Just Foreign Policy News
August 31, 2010
Feb 15, 2003: 30 million people were right
This evening, President Obama is giving a speech marking "the withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq" – although 50,000 "rebranded" troops remain. On February 15, 2003, millions of people around the world demonstrated to say no to the war then being planned by George Bush and Tony Blair. British filmmaker Amir Amirani is making a documentary about this "global day of protest"; you can view a trailer here.
http://www.wearemany.tv/
Should the Senate Fund "Enduring" U.S. Military Bases in Afghanistan?
The Pentagon is planning military construction for years of U.S. combat in Afghanistan. The Senate could refuse to fund; in 2008, Congress rejected a similar Pentagon request for "long term" military construction in Iraq. Urge your senators to oppose construction of long-term U.S. bases in Afghanistan.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/act/afghanistanbases
Bacevich: Washington Rules
Andrew Bacevich’s book, "Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War," is a call for Americans to reject the Washington consensus for permanent war.
Get the book
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/buywashingtonrules
September 24th: JFP "Virtual Brown Bag" with Andrew Bacevich
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/bacevichtalk
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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) Writing in the New York Times, Anthony Shadid puts a name on one of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who were killed in the war: Muhammad Jassem Bouhan al-Izzawi, who was killed in 2005 but whose family only recently discovered where he is buried. "Let me be honest," his brother Hamid said. "It would have been better if we had stayed under Saddam Hussein."
2) President Obama will speak to the nation from the Oval Office on Tuesday night, to convey that he has kept one of the central promises of his campaign: withdrawing U.S. combat troops from Iraq, the New York Times reports. Obama will also try to put into larger context "what this drawdown means to our national security efforts in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia and around the world as we take the fight to Al Qaeda," the White House said.
3) Antony Blinken, Vice-President Biden’s national security adviser, says the US does not have a plan for breaking the political logjam in Baghdad or a specific candidate for prime minister, the New York Times reports. But he "signaled" the Obama administration believes both Maliki’s State of Law coalition and Allawi’s Iraqiya coalition should be part of "the foundation of the next government," along with the Kurdish alliance. Blinken suggested that the US did not see the Sadrists bloc as "useful" members of a new governing coalition – or, as he put it, the Iraqi government should include "coalitions that are interested in building a long-term partnership with the United States," the Times says. [For a senior U.S. official to say who should and who shouldn’t be in the governing coalition would seem to undermine US rhetoric about other countries "meddling" in Iraq – JFP.]
4) 21 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since Friday, the Telegraph reports.
5) A Taliban official says opposition to the construction of a mosque in New York City now leads the talking points they use for recruitment, Newsweek reports. The backlash against the project has drawn the heaviest e-mail response ever on jihadi Web sites, the official claims – far bigger even than France’s ban on burqas earlier this year. "We talk about how America tortures with waterboarding, about the cruel confinement of Muslims in wire cages in Guantánamo, about the killing of innocent women and children in air attacks-and now America gives us another gift with its street protests to prevent a mosque from being built in New York," the official said.
6) President Obama’s Afghan policy now faces the unraveling of central authority in Kyrgyzstan, which hosts a US air base critical to the war, the Washington Post reports. A month after agreeing to extend for a year a $60 million lease on the Manas base, Kyrgyzstan’s pro-Western but increasingly impotent president has retreated from U.S.-backed security programs. Parliamentary elections in October are expected to amplify nationalist voices wary of the West. Russia has told Kyrgyzstan that it expects the U.S. Air Force out next year.
7) The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights have sued to block the Obama Administration from assassinating Anwar al-Awlaki, the New York Times reports. They also demand that the government disclose the standards it uses to determine who should be singled out for killing. Human rights activists have noted that the law requires the government to get a court warrant to eavesdrop on Awlaki or other US citizens. An order to kill him should require at least the same degree of review, they say, to meet the Fifth Amendment’s requirement of "due process" before depriving an American of life or liberty. "The United States cannot simply execute people, including its own citizens, anywhere in the world based on its own say-so," said Vince Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Iraq
8) Weapons dealers in Fallujah, Baghdad, Mosul and Kirkuk said sales of personal protection weapons are up by 30 to 50 percent in the past four months, Leila Fadel reports in the Washington Post, as people prepare for the US withdrawal.
9) The UN says 1.5 million people are displaced inside Iraq, of which 500,000 are squatting in camps or public buildings, Reuters reports. Aid workers fear that when the US officially ends its combat mission, Iraq’s humanitarian crisis will be forgotten as attention shifts elsewhere. UNHCR, which built around 10,000 houses last year to help address a shortage of an estimated 1.5 million homes in Iraq, said it only managed to build 6,000-7,000 homes this year.
Israel/Palestine
10) The crude outlines of a Palestinian state are emerging in the West Bank, with a growing sense among ordinary citizens that they can count on basic services, Ethan Bronner writes in the New York Times. Economic growth in the first quarter of this year was up 11 percent over 2009. The IMF says Palestinian Prime Minister Fayyad is imposing discipline on the bureaucracy and reducing dependence on foreign aid. But the West Bank remains occupied by Israel. It is filled with scores of Israeli settlements, some 10,000 Israeli troops and numerous roadblocks and checkpoints that render true ordinary life impossible for the area’s 2.5 million Palestinians. The central question facing peace talks is under what circumstances Israel might yield its control over the bulk of the West Bank to the emerging Palestinian state apparatus, Bronner writes.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Restoring Names to Iraq War’s Unknown Casualties
Anthony Shadid, New York Times, August 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/world/middleeast/31legacy.html
Baghdad – In a pastel-colored room at the Baghdad morgue known simply as the Missing, where faces of the thousands of unidentified dead of this war are projected onto four screens, Hamid Jassem came on a Sunday searching for answers.
In a blue plastic chair, he sat under harsh fluorescent lights and a clock that read 8:58 and 44 seconds, no longer keeping time. With deference and patience, he stared at the screen, each corpse bearing four digits and the word "majhoul," or unknown:
No. 5060 passed, with a bullet to the right temple; 5061, with a bruised and bloated face; 5062 bore a tattoo that read, "Mother, where is happiness?" The eyes of 5071 were open, as if remembering what had happened to him.
"Go back," Hamid asked the projectionist. No. 5061 returned to the screen. "That’s him," he said, nodding grimly.
His mother followed him into the room, her weathered face framed in a black veil. "Show me my son!" she cried. Behind her, Hamid pleaded silently. He waved his hands at the projectionist, begging him to spare her. In vain, he shook his head and mouthed the word "no."
"Don’t tell me he’s dead," she shouted at the room. "It’s not him! It’s not him!"
No. 5061 returned to the screen.
She lurched forward, shaking her head in denial. Her eyes stared hard. And in seconds, her son’s 33 years of life seemed to pass before her eyes. "Yes, yes, yes," she finally sobbed, falling back in her chair. Reflexively, her hands slapped her face. They clawed, until her nails drew blood. "If I had only known from the first day!" she cried.
The horror of this war is its numbers, frozen in the portraits at the morgue: an infant’s eyes sealed shut and a woman’s hair combed in blood and ash. "Files tossed on the shelves," a policeman called the dead, and that very anonymity lends itself to the war’s name here – al-ahdath, or the events.
On the charts that the American military provides, those numbers are seen as success, from nearly 4,000 dead in one month in 2006 to the few hundred today. The Interior Ministry offers its own toll of war – 72,124 since 2003, a number too precise to be true. At the morgue, more than 20,000 of the dead, which even sober estimates suggest total 100,000 or more, are still unidentified.
This number had a name, though. No. 5061 was Muhammad Jassem Bouhan al-Izzawi, father, son and brother. At 9 a.m., on that Sunday, Aug. 15, his family left the morgue in a white Nissan and set out to find his body in a city torn between remembering and forgetting, where death haunts a country neither at war nor peace.
[…] Eventually, he found the police report of Muhammad’s death.
Dated July 3, 2005, it read: "We discovered 11 unidentified bodies, their hands bound from behind, their eyes blindfolded and their mouths gagged. The bodies bore signs of torture."
"All of us were victims," Officer Hassan told Hamid, in an attempt at sympathy. "Who was the exception? No one was. Not the martyrs, not the policemen, no one."
"If they just shot them, O.K.," Hamid said. "But they beat them, tortured them and then they burned them. Why? And those guys" – the politicians, he meant – " are just watching."
"Power and positions, that’s all they’re worried about," Officer Hassan said.
"Let me be honest," Hamid said, flashing rare anger at no one in particular. "Just to tell the truth. It would have been better if we had stayed under Saddam Hussein."
The policeman shrugged and stayed silent.
[…]
2) Obama To Make 2nd Oval Office Speech
Helene Cooper, New York Times, August 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/world/middleeast/31prexy.html
Washington – For only the second time since he took office, President Obama will speak to the nation from the Oval Office on Tuesday night, in an address meant to convey that he has kept one of the central promises of his campaign: withdrawing American combat troops from Iraq.
Mr. Obama will steer clear of the "mission accomplished" tone that President George W. Bush struck so famously seven years ago – and that subsequently came back to haunt him as Iraq fell into further chaos. "You won’t hear those words coming from us," said the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs.
But Mr. Obama will still strike a promises-kept theme, aides said, even as he seeks to reconcile his opposition to the Iraq war – and his opposition to the so-called troop surge, which Republicans and many military officials credit for the decrease in violence in Iraq – with his role as a wartime commander in chief seeking to credit his troops with carrying out a difficult mission.
[…] In his Oval Office address, Mr. Obama will also try to put into larger context "what this drawdown means to our national security efforts in Afghanistan and Southeast Asia and around the world as we take the fight to Al Qaeda," Mr. Gibbs said. That means speaking to the country about the American presence in Afghanistan, a topic that the president has spoken about only in general terms since announcing his Afghanistan policy last December.
"I’m a general fan of how he’s handled the two wars," said Michael E. O’Hanlon, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "But if there’s a consistent weakness, it’s the episodic quality in how we hear from him about the wars. He temporarily engages."
Mr. Obama, Mr. O’Hanlon said, should use his Oval Office pulpit on Tuesday night to explain in clear terms exactly what American troops have been doing in Afghanistan over the past few months, and, looking forward, what his aims are over the next year.
[…]
3) Biden In Iraq For Talks And Handover
Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, August 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/world/middleeast/31biden.html
Baghdad – Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. arrived in Baghdad on Monday to commemorate the official end of the United States combat mission and to meet with Iraqi political leaders, who have yet to form a government more than five months after elections.
[…] An aide to Mr. Biden said Iraq had a functioning caretaker government and sought to dispel any sense of crisis. But he acknowledged that the delay in seating a new government had made it hard for Iraq to address longstanding political, legal and economic problems, and to further develop its relationship with the United States. "To build a partnership, you need a partner," said Antony J. Blinken, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser. "The vice president is going to urge the leaders to bring this process to a conclusion."
The Obama administration has been reported to be sympathetic to a compromise plan in which Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki might retain his post with somewhat more limited powers while a new council with binding authority would be established under Ayad Allawi, a former interim prime minister and leader of a political coalition that is a rival to Mr. Maliki’s.
Mr. Blinken said the United States did not have a plan for breaking the political logjam in Baghdad or a specific candidate for prime minister.
Still, he signaled that the Obama administration believed that both Mr. Maliki’s State of Law coalition and Mr. Allawi’s Iraqiya coalition – the two leading blocs in the voting in March – should be part of "the foundation of the next government," along with the Kurdish alliance.
Asked about the bloc of candidates loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite anti-American cleric, Mr. Blinken suggested that the United States did not see them as useful members of a new governing coalition – or, as he put it, the Iraqi government should include "coalitions that are interested in building a long-term partnership with the United States."
[…]
4) Afghanistan bomb attacks kill twenty-one US soldiers in 48 hours
Twenty-one American troops have been killed in Afghanistan since Friday in one of the bloodiest periods of the summer.
Ben Farmer, Telegraph, 31 Aug 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/7972863/Afghanistan-bomb-attacks-kill-twenty-one-US-soldiers-in-48-hours.html
Kabul – A series of bomb attacks have badly hit US troops in eastern and southern Afghanistan in the past 48 hours.
The death toll among in the Nato-led coalition has reached 484 this year and is predicted to far surpass 2009’s total of 521.
Deaths have risen consistently each year since 2001. Afghan police and civilians have suffered far higher casualties.
The coalition blames the rise in troop deaths partly on the influx of reinforcements, which is allowing commanders to target previously untouched insurgent safe havens where rebels are mounting stiff resistance.
Gen David Petraeus, senior US and Nato commander in the country, warned last week fighting would "get harder before it gets easier".
In two of the most deadly recent incidents, three Americans died in eastern Afghanistan on one bomb attack on Tuesday. Five died in a single bomb attack in the south on Monday.
[…]
5) Anti-Mosque Rhetoric in US Reportedly Boosts Taliban Recruitment
Sami Yousafzai and Ron Moreau, Newsweek, August 30, 2010
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/08/30/taliban-using-mosque-controversy-to-recruit.html
Taliban officials know it’s sacrilegious to hope a mosque will not be built, but that’s exactly what they’re wishing for: the success of the fiery campaign to block the proposed Islamic cultural center and prayer room near the site of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. "By preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor," Taliban operative Zabihullah tells Newsweek. (Like many Afghans, he uses a single name.) "It’s providing us with more recruits, donations, and popular support."
America’s enemies in Afghanistan are delighted by the vehement public opposition to the proposed "Ground Zero mosque." The backlash against the project has drawn the heaviest e-mail response ever on jihadi Web sites, Zabihullah claims-far bigger even than France’s ban on burqas earlier this year. (That was big, he recalls: "We received many e-mails asking for advice on how Muslims should react to the hijab ban, and how they can punish France.") This time the target is America itself. "We are getting even more messages of support and solidarity on the mosque issue and questions about how to fight back against this outrage."
Zabihullah also claims that the issue is such a propaganda windfall-so tailor-made to show how "anti-Islamic" America is-that it now heads the list of talking points in Taliban meetings with fighters, villagers, and potential recruits. "We talk about how America tortures with waterboarding, about the cruel confinement of Muslims in wire cages in Guantánamo, about the killing of innocent women and children in air attacks-and now America gives us another gift with its street protests to prevent a mosque from being built in New York," Zabihullah says. "Showing reality always makes the best propaganda."
Taliban officials say they’re looking forward to a new wave of terrorist trainees from the West like this year’s Times Square car bomber. "I expect we will soon be receiving more American Muslims like Faisal Shahzad who are looking for help in how to express their rage," says a Taliban official who was a senior minister when the group ruled Afghanistan and who remains active in the insurgency. As an indication of the anger that is growing among some Muslims in the West, this official, who requested anonymity for security reasons, mentions the arrest of three Canadian Muslims in Ontario last week on charges of plotting to build and detonate improvised explosive devices. (A fourth individual was arrested in Ottawa last Friday in connection with the case.) The Ground Zero furor will likely add to that anger. "The more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get," Zabihullah predicts.
6) In Central Asia, a new headache for U.S. policy
Andrew Higgins, Washington Post, Tuesday, August 31, 2010; 11:31 AM http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/31/AR2010083102620.html
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan – Beset by mounting casualties on the battlefield and deepening disquiet at home over America’s longest war, President Obama’s Afghan policy now faces another big headache: the unraveling of central authority in Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian nation that hosts an American air base critical to the battle against the Taliban.
Just a month after agreeing to extend for a year a $60 million lease on a U.S. Air Force base here, Kyrgyzstan’s generally pro-Western but increasingly impotent president, Roza Otunbayeva, has retreated from U.S.-backed security programs that Washington hoped would help fortify a fragile Kyrgyz government. These include a counter-terrorism and anti-narcotics training center and an international police mission.
The government’s paralysis, most notable in its inability to control truculent Kyrgyz nationalists in the south of this former Soviet republic, does not pose any immediate physical threat to the U.S. Air Force base, which is about 20 miles from Bishkek in the north. But it does raise the prospect of prolonged and possibly bloody clashes ahead and strengthens forces inimical to Washington’s interests in the region.
What diplomats and local analysts describe as perilous political drift in the capital, Bishkek, has been compounded by the approach of parliamentary elections in October, a vote that will probably amplify nationalist voices wary of the West and further enfeeble Otunbayeva.
[…] In a severe and humiliating blow to the president’s authority, the mayor of Osh, a rabble-rousing Kyrgyz nationalist hostile to what he sees as foreign interference, last week defied an order that he give up his post. "I am going nowhere," the mayor, Melis Myrzakmatov – who was appointed by Otunbayeva’s ousted predecessor – told supporters at a late-August rally. A minister from Bishkek sent to calm the crowd was roughed up and fled the city. "The president has lost face and also power," said one Western official. "This is a catastrophe."
[…] The U.S. base outside Bishkek, operated by the 376th Air Expeditionary Wing, plays a central role in Obama’s Afghan surge. It "is critical to all our mission sets" in Afghanistan and is "the crown jewel of Central Asia," said Col. Dwight C. Sones, base commander, in an interview.
Located at Bishkek’s Manas International Airport, the facility is a staging post for American troops entering and exiting Afghanistan. In May it handled a record 55,000 transiting troops. The base also acts as a giant gas station, with a fleet of KC-135 aero-tankers that are sent into the sky over Afghanistan. Through in-flight refueling, these tanker planes provide gas for about a third of all U.S. air operations inside Afghanistan.
[…] "It changed its name, but we know what is going on," said Felix Kulov, a Soviet-era security officer and now head of a pro-Russia Kyrgyz party that is expected to do well in the October elections. Kulov, in an interview, said that any decision on whether to end or extend the base’s lease must be taken in concert with the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a grouping of seven former Soviet republics that is dominated by Moscow. Russia, which also has a military base near Bishkek, has told Kyrgyzstan that it expects the U.S. Air Force out next year.
[…] Nationalist rhetoric has been rising steadily in Kyrgyzstan in the run-up to the October election. This is mostly directed at the country’s Uzbek minority but often also has an anti-Western edge. Many Kyrgyz see the West as unduly sympathetic to the plight of Uzbeks. There is also anger at what is widely seen as Washington’s past coddling of the ousted authoritarian leader Kurmanbek Bakiyev so as to hang on to its military base here.
7) Rights Groups Sue U.S. on Effort to Kill Cleric
Scott Shane, New York Times, August 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/us/31suit.html
Washington – Two human rights organizations went to court on Monday to challenge the Obama administration’s decision to authorize the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric now hiding in Yemen.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington on behalf of Mr. Awlaki’s father, Nasser al-Awlaki, argues that the United State government should not be permitted to kill an American citizen away from the battlefield and without judicial review.
The human rights groups, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights, asked the court to prohibit the government from killing Mr. Awlaki until the lawsuit is heard. They also demand that the government disclose the standards it uses to determine who should be singled out for killing.
The lawsuit is the first legal challenge since administration officials disclosed that Mr. Awlaki was the first American citizen to be designated for capture or killing by the Central Intelligence Agency. The authorization, which also applies to the Defense Department, came after intelligence agencies concluded early this year that Mr. Awlaki was actively participating in plotting attacks against the United States, including the failed bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25.
[…] Obama administration officials have argued that Mr. Awlaki, now believed to be an operative of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen branch of the terrorist network, has essentially joined the enemy in a time of war. The government does not need a court’s permission to kill an enemy soldier, the officials say.
But some legal experts and human rights activists have noted that the law requires the government to get a court warrant to eavesdrop on Mr. Awlaki or other American citizens. An order to kill him should require at least the same degree of review, the activists say, to meet the Fifth Amendment’s requirement of "due process" before depriving an American of life or liberty.
"The United States cannot simply execute people, including its own citizens, anywhere in the world based on its own say-so," said Vince Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
The lawsuit acknowledges that singling out someone for killing can be lawful "as a last resort to protect against concrete, specific and imminent threats of death or serious physical injury." But terrorism suspects designated secretly by the government and left on the target list for months or years do not qualify as such an urgent threat, the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit acknowledges that singling out someone for killing can be lawful "as a last resort to protect against concrete, specific and imminent threats of death or serious physical injury." But terrorism suspects designated secretly by the government and left on the target list for months or years do not qualify as such an urgent threat, the lawsuit says.
[…]
Iraq
8) As U.S. ends combat operations, Iraqis move to protect themselves from violence
Leila Fadel, Washington Post, Monday, August 30, 2010; 3:47 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/30/AR2010083003472.html
Baghdad – Four days after his brother was murdered in a Baghdad robbery this month, Muntather Shaker borrowed $1,500 and bought a pistol. He carries it in his back pocket, sleeps with it under his pillow and is ready to use it to defend his family. "If I thought the government could protect me I would never buy a weapon," he said. "We don’t know what will happen when the Americans leave."
Shaker is one of scores of Iraqis who feel they must depend on themselves for protection as the U.S. military has drawn down to just under 50,000 troops and ends combat operations on Tuesday.
The withdrawing troops leave behind a country with only a tenuous hold on stability: Nearly six months after the national parliamentary election, no new government has formed, violence is on the rise and Iraq’s security forces are being targeted.
Despite assurances that the United States is not abandoning Iraq, people here are scrambling to prepare themselves. Weapons dealers in Fallujah, Baghdad, Mosul and Kirkuk said sales of personal protection weapons are up by 30 to 50 percent in the past four months.
"Especially in the last three weeks, business has picked up," said Abu Fatma, who insisted on using his nickname to protect his illegal weapons sales business. "People are afraid. It is as if we are returning to 2005."
[…]
9) As U.S. withdraws, Iraqis still live in crisis
Serena Chaudhry and Khalid al-Ansary, Reuters, Mon Aug 30, 10:44 am ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100830/ts_nm/us_iraq_usa_humanitarian_2
Baghdad (Reuters) – Kareem Hassan Abboud’s family of seven share a two room house in a makeshift squatter camp in the mainly Shi’ite district of Chukook in northwestern Baghdad. Sewage muddies the dirt road outside.
The 59-year-old fisherman and his family were forced to move there four years ago when sectarian violence between majority Shi’ites and once dominant Sunnis raged in Iraq, set off after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled dictator Saddam Hussein.
As U.S. combat operations come to a close on Tuesday 7-1/2 years after the invasion, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis like Abboud, who fled mixed-sect neighborhoods at a time when bodies were piling up in the streets overnight, are living in squalor.
[…] The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, says the Iraq war produced the worst humanitarian crisis in the Middle East since 1948, when half the Arab population of Palestine fled their homes after the creation of Israel.
According to the UNHCR, 1.5 million people are displaced inside Iraq, of which 500,000 are squatting in camps or public buildings. In Baghdad, 200,000 people live in 120 camps. There are also hundreds of thousands of Iraqis abroad, mainly in neighboring Jordan and Syria.
Still too scared to go home, Iraqis who fled the war face trauma and hardship. Many find it impossible to get work and slide into poverty. Aid workers say many Iraqi women are falling into the hands of sex traffickers in the Middle East.
[…] Aid workers fear that when the United States officially ends its combat mission in Iraq on August 31, Iraq’s humanitarian crisis will be forgotten as attention shifts elsewhere.
Daniel Endres, the UNHCR representative in Iraq, said donors had already started to disengage from Iraq, especially Europe. "The funding that the U.N. alone would require this year would be about $264 million and right now we have $120 million. We don’t even have half of what we actually would need … I’m worried about next year in particular," he said.
[…] The UNHCR, which built around 10,000 houses last year to help address a shortage of an estimated 1.5 million homes in Iraq, said it only managed to build 6,000-7,000 homes this year. Endres said it was crucial donors continued to contribute.
"Statistics show that the majority of post-conflict situations crunch back into conflict within seven years," he said. "And very often you can trace it back to a lack of attention or no sustained support in these critical post-conflict years."
[…]
Israel/Palestine
10) Outlines Emerge of Future State in the West Bank
Ethan Bronner, New York Times, August 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/world/middleeast/31mideast.html
Ramallah, West Bank – As preparations intensify for a Palestinian-Israeli summit meeting in Washington on Thursday, the crude outlines of a Palestinian state are emerging in the West Bank, with increasingly reliable security forces, a more disciplined government and a growing sense among ordinary citizens that they can count on basic services.
Personal checks, long shunned as being unredeemable, are now widely accepted. Traffic tickets are issued and paid, movie theaters are opening and public parks are packed with families late into the summer nights. Economic growth in the first quarter of this year was 11 percent over the same period in 2009, the International Monetary Fund says.
"I’ve never seen Nablus so alive," Caesar Darwazeh, who owns a photography studio, said on Sunday night as throngs of people enjoyed balloons and popcorn, a four-wagon train taking merrymakers through the streets.
Of course, the West Bank remains occupied by Israel. It is filled with scores of Israeli settlements, some 10,000 Israeli troops and numerous roadblocks and checkpoints that render true ordinary life impossible for the area’s 2.5 million Palestinians.
The central question facing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority is under what circumstances Israel might yield its control over the bulk of this territory to the emerging Palestinian state apparatus.
[…] Palestinian officials say their central demand at the start of the talks is for the current settlement-building moratorium to be extended. Mr. Netanyahu and his aides have so far rejected that.
A top Netanyahu aide, however, said that if Mr. Abbas accepted – even privately when the two leaders meet alone – an end to the conflict with Israel and its Jewish identity, "the whole conventional wisdom can change very quickly."
And these talks, the first direct negotiations in nearly two years with 17 years of failed diplomatic efforts behind them, have one advantage that past rounds have lacked: a West Bank administration that to many Israelis and Palestinians alike has begun to resemble, tentatively, a functioning state.
A senior Israeli Army commander, speaking under army rules of anonymity, said security coordination with the Palestinian forces was better than it had ever been. Unlike the situation in 2000, he said, when Washington-sponsored peace talks failed and the West Bank exploded in violence, the area is stable because of both its economic growth and a strong security situation.
[…] Much of the credit for the positive changes in the West Bank go to Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, who is halfway through a two-year plan to build institutions and infrastructure for a Palestinian state. In the past year, he has opened 34 schools and 44 housing complexes, planted 370,000 trees and increased tax revenue by 20 percent.
"We have had 11 governments since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, and we never got anything from any of them until this one," remarked Ahmad Douqan, a leader in the Balata refugee camp near Nablus. "People in the camp look at Salam as someone who, more than anyone else, works for them."
Mr. Fayyad is imposing discipline on his bloated bureaucracy, taking away free cars and cellphones from officials. He has reduced the authority’s dependence on outside budgetary aid, from $1.8 billion in 2008 to a projected $1.2 billion in 2010, according to Oussama Kanaan, head of the International Monetary Fund mission to the West Bank and Gaza.
"The Palestinian Authority is determined to follow the path of fiscal consolidation with a view to substantially reducing reliance on foreign aid for government expenditures," Mr. Fayyad said at a news briefing on Monday.
Mr. Kanaan said the goal for 2011 was to bring the dependence below $1 billion. "The trend is good," he said in an interview. "Due to the reforms, there is no case to be made for withholding aid. The situation is very different from three years ago."
–
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
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