I'm a tad biased, and will therefore refrain from commentary here. But below is a pasted news bulletin which can be found here.
""
The existence of historical ties between Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate and the Afghan Taliban is hardly news. But when the Afghan Taliban's second in command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, was recently captured, many saw it as a turning point for an agency that is little understood within the CIA. But now officials believe that even as some of Pakistan's security forces have been working alongside Americans to capture key Afghan insurgents, the ISI "quietly freed at least two senior Afghan Taliban figures it had captured on its own," reports the Washington Post. This is seen as evidence that parts of Pakistan's security leadership continues to support elements of the Afghan Taliban in its broad attempt to shape the future of Afghanistan and prepare for an eventual U.S. withdrawal. Pakistani intelligence officials deny that any Taliban figures have been released.
""
The original story can be found in the Washington Post.
Showing posts with label Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peacebuilding and Conflict Resolution. Show all posts
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Karzai on Heroin?
Quote from "The Slatest", link here
Is President Karzai a Heroin Addict?
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been acting certifiably crazy. At first, everyone attributed it to hurt feelings (an invitation to the White House had been abruptly rescinded). But it's only gotten worse, with Karzai accusing Americans of engineering Afghan election fraud and hinting that he could join the Taliban. Now Peter Galbraith, the American who was once a top U.N. official in Afghanistan, has told MSNBC that the erratic behavior may be about a lot more than diplomatic snubbings. Galbraith said he questions Karzai's "mental stability" and dropped a not-so-subtle hint that the Afghan president is a herion addict. "He's prone to tirades," Galbraith said. "He can be very emotional, act impulsively. In fact, some of the palace insiders say that he has a certain fondness for some of Afghanistan's most profitable exports." Galbraith is not the world's most neutral source on Karzai (he was removed from his U.N. job after accusing Karzai of election fraud), and other diplomatic types say Karzai is paranoid or depressed, not on drugs. Either way, his behavior is bad news for the United States, which needs a strong ally in Kabul if it is to bring most of its troops home from Afghanistan by next year. The White House is bearish on Karzai; press secretary Robert Gibbs danced around the question of whether Karzai is a U.S. ally Tuesday, saying, "He is the democratically elected leader of Afghanistan." Many foreign policy analysts say it's time for the United States to effectively ditch the president; writing in the New York Times Wednesday, one former Defense official argues that if the United States wants to get out of Afghanistan, it's going to have to ignore Kabul (and Karzai) and deal directly with local leaders who will actually cooperate. "Mr. Karzai should be treated as a symbolic president and given the organizational 'mushroom treatment,' " he says. "That is, we should shut off the flows of information and resources directly to the national government."
It's about time for Afghanistan to take back all its "heritage territory", kick the ethnic elite out of government, shed interference from foreign intelligence agencies, and build some roads. And to execute Karzai for criminal incompetence.
Road map to peace right there.
--Abhinav
Is President Karzai a Heroin Addict?
It's about time for Afghanistan to take back all its "heritage territory", kick the ethnic elite out of government, shed interference from foreign intelligence agencies, and build some roads. And to execute Karzai for criminal incompetence.
Road map to peace right there.
--Abhinav
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Monday, March 1, 2010
Natural Disaster Survival: A Function of Society
Christopher Hitchens does it again, by succinctly pointing out the fact that the stability of a society goes far more towards determining the relative stability upon encounter with natural disaster than anything else.
Thesis here:
" Professor Amartya Sen made a reputation some decades ago for pointing out that in the 20th century no serious famine had occurred in an open or democratic society, however poor. In the classic case that he studied—that of Bengal under British colonial occupation in the 1940s—tens of thousands of people had starved to death in areas that had overflowing granaries. It was not a shortage of food, but of information and of proper administration (cough, Monty cough, Gregor), that had led to the disaster. The Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, as was pointed out by Robert Conquest in his book The Harvest of Sorrow, was the result of a dictatorial policy rather than any failure of the crops.
Taking this as an approximate analogy or metaphor, people are beginning to notice that the likelihood of perishing in an earthquake, or of being utterly dispossessed by it, is as much a function of the society in which one lives as it is of proximity to a fault."
Most Quotable Quote here:
" But the Iranian regime, as we know, has other priorities entirely, and it has worked very hard to insulate not its people from earthquakes, but itself from its people. I remember sitting in one of Tehran's epic traffic snarls a few years ago and thinking, "What if a big one was to hit now?" This horrible thought was succeeded by two even more disturbing ones: What if the giant shudder came at night, when citizens were packed tightly into unregulated and code-free apartment buildings? And what would happen to the secret nuclear facilities, both under the ground and above it? I know what the mullahs would say—that the will of Allah was immutable. But what would the survivors think when they looked around the (possibly irradiated) ruins and saw how disposable their leaders had considered them to be?"
Full article found here
Thesis here:
" Professor Amartya Sen made a reputation some decades ago for pointing out that in the 20th century no serious famine had occurred in an open or democratic society, however poor. In the classic case that he studied—that of Bengal under British colonial occupation in the 1940s—tens of thousands of people had starved to death in areas that had overflowing granaries. It was not a shortage of food, but of information and of proper administration (cough, Monty cough, Gregor), that had led to the disaster. The Ukrainian famine of the 1930s, as was pointed out by Robert Conquest in his book The Harvest of Sorrow, was the result of a dictatorial policy rather than any failure of the crops.
Taking this as an approximate analogy or metaphor, people are beginning to notice that the likelihood of perishing in an earthquake, or of being utterly dispossessed by it, is as much a function of the society in which one lives as it is of proximity to a fault."
Most Quotable Quote here:
" But the Iranian regime, as we know, has other priorities entirely, and it has worked very hard to insulate not its people from earthquakes, but itself from its people. I remember sitting in one of Tehran's epic traffic snarls a few years ago and thinking, "What if a big one was to hit now?" This horrible thought was succeeded by two even more disturbing ones: What if the giant shudder came at night, when citizens were packed tightly into unregulated and code-free apartment buildings? And what would happen to the secret nuclear facilities, both under the ground and above it? I know what the mullahs would say—that the will of Allah was immutable. But what would the survivors think when they looked around the (possibly irradiated) ruins and saw how disposable their leaders had considered them to be?"
Full article found here
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
"Peak Insurgency"?
A sidebar post by Joshua Keating in the March/April issue of Foreign Policy, reproduced in its entirety below:
"In the early 1990s, with the Cold War over and a rash of small but brutal conflicts breaking out in the Balkans and throughout Africa, it seemed the world was entering an age of irregular conflict and civil war. But, according to a working paper by two Yale University political scientists, the truth is just the opposite: The number of civil conflicts reached a high point in 1991 and has been dropping steadily ever since. The percentage of those conflicts that could be described as an "insurgency" -- an asymmetric conflict between a rebel group and central government -- has also dropped. So much for the "anarchy" that journalist Robert Kaplan predicted in 1994. Instead, the researchers declare, insurgency is "a historically contingent political phenomenon that has already peaked." The authors, Stathis N. Kalyvas and Laia Balcells, think the Cold War's dynamics benefited insurgents far more than central governments, as superpowers gave aid to rebel groups that fought as their proxies. The insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan that currently have Western policymakers tied up in knots are arguably throwbacks from another era. Conflict could make a comeback, but mostly as something the researchers call "symmetric non-conventional" civil war. This type of fighting, such as the ongoing chaos in Somalia, is often inaccurately described as guerrilla warfare but actually involves two sides that are evenly matched but poorly equipped. In other words: Goodbye, Baghdad; hello, Mogadishu. "
"In the early 1990s, with the Cold War over and a rash of small but brutal conflicts breaking out in the Balkans and throughout Africa, it seemed the world was entering an age of irregular conflict and civil war. But, according to a working paper by two Yale University political scientists, the truth is just the opposite: The number of civil conflicts reached a high point in 1991 and has been dropping steadily ever since. The percentage of those conflicts that could be described as an "insurgency" -- an asymmetric conflict between a rebel group and central government -- has also dropped. So much for the "anarchy" that journalist Robert Kaplan predicted in 1994. Instead, the researchers declare, insurgency is "a historically contingent political phenomenon that has already peaked." The authors, Stathis N. Kalyvas and Laia Balcells, think the Cold War's dynamics benefited insurgents far more than central governments, as superpowers gave aid to rebel groups that fought as their proxies. The insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan that currently have Western policymakers tied up in knots are arguably throwbacks from another era. Conflict could make a comeback, but mostly as something the researchers call "symmetric non-conventional" civil war. This type of fighting, such as the ongoing chaos in Somalia, is often inaccurately described as guerrilla warfare but actually involves two sides that are evenly matched but poorly equipped. In other words: Goodbye, Baghdad; hello, Mogadishu. "
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