Just Foreign Policy News
November 1, 2010
*Action – Human Rights First: Ask Obama to support election monitors for Egypt
Egypt will hold parliamentary elections on November 28. The Egyptian government is refusing to allow international election monitors into the country, cracking down on opposition voices, and muzzling the independent press. Ask President Obama to urge President Mubarak to accept international election monitors – something he said at the UN every member state should do.
http://bit.ly/bldTdi
Just Foreign Policy announces WaPo "Fox on 15th" campaign
In response to David Broder’s op-ed in the Washington Post calling for President Obama to orchestrate a war fever against Iran as a way of stimulating the US economy, (see Dean Baker, #1 below) Just Foreign Policy announces its "Fox on 15th" Campaign.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/node/749
South of the Border on DVD
Oliver Stone’s documentary South of the Border was released on DVD this week. Why is the center-left cruising to victory in Brazil? You can get the DVD here.
https://www.justforeignpolicy.org/southoftheborder
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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) David Broder’s op-ed in the Washington Post suggesting that fighting a war with Iran could be an effective way to boost the economy is a visit to loon tune land, writes Dean Baker for the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Referring to the Post as "Fox on 15th," Baker notes that war spending affects the economy in the same way that other government spending affects the economy. If spending on war can provide jobs and lift the economy then so can spending on roads, weatherizing homes, or educating our kids. All the forms of stimulus spending that Broder derided because they add to the deficit will increase GDP and generate jobs just like the war that Broder is advocating – which will also add to the deficit.
2) Brazil’s election on Sunday was a contest of "Restore Sanity" versus "Keep Fear Alive," writes Just Foreign Policy President Mark Weisbrot in the Guardian. Sanity triumphed over fear, as voters were more convinced by the substantial improvements in their well-being during the Lula years than the US Republican-like fear tactics of the opposition.
3) The plot to send explosives from Yemen to the US by courier would likely not have been discovered if not for a tip by Saudi intelligence officials, the New York Times reports. The Saudis have brought similar intelligence reports about imminent threats to several European countries in the past few years, and have played an important role in identifying terrorists in Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and Kuwait, according to Saudi and Western intelligence officials. The Saudis have stepped up their intelligence-gathering efforts in Yemen since last year.
4) The Obama administration is considering putting elite U.S. hunter-killer teams that operate secretly in Yemen under CIA authority, the Wall Street Journal reports. The move would allow the U.S. to strike suspected terrorist targets under US law without Yemen’s permission, the WSJ says. Experts have warned that an expanded U.S. military role could fuel a public backlash against Yemen’s already weak government and increase support for al Qaeda.
5) 19 of the 20 GOP candidates who are in closely contested races and have expressed a position on the issue say they have doubts about the scientific evidence for global warming, the Los Angeles Times reports. Some of the tea party’s biggest funders, including Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, are creatures of the oil and coal companies, the LAT notes.
6) The depravity of US foreign policy is producing increased depravity domestically, writes Glenn Greenwald in Salon. A Nebraska resident was arrested for waterboarding his girlfriend. The Chicago Tribune ran an Op-Ed from Jonah Goldberg headlined: "Why is Assange still alive?" Marc Thiessen wrote in The Washington Post, under the headline "WikiLeaks Must be Stopped": "The government has a wide range of options for dealing with him. It can employ not only law enforcement but also intelligence and military assets to bring Assange to justice and put his criminal syndicate out of business."
7) As the next round of U.N. climate talks approaches in Cancun, the Obama administration is claiming its commitment to action while the prospects for comprehensive legislation have evaporated at home, Juliet Eilperin reports for the Washington Post. Administration officials might not be able to deliver on all the climate assistance they have promised to give poor countries by 2012 and have questioned some financing proposals linked to longer-term foreign aid. The European commissioner for climate action said other countries are using U.S. lawmakers’ refusal to adopt binding limits on carbon dioxide to back away from the Copenhagen Accord, the deal forged in last year’s U.N. talks. A new dispute could flare up this week, when an international task force charged with showing how rich nations can mobilize $100 billion by 2020 for climate assistance will outline options for generating that money. Larry Summers has served in the group on behalf of the US and questioned some of the proposals, including imposing a new fee on some financial transactions.
8) The Cluster Munition Monitor says seven countries have destroyed their cluster bomb supplies and two have cleared the areas where the bombs were dropped, the BBC reports. The US, thought to have the world’s biggest stockpile of cluster bombs, has said it will keep them for a decade and has refused to sign the treaty banning them. The US is in the "untenable position of saying: ‘We agree these weapons cause too much harm to civilians, but at the same time we want to use them for another 10 years,’" said Stephen Goose of Human Rights Watch.
Iran
9) Sarah Shourd told the New York Times that the three American hitchhikers were inadvertently in Iran, not in Iraq, when they were arrested by Iranian authorities, the Times reports. Shourd said she wanted to correct the gathering false impression, fueled by a US military report made public by WikiLeaks and earlier news reports, that the hikers were detained inside Iraq and forced across the border. Shourd also rejected the claims of the US military report that they had been warned and that they were deliberately seeking to create a confrontation.
Afghanistan
10) According to an insurgent negotiator, the Afghan Taliban is demanding names of its senior leaders are removed from US and UN blacklists and that a number of prisoners are released as a precondition of further peace talks, the Telegraph reports. The negotiator said little progress could be expected from the Taliban until its leader, Mullah Omar, was included in talks.
11) The Afghanistan war reconstruction inspector general’s report said Western money being used to supplement the salaries of Afghan government officials and advisers has few if any controls ensuring against waste or corruption, the Wall Street Journal reports. Some officials were receiving supplements as large as 20 times their normal salaries. Much of the $45 million per year going to 6,600 Afghan officials is provided by the World Bank, the U.S., the U.K. and UNDP.
Kyrgyzstan
12) The head of a multinational jet fuel business that has received Pentagon contracts worth nearly $3 billion has refused to comply with a subpoena from the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, the Washington Post reports.
Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) David Broder Calls for War With Iran to Boost the Economy
Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research, Sunday, 31 October 2010
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-broder-calls-for-war-with-iran-to-boost-the-economy
This is not a joke (at least not on my part). David Broder, the longtime columnist and reporter at a formerly respectable newspaper, quite explicitly suggested that fighting a war with Iran could be an effective way to boost the economy. Ignoring the idea that anyone should undertake war as an economic policy, Broder’s economics is also a visit to loon tune land.
Broder tells readers:
"Can Obama harness the forces that might spur new growth? This is the key question for the next two years. What are those forces? Essentially, there are two. One is the power of the business cycle, the tidal force that throughout history has dictated when the economy expands and when it contracts. Economists struggle to analyze this, but they almost inevitably conclude that it cannot be rushed and almost resists political command. As the saying goes, the market will go where it is going to go. In this regard, Obama has no advantage over any other pol. Even in analyzing the tidal force correctly, he cannot control it. What else might affect the economy? The answer is obvious, but its implications are frightening. War and peace influence the economy."
Sorry Mr. Broder, outside of Fox on 15th [i.e., the Washington Post, whose corporate headquarters are on 15th street in northwest Washington DC – JFP] the world does not work this way. War affects the economy the same way that other government spending affects the economy. It does not have some mystical impact as Broder seems to think.
If spending on war can provide jobs and lift the economy then so can spending on roads, weatherizing homes, or educating our kids. Yes, that’s right, all the forms of stimulus spending that Broder derided so much because they add to the deficit will increase GDP and generate jobs just like the war that Broder is advocating (which will also add to the deficit).
So, we have two routes to prosperity. We can either build up our physical infrastructure and improve the skills and education of our workers or we can go kill Iranians. Broder has made it clear where he stands.
2) Dilma’s Victory in Brazil: "Restore Sanity" Beats "Keep Fear Alive"
It’s not the result Washington wanted, but Dilma’s victory creates the chance to consolidate Brazil’s social progress under Lula
Mark Weisbrot, Guardian, Monday 1 November 2010 02.00 G
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/nov/01/brazil-republicans
Like the rally led by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central that brought hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of Washington, DC on Saturday, Brazil’s election on Sunday was a contest of "Restore Sanity" versus "Keep Fear Alive" – but with the fate of millions of Brazilians seriously at stake.
Dilma Rousseff of the governing Workers’ party coasted to victory against the opposition candidate José Serra, with a comfortable margin of 56 to 44%. It had been a bitter and ugly campaign, marked by allegations of corruption and malfeasance on both sides, ending with Serra’s wife calling Dilma a "baby-killer."
Religious groups and leaders mobilised for the Serra campaign and accused Dilma of wanting to legalise abortion, ban religious symbols, being "anti-Christian", and a "terrorist" for her resistance to the military dictatorship during the late 1960s. The whole campaign was all too reminiscent of Republican strategies in the United States, going back to the rise of the religious right in the 1980s, through the "Swift Boat" politics and Karl Rove’s "Weapons of Mass Distraction" of recent years.
Serra even had a rightwing foreign policy strategy that prompted one critic to label him "Serra Palin". His campaign threatened to alienate Brazil from most of its neighbours by accusing the Bolivian government of being "complicit" in drug trafficking and Venezuela of "sheltering" the Farc (the main guerrilla group) in Colombia.
He attacked outgoing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for his refusal – along with most of the rest of South America – to recognise the government of Honduras. The Honduran government was "elected" following a military coup last year, under conditions of censorship and human rights abuses such that only the United States and a handful of mostly rightwing allies recognised it as "free and fair".
But in the end, sanity triumphed over fear, as voters proved to have been more convinced by the substantial improvements in their well-being during the Lula years than anything Serra had to offer.
[…] The election has enormous implications for the western hemisphere, where the Obama State Department has continued, with barely a stutter, the Bush administration’s strategy of "rollback" against the unprecedented independence that the left governments of South America have won over the last decade. A defeat of the Workers’ party would have been a big victory for the DC foreign policy establishment.
It also has implications for the rest of the world. In May, Brazil and Turkey broke new ground in the world of international diplomacy, by negotiating a nuclear fuel swap arrangement for Iran, in an attempt to resolve the standoff over Iran’s nuclear programme. The State Department was probably more upset about this than anything that Brazil had done in the region, including Lula’s strong and consistent support for the government of President Hugo Chavéz in Venezuela. Serra, for his part, had attacked the Iran deal during his campaign.
Outside of Washington, then, Dilma Rousseff’s win in this election, consolidating President Lula’s achievements, will be greeted as good news.
3) Saudi Help in Package Plot Is Part of Security Shift
Robert F. Worth, New York Times, October 30, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/world/middleeast/31saudi.html
Beirut, Lebanon – As new facts emerge about the terrorist plot to send explosives from Yemen to the United States by courier, one remarkable strand has stood out: the plot would likely not have been discovered if not for a tip by Saudi intelligence officials.
For many in the West, Saudi Arabia remains better known as a source of terrorism than as a partner in defeating it. It is the birthplace of Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Yet Western intelligence officials say the Saudis’ own experience with jihadists has helped them develop powerful surveillance tools and a broad network of informers that has become increasingly important in the global battle against terrorism.
This month, Saudi intelligence warned of a possible terrorist attack in France by Al Qaeda’s branch in the Arabian Peninsula. The Saudis have brought similar intelligence reports about imminent threats to at least two other European countries in the past few years, and have played an important role in identifying terrorists in Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia and Kuwait, according to Saudi and Western intelligence officials.
"This latest role is one in a series of Saudi intelligence contributions," said Thomas Hegghammer, a research fellow at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment. "They can be helpful because so much is going on in their backyard, and because they have a limitless budget to develop their abilities."
The Saudis have stepped up their intelligence-gathering efforts in Yemen since last year, when Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula came close to assassinating Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, who runs the Saudi counterterrorism program. A suicide bomber posing as a reformed jihadist detonated a bomb hidden inside his body, cutting himself to shreds but only lightly injuring the prince.
The Qaeda group’s main goal is to topple the Saudi monarchy, which they consider illegitimate and a slave to the West.
Prince bin Nayef, whose tip to the United States led to the discovery of the two bombs on Thursday, is held in high esteem by Western intelligence agencies, and works closely with them. He appears to be building a network of informers across Yemen, and some terrorism analysts say they believe the tip may well have come from one of his spies, possibly even from inside Al Qaeda.
[…]
4) Yemen Covert Role Pushed
Foiled Bomb Plot Heightens Talk of Putting Elite U.S. Squads in CIA Hands
Julian E. Barnes snd Adam Entous, Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2010
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704477904575586634028056268.html
Washington – The foiled mail bombing plot by suspected al Qaeda militants in Yemen has added urgency to an Obama administration review of expanded military options that include putting elite U.S. hunter-killer teams that operate secretly in the country under Central Intelligence Agency authority.
Officials said support was growing both within the military and the administration for shifting more operational control to the CIA-a move that would allow the U.S. to strike suspected terrorist targets unilaterally with greater stealth and speed.
Allowing the U.S. military’s Special Operations Command units to operate under the CIA would give the U.S. greater leeway to strike at militants even without the explicit blessing of the Yemeni government. In addition to streamlining the launching of strikes, it would provide deniability to the Yemeni government because the CIA operations would be covert. The White House is already considering adding armed CIA drones to the arsenal against militants in Yemen, mirroring the agency’s Pakistan campaign.
[…] Placing military units overseen by the Pentagon under CIA control is unusual but not unprecedented. Units from the Joint Special Operations Command have been temporarily transferred to the CIA in other countries, including Iraq, in recent years in order to get around restrictions placed on military operations.
[…] At the same time, an expanded U.S. military role could fuel a public backlash against Yemen’s already weak government and increase support for al Qaeda, experts have warned.
[…]
5) Delusions, dollars and climate
Nineteen of the 20 GOP candidates who are in closely contested races and have expressed a position on the issue say they have doubts about the scientific evidence for global warming.
Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times, October 30, 2010
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-1030-rutten-20101030,0,2213240.column
If you were going to pick a single issue whose treatment exemplifies the forces at work in this midterm election, the best choice would be one over which there’s been relatively little contention – climate change.
That’s not because there is any broad agreement among the candidates on the severity of global warming or human activity’s contribution to it. To the contrary, the question seldom has been discussed in this campaign because views on it have become utterly politicized. Skepticism about human technology’s role in accelerating climate change, and doubt concerning the phenomenon’s very existence, have become, at least on the Republican side, a matter of lock-step partisan orthodoxy.
For example, 19 of the 20 GOP candidates who are in closely contested races and have expressed a position on the issue say they have doubts about the scientific evidence for global warming, despite the overwhelming consensus among scientists. That includes Arizona’s John McCain, who formerly supported legislation to reduce carbon emissions. Mark Kirk of Illinois, who voted for cap-and-trade as a congressman, is the lone Republican holdout. Some of the other senatorial candidates express ambivalence about the science but firmly reject any legislative or regulatory remedy; more agree with Louisiana’s David Vitter, who calls the evidence for climate change "pseudo-science garbage."
[…] The fundamentalist delusion, whether about the Constitution or theology, and demands for a purified orthodoxy are defining characteristics of this campaign. When it comes to the politicization of a purely scientific question – climate change – so too is the role of money quietly or covertly dispensed by big business and the self-interested rich. Some of the tea party’s biggest funders, including Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, are creatures of the oil and coal companies. They’ve also supported virtually the entire network of fringe scientists, think tanks and publishers who over the past few years have raised a host of spurious questions and allegations concerning the consensus on climate change among reputable scientists.
[…]
6) The wretched mind of the American authoritarian
Glenn Greenwald, Salon, Friday, Oct 29, 2010 15:30 ET
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/10/29/goldberg/index.html
Decadent governments often spawn a decadent citizenry. A 22-year-old Nebraska resident was arrested yesterday for waterboarding his girlfriend as she was tied to a couch, because he wanted to know if she was cheating on him with another man; I wonder where he learned that? There are less dramatic though no less nauseating examples of this dynamic. In The Chicago Tribune today, there is an Op-Ed from Jonah Goldberg – the supreme, living embodiment of a cowardly war cheerleader – headlined: "Why is Assange still alive?" It begins this way:
"I’d like to ask a simple question: Why isn’t Julian Assange dead? . . . WikiLeaks is easily among the most significant and well-publicized breaches of American national security since the Rosenbergs gave the Soviets the bomb…So again, I ask: Why wasn’t Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago? It’s a serious question."
He ultimately concludes that "it wouldn’t do any good to kill him, given the nature of the Web" – whatever that means – and reluctantly acknowledges: "That’s fine. And it’s the law. I don’t expect the U.S. government to kill Assange, but I do expect them to try to stop him." What he wants the Government to do to "stop" Assange is left unsaid – tough-guy neocons love to beat their chest and demand action without having the courage to specify what they mean – but his question ("Why isn’t Julian Assange dead?") was published in multiple newspapers around the country today.
Christian Whiton, a former Bush State Department official, wasn’t as restrained in his Fox News column last week, writing: "Rather, this [the WikiLeaks disclosure] is an act of political warfare against the United States. . . . .Here are some of the things the U.S. could do: . . .Explore opportunities for the president to designate WikiLeaks and its officers as enemy combatants, paving the way for non-judicial actions against them."
[…] Whiton was just echoing his fellow war cheerleader, torture advocate Marc Thiessen, who wrote this in The Washington Post, under the headline "WikiLeaks Must be Stopped": "The government has a wide range of options for dealing with him. It can employ not only law enforcement but also intelligence and military assets to bring Assange to justice and put his criminal syndicate out of business."
[…]
7) U.S. plays conflicted role in global climate debate
Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post, Monday, November 1, 2010; 8:40 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/31/AR2010103103378.html
As the next round of U.N. climate talks approaches this month in Cancun, Mexico, the Obama administration finds itself in an awkward position: pushing its enduring commitment to bold climate action even as the prospects for comprehensive legislation have evaporated at home.
The atmosphere is very different from a year ago, when U.S. negotiators headed to Copenhagen touting the recent success of a House-passed climate bill. Now that legislation has died in the Senate, and with candidates poised to win this week who are more likely to focus on immediate economic concerns than on long-term environmental and energy ones, these constraints are shaping U.S. climate diplomacy.
Administration officials might not be able to deliver on all the climate assistance they have promised to give poor countries by 2012 and have questioned some financing proposals linked to longer-term foreign aid. They are considering whether to challenge China’s renewable energy subsidies as violating international trade rules, and have objected to Europe’s plan to force airlines operating there to pay for their carbon emissions. "The U.S. is conflicted," said Angela Anderson, program director for the U.S. Climate Action Network.
Some foreign politicians deliver a harsher assessment. Reinhard Hans Bütikofer, a member of the European Parliament who co-chaired the German Green Party until last year, said in an interview, "The yardstick I would measure the Obama administration against has been set by the president himself, when he said in the early days of his administration he wanted to make the United States a leader in international climate policy. That is obviously a test in which the U.S. is failing, by far."
[…] But Connie Hedegaard, the European commissioner for climate action, said other countries are using U.S. lawmakers’ refusal to adopt binding limits on carbon dioxide to back away from the Copenhagen Accord, the deal forged in last year’s U.N. talks. "Of course, from a European perspective it’s regrettable the administration could not get legislation through the Senate," she said. "That makes it easier for other parties to hide behind the back of the United States."
Last year, administration officials assumed that a plan to cap U.S. greenhouse gases and allow emitters to trade carbon allowances would help funnel millions to developing countries for climate projects such as preserving tropical forests; now that approach is politically dead. And even the administration’s ability to provide direct climate assistance to poor nations over the next two years is in doubt because a looming budget battle with Republicans could freeze U.S. foreign aid at this year’s levels, or even cut it. "That’s something people I talk to in other capitals are very aware of," said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group.
[…] A new dispute could flare up at the end of the week, when an international task force charged with showing how rich nations can mobilize $100 billion by 2020 for climate assistance will outline options for generating that money. Lawrence H. Summers, who chairs the White House National Economic Council, has served in the group and questioned some of the proposals, including imposing a new fee on some financial transactions.
[…] Critics of the United States, such as Bolivia’s U.N. ambassador, Pablo Solon, are already preparing to blame Washington for derailing the upcoming talks. "If the U.S. doesn’t make any positive move before Cancun, and during Cancun, we will have a big failure in Cancun," he said. "We’re going to see how politics in one state is going to define the entire future of humankind. And that’s something we cannot accept."
[…]
8) Cluster bomb stockpiles ‘being destroyed’
Alastair Leithead, BBC News, 1 November 2010
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-11663612
Three months after an international treaty banning cluster bombs came into force, stockpiles are already being destroyed by signatories to the convention, a monitoring group says.
More than 100 countries have agreed to ban the weapon, which scatters hundreds of smaller bombs over a wide area. They are blamed for causing civilian casualties both at the point of impact and for years afterwards by remaining armed and in effect becoming landmines. Some 108 states have signed the treaty. The legally-binding agreement also holds countries liable for clearing areas where the bombs were dropped.
In its first annual report, the Cluster Munition Monitor says seven countries have so far destroyed their supplies and two have cleared the areas where the bombs were dropped. "The main message from the report is this is working – the movement to ban cluster bombs is working," said Thomas Nash, co-ordinator of the Cluster Munition Coalition.
[…] The report says of the signatories, only 42 nations have so far ratified the treaty, and the US, which is thought to have the world’s biggest stockpile of cluster bombs, has said it will keep them for a decade and has so far refused to sign.
"The United States has a somewhat untenable position on this issue," said Stephen Goose, who edited the report and is director of the arms division at Human Rights Watch. "The US has been the most regular and most extensive user of the weapons, probably has the world’s biggest stockpile with maybe as many as a billion sub-munitions in its current arsenal."
Cluster bombs were used in the first Gulf War, in Kosovo, Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, and possibly in Yemen in 2009, he said, but America had agreed in principle the weapon was damaging to civilians. "They are in this untenable position of saying: ‘We agree these weapons cause too much harm to civilians, but at the same time we want to use them for another 10 years’."
Laos is said to have been the most heavily bombed country in the world and is still the worst affected by the legacy of cluster bombs dropped during the Vietnam War.
[…]
Iran
9) Guard Led 3 Americans Across Iran Border, Released Hiker Says
Neil MacFarquhar, New York Times, October 31, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/world/middleeast/01shourd.html
The three American hikers accused of espionage by Iran stepped off an unmarked dirt road – inadvertently crossing from Iraq into the Islamic republic – only because a border guard of unknown nationality gestured for them to approach, the lone hiker to be released said Sunday.
Sarah E. Shourd, a teacher freed in September after nearly 14 months in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, contacted The New York Times to give her fullest public account yet of the capture of the three in July 2009.
Ms. Shourd, 32, said she wanted to correct the gathering false impression, fueled by a classified United States military report made public last week by WikiLeaks, as well as earlier American and British news reports, that the hikers were detained inside Iraq and forced across the border.
[…] Besides stating that the three hikers were captured in Iraq, the American military report, by an anonymous official, also said, "The lack of coordination on the part of these hikers, particularly after being forewarned, indicates an intent to agitate and create publicity regarding international policies on Iran."
Ms. Shourd said that she was mystified by that conclusion. The three had no idea they were near the border and had not been warned about anything, she said. "Those claims are illogical and unsubstantiated. It is ridiculous to claim that mountain climbers would be agitating along a border."
The United States State Department has never suggested the version published by WikiLeaks, she said, always maintaining that it did not know how their arrest happened. The State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, confirmed that on Sunday.
[…]
Afghanistan
10) Taliban makes demands in Afghan peace talks
The Afghan Taliban is demanding names of its senior leaders are removed from US and United Nations terror blacklists and that a number of prisoners are released as a precondition of further peace talks, according to a key insurgent negotiator.
Rob Crillyand Ben Farmer, Telegraph, 9:00PM BST 29 Oct 2010
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/8097519/Taliban-makes-demands-in-Afghan-peace-talks.html
[…] Ghairat Baheer, a leader of the Hizb-I-Islami insurgent group, headed by his father-in-law Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, has disclosed to The Daily Telegraph the Taliban’s conditions for the talks. "For the Taliban side it’s all about the blacklists and the release of prisoners as a goodwill gesture," he said. "Those are the main issues – as well of course as the withdrawal of foreign troops. After that, in the later stages, would be talks about the setting up of a joint government."
The chances of a negotiated settlement have grown in recent weeks as the prospect of a military victory for Nato-led forces has diminished.
[…] Baheer said Hizb-I-Islami was in regular contact with government officials but the process was at an early stage.
He said little progress could be expected from the Taliban until its leader, Mullah Omar, was included in talks. "If there’s no approach to him then it can’t be fruitful," he said. "You cannot ignore the boss or founder of the political party."
[…] Several Taliban leaders have been removed from the blacklist at Kabul’s request as a possible overture to negotiations. However, the US has ruled out releasing Taliban prisoners held in Guantánamo bay.
[…]
11) SIGAR Report Says US Oversight Of Kabul Pay Is Lax
Samuel Rubenfeld, Wall Street Journal, October 29, 2010, 3:43 PM ET
http://blogs.wsj.com/corruption-currents/2010/10/29/sigar-report-says-us-oversight-of-kabul-pay-is-lax/
The money being used to supplement the salaries of Afghan government officials and advisers has few if any controls ensuring against waste or corruption, the Afghanistan war reconstruction inspector general’s report said.
Some of these officials were receiving supplements as large as 20 times their normal $200-per-month official salaries. The inspector general’s report says that neither the Afghan government nor the donors have a way to track the payments, most of which are in cash. Much of the $45 million per year going to 6,600 Afghan officials is provided by The World Bank, the U.S., the U.K. and the United Nations Development Programme.
"Very few, if any, controls are in place to ensure that there isn’t waste, fraud and abuse of this supplement to the government of Afghanistan," said Special Inspector General Arnold Fields, the retired Marine Corps general who heads the oversight office.
The report comes soon after Afghan President Hamid Karzai confirmed a New York Times report that Iran provided his office "bags of money" that officials told the paper were used to buy loyalty from lawmakers, tribal leaders and even the Taliban. Karzai said in his confirmation that Iran wasn’t the only provider of money in this manner, saying the U.S. did it too and that he discussed it with President Bush years ago.
Responding to Karzai’s accusation, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the U.S. "is not in the big bags of cash business."
Though the report didn’t name any officials, The Wall Street Journal noted this in the audit: "One high-ranking official received a salary supplement of $5,000 from USAID, on top of a $2,000 a month government salary and a hospitality allowance. Another senior official in Mr. Karzai’s office kept his $5,000 monthly supplement when he left his job to take a position in a ministry that wasn’t part of a USAID salary-support program."
The biggest recipients of the cash are the ministry of education and Karzai’s office, the report said.
Kyrgyzstan
12) Kyrgyz contracts fly under the radar
Andrew Higgins, Washington Post, Monday, November 1, 2010; 5:37 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/30/AR2010103002765.html
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan – When U.S. troops moved into Afghanistan in 2001, Douglas Edelman already had a foothold in Central Asia. He’d opened a bar and hamburger joint here in the capital of Kyrgyzstan, the crumbling, outer rim of the former Soviet empire.
Today, his fortunes turbo-charged by war, the 58-year-old Californian, along with a young Kyrgyz partner, controls a multinational jet fuel business that has received Pentagon contracts worth nearly $3 billion, according to current and former employees.
The contracts have kept U.S. warplanes flying over Afghanistan and helped the Pentagon skirt increasingly hazardous supply routes through Pakistan. But nurtured by retired U.S. military and intelligence officers, the jet fuel deals have generated a thick fog of mystery that has flummoxed competitors, and the White House.
Congressional investigators have spent six months digging into single-source Pentagon contracts, the possibly illegal diversion of Russian fuel and Kyrgyz claims of backroom deals, which have soured ties with a crucial U.S. ally.
The below-the-radar rise of Mina Corp. and Red Star Enterprises – whose ownership, operations and even office locations are shrouded in secrecy – shows how nearly a decade of war has not only boosted the bottom line of corporate behemoths but also enriched unknown upstarts.
In just eight years, Mina and Red Star – both registered in Gibraltar and run by the same people – have come from nowhere to become a key link in the U.S. military’s supply chain. They have beaten out established rivals to supply nearly a billion gallons of jet fuel to a U.S. Air Force base here in Kyrgyzstan, a vital staging post for the Afghan conflict, and also to American warplanes at Bagram air base in Afghanistan.
Without their supplies, the U.S. war effort would quickly grind to a halt. All American troops enter and leave Afghanistan on U.S. transport planes fueled by Mina in Kyrgyzstan. The firm also provides jet fuel for a fleet of C-135 aero-tankers that perform more than a third of all in-flight refueling operations over Afghanistan. Vast underground storage tanks built by Red Star at Bagram hold five Olympic-size swimming pools worth of jet fuel, the biggest such facility by far in the war zone.
The companies themselves, however, are largely invisible. In dealings with the Pentagon, they have used addresses in Toronto, London and Gibraltar, each apparently little more than a mail drop. Edelman, the former bar owner, who now lives in London, is so elusive that even congressional investigators probing the jet fuel deals have not managed to talk to him. He did not comply with a July subpoena from the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, according to people close to the probe.
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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.