Just Foreign Policy News
April 6, 2011
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I) Actions and Featured Articles
*Action: Urge Congress to Bar Ground Troops in Libya
Michigan Rep. John Conyers wants to explicitly prohibit U.S. ground forces from being introduced into Libya. Urge your Representative to support this prohibition. Supporters now include: Cohen, Jones, Farr, Grijalva, Honda, Kucinich, McClintock, George
Miller, Stark, Tonko, Woolsey.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/nogroundtroops
Background – Conyers: Congress Should Bar U.S. Ground Troops From Libya
For Congress to reassert its war powers requires an initiative that can attract majority support. The passage of Conyers amendment would reaffirm Congressional war powers, block an escalation to the use of ground troops in the future, and open political space for a negotiated resolution of the conflict.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/libya-ground-troops_b_844550.html
Stephen Walt: Is America Addicted to War?
The top 5 reasons why we keep getting into foolish fights.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/04/is_america_addicted_to_war
Alexander Cooley & Daniel Nexon: The US Base in Bahrain and the Arab Spring
The U.S. should decouple its basing arrangements from support for repressive regimes.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67700/alexander-cooley-and-daniel-h-nexon/bahrains-base-politics
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II) Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) South African jurist Richard Goldstone said he did not plan to seek nullification of his highly critical U.N. report on Israel’s 2008-2009 offensive in the Gaza Strip and asserted that claims to the contrary by Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai were false, AP reports. "I have no reason to believe any part of the report needs to be reconsidered at this time," Goldstone said.
2) Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Steve Chapman challenges the claim that President Obama averted a "bloodbath" in Benghazi with the U.S. military intervention in Libya. Gadhafi’s threats were plainly directed at armed rebels, not the city’s civilian inhabitants, Chapman writes.
Alan Kuperman, an associate professor at the University of Texas’ Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, is among those unconvinced by Obama’s case. "Gadhafi," he said, "did not massacre civilians in any of the other big cities he captured – Zawiya, Misrata, Ajdabiya – which together have a population equal to Benghazi. Yes, civilians were killed in a typical, ham-handed, Third World counterinsurgency. But civilians were not targeted for massacre as in Rwanda, Darfur, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bosnia, or even Kosovo after NATO intervention."
Another skeptic is Paul Miller, an assistant professor at National Defense University who served on the National Security Council under Bush and Obama. "The Rwandan genocide was targeted against an entire, clearly defined ethnic group," he wrote on the Foreign Policy website. "The Libyan civil war is between a tyrant and his cronies on one side, and a collection of tribes, movements, and ideologists (including Islamists) on the other. …The first is murder, the second is war."
3) Michel Martelly, who apparently won the second round of Haiti’s disputed election, promised reconciliation and unity, the New York Times reports. It appears turnout was far lower than in previous elections – an OAS projection put it at 30 percent, but no official figures have been released – potentially diminishing his claim of a mandate, the Times says.
4) Local officials say a night raid by NATO-led forces killed six civilians in the relatively peaceful northern Afghan province of Sar-e-Pul, AP reports. The U.S.-led coalition said the dead were Taliban insurgents. The disagreement adds to the debate surrounding night raids, AP says. The Afghan government has called for the night raids to be halted, but the US has refused.
5) An Obama administration report to Congress said the Taliban insurgency has gained strength in Pakistan’s border regions with Afghanistan in recent months, the Washington Post reports. "There remains no clear path toward defeating the insurgency in Pakistan," the report says.
6) Congress, the media, and the public are rightly asking whether America should be spending $1 billion or more on the intervention in Libya at a time of fiscal austerity, writes William Hartung on the Huffington Post. But those genuinely concerned about war costs need to go where the money is – Afghanistan. The Pentagon has asked for $113 billion to fight the war there for this year. The tax dollars being spent on Afghanistan are enough to offset the $100 billion per year that House Republicans are seeking to cut from next year’s budget, or enough to fill the projected budget gaps of the 44 states that expect to run deficits in 2012. In other words, if the Afghan war ended and the funds allocated for it were returned to the states, no state in America would run a deficit next year. This would save millions of jobs of teachers, police, firefighters and other public employees while holding the line on basic services like Medicaid and income support for families in poverty.
Afghanistan
7) U.S., Afghan and Taliban officials say nine years after a U.S.-led invasion routed almost all of al Qaeda’s militants in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden’s network is gradually returning, the Wall Street Journal reports. The return undermines U.S. hopes that last year’s troop surge would beat the Taliban badly enough to bring them to the negotiating table-and pressure them to break ties with al Qaeda. More than a year into the surge, those ties appear to be strong, the Journal says.
8) There is a deep undercurrent of unease and discontent in Kandahar caused by the foreign troop presence, which the Taliban and their sympathizers were able to ignite with the simple spark provided by the burning of a Koran in Florida, the New York Times reports. "Now the people of Kandahar are under so much threat, there’s so much pressure on them, they are afraid to do anything, they’ll be arrested or killed," said a prominent religious scholar who has generally supported the US role. "Then the slightest chance, like the Koran burning, and it all blows up."
Pakistan
9) The Obama administration on Tuesday gave Congress a harshly critical assessment of Pakistan’s efforts to defeat Al Qaeda and other militants, saying that after years of work with the Pakistani military "there remains no clear path toward defeating the insurgency" that thrives in the country, the New York Times reports. That conclusion amounts to a concession that the effort to match Obama’s "surge" of troops in Afghanistan with a new strategy to squeeze Al Qaeda and the Taliban from the Pakistani side of the border has yielded virtually no results, the Times says.
Yemen
10) The Pentagon said Tuesday there were no plans to suspend US military assistance to Yemen but urged a swift transition of power amid a wave of anti-regime protests, AFP reports. A spokesman suggested that US military assistance would continue no matter the outcome of the political turmoil.
Bahrain
11) Marina Ottaway, director of the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says Saudi Arabia believes its concerns in Bahrain are "best addressed by a hardline policy of suppressing the protests," AP reports. Ottaway concluded from Washington’s muted response that it has chosen to implicitly back the Saudi intervention in Bahrain. "Washington has seemingly accepted that for the time being the Saudis have won the battle for influence in Bahrain and concluded that mending relations with Saudi Arabia should take precedence right now," she wrote.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Goldstone won’t seek Gaza report nullification
Steven R. Hurst, Associated Press, Wed Apr 6, 12:13 am ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110406/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_un_report_5
Washington – South African jurist Richard Goldstone said Tuesday that he did not plan to seek nullification of his highly critical U.N. report on Israel’s 2008-2009 offensive in the Gaza Strip and asserted that claims to the contrary by Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai were false.
The 2009 Goldstone report initially concluded that both Israel and Hamas had committed potential war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during three weeks of fighting. The findings that Israeli forces had intentionally fired at Palestinian civilians triggered outrage in Israel and a personal campaign against Goldstone, who is Jewish.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Goldstone said that Yishai had called him on Monday to thank him for an op-ed piece published Friday in The Washington Post in which the judge wrote that new information had come to light that made him rethink his central conclusions.
Goldstone said, however, that he never discussed the report with Yishai in the telephone conversation. Israeli leaders have called for the report to be retracted since it was issued in 2009. "There was absolutely no discussion about the Goldstone report on the call," the jurist said in a telephone interview from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
[…] In the Post article, Goldstone lauded Israel for conducting dozens of investigations into alleged wrongdoing. In particular, he sighted evidence that a deadly strike that killed more than 20 members of a Palestinian family resulted from faulty intelligence and was not an intentional attack.
Nevertheless, Goldstone said, he did not intend to seek the report’s nullification. "As appears from the Washington Post article, information subsequent to publication of the report did meet with the view that one correction should be made with regard to intentionality on the part of Israel," the judge said. "Further information as a result of domestic investigations could lead to further reconsideration, but as presently advised I have no reason to believe any part of the report needs to be reconsidered at this time."
[…] The Geneva-based Human Rights Council has said it will continue to treat the report as a legitimate working document. Spokesman Cedric Sapey told the AP on Monday that Goldstone would have to submit a formal request for the report to be withdrawn.
Last month, a majority of the council’s 47 members voted to pass the report up to the General Assembly, recommending the powerful U.N. Security Council be asked to submit it to prosecutors at the International Criminal Court.
Such a move is unlikely to pass the Security Council, where Israel’s strongest ally, the United States, has veto power. But the mere suggestion of bringing war crimes charges has infuriated Israel.
[…]
2) Did Obama avert a bloodbath in Libya?
Panicking over a dubious threat
Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune, April 3, 2011
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-oped-0403-chapman-20110403,0,4286197.column
Remember when a crusading president, acting on dubious intelligence, insufficient information and exaggerated fears, took the nation into a Middle Eastern war of choice? That was George W. Bush in 2003, invading Iraq. But it’s also Barack Obama in 2011, attacking Libya.
For weeks, President Obama had been wary of military action. What obviously changed his mind was the fear that Moammar Gadhafi was bent on mass slaughter – which stemmed from Gadhafi’s March 17 speech vowing "no mercy" for his enemies.
In his March 26 radio address, Obama said the United States acted because Gadhafi threatened "a bloodbath." Two days later, he asserted, "We knew that if we waited one more day, Benghazi – a city nearly the size of Charlotte (N.C.) – could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."
Really? Obama implied that, absent our intervention, Gadhafi might have killed nearly 700,000 people, putting it in a class with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. White House adviser Dennis Ross was only slightly less alarmist when he reportedly cited "the real or imminent possibility that up to a 100,000 people could be massacred."
But these are outlandish scenarios that go beyond any reasonable interpretation of Gadhafi’s words. He said, "We will have no mercy on them" – but by "them," he plainly was referring to armed rebels ("traitors") who stand and fight, not all the city’s inhabitants.
"We have left the way open to them," he said. "Escape. Let those who escape go forever." He pledged that "whoever hands over his weapons, stays at home without any weapons, whatever he did previously, he will be pardoned, protected."
Alan Kuperman, an associate professor at the University of Texas’ Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, is among those unconvinced by Obama’s case. "Gadhafi," he told me, "did not massacre civilians in any of the other big cities he captured – Zawiya, Misrata, Ajdabiya – which together have a population equal to Benghazi. Yes, civilians were killed in a typical, ham-handed, Third World counterinsurgency. But civilians were not targeted for massacre as in Rwanda, Darfur, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bosnia, or even Kosovo after NATO intervention."
The rebels, however, knew that inflating their peril was their best hope for getting outside help. So, Kuperman says, they concocted the specter of genocide – and Obama believed it, or at least used it to justify intervention.
Another skeptic is Paul Miller, an assistant professor at National Defense University who served on the National Security Council under Bush and Obama. "The Rwandan genocide was targeted against an entire, clearly defined ethnic group," he wrote on the Foreign Policy website. "The Libyan civil war is between a tyrant and his cronies on one side, and a collection of tribes, movements, and ideologists (including Islamists) on the other. …The first is murder, the second is war."
When I contacted Miller, he discounted the talk of vast slaughter. "Benghazi is the second-largest city in the country and he needs the city and its people to continue functioning and producing goods for his impoverished country," he said.
Maybe these analysts are mistaken, but the administration has offered little in the way of rebuttal. Where Bush sent Colin Powell to the United Nations to make the case against Saddam Hussein, Obama has treated the evidence about Gadhafi as too obvious to dispute.
I emailed the White House press office several times asking for concrete evidence of the danger, based on any information the administration may have. But a spokesman declined to comment.
That’s a surprising omission, given that a looming holocaust was the centerpiece of the president’s case for war. Absent specific, reliable evidence, we have to wonder if the president succumbed to unwarranted panic over fictitious dangers.
Bush had a host of reasons (or pretexts) for invading Iraq. But Obama has only one good excuse for the attack on Libya – averting mass murder. That gives the administration a special obligation to document the basis for its fears.
Maybe it can. Plenty of experts think Obama’s worries were justified. But so far, the White House message has been: Trust us.
Sorry, but we’ve tried that before. In 2002, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice waved off doubts about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions, saying, "We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Right now, the Benghazi bloodbath looks like Obama’s mushroom cloud.
3) New Haitian Leader Pledges Reconciliation
Randal C. Archibold, New York Times, April 5, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/world/americas/06haiti.html
Port-au-Prince, Haiti – It was a new stage on Tuesday for Michel Martelly, the former hit-maker who nicknamed himself "president" in song and is now on the verge of serving as the real thing in this devastated country.
[…] The message was reconciliation and unity, not profane takes on past leaders. [This is presumably a reference to the video of Martelly joking about killing Aristide; perhaps the NYT edited out the explanation of the reference – JFP.]
"I am president for all Haitians," Mr. Martelly said. "We are going to work together for change."
And so Mr. Martelly, who, according to preliminary results announced Monday, won more than two-thirds of the votes cast in the March 20 presidential runoff, set about reassuring Haiti and the world that he has the capacity to lead a country still on its knees from the January 2010 earthquake, a cholera epidemic and decades of the worst poverty in the hemisphere.
[…] His political skills will quickly face a test, assuming the results hold up when the official outcome is announced April 16.
Parliament is dominated by the party of President René Préval, potentially stalling any legislation Mr. Martelly puts forth and complicating his pick for prime minister, who must be endorsed by the legislature. It appears turnout was far lower than in previous elections – an Organization of American States and Caribbean Community projection put it at 30 percent, but no official figures have been released – potentially diminishing his claim of a mandate.
[…]
4) NATO raid that killed six revives questions on nighttime attacks
Associated Press, April 6, 2011
http://azstarnet.com/news/world/article_8c085013-7856-55e1-a387-9fab2b27b0a6.html
Kabul – A night raid by NATO-led forces killed six civilians in the relatively peaceful northern Afghan province of Sar-e-Pul, local officials said Tuesday, but a statement from the U.S.-led coalition said the dead were Taliban insurgents armed with AK-47 assault rifles.
The disagreement adds to the debate surrounding night raids, which have become a centerpiece of U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan as coalition forces seek to kill or capture Taliban supporters.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has asked the International Security Assistance Force, the official name for the coalition, to halt the raids, one of which last month resulted in the death of a Karzai cousin in Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.
Night raids have been a source of friction between Karzai and the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan. Many of the raids are conducted independently by foreign troops without prior coordination with Afghan security forces.
Despite Karzai’s demand that the raids be halted, ISAF insists that the raids have played an important role in weakening the Taliban.
Meanwhile, the Taliban have allowed the restoration of cellular phone services to parts of southwestern Afghanistan, two weeks after they ordered a shutdown to prevent people from giving away their movements to NATO forces, a government official and the insurgents said Tuesday.
The ban affected more than 800,000 cellular phone users in southwest Helmand province and another 100,000 in surrounding areas. Helmand remains a Taliban stronghold despite months of fighting between U.S.-led coalition forces and insurgents. The Taliban ordered the networks to close down about two weeks ago and blew up eight cell phone towers to enforce the ban.
The shutdown, which was honored by all four of Afghanistan’s private cellular networks, shows the influence the Taliban wield in many parts of the country, despite a ramped-up campaign against them by coalition forces – who say they have stopped the insurgents in parts of the south.
Despite claims of success against the Taliban, government forces essentially control only the major cities and towns in many parts of the south and east.
[…]
5) Taliban has strengthened along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, report finds
Scott Wilson, Washington Post, Tuesday, April , 8:33 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/taliban-has-strengthened-along-pakistans-border-with-afghanistan-report-finds/2011/04/05/AFOPXklC_story.html
The Taliban insurgency has gained strength in Pakistan’s border regions with Afghanistan in recent months despite a sustained government offensive against it, the Obama administration said in a stark new assessment of the war effort.
The report, sent to Congress on Tuesday, praises Pakistan’s military for confronting the insurgency in several border regions, which Taliban forces use as training and staging areas to attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
But the report says that in one area, the military has conducted a "major clearing operation" three times in the past two years. The most recent operation, it concludes, is "a clear indicator of the inability of the Pakistan military and government to render cleared areas resistant to insurgent return."
"There remains no clear path toward defeating the insurgency in Pakistan," the report says.
The administration’s report to Congress is a semiannual appraisal of the progress and remaining challenges facing the United States in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This one comes as the administration prepares to withdraw some of the roughly 100,000 U.S. troops from the country in July and as domestic support for the war has reached new lows.
Much of the unclassified version of the document echoes the administration’s December review of the war effort, which underscored steady military gains in Afghanistan since Obama ordered an additional 30,000 troops to the country a year earlier but which called them "fragile and reversible." That warning is also in this report, which emphasized that "the challenge remains to make our our gains durable and sustainable."
But the report also evaluates U.S. efforts over the first three months of this year, and it underlines alarming trends in that period beyond the "deteriorating" security conditions in Pakistan’s tribal agencies.
[…]
6) America’s Costliest War
William Hartung, Huffington Post, 04/ 5/11
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-hartung/americas-costliest-war_b_844645.html
Congress, the media, and the public are rightly asking whether America should be spending $1 billion or more on the intervention in Libya at a time of fiscal austerity. One member of Congress has even proposed that the mission be offset dollar for dollar by cuts in domestic programs (leaving the Pentagon and related security programs off limits).
While this newfound attention to the costs of U.S. global military operations is welcome, focusing on Libya alone misses the mark. The $1 billion in projected spending on Libya is just one tenth of one percent of the over $1 trillion the United States has spent so far on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Looked at another way, the likely costs of the Libyan mission are the equivalent of less than four days of spending on the war in Afghanistan.
And that’s the point. Those genuinely concerned about war costs need to go where the money is – Afghanistan. The Pentagon has asked for $113 billion to fight the war there for this year, roughly two and one-half times what has been requested to support the United States’ dwindling commitment in Iraq. That gap will only increase as troop numbers in Iraq continue to fall. To put this in some perspective, the entire Gross Domestic Product of Afghanistan is about $29 billion per year, which means that annual U.S. expenditures on the war are nearly four times the value of the entire Afghan economy. That number would obviously change if the drug economy were taken into account, but it is stunning nonetheless.
The tax dollars being spent on Afghanistan are enough to offset the $100 billion per year that House Republicans are seeking to cut from next year’s budget, or enough to fill the projected budget gaps of the 44 states that expect to run deficits in 2012. In other words, if the Afghan war ended and the funds allocated for it were returned to the states, no state in America would run a deficit next year. This would save millions of jobs of teachers, police, firefighters and other public employees while holding the line on basic services like Medicaid and income support for families in poverty. This would in turn be good for the economy as a whole. Military spending creates fewer jobs than virtually any other form of expenditure, from education to housing to transportation. So shifting funds away from war spending will result in a net increase in jobs nationwide.
[…]
Afghanistan
7) Al Qaeda Makes Afghan Comeback
Matthew Rosenberg and Julian E. Barnes, Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2011
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704355304576215762431072584.html
In late September, U.S. fighter jets streaked over the cedar-studded slopes of Korengal, the so-called Valley of Death, to strike a target that hadn’t been seen for years in Afghanistan: an al Qaeda training camp.
Among the dozens of Arabs killed that day, the U.S.-led coalition said, were two senior al Qaeda members, one Saudi and the other Kuwaiti. Another casualty of the bombing, according to Saudi media and jihadi websites, was one of Saudi Arabia’s most wanted militants. The men had come to Afghanistan to impart their skills to a new generation of Afghan and foreign fighters.
Even though the strike was successful, the very fact that it had to be carried out represents a troubling shift in the war. Nine years after a U.S.-led invasion routed almost all of al Qaeda’s surviving militants in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden’s network is gradually returning.
Over the past six to eight months, al Qaeda has begun setting up training camps, hideouts and operations bases in the remote mountains along Afghanistan’s northeastern border with Pakistan, some U.S., Afghan and Taliban officials say. The stepped-up infiltration followed a U.S. pullback from large swatches of the region starting 18 months ago. The areas were deemed strategically irrelevant and left to Afghanistan’s uneven security forces, and in some parts, abandoned entirely.
American commanders have argued that the U.S. military presence in the remote valleys was the main reason why locals joined the Taliban. Once American soldiers left, they predicted, the Taliban would go, too. Instead, the Taliban have stayed put, a senior U.S. military officer said, and "al Qaeda is coming back."
The militant group’s effort to re-establish bases in northeastern Afghanistan is distressing for several reasons. Unlike the Taliban, which is seen as a mostly local threat, al Qaeda is actively trying to strike targets in the West. Eliminating its ability to do so from bases in Afghanistan has always been the U.S.’s primary war goal and the motive behind fighting the Taliban, which gave al Qaeda a relatively free hand to operate when it ruled the country. The return also undermines U.S. hopes that last year’s troop surge would beat the Taliban badly enough to bring them to the negotiating table-and pressure them to break ties with al Qaeda. More than a year into the surge, those ties appear to be strong.
[…]
8) Taliban Exploit Tensions Seething In Afghan Society
Rod Nordland, New York Times, April 5, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/world/asia/06afghanistan.html
Kandahar, Afghanistan – If the protesters who pushed this city to the brink last weekend were really worried about Koran burning, wondered Layloma Popal, the headmistress of this city’s biggest girls’ school, "then why did they try to burn down my school?"
"There were 10 Korans at least in there," Ms. Popal said, pointing to the charred remains of the Peace Room, where students learn about peace strategies for their war-torn country. "If we have more security in Kandahar these days, as they say, where was it?"
For three hours, the rioters – many members of the Taliban or their sympathizers – marauded around the campus of the Zarghona Ana High School for Girls, while the students hid in the bathrooms. "We never saw the Afghan Army or the police or the foreign forces until after the rioters left," Ms. Popal said.
They were busy elsewhere. In an effort to quell the two days of disturbances, on Saturday and Sunday, the Kandahar police shot more than 123 protesters, and by the time the wounded either stabilized or died, the death toll had reached at least 13, according to hospital officials.
Thousands of young men, waving Taliban flags and shouting slogans honoring the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, rampaged through the streets, setting tires on fire, looting and in some cases opening fire on the police. Two officers were killed.
The rioting exposed a fundamental quandary for the American war effort in Kandahar, the heartland of the insurgency, which Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top allied commander, has called "one of those very important places where Taliban momentum has been reversed."
If the insurgents have indeed retreated from crucial districts, and if security in the city is better than it was just months ago, when the Taliban carried out daily assassinations, then there is still a deep undercurrent of unease and discontent caused by the foreign presence, which the Taliban and their sympathizers were able to ignite with the simple spark provided by the burning of a Koran by a pastor in Florida.
The heavy security that has come with the influx of American and Afghan troops has tamped down the daily violence that once plagued the city, but it has done little to resolve those underlying tensions, said Shahbuddin Akhundzada, a prominent religious scholar who has generally supported the American role in Afghanistan. "Now the people of Kandahar are under so much threat, there’s so much pressure on them, they are afraid to do anything, they’ll be arrested or killed," he said. "Then the slightest chance, like the Koran burning, and it all blows up."
There is a palpable sense of fear. A visiting male foreigner is asked to wear a head covering so as not to look like a foreigner. Mr. Akhundzada asked to meet in a neutral place, where no one would see him receiving foreign journalists.
[…]
Pakistan
9) White House Assails Pakistan Effort On Militants
David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, April 5, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/world/asia/06pakistan.html
Washington – The Obama administration on Tuesday gave Congress a harshly critical assessment of Pakistan’s efforts to defeat Al Qaeda and other militants, saying that after years of work with the Pakistani military "there remains no clear path toward defeating the insurgency" that thrives in the country.
That conclusion, buried in a 38-page report on the state of the war in Afghanistan and the efforts to defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan, comes just three months before President Obama is scheduled to announce the pace at which American troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan. It amounts to a concession that the effort to match Mr. Obama’s "surge" of troops in Afghanistan with a new strategy to squeeze Al Qaeda and the Taliban from the Pakistani side of the border has yielded virtually no results.
For more than a year American officials have expressed frustration with the slow pace of the Pakistani effort, which was further complicated by the devastating floods there last summer. But rarely have they gone public with the scope of those frustrations. The report issued Tuesday was not accompanied by any public statement by Mr. Obama, who, like President Bush before him, has been loath to publicly criticize the efforts of Pakistan.
But the report states clearly what many administration and Pentagon officials have long said in private: Without pressure from the Pakistani side of the border, it is virtually impossible to wipe out the strongholds of Taliban or Al Qaeda, except through American-led Predator strikes from the air.
[…]
Yemen
10) No plans to suspend military aid to Yemen: US
AFP, April 5, 2011
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hq0gdrn-os3ilYBa3iak9cKQFbsw
Washington – The Pentagon said Tuesday there were no plans to suspend US military assistance to Yemen but urged a swift transition of power amid a wave of anti-regime protests.
Asked at a news conference if the US administration was considering withholding military aid due to unrest and violence against demonstrators, press secretary Geoff Morrell said: "As far as I know, it has not been (considered)."
[…] Tensions are running high in Yemen after 24 people were killed in anti-regime unrest, with European governments condemning violence by President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime.
Washington had viewed the autocratic leader, in power since 1978, as a valuable ally in its fight against Al-Qaeda in the region but the United States shifted its stance this week, urging Saleh to peacefully relinquish power. "The situation right now is a difficult one, the longer it festers the more difficult it becomes," Morrell told reporters. "That is why this government has been urging a negotiated transition as quickly as possible."
He said the threat from Al-Qaeda in Yemen was serious and suggested US military assistance would continue no matter the outcome of the political turmoil. Once there is a political settlement, "we will be able to better collectively go after this threat that exists in Yemen," he said.
In 2010, the Defense Department spent $150 million to train and arm Yemen?s security forces and has requested from Congress more than $100 million for the current fiscal year and $115.6 million in military and economic aid for 2012. Morrell said there was no evidence to show that weapons supplied by the United States had been used by the regime against demonstrators.
[…]
Bahrain
11) Gates tries to soothe Saudis rattled by unrest
Robert Burns, Associated Press, 04/06/11 1:33 AM
http://www.sfexaminer.com/news/2011/04/gates-discuss-arab-upheaval-saudi-king
Defense Secretary Robert Gates tried to smooth the worst rift in years with Arab ally and oil producer Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, reassuring the Saudi king that the U.S. remains a steady friend despite support for pro-democracy revolutions in the Middle East.
[…] "Saudis believe their concerns in Bahrain – containing Iran, protecting Gulf monarchies and sending a clear message to their own Shiite population – are best addressed by a hardline policy of suppressing the protests," Marina Ottaway, director of the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in an analysis Monday.
On March 14, two days after Gates visited Bahrain’s rulers, the Saudis sent more than 1,000 troops into Bahrain, at that government’s request, for security assistance. Ottaway concluded from Washington’s muted response that it has chosen to implicitly back the Saudis.
"Washington has seemingly accepted that for the time being the Saudis have won the battle for influence in Bahrain and concluded that mending relations with Saudi Arabia should take precedence right now," she wrote.
[…]
–
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