Times Online/UK, Aug 10, 2009
Nato needs to change its strategy in Afghanistan, says Anthony Cordesman, a military adviser
Michael Evans, Defence Editor
Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category
British spy chief weighs into torture row
August 11, 2009Morning Star Online, Monday 10 August 2009
by Paddy McGuffin
There has been “no torture and no complicity in torture” by the MI6, according to its head Sir John Scarlett
The government and MI6 head Sir John Scarlett have been accused of hiding behind ambiguities in their claims that British secret service agents were not complicit in torture.
Senior government figures and the spy chief have attempted to distance themselves from allegations of involvement in the torture of terror suspects in foreign countries.
The government currently faces a number of legal actions from torture victims who maintain that MI5 or MI6 agents were involved in their interrogation.
Yesterday, Foreign Secretary David Miliband and Home Secretary Alan Johnson wrote in a joint article for a national newspaper that there was no policy “to collude in, solicit or directly participate in abuses of prisoners” or to cover up alleged wrongdoing, although they added that it was not possible to “eradicate all risk.”
And in a highly unusual development, Mr Scarlett, who is usually content to remain in the shadows, emerged today in a bid to deflect criticism from MI6, stating that there was “no torture and no complicity in torture” by the British secret service.
He added that “our officers are as committed to the values and the human rights values of liberal democracy as anybody else.”
But responding to the comments, a spokesman for legal action charity Reprieve, which represents a number of torture victims, accused the spy chief and the government of a deliberate cover-up.
He said: “Like our government, the head of MI6 John Scarlett is hiding behind general statements rather than addressing specific allegations. This is simply not good enough.
“Failure to report torture is a serious crime. We would expect any citizen mixed up in such a crime to face the courts and governments should do the same.
“In the High Court case of Binyam Mohamed, the UK government has attempted to evade court scrutiny at every turn and behave increasingly as if they are above the law.”
Scotland Yard is conducting a criminal investigation into claims that MI5 was complicit in the abuse of Mr Mohamed, a British resident who alleges that he was tortured while being held at sites in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan.
“The Foreign Secretary denies covering up evidence of involvement in torture. Why then is he refusing to release a summary, written by High Court judges and stripped of all security-sensitive information, of what happened to Binyam Mohamed?” demanded the spokesman.
Today also saw an influential Westminster committee demand that torture victims be granted the right to sue foreign states through the British legal system.
The joint committee on human rights, chaired by Labour MP Andrew Dismore, called on ministers to lift state immunity, rejecting government claims that the decision would breach international obligations.
The committee concluded: “The practical questions of foreign relations, enforcement and litigation procedure are important, but they are secondary to the issue we are examining, which is, should there be a civil remedy available in the UK to victims of torture at the hands of foreign states?
“We are of the strong opinion that there should.”
The committee has also called for a full public inquiry into the allegations, a demand which has been backed by campaign groups such as Amnesty International and Liberty.
A Number 10 spokesman rejected the demands.
Burma’s nervous dictators try to quell the threat of Aung San Suu Kyi
August 11, 2009Critics view the opposition leader’s trial as a brazen attempt to exclude her from next year’s multiparty elections
- Justin McCurry
- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 11 August 2009 07.34 BST
The detained Burmese opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi. Photograph: Pornchai Kittiwongsakul/EPAAmid the secrecy, delays and legal squabbling of recent weeks, there has been one constant in the fate of Aung San Suu Kyi: that her arrest for allegedly breaking the terms of her house arrest is a brazen attempt by Burma’s military rulers to exclude the country’s opposition leader from the political process.
Aung San Suu Kyi, who was sentences to 18 months in detention today, celebrated her 64th birthday in Rangoon’s Insein prison in June, sharing curry and chocolate cake with her guards, was arrested in May after John Yettaw, an eccentric American well-wisher, sneaked into her compound and stayed for two nights without official permission.
China carries out mass arrests in Xinjiang
August 11, 2009By John Chan, wsws.com, August 11, 2009
The Chinese government is tightening its grip in the northwestern Uighur region of Xinjiang. On July 29, 253 people were arrested over their alleged involvement in the July 5 riot in Urumqi, the provincial capital. On August 2, an additional 319 were arrested.
The police had previously reported that over 1,400 had been detained shortly after the protest. Authorities claim that 197 people, mainly Han Chinese civilians, died at the hands of Uighur rioters, and 1,700 people were injured.
Reflections of Fidel: Seven Daggers at the Heart of the Americas
August 11, 2009Fidel Castro, Monthly Review, Aug 5, 2009
I read and reread data and articles written by smart personalities, some better known than others, who publish in various media outlets drawing the information from sources nobody questions.
Everywhere in the world, the people living on this planet are taking economic, environmental and war risks due to the United States policies but no other region of the world as threatened by such grave problems as that country’s neighbors, that is, the peoples of this continent south of that hegemonic power.
Israel PM vows never to evict settlers
August 10, 2009Yahoo! News, Aug 9, 2009
AFP/File – An Israeli policeman stands guard as Jewish settlers enter a house following the eviction of a Palestinian …
JERUSALEM (AFP) – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged on Sunday that he will never evict Jewish settlers from occupied Palestinian land as Israel did in 2005 in the Gaza Strip.
“The withdrawal from the Gaza Strip brought us neither peace nor security. The territory has become a base for the pro-Iranian Hamas movement and we will never make the same mistake again,” Netanyahu said at the weekly cabinet meeting.
“We will not evict any more people from their homes,” he added in comments carried by public radio.
In September 2005, the government of prime minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally removed all Jewish settlements from Gaza in a move aimed at ending Israel’s costly 38-year military presence in the Gaza Strip.
Sharon vowed to follow up that withdrawal with further pullbacks from the West Bank, but a massive stroke incapacitated him and his successor Ehud Olmert abandoned the policy in the wake of the June 2006 capture of an Israeli soldier by Gaza-based militants in a deadly cross-border raid.
An opinion poll published on Sunday showed Israeli Jews back Netanyahu’s stance against halting construction of settlements in occupied territory, with 66 percent endorsing his view that Israel has the right to build in east Jerusalem, which Palestinians want as the capital of their proposed state.
The survey of 512 people by Tel Aviv University‘s BI Cohen Institute found that only 27 percent of Israeli Jews, mostly supporters of the leftwing Meretz and Labour parties, oppose Netanyahu’s position.
Netanyahu has risked a rift with Israel’s strongest ally, the United States, by refusing to heed Washington’s calls to freeze building of settlements, which the international community considers illegal.
Deputy Foreign Minister Dany Ayalon on Sunday rejected UN protests against last week’s expulsion of two Palestinian families from their homes in occupied east Jerusalem.
In a meeting with UN Middle East envoy Robert Serry, Ayalon told him the expulsion followed a decision in an Israeli court and that Israeli jurisdiction applied to the entire city, a senior diplomat told AFP.
On August 2 club-wielding Israeli riot police evicted two Palestinian families from their houses in Jerusalem‘s Sheikh Jarrah district.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the European Union condemned the evictions, which followed an announcement by Israel that it planned to build Jewish homes in the Arab neighborhood.
Israel annexed the eastern part of the city in 1967 but Israeli sovereignty over the conquered territory has not been recognised internationally.
Around 200,000 Jewish people are estimated to have moved into the dozen or so Israeli settlements in east Jerusalem, home to 270,000 Palestinians.
Perpetual War for Perpetual War
August 10, 2009Get ready for a “lasting military presence” in Iraq
By Jeff Huber | The American Conservative, Aug 8, 2009
U.S. Army Col. Timothy R. Reese says it’s time for the U.S. to “declare victory” in Iraq and “go home.” It was time to declare victory and go home in January 2007, when the Bush administration decided to ignore the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group and charged off on its cockamamie “surge” strategy.
The original stated objective of the surge was political reconciliation in Iraq. By September 2007, when it was clear that the political objective was not in sight, Gen. David Petraeus pulled a bait-and-switch and announced that the military objectives of the surge were being met. Petraeus hagiographer Thomas E. Ricks slipped Freudian in February 2009 when he confessed that Petraeus’s goal was never to end the Iraq conflict but to trick Congress and the American public into extending it indefinitely by achieving short-term results though bribing Iraq’s militias.
According to Colonel Reese, chief of the Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team, the surge’s real objectives still haven’t been met and never will be. In a recent memorandum, Reese asserts that “the ineffectiveness and corruption” of Iraq’s government ministries is “the stuff of legend.” The government is “failing to take rational steps to improve its electrical infrastructure and to improve their oil exploration, production and exports.” There is “no progress towards resolving the Kirkuk situation,” transition the Sons of Iraq into the Iraqi Security Forces “is not happening” and “the Kurdish situation continues to fester.” Violent political intimidation is “rampant.” Iraq’s security forces are a disaster. The officer corps is corrupt. Enlisted men are neglected and mistreated. Cronyism and nepotism are rampant. Laziness, lack of initiative, and absence of basic military discipline are endemic. Iraq’s military leadership is incapable of leading; it can’t plan ahead, it can’t stand up to the Shiite political parties, it can’t stick to its agreements.
The U.S. military in Iraq has accomplished “all that can be expected,” Reese says.
Gen. Ray Odierno’s propaganda officer, Lt. Col. Josslyn Aberlem, told the New York Times that Reese’s memo “does not reflect the official stance of the U.S. military.” The memo “Reflects one person’s personal view at the time we were first implementing the Security Agreement post-30 June,” Abaelem said. “Since that time many of the initial issues have been resolved and our partnerships with Iraqi Security Forces and [government of Iraq] partners now are even stronger than before 30 June.”
Right. We shaved our monkey in Iraq for six years and change, but since June 30 everything’s gone hunky dory.
Oddly enough, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on July 29 that the relatively low levels of violence in Iraq might allow commanders to “moderately accelerate” troops reductions. He added, though, that Odierno would have to recommend speeding up the withdrawal before any decision is made. That pretty much tells you how things work in the Department of Defense. Gates isn’t in charge of his four-stars; they’re in charge of him.
Odie is on record as wanting to keep 35,000 U.S. troops in Iraq through 2015, so, predictably enough, on August 4 he rejected the idea of an accelerated pullout, saying that the surge hasn’t reached its goals yet and we need to “stay the course.” (Yes, he really used that moronic Bush-era mantra.) The Desert Ox doesn’t seem particularly concerned about the Status of Forces Agreement that requires all U.S. troops to leave Iraq by the end of 2011. Iraqi President Nuri al-Maliki doesn’t appear to be overly committed to the agreement either. In a July 23 appearance at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, Maliki opened the door for indefinite U.S. presence in his country, saying, “If Iraqi forces need more training and support, we will reexamine the agreement at that time, based on our own national needs.”
Even Reese isn’t all that committed about U.S. forces leaving Iraq. In his memo, he says that during the withdrawal period the U.S. and Iraqi governments “should develop a new strategic framework agreement that would include some lasting military presence at 1-3 large training bases, airbases, or key headquarters locations.”
Lasting military presence. That’s been the objective of the neoconservatives all along. In their September 2009 manifesto Rebuilding America’s Defenses Cheney’s pals at the infamous Project for the New American Century argued, “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” The neocons’ Pax Americana vision has translated into the Pentagon’s “long war,” a strategy that does not seek to win wars but rather to create a sequel to the Cold War in which Islamofacism substitutes for communism and puny Iran, whose defense budget is less than one percent of ours, replaces the Soviet juggernaut.
That might be justified if military applications overseas were making us safer from terrorism, but they are not. In 2008 the highly respected national security analysts at Rand Corporation released a report titled How Terrorist Groups End. The study involved a comprehensive analysis of terror organizations that existed worldwide between 1968 and 2006. 83 percent of the groups ended as a result of policing and political action. Military force accounted for a mere 7 percent of success against terrorists. Rand analysts recommend that the best course of counterterrorism actions should involve “a light U.S. military footprint or none at all.” We’re almost certainly, as Donald Rumsfeld suspected in 2004, making multiple new terrorists for every one we capture or kill. We have discovered a new style of warfare: reverse attrition. The more enemy we attrite the more enemy we have.
All the talk about withdrawing from Iraq is an Orwellian card trick. Reese says our “lasting military presence” should not “include the presence of any combat forces save those for force protection needs or the occasional exercise.” Why would we need to leave noncombat forces behind? So they can cook and clean for the combat forces that provide them force protection? The exercises we might do with the Iraqis would involve practicing for the invasions of Iran and Syria, which is the real reason the warmongery wants to keep an enduring base of operations in Iraq. There’s no need to conduct defensive exercises. None of Iraq’s neighbors is capable of invading and occupying it or crazy enough to try.
President Obama’s promise to remove all U.S combat troops from Iraq by August 2010 was also a see-through canard. As Gareth Porter revealed in March, the “advisory and assistance brigades” that will remain after that date will in fact be combat brigades augmented by a handful of advisers and assistants. The Cold War justified defense spending for a half-century. Now, the Pentagon is trying to validate its existence with another long war in the Middle East.
Sun Tzu famously said, “No nation ever profited from a long war.” The 27- year Peloponnesian War ended Athens’ reign as a superpower. The Thirty Years’ War Balkanized the Holy Roman Empire, dividing German power among multiple smaller states. The 46-year Cold War forced the Soviet Union to change its name back to Russia.
Don’t expect us to withdraw from Iraq or the Bananastans any time soon. The American warmongery, a confluence of Big War, Big Energy, Big Jesus, Big Israel, Big Brainwash, and Big Brother, is trying to entangle us in a state of constant armed conflict that will carry on into the next American century. There’s no need for anyone to challenge our hegemony; all they have to do is sit back and watch us collapse under the weight of our own stupidity.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals
Obama’s Israel Albatross
August 10, 2009Elections and Dissonance in the Middle East
By Elaine C. Hagopian, Counterpunch, Aug 7 – 9, 2009
Obama came into office vowing to resolve the Palestine question. He also vowed to approach the ME with civility and diplomacy, especially Iran, to iron out issues of mutual concern. The two-pronged plan was aimed at removing the Palestine question from the regional agenda, clearing the deck for improved relations with area states and resolution of existing US/ME issues. The February Israeli election yielded Netanyahu as Prime Minister presiding over an ultra right wing government. Netanyahu rejected Obama’s call for establishing a Palestinian state. He argued that Iran’s nuclear program with its assumed threat to Israel and to US interests was the primary issue to address, not Palestine. With the June election of anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, Holocaust denier Ahmedinejad, Netanyahu claimed that the danger Iran represents increased precipitously, and aggressive action was required. Therefore, Palestine should be put on the back burner. Public dissonance between the U.S. and Israel over Obama’s Palestine and Iran agenda amplified after Iran’s presidential election. The dissonance threatens Obama’s efforts to defuse ME volatility.
President Obama entered office with a promise of business not as usual. Although American foreign policy objectives were not changed, Obama insisted on the priority of dialogue and diplomacy to realize them, Afghanistan (and Pakistan) notwithstanding. Obama articulated two immediate goals he sought in the Middle East: 1) to resolve the Palestinian/Israeli conflict in accordance with the international consensus for a two-state solution without significantly alienating Israel. Israel is still considered important – wrongly as Mearsheimer and Walt (“The Israel Lobby,” LRB, 23 March 2006) would have it – to securing American economic interests and political hegemony in that region. As such, the US must guarantee key Israeli ME interests including area dominance. And 2) to dissolve, or at least checkmate the only regional alliance challenging US/Israeli designs in the ME, i.e., the alliance of Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and political elements in Iraq. Moving to resolve the Palestine question is seen by Obama as contributing to deflating the Iranian-led anti-US/Israel alliance by removing it as its cause célèbre, and thus making key alliance members amenable to American outreach. The thinking is that achieving these two interdependent goals would allow less hindered US maneuverability in taming Islamist movements in the region and prevailing in the energy grand game there.
A Just Peace in Kashmir?
August 9, 2009Reflections on Dynamics of Change
By Richard Shapiro | ZNet, Aug 8, 2009
What are the various roles that diverse constituencies must play to facilitate political processes that undo militarization and subjugation in Indian administered Kashmir? How can systemic structures that institutionalize violence, cultural annihilation, economic impoverishment, and political disempowerment be countered through non-violent, ethical resistance? What alliances are necessary to allow hope for overcoming cycles of oppression and breaking with histories of domination? How can international, national, and local actors and institutions work together to disrupt socially unnecessary suffering and ameliorate the conditions of existence? What forces must cohere to enable a just peace to emerge in a democratic Kashmir in the foreseeable future?
Numerous obstacles present tremendous challenges to movements for social justice. The current world order is predicated on systems of inequality that hierarchically divide countries, peoples, cultures, classes, genders, sexualities, ethnicities, and faith traditions to the benefit of the few and the detriment of the many. Dominant powers prescribe the rules of the game to their advantage and utilize knowledge, technology, and markets to structure social relations in their interests. The new global order presents itself as the best of all possible worlds in which sovereign nation-states organized through representative democracy, rule of law, free markets with government regulation, Enlightenment rationality, and human rights are promised as the solution to the problems of poverty, war, ecological devastation, genocide, and terrorism.
This dominant narrative of progress through the spread of capitalism organized in nation-states and guided by knowledge has attained hegemony as it has captured the imagination of postcolonial nations like India. Postcolonial nations have largely reproduced the structures of colonial oppression and organized themselves to become players in the existing global order as militarized, hyper-masculinized, nuclear powers measuring their worth on the basis of GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Emerging middle-classes of massive proportion in postcolonial nations like India buttress this process of nation building that mirrors and enforces dynamics of globalization through the production of unparalleled poverty, massive and multiple dislocations, genocide of indigenous peoples, ecological disaster, and abundant psychological malaise. India is embraced by the international community, meaning largely the United States and Western Europe, precisely because it marches in step with the new world order. India amasses great cultural capital as “the world’s largest democracy” in spite of the fact that it is home to 40% of the worlds most economically destitute, and seeks to constitute itself as a nation through policies that disregard the needs of the vast majority of its population.
India is inventing nothing new in its self-constitution as a powerful nation-state. National identity is being fabricated through the equation of India with Hindus, in blatant form in entities like the RSS and BJP, and in more subtle form in the Congress and progressive Indian citizens for whom nationalism linked to ‘Hindu cultural reassertion’ is an unreflective response to a colonial past. The equation of Hinduism (unity in diversity) and Christianity with tolerance for difference, and Islam with terrorism, backwardness, and fanaticism, functions as a global trope supportive of unleashing disproportionate violence on Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine, as well as within the territory of India in Gujurat, Orissa, and in the ‘disputed territory’ of Kashmir. India forms itself as nation with unexamined Hindu majoritarianism at its base, just as unexamined Christian cultural dominance organizes the United States, rendering explorations of the links between religionization, nationalism and particular secularisms close to impossible. India is also typical in its self-formation as nation in fashioning internal and external enemies as crucial to defining itself, and super-exploiting its most proximate ‘others’ to fuel its prosperity. European nations had the Jew as internal enemy. The United States is founded on the backs of its twin others – enslaved Africans and massacred Native Americans.
India has as its main ‘internal other’ the Muslim, who can take no solace in also occupying the role as external enemy in India’s dominant narrative. This double site is what the state uses to legitimate the brutalization of the Kashmiri people. Firstly, there is India’s need for a majority Muslim state within its borders to legitimate itself as a progressive, pluralistic, secular nation. Without a Muslim majority state within India, India cannot as easily legitimate itself as a progressive member of the new global order. Secondly there is India’s need to establish national identities that take precedence over regional, local, traditional identities. As a nation, India is in the process of seeking: (1) to establish territorial dominion over the current boundaries of the nation, (2) attain a monopoly on the means of violence, and (3) organize human and natural resources to enhance the productivity and power of the nation. Every nation that has achieved the normative status of modern democracy has utilized sustained and prolific violence to realize these three imperatives and in the process establish its identity. India is in a very vulnerable moment in this process as is evident from an examination of the myriad territories and forces fighting for autonomy in some form from the Indian state. Part of the strategy to foster national identity, simultaneous to providing very little to the vast majority of its population, and in fact fostering mal-development that impoverishes and displaces poor, rural ‘citizens’, is to fabricate an ‘us’ that must protect itself from ‘them’. Without internal enemies India cannot unify itself as a nation.
This internal enemy is also resolutely claimed as integral to India. The state and its loyal subjects repeat the same refrain: ‘Kashmir is an integral part of India.’ ‘Kashmir is integral to India.’ Kashmir is the other that is integral to the self, a difference that is integral to the identity of India. How then does India treat this other, this integral difference? To debase, devalue, disrespect, destroy the people, culture, history, land, waters, aspirations, imaginations, passions, thoughts, of this other that is claimed as integral to self reveals much about India’s current state of existence. What other measure is available to us to assess ourselves as ethical entities than how we treat the other, how we engage the differences to which we are ethically obliged to respond? What nation has satisfactorily answered to this call? If a day arrives when Kashmir is ‘a nation unto itself’, independent and sovereign, an equal to all other nations, will Kashmir point the nation-state in a new direction? Will the differences integral to Kashmir be respected, affirmed, heard and engaged? Will ‘the other’ be the call to ‘the self’ to practice hospitality? Will the Gujur, the village woman who buried loved ones and waits in silence for words of/from other loved ones, the atheist, the ardent believer, the Shia, the Sufi, the pundit, the Buddhist, the differently abled, the homosexual, the beggar, the prostitute, be welcomed as participants in constructing a nation that will be ‘a light unto other nations’? Will the other be welcomed without the demand or structural incentive to assimilate, to mirror/mimic dominance to be recognized as human? These questions are too much, perhaps even unfair. Yet, is it not necessary to raise them?
Kashmir occupies a literal and imaginary border as inside and outside of India in ways that structure an impossible predicament. The state (and its elites and middle-classes) does not trust Kashmiris whose allegiance is always presumed to lie with Pakistan as an Islamic Republic, thus denying Kashmiris the rights of citizens of India, while asserting the inviolability of its sovereignty over Kashmir as a secular, democratic nation governed by equality under rule of law. The distrust legitimates military rule organized through special laws as necessary to provide law and order as a matter of internal security. Thus, on the basis of being part of a democratic state, the rights granted citizens of such a state are denied to Kashmiris. Inclusion in nation is coupled with dispossession from historical memory, rights, and life. India legitimates its mistreatment through a logic originating with European nation-states. This denial of civil and human rights, rule of law, and the freedoms of citizenship to Kashmiris is because the state must protect itself from forces within itself that threaten its character as a lawful, democratic nation. India must violate what is most inviolable, through a state of exception (the use of law to suspend law as definitive of sovereignty), to protect itself. The discourse requires the allegiance of the Kashmiri people to India, as proof that Kashmiris are not what the nation suspects – traitors and terrorists, as precondition to access to the rights of citizenship. These same rights of citizenship provided by the nation, while denied to Kashmiris, are used by India to justify its claims to being a legitimate state entitled to act as it does in Kashmir. As a legitimate state, India is predicated on civil rights and rule of law that it may legitimately suspend in the name of national security. Kashmiris must align with India given this legitimacy, while living as subjects without rights in so far as the state defines them as a threat to its sovereignty. India must violate what gives it legitimacy in order to protect itself from the internal enemy integral to it. India must destroy itself to protect itself. The state of exception produces a state of autoimmunity. India is also asserting itself as superior to other regional nation-states, and an emerging player in relation to Western Europe and the United States. Like other powerful democracies, India is entitled to do whatever is necessary to fight terrorism and strengthen itself as a powerful, sovereign, capitalist nation, aligned with the movement of progress (dominance).
Kashmiris are placed in a situation where allegiance to India as prerequisite to participation in a lawful democracy involves allegiance to a state that has no rational basis to demand or expect allegiance from the people of Kashmir. India needs to exaggerate the degree of cross-border infiltration and armed Islamist militancy to rationalize 500,000+ troops, blurred boundaries between police and army, and massive intervention in daily life through systematic surveillance, land seizures, checkpoints, torture, disappearances, gendered and sexualized violence, fake encounter deaths and countless daily humiliations calculated to break the spirit of the Kashmiri people. This reality is currently resisted through mass demonstrations, regular protests, strategic use of elections, strategic boycott of elections, navigating restrictions on ‘free press’, civil society mobilizations, legal cases, an International Tribunal, and regular acts of dignity, courage, and faith that characterize the present in Kashmir. India demonstrates the persona all too common in the ‘league of nations’ – to act with impunity and disregard for international law and local demands for justice. India uses this fiction of the Kashmiri as existing in the shadowy space of inside/outside the nation to legitimate an occupation that ignores the historical particularity of Kashmir and the promises made to the people of Kashmir to determine its own future. The plight of Kashmiri pundits also becomes an opportunity for the state to legitimate regularized violence and systematic oppression of Kashmiris. Were all Kashmiris, whether currently residing in the state of Jammu/Kashmir or elsewhere, to be given voice to express their will, free from coercion, retribution, and manipulation, the outcome would not be in doubt.
Kashmir is the longest standing disputed area in the United Nations, the most militarized spot on earth, and a drain on the hopes for prosperity, peace and freedom for people throughout the subcontinent, and the world. There is no moving toward peaceful coexistence between India and Pakistan, no stabilization of the region, no possibility for global nuclear disarmament, no hope for forms of development that prioritize sustainability and cultural survival over militarization, urbanization, and middle-class consumerism, no space for the impossible healing through mourning/memorializing the trauma of Partition, without granting self-determination to the people of Kashmir.
The realization of that which is demanded by rationality in service of justice and emancipation is always against the odds. In relation to Kashmir, a more peaceful future requires at least four interrelated movements: (1) Massive, non-violent, ethical dissent within Kashmiri civil society must continue and expand, attentive to alliances that build stronger relations between men and women, youth and adults, various faith communities, urban and rural, rich and poor, facilitative of inclusive forms of polity that enable a diverse, pluralistic movement for freedom. (2) Leadership must form a unified coalition that activates and learns from the multiple constituencies that make up Kashmiri society. Divergent desires and imaginations regarding the future of Kashmir should be encouraged and discussed, outside the search for homogeneity or conformity. A Kashmir free of subjugation should enable multiple forms of life through participatory democracy, just governance, and economic practice promoting health, education, and individual and collective prosperity. Natural resources, like water, should be both safeguarded, and utilized for sustainable development. Cultural heritage should be understood as an inheritance of all Kashmiris to fashion a unique society nurturing hospitality, innovation, and multicultural polity. (3) Education and mobilization to shift public opinion in India must be undertaken throughout civil society to expand pressure on the Indian state. Citizen delegations from the various states and communities of India must visit Kashmir to learn first hand about the atrocities, resistances, hopes, and concerns prevalent in Kashmir. Such delegations must bring their new understandings to their neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and places of worship to facilitate discussion and reflection that expand the voices of those who demand that illegal and immoral action in Kashmir done in their name immediately cease. Institutions in India must sponsor delegations from Kashmir, composed of diverse peoples who constitute Kashmiri society, to share the realities they have suffered and the need for alliance toward justice. Hindu faith communities must forge relationships with social justice movements in civil society in Kashmir to oppose Hindu majoritarian dominance and insist that the Indian state demilitarize the state of Jammu & Kashmir, become accountable to international agreements, rule of law, and human rights as the first step on the road to affirming the right of Kashmir to self-determination. Universities and the press must play a strong role in addressing the history and present of Kashmir to empower students and the citizenry of India to participate as informed members of a democratic republic, whose resources and conscience are systematically misused and violated by their government. (4) International solidarities from citizens, governmental and non-governmental organizations, students, workers, professionals, public intellectuals, faith communities, and all interested parties must be organized to educate, inform, advocate, and mobilize for the liberation of Kashmir. International institutions must be both utilized and strengthened as legitimate sites able to hold nation-states legally accountable for their actions. Research, education, and publication on the reality of present-day Kashmir and its modern history must be supported by and within universities, think tanks, and civil society forums. Campuses must become sites where students mobilize themselves to exert public pressure to ethically resolve the situation in Kashmir. Resistance in all four ‘sites’ must struggle to establish alliances, clarify goals, mobilize resources, deconstruct desires, and carve out space where different forms of polity and community, promoting ethical dissent, may live.
To commit to these practices secures no guarantees. The process must draw from the resolve of Kashmiris to struggle for justice and strengthen this resolve through principled alliance that breaks the isolation and despair that accompanies any people subjected to brutal mistreatment. The multiple legacies that inspire and haunt us must become the very sustenance that, through sharing, nurtures our struggle. Allow me to conclude by drawing from a source common to the three Abrahamic traditions, and of universal relevance in the present, Deuteronomy 16:20, Justice, Justice, You Shall Pursue.
Richard Shapiro is Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
Nader Was Right: Liberals Are Going Nowhere With Obama
August 11, 2009Truthdig.com, Aug 10, 2009
By Chris Hedges
The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture or “extraordinary rendition,” restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems.
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