Mikhail Sergeyevich applies the idiomatic phrase “…… vydelyvnet Krendelya” to Karmal. We could use it do describe Karzai, Obama, Clinton, McChrystal, et. al.. It translates literally as “….. is walking like a pretzel.” The figurative meaning is that someone is staggering and weaving like a drunk; that is, not being straight-forward.

The Soviets had the exact same problem with Afghan government legitimacy that the US is having now. They had the same problem with the Pakistan-Afghan border land that we have now. They had a better Afghan Army to work with and still had the problems we’re having. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes and in this case we’re merely looking at history translated from Russian to English.

Early in the proceedings on 13 November 1986, Gorbachev says to the Politburo:

“We have been fighting in Afghanistan for already six years. If the approach is not changed, we will continue to fight for another 20-30 years. This would cast a shadow on our abilities to affect the evolution of the situation. Our military should be told that they are learning badly from this war. … In general we have not selected the keys to resolving this problem. What, are we going to fight endlessly, as a testimony that our troops are not able to deal with the situation? We need to finish this as soon as possible.”

President Obama is, of course, dealing with the most insubordinate cadre of generals since MacArthur went and lost the Korean War. They are hoping for another 20-30 years to continue learning badly–and attempting to wash out the stain of Vietnam by repeating the same mistakes. Obama could fire the lot of them, but he won’t. The question remains to what extent they will influence the decision making process towards their own, institutional ends. That is the operative process for the DoD here; fighting terrorism or stabilizing Afghanistan is of no concern to Petraeus, McChrystal, etc., they’re concerned with their budgets and their glory. The fate of the nation comes in somewhere well below personal and institutional ambition.

A.A. Gromyko points out, “Too long ago we spoke on the fact that it is necessary to close off the border of Afghanistan with Pakistan and Iran. Experience has shown that we are unable to do this in view of the difficult terrain of the area and the existence of hundreds of passes in the mountains.” My goodness does that sound familiar. The Soviets, of course, could not pressure Pakistan to apply military force to its side of the Durand Line, but it makes little difference. The last eight years have shown the situation to be like applying pressure to a water balloon: press the Afghan side and the insurgents squirt to Pakistan, press the Pakistan side and the insurgents move back to Afghanistan. It is, in effect, the same problem with different uniforms involved.

Gorbachev is clearly thinking about ending the war by this politburo session (in a maximum of two years), much like the D.C. leak-fest is suggesting that Obama wants exit strategies. But the Soviets spend a fair amount of time discussing the problems they have with domestic politics in Afghanistan. Gromyko says, “In the Afghan Army the number of conscripts equals the number of deserters.” And the politburo must contend with distancing itself from Karmal without completely undermining the relationship. “It is also necessary to keep him [Karmal] on the general track; to cut him off would not be the best scenario. It is more expedient to preserve [his relations] with us.”

Domestic politics in Afghanistan are clearly bleeding into wider political questions. “Concerning the Americans, they are not interested in the settlement of the situation in Afghanistan. On the contrary, it is to their advantage for the war to drag out.” If the reader would like to question American motives, he should refer to the statement of Ishmael Khan [a familiar name in current events], “The Americans want us to continue fighting but not to win, just to bleed the Russians.” Today there is no clear cut support for the Afghan insurgency against the US, but that doesn’t mean that regional players are not happy to see the insurgency bleed the United States as the mujaheddin bled the Soviets.

At this point, the politburo discusses involving regional players like India and puts a political settlement to the Afghan conflict at the top of its list. “In one word, it is necessary to more actively pursue a political settlement. Our people will breathe a deep sigh if we undertake steps in that direction.” My best guess is that there was hope in the administration that the Afghan elections would open the door for such a political settlement; to the same end we hear rumors of talks with the Taliban.

Shevardnadze, “Right now we are reaping the fruit of our un-thought-out decisions of the past.” And indeed, history does sometimes repeat itself with alarming precision. The Soviets were in a damned if we do/damned if we don’t situation by the middle of November 1986. We find ourselves in the same situation. Shevardnadze continues, “It is necessary to state precisely the period of withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. You, Mikhail Serge’evich, said it correctly – two years. But neither our, nor Afghan comrades have mastered the questions of the functioning of the government without our troops.”

Akhromeyev (deputy minister of defense):

Military action in Afghanistan will soon be seven years old. There is no single piece of land in this country that has not been occupied by a Soviet soldier. Nevertheless, the majority of the territory remains in the hands of rebels. … There is no single military problem that has arisen and that has not been solved, and yet there is still no result. The whole problem is the fact that military results are not followed up by political [actions]. At the center is authority; in the provinces there is not. We control Kabul and the provincial centers, but on occupied territory we cannot establish authority. The government is supported by a minority of the population. Our army has fought for five years. It is now in a position to maintain the situation on the level that it exists now. But under such conditions the war will continue for a long time.

If the similarities between then and now, the USSR and the USA, weren’t frightening enough already, they get worse. The Politburo continues its discussion and moves into the situation of the Afghans as a population. Vorontsov, “Afghanistan is a peasant country (80 percent of the population are peasants). But it is exactly they who have least benefited from the revolution. Over eight years of the revolution agricultural production has increased by only 7 percent, and the standard of living peasants remains at pre-revolutionary levels.” He then quotes comrade Zeray, “because of various reasons, the status of the peasants in the government zone is in certain ways worse than in regions of counter-revolutionary activity.”

That’s how a large power loses a counter-insurgency in an undeveloped nation, and that’s how the US is losing the counter-insurgency in Afghanistan. Being under the control of the occupier has little or no benefit to the population. Being under the control of the established central government is often worse than being under the control of the insurgency.

Gorbachev sums up the meeting:

“In October of last year [1985] in a Politburo meeting we determined upon a course of settling the Afghan question. The goal which we raised was to expedite the withdrawal of our forces from Afghanistan and simultaneously ensure a friendly Afghanistan for us. It was projected that this should be realized through a combination of military and political measures. But there is no movement in either of these directions. The strengthening of the military position of the Afghan government has not taken place. National consolidation has not been ensured mainly because comrade Karmal continued to hope to sit in Kabul under our assistance. It has also been said that we fettered the actions of the Afghan government.”

It seems that Obama’s first strategic review of Afghanistan took a similar shape to the Politburo’s 1985 decision, and roughly one year later the Obama administration finds itself in the same position as the Politburo’s 13 November 1986 meeting details. If there is any hope for the nation and the Obama administration, someone is brandishing the sheets of paper quoted above. The American experience in Afghanistan will be as fruitless and, ultimately, the same sort of failure as the Soviets experienced…for exactly the same reasons.

Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and it is not hyperbole to suggest that the long-term fate of the United States will mirror that of the Soviet Union if our leadership does not head the lessons available. The USSR expended money and energy badly needed at home in Afghanistan; Afghanistan alone did not destroy that nation, but it was certainly one straw too many. The United States is not unbreakable, and the time for basing decisions on national myths is long passed.

Choose well, Mr. President. The fate of your nation may well rest with the decisions made today.

PDF of the Politburo meeting minutes

Further archival material here and here

According to the paper of sure we’ll lie to help you invade Iraq record, Mr. Karzai was paid for “a variety of services” that included raising a paramilitary force. You don’t say…

I’ll just go ahead, break with writing convention and give you the money shot way ahead of schedule:

“The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban.”

Raise your hand if you’re surprised by that sentence.

Is your hand up? If it is, you’re an idiot.

The rest of the piece is pure, unadulterated agitprop…not that the majority of Homo americanus is quick enough on the uptake  to see through it. Oh, the Obama administration’s consternation and hand wringing that the brother Karzai might be a “malevolent force”. Lord, who could have guessed that throwing Benjamins at whoever made the best promises for the short term would blow up in our face?

Anyone who bothered to read anything deeper than the paper of evil Russia invades Georgia, the bastion of democracy, unprovoked record could have told this story anywhere between last week and eight years ago. Many of us did.

And none of you listened.

Congratulations, Mr. Obama, you’ve managed to push the Karzais into a corner. Got ‘em real flustered too. “I help, definitely,” Ahmed Karzai said, “I help other Americans wherever I can. That is my duty as an Afghan.” The poor guy doesn’t even know if he’s Afghan or American anymore.

But he’s not the only one’s who’s confused. We’ve got a Gen. Flynn who thinks that “the only way to clean up Chicago is to get rid of Capone.” (Whew, i’m sure glad there hasn’t been any mafia activity in Chicago since 1931.) And then the proverbial “unnamed CIA officer” who says, “Virtually every significant Afghan figure has had brushes with the drug trade. If you’re looking for Mother Teresa, she doesn’t live in Afghanistan.”

Again, show of hands if you’re surprised by the anonymous CIA officer’s statement. Yes, you’re an idiot.

The question, the big fucking question, is how Mr. Obama plans to establish a squeaky-clean slate of hope in Afghanistan under these circumstances. It’s one thing to make your few “friends” walk the plank for your benefit; it’s a whole other thing to not open yourself up to accusations that you’re doing the same thing that the last jackass-in-chief did. I’m talking about the US government’s tangential–at the very least–involvement in the opium trade; i’m also talking about the blatantly timed leaks and obvious media manipulation.

We get it, Karzai is the scapegoat for all the horrendous bullshit that’s happened in Afghanistan and all the blood on the hands of Republicans, Democrats, Homo americanus ignoramus and the rest of us. So what? All it proves is that being an ally of the United States is at least as dangerous as being its enemy. Now show us the lily white savior of freedom and democracy in Afghanistan.

Look, i’m not a fan of big time drug dealers like the CIA Ahmed Wali Karzai or their abettors like the paper of record the CIA. But this is just asinine.

Hunter was right, “We’re a nation of pigs and we’ll get what we deserve.”

There’s no question that the election was rigged, but the low voter turnout is more dangerous to government legitimacy than the fraud. Just five years ago Afghanistan held an election that defied expectations: women voted in large numbers, old men cried after voting for the first time in their lives, polls had to stay open late so that all who wanted to vote could, and it was peaceful. In effect, we’ve been moving backwards.

Karzai appears to be the odd man out, or at least a convenient scapegoat. The failure that characterizes the mission to date is less about Karzai’s imperfection than about what passed for strategy during the Bush administration. Obama administration spokespeople are promoting the meme that we need a strong central government in Kabul for the mission to be successful. That’s true, and i’m glad to see that everyone read COIN for Dummies, but we’re leaving out significant issues that need to be considered and addressed. The Pentagon only discovered counter-insurgency a few years ago. It certainly wasn’t practiced in the early stages of the Afghan conflict. Our counter-insurgency strategy then went by the name of, publicly i might add, “The Warlord Strategy”.

Karzai’s government is weak and ineffectual because we spent those heady days leaving him to molder in Kabul while the CIA handed attaché cases full of cash to the warlords whose power we now bemoan. Reconstruction has been woefully underfunded. Plans have been mired in indecision and bureaucracies working at cross-purposes. Much of the money spent found its way back to donor countries through consultancies and contracting. It’s a functioning society that gives government legitimacy. Would you give a rip what the President says if you only had electricity every few days?

You can’t change history. You also can’t pretend that it didn’t happen. And you certainly can’t make it go away by chanting, “Bush’s fault, Bush’s fault.” We do, however, have to deal with the effects of that sordid history. The Afghan insurgency—religious, nationalist or tribal—is strong and gaining strength; that’s what insurgencies do in the vacuum created by weak government. It’s victory by default, because while a person may find Taliban justice horrifying, it is at least justice. When a weak government obviously leans on its foreign patron, the insurgency wins again. It is able to portray an already weak government as a puppet of the occupier. The deck is stacked against a foreign power occupying territory with an indigenous insurgency. If the insurgency has outside support or safe haven, then the game is rigged. This insurgency has both, which is why Pakistan is leveling South Waziristan. Whether Pakistan is genuinely attempting to address the insurgency issues on its side of the not-really-an-international-border border or not remains to be seen. It has a long history of playing multiple sides of the game, even when Pakistan is endangered.

The Obama administration made Hamid Karzai lose whatever honor he had left when it forced him to announce the run off. I believe in the sanctity of democracy, and i’m disgusted by the fraud. On the other hand, Afghanistan after more than 30 years of ceaseless conflict is no place to play political-science Pollyanna. Our chances of finding a leader who’s untouched by corruption and also powerful enough to demand loyalty in the present circumstances are roughly the same as there being a leprechaun guarding that leader at the end of a rainbow.

That leaves us with a short list of possible resolutions to the election issue. We can assume that turnout will be dismally low, and we can assume that there will be more fraud. In which case we can A. hide it; B. declare the election fraudulent and let Karzai rule without a constitutional mandate through (at least) the winter, which will surely be a boon to the perception of legitimacy; C. depose Karzai and put an unelected leader in his place; or D. scrap the Afghan-written constitution and put together something we think will work better. I don’t see a good one in the lot.

Galbraith’s noble whistle-blowing put the administration in a difficult position. That it made political hay out of the situation by publicly lecturing on democracy, subtly blaming the mission’s failure on Karzai’s weak government and not-so-subtly displaying the true power relationship in the Kabul election fraud press conference was its own decision. It didn’t have to do any of those things. The left is divided on Afghanistan in the first place, and it isn’t even paying attention. Now the administration is in a corner of its own painting in the midst of deciding how to proceed.

This is not the time to give the Pentagon a chance to prove that it really could have won in Vietnam. Doing this by the DoD’s book will require hundreds of thousands of troops and uncountable sums of money over a very long time span, and even with all that, failure is a real possibility. McChrystal’s 40,000 minimum is unlikely to turn the tide of this conflict, and the idea that the Afghan National Army will make up the bulk of the hundreds of thousands of troops necessary is, at present and in the near-term, laughable. A piece-meal escalation of 15,000 here and 40,000 there might be easier to accomplish from a domestic politics perspective, but it won’t help—and may in fact hinder—the mission. Biden’s plan for a limited, counter-terrorism presence sounds good politically: protect the national security flank while mostly withdrawing from Afghanistan. But it will amount to the US being just one more militia on the Afghan landscape during a civil war.

Obama is in a difficult position. He’s been clear about his intent to stay in Afghanistan, so withdrawal means the dreaded flip-flop, a political opening for the Republican Party and having to stand up to his generals. The last is particularly problematic because he appointed them. Withdrawal has its consequences. The USGS found significant resources in Afghan territory: oil, gas and minerals. The Chinese have already developed a copper mine. These considerations may not make the front page, but rest assured that they’re being discussed behind closed doors.

There are no “good” or incredibly feasible solutions here. The US could drop its pretenses and behave like a real empire, but that’s unlikely and probably wouldn’t be successful anyhow. It can withdraw and leave the area to fester, which will be a massive victory for our supposed enemies and a loss of national honor that few politicians would be willing to risk. Or it can continue muddling through and leave the inevitable for future leaders at the cost of blood, treasure and regional stability.

The best option is, unfortunately, the least realistic. A massive international effort in peacekeeping, disarming Afghanistan and reconstruction combined with grand diplomacy that addresses regional issues is the only realistic possibility for accomplishing our purported goals in the region. There is no template for such an action. There may not be enough international trust to bring it to fruition. And Obama confronting the military to the degree necessary is unlikely, but more likely than him being able to commit the US to such a long-term project.

We can’t know if the deliberations are considering the long-term implications of policy direction. Given the nature of the US, there’s a good chance that decisions will be based more on institutional and political positioning for the short-term. Those long-term implications, however, are real and very dangerous. Remember that Gorbachev chose to escalate the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan when he became General Secretary; he was forced to withdraw later. His situation is instructive, as there are plenty of parallels between his USSR and the United States today. Wisdom is learning from other people’s experience. Should we choose to ignore history and follow Franklin’s maxim that experience is a dear school but a fool will learn in no other, we are likely to fulfill the “Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires” prophecy. Afghanistan is not the graveyard of empires because of any characteristics inherent in the nation. It just happens to be where falling empires go to die.

Mullah Omar is back with a vengeance, says a story on the front page of The NY Times that’s been echoed in red atop the Huffington Post. The latter patriotically reminds you to let the authorities know if you see a tall, male Afghan with black hair and a shrapnel wound to his right eye.

“This is an amazing story,” said Bruce Riedel, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who coordinated the Obama administration’s initial review of Afghanistan policy in the spring. “He’s a semiliterate individual who has met with no more than a handful of non-Muslims in his entire life. And he’s staged one of the most remarkable military comebacks in modern history.”

Whether or not Omar is the real brains behind the Taliban resurgence that has D.C. policy makers sweating remains to be determined, but it’s a gripping story that produces a nicely defined villain. It fits well with Secretary Clinton’s recent pronouncements concerning the attack-hostage situation-siege in Pakistan, reminding us “that extremists … are increasingly threatening the authority of the [Pakistani] state….” She also pointed out there is only “strong and clear” resolve in the fight against the Taliban; a fight that the US will work with the new Afghan government to win.

That would be the Afghan government that recently won an election we haven’t seen in many headlines. Thanks to Peter Galbraith, the UN was forced to announce that the election was marred by “widespread fraud“. And she forgot to mention the rumors of the Obama administration entertaining the possibility of allowing the Taliban a stake in governing Afghanistan. That would be unnamed official speak for “pretty much right back where we started from…minus a few hundred billion and stacks of dead bodies.”

There’s a lot to be considered when the mandarins spend this week beneath the Nobel sheen, deciding what to do next. General McChrystal will be arguing for at least 40,000 more boots on the ground. He needs them because “the overall situation is deteriorating” and “the insurgents currently have the initiative.” The doves (stop snickering), like my own Sen. Carl Levin, say that there are other ways to show our resolve.

More hawkish politicians point out that just training Afghans won’t cut it. We need to destroy the Taliban if we can ever hope to defeat Al Qaeda, and if we fail in Afghanistan then Pakistan will surely fall to the sort of extremists that keep Sec. Clinton awake at night. And imagine if the Taliban give Al Qaeda sanctuary again; that would be a grave threat to our national security.

We could consider Mullah Omar’s statement in September: “We assure all countries that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as a responsible force, will not extend its hand to cause jeopardy to others.” Mr. Riedel, the CIA officer quoted above, assures us that any such statement from Omar is just “clever propaganda.” Being one of the designers of the current Afghan strategy and a Langley fellow, he’d probably know.

And the Grey Lady would never lie to us *cough* Iraq *cough* Georgian War *cough*…excuse me, i seem to be having a coughing fit that might go on for some time.

Ahem. If you feel like you might be getting the run around South Asia, you’ll want to read Eric Margolis in The Toronto Sun:

Truth is war’s first casualty. The Afghan war’s biggest untruth is, “we’ve got to fight terrorists over there so we don’t have to fight them at home.”

Many North Americans still buy this lie because they believe the 9/11 attacks came directly from the Afghanistan-based al-Qaida and Taliban movements.

False. The 9/11 attacks were planned in Germany and Spain, and conducted mainly by U.S.-based Saudis to punish America for supporting Israel.

It’s well worth reading the whole article, because you are getting the run around. Margolis may not have it 100% correct, but he has less to gain by speaking the truth than men like Riedel and Levin have to lose from it.

We’re sinking in a pointless quagmire, begun on lies that our peace prize winner chooses to perpetuate. Do you really think that Obama will put a stop to it? Can you define victory in South Asia? The only question that remains is whether we’ll make it longer than the Soviets, since it’s pretty clear that the end will be the same.

Thanks to Ian Welsh for pointing out the Margolis piece.

To quote from a recent BBC article:

Lee Ki-Churl, a corporation official, said he expected Tanzanians to benefit from the deal. “Some African countries export fruit and import fruit juice, or export olives and import olive oil, simply because their past colonialists did not teach them how to process food,” he told the AFP news agency. “We plan to set up an education centre for Tanzanian farmers in the food-processing zone in order to transfer agricultural know-how and irrigation expertise to them.”

I think it is both patronising and ignorant to assume that Africans don’t farm the way modern western farms operate because they are uneducated.  This almost seems to imply that Africans are too stupid to help themselves.

I’m not a purist when it comes to the “rationalism” of markets (the theory that every price includes all available information to reflect that price), but I do believe that in relatively unsophisticated African markets there are good reasons why farmers do not farm or invest in productive capacity:  weak rule of law, ineffective property rights, high taxes, bribery and corruption all add up to ensure that the cost exceeds the benefit of investment.

Anthony Mills, a soil scientist at the University of Stellenbosch contacted me regarding the difficulty of conducting development in Africa.  “The Zambian land tenure system is particularly problematic.  By law the land is owned by the President.  In practice it is owned by the chiefs.  The land is consequently probably even further from private ownership than in most developing countries.”

Yet, without any due acknowledgment of the political and legal environment standing in the way of growth and development, international projects duly waste cash on major interventions.  In 2004, the UN launched the Millennium Development Villages project in an effort to demonstrate how the goals for the Millennium Development Goals could be realised.

Promises of the Millennium

Millennium Promise was co-founded by the economist Jeffrey Sachs and the philanthropist Ray Chambers. The project work of the Millennium Villages are overseen by a Scientific Council composed of leading scientific and development authorities at the UN Millennium Project and The Earth Institute at Columbia University, both of which are headed by Sachs.

The project is a miserable example of the patronising and objectionable way in which development in Africa is imposed, as if like manna from a benevolent West.

The project hasn’t “failed” in the way a business would fail.  Jeffrey Sachs hasn’t been forced to live in a homeless shelter, and the villages themselves aren’t derelict.  My concerns have to do with the nature of the promises, and of the results.  My analysis is based using only their published information and claims (on their sites: http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/ and http://www.millenniumvillages.org/).

Their objectives are an overwhelming mish-mash of wants and desires:

“In its first 18 months, the MVP’s five main objectives were to: (i) Provide universal access and free distribution of long-lasting, insecticide treated bed nets to fight malaria; (ii) Achieve significant increases in staple crop yields; (iii) Ensure universal access to functioning health clinics; (iv) Increase primary school enrollments; and (v) Provide community access to improved and year-round water for consumption. In addition, the MVP emphasized cross-cutting interventions focused on addressing gender inequality; on community mobilization, participation and leadership; and on infrastructure for transport, energy, and information and communications technologies (ICT).”

“The Millennium Villages seek to end extreme poverty by working with the poorest of the poor, village by village throughout Africa, in partnership with governments and other committed stakeholders, providing affordable and science-based solutions to help people lift themselves out of extreme poverty.”

Ending extreme poverty is a known quantity.  Numerous countries have done it (from South Korea to Brazil) and what is required mostly boils down to accountable government and rule of law, plus sound economic principles premised on enforceable property rights.

So much for the background.  Let’s look at the viability of these projects themselves.

The region chosen

“Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda.”

According to a quick check, the bottom 20% earn roughly $350 to $450 per annum in this region.  I’m being generous here, since the MDP aims to work with the absolute poorest which the UN usually defines as people earning less than $1/day.

“Between 1990 and 2001, the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa living on less than $1 a day rose from 227 million to 313 million, and the poverty rate rose from 45 percent to 46 percent. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of undernourishment in the world, with one-third of the population below the minimum level of nourishment.”

This implies a total of 62 – 63,000 villages (at their requirement of 5,000 people per village) who fall into the project scope.

The investment

“Each Millennium Village requires a donor investment of $300,000 per year for five years. This includes a cost of $250,000 per village per year (5,000 villagers per village multiplied by $50 per villager) and an additional $50,000 per village per year to cover logistical and operational costs associated with implementation, community training, and monitoring and evaluation. Note that this level of external support is fully consistent with the 2005 G8 commitments for official development assistance to Africa by 2010. The other $60 per villager per year will come from village members, local and national governments and partner organizations, making for total funding of $110 per person per year.”

This is a fudge.  Firstly, sure, the global community may have promised a grand total of $50billion in support, but that usually has strings attached, and includes a wide range of other bilateral investment.  So the full amount isn’t available.  Secondly, most African governments don’t spend their own money on internal development.  Thirdly, the villages have no money (since that is the reason they were chosen).  One way or another, all of that $110 will have to be donated.

That means we are investing $550k annually for each village over a five-year period (i.e. $2.75 million).  To reach all villages in the scope requires an investment of around $172 billion.

The return on investment

So much for the background.  One of the things I’m often asked on African tourism development projects is, “Does this town/area have good tourism potential for development?”  My answer is always this:  “Are there men and women by the side of the road selling curios?  If not, then no.”

People in Africa are not poor because they are ignorant of their own needs, or of how to earn a living.  Neither are they really victims of circumstances beyond their control.  Given the right environment, Africans are as capable of supporting themselves as is anyone else. When the Zimbabwe currency was worth less than spit, inflation was several trillion % and nothing was available for sale. A few months after the Zimbabwe government abandoned the Zimbabwe dollar in exchange for the US dollar everything is available, investment is happening and production is shooting up. Zimbabwe may even be entirely self-sufficient for food again by the end of next year. And that is without any major international intervention.

So, as far as the MDP villages are concerned, my first question is this:  “Are other villages visiting the MDP villages, becoming inspired, and copying this model?”

The answer is: No.  No-one is copying the villages.  No private investor has turned up and offered to do something similar.  Scratch that, George Soros turned up and made a spot donation of $50 million in 2006 to fund 33 villages.  But that is hardly investment.

There are a whole host of reasons that I can spot:

1. The investment changes nothing about the legal and economic situation in the country at hand; governments are still corrupt, infrastructure is still non-existent.  Even if the MDV were to produce a major food surplus, who would they sell it to and how would they get it to market?
2. The project makes a great deal of the village-based ownership structure.  This is a collectivist / communist system.  If no-one owns it, then there is little incentive for individuals to work harder, since everyone will get the same outcome.  Like most projects of this nature, the output will continue as long as the expensively-paid consultants are around, then it will return to its base level.  The only reason the Kibbutz system has lasted 100 years is the donations of both the Israeli government and of outside donors.  As soon as the Israeli government cut funding, then the Kibbutzim started to close.  Now only those most hardy (or the very few who have major industries earning revenue) are still functioning.  But at least the Kibbutzim were self-created.  The MDPs rely for their energy on do-gooder outsiders.
3. Who owns the investment?  If something intangible like a “village” owns the products of individual labour and investment, then what does a person with ambition do?  Can he/she sell their stake in the village and use the money to go to university, or buy a house?  Who decides on what the profits (should there be any) be spent on?

Even in the best-case scenario, all that you achieve is that a group of famished and unhealthy people are less famished and less unhealthy.  For an investment of $2.75 million.  Is it really sufficient to take people from earning $1/day to say $2/day?

What else could you achieve with that money?

You could build a nice, labour-intensive factory for $2.75 million.  Imagine the impact of 62,000 new factories on the central African economy?  And imagine all the things that would be required for such a thing to happen … roads, rule of law, healthcare, education.  All of which would be affordable if millions of people were earning proper salaries.

This isn’t happening.  There are no investors in Africa beyond a few resources and the inevitable mobile telephony.  Africa is 2% of the world economy.  To put the MDP investment in perspective ($110 per person), foreign direct investment in Africa is worth only $19 per person per year.

Whitey Basson of Shoprite, a major African retailer, put it best last week:  “It takes 15 inches of paper to cross a border in Africa.”  Africa’s countries are regularly ranked as the most appalling and corrupt places in which to do business.

The MDP villages do not change that situation.  The agricultural techniques behind the project may be sound, but the economics are a failure.

And, if the economics are a failure, then what is the point of the project?

And make no mistake, as Paul Boyer writes in an Arms Control Today review of a new book, Reagan’s Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World From Nuclear Disaster, according to authors Martin Anderson and Annelise Anderson. . .

Above all else, Reagan was a man of peace whose unwavering objective, rooted in his personal history and reinforced by his brush with death in 1981, was a world free of nuclear weapons.

William F. Buckley agreed, as Daniel McCarthy writes in a review for the January American Conservative of his posthumous book, The Reagan I Knew:

“What I [once] said. . . was that Reagan would, if he had to, pull the nuclear trigger,” writes Buckley. “Twenty years after saying that. . . in the presence of the man I was talking about, I changed my mind.” Reagan would not have unleashed a nuclear holocaust, even in retaliation.

But there’s disarmament and there’s disarmament: One is the result of diplomacy; the other comes from the end of a gun. To the Andersons, the latter inevitably precedes the former:

[They] quote Reagan’s repeated assertions of his peaceful intentions and wholly endorse his insistence that the massive military buildup and intensified nuclear weapons competition of his first term were only a means to his utopian goal: to force the Soviets to recognize the futility of competition and the inevitability of total nuclear disarmament as their best option.

With equal conviction, they embrace Reagan’s view that the missile defense system envisioned in his SDI proposal would advance the cause of peace. … a global defensive shield would protect all the world’s peoples against any cheaters or rogue states tempted to nuclear adventurism.

As you can see, to the Andersons, Reagan set the table for disarmament with his militarism, not via whatever rapport grew between him and Mikhail Gorbachev at the Reykjavik summit. Nor, at the time, were conservatives too sanguine about a product of the summit — the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF). National Review, McCarthy wrote, ran a cover story on the INF titled “Reagan’s Suicide Pact.”

In reality, of course, Reagan clinging to missile defense as if it were the country’s blankee was the stumbling block to going All. The. Way at Reykjavik. For a brief point in time, the sky had been the limit. In fact, when the idea of eliminating all nuclear weapons was brought up, even George Schultz, Reagan’s circumspect advisor, was caught up in the moment. “Let’s do it!” he said.

Boyer explains what went wrong:

[By the 80s, not only] the Russians, but most U.S. strategists, including some of the most hawkish, understood that, in the world of nuclear strategy, even “defensive” moves such as SDI. … radically altered the strategic balance. [In other words, the] United States would have been able to launch a nuclear first strike with no fear of a devastating counterblow.

But it’s not only Reagan who fails to understand that missile defense is more of a threat to world peace than it is protection (which has yet to be proved in any way, shape, or form) for the United States. Boyer again:

The Andersons share Reagan’s puzzlement that Gorbachev and his team proved unwilling to accept the president’s peace-loving protestations at face value and instead treated SDI as a grave escalation of the nuclear arms race. [To the Russians, it was] a potentially fatal blow to the concept and reality of deterrence, and an insuperable barrier to the dramatic strategic arms cuts the two leaders were considering. …

Within Reagan, though, existed “a radical disconnect between [his] visionary scenario and the. . . principles of deterrence theory.” One can’t help wondering why the means by which missile defense undermines deterrence wasn’t explained to him by his nuclear advisors, such as Richard Perle. Oh, because he’s Richard Perle. Alarmed by Reagan’s response to Gorbachev’s overtures, he would have been all too willing to leave the president in the dark if it kept him from realizing his dreams.

In the end, though, Reagan’s mentality may have been too wedded to the silver screen and the illusory hopes it holds out for wish fulfillment.

First posted at the Faster Times.

Part 3…God’s own medicine

The Obama administration rescinded the Bush administration’s quixotic order to eradicate poppy fields in Afghanistan. Judging by hectare cultivation numbers and harvest yields, the plan was either never fully implemented or failed miserably. At the very least, farmers in Afghanistan are no longer being punished for trying to make a living. Like Bush, the Obama administration wants to reform Afghan agriculture and move it away from poppy cultivation. Unfortunately, these plans are still “being finalized”. To understand the problems inherent in the administration’s plans and possible futures for Afghan agriculture we need to examine Afghanistan’s situation, the opium poppy, and the history of opium cultivation.

Papaver somniferum (the sleep bringing poppy) has a long history with humanity: seeds have been found in Neolithic burials and recorded use dates to c. 3500 BC in Mesopotamia. For most of those years it was not an evil scourge, but one of the most important plants in the human cornucopia. Gods were depicted wearing its flowers. It offered pain relief without equal in the ancient world, along with mystical visions. But its downside was noticed at least as early as Galen, who wrote that opium users developed a need for the substance and the negative effects of habituation.

As late as the U.S. Civil War, opium was hailed as “god’s own medicine”. God is, apparently, merciful as the plant is widely tolerant of temperate conditions; capable of withstanding drought later in its life cycle; and not particularly susceptible to pests and diseases. More importantly, gathering opium is a fairly simple, if laborious, process. After the flower petals fall, the seed pod is allowed to ripen for roughly two weeks. Then a series of shallow slashes or pin-pricks are made in the pod; latex seeps from these incisions and is scraped from the pod. Sun drying removes the water content, and the result is raw opium.

Not only did our ancestors have an effective pain reliever that could be produced with relative ease, but one that kept indefinitely without processing. In many parts of the world, opium is still cultivated for these same reasons. That opium is non-perishable and addictive makes it the quintessential agricultural commodity. The East India Company built an empire on it and nearly brought down a civilization with it. Users as varied as English intellectuals, Chinese coolies and Southern belles found themselves ensnared by opium, but opiate addiction was treated as an unfortunate malady rather than a social scourge until the beginning of the 20^th century. (It may be of interest to note that morphine was marketed as a ‘cure’ for opium addiction and heroin was claimed to cure morphine addiction.)

Contrary to popular belief, opium addiction does not incapacitate users…that is, the addict will not necessarily waste away in indolence. In the Orient, laborers were the most common users: opium allowing them to cope with the physical and emotional burdens of their low, social station. The US annexation of the Philippines set the stage for opium criminalization, when American officials were horrified by the rate of use on the islands. Until then, cultivation and use was spread broadly around the world, though the former was concentrated in Asia.

A series of control measures were enacted over the course of the 20^th century, which partially curbed opiate use – insomuch as you could no longer buy it over the counter – but also pushed the commodity into the black market.  Opium became even more profitable, though it became significantly more dangerous to profit from it. In 1953, a follow up to the Paris Convention designated seven nations as legal, export producers and allowed any nation to produce a domestic supply.  The major producer nations left off the list ignored the convention. One country appealed the decision and asked for an export license, “arguing opium was a vital cash crop supporting up to 90 percent of the population”. (Booth, 188) That country was Afghanistan, and the appeal was denied.

So it is incorrect to say that Afghanistan has an opium problem because of the violence that has wracked the nation since the late 1970’s; the violence and instability has only exacerbated the “problem”. A rugged, landlocked nation without significant transport infrastructure that receives seasonal rains has few options in cash crops that are saleable beyond local markets. More importantly, the horticultural cycle of poppies allows Afghan farmers to get a poppy crop and at least one other crop from the same earth. The poppy requires c. 120 days to mature; however, it is planted in the fall and survives the winter as an immature plant beneath the snow. In this way, opium can be harvested in the spring, leaving the remainder of the growing season for food crops. It is common for Afghan farmers to plant a second crop like maize, though any vegetable crop could follow poppies.

(There are varieties of Papaver somniferum that mature in as few as 55 days, and as home flower gardeners know, poppies can be perennial…though it would make no economic sense for a farmer to treat the plant as a perennial.)

Many other crops could be more profitable than opium, which is labor intensive, in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, every factor affecting agriculture in Afghanistan works against other crops and in favor of poppies. The US would like to see opium replaced by other short season crops, like cucumbers, but few – if any – of them could harvest as early as fall plantings of poppies. Pushing the date of the first harvest forward constrains the second harvest. Moreover, non-cereal crops rot. Without a reliable way to bring farm products to profitable markets, any and every replacement crop will lose the financial battle. Even as the farm gate price of opium has fallen, farmers still plant it. This is partially a function of reliability: low prices for opium are better than rotten cucumbers worth nothing. It is also a function of credit: farmers (even in the US) generally start the season on credit, so the crop that will get the loan gets planted. In Afghanistan that crop is opium, and much to the chagrin of the US, the creditors are corrupt officials or anti-occupation insurgents.

Changing Afghan agriculture will be herculean task. Only 25% of Afghanistan’s pre-war irrigation systems are operational, a fact that does not limit poppy farming but does make it difficult to bring the other half of Afghanistan’s arable land into production or replace poppies with other cash crops. Only 58% of rural Afghans have access to even seasonal roads, and many of them live an average of three miles from those. Fertilizer prices rose 30% between 2007 and 2009. And, amazingly, there is a perennial shortage of seeds that might grow replacement crops. (from the CFR)

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is keen on replacing opium with combination of common, market-garden crops and orchards. Several people have placed great hope in the Pomegranate, for which Afghanistan is famous. Tree crops, unfortunately, require years of dedicated land before producing reliable yields. Worse, many of Afghanistan’s orchards were destroyed after the US invasion…to plant poppies. Wheat is affected by world commodity market markets far more violently than opium, so any switch to wheat will last only as long as high wheat prices.

Replacing opium in Afghanistan will continue to fail so long as funding for agriculture is anemic. Between 2002 and 2006, USAID spent $4.4 billion in Afghanistan. Only 5% of that went to agriculture. The $24.7 million requested for agriculture related projects in 2009 is paltry compared to other expenditures, and it only raises the total spent since 2007 to $107.7 million. How much of those funds actually reach, and stay in, Afghanistan is questionable. USAID subcontracts many of its activities to private firms. (CFR) And the USDA will only have 64 staffers in Afghanistan by 2010; a massive increase from the three who were stationed there in 2003, but not anywhere near what’s needed.

If our commitment to Afghanistan is genuine, then our priorities must be rearranged. Attacking the opium trade is, in the long term, futile. If anything, all efforts should be directed at trans-shipment out of Afghanistan. Success in such a strategy would have the perverse effect of increasing farm gate prices, but that would help the Afghans who need it most. Farmers receiving more for their opium would need to plant less or be able to invest the proceeds in improving their farms. A civilian surge may well be required, though not under the assumption that Afghan farmers are ignorant and backwards. What Afghanistan does not need is to have the green revolution, export commodity model of agriculture forced upon it.

A hungry man is an angry man. Our efforts should focus on building sustainable agriculture models that provide sustenance and economic activity locally and regionally. High value export crops can be added after agricultural stability is attained, and any farmer worth the soil that he works will seek those out without any help from the USDA or Land ‘o’ Lakes. For the time being, opium fills that niche. We should avoid trapping Afghanistan in the globalized agriculture market, because that scenario is mostly likely to produce a return to massive poppy cultivation as soon as Afghanistan’s agricultural sector experiences any shock. The Afghan government is a long ways from being able to provide stability producing subsidies to farmers as the US does.

For every problem there are an infinite number of solutions and the problem of opium cultivation in Afghanistan is no different. Unfortunately, it appears the US has settled on the worst solution: lots of money for bullets and paramilitary drug war adventures. Until such time as our priorities for Afghanistan make sense in Afghanistan for Afghans and we focus our efforts on building the foundation of a stable society (food: politics starts at the breakfast table), we will reap only failure, violence and instability.

The Senate is prepared to discuss the problem of Afghan corruption at length. It must be all the marble and parliamentary silly-talk that makes these men immune to irony, because portions of the report’s section entitled “The Scope of Corruption” sound like a description of American politics if the reader mad-libs a little. The Senate is very worried about the scope of corruption from the drug trade in Afghanistan. It forgets, in its rush to explain how horrid Afghanistan is, that it already admitted to setting the stage for this very situation when the U.S. invaded in 2001. Or maybe the Honorable Senators think that they weren’t there, cheering on “the good war”…that they had no responsibility to oversee the comedy of errors that led us to this point they feel so compelled to decry. In any case, the Senators know evil when they see it. And they’re not afraid to dedicate three paragraphs to giving Ahmed Wali Karzai the Billy Carter treatment.

Opium corrupts absolutely, so the Senate should be unsurprised to find out that the rot may well reach to the presidential family. The question becomes what the Senate proposes to do about this corruption? Big plans, they have big plans.

The military, while not busy denying Al Qaeda safe haven, will be camping out near opium fields. It will be tasked with holding ground to “provide security” (no word on how secure the Afghan villagers will feel with a firefight waiting to happen in the neighborhood) so that opium farmers and traffickers will be pushed into less hospitable areas. The new security will also pave the way for DEA teams and the civilian surge that will right previous wrongs. Many acronyms new to the Afghan landscape will be involved, and there will be interdepartmental cooperation the likes of which we’ve never seen before. But the crown jewel of the “new strategies” is the blanket surveillance of cell traffic, which the Senate – perhaps with a touch of envy – points out is completely legal in Afghanistan. Those Afghans sure are lucky to be learning about freedom from the likes of us.

There will also be a new agency, the Joint Interagency Task Force, responsible for all sorts of Tom Clancy like Drug War adventures that the Senate likes to call, “Remove them from the Battlefield”. You’ve no doubt heard about the “hit list”, we’ll this is it and the brand new unit that has a brand new interpretation of the ROE to go with it.

The idea, and it’s a standard issue War on Drugs idea, is to go after the kingpins. Theoretically, the operation will fall apart without these men. Unfortunately, our record of actually apprehending kingpins in any of the drug trade is pretty spotty. And in a great many cases, the kingpin quietly walks out of jail after the media’s headline length attention span elapses. We’ll be treated to periodic declarations of a “major victory” in the Afghan narco-war, but the trade will continue on unabated. Kingpins are like politicians, there’s never a shortage of new ones to take the place of the old.

This narco war will require us to chase the drug traffickers into Pakistan. (Bet you didn’t see that coming.) And it will continue the long story of chasing illicit opium production around the globe. The other major producer regions have been producing less and less opium as Afghanistan has produced more. According to the UNWDR2009, the Golden Triangle produced 420 metric tons of opium in 2008, compared to Afghanistan’s 7,700. By the law of supply and demand, a kilogram of opium in the Golden Triangle cost $310 at the farm gate. A kilo in Afghanistan fetched just $70, and a recent report suggests that the price has dropped to $48/kg. Golden Triangle growers have no hope of competing with the Afghan opium explosion on world markets, but Afghanistan’s recent over production will probably do more to curb the trade there than any action by the U.S. Still, that world market will remain and if/when production decreases in Afghanistan it will just as surely increase somewhere else.

There is too much money involved for the trade to stop. More importantly, the powers that be don’t want it to stop. Assuming that Newsweek is publishing correct figures, the street value of Afghanistan’s production is $52 billion. And while that is spread across a very large network of people, the largest profits gravitate towards the top of the pyramid. There is not much (aside from entering the black market arms trade) that you can do with billions in dirty money. Suitcases – or pallets – full of cash are a problem for the drug trade. It gets cleaned by the kind of quiet bankers who deal with very large sums, and it enters the regular economy where it does regular things like get invested, purchase casinos or keep Ferrari in business. Billions talk, and when they do people listen…even Senators.

Senators, however, are likely to pretend not to hear if those billions whisper about funding covert operations in America’s name. Extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, contract torturers and assassinations cost money. Or weapons. Or drugs. You can bet your bottom dollar that an honest history of our Afghan adventure will include American involvement in the drug trade that produces Senate Foreign Affairs memos.

It is interesting that the leading nation in The War on Drugs happens to occupy the country producing 90% of the word’s opium harvest, yet only 2% of world-wide opium seizures occur in Afghanistan. Put your money on Richard Armitage’s name to figure prominently in this sordidness. And a side-bet on US agencies pushing heroin into Iran as a lucrative means to destabilize a nation with one of the highest per capita opiate addiction rates in the world will probably be a winner too.

Image credit: Newsweek

But it’s the Special Relationship that’s of interest here. We were, I admit, somewhat surprised to learn, when we arrived on these shores eleven years ago, that this was still a major concern. We thought this was something that Churchill and Roosevelt had during that last good war, but had died a slow death from attrition. Certainly we weren’t giving it a lot of thought when we moved here. But it was surprising, still, to discover that it’s taken very seriously here.

Recently this has been crystallized by the release in Scotland of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi from prison on compasionate grounds—he’s dying of cancer. But the affair is shrouded in enough mystery to keep tongues wagging. The following, from The Telegraph (so consider the source) is fairly representative of some of the reaction to this move:

But the growing transatlantic fall-out is likely to worry Downing Street more.

The New York Daily News, an influential newspaper, told readers that Mr Brown’s behaviour during the Megrahi affair had ruined relations between London and Washington.

In a stinging editorial it stated: “It was Winston Churchill who asked in the aftermath of Pearl Harbour, ‘What kind of people do they think we are?’,” the newspaper said. “And it is Gordon Brown who has given grounds to believe that today’s British are a cowardly, unprincipled, amoral and duplicitous lot. Because he is all of those.

“As for the “special relationship” between the US and Britain, the storied alliance built on the resolve of World War II and carried on through Thatcher and Blair, through Iraq and Afghanistan: It is, in a word, gone.”

In the same edition, Michael Rubin, from the right-wing American Enterprise Institute think-tank, wrote that as well as enraging the US government, Mr Brown had also failed to gain anything from Libya in return.

He said: “Not only did Libyan celebrations destroy the goodwill which Prime Minister Gordon Brown hoped would jump-start Anglo-Libyan relations, but his clumsy and transparent attempt to substitute an oil contract for justice has shredded the seven-decade U.S.-U.K. Special Relationship beyond repair.”

The Wall Street Journal, the influential international newspaper, also sharply criticised Mr Brown’s handling of the affair in its editorial column.

It said that the release of the documents had cast yet more doubt on ministers’ insistence that the release had been a matter only for Scottish administration.
The newspaper said: “The more we learn about the British Government’s negotiations over the release of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset Megrahi, the more it appears we aren’t getting the whole story from Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his Cabinet.”
Larry Korb, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress think-tank, said the fall-out was serious.

He said: “The feeling in the US is disappointment that our oldest ally and one we rely on would be a party to this.”

Well, boo-hoo. Only The Telegraph, by the way, would tell us that The New York Daily News is an influential newspaper, as opposed to The Wall Street Journal, which is an influential international newspaper. Leaving aside the fact that the US does not have anything like “release on compassinate grounds” in its legal system, while a number of European countries do, there are a whole lot of other issues here as well. First, the broader point to keep in mind is that the Scottish government, in releasing Megrahi on comassionate grounds, was entirely within its legal rights. It was not bound by any side deal Blair may have cut with Washington to keep Megrahi in prison—if Blair made any such deal in the first place. Second, it’s not as clear-cut as is supposed in the US that Megrahi is in fact guilty. There are any number of people, including the head of the victims’ families group here in the UK and others, who remain convinced that Megrahi was railroaded into this. We don’t imagine that this story was widely broadcast in the US media, but it’s s pretty widespread feeling here. (Although there are an equally large number of people who are convinced of Megrahi’s guilt. We’re agnostic—we don’t know enough one way or the other to say.) But here’s a convenient summary, from Marcel Berlins in The Guardian:

Megrahi’s return to Libya seemed conveniently to have sidelined another potentially embarrassing question: was he the victim of a miscarriage of justice? Was the decision to free him at least partly based on the Scottish desire to avoid having that question answered? Of course, no one connected with the decision, whether in Scotland, Whitehall or Downing Street, could admit, or even hint, that guilt or innocence was a factor. Officially, he was a properly convicted prisoner, no question.

It is not just Megrahi himself insisting on his innocence. For many years, the case has induced unease in the Scottish legal world. Evidence has emerged that appears to cast some doubt on the verdict. No one is saying the material absolutely proves Megrahi’s innocence, but it has been enough to raise the possibility of wrongful conviction.

Jim Swire, the father of one of the Lockerbie victims, who led the campaign of bereaved British relatives to discover the truth about the tragedy, now believes that an injustice occurred – so do many families of British victims (though this doubt is not shared by families on the American side).

Robert Black QC, one of Scotland’s most eminent advocates, who has studied the case, is of the same view. More importantly, in 2007, the independent Scottish criminal cases review commission (SCCRC) referred the Megrahi case to the Scottish appeal court, finding sufficient grounds to suggest a miscarriage. The court would not have been obliged to grant the appeal, but it has usually done so on previous SCCRC referrals. The court was due to hear the appeal later this year, but Megrahi formally withdrew it during the flurry of activity leading to his release.

His lawyer has made it clear that he did so because it was felt that continuing the appeal – which would have gone on after his death – might have prejudiced his chances of being sent home. In the last few days Megrahi himself has reiterated his claim to innocence.

My understanding is that the Scottish appeal court was to rule shortly. A finding that Megrahi was not fairly convicted would not have helped matters between the various nations here—Scotland, Britain (because their interests here are not necessarily aligned) and the US. I also imagine that the fact the this case could possibly have been found faulty by the Scottish judiciary was not widely covered in the US either. Now, there’s quite enough surrounding this case, and Megrahi’s release, to occupy a book, and I imagine there will be one (or more) at some point, all concerned with the machinations of the various governments, and what their various objectives were. The US, clearly, needed a guilty party, and Megrahi may or may not have been the one. The Labour government, between Blair and Brown, wanted the US off their backs, and Libyan oil. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats want to make Labour look foolish and duplicitous, which is not at all hard. Scotland wanted—well, it’s not clear what. Scotland wanted to let Megrahi go before he died, perhaps, as has been suggested about Brown as well, so that Megrahi would not die in a Scottish prison. So there are lots of balls in the air here, and most of them haven’t come down yet.

There’s a more general issue here, though, that relates to the whole Special Relationship thing that has fascinated me. If you read the quotes in the Telegraph article (go ahead—re-read them now), you almost pick up a threatening tone in some of the US comments. How dare these governments not do what we want, is the implication. The petulance here is staggering. This isn’t new, of course. But it does go to remind everyone of how short memories are. It just seems only yesterday that Tony Blair was lying through his teeth (with Gordon sitting by, silently) to declare Saddam Hussein a menace, whose weapons of mass destruction could reach Britain within 45 minutes, in solidarity with the US in its time of needing to exorcise its grief by invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, that was known to have no WMD, and that had never attacked the United States. That was about oil too.

Blair was the great enabler. Without his support, Bush in all likelihood could not have gone it alone, and the Coalition of the Willing would have been considerably smaller, if it had existed at all. And this is largely what the Special Relationship entails—the UK blindly supporting US policy, whatever it is. Once the US started pressuring the EU to lift the bans on GMOs, Blair thought that was pretty neat idea too. In fact, Blair and Brown’s slavishness toward anything American has been breathtaking. In spite of the recent hoo-hah over some Tory MEP’s negative comments about the NHS (which made quite a big splash in the US), it’s been the Labour government that has been privatizing portions of the NHS over the past decade, while denying it. Maybe part of the Special Relationship is lying with comparable equanimity.

It’s not that the Special Relationship was been such a great deal for Britain, either. It seems to run one way, in fact. Keynes was convinced that the post-war financing agreements were designed to prevent Britain from recovering economically, and it was his fighting these agreements that probably killed him. And history does sort of bear this out. We were astonished after moving here to discover that Britain was still paying off its WWII war debt to the US—and, in fact, was the only country doing so. These loans were finally paid off in 2006. Let’s see, what else? There’s Diego Garcia, the island in the Indian Ocean that the UK stripped of its inhabitants so it could turn it over to the US for an airbase. There’s lots more, in fact. About the only time Britain took a major, principled stand against the US was when Harold Wilson refused to send troops to Vietnam.

There have been significant and very public doubters. John Le Carre has build part of his fictional world on openly questioning the wisdom of the UK government, including its intelligence services, lending themselves like Rent-a-Cops to the US. One would have thought that Iraq would have proved his point, but we still see the types of anxieties expressed by right-wing oafs like Alistair Horne in the following passage:

It may be the sign of a romantic, but I still believe in the mystique of the special relationship. Pragmatically it received a boost at the time of the Falklands when the naval commander of the task force, Admiral Sandy Woodward, declared to me that in no way could the risky operation have succeeded without US commitment. This was founded upon long years of joint Nato experience, of speaking the same language, not only philologically but in terms of military-speak.
….

After Megrahi, can the special relationship be restored? We romantics, and optimists, believe that it can; it happened, after all, following 1973. But almost certainly it will not happen under this disastrous and terminally sick government. One can only hope that David Cameron can pull something out of the locker, to build upon that great residue of respect for British institutions, and enterprise, that continues to exist in the United States.

This is delusional thinking at its highest. Even yesterday Tony Blair was out there defending the Special Relationship to David Letterman, of all people.

But I suspect these are starting to be minority voices. When we first moved here, everyone loved America. After 9/11, we got calls of sympathy from people we barely knew. People would stop us on the street to express their sympathies. It’s all gone now, shredded in the tailwinds of Iraq. Now, or at least before Obama got elected and gave everyone a bit of hope, I would hear random conversations on the underground about going to pubs to beat up American students. Someone I worked with—a good lad, solid Tory, likes his pints, generally a pretty good guy—came back from a trip to Las Vegas and Florida two years ago with the comment, “You know, I don’t think I like your country very much.” And this is someone who thought Thatcher was the greatest Prime Minister ever. So the country is changing a bit. And with Brown continuing to fail to convince the public (and an increasingly vocal subset of Parliament across all parties) over the logic of remaining in Afghanistan, there are a fair number of people in the UK now who are starting to think that the Special Relationship isn’t so special after all.

The stamp above was issued in 1976 by the Royal Mail in honor of the US Bicentennial.

Part 1…lying sidelong on a divan in the Senate cloakroom

That John Kerry and his Senate Foreign Relations Committee are a regular bunch of cards. Their Aug. 10 report, “Afghanistan’s Narco War: Breaking the Link Between Drug Traffickers and Insurgents”, is funnier than a barrel of drunk monkeys. It opens with the statement: “At the end of March when President Obama fulfilled his pledge to make the war in Afghanistan a higher priority, he cast the U.S. role more narrowly than the previous administration: Defeat Al Quaeda and eliminate its safe havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan. To accomplish these twin tasks, however, the President is making a practical commitment to Afghanistan that is far greater than his predecessor—more troops, more civilians, and more money.”

First, hasn’t that always been the goal of the U.S. in Afghanistan? Second, good luck. Third, only in Washington could someone say that the new, smaller goal is actually larger than the old, big goal with a straight face. No, the rest of the report doesn’t get any better. It’s full of whitewashes, diversions, sins of omission, and gaping holes. Welcome to rationalizations for a quagmire that you can believe in.

This report boils down the Obama administration’s change in talking points. Since it refuses to define “Taliban”, it is at pains to focus the discussion of Afghanistan as a narco war.

The drug trade that finances the insurgency must be stopped in order to provide security to stabilize the nation. True, so far as it goes. But it neglects to mention that opium has, since its criminalization, always found fertile ground in remote places that lack security. To be fair, the report does admit that opium cultivation increased after the U.S. invasion; however, it refuses to honestly address the fact that the U.S. invasion destroyed whatever security there was in Afghanistan and just how much opium production increased under the U.S. occupation. The Senate prefers to call the poppy boom an “unintended consequence”, which translates into something similar to “collateral damage” and suggests that the Senate is not very good at planning for the future.

Laying the historical context of opium in Afghanistan is the second most painful portion of the report. It’s fine if the reader has never opened a serious history book (Senators?), but otherwise reads like a shifty teenager trying to explain the stains on the carpet and smell of stale cigarette smoke when his parents return from vacation.

Before 1978, Afghanistan produced a paltry 300 tons of raw opium. Then it was “dragged through a decade of brutal warfare”…with no mention of the U.S. involvement. Not surprisingly, opium production grew amidst the chaos in agriculture that war generally produces. Those unintended consequences are a bitch. Again, there is no mention of the U.S. turning a blind eye (or aiding and abetting*) the opium trade that helped to fund the Afghan insurgents when we called them freedom fighters. We are treated to an oblique admission of some guilt on the part of the U.S. in the opium war-lords securing positions of power in the post-Taliban Afghan government. This was the unintended consequence of invading on the cheap.

It’s also nothing new. The South Vietnamese government was riddled with heroin traffickers, in this case selling mostly to American GI’s. In both cases, the U.S. finds itself between the rock of needing so-and-so in the existential fight against what’s-it-called and the hard place of so-and-so being deeply involved in the drug trade. But Richard Holbrooke has stated recently that the majority of the Taliban’s funds do not come from trafficking opium. They come from good old-fashioned racketeering, the payoffs being skimmed off the top of reconstruction money. (And, yes, Richard Holbrooke says a lot of things that may or may not be complete bullshit.)

The “Taliban” profits from the drug trade and the warlords-cum-government officials profit from it. Chances are that not a few Americans and perhaps some of America’s intelligence services have profited from the Afghan opium trade. The Russian mafia is certainly profiting, and Kosovar organized crime probably is too. That’s the thing about the drug trade, particularly the opium trade: there’s so much profit that everyone finds some. What’s interesting is that the Senate has come to the conclusion that Al Qaeda is not profiting from the Afghan drug trade. “Surprisingly, there is no evidence that any significant amount of the drug proceeds go to Al Qaeda.”

If our goal is to remove Al Qaeda and deny it safe haven, and Al Qaeda is not involved in the Afghan opium trade, then what does this beautiful little narco war have to do with our stated objective?

*“The CIA has admitted involvement with the money laundry known as the Shakarchi Trading which had handled both Kintex and Globus transactions as well as acting for the mafia in Sicily. The owner of the company, Mohammed Shakarchi, declared his firm had cleaned $25 million for the CIA between 1981 and 1988, which was used to support the Mujaheddin insurgents fighting the Russian occupation army in Afghanistan.” (Booth, 338) Kintex/Globus operated as a state-owned company in Bulgaria, earning fame and fortune by running guns into the Middle East and heroin into Europe.

Image credit: UPI

• Remember the 2007 NIE (National Intelligence Report) which declared that Iran had abandoned any development of nuclear weapons in 2007? Well, at Inter Press Service, investigative reporter and historian Gareth Porter writes:

Western officials leaked stories. . . last week aimed at pressuring the outgoing chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, to include a summary of intelligence alleging that Iran has been actively pursuing work on nuclear weapons in the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] report due out this week. [More when that appears -- RW.] … the stories suggested that ElBaradei has been guilty of a cover-up in refusing to publish information he has had since last September alleging that Iran has continued to pursue research on developing nuclear weapons. [Why? The usual charge: to] “undermine the U.S. sanctions drive.”

And you thought those kinds of hijinks went out with the Bush administration. The NIE aside, ElBaradei has long been skeptical of documents downloaded from the notorious Laptop of Mass Destruction (also by Gareth Porter) purloined from Iran because they seemed to be tampered with.

In effect though, Iran came to its own rescue last week when, as Asia Times Online’s Kaveh Afrasiabi reports:

In a clear sign of new flexibility on the nuclear issue, Iran has agreed to allow the IAEA to inspect the heavy water reactor under construction in Arak, south of Tehran, as well as to upgrade the IAEA’s ability to monitor the nuclear facility in Natanz, central Iran. [But] Obama’s intelligence chiefs continue to offer nuances [nuances can be bad, too -- RW] on Iran’s nuclear program, saying that Iran “may” possess a bomb by 2013 “if” it decides to divert its uranium-enrichment program to weapons-grade enrichment. The wheels of Washington policymaking are slowly but surely turning in the direction of confrontation with Iran.

• On a more optimistic note, file the following under the category of Most Important Treaties You Never Heard of. The IAEA reports that the Treaty of Pelindaba entered into force after 13 years of gestation when the 53rd and last African state, Burundi, signed it. Thus does all of Africa become “a zone free of nuclear weapons [and] in turn expand[s] the nuclear-weapon free territories to cover the entire Southern hemisphere.” [Emphasis added.]

Freedom from fear that the likes of the Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir would develop or acquire nuclear weapons is no small thing — a plus for global security. This decade anyway.

• The CTC Sentinel, a publication of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, is probably the pre-eminent journal devoted exclusively to world terrorism. And Shaun Gregory, director of the Pakistan Security Research Unit at the University of Bradford in the UK, is perhaps the West’s foremost expert on just how secure Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are or aren’t. In the front page article of the July issue, he reports on something that seems to have slipped under the radar of many.

Concern that the Taliban or al-Qaeda might gain control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons isn’t taken seriously in many quarters because of the undeniable might of Pakistan’s military. But, Gregory reports that militants have already mounted attacks on Pakistan’s nuclear facilities:

These have included an attack on the nuclear missile storage facility at Sargodha on November 1, 2007, an attack on Pakistan’s nuclear airbase at Kamra by a suicide bomber on December 10, 2007, and perhaps most significantly the August 20, 2008 attack when Pakistani Taliban suicide bombers blew up several entry points to one of the armament complexes at the Wah cantonment, considered one of Pakistan’s main nuclear weapons assembly sites.

• As mentioned in a previous post, Daniel Ellsberg’s new book, American Doomsday Machine, will soon appear free on his Website. If this excerpt, Hiroshima Day: America Has Been Asleep at the Wheel for 64 Years, is any indication, it recalls James Carroll’s House of War (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). Both books narrate the history of the Cold War — by default a history of nuclear weapons — from the point of view of the son of a defense insider.

Here’s the reaction of the 14-year-old Ellsberg to bombing Hiroshima:

I remember that I was uneasy. . . about the tone in President Harry Truman’s voice on the radio as he exulted over our success. … I generally admired Truman [but] I was put off by the lack of concern in his voice, the absence of a sense of tragedy. … It seemed to me that this was a decision best made in anguish; and both Truman’s manner and the tone of the official communiqués made unmistakably clear that this hadn’t been the case.

Which meant for me that our leaders didn’t. . . grasp the. . . sinister implications. … I believed that something ominous had happened.

Out of the mouths of babes. If Ellsberg’s book is half the book that Carroll’s is it will still be one of the most important books of the Cold War.

• Now for our main feature. . . Writing for Slate, veteran journalist Ron Rosenbaum asks Will the Pentagon Thwart Obama’s Dream of Zero?

Obama put Zero on the map at the very beginning of his presidency. … But there have been recent indications of “pushback” against Obama by generals in the nuclear chain of command, not so much on reducing the numbers of missiles but on their alert status and on the flawed “command and control” system that makes us vulnerable to accidental nuclear war. …

. . . I am concerned that. …. Obama’s Zero will sink into a bureaucratic swamp of inertia. . . and passive-aggressive neglect from long-entrenched interests.

What’s does Rosenbaum think is the answer?

Obama has a car czar; he needs a Zero czar if he’s serious. [Also where] are the interagency working groups? [Nor has he yet mobilized] the Defense and State department bureaucracies by, for instance, issuing a presidential policy directive on the national security strategy of the United States. …

Most troubling is Obama’s failure to take up this challenge from his top generals: He’s sending a message that he’s not serious on the issue, that he can be rolled. [Who? Obama? -- RW] … he should call [the generals] into the White House and make sure they are on the same page when it comes to . . . our launch status. … Obama needs to. … kick some bureaucratic butt in the Pentagon.

In the spirit of master framers George Lakoff and personal favorite Drew Westen, here’s a suggestion on how the president — were he so inclined (there’s the rub) — might frame disarmament for hawks. . .

It wasn’t until after Ronald Reagan became president that his distaste for nuclear weapons came to the fore. Indeed, his belief in missile defense (known, until recently, as “Star Wars” — what, did George Lucas sue?) seemed driven by a sincere desire to protect the nation from a nuclear holocaust.

Then, at the Reykjavik Summit in 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proposed, without much ado, the total abolition of nuclear weapons. When Reagan enthusiastically agreed, he shocked the U.S. defense establishment.

But his insistence on clinging to missile defense like a teddy bear brought Gorbachev’s larger-than-life gesture crashing to earth. Still, the summit laid the groundwork for an important treaty, the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty).

Which brings us to our recommendation. . . Reagan subsequently became a latter-day saint to conservatives. Bearing that in mind, President Obama should frame the road to zero as the realization of Reagan’s dream of a nuclear-weapons free world.

Hawks will reflexively respond that, to the contrary, Reagan’s national security legacy was Star Wars. But if, as Dr. Westen counsels, Obama’s administration tells a story, in this case of Gorbachev and Reagan’s joint “epiphany,” it might strike a chord within the American public loud enough to drown out conservative resistance.

The irony of Ronald Reagan is that conservatives think his legacy was defeating communism and igniting an economic boom with his deregulatory policies. In reality, communism imploded, as did, thanks to his administration’s initiatives, our economy. Reagan’s real legacy was setting an example for future presidents with his willingness to dream big about the abolition of nuclear weapons. Are you listening, President Obama?

First posted at the Faster Times.

But the entire premise of the 1985 film Reanimator was reviving the dead, a subject which has also been on the mind of Joseph Cirincione, who, as the president of the Ploughshares Fund, is as able as he is visible a spokesperson for disarmament. He was recently quoted in a Global Security report (thanks to Armchair Generalist for the heads-up):

“RRW is dead but RRW supporters are looking to revive this corpse. … They are scheming and maneuvering to. . . convince the White House that the only way to get the test-ban treaty ratified is to get a new warhead.”

If you’re like me, you find the Web over-run with not only spyware but what are commonly called acronyms. Few are true acronyms (initial caps which attempt to spell or sound out a word); most are garden-variety abbreviations. That said, RRW is short for Reliable Replacement Warheads, a proposed Department of Energy project to replace aging nuclear warheads. Global Security reports:

Vice chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Gen. James Cartwright, formerly a top Marines nuclear weapons commander “expressed concern that today’s arsenal incorporates vacuum tubes and other outdated technologies that should be replaced.”

Vacuum tubes? Like those old black and white TV sets on which people watched the Milton Berle Show? Doesn’t that make the case for replacing the warheads cut and dried? Uh, not so fast:

Nuclear-weapon experts have cast doubt on the notion that the vintage technology constitutes a valid basis for a warhead-replacement program, because it is used sparingly in the arsenal and could easily be tested and replaced, if needed.

Besides nuclear warheads are already maintained through the Life Extension [sic, points out Ron Rosenbaum (see below)] and Stockpile Stewardship programs. Besides, according to many experts, they may not need — as if nuclear warheads were actually “needed” at all — replacement for 20 years.

Of course, there’s a certain urgency to those advocating RRW. In a couple of decades, with the momentum that disarmament is building, there may be not be enough nuclear warheads left by then to make it worth anyone’s while to replace them.

But with the backsliding President Obama has demonstrated on bail-outs and health-care reform, the expectation that his disarmament overtures will be spared that fate might be wishful thinking. (”Will the Pentagon Thwart Obama’s Dream of Zero?” asks Ron Rosenbaum at Slate.) Still, RRW’s proponents, whether it’s the Pentagon or congresspersons seeking to score programs for their constituencies, aren’t letting up.

Before we proceed, you might be asking yourself, “What’s with the ‘reliable’?” Since when have new weapons programs been prefaced by a laudatory adjective? Imagine adding such phrases to other defense programs that are twisting in the wind, such as the Trusty F-22. Or Old Faithful Future Combat Systems. Hyping the replacement warheads system by calling it “reliable” is yet another sign of its proponents’ desperation.

To return to Global Security’s story, in early June. . .

Defense Secretary Robert Gates raised the idea of reinstating the controversial Reliable Replacement Warhead effort during a secret “Principals’ Committee” meeting convened by the National Security Council.

However, Vice President Joe Biden, in charge of the administration’s nonproliferation initiatives, opposed Gates’ proposal. He contested that modernizing by. . .

. . . building replacement warheads could undercut the Obama administration’s nonproliferation goals [which include] international consensus against Iran’s suspected pursuit of nuclear weapons and North Korea’s maintenance of its nascent arsenal.

Biden, famous for not mincing words, had previously “alleged the warhead-replacement project had been ‘hijacked’ by those seeking to maintain a bloated nuclear arms establishment.”

But Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came down on Gates’s side. In fact, “behind closed doors in Obama’s administration, senior appointees and others have begun lining up behind one or the other policy goal, and the two sides are beginning to clash.” Her reasoning:

. . . it might be necessary for the Obama administration to embark on an ambitious warhead modernization effort if it is to win enough Republican support for Senate ratification of the START replacement pact, according to sources. [As well as] for Senate approval of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, another objective Obama laid out in his Prague speech.

Much as we disarmament types would hate to admit it, does Secretary of State Clinton have a point? To the contrary, according to Cirincione, who finds it. . .

. . . particularly galling. . . that many in Obama’s own appointed national security team are selling the president short by pushing for a replacement warhead.

“Ironically, in their effort to look strong, they’re displaying weakness,” he said. “They’re offering concessions up front that should only come down to the last resort.” [A bad habit of the president. -- RW]

“The president has to have the guts to say no,” said one RRW opponent who asked not to be named. “Almost everyone else is inclined to Clinton-vintage political triangulation.”

Yikes! Anything but that. Worse, at least from the point of hawks, when it comes to deterrence, RRWs may not even “add value.” In response to the Global Security report, an Arms Control Wonk commenter named Yousaf writes:

If anything, untested new warheads may hold marginally less deterrent value in the eyes of a potential adversary. … Would you fly on an airliner that had never had a test flight, even though its aerodynamics may be well understood? So why would you — or more importantly our enemies — believe untested new weapons would work better than the tested ones we have?

Actually, writes Rosenbaum in his Slate article, it’s not inconceivable that we would test them. RRWs “would probably require underground testing. . . and thus continued U.S. refusal to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban treaty.” 

What makes it all the more frustrating is that not only do RRWs keep getting up off the mat, but we’ve also got to grapple with that other monster that won’t die — missile defense.

First posted at the Faster Times.

The Deproliferator

In its constant quest to out-clever itself, Slate.com ran a series last week entitled How Is America Going To End? After readers participated via a “Choose Your Own Apocalypse” interactive feature, Slate reported:

The most popular out of 144 scenarios was loose nukes: “Taliban fighters wrest nuclear weapons from a destabilized Pakistan. Or al-Qaida acquires a small arsenal of nukes from a disintegrating Russia. … The nonstate actors launch against the United States in an attack exponentially worse than 9/11.”

Meanwhile, Barton Gellman reported in the Washington Post on Dick Cheney’s post-White House life:

John P. Hannah, Cheney’s second-term national security adviser, said the former vice president is driven, now as before, by the nightmare of a hostile state acquiring nuclear weapons and passing them to terrorists. Aaron Friedberg, another of Cheney’s foreign policy advisers, said Cheney believes “that many people find it very difficult to hold that idea in their head, really, and conjure with it, and see what it implies.”

Difficulty conjuring with the acquisition of nuclear weapons is one charge you can’t level at al Qaeda. For years, it’s been seeking the “crown jewels,” according to Paul Williams in books such as The Day of Islam: The Annihilation of America and the Western World. While the support Williams receives from arch-conservatives such as Newsmax.com might detract from his credibility, the fact remains that nuclear terrorism is an issue addressed, for the most part, by those ranging from the right to the center.

More credentialed than Williams, Graham Allison of Harvard’s Belfer Center put nuclear terrorism on the map after 9/11 with his primer on the subject, Nuclear Terrorism. But the definitive book on the subject wasn’t released until 2007 — On Nuclear Terrorism by the Council of Foreign Relations’ Michael Levi. If you’ll forgive a composite comment, it’s been called “the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and technically informed treatment [of] the opportunities and difficulties nuclear terrorists would face.”

Progressives, meanwhile, tend to shy away from the subject of nuclear terrorism. Most likely they fear providing the hard right with any more ammunition to advocate for the continuance or intensification of our operations in nations like Afghanistan and Pakistan, where terrorists, depending on who you believe, have either been harbored or taken refuge. But ignoring nuclear terrorism serves nobody’s best interests. After all, the threat has been around since the dawn of the nuclear age.

Dovetailing with my curiosity about nuclear weapons is a soft spot for Film Noir. You know, those post-World War II crime movies, in which the frequent nighttime settings seem even more nighttimey because they were filmed, for the most part, in black and white.

Anyone familiar with Noir — more an umbrella term or a style than a genre — can’t help but wonder why, after the devastating experience of World War II, Americans were still attracted to cynicism and violence. Perhaps it was because the smooth transition our government thoughtfully provided to Cold War fear — via the Red Scare — and nuclear paranoia — thanks to our own development (and use) of nuclear weapons.

In 1955, near the end of Noir, one of the best examples of the style, Kiss Me Deadly, was released. Its director was Robert Aldrich, who later went on to make films like The Dirty Dozen. You wouldn’t think a movie based on the work of an author as elementary as Mickey Spillane would become the Noir style’s standard bearer.

But the scriptwriter took liberal measures with the book and the character, P.I. Mike Hammer, as played by Ralph Meeker (who was never able to capitalize on his success beyond a busy TV career, perhaps because of his claxon of a voice). Hammer is an archetype of the ends-justify-the-means-cop, like Clint Eastwood’s character in Dirty Harry, that came to dominate crime films.

In Kiss Me Deadly, Hammer is unsure of what he’s trying to track down. His faithful and attractive secretary, Velda, who’s actually more of an assistant P.I., dubs it the “great whatsit.” A usually hostile police detective drops hints: “Manhattan Project. . . Los Alamos. . . Trinity.”

Near the end of the film an evil doctor kidnaps Velda and Mike in quick succession. “How civilized this earth used to be,” he remarks to Mike. “But as the world becomes more primitive, its treasures become more fabulous.”

Turns out the doctor managed to procure nuclear material, presumably from an American lab. What were “treasures” to him then are al Qaeda’s “crown jewels” today. Not only that, but what amounts to loose nukes are packed in a leather box (presumably lined with lead) that resembles an elaborate camera case — an early nuclear suitcase, if you will. Pulp Fiction’s glowing briefcase is thought to be a tribute to Kiss Me Deadly.

Then the doctor tells his young lover, who’s also got designs of her own on the radioactive material: “The head of the Medusa — whoever looks on her will be turned into brimstone and ashes.” As in a nuclear explosion.

When she shoots the doctor and opens the “nuclear suitcase,” she goes up in a blaze of radioactive glory. After Mike frees Velda and they escape, the house is rocked by a series of explosions. Unfortunately, by not representing them as big mushroom cloud instead, Aldrich failed or wasn’t allowed to capitalize on the movie’s full apocalyptic potential.

In an ironic postscript, the actress who played Velda, Maxine Cooper, later became an activist. After leading campaigns against House Un-American Activities Committee’s Hollywood blacklists, she spearheaded protests by those in the entertainment industry against nuclear weapons.

First posted at the Faster Times.

The Deproliferator

The development of nuclear weapons can be a significant source of national pride. When Pakistan successfully detonated five nuclear devices during its first underground test in 1998, it was reported: “They were dancing in the streets of Pakistan. … People handed out candies, set off fireworks and fired guns into the air.” They felt the playing field had been leveled with India and its nuclear weapons.

In the years since, extremists have come to view Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal as the Islamic bomb. Perhaps they’re simply justifying their designs on it, but they hope to use it — hopefully for deterrence only — in the service of the coming caliphate. Aside from that instance, nuclear weapons are seldom considered the property of a religion.

But, if you think about it, besides Islam, Christian countries — the United Sates, Great Britain, and France — have their own nuclear weapons. As do Jews — Israel — and Hindus — India. Isn’t it time Buddhism obtained its own bomb?

What? Buddhism? As Robert Kaplan writes in the current Atlantic:

Buddhism holds an exalted place in the half-informed Western mind. Whereas Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism are each associated. . . with a rich material culture and a defended territory, Buddhism. . . is somehow considered purer. . . the most peaceful, austere, and uncorrupted of faiths.

In fact, the rulers of a predominantly Buddhist state may already be in the early stages of developing nuclear weapons. I’m speaking, of course, of Burma. Wait, doesn’t calling its nuclear weapons program Buddhist make about as much sense as calling the Soviet bomb Russian Orthodox? Or the Chinese bomb Taoist? Burma’s ruling junta appears to be at least as godless as the U.S.S.R. and Communist China when they developed theirs.

In fact, Burma’s leadership likes to think of itself as — nominally, anyway — Buddhist. One reason for the brutality with which it reacted to protesting monks during the 1988 uprising and the 2007 Saffron Revolution was that it felt rejected by them and cut off from their “blessings.” As an example of the junta’s religiousness, in May, the wife of its leader, General Than Shwe, rededicated a 2,300 year-old temple. But three weeks later its pagoda collapsed into a pile of timbers, an inauspicious sign, the New York Times speculated, to the notoriously superstitious Than Shwe.

North Korea, meanwhile, makes no pretense of religiosity — unless it’s the cult of the Kims (father and son, Il-sung and Jong-il). Besides, if Burma develops a bomb, you can lay the blame, in large part, at North Korea’s feet.

At first glance, between Than Shwe’s superstition and Kim Jong-il’s eccentricities, the countries might seem like strange bedfellows. But imagine a phone conversation between the two leaders. . .

Than Shwe: Nobody understands my race to the moral bottom like you do, Jong.

Kim (with his affinity for American film): Schwing on, Shwe.

Still, there are other states that would like to be friends with Burma and North Korea, if they could just squeeze a concession or two out of them. In fact, as Bill Clinton’s trip to secure the release of Euna Lee and Laura Ling is said to have signaled, the Obama administration has become less concerned with disarming North Korea than simply containing its program. In other words, it seeks to prevent North Korea from trading nuclear-weapons technology and know-how to other states.

On July 31 the Sydney Herald published an article which attracted worldwide attention. It suggested that a Burmese nuclear program conceived with North Korea’s help may already be gestating:

Burma’s isolated military junta is building a secret nuclear reactor and plutonium extraction facilities with North Korean help, with the aim of acquiring its first nuclear bomb in five years, according to evidence from key defectors. …

The secret complex, much of it in caves tunnelled into a mountain. . . in northern Burma, runs parallel to a civilian reactor being built at another site by Russia that both the Russians and Burmese say will be put under international safeguards.

But, on August 13, at Verification, Implementation and Compliance (title aside, one compelling blog), Andreas Persbo writes:

. . . we learned from two sources. . . that [a] box-like building has been under scrutiny by the IAEA’s [International Atomic Energy Agency's] Department of Safeguards for quite some time, and that the department is nearly certain that the building does not serve any nuclear programme. …

[Burma] has requested a number of technical cooperation projects with the IAEA. [Respected nuclear journalist] Mark Hibbs reported in Nuclear Fuel that nuclear activities in Myanmar are low, but slowly increasing.

He quotes an official [to the effect] that a clandestine nuclear effort, [would] ‘have to be a totally black program within everything imported. … It is unthinkable that they could mount a [clandestine] nuclear program on the basis of what we already know is there’.

Hey, that’s where Nork comes in, right? As for Russia, Persbo writes:

While Burma has approached Russia for the purchase of a research reactor, a senior official at Atomstroyexport [of Russia] has confirmed that there is no construction in Myanmar of any reactor with Russian assistance.

Still, rumors of Burma developing a bomb are bound to displease China. Brian McCartan reports at the Burmese site Mizzima:

Burma’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon and the development of ballistic missiles. … would almost certainly not be favoured by Burma’s main international patron. …

Work [by China] is scheduled to begin next month on an oil and gas pipeline that will carry [oil and gas] across Burma to [China]. The proposed pipeline will allow Chinese oil [tankers] to bypass the narrow Malacca Straits. . . a potential strategic chokepoint in any conflict with the US.

The last thing China wants, say analysts, is to see its new commercial arteries put at risk by US concerns over a nuclear Burma.

Of course, the generals of Burma’s junta’s are scarcely genuine Buddhists. After all, would certified Buddhists seek to develop or acquire nuclear weapons? Don’t be too sure they wouldn’t.

For a modern-day example, just look at the way the Hindu Tamil Tigers, however brutal, were crushed by Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese Buddhists. To quote from Robert Kaplan’s Atlantic piece again:

There have been Buddhist military kingdoms — notably Kandy’s [in ancient Ceylon] — jut as there have bee Christian and Islamic kingdoms of the sword. Buddhism can be, under the right circumstances, a blood-and-soil faith.

More likely, he meant “under the wrong circumstances,” but you get the idea. Meanwhile, the subject of nukes probably didn’t come up this weekend in Burma where visiting Senator Jim Webb was granted a rare audience by General Shwe. Webb was too busy pulling a Bill Clinton by securing the release of imprisoned American John Yettaw.

First posted at the Faster Times.

Shortly after Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested by Burma’s junta, the otherwise earnest Burmese exile magazine Irrawaddy published an imaginary letter she wrote to head of state General Than Shwe.

A few excerpts:

Dear Senior-General,

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you. … for your unflinching political support. I thought that the world had forgotten about me, but you made sure that my face reappeared on TV all over the world.

You had previously cautioned foreign governments not to focus so much on one person (me), but now you have magnanimously ensured that my name is on the lips of every diplomat in Rangoon.

The international community has a reputation for having a short attention span.

Thanks to your efforts, Burma is back on the front pages of the newspapers. I believe that the US and the EU were in a bit of a pickle about how to handle the economic sanctions issue and recognition of next year’s election.

Now, thanks to your clear-cut methods and no-nonsense approach, those countries will have no hesitation in making decisions with regard to the Burmese government’s status. …

Yours in captivity,

Aung San Suu Kyi
Insein Prison

Few outside Burma know the impassive Than Shwe and the 10 other generals who make up the junta. On the other hand, seldom has one woman been as identified with her country as Suu Kyi. In fact, her fate and that of the junta have become inextricably linked. The harder the junta tries to remove her from the scene, the more prominent she becomes in the eyes of the world.

Not only is this bad for the junta, but at Huffington Post, international reporter Virginia Moncrieff questioned whether Suu Kyi’s continued preeminence actually benefits Burma’s people. In a piece entitled The Future of Burma Cannot Be Tied to Aung San Suu Kyi, she writes:

That old chestnut question “name six people you would love to have to dinner” usually holds no surprises. The guest list from many liberal, forward-thinking (and may I also point out — male) types will include Aung San Suu Kyi. She is regarded as the epitome of elegance and sacrifice. The pinup girl for human rights causes. [Emphasis added.]

Okay, let’s get it out of the way — Suu Kyi has always been a fine figure of a woman. Here’s hoping her health doesn’t deteriorate in jail. We’ll allow Ms. Moncrieff to continue:

No matter how great her sacrifice, the future of one country cannot revolve around the actions and ideas of one person. … there are 48 million other Burmese people and they cannot continue to be held captive while the international community listens to, and complies with Daw [an honorific -- RW] Suu’s policies of sanctions.

Daw Suu’s strategy [of] maintaining that the regime must be isolated and that Burma must be the target of stringent sanctions only helps the junta reverse further into mad “behind-the-wall” strategies. … Many pro-democracy activists. . . believe she is wrong about sanctions but such is her position, they often decline to say so publicly.

Australian Daniel Pedersen, who reports from Mae Sot, Thailand on the Burmese Karen ethnic insurgency, added a couple of comments to Ms. Moncrieff’s article:

In the West [Suu Kyi] is a figurehead. … [Meanwhile] in Burma she’s a hero to many in Rangoon [but] irrelevant to much of the country’s population. …There are thousands of villages. . . in which Suu Kyi could walk through the marketplace and not be recognised because the images the West sees aren’t encouraged inside Burma, to say the least.

A recent New York Times article confirms Pedersen’s observation:

“I only know her name,” said Ms. Ei Phyu, a slight and shy 20-year-old [worker in a textile plant]. “I’ve never seen a picture of her,” Ms. Ei Phyu said. “I think she’s an old lady.”

Meanwhile (from the same article):

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s political party, the National League for Democracy, is a shell of its former self, its leaders well into their 70s.

Still. . .

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi has been dismissed as irrelevant before, only to rally Burmese in large numbers.

Returning to the parody-letter, perhaps the junta does know what it’s doing. It’s easy to write it off as heavy-handed. But keeping Suu Kyi front and center may be a nefarious plot to keep the eyes of the world on her. It thus becomes impossible for her to back down, were she inclined, without appearing to sell out her cause.

Also, with next year’s plans for elections and the convening of a parliament (aka, ways of legalizing the military’s role in Burma’s political system) the junta can look like the conciliatory party. Of course, there’s the small matter of the plunder it perpetrates on ethnic Burmans and the under-the-radar genocide it inflicts on the ethnic minorities.

Meanwhile Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is on her way to the forty-second Ministerial Meeting of Asean (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations) in Thailand. Much of the discussion will revolve around Burma, which the Obama administration, once it completes its policy review, seeks to engage.

But, of course, Suu Kyi’s incarceration and trial throw a monkey wrench into the works. What state does that remind us of? Of, yeah, Iran, which has muddied the waters for negotiations with the United States by a presidential election that appeared staged and then by repressing the subsequent protests.

Iran’s government, however, neither a dictatorship nor a junta, may still be a candidate for rapprochement with the United States. As for Burma, any responsibility that Suu Kyi bears for the West failing to engage with it is beyond negligible compared to the blame that falls on the junta.

These 27 nominees contributed $144,431 to President Obama and $57,900 to once-rival and now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reports the center. They have bundled (collected, as middleman, donations from others) at least $5 million for the president’s campaign and at least $1,782,500 for the president’s inauguration.

The president’s most recent nominee as ambassador to Germany, former Democratic National Committee finance chair and former Goldman Sachs executive Philip D. Murphy, and his wife “have contributed nearly $1.5 million to federal candidates, committees and parties since 1989, with 94 percent of that sum going to Democrats, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis. They also contributed an additional $100,000 to Obama’s inauguration committee.”

But this isn’t the real news. According to figures kept by the American Foreign Service Association, President Obama is making political patronage nominations to ambassadorships at twice the rate of the previous nine presidents.

The president has made 59 ambassadorial nominations as of July 1, according to American Foreign Service Association records — 35 are political nominees (1 confirmed, 19 nominated, 2 announced, 2 rumored); 24 are career Foreign Service nominees (4 confirmed, 21 nominated, 4 announced, 6 rumored).

According to the association, 110 of the current 175 ambassadorships are filled by career Foreign Service professionals (63 percent) and 45 by political nominees (nearly 26 percent). So far, the president’s record on nominations is reversing that ratio.

About 60 percent of President Obama’s ambassadorial choices so far, according to the association’s data, have been non-career, or political patronage, nominations. That’s nearly twice the average percentage of political nominees in previous administrations. The 40-year average, from presidents Kennedy to Clinton, for nominees is 30 percent political patronage and 70 percent career Foreign Service, according to the association.

Even President George W. Bush, who led the previous nine presidents in political patronage through ambassadorships, made only 36 percent of his 370 ambassadorial nominations political.

In its “Statement on Ambassadors,” the association argues:

The primary authority for choosing Ambassadors rests with the President, and the United States has a long tradition of public service by private citizens. This is appropriate and valuable, and private citizens should continue to serve in the diplomatic field. However, the value of this tradition of public service is undermined when individuals are chosen as ambassadors primarily for the size of their contributions to political campaigns, or for their personal friendship with the President. [emphasis added]

Twelve days before he took office, President Obama said:

I want to recruit young people into the State Department to feel that this is a career track that they can be on for the long term. And so, you know, my expectation is that high quality civil servants are going to be rewarded. You know, are there going to be political appointees to ambassadorships? There probably will be some. [emphasis added]

So far, some is an understatement. If the president continues to nominate political loyalists and fundraisers at this early rate, he’ll easily surpass President Bush’s 36 percent rate of political nominees. Perhaps the Senate, which must confirm nominees, should take note of this trend.

Excuse me, Mr. President, but I thought I heard you promise not to use supplemental war funding bills any more. Apparently, according to PoliFact, I misheard (thank Bush for only funding Iraq and Afghanistan through September, 2009, instead of the whole year). But still, I’d really like to know how those programs are related to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Oh, that’s right. They’re not.

I’ve railed against emergency supplemental war funding bills for several years now. After all, we’ve been in Iraq for just over six years and in Afghanistan for nearly eight – you’d think we knew how much they were costing us every year. To his credit, Obama claims that he’s going to regularly fund the military in Iraq and Afghanistan via the normal appropriations bills starting in fiscal year 2010 (as of October 1, 2009). We’ll see. But there’s no way that a cash-for-clunkers program has anything to do with a war supplemental.

My issue isn’t that the IMF money and preparations for flu pandemic don’t qualify as emergencies. Depending on how serious the CDC and WHO think the pandemic will be come the start of this year’s flu season, supplemental funding for pandemic flu preparations may be an excellent idea. And if the IMF needs more money to keep the rest of the world from falling even deeper into recession and, not incidentally, dragging down the US with it, then by all means, procure supplemental funds for the IMF too. But don’t attach it to a “war funding” supplemental. Be honest about what you’re doing, come clean with the taxpayers and voters, and do it with different supplementals – one for the occupations of two sovereign nations, one for IMF funding, and a third for flu pandemic preparedness.

Sure, it’s less efficient – but it’s also more honest because it allows each of the supplementals to pass or fail based on their own merits, rather than on the merits of “funding the troops.” And attaching a non-emergency spending provision like the cash-for-clunkers program to a “must pass” bill is about as honest as attaching an amendment opening up national parks to people carrying loaded and concealed firearms to a credit card reform bill.

Oh, that’s right, Congress already did that.