Just Foreign Policy News
January 7, 2011
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A "Pledge of Resistance" to Defend Social Security (and Defund the Empire)
If we had a "Pledge of Resistance" to defend Social Security, like the "Pledge of Resistance" that pledged to resist a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua, much of the support for cutting Social Security benefits would likely evaporate. Such a Pledge could force a national debate in which proposed cuts to domestic spending and proposed military spending are examined on the same chalkboard.
The deficit commission co-chairs’ proposal to cut Social Security by lowering the cost of living adjustment would save $70 billion by 2020. By comparison, drawing down U.S. troops in Afghanistan to where they were when Obama took office could save $150 billion by 2014.
http://www.truth-out.org/a-pledge-resistance-defend-social-security-and-defund-empire66591
Rep. Barbara Lee: More Troops Not the Answer in Afghanistan
Barbara Lee announces plans to reintroduce legislation to limit funding in Afghanistan to the safe and orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops and military contractors; says she will work with colleagues to hold the President accountable for a significant July reduction in U.S. military presence.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-barbara-lee/more-troops-not-the-answe_b_805356.html
Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) The national laywers’ council in Tunisia said 95% of Tunisia’s lawyers answered a strike call to protest a police crackdown on demonstrations in support of protestors against unemployment, AFP reports. The council last week condemned the "unprecedented" use of force to "silence the lawyers who are determined to defend freedom of expression." Lawyers were beaten in several cities, the council said. A popular rapper and two popular bloggers were reportedly arrested Thursday; the three took part in May in an anti-censorship campaign in which they denounced the blocking of Internet services by Tunisia’s censors.
2) Retiring Mossad chief Meir Dagan does not believe Iran will have nuclear capability before 2015, Haaretz reports. In a summary given to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Dagan said Iran was a long way from being able to produce nuclear weapons. The Israeli intelligence community’s assessments of Iran’s nuclear capability have changed during Dagan’s tenure, Haaretz notes. In 2003, Israeli intelligence officials thought Iran would have its first bomb by 2007. In 2007, they thought it would be 2009, and a year later they put it at 2011. Now the date has moved to 2015. These adjustments were not the result of mistaken evaluations, but due to the difficulties Iran has encountered in advancing its program, largely because of the Mossad’s efforts, Haaretz claims.
3) Secretary of Defense Gates unveiled a proposed five-year budget plan that would cut tens of thousands of troops from the Army and Marine Corps, and eliminate two key weapons systems, McClatchy reports. But the proposal still foresees military spending growing by three percent next year, to $553 billion, not including spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Adjusted for inflation, the Defense Department budget has risen 65 percent over the past decade, McClatchy notes. But Sen. McCain complained that the budget recommends less than 1% growth above inflation. Under Gates’ proposal, the Army and Marines would shrink, but both would still be larger than when Gates assumed his post four years ago. "These projected reductions are based on an assumption that America’s ground combat commitment in Afghanistan would be significantly reduced by the end of 2014 in accordance with the president’s strategy," Gates said.
4) The U.S. has decided against renewing a $215 million Millenium Challenge aid program in Honduras, AP reports. No reason was given.
5) The State Department’s rhetorical embrace of "online democracy" has backfired, writes Evgeny Morozov in Foreign Policy. The State Department’s online democratizing efforts have fallen prey to the same problems that plagued Bush’s Freedom Agenda. By aligning themselves with Internet companies and organizations, Clinton’s digital diplomats have convinced their enemies abroad that Internet freedom is another Trojan horse for American imperialism. The state of web freedom in countries like China, Iran, and Russia was far from perfect before Clinton’s initiative, but at least it was an issue independent of those countries’ fraught relations with the US.
Israel/Palestine
6) Israeli troops shot dead a 67-year-old Palestinian civilian in his bed in Hebron, the BBC reports. Reuters reported that the man, Amr Qawasme, was shot and killed in his bed when Israeli soldiers broke into his home before dawn. His wife, Sobheye, said she heard several shots fired and later saw her husband lying in a pool of blood. The Israeli army has ordered an investigation.
7) Around 700 people attended a memorial march in the West Bank to honor a woman who died after being tear-gassed by Israeli troops, AFP reports from Bilin. Many mourners wore stickers in the shape of a large yellow star with eight points and the word "Palestine" in the middle, which was clearly meant to look like the yellow cloth star the Nazis forced Jews to wear in World War II. Organiser Rateb Abu Rahma said the demonstrators wanted to send a message to the army that they did not want to be treated as the Germans treated the Jews during the war. "This fence is illegal – it’s supposed to be removed," protester Mohamad Khatib told AFP. "There is a High Court decision that the wall is illegal and these soldiers are coming here to kill people only for a piece of metal."
Afghanistan
8) It is unclear what effect, if any, the sending of more than 1000 additional Marines to Afghanistan will have on the debate on the number of forces to be withdrawn in July, the New York Times says. "The coming debate is bigger than this," said war supporter Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. "The issue will be, do we reduce in the second half of the year by 1,000, 5,000 or 20,000?"
Pakistan
9) A key political party rejoined the Pakistani government, salvaging the coalition of Prime Minister Gilani, the New York Times reports. The price extracted included cancellation of moves pushed by the US and IMF to reduce fuel subsidies and increase tax collection. Secretary of State Clinton criticized the moves.
Haiti
10) UN relief agencies defended their role in the much criticized aid effort after Haiti’s earthquake, AFP reports. Several NGOs, including Oxfam, have criticized international aid for providing too little help too slowly. A spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said malnutrition had not worsened and that for some of the 725,000 children who received educational support, it marked the first time they went to school.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Thousands of lawyers across Tunisia on strike
Thousands of lawyers across Tunisia on strike, AFP, Thu Jan 6, 2:28 pm ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110106/wl_africa_afp/tunisiapoliticsunrest_20110106192905
Tunis – Thousands of lawyers in Tunisia went on strike Thursday, a week after a police crackdown on demonstrations they staged in support of protestors against unemployment in the tightly-controlled country.
Trade unionists said strikes, protests, even attempted suicides also took place in other parts of the country.
In a related development, police arrested a rapper and two bloggers, their families and friends announced, but could not say why or where they were being detained.
The strikes come amid growing unrest following the death of a jobless 26-year-old university graduate who had set himself alight last month in the central town of Sidi Bouzid to protest his lack of opportunities.
"Ninety-five percent" of the country’s 8,000 lawyers across the country answered the strike call issued by the national council of their order, Bar president Abderrazak Kilani told AFP.
[…] The national council had called the strike after lawyers across the country staged actions on New Year’s Eve in support of residents of Sidi Bouzid, a centre of mass protests against unemployment since December 19.
The council last week condemned the "unprecedented" use of force to "silence the lawyers who are determined to defend freedom of expression and the rights of Sidi Bouzid and other regions that are devoid of jobs and dignity."
Lawyers were "beaten, chased and insulted" in Tunis, Grombalia, Sousse, Monastir, Mahdia, Gafsa et Jendouba. One lawyer had his nose broken and another had an eye seriously injured, the council said.
[…] Most schools were also on strike Thursday in Sidi Bouzid but no clashes were reported in a city still in shock a day after the funeral of Bouaziz, unionist Ali Zari told AFP.
The student, who was reduced to selling vegetables for a living, had tried in vain to plead his cause to the local governor, who was later dismissed by Ben Ali.
Late Wednesday a woman and her three children threatened to take their own lives unless she was given a job and a home. Zari said the new governor met her.
To the south in Jbeniana, near Sfax, police broke up a students’ protest. Trade unionists reported one suicide and several attempts.
In Regueb, also near Sfax, jobless Hamed Slimi, 26, threatened to electrocute himself on a utility pole, denouncing corruption and bias in the jobs market. He was reportedly promised a job following his threat.
In the mining town of Metlaoui, which was already hit by social unrest in 2008, unemployed youth Mosbah Al Jawhari set himself on fire and was rushed to a hospital in Tunis, a resident told AFP on condition of anonymity.
And in central-eastern Chebba, construction worker Mohamed Slimane, a university educated 52-year-old father of four, hanged himself on Tuesday, a witness said. He reportedly suffered from a kidney ailment and was desperate for medical treatment and food for his family.
Rapper Hamada Ben Amor, 22, better known in Tunisia as "The General", was arrested at his parents’ home in Sfax at 5:30 am (0430 GMT), his brother Hamdi told AFP. He became famous after his song "President, your people is dead" made it to the Internet which is being used by thousands of youths for its possibilities to express dissent.
Popular bloggers Slim Amamou and El Aziz Amami were also arrested on Thursday, one of their friends, government opponent and journalist Sofiene Chourabi said.
[…] The three took part in May in an anti-censorship campaign with other Internet users in which they denounced the blocking of Internet services by Tunisia’s censors. All arrests could not immediately be confirmed by government or independent sources.
2) Outgoing Mossad chief: Iran won’t have nuclear capability before 2015
Meir Dagan tells Knesset committee that Iran’s nuclear program has been set back several years after a series of malfunctions.
Yossi Melman, Haaretz, 07.01.11
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/outgoing-mossad-chief-iran-won-t-have-nuclear-capability-before-2015-1.335656
Meir Dagan, who retired from his post as Mossad chief on Thursday after eight years, does not believe Iran will have nuclear capability before 2015. In a summary given to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Dagan said Iran was a long way from being able to produce nuclear weapons, following a series of failures that had set its program back by several years.
[…] The former Mossad chief had said on various occasions in the past that Israel should go to war only if attacked, or if in immediate danger of survival.
Dagan concluded his term saying Iran was still far from being capable of producing nuclear weapons and that a series of malfunctions had put off its nuclear goal for several years. Therefore, he said, Iran will not get hold of the bomb before 2015 approximately.
[…] Dagan’s term centered around two main issues: the Iranian nuclear program; and the assassinations of Hezbollah and Hamas leaders and Iranian scientists, most if not all of which have been attributed to the Mossad.
The Israeli intelligence community’s assessments of Iran’s nuclear capability have changed during Dagan’s tenure. In 2003, Israeli intelligence officials thought Iran would have its first bomb by 2007. In 2007, they thought it would be 2009, and a year later they put it at 2011. Now the date has moved to 2015. These adjustments were not the result of mistaken evaluations, but due to the difficulties Iran has encountered in advancing its program, largely because of the Mossad’s efforts.
3) Despite talk of cuts, Pentagon spending still going up
Nancy A. Youssef, McClatchy Newspapers, January 07, 2011 08:04:23 AM
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/01/06/106312/gates-budget-plan-would-shrink.html
Washington – Amid growing calls for government spending cuts, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates unveiled Thursday a proposed five-year budget plan that would cut tens of thousands of troops from the Army and Marine Corps, eliminate two key weapons systems, and raise the cost of health insurance for some military retirees.
The proposal still foresees military spending growing by three percent next year, to $553 billion, not including spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the plan would trim about $78 billion from anticipated spending over the next five years, with even greater cuts coming after 2015, when the size of the Army and Marine Corps would shrink by 47,000 troops – primarily in response to the anticipated U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan at the end of 2014.
[…] The budget Gates outlined would mark the 14th year in a row that Pentagon spending has increased. Pentagon spending has more than doubled in 10 years and is projected to rise to $620.2 billion by 2015; in fiscal year 2001, the defense budget was $291.2 billion. Adjusted for inflation, the Defense Department budget has risen 65 percent over the past decade.
Even that may not be enough for Republicans in Congress, however. "I am concerned that this budget proposal for the Defense Department recommends less than one percent real growth in the Departments base budget over the next five years," said Arizona Sen. John McCain, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, in a statement after Gates briefed him on the plan. "I look forward to receiving additional information to fully evaluate the impact of the administration’s defense budget request on the missions and operations of our military forces."
Other analysts said that if the military budget were ever to be cut seriously, it would require the U.S. to rethink its military strategy. "The administration continues say that the purpose of the U.S. military is not the defense of the United Sates but of the whole world," said Christopher Preble, the director of foreign policy studies at the CATO Institute, a libertarian policy organization in Washington. "I think it is worth asking whether the American taxpayer is willing to continue footing for the world’s security."
[…] Under Gates’ proposal, the Army would shrink by 27,000 starting in fiscal year 2015; there are currently 569,000 soldiers. Between 15,000 and 20,000 Marines would be cut from the current complement of 202,000.
Despite those cuts, both the Army and Marine Corps would be larger than they were when Gates assumed his Pentagon post four years ago under President George W. Bush.
"These projected reductions are based on an assumption that America’s ground combat commitment in Afghanistan would be significantly reduced by the end of 2014 in accordance with the president’s strategy," Gates said.
[…]
4) US will not extend Millennium aid in Honduras
Freddy Cuevas, Associated Press, Thursday, January 6, 2011; 4:42 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/06/AR2011010604326.html
Tegucigalpa, Honduras – The U.S. has decided against renewing a $215 million aid program for farming and infrastructure in Honduras, a decision the government of President Porfirio Lobo said it lamented.
The U.S. Embassy did not give a reason in a statement announcing the decision, but Honduran officials claimed Thursday it was because of corruption that occurred under the government of former President Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted in June 2009 coup.
The five-year program managed by the U.S.-funded Millennium Challenge Corporation trained 17,000 farmers, created 31,396 rural jobs and improved a key highway and 500 kilometers (310 miles) of rural roads. It ended in 2010.
The U.S. temporarily suspended the program in 2009 to protest the coup, but restored it after Lobo’s government took office in January 2010, replacing an interim government that took after soldiers forced Zelaya into exile in a dispute over changing the Honduran constitution. Lobo was elected in regular November 2009 elections that has been scheduled before the coup.
[…] The embassy statement did not mention any corruption. Instead, it praised "the many positive steps that the government of President Lobo has taken in his brief administration." The statement called the implementation of the Millennium program in Honduras a success, calling it one of the "best in the world."
The embassy also emphasized that the U.S. would continue to provide considerable aid to Honduras through other programs for education, nutrition and agriculture. The U.S. Treasury Department is also helping Honduras develop a more transparent government budget.
[…]
5) Freedom.gov
Why Washington’s support for online democracy is the worst thing ever to happen to the Internet.
Evgeny Morozov, Foreign Policy, January/February 2011
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/02/freedomgov
A year ago this January, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the stage at Washington’s Newseum to tout an idea that her State Department had become very taken with: the Internet’s ability to spread freedom and democracy. "We want to put these tools in the hands of people who will use them to advance democracy and human rights," she told the crowd, drawn from both the buttoned-up Beltway and chronically underdressed Silicon Valley.
Call it the Internet Freedom Agenda: the notion that technology can succeed in opening up the world where offline efforts have failed. That Barack Obama’s administration would embrace such an idea was not surprising; the U.S. president was elected in part on the strength of his online organizing and fundraising juggernaut. The 2009 anti-government protests in Iran, Moldova, and China’s Xinjiang region – all abetted to varying degrees by communications technology – further supported the notion that the Internet was, as Clinton said in her speech, "a critical tool for advancing democracy."
A year later, however, the Internet Freedom Agenda can boast of precious few real accomplishments; if anything, it looks more and more like George W. Bush’s lower-tech "Freedom Agenda," his unrealized second-term push for democratization across the broader Middle East. Clinton’s effort has certainly generated plenty of positive headlines and gimmicky online competitions, but not much else. In July, the New York Times Magazine lavished almost 5,000 words on a profile of Jared Cohen and Alec Ross, the State Department’s digital-diplomacy wunderkinds. But it’s hard to say what exactly they succeeded in doing, beyond getting in trouble for tweeting from Syria about how delicious the frappuccinos were. The only big move that the State Department did make was granting $1.5 million to Falun Gong-affiliated technologists based in the United States to help circumvent censorship – a step that instead angered Falun Gong’s numerous supporters in Washington, who had originally asked for $4 million.
Elsewhere, the State Department’s enthusiasm for technology has surpassed its understanding of it. Early last year, in an effort to help Iranian dissidents, the U.S. government granted an export license to the company behind Haystack, a privacy-protecting and censorship-circumventing technology then being touted in the media as a revolutionary tool for Internet freedom. But Haystack proved to be poorly designed and massively insecure in its early tests in Iran, putting its users – the democracy advocates it was supposed to protect – in even greater danger. It was summarily shut down in September. Since October 2009, the State Department has been working to launch an anonymous SMS tip line to help law-abiding Mexicans share information about drug cartels. Like Haystack, it attracted plenty of laudatory coverage, but it succumbed to (still ongoing) delays when it ran into a predictable problem: Ensuring the anonymity of text messages is not easy anywhere, let alone when dealing with Ciudad Juárez’s corrupt police force.
But the Internet Freedom Agenda’s woes extend far beyond a few botched projects. The State Department’s online democratizing efforts have fallen prey to the same problems that plagued Bush’s Freedom Agenda. By aligning themselves with Internet companies and organizations, Clinton’s digital diplomats have convinced their enemies abroad that Internet freedom is another Trojan horse for American imperialism.
Clinton went wrong from the outset by violating the first rule of promoting Internet freedom: Don’t talk about promoting Internet freedom. Her Newseum speech was full of analogies to the Berlin Wall and praise for Twitter revolutions – vocabulary straight out of the Bush handbook. To governments already nervous about a wired citizenry, this sounded less like freedom of the Internet than freedom via the Internet: not just a call for free speech online, but a bid to overthrow them by way of cyberspace.
The lessons of the first Freedom Agenda should have been instructive. After youth-movement-driven "color revolutions" swept Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan from 2003 to 2005, Bush openly bragged about his support for such groups and vowed to help the new pro-democracy wave go global. The backlash was immediate. Countries like Russia, which had previously been relatively blasé about such activism, panicked, blocking foreign funding to civil society groups and NGOs and creating their own pro-government youth movements and civil society organizations. The end result in many countries was a net loss for democracy and freedom.
The Internet Freedom Agenda has similarly backfired. The state of web freedom in countries like China, Iran, and Russia was far from perfect before Clinton’s initiative, but at least it was an issue independent of those countries’ fraught relations with the United States. Google, Facebook, and Twitter were hardly unabashed defenders of free speech, but they were nevertheless emissaries, however accidentally, of a more open and democratic vision of the Internet. Authoritarian governments didn’t treat them as a threat, viewing them largely as places where their citizens chose to check their email, post status updates, and share pasta recipes. Most governments, China being the obvious exception, did not bother to build any barriers to them.
But as the State Department forged closer ties with Silicon Valley, it vastly complicated the tech companies’ inadvertent democracy promotion. The department organized private dinners for Internet CEOs and shuttled them around the world as part of "technology delegations." Cohen, who recently left Foggy Bottom to work for Google, called Facebook "one of the most organic tools for democracy promotion the world has ever seen" and famously asked Twitter to delay planned maintenance work to keep the service up and running during Iran’s 2009 Green Revolution.
Today, foreign governments see the writing on the virtual wall. Democratic and authoritarian states alike are now seeking "information sovereignty" from American companies, especially those perceived as being in bed with the U.S. government. Internet search, social networking, and even email are increasingly seen as strategic industries that need to be protected from foreign control. Russia is toying with spending $100 million to build a domestic alternative to Google. Iranian authorities are considering a similar idea after banning Gmail last February, and last summer launched their own Facebook clone called Velayatmadaran, named after followers of the velayaat, or supreme leader. Even Turkey, a U.S. ally, has plans to provide a government-run email address to every Turkish citizen to lessen the population’s dependence on U.S. providers.
Where the bureaucrats and diplomats who touted the Internet Freedom Agenda went wrong was in thinking that Washington could work with Silicon Valley without people thinking that Silicon Valley was a tool of Washington. They bought into the technologists’ view of the Internet as an unbridled, limitless space that connects people without regard to borders or physical constraints. At its best, that remains true, but not when governments get involved.
The Internet is far too valuable to become an agent of Washington’s digital diplomats. The idea that the U.S. government can advance the cause of Internet freedom by loudly affirming its commitment to it – especially when it hypocritically attempts to shut down projects like WikiLeaks – is delusional. The best way to promote the goals behind the Internet Freedom Agenda may be not to have an agenda at all.
Israel/Palestine
6) West Bank civilian dies in Israeli army raid in Hebron
BBC, 7 January 2011 Last updated at 05:19 ET
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12133918
Israeli troops have shot dead a 67-year-old Palestinian man by mistake in an operation to arrest members of the Islamist militant organisation, Hamas.
The pre-dawn raid happened in Hebron, in the West Bank, a day after six supporters of Hamas had been released from jail by the Palestinian Authority. The man who died was a neighbour of one of the Hamas men.
[…] Reports from the scene of the shooting said it took place in a bedroom on the building’s first floor. The Reuters news agency has reported that the man, Amr Qawasme, was shot and killed in his bed when soldiers broke into his home before dawn.
His wife, Sobheye, said she heard several shots fired and later saw her husband lying in a pool of blood. "I was praying when they entered. I do not know how they opened the door. They put their hand to my mouth and a rifle to my head," she told Reuters. "I was shocked. They did not allow me to talk. I asked them, "What did you do?" They asked me to shut up."
The IDF said in a statement: "A Palestinian man who was present in one of the terrorist’s homes was killed. The IDF regrets the outcome of the incident." The army has ordered an investigation.
[…]
7) West Bank marchers mourn tear-gassed woman
Yoav Lemmer, AFP, Fri Jan 7, 12:42 pm ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110107/wl_mideast_afp/israelpalestiniansconflictbarrierbilin_20110107174305
Bilin, Palestinian Territories – Around 700 people, many of them women, attended a memorial march in the West Bank on Friday to honour a woman who died after being tear-gassed by Israeli troops, organisers said.
The march took place in the West Bank village of Bilin, exactly a week after the collapse and subsequent death of Jawaher Abu Rahma, a 36-year-old villager who had been at the weekly protest against the vast separation barrier Israel is building across the occupied West Bank.
Abu Rahma died after inhaling massive amounts of tear gas fired at demonstrators.
The Israeli army has rejected the Palestinian account of her death, arguing that her death was probably because of a pre-existing medical complaint. The military is currently conducting its own investigation.
Many mourners wore stickers in the shape of a large yellow star with eight points and the word "Palestine" in the middle, which was clearly meant to look like the yellow cloth star the Nazis forced Jews to wear in World War II.
Organiser Rateb Abu Rahma said the demonstrators wanted to send a message to the army that they did not want to be treated as the Germans treated the Jews during the war. "We used this star because we want to say to the Israeli army: don’t make a new holocaust for us like that which happened to the Jews," he told AFP.
With expectations of a confrontation higher than usual after last week’s violence, there was a large number of Israeli forces awaiting the marchers near the barrier, an AFP correspondent at the scene said, who counted some 20 jeeps. As the protesters approached, some of them started cutting through the fence with wire cutters, prompting the army to fire foul-smelling water and tear gas at them, he said.
Medical sources said 10 women had to receive medical attention after they inhaled tear gas.
"This fence is illegal – it’s supposed to be removed," protester Mohamad Khatib told AFP. "There is a High Court [ie, the Israeli supreme court – JFP] decision that the wall is illegal and these soldiers are coming here to kill people only for a piece of metal."
[…]
Afghanistan
8) More Than 1,000 Extra Marines To Be Deployed in Afghanistan
Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times, January 6, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/world/asia/07troops.html
Washington – The United States will send more than 1,000 additional Marines to Afghanistan this month to try to solidify progress in the south before troop reductions begin in July, American military officials said Thursday.
The majority of the forces will be sent to Helmand Province, where 20,000 Marines have made gains against the Taliban but where fighting remains intense in insurgent strongholds like Sangin. American commanders are under pressure to quell the violence and sustain their gains in the first six months of 2011, when the White House will assess whether a troop increase for the nearly decade-old war is working.
[…] It is unclear what effect, if any, the additional Marines will have on the debate on the number of forces to be withdrawn in July.
"The coming debate is bigger than this," said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a military analyst and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "The issue will be, do we reduce in the second half of the year by 1,000, 5,000 or 20,000?"
[…]
Pakistan
9) Key Party Rejoins Pakistan’s Coalition
Salman Masood and J. David Goodman, New York Times, January 7, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/08/world/asia/08pakistan.html
Islamabad, Pakistan – A key political party rejoined the government Friday, salvaging the fragile coalition of Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, but exacting a high price: a halt to economic reforms meant to strengthen Pakistan’s collapsing economy.
The bargain underscored an increasingly urgent problem for both Pakistan and its internationals backers, in particular the United States, which has pushed the government to boost its tax collection and make hard economic choices to ensure the nation’s solvency. If the government wants to survive, the week’s turmoil indicated, that may be all but impossible.
Pakistan, then, may remain dependent on infusions of international assistance, including billions in military and civilian aid from the United States, even as less than 2 percent of Pakistanis pay income tax, including many wealthy members of government, making Pakistan’s tax revenues among the lowest in the world.
The effort to increase tax revenues and to end costly subsidies for energy was strongly pushed by American officials and the International Monetary Fund, as a way to close gapping budget shortfalls. The need for reforms was not just a matter of economics, but also a way for the government to expand services and increase its presence in the lives of Pakistanis as the country faces a rising tide of militancy.
The party, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, or MQM, broke with Mr. Gilani’s ruling Pakistan Peoples Party last weekend in part to protest fuel price increases and other proposed reforms, setting off a political crisis for the prime minister and President Asif Ali Zardari. This week opposition parties echoed the call to reverse the price increases and other reforms and threatened to bring down the government with a no-confidence vote.
In his effort to lure the MQM back to his coalition, Mr. Gilani extended further economic concessions in a meeting with party officials Friday, saying his government would put off efforts to increase tax collection.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized the reversal of the fuel price increases and proposed tax reforms, saying on Thursday that it was "a mistake to reverse the progress that was being made to provide a stronger economic base for Pakistan."
[…] But the move was apparently a precondition to regain the support of the MQM. After days of frantic negotiations, Raza Haroon, a senior party leader, announced Friday that his party would rejoin the coalition for the sake of democracy and the country.
[…]
Haiti
10) UN defends Haiti quake relief efforts
AFP, January 7, 2011
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110107/wl_afp/haitiquake1yearreliefun_20110107190207
Geneva – UN relief agencies on Friday defended their role in the much criticised aid effort after Haiti’s devastating earthquake nearly a year ago, saying they had faced "apocalyptic" scenes. "We had to work on a kind of apocalyptic ground, a disaster. That’s why I think we did our job well with regard to the situation," said Elisabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Several non governmental organisations have criticised international aid over the past year for providing too little help too slowly. The charity Oxfam said this week that the recovery effort in the impoverished Caribbean country was put on hold by "a year of indecision" after 250,000 people were killed and 1.9 million displaced by the January earthquake. It blamed many rich nation donors for following their own aid priorities with little effective coordination.
Byrs told journalists that the emergency response by humanitarian agencies and NGOs was "good and fast" and insisted that their "life-saving" work should not be underestimated after Haiti’s frail public services were virtually destroyed by the tremor in the capital Port-au-Prince.
[…] "If there is one message that UNICEF wants to convey it is that the international response to humanitarian emergency is never perfect and Haiti is no exception," said Marixie Mercado, a spokeswoman for the UN Children’s Fund. "But this response has saved lifes and improved many. The crisis if far from over," she told journalists.
Mercado noted that malnutrition had not worsened despite the circumstances and that for some of the 725,000 children who received educational support, it marked the first time they went to school.
The World Food Programme underlined that four million Haitians were receiving food deliveries six weeks after the tremor. WFP spokeswoman Emilia Casella said there was evidence that "a nutritional crisis… was avoided," in the densely populated earthquake-hit areas.
[…]
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