Saturday October 22, 2011
A Parody of Himself: Muammar el Qaddafi had become irrelevant a long time ago. Like most tyrants, he never knew when to give it up. The graffiti on Benghazi's walls says it all. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
Until the brutal killing, it was like one of those Latin American novels of the 1970s and 80s about dictators long past their prime and power, but not yet past their illusions. He was surviving on rice and spaghetti scrounged from the homes of civilians his henchmen raided day after day, as Muammar el Qaddafi was on the run. He complained about the lack of electricity, the lack of water, according to a close aide. He was urged to leave the country, to give up. He wouldn't consider it.
Of course, he never picked up a gun. They never do. They only pretend to be warriors. Instead, he read. He made phone calls. And his lingering grasp on power cost innumerable more lives than necessary. Then again, 42 years of his rule cost innumerably more unnecessary lives. Until his own was taken by rebels too contemptuous of him, and the law, to bother with niceties.
The videos of his capture and death immediately went viral, of course. But there's been an incredible binge of hypocrisy about his killing, at least from the United States, where judgments piled up about the manner of Qaddafi's death in ways they never did when Osama bin laden was killed even though, in the end, the two killings were not significantly different. Libyan rebels killed Qaddafi more messily. The Navy Seals killed bin laden more surgically. The Libyans had cell phone cameras rolling. The Seals allegedly did not. And of course the Seals got rid of the body before anyone had time to take a closer look, to analyze the bullet wounds, to judge to what extent bin laden was, in fact, summarily executed.
We have to go on the word of nameless Seals who claim bin laden was armed, that the Seals were acting ins elf-defense. Qaddafi had his henchmen, his bodyguards. But both men were overwhelmed by force, and both, more likely than not, could have been taken alive, and judged where they should have been: in a court of law, not at the muzzle of a gun by unnamed killers.
This isn't to justify anything either did. But it does speak badly of those who killed them. I go in more details here: "Beyond Qaddafi's Death in Libya."
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Thursday October 20, 2011
Sneaky: The Kunar River in northeast Afghanistan, at the border with Pakistan, where Taliban insurgents, likely aided by Pakistani forces, have been attacking U.S. bases. (John Moore/Getty Images)
To answer the question in the headline: not in so many words. But Just about the entire relationship between Pakistan and the United States since 2001 can be defined by those five words: not in so many words. Pakistan has reaped the monetary benefits of an alliance with the United States, cashing in on more than $12 billion, without quite acting like an ally in return. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (its combination CIA-FBI) never seriously abandoned its loyalty to the Taliban, which it created in the 1990s as a hedge against Indian influence in Afghanistan.
Pakistan had the experience of 1989, when, after the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, the Americans lost interest in what until then had been a well-funded CIA proxy war on Afghan soil, by way of Pakistan. Pakistan has no reason to think the same thing won't happen again, as indeed it has with the killing of Osama bin laden and the American public's weariness with the war in Afghanistan.
But Pakistan's sense of abandonment on that account is self-inflicted. Just last year, Congress passed a Pakistani aid package worth $7.5 billion over five years. Then bin Laden was discovered and assassinated in his laird in Abbottabad, just north of Rawalpindi, the Pakistani military establishment's capital. It is almost impossible to think that al-Qaeda's leader lived there five years without some knowledge, at some level, by Pakistani authorities. It's par for Pakistanis' course: they helped him escape from Tora Bora in 2001. They helped him escape from prying eyes for the past five years, maybe more. Chances are that bin Laden had been in Pakistan for the past decade.
It's all been a double game.
Now American forces along the Afghan-Pakistani border are taking fire from insurgents who either step onto Afghan territory to fire their 105 mm shells or do so from inside Pakistan. The attacks have surged in 2011, as documented by The New York Times, and American military officials say that the level of command and control exhibited by the attacks is too sophisticated not to be backed up by the Pakistani military. Those officials are also angry at the rules in place: no firing back at Pakistani-based positions.
That, of course, is deceptive, too: Just as attacks on American forces from Pakistani bases have increased, so have attacks by American drones vastly increased on Pakistani targets. There's a tit-for-tat war going on, with each side choosing to tell only half the story. Strictly speaking, neither side is acting according to the rules of war. But the rules of war have never really prevailed in Afghanistan, which long ago ceased being, on the American side, a war against terrorism. It turned instead into a counter-insurgency, an insinuation into a civil war fudged as a battle against terrorism. But al-Qaeda is all but eradicated. And the Taliban is no al-Qaeda. It has no interest in attacking the United States or Europe or spreading its caliphate anywhere but in Afghanistan.
It's the Americans who are the strangers in the mix. They'll continue to be. Until, like every other invading foreign force on Afghan soil since the days of Alexander the great, they, too, are forced to leave.
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Sunday October 9, 2011
WMD Duo: Judith Miller, whose reporting on Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction would embarrass an inattentive New York Times, with Bill Keller of The Times, who now admits to inattention. (Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)
There was the "I-Can't-Believe-I'm-a-Hawk Club" column, back on Feb. 8, 2003, when Bill Keller, then a columnist for the war-cheering New York Times, imagined a victorious invasion: "If all this goes smoothly -- and even if it goes a little less smoothly -- Mr. Bush will hear a chorus of supporters claiming vindication. I imagine a triumphalist editorial or two in the neoconservative press. Pundits who earlier urged Mr. Bush to ignore Congress and the U.N. will assure him that he can now safely disregard everyone who caviled at the threshold of war, and urge him to get on with the next liberation in the series."
And even if it goes a little less smoothly.
There was his "Fear on the Home Front" column from Feb.; 22, 2003, that included this prediction, now equally, spectacularly wrong: "First, Al Qaeda terrorists do not need the pretext of an Iraq war to come after us. They will attack us, unprovoked, repeatedly and in as spectacular a fashion as their lethal ingenuity allows, regardless of what we do in Iraq. We know this, because they have done it." Al-Qaeda, of course, didn't need to attack after the United States essentially attacked itself by invading Iraq, and beginning a spiral downward, at a cost of $1 trillion, and 4,500 American lives, and 100,000 Iraqi lives, that has yet to end.
And there was this, in a column written a few days before Keller was appointed executive editor: "The truth is that the information-gathering machine designed to guide our leaders in matters of war and peace shows signs of being corrupted. To my mind, this is a worrisome problem, but not because it invalidates the war we won. It is a problem because it weakens us for the wars we still face."
The last two lines said it all. The war we won: The war was never won, still isn't, and never will be. And it led to the wars we now face, among them the enduring ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Bill Keller was just returned to the OpEd pages of the Times. In early September, he penned an essay repenting his support for the war. The piece has its problems. But it's indicative of the degree to which too many bright liberals suspended disbelief in the Bush administration's follies for a bet, a foolish bet, that they were on the right side of history with their support for war.
Here's an analysis of the Keller piece and the hawkish liberals' shift: "Iraq War: When Liberal Hawks Like Bill Keller Repent."
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Friday September 23, 2011
Pass this bill: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pulled an Obama on Obama. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
I can understand, up to a point, the contortions of the Obama administration as it tries to find a way, any way, to oppose Palestinian statehood by equating that opposition, absurdly, with "standing with Israel." But it's a little embarrassing to see even The New York Times falling for the absurdities. "President Obama was right to stand with Israel," the subhead to its lead editorial reads today.
To stand with Israel. In other words, Obama was right to put Israeli interests--no, not quite Israeli: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's interests, which are far narrower than Israel's interests, and far more dangerous to Israel than legions of Israelis are comfortable with--ahead of American interests.
For what? For this, as Haaretz's Aluf Benn put it: "The years-long diplomatic effort to integrate Israel as an accepted neighbor in the Middle East collapsed this week, with the expulsion of the Israeli ambassadors from Ankara and Cairo, and the rushed evacuation of the embassy staff from Amman. The region is spewing out the Jewish state, which is increasingly shutting itself off behind fortified walls, under a leadership that refuses any change, movement or reform ... Netanyahu demonstrated utter passivity in the face of the dramatic changes in the region, and allowed his rivals to seize the initiative and set the agenda." Now he's got Obama to go along with the suicide mission.
Thomas Friedman summed it up this way: "I have great sympathy for Israel's strategic dilemma and no illusions about its enemies. But Israel today is giving its friends -- and President Obama's one of them -- nothing to defend it with. Israel can fight with everyone or it can choose not to surrender but to blunt these trends with a peace overture that fair-minded people would recognize as serious, and thereby reduce its isolation." But it's not about to. And Obama and The New York Times are bending over backward to justify the passivity.
Today at the United Nations, Palestinians did what they should have done a long time ago. They made a bid for statehood. Palestinian Authority President submitted the bid to the United Nations Security Council. The United States will veto the bid. The spiral downward will continue, fueled mostly by American and Israeli intransigence, not, this time, by the Palestinian's long history of shooting themselves in the foot. In this case, it's the others who are pulling the trigger on themselves.
Soon after Abbas made his bid, the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia, known as the quartet, settled on terms to resume direct talks between Israel and Palestinians. Supposedly. But the United States was using that belated (and, in my view, bogus) settlement as a way to delay, postpone or eliminate the bid for statehood, as if resuming negotiations has anything to do with granting Palestinian full and permanent legitimacy at the United Nations.
Statehood and negotiations are not mutually exclusive. To the contrary. If the quartet has found a way to resume direct talks (and it hasn't, really, because, as the Times reports tonight, "the quartet's statement was a watered-down document, avoiding any of the difficult and highly contentious issues that have been the focus of negotiations for months and that continue to divide the Israelis and Palestinians"), it'll be a good thing to look forward to--once the United Nations ratifies the Palestinians' statehood bid. The bid is long overdue.
The Economist sums it up quite well: "The principle is simple: the Palestinians deserve a state, just as the Israelis do. The United States, the European Union and the Israeli government have all endorsed a two-state solution. There is broad agreement that the boundary should be based on the pre-1967 one, with land swaps allowing Israel to keep its biggest settlements close to the line, in return for the Palestinians gaining land elsewhere; Jerusalem should be shared; and the Palestinians should give up their claimed right of return to Israel proper. That still leaves much room for negotiation. But provided that the Palestinian request at the UN, still unfiled as The Economist went to press, does not undermine the basic terms of this deal, it is hard to see why any peacemaker, including America's Barack Obama, should oppose a proposal that nudges Palestine closer to real statehood."
I give it a shot myself. Here's my defense of Palestinian statehood: "Why Palestinian Statehood Is Necessary."
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