Just Foreign Policy News
April 26, 2010
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Reuters video: Japanese protest U.S. base
Japanese protesters in Tokyo demonstrate against the relocation of a U.S. military base on the island of Okinawa.
http://jp.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=77378494&videoChannel=-9993
Video: Bill Maher Challenges "Tea Parties" To Oppose the War
Cut the national debt? Maher proposes reducing military spending so that the U.S. only spends as much on the military as the next 8 countries combined, instead of the next 15 countries combined. "…and you know what America’s big stupid boat is? It’s our empire. We have an empire. We have half a million of our troops in other people’s countries all over the world…"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/24/bill-maher-to-tea-baggers_n_550430.html
Urge Congress to End the War in Afghanistan
Urge your representatives to support the Feingold-McGovern-Jones bill for a timetable for military withdrawal.
If we can get 100 co-sponsors in the House in the next few weeks, we may able to get on a vote on a withdrawal timetable when the House considers the supplemental.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/feingold-mcgovern
Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) More than 90,000 Okinawans rallied Sunday to oppose the relocation of a US air base on their island, the New York Times reports. The demonstrators demanded that Japan scrap a 2006 agreement with the US to move the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station to a different site on the island. Okinawan politicians and local news media have described the Japanese government’s emerging plan as a modified version of the 2006 agreement. But on Sunday, local leaders told demonstrators they rejected any plan that kept the air base on Okinawa.
2) Writing for the Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel urges support for Representative McGovern’s bill requiring the President to establish a timetable for military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Rep. McGovern expresses concern that U.S. policy in Afghanistan, like U.S. policy in Vietnam before, is frozen in place by concerns about "credibility" and "saving face," even though it’s obvious that what the U.S. is doing isn’t making Americans safer or helping people in Afghanistan. McGovern notes that the U.S. could do more with less to promote "security" both in the U.S. and Afghanistan by creating jobs and improving education.
3) Plans to spend more than half of Afghanistan’s national income on military and police are clearly unsustainable, notes Mark Weisbrot in the Guardian, so it’s no wonder that many in Afghanistan are looking for a way out of the conflict. But a rebellion is also growing in the U.S. Congress
4) U.S. decision-making in Afghanistan has not been the result of a meaningful democratic process, writes Steve Weissman in Roll Call. President Obama dispatched more than 50,000 additional troops to Afghanistan with essentially no legislative debate. This silence is amazing because it is widely accepted that past administrations, acting without Congressional input, made huge mistakes in America’s last two major wars. each, there was a sense that Congress could have done more to test flawed policy assumptions and hold decision-makers accountable. Yet despite different concerns about Afghanistan policy on both sides of the aisle, Congress has been re-enacting its performances in Vietnam and Iraq. Hearings have become a way of evading Congressional responsibility, say some Democratic staff: "People are unclear where they want to stand, they want to wait and see. Hearings are a good way!" "Many Members made [critical] statements at the hearing that they can spin later as saying they offered criticism." "People don’t want to own it. The default is to ‘express concern.’" "Members are on the fence in practice. It’s better if they are forced to vote."
5) Afghan protesters torched NATO supply vehicles in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday, hours after allegations emerged that U.S. and Afghan troops had killed three civilians, the Washington Post reports. The demonstration occurred in Logar province after a nighttime joint patrol of U.S. Special Operations forces and Afghan soldiers fatally shot three people and arrested two others. Military operations at night are deeply unpopular, and Afghan officials have called for them to stop.
Israel/Palestine
6) Israel’s main opposition party said the Israeli government has quietly frozen approval of Jewish housing projects in East Jerusalem to heal a rift with Washington and restart peace talks, Reuters reports. "All of the work of the Jerusalem district planning committee has been frozen completely, except for the veteran neighborhoods," said Roni Bar-On of the Kadima party. He said he was using the term "veteran neighborhoods" to refer to areas of Jerusalem that were under Israel’s control before it captured East Jerusalem in 1967. [If true, it would be a significant accomplishment for the Obama Administration’s diplomatic efforts, showing that US pressure on Israel is feasible – JFP.]
7) Israeli troops shot and wounded three Palestinians and a Maltese woman in Gaza during a protest near the border with Israel, AFP reports. The four were shot after they entered a 300-meter – "no-go" zone declared by Israel on the Gaza side of the frontier. The ban prevents Gaza farmers from using the land.
Afghanistan
8) A Rand study suggests that counterinsurgencies with Afghanistan’s characteristics are generally not won by the counterinsurgents, the Christian Science Monitor reports. Factors that favor the Taliban include receiving sanctuary and support in another country, learning to be more discriminating in targeting their attacks, and fighting a government that’s both weak and reliant on direct external support.
Iran
9) Iran has agreed to give the U.N. nuclear monitoring agency greater inspection and monitoring rights to a sensitive site where it is enriching uranium to higher levels, AP reports. Diplomats said Iran agreed to some – but not all – of the oversight the IAEA had asked for. "They have not agreed to the full measures sought by the agency but enough so that the agency would be happy," a diplomat told AP.
Iraq
10) A special elections court disqualified a winning parliamentary candidate, likely reversing the narrow defeat of Prime Minister Maliki’s coalition and possibly allowing him the first chance to form a new coalition government, the New York Times reports. But a representative of the prime minister’s bloc said the exact number of seats each coalition wins was not significant, given that none won close to a majority. "Whether Allawi is going to have 90 seats or 85 – or we have 89 or 95 – is not important," he said. "Whoever is going to be able to form coalitions will form the government."
Haiti
11) Some Haitian earthquake refugees have hurricane-resistant tents on groomed, graded mountain soil, while others have leaky plastic tarps and wooden sticks pitched on a muddy slope, writes Jonathan Katz for AP. Camp Corail has a stocked U.N. World Food Program warehouse for its 3,000-and-counting residents; the more than 8,500 at Camp Obama are desperate for food and water.
South Africa
12) South Africa is aggressively ramping up its response to AIDS, Celia Dugger reports for the New York Times. UN officials say it’s largest and fastest expansion of AIDS services ever attempted by any nation. The government has trained hundreds of nurses now prescribing antiretroviral drugs – formerly the province of doctors – and will train thousands more so that each of the country’s 4,333 public clinics can dispense AIDS medicines. The South African Finance Ministry said it expected that the broadened access to drugs would put a million more people on treatment in the next few years, roughly doubling the current case load. It has budgeted an extra $1 billion. South Africa pays far more for some drugs than compared with the prices paid by other African countries covered under steeply discounted prices negotiated by the Clinton Foundation, which is now advising the Health Ministry.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) 90,000 Protest U.S. Base On Okinawa
Martin Fackler, New York Times, April 25, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/world/asia/26okinawa.html
Tokyo – More than 90,000 Okinawans rallied Sunday to oppose the relocation of an American air base on their island, adding to the pressure on Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama to resolve an issue that has divided Tokyo and Washington.
The demonstrators, in one of the largest protests on Okinawa in years, demanded that Mr. Hatoyama scrap a 2006 agreement with the United States to move the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station to a different site on the island. Many of the protesters wore yellow to signal they were giving Mr. Hatoyama a warning for appearing to waver on election promises to move the busy base off Okinawa altogether.
Since his party’s landmark election victory last summer, Mr. Hatoyama has promised to come up with an alternative plan that would reduce the heavy American presence on the southern Japanese island, home to nearly half of the 50,000 United States military personnel in Japan. He has given himself until the end of May to put together such a plan that would also be acceptable to Washington.
So far, his efforts to find a new location for the base have not appeased Washington; it initially demanded that Tokyo adhere to the original 2006 deal but has recently signaled greater flexibility. The 2006 deal calls for moving the base from its current location, in the center of the city of Ginowan, to Camp Schwab, an existing Marine base in less-populated northern Okinawa.
The perception that Mr. Hatoyama has mishandled the relationship with the United States, Japan’s longtime protector, has contributed to his falling approval ratings, which have dropped below 30 percent. Opposition leaders and media commentators have begun calling on him to resign if he fails to find a compromise by the end of May.
While Mr. Hatoyama has remained tight-lipped about what his plan may look like, officials from his government have made repeated visits to Okinawa to sound out local leaders. Okinawan politicians and the local news media have described the emerging plan as a modified version of the 2006 agreement.
[…] However, on Sunday, local leaders told the demonstrators that they rejected any plan that kept the air base on Okinawa. Toshio Shimabukuro, the mayor of Uruma, said he opposed the construction of the island, which he said would turn his city in "a major military site," according to Japan’s Kyodo News.
The governor of Okinawa, Hirokazu Nakaima, who dropped his earlier support for the 2006 plan to join a rising movement against the base, called on the rest of Japan to share more of the burden of the American military presence. "This is not a problem that concerns only Okinawans," he said, according to Kyodo.
2) Demand an Afghanistan Exit Strategy
Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation, 04/26/2010 @ 11:11am
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/555290/demand_an_afghanistan_exit_strategy
Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern, Republican Congressman Walter Jones, and Democratic Senator Russ Feingold have introduced legislation demanding an exit strategy and timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. The bill reads, "Military operations in Afghanistan have cost American taxpayers more than $200,000,000,000 in deficit spending since 2001." Over 1000 American soldiers have been killed and more than 5,600 wounded. In 2009 alone, 2400 Afghan civilians were killed according to the UN, and tens of thousands have lost their lives since the war began.
The Senate and House bills – S. 3197 and HR 5015 , respectively – would require President Obama to provide a plan and a timetable for withdrawal of all US forces and military contractors, and identify any contingencies that might require changes to that timetable. It would demand an exit strategy – long overdue – from a war that has already cost us too much in treasure and lives, and isn’t in the interest of US national security.
"Basically, what the bill is is a rejection of an open-ended military commitment in Afghanistan," said Rep. McGovern, on a conference call with NGOs, activists, and media organized by Peace Action last week. "This bill is a signal to the President that we want him to come up with an exit strategy, and we want the details."
Last year, McGovern introduced a similar amendment to an Afghanistan war-funding bill that also called for an exit strategy. It garnered more than 100 cosponsors and received 138 votes. He hopes the current legislation will be attached to an upcoming Afghanistan supplemental – within as soon as two weeks – and that it will hopefully receive even greater support. The House bill already has 36 cosponsors, including Republican Congressmen Jones, John Duncan of Tennessee, and Tim Johnson of Illinois; also Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, and Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Bob Filner.
"This is an incredibly important time," said McGovern. "The more cosponsors we can get in the next couple of weeks – the more we’re going to be able to exert some pressure when the supplemental comes up, [and] the more we’re going to send a signal to the Administration that they need to pay attention to those of us who are saying that we need to rethink Afghanistan. What we want to make clear is that the concern about our involvement in Afghanistan is increasing, that it is deep, that a lot of people and members of Congress from all the over country – have a concern about this. So, it’s important that all of us work to try to get members of Congress as cosponsors."
While McGovern notes that Obama has said he will begin redeploying troops in July of next year – a statement which immediately received some pushback from Defense Secretary Gates – that’s insufficient. "It’s not only important to know when the first soldier is to be redeployed or brought home," he said, "it’s important to know when the last soldier is as well."
[…] But McGovern is also quick to point out that he isn’t advocating that the US abandon Afghanistan, "nor should anybody." He said some of most successful development in Afghanistan has occurred without a significant military footprint.
"Maybe we should learn from that," he said. "The cost of one American soldier for one year in Afghanistan is equal to the cost of building thirty schools in Afghanistan. If you want to win the hearts and minds I think thirty schools is a pretty big deal. Helping the people of Afghanistan – in a way that makes a real difference to them – is a fraction of the cost of what we’re doing right now."
And that cost of continuing this war isn’t lost on McGovern or other advocates of this legislation. (In fact, if this legislation shortens the war in Afghanistan by a year, that would pay the two-year cost of the Local Jobs for America Act.)
"The hundreds of billions of dollars we spend over there on war…. All that – mostly borrowed money – means that we’re not investing at home. It means our roads and our bridges aren’t being fixed. It means our schools aren’t being fixed. It means we’re not investing in healthcare, and a whole range of other things that we need to do to get our economy back on track," he said. "When we talk about national security, that definition needs to be enhanced to include jobs, and the quality of education that we offer our people, and healthcare, and infrastructure, and roads and bridges, and the purity of our environment. All those things are a part of our national security."
McGovern also draws from history to inform his thinking – something too rare among our representatives. Referring to Time of Illusion, by The Nation’s peace and disarmament correspondent Jonathan Schell, he said: "[Schell] talked about this doctrine of credibility where policymakers in the 1960s all agreed that this Vietnam War was a loser, that our policy was wrong, but they were all worried about saving face. So they continued the war for several years before they ended it, probably on the same terms they could have ended it in the 1960s. But it was all about saving face and all about credibility…. I don’t want to here 10 years from now, having this conversation, and having all of us say ‘We could have done this ten years ago.’"
[…]
3) Beginning of the end for Afghan war?
The war has dragged on long after the public turned against it – but a rebellion in the US Congress could speed our exit Mark Weisbrot, Guardian, Friday 23 April 2010 23.48 BST
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/apr/23/usforeignpolicy-afghanistan
Imagine that the United States were spending an amount that exceeded 60% of its national income on the military and police. (For comparison, the US department of defence budget – bloated as it is – is about 5% of GDP; and spending on police is less than 1% of GDP). Of course the United States would never reach these levels of spending, but it’s worth thinking about because any population in this situation would be looking for a way out of the horrific civil conflict that got them there. This would no doubt be true even if foreigners were fronting the money.
And so it is true for the people of Afghanistan, where spending for the army and police is programmed for $11.6bn (61% of projected GDP) in 2011. If that doesn’t fit the definition of "unsustainable", it’s not clear what would.
Not surprisingly, the Afghan people are looking for a way out. They want negotiations to end the conflict. But the United States says no. The US and its Nato allies are preparing for a major military offensive, perhaps the biggest of the war so far, in the southern province of Kandahar.
A poll sponsored by the US army showed that 94% of Kandahar residents support negotiating with the Taliban, rather than military confrontation.
The New York Times reports this week that "in some parts of the country, American and Nato convoys are already considered by Afghans to be as dangerous a threat as Taliban checkpoints and roadside bombs, raising questions about whether the damage" to the perception of US forces caused by the continued US killings of Afghan civilians "can be reversed to any real degree".
"’People hate the international forces,’ said Bakhtialy, a tribal elder in Kandahar. ‘ … Their presence at the moment is too risky for ordinary people. They are killing people, and they don’t let people travel on the road.’"
A series of high-profile atrocities by US and Nato forces that have surfaced recently has made matters worse. Three weeks ago Nato admitted that US special operations forces had killed five civilians, including three women, two of them pregnant. Nato had previously engaged in a cover-up, claiming that special operations forces had "found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed".
Meanwhile in the United States, a rebellion is growing in Congress against the war. Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, House Democrat Jim McGovern from Massachusetts, and House Republican Walter Jones from North Carolina have introduced legislation that would require President Obama to establish a timetable for withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan. The bill has quickly picked up 29 co-sponsors, and could reach 100 within the next few weeks.
How does this get us out of Afghanistan? My colleague Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy explains: "A signal like this is likely to have dramatic political effects in Afghanistan, just as these things had dramatic political effects in Iraq. In 2007, Congress never succeeded legislatively in writing a military withdrawal timetable into US law. But the fact that the majority of the House and Senate went on the record in favour of a timetable had dramatic effects in Iraq. It put pressure on the Bush administration to compromise its objectives, to start serious negotiations with people it had previously been trying to kill."
The result was a signed agreement between the US and Iraq for a timetable to withdraw US troops. That is how the Afghan war will end. The pressure will build until President Obama and his military have no choice but to begin the US exit from Afghanistan.
The majority of Americans are against the war, and every week thousands of Americans continue to put pressure on their representatives in Congress, who can also read the polls in an election year. The war has dragged on long after the public turned against it, and long after Washington abandoned any pretence of a coherent story to justify it – a result of our limited, corrupted form of democracy. But this Congressional rebellion is the beginning of the end of this war.
4) Congress Is Abdicating Its Authority on Wars
Stephen R. Weissman, Roll Call, April 26, 2010
http://www.rollcall.com/issues/55_121/ma_congressional_relations/45510-1.html
[Weissman is the author of "A Culture of Deference: Congress’s Failure of Leadership in Foreign Policy" and a former subcommittee staff director on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.]
One reason for the current confusion over U.S. policy toward the Karzai government in Afghanistan is that U.S. decision-making has not been the result of a meaningful democratic process. The yearlong debate over health care reform legislation produced a tidal wave of criticism of the "dysfunctional" American Congress. In the same period, President Barack Obama dispatched more than 50,000 additional troops to Afghanistan with essentially no legislative debate. But hardly anyone has complained about Congressional dysfunction here.
This silence is amazing because it is widely accepted that past administrations, acting without Congressional input, made huge mistakes in America’s last two major wars. And these eventually proved devastating to the parties in power. Both Democrats and Republicans have acknowledged that interventions in Vietnam and Iraq were either misconceived or significantly mismanaged. After each, there was a sense that Congress could have done more to test flawed policy assumptions and hold decision-makers accountable, enlisting sustained public support for better policies. Yet despite different concerns about Afghanistan policy on both sides of the aisle, Congress has been re-enacting its performances in Vietnam and Iraq.
According to several officials, key Congressional foreign policy committees have neither received nor requested a National Intelligence Estimate or comparable broad intelligence community analysis of the issues in Afghanistan. They have denied themselves a major resource of Congress in foreign policy: the ability to compare intelligence analysis with administration policy judgments. In Iraq, the Senate at least requested and received an NIE; its mistake was in failing to examine the document and reveal its flaws.
Learning little from its failures to expose administration divisions over Vietnam and Iraq, Congress has fumbled a golden opportunity to assess the U.S. Embassy in Kabul’s last-minute dissent from the developing Dec. 1 decision for a U.S. military "surge." When news leaked of two November cables from Ambassador Karl Eikenberry "expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan," one key foreign policy committee requested the classified documents. The State Department refused to provide them, and the committee never considered using its subpoena power, according to an informed source. Eikenberry subsequently testified that after "refinement" and "clarification" he was now "100 percent supportive" of the president’s strategy. No Congressman from either party pressed him to describe the basis of his reported reservations or how they were resolved.
As American troops began to move into Afghanistan, the full text of the cables was leaked to the New York Times. It showed how fundamental the ambassador’s critique was. Among several "unaddressed variables" in the new strategy, he emphasized that Afghan President Hamid Karzai "continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden … it strains credulity to expect Karzai to change fundamentally" and his government had "little or no political will or capacity to carry out basic tasks of governance."
Even after the ambassador’s critique was published, there was no visible Congressional reaction.
A month before President Obama decided to add 30,000-34,000 troops, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) warned that Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan "reaches too far too fast. We do not yet have the critical guarantees of governance and of development capacity … [and the] ability to produce effective Afghan forces to partner with." However, when the president essentially approved the plan without such guarantees, Kerry did not insist that his committee or Congress debate and vote on it. Instead, he chose to rely on what an informed source called his "continuous" private conversations with President Obama and the administration. That was the modus operandi of leading Democratic Senators in Vietnam and Iraq.
While there have been no full-scale legislative debates or votes on U.S. options, there have been hearings. But their educational value has been constrained by legislators’ meek acceptance of Defense Department restrictions limiting Members and staff to a single overnight stay in Afghanistan per trip as well as the failure of the foreign relations committees to call upon the leading academic experts on Afghan politics.
Most important, rather than functioning as part of a broad legislative process to expand public debate, force Members of Congress to think through issues and take positions, and supply policymakers with legislative guidance and support, hearings have become a way of evading Congressional responsibility. Staff for several Democratic Senators – including one who opposed the troop increase – were very clear on this point: "People are unclear where they want to stand, they want to wait and see. Hearings are a good way!" "Many Members made [critical] statements at the hearing that they can spin later as saying they offered criticism." "People don’t want to own it. The default is to ‘express concern.’" "Members are on the fence in practice. It’s better if they are forced to vote."
President Obama has told Congress that he will reassess his strategy in December. However, issues concerning host government performance, military strategy, political negotiations and regional actors are coming up fast. If Congress is to play a meaningful role in Afghanistan, it needs to get in the game now.
5) Afghans burn NATO trucks in response to killing of 3 civilians
Joshua Partlow, Washington Post, Monday, April 26, 2010; A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/25/AR2010042500850_pf.html
Kabul – Afghan protesters torched NATO supply vehicles in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday, hours after allegations emerged that U.S. and Afghan troops had killed three civilians, including two brothers, in their home.
The demonstration occurred in Logar province after a nighttime joint patrol of U.S. Special Operations forces and Afghan soldiers fatally shot three people and arrested two others. NATO officials said the men were insurgents who had displayed "hostile intent." One of those captured was a low-level Taliban commander who planned suicide bombings, they said.
But after daybreak, more than 100 people gathered on a main road in Logar to protest the killings and the death in a separate incident of an Islamic scholar, according to Afghan officials. Military operations at night are deeply unpopular, and Afghan officials have called for them to stop. The furious crowd blocked traffic and set fire to at least 10 fuel tankers using hand grenades, said the provincial police chief, Ghulam Mustafa Moisini.
"If they were insurgents, why are the people so angry?" asked provincial government spokesman Din Mohammad Darwish.
A relative of the slain men, Abdul Ghani, said that dozens of Afghan and U.S. soldiers appeared at his family’s home about 2 a.m. When they entered, a chaotic scene ensued, and two of his brothers, Haji Abdul Aziz and Abdul Waqil, were shot and killed. Two other brothers, Abdul Wahid and Abdul Hai, were arrested, he said.
Ghani said that his brothers work as shopkeepers and have no links to the insurgency. "Not only the families of the victims hate the U.S. forces," he said. "Everyone is turning against them."
The police chief, however, corroborated the NATO claims that the men killed and captured were insurgents. The joint patrol collected weapons, including AK-47s and pistols, along with Pakistani passports, he said. The people knew this, but protested anyway, Moisini said, a sign of either grass-roots support for the Taliban or intimidation by the insurgents. "Whether they are insurgents or civilians, the people go and protest," he said.
[…]
Israel/Palestine
6) Israeli opposition sees Jerusalem settlement freeze
Jeffrey Heller, Reuters, Monday, April 26, 2010; 11:17 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/26/AR2010042601988.html
Jerusalem – Israel’s main opposition party said on Monday the government has quietly frozen approval of Jewish housing projects in East Jerusalem in a bid to heal a rift with Washington and coax the Palestinians into peace talks. "I am talking about a fact. I checked it out. All of the work of the Jerusalem district planning committee has been frozen completely, except for the veteran neighborhoods," legislator Roni Bar-On of the centrist Kadima party said in parliament.
He said he was using the term "veteran neighborhoods" to refer to areas of Jerusalem that were under Israel’s control before it captured the eastern part of the city, along with the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in a 1967 war. "Why don’t you tell us the whole truth, Mr Prime Minister," Bar-On asked, calling a de facto freeze the right move to make to narrow differences with Washington over settlements and get peace talks, suspended since December 2008, under way.
The planning committee, an Interior Ministry body, embarrassed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last month – during a visit by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden – when it approved construction of 1,600 homes for Jews in a part of Jerusalem that Israel annexed after the 1967 conflict. News of the planned project led the Palestinians to rescind their agreement to begin indirect peace talks with Israel under U.S. mediation and insist on a settlement freeze first.
Netanyahu has insisted publicly that he would not curb Jewish housing construction anywhere in Jerusalem, restrictions that could cause cracks within a governing coalition dominated by pro-settler parties, including his own Likud.
Asked about a de facto building freeze, Mark Regev, a spokesman for Netanyahu, said there had been no fundamental change in government policy on construction in Jerusalem. "We have instituted a new mechanism which is being put in place so that we don’t have mishaps as happened during the Biden visit," Regev said about a step Israel has already announced. Regev did not elaborate, but Israeli media said a representative of the prime minister’s office would attend planning committee meetings to ensure high-level oversight.
Pro-settler politicians have complained publicly that since approving the housing project last month, the committee has been avoiding any discussion of further Israeli construction in and around East Jerusalem.
[…] Palestinian sources said on Sunday that U.S. envoy George Mitchell proposed a compromise in which the Palestinians would begin indirect talks in return for an unwritten commitment by Washington to assign blame publicly to any party that took action compromising the negotiations.
The formula appeared to envisage a situation in which Israel could quietly delay implementing housing projects in and around East Jerusalem – construction which Washington has said could jeopardize peacemaking – without declaring a freeze.
[…]
7) Israeli troops shoot protesters at Gaza demo
AFP, Sat Apr 24, 11:31 am ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100424/wl_mideast_afp/mideastconflictgazamaltademo_20100424153128
Gaza City – Israeli troops shot and wounded three Palestinians and a Maltese woman in the Gaza Strip on Saturday during a protest near the border with Israel, witnesses and medical sources said. The four were shot after they entered a 300-metre- (-yard) deep no-go zone previously declared by Israel on the Gaza side of the frontier.
The incident occurred when some 150 people, including six foreigners, began a demonstration to protest against the ban, which prevents Gaza farmers from using the land. The Maltese woman, said to have been shot in the legs, was identified as Bianca Zimmit, 28, a member of pro-Palestinian group the International Solidarity Movement. The ISM said Zimmit was wounded as she filmed the demonstration, east of the Al-Maghazi refugee camp, some 100 metres from the border.
An army spokesman said a "group of Palestinians approached the security fence in a provocative manner." "Some soldiers spotted them and fired warning shots. Three Palestinians were hit." No mention was made of a fourth person. The spokesman added that the army considers the area to be a "combat zone" and therefore out of bounds.
Afghanistan
8) Precedent suggests Afghanistan Taliban could win: report
A new study says the Afghanistan Taliban enjoy a slew of advantages that historically correlate with insurgent success, such as Pakistani sanctuary and a weak government in Kabul.
Ben Arnoldy, Christian Science Monitor, April 23, 2010 http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2010/0423/Precedent-suggests-Afghanistan-Taliban-could-win-report
New Delhi – While current US counterinsurgency doctrine in Afghanistan broadly conforms with historical best practices, the Taliban enjoy a slew of advantages that historically correlate with insurgent success, according to a new study of 89 past and ongoing insurgencies worldwide.
Factors that favor the Taliban include receiving sanctuary and support in another country, learning to be more discriminating in targeting their attacks, and fighting a government that’s both weak and reliant on direct external support.
The historical trends suggest that the Achilles heel for the Taliban would be the loss of their Pakistani sanctuary, while the principal American vulnerability lies in Hamid Karzai’s anocracy, or weak, pseudodemocracy. The study, says the author, cannot be predictive, but can help the US address or exploit these vulnerabilities.
"A lot of the things being done in the current [US military] plan are along the lines of successful things we’ve seen in the study," says Ben Connable, lead author "How Insurgencies End," published by RAND Corp. in Washington. "The key is if the US recognizes it is working with an anocracy and recognizes the limits of that kind of government, you can work on solutions to that problem."
Solutions to the problem of this type of weak central government, he says, involve focusing on local governance and setting up local civil defense forces that are carefully tied down to one location. To some degree, the US is already doing this. In rural Helmand, the Marines are focused on building local government from scratch. And international forces have dabbled with setting up arbakai, a traditional militia tied to a local council.
Still, anocracies have won only about 15 percent of their conflicts with insurgents.
[…] There may be limitations to applying international templates to a country like Afghanistan, a tendency among US military planners that has caused unease among Afghanistan-specific experts. The brain trust reportedly involved in Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan relied heavily on counterinsurgency – not regional – experts. "Afghanistan may well share similarities with other countries and societies, but these elements need to be documented rather than assumed," anthropologist Thomas Barfield writes in his new book, "Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History."
The RAND study looked at 89 insurgencies dating to the 1934 start of Mao’s uprising in China. In order to be included, the conflict needed to have killed at least 1,000 people, among other criteria. Excluded conflicts include the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Sikh uprising in 1980s India, and the Uighur independence movement in China’s Xinjiang Province. The final scoreboard: 28 wins for governments, 26 wins for insurgencies, 19 mixed results, and 16 ongoing.
[…]
Iran
9) Diplomats: Iran agrees to more IAEA overview
George Jahn, Associated Press, Friday, April 23, 2010; 10:08 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/23/AR2010042301555.html
Vienna – Iran has agreed to give the U.N. nuclear monitoring agency greater inspection and monitoring rights to a sensitive site where it is enriching uranium to higher levels, diplomats said Friday.
The move – indirectly confirmed by a senior Iranian envoy – comes as Tehran mounts a diplomatic offensive meant to stave off new U.N. sanctions for its defiance of Security Council demands that it curb nuclear activities that could be used to make weapons.
Iran began enriching uranium to near 20 percent two months ago and says it will be turned into fuel rods for research reactors that manufacture medical isotopes for cancer patients. It says it was forced to take this step because the big powers refused to meet it half way on a moribund plan that would have supplied the rods from abroad.
The International Atomic Energy Agency had pushed in vain for greater access to the enrichment operation since the start of the project, seeking to realign monitoring cameras already set up to oversee Iran’s long-standing enrichment plant that is churning out much-lower-level uranium. It has also been asking for more frequent inspections, said the diplomats, who asked for anonymity because their information is confidential.
They said Iran agreed in principle about 10 days ago to some – but not all- of the oversight the IAEA had asked for. "They have not agreed to the full measures sought by the agency but enough so that the agency would be happy" after being stonewalled for two months, said one of three diplomats, speaking to The Associated Press.
Ali Asghar Soltanieh, the chief Iranian envoy to the IAEA, indirectly confirmed agreement, saying the two sides had "constructive talks" on the issue.
[…]
Iraq
10) Iraq Political Crisis Worsens as Court Bars Candidates
Steven Lee Myers, New York Times, April 26, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/middleeast/27iraq.html
Baghdad – Seven weeks after Iraqis went to the polls, a special elections court disqualified a winning parliamentary candidate, likely reversing the narrow defeat of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s coalition and possibly allowing him the first chance to form a new coalition government.
The court disqualified the candidate on charges he was a loyalist of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and left open the possibility or barring still more.
The court’s decisions, if upheld on appeal, would erase the two-seat victory by a largely secular coalition led by Ayad Allawi, a Shiite who served as an interim prime minister after the American overthrow of Mr. Hussein.
At a minimum, it will further delay the formation of a new government through the months when the Obama administration planned to withdraw its combat troops, leaving a force of only 50,000 after September.
Iraqi officials now grimly predict that there might not be a new government in place by that deadline, putting the Obama administration in a difficult position of deciding whether to press ahead with its plans despite the political uncertainty here.
Mr. Allawi’s bloc won 91 seats in the country’s new-325 member parliament, compared to 89 for Mr. Maliki’s State of Law coalition, according to preliminary results announced a month ago that have now been cast in doubt.
The court also disqualified 51 other losing candidates and the votes they received will be discarded, requiring a recalculation of the winners – and losers – across the ballot. Under Iraq’s tortuous and untested election laws, that could cost Mr. Allawi’s bloc a second seat, while awarding seats to Mr. Maliki or other parties, officials said.
The director of a disputed commission charged with purging former Baath loyalists also disclosed on Monday that he had asked the court to bar eight more winning candidates. The court is expected to rule on those candidates as soon as Tuesday, all them with Mr. Allawi’s coalition.
The court’s moves strengthened Mr. Maliki’s bare-knuckled efforts to win a second term as prime minister. But that prospect is still by no means certain, since his government has faced new criticism following a series of bombings at Shiite mosques and neighborhoods on Friday.
[…] The court’s ruling can be appealed, which would delay final results for at least another month, perhaps longer. Only a week ago, the same election panel ordered a partial recount of votes in the province that includes Baghdad. That was supposed to have begun already, but the country’s election commission said on Monday that it would be delayed as its commissioners sought clarification from the same court about how exactly to conduct a recount.
[…] Mr. Hassani, from the prime minister’s bloc, said that the exact number of seats each coalition wins was not significant, given that none won close to a majority. "Whether Allawi is going to have 90 seats or 85 – or we have 89 or 95 – is not important," he said. "Whoever is going to be able to form coalitions will form the government."
Haiti
11) Good camp, bad camp: The shortfalls of Haiti aid
Jonathan M. Katz, Associated Press, Sun., April 25, 2010
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36767188/ns/world_news-haiti_earthquake/
Croix-des-Bouquets, Haiti – You name it, Camp Corail has got it. And Camp Obama does not. The organized relocation camp at Corail-Cesselesse has thousands of spacious, hurricane-resistant tents on groomed, graded mountain soil. The settlement three miles (four kilometers) down the road – named after the U.S. president in hopes of getting attention from foreigners – has leaky plastic tarps and wooden sticks pitched on a muddy slope.
Corail has a stocked U.N. World Food Program warehouse for its 3,000-and-counting residents; the more than 8,500 at Camp Obama are desperate for food and water. Corail’s entrance is guarded by U.N. peacekeepers and Haitian police. Camp Obama’s residents put up a Haitian flag to mark their empty security tent.
The camps, neighbors in the foothills of a treeless mountain, are a diptych of the uneven response to Haiti’s Jan. 12 earthquake. More than $12.7 billion has been pledged by foreign governments, agencies and organizations, including $2.8 billion for humanitarian response and another $9.9 billion promised at the March 31 U.N. donors conference.
In one camp, which dignitaries and military commanders visit by helicopter, those billions are on display. A short hop down the road, they barely register. "We’ve heard the foreigners have given a lot of aid money. But we’re still living the same way as before, and we’re still dying the same way as before," said Duverny Nelmeus, a 52-year-old welder-turned Camp Obama resident-coordinator.
Haiti’s needs are still enormous, but more than 100 days after the quake, the plan for dealing with them is unclear. Even the death toll is confusing: Government estimates hovered around 230,000 until the U.N. donors conference when, without explanation, the total jumped to 300,000.
There are officially 1.3 million people displaced by the magnitude-7 earthquake. Hundreds of thousands have massed in settlement camps that, like Camp Obama, sprouted with little or no planning. These Haitians live in makeshift tarp homes and shanties, govern their affairs with self-formed security committees and make do with whatever aid arrives.
It was said early on that nearly all the displaced needed to be moved ahead of the arriving rainy season to carefully planned camps like Corail. But it took months to procure land. By March, aid officials decided instead that people should start going home, saying thousands of houses are still habitable or can be repaired.
It was even better, they said, for most to stay where they were: Agencies deemed just 37,000 people in nine camps at high risk for flash floods, said Shaun Scales of the International Organization for Migration. But many people are not moving, nor do they want to stay where they are.
Persistent aftershocks and rumors of more to come – President Rene Preval warned of an impending earthquake at a news conference this month – are keeping people from going back. Private landowners and schools are threatening to evict squatters. Those who remain are suffering.
What they want is a better option. And for a few lucky people, right now, that’s Corail. The product of a coordinated effort by aid agencies, the United Nations, the U.S. military, the Haitian government and other entities, it has sprung up seemingly overnight on a cactus patch where the Cite Soleil slum meets the suburb of Croix-des-Bouquets.
There was little here but a few concrete homes, disorganized camps and brush until a few weeks ago, when Preval announced that the government would seize – with compensation for the owners – 18,500 acres (7,490 hectares) of the arid land.
[…] Now ecstatic arrivals are streaming in aboard air-conditioned buses, clutching laminated ID cards with maps of the settlement, wearing green bracelets bearing their names. Nearly all come from the most famous camp in post-quake Port-au-Prince: the Petionville Club golf course, home to 45,000 quake survivors, elements of the U.S. Army 82nd Airborne and a gaggle of Hollywood volunteers led by Sean Penn.
[…] In Camp Obama, the help has been spotty and often ineffective. Almost everyone has at least one plastic tarp, the "emergency shelter material," in aid-worker parlance, that was a focus of relief efforts in the months after the quake. But those are leaking and falling apart.
Nobody remembers what aid group came when – the parade of foreigners becomes a blur. Someone left a rubber bladder to hold drinking water, another a black tank for the same. Both are broken and empty. "We’d thank God for a glass of water," Nelmeus said.
Cuban doctors have come and provided anti-malarial and other medicines, as did some Americans. But while Corail’s hospital tent is fully staffed, Camp Obama’s is usually empty. Nelmeus’ two children are sick with fever and awaiting treatment.
[…]
South Africa
12) South Africa Redoubles Efforts Against AIDS
Celia W. Dugger, New York Times, April 25, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/health/policy/26safrica.html
Sovane, South Africa – South Africa, trying to overcome years of denial and delay in confronting its monumental AIDS crisis, is now in the midst of a feverish buildup of testing, treatment and prevention that United Nations officials say is the largest and fastest expansion of AIDS services ever attempted by any nation.
The undertaking will be expensive and difficult to pull off, but in the past month alone the government has enabled 519 hospitals and clinics to dispense AIDS medicines, more than it had in all the years combined since South Africa began providing antiretroviral drugs to its people in 2004, South African health officials said.
To accomplish this, the government has trained the hundreds of nurses now prescribing the drugs – formerly the province of doctors – and will train thousands more so that each of the country’s 4,333 public clinics can dispense AIDS medicines, a step Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi called essential to combating "this monster amongst us" in a country short of physicians.
And President Jacob Zuma, who recently admitted to having unprotected sex with a much younger woman, on Sunday inaugurated a campaign to test 15 million of the country’s 49 million people for H.I.V. by June 2011.
A photograph of his personal doctor drawing blood from Mr. Zuma’s arm for an H.I.V. test on April 8 appeared in newspapers across the country. And on Sunday, in a speech at a hospital east of Johannesburg, he disclosed that his fourth test again showed he was negative and said he made the result public "to eradicate the silence and stigma that accompanies this epidemic." To hoots and laugher from the audience, and with a touch of humor, Mr. Zuma said, "I’m sure South Africans know I’m open about my life generally."
Michel Sidibé, executive director of Unaids, the United Nations AIDS agency, said South Africa’s undertakings offered hope to the continent. "It’s the first time one country has scaled up so quickly, to so many people," he said.
South Africa, the region’s richest nation and a symbol of democracy, has an estimated 5.7 million H.I.V.-positive citizens, more than any other country. "In my village, when we want to kill the snake, we don’t hit the tail, but the head," said Mr. Sidibé, who is from Mali. "The head of this epidemic is South Africa."
The South African Finance Ministry said it expected that the broadened access to drugs would put a million more people on treatment in the next few years, roughly doubling the current case load. It has budgeted an extra $1 billion for it. Dr. Motsoaledi said Mr. Zuma reopened the budget to get more money for AIDS when it became clear that costs would be higher.
South Africa’s understaffed public health system and the ballooning cost of treating millions of people for life will pose daunting challenges to the government’s ambitious goals.
The United States has long been South Africa’s principal donor in the fight against AIDS, giving the country $620 million this year. But advocates worry that global donors will not provide enough money to sustain a rapidly growing treatment program.
For now, though, there is optimism among the scientists and advocates who had despaired as the nation dithered on AIDS under its former president, Thabo Mbeki. "I’ve never known such a gathering of momentum around H.I.V. as in the last month or so," said Mark Heywood, who directs the AIDS Law Project based in Johannesburg.
Mr. Mbeki had questioned whether H.I.V. caused AIDS and suggested that anti-retroviral drugs were harmful. Harvard researchers estimated that the government could have prevented the premature deaths of 365,000 people during the last decade if it had provided the drugs to AIDS patients and medicines that help stop pregnant women from infecting their babies. "If we had acted more than a decade ago, we might not have been in this situation where we are," Dr. Motsoaledi said. "Obviously, we did lose time."
Mr. Zuma, in office for almost a year, has broken sharply with the Mbeki record, broadening access to AIDS drugs for H.I.V.-positive pregnant women and babies, as well as for people with tuberculosis. The government is moving toward routinely offering H.I.V. tests to all who come into the public health system, rather than waiting for people to ask for them.
Silindelokuhle Biyela, a widowed nurse who works at a tidy red-brick clinic in this remote village in the rugged hills of KwaZulu Natal Province, is on the front lines of the new push. She has just completed the training that qualifies her to dispense AIDS medicines. No longer will her patients have to go to a hospital 30 miles away for drugs, an $8 round trip that many were too poor to make.
[…] Hundreds of private pharmacies, including the retail chains Clicks, Link and Dis-Chem, will offer free H.I.V. tests for the next year with government-provided kits. More than 2,000 retired nurses, doctors, pharmacists and other health workers have volunteered to help with the drive.
The health minister said the country was racing to reduce H.I.V. infections – now 1,500 a day – before treatment costs swell even further.
South Africa pays far more for some drugs than compared with the prices paid by other African countries covered under steeply discounted prices negotiated by the Clinton Foundation, which is now advising Dr. Motsoaledi. "We must be able to purchase ARVs at the lowest prices, as we are the largest consumers" of anti-retroviral drugs in the world, despite opposition from local pharmaceutical manufacturers, Dr. Motsoaledi told Parliament this month.
[…]
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Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
Just Foreign Policy is a membership organization devoted to reforming US foreign policy so it reflects the values and interests of the majority of Americans.