Peace and Justice Post

Doug Lorimer | Green Left online, 9 March 2008

While the Western corporate media was swooning over the tour of army duty in war-torn Afghanistan by Prince Harry, the third in line to the British crown, scant coverage was given to US national intelligence director Vice-Admiral Mike McConnell’s admission that the situation facing the US and its NATO allies in Afghanistan is “deteriorating”, despite a doubling of their occupation forces since 2004.

There are currently 28,000 US troops in Afghanistan, with another 3200 due to arrive later this month. More than half of the US troops in Afghanistan — 15,000 — operate under the command of the US-led NATO military alliance. There are also 28,000 non-US troops operating as part of the 43,000 NATO commanded International Security Assistance Force. The largest non-US ISAF contingent — 7700 troops — is from Britain, while 970 Australian troops constitute the largest non-NATO contingent.

‘Classic insurgency’

Testifying before the US Senate armed services committee on February 27, Connell said that after six years of US and allied military support and billions of dollars in foreign aid, the US-installed government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai — derided by critics as being little more than “the mayor of Kabul” — controls only 30% of the country.

McConnell said 60% of the country was controlled by local warlords, while the Taliban anti-occupation guerrilla fighters controlled 10-11%, mainly in the south. “Taliban forces have expanded their operations into previously peaceful areas of the west and around Kabul”, he added.

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China View, March 9, 2008

Asif Ali Zardari (R), widower of slain Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, shakes hands with former prime minister Nawaz Sharif during a joint news conference in Bhurban near Islamabad March 9, 2008.(Xinhua Photo) Photo Gallery>>>

Former prime minister Nawaz Sharif (L) and Asif Ali Zardari (R), widower of the slain opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, speak during a joint news conference in Bhurban near Islamabad March 9, 2008. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo) Photo Gallery>>>

ISLAMABAD, March 9 (Xinhua) — Pakistani’s two leading political leaders said Sunday that they had agreed to form a coalition government with the prime minister from the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).

“We undertake to form a coalition together for Pakistan, as the people of Pakistan had given mandate to the democratic forces on February 18,” said Nawaz Sharif, leader of the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) at the news conference after his meeting with PPPCo-Chairman Asif Ali Zardari at the scenic town of Murree in eastern Pakistan.

“We have fruitful meeting today, we are at the verge of making history, it was the desire of Shaheed Benazir Bhutto,” Zardari, former PM Benazir Bhutto’s widower, told a joint news conference with Sharif.

In a joint declaration at the end of their talks, Sharif and Zardari agreed to reappoint the Supreme Court justices, especially Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, who were ousted by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf on Nov. 3, 2007 when he imposed the state of emergency.

They agreed that the deposed judges would be restored through a parliamentary resolution within 30 days, according to the joint declaration.

Parliamentary elections took place on Feb. 18 this year, and according to the Election Commission results, the PPP has secured 120 seats for the 342-seat National Assembly, the PML-N has 90 and the PML-Q, which backs Musharraf, has 51.

The Awami National Party, a nationalist secular party mostly centered in the North-West Frontier Province, which has also announced to join the coalition, has bagged 13 National Assembly seats.

Independent victors and smaller groups are expected to join the coalition which will enable the coalition to gain the two-thirds majority in parliament needed to impeach Musharraf and to amend the constitution.

WASHINGTON — A new article on CENTCOM commander Adm. William Fallon confirms that his public statements last fall ruling out war against Iran last fall were not coordinated with the White House and landed him in trouble more than once with President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

In an admiring article on Fallon in Esquire, former Pentagon official Thomas P.M. Barnett writes that Fallon angered the White House by “brazenly challenging” Bush on his aggressive threat of war against Tehran. Barnett also cites “well-placed observers” as saying Bush may soon replace Fallon with a “more pliable” commander.

Barnett’s account, which quotes conversations with Fallon during the CENTCOM commander’s trips to the Middle East, shows that Fallon privately justified his statements contradicting the Bush policy of keeping the “option” of an unprovoked attack on Iran “on the table” as necessary to calm the fears of Egypt and other friendly Arab regimes of a U.S.-Iran war.

Barnett recalls that when Fallon was in Cairo in November, the lead story in that day’s edition of the English-language daily Egyptian Gazette carried the headline “U.S. Rules Out Strike against Iran” over a picture of Fallon meeting with President Hosni Mubarak.

That story, published Nov. 19 and not picked up by any U.S. news media, reported that Fallon had “ruled out a possible strike against Iran and said Washington was mulling non-military options instead.”

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The Independent, UK, March 10, 2008

PETER DEJONG/AP

Arab builders working on new housing in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Givat Ze’ev

By Eric Silver in Jerusalem

Israel approved plans yesterday to build 330 new homes in a suburban West Bank settlement north of Jerusalem. The move was denounced by the Palestinian Authority as “a slap in the face of the peace process” and called on the Quartet of the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia to “act to get Israel to revoke the decision”.

Saeb Erakat, the Palestinians’ chief negotiator, said: “This is a provocative action by Israel that demonstrates its intention of further strengthening illegal occupation and colonisation of Palestinian territory.”

He branded the timing of the decision as “outrageous” because it came on the eve of American-Israeli-Palestinian talks to assess the two sides’ performance under the international road map for peace. Expansion of settlements is supposed to be frozen under the terms of the peace process. The settlements, illegal under international law, already account for nearly 40 per cent of West Bank territory. The UN warned recently that they are making the achievement of an eventual two state solution elusive.

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New York correspondent Ed Pilkington explains the reaction in the US to the president’s support for what human rights campaigners view as torture

The New York Times, March 8, 2008
By JANE PERLEZ

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan — Beside racks of hanging meat and barrows of oranges in the alleys of the old town here, Aitzaz Ahsan, the leader of the lawyers movement in Pakistan, was back on the campaign trail Saturday, calling for the release of the nation’s detained judiciary leaders.

Fresh from being released after four months in detention, Mr. Ahsan said that the recent parliamentary elections were not enough proof that President Pervez Musharraf’s government was dedicated to democracy. He insisted that the next step had to be the release of the former chief justice, Mohamed Iftikhar Chaudhry, who was fired along with most of the Supreme Court during a state of emergency imposed by Mr. Musharraf on Nov. 3. Mr. Chaudhry and nine other justices remain in detention.

“Our struggle is to make Pakistan a state where the judiciary is independent, and what Musharraf did to the chief justice is an example of how under him no judge is ever independent,” Mr. Ahsan said to a crowd of lawyers who chanted for Mr. Musharraf’s resignation. The rally here on Saturday was part of a series of marketplace demonstrations between the capital, Islamabad, and this nearby city to show support for the lawyers movement. The lawyers are planning a week of anti-Musharraf demonstrations, called Black Flag Week after the protesters’ flags and armbands.

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By Ashfaq Yusufzai

An election meet by women of the Awami National Party, victorious in the Feb 18 polls Credit:Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

PESHAWAR, Mar 7 (IPS) – Saeeda Anwar is a 38-year-old Pakistani schoolteacher. She works in a school here in the capital of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), but she is not allowed to exercise her franchise.

“My family is strictly against women voting. They don’t like us to vote. Although, I am allowed to work as a teacher because I give them all my salary,” she says of the male members of her family.

Patriarchy is deeply embedded in the NWFP. The Pakistan government has neither been able to implement modernising programmes nor Article 34 of the Pakistan Constitution (1973) that says ‘steps shall be taken to ensure full participation of women in all spheres of national life’.

Here women are banned from participation and decision-making — a tribal feudalism almost as rigid as in adjacent Afghanistan under the Taliban. It is the men who decide who their women can talk to or whether they can go out of the house, also who their daughters should marry and when.

Yet, 15 women challenged political exclusion and contested the Feb. 18 polls to parliament and the national assembly from the NWFP. Not one won, and polling by women, both in the province and in the neighbouring Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), was once again the lowest in Pakistan.

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The New Yorker, Feb 25, 2008

Debating torture and counterinsurgency—a century ago.

by Paul Kramer

A picture of a “water detail,” reportedly taken in May, 1901, in Sual, the Philippines. “It is a terrible torture,” one soldier wrote.

Many Americans were puzzled by the news, in 1902, that United States soldiers were torturing Filipinos with water. The United States, throughout its emergence as a world power, had spoken the language of liberation, rescue, and freedom. This was the language that, when coupled with expanding military and commercial ambitions, had helped launch two very different wars. The first had been in 1898, against Spain, whose remaining empire was crumbling in the face of popular revolts in two of its colonies, Cuba and the Philippines. The brief campaign was pitched to the American public in terms of freedom and national honor (the U.S.S. Maine had blown up mysteriously in Havana Harbor), rather than of sugar and naval bases, and resulted in a formally independent Cuba.

The Americans were not done liberating. Rising trade in East Asia suggested to imperialists that the Philippines, Spain’s largest colony, might serve as an effective “stepping stone” to China’s markets. U.S. naval plans included provisions for an attack on the Spanish Navy in the event of war, and led to a decisive victory against the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay in May, 1898. Shortly afterward, Commodore George Dewey returned the exiled Filipino revolutionary Emilio Aguinaldo to the islands. Aguinaldo defeated Spanish forces on land, declared the Philippines independent in June, and organized a government led by the Philippine élite.

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Peace broker, bank adviser and lecturer, now Blair plans to teach religion at Yale

Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Patrick Wintour , Guardian, via Palestinian Pundit

March 8, 2008 Not content with trying to bring peace to the Middle East – as well as advising an insurance company on the risks of climate change, a bank on crisis management and Rwanda on good governance – Tony Blair is to add another job to his portfolio: teaching God and politics at one of America’s most prestigious universities. Yale, the Ivy League alma mater of his good friend George Bush, confirmed yesterday that the former prime minister is to join the schools of management and divinity at the campus in New Haven, Connecticut, in the autumn. He will teach a course on faith and globalisation, looking at religion in the modern world. This will also be the theme of his Faith Foundation, which he is to launch in London before his Yale commitment starts. It is intended to promote understanding between Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The deans of Yale’s management and divinity schools are discussing with Blair how much time he will spend on campus. A spokesman for Blair insisted yesterday that his position would not require him to spend extended periods in Connecticut. But even before yesterday’s announcement, his aides were expressing concern about his workload next year. Continued . . .

By RALPH NADER | Counterpunch, March 8 – 9, 2008

The world’s largest prison—Gaza prison with 1.5 million inmates, many of  them starving, sick and penniless—is receiving more sympathy and protest  by Israeli citizens, of widely impressive backgrounds, than is reported  in the U.S. press.

In contrast, the humanitarian crisis brought about by Israeli government  blockades that prevent food, medicine, fuel and other necessities from  coming into this tiny enclave through international relief organizations  is received with predictable silence or callousness by members of  Congress, including John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The contrast invites more public attention and discussion.

Israel has militarily occupied Gaza for forty years. It pulled out its  colonials in 2005 but maintained an iron grip on the area  controlling  all access, including its airspace and territorial waters. Its F-16s and  helicopter gunships regularly shred more and more of the areas—public  works, its neighborhoods and inflict collective punishment on civilians  in violation of Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. As the International Red Cross declares, citing treaties establishing  international humanitarian law, “Neither the civilian population as a  whole nor individual civilians may be attacked.”

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