Two more thoughts on Boston

Okay, I can't seem to let this go.

Last Thursday while lunching with a friend, I confessed I was hoping desperately that whoever set off the marathon bombs would turn out to be what people in this country call "white." The bombing itself had done enough damage to the social fabric; we didn't need an explosion of race hatred on top of that damage. We agreed.

So Thursday night when the authorities put out pictures of the men they thought were the bombers, I was pleased to see they appeared "white."

Like Joshua Marshall, I thought of frat boys -- perhaps college students like those my partner teaches. Boston has lots of those.

So it turns out, I wasn't altogether wrong. They had, at least recently, been college students. And they were as Caucasian as any of us can get -- actual immigrants from Central Asia. But they were also from Muslim backgrounds. So the usual suspects now are howling.

I have to wonder: does the historic practice in the United States of branding people who a majority fears mean that we must now believe that Muslims from the Caucasus region are non-white? It wouldn't be the first time we incongruously applied a racial label for an ethnic origin. It would however be flat out absurd -- and instructive about our notions of race.
*** Up until the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, I was prepared to give Massachusetts authorities and the Administration pretty high marks for not engaging in bellicose posturing in response to the crime. And they still deserve credit for largely tamping down unrealistic fears; a "Westerner's" chance of being killed in a terrorist attack in modern times is "one in three million each year, or the same chance an American will be killed by a tornado" according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal.

But then the feds had to blow it by announcing they were going delay giving the surviving Tsarnaev his Miranda warning -- put off telling him he had a Constitutional right to shut up and ask for a lawyer. Withholding the warning is just Administration posturing, demonstrating they are "tough." This guy is a kid who grew up with cop shows and, having completed naturalization, probably studied the Constitution; in theory he knows he has such rights.

I'll outsource legal comment on what is wrong with failing to expeditiously warn the prisoner:

Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said it would be acceptable for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ask Mr. Tsarnaev about “imminent” threats, like whether other bombs are hidden around Boston. But he said that for broader questioning, the F.B.I. must not “cut corners.”

“The public safety exception to Miranda should be a narrow and limited one, and it would be wholly inappropriate and unconstitutional to use it to create the case against the suspect,” Mr. Romero said. “The public safety exception would be meaningless if interrogations are given an open-ended time horizon.”

Sure, there are lots of things our security spooks want to know from this guy. And they are going to find out; they've got an airtight case with a death penalty option.

Choosing to use exceptional procedures because this concerns a crime of terror signals weakness, not strength. The Administration has turned down Republican calls to hand the guy over to the inept, law-free military commissions, but apparently it couldn't resist making a gesture to our homegrown authoritarians. Too bad; they'd been doing a good job.

An anniversary: remember Afghanistan?

Opium poppies flourish near Bamiyan, Afghanistan. Peace doesn't do so well. (Omar Sayami photo)

Seven years ago, the United States launched its attack on Afghanistan in response to the attacks of 9/11. The United States is still at war in Afghanistan, though often it is not very clear who the troops are fighting.

Michael T. McPhearson is Executive Director of Veterans For Peace and Co-Chair of United For Peace and Justice. He was a field artillery officer in the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division during Desert Shield/Desert Storm, also known as Gulf War I. Today he shared his thoughts on the Afghan war. (That's the war Senator Obama wants to expand.)

I was in New York City on September 11, 2001. I was horrified, angered and confused by the brutality and audacity of the attack. I knew there would be a military response. So I knelt and prayed that our nation's reaction would be thoughtful and provide leadership to the world through what promised to be the beginning of a dark time. ...

The hope was eclipsed. My government chose to use war as the primary policy direction. As I said, I expected military action. However, to what end? The current policy appears to be, engage the enemy until there is no longer opposition, or in a word “war.” War is not a sufficient policy to address the causes of the attack and will not bring peace. It will only bring more war. There is not a government to defeat or leader to topple. The faces of the opposition change and remain nameless with occasional exceptions like bin Laden. But without a doubt, even if bin Laden were captured today the occupiers and resisters would continue to fight.

Caught in the crossfire of U.S. waging war against a near endless supply of nameless and faceless opponents are civilians who wish to live their lives without fear. Civilians who if choosing between living in fear of U.S. air strikes and home invasions which to them seem to have no rhyme or reason, or in fear of the medieval thinking and actions of the Taliban, will pick the fear with a face they recognize and actions they can anticipate.

Meanwhile, the U.K.'s senior general in Afghanistan says that Western forces can't win against the Afghan insurgency.

An absolute military victory in Afghanistan is impossible, Brig.-Gen. Mark Carleton-Smith told England's Sunday Times newspaper.

What foreign forces must now come to grips with, he said, is reducing the level of insurgency so that it can be managed by Afghan forces and no longer poses a major threat. ...

As such, striking a deal with the Taliban could be considered as a strategic option, Carleton-Smith said. It is an idea that has been repeatedly — and recently — advanced by Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

CBCNews,
October 4, 2008

The Canadians are naturally interested; they've lost a lot of soldiers over there. So has the United States -- more than in Iraq in recent months.

What was this war about anyway?

Once again, I cannot recommend strongly enough Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos for a overview of the region and its wars.

Debate afterthought: Isn't Georgia peachy?

When John McCain wandered off into a tirade about Georgia last night, I didn't get too worried. It takes the people of U.S. quite a while to get properly ginned up about the woes of people in counties they can't locate, even if those country's names seem "borrowed" from a U.S. state. (I know that last is hogwash, but let's be real about our geographical self-centeredness.)

But the complete folly of the conversation is illustrated by the graphic from the Gallup organization above. By and large, Georgians are MUCH more interested in good relations with their actual neighbor, Russia, than in being a dependent of the United States all the way around the world.

It appears that what has been deemed the "2008 South Ossetian War" has pulled the people of Georgia into a conflict with Russia at a time when many see close relations with the country as important.

Just because they have an impetuous president, Mikheil Saakashvili, who got them into a war, doesn't mean they don't know better than to pull the tail of the bear, if the people at large had their druthers.

Remind anyone of why we don't need another quick-to-the-draw, impetuous president here?

Wish Obama wouldn't take the bait on this one too!

Back to the real world: Descent into Chaos

The debased politics of the United States certainly can make one question whether the rule of law or democracy can be sustained in a commercial communications environment. But until recently, the world did have a good-sized supply of true believers in these accomplishments of European civilization: the insurgent "western-leaning," educated classes of exploited and misruled former European colonies were some of the most ardent believers anywhere. For example, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh is reported to have admired the U.S. Constitution -- until the United States committed itself to preventing the Vietnamese from choosing their own path.

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid was another such believer whose trust has soured. His new book, Descent into Chaos, is both the record of his personal disillusionment and a meticulous, invaluable, chronicle of how the United States has destroyed hope for democracy and development in Afghanistan, the other Central Asian "Stans," and Pakistan in the years since 9/11.

Rashid, and many like him, thought the United States would have to side with freedom in his native part of the world.

Initially, it seemed that 9/11 assured that the world would address the social stagnation and state failure in South and Central Asia. ...Afghanistan had to be rescued from itself. Autocratic regimes in Pakistan and Central Asia had to change their repressive ways and listen to their alienated and poverty stricken citizens. Iran had to be made part of the international community. The West had to wake up to the realities and responsibilities of injustice, poverty, lack of education and unresolved conflicts such as those in Kashmir and Afghanistan which it had ignored for too long and which could not longer be allowed to fester. The West and democratic-minded Muslims had to help each other counter this new and deadly form of Islamic extremism.

The attacks of 9/11 created enormous trepidation in the region as America unsheathed its sword for a land invasion of Afghanistan, but they also created enormous expectations for change and hope for a sustained western commitment to the region that would lift it out of poverty and underdevelopment. Surely the 3000 American dead lying in the rubble n the Hudson as well as the others in Pennsylvania and Washington had not died in vain. Surely we would remember them not for the revenge that the United States was about to take on Al Qaeda, but for the hope that their deaths had brought to a neglected corner of the globe. Instead, seven years on, the US led "war on terrorism" has left in its wake a far more unstable world than existed on that momentous day in 2001.

The book is an exhaustive, pained narrative of the abysmal U.S. failure in Central Asia.

As the U.S. gets slowly booted from Iraq, this region is going to become the main zone of imperial conflict. Past performance ensures that the result will be bloody for the local population and probably fruitless for the NATO nations now embroiled there.

Ominously, today Juan Cole points out that with regard to the war in Pakistan/Afghanistan (yes, the U.S. is engaged in military action in both countries), "Obama looks closer to the thinking of the US officer corps in Afghanistan than does McCain."

If you want to know where your military is at 3 am, I cannot recommend Rashid's current book too highly.

We don't care; we don't have to.

It's not just utility monopolies that routinely slough off concern for the effects of their actions. I find this depressing. My reaction may be self-indulgent.

We the people of these United States simply find it more than we can do to attend to wars in which we don't, right this minute anyway, have our own soldiers dying.

Just 17 percent reported following news about Russian troops entering Georgia very closely, while 37 percent said they didn't follow it closely at all. The level of attention given to the Georgia conflict is comparable to previous international conflicts when they don't involve U.S. troops. The spike in military tensions between India and Pakistan in 2002 was followed very closely by 24 percent of Americans, and the conflict between the Russian military and rebels in Chechnya was tracked very closely by only about one-in-ten Americans. Even the 1993 civil war in Bosnia, which ultimately had far-reaching consequences for European politics, was followed very closely by just 23 percent of Americans.

Pew

I know, it is only human to pick and choose what we attend to. And all this agony is very far away in places we can't locate and don't understand.

But since we've been an empire since at least 1945, and the sole Alpha Global Dog since 1989 (though now on the wane), the quality of our democracy at home depends on whether our rulers are unregulated in their behavior toward the rest of the world.

And though we may not care now, as U.S. power declines -- as it must when other peoples demand their place in the sun -- we will have to care about what is done in our name in those faraway places.

Georgia on my mind *

Some observations on the Caucasus kafuffle, not deeply informed, but heartfelt and perhaps useful.

• A considerable number of people who had homes and lives until last week no longer do. That's wrong. People need urgent help -- and the global mechanisms for providing aid in a way that doesn't fuel the conflict are probably broken.

• In the 1990s, it became something of a truism in circles I ran in that nationalism had become dangerous to human thriving. We were looking at the post-Yugoslavian Balkans among other examples. Since 2000, the emphasis of concern has turned to places that were becoming "failed states." After all, U.S. military might created failed states as fast as possible in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the Caucasus, nationalism is back with a vengeance. And it is deeply destructive to all parties.

• At the beginning of the 21st century, probably the only places left that really believed that the U.S. was in the business of "democracy promotion," rather of our own empire, were those that had suffered under the Russian empire. They counted on the U.S., probably none more than the nationalistic Georgians who clearly believed they could bait the Russians and would get U.S. support. Now in Georgia

  there's a universal belief that the United States betrayed Georgia, so you have people who are really in despair and profoundly hopeless. We've lost 70 percent of our influence in the Caucasus in four days.

  Charles Fairbanks,
  TNR

  The U.S. didn't deserve the reliance Georgians placed on it; but what hope can any of these smaller peoples have to offset Russian dominance?

• The U.S. has clearly been shown up as overextended and led by incompetents, if anyone in the world had any doubts after Iraq and Afghanistan. After Iraq, it is hard to claim that recognized borders should protect any country from invasion. For those of us who already knew that, the clear demonstration can feel satisfying. But evidence of U.S, impotence does not translate into global betterment.

• John McCain is a complete wackjob, obviously unsuited to become President. Not only is his "top foreign policy advisor" a paid flack for the country of Georgia, but McCain can only respond to conflict in the Caucasus by trying to wedge events into the old Cold War paradigm. He demonstrates zero ability to discern what is actually going on; rather, he seems to welcome the opportunity to go back to the framework he grew up with: all the world's ills are the mean Ruskies' fault. Bomb them. The guy is dangerous.

  John McCain said “Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgia territory.” That is ultimatum talk. But if McCain were president today, just what would he have done if Russia defied him?

  William Pfaff

• The rest of Washington's leaders are suckers for the Cold War framing with McCain driving it. Even Bush showed some signs of sanity at the beginning of this crisis, indicating that Georgia's provocation and the Russian response called for no more than verbal admonitions. Now McCain's bellicosity is raising the ante for all of them. Now Obama is adding to the silly chorus suggesting bringing Georgia into NATO, a sure way to drag the U.S. into future iterations of this nasty little nationalist squabble.

A debacle all the way around, especially for people in immediate proximity.

* This article, probably through unconscious appropriation, shares a title with an excellent piece by Scott Horton of the Atlantic who has actually been to the region and knows some of the players.

Enter the arc of mountainous agony

Looks like we are going to need this map. Click on it for a somewhat larger version. Click your browser's "back" button to return to the post.

There's a war on in another of those distant places people in the United States don't know about and our government is, as usual, not an entirely disinterested bystander.

Some basics: the country of Georgia is one of the successor states that emerged out of the break up of the Soviet Union. This Southwest Asian Orthodox Christian statelet, located south of Russia between the Black Sea, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan, was absorbed by Tsarist Russia in the 19th century. In the communist era, it was a decidedly non-autonomous republic, most notable as the birthplace of Stalin.

Since becoming an independent republic after 1991, the state has been something of a protectorate of the United States. Our government has so far failed to persuade reluctant Europeans to bring Georgia into NATO. (Maybe someone knows enough not to embrace trouble they can't handle?) Georgia had the largest contingent of occupation troops in Iraq after the U.S. and Britain, though its government has rather desperately sought to bring them home to face the Russian army in the last few days.

South Ossetians are an ancient demographic group in Caucasus Mountain region, Orthodox Christians who speak an Iranian Indo-European language -- and who decidedly do not identify with the Georgians inside whose state they found themselves. Some 70-90 percent of them carry Russian passports. Since 1991, there's been a good deal of ethnic cleansing in the area, sending Georgians south and Ossetians north.

But Georgia, with U.S., European and U.N. support, has refused to recognize Ossetians separatist aspirations. Russia, never happy with being surrounded by U.S. supported statelets (however demographically distinct and historically ancient), has been propping up the South Ossetian separate entity. The President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, decided the opening day of the Olympics would be a great time to take back the disputed territory; the Russians threw their enormously superior force into the fight; and as of today the question has become, will the Russians carry the war into Georgia proper?

Then there is Abkhazia (see that map), where the Georgians claim the Russians are also attacking. Abkhazians speak Abkhaz, and comprise a large (how large is disputed) fraction of this bit of the state of Georgia. They accuse Georgians of attempting ethnic cleansing in the area -- and the Georgians respond that the Abkhazians were the aggressors. Interestingly, the area's economy consists of its desirability as a destination for Russian tourists. It's a resort. Russia has supported the separatist ambitions of the Abkhazians and 80 percent of them carry Russian passports. ***Where’s the U.S. in all this? Getting its ass bit by its inattention to on-the-ground grievances, including those of the Russian state which doesn't like being encircled by hostile U.S. clients. There is not a lot the U.S. can do to protect the rash Georgians at this point. Our administration is currently trying for a U.N. resolution -- and Russians, Ossetians, Abkhazians, and Georgians are getting chewed up in the great power meat grinder. ***I went to the trouble to research this post which probably no one wants at all because I think in the next few years people in the United States will be forced to learn the geography and history of Central Asia, just as the last few years have forced many of us to attempt at least a nodding acquaintance with the core states of the Middle East. The war the U.S. sponsors in the failed state in Afghanistan is going to move front and center. The whole region, in a band from Turkey east to through Kashmir, is profoundly unstable and the U.S. is mucking about in it ignorantly and incompetently. Readers can expect more pre-primer efforts like this one in the days to come. I think I'll label the series "arc of mountainous agony" in the tags.