By Francis Fukuyama
The New York Times Magazine, 19 February 2006
As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.
The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document.
But it is the idealistic effort to use American power to promote democracy and human rights abroad that may suffer the greatest setback. Perceived failure in Iraq has restored the authority of foreign policy "realists" in the tradition of Henry Kissinger. Already there is a host of books and articles decrying America's naïve Wilsonianism and attacking the notion of trying to democratize the world. The administration's second-term efforts to push for greater Middle Eastern democracy, introduced with the soaring rhetoric of Bush's second Inaugural Address, have borne very problematic fruits. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood made a strong showing in Egypt's parliamentary elections in November and December. While the holding of elections in Iraq this past December was an achievement in itself, the vote led to the ascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran (following on the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June). But the clincher was the decisive Hamas victory in the Palestinian election last month, which brought to power a movement overtly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In his second inaugural, Bush said that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," but the charge will be made with increasing frequency that the Bush administration made a big mistake when it stirred the pot, and that the United States would have done better to stick by its traditional authoritarian friends in the Middle East. Indeed, the effort to promote democracy around the world has been attacked as an illegitimate activity both by people on the left like Jeffrey Sachs and by traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan.
The reaction against democracy promotion and an activist foreign policy may not end there. Those whom Walter Russell Mead labels Jacksonian conservatives — red-state Americans whose sons and daughters are fighting and dying in the Middle East — supported the Iraq war because they believed that their children were fighting to defend the United States against nuclear terrorism, not to promote democracy. They don't want to abandon the president in the middle of a vicious war, but down the road the perceived failure of the Iraq intervention may push them to favor a more isolationist foreign policy, which is a more natural political position for them. A recent Pew poll indicates a swing in public opinion toward isolationism; the percentage of Americans saying that the United States "should mind its own business" has never been higher since the end of the Vietnam War.
More than any other group, it was the neoconservatives both inside and outside the Bush administration who pushed for democratizing Iraq and the broader Middle East. They are widely credited (or blamed) for being the decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq, and yet it is their idealistic agenda that in the coming months and years will be the most directly threatened. Were the United States to retreat from the world stage, following a drawdown in Iraq, it would in my view be a huge tragedy, because American power and influence have been critical to the maintenance of an open and increasingly democratic order around the world. The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a "realistic Wilsonianism" that better matches means to ends.
The Neoconservative Legacy
How did the neoconservatives end up overreaching to such an extent that they risk undermining their own goals? The Bush administration's first-term foreign policy did not flow ineluctably from the views of earlier generations of people who considered themselves neoconservatives, since those views were themselves complex and subject to differing interpretations. Four common principles or threads ran through much of this thought up through the end of the cold war: a concern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the internal politics of states; a belief that American power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its own ends.
The problem was that two of these principles were in potential collision. The skeptical stance toward ambitious social engineering — which in earlier years had been applied mostly to domestic policies like affirmative action, busing and welfare — suggested a cautious approach toward remaking the world and an awareness that ambitious initiatives always have unanticipated consequences. The belief in the potential moral uses of American power, on the other hand, implied that American activism could reshape the structure of global politics. By the time of the Iraq war, the belief in the transformational uses of power had prevailed over the doubts about social engineering.
In retrospect, things did not have to develop this way. The roots of neoconservatism lie in a remarkable group of largely Jewish intellectuals who attended City College of New York (C.C.N.Y.) in the mid- to late 1930's and early 1940's, a group that included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The story of this group has been told in a number of places, most notably in a documentary film by Joseph Dorman called "Arguing the World." The most important inheritance from the C.C.N.Y. group was an idealistic belief in social progress and the universality of rights, coupled with intense anti-Communism.
It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky was, of course, himself a Communist, but his supporters came to understand better than most people the utter cynicism and brutality of the Stalinist regime. The anti-Communist left, in contrast to the traditional American right, sympathized with the social and economic aims of Communism, but in the course of the 1930's and 1940's came to realize that "real existing socialism" had become a monstrosity of unintended consequences that completely undermined the idealistic goals it espoused. While not all of the C.C.N.Y. thinkers became neoconservatives, the danger of good intentions carried to extremes was a theme that would underlie the life work of many members of this group.
If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer, Moynihan and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations (for example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (like an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare). A major theme running through James Q. Wilson's extensive writings on crime was the idea that you could not lower crime rates by trying to solve deep underlying problems like poverty and racism; effective policies needed to focus on shorter-term measures that went after symptoms of social distress (like subway graffiti or panhandling) rather than root causes.
How, then, did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the "root cause" of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq? Neoconservatives would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold war ended.
Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an "evil empire" and for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but also to "tear down this wall." His assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, Richard Perle, was denounced as the "prince of darkness" for this uncompromising, hard-line position; his proposal for a double-zero in the intermediate-range nuclear arms negotiations (that is, the complete elimination of medium-range missiles) was attacked as hopelessly out of touch by the bien-pensant centrist foreign-policy experts at places like the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department. That community felt that the Reaganites were dangerously utopian in their hopes for actually winning, as opposed to managing, the cold war.
And yet total victory in the cold war is exactly what happened in 1989-91. Gorbachev accepted not only the double zero but also deep cuts in conventional forces, and then failed to stop the Polish, Hungarian and East German defections from the empire. Communism collapsed within a couple of years because of its internal moral weaknesses and contradictions, and with regime change in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact threat to the West evaporated.
The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside. The model for this was Romania under the Ceausescus: once the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation. As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000 book "Present Dangers": "To many the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades."
This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform. While they now assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise. According to George Packer's recent book on Iraq, "The Assassins' Gate," the Pentagon planned a drawdown of American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of the summer following the invasion.
By the 1990's, neoconservatism had been fed by several other intellectual streams. One came from the students of the German Jewish political theorist Leo Strauss, who, contrary to much of the nonsense written about him by people like Anne Norton and Shadia Drury, was a serious reader of philosophical texts who did not express opinions on contemporary politics or policy issues. Rather, he was concerned with the "crisis of modernity" brought on by the relativism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as the fact that neither the claims of religion nor deeply-held opinions about the nature of the good life could be banished from politics, as the thinkers of the European Enlightenment had hoped. Another stream came from Albert Wohlstetter, a Rand Corporation strategist who was the teacher of Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad (the current American ambassador to Iraq) and Paul Wolfowitz (the former deputy secretary of defense), among other people. Wohlstetter was intensely concerned with the problem of nuclear proliferation and the way that the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty left loopholes, in its support for "peaceful" nuclear energy, large enough for countries like Iraq and Iran to walk through.
I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the neoconservative movement. I was a student of Strauss's protégé Allan Bloom, who wrote the bestseller "The Closing of the American Mind"; worked at Rand and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked also on two occasions for Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted my book "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. "The End of History" is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern — that is, technologically advanced and prosperous — society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.
"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.
The Failure of Benevolent Hegemony
The Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters did not simply underestimate the difficulty of bringing about congenial political outcomes in places like Iraq; they also misunderstood the way the world would react to the use of American power. Of course, the cold war was replete with instances of what the foreign policy analyst Stephen Sestanovich calls American maximalism, wherein Washington acted first and sought legitimacy and support from its allies only after the fact. But in the post-cold-war period, the structural situation of world politics changed in ways that made this kind of exercise of power much more problematic in the eyes of even close allies. After the fall of the Soviet Union, various neoconservative authors like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan suggested that the United States would use its margin of power to exert a kind of "benevolent hegemony" over the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came up. Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, "It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power." (Italics added.)
It is hard to read these lines without irony in the wake of the global reaction to the Iraq war, which succeeded in uniting much of the world in a frenzy of anti-Americanism. The idea that the United States is a hegemon more benevolent than most is not an absurd one, but there were warning signs that things had changed in America's relationship to the world long before the start of the Iraq war. The structural imbalance in global power had grown enormous. America surpassed the rest of the world in every dimension of power by an unprecedented margin, with its defense spending nearly equal to that of the rest of the world combined. Already during the Clinton years, American economic hegemony had generated enormous hostility to an American-dominated process of globalization, frequently on the part of close democratic allies who thought the United States was seeking to impose its antistatist social model on them.
There were other reasons as well why the world did not accept American benevolent hegemony. In the first place, it was premised on American exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances where others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. The doctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy was one that could not safely be generalized through the international system; America would be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action. The United States was seeking to pass judgment on others while being unwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like the International Criminal Court.
Another problem with benevolent hegemony was domestic. There are sharp limits to the American people's attention to foreign affairs and willingness to finance projects overseas that do not have clear benefits to American interests. Sept. 11 changed that calculus in many ways, providing popular support for two wars in the Middle East and large increases in defense spending. But the durability of the support is uncertain: although most Americans want to do what is necessary to make the project of rebuilding Iraq succeed, the aftermath of the invasion did not increase the public appetite for further costly interventions. Americans are not, at heart, an imperial people. Even benevolent hegemons sometimes have to act ruthlessly, and they need a staying power that does not come easily to people who are reasonably content with their own lives and society.
Finally, benevolent hegemony presumed that the hegemon was not only well intentioned but competent as well. Much of the criticism of the Iraq intervention from Europeans and others was not based on a normative case that the United States was not getting authorization from the United Nations Security Council, but rather on the belief that it had not made an adequate case for invading Iraq in the first place and didn't know what it was doing in trying to democratize Iraq. In this, the critics were unfortunately quite prescient.
The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq's W.M.D. programs before the war. But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war's supporters did. Overestimation of this threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of measures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to domestic eavesdropping.
What to Do
Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. As recent events in France and Denmark suggest, Europe will be a central battleground in this fight.
The United States needs to come up with something better than "coalitions of the willing" to legitimate its dealings with other countries. The world today lacks effective international institutions that can confer legitimacy on collective action; creating new organizations that will better balance the dual requirements of legitimacy and effectiveness will be the primary task for the coming generation. As a result of more than 200 years of political evolution, we have a relatively good understanding of how to create institutions that are rulebound, accountable and reasonably effective in the vertical silos we call states. What we do not have are adequate mechanisms of horizontal accountability among states.
The conservative critique of the United Nations is all too cogent: while useful for certain peacekeeping and nation-building operations, the United Nations lacks both democratic legitimacy and effectiveness in dealing with serious security issues. The solution is not to strengthen a single global body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in any event, a "multi-multilateral world" of overlapping and occasionally competing international institutions that are organized on regional or functional lines. Kosovo in 1999 was a model: when the Russian veto prevented the Security Council from acting, the United States and its NATO allies simply shifted the venue to NATO, where the Russians could not block action.
The final area that needs rethinking, and the one that will be the most contested in the coming months and years, is the place of democracy promotion in American foreign policy. The worst legacy that could come from the Iraq war would be an anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled a sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United States with friendly authoritarians. Good governance, which involves not just democracy but also the rule of law and economic development, is critical to a host of outcomes we desire, from alleviating poverty to dealing with pandemics to controlling violent conflicts. A Wilsonian policy that pays attention to how rulers treat their citizens is therefore right, but it needs to be informed by a certain realism that was missing from the thinking of the Bush administration in its first term and of its neoconservative allies.
We need in the first instance to understand that promoting democracy and modernization in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian election bringing Hamas to power. Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society. It is no accident that so many recent terrorists, from Sept. 11's Mohamed Atta to the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to the London subway bombers, were radicalized in democratic Europe and intimately familiar with all of democracy's blessings. More democracy will mean more alienation, radicalization and — yes, unfortunately — terrorism.
But greater political participation by Islamist groups is very likely to occur whatever we do, and it will be the only way that the poison of radical Islamism can ultimately work its way through the body politic of Muslim communities around the world. The age is long since gone when friendly authoritarians could rule over passive populations and produce stability indefinitely. New social actors are mobilizing everywhere, from Bolivia and Venezuela to South Africa and the Persian Gulf. A durable Israeli-Palestinian peace could not be built upon a corrupt, illegitimate Fatah that constantly had to worry about Hamas challenging its authority. Peace might emerge, sometime down the road, from a Palestine run by a formerly radical terrorist group that had been forced to deal with the realities of governing.
If we are serious about the good governance agenda, we have to shift our focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those institutions of the United States government that actually promote democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations like the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like. The United States has played an often decisive role in helping along many recent democratic transitions, including in the Philippines in 1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland and Hungary in 1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can't "impose" democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.
The Bush administration has been walking — indeed, sprinting — away from the legacy of its first term, as evidenced by the cautious multilateral approach it has taken toward the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea. Condoleezza Rice gave a serious speech in January about "transformational diplomacy" and has begun an effort to reorganize the nonmilitary side of the foreign-policy establishment, and the National Security Strategy document is being rewritten. All of these are welcome changes, but the legacy of the Bush first-term foreign policy and its neoconservative supporters has been so polarizing that it is going to be hard to have a reasoned debate about how to appropriately balance American ideals and interests in the coming years. The reaction against a flawed policy can be as damaging as the policy itself, and such a reaction is an indulgence we cannot afford, given the critical moment we have arrived at in global politics.
Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American hegemony. What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world — ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about.
Francis Fukuyama teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. This essay is adapted from his book "America at the Crossroads," which will be published this month by Yale University Press.
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Citation: Francis Fukuyama. "After Neoconservatism," The New York Times Magazine, 19 February 2006.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/neo.html?ex=1298005200&en=4126fa38fefd80de&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
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28 February 2006
Taliban attacks on schools create 'lost generation'
By Kim Sengupta
The Independent, UK, 28 February 2006
Ghulam Rasul was leaving school when two gunmen walked in and opened fire. The 17-year-old died instantly. As other students and teachers fled in terror, the shooting continued. Two more people were hit.
The attack at Kartilaya High School in Lashkar Gar was just one in a series which is crippling Afghanistan's education system. At least 165 schools and colleges have been burnt down or forced to close so far by a resurgent Taliban and their Islamist allies.
Five years after the end of the Afghan war and Tony Blair's famous pledge that "this time we will not walk away", it seems the Taliban and al-Qa'ida are back with a vengeance, and one of their main targets is the country's education system.
The campaign is intended, say educationalists and human rights groups, to terrorise families into keeping children uneducated, unemployable, and a recruitment pool for the Islamists.
Teachers are the main targets. Some have been beheaded, others shot in front of their classes. One was killed while attending his father's funeral.
The years of fighting the Russians, the subsequent civil war and Taliban rule has produced a "lost generation" in education. International agencies and aid organisations speak of their difficulties in finding qualified people to run projects.
Now another lost generation is being created. The education system of modern Afghanistan is anathema to the Taliban and Islamist extremists because it is inclusive of girls, and offers secular subjects for study. They have declared that only madrassas (Muslim religious schools) meeting their approval will be allowed to operate.
There are bitter complaints from Afghans that neither their government, nor American and British forces, are doing anything like enough to stop the murderous targeting of children and schools. British commanders say they will address the problem when more troops arrive.
The attack at Kartilaya High, which has 4,200 pupils, about half of them girls, was in the centre of Lashkar Gar, the provincial capital of Helmand, where a massive British force is now being deployed. The school is 15 minutes drive from an American base, now being taken over by the British, and just 500 metres from an Afghan police post. Police did not turn up for half an hour after the shooting. The Americans failed to turn up at all.
Asadullah Ali, 20, who ran a sweet shop at the school, was shot in the neck during the raid two months ago.
"I was very lucky," he said. "It was also very lucky that it was just before the classes broke for the afternoon, otherwise there would have been a lot more children in the playground."
Sabira Ishmail, a 15-year- old girl, knew Ghulam Rasul and his family well. "He came from another province and stayed with his uncle. His cousin still comes to this school. Of course we are very frightened by what has happened," she said.
The killings of teachers are normally preceded by a warning "night letter" from the Islamists ordering schools to be shut down. Retribution is taken if there is a failure to comply.
Haji Abdul Kassim, the director of education for Helmand province, said: "In Helmand alone we have had 18 schools burnt down and 66 others which have been shut down because of threats.
"We are talking about thousands of children being affected. We have also had eight teachers killed.
"I have got one of these night letters threatening to kill me, but what can we do? It is our job to educate the young. If we don't, Afghanistan will always remain one of the poorest countries in the world.
"But why don't the security forces, our own, the Americans and the British protect these schools? What is the point of them being here if they cannot protect even children?"
n Supplies of food, water and electricity were restored to inmates at Kabul's main jail yesterday after prisoners agreed to halt violence, officials said. Security forces were surrounding Pulicharkhi jail, where al-Qa'ida and Taliban prisoners incited a riot over compulsory prison uniforms on Saturday.
Ghulam Rasul was leaving school when two gunmen walked in and opened fire. The 17-year-old died instantly. As other students and teachers fled in terror, the shooting continued. Two more people were hit.
The attack at Kartilaya High School in Lashkar Gar was just one in a series which is crippling Afghanistan's education system. At least 165 schools and colleges have been burnt down or forced to close so far by a resurgent Taliban and their Islamist allies.
Five years after the end of the Afghan war and Tony Blair's famous pledge that "this time we will not walk away", it seems the Taliban and al-Qa'ida are back with a vengeance, and one of their main targets is the country's education system.
The campaign is intended, say educationalists and human rights groups, to terrorise families into keeping children uneducated, unemployable, and a recruitment pool for the Islamists.
Teachers are the main targets. Some have been beheaded, others shot in front of their classes. One was killed while attending his father's funeral.
The years of fighting the Russians, the subsequent civil war and Taliban rule has produced a "lost generation" in education. International agencies and aid organisations speak of their difficulties in finding qualified people to run projects.
Now another lost generation is being created. The education system of modern Afghanistan is anathema to the Taliban and Islamist extremists because it is inclusive of girls, and offers secular subjects for study. They have declared that only madrassas (Muslim religious schools) meeting their approval will be allowed to operate.
There are bitter complaints from Afghans that neither their government, nor American and British forces, are doing anything like enough to stop the murderous targeting of children and schools. British commanders say they will address the problem when more troops arrive.
The attack at Kartilaya High, which has 4,200 pupils, about half of them girls, was in the centre of Lashkar Gar, the provincial capital of Helmand, where a massive British force is now being deployed. The school is 15 minutes drive from an American base, now being taken over by the British, and just 500 metres from an Afghan police post. Police did not turn up for half an hour after the shooting. The Americans failed to turn up at all.
Asadullah Ali, 20, who ran a sweet shop at the school, was shot in the neck during the raid two months ago.
"I was very lucky," he said. "It was also very lucky that it was just before the classes broke for the afternoon, otherwise there would have been a lot more children in the playground."
Sabira Ishmail, a 15-year- old girl, knew Ghulam Rasul and his family well. "He came from another province and stayed with his uncle. His cousin still comes to this school. Of course we are very frightened by what has happened," she said.
The killings of teachers are normally preceded by a warning "night letter" from the Islamists ordering schools to be shut down. Retribution is taken if there is a failure to comply.
Haji Abdul Kassim, the director of education for Helmand province, said: "In Helmand alone we have had 18 schools burnt down and 66 others which have been shut down because of threats.
"We are talking about thousands of children being affected. We have also had eight teachers killed.
"I have got one of these night letters threatening to kill me, but what can we do? It is our job to educate the young. If we don't, Afghanistan will always remain one of the poorest countries in the world.
"But why don't the security forces, our own, the Americans and the British protect these schools? What is the point of them being here if they cannot protect even children?"
Supplies of food, water and electricity were restored to inmates at Kabul's main jail yesterday after prisoners agreed to halt violence, officials said. Security forces were surrounding Pulicharkhi jail, where al-Qa'ida and Taliban prisoners incited a riot over compulsory prison uniforms on Saturday.
------------------------------
Citation: Kim Sengupta. "Taliban attacks on schools create 'lost generation'," The Independent, UK, 28 February 2006.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article348185.ece
------------------------------
The Independent, UK, 28 February 2006
Ghulam Rasul was leaving school when two gunmen walked in and opened fire. The 17-year-old died instantly. As other students and teachers fled in terror, the shooting continued. Two more people were hit.
The attack at Kartilaya High School in Lashkar Gar was just one in a series which is crippling Afghanistan's education system. At least 165 schools and colleges have been burnt down or forced to close so far by a resurgent Taliban and their Islamist allies.
Five years after the end of the Afghan war and Tony Blair's famous pledge that "this time we will not walk away", it seems the Taliban and al-Qa'ida are back with a vengeance, and one of their main targets is the country's education system.
The campaign is intended, say educationalists and human rights groups, to terrorise families into keeping children uneducated, unemployable, and a recruitment pool for the Islamists.
Teachers are the main targets. Some have been beheaded, others shot in front of their classes. One was killed while attending his father's funeral.
The years of fighting the Russians, the subsequent civil war and Taliban rule has produced a "lost generation" in education. International agencies and aid organisations speak of their difficulties in finding qualified people to run projects.
Now another lost generation is being created. The education system of modern Afghanistan is anathema to the Taliban and Islamist extremists because it is inclusive of girls, and offers secular subjects for study. They have declared that only madrassas (Muslim religious schools) meeting their approval will be allowed to operate.
There are bitter complaints from Afghans that neither their government, nor American and British forces, are doing anything like enough to stop the murderous targeting of children and schools. British commanders say they will address the problem when more troops arrive.
The attack at Kartilaya High, which has 4,200 pupils, about half of them girls, was in the centre of Lashkar Gar, the provincial capital of Helmand, where a massive British force is now being deployed. The school is 15 minutes drive from an American base, now being taken over by the British, and just 500 metres from an Afghan police post. Police did not turn up for half an hour after the shooting. The Americans failed to turn up at all.
Asadullah Ali, 20, who ran a sweet shop at the school, was shot in the neck during the raid two months ago.
"I was very lucky," he said. "It was also very lucky that it was just before the classes broke for the afternoon, otherwise there would have been a lot more children in the playground."
Sabira Ishmail, a 15-year- old girl, knew Ghulam Rasul and his family well. "He came from another province and stayed with his uncle. His cousin still comes to this school. Of course we are very frightened by what has happened," she said.
The killings of teachers are normally preceded by a warning "night letter" from the Islamists ordering schools to be shut down. Retribution is taken if there is a failure to comply.
Haji Abdul Kassim, the director of education for Helmand province, said: "In Helmand alone we have had 18 schools burnt down and 66 others which have been shut down because of threats.
"We are talking about thousands of children being affected. We have also had eight teachers killed.
"I have got one of these night letters threatening to kill me, but what can we do? It is our job to educate the young. If we don't, Afghanistan will always remain one of the poorest countries in the world.
"But why don't the security forces, our own, the Americans and the British protect these schools? What is the point of them being here if they cannot protect even children?"
n Supplies of food, water and electricity were restored to inmates at Kabul's main jail yesterday after prisoners agreed to halt violence, officials said. Security forces were surrounding Pulicharkhi jail, where al-Qa'ida and Taliban prisoners incited a riot over compulsory prison uniforms on Saturday.
Ghulam Rasul was leaving school when two gunmen walked in and opened fire. The 17-year-old died instantly. As other students and teachers fled in terror, the shooting continued. Two more people were hit.
The attack at Kartilaya High School in Lashkar Gar was just one in a series which is crippling Afghanistan's education system. At least 165 schools and colleges have been burnt down or forced to close so far by a resurgent Taliban and their Islamist allies.
Five years after the end of the Afghan war and Tony Blair's famous pledge that "this time we will not walk away", it seems the Taliban and al-Qa'ida are back with a vengeance, and one of their main targets is the country's education system.
The campaign is intended, say educationalists and human rights groups, to terrorise families into keeping children uneducated, unemployable, and a recruitment pool for the Islamists.
Teachers are the main targets. Some have been beheaded, others shot in front of their classes. One was killed while attending his father's funeral.
The years of fighting the Russians, the subsequent civil war and Taliban rule has produced a "lost generation" in education. International agencies and aid organisations speak of their difficulties in finding qualified people to run projects.
Now another lost generation is being created. The education system of modern Afghanistan is anathema to the Taliban and Islamist extremists because it is inclusive of girls, and offers secular subjects for study. They have declared that only madrassas (Muslim religious schools) meeting their approval will be allowed to operate.
There are bitter complaints from Afghans that neither their government, nor American and British forces, are doing anything like enough to stop the murderous targeting of children and schools. British commanders say they will address the problem when more troops arrive.
The attack at Kartilaya High, which has 4,200 pupils, about half of them girls, was in the centre of Lashkar Gar, the provincial capital of Helmand, where a massive British force is now being deployed. The school is 15 minutes drive from an American base, now being taken over by the British, and just 500 metres from an Afghan police post. Police did not turn up for half an hour after the shooting. The Americans failed to turn up at all.
Asadullah Ali, 20, who ran a sweet shop at the school, was shot in the neck during the raid two months ago.
"I was very lucky," he said. "It was also very lucky that it was just before the classes broke for the afternoon, otherwise there would have been a lot more children in the playground."
Sabira Ishmail, a 15-year- old girl, knew Ghulam Rasul and his family well. "He came from another province and stayed with his uncle. His cousin still comes to this school. Of course we are very frightened by what has happened," she said.
The killings of teachers are normally preceded by a warning "night letter" from the Islamists ordering schools to be shut down. Retribution is taken if there is a failure to comply.
Haji Abdul Kassim, the director of education for Helmand province, said: "In Helmand alone we have had 18 schools burnt down and 66 others which have been shut down because of threats.
"We are talking about thousands of children being affected. We have also had eight teachers killed.
"I have got one of these night letters threatening to kill me, but what can we do? It is our job to educate the young. If we don't, Afghanistan will always remain one of the poorest countries in the world.
"But why don't the security forces, our own, the Americans and the British protect these schools? What is the point of them being here if they cannot protect even children?"
Supplies of food, water and electricity were restored to inmates at Kabul's main jail yesterday after prisoners agreed to halt violence, officials said. Security forces were surrounding Pulicharkhi jail, where al-Qa'ida and Taliban prisoners incited a riot over compulsory prison uniforms on Saturday.
------------------------------
Citation: Kim Sengupta. "Taliban attacks on schools create 'lost generation'," The Independent, UK, 28 February 2006.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article348185.ece
------------------------------
Afghans Reject a Single Vote to Approve Karzai Cabinet
By Abdul Waheed Wafa and Carlotta Gall
The New York Times, 28 February 2006
KABUL, Afghanistan, Feb. 27 — The Afghan Parliament decided Monday to confirm cabinet ministers individually, rather than to vote on the president's cabinet as a whole, setting the stage for a long and tortuous confirmation process.
The vote, 130 to 90, was decided by secret ballot, after a vote by show of hands last month was questioned by supporters of President Hamid Karzai.
Across town, at the country's main high-security prison, Pul-i-Charkhi, a tense standoff with rioting prisoners accused of being fighters for the ousted Taliban regime continued.
The leader of the upper house of Parliament, Sebaghatullah Mojadeddi, and senior clerics visited the prison to try to mediate, but so far without success. At least 5 inmates were killed and 30 wounded when guards opened fire during an escape attempt late Saturday.
The prisoners had demanded to speak to Mr. Mojadeddi because he is the head of the peace and reconciliation commission, which negotiates the release of Taliban prisoners from American custody on condition they return to peaceful life. The director of the prison, Gen. Abdul Salaam Bakhshi, said that the leaders of the riot had Taliban ties and were demanding an amnesty.
On Monday, prisoners remained in control of the cellblock where the riots began on Saturday night, and still had not handed over those killed and wounded in the first clash with prison guards.
Confirmation of cabinet ministers and senior appointments and budget approval are among the few important powers granted to Afghanistan's Parliament under the 2004 Constitution.
In Parliament on Monday, in a debate that lasted all day, supporters of the current strong-president system contended that confirming ministers individually would bring regional and ethnic influences to bear on appointments and cause long delays.
"It would take maybe four months to approve a cabinet and voting would be based on tribe, language and region," said Safia Sidiqi, a representative from the eastern province of Nangarhar. Ministers would not be selected according to merit, but according to the support they can muster among Parliament members, she said.
Mr. Karzai has often been criticized, though, for juggling cabinet appointments in order to please all factions and regions.
The legislators made it clear on Monday that they wanted cabinet ministers to answer to Parliament for their actions. Kabir Ahmad Ranjbar, a Kabul lawmaker, accused Mr. Karzai of interfering in parliamentary affairs, saying, "If the voting is for a package of ministers, the cabinet will again be a coalition cabinet, and those who have influence will be ministers and merit will be ignored."
Abdul Waheed Wafa reported from Kabul for this article, and Carlotta Gall from Islamabad, Pakistan. Sultan M. Munadi contributed reporting from Pul-i-Charkhi.
-----------------------------
Citation: Abdul Waheed Wafa and Carlotta Gall. "Afghans Reject a Single Vote to Approve Karzai Cabinet," The New York Times, 28 February 2006.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/international/asia/28afghan.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
-----------------------------
The New York Times, 28 February 2006
KABUL, Afghanistan, Feb. 27 — The Afghan Parliament decided Monday to confirm cabinet ministers individually, rather than to vote on the president's cabinet as a whole, setting the stage for a long and tortuous confirmation process.
The vote, 130 to 90, was decided by secret ballot, after a vote by show of hands last month was questioned by supporters of President Hamid Karzai.
Across town, at the country's main high-security prison, Pul-i-Charkhi, a tense standoff with rioting prisoners accused of being fighters for the ousted Taliban regime continued.
The leader of the upper house of Parliament, Sebaghatullah Mojadeddi, and senior clerics visited the prison to try to mediate, but so far without success. At least 5 inmates were killed and 30 wounded when guards opened fire during an escape attempt late Saturday.
The prisoners had demanded to speak to Mr. Mojadeddi because he is the head of the peace and reconciliation commission, which negotiates the release of Taliban prisoners from American custody on condition they return to peaceful life. The director of the prison, Gen. Abdul Salaam Bakhshi, said that the leaders of the riot had Taliban ties and were demanding an amnesty.
On Monday, prisoners remained in control of the cellblock where the riots began on Saturday night, and still had not handed over those killed and wounded in the first clash with prison guards.
Confirmation of cabinet ministers and senior appointments and budget approval are among the few important powers granted to Afghanistan's Parliament under the 2004 Constitution.
In Parliament on Monday, in a debate that lasted all day, supporters of the current strong-president system contended that confirming ministers individually would bring regional and ethnic influences to bear on appointments and cause long delays.
"It would take maybe four months to approve a cabinet and voting would be based on tribe, language and region," said Safia Sidiqi, a representative from the eastern province of Nangarhar. Ministers would not be selected according to merit, but according to the support they can muster among Parliament members, she said.
Mr. Karzai has often been criticized, though, for juggling cabinet appointments in order to please all factions and regions.
The legislators made it clear on Monday that they wanted cabinet ministers to answer to Parliament for their actions. Kabir Ahmad Ranjbar, a Kabul lawmaker, accused Mr. Karzai of interfering in parliamentary affairs, saying, "If the voting is for a package of ministers, the cabinet will again be a coalition cabinet, and those who have influence will be ministers and merit will be ignored."
Abdul Waheed Wafa reported from Kabul for this article, and Carlotta Gall from Islamabad, Pakistan. Sultan M. Munadi contributed reporting from Pul-i-Charkhi.
-----------------------------
Citation: Abdul Waheed Wafa and Carlotta Gall. "Afghans Reject a Single Vote to Approve Karzai Cabinet," The New York Times, 28 February 2006.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/28/international/asia/28afghan.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
-----------------------------
Postwar Iraq Chaos Blamed on Poor Planning
By Pauline Jelinek
The Associated Press, 27 February 2006
Poor prewar planning left the United States without enough skilled workers to efficiently rebuild Iraq's economy and public works, according to a report issued Monday.
The study by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction provided a new explanation for the lagging reconstruction effort. Surveys by the Bush administration and congressional auditors have blamed insurgent attacks and the high cost of security.
Thanks to inadequate planning, the report said, early occupation officials lacked enough reconstruction staffers who knew what they were doing.
It recommended the government establish a "civilian reserve corps" to deploy around the world for postwar rebuilding.
While reconstruction has cost American taxpayers about $30 billion three years after the overthrown of Saddam Hussein, the country still lacks reliable electricity, water and other services. Monday's report — covering the time the country was under control of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority — said early efforts were greatly affected by personnel problems.
"Pre-war reconstruction planning assumed that Iraq's bureaucracy would go back to work when the fighting stopped," it said. "When it became clear that the Iraqi bureaucracy was in widespread disarray," occupation authorities "had to find coalition personnel to perform these tasks."
"The U.S. government workforce planning for Iraq's reconstruction suffered from a poorly structured, ad-hoc personnel management processes," the report said, calling hiring practices "haphazard."
At one point, officials asked civilian and military agencies for personnel "but did not prepare detailed job descriptions because of time constraints," the report said.
In late summer 2003, a new recruiting team was set up in the Pentagon's White House Liaison Office, based in part on the "transition team" model used to staff new presidential administrations. The team quickly hired hundreds of new temporary employees, "but some possessed what proved to be inconsistent skill sets," the report said.
It also criticized the Bush administration for failing to get government employees from outside the State and Defense departments to work in Iraq.
And it said many people who were supposed to work there a year ran up so much overtime that they hit salary caps in six to eight months — and left.
"You had these 90-day workers getting their tickets punched that indicated, 'I've been to Baghdad,'" said a former senior U.S. official in Iraq who is quoted in the report.
The episode "demonstrated the U.S. government's critical need for a reserve civilian corps of talented professionals, with the proper expertise, willing to work in a hostile environment during post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction periods," the report said. Legislation to form such a corps was introduced last year but did not pass.
"The United States can deploy military people quite easily," said James P. Mitchell, spokesman for the inspector general's office. "But when they need to deploy civilians, it's very difficult and complicated and there is no system to do it."
--------------------------------
Citation: Pauline Jelinek. "Postwar Iraq Chaos Blamed on Poor Planning," The Associated Press, 27 February 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060228/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_iraq_reconstruction
--------------------------------
The Associated Press, 27 February 2006
Poor prewar planning left the United States without enough skilled workers to efficiently rebuild Iraq's economy and public works, according to a report issued Monday.
The study by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction provided a new explanation for the lagging reconstruction effort. Surveys by the Bush administration and congressional auditors have blamed insurgent attacks and the high cost of security.
Thanks to inadequate planning, the report said, early occupation officials lacked enough reconstruction staffers who knew what they were doing.
It recommended the government establish a "civilian reserve corps" to deploy around the world for postwar rebuilding.
While reconstruction has cost American taxpayers about $30 billion three years after the overthrown of Saddam Hussein, the country still lacks reliable electricity, water and other services. Monday's report — covering the time the country was under control of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority — said early efforts were greatly affected by personnel problems.
"Pre-war reconstruction planning assumed that Iraq's bureaucracy would go back to work when the fighting stopped," it said. "When it became clear that the Iraqi bureaucracy was in widespread disarray," occupation authorities "had to find coalition personnel to perform these tasks."
"The U.S. government workforce planning for Iraq's reconstruction suffered from a poorly structured, ad-hoc personnel management processes," the report said, calling hiring practices "haphazard."
At one point, officials asked civilian and military agencies for personnel "but did not prepare detailed job descriptions because of time constraints," the report said.
In late summer 2003, a new recruiting team was set up in the Pentagon's White House Liaison Office, based in part on the "transition team" model used to staff new presidential administrations. The team quickly hired hundreds of new temporary employees, "but some possessed what proved to be inconsistent skill sets," the report said.
It also criticized the Bush administration for failing to get government employees from outside the State and Defense departments to work in Iraq.
And it said many people who were supposed to work there a year ran up so much overtime that they hit salary caps in six to eight months — and left.
"You had these 90-day workers getting their tickets punched that indicated, 'I've been to Baghdad,'" said a former senior U.S. official in Iraq who is quoted in the report.
The episode "demonstrated the U.S. government's critical need for a reserve civilian corps of talented professionals, with the proper expertise, willing to work in a hostile environment during post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction periods," the report said. Legislation to form such a corps was introduced last year but did not pass.
"The United States can deploy military people quite easily," said James P. Mitchell, spokesman for the inspector general's office. "But when they need to deploy civilians, it's very difficult and complicated and there is no system to do it."
--------------------------------
Citation: Pauline Jelinek. "Postwar Iraq Chaos Blamed on Poor Planning," The Associated Press, 27 February 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060228/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_iraq_reconstruction
--------------------------------
Iraq Violence Puts Troop Cuts in Doubt
The U.S. military needs to decide in coming weeks whether it can recommend an anticipated substantial reduction in force levels.
By Mark Mazzetti
Los Angeles Times, 28 February 2006
WASHINGTON — The recent explosion of violence in Iraq is forcing a debate inside the Pentagon about whether the U.S. military can proceed with plans to cut the number of troops in Iraq, Defense officials said Monday.
The violence came at a crucial time for the U.S. military: Top generals must decide within weeks whether to carry out a long-anticipated reduction in American troops this summer. Threats of civil war in the country have raised questions about the wisdom of a troop drawdown in the next few months.
"One perspective certainly is that with so much turmoil, how can you possibly think about drawing down at this point?" said a senior Defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
For nearly a year, senior commanders have said that political progress in Baghdad and the development of new Iraqi army units could lead to a substantial U.S. troop reduction this year. They have pointed to mid-2006 as a pivotal period, making the decisions on troop levels a telling indicator of progress.
Defense officials said that Army Gens. John P. Abizaid and George W. Casey, the top commanders of U.S. forces in Iraq, soon would travel to Washington to advise President Bush on future troop levels. Because the moves under consideration will be critical to overall U.S. progress in Iraq this year, officials said Abizaid and Casey would brief the president in person.
"The president wants to hear it directly from the commanders, so he can get the straight scoop," the senior Defense official said.
The immediate question is whether the White House should cancel the expected deployments of a handful of combat units, a decision that would mean a midsummer reduction in the overall U.S. military presence in Iraq by thousands of troops.
Commanders must decide on force levels several months in advance of actual deployments, because of the time needed to ship military equipment and enable troops to prepare for an extended combat tour.
Defense officials said they were still optimistic that reductions could take place. One positive development they cited from the past week's violence was that Iraqi army units had been largely successful in keeping the ethnic strife from escalating into a full-blown civil war.
Both Abizaid and Casey have argued in the past that a U.S. troop reduction would help reduce the Iraqis' dependency on American forces. Delaying a U.S. withdrawal, some argue, might prevent Iraqi units from taking charge of security throughout the country.
"If you keep bringing in American forces, the Iraqis are never going to step up to the plate," said a second Defense official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
At the same time, U.S. officials are concerned that armed sectarian militias are gaining power inside Iraq, and that many Iraqi police units are more loyal to ethnic and religious leaders than to the national government. Even as the capability of the Iraqi army grows, the influence of the militias could threaten the army's ability to keep Iraq from sliding into further ethnic conflict.
Several U.S. combat brigades, including units of the Army's 1st, 2nd and 25th Infantry Divisions, are making final preparations for deployment to Iraq this summer. Abizaid and Casey could recommend that these deployments be canceled to reduce the overall U.S. troop presence in the country.
Also under discussion is the future of one brigade of the Army's 1st Armored Division, currently stationed in the Kuwaiti desert as a "ready force" that could move into Iraq if the security situation worsened. Military planners had originally intended to pull the brigade out of Kuwait by the summer, but the unit's deployment could be extended because of the recent violence in Iraq.
With the Iraq war likely to be one of the key issues in November's midterm elections, lawmakers are increasing pressure on the administration to show progress by cutting the number of U.S. troops stationed in the country. But Bush has long insisted that decisions about troop levels in Iraq will be based solely on the recommendations of his generals, rather than on any political calculations.
Citing progress in training Iraqi soldiers and police units, Bush said during his State of the Union address in January that "we should be able to further decrease our troop levels — but those decisions will be made by our military commanders, not by politicians in Washington, D.C."
The U.S. military presence in Iraq has already been cut from the 155,000 troops the Pentagon assigned late last year to provide security for parliamentary elections. There are about 130,000 U.S. troops stationed in Iraq, and Pentagon officials have hoped to bring the number down to approximately 100,000 by year's end.
On Sunday, on CBS's "Face the Nation," White House national security advisor Stephen Hadley said it was unclear whether the recent violence would dim the Bush administration's hopes for a continued troop reduction.
Some outside analysts say the discussion in Washington of a troop drawdown has only emboldened insurgents, leading them to declare victory on jihadist websites and step up their attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops.
"The more we talk about withdrawals, the more insurgents assert themselves," said Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official and U.S. advisor in Iraq, now at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. "Perhaps now is not the time to be bringing troops home."
-----------------------
Citation: Mark Mazzetti. "Iraq Violence Puts Troop Cuts in Doubt," Los Angeles Times, 28 February 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-troops28feb28,1,6627550.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
-----------------------
By Mark Mazzetti
Los Angeles Times, 28 February 2006
WASHINGTON — The recent explosion of violence in Iraq is forcing a debate inside the Pentagon about whether the U.S. military can proceed with plans to cut the number of troops in Iraq, Defense officials said Monday.
The violence came at a crucial time for the U.S. military: Top generals must decide within weeks whether to carry out a long-anticipated reduction in American troops this summer. Threats of civil war in the country have raised questions about the wisdom of a troop drawdown in the next few months.
"One perspective certainly is that with so much turmoil, how can you possibly think about drawing down at this point?" said a senior Defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
For nearly a year, senior commanders have said that political progress in Baghdad and the development of new Iraqi army units could lead to a substantial U.S. troop reduction this year. They have pointed to mid-2006 as a pivotal period, making the decisions on troop levels a telling indicator of progress.
Defense officials said that Army Gens. John P. Abizaid and George W. Casey, the top commanders of U.S. forces in Iraq, soon would travel to Washington to advise President Bush on future troop levels. Because the moves under consideration will be critical to overall U.S. progress in Iraq this year, officials said Abizaid and Casey would brief the president in person.
"The president wants to hear it directly from the commanders, so he can get the straight scoop," the senior Defense official said.
The immediate question is whether the White House should cancel the expected deployments of a handful of combat units, a decision that would mean a midsummer reduction in the overall U.S. military presence in Iraq by thousands of troops.
Commanders must decide on force levels several months in advance of actual deployments, because of the time needed to ship military equipment and enable troops to prepare for an extended combat tour.
Defense officials said they were still optimistic that reductions could take place. One positive development they cited from the past week's violence was that Iraqi army units had been largely successful in keeping the ethnic strife from escalating into a full-blown civil war.
Both Abizaid and Casey have argued in the past that a U.S. troop reduction would help reduce the Iraqis' dependency on American forces. Delaying a U.S. withdrawal, some argue, might prevent Iraqi units from taking charge of security throughout the country.
"If you keep bringing in American forces, the Iraqis are never going to step up to the plate," said a second Defense official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
At the same time, U.S. officials are concerned that armed sectarian militias are gaining power inside Iraq, and that many Iraqi police units are more loyal to ethnic and religious leaders than to the national government. Even as the capability of the Iraqi army grows, the influence of the militias could threaten the army's ability to keep Iraq from sliding into further ethnic conflict.
Several U.S. combat brigades, including units of the Army's 1st, 2nd and 25th Infantry Divisions, are making final preparations for deployment to Iraq this summer. Abizaid and Casey could recommend that these deployments be canceled to reduce the overall U.S. troop presence in the country.
Also under discussion is the future of one brigade of the Army's 1st Armored Division, currently stationed in the Kuwaiti desert as a "ready force" that could move into Iraq if the security situation worsened. Military planners had originally intended to pull the brigade out of Kuwait by the summer, but the unit's deployment could be extended because of the recent violence in Iraq.
With the Iraq war likely to be one of the key issues in November's midterm elections, lawmakers are increasing pressure on the administration to show progress by cutting the number of U.S. troops stationed in the country. But Bush has long insisted that decisions about troop levels in Iraq will be based solely on the recommendations of his generals, rather than on any political calculations.
Citing progress in training Iraqi soldiers and police units, Bush said during his State of the Union address in January that "we should be able to further decrease our troop levels — but those decisions will be made by our military commanders, not by politicians in Washington, D.C."
The U.S. military presence in Iraq has already been cut from the 155,000 troops the Pentagon assigned late last year to provide security for parliamentary elections. There are about 130,000 U.S. troops stationed in Iraq, and Pentagon officials have hoped to bring the number down to approximately 100,000 by year's end.
On Sunday, on CBS's "Face the Nation," White House national security advisor Stephen Hadley said it was unclear whether the recent violence would dim the Bush administration's hopes for a continued troop reduction.
Some outside analysts say the discussion in Washington of a troop drawdown has only emboldened insurgents, leading them to declare victory on jihadist websites and step up their attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops.
"The more we talk about withdrawals, the more insurgents assert themselves," said Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official and U.S. advisor in Iraq, now at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. "Perhaps now is not the time to be bringing troops home."
-----------------------
Citation: Mark Mazzetti. "Iraq Violence Puts Troop Cuts in Doubt," Los Angeles Times, 28 February 2006.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/complete/la-fg-troops28feb28,1,6627550.story?coll=la-iraq-complete
-----------------------
27 February 2006
A Growing Afghan Prison Rivals Bleak Guantánamo
By Tim Golden and Eric Schmitt
The New York Times, 26 February 2006
While an international debate rages over the future of the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terror suspects in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges.
Pentagon officials have often described the detention site at Bagram, a cavernous former machine shop on an American air base 40 miles north of Kabul, as a screening center. They said most of the detainees were Afghans who might eventually be released under an amnesty program or transferred to an Afghan prison that is to be built with American aid.
But some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years. And unlike those at Guantánamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as "enemy combatants," military officials said.
Privately, some administration officials acknowledge that the situation at Bagram has increasingly come to resemble the legal void that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June 2004 affirming the right of prisoners at Guantánamo to challenge their detention in United States courts.
While Guantánamo offers carefully scripted tours for members of Congress and journalists, Bagram has operated in rigorous secrecy since it opened in 2002. It bars outside visitors except for the International Red Cross and refuses to make public the names of those held there. The prison may not be photographed, even from a distance.
From the accounts of former detainees, military officials and soldiers who served there, a picture emerges of a place that is in many ways rougher and more bleak than its counterpart in Cuba. Men are held by the dozen in large wire cages, the detainees and military sources said, sleeping on the floor on foam mats and, until about a year ago, often using plastic buckets for latrines. Before recent renovations, they rarely saw daylight except for brief visits to a small exercise yard.
"Bagram was never meant to be a long-term facility, and now it's a long-term facility without the money or resources," said one Defense Department official who has toured the detention center. Comparing the prison with Guantánamo, the official added, "Anyone who has been to Bagram would tell you it's worse."
Former detainees said the renovations had improved conditions somewhat, and human rights groups said reports of abuse had steadily declined there since 2003. Nonetheless, the Pentagon's chief adviser on detainee issues, Charles D. Stimson, declined to be interviewed on Bagram, as did senior detention officials at the United States Central Command, which oversees military operations in Afghanistan.
The military's chief spokesman in Afghanistan, Col. James R. Yonts, also refused to discuss detainee conditions, other than to say repeatedly that his command was "committed to treating detainees humanely, and providing the best possible living conditions and medical care in accordance with the principles of the Geneva Convention."
Other military and administration officials said the growing detainee population at Bagram, which rose from about 100 prisoners at the start of 2004 to as many as 600 at times last year, according to military figures, was in part a result of a Bush administration decision to shut off the flow of detainees into Guantánamo after the Supreme Court ruled that those prisoners had some basic due-process rights. The question of whether those same rights apply to detainees in Bagram has not been tested in court.
Until the court ruling, Bagram functioned as a central clearing house for the global fight against terror. Military and intelligence personnel there sifted through captured Afghan rebels and suspected terrorists seized in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, sending the most valuable and dangerous to Guantánamo for extensive interrogation, and generally releasing the rest.
But according to interviews with current and former administration officials, the National Security Council effectively halted the movement of new detainees into Guantánamo at a cabinet-level meeting at the White House on Sept. 14, 2004.
Wary of further angering Guantánamo's critics, the council authorized a final shipment of 10 detainees eight days later from Bagram, the officials said. But it also indicated that it wanted to review and approve any Defense Department proposals for further transfers. Despite repeated requests from military officials in Afghanistan and one formal recommendation by a Pentagon working group, no such proposals have been considered, officials said.
"Guantánamo was a lightning rod," said a former senior administration official who participated in the discussions and who, like many of those interviewed, would discuss the matter in detail only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy surrounding it. "For some reason, people did not have a problem with Bagram. It was in Afghanistan."
Yet Bagram's expansion, which was largely fueled by growing numbers of detainees seized on the battlefield and a bureaucratic backlog in releasing many of the Afghan prisoners, also underscores the Bush administration's continuing inability to resolve where and how it will hold more valuable terror suspects.
Military officials with access to intelligence reporting on the subject said about 40 of Bagram's prisoners were Pakistanis, Arabs and other foreigners; some were previously held by the C.I.A. in secret interrogation centers in Afghanistan and other countries. Officials said the intelligence agency had been reluctant to send some of those prisoners on to Guantánamo because of the possibility that their C.I.A. custody could eventually be scrutinized in court.
Defense Department officials said the C.I.A.'s effort to unload some detainees from its so-called black sites had provoked tension among some officials at the Pentagon, who have frequently objected to taking responsibility for terror suspects cast off by the intelligence agency. The Defense Department "doesn't want to be the dumping ground," one senior official familiar with the interagency debates said. "There just aren't any good options."
A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment.
Conditions at Bagram
The rising number of detainees at Bagram has been noted periodically by the military and documented by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which does not make public other aspects of its findings. But because the military does not identify the prisoners or release other information on their detention, it had not previously been clear that some detainees were being held there for such long periods.
The prison rolls would be even higher, officials noted, were it not for a Pentagon decision in early 2005 to delegate the authority to release them from the deputy secretary of defense to the military's Central Command, which oversees the 19,000 American troops in Afghanistan, and to the ground commander there.
Since January 2005, military commanders in Afghanistan have released about 350 detainees from Bagram in conjunction with an Afghan national reconciliation program, officials said. Even so, one Pentagon official said the current average stay of prisoners at Bagram was 14.5 months.
Officials said most of the current Bagram detainees were captured during American military operations in Afghanistan, primarily in the country's restive south, beginning in the spring of 2004.
"We ran a couple of large-scale operations in the spring of 2004, during which we captured a large number of enemy combatants," said Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson, who was the ground commander for American troops in Afghanistan at the time. In subsequent remarks he added, "Our system for releasing detainees whose intelligence value turned out to be negligible did not keep pace with the numbers we were bringing in."
General Olson and other military officials said the growth at Bagram had also been a consequence of the closing of a smaller detention center at Kandahar and efforts by the military around the same time to move detainees more quickly out of "forward operating bases," in the Afghan provinces, where international human rights groups had cited widespread abuses.
At Bagram, reports of abuses have markedly declined since the violent deaths of two Afghan men held there in December 2002, Afghan and foreign human rights officials said.
After an Army investigation, the practices found to have caused those two deaths — the chaining of detainees by the arms to the ceilings of their cells and the use of knee strikes to the legs of disobedient prisoners by guards — were halted by early 2003. Other abusive methods, like the use of barking attack dogs to frighten new prisoners and the handcuffing of detainees to cell doors to punish them for talking, were phased out more gradually, military officials and former detainees said.
Human rights officials and former detainees said living conditions at the detention center had also improved.
Faced with serious overcrowding in 2004, the military initially built some temporary prison quarters and began refurbishing the main prison building at Bagram, a former aircraft-machine shop built by Soviet troops during their occupation of the country in the 1980's.
Corrals surrounded by stacked razor wire that had served as general-population cells gave way to less-forbidding wire pens that generally hold no more than 15 detainees, military officials said. The cut-off metal drums used as toilets were eventually replaced with flush toilets.
Last March, a nine-bed infirmary opened, and months later a new wing was built. The expansion brought improved conditions for the more than 250 prisoners who have been housed there, officials said.
Still, even the Afghan villagers released from Bagram over the past year tend to describe it as a stark, forsaken place.
"It was like a cage," said one former detainee, Hajji Lalai Mama, a 60-year-old tribal elder from the Spinbaldak district of southern Afghanistan who was released last June after nearly two years. Referring to a zoo in Pakistan, he added, "Like the cages in Karachi where they put animals: it was like that."
Guantánamo, which once kept detainees in wire-mesh cages, now houses them in an elaborate complex of concrete and steel buildings with a hospital, recreation yards and isolation areas. At Bagram, detainees are stripped on arrival and given orange uniforms to wear. They wash in collective showers and live under bright indoor lighting that is dimmed for only a few hours at night.
Abdul Nabi, a 24-year-old mechanic released on Dec. 15 after nine months, said some detainees frequently protested the conditions, banging on their cages and sometimes refusing to eat. He added that infractions of the rules were dealt with unsparingly: hours handcuffed in a smaller cell for minor offenses, and days in isolation for repeated transgressions.
"We were not allowed to talk very much," he said in an interview.
The Rights of Detainees
The most basic complaint of those released was that they had been wrongly detained in the first place. In many cases, former prisoners said they had been denounced by village enemies or arrested by the local police after demanding bribes they could not pay.
Human rights lawyers generally contend that the Supreme Court decision on Guantánamo, in the case of Rasul v. Bush, could also apply to detainees at Bagram. But lawyers working on behalf of the Guantánamo detainees have been reluctant to take cases from Bagram while the reach of the Supreme Court ruling, which is now the subject of further litigation, remains uncertain.
As at Guantánamo, the military has instituted procedures at Bagram intended to ensure that the detainees are in fact enemy combatants. Yet the review boards at Bagram give fewer rights to the prisoners than those used in Cuba, which have been criticized by human rights officials as kangaroo courts.
The two sets of panels that review the status of detainees at Guantánamo assign military advocates to work with detainees in preparing cases. Detainees are allowed to hear and respond to the allegations against them, call witnesses and request evidence. Only a small fraction of the hundreds of panels have concluded that the accused should be released.
The Bagram panels, called Enemy Combatant Review Boards, offer no such guarantees. Reviews are conducted after 90 days and at least annually thereafter, but detainees are not informed of the accusations against them, have no advocate and cannot appear before the board, officials said. "The detainee is not involved at all," one official familiar with the process said.
An official of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Shamsullah Ahmadzai, noted that the Afghan police, prosecutors and the courts were all limited by law in how long they could hold criminal suspects.
"The Americans are detaining people without any legal procedures," Mr. Ahmadzai said in an interview in Kabul. "Prisoners do not have the opportunity to demonstrate their innocence."
Under a diplomatic arrangement reached last year after more than a year of negotiations, Afghan officials have agreed to take over custody of the roughly 450 Afghan detainees now at Bagram and another 100 Afghans held at Guantánamo once American-financed contractors refurbish a block of a decrepit former Soviet jail near Kabul as a high-security prison.
Because of the $10 million prison- construction project and an accompanying American program to train Afghan prison guards, both of which are to be completed in about a year, military officials in the region have abandoned any thought of sending any of the Afghan detainees at Bagram to Guantánamo. Still, many details of the deal remain uncertain, including when the new prison will be completed, which Afghan ministry will run it and how the detainees may be prosecuted in Afghan courts.
Pentagon officials said some part of the Bagram prison would probably continue to operate, holding the roughly 40 non-Afghan detainees there as well as others likely to be captured by American or NATO forces in continuing operations.
Prisoner Transfers Stalled
Until now, military officials at both Bagram and Guantánamo have been frustrated in their efforts to engineer the transfer to Cuba of another group of the most dangerous and valuable non-Afghan detainees held at Bagram, Pentagon officials said.
Three officials said commanders at Bagram first proposed moving about a dozen detainees to Guantánamo in late 2004 and then reiterated the request in early 2005. In an unusual step last spring, the officials added, intelligence specialists based at Guantánamo traveled to Bagram to assess the need for the transfer.
But as Central Command officials were forwarding a formal request to the Pentagon for the transfer of about a dozen high-level detainees, at least one of them, Omar al-Faruq, a former operative of Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia, escaped from the Bagram prison with three other men. Mr. Faruq had first been taken to Bagram by C.I.A. operatives in late summer 2002, but was removed from the prison about a month later, a soldier who served there said.
Two officials familiar with intelligence reports on the escape said that last July, after Mr. Faruq had been returned to Bagram by the C.I.A., he and the other men slipped out of a poorly fenced-in cell and, in the middle of the night, piled up some boxes and climbed through an open transom over one of the doors.
In August, weeks after the escape, a Defense Department working group called the Detainee Assistance Team endorsed the Central Command's recommendation for the transfer of nine Bagram detainees to Guantánamo, two officials familiar with the matter said.
Since then, the recommendation has languished in the Pentagon bureaucracy. Officials said it had apparently been stalled by aides who had declined to forward it to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld out of concern that any new transfers to Guantánamo would stoke international criticism.
"Out of sight, out of mind," one of those officials said of the Bagram detainees.
Carlotta Gall, Ruhullah Khapalwak and Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Afghanistan for this article.
--------------------------------
Citation: Tim Golden and Eric Schmitt. "A Growing Afghan Prison Rivals Bleak Guantánamo," The New York Times, 26 February 2006.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/international/26bagram.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1141056112-J1i8EdMV7chXzxLiUFENDQ
--------------------------------
The New York Times, 26 February 2006
While an international debate rages over the future of the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terror suspects in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges.
Pentagon officials have often described the detention site at Bagram, a cavernous former machine shop on an American air base 40 miles north of Kabul, as a screening center. They said most of the detainees were Afghans who might eventually be released under an amnesty program or transferred to an Afghan prison that is to be built with American aid.
But some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years. And unlike those at Guantánamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as "enemy combatants," military officials said.
Privately, some administration officials acknowledge that the situation at Bagram has increasingly come to resemble the legal void that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June 2004 affirming the right of prisoners at Guantánamo to challenge their detention in United States courts.
While Guantánamo offers carefully scripted tours for members of Congress and journalists, Bagram has operated in rigorous secrecy since it opened in 2002. It bars outside visitors except for the International Red Cross and refuses to make public the names of those held there. The prison may not be photographed, even from a distance.
From the accounts of former detainees, military officials and soldiers who served there, a picture emerges of a place that is in many ways rougher and more bleak than its counterpart in Cuba. Men are held by the dozen in large wire cages, the detainees and military sources said, sleeping on the floor on foam mats and, until about a year ago, often using plastic buckets for latrines. Before recent renovations, they rarely saw daylight except for brief visits to a small exercise yard.
"Bagram was never meant to be a long-term facility, and now it's a long-term facility without the money or resources," said one Defense Department official who has toured the detention center. Comparing the prison with Guantánamo, the official added, "Anyone who has been to Bagram would tell you it's worse."
Former detainees said the renovations had improved conditions somewhat, and human rights groups said reports of abuse had steadily declined there since 2003. Nonetheless, the Pentagon's chief adviser on detainee issues, Charles D. Stimson, declined to be interviewed on Bagram, as did senior detention officials at the United States Central Command, which oversees military operations in Afghanistan.
The military's chief spokesman in Afghanistan, Col. James R. Yonts, also refused to discuss detainee conditions, other than to say repeatedly that his command was "committed to treating detainees humanely, and providing the best possible living conditions and medical care in accordance with the principles of the Geneva Convention."
Other military and administration officials said the growing detainee population at Bagram, which rose from about 100 prisoners at the start of 2004 to as many as 600 at times last year, according to military figures, was in part a result of a Bush administration decision to shut off the flow of detainees into Guantánamo after the Supreme Court ruled that those prisoners had some basic due-process rights. The question of whether those same rights apply to detainees in Bagram has not been tested in court.
Until the court ruling, Bagram functioned as a central clearing house for the global fight against terror. Military and intelligence personnel there sifted through captured Afghan rebels and suspected terrorists seized in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, sending the most valuable and dangerous to Guantánamo for extensive interrogation, and generally releasing the rest.
But according to interviews with current and former administration officials, the National Security Council effectively halted the movement of new detainees into Guantánamo at a cabinet-level meeting at the White House on Sept. 14, 2004.
Wary of further angering Guantánamo's critics, the council authorized a final shipment of 10 detainees eight days later from Bagram, the officials said. But it also indicated that it wanted to review and approve any Defense Department proposals for further transfers. Despite repeated requests from military officials in Afghanistan and one formal recommendation by a Pentagon working group, no such proposals have been considered, officials said.
"Guantánamo was a lightning rod," said a former senior administration official who participated in the discussions and who, like many of those interviewed, would discuss the matter in detail only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy surrounding it. "For some reason, people did not have a problem with Bagram. It was in Afghanistan."
Yet Bagram's expansion, which was largely fueled by growing numbers of detainees seized on the battlefield and a bureaucratic backlog in releasing many of the Afghan prisoners, also underscores the Bush administration's continuing inability to resolve where and how it will hold more valuable terror suspects.
Military officials with access to intelligence reporting on the subject said about 40 of Bagram's prisoners were Pakistanis, Arabs and other foreigners; some were previously held by the C.I.A. in secret interrogation centers in Afghanistan and other countries. Officials said the intelligence agency had been reluctant to send some of those prisoners on to Guantánamo because of the possibility that their C.I.A. custody could eventually be scrutinized in court.
Defense Department officials said the C.I.A.'s effort to unload some detainees from its so-called black sites had provoked tension among some officials at the Pentagon, who have frequently objected to taking responsibility for terror suspects cast off by the intelligence agency. The Defense Department "doesn't want to be the dumping ground," one senior official familiar with the interagency debates said. "There just aren't any good options."
A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment.
Conditions at Bagram
The rising number of detainees at Bagram has been noted periodically by the military and documented by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which does not make public other aspects of its findings. But because the military does not identify the prisoners or release other information on their detention, it had not previously been clear that some detainees were being held there for such long periods.
The prison rolls would be even higher, officials noted, were it not for a Pentagon decision in early 2005 to delegate the authority to release them from the deputy secretary of defense to the military's Central Command, which oversees the 19,000 American troops in Afghanistan, and to the ground commander there.
Since January 2005, military commanders in Afghanistan have released about 350 detainees from Bagram in conjunction with an Afghan national reconciliation program, officials said. Even so, one Pentagon official said the current average stay of prisoners at Bagram was 14.5 months.
Officials said most of the current Bagram detainees were captured during American military operations in Afghanistan, primarily in the country's restive south, beginning in the spring of 2004.
"We ran a couple of large-scale operations in the spring of 2004, during which we captured a large number of enemy combatants," said Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson, who was the ground commander for American troops in Afghanistan at the time. In subsequent remarks he added, "Our system for releasing detainees whose intelligence value turned out to be negligible did not keep pace with the numbers we were bringing in."
General Olson and other military officials said the growth at Bagram had also been a consequence of the closing of a smaller detention center at Kandahar and efforts by the military around the same time to move detainees more quickly out of "forward operating bases," in the Afghan provinces, where international human rights groups had cited widespread abuses.
At Bagram, reports of abuses have markedly declined since the violent deaths of two Afghan men held there in December 2002, Afghan and foreign human rights officials said.
After an Army investigation, the practices found to have caused those two deaths — the chaining of detainees by the arms to the ceilings of their cells and the use of knee strikes to the legs of disobedient prisoners by guards — were halted by early 2003. Other abusive methods, like the use of barking attack dogs to frighten new prisoners and the handcuffing of detainees to cell doors to punish them for talking, were phased out more gradually, military officials and former detainees said.
Human rights officials and former detainees said living conditions at the detention center had also improved.
Faced with serious overcrowding in 2004, the military initially built some temporary prison quarters and began refurbishing the main prison building at Bagram, a former aircraft-machine shop built by Soviet troops during their occupation of the country in the 1980's.
Corrals surrounded by stacked razor wire that had served as general-population cells gave way to less-forbidding wire pens that generally hold no more than 15 detainees, military officials said. The cut-off metal drums used as toilets were eventually replaced with flush toilets.
Last March, a nine-bed infirmary opened, and months later a new wing was built. The expansion brought improved conditions for the more than 250 prisoners who have been housed there, officials said.
Still, even the Afghan villagers released from Bagram over the past year tend to describe it as a stark, forsaken place.
"It was like a cage," said one former detainee, Hajji Lalai Mama, a 60-year-old tribal elder from the Spinbaldak district of southern Afghanistan who was released last June after nearly two years. Referring to a zoo in Pakistan, he added, "Like the cages in Karachi where they put animals: it was like that."
Guantánamo, which once kept detainees in wire-mesh cages, now houses them in an elaborate complex of concrete and steel buildings with a hospital, recreation yards and isolation areas. At Bagram, detainees are stripped on arrival and given orange uniforms to wear. They wash in collective showers and live under bright indoor lighting that is dimmed for only a few hours at night.
Abdul Nabi, a 24-year-old mechanic released on Dec. 15 after nine months, said some detainees frequently protested the conditions, banging on their cages and sometimes refusing to eat. He added that infractions of the rules were dealt with unsparingly: hours handcuffed in a smaller cell for minor offenses, and days in isolation for repeated transgressions.
"We were not allowed to talk very much," he said in an interview.
The Rights of Detainees
The most basic complaint of those released was that they had been wrongly detained in the first place. In many cases, former prisoners said they had been denounced by village enemies or arrested by the local police after demanding bribes they could not pay.
Human rights lawyers generally contend that the Supreme Court decision on Guantánamo, in the case of Rasul v. Bush, could also apply to detainees at Bagram. But lawyers working on behalf of the Guantánamo detainees have been reluctant to take cases from Bagram while the reach of the Supreme Court ruling, which is now the subject of further litigation, remains uncertain.
As at Guantánamo, the military has instituted procedures at Bagram intended to ensure that the detainees are in fact enemy combatants. Yet the review boards at Bagram give fewer rights to the prisoners than those used in Cuba, which have been criticized by human rights officials as kangaroo courts.
The two sets of panels that review the status of detainees at Guantánamo assign military advocates to work with detainees in preparing cases. Detainees are allowed to hear and respond to the allegations against them, call witnesses and request evidence. Only a small fraction of the hundreds of panels have concluded that the accused should be released.
The Bagram panels, called Enemy Combatant Review Boards, offer no such guarantees. Reviews are conducted after 90 days and at least annually thereafter, but detainees are not informed of the accusations against them, have no advocate and cannot appear before the board, officials said. "The detainee is not involved at all," one official familiar with the process said.
An official of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Shamsullah Ahmadzai, noted that the Afghan police, prosecutors and the courts were all limited by law in how long they could hold criminal suspects.
"The Americans are detaining people without any legal procedures," Mr. Ahmadzai said in an interview in Kabul. "Prisoners do not have the opportunity to demonstrate their innocence."
Under a diplomatic arrangement reached last year after more than a year of negotiations, Afghan officials have agreed to take over custody of the roughly 450 Afghan detainees now at Bagram and another 100 Afghans held at Guantánamo once American-financed contractors refurbish a block of a decrepit former Soviet jail near Kabul as a high-security prison.
Because of the $10 million prison- construction project and an accompanying American program to train Afghan prison guards, both of which are to be completed in about a year, military officials in the region have abandoned any thought of sending any of the Afghan detainees at Bagram to Guantánamo. Still, many details of the deal remain uncertain, including when the new prison will be completed, which Afghan ministry will run it and how the detainees may be prosecuted in Afghan courts.
Pentagon officials said some part of the Bagram prison would probably continue to operate, holding the roughly 40 non-Afghan detainees there as well as others likely to be captured by American or NATO forces in continuing operations.
Prisoner Transfers Stalled
Until now, military officials at both Bagram and Guantánamo have been frustrated in their efforts to engineer the transfer to Cuba of another group of the most dangerous and valuable non-Afghan detainees held at Bagram, Pentagon officials said.
Three officials said commanders at Bagram first proposed moving about a dozen detainees to Guantánamo in late 2004 and then reiterated the request in early 2005. In an unusual step last spring, the officials added, intelligence specialists based at Guantánamo traveled to Bagram to assess the need for the transfer.
But as Central Command officials were forwarding a formal request to the Pentagon for the transfer of about a dozen high-level detainees, at least one of them, Omar al-Faruq, a former operative of Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia, escaped from the Bagram prison with three other men. Mr. Faruq had first been taken to Bagram by C.I.A. operatives in late summer 2002, but was removed from the prison about a month later, a soldier who served there said.
Two officials familiar with intelligence reports on the escape said that last July, after Mr. Faruq had been returned to Bagram by the C.I.A., he and the other men slipped out of a poorly fenced-in cell and, in the middle of the night, piled up some boxes and climbed through an open transom over one of the doors.
In August, weeks after the escape, a Defense Department working group called the Detainee Assistance Team endorsed the Central Command's recommendation for the transfer of nine Bagram detainees to Guantánamo, two officials familiar with the matter said.
Since then, the recommendation has languished in the Pentagon bureaucracy. Officials said it had apparently been stalled by aides who had declined to forward it to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld out of concern that any new transfers to Guantánamo would stoke international criticism.
"Out of sight, out of mind," one of those officials said of the Bagram detainees.
Carlotta Gall, Ruhullah Khapalwak and Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Afghanistan for this article.
--------------------------------
Citation: Tim Golden and Eric Schmitt. "A Growing Afghan Prison Rivals Bleak Guantánamo," The New York Times, 26 February 2006.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/international/26bagram.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1141056112-J1i8EdMV7chXzxLiUFENDQ
--------------------------------
'If they destroy our opium crop, how will we feed our family?'
By Kim Sengupta
Independent Online, UK, 27 February 2006
Haji Abdul Munaf can see the blooming fields of poppies belonging to his cousin by just glancing out of his bedroom window at Bolan.
It is a common enough sight in Helmand, but what adds piquancy to this particular vista is that Mr Munaf is the mayor of Lashkar Gar, the provincial capital, and his government is sending 1,500 troops to eradicate these and other opium poppy fields to curb Afghanistan's drug trade.
There is growing anger among farmers in Helmand at the imminent destruction of their crops and, with it, their livelihoods. And some of this backlash is likely to be directed at British troops who have begun deploying in this area.
"Why shouldn't people be angry? For three years the government has said they will compensate us for cutting our crop, but they have given nothing," said 77-year-old Agha Nour, the mayor's cousin, patriarch of the hundred-strong extended family, and poppy farmer.
"We are not rich people and we must fight to protect our crop. We have fought the army and police in the past and if the British come with them then we will fight them too. We have had this land for 40 years. If we cannot sell our crop we shall have to lose this land to pay for everything else."
The British commanders in Helmand have gone to great lengths to stress that their troops will play no part in the highly controversial eradication scheme. Privately, they express grave concern that the British will be identified with Afghan forces, and fear the detrimental effect this will have on operations in this dangerous region.
President Hamid Karzai is under intense pressure from the US and Britain to abort his country's cultivation of opium crop, the largest in the world and the primary source of heroin in Europe and America.
Helmand, producing 25 per cent of the crop and focus of international attention, appears to have been chosen for a public show of toughness.
"My cousin may be the mayor but he says there is nothing he can do because the decision has been taken in Kabul," said Mr Nour. "But all they are going to do is to hurt the small farmers. The big landlords will not be affected, they have too much money and too much influence in Kabul. How will we feed our family?"
Simple figures show why poppy farming is so attractive to Afghan farmers. Mr Nour also cultivates wheat, fruit and alfalfa in his two-hectare farm. But, while he gets 50 afghanis (just over $1) for 4kg of wheat, the price for the same amount of opium poppy is $500.
The farmers say it is also extremely difficult to grow crops other than the hardy poppy plant on the salty earth of their home, which is reclaimed from the desert. The cost of irrigation for other crops is frequently exorbitant.
"If Karzai really wants to stop opium production he should start with the involvement of government officials," said a Western aid worker in Helmand.
There are those only too eager to exploit the dissatisfaction of the farmers. Helmand and much of southern Afghanistan is seeing a resurgence of the Taliban and al-Qa'ida.
Haji Abdul Munaf can see the blooming fields of poppies belonging to his cousin by just glancing out of his bedroom window at Bolan.
It is a common enough sight in Helmand, but what adds piquancy to this particular vista is that Mr Munaf is the mayor of Lashkar Gar, the provincial capital, and his government is sending 1,500 troops to eradicate these and other opium poppy fields to curb Afghanistan's drug trade.
There is growing anger among farmers in Helmand at the imminent destruction of their crops and, with it, their livelihoods. And some of this backlash is likely to be directed at British troops who have begun deploying in this area.
"Why shouldn't people be angry? For three years the government has said they will compensate us for cutting our crop, but they have given nothing," said 77-year-old Agha Nour, the mayor's cousin, patriarch of the hundred-strong extended family, and poppy farmer.
"We are not rich people and we must fight to protect our crop. We have fought the army and police in the past and if the British come with them then we will fight them too. We have had this land for 40 years. If we cannot sell our crop we shall have to lose this land to pay for everything else."
The British commanders in Helmand have gone to great lengths to stress that their troops will play no part in the highly controversial eradication scheme. Privately, they express grave concern that the British will be identified with Afghan forces, and fear the detrimental effect this will have on operations in this dangerous region.
President Hamid Karzai is under intense pressure from the US and Britain to abort his country's cultivation of opium crop, the largest in the world and the primary source of heroin in Europe and America.
Helmand, producing 25 per cent of the crop and focus of international attention, appears to have been chosen for a public show of toughness.
"My cousin may be the mayor but he says there is nothing he can do because the decision has been taken in Kabul," said Mr Nour. "But all they are going to do is to hurt the small farmers. The big landlords will not be affected, they have too much money and too much influence in Kabul. How will we feed our family?"
Simple figures show why poppy farming is so attractive to Afghan farmers. Mr Nour also cultivates wheat, fruit and alfalfa in his two-hectare farm. But, while he gets 50 afghanis (just over $1) for 4kg of wheat, the price for the same amount of opium poppy is $500.
The farmers say it is also extremely difficult to grow crops other than the hardy poppy plant on the salty earth of their home, which is reclaimed from the desert. The cost of irrigation for other crops is frequently exorbitant.
"If Karzai really wants to stop opium production he should start with the involvement of government officials," said a Western aid worker in Helmand.
There are those only too eager to exploit the dissatisfaction of the farmers. Helmand and much of southern Afghanistan is seeing a resurgence of the Taliban and al-Qa'ida.
-----------------------------
Citation: Kim Sengupta. "'If they destroy our opium crop, how will we feed our family?'," Independent Online, UK, 27 February 2006.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article347957.ece
-----------------------------
Independent Online, UK, 27 February 2006
Haji Abdul Munaf can see the blooming fields of poppies belonging to his cousin by just glancing out of his bedroom window at Bolan.
It is a common enough sight in Helmand, but what adds piquancy to this particular vista is that Mr Munaf is the mayor of Lashkar Gar, the provincial capital, and his government is sending 1,500 troops to eradicate these and other opium poppy fields to curb Afghanistan's drug trade.
There is growing anger among farmers in Helmand at the imminent destruction of their crops and, with it, their livelihoods. And some of this backlash is likely to be directed at British troops who have begun deploying in this area.
"Why shouldn't people be angry? For three years the government has said they will compensate us for cutting our crop, but they have given nothing," said 77-year-old Agha Nour, the mayor's cousin, patriarch of the hundred-strong extended family, and poppy farmer.
"We are not rich people and we must fight to protect our crop. We have fought the army and police in the past and if the British come with them then we will fight them too. We have had this land for 40 years. If we cannot sell our crop we shall have to lose this land to pay for everything else."
The British commanders in Helmand have gone to great lengths to stress that their troops will play no part in the highly controversial eradication scheme. Privately, they express grave concern that the British will be identified with Afghan forces, and fear the detrimental effect this will have on operations in this dangerous region.
President Hamid Karzai is under intense pressure from the US and Britain to abort his country's cultivation of opium crop, the largest in the world and the primary source of heroin in Europe and America.
Helmand, producing 25 per cent of the crop and focus of international attention, appears to have been chosen for a public show of toughness.
"My cousin may be the mayor but he says there is nothing he can do because the decision has been taken in Kabul," said Mr Nour. "But all they are going to do is to hurt the small farmers. The big landlords will not be affected, they have too much money and too much influence in Kabul. How will we feed our family?"
Simple figures show why poppy farming is so attractive to Afghan farmers. Mr Nour also cultivates wheat, fruit and alfalfa in his two-hectare farm. But, while he gets 50 afghanis (just over $1) for 4kg of wheat, the price for the same amount of opium poppy is $500.
The farmers say it is also extremely difficult to grow crops other than the hardy poppy plant on the salty earth of their home, which is reclaimed from the desert. The cost of irrigation for other crops is frequently exorbitant.
"If Karzai really wants to stop opium production he should start with the involvement of government officials," said a Western aid worker in Helmand.
There are those only too eager to exploit the dissatisfaction of the farmers. Helmand and much of southern Afghanistan is seeing a resurgence of the Taliban and al-Qa'ida.
Haji Abdul Munaf can see the blooming fields of poppies belonging to his cousin by just glancing out of his bedroom window at Bolan.
It is a common enough sight in Helmand, but what adds piquancy to this particular vista is that Mr Munaf is the mayor of Lashkar Gar, the provincial capital, and his government is sending 1,500 troops to eradicate these and other opium poppy fields to curb Afghanistan's drug trade.
There is growing anger among farmers in Helmand at the imminent destruction of their crops and, with it, their livelihoods. And some of this backlash is likely to be directed at British troops who have begun deploying in this area.
"Why shouldn't people be angry? For three years the government has said they will compensate us for cutting our crop, but they have given nothing," said 77-year-old Agha Nour, the mayor's cousin, patriarch of the hundred-strong extended family, and poppy farmer.
"We are not rich people and we must fight to protect our crop. We have fought the army and police in the past and if the British come with them then we will fight them too. We have had this land for 40 years. If we cannot sell our crop we shall have to lose this land to pay for everything else."
The British commanders in Helmand have gone to great lengths to stress that their troops will play no part in the highly controversial eradication scheme. Privately, they express grave concern that the British will be identified with Afghan forces, and fear the detrimental effect this will have on operations in this dangerous region.
President Hamid Karzai is under intense pressure from the US and Britain to abort his country's cultivation of opium crop, the largest in the world and the primary source of heroin in Europe and America.
Helmand, producing 25 per cent of the crop and focus of international attention, appears to have been chosen for a public show of toughness.
"My cousin may be the mayor but he says there is nothing he can do because the decision has been taken in Kabul," said Mr Nour. "But all they are going to do is to hurt the small farmers. The big landlords will not be affected, they have too much money and too much influence in Kabul. How will we feed our family?"
Simple figures show why poppy farming is so attractive to Afghan farmers. Mr Nour also cultivates wheat, fruit and alfalfa in his two-hectare farm. But, while he gets 50 afghanis (just over $1) for 4kg of wheat, the price for the same amount of opium poppy is $500.
The farmers say it is also extremely difficult to grow crops other than the hardy poppy plant on the salty earth of their home, which is reclaimed from the desert. The cost of irrigation for other crops is frequently exorbitant.
"If Karzai really wants to stop opium production he should start with the involvement of government officials," said a Western aid worker in Helmand.
There are those only too eager to exploit the dissatisfaction of the farmers. Helmand and much of southern Afghanistan is seeing a resurgence of the Taliban and al-Qa'ida.
-----------------------------
Citation: Kim Sengupta. "'If they destroy our opium crop, how will we feed our family?'," Independent Online, UK, 27 February 2006.
Original URL: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article347957.ece
-----------------------------
Dealing in stocks behind Baghdad's sandbags
Agence France Presse, 26 February 2006
The three-storey, cream building on the corner of a Baghdad sidestreet could pass easily as a hotel or cinema, with gun-carrying guards at the door and sandbags protecting it -- a common sight in insurgency-racked Iraq.
But it offers neither accommodation nor movies, for this is Iraq's very own stock exchange, which comes alive every Monday and Wednesday as investors step through the wooden door onto the trading floor after being frisked by the guards.
"I think this is the only place where there is a buzz ... vibrancy in Iraq, where we want to forget our daily worries and do some business," says Rita Eliyas, aged 35 and one of the few female brokers on the Iraq Stock Exchange.
She is not wrong.
Hundreds of investors and dozens of brokers gather in the compact ground floor hall of the building on the only two days of trading for a brisk two-hour session that starts at 10 am (0700 GMT).
The bourse may be way behind the developed exchanges of the world but does share some common rituals -- here trading starts with a sharp ring of the bell -- something that the New York Stock Exchange still does.
As the bell sounds, the hall fills with a sudden rush of energy as hungry brokers rush to the trading floor, shouting and quoting stock prices as their clients -- most dressed in well-pressed suits, others in traditional dress -- watch over each other's shoulders from a distance.
"Bank stocks are favourites these days and of them the Middle East Investment Bank is hot," says Eliyas as she ducks under the arm of a burly, male broker and rushes to the floor to place an order for a client, a sheikh.
Even as she places his order, her mobile phone rings and she takes another from a different client.
Two computers are fixed high on two walls of the hall to indicate the index, though most of the time they appear still.
As the session peaks, brokers literally shove each other out of the way and run to-and-fro between their clients and the floor. Most of the time it's to rub off old stock prices and write new ones on the white boards fixed on the wall, a sign that electronic trading is still far away.
"We are looking at electronic trading," said Taha Ahmed Abdul Salam, the stocky, cigarette-smoking chief executive officer of the exchange who sits in a smart, first floor office.
"We have just moved into our own building ... let the political situation and security stabilise and then we are sure we will be the key financial institution in Iraq."
The exchange began business nearly two years back, replacing the now defunct Baghdad Stock Exchange which was riddled with corruption and often manipulated by officials of Saddam Hussein's regime and members of his family.
Initially operating in makeshift halls, the bourse opened in the building in the Kharada area of Baghdad in 2004.
"Many Iraqi banks, companies and stockbrokers have their offices here and so we decided to shift here," said Salam. "This does make us a potential target but we have been lucky, though bombs have gone off in nearby areas.
"Only a few weeks ago there was a bomb attack at a nearby church. Nobody is safe in Iraq but those who come to the exchange are small investors, while the rich give orders by phone."
Despite these concerns, Salam paints a rosy picture.
At least 80 companies are currently listed on the exchange and its market capitalisation has doubled to 2.14 billion dollars at end of 2005 compared to 1.15 billion dollars a year earlier.
Salam said a number of new issues have been floated by the companies in the past 18 months -- mostly by financial companies -- considered a "relatively safe" sector by hungry investors.
"Many foreign banks were striking alliances with Iraqi banks like Dar El-Salam Investment Bank has a joint venture with HSBC," he said.
At the moment the market is, however, bearish.
The index closed in 2005 at 46 points but has lost ground over the past weeks.
"We need more money," said Nabeel Abbas, 35, a doctor by profession who runs a pharmacy in Baghdad and also dabbles in stocks.
Abbas, who has nearly 100,000 dollars' worth of investments in the market, invested over the past five years, is worried about the security situation in the country and shortage of trading funds.
For him the market was steady during the Saddam regime, though it offered smaller returns.
"But now because of these deficiences there is extreme volatility and also rich investors are getting out and leaving Iraq," said Abbas, dressed in a smart brown suit.
But he offers a solution too.
"Open the market to foreign investors and get money into the market," he said, adding that the government seemed scared that a big foreign investor could swallow the whole market for a few billion dollars.
Brokers, however, continue to be upbeat.
"The market is bearish but then so what ... I like the rush, the frantic pace on the floor and I have been doing this for the last 10 years. I wish we had more money and tradings every day," said the short, chirpy Eliyas.
-----------------------
Citation: "Dealing in stocks behind Baghdad's sandbags," Agence France Presse, 26 February 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060226/ts_afp/iraqeconomystocks
-----------------------
The three-storey, cream building on the corner of a Baghdad sidestreet could pass easily as a hotel or cinema, with gun-carrying guards at the door and sandbags protecting it -- a common sight in insurgency-racked Iraq.
But it offers neither accommodation nor movies, for this is Iraq's very own stock exchange, which comes alive every Monday and Wednesday as investors step through the wooden door onto the trading floor after being frisked by the guards.
"I think this is the only place where there is a buzz ... vibrancy in Iraq, where we want to forget our daily worries and do some business," says Rita Eliyas, aged 35 and one of the few female brokers on the Iraq Stock Exchange.
She is not wrong.
Hundreds of investors and dozens of brokers gather in the compact ground floor hall of the building on the only two days of trading for a brisk two-hour session that starts at 10 am (0700 GMT).
The bourse may be way behind the developed exchanges of the world but does share some common rituals -- here trading starts with a sharp ring of the bell -- something that the New York Stock Exchange still does.
As the bell sounds, the hall fills with a sudden rush of energy as hungry brokers rush to the trading floor, shouting and quoting stock prices as their clients -- most dressed in well-pressed suits, others in traditional dress -- watch over each other's shoulders from a distance.
"Bank stocks are favourites these days and of them the Middle East Investment Bank is hot," says Eliyas as she ducks under the arm of a burly, male broker and rushes to the floor to place an order for a client, a sheikh.
Even as she places his order, her mobile phone rings and she takes another from a different client.
Two computers are fixed high on two walls of the hall to indicate the index, though most of the time they appear still.
As the session peaks, brokers literally shove each other out of the way and run to-and-fro between their clients and the floor. Most of the time it's to rub off old stock prices and write new ones on the white boards fixed on the wall, a sign that electronic trading is still far away.
"We are looking at electronic trading," said Taha Ahmed Abdul Salam, the stocky, cigarette-smoking chief executive officer of the exchange who sits in a smart, first floor office.
"We have just moved into our own building ... let the political situation and security stabilise and then we are sure we will be the key financial institution in Iraq."
The exchange began business nearly two years back, replacing the now defunct Baghdad Stock Exchange which was riddled with corruption and often manipulated by officials of Saddam Hussein's regime and members of his family.
Initially operating in makeshift halls, the bourse opened in the building in the Kharada area of Baghdad in 2004.
"Many Iraqi banks, companies and stockbrokers have their offices here and so we decided to shift here," said Salam. "This does make us a potential target but we have been lucky, though bombs have gone off in nearby areas.
"Only a few weeks ago there was a bomb attack at a nearby church. Nobody is safe in Iraq but those who come to the exchange are small investors, while the rich give orders by phone."
Despite these concerns, Salam paints a rosy picture.
At least 80 companies are currently listed on the exchange and its market capitalisation has doubled to 2.14 billion dollars at end of 2005 compared to 1.15 billion dollars a year earlier.
Salam said a number of new issues have been floated by the companies in the past 18 months -- mostly by financial companies -- considered a "relatively safe" sector by hungry investors.
"Many foreign banks were striking alliances with Iraqi banks like Dar El-Salam Investment Bank has a joint venture with HSBC," he said.
At the moment the market is, however, bearish.
The index closed in 2005 at 46 points but has lost ground over the past weeks.
"We need more money," said Nabeel Abbas, 35, a doctor by profession who runs a pharmacy in Baghdad and also dabbles in stocks.
Abbas, who has nearly 100,000 dollars' worth of investments in the market, invested over the past five years, is worried about the security situation in the country and shortage of trading funds.
For him the market was steady during the Saddam regime, though it offered smaller returns.
"But now because of these deficiences there is extreme volatility and also rich investors are getting out and leaving Iraq," said Abbas, dressed in a smart brown suit.
But he offers a solution too.
"Open the market to foreign investors and get money into the market," he said, adding that the government seemed scared that a big foreign investor could swallow the whole market for a few billion dollars.
Brokers, however, continue to be upbeat.
"The market is bearish but then so what ... I like the rush, the frantic pace on the floor and I have been doing this for the last 10 years. I wish we had more money and tradings every day," said the short, chirpy Eliyas.
-----------------------
Citation: "Dealing in stocks behind Baghdad's sandbags," Agence France Presse, 26 February 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060226/ts_afp/iraqeconomystocks
-----------------------
Deadly days put Iraq on ‘brink of civil war’
By Thomas Caywood and Brian Ballou
Boston Herald, 24 February 2006
Iraq lurched toward civil war yesterday with militants gunning down civilians in the streets and rampaging mobs attacking rival mosques as American aims of forging a stable democracy threatened to blow apart.
“It’s a big setback. I think we’re probably on the brink of civil war,” said U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch.
The South Boston Democrat returned from his fourth trip to Iraq late last month feeling encouraged that the political situation was stabilizing.
But at least 111 people were believed killed in two days of fighting sparked by Wednesday’s attack on a shrine in Samarra, including 47 people executed and left in a ditch near Baghdad.
Some 168 Sunni mosques had been attacked around the country, 10 imams killed and 15 abducted since the shrine attack, according to the Sunni Clerical Association of Muslim Scholars.
“This is a clear indication that our troops need to get in the background, and the Iraqis need to be up front,” warned U.S. Rep. Martin Meehan, agreeing with Lynch that “the situation is developing into an open state of civil war.”
The Lowell Democrat, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, said the perception of America as an occupier fuels longstanding conflict between Sunnis and Shiites.
But one local father of a soldier in Iraq said the bloodshed underscores the continuing need for American troops there.
“What we’re doing is the right thing. We’re there to bring democracy to the area. People like my son volunteered to go over there to help,” said Patrick Vardaro of Norwood, whose 23-year-old son, Army 2nd Lt. Patrick Vardaro, is serving with the 101st Airborne Divison in Beiji, Iraq.
The fighting between Shiite and Sunni mobs could prove disastrous for the Bush administration, said Carl Conetta of the Cambridge think tank Commonwealth Institute.
“To the extent people have bought into the administration’s view that we’re moving toward a stable democracy, a lot of people will lose hope in that vision,” he said.
Malik Mufti, a professor of political science at Tufts University, said the spasm of sectarian fighting will make the job of American soldiers that much harder.
“It becomes very difficult if you have to pick sides and insinuate yourself in the middle of these things,” Mufti said.
---------------------------
Citation: Thomas Caywood and Brian Ballou. "Deadly days put Iraq on ‘brink of civil war’," Boston Herald, 24 February 2006.
Original URL: http://news.bostonherald.com/international/view.bg?articleid=127752
---------------------------
Boston Herald, 24 February 2006
Iraq lurched toward civil war yesterday with militants gunning down civilians in the streets and rampaging mobs attacking rival mosques as American aims of forging a stable democracy threatened to blow apart.
“It’s a big setback. I think we’re probably on the brink of civil war,” said U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch.
The South Boston Democrat returned from his fourth trip to Iraq late last month feeling encouraged that the political situation was stabilizing.
But at least 111 people were believed killed in two days of fighting sparked by Wednesday’s attack on a shrine in Samarra, including 47 people executed and left in a ditch near Baghdad.
Some 168 Sunni mosques had been attacked around the country, 10 imams killed and 15 abducted since the shrine attack, according to the Sunni Clerical Association of Muslim Scholars.
“This is a clear indication that our troops need to get in the background, and the Iraqis need to be up front,” warned U.S. Rep. Martin Meehan, agreeing with Lynch that “the situation is developing into an open state of civil war.”
The Lowell Democrat, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, said the perception of America as an occupier fuels longstanding conflict between Sunnis and Shiites.
But one local father of a soldier in Iraq said the bloodshed underscores the continuing need for American troops there.
“What we’re doing is the right thing. We’re there to bring democracy to the area. People like my son volunteered to go over there to help,” said Patrick Vardaro of Norwood, whose 23-year-old son, Army 2nd Lt. Patrick Vardaro, is serving with the 101st Airborne Divison in Beiji, Iraq.
The fighting between Shiite and Sunni mobs could prove disastrous for the Bush administration, said Carl Conetta of the Cambridge think tank Commonwealth Institute.
“To the extent people have bought into the administration’s view that we’re moving toward a stable democracy, a lot of people will lose hope in that vision,” he said.
Malik Mufti, a professor of political science at Tufts University, said the spasm of sectarian fighting will make the job of American soldiers that much harder.
“It becomes very difficult if you have to pick sides and insinuate yourself in the middle of these things,” Mufti said.
---------------------------
Citation: Thomas Caywood and Brian Ballou. "Deadly days put Iraq on ‘brink of civil war’," Boston Herald, 24 February 2006.
Original URL: http://news.bostonherald.com/international/view.bg?articleid=127752
---------------------------
25 February 2006
The great Indian hope trick
By The Economist, 23 February 2006
“We who are free—and who prize our freedom above all other gifts of God and nature—must know each other better; trust each other more; support each other.” Dwight Eisenhower uttered this pious hope in Delhi in 1959 and, ever since, an American president has popped back once in a while to utter it again. George Bush, who is expected at the beginning of March, will be the fifth to pay a state visit. Leaders of both the world's most powerful democracy and of its most populous one have long found it baffling and irksome that they are not firmer friends. Mr Bush has a better chance than any of his predecessors of putting that right.
Some reasons for optimism are long-standing, but seem to grow stronger over time. India is the second-most-populous nation on earth, and will eventually overtake China to take the top spot. Its booming economy has enhanced its commercial attraction, and the Confederation of Indian Industry's publicity campaign at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos has achieved the aim implicit in its slogan: “India everywhere”.
It is, moreover, a friendly democracy sitting between the two places American strategists worry about most: China and the Middle East. “We're natural allies,” says an American official, “We should have been closer much earlier.” The feeling, by and large, is reciprocated in India, if not among the chattering classes; Arundhati Roy, a novelist, argues that to seek an alliance with America “would be like inviting a brick to drop through your windshield”. But a poll of 15 countries last year by the Pew Research Centre found that 71% of Indians had a favourable view of America, the highest proportion of all.
Two other reasons to cuddle up to India have come into focus because of the preoccupations of Mr Bush's presidency. India has more Muslims (150m or so) than any country other than Indonesia, yet, as Mr Bush likes to point out, no known members of al-Qaeda. Second, India's growing economy has a desperate hunger for energy and, because of its reliance on dirty coal, risks becoming, in the words of Jacques Chirac, France's president, who was in India this week, “a chimney for greenhouse gases”. Helping India fuel itself more cleanly is a global imperative.
India's “non-alignment” in the cold war—when it tilted towards Moscow—combined with its pursuit of economic self-sufficiency and third-world solidarity, kept the two “natural allies” apart for decades. Two relatively recent developments, however, have boosted hopes for a close strategic partnership. First, India and Pakistan are two years into a formal peace process. This makes America's alliance with Pakistan less of a hindrance to its relations with India, though India continues to believe Pakistan sponsors “cross-border terrorism” in India, and America's friendship with it remains a bugbear.
The nuclear knot
Second, the Bush administration has shown itself willing to find ways round the biggest legal and political obstacle to full-fledged partnership: India's emergence in 1998, never having accepted the global non-proliferation regime, as a declared nuclear power. A “breakthrough” on this issue marked the visit by Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister, to Washington last July, and was to have provided the icing on the wedding cake when Mr Bush reciprocated the visit. It may yet do so. But it has also shown both the gulf between the two sides' perceptions of each other, and the political difficulty within both countries of whole-hearted strategic co-operation.
Last July, Mr Bush agreed to grant India “full civil nuclear-energy co-operation” and to help it acquire “the same benefits and advantages” as other states with nuclear weapons. This meant persuading Congress to amend laws blocking such co-operation, and prodding other countries in the Nuclear Suppliers Group to follow America's lead. The deal has provoked a considerable backlash from critics at home and abroad. India, meanwhile, had to do its bit. Most important, it had to draw up a plan for separating its military nuclear facilities from the civilian ones, and subject the latter to international scrutiny.
This has proved highly contentious. Many Indian strategists—and some leading members of the nuclear establishment itself—fear it is a way to force India to accept a cap on the size of its nuclear arsenal. If all India's power-generating reactors were put in the “civilian” box, then they would be barred from providing fuel to the weapons programme. This would inhibit its expansion should there be a sharp worsening in relations with its nuclear-armed neighbours, Pakistan and China. Others argue that India probably already has enough plutonium to build as many bombs as it is ever likely to need. International co-operation, argue proponents of the American deal, is essential if nuclear-power generation, which currently produces about 3% of India's electricity, is to make a bigger contribution to India's energy needs in the next two decades.
America did not find India's first separation blueprint “credible”. Nicholas Burns, an under-secretary of state, who has been negotiating with India, was expected back in Delhi this week to secure a more plausible one.
His efforts to reach agreement in Delhi and in Congress have been complicated because the debate has become entangled with another issue: Iran's nuclear programme. The Communist parties, on whose votes Mr Singh's Congress party-led coalition relies for a parliamentary majority, took great exception to India's voting at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in favour of reporting Iran to the United Nations Security Council. The left's objections to the Iran vote are partly a matter of crude politics. Elections are due in the coming months in West Bengal and Kerala, two Indian states with large numbers of Muslim voters. But the left is also relying on the broader appeal of anti-American rhetoric.
Mr Singh has insisted that India voted in its own national interest. But in a news-agency interview last month, David Mulford, the American ambassador, pointed out that if India were to vote against the referral, it would mean the end of the India-America nuclear deal. This was no more than a statement of fact. America's Congress would surely not agree to rewrite the non-proliferation regime for one exceptional country, were that country, India, to line up on the opposing side in the most important nuclear-proliferation argument of the moment. Mr Mulford's remarks, however, were taken as a threat, and raised nationalist hackles.
Some former diplomats worry that India is paying too high a price for the new partnership. They point to a cabinet shuffle last month, when the petroleum portfolio was taken away from Mani Shankar Aiyar. Mr Aiyar had been aggressively pursuing India's “energy security”, which involved dealings with states America would prefer India to shun. Besides buying, in partnership with China, an oilfield in Syria, India has been discussing a pipeline to bring gas from Iran through some dangerous bits of Pakistan. Proponents of this project see it as an enormous boon to regional security, as well as to India's energy needs. America, however, opposes such a huge deal with Iran. Inevitably, there are suspicions that Mr Aiyar was a sacrifice on the altar of Indo-American partnership.
Misgivings about perceived American meddling run deep. M.J. Akbar, editor of the Asian Age, a newspaper, has noted that “The Indian street has been nourished by the view that America is a democracy at home and a dictatorship abroad...Indians do not make good stenographers. They simply do not like taking dictation.”
The China syndrome
Whatever the short-term outcome of the nuclear talks, they are unlikely to resolve the controversy in both countries. But nor will Mr Bush and Mr Singh abandon their pursuit of closer partnership. On the American side, one motive for this is usually couched in the most delicate diplomat-speak. The American government neither wishes to “contain” China, nor imagines that it can (though many congressmen would like to try). But America does have an interest in “preventing Asia from being dominated by any single power that has the capacity to crowd out others”, and that may threaten America's alliances in Asia. So Ashley Tellis, then a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (and now on secondment to the State Department), told Congress in November. Others put it more bluntly. “Of course we should sell advanced weaponry to India,” argues Robert Blackwill, Mr Mulford's acerbic predecessor as ambassador to India. “The million-man Indian army actually fights, unlike the post-modern militaries of many of our European allies.” America should help India with its space programme without worrying too much whether that will help India build missiles. “Why should the United States want to check India's missile capability in ways that could lead to China's permanent nuclear dominance over democratic India?” he wrote last year in the National Interest, a foreign-affairs journal.
India certainly has no intention of joining an anti-China axis. Nor, for now, does it have to choose between two big suitors. China, which at first voiced reservations about the Indian nuclear deal with America, is now shrewdly acquiescent. Perhaps it hopes that American congressmen and Indian Communists will kill it anyway. Or perhaps it does not want to jeopardise its own fast-improving relations with India.
American businesses are not as excited by India as they are by China, for the obvious reasons that China's economy is two-and-a-half times bigger, is growing faster and is more integrated with the rest of the world. In each of the past four years, the annual increase in China's foreign trade has exceeded India's total merchandise trade. Last year China received about ten times as much foreign direct investment as India did.
Yet American business is well aware of India, in large measure thanks to India's expertise in software development and other sorts of “outsourced” services. Despite the protectionist hoo-hah ahead of the American presidential election in 2004, outsourcing to India has not slowed at all. More than half the Fortune 500 companies outsource some of their information-technology work to India, and the rest have to explain to shareholders why they are not doing so.
This is not simply a matter of cost arbitrage. Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro, one of India's big information-technology firms, says that in India the very best young talent is moving into the profession—membership of which is even good for marriage prospects. America, by contrast, is not producing software engineers in the numbers it needs.
According to Promod Haque of Norwest Venture, a venture-capital firm, it is also suffering a “reverse brain-drain” as Indian and Chinese engineers go home. This, he argues, coupled with the retirement of the baby-boomers, is creating a “shortage of intellectual capital” in America which will eventually threaten its superpower status. The solution is to build a “strategic competitive advantage” through an alliance with an offshore base of intellectual capital. India is the obvious choice. Its pool of highly qualified graduates will be twice as large as China's by 2008, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, and they speak English.
Such a de facto alliance is already in the making, and is helping alert American business to India's other attractions: an economy expected to grow by more than 7% in 2006, for the fourth year running; a fast-expanding middle-class; and a government committed to liberalisation, even if implementing it is painfully slow. In the past year, India has allowed foreign firms to enter the construction and property industries, signed an “open skies” agreement with America and passed a patent law that meets WTO standards. As India continues to open up new industries to foreign investment, the opportunities for American firms are proliferating, says Ron Somers, head of the US-India Business Council. Two-way trade last year was only some $20 billion, but the nuclear deal itself may offer a bonanza for American suppliers of equipment. India is also by some estimates the world's biggest arms importer.
Reuters
Reuters
Retailing, new Indian style
American businesses have their gripes about India. They would like it to simplify its spaghetti-spill of bureaucracy, open up its markets faster and fix its rotten infrastructure. American insurers would like to be allowed to buy more than 26% of one of their Indian counterparts, for example. “Single-brand” retailers (eg, shops selling only Nike goods) are glad to have been allowed this year to open stores in India; general retailers such as Wal-Mart would like to be allowed in next.
None of these moans, however, approaches the intensity of the Japan-bashing of the 1980s or the China-bashing of today. India is seen as less of a threat, being neither rich, like Japan, nor an aggressive autocracy as China is. American union bosses complain far less about India than they do about China.
The promised land
India loves being in the international spotlight. Hotels are full, airports packed and the foreign ministry deluged with foreign dignitaries. Recent figures, which show the economy growing at more than 8% a year, have propelled the stockmarket into uncharted territory, with its main index up by 50% in a year. There is an air of euphoric expectation that at last India is reclaiming its rightful place both in the world economy and in the global balance of power.
The IT country
Not everyone is basking in this glow. Andy Xie of Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, frets that “India is experiencing typical overheating symptoms of an emerging-market boom: widening current-account deficit, high and accelerating inflation rate, and rampant stock-and property-market speculation. India's macro environment is quite similar to Latin America in 1980s and South-East Asia in 1990s.” India's low external indebtedness, managed exchange rate and large foreign-exchange reserves should insulate it from a financial-market shock. But Mr Xie is not alone in worrying about the dependence on inflows of portfolio investment to finance a current-account deficit.
Besides those giving warning of the short-term risk of a financial crisis, some observers also cast doubt on the staying-power of the present spurt of growth. In a new book, Shankar Acharya, a former chief economic adviser to the government, argues that over the next five years economic growth is more likely to average 5.5-6% a year than the 8-10% optimists now see as India's birthright.
That is still, by most standards, a boom. But the distribution of growth also risks sharpening regional and social differences. For Ms Roy, India is a land where gangs of emaciated labourers dig trenches to lay fibre-optic cables by candlelight. India's “progress” of the past decade and a half, she reckons, is like two convoys of trucks: a tiny one “on its way to a glittering destination somewhere near the top of the world” and a huge one that “just melts into the darkness and disappears.”
Of course, when celebrated novelists worry that a country is melting into the darkness, its prospects are probably bright. But Ms Roy touches on a concern shared by many economists: that, for all its phenomenal success in IT and some high-end manufacturing industries, India's boom has yet to reach many of the two-thirds of its people who live in the countryside. A particular concern is the failure of labour-intensive manufacturing to take off. According to a recent IMF paper, the proportion of the workforce employed in manufacturing actually fell slightly in the 1990s.
Stability, democracy, demography
Nevertheless, in the long term, India has two great attractions. One is stability. India has proven mechanisms for the peaceful transfer of power and the ability to withstand terrible internal conflicts—in Kashmir and the north-east, for example—without danger to its integrity. China's eventual transition to democracy could be traumatic. Another attraction is demography. China's one-child policy ensures that it will grow old before it gets rich: a generation of only children may suddenly find themselves struggling to support the parents who once pampered them. India will remain younger and more dynamic well into the middle of the 21st century.
For many reasons, a close partnership between India and America seems both desirable and inevitable. The fraught negotiation over the nuclear issue, however, has revealed how difficult it will be to achieve. To America, and to many Indians, it must seem inconceivable that India—still so poor, and so desperately in need of just the sort of help America is offering—should not jump at the chance of a special relationship. How on earth, for example, could the idea of siding with Iran instead be seriously debated? But for many in India, “non-alignment” is a synonym for independence, and should not be sacrificed, however enticing the prize. Moreover, so confident is India's mood at the moment, that many seriously believe America needs it more than the other way round. Tomorrow belongs to Asia.
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Citation: "The great Indian hope trick," The Economist, 23 February 2006.
Original URL: http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5545462
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“We who are free—and who prize our freedom above all other gifts of God and nature—must know each other better; trust each other more; support each other.” Dwight Eisenhower uttered this pious hope in Delhi in 1959 and, ever since, an American president has popped back once in a while to utter it again. George Bush, who is expected at the beginning of March, will be the fifth to pay a state visit. Leaders of both the world's most powerful democracy and of its most populous one have long found it baffling and irksome that they are not firmer friends. Mr Bush has a better chance than any of his predecessors of putting that right.
Some reasons for optimism are long-standing, but seem to grow stronger over time. India is the second-most-populous nation on earth, and will eventually overtake China to take the top spot. Its booming economy has enhanced its commercial attraction, and the Confederation of Indian Industry's publicity campaign at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos has achieved the aim implicit in its slogan: “India everywhere”.
It is, moreover, a friendly democracy sitting between the two places American strategists worry about most: China and the Middle East. “We're natural allies,” says an American official, “We should have been closer much earlier.” The feeling, by and large, is reciprocated in India, if not among the chattering classes; Arundhati Roy, a novelist, argues that to seek an alliance with America “would be like inviting a brick to drop through your windshield”. But a poll of 15 countries last year by the Pew Research Centre found that 71% of Indians had a favourable view of America, the highest proportion of all.
Two other reasons to cuddle up to India have come into focus because of the preoccupations of Mr Bush's presidency. India has more Muslims (150m or so) than any country other than Indonesia, yet, as Mr Bush likes to point out, no known members of al-Qaeda. Second, India's growing economy has a desperate hunger for energy and, because of its reliance on dirty coal, risks becoming, in the words of Jacques Chirac, France's president, who was in India this week, “a chimney for greenhouse gases”. Helping India fuel itself more cleanly is a global imperative.
India's “non-alignment” in the cold war—when it tilted towards Moscow—combined with its pursuit of economic self-sufficiency and third-world solidarity, kept the two “natural allies” apart for decades. Two relatively recent developments, however, have boosted hopes for a close strategic partnership. First, India and Pakistan are two years into a formal peace process. This makes America's alliance with Pakistan less of a hindrance to its relations with India, though India continues to believe Pakistan sponsors “cross-border terrorism” in India, and America's friendship with it remains a bugbear.
The nuclear knot
Second, the Bush administration has shown itself willing to find ways round the biggest legal and political obstacle to full-fledged partnership: India's emergence in 1998, never having accepted the global non-proliferation regime, as a declared nuclear power. A “breakthrough” on this issue marked the visit by Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister, to Washington last July, and was to have provided the icing on the wedding cake when Mr Bush reciprocated the visit. It may yet do so. But it has also shown both the gulf between the two sides' perceptions of each other, and the political difficulty within both countries of whole-hearted strategic co-operation.
Last July, Mr Bush agreed to grant India “full civil nuclear-energy co-operation” and to help it acquire “the same benefits and advantages” as other states with nuclear weapons. This meant persuading Congress to amend laws blocking such co-operation, and prodding other countries in the Nuclear Suppliers Group to follow America's lead. The deal has provoked a considerable backlash from critics at home and abroad. India, meanwhile, had to do its bit. Most important, it had to draw up a plan for separating its military nuclear facilities from the civilian ones, and subject the latter to international scrutiny.
This has proved highly contentious. Many Indian strategists—and some leading members of the nuclear establishment itself—fear it is a way to force India to accept a cap on the size of its nuclear arsenal. If all India's power-generating reactors were put in the “civilian” box, then they would be barred from providing fuel to the weapons programme. This would inhibit its expansion should there be a sharp worsening in relations with its nuclear-armed neighbours, Pakistan and China. Others argue that India probably already has enough plutonium to build as many bombs as it is ever likely to need. International co-operation, argue proponents of the American deal, is essential if nuclear-power generation, which currently produces about 3% of India's electricity, is to make a bigger contribution to India's energy needs in the next two decades.
America did not find India's first separation blueprint “credible”. Nicholas Burns, an under-secretary of state, who has been negotiating with India, was expected back in Delhi this week to secure a more plausible one.
His efforts to reach agreement in Delhi and in Congress have been complicated because the debate has become entangled with another issue: Iran's nuclear programme. The Communist parties, on whose votes Mr Singh's Congress party-led coalition relies for a parliamentary majority, took great exception to India's voting at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in favour of reporting Iran to the United Nations Security Council. The left's objections to the Iran vote are partly a matter of crude politics. Elections are due in the coming months in West Bengal and Kerala, two Indian states with large numbers of Muslim voters. But the left is also relying on the broader appeal of anti-American rhetoric.
Mr Singh has insisted that India voted in its own national interest. But in a news-agency interview last month, David Mulford, the American ambassador, pointed out that if India were to vote against the referral, it would mean the end of the India-America nuclear deal. This was no more than a statement of fact. America's Congress would surely not agree to rewrite the non-proliferation regime for one exceptional country, were that country, India, to line up on the opposing side in the most important nuclear-proliferation argument of the moment. Mr Mulford's remarks, however, were taken as a threat, and raised nationalist hackles.
Some former diplomats worry that India is paying too high a price for the new partnership. They point to a cabinet shuffle last month, when the petroleum portfolio was taken away from Mani Shankar Aiyar. Mr Aiyar had been aggressively pursuing India's “energy security”, which involved dealings with states America would prefer India to shun. Besides buying, in partnership with China, an oilfield in Syria, India has been discussing a pipeline to bring gas from Iran through some dangerous bits of Pakistan. Proponents of this project see it as an enormous boon to regional security, as well as to India's energy needs. America, however, opposes such a huge deal with Iran. Inevitably, there are suspicions that Mr Aiyar was a sacrifice on the altar of Indo-American partnership.
Misgivings about perceived American meddling run deep. M.J. Akbar, editor of the Asian Age, a newspaper, has noted that “The Indian street has been nourished by the view that America is a democracy at home and a dictatorship abroad...Indians do not make good stenographers. They simply do not like taking dictation.”
The China syndrome
Whatever the short-term outcome of the nuclear talks, they are unlikely to resolve the controversy in both countries. But nor will Mr Bush and Mr Singh abandon their pursuit of closer partnership. On the American side, one motive for this is usually couched in the most delicate diplomat-speak. The American government neither wishes to “contain” China, nor imagines that it can (though many congressmen would like to try). But America does have an interest in “preventing Asia from being dominated by any single power that has the capacity to crowd out others”, and that may threaten America's alliances in Asia. So Ashley Tellis, then a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (and now on secondment to the State Department), told Congress in November. Others put it more bluntly. “Of course we should sell advanced weaponry to India,” argues Robert Blackwill, Mr Mulford's acerbic predecessor as ambassador to India. “The million-man Indian army actually fights, unlike the post-modern militaries of many of our European allies.” America should help India with its space programme without worrying too much whether that will help India build missiles. “Why should the United States want to check India's missile capability in ways that could lead to China's permanent nuclear dominance over democratic India?” he wrote last year in the National Interest, a foreign-affairs journal.
India certainly has no intention of joining an anti-China axis. Nor, for now, does it have to choose between two big suitors. China, which at first voiced reservations about the Indian nuclear deal with America, is now shrewdly acquiescent. Perhaps it hopes that American congressmen and Indian Communists will kill it anyway. Or perhaps it does not want to jeopardise its own fast-improving relations with India.
American businesses are not as excited by India as they are by China, for the obvious reasons that China's economy is two-and-a-half times bigger, is growing faster and is more integrated with the rest of the world. In each of the past four years, the annual increase in China's foreign trade has exceeded India's total merchandise trade. Last year China received about ten times as much foreign direct investment as India did.
Yet American business is well aware of India, in large measure thanks to India's expertise in software development and other sorts of “outsourced” services. Despite the protectionist hoo-hah ahead of the American presidential election in 2004, outsourcing to India has not slowed at all. More than half the Fortune 500 companies outsource some of their information-technology work to India, and the rest have to explain to shareholders why they are not doing so.
This is not simply a matter of cost arbitrage. Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro, one of India's big information-technology firms, says that in India the very best young talent is moving into the profession—membership of which is even good for marriage prospects. America, by contrast, is not producing software engineers in the numbers it needs.
According to Promod Haque of Norwest Venture, a venture-capital firm, it is also suffering a “reverse brain-drain” as Indian and Chinese engineers go home. This, he argues, coupled with the retirement of the baby-boomers, is creating a “shortage of intellectual capital” in America which will eventually threaten its superpower status. The solution is to build a “strategic competitive advantage” through an alliance with an offshore base of intellectual capital. India is the obvious choice. Its pool of highly qualified graduates will be twice as large as China's by 2008, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, and they speak English.
Such a de facto alliance is already in the making, and is helping alert American business to India's other attractions: an economy expected to grow by more than 7% in 2006, for the fourth year running; a fast-expanding middle-class; and a government committed to liberalisation, even if implementing it is painfully slow. In the past year, India has allowed foreign firms to enter the construction and property industries, signed an “open skies” agreement with America and passed a patent law that meets WTO standards. As India continues to open up new industries to foreign investment, the opportunities for American firms are proliferating, says Ron Somers, head of the US-India Business Council. Two-way trade last year was only some $20 billion, but the nuclear deal itself may offer a bonanza for American suppliers of equipment. India is also by some estimates the world's biggest arms importer.
Reuters
Reuters
Retailing, new Indian style
American businesses have their gripes about India. They would like it to simplify its spaghetti-spill of bureaucracy, open up its markets faster and fix its rotten infrastructure. American insurers would like to be allowed to buy more than 26% of one of their Indian counterparts, for example. “Single-brand” retailers (eg, shops selling only Nike goods) are glad to have been allowed this year to open stores in India; general retailers such as Wal-Mart would like to be allowed in next.
None of these moans, however, approaches the intensity of the Japan-bashing of the 1980s or the China-bashing of today. India is seen as less of a threat, being neither rich, like Japan, nor an aggressive autocracy as China is. American union bosses complain far less about India than they do about China.
The promised land
India loves being in the international spotlight. Hotels are full, airports packed and the foreign ministry deluged with foreign dignitaries. Recent figures, which show the economy growing at more than 8% a year, have propelled the stockmarket into uncharted territory, with its main index up by 50% in a year. There is an air of euphoric expectation that at last India is reclaiming its rightful place both in the world economy and in the global balance of power.
The IT country
Not everyone is basking in this glow. Andy Xie of Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, frets that “India is experiencing typical overheating symptoms of an emerging-market boom: widening current-account deficit, high and accelerating inflation rate, and rampant stock-and property-market speculation. India's macro environment is quite similar to Latin America in 1980s and South-East Asia in 1990s.” India's low external indebtedness, managed exchange rate and large foreign-exchange reserves should insulate it from a financial-market shock. But Mr Xie is not alone in worrying about the dependence on inflows of portfolio investment to finance a current-account deficit.
Besides those giving warning of the short-term risk of a financial crisis, some observers also cast doubt on the staying-power of the present spurt of growth. In a new book, Shankar Acharya, a former chief economic adviser to the government, argues that over the next five years economic growth is more likely to average 5.5-6% a year than the 8-10% optimists now see as India's birthright.
That is still, by most standards, a boom. But the distribution of growth also risks sharpening regional and social differences. For Ms Roy, India is a land where gangs of emaciated labourers dig trenches to lay fibre-optic cables by candlelight. India's “progress” of the past decade and a half, she reckons, is like two convoys of trucks: a tiny one “on its way to a glittering destination somewhere near the top of the world” and a huge one that “just melts into the darkness and disappears.”
Of course, when celebrated novelists worry that a country is melting into the darkness, its prospects are probably bright. But Ms Roy touches on a concern shared by many economists: that, for all its phenomenal success in IT and some high-end manufacturing industries, India's boom has yet to reach many of the two-thirds of its people who live in the countryside. A particular concern is the failure of labour-intensive manufacturing to take off. According to a recent IMF paper, the proportion of the workforce employed in manufacturing actually fell slightly in the 1990s.
Stability, democracy, demography
Nevertheless, in the long term, India has two great attractions. One is stability. India has proven mechanisms for the peaceful transfer of power and the ability to withstand terrible internal conflicts—in Kashmir and the north-east, for example—without danger to its integrity. China's eventual transition to democracy could be traumatic. Another attraction is demography. China's one-child policy ensures that it will grow old before it gets rich: a generation of only children may suddenly find themselves struggling to support the parents who once pampered them. India will remain younger and more dynamic well into the middle of the 21st century.
For many reasons, a close partnership between India and America seems both desirable and inevitable. The fraught negotiation over the nuclear issue, however, has revealed how difficult it will be to achieve. To America, and to many Indians, it must seem inconceivable that India—still so poor, and so desperately in need of just the sort of help America is offering—should not jump at the chance of a special relationship. How on earth, for example, could the idea of siding with Iran instead be seriously debated? But for many in India, “non-alignment” is a synonym for independence, and should not be sacrificed, however enticing the prize. Moreover, so confident is India's mood at the moment, that many seriously believe America needs it more than the other way round. Tomorrow belongs to Asia.
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Citation: "The great Indian hope trick," The Economist, 23 February 2006.
Original URL: http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5545462
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