UN: Poverty tripled in Gaza

John Ging, the head of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, told reporters on Thursday that the number of Gazans considerered “abject poor” had tripled to 300,000 this year, equal to one in five Gazans.Ging described the situation in the narrow and overcrowded Palestinian territory as “unbearable” and as a “man-made crisis”, calling on Israel to ease its siege immediately. Full article.

Obama’s war council divided on Afghanistan

Both very bad ideas:

“Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and special Afghan and Pakistan envoy Richard Holbrooke appeared to be leaning toward supporting a troop increase, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions were private. The official, who attended the meeting, based the assessment on the tone and substance of their participation.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Gen. James Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, appeared to be skeptical of troop increases, the official said. Vice President Joe Biden, who attended the meeting, has been reluctant to support a troop increase, favoring a strategy that directly targets al-Qaida fighters who are believed to be hiding in Pakistan.” Full article.

Mullah Omar not in Pakistan, Taliban commander says

A Taliban commander, Hayatullah Khan, told Reuters by telephone that the entire Taliban leadership was in Afghanistan. ‘Pakistan is not safe for us. More of our people have been captured in Pakistan than in Afghanistan so everybody is here including Mullah Omar,’ said Khan, who said he was speaking from Afghanistan, although he declined to be specific. ‘The Americans are making the Quetta shura an excuse for an expansion of their drone strikes to Balochistan, nothing else,’ said Khan. Full article.

Riz Khan – Is Bagram the new Guantanamo?

the incredible andy worthington – thanx for cutting out the b.s. and saying it like it is: detainees are either prisoners of war (refer to the geneva conventions for how to treat them) or criminals (terrorism is a crime) who should be processed thru a court system. the special category of “enemy combatant” was invented by the bush admin to bypass all applicable laws. it should be made obsolete.

Arundhati Roy: Is Democracy Melting?

“The question here, really, is what have we done to democracy? What have we turned it into? What happens once democracy has been used up? When it has been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions has metastasized into something dangerous? What happens now that democracy and the free market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?” (Arundhati Roy) Full article.

MASSIVE REPRESSION IN HONDURAS – 45 DAY STATE OF EMERGENCY

This is an urgent call to activate all political and social emergency networks to organize support for the Honduran people and to further pressure the Obama Administration to withdraw immediately all its economic and military support to Honduras. Just last week, the Pentagon invited the Honduran military – under the control of the coup regime – to continue participating in training exercises with the United States. This is outrageous considering the Honduran military is principally responsible for the widespread human rights abuses taking place in the country since the coup was executed on June 28th. Furthermore, the State Department continues to provide USAID and other funding to NGOs and political parties backing the coup. All aid should be suspended and diplomatic relations and commercial ties should be immediately cut in order to suffocate the regime out of power. Full article.

Fmr. UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter Warns Against “Politically Motivated Hype” on Iran Nuke Program

“Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has a complete inspection regime conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency. It’s not been found to be in noncompliance. And yet, here we are condemning Iran for doing its job, declaring a facility, inviting inspectors in. And the conclusion it’s reached from this? That they’re producing nuclear weapons. This is politically motivated hype designed to create a situation this coming Thursday that will find the United States unable to reach any sort of agreement with Iran about its nuclear program.” Watch interview.

Author Arundhati Roy on the Human Costs of India’s Economic Growth

“What I think is beginning to be very clear now is that we see now that democracy is sort of fused to the free market, or to the idea of the free market. And so, its imagination has been limited to the idea of profit. And democracy, a few years ago, maybe, you know, even twenty-five years ago, was something that, let’s say, a country like America feared, which was why democracies were being toppled all over the place, like in Chile and so on. But now wars are being waged to restore—to place democracy, because democracy serves the free market, and each of the institutions in democracy, like you look at India, you know, whether it’s the Supreme—whether it’s the courts or whether it’s the media or whether it’s all the other institutions of democracy, they’ve been sort of hollowed out, and just their shells have been replaced, and we play out this charade. And it’s much more complicated for people to understand what’s going on, because there’s so much shadow play.” (Arundhati Roy) Watch interview.

From Great Game to Grand Bargain

From Great Game to Grand Bargain – Ending Chaos in Afghanistan and Pakistan
by Barnett R. Rubin and Ahmed Rashid
Foreign Affairs, Nov/Dec 2008

The Great Game is no fun anymore. The term “Great Game” was used by nineteenth-century British imperialists to describe the British-Russian struggle for position on the chessboard of Afghanistan and Central Asia — a contest with a few players, mostly limited to intelligence forays and short wars fought on horseback with rifles, and with those living on the chessboard largely bystanders or victims. More than a century later, the game continues. But now, the number of players has exploded, those living on the chessboard have become involved, and the intensity of the violence and the threats it produces affect the entire globe. The Great Game can no longer be treated as a sporting event for distant spectators. It is time to agree on some new rules.

Seven years after the U.S.-led coalition and the Afghan commanders it supported pushed the leaderships of the Taliban and al Qaeda out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan, an insurgency that includes these and other groups is gaining ground on both the Afghan and the Pakistani sides of the border. Four years after Afghanistan’s first-ever presidential election, the increasingly besieged government of Hamid Karzai is losing credibility at home and abroad. Al Qaeda has established a new safe haven in the tribal agencies of Pakistan, where it is defended by a new organization, the Taliban Movement of Pakistan. The government of Pakistan, beset by one political crisis after another and split between a traditionally autonomous military and assertive but fractious elected leaders, has been unable to retain control of its own territory and population. Its intelligence agency stands accused of supporting terrorism in Afghanistan, which in many ways has replaced Kashmir as the main arena of the still-unresolved struggle between Pakistan and India.

Listen to entire essay by going to this link.

Does the west take the Afghans for fools?

by Charles Ferndale
The News, Sunday, September 27, 2009

The American commander of the Western forces in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, says he needs more troops or the war there will be lost within 12 months. He says also that US/NATO forces should kill fewer Afghans and try harder to win over their hearts and minds. “Hearts and minds” is a dreadful cliché, meaning little. But accepting it for the moment, there is no hope whatever of the Western powers winning over the hearts and minds of a people whom they have never even begun to understand. The only way we can win over their hearts and minds is to pull out of their country. I shall not attempt here to educate people who seem unwilling to learn, but I shall say only what is obvious to most people in the war region.

The fighters opposing western presence in Afghanistan, whom we conveniently call “the Taliban,” do so because they think the war in Afghanistan is evil. They are proud to die fighting against this evil. And, in increasing numbers, they are willing to do so. They are fighting a war of national and cultural liberation from foreign oppressors. What we westerners find it hard to grasp is that there are few things about the west that appeal to Afghans. Even if we possessed the virtues to which we lay claim, they would not want to be like us. They do not admire us. So winning over their hearts and minds would require us to leave them alone, which, as I understand it, would be unthinkable for our geopolitical strategists.

Afghans are not easily fooled; they know we wish to tame them and turn them into our obedient servants. Not only do they not like our culture, but to accept it would require them to give up their own culture. It would require us to persuade them that the codes by which they have lived for thousands of years are bad, while the codes of aggressive, opportunistic, dishonest, murderous unbelievers, who are their historical enemies, are better. We could only succeed in this venture by destroying the soul of the Afghan people; by cowing them into submission. They would rather die. Afghans have seen armed opportunists before and they are a proud people. They really do prefer death to dishonour, which is one reason why no one has ever conquered them.

They see our presence in their country as evil, for many obvious reasons. We are a non-Muslim occupying armed force which it is the religious duty of every true Muslim to oppose; we are killing thousands of Afghans (most of whom are unarmed) for no reason acceptable to the families and fellow nationals of those we kill; we are maiming many thousands more; we are killing and maiming their animals; we are destroying their farms and livelihoods; we are destroying their homes; we are imprisoning and torturing their people; we have put power back into the hands of the very brutes from whom Mullah Omer liberated the country (almost bloodlessly) from 1994 to early 2001 (until we destroyed his power and brought to the fore all the worst people in Afghanistan); we are trying to impose upon them a political system that is entirely alien to their culture and that threatens the foundations that supported their culture for hundreds of years; we are corrupt liars who preach at them for their allegedly being corrupt liars; we kill them in the name of false ideals and false promises; we have done nothing whatever to improve the lives of most Afghans, while our industrialists have enriched themselves at the expense of the poor there; we refuse to give an honest answer to the question of why we are there at all, but talk rubbish about protecting our streets from terrorism; Westerners “tending to the needs” of Afghans in Kabul earn at least $300 a day (‘danger money’, though they are not in danger), while Afghans starve and die on less than $1 a day. In Afghanistan, the gap between our precepts and our practices is as tragically wide as is the gap between our incomes and theirs. Afghans are now starving to death, and well over a third of the population is suffering from malnutrition and its attendant diseases. Billions of dollars a month go into Afghanistan and most of it goes straight back out again into the bank accounts of the affluent.

The Afghan war is an excuse to make some people very rich indeed. Almost no money reaches poor Afghans. We are dangerous hypocrites destabilising the region. All this is obvious to all Afghans. They are perceptive people. The means normally used in our own cultures to deceive the public are unavailable to most Afghans. Few read. Few have televisions sets. Few have radios. All they know is that they are fighting the most technologically advanced army in history; it is as heartless as it is advanced. Since the western armies arrived in 2001, pretending to be liberators, thousands of Afghans have died and every aspect of life has got much worse. These are some of the reasons why our military activities are seen as evil by an increasing number of Afghans.

Meanwhile, General McChrystal says he wants more troops, so as to kill fewer Afghans! And he wants the soldiers to learn Pashto, so as to win over the hearts and minds of the people they are used to oppress! God preserve the Afghans from such insultingly, simple-minded dishonesty. Fortunately, few Afghans will have heard this nonsense. If they heard it they would laugh bitterly. The only people who appear unable to see through this sham are western leaders, perhaps because they are party to it.

The writer has degrees from the Royal College of Art, Oxford University, and the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London. He divides his time between the UK and Pakistan. Email: charlesferndale@yahoo.co.uk

Pakistan Army Said to Be Linked to Swat Killings

Pakistan’s military operations against the Taliban in Swat, begun in May under public pressure from the United States, has been hailed by Washington as a showcase effort of the army’s newfound resolve to defeat the militants. The American ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, visited Mingora, the biggest town in Swat, last week, becoming the first senior American official to go to Swat since the army took over.Now, concerns over the army’s methods in the area threaten to further taint Washington’s association with the military, cooperation that has been questioned in Congress and has been politically unpopular in Pakistan. Full article.