. giving money to Pakistan's military for anti-terrorism purposes. I'm green with envy. "Military-Industrial Welfare" is so much pithier than my unwieldy "First use a sieve to empty the bathtub then turn the tub faucet on full blast."

But the idea of MIW is not just for the U.S. military to help fund terrorism and support repressive regimes. No, the welfare aspect of the U.S. military's financial aid program to foreign militaries is so they can buy U.S.-made defense equipment. The sales bring enough profits to U.S. defense manufacturers so that they don't have to relocate plants to Sri Lanka or North Korea, which means keeping many Americans in a job so they don't have to go on the dole.

However, there is a crucial point that the UPI report Newshoggers links to does not mention, and neither does the American official UPI quotes:

The $2 billion package [to Pakistan] is in addition to the billions of dollars the United States provides Pakistan in military aid and a five-year, $7.5 billion aid package in non-military counter-terrorism assistance approved by Congress last year.

"They key is to beef up their ability to go after militants, it can't be diverted to other threats," one senior U.S. official said.

Once cash is received by a donor government it becomes the property of the recipient government. I've mentioned the Catch-22 before, and the same point is covered in a 2009 Belfer Center paper that Newshoggers links to:

Pakistan is one of only four countries to receive direct cash transfers [from the USA]. Between 2002 and 2008, this “thank you” to Pakistan for help in fighting terrorism cost the U.S. taxpayer $2,374,000,000. By its nature, these cash transfers became Pakistani sovereign funds, precluding U.S. oversight.

By the way, there might be a grimly funny aspect to the Belfer Center paper, which is titled U.S. Aid to Pakistan: U.S. Taxpayers Have Funded Pakistani Corruption. The author, renaissance man Azeem Ibrahim, was apoplectic about the misuse of so much U.S. tax money when he wrote a column for Foreign Policy to summarize his research on the issue. Ibrahim is of Pakistani ancestry and holds dual citizenship in the USA and the UK but he was born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland and spends as much time as he can there with his family. The Scots are famous penny-pinchers.

The Newshoggers post links to additional blood-boiling reports about the Thelma-and- Louise relationship between the Pakistani and U.S. militaries, including a 2008 Guardian report citing that as much as 70 percent of U.S. military aid to Pakistan had been misspent. (I'm still waiting for the report from the World Bank on how all their development loans to Pakistan have been spent.) So if you're an American suffering from low blood pressure -- particularly if you're an American of Scottish ancestry -- you can save yourself a bundle on medication just by reading the Newshoggers post every morning.

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Team Obama announces plan to give more money to Pakistan military

BFF: Generals Petraeus and Kayani in Kabul

Is the promise of yet more aid money an attempt to placate Rawalpindi ahead of Obama's trip to India, or is this Mullen or Petraeus's idea of how to do counterinsurgency? Does it matter what color the knife handle is?

Wall Street Journal - October 20

U.S. Plans Increased Military Aid for Pakistan
Administration Seeks More Action by Islamabad Against Militants

By ADAM ENTOUS And JULIAN E. BARNES

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is planning to ramp up military support to the Pakistani army as part of an effort to persuade Islamabad to do far more to combat Islamic militants.

Top U.S. policy makers, who will meet with their Pakistani counterparts in Washington this week [Oct 20-22], say they doubt Islamabad will agree in the near term to mount a major army campaign against al Qaeda-linked militants in their biggest sanctuary bordering Afghanistan, officials say.

Instead, American officials are pushing Pakistan to agree to interim steps to increase pressure on the militant groups, such as by carrying out more targeted operations using U.S.-trained special operations units, according to officials close to the deliberations.

U.S. frustration with Pakistan has grown over what American officials see as Islamabad's unwillingness to mount a campaign against militants who have havens in North Waziristan and Baluchistan. North Waziristan is the main base for operations for the Haqqani network, an extremist group that frequently attacks U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan and has close ties to al Qaeda, which also takes refuge in the area. Leaders of the Afghan Taliban are based in Baluchistan.

Pakistani officials said Islamabad is willing to step up the current level of surgical strikes. But they said a full-scale clearing operation in North Waziristan isn't possible because large numbers of its troops and equipment are being used to respond to recent devastating flooding, the country's worst yet, and are being used to rout militants from other areas.

The new military aid, which is contingent on congressional approval, is expected to amount to more than $2 billion over five years, would pay for equipment Pakistan can use for counterinsurgency and counterterror operations. U.S. officials say they hope the new aid could effectively eliminate Pakistan's objections that it doesn't have the equipment needed to launch more operations in tribal areas.

Department of Defense officials, including Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will meet on Wednesday with Pakistani Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kayani at the Pentagon.

In a recent report to Congress, the White House said it believed the Pakistani military was avoiding direct conflict with the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda forces for political reasons. Despite the U.S. calls for a crackdown on the Haqqani network, some Pakistani officials continue to support the group, viewing it as a longtime ally that has steadfastly opposed Indian involvement in Afghanistan.

Pakistan received about $1.9 billion in military assistance from the U.S. in fiscal 2010, which ended Sept. 30, including about $300 million in grants to buy U.S. defense equipment. The new package of defense equipment would average out to an additional $100 million a year in aid, although the size of the grants would start lower and grow over time.

By seeking assurances from Pakistan that the new equipment will be used only to combat militants in the border areas, the U.S. hopes to reassure India that it isn't trying to further boost the power of Pakistan's conventional military.

Officials from both the U.S. and Pakistan rejected the notion that the military assistance and talks were a quid pro quo, arguing that they are trying to build a partnership, not cut a deal.

U.S. officials, although they denied that the increased aid was part of an explicit deal to get Islamabad to mount a ground offensive in North Waziristan, said they hoped increased Pakistani military capabilities would translate into increased action on the ground.

"It would seem natural that they could become more aggressive" in the tribal areas, said one American official.

The U.S. trains Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps, as well as members of the country's regular army, air force and navy. In 2010 alone, more than 1,100 Pakistani special operations troops were trained by the U.S., according to a recent White House report to Congress.

U.S. officials hope that this week's talks also result in an agreement on ways to make joint border-control centers and intelligence fusion centers more effective. The border-control centers, most on the Afghan side, help Pakistan, Afghanistan and the U.S. share information and coordinate cross-border operations. Intelligence fusion centers, most in Pakistan, share video feeds from drones and help develop target lists.

U.S. and Pakistani officials also emphasized that if Washington pushes too much it could undermine recent progress and erode Islamabad's will to fight in the tribal areas. "This is our war now; that is the biggest achievement of the last two years," said a Pakistani official.

The new military aid, which would complement an existing five-year, $7.5 billion nonmilitary package approved last year, will require U.S. congressional approval. Key members of Congress, upset by Pakistan's inaction in North Waziristan and concerned about the Pakistani army's human-rights record in the tribal areas, could hold up part or all of the funding and impose conditions of their own. "There is a lot of skepticism," said one a senior aide of the sentiment in Congress.

Islamabad remains skeptical of U.S. pressure to push into North Waziristan, playing down the region's importance as a safe haven for terrorists. Gen. Athar Abbas, spokesman for the Pakistan army, said the importance of North Waziristan as a base for hardened Taliban fighters had been exaggerated by U.S. officials.

"The effect of the Haqqani network in disturbing the U.S. in Afghanistan has been overblown," he said.

American officials hope that expanding the work of the joint U.S.-Pakistani intelligence fusion centers could help the Central Intelligence Agency improve its targeting of members of the Haqqani network and other militants.

The CIA has stepped up strikes on militant targets in the region using armed aerial drones, in part to add to pressure on the Haqqanis and the Afghan Taliban, but also to try to disrupt a suspected terrorist plot to strike Western Europe.

Speaking to a small group of reporters on Tuesday, CIA Director Leon Panetta said the stepped-up campaign were "taking a serious toll" on the Haqqani network. "All of that, I think, must be having an impact," he said.

Tom Wright in Islamabad contributed to this article.

Photograph: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Reports: For months NATO has been facilitating Karzai talks with al Qaeda-affiliated Haqqani and Quetta shura

Hamid Karzai in tears about violence in Afghanistan

AP - Oct 20

Afghan Lawmaker: Karzai in talks with Haqqani
By DEB RIECHMANN and KATHY GANNON, Associated Press Writers

KABUL, Afghanistan -- A lawmaker says the Afghan government has been in reconciliation talks for months with members of a Taliban faction closely tied to al-Qaida and responsible for lethal attacks on coalition forces and bombings inside Kabul.

The parliamentarian, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks, says the government has been in direct contact with Jalaludin Haqqani, the leader of the Pakistan-based Haqqani network.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that three members of the Taliban's leadership council also have participated in preliminary discussions with the Afghan government.

While skeptical in the past, the U.S. last week expressed support for the Afghan government's efforts to talk with senior members of the Taliban.

(U.K.) Telegraph - Oct 20

Senior Taliban commanders emerge from hiding for Afghanistan peace talks

Senior Taliban commanders, who were in hiding in Pakistan, have been escorted back into Afghanistan by allied forces for negotiations over ending the war, it was reported last night.

by Jon Swaine

(New York) Talks are being held between the inner circle of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, and members of the Quetta shura, the Taliban leadership, according to The New York Times.

Some exiled Taliban were taken from Pakistan to Kabul on a NATO aircraft after assurances that they would be protected, it was reported, while others had roads into Afghanistan cleared by allied forces.

Members of the hardline Haqqani network of insurgents are also said to have held talks with officials from the Afghan government.

The US government had acknowledged that talks had begun but the seniority of those involved was not previously known.

"When the Taliban see that they can travel in the country without being attacked by the Americans, they see that the government is sovereign, that they can trust us," an Afghan official was quoted as saying.

The newspaper said it was withholding the names of the Taliban involved at the request of The White House, in order to prevent the possibility of retribution from Afghans opposed to a settlement.

For the same reason, it is claimed, the talks are being organised and held without the knowledge of the Pakistani authorities. The ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, has close ties to some insurgent groups.

Mullah Omar, the "spiritual leader" of The Taliban and the unofficial ruler of Afghanistan in the years prior to the 2001 invasion, has also been sidelined by the new Afghan government.

Why Western aid reinforces the worst about Pakistani society

In Stay Out of the Bazaar I discussed obstacles to U.S.-Pakistan communication that are rooted in cultural differences. In this post I'll address obstacles that are rooted in human nature, which is the same in every culture.

When people are engaging in behavior they know is wrong and yet they don't want to change, they deploy tactics that will allow them to resist pressure to change. One tactic is to persistently misread cues that are attached to money or presents given as an inducement to change.

This tactic easily leads to a vicious cycle with the giver expecting improvement in the recipient's behavior, and the recipient accepting the money without changing his behavior. When the giver tries withholding the money as a prod the other person acts very injured, as if he's being attacked.

In short, human nature is shrewd enough to outwit the famous carrot-and-stick method of conditioning when it's determined not to change its ways.

How do you break the cycle? You remove giving from it because unless you do, the recipient is studiously interpreting the giving not as an inducement to change but as a reinforcement to stay the same.

The recipient's logic is a little twisted but it hangs together: Hey, if you really think my behavior is that bad, why would you give me anything?

This logic is in operation in the Washington-Rawalpindi/Islamabad relationship. So every time the USA gives money to Pakistan's regime the Pakistanis don't say to themselves, We know the Americans want us to do something because they're giving us this money, so we'll do it.

Instead they're thinking, As long as the Americans keep giving this money, they're telling us they're accepting our behavior.

If Washington retorts, We're doing nothing of the kind! We're giving the money because we want you to change -- the ready refrain would be, If you really want us to change, then why do you keep giving us money?

Washington: We keep giving you money because you keep demanding money!

Pakistan: Then if you keep giving into our demands, you can't think our behavior is really wrong! Right?

Human nature: more fun than a barrel of monkeys. The consequences in this case have not been fun; they've led to an ever-deepening sense of frustration and anger on both sides -- and, in the case of the Pakistan side, the claim of being publicly humiliated.

If they're being humiliated they're doing it to themselves. As the U.S. deploys the stick or threatens to, Pakistan's professional moochers redouble their efforts to prise money out of the Americans. As I've noted before this leads to the Pakistanis (or their American apologists) publicly listing all Pakistan's sins before making the pitch for more money.

The most recent display of this tactic was in the Christian Science Monitor yesterday in an opinion piece by Mansoor Ijaz titled, A game-changer for US-Pakistan relations. On its own the writing is not funny but after you've plowed through a couple hundred of these pitches it's fun watching the wind-up: Kick us, beat us, I know we're awful, our military is a mess, our terrorism is terrible -- so what Pakistan needs is more money, and here's the best way to give it so that this time all of it won't get stolen.

Aside from the harm that going along with this tactic does to taxpayers around the world who support it, and the ISAF troops and innocent Afghans who get killed and maimed because of it, the people suffering most are Pakistan's best citizens: the middle-class taxpayers.

I know the Western powers couldn't care less about what happens to Pakistanis; they just want the terrorism problem solved. But I think the middle classes in NATO countries would be sympathetic and outraged if they realized what their tax-funded bribes to Pakistan's military are doing to the middle-class in Pakistan.

The more aid and low-cost loans thrown at Pakistan, the more the wealthy among them can stave off paying their taxes. This situation is by no means limited to Pakistan; I've mentioned it several times in relation to Mexico. But in Pakistan it's helped support the very conditions that make the country Terrorism, Inc.

I've talked about this issue before but recently Inter Press Service did a great report on Pakistan's tax problem and how it folds into the rest of the country's ills. Asia Times Online snapped up the report, which I'll feature here. (See the AToL website for links in the report.) Unfortunately the report has no byline so I can't thank the individual reporter(s) for their work, but a big thanks to IPS:

Anger rises over flood tax plan
October 9, 2010

KARACHI, Pakistan - It was meant as an appeal to generous souls, but a suggestion for a one-time tax to help raise funds for Pakistan's millions of flood victims has instead reminded many Pakistanis of their country's faulty tax system.

Indeed, many are angered by President Asif Ali Zardari's proposal for a tax to be imposed on Pakistan's "well-off" and "people of means"; many, like accountant Munaf Lakda downright seething.

"I most definitely protest and would not pay the flood tax at all if I can avoid it," says Lakda. "Just pick up their [ruling elites'] income tax returns and compare them to mine - it's ridiculous how little they pay, if they pay at all!"

Fouzia Mapara, another salaried worker, says, "It is another gimmick to skin the poor middle class who are already going through a tough time to make both ends meet."

It is not that Pakistanis are not generous lot, since many have expressed willingness to help the estimated 18 million people affected by the floods that inundated large parts of Pakistan two months ago. Zardari's tax proposal, however, has hit a raw nerve in this South Asian country where government officials are among those said not to be paying the proper amount of taxes.

A recent media report says that many ministers - majority of whom are feudal lords with big land holdings - including Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, paid taxes based only from their salaries as lawmakers, not from their private fortunes. There are even ministers who have paid less than 10,000 rupees (US$117 ) as their annual income tax.

A report on Pakistan's taxation system by the Washington DC-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace confirms that fewer than three million of Pakistan's 180 million people pay any income tax. It also says the country's tax-to-GDP ratio stands at just 9%.

According to economist Haris Gazdar, a tax-GDP ratio is low "in 'strong arm' military governments as well as 'weak' civil governments". Akbar S Zaidi, the Pakistani economist who authored the Carnegie report, writes, "Pakistan's lack of a proper tax and revenue regime has resulted in high rates of tax evasion, burdening the country with unsustainable debt and undermining its development priorities."

Pakistan's tax system is apparently so dismal that in September 2010, the country's biggest creditor, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), told Finance Minister Abdul Hafeez Sheikh that an US$11 billion emergency loan program would be frozen until Pakistan fixed its tax collection system.

United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has also commented that countries "that will not tax their elites but expect us to come in and help them serve their people are just not going to get the kind of help from us that they have been getting."

"There's got to be some reciprocity here," she said. "You cannot have a tax rate of 9% of GDP when big landholders and all the other elites do not pay anything, or pay so little that it's laughable."

Such remarks from outsiders may have prompted Zardari to try asking Pakistanis themselves to help the government come up with the estimated $43 billion needed to rebuild infrastructure damaged by the floods, the worst in many decades, and for the relief and rehabilitation of those rendered homeless by the calamity.

In suggesting the one-time tax, the president had noted, "Unless we are prepared to share bread with our grief- and disaster-stricken brethren, we should not expect others to help us."

Zardari probably did not expect the generally negative reaction to his proposal. But as Quaid-e-Azam University physics professor Pervez Hoodbhoy explains, "Because documentation exists, the salaried class is the only segment of society that actually pays taxes. To milk it further will produce much resentment."

Fellow academic Q Isa Daudpota, who suggests that perhaps the government should stop buying military aircraft instead of imposing a flood tax, said: "Ad-hoc taxation is bad and reflects poorly on successive governments."

There are even those like Najma Sadeque, a non-government organization worker, who says, "All big tax evaders starting from Zardari and Gilani and guilty parliamentarians and ministers, and all tax evaders [should be placed] under house arrest until they cough up overdue taxes!" Sadeque says that if they all just pay up, there would be no need for a flood tax.

Still, there have been more sober counterproposals from even those who are critical of both the Pakistani government and the tax system.

Badar Alam, editor of the current-affairs monthly Herald, says, "A one-time flood tax should be imposed on conspicuous consumption." He suggests that something like a 1% sales tax be imposed only on "high spenders" for one-time shopping or dining that exceeds 10,000 rupees.

Hoodbhoy, for his part, proposes "a flat one-time tax on urban property and agricultural lands at one percent of the current market price".

Yet he also believes the current furor over the elite's supposed non-payment of proper taxes is all sound and fury that will eventually die down.

"Apart from the exception created by the lawyers' movement [started in 2007 in protest against General Pervez Musharraf's dismissal of the chief justice of Pakistan], the common man has come out on the streets only when blasphemy is alleged, or when some religious or anti-West issue gains prominence," said Hoodbhoy.

"The absence of a progressive national movement for economic and social justice means that tax thieves, feudals, and other enemies of Pakistan's people will get away this time as well."

(Inter Press Service)

Obama at War: First we get a sieve to empty the bathtub, then we keep the tub faucet on full blast

Yesterday Long War Journal gave their prestigious Captain Louis Renault Award to an unnamed NATO official. This was for his providing CNN with the shocking information that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, a branch of Pakistan's military, has been sheltering al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and his second in command, Ayman al Zawahiri.

The NATO official also thought to mention that the duo were not in North Waziristan, where CIA drones are ostensibly hunting for them, but in Pakistan's northwest in the region between Kurram and Chitral.

The official also provided the shocking information, which surely he stumbled upon just yesterday while getting out of the shower, that the two al Qaeda leaders were not roughing it in Pakistan ("Nobody in al-Qaeda is living in a cave") but in houses close to each other, where they were looked after by members of the ISI and tribal flunkies.

Pakistani officials were quick to categorically deny everything. One official told the U.K. Telegraph:

... that the latest allegations were designed to heap pressure on Islamabad ahead of talks in Washington this week that would focus on strengthening cooperation between the two countries.

"Every time something important is happening then things like this keep creeping out," he said. "If it's not bin Laden it's something else."

It's nice to know there's a little pressure on Islamabad ahead of the latest U.S.-Pakistan strategic dialogue, which from the following report is centered around the Obama administration's plan to give away the store to Pakistan -- at U.S. taxpayer expense, of course -- and asking nothing in return except that General Kayani politely twiddle his thumbs while listening to a few lectures about Pakistan's need to do better in future:

Meeting Pakistanis, U.S. Will Try to Fix Relations
By MARK LANDLER and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: October 18, 2010, The New York Times

WASHINGTON — As Pakistani civilian and military leaders arrive here this week for high-level meetings, the Obama administration will begin trying to mend a relationship badly damaged by the American military’s tough new stance in the region.

Among the sweeteners on the table will be a multiyear security pact with Pakistan, complete with more reliable military aid — something the Pakistani military has long sought to complement the five-year, $7.5 billion package of nonmilitary aid approved by Congress last year. The administration will also discuss how to channel money to help Pakistan rebuild after its ruinous flood.

But the American gestures come at a time of fraying patience on the part of the Obama administration, and they will carry a familiar warning, a senior American official said: if Pakistan does not intensify its efforts to crack down on militants hiding out in the tribal areas of North Waziristan, or if another terrorist plot against the United States were to emanate from Pakistani soil, the administration would find it hard to persuade Congress or the American public to keep supporting the country.

“Pakistan has taken aggressive action within its own borders. But clearly, this is an ongoing threat and more needs to be done,” the State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, said Monday. “That will be among the issues talked about.”

The Pakistanis will come with a similarly mixed message. While Pakistan is grateful for the strong American support after the flood, Pakistani officials said, it remains frustrated by what it perceives as the slow pace of economic aid, the lack of access to American markets for Pakistani goods and the administration’s continued lack of sympathy for the country’s confrontation with India.

Other potentially divisive topics are likely to come up, too, including NATO’s role in reconciliation talks between President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and the Taliban. Pakistani officials say they are nervous about being left out of any political settlement involving the Taliban.

Still, in a relationship suffused by tension and flare-ups — most recently over a NATO helicopter gunship that accidentally killed three Pakistani soldiers and Pakistan’s subsequent decision to close a supply route into Afghanistan — this regular meeting, known here as the strategic dialogue, serves as a lubricant to keep both countries talking.

At this meeting, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will formally introduce the new American ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter. Mr. Munter, who recently served in Iraq, replaces Anne W. Patterson, who just wrapped up her tour of duty in Islamabad.

“No country has gotten more attention from Secretary Clinton than Pakistan,” said Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan’s delegation will be led by its foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, but much of the attention will be on another official, the military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who is viewed by many as the most powerful man in Pakistan.

White House and Pentagon officials said one immediate goal of this meeting was to ease the tensions that led Pakistan to close the border crossing at Torkham, halting NATO supplies into Afghanistan. Officials on both sides said that acrimony from the border flare-up had already receded, soothed by the multiple apologies that American officials made to Pakistan last week.

Last week, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that General Kayani had assured him that Pakistan’s army would tackle the North Waziristan haven, but on Pakistan’s timetable.

In an interview, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, said, “Our American partners understand that we have 34,000 troops in North Waziristan. Our soldiers have been engaged in flood relief after history’s worst floods. It is not a question of lack of will.”

"The British don't know who they are, so they can't teach us how to adapt."

Merkel: Multiculturalism has "utterly failed" in Germany

I dislike many of David Frum's views so I thought hard before highlighting his latest opinion piece for CNN on this blog. But he marshals data that's a great help in grasping the complex background to the current furor in Germany about immigration and the implications for other EU countries.

Odd to think in light of today's events that when Mark Steyn's America Alone was published in 2006 his harsh criticism of multiculturalism was met with outrage from many quarters, and that the American blog, Gates of Vienna, which began around 2004 to chronicle the fast-deteriorating immigrant situation in those countries, was considered alarmist.

Germany's Merkel is right -- multiculturalism has failed
By David Frum, CNN Contributor
October 18, 2010 1:38 p.m. EDT

[...] Speaking in Potsdam on Saturday, [German] Chancellor [Angela] Merkel told a gathering of young Christian Democrats that multiculturalism has failed.

That might seem to be saying the obvious.

Item: December 20, 2007. Two young men are smoking on a Munich subway train, where smoking is prohibited. A fellow passenger, a 76-year-old pensioner, asks them to stop. What happened next was captured on surveillance cameras. The young men call the old man a "s--- German" and savagely beat and kick him, fracturing his skull. Other passengers on the train failed to intervene. One of the attackers was a Greek immigrant, 17. The other, 20, was born in Germany of Turkish parents.

The Munich train story captured the attention of the country, symbolizing an apparent deterioration of public order driven by multicultural immigration. After the attack, Hesse governor Roland Koch asked: "How much are we prepared to take from a small proportion of violent youths, who frequently have a foreign background?"

There are more than 15 million people living in Germany who were either born outside Germany or whose parents were born outside Germany. That amounts to almost 20 percent of the population.

This immigrant population is disproportionately connected to almost all of the social problems of modern Germany. Yet the problem that has transfixed the country is, very understandably, the problem of crime. In Berlin, young men of immigrant stock are three times as likely to commit a crime as young men of German background, reports Germany's state broadcaster, Deutsche Welle. In a September interview, Chancellor Merkel endorsed claims that religious young men of Muslim origin were more likely to commit acts of violence than other young Germans.

These crimes seem increasingly the work of criminal gangs of immigrant origin that organize resistance to police authority in what the German media -- with tabloid exaggeration -- increasingly call "No Go areas." Violent assaults upon police officers jumped 60 percent between 2005 and 2009, according to the German newspaper Bild.

Less spectacular -- but as important to ordinary people's feelings of security -- is the perceived deterioration of public order: declining schools, rising welfare rolls and foiled terrorist attacks.

Because of very low birth rates among old-stock Germans, the proportion of foreign-born is highest among those younger than 20s. In the poor Berlin neighborhood of Wedding, three out of four students and at least half the parents lived on unemployment benefits and welfare, even before the global economic crisis. In 2005, The New York Times interviewed a teacher in a Wedding high school:

"In Wedding, [Evelyn] Rühle says, immigrant children today speak poorer German and have less contact with German culture than when she started teaching 20 years ago. Many Muslim students ... go to Koran classes outside of school and speak only Turkish or Arabic at home. Meanwhile, the growth of digital television has made a host of Turkish- and Arabic-language channels available, intensifying language problems and nurturing identities that are informed more by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the war in Iraq than by the local German environment."

A high-tech economy offers few opportunities for the poorly educated, with the result that immigrants and their children increasingly find themselves dependent on public assistance.

In the United States, immigrants are less likely than the native-born to collect welfare or other social benefits. In Europe, immigrants are radically more likely than the native-born to collect welfare and social benefits, with Third World immigrants collecting the most of all. That's the findings of a 2005 study by researchers at Prague's Charles University.

European voters have absorbed these uncomfortable data into a suspicious view of newcomer intentions: According to a recent study by the Friedrich Ebert think tank, 34.3 percent of Germans believe that migrants come to Germany primarily to receive welfare benefits.

Merkel's Potsdam speech did not cite those social problems.

In Germany, the problems created by immigration literally go without saying, and those who do try to talk about them rapidly find themselves ejected from public life. Thilo Sarrazin, a governor of the Bundesbank (and it's worth mentioning, a member of the left-of-center Social Democratic party) was pressured to resign his post in September after publishing a book arguing the failure of Germany's absorption of immigrants.

Yet in the words of Sigmund Freud, the repressed always return.

Even if Germany and the other European Union countries can prevent the immigration population from growing -- and that is a very uncertain if -- they must find ways to deal with integrating the immigrant population already present, both first- and second- generation.

It's safe to say that no country in Europe is succeeding at that all-important job.

Two weeks ago, I visited the British city of Birmingham.

In 2005, the city had been torn by riots that erupted about 50 yards from the lawyer's office in which I met with four community activists. The riots were sparked when a rumor spread through the neighborhood's Afro-Caribbean population that some Asian youths had gang-raped a black girl. That rumor proved false, but only after blacks and Asians had fought two days of street battles that left two people dead.

I asked these local leaders how things had changed since 2005. The answer: not very much at all.

The authorities had responded to the riots by infusing more money into the community and by intensifying police patrols.

But the mutual suspicions between groups had not been allayed. Problems of integration remained. One of the four activists I met was obviously uncomfortable speaking English, even though born and raised in the United Kingdom.

One said to me very poignantly: "The British don't know who they are, so they can't teach us how to adapt."

On the other hand, it's not so clear how much the newcomers want to adapt. The man who spoke poor English had spent his entire life inside an Islamic school system, memorizing the Quran in Arabic. Hard to see how that form of knowledge would equip anyone for life in a modern technological society.

Chancellor Merkel's Potsdam speech raised the question: Could more be done to accelerate immigrant adaptation? Unfortunately the speech offered few answers.

Quietly, some Europeans are wondering whether Europe -- by stumbling into an American-style immigration policy -- has willy-nilly forced itself to follow other American policies as well:

-- Tougher law enforcement and longer prison sentences to fight crime.

-- A less generous welfare state that compels migrants to work rather than collect benefits paid for by the native-born.

-- A stronger assertion of national identity -- and a more emphatic demand that newcomers adapt to the existing society.

These days, many American conservatives are warning that the United States is going the way of Europe. But maybe the real story is the reverse: Is it Europe that will soon be imitating the United States?

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of David Frum.

See Frum's column at CNN for links in the above text.

Updates on the murder of David Michael Hartley

The Hartleys on vacation

I'm still adding updates on news about the case and my impressions of the ongoing investigation to my October 3 essay on David Hartley's murder. For readers looking for a record of the investigation and related issues -- the first update was on October 5; the last update was today at 3:15 PM Eastern Time.

Americans and Mexicans must not allow the murder to drift out of the daily news cycle. By the way, Americans and Mexicans might be surprised to learn how much interest the murder has generated around the globe.

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Waking the Watchmen, Part 4

The night was not cold but exhaustion and physical shock had set in. I was shivering so badly and my mouth was so dry that I could only choke down a few bites of the sandwich. With shaking hands I poured a cup of cold coffee, added milk and sugar, then downed aspirin and more megadose-strength Vitamin C. I applied mosquito repellent to my face, neck, hands and wrists. Then I wrapped myself in the blanket.

With no more chores to focus on, the terror seeped back.

It struck me that the man's motive for setting the fire was not necessarily to teach a lesson in humility. It had never occurred to me before that the man, or whatever it was, had been aware of my attempt to help Sai Baba during the struggle in the Poornachandra auditorium. Clearly he had been aware, so then he had my number. He would have gauged I would try to save the others in the hotel from the fire with little thought for myself.

I recalled the massive doses of Vitamin C I'd swallowed moments before the fire broke out and the huge amount of smoke it had generated. Had the vitamin done as promised? Warded off the worst effects of carbon monoxide poisoning long enough that I hadn't fallen unconscious before I'd gotten outside?

If so, and if the man's intention had been to kill me and make it look like an accidental death from carbon monoxide, I had outwitted the devil with a bottle of Vitamin C. Hysterical laughter bubbled in my chest then died. If the man's aim had been to kill me he would not stop with one attempt.

Whether there was a moon to accompany the bright starlight I can't recall but I could see well enough. I got up and moved the lounge chair so I could more easily keep an eye on the door leading to the roof.

I asked myself mockingly, 'And what would you do if he came through the door?'

This attempt to wring trench humor from the situation only made me more acutely aware of my vulnerability. I would be utterly defenseless if he attacked me on the roof.

I fought down the urge to scream and run. There was nowhere to run. Every nerve seemed on alert; I strained to place the slightest night sound. My shivering became uncontrollable.

I am not going to make it through the night, I thought.

I turned in the chaise lounge and looked at the stylized painting of the Buddha's eyes on the stupa of the Swayambhu temple, the side that faced the Vajra hotel roof. They gazed across Kathmandu Valley with perfect detachment. I'd been told that ears were not added to the depiction to signify that the Buddha wasn't interested in hearing praise. No ears, no hearing prayers for help, either. The Buddha was completely beyond this realm, beyond the affairs of humans.

I tried to pray but couldn't. I had never been good at prayer and less good at praying for myself; the extremis of terror was not a good time to start practicing, I considered.

Then something Sai Baba had said in a discourse came to mind: "Never hesitate to call for help. If you're ever in trouble pray to whatever form of God you believe in. If you can't pray, call on me. If you can't call on me, call on your mother and someone's mother will come rushing to your aid."

My mother was long dead, and no one's mother was going to rush to my aid on a rooftop in the middle of nowhere at three in the morning.

"Mother," I cried out in despair. "Mother, please help me!" Then I burst into sobs.

A few minutes later I heard a rustling sound. I started, nearly leaping to my feet in panic, and forced myself to stop crying so I could pinpoint the sound. My eyes went to the portion of the low brick wall around the roof that my chair faced. The rustling sound was coming from where the wall joined the building. Something was climbing on the vines that ran up the side the building.

Within a moment what looked to be a kitten came into sight, then began moving slowly along the top of the brick wall. As it drew nearer a thrill went through my body. I stared in wonderment.

It was not a kitten. It was a rat. A pregnant rat. Someone's mother had climbed, laboriously, to a roof in the middle of nowhere at three in the morning.

The rat was so heavy with pregnancy that movement was difficult for her. She inched ponderously along the wall until she was opposite me, less than two yards away. Then she turned her head to contemplate me.

For a moment I was afraid to speak for fear of startling her, then I whispered pleadingly, "Mother, please don't leave me!"

She stayed with me until the dawn.

Once she turned to look at me as if to say, 'I will be right back,' then lumbered to the far end of the wall, out of my sight. She returned moments later to stand guard.

At first I thought to offer her some of my sandwich then told myself, 'Be humble. She is here to help you, not the other way around.'

I ate the rest of the sandwich. The food helped me feel stronger.

The remainder of the night passed uneventfully, the mother busy with her thoughts, I with mine. I can't remember what I thought about but I do recall that the terror and despair quickly ebbed, leaving me calm, and the shaking gradually left me.

When the dawn came I stood and thanked her. She headed for the edge of the building then began her slow descent down the vines.

I turned and saw that the cloud cover over the Himalayas had lifted. So I had finally been on the Vajra roof early enough to see the dawn, I thought wryly.

When the sun rose I stared in awe and a touch of fear at the snow-tipped mountain chain appearing golden against the luminous sky.

It is one thing to see photographs of the Himalayas, quite another to see them with the naked eye. Even at a distance of several miles one can sense their forbidding power.

In that moment I knew that if there clues on the other side of those mountains to the murder mystery I was trying solve I would have to leave them unturned. My stays in this part of the world had taken a great toll on my health. Even if I somehow managed to get across the Himalayas in the company of Tibetans who knew how to navigate around Chinese soldiers I would not be strong enough to make the return journey.

For the first time I wondered why the man had tried to kill Sai Baba and why I'd been drawn into the incident. The questions had not occurred to me before because Sai Baba was a perennial target of murder attempts. I'd looked at the attempt on his life in the Poornachandra auditorium as being entirely unrelated to my life and my search. Perhaps the supposition wasn't true.

"Hunt," I corrected myself. For the first time I used the word. I was not searching; I was on a hunt, and I had turned to Sai Baba for help in the hunt.

If the assassin didn't want me pursuing the murder mystery he would have had plenty of chances to attempt to kill me since his attack on Baba. Yet seemingly he had not struck until I'd reached Nepal.

Over the years I'd received warnings to abandon the hunt, including warnings from Sai Baba. The most recent warning had come from a Tibetan Buddhist monk I'd met briefly in Ladkah then invited to lunch when our paths had crossed again in Kathmandu.

After studying me he said, "You remind me of a strongman in my village in Tibet. He was with some people walking in the wilds when they were attacked by a snow leopard. They had no weapons. He told the others to run for help. To prevent them from being chased he charged at the leopard and fought it with his bare hands.

I asked who'd won the battle.

The monk replied, "When the villagers arrived they found he had broken the leopard's back. But you should have seen the man! Every inch of his skin was clawed to shreds. He soon died from his wounds."

His point, taken with all the other warnings, was clear. I was poking into a mystery which might not be the business of ordinary humans. So if I was determined to keep playing sleuth I had better learn to become harder to kill.

The monk had advised me to take up the practice of Yoga. However, I wasn't the Yoga type. Other kinds of meditation weren't my métier, either. So it seemed I was destined to keep repeating those moments in boarding school when I'd stumbled around in the pitch dark while something invisible to my eyes looked on.

If the man had meant to stage my death at the Vajra hotel, it looked as if I'd survived with the help of Western science, a kind-hearted rat and -- recalling the feeling of hands shoving me to notice a fire extinguisher -- perhaps a little behind-the-scenes help from Sathya Sai Baba. The next time I might not be so fortunate.

***************

Part 5 will be posted on Monday morning.

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Steve Diamond lets rip about phony radicalism

Too many on the left fall for ... pro-Castro and pro-Hugo Chavez politics, a modern day version of the third worldism that the Weather Underground propagated in the 1970s.


I always mean to introduce an essay by Dr Stephen Diamond with just a few words then give him the floor. But I don't know what it is about so many of his writings that set off a Pundita rant; maybe it's because they're thought-provoking.

His latest essay, Obama and Ayers: Faux Radicalism Redux, is a take-down of phonies on the American left and right, although he patiently terms some of them 'naive.' It's bound to anger many American readers who assert that communism is a threat to democracy. I myself don't think communism and democracy are compatible so I'm always in disagreement with Steve on this point.

Yet one only need listen to the excuses from American apologists for China's communist regime to realize that U.S. policy is two-faced on the issue of communism. ('It's not really communism; it's just quasi-capitalism with Chinese characteristics.')

Worse, the policymakers and voters who keep returning them to office have never thought it strange that they'll support any kind of repressive regime if they find it expedient. When they're called out on their behavior they reply, 'Oh well that's just realpolitik.'

Oh, yes? Then what happened to America the great defender of democracy?

Legions of phonies is what happened.

When was the last time you saw Bill Ayers, or any of his buddies on the American left, chain themselves to a fence outside a Mexican consulate to protest the Mexican elites' rape of Mexico's poor? Never. You never saw that.

And you never saw them stage a march to protest the Mexican presidential election that was as much stolen from the leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Same for the American union leaders who yammer about solidarity with their downtrodden brothers and sisters in Latin America.

The American unions and the American left were as silent as the grave about what was done to López Obrador with the help of American political consultants. They were joined in keeping their mouths shut by their American opponents on the so-called right, who jabber endlessly about their support for democracy.

Why were they silent?

Because he said there was no need to raise taxes on Mexico's elite; just get them to pay the taxes already on the books. Because he said that Mexicans shouldn't have to find work in the USA. Because he promised that if he became Mexico's President he'd create enough jobs so that Mexicans didn't have to demean themselves by running to the USA for employment.

That campaign pledge went over like bacon at a bar mitzvah with U.S. labor unions that wanted swell their ranks with Mexican immigrants and with U.S. agribusiness and the construction industry. Ditto for the Democrat party machine, which has been using illegal Latin American immigrants to supplement voter lists of Americans who died a century ago.

That's why.

So I can't muster any patience for these types, who attempt to hide their hypocrisy behind political and philosophical discourses. But that's just me. Steve's essay, which I republish below, makes many points about phony radicalism that are important to ponder, no matter how much one may disagree with his argument that communism is compatible with democracy.

For readers who'd like to read more of Steve's essays, he has his own website now, which is called, Stephen Diamond; it's linked on my blogroll.

Obama and Ayers: Faux Radicalism Redux
by Stephen Diamond
October 13, 2010

Get ready for an onset from the wacky anti-communist right wing. One of their most loyal -- and actually reasonably honest -- scribes, Stanley Kurtz, is just in time for the fall election with a new book on what he calls our "radical in chief," by which he means, believe it or not, Barack Obama.

Yes, the same Barack Obama who has sent tens of thousands of young Americans off to central Asia for no discernible reason other than the preservation of U.S. influence in the region. The same Barack Obama who has steadfastly refused to nationalize a sclerotic and corrupt banking system. The same Barack Obama who brought centrists like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner into office to steer the economic ship that had run aground under President Bush.

Whatever Barack Obama thought his politics were when he and I were both active in the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s (he was at Occidental College while I was at U.C. Berkeley, both schools part of the statewide Campuses United Against Apartheid), he had long since abandoned them in favor of his opportunistic and winding road to political power.

But that has not stopped the troglodyte right from hoping that the red-baiting tactics of the 1950s can help restore the Republicans to power. And Stanley Kurtz has been among the most effective in misleading people about the real nature of Obama's politics, which I believe are fundamentally bureaucratic and authoritarian in a faux radical guise.

Stanley and I crossed blogging paths during the election campaign because of our shared concern that the University of Illinois denied him access to the archives stored there from the now defunct Chicago Annenberg Challenge, or CAC. The CAC was a non-profit corporation established in Chicago in 1995 to funnel a $49 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation (matched by $100 mn more in grants from other Chicago groups) to reform projects in the Chicago public school system.

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, then an education professor at the University of Illinois' Chicago campus. Ayers appointed Barack Obama as the CAC's board chair after consultation with the small coalition of foundation and reform groups he had built as part of designing the CAC proposal.

(While I was attacked by left Democrats when I had the temerity to point out the role of Ayers in elevating Obama to this post at a critical stage in Obama's young career - just months before he launched his first campaign for political office - Ayers' role was confirmed recently by liberal David Remnick of the New Yorker magazine in his book on Obama.)

While Kurtz was eventually allowed access to the CAC documents, it was disturbing to learn that the former CAC executive director, Ken Rolling, who was appointed by the CAC board headed by Obama, had been in touch privately with the library asking to delay Kurtz' access to the documents which were already listed as available for public use and had been, I was told by a Chicago Tribune reporter, accessed earlier in the year by another researcher.

I had also been told that a source in the Obama campaign had direct knowledge that David Axelrod was personally in contact with Bill Ayers in an attempt to coordinate a response by the campaign to the CAC documents. And a senior Democratic Party source said that Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dorhn were providing Obama and his wife Michelle with suggested names for enventual appointees to White House positions.

The list included Van Jones, an environmental activist with a maoist background who was first appointed and then quickly pushed off the President's staff when it was alleged he had signed a petition supporting a group that questioned the fact that the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were instigated by fundamentalists.

Valerie Jarrett, another member of the Obama inner circle, publicly confirmed at a NetRoots convention that Obama had kept an eye on Jones from his days as a maoist activist in the early 1990s.

Until late in the campaign very few people, however, had paid attention to the close relationship between Ayers and Obama. But a senior Democratic party figure supporting the Obama campaign confirmed that the relationship was longstanding and that the CAC appointment was a way for Ayers to help advance Obama's career.

Because of Bill Ayers' history as a terrorist with the Weather Underground movement the right saw a gold mine in these connections. Certainly a relationship with Ayers would be toxic to Obama, who deftly sidestepped efforts to link him to Ayers during the campaign.

A compliant mainstream media did much to help in the effort, most notably the New York Times which despite sending several reporters to cover the story somehow could not discover what was common knowledge among many on the left in Chicago, that Obama and Ayers were friends. Such good friends, in fact, that no one raised an eyebrow when Ayers appointed him to the CAC board or when Ayers and his wife, fellow terrorist and now law professor at Northwestern Bernardine Dohrn, hosted a campaign event for Obama in the fall of 1995 at their Hyde Park town house.

Here is where Kurtz, however, begins to misread the Ayers/Obama relationship. The blind spot he shares with many on the right is the presumption, conscious or not, that the left and democracy are somehow incompatible.

In my view the only meaningful left is firmly committed to democracy. Thus, as an academic I have researched the tensions in the Sandinista revolution between those committed to democracy versus those committed to top down state controlled solutions to economic backwardness. I have examined the issue of international labor rights in stalinist controlled eastern Europe as well as communist China. As a union organizer before pursuing my academic career I advocated for democratic rights inside the union movement as well as inside the workplace.

But one need only spend a few minutes reviewing the political perspective of Bill Ayers and those who support his views to conclude that authoritarianism, not democracy, is at the heart of their politics.

Granted, it takes a strong stomach to closely study the views of Ayers and his wife Dohrn and their adopted son Chesa Boudin (biological son of jailed terrorists who were comrades of Ayers and Dohrn in the Weather Underground) or their 60s SDS ally, Mike Klonsky. Klonsky is the leader of a maoist sect who received his PhD under Bill Ayers and then got approximately $1 million in grant money from the CAC led by Obama and Ayers.

Yet ironically the major policy issue that likely first brought Obama and Ayers together, and was later at the heart of the CAC project in mid-90s Chicago, was what I view as an undemocratic approach to reform of education. While you can do a search for my numerous blog posts on this issue here, the short story is that Ayers and Obama both backed the imposition in Chicago in the late 1980s "local control" of public schools, against the will of the Chicago teachers' union and many leading community groups, particularly those in the black community. The fear of the union, rightly in my view, was that local control would enable foundations and big business interests in Chicago to manipulate parents against teachers.

Far from being "democratic" as Ayers attempted to argue, local control was bureaucratic and allowed those powerful groups to hide their attempt to break the union behind the understandable frustration of many parents with the poorly funded and organized schools. No wonder then that the Heritage Foundation praised the local control movement. They saw that local control was a stepping stone to "school choice," their misguided effort to introduce a naive view of capitalist markets into the education system.

The CAC in the mid-90s was an effort to revitalize that local control movement in what was called at the time the Chicago School Wars. By then big business in Chicago and its mayor, Richard Daley the second, had lost interest in Ayers' pet project as it had failed to break the union. And so Obama and Ayers worked side by side against the Daley administration to beef up the local school councils they had both fought for nearly a decade earlier, when Obama was a community organizer on the Chicago South Side.

But in what Stanley Kurtz has written so far about the CAC, for example in a long article about it in the Wall Street Journal, he ignored the real meaning of this odd alliance of the right, business, foundations, Ayers and Obama behind "local control" and concentrates on other far less important efforts like money that was funneled by the CAC to pan-African oriented curricular reform.

Of course, Kurtz is not alone in being fooled by what it means to fund a project like the South Shore African Village Collaborative as the CAC did. Too many on the left view such politically correct efforts as genuine and constructive approaches to reform.

Too many on the left fall for, as well, Ayers' and Dohrn's pro-Castro and pro-Hugo Chavez politics, a modern day version of the third worldism that the Weather Underground propagated in the 1970s. Some, a small minority, on the left actually think people like Chavez and Castro are leftists but far more are taken in by the naive view that the "enemy of my enemy is my friend." This idea hobbled the anti-Vietnam War movement in the 1960s, when thousands cheered "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win" despite Ho's record as a butcher of the real Vietnamese left. And today too many cheer Chavez as he crushes genuine life out of the Venezuelan poor and working class or Hamas and Hezbollah when they wave the image of "Che" Guevara on the west bank.

Faux radicals like Ayers and Dohrn exploit that kind of thinking to disable the left and isolate it. No doubt at some point a young Barry Obama himself fell for this kind of world view, changing his name to Barack, joining the church of Jeremiah Wright, joining the law firm of Dohrn law school classmate and former anti-war radical Judson Miner, and using those relationships to carve a path to political power through the south side of Chicago where the remnants of a stalinist-influenced labor movement could still be found in new Obama friends like SEIU's Tom Balanoff.

But to confuse this career path with a genuine left, a genuine commitment to democracy, is to do a disservice to historical and political analysis.

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Will wonders never cease

After 13 days the murder of David Michael Hartley has finally made it onto the front page of Google News. I guess the gremlins that pick the top news stories for Google readers decided that the beheading of a Mexican investigator working on the case of an American citizen murdered in Mexican territory was worthy of a raised eyebrow.

See all the updates at my October 3 post on the murder to catch up with news on the case. And if you're a first-time reader of the Oct 3 post, especially if you're an American reader, I hope you can sqeeze in the time to read the rant that's posted beneath all the updates, and which was the original post.

At first I thought I'd gone too far in railing at Americans, including myself, but I got feedback from several American readers and a few American bloggers who told me I was on the money. In any case, I'm tired of seeing Democrats and Republicans point fingers at each other about Mexico. When nobody's to blame, everybody's to blame.

Before I sign off, I've gotten complaints that I never published Part 2 of the September 28 post, Does Mexico's drug violence parallel Colombia's narco-insurgency?, which features a debate about the two sides of the question. Monday. I Promise.

A respite for me from Mordor's onslaught

Yesterday I wrote: "Lately I have been throwing tantrums on this blog; that these arise from despair about the awful state of the war and the American union makes them no less petulant. The only cure I can find for my wretched mood is to think of fellow bloggers and readers who have been there for me, in one way or another, during my years of blogging. So instead of sitting out this week in a sulk as I'd planned, I will make gifts."

The first gift, titled Finish the Dance, was for an Indian named Rajeev Srinivasan, author of the Shadow Warrior blog, and Dr. Madhu, an American of Indian ancestry, who tends to neglect her own blog so much in favor of bravely commenting and posting at various milblogs (which are an overwhelmingly male bastion) that frankly I can't remember the name of her blog.

These are two brilliant and admirably scrappy people, although I think Madhu's nerves have been stretched as thin as mine by the inane U.S. approach to dealing with Pakistan. I've considered it an honor that they've taken a great liking to my writings and promoted them whenever they could.

However, I got a little carried away and worked a tribute to Christopher Columbus into the new version of Finish the Dance, which I first published on this blog in April 2005, and published again in the summer of 2008 as a way to shore my flagging spirits when it was clear the two choices for U.S. president were both awful.

On a second read I decided that despite Columbus's strong connection with India (until his dying day he insisted his explorations had landed him on Indian soil) he should have his own post, and the Bharata Natyam tale was better standing on its own.

The second gift, an essay I titled Waking the Watchmen, is for Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye and Uppity of Uppity Woman blog.

Dave was the first American blogger to discover my writings and promote them on the American blogosphere, in early 2005, and although we've never met I consider him a dear friend and mentor. He is a person of great integrity. Yet it is Dave's stories of his life as a member of a Samoyed dog pack that are the reason for the gift.

Dogs are very large in Dave's legend, and I think that a special relationship with dogs goes back through his family tree. I can never remember the story correctly but one of Dave's relatives, who was recognized as a saint by the Christian church, went off to a cave to pray and mediate for years -- I think maybe this was in Switzerland. His only companion was a St. Bernard dog. Or maybe it was a bear. Or maybe it was both.

Anyhow, many a time over the years, when following the Iraq war threatened my sanity, I recovered my balance by going to The Glittering Eye and looking at pictures of the Schuler Samoyeds and reading up on their lives. The famous Samoyed smile is no joke; they're not angels or (as a woman I once knew insisted) a superior race of beings from another planet, but if Samoyeds ran human affairs everyone would be happy and it would be the same even for their dogs.

Samoyeds are working dogs -- they need to be piled up with responsibility -- but they're so good-natured they make wonderful companions not only for humans but also for other kinds of dogs, although 'companion' doesn't quite cover it. Samoyeds are herding dogs, you understand, which is why Dave and his wife are members of a pack rather than dog owners LOL.

Uppity's strategy last year to keep me on the blogosphere, after I'd thrown in the towel, is the reason she's receiving the same gift. She didn't mess around with rational arguments. She set her dog on me.

I didn't know she had a dog until then. I thought Uppity was only a cat person; her blog is stuffed with pictures of her cats. But she sent me picture after picture of the most soulful dog I'd ever seen gazing mournfully at the camera and pleading with "Auntie Pundita" to please not leave.

I had to swear an oath to Uppity not to post pictures of that dog because it's quite famous in certain circles. But if you could see the dog you'd understand why it was easier to stay on the blogosphere than to keep saying no. It was either that or block Uppity's emails.

The first installment of Waking the Watchmen, which introduces my encounter with a particularly nasty form of evil, doesn't make clear why I consider it an appropriate gift for two bloggers whose love for their canine companions has been an inspiration to me and many other people. By the end of the tale I hope the connection will be evident.

********

For Rajeev and Madhu: Finish the Dance

Finish The Dance

The above photograph was taken from a Youtube video of a Bharata Natyam recital. Many years ago I was a guest at a similar recital that took place in Bethesda, Maryland. The Bharata Natyam is surely one of the most difficult dances that humanity has thought up; as such it's an accurate reflection of the very ancient and complex Indian culture.

Except for a handful in attendance, including Pundita, the audience was Indian or Americans of Indian heritage. The recital was a graduation ceremony for American girls of Indian ancestry who had been studying Bharata Natyam for years -- some practicing since early childhood.

One girl among the dancers riveted the audience's attention. She was beautiful, incredibly graceful, and for one so young she demonstrated impressive dance technique.

I ask you to put yourself for a moment in the girl's place and consider that the Indian culture, even when transposed to Indians living in America, is very conservative, very restrained. Think of practicing for years to master a dance that is far more than dance -- at once living history, a statement of your heritage, and a spiritual meditation. Finally comes the time to demonstrate everything your teacher has taught you and make your parents and community proud.

Now ask yourself what might be the worst thing that could happen to you on that stage, with hundreds of eyes upon you.

Suddenly a murmur went up from the audience. The woman next to me gripped my arm and whispered, "Oh my God her pantaloons have come undone!"

Yes. The button or safety pin had given out. As the hapless child continued her dance the leggings underneath her costume slowly continued their descent. A look of horror fleeted across the girl's face. The other dancers broke their stride a bit to glance in sympathy.

The girl's teacher raced to the stage wing and gestured, calling softly for her to leave the stage for a moment so she could regain her dignity and her pantaloons. Everyone would have understood if she'd left the dance momentarily under those awful circumstances.

A look of determination came over the girl's features; within an instant the look was gone, replaced by the stylized expression of the deity her dance was meant to represent.

Without missing a beat, and as the pantaloons continued their downward journey to twist around her ankles, the girl continued with her dance.

Even before the triumphant stamping of the dancers' feet to signal the end of the dance, the audience was clapping her on.

Yet only after all the dancers made their bow to the audience was the deity replaced by a mortified child. She whisked off the pantaloons, scampered to her teacher's embrace, then disappeared backstage for pantaloon repair.

Then at the insistence of the other dancers, her teacher, her parents, the musicians and the audience, the girl shyly returned to the stage to take a bow to thunderous ovation.

As the audience dispersed I heard a man say to a companion, "It was as if Saraswati [the goddess of wisdom, music and the arts] appeared tonight to teach us a lesson."

Goddess or no goddess, the lesson was abundantly clear. To be human means you can't avoid making a damn fool out of yourself, even if you're the best-looking and most accomplished of the lot. But you show the spark of that which transcends the human condition when you hang in there and finish your dance.

.

Christopher Columbus

Today is a federal holiday in the USA -- the day the United States joins with much of Latin America and the Caribbean countries to officially celebrate the arrival of Cristoforo Colombo, or as we call him, Christopher Columbus, in the 'new world' on October 12, 1492.

Columbus was so unreasonable, so obstinate in his views, that the reason the United States of America isn't called Columbia is that against all evidence to the contrary he insisted to his dying day that he'd found India. Thus, the honor of having the new world named after him passed to another great explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, who reasonably argued that Columbus had landed on a continent previously unknown to Europeans, not the shores of India.

Yet Christopher Columbus had so many gifts that to attempt to describe him in a few words is out of the question. He also possessed the epic courage and insatiable curiosity about the world that marked the greatest sailors and explorers of his day, which I pay tribute to with this excerpt from Wikipedia's article about him:

On 5 December 1502, Christopher Columbus and his crew found themselves in a storm unlike any they had ever experienced. In his journal Columbus writes:

"For nine days I was as one lost, without hope of life. Eyes never beheld the sea so angry, so high, so covered with foam. The wind not only prevented our progress, but offered no opportunity to run behind any headland for shelter; hence we were forced to keep out in this bloody ocean, seething like a pot on a hot fire. Never did the sky look more terrible; for one whole day and night it blazed like a furnace, and the lightning broke with such violence that each time I wondered if it had carried off my spars and sails; the flashes came with such fury and frightfulness that we all thought that the ship would be blasted. All this time the water never ceased to fall from the sky; I do not say it rained, for it was like another deluge. The men were so worn out that they longed for death to end their dreadful suffering."

Karzai confirms holding talks with Taliban

Of course this is not really news, other than Karzai's confirmation of the talks. Somehow, I just can't think of any other words to introduce this news story, except to say I'm outta here. I'll post again on Friday evening. By then maybe I'll have cooled off so the post isn't just strings of cuss words. But cursing Obama and his team, the Congress, the U.S. military and all the analysts they rely on, would be shouting at a lame horse to run.

Bye for now. This means I won't be posting comments until Friday. Going dark -- unplugging from the Net.

CNN Wire Staff
October 10, 2010 4:06 p.m. EDT

Watch Larry King's exclusive interview with Hamid Karzai's on "Larry King Live" at 9 p.m. ET Monday.

(CNN) -- Attempting to advance his nation's peace progress with insurgents, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said unofficial negotiations with the Taliban have been taking place and hopes the formation of a peace council will further those efforts.

"We have been talking to the Taliban as countryman to countryman, talk in that manner," Karzai told CNN's "Larry King Live" in an interview scheduled to air Monday night. "Not as a regular official contact with the Taliban with a fixed address, but rather unofficial personal contacts have been going on for quite some time."

In excerpts of the interview released Sunday, Karzai also spoke on the High Peace Council, an initiative headed by former Afghan President Buhanuddin Rabbani and tasked with boosting negotiations with Taliban insurgents.

"The Taliban, those of whom who are Afghans and the sons of Afghan soil, who have been driven to violence by various factors beyond their control and beyond ours caused by circumstances in Afghanistan, we want them to come back to their country," Karzai said. "They are like kids who have run away ... from the family. The family should try to bring them back and give them better discipline and incorporate them back into their family and society. President Rabbani assuming chairmanship today of the peace council is exactly in that spirit."

However, the Afghan government will work against groups like al Qaeda, he said. "But those who are a part of al Qaeda and the other terrorist networks who are ideologically against us or who are working against Afghanistan knowingly and out of the purpose of hatred and enmity -- those of course we have to work against. Whether they are against Afghanistan or whether they are al Qaeda and the terrorist war against the United States or our neighbors in Pakistan, those of course cannot be accepted."

Karzai's remarks about the unofficial contacts with the Taliban came when the president was asked about a Washington Post report that secret high-level talks between the government and the Taliban were underway.

"Now that the peace council has come into existence, these talks will go on, and will go on officially and more rigorously, I hope," Karzai said.
[...]

Two suspects named in murder of David Hartley on Falcon Lake

AOL News:

... Tamaulipas State Police Commander Juan Carlos Ballesteros told the El Universal newspaper that authorities are searching for Juan Pedro Saldivar-Farias and Jose Manuel Saldivar-Farias in the case, according to CBS News.

When asked about the suspects' identification on NBC's "Today" show, [Tiffany] Hartley said, "We have gotten word that they have been identified. As far as we know, nobody is in custody or anything. Hopefully, it will be a good lead and they can lead us to where David is. Right now, we just don't know."

Officials also said they were continuing the search for David Hartley's body on Sunday and were using military aircraft in the effort, reported KGBT. ...

Looks as if Mexican authorities are now moving heaven and earth to find Hartley's killer. Good. The AOL report has a video of the Today show interview. Also, Geraldo Rivera's At Large show last night featured an informative half-hour segment on the case, which included an interview with Tiffany Hartley.

China's Possum Tale: Reaction to Nobel Peace Prize award to Liu Xiaobo

Please do not humiliate me. I am a poor developing country.

I do not know, and I am pretty sure I don't want to know, why young possums think it's cool to hang upside down by their tails on tree branches. But there's not much sillier than a possum showing off unless it's bungee-jumping or China's apologists.

When China overreaches, such as hosting the Olympics while a huge number of Chinese go homeless and hungry and without basic repairs to the country's infrastructure, the apologists "Oooh" and "Ahhh" and jabber about China's status as an emerging superpower nation. When China gets exposed for acting like a tyrant the apologists reverse course and caution that developing China must not be humiliated on the world stage.

I've had quite enough of this talk of humiliation. If a 'developing' country doesn't want to be humiliated on the world stage it shouldn't act like a tyrant.

But egged on by the apologists, China's leaders have mastered the art of playing possum. For readers unfamiliar with the ways of possums (and opossums), they will play dead to fool a predator they think is too big to fight. Possums are so good at playing dead they even exude the smell of a dead animal, until the coast is clear enough for them to shake off the stink and rigor mortis and make a run for it. But when China's leaders want something outside their borders, such as a piece of India's land, no more playing possum; instead China's military takes a page from wolf behavior.

Wolves are not quite the pack animals that legend makes them out to be; as with the meerkats of the Kalahari Desert they are 'family' or clan animals rather than pack ones. But wolf clans are infamous for demanding control of more territory than they actually need to survive, just so they can feel secure.

China's apologists should remember that -- and also consider that Mao Zedong ruthlessly ordered the slaughter of every single wolf in China so they wouldn't threaten his animal husbandry reforms. Every wolf was hunted down and killed.

It is true, and over the years I've shouted out the truth on this blog, that Westerners seeking to destabilize China's government (and the governments of several other countries) have done so behind the mask of human rights/democracy activism. And even sincere Western activists have often helped sow tragedy by meddling in societies they don't understand.

But China has its own human rights/democracy initiatives, and they spring not from Westernization or a desire to break up China but from a recognition of certain universal truths and frank appraisal of what China needs to move forward in this era.

The Nobel Committee belatedly acknowledged the Chinese initiatives when they awarded the peace prize to Liu Xiaobo and explained the decision in a blunt lecture to Beijing. So to decry the award as humiliating to China is to betray the very Chinese who care most about their country.

China's leaders need to acknowledge that for a civilization of China's antiquity, playing possum whenever they want to appear vulnerable to the rest of the world is as silly as a juvenile possum clowning around in the trees.

The leaders can't have it both ways: have China treated as a superpower by other nations when it suits them and as a backwater when it doesn't.

The wolves are finally returning to China -- an auspicious and instructive omen if one knows how to read it. Starving wolves will prey on healthy livestock, and even on small human children and females, if the opportunity arises and they think the humans aren't armed with guns. (Wolves are masters of observational learning so they practically have a fear of guns stamped into their DNA by this era.) But wolves prefer to prey on the weak when it comes to picking on something their own size or larger because that kind of hunt uses less energy than going after healthy, strong creatures in the prime of life.

So they focus on the diseased, dying, and the old and very young animals that don't have protection from a herd -- and their observational powers make them a good judge of the weakest. They also eat carrion. And mice. And rats -- one of the all-star infectious disease carriers.

If you think of carrion floating in rivers, lakes, and wells, and how just one sick livestock can wipe out an entire village of humans, you can see that wolves are one of Nature's most effective infectious-disease control specialists. They remove animals and fowl that are disease carriers or will soon be carrion, which if not quickly disposed of breeds diseases that are deadly to humans.

For that reason I think one can trace a connection between the rise of horrific killer epidemics in China in the past century and the complete destruction of the wolf clans in China.

Rural China has been called a laboratory for infectious disease because Chinese villagers live in close proximity to pigs and fowl and other livestock. But since there were rural Chinese they were always living in close proximity to such creatures, and without the waves of killer edpidemics that characterized China in the modern era.

The difference is that after Mao's edict, the wolves weren't around to kill off the weakest domestic and wild animals that were likely disease carriers and eat up the carrion -- or snack on legions of rats.

There are infectious diseases, such as certain types of plague, that are so deadly to humans that if not treated with antibiotics the mortality rate is virtually 100 percent. There was one such epidemic in China during the swine flu outbreak, which I suspect is the only reason news of the epidemic got past China's censors; if my memory serves the disease was pneumonic plague, which is one of the plagues with a virtual 100 percent kill rate.

Luckily, or perhaps because they were watching so closely for swine flu outbreaks in the countryside, China's health authorities caught the disease and treated it with antibiotics before it wiped out everyone in the town although they had also had to quarantine the entire town.

But think about that. Think about the days before antibiotics. Entire villages and towns and clans, wiped out, within a matter of hours -- three, four days. Fast death, so fast that before people realized what was happening a person from the infected region had traveled to another village.

Yet wolves, as with some other animals, have such keen smell they can sense a diseased animal (or person) before the symptoms are obvious to humans. That ability, combined with their incredible powers of observation, allows wolves to unwittingly pick out the most likely disease carriers that can interact with humans. Mao didn't know any of that when he ordered the wolf genocide.

China's present leaders should ponder the awful consequences of Mao's extermination-happy mindset then realize it's unwise for humans to destroy everything they perceive to be a threat, for in its variety Nature gives to the human race all it needs to survive.


The same is true for the dissenting political view.

Twentieth Anniversary, Tiananmen Square protests
150,000 Chinese gather for Candlelight Vigil
4 June 2009, Victoria Park, Hong Kong