My my what a difference a decade makes. The Wall Street Journal today published this. Yes the Wall Street Journal, the voice of Rupert Murdock, the voice of corporate capitalism in America sounding like Mother Jones magazine. The irony is that contracting out government services has created a welfare state for private companies, and an increase in the size of government. The exact opposite of what the neo-copns claimed it would do.
Government by Contractor Is a Disgrace
Many jobs are best left to federal workers.
Back in 1984, the conservative industrialist J. Peter Grace was telling whoever would listen why government was such a wasteful institution.
One reason, which he spelled out in a book chapter on privatization, was that "government-run enterprises lack the driving forces of marketplace competition, which promote tight, efficient operations. This bears repetition," he wrote, "because it is such a profound and important truth."
And repetition is what this truth got. Grace trumpeted it in the recommendations of his famous Grace Commission, set up by President Ronald Reagan to scrutinize government operations looking for ways to save money. It was repeated by leading figures of both political parties, repeated by everyone who understood the godlike omniscience of markets, repeated until its veracity was beyond question. Turn government operations over to the private sector and you get innovation, efficiency, flexibility.
What bears repetition today, however, is the tragic irony of it all. To think that our contractor welfare binge was once rationalized as part of an efficiency crusade. To think that it was supposed to make government smaller.
As the George W. Bush presidency grinds to its close, we can say with some finality that the opposite is closer to the truth. The MBA president came to Washington determined to enshrine the truths of "market-based" government. He gave federal agencies grades that were determined, in part, on how abjectly the outfits abased themselves before the doctrine of "competitive sourcing." And, as the world knows, he puffed federal spending to unprecedented levels without increasing the number of people directly employed by the government.
Instead the expansion went, largely, to private contractors, whose employees by 2005 outnumbered traditional civil servants by four to one, according to estimates by Paul Light of New York University. Consider that in just one category of the federal budget -- spending on intelligence -- apparently 70% now goes to private contractors, according to investigative reporter Tim Shorrock, author of "Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing."
Today contractors work alongside government employees all across Washington, often for much better pay. There are seminars you can attend where you will learn how to game the contracting system, reduce your competition, and maximize your haul from good ol' open-handed Uncle Sam. ("Why not become an insider and share in this huge pot of gold?" asks an email ad for one that I got yesterday.) There are even, as Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group in Washington, D.C., told me, "contractor employees -- lots of them -- whose sole responsibility is to dream up things the government needs to buy from them. The pathetic part is that often the government listens -- kind of like a kid watching a cereal commercial."
Some federal contracting, surely, is unobjectionable stuff. But over the past few years it has become almost impossible to open a newspaper and not read of some well-connected and obscenely compensated contractor foisting a colossal botch on the taxpayer. Contractors bungling the occupation of Iraq; contractors spinning the revolving door at the Department of Homeland Security; contractors reveling publicly in their good fortune after Hurricane Katrina.
At its grandest, government by contractor gives us episodes like the Coast Guard's Deepwater program, in which contractors were hired not only to build a new fleet for that service, but also to manage the entire construction process. One of the reasons for this inflated role, according to the New York Times, was the contractors' standing armies of lobbyists, who could persuade Congress to part with more money than the Coast Guard could ever get on its own. Then, with the billions secured, came the inevitable final chapter in 2006, with the contractors delivering radios that were not waterproof and ships that were not seaworthy.
Government by contractor also makes government less accountable to the public. Recall, for example, the insolent response of Erik Prince, CEO of Blackwater, when asked about his company's profits during his celebrated 2007 encounter with the House Oversight Committee: "We're a private company," quoth he, "and there's a key word there -- private."
So you and I don't get to know. We don't get to know about Blackwater's profits, we don't get to know about the effects all this has had on the traditional federal workforce, and we don't really get to know about what goes on elsewhere in the vast private industries to which we have entrusted the people's business.
SEE:
The Failure of Privatization
Another Privatization Failure
Moral Turpitude Is Spelled Blackwater
IRAQ- THIS WAR IS ABOUT PRIVATIZATION
The Neo Liberal Canadian State
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Thursday, November 27, 2008
Somali Eco Disaster Bred Pirates
Piracy is the earliest form of primitive captialist accumulation. It was a major force historically in the transition from fuedalism to capitalism, and in the expansion of the European colonization of Africa with the slave trade and then with the colonization of America. Today it thrives in Asia and now the Horn of Africa.
Those offering solutions to piracy advoacte armed force, perhaps hiring the privateers like has been done in the past but in this case one wag has suggested that Blackwater the mercenary corporation involved in scandals in Iraq should deal with the Somali pirates. He also suggested that the pirates of Somalia are connected to Iran.
This is as spurious an assertion as those being made that the pirates are connected to the Islamist movement currently savaging Somalia. They are not. Rather their seaside towns have been assualted by the Islamists seeking to gain control of the pirates booty. Especially the Ukrainian ship which contains tank and heavy weapons.
Battling the Somali Pirates: The Return of the Islamists
However, General William Ward noted on Wednesday that despite piracy being a growing issue of global concern, there was no actual proof that the group responsible for the Somali troubles was linked with Islamic terrorism.
A columnist for the Wall Street Journal has suggested we bring back hanging em from the yardarms. Which was a rare occurance in the 18th ceentury and rarely worked. It certainly did not end priacy in the Caribbean and the Carolina's. That was ended by a privateer being hired by the British mercantilists government to hunt them down.
As I wrote in the Opionion Forum at the WSJ in repy to his column; "Your assertion that pirates were hung because they posed a danger when captured is true but not for the reason given, it was because they were free men, while the saliors aboard most ships at the time were pressed men, indentured, and the priates were seen as subversive, capable of undermining the ships owners and captains authority, enough so that having pirates aborad would lead to mutiny. The hanging of pirates did not end piracy, au contraire to your article, rather it was a concerted effort of the British government to end priacy on the American coast and in the Caribean using ex pirates to break up their hold in the Bahamas and North Carolina. Few pirates were hung, most retired. "
It is because I have been reading about pirates , slavery and submarieslately, as you can see in my Shelfari bookshelf to the left. The Republic of Pirates discusses the history of the short lived pirate republic in the Bahama's how it disrupted British, Spanish and French slave trade in the region and the America and how it was defeated. Eric Willaims Salvery and Capitalism is an important ground breaking work explaining how the use of slaves and a slave economy was key to the growth of primitive accumulation of capital for English capitalists, moving them from a mercantilist economy to a full blown capitalist economy and an Imperial empire. Finally the book on submarines explains that at least one 18th Century American advocate for submarine warfare; Robert Fulton promoted it as a way of guarnteeing free trade and free markets using of the submarine to attack exiting navy blockades of ports. Shades of Hagbard Celine.
The irony is that the Horn of Africa was the original source of the historical 18th Century Pirates, in that case the pirates used Madagascar as their base. The pirates whom lived off raiding the slave ships of the European Imperialist nations. Like their Somali counterparts Muslim pirates led Thomas Jefferson to engage in America's first imperialist navel action against the Barbary Coast Pirates.
As Christopher Hitchens writes;Some of this activity was hostage trading and ransom farming rather than the more labor-intensive horror of the Atlantic trade and the Middle Passage, but it exerted a huge effect on the imagination of the time—and probably on no one more than on Thomas Jefferson. Peering at the paragraph denouncing the American slave trade in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, later excised, I noticed for the first time that it sarcastically condemned “the Christian King of Great Britain” for engaging in “this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers.” The allusion to Barbary practice seemed inescapable. One immediate effect of the American Revolution, however, was to strengthen the hand of those very same North African potentates: roughly speaking, the Maghrebian provinces of the Ottoman Empire that conform to today’s Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. Deprived of Royal Navy protection, American shipping became even more subject than before to the depredations of those who controlled the Strait of Gibraltar. The infant United States had therefore to decide not just upon a question of national honor but upon whether it would stand or fall by free navigation of the seas.
One of the historians of the Barbary conflict, Frank Lambert, argues that the imperative of free trade drove America much more than did any quarrel with Islam or “tyranny,” let alone “terrorism.” He resists any comparison with today’s tormenting confrontations. “The Barbary Wars were primarily about trade, not theology,” he writes. “Rather than being holy wars, they were an extension of America’s War of Independence.”
Piracy arose because of the slave trade on one hand, and because Imperial navies around the world used pressed men, indentured servents. Piracy was the rebellion of the common man against his exploitation, they seized the ships, created a contract form of employment sharing the wealth between them, and ended up creating capitalist democracy on the high seas as Buckminister Fuller wrote in his book Operating Manul For Spaceship Earth
But back to the topic at hand Somali pirates. They are fishermen. Not terrorists. The piracy is the result of the anarchy and free market that is Somalia. But even more so it is the result of the poisioning of the coastal waters by giant shipping companies, poor environmental regulations, lack of UN policing, whereby dumping of toxic waste has devastated the fishing stocks. Fishing stocks that were overfished not by Somali's but by European trawlers. So overfishing and toxic dumping led to the Somali fishermen to take up piracy. In true pirate tradition they are more interested in the booty than harming the hostages. Whom they have exchanged for ransom. And they even have a Canadian connection.
With the world waiting and watching, one of the pirates calling himself Daybed spoke to the BBC via telephone from the Sirius Star. He says the pirates are not negotiating with the supertanker's owners, instead they're dealing with intermediaries and he insists they "cannot be trusted.
"DAYBED (translated): We're fully aware of the consequences, but the world has to realise the problems we're facing here at home. There's been no peace for 18 years, there's no life here. The last resource Somali's have is the sea, but foreign fishing trawlers have come here to plunder our fish. How can they allow the Somali people to die, it's not possible. This is what drove us to piracy, we have to do anything we can to survive. The lack of government causes problems, if we solve the problem with the government, everything would be solved.
Ex-Somali Army Colonel Mohamed Nureh Abdulle lives in Harardhere - the town closest to where the hijacked Saudi oil tanker, Sirius Star is moored. He tells the BBC, via phone from his home, that the town's residents are more concerned about the apparent dumping of toxic waste than piracy.
You know, our problem is not piracy. It is illegal dumping.
These problems have been going for sometime and the world knows about it. The Americans have been here in the region for a long time now - they know about the pollution.
Instead, no, the world is only talking about the pirates and the money involved.
Meanwhile, there has been something else going on and it has been going on for years. There are many dumpings made in our sea, so much rubbish.
It is dumped in our seas and it washes up on our coastline and spreads into our area.
Our community used to rely on fishing. But now no-one fishes. You see, a lot of foreign ships were coming and they were fishing heavily - their big nets would wipe out everything, even the fishermen's equipment. They could not compete.
THE PIRATE CAPITAL By David Pratt
IT was almost dusk and the sun was sinking on the horizon. A few hundred yards offshore, the freighter that had earlier dropped anchor was swarming with local Somali men. The ship's crew, however, were nowhere to be seen.
Some of the Somalis carried Kalashnikovs and stood guard, while others, like worker ants, busied themselves loading the ship's cargo on to barges that were then hauled to the beach by relays of sweating men pulling on ropes.
Noticing my curiosity, one of the staff at the tumbledown guesthouse in the port town of Merka where I was staying decided to offer an explanation as to what I was witnessing.
"Our coastguards," he said with a mischievous grin. "Some of them used to be fishermen, but today, with the war and no law or government, they have a more profitable catch," nodding towards the rusting hulk sitting offshore.
Until that moment, nothing I'd seen had struck me as being out of the ordinary. At Merka and other port towns along Somalia's coastline, ships often came close inshore to unload. As for the gunmen, Somalia was awash with weapons and arms smugglers. A few years ago, when I first went to the capital, Mogadishu, and visited its infamous "sky shooters" weapons market in the Bakara district, an AK-47 assault rifle cost a mere $150. Mortars, grenade launchers, heavy machine guns - all were readily available here.
As the ultimate "failed state", Somalia has been exposed to more than its fair share of man's evil ways. It has been neglected for years by the international community and let down by its fellow African nations. It is wracked with Islamic terrorism, suffering a largely ignored humanitarian crisis and is home to widespread organised crime, including the piracy that I witnessed in Merka that day that has now become a multi-million dollar business.
With their biggest hijacking yet last week, of an oil tanker, Somalia's pirates have suddenly drawn world attention to an ancient trade whose only recognisable modern-day practitioners until recently were Jack Sparrow and the crew of the Black Pearl in the Pirates of the Caribbean Hollywood movie series.
There are now serious concerns over the fate of crew members taken hostage by the Somali pirates. There is considerable disquiet, too, on behalf of shipping companies over the huge losses incurred. But pressing as these questions are, there are others regarding Somalia itself that need addressing.
For a start, why is it that piracy has flourished here? Who are these ocean-going bandits and how has their trade affected the local communities? More significantly perhaps, to what extent if any, is this vast money-making criminal activity bound up with Islamic terrorist groups such as al-Shabab that daily tighten their grip on Somalia?
In this impoverished country long devoid of solid institutions or individuals worth looking up to, the pirates and in some cases even the insurgents have even become heroes with virtually celebrity status.
In pirate communities, the trophies gleaned from their trade sit brashly juxtaposed against the poverty. In pirate boom towns such as Harardhere, Eyl and Bosaso on Somalia's northern coast, along the breakaway Somali statelet of Puntland, sprawling new-build stone houses nestle next to shacks made of sticks and discarded plastic bags.
Like western urban drug barons, pirates cruise in luxury cars through unimaginable squalor. However, in these humid coastal dens, where life expectancy is just 46 years and a quarter of children die before they reach five, not everyone sees the pirates in a negative light.
"The pirates depend on us, and we benefit from them," said Sahra Sheik Dahir, a shop owner in Harardhere, the nearest village to where the hijacked Saudi Arabian supertanker Sirius Star is now anchored.
In these pirate-controlled areas of northern Somalia, people's hopes of a better future are firmly pinned on the prevailing maritime gangsterism.
"There are more shops and business is booming because of the piracy," said Sugule Dahir, who runs a clothing shop in Eyl. "Internet cafes and telephone shops have opened, and people are just happier than before."
In Harardhere, residents are said to have celebrated as the Sirius Star dropped anchor last week.
Businessmen gathered cigarettes, food and soft drinks, setting up kiosks for the pirates who come to shore to resupply almost daily.
"They always take things without paying and we put them into the book of debts," said Dahir. "When they get the ransom money, they pay us a lot."
Among the big men who run the pirate syndicates are an army of negotiators, spokesmen and accountants. The pirates take no chances with the cash, giving "clerks" the task of making sure the banknotes are not counterfeit, using machines like those housed in foreign exchange bureaux worldwide.
Ask Somalia's pirates why they turned to this lucrative trade and they will give a one-word answer: "Survival." They will tell of how, following the collapse of the government in 1991, their fishing grounds were opened to illegal harvesting by foreign fishing vessels from all corners of the world, and how the dumping of toxic waste destroyed so much of their livelihood. To some extent this is true, but some analysts argue it merely serves as a moral cover for their criminal activities.
More worrying perhaps is that the piracy trade might help fund and arm Islamic terrorists in the region.
Recent United Nations reports on arms smuggling in the Horn of Africa, suggest that groups like al-Shabab may have begun to use piracy as a means of bringing in arms or generating cash for weapons. But so far the evidence is sparse, and the pirates' commercial largesse seems directed mainly at those within their clan, families and friends.
Iqbal Jhazbhay, a Somali expert at the University of South Africa in Tshwane, said: "There may be some loose elements among the Islamist groups that have tie-ups with the pirates, because the movement is fractured into six or seven different groups, and each may have its own problems getting funding."
Somalia's recent history is in great part the tale of grave miscalculations made by foreigners in a very foreign land. Here the margins between death and survival are the narrowest imaginable. Given such unforgiving odds, is it really surprising that piracy is considered a sure bet to a better life?
"Regardless of how the money is coming in, legally or illegally, I can say it has started a life in our town," said Shamso Moalim, 36, a mother of five from Harardhere. "Our children are not worrying about food now, and they go to Islamic schools in the morning and play soccer in the afternoon. They are happy."
SEE;
Somalia
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Mayor Of Kabul Says Get Out
Oh dear it seems that Hamid Karzai the Mayor of Kabul, since he can't travel outside of the city and has no base anywhere else in Afghanistan, has finally had it with U.S. and NATO forces fighting in Kandahar. Seems that the poor Mayor who is Pashtun and is running for re-election as the U.S. puppet President, is exerting some independence. Criticizing the very folks who are doing his fighting for him.
Afghan security at a seven-year low
Afghanistan demands 'timeline' for end of military intervention
His corrupt government of warlords, opium growers, and former Taliban, have made no inroads in developing real governance over the country. So facing the simple fact that Kandahar is the Pashtun stronghold, and Karzai is Pashtun, he is calling on us to all leave. Heck that's what the NDP and the left in Canada has been saying for the past two years.
Karzai says US, NATO created 'parallel' government
This is a phony war. The supposed development of a liberal capitalist economy, with liberal bourgoise enlightment ideals like education for women and girls, human rights, the end of torture and capital punishment, freedom of speech and religion, none of this exists in this failed Islamic State.
So what the heck are we there fighting for? Simply put so that this U.S. puppet the Mayor of Kabul can keep his job and keep his crony goverment in power sharing the spoils of war and international aid. And of course once again Karzai bleames others while the reality is that his is a corrupt regime.
Karzai fires prominent minister
'Nobody supports the Taliban, but people hate the government'
Mr. Karzai also blamed Afghanistan's endemic corruption in part on foreign contractors who "contract, then subcontract, and then another subcontract and then perhaps another subcontract." The process "means immense possibilities of major corruption."
The problems of Afghanistan are immense, at the heart of which lies the issue of trust. Time and again, in interviews with senior Western officials, I heard deep scepticism voiced about the ability of Karzai's government to use aid money wisely and effectively. As even the Afghan economics minister, Muhammed Jalil Shams, candidly admitted to me, for every $100 of Western aid given, only $40 finds its way to the intended projects. The rest disappears into the pockets of unscrupulous government officials. It is worth noting too that corruption surrounding the heroin trade, worth $3 billion a year, has further paralysed the government. A recent New York Times report identified the president's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, as a major beneficiary of the illegal trade. 'Corruption is the biggest problem facing Afghanistan,' Shams said. He went on to make the point that giving money to the Afghan government is still better than giving it to Western contractors to perform reconstruction jobs, when only 25 per cent of the money finds its way into the local Afghan community, but that is a tough argument to make to nervous aid donors and potential investors.
A recent survey conducted by the Asia Foundation is a good place to start. More than 6,500 Afghans were interviewed from all 34 of the country's provinces. It was the fourth public opinion poll conducted by the foundation since 2004, so it provides valuable perspective of the national mood of Afghans over time. Three quarters of those polled cite corruption as a major problem, especially at the highest levels of government. Fifty percent say it affects their daily lives. President Hamid Karzai's recent re-shuffling of his cabinet was intended to address this concern, which has undermined public confidence in his leadership.
Situation normal, all fouled up
Kabul businessman Nasrullah Rahmati rarely travels without a bodyguard but says his biggest security threat is not suicide bombers. "I have been robbed at gunpoint by our own police and I am more scared of them than I am of the Taliban," he said in his factory, where 250 workers make uniforms.
Afghanistan's politicians and government officials are as corrupt as the police, locals say, and a striking feature of Kabul is the "poppy palaces", mansions being built by strangely wealthy locals in a country that ranks behind only Somalia on the UN's list of the poorest and most dysfunctional countries. A British official working against the heroin trade jokes that the mansions are triumphs of "narchitecture". What is not so funny is the corrosive effect open corruption and poor governance have on the Afghan Government's legitimacy.
It seems to be conventional wisdom in Kabul that President Hamid Karzai's brother Ahmed Wali Karzai is an important drug dealer, a view many US officials privately share. Installed by the Americans, then endorsed in national elections, Hamid Karzai is likely to retain US support in elections due next year despite his ineffective rule. Karzai certainly has been a disappointment to the relatively few educated liberals in Afghanistan, who say he is not the champion of liberal democracy that he seems to many in the West. He has not championed women's rights with any great vigour and local journalist union officials say he warned them some time ago that his support for free speech did not extend to issues relating to the Islamic faith. When death sentences were pursued against two men for publishing unapproved translations of the Koran, the President offered only a muted response.
Despite all the vain glory announcements by those who support this war, and by our Government and military, we are not defending a liberal capitalist state, women still wear burkhas, child brides (female and male) are still traded amongst villagers, local patriarchs rule and dominate the culture, Islamic courts jail Christians as well as editors who speak out,
women are attacked for going to school, girls schools are burned, attacks on women have increased, opium production has increased, Pashtuns are fighting against our troops and will continue to as they see us as invaders.
Strict Islamic rules creep their way back into Afghans' lives
In Afghanistan, Islamists' influence widens
Violence and other abuse of Afghan women is enough to make you wonder what we're there fighting for, reports Paul McGeough from Kabul.
International human rights officials in Kabul are privately explosive about what they see as a marked slide in human rights generally, but for women in particular - especially in light of demands by officials that they must play the glad game. "Can't be all doom and gloom," a senior foreign official regularly exhorts his frustrated staff. Amid the many mistakes in Afghanistan, there have been two constants. One is the Western obsession with winning a war while forgetting the welfare of the Afghan people - particularly women. The other is reducing the equation to a simplistic contest between the "good" President Hamid Karzai and the "bad" Taliban. For women, this pincers grip has knocked their rights to the bottom of the agenda. "Karzai operates like a mafia crook. His regime is corrupt, brutal and repressive and it is based on the President's umpteen deals with the devil - fundamentalists, warlords and criminals," a senior human rights figure told me privately this week. "But Karzai never acts alone. His regime was supposed to be different to the Taliban… and the Australian and the French and all the other governments [still] back him."
Karzai lurches from one crooked or corrupt power base to the next - one day pardoning brutal rapists and saying nothing about it; the next celebrating the execution of small-time criminals while the Mr Bigs of the criminal and political worlds are untouchable.
The Pashtun are delibertely identified by the Western forces and their media as Taliban, when in fact they are not. But they are fighting us as Karzai well knows, which is why he has called for peace talks and has called for U.S. and NATO forces to stop doing reconstruction, invading villagers homes and demanding a time line for so called victory over the Taliban. Which will never happen. Because the Taliban do not exist, who we are fighting are the Pashtun peoples of Southern Afghanistan.
Opium war impasse
About 250 of them had come to hear Governor Asadullah Hamdam's arguments about why they should give up growing opium poppies which, for many, were their primary source of income.
Then one elder from the village of Sorkh Murgab stood up and said what many of the farmers must have been thinking.
"The people don't have jobs," he said, according to notes taken by US government field officer Eric Bone during the November 26 meeting last year.
"The (Government) promised projects but we haven't seen them," the elder said. "The (Government tells us) there is not enough security to do projects. In the daytime the ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force, comprising Australian and Dutch troops) is around but at night the Taliban come and force us to cultivate poppy. We have the poorest region, who can we listen to?"
Another elder stood up and joined the fray. "Assistance in the past two years has only been to the provincial administration, not to us. The people have not received assistance ... when people don't have jobs they go to the Taliban."
These exchanges, contained in a series of confidential documents written by anti-narcotic officials in Tarin Kowt and obtained by The Australian, reveal the magnitude of the task faced by Australia and the West in seeking to kill Afghanistan's opium trade, which reaps more than $4billion a year, almost half of Afghanistan's total income.
Karzai offers Taliban leader 'protection' for peace
Afghan president wishes he could down US planes
Britain 'bribes Afghans to fight Taleban'
Divided tribes make it hard to find elders who will helpTHE tribes in Helmand province have been heavily fractured by decades of fighting, and balance of power is now inextricably linked to the drugs trade.
An Interview About Afghani Women's Rights and Rebuilding in the Face of Politics
Homemakers Magazine editor-in-chief Kathy Ullyott reveals the complex situation the progress of women's rights are in the face of the presence of Western countries, Afghani politics, and nation rebuilding. This is the first of a three-part interview.
SD: Yes, exactly, the period of jihad against the Soviet Union, which we know was covertly backed by the U.S., the civil war, the emergence of the Taliban who were essentially let loose by Pakistan to make their way north…
KU: It’s very complicated, and that’s something else I discovered, and I still don’t think I’ve answered your question – as you say, it’s a big thing and impossible to get a handle on, some I realized there while talking to people. Here we think of the Taliban as some opposing force, but there the Taliban is really just the most organized of the many insurgent groups with different interests. Some of them are the Taliban, but others are warlords in a certain area, in a very ancient and tribal culture going back hundreds of years. Some of these are very vicious rivalries spanning loyalties. The Taliban tend to claim responsibility for any attacks, but that’s just PR. A lot of attacks have nothing to do with the Taliban. It’s really a very amorphous thing and very difficult to fight. And I’m not a military expert by any stretch of the imagination. But it makes the whole question very complex…
SD: People don’t realize the extent of the power of the warlords or how far it extends into rural areas…
KU: Totally – into the rural areas and into the government as well. The women I spoke to, the MP, and Horia…one of the greatest frustrations of the people there is that the government itself is so corrupt. And we’ve seen reports of that. That’s one of the things making progress so difficult. And of the things that created so much pessimism in the intervening years is that people within the country expected that (the ousting of the Taliban) was going to be a big change and that life was going to get better. And they are continuing to see that these warlords exercise great control over the government. The opium trade is one such situation. They (citizens) know that there are ‘bad guys’ still in power, the police force is still horribly corrupt, yet they had hoped-with the involvement of NATO – that the more developed world was going to help them get rid of this stuff. But it’s much harder than they expected.
We are not battling Islam we are battling a medival patriarchical fuedal culture which we are trying to transform into a liberal capitalist democracy. We are failing just like the Russians and before them the British.
Tariq Ali talks tough
The West doesn’t totally appreciate one simple factor: that the Afghan people do not like being occupied by foreign powers,” he said. “Most people don’t like being occupied by foreign powers.” Ali argued that Hamid Karzai’s legitimacy is complicated due to Karzai’s construction on prime Kabul property. He added that a New York Times report links his brother to drug smuggling (Karzai has denied the charges).
Retired general looks back on Russia's Afghan war
Sergei L. Loiko / Los Angeles Times
THE GENERAL'S VIEW: Retired Lt. Gen. Ruslan Aushev says the key to U.S. success would be to help set up a sovereign government. Moscow and Washington have made the same mistakes in their conflicts there, says Ruslan Aushev. He offers advice for the U.S. as it enters the eighth year of war.We said, "Afghans, you are living according to the Soviet way of life, where religion is separated from the state, mullahs should be expelled, religion is the opiate of the people. You'll be living in collective farms. You will have pioneer camps, Comsomol [youth] organizations, and so on and so forth." The Soviet way of life in a country that still lives in the Dark Ages!And what did you say? You said, "We are giving you democracy." They cannot even translate the term properly. Under us there was a lot of corruption, and today there's a lot of corruption. Neither under you nor under us did an ordinary person get anything
SEE:
Afghanistan the UNwinnable war
Afghanistan A Failed State
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Afghan security at a seven-year low
Afghanistan demands 'timeline' for end of military intervention
His corrupt government of warlords, opium growers, and former Taliban, have made no inroads in developing real governance over the country. So facing the simple fact that Kandahar is the Pashtun stronghold, and Karzai is Pashtun, he is calling on us to all leave. Heck that's what the NDP and the left in Canada has been saying for the past two years.
Karzai says US, NATO created 'parallel' government
This is a phony war. The supposed development of a liberal capitalist economy, with liberal bourgoise enlightment ideals like education for women and girls, human rights, the end of torture and capital punishment, freedom of speech and religion, none of this exists in this failed Islamic State.
So what the heck are we there fighting for? Simply put so that this U.S. puppet the Mayor of Kabul can keep his job and keep his crony goverment in power sharing the spoils of war and international aid. And of course once again Karzai bleames others while the reality is that his is a corrupt regime.
Karzai fires prominent minister
'Nobody supports the Taliban, but people hate the government'
Mr. Karzai also blamed Afghanistan's endemic corruption in part on foreign contractors who "contract, then subcontract, and then another subcontract and then perhaps another subcontract." The process "means immense possibilities of major corruption."
The problems of Afghanistan are immense, at the heart of which lies the issue of trust. Time and again, in interviews with senior Western officials, I heard deep scepticism voiced about the ability of Karzai's government to use aid money wisely and effectively. As even the Afghan economics minister, Muhammed Jalil Shams, candidly admitted to me, for every $100 of Western aid given, only $40 finds its way to the intended projects. The rest disappears into the pockets of unscrupulous government officials. It is worth noting too that corruption surrounding the heroin trade, worth $3 billion a year, has further paralysed the government. A recent New York Times report identified the president's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, as a major beneficiary of the illegal trade. 'Corruption is the biggest problem facing Afghanistan,' Shams said. He went on to make the point that giving money to the Afghan government is still better than giving it to Western contractors to perform reconstruction jobs, when only 25 per cent of the money finds its way into the local Afghan community, but that is a tough argument to make to nervous aid donors and potential investors.
A recent survey conducted by the Asia Foundation is a good place to start. More than 6,500 Afghans were interviewed from all 34 of the country's provinces. It was the fourth public opinion poll conducted by the foundation since 2004, so it provides valuable perspective of the national mood of Afghans over time. Three quarters of those polled cite corruption as a major problem, especially at the highest levels of government. Fifty percent say it affects their daily lives. President Hamid Karzai's recent re-shuffling of his cabinet was intended to address this concern, which has undermined public confidence in his leadership.
Situation normal, all fouled up
Kabul businessman Nasrullah Rahmati rarely travels without a bodyguard but says his biggest security threat is not suicide bombers. "I have been robbed at gunpoint by our own police and I am more scared of them than I am of the Taliban," he said in his factory, where 250 workers make uniforms.
Afghanistan's politicians and government officials are as corrupt as the police, locals say, and a striking feature of Kabul is the "poppy palaces", mansions being built by strangely wealthy locals in a country that ranks behind only Somalia on the UN's list of the poorest and most dysfunctional countries. A British official working against the heroin trade jokes that the mansions are triumphs of "narchitecture". What is not so funny is the corrosive effect open corruption and poor governance have on the Afghan Government's legitimacy.
It seems to be conventional wisdom in Kabul that President Hamid Karzai's brother Ahmed Wali Karzai is an important drug dealer, a view many US officials privately share. Installed by the Americans, then endorsed in national elections, Hamid Karzai is likely to retain US support in elections due next year despite his ineffective rule. Karzai certainly has been a disappointment to the relatively few educated liberals in Afghanistan, who say he is not the champion of liberal democracy that he seems to many in the West. He has not championed women's rights with any great vigour and local journalist union officials say he warned them some time ago that his support for free speech did not extend to issues relating to the Islamic faith. When death sentences were pursued against two men for publishing unapproved translations of the Koran, the President offered only a muted response.
Despite all the vain glory announcements by those who support this war, and by our Government and military, we are not defending a liberal capitalist state, women still wear burkhas, child brides (female and male) are still traded amongst villagers, local patriarchs rule and dominate the culture, Islamic courts jail Christians as well as editors who speak out,
women are attacked for going to school, girls schools are burned, attacks on women have increased, opium production has increased, Pashtuns are fighting against our troops and will continue to as they see us as invaders.
Strict Islamic rules creep their way back into Afghans' lives
In Afghanistan, Islamists' influence widens
UN rights chief condemns Afghan executions
Women lose in deal made with devil
Afghan justice: 'They should die'
The perils of treating women in Afghanistan
Food Crisis, Poverty Spur Child Marriages, Grim Realities for Girls
A woman's lotViolence and other abuse of Afghan women is enough to make you wonder what we're there fighting for, reports Paul McGeough from Kabul.
International human rights officials in Kabul are privately explosive about what they see as a marked slide in human rights generally, but for women in particular - especially in light of demands by officials that they must play the glad game. "Can't be all doom and gloom," a senior foreign official regularly exhorts his frustrated staff. Amid the many mistakes in Afghanistan, there have been two constants. One is the Western obsession with winning a war while forgetting the welfare of the Afghan people - particularly women. The other is reducing the equation to a simplistic contest between the "good" President Hamid Karzai and the "bad" Taliban. For women, this pincers grip has knocked their rights to the bottom of the agenda. "Karzai operates like a mafia crook. His regime is corrupt, brutal and repressive and it is based on the President's umpteen deals with the devil - fundamentalists, warlords and criminals," a senior human rights figure told me privately this week. "But Karzai never acts alone. His regime was supposed to be different to the Taliban… and the Australian and the French and all the other governments [still] back him."
Karzai lurches from one crooked or corrupt power base to the next - one day pardoning brutal rapists and saying nothing about it; the next celebrating the execution of small-time criminals while the Mr Bigs of the criminal and political worlds are untouchable.
The Pashtun are delibertely identified by the Western forces and their media as Taliban, when in fact they are not. But they are fighting us as Karzai well knows, which is why he has called for peace talks and has called for U.S. and NATO forces to stop doing reconstruction, invading villagers homes and demanding a time line for so called victory over the Taliban. Which will never happen. Because the Taliban do not exist, who we are fighting are the Pashtun peoples of Southern Afghanistan.
Opium war impasse
About 250 of them had come to hear Governor Asadullah Hamdam's arguments about why they should give up growing opium poppies which, for many, were their primary source of income.
Then one elder from the village of Sorkh Murgab stood up and said what many of the farmers must have been thinking.
"The people don't have jobs," he said, according to notes taken by US government field officer Eric Bone during the November 26 meeting last year.
"The (Government) promised projects but we haven't seen them," the elder said. "The (Government tells us) there is not enough security to do projects. In the daytime the ISAF (the International Security Assistance Force, comprising Australian and Dutch troops) is around but at night the Taliban come and force us to cultivate poppy. We have the poorest region, who can we listen to?"
Another elder stood up and joined the fray. "Assistance in the past two years has only been to the provincial administration, not to us. The people have not received assistance ... when people don't have jobs they go to the Taliban."
These exchanges, contained in a series of confidential documents written by anti-narcotic officials in Tarin Kowt and obtained by The Australian, reveal the magnitude of the task faced by Australia and the West in seeking to kill Afghanistan's opium trade, which reaps more than $4billion a year, almost half of Afghanistan's total income.
Karzai offers Taliban leader 'protection' for peace
Afghan president wishes he could down US planes
Britain 'bribes Afghans to fight Taleban'
Divided tribes make it hard to find elders who will helpTHE tribes in Helmand province have been heavily fractured by decades of fighting, and balance of power is now inextricably linked to the drugs trade.
An Interview About Afghani Women's Rights and Rebuilding in the Face of Politics
Homemakers Magazine editor-in-chief Kathy Ullyott reveals the complex situation the progress of women's rights are in the face of the presence of Western countries, Afghani politics, and nation rebuilding. This is the first of a three-part interview.
SD: Yes, exactly, the period of jihad against the Soviet Union, which we know was covertly backed by the U.S., the civil war, the emergence of the Taliban who were essentially let loose by Pakistan to make their way north…
KU: It’s very complicated, and that’s something else I discovered, and I still don’t think I’ve answered your question – as you say, it’s a big thing and impossible to get a handle on, some I realized there while talking to people. Here we think of the Taliban as some opposing force, but there the Taliban is really just the most organized of the many insurgent groups with different interests. Some of them are the Taliban, but others are warlords in a certain area, in a very ancient and tribal culture going back hundreds of years. Some of these are very vicious rivalries spanning loyalties. The Taliban tend to claim responsibility for any attacks, but that’s just PR. A lot of attacks have nothing to do with the Taliban. It’s really a very amorphous thing and very difficult to fight. And I’m not a military expert by any stretch of the imagination. But it makes the whole question very complex…
SD: People don’t realize the extent of the power of the warlords or how far it extends into rural areas…
KU: Totally – into the rural areas and into the government as well. The women I spoke to, the MP, and Horia…one of the greatest frustrations of the people there is that the government itself is so corrupt. And we’ve seen reports of that. That’s one of the things making progress so difficult. And of the things that created so much pessimism in the intervening years is that people within the country expected that (the ousting of the Taliban) was going to be a big change and that life was going to get better. And they are continuing to see that these warlords exercise great control over the government. The opium trade is one such situation. They (citizens) know that there are ‘bad guys’ still in power, the police force is still horribly corrupt, yet they had hoped-with the involvement of NATO – that the more developed world was going to help them get rid of this stuff. But it’s much harder than they expected.
We are not battling Islam we are battling a medival patriarchical fuedal culture which we are trying to transform into a liberal capitalist democracy. We are failing just like the Russians and before them the British.
Tariq Ali talks tough
The West doesn’t totally appreciate one simple factor: that the Afghan people do not like being occupied by foreign powers,” he said. “Most people don’t like being occupied by foreign powers.” Ali argued that Hamid Karzai’s legitimacy is complicated due to Karzai’s construction on prime Kabul property. He added that a New York Times report links his brother to drug smuggling (Karzai has denied the charges).
Retired general looks back on Russia's Afghan war
Sergei L. Loiko / Los Angeles Times
THE GENERAL'S VIEW: Retired Lt. Gen. Ruslan Aushev says the key to U.S. success would be to help set up a sovereign government. Moscow and Washington have made the same mistakes in their conflicts there, says Ruslan Aushev. He offers advice for the U.S. as it enters the eighth year of war.We said, "Afghans, you are living according to the Soviet way of life, where religion is separated from the state, mullahs should be expelled, religion is the opiate of the people. You'll be living in collective farms. You will have pioneer camps, Comsomol [youth] organizations, and so on and so forth." The Soviet way of life in a country that still lives in the Dark Ages!And what did you say? You said, "We are giving you democracy." They cannot even translate the term properly. Under us there was a lot of corruption, and today there's a lot of corruption. Neither under you nor under us did an ordinary person get anything
There has been massive internal displacement, especially in the south as a result of the insurgency - which has intensified since 2006. The number of people being killed in the Afghan conflict has soared in recent years as violence has returned to levels not seen since the Taleban were driven from power in 2001.
The UN says that from January to August 2008 1,445 civilians were killed - a rise of 39% on the same period for 2007. Most deaths were attributed to the Taleban but the number of civilians killed by pro-government forces - the majority in air strikes - also rose sharply. Afghan and foreign forces say hundreds of militants have also been killed - it is impossible to verify precise numbers. Military fatalities among foreign and Afghan forces have also soared.
SEE:
Afghanistan the UNwinnable war
Afghanistan A Failed State
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