JK Alternative Viewpoint

Reviewed by Brian M Downing

With the United States ensnarled in the Afghan insurgency and Pakistan headed toward implosion, AfPak and the countries around it are in crisis.

Renowned journalist Ahmed Rashid offers a series of essays drawn from his connections to figures in the state, army, and insurgent groups which succinctly and engagingly analyze the regional troubles. His insights are remarkable, his candor and courage all the more so. As he notes more than once, the Pakistani army has been known to treat roughly, or even kill, turbulent journalists – including in all likelihood Asia Times Online

Pakistan bureau chief Syed Saleem Shahzad last May.

Pakistani political and military elites, he argues, have failed their country in four interrelated regards. First, they have failed to build a national identity embracing the Pashtun, Punjabi, Sindhi, and Baloch ethnic groups. The military has instead only built an identity based on opposition to India, while militants have recently begun building an Islamist one.

Second, elites have fix ated on n

ational security and allocated exorbitant funds upon the military at the expense of education, healthcare, and infrastructure – a predilection that civilian leaders dare not challenge. Third, elites have encouraged or at least tolerated jihadi groups that strike targets in the region and occasionally turn on Pakistan as well.

Fourth, elites have allowed the country to fragment along ethnic lines. Punjabis are over-represented in the army and state to the resentment of other peoples. The Balochs have begun their fifth insurgency and many Pashtun tribes are at war with the government.

With its politicians drawn from corrupt family dynasties and its generals obsessed with their immense budgets, the country has failed to develop politically or economically. While India and other countries in the region have won places in the global market, Pakistan’s belligerent policies in Afghanistan and Kashmir have cut the country off from commerce with Central Asia and India. Much of its industry remains state-owned and uncompetitive. The two foes could have benefited from trade. Instead, India has developed exports in manufactured goods and technology; Pakistan is still selling rice and cotton.

Rashid has long argued that the army supports the Afghan Taliban and he makes his strongest case here. Though nominally supportive of US/International Security Assistance Forces efforts in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s then ruler General Pervez Musharraf was dismayed by the Pashtun Taliban’s ouster in late 2001 and the attendant rise of northern peoples tied to India.

Musharraf was certain that India and its northern allies would seek to destabilize Pakistan’s Pashtun and Baloch borderlands, endangering Pakistan’s territorial integrity.

Musharraf reasoned that the US would soon tire of Afghanistan, all the more so once it had invaded Iraq (2003) and a bitter insurgency soon developed. Better to back the Taliban and guide them back to power. Pakistani intelligence (Inter-Services Intelligence – ISI) helped secure funding for the Taliban from wealthy Gulf donors and built camps for their fighters in northern Balochistan, not far from Quetta where Taliban leaders were safely ensconced.

Rashid is also sharply critical of the US, especially of President Barack Obama whom he sees as even less interested in AfPak than his predecessor. George W Bush, Rashid rather puzzlingly insists, showed considerable interest in Afghanistan; Obama handed off AfPak to others, especially the military, where artfulness in political development and diplomacy is limited and where reliance on force is not. Whether Afghanistan’s lack of priority is true of the new administration as a whole or just the president, who after all faces pressing economic problems, is unclear – probably deliberately so.

The new administration began with high hopes of negotiating a broad regional settlement, including the decades-long conflict over Kashmir. But when India objected to linking Kashmir to the war in Afghanistan, the Obama administration backed down. This fueled a new wave of conspiratorial speculation inside Pakistan: Indians had become the Israelis of the region, lavished upon by gullible Americans, and Pakistanis were becoming the Palestinians of South Asia, innocent victims of foreign lobbies and nefarious intrigues.

Rashid argues that it was a bad idea for the US to insist on elections in Afghanistan back in 2009. As much as this goes against the faith in democratic processes, he makes strong points. The Afghan parliament was essentially functionless, the parties were weak and not well known, and the public was more attached to well established patronage networks than to newly-minted political processes.

United States pressure for candidates to run against President Hamid Karzai convinced him that Washington was determined to unseat him. He responded by rigging the election with the help of warlords, drug racketeers, and a legion of corrupt officials who wished to retain their jobs. Owing to the strength of the insurgency in the south, the Pashtun vote was low and the non-Pashtun northerners enjoyed disproportionate success, which had the adverse consequence of strengthening ethnic mistrust.

Rashid looks at attempts at counterinsurgency in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Although a Pakistani army study in 2000 saw serious internal dangers, the generals refused to reorient from conventional warfare with India to counterinsurgency efforts toward internal groups.

A few years later, the US pressed Pakistan to retrain two divisions (about 45,000 troops) of its 29 divisions to conduct counter-insurgency campaigns in Pashtun tribal regions against the Taliban. The army, however, refused, citing the need to defend against an Indian invasion, which of course is highly unlikely now that Pakistan has nuclear weapons.

The US was only able to retrain Frontier Corps units – Pashtun tribal units that stretch along the Durand Line. This proved short-lived as the special forces advisers were ordered out of the country after the US raid on Osama bin Laden’s home near an army compound in Pakistan in May of 2011.

The US was able to persuade the army to go after militant groups in the tribal areas of South Waziristan, but the operations did not use counterinsurgency techniques. They relied instead on heavy firepower, which caused large numbers of civilian casualties and turned more locals against them.

To the north in Afghanistan, American counter-insurgency efforts have not brought appreciable success. There is little economic activity unrelated to the war or foreign doles. The enclaves carved out of former Taliban areas aren’t secure and locals are reluctant to cooperate with the US or Kabul officials. Indigenous military units are not effective.

The army and police have high desertion rates and exhibit no fighting spirit. General David Petraeus pressed hard for building up local militias and won, despite Karzai’s opposition to what he thought would become more warlord bands. Thus far, these militias have accomplished nothing as they are viewed with suspicion by locals.

Karzai’s state remains both corrupt and inept. Ten years after the Taliban’s ouster, many districts do not have a government court. Taliban courts have established themselves there.

Rashid sees the Taliban leadership as war-weary, perhaps even more so than their opponents. It was the Taliban, after all, who approached the US for peace talks. ISI, however, opposes peace until its regional agenda on India and Kashmir is guaranteed to be a central part of negotiations. Last year, ISI arrested the Taliban’s second in command, Mullah Baradar, as he was embarking on peace talks that the generals had not approved.

As a result of at least somewhat diverging interests with the Taliban, the generals may be placing more emphasis on the Haqqani network, an insurgent group which is only partially integrated into the Taliban and which has been close to ISI since the old days of the Soviet war. The Haqqanis are thought responsible for most of the assassinations, suicide bombings, and terrorist strikes into major cities – including the coordinated attacks in Kabul and other cities last week. (As an insurgent offensive has recently begun, it will be interesting to see if the Taliban send signals through relative inaction in the south, contrasting with Haqqani boldness in the east.)

The Taliban’s war-weariness and their disagreements with ISI offer some prospects for negotiations in the near term. Rashid suggests that the Taliban and the US negotiate a confidence-building arrangement whereby the US foregoes the night raids on Taliban commanders and the Taliban forego the assassinations of government officials. In this respect, Rashid offers some hope in his bleak yet compelling account of the region.

Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan and Afghanistan by Ahmed Rashid. (New York: Viking, 2012). ISBN-10: 0670023469. Price US$26.95, 256 pages.

Brian M Downing is a political/military analyst and author of The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory: War and Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam. He can be reached at brianmdowning@gmail.com.

(Copyright 2012 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.) 
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/ND28Df01.html

The recent news from Europe could hardly be more unsettling for those who desperately wanted to believe that the eurozone was finally finding its way out of the region’s imbroglio. The collapse of the Dutch coalition government over budget cuts dramatically called into question the commitment of the staunchest supporter of the German hard line on the need for fiscal austerity. On the same day, the National Front, whose platform calls for an exit from the euro, gained a record 18 percent of the vote in the first round of the French presidential elections. And the results confirmed François Hollande, who wants to renegotiate the European Union’s recent German-inspired fiscal pact to create room for growth policies, as a firm favorite to wrest the presidency from Nicolas Sarkozy. Not surprisingly, markets retreated and troubled countries such as Italy, Spain, and France itself saw their borrowing costs soar.

Indeed, every time Italy and Spain — two of the world’s largest economies, with a combined government debt that exceeds $3.5 trillion — struggle to refinance their debt at acceptable interest rates, the eurozone and the global economy flirt with disaster. Yet while the commotion over bond spreads is entirely justified, it diverts attention from the main arena where the survival of the euro will ultimately be decided: the realignment of Europe’s peripheral economies (Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, or the “GIIPS”) toward exports and import substitutes (think Spaniards buying fewer Japanese cars and more Spanish-made cars). Since domestic demand in the periphery is declining fast as finance dries up and budgets shrink, trade is the only hope for reigniting sustained growth in the region. Without growth, unemployment will keep rising from its extraordinarily high levels, political resistance to the monetary union will escalate, and it will become more and more difficult to service debts, with the very real risk that countries will be forced into default and — possibly — an exit from the euro.

 
Until recently, improved global economic conditions and large-scale liquidity injections by the European Central Bank (ECB) into European banks under its long-term refinancing operation (LTRO) program had reassured markets and kept Italian and Spanish bond yields well below their terrifying peak of last November. Global conditions can change quickly, however, and the policies adopted, however necessary they may have been, are more palliative than cure.

For example, Greece’s debt remains unsustainable, and a second round of restructuring — this time to include forgiving official debt as well as private debt — will be needed. And the ECB’s LTROs, which have so far shored up banks and supported government bond purchases, may backfire if, as is already happening, risk aversion returns and the prices of government bonds that banks have acquired fall again. While the periphery cannot avoid cutting government deficits, it may ultimately have trouble hitting its deficit targets if austerity stunts growth.

More important still, it is vital to recognize that the periphery’s fiscal mess is not at the root of the euro crisis. The crisis, in other words, cannot be resolved with a fiscal fix alone, although a fiscal correction must be part of the solution. For example, Ireland almost halved its debt-to-GDP ratio (from 48 percent to 25 percent) between 1999 and 2007 and Spain nearly did the same (62 percent to 36 percent). These ratios were much lower than Germany’s at the outbreak of the current crisis and, in Spain’s case, they still are. Nor are weak banking systems the cause of the crisis in the periphery. When the global financial crisis struck in 2008, for instance, the Italian and Portuguese banking systems were in much better shape than their British, French, or German counterparts. Fiscal and banking problems, dangerous as they are, are a consequence of the crisis — not their primary cause.

Fundamentally, Europe’s so-called debt crisis is really more of a competitiveness crisis — one that divides the eurozone’s core (Austria, Belgium, Germany, France, Finland, and the Netherlands) from its periphery. The misalignment began in the mid-1990s as interest rates in the periphery declined to the lower levels found in the core, and domestic demand and inflation grew more rapidly in the periphery than in the core. This, combined with highly inflexible labor markets and limited competition in sectors ranging from pharmacies to banks, led to an erosion of competitiveness in the periphery — reflected in wages outpacing productivity and prices in the sheltered sector (comprising everything from government to construction to coffee and barber shops) rising relative to the prices of exports and import substitutes, whose prices are determined in world markets. There followed a progressive reallocation of the periphery’s production capacity toward the sheltered sector, most visibly toward construction in countries such as Ireland and Spain, which went on to experience the mother of all housing bubbles. Measures and estimates of the competitive misalignment in the eurozone vary. Typical estimates suggest that, in the periphery, the cost of labor, adjusted for productivity, is higher by 15 to 30 percent relative to Germany.

This competitive misalignment had significant consequences. From 1997 to 2007, housing expenditure as a share of GDP cumulatively increased by 2.7 percentage points in the periphery (excluding Greece, for which data is not available prior to 2000), compared with a 2.2 percentage-point decline in Germany. Meanwhile, exports of goods and services as a share of GDP increased by almost 20 percentage points in Germany, compared with an increase of less than 3 percentage points, on average, in the periphery. In the periphery, current account deficits — the excess of imports over exports — deteriorated by nearly 8 percentage points of GDP. In the core, current account surpluses rose by 0.9 percentage points.

Financial markets mistakenly supported the periphery’s domestic demand-based growth model, only to go into sharp reverse — as they are wont to do — when the model became patently unsustainable. Greece and Ireland, for example, experienced capital outflows equivalent to 40 percent and 70 percent of 2007 GDP, respectively, from mid-2008 to mid-2011. Current account deficits in peripheral economies did not narrow correspondingly because euros were made available through the intra-European payment system among central banks and rescue programs. Outside the eurozone, by contrast, countries such as Latvia (which did not devalue its currency) saw a huge and immediate correction in their current account deficits. The workings of the monetary union, in other words, have inhibited the eurozone’s ability to narrow the very competitiveness gap that the monetary union helped create.

The external and internal imbalances in the periphery still necessitate a large competitive adjustment that can only occur through deflation, since adoption of the single currency means that devaluation is no longer an option. Given the post-2007 plunge in domestic demand in the periphery, one would have expected to see price and unit labor cost containment (either through lower wages or higher productivity) and a shift toward exports by now. But almost  three years after the euro crisis erupted, progress remains remarkably limited (see table). With the exception of Ireland, there has been little improvement in the competitiveness of the periphery (as measured by the decline in the real effective exchange rate, an indicator of labor cost adjusted for productivity and expressed in a common currency).

In fact, over the last year, the periphery has actually lost even more competitiveness relative to the core. These trends are reflected in the periphery’s exports, which have hardly budged as a share of GDP, increasing by less than in Germany and the Netherlands. Italy’s current account deficit has actually increased since the global financial crisis began. And while current account deficits have come down elsewhere in the periphery, this is largely due demand contraction, and the external deficits remain sizable (see chart). Greece is running a current account deficit that is 10 percent of GDP and showing no improvement in exports despite an 18 percent decline in domestic demand since 2007. Over the past year, the most notable changes that have occurred are further increases in the periphery’s unemployment rate and (Italy excepted) government debt-to-GDP ratio.

More demand compression and recession are coming, and will place even more strain on the periphery’s social fabric. Unemployment is excruciatingly high and headed in the wrong direction. The unemployment rate is already at around 24 percent in Spain, 21 percent in Greece, 15 percent in Portugal and Ireland, and 9.3 percent — and rising fast — in Italy.

With substantial fiscal contraction in store over the next two years, banks deleveraging, and consumers and investors scared, there is simply no possibility of growth from domestic demand in the periphery in the foreseeable future. Indeed, with structural reforms incomplete and slow to produce results, recession — in containing wages and inflation — is the main instrument to engineer the competitive realignment. And in economies where both the private and public sector have become highly externally indebted and competitiveness hasn’t improved, any recovery of domestic demand will quickly run up against borrowing constraints as current account deficits widen.

In these dire circumstances, can the trade sector come to the rescue?

This currently appears least likely in Greece because its export sector is small and mostly based on tourism. Portugal has a bigger export sector, but one that still confronts Chinese competitors directly in sectors such as footwear and garments. Ireland, by contrast, has high-tech exports that amount to 100 percent of GDP and are funded and operated by foreign multinationals. For these reasons, Ireland has a chance of reigniting growth, but it may be hit again by large banking losses.

Spain, meanwhile, has several competitive international firms and, unlike the other peripheral countries, has maintained its share of European exports over the past decade. But its export sector is small at roughly 26 percent of GDP, its private sector is heavily and externally indebted, its unemployment is already extremely high, and its fiscal and housing sectors still require enormous adjustments. Spain’s capacity to steer through more austerity is therefore questionable.

While Italy’s public debt is larger than Spain’ s, it has a more diversified export base and smaller fiscal, housing, and labor market imbalances.

Italy’s austerity and liberalization measures, however, are still very recent, and there is no sign yet of a trade-led recovery.

How should Europe address these challenges? As many economists are advocating, a €2 trillion firewall could be erected to protect Italy and Spain, the ECB could provide unlimited support to governments, and eurozone governments could even jointly issue eurobonds that would be less liable to attack than those of individual countries. Yet even if the resolute German political resistance to these measures could conceivably be overcome in the event of a market panic, none of these approaches would deal with the underlying competitiveness issue, and could instead delay its resolution.

In any event, the political stars are not aligned at present for these ambitious steps and there is little alternative but to accelerate the adjustment process in the periphery through small steps. These could include tax changes that incentivize production and exports (such as cutting payroll taxes) and discourage consumption and imports (such as increasing value-added taxes), and more far-reaching labor and product market reforms such as reducing severance payments drastically and attacking price fixing with more determination. A less ideological approach to policy by Germany and less insistence on blanket austerity measures even in relatively healthy economies could also stoke demand in the eurozone’s core, increase eurozone inflation, and lower the value of the euro, all of which would ease adjustment in the periphery.

If, however, all this and fiscal cuts are not enough to restore competitiveness in the periphery — as has so far been the case — and unemployment keeps climbing, new approaches must be considered.

Should failing countries be assisted by healthier ones in the core, the ECB, and the IMF to restructure their debt and leave the eurozone? The complexity of doing so is daunting and great collateral damage would ensue, but there would at least be a light at the end of the tunnel. The alternative — depression, chronic unemployment, deindustrialization, and depopulation of the afflicted countries, plus even more concentration of industry in northern Europe — is not what anyone signed up for, or what electorates will accept.

This article originally appeared in Foreign Policy.
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/2012/04/25/competitiveness-crisis/ahh7

“Competition in a global economy is… not an option…. Rich people can always take their wealth elsewhere.” That was how one columnist in the Wall St.

Journal (Bret Stephens, WSJ, 4/24/12) denounced the French voters for in effect rejecting the austerity measures of Sarkozy in their recent (Sunday, April 22) elections, and this has been the theme of the corporate propagandists for decades now. What they are saying is this:

“The owners of capital can take their investments anywhere in the world where they encounter cheap labor, low taxes and lax or no environmental regulations. They moved from the US to Mexico and from there to China. Now, as a result of the struggles of Chinese workers, they are in the process of moving to Vietnam and Cambodia, where wages are even lower still. And you, the workers, are powerless before this drive. Trying to stop it is like trying to stand up to a tsunami. All you can do is hunker down, accept cuts in your standards of living, and hope that the worst doesn’t befall you, personally.”

May Day

As May Day (May 1) approaches, it is useful to look back and consider the traditions of the international workers’ movement, the traditions of May Day, and what they mean in the face of what seems to be a never-ending race to the bottom in which one group of workers leap frogs backwards over another in the hopes of keeping a few crumbs.

However, what workers have won in struggle they will not just surrender without an equal struggle. And around the world, there is a rising tide of struggle as May Day, 2012, approaches.

Workers’ Struggles Around World

The economic crisis in Western Europe (the European Union) has been much in the news recently. This crisis is being used to drive down the living standards in this region, but workers are not just passively letting this happen. Greece has been in the forefront of this effort as Greek workers and youth have poured out into the streets in massive displays of protest against the cuts in pensions, benefits, wages and jobs that are being imposed there. Similar protests have been held in Italy and Spain. Feeling the pressure of the working class, the government in the Netherlands just recently collapsed.

There has been a new round of strikes and labor struggles in Egypt, and in Iran, even with all the repression, bus workers in Tehran have been organizing to the extent that the regime felt forced to sentence a leader of their union, Reza Shahabi, to a flogging and to six years in prison. From a strike of government workers in Nigeria to a general strike in South Africa (early March), workers throughout the African continent are starting to rebel against this race to the bottom. A similar process is under way in Latin America and also in Asia, where power loom workers in Pakistan have struck as well as workers in Cambodia and elsewhere. And in China, where potentially the most powerful working class in the world is, there have been hundreds of protests and strikes weekly.

Occupy Movement

In the United States, the main form of opposition to the attacks of global capitalism has been through the Occupy movement. This movement, despite some mistakes, has started to affect the workers’ movement also. At the Nov. 2 Occupy-called Oakland general strike, some grocery workers appeared. They came there to support Occupy Oakland, but also to see how they could combine with it to start to combat their own union leaders and transform their union. And now, for the first time in decades, several local unions (including the nurses, the janitors and transit workers) are calling for actions on May Day. Limited as these actions may be, the fact that they are recognizing May Day is a result of the pressure from Occupy Oakland. Also, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is calling for a one hour stop-work rally at several of its work places on May Day.

May Day, 1886

It is in this context – of the global attacks of capitalism and the slowly rising tide of resistance – that the history and the meaning of May Day should be considered.

May Day as a day of worker struggle was initiated in the United States. Following the overthrow of slavery here, workers increased their struggles and renewed their efforts to organize and resist wage cuts.

This effort built to a crescendo in 1886. The figures tell the story: From 1881 to 1885, the number of strikes increased from 471 to 645 and the number of workers who participated increased from 129,000 to 242,000. In 1886, the number of strikes jumped to 1,411 and the number of strikers went up to almost a half million.

This strike wave had several demands, but foremost among them was the demand for the 8 hour work day. (At that time, workers were working anything from a ten to a 16 hour day.) And May 1 was set to be a general, nation-wide strike for the 8 hour day. By the second week in May, some 80,000 had struck in Chicago, 45,000 in New York, 32,000 in Cincinnati, and so on in almost all the major US cities of the time. In some cases, the workers simply imposed an 8 hour day, and the workers’ movement was so powerful that there was little the employers could do about it. As one labor paper (John Swinton’s Journal) reported at the time, “It is an eight-hour boom, and we are scoring victory after victory. Today the packing houses of the Union Stock Yards all yielded… men… are wild with joy…” This nation-wide movement represented an advance for the US workers’ movement. Previously, the tendency had been for workers to struggle in one region or one city alone; there was little recognition in practice of the need for a national movement.

In the years that followed, May Day became established as the international day of workers’ struggle, and it was taken up by workers throughout the world. From Russia to Western Europe to India, from Africa to Asia to Latin America, May Day became celebrated by the world workers movement as a day of struggle. Gradually, however, over the years, as the opportunists and those who work hand-in-hand with the employers started to take over the workers’ movement, the real meaning of May Day was watered down. At first it was transformed into a mere celebration or a holiday rather than a day of struggle. In the United States, it was nearly wiped out of the collective memory altogether. In its place was imposed Labor Day (first Monday in September) as a holiday. While all workers enjoy an extra day to relax, enjoy a nice barbecue or a day with the family, the idea of a national – never mind an international – day of struggle was nearly eliminated.

Foremost among the unions that led the eight hour struggle was the Carpenters Union, whose president, Peter J. McGuire, was a socialist and a participant in the First International. Today, that same union is controlled by a millionaire business man – Doug McCarron – who is one of the foremost advocates of the idea that the employers and the workers are on the same team, and that the unions must help the employers increase their profits. As for the union, McCarron sees it as merely an employment agency. “We are marketing a good product” (the carpenters themselves), he says. He is joined in this view by the tops of all the mainstream unions. As for the local leaders, having failed to organize an opposition to this policy, almost all of them are forced in the end to carry it out also.

They see their task as increasing the “market share” (their term) of their unions. And how does a business increase market share? By keeping prices down. And what are those prices? Why, the cost of labor – the wages and benefits – of their members. And who are their competitors? The non-union workers as well as workers in other countries.

One very real consequence of this approach is that in the US, most workers have in effect lost the eight hour day for which their ancestors fought so hard. They are forced to work ten and twelve hours a day; they are forced to work two jobs, just to make ends meet. In other cases, they work under mandatory overtime conditions because the employer finds it cheaper to hire fewer workers, thereby avoiding paying for health care, social security and other benefits for additional employees. That great conquest of the earliest May Days has been largely frittered away by the leaders of the workers’ organizations.

International Solidarity in Deeds, not Just Words

Thus we have come full circle. Whereas in the past, raising the struggle of workers to the national level in the United States was a huge step forward, today a similar but even greater step is required. In the 19th century workers recognized that wages and conditions in one part of the US affected wages and conditions in another region. Today, however, living in the reality of global production and the global market, that recognition must be raised to a higher level in practice, as opposed to mere words. Today, what is required is international worker solidarity. A first step in that direction could be direct links between workers in struggle around the world. With the internet and social media, such links would be far easier than ever before.

Within the European Union we are seeing the first steps in that direction as a united struggle is starting to develop against the austerity measures that are sweeping the region. But this is only a start. What is necessary is an international union movement that establishes minimum conditions throughout the world. If workers are forced to strike against a company in one country, then that company must be shut down globally. And the same must be done for entire industries. Without such international solidarity in deeds, not just words, companies will simply shift production to whatever region or country they can find where wages are cheapest.

But there is more. As the workers’ struggle develops, the most combative layer of the class – together with their pro-worker allies – will tend to organize and combine in the work places, in the communities and in the schools. What they organize can only be described as a party – a mass workers’ party. And just as with the mass union movement, such a party cannot succeed unless it is international. That is also what is required: An international party of the world working class, one which rejects the dictates of the “free” market and of capitalism itself.

This crying need is in the process of developing in the factories of China, in Tahrir Square, Egypt, amongst the transport workers of South Africa and the oil workers in the Mid East and elsewhere. When it bursts through to the surface, it will be a huge step towards the liberation of humanity from the yoke of capitalism itself.

From 1886 to the present, that is the real lesson of May Day as the international working class’s day of common struggle.
 John Reimann is a retired carpenter and an expelled member of the Carpenters’ Union in the United States. (He was expelled for leading rank and file struggles against the union bureaucracy.) He is a long-time socialist, who organized for a number of years in Mexico. He is presently a member of the Industrial Workers of the World.
 
http://www.viewpointonline.net/may-day-and-the-world-working-class-in-2012.html

France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, one half of the eurozone’s twin-engine, lost the first round of the presidential race. Photo: KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP/Getty Images
Like a tidal wave, the crisis that has overwhelmed southern Europe smashed into the northern core last week.
The rock-solid “hard-line” leaders of France and the Netherlands were exposed as mere sandcastles, next in line to be swept away by the eurozone’s economic woes.

Eight days ago, the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte was deposed. A day later, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, one half of the eurozone’s twin-engine, lost the first round of the presidential race. The other half, Germany’s iron chancellor, Angela Merkel, remained above water – but only as a dangerously isolated island.

The markets lurched in horror at the apparition of the deadly seventh wave of contagion. But the real shock was that this time the force wasn’t debt, but democracy.

Bond yields, borrowing costs and bail-outs, which have overwhelmed Greece, Ireland and Portugal, and that hover over Spain and Italy, too, were no real threat in the north last week. Despite their debts, the Netherlands and France have retained their low bond yields and AAA-ratings (France has only been downgraded by S&P). Germany’s economy is in rude health, relatively speaking.

Instead, the continent’s northern core has been hit by the eurozone’s other big crisis: the question of legitimacy.
For three years, Merkel and Sarkozy have imposed savage austerity with one overriding justification: to save the euro. As if in wartime, democracy has been sidelined and public opinion ignored under the assumption that the state – or superstate – has a higher cause.

With breathtaking audacity, Brussels installed its own technocrats in Greece and Italy to impose its policies in “sinner states”. Extreme measures were needed to keep the eurozone intact, they said – without ever properly asking if the electorate wanted the prize, let alone had the stomach for the cost of winning it.

The “legitimacy question” has been quieter than the rampaging debt farrago. Yet plenty reckon it poses the real danger to the eurozone – and is most likely to trigger its collapse. Over the next few weeks its pent-up energy will be unleashed in full – via a raft of ballot boxes across Europe.

Last week was just a warm-up. May 6 is a day of reckoning for Europe’s leaders as France votes for a new president, Greece for a new parliament, and Italy goes to the polls for local elections. German state elections follow. On May 31, Ireland is holding a referendum on Europe’s fiscal pact. In June, France has parliamentary elections. Then, on September 12, the Netherlands will go to the polls.

As last weekend has shown, the elections are fast becoming a vote on Europe’s growth and stability pact – the German-led plan to impose binding austerity rules on all eurozone countries. Merkel said the pact was “non-negotiable” and would “last forever”, but any national parliament that was ready to ratify the treaty is being roundly rejected.

François Hollande, the socialist front-runner to become France’s president, has vowed to scrap the pact. In a week’s time he could be tasked with co-driving the rescue mission with Merkel.

Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen, the self-styled Joan of Arc, put quitting the euro altogether at the centre of her campaign. Last weekend, she chalked up a record 18pc of the vote. Then, on the Left, is Jean-Luc Melenchon, an avowed anti-capitalist, describing financial markets as “parasitic”.

In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders withdrew support from the coalition, saying he refused to back the “diktats from Brussels”. He said: “We must be master of our own house.”

Yet the crisis is advancing mercilessly, particularly in Spain, which is too big to bail out, even by prime minister Mariano Rajoy’s admission.

So, will the eurozone’s austerity drive be swept away with its proponents? If so, who and what will replace them? If it’s not the fiscal pact, then what? If it’s not the eurozone, then what?

George Soros, the veteran investor, said the crisis was “undermining, destroying the European Union” in a way that is comparable to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“Instability in the eurozone threatens the prosperity of the UK, the region and possibly the globe,” warned Andrew Tyrie, chairman of the Treasury select committee on Thursday.

No wonder Treasury insiders reckon the biggest threat to Britain’s fragile recovery is the French election.

On a recent trip to London, France’s presidential candidate Hollande declared: “I’m not dangerous.”

He meant that he didn’t plan to nationalise French industries in the manner of François Mitterrand, his early mentor and the last socialist to occupy the Elysée Palace. But his huge lead in the polls at the moment – at a level that has never before been overturned in a presidential race – is enough cause for alarm.

Hollande has promised, within days of the election, to reduce the retirement age for some workers to 60; boost family welfare payments by 25pc; freeze petrol prices; cap pay at state companies; and, crucially, to renegotiate Europe’s fiscal pact and block the treaty if he doesn’t get his way.

Hollande has never even met Merkel. And she’s already flouted diplomatic protocol and campaigned against him in favour of Sarkozy.

All week she repeated that the fiscal pact is not up for discussion. “The fiscal pact has been negotiated, it was signed by 25 government heads and is already ratified by Portugal and Greece. Parliaments all over Europe are about to adopt it,” she said in an interview on Friday.

“It is not renegotiable.”

So, Germany and France seem to be on a collision course, since Hollande’s policies appear to take France away from the pact, not towards it. For France – which has the highest public-spending rate in the eurozone at 56pc of GDP – to reduce its deficit to the agreed 3pc of GDP by next year, Paris will need to impose €18bn (£14.6bn) of cuts, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But Hollande is planning a government spending spree, including hiring 60,000 teachers, which, by his own admission, will add €20bn to public spending over five years. His answer to spending gaps appears to be attacking business and the rich: he wants to impose a 75pc rate on the “grasping and arrogant” super-rich, and ratchet corporate taxes, too.

If the crisis has been tough with the tight-knit “Merkozy” in charge, what chance does it have under “Mellande”?

Little wonder that Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper asked: “Is Europe Failing?”

Beyond the election bluster, Hollande isn’t as alarming as he sounds. Despite his revolutionary talk about the fiscal pact, he has pledged to reduce the deficit to 3pc of GDP by next year, as agreed, and balance the budget (for the first time since 1974) by 2017.

Instead, his reforms for the pact revolve around inserting clauses and measures to boost growth while slowing the cuts.

On this, Hollande has the sympathy of politicians and social campaigners who insist the human cost of the austerity plan is too much. There was almost palpable shock when, on April 4, Dimitris Christoulas, a 77-year-old pensioner, shot himself outside the Athens parliament, after saying he couldn’t face the prospect of “scrounging for food”.

A generation without jobs is growing up in Greece and Spain, where unemployment for the under-25s is more than 50pc and rising.

But Hollande would also have the support of other European leaders. Spain’s Mariano Rajoy has already negotiated a relaxation of his budgetary targets for 2012 to 5.3pc of GDP, after his officials told Brussels that their 5.8pc target would be “suicidal”.

Italy’s Mario Monti has repeatedly called for a greater focus on growth. Meanwhile, a mounting band of economists around the world reckon that German austerity is pushing the eurozone into deep recession – the spectre of which is beginning to rattle markets more than debt updates.

On Thursday night, S&P downgraded Spanish sovereign debt by two notches because of “budget trajectory [that] will likely deteriorate against a background of economic contraction”.

The rating agency said it expected Spain’s economy to contract by 1.5pc in 2012, rather than the 0.3pc it had forecast. It listed four reasons: declining incomes; private sector deleveraging; the government’s “front-loaded fiscal consolidation plan”; and the “uncertain outlook” for the rest of the eurozone. In other words: the austerity drive.

So, is the electorate right after all? Should the hardliners stand aside and allow a new set of leaders try a new set of policies? Or is Merkel right to say there is only one path to recovery? Over the next few weeks, Europe may be about to find out.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/9233886/Could-democracy-derail-the-euro.html

The ongoing conflict between North and South Sudan and the threat of these countries’ further fragmentation hold lessons for the Arab order as a whole
By occupying the Heglig oil region, internationally regarded as a part of North Sudan, South Sudanese President Salva Kiir has shown himself to be either short-sighted or reckless or to have been propelled into this action by outside forces that care little about the welfare of South Sudan and its people.

Within a few months of its secession and establishment as an independent state, South Sudan has moved to the brink of another destructive war with its northern neighbour. The signs of impending war were already present before the secession and they continued afterwards. Clashes had flared in South Kordofan, where Heglig is located, in June 2011 just before the South’s proclamation of independence, and some analysts say that the South’s failure in these clashes drove it to its present recklessness.

The government in the South Sudanese capital Juba took this aggressive measure while the African Union-brokered talks in Addis Ababa were still in progress and in spite of the fact that only two months ago the South and the North signed a non- aggression pact in which they agreed to “continue dialogue over issues still pending between the two sides.”

Is the present move to occupy Heglig proof that Juba never intended to honour its commitment and that even as Kiir put pen to paper it had other plans?

The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), also known as the Naivasha Agreement, was meant not only to end the conflict between the Sudanese government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), but also to end the tensions between what have become two neighbouring states since July 2011. However, the Southern People’s Liberation Movement in the North (SPLM- North) has remained active, and, prompted by Juba, it has allied with rebel movements in Darfur and South Kordofan to form the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF) with the declared aim of toppling the regime in Khartoum.

The implications of this seem clear: first, the rulers of the South never intended to implement the peace agreement they had claimed to seek in the Naivasha Agreement; second, they planned to grab more than they obtained in the agreement; and, third, they always had their eyes on a greater goal, which was to topple the regime in Khartoum, probably on behalf of parties interested in the further fragmentation of Sudan.

The way the situation in the two Sudans has developed over recent months points to major deficiencies in the CPA, which did not lay genuine foundations for ending the tensions between the two sides — perhaps because this was never really the aim — and which instead kept outstanding issues pending like fuses that could be lit at any moment. The essential aim of the CPA may have been clear, but it was still very general, being “the division of power and wealth”. The agreement did not specify the ways in which this was to be done, however, and though power was indeed divided through the division of Sudan, the division of wealth has not been settled even though the South obtained three- quarters of Sudan’s oil wealth, and the question of borders remains unresolved.

In overseeing the drafting and implementation of the CPA the United States was not aiming to halt the conflict and bring about peace in Sudan. Instead, it aimed to divide Sudan before going on to fragment it further into ever smaller pieces. For this reason, having ensured that the partition of the country would go ahead as planned, the US planted plenty of mines that could be detonated in that partition’s aftermath.

However, it is also true that the regime of North Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir bears a large share of the responsibility for what has happened.

Concerned for little more than securing his own survival, Al-Bashir acted in such a way as to reap what Khartoum obtained from the Naivasha Agreement: the loss of the South, of three-quarters of his country’s oil, and of any prospect of peace, with problems that were supposed to be peacefully resolved slipping beyond the point where there is much hope of a peaceful resolution.

In their recent statements, the leaders of South Sudan have made it clear that they consider the oil- rich regions of Heglig and Abyei to belong to them. It is also obvious that they have been inciting rebels in Darfur, and perhaps East Sudan, to secede as well. The latest measure is intended to impose an economic stranglehold on Khartoum and to weaken it politically, perhaps in order to strengthen South Sudanese negotiations over Abyei. It is doubtful that things will stop there.

Although international opinion has condemned Juba’s occupation of Heglig, and calls for its unconditional withdrawal have been voiced by the US, the EU, the African Union and the UN Security Council, Juba has nevertheless set out a list of conditions that it says must be met before it withdraws from the region.

Read aloud by South Sudan Minister of Information Barnaba Benjamin, these demand the withdrawal of North Sudanese forces from Abyei, the immediate cessation of all land and air attacks, and the deployment of international observers along the demilitarised border areas until the boundary between the two countries has been settled by international arbitration.

Under a barrage of international criticism, the government of South Sudan then softened its stance slightly, saying it would withdraw from Heglig if the UN deployed peacekeeping forces in the area until a settlement could be reached between the two sides.

SUDAN AND THE ARAB ORDER: Observers of the situation in Sudan fear that developments in the two countries less than a year after the independence of the South bode ill not just for Sudan but also for the Arab order as a whole.

The CPA provided a mechanism that would open up the possibility of self-determination for the people of the South after a six-year period, the purpose of this interim period being to give Khartoum a chance to make the preservation of the unity of Sudan attractive to the southerners. Largely due to a chain of political and military blunders on the part of the Al-Bashir regime in the North, the Southerners remained unconvinced, and this was demonstrated in the referendum at the end of the interim period in which the people of the South voted almost unanimously for secession, leading to the creation of an independent state in July 2011.

Unfortunately, arrangements for the future relationship between the two Sudans fell far short of the importance of this event, and the final borders between the two countries remained undecided, with the two sides continuing to quarrel over them.

Such a situation naturally breeds tensions, and these have remained the chief trait of the two countries’ relationship. Only a month before the latest crisis, the two sides clashed over the border areas, with southern forces invading and occupying Heglig, which belongs to the North in accordance with an International Court of Justice ruling, on 26 and 27 March.

Heglig is strategically vital to North Sudan. According to some reports, the region produces 50 per cent of the oil that remains to the North following the South’s secession, with others placing the figure as high as 70 per cent. Southern leaders have defended their actions on the grounds of self-defence, claiming that they acted in response to northern attacks, repelling the invading forces and driving them back up to Heglig.

However, the South’s decision to occupy the area suggests that Juba has adopted a policy of calculated escalation, believing that one of the chief aims of the North’s attacks is to seize the oil fields in the South. In statements following the occupation, southern leaders insisted that they would not withdraw from Heglig until the threat from northern forces had ceased. They then linked the South’s withdrawal from this area to the North’s withdrawal from Abyei, which northern forces have controlled since May last year. Such escalatory tactics reached new heights when South Sudanese President Kiir threatened to move his forces into Abyei if the UN did not evacuate northern forces from the area.

Officials in Khartoum were initially shocked by the South’s occupation of Heglig. The talks in Addis Ababa were in progress, and they had succeeded in solving nearly 80 per cent of the pending issues between the two states, according to North Sudanese Foreign Ministry sources. According to the North Sudanese minister of defence, the South’s actions demonstrate that it has been colluding with rebel movements in the North planning to seize power in Khartoum. President Al-Bashir has echoed this view, charging the South with supporting insurgents in the South Kordofan and Blue Nile regions of the North as part of a drive to strangle the North economically by choking off oil production in Heglig.

Given such views and its rejection of Juba’s demands, it was inevitable that Khartoum would break off the talks in Ethiopia and revert to the military option with the declared intention of “recovering Heglig immediately and by force”. However, in the two weeks since the crisis broke out, the North has been unable to recapture the area by military means. After declaring that Heglig would be “purged” within 24 hours, reports from Khartoum began to speak of “fierce resistance” on the part of southern forces.

Regardless of the outcome of this confrontation, such developments should have reminded both sides of their long and bitter experience of hostilities and served as yet another lesson that military solutions to their problems are counter-productive. Such solutions, if solutions they be, are highly costly, especially for countries with very limited resources.

For the North, military action against the South has profound repercussions for other trouble spots, notably in Darfur and Kordofan.

Khartoum should bear in mind that if the South succeeds in imposing its will militarily, or if it succeeds in preventing the North from accomplishing its aims in this manner, this will encourage the rebel movements in the North and endanger the country’s territorial integrity.

The degree to which the relationship between the two states has deteriorated recently also suggests that they are still unable to pursue diplomatic solutions on their own and that they need the help of mediation. Perhaps international, African and Egyptian efforts can succeed where they have failed, especially given that the latter parties would also be motivated by the spectre of fall-out from the confrontation between the two Sudans on the neighbouring Arab and African environment.

There have been numerous cases similar to that afflicting Sudan in the Arab order as a whole. Although these did not reach the point of secession, they had many features in common. The cases of Yemen, Iraq and Libya immediately spring to mind, as does that of Somalia, which seems to have deteriorated beyond hope, perhaps in large part because it has drawn so little Arab attention.

In view of this past history, it is important that the Arabs try to absorb lessons from the Sudanese case. The first lesson they should grasp is that secession is not a solution: as the case of Sudan demonstrates, in countries where there are disaffected groups or regions due to a legacy of suspicion and, perhaps, bloodshed between them and the central authorities, secession is no guarantee that further deterioration in relations between the sides can be prevented. Instead of secession, the solution is to institute comprehensive political change in such a way that all the parties concerned are able to claim their fair share of rights within the existing framework of the state.

This was former SPLM leader John Garang’s approach. He saw the SPLM as an inclusive and all- Sudanese movement that embraced all opposition forces in the country, both in the South and in the North, and united them with the purpose of changing the political system in Sudan as a whole. Unfortunately, Garang was not destined to bring his vision to fulfilment.

One can only hope that the Arab order turns its attention to this matter, not just for Sudan but also for other similar cases where the threat of secession may loom. Early intervention is better than waiting until the situation reaches the brink of secession, as the Arab order did with the situation between North and South Sudan. Conversely, if the Arab order chooses to remain indifferent to, or to handle events in Sudan and elsewhere in routine ways, then it should not be a surprise if this order, which seeks to promote unity between its member states, sees the unity of these states crumble.

Such a nightmare of chaos and disintegration is closer than many might care to imagine. Somalia is in the midst of such a nightmare, Libya may be only around the corner from it, and behind them stands a long queue of Arab countries that may be only steps away.
 
 
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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2012/1095/op1.htm

A new phase of violence in Iraq and the dynamics of the conflict in Syria provide fertile conditions for the re-emergence of the al-Qaida idea.

About the authorPaul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 28 September 2001, and writes an international-security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group. His books include Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010). He is on twitter at: @ProfPRogersThe structure of the al-Qaida movement at its height was always far from the traditional hierarchy of many revolutionary bodies. But it did have a recognised leadership and a shifting geographical base which over two decades moved from Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia to Sudan, then back to Afghanistan and (most recently) Pakistan.

Today, as a structured entity al-Qaida is clearly less formidable than before, and even as a more fluid movement it has lost momentum.

But it endures as an idea and sense of mission: something apparent in different ways in north Africa, Yemen, Somalia and (most potently at present) in the form of the Boko Haram movement in Nigeria (see “Al-Qaida franchise: the Nigerian case”, 25 August 2011).

Yet of these developments, only Boko Haram represents a new lease of life. This is what gives current developments in Iraq and Syria an extra potential significance. For there are indications that the aftermath of the eight-year war in Iraq and the dynamics of the conflict in and around Syria could fuel a further evolution of al-Qaida (see “Al-Qaida: an open endgame”, 12 January 2012).

The Iraqi descent

In Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki has survived as prime minister far longer than many expected and has now begun seriously to consolidate power. His power-base lies in the country’s Shi’a majority which had been marginalised and excluded during the Saddam Hussein regime. That experience of persistent mistreatment underlines the present government’s determination to maintain control of the country at the expense of much of the previously powerful Sunni minority, as well as to clip as far as possible the Iraqi Kurds’ extensive authority in the northeast.

A new assessment from the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) is bluntly pessimistic. It contrasts expectations at the time of the United States withdrawal with outcomes:

“When the American military presence in Iraq ended in December 2011, Washington and Baghdad claimed that Iraq was a stable, sustainable democracy. However, this seems questionable as Nuri al-Malaki, prime minister since 2006, has continued his quest to dominate the state and to use its power to break opposition to his rule. His systematic exclusion of key politicians from power underlines the failure of the 2010 elections to deliver representative government, and leaves the country vulnerable to heightened sectarian tension and a new civil war” (see “Iraq: Malaki power grab risks fresh civil war”, IISS Strategic Comments, 20 April 2012).

Al-Maliki has done more than excluded politicians: he has targeted them for arrest, and his security personnel have tortured associates to gain evidence against them. He is aided in his endeavours to entrench control by violent opposition from Sunni paramilitaries, whose series of bombings and shootings (mainly in Shi’a areas and against Shi’a figures) reinforces sectarian-political divides.

The associated decay of prospects for democracy in Iraq is a condition favourable to the further re-emergence of the al-Qaida idea there. The tendency of events in Syria, and the wider regional context of the deep antagonism between Saudi Arabia and Iran, are also relevant to this prospect.

The pattern of conflict

The Syrian rebellion is now in its second year. Though it has not yet developed a marked sectarian dimension, it is clear that radical Islamist elements are working hard to influence the progress of the opposition to the Bashar al-Assad regime (see Liz Sly, “Fears of extremism taking hold in Syria as violence continues”, Washington Post, 23 April)

Much of this is centred on a group called the Jabhat al-Nusra which has claimed responsibility for attacks on government buildings, most recently the bombing in Damascus on 17 March 2012 that killed twenty-seven people and injured ninety-seven (see Fay Ferguson & Hugo Wlliamson, “Factional fight – conflicting objectives in the Syrian struggle”, Jane’s Intelligence Review, May 2012).

Perhaps most significant of all is the growing evidence that experienced paramilitary radicals are entering Syria, principally from Iraq, in order to join the rebellion and influence its nature and direction. A high proportion may themselves be returning Syrians, while others are Iraqi and from elsewhere in the region. The absolute numbers are not yet greatly significant, but the phenomenon has an important historical perspective that must be factored in.

In Afghanistan in the 1980s, some of the mujahideen fighting against Soviet occupation went on to be part of the cohort of paramilitary Islamists that were so crucial to the early development of al-Qaida. Many of the latter were committed young men who had gained confidence and experience in fighting against the Soviet forces.

Twenty years later, a new generation of paramilitaries fought the coalition in Iraq. They acquired intense combat experience in an urban insurgency against the well-trained and very well-armed volunteer army and marine corps of the United States – a far more valuable encounter than the one against low-morale Soviet conscripts in rural Afghanistan (see “Afghanistan: echoes of Vietnam”, 10 February 2011).

Most of those that survived the Iraqi crucible, probably amounting to thousands, returned to their own countries – or, if they were themselves Iraqis, continued to engage in some way in violent opposition to al-Maliki’s regime.

It is they and their co-fighters from other theatres who are now crossing the border into Syria. A component of the mix of motivation and opportunity that guides them is awareness of the geopolitical balance where the hated Bashar al-Assad regime has a very close relationship with Tehran and is thus strongly opposed by Iran’s regional rival Saudi Arabia (see Madawi al-Rashid, “Saudi Arabia and Syria: logic of dictators”, 20 March 2012).

This pattern of alignments creates a risk that the Syrian conflict will evolve into a rebellion in which – as in Iraq today – a resurgent al-Qaida ideology plays a prominent role. This is by no means inevitable, but the risk is reinforced by the deep Saudi-Iranian antagonisms and the influence of both countries in Syria and Iraq.

A situation so dangerously poised could yet be retrieved if some kind of compromise can be reached between Assad and the Syrian opposition; and, where any influence can be brought to bear, if Nouri al-Maliki’s government can be persuaded that its rigid centralisation of power could have violent and counterproductive consequences. It is very late in the day for such negotiations, but conditions on the ground and the tensions between states alike add to the urgency.
–Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 28 September 2001, and writes an international-security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group. His books include Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007), and Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century (Pluto Press, 3rd edition, 2010). He is on twitter at: @ProfPRogers
http://www.opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/syria-iraq-and-al-qaidas-opportunity

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While it might not have died, the Arab Spr ing

has not lived up to its promise, though much has changed
2011 was the year of the Arab Spring in full bloom.

The winds of revolution blew in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria. Other countries were shaken by waves of demonstrations, sit-ins, and strikes that did not reach the point of full-scale revolution but that left their stability uneasy. The situations in Morocco, Algeria, Kuwait, Oman, Iraq and the Palestinian territories, for example, were far from calm. Nor was the Arab Spring limited to the Arab region. The phenomenon spread among youth in other countries of the world, such as China, Russia and even the US in the form of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It even reached Israel where social protest movements took to the streets.

In a sense, Cairo’s Tahrir Square epitomised the Arab Spring. It breathed the memory and the spirit of Bouazizi in Tunisia and Khaled Said in Egypt, who had become symbols of a world of fresh and vigorous youth crying out against an unjust world and who were crushed by a generation of geriatric officials who clung tenaciously to their seats of power from which they sewed enormous corruption. Of course, the revolutions were not solely political, striving to overthrow rulers and change the forms of government. They also gave rise to new forms of music, art and literature that sought to break old moulds.

Much has changed in the 15 months since the outbreak of the Arab Spring. Figures who looked like they would never leave until they keeled over into their graves have gone. As they fell, so too did thousands of dead and wounded during an upheaval that sometimes descended into civil war and occasioned foreign intervention in the form of money and/or troops. In 2012, the Arab Spring dealt with the unfinished business of Ali Abdallah Saleh in Yemen. The spring in Syria, on the other hand, turned into a huge quagmire after a year of revolution and confrontation. The prestige and status of the Baathist regime in Damascus may have sustained blows that seemed debilitating enough to force it into undertaking fundamental changes in order to survive, but it has survived nevertheless. At the moment, therefore, Damascus looks like the Arab Spring’s last battle as the seasons shift to a scorching summer filled with blasts of hot sand storms.

In spite of the uplifting romanticism that infused the Arab Spring at the outset, the revolutions soon returned to the basics. The revolutions in the Arab region are a manifestation of a phase of the profound transformations that Arab societies have undergone in recent decades. However, it soon became apparent that Facebook, Twitter and the other contemporary IT phenomena that had lent their badges to the revolutions formed no more than a surface layer of the change. Modernist culture has not yet penetrated Arab society deeply enough, while the traditionalist opposition, which has built up over the past eight decades, was presented with the opportunity to assert itself. Represented primarily by the Muslim Brotherhood, it leaped to the fore in the streets, in the “million-man” marches and the occupation of city squares, and then in the ballot boxes that brimmed with the votes of its supporters.

But then a long-established historical process came into play. One of the conventions among the leaderships of movements of profound change is a form of ideological one- upmanship that casts to the fore the most hard line and dogmatic factions. As communist parties assumed power in various parts of the world in the early 20th century, there immediately sprouted Trotskyist, Maoist, and Guevarist parties, and there proliferated proponents of permanent revolution or whatever they might have termed it so long as the revolution didn’t end. The same phenomenon occurred with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, in the form of the Salafist trends and the Jihadist Islamist groups that date from the 1990s. The US may have succeeded in killing Osama bin Laden, but his many offspring remain and, after some changes in approach and outlook, they have returned to the field. Be that as it may, the upshot is that the original revolution generation, the one that spearheaded the Arab Spring, has been eclipsed by the more traditional and familiar elements in the political scene with the result that the movements that are the most steeped in traditionalism have surfaced as the chief adversary of existing regimes. The “bogeyman” of the past has come to life as a player in the political game, which differs from country to country according to the local rules and the historical circumstances specific to each country.

The rise of the Islamist movements in the Arab countries may present a formidable obstacle to the Arab Spring. They have probably caused large segments of Arab youth to wonder whether their revolution has turned out to offer a shortcut to domination by political movements whose particular ideology, even at its most moderate, is not conducive to the realisation of the dream to catch up with the Turkish, Malaysian and Indonesian experiences. This is not just because such groups as the Muslim Brotherhood have an excess of conservatism, but also because such groups are staring at the even more conservative Salafis who are constantly threatening to encroach on their space.

As though what was happening in post-revolutionary countries were not enough, after over a year of Arab Spring, the region is teeming with various forms of violence, sectarianism and even threats of partition. What appeared to be a new Arab world in the making has returned to familiar ruts. After the secession of the South, Sudan has reverted to war between the North and South as though unable to break the habit. Even the Palestinian rift, which had seemed to have subsided, has begun to show signs of flaring up again. Perhaps Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Abu Moussa Island in the Gulf was little more than an attempt to remind the Arabs that the Arab Spring probably has not altered the issues that we are all too familiar with.

Still, it is impossible to say that the Arab Spring has died. Many things have changed and irreversibly so, even if there remain certain causes and problems that do not fade away with the onset of a spring or autumn, or even with the passage of all the seasons of the year, if not many years. For one, we can no longer accept the Arab systems of government as they currently exist. Regardless of whether the ruling elites themselves realise this and are in a quandary as to how to change them and to what degree, these were the regimes that bred the passion for more radical change that now pervades large segments of Arab societies. It is impossible to put that genie back into its bottle. These segments of society have probably matured over the past year. They have come to realise that the IT revolution has limits and, perhaps, they are sobered by how naïve they have been and how inept they were in their management of complex political processes. But they have definitely hit upon the key to moving the masses.

Another significant change is related to the rise of the culture of law and constitutional jurisprudence. After succeeding in their immediate aims, the revolutions found themselves in unknown territory and had no choice but to seek refuge in the law against the spread of chaos. Producing constitutions and legislation was a major key to curbing the chaos and forestalling its heavy toll. But even in those countries that have not been hit by the Arab Spring, authorities have cracked open the law books in the search for legal legitimacy to bolster the various forms of traditional legitimacy. Their hope is to avert the Arab Spring and enjoy all the other seasons.

Such are the dynamics unleashed by the Arab Spring. They operate on the ground and they work to change realities there. In this sense, at least, the Arab Spring has probably taken a warrior’s rest at the gates of Damascus as it searches for a new beginning.
 
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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2012/1095/op2.htm

India’s political spectrum is considerably wider than that of the US, and Patnaik offers an unusual perspective [AFP]
Economist Prabhat Patnaik says moving back to an economic ‘golden age’ is impossible, so we must invent new solutions.
Austin, TX – After an engaging half-hour interview with India’s pre-eminent Marxist economist during a conference at New York University, I told a friend about my one-on-one time with Prabhat Patnaik.

“There are Marxists in India?” came the bemused response. “I thought India was the heart of the new capitalism.”

Indeed, we hear about India mostly as a rising economic power that is challenging the United States. While there certainly are no shortages of capitalists, there are still lots of Marxists in India, as well as communist parties that have won state elections. Patnaik represents the best thinking and practice of those left traditions – both the academic Marxism that provides a framework for the critique of economics, and the political Marxism that proposes public policies – which is why I was so excited to talk with him about lessons to be learned from the current economic crisis.

In the interview, conducted during a break in the NYU Institute for Public Knowledge’s “Futures of Finance” conference, I asked Patnaik two main questions: First, is there a “golden age” of capitalism to which we can return? Second, can we ever expect ethical practices from the financial sector of the global capitalist economy? Before explaining why his answer to both questions was “no”, some background.

 
 Inside Story – Financial market meltdown

Prabhat Patnaik started his academic career in the UK, earning his doctoral degree at Oxford University and then teaching at the University of Cambridge. He returned to India in 1974 to teach at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi until his retirement in 2010. He’s the author of several influential books, including The Value of Money, published in 2008. Patnaik-the-politician served as Vice-Chairman of the Planning Board of the state of Kerala from 2006 to 2011 and is a member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). He regularly writes on economic issues in the party’s journal and addresses trade union meetings.

In the United States, where people believe Marxism was buried under the rubble of the Berlin Wall and communism can only mean Soviet-style totalitarianism, his political affiliations would guarantee a life on the margins. But India’s political spectrum is considerably wider, and leftist ideas have a place in the national political discourse there. On the world stage, Patnaik brings an unusual perspective: An experienced economist with a history of political organising; an Indian who is engaged in the political debates of the West; a leftist who is not afraid to critique the weaknesses of the left tradition.

The quixotic quest for a ‘golden age’

Ever since the financial meltdown of 2008, there has been more and more nostalgia in the United States – especially among liberals – for the immediate post-WWII period, the so-called “golden age” of capitalism during which profits and wages rose, and unemployment was low. This was the achievement of Keynesianism, the philosophy that unwanted market outcomes can be corrected through monetary and fiscal policy designed to stabilise an otherwise unstable business cycle. Primarily through “military Keynesianism” – massive spending on wars and a permanent warfare state – the US government helped stimulate the economy when it went into inevitable periods of stagnation. That worked until the mid-1970s, when growth started to slow.

Whether or not that system was good for everyone (lots of people in the “third world”, for example, were not particularly happy with it), the question remains: Can we go back to that strategy? Patnaik says that golden age was necessarily short-lived, as the pressure for global investment pushed nations to give up the ability to impose controls on capital. This globalisation of finance made national Keynesian policies less relevant. At about the same time, steep increases in the price of petroleum generated even more capital in the oil states, which went looking for investment opportunities around the world.

Globalisation – meaning in this case, the concentration of capital moving freely around the world – meant that no single nation-state could go up against international finance. And with the global flow of goods, the large “reserve army of labour” (the unemployed and under-employed) in places such as China and India meant that workers in the advanced industrial countries had less leverage. So, productivity continued to rise, but wages stagnated. Patnaik said it is important to see the contemporary crisis in that historical context.

“The collapse of the housing bubble in the United States is certainly part of the problem, but not the root cause of the problem today,” he said. “The immediate crisis it touched off helps make the underlying problem visible.”

 
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Is Wall Street beyond reform?

If this financialisation of the global economy, which has put so much power in so few hands, is at the heart of the problem, the question is clear: In the absence of a global state, who is going to control international finance capital?

If cap ital is going to be concentrated, can we at least make

it behave?

If the power of finance capital can’t be diminished, is there a way to at least make it follow some sane rules to prevent the worst from happening again? Short answer: No.

“It’s important to understand that capitalism is a spontaneous system, not something that is always necessarily planned or controlled,” Patnaik said. Because the reward for ignoring, evading, or getting around rules is so powerful, the attempts to make capitalism follow ethical norms are bound to fail.

“Keynesianism worked in a specific time and place, but capitalism escaped Keynesianism,” he said. New rules will suffer a similar fate, absent a force as strong as international finance capital to enforce the rules.

Although Patnaik often talks in detail about the complex workings of the global economy, he also articulates simple truths when that kind of straightforward analysis is needed. In doing so, he often draws on aspects of Marx’s analysis that the world tends to forget.

To make the point about the futility of talking about ethical norms in capitalism, Patnaik pointed to Marx’s insight that a capitalist is “capital personified”. Here’s the relevant passage from the first volume of Marx’s Capital:

“[T]he possessor of money becomes a capitalist … [A]nd it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations, that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will.”

What Marx described as “the restless never-ending process of profit-making” and “boundless greed after riches” reminds us that, as actors on the economic stage, we are less moral agents and more “capital personified” – relentless in our restlessness and bound to believe in an illusory boundlessness. Society might be able make some moral claims on people with wealth if they were merely working in capitalism, but it’s more difficult to find common moral ground with “capital personified”.

What should people fight for?

If we can’t go back to business as usual, and there’s no reason to expect that new rules will solve our problems, what kinds of solutions are possible? Patnaik said that neither of the two most obvious responses to the financial crisis – creating a surrogate global state to impose controls on finance, or “delinking” a nation’s economy from the global finance system – are now on the cards. Even though capitalism is in deep crisis, resistance to capitalism is not nearly strong enough to produce movements that could make that possible.

Given his intellectual roots and political affiliation, it may seem surprising that Patnaik argues for organising to bring back the liberal welfare-state policies that developed in the advanced industrial countries during the postwar period when Keynesian economics ruled.

“That is not about going back, which is impossible,” Patnaik said. “We have to go forward with new ideas.” The call for a more robust social safety net (protecting workers’ rights, unemployment insurance, social security, health insurance, etc.) isn’t new, but such policies can be a step towards new ideas, a transitional measure, he explained. Rather than making those policies the final goal, as part of a more-or-less permanent accommodation with capitalism, they should be seen as a stepping stone toward radical change.

“We can work towards a reassertion of welfare state policies, not as an end but as a vehicle toward greater justice, as a way of making visible the inherent limitations of capitalism,” he said.

In additions to the limitations of capitalism, there also are ecological limitations we can’t ignore, he said, which means the goal can’t be raising India and China to the material standards of the United States. Patnaik recognises the need to adjust older socialist goals to new realities.

“The world simply has to be refashioned,” both in the “third world” and in advanced capitalist countries, and specifically in the United States, Patnaik said, which means experiments in alternative ways of living that are not based on material measures.

 
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“This really is a spiritual/cultural question, about what it means to live a good life,” he said, which should not be seen as foreign to socialism. “Marxism shouldn’t be reduced to productionism. The goal of socialism has always been human freedom, which is about much more than material wealth.”

“Gandhi talked about the ethical demands of nature, but I don’t like that phrase, being a socialist and anthropocentric,” Patnaik said with the hint of a grin. “But we do have to live within the limits of nature.”

The role of Marxism

It is easy to misjudge Patnaik from first impressions. Unlike many intellectuals, Patnaik does not immediately thrust himself into a discussion, and he’s soft-spoken both in conversation and from the podium. But when he does speak, his passion for justice comes through loud and clear. And, while Patnaik identifies very much as a communist, he also is quick to poke at some of the tradition’s platitudes.

“I just came from the (Communist) Party Congress, and I keep reminding everyone that they have to give up notions of a one-party State, of democratic centralism (the Leninist notion that party members were free to debate policy but must support the final decision of the party),” Patnaik said. “Democratic centralism always leads to centralism.”

If leftists reject the current dominance of finance in the world, Patnaik said that it’s important to reject any suggestion that a single perspective or party should dominate.

“The hegemony of finance throttles democracy. The hegemony of finance beats you into shape,” he said. If the goal is to resist that kind of hegemony, then the approach of the old communist movement simply isn’t relevant, Patnaik said – but socialist principles are more relevant than ever.

“Any resistance has to be about opening up alternatives, opening up critical thinking to imagine those alternatives,” he said. “The only way to challenge that global regime is mass mobilisation.”

Patnaik has no off-the-shelf solutions to offer, and it’s difficult to reduce his thinking to slogans. At the age of 66, when many people hold on tightly to what they believe will work, Patnaik doesn’t hesitate to say: “It’s time to invent.”

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin, one of the partners in the community centre “5604 Manor”. His latest book is All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice.

Follow him on Twitter: @jensenrobertw

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
 
 
Source: Al Jazeera 
–Robert Jensen
Robert Jensen is a professor at the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/04/2012423164839425416.html

A year after the Abbottabad raid,al Qaeda’s mastermind is still loose. Bin Laden’s death has only made the hunt harder.
A year after the death of Osama bin Laden, American special operators are training their sights on his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the former Egyptian Army surgeon widely regarded as the mastermind of major attacks against Americans and other targets. And forces loyal to Zawahiri, who affectionately call him “Glasses” because of his trademark oversize spectacles, are determined to guard their leader.
Zawahiri’s safety was the main subject of conversation when several senior al Qaeda operatives and a handful of other militants sat down for a dinner meeting in North Waziristan six months ago, according to a well-placed Taliban source. The host of the dinner, from a prominent Taliban family, had a sheep slaughtered in honor of his Arab guests. Over a meal of mutton kebabs and pilau, the men expressed concerns about Zawahiri’s security in light of bin Laden’s bloody end. They said Zawahiri’s handlers and tribal hosts had strongly advised him “to move to a new place,” to stop using electronic devices, to limit his exposure by issuing fewer audio and video propaganda tapes, and to exercise extreme caution in dealing with couriers.
“We are hoping he can avoid being captured by the U.S. for at least 10 more years,” the source says. One of the al Qaeda operatives at the dinner, which took place outside the town of Miran Shah, asked if the Afghan Taliban would consider harboring Zawahiri if he decided to hide in Afghanistan. According to the Taliban source, the Afghan was noncommittal.
Taliban and al Qaeda operatives who have met Zawahiri say he is highly respected in militant circles, both as a thinker and a doer. He’s not nearly as charismatic as bin Laden, but in some ways, he’s more important. Bin Laden was the face of terror, but Zawahiri is the mind: an important ideologue as well as an operational commander.
He’s under increasing pressure now to carry out a fresh act of headline-grabbing mayhem. “Zawahiri needs to terrorize in order to really cement his position as bin Laden’s long-term successor,” says Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official who has advised the Obama administration on counterterror policy. Yet the new al Qaeda chief faces a dilemma: the more involved he gets in planning and propaganda, the more exposed he becomes. And he can’t conduct terror operations if he’s dead, much less serve as a symbol of al Qaeda resilience.
American intelligence on him is sketchy; the last time U.S. agents are known to have had actionable intelligence on his whereabouts was in January 2006, when they learned that he had been invited to an Islamic holiday dinner in a mud-walled compound on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. A Predator drone fired a salvo of Hellfire missiles at the compound, killing some 18 people, including several al Qaeda militants. But Zawahiri was not among them.
“There are indicators that some elements of the Pakistani government may be protecting Zawahiri,” says a U.S. intel official who did not want to be named discussing sensitive information. “We have reports that he’s been hanging out in Karachi for brief periods, and we just don’t think he’s going to be doing that without a lot of people knowing about it.”
At the moment, it would be politically fraught, however, for American special operators and CIA agents to carry out an attack even in the remote tribal areas, much less in a city. Pakistan’s political and military leaders, humiliated and furious that Washington kept them in the dark about the bin Laden raid and other missions, have forbidden the United States from conducting drone strikes in their territory. American forces are respecting Pakistani wishes—for now—in an effort to “lower the temperature,” says one senior administration official. But that forbearance won’t last long. Eventually, American officials tell Newsweek, offensive drone operations will restart, with or without Pakistan’s approval.
the militants who gathered for dinner near Miran Shah were still mourning bin Laden’s death at the time. They recalled the care he had taken to protect himself. Bin Laden’s trusted aide and courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, had devised ingenious ways to move his leader from one safe house to another in Pakistan. He had hidden bin Laden inside a large box that was fitted at the bottom of Pakistan’s brightly colored transport trucks. The box would be stuffed under cargoes of cement, wheat flour and rice sacks, or even under a noisy collection of goats, sheep, or chickens.
The men blamed the courier, a Pakistani Pashtun from the tribal areas who had lived in Kuwait for a time, for bin Laden’s death. “A Qaeda investigation showed that al-Kuwaiti’s carelessness provided the clues for our enemies to discover the sheik’s house,” says the Taliban operative. “He was not a traitor, but his mistakes led to the great sheik’s death.” The blunders included driving the same car every time he went to the compound inside the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad and using a cellphone that could be monitored.
The militants at the dinner didn’t want Zawahiri to make similar mistakes. They lamented the heavy casualties that armed drones had inflicted on al Qaeda’s hierarchy. All of them had heard that bin Laden had become increasingly depressed and detached as the death toll of his lieutenants mounted. “The sheik’s last days were painful, as he was hearing bad news all the time about the loss of the remaining Qaeda leaders,” the source says. “The sheik’s last year was not a good one.”
Zawahiri is more connected to day-to-day operations. He was involved, for instance, in the 2005 bombing of the London Underground and in the assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007. It seems he also played a role in deploying a Jordanian double agent to bomb a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, in 2009. The CIA operatives who were killed believed they were about to receive key intelligence on Zawahiri’s whereabouts. “That attack gave a big boost to Zawahiri’s credentials as a terror planner,” says Riedel.
Zawahiri can take heart from the fact that as pressure has grown on al Qaeda’s central command, affiliated groups have sprung up around the globe: in Yemen, Somalia, and North Africa, among other places. But like bin Laden before him, Zawahiri is now an important symbol—of either the success or failure of the global jihad.
It’ll be much easier to mount an effective operation against Zawahiri and his close circle of aides if the United States has the support—explicit or otherwise—of Pakistan. Though several top al Qaeda figures have been killed or captured in Pakistani cities, Zawahiri may still be living in the tribal areas along the Afghanistan border. Drones can learn a lot from the sky, but the region is large, and human intelligence is vital. The Pakistanis could help get that, but cooperation requires trust—on both sides.
There is none. “This time it’s the lowest it has ever gone,” says retired Maj. Gen. Mahmud Ali Durrani, a former ambassador to Washington. He blames both sides. “We have failed at convincing America that we are with you, that we want to get rid of these militants,” says Durrani. Yet Pakistan believes the United States does not respect the country’s sovereignty and treats it like a vassal state.
The distrust only got worse after the bin Laden raid. President Obama, fearing a leak, ordered that Pakistan be kept in the dark. The United States, in fact, expected that the Navy SEALs would bring back evidence that Pakistani intelligence was cooperating with al Qaeda. Newsweek has learned that shortly after the SEALs stormed bin Laden’s hideout, federal prosecutors were laying the groundwork to issue sealed indictments against members of the Pakistani government or anyone else they believed had aided bin Laden. The charge, according to two law-enforcement sources, would have been “harboring a fugitive terrorist.”
The SEALs carted away boxes of computers, hard drives, thumb drives, DVDs, and thousands of documents. It was the greatest intel haul on al Qaeda’s operations and habits since 9/11: 3.4 terabytes of information, according to an intelligence source, including a personal journal by bin Laden, outlines for aspirational plots, cellphone numbers, and other contact information for al Qaeda allies. No smoking gun on Pakistani complicity was found, however, and no indictments were returned.

It’s not just the bin Laden raid that exacerbated ties. In January 2011 CIA contractor Raymond Davis shot and killed two alleged Pakistani robbers on a Lahore street. Then in November, U.S. warplanes killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in an airstrike along the Afghan border. A U.S. investigation concluded that mistakes by both sides contributed to the deaths. The Pakistani military angrily rejected that conclusion, saying the attack was unprovoked and deliberate.
Pakistan retaliated by closing down the vital supply line for NATO cargo moving to Afghanistan. It also expelled American personnel and drone aircraft from a Pakistani airbase. Most Pakistanis see the drone operations as a violation of sovereignty, and they decry the civilian casualties that sometimes result. Not just ordinary Pakistanis but also intelligence and counterterror agents often view the United States as an enemy. “Even right now we are collecting data on each American and each Pakistani working with the U.S. embassy and everyone they are in touch with,” says a Pakistani counterterror officer who declined to be quoted by name.
Last week talks began between the United States and Pakistan to try to “reset” the relationship. The drone issue is the toughest challenge. Even the U.S. government is divided over what the American position should be. Some would like to appease Pakistan by restricting the circle of possible targets for the drones and to give the Pakistanis a greater sense of involvement and control over what happens in their territory. Others say no way: too often in the past, Pakistan’s ISI spy service had tipped off targets before any missiles were fired. During one period in 2007, there were seven consecutive drone attacks in which the targets managed to slip away, according to a former Obama administration official who was briefed on the matter by the CIA.
U.S. officials have repeatedly confronted their Pakistani counterparts with evidence of ISI double-dealing, but that has made little difference. On one occasion the U.S. provided surveillance imagery of Pakistani soldiers waving arms shipments for the Haqqani faction of the Taliban across the border into Afghanistan. In the weeks after the raid on bin Laden, the U.S. military twice provided Pakistan with intelligence on bomb-making factories in its territory. Both times, the militants escaped before the weapons facilities could

be attacked. “The reality is that Pakistan remains a permissive environment for terrorism—even though al Qaeda has killed thousands of Pakistanis,” says a U.S. official.
If the U.S. gets Zawahiri in its sights, it won’t want to risk compromising an operation to take him out. The al Qaeda leader’s safest bet might be to hide as deep inside Pakistani territory as he can get. Riedel believes he’s probably already there. “I think the CIA would be looking for something that looks an awful lot like Abbottabad,” he says. “A safe house in an urban area near a military base. That’s been the signature of almost all of the senior Qaeda operatives who have been killed or captured.”
The problem for Zawahiri, however, is that “the CIA has demonstrated that it can break the code,” says Riedel. “Bin Laden actually practiced pretty good operational security, but Zawahiri has to take it up a notch. If I were him, I would be worried. I think we’ll find him, and I don’t think it will take 10 years.” Once again, Pakistan may learn about it only after the fact.

Sami Yousafzai is Newsweek’s correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he has covered militancy, al Qaeda, and the Taliban for the magazine since 9/11. He was born in Afghanistan but moved to Pakistan with his family after the Russian invasion in 1979. He began his career as a sports journalist but switched to war reporting in 1997.
Ron Moreau is Newsweek’s Afghanistan and Pakistan correspondent and has been covering the region for the magazine the past 10 years. Since he first joined Newsweek during the Vietnam War, he has reported extensively from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Klaidman, a former NEWSWEEK managing editor, is writing a book on President Obama and terrorism to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2012.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/04/29/in-bin-laden-s-wake-the-hunt-for-al-qaeda-mastermind.html

The writer is Director South Asian Media School, Lahore khaled.ahmed@tribune.com.pk
The Americans are leaving behind an Afghan National Army (ANA) which is more than 250,000-strong, and historically the largest in a country ravaged by state failure. Its officers’ corps is filled by a majority of non-Pashtuns: Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras. The rank and file is plurally dominant Pashtun, apparently undivided but subject to intimidation by the Taliban.

Chances are that the ANA will fall apart after the Americans leave. But one must remember that even in a state of internal division, all of them hate the Taliban.

The Afghan Pashtuns who have been polled also show that they overwhelmingly hate the Taliban. The ANA will be somewhat buttressed by the US which has pledged to maintain its military presence in Afghanistan till 2014 in a strategic agreement with Kabul to be signed in Chicago next month.

Dilip Hiro’s latest book Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia (Yale University Press 2012) talks about the past muster of the Afghan Army after the Soviets left: “The civil war erupted about three years after the pullout by the Soviet Union. On the eve of their departure, Afghan president Najibullah declared a state of emergency and appointed a new 22-member Supreme Council for the Soviet military academies, and raised 45,000 Special Guards to replace the departed Soviet troops…In March 1989, his soldiers frustrated a bid by Afghan Mujahedin’s interim government to capture Jalalabad”.

Najibullah, in January 1990, gave autonomy to Hazaras and Uzbeks, which won him the backing of the ten thousand-strong Uzbek militia led by General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who defected from the Mujahedin camp. Yet, his rival Tajik warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud boasted the best army in Afghanistan, numbering 30,000. Will the Tajik faction inside the ANA now fight the Taliban after the American exit?

Will someone additionally help by binding the Uzbek-Tajik rift in the Northern Alliance? Hiro tells us that in the past, when Pak-Saudi backing sent the Taliban into Afghanistan, Iran and the Central Asian states panicked and approached Russia for help: “Central Asia and Russia remain resolutely opposed to the Taliban while Iran tries to juggle its position between the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, stiffly opposing the US, and maintaining clandestine contacts with the Taliban”.

The Shanghai Cooperation Council (SCO) has six members: Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. It assumed anti-terrorism functions in 1998, held military exercises in 2000, established a secretariat in 2004 and changed its name from the Shanghai Five to SCO in June 2001 when it admitted Uzbekistan as the sixth member. Russia doesn’t want the Americans to leave Afghanistan. It describes terrorism as “threat from failing states” which is presumably how it looks at Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Will the Central Asians again seek help from Russia? “In 1989 after the exit of the Soviets, the Taliban’s triumph alarmed the five Central Asian republics. Their leaders met in the Kazakh capital of Alma Aty on October 4-5. The Uzbek president, Islam Karimov, urged his counterparts to strengthen Dostum’s Northern Alliance government, which controlled six provinces. He provided it with military and economic aid”.

This time the war is going to be more chaotic. The Pakistan-backed Haqqani network sits atop all of the Punjabi non-state actors that Pakistan is scared of: the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, the Jaish-i-Muhammad, Uzbek warriors of IMU and all others that Pakistan evacuated from Kunduz after 2001 when Dostum fell on them in the wake of American invasion.

If the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan has had a decade in which to prepare itself against Pakistan, the non-state actors of Pakistan are also sure about what they will do to Pakistan after triumphing in Afghanistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 29th, 2012.
http://tribune.com.pk/story/371308/will-the-northern-alliance-fight/