Seven Effective Ways to Defeat Extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan

There are less extreme and more effective ways to fight extremism than by huge military offensives which only feed it. The Taliban remain armed, but they have no heavy armaments. If they have to be fought it can’t be with heavy weapons likely to kill as many civilians as fighters. Providing people with education, legal ways to make a living and healthcare are far more effective ways to win any battle for ‘hearts and minds’ than killing people close to them or leaving them homeless.

Legalise opium poppy production for opiate painkillers, as proposed by the Senlis Trust (1). The British and American governments propose poppy crop destruction in Afghanistan, but the British government have legalised their growth for sale as opiates in the UK (2). Opium poppies grown for heroin provides around 38% of Afghanistan’s annual income (3). For comparison the recent credit crisis has led to a reduction in the size of the British economy of around 1.6% in the last quarter. The effects of reducing the income of Afghanistan, a much poorer country, by 38%, would be mass starvation on a scale even greater than that in the famines of 2001-2. Poppies can grow with very little water in poor soil. Due to the destruction of irrigation systems over decades of civil wars and invasions there are large parts of Afghanistan where no other crop is viable. With less than 7% of Afghanistan now arable land Afghans rely on poppies as a cash crop to earn revenue to import enough food (4). Neither destroying nor legalising poppy crops is likely to eliminate the drugs trade in any case – only move production to other countries. Legalisation for painkillers in Turkey succeeded, but then heroin production moved to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The US government has funded and pushed pesticide spraying of crops from the air in South and Central American countries with ‘Roundup’, a modern version of Agent Orange, which, like Agent Orange, kills not only coca crops but food crops, animals and people. Despite the ‘eradication’ programme cocaine production in Colombia has increased rapidly (5), (6). In Afghanistan it’s the same. Between 2002 and 2008 heroin poppy cultivation doubled from around 75,000 hectares to over 150,000 hectares. There was a small reduction in the area cultivated between 2007 and 2008 (7).

One possible reason, as discovered by many academics and journalists and confirmed by former US Drug Enforcement Agency officers is that the drugs trade has been used for decades by elements of the US military intelligence and CIA as a means of providing funds for ‘covert operations’ and support to groups which congress has refused funding for. The most famous case was in the 1980s when Colonel Oliver North’s operations which involved smuggling arms to the contras in Nicaragua on the same planes that cocaine was smuggled into the US in. This was discovered in investigations into the Iran-Contra scandal. Obama’s Defence Secretary Robert Gate was a high ranking member of the CIA at the time. Although there wasn’t evidence he was directly involved the inquiry found his statements to it “seemed scripted and less than candid” (8), (9), (10),(11), (12). Given all this any eradication programme is likely to go the way the Colombian one has – becoming a war for control of the drugs trade in that country rather than to end it. The Bush administration backed the Uribe government’s ‘war on drugs’ in Colombia despite Senators close to Uribe having been convicted on charges of involvement in the drugs trade and high ranking members of the Colombian military having been reported by the CIA and Human Rights Watch to be working along with right wing paramilitaries involved in murders and drug trafficking (13), (14), (15). Obama in his Presidential campaign suggested he would change Plan Colombia to focus on social and economic causes of the drugs trade and protecting human rights rather than military aid. The reality remains to be seen though and it’s hard to see how this could be done through a government as corrupt as Uribe’s.

Critics of the legalisation for opiates proposal have claimed that painkillers couldn’t provide the same income to farmers as heroin. That’s not true though – it would provide more. Legalisation for painkiller production is a viable alternative which could provide farmers with at least as much income as illegal drugs would, since they only get around 20% of the final sale price from drugs smugglers (14). In 2004 US state department official Robert Charles claimed heroin could sell for 100 times the price poppy farmers are paid by smugglers (though, like all Bush administration claims, this must be treated with scepticism) (15) If fair trade schemes for farmers growing poppies for painkillers were set up they would be likely to make much more from poppy crops grown for painkillers than poppies grown illegally for heroin. Farmers producing a legal product can demand the government ensures they are paid a fair price for it. Farmers growing an illegal product can’t.

Making poppy production illegal and attempts at poppy crop eradication unnecessarily turn many Afghans into criminals and threaten their main source of income. As a result many farmers and smugglers who would otherwise have no reason to fight the central government are hiring people to defend their crops and income by force. Legalisation for painkiller production could end this problem without any more deaths.

One World Bank and UN report on the benefits of poppy crop eradication in Afghanistan came to the stunning conclusion that “The interdiction campaign should lead to a substantial improvement in the balance of payments. The decline in farmers' income should result in a substantial reduction of aggregate demand, including for traded goods. Moreover, the decline in labor costs relative to the price of tradable goods should boost investment and production in the tradable
goods sector. Overall, the resulting improvement in the licit trade balance would largely offset the deterioration in the illicit balance of payments.” (16)

In other words poppy eradication will reduce the income of Afghan farmers and the wages of Afghan farm workers, so they’ll not be able to afford to buy as much, reducing imports and so improving the balance of payments as imports will be reduced relative to exports. This shows how far many official policies are from aiming at benefiting the majority of Afghans.

Ahmed Rashid has pointed out that farm labourers earn $10 a day harvesting opium poppies – five times the average wage in Afghanistan (17). They could earn just as much from poppies grown for painkillers.

Provide foreign aid to build factories and laboratories to refine the opium paste into generic opiate painkillers. This way Afghans and Pakistanis would get skilled jobs and increased personal incomes and government revenues from this manufacturing and export industry, rather than only the income from the raw materials grown by farmers. Their health services would also get cheaper painkillers for their own patients.

End military offensives, including reducing the use of air strikes and unmanned drones. These result in too many civilian deaths and lose support for their governments and democratic values by associating them with the killing of civilians and foreign forces. Air strikes should only be used to defend against Taliban offensives. A single US airstrike in Afghanistan on 5th May 2009 was confirmed to have killed dozens of civilians by International Red Cross aid workers. It was one of many. President Karzai has repeatedly and publicly asked NATO to end its reliance on air strikes which cause heavy civilian casualties, but has been ignored so far. (See this post and sources for it)

Focus any military effort on defending schools and development projects and areas the central government currently controls, not on offensives to clear the Taliban out of areas they currently control. This would encourage those outside the core areas where the central government’s authority is strong to want to join it voluntarily and get the benefits it offers rather than alienate people by force and violence. This would work on the model of the EU rather than NATO, though it does not need to mean an entirely ‘free market’ approach. One possible exception would be to secure control of main roads to prevent attacks by Taliban or bandits on them and permit trade and development within the country.

Ideally Afghan and Pakistan forces should be trained and equipped to do this. Currently they are hampered by poor equipment, low wages and infiltration by the Taliban. The other measures suggested here could help with these problems. The problem with this is that most of the military forces in Iraq are loyal to one warlord or another, involved in human rights abuses such as torture and even in kidnapping, banditry, murder and theft. This includes many of the poorly paid Afghan police. Foreign aid providing increased pay for police would be one way to reduce this problem.

Increase civilian aid rather than military aid, in order to provide jobs, healthcare and education. That is what could win the battle for hearts and minds which military force has so far lost. Families and children who can get a real education rather than only a religious one in a madrassa are less likely to become extreme in their views. People who are provided with viable livelihoods and healthcare by their government and foreign donors are much less likely to become supporters or members of extremist groups than people who have lost friends and family members in offensives by government and foreign forces. Killing people’s relatives and friends causes them extreme suffering. It should not be surprising that it creates extreme reactions. Much military aid is probably still being used by elements of the Pakistan and Afghanistan militaries as it has in the past for their own aims – such as training Islamic groups such as the Taliban to help counter Indian influence or ‘threats’ in the case of Pakistan’s ISI military intelligence ( 18) – (26).

Make aid to the Afghan and Pakistan governments conditional on increased minimum wages for the poorest. Aid which only benefits the wealthy and powerful will not help or persuade the majority of Afghans and Pakistanis.

Also make aid conditional on increases in wages for Afghan and Pakistani police and soldiers to amounts as high as those currently paid by the Taliban, Al Qa’ida and other warlords. One lesson from Iraq was that people in countries suffering dire poverty will fight for whoever pays most. The Sunni ‘awakening’ militias began turning on Al Qa’ida after the US offered aid to fund pay of $300 a month for each militia member.

Some of them were even former Al Qa’ida fighters, who were fighting more for money to survive than anything else. When this US aid ended in November 2008 there was a resurgence of car bombing attacks against Shia within months Shia.

It should be noted though that while the surge and the ‘Awakening’ militias reduced attacks on coalition forces sectarian killings of Shia by Sunnis and Sunnis by Shia actually increased during it, though they fell after it. The ‘El Salvador’ option of hiring locals to torture and murder the opposition was promoted by many former Pentagon and CIA staff. The fact that occupying powers have always sought to divide the people of occupied countries and turn them against each other to stop them uniting against the occupiers is also worth remembering.

Any solution focusing on the military and policing over political negotiations, peace settlements and social and economic solutions is at risk of making things worse rather than better.

(1) = Senlis Council (2007) ‘Poppy for Medicine - Licensing poppy for the production of essential medicines: an integrated counter-narcotics, development, and counter-insurgency model for Afghanistan’, http://www.poppyformedicine.net/ and http://www.icosgroup.net/

(2) = Herald 03 Sep 2008 ‘UK farmers allowed to cultivate poppies for morphine’,
http://www.theherald.co.uk/search/display.var.2439164.0.uk_farmers_allowed_to_cultivate_poppies_for_morphine.php

(3) = CARE & CIC March 2005 ‘TOO EARLY TO DECLARE
SUCCESS: Counter-Narcotics Policy in Afghanistan’, page 2,
http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/APCITY/UNPAN022664.pdf,
Cited by Ahmed Rashid (2008) ‘Descent Into Chaos’ , Chapter 15, page 325

(4) = Ahmed Rashid (2008) ‘Descent Into Chaos’ , Chapter 15, pages 317-319

(5) = Observer 17 Jun 2001 ‘How global battle against drugs risks backfiring’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/jun/17/usa.drugstrade

(6) = Washington Post 19 Jun 2008 ‘Coca Cultivation Rises In Colombia, U.N. Says’,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/18/AR2008061802950.html

(7) = BBC News 26 Aug 2008 ‘UN reports Afghan opium decline’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7582018.stm (see graph of heroin production based on UN figures)

(8) = Levine , Michael (2000) Deep Cover uPublish.com , 2000 (Michael Levine is a former US Drug Enforcement Agency officer)

(9) = Scott , Peter Dale & Marshall , Jonathan(1998) Cocaine Politics University of California Press , LA & London ,1998

(10) = McCoy , Alfred (1991) The Politics of Heroin - CIA complicity in the global drug trade Lawrence Hill , New York ,1991

(11) = Cockburn , Alexander & St.Clair , Jeffrey (1998) Whiteout - The CIA , Drugs & The Press Verso , London & New York , 1998

(12) = FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR
IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS, Volume I: Investigations and Prosecutions,
Lawrence E. Walsh, Independent Counsel, August 4, 1993, Chapter 16 – Robert M. Gates,
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/chap_16.htm

(13) = Guardian 27 Mar 2007, ‘The politicians and the drugs cartels - scandal engulfs Colombia's elite’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/mar/27/colombia.internationalnews

(14) = Human Rights Watch 2002(a) ‘Colombia Human Rights Certification IV’,
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/americas/colombia-certification4.htm

(15) = Guardian 18 May 2007, ‘Colombian leader denies link to paramilitaries’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/colombia/story/0,,2082667,00.html

(14) = UN Office on Drugs and Crime & The World Bank ‘Afghanistan’s Drug Industry’,
http://www.unodc.org/pdf/afg/publications/afghanistan_drug_industry.pdf
(cited by Ahmed Rashid (2008) Descent into Chaos, Chapter 15, p326)

(15) = Voice of America (VOA) News 27 Feb 2004 ‘US Officials See Link Between Terrorists and Narcotics Trade in Afghanistan’, http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2004-02/a-2004-02-27-2-US.cfm?moddate=2004-02-27

(16) = UN Office on Drugs and Crime ‘Afghanistan’s Drug Industry’ & The World Bank,
http://www.unodc.org/pdf/afg/publications/afghanistan_drug_industry.pdf
(cited by Ahmed Rashid (2008) Descent into Chaos, Chapter 2, p40)

(17) = Ahmed Rashid (2008) ‘Descent Into Chaos’ , Chapter 15, page 325

(18) = New York Times 09 Oct 2001 , 'Pakistani Is Already Calling on U.S. to End Airstrikes Quickly', http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D01E3D9113CF93AA35753C1A9679C8B63

(19) = Ahmed Rashid (2008) , ‘Descent Into Chaos’, Penguin, London & NY, 2008, (hardback edition) especially Chapter 17 and esp 367-368 and note 35 on page 452 (notes for ch17) on June 2006 internal NATO and Afghan intelligence report on Pakistan’s ISI military intelligence training, funding , arming of Taliban in Pakistan for attacks in Pakistan , but also pages 77-78, 48, 50, 114, 116 and rest of Ch17

(20) = Telegraph 06 Oct 2006 ‘Nato's top brass accuse Pakistan over Taliban aid’,http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1530756/Nato's-top-brass-accuse-Pakistan-over-Taliban-aid.html

(21) = Independent 14 March 2006, ‘Pakistanis accused of aiding Taliban with missile parts’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/pakistanis-accused-of-aiding-taliban-with-missile-parts-469798.html

(22) = Guardian 19 May 2006, ‘Pakistan sheltering Taliban, says British officer’,http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/may/19/pakistan.alqaida

(23) = Times 8 Oct 2006 ‘Britain says Pakistan is hiding Taliban chief’,http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article665054.ece

(24) = Times 21 Jab 2007 ‘Pakistan accused of backing Taliban’,http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/21/asia/web.0121pakistan.php?page=1

(25) = Times 27 Dec 2007 ‘Main suspects are warlords and security forces’,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article3100052.ece

(26) = IHT 01 Oct 2008 ‘Spanish report ties Pakistan spy agency to Taliban’,
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/10/01/europe/EU-Spain-Pakistan-Taliban.php

Mistakes from Iraq to Af-Pak

The Obama administration’s offensives in Afghanistan and Pakistan fail to learn the lessons of the failure of the same methods in Iraq in 2004

The Obama administration’s reliance on airstrikes and military offensives in Pakistan and Afghanistan suggest it’s not learned from failures in Iraq in 2004 where the Coalition and Iraqi army ‘won’ in battles for control of Fallujah, Samarra and other cities, without ever making any progress in the war. Any full scale military offensive using heavy weaponry such as air forces and artillery kills at least as many civilians as combatants. This is true whether you look at Israeli offensives in the occupied territories, Russian ones in Chechnya (until a few years ago), Coalition offensives in Iraq or current NATO, Afghan army or Pakistani ones. Of course the fact that armies are frequently ordered to fire on ambulances and anyone else present – as reported by both Iraqis and western journalists and aid workers who were eye-witnesses of the April 2004 assault on Fallujah (1), (2), (3), (4).

The assumptions involved seem to be that anyone left is a terrorist and that if someone’s got to do it’s better that it’s one of ‘them’ than one of ‘our guys’. Whether you choose to blame the militaries for indiscriminate fire or the guerrillas and terrorist groups for hiding among civilians the result is the same though. Military offensives kill at least one civilian for every combatant. Killing the people closest to them is not a great way to win anyone’s heart or mind, nor is such an extreme action likely to make them more moderate in their beliefs or their actions.

That’s why, apart from the obvious moral issues involved in using methods you know from experience will kill as many innocent people as guilty ones, superior military force is worthless in a war against a much weaker enemy.

When fighting irregulars using overwhelming military force each battle won loses the war by killing so many civilians and alienating so many survivors that the insurgents get more recruits and more supporters than they lost. That (plus lots of massacres of civilians using napalm, carpet bombing and ‘free fire zones) is why the Americans lost in Vietnam (5). It’s why the Soviets lost in Afghanistan. It’s why the American offensives in Iraq in 2004 ended up going round in circles taking and re-taking the same cities – Fallujah for instance twice in the same year, first in April and then again in November. It’s one of the main reasons that NATO and its allies are losing in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Everyone will be familiar with the condemnation of ‘cowardly’ insurgents for ‘hiding among civilians’. A force that has no air force, artillery or tanks doesn’t stand a chance in open combat against regular militaries that have all three. So it is forced to use guerrilla or terrorist tactics – not wearing uniforms and escaping or blending in among civilians when a major assault by the regular forces arrives. We can condemn this as cowardice if we want but the reality is that it’s the only way a much weaker force can fight a much stronger one and these tactics were used by French and Italian partisans against the Germans in World War Two and by Zionist groups in the British Mandate of Palestine before the foundation of Israel in the 1948 war (6). They do not mark a side as morally inferior or superior, only as militarily weaker. They are a breach of the Geneva conventions, but then so are many of the methods used by regular militaries.

Some claim that the Coalition ended the war in Iraq after General Petraeus’ surge. There was certainly a reduction in attacks on Coalition forces during the surge, but there was actually an increase in sectarian killings by Iraqis of other Iraqis. This was because the surge did not reduce attacks on Coalition forces because there were more of them in Iraq, but because the US began paying Iraqis more than Al Qa’ida or the militias or organised crime could offer to fight for Iraqi government ‘awakening’ militias. Some of the same people joining these militias had previously fought for Sunni groups fighting the Coalition – some of them had even fought for Al Qa’ida (7), (8), (9), (10).

Wars and poverty result in increased support for extreme sectarian ideologies and violent crime replacing jobs as the main source of income. The presence of foreign troops – and ones not of the same religion as the majority in that country - only makes this problem worse, because it boosts nationalism and fundamentalism.

The latest NATO air strike in Afghanistan was confirmed by International Red Cross staff to have killed dozens of civilians. The strikes went on for 14 hours, long after Red Cross staff told NATO there were civilians present, which should have been obvious anyway; and also bombed compounds full of civilians 8 kilometres from ground fighting. There are also reports of the use of white phosphorus wounding and killing civilians. (11), (12), (13), (14), (15), (16).

There are claims from Afghan police that the Taliban forced villagers to stay with them in houses or compounds they’d occupied (17). Even if that turns out to be true it can’t justify razing three villages to the ground with air strikes and killing over 100 civilians in order to kill enemy fighters though. How would we react if, when British and American civilians were taken hostage, our governments responded by having the building they were held in bombed to dust with everyone inside it in order to avoid casualties among those fighting the hostage takers? It’s unlikely we would praise the decision as the right thing to do, so, unless we want to send the message that Afghan and Pakistan civilians’ lives don’t matter to us we shouldn’t do the same there either.

The US military denies reports of over 100 civilians killed by the strikes but they have been proven to have taken place in many other cases in which the US military flatly denied civilians had died or claimed the numbers were lower. Independent investigations by Human Rights Watch and the UN found past US military investigations of other air strikes which killed dozens of civilians were ‘deeply flawed’ and inaccurate (18), (19), (20), (21), (22), (23).

US Defence Secretary Robert Gates felt it necessary to make up a story about the Taliban running from house to house throwing grenades in order to kill civilians and then blame it on NATO air strikes. To be fair he did withdraw this fairy tale later and he’s probably got into bad habits what with having been involved in white-washing CIA involvement in drugs and arms running during the Iran-Contra inquiry and then being part of the Bush administration. (23a), (23b)

President Karzai of Afghanistan has repeatedly publicly demanded that air strikes end after many strikes causing civilian deaths over years, but he’s been repeatedly been ignored. His latest demand was refused on the grounds that it would risk the lives of Afghan Army forces (24), (25), (26), (27). So Afghan civilian lives aren’t a concern and the Afghan government has no right to say what foreign troops can do in it’s country or what methods should be used to fight the Taliban? This makes a mockery of claims that NATO are only in Afghanistan at the request of the elected government and provides more propaganda to the Taliban who can point to Karzai as a powerless puppet of the US. If it really respects the Afghan government as a democratically elected one NATO has to act in accordance with the wishes of the elected President and Afghan public opinion, both of which oppose air strikes.

Making people homeless refugees also kills indirectly through lack of clean water, sanitation, food and medical care. Making people destitute refugees also creates a huge pool of potential criminals, insurgents or terrorists. Hundreds of thousands fled the cities assaulted by the coalition in Iraq in 2004 and a cholera epidemic followed in 2007 (28), (29). Half a million people are now fleeing the Pakistan military offensive in the North-West of the country (30). Since the Soviet invasion in 1979 refugee camps in Pakistan full of homeless Afghans have been the main recruiting grounds for the different factions in Afghanistan. If fighting in Pakistan continues they will be full of Pakistani recruits for Pakistan’s Taliban too, especially as some are grieving family members killed in US missile strikes and Pakistan army air and artillery strikes (31) , (32).

While the Obama administration has now replaced the most senior US general in Afghanistan and announced a new strategy it remains to be seen if that strategy is significantly different from the Bush administration’s, which was also meant to combine non-military reconstruction and development with ‘counter-insurgency’. The new US commander in Afghanistan, General David Kiernan, was involved in ‘special operations’ in Afghanistan and Iraq and was head of Special Operations commanding units involved in torture in Iraq, including at Camp Nama –where methods included punching prisoners in the spine till they passed out and kicking them in the stomach till they vomited (33), (34).

(1) = BBC News 23 Apr 2004 ‘Picture emerges of Falluja siege’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3653223.stm

(2) = Guardian 17 Apr 2004 ‘'Getting aid past US snipers is impossible'’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/apr/17/iraq

(3) = Iraq Body Count 26 Oct 2004 ‘No Longer Unknowable: Falluja's April Civilian Toll is 600’,
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/reference/press-releases/9/

(4) = B’Tselem Press Release 31 Dec 2007, ‘131 Palestinians who did not participate in the hostilities killed by Israel's security forces in 2007’, http://www.btselem.org/english/Press_Releases/20071231.asp

(5) = Marilyn B. Young (1991), The Vietnam Wars , HarperCollins, New York , 1991

(6) = Benny Morris (1999), ‘Righteous Victims : A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict 1881-1999’, John Murray Publishers, London, 2000, Hardback Edition, pages 147, 173-179

(7) = Guardian 10 Nov 2007, 'Meet Abu Abed: the US's new ally against al-Qaida', http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/nov/10/usa.alqaida

(8) = Sunday Times 25 Nov 2007, ‘American-backed killer militias strut across Iraq’, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article2937104.ece

(9) = Guardian 20 Dec 2007, 'A surge of their own: Iraqis take back the streets', http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,2229892,00.html

(10) = NPR 17 July 2008, 'U.S. Trains Ex-Sunni Militias as Iraqi Police', http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11240000

(11) = ICRC News Release 06 May 2009 ‘Afghanistan: ICRC confirms dozens killed in air strikes’, http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/afghanistan-news-060509!OpenDocument

(12) = Independent 06 May 2009 ‘Afghans riot over air-strike atrocity’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/afghans-riot-over-airstrike-atrocity-1681070.html

(13) = Independent 08 May 2009 ‘US denies 147 Afghan civilians killed’,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/us-denies-147-afghan-civilians-killed-1681620.html

(14) = IOS 10 May 2009 ‘Patrick Cockburn: Who killed 120 civilians? The US says it's not a story’, http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/patrick-cockburn-who-killed-120-civilians-the-us-says-its-not-a-story-1682310.html

(15) = Independent 06 May 2009 ‘'Dozens die' in Afghan air strikes says Red Cross’,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/dozens-die-in-afghan-air-strikes-says-red-cross-1679930.html

(16) = guardian.co.uk 10 May 2009 ‘Phosphorus claim after fatal air strikes in Afghanistan’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/10/afghanistan-attacks-phosphorus-investigation

(17) = See (15) above

(18) = PBS 27 Aug 2008 ‘U.N. Says 90 Civilians Killed in Afghan Airstrike’,
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/asia/july-dec08/afghan_08-27.html

(19) = Washington Post 29 Aug 2008 ‘Pentagon Reports U.S. Airstrike Killed 5 Afghan Civilians, Not 90’, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/28/AR2008082802203.html

(20) = Guardian.co.uk 28 Nov 2007 ‘US air strikes kill civilian roadworkers in Afghanistan’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/nov/28/afghanistan.davidbatty

(21) = Guardian.co.uk 11 Jul 2008 ‘US air strike wiped out Afghan wedding party, inquiry finds’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/11/afghanistan.usa

(22) = Human Rights Watch 15 Jan 2009 ‘Afghanistan: US Investigation of Airstrike Deaths ‘Deeply Flawed’’, http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/01/15/afghanistan-us-investigation-airstrike-deaths-deeply-flawed

(23) = Human Rights Watch 08 Sep 2008 ‘“Troops in Contact” - Airstrikes and Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan’, http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2008/09/08/troops-contact-0

(23a) =NYT 07 May 2009 ‘U.S. Admits Civilians Died in Afghan Raids’,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/world/asia/08afghan.html?_r=2&hpw

(23b) = FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR
IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS, Volume I: Investigations and Prosecutions,
Lawrence E. Walsh, Independent Counsel, August 4, 1993, Chapter 16 – Robert M. Gates,
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/chap_16.htm

(24) = CBS News 31 Aug 2008 ‘Bombing Afghanistan
- Afghan President Tells 60 Minutes That Too Many Civilians Are Being Killed’,
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/25/60minutes/main3411230.shtml?source=RSSattr=HOME_3411230

(25) = Washington Post 06 Nov 2008 ‘End Civilian Deaths, Karzai Tells Obama -
Afghan Says Airstrike Killed Dozens’, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/05/AR2008110504052.html

(26) = AFP 8 May 2009 ‘Afghan leader demands air strikes end’,
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090508/wl_afp/afghanistanunrestuscivilians

(27) = AFP 9 May 2009 ‘Air strike end would harm Afghan troops: US official’,
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090509/pl_afp/afghanistanunrestuscivilians

(28) = Congressional Research Service 13 Feb 2009 ‘Iraqi Refugees and Internally Displaced People : A Deepening Humanitarian Crisis’, http://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33936.pdf

(29) = NYT 12 Sep 2007 ‘Cholera Epidemic Infects 7,000 People in Iraq’,
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/world/middleeast/12iraq.html?_r=1

(30) = ICRC News Release 07 May 2009 ‘Pakistan: ICRC priming itself to address escalating humanitarian crisis’, http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/pakistan-news-070509!OpenDocument

(31) = AP / Independent on Sunday ‘Nine killed in US missile strike in Pakistan’,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/nine-killed-is-us-missile-strike-in-pakistan-1681973.html

(32) = channel 4 News (UK) 11 May 2009 ‘Swat valley death toll rises’,
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/politics/international_politics/swat+valley+death+toll+rises/3140157 ;
(watch video to see interviews with refugees whose family members were killed in army offensive)

(33) = BBC News 11 May 2009 ‘US sacks top Afghanistan general’,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8044735.stm

(34) = NYT 19 Mar 2006 ‘In Secret Unit's 'Black Room,' a Grim Portrait of U.S. Abuse’,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/international/middleeast/19abuse.html?ei=5088&en=e8755a4b031b64a1&ex=1300424400&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

Thatcher didn’t promote freedom, nor was she a success at anything except getting re-elected

Thatcherism failed as anything but an electoral project based on mindless nationalist demagoguery – it’s no longer even any use for getting re-elected

There have been many paeans to Maggie on the thirtieth anniversary of her election as British Prime Minister in 1979. Some, like Mark Smith’s in the Herald, claim that she was a ‘freedom fighter’ on the grounds that she said she was. Note to political analysts – politicians often lie.

Among all of the rose-tinted eulogies Bruce Anderson’s piece in the Independent stands out for actually praising her for having no knowledge of history, as if that was a virtue. Bruce seems to have little knowledge of even the small part of history which he’s writing about – Thatcher’s period as Prime Minister of the UK.

It’s worth recounting the actual history of 1979 to 1991. Useful sources include ‘Dancing with Dogma’, a book by one of Thatcher’s opponents in the Conservative party, Ian Gilmour MP, who Anderson castigates for only knowing the “history of failure”. Since Thatcher as Prime Minister failed at everything except getting re-elected (and only succeeded in that due to an electoral system which allows parties with a minority of the vote to get a majority of seats in parliament) I’m happy to accept Gilmour as one authority on the period.

Thatcher came into office promising to reduce unemployment – then increased it to an unprecedented figure of over 3 million by a party political manoeuvre, destroying the country’s coal, steel and ship-building industries in order to destroy the trade unions their employees were in, in order to weaken the Labour party. The lie that these industries were going anyway was highlighted by massive imports of coal and steel from abroad.

Nor did she replace them with investment in new industries – like wind, wave, solar or tidal power. Instead we got nuclear, which provides almost no jobs but plenty of costly, dangerous waste to dispose of and plenty of deaths from leukaemia.

Gilmour in his book ‘Dancing with Dogma’ points out that Thatcher only increased the efficiency of Britain’s manufacturing firms by destroying 95% of them, with only the most efficient 5% surviving. Gilmour also showed that average annual economic growth rates from 1979-1990 in the UK, at 1.8%, were actually lower than those from 1968-1979, at 2.2%. So even on Thatcher’s own narrow, blinkered standard of ‘success’ - economic growth and efficiency - she failed (1).

Before the Falklands war the promise of reduced unemployment versus the reality of a massive increase in it had made Thatcher the least popular British Prime Minister since polling began (2). Both Thatcher and the equally unpopular Argentine military junta saw a ‘patriotic’ war over the Falklands or ‘Malvinas’ as a way to restore their popularity.

A couple of years earlier under Callaghan then foreign secretary David Owen had responded to Argentinian sabre rattling over the islands by sending more British warships to the South Atlantic to deter any Argentinian attack (3), (4).

Thatcher in 1982 responded to a similar situation by withdrawing the last Royal Navy patrol ship from the area – a clear signal to the junta that Britain wasn’t prepared to fight for the islands – and a trap. Thatcher and the junta both got their pointless, unnecessary patriotic war and hundreds of people on both sides died so these vain manipulators could gamble on staying in power. Thatcher’s gamble paid off for her. She won the 1983 election at the cost of hundreds of easily avoidable deaths.

Thatcher, like Reagan is also often praised for promoting ‘freedom’ worldwide. In fact Thatcher’s government backed Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile as it tortured and ‘disappeared’ thousands, South African apartheid as it did the same to black South Africans and white dissidents - and Saddam Hussein as he massacred the kurds in the Anfal campaign, right up to Halabja. The Saudi monarchy - corrupt torturing dictators involved in promoting religious fundamentalist terrorism - were another favourite due to lucrative arms for oil deals complete with bribes for the politicians and company executives involved. To be fair they have been a favourite of all British governments for the same reasons.

Reagan’s regime did the same, also backing the terrorism of the Contras and other right-wing terrorists and military dictatorships in South and Central America as they murdered and raped their own people along with American nuns. The Reagan administration did nothing to avenge their deaths.

‘Freedom’ for Thatcher and Reagan meant the same as it meant for Bush junior – freedom for big companies and billionaires – meaning supporting any government that had a free market economic policy no matter how undemocratic and murderous, while condemning and attacking any dictatorship or democracy that tried to run their country primarily in the interests of the majority of their own population – like for instance the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

Then in 1991 US President George W. Bush, who, like Thatcher before him, was sinking in the polls due to unemployment, decided to set a trap for his ally Saddam like Thatcher’s earlier trap for Galtieri. The US ambassador to Iraq was directed to tell Saddam that “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait”. Six days before the invasion US State Department Official John Kelly told congress that "the US has no intention of defending Kuwait if it is attacked by Iraq". Then, when Saddam thought he had the green light to invade Kuwait the way he’d invaded Iran with the backing of world powers, the trap was sprung. President George H W Bush rejected any possibility of negotiations with his former ally on an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. Thousands of retreating Iraqi forced conscripts were massacred in the Coalition air strikes along with tens of thousands of civilians inside Iraq. Thatcher, on her last political legs after the poll tax and perhaps hoping for another last minute political reprieve through mindless militarism, committed British troops to the Coalition and urged Bush to continue – ‘don’t go wobbly on me now George’. (5), (6), (7), (8), (9), (10)

The Thatcher government, like its Labour predecessor, also approved the use of diplock courts – i.e trial without jury – and torture by the British military in Northern Ireland, with methods like beating, sensory deprivation and the use of dogs which surfaced again in Iraq from 2003. John McGuffin’s book ‘The Guineau Pigs’ is a disturbing eye-opener on this.

Amnesty International reports are among the many sources detailing how British military intelligence and the RUC police force in Northern Ireland also colluded with ‘Loyalist’ or Unionist terrorist groups like the UVF and LVF, handing them hit lists of suspected terrorists along with suspected ‘sympathisers’ and lawyers who had represented suspected IRA members – and also colluding in sectarian murders of entirely innocent parties like lawyer Patrick Finucane, murdered by loyalist terrorists directed to him by British military intelligence in 1989, Catholic man Robert Hamill, kicked to death by ‘loyalist’ thugs – and his family’s lawyer Rosemary Nelson, killed in a car bombing in 1999. Thatcher’s governments renewed the 1974 ‘Prevention of Terrorism Act’ which allowed indefinite detention without fair trial. The IRA and its political wing Sinn Feinn gained increasing support as a result of these injustices and the Thatcher and Major governments refusal to negotiate with them, despite their own atrocities against civilians. This began before Thatcher became Prime Minister and continued afterwards, but once again makes any claim that Thatcher promoted ‘freedom’ in Britain hard to back up with evidence.

Thatcher shared an ignorance of history with Tony Blair, who also dragged his country into a totally un-necessary war which caused many needless deaths. Blair at least had the sense to realise the Northern Ireland conflict could only be solved by negotiation and compromise, even if he was blind to applying the same principle internationally.

I remember seeing a Tibetan Buddhist tapestry on TV showing Thatcher in one of the inner circles of hell. Given her actions it seemed appropriate.

Thatcher is often lauded for having given Britain it’s ‘greatness’ back in the sense of national pride; so a false sense of the ‘greatness’ and importance of their nation over ‘lesser’ ones combined with unthinking prejudice against people of other nationalities of the kind peddled by demagogues from Napoleon and Hitler to Mladic, Karadzic, Tudjman, Chirac and Dubya.

Margaret Thatcher’s legacy is one of cynical manipulation of false ‘patriotism’, destroying livelihoods and losing lives for purely selfish ends. Even at the height of her popularity though she never even had the support of the majority of British voters. She achieved massive parliamentary majorities on the support of around 40% of voters and about a third of the total electorate (11). Yet, like Tony Blair, she behaved as though the vast majority of the electorate had voted for her; as though this gave her a blank cheque to carry out policies that weren’t even in her party’s election manifesto; and as though the interests, views and beliefs of her critics and opponents were of no consequence. Other people were not there to be persuaded or negotiated with or debated with but to be forced to submit to her beliefs and interests. Some ‘freedom’.

Since then her policies have lost even more supporters. So why do so many politicians still adopt the failed rhetoric and failed policies of Thatcherism when they’re not even vote winners any more? The majority of the public rejected it long ago as the confidence trick it always was. It seems the leaders of the major parties are living in the past, relying on the political equivalent of an actual ‘sunset industry’ which didn’t even work when it was a ‘sunrise’ one. As long as they do that they don’t deserve our votes.

(1) = Gilmour, Ian (1992) ‘Dancing with Dogma’ – Britain under Thatcherism , Simon & Schuster , London , 1992 , p72

(2) = Lenman, B. P. (1992) The Eclipse of Parliament: Appearance and Reality in British Politics since 1914 (London: Edward Arnold)

(3) = Freedman, Lawrence (2005) ‘Official History of the Falklands Campaign Volume 1’,
Routledge, 2005, chapters 8 – 9

(4) = Sunday Times 27 Mar 2005 ‘Comment: David Owen: We all benefited from Jim's honesty and generosity’,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/article438515.ece

(5) = Bennis , Phyllis & Moushabeck , Michael (Editors) (1992) ‘Beyond the Storm’ ; Cannongate Press , London , 1992, pages 326-355, 391-396

(6) = Aburish , Said K (1997) ‘A Brutal Friendship’ Indigo , London , 1997 & 1998

(7) = Aburish , Said K (2000) ‘Saddam Hussein - The Politics of Revenge’ Bloomsbury , London , 2000 & 2001

(8) = Chomsky, Noam (1994) ‘World Orders , Old and New’ Pluto Press , London , 1994

(9) = Pilger , John (1998) ‘Hidden Agendas’ Vintage , London , 1998, pages 29-30, 49-53 ,614

(10) = Blum , William (1995) ‘Killing Hope’ Common Courage Press , Monroe , Maine , 1995, pages 334-338

(11) = Butler, David (1989) ‘British General elections since 1945’,Blackwell, Oxford and NY 1989

Not All Heroes

Drowning teenagers and beating waiters to death doesn’t make someone a hero just because they were wearing uniform and obeying orders at the time. Those soldiers who testified against torturers and murderers, despite the threats, are genuine heroes though.

There are even more parades for ‘our heroes’ returning from Afghanistan and Iraq than usual recently.

The trouble is some of those they’re cheering are anything but heroes.

Forcing a teenager who can’t swim into deep water to drown and then throwing bricks at them is not the act of a hero, whether those who carry it out are thugs in Britain or British soldiers obeying orders in Iraq and whether the teenager is Iraqi or British. Neither is beating and kicking someone to death.

Welcoming troops back from foreign wars as ‘heroes’ is blatant propaganda aimed at preventing criticism of governments’ decisions to fight un-necessary wars and approve, order or turn a blind eye to war crimes including murder and torture – and at presenting blind obedience to whoever happens to be in power as a virtue. Nor is just doing whatever you’re ordered to do without question heroic, any more than it is for Al Qaeda suicide bombers or than it was for SS guards who ran concentration camps to obey orders to gas Jews.

Shane Owoo, a 16 year old boy in Britain, was forced into a claypit pool for a ‘punishment swim’ for stealing a bike in 2007. His two tormentors pushed him back into the water whenever he tried to get out and threw stones at him. He drowned. They were both jailed for manslaughter (1).

Ahmed Jabar Karheem, a 15 year old Iraqi in Basra, Iraq, in May 2003, was forced into a tidal canal by British soldiers acting on the orders of their superiors to punish looters. They, like Owoo’s killers, could soon tell that he was unable to swim, but let him drown anyway. One of the four soldiers considered saving Karheem but was persuaded by the other three to let him drown. Some of them threw bricks and stones at Karheem and three other Iraqis they had beaten before forcing them into the canal at gunpoint. Karheem also drowned. All four of the men responsible for his death were released by a British Court Martial without facing any jail sentence. Nor were any of their superiors ever charged for giving the orders – unsurprising since a court martial in which the military cover up for the military bears no resemblance to a real trial (2), (3).

Grant McDonald was kicked and beaten to death by two men in Edinburgh,Scotland in 2005. His murderers were both jailed for 12 years (Not long enough in my opinion) (4).

Baha Mousa, an Iraqi waiter, was one of many Iraqis beaten and kicked for days and nights on end by squads of British soldiers of the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment, working in shifts as torturers in 2003. Despite members of the regiment and other members of the British armed forces coming forward as witnesses no-one was convicted over his death. No proper trial by jury ever took place, only another Court Martial sham organised by the army and the British Ministry of Defence. The officer who directly oversaw his death was promoted and began training new recruits being sent to Afghanistan. Once again the government line was ‘a few bad apples’ while some of the Conservative party opposition claimed not even the soldiers involved should ever have had to face charges (5), (6), (7),(8),(9).

Can anyone seriously say that the way British troops tortured and killed Iraqis in these cases was heroic, or even justifiable?

I recognise the bravery of risking your life for a cause you believe in. That doesn’t automatically make the cause right, nor any methods used to try to further it right. If it did the July 7th bombers would all be ‘heroes’ too.

I accept our soldiers in Iraq were in a stressful situation. What were Iraqi civilians in? A fun fair? ; Or a situation where they could be killed or dragged off for torture by any side at any time? Being in a stressful situation does not excuse anything and everything.

So, while I won’t shout at entire regiments as if all were equally guilty, or condemn every soldier who ended up firing on innocent people at a checkpoint due to fear of suicide bombers, I won’t give in to propaganda to treat all our soldiers as ‘heroes’ who are beyond criticism and who have done the right thing by obeying orders without question either.

On the BBC and ITV people who had come to the welcome home ceremonies claimed that it wasn’t the job of soldiers or the public to decide whether what they’d been ordered to do was right or not. Their job was just to go where they were sent and do what they were told to do – and the role of everyone else was to support them unconditionally.

Sorry, but that’s how the Nazis got away with so many terrible crimes for so long, because people blindly followed government propaganda and believed what they wanted to believe – that their country and its people were innately good and superior and anyone they were fighting or targeting was innately evil. It wasn’t so much that they had no source of information to tell them otherwise as that they didn’t want to hear anything else, so wouldn’t listen to it.

The British and American governments and militaries have not committed a Holocaust against Iraqis, but they are guilty of systematic war crimes – torture and killing civilians, sometimes by not caring whether they kill civilians (as when firing cluster munitions and new versions of napalm into the middle of cities) and sometimes by targeting civilians (as reported by journalists and aid workers who witnessed it in the assaults on Fallujah for instance).

To obey without question is not the mark of a hero, but of a dupe, an unusually stupid person or a totally amoral psychopath who doesn’t care about right or wrong, only about rewards or punishments. To support any war any government of your country calls for without question in order to ‘support the troops’ (many of whom don’t want to be there) is just as wrong.

Pointing to torture and murders by Saddam’s regime or Iraqi militias or Al Qa’ida does not change or justify any of this – and it never will. The same goes for Afghanistan, where torture and the killing of civilians are also common practice by both sides (10), (11), (12), (13).

If we want to understand why the July 7th bombers and the attempted attack on Glasgow airport took place we only have to follow the same flawed logic our government, military and many of our soldiers have. They beat Baha Mousa to death because a member of their regiment was killed in a roadside bombing and they wanted revenge. So they took revenge on random Iraqi civilians. The people who attacked us did so because other Muslims – like Baha Mousa and Ahmed Karheem – had been murdered by British troops and they wanted revenge – and took it against random British civilians. In both cases the flawed logic is that killings of any members of our group – British citizens or Muslims – can be justifiably avenged by killing any member of the other group. They can’t. British lives are not more valuable than Iraqi or Afghan or Pakistani lives. Muslim lives are not more valuable than non-Muslim lives. All British people are not responsible for the actions of the British government and military. All Muslims or Iraqis are not responsible for the actions of every other Muslims or Iraqi.

The only excuse possible for some of our own soldiers and some Al Qa’ida recruits is that they had been given no education and/or had their heads thoroughly filled with propaganda by the government, their superiors and the lies and half-truths churned out by the British tabloids and their Muslim equivalents. The superiors giving the orders and the members of government and opposition parties who approved their actions or looked the other way have no such excuse.

There are some of our soldiers who undeniably deserve to be treated as heroes - the ones who came forward to testify against those who committed these crimes to try to make sure more innocent people would not suffer torture or death in future.

If they’re treated anything like their counterparts in the US military they’ll be arrested like Captain Ian Fishback, threatened with prosecution like Sergeant Samuel Provance or driven to suicide for “crimes” such as showing empathy with tortured prisoners, like Specialist Alyssa Peterson (assuming it was suicide) (14), (15), (16), (17).

The Obama administration has announced that members of government who ordered and approved torture may be prosecuted. A similar measure in the UK seems unlikely given that the leaderships of both main parties have been apologists for torture sticking to the lie of ‘a few soldiers out of control’.

(1) = Times 26 Apr 2008 ‘Jail for men who stoned Shane Owoo as he drowned in claypit pool’, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article3818546.ece

(2) = Independent 03 May 2006 ‘Soldiers 'allowed Iraqi boy to drown'’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/soldiers-allowed-iraqi-boy-to-drown-476576.html

(3) = BBC News 06 Jun 2006 ‘Troops cleared over Iraq drowning’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5053006.stm

(4) = Edinburgh Evening News 22 Apr 2009 ‘Sister of man beaten to death tells of her relief at judge's ruling’, http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/topstories/Sister-of-man-beaten-to.5192502.jp

(5) = BBC News 20 Jul 2005 ‘UK soldiers face war crimes trial’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4698251.stm

(6) = Panorama – BBC 15 March 2007, 14:55 GMT - A good kicking: Transcript http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/6455113.stm

(7) = Scotsman 19 May 2004 - ‘Soldiers 'took turns to beat Iraqi captives'' - http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=404&id=199022004

(8) = Amnesty International 15 Mar 2007 - ‘United Kingdom Court Martial acquittals: many questions remain unanswered and further action required to ensure justice' - http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGEUR450052007

(9) = BBC News 14 Feb 2007 ‘UK soldiers cleared of Iraq abuse’,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6360261.stm

(10) = Amnesty International 2008 Annual Report, Asia-Pacific, Afghanistan,
http://archive.amnesty.org/air2008/eng/regions/asia-pacific/afghanistan.html

(11) = Human Rights Watch World Report 2009, Afghanistan, http://www.hrw.org/en/node/79295

(12) = Human Rights Watch 8 Sep 2008 ‘Troops In Contact – Airstrikes and Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan’, http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2008/09/08/troops-contact-0

(13) = HRW 15 Jan 2009 ‘Afghanistan: US Investigation of Airstrike Deaths ‘Deeply Flawed’,
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2009/01/15/afghanistan-us-investigation-airstrike-deaths-deeply-flawed

(14) = ABC News 21 May 2004 ‘Military Punishes Abu Ghraib Key Witness’, http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=131659&page=1

(15) = Washington Post 28 Sep 2005 ‘A Matter of Honor’, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/27/AR2005092701527_pf.html

(16) = Sunday Times 02 Oct 2005 ‘How America tiptoed into the torture chamber’, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1806906,00.html

(17) = Independent 26 Apr 2009 ‘US interpreter who witnessed torture in Iraq shot herself with service rifle’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/us-interpreter-who-witnessed-torture-in-iraq-shot-herself-with-service-rifle-1674399.html

50% not-for-profit Public banks as a solution to the credit crisis

While bailing out private banks with public money has so far prevented a crisis turning into another Great Depression it does not seem to have restored a flow of credit sufficient to end the recession.

This may be partly because banks have over-reacted by going from being too lax in giving out credit to almost anyone on generous terms to refusing bridging loans to viable businesses and loan applicants; and partly due to the inevitable cycle of boom and bust in a market that’s been deregulated too much.

It may also be partly the result of self-fulfilling prophecies, with the widespread belief that economic disaster was inevitable resulting in a real economic collapse.

However it’s also because private banks do not have the confidence of shareholders or savers and so fear providing much new credit in case that makes stock market traders decide to target them. This is exacerbated by futures trading and hedge funds, both of which basically allow investment firms to gamble on whether the value of a commodity or a company’s shares will rise or fall in future. So if they for instance decide to target a particular bank they can buy shares in it, sell them cheaply, making a loss on that transaction, while simultaneously having bet through futures trading that the share value of that bank will fall sharply – and make a huge profit on this second transaction.

The only institutions which do retain the full confidence of the markets are governments, which retain creditworthiness and a virtually infinite supply of capital from tax revenues and loans.

So why work through the banks as middle-men when it’s not working? Why not have public banks, accepting savings account deposits and providing loans? There would be no need to nationalise any existing private banks. Governments already own public buildings and already have a supply of capital. They would only have to advertise for staff to run public banks – and with the private banks laying off many employees there will be no shortage of applicants.

There are at least two possible counter-arguments. First public banks, having funding from taxation, might put all private banks out of business. Second a public bank might risk control of the entire credit system and so the entire economy by one party in government or one prime minister and their clients, much as in many former Soviet republics.

One simple solution would be to have public banks operating alongside existing private banks and on a different model. Private banks make all loans on a for-profit basis, but public banks don’t have to do so. A public bank could be required to make half its loans not-for-profit ones which provide social or environmental benefits to the whole community. The rest of its loans would be for-profit ones, the profits from which would fund the social loans. Any surplus could go on further public spending or on reducing taxes on people on low incomes.

By requiring public banks to fund all social loans from for-profit loans in each financial year a replay of the credit crisis, this time among public banks, could be avoided. It would make it un-necessary to try to get private banks and other private lending institutions to make a certain proportion of social, or non-profit, loans and mortgage deals, as the Clinton administration did with legislation requiring many American lending firms to provide social mortgages and loans to people who were too poor ever to be likely to be able to repay them. The attempt to present these unprofitable loans and mortgages as potentially profitable was one of the causes of the current crisis – the so-called ‘toxic debts’. (1)

This was not the only cause of the credit crisis – deregulation by governments (lobbied by banks) also played it’s part along with commissions for mortgage brokers.

NYT 30 Sep 1999 ‘Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending’,
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/30/business/fannie-mae-eases-credit-to-aid-mortgage-lending.html

It's not what you spend, It's the way that you spend it

Public Debt’s not the Devil and Balanced Budgets are no Cure-All

Going into debt is not necessarily a disaster for governments, nor will balancing the books automatically result in economic success and good public services. What’s important is what governments spend money on. The solutions to our economic problems are also much wider ranging and less separable from political, military, social and environmental problems than many economists and politicians seem to think.

What is vital in public spending is not whether governments go into debt but whether they spend money productively on things that will bring a mixture of increased revenue and collective benefits, or reduced financial costs and suffering, in the long run – in other words whether they waste money or spend it productively. A government which balances its books or reduces its debt in the short term can still be destroying its revenues or increasing its costs to an unsustainable level in the long run.

Private Finance Initiatives or ‘Public Private Partnerships’ are a good example of debt that isn’t formally counted as debt at all but in fact results in massively and costs on the public sector in annual payments over decades, resulting in increased taxes along with cuts in the number of full-time, fully-trained staff and beds in hospitals. Both main parties in the UK have expanded these massively from the 1990s on.

The US federal government has repeatedly gone into massive debt under Republican administrations from 1970 to the present, but their economy has never collapsed as a result, despite mis-spending massively on military contracts such as a fleet of submarines commissioned in the Cold War and re-marketed as ‘special ops’ submarines which would supposedly fire special forces in capsules onto beaches from their torpedo tubes. It’s Iraq ‘reconstruction’ and army supply contracts running to tens of billions have similarly been grossly over-priced and provided a tiny fraction of what they were supposed to in services and reconstruction.

The only governments to collapse due to over-spending in the modern period were the Soviet Union and it’s satellites. That was the result of mis-spending. Under Leonid Brehznev and Yuri Andropov in the 1970s the Soviet government increased their military budget massively to attempt to make their military as powerful as that of the rest of the world combined when their economy wasn’t as large as that even of their main rival’s, never mind it and all its allies. Over-spending on the military is indeed wasteful, as military spending never creates a fraction of the number of jobs or tax revenue that investment in civilian technologies and research does.

However going into debt in order to develop new technologies such as more efficient wave, tidal, solar and wind power would be the most sensible thing our governments could do. Obama has taken a step in this direction, even if a relatively modest one, but other governments seem slow to follow.

After World War Two Japanese and German industry had been destroyed by their defeat in the Second World War. Two decades later the Japanese and West German economies had overtaken most of the rest of the world in wealth because they had been forced to re-build their economies and so had been willing to pay for newer technology, while the rest of the world delayed making the investment and relied on its existing machinery.

The longer we delay now on investing in developing new, cheaper, more environmentally sustainable, energy and transport technologies the more we will suffer for it in the long run in terms of delayed economic recovery, unemployment (and the costs of paying unemployment benefit rather than getting tax revenue from the employed) and climate change related ‘natural’ disasters and illnesses (e.g lung cancer, other cancers and leukaemia caused by air pollution, mercury poisoning of seas, water and fish and nuclear waste).

Even John Browne, the former Chief Executive of British Petroleum, has said that private companies cannot be relied on to invest in these new technologies on the scale that’s required unless new government regulations and incentives ensure that they do (1). It should be added that the majority of people should not be gullible enough to allow their taxes to be used to pay to develop technologies which are then handed royalty-free for big multinational firms to reap all the profits when we’ve paid for the costs of the research and development. We need to demand that if we pay for the development of these technologies we also see a return on them in increased spending on public services and infrastructure and more apprenticeships and full-time skilled jobs.

That’s where a return to the 1970s British system of requiring all firms over a certain size to take on a certain number of apprentices relative to their number of employees or else pay an apprenticeship levy can come in. This eliminated the ‘free rider’ problem. Since it was abolished by the Thatcher government in 1979 there has been a massive shortage of apprenticeships and trained staff in Britain because every company has faced the problem that if it spends money to train apprentices other firms can simply coax them away with slightly increased pay without having to spend nearly as much on training itself. Unemployment has risen because of the resulting mis-match between the skills available among the potential work force and required by businesses. Only a reintroduction of a law making it compulsory for all medium sized and large businesses to take on apprentices or pay a fine to subsidise those who are will solve this problem.

Of course investment in green technologies and an apprenticeship law will not be enough to rebuild our economies and societies on a more sustainable model on their own. That will require a new mixed credit system, involving not just private credit from private banks but public and micro-credit, which i’ll give the outlines of in another post. It will also require fair trade with a balance between protectionism and free trade; a reform of farming towards organic mixed farming rather than chemical-using monoculture; a redistribution of wealth within and between countries; a move away from over-spending on military technology towards civilian technology ; a new system of international regulation to eliminate tax havens and allow and require firms to behave responsibly and take a long term view looking at returns over the next decade or two rather than the next quarter; and increased foreign aid replacing some military spending in order to take into account the primarily economic and social causes of many wars and genocides – and the primarily economic and social ways to end them and prevent them starting in the first place. We can always crush pirates and militias by military force in the short term, but in the long term that will not deal with the causes of piracy, civil war, sectarian violence and failed states – which are also often the product of our own governments’ wars, foreign polices, sanctions and economic policies. As with the credit system i’ll deal with all these issues in other posts here and/or articles on my website www.duncanmcfarlane.org in the future.

(1) = Guardian 25 Mar 2009 ‘State intervention vital if Britain is to meet its green energy targets, says former BP boss, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/25/clean-energy-uk-browne

Want to reduce our national debt by making real "efficiency savings"? Scrap PFIs and PPPs then - and arms Export Credit Guarantees too

The budget announced by Chancellor Alastair Darling includes £15 billion of cuts in public spending through “efficiency savings”.

If the government really wants to make significant efficiency savings it doesn’t need to fire even one public sector employee to get them. Instead it should scrap the grossly inefficient and over-priced Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and ‘Public Private Partnership Programme’(PPPP) contracts given by Blair, Brown and the Conservatives under Major and Clarke to consortia led by huge multinational firms to build and maintain hospitals at costs which Professor Allyson Pollock and other healthcare academics found to be between 4 and over 10 times the cost of either paying for them with taxes or taking out loans to pay with them.

PFIs and PPPs are not shown on the government’s debts – but in reality they are probably the largest debts we've incurred – and ones that taxpayers are already paying for twice – as taxpayers in increased taxes and as NHS patients.The annual payments which NHS trusts have to pay to the PFI consortia have already resulted in cuts in the number of beds and full time, trained staff in hospitals, making it more and more difficult for the remaining, exhausted staff to give patients the care they need and pay for through taxes.

Sacking public sector employees would result in them spending less money, further weakening the economy and putting people in the private sector out of work too.

Another “efficiency saving” could be made by ending all Export Credit Guarantees for arms exports. The weapons mostly go to military occupations and dictatorships anyway and the money could be invested in green energy technologies such as tidal, wave and solar power and create far more jobs than the arms industry ever has or could.

De Ja Vu in Baghdad

New attacks in Iraq are not down to ‘die-hards’ any more than they were in 2004 –They’re caused by unemployment, poverty and by a cycle of violence also involving the other side.

/

US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton is repeating a Bush administration mistake in a new form in assuming that the new wave of sectarian violence in Iraq is down to Al Qa’ida die-hards rather than mass unemployment, poverty and a cycle of violence caused by both sides(1).

Al Qa’ida is not the only force in Iraq contributing to civil war. The vast majority of Sunni insurgents have never been Al Qa’ida but Sunnis fearing Shia dominance and repression. The Coalition forces after the 2003 invasion initially used Shia militias to target Sunnis – including civilians – for “detention”, torture and death, mistakenly viewing them all as “pro-Saddam die-hards” and “Saddam loyalists” (2). A couple of years later the US military and the Bush administration did a u-turn, deciding that a Shia dominated Iraq would be an Iranian dominated one and hired Sunni “awakening” militias to target Al Sadr and other Shia Iraqi nationalist and fundamentalist groups (though strangely not the Iranian backed Badr brigade – perhaps Iraqi nationalism has been the real target in a divide and conquer strategy by the occupying forces, rather than Iranian influence). (See this page and this one and the source notes and links on them for more information and sources on the links between unemployment, poverty, sectarian violence, organised crime and terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere).

The new wave of suicide bombings coincide with the US ending funding for the sunni militias to fight for them and the Iraqi government – and the mostly Shia Iraqi government attempting to disarm the Sunni militias. With many Sunnis who were in the awakening militias made unemployed – or at least moved to jobs which won’t pay their previous wage of $300 a month - the result is similar to the earlier decision to disband the Iraqi army – lots of unemployed or poor people with weapons but not enough money looking for a way to make a living – and fearing being victims if they aren’t armed (3). Organised crime can overlap with sectarian violence – sectarian politics giving a cover for kidnapping for profit. Sunnis have been the targets of Shia death squads just as former members of Saddam’s forces inside Iraqi government forces have tortured and murdered Shia - and Shia have been victims of Sunni suicide bombings (4), (5). Working for any group that will pay them to fight for it – including Al Qa’ida in Iraq – is another option. Indeed some of the Sunni awakening militia worked for Al Qa’ida before the US offered them more money. They may now return to it unless the US and the Iraqi government think again and provide them with paid jobs. (Again see this page and this one and the source notes and links on them for more information and sources on the links between unemployment, poverty, sectarian violence, organised crime and terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere).

In 2004 then Iraqi Governing Council member Adnan Pachachi warned “More violence will cause more violence and this will be an endless spiral.” (5). His words remain as true today as they were five years ago. I’d only add that making more Iraqis unemployed or only giving them very low-paid jobs that won't give them an income they can survive on will have the same effect.

(1) = Guardian 25 Apr 2009 ‘Hillary Clinton says Iraq suicide bombs are sign of extremist fear’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/25/hillary-clinton-iraq

(2) = BBC News 11 Jul 2005 ‘Profile: Iraq's Wolf Brigade’,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4083326.stm

(3) = Guardian 02 Apr 2009 ‘Iraq disbands Sunni militia that helped defeat insurgents’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/02/iraq-sunni-militia-disbanded

(4) = Guardian 20 May 2005 ‘British lawyers to pursue Iraqi security forces over killings’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/may/20/iraq.uk

(5) = Times 07 Jul 2005 ‘West turns blind eye as police put Saddam's torturers back to work’,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article541123.ece

(6) = Guardian 08 Apr 2004 ‘Battles rage from north to south’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/apr/08/iraq.ewenmacaskill1

One thing Ahmadinejad’s right about – and Desmond Tutu agrees

Israel is racist in its treatment of Israeli Arabs and Palestinians

The Iranian government are wrong on many things. They’ve beaten Iranians, tortured them, jailed them without fair trial and murdered them. Their victims include striking bus drivers and teachers to women’s rights activists, journalists, gay people, students demonstrating for democracy, journalists, editors and unmarried women who have had sex or publicly held their fiancée’s hand (1,2,3,4,5).

Ahmadinejad is also wrong in doubting the scale of the Holocaust in which six million Jews were murdered, but he’s right about one thing – Israel’s treatment of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs is racist.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and UN special rapporteur Professor John Dugard both visited Israel and the Israeli occupied Palestinian territories. Both compared it to the apartheid system they’d lived under (6, 7).

The current Israeli foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has proposed expelling all Arab citizens from Israel and bombing Israel’s ally Egypt (8).

Ehud Barak is Defence Minister in the current Israeli government and was also Defence Minister in the previous one. While his Labor party is seen as progressive and ‘pro-peace’, he has claimed Arabs have a “culture” of lying (9). In 2000, when he was Prime Minister, armed paramilitary police were ordered by his government to fire on Palestinian and Israeli Arab rioters with live ammunition after Ariel Sharon deliberately provoked Palestinians by visiting the disputed Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The anger created by this visit is understandable given that Sharon was personally involved in carrying out the Qibya massacre in 1953 and the architect of the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982 along with many other war crimes against Arab civilians and prisoners of war. The rioters were armed only with bottles and stones (10 -16).

The deaths and injuries caused by this led to widespread riots and demonstrations across Israel and the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories by both Palestinians and Israeli Arabs (some of whom consider themselves Palestinians or want a bi-national state with Israeli Jews, Arabs and Palestinians all given citizenship) This was the start of the ‘Second Intifada’ or ‘uprising’ against Israeli occupation (10 – 16).

Israeli police and soldiers responded by shooting unarmed Palestinian and Israeli-Arab protesters, bystanders and peace campaigners, killing large numbers and wounding thousands. The dead included 12 Israeli Arab citizens of Israel, including peaceful demonstrators and bystanders to demonstrations and riots. Aseel or Asel Asleh, a 17 year old Israeli Arab member of the American funded ‘Seeds of Peace’ peace campaign group (whose members include Israelis and Palestinians) was killed by Israeli police who shot him in the neck. He had not been involved even in throwing stones, only peacefully demonstrating. Israeli Arab Ibrahim Suleiman and his daughter Nur Suleiman were both shot by Israeli armed police while watching demonstrators from the flat roof of their house. Marlene Ramadan was shot dead without warning by hidden Israeli snipers as she and her husband Doctor Amr Ramadan drove home. One Israeli Jewish woman was killed by a rock thrown at her car by rioting Israeli Arabs (10 -16).

In the occupied territories the numbers of Palestinians killed when rioting, stone-throwing or merely being unfortunate to be around at the time was far higher (10 – 16).

Not one Israeli policeman, soldier or government minister was jailed or fired for any of this. The Israeli Or Commission, appointed to investigate the deaths was a partial white-wash – but even it criticised Israeli police for opening fire with rubber bullets at point blank range and live ammunition on Israeli Arab demonstrators, especially since they managed to stop Israeli Jewish rioters, who were throwing Molotov cocktails and attacking Arabs, without using deadly force (10 – 16).

When an Arab Knesset member proposed a bi-national state, with equal citizenship for all Jews and Arabs across Israel and the occupied territories, Barak portrayed Israeli Arabs as a ‘fifth column’ inside the ‘Jewish state’. (17).

The long-standing Israeli government policies of refusing any ‘right of return’ to Palestinian refugees and their descendants forced out of their homes at gunpoint in 1948 and 1967 to present also stands in marked contrast to the Israeli ‘law of return’ for Jewish immigrants to Israel. A 1970 amendment to it also allows Israeli citizenship to anyone with one Jewish grandparent. This shows the emptiness of the Israeli government claim that there is ‘no room’ for the Palestinian refugees or that Israel couldn’t support them. Palestinians and Israeli Arabs are seen as ‘a demographic timebomb’ that must be prevented from outnumbering non-Arabs in Israel either by forced transfer of Arabs or by increasing the non-Arab birth rate - notably by very high grants and child benefit provided to all Israeli Jewish (or non-Arab) families but not to Israeli Arab parents. (18) (also click here for more on this and more sources).

Israeli government adviser Arnon Soffer once suggested that the only solution is to “kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.” to keep Arabs’ numbers down within Israel and the occupied territories (19).

While the Israeli government are certainly not putting Israeli Arabs or Palestinians to the gas chambers there are uncomfortable echoes of the 1930s German government’s policy of encouraging ‘Aryan’ Germans to have lots of children and discouraging non-Aryan ones.

The American Jewish professor Norman Finkelstein has also pointed out the similarities between the South African Apartheid system of autonomous, poor, inner-city ‘homelands’ or ‘Bantustans’ for black and coloured people and the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords which granted the Palestinian Authority very limited autonomy in mostly poor urban areas cut off from one another by Israeli occupied territory, while reserving most good farmland and water for Israeli settlers in the West Bank. The role Israel’s government intended for the PA also parallels that intended by South African Apartheid governments for black ‘homeland’ governments – they are to help oppress their own people in return for being allowed to pocket some money for themselves. Ehud Barak’s later offer to Arafat at Taba in 2001 was little different from the Oslo offer, forcing Arafat to reject it. (Click here to read more and for source notes on this).

Corruption among Arafat and Abbas’ Fatah party was one of the major reasons for Hamas winning the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections – the others being Israeli violence against Palestinians and Israeli Arabs and the mass unemployment and poverty caused by the Israeli occupation and Fatah corruption.

Many Israeli Jews fear that if they are not the majority in a Jewish state they will face massacres like the pogroms and Holocaust. This however can’t justify their brutality towards and repression of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. The only way to guarantee peace is to end the cycle of violence and hatred by granting equality.

Even former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said that if Israel does not allow Palestinians their own state soon the result will be the overthrow of the current ‘Jewish state’ by a binational one supported by the majority of the population, much as happened with South African Apartheid (20). As in Apartheid South Africa there are many of the currently ‘dominant’ group – Israeli Jews rather than whites in this case -who oppose the racism of their government and society. Whether the solution found is two-state or one binational state, it’s clear that the status quo is not morally or politically tenable in the long run.

(1) = Guardian 17 Mar 2007 ‘Iran crushes teachers' pay protest’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/17/iran.schoolsworldwide

(2) = BBC News 22 July 2003 ‘Canada tackles Iran over reporter’,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3085551.stm

(3) = Human Rights Watch 06 Jun 2004 ‘"Like the Dead in Their Coffins"
- Torture, Detention, and the Crushing of Dissent in Iran ‘,
http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2004/06/06/dead-their-coffins

(4) = Human Rights Watch 30 May 2008 ‘The Issue is Torture’,
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2008/03/30/issue-torture

(5) = Human Rights Watch World Report 2009 – Iran,
http://www.hrw.org/en/node/79223

(6) = BBC News 29 Apr 2002 ‘Tutu condemns Israeli 'apartheid',
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1957644.stm

(7) = BBC News 23 Feb 2007 ‘UN envoy hits Israel 'apartheid'’,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6390755.stm

(8) = Times 17 Mar 2009 ‘Avigdor Lieberman - branded Arab-hating racist - set to be Israeli foreign minister’, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5920555.ece

(9) = Guardian 23 May 2002 ‘Lying is cultural trait of Arabs, says Barak’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/may/23/israel

(10) = New York Times 15 Jun 2001 ‘Police Killings of Israeli Arabs Being Questioned by Inquiry’, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/15/world/police-killings-of-israeli-arabs-being-questioned-by-inquiry.html?n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/A/Arabs

(11) = Seeds of Peace – Tribute to Asel Asleh,
http://www.seedsofpeace.org/about/aseltribute

(12) = New York Times 02 Sep 2003 ‘Police Used Excessive Force on Israeli Arabs, Panel Says’, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/02/world/police-used-excessive-force-on-israeli-arabs-panel-says.html

(13) = B’Tselem March 2002 ‘Trigger Happy: Unjustified Gunfire and the IDF's Open-Fire Regulations during the al-Aqsa Intifada’, http://www.btselem.org/Download/200203_Trigger_Happy_Eng.pdf

(14) = Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel ‘Special report: Official Commission of Inquiry into the October 2000 Events’, http://www.adalah.org/eng/commission.php

(15) = The official summation of the Or Commission report, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=335594&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y

(16) = Jonathan Cook (2006) ‘Blood and Religion – The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State’ , Pluto Press, London, 2006 , pages 38-40, 43-44, 51-54, 66-70

(17) = Jonathan Cook (2006) ‘Blood and Religion : The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State’, Pluto Press, London , 2006, Chapter 1 , especially pages 55 & 57

(18) = Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs ‘The Law of Return’,
http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2001/8/The%20Law%20of%20Return-%201950

(19) = John Pilger (2006) , ‘Freedom Next Time’ , Bantam, London, 2006 , page 152

(20) = Guardian 30 Nov 2007 ‘Israel risks apartheid-like struggle if two-state solution fails, says Olmert • Jewish state is finished without deal, warns PM’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/nov/30/israel

What they never wrote down

The Bush administration torture memos Obama released don’t mention any of the worst methods of torture used

The methods described in the Bush administration memos released by Obama do include torture, but they don't come close to the worst torture methods used by the US army and the CIA (not to mention some of the British army in Iraq).

Prisoners' heads were beaten against concrete floors to 'restrain' them, even when they were already on the cell floor with several guards holding them down.

For instance Sean Baker of the Kentucky National Guard says was left brain damaged when made to play the role of a prisoner in a training exercise at Guantanamo (1).

At Bagram air base, Abu Ghraib and other prisons and military bases prisoners were tortured by beating and kicking them and asphyxiating them by waterboarding or sitting on them while they were tied inside a sleeping bag (2).

Baha Mousa died after being kicked and beaten by squads of British soldiers over several days and nights - other soldiers not involved in the torture testified, but the officer who oversaw the torture was still promoted (3).

Afghan prisoners similarly died after prolonged torture by beating by American soldiers at Bagram air base and being chained to the roofs of their cells by their arms. They turned out to have no involvement in terrorism (4).

Members of the US military who tried to testify on the fact that military intelligence officers were approving, ordering and over-seeing these torture methods - and that other senior officers were uninterested or threatened the whistle blowers with prosecution when they were told of them - were confined to base and threatened with prosecution.

One was Sergeant Samuel Provance, who served as a military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib. When he reported to superiors that high ranking military intelligence officers had told him they had ordered and overseen the torture methods used he was threatened with prosecution (5).

Captain Ian Fishback, who served in Afghanistan and Iraq and reported seeing prisoners arms and legs broken with baseball bats, with his superiors unconcerned when he told them - until he went public, when they confined him to Fort Bragg (6), (7).

The Bush administration was full of old hands at organising torture and death squads in Latin America in the 1980s - and good at propaganda. They didn't put authorisation for the worst torture methods down in writing. They made memos about the less bad methods, so that when the memos were released, people would wonder what all the fuss had been about. For plausible deniability the paper trail must look morally good or neutral, with the worst orders only ever given by word of mouth or by making it clear a blind eye will be turned to those actions.

(1) = New York Times 05 Jun 2004 ‘Beating Specialist Baker’, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/05/opinion/beating-specialist-baker.html?scp=1&sq=kristof+sean+baker&st=nyt

(2) = CBS News 24 Jun 2004 ‘Intel GIs To Be Charged In Death’, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/25/iraq/main626121.shtml

(3) = Panorama – BBC 15 March 2007, 14:55 GMT - A good kicking: Transcript http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/6455113.stm

(4) = New York Times 20 May 2005 ‘In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths’, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html?ex=1274241600&en=4579c146cb14cfd6&ei=5088

(5) = ABC News 21 May 2004 ‘Military Punishes Abu Ghraib Key Witness’, http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Investigation/story?id=131659&page=1

(6) = Washington Post 28 Sep 2005 ‘A Matter of Honor’, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/27/AR2005092701527_pf.html

(7) = Sunday Times 02 Oct 2005 ‘How America tiptoed into the torture chamber’, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1806906,00.html

Rules must be binding on us and our allies as well as our enemies

"Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something. The world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons. Now is the time for a strong international response," President Barack Obama 5th April 2009

The North Korean government is a brutal one that uses many of its own people as slave labour in prison camps. It’s missile launches over Japan in the past have been highly provocative. The most recent was of a satellite, but may have involved testing ‘dual use’ technologies that could also be used to launch nuclear missiles.

The trouble is that Obama is selective in who he condemns for breaking which rules

Obama has taken a major step back towards promoting moral behaviour in international politics by stating that US forces will not carry out torture and in closing down the camps at Guantanamo Bay and the CIA ‘black sites’ around the world.

However Israel and Pakistan have both already developed nuclear weapons, yet there’s no suggestion of punishing them for violating the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Another set of rules - the Geneva Conventions - also ban targeting civilians, yet Obama made no mention of Israeli forces’ targeting of civilians, including UN aid workers and trucks and the main UN aid depot in Gaza, in their offensive into Gaza.
Obama said he was ‘concerned’ and wouldn’t want [Palestinian] missiles falling in his garden and threatening to kill or injure his children, as if some Palestinian groups missile attacks on Israelis justified Israeli forces’ attacks on equally innocent Palestinian civilians and children and UN aid workers. Not only did he not punish the Israeli government for its actions, he hasn’t even ended military aid or arms sales to Israel.

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton did condemn Israeli house demolitions in East Jerusalem, but said not a word on Israeli forces targeting civilians, as though Israeli forces only harmed houses, not people.

The morality and legality of missile strikes in Pakistan is also questionable since they kill many civilians. Obama rightly condemned over-reliance on air-strikes in Afghanistan, but it's hard to see what the difference in results between air strikes in Afghanistan and missile strikes by unmanned drones in Pakistan is.

For Obama’s administration to make a real change in US foreign policy internationally accepted rules would have to be as binding on the US and its allies as on it’s enemies.

This is sometimes referred to as Immanuel Kant’s principle of universalisability, but it really doesn’t need such a big word to say that rules have to apply to everyone equally.

Correction - : Obama may not be continuing Clinton administration rendition to countries that torture

I wrote in my last blog post that the new head of the CIA told congress that extra-ordinary rendition to countries that practice torture might continue. While both Obama and Panetta have been vague on this in some interviews both seem to be saying this won't happen under the Obama administration. There is some uncertainty still about whether the administration is saying it would accept (worthless) diplomatic assurances from governments such as Egypt and Jordan that they wouldn't torture prisoners rendered to them by the CIA.

Why a nuclear weapon free world might mean more Iraq wars and more Hiroshimas and Nagasakis

President Obama has stated that his aim is a world free of nuclear weapons, beginning with a treaty to reduce the number of nuclear weapons possessed by the US and Russia. Dismantling some of the thousands of nuclear weapons which both countries are paying a fortune to maintain, while they multiply the risk of an accidental launch by thousands of times, is very wise and very possible.

However achieving the aim of a world free of nuclear weapons is likely to be as impossible as the medieval papacy’s attempts to ban crossbows though. Crossbows did eventually fall out of use, but only when they were made obsolete by newer technologies. The analogy with crossbows doesn’t highlight the much greater threats faced by countries attempting to give up nuclear weapons.

In theory every country in the world could make a mutual agreement to destroy all its nuclear warheads, but the technological know-how to create more would still exist and sooner or later someone - governments or terrorist groups (probably both) – would build new ones. Those countries which had given up their nuclear deterrents would then be at best vulnerable to blackmail by those possessing such weapons – and at worst would be in the position of Japan at the end of World War Two, facing massive nuclear attacks on their people merely in order to make an example of someone to show that those possessing nuclear weapons were willing to use them.

There’s also the question of how the ban on nuclear weapons would be enforced. By sanctions of the kind that led to the deaths of millions, including hundreds of thousands of children, in Iraq in the 1990s? ; By wars like the Iraq war?

When Bush and Blair began the fear-mongering for war on Iraq in 2002 opponents of the war were able to point to the British, American, French and Israeli nuclear deterrents and the way they had deterred Saddam from using chemical and biological weapons when he did have them - in the 1991 Gulf war.

If there were no nuclear deterrents though it would be that much easier for unscrupulous politicians to whip up fears of WMD or nuclear attack – and in fact they might even turn out to be pointing to genuine threats in future, which wouldn’t be threats if we had nuclear deterrents. We might well see another Iraq war every couple of years as part of enforcing the Non-Proliferation Treaty. How many soldiers and civilians would die in those? How many civilians would die in the increased terrorist attacks created by them?

Most of Obama’s foreign policy is a break from the Bush administration’s, but it's not clear yet how different it is from the Clinton administration's. Obama seems to have said that rendition may continue - but not to countries which practice torture. Interviews given by Obama and the new head of the CIA leave some room for uncertainty on this though. Obama, while condemning the collateral damage caused by the over-use of air strikes due to insufficient ground forces in Afghanistan, also continues Clinton’s disastrous policy of trying to assassinate Taliban and Al Qa’ida leaders by cruise missile strikes, using intelligence provided by the highly unreliable Pakistani ISI military intelligence.

These conventional missile strikes, like terrorist attacks, kill civilians along with combatants. In fact they’ve killed far more people in the last few decades than nuclear weapons have (excluding Depleted Uranium shells used by NATO and coalition forces which, again, Obama makes no mention of). Since most countries acquired nuclear weapons there have been no new Hiroshima’s or Nagasaki’s, because those were only possible when only one country had nuclear weapons. An attempt to eradicate nuclear weapons entirely could bring that nightmare scenario back along with millions of deaths.

Obama, unlike Bush, will talk to Iran – but, like Clinton, only to hector it about giving up its nuclear weapons programme or facing sanctions at the least, even though Iran was attacked with chemical and biological weapons by Saddam, who had funding and support from almost every other government in the world. Iran has no nuclear deterrent and no reliable ally to provide it with cover by providing a nuclear umbrella to them. While the US under Obama has ended threats to attack Iran for now Israeli governments have continued to threaten Iran with air strikes, while Obama says he will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.

Obama’s rhetoric on nuclear disarmament may also be merely a return to the Clinton-era doctrine of using diplomacy to put pressure on opponents and gain greater international support for sanctions and air and cruise missile strikes. Obama has condemned Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear programmes and missile tests respectively, but made no mention of Israel’s large nuclear arsenal, which has broken the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for Decades, nor Pakistan’s, nor India’s active nuclear programme, nor the leaks suggesting the Saudi monarchy are developing nuclear weapons.

If Obama put as much pressure on his allies to give up nuclear weapons as on his country’s enemies his ‘world free of nuclear weapons’ speeches might carry more weight, but they would still fail to explain what we would do if we had given up our nuclear weapons and someone else then produced some; and how we would enforce the ban without constant wars?

There is the option of developing some kind of nuclear missile shield of the kind proposed by the Bush administration and then providing every country in the world with it, thus making ICBM nuclear weapons obsolete. This is a very attractive idea but it faces three serious and probably insurmountable problems.

First no-one has managed to develop any weapons system capable of reliably shooting down high speed missiles travelling across vast distances. Second, even if they did technologies could be developed to counter them and get missiles past them (and such technologies are being developed now).

Third, nuclear weapons don’t have to be delivered by missiles either (though these are the fastest and so most effective deterrent). They can be dropped by planes as bombs – and more advanced ‘stealth bombers’, not to mention bombers capable of space flight and orbital weapons systems in space, are being developed all the time. The Pentagon and NASA are at the cutting edge on these technologies and the US has the most advanced aircraft and highest military research and development budget in the world.

So while it would definitely make sense to dismantle some of the thousands of missiles the US and Russia currently maintain, a world without nuclear weapons is something we’re unlikely to see unless new weapons make them obsolete – and an attempt to free ourselves of nuclear weapons might cost many lives without saving any.