Right at the top of the label on the 2 liter bottle, above the iconic Coca-Cola signature and the vintage picture of Santa holding a Coke glass bottle, are the words "Feliz Navidad." So has it come to the point in this country that the only politically correct way for Americans to wish each other Merry Christmas is if we say it in Spanish?
But then if you turn the bottle around and look at the same smiling Santa on the other side of the label, Coke wishes its customers a terse "Holiday 2009."
I wonder how long Coke's demographics and PR experts agonized over how to sit on the fence without offending America's Hispanic Coke drinkers, most of whom are Christian?
Google went through similar agonies of decision this year, probably after hearing howls from Christians over last year's un-Christmas greeting, which over the course of Christmas week featured a grandfatherly man making a toy for a child. This year, Google made a literal attempt to thread the camel through the needle's eye:
The first "Merry Christmas But We Can't Say It" greeting from Google's search engine was in the form of a postcard placed over the multi-color Google word. The postcard showed a painted scene that looked suspiciously as if were set in the Middle East -- palm tree in the foreground, sand in the background -- and with a few blobs on the distant horizon that might be construed by a devout Christian as three wise men on their camels.
But, unencumbered by a budget for printed labels, and clearly in response to 100 billion emails from miffed atheists, agnostics, earth worshippers, CAIR, the ACLU, and those Christian evangelicals who consider Christmas a pagan holiday, Google chickened out with a few keystrokes:
This morning's un-Christmas greeting from Google has a postcard of three snowmen placed artfully atop the Maybe in the Middle East postcard, and at such an angle as to cover up just enough of the blobs on the horizon so that imagination can no longer seize on the idea of Christmas.
Will Google's un-Christmas greetings between now and December 25 continue their theme of three? Is there a rational employee in a closet somewhere in Google's PR department?
Every Christmas season in the United States, any number of Jewish and Hindu charitable organizations cheerfully prepare holiday meals and Christmas presents for less fortunate Americans, and I'll bet there are Muslim charities that do the same.
Every Christmas season a friend of mine, an Irish-American lapsed Catholic who took up Buddhism while serving in the Vietnam War, drapes his large Buddha statue with Christmas lights. I am quite sure the Buddha, an eminently rational man, would have taken no offense.
I understand that the desire to get along and go along has prompted many Americans, particularly those who live in melting-pot cities, to substitute the generic "Happy Holiday" for the Christmas greeting. After all, one never knows whether the recipient of a Christmas greeting will snap, "I am member of the Nation of Islam."
But what is the proper response, if one is rational? "Merry Christmas anyway."
Not all America's founders considered themselves Christian -- some admitted to agnosticism and even atheism, if my memory serves. But the thinkers who hammered out America's charter documents were profoundly influenced by Enlightenment philosophers who were grounded as much in the Judeo-Christian outlook as the Hellenic one. So if Americans cannot find it in their hearts once a year to wish each other Merry Christmas, we are being more than mean-spirited; we're spurning our heritage.
Merry Christmas to one and all. May the spirit of Christmas, the idea that a divine power loved humanity so much that he sacrificed his son to save us, infuse our daily lives and arm us with courage.
Tuesday, December 22
Saturday, December 19
Alden Pyle in Pakistan, Part 2: Once upon a time in Saigon and Mumbai
(This post was actually published Sunday the 20th around 5 PM ET.)
"The costs of open war are well known. But the price of endless, shadow conflicts is only improperly understood." -- Richard Fernandez, Belmont Club
Is Afghanistan another Vietnam? No, Pakistan is.
The American Left no more understood Indochina than the American Right, which is to say they understood nothing, and the U.S. military understood even less. Today, in Pakistan, we have recreated the wheel of our ignorance in Indochina, which saw the U.S. fund at least 80 percent of the French war against the native anti-feudalists (termed "communists") and indirectly fund the other 20 percent by propping up the French government in the wake of World War Two. This time, though, we won't be able to walk away from the consequences of our ignorance. From the December 20 (London) Sunday Times (H/T Brenda J. Elliott at RBO blog and Jihad Watch):
The first public word of the relocation effort came in a 'leak' to the Washington Times on November 20 that Mullah Omar had relocated to the large Pakistan city of Karachi. However, what use was it for Omar to relocate when he would need his support network with him? So while the Washington Times made no mention of this, it couldn't have been only Omar who headed for the bright lights of the big city. Word of this came in yesterday's Washington Post:
Washington has yet to confront that the insurgency in Afghanistan, to the extent it exists, is miniscule and can be handled largely by non-military means. The major part of the fighting against NATO troops in Afghanistan is directed by Pakistan's military and their intelligence service. As Rajeev Srinivasan explained earlier this month:
However, we don't have enough time to become armchair anthropologists in the effort to help rectify a situation that goes back not to Pakistan's independence but to thousands of years into the past. As I noted in Part 1 of this essay, Pakistan has not so much a feudal system as the remnants of the Indian subcontinent's maharaja system, which in turn is based on a much older system of government in agrarian ages.
So I will fall back on weaving an allegory from two struggles between good and evil that exposed a larger evil, and which intersect in the present war. This to warn that time is running out, as the news from London today indicates. How long have we got? Well, toward the end of the siege of Mumbai in 2008, one of the terrorist's handlers said that the carnage in Mumbai was just the film trailer and to wait for the film.
(The First Indochina War was fought from 1946-1954. The Second Indochina War, also referred to simply as the Vietnam War, did not start until 1959.)
The Photograph
The Good Cop
In a city famously corrupt the Mumbai police force has a well-deserved reputation for corruption. Money intended for upgrading weapons goes instead to buying fancy cars for officers, and bribe-taking officers routinely buy themselves higher ranks -- where they can collect even bigger bribes. That leaves Mumbai's honest and best police at or near the bottom of the rank and file; overworked and underpaid, more often armed with nothing more than a night stick or an antiquated rifle, they are the front lines against crime in one of the world's Alpha Cities.
One such policeman was Assistant Sub-Inspector Tukaram Omble. (Picture above.) Officer Omble, an army veteran who served on the Mumbai police force for 34 years, was a cop's cop and the kind of cop you'd want answering your call for help. Omble Story: When Mumbai residents ignored warnings to keep off a jellyfish-infested beach he read up on jellyfish, then with his own money bought a bag of limes and applied lime juice to sting injuries.
There are slightly different versions of how Officer Omble sacrificed his life to aid in the capture of the only terrorist to survive the November 2008 massacre in Mumbai. But the gist is that Officer Omble, armed only with a night stick, charged straight at the terrorist when he drew an AK-47. Officer Omble grabbed onto the gun barrel with both hands while the terrorist pulled the trigger and pumped by different accounts anywhere from five to nine bullets into him. Mortally wounded, Officer Omble still wouldn't let go of the gun, shielding other police officers and making it possible for them to wrest the weapon away and pin down the terrorist. Only then did Officer Omble collapse and die.
The Indian commandos who later retook the city from the rest of the terrorists made no effort to take prisoners and it's unlikely they would have been successful if they'd tried. The terrorists had been drilled by their commanders to keep shooting until they were killed.
The reason for the order is obvious: survivors could talk. I think the commanders knew they must make every effort to prevent the attack being traced with certainty to their organization because the heat was on. The Americans had become increasingly vocal about the Pakistan government's involvement with terrorist groups.
So here's the part that gives me chills: While Officer Omble's struggle with the terrorist protected his fellow officers it also protected the terrorist from being shot dead, as happened to the terrorist's partner just before the encounter. With Omble in the range of fire the policeman who'd shot the other terrorist couldn't get a bead. That meant one terrorist survived; like a slow-spreading stain from a pool of blood that's having far-reaching consequences.
The Joker Cards
Within the first hours of the commando-style terrorist attack on Mumbai, India's R&AW ("Research and Analysis Wing") intelligence agency had learned many things with reasonable certainty about the attack; among them:
1. The attackers were Pakistani members of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a terrorist organization that was the creation of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, and which retained close ties to ISI and Pakistan's military.
2. Throughout the entire 60 hour siege of Mumbai the attack was micro-managed, almost minute-by-minute, in textbook military fashion by Pakistani handlers who were most probably situated in Pakistan, thus making it unnecessary to use highly trained operatives for the attack and making it likely that the handlers were current or former Pakistan military or ISI officers.
By the time an Indian interrogator had finished questioning Mohammed Ajmal Amīr Kasab, the captured member of the terrorist commando team, R&AW had reasonable confirmation of points 1 and 2. (The questioning began even before the siege was ended, while Kasab was still in the hospital.)
How did R&AW learn so much at such an early stage, even before the attack on Mumbai ended? At the outset of the attack the Mumbai police, paralyzed with confusion about what seemed a large-scale invasion, took a shot in the dark and began monitoring cell phone conversations in the city. They did this even though there were so many conversations that any chance of intercepting an exchange among the terrorists, if they were even communicating by phone, would be very remote. But to their wonder the police locked quickly into conversations between terrorists and their commanders.
It turned out Indian defense operatives had done good groundwork. Earlier they'd seeded cell phone stores with SIM cards that were locked into the police frequency. Miraculously, three of the cards turned up in phones used by the terrorists. So the police were able to follow in real time more than 200 conversations between the commander/handlers and three of the five two-man teams while they carried out the massacre.
Then another Joker card turned face up: the terrorists, all of them green at playing commando, had not thought to sink the rubber dinghy they disembarked from when they arrived at the Mumbai shore, and they'd left various supplies on board that could be traced to Pakistan -- oversights considered serious by the terrorists' handlers and discussed in one of the intercepted conversations.
The intercepts also made it clear that the terrorists had been prepped for a shahid operation; i.e., they were to kill as many people as possible but under no circumstances were they to be taken alive. The Mumbai police monitoring the intercepts learned that the issue was considered so critical that when the handlers realized from watching television coverage of the attack that a terrorist had been captured they tied down one of the teams at Nariman House in an effort at a hostage exchange negotiation with the Indian government.
The surviving terrorist, Kasab, was also a Joker card in LeT's deck. Kasab was not exactly what you'd call good Fedayeen material -- Fedayeen being those warriors for Islam who refuse to leave the battlefield alive. He was run to ground while trying to flee in a hijacked car. And during his interrogation he threw LeT and militant Islam under the bus in the course of his heart-tugging account of how he'd gotten involved with terrorism.
If you've seen the video of that part of the interrogation you know that even the interrogator was having a hard time sitting on his sympathy for the kid, even though he gruffly told him to stop crying. Kasab blurted out enough to convey that as a poor village boy he'd been brainwashed by LeT and he explained that his father had sold him to the terror organization.
"I do not sell my sons," said his father when he was finally located.
It turned out Kasab was a punk. He got angry when his father couldn't afford to buy him new clothes for the Eid Muslim holiday, left home, took up petty crime, then turned to armed robbery. Then he thought he'd try terrorism.
He was a mighty scared punk without his AK-47. Stripped of his blood-stained clothing, clothing stained with Officer Omble's blood, lying naked under a wool blanket on a gurney with a video camera running, he sang like a bird. He named every name he could think of connected with LeT, blurted every detail of the attack he was privy to, told where to locate a satphone and other items the commandos left on a trawler. And, when he said that the attack was originally planned for September, unknowingly confirmed information that the FBI had passed to R&AW earlier in the year.
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Update Dec 21 8:30 PM ET
The information that the FBI had alerted R&AW of a pending Sept. 2008 attack on Mumbai came from Gerald Posner's Dec. 8, 2009 report for the Daily Beast, which I mention below, and which broke the news in the USA that the Indian government had been alerted by the US about a planned Sept. 2008 attack. Today's edition of The Hindu (Dec. 22) reports unnamed Indian government sources giving the CIA as the source for the alert.
Because the Posner report does not state when the alert was given to R&AW or the exact date of the planned Sept. 2008 attack, I simply reported above that the alert came "earlier in the year." According to the Hindu, which quotes Kasab's statement under interrogation that the date of the planned attack was Sept. 27, 2008, the Indian government received the alert from the CIA on Sept. 24, 2008 -- only three days before the planned attack.
The Hindu report contains a number of other disturbing revelations so I'm appending it to this post.(2) The Headley Affair is turning into a major scandal for the U.S. government, although I doubt it will make headlines in the USA. Now to continue (I am not revising the following text to take the Hindu report into account):
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In light of Kasab's revelation, the FBI warning, which was detailed -- even to naming the two hotels that were to be struck in the attack -- now gave fresh urgency to the question of how the U.S. had obtained the information. Was it from 'signals intelligence' -- phone or internet intercepts and the like? Or was it obtained from human intelligence -- a U.S.-sponsored mole at LeT? Or from a combination of the two?
If the source had been HUMINT, had the FBI reeled in the mole or would it do so now, while the carnage from the Mumbai attack was airing on international television?
The Dossier
Here I must fall back on speculation but I'd say it's a fair guess that as soon as the Indian goverment got confirmation that the attack had been originally planned for September, it urgently asked the FBI to provide more information about how they learned of the attack. If indeed such a request was made it seems in light of unfolding events that the Indian government got stonewalling in reply.
In any event, 40 days later, on January 5, 2009, the Indian government officially presented Pakistan's government with a 69-page dossier. The document contained forensic evidence about the massacre, which included a transcript of several of the intercepted conversations between the terrorists and their handlers. India's government also released the dossier to several 'friendly' governments, including the U.S. one. And within two days Indian officials released a PDF copy of the dossier to the national Indian newspaper, The Hindu.
The evidence presented in the dossier is damning. And while it doesn't directly point at the U.S. government, any U.S. official who read the dossier and knew of the FBI warning to India's government would have realized India was asking whether the U.S. had withheld vital information that could have saved lives.
On Monday, January 7 The New York Times published a report on the dossier with a link to The Hindu's copy of the dossier. The Times report speculated on the reason for the dossier's release:
From what is known today it's a fair guess that any U.S. officials knowledgeable enough at the time to comment on the dossier were too busy doing CYA to spare a moment for a reporter's question. What is known today is that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had been knowingly using an informant with terrorist ties and, at the least, not been keeping close track of him.
That, in one sentence, is the still-murky back story to the arrest on October 3 of one David Coleman Headley aka Daood Sayed Gilani -- an American citizen with a Pakistani father whose European looks inherited from his American mother made him very useful to the LeT as a scout for planned terrorist operations.
The original U.S. complaint mentioned only the accusation that Headley had traveled to Denmark to scout the building of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper (home of the famous Mohammed cartoon) and a nearby synagogue.
It wasn't until December 8 that the FBI added to the complaint the accusation that Headley had been an integral part of the "26/11" plot -- the November 2008 LeT terrorist attack on Mumbai.
Since then the unwinding ball of yarn continues to roll across the floor. Perhaps because rumors were flying that Headley had been working for the CIA, unnamed officials in Washington finally found their tongue. They confirmed for investigative reporter Gerald Posner on December 7 that Headley was the DEA's mess. However, Posner's December 8 report for the Daily Beast on the Headley affair didn't do much to quash the rumors:
There are a few other ways of looking at the same data: For example, it could be that Headley was indeed the source but that Nariman House was added as a target after he informed his U.S. handlers about the September attack; i.e., Nariman House was chosen as a target only after the September attack was scrubbed and replaced with the November one, and Headley wasn't informed of this.
That last line of speculation takes on a little weight in light of unfolding events. On November 14, 2009 the Wall Street Journal reported that, in the year since 26/11, India's government has disrupted at least six more plots by Lashkar-e-Taiba to launch terror attacks in Mumbai. So the fact that Headley scouted Nariman House as a target doesn't necessarily mean LeT was going to include it in the planned September 2008 attack. LeT was scouting a range of targets for a series of attacks.
In any case Raman is now less willing to be charitable in assessing the Headley Affair. In his December 15 post, titled Headly: A Quadruple Agent (the ball of yarn has many skeins) he observed:
Kasab tries his hand at blackmail
For a Fedayeen Kasab is trying his darndest to avoid the hangman's noose. His latest move, yesterday in an Indian court, was to recant his videotaped confession and his July courtroom confession on the grounds that he was tortured into incriminating himself.
As for the famous photographs of Kasab showing him shooting unarmed civilians, he now claims he's not that man. It's a complicated story but moving right along, it seems that either he or his attorney decided to play Monkey See, Monkey Do: If Headley was able to get a reduced jail sentence for cooperating with the U.S. government, and if Headley might avoid the death penalty if he knew anything of substance about a U.S. agency getting too cozy or negligent with LeT, the tack was worth a shot for Kasab. So he announced in court that while he was in jail in Mumbai he received a visit from "four white men," including David Coleman Headley.
According to the AP reporter who filed the story, the judge then told Kasab "not to reveal any more details on Headley."
He didn't need to reveal any more details, if he even had any. All he needed to do was drop the name "Headley."
And that's the way it's going to be from now on, with every terrorist on the planet who thinks he can do on a small scale what Pakistan's government has been doing on a grand scale: blackmailing the government of the United States of America. Any terrorist who has information pointing to U.S. complicity with Pakistan's sponsorship of terrorism, or who's even good at telling a whopper, has gotten the idea he might pick up a few million dollars in hush money and even get the U.S. to studiously overlook his gang's terrorist activities.
We're not in 1946 anymore, Toto, but then did we ever leave it?
There's no need to ask, 'How did it come to this?' We just need to look back down the yellow brick road. What started with a photograph in LIFE ended up with many American troops murdered in Afghanistan by agents of a U.S. client state -- and with Washington's only protest to engage in butterknife rattling at the client state. And, perhaps in the hope that two clattering butterknives would equal the sound of one rattling saber, London joined Washington in telling Pakistan's military and ISI that if they didn't stop blowing up ISAF troops in Afghanistan, well, they needed to stop. This tough line was followed by Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown fobbing hush money on Pakistan's government to the tune of £60m, "which will include funds for education and clean drinking water for children, to be delivered before the end of the financial year."
"None Dare Call it a Rogue State"
On December 9 a sharp American military/foreign policy analyst by the name of Mark Safransksi, who blogs at Zenpundit, came right out and called a spade a spade:
In the next post I'll fall back on the insights of Pakistani intellectuals to examine whether the country is truly a feudal society. I think that will help Americans understand more about the country we've poured so many billions of dollars into for almost a half century, either through direct aid or indirectly through international organizations such as the World Bank.
The Documentary
On November 26, 2009, the date of the one-year anniversary of the first night of the 60-hour siege of Mumbai, the American cable TV channel HBO aired a 64 minute documentary titled "Terror in Mumbai."
From HBO's interview with the director, HBO had not at that point found a television station in India that was willing to broadcast the documentary and one shouldn't wonder why. The film represents the most harrowing footage I've ever seen aired on American television because it juxtaposes scenes of the carnage, and interviews with survivors, with real-time phone conversations between teams of terrorists and the commander who was micro-managing their murder rampage.
Those are the conversations I mentioned earlier in this post but I gave no hint of how rough they are to listen to for anyone with a conscience. The documentary also features part of Kasab's interrogation in the hospital, and which I also mentioned.
I warn that Americans of conscience who know a great deal about U.S. sponsorship of Pakistan's terrorist regime will find the film almost unbearable to watch. This said, I think it's very important for as many American voters as possible to see the documentary. We must confront what we have done by blindly allowing our tax dollars to go to financial assistance to Pakistan's government -- and by not criticizing our government's pandering to Pakistan's military and ISI in the name of fighting terrorism. Watch the documentary to see the kind of terrorism we have helped finance; that this happened unwittingly does not change what we did.
"Terror in Mumbai" will air next at these times:
Mon 12/21 08:00 AM - HBO2 - EAST
Mon 12/21 11:00 AM - HBO2 - WEST
Sat 12/26 10:00 AM - HBO2 - EAST
Sat 12/26 01:00 PM - HBO2 - WEST
Here is the link to HBO's interview with Daniel Reed, the award-winning director. Perhaps only a director of Reed's caliber could have persuaded the Indian government to agree to release excerpts of the phone conversations -- the worst of which do not show up in the film; in other words you won't hear the terrorists torturing people before they murdered them.
Graham Greene and Tukaram Omble
On the surface you could not find two men who were more different. Officer Omble, a tower of strength for others, never giving into illness, never missing a day's work, a man who believed that if punctuality was abandoned everything else fell apart. Greene, a train wreck of a man -- suffering from bipolar disorder, always on the verge of suicide, a man of poor morals in many areas and whose political views were hopelessly contradictory.
Yet when you sweep away the differences you find two people of great spiritual strength. Both stumbled across real evil and fought it, each in his own way, and both got in the last word. That, I should think, is a fact to keep in mind when you watch "Terror in Mumbai."
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This entry, as with all Pundita essays, is crossposted at RBO. Many thanks to Brenda for helping me with the illustrations and proofreading, as she's done do many times before.
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1) From H. Bruce Franklin's review of the 2003 remake of Mankiewicz's version of the Greene novel. The review was originally published in January 2003 in the leftist magazine The Nation, which introduced Franklin as the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey and the author or editor of 18 books, including the "just published" Vietnam and Other American Fantasies.
If the 1958 film took too many liberties in favor of the war hawks, the 2002 version got even. Made at the height of the controversy about the U.S. entry into Iraq and with the benefit of hindsight about the Cold War that Greene didn't have in 1952, it does double duty as a polemic against Bush's war policy.
Someday, somebody's going to make a film about the damn novel that just tells the story Greene put down on paper.
"The costs of open war are well known. But the price of endless, shadow conflicts is only improperly understood." -- Richard Fernandez, Belmont Club
Is Afghanistan another Vietnam? No, Pakistan is.
The American Left no more understood Indochina than the American Right, which is to say they understood nothing, and the U.S. military understood even less. Today, in Pakistan, we have recreated the wheel of our ignorance in Indochina, which saw the U.S. fund at least 80 percent of the French war against the native anti-feudalists (termed "communists") and indirectly fund the other 20 percent by propping up the French government in the wake of World War Two. This time, though, we won't be able to walk away from the consequences of our ignorance. From the December 20 (London) Sunday Times (H/T Brenda J. Elliott at RBO blog and Jihad Watch):
Scotland Yard has warned businesses in London to expect a Mumbai-style attack on the capital. In a briefing in the City of London 12 days ago, a senior detective from SO15, the Metropolitan police counter-terrorism command, said: "Mumbai is coming to London."Why has the light switched to green for a Mumbai-style attack in London? Most likely because Pakistan's military has finished relocating important warlords to the relative safety of Pakistani cities, away from regions in Pakistan's tribal areas that see American UAV attacks.
The detective said companies should anticipate a shooting and hostage-taking raid "involving a small number of gunmen with handguns and improvised explosive devices". [...]
"Before, there has been speculation. Now we are getting what appears to be a definite plot to carry out a firearms attack on London," he said. [...]
The first public word of the relocation effort came in a 'leak' to the Washington Times on November 20 that Mullah Omar had relocated to the large Pakistan city of Karachi. However, what use was it for Omar to relocate when he would need his support network with him? So while the Washington Times made no mention of this, it couldn't have been only Omar who headed for the bright lights of the big city. Word of this came in yesterday's Washington Post:
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN -- Militants forced to flee their havens in Pakistan's mountainous tribal areas are establishing new, smaller cells in the heart of the country and have begun carrying out attacks nationwide, U.S. and Pakistani officials say.I am afraid the insistence rings hollow in light of recent history and the fact that the relocation of major terrorists and their supporters to major Pakistani cities wouldn't have been possible without the knowledge and cooperation of the military.
The spread of fighters is an unintended consequence of a relatively successful effort by the United States and Pakistan to disrupt the insurgents' operations, through missile strikes launched by unmanned CIA aircraft and a ground offensive carried out this fall in South Waziristan by the Pakistani army.
American and Pakistani officials say the militants' widening reach has added to the challenge for both nations' intelligence, which must now track an insurgent diaspora that can infiltrate Pakistan's teeming cities and blend seamlessly with the local population. A Pakistani intelligence official said the offensive had put militants "on the run" but added: "Now they're all over -- Afghanistan, North Waziristan and inside Pakistan."
"They have scattered their network and structure," said Muhammad Amir Rana, director of the Pak Institute for Peace Studies, a security-oriented think tank. "It's easy for many of them to hide in Punjab or Karachi."
Pakistani officials insist that they are doing as much as they can to counter the extremist threat and that they are paying the price.[...]
Washington has yet to confront that the insurgency in Afghanistan, to the extent it exists, is miniscule and can be handled largely by non-military means. The major part of the fighting against NATO troops in Afghanistan is directed by Pakistan's military and their intelligence service. As Rajeev Srinivasan explained earlier this month:
[...] Pakistan has clearly articulated its pursuit of strategic depth which, for instance, involves having a Plan B even if its major cities such as Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi, close to the Indian border, are obliterated in a possible Indian nuclear second strike (after Pakistan has wiped out Delhi and Mumbai in a first strike). They want to regroup from Afghanistan and continue their jihad against India from there.Got all that? As to what to do about it: For a few minutes set aside al Qaeda, the War on Terror, and Islamism. Get into the ballpark of what's actually going on in Pakistan. From there it's a hop and skip to working out a better war strategy in Afghanistan. Reaching the ballpark starts with realizing that we can't 'solve' Afghanistan until we confront what Pakistan is and what we've been supporting in Pakistan since (drum roll please) 1947: a form of feudalism that's supported by a caste system.
The Taliban, of course, are Pakistani Army and ISI soldiers dressed in baggy pants and beards for the occasion. The fact that alleged seminary students (whom the Taliban are supposed to be) suddenly started driving tanks and flying planes is indirect evidence that they were trained soldiers.
Therefore, Taliban rule in Kabul means Pakistan has achieved its strategic depth. Clearly, they have no desire to fight or eliminate the Taliban, despite the fact that some factions (such as the one from the Mehsud tribe) have begun to inconvenience Pakistan through a campaign of suicide bombings. Dead Pakistani civilians are considered acceptable collateral damage by the ISI, but their attacks on the military apparatus is a big no-no. They are clearly ‘bad Taliban’, and will not get any share of the spoils.[...]
However, we don't have enough time to become armchair anthropologists in the effort to help rectify a situation that goes back not to Pakistan's independence but to thousands of years into the past. As I noted in Part 1 of this essay, Pakistan has not so much a feudal system as the remnants of the Indian subcontinent's maharaja system, which in turn is based on a much older system of government in agrarian ages.
So I will fall back on weaving an allegory from two struggles between good and evil that exposed a larger evil, and which intersect in the present war. This to warn that time is running out, as the news from London today indicates. How long have we got? Well, toward the end of the siege of Mumbai in 2008, one of the terrorist's handlers said that the carnage in Mumbai was just the film trailer and to wait for the film.
(The First Indochina War was fought from 1946-1954. The Second Indochina War, also referred to simply as the Vietnam War, did not start until 1959.)The Photograph
Reds' Time Bombs Rip Saigon Center blared a headline in The New York Times of January 10, 1952. Written by Tillman Durdin, a Times reporter in Saigon working in tight collaboration with the CIA, the story called the bombing "one of the most spectacular and destructive single incidents in the long history of revolutionary terrorism" carried out by "agents here of the Vietminh."Fast forward a half century:
A blood-chilling photograph of the carnage appeared as the Picture of the Week in the January 28 LIFE magazine, with a caption that asked people to focus on the most gruesome results of this terrorism by the "Viet Minh Communists":
"The bomb blew the legs from under the man in the foreground and left him, bloody and dazed, propped up on the tile sidewalk."
The bombing certainly came at a convenient time for the war hawks, including LIFE, whose previous week's lead editorial, Indo-China Is in Danger, was a near panicky call for major U.S. participation in the [First Indochina War] (which the French were still fighting, with U.S. assistance), because "It's all one war, and our war, whether the front be in Europe, Korea, or Indo-China."
Graham Greene, who was then wintering in Saigon, wondered how LIFE happened to have a photographer on the scene, as he explained in his 1980 memoir, Ways of Escape:
"The LIFE photographer at the moment of the explosion was so well placed that he was able to take an astonishing and horrifying photograph which showed the body of a trishaw driver still upright after his legs had been blown off.
This photograph was reproduced in an American propaganda magazine published in Manila over the caption The work of Ho Chi Minh," Greene continued, despite the fact that General Trinh Minh Thé, a warlord masquerading as Vietnam's savior from colonialism and communism, "had promptly claimed the bomb as his own."
"Who," Greene pondered, "had supplied the material" to this "bandit?"
A few months after this bombing and a series of bicycle bombs set off later in January by Thé's agents, Greene began writing his answer in The Quiet American.
When Greene, a veteran of British intelligence, used his contacts in French security services to investigate the Saigon bombings of January 1952, he discovered a U.S. campaign to create a "Third Force," opposed to both Communism and colonialism and designed to evolve into a U.S.-backed 'democracy' in Vietnam. [...]
The hotbed of U.S. Third Force activities was the Economic Aid Mission, headed by someone French commanding General Jean De Lattre called "the most dangerous man in Indochina."
Greene himself had been ardently sermonized about the wonders of Third Force democracy by a boyish, enthusiastic member of the Economic Aid Mission, a likeable young man who, according to Greene, was the original model for Alden Pyle.
By the time The Quiet American was published in 1955, America's Third Force democracy had actually been institutionalized in Saigon in the person of the brutal puppet dictator Ngo Dinh Diem, a former New Jersey resident who claimed to be the legitimate ruler of the entire country of Vietnam.
(No government in either Saigon or Hanoi ever recognized the U.S. invention of two separate countries called "South Vietnam" and "North Vietnam.")
To prepare for Diem's insertion into Vietnam, CIA operative Colonel Edward Lansdale [photograph above] arrived on June 1, 1954, in the midst of the Geneva peace negotiations, to launch a systematic campaign of sabotage and terror in the north and to supply a military force for Diem to gain control of Saigon.
Building on the CIA contacts that Greene had earlier discovered, Lansdale employed terrorist warlord General Trinh Minh Thé to secure the city [...] Thé was paid by the CIA. [...]
Especially since Lansdale's covert activities were revealed in his top-secret reports included in the Pentagon Papers, most commentators on the novel have assumed that he must have been the model for the Quiet American, something denied repeatedly by Greene.
[...]
Whether or not Greene wrote Lansdale into his novel, Lansdale wrote Greene into the next version of The Quiet American, the 1958 film directed by Joseph Mankiewicz. Just as the CIA in 1952 had orchestrated terrorist bombings in Saigon to incite a U.S. war in Vietnam, the CIA and several of its front organizations used the 1958 film to resurrect those bombings, blame the Communists once again, build support for Diem's dictatorship, and savage Greene personally as the archetypal 'intellectual' Communist dupe who menaced the democracy that America had built in Vietnam.
In March 1956, shortly after Mankiewicz bought the film rights to The Quiet American, Lansdale wrote to the director from his Saigon operations headquarters and, showing his skills as a former advertising executive, explained how to turn the novel into an assault on Greene and an advertisement for Diem.
Although Lansdale acknowledged that Trinh Minh Thé had done the bombing and claimed credit for it in a radio broadcast, he assured Mankiewicz that no "more than one or two Vietnamese now alive know the real truth of the matter, and they certainly aren't going to tell it to anyone," so he should "just go ahead and let it be finally revealed that the Communists did it after all, even to faking the radio broadcast."
Mankiewicz cast Audie Murphy, the most decorated U.S. soldier of World War II, as "The American" (he has no other name in the film), got one of Diem's henchmen to organize the on-location shooting, dedicated the film to Diem, and arranged for the first screenings to be benefits for one of Diem's main sponsors, the International Rescue Committee.
"The American" is completely innocent and thoroughly heroic. In the car bomb scene, it is not he but Fowler (Michael Redgrave) who is unmasked. The American arrives with medical equipment in a "United States Christian Mission" truck (the movie makes Murphy closely resemble Tom Dooley) to care for the wounded.
When Fowler, who has been duped by the Communists, stands amid the carnage hysterically accusing him of involvement in the bombing, The American, fuming with righteous indignation, shouts, "For once in your life, why don't you just shut up and help somebody?"
Later, The American tries one last time to convince Fowler of the righteous destiny of the democratic Third Force.
"I met a very prominent Vietnamese living in exile in New Jersey," he earnestly explains. "If all goes well, if Vietnam becomes an independent republic, this man will be its leader."
This was, of course, the man actually reigning in Saigon in 1958, five years before another covert U.S. plot arranged his murder.[1]
The Good Cop
In a city famously corrupt the Mumbai police force has a well-deserved reputation for corruption. Money intended for upgrading weapons goes instead to buying fancy cars for officers, and bribe-taking officers routinely buy themselves higher ranks -- where they can collect even bigger bribes. That leaves Mumbai's honest and best police at or near the bottom of the rank and file; overworked and underpaid, more often armed with nothing more than a night stick or an antiquated rifle, they are the front lines against crime in one of the world's Alpha Cities.One such policeman was Assistant Sub-Inspector Tukaram Omble. (Picture above.) Officer Omble, an army veteran who served on the Mumbai police force for 34 years, was a cop's cop and the kind of cop you'd want answering your call for help. Omble Story: When Mumbai residents ignored warnings to keep off a jellyfish-infested beach he read up on jellyfish, then with his own money bought a bag of limes and applied lime juice to sting injuries.
There are slightly different versions of how Officer Omble sacrificed his life to aid in the capture of the only terrorist to survive the November 2008 massacre in Mumbai. But the gist is that Officer Omble, armed only with a night stick, charged straight at the terrorist when he drew an AK-47. Officer Omble grabbed onto the gun barrel with both hands while the terrorist pulled the trigger and pumped by different accounts anywhere from five to nine bullets into him. Mortally wounded, Officer Omble still wouldn't let go of the gun, shielding other police officers and making it possible for them to wrest the weapon away and pin down the terrorist. Only then did Officer Omble collapse and die.
The Indian commandos who later retook the city from the rest of the terrorists made no effort to take prisoners and it's unlikely they would have been successful if they'd tried. The terrorists had been drilled by their commanders to keep shooting until they were killed.
The reason for the order is obvious: survivors could talk. I think the commanders knew they must make every effort to prevent the attack being traced with certainty to their organization because the heat was on. The Americans had become increasingly vocal about the Pakistan government's involvement with terrorist groups.
So here's the part that gives me chills: While Officer Omble's struggle with the terrorist protected his fellow officers it also protected the terrorist from being shot dead, as happened to the terrorist's partner just before the encounter. With Omble in the range of fire the policeman who'd shot the other terrorist couldn't get a bead. That meant one terrorist survived; like a slow-spreading stain from a pool of blood that's having far-reaching consequences.
The Joker Cards
Within the first hours of the commando-style terrorist attack on Mumbai, India's R&AW ("Research and Analysis Wing") intelligence agency had learned many things with reasonable certainty about the attack; among them:
1. The attackers were Pakistani members of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a terrorist organization that was the creation of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, and which retained close ties to ISI and Pakistan's military.
2. Throughout the entire 60 hour siege of Mumbai the attack was micro-managed, almost minute-by-minute, in textbook military fashion by Pakistani handlers who were most probably situated in Pakistan, thus making it unnecessary to use highly trained operatives for the attack and making it likely that the handlers were current or former Pakistan military or ISI officers.
By the time an Indian interrogator had finished questioning Mohammed Ajmal Amīr Kasab, the captured member of the terrorist commando team, R&AW had reasonable confirmation of points 1 and 2. (The questioning began even before the siege was ended, while Kasab was still in the hospital.)
How did R&AW learn so much at such an early stage, even before the attack on Mumbai ended? At the outset of the attack the Mumbai police, paralyzed with confusion about what seemed a large-scale invasion, took a shot in the dark and began monitoring cell phone conversations in the city. They did this even though there were so many conversations that any chance of intercepting an exchange among the terrorists, if they were even communicating by phone, would be very remote. But to their wonder the police locked quickly into conversations between terrorists and their commanders.
It turned out Indian defense operatives had done good groundwork. Earlier they'd seeded cell phone stores with SIM cards that were locked into the police frequency. Miraculously, three of the cards turned up in phones used by the terrorists. So the police were able to follow in real time more than 200 conversations between the commander/handlers and three of the five two-man teams while they carried out the massacre.
Then another Joker card turned face up: the terrorists, all of them green at playing commando, had not thought to sink the rubber dinghy they disembarked from when they arrived at the Mumbai shore, and they'd left various supplies on board that could be traced to Pakistan -- oversights considered serious by the terrorists' handlers and discussed in one of the intercepted conversations.
The intercepts also made it clear that the terrorists had been prepped for a shahid operation; i.e., they were to kill as many people as possible but under no circumstances were they to be taken alive. The Mumbai police monitoring the intercepts learned that the issue was considered so critical that when the handlers realized from watching television coverage of the attack that a terrorist had been captured they tied down one of the teams at Nariman House in an effort at a hostage exchange negotiation with the Indian government.
The surviving terrorist, Kasab, was also a Joker card in LeT's deck. Kasab was not exactly what you'd call good Fedayeen material -- Fedayeen being those warriors for Islam who refuse to leave the battlefield alive. He was run to ground while trying to flee in a hijacked car. And during his interrogation he threw LeT and militant Islam under the bus in the course of his heart-tugging account of how he'd gotten involved with terrorism.
If you've seen the video of that part of the interrogation you know that even the interrogator was having a hard time sitting on his sympathy for the kid, even though he gruffly told him to stop crying. Kasab blurted out enough to convey that as a poor village boy he'd been brainwashed by LeT and he explained that his father had sold him to the terror organization.
"I do not sell my sons," said his father when he was finally located.
It turned out Kasab was a punk. He got angry when his father couldn't afford to buy him new clothes for the Eid Muslim holiday, left home, took up petty crime, then turned to armed robbery. Then he thought he'd try terrorism.
He was a mighty scared punk without his AK-47. Stripped of his blood-stained clothing, clothing stained with Officer Omble's blood, lying naked under a wool blanket on a gurney with a video camera running, he sang like a bird. He named every name he could think of connected with LeT, blurted every detail of the attack he was privy to, told where to locate a satphone and other items the commandos left on a trawler. And, when he said that the attack was originally planned for September, unknowingly confirmed information that the FBI had passed to R&AW earlier in the year.
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Update Dec 21 8:30 PM ET
The information that the FBI had alerted R&AW of a pending Sept. 2008 attack on Mumbai came from Gerald Posner's Dec. 8, 2009 report for the Daily Beast, which I mention below, and which broke the news in the USA that the Indian government had been alerted by the US about a planned Sept. 2008 attack. Today's edition of The Hindu (Dec. 22) reports unnamed Indian government sources giving the CIA as the source for the alert.
Because the Posner report does not state when the alert was given to R&AW or the exact date of the planned Sept. 2008 attack, I simply reported above that the alert came "earlier in the year." According to the Hindu, which quotes Kasab's statement under interrogation that the date of the planned attack was Sept. 27, 2008, the Indian government received the alert from the CIA on Sept. 24, 2008 -- only three days before the planned attack.
The Hindu report contains a number of other disturbing revelations so I'm appending it to this post.(2) The Headley Affair is turning into a major scandal for the U.S. government, although I doubt it will make headlines in the USA. Now to continue (I am not revising the following text to take the Hindu report into account):
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In light of Kasab's revelation, the FBI warning, which was detailed -- even to naming the two hotels that were to be struck in the attack -- now gave fresh urgency to the question of how the U.S. had obtained the information. Was it from 'signals intelligence' -- phone or internet intercepts and the like? Or was it obtained from human intelligence -- a U.S.-sponsored mole at LeT? Or from a combination of the two?
If the source had been HUMINT, had the FBI reeled in the mole or would it do so now, while the carnage from the Mumbai attack was airing on international television?
The Dossier
Here I must fall back on speculation but I'd say it's a fair guess that as soon as the Indian goverment got confirmation that the attack had been originally planned for September, it urgently asked the FBI to provide more information about how they learned of the attack. If indeed such a request was made it seems in light of unfolding events that the Indian government got stonewalling in reply.
In any event, 40 days later, on January 5, 2009, the Indian government officially presented Pakistan's government with a 69-page dossier. The document contained forensic evidence about the massacre, which included a transcript of several of the intercepted conversations between the terrorists and their handlers. India's government also released the dossier to several 'friendly' governments, including the U.S. one. And within two days Indian officials released a PDF copy of the dossier to the national Indian newspaper, The Hindu.
The evidence presented in the dossier is damning. And while it doesn't directly point at the U.S. government, any U.S. official who read the dossier and knew of the FBI warning to India's government would have realized India was asking whether the U.S. had withheld vital information that could have saved lives.
On Monday, January 7 The New York Times published a report on the dossier with a link to The Hindu's copy of the dossier. The Times report speculated on the reason for the dossier's release:
The compilation seems intended to achieve at least two objectives for India: demonstrate that the attackers were sent from Pakistan, and rally international support for India’s efforts to press Pakistan on its handling of terrorism suspects.After providing a short list of the dossier's evidence the reporter adds:
[T]he dossier chronicles India’s efforts in recent years to persuade Pakistan to investigate suspects involved in terrorist attacks in India and to close terrorist training camps inside Pakistani territory. In the final pages, India demands that Pakistan hand over “conspirators” to face trial in India and comply with its promise to stop terrorist groups from functioning inside its territory.Oddly for the Times, a favored conduit for CIA leaks, and which can always be counted on to scare up comments from an unnamed U.S. official or two, the report contained nary a word of comment about the dossier from any U.S. official, named or unnamed.
[...]
Although the dossier takes pains not to blame current or former officials in Pakistan’s army or spy agency, Indian officials have consistently hinted at their complicity, at least in training the commando-style fighters who carried out the attack.
On Tuesday, the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, upped the ante, but stopped short of naming any specific entities or individuals. “There is enough evidence to show that, given the sophistication and military precision of the attack, it must have had the support of some official agencies in Pakistan,” he said.
Pakistan on Tuesday rejected the Indian allegation. “Scoring points like this will only move us further away from focusing on the very real and present danger of regional and global terrorism,” Sherry Rehman, Pakistan’s information minister, said in a statement, according to Reuters. “It is our firm resolve to ensure that nonstate actors do not use Pakistani soil to launch terrorist attacks anywhere in the world.”
From what is known today it's a fair guess that any U.S. officials knowledgeable enough at the time to comment on the dossier were too busy doing CYA to spare a moment for a reporter's question. What is known today is that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had been knowingly using an informant with terrorist ties and, at the least, not been keeping close track of him.
That, in one sentence, is the still-murky back story to the arrest on October 3 of one David Coleman Headley aka Daood Sayed Gilani -- an American citizen with a Pakistani father whose European looks inherited from his American mother made him very useful to the LeT as a scout for planned terrorist operations.
The original U.S. complaint mentioned only the accusation that Headley had traveled to Denmark to scout the building of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper (home of the famous Mohammed cartoon) and a nearby synagogue.
It wasn't until December 8 that the FBI added to the complaint the accusation that Headley had been an integral part of the "26/11" plot -- the November 2008 LeT terrorist attack on Mumbai.
Since then the unwinding ball of yarn continues to roll across the floor. Perhaps because rumors were flying that Headley had been working for the CIA, unnamed officials in Washington finally found their tongue. They confirmed for investigative reporter Gerald Posner on December 7 that Headley was the DEA's mess. However, Posner's December 8 report for the Daily Beast on the Headley affair didn't do much to quash the rumors:
It was shortly before the Mumbai attacks that the FBI evidently first put Headley under its surveillance, leading to his arrest this past October. The FBI has rejected the requests of Indian investigators to talk to Headley or his co-conspirator, Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a 48-year-old Pakistani native with Canadian citizenship.Those are the least of the questions. B. Raman, one of the best counterterrorism experts writing for the general public, was initially willing to give the U.S. government the benefit of the doubt. Earlier in the investigation he pointed out on his blog that the details the FBI provided to India's government about the planned September attack didn't include the Nariman House as a target, even though Headley had scouted the building for LeT. Raman speculated that the omission could have meant the FBI obtained information about the attack from signals intelligence.
U.S. officials blamed “bureaucratic” and “procedural” hurdles for denying Indian investigators access to Headley. But keeping Headley locked up and away from other investigators isn’t stopping the questions posed by some foreign governments about whether an American informant turned on his handlers and might have helped pull off India’s 9/11.
There are a few other ways of looking at the same data: For example, it could be that Headley was indeed the source but that Nariman House was added as a target after he informed his U.S. handlers about the September attack; i.e., Nariman House was chosen as a target only after the September attack was scrubbed and replaced with the November one, and Headley wasn't informed of this.
That last line of speculation takes on a little weight in light of unfolding events. On November 14, 2009 the Wall Street Journal reported that, in the year since 26/11, India's government has disrupted at least six more plots by Lashkar-e-Taiba to launch terror attacks in Mumbai. So the fact that Headley scouted Nariman House as a target doesn't necessarily mean LeT was going to include it in the planned September 2008 attack. LeT was scouting a range of targets for a series of attacks.
In any case Raman is now less willing to be charitable in assessing the Headley Affair. In his December 15 post, titled Headly: A Quadruple Agent (the ball of yarn has many skeins) he observed:
[...] The communications between Headley and his LeT handler intercepted by the FBI in July and August also indicated that he was planning to visit India in October to prepare the ground for another terrorist strike. The FBI had two options: either allow him to go to India, alert the Indian intelligence and keep him under surveillance -- or arrest him before he left for Pakistan and India. If he had been allowed to go to India, watched there and arrested by the Indian intelligence, his past contacts with the US agencies and his role in 26/11 would have come to the notice of the Indian authorities. [...]Yes. And that would have been unwelcome in Washington because it could have turned up the famous smoking gun that a U.S. official told the Los Angeles Times this November didn't exist:
A report distributed in late 2007 by the [U.S.] National Intelligence Council was characteristically conflicted on the question of the ISI's ties to the Afghan Taliban, a relationship that traces back to Pakistan's support for Islamic militants fighting to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan.I wonder how many more smoking guns U.S. officials will identify as a bag of potato chips? Never mind; that's just me blowing off steam.
"Ultimately, the report said what all the other reports said -- that it was inconclusive," said a former senior U.S. national security official.
"You definitely can find ISI officers doing things we don't like, but on the other hand you've got no smoking gun from command and control that links them to the activities of the insurgents."
Kasab tries his hand at blackmail
For a Fedayeen Kasab is trying his darndest to avoid the hangman's noose. His latest move, yesterday in an Indian court, was to recant his videotaped confession and his July courtroom confession on the grounds that he was tortured into incriminating himself.
As for the famous photographs of Kasab showing him shooting unarmed civilians, he now claims he's not that man. It's a complicated story but moving right along, it seems that either he or his attorney decided to play Monkey See, Monkey Do: If Headley was able to get a reduced jail sentence for cooperating with the U.S. government, and if Headley might avoid the death penalty if he knew anything of substance about a U.S. agency getting too cozy or negligent with LeT, the tack was worth a shot for Kasab. So he announced in court that while he was in jail in Mumbai he received a visit from "four white men," including David Coleman Headley.
According to the AP reporter who filed the story, the judge then told Kasab "not to reveal any more details on Headley."
He didn't need to reveal any more details, if he even had any. All he needed to do was drop the name "Headley."
And that's the way it's going to be from now on, with every terrorist on the planet who thinks he can do on a small scale what Pakistan's government has been doing on a grand scale: blackmailing the government of the United States of America. Any terrorist who has information pointing to U.S. complicity with Pakistan's sponsorship of terrorism, or who's even good at telling a whopper, has gotten the idea he might pick up a few million dollars in hush money and even get the U.S. to studiously overlook his gang's terrorist activities.
We're not in 1946 anymore, Toto, but then did we ever leave it?
There's no need to ask, 'How did it come to this?' We just need to look back down the yellow brick road. What started with a photograph in LIFE ended up with many American troops murdered in Afghanistan by agents of a U.S. client state -- and with Washington's only protest to engage in butterknife rattling at the client state. And, perhaps in the hope that two clattering butterknives would equal the sound of one rattling saber, London joined Washington in telling Pakistan's military and ISI that if they didn't stop blowing up ISAF troops in Afghanistan, well, they needed to stop. This tough line was followed by Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown fobbing hush money on Pakistan's government to the tune of £60m, "which will include funds for education and clean drinking water for children, to be delivered before the end of the financial year."
"None Dare Call it a Rogue State"
On December 9 a sharp American military/foreign policy analyst by the name of Mark Safransksi, who blogs at Zenpundit, came right out and called a spade a spade:
[...] The horns of our dilemma is that our long time “ally” whom we have hitched ourselves to in a grand war effort against revolutionary Islamist terrorism is not our ally at all, but a co-belligerent with our enemy. By every policy measure that matters that causes the United States -- justifiably in my view -- to take a tough stance against North Korea and Iran, applies in spades to Islamabad. Yet none dare call Pakistan a rogue state.True, true, all true. However, getting grounded in reality in this case means we untangle our contradictory policy toward Pakistan and understand what the country is like. Only then can we deal intelligently with Pakistan's rogue regime.
[...]
We play a bizarre game, our leaders being more concerned about Pakistan’s “stability” than Pakistan’s own generals and politicians who egg on, fund and train the very militant Islamist groups spreading death and chaos inside Pakistan and beyond its borders.
[...]
Until America’s bipartisan foreign policy elite grapple with the fact -- and it is an easily verifiable, empirical, fact -- that Pakistan’s government is in chronic pursuit of policies that destabilize Central Asia, menace all of Pakistan’s neighbors, generate legions of terrorists and risk nuclear war with India, no solutions will present themselves.
A strategy will only have a chance of success when it is grounded in reality.
In the next post I'll fall back on the insights of Pakistani intellectuals to examine whether the country is truly a feudal society. I think that will help Americans understand more about the country we've poured so many billions of dollars into for almost a half century, either through direct aid or indirectly through international organizations such as the World Bank.
The Documentary
On November 26, 2009, the date of the one-year anniversary of the first night of the 60-hour siege of Mumbai, the American cable TV channel HBO aired a 64 minute documentary titled "Terror in Mumbai."
From HBO's interview with the director, HBO had not at that point found a television station in India that was willing to broadcast the documentary and one shouldn't wonder why. The film represents the most harrowing footage I've ever seen aired on American television because it juxtaposes scenes of the carnage, and interviews with survivors, with real-time phone conversations between teams of terrorists and the commander who was micro-managing their murder rampage.
Those are the conversations I mentioned earlier in this post but I gave no hint of how rough they are to listen to for anyone with a conscience. The documentary also features part of Kasab's interrogation in the hospital, and which I also mentioned.
I warn that Americans of conscience who know a great deal about U.S. sponsorship of Pakistan's terrorist regime will find the film almost unbearable to watch. This said, I think it's very important for as many American voters as possible to see the documentary. We must confront what we have done by blindly allowing our tax dollars to go to financial assistance to Pakistan's government -- and by not criticizing our government's pandering to Pakistan's military and ISI in the name of fighting terrorism. Watch the documentary to see the kind of terrorism we have helped finance; that this happened unwittingly does not change what we did.
"Terror in Mumbai" will air next at these times:
Mon 12/21 08:00 AM - HBO2 - EAST
Mon 12/21 11:00 AM - HBO2 - WEST
Sat 12/26 10:00 AM - HBO2 - EAST
Sat 12/26 01:00 PM - HBO2 - WEST
Here is the link to HBO's interview with Daniel Reed, the award-winning director. Perhaps only a director of Reed's caliber could have persuaded the Indian government to agree to release excerpts of the phone conversations -- the worst of which do not show up in the film; in other words you won't hear the terrorists torturing people before they murdered them.
Graham Greene and Tukaram Omble
On the surface you could not find two men who were more different. Officer Omble, a tower of strength for others, never giving into illness, never missing a day's work, a man who believed that if punctuality was abandoned everything else fell apart. Greene, a train wreck of a man -- suffering from bipolar disorder, always on the verge of suicide, a man of poor morals in many areas and whose political views were hopelessly contradictory.
Yet when you sweep away the differences you find two people of great spiritual strength. Both stumbled across real evil and fought it, each in his own way, and both got in the last word. That, I should think, is a fact to keep in mind when you watch "Terror in Mumbai."
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This entry, as with all Pundita essays, is crossposted at RBO. Many thanks to Brenda for helping me with the illustrations and proofreading, as she's done do many times before.
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1) From H. Bruce Franklin's review of the 2003 remake of Mankiewicz's version of the Greene novel. The review was originally published in January 2003 in the leftist magazine The Nation, which introduced Franklin as the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey and the author or editor of 18 books, including the "just published" Vietnam and Other American Fantasies.
If the 1958 film took too many liberties in favor of the war hawks, the 2002 version got even. Made at the height of the controversy about the U.S. entry into Iraq and with the benefit of hindsight about the Cold War that Greene didn't have in 1952, it does double duty as a polemic against Bush's war policy.
Someday, somebody's going to make a film about the damn novel that just tells the story Greene put down on paper.
Monday, December 7
Alden Pyle in Pakistan, Part 1
Client State. Definition: A country that is dependent on the economic or military support of a larger, more powerful country
Setting the record straight
I think Americans who don't know anything about Pakistan tend to assume that the worst aspects of the society are rooted in extremist Islam imported from Saudi Arabia. That's not the case; it's just that when Wahabism intersected with the maharaja system, a way of life that had been preserved in certain Pakistan regions through various interventions, including the British Raj and U.S. actions during the Cold War, the outcome was perhaps the world's most toxic society.
Several Americans I've heard speak on the topic over the years also wrongly assume the U.S. government first got involved with Pakistan when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. That is incorrect. America was there, at the beginning of Pakistan's independence. Yet when you know something about the beginning you'll understand why it's rarely discussed in the USA.
Pakistan first became a U.S. client state in 1947, shortly after the country came into existence. The U.S. provided $411 million to the government to establish Pakistan's armed forces.
So it's a myth, which even many Western leftists believe, that the U.S. 'sided' with Pakistan's military against India because India was on friendly terms with the Soviet Union. That's not how things got started.
The U.S. chose Pakistan over India to make into a client state because Pakistan's feudal lords reigned supreme at Independence; that, coupled with Pakistan's rigid caste system, guaranteed that a military coup could derail any genuine democracy in the country. That made Pakistan's military, and the country's defense policy, easy for the U.S. to control.
India was a different story. From Scottish historian William Dalrymple's clear-eyed eulogy for Benazir Bhutto, which Pakistan's Chowk literary magazine republished from the U.K. Guardian:
Real democracy has never thrived in Pakistan in part because landowning remains the principle social base from which politicians emerge. The educated middle class -- which in India gained control in 1947 -- is in Pakistan still largely excluded from the political process. As a result, in many of the more backward parts of Pakistan the local feudal landowner can expect his people to vote for his chosen candidate.Americans, get to know a little more about your client state Pakistan
As the [Pakistani] writer Ahmed Rashid put it, “In some constituencies if the feudals put up their dog as a candidate, that dog would get elected with ninety-nine percent of the vote."
Even if the populace didn't want to elect the dog the majority would be hard pressed to arrive at an independent study of the political issues. That's because the majority of Pakistanis are illiterate, contrary to the government's propagada. As I reported in November 2007, even UNESCO wasn't fooled by the fantasy statistics the government provided.
Writing for Chowk in April 2007 a Pakistani financial analyst named Zarrar Said made mince pie with the government's method of fudging the numbers. The actual allover literacy rate for Pakistanis at that time was roughly 26 percent, and 12 percent for females; I doubt those statistics have changed much since then.
When you combine Islamism (the country was founded as an Islamic republic), widespread illiteracy and poverty, a caste system upheld by leftovers from the maharaja system, and whose only interests are protecting their high-caste status and land holdings, you have the perfect conditions for the most powerful elements of a brutal ruling class to support a military dictatorship. Just such conditions made Pakistan the perfect client state for the U.S. as the Cold War got seriously underway.
Caste in Pakistan
If you're surprised to learn that an Islamic nation has a caste system -- the chatter about Islam being egalitarian is for the tourists; anywhere the conquering Muslims found the caste system they continued it because it was so useful for keeping the conquered and their own lower classes in line. That's how it is for Pakistan, not only with their Hindu population (the "scheduled" castes) but also the Muslim one.
Those who're unaware of the caste issue among Muslims living in caste societies (or a diaspora caste community; e.g., Pakistanis in Norway) assume that gang rapes and murders among those communities are products of fundamentalist Islam. Yet these are often caste crimes; the rigidity of fundamentalism only makes for more brutal enforcement of caste.
In Pakistan any lower caste Pakistani caught consorting with a higher caste person or taking a job assigned to a higher caste can be gang-raped or worse by high caste Pakistanis.
For an excellent introduction to the subject read Shahbano Aliani's August 2009 essay, Caste in Pakistan: The Elephant in the Room. Just so you understand that by 'caste' I don't mean merely 'social station,' Aliani's essay begins with the words:
A pregnant woman from a remote rural village in Tharparkar goes to a private hospital in Hyderabad. The medical staff refuse to attend to her, saying they do not want to pollute their instruments and dirty their hands.Low caste does not only mean 'bottom of the human social order.' It also means subhuman. And where it is rigidly enforced low-caste people are treated as if they're subhuman.
Yet people outside nations with a Muslim caste system know virtually nothing about the situation. This is particularly true in the USA, where the news media here refrain as much as possible from portraying Pakistan in a negative light. You won't even find mention of Pakistan's caste system at the U.S. Department of State website or the CIA one, or in Wikipedia's article on Pakistan -- although Wikipedia does make brief mention of the topic at their entries on Caste and the Caste system among South Asian Muslims.
There's very little reporting in the USA about Pakistan, period, except when there's a terrorist strike inside the country or when there's a report directly related to Pakistan's actions in the U.S. war effort. But such reports are narrow in scope; because of that few Americans who aren't of South Asian parentage know anything about Pakistan's society unless they're involved in certain fields such as international aid/development or human rights.
Discussion about the caste system in Pakistan is hard to come by even inside the country because it's off limits for public discussion. Few Pakistanis other than the country's communists are willing to publicly engage in frank analysis of the country's caste system. Not surprisingly, given the brutal repression of Pakistan's communist party in earlier days, the number of communists is very small.
Reign of terror
In addition the communists have to be careful how they frame the discussion of caste. Pakistan has a draconian anti-blasphemy law. Any derogatory remark about the Prophet, even indirectly or by innuendo, is punishable by death.
The law has also been very hard on Pakistan's Christians (less than 2% of the population), and false accusations of blasphemy against them are on the increase. From this recent report, Christians in the country are greatly concerned about widespread anti-Americanism there because it falls back hard on them. They are also concerned about spiking numbers of Pakistanis joining a fundamentalist madrassa (40% increase in enrollments during the past academic year, according to the report).
The situation in Pakistan has only grown worse while Western non-Muslims have tip-toed around discussion of the country's society, which was sick to begin with and got sicker with every passing decade since Partition.
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the country's founding father, told Pakistanis in 1947, "You may belong to any religion or caste or creed -- that has nothing to do with the business of the state."
Actually, ending the caste system should be very much the business of the state, and Jinnah's assurance about freedom of worship and belief turned out to hollow. Underneath the veneer of a democracy Pakistan has not so much a police state as a self-imposed reign of terror. Thus, many in the country live in constant fear, which dampens frank public discussion about many things, including caste.
All the above underscores that discussions about the caste system in Pakistan and India are treated differently; the latter country has open discussions and condemnations of caste so there's been progress against the system.
More to the point of this writing, attacks on NATO troops in Afghanistan are not launched from Indian soil, and India's government is genuinely cooperating with the USA and other Western governments in the war on terrorism. Pakistan's government, on the other hand, has found low-caste tribes within their purview to be useful idiots if they're willing to deploy terrorism against Afghanistan and India. That several of the tribes are now bringing the terrorism home -- file under "Blowback," the old CIA term meaning a nation reaps what it sows.
History that Americans need to confront
This said, the United States also experienced blowback because a client state can have a way of turning on its master, as happened with Pakistan. To examine how that all came about I'm going to rely with caution on Asad Ismi, who went Postal in a 2002 report titled A U.S.-FINANCED MILITARY DICTATORSHIP: Pakistan has Long, Bloody History as Terrorist Arm of U.S.
The report was published for the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, an "independent, non-partisan research institute concerned with issues of social, economic environmental justice. Founded in 1980, the CCPA is one of Canada’s leading progressive voices in public policy debates."
Translation: A bunch of leftist anti-globalists.
Thus, a number of Asad's conclusions are open to question (e.g., his assertion that Washington stopped dealing with the Taliban "when the two failed to reach an accord on sharing the oil riches of Central Asia.").
His picture is also distorted because it makes it seem as if the U.S.-Pakistan relationship was always a happy one, whereas it was often very stormy. And the picture omits much, including the Pakistan government's anger when the USA wouldn't support their 1965 war against India.
His account also ignores that at different times over the decades the U.S. withheld direct aid from Pakistan and finally imposed sanctions, which were lifted after 9/11. See the Wikipedia article on Pakistan-U.S. relations for details.
Also see Zia Mian's November 3, 2009 overview of the ups and downs of direct U.S. aid to Pakistan and for the more-or-less official U.S. version of the history of the Washington-Islamabad relationship. Mian is a physicist with the Program on Science and Global Security at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus.
(I note that the year Mian names for when the U.S. first began giving aid to Pakistan, 1954, differs from the one provided by Asad Ismi, and which I quoted earlier in this post. I'll stick with Ismi's date of 1947.)
With all those caveats out of the way, Asad Ismi's report is still valuable. His research is a window on the U.S.-Pakistan relationship in the early days and the horrors that emerged from it -- and yes, the descriptions of genocide and atrocities that Ismi provides are accurate. Mian, who is clearly not a leftist, and who is a strong supporter of the U.S. war on terror, spares the reader the gore in his overview of the history but tells the same basic truth that Ismi spits out:
U.S. money helped create a much larger army than Pakistan could afford on its own, equipped it with new American weapons, and trained young Pakistani officers in the United States in modern warfare. Bolstered by their alliance, Pakistan's generals went to war with India in 1965.In every way Pakistan's military, and the intelligence service that sprang from it, is America's creation. Now on to excerpts from Ismi's diatribe:
[...] When [Pakistan's] first democratic elections scheduled for 1958 threatened to reduce the army's power, General Mohammed Ayub Khan, the commander-in-chief, cancelled them and took over the government in a coup. This created a military dictatorship that continues to this day.If we build a railroad, that will make us into a productive nation
Pakistan became a U.S.-financed garrison state, spending 80% of its budget on the military, which massacred thousands of people and ensured that most of those not killed continued to be mired in poverty and illiteracy.
Ayub was an actual employee of the U.S. State Department, which paid him an annual salary of U.S.$16,000.
[If that amount sounds like peanuts remember the era; it was a good salary even for Americans in those days and a fortune in Pakistan.]
There is little doubt that the U.S. government was "fully aware" that the Pakistan army was planning a coup. A few years after the 1958 coup, Sardar Bahadur, Ayub's brother, alleged that the CIA had "been fully involved" in the coup.
Ayub declared Pakistan to be Washington's "most allied ally," and explained his takeover by claiming that "Democracy cannot work in a hot climate."
Ayub allowed the U.S. to use Pakistani air bases for the CIA's U-2 spy flights over the Soviet Union. The U.S. also controlled a signals intelligence facility near Peshawar which monitored Soviet military activity.
Such servility prompted John Foster Dulles, the U.S. Secretary of State (during the 1950s), to call Pakistan "a bulwark of freedom in Asia."
As Milton Bearden, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, recently put it, "[Pakistan is] the only country in South Asia that always did what we asked."
The Pakistan government's terrorism has mainly been perpetrated against its own people, with the U.S.-armed and trained military unleashing genocidal wars on all those who dared oppose its dictatorship. With U.S. arms, training, military aid, and encouragement, the Pakistan army butchered half a million to three million Bengalis in 1971 when their popular, elected, left-wing leadership had the temerity to demand provincial autonomy.
U.S. officials reacted to this slaughter by thanking General Yahya Khan, the Pakistani military dictator, for his "delicacy and tact." As one eyewitness described it, the army in East Pakistan was "like a pack of wild dogs," killing "on a scale not seen since the Third Reich." One thousand intellectuals were murdered in a single day at Dhaka University alone.
"Women were raped or had their breasts torn out with specially fashioned knives," one journalist (who fled) reported. "Children did not escape the horror: the lucky ones were killed with their parents; but many thousands of others must go through what life remains for them with eyes gouged out and limbs roughly amputated."
Losing East Pakistan (which constituted half the country) did not prevent the army from attacking another province only two years later. In 1973, four Pakistan army divisions assaulted Baluch tribal communities in the province of Baluchistan, wiping out "mountain villages and nomad caravans." Like the Bengalis, the Baluchi political leadership was elected, popular, left-wing, and also wanted autonomy.
Mirage fighter-bombers and U.S. Cobra helicopter gunships pummeled unarmed Baluch civilians for five years. Of the 5,000 Baluch men, women and children captured by the army in 1977, 95% were "brutally tortured."
As one account put it: "Apart from the standard practice of severe beatings, limbs are broken or cut off; eyes gouged out; electric shocks are applied, especially to the genitals; beards and hair are torn out; fingernails ripped; water and food are withheld."
The Pakistan army has provided Washington with an instrument for crushing or hindering progressive social movements, not just inside Pakistan, but also in South Asia. India's non-alignment and the good relations of both India and Afghanistan with the Soviet Union were anathema to Washington, which deployed Pakistan against both countries.
When a left-wing government came to power in Afghanistan in 1978, the U.S. decided to overthrow it, using Pakistan as a conduit. The New York Times described the main objectives of this government as being the implementation of land reform and the expansion of education for women. Afghan Islamic fundamentalist groups (known as Mujahideen) in exile in Pakistan were covertly armed by the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and sent into Afghanistan.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser in the Carter administration, knew that this policy would, as he put it, "induce a Soviet intervention in Afghanistan." Brzezinski stated in a recent interview: "That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap."
Once the Soviets invaded in December 1979, the U.S. poured $6 billion in military aid to the Mujahideen through Pakistan. The ensuing war destroyed Afghanistan, ending all hope of progressive reforms.
With the withdrawal of the Soviets in 1989, Afghanistan became a centre for U.S. and Pakistani-backed international terrorism. Islamist fighters trained there poured into Central Asia and India, aiming to create a pan-Islamic state stretching from Kashmir to Kazakhstan. The Taliban was a CIA-ISI creation as well, and its relations with Washington only soured when the two failed to reach an accord on sharing the oil riches of Central Asia.[...]
You'd be grasping at a straw if you hope Pakistan's government has changed in any fundamental way since the days of General Mohammed Ayub Khan.
To return to William Dalrymple's eulogy:
More than anything, perhaps, Benazir was in the end a feudal princess with the aristocratic sense of entitlement that came with owning great tracts of the country [...]That's not the half of it. Benazir during her tenure was complicit in the deaths of thousands of innocent Indian Kashmiris, both Muslim and Hindu, who died because Pakistan's military launched a guerilla war against India in Kashmir.
Today Benazir is being hailed as a martyr for freedom and democracy; but far from being a natural democrat, in many ways Benazir was the person who brought Pakistan’s strange variety of democracy - really a form of ‘elective feudalism’ - into disrepute, and who helped fuel the current apparently unstoppable growth of the Islamists.
For Bhutto was no Aung San Suu Kyi. During her first twenty-month long premiership, astonishingly, she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation. Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world's worst records of custodial deaths, killings and torture.
And for what? All that horror in Indian Kashmir, all that carnage, was about a railroad route. In 1995 the counterterrorism expert Yossef Bodansky reported:
[...] by the fall of 1994 the ISI [Pakistan's military intelligence agency] was already successful in consolidating control over the Islamist armed struggle in Kashmir. The ISI can now ensure that key operations and major escalation in Kashmir will serve the strategic and political priorities and interests of Islamabad.There's just one problem with Bodansky's analysis. Pakistan had nothing much to export beyond heroin, WMD technology, and terrorism. Pakistani A. Q. Khan, boasting of how his theft of nuclear technology from the West gave Pakistan a nuclear weapon, wrote:
This marked escalation in the ISI's support for the Islamist insurgency and terrorism in Kashmir is a direct by-product of Pakistan's national security policy and grand strategy. Ms. [Benazir] Bhutto has repeatedly emphasized the centrality of the annexation of the entire Kashmir for the long-term development of Pakistan.
The new rail-line that will connect Karachi and Central Asia must pass through Indian-held Kashmir to be engineeringly and economically effective. Ms. Bhutto's Islamabad considers the opening of the road to Central Asia by using Pakistan as the region's gateway to the Indian Ocean as the key to the growth of Pakistan's commercial activities. Kashmir is also Pakistan's true gateway to the PRC and into Central Asia -- the path of the new Silk Road. And there lies the future and strategic salvation of Pakistan.[...]
"The speed of our work and our achievements surprised our worst enemies and adversaries and the West stood helplessly by to see a Third World nation, unable even to produce bicycle chains or sewing needles, mastering the most advanced nuclear technology in the shortest possible span of time."Right; they couldn't even produce the most simple manufactured goods. It was China's government that wanted the rail line for exports.
Ismi also outlined the Pakistan government's involvement with the narcotics trade. I'll bypass the discussion except to quote these observation:
In 1993, Raoolf Ali Khan, Pakistan's representative to the UN Commission on Narcotics, said that "there is no branch of government where drug corruption does not pervade." The CIA reported to the U.S. Congress in 1994 that heroin had become "the life-blood of the Pakistani economy and political system."Blowback
By the 1990s, as the Wikipedia article I mentioned above points out, the stage was set for a break in relations between the U.S. and Pakistan:
[...] Pakistan found itself in a state of extremely high insecurity as tensions mounted with India and Afghanistan’s infighting continued. Pakistan’s alliance with the U.S was strained due to factors such as its support for the Taliban and public distancing of the Pakistani government from the U.S.Behind the public posturing, Pakistan, which had started out a pro-American country, had struck a bargain -- with America's enemies!
In 1995 Yossef Bodansky revealed the details of the bargain. Here is an excerpt, which I republished on my blog in 2007:
The Rise of The Trans-Asian AxisNow just see one of the downsides when a government creates a client state: much in the manner of Frankenstein, or to be more precise in the manner of the prototype ED-209 RoboCop, it has a way of malfunctioning. (See the above illustration of the ED-209.) However, one can hardly blame China or Iran for wanting to create an alliance, if one looks at things from their point of view:
A new cohesive strategic global bloc is emerging amidst the fractured structure of the post-Cold War world. This bloc emerges from the consolidation of an essentially anti-US/anti-West alliance led and guided by the People's Republic of China (PRC) and stretching from North Africa to North East Asia. [...]
The Chinese strategic cooperation with both Iran and Pakistan intensified in the wake of the visit by PRC President Yang Shangkun in the Fall of 1991. In this visit, Beijing introduced this new grand strategy to its most important allies and won its commitment to close cooperation.
In Islamabad, Yang discussed the expansion of defence cooperation with both Pakistan and Iran. Yang finalised the details of an "essential agreement on the signing of a joint pact" with both Pakistan and Iran aimed at countering the nuclear threats from the US and India.
Pakistani and Iranian officials stressed at the time that the tripartite agreement would remain clandestine: "These three nations will not sign a treaty officially, but in the event of foreign aggression against the one of these nations, the other two will treat the aggression as aggression against itself and will rise to its defence."[...]
China had encouraged Pakistan's use of terrorism to destabilize India and had given Pakistan help in their development of a nuclear weapon. But America's use of Muslim tribes in China's back yard to push the Soviet Union to the brink, and the skill with which the CIA carried out the shadow war, greatly alarmed the Chinese and Iranian governments. Both governments were dealing with restive tribal populations in their own countries. As Zia Mian observed:
The 1970s saw a superpower détente. The U.S.-Pakistan relationship languished, and U.S. aid to Pakistan dried up. The United States began to pressure Pakistan not to follow India in developing nuclear weapons.The rest turned out to be our present, as well, and which I'll discuss in Part 2.
But 1979 brought the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, an intervention incited by the United States. The United States needed an ally bordering Afghanistan to help organize and fight its proxy war. Pakistan's generals were more than happy to oblige. The army had taken power again in 1977 and was under international pressure to restore civilian rule and to give up Pakistan's nascent nuclear weapons program.
The demands to restore democracy and give up the bomb quieted down. Instead, money and weapons poured in. The Pakistan army bought new American fighter jets and other high-tech weapons that could serve in a war with India. It worked with the United States to raise, train, fund, and equip an international Islamist army to fight in Afghanistan. With American help, Pakistan's generals learned how to organize guerrilla fighters, how to provide a safe haven, and how to cover their tracks. The rest is history.
For readers who're unfamiliar with the name Alden Pyle, it belongs to a fictional American character in Graham Greene's The Quiet American, which was set in Saigon in 1952 during the closing years of the First Indochina War. I say with a cackle that you'll never in a million years figure out why I used Pyle to introduce this post if you try to learn about the character from the Wikipedia article about Greene's novel -- or, for that matter, by reading the novel. Allow me to be mysterious a bit longer.
This entry follows on two earlier ones: Pakistan-U.S. relations: Why General Stanley McChrystal is going straight to hell (Nov. 21) and How the U.S. government built a perpetual-motion war machine in Afghanistan and sacrificed American values in the process (Nov 25).
Sunday, December 6
Pirate Bourse: Somali pirates turn to capitalism to invest their hijacked millions
"We've made piracy a community activity"
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this report from Sam Gustin at Daily Finance; Nils Gilman probably already knows the story but I can't wait to send it to him.
You remember Nils; right, from my posts last year? If not, read his talk on deviant globalization. This latest twist in the adventures of Somalia's pirates could be lifted from one of his lectures on how criminal gangs are bypassing the state to set up their own economies. From Gustin's report:
Several months ago John Batchelor's show had a segment on the building of a mega-super oil tanker, a virtual floating island, which was designed to cut down on shipping costs because it could carry so much oil in one trip. Try to imagine the oil spill from one of those monsters, eh? Anyhow, the ship has a deck that's so high off the water, pirates can't scale it from their boats.
But what's to prevent the pirates from boarding a mega-tanker from the air -- either by landing a helicopter on the deck or parachuting onto it? They're raking in so much from their bourse they can afford a few helicopters and planes.
The story of the Somali pirates folds into the larger story of deviant or 'black' globalization that Nils and two of his colleagues, and a small host of thinkers drawn from a variety of fields, have been studying for years.
That story in turn folds into the failure of highly centralized national governments in poorer countries to provide even baseline services for large numbers of their citizens.
And that story intersects with the 'failure' of first-world schemes to significantly develop the world's poorest nations -- although, as I pointed out in a series of essays in 2005 about international development banks, it's not really a failure. That's because the primary goals of those banks were not actually to develop the poorest nations, no matter what the glossy annual reports said. The goals were to serve geostrategic ends -- to support governments that allied themselves with a first-world country -- and to provide gainful employment for large numbers of contractors and sub-contractors.
The pirate story is a perfect illustration of unintended consequences that arise from the misuse and abuse of the development principle. Has the first world learned its lesson yet? Nah, nothing has changed; not if Afghanistan is any indication: The Aga Khan still slogs on, after all these decades, now helping small but genuinely useful vilage development projects in Afghanistan. And the first world still deploys discredited modernization theory, now in Afghanistan, to advance military ends and provide employment, at gouge prices, for hosts of contractors.
And yet with all this I find the story of the capitalistic pirates to be oddly inspiring. It reminds me of a report from so many decades ago I can't even remember where the story took place. It was about a terrible accident, a chemical spill or radiation leak, which could not be cleaned up. It had rendered a large tract of land unfit for all living things. So the land, completely barren, was fenced off with warning signs posted not to enter, then left alone by humans.
Some years later, maybe 10 or 20 years later, observers returned to inspect the cataclysm. They were stunned by what their eyes took in. They had come across Paradise Lost: a land teeming with wildlife and vegetation. Animal, bird, and insect species that had abandoned the land long before because of human encroachment had returned. Plants and trees that were immune to the poison in the earth had taken root and flourished. This caused the reporter to muse on the incredible fecundity of nature.
So it is with unlucky Somalia -- possessing nothing, not even geostrategic importance, so hopelessly poor and underdeveloped it couldn't even qualify as a fourth-world nation. And yet human creativity, if not smothered by state control, always finds a way. That it found a way in Somalia through thieving -- it wouldn't be the first time in history a ruling class got its start in a life of crime.
History, however, has never before seen such a high level of globalized crime. So I will end on a less hopeful note by quoting Nils Gilman on deviant globalization:
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this report from Sam Gustin at Daily Finance; Nils Gilman probably already knows the story but I can't wait to send it to him.
You remember Nils; right, from my posts last year? If not, read his talk on deviant globalization. This latest twist in the adventures of Somalia's pirates could be lifted from one of his lectures on how criminal gangs are bypassing the state to set up their own economies. From Gustin's report:
[...].Somali pirates have begun to put all of that ransomed lucre -- tens of millions of dollars in recent years -- to work for them, setting up a stock exchange "that has drawn financiers from the Somali diaspora and other nations," according to a startling Reuters dispatch from Somalia published Tuesday.Gustin reports that meanwhile, on the high seas, pirate business is booming:
The bandits' bourse is a small building in the once-small fishing village of Haradheere, about 250 miles northeast of Mogadishu. "Now it is a bustling town where luxury 4x4 cars owned by the pirates and those who bankroll them create honking traffic jams along its pot-holed, dusty streets," the wire service reports. Somalia is considered one of the most dangerous countries in the world for Western journalists.
"Four months ago, during the monsoon rains, we decided to set up this stock exchange. We started with 15 'maritime companies' and now we are hosting 72. Ten of them have so far been successful at hijacking," Reuters quotes a "wealthy former pirate named Mohammed" as saying.
"The shares are open to all and everybody can take part, whether personally at sea or on land by providing cash, weapons or useful materials ... we've made piracy a community activity."
Also quoted is "piracy investor" Sahra Ibrahim, a 22-year-old divorcee, who was lined up with others waiting "for her cut of a ransom pay-out after one of the gangs freed a Spanish tuna fishing vessel."
"I am waiting for my share after I contributed a rocket-propelled grenade for the operation," she said, adding that she got the weapon from her ex-husband in alimony. "I am really happy and lucky. I have made $75,000 in only 38 days since I joined the 'company'."
[...]
Piracy used to be dominated by two clans, according to Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times: "the Saleban, based in Xarardheere [Haradheere], and the Majeerten, who brought hijacked ships back to a small beach town called Eyl. Now, according to witnesses in Somalia, many other clans are involved, even Bantus, a minority group best known as farmers."
Somali pirates have seized a U.S.-bound tanker carrying $20 million worth of crude oil and taken it to a pirate harbor along the barren desert coast of central Somalia in one of the most audacious pirate strikes ever, U.S. naval officials said.Is there any way to stop the pirates? Not appreciably, according to the AP report that Gustin's article links to. It's virtually impossible to adequately patrol 2.5 million square miles of ocean -- particularly during these times, when nations have little revenue to spare for such activity.
"She's a big ol' girl, almost a quarter million tons. They're not speedy, they sit low in the water ... so a determined pirate like this one can be successful," Rear Adm. Peter Hudson said in Kenya on Tuesday, according to the AP. Hudson said it was the second-largest ship ever hijacked by pirates. The tanker's 30-member crew was also kidnapped.
Several months ago John Batchelor's show had a segment on the building of a mega-super oil tanker, a virtual floating island, which was designed to cut down on shipping costs because it could carry so much oil in one trip. Try to imagine the oil spill from one of those monsters, eh? Anyhow, the ship has a deck that's so high off the water, pirates can't scale it from their boats.
But what's to prevent the pirates from boarding a mega-tanker from the air -- either by landing a helicopter on the deck or parachuting onto it? They're raking in so much from their bourse they can afford a few helicopters and planes.
The story of the Somali pirates folds into the larger story of deviant or 'black' globalization that Nils and two of his colleagues, and a small host of thinkers drawn from a variety of fields, have been studying for years.
That story in turn folds into the failure of highly centralized national governments in poorer countries to provide even baseline services for large numbers of their citizens.
And that story intersects with the 'failure' of first-world schemes to significantly develop the world's poorest nations -- although, as I pointed out in a series of essays in 2005 about international development banks, it's not really a failure. That's because the primary goals of those banks were not actually to develop the poorest nations, no matter what the glossy annual reports said. The goals were to serve geostrategic ends -- to support governments that allied themselves with a first-world country -- and to provide gainful employment for large numbers of contractors and sub-contractors.
The pirate story is a perfect illustration of unintended consequences that arise from the misuse and abuse of the development principle. Has the first world learned its lesson yet? Nah, nothing has changed; not if Afghanistan is any indication: The Aga Khan still slogs on, after all these decades, now helping small but genuinely useful vilage development projects in Afghanistan. And the first world still deploys discredited modernization theory, now in Afghanistan, to advance military ends and provide employment, at gouge prices, for hosts of contractors.
And yet with all this I find the story of the capitalistic pirates to be oddly inspiring. It reminds me of a report from so many decades ago I can't even remember where the story took place. It was about a terrible accident, a chemical spill or radiation leak, which could not be cleaned up. It had rendered a large tract of land unfit for all living things. So the land, completely barren, was fenced off with warning signs posted not to enter, then left alone by humans.
Some years later, maybe 10 or 20 years later, observers returned to inspect the cataclysm. They were stunned by what their eyes took in. They had come across Paradise Lost: a land teeming with wildlife and vegetation. Animal, bird, and insect species that had abandoned the land long before because of human encroachment had returned. Plants and trees that were immune to the poison in the earth had taken root and flourished. This caused the reporter to muse on the incredible fecundity of nature.
So it is with unlucky Somalia -- possessing nothing, not even geostrategic importance, so hopelessly poor and underdeveloped it couldn't even qualify as a fourth-world nation. And yet human creativity, if not smothered by state control, always finds a way. That it found a way in Somalia through thieving -- it wouldn't be the first time in history a ruling class got its start in a life of crime.
History, however, has never before seen such a high level of globalized crime. So I will end on a less hopeful note by quoting Nils Gilman on deviant globalization:
A new class of global actors is playing an increasingly important role in globalization: smugglers, warlords, guerrillas, terrorists, gangs, and bandits of all stripes. Since the end of the Cold War, the global illicit economy has consistently grown at twice the rate of the licit global economy. Increasingly, illicit actors will represent not just an economic but a political force.This RBO entry, which republishes one of my posts on Nils Gilman's work, adds a number of links that are a good introduction to Nils's research on deviant globalization and modernization theory. These are two subjects you need to learn something about if you want to understand the early part of the 21st century and how we got here.
As globalization hollows out traditional nation-states, what will fill the power vacuum in slums and hinterlands will be informal non-state governance structures. These zones will be globally connected, effectively run by local gangs, religious leaders, or quasi-tribal organizations – organizations that will govern without aspiring to statehood.
Saturday, December 5
Copenhagen climate change treaty: The fix is in
Today's Washington Post reports:
In taking up argument with Monckton's assertions Bolton followed the talking points at Polifact, which had attempted a point-by-point refutation of Monckton's criticisms of the treaty. Polifact and Bolton observed that there was no treaty yet, just a vaguely worded and contradictory draft document which found so much disagreement among the 192 participating nations that the conference was unlikely to produce a finalized document for signing. Polifact noted:
If Alden Meyer and Kenneth Green have correctly interpreted Obama's surprise decision there won't be any need for an all-nighter in Copenhagen, except perhaps for show. If a treaty isn't actually ready for signing at the end of the conference the final draft could be ratified at a later meeting and signed then.
What if Obama is just being clever? Seeming to support the accord if it emerges at Copenhagen, then planning to stall the signing until next year or even later? This way he could use the treaty as a bargaining chip with members of Congress who're against both the treaty and his domestic agenda.
Either way, Obama's decision to attend the critical phase of negotiations in Copenhagen signals that he wants the United States held accountable for 'CO2 reparations' -- code words for the claim that first-world countries owe a huge debt to the third-world ones because of CO2 transgressions. From the Post report:
And De Boer made his statement to the Times on October 20 -- ten days before Monckton made a big splash on the Glenn Beck TV show with a handy chart in tow, which showed at a glance what MIT meteorologist Richard S. Lindzen discovered.
It is Lindzen's research finding, not Climate-gate, that's the real death knell for the global warming - CO2 emissions arguments (although the finding and the revelations dovetail at key points). The finding was published in September but for weeks it languished even though it was in the public eye.
Why? Well, have you ever read Lindzen's attempts to communicate with the public? His recent article for The Wall Street Journal to explain the true import of Climate-gate and his finding is as clear as mud and as fun to read as watching paint dry.
But Monckton, who is a great showman, who has both the math and verbal parts of his brain working in synch and who has, as his critic George Monbiot so deftly put it, the benefit of a classics degree from Cambridge, is an ace at explaining Lindzen's findings in simple English.
Monckton ran through the drill during his appearance with Bolton on Beck's TV show and also a few days earlier on Beck's radio show:
In short, advocates of the CO2-global warming theory are now racing to throw together a treaty before everyone on the planet realizes that Al Gore is talking trash.
As to whether Monckton is right about the global governance aspect of the treaty's language, and whether it would represent a threat to U.S. sovereignty -- I don't know. And I also don't know whether even a Constitutional attorney knows for certain. It's a very complicated issue and one that's never been fully tested in the USA. But Polifact and Bolton thought he was reading too much into the draft treaty language, and that the USA has built-in safeguards against being run by an international treaty.
Monckton had a comeback for both arguments, which of course doesn't mean he's right. RBO has the complete video set of Beck's October 30 show if you want to follow his answers.
But if my memory serves it was during his appearance on Beck's TV show that Monckton laid out the rationale behind the push for CO2 reparations. He said that the perennial problem for the United Nations has been that they're dependent on national governments for money to support their operations -- money that always comes with strings attached. He said what they really want is a source of revenue that's independent of the control of sovereign nations, and until that happens they can't move forward with plans for a global governance structure.
That's where the push for CO2 reparations comes in: it will provide the UN with the revenue to set up oversight panels for the redistribution of first-world wealth -- panels that will serve as the basic framework for a transnational governing body.
If Monckton nailed it you may trust that the UN, and others who most strongly support a transnational government, are determined to go ahead with a global warming treaty, even if it's based on a discredited theory about the impact of man-made CO2 on the climate.
From that angle the issue of the treaty's impact on a nation's sovereignty is jumping the gun. I think Monckton indicated that if the treaty is signed it'll be just the first phase in establishing a transnational government -- but a key phase, in that it'll establish a revenue stream for setting up the bureaucracy which, down the road, can impose real punishments on nations that don't adhere to laws created by the United Nations.
What's next? Now we wait and see what happens in Copenhagen. The circus gets underway December 7 and runs through the 18th. The Guardian has charitably provided a glossary of the organizations/government entities that will be participating in the conference. So you might as well familiarize yourself with the alphabet soup because the acronyms will be bandied about during news coverage of the conference.
President Obama will attend the high-level portion of international climate talks in Copenhagen on Dec. 18, the White House announced Friday, ratcheting up expectations that the United Nations-sponsored negotiations could produce a significant deal on global warming.So. It looks as if Christopher Walter Monckton was right and John Bolton was wrong. Bolton played Devil's Advocate when Monckton appeared on Glenn Beck's TV show on October 30 to argue that the Copenhagen accord was based on junk science and that it was actually a framework for a transnational government. He cautioned that for those reasons, under no circumstances should President Barack Obama sign any treaty to emerge from the talks in Copenhagen.
[...]
Obama's aides have said for weeks that he would attend the closing hours of the world meeting only if he thought his presence could help secure an accord.
[...]
Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in an interview from Copenhagen that Obama's decision to go suggests that "he'll be here at the end to help seal the deal."
Even conservative critics of the president such as Kenneth P. Green of the American Enterprise Institute said Obama's switch in timing "changes the game." He wrote in an e-mail: "It suggests that a 'deal' is already in the bag, and Obama's expecting that he'll get to bask in the glow of a new global agreement, flagrantly repudiating the position of the Bush administration in previous climate negotiations."
In taking up argument with Monckton's assertions Bolton followed the talking points at Polifact, which had attempted a point-by-point refutation of Monckton's criticisms of the treaty. Polifact and Bolton observed that there was no treaty yet, just a vaguely worded and contradictory draft document which found so much disagreement among the 192 participating nations that the conference was unlikely to produce a finalized document for signing. Polifact noted:
“There isn’t sufficient time to get the whole thing done,” Yvo De Boer, the Dutch diplomat who oversees the negotiations, said in mid October, according to the New York Times. “But I hope it will go well beyond simply a declaration of principles. The form I would like it to take is the groundwork for a ratifiable agreement next year.”Monckton, who had helped write and negotiate international treaties while he worked for Margaret Thatcher's government, told Bolton that's what treaty negotiators always say -- then they emerge at the 11th Hour "with their neckties around their ears and bags under their eyes" and announce that overnight they managed to hammer out an agreement.
What we learn from these two points is that the substance of the agreement remains distinctly up in the air, and that Obama is unlikely to be asked to sign anything at the conference beyond a nonbinding statement of interim steps or a promise to meet again -- if that.
If Alden Meyer and Kenneth Green have correctly interpreted Obama's surprise decision there won't be any need for an all-nighter in Copenhagen, except perhaps for show. If a treaty isn't actually ready for signing at the end of the conference the final draft could be ratified at a later meeting and signed then.
What if Obama is just being clever? Seeming to support the accord if it emerges at Copenhagen, then planning to stall the signing until next year or even later? This way he could use the treaty as a bargaining chip with members of Congress who're against both the treaty and his domestic agenda.
Either way, Obama's decision to attend the critical phase of negotiations in Copenhagen signals that he wants the United States held accountable for 'CO2 reparations' -- code words for the claim that first-world countries owe a huge debt to the third-world ones because of CO2 transgressions. From the Post report:
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama has determined that "there is progress being made towards a meaningful Copenhagen accord" now that both China and India have announced nationwide energy-efficiency targets in the last week.If even the man tasked with overseeing the negotiations thinks there's not enough time by the Copenhagen meeting to finalize an accord -- ah, but he made the assertion before Climate-gate. It is truly amazing how quickly people can act when they're desperate.
India announced Thursday that it will lower its carbon emissions relative to the size of its economy by 20 percent by 2020, and China announced a week earlier that it would lower its emissions relative to its economy's size by up to 45 percent over the same period.
[...]
In the statement, Gibbs indicated that the United States would be willing to support a short-term financial package to help poorer nations curb their emissions and cope with climate change, an initiative that could cost the United States several billion dollars.
Gibbs said: "There appears to be an emerging consensus that a core element of the Copenhagen accord should be to mobilize $10 billion a year by 2012 to support adaptation and mitigation in developing countries, particularly the most vulnerable and least developed countries that could be destabilized by the impacts of climate change. The United States will pay its fair share of that amount and other countries will make substantial commitments as well."
And De Boer made his statement to the Times on October 20 -- ten days before Monckton made a big splash on the Glenn Beck TV show with a handy chart in tow, which showed at a glance what MIT meteorologist Richard S. Lindzen discovered.
It is Lindzen's research finding, not Climate-gate, that's the real death knell for the global warming - CO2 emissions arguments (although the finding and the revelations dovetail at key points). The finding was published in September but for weeks it languished even though it was in the public eye.
Why? Well, have you ever read Lindzen's attempts to communicate with the public? His recent article for The Wall Street Journal to explain the true import of Climate-gate and his finding is as clear as mud and as fun to read as watching paint dry.
But Monckton, who is a great showman, who has both the math and verbal parts of his brain working in synch and who has, as his critic George Monbiot so deftly put it, the benefit of a classics degree from Cambridge, is an ace at explaining Lindzen's findings in simple English.
Monckton ran through the drill during his appearance with Bolton on Beck's TV show and also a few days earlier on Beck's radio show:
[W]e now know for certain by [Lindzen's] measurement that the effect of CO2 and all greenhouse gases on temperature globally is less than 1/6th of what the UN says it is. ...Lindzen has been out there on his own trying to explain his research to the general public -- he was even on Beck's show prior to Monckton's appearance. But more than anyone Monckton is breaking down the research to the simplest elements without sacrificing its import. And he's not only been talking to Glenn's audience. Reportedly he's also educating several members of Congress.
The amount of outgoing radiation escaping into space is supposed to reduce enormously as the temperature warms down here. That's the official theory because of all the greenhouse gases getting in the way. What is actually happening is that nearly all of it is getting out into space just as before. So the warming effect of CO2 over the whole of the next 100 years is going to be well below 2 Fahrenheit degrees, just negligible, it might even be 1 Fahrenheit degrees.
And now that that is known by measurement, all of the UN's report on which [the Copenhagen] treaty is based are out-of-date, and the Supreme Court's own judgment in Massachusetts V. EPA, where they said CO2 was a pollutant because it might cause warming, are now also out-of-date. Because the facts have changed, and it's now been a measured result. There's no argument with it. Nobody's dared to argue with [Lindzen's] paper.
In short, advocates of the CO2-global warming theory are now racing to throw together a treaty before everyone on the planet realizes that Al Gore is talking trash.
As to whether Monckton is right about the global governance aspect of the treaty's language, and whether it would represent a threat to U.S. sovereignty -- I don't know. And I also don't know whether even a Constitutional attorney knows for certain. It's a very complicated issue and one that's never been fully tested in the USA. But Polifact and Bolton thought he was reading too much into the draft treaty language, and that the USA has built-in safeguards against being run by an international treaty.
Monckton had a comeback for both arguments, which of course doesn't mean he's right. RBO has the complete video set of Beck's October 30 show if you want to follow his answers.
But if my memory serves it was during his appearance on Beck's TV show that Monckton laid out the rationale behind the push for CO2 reparations. He said that the perennial problem for the United Nations has been that they're dependent on national governments for money to support their operations -- money that always comes with strings attached. He said what they really want is a source of revenue that's independent of the control of sovereign nations, and until that happens they can't move forward with plans for a global governance structure.
That's where the push for CO2 reparations comes in: it will provide the UN with the revenue to set up oversight panels for the redistribution of first-world wealth -- panels that will serve as the basic framework for a transnational governing body.
If Monckton nailed it you may trust that the UN, and others who most strongly support a transnational government, are determined to go ahead with a global warming treaty, even if it's based on a discredited theory about the impact of man-made CO2 on the climate.
From that angle the issue of the treaty's impact on a nation's sovereignty is jumping the gun. I think Monckton indicated that if the treaty is signed it'll be just the first phase in establishing a transnational government -- but a key phase, in that it'll establish a revenue stream for setting up the bureaucracy which, down the road, can impose real punishments on nations that don't adhere to laws created by the United Nations.
What's next? Now we wait and see what happens in Copenhagen. The circus gets underway December 7 and runs through the 18th. The Guardian has charitably provided a glossary of the organizations/government entities that will be participating in the conference. So you might as well familiarize yourself with the alphabet soup because the acronyms will be bandied about during news coverage of the conference.
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