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.

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."

Americans, get to know a little more about your client state Pakistan

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.

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.[...]

If we build a railroad, that will make us into a productive nation

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 [...]

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.

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.

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.

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.[...]

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:

"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 Axis

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."[...]

Now 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:

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.

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.

The rest turned out to be our present, as well, and which I'll discuss in Part 2.

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).

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:

[...].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.

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."

Gustin reports that meanwhile, on the high seas, pirate business is booming:

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Copenhagen climate change treaty: The fix is in

Today's Washington Post reports:

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.

[...]

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."

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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. ...

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.

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.

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.

Gee Rajeev, don't stand on ceremony; tell us what you really think about Manmohan Singh's visit with Barack Obama

The American news media, which is over a barrel when it comes to reporting on the interactions between China, India, and Pakistan, have seized with almost hysterical relief on the gate-crashing of two wannabe Bravo TV stars. Of course it's a very serious matter if there was indeed a security breach at the White House dinner honoring Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. However, the media have bathed in every conceivable detail of Washington's version of the Hot Air Balloon Caper and the two social climbers at the center of it.

All this neatly distracts the U.S. public's attention from an event that represents the nadir of American foreign relations, which found White House special envoy Richard Holbrooke groveling before the Pakistanis during a two hour press conference.

Mr Holbrooke, whose handling of his portfolio on Afghanistan quickly showed he'd confused India and Pakistan with Bosnia, said that "no one in Pakistan, and no one in any other country," should read Manmohan’s state visit "as a diminution of the importance we attach to them.”

"Them," just to be clear, means "Pakistanis."

Why did Holbrooke stop there, I wonder? Why didn't he zip next to Beijing and get a photo op kissing Hu Jintao's feet?

(Obama's eased Holbrooke out of the picture, a friend told me soothingly. I shot back, "Did Kayani get the memo?" For that matter, has someone informed Holbrooke he's out of the picture?)

But the chattering class here and in India decided to pat the air and interpret Singh's visit to Washington as a feather in Washington's cap and New Delhi's.

The glaring exception is Rajeev Srinivasan's scorched-earth analysis, although he's not a member of the chatterati, for all his published essays. An Indian, a Hindu, a computer professional who commutes between the USA and India, he writes with too much passion and far too much bitterness to crank out opinion for a living:

The number of fifth-columnists in India has reached record proportions. India has ‘friends of America’, ‘friends of China’, ‘friends of Saudi Arabia’, ‘friends of the Vatican’ in high places, but hardly anyone is a ‘friend of India’.

Yes, there is formal independence, but there is no freedom. There is, for instance, no respite from the State religion, some baffling animal called ‘secularism’, which basically means total apartheid against large groups of people.

The State excels in perpetuating the most ridiculous system ever invented: a chimera that combines all the vices of communism and capitalism (and none of the virtues). The idiocies and inefficiencies of the first and the thievery and inequities of the second; but not the iron discipline and will nor the unshackled flair for getting ahead.

The State has interfered in everything it has no business being in: running airlines, hotels, and so forth; and it has been practically invisible in everything it is the one and only provider of: infrastructure, defense, social programs, human rights. Crony capitalism and the license raj run rampant."

If all that sounds to an American reader like an Indian version of a Tea Partier -- maybe what's fueling his bitterness is that Indians won't get off their behinds and do their own version of Tea Partying. But I offered that sample from his writings to convey that while he calls himself a "Hindu nationalist," that's like Glenn Beck describing himself as a Christian nationalist, which would be misleading.

Rajeev Srinivasan is a man who loves his country, that's all, and who refuses to be understanding about his government's methodical dismantling of his country's heritage.

I don't agree with everything he writes. But I like him because he sees many things with great clarity -- although in his rip on "Slumgdog Millionaire" he runs himself in circles trying to fathom why so many British hate India and Hindus.

The answer is simple. If the Indians had thrown them out, the British would have respected that. But the shilly-shallying around for the decades of Gandhi's non-violent movement they found highly insulting. They paid back the perceived insult by machinating to give the region called Pakistan to a bunch of raja families who didn't want their land holdings broken up by democracy reforms in post-Independence India.

And here we are today, with American troops being blown up in Afghanistan by so-called Taliban while Richard Holbrooke thrashes about trying to placate Pakistan, so China doesn't get any more upset than they already are with U.S. overtures to India.

If American readers groan, 'High school' -- yes, well, high school with nukes. It's something Americans didn't think about when we charged off to Afghanistan in 2001 to rout al Al Qaeda. So now we're having to think about the hornet's nest we stirred up when we landed in Pakistan's cold war against India and China's machinations against India. We're also having to confront the consequences of certain actions we took during the Cold War in that part of the world.

That's why Americans should read Rajeev Srinivasan's no holds barred take on Singh's visit with Obama. Rajeev rips open closet doors, yanks out skeletons, and says things that many Indians think but few will say in a public forum. Now more than ever Americans need to understand these things. For readers who're tempted to skip the discussion, at least they should direct their attention to these passages:

Then there was the recent appointment of Robin Raphel to the Richard Holbrooke team dealing with Pakistan and Afghanistan. Raphel is well-known as one of the most virulent and vitriolic critics of India in the entire US Democratic set-up. She was, until August, a registered and paid lobbyist for Pakistan. She is infamous for insisting that the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India is not final, and for asserting that Pakistan is the very epitome of a 'model, modern, and moderate Muslim nation'.

[...]

Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Obama may well be following in Jimmy Carter's footsteps. Carter, of MEOW fame (moral equivalent of war), who groveled to Middle-Easterners, bringing upon himself the Iran hostage crisis that destroyed his presidency.

Obama is going down this path with his Af-Pak policy, which consists primarily of outsourcing the Afghan problem to Pakistan's Inter Services intelligence, to be followed by the United States declaring victory and leaving. He is ignoring the instructive example of Neville Chamberlain appeasing Hitler

Ms Raphel needs to crawl back under whatever rock she crawled out from, and Mr Holbrooke needs to be removed from his post. There is enough mess in Afghanistan without Americans who understand nothing about that part of the world further complicating matters for the U.S. war effort. And General David Petraeus needs to rip up the Afpak strategy and instruct his advisors to return to the drawing board.

Finally, a word to the British. Kashmir is not your problem to solve. If you touch off a disaster, that disqualifies you from a leadership position or even giving advice on how to wrest something approximating a solution.

Don't take advantage of President Obama's ignorance about that part of the world. Find a way other than meddling in Kashmir at India's expense, and America's, to placate your nation's Muslim community.

We're all trying to get through the coming years, trying to make it work out with the least bloodshed possible for all concerned. I understand. But just for that reason I'd advise you to refrain from actions that rake up too much of the past, for Rajeev in no way pulled all the skeletons out of the closet.

Back off.

How the U.S. government built a perpetual-motion war machine in Afghanistan and sacrificed American values in the process

In July 2008 Mark Mazzetti, one of the great American journalists to report on U.S. defense issues in the post-9/11 era, wrote for The New York Times about the complexities that American intelligence professionals faced when dealing with Pakistan's ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence)agency.

The CIA in Pakistan has been myopic about how ISI objectives, which conflict with America's in key areas, have impacted the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan. This led the CIA station chief in Afghanistan to accuse the CIA station chief in Islamabad of Going Native, touching off a virtual cold war between the CIA stations in both capital cities:

[...] As American and allied casualty rates in Afghanistan have grown in the last two years, [Pakistan's] I.S.I. has become a subject of fierce debate within the C.I.A. Many in the spy agency -- particularly those stationed in Afghanistan -- accuse their agency colleagues at the Islamabad station of actually being too cozy with their I.S.I. counterparts.

There have been bitter fights between the C.I.A. station chiefs in Kabul and Islamabad, particularly about the significance of the militant threat in the tribal areas. At times, the view from Kabul has been not only that the I.S.I. is actively aiding the militants, but that C.I.A. officers in Pakistan refuse to confront the I.S.I. over the issue.

Veterans of the C.I.A. station in Islamabad point to the capture of a number of senior Qaeda leaders in Pakistan in recent years as proof that the Pakistani intelligence service has often shown a serious commitment to roll up terror networks. It was the I.S.I., they say, that did much of the legwork leading to the capture of operatives like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi bin al-Shibh.[...]

The question on which much turns, and which is outside the scope of Mark's report, is whether the ISI actually needed to do any "legwork" to capture KSM (and several other operatives the ISI turned over to the CIA) or whether it was even technically a "capture." Several pieces of the terrorism puzzle, including aspects of the plot to kidnap and murder Daniel Pearl, suggest that the ISI had no need to track down KSM because he was an 'asset,' one they decided was worth sacrificing to the Americans.

In any event the worth would be literal: the CIA paid the ISI $25 million for KSM; they paid the ISI $10 million for Abu Zubaydah, a top al Qaeda operative.

(For readers unfamiliar with that part of the world I'm not sure it conveys the full picture to explain that in 2001 the currency exchange rate was roughly 63 Pakistani rupees to 1 U.S. dollar and that today, even with the weak dollar, the rate is 84:1.)

In addition, the ISI raked in a fortune from a clandestine bounty fund the CIA set up for them, which Greg Miller reported on for The Los Angeles Times on November 15 of this year:

The CIA has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Pakistan's intelligence service since the Sept. 11 attacks, accounting for as much as one-third of the foreign spy agency's annual budget, current and former U.S. officials say.

The Inter-Services Intelligence agency also has collected tens of millions of dollars through a classified CIA program that pays for the capture or killing of wanted militants, a clandestine counterpart to the rewards publicly offered by the State Department, officials said.

The payments have triggered intense debate within the U.S. government, officials said, because of long-standing suspicions that the ISI continues to help Taliban extremists who undermine U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and provide sanctuary to Al Qaeda members in Pakistan.

But U.S. officials have continued the funding because the ISI's assistance is considered crucial: Almost every major terrorist plot this decade has originated in Pakistan's tribal belt, where ISI informant networks are a primary source of intelligence.

The White House National Security Council has "this debate every year," said a former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official involved in the discussions. Like others, the official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. Despite deep misgivings about the ISI, the official said, "there was no other game in town."[...]

Why would the NSC and the CIA assume there was no other game? Mark Mazzetti's July 2008 report spells out the thinking, which has been voiced countless times by U.S. defense experts since 9/11:

Unlike spying in the capitals of Europe, where agency operatives can blend in to develop a network of informants, only a tiny fraction of C.I.A. officers can walk the streets of Peshawar unnoticed. And an even smaller fraction could move freely through the tribal areas to scoop up useful information about militant networks there.

So the thinking was that because few American spies looked or sounded like the people they wanted to spy on, they needed to pay an agency with a history of double dealing with the USA to do their espionage for them; this on the reasoning that the agency's spies could pass for the natives. This, despite the fact that even the agency's spies have a hard time passing for natives in their own country's tribal regions! To return to Greg Miller's report:

Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, who served as ISI director before becoming army chief of staff, has told U.S. officials that dozens of ISI operatives have been killed in operations conducted at the behest of the United States.

A onetime aide to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described a pointed exchange in which Kayani said his spies were no safer than CIA agents when trying to infiltrate notoriously hostile Pashtun tribes.

"Madame Secretary, they call us all white men," Kayani said, according to the former aide.

Nonetheless the CIA clung to the idea that relying heavily on the ISI was in line with good espionage practice from America's World War Two-Cold War eras. Mark Mazzetti writes:

[C]ircumstances have for years forced successful, if ephemeral, partnerships among spies. The Office of Strategic Services, the C.I.A.’s predecessor, worked with the K.G.B.’s predecessors to hunt Nazis during World War II, even as the United States and the Soviet Union were quickly becoming adversaries.

Yet the farther the United States government moved from the Western world during the post-WW2 era, the less their defense and diplomatic professionals saw the tripwires -- the unforeseen consequences of initiatives that seemed a good idea at the outset.

The Cold War era is littered with so many ill-conceived and counterproductive U.S. initiatives it's hard to pick out representative examples. Indeed, one way to describe U.S. efforts to be clever in regions they knew nothing about is to say they were a caricature of the Tourist from Hell.

The CIA's heavy reliance on the ISI to put al Qaeda out of business in South Asia suggests that my government didn't even squeeze bitter wisdom from mistakes during the Cold War. Or if the wisdom was there, it retired with the graying of the Cold War generation of spies, foreign service officers, and military commanders.

Taken together the reports by Greg Miller and Mark Mazzetti point up the tripwires in the clever idea of outsourcing al Qaeda-hunting to the ISI. A former CIA official who worked with the ISI told Miller, "They gave us 600 to 700 people captured or dead. Getting these guys off the street was a good thing, and it was a big savings to [U.S.] taxpayers."

Another CIA official who worked in Islamabad chipped in, "There were a lot of people I had never heard of, and they were good for $1 million or more" in payments from the CIA's slush fund.

But you can see the downside here: if you're blindly paying a spy agency that's desperate for huge amounts of cash to also play bounty hunter -- bring 'em in dead or alive -- then you have no way of knowing whether all the dead prizes were your enemy or the spy agency's.

So it's small wonder that as the ISI continued playing assassin for the USA in Pakistan you could trace a rising curve of violence against U.S. forces in Afghanistan emanating from Pakistan's tribes -- a curve that extended to the Pakistan side of the Durand Line.

As the violence from terrorism rose in Pakistan the country's security services cracked down harder, touching off a series of reprisals and counter-reprisals that spawned new terrorist factions -- all calling themselves "Taliban." There are now so many "Taliban" it's hard to keep them straight. As the Indian counterterrorism expert, B. Raman, explained:

[T]he Pakistani Pashtun Talibans are products of the commando raid into the Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad in July 2007, in which a large number of Pashtun tribal children, many of them girls, were killed. It was after this that tribal sirdars [leaders], including Fazlullah, Baitullah and Hakeemullah, called for a jihad against the Pakistan army and the ISI in retaliation for the raid. While the TNSM has been in existence since the early 1990s, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) was born after the Lal Masjid raid.[...]

That's not the half of it; the other half is that the tribal leaders extended their rage to the United States. As of Raman's writing (June 2009) they were continuing to launch attacks against the ISI and Pakistan military targets not only because of Lal Masjid but because they associated the Pak government's crackdowns with the government's alliance with the United States. Then the tribes' aim in life was split between revenge on the Pak military and killing as many Americans as they could in Afghanistan.

Another tripwire was summarized in Mark Mazaetti's 2008 report: "Without the millions of covert American dollars sent annually to Pakistan, the I.S.I. would have trouble competing with the spy service of its archrival, India."

The competition includes mounting evidence that the ISI was involved in the 11/26/08 massacre in Mumbai, India, considered by terrorism experts to be one of the worst terrorist attacks since 9/11:

The Mumbai attacks were hatched by the self-described "Army of the Pure," or Lashkar-e-Taiba, increasingly regarded as a jihadist threat similar to the Taliban.

For years, Lashkar-e-Taiba had acted as a proxy militia as Pakistani intelligence sought to carve out a buffer zone from disputed territories in Kashmir. The network has shown a recent inclination toward launching al-Qaeda-style attacks across India.

The competition includes evidence that the ISI was behind the suicide bombings outside the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

The competition includes fury on the part of Pakistan's government that Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai and the U.S. forces in Afghanistan are friendly with India's government.

So what the CIA in Pakistan has created by their close cooperation with the ISI, and which their bosses in Langley and Washington have blessed, is a kind of hybrid of a perpetual motion machine and a Rube Goldberg contraption.

The difference is that Goldberg's machines were deliberately engineered to do simple tasks in the most complicated fashion. But whether by accident or design it works out to the same difference: at the end of every complex set of transactions between the CIA and the ISI, yet more enemy combatants materialize, to be rounded up or dispatched, leading to yet more enemy combatants to attack ISAF troops and nation-building efforts in Afghanistan, to be rounded up or dispatched, leading to -- well, last night CNN reported that "Taliban" now control 80 percent of Afghanistan, even though only 7 percent of Afghanis support the Taliban.

And it's this infernal process the CIA considers to be a big savings for U.S. taxpayers.

I should add that Greg Miller's report on the CIA's clandestine bounty program is not a 'scoop.' He mentioned that "former CIA Director George J. Tenet acknowledged the bounties in a little-noticed section in his 2007 memoir. "Little noticed" is an understatement. If you can recall that any U.S. media outlet mentioned the clandestine program prior to Miller's report, and the fact that the CIA was also paying for an assassination program over which they had no oversight, please tell me if you can recall the name of the newspaper, radio program, or TV show that rendered the public service.

For that matter, can you recall whether any mainstream news outlet picked up on Greg Miller's report? And yet it's not as if it's been buried under a basket. Robert Haddick, one of most influential voices on the 'milblog' portion of the blogosphere, mentioned the report on Small Wars Journal blog and in his November 20 column at Foreign Policy blog -- both widely read by defense and foreign policy wonks and news media researchers.

Why are so many unnamed officials now willing to talk with a reporter from The Los Angeles Times about the bounty program and the assassinations? According to Miller the reward payments have slowed as the number of suspected Al Qaeda operatives captured or killed by the ISI has declined. That, in addition to the fact it's getting progressively harder for Washington to maintain deniability about the Pakistan government's intimate connection with international terrorism and nuclear proliferation might have loosened tongues.

Yet I suppose it'll always be a matter of argument as to how much the short-sightedness of the CIA and the Bush and Obama administrations contributed to turning the 2001 U.S -U.K. victory over the Taliban into the mess in Afghanistan today. What is beyond argument is that the close association between the U.S. government and Pakistan's meant that Washington turned a studiously blind eye to a society that is inimical to American values, and the U.S. news media followed suit. So I think it's past time more Americans understood just what their tax dollars have been supporting in Pakistan. That will be the subject of my next post.

For more on the Pakistan-U.S. relationship during the Afghanistan War see November 21 Pundita post, Why General Stanley McChrystal is going straight to hell.

Starting Monday John Batchelor Show goes to seven nights a week

Well, John Batchelor is finally back where he started in 2001 -- back on New York City's 77 WABC-AM weeknights from 9 PM to 1 AM. The weeknight show will join the weekend one in syndication. Check your local WABC-affiliated radio station for details.

It's almost Thanksgiving so I'll refrain from making sarcastic, bitter, venomous, and all-around nasty comments about the radio biz. I will be polite and only observe about all the MESS at WABC and ABC Radio Network in 2006 that removed John's daily show that all's well that ends well.

Welcome back, John!

As to how he's going to keep up the pace seven nights a week, I guess he'll cross that bridge when he comes to it.

The question is whether he'll find time to crank out daily schedules for posting at his website. The weekend schedules he puts out have spoiled me.

From All Access, the music/radio industry internet rag:

CITADEL Talk WABC-A/NEW YORK is expanding weekend host JOHN BATCHELOR to weeknights 9p-1a ET starting MONDAY (11/30). The move into the slot presently occupied by CITADEL MEDIA's CURTIS SLIWA follows the recent launch of BATCHELOR's weekend show into syndication by WABC.

General Manager STEVE BORNEMAN said, "BATCHELOR's SATURDAY and SUNDAY ratings have been so explosive, it's a logical move to expand the program to weeknights."

Program Director LAURIE CANTILLO added, "BATCHELOR offers a road map for understanding our fast-changing world at a time when listeners are hungrier for information than ever before." [...]

Pakistan-U.S. relations: Why General Stanley McChrystal is going straight to hell

On or about August 30, 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates received a detailed assessment of the military situation in Afghanistan that included a request for additional U.S. troops. The report was from General Stanley A. McChrystal, Commander, Nato's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan. But as noted on the first page the assessment was a joint effort representing input from ISAF staff and the component commands.

On the matter of Pakistan the report noted:

Afghanistan's insurgency is clearly supported from Pakistan. Senior leaders of the major Afghan insurgent groups are based in Pakistan, are linked with al Qaeda and other violent extremist groups, and are reportedly aided by some elements of Pakistan's lSI.

A year earlier McChrystal's predecessor, General David D. McKiernan, delivered a franker assessment of the same situation. He stated flatly that he was certain there was a "level of ISI complicity" in the militant areas of Pakistan and within organizations like the Taliban.

McKiernan's observation came on the heels of a secret visit by a top CIA official to Islamabad; the visit was to directly confront Pakistan's most senior officials with new data about ties between the ISI and militants operating in Pakistan tribal areas.

It seems the CIA met with the same stonewalling Britain's government encountered in 2006 when they brought virtually the same charges to Pakistan because their next move echoed the one taken by Britain's Ministry of Defense: the CIA leaked news of the trip to a major press outlet -- in their case, The New York Times.

These naive attempts to embarrass a government comprised of terror-masters, dope dealers and professional beggars skilled at wheedling billions in aid out of the West came to nothing, beyond the ISI's decision to outsource more of their oversight of terrorist attacks on NATO troops to front agencies such as the SSG.

And General McKiernan hardly needed to study a classified CIA report to know the score. Over a period of years many intelligence analysts and journalists from India, Pakistan, Europe and the USA, not to leave out Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai and his intelligence advisors, have spent years publishing books, churning out reports, and generally doing everything they could think of to impress on Washington that Pakistan is the biggest problem.

However, look at it from Washington's viewpoint. You know how it is when you can't find the keys you lost inside the house: you go outside to search because the light is better out there.

So Washington continues to search high and low for solutions in Afghanistan that don't address the biggest problem there.

Fine. Understood. The United States has been covering Pakistan's ass for 60 years, on one excuse or another. It is a matter of public record that starting in the 1950s the U.S. government was aiding and abetting Pakistan's machinations against India; that since the Carter administration the U.S. government knew of A. Q. Khan's activities to sell nuclear weapons technology to any buyer and took no action to roll up his WMD network until 2003; and that the U.S. government helped the ISI sweep Daniel Pearl's murder under the rug.

But you need to draw the line when it comes to cooperating with a government that's ordering the shooting and maiming of your own troops, or you need to face a charge of treason.

The situation of Pakistan-directed attacks on ISAF troops has not been resolved. I believe that to call for more troops under such circumstances is criminally negligent.

General McKiernan might have broken rank or trod on the State Department's turf by publicly speaking about the ISI in blunt terms. Whether this might have added to Gates's displeasure with his performance, I don't know. The reasons given for the very unusual decision to fire a commander of his rank and under such circumstances have never stacked in my eyes.

I will not explore the decision here, beyond asking whether the Department of Defense thought to do a study analyzing the increased attacks on NATO forces in Afghanistan in light of any increased ISAF intelligence-sharing with Pakistan's military.

Another question I'd like answered: were any known instances of ISI spying on ISAF movements analyzed in light of the increased attacks during the same period?

From all the accounts I've read, it seems the U.S. government's public response to Pakistan's duplicity tends to echo Pakistan's claim that "rogue" elements of the ISI and military are responsible for any attacks on NATO troops. Such claims would fly in the face of history.

Writing for the January 2, 2008 edition of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Alan Brody gave the clearest summary I've ever come across of the Pakistan-backed rise to power of the Taliban.

Brody, a graduate of Harvard and the University of Iowa, worked for UNICEF for 22 years before his retirement in 2006. In 1993 he was assigned as the planning officer and deputy head of office for UNICEF in Afghanistan to deliver humanitarian aid. The periodic outbreaks of war between factions occupying Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, prevented him from living in the city. He worked from an office across the border, in Peshawar, in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province -- itself a very dangerous a place, a place of "intrigues," as Brody observed. But he commuted to Afghanistan and his position gave him a bird's eye view of the battles for Kabul during that era, which the Pakistan-backed Taliban forces finally won.

Writing elsewhere Brody has observed that the mujahideen groups in Afghanistan during the early 1990s were "bickering and fighting among themselves, with support to these different factions coming from their patrons in Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia."

There were indeed different mujahideen factions, but it was Pakistan's Taliban that finally overran Kabul then took over much of the country until the combined U.S.-U.K. operations in 2001 routed them.

And for those who don't remember it or never knew, the U.S. sponsored evacuation dubbed "Operation Evil Airlift" made it clear that Pakistan -- a vaunted U.S. ally -- was at war with U.S. and U.K. during the 2001 invasion. I've provided the entire Wikipedia article on the operation at the end of this post. If you're new to the story and have relatives serving in Afghanistan, better belt down a stiff drink before you read it.(1)

One may lay the blame for Operation Evil with Vice-President Dick Cheney, and his act could be construed as treasonous if one doesn't know it was par for the Cold War course. But the Cold War is long gone, and Cheney has been gone for office for close to a year. Yet still the U.S. government continues to downplay that Pakistan did not create the Taliban to fight the Soviets; they did it because they saw the U.S.-led effort against the Soviets in Afghanistan as their means to take over the country without running into stiff international punishment.

And the U.S. government continues to mix apples with oranges: there are surely "rogue" elements in Pakistan's military and intelligence agency -- "rogue" meaning Pakistanis who want a Taliban-style government in Pakistan. But the entire Pakistan defense establishment and the civilian government are united in support of their decades-old cold war against India. As part of that war they want to regain the control of Afghanistan they lost because of Operation Enduring Freedom.

I think Islamabad's determination to control their neighbor has only increased with the recent discoveries of vast oil and gas reserves and key industrial/ military-use metal lodes in Afghanistan. With development, Afghanistan's fabulous store of natural resources can make the country one of the richest and even a major world power.

As long as the United States was chiefly preoccupied with Iraq, Pakistan's military was content to allow things to bump along in Afghanistan. But once the United States signaled a serious intention to build up Afghanistan's military and civilian government; once the U.S. began a close cooperation with India's external intelligence service, which provided the U.S. defense establishment with considerable evidence about Pakistan's actions against Kabul and the ISAF; and once it was evident to Islamabad that the CIA was not going to neutralize Hamid Karzai, who had allied his government with India's, the targeting of U.S. forces had to be stepped up.

The ISAF assessment tip-toes around the situation:

Indian political and economic influence is increasing in Afghanistan, including significant development efforts and financial investment. In addition, the current Afghan government is perceived by Islamabad to be pro-Indian. While Indian activities largely benefit the Afghan people, increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions and encourage Pakistani countermeasures in Afghanistan or India.

I'd like to know what part of Indian aid is not benefiting the Afghans. And there's no "likely" about it; any doubts that regional tensions are already exacerbated, study the two suicide bombings outside the Indian embassy in Kabul.

No amount of bribing, either from the USA or any other government or agency, is going to change the situation. Pakistan's government will take the bribes -- either in cash, loans, or military equipment -- then continue on as they've done. Why not? They have history to guide their confidence that they can play the WMD blackmail card whenever the NATO countries bring pressure on them. That's what they've been doing since 2001; without a significant change in U.S. policy they'll continue in exactly the same pattern.

Those who assume Pakistan is turning over a new leaf because of several Taliban attacks on the ISI or military facilities need to read B. Raman's crash course on Taliban factions, which he dashed off in May 2009 for Forbes magazine. He wrote in answer to a reader who asked why Taliban attacked the ISI (if the ISI indeed controlled them).

The answer has to do with internal disputes -- with tribes and sub-tribes who're mad at Pakistan's government -- and who're also mad at the USA for helping to prop up the government. (Take special note of Raman's mention of the Lal Masjid massacre.) The tribes in the pay of the ISI who attack ISAF troops are a different story.

Does all this mean there is no actual insurgency in Afghanistan, just a proxy war being fought by Pakistan, and spillovers of tribal rage toward Islamabad? The answer is to first thin the forest of Pakistan's actions in Afghanistan, then see how many trees are left standing.

Things have turned very ominous in recent months because Afghanistan's north, including the region's biggest city, Mazar-e-Sharif, is coming under increasing attack from Taliban, who are bribing unemployed locals to work for them. There is a mystery attached to the situation:

[...] Karzai ... stunned the country in October when he announced that there would be [inquiries] into reports that helicopters had been transporting Taliban fighters to the north, adding that he had known about the action for some time.

It is widely believed that such air transit could only have operated with the knowledge of local and foreign powers who control air traffic. So conspiracy theories blossomed.

People wondered if southern politicians were stirring up the rebellion to undermine their northern rivals, or if international forces were fanning the flames of violence to provide an excuse for staying the country and exploiting its mineral wealth.

The regional head of the Afghan Human Rights Commission, Qazi Same, believes that “invisible hands” may be trying to destabilise the area. But he dismisses as completely illogical the idea that either local or international armed forces are involved,

“They suffer casualties every day. That they try to spread insecurity, logically that’s not believable,” he says. [...]

I agree with Same, but his observations suggest the "invisible hand" belongs to Pakistan. They backed the Taliban's struggle to conquer Mazar-e-Sharif prior to Operation Enduring Freedom. If Taliban had won the city they would have controlled the region, and that would have consolidated Pakistan's hold on the entire country.

If my analysis of the allover situation is correct, it would indicate the U.S. needs a different plan than the stepped-up counterinsurgency operation the ISAF report recommends, or at least a greatly altered plan.

It would also indicate that General McChrystal needs to yell at the top of his lungs, in public if necessary, about a holdover Cold War-era relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan that's getting many U.S. troops killed and injured for no good reason. And wasting billions of U.S. dollars.

There are a few other things the U.S. command could do in the short term to deal more wisely with Pakistan. That would include ditching the uninformed and self-defeating "Afpak" strategy. But I think I've given you enough reading material for one day, so I'll leave further discussion for a subsequent post.

1) Operation Evil Airlift, Wikipedia (See the article for the footnotes.)

The Airlift of Evil refers to the evacuation of thousands of Pakistani military personnel, Afghan sympathizers, and some members of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda from the city of Kunduz during the week before its capture by the forces of the Northern Alliance during the early days of the War in Afghanistan (2001-present).

The idea that the American military had aided the escape of potentially dangerous individuals was politically contentious, and sparked a debate in the western media. The first reference to the term appeared in a column on msnbc.com. It is generally thought that the airlift was an attempt to avoid destabilizing the government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who, although an ally in the War on Terror, had historically supported the Taliban.

In 2008, more details have emerged in Descent into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid:

"One senior (U.S.) intelligence analyst told me, "The request was made by Musharraf to Bush, but Cheney took charge -- a token of who was handling Musharraf at the time. The approval was not shared with anyone at State, including Colin Powell, until well after the event. Musharraf said Pakistan needed to save its dignity and its valued people.

Two planes were involved, which made several sorties a night over several nights. They took off from air bases in Chitral and Gilgit in Pakistan's northern areas, and landed in Kunduz, where the evacuees were waiting on the tarmac.

Certainly hundreds and perhaps as many as one thousand people escaped. Hundreds of ISI officers, Taliban commanders, and foot soldiers belonging to the IMU and al Qaeda personnel boarded the planes.

What was sold as a minor extraction turned into a major air bridge. The frustrated U.S. SOF who watched it from the surrounding high ground dubbed it "Operation Evil Airlift."

Another senior U.S. diplomat told me afterward, "Musharraf fooled us because after we gave approval, the ISI may have run a much bigger operation and got out more people. We just don't know. At the time nobody wanted to hurt Musharraf, and his prestige with the army was at stake. The real question is why Musharraf did not get his men out before. Clearly the ISI was running its own war against the Americans and did not want to leave Afghanistan until the last moment."

Swine flu! Plague! Ukraine presidential politics!

A colleague sent me this November 15 news item from Britain's Daily Express headlined MILLION HIT BY "PLAGUE WORSE THAN SWINE FLU"; she commented, "Always watch the other hand." So naturally I opened the link and read with interest:

A deadly plague could sweep across Europe, doctors fear, after an outbreak of a virus in Ukraine plunged the country and its neighbours into a state of panic.

A cocktail of three flu viruses are reported to have mutated into a single pneumonic plague, which it is believed may be far more dangerous than swine flu. The death toll has reached 189 and more than 1 million people have been infected, most of them in the nine regions of Western Ukraine.

President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko has called in the World Health Organisation and a team of nine specialists are carrying out tests in Kiev and Lviv to identify the virus. Samples have been sent to London for analysis.

President Yushchenko said: “People are dying. The epidemic is killing doctors. This is absolutely inconceivable in the 21st Century."

In a TV interview, the President added: “Unlike similar epidemics in other countries, three causes of serious viral infections came together simultaneously in Ukraine – two seasonal flus and the Californian flu.

“Virologists conclude that this combination of infections may produce an even more aggressive new virus as a result of mutation.”

Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has been touring hospitals where victims are being treated and presidential elections in January could be cancelled.[...]

At that point I could not continue reading due to paroxysms of laughter.

In the effort to get a grip I busied myself with finding recent reports on Ukraine's politics and rooting around in the Pundita archives for an old Anti-war.com article about the dynamic, co-dependent, and oft-warring duo of Yulia Tymoshenko and Viktor Yushchenko.


These I planned to send to the colleague with the following note before I decided to turn it into a post:

Thank you very much for sending the article. However, be careful, be very careful, whenever Viktor Yushchenko is involved. Watch not only the other hand but also behind the back.

Yushy is a Ukrainian oligarch; I think he once threatened to sue anyone who called him a crook over that trifling matter several years ago of $600 million that went missing from the IMF while he headed up Ukraine's central bank. But I digress; he was installed as Ukraine's president in the phony US-backed 'orange' revolution in 2004. His approval rating in Ukraine is around 5% right now and he's fighting for his political life.

Swine flu has been turned into cannon fodder in the latest war between Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, his prime minister and another Ukrainian oligarch with a very colorful career, with Yulia accusing Yushy of trying to use the swine flu outbreak in Ukraine to stall the planned January election, and Yushy accusing Tymoshenko of criminal negligence in the handling of the outbreak.

It gets better, or worse, or simply more complicated, depending on how you want to look at it:

Yushy is in Ukraine's anti-Russia camp, and Yulia has moved into the 'let's be pragmatic camp' with regards Russia. So there's much more at stake here than a national political election because Ukraine is Russia's Line in the Sand when it comes to NATO's meddling in former Soviet countries.

Here comes the knee-slapper: Yushy and Yulia have been doing so much fighting, and between them they've made such a mess of Ukraine's economy, that Viktor Yanukovych might walk off with the presidential election.

Yanukovych was Russia's pick for Ukraine's president against Yushy in 2004 but his people were accused of ballot stuffing to put him in office -- it was really a matter of which camp could stuff the most without being caught -- and so the election was annulled and Yushy was 'elected.'

But this time Moscow is keeping clear of Ukraine's presidential politics, which is making Yanukovych look even better and pumping up his poll numbers. So the question at this moment is whether Yulia has joined with Yushy in calling for a postponement of the election due to circumstances beyond everyone's control such as a new plague.

If you don't see what's so terribly funny about all this, I'm not sure you want to hear the whole story but there are any number of fables that advise to leave well enough alone. And that is the situation I warned about in a 2005 post titled, But Kuchma was our tyrant. I pointed out that Ukraine's president Leonid Kuchma was a perfectly serviceable U.S. puppet for many years who managed to get along with both the European Union and Russia and who pulled Ukraine out of its moribund post-Soviet economy.

But then came the not-so-covert war against Vladimir Putin (Russia's president at the time) staged by the U.S. Department of State and the rest of the Get Russia crowd, which mushroomed after Putin had the bad grace to sack Russia's Oligarchs.

So Kuchma, who got along well with Putin, found himself accused of ordering every political murder that happened in Ukraine and Yushy accused him of selling missiles to Iran. This cleared the deck for Yushy and Yulia to show they could be better U.S. puppets, which included freezing out Putin.

And here we are today, with Washington slowly waking up to the fact that it was idiocy to make an enemy of Russia by meddling in Ukraine. And here is today's Ukrainian presidential politics:

KIEV, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Ukraine's president and prime minister hurled angry accusations at each other on Wednesday over ways of fighting an influenza epidemic, now a major factor in campaigning for a January election in which they are rivals.

A total of 189 people have died in the outbreak, the health ministry said, and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has cancelled political rallies and ordered schools shut to try to curb it.

The toll included 17 deaths from the H1N1 flu, First Deputy Health Minister Vasily Lazorishinets told journalists.

The health scare has caused panic across Ukraine and has become, like other hot issues such as contacts with the International Monetary Fund, a political football between President Viktor Yushchenko and Tymoshenko, both contenders in the Jan. 17 poll for president.

Weighing in against Yushchenko, Tymoshenko told ministers that the President, by failing to approve a law to release $125 million to fight the outbreak, was endangering human life.

"Without the signing of this law, the government can not fight this epidemic today," she said.

"The action of the President ... is an action today against Ukraine. The President will be responsible for every person who is ill today or dies."

Yushchenko, who in late October gave the go-ahead to rises in pensions and the minimum wage in defiance of the IMF and pleas by Tymoshenko, hit back immediately.

Signing a proposed law to release anti-flu funds would lead to new money being printed and a devaluation of the national currency, the hryvnia, he said.

"I will not be the author of such a policy. I don't need to be blackmailed. I have the right of President. I am taking a decision (to veto the bill) and it's taken," Interfax news agency quoted him as saying.

Implying further criticism of Yushchenko, Tymoshenko said Ukraine's economy will undergo an "extremely difficult" period without $3.8 billion from the IMF, which her aides fear would rebound on Kiev's ability to pay for Russian gas.

The Fund refrained from releasing the funds -- part of a $16.4 billion programme to counter the economic crisis -- after Yushchenko signed the minimum wage law into force.

And here's more on that lovely duo, and Ukraine's woes, from Andrew Osborn reporting from Moscow November 15 for the (U.K.) Telegraph:

Apparently keen to curry favour with voters, Viktor Yushchenko, the president, turned a blind eye to the appalling state of Ukraine's public finances and recently approved a 20 per cent hike in wages and pensions last month. But, by ignoring the advice of the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, and Yulia Tymoshenko, his own prime minister, Mr Yushchenko has jeopardised the disbursement of badly-needed IMF funds.

Mr Yushchenko justified the move by saying he was unwilling to solve the country's budget problems "at the expense of pensioners, poor people and the disabled."

But the IMF has now suspended payment of a $3.8 billion loan, arguing that Ukraine needs austerity measures rather than profligacy. Ukraine needed the IMF money to plug gaping holes in its budget.

Five years ago, large-scale protests set up what was supposed to be a pro-Western dream team of Mr Yushchenko and Mrs Tymoshenko. But the duo's friendship has since turned to loathing even though the pair continue jointly to govern the ex-Soviet republic.

The two are now bitter rivals who will face off against each another in a January presidential election. Analysts warn their battle for power appears to be poisoning the country's economic prospects and could interfere again with the supply and transit of gas to the West in the coming winter.

The country's biggest strategic companies are saddled with crippling debts, including the state gas company which has struggled to meet Russian gas payments, only just managing a $500m payment this month.

Mrs Tymoshenko's supporters have accused Mr Yushchenko of raw populism and irresponsibility, intensifying a political standoff that opinion polls show Mr Yushchenko is losing. Polls show he has just 5 per cent support compared to Mrs Tymoshenko's 20 per cent.

Meanwhile the global economic crisis has caused the country's budget deficit to balloon, its inefficient Soviet-era factories to stagger, and international rating agencies have rushed to downgrade their view of economic prospects. The national currency, the hryvnia, has plunged by 60 per cent in a year, foreign direct investment has slowed to a trickle, and bad bank loans have multiplied.

Ironically, all this has left the Kremlin's candidate for the Ukrainian presidency in 2004 – Viktor Yanukovych – with a strong lead in the polls, making him the candidate to beat.[...]

As for that old Anti-war.com report, if memory serves my only complaint about it when I linked to it, in 2005, was that it had nary a word to say about the U.S. Department of State's role in the mess. But you can't find a better introduction to Yulia Tymoshenko and Viktor Yushchenko.

Once you get in the swing of the story, you might pardon my cynicism about the serious matter of plague.

As to those missile sales, reference the pirating of the MV Faina last year, which turned up the ship's very strange cargo. Translation: business as usual in Ukraine.

UPDATE:
Just received this item, which I present with no editorial comment whatsoever:

November 04, 2009
"Authorities Deny Aircraft Are Spraying Aerosol Chemtrails and Forced Medications Over Ukrainian Cities (Martial Law Expected as Mystery Flu Spreads)"

UPDATE 2:
This just in; from the same source as the Nov. 4 report:

November 15, 2009
"Ukraine; Virus Is Mixture Of H1N1 And Parainfluenza, Causes Cardiopulmonary Failure; Indicates BioWeapon"

This time I will comment: The World Health Organization needs to get on the horn and read the riot act to Ukraine's battling politicians before the whole country ends up in the loony bin.