JK Alternative Viewpoint

U.S. officials believe that the Israelis have gained access to airbases in Azerbaijan. Does this bring them one step closer to a war with Iran

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In 2009, the deputy chief of mission of the U.S. embassy in Baku, Donald Lu, sent a cable to the State Department’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom titled “Azerbaijan’s discreet symbiosis with Israel.” The memo, later released by WikiLeaks, quotes Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev as describing his country’s relationship with the Jewish state as an iceberg: “nine-tenths of it is below the surface.”

Why does it matter? Because Azerbaijan is strategically located on Iran’s northern border and, according to several high-level sources I’ve spoken with inside the U.S. government, Obama administration officials now believe that the “submerged” aspect of the Israeli-Azerbaijani alliance — the security cooperation between the two countries — is heightening the risks of an Israeli strike on Iran.

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In particular, four senior diplomats and military intelligence officers say that the United States has concluded that Israel has recently been granted access to airbases on Iran’s northern border. To do what, exactly, is not clear. “The Israelis have bought an airfield,” a senior administration official told me in early February, “and the airfield is called Azerbaijan.”

Senior U.S. intelligence officials are increasingly concerned that Israel’s military expansion into Azerbaijan complicates U.S. efforts to dampen Israeli-Iranian tensions, according to the sources. Military planners, I was told, must now plan not only for a war scenario that includes the Persian Gulf — but one that could include the Caucasus. The burgeoning Israel-Azerbaijan relationship has also become a flashpoint in both countries’ relationship with Turkey, a regional heavyweight that fears the economic and political fallout of a war with Iran. Turkey’s most senior government officials have raised their concerns with their U.S. counterparts, as well as with the Azeris, the sources said.

The Israeli embassy in Washington, the Israel Defense Forces, and the Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, were all contacted for comment on this story but did not respond.

The Azeri embassy to the United States also did not respond to requests for information regarding Azerbaijan’s security agreements with Israel. During a recent visit to Tehran, however, Azerbaijan’s defense minister publicly ruled out the use of Azerbaijan for a strike on Iran. “The Republic of Azerbaijan, like always in the past, will never permit any country to take advantage of its land, or air, against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which we consider our brother and friend country,” he said. (Following the publication of this article, an Azeri spokesman denied that his government had granted Israel access to Azeri airbases.)

But even if his government makes good on that promise, it could still provide Israel with essential support. A U.S. military intelligence officer noted that Azeri defense minister did not explicitly bar Israeli bombers from landing in the country after a strike. Nor did he rule out the basing of Israeli search-and-rescue units in the country. Proffering such landing rights — and mounting search and rescue operations closer to Iran — would make an Israeli attack on Iran easier.

“We’re watching what Iran does closely,” one of the U.S. sources, an intelligence officer engaged in assessing the ramifications of a prospective Israeli attack confirmed. “But we’re now watching what Israel is doing in Azerbaijan. And we’re not happy about it.”

Israel’s deepening relationship with the Baku government was cemented in February by a $1.6 billion arms agreement that provides Azerbaijan with sophisticated drones and missile-defense systems. At the same time, Baku’s ties with Tehran have frayed: Iran presented a note to Azerbaijan’s ambassador last month claiming that Baku has supported Israeli-trained assassination squads targeting Iranian scientists, an accusation the Azeri government called “a slander.” In February, a member of Yeni Azerbadzhan — the ruling party — called on the government to change the country’s name to “North Azerbaijan,” implicitly suggesting that the 16 million Azeris who live in northern Iran (“South Azerbaijan”) are in need of liberation.

And this month, Baku announced that 22 people had been arrested for spying on behalf of Iran, charging they had been tasked by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to “commit terrorist acts against the U.S., Israeli, and other Western states’ embassies.” The allegations prompted multiple angry denials from the Iranian government.

It’s clear why the Israelis prize their ties to Azerbaijan — and why the Iranians are infuriated by them. The Azeri military has four abandoned, Soviet-era airfields that would potentially be available to the Israelis, as well as four airbases for their own aircraft, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Military Balance 2011.

The U.S. intelligence and diplomatic officials told me they believe that Israel has gained access to these airbases through a series of quiet political and military understandings. “I doubt that there’s actually anything in writing,” added a senior retired American diplomat who spent his career in the region. “But I don’t think there’s any doubt — if Israeli jets want to land in Azerbaijan after an attack, they’d probably be allowed to do so. Israel is deeply embedded in Azerbaijan, and has been for the last two decades.”

The prospect of Israel using Azerbaijan’s airfields for an Iranian attack first became public in December 2006, when retired Israeli Brig. Gen. Oded Tira angrily denounced the George W. Bush administration’s lack of action on the Iranian nuclear program. “For our part,” he wrote in a widely cited commentary, “we should also coordinate with Azerbaijan the use of airbases in its territory and also enlist the support of the Azeri minority in Iran.” The “coordination” that Tira spoke of is now a reality, the U.S. sources told me.

Access to such airfields is important for Israel, because it would mean that Israeli F-15I and F-16I fighter-bombers would not have to refuel midflight during a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, but could simply continue north and land in Azerbaijan. Defense analyst David Isenberg describes the ability to use Azeri airfields as “a significant asset” to any Israel strike, calculating that the 2,200-mile trip from Israel to Iran and back again would stretch Israel’s warplanes to their limits. “Even if they added extra fuel tanks, they’d be running on fumes,” Isenberg told me, “so being allowed access to Azeri airfields would be crucial.”

Former CENTCOM commander Gen. Joe Hoar simplified Israel’s calculations: “They save themselves 800 miles of fuel,” he told me in a recent telephone interview. “That doesn’t guarantee that Israel will attack Iran, but it certainly makes it more doable.”

Using airbases in Azerbaijan would ensure that Israel would not have to rely on its modest fleet of air refuelers or on its refueling expertise, which a senior U.S. military intelligence officer described as “pretty minimal.” Military planners have monitored Israeli refueling exercises, he added, and are not impressed. “They’re just not very good at it.”

Retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner, who conducted a study for a think tank affiliated with the Swedish Ministry of Defense of likely Israeli attack scenarios in March 2010, said that Israel is capable of using its fleet of F-15I and F-16I warplanes in a strike on Iran without refueling after the initial top-off over Israel. “It’s not weight that’s a problem,” he said, “but the numbers of weapons that are mounted on each aircraft.” Put simply, the more distance a fighter-bomber is required to travel, the more fuel it will need and the fewer weapons it can carry. Shortening the distance adds firepower, and enhances the chances for a successful strike.

“The problem is the F-15s,” Gardiner said, “who would go in as fighters to protect the F-16 bombers and stay over the target.” In the likely event that Iran scrambled its fighters to intercept the Israeli jets, he continued, the F-15s would be used to engage them. “Those F-15s would burn up fuel over the target, and would need to land.”

Could they land in Azerbaijan? “Well, it would have to be low profile, because of political sensitivities, so that means it would have to be outside of Baku and it would have to be highly developed.” Azerbaijan has such a place: the Sitalcay airstrip, which is located just over 40 miles northwest of Baku and 340 miles from the Iranian border. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Sitalcay’s two tarmacs and the adjacent facilities were used by a squadron of Soviet Sukhoi SU-25 jets — perfect for Israeli fighters and bombers.  “Well then,” Gardiner said, after the site was described to him, “that would be the place.”

Even if Israeli jets did not land in Azerbaijan, access to Azeri airfields holds a number of advantages for the Israel Defense Forces. The airfields not only have facilities to service fighter-bombers, but a senior U.S. military intelligence officer said that Israel would likely base helicopter rescue units there in the days just prior to a strike for possible search and rescue missions.

This officer pointed to a July 2010 joint Israeli-Romanian exercise that tested Israeli air capabilities in mountainous areas — like those the Israeli Air Force would face during a bombing mission against Iranian nuclear facilities that the Iranians have buried deep into mountainsides. U.S. military officers watched the exercises closely, not least because they objected to the large number of Israeli fighters operating from airbases of a NATO-member country, but also because 100 Israeli fighters overflew Greece as a part of a simulation of an attack on Iran. The Israelis eventually curtailed their Romanian military activities when the United States expressed discomfort with practicing the bombing of Iran from a NATO country, according to this senior military intelligence officer.

This same senior U.S. military intelligence officer speculated that the search and rescue component of those operations will be transferred to Azerbaijan — “if they haven’t been already.” He added that Israel could also use Azerbaijan as a base for Israeli drones, either as part of a follow-on attack against Iran, or to mount aerial assessment missions in an attack’s aftermath.

Azerbaijan clearly profits from its deepening relationship with Israel. The Jewish state is the second largest customer for Azeri oil – shipped through the Baku-Tibilisi-Ceyhan pipel ine

– and its military trade allows Azerbaijan to upgrade its military after the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE) slapped it with an arms embargo after its six-year undeclared war with Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. Finally, modernizing the Azeri military sends a clear signal to Iran that interference in Azerbaijan could be costly.

“Azerbaijan has worries of its own,” said Alexander Murinson, an Israeli-American scholar who wrote in an influential monograph on Israeli-Azeri ties for Tel Aviv’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. “The Baku government has expelled Iranians preaching in their mosques, broken up pro-Iranian terrorist groups, and countered Iranian propaganda efforts among its population.”

The deepening Azeri-Israeli relationship has also escalated Israel’s dispute with Turkey, which began when Israeli commandos boarded a Turkish ship destined for Gaza in May 2010, killing nine Turkish citizens. When Turkey demanded an apology, Israel not only refused, it abruptly canceled a $150 million contract to develop and manufacture drones with the Turkish military — then entered negotiations with Azerbaijan to jointly manufacture 60 Israeli drones of varying types. The $1.6 billion arms agreement between Israel and Azerbaijan also left Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan “sputtering in rage,” according to a retired U.S. diplomat.

The centerpiece of the recent arms deal is Azerbaijan’s acquisition of Israeli drones, which has only heightened Turkish anxieties further. In November 2011, the Turkish government retrieved the wreckage of an Israeli “Heron” drone in the Mediterranean, south of the city of Adana — well inside its maritime borders. Erdogan’s government believed the drone’s flight had originated in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq and demanded that Israel provide an explanation, but got none. “They lied; they told us the drone didn’t belong to them,” a former Turkish official told me last month. “But it had their markings.”

Israel began cultivating strong relations with Baku in 1994, when Israeli telecommunications firm Bezeq bought a large share of the nationally controlled telephone operating system. By 1995, Azerbaijan’s marketplace was awash with Israeli goods: “Strauss ice cream, cell phones produced by Motorola’s Israeli division, Maccabee beer, and other Israeli imports are ubiquitous,” an Israeli reporter wrote in the Jerusalem Post.

In March 1996, then-Health Minister Ephraim Sneh became the first senior Israeli official to visit Baku — but not the last. Benjamin Netanyahu made the trip in 1997, a high-level Knesset delegation in 1998, Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in 2007, Israeli President Shimon Peres in 2009, and Lieberman again, as foreign minister, this last February. Accompanying Peres on his visit to Baku was Avi Leumi, the CEO of Israel’s Aeronautics Defense Systems and a former Mossad official who paved the way for the drone agreement.

U.S. intelligence officials began to take Israel’s courtship of Azerbaijan seriously in 2001, one of the senior U.S. military intelligence officers said. In 2001, Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems contracted with Georgia’s Tbilisi Aerospace Manufacturing to upgrade the Soviet SU-25 Scorpion, a close air-support fighter, and one of its first customers was Azerbaijan. More recently, Israel’s Elta Systems has cooperated with Azerbaijan in building the TecSar reconnaissance satellite system and, in 2009, the two countries began negotiations over Azeri production of the Namer infantry fighting vehicle.

Israeli firms “built and guard the fence around Baku’s international airport, monitor and help protect Azerbaijan’s energy infrastructure, and even provide security for Azerbaijan’s president on foreign visits,” according to a study published by Ilya Bourtman in the Middle East Journal. Bourtman noted that Azerbaijan shares intelligence data on Iran with Israel, while Murinson raised the possibility that Israelis have set up electronic listening stations along Azerbaijan’s Iranian border.

Israeli officials downplay their military cooperation with Baku, pointing out that Azerbaijan is one of the few Muslim nations that makes Israelis feel welcome. “I think that in the Caucasian region, Azerbaijan is an icon of progress and modernity,” Sneh told an Azeri magazine in July 2010.

Many would beg to differ with that description. Sneh’s claim “is laughable,” the retired American diplomat said. “Azerbaijan is a thuggish family-run kleptocracy and one of the most corrupt regimes in the world.” The U.S. embassy in Baku has also been scathing: A 2009 State Department cable described Aliyev, the son of the country’s longtime ruler and former KGB general Heydar Aliyev, as a “mafia-like” figure, comparable to “Godfather” characters Sonny and Michael Corleone. On domestic issues in particular, the cable warned that Aliyev’s policies had become “increasingly authoritarian and hostile to diversity of political views.”

But the U.S. military is less concerned with Israel’s business interests in Baku, which are well-known, than it is with how and if Israel will employ its influence in Azerbaijan, should its leaders decide to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. The cable goes on to confirm that Israel is focused on Azerbaijan as a military ally — “Israel’s main goal is to preserve Azerbaijan as an ally against Iran, a platform for reconnaissance of that country and as a market for military hardware.”

It is precisely what is not known about the relationship that keeps U.S. military planners up at night. One former CIA analyst doubted that Israel will launch an attack from Azerbaijan, describing it as “just too chancy, politically.” However, he didn’t rule out Israel’s use of Azeri airfields to mount what he calls “follow-on or recovery operations.” He then added: “Of course, if they do that, it widens the conflict, and complicates it. It’s extremely dangerous.”

One of the senior U.S. military officers familiar with U.S. war plans is not as circumspect. “We are studying every option, every variable, and every factor in a possible Israeli strike,” he told me. Does that include Israel’s use of Azerbaijan as a platform from which to launch a strike — or to recover Israeli aircraft following one? There was only a moment’s hesitation. “I think I’ve answered the question,” he said.
Mark Perry is an author and historian. His latest book is Talking to Terrorists.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/28/israel_s_secret_staging_ground?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full

Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) in the HBO Series Game of Thrones (Courtesy HBO).

For half a century, fantasy has essentially been a series of footnotes to Tolkien. Until George R.R. Martin, that is. Martin’s epic A Song of Ice and Fire series — now five novels and counting, with the first two dramatized by David Benioff on HBO as Game of Thrones — ventures boldly outside the Tolkien box and has revitalized the entire genre in the process.

Gone are hobbits, elves, orcs, non-human dwarves, ents, balrogs, and most magical items (although not all magic or magical creatures). Gone too are the Manichaean simplicities of a world in which most characters can be quickly identified as good or evil. Martin’s saga has few one-dimensional heroes but many fully fleshed out people.

A Song of Ice and Fire is set in a world modeled after medieval England, and many claim that the series’ genius and popularity stems from its accurate and sensitive portrayal of medieval life. Millions of readers and viewers have formed a passionate bond with Martin’s creation, this argument runs, precisely because it is not simply made up but, rather, rooted in actual human experience. Martin himself has encouraged this line of thinking, claiming he reads “everything I can get my hands on” about medieval history and even including a bibliography on his Web site for those interested in his source materials. But is the argument correct? Just how realistic is A Song of Ice and Fire?

The short answer is “not very.” Before hordes of angry fans launch their trebuchets in my direction, however, let me hasten to add that this is a good thing, not a bad one. As a historian of the period, I can assure you that the real Middle Ages were very boring — and if Martin’s epic were truly historically accurate, it would be very boring too. I’m glad Martin takes all the liberties he does, because I prefer my literature exciting. Medieval people did also, which is why their own most popular literary creations were nearly as fantastic as Martin’s.

Noble traitors were usually beheaded, while non-noble ones were executed in more creative ways. No Geat named Beowulf ripped the arm off a monster named Grendel and then fought the monster’s mother in a cave. It is conceivable that there was an actual early medieval Scandinavian warrior-chief named Beowulf, but if so his life was likely spent farming, herding, hunting, fishing, and perhaps judging a few minor local disputes or doing some raiding. There probably was a warlord named something like Arthur living in post-Roman Celtic Britain, but at most he might have led a short, unsuccessful defensive campaign against Saxon invaders. Merlin, Excalibur, the Lady of the Lake, the Grail, Lancelot, Guinevere, Galahad, and all the rest were sketched in by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century and his various successors later on. St. George did not slay a dragon; Robin Hood didn’t rob from the rich or fight the Sheriff of Nottingham. Just like Martin, the authors of those tales made things up rather than taking their cues from actual life, because the reality around them was so dull and drab.

During the Middle Ages, most peasants and townspeople led a pretty static life. They worked as children, worked as adolescents, and worked as adults; they got married, had children themselves, and died, either quite young or possibly after living to the grand old age of 55. Not much violence interrupted their existence. They could not read, went on no adventures, and had little entertainment except for church services and holy days.

A medieval peasant working in the fields or a laborer toiling in the towns certainly had a more onerous life than a farmer or blue-collar worker today, but the degree of misery should not be overstated. Mundane and boring does not necessarily mean harsh, and harsh does not necessarily mean unhappy. Contemporaneous literary depictions such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales do not portray the daily existence or mindset of the lower classes as terrible, and the merciless brutality regularly suffered by the lower orders in fantasy works such as Martin’s does not reflect reality — not least because it would have been economically ludicrous for nobles to so abuse the people on whose productivity their own livelihoods depended.

As for the nobles themselves, they had it a bit better. They ate a more varied diet, had more possessions, and met a broader range of acquaintances; they might also have had more education and entertainment. But their lives were still boring. Most men of noble birth would train in military arts that they would never use, and most women would train in domestic arts they would use, repeatedly (although only after their fathers or brothers had bartered them to the most politically well-connected suitor). Violence may have been more diverse at this level of society, but it was unlikely to have been more frequent. There was no incest (at least none recorded), no dwarves, few assassinations.

[Spoiler Alert] Some of the incidents and characters in A Song of Ice and Fire are indeed drawn from actual medieval history. Dragons, for example, were all over the place, especially in England and Scandinavia. They were not real dragons, naturally, but metaphors of evil. Religious icons often depict Saints George and Michael defeating dragons, by lance and feet, respectively. Scandinavian gods and heroes such as Beowulf often slew them in the course of their duties protecting weaker people. And in 1388 the generally trustworthy chronicler Henry Knighton even noted that a “fiery dragon” was seen flying around the north of England.

Cersei Lannister’s walk of shame in A Dance with Dragons has both medieval and ancient precedents. Capital punishment was permissible in the Middle Ages really only for one crime: treason. Noble traitors were usually beheaded — as Ned Stark was — while non-noble ones were executed in more creative ways. (In 1305, William Wallace was hung until almost dead, then emasculated, ripped open, and, finally, beheaded, after having his intestines wrapped around a pole.) For adultery, humiliation was a standard punishment, and walks of shame were used for noble women. After her capture, Joan of Arc was taken throughout English-occupied France on a very lengthy walk of shame before her trial and burning at the stake for treason (to the Church). Martin has said that he based Cersei’s walk on that of Jane Shore, mistress of Edward IV, in the late fifteenth century (although his treatment seems to owe more to William Blake’s later representation of it than to the actual penance Jane was forced to endure).

Martin gives Vargo Hoat, the sadistic leader of the Bloody Mummers, the trademark gesture of chopping off his victims’ hands and feet. King John of England did that to wounded rebels during his siege of Rochester Castle in 1215, and John of Worcester says that Harold Godwinson did it to Alfred Aetheling and his companions in 1036.

As Martin notes, swords were important. They were the weapons of leadership, both ceremonial objects and effective military tools. A sword could be given to a boy as a gift at birth or naming, and he would grow up playing with it and with other, lighter swords until it became a weapon he could wield with strength and agility. A sword could also be presented when a man proved himself worthy of it, just as Longclaw is given to Jon Snow by the commander of the Night’s Watch in A Game of Thrones. And like Longclaw, swords could be named and could have their pommels replaced as necessary or desired.

At the Battle of the Blackwater in A Clash of Kings, Stannis Baratheon’s fleet is defeated by canisters of “wildfire” and a massive chain stretched across the river. Here Martin probably has in mind Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Byzantines had in their arsenal Greek fire, a petroleum substance that could be pumped over open fires to create a flame-thrower. The natural beds that produced Greek fire seem to have dried up by the early thirteenth century, but later Muslim armies managed to produce a synthetic version and put it in canisters that could then be thrown by hand or catapult. Such incendiaries were rarely effective and rarely used.

Chains across rivers or harbors, on the other hand, were very effective. A long chain crossed the Golden Horn, protecting Constantinople. How early it was placed there is unknown, but Icelandic sagas record it as a hindrance that had to be overcome when Harald Hardrada, later king of Norway, escaped from the city in the mid-eleventh century: his ship managed to make it over the chain with difficulty, although a companion vessel sank trying to do the same. Other chains protected the harbor on Rhodes, the city of York, the Golubac Fortress on the Danube, and even, centuries later, West Point, on the Hudson.

Martin’s depiction of medieval warfare certainly has some accurate points, but, like his description of medieval life more generally, it is far more action-packed than its historical counterpart. The desired result of medieval warfare was usually not death but flight. Trying to kill the enemy was costly and potentially risky; it was easier just to get him to run away.

Battles often turned on chance factors such as a leader’s death or heroism or the combatants’ relative enthusiasm. Good strategy involved finding a way to challenge perceived weaker forces, causing them to panic and rout, and then quickly claiming victory. Often medieval battles took no more time than 20 or 30 minutes from start to finish; longer fights were unusual.

The battle of Courtrai, fought between the French army and rebellious Flemish townspeople on July 11, 1302, was one of the bloodiest of all medieval battles, in part because the townspeople knew that if they lost they might well be massacred. The Flemish army prepared the field for expected French cavalry charges, digging ditches that were often flooded or concealed, and established their lines along a bend in a river to make their own soldiers’ desertion difficult. Flemish soldiers did not break and run when the French charged and the battle took several hours to fight. Flemish forces were armed with spears and spike-tipped staves; these were used to knock French cavalry from their mounts, after which a coup de grace could be administered with a dagger. Hundreds of men were killed, perhaps as many as a thousand.

But for every Courtrai there were several Patays (1429), with English troops lying in ambush but being revealed and flushed quickly from the field by the French, and Towtons (1461), with a brief archery exchange followed by a single Yorkist charge that routed the Lancastrians. Neither Patay nor Towton — nor the endless routine campaigning that involved little violence but lots of boredom, logistical troubles, and dysentery — makes for good fantasy literature. Martin knows this — which is why he treats the highly unusual Courtrai level of violence as his norm.

At times, Martin clearly invokes the Wars of the Roses, what with the house of Lannister (Lancaster) locked in a rivalry with the house of Stark (York), and there are parallels to Mongol invasions (the Dothraki), the Hanseatic League (the Free Cities), and so forth. But searching too intensely for the “real” elements beneath the text is pointless, since what is truly captivating about Martin’s world — the detailed descriptions, the strong dialogue, the multifaceted characters, the intricate plots and subplots — stems from not from his source material but from his own imagination. That turns out to be the true magic.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137363/kelly-devries/game-of-thrones-as-history?page=show

I never met my mother’s aunt, but the memory of her lingered around the margins of my childhood. Perhaps it was inevitable that a person whose name meant “Honor” would invoke a child’s fascination and wonder, just as if she were named “Truth” or “Fortune.” But perhaps “Honor” in particular meant more to me because I was a girl. The burden of upholding honor, the trickiness of maintaining it, and the strictures of respecting it increasingly defined my life as I got older.

My mother’s aunt died before I was born, not long after my mother (one of four sisters) was married

in the late seventies. She, her mother, and her sisters grew up on the suburban edges of Karachi, before those edges of the city were as populous or as accessible as they are now. In a modern bungalow in the sandy, almost-hilly recess of North Nazimabad, my mother and aunts learned life’s lessons through the lives of the women around them. The story of Aunt Honor, unfolding before them, was a cautionary tale. She was all wrong for the new country made just for the subcontinent’s Muslims: too friendly, too flirtatious, too eager for frivolity. She had come from Bombay, a city with a cosmopolitan culture where she lived among an urbane set of Iranian émigrés and Zoroastrian socialites who saw theater in the evenings and opera on the weekends.

Karachi was different—a city anxious and uncertain about what it meant to be Muslim and democratic and cosmopolitan and, of course, female

and honorable. This was true even in the sixties and seventies; I had trouble imagining the theater matinees and dance recitals of that era in the post-Islamization Karachi of the late eighties and nineties. In this Karachi, Aunt Honor, with her Persian ancestry and her elegant Bombay society mien, stood out. From my mother’s telling, it is difficult to extricate the lessons from the life. Her two sisters, including my grandmother, were better at reading and following the dictates of respectability in the new country, better at compromise, better at being female.

Aunt Honor, like her sisters, was married, but her union was shadowed with doubt from the start. With her characteristic impetuosity, she insisted on marrying on a day on the Iranian calendar that my superstitious great-grandmother believed was inauspicious. She gathered her similarly rebellious friends, the eggers-on of the ill-fated, and married a man from a Sindhi family. He enjoyed a prominent post in the inland city of Hyderabad, so the bride and groom set off for a new life deep inside Pakistan. Aunt Honor would be wife and host, and it seemed all would be well.

But when Aunt Honor’s expectations did not meet reality, she refused to follow the hushed tradition of saying nothing when nothing good can be said. It is said that her husband was abusive, that she returned again and again from the isolation of Hyderabad beaten and bruised, emotionally if not visibly. She rebelled against her husband and her marriage at the same time that my mother passed through adolescence. In her sister’s home, full of teenage girls brimming with aspirations and hope, Aunt Honor cast the bitterness of her own failure, her realization of the violence and antagonism that relationships can be reduced to. Aunt Honor’s disappointments came fast and furious and always at times that were supposed to be joyous—the two Eids, birthdays, weddings. She told stories of manipulation and exploitation, of accusations of infidelity, of beatings. With each one of them, she was diminished more and more, from a bubbly, charming beauty to a washed out, morose, and hostile shadow. Her face hardened and lost its bloom. To kill the pain she began to take pills; to free herself from the pills, she took some more.

And then one day the fights were over forever. Aunt Honor left her husband and told my grandmother that she would not return again to the cruel man she had married. But there was no room to weep for her tragedy; my mother and her sisters were to be married, and Aunt Honor’s act jeopardized all of their futures. It was yet another episode of selfishness whose price would be paid by others. Aunt Honor’s decline continued. She became mentally ill, attempted suicide, and was institutionalized, her life—a life that did not fit in the spaces available—gone awry. The family found Aunt Honor a room, rented from a respectable family, where she could live alone, hidden from the scrutiny of suitors awaiting another generation of women. In her seclusion, Aunt Honor rode the tides of paranoia and ostracism that were now her life. She never forgave her mother and sisters, whose concerns about respectability she laughed at in her lunacy.

My mother does not remember her Aunt Honor fondly. The acrimony of her end was too large and pressing, her transgressions impressed too deeply on the girls that watched them unfold. There is an Aunt Honor in the life of every Pakistani woman, indeed perhaps in the life of every woman. I tell her story—the story of this ancestor who was transformed from a woman to a lesson—to underscore a paradox that women everywhere are led to believe: that there are no good women without bad ones, enlightened women without ignorant ones, empowered women without weak ones, and free women without enslaved ones.

The moral hues of Aunt Honor’s life were marked by the women who told it to me. But her story echoes with a question both they and I continue to wrestle with decades after her death: Is the enlightened woman the one who stomachs easily the silences and manipulations that enable survival in a world made for men, or one like Aunt Honor who rebels and is left to endure the bleak punishments that come with that choice? I cannot answer for us all, but my words here, from a future that has finally arrived, come out of remembrance and respect and love for a woman so castigated in her present.

The story of Aunt Honor, a newly Pakistani woman who lived and died in the remote recesses of a foreign land, is not only a story of a woman wronged by circumstances, of the vagaries of female existence in a patriarchal society. It is a story about the disastrous dance of opposites that divides and conquers and silences women, besetting them with hatreds and capturing them in boxes so they become schooled in blaming only each other, while remaining convinced that the women who fall and fail will never, ever be them.
http://dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=704

The decades-old winter of frozen and fossilised structures and systems in the Arab world are thawing.

The term exceptionalism in the Arab context harks back to Samuel Huntington’s thesis that envisages the progression of democracy in waves. The third wave was frozen after its initial advances in the 1970s. It never washed the shores of the Arab/Muslim world, according to this thesis. Hence the Arab exceptionalism. Today, the term has been reinvented in the context of the Arab Spring. The Spring is a year old, and not a single crowned head has rolled so far. Hence, the monarchical exceptionalism.

The institution of monarchy does provide a buffer between the monarch and his subjects in the form of a government structure. The king has the privilege of sacking a besieged government and still remaining in power. In the case of Saudi Arabia, the oil-wealth, a small population, huge government patronage, welfare economy, etc., provide additional immunity. On the other hand, an ageing leadership, internet-savvy and educated youth, assertive women, sectarian divisions, and a contagious “Arab Spring” all around in the neighbourhood indicate a partial and potential vulnerability of the Saudi King.

Youth, women & minorities

The condition of the youth, women and the minorities is the barometer of a country’s socio-political health. A closer scrutiny of these three segments of Saudi society is necessary to understand the general ethos in the country. There is no uniform mobilisation and there have been no widespread protests in the country so far.

The Saudi youth, women and the Shias in the east of the country have voiced their grievances separately, nonetheless.

In view of the tightly secured Saudi streets, cyberspace has provided an alternative platform to mark the popular protests. Internet activists have resorted to it in a big way. Blogs have appeared to express the anger; documentaries have been made to expose poverty that has never been acknowledged. Petitions have been signed to call for a constitutional monarchy. There was an attempt at forming a political party. The founders were arrested almost immediately.

Saudi women live under the guardianship of their male relatives. Their decisions to get education, to work, to travel or to receive health care must be endorsed by their guardians. They are not permitted to drive or ride in a vehicle driven by someone who is not a close male relative or an employee. King Abdullah evoked a flurry of expectant speculation, when he stated that the Saudi women would “one day be able to drive.” That was soon after he inherited the Saudi monarchy. After waiting several years for that “one day,” the women have become restive.

Late last year, some drove and posted the videos of themselves behind the wheels on YouTube and other social networks. Their cases are pending before the courts and they will not go unpunished.

Late last year, King Abdullah announced in a five-minute speech televised live that he was granting women the right to vote in future municipal elections, the right to run as candidates, and that they would be appointed to the Shura Council, the 150-member body that advises the King on legislation and policy. This time around, fewer Saudi women are reported to be excited about it. Some are sceptical, and many more cynical.

All Saudis follow Islam. There is a major sectarian cleavage between the Sunni and the Shia interpretations of Islam. The Shias are the largest minority in the country, constituting anywhere between four and 15 per cent of the population and numbering anywhere between one and four million. What makes the Shia situation crucial is the fact that the oil wealth is located under their soil and in the water around their land. Left to themselves, theirs could be the richest state in the entire region. Protests erupted in the Eastern Province on the “Day of Rage” in mid-March last year, and have continued since then. A hundred people have been arrested, scores have been shot dead.

Survival, sectarianism & Iran

The Saudi responses to the Arab Spring in its neighbourhood can neatly be summarised in three words: survival, sectarianism and Iran. Zainul Abedin ben Ali, Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Qaddafi did not survive the onslaught of the Arab Spring. The signs of its nascent arrival in the Kingdom are already evident. An active foreign policy to claim leadership of the Sunni Arabs, therefore, is an imperative for the royal survival. Iran, a Shia non-Arab power across the Gulf waters, to that extent, is the prime target of Saudi activism.

The Saudi involvement with the Arab Spring has seen a progression with each case. The Saudis were reportedly disappointed by the U.S. abandoning the besieged Hosni Mubarak and offered to restore the monetary assistance that the U.S. withdrew from him. King Abdullah came out in support of Mr. Mubarak from his sickbed in Morocco. The Saudis’ response to the Libyan developments was one of reticence, even as they went along with the Qatari lead in inviting foreign intervention.

Yemen is a complicated and multi-layered conflict situation. The Saudis have three major concerns. One, the Saudi-born-and-bred al-Qaeda has found a safe haven in Yemen. Two, the long and uncontrolled border has been a regular route for illegal immigration, arms smuggling and narcotics trade. Three, the Saudis fear waves of Yemeni refugees, if the situation deteriorates. The Saudis have sought to manage the Yemeni situation, first by granting the former President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, political asylum, and then facilitating his exit.

It was the Spring in Bahrain that jolted the Saudis into action. A small island Kingdom with a Sunni ruler and roughly 70 per cent Shia population, Bahrain has always been divided along the sectarian cleavage. The Spring, predictably, turned into the Shia struggle for equality. Political stability and a compliant regime in Bahrain are of utmost importance to the U.S., as the American base on the island is considered the most important strategic territory outside the U.S. proper. Any disturbance in the country would be unacceptable to the U.S. and its Saudi ally.

As the violence erupted beyond the Bahraini authority’s capability to tackle it, the Saudis stepped in. A convoy of 150 armoured troop carriers and about 50 lightly armed vehicles carried about 1,000 Saudi soldiers across the King Fahd Causeway into Bahrain in mid-March.

The Saudi stand on Syria, unlike on Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain, is to support the uprising. Lest there be a doubt about its motive in castigating President Bashar al-Assad’s repressive policy, the Saudi Prince, Turki al-Faisal, explained it thus: “The impending fall of Mr. Assad’s barbarous regime provides a rare strategic opportunity to weaken Iran. Without this vital ally, Tehran will find it more difficult to foment discord in the Arab world. Today, there is a chance for the United States and Saudi Arabia to contain Iran and prevent it from destabilising the region.” The quote is an open admission; even an assertion. The Saudi path to Iran runs through Syria.

What next?

Tunisia, Libya and Egypt in North Africa have been the harbingers of the Arab Spring. All three of them have witnessed regime changes and are in the process of taking stock and moving forward at their own individual pace. Whether the Spring will spread eastward in a typical domino fashion to the rest of the Arab world remains to be seen. Whether it eventually brings about a comprehensive reshaping of the region is uncertain at best. What is certain is that the decades-old winter of frozen and fossilised structures and systems in the Arab world are thawing. And Saudi Arabia is no exception.

(Professor Gulshan Dietl is at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.)
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article3263432.ece?homepage=true

On January 20, 2009, when Barack Obama assumed the presidency, labor found the stars aligned to pass meaningful labor law reform. It had a friend in the president and vice president, with both Obama and Biden having been co-sponsors of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) when they were in the Senate. The Democrats had a majority in the House and a near filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, if one counted the independents that caucused with the party. They even had a Republican on board who had previously voted for cloture on EFCA (then-Republican Arlen Specter), providing the possibility that the legislation would not only pass but would have the all-important veneer of bipartisanship. EFCA would have made several moderate, but important, amendments to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). These included card-check (which would have allowed a majority of workers to sign cards to organize a union, rather than proceed under the more difficult National Labor Relations Board–supervised election process), mandatory interest arbitration on stalled negotiations, and increased penalties for employers that commit violations of labor law.

Even under these optimal conditions, which are unlikely to repeat in the near future, EFCA was not even put to a formal vote in the Senate. EFCA’s defeat marked the fourth time since the 1947 passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which diminished labor rights under the NLRA, that Democrats controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, pushed for labor law reform, and failed. Under Lyndon Johnson, Democrats fell short in a Senate effort to modify Taft-Hartley. Under Jimmy Carter, labor law reform that would have enhanced penalties for unfair labor practices failed by two votes in a Democrat-controlled Senate. During Bill Clinton’s first term, legislation to outlaw the permanent replacement of strikers stalled. And EFCA, which many called “labor’s last stand,” died the slow death of the silent filibuster. Republican-controlled bodies of Congress are unlikely to support efforts to strengthen labor under any circumstances, but progressives need to begin developing a new strategy now so that when they do regain full political power, they do not miss a fifth chance to revitalize labor.

It is time for supporters of labor to try an approach to reforming labor laws that does not involve a national conversation on the pros and cons of procedures like “card-check”—which most Americans know little about—and instead focuses on the fact that labor organizing is a civil right and should be written into our civil rights laws. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which extends the public protections for fundamental rights articulated in the Constitution to the private sphere, is the appropriate legislative vehicle to reform labor law. The result of an amendment to the Civil Rights Act would be significant: just as it is now illegal to fire or discipline someone for race or gender or national origin or religion, it would be illegal under the Civil Rights Act to fire or discipline someone for trying to organize or join a union.

Conceptually, amending the Civil Rights Act would not break new ground. It is already illegal, under the NLRA, to fire someone for organizing. But amending the Act to protect union organizing would offer two advantages. First, it would put teeth into the existing NLRA prohibition by applying the full force of Civil Rights penalties and procedures to businesses, which currently break the law with relative impunity. Today, labor leaders note, the right to form a union is “the only legally guaranteed right that Americans are afraid to exercise.” Amending the Civil Rights Act would provide a far more effective deterrent to lawbreaking than the current statute, thereby finally recognizing the theoretical right to organize as authentic.

The second advantage to this approach lies in its potential to break a longstanding political logjam surrounding labor law reform. Amending the Civil Rights Act rather than the NLRA would, for the broader American public, help elevate the debate from the obscure confines of labor law to the higher arena of civil rights, which Americans readily understand. Whereas labor law is seen by many as a body of technical rules governing relations between two sets of “special interests”—business and labor—Americans understand the principle of nondiscrimination as an issue of fairness. Employment rights have long been considered civil rights, and there is no reason to exclude labor rights from this formulation.

Previous efforts to amend the NLRA have encountered the Catch-22 of labor reform. In order to achieve reform, labor needs political power, which requires expanding union membership; but in order to grow, unions need labor law reform. As Harvard Law Professor Paul C. Weiler noted more than a decade ago, “No part of American law in the last fifty years has been less amenable to reform than labor law.” The Civil Rights strategy would offer a fresh approach.

Recent developments suggest that labor may have the public on its side. Following the 2010 elections, Republican governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and elsewhere took what had primarily been an assault on private sector collective bargaining rights to the public sector, which had previously faced a more favorable climate. These attacks on public sector collective bargaining prominently raised issues about the role of labor in American society and energized many progressives who had taken the right of employees to band together collectively for granted. Indeed, recent polling suggests that while the opinions of Americans are mixed on unions, they strongly believe, by margins of two-to-one or even three-to-one, in the basic right of collective bargaining. In November 2011, the people of Ohio overwhelmingly voted to repeal an anti-union law that restricted public employee collective bargaining rights.

Moreover, the attack on public sector unions for receiving more generous pension and health benefits than private sector workers raises the possibility of a different discussion: rather than pursuing a race to the bottom, where the diminishing benefits of nonunionized private employees are used as a club against unionized public employees, why not take steps to strengthen private sector unionization, so that private sector employees can enjoy the same level of benefits that those employed in the public sector do

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SOME HAVE argued that organized labor is an anachronism and that its decline in the United States is due to economic and technological changes, like the advent of globalization. However, strong union movements in other industrialized democracies that are affected by these same changes show that story to be incomplete. Likewise, the notion that modern workers no longer desire to join unions is contradicted by evidence suggesting that, in 2007, 53 percent of non-managerial, nonunion workers would probably or definitely vote for a union if they could—up from 30 percent in 1984. If just one-quarter of those people unionized, the labor movement would double in size.

Instead, the social science evidence suggests that the NLRA has failed to deter employers from firing workers who are trying to organize a union. The chief problem: while existing labor law makes it technically illegal to fire employees for trying to organize, the price for violating the law is extremely small, leading employers to break the law with increasing frequency. Cornell University researcher Kate Bronfenbrenner found that, between 1999 and 2003, employees were illegally dismissed in 34 percent of union drives for engaging in union organizing. Similarly, a 2007 study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research estimated that “almost one in five union organizers or activists can expect to be fired as a result of their activities in union election campaigns.”

One exception to the general decline in labor is the increase in union density among public sector workers, where state statutes rather than the NLRA govern union elections and more than one-third of workers are organized. The fact that public sector unionization has grown in the past half-century while private sector union representation has plummeted suggests that the very real threat of termination may be a significant deterrent to successful organizing efforts. As journalist Hendrik Hertzberg has written in the New Yorker, “It’s not that toll-booth attendants, clerks in government bureaucracies and schoolteachers are by nature tough, hardened militants or have bulging, ropy forearms. It’s that their employer, the government, is in a poor position to routinely and brazenly flout the plain language of the law.”

A review of the international landscape finds that the United States is an outlier among advanced industrial nations in failing to protect worker rights. In a 2010 report, Freedom House found that the United States is less free than forty-one other nations when it comes to protecting labor rights.

The report declared, “The United States is almost alone among economically advanced democracies in its lack of a strong trade union movement in the private sector,” and cited weak penalties for illegal worker discharges as among the causes. Freedom House and other researchers find that our major European competitors—such as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom—protect labor rights far more effectively than the United States. (In contrast to the low ranking of the United States in protecting labor rights, Freedom House commended the United States for the strength of its civil rights laws.)

Amending Title VII of the Civil Rights Act would immediately strengthen the procedures and remedies available to aggrieved employees, by permitting pre-trial discovery and providing jury trials, attorneys’ fees for successful plaintiffs, and compensatory and punitive damages. These procedural and remedial changes would not only help make employees whole after they suffer discrimination for seeking union representation, but would also create powerful deterrents to employers who consider breaking the law.

Writing labor organizing protections into the Civil Rights Act could also spawn a cultural shift in employer behavior. Employers who are found guilty of racial or gender discrimination are today seen to have done something shameful—a seismic shift from the days when businesses routinely espoused racist and chauvinistic attitudes. While the lucrative “labor consulting” industry works with employers to keep unions out, there is no comparable industry to aid employers in thwarting civil rights laws. In fact, it’s the opposite: employers spend billions of dollars a year on human resource departments, in part to ensure that all employees understand and follow the requirements of Title VII.

By contrast, managers are unapologetic about wanting to silence the voice of workers. Walmart CEO Lee Scott, for example, famously said, “We like driving the car and we’re not going to give the steering wheel to anybody but us.” Shifting labor organizing protections to civil rights legislation could, over time, make Americans, like Europeans, see corporations that fire employees for trying to form a union, join the middle class, and have a say in the workplace as morally suspect.

Beyond practical and economic considerations, there are also deep historical and conceptual connections between the labor and civil rights movements in the United States that show why the Civil Rights Act is the right vehicle for protecting those trying to organize a union: (1) labor organizing is a basic human right, which is bound up with an important democratic right to association; (2) strengthening labor advances the values and interests of the civil rights movement by promoting dignity and equality, particularly for people of color; and (3) stronger unions can enhance existing protections against discrimination by race, gender, national origin, and religion by reducing employer discretion and enhancing processes for redress.

Labor organizing is connected to the fundamental constitutional right of association that is recognized as part of the First Amendment. In a democracy, individuals have a right to join together with others to promote their interests and values. Just as the original Civil Rights Act extended the Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition against government discrimination to private sector employers, adding anti-discrimination protection for labor organizing would extend a First Amendment right against government restraint of free association to private sector employers. In 1935, Congress voted to protect workers in exercising their fundamental rights to organize a union and bargain collectively; the protections of the Civil Rights Act would reemphasize that national commitment.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, and Moshe Z. Marvit, a labor and employment discrimination attorney, are the authors of Why Labor Organizing Should Be a Civil Right: Rebuilding a Middle-Class Democracy by Enhancing Worker Voice.
http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=589

Head of Medusa, at the Severan Forum, Leptis Magna, Libya. Photograph: © Martin Bedall/Alamy
Whenever modern civilisations contemplate their own mortality, there is one ghost that will invariably rise up from its grave to haunt their imaginings. In February 1776, a few months after the publication of the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon commented gloomily on the news from America, where rebellion against Britain appeared imminent. “The decline of the two empires, Roman and British, proceeds at an equal pace.” Now, with the west mired in recession and glancing nervously over its shoulder at China, the same parallel is being dusted down. Last summer, when the Guardian’s Larry Elliott wrote an article on the woes of the US economy, the headline almost wrote itself: “Decline and fall of the American empire”.

In The Shadow of ohe Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World
by Tom Holland
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   Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this bookHistorians, it is true, have become increasingly uncomfortable with narratives of decline and fall. Few now would accept that the conquest of Roman territory by foreign invaders was a guillotine brought down on the neck of classical civilisation. The transformation from the ancient world to the medieval is recognised as something far more protracted. “Late antiquity” is the term scholars use for the centuries that witnessed its course. Roman power may have collapsed, but the various cultures of the Roman empire mutated and evolved. “We see in late antiquity,” so Averil Cameron, one of its leading historians, has observed, “a mass of experimentation, new ways being tried and new adjustments made.”

Yet it is a curious feature of the transformation of the Roman world into something recognisably medieval that it bred extraordinary tales even as it impoverished the ability of contemporaries to keep a record of them. “The greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene, in the history of mankind”: so Gibbon described his theme. He was hardly exaggerating: the decline and fall of the Roman empire was a convulsion so momentous that even today its influence on stories with an abiding popular purchase remains greater, perhaps, than that of any other episode in history. It can take an effort, though, to recognise this. In most of the narratives informed by the world of late antiquity, from world religions to recent science-fiction and fantasy novels, the context provided by the fall of Rome’s empire has tended to be disguised or occluded.

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Consider a single sheet of papyrus bearing the decidedly unromantic sobriquet of PERF 558. It was uncovered back in the 19th century at the Egyptian city of Herakleopolis, a faded ruin 80 miles south of Cairo. Herakleopolis itself had passed most of its existence in a condition of somnolent provincialism: first as an Egyptian city, and then, following the conquest of the country by Alexander the Great, as a colony run by and largely for Greeks. The makeover given to it by this new elite was to prove an enduring one. A thousand years on – and some 600 years after its absorption into the Roman empire – Herakleopolis still sported a name that provided, on the banks of the Nile, a little touch of far-off Greece: “the city of Heracles”. PERF 558 too, in its own humble way, also bore witness to the impact on Egypt of an entire millennium of foreign rule. It was a receipt, issued for 65 sheep, presented to two officials bearing impeccably Hellenic names Christophoros and Theodorakios and written in Greek.

But not in Greek alone. The papyrus sheet also featured a second language, one never before seen in Egypt. What was it doing there, on an official council receipt? The sheep, according to a note added in Greek on the back, had been requisitioned by “Magaritai” – but who or what were they? The answer was to be found on the front of the papyrus sheet, within the text of the receipt itself. The “Magaritai”, it appeared, were none other than the people known as “Saracens”: nomads from Arabia, long dismissed by the Romans as “despised and insignificant”. Clearly, that these barbarians were now in a position to extort sheep from city councillors suggested a dramatic reversal of fortunes. Nor was that all. The most bizarre revelation of the receipt, perhaps, lay in the fact that a race of shiftless nomads, bandits who for as long as anyone could remember had been lost to an unvarying barbarism, appeared to have developed their own calendar. “The 30th of the month of Pharmouthi of the first indiction”: so the receipt was logged in Greek, a date which served to place it in year 642 since the birth of Christ. But it was also, so the receipt declared in the Saracens’ own language, “the year twenty two”: 22 years since what? Some momentous occurance, no doubt, of evidently great significance to the Saracens themselves. But what precisely, and whether it might have contributed to the arrival of the newcomers in Egypt, and how it was to be linked to that enigmatic title “Magaritai”, PERF 558 does not say.

We can now recognise the document as the marker of something seismic. The Magaritai were destined to implant themselves in the country far more enduringly than the Greeks or the Romans had ever done.

Arabic, the language they had brought with them, and that appears as such a novelty on PERF 558, is nowadays so native to Egypt that the country has come to rank as the power-house of Arab culture. Yet even a transformation of that order barely touches on the full scale of the changes which are hinted at so prosaically. A new age, of which that tax receipt issued in Herakleopolis in “the year 22″ ranks as the oldest surviving dateable document, had been brought into being. This, to almost one in four people alive today, is a matter of more than mere historical interest. Infinitely more – for it touches, in their opinion, on the very nature of the Divine. The question of what it was that had brought the Magaritai to Herakleopolis, and to numerous other cities besides, has lain, for many centuries now, at the heart of a great and global religion: Islam.

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It was the prompting hand of God, not a mere wanton desire to extort sheep, that had first motivated the Arabs to leave their desert homeland. Such, at any rate, was the conviction of Ibn Hisham, a scholar based in Egypt who wrote a century and a half after the first appearance of the Magaritai in Herakleopolis, but whose fascination with the period, and with the remarkable events that had stamped it, was all-consuming. No longer, by AD 800, were the Magaritai to be reckoned a novelty. Instead – known now as “Muslims”, or “those who submit to God” – they had succeeded in winning for themselves a vast agglomeration of territories: an authentically global empire. Ibn Hisham, looking back at the age which had first seen the Arabs grow conscious of themselves as a chosen people, and surrounded as he was by the ruins of superceded civilisations, certainly had no lack of pages to fill.

 PERF 558 … the receipt for 65 sheep, issued in year 22, written in Greek and Arabic. Photograph: National Museum In Vienna What was it that had brought the Arabs as conquerors to cities such as Herakleopolis, and far beyond? The ambition of Ibn Hisham was to provide an answer. The story he told was that of an Arab who had lived almost two centuries previously, and been chosen by God as the seal of His prophets: Muhammad. Although Ibn Hisham was himself certainly drawing on earlier material, his is the oldest biography to have survived, in the form we have it, into the present day. The details it provided would become fundamental to the way that Muslims have interpreted their faith ever since. That Muhammad had received a series of divine revelations; that he had grown up in the depths of Arabia, in a pagan metropolis, Mecca; that he had fled it for another city, Yathrib, where he had established the primal Muslim state; that this flight, or hijra, had transformed the entire order of time, and come to provide Muslims with their Year One: all this was enshrined to momentous effect by Ibn Hisham. The contrast between Islam and the age that had preceded it was rendered in his biography as clear as that between midday and the dead of night. The white radiance of Muhammad’s revelations, blazing first across Arabia and then to the limits of the world, had served to bring all humanity into a new age of light.

The effect of this belief was to prove incalculable. To this day, even among non-Muslims, it continues to inform the way in which the history of the Middle East is interpreted and understood. Whether in books, museums or universities, the ancient world is imagined to have ended with the coming of Muhammad. Yet even on the presumption that what Islam teaches is correct, and that the revelations of Muhammad did indeed descend from heaven, it is still pushing things to imagine that the theatre of its conquests was suddenly conjured, over the span of a single generation, into a set from The Arabian Nights. That the Arab conquests were part of a much vaster and more protracted drama, the decline and fall of the Roman empire, has been too readily forgotten.

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Place these conquests in their proper context and a different narrative emerges. Heeding the lesson taught by Gibbon back in the 18th century, that the barbarian invasions of Europe and the victories of the Saracens were different aspects of the same phenomenon, serves to open up vistas of drama unhinted at by the traditional Muslim narratives. The landscape through which the Magaritai rode was certainly not unique to Egypt. In the west too, there were provinces that had witnessed the retreat and collapse of a superpower, the depredations of foreign invaders, and the desperate struggle of locals to fashion a new security for themselves. Only in the past few decades has this perspective been restored to its proper place in the academic spotlight. Yet it is curious that long before the historian Peter Brown came to write his seminal volume The World of Late Antiquity – which traced, to influential effect, patterns throughout the half millennium between Marcus Aurelius and the founding of Baghdad – a number of bestselling novelists had got there first.

What their work served to demonstrate was that the fall of the Roman empire, even a millennium and a half on, had lost none of its power to inspire gripping narratives.

“There were nearly twenty-five million inhabited planets in the Galaxy then, and not one but owed allegiance to the Empire whose seat was on Trantor. It was the last half-century in which that could be said.” So begins Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, a self-conscious attempt to relocate Gibbon’s magnum opus to outer space. First published in 1951, it portrayed a galactic imperium on the verge of collapse, and the attempt by an enlightened band of scientists to insure that eventual renaissance would follow its fall. The influence of the novel, and its two sequels, has been huge, and can be seen in every subsequent sci-fi epic that portrays sprawling empires set among the stars – from Star Wars to Battlestar Galactica. Unlike most of his epigoni, however, Asimov drew direct sustenance from his historical model. The parabola of Asimov’s narrative closely follows that of Gibbon. Plenipotentiaries visit imperial outposts for the last time; interstellar equivalents of Frankish or Ostrogothic kingdoms sprout on the edge of the Milky Way; the empire, just as its Roman precursor had done under Justinian, attempts a comeback. Most intriguingly of all, in the second novel of the series, we are introduced to an enigmatic character named the Mule, who emerges seemingly from nowhere to transform the patterns of thought of billions, and conquer much of the galaxy. The context makes it fairly clear that he is intended to echo Muhammad. In an unflattering homage to Muslim tradition, Asimov even casts the Mule as a mutant, a freak of nature so unexpected that nothing in human science could possibly have explained or anticipated him.

Parallels with the tales told of Muhammad are self-evident in a second great epic of interstellar empire, Frank Herbert’s Dune. A prophet arises from the depths of a desert world to humiliate an empire and launch a holy war – a jihad. Herbert’s hero, Paul Atreides, is a man whose sense of supernatural mission is shadowed by self-doubt. “I cannot do the simplest thing,” he reflects, “without its becoming a legend.” Time will prove him correct. Without ever quite intending it, he founds a new religion, and launches a wave of conquest that ends up convulsing the galaxy. In the end, we know, there will be “only legend, and nothing to stop the jihad”.

There is an irony in this, an echo not only of the spectacular growth of the historical caliphate, but of how the traditions told about Muhammad evolved as well. Ibn Hisham’s biography may have been the first to survive – but it was not the last. As the years went by, and ever more lives of the Prophet came to be written, so the details grew ever more miraculous. Fresh evidence – wholly unsuspected by Muhammad’s earliest biographers – would see him revered as a man able to foretell the future, to receive messages from camels, and to pick up a soldier’s eyeball, reinsert it, and make it work better than before. The result was yet one more miracle: the further in time from the Prophet a biographer, the more extensive his biography was likely to be.

Herbert’s novel counterpoints snatches of unreliable biography – in which Paul has become “Muad’Dib”, the legendary “Dune Messiah” – with the main body of the narrative, which reveals a more secular truth. Such, of course, is the prerogative of fiction. Nevertheless, it does suggest, for the historian, an unsettling question: to what extent might the traditions told by Muslims about their prophet contradict the actual reality of the historical Muhammad? Nor is it only western scholars who are prone to asking this – so too, for instance, are Salafists, keen as they are to strip away the accretions of centuries, and reveal to the faithful the full unspotted purity of the primal Muslim state. But what if, after all the cladding has been torn down, there is nothing much left, beyond the odd receipt for sheep? That Muhammad existed is evident from the scattered testimony of Christian near-contemporaries, and that the Magaritai themselves believed a new order of time to have been ushered in is clear from their mention of a “Year 22″. But do we see in the mirror held up by Ibn Hisham, and the biographers who followed him, an authentic reflection of Muhammad’s life – or something distorted out of recognition by a combination of awe and the passage of time?

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There may be a lack of early Muslim sources for Muhammad’s life, but in other regions of the former Roman empire there are even more haunting silences. The deepest of all, perhaps, is the one that settled over the one-time province of Britannia. Around 800AD, at the same time as Ibn Hisham was drawing up a list of nine engagements in which Muhammad was said personally to have fought, a monk in the far distant wilds of Wales was compiling a very similar record of victories, 12 in total, all of them attributable to a single leader, and cast by their historian as indubitable proof of the blessings of God. The name of the monk was Nennius; and the name of his hero – who was supposed to have lived long before – was Arthur. The British warlord, like the Arab prophet, was destined to have an enduring afterlife. The same centuries which would see Muslim historians fashion ever more detailed and loving histories of Muhammad and his companions would also witness, far beyond the frontiers of the caliphate, the gradual transformation of the mysterious Arthur and his henchmen into the model of a Christian court. The battles listed by Nennius would come largely to be forgotten: in their place, haunting the imaginings of all Christendom, would be the conviction that there had once existed a realm where the strong had protected the weak, where the bravest warriors had been the purest in heart, and where a sense of Christian fellowship had bound everyone to the upholding of a common order. The ideal was to prove a precious one – so much so that to this day, there remains a mystique attached to the name of Camelot.

Nor was the world of Arthur the only dimension of magic and mystery to have emerged out of the shattered landscape of the one-time Roman empire. The English, the invaders against whom Arthur was supposed to have fought, told their own extraordinary tales. Gawping at the crumbling masonry of Roman towns, they saw in it “the work of giants”. Gazing into the shadows beyond their halls, they imagined ylfe ond orcnéas, and orthanc enta geweorc – “elves and orcs”, and “the skilful work of giants”. These stories, in turn, were only a part of the great swirl of epic, Gothic and Frankish and Norse, which preserved in their verses the memory of terrible battles, and mighty kings, and the rise and fall of empires: trace-elements of the death-agony of Roman greatness. Most of these poems, though, like the kingdoms that were so often their themes, no longer exist. They are fragments, or mere rumours of fragments. The wonder-haunted fantasies of post-Roman Europe have themselves become spectres and phantasms. “Alas for the lost lore, the annals and old poets.”

So wrote JRR Tolkien, philologist, scholar of Old English, and a man so convinced of the abiding potency of the vanished world of epic that he devoted his life to conjuring it back into being. The Lord of the Rings may not be an allegory of the fall of the Roman empire, but it is shot through with echoes of the sound and fury of that “awful scene”. What happened and what might have happened swirl, and meet, and merge. An elf quotes a poem on an abandoned Roman town. Horsemen with Old English names ride to the rescue of a city that is vast and beautiful, and yet, like Constantinople in the wake of the Arab conquests, “falling year by year into decay”. Armies of a Dark Lord repeat the strategy of Attila in the battle of the Catalaunian plains – and suffer a similar fate. Tolkien’s ambition, so Tom Shippey has written, “was to give back to his own country the legends that had been taken from it”. In the event, his achievement was something even more startling. Such was the popularity of The Lord of the Rings, and such its influence on an entire genre of fiction, that it breathed new life into what for centuries had been the merest bones of an entire but forgotten worldscape.

It would seem, then, that when an empire as great as Rome’s declines and falls, the reverberations can be made to echo even in outer space, even in a mythical Middle Earth. In the east as in the west, in the Fertile Crescent as in Britain, what emerged from the empire’s collapse, forged over many centuries, were new identities, new values, new presumptions. Indeed, many of these would end up taking on such a life of their own that the very circumstances of their birth would come to be obscured – and on occasion forgotten completely. The age that had witnessed the collapse of Roman power, refashioned by those looking back to it centuries later in the image of their own times, was cast by them as one of wonders and miracles, irradiated by the supernatural, and by the bravery of heroes. The potency of that vision is one that still blazes today.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/30/fall-roman-empire-rise-islam

An Afghan man exchanged currency for a client at the Money and Exchange Market in Kabul.

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KABUL, Afghanistan — America may be struggling to come up with a viable exit plan for Afghanistan, but Abdul Wasay Manani is sure of his.

The broad-set Afghan butcher spent the past seven years trucking cattle in from the Pakistan border and building a thriving business for himself and his family, serving up some of the best hamburgers in Kabul for the embassies and expatriates and their barbecues.

But this month, Mr. Manani, 38, flew to India for 14 days to scout out a new business, and a new home, ready to leave Afghanistan and everything he worked to build here, just in case things fall apart when most Americans and other foreign troops leave in 2014. “If the Taliban come like last time, ordering people around with whips, I can’t stay here,” he said. “I have to leave this country to keep my family safe.”

Many Afghans share his concern. Interviews with business owners, analysts and economists paint a picture of extreme anxiety in both the domestic and international business communities here as the Afghan-United States relationship deteriorates and as the Western drawdown begins.

In this environment, troubling indicators are not hard to find. More than 30,400 Afghans applied for asylum in industrialized nations in 2011, the highest level in 10 years and four times the number seeking asylum in 2005, according to provisional figures from the United Nations. Meanwhile, the number of displaced Afghans outside the country seeking to come the other way slowed to 68,000 last year,

down from 110,000 in 2010 and a big decrease from the 1.8 million Afghans who repatriated in 2002, the year after the Taliban were driven out of power.

The only Western bank operating here said on Wednesday that it would be leaving. Piles of cash equaling about a quarter of Afghanistan’s annual economic output were physically carried out of Afghanistan last year. Fewer foreign companies are seeking to do business here, and those already here are downsizing and putting off new investments. And there are businessmen like Mr. Manani who already have a foot out the door, working actively toward a Plan B for life and business outside Afghanistan.

Senior Afghan officials are acutely aware of it, and are alternately worried and angry. “Sometimes I hear that some businessmen are fleeing and moving their businesses to outside Afghanistan,” President Hamid Karzai said at a news conference this month. “Curses be upon such businessmen that made tons of money here and now that the Americans are leaving they flee. They can leave right now. We don’t need them.”

Given the importance of trying to bolster economic independence in the overall plan for Afghanistan, the skittish responses and decreasing investment and hiring strike right at hopes that this impoverished nation, still barely on the cusp of modernity, can thrive on its own.

Large companies are expressing worries about security. One of the most significant is Standard Chartered, the only big Western bank with a branch in the country, which said Wednesday that it was turning over its operations to a local Afghan bank and withdrawing mainly because of deteriorating conditions.

Mohammad Qurban Haqjo, chief executive of the Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and Industries, said the head of one of the country’s four big cellphone companies had told him that he planned to take his investments out of the country after 2014.

“It is still two years to go, but we are hearing from our businesses that everybody is raising this question,” Mr. Haqjo said.

Even those who are trying to stay, foreign companies in particular, have become very conservative. According to the Afghanistan Investment Support Agency, capital spending by foreign companies newly registered in the past year, at $55 million, was the lowest rate in at least seven years, and about one-eighth the rate’s peak in 2006.

According to Masuda Sultan, an Afghan-American businesswoman who grew up in Queens, the caution is expressing itself in businesses that are downsizing work forces, for example, or holding off on new investments.

“Among the people I know, there is planning going on in terms of investment decisions,” she said. “They are not packing up their bags just yet, but people are looking to diversify abroad or into other business sectors within Afghanistan.”

Some of the companies that are more heavily dependent on the military and the aid economy, like construction and logistics businesses, are trying to stay put by reconfiguring toward the few areas where analysts feel Afghanistan might have growth potential, like mining or trade.

But others are nervous that Afghanistan’s nebulous private sector will not be enough to fill the gap left by the United States’ military and development spending. World Bank figures back up those fears: the bank estimates that outside aid is equivalent to more than 90 percent of the country’s total economic activity, and forecasts a slowdown in growth in the coming years to 5 or 6 percent from about 9 percent, or much lower if security worsens.

That is in part because, despite the billions in reconstruction and aid money poured into Afghanistan, there still is no major manufacturing or technology base that could be a driver of future prosperity. A new Pepsi bottling plant on the outskirts of Kabul is trumpeted as one of the few new investment triumphs.

“There is a sense that they have to change from a war economy to a postwar economy, and people definitely expect it to contract,” said Thomas Rosenstock, a lawyer, originally from New York, who helps foreign companies entering the Afghan market. “It’s uncertain how dramatic the contraction would be.”

Then there are those who are voting with their cash.

Each week tens of millions of dollars — some thought to be diverted American aid or drug money — are packed into suitcases or boxes and loaded onto planes leaving Kabul International Airport for destinations like Dubai, capital flight that is increasing steadily ahead of the 2014 deadline, officials say.

Noorullah Delawari, the central bank governor, recently imposed restrictions limiting the amount a passenger can take out of the country to $20,000 a trip.

But the mountain of departing cash that is officially declared — about $4.6 billion last year, the same size as the Afghan government’s annual budget — may be matched by money fleeing through other airports and over borders, or seeping out through the black market, an Afghan official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “We really don’t know how much is being moved,” the official said.

Security officials are still struggling to ensure that people passing through the V.I.P. area of the Kabul airport put their bags through X-ray machines installed a few years ago in part to keep people from sneaking cash out, the official said.

For Mr. Manani, the butcher, and others like him who do not have huge amounts of capital as a safety blanket, the hopes that they can stay at home and still expand their businesses are being tempered by the need to ensure their families’ safety.

His plan is rooted in an effort to start a second business in New Delhi with his local Sikh business partner there, he says. That would enable him to get a long-term visa, and so a way out for his wife and five children, as well as his parents, brothers and a sister and their children, all of whom depend on him and would have to move with him, he says.

“Every businessman is just thinking about how to move from here, about how to be safe,” Mr. Manani said as he stood in front of a big cooler where sides of beef and lamb were hanging. Through the doorway into another room, four workers were busily cutting and packing.

He grew up in the north of Afghanistan and fought in the bitter civil war of the 1990s. There is no way he wants to relive that experience, he said.

“I don’t have the energy to take the gun again and start fighting,” he said. “That’s why I am looking for a way out.”

Habib Zohori contributed reporting.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/31/world/asia/businesses-may-flee-afghanistan-after-troop-withdrawal.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

NATO is trying to establish a larger presence in Central Asia’s energy sector to reduce Russian dominance [GALLO/GETTY] 
London, United Kingdom – Dubbed as the “pivot region” of world politics, the five Central Asian nations of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan have collectively gained an immense strategic importance over the last two decades, thanks to their geography and vast deposits of natural resources including gold, gas, oil and uranium.

Today, China has its eyes on Central Asia as a source of energy and raw materials for its expanding economy, as well as a “critical frontier” for its trade expansion and ethnic stability.

Chinese state-owned enterprises have penetrated deep into the infrastructure and energy sectors across the region, especially in Turkmenistan, while the government has sought to increase its soft power by sponsoring a large network of Confucius Institutes in the region’s capitals.

China leaders set out to map five-year growth plan
 

In what seems to be both a response to NATO’s expansion in Eastern Europe and an attempt to keep the US and China’s Central Asian ambitions at bay, Russia – the traditional Central Asian power – has been seeking to expand its power in, and relevance to, the region since the late 1990s.

Currently, Moscow exerts a great deal of influence over the politics of Central Asian states. It is also a crucial market for Central Asia’s “surplus labour” and therefore, a key source of remittances, which in turn make some regional governments extremely vulnerable to Moscow’s demands. The recent spat between Moscow and Dushanbe over the imprisonment of a Russian pilot by Tajik authorities is a case in point. Angered by Tajikistan’s apparent independent decision, Moscow secured Vladimir Sadovnichy’s release by threatening Rahmon’s government with mass deportation of Tajik workers.

Preoccupied with Eastern Europe in the 1990s, NATO’s Central Asian strategy was limited to the expansion of ties with  energy-rich Kazakhstan and prevention of a Russian monopoly over pipelines carrying oil from the Caspian Sea region. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, however, Central Asia’s proximity to Afghanistan elevated its strategic importance by offering a “natural” force projection platform as well as a relatively safe exit gate from the Afghan theatre.

Depending on Russian gas

In addition, Europe’s ever increasing dependency on Russian gas and the various strategic vulnerabilities embedded in such dependency have encouraged NATO to try to establish a firmer presence in Central Asia’s energy sector in order to reduce Russia’s dominance over the international gas market.

Aware of this ongoing and intensifying great power rivalry in their region, Central Asian states themselves have embarked upon a geopolitical chess game playing, albeit to various extent, Washington, Beijing and Moscow against one another so to maintain and secure their holds on power in their respective countries.

As NATO tries to utilise the region as its “exit road” from Afghanistan and pursues its ambitious New Silk Road Strategy, therefore, it is imperative to explore NATO’s options and their limits, for securing these ends, especially that a regional political crisis of some kind over the short to medium term seems inevitable.

Like their counterparts in the much of the Arab world, lives of average citizens in Central Asia are marred with misery and misfortune. Central Asia, in other words, suffers from autocratic rules, widespread corruption, endemic poverty, chronic human rights abuses, a youth bulge, high rates of inflation and unemployment, imposed secularism and religious intolerance.

Since 2005, in fact, the region has gone through a series of political crisis evident in public strikes in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and indeed, Kyrgyzstan, which has managed to set a world record by undergoing two revolutions over a five-year span.

And to make matters worse, there are unresolved intra-regional disputes over border demarcations and management of scarce water resources which have not only sharpened mutual distrust and recriminations, but have also exposed regional states to political developments in each other’s territories.

Kyrgyz revolt backfires on economy
 

Last year’s quarrel between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan over a railway blast near the Uzbek-Afghan border, which Uzbekistan described as a terrorist attack, is a testimony to this. Dependent on Uzbekistan for its rail connections with the outside world, Dushanbe first blamed Tashkent for the explosion and then complained that it had been “inexplicably slow in repairing the bridge”.

Influence of Russia

Hence, advocating democracy is neither a remedy to Central Asia’s myriad political and economic ills nor a sound strategic option for NATO. In the context of entrenched authoritarian political cultures inherited from the Soviet era, rise of China and the continuing influence of Russia whose developmental model does not equate trade and economic prosperity with democracy and a lack of state institutions as well as civic entities in largely nomadic societies of Central Asia, any democratisation project could have the unintended effect of complicating matters further, while also pushing regional states towards the Chinese and Russian orbits.

Any attempt at democratisation in Central Asia should be painstakingly slow and confined to assisting Kyrgyzstan, as it tries to consolidate a parliamentarian system of governance. Should Kyrgyzstan succeed in its democratic experiment, there can then be hopes that other nations might follow suit in the future. The bad news here is that the current, democratically elected government in Bishkek seems to be tilting closer to Russia and thus, it might not ask for any Western assistance.

NATO could also go at it alone and try to capitalise on Central Asian regimes’ desire for its continual engagement with the region as a “counterbalance” to Russia and China in return for a permanent base. Although appreciative of Chinese investment, regional states are nonetheless fearful of becoming a “mere raw materials appendage” to China.

Russia, on the other hand, is distrusted due to her continuous meddling in the internal affairs of Central Asian states. Nevertheless, a unilateral NATO approach to the region would certainly irk Beijing and Moscow, encouraging them to forge closer ties and transform the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO) into a truly anti-NATO organisation.

Notwithstanding official statements, institutionalisation of Sino-Russo rivalries in both Central Asia and further afield – not an anti-NATO posture – has been the key reason behind the establishment of the SCO. This is evident in the fact that Belarus became a dialogue partner at the organisation immediately after its completion of lucrative trade and military agreements with China; a development that Russia was not particularly content with.

Dwindling economic influence

Alternatively, NATO could forge an alliance with Russia in its effort to stay engaged in Central Asia. Despite having troops stationed throughout the region, Russia has proved incapable of contributing to peacekeeping operations there, while Moscow is genuinely concerned about its dwindling economic influence in the region vis-à-vis that of China.

Russia’s ‘Silicon valley’ in the pipeline
 

For its part, NATO has much to gain through co-operation with Russia, especially that it has readily turned a blind eye to human rights abuses in the region in recent years. Not only the two have a vested interest in curbing drug trafficking and terrorism, but they also have a common interest in limiting Beijing’s influence in Central Asia.

What is more, history shows that Sino-Russo co-operative gestures have been strongest only when their bilateral ties with Washington have suffered setbacks. A NATO-led co-operation with Russia in Central Asia, hence, could be an opportunity for the US to improve its ties with Moscow and deprive Beijing of an important ally on the world stage provided that the US government is prepared to satisfy certain Russian demands.

All in all, as NATO member states prepare themselves for the upcoming meeting in Chicago, there is an urgent need for prompt discussions and contingency planning on Central Asia. This is so because, not only Central Asia is of immense importance to NATO’s ability to successfully execute its wider geostrategic interests in the world, but also because a political crisis in the region is now a matter when not if.

The anticipated turmoil and instability could be driven by a dangerous rise in Kyrgyz nationalism directed at ethnic Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan, a succession crisis in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan where lifelong leaders have yet to nominate their successors, or a surge in Islamic militancy in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan since states’ inability to provide basic social services for the public, violent crackdown on dissent, proximity to Afghanistan and a lack of secular opposition are giving rise to Islamic extremist discourses.

Since both Russia and NATO have a broad range of common strategic interests in Central Asia, efforts must thus be made to pave the way for a NATO-Russo co-operation in Central Asia as this present the least bad option available at NATO’s disposal. Failure in doing so, however, could, at the very least, jeopardise NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, thereby plunging the US into another calamity born out of the ashes of the Afghan war.

Nima Khorrami Assl is a security analyst at the Transnational Crisis Project in London.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
 
 
Source: Al Jazeera 
 
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/201232594140716265.html

Ben White, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy (Pluto 2012), forward by Haneen Zoabi, xiv, 128pp
A tightly-argued book on the oppression of Palestinians living in Israel reveals the imperialist background of the Israeli style of apartheid, argues Joe Glenton.

Ben White, Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy (Pluto 2012), forward by Haneen Zoabi, xiv, 128pp.The devil, they say, is in the details. This is doubly the case with apartheids.

The real perniciousness of Israel’s policies against the Palestinians is not best understood through the foaming-at-the-mouth Zionist rhetoric that we hear. Armchair racists are easy to deal with: move the cursor to ‘report’ or just ignore them. Nor is Israel’s persecution best understood in its penchant for killing women and children, or expansionism, or bulldozing houses, though there is can be no apology strong enough to excuse those activities. The real venom, the most terrifying and fascistic racisms, are the ones enacted in laws and constitutions; the official xenophobia. The Israeli Arabs, White argues, are too often overlooked. Israeli Arabs being Palestinians who live in Israel, rather than dodging bulldozers in the occupied territories – lucky them… Or not, as they have their own set of oppressions to negotiate.

Ben White’s short book spells these out clearly and addresses a number of issues in the Palestinian saga. Firstly, the issue of Israel’s obscurantist claims to be Jewish and democratic. There is no doubt that it is democratic, but only if you are Jewish. The claim tries – and fails – to ignore that Jews are not the only people who live in Israel. Secondly, White exposes the mystical, hair-splitting law-speak which always accompanies, and reinforces, racist regimes. He reveals how and why racism in the only ‘democracy’ in the region is okay by law.

Their history is intertwined with that of their kin in the shrinking gulags. White provides a shocking history lesson. If Israel’s polices are particularly vicious, it is because they were inducted by the best; Britain. While many at the time portrayed Palestine as a terra nullius, Churchill – sounding characteristically liberal – at least accepted that there were people on the land originally when he ‘bigged up’ the Jewish claim at the 1937 Peel Commission, saying ‘I refuse to admit the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time’ (p.5). The tone displays an imperialist tendency to compare colonised people to animals, manifested by, among others, Wellington, and recalling his refutation of the Irish claim that he was one of theirs. ‘A man might be born in a stable,’ he quipped, ‘but it doesn’t make him a horse’. Imperial hubris, then, from the very beginning, followed by more of the same.

One particular feature of the Israeli constitution must rank alongside bombing for peace, securing stability in Afghanistan by putting 130,000 foreign troops in it, and American artillery exploding in Iraq being explained away as ‘the sounds of freedom’. This is 1985’s Section 7A of the Basic Law, which prohibits any denial of ‘the nature of the state as democratic’ (p.15). Basic Law it may be, but such legislation can hardly be presented as democratic. Alarms bells could be forgiven for shaking loose of their mountings.

Further, there are no less than 11 laws and 48 ordinances of Israeli law which depend on the State of Emergency in force since 1948; these include restrictions on travel from abroad and, that staple of terror tactics, baking at night (p.16). The laws also allow the army to seize property and attempt to legitimate the seizure of maritime vessels (as recently demonstrated on the Gaza Flotilla). These laws also mean that the rabbinate alone decides who gets buried in a state cemetery; the key criteria is being a recognizably orthodox Jew. Israel, then, is a state where you are even discriminated against post-mortem, based on your faith (p.16).

This kind of thing is not anomalous, but rather should be of no surprise in a country where senior figures can make xenophobic statements unchecked. In 2004, a security minister felt confident enough to say ‘there are Arab citizens in the State of Israel. This is our greatest sorrow’ (p.54). While a local councillor in the same year said ‘I am not a racist…but many Jewish families are afraid that Arabs will start relationships with their daughters’ (p.55). It is by no means an obscure observation that people who start sentences with ‘I am not a racist’ are racists. This one, by playing the oldest card in the racist repertoire, that of casting women as both property and feckless cattle incapable of choosing appropriate partners, also manages to be a raging sexist. Impressive! Rather like a comment I heard directed against a work colleague suggesting that he was not effeminate because he was gay, but because he was European.

The competition for the most all-encompassing bigotry aside, White’s book has heroism in it. The passionate MK Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian firebrand whose struggles in Parliament are touched upon, is one. Her emotive introduction rings out like something from Arundhati Roy and I took her for a writer before I realised the title MK basically meant MP. She has faced repeated political attacks by Israeli MPs in parliament and has been accused of betraying the state.

There has been some talk of removing her parliamentary privileges, not least from those on the committee which governs the immunity of politicians (p.80). The plight of just one of the many jailed activists is also mentioned. Ameer Makhoul was snatched by Shin Bet (the intelligence agency charged with deterring those who challenge the Jewishness of the state), tied to a chair for two weeks and sleep-deprived until he felt liking confessing. He got nine years in an Israeli prison, while his wife, activist Janan Abdu, fights on. ‘We are patient’ she says ‘we resist’ (p.79).

White finishes with prescriptions for peace and highlights simple requests: freedom to return, reparations, equality, the end of apartheid (p.90). These are no more than political decisions and in the face of White’s carefully evidenced arguments, what stands in the way is the structure of empire. He adds to the wealth of reasons to support the Palestinian cause in both the occupied territories and Israel. Meanwhile, Israel has already demonstrated its willingness to kill civilians willy-nilly, and this against the background of bellicose words over Iran. It is nonetheless surrounded by increasingly energised Arab revolutions, and every demonstration in the revolutions has had at its core demands for Palestinian freedom.

Personally, I feel White’s book and his specialised expertise are worth tapping into. He highlights a group I was less familiar with and he does it clearly. The book is short at around a hundred pages, and the arguments are tight and clear. I have been able to move past familiarity with just the key words of the conflict – Nakba, Gaza, Judaisation, apartheid – to a position of greater knowledge. The occupation is sickening, based as it is, on the same flaccid claims about ‘security’ and ‘terrorism’ that have been used to pillage Afghanistan and Iraq.

In closing, I have had bigger things than home-made Kazan rockets fired at me; the Taliban had a good line in 107mm Chinese white phosphorous rockets. They are both piffling armaments, neither justify Apache helicopters, infantry assaults or a racist framework of laws. They do, however, merit a serious, adult enquiry into why people are shooting at you. What is required is an even-handed role by the hegemon and for Israel to pull its bloody finger out. If that fails, which is likely, it is down to the rest of us. We are, I’m told, all Palestinians.
http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/book-reviews/15629-palestinians-in-israel-segregation-discrimination-and-democracy

A recent article by Andre Beteille, “India’s destiny not caste in stone” argues that caste in fact is dying down, that it lives on mostly in consciousness, and that this is a result of the manipulations of the media during elections. The piece shows that elite social scientists are living in a dream world of their own making. Beteille’s article has the two major faults of lacking evidence and lacking theory. In addition it shows a basic muddle and a refusal to carry thorough some minimal requirements of debate, such as, for example, clarity of writing. For instance, I confess I have found it had to understand an early sentence, “They [who believe that caste is an ineradicable feature of Indian society] also believe that to ignore those divisions or to draw attention to other divisions such as those of income, education and occupation is to turn our backs on the ground reality.” Is he saying that all who want to see caste as a materially existing social structure refuse to deal with other [materially existing] social structures? In any event, since Betelle does not put gender in his little list of “divisions” it seems that it also exists primarily in consciousness.

The themes are familiar. Tremendous changes have taken place since independence. His assessment of this starts with reference to the “ritual opposition of purity and pollution, which was the cornerstone of the hierarchical structure of caste” and, among these begins with “commensality or inter-dining.” This is a perverted use of Louis Dumont. Why begin with inter-dining? Evidence for its persistence and extent is simply that anyone who goes to a village, a region or a city can give some assessment of its variation. However the professor does not consider this kind of informal, hands-on survey to be scientific.

Let us go on to the more important issues of inter-marriage and the association between caste and occupation. That they are more important, I should add, has to do with the theory of what is more fundamental to caste as a system, which Beteille does not even try to deal with.

Regarding intermarriage, where is the evidence that it is on the increase? Here we can be more precise, at least in the sense of giving the beginnings of a numerical estimate. I will give just one village example, which is one more than Beteille gives.

I live in Kasegaon, a “village” (legally; it has a gram panchayat) of about 15,000 population on the Pune-Bengaluru road about 3 hours south of Pune. It is thus a small agricultural town, and as even sociologists are aware, in small towns everyone knows everyone else, and talks about them. How many inter-caste marriages are there? I myself know about one; others in my family know more. My husband Bharat says about 30 such marriages have taken place in his memory, which dates back 50 years ago for clear social issues; of these about 20 couples are living in Kasegaon today. My brother-in-law Jayant and mother-law Indumati confirm this estimate, and can give exact names for most of the couples. What does this amount to? A little more than one tenth of one percent! (if we take 20 and 15,000 as the the basis, since the 2011 data have not yet been published, we get 0.00133%). My mother-in-law Indumati has herself presided over four inter-caste and one Hindu-Muslim marriage, but these were of people from outside Kasegaon.

Of course Kasegaon is not typical of Indian villages; there is no “typical” village. Kasegaon is more sophisticated, more urban, than most and probably in a region famous for its progressive social tradition.

There may be a larger percentage of inter-caste marriages in the cities, but it is not likely. The reason we have to extrapolate from such examples results from the total lack of information about caste whether in the census or NSS type surveys.

Additionally, all villages in India have caste-based localities, and most of the regions and areas of cities can be identified with specific castes or religious groups. Even resettled villages of project evictees cannot do away with caste-wise wards. For example, caste discrimination in housing projects in the case of the tsunami and the flood affected in northern Karnataka has been well documented in the media.

If we do decide to look at economic issues, then what about caste and occupation? Here Beteille admits, “There continues to be a general association between caste and occupation to the extent that the lowest castes are largely concentrated in the menial and low-paying jobs whereas the higher castes tend to be in the best-paid and most esteemed ones.” I am puzzled here again about his theoretical capacity. Wouldn’t any extent of such an association mean that caste is a material reality to that extent? We can be much more specific about the economics of caste. For instance, economist Ashwini Deshpande has assembled existing data in a recent book The Grammar of Caste: Economic Discrimination in Contemporary India, Oxford University Press, July 2011. Surely this was published not too long ago for Professor Beteille to have read; many of my friends have already snatched up the book, my own copy disappearing in this way. (For a more recent lay estimate of how the caste hierarchy works in economic terms, see Bharat Patankar, “Caste and Exploitation,” http://seekingbegumpura.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/caste-and-exploitation/)

Beteille writes, “Rapid economic growth and the expansion of the middle class are accompanied by new opportunities for individual mobility which further loosens the association between caste and occupation.” Such sweeping statements without any attempt to show evidence show not only a lack of scholarship but also a disdain for the people affected by the caste hierarchy.

Beteille wants to claim that the primary existence of caste today is in consciousness and derives from the agency of people engaged in politics and the media. This agency seems to exist in a vacuum and the consciousness it derives from determines material reality rather than vice versa. Is this pure idealism or a new epistemology based on magic powers of those controlling the media? Come on, professor. Consciousness and agency may have a complicated relationships to material structures but they are certainly not disassociated and are not primary. It is good social science, I think, to reject any assertion that consciousness has no role of its own, but it is certainly not good social science to argue that in spite of some material reality, about which no evidence is given, the role of consciousness and agency is primarily.

There is nothing new in the argument that the use of caste “vote banks” by politicians is the decisive factor in keeping alive whatever is left of the caste system. We can hear it all the time from those who want to protect their own place in the hierarchy. Beteille’s new take on this theme is to link politics with the media through the assertion that the media keeps caste in people’s consciousness by featuring it during elections; and as a result politicians pay attention to it

and presumably act on it, thus reinforcing caste. Here the one truth in this otherwise illogical and nonempirical article is that “for the country as a whole the election season never comes to an end.”

However: compared to the political arena, the media is more highly controlled by the “upper” castes, ie those coming from the traditionally higher three varnas. Most people in the media do not want to talk or write about or depict caste unless they feel there is popular interest in it and they will gain something; and when they do talk or write about it they do so in a distorted way. And politicians are much less enchanted by and affected by the media than the general population since they simply cannot afford to take the media as a depiction of reality; they understand what it is trying to do. Every politician knows.

Beteille’s conclusion is, “Private television channels have created a whole world in which their anchors and the experts who are regularly at their disposal vie with each other to bring out the significance of the ‘caste factor,’ meaning the rivalries and alliances among castes, sub-castes and groups of castes by commentators who, for the most part, have little understanding of, or interest in, long-term trends of change in the country. These discussions create the illusion that caste is an unalterable feature of Indian society. It will be a pity if we allow what goes on in the media to reinforce the consciousness of caste and to persuade us that caste is India’s destiny.” This is an amazing statement.

As for us, we do not think that “caste is India’s destiny.” Rather we think the annihilation of caste is India’s destiny and want to help those who want to destroy it. We doubt if Professor Beteille wants this or wants to do anything that is necessary to achieve a caste-free society. We think he prefers to live in the dream world he has made rather than engage with the majority of the people of India.

Dr. Gail Omvedt recently retired as Chair Professor of the Dr. Ambedkar Chair for Social Change and Development, IGNOU, and is currently an independent researcher and writer.

 
http://www.countercurrents.org/omvedt200312.htm