Is the West Moving Closer to Military Intervention in Syria?

FSA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As noted on this blog at the beginning of October, the autumn skirmishes on the Turkish-Syrian boarder may be providing an excuse for greater NATO involvement in the Syrian civil war, with Turkey acting as a key base of operations.

This exclusive from the Independent today claims that western military leaders are already meeting, along with their counterparts from Jordan, Qatar, Turkey and the UAE, to formulate an air and sea-based campaign in support of the Syrian rebels.

The paper quotes a senior Whitehall source as saying,

"If this is worth doing, then it is worth doing professionally; training the FSA [Free Syrian Army] and providing them with air and maritime support when necessary."

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of this development is its shameless repetition of history as Western powers claim to be able to intervene on the side of the moderates, while excluding the jihadists such as the Islamist Al-Nursa group:

"The Obama administration is considering  proscribing Al-Nusra as a terrorist organisation, making it illegal for American citizens to fund it and sending a warning message to Arab states not to back it. At the same time Western help will be directed at and strengthen the moderate groups. The unified rebel command structure set up in Turkey, at the behest of the US and UK, has excluded the Islamist militias."

Those with a long memory may remember such platitudes being made in the early 1980s when western powers armed and supported the Afghan rebels in their fight against the occupying Soviet forces. In the process, the CIA not only recruited but helped to create the Taliban and, indirectly, al-Qaeda.

  

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• Exclusive: UK military in talks to help Syria rebels

From Cairo to the Drone Wars: how the Wheels Came off Obama's Rapprochement with the Muslim World

President Barack Obama speaks at Cairo University in Cairo, Thursday, June 4, 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Raise your hands if you can remember when President Obama used to be accused of being soft on Islamic militancy?

Me neither.

The 44th President of the United States may well go down in history not for his health care reform, but more significantly for the dramatic volte-face in his foreign policy. The change from peace-maker (remember his Nobel Prize?) to his relentless pursuit of drone-based attacks has been dramatic. Not only that, his policy of attacking suspected militants with drone-based missiles is actually contributing to the creation of new generations of Islamic militants, radicalised by the experience of silent and lethal force which has killed between 282 and 535 civilians in Pakistan alone. This total includes 60 children (source).

It is difficult to remember the early days. The President's speech - titled A New Beginning - at the University of Cairo in June 2009 was claimed by the White House to be the start of a new process of restoring relationships between America and the Muslim-majority world which had been damaged during the Bush era and following the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Some saw the speech as representing a water-shed in US-Muslim relations.  The sight of an American President talking in a conciliatory manner about the rich contributions that Islam has made to the world was favourably received in some quarters, even as it was rejected out of hand by others.

It was on the back of the speech - and his earlier New Year video message to the people of Iran - that Obama was awarded the the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2009. The Nobel Committee specifically referred to the President's "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples" and particularly his reaching out to the Muslim world.

Two turning points can be discerned in the President's approach since these early, heady days. The first was his decision to intensify the war in Afghanistan through the deployment of an additional 30,000 troops. Initial deliberations in the White House about this policy gave some encouragement to those hoping for a early US departure from the country. Critics, meanwhile, accused the Commander in Chief of weakness and dithering.

The second turning point was Libya. Although signalling early on that America would not take a lead in military action in the country, the President nonetheless ordered cruise missiles and attack aircraft to be deployed against ground and air forces loyal to Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi.  Regime change would not have been possible in Libya without American approval, participation and support.

America's co-operation during the Libya campaign with the Gulf state of Oman was significant. After the country's air force had played a crucial role in the operation, the US Defence Department concluded a treaty by which US-based Lockheed Martin supplied 18 new F-16 Fighting Falcons at a cost of $600 Million. 

America's engagement with Oman - a tiny Arab state with a vast military sector - highlighted the increasing difficulty with Obama's policy towards the Arab Spring, then in its early days. While endorsing the aspirations of those demonstrating for democratic freedoms in Egypt, the President also refused to publicly condemn the brutal suppression of those protesters who were demanding reform in the Gulf state of Bahrain. 

Increasingly hiding behind his Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, the President's Bahrain policy stemmed from his administration's fear that the old enemy Iran was fuelling the fires of protest inside the island state. Bahrain's Shia population, with historic and cultural links to Iran, were at the forefront of the protests against the embattled and pro-Western Sunni elite who dominated the government. 

When US-made M-113 Armoured Personnel Carriers rolled menacingly across the road bridge that links Saudi Arabia with Bahrain, Obama was mute at the use of foreign military forces to put down a pro-democratic uprising. With a vast US military base in Bahrain, America simply could not run the risk of endorsing a possible takeover by a population with close links to Iran, even if such a democratic moment was in line with the President's stated policy in his Cairo speech of supporting democratic movements in the region.

With Afghanistan and Libya as hard lessons in realpolitik, the increasingly embattled President, whose domestic policy endeavours were being thwarted by a hostile Republican-Congress, began to broaden the scope of his military interventions.

Here was an area of Presidential power not hampered by internal partisan bickering. As Commander-in-Chief he had exactly what he lacked in his domestic agenda - the power to command and achieve dramatic results.

The daring raid into Pakistani sovereign territory in order to kill Osama bin Laden must have felt like an affirmation that such bold military moves were the way forward. Ignoring the legal niceties of invading a foreign country with whom they were not at war, the bin-Laden success seems to have emboldened the President. Despite no declaration of war, military activities were ramped up in Yeman and Somalia, with apparently scant regard for the killing of innocent civilians in the process.

Obama's drone wars have, since their early days in Afghanistan, expanded dramatically. US drone strikes are often controlled by operators thousands of miles away in American bases in Nevada and have resulted in hundreds if not thousands of deaths. Statistics compiled by those watching with concern the escalation in the drone wars indicate that drone attacks are now occurring about once every four days inside Pakistan.

There are several worrying developments with this drone war policy. Firstly, the weapons are killing innocent civilians. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports that over 3,000 people have been killed by drones inside Pakistan since 2004. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, it has also calculated that between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly reported as killed in drone attacks inside the country since Obama took office.

Secondly, the use of drones is contributing to rather than reducing the rise of Islamic militancy among those populations affected by the drone-borne missiles. A recent report by Stanford Law School and the New York University School of Law highlights the psychological effects on the civilian population of those living in the areas attacked by US drones. 

This from the report Living Under Drones:

In the United States, the dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer by enabling “targeted killing” of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts. This narrative is false......

"This report presents evidence of the damaging and counterproductive effects of current US drone strike policies...."

One of the few accounts of living under drones ever published in the US comes from a former New York Times journalist who was kidnapped by the Taliban. He reports:

“The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.”

Living Under Drones describes how

"Community members, mental health professionals, and journalists described how the constant presence of US drones overhead leads to substantial levels of fear and stress in the civilian communities below....".

"Another interviewee who lost both his legs in a drone attack said that “[e]veryone is scared all the time. When we’re sitting together to have a meeting, we’re scared there might be a strike. When you can hear the drone circling in the sky, you think it might strike you. We’re always scared. We always have this fear in our head.”

Another described the effect of the drones as causing a "wave of terror" among the civilian population of north-west Pakistan.




It is difficult to imagine how US-Muslim relations could be made any worse than by pursuing a policy that traumatizes the civilian population of Pakistan, leading to parents keeping their children away from school for fear of attack by unseen unmanned American aircraft.

The President's policy of openness and engagement with the Muslim-majority world has come a long way since the heady days of his Cairo University speech. It is a tragedy that the direction of travel has been in the wrong direction. 

   

  

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The War Your Don't See

The War You Don't See trailer from John Pilger on Vimeo.

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Tony Blair Doesn't Speak for Me When He Speaks of God

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For the benefit of my four-and-a -half regular readers, and those others who stumble here unintentionally, here's my take on the Tony Blair-Christopher Hitchens debate taking place this week at the Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto on the question, "Is religion a force for good in the world?"

As a Christian believer myself (I hope I am a real one, converted to Christ from a secular background) it may be assumed that I will be pleased to support Mr Blair's case for God.

But I am not.

For a start, I do not support "religion" as a whole, as if the essence of Buddhism is essentially the same as the essence of Christianity, as the essence of Islam, etc.

They are not all the same. Any superficial consideration of the matter will reveal that religions vary greatly, from the brutal sun-worshiping religions of pre-Colombian America, to the Salvation Army, the Catholic crusades, and the nature-worshiping Druids. Lumping them all together and assessing whether they are "good" or not seems analogous to lumping together one-state Marxism, participatory multi-party democracy and market-anarchism, and asking whether or not "politics" is a force for good.

Clearly, the devil in such a question is in the detail.

More significantly, however, is my objection to the participation of Tony Blair in such a high-profile debate. Although I am unqualified to comment on the reality of his Christian faith, and would not presume to do so, I am sure of this: the action of invading Iraq in 2003 set in motion a chain of events which, by 2010, has had catastrophic results for the Christian churches in Iraq - including the Roman Catholic wing of the church to which Tony Blair converted in 2007.

Christians are required to exercise discernment in their lives, and part of this discipline includes an assessment of the consequences (the "fruit") of a course of action, not only its abstract theoretical dimension. The fruit of the invasion of Iraq for the Christian believers in that nation has been to make them significantly more vulnerable to brutal attack and persecution than was the case before 2003.

The murderous Jihadists who cut off the heads of church leaders in Iraq, and who blow themselves up inside churches, were not committing these acts inside Iraq before the invasion. The same tragic story is unfolding in Pakistan, where Jihadists forced out of Afghanistan by NATO forces, have added to the volatile religious and political mixture in the country and have increased their violent attacks upon Christians and their churches.

The professing Christian Tony Blair, as Prime Minister, was a prime mover in these terrible events which have unleashed such harm onto the church, not to mention the wider non-Christian population. President Bush, also a professing Christian, was of course the senior partner in this folly.

In light of such harm that has been caused, to those the Bible encourages me to see as members of my extended spiritual family, I cannot passively accept that the man who helped to create the conditions which have allowed such suffering to the church, should be accepted in any way as a spokesman for "the faith" that we both profess to share, or for "faith" in general.

There was a time in history when a warrior-ruler who professed faith would be taken kindly but firmly in hand by a bishop and led on a path of repentance and humility. The phenomenon of a king abdicating in order to enter a monastery was not an uncommon occurrence in the pre-modern era. Today, the path for such a man appears to consist of book deals, speaking tours, six figure salaries and endless justifications for indefensible actions which have had catastrophic consequences.

Would it be too much to ask for Mr Blair to choose to lower his personal profile, to repent of his presumption in acting as apologist for God, and to head the words of the ancient prophet:

He has shown you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.

Micah 6:8

Or to heed the words of the prophet Jeremiah:

Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.

Jeremiah 6:16

In the meantime, as a Christian, I can accept Tony Blair as a repentant sinner, if that is what he is. I am one too and God knows my own need of forgiveness. But I cannot identify with Mr Blair's role as a religious apologist and, not for the first time, I am reluctantly left to say of his actions, "Not in my name."

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Related articles

• Tony Blair to debate Christopher Hitchens on religion (ctv.ca)
• Blair v. Hitchens: Is religion a force for good or ill? (theglobeandmail.com)
• Blair v. Hitchens poll (scienceblogs.com)

Lessons from Afghanistan

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Robert Blackwill, is a former U.S. Ambassador to India and was a member of the National Security Council during the Bush administration (with responsibility for Iraq). In a recent speech, Blackwill noted the following lessons that future policy makers should learn from America's Afghanistan experience:

• Keep U.S. policy objectives feasible. No dreams allowed.
• Take into account that local realities dominate global constructs.
• Stay out of long ground wars in general, and especially stay out of long ground wars in Asia.
• Reject the notion that America has the capability to socially engineer far-off societies fundamentally different from our own.
• Be cautious about making counterinsurgency the U.S. Army's core competence. Interacting with exotic foreign cultures on the ground, not to say dramatically changing them, is not exactly America's comparative advantage.
• Accept that diplomacy is almost always a better instrument of U.S. national purpose than the use of military force.
• Remember that often purported worst case consequences of U.S. external behavior don't ever happen, not least because we remain the most powerful and resilient country on earth.

Also from Stephen M Walt, who is the source of the above summary of Robert Blackwill's speech, is a great piece on 10 Reasons Wars Last Too Long. One of the many insightful quotes from the essay is:

Great powers often stay in losing wars not because the stakes in a particular conflict are so large, but because they fear that withdrawal will have profound effects on their reputation and far-reaching repercussions elsewhere. The scholarly literature on this issue suggests that these concerns are usually exaggerated, but that doesn't stop pundits from making this claim and doesn't stop politicians from listening to it.

A further lesson (my own I suppose) is to recognise that the perceived dangers of backing out of an un-winnable war (in terms of loss of national prestige) are far greater than those associated with staying in one.

Source of Blackwill quote is from Stephen M Walt.

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Widows: They Haven't Gone Away

For Christians living in the economically developed world, the Biblical emphasis on caring for "widows" is one that we tend to rapidly contextualise away from its traditional and literal meaning.

Our line of reasoning goes something like this:

1. there aren't that many widows around today and those that exist tend to be elderly
2. the state (shaped in part, we claim, by centuries of Christian influence in the west) is now the main provider of care to widows
3. the equivalent person in our culture to the widow of biblical times is a) the single mother or b) the victim of sex trafficking.

No doubt such contextualisation has its place, but recent research reveals that, internationally, the plight of widows remains significant.

The Loomba Foundation, of which Cherie Blair is a patron, has this week launched a new report showing that 115 million widows around the world live in extreme poverty. Prejudice, mistreatment and exploitation are common among this section of the global population.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the countries with the largest number of widows broadly reflect those with large general populations - China (43 million widows), India (42 million) and the United States (13 million). Indonesia, Russia and Japan have a total of 24 million between them and there are around 245 million widows worldwide.

Widows in Afghanistan (2 million) and Iraq (3/4 of a million) are, according to the report, among those in the most difficult circumstances. The irony of this fact cannot be missed, both countries having been invaded by the orders of the British government while Mrs Blair's husband was prime minister.

The report also highlights the suffering of over 500 million dependent and adult children of widows, many of whom are severely affected by homelessness, poor health, economic and sexual exploitation and violence.

It is notable that both the old and new testaments place the care of widows at the heart of the responsibility of God's people. The church in Jerusalem, the first church to come into existence, ran a daily food distribution service to widows within its community, supported by the generous giving of its members. Deuteronomy 10 is typical of this Biblical emphasis:

For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing.

Whereas many Christians in the west will continue to try and apply the Biblical commands to their specific cultural circumstances, it is worth remembering that "real" widows remain a significant part of the global population and, as in Biblical times, are at the sharp end of economic need.

A Brief History of Afghanistan

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Can the Afghan National Army Deliver?

President Obama's hope of withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan within 18 months rests upon one key development: the effective training and deployment of the Afghan National Army.

The following video from Guardian Films highlights some of the challenges of this strategy.

Meanwhile, New York-based journalist Tony Karon reports on a number of issues involved in this growing policy of Afghanistination that risk being ignored in the current climate:

• 1 in 4 members of the ANA have left the force in the last year
• only 39,000 troops are considered combat ready
• even fewer have the skill and training necessary to fight the Taliban
• recruits complete a 10-week basic training programme and receive a Kalashnikov at the end. Many desert at this point.
• There is widespread evidence of ex-recruits returning for basic training under a false name - and receiving the $30 paid to such recruits

Ann Jones comments on this phenomenon:

"Some of these circulating soldiers are aging former mujaheddin -- the Islamist fundamentalists the U.S. once paid to fight the Soviets -- and many are undoubtedly Taliban."

"In a country where 40% of men are unemployed, joining the ANA for 10 weeks is the best game in town. It relieves the poverty of many families every time the man of the family goes back to basic training, but it's a needlessly complicated way to unintentionally deliver such minimal humanitarian aid."

• Incidences of drug taking in the national police and army are common. British officers in Helmand province, for instance, have said they estimate up to 60% of the police force are drug users.
  
• incidences of sexual abuse of children by ANA members have, according to some reports, been ignored by NATO military officials. "Some military officers have argued that since it is practised by some Afghans, particularly in Kandahar, then the Canadian Forces should not get involved in what should be seen as a “cultural” issue."

Tony Koran concludes:

"The idea that there are 240,000 Afghans out there with the hearts and souls of Prussian military cadets, who simply need US training in order to turn into the politically neutral professional military who will put their lives on the line for the Karzai state and its infidel patrons is, to put it mildly, somewhat fanciful."

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Democracy Afghan Style

A new law has been passed in Afghanistan allowing Shia men to withhold food from their wives if they refuse to obey their sexual desires. It also prohibits women of Shia mean from leaving their homes without their husbands' approval.

The law is seen as an attempt by President Karzai to win votes in the forthcoming national elections.

Source.

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Bush Widens America's Afghan War, a Throwback to Cambodia

News that the US Joint Chiefs of Staff are calling for American troops to pursue "extremists" across the Afghan boarder into Pakistan reminds me of the failed US policy in Vietnam when, faced with an unwinnable war, the decision was taken in 1970 to widen its scope into neighbouring Cambodia.

As today in Afghanistan, the situation in south east Asia in 1970 appeared to justify the initiative. Viet Cong forces had extended the Ho Chi Minh Trail into Laos and the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh was under threat of communist attack. American forces were vulnerable to attacks originating from within Cambodia and on that basis Commander of US forces in South Vietnam General Creighton Abrams argued for the elimination of their bases on the Cambodian side of the boarder.

Without consulting of informing the Cambodian government of Lon Nol, President Nixon agreed with his General's advice and ordered 20,000 American troops and warplanes across the boarder, announcing on a televised broadcast on April 28th that the future of world peace depended on America's success in Cambodia.

38 years later, and illustrating the maxim that there is nothing new under the sun, we are faced with an American military commander (Admiral Mike Mullen) calling publicly for a military strategy that covers "both sides of the boarder" between Afghanistan and Pakistan, announcing to the House Armed Services Committee that

"In my view, these two nations are inextricably linked in a common insurgency....We can hunt down and kill extremists as they cross over the border from Pakistan... but until we work more closely with the Pakistani government to eliminate the safe havens from which they operate, the enemy will only keep coming."

One can only hope that President Bush resists this call in the final months of his administration - an initiative that will plunge America's only "ally" in the region into complete turmoil and dissipate the remnants of any good will that may exist among the Pakistani population. The evidence so far gives little hope for that outcome:

• in July, President Bush approved orders enabling US Special Operations forces to conduct ground operations in Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistan government
• since April, missile strikes have been carried out on positions within Pakistan, attributed to coalition forces or CIA drones based in Afghanistan - strikes that have killed both Pakistani civilians and militants
• A raid in South Waziristan last week left 15 people dead and prompted Pakistan's army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani to strongly criticise the raids and insist that there was no deal allowing foreign troops to conduct operations inside the country: "The sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country will be defended at all cost," he added in a statement subsequently backed by the country's Premier Yousaf Raza Gilani.

It seems to be a principle of imperialism that when losing a war, the "arrogance of power" (to quote Senator J. William Fulbright) dictates an expansion of that same war. The Senator's observation from 1966 still seems relevant in 2008:

"Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations — to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence."

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