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THE WORSENING ECONOMIC CRISIS has prompted the US Army War College to issue a report urging the use of military troops to contain possible civil unrest throughout America.
Entitled, Strategic Shocks in Defense Strategy Development, issued on November 4, 2008, the report argues that the US military must prepare for a “violent domestic dislocation provoked by an economic collapse.”
The report was authored by Nathan Freier, an Army lieutenant-colonel and professor at the US War College in Carlyle PA - the Army’s main training institute for prospective senior officers. Freier consigns dissenting Americans to the category of “hostile groups:”
“Civil unrest would force the defense establishment to maintain domestic order. Under certain circumstances this would include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States.” View Entire Report Here.
Zionist Jews who control America’s banks also have a stake in a militarist usurping of America’s civilian realm. On November 22, 2008, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former CEO of the Jewish investment bank, Goldman Sachs, threatened Congress of martial law if they did not pass a bailout bill. Because Jews fear an “Anti-Semitic” backlash during an economic downturn, an imposition of martial law would be welcomed by US Jewry.
Preparing to implement martial law, on December 1, 2008, the Pentagon announced its plans to deploy 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 to help state and local officials respond to emergencies.
And General Tommy Franks, a former US Commander in Iraq, said in a recent interview, that if another terrorist attack occurs in America, the Constitution would be discarded in favor of a military form of government. This “military form of government” is now being set up by the newly-formed Obama administration.
OBAMA BOWS TO THE PENTAGON
PUPPET-PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA has appointed 3 four star military officers to his cabinet since his election on November 4, 2008. With Obama’s choice of Admiral Dennis Blair as Director of National Intelligence, Robert Gates at Defense, & General James Jones at National Security, the launching of a military dictatorship is now in place in Obama’s fascist administration.
The leading warlord in Obama’s cabinet is Defense Secretary, Robert Gates. Gates answers to the powerful Trilateralists, David Rockefeller and his 80 year old protege, Zbigniew Brzezinski. The Trilateralist global agenda is presented in Brzezinski’s book, The Grand Chessboard. In Brzezinski’s call to escalate US military power, democracy is a hindrance to his militaristic goals:
“Democracy limits the use of America’s power - especially its capacity for military intimidation. Pursuit of military power is not a goal that commands popular passion except in conditions of a sudden threat to domestic well-being. Democracy is inimical to military mobilization.” View Entire Story Here & Here.
Obama is fully subservient to his masters of “military mobilization” - Brzezinski, Rockefeller, Gates, Blair & Jones. Spelling out his subservience to the Pentagon, on December 1, 2008, Obama declared, “To ensure prosperity here at home, we must maintain the strongest military on the planet.” To this end, Obama has pledged to increase the size of US ground forces by 100,000 soldiers.
Portending a full militaristic culture in America, Obama’s Chief of Staff, the Zionist Jew, Rahm Emanuel, has called for compulsory service for Americans ages 18 to 25. Service would include three months of basic training & civil defense preparation. Emanuel has also said he sees no reason why ALL Americans should not do national public service.
If the Zionists succeed in their plan for forced national service, Obama’s fascist warlords will have hundreds of thousands of SS Brown Shirts to enforce a military dictatorship right down to the neighborhood level. And this military dictatorship is…
– Coming To A “Theatre” In Your Neighborhood Soon –
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Former Blackwater guards plead not guilty
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By JESSE J. HOLLAND
Five former Blackwater Worldwide security guards pleaded not guilty Tuesday to federal manslaughter and gun charges resulting from a 2007 shooting in a crowded Baghdad square that killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured dozens of others.
The five — all decorated military veterans — stood silently in a line behind their lawyers as their not guilty plea on all charges was entered in front of U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina in federal court.
They are charged with 14 counts of manslaughter, 20 counts of attempted manslaughter and one count of using a machine gun to commit a crime of violence. The machine gun charge, typically used in drug cases, carries a 30-year minimum prison sentence.
Saying the case was complex, Urbina set a February 1, 2010 hearing date for former Marines Donald Ball of West Valley City, Utah; Dustin Heard of Knoxville, Tenn.; Evan Liberty of Rochester, N.H.; and Army veterans Nick Slatten of Sparta, Tenn., and Paul Slough of Keller, Texas.
The Iraqi government has labeled the guards "criminals" and is closely watching the Blackwater case. The shooting strained diplomacy between Washington and Baghdad and fueled the anti-American insurgency in Iraq, where many Iraqis saw the bloodshed in Nisoor Square as a demonstration of American brutality and arrogance.
The shooting took place around noon on Sept. 16, 2007, in a crowded square where prosecutors said civilians were running errands, getting lunch and otherwise going about their lives.
Prosecutors said the men unleashed a gruesome attack on unarmed Iraqis, with the slain including young children, women, people fleeing in cars and a man whose arms were raised in surrender as he was shot in the chest.
Twenty others were wounded in the crowded square, including one injured by a grenade launched into a nearby girls' school. Another 18 Iraqis were assaulted but not wounded, prosecutors said.
Iraqi witnesses said the contractors opened fire unprovoked and left the square littered with blown-out cars.
"This is a straightforward shooting of a lot of people," Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth C. Kohl said.
But the Blackwater guards contend they were ambushed by insurgents. One of the trucks in the convoy was disabled in the ensuing firefight, the guards say.
Blackwater radio logs made available to The Associated Press by a defense attorney in the case last month raised questions about prosecutors' claims that the guards' shooting was unprovoked. The log transcripts describe a hectic eight minutes in which the guards repeatedly reported incoming gunfire from insurgents and Iraqi police.
North Carolina-based Blackwater is the largest contractor providing security in Iraq. Most of its work for the State Department is in protecting U.S. diplomats in Iraq. The company has not been charged in connection with the shooting.
The five guards, all dressed in dark suits and ties, said nothing while in the courtroom.
A sixth, however, is cooperating with the government. Jeremy Ridgeway of California pleaded guilty to one count each of manslaughter, attempted manslaughter, and aiding and abetting. In his plea agreement with prosecutors, Ridgeway admitted there was no threat from a white Kia sedan whose driver, a medical student, was killed and his mother, in the front passenger seat, was injured.
Urbina ordered prosecutors to give defense lawyers copies of Ridgeway's sealed plea agreement in three months.
In a separate case, another former Blackwater security contractor will soon be charged in the killing of an Iraqi guard in 2006, his lawyer said.
Andrew Moonen of Seattle, a former Army Ranger, fatally shot a 32-year-old guard for Iraqi Vice President Adil Abd-al-Mahdi while wandering around drunk after a Christmas Eve party in 2006, according to a congressional report.
Moonen, now 28, said he had been in a gunfight with Iraqis. Blackwater arranged to have the State Department fly him back to the United States, fired him and fined him, and paid the slain guard's family $15,000.
By JESSE J. HOLLAND
Five former Blackwater Worldwide security guards pleaded not guilty Tuesday to federal manslaughter and gun charges resulting from a 2007 shooting in a crowded Baghdad square that killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured dozens of others.
The five — all decorated military veterans — stood silently in a line behind their lawyers as their not guilty plea on all charges was entered in front of U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina in federal court.
They are charged with 14 counts of manslaughter, 20 counts of attempted manslaughter and one count of using a machine gun to commit a crime of violence. The machine gun charge, typically used in drug cases, carries a 30-year minimum prison sentence.
Saying the case was complex, Urbina set a February 1, 2010 hearing date for former Marines Donald Ball of West Valley City, Utah; Dustin Heard of Knoxville, Tenn.; Evan Liberty of Rochester, N.H.; and Army veterans Nick Slatten of Sparta, Tenn., and Paul Slough of Keller, Texas.
The Iraqi government has labeled the guards "criminals" and is closely watching the Blackwater case. The shooting strained diplomacy between Washington and Baghdad and fueled the anti-American insurgency in Iraq, where many Iraqis saw the bloodshed in Nisoor Square as a demonstration of American brutality and arrogance.
The shooting took place around noon on Sept. 16, 2007, in a crowded square where prosecutors said civilians were running errands, getting lunch and otherwise going about their lives.
Prosecutors said the men unleashed a gruesome attack on unarmed Iraqis, with the slain including young children, women, people fleeing in cars and a man whose arms were raised in surrender as he was shot in the chest.
Twenty others were wounded in the crowded square, including one injured by a grenade launched into a nearby girls' school. Another 18 Iraqis were assaulted but not wounded, prosecutors said.
Iraqi witnesses said the contractors opened fire unprovoked and left the square littered with blown-out cars.
"This is a straightforward shooting of a lot of people," Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth C. Kohl said.
But the Blackwater guards contend they were ambushed by insurgents. One of the trucks in the convoy was disabled in the ensuing firefight, the guards say.
Blackwater radio logs made available to The Associated Press by a defense attorney in the case last month raised questions about prosecutors' claims that the guards' shooting was unprovoked. The log transcripts describe a hectic eight minutes in which the guards repeatedly reported incoming gunfire from insurgents and Iraqi police.
North Carolina-based Blackwater is the largest contractor providing security in Iraq. Most of its work for the State Department is in protecting U.S. diplomats in Iraq. The company has not been charged in connection with the shooting.
The five guards, all dressed in dark suits and ties, said nothing while in the courtroom.
A sixth, however, is cooperating with the government. Jeremy Ridgeway of California pleaded guilty to one count each of manslaughter, attempted manslaughter, and aiding and abetting. In his plea agreement with prosecutors, Ridgeway admitted there was no threat from a white Kia sedan whose driver, a medical student, was killed and his mother, in the front passenger seat, was injured.
Urbina ordered prosecutors to give defense lawyers copies of Ridgeway's sealed plea agreement in three months.
In a separate case, another former Blackwater security contractor will soon be charged in the killing of an Iraqi guard in 2006, his lawyer said.
Andrew Moonen of Seattle, a former Army Ranger, fatally shot a 32-year-old guard for Iraqi Vice President Adil Abd-al-Mahdi while wandering around drunk after a Christmas Eve party in 2006, according to a congressional report.
Moonen, now 28, said he had been in a gunfight with Iraqis. Blackwater arranged to have the State Department fly him back to the United States, fired him and fined him, and paid the slain guard's family $15,000.
Fears mount of Gaza conflict spill over in Europe
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By JOHN LEICESTER
Government officials and Jewish leaders are concerned the conflict in Gaza may spill over into violence in Europe, with attacks reported against Jews and synagogues in France, Sweden and Britain.
Assailants rammed a burning car into the gates of a synagogue in Toulouse, in southwest France, Monday night.
A Jewish congregation in Helsingborg, in southern Sweden, was attacked Monday night by someone who "broke a window and threw in something that was burning," said police spokesman Leif Nilsson. And on Sunday slogans, including "murderers ... You broke the cease-fire," were daubed on Israel's Embassy in Stockholm.
In Denmark, a 27-year-old Dane born in Lebanon to Palestinian parents is alleged to have injured two young Israelis last week in a shooting police suspect could be linked to the Gaza crisis. Belgium ordered police in Antwerp and Brussels to be on increased state of alert" Tuesday after recent pro-Palestinian protests ended in violence and arrests.
France has Western Europe's largest Jewish and Muslim communities and a history of anti-Semitic violence flaring when tensions in the Middle East are high. In 2002, some 2,300 Jews left France for Israel because they felt unsafe. Even in normal times, anti-Semitic incidents are not uncommon.
President Nicolas Sarkozy warned in a statement Tuesday that France would not tolerate violence linked to the Gaza crisis. A day earlier, his interior minister said she was concerned about the prospect of contagion and met with the heads of the two main Muslim and Jewish groups and police officials to stress the need to "preserve national unity."
Jews in the small Strasbourg suburb of Lingolsheim in eastern France woke up Tuesday to find graffiti with words like "assassins" spray-painted on the outside walls of their synagogue. The community filed a complaint for "degradation of a place of worship," the mayor's office said.
Damage to the synagogue in Toulouse was limited to a blackened gate. Police said unlighted gasoline bombs were found in a car nearby and in the synagogue's yard. A local Jewish leader, Armand Partouche, said he believed the assailants fled when the building's alarm went off.
Local authorities promised Tuesday to boost security for synagogues and other Jewish sites in the city, Partouche said.
"We really fear that anti-Semitism will spring up again and that the current conflict will be transposed to our beautiful French republic," Partouche said.
French Muslim leader Mohammed Moussaoui condemned the attack, saying no motive could justify an assault on any place of worship.
Interior Ministry spokesman Gerard Gachet said police have not noted an increase in violence against Jews linked to the Gaza crisis. But he said tensions are likely.
In Britain, the Community Security Trust, a Jewish defense group, said it had seen a rise in anti-Semitic incidents since the start of Israel's offensive against Gaza. The group said it recorded 20-25 incidents across the country in the past week — a sizable increase from 2-3 incidents usually reported to the group over the Christmas-New Year period.
Police are investigating an arson attempt Sunday on a synagogue in north London. Assailants splashed liquid on the door and set it on fire. Police would not speculate on whether the attack was linked to the Gaza crisis.
In another incident last week, a gang of 15-20 youths walked along the main street in Golders Green, a largely Jewish neighborhood in north London, shouting "Jew" and "Free Palestine" at passers-by, said Community Security Trust spokesman Mark Gardner.
By JOHN LEICESTER
Government officials and Jewish leaders are concerned the conflict in Gaza may spill over into violence in Europe, with attacks reported against Jews and synagogues in France, Sweden and Britain.
Assailants rammed a burning car into the gates of a synagogue in Toulouse, in southwest France, Monday night.
A Jewish congregation in Helsingborg, in southern Sweden, was attacked Monday night by someone who "broke a window and threw in something that was burning," said police spokesman Leif Nilsson. And on Sunday slogans, including "murderers ... You broke the cease-fire," were daubed on Israel's Embassy in Stockholm.
In Denmark, a 27-year-old Dane born in Lebanon to Palestinian parents is alleged to have injured two young Israelis last week in a shooting police suspect could be linked to the Gaza crisis. Belgium ordered police in Antwerp and Brussels to be on increased state of alert" Tuesday after recent pro-Palestinian protests ended in violence and arrests.
France has Western Europe's largest Jewish and Muslim communities and a history of anti-Semitic violence flaring when tensions in the Middle East are high. In 2002, some 2,300 Jews left France for Israel because they felt unsafe. Even in normal times, anti-Semitic incidents are not uncommon.
President Nicolas Sarkozy warned in a statement Tuesday that France would not tolerate violence linked to the Gaza crisis. A day earlier, his interior minister said she was concerned about the prospect of contagion and met with the heads of the two main Muslim and Jewish groups and police officials to stress the need to "preserve national unity."
Jews in the small Strasbourg suburb of Lingolsheim in eastern France woke up Tuesday to find graffiti with words like "assassins" spray-painted on the outside walls of their synagogue. The community filed a complaint for "degradation of a place of worship," the mayor's office said.
Damage to the synagogue in Toulouse was limited to a blackened gate. Police said unlighted gasoline bombs were found in a car nearby and in the synagogue's yard. A local Jewish leader, Armand Partouche, said he believed the assailants fled when the building's alarm went off.
Local authorities promised Tuesday to boost security for synagogues and other Jewish sites in the city, Partouche said.
"We really fear that anti-Semitism will spring up again and that the current conflict will be transposed to our beautiful French republic," Partouche said.
French Muslim leader Mohammed Moussaoui condemned the attack, saying no motive could justify an assault on any place of worship.
Interior Ministry spokesman Gerard Gachet said police have not noted an increase in violence against Jews linked to the Gaza crisis. But he said tensions are likely.
In Britain, the Community Security Trust, a Jewish defense group, said it had seen a rise in anti-Semitic incidents since the start of Israel's offensive against Gaza. The group said it recorded 20-25 incidents across the country in the past week — a sizable increase from 2-3 incidents usually reported to the group over the Christmas-New Year period.
Police are investigating an arson attempt Sunday on a synagogue in north London. Assailants splashed liquid on the door and set it on fire. Police would not speculate on whether the attack was linked to the Gaza crisis.
In another incident last week, a gang of 15-20 youths walked along the main street in Golders Green, a largely Jewish neighborhood in north London, shouting "Jew" and "Free Palestine" at passers-by, said Community Security Trust spokesman Mark Gardner.
Can the Jewish People Survive Without an Enemy?
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By Tony Karon
By Tony Karon
Avrum Burg is the scion of one of Israel’s founding families — his father was the deputy speaker of the first Knesset, and Burg himself later became speaker of the legislature, and a member of Israel’s cabinet. His position at the heart of the Israeli establishment makes all the more remarkable his critique of the Jewish State, which he claims has lost its sense of moral purpose. In his new book The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise from Its Ashes (Palgrave/MacMillan), he argues that an obsession with an exaggerated sense of threats to Jewish survival cultivated by Israel and its most fervent backers actually impedes the realization of Judaism’s higher goals. He discussed his ideas with TIME.com’s Tony Karon.
TIME: You argue that the Jewish people are in a state of crisis, partly because of the extent to which the Holocaust dominates contemporary Jewish identity. Can you explain?
Burg: I, like many others, believe that a day will come very soon when we will live in peace with our neighbors, and then, for the first time in our history, the vast majority of the Jewish people will be living without an immediate threat to their lives. Peaceful Israel and a secure Diaspora, all of us living the democratic hemisphere. And then the question facing our generation will be, can the Jewish people survive without an external enemy? Give me war, give me pogrom, give me disaster, and I know what to do; give me peace and tranquility, and I’m lost. The Holocaust was a hellish horror, but we often use it as an excuse to avoid looking around seeing how, existentially, 60 years later, in a miraculous way, are living in a much better situation.
In your book, you raise the question of the purpose of Jewish survival over thousands of years, insisting that Jews have not simply survived for the sake of survival. What is this higher purpose?
Both my parents were survivors — my father ran away from Berlin in September 1939; my mum survived the 1929 massacre in Hebron. So, my family knows something about trauma. Still, my siblings and I were brought up in a trauma-free atmosphere. We were brought up to believe that the Jewish people did not continue in order to continue, or survive in order to survive. A cat can survive — so it’s a circumcised cat, so what? It’s not about survival; survival for what?
Look at the Exodus: After 400 years of very aggressive oppression and enslavement, all of a sudden the outcry was "Let my people go," and that continues to resonate against slavery everywhere to this day. Then we come to the Sinai covenant, which is a key moment not just for Jewish theology, but for Christian belief as well: The Ten Commandments is the first human-to-human constitution, setting out the relations among humans on the basis of laws. And then you come to the Prophets, and its amazing that they’re calling so clearly for a just society. And then, in the Middle Ages, you listen to Maimonides say he’s waiting for redemption of the world without oppression between nations. So, in the Jewish story over so many centuries, there has always been a higher cause, not just for the Jews, but for all of humanity.
Even in the Holocaust, the lesson is "Never Again." But this doesn’t mean just never again can genocide be allowed to happen to the Jews, but never again can genocide be allowed to happen to any human being. So, the Holocaust is not just mine; it belongs to all of humanity.
You suggest that there’s been a turning inward from the universal purpose and meaning of the Jewish experience...
Both the internal and the external hemispheres of the Jewish experience are essential. I cannot envisage my Judaism without the input I got from the external world, be it philosophy, aesthetics, even democracy, which was introduced to the Jews in the last 200 years because of our interface with the the world. On the other hand, I can’t imagine my Western civilization and Western culture without the Jewish input, without Jesus Christ, who was born, was crucified and passed away as a Mishnaic rabbinical Jew. I cannot image Christian Europe opening up to modernity without a Maimonides reintroducing Greek philosophy. I cannot imagine modern times without a Spinoza, and Mendelson. I cannot imagine the 20th century without Marx and Freud. So, this conversation between Jews and the world is not just a conversation of pogroms and slaughter and Holocaust; it’s also a couple of thousand years of a conversation that enriched me and enriched them, and I don’t want to give that up.
Your book argues that the centrality of the Holocaust in Israeli identity is dysfunctional...
The Holocaust is a very real trauma for many people in Israel, and nobody can argue with that. But ... when I hear someone like Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a very intelligent person, say of [Iran’s President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, "It’s 1938 all over again," I say, is it?! Is this the reality? Did we have such an omnipotent army in 1938? Did we have an independent state in 1938? Did we have the unequivocal support in 1938 of all the important superpowers in the world? No, we did not. And when you compare Ahmadinejad to Hitler, don’t you diminish Hitler’s significance?
The sad thing is that whenever a head of state begins a visit to Israel, he doesn’t go to a university or to the high-tech sector or the beautiful cultural places we have in Israel; first you should get molded into the Israeli reality at [the Holocaust memorial] Yad Vashem. And I do not think that Yad Vashem should be the showcase or the gateway through which everybody should first encounter Israel. Part of the program, yes; but the starting point? This is not the way to baptize people into an encounter with Judaism.
You argue that the purpose of the Yad Vashem visit is to silence criticism...
It’s an emotional blackmail that says to people, this is what we have experienced, so shut up and help us... When the sages created the national holiday of Tisha Be’av, they made it the single day on which we commemorate all the traumas of our history, from the destruction of the first temple to the Spanish expulsion. These events did not all happen on this exact date; the founders of Jewish civilization confined the memory of the traumas of our history to one day, to allow us the rest of the year to get on with being Jewish, rather than letting sorrow take over our entire existence...
Look where we were 100 years ago and look where we are today — no other people made this transformation. Imagine we did not keep the shadow of the trauma looming over ourselves daily, what could we have been? How come 25% of the Nobel laureates in certain fields are of Jewish origins, and 10% of the arms deals around the world are done by Israelis? Why is my brother or sister in America a great poet or composer or physician whose achievements raise up all of humanity, and I who live here on my sword became a world expert on arms and swords? Is that really my mission, or is that an outcome of the black water with which I water my flowers? To make our contribution to humanity, we have to free ourselves of the obsession with the trauma.
Many Jews, in Israel and in America, see Israel as surrounded by deadly threats, and would see the benign and peaceful world you describe as a dangerous fantasy. What do you say to your critics?
I have very low expectations of new thinking and insight emerging from the mainstream Israeli and Jewish establishment. Their role is to maintain the status quo. Israel is bereft of forward thinking. We are experts at managing the crisis rather than finding alternatives to the crisis. In Israel you have many tanks, but not many think tanks. One of the reasons I left the Israeli politics was my growing feeling that Israel became a very efficient kingdom, but with no prophecy. Where is it going?
My idea of Judaism can be represented through a classic Talmudic dilemma: You are walking along by the river and there are two people drowning. One is Rabbi [Meir] Kahane, and the other is the Dalai Lama. You can only save one of them. For whom will you jump? If you jump for Rabbi Kahane because genetically he’s Jewish, you belong to a different camp than mine, because I would jump for the Dalai Lama. As much as he’s not genetically Jewish, he’s my Jewish brother when it comes to my value system. That’s the difference between me and the Jewish establishment in Israel and America.
But how can this new thinking you’re advocating help Israel solve its security problems?
Many people say to me, "What about Gaza? Don’t have so much compassion for them, don’t tell the Israelis to be nice there, tell [the Palestinians] to be nice there. And I say Gaza is a nightmare, and it’s a stain on my conscience. And I’m very troubled by the attitude of Israelis against Israeli Arabs. It’s a shame. It’s a black hole in my democracy. But I say sometimes that I’m too close to the reality; I don’t have the perspective; I don’t have the bigger picture. But if enough of my kids and enough of my youth will go to volunteer, be it in Darfur or be it Rwanda, or be it in the squatter camps of South Africa, they will sharpen their sensitivities. And they will come back and say, listen, if we can do so much good out there, let’s do something over here. And I see my own kids, when they come back from India and from Latin America, how changed they are as people. I see my son, after one and a half years in Latin American. He came home, and five days later, was called for 30 days "miluim" service [with his military unit] in the West Bank. And he was sitting in the worst junction in the West Bank. And he says, "When I look around me 360 degrees, nobody loves me. Settlers, Kahanes, rabbis, mullahs, Hamas, Palestinians, you name it — they all hate me. And he told me, "Here I was sitting on a corner one day; it was my break time, and I was drinking coffee with a friend of mine, and out of the valley climbed an old Arab. He was very bent forward and frail, and walked slowly to us and said ’Here is my ID.’ And we told him, you don’t have to give us your ID; we didn’t ask for it. And he said ’No, here it is, I want you to look at it. Look at it, I’m okay, I’m kosher, I’m kosher.’ I checked it and let him pass, and then I began crying and crying."
So, I asked my son, why did you cry, what happened? And he said, "You don’t understand that for a year and a half, I was in Latin America, going to small villages and sitting with this kind of man, listening to their oral tradition, to the beauty of their history, to the wisdom of their culture. And they shared it with me. And now here I am, the policeman, here I am the bad guy, here I am the occupier. And I can’t talk to this man. You know how much he could tell me under different circumstances?" And I say, that’s an example for me.
Israel May Face Charges for War Crimes
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By Mel Frykberg
Israel has committed war crimes and should be prosecuted in an international court, says Raji Sourani, head of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) in Gaza.
"The repeated bombing of clearly marked civilian buildings, where civilians were sheltering, crosses several red lines in regard to international law," Sourani told IPS.
Palestinian Authority (PA) delegate to Britain Professor Manuel Hassassian has said the PA will launch legal proceedings against Israeli leaders it says are responsible for war crimes in Gaza, according to a Palestinian news report.
Another 22 Palestinians were killed Wednesday morning in bombing and shelling as Israel's Operation Cast Lead entered day 11. The dead included four people killed in the shelling of a children's playground near a mosque in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood of Gaza city.
Six Israelis were treated for shock as several rockets from Gaza hit Israel.
Hassassian's comment came in the wake of Israeli shelling of a UN school in Jabaliya refugee camp Tuesday afternoon which killed over 40 Palestinians. Several other UN schools in the Gaza Strip were also hit in the last few days, resulting in a number of casualties.
The UN called for an investigation, stating that prior to the current operation the Israelis were given the precise coordinates of all UN institutions in Gaza.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has already condemned an Israeli attack on two members of the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRC) last week. The ICRC said the medics were wearing fluorescent jackets, their ambulances were clearly marked, and their flashing lights were on.
Nihal Al-Akras, chairman of the Palestinian Health Care Committees, asked the international community to pressure Israel to stop firing on medical facilities and workers in the Gaza Strip.
Akhras's comments followed Tuesday's bombing of the Ad-Dura hospital in the Rimal neighbourhood of Gaza city. Three mobile clinics provided by a Danish NGO, DanChurchAid, were also destroyed.
"We've been able to help the wounded and suffering so far because our vehicles have been present and ready inside Gaza. This possibility of emergency aid is now in ruins," said Henrik Stubkjær, secretary general of DanChurchAid.
"We are deeply shocked that the Israeli air strikes directly prevent the humanitarian aid effort," he added.
According to DanChurchAid the clinics were clearly marked with red crosses and were parked in the Union of Healthcare headquarters.
"One Palestinian doctor and three medics have been killed during Israel's bombing campaign which began on December 27," Sammy Hassan, spokesman for Gaza's Shifa Hospital told IPS.
While Israel has denied that it deliberately targets civilians, reading between the lines of reports in the Israeli media and admissions by military leaders would suggest that the lives of Palestinian civilians are secondary to saving Israeli soldiers.
Several senior Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) officers have admitted that the IDF strategy is to use tremendous firepower on the ground to protect Israeli soldiers during fighting in civilian areas, a senior officer explained to journalists on Tuesday.
"For us, being cautious means being aggressive," said one officer. "From the minute we entered, we've acted like we're at war. That creates enormous damage on the ground.
"When we suspect that a Palestinian fighter is hiding in a house, we shoot it with a missile and then with two tank shells, and then a bulldozer hits the wall. It causes damage but it prevents the loss of life among soldiers."
The IDF suffered significant military casualties during the 2006 Lebanon war, and the top brass realised that a repeat of this would erode public morale and the country's political will. The Israeli cabinet took all this into account prior to the ground operation into Gaza.
Additionally, limited global reaction -- due to the lack of international media on the ground in Gaza following an Israeli ban -- to several of the more serious incidents of civilian casualties has emboldened Israel to a certain degree.
Even during the Lebanon War following similarly serious attacks by Israel on Lebanese civilians, a ceasefire took weeks to be enforced.
However, Israel has not been completely immune from the world's outrage. Following international pressure on the escalating humanitarian crisis, Israel has agreed to establish a humanitarian corridor near Gaza city.
Israeli military operations will be halted for threehours every day to allow humanitarian aid to reach Gaza's besieged population through this corridor.
"The idea is for the Israeli military to lay down its weapons every day from 1 pm to 4 pm starting today (Wednesday) in the area of the city of Gaza," an Israeli source was quoted as saying.
Israeli leaders met in Tel Aviv Wednesday morning to discuss expanding the ground offensive during a period when most of the aims of the operation have been reached, according to a number of Israeli analysts.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Defence Minister Ehud Barak -- the war cabinet's troika – reportedly discussed an even more intensive campaign in Gaza's towns and cities. Israel is hoping to inflict as much damage as possible to Hamas's personnel and infrastructure.
By Mel Frykberg
Israel has committed war crimes and should be prosecuted in an international court, says Raji Sourani, head of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) in Gaza.
"The repeated bombing of clearly marked civilian buildings, where civilians were sheltering, crosses several red lines in regard to international law," Sourani told IPS.
Palestinian Authority (PA) delegate to Britain Professor Manuel Hassassian has said the PA will launch legal proceedings against Israeli leaders it says are responsible for war crimes in Gaza, according to a Palestinian news report.
Another 22 Palestinians were killed Wednesday morning in bombing and shelling as Israel's Operation Cast Lead entered day 11. The dead included four people killed in the shelling of a children's playground near a mosque in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood of Gaza city.
Six Israelis were treated for shock as several rockets from Gaza hit Israel.
Hassassian's comment came in the wake of Israeli shelling of a UN school in Jabaliya refugee camp Tuesday afternoon which killed over 40 Palestinians. Several other UN schools in the Gaza Strip were also hit in the last few days, resulting in a number of casualties.
The UN called for an investigation, stating that prior to the current operation the Israelis were given the precise coordinates of all UN institutions in Gaza.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has already condemned an Israeli attack on two members of the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRC) last week. The ICRC said the medics were wearing fluorescent jackets, their ambulances were clearly marked, and their flashing lights were on.
Nihal Al-Akras, chairman of the Palestinian Health Care Committees, asked the international community to pressure Israel to stop firing on medical facilities and workers in the Gaza Strip.
Akhras's comments followed Tuesday's bombing of the Ad-Dura hospital in the Rimal neighbourhood of Gaza city. Three mobile clinics provided by a Danish NGO, DanChurchAid, were also destroyed.
"We've been able to help the wounded and suffering so far because our vehicles have been present and ready inside Gaza. This possibility of emergency aid is now in ruins," said Henrik Stubkjær, secretary general of DanChurchAid.
"We are deeply shocked that the Israeli air strikes directly prevent the humanitarian aid effort," he added.
According to DanChurchAid the clinics were clearly marked with red crosses and were parked in the Union of Healthcare headquarters.
"One Palestinian doctor and three medics have been killed during Israel's bombing campaign which began on December 27," Sammy Hassan, spokesman for Gaza's Shifa Hospital told IPS.
While Israel has denied that it deliberately targets civilians, reading between the lines of reports in the Israeli media and admissions by military leaders would suggest that the lives of Palestinian civilians are secondary to saving Israeli soldiers.
Several senior Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) officers have admitted that the IDF strategy is to use tremendous firepower on the ground to protect Israeli soldiers during fighting in civilian areas, a senior officer explained to journalists on Tuesday.
"For us, being cautious means being aggressive," said one officer. "From the minute we entered, we've acted like we're at war. That creates enormous damage on the ground.
"When we suspect that a Palestinian fighter is hiding in a house, we shoot it with a missile and then with two tank shells, and then a bulldozer hits the wall. It causes damage but it prevents the loss of life among soldiers."
The IDF suffered significant military casualties during the 2006 Lebanon war, and the top brass realised that a repeat of this would erode public morale and the country's political will. The Israeli cabinet took all this into account prior to the ground operation into Gaza.
Additionally, limited global reaction -- due to the lack of international media on the ground in Gaza following an Israeli ban -- to several of the more serious incidents of civilian casualties has emboldened Israel to a certain degree.
Even during the Lebanon War following similarly serious attacks by Israel on Lebanese civilians, a ceasefire took weeks to be enforced.
However, Israel has not been completely immune from the world's outrage. Following international pressure on the escalating humanitarian crisis, Israel has agreed to establish a humanitarian corridor near Gaza city.
Israeli military operations will be halted for threehours every day to allow humanitarian aid to reach Gaza's besieged population through this corridor.
"The idea is for the Israeli military to lay down its weapons every day from 1 pm to 4 pm starting today (Wednesday) in the area of the city of Gaza," an Israeli source was quoted as saying.
Israeli leaders met in Tel Aviv Wednesday morning to discuss expanding the ground offensive during a period when most of the aims of the operation have been reached, according to a number of Israeli analysts.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Defence Minister Ehud Barak -- the war cabinet's troika – reportedly discussed an even more intensive campaign in Gaza's towns and cities. Israel is hoping to inflict as much damage as possible to Hamas's personnel and infrastructure.
Student loans turn into crushing burden for unwary borrowers
Go to Original
By Kathy M. Kristof
Some who think they are getting a federal loan find out later that they hold a private loan. The difference can be costly.
One in a series of occasional stories
Natalie Hickey left her small hometown in Ohio six years ago and aimed her beat-up Dodge Intrepid for the West Coast. Four years later, she realized a long-held dream and graduated with a bachelor's degree in photography from Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara.
She also picked up $140,000 in student debt, some of it at interest rates as high as 18%. Her monthly payments are roughly $1,700, more than her rent and car payment combined.
"I don't have all this debt because I was buying stuff," said Hickey, who now lives in Texas. "I was just trying to pay tuition, living on ramen noodles and doing everything as cheaply as I could."
Hickey got caught in an increasingly common trap in the nation's $85-billion student loan market. She borrowed heavily, presuming that all her debt was part of the federal student loan program.
But most of the money she borrowed was actually in private loans, the fastest-growing segment of the student loan market. Private loans have no relation to the federal loan program, with one exception: In many cases, they are offered by the same for-profit companies that provide federally funded student loans.
As a result, some students who think they are getting a federal loan find out later that they hold a private loan. The difference can be costly.
Whereas federally guaranteed loans have fixed interest rates, currently either 6% or 6.8%, private loans are more like credit card debt. Interest rates aren't fixed and often run 15% or more, not counting fees.
Most students have little experience in taking out loans, yet the federal government doesn't require lenders to disclose the total cost of a student loan and other terms upfront -- before signing -- as it does for car loans and mortgages.
"Students are in the cross hairs, being bombarded by very sophisticated and, to some extent, ethically marginal lenders," said Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), who sponsored legislation passed this year that will require lenders to provide more disclosures on fees. "My fear is that we are developing a predatory market, just like we have had in mortgages."
About $15 billion in private student loans are expected to be funded this year, a 900% increase from a decade ago, according to the nonprofit College Board. Private loans are growing faster than federally guaranteed loans, which rose 59% over the same period, in part because of limits on how much students can borrow with the government's backing.
Four years at a public university, including room and board, costs an average of $57,332, according to the College Board. The average tab for a private university is $136,528. Yet the maximum that can be borrowed under the federal loan program is $31,000.
High-cost private loans fill that gap. One result is that students now average nearly $20,000 in debt by the time they graduate, twice as much as a decade ago.
"There is an alignment of interests that lead students to take out larger and larger amounts of debt," said Luke Swarthout, a former higher education advocate at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group in Washington.
"The students think it's an investment in their future, and the colleges are willing to let them borrow heavily because it helps them fill in their enrollment."
In the dark
Hickey knew she would need loans to complete her degree, so she went to the campus financial aid office as a freshman. After she filled out paperwork, Brooks Institute set her up in a loan program administered by Sallie Mae, the nation's biggest student lender.
Sallie Mae was chartered by the federal government in 1972, and most of its business is in issuing federally insured student loans. But while it may appear to be a quasi-government agency, it is in fact a for-profit company whose stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange.
Hickey ended up with $20,000 in low-interest federally guaranteed loans issued by Sallie Mae, and $120,000 in higher-interest private loans issued by Sallie Mae.
Hickey said no one explained the difference to her.
"The financial aid officer just said that my federal loans weren't enough to pay the tuition, but that was OK because they had these great alternative loans," Hickey said. "They made it sound so good that I didn't ask that many questions."
Tim Halsey, vice president of finance for Brooks Institute, declined to discuss Hickey's case directly, citing federal privacy laws. But he said the school's financial aid officers take great pains to explain the differences between loans and to guide students to the best deals.
"It is really to our advantage to get the loans and interest rates as low as possible," Halsey said.
"My motivation is to get that person to come to the school, if that's what they want to do. If I can get those costs as low as possible, it benefits us both."
Spotty disclosure
But some lenders market directly to students, and consumer advocates say they often fail to clearly detail loan costs and may even seek to present themselves as part of a school's financial aid office.
For a glimpse into how lenders operate, The Times filled out online loan applications with JPMorgan Chase & Co., Sallie Mae and MyRichUncle. An 18-year-old student who began college this fall agreed to provide personal information, including her Social Security number, so that lenders would provide detailed loan terms.
JPMorgan Chase, the giant New York bank, did not disclose its interest rates or fees in the online application.
Sallie Mae, which is based in Reston, Va., disclosed an interest rate and fee, but an attached disclaimer in capital letters said the numbers were preliminary "and may change."
The third, MyRichUncle, a New York-based student loan firm formed in 2005, disclosed a variable rate that starts at 9.6% and said there would be an unspecified origination fee.
The loan companies provided a bit more information over the phone. A MyRichUncle representative said its origination fee would be 2%. A Chase agent said the variable rate would start at 7.5% with no origination fee, and Sallie Mae said its variable rate would be 8%, also with no fee.
After initially resisting, agents for Sallie Mae and Chase both agreed to provide summaries of the loan costs in writing. But the one-page letters they mailed did not include the total cost of the loan over time.
The Times then called all three lenders to discuss their practices. MyRichUncle co-founder Raza Khan said that the failure to state the amount of the origination fee in the online application was a mistake and that the information was now included.
Sallie Mae spokeswoman Martha Holler maintained that the company's disclosures were adequate.
JPMorgan Chase spokeswoman Mary Kay Bean said the loan terms would be sent after the loan had been approved, pointing out that the company was not required to do so beforehand.
"We send borrowers a letter with the rate," Bean said. "We comply with the law. That's it."
Lenders in disguise
When Shianily Torres took out $38,000 in student loans at Florida's International Academy of Design and Technology, she thought she was dealing with the college financial aid office.
She now thinks it may actually have been a representative of Sallie Mae -- in part because that was the only company that offered her a loan.
"My father asked if there was somewhere else we could get the loan and they said no. The school didn't accept money from just any bank," Torres said.
Torres said she didn't learn the rate on her loan until after graduation, when she got the bill. The variable rate rose as high as 18.5%, which requires a monthly payment of $650 -- more than twice what she makes in her part-time job.
She said that she couldn't make the payments, and that Sallie Mae had not responded to her efforts to renegotiate terms.
An investigation last year by New York Atty. Gen. Andrew Cuomo found an "unholy alliance" between lenders and hundreds of schools across the country.
Charging more than a dozen lenders with wrongdoing, Cuomo cited a pattern of bribes to financial aid officers making decisions about which lenders would appear on school-preferred lender lists and "revenue-sharing" kickbacks -- in cash or products -- to schools that led their students to specific companies.
Hundreds of colleges agreed to abide by new ethics rules and not to accept gifts, and half a dozen even refunded money to students. The U.S. Department of Education tightened its guidelines to discourage quid pro quo arrangements.
More than a dozen student lenders, including Sallie Mae, Bank of America, Citibank and JPMorganChase, paid a combined $13.7 million to settle Cuomo's charges, without admitting or denying the allegations.
Private litigation continues, however. Torres is one of dozens of students who are suing Sallie Mae, alleging deception and discriminatory practices that left low-income and minority students saddled with the highest-cost loans.
Andrew Meyer, the Tampa, Fla., attorney handling the case, said his law firm gained insight into Sallie Mae's practices from people who formerly worked there as loan officers.
A key strategy was to make students believe the loan officers worked directly for the college, he said. Meyer said Sallie Mae purposely sent disclosure forms a month or more after classes had begun so that students would be less likely to protest onerous terms.
Sallie Mae's Holler said she could not comment on litigation, but she defended the company's lending practices.
"It's risk-based pricing," she said. "Students can take advantage of an interest rate decline, like we've seen in the past several months, but the loan rates also have the potential to rise when there is a rising rate environment."
Direct marketing
In addition to working with schools, lenders try to reach students directly. Although some companies have failed in the credit crunch, dozens remain in business, sending e-mails to students and advertising on sites such as YouTube.
Loan-shopping websites also lure young people into private loans, said Nancy Coolidge, a financial aid executive with the UC Board of Regents.
She noted that one site -- TuitionBids.com -- encouraged students to seek federal loans first but also had a "let the bidding begin" button that directed users to an application for a private loan.
"The way the site is set up encourages misunderstanding," Coolidge said. "They do what we ask by saying that private loans should be a last resort, but then ask, 'Are you interested?' When the kid clicks yes, they're catapulted to a private loan."
Keith Alliotts, chief executive of TuitionBids.com, counters that customers are able to choose either a private or a federally guaranteed loan.
"We don't advocate just private loans, we tell borrowers to get federal money first," he said. "But a lot of people need private loans."
But Alliotts acknowledged that TuitionBids.com receives a loan fee when a customer secures a private loan. The website makes nothing when consumers get a federally guaranteed loan.
Federal loan limits
Marja Lopees of Burbank is a few years out of school and makes about $70,000 a year as a lawyer. But she racked up $196,253 in debt and says her student loan payments swallow 40% of her earnings.
Lopees turned to private loans when she hit borrowing limits imposed by the federal student loan program. Now she has $88,303 in private loans that charge an interest rate of 8.84%. The payment on that loan is her second-largest monthly expense, after rent.
"I'm making interest-only payments on one of the loans, and still the payments keep going up," she said. "It's just overwhelming."
When she just makes minimum payments, her debt and rent consume 60% of her after-tax income. That's before she pays for food, clothing, utilities, and gasoline or saves for long-term goals.
"No one tells you to be careful of taking on too much debt when you're in school," she said. "It's just the opposite. They just keep giving you loans and saying, 'Don't worry about it. You're going to be a lawyer. It's no big deal.' "
By Kathy M. Kristof
Some who think they are getting a federal loan find out later that they hold a private loan. The difference can be costly.
One in a series of occasional stories
Natalie Hickey left her small hometown in Ohio six years ago and aimed her beat-up Dodge Intrepid for the West Coast. Four years later, she realized a long-held dream and graduated with a bachelor's degree in photography from Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara.
She also picked up $140,000 in student debt, some of it at interest rates as high as 18%. Her monthly payments are roughly $1,700, more than her rent and car payment combined.
"I don't have all this debt because I was buying stuff," said Hickey, who now lives in Texas. "I was just trying to pay tuition, living on ramen noodles and doing everything as cheaply as I could."
Hickey got caught in an increasingly common trap in the nation's $85-billion student loan market. She borrowed heavily, presuming that all her debt was part of the federal student loan program.
But most of the money she borrowed was actually in private loans, the fastest-growing segment of the student loan market. Private loans have no relation to the federal loan program, with one exception: In many cases, they are offered by the same for-profit companies that provide federally funded student loans.
As a result, some students who think they are getting a federal loan find out later that they hold a private loan. The difference can be costly.
Whereas federally guaranteed loans have fixed interest rates, currently either 6% or 6.8%, private loans are more like credit card debt. Interest rates aren't fixed and often run 15% or more, not counting fees.
Most students have little experience in taking out loans, yet the federal government doesn't require lenders to disclose the total cost of a student loan and other terms upfront -- before signing -- as it does for car loans and mortgages.
"Students are in the cross hairs, being bombarded by very sophisticated and, to some extent, ethically marginal lenders," said Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), who sponsored legislation passed this year that will require lenders to provide more disclosures on fees. "My fear is that we are developing a predatory market, just like we have had in mortgages."
About $15 billion in private student loans are expected to be funded this year, a 900% increase from a decade ago, according to the nonprofit College Board. Private loans are growing faster than federally guaranteed loans, which rose 59% over the same period, in part because of limits on how much students can borrow with the government's backing.
Four years at a public university, including room and board, costs an average of $57,332, according to the College Board. The average tab for a private university is $136,528. Yet the maximum that can be borrowed under the federal loan program is $31,000.
High-cost private loans fill that gap. One result is that students now average nearly $20,000 in debt by the time they graduate, twice as much as a decade ago.
"There is an alignment of interests that lead students to take out larger and larger amounts of debt," said Luke Swarthout, a former higher education advocate at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group in Washington.
"The students think it's an investment in their future, and the colleges are willing to let them borrow heavily because it helps them fill in their enrollment."
In the dark
Hickey knew she would need loans to complete her degree, so she went to the campus financial aid office as a freshman. After she filled out paperwork, Brooks Institute set her up in a loan program administered by Sallie Mae, the nation's biggest student lender.
Sallie Mae was chartered by the federal government in 1972, and most of its business is in issuing federally insured student loans. But while it may appear to be a quasi-government agency, it is in fact a for-profit company whose stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange.
Hickey ended up with $20,000 in low-interest federally guaranteed loans issued by Sallie Mae, and $120,000 in higher-interest private loans issued by Sallie Mae.
Hickey said no one explained the difference to her.
"The financial aid officer just said that my federal loans weren't enough to pay the tuition, but that was OK because they had these great alternative loans," Hickey said. "They made it sound so good that I didn't ask that many questions."
Tim Halsey, vice president of finance for Brooks Institute, declined to discuss Hickey's case directly, citing federal privacy laws. But he said the school's financial aid officers take great pains to explain the differences between loans and to guide students to the best deals.
"It is really to our advantage to get the loans and interest rates as low as possible," Halsey said.
"My motivation is to get that person to come to the school, if that's what they want to do. If I can get those costs as low as possible, it benefits us both."
Spotty disclosure
But some lenders market directly to students, and consumer advocates say they often fail to clearly detail loan costs and may even seek to present themselves as part of a school's financial aid office.
For a glimpse into how lenders operate, The Times filled out online loan applications with JPMorgan Chase & Co., Sallie Mae and MyRichUncle. An 18-year-old student who began college this fall agreed to provide personal information, including her Social Security number, so that lenders would provide detailed loan terms.
JPMorgan Chase, the giant New York bank, did not disclose its interest rates or fees in the online application.
Sallie Mae, which is based in Reston, Va., disclosed an interest rate and fee, but an attached disclaimer in capital letters said the numbers were preliminary "and may change."
The third, MyRichUncle, a New York-based student loan firm formed in 2005, disclosed a variable rate that starts at 9.6% and said there would be an unspecified origination fee.
The loan companies provided a bit more information over the phone. A MyRichUncle representative said its origination fee would be 2%. A Chase agent said the variable rate would start at 7.5% with no origination fee, and Sallie Mae said its variable rate would be 8%, also with no fee.
After initially resisting, agents for Sallie Mae and Chase both agreed to provide summaries of the loan costs in writing. But the one-page letters they mailed did not include the total cost of the loan over time.
The Times then called all three lenders to discuss their practices. MyRichUncle co-founder Raza Khan said that the failure to state the amount of the origination fee in the online application was a mistake and that the information was now included.
Sallie Mae spokeswoman Martha Holler maintained that the company's disclosures were adequate.
JPMorgan Chase spokeswoman Mary Kay Bean said the loan terms would be sent after the loan had been approved, pointing out that the company was not required to do so beforehand.
"We send borrowers a letter with the rate," Bean said. "We comply with the law. That's it."
Lenders in disguise
When Shianily Torres took out $38,000 in student loans at Florida's International Academy of Design and Technology, she thought she was dealing with the college financial aid office.
She now thinks it may actually have been a representative of Sallie Mae -- in part because that was the only company that offered her a loan.
"My father asked if there was somewhere else we could get the loan and they said no. The school didn't accept money from just any bank," Torres said.
Torres said she didn't learn the rate on her loan until after graduation, when she got the bill. The variable rate rose as high as 18.5%, which requires a monthly payment of $650 -- more than twice what she makes in her part-time job.
She said that she couldn't make the payments, and that Sallie Mae had not responded to her efforts to renegotiate terms.
An investigation last year by New York Atty. Gen. Andrew Cuomo found an "unholy alliance" between lenders and hundreds of schools across the country.
Charging more than a dozen lenders with wrongdoing, Cuomo cited a pattern of bribes to financial aid officers making decisions about which lenders would appear on school-preferred lender lists and "revenue-sharing" kickbacks -- in cash or products -- to schools that led their students to specific companies.
Hundreds of colleges agreed to abide by new ethics rules and not to accept gifts, and half a dozen even refunded money to students. The U.S. Department of Education tightened its guidelines to discourage quid pro quo arrangements.
More than a dozen student lenders, including Sallie Mae, Bank of America, Citibank and JPMorganChase, paid a combined $13.7 million to settle Cuomo's charges, without admitting or denying the allegations.
Private litigation continues, however. Torres is one of dozens of students who are suing Sallie Mae, alleging deception and discriminatory practices that left low-income and minority students saddled with the highest-cost loans.
Andrew Meyer, the Tampa, Fla., attorney handling the case, said his law firm gained insight into Sallie Mae's practices from people who formerly worked there as loan officers.
A key strategy was to make students believe the loan officers worked directly for the college, he said. Meyer said Sallie Mae purposely sent disclosure forms a month or more after classes had begun so that students would be less likely to protest onerous terms.
Sallie Mae's Holler said she could not comment on litigation, but she defended the company's lending practices.
"It's risk-based pricing," she said. "Students can take advantage of an interest rate decline, like we've seen in the past several months, but the loan rates also have the potential to rise when there is a rising rate environment."
Direct marketing
In addition to working with schools, lenders try to reach students directly. Although some companies have failed in the credit crunch, dozens remain in business, sending e-mails to students and advertising on sites such as YouTube.
Loan-shopping websites also lure young people into private loans, said Nancy Coolidge, a financial aid executive with the UC Board of Regents.
She noted that one site -- TuitionBids.com -- encouraged students to seek federal loans first but also had a "let the bidding begin" button that directed users to an application for a private loan.
"The way the site is set up encourages misunderstanding," Coolidge said. "They do what we ask by saying that private loans should be a last resort, but then ask, 'Are you interested?' When the kid clicks yes, they're catapulted to a private loan."
Keith Alliotts, chief executive of TuitionBids.com, counters that customers are able to choose either a private or a federally guaranteed loan.
"We don't advocate just private loans, we tell borrowers to get federal money first," he said. "But a lot of people need private loans."
But Alliotts acknowledged that TuitionBids.com receives a loan fee when a customer secures a private loan. The website makes nothing when consumers get a federally guaranteed loan.
Federal loan limits
Marja Lopees of Burbank is a few years out of school and makes about $70,000 a year as a lawyer. But she racked up $196,253 in debt and says her student loan payments swallow 40% of her earnings.
Lopees turned to private loans when she hit borrowing limits imposed by the federal student loan program. Now she has $88,303 in private loans that charge an interest rate of 8.84%. The payment on that loan is her second-largest monthly expense, after rent.
"I'm making interest-only payments on one of the loans, and still the payments keep going up," she said. "It's just overwhelming."
When she just makes minimum payments, her debt and rent consume 60% of her after-tax income. That's before she pays for food, clothing, utilities, and gasoline or saves for long-term goals.
"No one tells you to be careful of taking on too much debt when you're in school," she said. "It's just the opposite. They just keep giving you loans and saying, 'Don't worry about it. You're going to be a lawyer. It's no big deal.' "
Stimulus to offer health subsidies for jobless, senator says
Go to Original
By Lisa Wangsness
COBRA help would allow more to stay insured
The economic stimulus package now being assembled on Capitol Hill will include significant subsidies to help the newly unemployed keep their health insurance after they lose their jobs, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee said yesterday.
COBRA benefits let laid-off workers keep their group healthcare coverage for up to 18 months, but the benefits are too expensive for many unemployed people because they must pay the full cost of their premiums - typically more than $1,000 a month for a family. Democratic senators want the federal government to ease that burden so more people can keep their insurance.
"It's pretty much been agreed to," said Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat who heads the Senate finance panel. "COBRA is just so expensive."
Massachusetts is virtually alone in subsidizing COBRA premiums for the unemployed, paying 80 percent of the cost for low- and middle-income people for about a year. But an aide to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said Kennedy is working to make sure the federal subsidy would replace state money.
Families USA, a consumer advocacy group based in Washington, is planning to release a report on Friday that shows the average COBRA premium for family coverage uses up 84 percent of unemployment benefits. Buying insurance outside COBRA usually means either losing benefits or paying much higher prices.
For many families, Kennedy said, the stress of losing a job is compounded by the loss of quality healthcare.
"Congress has a responsibility to help the victims of this crisis to keep their health insurance even when they lose their jobs," he said in a statement. "The stimulus package needs to include both job support and health support."
The COBRA subsidies will be part of a large investment in healthcare in the economic stimulus package, which Democrats view as a down payment on a larger healthcare overhaul. Total spending on healthcare could amount to $100 billion of the $775 billion total package, a Democratic Senate aide said yesterday. The aide said health provisions will also include investments in health information technology - as a candidate, President-elect Barack Obama promised a $50 billion investment over five years - as well as Medicaid, community health centers, medical research, and disease prevention.
As unemployment has risen in Massachusetts, participation in the state's Medical Security Program has grown by 73 percent over a year ago, the Globe reported last week. Callers to the program's hot line yesterday were put on hold for more than 10 minutes. Funded by a tax on employers, the program had $71.8 million in reserves as of November - enough, the director of the program told the Globe, to keep it running for another year.
But Brian Rosman, research director for the nonpartisan Boston consumer advocacy group Health Care For All, said he was not sure that would be enough with unemployment on the rise, so the federal subsidy could be critically important. Some of the additional money could also be spent on outreach to the newly unemployed, he added.
"We hear frequently from people who were unaware they were eligible for the benefit," he said.
Governor Deval Patrick's office said yesterday that it is working closely with Kennedy's office on the issue.
Senate Democratic aides said they had no estimate of how much a COBRA subsidy would cost, but that the Congressional Budget Office was working on numbers. Also uncertain was what portion of COBRA premiums would be covered.
Republicans have yet to weigh in on the issue. Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the ranking Republican member on the Senate Budget Committee, said he was open to the idea, depending on the cost, but said it ought to be temporary.
Nina Owcharenko, a health policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said that it is not a bad idea to provide health subsidies for the unemployed but that Congress should let the jobless decide whether to buy insurance through COBRA or a cheaper plan on their own, an option that could save both them and taxpayers money, she said.
By Lisa Wangsness
COBRA help would allow more to stay insured
The economic stimulus package now being assembled on Capitol Hill will include significant subsidies to help the newly unemployed keep their health insurance after they lose their jobs, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee said yesterday.
COBRA benefits let laid-off workers keep their group healthcare coverage for up to 18 months, but the benefits are too expensive for many unemployed people because they must pay the full cost of their premiums - typically more than $1,000 a month for a family. Democratic senators want the federal government to ease that burden so more people can keep their insurance.
"It's pretty much been agreed to," said Senator Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat who heads the Senate finance panel. "COBRA is just so expensive."
Massachusetts is virtually alone in subsidizing COBRA premiums for the unemployed, paying 80 percent of the cost for low- and middle-income people for about a year. But an aide to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said Kennedy is working to make sure the federal subsidy would replace state money.
Families USA, a consumer advocacy group based in Washington, is planning to release a report on Friday that shows the average COBRA premium for family coverage uses up 84 percent of unemployment benefits. Buying insurance outside COBRA usually means either losing benefits or paying much higher prices.
For many families, Kennedy said, the stress of losing a job is compounded by the loss of quality healthcare.
"Congress has a responsibility to help the victims of this crisis to keep their health insurance even when they lose their jobs," he said in a statement. "The stimulus package needs to include both job support and health support."
The COBRA subsidies will be part of a large investment in healthcare in the economic stimulus package, which Democrats view as a down payment on a larger healthcare overhaul. Total spending on healthcare could amount to $100 billion of the $775 billion total package, a Democratic Senate aide said yesterday. The aide said health provisions will also include investments in health information technology - as a candidate, President-elect Barack Obama promised a $50 billion investment over five years - as well as Medicaid, community health centers, medical research, and disease prevention.
As unemployment has risen in Massachusetts, participation in the state's Medical Security Program has grown by 73 percent over a year ago, the Globe reported last week. Callers to the program's hot line yesterday were put on hold for more than 10 minutes. Funded by a tax on employers, the program had $71.8 million in reserves as of November - enough, the director of the program told the Globe, to keep it running for another year.
But Brian Rosman, research director for the nonpartisan Boston consumer advocacy group Health Care For All, said he was not sure that would be enough with unemployment on the rise, so the federal subsidy could be critically important. Some of the additional money could also be spent on outreach to the newly unemployed, he added.
"We hear frequently from people who were unaware they were eligible for the benefit," he said.
Governor Deval Patrick's office said yesterday that it is working closely with Kennedy's office on the issue.
Senate Democratic aides said they had no estimate of how much a COBRA subsidy would cost, but that the Congressional Budget Office was working on numbers. Also uncertain was what portion of COBRA premiums would be covered.
Republicans have yet to weigh in on the issue. Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the ranking Republican member on the Senate Budget Committee, said he was open to the idea, depending on the cost, but said it ought to be temporary.
Nina Owcharenko, a health policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said that it is not a bad idea to provide health subsidies for the unemployed but that Congress should let the jobless decide whether to buy insurance through COBRA or a cheaper plan on their own, an option that could save both them and taxpayers money, she said.
Judge's Order Could Keep Public From Hearing Details of 9/11 Trials
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By Peter Finn
The military judge overseeing proceedings against five of the men accused of planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks signed an order designed to protect classified information that is so broad it could prevent public scrutiny of the most important trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to lawyers and human rights groups.
The protective order, which was signed on Dec. 18 by Judge Stephen R. Henley, an Army colonel, not only protects documents and information that have been classified by intelligence agencies, it also presumptively classifies any information "referring" to a host of agencies, including the CIA, the FBI and the State Department. The order also allows the court in certain circumstances to classify information already in the public domain and presumptively classifies "any statements made by the accused."
Three of the accused, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, are defending themselves and, under the order, anything they say during the course of the trial could be shielded from the public.
"These rules turn the presumption of openness on its head, making what is perhaps the most important trial in American history presumptively closed to the public and the press," said Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch. "If these rules applied in all cases, there would be no such thing as an open trial in America."
Late Monday, the judge appeared to have second thoughts about the breadth of the order. In an e-mail to both the prosecution and the defense, he invited counsel to file briefs on whether the protective order expands "the definition of 'classified information' and the scope of protective orders generally beyond that provided for in the [Military Commissions Act] and other applicable legal authority?"
If so, the judge said, he wants to know what "modifications" should be made to the order.
Prosecutors defended the wording of the order. It "is standard language used in numerous other counterterrorism, counter-espionage or habeas detainee cases in federal court throughout the past nine years," said Col. Lawrence Morris, chief prosecutor for the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions. "In fact, numerous cases have applied far more restrictive language in their protective orders that we did not implement here."
Asked if Henley would discuss his order, the Office of Military Commissions said it would be inappropriate for a judge to comment on an ongoing case.
Military and civilian defense lawyers in the 9/11 case declined to comment. They said they are under military court order not to discuss documents in the case until they have been released by the court. The protective order, which was obtained by The Post, had not been made public.
The case against the 9/11 defendants has yet to go to trial, and it is unclear if it ever will. President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. But he has not said whether he will also abolish the system of military commissions created by the Bush administration or if he will transfer cases to federal court or military courts-martial in the United States, as some of his supporters have urged.
The protective order states, in part, that "any document or information including but not limited to any subject referring to the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of State, National Security Council, Federal Bureau of Investigation, or intelligence agencies of any foreign government, or similar entity, or information in the possession of such agency, shall be presumed to fall within the meaning of 'classified national security information or document' unless and until the [senior security adviser] or Prosecution advises otherwise in writing."
The senior security adviser assists the military court in the handling of classified material.
Defense attorneys and military and civilian lawyers advising the defendants representing themselves want to challenge any evidence gleaned from coercive interrogations at the hands of the CIA. But the defense is required to notify the prosecution of any intention to disclose "classified information in any manner." Defense lawyers said the order, which carries the threat of criminal penalties if it is violated, hobbles any ability to independently investigate the charges against the accused and their treatment by the government.
"It's a gag order that gives the U.S. government almost absolute control over the disclosure of information about the detention and interrogation of these defendants," said a lawyer familiar with the document, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "If you look at the order in its strictest language, you better not read even the 9/11 Commission report in a court in Guantanamo."
The document was signed after the Guantanamo Bay court considered motions from the prosecution and declarations by the director and officers of the CIA.
CIA Director Michael V. Hayden has acknowledged that Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding, an interrogation technique in which a prisoner is restrained as water is poured over his mouth, causing a drowning sensation.
But the ability to explore even that admission in open court is uncertain under Henley's order. Attempts to corroborate the known actions of the CIA can be classified under the order.
Mohammed has already alleged in open court that he was tortured, but such claims by the accused may now be considered classified and off-limits to the public. The Guantanamo court is sealed and the proceedings are heard by those in the public gallery after a time-delay that allows the senior security adviser to cut off the audio feed when information thought to be classified arises.
Pentagon officials have long insisted that trials at Guantanamo would be transparent as well as fair. Prosecutors said they have to balance the desire to be open with the need to protect national security secrets.
"It is also important to remember that defense counsel, by virtue of their access to the accused in this case, are uniquely situated to credibly comment, confirm, or deny classified information in a public way that risks further damage to national security," Morris said.
Daskal, however, said: "These rules seem little more than a thinly disguised attempt to classify evidence simply because it might be embarrassing or unlawful. These five men are known to have been tortured and severely mistreated during their years in CIA custody, including the acknowledged waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The claims of torture should be investigated rather than concealed."
By Peter Finn
The military judge overseeing proceedings against five of the men accused of planning the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks signed an order designed to protect classified information that is so broad it could prevent public scrutiny of the most important trial at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, according to lawyers and human rights groups.
The protective order, which was signed on Dec. 18 by Judge Stephen R. Henley, an Army colonel, not only protects documents and information that have been classified by intelligence agencies, it also presumptively classifies any information "referring" to a host of agencies, including the CIA, the FBI and the State Department. The order also allows the court in certain circumstances to classify information already in the public domain and presumptively classifies "any statements made by the accused."
Three of the accused, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, are defending themselves and, under the order, anything they say during the course of the trial could be shielded from the public.
"These rules turn the presumption of openness on its head, making what is perhaps the most important trial in American history presumptively closed to the public and the press," said Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch. "If these rules applied in all cases, there would be no such thing as an open trial in America."
Late Monday, the judge appeared to have second thoughts about the breadth of the order. In an e-mail to both the prosecution and the defense, he invited counsel to file briefs on whether the protective order expands "the definition of 'classified information' and the scope of protective orders generally beyond that provided for in the [Military Commissions Act] and other applicable legal authority?"
If so, the judge said, he wants to know what "modifications" should be made to the order.
Prosecutors defended the wording of the order. It "is standard language used in numerous other counterterrorism, counter-espionage or habeas detainee cases in federal court throughout the past nine years," said Col. Lawrence Morris, chief prosecutor for the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions. "In fact, numerous cases have applied far more restrictive language in their protective orders that we did not implement here."
Asked if Henley would discuss his order, the Office of Military Commissions said it would be inappropriate for a judge to comment on an ongoing case.
Military and civilian defense lawyers in the 9/11 case declined to comment. They said they are under military court order not to discuss documents in the case until they have been released by the court. The protective order, which was obtained by The Post, had not been made public.
The case against the 9/11 defendants has yet to go to trial, and it is unclear if it ever will. President-elect Barack Obama has vowed to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay. But he has not said whether he will also abolish the system of military commissions created by the Bush administration or if he will transfer cases to federal court or military courts-martial in the United States, as some of his supporters have urged.
The protective order states, in part, that "any document or information including but not limited to any subject referring to the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of State, National Security Council, Federal Bureau of Investigation, or intelligence agencies of any foreign government, or similar entity, or information in the possession of such agency, shall be presumed to fall within the meaning of 'classified national security information or document' unless and until the [senior security adviser] or Prosecution advises otherwise in writing."
The senior security adviser assists the military court in the handling of classified material.
Defense attorneys and military and civilian lawyers advising the defendants representing themselves want to challenge any evidence gleaned from coercive interrogations at the hands of the CIA. But the defense is required to notify the prosecution of any intention to disclose "classified information in any manner." Defense lawyers said the order, which carries the threat of criminal penalties if it is violated, hobbles any ability to independently investigate the charges against the accused and their treatment by the government.
"It's a gag order that gives the U.S. government almost absolute control over the disclosure of information about the detention and interrogation of these defendants," said a lawyer familiar with the document, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "If you look at the order in its strictest language, you better not read even the 9/11 Commission report in a court in Guantanamo."
The document was signed after the Guantanamo Bay court considered motions from the prosecution and declarations by the director and officers of the CIA.
CIA Director Michael V. Hayden has acknowledged that Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding, an interrogation technique in which a prisoner is restrained as water is poured over his mouth, causing a drowning sensation.
But the ability to explore even that admission in open court is uncertain under Henley's order. Attempts to corroborate the known actions of the CIA can be classified under the order.
Mohammed has already alleged in open court that he was tortured, but such claims by the accused may now be considered classified and off-limits to the public. The Guantanamo court is sealed and the proceedings are heard by those in the public gallery after a time-delay that allows the senior security adviser to cut off the audio feed when information thought to be classified arises.
Pentagon officials have long insisted that trials at Guantanamo would be transparent as well as fair. Prosecutors said they have to balance the desire to be open with the need to protect national security secrets.
"It is also important to remember that defense counsel, by virtue of their access to the accused in this case, are uniquely situated to credibly comment, confirm, or deny classified information in a public way that risks further damage to national security," Morris said.
Daskal, however, said: "These rules seem little more than a thinly disguised attempt to classify evidence simply because it might be embarrassing or unlawful. These five men are known to have been tortured and severely mistreated during their years in CIA custody, including the acknowledged waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The claims of torture should be investigated rather than concealed."
Why do they hate the West so much, we will ask
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By Robert Fisk
So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night's work in Gaza by the army that believes in "purity of arms". But why should we be surprised?
Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?
What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties. "Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties," yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night's butchery on their hands. Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women and children, would be alive.
What happened was not just shameful. It was a disgrace. Would war crime be too strong a description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if it had been committed by Hamas. So a war crime, I'm afraid, it was. After covering so many mass murders by the armies of the Middle East – by Syrian troops, by Iraqi troops, by Iranian troops, by Israeli troops – I suppose cynicism should be my reaction. But Israel claims it is fighting our war against "international terror". The Israelis claim they are fighting in Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our security, for our safety, by our standards. And so we are also complicit in the savagery now being visited upon Gaza.
I've reported the excuses the Israeli army has served up in the past for these outrages. Since they may well be reheated in the coming hours, here are some of them: that the Palestinians killed their own refugees, that the Palestinians dug up bodies from cemeteries and planted them in the ruins, that ultimately the Palestinians are to blame because they supported an armed faction, or because armed Palestinians deliberately used the innocent refugees as cover.
The Sabra and Chatila massacre was committed by Israel's right-wing Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli troops, as Israel's own commission of inquiry revealed, watched for 48 hours and did nothing. When Israel was blamed, Menachem Begin's government accused the world of a blood libel. After Israeli artillery had fired shells into the UN base at Qana in 1996, the Israelis claimed that Hizbollah gunmen were also sheltering in the base. It was a lie. The more than 1,000 dead of 2006 – a war started when Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border – were simply dismissed as the responsibility of the Hizbollah. Israel claimed the bodies of children killed in a second Qana massacre may have been taken from a graveyard. It was another lie. The Marwahin massacre was never excused. The people of the village were ordered to flee, obeyed Israeli orders and were then attacked by an Israeli gunship. The refugees took their children and stood them around the truck in which they were travelling so that Israeli pilots would see they were innocents. Then the Israeli helicopter mowed them down at close range. Only two survived, by playing dead. Israel didn't even apologise.
Twelve years earlier, another Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance carrying civilians from a neighbouring village – again after they were ordered to leave by Israel – and killed three children and two women. The Israelis claimed that a Hizbollah fighter was in the ambulance. It was untrue. I covered all these atrocities, I investigated them all, talked to the survivors. So did a number of my colleagues. Our fate, of course, was that most slanderous of libels: we were accused of being anti-Semitic.
And I write the following without the slightest doubt: we'll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We'll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we'll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very definitely have the anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn't. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians.
Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel – is on a quite different scale. This recalls not a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the level of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer.
By Robert Fisk
So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night's work in Gaza by the army that believes in "purity of arms". But why should we be surprised?
Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead – almost all civilians, most of them children and women – in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?
What is amazing is that so many Western leaders, so many presidents and prime ministers and, I fear, so many editors and journalists, bought the old lie; that Israelis take such great care to avoid civilian casualties. "Israel makes every possible effort to avoid civilian casualties," yet another Israeli ambassador said only hours before the Gaza massacre. And every president and prime minister who repeated this mendacity as an excuse to avoid a ceasefire has the blood of last night's butchery on their hands. Had George Bush had the courage to demand an immediate ceasefire 48 hours earlier, those 40 civilians, the old and the women and children, would be alive.
What happened was not just shameful. It was a disgrace. Would war crime be too strong a description? For that is what we would call this atrocity if it had been committed by Hamas. So a war crime, I'm afraid, it was. After covering so many mass murders by the armies of the Middle East – by Syrian troops, by Iraqi troops, by Iranian troops, by Israeli troops – I suppose cynicism should be my reaction. But Israel claims it is fighting our war against "international terror". The Israelis claim they are fighting in Gaza for us, for our Western ideals, for our security, for our safety, by our standards. And so we are also complicit in the savagery now being visited upon Gaza.
I've reported the excuses the Israeli army has served up in the past for these outrages. Since they may well be reheated in the coming hours, here are some of them: that the Palestinians killed their own refugees, that the Palestinians dug up bodies from cemeteries and planted them in the ruins, that ultimately the Palestinians are to blame because they supported an armed faction, or because armed Palestinians deliberately used the innocent refugees as cover.
The Sabra and Chatila massacre was committed by Israel's right-wing Lebanese Phalangist allies while Israeli troops, as Israel's own commission of inquiry revealed, watched for 48 hours and did nothing. When Israel was blamed, Menachem Begin's government accused the world of a blood libel. After Israeli artillery had fired shells into the UN base at Qana in 1996, the Israelis claimed that Hizbollah gunmen were also sheltering in the base. It was a lie. The more than 1,000 dead of 2006 – a war started when Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers on the border – were simply dismissed as the responsibility of the Hizbollah. Israel claimed the bodies of children killed in a second Qana massacre may have been taken from a graveyard. It was another lie. The Marwahin massacre was never excused. The people of the village were ordered to flee, obeyed Israeli orders and were then attacked by an Israeli gunship. The refugees took their children and stood them around the truck in which they were travelling so that Israeli pilots would see they were innocents. Then the Israeli helicopter mowed them down at close range. Only two survived, by playing dead. Israel didn't even apologise.
Twelve years earlier, another Israeli helicopter attacked an ambulance carrying civilians from a neighbouring village – again after they were ordered to leave by Israel – and killed three children and two women. The Israelis claimed that a Hizbollah fighter was in the ambulance. It was untrue. I covered all these atrocities, I investigated them all, talked to the survivors. So did a number of my colleagues. Our fate, of course, was that most slanderous of libels: we were accused of being anti-Semitic.
And I write the following without the slightest doubt: we'll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We'll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we'll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very definitely have the anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn't. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians.
Yes, Israelis deserve security. Twenty Israelis dead in 10 years around Gaza is a grim figure indeed. But 600 Palestinians dead in just over a week, thousands over the years since 1948 – when the Israeli massacre at Deir Yassin helped to kick-start the flight of Palestinians from that part of Palestine that was to become Israel – is on a quite different scale. This recalls not a normal Middle East bloodletting but an atrocity on the level of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And of course, when an Arab bestirs himself with unrestrained fury and takes out his incendiary, blind anger on the West, we will say it has nothing to do with us. Why do they hate us, we will ask? But let us not say we do not know the answer.
Stop Censoring International News in America!
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By Timothy V. Gatto
I was preparing for my radio show after watching CBS News with Katie Couric. I already knew that my show was to be about Gaza and the hostilities there. As I read the different stories I became increasingly angry. Why is half of the story always left out of the American Mainstream Media? If I were only getting my news from the MSM, I would believe that Hamas started everything by raining down missiles on hapless Israeli citizens. Is that what some of you reading this believe?
By Timothy V. Gatto
I was preparing for my radio show after watching CBS News with Katie Couric. I already knew that my show was to be about Gaza and the hostilities there. As I read the different stories I became increasingly angry. Why is half of the story always left out of the American Mainstream Media? If I were only getting my news from the MSM, I would believe that Hamas started everything by raining down missiles on hapless Israeli citizens. Is that what some of you reading this believe?
Let me set the record straight. The UN fact finding mission to Gaza has a different story. The people of Gaza (and not just Hamas) have been enduring a blockade on three sides and a navel blockade on their Mediterranean coast. This is a violation of International Law and a blockade is considered to be an act of war by International standards. This means that Israel has been effectively waging war against the Gaza Strip since last September when they were supposedly adhering to a six-month ceasefire. People in Gaza ran short of medical supplies, food and fuel. This was uncalled for and Israel was the prime aggressor. Every time the Security Council tried to deal with this problem the United States cast a veto on any sanctions against Israel.
The people of Israel need to rise up and change their government. The constant state of war that they wage against the Palestinian people is starting to grate on the nerves of those that know the truth. France and Germany have issued formal protests against Israel, but as long as the United States gives them Carte Blanc to wage a war of aggression and gives them billions in military aid every year, the Israelis turn a deaf ear on sanctions and protests. They march to the tune of a different drummer, the same drummer that played for the Nazis’ in WWII.
Americans must realize that our media is not telling the entire truth, not only about Israel and Gaza, but just about every international event. The media actually twists the truth to correlate with the State Department on foreign affairs. This gives the illusion that America is always on God’s side, and supports the “good fight”. Nothing could be further from the truth. The United States supports any country that can further their mindless wars against Islam and Arabs. When will this stop?
This situation will only correct itself when Americans are offered the truth when it comes to international events. We must demand that the networks and newspapers stop spreading government propaganda and start reporting the truth. Meanwhile if you really want the truth, start reading your news from the internet. This is the last bastion of truth that the people of America have. In every year that passes, our mainstream media becomes more and more like “The Ministry of Truth” in 1984. Those that get their news from the internet realize this and are not happy about it. It is so easily observed in conversations with those that get their news from the mainstream media. The difference in opinion between those that know the full story and those that prefer to “trust” the commercial media is like the difference between night and day. How long did it take to learn that Russia did not attack Georgia first, but that Georgia attacked Russian peacekeepers first with a rocket barrage? There are some Americans out there that STILL think the Russians started that little confrontation. This was a perfect example where the truth was abandoned for political gain. The President-elect and the Vice President-elect both warned about “Russian aggression” at the Democratic National Convention. Frankly, I don’t like to be taken for a sucker.
Israeli Militants Poised to Resettle Gaza After Assault
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By Linda Mamoun
By Linda Mamoun
Israel’s "Operation Cast Lead" is reported to have overwhelming support among the Israeli public, but few are as enthusiastic as the former residents of the Israeli settlements in Gaza. As tens of thousands of Israeli troops descend on Gaza in an apocalyptic frenzy, scores of determined settlers are prepared to enter in their wake.
The Gaza settlements were dismantled in August 2005 as part of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan. In a single stroke, the Israeli army removed 8,000 people from the Gush Katif settlement bloc in the southwest corner of the Gaza Strip near the Egyptian border and from four smaller settlements in northern and central Gaza.
In spirit, many of the Gaza settlers never left the coveted Palestinian territory on the Mediterranean coast. Despite ample compensation from the Israeli government, many have chosen to live in nearby caravan camps in desert towns between Ashdod and Ashkelon, clustered with families from the same settlement of origin. Most of the settlers didn’t pack before they were escorted out of their compounds, not believing that the Israeli government would permanently expel them. Some have posted the road signs identifying their old settlements in their camps.
The evacuees have reportedly suffered from high rates of divorce, drug abuse and other problem behavior. Imbued with messianic zeal, for the last three-and-a-half years, they have been mobilizing to resettle the land they believe is theirs by divine right.
Settler activists are counting on their historically strong ties to the Israeli military, with some units composed entirely of settlers, to help in their fight. Indeed, some soldiers and reservists currently in Gaza were there three years ago living in cherished settlement communities. On Monday, an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz described the bittersweet reactions of soldiers who had lived in Gaza settlements and are now back in uniform, noting, "Some see it as a first step toward returning to their former homes."
Earlier this year, Haaretz reported on settlers’ plans to follow the Israeli army into Gaza. Boaz Haetzni, a leader of the settler movement, explained, "In our estimation the ’big operation’ is only a matter of time; we will follow them in. We will not ask for permission from anyone. The [settlement] groups will be ready ... These core groups will do exactly what the group that re-established Kfar Etzion did after 1967. They will return to the lands where they existed in the past and will rebuild them."
Kfar Etzion was the first Israeli settlement established in the West Bank after the end of the Six Day War and is now part of a large bloc of settlements connecting Jerusalem to Hebron.
In August, settlers and their supporters commemorated the third anniversary of the Gaza evacuation at the Great Synagogue in Jerusalem. The event featured music, prayers, testimonials and updates from volunteers assisting the Gush Katif "refugees." A flyer promoting the event highlighted a biblical passage: "And the threefold cord is not easily broken" (Kohelet 4:12), a reference to the strength of the bond tying the Gush Katif settlers to one another and to the support they receive from the broader community of supporters in Israel and abroad.
The program was similar to "A Tribute To Hebron," an event held at the Great Synagogue in late December. This event, organized by www.thelandofisrael.com, was a fundraiser for the Beit Hashalom settlers, who were evicted earlier in the month from their illegally occupied house in the heart of Hebron. The night included live music, comedy sketches and a speech by former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Danny Ayalon, a prominent leader of the settler movement.
Both events reflect the pattern that has emerged over the last several decades. After Palestinian land is seized by the Israeli army, settlements are established, connected to Israel’s electricity, water and security system, and aggressively marketed to potential residents. Today, Israeli settlements and the state security apparatus cover over 40 percent of the West Bank. Nearly half a million Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, all of which are considered illegal under international law.
As with the unilateral disengagement from Gaza, the Israeli government occasionally dismantles overly controversial settlements, amid great fanfare, but new settlements continue to be built and existing ones expanded. In the three years since the state of Israel removed its settlers from Gaza soil, it has authorized the construction of thousands of new housing units for West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements. To make room for these settlements, thousands of Palestinian homes have been demolished, and in East Jerusalem, entire Palestinian neighborhoods are still being cleared. According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, 19,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished since 1967. All the while, mainstream political elements decry "radical" settlers as violent extremists even as they celebrate their achievements and help establish new colonies.
Israelis differentiate between "economic settlers," those who move to the occupied territories for subsidized housing and a better "quality of life," and "ideological settlers," nationalists who seek to establish a "Greater Israel" from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. But the distinction is overstated. Residents of the large suburban settlements that encircle Jerusalem (Ma’ale Adumim, Pisgat Ze’ev, etc.) are embedded in social networks that include radical leaders from the so-called ideological settlements (Gush Etzion, Kiryat Arba, Hebron and the smaller outposts). And many suburban settlers have an intensely militant outlook, feeling themselves to be under siege just as they view the Gush Katif and Hebron "refugees" as demonized and besieged.
For the Beit Hashalom. supporters the mood at the Great Synagogue in late December was jubilant, coming just days after the settlers’ zealous stand against the Israeli army and with plenty of time to implement what they refer to as their new "price tag" policy of payback for evacuations carried out by the Israeli army and police.
In Hebron, as elsewhere, the price tag has come in the form of fiery pogroms against Palestinians. According to a recent United Nations report, there has been a surge in Israeli settler violence across the West Bank, with at least 290 incidents of violence against Palestinians documented between January and October 2008.
The increase in violence may be related to the "price tag" policy, but the settlers’ strategy reflects nothing new: the price Palestinians have paid throughout Israel’s 60-year history is incalculable in economic, social and demographic terms.
Nonetheless, because of their humiliating departure from Gaza and years of displacement, the Gush Katif settlers believe they have paid the greatest price. Not a day seems to go by without media coverage of their plight. On Dec. 31 the Jerusalem Post published an editorial on Hamas rocket attacks by Rachel Saperstein, a settler from Gush Katif who lamented, "From our homes in Gush Katif to cardboard caravillas in a refugee camp to a sewer pipe. We have certainly hit rock bottom." On the same day, Arutz Sheva, a right-wing Internet news site, published an editorial by Nadia Matar that calls for Israel to "free Gaza from its Arab occupation ... and rebuild the 25 beautiful Jewish communities of Gush Katif."
Although government agencies have attempted to move the former residents of Gush Katif to new settlements in the West Bank and the Negev, most have stayed in southern Israel, waiting for their day of return to resurrected Jewish enclaves in the ravaged Gaza Strip.
That day, and the promise of redemption revived by Israel’s bloody price tag policy in Gaza, draws closer with each hour of "Operation Cast Lead."
This Looks Like the Start of a Second Great Depression
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By Paul Krugman
“If we don’t act swiftly and boldly,” declared President-elect Barack Obama in his latest weekly address, “we could see a much deeper economic downturn that could lead to double-digit unemployment.” If you ask me, he was understating the case.
The fact is that recent economic numbers have been terrifying, not just in the United States but around the world. Manufacturing, in particular, is plunging everywhere. Banks aren’t lending; businesses and consumers aren’t spending. Let’s not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression.
So will we “act swiftly and boldly” enough to stop that from happening? We’ll soon find out.
We weren’t supposed to find ourselves in this situation. For many years most economists believed that preventing another Great Depression would be easy. In 2003, Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago, in his presidential address to the American Economic Association, declared that the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades.”
Milton Friedman, in particular, persuaded many economists that the Federal Reserve could have stopped the Depression in its tracks simply by providing banks with more liquidity, which would have prevented a sharp fall in the money supply. Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, famously apologized to Friedman on his institution’s behalf: “You’re right. We did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”
It turns out, however, that preventing depressions isn’t that easy after all. Under Mr. Bernanke’s leadership, the Fed has been supplying liquidity like an engine crew trying to put out a five-alarm fire, and the money supply has been rising rapidly. Yet credit remains scarce, and the economy is still in free fall.
Friedman’s claim that monetary policy could have prevented the Great Depression was an attempt to refute the analysis of John Maynard Keynes, who argued that monetary policy is ineffective under depression conditions and that fiscal policy -- large-scale deficit spending by the government -- is needed to fight mass unemployment. The failure of monetary policy in the current crisis shows that Keynes had it right the first time. And Keynesian thinking lies behind Mr. Obama’s plans to rescue the economy.
But these plans may turn out to be a hard sell.
News reports say that Democrats hope to pass an economic plan with broad bipartisan support. Good luck with that.
In reality, the political posturing has already started, with Republican leaders setting up roadblocks to stimulus legislation while posing as the champions of careful Congressional deliberation -- which is pretty rich considering their party’s behavior over the past eight years.
More broadly, after decades of declaring that government is the problem, not the solution, not to mention reviling both Keynesian economics and the New Deal, most Republicans aren’t going to accept the need for a big-spending, F.D.R.-type solution to the economic crisis.
The biggest problem facing the Obama plan, however, is likely to be the demand of many politicians for proof that the benefits of the proposed public spending justify its costs -- a burden of proof never imposed on proposals for tax cuts.
This is a problem with which Keynes was familiar: giving money away, he pointed out, tends to be met with fewer objections than plans for public investment “which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict ‘business’ principles.” What gets lost in such discussions is the key argument for economic stimulus -- namely, that under current conditions, a surge in public spending would employ Americans who would otherwise be unemployed and money that would otherwise be sitting idle, and put both to work producing something useful.
All of this leaves me concerned about the prospects for the Obama plan. I’m sure that Congress will pass a stimulus plan, but I worry that the plan may be delayed and/or downsized. And Mr. Obama is right: We really do need swift, bold action.
Here’s my nightmare scenario: It takes Congress months to pass a stimulus plan, and the legislation that actually emerges is too cautious. As a result, the economy plunges for most of 2009, and when the plan finally starts to kick in, it’s only enough to slow the descent, not stop it. Meanwhile, deflation is setting in, while businesses and consumers start to base their spending plans on the expectation of a permanently depressed economy -- well, you can see where this is going.
So this is our moment of truth. Will we in fact do what’s necessary to prevent Great Depression II?
By Paul Krugman
“If we don’t act swiftly and boldly,” declared President-elect Barack Obama in his latest weekly address, “we could see a much deeper economic downturn that could lead to double-digit unemployment.” If you ask me, he was understating the case.
The fact is that recent economic numbers have been terrifying, not just in the United States but around the world. Manufacturing, in particular, is plunging everywhere. Banks aren’t lending; businesses and consumers aren’t spending. Let’s not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression.
So will we “act swiftly and boldly” enough to stop that from happening? We’ll soon find out.
We weren’t supposed to find ourselves in this situation. For many years most economists believed that preventing another Great Depression would be easy. In 2003, Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago, in his presidential address to the American Economic Association, declared that the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades.”
Milton Friedman, in particular, persuaded many economists that the Federal Reserve could have stopped the Depression in its tracks simply by providing banks with more liquidity, which would have prevented a sharp fall in the money supply. Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, famously apologized to Friedman on his institution’s behalf: “You’re right. We did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”
It turns out, however, that preventing depressions isn’t that easy after all. Under Mr. Bernanke’s leadership, the Fed has been supplying liquidity like an engine crew trying to put out a five-alarm fire, and the money supply has been rising rapidly. Yet credit remains scarce, and the economy is still in free fall.
Friedman’s claim that monetary policy could have prevented the Great Depression was an attempt to refute the analysis of John Maynard Keynes, who argued that monetary policy is ineffective under depression conditions and that fiscal policy -- large-scale deficit spending by the government -- is needed to fight mass unemployment. The failure of monetary policy in the current crisis shows that Keynes had it right the first time. And Keynesian thinking lies behind Mr. Obama’s plans to rescue the economy.
But these plans may turn out to be a hard sell.
News reports say that Democrats hope to pass an economic plan with broad bipartisan support. Good luck with that.
In reality, the political posturing has already started, with Republican leaders setting up roadblocks to stimulus legislation while posing as the champions of careful Congressional deliberation -- which is pretty rich considering their party’s behavior over the past eight years.
More broadly, after decades of declaring that government is the problem, not the solution, not to mention reviling both Keynesian economics and the New Deal, most Republicans aren’t going to accept the need for a big-spending, F.D.R.-type solution to the economic crisis.
The biggest problem facing the Obama plan, however, is likely to be the demand of many politicians for proof that the benefits of the proposed public spending justify its costs -- a burden of proof never imposed on proposals for tax cuts.
This is a problem with which Keynes was familiar: giving money away, he pointed out, tends to be met with fewer objections than plans for public investment “which, because they are not wholly wasteful, tend to be judged on strict ‘business’ principles.” What gets lost in such discussions is the key argument for economic stimulus -- namely, that under current conditions, a surge in public spending would employ Americans who would otherwise be unemployed and money that would otherwise be sitting idle, and put both to work producing something useful.
All of this leaves me concerned about the prospects for the Obama plan. I’m sure that Congress will pass a stimulus plan, but I worry that the plan may be delayed and/or downsized. And Mr. Obama is right: We really do need swift, bold action.
Here’s my nightmare scenario: It takes Congress months to pass a stimulus plan, and the legislation that actually emerges is too cautious. As a result, the economy plunges for most of 2009, and when the plan finally starts to kick in, it’s only enough to slow the descent, not stop it. Meanwhile, deflation is setting in, while businesses and consumers start to base their spending plans on the expectation of a permanently depressed economy -- well, you can see where this is going.
So this is our moment of truth. Will we in fact do what’s necessary to prevent Great Depression II?
Hey Obama, Don't Let Afghanistan Be Your Quagmire
Go to Original
By Robert Dreyfuss
President-elect Barack Obama says that Afghanistan is "the right war." "It's time to heed the call from General [David] McKiernan and others for more troops," Obama said in late October, referring to the US commander in Afghanistan. "That's why I'd send at least two or three additional combat brigades to Afghanistan." He's coupled that with tough talk about hitting Al Qaeda anywhere, including next door in Pakistan. "If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then I think that we have to act, and we will take them out," Obama said in the second of his three debates with John McCain. "We will kill bin Laden. We will crush Al Qaeda."
Despite such rhetoric, however, nearly two years ago Obama began assembling a cast of experts steeped in the intricacies of South Asian affairs, and they have provided him with a far richer and more sophisticated view of the Afghanistan-Pakistan tangle than emerged in the campaign. "The format of presidential debates does not lend itself to a nuanced discussion," says Bruce Riedel, wryly. A former CIA specialist on South Asia who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Clinton and Bush, Riedel led an advisory task force on Afghanistan-Pakistan for Obama. Interviews with Riedel and other Obama advisers--who made it clear they were not speaking for the president-elect--suggest that Obama intends to reorient US policy in the region significantly, and a key plank in that reorientation includes negotiations with the enemy. But assertions by the US command and the Obama team that we can both "surge" and negotiate overlook the glaring reality that sending more troops into the Afghan quagmire and urging the Pakistani government to escalate the war it is fighting against its own people will make the crisis worse, not better.
The outlines of Obama's strategy, which aren't likely to be articulated fully until after the inauguration, include a repudiation of the strident "global war on terror" rhetoric that marked President Bush's years and that only inflamed Muslim attitudes toward the United States. Campaign sloganeering aside, Obama may try to curtail the indiscriminate use of air power in Afghanistan against often ill-defined targets ("just air raiding villages and killing civilians" was how he put it in 2007), though how he'll do that while adding more troops and escalating the war isn't clear. He'll slow down, if not halt, the provocative cross-border attacks into Pakistani tribal areas against insurgent bases, even as he reserves the right to hit bin Laden. The incoming administration will take steps to strengthen the fledgling civilian government of President Asif Ali Zardari in Pakistan against the machinations of the Pakistani army and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), which maintains covert ties to a wide range of extremist groups, including the Taliban. And it will support a major boost in economic aid to both countries.
Nearly all of Obama's advisers--along with members of a parallel task force at the Center for American Progress, a think tank likely to be the source of many Obama appointees--insist that a central part of a new US policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan must be to facilitate a peace process between Pakistan and India, its giant neighbor to the east. For decades, Pakistan's military and the ISI have lent covert support to Islamist terrorist groups, in Afghanistan and in the disputed territory of Kashmir, as part of a strategy of asymmetric warfare against India. A Pakistan-India accord would strengthen Pakistan's civilian government and undercut the rationale for the army and ISI's ties to the Taliban, allied Afghan Islamist warlords and Kashmiri Islamist militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, suspected of involvement in the Mumbai terror attack. Wendy Chamberlin, US ambassador to Pakistan on 9/11 and a member of Obama's Pakistan task force, is a strong supporter of efforts to forge a Pakistan-India accord. "I argued for it [in 2002]," she says. And I got dismissed."
Many of Obama's advisers are open to the notion of bringing Iran into the mix, pointing out that Iran was helpful in 2001 in building the original coalition behind Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Iran's role was also highlighted in a September report by a private working group led by Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state, and Lee Hamilton, co-chair of the 9/11 Commission. They suggested connecting Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Iran in a regional economic community, concluding, "The U.S. should...reconsider its opposition to the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline project." Tariq Ali, a British-Pakistani scholar and author of The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, has called for creation of a South Asian Union to facilitate a regional economic resurgence.
Even as they favor eventual talks with "reconcilable" elements of the Taliban movement, some of Obama's advisers and Gen. David Petraeus, the Centcom commander, defend their call for a surge by arguing that their first priority is to stabilize Afghanistan militarily. "Trying to divide your enemy is always a smart thing to do," says Riedel. "But until we break the momentum that the Taliban has today, where they feel that they're the winner, I don't see that you have any credible chance of persuading even a small number of Taliban to break. They think they're winning, and if you look at the numbers, you can make a pretty convincing case."
In the first ten months of this year, 255 US and NATO troops were killed in Afghanistan, more than all those who died in the first four years of the war in Afghanistan put together. Entire swaths of southern Afghanistan, in provinces along the Pakistan border south and east of Kabul, are controlled by the Taliban and their allies. Lately they have been able to strike with impunity even within Kabul, the Afghan capital. The CIA has been warning for more than two years that Afghanistan was spinning out of control. A forthcoming National Intelligence Estimate, representing the views of sixteen US intelligence agencies, warns that Afghanistan is in a "downward spiral" and, according to the New York Times, "casts serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban's influence there." The enemy has also evolved as a fighting force. Already by 2006, according to a report for West Point by retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the Taliban were fielding battalion-size units of more than 400 fighters. In some provinces the Taliban and their allies are creating a parallel state, appointing governors and provincial officials and establishing Sharia-style courts.
The counterinsurgency is made all the more difficult by the nature of the enemy, an exceedingly complex, multiheaded Islamist insurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It goes far beyond Mullah Omar's Taliban and Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda. "Calling it the Taliban is a failure to understand what's going on," says Seth Jones, an expert on Afghanistan and terrorism at the RAND Corporation. "It's a movement, not an organization," explains Chas Freeman, president of the Middle East Policy Council and a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia. "What we conveniently have been labeling 'the Taliban' is a phenomenon that includes a lot of people simply on the Islamic right." In all, the US military has identified at least fourteen separate insurgent organizations in Afghanistan, and according to Riedel, there are as many as fifty separate Islamist formations in neighboring Pakistan [see Anand Gopal, page 17, for more on the insurgency].
At the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Anthony Cordesman, a sober-minded, conservative military analyst, sounded the alarm. "We are running out of time," he wrote. "We currently are losing, and the trends have been consistent since 2004...we face a crisis in the field--right now." The situation, he said, is far more urgent than anything that can be solved by economic aid or nation-building efforts. "At least during 2009-10, priority must be given to warfighting needs." McKiernan, the US commander, has called for at least four more brigades, perhaps as many as 25,000 troops. He warned that the mission in Afghanistan will require a "sustained commitment" lasting many years, and the United States has announced plans to help more than double the size of the Afghan National Army (ANA), to 134,000 troops. "This is a decades-long project," says Ashley Tellis, a former National Security Council specialist on South Asia, who adds that it will take at least ten years before the United States can withdraw and let the ANA fight its own battles. "The transition alone will take a decade, until you can switch to the ANA," he says.
But surging troops into Afghanistan would be akin to sending the fabled 600 into the valley of death. As in Vietnam, tens of thousands more troops will only provide the Taliban with many more targets, sparking Pashtun nationalist resistance and inspiring more recruits for the insurgency. Advocates of sending additional US forces into this maelstrom have yet to articulate exactly how another 25,000 can turn the tide. Tariq Ali says that pacifying the country would require at least 200,000 more troops, beyond the 62,000 US and NATO forces there now, and that it would necessitate laying waste huge parts of Afghanistan. Many Afghan watchers consider the war unwinnable, and they point out that in the 1980s the Soviet Union, with far more troops, had engaged in a brutal nine-year counterinsurgency war--and lost. British Ambassador to Afghanistan Sherard Cowper-Coles has warned against precisely the escalation that Obama and Petraeus advocate. Sending more troops, he says, "would have perverse effects: it would identify us even more strongly as an occupation force and would multiply the targets [for the insurgents]." A top British general, Brig. Mark Carleton-Smith, says, "We're not going to win this war.... It's about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that's not a strategic threat."
"What began as a punitive raid aimed at beheading Al Qaeda and chastising its Afghan household staff has somehow morphed--with no real discussion or debate--into a prolonged effort to pacify Afghanistan and transform its society," says Freeman. "This moving of the goal posts gratified neoconservatives and liberal interventionists alike. Our new purpose became giving Afghanistan a centrally directed state--something it had never had. We now fight to exclude reactionary Muslims from a role in governing the new Afghanistan." Freeman suggests that this is an untenable goal, and that it is time to co-opt local authorities and enlist regional allies in search of a settlement.
Those who insist the war is winnable, including US and NATO commanders, also say that it can't be won without taking the war across the border to Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan's tribal areas, an escalation that's already under way. But this poses a whole new set of problems. The situation in Pakistan is only slightly less dire than in Afghanistan. The country emerged this year from nearly a decade under a US-backed military dictatorship and faces a daunting set of challenges. A multipronged insurgency based in the tribal areas is spreading its influence into the neighboring North-West Frontier Province, and it has reached all the way to Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, where assassinations and suicide bombings occur regularly. The new government is weak and divided, with little or no control over the Pakistani army and ISI. And its economy is virtually bankrupt: with inflation at 25 percent and vast unemployment, the country is desperately seeking $10 billion to $15 billion in immediate financial aid.
Yet the fragile Pakistani state is being pushed to the breaking point by the Bush administration. Since August, nearly two dozen CIA Predator missile attacks in tribal areas have inflamed much of the country against the United States. Already, before the spate of attacks, public opinion polls showed that 86 percent of Pakistanis say the goal of the United States is to "weaken and divide the Islamic world," 84 percent say the United States is a greater threat than Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and 89 percent oppose Pakistan's cooperation with the US "war on terror." Many Pakistanis blame the United States for its fifty-year record of propping up military dictators, which makes it hard for the United States to support even its allies, such as President Zardari. "Right now, we're kind of the kiss of death," says Marvin Weinbaum, a scholar at the Middle East Institute who was part of Obama's Pakistan task force.
Since 9/11, Pakistan has received more than $11 billion in US aid, but almost all of it has flowed into the coffers of Pakistan's army and ISI, with little or no oversight. According to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, between 2002 and 2007 only 10 percent of US aid was devoted to development and humanitarian assistance. That avalanche of cash to the military has allowed the ISI free rein to support its network of Islamist extremists, which it has built up systematically since the 1980s. As long as ISI helped nab an occasional Al Qaeda bigwig, even as it tolerated or supported the Afghan Taliban and other Islamist radicals, the United States went along. "We've got to put an end to this dirty game, where Pakistan uses surrogate terrorist groups," says Chamberlin.
Even those fighting the war have difficulty distinguishing friends from enemies. Michael Vickers, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflicts, who oversees a Pentagon anti-terrorism force, isn't sure. Asked if ISI is on our side or not, he pauses. "It's complicated. I'll put it that way," he says finally. "It's not black and white." Last summer Zardari attempted to bring ISI under the control of the civilian-run Interior Ministry, but the idea was quickly shot down. "That lasted eight hours," says Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars, a book about the CIA and Afghanistan that Obama was recently seen carrying. "Somebody told the ISI about the announcement, and they said, 'No, that won't be happening.'" Then, in the fall, Pakistan's army chief of staff installed a new set of generals atop the ISI, though there was widespread skepticism that the move reflected a real policy change by the army.
Yet Pakistani attitudes are slowly changing, even inside the military, analysts say. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto a year ago and the massive bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad in September alarmed many generals about the threat to Pakistan from its Islamist creations. "Pakistan has had a tolerance and a see-no-evil attitude toward the Taliban," says Riedel. "But the Afghan Taliban has also created a Pakistani Taliban, which is a Frankenstein the Pakistani army can't control. So it still has relations with parent Taliban, but the infant Taliban is now increasingly a threat to the cohesion of the Pakistan state, and it's a physical threat to the Pakistani army and even to the ISI. This is the classic case of a covert action program getting out of control."
As a result, of late the army is scrambling to control a crisis of its own making, without much success. It has launched a three-pronged military offensive in the tribal areas and nearby districts, but--having spent a half-century preparing for a tank war with India--the Pakistani army is not well equipped to fight a counterinsurgency war. And in the tribal areas the Pakistani army, which is mostly Punjabi, is seen as a foreign force by local Pashtuns, while many Pakistani officers and enlisted men are loath to fight against their compatriots in what they see as America's war. Both the military and the Pakistan government have tried to build tribal militias to combat the Taliban, but so far this effort hasn't paid off. And the government has tried to encourage the holding of tribal jirgas, or councils, to generate grassroots opposition to the dominance of Taliban-like elements in and around the tribal areas. That, too, hasn't worked well, since the Taliban have engaged in murderous counterattacks, including gruesome killings and suicide bomb attacks aimed at the jirgas. Many in Pakistan are operating under outdated assumptions about the tribes in the northwest, says Christine Fair, an independent expert on South Asia who took part in the Center for American Progress study. "The jirgas used to be made up of secular tribal leaders," she says. "Now, they meet in mosques and madrassas." Since the US-backed anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, madrassas, or religious schools, have become factories and recruiting areas for militant Islamists.
Part of the solution, stressed by all of Obama's aides, is more economic support to both countries, targeted toward building infrastructure, improving agriculture, providing microcredit for small business and constructing schools and clinics. One member of Obama's task force on Pakistan is Jonah Blank, a senior staff member at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who is a key aide to Vice President-elect Joe Biden. Blank was a driving force behind the Biden-Lugar-Obama bill to provide $1.5 billion a year for ten years in economic support to Pakistan. A parallel effort for Afghanistan, including what Obama calls a Marshall Plan-style mobilization, is also under way. "Call it a democracy dividend," says Blank. "The civilians can say, 'See? We deliver.'"
But economic development takes a long time to be felt, and the crisis is now. If the wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan aren't going to be resolved militarily--and they won't be--the solution to both crises, now inextricably linked, must be a diplomatic one: first, negotiations with many of the forces opposing the two governments and the US presence in the region, and, second, progress toward a Pakistan-India accord.
In Pakistan, the Zardari government and the Parliament have strongly endorsed talks with the Taliban, better organized than the faltering accords announced in 2004 and 2006. In Afghanistan, Karzai declared in mid-November that he is open to direct talks with Mullah Omar. And in late October, tribal elders and dozens of Pakistani and Afghan officials convened a two-day "mini-jirga" intended to be the start of a dialogue with the Taliban. Owais Ghani, governor of the North-West Frontier Province and a leader of the secular, nationalist ANP party, said at the mini-jirga: "We will sit, we will talk to them, they will listen to us, and we will come to some sort of solution."
Karzai's offer to Mullah Omar, which was unprecedented, followed two years of quiet discussions in South Asia, Europe and the Middle East among Pakistani and Afghan officials, former leaders of the Taliban and members of Saudi Arabia's royal family, including King Abdullah. Among the participants: Karzai's brother and Nawaz Sharif, a Pakistani politician with close ties to the religious establishment who spent years in exile in Saudi Arabia. According to news reports, London and Paris provided logistical and diplomatic support for the contacts. The Pakistani daily Dawn reported that French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner is supporting talks between Karzai and "moderates within the Taliban," and he has invited Iran and Pakistan to Paris to participate in talks on Afghanistan.
So far, Mullah Omar has rejected Karzai's offer of direct talks, and the Taliban continues to insist on the withdrawal of US and NATO forces before any deal. A deal with the Islamist insurgency, or at least enough of it to make it stick, is an exceedingly difficult undertaking, and most of Obama's advisers are skeptical that it can work. India, Iran and Russia, which supported the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in the decade before 9/11, won't look with favor on a US-Saudi effort to allow the Taliban back in power, so their concerns will have to be taken into account. The fragmented nature of the Taliban movment makes it hard to figure out whom, exactly, to negotiate with. And though parts of the movement may be pragmatic enough to strike a deal, other parts are likely to fight to the bitter end.
The Obama team is far more supportive of an urgent diplomatic initiative to bring Pakistan and India toward an accord. But after the Mumbai attack, with its potential to bring the two countries back to the brink of war, that is a task that has just become far more difficult. "This requires great subtlety and a degree of sophistication that, I have to say, is not the norm in American diplomacy," says Riedel. "It calls for a stretch. I think the way to start is with very, very quiet conversations between the United States and India, and I think that the new relationship that we have with India gives us a better platform than ever before." India, Riedel says, is worried that the United States will seek a deal with Pakistan at India's expense. But closer US-India ties, cemented by a recent deal over India's nuclear program, give Washington new credibility to assure New Delhi that its interests in Kashmir and Afghanistan, where India is worried about a Taliban resurgence, will be protected.
India is deeply involved in Afghanistan now, and its role there is causing a degree of paranoia in Pakistan. India, along with Iran and Russia, helped oust the Pakistan-backed Taliban in 2001. India has provided $1.2 billion in aid to Afghanistan since then, and it has opened consulates in four Afghan cities that, Pakistan fears, could be bases for Indian intelligence. It is against that threat, historically, that Pakistan has supported right-wing Islamists. But India is a power with global ambitions, a thriving economy and powerful armed forces, and it is becoming clear in Pakistan that it can no longer compete with India, which is causing an outbreak of realism inside the Pakistani army. Ashley Tellis, now of the Carnegie Endowment, has had extensive contacts with Pakistan's military. "The mainstream of the Pakistani army no longer sees India as the main threat," he says. "There may be some of the far right, among the Islamists, who believe that India is the central danger." But Tellis says they are a minority. "To protect their institutional interests, they know that they must have a rapprochement with India."
The opportunity for a dialogue with elements of the Taliban and the possibility of a peace process between Pakistan and India constitute the true exit strategy for the United States in Afghanistan. But to nail down a deal with the insurgents, the United States will have to offer them what they most want, namely, a timetable for the withdrawal of US and NATO forces.
"What the insurgents do seem to agree about is that foreigners shouldn't run their country, and that the country should be run according to the principles of Islam," says Chas Freeman.
"We need to recall the reason we went to Afghanistan in the first place," he says. "Our purpose was...to deny the use of Afghan territory to terrorists with global reach. That was and is an attainable objective. It is a limited objective that can be achieved at reasonable cost. We must return to a ruthless focus on this objective. We cannot afford to pursue goals, however worthy, that contradict or undermine it. The reform of Afghan politics, society and mores must wait."
Meanwhile, the stage is set. The governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan want peace talks with Islamist insurgents and the Taliban. Outside powers, led by Saudi Arabia and quietly supported by Britain and France, are facilitating behind-the-scenes contacts between the Taliban and key Afghan and Pakistani leaders. Neighboring states, including India, Russia and Iran, while hardly enamored of the Taliban, might underwrite a truce. And the possibility of a regional economic pact linking Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India could tie it all together.
Al Qaeda, pushed into remote redoubts in Pakistan's mountains, is most certainly still plotting against the United States. But many, perhaps most, of its fair-weather allies on the Islamic right, including the Taliban, might very well be persuaded to make a final break with Osama bin Laden and his like if they can get a better deal, including a share of power in Kabul. Will President Obama seize the moment? Will he have the courage to offer an end to US occupation of Afghanistan if the Taliban-led movement abandons its ties to Al Qaeda?
By Robert Dreyfuss
President-elect Barack Obama says that Afghanistan is "the right war." "It's time to heed the call from General [David] McKiernan and others for more troops," Obama said in late October, referring to the US commander in Afghanistan. "That's why I'd send at least two or three additional combat brigades to Afghanistan." He's coupled that with tough talk about hitting Al Qaeda anywhere, including next door in Pakistan. "If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then I think that we have to act, and we will take them out," Obama said in the second of his three debates with John McCain. "We will kill bin Laden. We will crush Al Qaeda."
Despite such rhetoric, however, nearly two years ago Obama began assembling a cast of experts steeped in the intricacies of South Asian affairs, and they have provided him with a far richer and more sophisticated view of the Afghanistan-Pakistan tangle than emerged in the campaign. "The format of presidential debates does not lend itself to a nuanced discussion," says Bruce Riedel, wryly. A former CIA specialist on South Asia who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Clinton and Bush, Riedel led an advisory task force on Afghanistan-Pakistan for Obama. Interviews with Riedel and other Obama advisers--who made it clear they were not speaking for the president-elect--suggest that Obama intends to reorient US policy in the region significantly, and a key plank in that reorientation includes negotiations with the enemy. But assertions by the US command and the Obama team that we can both "surge" and negotiate overlook the glaring reality that sending more troops into the Afghan quagmire and urging the Pakistani government to escalate the war it is fighting against its own people will make the crisis worse, not better.
The outlines of Obama's strategy, which aren't likely to be articulated fully until after the inauguration, include a repudiation of the strident "global war on terror" rhetoric that marked President Bush's years and that only inflamed Muslim attitudes toward the United States. Campaign sloganeering aside, Obama may try to curtail the indiscriminate use of air power in Afghanistan against often ill-defined targets ("just air raiding villages and killing civilians" was how he put it in 2007), though how he'll do that while adding more troops and escalating the war isn't clear. He'll slow down, if not halt, the provocative cross-border attacks into Pakistani tribal areas against insurgent bases, even as he reserves the right to hit bin Laden. The incoming administration will take steps to strengthen the fledgling civilian government of President Asif Ali Zardari in Pakistan against the machinations of the Pakistani army and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), which maintains covert ties to a wide range of extremist groups, including the Taliban. And it will support a major boost in economic aid to both countries.
Nearly all of Obama's advisers--along with members of a parallel task force at the Center for American Progress, a think tank likely to be the source of many Obama appointees--insist that a central part of a new US policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan must be to facilitate a peace process between Pakistan and India, its giant neighbor to the east. For decades, Pakistan's military and the ISI have lent covert support to Islamist terrorist groups, in Afghanistan and in the disputed territory of Kashmir, as part of a strategy of asymmetric warfare against India. A Pakistan-India accord would strengthen Pakistan's civilian government and undercut the rationale for the army and ISI's ties to the Taliban, allied Afghan Islamist warlords and Kashmiri Islamist militant groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, suspected of involvement in the Mumbai terror attack. Wendy Chamberlin, US ambassador to Pakistan on 9/11 and a member of Obama's Pakistan task force, is a strong supporter of efforts to forge a Pakistan-India accord. "I argued for it [in 2002]," she says. And I got dismissed."
Many of Obama's advisers are open to the notion of bringing Iran into the mix, pointing out that Iran was helpful in 2001 in building the original coalition behind Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Iran's role was also highlighted in a September report by a private working group led by Richard Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state, and Lee Hamilton, co-chair of the 9/11 Commission. They suggested connecting Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Iran in a regional economic community, concluding, "The U.S. should...reconsider its opposition to the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline project." Tariq Ali, a British-Pakistani scholar and author of The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, has called for creation of a South Asian Union to facilitate a regional economic resurgence.
Even as they favor eventual talks with "reconcilable" elements of the Taliban movement, some of Obama's advisers and Gen. David Petraeus, the Centcom commander, defend their call for a surge by arguing that their first priority is to stabilize Afghanistan militarily. "Trying to divide your enemy is always a smart thing to do," says Riedel. "But until we break the momentum that the Taliban has today, where they feel that they're the winner, I don't see that you have any credible chance of persuading even a small number of Taliban to break. They think they're winning, and if you look at the numbers, you can make a pretty convincing case."
In the first ten months of this year, 255 US and NATO troops were killed in Afghanistan, more than all those who died in the first four years of the war in Afghanistan put together. Entire swaths of southern Afghanistan, in provinces along the Pakistan border south and east of Kabul, are controlled by the Taliban and their allies. Lately they have been able to strike with impunity even within Kabul, the Afghan capital. The CIA has been warning for more than two years that Afghanistan was spinning out of control. A forthcoming National Intelligence Estimate, representing the views of sixteen US intelligence agencies, warns that Afghanistan is in a "downward spiral" and, according to the New York Times, "casts serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban's influence there." The enemy has also evolved as a fighting force. Already by 2006, according to a report for West Point by retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the Taliban were fielding battalion-size units of more than 400 fighters. In some provinces the Taliban and their allies are creating a parallel state, appointing governors and provincial officials and establishing Sharia-style courts.
The counterinsurgency is made all the more difficult by the nature of the enemy, an exceedingly complex, multiheaded Islamist insurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It goes far beyond Mullah Omar's Taliban and Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda. "Calling it the Taliban is a failure to understand what's going on," says Seth Jones, an expert on Afghanistan and terrorism at the RAND Corporation. "It's a movement, not an organization," explains Chas Freeman, president of the Middle East Policy Council and a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia. "What we conveniently have been labeling 'the Taliban' is a phenomenon that includes a lot of people simply on the Islamic right." In all, the US military has identified at least fourteen separate insurgent organizations in Afghanistan, and according to Riedel, there are as many as fifty separate Islamist formations in neighboring Pakistan [see Anand Gopal, page 17, for more on the insurgency].
At the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Anthony Cordesman, a sober-minded, conservative military analyst, sounded the alarm. "We are running out of time," he wrote. "We currently are losing, and the trends have been consistent since 2004...we face a crisis in the field--right now." The situation, he said, is far more urgent than anything that can be solved by economic aid or nation-building efforts. "At least during 2009-10, priority must be given to warfighting needs." McKiernan, the US commander, has called for at least four more brigades, perhaps as many as 25,000 troops. He warned that the mission in Afghanistan will require a "sustained commitment" lasting many years, and the United States has announced plans to help more than double the size of the Afghan National Army (ANA), to 134,000 troops. "This is a decades-long project," says Ashley Tellis, a former National Security Council specialist on South Asia, who adds that it will take at least ten years before the United States can withdraw and let the ANA fight its own battles. "The transition alone will take a decade, until you can switch to the ANA," he says.
But surging troops into Afghanistan would be akin to sending the fabled 600 into the valley of death. As in Vietnam, tens of thousands more troops will only provide the Taliban with many more targets, sparking Pashtun nationalist resistance and inspiring more recruits for the insurgency. Advocates of sending additional US forces into this maelstrom have yet to articulate exactly how another 25,000 can turn the tide. Tariq Ali says that pacifying the country would require at least 200,000 more troops, beyond the 62,000 US and NATO forces there now, and that it would necessitate laying waste huge parts of Afghanistan. Many Afghan watchers consider the war unwinnable, and they point out that in the 1980s the Soviet Union, with far more troops, had engaged in a brutal nine-year counterinsurgency war--and lost. British Ambassador to Afghanistan Sherard Cowper-Coles has warned against precisely the escalation that Obama and Petraeus advocate. Sending more troops, he says, "would have perverse effects: it would identify us even more strongly as an occupation force and would multiply the targets [for the insurgents]." A top British general, Brig. Mark Carleton-Smith, says, "We're not going to win this war.... It's about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that's not a strategic threat."
"What began as a punitive raid aimed at beheading Al Qaeda and chastising its Afghan household staff has somehow morphed--with no real discussion or debate--into a prolonged effort to pacify Afghanistan and transform its society," says Freeman. "This moving of the goal posts gratified neoconservatives and liberal interventionists alike. Our new purpose became giving Afghanistan a centrally directed state--something it had never had. We now fight to exclude reactionary Muslims from a role in governing the new Afghanistan." Freeman suggests that this is an untenable goal, and that it is time to co-opt local authorities and enlist regional allies in search of a settlement.
Those who insist the war is winnable, including US and NATO commanders, also say that it can't be won without taking the war across the border to Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan's tribal areas, an escalation that's already under way. But this poses a whole new set of problems. The situation in Pakistan is only slightly less dire than in Afghanistan. The country emerged this year from nearly a decade under a US-backed military dictatorship and faces a daunting set of challenges. A multipronged insurgency based in the tribal areas is spreading its influence into the neighboring North-West Frontier Province, and it has reached all the way to Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, where assassinations and suicide bombings occur regularly. The new government is weak and divided, with little or no control over the Pakistani army and ISI. And its economy is virtually bankrupt: with inflation at 25 percent and vast unemployment, the country is desperately seeking $10 billion to $15 billion in immediate financial aid.
Yet the fragile Pakistani state is being pushed to the breaking point by the Bush administration. Since August, nearly two dozen CIA Predator missile attacks in tribal areas have inflamed much of the country against the United States. Already, before the spate of attacks, public opinion polls showed that 86 percent of Pakistanis say the goal of the United States is to "weaken and divide the Islamic world," 84 percent say the United States is a greater threat than Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and 89 percent oppose Pakistan's cooperation with the US "war on terror." Many Pakistanis blame the United States for its fifty-year record of propping up military dictators, which makes it hard for the United States to support even its allies, such as President Zardari. "Right now, we're kind of the kiss of death," says Marvin Weinbaum, a scholar at the Middle East Institute who was part of Obama's Pakistan task force.
Since 9/11, Pakistan has received more than $11 billion in US aid, but almost all of it has flowed into the coffers of Pakistan's army and ISI, with little or no oversight. According to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, between 2002 and 2007 only 10 percent of US aid was devoted to development and humanitarian assistance. That avalanche of cash to the military has allowed the ISI free rein to support its network of Islamist extremists, which it has built up systematically since the 1980s. As long as ISI helped nab an occasional Al Qaeda bigwig, even as it tolerated or supported the Afghan Taliban and other Islamist radicals, the United States went along. "We've got to put an end to this dirty game, where Pakistan uses surrogate terrorist groups," says Chamberlin.
Even those fighting the war have difficulty distinguishing friends from enemies. Michael Vickers, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflicts, who oversees a Pentagon anti-terrorism force, isn't sure. Asked if ISI is on our side or not, he pauses. "It's complicated. I'll put it that way," he says finally. "It's not black and white." Last summer Zardari attempted to bring ISI under the control of the civilian-run Interior Ministry, but the idea was quickly shot down. "That lasted eight hours," says Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars, a book about the CIA and Afghanistan that Obama was recently seen carrying. "Somebody told the ISI about the announcement, and they said, 'No, that won't be happening.'" Then, in the fall, Pakistan's army chief of staff installed a new set of generals atop the ISI, though there was widespread skepticism that the move reflected a real policy change by the army.
Yet Pakistani attitudes are slowly changing, even inside the military, analysts say. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto a year ago and the massive bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad in September alarmed many generals about the threat to Pakistan from its Islamist creations. "Pakistan has had a tolerance and a see-no-evil attitude toward the Taliban," says Riedel. "But the Afghan Taliban has also created a Pakistani Taliban, which is a Frankenstein the Pakistani army can't control. So it still has relations with parent Taliban, but the infant Taliban is now increasingly a threat to the cohesion of the Pakistan state, and it's a physical threat to the Pakistani army and even to the ISI. This is the classic case of a covert action program getting out of control."
As a result, of late the army is scrambling to control a crisis of its own making, without much success. It has launched a three-pronged military offensive in the tribal areas and nearby districts, but--having spent a half-century preparing for a tank war with India--the Pakistani army is not well equipped to fight a counterinsurgency war. And in the tribal areas the Pakistani army, which is mostly Punjabi, is seen as a foreign force by local Pashtuns, while many Pakistani officers and enlisted men are loath to fight against their compatriots in what they see as America's war. Both the military and the Pakistan government have tried to build tribal militias to combat the Taliban, but so far this effort hasn't paid off. And the government has tried to encourage the holding of tribal jirgas, or councils, to generate grassroots opposition to the dominance of Taliban-like elements in and around the tribal areas. That, too, hasn't worked well, since the Taliban have engaged in murderous counterattacks, including gruesome killings and suicide bomb attacks aimed at the jirgas. Many in Pakistan are operating under outdated assumptions about the tribes in the northwest, says Christine Fair, an independent expert on South Asia who took part in the Center for American Progress study. "The jirgas used to be made up of secular tribal leaders," she says. "Now, they meet in mosques and madrassas." Since the US-backed anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s, madrassas, or religious schools, have become factories and recruiting areas for militant Islamists.
Part of the solution, stressed by all of Obama's aides, is more economic support to both countries, targeted toward building infrastructure, improving agriculture, providing microcredit for small business and constructing schools and clinics. One member of Obama's task force on Pakistan is Jonah Blank, a senior staff member at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who is a key aide to Vice President-elect Joe Biden. Blank was a driving force behind the Biden-Lugar-Obama bill to provide $1.5 billion a year for ten years in economic support to Pakistan. A parallel effort for Afghanistan, including what Obama calls a Marshall Plan-style mobilization, is also under way. "Call it a democracy dividend," says Blank. "The civilians can say, 'See? We deliver.'"
But economic development takes a long time to be felt, and the crisis is now. If the wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan aren't going to be resolved militarily--and they won't be--the solution to both crises, now inextricably linked, must be a diplomatic one: first, negotiations with many of the forces opposing the two governments and the US presence in the region, and, second, progress toward a Pakistan-India accord.
In Pakistan, the Zardari government and the Parliament have strongly endorsed talks with the Taliban, better organized than the faltering accords announced in 2004 and 2006. In Afghanistan, Karzai declared in mid-November that he is open to direct talks with Mullah Omar. And in late October, tribal elders and dozens of Pakistani and Afghan officials convened a two-day "mini-jirga" intended to be the start of a dialogue with the Taliban. Owais Ghani, governor of the North-West Frontier Province and a leader of the secular, nationalist ANP party, said at the mini-jirga: "We will sit, we will talk to them, they will listen to us, and we will come to some sort of solution."
Karzai's offer to Mullah Omar, which was unprecedented, followed two years of quiet discussions in South Asia, Europe and the Middle East among Pakistani and Afghan officials, former leaders of the Taliban and members of Saudi Arabia's royal family, including King Abdullah. Among the participants: Karzai's brother and Nawaz Sharif, a Pakistani politician with close ties to the religious establishment who spent years in exile in Saudi Arabia. According to news reports, London and Paris provided logistical and diplomatic support for the contacts. The Pakistani daily Dawn reported that French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner is supporting talks between Karzai and "moderates within the Taliban," and he has invited Iran and Pakistan to Paris to participate in talks on Afghanistan.
So far, Mullah Omar has rejected Karzai's offer of direct talks, and the Taliban continues to insist on the withdrawal of US and NATO forces before any deal. A deal with the Islamist insurgency, or at least enough of it to make it stick, is an exceedingly difficult undertaking, and most of Obama's advisers are skeptical that it can work. India, Iran and Russia, which supported the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in the decade before 9/11, won't look with favor on a US-Saudi effort to allow the Taliban back in power, so their concerns will have to be taken into account. The fragmented nature of the Taliban movment makes it hard to figure out whom, exactly, to negotiate with. And though parts of the movement may be pragmatic enough to strike a deal, other parts are likely to fight to the bitter end.
The Obama team is far more supportive of an urgent diplomatic initiative to bring Pakistan and India toward an accord. But after the Mumbai attack, with its potential to bring the two countries back to the brink of war, that is a task that has just become far more difficult. "This requires great subtlety and a degree of sophistication that, I have to say, is not the norm in American diplomacy," says Riedel. "It calls for a stretch. I think the way to start is with very, very quiet conversations between the United States and India, and I think that the new relationship that we have with India gives us a better platform than ever before." India, Riedel says, is worried that the United States will seek a deal with Pakistan at India's expense. But closer US-India ties, cemented by a recent deal over India's nuclear program, give Washington new credibility to assure New Delhi that its interests in Kashmir and Afghanistan, where India is worried about a Taliban resurgence, will be protected.
India is deeply involved in Afghanistan now, and its role there is causing a degree of paranoia in Pakistan. India, along with Iran and Russia, helped oust the Pakistan-backed Taliban in 2001. India has provided $1.2 billion in aid to Afghanistan since then, and it has opened consulates in four Afghan cities that, Pakistan fears, could be bases for Indian intelligence. It is against that threat, historically, that Pakistan has supported right-wing Islamists. But India is a power with global ambitions, a thriving economy and powerful armed forces, and it is becoming clear in Pakistan that it can no longer compete with India, which is causing an outbreak of realism inside the Pakistani army. Ashley Tellis, now of the Carnegie Endowment, has had extensive contacts with Pakistan's military. "The mainstream of the Pakistani army no longer sees India as the main threat," he says. "There may be some of the far right, among the Islamists, who believe that India is the central danger." But Tellis says they are a minority. "To protect their institutional interests, they know that they must have a rapprochement with India."
The opportunity for a dialogue with elements of the Taliban and the possibility of a peace process between Pakistan and India constitute the true exit strategy for the United States in Afghanistan. But to nail down a deal with the insurgents, the United States will have to offer them what they most want, namely, a timetable for the withdrawal of US and NATO forces.
"What the insurgents do seem to agree about is that foreigners shouldn't run their country, and that the country should be run according to the principles of Islam," says Chas Freeman.
"We need to recall the reason we went to Afghanistan in the first place," he says. "Our purpose was...to deny the use of Afghan territory to terrorists with global reach. That was and is an attainable objective. It is a limited objective that can be achieved at reasonable cost. We must return to a ruthless focus on this objective. We cannot afford to pursue goals, however worthy, that contradict or undermine it. The reform of Afghan politics, society and mores must wait."
Meanwhile, the stage is set. The governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan want peace talks with Islamist insurgents and the Taliban. Outside powers, led by Saudi Arabia and quietly supported by Britain and France, are facilitating behind-the-scenes contacts between the Taliban and key Afghan and Pakistani leaders. Neighboring states, including India, Russia and Iran, while hardly enamored of the Taliban, might underwrite a truce. And the possibility of a regional economic pact linking Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India could tie it all together.
Al Qaeda, pushed into remote redoubts in Pakistan's mountains, is most certainly still plotting against the United States. But many, perhaps most, of its fair-weather allies on the Islamic right, including the Taliban, might very well be persuaded to make a final break with Osama bin Laden and his like if they can get a better deal, including a share of power in Kabul. Will President Obama seize the moment? Will he have the courage to offer an end to US occupation of Afghanistan if the Taliban-led movement abandons its ties to Al Qaeda?
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