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Democrats Desperately Need the Tea Party

August 25, 2011 by Haviland Smith

Originally published in The Herald of Randolph

By Haviland Smith

On August 5, Senator John Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts, did it again.  He let his mouth get way out in front of whatever brain he actually has. In a discussion of the Tea Party on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, he made the following statement:

“The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual, it doesn’t deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do.”

Apparently Kerry not only wants the media to ignore the Tea Party, he wants Congress to ignore it as well, for he continued with the following comment on Republican appointments to the upcoming joint debt ceiling committee which will (or won’t) decide our immediate economic future:

“And if the joint committee, the joint committee cannot be, I mean John Boehner, please, Mitch McConnell, please, don’t appoint people with a preconceived idea of exactly what they’re going to do. That will not serve the nation. It may serve Party, but that’s not leadership. They need to put people on that committee who are going to work for the interests of our country so we can decide how to deal with our long-term structural problems and put people to work now.”  In other words, they have to do it the Democrats’ way!

There are two ways to look at Kerry’s statement.  To be charitable, the Republicans and their Tea Party, have completely changed the rules in Washington.  Votes on virtually anything and everything are now political, with little care or attention being paid to the wellbeing of the nation or its people.  Everything is now for the party.  My way or the highway!

In that context, Kerry can be seen bewailing the change to a totally dysfunctional congressional environment, while at the same time not accepting any of the responsibility the Democrats have for its existence.

But what kind of naïve ideological claptrap is that?  Kerry, in the eyes of the Tea Party, can be added to the list of Americans who have not found their truth, i.e. that U.S. debt problems have to be solved now, irrespective or what the Democrats and over half the country want, or of any harm that solution may bring to the wellbeing of the country.

National polls now indicate that a solid majority of Americans would like to see more immediate Federal investment in job creation, greater taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and continued support for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – all of which programs are on the Tea Party death list!

Quite apart from the absurdity and unconstitutionality of Kerry’s position, has it not occurred to him that if those polls are true, he and his fellow Democrats desperately need the Tea Party?   In the Tea Party, we have a new political movement that is challenging everything we know about the state of the world and the conduct of government.  Fiscal policy, immigration law, gay and lesbian rights, climate change, the role and intentions of government, tax policy and foreign policy have all come under the scrutiny of the Tea Party, almost invariably producing new policies at odds with Democrats as well as many Republicans, not to speak of science and reality!

If poll results hold where they now are, frightened Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, should want to be sure that absolutely nothing inhibits the Tea Party, or particularly, its leaders.  If you are not a believer in the Tea Party platform, you desperately need the active, involved presence of people like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman and just now, Governor Perry from Texas.  You need their informational and intellectual shortfalls. They are the Tea Party equivalents to Kerry, but without much feel for history or reality and without his Yale-trained eloquence and respect for English language and grammar.

No, at a time when nothing much of interest is coming from their leadership, Democrats are in desperate need of political help.  President Obama is increasingly viewed as weak and ineffective and Pelosi and Ried seem unable to accomplish much of anything for their party in the Congress.

The best hope Democrats have of holding what they now have, or of even regaining political power in Washington, lies very much in the ability of the Tea Party to display itself as the twenty-first century “know-nothings” who are out of step with facts, reality and, incidentally, grammar.

Without such Republican candidates, the Democrats haven’t much hope.  Eloquence alone never wins the day!

Posted in Uncategorized, United States | Leave a Comment »

Counterproductive in Pakistan

July 17, 2011 by Haviland Smith

Originally published in The Rutland Herald and The Barre Times Argus

Over the weekend of July 10-11, it was announced that the United States would suspend, and in some cases cancel, nearly $800 million in military aid to Pakistan. This would amount to almost half of the $2 billion slated for the country’s armed forces.

Let’s get one thing straight right away.  It doesn’t matter what we think of Pakistan, India or Afghanistan.  What matters is  tht we understand regional reality and how that affects our goals there. In that context, we might profitably examine whether or not Afghan/Pakistan realities, in effect, make our goals illusory.

It is difficult to understand precisely what could have rationally motivated the Obama administration to implement this policy. Absent any logical underpinnings, it may well be the result of our anger that we are not getting our way with Pakistan when it comes to what we see as their uncooperative operations on their own territory against that part of the Taliban that resides on their side of the border with Afghanistan.

We are late-comers to the complex realities of the Middle East and South Asia.  Our policies, such as they are, would appear to be based in the domestic political needs of the Bush and Obama administrations, rather than on facts on the ground. More than that, we are deeply involved there for reasons that difficult to understand.  While we all understand our invasion of Afghanistan in the aftermath of 9/11, our 2003 invasion of Iraq and our subsequent re-invasion of Afghanistan are far less comprehensible.

Whatever the current facts and prospects, and none of those are any more clear under Obama than they were under Bush, one thing is absolutely clear and critical.  Pakistan sees India as an existential threat.  Those two countries have fought wars in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999, as well as significant skirmishes in 1984, 1985, 1987 and 1995, and have almost come to blows on numerous other occasions.

Despite the wishes of Muslims prior to the 1947 partition of colonial India, for a clean line of demarcation between themselves and the other religious groups, that did not happen.

Roughly 50% of the Muslim population of colonial British India remained in what is today India. Since 1947, interfaith violence between Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs has resulted in something between a half million and a million casualties.

Since partition, Pakistan has focused narrowly on what it sees as the existential threat from India. As a result, Afghanistan has become extremely important to the Pakistanis.  They are culturally, religiously, linguistically and ethnically inseparable.

Pakistan sees the Taliban as one way to apply pressure on India.  For that reason, Pakistan military intelligence (the ISI) has long subsidized the Taliban and its activities as a counterbalance to India’s influence in the disputed Kashmir region.

it has been clearly stated by virtually every US official from President Obama to General Petraeus that we cannot “win” in Afghanistan as long as the Taliban has a safe haven in Pakistan. The Pakistanis, for their own national reasons, are unwilling to eliminate that safe haven and we must remember that and as long as all our major military supply routes for Afghanistan cross Pakistan territory, we might wish to better consider their sensitivities.

So, the issue cannot be simply that we are displeased with the reluctance of the Pakistan government to undertake activities that it believes are directly threatening to its national interests vis a vis India.  There has to be something more than that, either a total lack of understanding among US policy makers of the realities in Southeast Asia, or some sort of convoluted belief that denying Pakistan our support will somehow make it easier for us to withdraw from Afghanistan.

And it may be just that! For this thumb in the eye of Pakistan, following on the heels of their open displeasure with our unilateral drone assassinations and our killing of bin Laden without their coordination and on their territory, will certainly change the balance in Afghanistan.

If we thought for a moment, as some American dreamers did, that we had any sort of chance for any kind of “win” in Afghanistan, we have just measurably raised the odds against successfully achieving our own goals by further humiliating the Pakistan military establishment, government and people.

Go figure!



Posted in Military Polilcy, Pakistan, Uncategorized |

Speaking truth to power

July 3, 2011 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published in the Rutland Herald and the Barre Times-Argus]

One of the primary purposes of any foreign intelligence organization like the CIA is that it provide to policymakers the best and most accurate information and analyses. In the language of the trade it’s called “speaking truth to power,” a statement that correctly implies that not all makers of foreign policy welcome the information provided to them by the intelligence community.

It is a simple fact of life that much of our foreign policy evolves as a result of domestic political needs rather than the intelligence and analyses that reflect the facts on the ground where the policy is to be implemented.

An excellent example of the perils involved in foreign policy formulation can be seen in the efforts of the Bush White House to influence the production of intelligence analysis during the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Former CIA officers have reported that Vice President Dick Cheney made numerous visits to CIA headquarters to ensure that a crucial National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on weapons of mass destruction was alarmist enough to scare Congress into authorizing the Iraq invasion.

At the same time, an Office of Special Plans was set up in the Pentagon by Paul Wolfowitz and headed by Douglas Feith to “relook” or re-examine the raw intelligence that had led to the unhelpful conclusions that the White House found “inaccurate” and unsupportive. Its purpose was to find “overlooked” raw intelligence that would support the White House’s planned Iraq invasion.

It also has been reported that George Tenet, the CIA director at the time, finally told his analysts that if they wished to have any influence on Bush White House foreign policy, they would have to modify their analyses.

This can happen during foreign policy formulation. If the foreign policy authors have already decided on the policy they want to pursue and that policy is not supported by the available intelligence and analyses, it can lead to attempts to subvert the intelligence system.

The appointment of Gen. David Petraeus as director of the CIA raises some interesting issues. In his March 2011 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee he said, “As a bottom line up front, it is ISAF’s assessment that the momentum achieved by the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2005 has been arrested in much of the country and reversed in a number of important areas. However, while the security progress achieved over the past year is significant, it is also fragile and reversible. Moreover, it is clear that much difficult work lies ahead with our Afghan partners to solidify and expand our gains in the face of the expected Taliban spring offensive.”

Petraeus is an intelligent, ambitious, educated military officer. He enjoyed unprecedented success with the “surge” in Iraq, even though there were other critical elements over which he had no control that heavily contributed to the surge’s success.

However, while the general was speaking of the progress made in Afghanistan, the Los Angeles Times was saying that the analysts of 16 intelligence agencies in Washington (in an NIE) “contend that large swaths of Afghanistan are still at risk of falling to the Taliban” and that Pakistan’s intelligence services continue to train, support and manipulate Taliban groups in Afghanistan.

And this while we are dealing with a totally dysfunctional President Karzai and Afghan realities and history that have defied foreign manipulation and exploitation for centuries.

It was subsequently reported that the 2011 NIEs on Afghanistan and Pakistan said that the fight was not winnable without Pakistani engagement against Taliban militants on its side of the border. Our military commanders have challenged this conclusion.

The question here is not who is right or wrong about Afghanistan. The question is whether or not any individual, despite an exemplary character and record, is capable of changing roles from that of head cheerleader for Americans who favor our continued involvement in the Afghan war to director of the organization that up until now has been reluctant to be optimistic, given the realities that exist in Afghanistan and Pakistan, about our prospects for any kind of success in that region.

Given the current demands on our national purse — our aging population, our current economic fragility, our infrastructural disintegration, our failing educational system and the expense of the largest military establishment in the history of the world, it is inordinately important that the new CIA director be able to accept the analyses of his organization and pass them on to the White House.

He must speak truth to power.

Posted in CIA, foreign policy, intelligence, United States |

Crude Oil: What Gives with the Squabbling at OPEC

June 23, 2011 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published in the Herald of Randolph]

In the most recent OPEC session, the Saudis pushed very hard for approval to raise the output of crude oil.  They were rejected by a majority of the membership.

Such a rise would likely have pushed the price of oil down to the $75 dollar per barrel range, which would have been a boon to all of the countries now trying to deal with the ongoing recession, most emphatically including the United States.

At the same time, you may have noticed that the Saudis are anything but pleased with what they consider to be America’s ill-advised new policy of supporting the Arab Spring.  They are particularly displeased with our support of the Egyptian rebellion.

Why then, would the Saudis want to do something that would be pleasing to the United States, like trying to put some sort of cap on the ever-rising price of crude? Don’t be confused about this, their decision had very little to do with the Unites States or with international politics.  It had to do primarily with their own internal economic situation.

Saudi Arabia has one of the world’s largest oil reserves.  It has very little else going for it economically. As long as its reserves last, which is estimated to be around 75 years, Saudi Arabia will stay economically healthy. But it must keep the rest of the world comfortable and happy with the price of crude oil.

If that price goes too high, the consumer countries, which include the most technically advanced and innovative countries in the world, will start looking for alternative sources of energy. If they can’t easily find them, they will look to create or invent them.  In the end, one or more of those countries will find energy sources that are close enough in price to crude and politically far more stable than the crude oil energy offered by what are, arguably, among the most unstable countries in the world.  That would be bad news for Saudi Arabia.

This internal economic reality runs headlong into political reality in OPEC where Saudi interests are in keeping customers by maintaining reasonable prices. Unfortunately for the Saudis (and the world’s leading consumer – the United States), this view is not shared by that majority of OPEC members who do not have the oil reserves required for them to have a truly long-term policy on crude.

In fact, such producers, most of whom simply cannot significantly raise the output of their product because they have neither the reserves nor the facilities, want to avoid a drop in the price of crude at all costs.  A drop from today’s price of $100 per barrel to the Saudi’s hope for $75 per barrel would mean a cut of 25% in the income of those countries from oil.

A perfect example of this dilemma is in Algeria, where a cut of 20% in income from crude oil sales would result in a 10-15% drop in their overall GDP!  That is a massive economic blow to a country like Algeria. Because so many of these low-volume OPEC oil producers are countries that do not enjoy the benefits of either affluence or real self-determination, GDP cuts in that range are highly destabilizing and thus to be avoided at all costs.

Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, Libya, Nigeria, Ecuador, Qatar, Venezuela and Angola, for example, are 10 of today’s 12 OPEC member states.  Most of those states are far more interested in the income produced by crude today than they are in crude produced in 100 years.  Thus, they represent a bloc opposed to any Saudi plans to lower the price of crude today.

However, the reality is that the Saudis are going ahead and raising production on their own by up to 13%, with the sale of the surplus going largely to China and other expanding Asian economies.  The net result of this overall rise in world production will be a drop in the worldwide price of crude oil.

The lesson for Americans who consume such an outrageously large proportion of the world’s production is that we are going to run out of oil.  No matter what you hear from the Oil and Gas industry in their constant barrages on television, we will be without oil far sooner than anyone realizes. If our past behavior is predictive, we will ignore this reality because we can drive, heat and cool, etc. today. We will rather stupidly wait for the inevitable Armageddon.

Imagine the misery we could avoid and the money we could make if we addressed and solved the problem of alternate forms of energy before the crude runs out!

Posted in Middle East, United States |

How we helped al-Qaida

June 19, 2011 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published in the Barre Times-Argus and the Rutland Herald]

Terrorism is not designed to overwhelm. It is designed to undermine. In that context, whatever it does to cause or initiate anxiety in populations, it relies on the reaction of those populations equally as much to achieve its final goal.

The reaction of the Bush administration to the slaughter of 9/11, largely continued under Obama, was precisely what bin Laden and al-Qaida would have prayed for as it created an environment which made life for Americans difficult, induced levels of paranoia and ultimately resulted in the loss of many of its citizens’ basic human rights in the name of the fight against terrorism. Terrorism has now been fully planted in our collective psyche. To wit:

We have lived for almost a decade with an insane, multicolored “terrorist warning system” designed primarily to cover the posterior of the administration that designed and implemented it.

Transportation has become a nightmare. The simple preparation for air travel takes infinitely longer now than it did 10 years ago. Controls in airports have become so repressive and intrusive that air travel now proceeds at a crawl.

We have become paranoid and morbidly suspicious and distrustful of anyone we think might be a Muslim.

Our government has been able to get whatever it wanted in terms of surveillance rights. We have been subject to warrantless surveillance of all kinds.

We have watched our government torment, torture and incarcerate people without any regard for human rights or international law and convention.

The sad thing is that we have acquiesced to all of this because of our concerns about our own personal safety. But will we ever get our human rights back or will we lose more? In the dark days of 1775, Benjamin Franklin wrote perceptively, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

The key here is that without the active, witless involvement and effective acquiescence of our government, al-Qaida terrorism would have caused us far less pain than it ultimately has.

When it came to planning the attack on 9/11, most of the al-Qaida operational management was dead set against it. The plan prevailed solely because Osama bin Laden, their oracle, was its champion.

Ultimately, those in al-Qaida who opposed the 9/11 plan were proven correct. The 9/11 attack was the beginning of the decline of al-Qaida, who did just about everything wrong. They provoked a nasty, powerful and retributive America which turned on them full force. We invaded Afghanistan, denying them their operational base and stability. We methodically began to eliminate their senior and mid-level operational management. We pursued bin Laden so relentlessly that it completely changed al-Qaida’s modus operandi.

Al-Qaida became a franchise operation, the McDonald’s of terrorism. All a wannabee jihadi had to do was get a group of like-minded folks together and find a building from which to operate. At that point, visits to training facilities in Pakistan or Yemen or wherever, would teach them how to make bombs and how to run a business. Just like McDonald’s.

This progression was largely the result of the environment in which al-Qaida lived. As they ramped up their operations, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq and later in Yemen and in North Africa, they created another entire category of enemy — those Muslims who objected to their killing of other Muslims. Since they were killing Muslims in droves, that meant that they could no longer be sure that their living environment was benign.

Worst of all from the Muslim point of view, they began to justify those killings by indiscriminately and in Muslim eyes, inappropriately employing takfir, the practice of branding other Muslims as unbelievers and making them thereby “legally” executable by al-Qaida.

Add to that the fact of lethal Western pursuit of their members, and we see al-Qaida going underground and paranoid. Bin Laden hid in the open in suburban Pakistan. But he was so paranoid that he had no phone, no Internet connection. Under those circumstances, there ceased to be an “al-Qaida Central.” All that was left were the franchises around the world. Given his personal circumstances, bin Laden could not conceivably have exercised classic command and control over them.

Which is precisely where we are now. We see disparate groups freelancing on their own in whatever operations appeal to them and doing so in operational environments that are increasingly hostile to them. Osama’s death hasn’t changed much.

If we could only bring ourselves to mitigate those of our activities, like our Middle East military operations, that provoke moderate Muslims and therefore strengthen al-Qaida, we might find ourselves in a far stronger counterterrorist position than that in which we find ourselves today.

Posted in foreign policy, Middle East, terrorism, United States |

In Egypt, a perilous journey to democracy

June 5, 2011 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published in the Barre Times-Argus and the Rutland Herald]

 By Haviland Smith


What is happening in Egypt may be unique to that country, but it is certainly a portent of what may come to pass in the Middle East and North Africa. Time will tell as the “Arab Spring,” President Obama’s “new” policy toward the region and American congressional attitudes unfold.

Our president has just said we will support the legitimate wishes of the Arab people for self-determination. But what if that turns into an Islamist government or a military dictatorship in Egypt?

Egyptians will have their first presidential election this fall. There is only one political party that is in any way “established” in Egypt. That is the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in 1928 as an Islamist movement.

Egypt doesn’t have a lot of options. With a broad array of political candidates and virtually no established democratic institutions, the Egyptian military is the only other organization with any real power.

Mohamed El-Sayed Habib, first deputy of the chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood, recently made a bold statement in which he outlined his party’s positions. Whether you believe him or not, and many Egyptians do not, he has come out along the following lines.

He said the brotherhood believes in political reform, democracy, pluralism and the peaceful rotation of political power. He sees the nation as the primary source of national power.

Further, the brotherhood is in favor of the termination of the state of emergency, restoring public freedoms, including the right to establish political parties, whatever their tendencies may be. It also supports freedom of the press, freedom of criticism and thought, freedom of peaceful demonstrations and freedom of assembly.

He concluded that the brotherhood also supports the end of Hosni Mubarak’s exceptional courts and exceptional laws. It wishes to establish the independence of the judiciary and fully supervised general elections, and remove all obstacles that restrict the functioning of civil organizations.

Whatever you may have heard about the brotherhood, this statement certainly contains just about all the elements we Americans, as purveyors of liberal democracy, would like to see embedded in constitutions around the world.

And remember, this statement was made for internal Egyptian consumption prior to the fall 2011 presidential election, in which roughly 20 percent of the population is estimated to support the brotherhood; it is unclear if it will even be allowed to run its own presidential candidate.

With the presidential election coming up this fall, the U.S. Congress has already weighed in. The Republican chairman and the Democratic ranking member of the House Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs vowed in May at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference to deny aid to Egypt if the Muslim Brotherhood should happen to gain strength in the upcoming elections.

Over the last 50 years, the Egyptian military has invested in and now “owns” somewhere between 5 percent and 40 percent of the entire Egyptian economy. That makes it the only cohesive force in Egypt that has a real, ongoing stake in the status quo, and it is the only ones with guns.

What might happen if the Muslim Brotherhood gets favorable results in a new, free election? It got 20 percent in the rigged 2005 election when it was not even allowed to label its own candidates as belonging to the brotherhood. Will a favorable result trigger the withdrawal of U.S. aid from Egypt? Will that withdrawal include our generous provision of military aid?

If that plays out as our congressmen vow it will, what is the Egyptian military likely to do? For it, everything is at stake. It relies heavily on U.S. aid. What happens immediately after the election is critical for Egypt’s hopes for future liberalization. The military has already begun to threaten some of the civil rights gained after the Tahrir Square revolution.

It has the power and is not about to give it up. Any election result will have to be at least tacitly approved by the military. It may or may not object to the Muslim Brotherhood; however, it can probably re-establish a military dictatorship whenever it wishes.

The military would certainly react badly to a loss of billions in U.S. aid. If ultimately there is a military coup, will it be because Congress is miffed at what it considers to be positive brotherhood election results and halts all aid to Egypt? Do we support real self-determination in the Middle East or not?

America must not kill the Egyptian Spring, ultimately returning Egypt to military dictatorship, simply because of our fear of and suspicions about Islam.

Posted in Egypt, foreign policy, Middle East |

Syria’s struggle is not our fight

May 22, 2011 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published in  the Rutland Herald and the Barre Times-Argus]

Syria is a complicated place. Like just about every other modern-day “country” in its region, it has been conquered and reconquered by all the major culprits, Persian, Roman, Greek, Ottoman as well as others.

Since World War II, Syria has evolved much like the other countries in the region. It has survived periods of severe instability and pure repression. In its first 10 years of existence, it went through four constitutional rewrites and 20 separate cabinets.

It suffered through numerous military coups and suffered often under martial law. An emergency law, which effectively ended most of the protections afforded to its citizens by its various constitutions, was declared in l962 and lasted until 2011. In short, throughout its existence, Syria has been the victim of invasion, plotting, coups, instability and chaos.

Like Iraq, Syria is another example of rule by a repressive minority. Syria is roughly 74 percent Sunni, 16 percent Shiite (Alawites) and 10 percent Christian and “others,” including a very few Jews. The Alawites are a mystical minority of Shiite Islam. They came into power with Hafez al-Assad in 1970, which was something of an unwelcome surprise to the three quarters of the population that was Sunni and had held power in Syria for centuries.

The Assad years were anything but rosy for Syrians. His rule was characterized by automatic repression of any opposition. This, of course, was made doubly difficult and doubly repressive by the minority status of the Alawites in Syria. Assad ran a pervasive internal security apparatus comprising thousands of agents, all of whom were reporting primarily on real and imagined dissent.

During the period, he is accused of having been responsible for literally thousands of extrajudicial executions of Syrian citizens. Perhaps the most memorable of these was the Hama massacre in February 1982, when the Syrian army put down a revolt by Sunnis in Hama; it is said that 10,000 to 40,000 Sunni civilians were killed and the city almost completely razed.

In foreign affairs, modern Syria has been involved in the 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars with the Israelis. It has been in the forefront of the opposition to Israeli occupation of Palestine, financing and assisting both Hamas and Hezbollah.

Lebanon, which is considered by Syrian irredentists to be rightfully theirs, has been a constant target for their military and political action. In recent times, during and even after the Lebanese civil war of 1975 to 1990, Syrian troops were invited into Lebanon by partisan factions seeking support from the Assad regime. Particularly sensitive and contentious even today is the popular belief that in more recent years Syrian agents assassinated a pro-Western Lebanese prime minister and several other prominent leaders regarded by Damascus as hostile to Syria’s historic ambitions to control Lebanon.

Now Syria is under new management. Hafez al-Assad’s son, Bashar, has been president of Syria since 2000 when his father died. As Bashar had studied in Great Britain as an ophthalmologist, there were some hopes that Syria might enjoy a less repressive rule under his hand.

That has not proven to be the case. The fact is that he is a minority Alawite working in a government with fellow minority Alawites who are generally resented by the majority Sunnis whom they rule. They have ruled for the past 40 years because they have stuck together and terrorized the majority Sunnis.

There are neighbors who have conflicting stakes in the current Syrian rebellion. For example, anti-American elements like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, which have been closely allied to and supported by Syria, are finding today that many of their youthful members are sympathetic to the protesters being ruthlessly suppressed by the Assad regime.

The result here is simple and pervasive. The Sunnis who are now in fairly full rebellion against the sitting Syrian government are not going to be handed the reins of power. The Alawites will fight them to the end, if only to save their own lives.

We have no dog in this fight. The Syrians, whether they rid themselves of the Assad government or not, have no history, no experience, no training in anything we Americans would recognize as politically attractive or worth actively supporting.

Direct American intervention of any kind and at any level would simply risk being drawn into another potentially costly and bloody civil war in which vital U.S. national interests are clearly not at stake.

Posted in foreign policy, Middle East, Syria, United States |

Don’t leave counterterrorism to the Military

May 12, 2011 by Haviland Smith

The old saw tells us that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”.  But that really isn’t true.  A terrorist is a  terrorist and an insurgent, or freedom fighter, is an insurgent. If we are able to stick to labeling them on the basis of what they actually do, rather than what we think they represent, we will be able to keep them straight and stand a much better chance of dealing effectively with terrorism.

Insurgencies are movements designed to overthrow existing governments.  Some are popular and have pretty good prospects for success. Some are not. Generally they spring from within populations.  If they are successful, it is because they generally represent the population’s views and thus have their support.  That makes them very difficult to defeat, particularly by a foreign government.

It is extremely difficult to define “terrorism” largely because it is such an emotional subject.  The United Nations has been unable to do so. Having said that, there are certain characteristics that are helpful in identifying terrorists.  They use violence and asymmetrical warfare as their primary tools.  They are not typically organized like insurgencies, but rather resemble politically oriented covert action groups. They use their terror psychologically for maximum impact to intimidate populations rather than simply kill individuals.  Finally, they are non-state groups.

Historically, governments have been far more successful against terrorist groups than they have been against insurgencies, primarily because insurgencies tend to enjoy more support from local populations

Today’s American foreign and domestic counterterrorism policies have been built on the “Global War on Terror” or (GWOT).  The Bush Administration labeled everyone it didn’t like a “terrorist”, never taking the time to differentiate between terrorism and insurgency.  That was our first mistake. The Taliban, despite the fact that it commits terrorist acts, is essentially an insurgent organization. Yet, until recently, they were constantly referred to as terrorists, perhaps because we needed terrorists for our GWOT in an Afghanistan where there were hardly any Al Qaeda members left.  Even though Afghans generally hate Taliban policies, and with good reason, they will often chose them over us if they are forced to do so.  We are, after all, the foreigners in the fracas.

Our second mistake was in deciding to “solve” our terrorism problems with the military might that had so brilliantly served us during the preceding fifty years.  In employing a military response, we were using an asset that had been designed in the Second World War to sweep across northern Europe in an attack on Germany and then further fine-tuned during the Cold War to sweep across Germany and Poland to defeat the USSR.  How we figured that was an appropriate tool for dealing with the new terrorism is hard to understand.  The answer probably lies in the fact that the military establishment wanted a piece of the action, and all it had to offer was its sword.

Until the early May operation that dispatched Osama bin Laden, the only example we had that argued that massive military response might not be the best approach, was the initial invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001.  In that operation, a handful of special operations troops accompanied by a small number of intelligence officers, kicked off a blitzkrieg that ended in very short order with the literal destruction of Al Qaida in Afghanistan and, coincidentally, the defeat of the Taliban.  Remember, this was the “GWOT”.  Afghanistan initially had nothing to do with insurgencies, only with 9/11 and the terrorists.  Even though it all went south with the subsequent invasion of Iraq, the lesson was there to be studied, absorbed and implemented.

SOME HISTORY

In 2010, the Rand Corporation reviewed the findings of its own 2008 study of 648 terrorist groups that existed around the world between 1968 and 2006.  It concluded that of those groups, 43% were absorbed quietly back into the environments in which they had been active, 40% were defeated by police and intelligence operations and 7% by military confrontation.

In Islam, as elsewhere, true terrorist groups most often are involved in activities that are dangerous to the general population.  Such groups, as in the case of Al Qaeda, often include members who are foreigners, who have goals inimical to the local population’s goals, or serve non-local causes. In the case of Al Qaeda, they often kill Muslims, a sin under the Koran. In short, they do not necessarily spring from and represent the ideas and desires of the local population.

Terrorists normally operate clandestinely in their local environments, trying to avoid identification by local populations. In fact, they often conduct operations designed to pit one portion of the population against another, simply for the purpose of creating chaos.  That was part of Al Qaeda in Iraq’s (AQI) operational approach under Abu Musab al Zarqawi. AQI provocations were designed specifically to goad Shia into attacking Sunnis or vice versa, simply to keep the pot boiling.

When terrorists are the object of an essentially clandestine response like the one we conducted in Afghanistan in early October 2001, it is they alone, not the local population that are being targeted. That fact gives operational advantages to the special ops personnel and non-military police and/or intelligence officers working against them and permits local resident neutrality or even support for the local authorities.

When terrorist operations become known to local populations and are recognized as threatening or opposed to their interests, those populations often turn against them, as was the case with AQI at the beginning of the 2007 “surge” in Iraq, when the Sunni “Awakening” began to methodically wipe them out.

In direct contrast, when terrorists are confronted with military power, particularly foreign military power, the entire equation changes.

Let’s start here by stipulating that what America seeks from local Muslims in the struggle with radical Muslim terrorism, is optimally their support or, failing that, their neutrality.

As we know from our own experiences in the Middle East, American military confrontation tends to force the local non-combatant population to make a decision about whom to support, particularly if the local population believes that our “terrorist” is his “insurgent”. Will it be the foreigner or the local?  This is the main reason that accurate labeling is so critically important and that a non-military approach is preferable in cases of terrorism. Is he a terrorist who is not seeking the same goals as the population and can be justly opposed? Or is he an insurgent who is on the same page with the population and must be supported?  If he is a terrorist he is less likely to be accepted or protected by the locals.  If he is really an insurgent, he will be one of them and they will back him against the foreigner.

If we misidentify out of carelessness, stupidity or even willfulness, as may very well have been the case in the past, we will likely employ the wrong techniques against the troublemaker, whatever he really is.

TODAY’S MIDDLE EAST DESTABILIZERS

As if all this terrorism/insurgency discussion is not enough, our problems in the Middle East are made especially difficult by the facts that exist both there and here in America.  The historical, political and cultural differences between us are numerous and important.

The Middle East is rife with ongoing conflicts.  Sometimes they are absolutely overt, sometimes they are less obvious, but they are always there and have been for millennia.  The Shia/Sunni split, the Persian/Arab competition for hegemony in the Gulf, the anomalous position of the Kurds. The hangovers of the Crusaders, Western imperialism and US Regime change operations in Syria and Iran have all added up to a region in which, today, the notion of liberal democracy is quite foreign and its bearer is viewed with extreme suspicion.  There is little history of democracy. The peoples of the region, particularly given their tribalism, ethnic and sectarian differences have no experience that would prepare them for the freedoms and responsibilities that must come with self-rule and liberal democracy.  What they do have is a Koran which gives any believing Muslim an exhaustive blueprint for life.

On the other side of the ledger, we have a United States that is ruled by its own American exceptionalism and eager to save the world by exporting its model.  Yet, we are a wildly impatient, ADHD nation, short on planning, and married to short-term political timetables. In foreign affairs, we tend to evolve policies for American domestic political reasons, eschewing the realities that exist abroad.  We talk democracy and support the most repressive rulers in Islam. For over sixty years we have failed miserably to bring peace to Israel and Palestine. We are so bereft of influence there that the sides are preceding in their own respective directions without reference to America.   Yet, our goal seems to be a desire to install “democracy” in a world that has little reason to want to accept it.  As a result, we are seen as opportunistic, narcissistic and hypocritical.

Many, if not most of these problems have solutions that would help us.   The “Arab Spring” will change the Middle East forever, as the rebellions against existing authority have completely stolen the show from Al Qaeda, rendering their dreams of a medieval caliphate virtually obsolete.  The rebellions have brought some sort of self-determination to those people who outlast the tyrants that have recently ruled them.  If we can bring ourselves to accept self-determination in place of democratization as a viable goal for them, active nation-state hostility to us will subside.

What we can do completely on our own is change our counterterrorism policy.  When we attack terrorism with our military establishment, as we have done in Iraq and Afghanistan after 2003, terrorism morphs into insurgency. That insurgency then demands our involvement in the export of democracy and nation building, all of which are matters at which we are demonstrable failures.

We are proposing to do all of this in the face of popular American disinterest in and lagging support of our adventures in the Middle East.  Reality is additionally determined by a burgeoning national debt, ongoing national economic problems, a wildly expensive military establishment built for wars we do not face and acute national taxophobia.

We need to acknowledge that our current use of military might against terrorism in acutely counterproductive. In the absence of that constant military presence, local governments will find it politically more acceptable to share Al Qaeda as an enemy than they do today.  We need to concentrate on our liaison relationships with friendly countries, our production of intelligence on all terrorism activities and our training and deployment of the kind of special operations teams that we have recently seen operating so successfully.

The effectiveness of those teams and of a program based on them, coupled with the absence of our provocative uniformed military in battle all over the region, will give us a better shot at solving our problems in the region.  At the same time, a change in counterterrorism tactics and the deployment of a greatly reduced, but uniquely competent force should permit the saving of billions of dollars and the opportunity to put our economic house in order here at home, while it raises our prospects of diminishing the future threat of terrorism.


Posted in Afghanistan, foreign policy, intelligence, Middle East, terrorism, United States |

Zionist dream in peril

May 8, 2011 by Haviland Smith

[Originally published in the Rutland Herald and the Barre Times-Argus]

Israel’s only hope for the continuation of its Zionist dream of a democratic, Jewish state lies in a solution in which both Israel and the Palestinians have their own separate states — the “two-state solution.”

Absent such a solution and because of demographic imperatives, Israel will become either a non-democratic, apartheid state or a state in which Jews will be in the minority.

This situation has existed since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, after which Israel took possession of East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and large chunks of the West Bank, all previously held by Palestine under the 1948 U.N. partition of Palestine.

In those 44 years of occupation, the two-state solution has been extremely elusive. Israel would seem to have been driven by its desire to hold on (illegally, under international law) to those territories and to expand them through its “settlement” policies, where Palestinian motivation appears to have been driven by their desire to “throw the Israelis into the sea.” Arab countries have fully backed the Palestinians, and we Americans have done the same for Israel. Under those circumstances, there has never been enough momentum for success, and recently, America’s ability to actually influence the situation has faded with our increasing military involvement in the Middle East.

Now, suddenly, the game has changed. Instead of continuing to rely on the United States for support, which has never materialized, and to push for a two-state solution, which is clearly of little to no interest to the Netanyahu government, the Palestinians have changed course. Hamas and Fatah have decided to make nice. They have finally given up on any help from America. Sensing increased international frustration with a lack of progress toward a two-state solution, as mirrored in what many countries see as Israeli intransigence, they have decided to try to gain recognition as a state under the United Nations.

If this succeeds, as appears likely, the Israelis will be put in the position of occupying parts of a fellow member state of the U.N.

Where would that leave Israel in the international community?

As the author of much if not most of the violence against Israel, Hamas has always been a total anathema to Israelis. Israel has flatly refused to deal with them in any way other than militarily.

All of this has happened without any participation of the United States. We have, in fact, continued our attitude that Israel can do no wrong, despite the obvious fact that either Israeli or Palestinian intransigence will likely lead to a total change in the nature of the state of Israel, leaving an undemocratic apartheid state that would be difficult for Americans to support, or a minority Jewish state impossible for Israeli Jews to support.

Common sense would make one think that the two-state solution would be more and more attractive. But where it may be so for Palestinians and, by extension, Arabs, it would appear not to be for the majority of Israelis. In addition to that, the Palestinians have now apparently made peace between their two previously hostile factions, Fatah and Hamas.

The Netanyahu government has said it will never negotiate anything with Hamas. At the same time, it has pulled out all the stops in trying to block the Palestine recognition move in the United Nations. In doing that, it has cranked up all its “Israel right or wrong” allies, particularly here in the United States, to fight against any consideration of U.N. recognition of Israel, even though that flies directly in the face of hopes for the continued existence of a democratic Jewish state that Israelis and Americans will continue to support.

This leaves only one question. What are the true goals of Israelis and their American supporters who are so stridently opposed to a two-state solution? The only answer that holds water is that they are more interested in the acquisition of Palestinian land than in the Zionist dream. Nothing else makes any sense.

A clue to this phenomenon may lie in the nature of recent Jewish immigration to Israel from the Soviet Union and Russia. In both cases, the raw material that has come to Israel has had neither interest nor experience in democracy. Given their backgrounds, they are the direct antithesis of the Zionists who created and nurtured that Israel.

Zionism may be dead or dying. Today’s Israelis and their supporters appear far more interested in growing the size of Israel than in its democratic nature or its Zionist founders’ dreams.

Posted in Israel/Palestine, Middle East, United States |

The U.S Government and the Arab Spring

April 28, 2011 by Haviland Smith

[Originally Published in the Herald of Randolph]

What is there about the United States that makes it possible for us to get involved in foreign affairs when we have little, if any idea exactly what is going on or how our involvement, whatever that may be, will effect the outcome.  The “Arab Spring” is the perfect example of this issue.

Since the end of the Second World War, we have supported any regime in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, providing we believed that the regime in question would support US interests.  Over time, that has brought us into uncomfortable relationships with Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the old Soviet Central Asian Republics, now states.

We signed on with those countries simply because we felt it in our interest to do so.  Oil was important, although far less so for us than for Europe and Asia.  What we were really after, whether we articulated it clearly or not, was regional stability. The Cold War caused us to seek allies against the Soviet Union to deny them oil and international support.  In support of that, we believed we needed those states to be politically stable.

The problem was that those geographic entities that called themselves states were inherently unstable largely because they had been created without any particular thought being given to ethnic, tribal, or religious realities by the imperial powers that created them. They were, as can be seen in Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, made up of ethnic, religious and tribal groups that had little sense of nation, and loyalty primarily to their tribe or religion.  Libya is the perfect example.  As a country which is probably likely to turn into two or three separate states, Libya comprises something on the order of 140-150 separate tribes and tribal groupings.

That has always been true and we have always known it.  How can we now employ a policy based on the likelihood that there is hope for unity in Libya? How can we assume that those disparate groupings will cast aside of thousands of years of animosity and suddenly enter into the 21st century world with a welcoming hand?

In Afghanistan, we predicate our success in creating a unified state on being able to assemble and train police and Army forces that will keep order once we leave.  Absent a repressive government like the Taliban we overthrew, how can that be possible?  If we want a police force that represents all the people, we have to have Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Turkmen, Baloch, Aimak, etc, etc, on it and they have to serve throughout the nation, despite the fact that they are historically at odds with each other.  There’s nothing new here.

Iraq is no different, just a bit farther down the road toward internal strife.  Because of their past, the Sunnis, who have always run things, honestly believe they are entitled to do so in the future.  Why, many of they still actually believe they are the majority group in Iraq!

The Shia, never having been allowed to run anything and having been horribly mistreated by the Sunnis, know they are the majority group and believe they should rule.

And the Kurds!  The Kurds have been mistreated by just about everyone in the Region and are not about to let that happen again.  They will look out for their own interests despite the interests and needs of any other group.  And to further complicate everything, the Kurds who at thirty million people are the largest ethnic group in the world without a country of their own, have something up to fifteen million living in Turkey where they are restive, repressed and a source of major concern for Turkish stability.

What started simultaneously with our invasion of Iraq and subsequent re-invasion of Afghanistan was a process of ferment in the Middle East. It is difficult to argue that the invasion was irrelevant to the Arab Spring.  What we have done, quite simply, is start the process that is leading to the forcible removal of all the old tyrants who have been our stability-friendly allies for the past 75 years.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. Unfortunately, with all the religious, tribal and ethnic divisions in the Middle East today and given its dismal record of accommodation, it seems unlikely that there will be comity in the short run or that we will see what we think of as a positive outcome there for a very long time.


Posted in foreign policy, Middle East, United States |

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