Saturday, April 03, 2010


Russia delivers missile systems to China

02 April, 2010, 20:13

Russia has delivered 15 batteries of S-300 surface-to-air missile systems to China. Officials from the National Defense Sector say the deal is unprecedented both in terms of cost and quantity.

The deal is said to be worth over $2 billion.


The S-300 systems will be used to defend the Chinese cities of Beijing and Shanghai against potential threats. The upgraded S-300 system is capable of hitting short range missiles and also fixed land targets.

Moscow-based political analyst Aleksandr Pikaev thinks China's purchase will not trigger tensions in the region.

“Japan is purchasing the American Patriot system, and likely the Chinese think they need to have their own air defense and missile defense capabilities. I do not expect considerable negative reaction from the region, but certainly the United States would be concerned about that. It would require them to concentrate more offensive weapons on Chinese targets,” Pikaev told RT.







One of the metro bombers identified – anti-terrorist committee

02 April, 2010, 14:50

The national anti-terrorist committee has confirmed the identity of one of the suicide bombers involved in the Moscow Metro bombings on Monday. The woman is reported to have been 17-year-old Djennet Abdurakhmanova.



Abdurakhmanova (Abdulayeva), allegedly a widow of Umalat Magomedov – the leader of radical Islamists in the South Russian Republic of Dagestan who was killed in December last year – carried out the second attack at Park Kultury Metro station.

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"As a result of forensic and genetic analysis, as well as visual identification, we have established that the explosive device on the Park Kultury metro station was set off by Dzhanet Abdulayeva born in 1992 in Dagestan. At the moment, investigations are being carried out to identify the second suicide bomber," Vladimir Markin, spokesman for the Investigations Committee stated.

According to Kommersant newspaper, the other bomber could be 20-year-old Markha Ustarkhanova, also a widow of a militant from Dagestan.

Sergey Smirnov, deputy director of the Federal Security Service, said those responsible for the attacks are already known to the authorities.

''The investigation is underway. We are trying to identify those who organised the terror attacks. There were several people arrested on suspicion of plotting the bombings, " Smirnov stated. "We now can say that investigation has resulted in something concrete. ''

Meanwhile, the Federal Operation Department at the National anti-terrorist committee has assured that “as a result of investigating a range of possible leads, [they] have identified individuals responsible for organizing and carrying out the attacks.

Two Moscow Metro stations were struck by suicide bombers on Monday morning. On Friday, the number of casualties from the attacks was 40 dead and over 90 wounded. It was the first major terrorist attack in the Russian capital in six years.







Putin visits Venezuela to talk energy, arms

02 April, 2010, 09:44

Russia and Venezuela agreed to forge closer military and energy links as the Russian Prime Minister held talks with President Hugo Chavez in Caracas. Vladimir Putin has also approved a $2.2 billion loan to Venezuela.



“The Ministry of Finance reviewed the request and today I informed the Venezuelan President that Russia is ready to provide this credit to his country,” he said.

A deal to help Venezuela build its first nuclear power plant was also struck by Putin during his meeting with Chavez in Caracas.

While Russia and Venezuela share a lot of common interests, the Putin visit has been mostly focused on two aspects of their bilateral relationship: energy resources and military cooperation. The negotiations led to a number of agreements signed in these fields.

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Russia and Venezuela have created a joint venture in order to explore oil fields in the Venezuelan Orinoco Belt. The venture, 60% of which will be held by the Venezuelan national petroleum company and 40% by an oil and gas consortium made up of Russian companies, is expected to pump up to 450,000 barrels of oil per day. It would allow both sides to significantly stabilize and influence the global energy market.

“This is a commercial and strategic partnership, basically. For Russia, Venezuela is a very attractive market in terms of selling Russian technology and weapons as well, and also in terms of energy cooperation. The key deal being signed between Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez [concerns] the Orinoco oil belt. That is probably one of the largest, if not the largest oil reserve in the world. But it's basically heavy crude, so you need technology to transform it into light crude – and Russia has it,” says journalist Pepe Escobar.

Grigory Volchek, press-secretary of Lukoil, one of Russia's major oil companies, says that Venezuela could be a model for future co-operation with Latin America countries and Caribbean states.

Russia and Venezuela are the two major and very serious players at the world energy market. And Russia could regard Venezuela as kind of a key model for future co-operation with other Latin American countries," Volchek said. “Using it as example we could plan our projects with Brazil – the new world economic giant, Argentina, Mexico, Columbia – where Russian companies have been successfully working for a number of years already, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chili and the states of Carrebian basin.

Military cooperation between Moscow and Caracas was the second matter topping the agenda. Russia has pledged to continue providing Venezuela with military equipment in order to support its self-defense.

Venezuelan lawyer and author Eva Golinger says the defense deals between Venezuela and Russia may lead to a shift in the balance of power in the region and affect US dominance.

“Venezuela had been sanctioned by Washington and sought other partners that were not subordinate to the US agenda and had their own defense technology. Russia has been one of the most consistent suppliers of different equipment to Venezuela – which was basically rendered debilitated by Washington because of the sanctions. I think it has been changing the balance of power for the last few years,” she told RT.

In addition, the Russian Prime Minister has finalized an agreement on the sale of 50 military and civilian aircraft to the Venezuelan side, among them BE-200 amphibian planes. Instrumental in Venezuela's fight against forest fires, these planes are a very welcome purchase.

“To gather water in order to put out a fire this plane does not have to land on the water’s surface. It gathers it while flying above the water. This increases the amount that can be dropped on to the hot spots of the fire and increases the effectiveness of these crafts. This is a unique plane; there is nothing comparable to it,” Prime Minister Putin said.

Venezuela’s will to arm itself has more to do with its image in general, rather than with self-defense, says Professor Pavel Baev from the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway.

“Deliveries of Russian arms played the role of increasing Hugo Chavez’ personal prestige,” he said. “The army was not created so much to threaten the neighbors, but to show the US that Venezuela is strong and capable of self-defense, because his main ideological conflict is not with his neighbors, but with the United States.”

Some, however, are concerned about such contracts.

The US State Department has said that it does not see why Venezuela should arm itself to such a level. It stated, though, that the Venezuelan leadership has the right to make any decision concerning its military and national security by itself.

Chavez himself has visited Moscow eight times already, while for Putin it was his first visit to Venezuela, which has already been labeled as “historic” by Chavez.

During the visit, the Russian Prime Minister also met with Bolivian leader Evo Morales, who arrived in Caracas especially for the occasion.

Moscow-based political analyst Maria Kusakina told RT that Russia and Venezuela are now forging closer ties, both economically and politically.

“This year the countries are celebrating 75 years since the establishment of diplomatic relations. However, it is only the last decade that has seen the real partnership,” Kusakina said. And if the first part of it is more about economic cooperation, we now see a strengthening of political cooperation.

“Last year, when President Chavez made a revolutionary decision to recognize the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, he really converted into our political ally,” she added.







The alienation of Hamid Karzai

By M K Bhadrakumar

It must have been the first time in the history of the United States that an incumbent president had to undertake a 26-hour plane journey abroad with repeated mid-air refueling to meet a foreign leader - all for a 30-minute pow-wow.

The staggering message that came out of US President Barack Obama's hurried mission to the presidential palace in Kabul to meet Afghan President Hamid Karzai last Sunday afternoon is that his own AfPak diplomats have let him down badly.

The US president is left with not a single functionary in his star-studded AfPak team on whom he can rely to hold meaningful interaction with the Afghanistan president. Of course, AfPak special representative Richard Holbrooke is not about to lose his job so long as he enjoys the confidence of his mentor in Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The Holbrooke factor
Why have things come to this impasse? The plain truth is that Karzai distrusts Holbrooke. He shares the widespread opinion in the capitals of the region that Holbrooke is under a Pakistani spell. On the other hand, Holbrooke's version is that Karzai is corrupt and presides over a morally decrepit and decadent regime that hangs around America's neck like an albatross.

But then, no one is asking Holbrooke since when is it that corruption became a big issue in America's South Asia policies? Billions and billions of dollars American taxpayers' dollars were funneled into the black hole that was military dictator General Zia-ul-Haq's Pakistan during the Afghan jihad.

In today's Afghan war, history is repeating itself. There is no accountability about where the money is going and it is the talk of the bazaars that vested interests control disbursement of such vast sums of money. The US Congress should perhaps begin an investigation starting with the so-called "experts" who advise the Pentagon and Holbrooke's team.

If the local grapevine is to be believed, a gravy train runs through Rawalpindi and Lahore to Kabul for civilian and military "experts" and "advisors" who are having a whale of a time.

Obama has lived in Indonesia and can figure out how gravy trains run on and on. For argument's sake, how much of the money that the international community poured into Afghanistan has indeed passed through Karzai's hands?

If the report tabled by the United Nations secretary general that was tabled in the Security Council in New York in March is to be believed, even after eight years of engagement in Afghanistan, 80% of international community assistance still bypasses the Afghan government and is not closely aligned with Kabul's priorities. Therefore, the corruption in Afghanistan needs to be viewed in perspective.

Karzai makes a serious point when he says that those who talk about corruption are obfuscating the real issues that aggravate the crisis of confidence between him and Washington. Now that Obama has plunged into the cesspool of AfPak diplomacy, he should perhaps get to the bottom of it and make it a point to try to understand why Karzai feels so alienated.

Looking back, the turning point was the critical period leading to the Afghan presidential election. Holbrooke should never have tried to exert blatant strong-arm tactics aimed at expelling Karzai from the Afghan leadership. Afghans are a proud people and will never tolerate such nonsense from a foreigner.

ISI's fear of Karzai
Karzai believes that Holbrooke and his aides were heavily influenced by Pakistani advice. Unsurprisingly, Pakistan hates Karzai and knows that as long as a Popolzai chieftain remains in power in Kabul, it cannot have its way in Afghanistan.

Karzai represents exactly the sort of Pashtun nationalism that the Punjabi-dominated military establishment in Pakistan dreads. When the ISI murdered former Afghan president Mohammad Najibullah in 1996, its calculations were precisely the same; namely, that there should be no rival fountainhead outside of its orbit of control with the potential stature to claim leadership in the Pashtun constituency.

The ISI is well aware that Karzai, in crafting his national reconciliation policy, is almost entirely emulating Najibullah. Like Najibullah, Karzai is at ease with the political ethos of observant Muslims, though himself imbued with staunchly secular beliefs. So, he cannot be pitted as alien to Afghan culture or to Islam.

Like Najibullah, he is prepared to accommodate the Islamist elements in the power structure within the framework of a broad-based government. He is also well-educated and urbane, and yet he keeps closely in touch with the tribal ethos and culture.

Karzai has direct contacts with the opposition Islamist camp and has no need of ISI intermediaries to put him in touch with the Taliban. Most importantly, like Najibullah - who was a blue-blooded Ahmedzai - Karzai too is a Pashtun aristocrat who has a place and a name in Pashtun tribal society.

In Karzai, the ISI faces a formidable opponent. The Taliban leaders will always appear to the ordinary Afghan as obscurant and medieval in comparison.

A shrewd tactician and coalition-builder like Karzai can be expected to frustrate the best-laid plans of the ISI to project power into Afghanistan. The ISI desperately tried to woo non-Pashtun ethnic groups during recent years, but Karzai frustrated these attempts and they eventually opted to rally behind him.

In short, no other Pashtun today on the Afghan political landscape has Karzai's ability to assemble such a diverse coalition comprising powerful non-Pashtun leaders such as Mohammed Fahim, Rashid Dostum and Karim Khalili (who often don't enjoy good relations amongst themselves), former Mujahideen commanders and tribal leaders, and even erstwhile communists and technocrats.

Karzai's game plan
Now, the big question for Obama is whether US interests necessarily coincide with those of the ISI. If they do not, Obama needs to ask Holbrooke for a coherent explanation as to why he used all his skill and the power of US muscle to try to oust Karzai.

Having failed to unseat Karzai, a furious media campaign has been launched to settle scores by humiliating him on the one hand and to establish that he must somehow be removed from power. Karzai's family members have been dragged into the controversy. Does the US think the Pakistani generals it deals with are lily-white?

Karzai, of course, proved to be no cakewalk for Holbrooke. He brusquely showed Holbrooke the door after a famous showdown in the presidential palace. Since then Karzai is a changed man. He is constantly on guard against American schemes aimed at trapping him.

Therefore, Obama did the right thing by deciding to deal with Karzai, warts and all, personally. In fact, he should have undertaken this mission to Kabul at least six months ago.

Karzai is a deeply disillusioned man today. The responsibility for almost all that has gone wrong in the war is placed on his doorstep. The whole world knows that the Afghan governmental machinery simply lacks the "capacity" to govern. There just aren't enough Afghans with the requisite skill to be administrators at the central or local level. There is no such thing as a state structure on the ground in Afghanistan. The people are so desperately poor that they go to any extent to eke out day-to-day living. Indeed, Karzai has to make do with what he has got, which is pitiably little.

Then, there is the acute security situation, which all but precludes effective governance. Karzai is invariably held responsible by the Afghan people for the excessive use of force by the US military and North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies during their operations that result in large-scale "collateral killings". Every time wanton killings take place, he cuts a sorry figure when it transpires that Americans coolly ignore his protestations.

To compound everything, Karzai is aghast that the ISI, which promotes the insurgency, is today far closer to the AfPak team than he could ever imagine himself to be. It is literally a situation where it's his word against the ISI's.

Thus, Karzai has turned to various groups to tap into the vast reservoir of resentment in the Afghan opinion about Pakistan's half-a-century-long interference in their country's internal affairs. In order to isolate Karzai, a campaign has been built up regarding these groups - "warlordism".

Gullible Western opinion gets carried away by the campaign over "warlordism", which militates against human rights and norms of civilized life. But no one ponders as to when is it in its entire history Afghanistan could do away with local strongmen, sodomy, tribalism or gun culture?

Besides, is "warlordism" typical of Afghanistan? Is it alien to Pakistan's feudal society? Famous books have been written about the "feudal lords" in the Punjab. According to authoritative estimates, not less than 8,000 Pakistanis have simply disappeared from the face of the earth after being nabbed by Pakistani security agencies since September 2001. Richard Falk, a renowned British journalist who is currently on a visit to Pakistan, has written harrowing accounts of what he has heard about these "disappeared".

Aren't the Taliban commanders "warlords"? The politics behind the highly selective invocation of "warlordism" in Afghanistan must be properly understood. It aims at discrediting Karzai's allies like Fahim, Dostum and Khalili, who would resist to the last minute another Taliban takeover of their country.

Taliban are fair game
The ISI's biggest worry is that some day Karzai might get through to Taliban leader Mullah Omar himself. Karzai has made no bones about it, either. As things stand, the ISI has to keep one eye over its shoulders all the time to see that outsiders do not poach in the Taliban camp. Keeping the Quetta Shura together as a single flock has always been a tough job that it is only going to get tougher.

The ISI dreads to think that all sorts of poachers are stalking the Taliban today - Iranians, Indians, Saudis, Russians, British, the Central Asians, and indeed the Americans themselves. The intelligence services of the world are no longer prepared to accept that the Taliban should remain the ISI's sole monopoly.

From the Taliban perspective, they too harbor hopes of some day breaking out of the ISI stranglehold. The ISI always had nightmarish fears that the Taliban might make overtures to Delhi for a covert relationship. Whenever it appeared that the Taliban were reaching out to the Indians (or vice versa ) and that some sort of communication channel might open between the erstwhile adversaries, the ISI precipitated gruesome incidents that hardened attitudes in Delhi and the door became shut against any form of rapprochement between the Taliban and the Indians.

Such ISI operations continue even today. It is a different matter, though, that there are probably enough "hawks" within the Indian strategic community and security establishment, too, who lack the political astuteness to respond to subtle overtures from the Taliban. In fact, the Indian consulates in Jalalabad and Kandahar can provide a great window for establishing direct contact with the Taliban. The ISI may not even get to know about such contacts.

Clearly, Obama's agenda is different from the ISI's. What Obama needs to factor in is that if Karzai is allowed a free hand, he will establish dialogue with the Taliban, sooner or later bypassing the ISI.

Karzai has excellent networking with the tribal channels and with Peshawar-based Pashtun nationalists. A genuine national reconciliation becomes possible since Karzai can act as a bridge between the Taliban and the virulently anti-Taliban "warlords". On the other hand, the backing of the "warlords" ensures that Karzai does not get overwhelmed by the Taliban. This is important as the Taliban today are the single-best organized force in the country, whereas Karzai lacks muscle power on his own without the backing of the "warlords".

Quintessentially, Karzai has resorted to what can only be called the "united front" strategy, to use the Marxist-Leninist parlance. He is probably on the right course, and in any case he has no other choice because he cannot hold out indefinitely against the full weight of the Pakistani "deep state" bent on demolishing him.

When American commentators blame Karzai for his apparent hurry to have alleged trade-offs with the Taliban, including Mullah Omar, they are unfairly not taking into account his real compulsions.

Curiously, Karzai's allies, the notoriously anti-Taliban "warlords" from the non-Pashtun groups, who have everything to lose in the event of a Taliban takeover, also see that time is not on their side as war-weariness sets in and the US searches for an exit strategy.

They also apprehend that the Taliban will become irreconcilable if the US's surge in military presence fails to produce the intended results, and, therefore, they realize the urgent need for the reconciliation strategy that Karzai is probing.

In their estimation, the "Afghan-ness" of the Taliban will eventually come out once they come on board a coalition - and that will erode the ISI's stranglehold over their country.

Pashtun alienation
That is to say, Obama should realize that Karzai does not visualize the Americans as his enemy, as is often being projected naively by correspondents for the Western media . Nor is Karzai irrational in striving for reconciliation. He has no reason to torpedo Obama's policy or to "spite" the US, as interpreted recently by a Washington Post correspondent.

Karzai is an able politician with acute survival instincts, and he is not a woolly headed romantic who fancies that he can get away with strategic defiance of the US, which has staked its global prestige and that of the entire Western alliance in the war in the Hindu Kush.

Obama should distinguish that it is the ISI and the Pakistani military whom Karzai (and the "warlords") considers to be his adversaries. His frustration is that the Americans are either far too naive to comprehend what is going on or are dissimulating since they are pursuing some "hidden agenda" in relation to the geopolitics of the region.

Karzai's alienation is widely shared by the Afghan elites in both Kabul and Peshawar. A grand tribal jirga was recently held in Peshawar just ahead of the US-Pakistan strategic dialogue of March 24, and was widely attended by noted Pashtun intellectuals, tribal leaders, politicians, professionals, civil society members, women's groups and representatives of established political parties of the North-West Frontier Agency.

Obama can always ask the American consulate in Peshawar for a report on the jirga. It will prove an eye-opener. Essentially, the jirga raised the widespread grievance that the Pashtuns do not trust Pakistan's Punjabi-dominated military establishment, which was leading the strategic dialogue with the US. The jirga alleged that the Pakistani military establishment's sole agenda is to attain "strategic depth" in Afghanistan and this lies at the root of the sufferings of the Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line.

The jirga issued the Peshawar Declaration, a statement which cautioned Washington that the root causes of terrorism lie in the Pakistani military establishment's "strategic depth" mindset and the Arab expansionism embodied by the al-Qaeda under the garb of global Islam.

It made an impassioned plea not to leave the helpless Pashtuns of the tribal agencies and the North-West Frontier Province at the mercy of the Pakistani army and the intelligence agencies.

In the prevailing circumstances, Karzai has no option but to turn toward Tehran for understanding and support. The Iranians have a profound understanding of the Afghan chessboard and can grasp the raging storms in the mind of the Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line.

The Iranians empathize with the plight of the Pashtuns, whose traditional way of life and eclectic culture have been systematically vandalized during the recent decades of the jihad. The Iranians are inclined to help Karzai, as they do not want a takeover of Afghanistan by the Wahhabi-inclined Taliban. The Iranians also have good contacts with the "warlords" and can ensure that the latter work with Karzai.

These are all good enough reasons why Karzai is keen to shore up Iranian support. But Karzai has no reason to conspire with the Iranians against the US. His first option will always be that the US reposes confidence in him and allows him to negotiate a national reconciliation.

Nor is Tehran unaware that Karzai's first preference will always be to work with the Americans. If Tehran has still opted to work with Karzai, that is because he has been an exceptionally good neighbor and, even during the period when he might have been an American "puppet", he never acted in a hostile manner against Iranian interests, instead welcoming Iran's participation in the Afghan reconstruction.

The human factor
In sum, Obama has done the right thing by inviting Karzai to go over to Washington in May to discuss all issues with him directly. In a war theater with 100,000 troops deployed, this is the right approach for a commander-in-chief to take. Even in our information age, wars cannot be fought through remote-control or video-conferencing. The human factor still counts.

In all probability, Obama will have the opportunity to form his own opinions about Karzai rather than hear from second-hand sources. Obama has a rare streak in his political personality insofar as, ultimately, he works his way out himself. He seems to sense he needs to get a correct picture of what is going on in Kabul and that is best done by seeing for himself.

Indeed, the stakes are high for Obama politically. The fact that he kept his distance from the high-profile Pakistani delegation that visited Washington last week is in itself an extraordinary statement regarding the way that his mind's antennae are probing the AfPak landscape.

Meanwhile, Holbrooke doesn't become superfluous. He claims to have developed good personal chemistry with Pakistani army chief General Pervez Kiani, which is always useful. Holbrooke should perhaps visit Islamabad and Rawalpindi more frequently.

Ambassador Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

(Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

The opium wars in Afghanistan

By Alfred W McCoy

In ways that have escaped most observers, the Barack Obama administration is now trapped in an endless cycle of drugs and death in Afghanistan from which there is neither an easy end nor an obvious exit.

After a year of cautious debate and costly deployments, President Obama launched his new Afghan war strategy at 2:40am on February 13, 2010, in a remote market town called Marjah in southern Afghanistan's Helmand province. As a wave of helicopters descended on Marjah's outskirts, spitting up clouds of dust, hundreds of US Marines dashed toward the town's mud-walled compounds through fields sprouting opium poppies.

After a week of fighting, US war commander General Stanley McChrystal choppered into town with Afghanistan's vice president and Helmand's provincial governor. Their mission: a media roll-out for the general's new-look counterinsurgency strategy based on bringing government to remote villages just like Marjah.

At a carefully staged meet-and-greet with some 200 villagers, however, the vice-president and provincial governor faced some unexpected, unscripted anger. "If they come with tractors," one Afghani widow announced to a chorus of supportive shouts from her fellow farmers, "they will have to roll over me and kill me before they can kill my poppy."

For these poppy growers and thousands more like them, the return of government control, however contested, brought with it a perilous threat: opium eradication.

Throughout all the shooting and shouting, American commanders seemed strangely unaware that Marjah might qualify as the world's heroin capital - with hundreds of laboratories, reputedly hidden inside the area's mud-brick houses, regularly processing the local poppy crop into high-grade heroin. After all, the surrounding fields of Helmand produce 40% of the world's illicit opium supply, and much of this harvest has been traded in Marjah.

Rushing through those opium fields to attack the Taliban on day one of this offensive, the Marines missed their real enemy, the ultimate force behind the Taliban insurgency, as they pursued just the latest crop of peasant guerrillas whose guns and wages are funded by those poppy plants. "You can't win this war without taking on drug production in Helmand Province," said one US Embassy official just back from inspecting these opium districts.

Indeed, as Air Force One headed for Kabul on Sunday, National Security Adviser James L Jones assured reporters that Obama would try to persuade Afghan President Hamid Karzai to prioritize "battling corruption, taking the fight to the narco-traffickers". The drug trade, he added, "provides a lot of the economic engine for the insurgents".

Just as these Marjah farmers spoiled General McChrystal's media event, so their crop has subverted every regime that has tried to rule Afghanistan for the past 30 years. During the CIA's covert war in the 1980s, opium financed the mujahedeen or "freedom fighters" (as president Ronald Reagan called them) who finally forced the Soviets to abandon the country and then defeated its Marxist client state.

In the late 1990s, the Taliban, which had taken power in most of the country, lost any chance for international legitimacy by protecting and profiting from opium - and then, ironically, fell from power only months after reversing course and banning the crop. Since the US military intervened in 2001, a rising tide of opium has corrupted the government in Kabul while empowering a resurgent Taliban whose guerrillas have taken control of ever-larger parts of the Afghan countryside.

These three eras of almost constant warfare fueled a relentless rise in Afghanistan's opium harvest - from just 250 tonnes in 1979 to 8,200 tonnes in 2007. For the past five years, the Afghan opium harvest has accounted for as much as 50% of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) and provided the prime ingredient for over 90% of the world's heroin supply.

The ecological devastation and societal dislocation from these three war-torn decades has woven opium so deeply into the Afghan grain that it defies solution by Washington's best and brightest (as well as its most inept and least competent). Caroming between ignoring the opium crop and demanding its total eradication, the George W Bush administration dithered for seven years while heroin boomed, and in doing so helped create a drug economy that corrupted and crippled the government of its ally, President Karzai.

In recent years, opium farming has supported 500,000 Afghan families, nearly 20% of the country's estimated population, and funds a Taliban insurgency that has, since 2006, spread across the countryside.

To understand the Afghan War, one basic point must be grasped: in poor nations with weak state services, agriculture is the foundation for all politics, binding villagers to the government or warlords or rebels. The ultimate aim of counterinsurgency strategy is always to establish the state's authority. When the economy is illicit and by definition beyond government control, this task becomes monumental. If the insurgents capture that illicit economy, as the Taliban have done, then the task becomes little short of insurmountable.

Opium is an illegal drug, but Afghanistan's poppy crop is still grounded in networks of social trust that tie people together at each step in the chain of production. Crop loans are necessary for planting, labor exchange for harvesting, stability for marketing, and security for shipment. So dominant and problematic is the opium economy in Afghanistan today that a question Washington has avoided for the past nine years must be asked: Can anyone pacify a full-blown narco-state?

The answer to this critical question lies in the history of the three Afghan wars in which Washington has been involved over the past 30 years - the CIA covert warfare of the 1980s, the civil war of the 1990s (fueled at its start by US$900 million in CIA funding), and since 2001, the US invasion, occupation, and counterinsurgency campaigns. In each of these conflicts, Washington has tolerated drug trafficking by its Afghan allies as the price of military success - a policy of benign neglect that has helped make Afghanistan today the world's number one narco-state.

CIA covert warfare, spreading poppy fields
Opium first emerged as a key force in Afghan politics during the CIA covert war against the Soviets, the last in a series of secret operations that it conducted along the mountain rim-lands of Asia which stretch for 8,000 kilometers from Turkey to Thailand.

In the late 1940s, as the Cold War was revving up, the United States first mounted covert probes of communism's Asian underbelly. For 40 years thereafter, the CIA fought a succession of secret wars along this mountain rim - in Burma (now Myanmar) during the 1950s, Laos in the 1960s, and Afghanistan in the 1980s. In one of history's ironic accidents, the southern reach of communist China and the Soviet Union had coincided with Asia's opium zone along this same mountain rim, drawing the CIA into ambiguous alliances with the region's highland warlords.

Washington's first Afghan war began in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded the country to save a Marxist client regime in Kabul, the Afghan capital. Seeing an opportunity to wound its Cold War enemy, the Reagan administration worked closely with Pakistan's military dictatorship in a 10-year CIA campaign to expel the Soviets.

This was, however, a covert operation unlike any other in the Cold War years. First, the collision of CIA secret operations and Soviet conventional warfare led to the devastation of Afghanistan's fragile highland ecology, damaging its traditional agriculture beyond immediate recovery, and fostering a growing dependence on the international drug trade. Of equal import, instead of conducting this covert warfare on its own, as it had in Laos in the Vietnam War years, the CIA outsourced much of the operation to Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), which soon became a powerful and ever-more problematic ally.

When the ISI proposed its Afghan client, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, as overall leader of the anti-Soviet resistance, Washington - with few alternatives - agreed. Over the next 10 years, the CIA supplied some $2 billion to Afghanistan's mujahedeen through the ISI, half to Hekmatyar, a violent fundamentalist infamous for throwing acid at unveiled women at Kabul University and, later, murdering rival resistance leaders. As the CIA operation was winding down in May 1990, the Washington Post published a front-page article charging that its key ally, Hekmatyar, was operating a chain of heroin laboratories inside Pakistan under the protection of the ISI.

Although this area had zero heroin production in the mid-1970s, the CIA's covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world's largest heroin producing region. As mujahedeen guerrillas captured prime agricultural areas inside Afghanistan in the early 1980s, they began collecting a revolutionary poppy tax from their peasant supporters.

Once the Afghan guerrillas brought the opium across the border, they sold it to hundreds of Pakistani heroin labs operating under the ISI's protection. Between 1981 and 1990, Afghanistan's opium production grew 10-fold - from 250 tonnes to 2,000 tonnes. After just two years of covert CIA support for the Afghan guerrillas, the US attorney general announced in 1981 that Pakistan was already the source of 60% of the American heroin supply. Across Europe and Russia, Afghan-Pakistani heroin soon captured an even larger share of local markets, while inside Pakistan itself the number of addicts soared from zero in 1979 to 1.2 million just five years later.

After investing $3 billion in Afghanistan's destruction, Washington just walked away in 1992, leaving behind a thoroughly ravaged country with over one million dead, five million refugees, 10-20 million landmines still in place, an infrastructure in ruins, an economy in tatters, and well-armed tribal warlords prepared to fight among themselves for control of the capital. Even when Washington finally cut its covert CIA funding at the end of 1991, however, Pakistan's ISI continued to back favored local warlords in pursuit of its long-term goal of installing a Pashtun client regime in Kabul.

Druglords, dragon's teeth and civil wars
Throughout the 1990s, ruthless local warlords mixed guns and opium in a lethal brew as part of a brutal struggle for power. It was almost as if the soil had been sown with those dragons' teeth of ancient myth that can suddenly sprout into an army of full-grown warriors, who leap from the earth with swords drawn for war.

When northern resistance forces finally captured Kabul from the communist regime, which had outlasted the Soviet withdrawal by three years, Pakistan still backed its client Hekmatyar. He, in turn, unleashed his artillery on the besieged capital. The result: the deaths of an estimated 50,000 more Afghans. Even a slaughter of such monumental proportions, however, could not win power for this unpopular fundamentalist. So the ISI armed a new force, the Taliban, and in September 1996 it succeeded in capturing Kabul, only to fight the Northern Alliance for the next five years in the valleys to the north of the capital.

During this seemingly unending civil war, rival factions leaned heavily on opium to finance the fighting, more than doubling the harvest to 4,600 tonnes by 1999. Throughout these two decades of warfare and a 20-fold jump in drug production, Afghanistan itself was slowly transformed from a diverse agricultural ecosystem - with herding, orchards, and over 60 food crops - into the world's first economy dependent on the production of a single illicit drug. In the process, a fragile human ecology was brought to ruin in an unprecedented way.

Located at the northern edge of the annual monsoon rains, where clouds arrive from the Arabian Sea already squeezed dry, Afghanistan is an arid land. Its staple food crops have historically been sustained by irrigation systems that rely on snowmelt from the region's high mountains. To supplement staples such as wheat, Afghan tribesmen herded vast flocks of sheep and goats hundreds of miles every year to summer pasture in the central uplands. Most important of all, farmers planted perennial tree crops - walnut, pistachio, and mulberry - which thrived because they sink their roots deep into the soil and are remarkably resistant to the region's periodic droughts, offering relief from the threat of famine in the dry years.

During these two decades of war, however, modern firepower devastated the herds, damaged snowmelt irrigation systems, and destroyed many of the orchards. While the Soviets simply blasted the landscape with firepower, the Taliban, with an unerring instinct for their society's economic jugular, violated the unwritten rules of traditional Afghan warfare by cutting down the orchards on the vast Shamali plain north of Kabul.

All these strands of destruction knit themselves into a Gordian knot of human suffering to which opium became the sole solution. Like Alexander's legendary sword, it offered a straightforward way to cut through a complex conundrum. Without any aid to restock their herds, reseed their fields, or replant their orchards, Afghan farmers - including some 3 million returning refugees - found sustenance in opium, which had historically been but a small part of their agriculture.

Since poppy cultivation requires nine times more labor per hectare than wheat, opium offered immediate seasonal employment to more than a million Afghans - perhaps half of those actually employed at the time. In this ruined land and ravaged economy, opium merchants alone could accumulate capital rapidly and so give poppy farmers crop loans equivalent to more than half their annual incomes, credit critical to the survival of many poor villagers.

In marked contrast to the marginal yields the country's harsh climate offers most food crops, Afghanistan proved ideal for opium. On average, each hectare of Afghan poppy land produces three to five times more than its chief competitor, Burma. Most important of all, in such an arid ecosystem, subject to periodic drought, opium uses less than half the water needed for staples such as wheat.

After taking power in 1996, the Taliban regime encouraged a nationwide expansion of opium cultivation, doubling production to 4,600 tonnes, then equivalent to 75% of the world's heroin supply. Signaling its support for drug production, the Taliban regime began collecting a 20% tax from the yearly opium harvest, earning an estimated $100 million in revenues.

In retrospect, the regime's most important innovation was undoubtedly the introduction of large-scale heroin refining in the environs of the city of Jalalabad. There, hundreds of crude labs set to work, paying only a modest production tax of $70 on every kilo of heroin powder. According to UN researchers, the Taliban also presided over bustling regional opium markets in Helmand and Nangarhar provinces, protecting some 240 top traders there.

During the 1990s, Afghanistan's soaring opium harvest fueled an international smuggling trade that tied Central Asia, Russia, and Europe into a vast illicit market of arms, drugs, and money-laundering. It also helped fuel an eruption of ethnic insurgency across a near 5,000 kilometer swath of land from Uzbekistan in Central Asia to Bosnia in the Balkans.

In July 2000, however, the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, suddenly ordered a ban on all opium cultivation in a desperate bid for international recognition. Remarkably enough, almost overnight the Taliban regime used the ruthless repression for which it was infamous to slash the opium harvest by 94% to only 185 tonnes.

By then, however, Afghanistan had become dependent on poppy production for most of its taxes, export income, and employment. In effect, the Taliban's ban was an act of economic suicide that brought an already weakened society to the brink of collapse. This was the unwitting weapon the US wielded when it began its military campaign against the Taliban in October 2001. Without opium, the regime was already a hollow shell and essentially imploded at the bursting of the first American bombs.

The return of the CIA, opium and counter-insurgency
To defeat the Taliban in the aftermath of 9/11, the CIA successfully mobilized former warlords long active in the heroin trade to seize towns and cities across eastern Afghanistan. In other words, the Agency and its local allies created ideal conditions for reversing the Taliban's opium ban and reviving the drug traffic. Only weeks after the collapse of the Taliban, officials were reporting an outburst of poppy planting in the heroin-heartlands of Helmand and Nangarhar. At a Tokyo international donors' conference in January 2002, Hamid Karzai, the new prime minister put in place by the Bush administration, issued a pro forma ban on opium growing - without any means of enforcing it against the power of these resurgent local warlords.

After investing some $3 billion in Afghanistan's destruction during the Cold War, Washington and its allies now proved parsimonious in the reconstruction funds they offered. At that 2002 Tokyo conference, international donors promised just $4 billion of an estimated $10 billion needed to rebuild the economy over the next five years. In addition, the total US spending of $22 billion for Afghanistan from 2003 to 2007 turned out to be skewed sharply toward military operations, leaving, for instance, just $237 million for agriculture. (And, as in Iraq, significant sums from what reconstruction funds were available simply went into the pockets of Western experts, private contractors, and their local counterparts.)

Under these circumstances, no one should have been surprised when, during the first year of the US occupation, Afghanistan's opium harvest surged to 3,400 tonnes. Over the next five years, international donors would contribute $8 billion to rebuild Afghanistan, while opium would infuse nearly twice that amount, $14 billion, directly into the rural economy without any deductions by either those Western experts or Kabul's bloated bureaucracy.

While opium production continued its relentless rise, the Bush administration downplayed the problem, outsourcing narcotics control to Great Britain and police training to Germany. As the lead agency in allied operations, Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department regarded opium as a distraction from its main mission of defeating the Taliban (and, of course, invading Iraq). Waving away the problem in late 2004, president Bush said he did not want to "waste another American life on a narco-state". ' Meanwhile, in their counterinsurgency operations, US forces worked closely with local warlords who proved to be leading druglords.

After five years of the US occupation, Afghanistan's drug production had swollen to unprecedented proportions. In August 2007, the UN reported that the country's record opium crop covered almost 20,000 hectares, an area larger than all the coca fields in Latin America. From a modest 185 tonnes at the start of American intervention in 2001, Afghanistan now produced 8,200 tonnes of opium, a remarkable 53% of the country's GDP and 93% of global heroin supply.

In this way, Afghanistan became the world's first true "narco-state". If a cocaine traffic that provided just 3% of Colombia's GDP could bring in its wake endless violence and powerful cartels capable of corrupting that country's government, then we can only imagine the consequences of Afghanistan's dependence on opium for more than 50% of its entire economy.

At a drug conference in Kabul in March, the head of Russia's Federal Narcotics Service estimated the value of Afghanistan's current opium crop at $65 billion. Only $500 million of that vast sum goes to Afghanistan's farmers; $300 million goes to the Taliban guerrillas, and the $64 billion balance "to the drug mafia", leaving ample funds to corrupt the Karzai government in a nation whose total GDP is only $10 billion.

Indeed, opium's influence is so pervasive that many Afghan officials, from village leaders to Kabul's police chief, the defense minister, and the president's brother, have been tainted by the traffic. So cancerous and crippling is this corruption that, according to recent UN estimates, Afghans are forced to spend a stunning $2.5 billion in bribes. Not surprisingly, the government's repeated attempts at opium eradication have been thoroughly compromised by what the UN has called "corrupt deals between field owners, village elders, and eradication teams".

Not only have drug taxes funded an expanding guerrilla force, but the Taliban's role in protecting opium farmers and the heroin merchants who rely on their crop gives them real control over the core of the country's economy. In January 2009, the UN and anonymous US "intelligence officials" estimated that drug traffic provided Taliban insurgents with $400 million a year. "Clearly," commented Defense Secretary Robert Gates, "we have to go after the drug labs and the druglords that provide support to the Taliban and other insurgents."

In mid-2009, the US embassy launched a multi-agency effort, called the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, to cut Taliban drug monies through financial controls. But one American official soon compared this effort to "punching jello". By August 2009, a frustrated Obama administration had ordered the US military to "kill or capture" 50 Taliban-connected druglords who were placed on a classified "kill list".

Since the record crop of 2007, opium production has, in fact, declined somewhat - to 6,900 tonnes last year (still over 90% of the world's opium supply). While UN analysts attribute this 20% reduction largely to eradication efforts, a more likely cause has been the global glut of heroin that came with the Afghan opium boom, and which had depressed the price of poppies by 34%. In fact, even this reduced Afghan opium crop is still far above total world demand, which the UN estimates at 5,000 tonnes per annum.

Preliminary reports on the 2010 Afghan opium harvest, which starts next month, indicate that the drug problem is not going away. Some US officials who have surveyed Helmand's opium heartland see signs of an expanded crop. Even the UN drug experts who have predicted a continuing decline in production are not optimistic about long-term trends. Opium prices might decline for a few years, but the price of wheat and other staple crops is dropping even faster, leaving poppies as by far the most profitable crop for poor Afghan farmers.

Ending the cycle of drugs and death
With its forces now planted in the dragon's teeth soil of Afghanistan, Washington is locked into what looks to be an unending cycle of drugs and death. Every spring in those rugged mountains, the snows melt, the opium seeds sprout, and a fresh crop of Taliban fighters takes to the field, many to die by lethal American fire. And the next year, the snows melt again, fresh poppy shoots break through the soil, and a new crop of teenaged Taliban fighters pick up arms against America, spilling more blood. This cycle has been repeated for the past 10 years and, unless something changes, can continue indefinitely.

Is there any alternative? Even were the cost of rebuilding Afghanistan's rural economy - with its orchards, flocks, and food crops - as high as $30 billion or, for that matter, $90 billion, the money is at hand. By conservative estimates, the cost of President Obama's ongoing surge of 30,000 troops alone is $30 billion a year. So just bringing those 30,000 troops home would create ample funds to begin the rebuilding of rural life in Afghanistan, making it possible for young farmers to begin feeding their families without joining the Taliban's army.

Short of another precipitous withdrawal akin to 1991, Washington has no realistic alternative to the costly, long-term reconstruction of Afghanistan's agriculture. Beneath the gaze of an allied force that now numbers about 120,000 soldiers, opium has fueled the Taliban's growth into an omnipresent shadow government and an effective guerrilla army.

The idea that our expanded military presence might soon succeed in driving back that force and handing over pacification to the illiterate, drug-addicted Afghan police and army remains, for the time being, a fantasy. Quick fixes like paying poppy farmers not to plant, something British and Americans have both tried, can backfire and end up actually promoting yet more opium cultivation. Rapid drug eradication without alternative employment, something the private contractor DynCorp tried so disastrously under a $150 million contract in 2005, would simply plunge Afghanistan into more misery, stoking mass anger and destabilizing the Kabul government further.

So the choice is clear enough: we can continue to fertilize this deadly soil with yet more blood in a brutal war with an uncertain outcome - for both the United States and the people of Afghanistan. Or we can begin to withdraw American forces while helping renew this ancient, arid land by replanting its orchards, replenishing its flocks, and rebuilding the irrigation systems ruined in decades of war.

At this point, our only realistic choice is this sort of serious rural development - that is, reconstructing the Afghan countryside through countless small-scale projects until food crops become a viable alternative to opium. To put it simply, so simply that even Washington might understand, you can only pacify a narco-state when it is no longer a narco-state.

Alfred W McCoy is the JRW Smail professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which probes the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over half a century. His latest book, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, explores the influence of overseas counter-insurgency operations on the spread of internal security measures at home.

(Copyright 2010 Alfred W. McCoy.)

(Used by permission Tomdispatch)

Korea’s Income Gap by Gender Largest in OECD



By Kim Jae-won

Staff Reporter

Despite numerous improvements in women's social status, Korea is at the bottom of the list of advanced countries when it comes to the gap in income between men and women.

According to a report by the 30-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Korea found its income gap by gender to be the largest men among 22 surveyed member countries.

On average full-time female employees get paid 38 percent less than their male counterparts on the basis of statistics from 2003 to 2006. The gap is more than double the OECD average of 17.6 percent.

European nations showed their women workers were enjoying relatively better pay, grabbing top places on the list.

Belgium came first with a 9.3-percent income gap, followed by Poland and New Zealand, which both marked 10 percent. Denmark, Greece and France also appeared on the top 10 board with 11, 11.5 and 12 percent, respectively.

Japan's income gap by gender was the second largest among the OECD members with 33 percent.

The difference in Germany, Canada and the U.K. was also above the OECD average at more than 20 percent.

The report said sharing the burden of child rearing, which can be shown by more active use of "paternity" leave, is a key to narrowing the gap between men and women.

"As long as women rather than men take time off work to provide care for children, there will always be employers who perceive women as less committed to their career than men, and are therefore less likely to invest in female career opportunities and depress female earnings as a whole," the report said. Promoting flexible workplace practices also can reduce the income gap, it added.

Korean government officials said the income gap is big, as women quit jobs when they get pregnant, so work is under way to provide them with better day care services so they will be able to work with less concern about child rearing.

"We encourage companies to provide in-office childcare centers for working moms. It is mandated by law that workplaces, which have more than 500 employees, should establish childcare centers for workers," Lim Jong-hwan, an official of the Ministry of Labor, said.

shosta@koreatimes.co.kr





US Diplomat Allegedly Received Tips Before Fleeing

An American diplomat in South Korea who fled to the Philippines, two days before U.S. authorities were to strip him of diplomatic immunity, might have benefited from advance tips, a local daily said Saturday.

Dario Thomas, a 50-year-old official with the Department of Homeland Security, is accused of swindling 220 million won from a local widow, identified only by her last name, Lim.

Thomas left the country on March 3, two days before he would lose his diplomatic immunity.

The police suspect that the American government "tipped" the accused in advance about the U.S. imminent decision on invalidating his diplomatic privilege, which would lead him to subject to the South Korean judicial investigation, Chosun Ilbo said on Saturday.

The U.S. embassy flatly rejected the allegation, saying it "didn't know he already left the country before his diplomatic immunity was scrapped," the newspaper said.

The suspect allegedly promised her a high return on an investment in the Philippines.

The diplomat was initially questioned last November and police learned that he had no business plans in the Philippines.

The Korean government then asked the U.S. to strip him of diplomatic immunity.

The U.S. embassy assured the police that the suspect wouldn't be able to flee because his passport was confiscated until his case was under review. "But they didn't confiscate his civilian passport," Chosun said. A diplomat has both diplomat and civilian passports. He fled using his civilian passport.

Lim, who was married to an American, got to know the U.S. diplomat in 2007 at an airport. After Lim's husband died in a traffic accident, he accompanied her to the U.S. embassy in Seoul to file paperwork related to the death. The process was speedy, making him gain Lim's trust.

If convicted locally, the suspect could face up to 10 years in prison in South Korea.

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2010/04/113_63580.html

Former IAEA chief: Iraq war killed “a million innocent civilians”

By Patrick Martin
3 April 2010

The former head of the UN’s chief nuclear agency, Mohammed ElBaradei, said in an interview with the British newspaper Guardian Wednesday that those who launched the war in Iraq were responsible for killing a million innocent people and could be held accountable under international law. He was clearly referring to US President George Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and their top military and security aides.

It was his first interview with an international publication since ElBaradei returned to his native Egypt, after a decade heading the International Atomic Energy Agency, where he won the Nobel Peace Prize, in large measure because of his opposition to the efforts by the Bush administration to use concocted charges about “weapons of mass destruction” as an all-purpose pretext for military intervention throughout the Middle East.

“I would hope that the lessons of Iraq, both in London and in the US have started to sink in,” he told the Guardian. “Sure, there are dictators, but are you ready every time you want to get rid of a dictator to sacrifice a million innocent civilians? All the indications coming out of [the Chilcot inquiry in Britain] are that Iraq was not really about weapons of mass destruction but rather about regime change, and I keep asking the same question―where do you find this regime change in international law? And if it is a violation of international law, who is accountable for that?”

This suggestion that Bush and Blair were guilty of war crimes, coming from a high-ranking former UN official, would ordinarily be considered major news. The Guardian interview was reported by the main British and French news agencies, Reuters and AFP, but the entire American corporate media gave it zero coverage. Not a single major American newspaper or television network mentioned it.

The discussion of the violation of international law in launching the Iraq war came in the course of a longer discussion of the bankruptcy of US-British foreign policy in the Muslim world. ElBaradei criticized the longstanding support of Washington for dictators like Mubarak. “The idea that the only alternative to authoritarian regimes is Bin Laden and Co. is a fake one, yet continuation of current policies will make that prophecy come true.”

He warned of “increasing radicalization” in the Arab world: “People feel repressed by their own governments, they feel unfairly treated by the outside world, they wake up in the morning and who do they see―they see people being shot and killed, all Muslims from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Darfur.”

“Western policy towards this part of the world has been a total failure, in my view,” he said. “It has not been based on dialogue, understanding, supporting civil society and empowering people, but rather it’s been based on supporting authoritarian systems as long as the oil keeps pumping.”

ElBaradei warned of the hypocrisy and double standard of Western policy. “The West talks a lot about elections in Iran, for example, but at least there were elections,” he said. “Yet where are the elections in the Arab world? If the West doesn’t talk about that, then how can it have any credibility?”

ElBaradei is now reportedly considering a presidential bid against 81-year-old President Hosni Mubarak, whose fifth six-year term expires next year. He clearly hopes that Western pressure will compel Mubarak to permit a more robust opposition campaign than during the last presidential election, when the largest opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, was barred from standing a candidate, and Ayman Nour, the bourgeois liberal candidate who finished second, was jailed for alleged petition fraud.

Speaking to a British newspaper, ElBaradei was in essence warning his old patrons, the major European powers, of the counterproductive character of Western policy, particularly that of the United States. “When you see that the most popular people in the Middle East are Ahmadinejad and Hassan Nasrallah [leader of Hezbollah], that should send you a message: that your policy is not reaching out to the people,” he said.

He also took note of the extreme social tension in Egypt, where the vast majority of the population lives in crushing poverty. The Guardian account reads: “In Egypt the rich live in ghettoes,” he said, waving his hand at the beautifully manicured garden, complete with pool. “The gap in social justice here is simply indescribable.”

In addition to the US media blackout of the interview, the Guardian engaged in apparent self-censorship. The initial article appeared at 6:01 GMT on the Guardian web site, including the implicit reference to Bush and Blair violating international law. It is here.

Just over two hours later, that article had been replaced by a longer profile of ElBaradei, containing additional comments about the political situation in Egypt. But the reference to the Chilcot inquiry and the killing of one million innocent people had been excised. The revised article is here.


March jobs report points to protracted US downturn

By Andre Damon
3 April 2010

The US economy gained 162,000 jobs last month, the most in three years, according to the latest figures from the Labor Department. Far from a recovery, however, the figures reveal a stagnant economy with mass long-term unemployment and a continual decline in wages.

The official unemployment rate remained at 9.7 percent. Even by government estimates, the rate is expected to stay at or above 10 percent for months, if not years.

Approximately 48,000 jobs added in March were temporary hires as part of the US census. According to some estimates,150,000 jobs have to be created every month in order to keep up with population growth. Combining these two figures erases the jobs gain.

The broadest measure of unemployment, which includes “discouraged” workers who have left the labor market and people working part-time because there are no full-time jobs, increased to 16.9 percent. This was the third consecutive monthly increase of this figure.

Long-term unemployment continues to rise, as millions of people have been unable to find jobs for months or years. More than 6.5 million have been out of a job for at least six months, up 414,000 from last month, and an all-time high. The average length of unemployment also rose to the highest level on record going back more than six decades—31 weeks.

An article in the Wall Street Journal Friday noted that the problem of long-term unemployment “is markedly worse in this recession than even in the deep slide of 1981 and 1982.” At the peak of the earlier crisis, the percent of unemployed out of work for six months or more was 26 percent, compared to over 40 percent today.

Many of the long-term unemployed will see the cut-off of their benefits and health care this week, as the Senate failed to pass an extension of benefits before taking a two-week recess.

A vast portion of American society is either unemployed or underemployed. About 15 million people are without jobs and look for work every week. Another 9.1 million work part-time because full-time work is not available. And millions more have simply given up looking for work.

The US economy has lost 8.4 million jobs since the start of the downturn, and would need to create 10.8 million jobs for the unemployment rate to return to pre-recession levels.

Wages are also stagnant, as employers have seized on mass unemployment to cut costs and boost profits. Average hourly wages fell by 0.1 percent in March, without taking into account inflation. When inflation is taken into account, average weekly wages fell by 2.2 percent in the third quarter of last year, the latest figures for which data is available.

March’s tepid job growth does not represent, as Obama termed it, “turning the corner” and the beginning of a sustained recovery in jobs. Even by the Obama administration’s own estimates, the US economy will not reach its pre-crisis level of unemployment for another seven years, if ever.

Obama met the jobs report with a speech at a lithium-ion battery plant in Charlotte, North Carolina. The White House had a propaganda video prepared beforehand, featuring interviews from workers at the company, Celgard, who had been rehired after their employer received money from the stimulus bill.

Obama used the speech to insist once again that there would be no federal jobs program to address the unemployment crisis. “The true engine of job growth in this country has always been the private sector, businesses like Celgard,” he said. “What government can do is create the conditions for companies to succeed.”

Indeed, the main component of the “recovery” has been in the profit levels of corporations, aided by the Obama administration. Corporate profits, which are highest when workers are overexploited and underpaid, grew explosively in 2009. The Obama administration’s various “jobs” programs, including the $750 billion stimulus bill, have gone in large part into subsidies to businesses like Celgard.

The growth of exploitation is reflected in a dramatic increase in labor productivity. Last month the Labor Department announced that labor productivity increased at a rate of 6.9 percent, meaning that, on average, people are working 7 percent harder now than they were a year ago.

All of this has taken its toll on the working class. A study of court records found that there were 158,000 personal bankruptcy filings in March, an increase of 35 percent since February, and up 20 percent from the same time last year.

The housing situation is even worse. In 2009 there were 2.8 million foreclosures, but RealtyTrac.com, a property marketplace, expects another 4.5 million people to lose their homes next year.

The Obama administration is presiding over a job-cutting offensive on all levels of the government. States and cities are facing record budget deficits and are responding by slashing social programs and jobs. Leaving aside temporary census hiring, the government sector shrank dramatically in March, including 3,500 postal jobs, 5,000 state government jobs, and 4,000 in local government.

But even more job cuts are coming. Employers announced plans in March to cut 67,611 jobs according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. This is a 61 percent increase from February. Planned layoffs in the government sector amounted to an astounding 75 percent of total job losses. The US Postal Service is leading other services, announcing that it would reduce its workforce by 30,000 this year.

Far from creating jobs, the Obama administration’s program is to foster an economic environment with high unemployment, low social spending, and falling wages. This is done in the direct interest of boosting the profits of corporations.