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Saturday, March 13, 2004
Sick of this rancid orange background all atff posts are migrating elsewhere:
The Kid Stays in the Picture
There. Go there.
6:56 PM
Friday, February 27, 2004
Clearing Matters Up Before I Go Away
The bottom line is this: all I really want to do is scan and relay chaos and calamity and point and go "look! look what's happening there! And there! And here!" My only real conclusion, ever, is "but that's insane!" That's why I don't read papers: I don't want to analyse somebody else's analysis of an event witnessed second- or third-hand, via the mystification of CNN and Sky or Reuters chits sprinkled like bloody confetti. What I mean, of course, is that I don't want to read our papers, unless they've actually bothered to dispatch someone to this or that warzone, and even then I don't. I like the BBC World Service/Worldwide because I get the impression that it's propped up by chinless wonders running around deserts and getting an unconscious kick out of the agony they inflict on their home-shackled little wives. Bravo, chaps! Also, on the radio, it sounds like transmissions from the third rung of hell, or cities emptied by smallpox and plutonium. Al-jazeera employs tough, thick-blooded old boys who aren't afraid of anything, and always on the roof of some hotel dodging missiles (in their mind, those missiles are knickers). Boom! Thud! There's a lot of scrappy, specific sites to help hunt down, embellish or invent stories (so find your own). I sugest Asia Times Online to start; it enjoys a special place in my heart because it covers all my favorite places (i.e. anywhere I haven't been and wouldn't go without a weapon and a hip-flask full of cognac).
I think I've realised, though, that there are some basic things that people enjoy and desire and deserve (within reason) to experience, consume or own. Something decent to drink would be a ready requirement. Access to French wine and brandy, Russian vodka, or a bottle of Scotch malt whiskey, for example, is an inalienable and global human right. An important corollary to this, of course, is somewhere decent to drink it. There are some basic requirements here, too. 1. Atmosphere, and the right noise level to allow intelligent conversation to fully bloom and reach a desired pitch of sarcasm, scorn and contempt. 2. Atmosphere refers to decor, vintage, and people involved. Everyone should be able to go to a bar and meet a femme fatal, a war hero, a cyncical and drunk professor, or, at the very least, a stock-broker with a sense of humour. There should be the potential for human variety and interaction. 3. Access to a bar with a late license and somewhere not so busy that oxygen is an issue, but not so empty that the sound of you putting your glass back on the table echoes. However, it should be noted that, in this respect, central London is as desolate as Baghdad. (The essence of good foreign affairs journalism, I gleam from afar, is finding the best bar in the worst city, and sending a message back to your employees that says "you're paying for this, right?")
Other important things. Food and good shoes. A wide choice of restaurants with menus you can't even read. Somewhere attractive to go and argue and spit quail and venison at each other, or romance someone irresistible. Plus, exquisite or simply well-cooked food, made with ingredients that aren't delivered in industrial vats or pumped with toxins or subject to some sinister biotech fix-up. Restaurants that let you smoke. Smoking! While we're on the subject, this also comes under my personal rubric of basic human rights (right next to "the vote" in case you're interested) and is, nevertheless, severely infringed upon only by the most advanced democracies. Taxing pleasure is one thing, but when it comes to the outright suppression of minor appetites by some nebulous external force - the soft power of moral censure enshrined in law, for fuck's sake! - that provokes one's capacity for resistance, to put it politely. (And when allied to false statistics, i.e. the "facts" of passive smoking, the imposture is compounded.) It's degrading to have to deal with this erosion of autonomy.
Meanwhile, can a society be evaluated by its diet? Of course! Damn straight! If I was forced to live on potato scones and vodka, say, or spam and rye, then I'd know something, at core, was wrong. As it is, I even reserve the option of eating in a Polish restaurant should I get the mad urge (and have done before now). The central thesis put forward is water-tight in so many ways, applying, as it does, to the unfettered assimilations and twists of Japanese cuisine as to the shrink-wrapped fast-death of Sainsbury's packaged meals that say so much about post-Thatcher Britain, mm hmm. Meanwhile, my own kitchen, I wager, is a little Garden of Eden, a mini-Avalon of dinner time in Bow, a triumph of invention over underwhelming circumstances. It's like Madhur Jaffrey crossed with Elizabeth David crossed with Oliver Craner. The British diet is very bad, but very good if you know how to exploit its obscure delights, just like Britain itself.
To emphasise the point, I defiantly retain my options. Venturing into Victoria Park, for instance, with a crossbow, on the hunt for tasty tufted ducks to kill, sling over my shoulder, and take home to cook. I don't recommend mallards, in case you're tempted. Which is a shame because it sometimes seems as if, in British parks, this was the only duck ever. Rat's-tail soup turned out to be a bad idea, but apparently it's possible to import shark fins in tins (well, that's what I heard). And don't ever ever try to eat a seagull because I suspect they have an unlimited capacity for revenge. Same with badgers: they're lethal. They'd drag you to the ground and gnaw your face off without even thinking about it. Don't go near them.
As for good shoes, that's not simply a right, it's a duty. The problem with Western democracy is that finding a good pair of shoes involves a kind of quest, and a mortgage. It's the sort of detail that Thomas Paine did not forseee. All shoes should be good! All commodities should be good quality, because that's their only justification (dialectical materialism, by the way). This is not a question of taste: it's a question of craft and personal dignity. It's not that I'm opposed to sandals, flip-flops and espadrilles (except when worn off the beach); it's just that I am opposed to, say, leather loafers that start to lose their colour after a month. Leather's not supposed to lose it's colour. Hair is, but not leather.
I have a modern outlook; I suppose you could say I'm against the forces of reaction (strict Marxist critique, obviously). I don't necessarily concur with Norman Mailer's utter distaste for plastic, for example. Ambivalence is sacrosanct, nevertheless there's something elemental about plastic. It's the only man-made substance that has the longevity of rock, and maybe exceeds that. Its capacity for immortality demands a certain basic respect. Another example: litter infuriates me, but I'm also impressed by its persistence. In an empty world light years into the future there will still be Top Shop bags and empty cans of Vanilla Coke scraping the ruined pavements of Oxford Street. It will be the final triumph of trash. Another thing: helium balloons that escape the hands of upset children. For some reason, millennia from now, I imagine empty skies full of drifting balloons. Then I feel humbled, as if God had just pushed me off a chair.
Air travel is the great joy of now. If you ever see me on a plane you won't, because my face will be stuck to a window. I'll be dribbling with joy. "Clouds! The sea! A flock of geese!" Really, it's pathetic. But I'm not ashamed. Should a plane I was on be hijacked, I wouldn't notice until the very last moment. On a plane, I have no concept of death. A surge of immortality colonises my soul. I'm like Leonardo da Vinci on a night flight. It's my only genuine moment of vision. Flying to New York last March, I watched the sun set, and felt truly omnipotent. "I'm Icarus, but you won't melt my wings!"
I like driving too, whenever I get the chance. Cars, generally, help me vent anger, which is good, while I have a clean license. As a London pedestrian or bus-rider they serve as a channel for vague flurries of scorn. My general attitude is "Legs before wheels! That's what History says!" As a driver, meanwhile, I roar without thought or mercy towards a pixellated Out Run sunset seared onto my third eye. A car is a means to an end. In other words, getting back to the beach. Therefore, it's the only true valet of freedom. If that seems depressing, then consider this: I can get the best of both worlds.
"Liberty", said John Stuart Mill, "something something something" (I haven't read him yet). I'm pretty sure he wasn't talking about cars, planes, shoes, food or alcohol, but he should have been, so I agree with him. When I think about these things, and the photos I rescued from my Olympus Trip 35 after a year, and Vorticists completely out of place in Islington, and not having to read Tolstoy or North Korean school textbooks, I get a surge of what the French foppishly call joie de vivre. Where does it come from - the pine forests or palm-lined roads, or the back of my fuzzy/fiddly head, or the pit of my ritually abused stomach (bit of a cheer here for the Alpa brand of non-vintage, unfairly maligned as it is, except in our house, where we happen to be connoisseurs)? I can't, I can't answer that. But it feels as good as gorgeous guilt, like fancying your girlfriend's best friend. We have some people who have helped us quantify and articulate this, like Omar Khayyam, Louise Brooks, and Ben Jonson. The only way I can describe it is by saying that it's like sitting down to an argument with a full bottle of red and a fresh pack of cigs and getting stuck in for the evening and then falling into bed with Claire Luce before leaving in the morning for the Amalfi. Or, it's like this: once when I left for the Arctic, I came back with a beautiful block of ice in a tin for a lovely Soho stripper, and she smiled when I gave it to her. And I'd expected a kick in the chops, or a sneer of derision. Look, what kind of definition do you want exactly? I know you know what I mean, anyway. Don't make me drag this blather out any longer.
This spiel is dedicated to the woman in my life, Monica Bellucci.
11:34 PM
Naughty Naughty
It turns out that we're like this small but well-stocked hardware stall and our leaders are like so many discreet and slightly crooked market traders. Here's the deal: you can't just sell certain large-scale weapons systems due to all kinds of international bans, treaties, trade agreements and other unsporting export controls. So what we do is, we build them in small parts, and shift them that way. No laws against seperate "who me?" components. That, class, is what we call a "loophole".
How do you like this list of clients: Israel*, Indonesia, Uganda, Colombia, the Philippines and...Zimbabwe! It is further suggested that deadly bits sold to Uganda, Nambia and Angola could end up being shuttled to the Congo, a place so desperate for weapons that 6 national armies proved insufficient.
*Components exported for F-16s used to smash Palestinian settlements on the West Bank and Gaza, by the way.
7:40 PM
Thursday, February 26, 2004
Narco-war
There are 6 separate wars being fought in Colombia at the moment. This is, I think you'd agree, far too many for such a small country. Marxist guerrillas FARC are fighting over slim territory with rival left wing insurgents the ELA. FARC and the ELA are both fighting the Colombian State, still unable to vanquish their fierce challenge. The State has recently acquired a new enemy in a right wing paramilitary group called the AUC, a one-time ally and auxiliary of the army. The whole reason for the existence of the AUC, meanwhile, is to wipe out FARC and the ELA, so they're all at war with each other as well.
FARC and the ELA are long-established and run a semi-operational social system inspired by Marx-Mao-Leninism, similar to Peru's Shining Path in the 70s and 80s. Outside locale, the ELA are relevant because they fight FARC. FARC, meanwhile, are the most famous of Colombia's terrorist factions. They get the most press and the most hassle. This has something to do with their success and their audacity. They are larger and better equipped than the ELA, and pull outrageous stunts that provoke exciting headlines. They make money from coca production and extortion but extract political capital from kidnapping senior politicians from cities and government buildings, or hijacking their planes. Generally, when people think of Colombia, they think of drug cartels. If they know anything more, they think of FARC.
The AUC, however, would lag in their memory. This is strange because, of the average toll of civilian deaths per year in Colombia (3500), FARC and the ELA are collectively responsible for 15% of them, while the AUC can claim 75%.
The AUC has its origin in semi-official counter-insurgency militias that were organised to fight the methods and effects of the guerrillas. The core of the AUC formed around two men, both prominent figures in Colombia's drug cartels: Jose Rodriguez Gacha and Fidel Castano. These two drug lords were typical of the type in that they used their vast and illicit wealth to become important landowners. Cartel members are known to have brought up to 3.5 million hectacres of Colombian farmland. This put them in direct conflict with FARC and the ELA, who both controlled drug production in their peasant enclaves, as well as dealing with local landowners by means of extortion, kidnap, and murder. In fact, Castano's father had been killed by FARC guerrillas, and the Castano clan had sworn revenge from that moment on.
These were the roots of the AUC, formally inaugurated in 1997, with the blessing (and money) of the army, the government, business leaders, landowners, drug barons, and the US. The AUC were, originally, considered a formal subdivision of the Colombian military machine, a de facto special force. Their money came from vast donations from the landowners and narco-traffickers they protected; from participation in the drug trade itself; and from the redirection of US aid from the Colombian military. Their aim was to completely eliminate the existence and influence of FARC and the ELA in their rural strongholds.
Loretta Napoleoni describes an incident which illustrates their methods:
On 25 October 1997, members of the AUC and the 4th Brigade of the Colombian army, attacked the village of El Aro, in an area reputed to be sympathetic to FARC, the left-wing guerrillas. The army encircled the village, preventing anyone from escaping, and the AUC proceeded to exterminate the population. A shopkeeper was tied to a tree and brutally tortured before being castrated: his eyes were gouged out and his tounge severed with a knife. Eleven people, among them three children, were beheaded; all the public buildings were set on fire, houses were looted and the water supply destroyed. The AUC and the 4th Brigade left with 30 people, who are now some of the thousands of missing Colombians. The butchery in El Aro had a specific aim: to terrorise FARC sympathisers in an area targeted by the AUC and the army.
The AUC is now "outlawed" (it was added to the US list of terrorist organisations which expanded exponentially after 9/11) and currently fighting the Colombian army, despite strong links that remain between the two. AUC squads continue to massacre peasants, trade unionists, left wing politicians, left wing anyone, humanitarian/aid workers, local leaders, and land reform activists. They boast 10,000 paramilitaries, a number growing rapidly. In a recent bid for good publicity they announced that, from now on, they would not execute more than 3 people during every attack. This is, apparently, "something, at least."
11:07 PM
Passion of Christ opens in the US.
In Texas, thousands of Christians rose before dawn to view the movie, with 6,000 filmgoers filling all 20 auditoriums at a multiplex in Plano, Dallas, for screenings from 6.30am onwards. Arch Bonnema, the Christian businessman who reserved the theatre, had spent $42,000 on tickets, having told his wife: "Honey, we've got to get as many people as possible to see this film because it's changed my life."
Its subtle blend of sado-masochism, anti-semitism, "Jesus porn" and sectarian fury has moved a country to collective tears of redemption and rage. "Better than Operation Iraqi Freedom" read a notice.
However, this reassured me: Italian reality TV has a certain slasher style
Scalpel - Nobody's Perfect, a programme in which viewers volunteer for cosmetic surgery...is shown on Italia 1, owned by Mr Berlusconi, who himself underwent a facelift recently.
It's because we Europeans have culture, and history. That's what sets us apart.
3:00 PM
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
The Tiny Revolt
You may not of heard about a spasm of Islamist-instigated violence in Nigeria last December, but it happened.
About a year ago, a group of pro-Taliban radicals called Al-Sunna Wal Jamma (Followers of the Prophet) moved into Yobe, a Northeastern state that borders Niger. The group mostly comprised Nigerians (including the sons of many prominent Nigerian families) but also boasted recruits from Lagos and Niger. They set up camps outside the town of Kanamma and travelled into town to preach hardline doctrine to the Muslim population. Locals were outraged, however, when members of the outfit began to farm private land and fish on the banks of the Yobe river that were owned by eminent local families. When confronted over these incursions, they would answer: "Everything belongs to Allah."
Finally, in December, the governor of Yobe, Abba Ibrahim, decided to intervene. He implemented a plan to peacefully disperse the Al-Sunna Wal Jamma camps. In reply, the Islamists went beserk. To kick off, they attacked and raided a police station, killed two police officers, and torched the premises. Then they retreated en mass to a primary school, hoisted the flag of Afghanistan, and demanded a fight. The Nigerian army was sent in. After two weeks of violence, 18 people had been killed (mostly Islamists) and 200 Al-Sunna Wal Jamma members had been locked up.
This doomed uprising highlights religious tensions in Nigeria, a country split between its Christian South, Muslim North, and animist centre. 12 Northern States have so far adopted Shariah law. Ominously, Nigeria was pin-pointed by bin Laden (in a tape shown on al-Jazeera in 2002) as a future frontline for Jihad, alongside Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Nigeria is also Africa's largest oil producer and is being assiduously courted by Western oil companies. This strategic importance makes it increasingly vulnerable to Islamist attack.
In the meantime
10:47 PM
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
It is painful to behold a man employing his talents to corrupt himself.
Thomas Paine
6:10 PM
Go here and here for news links about the imminent capture of Osama bin Laden (plus a lot of other stuff about events in Afghanistan).
2:01 PM
Monday, February 23, 2004
Eternal return
Haiti
9:50 AM
Sunday, February 22, 2004
Springtime for Khost and the Taliban
As spring approaches, the Afghan resistance, singularly unaffected by joint US and Pakistan offensives earlier this year, prepares for its own battle to retake the cities and expel the Western occupiers.
Khost, on the Eastern Afghan-Pakistan border, is the first target marked by the two resistance leaders Maulana Jalaluddin Haqqani (an iconic ex-colonel) and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (HIA head and the Pakistan president originally ousted by the Taliban). The resistance coalition (comprising Taliban fighters, foreign jihadists and the HIA) has been liaising with local warlords and tribal chiefs who control the areas around Khost and have agreed to either support the offensive or remain neutral.
NATO forces are concentrated along the Afghan border, facing the North Waziristan Agency of Pakistan, where earlier US-Pakistan attacks failed to find much to fight. NATO plans to cluster around Khost in an attempt to repel the resistance in advance.
Through the mediation of Pakistan, the US has attempted diplomacy in the form of political bribery: promising a share of power to Haqqani and HIA participation in upcoming elections in exchange for ending the resistance. Haqqani has refused, for now. Hekmatyar has yet to respond.
The Spring Offensive is timed to take advantage of the good weather. But did you know that the Taliban, in 1996, banned weather forecasting? "They were allergic to the word 'prediction'," explains Abdul Qadeer, head of Afghanistan's meteorological office, in this article. "They said God only knows prediction, only God knows these things. We tried to explain that meteorology is not prediction, that it is forecast based on science. It didn't work."
Meanwhile, hundreds of Taliban fighters are apparently regrouping in the Zabul province in Southern Afghanistan (60 miles from Khandahar), with the intention of exploiting US focus on the Eastern border to undermine local stability in the run-up to the June election. The US military, however, has denied this: "If there were hundreds of fighters there, we would kill them," said a Colonel, bluntly.
10:02 PM
New Lord's Resistance Army atrocities in Northern Uganda.
12:04 PM
Thursday, February 19, 2004
case 412a: judgement of comrade Craner, O
Oh shit. Now I'm in trouble.
Dear Mr Craner
It is my sad duty to inform you that your blog spot has been read and analysed by the Party committee and has been found to have the following serious doctrinal errors:
1) Extreme Right Deviation for supporting American Imperialism.
2) Extreme Left Deviation concerning belief in possibilities for grass roots democratic reform under said pigs authority.
3) Insubordination for being nasty about the lovely Des Tutu (The man's one rung under Mandela in the sainthood stakes Man! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!)
4) Other things that we've forgotten.
As undersecretary I must inform you that you are to stop writing from this point on and must draft a fulsome and abject self criticism to be submitted as soon as possible or we're sending some people round.
As your friend I know that pride and mistaken conviction will cause you to refuse to recant. Thus our comradeship, like Hitchens and Amis, shall now degrade to silence save for the occasional sniping in print.
Yours (you neo-con turncoat)
G Watkins
10:30 PM
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
This is what I'm talking about.
12:53 PM
Tuesday, February 17, 2004
Here's a gem culled straight from a book that came out last year called Modern Jihad - Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks by Loretta Napoleoni. A book, by the way, that received unequivocal endorsments from, among others, Henry Porter and Professor Paul Gilbert and Greg Palast and Noam Chomsky.
On the recruitment of young suicide bombers in the occupied Palestinian territories:
Overall, the most important cost is the compensation to the family for the loss of a loved one. How to quantify the life of a child? Impossible. In the occupied territories, families recieve about $ 30, 000 for each son or daughter's death from outside sponsors such as charitable organisations, groups of sympathisers or foreign regimes such as Saudi Arabia and until recently* that of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Since compensation for families comes from money raised abroad, the organisers of the suicide missions do not have to fund it entirely by themselves.
*i.e. pre-war.
10:26 PM
And yes, I do think that a "septic State mafia" in power is worse than a potentially functioning US-backed Shi'ite-instigated but pluralist democratic State (including Sunnis, Kurds, Christians, secularists etc.) - and I say that fully aware of US history, US duplicity, US interests, all the difficulties and probabilties, and the potential betrayals and the festering anger, and the ruin of the lingering, miserable fucking resistance, AND corruption and OIL COMPANIES and EVERYTHING, alright, I KNOW ALL ABOUT THAT. I've even written about it, but I won't be quoting any more of me here because this is a different argument. Yes it is. Yes it is. Yes it IS. There are some basics to manage and No. 1 is bulding a non-despotic, non-theocratic State. No 1 is avoiding one-party, one-leader rule. No 1. is keeping an eye on US oil companies, corporate concessions - more important to the success of Iraq's future than how many US troops are killed in the process. That's their job: to fight to ensure the security of Iraqi citizens. If that's a stated intention then take them at their word: it's harder for them to escape it then. And that EXTENDS: if the US openly states its intention to liberate Iraq and build democracy then make sure you HOLD them to their word. There is more at stake, really, than partisan shots and rhetorical victories.
If you feel like it's fine to give up fighting and hoping for people then that's fine too - just don't claim moral authority and don't even dare degrade those who don't give up.
The reason US occupation will be allowed to fuck up is because of people condeming it in absolute terms rather than staying sharp and alert and making sure the US does not corrupt or dilute 1. the process and 2. the outcome. Those who base their opposition on anything that happens in Iraq no matter who does what start from a position of fatalism and that's not something I subsribe to any longer.
Making it difficult for the US to fudge and dissemble is the way to make it easy for democracy in Iraq. That is constructive application rather than blanket opposition.
Why not try and say something useful for once.
8:21 PM
An immoral war was thus waged and the world is a great deal less safe place than before
This sentence from Archbishop Desmond Tutu made me angry. I'm sick of statements like this - more disingenuous and self-serving and ill-informed than anything currently fed to the White House press corps, by the way - being hailed as "courageous" and "a voice of reason."
To claim that bombing and occupying Iraq to the end of removing Saddam Hussein is "immoral" effectively legitimises the alternative: leaving Iraq under the control of a septic State mafia that oppresses its people and robs them of their resources and wealth to satisfy personal greed and further destabilise the Middle East. And that's the moral alternative?
No, I'm sorry, that is the immoral alternative. Deposition of tyranny should be a requirement, a duty, a moral and civil imperative, whatever the motives, wherever the region, whatever the tyranny.
Saying that the world is less safe now is true in one sense: an open war between two ideological forces has been declared. But it is also untrue. How is the world less safe when, for example:
- the international nuclear weapons black market has been exposed, and continues to unravel.
- Islamist terrorism no longer has 1. a state or protectorate or 2. substantial funding or support from any other state.
- The main terrorist cells have been dispersed or destroyed
- Western security continues to "jump at shadows."
- Pakistani Islamist parties are, for the moment, in check.
- India and Pakistan are engaged in Peace Talks for the first time since, like, whenever.
- Liberal and Democratic Reform movements in theocratic or despotic States like Iran and Saudi Arabia are now supported by and given a voice in the West.
etc. etc.
If Tutu sincerely means what he's saying - which, not being a total cynic, I assume he does - then he's getting his moral categories confused in a way that is both simple and sinister.
7:25 PM
Monday, February 16, 2004
Received from Joyo Indonesia News
Associated Press
February 13, 2004
Indonesian Warship Sinks Hijacked Boat In Malacca Straits
An Indonesian warship sank a boat that had been taken over by gunmen in the Malacca straits near the maritime border with Malaysia, a navy spokesman said Friday.The landing ship Teluk Sibolga sank the tugboat Champion Thursday near Berhala Island after receiving reports that the ship had been hijacked, said military spokesman Lt. Col. Asep Sapari.
"The rebels ignored our warning to stop," Sapari said.
The Champion's 11-member crew reported that their vessel had been taken over the previous day by three gunmen who robbed the sailors and forced them to sail toward Malaysia. It was impossible to independently verify the report because Indonesian authorities have imposed a media blackout in Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra island. Sumatra's coastline is notorious for pirates who prey on passingships in the Malacca Straits.
6:22 PM
Sunday, February 15, 2004
The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.
Chop!
3:39 PM
Then you witness yourself or watch people pretend to know everything in a debate: it's a funny front, but also necessary, a mass hallucination of total knowledge or total ignorance that, somehow, prevents the argument from collapsing into silence or chaos and forgoes the death of debate. Democracy thrives, even, on an ability to circumvent the limits or shortcomings of what is known, collectively and individually. (How glib.) Just to keep things moving: obviously is both negative and positive. The contemporary travesty of "opinion" is a high-profile victim of this tendency as consuming malaise. Nevertheless, an argument is the most necessary form of human interaction after laughter and sex.
2:55 PM
The Jakarta Post
Friday, February 13, 2004
RI, U.S. May Improve Military Ties
JAKARTA: The Indonesian and United States militaries have agreed to improve cooperation, despite the ongoing weapons embargo imposed in 1999 by the U.S. Congress against the Indonesian Military (TNI) In a meeting with President Megawati Soekarnoputri Thursday, visiting U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Adm. Thomas Fargo promised to seek new measures to enhance military operations between the two countries. 'Despite the Timika (Papua) issue, we agreed to find new measures to improve military cooperation,' TNI chief Gen. Endriartono Sutarto said, referring to an unsolved ambush in Timika that left two Americans dead. He, however, stressed that they were yet to agree on the new measures. The U.S. imposed a military embargo on the TNI following widespread allegations of rights abuses in East Timor in 1999. The killing of the teachers in Timika, Papua in August 2002 exacerbated the problem."
Re: Aceh, too.
11:54 AM
Friday, February 13, 2004
Tim Sebastian, BBC World HARDtalk: You are trying to give the Indonesians a better image?
It would be hard to give Indonesia a better image
Bob Dole: No it's easy. Indonesia is in a transition to
democracy and President Megawatti is doing a great
job.
TS: They can't get control of their army and
stop it massacring people in Aceh province. That would
help their image.
BD: You've got that journalist's limited view of the
country. Here this the 4th largest country in the
world. The greatest population of Muslims; 90% Muslim.
17,000 islands; 7000 inhabited. And we pick out one
little place where they are making progress. They're
in a transition to democracy. We ought to be standing
up and applauding Indonesia.
TS: They are massacring people. You know that
as well as I do, in Aceh province.
BD: When?
TS: Over the last year, the last two years.
BD: No, I don't think so.
TS: Look at the figures.
BD: It is being investigated. There are a lot of ...
Again, Let's look at the big picture. I think there
are things going on in every country that we don't
like. There are things going on in America that we
don't like.
TS: So we should chat about it
BD: We ought to let people know about it and maybe
we can change it. But don't sink the whole country
because of a problem in one little place. If they
don't deal with it, if they don't try to deal with it
then you go after the people. But when they are trying
to deal with it. It's a very complex country.
TS: Human beings should be treated as human
beings whether it is a little place or a big place.
BD: That has been my view ever since I was born and
raised and grew up living in a basement. I've been in
the bottom so really know where the people are who
really need the help.
Sweden has been, until recently, the most popular destination for exiled GAM leaders, but after former Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas visited Stockholm in June last year their status has become less secure. Now they all want to move to Norway. In fact, over 200 political refugees from Aceh have already moved there in the last 3 years, but 50 top GAM operatives currently remain in Sweden.
Aceh's brutal little war continues. The UK has gone lax on its restrictions regarding Indonesian use of Hawks and Scorpions, which we sold to them on condition that they would not be used for internal suppression, which is exactly what they are being used for.
6:36 PM
Thursday, February 12, 2004
Pepe Escobar picks holes in the al-Qaeda memo "discovered" by the US:
This latest US intelligence, though, makes little sense. For starters, al-Qaeda pigeons are highly unlikely to move around with computer discs in their briefcases: since early 2002 a disabled al-Qaeda has used women couriers to deliver strictly verbal messages. The memo says that the resistance against the occupation is 'struggling to recruit Iraqis'. This is not borne out by the situation on the ground - the resistance continues, even rising, despite the capture of Saddam. The purported memo also says that the 'new anti-American campaign' must start before 'zero hour', when power is scheduled to be transferred to an Iraqi administration in June. Again, this is not true. The resistance knows all too well that only the responsibility for security will be transferred in June, not power. The Americans will remain behind their heavily fortified military bases, but will remain as occupiers.
Which is fair enough, but I would like, in fact, to see his evidence that Iraqi resistance is "on the rise," because there is plenty to suggest that it remains a desperate coalition of geurillas and inflitrators hitting deliberately soft targets precisely because of its essential inability to fulfill its aim: retake Iraqi cities, and eject American troops.
Furthermore, and this may seem a terrible predicament to some, but it is nevertheless inescapeable: the best chance Iraq has of being rebuilt is with a strong US military presence for the time being as occupiers, peacekeepers, army etc.
If you think the situation is as bad as it can possibly be then you must surely agree with me: we should not talk about the future, we should talk about now.
7:42 PM
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Iraq, Year Zero
This astonishing passage comes from Said K. Aburish's virulent book The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of The House of Saud, published in 1994. It details an account of a meeting between the US and the Saudis on the eve of America's declaration of war on Iraq in 1990. According to Aburish, this story is recounted and verified by four separate and reliable sources. If true, it sheds light on America's reasons for starting both Gulf Wars. DO NOT SKIP THIS:
Dick Cheney went to Saudi Arabia accompanied by General Norman Schwarzkopf, two intelligence personnel and one middle east expert, and the Saudi Ambassador to the United States Prince Bandar, the son of the Saudi Minister of Defence and a favorite of his uncle, Fahd. The American ambassador to Saudi Arabia Charles Freeman joined the American group. The King (Fahd) met Cheney and his group accompanied by Crown Prince Abdullah, Defence Minister Sultan (the father of Bandar) and several members of the royal family.
There was no discussion of any initiative to solve the problem short of war, nor were the Americans, or Fahd, interested in the results of the efforts of Arab intermediaries. Using satellite maps, Dick Cheney showed King Fahd that 200, 000 Iraqi troops were poised to attack Saudi Arabia. Cheney said nothing about the extremely important facts of the small withdrawal of Iraqi troops and the pull-back of other Iraqi units from the Saudi border. Cheney asked Fahd to invite US troops to Saudi Arabia, 'to protect our friends', and the king nodded agreement, but the Crown Prince Abdullah wanted to hear more about the disposition of Iraqi troops, the intended use of American troops after they arrived and the conditions under which they would leave the country.
Cheney's answer to the points raised by Prince Abdullah was vague. Instead of answering them directly, he is reported to have addressed himself to Fahd and told him that there was a strong possibility that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was part of an Iraqi-Yemeni-PLO plot to destabilize the Arabian Peninsula and divide it among themselves. He added that, at that moment, there was nothing to stop the Iraqi army from marching to Riyadh. Cheney added that it was difficult to determine whether King Hussein (of Jordan) was part of this sinister partition plan.
This unbelievable story was told to me by two former American ambassadors to Saudi Arabia, a former member of the National Security Council and a disaffected member of the House of Saud. At this point, there are no documents to confirm it and it is impossible to establish whether the official US record of the meeting alludes to it, but there is little doubt that Cheney's total presentation reflected America's intentions to destroy Saddam [...T]he American attitude amounted to capitalizing on a situation they had created and forces the question of whether or not Saddam had been set up and the whole war was nothing more than a plan to eliminate the only Middle East power capable of challenging America's hegemony over the Arab world.
This may make more sense if you remember that, in the run-up to Saddam's invasion, Kuwait was not exactly the innocent bystander and victim as is often portrayed (the impression you would get, for example, by reading David Halberstam's War In a Time of Peace). On the contrary, Kuwaiti intransigence did not simply provoke Iraq - it forced Hussein to implement the one viable option left to him. In fact, Kuwaiti actions made confrontation with Iraq inevitable. After the Iran-Iraq war Kuwait started to pump oil from Rumailla, an oilfield barred from production because of a territorial dispute with Iraq. Consequently, the price of oil tumbled, which adversely affected the Iraqi economy, dependent on oil profits to rebuild its war-shattered infrastructure. Kuwait's actions reduced Iraq's gross income by $4 billion a year. On top of this, Kuwait demanded the immediate repayment of $8 billion lent to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, a lump sum Iraq could not afford, and Kuwait did not even need (with reserves of over $90 billion, and a profitable OPEC-endorsed oil economy). When Iraq admitted that it could not pay, Kuwait contacted Lloyds with the intention of selling Iraqi debt notes at a large discount: a potentially ruinous move for the Iraq economy. In a series of meetings running up to Saddam's order to invade, Kuwait refused to concede anything, despite Iraq's abject position in the negotiations.
Why did Kuwait behave like this? More importantly, why were they allowed to?
This is Aburish's account of the final, fateful meeting between Kuwait and Iraq, adjudicated with disastrous results by the idle Saudi King, Fahd:
The Iraqis demanded billions of dollars worth of compensation for the oil from the Rumailla field proceeds and a permanent border adjustment. The Kuwaitis would not give on either point and Fahd, behaving oddly, spent half an hour with the delegations and left his brother, the gentle but incompetent Prince Abdallah, to mediate. When news reached Fahd that the Kuwaiti and Iraqi positions appeared irreconcilable, all he did to settle the issue was to make a gesture the Iraqis were sure to refuse: he offered Iraq $1 billion in aid. The Iraqis, now angrier with Kuwait and smarting over Fahd's unattentiveness and the deliberately insulting offer, left without accepting it. War was 36 hours away.
*
Early last year, I went through all the options, tried to work out what was pushing the US war plan to its logical conclusion. I came up with a strange answer, after discarding many arguments proffered by the Anti-War mob as, if not actually irrelevant, then only part of a wider story. Or should I say instinct rather than "story"; a drive that was an energy, an objective with a self-propelling velocity, an objectile. Whatever it was, I decided it was more obtusely psychological than it was do with geopolitical ambition or national security. And then there's what I said here: do not "underestimate the strange dynamic that pulses between the White House and the Pentagon right now, the mysterious schisms and alliances and almost occult ferment of ideals and agendas at the heart of the administration, like an allegiance of evangelism and freemasonry." And there's what I said here: "this almost somnolent, stupid obsession with one regime at a time that’s a bit like a calm psychopathology that finally, inevitably, leads into barbaric violence" and "you have more respect for the worst Pentagon strategists (Rumsfeld, Wolfowtiz, the military chiefs) than the best Whitehouse diplomats and appeasers (Powell, Rice) because you can trust these blunt, dead-eyed bastards more than the oily politico sharks whose concern it is to disguise and obscure the naked and distinct workings of power for the further advantage of this very power (and its tentacles, reaching into the everyday, the psychological, the fiscal, the cultural…all forms of capital, all types of investment, financial and libidinal…)." (No, this isn't Oliver Craner: The Greatest Hits or The Final Chapter: How I Became a Hawk BUT...)
I still concur with most of that too, but it's easier to clarify now. Let's pretend, for a moment, that I don't know what's going on, that I don't have my own direct line to the White House and No. 10, that I don't have special dispensation in Riyadh, that I didn't spend the whole of last summer trekking mountains on the Afghan/Pakistan border with a mountain goat and the mujahedin. I mean, suspend belief just for a second...then how might I attempt to explicate motive...
<<< December, say, 2001.
You have Afghanistan, and between your position and the frontline of power in Pakistan (at least to the extent that you can control it) you have al-Qaeda, Taliban and mujahideen fighters jammed in the Islamist heartlands. You have the Saudis in your paw, but, on the other hand, they look increasingly vulnerable to internal dissidence, Islamist opposition, and anti-House of Saud terrorism; they are, therefore, unpredictable. Their obscene power, exerted through the exploitation of cheap oil prices, is increasingly untenable and resented. Because of links and schisms with Wahhabism and Islamist terrorism, Saudi Arabia is a prinicipality about to be torn apart by its own contradictions. Furthermore, the royal family is as stupid, ignorant, corrupt and lazy as ever. Certainly, no longer a stable Middle East base for US interests. Iran, also, looks vulnerable to internal disruption, a call for democracy and greater freedom the mullahs are increasingly unable to contain. What happens if that edifice topples? Meanwhile, Iraq remains stuck in the middle - oil-rich, crippled by sanctions, reverting to gangsterism: from Ba'ath despotism to Hussein mafia rule. On the horizon looms the rule of Uday and Quasay: two psychopaths for the price of one. Needless waste of desperately needed fuel reserves. More internal suppression and oppression. More hawking for weapons on the black market (North Korea), more covert supplies (Syria) and more shady sanctions-busting trade arrangements (France, Russia). On the other hand, the state and its army remains ineffectual, still paralysed after the first Gulf War (the same reason why saudi Arabia is debt-ridden and continues to default like crazy). And, more to the point, while Saddam remains in power - toying with international weapons inspectors, thumbing his nose at the West and, in partcular, the Bush Dynasty - it's a humiliation and exposes an essential position of impotence, the trap of bloodless, disproportionate checks and balances. And above even that, exists as an incitement, an example, erroneously, to Islamist jihadists, who may not admire the man and his secular state politics of yore, but recognise a fellow anti-American warrior, enough to dispel difference for the time being (remember bin Laden on a tape smuggled to Al-jazeera sometime in 2001; no fan of Hussein before, but managing to include Iraq on his jihad list).
And so, there you go, a rational case for war in Iraq - easily slotted into the working frame of the War on Terror (because, in fact, in the end, it fed it).
This, of course, seems a particularly urgent argument today, with that bomb blast in Iskandariya as well as the discovery of this supposed al-Qaeda-related plot to incite Shia-Sunni conflict. The latter, if true, is an appalling plan and illustrates the utterly debased tactics the Islamist cells are prepared to deploy in their misguided and pernicious jihad. Planning to ignite civil and religious conflict and deliberately targeting civilians is, I say, in a rather different league to launching smart bombs and laser-guided missiles (at State targets) which, in design at least, aim at 100% accuracy and limited collateral. Islamist jihad tactics have more in common with the covert tactics of Nixon and Reagan's outlaw foreign policies: that is, the creation of maximum chaos and conflict at the expense of the civilian population, who inevitably suffer the worst of it (e.g. Cambodia, Chile, Nicaragua, etc etc.) Whatever you think about the current American occupation of Iraq - and there are plenty of objections, for example: the already corrupt distribution of business contracts, the elections fudge, incidents of military brutality, etc. - the fact is, it is absolutely in American as well as Iraqi interest to regain civil order, a working economy, and implement some kind of semi-self-sufficient democratic process as soon as possible. And there's nothing more stupid than, at this time, rejecting the whole process because of supposed US manipulation, e.g. "it'll just be an American puppet regime because they would never allow real democracy" - well fine, of course, but isn't democracy easier to reform once it actually exists, in whatever form? What are you objecting to - a future potentiality that may not come to pass anyway? Because these arguments, weirdly, underestimate the extreme dangers that Iraq (and, by extension, the Middle East) faces as the country emerges from decades of Ba'ath rule. The "al-Qaeda" document seized admits that "the resistance against US occupation is struggling to recruit Iraqis," and the plan to radicalize Sunnis - by attacking Shia targets and provoking a Shia backlash against Sunnis (note that Iskandariya is a Shia town) - smacks of desperation. Which is excellent news, and reveals the very opposite of what today's bomb suggests: rather than consolidating forces and picking up momentum, the Iraqi resistance is, in fact, on its last legs, a dwindling coalition desperate to retain its presence by importing any willing jihadi fighters. They may not have done their worst as yet, but they cannot hope to gain any more than they already have (a couple of scalps and a lot of dead Iraqis).
2:20 PM
Friday, February 06, 2004
Dr. Doom & Doom Jr.
This is a sovereign country. No document will be given. No independent investigation will take place. There is a written mercy appeal from Khan's side and there is a written pardon from my side. No rollback of Pakistan's nuclear programme will ever happen.
Musharraf
The "outing" of Abdul Qadeer Khan's nuclear deals and the exposure of a procurement network of nuclear weapons technology (see below) is causing (at last) vast global repercussions. Mohammed El Baradei, head of the IAEI, sounds terrified! (And still reeling from the fact that Libya has more than anybody guessed.) He says: "Mr Khan is the tip of the iceberg. His confession raises more questions than it answers. A lot of other people are involved. Items were made in one county, assembled in others and shipped on false certificates."
Meanwhile: more revelations and accusations.
The CIA (who credit themselves and MI6 with having unveiled this illicit international network, not without justification, although remember how much they choose to conceal or reveal at a given moment) have also murmured their "suspicions" that Syria and Saudi Arabia were prominent Khan clients.
Iran is accused of hiding the full extent of its nuclear programme. A senior US official has claimed that Tehran still has a lot of equipment that the IAEA does not know about.
The list of countries whose companies have supplied parts to middlemen has extended to include Japan, Malaysia, South Africa and two more - so far unnamed - European countries.
The case of Malaysia is a juicy one as it seems to tie up all the loose ends in one tightly-bound radioactive bundle. To explain:
A Malaysian company is being investigated on the charge of supplying parts to Libya. The company (Scomi Precision Engineering, aka Scope) is owned by Kamaluddin Abdullah, son of the Malaysian prime minister Abdullah Badawi. On October the 4th last year "suspicious parts" were seized from a ship bound for Malaysia - uranium centrifuges contained in wooden boxes emblazoned with the Scope company badge. The ship was German-owned, and seized in Italy. It was revealed that Mr. BSA Tabir - a Sri Lankan businessman based in Dubai - had, in 2001, negotiated a contract with Scope to manufacture the components destined for Libya. It further transpired that Tabir was a middleman employed by one Abdul Qadeer Khan. The parts seized by the Italian police exactly resembled the designs Khan stole and refined in his own laboratories in Pakistan.
Meanwhile, the US and the UK seem unlikely to push too hard on Musharraf's refusal to sanction any investigations into Khan, his labs, and the role of the Pakistani military in this proliferation outrage. Some claim that Musharraf's reluctance is due to "how much Pakistan has to hide" - but it's as much, if not more, to do with checking the ire of the Islamist forces currently ranged against him.
10:48 PM
Wednesday, February 04, 2004
Anyway, the reason that the US/Pakistan offensives in South Waziristan have been so unsuccessful - uneventful, even - is because the Afghanistan resistance is based, it turns out, somewhere else entirely. The Americans had believed the Waziristan Agency to be a crucial centre for Taliban and Mujahideen fighters, granting ample protection because of its rough, mountainous terrain and the hardline Islamist sympathies of the local population.
Now Pakistani Intelligence has located the resistance base in a remote area called the Khyber Agency in the North West Frontier Province, already known to be an al-Qaeda heartland, with almost blanket support from the local population. Years ago bin Laden cultivated the Tero and Moro mountains - located directly along the Afghan-Pakistan border, near Jalamabad and Tora Bora, site of the original US and Taliban/al-Qaeda showdowns in 2001-2 - as a subterranean base for his network. He built undergound tunnels and bunkers to use as hideouts and storage space for weapons, ammunition, and supplies. The resistance is now using this system as a supply line into Afghanistan. Under the new leadership of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar - head of Hizb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA) and until (very) recently recipient of Pakistani aid - the Afghan resistance is using the Khyber as an Islamist enclave where they can regroup in safety. The formidable terrain and the hostile population prevent the Pakistani military from planning any major offensive in the area, particularly as direct US military involvement in Pakistan (i.e. air cover or missile strikes) is a political impossibility.
12:12 PM
Sunday, February 01, 2004
The Nukes of Hazard
A subplot in the rapidly unfolding story of Pakistan: its central role in a global black market that deals in nuclear equipment and expertise, leading to the arrest of the architect and daddy of the first Islamic nuke, Abdul Qadeer Khan. Khan has been in custody for a month. His case is particularly sensitive because, in pre-9/11 Pakistan, Khan was feted as a national hero. In a country consumed, primarily, by its furious rivalry with India, Khan gave Pakistan (in Musharraf's words) "honour" and "the pride of [...] nuclear capability." Despite Musharraf's tribute (which dates back to Khan's first forced "debriefing" in 2001), Khan and other members of Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) are being forced to talk about the part they played in the proliferation of nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Khan's career highlights the knife-edge Pakistan lives on, and the fact that, had Musharraf not been such a weak character and therefore pliable to US muscle and money after 9/11, then the world would be facing the prospect of an Islamist bomb and it is surely certain that, by now, that bomb would have been used. Still the possibility cannot be discounted, or the danger underestimated: if Musharraf is killed then we are in that exact position. Meanwhile, the military, the ISI and Pakistan's Islamist parties all look to remove their renegade puppet and, evidently, actively pursue the event. Again, a man of insignificant character and mediocre ability assumes a position of preeminent strategic importance - a common refrain in the politics of global warfare.
Khan is a hardline Pakistani Nationalist and Islamist, who once said that "all Western countries are not only the enemies of Pakistan but in fact of Islam". As the India-Pakistan confrontation over Kashmir switched from nationalism to jihad, Khan was perfectly placed to elevate tensions through his clandestine nuclear programme, begun for that very reason. Khan had stolen the blueprints for the enrichment of uranium when he worked in Holland for an Anglo-Dutch-German nuclear engineering consortium called Urenco. He returned to Pakistan with this stolen intelligence and, with the backing of the ISI, set up his research and development laboratories. During the Cold War America poured money into ISI coffers and this was diverted, in increasing amounts, to Khan's project. Pretty soon Pakistan could produce its own nuclear warheads and just lacked a delivery system (i.e. ballistic missiles). The CIA informed the White House almost immediately, but both the US and Pakistan denied the existence of Khan's bomb so that the US could continue funding the ISI in a still tense Cold War theatre. This silence ended in 1998 when, aided by Chinese ballistic hardware, Pakistan conducted its first open nuclear test. Street celebrations in Islamabad were shown on TV across the globe, gleeful citizens dancing around massive model missiles, jeering anti-Indian invective. The US put pressure on China to cease assistance to the Pakistan nuclear programme, which it did. Pakistan once again lacked the money and means to build its own ballistic missiles. One pugnacious little Cold War survivor, however, specialised in that very field.
North Korea is the largest exporter of long-range missiles to the Muslim world. In the last 15 years it has shifted over 400 missiles to rogue states unable to obtain them from the West, including Pakistan and Iran (a covert supply of aid is not exactly the same as direct arms trading, it seems). Kim Jong-Il dominates the ballistics black market. (The CIA also claims that Jong-Il supplied SCUD technology to Iran, Syria, Libya, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.) Pakistan's ties with North Korea date back to the mid-seventies, but really bore fruit in the mid-nineties. In 1995, Islamabad signed a deal with Pyongyang for the purchase of long-range missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads and, potentially, striking US, NATO and allied deployed forces. Initially Pakistan intended to pay back North Korea with money, but as the country slid further into debt and domestic decay this became less and less tenable (missiles are, after all, expensive items). However, in the late '90s, when they were forced to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, North Korea sent their nuke programme underground. Pakistan now had a valuable asset: the uranium enrichment techniques stolen and developed by Khan and his research lab. By obtaining enrichment technology from Pakistan, the North Koreans could continue developing nuclear weapons in secret. The eventual deal saw Pakistan swapping uranium enrichment equipment for ballistic missiles. This exchange has only been completed in recent months.
The KhanRL nuclear trail also leads to Libya and Iran, two countries that have just opened their weapons programmes to International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. Enrichment facilities bearing the Urenco/Khan blueprint have been discovered in both cases. Furthermore, Iran has blurted out details of a vast procurement network that connects rogue scientists in Pakistan (i.e. Khan and his kru) with German and Sri Lankan middlemen based in Dubai who could obtain parts from European, Asian and American companies. This, plus North Korea's missiles. Oh, and the (very) covert or indirect supply of technology and expertise from China and Russia (so the CIA claims).
Khan, a flamboyant egomaniac and icon of Pakistani nationalism and Islamic jihad, is far less dispensable than Musharraf (a puppet dictator who has turned his back on those who, effectively, put him in power, i.e the ISI and military Islamists). The Bush administration has so far suppressed its own intelligence about the extent of Pakistan's nuclear proliferation (recent leaks have been viewed as warning shots aimed at Islamabad). They understand how delicate everything is in every way. An alienated Musharraf is the same as a dead Musharraf: it leaves you with a nuclear-armed Islamist state itching for holy thermonuclear war on the subcontinent. The best way to keep Musharraf safe is to buy off Pakistan wholesale. The one thing the Islamists cannot fight, in the end, is debt relief and aid. Since Musharraf rallied to the Bush cause in 2001, all of Pakistan's debts have been cancelled, most recently with a $395 million lump sum. This is the only populist call that Musharraf has to fight the call of faith (one of the reasons that Musharraf is so threatened by US intelligence leaks linking Pakistan to North Korea's nuclear programme is because Japan is Pakistan's second largest aid donor after the US: evidence that Pakistan is arming an adversary could, potentially, prompt Japan to reconsider aid conditions).
7:15 PM
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
A Sri Lankan Air Force Commodore just came into the shop with a long list of books he wanted all about military ballistics and industrial chemistry. He told me where he was from, and added, "we always beat you at cricket." I should have said "I'm not surprised, Wales are shit at cricket," but my actual reply was: "yes, ho ho, but not at WAR." Dumb! Like, I might as well have added "you were under us for a while, weren't you?" or "Ah yes, Ceylon!" He was a thick-faced lump, though; it didn't seem to penetrate. All of the books he wanted were out of date, and mostly out of print. Apart from, ah, Gaseous Detonations and, um, Battlefield Ballistics. Watch out Tamils!
It's really snowing now, there's thunder, and the church bell across the road is ringing like mad.
5:35 PM
I like this weather a lot: fucking freezing air and clear blue sky. How I cope with this vicious morning gift is: fine lambswool scarf, pigskin gloves, and duffel coat (of good quality, i.e. Gloverall, not CND march rubbish - a distinct difference). Gulls wheel, light-reflected, perfect white. Felt the warm breath of a sexy blonde mathematician with a name like a Slavic pop star on my neck, but that was just my imagination. Again.
More on Liberia: it's (almost) back on.
9:46 AM
Monday, January 26, 2004
Liberian Fruit
The wife of Liberia's most powerful rebel leader has taken control of her husband's guerilla movement without, it seems, his consent. In fact, Sekouh Conneh has insisted that this is just "a family squabble," and that, actually, he is in charge of the militia. Unfortunately for him, Asha Keita-Conneh claims the loyalty of all of his battlefield commanders. Like a little Madame Agathe doll, she is widely regarded as being the real ideological and tactical force behind 'Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy' (or LURD for short - how marvelous!). Surrounded by her fighters, all nodding their assent, with her baby on the ground beside her, she sat in her living room in Monrovia last week, and said:
I put him there as chairman. If you open a big business and put your husband in charge, if you see that things are not going the right way, you step him aside and straighten things up. If somebody gives you something and the person wants it back, there should be no problem.
10:45 PM
Friday, January 23, 2004
Cathy, Come Home
I'm a Peking O fan.
I think it might be the best blog of all. However low-key, Cathy has craft, but not like George Oppen or Basil Bunting (the latter would be no insult; the former would). Exquisite arrangement: words + pictures + links dotted like scattered bits of tale that tie together. Mental shots (slots and shoots) in all directions, like sitting on a bus reading a magazine while listening to conversations, thoughts, with the corner of an eye caught by a flyposter or a strange sign, or both, and all of it bent backwards. Best backgrounds are always black or white; to highlight or frame care, creative energy, flair (see also, Lex Luka, Ingram, Cozen). Also an escape from restraint and restriction of subject, topic, or autobiography: white space and word gaps sooth and seduce. Peking O is rigorous autobiography, realism of an applied kind: Ulysses, last stop before Finnegans Wake; or, to be more accurate, mid to late-period Beckett (How It Is maybe, or Company) served on a sweet trolley. I hold her in high esteem: expert finger-jabs on keyboard; pen, word, and delicious, brittle syntax. I don't even know the girl; less through each Peking O vignette or word-cluster. A byte is enough to get me
12:10 PM
I need to be left in Pakistan, with laptop, contacts and contract. I can't keep making this rubbish up. I need a nice wife, like Monica Bellucci or something. I'm almost 26, and have nothing except youth, which is draining fast. How ridiculous! Cracking quangos in Tower Hamlets, a reporter-sleuth, in trenchcoat and snap brim fedora - that's me! At least, IT SHOULD BE. Connecting East End to the World - Afghanistan or Columbia or Beijing or whereever. I have: distinct jawline, fine Roman nose, strong bones; I'm a suspicious hawk, with vague misgivings, a distrust of Utopian rhetoric, but special fine grade optimism. I can be useful.
Fuck foxes, you should have heard the gulls cry above Orion House.
12:05 PM
Thursday, January 22, 2004
Egypt the Prize
Saudi Arabia is a divisive issue in Washington. Officially, the White House and the Pentagon maintain the House of Saud's elevated position as ally and client, paying lip service to a long history of friendship and trade (though with less emphasis than the nervous Saudi Royals).
BUT: an increasing number of representatives, house members, senators, etc. are in agreement with Perle and Frum, and coming around to their contention that, sooner or later, the US will have to take action against the Saudis unless they relinquish ALL ties with terrorism and Wahhabism. Some argue that the Saudis will never meet such conditions whatever they say - because, in the end, they can't - and should simply be deposed forthwith.
There is another element - (a phantom trace of personal suspicion...).
With the Iraq oil fields under US/UK control and, essentially, open to Western exploitation, Saudi Arabia is no longer the one significant oil producing State in the Middle East. But the exploitation of this bountiful natural resource necessitates a bottom threshold of national security. Iraq is obviously far below that threshold. The Iraqi resistance movement would not, however, be able to perpetuate such effective strikes against US forces and Iraqi cities if it was confined to national dissidents, ex-Baathists and Sunni muslims. The strength and expertise comes from alien elements; that is: a cynical pact with Islamist guerrillas. In other words, a (very) significant number of Saudi jihadists - ...the question is, do they recieve the tacit or even active support of the Saudi regime? Considering the regional stakes involved - Saudi oil hegemony = leverage with the US; without it the regime is more than vulnerable, internally and externally - ...blah blah...bullshit...
On July 10th, 2002, a rather shady character called Laurent Murawiec (an analyst for White House advisors Rand Corp.) gave a presentation to a Pentagon advisory group that included Donald Rumsfeld, Newt Gingrich, Dan Qayle and Henry Kissinger. Murawiec had been invited by Richard Perle; the briefing was titled: Taking Saudi Out of Arabia. The contents of Murawiec's Powerpoint display proved explosive, especially when leaked to the Washington Post. It called for a full US invasion of Saudi Arabia, deposing the House of Saud, seizing the State's oil fields and its financial assets.
The presentation began with a critique of the Arab world, detailing its isolation from the industrial and digital revolutions; theological crises; perpetuation of wars, demagogues, criminal states and human rights abuse. At one point, Murawiec claimed that "in the Arab world, violence is not a continuation of politics by other means - violence is politics, politics is violence." This combination of politics, violence and regressive theology led the twin poles of terrorism and Wahhabism to migrate from Islam's "lunatic fringe to centre-stage".
Saudi Arabia, Murawiec stressed, was principal party to this migration. On from this, Murawiec then (correctly) pointed out that "Saudi Arabia is not a God-given entity," because the House of Saud received dominion over Arabia in 1922 from the British, and took guardianship of Mecca and Medina by force from the Hashemite dynasty. "There is an 'Arabia'," he added, "but it need not be 'Saudi'."
From here, Murawiec defined the outer edges of Neocon foreign policy. America must demand that the Saudi regime: 1. stop funding fundamentalist movements, groups, and mosques worldwide; 2. ban all anti-American/Isreali/Western propaganda, writing and teaching within Arabia; 3. ban Islamic charitities and confiscate their assets; 4. prosecute all sponsors of terrorism within the kingdom, including the Saudi intelligence services. Once clear that these demands were not being met (as if they could be), Murawiec suggested that the US threaten Mecca and Medina with force!
Murawiec's summation remained incomprehensible to everyone present. "Iraq is the tactical pivot; Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot; Egypt the prize," he stated, boldly. The room looked confused, then stunned (or vice versa).
When the story of Murawiec's briefing was leaked to the press, everybody distanced themselves from it. People said truly amazing things. The hypocrisy of the situation was palpable, and unwittingly justified parts of Murawiec's critique, if not his remedies.
Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke said: "The Saudi's cooperate fully in the global war on terrorism" (yes, Victoria, on the other side!). Kissinger, typically, got to the realpolitik nub (highlighting the difference between the old-skool slippery Kissinger-style realpolitik and new-skool megablast Perle-style realpolitik; an important distinction to keep in mind): "I don't consider Saudi Arabia to be a strategic adversary of the United States. They are doing some things I don't approve of, but I don't consider them a strategic adversary," he said. Donald Rumsfeld, however, truly excelled, with this gem of all apologisms: "It is correct, as apparently someone said in the briefing, that a number of the people who were involved on September 11th happen to have been Saudi individuals and that there are those issues that Saudi Arabia is wrestling with, just as other countries of the world are wrestling with them." Which must mean, therefore: Afghanistan needs bombs, Iran needs international inspectors, but the Saudis need a good Manhattan therapist.
5:47 PM
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
Romeo Dun
And this is Romeo Dellaire talking; the dashing UN General ordered by the Security Council to do nothing as he witnessed Hutus massacre Tutsis and Hutu moderates with machetes and machine guns in a genocidal bloodbath. The price of following orders: early retirement due to post-traumatic stress disorder; nightmares and flashbacks.
Dellaire is testifying against Rwandan colonel Theoneste Bagosara who took control of the country on April 7, the day after Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane was shot down (killing everyone on board, including Burundian president Cyprian Ntarymira). Bogosara and his officers are accused of organising and unleashing a country-wide slaughter that began within hours of Habyarimana's assassination - the result of a conspiracy involving Madame Agathe Kanzinga (Hutu Power icon; wife of Habyarimana), the Presidential guard, the Rwandan Armed forces, and the interahamwe militias.
The initial spark was an accord signed between Habyarimana and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (a Tutsi army engaged in civil war with the Hutu regime). However, the assassination marked the culmination of a simmering campaign of ethnic hatred ("tension" would be an inadequate description) fomented by State media under the control of Hutu extremists. The planned genocide had been explained in detail on live radio for months before: killing techniques and lists of local armed militias ("These people were trained to be able to kill 1 000 Tutsis in 20 minutes," says Dellaire*) were broadcast to a captive Hutu population ; Tutsis listened with a passive fatalism borne of dread. The death of Habyarimana provided the opportunity for Hutu extremists to begin the slaughter. (It's astonishing that this could ever be conceived as a rational plan - which it was - no state could continue to function, or even exist, after genocide on this scale: the Hutu plan was not only genocidal, it was suicidal too).
I'm glad that Dellaire is testifying in Tanzania, and he should be commended; it does something to address, if not redress, forced non-intervention - a kind of revenge on Hutu genocide criminals, the UN, and every country guilty of abandoning Rwanda to ethnic apocalypse; leaving a UN general and a handful of soldiers to somehow cope alone in the midst of a human disaster with few historical precedents. Dellaire is the last person to blame: this is not the culpability of one man, but an indictment of Western priority and motive.
*And this is explosive: He said foreigners supervised the training alongside Rwandan officers, without identifying their nationality.
10:24 AM
Brooklyn Legend Daria Brit sent me this important article ("compulsory reading material") about the 21st Annual Porn awards in Las Vegas. An interview with anal sex specialist Ashley Blue, who found her vocation via Henry Miller:
"I found out about anal sex reading him, and I was like, 'Whoa!' He wrote things like, 'I stuck my cock up her ass and hit something'—really, really cool, great, disgusting things."
Ashley is choice. "I don't get recognized in public 'cause I don't look like a goddamn fucking whore," she says.
8:58 AM
Sunday, January 18, 2004
Neocon Id
The roots of Muslim rage are to be found in Islam itself. There is no middle way for Americans...It is victory or holocaust.
Richard Perle (aka 'The Prince of Darkness') made his name as a senior Pentagon official during the Reagan administration; in the Cold 80s he was known for his opposition to all arms control agreements with the USSR. Past Chairman of the Defence Policy Board, he is a close friend and colleague of Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
David Frum is a former White House speech writer; 'The Axis of Evil' is one of his.
Perle and Frum have just written a book together (Perle policy, Frum style). It's called An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, and it sounds like the first essential read of 04.
In this "manual for victory" all insurgent movements with any alleged Islamic ties are grouped under the general designation of "militant Islam" (hence the rather suspect inclusion of peripheral movements and guerilla groups in Venezuela and Aceh, as well as Brazil, Paraguay, Nigeria). The War on Terror can then be fought, in a way, by proxy - although, of course, there is no real comparison with Cold War-by-other-means geostrategy: the enemy here is continually sought out and engaged wherever possible. One admirable strand of Perle and Frum's argument is their call for Bush to end the hypocritical US retainment of Saudi Arabia; they demand Saudi accountability for the international promotion of Wahabbism and covert support of terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. Then again, hypocrisy is not something that An End to Evil lacks - particularly funny (almost wry) is Perle and Frum's attack on China for "bullying democratic neighbors" and opposing US military assistance to Taiwan: "Defensive weapons pose problems only for aggressors," they scold (!). However, the book locates targets with a brutal clarity otherwise lost in a post-Clinton political landscape of spin, blurred motives, and denial.
For example: in a moment of astonishing rhetoric, Perle and Frum ascribe the whole problem of World Evil to religion. I agree! But what a diagnosis: if Wahabbism is the disease, then all Muslim communities are invariably infected by it (because of some mysterious "loyalty" bug Perle and Frum cite, every Muslim is a potential suicide bomber). This kind of mongrel Manichean pomp is, of course, a disguise for something more complex, ruthless, and rational: strategic global dominance. Yeah, obvious! But the point is that such vision is never clearly articulated outside the Left, who often overestimate the realpolitik focus of the Bush administration (i.e. energy supplies, neoliberal expansion, national security, a specific step-by-step response to a diffuse threat). It takes the ruthless candor of a Perle/Frum Faustian pact to frame the scale and scope of future neo-Imperial ambition. The root of all US machinations over the next twenty years - barring vast global shifts or disasters - will, I wager, be contained in the premises and details of this book.
So, what then?
Perle and Frum outline three major strategic policies: 1. the next phase(s) of the War on Terror; 2. neutralising China as a power bloc in the Far East; 3. bolstering a pro-Western alliance in South Asia. Alongside these prescriptions they recognise related symptoms to be cured in different ways. One of the most striking is Europe, in which they single out France (in similar terms to Saudi Arabia!) as a potential rival, if not enemy. Their remedy is to isolate France from the rest of Europe, in part by offering preferential treatment to UK arms manufacturers. Another area they focus on - with a revealing lack of emphasis - is Israel. They say that the Bush administration should stop criticising Israel for deploying military force against Hamas and Hezbollah (including bombing raids on Syrian territory) and state that "the distinction between Islamic terrorism against Israel, on the one hand, and Islamic terrorism against the United States and Europe, on the other, cannot be sustained." (A distinction not made by al-Qaeda, incidentally.)
As to the 3 major policies, this is what they say:
1. The Next Phase(s) of the War on Terror.
Firstly, it involves the Islamist regimes. Perle and Frum call for a succession of the House of Saud, unless they cooperate unconditionally with the US War on Terror (the Saudis have really fucked things up: attacked by al-Qaeda whom they fostered, and - potentially - the US, their greatest client and ally). Next, they want to see the flow of oil and arms from Iraq to Syria cut off, and the removal of Bashar al-Asad. Finally, they want the Bush administration to help dissidents otherthrow the theocratic regime of Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran.
Secondly, North Korea. Here the choice is stark; either China removes Kim Jong-Il, or the Americans do. Perle and Frum contend that North Korea's nuclear weapons programme is a Chinese responsibility for which they will be held to account. On the other hand, they lay out a strategy for action against North Korea (once Kim Jong-Il has undermined all inspection demands, like Saddam) on the premise that "the surest way to avoid war is to prepare to fight it". This involves three procedures: 1. an air and naval blockade; 2. the repositioning of American troops along the frontline; 3. the development of detailed plans for a pre-emptive strike against North Korea's nuclear facilities. The likely outcome of inevitable war on the Korean peninsula would be the destruction of the North Korean regime and the unification of Korea under the democratic rule of Seoul. They believe that, since this would be a bad result for China, China will, in the event, shoulder the burden and replace Kim Jong-Il with a moderate Communist ruler acceptable to both China and the West. This is Perle and Frum's ideal outcome, they say.
2. Neutralising China
Although Perle and Frum stress that China and America can be friendly, this relies on a number of conditions (human rights, regional power, Taiwan, US interests) that they outline with a certain scepticism, adding:
Whatever hope we may have that China will move toward greater openness through a process of economic-leading-to-political reform, we will have to deal with a deep-seated Chinese determination that their great and ancient civilization should recover its place as a great power.
(What a revealing combination of respect and contempt!) To counter this, Perle and Frum propose a defensive partnership with Japan, Australia, and any other Asian democracies willing to join them, thereby creating a regional power bloc to balance dominant Chinese influence in the region. On China, Perle and Frum unwittingly expose the ancient insolubility of power politics: one major power will always seek total domination as its ultimate goal at the expense of any competing power; if there are competing powers then this determination can only lead to war.
This is perhaps the most alarming aspect of An End to Evil; it, in effect, details the roots of future conflict.
3. Pro-Western alliance in South Asia.
This is linked to the Saudi export of Wahhabism; most prominently, to Pakistan. In South Asia, Musharraf is their ideal.
Men of Musharraf's generation were already mature by the time Saudi money began to infiltrate Pakistan. They seem to have been able to accept it without being unduly influenced by it. The next generation may have other ideas - and bombs that are today Islamic in name only may some day end up as weapons of jihad.
The Perle-Frum strategy here rests on the model of Musharraf's coup and subsequent move to civilian leadership. It calls for stronger military ties with India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, fostering pro-West army officers, imparting counterterrorism tactics and nuclear command and control systems (to India and Pakistan; there remains a deep-rooted scepticism about the reliability of Pakistan in this respect). In this case, an old Cold War perspective is revealed: democracy is not valued in itself; the main concern is to keep the enemy out of power. This is a recipe for the promotion of corrupt, dictatorial (but ostensibly pro-West) regimes. Again, I make the point: the real tragedy is that this should be the only viable alternative to theocratic fascism (even worse: Pakistan currently combines both in one country). To counter the blatancy of this, Perle and Frum stress the US role in increasing aid to these countries (primarily to fund the reform of education and reverse what they call the graduation of "deformed personalities" from the current Islamic schooling system) and the offer of free trade agreements with the West.
*
The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id.
Freud
I call this Neocon Id because An End to Evil reveals the unconscious desire of Neocon Hawks to themselves: policy and thinking freed from the repressive apparatus of international opinion, ethics, and public accountability. Unmediated and rampant in its heartless, dead-eyed, fucked glory: everything Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld have ever wanted to say and do in one lethal volume. You no longer need to humour some bore who decides to "reveal" American motives and aggression to you: just say, yeah, I know, everybody knows, they said it in this book. No secrets: the absolute polar extreme of Clinton spin and obfuscation. An End to Evil is a textbook for Imperial takeover shorn of responsibility and morality (or: superego!). The hard nerve of it is seductive: it will surely have an evil influence on realpolitik movers and shakers (number crunchers, military maniacs) to emerge in the near future. In 1899, Oscar Wilde described Octave Mirbeau's Torture Garden as "disgusting...a sort of grey adder" - a description that came to mind when I first heard about Perle and Frum's "manual". That same insidious, repulsive, reptilian influence - now creeping over the body politic.
Perle and Frum: I call them the Decepticons.
.
10:52 AM
Saturday, January 17, 2004
No messing around: War Blogs : KEEP YOUR HELMET ON
The operation then turned from one of a high profile search for a global terror ring into one of finding the tribals who had aided the fugitives and attacked the Pakistanis.
Well that didn't work, then.
Meanwhile, Musharraf makes a speech: The Pakistani leader's message went largely unheard on the floor of the house because of the noisy protest...
Calling for a "jihad on extremism" (inelegant rhetorical twist) while the North West Frontier Province goes under Sharia law: In practice, that means abolishing interest payments in banks, imposing more Koranic studies in school, and subjecting the administration of justice to Sharia interpretation.
11:40 AM
Thursday, January 15, 2004
Boom Bye Bye
The battles for the cities are expected to begin next summer. In the mean time, during the long harsh winter that is already well advanced, the mujahideen will lie low in their caves, from where, for the first time, they will launch a series of suicide missions.
The Taliban announce strategy, October '03
And so far they have remained true to their word; as the toll of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan tops 100, pressure is mounting on Musharraf to flush out remaining Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives based in the Pashtun area - a rocky Islamist enclave along the Pakistan/Afghan border, untouched by Pakistan law. A Pakistani military operation in early January was ineffectual, amounting to a few minor skirmishes; further operations are expected, on the insistence of Washington. The Pentagon suspects that the Afghan resistance movement is receiving supplies, weapons and training from the ISI and elements of the military, and want to gauge the extent of Musharraf's benign complicity in this aid. Asia Times Online claims that
Washington "requested" from Islamabad a list of military operators who served in Afghanistan under cover during and after the fall of the Taliban...This request was apparently fulfilled, and marks one of the most significant developments in Pakistan's cooperation with the US as the list, with a little bit of extrapolation, provides detailed information on the activities of the Inter-Services Intelligence's key military operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the region.
Again, this seems crucial in the context of two attempts on Musharraf's life in December; I am convinced that the ISI is involved in a conspiratorial alliance aimed at removing the President, wresting control of Pakistan, and creating a secure Islamist base for war. I also believe that Musharraf knows this, and is willing to give the US their scoop on ISI operatives for that very reason. It seems that the Islamists have gone too far to fail, and have failed, losing their best chance of killing Musharraf. He is now more willing to cooperate with the US precisely because Islamist insurgency in Pakistan has proved a direct and urgent threat to his survival.
The US drive a hard bargain, forcing Musharraf to confront the power and duplicity of the ISI and Islamist military officers in Kashmir, but also in Pakistan's lawless Islamist territories. US intelligence has pinpointed the South Waziristan region - an area not under the direct rule of central government - as a key Taliban and al-Qaeda base. The US are planning a future military offensive in South Waziristan and across the border in the mountains around Shakin: a pincer movement it is hoped will trap resistance forces. The US is determined to destroy Taliban resistance before it kicks off a declared summer offensive; it also wants to arrest internal disaffection among those in the Northern Alliance who oppose Afghanistan's new US-backed constitution, and prevent an alliance with mujahideen warlords like Gulbudden Hekmatyar.
Meanwhile, despite a rather civilized meeting between Musharraf and Vajpayee, Pakistan and India continue their mutual destabilisation by fermenting proxy wars in minor but strategically-charged regions (the India-Pakistan war has now turned Cold, like a miniature version of the US-Soviet deep freeze). While shaking hands in public, Musharraf and Vajpayee continue to (in effect) support or aid insurgencies in areas other than Kashmir; low-level tactics that keep out of the headlines. In the province of Balochistan in the south of Pakistan, various Separatist organisations and rebel sleeper cells have reawoken and made contact; rocket attacks and bomb blasts have been reported in the regional capital Quetta. Balochitan has strong familial ties with India and Pakistan believes that the Indian government is taking an active part in fostering the Separatist groundswell. Similarly, in Sindh, Pakistan claims that covert Indian agents have been infiltrating the local "Nationalists" in an attempt to undermine the Punjab establishment. Pakistan, on the other hand, gathers covert forces against Indian insurgency in the Punjab and Manipur regions.
All around trouble afoot and apace. Either that or 04 could conclude the first phase of the War on Terror, with a clear victory one way.
Dramatic Prediction!
Either: the Islamic states erupt, overthrow and fight in a pan-Arab Islamist coalition; the terror networks regroup, reconnect, recruit afresh and attack with devastating force.
Or: the remnants of al-Qaeda and the Taliban are wiped out along the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan; terror cells remain scattered, disconnected, without leadership or base; Arab nations acquiesce to US demands; and bin Laden is discovered to be dead, or alive and then killed.
Anyway, get your cards on the table now. (Oh, fuck off.)
11:21 PM
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
Honey Monster
Yemenese honey is the best honey money can buy; really, would I recommend anything less? Pure, rich, sweet, and expensive, it is a worthy extravagance. Yemenise honey is also a front for international terrorism. Or, at least, was until (roughly) 2001, when the US ordered the Yemenese government to freeze several bank accounts belonging to honey dealers accused of acting as al-Qaeda conduits (it blacklisted 3 Yemenese businesses on this charge: al-Hamati Sweets Bakeries, al-Nur Honey Center, and al-Shifa Honey Press for Industry and Commerce).
The Yemenese Honey Industry was, the CIA claimed, an important source of legal funding for terror "entrepreneurs" like bin Laden and Abu Zubaydah, as well as armed groups, including Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Honey is consumed in large quantities in the Middle East, and honey shops provided a crucial source of income for such groups. Nearly all terror organisations mix legitimate fundraising activities with crime; in the (or a) case of honey, literally. The export of honey is a good way to shift contraband:
drugs, arms, gold, electronic equipment and cash are often smuggled in honey containers. With the tacit approval of shopkeepers, these 'goods' are literally buried in honey. 'The smell and consistency of the honey makes it easy to hide weapons and drugs' explained a Yemeni customs officer. '[In addition,] inspectors don't want to inspect that product. It's too messy.' (Loretta Napoleoni)
11:29 PM
Monday, January 12, 2004
Bad Diet
Large Quarterpounder with Cheese Meal. French Fries like shriveled fingers, lashed with salt effect. A glutted mausoleum; hard mirrors, molded seats, the soothing stench of fat and chemicals. Just like slipping into fever. Once, a friend of mine brought me a McShake, watched me suck at it for, like, an age, and when I'd finished, my head full of cold gloop, said "you know how they make their shakes so thick, don't you? Chicken fat."
A French lady on the radio, of good intelligence, just said: globalisation is way of denying anything natural, from body smells, to food smells. Talking about deodorant and a disgust of garlic.
Drinking cheap wine, with dedication. An inverted wine connoisseur, I can expertly navigate the worst wine for sale in London. Currently quaffing Villa Radiosa Rosato Salento ("brilliantly coloured, richly scented 'Rose' with delicious ripe fruit. It has good acidity and is consistently fresh and fruity") which tastes like nail varnish. Extra long spaghetti (Buitoni), crushed tomatoes in a tin (Napolina), spring onions tied with blue elastic, loose mushrooms flaking earth. Chop, chop. A Mediterranean diet. Perfume and hot pavements, perfect hemlines, tiny islands and temple ruins (and all this in Bow). Really, reduced to bad bacon, when you fry it fat and water seeps out and boils in the pan. Currant buns. (Remember crumbs in bed? My tray and a pot of tea?) Welsh Butter (a clot of salt and cream) and Guernsey goldtop milk. Yemenese honey, with crumbling comb.
Yasmine Bleeth is fat and addicted to coke: her belly spills over tracksuit bottom elastic. I find that so sad. I think she's a nice girl with extraordinary blue eyes and good lineage: her mother, Carina Bleeth, escaped the Algerian War, moved to New York, and used her sharp wits to cut out a niche in the fashion shark pool.
7:15 PM
Friday, January 09, 2004
Global Error
Musharraf survived two assassination attempts this Christmas. (Good effort!) The first attempt was an event assassination: the would-be assassins strapped 550lbs of explosives to a bridge and detonated it as Musharraf's motorcade crossed. In the event, Musharraf's limousine drove clear of the blast by seconds and the bridge was completely destroyed. The second attempt seemed like a hasty reaction to the failure of the first, but was more daring: a stunt assassination. Three suicide bombers loaded two lorries with explosives and tried to ram Musharraf's motorcade from both sides as it drove past two petrol stations. What more could they do? Amazingly, Musharraf escaped with only minor damage to his limo.
Keeping Musharraf alive and in control of Pakistan is crucial to the success of Bush's War on Terror. Most people concede that avoiding regional chaos, theocratic fascism in Pakistan and a nuclear holocaust on the subcontinent takes precedence over challenging Musharraf's autocratic aspirations and the corruption of his abortive democratic "system". The real regional tragedy is that such a decision - or judgement - need be made. Apart from social sticking points, there are two important issues on which Musharraf should be challenged: Kashmir (see below) and the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology. It is unclear to what extent Musharraf is complicit in the trade of nuclear equipment to Iran, North Korea and Libya (even Pakistan's nuclear weapons labs boast their share of Islamists) - but this is the issue on which he will be, finally, condemned.
The problem is, without Musharraf in place the WoT axle snaps and there is no replacement or remedy. The alternative is a nuclear-armed Islamist State run by former Taliban and al-Qaeda members, sponsors and allies - the worst possible scenario. Musharraf's position is strong only in the sense that the ISI or the military will not remove him through legitimate, legal, or electoral channels. While Musharraf has power he can rig anything - particularly elections. He can also, slowly and methodically, tighten his grip on power. For example, on January 2, a vote of confidence was held in the national parliament and regional assemblies which Musharraf won. He claimed that the victory "legitimised" his Presidency, and so extended his term of office until 2007. You will notice, however, that the only parties contesting Musharraf's legitimacy, as such, are the very Islamists willing to use democratic victory to dismantle democratic rights. In effect, an Islamist electoral platform urges people to vote themselves out of existence. That's the alternative to sham democracy.
Nevertheless, Musharraf remains internally isolated. In the eyes of many it is impossible to 'legitimise' rule won by force, except by force. The ISI retains a large degree of independence from the government as well as significant ideological ties with Islamic jihadists. Tension between Musharraf and this pro-Taliban secret service - forced to work with the Americans against the Taliban during the Afghanistan war - is extremely corrosive. The face-off with India over Kashmir was exacerbated by the need for Musharraf to placate the ISI and military in exchange for their cooperation with the FBI as it scoured Pakistan for hot al-Qaeda operatives. This paid remarkable dividends with the capture of senior al-Qaeda members in Karachi (Ramzi Binalshibh), Punjab (Abu Zubaida) and Rawalpindi (Khaled Shaikh Mohammed). (Remarkable, because they were plucked from impenetrable tribal nests located inside hardline Islamist territories.) Over Kashmir national and religious tensions rub, and the pride and pettiness of regional power politics takes hold. The fight gets mixed with ISI and militant demands: the reason India accuses Pakistan of ignoring - even backing (i.e. ISI funding) - Islamic jihadists in Kashmir is because it's true. Nuclear rocket rattling last summer was a dangerous game and Musharraf had the ISI in mind when playing. And yet Musharraf knows that he can no longer get away with double-play: it's impossible to ignore Islamist guerrillas operating out of Pakistan in Kashmir while hunting al-Qaeda at the behest of the West. Those kind of inconsistencies are not accepted in W's WoT (a message impressed on the Saudis, who are beginning to understand what's afoot). As Musharraf is forced to crack down on Kashmiri guerrillas, enmity grows in the ranks of the ISI and the military. Put the assassination attempts in the context of Musharraf's recent meeting with Vajpayee in Islamabad and you can see The General in sharky water.
Even within the army Musharraf is in a minority, as Seymour M. Hersh points out in this article from November, 2001:
Musharraf and many of his newly appointed senior aides are muhajir - immigrants who fled to Pakistan from India after Partition, in 1947 - but they are in charge of an Army that traditionally has been dominated by officers from the Punjab region. Even now, an estimated ninety percent of the officers are Punjab. "These things matter a lot," a retired Pakistani diplomat told me. "The Punjab officers would be thinking that there's an earthquake or a revolution taking place. Is it because of the ethnic background of Musharraf? Don't write off the unhappiness within the Army."
The background to the coalition's last major success in Pakistan - the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - reveals the scale and complexity of the threat to Musharraf. Mohammed was captured in a rich residential location largely populated by retired army generals (and only two miles for Musharraf's own mansion). At the time of Mohammed's arrest, a high-ranking, serving officer with close ties to Mohammed was also arrested (the two arrests were obviously, if not openly, related). Another Mohammed link led to Jama'at Islami, Pakistan's largest radical Islamist party and a substantial political rival to Musharraf (in the event of a free and open democratic election, ironically, although in the last round of parliamentary elections the Islamists made substantial gains despite heavy rigging). Jama'at Islami also has strong ideological and material support from elements of the army disloyal to Musharraf. When he was arrested, Mohammed was being shielded by a Jama'at Islami activist. The whole affair uncovered a tight nexus of al-Qaeda jihadists, muhajir and Islamist army officers and Pakistan's most powerful Islamic party. Such ties obviously extend and include ISI dissidents, if not the whole secret service hierarchy. (The diplomat Hersh cites goes on to say that the ISI is "a parallel government of its own. If you go through the officer list, almost all of the ISI regulars would say of the Taliban, 'They are my boys'.") Such an alliance seems more than capable of producing assassins able to devise and carry out assassination attempts on the scale of Decembers failures.
Musharraf's survival is perhaps due to the tenacity and shrewd caution of a former coup leader able - so far successfully - to play between two opposing and powerful forces (the US and al-Qaeda/ISI/the army/Jama'at Islami). Musharraf has so far displayed a willingness to keep militants in line or have them removed. It would seem, now, to be a question of survival. And Musharraf's survival instinct is so strong that it could almost be called miraculous.
12:29 PM
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