Afghanistan: The New Endgame

The alarming pace of events in Afghanistan is forcing United States and NATO strategists to adjust their strategy and timetable to end the war. But they cannot acknowledge the flaw at the heart of their efforts.

By Paul Rogers, cross-posted from openDemocracy

A number of recent columns in this series has reflected on the interplay of military and political dynamics in the "greater middle east", from Iran to Afghanistan. to Syria. Several have examined the possibility that a process of crisis escalation involving "accidents, incidents or mavericks" - a combination summarised in the acronym "AIM" - would trigger war over Iran (see "America, Israel, Iran: mediation vs war", 16 February 2012).

A subsequent column assessing the conflict in Afghanistan concluded that United States policy there is unlikely to change much even if Mitt Romney defeats Barack Obama in the presidential election in November 2012 (see "Afghanistan: the endgame drama", 1 March 2012). But in Afghanistan as in Iran, the AIM effect may now be having an impact in a way that has implications for the future of western military power.

A political retreat 

The argument for continuity in Afghanistan draws on evidence that President Obama has decided on a timetable ^↑ for withdrawal of American troops there, hoping both that Afghan government forces can assume responsibility for security and that any Taliban role in a post-withdrawal government would be very limited. Romney's election rhetoric (and that of any plausible Republican rival) might scorn Obama's approach as "defeatism" or worse, but the next US president would follow a similar course - precisely because the western ^↑ predicament in Afghanistan is now becoming unsustainable.

The response to such acts ^↑ by American soldiers as urinating on dead Afghans and burning ^↑ copies of the Qur'an (both of which led to widespread fury and retaliatory attacks ^↑ on American targets) strengthen ^↑ the case that strategic reality in Afghanistan is becoming inexorable.

The massacre of sixteen Afghan civilians on 11 March by (it seems) a lone American soldier ^↑  confirms in bleak fashion that the "AIM" concept can shed light on the Afghan endgame as much as it does the twisting Iranian crisis. This might yet be attributed to a "maverick", but it is certainly also an "incident" in the tripartite schema - and its sheer horror, especially the killing of children, makes it one of special extremity that also betrays a deep problem within the US military.

But in combination with the earlier outrages, the massacre may come ^↑ to acquire importance as a rare example of an AIM element that will - by clarifying options on both sides - have the effect of ratcheting a conflict down rather than up. Its impact is already significant. In Afghanistan it has intensified antagonism ^↑ to the foreign military presence, as evidenced ^↑ on 15 March both in the Taliban's statement that it is suspending ^↑ preliminary talks with the US and in the demand of Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, that American forces retreat to their bases from villages and patrols.

Syria: A Human Security Approach

The key to any intervention is to combine upholding human rights inside Syria with de-escalation of the broader regional conflict. Far from being contradictory, these two goals – human rights and peace – reinforce each other. 

By Mary Kaldor, cross-posted from openDemocracy


The United Nations Human Rights Council has described the Syrian government’s repression of peaceful protests as ‘crimes against humanity’. Even the shocking number that is widely quoted of 7,000 people killed cannot convey the sheer horror of what is happening including shelling, torture, arbitrary detention, child-rape and other atrocities. Reports suggest some 50,000 people are missing, some 60,000 have been imprisoned, and a minimum of 15,000 (the number of refugees in Turkey) have been forced to leave their homes.

The scale of violence gripping Syria today has long crossed the line of a domestic issue. The international community is obliged both morally and legally to intervene to stop the violence – to protect Syrian civilians and to establish conditions for peaceful political change. The question is what form should such an intervention take?

What began as an inspiring non-violent protest is degenerating into something that has all the hallmarks of what I call a ‘new war’ ^↑ . The Assad regime is showing many of the characteristics of a weak state. The economic sanctions imposed by the west are beginning to take their toll. The regime cannot rely on the army. Reportedly it has been unable to call up more than 60% of the reserves.

When army units are sent to repress protestors there are usually many defections. Instead the regime relies on the Republican Guard, the intelligence agencies and some extremist militias known as Shabbiha, all of whom act with great savagery. The regime has been engaged in fomenting sectarian conflict, distributing weapons and sandbags to the Alawite community and spreading horrendous stories of ethnic hatred on the part of the majority Sunnis. It has also, reportedly begun to release criminals from gaol, a practice pioneered by Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Gadhafi. Indeed Assad has talked of creating ‘another Afghanistan’.

Baltasar Garzón And The Politics Of Justice

Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón is a heroic figure who gained international notoriety in 1998, when he ordered the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for the alleged deaths and torture of Spanish citizens.  Ten years later, he tried to fill a vacuum left by the Obama Administration by seeking to investigate whether six senior Bush administration officials, the Bush Six, were responsible for "an authorized and systematic plan for torture" at Guantanamo.  (See No Spain, No Gain)  The torture investigation languished when Garzon was suspended after being charged with abusing his powers to investigate Spanish Civil War atrocities, and the case was assigned to another judge.  As Pia Navazo writes below, Garzon's efforts to investigate killings of civilians during the era of General Franco’s dictatorship has made him a legal target, raising profound legal and moral issues.  -- Lovechilde

By Pia Navazo, cross-posted from openDemocracy

The well-known and high-profile Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón faces a private prosecution over his attempt to investigate crimes committed under the regime of Francisco Franco, which ruled Spain for thirty-six years following his forces’ victory in the civil war of 1936-39.

Garzón is accused on three separate charges of “malfeasance” for having exceeded his powers and contravened Spain’s amnesty law, passed in 1977 - two years after Franco’s death, and in the early stages of the country’s transition to democracy. Garzón himself and Spain’s state prosecutor appealed to Spain’s supreme court to dismiss the case against him, but on 31 January 2012 the judges on the court voted ^↑ (by a four-to-three margin) to reject requests from both. This ruling is independent of the final ruling on the merits of the charges.

A prosecution of judges for malfeasance is very rare in Spain. It is equally rare for the state prosecutor to support a defendant’s request for dismissal. Still, the supreme court dismissed the arguments put forward by Judge Garzón on the grounds that “they didn’t have sufficient weight”. As a result, the private prosecution of Garzón was allowed and the trial began immediately.

Judge Garzón told ^↑ the court that he did what he felt compelled to do in pursuing the investigations. He drew on precedents set by the Scilingo case ^↑ when the Argentine military officer Adolfo Scilingo was convicted by the Spanish supreme court for attempted genocide and other crimes committed during Argentina’s “dirty war” of 1976-83. The state prosecutor initially challenged that investigation but changed its position and supported the case on the basis that the crimes being investigated were crimes against humanity. At the time, the supreme court affirmed the judge’s obligation to investigate facts that could amount to such crimes.

Judge Garzón argued that he had received reports regarding detailed events that took place during and after the civil war, which involved alleged crimes such as extra-judicial executions, enforced disappearances and torture. He argued further that the amnesty law only applies to crimes “of a political nature”, meaning crimes with a political connection, and - on the grounds that crimes against humanity cannot be considered political acts - rejected the allegation that he had the intention to proceed in violation of the amnesty law in investigating these crimes.

Attacking Iran: Lessons From The Iran-Iraq War

Military action against Iran, and even the continuing threat of attack, is likely to give the Islamic Republic a new lease on life.

 By Annie Tracy Samuel, cross-posted from openDemocracy

The presumed aim of an attack by the United States and/or Israel on Iranian nuclear and military facilities would be to weaken the Islamic Republic, particularly by hindering its ability to build a nuclear weapon. However, the history of the Iraqi invasion of Iran in September 1980 calls into question the contention that an attack will weaken the regime in Tehran. Iran’s security policies, and its policy outlook more generally, have been shaped enormously by the country’s experience in the Iran-Iraq War. As the Iranians themselves continuously point to the lessons of the war and their bearing on the present day, it behooves policymakers to follow suit.

The Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 was a movement of several different groups that were united most strongly in their opposition to the regime of Muhammad Reza Shah. Following the ouster of the Shah in February 1979, the union of those groups began to break down. In invading Iran, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein assumed that the divided Iranians and their dilapidated armed forces would be unable to put up much of a fight. He was wrong. Iranians responded to the invasion by uniting against him and under their current leadership, even though many opposed the direction the revolution had taken. Iran’s leaders quickly resurrected the armed forces by halting military trials and purges and enforcing conscription.

The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), which was established following the revolution to serve primarily as an internal security force, transformed into a second military and rushed to confront the invading forces. Thousands of volunteers were incorporated into both the IRGC and the regular military. They were driven to defend the country, the revolution, and the Islamic Republic by a potent combination of nationalism, revolutionary mission, and religious zeal that was stoked by the foreign threat. Their dedicated and determined defense, combined with the Iraqi forces’ poor performance, caused the invaders to stall and then retreat. The IRGC and the Basij remain today as the Islamic Republic’s most devoted defenders. They have a substantial interest in the survival of the regime, and can therefore be expected to vigorously confront attacking forces, just as they did when the Iraqis invaded.

An attack on Iran by the United States or Israel will likely add to the ranks of the regime’s supporters. Just as a divided population came together to confront the Iraqi invasion, Iranians of all stripes will unite in opposition to an attack. The upshot will be a stronger, more cohesive, and more militant Islamic Republic. In the words of Mohammad Khatami, Iran’s reformist former president and a harsh critic of some of Iran’s current leaders and policies, “If there should one day be any military interference in Iran, then all factions, regardless of reformists or non-reformists, would [unite] and confront the attack.” Iranians interviewed by Reuters, Radio Farda, and the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran made the same argument. “A war will unite the regime, and it will also force many to unite behind a regime they don’t even support” said a 56-year-old woman living in Tehran. “What else should we do, [cheer] for Israel, which would kill our countrymen working in the nuclear sites?” Similarly, a Tehran-based journalist who said he sympathized with the opposition Green Movement wrote that, “[Iranian] society will not welcome any country that attacks its soil.”

Vaclav Havel: Living In Truth

By Mary Kaldor, cross-posted from openDemocracy

It is hard to imagine a world without Vaclav Havel. Human, self-deprecating, witty and even absurdist, often wrong as well as right, he represented a rare voice of integrity, courage and optimism in an era that is depressingly lacking in political leadership. His autobiography To the Castle and Back captures the quintessentially Czech character of his life – a fairytale in which a dissident playwright becomes a President in Kafka’s castle and later returns to not quite normal life. It is introspective and gloomy yet pierced through with new projects and jokes. For example, he describes how he nearly had a nervous breakdown when half-cooked potatoes were served to the Japanese Emperor. ‘Fortunately, he understood this to be a Czech culinary speciality.’ He also explains that now he is no longer president, nobody knows what to call him: Mr President, Mr Former President or even just Mr Havel. ‘It’s only a matter of time before someone addresses me as “Mr former Havel”’

I first met Vaclav Havel at a meeting in Prague in 1988 that was supposed to bring together the West European peace movement and Charter 77. Unfortunately, we were all arrested and the foreigners were thrown out of the country, accused of being ‘NATO agents posing as tourists’. (Coincidentally, Christopher Hitchens, who also died this week was also there and, like me, was forced to spend our visit to Prague in police stations and the airport). Long before that meeting, however, I had been in correspondence with Havel and he had been a regular contributor to the European Nuclear Disarmament Journal, which I edited during the 1980’s.

When I first came across Havel’s ideas and the ideas of the Czech intellectuals around him, it seemed to me that they had discovered a new conceptual language in which to express the kind of politics that I was engaged in. Many of them had become window cleaners or boiler stokers or like Havel, spent time in prison in the ‘normalisation’ after 1968 and they had used the time to read and think. Havel invented concepts like ‘Anti-Politics’– a sphere of society that escapes the total hold of the overbearing state; ‘Living in Truth’– the notion of refusing the lies of the political class; or the ‘parallel polis’– the idea of an Aristotelian polis organised around the good life which would, as it were, spread out and gradually chip away at the formal political institutions. In ‘The Power of the Powerless’ Havel described the grocer who puts the slogan ‘Workers of the World Unite’ in his shop window, not because he believes it but as a badge of loyalty. His emphasis on acting autonomously according to one’s conscience and on human solidarity guided his politics throughout his life.

Tunisia's Elections: Consolidating Democracy

By Ayman Ayoub, cross-posted from open Democracy

The Tunisian people in December 2010 sparked the popular movement that became known as the Arab spring and opened new horizons for freedom in the region. Now, on 23 October 2011, they completed a vital round of their nascent democracy by delivering Tunisia's first genuinely democratic and competitive elections since the country's independence in 1956.

This achievement belongs to Tunisians above all, but it is also a great occasion for democrats and supporters of democracy around the world. To see the long queues of Tunisians awaiting their chance to cast a vote for the future of democracy in their country is a delight and a source of hope. For many of these voters - young and old, women and men - this was the first occasion to express their real choice freely, in an orderly fashion and with no fear or intimidation.

The remarkably high turnout - up to an astonishing 90% of the electorate in many areas, according to official data released by the electoral authorities - is a clear indicator of the Tunisian people’s thirst for dignity, and their determined will to build a democratic society. It is notable here that some waiting voters protested against an attempt by the head of one leading political party to bypass the queue by using a common expression from the days of revolution: "Dégage!" In calling him back to join the queue, they were also affirming something profound about equality of citizenship. That is where democracy starts.

This exceptional expression of "civism" in Tunisia also represents a clear signal of the real objectives of the Arab uprisings at large. This is a region that has suffered from long decades of dictatorships, oppression and injustice. Now, a new generation is crying out "enough" - and voicing to the entire world that it also deserves a chance to join the ever increasing community of democratic nations. The success of the elections in Tunisia is undeniable evidence of the popular will underlying the peaceful demands sweeping the Arab world for freedom and democracy.

Iran And America: Components Of Crisis

By Paul Rogers, cross-posted from openDemocracy

The Arab awakening of 2011 has to a degree refocused international attention away from Iran. A number of current developments, most prominently the allegation that a high-level official in Tehran was involved in a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, is now exposing Iran's regime to renewed scrutiny. The suspicion and hostility that marks the political relationship between Iran and the United States mean that this shift may have very serious implications.

The indictment issued on 11 October 2011 by a federal court in New York against two men - Manssor Arbabsiar, an Iranian-American (and US citizen, arrested on 29 September), and Gholam Shakuri, a senior figure in the elite Qods Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps [IRGC] - states that the murder plan originated in Iran and got as far as approaching (and paying a first instalment to) a would-be assassin linked to a Mexican drug-cartel. The belief, drawing on the testimony of Arbabsiar, is that the perpetrators intended (inter alia) to explode a bomb in a restaurant where the target was dining, which would almost certainly have killed other people.

The Barack Obama administration has reacted to the news by calling for intensified United Nations sanctions against Iran, on top of those already imposed on account of Tehran's nuclear-energy programme and the uncertainties over its exact purpose. The secretary of state Hillary Clinton describes the operation as "a dangerous escalation of the Iranian government's longstanding use of political violence and sponsorship of terrorism". Iran strenuously denies any role in what it regards as based on a fiction concocted by the country's adversaries. The affair is thus already becoming another episode in an enduring pattern of enmity between the two states.

There is as yet little substantive detail on an investigation that US federal agencies had apparently been pursuing for four months. Some of the alleged plot elements are odd, not least an amateurish approach that is untypical of the IRGC - as in the supposed hiring of a drug-gang associate who turned out to be a federal informant (see Joby Warrick, "Investigators initially doubted plot had Iran ties", Washington Post 12 October 2011).

America's Wars: The Logic Of Escalation

By Paul Rogers, cross-posted from openDemocracy

The United States political-military strategy for draw-down in Afghanistan is in trouble, even as Washington is tempted by increased high-tech military engagement in other theaters of war. 

The killing of Afghanistan’s former president Burhanuddin Rabbani in a suicide bomb-attack at his home in Kabul on 20 September 2011 removes a senior player who for decades was at the centre of the country’s political scene. A major incident in itself, which led the current Afghan president Hamid Karzai to return home from New York to attend the funeral, Rabbani’s death follows the concerted assault on key targets in central Kabul on 13-14 September that lasted twenty hours.

The exact responsibility for Rabbani's death is still to be established. But this and similar operations - such as attacks on Kabul hotels, and on the offices of the British Council in the city on 19 August - reflect the ability of the Taliban to hone tactics in recent months in response to the "surge" in United States troops into Afghanistan.

There is a specific and two-sided context here. First, the Taliban and other armed opposition groups have been seeking to maintain control of rural districts in parts of southern and eastern Afghanistan, using both subtle and violent means. The endemic government corruption and maladministration creates a base of support for these groups, many of whom can build on their pre-existing links with the same communities; such support can be supplemented by often ruthless intimidation.

Second, the paramilitaries face substantial dangers in engaging openly with the increasing numbers of US troops that can be deployed to suppress any large-scale insurgent activity. Such more open confrontation has worked in the past (especially against some of the more remote US outposts), but the Americans’ huge manpower and firepower superiority underpins a shift to assassinations and suicide-martyr missions.

The impact of the Taliban’s refocus may be less important militarily than in psychological and political terms. The death of Rabbani, who was involved in negotiation with the Taliban, makes any talks process less likely to produce results. The broader Kabul attacks, embarrassing as they are, don't of themselves constrain greatly US and other Nato troops; but they confirm that these forces do not control the country, and make it harder for them to contemplate an early withdrawal.

This is a real problem for the Barack Obama administration, which wants to accelerate the drawdown of forces as the US presidential-election campaign of 2012 begins to dominate calculations.

Every Casualty: The Human Face Of War

By Paul Rogers, cross-posted from openDemocracy

The idea of recording, identifying and acknowledging each individual victim of armed conflict - and holding to account those responsible - extends the principles underlying the laws of war.

From the Soviet Union to Libya, the story of a single American submarine - the USS Florida - throws light on the transition to the post-cold-war world. The Florida was an Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarine launched in 1981, at the start of the most dangerous period of that conflict, and commissioned two years later. It was then one of the most powerful warships ever built.

At the start of its career, the Florida was equipped with twenty-four vertical missile launch-tubes, each carrying a Trident missile. Each missile was fitted with multiple independently-targetable re-entry vehicles (the so-called MIRVs) armed with W-87 thermonuclear warheads rated at nearly 500,000 tonnes of explosive power. The Florida, to put it bluntly, could have destroyed every city in the old Soviet Union, and with bombs to spare - such was the ludicrous overkill of those supposedly stable days.

With the end of the cold war, the Soviets and Americans began to scale down their strategic nuclear arsenals. The Ohio-class boats, however, had plenty of life left in them and the search was on to find them new roles. The Florida was one of four boats in the class that were converted into a new role - carrying conventionally-armed Tomahawk cruise-missiles. The Florida had good potential as a cruise-missile boat. Its launch-tubes were adapted to take multiple capsules for the missiles, allowing it to deploy 154 Tomahawks instead of the mere twenty-four Trident ones.

The Tomahawk missile itself has been around since the 1970s. The ground-launched nuclear-armed version was deployed in the early 1980s - amid huge political controversy and demonstrations - at European bases such as England’s Greenham Common. There were also nuclear-armed and conventionally-armed sea-launched Tomahawks carried on warships and submarines; a modern version of the latter, the UGM-109E Tomahawk land-attack missile (TLAM-Block4), is on the Florida.

The capacity of each missile in this range is immense. It can operate in all weathers, and  night or day; it has a reach of up to 2,480 kilometres; it can carry either a high-explosive “unitary” warhead or large numbers of cluster-munitions; and it has a guidance and targeting computer that is fully integrated inThis military story has an obvious strategic aspect, namely that these modified Ohio-class boats provide the United States with yet another form of global strike. But it also carries an equally obvious but far less noted consequence: that these missiles are used to kill people, and the identity and fate of those on the receiving end are no part of this military or any other story (see "The casualties of war: Libya and beyond", 7 July 2011) to the US navy's network-centric system, involving inputs from multiple sources including satellites and reconnaissance drones.

The cost

Why is all this “anorak” stuff worth mentioning? The reason is that the Florida was a few months ago nearing the end of a fifteen-month-long around-the-world patrol that kept it away from its home base in the United States. Then, in March 2011, the air-campaign against the Muammar Gaddafi regime in Libya was launched - and the Florida was by then near enough Libya’s coastline to be called into service. In the event, this boat alone is reported to have fired about 130 of its missiles at targets across northern Libya at the start of the war (see Christopher P Cavas, “U.S. Sub Force Sharpens its Sense of Self”, Defense News, 29 August 2011).

The Age Of High Tech War: After Libya

By Paul Rogers, cross-posted from openDemocracy

There is intense rethinking in the Pentagon about the “war on terror.”  The outcome of the Libyan conflict will reinforce its principal trends.

When Donald Rumsfeld was appointed George W Bush's defence secretary in 2001, he had the clear aim of fighting wars with minimal “boots on the ground”. From that point, the United States would fight its enemies mainly from the air and the sea.

This vision of a high-tech military age saw armies as increasingly redundant.

After the 9/11 atrocities this line of thinking was exemplified in the termination of the Taliban: the chief instruments were air-power, a rearming of the Northern Alliance of warlords, and the deployment of a few hundred special forces to target, coordinate and undertake some direct raids.
The vision gained further momentum in the destruction of the Saddam Hussein regime in March-April 2003: here the operation used air-power, multiple rocket-launchers, and far fewer troops than had been used to push the Iraqis out of Kuwait in 1991.

By 1 May 2003, when Bush made his famous “mission accomplished” speech on the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, Rumsfeld and his associates seemed vindicated. Afghanistan and Iraq were coming under western influence, including hosting big US bases; several central Asian republics were providing facilities that would increase US capabilities in an oil- and gas-rich region; and Iran, it was believed, would be constrained by the much bigger US military footprint in the region. Perhaps most welcome of all was the conviction that Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq would establish a truly free-market economy with minimal financial regulation, a flat-rate tax system and wholesale privatisation of state assets.

It all went desperately wrong. A new report by the Oxford Research Group maps the damage (see A War Gone Badly Wrong - The War on Terror Ten Years On, September 2011). This cites the Eisenhower Research Project study that estimates the human and financial cost at 225,000 people killed, 7.8 million refugees and $4,000 billion potentially spent (see "The harvest of war: from pain to gain", 28 October 2010).

The costs and the ambitions persist: plans are reported to keep US soldiers in Afghanistan until 2024, the withdrawal from an insecure Iraq is proving problematic, and al-Qaida affiliates are active in west and east Africa as well as south Asia (see "Al-Qaida: an enduring insurgency", 1 September 2011).

Libya: A Time For Patience

By Vidar Helgesen, cross-posted from openDemocracy

The task of building a democratic and inclusive Libya with working institutions must overcome the international community’s key flaw as well as the Gaddafi regime’s legacy

In the wake of the tumultuous end-days of Muammar Gaddafi’s forty-two-year regime, Libya faces the daunting challenge of turning the private networks of loyalty he created into a democratic state-building process. To meet it, Libya and the international community must work together in an imaginative way that combines decisive short-term policy with careful longer-term vision.

The immediate priorities are to establish security, law and order, to restore basic services, and to provide humanitarian assistance. These must be followed soon by a reinvigoration of Libya’s economy, in particular oil production, which accounts for almost all of Libya’s national income. The question here is how to establish a framework for the administration and distribution of oil revenues in a post-Gaddafi Libya. This will take time and the risk of corruption is high.

This particular task indicates Libya’s longer-term strategic priority: to develop institutions in a country whose basic existence and ideology have for decades been reliant on the very absence of institutions (see Fred Halliday, "Libya's regime at 40: a state of kleptocracy", 8 September 2009).

In practice this means writing a new constitution that determines the country’s form of government, establishing political parties, and forming a parliament. In Libya, this work will be even harder than elsewhere; for its singular experience of dictatorship means that it starts from the equivalent of a blank slate (Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge and East Timor after Indonesia, different from Libya as they are, offer a point of comparison).

Norway's Tragedy: Contexts and Consequences

By Thomas Hylland Eriksen, July 24, 2011, cross-posted from open Democracy.
 

The atrocities inflicted on Norwegian society by a far-right activist leave the country shocked and in mourning. They will have lasting effects even if their exact character is hard to foreseen. 

By coincidence, I was in Oslo on Friday 22 July 2011. During this time of the year, the main holiday season in Norway, the cities tend to be empty and quiet. My teenage son was due to participate in a soccer tournament in Denmark, and I was there to accompany him to the boat before returning to our summer house on the south coast.

In the afternoon, as I was working in the garden and my son was practicing with his football, we heard a loud crash, as if lightning had struck. Dark clouds began to loom nearby. We didn't think any more about it. Only half an hour later, however, I was rung up by a friend who asked me to turn on my computer. From then onwards, events took an increasingly dramatic turn as the afternoon gave way to evening, evening to night, and gradually the full extent of the atrocities became known.

When the domestic media began to report on the blast in central Oslo, virtually everybody must have thought of extreme Islamic groups. At least one, unknown group which called itself "friends of global jihad", appeared to have taken responsibility for the attack on the web. Some experts said that the attack carried the “fingerprints” of al-Qaida. But when the first reports came of the shootings at Utøya - my son and I were in the car by then, on our way to the boat - the connection with international terrorism, Islamic or not, started to seem less likely.

Utøya, a tiny island on a picturesque lake about forty minutes' drive from Oslo, has for decades been the summer camp site of the youth wing of the Labour Party. To target this camp, a gathering of several hundred politically engaged youths from their early teens to their mid-20s, suggested a connection with domestic politics rather than a link to Norway's participation in the wars in Libya or Afghanistan.

The perpetrator was finally apprehended towards the end of what was already being described as the most tragic day in Norwegian history since the second world war. The attack on government buildings in central Oslo, which led the New York Times correspondent to describe “the usually placid” capital of Norway as a place resembling a war-zone, was suddenly a lesser concern; although physical destruction and human suffering, including the loss of at least seven lives, were very considerable. The massacre of youths trapped on Utøya, still difficult to fathom, was simply beyond belief.

The death-toll from Utøya, over ninety at the time of writing, is likely to increase in the coming days. The police investigation and interrogation of the perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, will continue in order to understand the context of this catastrophe. We are still in a collective state of shock and disbelief, yet it is necessary, even now, to take a step back and begin to reflect on the consequences of this tragedy for Norwegian society. I can think of three.

Drone Warfare: Cost And Challenge

By Paul Rogers, originally posted at openDemocracy, June 23, 2011.

The repositioning of the United States’s military strategy includes a great expansion in the use of armed-drones to attack targets in Pakistan and Yemen. But this development raises profound legal and ethical questions that are now entering the public arena. 

The announcement by President Obama on June 22 of substantial withdrawals of United States troops from Afghanistan by September 2012 marks an important moment in the almost decade-long war in the country. The impact of the decision will be on the current diplomatic calculations over the nature of a settlement that will bring the war to an end. It may also impinge on the presidential-election campaign in the US that reaches a climax in November 2012. But whatever the diplomatic or political consequences of the drawdown will be, the Afghanistan war is still far from over - and indeed, in one significant way it has in its tenth year been intensifying rather than winding down (see “Afghanistan: mapping the endgame”).

This is the use of pilotless armed drones. These are employed under CIA command - a procedure chosen because the CIA's rules of engagement are less restrictive then those of the military. The continuous drone-attacks across the border in Pakistan have very destructive human effects that often reach beyond the presumed insurgent targets; the agency claims to have killed around 1,400 suspected al-Qaida and Taliban paramilitaries, but Pakistan sources also (amid a scarcity of precise details) estimate that hundreds of civilians have also died in these operations.

The Wild West v. International Justice

After 9/11, any suggestion that terror suspects could be questioned, arrested and tried as criminals in the United States was widely ridiculed.  President Bush said he wanted Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," setting a tone for the war on terror which eschewed law and justice for extraordinary rendition, torture, wiretapping and, finally, assassination.

Bin Laden was hunted down by Navy SEALS, reportedly shot in the eye, and unceremoniously dumped into the sea.  What a stark and ignoble contrast to the arrest by Serbian police of Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb military leader was also allegedly responsible for the killing thousands.  Mladic is believed to have overseen the worst massacre of civilians in Europe since the Second World War.  But instead of targeting him for assassination, the Serbs adhered to international standards of justice and had him extradited to the Hague to face charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and other war crimes.

As John Feffer wrote in Huffington Post, "the peaceful arrest of Mladic, which signaled that Serbia is ready to become embedded in the web of rules and regulations of the EU, was a rite of passage. In contrast, the United States got its man, but demonstrated that it still hasn't grown out of its comic-book phase."

President Obama hailed Mladic's arrest as an "important day" for "international justice," and declared that: "From Nuremberg to the present, the United States has long viewed justice for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide as both a moral imperative and an essential element of stability and peace."  This raises the question that Glenn Greenwald asks, "if 'justice' demands that this heinous Serbian war criminal be arrested and tried before being punished, why was the same not true for bin Laden?"

Another disturbing question concerns the attitude of the United States towards international law.  With Mladic's arrest, Obama and other U.S. officials paid lip service to the international system of justice, avoiding the awkward reality that this country is not a member of the International Criminal Court, which was established in 2002, to "bring to justice the perpetrators of the worst crimes known to humankind - war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide."  Martin Shaw writes, in the article below, originally published at openDemocracy, about the precariousness of international order in light of the refusal of the United States to meaningfully participate. 

International Justice, Wild West v. ICC:  A Coming Crisis

By Martin Shaw, originally published at OpenDemocracy, on May 31, 2011.

Two of the world’s most notorious mass murderers and fugitives from justice, Osama bin Laden and Ratko Mladic, have been apprehended in a single month. This should be cause for great celebration, but instead the contrasting outcomes of these events only underline the precariousness of international order and international law.

Libya: The Costs Of Stalemate

By Paul Rogers, originally posted at openDemocracy, May 19, 2011

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The course of the war in Libya was set on 14 April 2011, when a joint statement from three western leaders (Barack Obama, David Cameron, and Nicolas Sarkozy) made it clear that the core aim of the NATO operation launched almost a month earlier was regime termination. The protection of civilians remained the formal objective enshrined in United Nations Security Resolution 1973, but the unequivocal view that Gaddafi had to go was revealing of the real intention of the most powerful combatant states (see “Libya: the view from the bunker”, 21 April 2011).

Since then, as the air-strike campaign begun in the late evening of 19 March reaches its two-month mark, the war has turned into a stalemate. On the ground, the anti-Gaddafi rebels make occasional progress (as in Misrata during the past week), but they do not pretend to any ability to unseat the regime.

As the conflict has developed NATO has intensified its air-assaults, with more focused targeting on core regime command-and-control sites in Tripoli. In the four weeks to 26 April, for example, Nato’s 3,981 air-sorties included 1,658 strike-sorties (see Tom Kington, “Managing Limited Assets”, Defense News, 2 May 2011). Yet the British armed-forces chief, General David Richards, acknowledges that the effort so far is insufficient: Nato must upgrade its operations even further to achieve its objectives in the war.

America's Military: Failures Of Success

By Paul Rogers, originally published at openDemocracy , May 12, 2011.

The afterglow of Osama bin Laden’s killing fuels the United States’ confidence in its shift towards integration of military and security policy.  But it is another grand illusion and missed opportunity.

 Three actions undertaken by western forces in three different countries in the second week of May 2011 are connected by a single feature:  the “transnationalisation” of warfare, whereby national boundaries and sovereignty count for less and less:

* In Pakistan early on May 2nd, a United States “Seal” team killed Osama bin Laden
* In Libya, a NATO air-raid on May 1st that hit Muammar Gaddafi’s compound came close to the leader, instead killing one of his sons and two grandchildren
* In Yemen on May 6th, an armed-drone attack that targeted the radical preacher Anwar al-Awlaki killed two people.

The pursuit by states of enemies across frontiers is not new. The approach was practised by European powers in the colonial era; by the United States (for example in Latin America) and the Soviet Union (for example in Afghanistan) during the cold war; and since the 1980s most intensively by Israel.

The above cases of military action by western forces suggest that, within this overall context, a redirection of this trend may be developing. Some changes in US security policy and personnel provide further evidence of this.

Al-Qaida And The Arab Spring After Bin Laden

By Paul Rogers, originally posted at openDemocracy, May 5, 2011.

The euphoria in the United States that greeted Osama bin Laden's death in Pakistan early on 2 May 2011 reflects how far he had been the focus for the “war on terror” declared by George W Bush in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The al-Qaida leader's actual role in the movement may have diminished in recent years, but his mere existence was an enduring source of American dismay: a living symbol of Washington’s inability to kill or capture its chief global adversary (see "America vs al-Qaida: the widening war", 11 November 2010).

This national wound was revealed by President Obama’s differential arguments over Iraq and Afghanistan: the former was a bad war (of choice) which now demanded the withdrawal of US forces, whereas the latter was a good war (of necessity) because it connected directly with 9/11 through the continuing presence of al-Qaida.

Osama bin Laden’s active leadership al-Qaida had long receded, though he remained an iconic figure during a decade of the movement’s dispersal (see Omar al-Qattan, "Disneyland Islam", 17 October 2001). There is now too little residual connection between the Taliban and al-Qaida. The Obama administration’s signals of willingness to negotiate a progressive withdrawal from Afghanistan too, even if it involves talking to the Taliban, may reflect its understanding of this reality.

The administration's problem in pursuing this strategy has been that the Republican right - sharing and (via the media) amplifying the view of many Americans that the Taliban and al-Qaida are interchangeable - would depict any lessening of military commitment in Afghanistan as a sign of presidential weakness. Bin Laden’s death, in removing al-Qaida’s figurehead and breaking the Afghanistan-9/11 connection, partially resolves that problem: Obama now has an opportunity to speed up the withdrawal before the presidential-election campaign for 2012 gets underway (see "Afghanistan: between war and politics", 28 April 2011).

Bad Form At The Royal Wedding

Far be it from me to put a damper on the royal festivities, but it seems worth pointing out that those who viewed the spectacle as an opportunity to voice dissenting opinions or protests would not to be tolerated. 






Political Policing In Britain

By Guy Aitchison, originally published in openDemocracy, April 28, 2011

If anyone was in any doubt that we have a highly politicized, out-of-control police force in this country with scant regard for basic rights, the build up to the royal wedding will have provided a much-needed corrective. When it comes to our divinely ordained rulers, even the most minimal pretence at neutrality and respect for due process has been dropped and the attitudes and motivations of law enforcement laid bare. There is to be a strict zero tolerance policy towards republican thought crimes. Faced with tomorrow’s pompous medieval extravaganza, we must either wave our plastic Union Jack flags like the serfs that we are, or else keep quiet and hope we aren’t on the Met’s “political” hit-list.

For weeks, senior officers have been boasting that anyone planning to voice dissent at tomorrow’s event will be treated as a criminal with sinister warnings that officers have been ordered to “shoot-to-kill” and the Queen’s Guard empowered to impale any threat with their bayonets. With the memories of Jean Charles de Menezes and Iain Tomlinson still fresh, such warnings sound more than a little ominous. The press have gleefully collaborated with the Met in their intimidation, uncritically reporting plans for “pre-emptive” strikes against anyone suspected of being inclined to violate the “sterile areas” 1.6 kilometres around the Palace of Westminster created under the totalitarian Serious Organised Crime and Police Act introduced by Labour. In all the frenzied reporting, the words “anarchists” and “criminals” are used interchangeably to denote anyone opposed to a hereditary head of state. Ahead of the happy couple’s big day, political opinions alone are enough to get you locked up. As one “police source” chillingly put it “the same faces often reappear at different protests and we will try and take a pre-emptive strike against them."

What Egypt Should Learn From Iraq

by Zaid Al-Ali, originally published at openDemocracy.net, April 21, 2011.

The Iraqi experience of creating a new constitution from political and social ruin offers lessons for Egypt.

After the extraordinary initial success of Egypt’s popular revolution in removing Hosni Mubarak from power, the supreme council for the armed forces published an interim constitution on 30 March 2011 that is to guide the country through the coming period. Although the text opens up exciting new possibilities and opportunities for change, it is also deeply problematic, particularly insofar as the mechanism for drafting the permanent constitution is concerned.  In that regard, Egypt has much to learn from Iraq, which is the only country in the Arab region to have engaged in a constitutional drafting process in recent memory.

Every country in the middle east has its own share of challenges and attributes, and there is no question that Egypt’s constitutional drafting process will be a far different experience to what took place in Iraq in 2005 (not least because Egypt does not have to suffer the consequences of a foreign military occupation).

However, there are enough similarities between the two countries (aside from obvious linguistic, cultural, religious and historical ties) that allow for one to learn from the other in relation to specific issues.  Egypt and Iraq have many of the same basic needs, some of which can at least be partly addressed through a successful constitutional drafting process. In that sense, the Iraqi experience has failed miserably and Egypt should take stock and learn from that experience, with a view to avoid repeating the same fatal mistakes. 

The Cost Of Error

Paul Rogers wrote the following piece in openDemocracy, about an incident in the Libyan conflict which may turn out to be "pivotal in shaping the fate both of the anti-Gaddafi effort and of western military intervention."

Libya, And The Decisive Moment

by Paul Rogers, April 14, 2011

The Saddam Hussein regime was terminated in three weeks in 2003, but the war in Iraq that followed lasted seven years. The Taliban were gone in eight weeks in 2001, but the war in Afghanistan will soon enter its second decade. In each case, an early incident gave some idea of what was to come, even if its significance was appreciated only later. In Libya, four weeks into the war, one such incident has occurred which may prove to be a similar marker (see “Libya and a decade’s war”.)

In Iraq, it came five months into the war: the bombing in August 2003 of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad. The twenty-two people killed included the gifted diplomat and head of mission, Sergio Vieira de Mello, as well as the openDemocracy columnist Arthur C Helton. The assault demonstrated the ruthlessness of the incipient insurgency, a point accentuated by the fact that the building’s canteen had already acquired the reputation as a rare “safe space” in Baghdad where people of diverse opinions and factions could meet (see "America's entrapment," and "A hard road in Iraq.").

In Afghanistan, it came at a slightly later stage, six months into the conflict: an engagement in March 2002 by United States forces in the mountains near Gardez, around 150 kilometres south of Kabul. The prevailing assumption of the time was that the Taliban and their al-Qaida associates were in full retreat, yet they were capable of launching a sustained attack that killed or injured forty American troops (see "The spiral of war."). It took four more years before the United States and its NATO partners became fully apprised of the security vacuum that they had created, by which time the Taliban had retaken control of much of Afghanistan.

In Libya, a less high-profile incident scarcely three weeks into the war may yet acquire comparable significance. The international intervention began on 19-20 March with intensive French and American air-raids on Muammar Gaddafi's armoured columns as the latter headed for the eastern, rebel-held city of Benghazi. The raids are likely to have prevented the deaths of many civilians in the city, yet they also left a trail of dead and wounded soldiers in their wrecked vehicles on a littered road.

The retreat of Gaddafi’s forces allowed the rebels to advance rapidly along the coast towards the key regime stronghold of Sirte and to seize the oil-and-gas terminals at Brega and Ras Lanuf; they thereby gained control of most of Libya's oil-and-gas export capacity. This progress did not last. The Tripoli regime’s forces reorganised themselves into small mobile units that were almost impossible to disrupt from the air. By the end of the first week of April 2011, the rebels - ill-trained, under-armed and lacking coherence as a fighting force - were pushed back towards Benghazi.

Yet rebel sources had at this point managed to assemble a number of tanks, artillery-pieces and large transporters to spearhead a counter-attack. They expected that Nato would provide air-cover to allow them unhindered use of these weapons, while using air-attack to deny Gaddafi's troops the chance to deploy tanks and artillery in countering their advance. This might even become the conflict’s turning-point (see "Libya's war, history's shadow.")