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A homeless man on the streets of Washington, DC. (Photo: Elvert Barnes / Flickr)

It’s been exactly 50 years since Americans, or at least the non-poor among them, “discovered” poverty, thanks to Michael Harrington’s engaging book The Other America. If this discovery now seems a little overstated, like Columbus’s “discovery” of America, it was because the poor, according to Harrington, were so “hidden” and “invisible” that it took a crusading left-wing journalist to ferret them out.

Harrington’s book jolted a nation that then prided itself on its classlessness and even fretted about the spirit-sapping effects of “too much affluence.” He estimated that one quarter of the population lived in poverty — inner-city blacks, Appalachian whites, farm workers, and elderly Americans among them. We could no longer boast, as President Nixon had done in his “kitchen debate” with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow just three years earlier, about the splendors of American capitalism.

At the same time that it delivered its gut punch, The Other America also offered a view of poverty that seemed designed to comfort the already comfortable. The poor were different from the rest of us, it argued, radically different, and not just in the sense that they were deprived, disadvantaged, poorly housed, or poorly fed. They felt different, too, thought differently, and pursued lifestyles characterized by shortsightedness and intemperance. As Harrington wrote, “There is… a language of the poor, a psychology of the poor, a worldview of the poor. To be impoverished is to be an internal alien, to grow up in a culture that is radically different from the one that dominates the society.”

Harrington did such a good job of making the poor seem “other” that when I read his book in 1963, I did not recognize my own forbears and extended family in it. All right, some of them did lead disorderly lives by middle class standards, involving drinking, brawling, and out-of-wedlock babies. But they were also hardworking and in some cases fiercely ambitious — qualities that Harrington seemed to reserve for the economically privileged.

According to him, what distinguished the poor was their unique “culture of poverty,” a concept he borrowed from anthropologist Oscar Lewis, who had derived it from his study of Mexican slum-dwellers. The culture of poverty gave The Other America a trendy academic twist, but it also gave the book a conflicted double message: “We” — the always presumptively affluent readers — needed to find some way to help the poor, but we also needed to understand that there was something wrong with them, something that could not be cured by a straightforward redistribution of wealth. Think of the earnest liberal who encounters a panhandler, is moved to pity by the man’s obvious destitution, but refrains from offering a quarter — since the hobo might, after all, spend the money on booze.

In his defense, Harrington did not mean that poverty was caused by what he called the “twisted” proclivities of the poor. But he certainly opened the floodgates to that interpretation. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan — a sometime-liberal and one of Harrington’s drinking companions at the famed White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village — blamed inner-city poverty on what he saw as the shaky structure of the “Negro family,” clearing the way for decades of victim-blaming. A few years after The Moynihan Report, Harvard urbanologist Edward C. Banfield, who was to go on to serve as an advisor to Ronald Reagan, felt free to claim that:

“The lower-class individual lives from moment to moment… Impulse governs his behavior… He is therefore radically improvident: whatever he cannot consume immediately he considers valueless… [He] has a feeble, attenuated sense of self.”

In the “hardest cases,” Banfield opined, the poor might need to be cared for in “semi-institutions… and to accept a certain amount of surveillance and supervision from a semi-social-worker-semi-policeman.”

By the Reagan era, the “culture of poverty” had become a cornerstone of conservative ideology: poverty was caused, not by low wages or a lack of jobs, but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles. The poor were dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to “defer gratification,” or possibly even set an alarm clock. The last thing they could be trusted with was money. In fact, Charles Murray argued in his 1984 book Losing Ground, any attempt to help the poor with their material circumstances would only have the unexpected consequence of deepening their depravity.

So it was in a spirit of righteousness and even compassion that Democrats and Republicans joined together to reconfigure social programs to cure, not poverty, but the “culture of poverty.” In 1996, the Clinton administration enacted the “One Strike” rule banning anyone who committed a felony from public housing. A few months later, welfare was replaced by Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which in its current form makes cash assistance available only to those who have jobs or are able to participate in government-imposed “workfare.”

In a further nod to “culture of poverty” theory, the original welfare reform bill appropriated $250 million over five years for “chastity training” for poor single mothers. (This bill, it should be pointed out, was signed by Bill Clinton.)

Even today, more than a decade later and four years into a severe economic downturn, as people continue to slide into poverty from the middle classes, the theory maintains its grip. If you’re needy, you must be in need of correction, the assumption goes, so TANF recipients are routinely instructed in how to improve their attitudes and applicants for a growing number of safety-net programs are subjected to drug-testing. Lawmakers in 23 states are considering testing people who apply for such programs as job training, food stamps, public housing, welfare, and home heating assistance. And on the theory that the poor are likely to harbor criminal tendencies, applicants for safety net programs are increasingly subjected to finger-printing and computerized searches for outstanding warrants.

Unemployment, with its ample opportunities for slacking off, is another obviously suspect condition, and last year 12 states considered requiring pee tests as a condition for receiving unemployment benefits. Both Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have suggested drug testing as a condition for allgovernment benefits, presumably including Social Security. If granny insists on handling her arthritis with marijuana, she may have to starve.

What would Michael Harrington make of the current uses of the “culture of poverty” theory he did so much to popularize? I worked with him in the 1980s, when we were co-chairs of Democratic Socialists of America, and I suspect he’d have the decency to be chagrined, if not mortified. In all the discussions and debates I had with him, he never said a disparaging word about the down-and-out or, for that matter, uttered the phrase “the culture of poverty.” Maurice Isserman, Harrington’s biographer, told me that he’d probably latched onto it in the first place only because “he didn’t want to come off in the book sounding like a stereotypical Marxist agitator stuck-in-the-thirties.”

The ruse — if you could call it that — worked. Michael Harrington wasn’t red-baited into obscurity.  In fact, his book became a bestseller and an inspiration for President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But he had fatally botched the “discovery” of poverty. What affluent Americans found in his book, and in all the crude conservative diatribes that followed it, was not the poor, but a flattering new way to think about themselves — disciplined, law-abiding, sober, and focused. In other words, not poor.

Fifty years later, a new discovery of poverty is long overdue. This time, we’ll have to take account not only of stereotypical Skid Row residents and Appalachians, but of foreclosed-upon suburbanites, laid-off tech workers, and America’s ever-growing army of the “working poor.” And if we look closely enough, we’ll have to conclude that poverty is not, after all, a cultural aberration or a character flaw. Poverty is a shortage of money.

Thursday 15 March 2012

by: Barbara Ehrenreich, TomDispatch | News Analysis

Barbara Ehrenreich, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (now in a 10th anniversary edition with a new afterword).

Copyright 2012 Barbara Ehrenreich

Last October I was asked to write an article on the direction of the crisis in Syria – a month later, I had still not made it beyond an introductory paragraph. Syria was confusing. The public discourse about events in the country appeared to be more hyperbole than fact. But even behind the scene, sources strained to provide informed analyses, and it was fairly evident that a lot of guesswork was being employed.

By December, it occurred to me that a big part of the problem was the external-based opposition and their disproportionately loud voices. If you were actually in the business of digging for “verified” information on Syria last year, you would have also quickly copped on to the fact that this wing of the Syrian opposition lies – and lies big.

This discovery coincided with a new report by US intelligence analyst Stratfor [1] that claimed: “most of the opposition’s more serious claims have turned out to be grossly exaggerated or simply untrue, thereby revealing more about the opposition’s weaknesses than the level of instability inside the Syrian regime.”

I had another niggling feeling that just wouldn’t quit: given the amount of regime-initiated violence and widespread popular dissent being reported in the mainstream media, why was the Syrian death toll so low after 10 months of alleged brutality?

Because, if the regime was not engaging in the kind of reckless slaughter suggested by activists, it would appear that they were, in fact, exercising considerable restraint.

Stratfor said that too. The risk analysis group argues that allegations of massacres against civilians were unlikely because the “regime has calibrated its crackdowns to avoid just such a scenario. Regime forces,” Stratfor argues, “have been careful to avoid the high casualty numbers that could lead to an intervention based on humanitarian grounds.”

For me, the events in Homs in February confirmed rather than contradicted this view. The general media narrative was very certain: there was a widescale civilian massacre in Baba Amr caused by relentless, indiscriminate shelling by government forces that pounded the neighborhood for weeks.

The videos pouring out of the besieged city were incriminating in the extreme. Black smoke plumes from shelling choked the city, piled up bodies spoke of brutal slaughter; the sound of mass wailing was only interrupted by explosions, gunfire and cries of “Allahu Akbar.”

But when it was over, we learned a few things. Contrary to reports during the “siege,” there were only a few thousand civilians in Baba Amr at the time – all others had already evacuated the area. The International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) and its local partner, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC), had been administering assistance at nine separate points in Homs for the duration. They would not enter the neighborhoods of Baba Amr and Insha’at because of continuing violence on “both sides.”

The armed opposition fighters holed up in Homs during that month were, therefore, unlikely to be there in a purely “protective” capacity. As American journalist Nir Rosen [2] points out, what happened in Homs on February 3 was a government response to direct and repeated “provocation:”

“Yesterday opposition fighters defeated the regime checkpoint at the Qahira roundabout and they seized a tank or armored personnel carrier. This followed similar successes against the Bab Dreib checkpoint and the Bustan al Diwan checkpoint. In response to this last provocation yesterday the regime started shelling with mortars from the Qalaa on the high ground and the State Security headquarters in Ghota.”

This account contrasts starkly with the oft-repeated notion that armed opposition groups act primarily to protect “peaceful demonstrators” and civilians.

Homs also marks the point in the Syrian crisis when I noticed a quiet cynicism developing in the professional media about sources and information from Syria. Cracks are bound to appear in a story this widely broadcast, especially when there is little actual verifiable information in this highly competitive industry.

Cue the now infamous video by Syrian activist Danny Abdul Dayem [3] – dubbed by the Washington Post [4] as “the voice of Homs” – where he dazzles CNN’s Anderson Cooper with little more than bad 1950s-style sound effects, blurry scenes of fires and a breathless rendition of “facts.” Of all the media-fraud videos Syrian TV broadcast two weeks ago, none were as compelling as Danny’s – his credibility stock plummeting almost as fast as his meteoric rise to media “darling.”

It reminds me of August 2011 news reports [5] of warships shelling the coastal city of Latakia. Three separate sources – two opposition figures from the city and an independent western journalist – later insisted there were no signs of shelling. It was also the first time I learned from Syrians that you can burn rubber tires on rooftops to simulate the after-effects of exploded shells.

Question: Why would activists have to resort to stage-crafting scenes [6] and sound effects of violence if the regime was already “pounding Homs” to bits?

What have we actually seen in Homs? Explosions. Fires. Dead bodies. Injured civilians. Men with weapons. The government has openly admitted to shelling, so we know that is a fact. But how much shelling, and is it indiscriminate? Observers afterward have said Baba Amr resembles a destroyed ghost town. How much of this was done by the regime? And how much was done by the opposition?

Turkish publication Today’s Zaman [7] reported on Sunday: “Last week, a Pentagon report stated that IED usage by the opposition has more than doubled since December.” How are these Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) – used mainly in unconventional warfare – being employed? As roadside bombs, targeting security forces, inside towns and cities?

On Sunday I was included in a private messaging thread with seven Syrians who I have communicated with over the course of some months. Most are known to me either directly or with one degree of separation. This was not a usual thread on Syria – the initiating participant, who I will call Ziad, was informing the others privately about what was taking place in Idlib as government forces moved into the area.

Ziad’s family is from Idlib, and although I wasn’t a participant in the conversation, it appears that he had spent much of the weekend making phone calls to family members who were reporting the following. I have changed the names of participants to protect their identities. Two things strike me about this chat – the first is the information that armed groups are rigging the town with IEDs before the army arrives, either to target security forces or to create material damage to buildings. The second is that there is a malaise among the message participants about this information. As in, so what? Who is going to believe this? Who is going to do anything about this?

Ziad:

Today the Army went into the city of Idleb (the city itself not the province).

There was no random shelling, they were slowly moving into neighborhoods, starting from the east and southern.

The militants had seeded IEDs (improvised explosive devices, basically remote detonated landmines) across the city, one of them was under my uncles balcony , who now lost half his home, his living room got bigger and has a panoramic view.

They had set up machine gun nests on a few mosques and communication towers.

Around 200 militants were gathered near my grandmother’s house and took refuge in the building right next to them. The neighborhood is a Christian neighborhood (cant confirm or deny it’s a coincidence).

The battle lasted all day, my family is safe but both my grandmother’s house and my uncle’s house got damaged. The first by the IED and the second by exchange of fire, largely done by the militants and the army was returning fire.

The army was moving in slowly and checked Idleb neighborhood by neighborhood. They searched most houses but there were no mass random arrests. Mainly they asked adult men out before searching and they were released after. I assume at this point they have a list of who to arrest so there was no surprise there.

The rumors of electricity and water cuts are not true. The entire country is suffering from electricity cuts, so Idleb will not be an exception. There is no cell phone coverage but landlines are working, though there is heavy pressure and you have to attempt several times for the call to go through.

Ziad:

The plan will probably be pushing them into what is called “the northern quarter” an area already emptied from civilians and largely a militant stronghold. Once they corner them in the northern area the army will take them out decisively. Most people expect this to end within the next two days.

Outside the city there was a clash on the Turkish border with militants attempting to come from turkey to Idleb to reinforce the militants.

Ziad:

Just to make it clear the Army did not finish sweeping the entire city

Joumana:

I don’t know what to say Ziad. Should I be happy or sad? I feel sorry for the people caught in the middle, but this has to be done! So is the city clean?

Ziad:

No its not clean. Operation started yesterday from 5 am till around 6. The same thing today but today the army went in deeper. They are doing it progressively and trying to avoid the most damages.

Most damages are caused by the IEDs (some up to 50kgs of explosives) and random firing by militants (using PKT/PKC and DUSHKA/DShk machine guns), with the army returning fire when attacked, but no excessive use of force i.e no artillery barrages as reported by al Jazeera and other channels)

Ziad:

Also, contrary to what is being reported, the town of Benech (بنش ) was not shelled today and was not even attacked.

Oh and since the morning the army was asking people to go down to the shelters and take refuge using speakers across the city.

I just heard on Aljazeera that the army dragged over 20 civilians and executed them in “Dabbit neighborhood”(ضبيط ), that is not true because I have family there too and that did not happen.

Hanan:

Ziad, they are using the propaganda of the 80’s. Want to lead people’s brains to the Hama massacre. To make it look believable

Joumana:

The MB are insisting on getting their revenge. Linking the events to what happened in Hama. Many people will believe.

Ziad:

Just to give you a perspective on the scale of irresponsibility and damage by the militants. Just under my uncles house there were 4 IEDs, one of them exploded damaging a BMP (and the building) as the army was approaching and the army stopped there and pulled back to reassemble for another try. In that single spot there was over 60 kgs of explosives. Once large one was planted in a 2×2 hole. Right now the army reached their neighborhood and is still there.

These militants don’t even live there and are just making those neighborhoods their front using civilians as shields. Once they are pushed back into the open fields the army will mow them down like grass.

I’m optimistic this will be over in the coming two days.

Jouwana:

But Ziad, why isn’t there anyone reporting this to the media?

Mohammad:

if they report it no one (outside Syria) will believe it …

Ziad:

I think by now we can all agree the pro Syrian media has limited clout and the anti Syria media just doesn’t do any fact checking and research and is resorting to sectarian tone and hysteria.

The government I think it focusing its energy and resources on finishing the security element of the crisis while juggling the economy and foreign diplomacy. They realize they cannot win the media war and might as well focus on what they are good at and what is more important. Syria never was “popular” and it certainly won’t be done during this crisis.

Ziad is not a reporter, he relies entirely on his family’s accounts and estimates in Idlib, and his claims cannot be verified at this point. But these are important testimonies – the anecdotal evidence that provides the basis for further investigation. We used to hear many more of these accounts from all sides in the first few months of the Syrian crisis, before the pressure of the dominant narratives intimidated even the best bloggers into toeing a hyper-cautious line.

Conjecture and hysteria aside, there is plenty of indication that the Syrian government is pursuing a policy of eliminating armed groups in a slow, measured sweep of the country, particularly focusing on towns and neighborhoods where they have allowed these elements to swell in recent months.

There are many who would find this offensive enough to continue raging against the Syrian regime – it is unnecessary to concoct daily stories of civilian slaughters to keep Syria in the headlines.

There is also increasing evidence that armed opposition groups are targeting civilians, security forces and property with violence in ever greater numbers. Is there absolute evidence of this? Not yet. Is there absolute evidence for the allegations against the regime? Not yet. I doubt that there has been a recent conflict with this much finger-pointing, and this little established fact.

Today, reporting from inside Idlib, Al Jazeera’s Anita McNaught [8] described the bombing as “earth-shaking and relentless.” Bombing caused by who?

“Hollywood” in Syria? Oh yes. Scene-setting the likes of which we have not yet seen outside of celluloid fiction. Delivering lines to a rapt audience that seems incapable of questioning the plot. Some of what transpires in Syria in the future will depend on this: Do people want to go behind the velvet curtain and see the strings – or are they content to be simply led by the entertainment.

By Sharmine Narwani

13 March 2012

@ Al Akhbar English

Sharmine Narwani is a commentary writer and political analyst covering the Middle East. You can follow Sharmine on twitter @snarwani [9].

Tags

Tags: washington post [10], syria [11], SARC [12], Media [13], IEDs [14], Idlib [15], ICRC [16], Homs [17], Hollywood [18], Danny Abdul Dayem [19], cnn [20], Anderson Cooper [21]

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Source URL: http://english.al-akhbar.com/blogs/sandbox/hollywood-homs-and-idlib

Links:

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sharmine-narwani/stratfor-challenges-narra_b_1158710.html”

[2] http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2012/02/what-happened-in-homs.html”

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-DCZxsrt9I”

[4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/syrian-activist-danny-abdul-dayem-flees-to-lebanon-amid-violence/2012/02/13/gIQAO0Z2AR_blog.html”

[5] http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2011/08/20118158309760895.html”

[6] http://www.moonofalabama.org/2012/03/avaaz-sponsoring-fake-reporting-from-syria.html

[7] http://www.todayszaman.com/news-273912-syrian-rebellion-to-move-forward-amid-intervention-waiting-game.html”

[8] http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/03/201231203843221328.html”

[9] https://twitter.com/#!/@snarwani

[10] http://english.al-akhbar.com/tags/washington-post

[11] http://english.al-akhbar.com/tags/syria

[12] http://english.al-akhbar.com/tags/sarc

[13] http://english.al-akhbar.com/tags/media

[14] http://english.al-akhbar.com/tags/ieds

[15] http://english.al-akhbar.com/tags/idlib

[16] http://english.al-akhbar.com/tags/icrc

[17] http://english.al-akhbar.com/tags/homs

[18] http://english.al-akhbar.com/tags/hollywood

[19] http://english.al-akhbar.com/tags/danny-abdul-dayem

[20] http://english.al-akhbar.com/tags/cnn

[21] http://english.al-akhbar.com/tags/anderson-cooper

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Blair House in Washington, D.C., on March 6, 2012. (United States Department of State)

Today US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a stirring UN Security Council speech on the virtues of democracy, human rights, and US support for them. She contrasted the purity of American motives with those of regional adversaries:

When a country like Iran claims to champion these principles in the region – and then brutally suppresses its own people and supports suppression in Syria and other places — their hypocrisy is clear to all.

Perhaps. Of course Hillary did not examine the hypocrisy of US support for dictatorships in the region that also purport to support democracy but only in Syria, while brutally suppressing their own people.

Last Friday millions of voters in Iran – men and women – chose new legislators from among thousands of candidates in parliamentary elections. Critics may be quite right that the elections are “nothing more than a selection process amongst the ruling conservative elite” (cf. US elections currently underway), but that’s much more than citizens in some US-backed states ever get the opportunity to do.

It was however on Gaza that Hillary’s hypocrisy truly shone. Here’s what she said regarding Syria:

Now the United States believes firmly in the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all member-states, but we do not believe that sovereignty demands that this council stand silent when governments massacre their own people, threatening regional peace and security in the process. And we reject any equivalence between premeditated murders by a government’s military machine and the actions of civilians under siege driven to self-defense.

Clinton was explicitly supporting the right of Syrians to use armed struggle to resist the government, and even claimed that such armed struggle is morally superior. Very well. What did she say about Gaza, which has been under unprovoked Israeli bombardment for five days killing more than twenty people and injuring dozens?

And let me also condemn in the strongest terms the rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel which continued over the weekend. We call on those responsible to take immediate action to stop these attacks. We call on both sides – all sides – to make every effort to restore calm.

That was it. Not one word of sympathy for the families of Palestinian civilians killed in the Israeli attacks. She failed to mention that Israel began the round of violence on Friday with the premeditated murders by its military machine of Palestinians Israel accuses of “masterminding” attacks.

So Israel carried out an extrajudicial execution of people in an occupied territory whom it accuses of a crime. Israel, as I have explained, unlike even China and Iran, does not bother to try Palestinians it has sentenced to death in secret and in absentia. It merely jumps straight to the execution phase.

But this is all perfectly fine for Hillary – she didn’t even mention it. And after 63 years of dispossession, ethnic cleansing and occupation, do Palestinians ever have a right to self-defense? Are Palestinians ever to be considered, like Syrians, “civilians under siege driven to self-defense”?

Of course not. Instead, Hillary repeated the same old tired slogans.

The only way for Palestinians to achieve anything she insisted – even as Israel bombs and besieges them, executes them, and seizes their land for Jewish-only colonies – is through rigged “negotiations” that have gone nowhere precisely because the US has its mighty hands on the scale in favor of Israel.

Today at the UN, Hillary Clinton once more gave Israel a blank check to do as it wishes, assured of impunity and full US support.

By Ali Abunimah

@ 13 March 2012

@ Electronic Intifada

Ali Abunimah is Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, and author of One Country: A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse

Hamas leader Ismail Haniya delivered a speech last Friday at Al-Azhar mosque in Cairo endorsing the Western-backed opposition in Syria and thereby confirming speculation in recent months that the Palestinian Islamist movement has found new patrons among the most reactionary regimes of the Middle East. These apparently include the military junta in Egypt, the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf and Turkey.

Hamas’s reorientation points ultimately toward a complete break with Iran and Syria and rapprochement the US imperialism. This aptly called “seismic” shift has already expressed itself in the most recent position of the group’s leadership toward reconciliation with Fatah in the West Bank and its willingness to abandon armed struggle against Israel and ultimately endorse a two-state solution.

“I salute all the nations of the Arab Spring and I salute the heroic people of Syria who are striving for freedom, democracy and reform,” declared Haniya. He was answered by worshipers, most of them supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis, who chanted slogans against Iran and Hezbollah, which have sided with the regime of Bashar al-Assad against the Western-backed opposition in Syria.

The same day in Gaza, a senior Hamas member, Salah al-Bardaweel, told thousands of Palestinian worshippers, “No political considerations will make us turn a blind eye to what is happening on the soil of Syria.”

As reported with evident satisfaction in the Western media, these remarks should be seen in light of new accommodations between Hamas, on the one hand, and Egypt’s military junta and the Qatari regime, on the other, as part of US machinations to isolate Iran. The Telegraph on Tuesday commented on Haniya’s remarks: “Choosing to make this announcement in Cairo is a strong indication that Hamas is willing to sever its old allegiances and suffer the inevitable cut in funding from Tehran in order to tie itself to the Arab world’s rising power—the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.” Similarly a Global Post article on Feb 26 states that, “the fact that Haniya was able to give this speech from one of Egypt’s most prominent and influential mosques is remarkable in itself. It suggests the Hamas leader was given guarantees of assistance and perhaps promises of a diplomatic future in Egypt if he turned against his benefactors.”

Similar pledges have been made by Qatar and Turkey, and there is speculation that either Egypt, Qatar or Jordan would host Hamas headquarters once it is moved from Syria permanently. Just this week, Qatar pledged a $250 million aid package for reconstruction in Gaza.

Hamas’s presence in Syria dates back to 1999, when the Jordanian monarchy expelled it in a bid to strengthen the position of its rival, the Fatah leadership in the PLO in the so-called peace process. Syria, which had historically opposed any settlement between Palestinian groups and Israel on the basis of a two-state solution, provided the group with logistical and financial support. It had done the same with other tendencies in the PLO’s “rejectionist” camp in 1988, the year Yasser Arafat recognized the state of Israel.

The Israeli media closely covered the remarks of Haniya. Haaretz, in an article headlined “Hamas ditches Assad, backs Syria revolt” hailed the reorientation of Hamas away from Syria [and Iran] as a weakening of the “anti-Israeli axis”.

Even prior to these remarks, there were strong indications that Hamas is willing to abandon its previous allies as well as its seemingly more militant posture toward Israel in exchange for recognition by the West. Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, at a meeting in November with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, indicated that Hamas would stop the armed struggle and pursue a policy of non-violent resistance. The UAE daily the National wrote in this regard that “Although Hamas’s outgoing leader, Khaled Meshaal, has toned down the group’s stance towards Israel, it is still far from certain if Hamas would be accepted by Washington and the West. This would probably require Hamas to recognise Israel’s right to exist.”

In a related development, the Hamas leadership has started negotiation with Fatah for a unity government. The deal was brokered on Feb 5 by Qatar, which has had close diplomatic and economic ties with Israel. The post of premier in such a government is reserved for Abbas, who would serve also in his current capacity as the president. There were initial disagreements between the Hamas leadership in exile and Haniya’s administration in Gaza, which saw the deal as too much of a compromise by Meshaal but, as it became clear last week in Cairo, all top Hamas leaders are on board.

Around the same time, Haniya took a tour of the Arab Monarchies of Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar begging for aid. The Boston Globe reported that, “Even as Qatar was mediating the unity deal [between Meshaal and Abbas], the Hamas prime minister of Gaza, Ismail Haniya, was leading his own tour through wealthy Gulf states Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. His tone was far more CEO than anti-Israel firebrand as he met Gulf rulers and investment groups about pumping money into struggling Gaza.” [emphasis added]

Another significant aspect of Haniya’s tour was his cordial meeting with Bahrain’s King Hamad in which Haniya tacitly endorsed the brutal crackdown against the ongoing uprising by the predominantly Shia population against his Sunni monarchical regime, asserting that “Bahrain is a red line that cannot be compromised because it is an Arab Islamic State.”

Haniya had been asked in Doha to skip the last itinerary of his trip in the Persian Gulf, which was Tehran, in an effort to undercut the influence of Iran on the Palestinian issue. He finally met with Ayatollah Khamenei in Tehran on Feb 12.

Haniya’s tour of the reactionary sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf prompted angry comments in the Iranian media. Hasan Hanizadeh, an analyst of Middle Eastern affairs who frequently appears on Arab channels, called Haniya’s tour an “end to Hamas.” He clarified “Hamas is stepping in the same path that Yasser Arafat did and that is the path of reconciliation.”

The Jerusalem Post reported in December in an article titled “Islamic Jihad rise in Gaza challenges Hamas rule” that Iran “with Hamas out of its orbit, has upped its support of Islamic Jihad, which, according to some estimates, has a rocket arsenal that competes in its quantity and quality with that in Hamas’s warehouses.”

Islamic Jihad is the only major group in Gaza that has openly sided with Syria. Its leader, Ramazan Abdollah, traveled to Iran and met with Ayatollah Khamenei in February and condemned the events in Syria as a US plot.

Similarly Syria is throwing its support behind the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), which has some following within the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria, to offset the loss of Hamas.

In the final analysis, Hamas represents a rival faction of the Palestinian bourgeoisie. Its reactionary program of a capitalist Islamic state has proven no more capable of fulfilling the needs and aspirations of the Palestinian masses than the policies of the PLO leadership, whose betrayals led to the Islamist group’s rise. Under conditions in which Washington is backing similar groups in Libya and Syria, while making approaches to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas—like Fatah before it—sees realignment with imperialism and its Arab allies as better means of securing is interests against the threat of a revolt from below by the Palestinian masses.

As for the other organizations to which Iran and Syria are apparently shifting their support, apart from the limited influence they enjoy among millions of Palestinians in occupied Palestine and in the refugee camps throughout the Middle East, they have no more in the way of a political program to combat the imperialist intrigues in the region than the bourgeois regimes in Tehran and Damascus themselves.

Such a struggle can be waged only on the basis of a socialist program to unite the working class across national boundaries and all religious and ethnic divides for the defeat of imperialism and the establishment of workers governments throughout the region.

By Sahand Avedis

1 March 2012

@ WSWS.org

MADRID – Seen from Europe, the irrationality of the political and media discourse over nuclear energy has, if anything, increased and intensified in the year since the meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Yet a dispassionate assessment of nuclear energy’s place in the world remains as necessary as it is challenging.

Europeans should not pontificate on nuclear-energy policy as if our opinion mattered worldwide, but we do. On the other hand, Europe does have a qualified responsibility in the area of security, where we still can promote an international regulatory and institutional framework that would discipline states and bring about greater transparency where global risks like nuclear power are concerned.

Europe is equally responsible for advancing research on more secure technologies, particularly a fourth generation of nuclear-reactor technology. We Europeans cannot afford the luxury of dismantling a high-value-added industrial sector in which we still have a real comparative advantage.

In Europe, Fukushima prompted a media blitz of gloom and doom over nuclear energy. The German magazine Der Spiegel heralded the “9/11 of the nuclear industry” and “the end of the nuclear era,” while Spain’s leading newspaper El Pais preached that supporting “this energy [was] irrational,” and that “China has put a brake on its nuclear ambitions.” But reality has proven such assessments to be both biased and hopelessly wrong.

True, a few countries – Belgium, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, with Peru the only non- European country to join the trend – formally declared their intention to phase out or avoid nuclear energy. These decisions affect a total of 26 reactors, while 61 reactors are under construction around the world, with another 156 projected and 343 under official consideration. If these plans are realized, the number of functioning reactors, currently 437, will double.

But, more interestingly, the nuclear boom is not global: Brazil is at the forefront in Latin America, while the fastest development is occurring in Asia, mostly in China and India. If we compare this geographical distribution with a global snapshot of nuclear sites prior to the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in the United States in 1979, a striking correlation emerges between countries’ nuclear-energy policy and their geopolitical standing and economic vigor.

Whereas the appetite for reactors in the 1970’s reflected the international heft of the Soviet Union, and principally that of the geopolitical West – Japan, the US, and Europe – today the center of gravity has shifted irrevocably to the East, where nuclear energy has become a “gateway to a prosperous future,” in the telling words of a November 2011 commentary in The Hindu. Indeed, US President Barack Obama, evidently agreeing with that view, has boldly bet that loan guarantees and research into creating small modular reactors will reconfirm America’s global position at the forefront of civilian nuclear technology and its relevance in the new global order.

Energy is, of course, the bloodline of any society, reflected in the correlation between energy demand and income. In this respect, nuclear energy’s advantages, particularly its reliability and predictable costs, stand out. The International Energy Agency’s 2010 World Energy Outlook foresees a rise in global energy demand of 40% by 2030 – an unforgiving reality that is most tangibly felt in developing countries, particularly in Asia.

So expansion of nuclear energy is, and will continue to be, a fact. To act responsibly, Europeans should be working to enhance international security standards for nuclear power, not opting out of the game. The real lesson of Fukushima is that state controls are necessary but not sufficient to ensure nuclear safety.

Unfortunately, a proposal last year at the International Atomic Energy Agency aimed at launching an effective international control system on safety and security of nuclear power worldwide blatantly failed with the acquiescence of the European Union. Worse still, with European backing, the IAEA’s budget, already a paltry €300 million, has been cut by almost 10%.

In this context, an initiative to mandate random IAEA inspections of 10% of the world’s operating reactors within three years was watered down, again with the EU’s active support, on the grounds that responsibility for security and inspections should rest primarily with member states. Only a slim provision that made joint inspections with the IAEA voluntary made it into the final agreement. As for the EU itself, the debate and final formulation of the March 2011 “voluntary” stress tests, accurately called “stormy” by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, revealed a bewildering array of deficiencies and weaknesses.

Perhaps the most striking contradiction in Europe’s nuclear discourse is the discrepancy between the seeming effort to boost economic growth and employment, and the flippancy of member states in abandoning the nuclear industry, which depends on the design, engineering, and command-and-control skills that underlie Europe’s comparative advantage in the industry.

One heartening exception is a recent agreement between the United Kingdom and France to forge a manufacturing alliance between Rolls Royce and Areva in nuclear technology. But they should not be alone. Is it reasonable that Europe’s countries give up a niche of prosperity on ideological grounds that are irrelevant from a global perspective?

The rise of nuclear power in Europe paralleled its post-war economic prowess. It coincided with the peak of the West’s belief in its soaring economic strength and perpetual global ascendancy. Today, with Europe increasingly seen as the sick man of the world’s economy, even the whole continent’s renunciation of nuclear energy would have little to no reverberation on the world stage. Dictating the direction of the policy discourse is no longer Europe’s role. Behaving responsibly is.

9 March 2012

By Ana Palacio

@ Project Syndicate

Ana Palacio, a former Spanish foreign minister and a former senior vice president of the World Bank, is a senior fellow and lecturer at Yale University.

 

Privacy advocacy group Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the National Security Agency (NSA) asking for details on the agency’s purported partnership with Google Inc. on cybersecurity issues.

In a separate action that was also taken today, EPIC filed a lawsuit against the NSA and the National Security Council, seeking more information on the NSA’s authority over the security of U.S. computer networks.

EPIC’s FOIA request relating to Google was filed after a story in the Washington Post about an impending partnership between Google and the NSA on cybersecurity issues.

The Post reported that the NSA and Google are in the process of finalizing an agreement under which the NSA will help Google better defend itself against cyberattacks.

The report said Google approached the NSA shortly after the recent cyberattacks, which it said originated in China.

The deal does not involve the NSA gaining access to Google users’ search information or e-mail accounts, and neither will Google be sharing any proprietary data, the Post said, quoting anonymous sources.

Neither Google nor the NSA confirmed the reporting about the partnership. But the Post quoted an NSA spokeswoman as saying the agency, as part of its “information assurance mission,” has been working with a broad range of commercial partners and research associates.

News of the purported agreement is already stirring up a storm in the privacy community. In its FOIA request today, EPIC asked the NSA for all records concerning any agreement between Google and NSA whether in draft or final form.

EPIC also asked the NSA for any communications the agency might have had with Google on the issue of Google’s not encrypting Gmail messages prior to the cyberattacks from China but then deciding to implement encryption immediately after the attacks.

“There is particular urgency for the public to obtain information about the relationship between the NSA and Google,” EPIC said in its FOIA request. “As of 2009, Gmail had roughly 146 million monthly users, all of whom would be affected by any relationship between the NSA and Google.”

However, James Lewis, director and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), cautioned against overstating the privacy concerns. Without all the details, it’s hard to know what information exactly Google will share with the NSA, he said.

And he said it’s highly unlikely that Google will share personal data with the NSA. All it wants is for the NSA to look at its networks and help them figure out how to protect it against similar attacks, he said. “It has nothing to do with intelligence. That point appears to have been missed,” Lewis said.

Meanwhile, EPIC’s lawsuit against NSA was filed today in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It seeks the court’s intervention in getting the NSA to divulge details on the authority it has been granted on domestic cybersecurity matters under National Security Presidential Directive 54 (NPSD54). The classified directive, which is also known as Homeland Security Presidential Directive 21, was issued during the Bush Administration.

The directive was used to set up a highly classified, multi-billion dollar cybersecurity program called the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), which is designed to bolster the ability of federal networks to detect and respond to cyber-intrusions.

Lawmakers, industry executives and privacy advocacy groups including EPIC have urged the government to release more information on CNCI and the NSA’s role. EPIC has previously filed FOIA requests with the NSA asking for the information. Its lawsuit stems from what EPIC claims has been the NSA’s failure to comply with statutory deadlines for providing the information.

By Jaikumar Vijayan

4 February 2010

@ Computerworld

covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld. Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at Twitter@jaivijayan or subscribe to Jaikumar’s RSS feed Vijayan RSS. His e-mail address is jvijayan@computerworld.com.

Don’t Bank on the Bomb is a 180-page report identifying more than 300 financial institutions in 30 countries that invest heavily in companies involved in the US, British, French and Indian nuclear weapons programmes. It was published by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in March 2012.

By Tim Wright

8 February 2012

@ Dontbankonthebomb.com

Here we are publishing Chapter 8 on Financial Institutions , Companies Financing Nuclear Weapons Producers (PDF)

You can read the rest of the report at the webstie www.Dontbankonthebomb.com

 

New Delhi: In a rare show of solidarity from different quarters, the demand for the immediate release of noted Urdu journalist Syed Mohammed Kazmi is growing stronger and stronger. Over a few days, many press conferences have been organized across the country by Journalists Unions, Civil Society Organizations and Muslim groups. Kazmi, a senior Urdu Journalist with “extraordinary linguistic skills”, in veteran Journalist Saeed Naqvi’s words, was picked on 6th March while returning home from India Islamic Cultural Centre (IICC) in South Delhi’s Lodhi Road area. Kazmi lived at the nearby B K Dutt Colony of Jor Bagh area. The Delhi Police have alleged Kazmi’s involvement in terms of local support in carrying out the attack on the Israeli Diplomat’s car last month. The very next day, the police produced him before the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Vinod Yadav at the Tis Hazari court. The court sent him in police custody till March 20th for further investigation.

Eminent journalists and activists have condemned the arrest. Just a day after the arrest, Delhi Union Journalists (DUJ), considered to be the largest body of Journalists in India, demanded immediate release of Mr. Kazmi. “The Delhi Union of Journalists condemns the arrest of veteran journalist Syed Mohammed Kazmi by the police in connection with last month’s attack on the car of an Israeli diplomat in Delhi”, said a statement issued by DUJ. It further mentioned, “The DUJ cautions that Mr. Kazmi must not be victimized merely because he has worked for Iranian Broadcasting and written for Persian newspapers… The DUJ feels strongly that journalists must not be targeted because of their professional work, sources and connections”. Joining DUJ, The International Federation of Journalists (IJF), Asia-Pacific said, “With all respect for the legal process in India, the IFJ is concerned that Kazmi may have been identified for the arrest based on his political views, rather than solid evidence”. Similarly, the Coordination Committee of Indian Muslims (CCIM) in its statement said, “It is a matter of alarm that now a senior member of the Urdu journalist community has been arrested without any apparent evidence or proof. Muhammad Ahmad Kazmi is a senior Urdu journalist of long standing who works and writes in the higher interests of the country”.

On 9th of March, as many as four Press conferences were organized by different groups in Delhi and Lucknow. In the Press Conference organized by DUJ at the Press Club of India, Delhi, veteran Journalist Saeed Naqvi said, “This arrest of a high-profile journalist is an attack on the journalistic fraternity in the country. They (State) want to see how many of us can be cowed down by such arrests.” Recalling his personal association with Mr. Kazmi he said, “I have personally known Kazmi for 10-15 years. He is as honourable and as honest a person I have ever worked with”. He appealed to the media persons to come out and speak because tomorrow it could be anybody of us. After the press conference, a delegation of journalists headed by DUJ Secretary, S K Pande, submitted a memorandum to the Information and Broadcasting Minister, Mrs. Ambika Soni A similar memorandum was submitted to the Delhi Police Commissioner and the Chairman of the Press Council of India. The demands of the memorandum were:

a) Kindly withdraw the charges framed against Mr Kazmi under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act until the investigations are completed, to establish any kind of his involvement in the car bomb blast.

b) Stop the custodial interrogation since Mr Kazmi is fully cooperating and ready to be available to assist the Police whenever required in its investigation.

c) Stop all sorts of allegations against Mr Kazmi being palmed off to the gullible journalists by the Delhi Police officers anonymously and ensure that no such allegations are planted in the Media until presented before the Court.

d) If the Police have foolproof evidence against Mr Kazmi, a charge-sheet may be filed without delay to let him apply for bail.

Meanwhile, Communist Party of India (CPI) leaders Mr. A B Vardhan and Mr. Atul Kumar Anjan also demanded for the immediate release of Mr. Kazmi. On the next day, three more press conferences were organized in Delhi by Civil Society Groups at ANHAD’s office, CCIM at the Press Club of India and Lok Janshati Party Chief Ram Vilas Paswan at his residence, namely. In all the press conferences, the immediate release of Mr. Kazmi was demanded. The press conference held at ANHAD’s office was addressed by senior journalists Seema Mustafa, Sukumar Muralidharan (also representative of IFJ) and Saeed Naqvi; Senior Advocate N D Pancholi; Activists Manisha Sethi and Shabnam Hashim; and Mr. Kazmi’s youngest son, Turab Ahmed Kazmi. TheYoung Kazmi reiterated that his father was innocent and appealed to the media community to help the family to bring his father back home.

“I am glad to see that so many people have come out in support of Mr. Kazmi”, says Iftikhar Gilani in an informal discussion with journalists and activists. Iftikhar Gilani, a senior journalist based in Delhi, was booked under the draconian Official Secrets Act (OSA) in June 2002 and had to spend seven long months without bail. He was released only in January 2003, after the government withdrew its case against him on January 13, 2003. Many believe that Kazmi’s arrest is a repetition of what has happened with Mr. Gilani. He was severely tortured and badly treated both during the Police and the Judicial Custody (Jail). “In my case, there were few who came out in solidarity”, added Mr. Gilani.

Through a statement, eminent citizens, academicians, film stars and activists have also condemned the arrest. “Mr. Kazmi is well respected and known to the journalist fraternity for his professional integrity. We demand that he be immediately released on bail and the due process of law followed”, reads the statement. The statement has been signed by the likes of Writer and Activist Arundhati Roy, Veteran Actress Sharmila Tagore, NAC member Farha Naqvi, Film-actress Nandita Das, Film-maker Mahesh Bhatt, Prof. Kamal Mitra Chenoy, JNU, Prof. Nirmalangshu Mukherjee, University of Delhi, Senior Journalist Saeed and Javed Naqvi, Dr. Zafarul Islam Khan and dozens of others. Various groups have also written to the Union Home Minister of India.

Not satisfied with only holding press conferences and releasing appeals, the family, friends and fellow journalists are planning to hold protest march and dharnas. On 12th of March (Monday), in the evening around 7 PM, hundreds of them will be assembling at India Gate to hold a peace march seeking justice for Mr. Kazmi. The organizer of the march has appealed to the citizens and journalists, to join it in large numbers. Similarly, the CCIM has said that if Mr. Kazmi is not released, tt will hold a dharna at Jantar Mantar on 26th March to press its demand”. “In this regard, the group has also written to the Union Home Minister, Chairman of Press Council of India and the Commissioner of Police.

By Mahtab Alam

11 March 2012

@ Countercurrents.org

Mahtab Alam is a Delhi based Civil Rights Activist and Freelance Journalist. He can be reached at activist.journalist@gmail.com

 

 

Relations between the Pakistani government and the military have been tense recently, even resulting in rumours of an impending military coup. A coup is not very likely at this stage, but the situation has created the environment for at least one new political actor to emerge and gain popular support.

With relations between Pakistan’s civilian government and military incredibly tense, speculation is rife in the Pakistani and international media of a looming military takeover. The military is allegedly buoyed by support of the Supreme Court and the country’s business and political elite. However, the nature of events is changing at such a fast pace that it is difficult to predict the future.

The tenuous relationship between the government and the military appears to have finally eased somewhat since the government markedly toned down its anti-military rhetoric. Indeed, Prime Minster Yousuf Raza Gilani has extended an olive branch of sorts to the military. He had previously accused Army Chief of Staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the head of Pakistan’s principal intelligence agency, Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, of acting unconstitutionally when they expressed their alleged disapproval of the government. Just before Gilani left for the World Economic Forum in Davos in the middle of February, he attempted to smooth over the difficulties with his comment that he wanted to ‘dispel the impression that the military leadership acted unconstitutionally or violated rules… The current situation cannot afford conflict among the institutions.’

Tensions between these institutions reached a tipping point on 11 January 2012 when the prime minister had alleged that the Pakistan Army and its intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), had been unlawfully interfering in a controversial court case involving the government. This amounted to accusing the heads of the army of defying the constitution and the democratically-elected government. The military was quick to warn of ‘very serious ramifications’ and ‘grievous consequences’ if the government continued its confrontational posturing. The warning fuelled rumours that the army was planning a coup to force the four year-old PPP-led coalition from office. Later that day, Gilani found himself on the receiving end of the army’s ire when he sacked the defence secretary, Retired-General Khalid Naeem Lodhi, a confidante of Pakistan’s Chief of Armed Services, General Kayani. The person holding the pivotal defence secretary position acts as the liaison between the military and the government.

Lodhi’s dismissal stemmed from his support of the military in the ‘memo-gate’ case. This court case revolves around the scandal that emerged from a memo allegedly sent to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in the aftermath of the raid in May 2011 by American forces on Osama Bin Laden’s hideout in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad. The memo sought the help of the US government to topple the military leadership and to replace it with people more compliant with US designs. While the authenticity of the memo remains uncertain, for the already volatile political landscape of Pakistan the implications of its revelation were explosive. Since the memo had been made public, the government has been under fire, resulting in a petition filed in the Supreme Court.

The resulting crisis saw the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) government trying to deal with the matter through a parliamentary committee. However, the leader of the opposition Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) filed a petition at the Supreme Court, which then claimed jurisdiction over the matter, side-stepping the parliamentary committee. The court enjoys the full support of the army leadership, and Kayani and Pasha have both filed briefs supporting the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction. The military’s indignation is rooted in its belief that the memo was treasonous and that that it will dent the morale of the armed forces.

Gilani’s recent retraction of his anti-military statements in January came on the heels of another very public war of words, this one between the PPP government and the Supreme Court. Regarding the public spat with the army, Gilani claimed his comments had been misinterpreted as he had meant to target only ‘certain functionaries’. This stance convinced no one. There is speculation that Gilani’s backtracking resulted from a secret deal between the government and the army, agreed to in a closed-door meeting between Gilani, Kayani, and Pasha. Such a scenario is not unlikely, considering the unencumbered control the military continues to enjoy over national security, foreign policy and relations with the US.

Scattered reports regarding the alleged secret deal surprised observers who have monitored long-standing tensions between the military leadership and the PPP-led government. The Supreme Court, while toning down its confrontation with PPP leaders, has not withdrawn its cases against the government. Apart from memo-gate, the court is also presiding over a case that will likely order the government to reopen corruption cases pertaining to Swiss accounts held by PPP co-chairman Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari. The court indicted Gilani, and his contempt of court trial – which has overshadowed the memo-gate scandal – will play out over the next few weeks.

Pakistan’s political turmoil comes amidst the population’s worsening socio-economic conditions. Extreme inequality and poverty reflect the endemic corruption of, and catastrophic social policies pursued by, Pakistan’s rulers. Elite cronyism and patronage systems pervade every social, economic, and political aspect of Pakistani life.

The three tiers of the state – the executive, legislature and judiciary – are steeped in corruption and malfeasance. A central problem regarding the crisis scenario being probed by the Supreme Court is that it obscures several other important problems besetting the country. One striking oversight seems to be the judiciary’s indifference towards the army’s role in the memo-gate case, as the memo contains clear accusations regarding the army’s intentions to subvert government authority and derail the democratic process. There is an increasingly prevalent view in the country that the court is dispensing selective justice which is indicative of the deeper power struggles within the state.

Furthermore, the Pakistani police and security forces are rarely perceived to protect the rights of people and the rule of law; indeed, their corruption and torture tactics are notorious and deeply feared by the population. While the media focuses on high-profile show trials, the majority of Pakistanis do not have access to basic necessities, leading to public frustration reaching extraordinary levels. The middle class is shrinking due to rising inflation and the global economic recession and corruption by the PPP is generating tremendous popular anger.

American pressure

At the heart of the mass dissatisfaction is the US-Pakistan relationship that most Pakistanis regard as neo-colonial. There is a widespread sense that Pakistan’s relationship with the United States has not served Pakistani interests and is responsible for a great deal of the current problems, including the suffocating political role of the military due to US support for various military regimes. This has led to a heightened anti-Americanism, particularly since the US invasion of Afghanistan and the expansion of the war, with drone attacks and US special-forces raids, into Pakistan. Nevertheless, the Pakistani elite seems reluctant completely to cut ties with the US because the relationship has been the bedrock of Pakistani rulers’ geopolitical interests.

But increased American pressure on Pakistan to ‘do more’ against terrorism, coupled with mass opposition to US foreign policy, have persuaded the army to ensure it exercises untrammelled control over Pakistan’s relations with Washington – at the expense of the civilian government. The Pakistani elite fears the current government lacks the legitimacy and ability to institute economic restructuring needed to win the confidence of the International Monetary Fund and foreign investors. Furthermore, the elite seems exasperated by the government’s monopoly over corruption and patronage. This is a chronic disposition amongst Pakistan’s oligarchs who feel that when a government is ‘too corrupt’ its appetites need to be tamed and other elites need to retrieve their ‘fair share’ of the pie.

It should be remembered that the PPP did not wholeheartedly back the 2007 mass protests against then-president Pervez Musharraf, because its former leader, Benazir Bhutto, felt the popular feeling of discontent would escape the party’s control. This prompted the PPP to instead approach US President George W. Bush directly to convince him that the PPP would be a more suitable ally in his ‘War on Terror’.

Since assuming power, the PPP has bent over backwards to please Washington, proving it was more pliant to US demands than the military or any other political party. However, the US continued to regard the military as the central player in Pakistani politics, with US officials talking exclusively to the military top brass in major strategic discussions.

Clearly, both the civilian government and the military high command would like to re-establish cordial relations with the US. For the past six decades the alliance with the US has been the cornerstone of the Pakistani national security establishment’s geopolitical strategy. This strategy has, however, been undermined by mass antagonism to US ‘Af-Pak’ policies. The deteriorating ties between the government and the army have also acted as an obstacle for a united Pakistani foreign policy.

Drone war

As Pakistan wallows in perennial uncertainty, the US continues to launch drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The recent resumption of attacks comes after the November NATO strike on a Pakistani military check-post which killed twenty-six soldiers. Following the uproar in Pakistan, the Pentagon conceded that errors had been made, yet justified the attack as ‘self-defence’. The Obama administration’s failure to specify who was being targeted by the drones highlighted that Pakistani sovereignty was irrelevant to US-NATO geo-strategic objectives.

Drone attacks resumed after The New York Times published a report in December claiming that the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, among other insurgent groups, had been bolstered by the halt in US drone strikes. The article concluded that the hiatus allowed for a coalition between the Taliban and sympathetic militias in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Furthermore, it was claimed, the break had opened the door for a deal between the Taliban and the Pakistani government.

This NYT article – and the larger imperial discourse it fed into – acted as the pretext for the US military establishment to by-pass the Obama administration, which was attempting to rebuild trust with Islamabad, and push its military agenda.

While the US continues to justify drone attacks as an efficient way of eliminating ‘terrorists’, the human cost of the strikes is barely recognised. Hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent villagers have lost their lives in these assaults. The rate and intensity of the attacks can be gleaned from a report by the pro-US ‘Long War’ website, which conservatively estimated that US forces carried out more than 180 drone missile attacks in Pakistan in 2010 and 2011.

In the short term, it seems likely that there will be continuity in Pakistani state policy – maintaining a public posture of vocally asserting Pakistani sovereignty while strengthening the alliance with the US. While organs of the Pakistani state continue vigorously to denounce drone attacks in public, the Pakistani military and civilian elites have consented to, and sometimes even requested, these strikes.

Foreign influences

The dominant foreign influence in Pakistan is that of the US which is focused on expanding its hegemony in Central, West, and South-west Asia and in containing the influence of rivals such as China, Russia, and Iran. Washington has successfully retained Pakistan in its geo-strategic orbit, showering it with billions of dollars to enlist the Pakistani military in America’s ‘Af-Pak’ theatre of its ‘War on Terror’. However, US indifference to the Pakistani state’s own geo-strategic interests has produced unfavourable results with regard to combating and curtailing terrorism, and establishing western control and stability in Afghanistan. Indeed, there has been destabilisation in both Afghanistan and Pakistan due to the policies and approach Washington has pursued since is invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The influence on Pakistan of political developments and political actors in Afghanistan cannot be underestimated. Ever since the US-led war in Afghanistan, Pakistan has been a pivotal player because of its age-old relationship and involvement with its western neighbour. Furthermore, a significant consequence of the decade-long war was that it regenerated the long-standing tribal and kinship ties of the Pashtun people along both sides of the artificial Durand Line – the British-imposed border that separates Pakistan from Afghanistan. This has compelled many Pashtuns, who feel disenfranchised in Afghanistan despite comprising sixty percent of the population, to flee across the border into Pakistan. Washington and its NATO allies, along with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, have accused these Afghan Pashtuns of joining forces with their Pakistani Pashtun brethren, and of being primarily responsible for the resistance to foreign occupation.

 Al-Qaeda and the Taliban remain important actors of global significance. The latter have recently been closely monitored by the Pakistani security establishment due to the emergence of its new Pakistani component, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Al-Qaeda is a marginal force and capitalises on the support that the resurgent Taliban receives from an Afghan (and Pakistani) population increasingly disgusted by western occupation and meddling.

A role-player not to be forgotten is Pakistan’s long-standing foe and eastern neighbour – India. While Pakistan did make a significant shift in its policy of low intensity conflict that entailed supporting and arming non-state actors fighting Indian rule in Kashmir, it is still accused of supporting ‘cross-border terrorism’ in India – the most recent being the Mumbai terror attack in November 2008. The Pakistani political establishment firmly believes that India, now a partner of the US, is trying to weaken and destabilise Pakistan by expanding Indian economic and strategic influence in Afghanistan, and by supporting non-state actors inside Pakistan who are engaged in anti-state violence – especially in the province of Balochistan.

Other significant foreign influences in Pakistan include China and Saudi Arabia. China is an old Pakistani ally, and as the Pakistani military becomes frustrated with American heavy-handedness and political pressure, the Pakistani establishment increasingly looks to its alliance with China. Economic and strategic ties between Pakistan and China have greatly expanded over the past year. Saudi Arabia has always served as a useful intermediary between Pakistan and the US – at least since the Afghan ‘jihad’ against the Soviet Union in the 1980s – and the Saudis continue to have considerable influence on Pakistani civilian and military authorities. The Saudi monarchy often mediates and resolves conflicts within the Pakistani elite.

Pakistani nuclear project and security concerns

As might be expected, Pakistan’s nuclear programme is shrouded in secrecy for national security reasons. It has, therefore, always been a difficult task to speculate on the size and nature of control mechanisms over the nuclear programme. On the whole, however, serious and credible experts are convinced that the programme is safe ,secure and firmly under the close watch of the military high command. Indeed, this is what former President Musharraf asserted whenever the US raised concerns. Western governments and think tanks, however, constantly raise concerns about the infiltration of the intelligence services and the army by extremist elements, and predict how these ‘rogue’ individuals may capture Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

The government and military officials firmly maintain that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are secure because of rigorous background checks and continuous monitoring of personnel ‘for extremist sympathies’, and continually stress the military’s scrupulous approach and careful monitoring in this regard.

Nevertheless, The Atlantic and the National Journal, in a recent joint report that cited unnamed sources, asserted that the May 2011 assassination of Osama bin Laden had renewed the fears of sections of the Pakistani establishment that the US planned to dismantle Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. This fear ostensibly has made the weapons more vulnerable as the Pakistani authorities would, according to the claim, be inclined to disperse the weapons stockpile to keep its location hidden. ‘Instead of transporting the nuclear parts in armoured, well-defended convoys,’ the report asserted, ‘the atomic bombs capable of destroying entire cities are transported in delivery vans on congested and dangerous roads.’

Pakistani authorities dismiss the assertions in this and similar reports. But repeated concerns about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons indicate 1) propaganda pressure tactics, or 2) a genuine belief by western powers that the programme is unsafe. Analysts, however, note that it is western intervention that creates the conditions of instability that could place the weapons at the risk of ‘falling into the wrong hands’. Such an eventuality will occur only in the event of serious, irreconcilable fissures within the military high command and officer corps – something which has not yet happened.

Volatile politics

The popularity of the PPP government has plummeted in the past year with persistent accusations of corruption, failure to remedy systemic economic woes and the resurgence of a politicised civil society. Besieged from all sides, the government is struggling to complete its five-year term and speculation is rife about an early election. Opposition parties are gaining ground by tapping into the mass resentment. The leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) – and charismatic former captain of Pakistan’s cricket team, Imran Khan, has held several massive rallies and is emerging as a serious political contender in the upcoming general elections. One of his core platforms is uncompromising opposition to the US ‘War on Terror’. Khan’s position against American policies in the region and in Pakistan specifically, as well as his strong advocacy for national policies that advance greater social and economic justice in the country, has made him the most popular political figure in Pakistan.

The traditional opposition to the PPP is found in ethnic- and religious-based parties. The Pakistani elite, while occasionally patronising this opposition, feels it is neither adequately equipped to ride the storm of IMF austerity measures currently dogging Pakistan’s economy nor to ensure stability in the country. There is now a view that the establishment-elite is giving tacit support to Khan’s political campaign.

Concern over Pakistan’s vulnerable economy coupled with a deteriorating balance of payments situation makes the country a prime candidate for a fresh loan. With a budget deficit estimated at seven percent of the GDP and with an inflation rate of twelve percent, the lax monetary policy of the State Bank of Pakistan has been severely criticised by the IMF which would like to make new loans conditional on stipulations that include a tax increase. Since the government reneged on the loan agreement negotiated in 2008, the IMF has not resumed loan instalments even in the face of the humanitarian crisis that followed the floods of 2010 and 2011. Moreover, the US has displayed an unwillingness to leverage the IMF in loan negotiations due to weakened Pakistan-US relations. Plans to appease the US include promises to reopen the US-NATO supply route from Pakistan to Afghanistan – which was effectively shut down after the November US attack.

For several decades the elite had called on the Pakistan Army to stabilise the country’s political situation. However, there is now reluctance to resort to military intervention and thus derail the democratic dispensation. The military suffers from a credibility deficit as it was ousted from direct rule via a popular movement only four years ago.

Owing to the mercurial nature of Pakistani politics, even the most prudent analysts are wary of ruling out any option. As a ‘senior US official’ posited in a Reuters report, ‘Things have calmed down in the last week or so… but this is Pakistan. Any of the players could do something unexpected.’ This assessment ignores the destabilising impact of the Pakistan-US relationship which culminated in the US forcing Pakistan to ‘do more’ in the ‘War on terror’, thus ravaging the north-west Pashtun-speaking tribal areas in a bid to root out Taliban-aligned militias, and pushing Washington’s neo-liberal policies through support for IMF restructuring.

Conclusion

The current deadlock between the government on the one hand and the Supreme Court and the army on the other reflects a wider, recurring trend in Pakistani politics. While the faces might change, the issues being debated and the powerful interests at stake tend to remain fairly constant.

Power struggles and fissures in leadership have been a perennial feature of the Pakistani state since independence. However, this dynamic has become exponentially dangerous in the face of ever-widening social and economic gaps between the ruling elite and the population. In the wake of new global political realities following the Middle East-North Africa uprisings, the Pakistani elite has become paralysed with fear of the growing discontent emerging from a myriad issues ranging from the ‘War on terror’ to economic instability and the disintegration of public infrastructure.

In an incredibly brazen acknowledgement, US President Barack Obama for the first time recently declared what had already been common knowledge in Pakistan: the US conducts drone strikes inside the country. Such a proclamation demonstrates callous disregard for the wishes of the Pakistani people and utter indifference to both the sovereignty and interests of the Pakistani state. Whether Obama has brought ‘change’ to America is uncertain. But as far as most Pakistanis are concerned, he certainly has brought change to Pakistan – for the worse.

By Junaid S. Ahmed

29 February 2012

@ AMEC

Junaid S. Ahmed teaches in the Faculty of Law and Policy at the Lahore University for Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan

 

Accused US Army whistleblower Bradley Manning entered no plea in the brief opening hearing of military court martial February 23. The 24-year-old Army private also deferred a choice of whether to be tried by military judge or jury.

Manning faces 22 charges under the Espionage Act, including “aiding the enemy,” for allegedly leaking 700,000 military and government files while working as an Army intelligence analyst. The charges carry a maximum sentence of death. While military prosecutors said they were pursuing “only” a term of life in prison during the pre-trial hearing late last year, under court martial, Manning may still be subject to capital punishment.

Many of the files that Manning is charged with leaking document evidence of war crimes committed by US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq; these were published by the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks.

The hearing at Fort Meade, Maryland, lasted less than an hour, during which Manning spoke only a few times, to acknowledge that he understood the course of the proceedings.

Manning’s defense attorney, David Coombs, has pressed for a trial by April. Legal experts have said that by deferring to enter a plea or choose a judge or jury, the defense could have more time to negotiate a deal. Manning has been held in prison for 19 months, during much of which he was tormented in solitary confinement and denied access to legal counsel, exercise, and other basic necessities.

Military judge Colonel Denise Lind concluded by scheduling another session March 15. The government wants to schedule the trial for August 3. By this time, Manning will have been held without being convicted of a crime for more than 800 days. Under military law, courts martial are required to be held within 120 days of arrest. The fate of Manning makes a mockery of the constitutional right to a speedy trial.

The government has sought to break down the young soldier in an effort to arrive at a plea bargain, the terms of which would likely include a reduced sentence in exchange for testimony against WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. The prosecution has asserted that it has evidence in its possession that links Manning directly to Assange (see: “Manning prosecution lays basis for terror charge against WikiLeaks founder Assange”).

The government has also, with no proof, claimed that the leaks have endangered the security of the US and its military personnel by making information available publicly, and therefore accessible to al Qaeda or other enemies of the US government.

Assange is presently fighting extradition to Sweden on trumped-up charges; if he is transferred to Sweden, he faces possible extradition to the US to face a drumhead trial on terrorism charges.

Rather than mount an argument on the basis of opposition to war crimes, censorship, and attacks on democratic rights, Manning’s defense team has focused on the young soldier’s emotional state during the time he was stationed in Iraq, insisting that he never should have been granted access to classified material in the first place. During the pre-trial hearing, Coombs centered his efforts on having the 22 charges reduced to 3, for a sentence of 30 years in prison.

Media reports note that observers of the hearing were sparse, with only 20 in attendance and no more than half a dozen journalists. Another 10 journalists watched the proceeding via closed-circuit television.

US media coverage was conspicuously muted. The Associated Press wire report that was picked up by the major newspapers commented that the “only outburst was as the judge adjourned the hearing.” A 70-year-old anti-war activist from nearby Baltimore, Maryland, asked, “Judge, isn’t a soldier required to report a war crime?” The interruption elicited no response from Lind.

By Naomi Spencer

27 February 2012

WSWS.org