We congratulate Mr. Ban Ki-moon for finally taking this initiative as
his first term at the UN has entered its last year. We have advocated
this move from the first day he won the UN contest for the job he
holds. It was obvious to us that a success there, against the odds
that none of the powers involved likes to see a united Korea on their
global bloc – I mean the US, China, and Japan – this will cover for
all the other impossible jobs that were his lot. Compared to these
other topics, a well programmed approach by his right-hand man -
Ambassador Kim Won-soon – at a time North Korea is really down, has a
good chance of success, if he can just get full backing from his home
government in Seoul.

In the global economic conditions of today, building from scatch North
Korea could become the greatest thing for South Korea – and the united
Korea has the potential of being the united Germany of the Far East.
This requires the acceptance of North Korea leadership as part of the
United Korea leadership according to a Federal construct of the State.

In the process – a denuclearized Korean Peninsula can be established
and threats against China and Japan avoided.The Obama US
Administration, with its own economical problems today, has no reason
to insist on guarding the two Koreas from each other, while it could
be a clear winner when being able to pull the major part of the US
troops out of Korea. China, on its part, will be relieved of the
danger of an imploding nuclear Korea and the mass migration of Koreans
into China. The only remaining resistance might come from Japan that
might fear the economic competition from the United Korea. Even that
can be handled with economic agreements that will bind the two
countries by providing cheap labor also for Japanese industry that
moves into Korea.

Will now the Korean UNSG make this as the main topic to deal with in
the coming few months? Will the US President, he also seeking a
break-through this year, give him his blessing for going ahead with
this effort? It seems that such an agreement exists when judging the
composition of the three people group that will handle the approach to
North Korea. If on this team is also Mr. Lynn Pascoe is an american.
The third member seems to be the Chef de Cabinet – Mr. Vijay Nambiar -
an Indian.
 http://www.innercitypress.com/unban2kore…

As
UN’s Ban Rolls Dice on N. Korea Trip, Kim Won-soo Is
Asked to Brief Press

By
Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED
NATIONS, February 3 — UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, returning
from a brief trip during which protesters in South Sudan told him to
“repent before judgment” while he was snubbed in Cyprus by
four political parties, is said by close observers to be “rolling
the dice” on a trip to
North Korea.

“Ban
wants to
be remembered as the S-G when the Koreas reunited,” the close
insider said. “If it happens, all the other failures will be
forgotten.”

The
importance of
the upcoming trip to Ban’s closest inner circle is reflected by on
the record quotes that his main advisor Kim Won soo — Ban’s Karl
Rove, as some put it — gave
to the JoongAng Daily. Inner City Press
asked Ban’s spokesman Martin Nesirky, with his own Korean
connections, about the quote at Wednesday noon briefing, UN
transcription here,
video here:

Inner
City Press… You said the other three members; who are the other
three members of Mr. Pascoe’s team?

Spokesperson
Nesirky: Kim Won-soo, the Deputy Chef de Cabinet is one of them, and
two other members of staff.

Inner
City Press: Of DPA or of the Executive Office of the Secretary
General?

Spokesperson:
One of each.

Inner
City Press: Okay. I had asked earlier about when it was first
announced that Kim Won-soo was quoted in Joong Ang Daily, describing
the trip, saying it may have a nuclear component, as well as
humanitarian. So, I was wondering, I mean, those are his quotes,
right? That he spoke on the record Joong Ang?

Spokesperson:
Well, you have to ask Kim Won-soo.

Inner
City Press: That’s why I asked. When it first came up, I actually
asked whether he could be a part of the briefing with Lynn Pascoe,
since I don’t think he’s ever briefed the media on the record,
but he seems to have a pretty important role within the Executive
Office of the Secretariat, and obviously he is willing to speak on
the record to at least some media. Is that possible to convey that
request?

UN’s Kim, at left, with UN’s Ban and Munoz, on glaciers

Spokesperson:
I will certainly convey it.

Hours
later when
Ban and his entourage, including Vijay Nambiar and Lynn Pascoe,
passed the Press at the Security Council stakeout, Kim Won-soo waved
over. Correspondents recounted anecdotes from Ban’s trip last month
to Haiti. There was general agreement: Mister Kim must brief the
press, and on the record. We’ll see. Watch this site.
================

Monday February 8, 2010 UPDATE with information from the UN.

UN POLITICAL CHIEF HEADS TO DPR KOREA FOR TALKS WITH DPRK SENIOR OFFICIALS.

The top United Nations political official will arrive in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) tomorrow for talks with senior Government officials after wrapping up meetings in Beijing and Seoul.

As the Special Envoy of the Secretary-General, Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs B. Lynn Pascoe will depart the Chinese capital tomorrow morning to hold comprehensive talks on all issues of mutual interest and concern with the DPRK during his visit to Pyongyang, slated to run from today through Friday.

While in the DPRK, he also plans to meet with the UN country team and foreign diplomats, as well as visit several UN project sites.

Over the weekend in Seoul, Mr. Pascoe held talks with officials from the Republic of Korea – including Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan and the country’s chief negotiator to the Six-Party Talks, which also involve Japan, China, Russia and the United States – on its relationship with the UN as well as the DPRK, among other topics.

Mr. Pascoe also conferred with UN-related civil society leaders, including former prime minister Han Seung-soo, who is now president of the World Federation of UN Associations (WFUNA), before travelling to Beijing for talks with officials from that country.

In September, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met with the DPRK’s Vice Foreign Minister Park Gil Yon at UN Headquarters in New York, where he discussed the country’s nuclear issue along with the humanitarian and human rights situations.

In a report to the General Assembly last year, Mr. Ban voiced concern over the impact of the humanitarian situation on human rights in the country, where more than one third of the nearly 24 million-strong population is in need of food assistance.

The Asian nation’s humanitarian problems – including food shortages, a crumbling health system and lack of access to safe drinking water – seriously “hamper the fulfilment of human rights of the population,” he wrote.

From: Brazil Windpower 2010
Date: Mon, Feb 8, 2010
Subject: Brazil Windpower 2010

 http://www.zonaeletrica.com.br/nwlt2/bwp…

GWEC | 63-65 Rue d’Arlon | Brussels | Belgium | 1040 | Belgium

 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23630?ut…

Volume 57, Number 3 · February 25, 2010 , The New York Review of Books

A Deal With the Taliban?
Ahmed Rashid
The war in Afghanistan now faces a pivotal moment: at stake is whether the US and its allies are willing to talk to the Taliban. General Stanley McChrystal has a special fund of $1.5 billion to provide incentives to Taliban fighters who put down their arms. Senior Pakistani officials now say they have offered to help broker talks between Taliban leaders, the Americans, and Karzai. For their part, the Taliban have shown the first hint of flexibility, following secret talks in Saudi Arabia last year. But talking to the Taliban requires more than just secret cooperation among intelligence agencies or the CIA handing out bribes. What can be done?
A Deal with the Taliban?
By Ahmed Rashid

My Life with the Taliban.
by Abdul Salam Zaeef,

translated from the Pashto and edited by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn
Columbia University Press, 331 pp., $29.95
1.

For thirty years Afghanistan has cast a long, dark shadow over world events, but it has also been marked by pivotal moments that could have brought peace and changed world history.

One such moment occurred in February 1989, just as the last Soviet troops were leaving Afghanistan. Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had flown into Islamabad—the first visit to Pakistan by a senior Soviet official. He came on a last-ditch mission to try to persuade Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the army, and the Interservices Intelligence (ISI) to agree to a temporary sharing of power between the Afghan Communist regime in Kabul and the Afghan Mujahideen. He hoped to prevent a civil war and lay the groundwork for a peaceful, final transfer of power to the Mujahideen.

By then the Soviets were in a state of panic. They ironically shared the CIA’s analysis that Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah would last only a few weeks after the Soviet troops had departed. The CIA got it wrong—Najibullah was to last three more years, until the eruption of civil war forced him to take refuge in the UN compound in April 1992. The ISI refused to oblige Shevardnadze. It wanted to get Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the seven disparate Mujahideen leaders and its principal protégé, into power in Kabul. The CIA had also urged the ISI to stand firm against the Soviets. It wanted to avenge the US humiliation in Vietnam and celebrate a total Communist debacle in Kabul—no matter how many Afghan lives it would cost. A political compromise was not in the plans of the ISI and the CIA.

I was summoned to meet Shevardnadze late at night and remember a frustrated but visibly angry man, outraged by the shortsightedness of Pakistan and the US and the clear desire of both governments to humiliate Moscow. He went on to evoke an apocalyptic vision of the future of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the region. His predictions of the violence to come turned out to be dead right.

At that pivotal moment, if Shevardnadze’s compromise had been accepted, the world might well have avoided the decade-long Afghan civil war, the destruction of Kabul, the rise of the Taliban, and the sanctuary they provided al-Qaeda. Perhaps we could have avoided September 11 itself—and much that has followed since, including the latest attempt by a Nigerian extremist to blow up a transatlantic airliner, the killing of seven CIA officers at an Afghan base, and the continuing heavy casualties among NATO troops and Afghan civilians in Afghanistan.

With Obama’s controversial and risk-laden plan to first build up and then, in eighteen months, start drawing down US troops in Afghanistan, every nation and political leader in the region now faces another pivotal moment. At stake is whether the US and its allies are willing to talk to the Afghan Taliban, because there is no military victory in sight and no other way to end a war that has been going on for thirty years.

When that moment comes—as it must—will the US and NATO be ready to talk with the Taliban or will they be internally divided, as they are now? Will President Hamid Karzai have the credibility to take part in such talks and deliver on an agreement that might be reached? Will the ISI demand that their own Taliban protégés return to power? Will the Taliban hard-liners, now scenting victory, even agree to talks and, as a consequence, be prepared to dump al-Qaeda? Or will they sit out the next eighteen months waiting for the Americans to begin to leave?

2.

The Afghan Taliban are now a country-wide movement. During the last year they expanded to the previously quiet west and north of Afghanistan. Their leadership has safe havens in Pakistan. Casualties on all sides have risen dramatically. According to the UN, in 2009 there were an average of 1,200 attacks a month by Taliban or other insurgent groups—a 65 percent increase from the previous year. Over the twelve-month period, 2,412 Afghan civilians were killed, an increase of 14 percent; of those, two thirds were killed by the Taliban, a 40 percent increase. In addition, US and NATO combat deaths rose 76 percent, from 295 in 2008 to 520 in 2009.

Adding to the challenges facing the Afghan government, over the years it has been difficult to recruit Pashtuns for the Afghan army and police from the southern Pashtun provinces that are largely controlled by the Taliban, although recently Pashtun recruitment has increased following a pay rise for security forces. Even so, the Taliban have infiltrated parts of the Afghan army and police—the key components of the US plan to start the handover of power to local forces by July 2011. In large parts of Afghanistan, development programs have come to a halt and nearly half of the UN staff assigned to Afghanistan have been relocated to Dubai and Central Asia because of security concerns.

According to Major General Michael Flynn, the NATO military chief of intelligence in Afghanistan, the Taliban now have shadow governors in thirty-three out of thirty-four provinces—they serve to organize the movement at a provincial level and disrupt government initiatives in their area—and the movement “can sustain itself indefinitely.” Flynn has described US intelligence in Afghanistan as “clueless” and “ignorant.”*

Taliban commanders have stepped up their vicious campaign to intimidate or kill any Afghan civilians working for the Karzai government, aid agencies, women’s groups, and even the UN. On January 18, militants launched a double suicide attack just yards from the presidential palace in central Kabul, provoking a gun battle in which three soldiers and two civilians were killed and more than seventy wounded. “We are now at a critical juncture…. The situation cannot continue as is if we are to succeed in Afghanistan,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the UN Security Council earlier in the month. “There is a risk that the deteriorating overall situation will become irreversible,” he added.

The prevailing view in Washington is that many Taliban fighters in the field can eventually be won over, but that the present US troop surge has to roll them back first, reversing Taliban successes and gaining control over the population centers and major roads. According to the current American strategy, the US military has to weaken the Taliban before negotiating with them. The commander of US and NATO forces, General Stanley McChrystal, has both a special fund of $1.5 billion to provide incentives and other forms of support to Taliban who put down their arms, and a group of British and American officers who are drawing up plans to win over Taliban commanders and fighters as the troop surge tilts the battlefield back in favor of the US. General McChrystal told me in Islamabad in early January that he is confident that many Taliban will be won over in the field. This US reconciliation effort would be led by Karzai, who for several years has called for talks with Taliban leaders.

There is another way of looking at the present crisis. Despite their successes, the Taliban are probably now near the height of their power. They do not control major population centers—nor can they, given NATO’s military strength and air power. There are no countrywide, populist insurrections against NATO forces as there were against the coalition forces in Iraq. The vast majority of Afghans do not want the return of a Taliban regime despite their anger at the Karzai government and the general international failure to deliver economic progress. Many Afghans believe that as long as Western troops remain, there is still the hope that security can return and their lives change for the better.

Thus the next few months could offer a critical opportunity to persuade the Taliban that this is the best time to negotiate a settlement, because they are at their strongest.

3.

Both Generals McChrystal and David Petraeus, the head of the US military’s Central Command, have said that they cannot shoot their way to victory. Obama is clear about defeating al-Qaeda, but he is more inclined toward negotiations with the Taliban. In his West Point speech in December, Obama said he supported Kabul’s efforts to “open the door to those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens.”

The present US military strategy aims to peel away Taliban commanders and fighters and resettle them without making any major political concessions or changes to the Afghan constitution. But Washington remains deeply divided about talking to the Taliban leaders. The State and Defense Departments, the White House, and the CIA all have different views about it, and there are also divisions between the US and its allies.

General McChrystal told me that many mid-level Taliban commanders and their men are waiting for Karzai to announce a reconciliation strategy before offering to change sides. “The reintegration of former Taliban into society offers a good chance to reduce the insurgency in Afghanistan…while al-Qaeda needs to be hunted and destroyed.” Whether the US and its allies should hold talks with the Taliban leadership, he said, is a political decision to be made by Washington. In December Richard Holbrooke, the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told me that in his estimation some 70 percent of the Taliban fight for local reasons or money rather than because of ideological commitment to the movement, and they can be won over.

Meanwhile the Taliban have shown the first hint of flexibility, as suggested in a ten-page statement issued in November 2009 for the religious festival of Eid. The Taliban leader Mullah Omar, while urging his fighters to continue the jihad against “the arrogant [US] enemy,” also pledged that a future Taliban regime would bring peace and noninterference from outside forces, and would pose no threat to neighboring countries—implying that al-Qaeda would not be returning to Afghanistan along with the Taliban. Sounding more like a diplomat than an extremist, Omar said, “The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan wants to take constructive measures together with all countries for mutual cooperation, economic development and good future on the basis of mutual respect.”

A week later, the Taliban’s response to Obama’s West Point speech again suggested a changed attitude. There was not a single mention of jihad or imposing Islamic law. Instead the Taliban spoke of a nationalist and patriotic struggle for Afghanistan’s independence and said they were “ready to give legal guarantee if the foreign forces withdraw from Afghanistan.” In a New Year’s message the Taliban, while condemning the US surge, even seemed to empathize with Obama, observing that the American president faces “a great many problems and opposition” at home.

The Taliban’s new tone can be traced to secret talks in the spring of 2009. Sponsored by Saudi Arabia at Karzai’s request, the talks included former (or now retired) Taliban, former Arab members of al-Qaeda, and Karzai’s representatives. No breakthrough took place, but the talks led to a series of visits to Saudi Arabia by important Taliban leaders during the rest of 2009. The US, British, and Saudi officials who were indirectly in contact with the Taliban there quickly encouraged them to renounce al-Qaeda and lay out their negotiating demands. In turn, the Taliban said that distancing themselves from al-Qaeda would require the other side to meet a principal demand of their own: that all foreign forces must announce a timetable to leave Afghanistan.

Istakhbarat, the Saudi intelligence service, is not set up to produce political results, but it has given the Taliban a safe venue to meet and it has acted as an interlocutor with Afghan government and Western officials. Significantly the ISI, which has demanded a key part in the negotiations from its erstwhile Saudi allies, has so far been left out at the request of both the Taliban and the Afghan government—neither of whom trust it. That now may be about to change. The key to more formal negotiations with Taliban leaders lies with Pakistan and the ISI.

4.

Tensions between the US and Pakistan have escalated in recent months as Washington demands that the Pakistani military “capture or kill” Afghan Taliban leaders as well as top militants in Pakistan. These include the Afghan Taliban leadership living in Quetta and Karachi, as well as their allies such as Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who live in North Waziristan in the tribal areas abutting Afghanistan. Pakistan says it is too busy dealing with its own acute problems with the Pakistani Taliban and a growing number of terrorist attacks by various insurgent groups. Its forces are overstretched, it has little money, and it will oblige the Americans only when it is ready to do so. In fact Pakistan would never launch a military offensive against the Afghan Taliban leaders since it has viewed them as potential allies in a post-American Afghanistan, when the US will probably ditch Pakistan as well.

Pakistan’s military is deeply fearful of a US withdrawal from Afghanistan; the result could be civil war and mayhem in its backyard once again. “We want the American surge to succeed in Afghanistan, because if they don’t we will pay the price,” a senior Pakistani military officer told me. The army is also convinced that the US will eventually align itself with India and that it has allowed India to strengthen its influence in Kabul at Pakistan’s expense. Despite all the sacrifices it has made for the Afghans over thirty years, supporting them against the Soviets, Pakistanis are now friendless in Afghanistan—except for the Afghan Taliban, who are more wary than friendly toward the ISI.

To regain influence in Afghanistan and drive the Indians out once the Americans leave, the Pakistan military could, as an alternative, back the Taliban in a plan to retake Kabul and set up a government that would do Pakistan’s bidding. However, that possibility is now too risky; the international community would never tolerate it, and such a regime would also provide a base from which the Pakistani Taliban could launch further attacks in Pakistan.

In a major policy shift, senior Pakistani military and intelligence officials say they have offered to help broker talks between Taliban leaders, the Americans, and Karzai. “We want the talks to start now, not in eighteen months when they are leaving; but the Americans have to trust and depend on us,” a senior military officer told me. There is a deep lack of trust between the CIA and the ISI, and other countries may also balk at Pakistan’s insistence that all negotiations should be channeled through the ISI. Pakistani officials suggest that if the ISI helps arrange talks, then independent contacts between Taliban leaders and the CIA, British intelligence (MI6), and Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) would have to stop. In return, Pakistani officials say only that they want to be sure “that Pakistan’s national interests in Afghanistan are looked after”—interests that have yet to be clearly spelled out to the Americans and Afghans.

This is an important change in the official position of Pakistan. For the past nine years—despite the well-known connections between the ISI and the Afghan Taliban—Pakistan has denied that it has influence over the Taliban leaders, and openly playing host to them was considered out of the question. Pakistan will have to make serious efforts to gain the confidence of the US and the Afghans if it is to sponsor negotiations with the Taliban; but their differences could be worked out through arrangements made between the various intelligence agencies and governments involved. Senior US officials say that Pakistan is showing itself to be “more flexible” on Afghan policy than before.

How will the Taliban leaders respond? Many of them are fed up with years of ISI manipulation and strategizing on their behalf and would prefer to keep the ISI out of such talks. Some members of the Taliban have built up a rapport with Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, the domestic intelligence agency of the Kabul government. The NDS and the ISI loathe and mistrust each other, and the NDS would be extremely reluctant to allow the ISI a central part in negotiations. Moreover, the crucial acceptance of reconciliation with the Taliban has to come from the non-Pashtun population in the north who are extremely hostile to the Taliban and the ISI. If the northern ethnic groups who make up just over 50 percent of the population do not accept the reconciliation plan, there could be a renewed civil war as in the 1990s.

But the ISI has power and influence over the Taliban. Not only are the Taliban able to resupply their fighters from Pakistan, and seek medical treatment and other facilities, but the families of most Taliban leaders live in Pakistan where they own homes and run businesses and shops. Taliban leaders travel to Saudi Arabia on Pakistani passports. All this makes them vulnerable to ISI pressure. Even before the US military can consider coopting mid-level Taliban commanders, both sides would have to ascertain how this would play with the ISI.

The Pakistani army’s desperate desire to have some control over future events in Afghanistan is partly due to its strategic aim of avoiding encirclement by India; but it is also a result of the setbacks it has received since 2001. The military is still smarting from former President Bush’s decisions to allow the anti-Pakistan Northern Alliance to take Kabul in 2001, to ignore Islamabad’s later requests for consultations on US strategy in Afghanistan, and to treat all Afghan Pashtuns as potential Taliban. This helped radicalize Pakistan’s own Pashtun population, which is more than twice the size of Afghanistan’s. (There are 12 million Pashtuns in Afghanistan and 27 million in Pakistan.)

5.

Talking to the Taliban requires more than just secret cooperation among intelligence agencies or the CIA handing out bribes to Taliban commanders to change sides—as it did with the Northern Alliance in 2001. There is an urgent need for a publicly promoted strategy involving concrete efforts to build political institutions and provide humanitarian aid in ways that do not require intrusive Western control—a strategy that could attract many members of the Taliban, reduce violence, and placate Afghans who are opposed to all such compromises. Obama officials have talked up the need for such a public strategy but accomplished little during his first year in office. Yet such goals are of paramount importance.

Here are some suggestions of steps that should be taken in advance of talking to the Taliban. Almost all these points have theoretically been accepted by the US and NATO but none have been acted upon:

Convince Afghanistan’s neighbors and other countries in the region to sign on to a reconciliation strategy with the Taliban, to be led by the Afghan government. Creating a regional strategy and consensus on Afghanistan was one of the primary aims of the Obama administration; but little has been achieved. From Iran to India, regional tensions are worse now than a year ago.
Allow Afghanistan to submit to the UN Security Council a request that the names of Taliban leaders be removed from a list of terrorists drawn up in 2001—so long as those leaders renounce violence and ties to al-Qaeda. Russia has so far refused to entertain such a request; but Obama has not tried hard enough to extract this concession from Russian leaders.
Pass a UN Security Council resolution giving the Afghan government a formal mandate to negotiate with the Taliban, and allow the US, NATO, and the UN to encourage that process. This would mean persuading reluctant countries like Russia and India to support such a resolution. (On January 27, a UN Security Council committee announced, with Russian agreement, that it has lifted sanctions against five former Taliban officials who are said to support the Karzai government.)
Have NATO and Afghan forces take responsibility for the security of Taliban and their families who return to Afghanistan, enlisting the help of international agencies such as the UN High Commission for Refugees or the International Committee of the Red Cross to work with the Afghan government to assist these returning Taliban members, arranging for compensation, housing, job training, and other needs they may have in facing resettlement.
Provide adequate funds, training, and staff for a reconciliation body, led by the Afghan government, that will work with Western forces and humanitarian agencies to provide a comprehensive and clearly spelled-out program for the security of the returning Taliban and for facilities to receive them.
Encourage the Pakistani military to assist NATO and Afghan forces in providing security to returning Taliban and their families and allow necessary cross-border support from international humanitarian agencies. Encourage Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to help the Taliban set up a legal political party, as other Afghan militants—such as former members of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb-i-Islami party—have done. This would be a tremendous blow to al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban and it would give concrete form to Obama’s repeated pledge that he is ready to reach out to foes in the Muslim world.
The Taliban leadership should be provided with a neutral venue such as Saudi Arabia or elsewhere, where it can hold talks with the Afghan government and NATO. The US should release the remaining Afghan prisoners held at Guantánamo and allow them to go to either Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia.
Unless such publicly announced policies are carried out, the Taliban may well conclude that it is better and safer to sit out the next eighteen months, wait for the Americans to start leaving, and then, when they judge Afghanistan to be vulnerable, go for the kill in Kabul—although that would only lead to a renewed civil war.

6.

Just as Afghanistan faces a crucial choice, we have a book that for the first time places readers at the heart of the Taliban’s way of thinking—My Life with the Taliban, by Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban minister and ambassador to Pakistan, who spent over four years in Guantánamo prison. Originally published in Pashto, the language of the Pashtuns, the book has been beautifully translated and extensively edited for easier understanding by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, two researchers who live in Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban.

Zaeef was born in 1968 and grew up in a small dusty village in Kandahar province. Like many Taliban, he came from a family of mullahs and grew up an orphan, having lost his parents at an early age. Economic development never penetrated such Afghan villages as his and daily life was centered on learning at the madrasa, farming, and sustaining the Pashtun tribal code of honor and revenge. His extended clan fled to Pakistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion, but at the age of fifteen he secretly returned home to fight the Soviets. In the 1980s he served under several commanders, including Mullah Omar.

Zaeef dramatically brings to life the extremely harsh conditions under which the Afghans fought—without food, medical aid, or enough ammunition, and under constant Soviet bombardment:

When I first joined the jihad I was fifteen years old. I did not know how to fire a Kalashnikov or how to lead men. I knew nothing of war. But the Russian front lines were a tough proving ground and…I eventually commanded several mujahedeen groups.
After the Soviets left Afghanistan, Zaeef became a mullah in a small village near Kandahar. He describes how the situation deteriorated in the south as warlords and criminals extracted tolls from trucks on the road, kidnapped and raped women, and held young boys captive to become their forced lovers. Zaeef was one of the original Taliban; in the winter of 1994 he joined with like-minded young men to work out a strategy for dealing with the warlords.

He was and remains intensely loyal to Mullah Omar, who would, he writes,

listen to everybody with focus and respect for as long as they needed to talk, and would never seek to cut them off. After he had listened, he then would answer with ordered, coherent thoughts.
When Zaeef attended the founding meeting of the Taliban, each man took an oath of loyalty to Omar. That oath is still in effect, which is why no senior Taliban commander has ever betrayed the whereabouts of Omar. As the Taliban started to conquer Afghanistan, Zaeef was promoted from one job to the next.

fter the Taliban capture of Kabul in 1996, Zaeef was moved to the defense ministry where, he writes, the weekly budget for the various Taliban militias fighting the Northern Alliance was $300,000 a week, or just $14 million a year. By 1999, when the Taliban controlled 80 percent of the country, their entire annual budget was just $80 million—from the Islamic taxes the Taliban imposed as well as donations from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and, after 1996, Osama bin Laden (although Zaeef does not mention his contribution). He describes a chaotic and uncoordinated government:

The budget didn’t even come close to what was needed in order to start any serious development; it was like a drop of water that falls on a hot stone, evaporating without leaving any trace.
Early in his book Zaeef describes his intense hatred for the ISI, which deepened in 2000 when he was appointed Taliban ambassador to Pakistan. He claims he resisted being recruited by the ISI. “In my dealings with them I tried to be not so sweet that I would be eaten whole, and not so bitter that I would be spat out.” He describes how “the ISI extended its roots deep into Afghanistan like a cancer puts down roots in the human body,” and how “every ruler of Afghanistan complained about it, but none could get rid of it.” Zaeef set up his own clandestine network of Pakistani officials who provided him information about what the ISI was planning regarding the Taliban.

What Zaeef omits or fudges is significant. He makes no mention of the ISI’s financial and material support to the Taliban, and says hardly anything about al-Qaeda or how his hero Mullah Omar became so close to Osama bin Laden. He has nothing to say about the Taliban’s repressive attitudes toward women, including the ban on their education, and he makes no mention of the Taliban’s harsh punishments, including public stonings.

By 2001, after UN sanctions restricted the Taliban’s international contacts, Zaeef became the only Taliban leader who could meet with US and Western envoys. His relationship with the US embassy in Islamabad was dominated by American demands to hand over Osama bin Laden. In the days after September 11, he frantically tried to stave off the impending US attack on his country by appealing to Western embassies, writing letters to the UN, and trying to enlist support from Islamic countries. He met with Mullah Omar, who was convinced that the Americans would not dare attack. In Omar’s mind, Zaeef writes, “there was less than a 10 percent chance that America would resort to anything beyond threats and so an attack was unlikely.”

In January 2002 he was turned over to the Americans by the ISI—sold, according to him—and ended up in Guantánamo. He now lives in Kabul under government protection and his final plea is for peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan. He says he does not believe in al-Qaeda, but speaks as an Afghan patriot with strong Islamist leanings toward the Taliban. Afghanistan, he writes, is “a family home in which we all have the right to live…without discrimination and while keeping our values. No one has the right to take this away from us.” Can Afghanistan ever be a peaceful home for all Afghans? They certainly deserve it.

—January 27, 2010

Notes
*See Noah Shachtman, “‘Afghan Insurgency Can Sustain Itself Indefinitely’: Top U.S. Intel Officer,” Wired.com, January 8, 2010. General Flynn’s briefing, called ” State of the Insurgency: Trends, Intentions and Objectives,” was presented on December 23, 2009. Also see “NATO Official: US Spy Work Lacking in Afghanistan,” Associated Press, January 5, 2010.

WORLD
Ancient Tribe Goes Extinct as Last Member Dies

David Knowles
Writer for aol.com News

(Feb. 5, 2010) – Marking the end of a language and an entire people,
the last member of the Bo, an ancient tribe that lived in the Andaman
Islands, has died.

When Boa Sr, as she was known, died last week, she was believed to be
about 85 years old. Her husband had died years beforehand, and Boa,
whose name means “land” or “earth” in the Bo language, had no
children.

CNN
When Boa Sr, the last member of the Bo tribe of the Andaman Islands,
died last week, the Bo language died along with her.

“She was the only person who spoke Bo,” Anvita Abbi, a professor of
linguistics at India’s Jawaharlal National University, told The Times
of London. “At times, she felt very isolated and lonely as she had no
one to talk to in her own language.”

The Bo are believed to have first come to the Andaman Islands –
located roughly 850 miles off India’s east coast in the Bay of Bengal
– 65,000 years ago. Bo was one of at least 10 pre-colonial languages
spoken on the islands.

According to Survival International, an advocacy group for native
peoples throughout the world, the Bo were one of the oldest surviving
human cultures on earth.

Of the thousands of Great Andamanese who once inhabited the islands,
only 52 people are still alive today. But Boa Sr, who also spoke a
local dialect of Hindi as well as the amalgam language called Great
Andamanese, was the last of her particular tribe.

“After the death of her parents, Boa was the last Bo speaker for 30 to
40 years,” Abbi told the BBC.

The following footage, courtesy of CNN, was recorded over the last few
years of Boa’s life by Abbi and represents the some of the last
recorded utterances and song in Bo.

The Bos’ Downfall

In 1858, when the British decided to colonize the Andaman Islands and
use them as a penal colony, they estimated that 5,000 Great Andamanese
lived there.

“At first, the British didn’t notice any difference between the
tribes,” said Sophie Grig, senior campaigner at Survival
International.

But in 1879, a British officer named M.V. Portman was appointed
officer in charge of the Andamanese, and after years of attempting to
acclimate them to life as British subjects, Portman wrote “A Manual of
the Andamanese Languages,” which distinguished the differences among
tribal languages.

Portman’s own obituary, which appeared in The Times on Feb. 22, 1935, reads:
In many parts of the islands the natives were still either ferocious
enemies or at best half-tamed; and his work consisted in making
contact with them and very gradually bringing them to recognize the
value of British rule.
But colonization proved ruinous for the tribes of the Andamans,
including the Bo, with large numbers decimated by measles and syphilis
brought to the islands by foreigners. Many of those who were left
gravitated to alcohol, another import to the islands, as a way of
seeking solace.

“When people are dispossessed from their land and their way of life,
they often turn to alcohol,” Grig said. “It’s not surprising, and it
was very much true in the case of the Bo.”

In 1970 the Indian government began relocating the Bo to a settlement
of concrete row houses on Strait Island. Boa Sr was moved in 1978, and
Abbi said she often said that she missed her old life in the jungle.

“What’s important is that we learn from this lesson and do everything
we can to protect the remaining tribes like the Jarawa and the
Sentinelese, who are still there and remain threatened,” Grig said.

Now kept in a protective quarantine by the Indian government, the
Sentinelese received worldwide attention in 2004, when they were
filmed running out of the jungle firing arrows at passing helicopters
shortly after the Asian tsunami killed thousands on the Andaman and
Nicobar island chains.

Abbi argues that preventing the extinction of other Andamanese
languages is crucial if we hope to expand our understanding of how
language in the region evolved over time.

“It is generally believed that all Andamanese languages might be the
last representatives of those languages which go back to pre-Neolithic
times,” Abbi told the BBC.

But the death of a language also has other implications.

“A language contains the memories and experiences, everything that
explains and encapsulates a way of life,” Grig said. “It’s sad for the
entire world.”

 http://ipsterraviva.net/UN/currentNew.as…

South-South Cooperation Key to MDGs
IPS Correspondents

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 7 (IPS) – Member states meeting here Thursday called for the immediate implementation of development commitments made during the Nairobi high-level U.N. conference on cooperation between developing countries.

UNDP Administrator Helen Clark highlighted the importance of the Nairobi meeting on South-South cooperation in sharing information, technologies, and experiences across the South. The Nairobi outcome document calls for concrete measures to mainstream support for South-South and triangular cooperation in the U.N.’s work.

“I can assure you that we in UNDP have received that loud and clear message,” Clark said. “We have long proudly hosted the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation and fully supported its work.” On the heels of Thursday’s General Assembly High-level Committee on South-South Cooperation (HLC) meeting, focal points of South-South cooperation at 29 U.N. agencies met Friday at headquarters to discuss follow-up to the Nairobi conference.

“South-South cooperation is an expression of solidarity that has proven its relevance by a rapid growth,” said Ambassador Abdullah M. Alsaidi of Yemen, the chair of the Group of 77 developing countries.

“Cooperation across the South has been transformed by the growth of the emerging economies,” Clark explained.

The share of global GDP generated by low and middle income countries has grown from 15 percent to 25 percent over the last 50 years according to UNDP estimates, and analysts predict that emerging markets will outperform developed markets over the course of the next decade.

“Strengthening of regional integration and improved networking among members of regional blocs and organisations has a multiplier effect to South-South cooperation,” said Ambassador Zachary Muburi-Muita of Kenya, who was elected president of the HLC meeting here.

“The emerging economies in the South are attracting international attention and will increasingly acquire the muscle to influence the course of economic growth and development,” said Ambassador Gyan Chandra Acharya of Nepal, stressing that the recent successes of the developing world are in danger of being reversed and are not being felt equally across countries or regions.

Despite the gains achieved through trade and finance, delegations noted the deepening economic asymmetries among developing countries, particularly in regard to the least developed countries (LDCs) and landlocked developing countries.

The HLC stressed that the current financial, food and energy crises have exacerbated the vulnerabilities of developing countries that lack the capacity to withstand shocks.

There is an “implementation gap” that has been looming over the recommendations of the major U.N. conferences in the economic and social areas, delegates agreed.

It is only with “political will towards fulfilling the commitments that parties have undertaken in Nairobi that we can make real progress,” an Egyptian delegate stressed.

“South-South cooperation is immensely important at this time for achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and other internationally agreed goals, and for tackling climate change,” said Clark.

Clark urged delegations to take a particularly close look at the gender aspects of achieving the MDGs.

“Progress is lagging behind particularly on MDG5 on maternal health; on MDG3 on empowering women; and on MDG2 with respect to gender parity in access to education,” Clark said, “To achieve the MDGs and indeed other internationally agreed development goals, women have to be an equal part of the equation.”

In order to effectively implement the Nairobi outcome with demonstrable results, stakeholders need to identify “quick wins” whose implementation should be devoid of unnecessary red tape and bureaucracy, said Muburi-Muita.

The government of Brazil and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) have signed agreements on South-South cooperation to prevent and combat child labour and to promote good practices and lessons learned in Latin America and Portuguese-speaking countries in Africa and Asia.

“This is an excellent example of how member states are able to engage entities of the U.N. system through a South-South and triangular partnership in support of their national development strategies,” according to the ILO delegation.

The HLC stressed local ownership of solutions as a key component of South-South cooperation.

“Now, as UNDP positions itself to be of the greatest possible relevance and support to developing countries in the 21st century, we see facilitating South-South exchanges of experience and knowledge as absolutely central to what we do,” Clark explained.

A growing priority of the U.N. will be to share experience on climate change adaptation and mitigation. This could include sharing knowledge on growing drought-tolerant crops, on reforestation, or on providing low-cost access to clean energy and transport technology.

Clark emphasised that a very wide range of developing countries make contributions to South-South cooperation. In the recent weeks “we have seen least developed and low-income countries, along with middle-income and net-contributing countries, digging deep into their pockets for Haiti,” she said.

Robert Schmuhl: Is Obama’s Search for ‘Common Ground’ Real?
02/8/10, aol.com, Politics Daily
In the stagecraft of statecraft, Barack Obama keeps searching for his leading role:

Throughout much of his first year as president, he continued to portray himself as he had in his campaign for the White House. The cool, cerebral, controlled figure of the hustings moved into the Oval Office — but after a few months his approval ratings started to plummet and critics began to question his approach.

Could a “cool” temperament appear frosty when some fire and passion seemed more appropriate? Was “cerebral” too much like an academic seminar of endless, inconclusive conversation?

When Obama first spoke in public about the failed terrorist act near Detroit at Christmas, his calmness might have been reassuring, but it also raised doubts about how seriously he was taking the planned attack. Shortly afterwards, Obama became more animated and assertive, and during January his presidential rhetoric took on a range of different tones.

In talking about the banks and their astronomical bonuses, he came across as a populist pitted against the forces of greed. Then he assumed the pose of a fighter, duking it out with entrenched interests and institutions on behalf of those less powerful.

More recently, Obama-a tough sell as a populist or as a fighter-has modulated his voice and adopted another approach. Since the State of the Union, he’s been trying to position himself as an aisle-crossing, let’s-all-get-along consensus-seeker.

For Obama, appealing for bipartisanship is not only recognition of the altered political landscape after Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts last month but also a return to how the public first perceived him as a national figure in 2004.

In his keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention that year, he challenged the notion of “Red States and Blue States,” noting that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America-there is the United States of America.”

During his first State of the Union address a couple weeks ago, he took on partisan gridlock directly, saying “what frustrates the American people is a Washington where every day is Election Day. We can’t wage a perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about the other side-a belief that if you lose, I win.

“Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, no matter how malicious, is just part of the game. But it’s precisely such politics that has stopped either party from helping the American people. Worse yet, it’s sowing further division among our citizens, further distrust in our government.”

Just as tellingly, two days later, he told Republican House members at their Baltimore retreat that Americans don’t “want more gridlock. I don’t think they want more partisanship. I don’t think they want more obstruction. They didn’t send us to Washington to fight each other in some sort of political steel-cage match to see who comes out alive. That’s not what they want. They sent us to Washington to work together, to get things done, and to solve the problems that they’re grappling with every single day.”

Obama’s calls for more — well, at least some — bipartisanship might cause heartburn for his Democratic base, especially the ideologically-minded left. But such rhetoric could help bring back independent swing voters who flocked to the GOP in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races and also in the Massachusetts Senate vote.

The most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey reported that a stunning 93 percent of those polled agreed with the statement “There is too much partisan fighting between Democrats and Republicans and very little cooperation.”

With the perception of polarization that pronounced, a politician viewed as trying to bridge partisan divisions could stand apart from — and even above — the crowd and force the other side to change course or at least conduct itself differently.

Appealing as a bipartisan spirit might sound, there’s potential danger if actions don’t follow words — or if the words seem hollow and calculated. Should the public see such calls as what you might term “a wedge tactic” — a ploy without substance that’s executed primarily for self-interested advantage — it could be viewed as just another play in today’s political game, with deeper polarization a likely result.

For the moment, though, the president seems intent on making a pitch to Republicans that might improve his own standing and that of his party. At the National Prayer Breakfast last week, he even returned to political terrain he hasn’t occupied for several months. Twice during his 15 minute-long talk, he invoked the phrase “to find common ground” in remarks that focused on the need for civility.

Whether any “common ground” can be staked out in the current political environment is a prime concern the president confronts as he tries to regain his footing and to find his role for leadership. Said another way: Who is the real Barack Obama?
_____________________________________________________________

Robert Schmuhl is Walter H. Annenberg-Edmund P. Joyce Chair of American Studies and Journalism at the University of Notre Dame, where he directs the John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics & Democracy.

==============

Wall Street Journal, Opinion, REVIEW & OUTLOOK, FEBRUARY 7, 2010
 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424…

Democratic Climate Revolt: A bipartisan effort to stop the EPA’s anticarbon crusade.

The Obama Administration has been moving full-speed ahead on anticarbon regulation, never mind waiting for Congress to pass a bill. But now opposition is building among senior Democrats, with two powerful committee Chairmen introducing a bill last week to bar the Environmental Protection Agency from declaring that carbon is a dangerous pollutant.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson is busy writing new rules that would let her drive a tax-and-regulation bulldozer through the U.S. economy under laws never meant to apply to greenhouse gases. Ms. Jackson is expected to issue new anticarbon regulations for cars and trucks next month before moving on to power plants and other industries.

This is all too much for Missouri’s Ike Skelton and Minnesota’s Collin Peterson, the Chairmen of the House Armed Services and Agriculture Committees, respectively. Along with Missouri Republican Jo Ann Emerson, they are pushing a two-page bill that would amend the Clean Air Act to restore Congress’s original intent and strip CO2 and other greenhouse gases from the statutory language.

This is bipartisanship we can believe in. Such legislation would vaporize the EPA’s “endangerment finding” for carbon and thus require the Administration to use democratic debate and persuasion if it really wants to reshape the energy markets and impose huge new costs on American consumers. What a thought.

“If Congress doesn’t do something soon, the EPA is going to cram these regulations through all on their own,” Mr. Peterson said. “I have no confidence that EPA can regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act without severe harm to all taxpayers.”

Added Mr. Skelton: “Simply put, we cannot tolerate turning over the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions to unelected bureaucrats at EPA. America’s energy and environmental policies should be set by Congress.” Yes, they should be.

The Skelton-Peterson-Emerson bill follows a similar effort by North Dakota Democrat Earl Pomeroy, not to mention Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski’s coming “disapproval resolution” in the Senate that has the support of Democrats Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln.

Our one caveat here is that Messrs. Skelton and Peterson are doing the right thing for the wrong reason—specifically, to defend the ethanol industry. Their bill includes provisions that would expand the definition of renewable fuels and make it easier for corn ethanol and soy biodiesel to qualify for federal tax credits. This is despite the growing shelf of studies that common crop-based fuels increase carbon emissions because of land-use changes and deforestation.

In any case, Ms. Jackson released final rules last week that would allow ethanol to maintain its mandate on the U.S. fuel supply, requiring her agency to back down from the more restrictive and supposedly science-based rules that it had proposed last year. Ms. Jackson insisted that EPA wasn’t “dumbing down” its regulations, but her bow to the ethanol lobby revealed the death-grip it exerts on Congress.

Yet in the case of carbon regulation—an even dumber policy—we’ll take what we can get. If the power of farm-state politicians ends up stopping the EPA’s global-warming power grab, it would be the first good thing ethanol has done for the country.

——————=============——————

Conclusion: just as before the Obama Revolution of 2008, the American malaise is with both iles of Congress and Obama’s immediate problem are the Democrats who with 59% still give him only a minority!

Arava Power Gets Deals For 15 Mid-Size Solar Fields

Date: 08-Feb-10
Country: ISRAEL
Author: Tova Cohen, Reuthers

TEL AVIV – Israeli solar energy developer Arava Power said on Sunday it signed long-term contracts with 15 agricultural cooperatives to build mid-size solar fields at an investment of 2 billion shekels ($533 million).

The fields will produce a total of 100 megawatts of solar energy using photovoltaics, for an average of 6.5 megawatts per field.

Arava said it is advancing rooftop solar installations on cowsheds and factories in the signatory cooperatives.

Last year German conglomerate Siemens invested $15 million in Arava Power to build 10 five-megawatt solar fields.

In December the Public Utilities Authority decided to allow mid-size solar fields at a nationwide capacity of 300 megawatts but many in the industry believe this cap will be filled quickly.

“The goal to produce 300 solar megawatts is an important step toward implementing the government’s decision to produce 5 percent of Israel’s energy consumption from renewable sources by 2014, but it’s not enough,” Arava Power Chief Executive Jon Cohen said.

“In order to achieve this goal, at least 1,000 megawatts are needed, and the market indicates that … mid-size solar fields can fill the gap faster than any other source.”

Arava Power President Yosef Abramowitz said that in each of the 15 mid-size field locations the company plans to build a large-size field, adding another 500 megawatts to its pipeline.

“Together with our partners from Siemens, we are weighing additional proposals from investors,” he said, without providing further details.

Siemens also acquired Israel’s Solel Solar Systems in October for $418 million.

Arctic Melt To Cost Up To $24 Trillion By 2050: Report

Date: 08-Feb-10
Author: Timothy Gardner, Reuthers

WASHINGTON – Arctic ice melting could cost global agriculture, real estate and insurance anywhere from $2.4 trillion to $24 trillion by 2050 in damage from rising sea levels, floods and heat waves, according to a report released on Friday.

“Everybody around the world is going to bear these costs,” said Eban Goodstein, a resource economist at Bard College in New York state who co-authored the report, called “Arctic Treasure, Global Assets Melting Away.”

He said the report, reviewed by more than a dozen scientists and economists and funded by the Pew Environment Group, an arm of the Pew Charitable Trusts, provides a first attempt to monetize the cost of the loss of one of the world’s great weather makers.

“The Arctic is the planet’s air conditioner and it’s starting to break down,” he said.

The loss of Arctic Sea ice and snow cover is already costing the world about $61 billion to $371 billion annually from costs associated with heat waves, flooding and other factors, the report said.

The losses could grow as a warmer Arctic unlocks vast stores of methane in the permafrost. The gas has about 21 times the global warming impact of carbon dioxide.

Melting of Arctic sea ice is already triggering a feedback of more warming as dark water revealed by the receding ice absorbs more of the sun’s energy, he said. That could lead to more melting of glaciers on land and raise global sea levels.

While much of Europe and the United States has suffered heavy snowstorms and unusually low temperatures this winter, evidence has built that the Arctic is at risk from warming.

Greenhouse gases generated by tailpipes and smokestacks have pushed Arctic temperatures in the last decade to the highest levels in at least 2,000 years, reversing a natural cooling trend, an international team of researchers reported in the journal Science in September.

Arctic emissions of methane have jumped 30 percent in recent years, scientists said last month.

Thin ice over the Arctic Sea this winter could mean a powerful ice-melt next summer, a top U.S. climate scientist said this week.

And early findings from a major research project in Canada involving more than 370 scientists from 27 countries showed on Friday that climate change is transforming the Arctic environment faster than expected and accelerating the disappearance of sea ice.

Goodstein’s study did not look at worst-case scenarios Arctic melting could have, such as warmer temperatures that trigger massive releases of crystallized methane formations in Arctic soils and ocean beds known as methane hydrates. It also did not look at sea ice erosion troubling people in the Arctic.

Monday, Feb. 8, 2010

Abbas begins Japan trip with visit to A-bomb museum.

HIROSHIMA (Kyodo) Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas arrived in Japan on Sunday for a four-day visit as part of his Asian tour and visited Hiroshima for the first time.

On the first day of his four-day visit to Japan, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas listens to an explanation of an exhibit at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.

After offering flowers at the cenotaph for the victims of the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing of the city, Abbas went to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and wrote in a visitors’ book that his heart bleeds for the calamities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the other Japanese city to suffer an atomic bombing.

The Palestinian leader told reporters that the world should eliminate nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. He also said the Palestinians have been tormented by war and need support from other countries to achieve peace.

Abbas, who last visited Japan in May 2005, is scheduled to hold talks with Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyamaon Monday and with Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada on Tuesday before heading for South Korea on Wednesday.

During the talks, the Japanese side is expected to formally notify the Palestinian leader of its intention to provide $20 million in aid and build a solar power plant in the West Bank town of Jericho.
Tokyo is also likely to commit to providing support for the resumption of the Middle East peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians, which remains in a stalemate.

In Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh – the news were the record snow. So, that keeps them busy – the need to dig out from under that snow.

So far as governing goes, the Village Voice – that is Greenwich Village in new York City – wrote that the Republicans won a 41-59 majority as a result from the Massachusetts avalanche.

The new weather predictions are that the President will set now the agenda and expect the Democrats to follow – AMEN!       That is leadership – for God’s sake with 59 still standing – what do they wait for?

Further – he – that is Obama – will try to brow-beat the Republicans to cooperate first. The American people say Washington is too partisan ? If that were true the 59 would be good enough – but really? Who are the Obstructionists?

If Obama invites the Republicans to come on board that would be very clever – it would tell the Democrats to stop being obstructionists.

But, politics might be such that the Republicans feel comfortable to project that they are THE PARTY OF NO!

How do you pull out a rabbit from your top-hat? How do you change unemployment rates with nothing happening in the economy? The Republicans might be happy to see the Administration collapse – the country collapse – so who cares about OSAMA!

Obama tells the Democrats – we will be losers together if you do not shape up and they returned – SHOW US THE WAY!

——————

Next topic:  How long can the World’s biggest borrower continue to be the World’s biggest power?

If we get to the point that we have a difficulty to sell our treasuries in the world we will cease to be a big power – that came from Greenspan – the former head of the Federal Reserve. Henry Paulson, the present holder of that job seemed less convincing.

David Walker, former US Controller General – head of the GAO – now head of te Peterson Foundation – wrote a book on the US deficit that has reached now $1.56 trillion and this is untenable.

—————–

Fareed Zakharia on China-US relations – a US – China economic war is MAD – that is Mutual Assured Destruction – he thinks that the two are symbiotically bound now. I think he is wrong. China has such a huge internal market that it can continue well by producing just for their own people without exports to the US. They may not want to do that because it would mean a too soon push at increasing China’s middle class and risking folks ask for a mellowing down of the political regime. But nevertheless, this does not assure an immediate rebellion. In the US rather – a rebellion is possible – or a call for some real war – internally or externally.

To the latest two skirmishes – the US sending $6.4 billion worth of weapons to Taiwan, and Obama hosting The Dalai Lama at the White House. Both topics are not new. The military hardware agreement with Taiwan was agreed in 2001, and the Dalai Lama has visited every single US previous President since he landed in India. Why did the Chinese get excited right now? That is before the April visit they will be making themselves to the White House? What about the Iran sanctions and the fact that Obama was left to wait outside that China conference room in Copenhagen? Are we going to see some muscle show here?

Christiane Amanpour, on her program had as guest Victor Gao, of the China National Association of International Studies.

He pointed out that the US sells weapons to Taiwan that it does not allow for sale to China. China is now the largest credit maker to the US. What if China buys less for several months? Is 2010 going to be the year that Obama gets tough and China gets nasty? Neither of them can afford a real trade war.

David Rothkopf affirmed that “we are interconnected” so we have to develop a different approach.

Victor Cha – he was on China desk at the National  Security Council. He said – This is a MUTUAL HOSTAGE GAME – both sides lose.

—————-

Fareed Zakharia in Davos, had in front of an audience a half hour interview with King Abdullah II of Jordan.

It started out with Fareed pointing out the two main problems he thinks are facing Jordan: Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the Islamic fighting movement, but he was brushed aside by the King who continued coming back to the Israeli – Palestinian problem.

Fareed said that no-one has yet lost money by betting against Peace in the Middle East, but the King countered that the credibility of the US is at stake. We desperately need the undivided attention of the US – he said. If God forbid we cross the line of the viability of the 2 State Solution, what are we left with – continuing warfare – or even worse – the One State solution that many Israelis dread?

Fareed wanted to know if there is a Jordan option and was told flatly by the King that it will not work – Jordan absolutely does not want the West Bank. Are we talking of a viable entity? A third of the UN do not recognize Israel now.  The building of the wall has made Israel safer Fareed said and he spoke with President Peres who believes in a two States solution for the future of Israel but because of the security threats they think only of today and not the future.

The King disagreed – the injustice felt towards the Palestinian people pushes all other issues. He thinks that if you solved the problem of the Palestinians why should Iran then want the nuclear power. It does not make any sense for them to continue on that path. For now, it is the Palestinian issue that propels Iran’s efforts. When asked if he thinks that if not for the Israeli – Palestinian issue, there would be no Islamic terrorism? The King retreated by saying that – for evil to succeed – is for good men to do nothing. Evil will always exist – the evil always will be evil. On November 9, 2005 we had our own 9/11 and proportionately we lost twice as many people as the US casualties. The Israeli-Palestinian issue is is incendiary that it drives everything else.

Fareed suggested that Professor Bernard Lewis explained that it was rather because of the lack of openness in the Muslim world that created the Al Qaeda – it was against Egypt and Saudi Arabia. We have 400 million young people in the Islamic world that need a direction. My role is to create a viable political Middle Class. If you want to move your country it is education – education – education. Bahrain speaks our language – so is a list of young countries that agree.

————-

Christiane Amanpour had a panel on security issues and wanted to know what are the real security problems today. Surely it was not what you would have expected to hear. She was told:

- Outer Space

- The Open Sea

- The Cyber Space

- The Polar Ice Caps.

So far as the conventional thinking she was told that Washington and Beijing have less to fear from each other then from failed States like Somalia.

When satellites become more crucial they become targets. Where are the National borders in cyber-space? Most governments cannot even define a cyber attack.

Zbigniew Brzezinski said that we have to define the nature of the threat. Today it is not as lethal as it was when within 6 hours we could have had 80 million casualties in the cold war. But today attacks are less predictable even though less lethal.

The US still has a higher sophisticated technology capability. The Google issue is a cyberthreat. Are the hackers from China government? Do they really come from China? We may have to retaliatete selectively and we must have a foreign policy that does not object to this.

The way the domestic policy goes now, will Obama continue the international engagement that he started out with so well? Now we have gridlock.

Brzezinski called for Presidential leadership. Also – the President should persevere with the Iran effort.

The other topic is the Israeli -Palestinian conflict. Rhetorically Obama gets an A, For Performance a B or B-

On space – we must avoid a nuclear race in space – we must have the capacity to shoot down satellites and space vehicles.

———————

From the Kathie Crowley show – her interview with Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, I picked up one fleting issue – the names of the countries the Secretary mentioned as friends to work with in the present world. She clearly mentioned the big two China and India, but then she spoke also of other major economies – Brazil, South Africa and Turkey. I mention this here because it vindicates our recent decision to move Turkey to the Home-page of www.SustainabiliTank.info and it seems that we were right.

Clearly, there were no Europeans mentioned in that segment, neither Mexico nor Canada or Japan.

Obama invites GOP to health-care summit.
By Michael D. Shear February 7, 2010
 http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2010…

President Obama made a dramatic attempt to jump-start the stalled health care debate Sunday, inviting Republicans in Congress to a half-day summit on the subject to be televised live later this month.

The president made the offer in an interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric just hours before the Superbowl. Obama challenged Republicans to come to the discussion armed with their best ideas for how to cover more Americans and fix the health insurance system.

“I want to consult closely with our Republican colleagues,” Obama told Couric. “What I want to do is to ask them to put their ideas on the table… I want to come back and have a large meeting, Republicans and Democrats to go through, systematically, all the best ideas that are out there and move it forward.”

The invitation to join him later this month follows comments he made on Thursday during a speech at a Democratic fundraiser in which he said he wanted to sit with Republicans and “walk through the [health care plans] in a methodical way so that the American people can see and compare what makes the most sense.”

It also comes just weeks after the president received high marks for engaging the House Republicans in a televised, 90-minute discussion at their retreat in Baltimore. The president has been hammered by critics who said his year-long push to revamp the health care system did not live up to his campaign promise to conduct the debate in the open.

Democratic efforts to push a final health bill through the Congress fell apart last month when the party lost their 60-seat, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. The newly-elected Republican senator from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, campaigned against what he called the Democratic party’s government takeover of the health-care system.

The president’s proposed half-day summit, which aides said could take place at the historic Blair House across the street from the White House, represents an effort by Obama to hit the reset button on the top domestic priority of his first year in office.

And it is a recognition that he must now have at least some Republican support to get it passed.

In a statement, House Republican leader John Boehner said that he is looking forward to the discussion and is “pleased that the White House finally seems interested in a real, bipartisan conversation on health care. The American people have overwhelmingly rejected both of the job-killing trillion-dollar government takeover of health care bills passed by the House and Senate. The problem with the Democrats’ health care bills is not that the American people don’t understand them; the American people do understand them, and they don’t like them.”

Boehner added that “The best way to start on real, bipartisan reform would be to scrap those bills and focus on the kind of step-by-step improvements that will lower health care costs and expand access.”

But aides said that Obama does not plan to scrap months of legislative effort on the issue. Democratic leaders have continued to work quietly to reconcile House and Senate versions that passed last year, and the president plans to come to the summit armed with a Democratic bill, aides said.

“This is not starting over,” one White House official said. “Don’t make any mistake about that. We are coming with our plan. They can bring their plan.”

The official added: “What the President will not do is let this moment slip away. He hopes to have Republican support in doing so – but he is going to move forward on health reform.”

That declaration could help reassure Democrats who have expressed concern that Obama was essentially abandoning the health reform effort in favor of a new focus on the economy and jobs.

The White House has played down the health care subject since Brown’s election to fill the seat vacated by the late Edward M. Kennedy. Obama made only a brief mention of the issue during his State of the Union speech last month. In the speech to the DNC last week, he urged patience, saying, “I think we should be very deliberate, take our time

January 14, 2010 we got an e-mail from the Office of Science and Technology of the Embassy of Austria to the United States, informing us that a documentary “In Search of Memory” will be shown to the public from January 8 t0 January 14, 2010 at the Movie House of IFC on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. In effect the showings were extended by two additional weeks subsequently, and covered the time period of this year’s Holocaust Remembrance week.

Further, the e-mail said – The documentary had its first US screening tour a year earlier in 2009, and was shown in DC, NY, MA, CA as can be found on http://www.ostina.org/content/view/15/30…

This is a biographical documentary on the life and work of Austrian neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel it said.

Also it said: Please find details on today’s premiere featuring a Q&A session with Dr. Kandel, show times, media comments, and details on the movie at – http:// www.ostina.org

and at http://icarusfilms.com/new2009/mem.html

We could not go that opening day but made it up later as this is indeed an exceptional documentary with many good reasons for people to go to see it if the chance is offered again.

Dr. Kandel, then a youngster, arrived with his brother Ludwig, alone, to Hoboken New Jersey in April 1939. They escaped Nazi Vienna as their grandparents did earlier. Their parents sent them to the grandparents and luckily managed to join in a short while also. Please see - http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Eric_Ka…

Eric Richard Kandel (born November 7, 1929) is a psychiatrist, a neuroscientist and professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He was a recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. He shared the prize with fellow recipients Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard. His other honors include the National Medal of Science, the Wolf Prize – which is the Israeli Nobel, the Gairdner International Award, the Charles A. Dana Award and the Lasker Award. Kandel has been at Columbia University since 1974, and lives in New York City. Kandel has recently authored “In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind” (WW Norton), which chronicles his life and research. The book was awarded the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Award for Science and Technology.

Eric Kandel was born in 1929 in Vienna, Austria, in a middle-class Jewish family. His mother had come from Kolomyya in Eastern Poland (Eastern Galizia that was under Austrian rule until WWI – he used to joke “as with all bright people, my roots are in Poland”) and his father from Olesko in Western Ukraine. His parents met in Vienna and married in 1923, shortly after Hermann Kandel, Eric’s father, had established a toy store. They were a thoroughly assimilated and accultured family, which had to leave Austria after the country had been invaded/annexed by Germany in March 1938, Aryanization (Arisierung) started and attacks on Jews and Jewish property escalated. Eventually Eric and his brother Ludwig, and later their parents, succeeded in moving to the US.

Eric Kandel’s initial intellectual interests lay in the area of history, and that was his undergraduate major at Harvard University. He wrote an honors dissertation on “The Attitude Toward National Socialism of Three German Writers: Carl Zuckmayer, Hans Carossa, and Ernst Jünger.”

“While at Harvard, a place dominated by the work of B. F. Skinner, Kandel became interested in learning and memory. (It should be noted, however, that while Skinner championed a strict separation of psychology, as its own level of discourse, from biological considerations such as neurology, Kandel’s work is essentially centered on an explication of the relationships between psychology and neurology.)”

“The world of neuroscience was first opened up to Kandel through his interactions with a college girlfriend, Anna Kris, whose parents were Freudian psychoanalysts. Freud, a pioneer in revealing the importance of unconscious neural processes, was at the root of Kandel’s interest in the biology of motivation and unconscious and conscious memory.”

I will stop here and refer the reader to the above mentioned link. My  reason for going up to this point was to show the thorough  Viennese cultural home environment of this refugee family that had to escape for their life to the new world of freedom they found in the US, and how at first, at Harvard, Eric Kandel was still trying to understand what happened to his parents first adopted homeland – Austria. It was this search for understanding that turned perhaps to his scientific search to understand the process of memory – so now this explains the trip back to Vienna, after years of having had no direct relationship to that part of his roots, he eventually goes there and the whole event turns into an exercise in practical memory.

On the other hand, interesting is also the way how the New Austria looks at Dr. Kandel, and many of the other refugee families that managed to escape the Nazi planned extermination of the Jews – really without even a consideration of who among those Jews still had any relationship to his/her Jewish origin. Yes, after he got the Nobel Prize, Austria claimed him back and restored his Austrian citizenship – now it is claimed that he is an Austrian scientist – something that from his personal make-up he might well be, but then – who deserves what kudos for his success story? Austria? Harvard? Columbia? Plain humanity?

Dr. Kandel is an amazing fellow – great are also all the members of his family that went with him on that trip back to Vienna, and also back to France where Dr. Kandel’s wife was saved by good Samaritans in a Cahors monastery. Amazing how they were able to show no single sign of bitterness about those past events, and how they were able to make new connections with friendly young Austrians, including the people that live in his parents old apartment, that swooned about them and relished in Dr. Kandel’s success in making for himself a successful life in spite of everything.

I would like also to suggest to the good people of the UN outreach program, that for next year’s Holocaust Remembrance week at the UN headquarters they figure a program with the Kandel family and Austria. This will be a clear chance to show that it is possible to overcome memories when one manages to bring them up from the unconscious – and have the courage to explain them scientifically as well.

We kept saying all last year – Mr. President – change requires new people . On economy issues this means people that are not graduates of Goldman Sachs. Granted that one year is not enough to measure the success of the new Administration, but watching the people defend what they did or what they did not do for the country’s economic revival – it is clear that rather people like Joe Stiglitz or Paul Krugman should have been entrusted with those jobs – if change is what the Administration wanted to achieve.

Lloyd C. Blankfein, CEO, Goldman Sachs just got his $9 Million 2009 Achievements Bonus – coincidentally, this was also the amount equal for what the Bernard L. Madoff Lexington Avenue in Manhattan penthouse sold for as a tocken repayment to those he defrauded. Now to be fair to Blankfein, he actually took a large cut in bonus pay when compared to James Dimon from J.P. Morgan who got $17 Million; but then J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. also recovered from the crisis much faster then its rivals. Now, the CEOs of the these banks did not directly defraud their customers like Madoff did. They simply plaid by the rules established by Congress – they gambled with the customers money – and the rules were – if they win it is great – if they lose the public pays. The folks in Congress that got their own positions, among others,  on the back of funds from above mentioned banks, can be counted upon to oppose change of these rules. The following article expresses the need for leadership that is fresh and can take on the established foes of US revival. Obama was elected to achieve such results.

Obama’s muddled solutions: The president is trying to please everyone, but he needs to take tough action to prevent the US economy’s second freefall.

Joseph Stiglitz
guardian.co.uk,     Saturday 6 February 2010

Article history: Defeat in the Massachusetts senatorial election has deprived US Democrats of the 60 votes needed to pass healthcare reform and other legislation, and it has changed American politics – at least for the moment. But what does that vote say about American voters and the economy?

It does not herald a shift to the right, as some pundits suggest. Rather, the message it sends is the same as that sent by voters to former president Bill Clinton 17 years ago: “It’s the economy, stupid!” and “Jobs, jobs, jobs”. Indeed, on the other side of the United States from Massachusetts, voters in Oregon passed a referendum supporting a tax increase.

The US economy is in a mess, even if growth has resumed, and bankers are once again receiving huge bonuses. More than one out of six Americans who would like a full-time job cannot get one; and 40% of the unemployed have been out of a job for more than six months.

As Europe learned long ago, hardship increases with the length of unemployment, as job skills and prospects deteriorate and savings gets wiped out. The 2.5-3.5m foreclosures expected this year will exceed those of 2009, and the year began with what is expected to be the first of many large commercial real-estate bankruptcies. Even the Congressional budget office is predicting that it will be the middle of the decade before unemployment returns to more normal levels, as America experiences its own version of “Japanese malaise”.

As I wrote in my new book Freefall, Barack Obama took a big gamble at the start of his administration. Instead of the marked change that his campaign had promised, he kept many of the same officials and maintained the same “trickle down” strategy to confront the financial crisis. Providing enough money to the banks was, his team seemed to say, the best way to help ordinary homeowners and workers.

————

When America reformed its welfare programs for the poor under Clinton, it put conditions on recipients: they had to look for a job or enroll in training programs. But when the banks received welfare benefits, no conditions were imposed on them. Had Obama’s attempt at muddling through worked, it would have avoided some big philosophical battles. But it didn’t work, and it has been a long time since popular antipathy to banks has been so great.

Obama wanted to bridge the divides among Americans that George W Bush had opened. But now those divides are wider. His attempts to please everyone, so evident in the last few weeks, are likely to mollify no one.

Deficit hawks – especially among the bankers who laid low during the government bailout of their institutions, but who have now come back with a vengeance – use worries about the growing deficit to justify cutbacks in spending. But these views on how to run the economy are no better than the bankers’ approach to running their own institutions.

Cutting spending now will weaken the economy. So long as spending goes to investments yielding a modest return of 6%, the long-term debt will be reduced, even as the short-term deficit increases, owing to the higher tax revenues generated by the larger output in the short run and the more rapid growth in the long run.

Trying to “square the circle” between the need to stimulate the economy and please the deficit hawks, Obama has proposed deficit reductions that, while alienating liberal democrats, were too small to please the hawks. Other gestures to help struggling middle-class Americans may show where his heart is, but are too small to make a meaningful difference.

————

Three things can make a difference:

a second stimulus,

stemming the tide of housing foreclosures by addressing the roughly 25% of mortgages that are worth more than the value the house,

and reshaping our financial system to rein in the banks.

———–

There was a moment a year ago when Obama, with his enormous political capital, might have been able to achieve this ambitious agenda, and, building on these successes, go on to deal with America’s other problems. But anger about the bailout, confusion between the bailout (which didn’t restart lending, as it was supposed to do) and the stimulus (which did what it was supposed to do, but was too small), and disappointment about mounting job losses, has vastly circumscribed his room for manoeuvre.

Indeed, there is even skepticism about whether Obama will be able to push through his welcome and long overdue efforts to curtail the too-big-to-fail banks and their reckless risk-taking. And, without that, more likely than not, the economy will face another crisis in the not-too-distant future.

Most Americans, however, are focused on today’s downturn, not tomorrow’s. Growth over the next two years is expected to be so anaemic that it will barely be able to create enough jobs for new entrants to the labour force, let alone to return unemployment to an acceptable level.

Unfettered markets may have caused this calamity, and markets by themselves won’t get us out, at least any time soon. Government action is needed, and that will require effective and forceful political leadership.

————————————-

Opinion, The Los Angeles Times
The winter of America’s discontent: Dissatisfaction with both political parties runs deep.

By Tim Rutten
February 5, 2010

It has been more than four decades since the Congress of the United States has been able to summon the will to pass a major piece of social legislation. Not since 1965, when Medicare and the Voting Rights Act both overcame decades of opposition to become law, has Congress proved itself up to the task.

Significant healthcare reform is all but dead for this session, and the chances of substantively addressing the regulatory breakdown that allowed Wall Street’s irresponsible speculation to precipitate the worst global financial crisis since the Depression seem to recede with each passing day. So too the prospects for passage of further stimulus measures to remedy the crisis of unemployment and underemployment that continues to ravage the lives of families in states from Michigan to California.

In the face of these daunting issues, what was it that preoccupied the Senate on the eve of its long weekend recess? The legislative drama du jour is the standoff between the White House and Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), who has put a personal hold on more than 70 executive branch appointments until the Obama administration agrees to fund a couple of pork-barrel projects he has earmarked for his state. One involves tens of millions of dollars for an FBI laboratory focusing on improvised explosives — something the bureau doesn’t think it needs. The other involves contract specifications for an aerial tanker that Northrop Grumman and Airbus would manufacture in Alabama, if they win the deal. (Boeing also is competing for the plane, which it would build in Topeka, Kan., and Seattle.)

Unless the administration agrees to give Shelby what he wants, he intends to invoke an archaic senatorial privilege that allows him to prevent the chamber from considering any of the administration’s nominees to executive branch vacancies, no matter how crucial. Without the 60 votes to force cloture — another archaic convention — there’s nothing the Democrats or the White House can do.

Outside the Senate, Shelby’s conduct would be called extortion; inside the chamber, it’s a “parliamentary tactic.”

It’s also the sort of shabby situation that brings into sharp focus both the sources of congressional dysfunction and the popular discontent on both the left and right with the congressional parties. Earmarks and pork are anathema to a majority of conservatives and independents; the Senate’s outdated, made-for-obstruction rules and susceptibility to special interests are a source of increasing frustration to liberals and some independents. Yet, here we have one senator from one Southern state obstructing with impunity an entire nation’s business — purely for his narrow constituency’s financial interests.

——-

You don’t have to attend a “tea party” convention to see the corrosive effect this sort of otherworldly political navel-gazing has on American attitudes toward the institutions of national government and the parties vying to control them. Evidence of the damage is scattered throughout the recent polls:

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, for example, found that although 52% of the nation’s voters retain a favorable view of President Obama, only 38% have a similar appraisal of the Democratic Party. The Republicans fare even worse; just 30%, fewer than

1 in 3 voters, view the GOP favorably.

A recent CBS News poll found that nearly half of all Republicans, 45%, disapprove of their party’s congressional delegation.

A national Washington Post/ABC News poll found that just 24% of Americans, fewer than 1 in 4, trust congressional Republicans, like Shelby, “to make the right decisions for the country’s future.” (Wonder why?) The House and Senate Democrats didn’t fare all that better, and are trusted by just 32%. Forty-seven percent of those polled — still less than half — have confidence in Obama’s ability to make the right decisions.

When people’s mistrust of their elected officials and the parties reaches these levels, there is little for political leaders to do but take counsel from their own anger and anxieties — and, these days, the popular mood fairly seethes with both those things. Discontent with the present and apprehension about the future have become the background noise of our politics, yet both sides of the congressional aisle seem deaf to the din.

In one of his magisterial explorations of German politics between the wars, the historian Ian Kershaw mused that “there are times — they mark the danger point for a political system — when politicians can no longer communicate, when they stop understanding the language of the people they are supposed to be representing.”

It would be reckless not to insist that this country and its politics remain, in crucial ways, far distant from Weimar. It would be rash, though, to pretend that the distance remains as great as it once was.

 timothy.rutten at latimes.com

from    Luis Gutierrez <luisgutierrez@peoplepc.com>

date    Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 12:56 AM
subject    Pelican Journal of Sustainable Development
 http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv06n02…

Page 1 is a book review of “State of the World 2010″:
Transforming Cultures from Consumerism to Sustainability
By Erik Assadourian & Staff, Worldwatch Institute, 2010

Pages 2 to 4 are three invited articles:

- Truth and Consequences on the Last Frontier
by Richard Steiner, University of Alaska-Anchorage, USA
 http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv06n02…

- Woman as “Other” in Monotheistic Religious Discourse
by Zilka Spahic-Šiljak, University of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina
 http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv06n02…

- A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030
by Mark Jacobson & Mark Delucchi, Stanford University, USA
 http://www.pelicanweb.org/solisustv06n02…

There are also two supplements: one is on news and tools for sustainable
development, and the other is a directory of online reference material.

————————————
Luis T. Gutierrez, Ph.D.
The Pelican Web
Editor, PelicanWeb Journal of Sustainable Development
 http://www.pelicanweb.org

At The Foreign Policy Association, New York, Wednesday, January 13, 2010, in the Grupo Santander building Auditorium, there was a meeting with Dr. Julia E. Sweig who wrote the book: “CUBA: WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW.”

Julia Sweig is Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin American Studies & Director for Latin American Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

She has authored several reports on Latin America and American Foreign Policy. Her book “Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground” of 2002 received an award for the best book of the year by an independent scholar from the American Historical Association.

The meeting was chaired by Ambassador Viktor Polgar, Consul General of Hungary in New York City.

Dr. Sweig started out by saying that she was part of the US culture relating to Latin America – that educated in Spanish language also lots of Cuban students  and studies about Cuba but nothing in Portuguese or Brazil, implying that in the US Cuba got much too thigh attention then it deserved – and Brazil much less attention then it deserved. But even so, in effect Cuba was in a dormant state so far as US direct involvement, until the switch from Fidel to Raoul.

The discussion with Cuba was always difficult. Cuba was focusing on history while the US was looking to the future.

2006 – 2007 changes start in Havana and the Miami Cubans find this important – then 2007-2008 Raoul begins to look at domestic issues in Cuba and starts to talk of dirty laundry of the regime. On February 2008 he takes office in a 34 minutes speech – a novelty to who was used to the unending Fidel rhetoric. He skips the gov’t talk to improve the life and says that inefficiency will be removed. He eliminates control of Cubans travel abroad. There seems to be a new government, new people, new ways of doing things – and expectations started to be high. With the changes in the US – President Obama suggested in april 2009 to open a new chapter.

——-

In Miami, the last decade the Cuban Americans shift from the call for embargo to a people-to-people family oriented approach. This in South Florida more then in New Jersey. Miami is now for the first time ahead of Washington asking for change.

Since 2001 there were exchanges with Cuba, but then they were stopped by the Bush Administration – including the remittances. Then came the war on Iraq and the notion of regime change that ruffled Cuba. All what started before Bush years was now suspicious

President Lula and Spanish PM Zapatero are pushing Washington for change in regard to Cuba. Indeed, in Trinidad the US allowed the return of Cuba to the OAS, and in Congress there is now a bill to remove travel restrictions and to take Cuba of the terrorism lists.

Clearly, the US is not the final decider in Cuba – but it has a role to play in Cuba changing.

Former Congressman John Brandemas said that President Bush restricted Microsoft and Google in regards to Cuba, as Cuba also reacted with restrictions. In effect the same day as this meeting at the FPA, the New York Times had an article about a communications contractor who was arested in Cuba, Alan P. Gross, who was working with local groups to make sure they are capable of using internet communication.

Questions abunded about how long will it take to get to “YES WE CAN.” It was pointed out that $9,000 gets a Congressman’s vote and this is a reason for the bottleneck. The Cuban Americans still hold the game, even though they would like to see change.

The facts are that after the US and Canada, Cuba is third on medical issues in the hemisphere. Cuba helped Chavez consolidate his power and they like him to take out oxygen of Latin America.

—————

Further, let us recommens CUBA – La Isla Grande, Edited by Martino Fagiuoli, a 2007, Fall River Press, New York, printed in China, an album about Cuba with photos taken in the 1990s. The country seems to be ready to stick it out until the US changes its attitude towards the island.

Sunday, Feb. 7, 2010

U.S. Afpak path comes full circle

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY
NEW DELHI, for the Japan Times online  — What U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has been pursuing in Afghanistan for the past one year has now received international imprimatur, thanks to the well-scripted London conference. Four words sum up that strategy: Surge, bribe and run.

Obama has designed his twin troop surges not to militarily rout the Afghan Taliban but to strike a political deal with the enemy from a position of strength. Without a deal with Taliban commanders, the United States cannot execute the “run” part.

The Obama approach has been straightforward: If you can’t defeat them, buy them off. Having failed to rout the Taliban, Washington has been holding indirect talks with the Afghan militia’s shura, or top council, whose members are holed up in Quetta, capital of Pakistan’s sprawling Baluchistan province, including the one-eyed chief, Mullah Mohammad Omar. The talks have been conducted through the Pakistani, Saudi and Afghan intelligence agencies.

Obama, paradoxically, is seeking to apply to Afghanistan the Iraq model of his predecessor, George W. Bush, who used a military surge largely as a show of force to buy off Sunni tribal leaders and other local chieftains. But Afghanistan isn’t Iraq, and it is a moot question whether the same strategy can work, especially when Obama has not hidden his intent to end the U.S. war before he comes up for re-election in 2012.

In a land with a long tradition of humbling foreign armies, payoffs are unlikely to buy peace. All that the Pakistan-backed Taliban has to do is to simply wait out the Americans. After all, popular support for the Afghan war has markedly ebbed in the U.S., even as the other countries with troops in Afghanistan exhibit war fatigue.

If a resurgent Taliban is now on the offensive, with 2008 and 2009 proving to be the deadliest years for U.S. forces since the 2001 American intervention, it is primarily because of two reasons: the sustenance the Taliban still draws from Pakistan; and a growing Pashtun backlash against foreign intervention.

The Taliban leadership — with an elaborate command-and-control structure oiled by Wahhabi petrodollars and proceeds from opium trade — operates from the comfort of sanctuaries in Pakistan. Fathered by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and midwifed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in 1994, the Taliban emerged as a Frankenstein’s monster.

Yet President Bill Clinton’s administration acquiesced in the Taliban’s ascension to power in Kabul in 1996 and turned a blind eye as the thuggish militia, in league with the ISI, fostered narco-terrorism and swelled the ranks of the Afghan war alumni waging transnational terrorism. With 9/11, however, the chickens came home to roost. The U.S. came full circle when it declared war on the Taliban in October 2001. Now, desperate to save a faltering military campaign, U.S. policy is coming another full circle as Washington advertises its readiness to strike deals with “moderate” Taliban (as if there can be moderates in an Islamist militia that enforces medieval practices).

In the past year, the U.S. military and intelligence have carried out a series of air and drone strikes and ground commando attacks from Afghanistan in Pakistan’s tribal Waziristan region against the Pakistani Taliban, the nemesis of the Pakistani military. The CIA alone has admitted carrying out a dozen drone strikes in Waziristan to avenge the bombing of its base in Khost, Afghanistan, by a Jordanian double agent, who in a prerecorded video said he was going to take revenge for the U.S. attack — carried out at Pakistan’s instance — that killed the Pakistani Taliban chief, Baitullah Mehsud.

Yet, the U.S. military and intelligence have not carried out a single air, drone or ground attack against the Afghan Taliban leadership in Baluchistan, south of Waziristan. The CIA and the ISI are again working together, including in shielding the Afghan Taliban shura members so as to facilitate a possible deal.

Obama’s Afghan strategy should be viewed as shortsighted and apt to repeat the very mistakes of American policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past three decades that have come to haunt U.S. security and that of the rest of the free world.

Washington is showing it has not learned any lessons from its past policies that gave rise to monsters like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar and to “the state within the Pakistani state,” the ISI, which was made powerful during Ronald Reagan’s presidency as a conduit of covert U.S. aid for Afghan guerrillas fighting Soviet occupiers.

To justify the planned Faustian bargain with the Taliban, the Obama team is drawing a specious distinction between al-Qaida and the Taliban and illusorily seeking to differentiate between “moderate” Taliban and those that rebuff deal-making.

The scourge of transnational terrorism cannot be stemmed if such specious distinctions are drawn. India, which is on the frontline of the global fight against international terrorism, is likely to bear the brunt of the blowback of Obama’s Afpak strategy, just as it came under terrorist siege as a consequence of the Reagan-era U.S. policies.

The Taliban, al-Qaida and groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba are a difficult-to- separate mix of soul mates who together constitute the global jihad syndicate. To cut a deal with any constituent of this syndicate will only bring more international terrorism. A stable Afghanistan cannot emerge without dismantling the Pakistani military’s sanctuaries and sustenance infrastructure for the Afghan Taliban and militarily decapitating the latter’s command center in Baluchistan. Instead of seeking to achieve that, the U.S. is actually partnering the Pakistani military to win over the Taliban.

Even if the Obama administration managed to bring down violence in Afghanistan by doing a deal with the Taliban, the Taliban would remain intact as a fighting force, with active ties to the Pakistani military. Such a tactical gain would exact serious costs on regional and international security by keeping the Afpak region as the epicenter of a growing transnational-terrorism scourge and upsetting civilian reconstruction in Afghanistan, where Japan and India are two of the largest bilateral aid donors.

Regrettably, the Obama administration is falling prey to a long- standing U.S. policy weakness: The pursuit of narrow objectives without much regard for the interests of friends.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is a regular contributor to The Japan Times.

“THE WINTER OF THEIR DISCONTENT: PYONGYANG ATTACKS THE MARKET.”

That was the title of a lunch event at The Korea Society Forum on Wedneday, January 27, 2010, and the speaker was Mr. Marcus Noland, Deputy Director at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC, and  Senior Fellow at the East-West Institute.He has held academic positions at Yale, Johns Hopkins, USC, Tokyo U, Saitama U, The U. of Ghana, and the Korea Development Institute. He was also a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers to the President of the USA.

The event was chaired by Mr. Evans Revere, President and CEO of the Korea Society. Both of them also old hands of the US Department of State – former Ambassadors with deep knowledge of Korea.

The paper that was presented was co-authored by Mr. Noland with Stephan Haggard with whom he also co-authored a book titled:  “Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid, and Reform.” Other books he wrote are “Pacific Basin Developing Countries: Prospects for the Future and Korea after Kim Jong-il,” and he edited “Economic Integration of the Korean Peninsula.” His book “Avoiding the Apocalypse: the future of the Two Koreas,” won the Ohira Memorial prize.

The reason for having this meeting was the North Korea’s recent currency reform of November 30, 2009, that literally threw North Korea back to Stalinistic Days of unbelievable economy these days of the 21st century.

North Korea also declared a ban on the use of foreign currencies on top of having declared useless their own National currency account. The net result was a clear blow o the market – so there is literally no market – thus no real economy – only a barter system.

History: In the last 15-20 years there was a bottom up marketization of the North Korean economy. It started with households and local government offices. It somehow evolved in the 1990s into a highly distorted market economy and the State was not comfortable with this because of the private origin of this up-swell – it was outside the State Control. There was also some intrusion of foreign companies – such as an Egyptian Telecoms that provided for individuals and businesses a cellphone network. The recent currency reform is simply the outcome – a clamp down on private initiative – and as there are no civil society institutions there is also no way to channel the peoples unhappiness. What we have now said Noland – is a revival of the Stalinist economy of the 1950s.

There have been conventional currency reforms in many countries – Turkey, Romania, Ghana … usually you cut off three zeros from the currency and you get it exchanged – but not in North Korea. Here, on November 30, 2009, North Korea announced a reform to replace all currency in circulation with new bills and coins. You had to declare all what you have and you could only exchange a small part of what you had – so the rest became useless paper. It was thus a confiscatory measure. Businesses operated in cash – so this destroyed the financial basis of the economy that operated outside the government controlled system. Call it the return to State socialism for those that tried to make a living for themselves. The Chinese never entered this North Korean world – they just do not operate in this sort of environment anymore.

The inflation was spiralling out of control before this sort of reform, now people did not even know how to price their products – it did not make sense to obtain this new currency – so how do you run a market under these conditions?

Things even sound worse when you realize that most North Koreans are government employees. – People join the government system so they can participate in the corruption cycle. If you ask in North Korea someone -Have you ever been detained? Most likely the answer will be yes. Even in this case – the currency exchange law – it was several days before it happened and you felt there was a dollarization of the system. Many knew it is coming and did buy dollars for their soon to be devalued money.

Some information became available when mid January a North Korean defected from the Embassy in Ethiopia.

Look at the difference between North Korea and Vietnam. Both were hit by withdrawal of Soviet assistance in the 1980s. While Vietnam changed and took off – North Korea stagnated and rolled back.

China started its reforms in the 1970s – Vietnam in the 1980s – both started from a high agriculture society. They had parades of improvement and everybody participated and took advantage of the changes. THey did freeze State Planning and people improved. Now North Korea did the opposite – they froze the market and demonetized the economy and the society. There is no lending – there is no banking – nothing. NORTH KOREA IS A FAILED STATE! What about the nukes? {as we shall see this was only the last question and came from a Japanese Government official.}

Before November 30, 2009, if you had some drive – you did push yourself up, or you left for China. What now? If there is no market you cannot sell even if you make something.

It amounts to a militarized workers party regime. Being a conscript in the lower ranks of the army is no big deal – but then the further down the ladder you go in North Korea – the more sensible the people are! The closer you are to Pyongyang – the more ideological and worse people get.

Interesting – the word nuclear was not uttered by the speaker or by people asking questions – this until the last question that came from a Japanese Consulate person. Mr. Noland pointed out that he was already hoping, against his expectations, that nobody will touch upon this. Then he stressed that development assistance is important – but you must make sure that like food assistance, it goes for good purpose to the right people. Such efforts are fungible and might produce no results if you are not careful.

———–

At the end of the Forum, I stayed around to discuss issues with some of the people present – it was a roomful – maybe 40 people. My cklear question was about reunification of the Koreas and I got quite a few skeptical answers. It is obvious they thought that a united Korea will be nuclear and the Japanese official just had no interest in this. Others just did not trust the North Korean leadership of being ready to give up the reins for an unsafe future – that is as if today their future is safe.

What about the real huge internal market that would open up by reunification? Why not do it in such a way that some leadership position is left in the hands of the present leaders of the North, in the hope that an Angela Merkel type will emerge from among them also? It will be no big thing to award penssions and guarantee the condition of those that will have to give up power? No tribunals please – just future well behavior can be the link. Part of this generation will be non-productive, but the young people from the North will show talents that can help all of Korea.

OP-ED COLUMNIST, The New York Times.
TIME IS RUNNING OUT.

By BOB HERBERT
Published: February 5, 2010
Palo Alto, Calif. – We’ve now lost 8.4 million jobs in this recession, and a vast majority of them are gone for good. The politicians are clambering aboard the jobs bandwagon, belatedly, but very few are telling the truth about the structural employment problems in the U.S. and the extremely heavy lift that is necessary to halt our declining living standards and get us back to an economy that is self-sustaining.

We don’t hear a lot that is serious about the sorry state of the nation’s infrastructure or the trade policies that crippled so many American industries or our inability (or unwillingness) to compete effectively with China when it comes to the new world of energy for the 21st century or our abject failure to provide a quality public education for the next generation of American workers, scientists, artists and entrepreneurs.

Speaking at a conference here on Wednesday, Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania said that if we don’t act quickly in developing long-term solutions to these and other problems, the United States will be a second-rate economic power by the end of this decade. A failure to act boldly, he said, will result in the U.S. becoming “a cooked goose.”

{Governor Edward G. Rendell, a Democrat of Pennsylvania, early backer of Hillary Clinton for President, but later switched to Barak Obama Saying he would be the better President, we hope is not the kind of leader that will just back the labor unions by using key word “infrastructure” and mean what he says when calling for a green future as the main motor for creating the needed jobs. Editor comment for ST,info}

Neither the politicians nor much of the mainstream media are spelling out the severity of these enormous structural problems or the sense of urgency needed to address them. Living standards are sinking in the United States, and there is no coherent vision or plan for reversing that ominous trend over the long term.

The conference was titled, “The Next American Economy: Transforming Energy and Infrastructure Investment.” It was put together by the Brookings Institution and Lazard, the investment banking advisory firm.

When Governor Rendell addressed the conference on Wednesday, he used words like “stunning” and “unbelievable” to describe what has happened to the nation’s infrastructure. His words echoed the warnings we’ve been hearing for years from the American Society of Civil Engineers, which tells us: “The broken water mains, gridlocked streets, crumbling dams and levees, and delayed flights that come from failing infrastructure have a negative impact on the checkbook and on the quality of life of each and every American.”

The conference was sparked by a sense of dismay over what has happened to the U.S. economy over the past several years and a feeling that constructive ideas about solutions were being smothered by an obsessive focus on the short-term in this society, and by the chronic dysfunction and hyperpartisanship in much of the government.

I was struck by the absence of grousing and finger-pointing at the conference and the emphasis on trying to develop new ways to establish an economy that is not based on financial flimflammery, that enhances America’s competitive position in the world, and that relieves us of the terrible burden of reliance on foreign energy sources.

I was also struck by the pervasive sense that if we don’t get our act together then the glory days of the go-go American economic empire will fade like the triumphs of an aging Hollywood star. One of the participants raised the very real possibility of Americans having to get used to living in an economy “that won’t be number one,” an economy that perhaps is more like Germany’s.

Rescuing the U.S. economy will require a commitment, and undoubtedly sacrifices, that need to start now. And it will require leadership that pulls together the best talents from all sectors of the society — not just business, not just government, but from everywhere.

Bruce Katz, the director of Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program, discussed some of the steps that need to be taken to remake an economy that has been thrown completely out of whack by frantic, debt-driven consumption, speculative bubbles, exotic financial instruments, and so on.

A new, saner, more sustainable economy will have to be more export-oriented, powered by cleaner fuels, bolstered by innovation that comes from a renewed focus on research and development, and committed to delivering a better-educated, more highly skilled work force.

Mr. Katz believes this is doable, but by no means easy. The nation’s infrastructure, he said, will have to “shift from 20th-century models of transport and energy transmission to rapid bus, ubiquitous broadband, congestion pricing, smart grid, high-speed rail and intelligent transport.”

New ways of financing such transformative changes will have to be developed, linking public and private capital, preferably through the creation of a national infrastructure bank, among other things. The nation’s political leaders and the public at large will have to grasp the difference between wasteful spending and crucial investments in the future.

It’s time for serious people to step forward and help lead on these critically important issues. Time is short.

from    lwarnars@gmail.com
date    Sat, Feb 6, 2010
subject   Yasuni-ITT: an equity mechanism?

A new document regarding the Yasuni-ITT Initiative (the innovative initiative of Ecuador to keep petroleum underground, protect biodiversity and indigenous peoples, and develop sustainably) is now available online: The Yasuni-ITT Initiative: an international equity mechanism? Master thesis.

The thesis aimed at analysing and assessing whether the Yasuni-ITT Initiative can be considered as an alternative pilot project to address not only environmental and climate justice, but also power imbalances. Current and proposed climate change mechanisms such as the CDM and REDD, as well as the history of Ecuador are being examined as motivations of the initiative. Such motivations include injustice aspects as well as how the petroleum industry has affected the country severely in terms of environment, society, economy and politics. These motivations and the Yasuni-ITT Initiative are therefore carefully examined in relation to environmental and climate justice as well as power imbalances.

The thesis is available through the link below. For any questions, be welcome to write me (also if you cannot access the file, please contact me so I can send it in an attachement).
 https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B59…

–
Lavinia Warnars,
Researcher for the Yasuní-ITT Initiative

www.ikbeneensportklimmer.nl/fien
 lwarnars at gmail.com
tel nl: +31650887172

from: http://twitter.com/AfghanNews?utm_source…

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Militarism in Afghanistan is not enough: The U.S. Afghanistan policy needs a revision, given realities on the ground.
PUBLISHED: 01/31/2010 - http://bit.ly/99iGQm
BY UTTAM DAS

President Barack Obama’s announcement in December 2009 of the deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan has received mixed reactions at home and abroad.

Military compulsion on the ground and political expediency at home are apparently in collision; frustration and anger are growing. Allies in the Afghan war such as France, Germany and Australia have reportedly opposed Obama’s announcement. However, the United Kingdom, Poland and Italy promised to send a small number of additional troops.

By June 2010, the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is expected to be 98,000. There were 29,950 U.S. troops in the International Security Assistance Force under NATO command, which has 64,500 troops, most supplied by the NATO member countries.

Though Obama had promised “change you can believe in” following his landslide victory in the 2008 presidential election, in the meantime he’s faced criticism for his decision to deploy additional troops to Afghanistan. The president announced that he will begin to withdraw troops in Afghanistan by July 2011 to bring an end to the decade-long war; however, the timeline has not convinced the American people, especially those on the left of the president’s own Democratic Party, who are increasingly demonstrating in front of the White House against the war.

Analysts and media in the region of South Asia are also critical of Obama’s new plan. The influential Indian daily The Hindu observes that sending additional troops to Afghanistan may provide “tactical relief to American commanders on the ground;” however, there is no guarantee that this new deployment would bring any “victory against terrorism and extremism.” For this, innovative strategies must be devised.

In a Dec. 3, 2009 editorial, The Hindu identified four deficits in America’s war against the Taliban and al-Qaida: the political consideration or attention, military doctrine, Afghan capability and a commitment from Pakistan where both the Taliban and al-Qaida allegedly have bases. Flurries of questions will continue to surround the comprehensiveness of U.S. policy and military actions in Afghanistan in the Asian media.

Given the reality on the ground, Pakistan is now in a crisis of sectarian conflict and a rising religious militancy. There is also reported presence of al-Qaida members in its territory; thus, Pakistan’s stability, politics, economy and military power are under great threat, as observes the Bangladeshi newspaper The Daily Ittefaq.

Analysts comment that it is likely impossible for the United States to win the war in Afghanistan by merely raising the number of troops. On the contrary, it may prolong the war with serious casualties on both sides.

Analysts recommend improving the conditions of the Afghan people by investing in poverty reduction, education and health. But the country has been further devastated by a war that has brought insufferable civilian casualties. Any investment in social sectors would facilitate to decrease the anger of the Afghan people toward the United States. Without this infrastructure, the poverty- and illiteracy-ridden country will not be able to get on its feet.

The U.S. policy should also engage resources to other countries in the region where al-Qaida is reportedly trying to spread its “ideology.” The presence of poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, natural challenges and displacements all contribute to the people’s vulnerability, which catalyses the spread of ideological organizations like al-Qaida. Reportedly, a swath of religious schools in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh — allegedly beyond the reach of government monitors — are working as bases for the spread of the militaristic, ideological challenge to the West, especially the United States. To offset this trend, governments need to engage civic institutions, but this deserves investment.

In the latest development, a London conference on Afghanistan has drafted a recommendation to initiate dialogues between the Afghan government and the Taliban, with an aim to dislodge al-Qaida from the country. The Taliban extremist Islamic group is essentially ideologically distinct from the terrorist al-Qaida and seized power in Afghanistan in 1996.

However, the international community must monitor such dialogues to ensure they are strategic and to guard against the Taliban using it as a legitimization and recruitment tool.

These dimensions in the Afghanistan conflict make a challenging situation all the more difficult, but for now, the deployment of more troops to the region seems only to increase our dependence on military strategy. What is needed most desperately in the region, however, is stability, investment and infrastructure.

———————

Robert NaimanPolicy Director of Just Foreign Policy
Posted: February 2, 2010 - http://bit.ly/apDj4q

Eat Your Spinach: Time for Peace Talks in Afghanistan – What’s Your Reaction:

In the last week the New York Times and Inter Press Service have reported that the Obama Administration is having an internal debate on whether to supports talks with senior Afghan Taliban leaders, including Mullah Muhammad Omar, as a means of ending the war in Afghanistan. Senior officials like Vice President Biden are said to be more open to reaching out because they believe it will help shorten the war.

Wouldn’t it be remarkable if this remained merely an “internal debate” within the Obama Administration? Wouldn’t you expect that the part of public opinion that wants the war to end would try to intervene in this debate on behalf of talks in order to end the war?

As an administration official told the New York Times,

“Today, people agree that part of the solution for Afghanistan is going to include an accommodation with the Taliban, even above low- and middle-level fighters.”
And in fact, US and British officials have been saying for months that the “endgame” in Afghanistan includes a negotiated political settlement with the Afghan Taliban.

Now, suppose you tell Mom that you want to have ice cream. And Mom says, you can have ice cream when you’ve eaten your spinach. Wouldn’t you eat your spinach? If you don’t eat your spinach now, you didn’t want ice cream very badly.

So if U.S. and British officials say the endgame includes a negotiated political settlement with the Afghan Taliban, and you figure, extrapolating from the last five thousand years of human history, that a negotiated political settlement typically does not just drop down from the sky, but in fact is generally preceded by political negotiations, and you want to end the war as soon as possible, wouldn’t you be clamoring for political negotiations to start as soon as possible? Because the longer political negotiations are delayed, the longer the war will last. If you don’t support political negotiations now, you don’t want to end the war very badly.

If you consider peace negotiations with the Afghan Taliban “distasteful,” consider this: every month that the war continues, every month that U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan, is another month in which U.S. soldiers will die horrible deaths, be horribly maimed, and be horribly scarred psychologically, perhaps for life. It’s also another month in which the U.S. military is likely to “accidentally” kill Afghan government soldiers (such episodes “are not uncommon,” the New York Times notes) and kill Afghan civilians, as they have done at least twice in the last week, according to the reporting in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

I put the word “accidentally” in quotation marks, not of course because I believe that the U.S. military is killing Afghan soldiers and Afghan civilians “on purpose,” but because when you repeatedly take an action (continuing the war) that leads to a predictable result (killing Afghan government soldiers and civilians) you lose the exoneration otherwise conferred by the word “accidentally.”

Is this not also “distasteful”? Is killing innocent people not more “