Ballot Fraud, Mafia Rule making Afghans Pessimistic: Chayes

I heard Sarah Chayes at the Michigan Theater on Thursday afternoon, speaking on Afghanistan.

She is a long time expatriate in Qandahar, where she arrived late in 2001 as a reporter. She has gone on to be an entrepreneur of the Peace Corps kind, and a consultant to the ISAF forces.

The one thing she said that most struck me was the absolute panic and profound disappointment that afflicted her circles in Qandahar in fall of 2009, when it became clear that Hamid Karzai had successfully stolen the presidential election. She said that some of her Afghan friends thought about emigrating to Pakistan. Others determined to get rich quick, by any means possible. She represented their reaction as one of disillusionment with the United States, at its inability to stand up a government better than that of the Taliban and Mujahidin. She described Afghanistan as increasingly beset by mafia and warlord rule, and apparently Karzai’s ballot fraud deprived people of any hope that things would get better any time soon. (In corroboration, I’d point out that Gen. David Petraeus is said to have referred to the Karzai brothers as themselves a criminal cartel, a remark that seems more prescient every day.)

Chayes was also scathing on the US military’s hopes of standing up a 400,000 man security force and turning things over to it. She insisted that the military derived its legitimacy from the civilian political structure, and that if the latter were weak or corrupt, the military would just fall apart after the US left. I understood her to want vastly more resources put into supporting good civilian governance, in preference to putting all the eggs in the military basket.

Chayes’ book on Afghanistan is The Punishment of Virtue.

See for similar comments on the ‘other midterms’, those in Afghanistan this fall, this essay at Tomdispatch by Ann Jones.

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Posted in Afghanistan | 1 Comment

American Noir: Arizona anti-Immigrant Law penned by Private Prison Industry, says NPR

NPR reports that Arizona’s fascist immigration law was cooked up and in large part written by the private prison industry in the state, which saw dollar signs every time they glimpsed a Latina maid or Latino garage mechanic whose papers might not be in order. I hope Latino voters keep in mind that the Republican Party was a willing accomplice.

If the Arizona story sounds like a hard-boiled noir detective novel, it is no accident. Dashiell Hammett’s dark view of human nature was formed in the teens of the last century when he worked as a Pinkerton (we would now say private security guard). He quit when he was offered $5000 to murder union leader Frank Little. He refused, but Little was nevertheless executed, probably by masked Pinkerton agents, in Butte Montana a little later.

Noir is a quintessential American art form precisely because it exposes the paradox at the heart of American life, that a country founded on individual liberty has had it chipped away by unscrupulous and predatory corporations (now elevated by SCOTUS to our co-citizens!) (Not all companies are unscrupulous and predatory, but plenty are.)

Private corporations policing workers, killing union organizers, and profiting from depriving people of their liberty, have been part of the warp and woof of the United States all along. A massive scam to lock up immigrants for profit is just one more such scheme.

That American workers can so easily be pitted against one another on stupid ethnic grounds helps explain why we put up with all these shenanigans, unlike the French workers, who if they cannot stop the elite from poaching on their rights, can at least make it costly to try. The private prison executives must have laughed their asses off at the way the country swung around to support their new “law.”

It reminds me of the allegations against Dick Cheney’s private prisons in Texas, which were indicted by a grand jury for abusive practices. Cheney seems to have liked prisons. He managed to lock up 26,000 Iraqis in American military compounds, and had his cronies like Ahmad Chalabi lock up another 25,000. You wonder how many were “arrested” by the latter-day Pinkertons, the trigger-happy Blackwater agents. Prisons for personal profit– why it is an American way of life that can now be exported…

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Posted in US Politics | 1 Comment

Mission Impossible: Iraq

Mission Impossible: Government Formation

Producer and screenwriter: The United States

Starring: Nuri al-Maliki, Iyad Allawi, Ammar al-Hakim, Salih al-Mutlak, Muqtada al-Sadr, Tariq al-Hashimi

Sound and Visual Effects: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan

(Someone sent me this by email, so I don’t know who the artist is and would be glad to add credits if informed of her or his identity. For those who haven’t been following Iraq, the poster refers to the inability to form a government since the March 7 elections. – JRIC)

Satire.

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Posted in Iraq, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Scary Tea Party Compilation

You can’t make this stuff up. Vote Sanity suggests that however angry you might be about the current situation, it is important that you vote for sanity. They give some examples of the alternative.

More at Ranker.com– Top 13 Craziest Midterm Election Moments.

And for the Muslim-Hating Industrial Complex, see the Tenneseean.

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Posted in US Politics | 2 Comments

Obama fails to Galvanize the Youth on Daily Show

President Obama came on Jon Stewart’s Daily show on Wednesday.

This was the president’s chance to rally the youth, who typically don’t vote in midterms. Obama defended his legislative record in wonky terms. But he did not have good comebacks to Stewart’s critiques from the left.

Obama’s hair should have been on fire. He should have pointed out all the horrible things the tea party plans to do to young people. He had a chance to mobilize them around youth issues.

Instead he played it safe. I didn’t take away a single talking point that seemed to me likely to galvanize people like the students I teach.

When Bill Clinton went wonky you could still sense his passion. I got no sense of urgency or passion. I am sure he feels it. But now that he isn’t running for office himself, he just doesn’t seem able to put it on display.

A wasted opportunity. At least he will be there to veto the crazy tea party legislative agenda.

Here is pt. one:

The Daily Show With Jon
Stewart
Mon – Thurs 11p /
10c
Barack
Obama Pt. 1
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full
Episodes
Political
Humor
Rally
to Restore
Sanity
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Posted in Uncategorized | 26 Comments

Israeli extremists Provoke Clashes in Umm al-Fahm

The extremist “Our Land of Israel” group that opposes any negotiations with Arabs or relinquishing of conquered territory staged a provocative march Wednesday in Umm al-Fahm, the second largest Palestinian-Israeli city in Israel. Palestinian-Israeli young people demonstrated by throwing stones, and Israel police responded with force, deploying stun grenades and bAton charges. The ensuing clashes left about a dozen Injured one each side. Among those wounded were two Arab members of the Israeli parliament or knesset.

In part the right wing Israelis were protesting the establishment there of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement, a fundamentalist group with growing influence among Palestinian-Israelis, who comprise over 20% of Israel’s population. The right-wingers say that the Islamic Movement is allied with Hamas.

The clash is a further sign of an increasing divide between Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Israelis, with each turning to fundamentalist religion in ever greater numbers. Russian Israelis, most of whom have immigrated since 1991, are especially militant about subordinating and even denaturalizing and expelling the Palestinian-Israelis. They are seeking to impose a loyalty oath. There are also recent moves toward excluding Palestinian-Israelis from some Jewish housing complexes, in a move that evokes Apartheid South Africa or Jim Crow in the old American South.

To the perennial problem of Israel’s relationship with the exiled Palestinians chased out in 1948 is increasingly being added the question of communal coexistence inside Israel. And that question is even more dangerous.

Aljazeera English has video

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Posted in Israel/ Palestine, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

On Beating Uppity Liberal Women: Afghanistan and Kentucky

Afghanistan style (Taliban version):

American style (Tea Party version):

For more on woman-stomper Tim Profitt and Rand Paul see HuffPo. The episode puts Paul’s youthful opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment for women in a whole new light.

Lauren Valle of MoveOn.org suffered a concussion and a sprained arm. It is not known what injuries the Afghan women suffered.

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Posted in Afghanistan, US Politics | 6 Comments

A North-South Global Climate War?

This looks to me like a sort of north-south global war, with the North inflicting profound damage on the South:

Here are carbon dioxide emissions per capita by country, calculated from data at the US Department of Energy’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC):

and here is the new Maplecroft estimation of the countries most likely to be adversely affected by climate change, as reported by WaPo’s Juliet Eilperin and Agence France Presse (including climate-related disasters, heightened competition for scarcer resources, and consequent security challenges)– shown in dark blue:


Courtesy Maplecroft

It is almost a mirror image, isn’t it? And, ironically, it looks like the North may for a while escape the worst consequences of its carbon profligacy, inflicting them on Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, and parts of Africa instead.

I don’t think Usama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are the last demagogues and terrorists in the global south who will attempt to mobilize hatred of the US and the other developed nations on this basis.

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Posted in Environment, al-Qaeda | 6 Comments