JK Alternative Viewpoint

BEIRUT – No one really saw this coming. That is, no one except for the handful of Syrian rebels who executed the startling July 18 bombing in Damascus that claimed the lives of Syria’s top intelligence and security officials. But the shockwaves of this assassination have already reverberated across the Middle East, leading political players of all stripes to contemplate the possibility of President Bashar al-Assad’s imminent demise.

Confirmed dead in the explosion, which Syrian state media blames on a suicide bomber but Free Syrian Army officials insist was caused by a remote-detonated device, are Defense Minister Dawood Rajiha; his “deputy” Asef Shawkat, Assad’s brother-in law and one of the regime’s most feared strongmen; and Assistant Vice President Hassan Turkmani, a former Defense Minister.

After more than a year of being shelled by the regime’s well-equipped military and terrorized by gangs of pro-regime military thugs, the Syrian rebels’ attack was the equivalent of blowing up the Death Star: They not only decapitated the Assad regime’s top security officials, they sent a message that they could reach anyone — and any part of the country. Even if the belief that Assad could fall any day is overblown (and with such limited access inside Syria it’s impossible to know for sure) — it is clear that his hold on power is shakier than ever.

Syrian state media’s account of the attack focused on the “martyrdom” of Rajiha, but Shawkat — who only merited a single line in that same announcement — is the real story here. The defense minister, who hailed from the Greek Orthodox community, was widely considered an affirmative action hire — someone meant to keep Syria’s Christian minority on the side of the regime. Shawkat, on the other hand, is a true insider. He has run Syria’s feared military intelligence services, which is probably the only institution still trusted on any level by loyalists, and was in charge during the last gasps of Syria’s occupation of Lebanon. He also often acted as a regime fireman, parachuting into trouble areas to quell dissent. Despite much resistance from some members of the Assad family to his marriage, Shawkat regularly amazed Syria observers with his ability to navigate the opaque power struggles and often-deadly intrigue that comes part and parcel with the Assad family dictatorship.

Syria’s rebels responded with unrestrained glee, filming celebrations around Syria for YouTube and fielding phone calls from journalists in Lebanese safe houses, where they openly expressed pride in the operation. The real prize was Shawkat: Rebel officials tell FP that despite his sometimes rocky history with his in-laws — it’s rumored that Maher al-Assad, the president’s brother, once shot him during a family meal — Shawkat’s dedication to the regime once again made him an indispensible and trusted enforcer at a time when the Assad clan has seen key allies abandon them.

“Shawkat and Maher have been in charge of crushing the revolution,” said a Free Syrian Army official in Lebanon who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Ahmad. “They can’t trust the Sunnis in the army after thousands of defections and this regime always turns to its own blood when it is time to protect the regime.”

It’s not only the assassination that is bolstering the Syrian opposition’s morale. The rebels have also sustained four days of fighting in the capital, which had previously seen only limited clashes and smaller demonstrations as the rest of Syria descended into civil war. Furthermore, in numerous meetings with anti-regime fighters in Lebanon over the past several months, it has become abundantly clear that new financing and equipment have reached the once shabby rebel army units.

“This regime is so rotten that even their own supporters sell us weapons,” one rebel commander in a village along the border with Lebanon told me. “We never needed weapons from outside countries like America or Saudi — we needed money. Syria has plenty of weapons already and these guys are so corrupt that they profit by selling us the weapons we will later use to kill them.”

“Now we have money,” he concluded, before demurring about the source of the generosity.

Across the border in Lebanon, which rightfully watches events unfold in Syria like its future could depend on the outcome, reaction to the assassination depended on one’s political loyalties.

Sheikh Ahmad al-Assir, a conservative Sunni cleric currently engaged in a political standoff in the Lebanese city of Sidon with Hezbollah and its pro-Syrian allies, has emerged in the last month as a key critic of the Lebanese government’s neutrality on the Syria question. In a wide-ranging interview, I asked the cleric — whom critics have painted as an al Qaeda-style radical — about his feelings towards the Syrian revolution next door.

“The Syrian regime will fall,” he said. “And it will have an impact in Lebanon, but I doubt Hezbollah will resort to violence over it. I expect they will push out politically to protect themselves from the loss of their allies in Damascus. But, God willing, we will not see sectarian violence.”

Assir may be right — but as he well knows, there are no guarantees. The revolt in Syria has already been felt on multiple levels in Beirut, notably leading to street clashes in May. The Assad regime’s brutal crackdown has exacerbated sectarian tensions between the pro-Assad parties that dominate the Shiite community and Lebanese Sunnis who have long resented Syria’s domination of Lebanon. Assir himself has made waves in the Lebanese media by directly criticizing Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, which most Lebanese hesitate to do out of respect, fear, or both. Several weeks ago, supporters of Nasrallah attacked a local television station for daring to broadcast an interview with Assir in which he directly challenged both Nasrallah and his Shiite ally Nabih Berrih, who heads the Amal Movement.

Assir worries that the Alawite-dominated Syrian government’s efforts to cling to power will only further radicalize its Sunni opponents.

“Now as we see the regime ready to fall, I worry that the Alawites will be persecuted over personal vendettas,” he said. “I speak with many leaders of the Syrian revolution and they do not want this. They have moderate minds and do not hate a group, only the regime. But even they admit that so much violence has made this a personal war and they might not be able to stop the Alawites from great suffering once the regime falls. I hope this does not happen, but I fear it is too late to stop it.”

Assad’s allies in Lebanon, however, are not about to concede defeat. An hour and a half after my interview with Assir, back in Beirut, my car stopped to pick up several supporters and members of Hezbollah. Nasrallah has consistently argued for the survival of the Assad regime, which he describes as a great friend to Hezbollah — and he did it again in a speech Wednesday night, praising the assassinated Syrian officials and hailing the Syrian government as “a real military supporter of the resistance.”

An argument immediately broke out between the four men as they entered the car about the implications of the news of the bombing. One cadre member I have known for years was arguing that the regime was finished and that Hezbollah had a contingency plan, while his friends — supporters but not official members of the group — seemed skeptical.

“How could they have killed Shawkat?” one supporter demanded of his friend, a member of Hezbollah’s military wing. “Did the regime have him killed and want to blame terrorists?”

“You know these Salafis,” the Hezbollah guy said, citing a common refrain that the rebels are al Qaeda members backed by the United States and Israel. “They use suicide bombings and can reach anyone if they want to.”

“Hezbollah has a plan,” he added. “The party knows that the regime can now fall and has a plan to protect Lebanon from these people if it does.”

I asked if, in the case of a rebel victory, Hezbollah expects that the mostly Sunni victors will take the war to the powerful Shiite group that dominates much of Lebanon. The car grew quiet as my question was translated for all to hear.

“Of course they will,” he said. “These people are crazy. But we are ready for them.”

And maybe they are — at least, in the short term. But the war in Syria has all the makings of a nasty sectarian conflict that will rebound around the Middle East for years to come. The Syrian regime’s propaganda that the rebels are nothing more than a group of Saudi and Israeli-backed jihadist nutters is just that — propaganda. But just because the rebels aren’t al Qaeda guys frothing at the mouth for the blood of Christians and Alawites doesn’t mean they’re cuddly Ewoks either. And it’s not just about religion: As we have seen in Libya, those who pick up weapons with the intention of fighting to the death to protect their homes rarely just go home and retire. They are deeply changed by having killed in the name of survival, and they want power — if only to prevent feeling so helpless ever again.

But for the first time in this long conflict, Assad’s opponents are allowing themselves a glimmer of optimism. After the interview with Assir, the Sunni sheikh was walking me to my car when a phone call arrived with the news of the bomb. After I told him it appeared that Shawkat and Rajiha had been killed, Assir — who consistently preached nonviolence in our interview — allowed a grin to erupt across his bearded face.

Reaching out to bump my hand in the classic “terrorist fist jab” that President Barack Obama once gave his wife after a speech, Assir quietly predicted the fall of the Syrian regime.

“God willing, by the end of Ramadan,” he said, referring to the holy month that begins in a few short days. “God willing.”

Mitchell Prothero is a writer and photographer based in Beirut.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/07/18/blowing_up_the_death_star?print=yes&hidecomments=yes&page=full

Zocor

A Map of the NATO Supply Routes out of Afghanistan (Sam Pepple / Sample Cartography). Click to enlarge.

It took seven months of tough bargaining with Islamabad for the United States to get Pakistan to reopen its border with Afghanistan to NATO supply trucks. Until the border closed last year, about 5,000 trucks a month had plowed their way from the Pakistani port city of Karachi, through dusty Baluchistan, around the Taliban-infested switchbacks of the Khyber Pass, and on to Bagram, Kandahar, and other NATO logistical hubs in Afghanistan. That came to a halt in November, after a U.S. air raid mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani soldiers and Islamabad retaliated by suspending NATO traffic. It would reopen the border, it said, only if the United States both apologized and agreed to pay much higher transport fees for the NATO trucks traversing its territory. Islamabad eventually dropped the fee demand, but it did induce U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to say sorry.

After the November shutdown of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, NATO reoriented its supply routes to northern Afghanistan through a series of roads in Central Asia, which make up what is known as the Northern Distribution Network (NDN). The seven-month total dependence on the northern transportation routes, which are circuitous and treacherous, cost the United States hundreds of millions of dollars and much heartache. Far from being a thing of the past, the troubles associated with the NDN are here to stay: even after the reopening of the border with Pakistan, use of the NDN will remain crucial as NATO starts to ship home equipment as part of the drawdown this summer.

By the end of 2014, NATO needs to remove about 100,000 shipping containers full of equipment and 50,000 wheeled vehicles from Afghanistan; it will leave behind any unused fuel. NATO officials point out that in order for all International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) military equipment to be removed from Afghanistan in time, a container would have to leave the country every seven minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, starting now — a tough order. Many of those containers and vehicles will have to travel along the northern route. For its part, ISAF is still counting on removing at least a third of its cargo in Afghanistan through Central Asia.

The spine of the NDN is a jagged, potholed road that leaves Kabul for Kunduz, the capital city of Kunduz province, which borders Tajikistan, and then continues on to Central Asia. The privilege of using the route does not come cheap: the United States and ISAF recently renegotiated their transshipment agreements with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan to permit two-way transit of non-lethal supplies (i.e., not armored vehicles or guns) through their territories. In addition, all three now allow transport planes carrying NATO soldiers to enter their airspace. Negotiations still continue, however, on a host of unresolved issues, such as expanded access to airspace and airports, fees, alternate routes, and the removal of restrictions on what type of military cargo can be transported. Meanwhile, the United States is also locked in talks with Russia about similar issues, such as the establishment of an air hub for Europe-bound cargo planes. Like its Central Asian neighbors, Russia has agreed to allow non-lethal equipment to be transported through its territory into Afghanistan, but NATO would like to see the agreement expanded.

In return for permitting tens of thousands of vehicles carrying ISAF military equipment to transverse their territory, the Central Asian countries have demanded, and received, huge payoffs. ISAF has not released details of its most recent accords with them, from June 2012. But, previously, each truck traveling through their territory had cost around $1,250 — about five times what Pakistan had charged. And Uzbekistan, for example, has sought a 50 percent surcharge on the use of its major rail link to Afghanistan.

In congressional testimony in June, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta estimated that, all in all, routing supplies through the northern pass adds about $100 million a month to the United States’ Afghanistan war tab. Perhaps that is why, before Clinton said the magic words in July, the Pentagon had requested that Congress reallocate an additional $2.1 billion to cover the costs of the greater reliance on the NDN. And, despite Pakistan’s reopening of its border, the Pentagon, as of mid-July 2012, did not anticipate reducing the requested reallocation.

The NDN is not only expensive, it is precarious. Much of the asphalt that the Turkish government paid to lay down in 2005 has crumbled away. For long stretches, the road is little more than an obstacle course of enormous puddles, mud traps, and dirt gorges, many too big for an unlucky car to drive out of. Although the road was constructed with one lane of traffic moving in each direction, drivers use it as if it were a four-lane freeway. They pass each other on all sides and joust for the right of way on the cliffs of the Hindu Kush. A breakdown or collision paralyzes the path for days. Not surprisingly, the ravines beside the road are littered with the skeletons of trucks and cars. In certain parts, remnants of vehicles that toppled over the edge appear every hundred meters or so. Many of them are fresh; others date back to the 1980s, when the mujahideen made sport of blowing up Soviet oil tankers as they crawled along the very same path.

About halfway between Kabul and Kunduz lies the Salang Pass. NATO trucks have no option but to drive through this tunnel, but, at an elevation of over 12,000 feet, it is a deathtrap. Built in 1964 by the Soviets, it was designed to handle 1,000 vehicles a day. During the recent closure of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, some 10,000 tried to jostle their way through every 24 hours. Some get stalled for days. Carbon monoxide, and gas fumes, fill the air; if one of the fuel trucks were to blow, the others would all go with it. Exactly that happened in 1982, and, reportedly, some 900 Russians and Afghans were killed.

As if fumes and fire weren’t enough, the tunnel is also plagued by water and ice. The ceiling and walls were never completed, so they leak. As winter snows come, the tunnel becomes one gigantic mud bath, opening onto a cliff-side ice rink on the other side. Given the extreme weather conditions and the fact that the road carries about four times the weight that a highway is supposed to withstand, it is unlikely that any pavement that Turkey or the United States or any of its allies could lay would last. The patching that ISAF did in 2010 is already long gone. Even so, ISAF is discussing repaving at least part of the road, at the cost of more than $60 million.

When trucks do finally emerge from the Salang Pass, they hit the winding, bumpy road leading them through Afghanistan’s north. What the path lacks in comfort it makes up in stunning scenery. Below wintry peaks lie fertile valleys filled with wheat and vegetable fields. Men on donkeys and women wearing burqas lumber past. Long neglected by ISAF and the Afghan National Security Forces and left to the tender mercies of former Northern Alliance commanders, these areas are far from serene. Ethnic groups angle for power, and the Taliban and Hezb-i-Islami have gained traction. In Baghlan, another northern province the road transverses, and Kunduz, the Taliban have managed to recruit not just minority Pashtuns but also Uzbeks and some Tajiks, who feel disenfranchised by the turn Afghanistan has taken since 2002.

So, although security has improved over the past two years, calm can be fleeting. In 2010 and 2011, insurgents staged daily attacks along the supply roads in Baghlan and Kunduz. NATO has repeatedly tried to clear some of the neighborhoods in the area, but ethnic tensions frequently plunge them right back into insecurity. Most Afghans I interviewed in the north believe that, as the United States draws down in Afghanistan, the violence and ethnic infighting will intensify, and the country could plunge into civil war.

All this is to say that the Salang Pass highway is not ideal for supplying U.S. troops or, more important at this point, drawing the U.S. presence down. One might may be tempted to argue for leaving the military equipment behind. But that would be expensive — and it could intensify a civil war, if it comes. Alternatively, the supplies could be airlifted out. But that would cost about ten times as much as going through Pakistan, and about three times as much as going through the north. Thus, even with the Pakistani border reopened and the southern route again in operation, the northern route will necessarily remain in heavy use for some time; there are simply too many supplies and too few options for transporting them to avoid it.

Keeping the route and the Salang Pass in some form of working order will also provide insurance in case Pakistan again decides to close its border. Since tensions between the United States and Pakistan are still high, and points of contention between the two — including U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan and Pakistan’s hands-off approach to the Haqqani network — aren’t going away anytime soon, another incident could easily lead to standoff. Particularly because the negotiations to get the southern route back open were so difficult, ISAF should not get too comfortable now.

The two main stumbling blocks that prevented a deal for seven months have been overcome, but the tensions that created them remain, and the path is not yet entirely clear. First, Pakistan had raised its price per truck, from $250 to a whopping $5,000, and it demanded legal absolution for any damage that may happen to NATO trucks that pass through Pakistan’s territory — everything from looting and theft by Karachi’s many mafias to torching by the Pakistani Taliban. Second, Pakistan insisted on the formal apology for the November 2011 air raid, which it ultimately got. It backed down on the fee, settling for the original price of $250 per truck, and even agreed to beef up security at the most frequently used crossing. But presumably to make its continuing displeasure known, Pakistan also insists that it will x-ray every ISAF container to make certain that, as per the deal, it does not contain any lethal equipment. Before November 2011, the Pakistani guards usually verified only a few random containers. The check will of course delay the transport and increase non-fee costs.

Even before the July agreement, a deal had seemed within reach several times. Through the winter and spring, the United States had stood firm on freezing the $1.1 billion in the U.S. Coalition Support Fund, which had been earmarked to reimburse Pakistan for its cooperation in counterinsurgency operations. Pressure not being enough, in April, Washington was on the verge of issuing a formal apology when the Haqqani network, which the Pakistani military sponsors — or, at least, tolerates — launched a major attack in Kabul. Then, in May, believing that Pakistan had dropped its transit fee to a more reasonable $1,250, President Barack Obama issued a last-minute invitation to Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari to attend the Chicago NATO summit. NATO, in addition, offered to sweeten the pot by paving some of the 1,000-mile roads that NATO trucks would transverse between Karachi and the Afghan border. That deal, too, fell through when Pakistan refused to back down from any of its demands.

Although the border showdown has been resolved, Pakistan’s persistence in providing safe havens to Afghan militants continues to anger and frustrate Washington. But Pakistan’s trump card — its own internal fragility — remains in hand. Its government is weak, its economy is in shambles, the country suffers from massive electricity blackouts, and severe poverty and unemployment are widespread. Although NATO traffic across the border provides Pakistan with strong leverage, shutting the border puts Pakistan’s own strategic interests in Afghanistan in peril. Pakistan does not want to be sidelined as the United States and NATO revise their roles in Afghanistan after 2014. It fears being left out of any potential deal between the Taliban, the United States, and Kabul. (Ironically, Kabul is equally terrified of being left out of a Taliban-U.S. deal.) And if NATO is not able to remove all its military equipment from Afghanistan, Rawalpindi would be deeply worried about it falling into the hands of the Northern Alliance.

The pace and shape of the U.S. and ISAF drawdown in Afghanistan, which are yet to be fully determined, will produce far greater pressures than simply logistical ones. How many U.S. troops are left behind in Afghanistan after 2014 and what roles they retain will influence whether civil war will, in fact, materialize. Ultimately, although Pakistan is likely to continue cultivating vicious allies like the Haqqanis, an unstable Afghanistan will destabilize Pakistan, too. Resolving the logistics to get out of Afghanistan on schedule is important. But staying in Afghanistan in a sufficiently robust and wisely structured presence so that security can be strengthened and Afghan governance improved is even more crucial. The worst possible outcome would be to be rushing out of Afghanistan and then lacking even the logistical routes to do so.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137785/vanda-felbab-brown/stuck-in-the-mud?page=show

Introduction: The United States has experienced the biggest political upheaval in its recent history: the transformation of a burgeoning welfare state into a rapidly expanding, highly intrusive and deeply entrenched police state, linked to the most developed technological innovations.

The ‘Great Transformation’ occurred exclusively from above, organized by the upper echelons of the civil and military bureaucracy under the direction of the Executive and his National Security Council. The ‘Great Transformation’ was not a single event but a process of the accumulation of powers, via executive fiats, supported and approved by compliant Congressional leaders. At no time in the recent and distant past has this nation witnessed the growth of such repressive powers and the proliferation of so many policing agencies engaged in so many areas of life over such a prolonged period of time (a time of virtually no internal mass dissent). Never has the executive branch of government secured so many powers to detain, interrogate, kidnap and assassinate its own citizens without judicial restraint.

Police state dominance is evident in the enormous growth of the domestic security and military budget, the vast recruitment of security and military personnel, the accumulation of authoritarian powers curtailing individual and collective freedoms and the permeation of national cultural and civic life with the almost religious glorification of the agents and agencies of militarism and the police state as evidenced at mass sporting and entertainment events.

The drying up of resources for public welfare and services is a direct result of the dynamic growth of the police state apparatus and military empire. This could only take place through a sustained direct attack against the welfare state – in particular against public funding for programs and agencies promoting the health, education, pensions, income and housing for the middle and working class.

The Ascendancy of the Police State

Central to the rise of the police state and the consequent decline of the welfare state have been the series of imperial wars, especially in the Middle East, launched by every President from Bush (father), Clinton, Bush (son) and Obama. These wars, aimed exclusively against Muslim countries, were accompanied by a wave of repressive ‘anti-terrorist’ laws and implemented through the rapid build-up of the massive police state apparatus, known as ‘Homeland Security’.

The leading advocates and propagandists of overseas militarism against countries with large Muslim populations and the imposition of a domestic police-state have been dedicated Zionists promoting wars designed to enhance Israel’s overwhelming power in the Middle East. These American Zionists (including dual US-Israeli citizens) secured strategic positions within the US police state apparatus in order to terrify and repress activists, especially American Muslims and immigrants critical of the state of Israel.

The events of 9/11//01 served as the detonator for the biggest global military launch since WWII, and the most pervasive expansion of police state powers in the history of the United States. The bloody terror of 9/11/2001 was manipulated to institute a pre-planned agenda – transforming the US into a police state while launching a decade- long series of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and, now, Syria as well as covert proxy wars against Iran and Lebanon. The military budget exploded and government deficits ballooned while social programs and welfare were denigrated and dismantled as the ‘Global War on Terror’ swung into full gear. Programs, designed to maintain or raise living standards for millions and increase access to services for the poor and working class, fell victim to ‘9/11’.

As the wars in the Middle East took center-stage, the US economy tanked. On the domestic front vital public investment in education, infrastructure, industry and civilian innovations were slashed. Hundreds of billions of tax payer dollars flowed into the war zones, paying mercenaries (private contractors), buying off corrupt puppet regimes and providing a golden opportunity for military procurement officers and their private contractor-cronies to run up (and pocket) huge billion dollar cost overruns.

As a result, US military policy vis a vis the Middle East, military policy, which at one time had been designed to promote American imperial economic interests, now took on a life of its own: wars and sanctions against Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya had undermined profitable oil contracts negotiated by US multi-nationals while enhancing militarism. Indeed, the Zionist-Israeli power configuration in the United States has become far more influential in directing US Middle East military policy than any combination of Big Oil – and all to the benefit of Israeli regional power.

Imperial Wars and the Demise of the Welfare State

From the end of World War II to the end of the 1970’s, the US managed to successfully combine overseas imperial wars with an expanding welfare state at home. In fact, the last major pieces of welfare legislation took place during the bloody, costly US-Indo-Chinese war, under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The economic basis of welfare-militarism was the powerful industrial-technological foundations of the US war-machine and its dominance over world markets. Subsequently, the declining competitive position of the US in the world-economy and the massive relocation of US-MNC (and their jobs) overseas strained the ‘marriage’ of domestic welfare and militarism to the breaking point. Fiscal and trade deficits loomed even as the demands for welfare and unemployment payments grew in part because of the shift from stable well-paid manufacturing jobs to low paid-service work. While the global US economic position declined, its global military expansion accelerated as a result of the demise of the Communist regimes in the USSR and Eastern Europe and the incorporation of the new regimes of the former Eastern bloc into the US-dominated NATO military alliance.

The demise of the Communist states led to the end of competing global welfare systems and allowed capitalists and the imperial state to slash welfare to fund their massive global military expansion. There was virtually no opposition from labor: the gradual conversion of Western trade unions into highly authoritarian organizations run by self-perpetuating millionaire ‘leaders’ and the reduction of trade union membership from 30% of the work force in 1950 to less than 11% by 2012 (with over 91% of private sector workers without any representation) meant that American workers have been powerless to organize strikes to protect their jobs, let alone apply political pressure in defense of public programs and welfare.

Militarism was on the ascendency when President Jimmy Carter launched his multi-billion dollar ‘secret war’ against the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan and President Ronald Reagan initiated a series of ‘proxy wars’ throughout Central America and Southern Africa and sent the US Marines into the tiny island of Grenada. Reagan oversaw the escalation of military spending boasting that he would ‘bankrupt’ the Soviet Union with a new ‘arms race’. President George Bush, Sr. invaded Panama and then Iraq, the first of many US invasions in the Middle East. President Bill Clinton accelerated the military thrust, along the way slashing public welfare in favor of ‘private workfare’, bombing and destroying Yugoslavia, bombing and starving Iraq while establishing colonial enclaves in Northern Iraq and expanding the US military presence in Somalia and the Persian Gulf.

The constraints on US militarism imposed by the massive popular anti-Vietnam War movement and the US military defeat by the Vietnamese Communists, were gradually eroded, as successful short term wars (like Grenada and Panama) undermined the Vietnam Syndrome –public opposition to militarism. This prepared the American public for incremental militarism while chipping away at the welfare system.

If Reagan and Bush built the foundation for the new militarism, Bill Clinton provided three decisive elements: together with Vice-President Al Gore, Clinton legitimized the war on welfarism, stigmatizing public assistance and mobilized support from religious and political leaders in the black community and the AFL-CIO. Secondly, Clinton was key to the ‘financialization’ of the US economy, by de-regulating the financial system (repealing the Glass-Steagal Act of 1933) and appointing Wall Street financiers at the helm of national economic policy. Thirdly, Clinton appointed leading Zionists to the key foreign policy positions related to the Middle East, allowing them to insert Israel’s military view of reality into strategic decision-making in Washington. Clinton put in place the first series of repressive police state ‘anti-terrorist’ legislation and expanded the national prison system. In sum, Bill Clinton’s Middle East war policies, his ‘financialization’ of the US economy, his ‘war on terror’, his Zionist orientation towards the Arab world and, above all, his own ideological anti-welfarism led directly to Bush Junior’s full scale conversion of the welfare state into the police state .

Exploiting the trauma of 9/11, the Bush and later the Obama regimes nearly tripled the military budget and launched serial wars against Arab states. The military budget rose from $359 billion in 2000, to $544 billion in 2004 and escalated to $903 billion in 2012. Military expenditures financed major foreign military occupations and colonial administrations in Iraq and Afghanistan, border wars in Pakistan and US Special Forces covert operations (including kidnappings and assassinations) in Yemen, Somalia, Iran and seventy-five other countries world-wide.

Meanwhile financial speculation ran rampant, budget deficits ballooned, living standards plunged, international trade deficits reached record levels and public debt doubled in fewer than eight years. Multiple imperial wars dragged on without end; the costs of these wars multiplied while the financial bubble burst. The contradiction between domestic welfare and militarism exploded. Finally, the massive roll back of basic social programs for all American topped the Presidential and legislative agenda.

Previous ‘untouchable programs’ like Social Security, Medicare, the US Post Office, public sector employment, services to the poor, elderly and handicapped and food stamps were all put on the butcher’s block. At the same time the federal government increased its funding of private military and police contractors (mercenaries) overseas and extended the scope and depth of US Special Forces clandestine operations. Bush-Obama vastly increased spending for the military and espionage agents in support of wildly unpopular, brutal collaborator regimes in Pakistan and Yemen. They funded and armed foreign mercenaries in Libya, Syria, Iran, and Somalia. By the first decade of the new century it had become clear that imperial militarism and domestic welfarism were in a zero sum game: as imperial wars multiplied, domestic programs were slashed.

The severity and depth of the cuts to popular domestic welfare programs were only in part the result of imperial wars; equally important was the huge increase in the funding for personnel and surveillance technology for the burgeoning police state at home.

The Origins of the Conversion of the Welfare State to the Police State

The precipitous decline of the welfare state and the dismantling of social services, public education and access to affordable health care for the working and middle classes cannot be explained by the demise of organized labor, nor is it due to the ‘right-turn’ of the Democratic Party. Two other deep structural changes loom large as fundamental to the proces: the transformation of the US economy from a competitive manufacturing economy into a ‘FIRE’ (finance, insurance and real estate) economy; and secondly, the rise of a vast police legal-political-administrative state apparatus engaged in permanent ‘internal warfare’ at home, designed to sustain and complement permanent imperial warfare abroad.

Agencies and personnel of the police state expanded dramatically during the first decade of the new century. The police state penetrated telecommunications systems, patrolled and controlled transport outlets; dominated judicial procedures and oversaw the major ‘news outlets’, academic and professional associations. The expanded police state covertly and overtly entered the private lives of tens of millions of Americans.

The loss to taxpayers in terms of citizen rights and the welfare state has been staggering.

As the biggest and most intrusive component of the police state apparatus, christened ‘Homeland Security’, grew exponentially, the budget and agencies providing welfare and public services, health, education and unemployment shrank. Tens of thousands of domestic spies have been hired and costly intrusive spyware has been purchased with tax-payer money, while hundreds of thousands of teachers and public health and social welfare professionals have lost their jobs.

The Department of Homeland Security (as of the end of 2011) is composed of approximately 388,000 employees, including both federal and contracted agents. Between 2011-2013 the DHS budget of $173 billion has faced no serious cuts. Homeland Security’s rapid expansion occurred at the expense of Health and Human Services, education and the Social Security Administration, which currently face large scale ‘retrenchment’.

Among the top officials, appointed by the Bush, Jr. Administration to key positions in the police state apparatus, there are two who have been the most influential in setting policy: Michael Chertoff and Michael Mukasey.

Michael Chertoff headed the Criminal Division of the Justice Department (from 2001 – 2003). During that time he was responsible for the arbitrary arrest of thousands of US citizens and immigrants of Muslim and South Asian heritage, who were held incommunicado without charge and subject to physical and psychological abuse – without a single resident alien or Muslim US citizen linked to 9/11. In contrast, Chertoff quickly intervened to free scores of Israeli spy suspects and 5 Israeli Mossad agents who had been witnessed filming and celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center and were under active investigation by the FBI. More than any other official, Michael Chertoff has been the chief architect of the ‘Global War on Terror’ – co-author of the notorious ‘Patriot Act’ which trashed habeas corpus and other essential components of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. As Secretary of Homeland Security from 2005-2009, Chertoff promoted ‘military tribunals’ and organized the vast internal spy network, which now preys on private US citizens.

Michael Mukasey, the Bush-appointed US Attorney General, was an enthusiastic defender of the Patriot Act, supporting military tribunals, torture and overseas assassinations of individual suspected of what he called ‘Islamic terrorism’ without trial.

Both Chertoff and Mukasey are zealous Zionists with longstanding ties to Israel. Michael Chertoff was believed to hold dual US-Israeli citizenship as he launched the Administration domestic war on US citizens.

A cursory review of the origins and direction of the police-state apparatus and the top echelons of the global war on ‘Islamic terrorism’ – code languages for military imperialism – reveals a disproportionate number of Israel-Firsters, who placed greater importance on persecuting potential US critics of the Middle East wars for Israel than in upholding Constitutional guarantees and the Bill of Rights.

Back in ‘civilian’ life, Michael Chertoff profited greatly from the bogus ‘War on Terror’ promoting radioactive and degrading body scanning technology in airports throughout the US and Europe.He established his own security consulting firm Chertoff Groups (2009) to represent the manufacturers of surveillance body scanners. Americans can thank Michael Chertoff every time they pass through the humiliation of an airport body scan.

The fusion of the police state apparatus with the industrial-security complex and its prominent overseas links with its corporate security counterparts in the state of Israel, underscores the imperial state’s ties to the Israeli military establishment.

As the police state has grown it has created a powerful lobby of high tech surveillance industry backers and beneficiaries who push federal and state ‘security’ spending at the expense welfare programs.

The police state’s squeeze on social programs, education and welfare has a powerful ally on Wall Street, which emerged as the dominant sector of US capital in terms of access to and influence over US Treasury and its budgetary allocations.

Unlike the manufacturing sector, financial capital does not need a population of educated, healthy and productive workers. Its own ‘labor force’ is composed of a small educated elite of speculators, analysts, traders and brokers at the top and middle levels and a small army of ‘contract’ office sweepers, secretaries and menial workers at the bottom. They have their own ‘invisible’ army of domestic servants, cooks, caterers, gardeners and nannies devoid of any ‘Social Security’, health coverage and pension plans. And the financial sector has its own private networks of doctors and clinics, schools, communications systems and messengers, estates and clubs, and security agencies and body guards; it needs not an educated, skilled public sector; and it certainly does not want national wealth to support high quality public health and educational systems. It has no interest in supporting this mass of public institutions which it views as an obstacle to ‘freeing up’ vast amounts of public wealth for speculation. In other words, the dominant sector of capital has no objection to ‘Homeland Security’; indeed it shares many sentiments with the proponents of the police state and supports the shrinking the welfare state. It is concerned about lowering taxes on finance capital and increasing Federal bail-out funds for Wall Street while controlling the impoverished citizenry.

Conclusion

The conversion of a welfare state to a police state is the result of militarized imperialism abroad and the ascendancy of finance capital at home, as well as the proliferation of security state agencies and related private industries and the strategic role of rightwing Zionists in top positions of the police state apparatus.

This convergence of international and domestic structural changes took hold during the 1980’s and 1990’s and then accelerated during the first decade of the 21st century. The downgrading of the vast public services of the welfare state was covered up by a massive government propaganda campaign to promote the ‘global war on terror’ together with a fabricated widespread domestic ‘terrorist threat’ involving the most hapless of suspects (including oddball Haitian millenarianists entrapped by FBI agents). The supporters and beneficiaries of the welfare state found themselves on the margins of any national debate. The mass media/regime propaganda campaign demanded and successfully secured massive increases in centralized powers of domestic policing, surveillance, provocations, disappearances and arrests. Throughout the past decade what the welfare state lost in support and funding, the police state gained. The rise of financial capital and the deregulation of the financial system crowded out any public subsidies to promote and sustain the competitiveness of the US manufacturing sector. This has led to a major break in the links between industry, labor and the welfare state. Huge tax write-offs to big business, combined with the growth in expenditures for a non-productive police state bureaucracy and the series of costly overseas wars, has caused unsustainable budget and trade deficits, which then became the pretext to further savage the welfare state.

Significant political, cultural and ideological shifts have aided the rise of the police state over the public welfare state. The success of prominent American Zionists in securing power within key media propaganda mills and obtaining appointments to critical position in the top echelons of the police state apparatus, judiciary and in the imperial state bureaucracy (Treasury and State Department) has put Israel’s colonial interests and its own police-state apparatus at the center of US politics. The US police state has adopted Israeli-styled repression targeting US citizens and residents.

US society is now split into two sectors: the ‘winners’ linked to the expanding and lucrative financial – security complex embedded in the police state while the ‘losers’, tied to the manufacturing – welfare sector, are relegated to an increasingly marginalized ‘civil society’. The police state purges dissidents who question the ‘Israel-First doctrine’ of the US security-military apparatus. The financial sector, embedded in its own luxurious ‘cocoon’ of private services, demands the total gutting of public services directed toward the poor, working and middle classes. The public treasury has been taken over in order to finance bank bailouts, imperial wars and police state agencies while paying the bondholders of US debt.

Social Security is on target to be privatized. Pensions are to be reduced, delayed and self-financed. Food stamps, access to affordable health care and unemployment support will be slashed. The police state cannot pay for glitzy new repressive technologies, greater policing, more intrusive surveillance, arrests and prisons while financing the existing welfare state with its vast educational, health and human services and pension benefits.

In sum, there is no future for social welfare in the United States within its powerful financial-imperial-police state system. Both major political parties nurture this system, support serial wars, appeal to the financial elites and debate over the size, scope and timing for further cuts in social welfare.

The American social welfare system was a product of an earlier phase of US capitalism where US global industrial supremacy allowed for both military spending and welfare support and where US military spending was constrained by the demands of the domestic socio-economic sectors of manufacturing capital and ‘labor’. In an earlier phase Zionist influence was based on wealthy individuals and their congressional ‘lobby’ — they did not occupy key Federal policymaking positions setting the agendas for war in the Middle East and domestic police state.

Times have changed for the worse: a police state, linked to militarism and perpetual imperial wars in the Middle East has gained ascendancy and now impacts our everyday life. Underlying both the growth of the police state and the erosion of the welfare state is the rise of an inter-locking ‘financial-security power elite’, held together by a common ideology, unprecedented private wealth and the relentless drive to monopolize the public treasury to the detriment of the vast majority of Americans. A confrontation and full exposure of all the self-serving propaganda, which undergirds the power elite is an essential first step. The enormous budgets for imperial wars are the greatest threat to US welfare. The police state erodes real public services and undermines social movements. Finance capital pillages the public treasury demanding bailouts and subsidies for the banks. Israeli Firsters, in key decision-making positions, serve the interests of a foreign police state against the interests of the American people. The state of Israel is the mirror opposite of what we Americans want for ourselves and our children: a free and independent secular republic without colonial settlements, clerical racism, and destructive self-serving militarism.

Today the fight to restore the advances in citizens’ welfare established through public programs of the recent past requires that we transform an entire structure of power: true welfare reform requires a revolutionary strategy and, above all, a grass-roots mass movement breaking with the entrenched ‘two party’ regime tied to the financial- imperial- internal security system.

James Petras is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, and Journal of Peasant Studies. He has published over 2000 articles in nonprofessional journals such as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Nation, Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, New Left Review, Partisan Review, TempsModerne, Le Monde Diplomatique, and his commentary is widely carried on the internet. His publishers have included Random House, John Wiley, Westview, Routledge, Macmillan, Verso, Zed Books and Pluto Books. He is winner of the Career of Distinguished Service Award from the American Sociological Association’s Marxist Sociology Section, the Robert Kenny Award for Best Book, 2002, and the Best Dissertation, Western Political Science Association in 1968. His most recent titles include Unmasking Globalization: Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century (2001); co-author The Dynamics of Social Change in Latin America (2000), System in Crisis (2003), co-author Social Movements and State Power (2003), co-author Empire With Imperialism (2005), co-author)Multinationals on Trial (2006).

 
http://www.countercurrents.org/petras160712.htm

JERUSALEM

The issue convulsing this country, and splintering its governing coalition, is not a nuclear-armed Iran or a moribund peace process. It is the question, as wrenching as it is unique to the Jewish state, of whether the country’s fast-growing ultra-Orthodox population should continue to be exempt from compulsory military ­service.

The debate came to a head this week, with Shaul Mofaz’s announcement that his Kadima party would quit, after a scant 70 days, the broad coalition assembled by Likud Prime Minister Benjamin ­Netanyahu.

Likud retains a majority without the centrist Kadima, although one now torn between religious parties resistant to weakening the exemption and ultranationalists demanding an immediate draft for both ultra-Orthodox and Arabs.

But the real threat is to Israel’s prospects, not Netanyahu’s. How the uproar over service is resolved will shape the nation’s economic and social future.

Strangely, this is a matter on which Likud and Kadima essentially agree. They agree, as well, that the exemption, declared unconstitutional by the Israeli Supreme Court and set to expire Aug. 1, must be substantially pared back.

The argument is over the scope and pace of change, and the ramifications of adjusting either too fast or too slowly.

Too fast, warn Likud and its allies, and the ultra-Orthodox will stage an ugly revolt that will cleave Israeli society.

“The integration of the ultra-Orthodox into Israeli society is of enormous importance. The question is how you do it,” says Ron Dermer, a top Netanyahu aide. “If you pull on the rope too hard, the whole thing is going to snap.”

Too slowly, warn Kadima and its allies, and the revolt will come from a secular majority fed up with being freierim — suckers. They not only serve in the military but pay taxes that support religious schools and fund a social safety net that enables an astonishing 55 percent of ultra-Orthodox men to remain outside the workforce.

“We’re verging on a trajectory of Israel slipping toward a third-world economy, and a third-world economy can’t sustain a first-world military,” says Yohanan Plesner, a Kadima member who chaired a committee to rewrite the exemption. “I see this as no less than an existential threat.”

The roots of today’s controversy date to Israel’s founding in 1948. In the raw aftermath of the Holocaust, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion agreed to excuse students in yeshivot (religious schools) from military service.

Then, there were 400 such students. Now, the number has soared to 40,000. The ultra-Orthodox — known as the Haredim, those who tremble before God — make up about 10 percent of the population. More significantly, one-fourth of Israeli first-graders come from Haredi families observing the biblical commandment to be fruitful. With an Arab population of 20 percent, and growing quickly, the burden of service — allowed but not mandatory for Arabs — will fall increasingly on the secular population.

The argument is nominally about military service; it is about much more. The military exemption is contingent on ultra-Orthodox men continuing to study, making them unable to work legally. Meantime, their separate, state-funded schools offer scant preparation for decent jobs; secular subjects such as math and science are not taught to boys after eighth grade. Currently, 60 percent of Haredi families live in poverty.

This situation is unhealthy and unsustainable. Low workforce participation by Haredi men — and Arab women — “will not only result in a further increase in poverty but also undermine Israel’s overall growth potential and fiscal sustainability,” the International Monetary Fund warned recently. Bringing the ultra-Orthodox into the military would offer a glide path for integrating them into regular society.

This assimilation is, from the ultra-Orthodox perspective, precisely the problem: the threat of losing youth to the lure of secular life. Some extreme elements are anti-Zionist; others believe they serve the state, and protect troops, with Torah study and prayer. The more pragmatic recognize that more service is inevitable, but they want to postpone the day of reckoning as long as possible, to age 23 or even 26 instead of the usual 18.

A walk around the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim underscores the Haredi sense of being under siege from modernity, with wall posters in Hebrew warning of the dangers of the iPhone and inveighing against forced conscription.

From the American vantage point, this argument seems remote and esoteric. But its continued festering matters to the United States because it is so crucial to Israel’s future strength. And the failure of the short-lived national unity government to forge a solution is, consequently, bad news for both countries.

ruthmarcus@washpost.com

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-israel-at-a-cultural-crossroads/2012/07/18/gJQAridSuW_print.html

The National Forces Coalition, headed by Mahmoud Jibril, soundly defeated Islamists in Libya’s elections [Reuters]
“We certainly did not expect the results, but… our future is certainly better than our present and our past,” said Sami al-Saadi, the former ideologue of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) and the founder of the political party al-Umma al-Wasat, which finished third in Central Tripoli during Libya’s recent parliamentary election. The man whom Taliban leader Mullah Omar once called the “Sheikh of the Arabs”, and who authored the LIFG’s anti-democracy manifesto The Choice is Theirs, accepted the apparent victory of Libya’s more liberal forces.

Indeed, the results raised eyebrows, even among those analysts who did not expect an Islamist landslide. In the electoral district that includes Derna, commonly viewed as an Islamist stronghold, the liberal-leaning National Forces Coalition (NFC), a grouping of more than 60 parties and hundreds of local civil-society organisations, won 59,769 votes, while the Justice and Construction Party (JCP) of the Muslim Brothers (MB) received only 8,619. The liberal-leaning Central National Trend (CNT) finished third, with 4,962 votes.

In the impoverished western district of Abu Selim, where many Islamists are seen as local heroes due to their sacrifices under Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, the NFC swept the field with 60,052 votes, defeating all six Islamist parties, which received a combined total of fewer than 15,000 votes. Overall, liberal-leaning parties finished first in 11 of Libya’s 13 electoral districts, with the NFC winning ten and the CNT taking one.

 
 Listening Post – Covering Libya’s first post-Gaddafi elections

To be sure, the results will affect only 80 of the 200 seats in the constituent assembly, whose mandate is to appoint a prime minister, government and a committee to draft the constitution. The other 120 seats are assigned to individual candidates, who are likely to be local notables, independents with strong tribal affiliations, and, to a lesser extent, a mix of Islamist and liberal politicians.

Moreover, while the Islamists were soundly defeated, they performed quite well in many districts. Across Libya, they took second place in 10 districts (the JCP in nine and the Salafi-leaning Originality Coalition in one). In Misrata, the JCP finished second, after the local Union for Homeland Party, but still managed to win almost three times as many votes as the NFC, which came in fourth.

Nevertheless, the question remains: what happened to the Islamists? They spearheaded the opposition to Gaddafi, were advised by their Tunisian and Egyptian brethren, and larded their rhetoric with religious symbolism in a conservative Muslim country. For many, however, this was not enough.

A striking difference between Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia’s Ennahda, on the one hand, and Libya’s Islamists on the other is the level of institutionalisation and interaction with the masses. In Gaddafi’s four decades in power, Libya’s Islamists could not build local support networks; develop organisational structures, hierarchies, or institutions; or create a parallel system of clinics and social services, as their counterparts in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and Jordan were able to do.

As a result, Libya’s Islamists could not unite in a coalition as large as that of Mahmoud Jibril, the former prime minister under the National Transitional Council, who heads the NFC. Instead, their votes were divided between several parties, six of which are significant.

But another reason for the strong “liberal” turnout is the “blood” factor. “I am not giving my family’s votes to the MB. Two of my cousins died because of them,” Mohamed Abdul Hakim, a voter from Benghazi, told me. He agrees that Islam should be the source for legislation, and his wife wears a niqab. Nonetheless, he voted liberal: his cousins were killed in a confrontation in the 1990s, most likely between the Martyrs Movement (a small jihadist group operating in his neighbourhood at the time) and Gaddafi’s forces.

But many average Libyans, including Hakim, do not distinguish between Islamist organisations and their histories. For them, all Islamists are “Ikhwan” (MB). The “stain” of direct involvement in armed action, coupled with fear of Taliban-like laws or a civil war like Algeria’s in the 1990s, harmed Islamists of all brands.

A third reason for the Islamists’ defeat had to do with their campaign rhetoric. “It is offensive to tell me that I have to vote for an Islamic party,” Jamila Marzouki, an Islamic studies graduate, told me. Marzouki voted liberal, despite believing that Islam should be the ultimate reference for Libyan laws. “In Libya, we are Muslims. They can’t take away my identity and claim that it’s only theirs.”

Other factors had to do more with the liberal side. Jibril’s international legitimacy, his tribal affiliation (the Warfalla tribe includes about one million of Libya’s 6.4 million people), and leadership style, coupled with a broad coalition, served the country’s liberal forces well. So did a clever electoral campaign, which focused on incentives and hope (while also exaggerating the repercussions of an Islamist takeover).

The result was yet another paradox of the Arab Spring: a country that seemed to meet all of the conditions for an Islamist victory produced the sort of election results that liberals in Egypt and Tunisia could only dream about.

Omar Ashour is Director of the Middle East Graduate Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, and Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Doha Center.

A version of this article was originally published on Project Syndicate.

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
 
 
Source: Al Jazeera 
 
Omar Ashour is Director of the Middle East Graduate Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, and Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Doha Center.
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/07/20127187155487377.html

Most visitors to Myanmar these days, when the country is opening up, limit their trips to Yangon, better known in better times as Rangoon. They rarely make the five-hour trip to Naypyitaw, the site upcountry to which the ruling military regime has transferred the capital. As a parliamentary delegation from different Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) governments seeking to make contact with opposition legislators, we embark on the road trip to the Burmese generals’ version of Brasilia, not really knowing what we’ll find at the end of the 230-mile journey.

Before we leave Yangon, however, we meet with members of “Generation 88,” people now in their forties who were leaders of the student uprising of 1988. Our meeting takes place against the background of fast-moving developments in Burmese politics : the triumphant European tour of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, universally referred to as Daw Suu or “the Lady” ; the release of two dozen more political prisoners ; and the opening session of parliament on July 4. There is a widespread sense that the country is undergoing momentous change.

Having spent a large part of the last 20 years in jail, the Generation 88 leaders are hardened activists who know the mentality of the military regime to the core. So it is a bit of a surprise when one of them, Ko Ko Gyi, says that the country’s political opening is “irreversible.” “Of course,” he clarifies, “there might be setbacks, but the military knows it is in their interest, broadly, to reform. They know they can’t go on like this.”

How do they plan to engage with the current reform process ? “We will mobilize different sectors around their legitimate demands such as wages,” says Ko Ko Gyi, “but we also want to make sure that things are resolved within the framework of the current reform process.” And yes, they plan to constitute themselves as a party and field candidates in the parliamentary elections of 2015.

The Military’s Shangri-la

The meeting with Generation 88 provides much food for reflection during the trip to Naypyitaw. Some of us had expected architecture and planning in the fascist style, but what we found bordered on the surreal : surreal fascism. The place is linked by concrete roads that can be as wide as 18 lanes. The road leading to the parliament building, for instance, is wide enough for the latest jumbo jet to land on.

A great deal of empty space separates imposing government buildings, upscale shopping malls, and pricey resort hotels said to be run by cronies of the top generals. These first-world structures coexist with miserable settlements of the poor found near construction sites, where they provide the work force for ongoing projects.

Perhaps the most imposing structure is the Uppatasanti Buddhist pagoda, which is one of the tallest and largest structures of its kind in the world. The pagoda has a spire coated with 32 tons of gold, while its interior, which is patterned after Istanbul’s famous blue mosque, boasts pillars constructed out of jade. All in all, Naypyitaw is, as one member of our delegation notes wryly, “a bizarre display of military intelligence.”

That this country is still far from being a democracy is something we are reminded of when soldiers barred us from visiting the parliamentary building, and no amount of arguing that we are a fraternal parliamentary delegation can persuade them to let us through. We are not stopped, however, when we visit the residential quarters of the opposition members of parliament, which they occupy during the seven months that the body is in session. These are small one-room habitations that share communal toilets. The freshly laid barbed wire on top of the walls surrounding the compound gives the overall impression, as one member of our delegation remarks, of a “concentration camp.” Adds another, “Maybe the point is to discourage the opposition people from running for office.”

Ethnic Minorities

Since we cannot go to the parliament, MPs belonging to parties representing ethnic minorities and the National League for Democracy (NLD) join us in meetings at a restaurant in one of the capital’s two malls. The session with the MPs representing the ethnic minorities reveals an upbeat mood, with one MP from Rakhain state telling us, “It takes some time before you can get pure water from a well.” The MPs assure us that they belong to the opposition, though one of them says that only 70 percent of them can be counted on to be with the opposition, the rest being influenced by the military.

How to work with the ethnic minority parties and organizations will be one of the biggest challenges confronting the NLD. Myanmar has about 135 different ethnic groups scattered in seven states and seven regions, some of them with armed groups that have been battling the military regime for decades. Will Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD succeed in promoting by peaceful means a comprehensive agreement that has eluded the military ? The Kachins have been dissatisfied with her failure to condemn the military’s recent offensive against them. Even more criticism has greeted her statement during her European tour that she was unsure whether the Muslim Rohingyas, who were victims of ethnic clashes in the state of Rakhine, were actually Burmese nationals. Clearly, Daw Suu will have to tread carefully here, reassuring the country’s minorities that she’s on their side while not giving the military the opportunity to paint her as endangering national unity.

NLD and the Reform Process

When we meet with some members of the NLD parliamentary delegation the next evening, they warmly thank us for the support given by the ASEAN Interparliamentary Myanmar Caucus (AIPMC) during all those years that the regime tried to crush them. We, in turn, express our admiration for their perseverance in uncompromisingly opposing the military for over 20 years — ever since the NLD was prevented from taking political power after its landslide victory at the polls in 1990, when it won 80 percent of the seats. The eight MPs who attend the dinner have a total of over 70 years in jail between them, notes Kraisak Choonhavan, the former Thai senator who is one of the leaders of our delegation.

Unlike the meeting with the MPs representing ethnic minorities the night before, when many expressed optimism about the future, the NLD legislators are cautious, indeed very cautious. We are told to keep things in perspective, that the NLD has only 43 seats and the opposition has at most 168 seats in the 600-member parliament. One of them, U Win Htein, tells us that the regime is beginning to “tighten the screws on us.” He cites the government’s new requirement that the NLD must first inform the government before it establishes an office in any locality, its recent decree requiring parties to account for their expenditures in the recent by-elections in April, and a recent lower court decision awarding half of Suu Kyi’s family property to her estranged brother, Aung San Oo — a naturalized American that, as a foreign citizen, is forbidden by law from owning property. The regime, the NLD MPs say, has also made much of the Lady’s initial refusal to swear to “respect” the 2008 constitution and her constant use of the name Burma instead of Myanmar.

Caution is also the mood communicated by NLD senior statesman U Tjn Oo, head of the Central Convening Committee of the party, whom we visit at NLD headquarters when we return to Rangoon. He tells us, “Note carefully that Daw Suu has said she can work with President U Thein Sein but she is not sure she can work with the government.” He sees the the NLD’s future as resting on its work in organizing and winning over the younger generation. He also tells us that while the NLD welcomes foreign investors, projects “will have to be transparent and to be clearly beneficial for the masses and not simply for businessmen.”

Tentative Conclusions

It might be rash to make a judgment after a three-day-visit, but let me venture the following tentative conclusions about the process unfolding in Burma. The country has definitely taken steps toward democracy, but these are baby steps, and “democratization” may not be the right word for the current process. Power continues to be tightly concentrated in the military, the official expression of this being the 11-member National Defense and Security Council. Although President U Thein Sein and reformers within the Burmese military currently hold the upper hand vis-à-vis the hardliners, their position continues to depend on the man behind the scenes, the aging dictator Than Shwe.

The momentum for reform is clearly gathering force, but it is not irreversible. Right now the regime is on good behavior, eager not to do anything that might derail its assumption of the chairmanship of ASEAN in 2014, which will complete Burma’s reentry into the ranks of legitimate governments. The real test will come during the parliamentary elections of 2015, when the NLD is expected to coast to victory if the elections are free and fair. Will the regime allow the NLD and its allies come to power, or will it panic as in 1990 ?

Finally, Aung San Suu Kyi and the democratic forces will need all the support they can get from the outside world as they negotiate the swirling political currents over the next few years in their terribly challenging task of steering Burma toward genuine electoral democracy.

BELLO Walden
From Focus on the Global South

http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article25829

If Petro-dollars have become the backbone of terrorism in Pakistan, Narco-dollars are the major source of funding for the Afghan Taliban. Without eliminating financial networks in both countries, terrorism will remain a force to be reckoned with for a long time to come.

Opium has been a traditional cash crop in Afghanistan but Narco-terrorism has emerged as a dangerous new phenomenon in the last two decades becoming a financial backbone for terrorist organizations. It’s not a by-product of recent foreign invasions; it has become an added component to terrorist operations as there has been a substantial increase in the opium production and export since the arrival of NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The NATO forces in Afghanistan have not paid much attention to this booming enterprise which has become the main source of terrorists’ growth and survival. To gain support of powerful warlords who are involved in opium cultivation and export, they have quietly allowed them to operate.

Knowing there is a strong connection between the Narco-industry and terrorism, the allies do not see it as their responsibility to curtail the drug production. As they perceive al-Qaida as their main enemy whose survival depends on funding from the Middle East and Gulf states, the U.S. and its allies think it is the Taliban who are involved in the drug business.

Washington’s strategy to eradicate terrorism within the United States depends on legal and illegal security measures and rooting out the financial base of terrorism. On the other hand, destroying the financial networks of terrorists and their organizations has been widely set aside in Afghanistan and Pakistan where terrorism is primarily viewed as a security and criminal issue.

As a result the drug business has been booming in the aftermath of 9/11 in Afghanistan. While most of the opium farming is carried out by warlords, landlords and powerful business leaders, the Taliban provide security and protection with a huge compensation in return. In this role as Narco-cops, they are extremely successful in supporting terrorist activities with the drug money.

A UN report released last month concludes that after a plant disease that reduced the opium production in the last few years, it has surged again in 2011 in Afghanistan. The report provides the following data for different years:

“Estimated potential opium production increased from 4,700 tons in 2010 to 7,000 tons in 2011, reaching levels comparable to the levels of previous years. In Afghanistan itself, potential opium production fell to 3,600 tons in 2010 but resurged to 5,800 tons in 2011” (UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Report, June 2012).

According to an estimate, 70% of Taliban’s income comes from managing and taxing the illicit drug business. Preaching a narrowly defined religious ideology, they have found a way out to conveniently justify their drug dealings. Although Islam strictly bans producing, using and trading drugs, Taliban’s justification for gaining profits from the dirty business rests on the misconception that by supplying opium they are paralyzing Western societies indirectly and thus it is permissible.

Contrary to their assumptions, however, production and export of opium is adversely affecting a large Muslim population in neighboring countries in South Asia, Central Asia and Far East. Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Iran, and Pakistan are the most affected countries of this drug business where mixed with other factors of unemployment, poverty and illiteracy, druggies are fast becoming living zombies as a dysfunctional section of the society. Thanks to the drug industry, there are 400 million drug users in Iran and Pakistan only and about 3% of the opium produced in Afghanistan is consumed domestically.

Narco-terrorism as a global, economic, social, political and security phenomenon has also been mishandled by the Karzai government. This negligence has ultimately strengthened the power and influence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Pakistan and neighboring countries.

Consequently, the drug industry in Afghanistan has become a main source of income and survival for the Taliban. Their ability to influence and infiltrate poppy growers, transporters and political leaders keeps the supply lines booming.

As an intra and interstate issue, production and trade of narcotics also depends on external demands and internal production. Drug trafficking and production in the so-called Golden Triangle of Southeast Asian countries, for example, has been reduced to a lower level recently but its global demand has not declined which has benefited production in Afghanistan. Obviously, without a global and holistic approach, the issue can hardly be resolved.

Afghanistan has become the main source of drug supplies to the world as 90% of narcotics in European countries come from Afghanistan. Highlighting the use of drugs globally, the above mentioned UN Report also reveals that between 153 to 300 million people aged 15-64 have used drugs at least once recently.

According to the World Bank, the drug business has grown to 27% of national GDP in Afghanistan. In a country where people have limited means of employment with a widening gap of income between upper and lower classes, the drug business has become a main source of income for farm workers, warlords, landlords and the Taliban.

Elimination of Narco-terrorism needs a long term, collaborative and holistic approach rather than sporadic destruction of poppy fields.

If Petro-dollars have become the backbone of terrorism in Pakistan, Narco-dollars are the major source of funding for the Afghan Taliban. Without eliminating financial networks in both countries, terrorism will remain a force to be reckoned with for a long time to come.

Dr. Qaisar Abbas
——————————————————————————–

ABBAS Qaisar
* From Viewpoint Online, Thursday, 05 July 2012 22:25: http://www.viewpointonline.net/narc…

* Dr. Qaisar Abbas, a U.S. based free lance journalist, grant writing consultant and a published Urdu poet, frequently writes on media, literature and society. With a Master’s degree in Journalism from Punjab University, Lahore, he worked as Public Relations Officer for the provincial government of Punjab. Later he joined Pakistan Television as News Producer before moving to the United States where he did Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin-Madison in Mass Communication. After working on administrative and teaching positions at several universities in the U.S., he is currently working as Assistant Dean at the University of North Texas. He can be reached at qaabbas@gmail.com

http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article25844

The book explores the ‘transnational’ links of Sufis in the making of Muslim space on Indian soil. 

For more than a thousand years, there has been a constant theological wrangling on the position of Sufis within Islam. Puritans have always argued that the tombs of Sufis that are converted into shrines ( dargahs) are locations where Islam is corrupted and where bid’at (innovation) creeps into the practice of the religion. On the other hand, other prominent Muslims in South Asia and in other parts of the world have consistently argued that these practices have religious sanction and draw legitimacy from the Quran.

The arguments in favour of the sacerdotal practices at Sufi shrines received a fillip in South Asia with the aggressive theological work of Ahmed Riza Khan Barelwi (1856-1921). Anecdotal evidence also suggests that most Indian Muslims are Barelwis (followers of Barelwi), but there has been an increasing tendency within Indian Islam, under a global move to homogenise the faith, to conform to a more Wahabi version of Sunni Islam. The first consequence of this global move has been the reduced patronage of the various Sufi shrines in the subcontinent.

Thus, the person of the Sufi and, concomitantly, the shrine where he has been physically and spiritually immortalised have emerged as the key sites where these theological battles are fought between the traditionalists and the reformers. Recently formed organisations such as the All India Ulama and Mashaikh Board (AIUMB), comprising mainly sajjada nashins (descendants of Sufis), have tried to organise themselves against the overarching influence of the Deoband madrassa and its discourse of Sunni Islam on Muslims in the subcontinent.

In the context of this tremendous churn in Indian Muslim society and the internecine battle among India’s Sunni Muslims, the academic relevance of Nile Green’s new book of integrated essays, Making Space: Sufis and Settlers in Early Modern India, is invaluable as it provides a useful account of the roles of Sufis in early modern India. Of course, it also has a wider relevance for students of Indian history, historians of religion, students of migration studies, discerning intellectuals and anybody who has an interest in the world of Sufis.

As the work of historians such as Richard M. Eaton has demonstrated, Sufis have played a key role in the spread of Islamic culture (and concomitantly Islam) in South Asia. In the later centuries, Sufi shrines were also powerful economic institutions that played important political roles. Therefore, in-depth studies of Sufism in India are absolutely necessary to add to our understanding of South Asian Islam. Green’s work, which looks at the world of Sufis in early modern India with several case studies from the Deccan, adds significantly to this understanding of Sufis’ role. The integrated essays in this collection look at several facets of Sufis’ lives and the roles they played in early modern Indian society.

Studies of Indian Islam tend to restrict their inquiries to the limited geography of the subcontinent, but Green’s work demonstrates the “transnational” links of Sufis. This is the key aspect he chooses to address – how settlement emerged from a “world on the move”, as historians described medieval Islamic India. With their settlements, Green argues, “Sufis were the key mediators between the new Muslim communities that emerged in early modern India and the rural landscape and urban spaces of their settlement and homemaking.” He goes on to say that “…the shrines of the immortalised Sufi saints were crucial to the making of Muslim space on Indian soil”.

Green approaches the itinerant world of Sufis by positioning the texts and territories that they inhabited in their double lives as blessed men and remembered saints. He writes: “For the purpose of this book, what is ultimately most important to recognise is that blessed men and saints were at once territorial and textual constructions who were created by and in turn created texts and territories.”

The Persian texts that Sufis brought with them from their homes in central Asia were their links with a larger Islamic world, in the process creating Muslim “communities of memory”. The territories that they inhabited in India or passed through acquired a sacred geography and in the process marked, claimed and transformed India’s landscape into homelands. Green writes: “Through the movement of Sufis to India, an interconnected and overlapping Muslim geography emerged that connected India with wider Muslim memory space.”

The textual repertoire that Sufis brought with them was the source for practices like the urs (the death anniversary of a Sufi saint celebrated at his shrine). Green demonstrates the extraterritorial (outside South Asia) lineage of this practice, locating it in early Islam, and argues that it was part of the high Islamic South Asian religious practice.

Sufis were great travellers and Green uses the phrase “mobile blessed men” to describe them. They travelled along with armies and merchants. Several Sufis had also come from the modern region of Afghanistan, and for a group like the Afghans, whose identity was formed only among the diaspora, the Afghan saint acted as the “anchor of memory” by preserving cultural memory and linking the territories to which Afghans migrated. As the Afghan diaspora seeped more into the cultural and cosmopolitan fabric of India, the Afghans also began to patronise non-Afghan Sufis during the time of Mughal rule in India.

The travel of these Sufis to remote lands helped people settle there and patronise the Sufi, and subsequently the shrine, in a sort of symbiotic relationship between the Sufi and the community that had sprouted around him. In this way, Sufis were central in creating new Muslim homelands and they also helped in the process of gradual conversion. Islam was a religion fixed in geographical origin, and Sufi shrines linked Arabian geographies of the Quran’s text to their Islam in a variety of ways, thus “…helping in the acculturation of local converts to a religion that was fixed in geographical origin”.

Presence in the South
The Mughals were great patrons of Sufi shrines and as they expanded their massive empires into southern India, vanquishing one kingdom after the other, they encountered a pre-existing sacred Sufi geography. Sufis had a presence from the early medieval era in the Deccan with systematic support from the southern Sultans. Their patronage helped in expanding the sacred geography of the Deccan and the system that they set in place empowered the institutions of these shrines. This was continued by smaller successor states through the 18th and 19th centuries.

When Aurangzeb entered Gulbarga at the head of the conquering Mughal army in 1686, one of his first acts was to visit the shrine of Gesu Daraz (d. 1422), showing how even the puritanical Aurangzeb endorsed Sufi shrines. Green shows how such patronage by the Mughals and their successor states led to the expansion in the grandeur of many Sufi shrines in Bijapur, Hyderabad, Balapur, Bidar, Khuldabad, Aurangabad, Jalna, Beed, Vaizapur and Paithan. The extensive royal patronage that shrines in the Deccan received makes Green write: “There were few regions of the early modern Deccan in which the fleeting presence of Sufi blessed men was not permanently built into the landscape by the patronage of shrines.”

Sufi shrines were also the few spaces in early modern India where books were circulated, but we must remember that literacy at the time was merely a bureaucratic aid rather than a sign of knowledge. Although books were available at the shrines, the site of knowledge was the blessed man himself, who was the authoritative person, and textual authority rested with the master of the shrine. Green writes: “Knowledge was that which was committed to memory, which books served to aid and supplement, but not to correct.” The role of the Sufi as the pre-modern repository of knowledge is interesting.

As the anchors of memory in the subcontinent, Sufis also figured in the various historical narratives that emphasised Muslim presence in the subcontinent. In an essay on the great fortress of Daulatabad, Green shows how competing Muslim and Brahmin accounts of the fortress were different. In a Muslim version, the Sufi saints who lived in the area had held the land safe for Muslim settlement. Similar tales of Sufi saints’ links with power are narrated by current visitors to the various Sufi shrines of Aurangabad. The connection between Aurangzeb and the saints of Aurangabad such as Shah Musafir, Shah Palangposh and Shah Nur is still remembered by people at the shrines through oral traditions.

Green’s primary research is extensive, and to construct his arguments he relies on a range of Persian malfuzat (accounts of saints) and tazkira (biographical anthologies) of Sufi saints who came to the Deccan. Green’s reputation as a historian of South Asian Islam has only been enhanced by this book. In the past few years, he has written three other books specifically on the early modern and modern periods in India broadly around Islamic themes. These are Indian Sufism since the Seventeenth Century: Saints, Books and Empires in the Muslim Deccan (2006); Islam and the Army in Colonial India: Sepoy Religion in the Service of Empire (2009); and Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840-1915 (2011). His books have been well received, and the rate at which this relatively young historian is making significant additions to the study of South Asian Islam is admirable.

 
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 http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20120727291407900.htm

Engels Revisited: Feminist Essays
Routledge Revivals, Abingdon, 2009, £65 hb
 

Reviewed by Clara Fischer

Clara Fischer has recently completed her Ph.D. thesis in political philosophy and feminist theory in Trinity College Dublin (fischecc@tcd.ie)
ReviewForming part of the Routledge Revivals programme, this book, originally published in 1987 to commemorate the centenary of Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, has been reissued in 2009. As such, it gives us an insight into the lasting importance of Engels’ influential work on ‘the woman question’ on the one hand, while providing us with the complex and sophisticated late 1980s feminist analyses of said work, on the other. The articles in this edited volume attest to the nuanced and often critical readings of The Origin by feminists, who, equipped with conceptual tools developed to explain the distinctly gendered oppression experienced by women, identify several shortcomings in Engels’ important, but contentious exposition of the origins of women’s subjugation.

For instance, several articles point out that the anthropological research used by Engels in his account of the concomitant rise of private wealth accumulation and what he deems women’s enslavement by men, has been shown to be inaccurate (see Redclift’s ‘Rights in Women: Kinship, Culture and Materialism’ and Mocanachie’s ‘Engels, Sexual Division, and the Family’). Assumptions regarding the historical development of the family, and the sexual division of labour between women and men, are critiqued and Engels is shown to have oversimplified complex phenomena, and to have universalised structures and processes which are best treated within their specific contexts. Hence, Engels evinces a narrow ‘unilinear evolutionism’ (Maconachie, 102) in his tracing of the singular family from its uncivilised to its modern, monogamous form; and he fails to recognise his own androcentric and homophobic preconceptions about sexuality and gendered labour (Redclift and Evans’ ‘Engels: Materialism and Morality’).

Although Engels distinguishes between social production and reproduction, the latter is ultimately subsumed in the former as women’s liberation is said to go hand in hand with economic liberation (Evans, 82). Voicing this most pressing socialist feminist concern regarding the reduction of gendered oppression to economic oppression, Gimenez nonetheless highlights the importance of Engels’ recognition of ‘the twofold character of production’ (‘Marxist and Non-Marxist Elements in Engels’ Views’, 53), which constitutes a substantial resource for feminists wishing to theorise the intersection of class and gender structures. The linkages between social production and reproduction are explored by Gimenez and Humphries (‘The Origin of the Family: Born out of Scarcity not Wealth’), but Engels’ ultimate inability to give equal importance to reproduction, when coupled with his interpretation of the naturalness of the sexual division of labour, leaves, for Maconachie, intact the implicit assumption that domestic work will still be undertaken by women under socialism (102-108).

Indeed, as Evan’s points out, evidence from state socialist societies indicates that the inclusion of women in social production requires ‘an accompanying change in ideology of gender’ (82) which is often lacking, or as Delia Davin outlines in her analysis of family policy in China (‘Engels and the Making of Chinese Family Policy’), lost to a conservative backlash. Here too, though, a thorough-going understanding of the ‘ideology of gender’ may have been missing from the beginning, perhaps owing to Engels’ own theoretical limitations, a shortcoming Sayers (‘For Engels: Psychoanalytic Perspectives’) seeks to remedy with the help of psychoanalytic work. Assessing several feminist theorists (Rich, Horney, Dinnerstein, Klein, Chodorow, Mitchell) and their capacity to elucidate the replication of class and gender oppression through the generations, she notes the similarities between Freud and Engels and treats these as complementary, each drawing attention to the contradictions in families, and the changes necessitated thereby (70-76).

Nonetheless, ‘the family’ remains contentious in several articles in this volume, especially in view of Engels’ distinction between the bourgeois and the working class family, and the role ‘individual sex love’ plays therein. For Engels, property distorts our capacity to engage in free, passionate relationships and it is only with the realisation of socialism that ‘individual sex love’ can be brought about. The proletarian family, however, lacking in the constraints imposed by property, already enjoys this privilege, and this, understood in light of working class women’s roles as breadwinners, bestows upon proletarian women an equality premised upon their participation in social production. Hence, what Maconachi calls Engels’ ‘more romantic vision of working-class relationships’ (110, see also Redclift, 115) feeds into the aforementioned reduction of women’s liberation to economic liberation. However, as she points out, Engels’ view of the freer, proletarian woman presupposes that ‘women enter social production on the same footing as men do, and attain equal status and pay’ (ibid.). This, however has not been the case in capitalist, nor in state socialist systems, where women have predominantly continued to hold inferior positions, while being largely absent from structures of power (Evans, 83, Davin, 156).

Interestingly, Davin highlights the influence of Engels’ theorising on socio-sexual relations in China, where radical policies had far-reaching effects in terms of ‘polygamy, concubinage, child betrothal, and the worst forms of forced marriage’ (156). A true enabling of ‘individual sex love’ as envisaged by Engels was soon undercut, however, as unconditional divorce was met with violent reactions (154). Women’s acquisition of land through agrarian reform encountered similar responses (ibid.), and the growing conservatism of Chinese family policy was evinced by a supplementation of the professed aim to abolish the family as an economic unit with a desire for it to be preserved, albeit in altered form (155-156). Davin notes that despite collectivisation, the family retained many former aspects of its functioning in socio-economic terms, and since this operated largely through the male head of the household, women remained at a disadvantage (156).

As can be seen from the brief overview proffered above, the range of topics covered in this collection is impressive. Several wide-ranging themes, such as production/reproduction, the family, sexual relationships, the division of labour, and Engels’ historical materialism, are explored within an inter-disciplinary setting, which certainly contributes to the versatility and appeal of this book (contributors draw upon anthropology, political science, psychology, sociology and economics). Each chapter provides an in-depth discussion on Engels’ theoretical failings or successes, as the case may be, often utilising empirical evidence from state socialist countries. While presenting a critical engagement with Engels’ work, the authors nonetheless remain balanced in their appraisals, and indeed, many aspects of The Origin are lauded for their conduciveness to a feminist understanding of the intersections of class and gender. Hence, Humphries finds that ‘The Origin does contain the germ of a feminist methodology’ (12), while Gimanez maintains that Engels ‘forces us to think…historically and politically about the question of sexual inequality’ (53). Similarly, Sayers notes Engels’ depiction of the ‘mutability of the family’ (57) as an important contribution for feminists, and Davin asserts that ‘Engel’s legacy’ in China ‘at least helped to put women’s emancipation on the agenda of one of the most far-reaching revolutions in history’ (161). The merits of Engels’ work are thereby posited in conjunction with its limitations, providing for a rich and detailed feminist reading of The Origin. In sum, Engels Revisited constitutes a valuable resource both for the study of Engels’ original work, and for an increased understanding of the role it has played in the development of feminist thought more generally. With the reissue of this book, students and scholars interested in Engels and/or feminism will fortunately be able to avail themselves of the insights found in these chapters for many years to come.

http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2010/178

By the end of the 1920s, Stalin’s party-state apparatus had become the dominant force in Russian society. A bureaucratic ruling class treated all forms of dissent and resistance as crimes against the state

Stalin’s gulags condemned millions to slave labour and early death

First the Wall Street Crash plunged the world into the Great Depression and put 40 million out of work. Then the Nazis, the most barbaric political movement of modern times, seized power in Germany.

No wonder millions of desperate activists looked for an alternative. No wonder they believed Russian leader Joseph Stalin’s claim to be the world’s standard-bearer against capitalism and fascism.

Mass unemployment and the menace of fascism made them uncritical. Why should they believe western reports of atrocities and injustices in Russia? Was it not inevitable that ‘the capitalist press’ would denigrate the homeland of socialist revolution?

After all, the new Russian economy was booming while the rest of the world was mired in depression. The success of Stalin’s ‘Five Year Plans’ seemed prodigious.

Between 1927/28 and 1937, the value of Russian industrial output increased five-fold. While Russia had accounted for just 4% of global industrial production in 1929, this had risen to 12% by 1939.

But these were not the triumphs of any sort of socialism. On the contrary: all vestiges of workers’ control over industry had been stamped out.

In its place, a new model of state-capitalist development was being pioneered, where the ruling class was formed of government bureaucrats, the national economy was run like a single giant corporation, and all forms of dissent and resistance were treated as crimes against the state.

Lenin had seen the danger before his premature death in 1924. ‘The party’s proletarian policy,’ he had written, ‘is determined at present not by its rank and file, but by the immense and undivided authority of tiny sections of what might be called the party’s “old guard”.’

The party had filled up with the johnny-come-latelies of post-revolutionary times – because a party card had become a passport to a paid post in government, army, or industry. As early as 1922, only one in forty members had joined before the February Revolution.

Lenin had also identified Stalin as the potential leader of the emerging party-state bureaucracy. In a secret ‘Testament’ written shortly before his death, he warned leading party comrades that the Secretary-General of the Party had ‘unlimited authority concentrated in his hands’, that he was too boorish and bureaucratic to wield such power, and that they should consider ‘removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead’.

The Testament was suppressed and ignored, and, with civil society hollowed out by war and economic collapse, the party-state apparatus swelled to fill the vacuum (see MHW 80). Stalin’s position gave him control of this apparatus. By the end of the 1920s, it was the dominant force in Russian society.

Show trials in Moscow condemned veteran revolutionaries to death
The destruction of the opposition currents inside the party was easily accomplished by the police agents of the bureaucracy in 1928 – both the Right, led by Bukharin and representing the private capitalist interests which had developed under the New Economic Policy, and the Left, led by Trotsky, representing the revolutionary socialist tradition of the Bolsheviks.

Against Trotsky was the power of inertia in an exhausted, impoverished, peasant country. Without world revolution to reinforce them, backward war-torn Russia had simply consumed its native revolutionaries – until they were so few that they could be swept into the oblivion of the gulags.

Even so, the idealism and self-emancipation of the revolutionary years survived in popular memory and served to indict all that followed. For this reason, the remaining revolutionaries were hounded to their deaths during the 1930s. Only one in 14 of the Bolshevik Party’s 1917 members still belonged to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1939; virtually all of rest were dead.

The bureaucracy had acted in 1928 because it had the power to do so and it faced a crisis. The peasants were refusing to supply enough grain to the cities, and foreign governments were cutting off diplomatic relations and banning trade links. The leadership’s response was to seize the grain, drive down wages, and impose rapid industrialisation.

‘To slacken the pace of industrialisation would mean to lag behind,’ Stalin announced, ‘and those who lag behind are beaten … We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this lag in ten years or they will crush us.’

Russia had survived civil war and foreign invasion: the new regime had not been destroyed by military force. But the defeat of the world revolution had left Russia isolated and impoverished in a global economy dominated by capitalism. So the counter-revolution was achieved not by violent overthrow, but by the relentless external pressure of economic and military competition.

Russia needed to export grain to pay for machine tools. It needed machine tools to build modern industries. It needed these to produce the guns, tanks, and planes with which to defend itself in a predatory global system of competing nation-states.

Private capital accumulation was too slow. What Bukharin in the 1920s had called ‘socialism at a snail’s pace’ would have left Russia trailing behind and ever vulnerable to dismemberment by hostile powers.

Only the state had the power to concentrate resources, impose a plan, override opposition, and drive through rapid forced industrialisation.

The aim was mass production to build state power. Russia’s rulers thus became personifications of state-capitalist accumulation. But they also used their power to reward themselves richly, even as they plundered the peasantry, cut wages, increased work pressure, and filled the gulags with slave-labourers.

By 1937, plant directors were paid 2,000 roubles a month, skilled workers 200-300 roubles, and workers on the minimum wage 110-115 roubles. Pay differentials in the army were even more extreme: during the Second World War, colonels were paid 2,400 roubles a month, private soldiers 10.

The pay of plant directors and army colonels was modest, however, compared with that of top members of the state bourgeoisie earning up to 25,000 roubles a month – more than 200 times the minimum wage.

So the bureaucracy was a privileged class with a clear material interest in remaining loyal to Stalin and the state-capitalist system. It proved utterly ruthless in imposing forced industrialisation on society at a colossal cost in human suffering.

Grain seizures led to famine for tens of millions
Consumption was sacrificed to investment in heavy industry. The proportion of investment devoted to plant, machinery, and raw materials – as opposed to consumer goods – rose from 33% in 1927/28 to 53% by 1932 and 69% by 1950.

The result was shortages and queues – though less then there might have been, because at the same time, wages were cut, by an estimated 50% over six years.

Grain was seized from the peasantry to feed the growing urban population and to pay for imports of foreign machinery. Because of this, when the price collapsed on world markets in 1929, at least three million peasants starved to death.

It was not enough. The state decreed ‘the collectivisation of agriculture’ (state control). Millions of peasants – denounced as kulaks (rich peasants producing for the market) – were dispossessed and transported. Many died. Others ended up as slave-labourers in the gulags.

The gulags (labour camps) expanded into a vast Siberian slave empire run by Stalin’s security apparatus. The 30,000 prisoners of 1928 had become two million by 1931, five million by 1935, and probably more than ten million by the end of the decade.

Millions of others were simply murdered by the police, the annual cull rising from 20,000 in 1930 to 350,000 in 1937.

State terror on this scale reflected Russian backwardness, the pace of state-capitalist accumulation, and the levels of exploitation necessary to achieve it. The working class, the peasantry, and the national minorities had to be pulverised into submission.

Roses for Stalin – a typical example of the totalitarian state’s ‘Socialist Realist’ propaganda art
The damage was not confined to Russia. The revolutionary content of Marxism was abandoned but its verbal formulas were retained and redeployed to justify the policies of the Russian bureaucracy. The Comintern – the Communist International – became a vehicle for imposing the ideology and policies of the Russian state on foreign Communist parties.

In 1927, having abandoned world revolution in favour of ‘socialism in one country’, Stalin tried to break out of Russia’s isolation by seeking respectable allies abroad. So the Chinese Communist Party was ordered to kow-tow to Chiang Kai-shek and disarm the Shanghai working class. The result was a terrible counter-revolutionary massacre (MHW 78).

The following year, the policy suddenly switched to sectarianism and adventurism. In the Comintern’s disastrous ‘Third Period’, Stalin proclaimed a new revolutionary advance, such that Communists were to break all ties with Social-Democrats and prepare for an imminent seizure of power.

This mirrored (and helped justify) the policy inside Russia. The attack on the kulaks was presented as an attack on private capitalism (which was true) and as a major advance towards ‘socialism’ (which was not). The ultra-left turn of the Third Period provided a smokescreen for bureaucratic power and forced industrialisation.

The sectarianism of the Third Period created a fatal division inside the German labour movement and allowed Hitler to take power in 1933 (MHW 83).

But the Nazis threatened a resurgence of aggressive German imperialism, and Stalin began casting around for European allies. The Comintern therefore lurched from ultra-left madness to ‘broad frontism’: Communists were now to form alliances with the liberal bourgeoisie, reining back the working class to placate potential allies of the Russian state.

Thus, instead of promoting world revolution, the Stalinist Comintern had, by the mid 1930s, become actively counter-revolutionary. This was to produce, in 1937, another catastrophic disaster to place alongside those of 1927 and 1933.

http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/a-marxist-history-of-the-world/15903-a-marxist-history-of-the-world-pat-84-state-capitalism-in-russia