Taliban Takes Stand In Favor Of Polio

According to news reports out of Pakistan, groups affiliated with the Taliban have killed several medical professionals working in remote villages on a vaccination program designed to eradicate polio. The Taliban countered that the vaccination program was actually a Western-designed plot to make their children sick, rather than to prevent illness, and that the whole medical effort was really a cover for covert military operations in these remote areas.

These are the exact same arguments made by the Taliban a few years earlier when they murdered other Pakistani medical professionals to halt an earlier polio eradication effort in 2006, an event outlined in Dominic Streatfeild’s book A History of the World Since 9/11.  In justifying their earlier attacks, the Taliban said that if a few children got ill or died from polio, it was “God's will” and a small price to pay to keep their region free of evil Western influences like, apparently, modern medical procedures.

But there is something more sinister at play here than merely the Taliban's religious-inspired paranoia, the vaccination efforts in these remote mountain villages are the last links in a chain of efforts to end polio, not just in Pakistan, but everywhere on the globe, forever. As explained in A History of the World Since 9/11, diseases can be wiped out if everyone carries an immunity to them – without new hosts, the diseases die. But for an eradication effort to work, everyone must get the vaccine.  Diseases have a stubborn tendency to hide out in remote corners of the world and humans have an annoying habit of not staying put. So, remote corners of the globe, like the AfPak border can be just the right place for a disease like polio to wait out a global eradication effort.

The Taliban's murder of the first group of medical professionals in 2006 meant that the first attempt to end polio failed; if these Taliban villages can't be vaccinated now, this latest effort will fail as well.

Of course the United States hasn't helped matters by using an earlier vaccination program as cover for an intelligence gathering operation around Abbottabad, the hiding place of Osama bin Laden, thus somewhat validating the Taliban's paranoia, and casting a pall over efforts like the current polio eradication program.

More On The End Of OBL

While the world continues to try to digest the news of the death of Osama bin Laden, speculation is naturally falling on what will become of his terrorist baby, al-Qaeda. Over at the Global Public Square, Fareed Zakaria is arguing, perhaps optimistically, that bin Laden's death with also be the death knell for al-Qaeda – that stripped of their spiritual head the organization will become adrift and will eventually burn itself out. On CBS during their Sunday night coverage, Lara Logan (and it's great to see her back to work) wondered if bin Laden had been betrayed by a member of his inner circle, or at least by one of their respective underlings, and if so what impact it would have on al-Qaeda as a whole?

That made me think of the mafia here in the United States. In their heyday during Prohibition in the 1920s and 30s, the idea of omerta (“silence”) was strong – if you were picked up by the police or the feds, you didn't talk about the mafia's operations or members, “this thing of ours” to quote Tony Soprano. But the idea of omerta began to fade as the years went on, particularly after anti-racketeering laws were passed that basically meant that even if you were a low-level foot soldier you could face the same kind of charges - and jail time - that would be awaiting The Boss if he ever got arrested. More mobsters started to talk when they were inevitably arrested, which sent more mobsters to jail and seriously undermined the effectiveness of the whole criminal enterprise. The leaders of the mafia families became more and more insulated out of fear of being betrayed by one of their colleagues (think about how nervous Tony Soprano always seemed), and worried more about finding the “rats” within their organizations than in actually engaging in money-making activities, which left them less able to manage their criminal empires, which in turn became less and less effective.

Could then a similar thing happen to al-Qaeda and it's frachises? Bin Laden himself had apparently not only withdrawn from the active operational role he played pre-9/11, but in these last few years he seemed to have become a hermit, holed up in a sprawling, barb-wire encircled “mansion” in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Now that even these precautions seem not to have helped keep him safe, will the leaders of al-Qaeda's franchises – the Pakistan operation, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (Yemen, mostly), al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (North Africa) – isolate themselves further? The best part, from an anti-terror perspective, is that bin Laden doesn't even have to have been betrayed by a follower, the other leaders in al-Qaeda only have to believe that he was and they will act accordingly.

This likely isn't the end of al-Qaeda, just like the arrests of a number of capos hasn't been the end of the mafia in America, but it will likely lead to a far less effective organization and one that is even less capable of pulling off a major 9/11-style (or London or Mumbai for that matter) attack in the future.

Obama Gets Osama

Even though the media coverage of the death of Osama bin Laden has been wall-to-wall, ESPN of all places ran it on their bottom-of-the-screen score ticker, I still felt like I should throw in a few of my own comments this morning. First is that along with giving credit to the SEALs team that carried out the operation on Sunday, credit also has to go to the Obama Administration for their careful handling of the intelligence leading up to the raid. I thought this graphic posed by several friends on Facebook this morning was pretty hilarious:



The raid came after six months of dedicated intelligence work that had narrowed bin Laden's likely whereabouts from a region in Pakistan to a specific mansion in the city of Abbottabad. The administration handled this analysis the way that covert intelligence should be handled – quietly, smartly and without fanfare. Unfortunately the same can't be said for some Congressional staffers who apparently leaked news of bin Laden's death in the hour ahead of the President's official announcement last night after their respective bosses had received courtesy calls from members of the administration to give them a heads-up about the soon-to-be breaking news. It shows again how Congress today, sadly, is more interested in self-promotion than in actually doing anything useful for the country. Those leaking staffers should all be fired. Today.

Other thoughts. I wasn't surprised that bin Laden was caught living in a city rather than hoping from cave to cave like a mountain goat. Ever since former Bosnian Serb president and indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic was captured after years on the run living a fairly public life in Belgrade, Serbia where he had reinvented himself as some kind of alternative medicine guru, I thought the cave-hopping scenario for bin Laden was pretty unlikely.

Bin Laden's death does provide some valuable lessons to any others who find themselves the target of a global manhunt. First is not to live in a mansion owned by a pair of unemployed brothers; one reason why intelligence officials scrutinized the bin Laden compound was that it was built in 2005 supposedly for $1 million, yet its owners of record were unemployed and apparently lacking assets of their own. Blending in is also important. Analysts were further tipped off by the fact that this million-dollar home lacked Internet or phone service, something you think you would add if you were going to spend seven-figures on building a house. And they burned their trash unlike everyone else in the neighborhood who just used the curb-side refuse pick-up; perhaps bin Laden should have invested in a good quality paper-shredder instead if he was that worried about security.

I also have to admit that the mission leaves me feeling conflicted about Guantanamo Bay. I've been critical of the “eternal imprisonment” of some at Guantanamo Bay. Last week's Wikileaks story that US officials believe roughly ¾ of the prisoners there haven't actually done anything to warrant being locked up forever, but that they're being kept in prison “just in case” didn't do anything to improve my opinion of the place. Yet the intelligence chain that led to the death of bin Laden apparently started four years ago from intel gathered from a Gitmo prisoner about a trusted bin Laden courier, who happened to be one of the owners of the Abbottabad mansion. It does make you at least have to take another look at the utility of the place.

Finally, the death of bin Laden provides a great opportunity for the United States to declare victory and come home from Afghanistan once and for all (ironically this is the eight-year anniversary of George W. Bush's infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech on Iraq). The United States didn't go to Afghanistan to build democracy or fight for women's rights or to build schools or any of the other myriad of reasons that have become attached to the Afghan War. Or mission was simple: capture or kill Osama bin Laden and dismantle al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The capture or kill part has now been accomplished, and the fact that he was hiding out in Pakistan in the first place is pretty clear indication that al-Qaeda no longer exists in Afghanistan at least as a viable force. If this isn't victory I don't know what is.

Another Afghan Pipeline Conspiracy

I love a good Internet conspiracy theory, so this one from Internet journalist Webster Tarpley caught my eye. He’s arguing that the recent US-led assault on the southern Afghan town of Marjah in restive Helmand province wasn’t aimed at striking a deadly blow at the heart of the Taliban insurgency, but rather was designed to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan and into Pakistan’s Belujistan region directly to the south. And why would the US want to push more of the Taliban into our supposed ally Pakistan? To disrupt the construction of an oil pipeline that would ship Iranian oil directly to China, of course.

What makes a conspiracy theory, like Tarpley’s ‘drive the Taliban into Pakistan’ notion, great is the inability to disprove it. But not being able to disprove something doesn’t automatically make it true, and Tarpley’s piece plays into an idea that’s become something of an obsession among some people – to explain the US/NATO/Western involvement in Afghanistan in terms of oil. The genesis for these theories likely go back to the days following the demise of the Soviet Union when it was believed that the newly-accessible Caspian Sea region (once in the midst of the Soviet heartland) might contain as much oil as Saudi Arabia. That sparked a round of speculation on how to get that oil out of the Caspian Sea and to the West via a route that didn’t cross either Russia or Iran, since both were considered to be unreliable partners in such an endeavor. The most direct path left was via Afghanistan and on to the coast of Pakistan where it could then be loaded onto tankers and shipped around the world.

But it turned out that the Caspian Sea wasn’t another Saudi Arabia, at least as far as oil was concerned and the oil pipeline plans were put on a shelf, except in the minds of people who want to see oil at the heart of any US foreign policy exercise. To confuse matters, there is a pipeline project well into the planning stages that would cross Afghanistan – the TAPI pipeline.

“TAPI” stands for Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India; the projected route of the pipeline, that’s meant to bring gas from Turkmenistan, which has the third-largest reserves in the world, to the P and I countries. The Asian Development Bank is backing TAPI to the tune of around $7 billion and the project is being touted as something that could help to stabilize Afghanistan in the long run. But even with that level of backing TAPI isn’t a sure thing. A Canadian study notes that in addition to having to build a pipeline across some of the most rugged, most remote mountains in the world, TAPI will also have to cross an area heavily landmined during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, as well as running through the heartland of the Taliban movement, including the aforementioned Helmand province.

Last Thoughts On The Afghan Election

There's a lot happening in the world, but I wanted to share a few last links about the Afghan election debacle. The first is an editorial by Peter Galbraith, who was the UN official who sounded the alarm about the massive fraud in the Afghan election in the first place. I'd say those credentials alone make his editorial worth reading, but Galbraith also debunks a major claim making the rounds, namely that President Hamid Karzai would have won the election anyway, fraud or not.

This bit of "wisdom" is being offered up as a justification for continuing Western support of the thoroughly corrupt Karzai regime. But Galbraith argues that it's a big assumption to make. An audit of the votes cast in the August 20th election dropped Karzai below the 50% threshold needed to trigger a run-off, once officials hit that target though, they stopped examining the votes. Galbraith claims that his sources indicate if all the votes were examined and all the bad ones tossed, the results would have been Karzai 41% / Abdullah 34%. A seven-percent deficit certainly isn't insurmountable in a run-off election - if the second round was run fairly - so this notion that Karzai would have won regardless is a pretty big assumption to make.

Germany's Der Spiegel, meanwhile, offers a round-up of opinions from the German media about the elections in Afghanistan. The take-away is that they pretty much all view Karzai's "victory" as a fraud and most question the ongoing purpose of the Afghan mission.

And finally Fox News of all places offers up an editorial by analyst KT McFarland who says that in the wake of Karzai's stealing the election the US should "pull the plug" on our Afghanistan mission. Now I ripped KT a couple of weeks ago for an utter lack of knowledge on current events in Russia, but this time I think she makes a good argument - the real security/terrorism problem lies in Pakistan so why should the US continue to spend lives and money propping up a corrupt government in Kabul?

Is Iran Really a Threat?

That is the question the Compass Blog over at RealClearWorld is asking, at least in regard to America's security. Writer Greg Scoblete cites an article in London's Daily Telegraph that argues Iran is a bigger threat to global security than even Afghanistan or Pakistan. Scoblete notes though that Iran's threat isn't global but instead aimed at two specific regions/goals - Israel and disrupting the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf, and there have been no acts of terrorism on American soil - actual or attempted - that have been traced back to Iran.

Meanwhile a media event staged by the Pakistani military this morning to tout their recent offensive against terrorist groups in their Waziristan region turned up passports of militants linked to both the Madrid train bombings of 2004 and the 9/11 attacks.

It does make you wonder...

Tensions On The Rise Between India and China

India and Pakistan have fought two wars over the disputed region of Kashmir, but it's worth remembering that India and China also have competing claims over some of the world's most hotly contested for lands. And lately, as AFP notes, tensions have been growing between the two rising Asian powers.

China is angry that India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh paid a visit to the disputed India-China border in Kashmir earlier in the month and that India will allow Beijing's nemesis, the Dalai Lama, to visit Kashmir in a few weeks. India, meanwhile, is upset that China is underwriting the construction of a massive hydroelectric dam in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir.

India said they hope China will take a "long view" of India-China relations and not build the dam in what they see as Indian land being illegally occupied by Pakistan. India and China fought a brief war over Kashmir in 1962. We're pretty far from a repeat of that, but it's worth noting that tensions over Kashmir aren't just an India-Pakistan affair.

Nuclear Free Follies

Apparently part of the rationale behind awarding Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize was to support his efforts at ridding the world of nuclear weapons. This has been a theme in some of his keynote speeches as President, like his address to the United Nations last month; other commentators like Joe Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund have regularly been campaigning for a nuclear-free world he specifically in numerous posts at the Huffington Post.

But on this topic, I'll defer to Rush - the band, not the blowhard. Their song about the development of the nuclear bomb "Manhattan Project" contains this line, which I think sums up the current debate nicely:

The big shots tried to hold it back,
Fools tried to wish it away...

I don't mean to imply that Obama, Cirincione and others in the disarmament campaign are fools, but they are pursuing a goal they'll never attain. Mind you, I wish that disarmament would happen, I remember as a child being scared witless by the movie "The Day After", a made-for-TV film on ABC that showed the aftermath of a limited nuclear war by following a collection of average people in Kansas. An estimated 100 million people watched that movie, even Ronald Reagan said the effects of nuclear war depicted in the film left him feeling "greatly depressed." So yeah, I'd love to see a world free of nukes, I just know that it won't ever happen.

As for the why, let's take a quick look at the world's nuclear powers, starting with Russia. Russia sees itself as one of the world's great powers, but its military is a shell of the mighty Red Army thanks to a couple of decades of neglect and underfunding. The one area where Russia can still claim superpower status though is in its nuclear forces, estimated to be either the world's first or second largest nuclear arsenal depending on the source you use. Russia will agree to reductions in their nuclear forces - largely because they have thousands of warheads nearing or past their effective lifespans that need replacement - the fewer they need to replace, the more money they will save. It's naive to think though that the Russian military will totally give up the one thing that makes them a formidable force.

Then there's India and Pakistan, two nations which in their post-British Empire history have fought three wars, though none since Pakistan officially became a nuclear power in 1998. The two states are mutually suspicious of each other, therefore it's again naive to think either side would believe claims that the other had disarmed, thus it's impossible to imagine either giving up their arsenal.

China views both India and Russia as potential competitors for influence among the nations of Central Asia, so it's hard to imagine the Chinese giving up their nukes so long as Russia and/or India keep theirs (or so long as the United States has its arsenal). And then there's Israel, a country that won't even admit to having nuclear weapons in the first place. Israel's nukes are their ace up the sleeve - a last resort should they ever face another Six Day War scenario, where a pan-Arab army is moving against them on several fronts. Israeli planning dictates that if such a conflict were going badly, it could be quickly ended by use of nuclear weapons (it's also the reason they're so dead set against Iran ever getting the bomb).

So there you have Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel - five nuclear powers all of whom, despite what the anti-proliferation side argues, will never totally give up their nukes since each will argue giving up nuclear weapons will leave them weaker in the face of potential adversaries. And don't think the Pentagon will sign off on a plan to eliminate America's nuclear arsenal either, so long as a half-dozen or so countries are keeping theirs - or that a president will order the Pentagon to fully disarm under those circumstances, no matter how many Nobel Prizes they're awarded.

And there's something the disarmament proponents never discuss, let's call it the Japan Option, which is this: just because you get rid of all your nuclear weapons, that doesn't mean that you immediately forget how to make more. While Japan isn't a nuclear state, it's generally admitted by the folks in the nuclear weapons field that Japan could have a nuclear arsenal if they wanted one: Japanese industries produce some of the world's most advanced electronics, while decades of using nuclear power have left Japan with several tons of plutonium, a by-product of operating nuclear power plants, and also the raw material of choice for making an A-bomb.

Let's imagine for a moment then that tomorrow we were to wake up and all of the world's nuclear arsenals had disappeared. The bombs might be gone, but the knowledge of how to make them would not. And it's hard to believe that some country wouldn't start up production again, especially if they thought it would give them a quick advantage over everyone else.

The nuclear genie is long out of the bottle and sadly she can't be stuffed back in. It would be great to think there could be a world where a city might not be snuffed out in the glow of a mushroom cloud, but realistically that's not the world in which we live. There are some huge issues facing the world, one's that need the international community to come together to address. Maybe it would be best then for our leaders to focus on the problems they can solve, rather than ones - like nuclear disarmament - that they can't.

Should We Just Learn To Love The Bomb?

That question is at the heart of an essay in this week’s issue of Newsweek. The conventional wisdom has been that the world would be much better off if there were no nuclear weapons, even the great ‘Cold Warrior’ Ronald Reagan himself worked towards the goal of a nuclear-free globe. In a few weeks, as heads of state gather for the general assembly of the United Nations, President Obama is expected to make his own push towards eliminating nukes. But should he?

According to Jonathan Tepperman in Newsweek, maybe not. And there are some interesting facts that back up this unconventional point of view. One is that nearly 65 years after the US detonated the first nuclear bomb, the much-feared mass proliferation of these weapons hasn’t occurred. Today there are fewer than a dozen nuclear-armed states, and several countries (Kazakhstan, Belarus, Canada and South Africa) have actually given up their nukes.

Fear of a nuclear war between two nuclear-armed states is another fear that drives the ban the bomb movement but, again, Tepperman argues, nuclear states seem less likely to go to war, because they know the horrible consequences a nuclear war would bring. He cites the example of India and Pakistan, who have fought three wars since independence from Great Britain, but none since Pakistan got the bomb back in 1998, even after a brief conflict in the disputed Kashmir region in 1999 and Pakistan’s involvement in the terror attacks that rocked Mumbai last year.

Critics say that the world has just been exceptionally lucky in the nuclear era and that we’re putting a lot of faith in some sketchy leaders (Kim Jong-Il anyone?) not to go nuclear. But I think Tepperman makes some good points, and one problem I’ve had with the nuclear-free world campaign is that it’s just not going to happen. Russia’s not about to give up its nukes, nor China, and Israel (that won’t even admit it has them in the first place)? Forget it. And now a consensus seems to be building in the international community for “crippling sanctions” against Iran to make them give up their nuclear bomb project. But considering that we’re also still hoping to encourage pro-democracy, pro-western reformers within Iran (the folks who took to the streets in protest this summer), you have to wonder if sanctions that will wreck Iran’s already fragile economy is really the best idea right now. Especially when the alternative might not be all that bad.

Pakistan says bin Laden is dead (or maybe not)

Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari raised some eyebrows on Monday when he said that Pakistani intelligence agencies believe that terrorist mastermind and the world's number one fugitive, Osama bin Laden, is in fact dead. Zardari didn't explain why the intelligence agencies thought that bin Laden was dead, though one reason seemed to be simply because he hasn't been caught after eight years of intensive searching.

US officials rushed to say that they believed bin Laden was still alive and that the hunt for him continues. Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani also worked to backtrack, at least a little, from Zardari's comments by saying that "nobody knows" whether bin Laden is alive or dead.

Part of the problem with the hunt for bin Laden is that in an absence of factual evidence, like a physical sighting of the man, much of it tends to be built on the prevailing conventional wisdom of the situation. For example, one reason given to believe that bin Laden is still alive is that there would be a lot of "noise" among the tribes along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border, where he's believed to be hiding out, if he died. "Bin Laden's death will likely be celebrated by the group and its affiliates as him having achieved martyrdom," according to Ben Venzke, director of IntelCenter (which tracks extremist propaganda).

That's true, assuming that bin Laden died a martyr's death fighting the infidels. But what if he just died of pneumonia, or fell off his horse, or died some other un-martyrly death, would his supporters still celebrate? Or might they keep it a secret to preserve his mythic status?

While we're on the topic, I’ve had a problem with the idea of bin Laden running from cave to cave for much of the past decade, especially since the capture last summer of Radovan Karadzic. If you recall, Karadzic was the former president of the Bosnian Serb Republic in the former Yugoslavia; he was charged with war crimes for the deaths of thousands of Bosnian Muslims during the wars that swept through the region in the mid-1990s. Like bin Laden, he spent almost a decade on the run, the prevailing thought was that Karadzic was sheltering among a clutch of die-hard supporters in remote Orthodox monasteries in the mountains of Serbia. In reality, Karadzic lived a very public life (in a very flimsy disguise) in Serbia's capital city, Belgrade - he even practiced medicine as 'alternative healer', before finally being captured one day on a city bus.

So isn't it possible that rather than a cave, bin Laden might just be living in a city like Kandahar or Islamabad? Somehow blending into the hustle and bustle of a large city seems an easier way to hide than to scurry between caves that are under the constant surveillance of the world's most hi-tech military.

Just a thought...

Google Earth outs secret US mission

Put this one in the whoops file. Google Earth, that amazing service that lets you see satellite images of just about any spot on Earth showed something they shouldn't have - namely US military Predator drone aircraft at a remote airfield in Pakistan.

The Predator is an unmanned aircraft, piloted remotely by an operator sitting back at its airfield (think of it as a remote control model airplane on steroids). Originally the Predator was designed to be a surveillance aircraft, something that could hover over a target in hostile territory for a few hours without putting the life of a pilot at risk. A few years ago though the military tried an experiment where they mounted a pair of missiles on a Predator, and thus a new weapon was born. For the past couple of years the Predators have been patrolling the skies above the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, occasionally taking out “high value” targets - suspected al-Qaeda members - on both sides of the border. The Pakistani public has been growing steadily more angry over these Predator airstrikes since they feel they are a violation of Pakistan's sovereignty and because there has been “collateral damage” (a.k.a. dead civilians) in a number of the airstrikes.

And that's where the problems begin. The News, Pakistan's premier English-language newspaper, got a hold of an image from Google Earth taken in 2006 that shows what appears to be three Predators sitting on the tarmac at Shamsi Airfield, a remote airport near the Afghan border. Officially Pakistan says that the United States used Shamsi during the initial movement of US forces into Afghanistan following 9/11, but that the US had stopped using the airfield by 2006. Both sides deny that there are, or ever were, Predators at Shamsi.

But it puts Pakistan's already fragile government into a difficult position - the Pakistani government has repeatedly said the US does not fly Predator drones from their territory and on a number of occasions has demanded that the US stop Predator airstrikes along their side of the border, yet the pictures tell another story. How much fallout there is from this revelation remains to be seen.

Meanwhile in other airbase news, the government of Kyrgyzstan officially approved a bill ordering the United States to leave Manas airfield in their country, which is seen as a severe blow to US operations in Afghanistan since Manas was used as a base for US transport and refueling aircraft. The US government though continues to insist a deal can still be reached with the Kyrgyz about keeping the Air Force at Manas - I still can't decide if there's something secret in the works or if this is just a wild bout of wishful thinking on the part of the Pentagon.

Is closing Guantanamo Bay really a bad thing?

Pres. Obama has been taking flak for a few days now since he signed an executive order to close the infamous prison at Guantanamo Bay. Critics of the step made the rounds of the Sunday chat shows this morning talking about the dire consequences of shutting the prison. The 240-odd inmates locked up there were described as being "hardcore terrorists" or "the worst of the worst" among other fear-inducing names.

Ignored by the critics were the guys in Gitmo that we know didn't do anything, like the 17 Chinese Uighurs who have been cooling their heels there since we scooped them up in Afghanistan in 2002. I wrote about their plight back in October (see this post "Release of Chinese Muslims Ordered"), but the highlights are that the US government has admitted that the 17 were not guilty of terrorist acts against the United States, and had long ago given up trying to prove that they were even “enemy combatants.” The only reason we haven't sent them back to China is that the Chinese government is actively trying to eradicate the Uighur’s culture from Xinjiang Province (much like they are trying to do with the Tibetan culture), so we are pretty sure the Chinese would arrest these men on sight, and likely torture and shoot them soon afterwards. We let six of their compatriots go in 2006 after Albania agreed to host them.

It makes you wonder how many other innocent men are among the “worst of the worst…”

Keith Olbermann took a shot at debunking another Guantanamo scare tactic on MSNBC ‘Countdown’ Friday night - critics also point to the number of former detainees that have been released who then became involved with terror groups in the Mid-East. Olbermann said though that the official Pentagon numbers on how many detainees became terrorists keeps shifting - ranging back and forth between several dozen down to as few as two - and that they Pentagon gives no details on what these terrorists are actually doing, making the whole story seem a bit dodgy.

Meanwhile a senior Pakistani official said that closing Guantanamo would, in fact, have a positive effect on the War on Terror in his country. “It bore no fruit for the Americans nor did it provide any leads in the war on terror,” said Tasnim Noorani. When Mr. Noorani was a senior Interior Ministry official, one of his jobs was to turn suspected militants over to the US, so I'd think he knows what he's talking about. Another unnamed Pakistani official told the AFP that “the very fact that the Americans announced they will close down this infamous prison will have a positive effect on efforts to curb militancy,” adding that it would take away one of al-Qaeda's main anti-American propaganda tools.

Pres. Obama wants Guantanamo Bay closed within a year.

India and Pakistan - stumbling towards war

Pakistan today reportedly moved thousands of troops to positions along their border with India in another sign of worsening relations between the two countries.

The most recent India-Pakistan crisis was sparked by the massive series of terrorist attacks in Mumbai last month. India blamed Pakistan for the attacks – India believes that Pakistan offers a safe haven for terrorists and that the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, has helped to train them in the past. After the Mumbai attacks, India gave Pakistan 30 days to crack down on the terrorist organizations that India says organized the Mumbai attacks, or else they (India’s government) would take action on their own. Pakistan, in response, has said they can’t do much without more evidence, which they say the Indian side hasn’t provided.

The 30-day period ends today, December 26 (which probably explains why Pakistan is suddenly moving troops to the border).

I think that there is a good chance the people of India and Pakistan could push their two countries into their fourth war in the last sixty years. The population in India is getting more and more critical of their government for not taking decisive action against the terrorists that is why India gave Pakistan the 30-day ultimatum. India has talked about launching raids into Pakistan to take out what they suspect are terrorist training camps, but have held off so far, trying to cooperate with the Pakistani government instead. If India decides that Pakistan isn’t dealing with them fairly though, the pressure to take some decisive action will likely be too much for the Indian government to resist.

Of course if India attacks then the Pakistanis will want their country to retaliate, it will be hard for Pakistan’s already weak government to resist the wishes of an angry population, so they’ll likely strike back. And once that happens, it’s hard to see things getting any calmer.

The Mumbai attacks are already having the effect the terrorists hoped for – relations between India and Pakistan, after a growing thaw, have gotten much worse. Pakistan, apparently, is shifting troops from their border with Afghanistan to the border with India, meaning that there will be fewer around to patrol the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the Afghan border, letting the extremists and terror groups already in the area operate even more freely. And wars always drive up extremist and nationalist feelings, providing new recruits for the terror groups.

The people in India, understandably, want to get the groups responsible for the Mumbai attacks; military strikes though are the wrong way to go.

Flawed Pakistan strategy now in Syria?

Is a US strategy to defeat terrorists just creating more of them?

That's the verdict from Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on the policy approved last month by President Bush that authorized the US military to launch air strikes against Taliban and al-Qaeda targets inside Pakistan. While the Pentagon is claiming that a number of militants have been killed in the lawless border region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, Prime Minister Gilani said that the policy is counterproductive and because it only enrages the local population and turns more of them to the side of the terrorists. Pakistan's government is also angry over the repeated raids, which they see as a violation of their national sovereignty.

Pakistan's government is instead pursuing a strategy of targeted raids against some suspected terrorists, but is also trying to persuade local tribal chiefs to turn away from al-Qaeda and side with the Pakistani government. Gilani says that what's needed in the tribal areas more than air strikes is money for development efforts to raise the standard of living in an area mired in poverty.

So the air strike strategy very well may be making more terrorists than it's eliminating. Now the word out tonight is that the same plan may now be underway in Syria.

Reports from Syria are that US Special Forces conducted a raid on a village on the Syria/Iraq border in an area notorious for smuggling. Troops flew in on helicopters and struck a building that the US said was part of a “foreign fighter network”. Of course the Syrians have a different story to tell - they say that the building was under construction and that those killed included a guard at the construction site and his wife. Syria is condemning the raid as a "serious aggression".

The BBC is speculating what might be behind the raid, especially since European countries and Israel have recently been trying to improve relations with Syria. The BBC thinks the raid may be a "parting shot" by the Bush administration, since it expects Barack Obama to win the election and several of his advisors are in favor of improving relations with Syria.

Grading the Bush foreign Policy

Expect to see a lot of these in the coming weeks as the George W. Bush presidency comes to a close...

The Asia Times Online is up first, offering a scorecard on Bush's foreign policy record. A quick preview - the average grade falls somewhere between E and G.

Strains Show in New Pakistani Government

After only a week in power, Pakistan's new ruling coalition is showing some strains.

The Pakistan People's Party (PPP) of slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's joined forces with the party of another former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif in a ruling coalition - a union that many thought meant the end of current President Pervez Musharraf. But now the PPP may compromise with Musharraf on a deal to bring back the country's supreme court, a move that is angering their coalition partner.

All of this goes back to last year when Musharraf's rule was legally challenged in Pakistan's supreme court. But before the court could rule, Musharraf declared a national state of emergency - supposedly in response to domestic terror threats - and dismissed the court's justices, replacing them with his own appointees that were sympathetic to his point of view. This crisis led to Bhutto's return to Pakistan, which ultimately resulted in her assassination. That event galvanized average Pakistanis’ opposition to Musharraf's rule and gave the opposition a victory in the subsequent elections.

Follow all that?

When the PPP/Sharif coalition took power, one of their promises was to restore the Supreme Court. But the two parties can't decide on how to do that. Sharif's party wants to restore the fired justices immediately, while the PPP wants to bring the justices back as part of a broad judicial reform package.

If the two sides can't come to an agreement, then Pervez Musharraf may still keep his hold on the presidency.

Exit whispers buffet Musharraf

It’s looking like Pervez Musharraf's days as president of Pakistan may be numbered.

A story in yesterday's London Sunday Telegraph had Musharraf talking with insiders about resigning within the next few weeks. His office denied the report today, but Musharraf has to see the writing on the wall. The opposition parties won big in last week's elections and are forming a coalition government. Musharraf stepped down as head of the army last year, so he can't count on the backing of the military either - his presidency has little popular support.

The opposition though will not have a large enough majority in the parliament to impeach Musharraf, but they could reinstate the supreme court justices Musharraf dismissed last year (Musharraf declared a state of emergency supposedly to because of terrorist threats, but then used the emergency to dismiss the supreme court - just as they were about to rule on the legality of his presidency). The court, if restored, could just dismiss Musharraf. Or he could choose to resign on his own.

“He may have made many mistakes, but he genuinely tried to build the country and he doesn’t want to destroy it just for the sake of his personal office,” said an official close to the President.

Meanwhile pro-Taliban militants along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border are reaching out to the new Pakistani government. Fundamental religious parties representing the area also lost big in last week's elections. Now they are asking for an end to military action in the territory in support of the War on Terror. Musharraf's defeat was seen in part because of his backing of US policy in the War on Terror, now the opposition has called for a new strategy of economic development and incentives to fight extremists in the border region rather than fighting them with troops and guns.

A cease-fire in 2006 in the Northwest Frontier territories with these same militant groups though failed to end tribal support of pro-Taliban groups and US officials believe it provided the Taliban in Afghanistan with a safe haven where they could flee from NATO operations in southern Afghanistan and regroup.

Musharraf's days could be numbered

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf suffered a crushing defeat in yesterday's parliamentary elections, winning only 15 percent of the vote. The party of slain candidate Benazir Bhutto won the largest share, taking 33.6 percent of the vote, while the party of former PM Nawaz Sharif (who Musharraf ousted in a coup in 1999) took almost 26 percent. The two parties are now talking about forming a coalition government.

All this means that Musharraf is on pretty thin ice. Last year he stepped down as head of the military, when you combine that with the loss of popular support he suffered in the election, it seems like few people are standing behind Musharraf.

An even more interesting result from the election though came from Pakistan's frontier region. These are the tribal areas where support for Muslim extremists and Osama bin Laden are said to be high, yet in the election religious parties representing the area were soundly beaten by secular ones. Musharraf in the past has used the threat of Islamic extremism to bolster Western support for his regime. But could the election results from the frontier region be an indication that Muslim extremists are really a smaller part of Pakistan's population than Musharraf would like us to believe?

Musharraf Blames Bhutto

Musharraf: Bhutto bears responsibility for death
| Reuters

I guess when all else fails, blame the victim.

In an interview to be aired Sunday on "60 Minutes," Musharraf said that Benazir Bhutto was in part to blame for her own death because she chose to waive to a crowd of her supporters though the open sunroof of her car. Musharraf also claimed that his government did everything possible to provide security for her. "She was given more security than any other person," Musharraf claimed.

Really? If you look at the video of her assassination, at the crowds of people swarming around her vehicle, and compare it to video of a the security around, say, President Bush's motorcades the differences are clear. Musharraf himself travels in a highly secure, multi-vehicle entourage. Bhutto had an SUV and no uniformed security in sight. Where then was the security Musharraf claimed his government provided.

Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, has called for the UN to lead an investigation into her assassination.

Pakistan: Blitzer Scores Coup

Wolf Blitzer scored a coup for CNN when he was selected to read a letter from Benazir Bhutto that was to be made public only after her death. In the letter Bhutto said if she were to be killed the current president Pervez Musharraf should be held accountable for failing to provide her with adequate security, despite an earlier assassination attempt in September.

In the letter, Bhutto said the Pakistani authorites failed to provide her with armored vehicles and devices to jam the detonation of roadside bombs. Other security precautions, like police escorts to political rallies, were inconsistent in their size and effectivness.

The video of Bhutto’s assassination seems to support her claim. At the moment of her attack, Bhutto’s vehicle is surrounded by a large crowd. No uniformed security can be seen, nor do any security agents attempt to intercept the assassin. Given that the assassination attempt against her in September came as an attack on her motorcade, it is hard to believe that such a crowd was allowed to gather around her vehicle.

UPDATE

Just a day after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistani officials have said they have proof the attack was ordered and carried out by al-Qaeda.

A transcript of intercepted phone calls has Baitullah Mehsud, a pro-al-Qaeda militia leader from Waziristan (part of the largely uncontrolled border between Pakistan and Afghanistan), congratulating another militia leader on the successful operation. Pakistani officials offered the transcripts as proof of al-Qaeda’s involvment. A spokesman for Mehsud, meanwhile, dismissed the claims as “government propaganda.”

The security forces’ announcement only begs the question: if they could intercept messages and gather information so quickly after her death, then where were they before she was killed? Are we to believe that they had no idea, had intercepted no “chatter” about an assassination attempt, but then in mere hours after the event found proof not only that al-Qaeda was behind the hit, but also identified the individual who arranged it?

It is too neat a picture to be readily believed. And one that already has Bhutto’s supporters pointing to a government conspiracy. Further fueling their beliefs are claims, again from Pakistan’s government, that Bhutto died from striking her head on the sunroof of the SUV she was riding in, not from bullet or shrapnel wounds. This is contrary to the eyewitness accounts of her aides who claim that Bhutto suffered bullet/shrapnel wounds to the neck and chest.

Bhutto's supporters already do not trust Musharraf's government. Putting out information that contradicts eyewitness testimony, or quickly provides culprits in her assassination will do nothing to bring stability to the situation in the country.