How the Mighty Have Fallen

Dubai used to be the playground of the Middle East sporting enormous wealth and some of the most spectacular architecture on the planet. For a lot of ambitious Europeans and North Americans it was the place to be, emphasis on "was."

Dubai's prosperity depended entirely on its neighbours' prosperity. They have oil, Dubai has none. Dubai was literally fueled by their oil profits. Even since the global slump, however, Dubai has been running on empty.

A lot of those foreigners who thought the sky was the limit bought expensive cars and even more expensive homes that suddenly became much less valuable once Dubai's economy tanked. Now ultra-modern Dubai clings to some old ways, one of them is the Debtor's Prison for folks who can't pay their creditors. That caused a lot of Westerners to leave Dubai quite abruptly and with no notice. Dubai's airports and streets remain littered with very expensive cars, marques like Mercedez Benz, BMW and the like.

According to the local paper, The National, the abandoned luxury car problem has become so bad that new cars lose half their value the moment they're driven off the dealer's lot:

Last year, the value of a new saloon or 4x4 fell immediately after purchase by about 20 to 35 per cent. This year, the loss is between 35 and 55 per cent, according to Pradeep Ramakrishnan, the head of used-car operations at Swaidan Trading, the Peugeot dealer for Dubai and the northern emirates.“They have fallen drastically,” he said. “The market is very erratic but, basically, this drop is because many used cars are on the market.

...The fall in value of new luxury cars was even greater, he said – at least 55 per cent – because so many people wanted to get rid of them. That was confirmed when, in one day, The National spotted more than 60 cars, many high-end vehicles, abandoned on the streets of Dubai. Many had fines outstanding.

It's easy to tell the abandoned cars. In Dubai a car doesn't have to sit too long before it's covered in a tell tale coat of sand.

The Next Iraq War - Water Wars

The Middle East is facing severe drought and the political and security problems from that are spilling across national borders.

Long-troubled Iraq has now been hit by water shortages that some observers believe could destroy the nation. From the Abu Dhabi newspaper, The Nation:

As bombs continue to tear apart its towns and villages, Iraq is now in the grip of an environmental crisis that experts and officials warn may do what decades of war have not been able to – destroy the country. The new war on Iraq, says one member of the country’s parliament, “is a war of water”.

The Tigris and Euphrates, two of the world’s great water courses, fed life to the historic lands of Mesopotamia, “the land between two rivers”. The previously lush plains south of Baghdad are widely held to be the cradle of civilisation, the birthplace of some of humanity’s greatest achievements and earliest empires.

Today, however, those same rivers are increasingly starved of water. The floodplains on either side of the Euphrates and Tigris, Iraq’s old fertile agricultural heartlands, are parched. In northern Iraq, underground supplies of water have been so depleted they may never recover.

...Wells once 200 metres deep now have to go down twice as far to reach the lowered water table. A majority of existing wells in the region are running dry.“Vast areas of Iraq are now cracked and barren, the marshes have dried up and dust storms worse than anyone can remember obscure the sun,” says Ibrahim al Alubiddi, an economics professor at Baghdad’s Mustansariya University.

...Iraq’s devastating water shortages have three main causes: upstream dams in Turkey and Syria have drastically reduced the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates; rainfall levels have hit record lows; and inefficient management techniques mean Iraq wastes what limited water it does have.

“The drought has been a real issue; without rain there has been no replenishment of rivers and groundwater aquifers,” says Mohammed Amin Faris, a leading Iraqi water official. “We used to have droughts once a decade. Now we are worried they are coming every two or three years because of global climate change.

Turkey and Syria aren't damming off the Tigris and Euphrates to punish Iraq. Those countries are simply also hard hit by drought. Over the last three years 250,000 Syrian farmers have been driven off the land by drought, the worst hit region being along the Iraq border. Both Syria and Iraq met this week with the Turkish energy minister, Taner Yildiz, but came away empty handed when Yildiz said Turkey itself doesn't have enough water to be able to increase flows into the Tigris and Euphrates.

If you look around the world you'll find that severe drought is becoming a common, enormous threat throughout the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, East Africa, most of South America and the southern US. In virtually all of those areas, groundwater (aquifers) are being pumped dry. When the water runs out, food goes with it, and nations that lose their ability to feed their people become destabilized and a threat to their neighbours and to global security.

Iggy - Not So Fast

Harper EnviroMin Jim Prentice may have given Michael Ignatieff the best reason ever not to pull the pin on the minority Conservative government.

To Prentice has fallen the unenviable task of formulating a Canadian policy on global warming in advance of December's international climate change summit in Copenhagen. To put it delicately, Jim's nuts are in a vice on this one.

Jimbo has to come up with something that could pass for a carbon emissions reduction plan while protecting the most environmentally catastrophic energy project on earth - the Athabasca Tar Sands. All this nonsense about carbon capture and sequestration is just that, nonsense. If it was viable for the Tar Sands, it would have been in place by now and it's not nor is it scheduled for any time in the future. CCS isn't even a target. It's a joke. Unable to turn lead into gold, Prentice is scrambling to do something and, according to the Toronto Star, that something translates into shifting the burden of our national emissions targets onto every province except Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Environment Minister Jim Prentice has pitched the two-tier approach in meetings with industry executives and provincial governments aimed at setting up a market to cap greenhouse gas emissions and let companies trade carbon credits to reduce pollution.

Though plans are described as a work in progress, numerous accounts say the Conservatives intend to put a cap on the emissions from Ontario's manufacturing sector and other polluting industries across Canada, while letting oil and gas companies meet less stringent intensity targets which allow output, and pollution, to increase.

That could jeopardize the economies of eight provinces and three territories for the sake of continued growth in Alberta and Saskatchewan, detractors say.

I can't understand why Ignatieff would take Messrs. Harper and Prentice off the hook just when they have finally painted themselves into this corner. Then again, I haven't been able to understand most of Iggy's positions anyway.

We May Not Like Karzai - But Somebody Does

And those somebodies are powerful enough to hand Hamid Karzai a victory in Afghanistan's elections, powerful enough even to give him every vote in some ridings where he wasn't even liked. From McClatchey Newspapers:

The records bolster the case of ballot-box stuffing during the Aug. 20 election to pick a new president to lead Afghanistan, which is now struggling against an increasingly powerful Taliban insurgency.
In Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan, the results from 66 polling sites have been released. In nine of them, 100 percent of the votes went to Karzai.

Also in Kandahar Province, an area that was a target of insurgent attacks to try to suppress the vote, there were six polling places that had more than 100 percent of the estimated registered voters reportedly turn out. At one location, the turn out was nearly a third higher than the number of voters registered.

"It is state organized fraud," said Karzai's main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, a former minister in Karzai's government, on Saturday.

Well that's certainly one way to avoid having to face a run-off election. The question is what exactly are we in the West going to do about it?

It strikes me that, if Karzai is powerful enough to steal an election, he's powerful enough to defend his country against the civil war that's underway today. The corollary to this is that, if Karzai is able to steal an election, what on earth are we doing propping him up against any other group? What options do we have left? The West has a wealth of experience at triggering coups but its a very spotty record when it comes to doing it successfully.

It seems that we have three options, each lousy to some degree. We can move to topple Karzai and live with the aftermath - probably a full blown civil war. We can simply ignore this fiasco, pretend it didn't happen, prop up Karzai and heap dishonour on our forces, especially those who have died for this hellhole. Or we can leave and live with the aftermath - probably a full blown civil war. I vote that we leave.

Global Warming Means High Water and Hot Rocks

Around the world, native populations of low-lying islands are abandoning their ancestral homes, taking to their boats and sailing to higher ground. This is happening on a relatively small scale at the moment but the accounts have been coming in with sufficient frequency that they're no longer drawing much attention. We - have become resigned to - Their - fate. And so, climate change proceeds apace without causing much alarm or even notice where it matters, places like Ottawa and Washington.

A report to be released next week at the University College London's Climate Forcing of Geological Hazards conference, warns that global warming has a whole bag of nasty tricks that will indeed get our attention before long. From The Guardian:

Scientists are to outline dramatic evidence that global warming threatens the planet in a new and unexpected way – by triggering earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches and volcanic eruptions.

...Melting glaciers will set off avalanches, floods and mud flows in the Alps and other mountain ranges; torrential rainfall in the UK is likely to cause widespread erosion; while disappearing Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets threaten to let loose underwater landslides, triggering tsunamis that could even strike the seas around Britain.

At the same time the disappearance of ice caps will change the pressures acting on the Earth's crust and set off volcanic eruptions across the globe. Life on Earth faces a warm future – and a fiery one.

"Not only are the oceans and atmosphere conspiring against us, bringing baking temperatures, more powerful storms and floods, but the crust beneath our feet seems likely to join in too," said Professor Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre, at University College London (UCL).

...Last week scientists from Northern Arizona University reported in the journal Science that temperatures in the Arctic were now higher than at any time in the past 2,000 years. Ice sheets are disappearing at a dramatic rate – and these could have other, unexpected impacts on the planet's geology.

According to Professor Mark Maslin of UCL, one is likely to be the release of the planet's methane hydrate deposits. These ice-like deposits are found on the seabed and in the permafrost regions of Siberia and the far north.

...It was not just the warming of the sea that was the problem, added Maslin. As the ice around Greenland and Antarctica melted, sediments would pour off land masses and cliffs would crumble, triggering underwater landslides that would break open more hydrate reserves on the sea-bed. Again there would be a jump in global warming. "These are key issues that we will have to investigate over the next few years," he said.

There is also a danger of earthquakes, triggered by disintegrating glaciers, causing tsunamis off Chile, New Zealand and Newfoundland in Canada, Nasa scientist Tony Song will tell the conference. The last on this list could even send a tsunami across the Atlantic, one that might reach British shores.

Global Warming - Just One Damned Thing After Another!

Playing For Time Is Playing With Fire

When it comes to international action to combat global warming, time is not on mankind's side. Unfortunately some of the key players simply don't get that, among them the United States. The Guardian reports that America's climate change legislation is hopelessly bogged down in the Senate:

Without concrete action in the Senate, there will not be an actual deal ready to sign in Copenhagen. With no Senate action, there's no guarantee that the US will commit to binding targets. And with no US targets, there will be no firm agreement from China, India or other emerging powers. Ratification of an international treaty requires the consent of 67 senators – and right now, just getting to 60 just to vote on the climate bill is looking difficult.

With a realistic time frame, this delay means they won't release a bill until the end of September. Boxer, who chairs the Senate's environment and public works committee, has said she plans to hold hearings on the draft text, followed by markup of the full legislation. Her committee is not the only one likely to play a major role in the bill.

So, what's the rush anyway? It's going to take years to implement climate change measures anyway, isn't it? Of course it is. The important distinction is that we have a lot more time to act on climate change than we do to achieve an effective consensus to act on climate change.

Climate change is already happening. In some countries its impact is setting in fast and hard while in others it's barely noticeable. The ironic part is that it's the "last and least"countries of the West (where the warming will arrive last and that will be least affected) that are probably going to be expected to make the greatest concessions. If the West balks on this, the other major carbon emitters - India and China - won't budge either. Before long, climate change will cause enormous social upheaval in South and East Asia and, when that happens, the window for consensus slams irrevocably shut. When that happens, climate change completes the transition from a scientific problem to a political problem to a military problem.

If we don't get everyone onside in Copenhagen in December it will be vastly more difficult, perhaps even impossible, to later achieve any meaningful consensus. I'm beginning to wonder whether Washington isn't counting on just that.

How Manley & Co. Fed Us Pure Horseshit on Afghanistan

Canadians have a decision to make.
The Government has affirmed that
Parliament will decide whether
Canada will extend its military
deployment in Afghanistan after
February 2009. Reaching that
decision requires a realistic
assessment of conditions in
Afghanistan, along with a pragmatic
assessment of Canada’s engagement
there. Just as importantly, it
demands consideration of Canada’s
own interests, our values, and our
willingness and capacity to make a
difference to Afghanistan’s future.

Does anyone recall that dark farce we came to know as the "Manley Report"? The report, the handiwork of a gaggle of aging political hacks with no military expertise, was hopelessly flawed from the outset. Manley, Tellier, Burney, Epp and Wallin knew as much about unconventional warfare as they did about auto mechanics. That was evident in the way they characterized the Afghan war:

It is a war fought between an elected, democratic government and a zealous insurgency of proven brutality.

Two glaring errors. There has never been anything approaching a democratic government in Afghanistan and, by the time Manley & Company began looking at the situation, the notion of an insurgency was probably outdated. We may not have realized it back in 2007/2008 but what had begun in 2002 as an insurgency had already evolved into a nascent civil war five years later, a "people's war."

The Prussian military philosopher, Carl von Clausewitz identified five conditions for a successful people's war:

1. that the war is "carried on in the heart of the country"

2. that it "cannot be decided by a single catastrophe"

3. that "the theatre of war embraces a considerable extent of the country"

4. that "the national character is favourable to the measures" and

5. that "the country is of broken and difficult nature, either being mountainous, or by reason of woods and marshes, or from the peculiar mode of cultivation in use."

All five of Clausewitz' conditions are met today in Afghanistan. In fact, the Taliban tactics today would be instantly recognized by the Prussian:

"Militia and bands of armed civilians cannot and should not be employed against the enemy main force - or indeed against any sizeable enemy force. They are not supposed to pulverize the core but to nibble at the shell and around the edges. They are meant to operate in areas just outside the theatre of war - where the invader will not appear in strength - in order to deny him these areas altogether."

If Clausewitz underestimated the revolutionary potential of people's war, he correctly grasped its essential nature...

"A general uprising...should be nebulous and elusive; its resistance should never materialize as a concrete body, otherwise the enemy can direct sufficient force at its core, crush it, and take many prisoners....On the other hand, there must be some concentration at certain points: the fog must thicken and form a dark and menacing cloud out of which a bolt of lightning may strike at any time."

There's a echo of this in T E Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Setting out a theory of guerrilla warfare, as applied during the Arab revolt against Ottoman rule of 1917-18, Lawrence described guerrillas as "an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas....a vapour, blowing where we listed." Lawrence's thinking was influenced by Clausewitz, who he described as "intellectually so much the master" of the other great military theorists.

The Manley Report was sheer political theatre and nothing more. It sold us on a war that didn't exist on behalf of a democratic government that didn't exist either. It was a device conjured up by Stephen Harper to achieve his ends while simultaneously taking him off the hook. It worked well enough to ensure the waste of Canadian lives would be extended by the Conservatives and the Liberals into 2011 and, perhaps, beyond.

Perhaps it's best that we not delve into these questions because our decisions, our actions today and in the next two years hinge directly on the legitimacy of the central government in Kabul. The realization that our soldiers are fighting, and dying, to prop up a "criminal enterprise" in Kabul in what has now transformed from an insurgency to a civil war is almost too much to bear. Yet we need to see the Afghan War for what it really is if we're to ever get our soldiers out of that place, rid them of this fiasco.

Galloway - America Out NOW

Joe Galloway earned his reputation as one of the great war correspondents during Vietnam. Now, writing in McClatchey Newspapers, Galloway argues the Powell Doctrine proves America shouldn't waste one more life on Afghanistan:

Gen. Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said these questions all must be answered with a loud YES before the United States takes military action. He listed his questions in the 1990 run-up to the Persian Gulf War, drawing heavily on the Weinberger Doctrine that was laid down by former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger during the debate over America's ends and means in Lebanon.

1. Is a vital national security interest threatened?

2. Do we have a clear, attainable objective?

3. Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?

4. Have all non-violent policy means been exhausted?

5. Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?

6. Have all the consequences of our action been fully considered?

7. Is the action supported by the American people?

8. Do we have broad international support?

Those questions weren't asked and answered before we invaded Afghanistan late in 2001, and by the time we invaded Iraq early in 2003, then-defense secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was declaring the Powell doctrine "outmoded" as he ran premature victory laps around a fleeting success in Afghanistan.

...It can fairly be argued that not a single affirmative answer can be given to Gen. Powell's eight questions with regard to the actions now planned or underway in Afghanistan. Had those questions been asked about Iraq in early 2003, not a single affirmative answer could have been given.

...We no longer have a vital national security interest or a clearly attainable goal in Afghanistan. Our stated goal is to deny any future sanctuary to al Qaida in Afghanistan - but al Qaida isn't based in Afghanistan and hasn't been for years.

...If you're determined to fight a war, choose a commander whom you trust and a strategy that you back, and then give your military leaders all the resources they say they need to achieve your objective.

If you can't do that, if your objective isn't clear, if the American people and the international community aren’t with you, then order a withdrawal and explain why.

Joe Galloway is no raving leftie, no doctrinaire pacifist. It's just that he's seen this senseless tragedy before and doesn't have the stomach to watch it repeated.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/101/story/74876.html?storylink=omni_popular

Arrogance? No, Hubris.

It's time for NATO forces to pack up and hand Afghanistan back to the Pentagon. According to top US military leaders, these past eight years really don't matter, they're only getting started on the real war. From McClatchey Newspapers:

Top Pentagon leaders Thursday insisted that despite an expected request for more American troops in Afghanistan, the U.S. isn't engaged in nation building there and that although violence is increasing, the military effort there is "only now beginning."

In a news conference Thursday at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, responded to mounting criticism that the Obama administration can't define success in Afghanistan.

Critics charge that the administration's effort to build a stable and secure nation are unachievable because of rampant corruption in the Afghan central government, a disjointed coalition force structure, a resurgent Taliban and the absence of cooperation from neighboring Pakistan.

Gates, in response to a question, said the war is "not slipping through the administration's fingers."

Although it's rarely mentioned, America already has more forces in Afghanistan than the Soviets had at their peak. It's widely believed there are as many, if not more, "contractors" - that is to say private mercenaries - as US soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan. When the mercenary force is added in the existing numbers far exceed the 125,000 the Soviets had in their day.

If America's military effort truly is "only beginning," just what have they been playing at these past eight years? Why were they constantly berating NATO members for somehow not pulling their weight when the US wasn't taking Afghanistan seriously, wasn't fighting to win, all these years?

To me this arrogance merely confirms what I've claimed all along: that NATO forces were deployed to Afghanistan to babysit that war while American forces played in the sandbox also known as Iraq. Fair enough but it's time that the grownups came back home and took over again. Time for us to leave.

And Now a Worried Word from The World Bank

I figured I'd let someone else harp on these topics. This from The World Bank press review:

Climate Change Threatens South Asia Food, Water: ADB.

==============================================================

"Melting Himalayan glaciers and other climate change impacts pose a direct threat to the water and food security of more than 1.6 billion people in South Asia, according to initial findings of an Asian Development Bank (ADB) study.... If current trends persist until 2050, yields of maize, wheat and rice can fall by up to 17 percent, according to the study, [titled Addressing Climate Change in the Asia and Pacific Region: Building Climate Resilience in the Agriculture Sector,] which will be unveiled at a UN convention on climate change in Bangkok in late September...."

[Reuters/Factiva]Xinhua adds that "...analyzing current trends and scenarios based on projected temperature increases, the study warns that four countries in South Asia - Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India and Nepal - are particularly vulnerable to falling crop yields caused by glacier retreat, floods, droughts, erratic rainfall and other climate change impacts...."

[Xinhua/Factiva]Business Recorder writes that "...the study outlines a range of agricultural adaptation measures that could significantly reduce the region's vulnerability to climate change impacts. These include investments in irrigation expansion and water resource management, farm-to-market roads, and agriculture research and dissemination...." [Business Recorder (Pakistan)/Factiva]

==============================================================

India Carbon Emissions To Triple By 2030: Studies.

==============================================================

"India's per capita greenhouse gas emissions are expected to nearly triple in the next two decades, but will still remain below the current global average, a government-backed report said. The data released late on Wednesday showed the current per capita rate at around 1.2 tons per year, compared to the global average of 4.22 tons. Five different studies released by independent institutions concluded that India's per capita emissions of carbon dioxide equivalent would reach 2.1 tons in 2020 and 3.5 tons in 2030...." [Agence France Presse/Factiva]

BBC News adds that "...but the document, compiled by experts for the government, also says India's per-capita emissions will be much lower than major industrialized countries. The report will form the basis of India's negotiating position at a UN climate change conference in December.... At present India accounts for about 5 percent of global carbon emissions. China, the US and Russia are placed higher...."

[BBC News]FT reports that "...India has defied international pressure to curb emissions by stressing that its greenhouse gas output would when measured per capita stay below that of developed countries. 'The results are unambiguous. Even with very aggressive GDP growth . . . India's per capita emissions will be well below developed country averages,' said Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh.... The studies also showed India would achieve greater fuel efficiency than Japan and Germany...." [Financial Times]

India's problem isn't per capita emissions, it's a matter of way too many capita! India, like China, shirks all accountability for the consequences of its overpopulation. When these two countries represent a third of the planet's population, they can damned well back off the per capita emissions whine.

Isn't It Time for an Intervention with the Pentagon?

Yippee! America has appointed a new uniform to run the Afghanistan war, General Stan the Man McChrystal, and his solution is, wait for it, let's start again - from scratch - with a lot more troops.

Forget about the past eight years. Pretend they never happened. New general, new army, new war.

McChrystal wants to replicate the Iraq Surge in Afghanistan, oblivious to the enormous differences between Afghanistan and Iraq. He assumes that Iraq surge actually accomplished something which is anything but apparent. Did extra troops on the ground stop the murderous carnage in Baghdad or did it simply coincide with the completion of the ethnic cleansing campaigns in Baghdad neighbourhoods? Did it resolve even one of the major issues Arab/Arab (Shia v. Sunni) or Arab/Kurd that can plunge Iraq into civil war? Of course not.

McChrystal wants to pretend that he's still fighting the Taliban insurgency instead of a far broader-based and steadily expanding resistance that has now transformed into a nascent civil war. He wants to pretend that there exists a viable central government in Kabul and pretend that it's capable of being defended.

McChrystal wants to ignore the impact of the past eight years that, implied in his logic, have been squandered. He doesn't want to acknowledge that counter-insurgent forces (that'd be us) have a very limited shelf-life before they morph from liberator-defender to occupier-oppressor.

It's hard not to feel sympathy for McChrystal for he really has no good choices. Either he plays the dysfunctional fantasy game or he has to run up the white flag and say it's time to di di mau right out of Afghanisnam.

The only person who can take McChrystal out of this hopeless situation is his Commander in Chief. Barack Obama needs to realize that Afghanistan is no longer a military challenge looking for a military response. It's now a mainly political challenge, one that no general, no army and no new war can resolve.

Screw the Planet, Screw Your Kids and Screw You!

Big Oil and Big Coal ride again!

They're pulling out all the stops to undermine the upcoming debate in the US Senate over legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

America's fossil fuel industry knows that the key to disrupting international action to tackle global warming lies in Washington. America is the key to global consensus. Around the world, all eyes are on the US. The Copenhagen climate summit, which some believe is our last best chance to avert truly calamitous climate change, is barely a few months away.

Climate change is a top priority for the Obama administration. The problem is the Obama administration is awash in top priorities and he's running into determined, ultra-partisan opposition on everything from economic recovery to health care reform. In the process of these battles he's shown himself all too willing to water down his wine for compromise.

What it all boils down to is that the climate change issue may be Obama's and the American Congress' "bridge too far." Big Oil and Big Coal sense their opportunity and, according to the Washington Post, they're striking back hard:

The oil lobby was sponsoring rallies with free lunches, free concerts and speeches warning that a climate-change bill could ravage the U.S. economy.

Professional "campaigners" hired by the coal industry were giving away T-shirts praising coal-fired power.

But when environmentalists showed up in this college town -- closer than ever to congressional passage of a climate-change bill, in the middle of the green movement's biggest political test in a generation -- they provided . . . a sedate panel discussion.

And they gave away stickers.

...It seems that environmentalists are struggling in a fight they have spent years setting up. They are making slow progress adapting a movement built for other goals -- building alarm over climate change, encouraging people to "green" their lives -- into a political hammer, pushing a complex proposal the last mile through a skeptical Senate.

Even now, these groups differ on whether to scare the public with predictions of heat waves or woo it with promises of green jobs. And they are facing an opposition with tycoon money and a gift for political stagecraft.

Of course, who are we to criticize? Here in Canada the leaders of both major parties are unrepentant Tar Sands boosters. Even Jack Layton dummies up when it comes to climate change lest he be seen as supporting even a small tax on SUV juice. Self-serving cowards, the lot of them. Harper has EnviroCan's top climate scientists gagged and locked away in a closet and that's just fine with Ignatieff and Layton. Ignatieff even proclaims the Athabasca bitumen a "key to national unity."

Unwrapping the Lockerbie Travesty

There was no shortage of indignation in Western capitals at Scotland's decision to release Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the supposed Lockerbie bomber now suffering from terminal cancer.

Gwynne Dyer, however, makes the case that al-Megrahi should never have been in jail in the first place. Whoever did place a bomb aboard Pan-Am flight 103 in December, 1988, it almost certainly wasn't al-Megrahi:

http://www.embassymag.ca/page/view/dyer-8-26-2009

Afghanistan - Time For a New Experiment

The Guardian thinks we should take a new approach to Afghanistan, try something different - leave.

...The view that elections are the essential ingredient for a stable future is undermined in a country where President Hamid Karzai has stuffed his cabinet with war lords and where a functioning civil society is but a rumour along with the notion of justice. They appear like a fig leaf rather than the ultimate expression of democracy.

It is easy to blame the Taliban for this. But it was the west's half-hearted engagement with Afghanistan, after bringing down the Taliban regime after 9/11, that created the social tensions, particularly in the south, that allowed the Taliban to re-emerge. Promises to create an effective national police force were not followed up with resources. Farmers whose opium was destroyed were promised aid that never came. Billions were spent with little impact on a country with huge unemployment.

This failure is a problem for all of us. With so much invested by the west in the result of the elections, the outcome threatens to leave our politicians without an obvious exit strategy for NATO troops.

We need to recognise that a large part of the difficulty lies with the west's support for President Karzai. For years, US diplomacy has been expended coaxing and threatening Karzai into doing what the west would like: to be less tolerant of corruption, to secure more international investment and to be more effective in delivering services and aid to ordinary people.

Karzai's relationships with drug dealers and war lords are, perhaps, not as serious in the long run as another culpability – his presiding over a regime devoid of the development of any party political system that might have thrown up options for his country's future, rather than a system that has supervised the sharing of its spoils.

It is clear that Karzai is neither capable of nor willing to change. The democratic process has run aground. The west faces the prospect of upholding a dubious regime for a narrow strategic reason – to prevent terrorism in the UK and the US and to stop al-Qaida setting up their terror camps again.

The question now is whether this is necessary. If Nato troops leave Afghanistan, it may become easier for al-Qaida to operate there but, equally, the sense of grievance that attracts Afghans to the Taliban and Muslims to extremism elsewhere may be diminished. But for as long as our troops are in Afghanistan, British soldiers will be killed, making it an increasingly urgent political problem for Gordon Brown.

The government finds itself nailed to the logic of a failed humanitarian intervention where it is hard to abandon what it promised to redeem.

...It is clear that there will be no obvious moment for withdrawal. There are two highly risky options: a commitment to do whatever it takes to rout the Taliban, rebuild Afghan infrastructure, reconfigure Afghan politics and stick around for a generation for which there is a fast diminishing public appetite. Or to set a time-table for a staged military withdrawal.

In the end, it may be that solutions cannot be imposed by the west, but need to emerge from within an Afghan society free of the interference that has for three decades exacerbated its problems.

The writing is on the wall. We in the West cannot relieve Afghanistan of the scourge of warlordism. That failure dooms any prospect of a viable, central government and leaves the nation in a state of suspended civil war just waiting for the Western forces to leave.

We're not just treading water in Afghanistan, we're loitering and the longer we hang around in that country swatting at Taliban flies, the stronger and more broad-based grows the insurgency. Every faction that joins the insurgency is a victory for the Taliban and a defeat for us. This is a war in which time is not on our side and a war that is going badly - on the front lines and in the capital.

The Guardian is right. If Afghanistan's tribes cannot resolve their differences without a civil war and if we can't change that, let's accept the inevitable and leave before that too becomes impossible.

Go Big or Go Home, Ah Forget It - Go Home!

That's the question on the minds at the Pentagon and NATO these days. It's a "more for less" bargain now, eight years down the road. The resurgent Taliban have plainly shown the Western forces need a lot more troops on the ground but the Afghan election has shown that the country's warlords hold the balance of political power and that's now been institutionalized into one desperately criminal enterprise.

Of course we're no longer just fighting the Taliban. That neat little scenario rode off into the sunset sometime around 2006. Since then the insurgency has morphed into a more complex alliance of religious fundamentalists, warlords, drug lords, common criminals, aggrieved folks looking for revenge and garden variety nationalists who just want these white people to go away.

Afghanistan's Deeply Fractured Power Base or Run-Off - to Where?

Right now signs point to a runoff election between Hamid Karzai and his Tajik-Pashtun rival Abdullah Abdullah. What hangs in the balance? A lot and, at the same time, almost nothing. How much different will Afghanistan be under a supposed reformer like Abdullah Abdullah? Probably not very much at all.

Power in Afghanistan isn't won in an election. The last vote that Karzai won in a landslide proved that. Despite his solid win at the polls, Karzai's powers almost immediately began devolving to the warlords who once comprised the Northern Alliance. They saw to it that Karzai's control remained largely bottled up within the boundaries of the capital, Kabul. Outside the capital, it was the warlords who shared their power with Karzai but only on their terms.

The West had five years to clean up the mess from that first election and, beyond bitching at Karzai about corruption, we did bugger all. That paved the way for an even more disastrous outcome in the current elections. Karzai didn't even attempt to hide the Faustian deals he struck with Uzbek, Tajik and Hazara warlords. He bought their support and they in turn cajoled and intimidated their own local authorities to support Hamid.

But what about Abdullah? If he wins he steps straight into the shoes of Hamid Karzai. He will have to confront not only the insurgency but those warlords who backed the incumbent. Does anyone really believe those warlords are going to allow Abdullah to consolidate his power at the expense of their own interests? Please, this is Afghanistan.

NATO's Options - Bad and Worse

The outcome of this election - either way - could transform Afghanistan and not for the better. So long as warlordism holds sway, Afghanistan will never be more than a civil war on hold. Nothing more than that. Nothing.

Every warlord in Afghanistan has, by turns, fought against and fought alongside every other warlord. Treachery is their stock in trade. Every now and then they do unite - to throw out a foreigner (that would be us).

Up to 2001 the Northern Alliance was on the field, contesting the Taliban's control. After 2001 these guys moved to the bleachers (government) and sat by watching us try to keep their former rivals on the defensive. Now the Taliban are back and they're on the offensive. If those warlords are tossed from the bleachers by a reformer like Abdullah they have to go back to the playing field, they have to pick a side to join. What do they stand to gain by siding with us and what do they stand to gain by siding with the insurgency?

If this election sees the warlord base given the boot, we may find ourselves in a position remarkably akin to that experienced by the Soviets before they were driven out. All the tribes coalesce against us while we're left to defend a nub government that does not control the countryside with an indigenous army that doesn't want to fight. That is the worst case scenario.

The best case scenario sees Karzai holding onto office, the presidency even further weakened and more directly beholden to a group of pretty nasty warlords with names like Dostum and Fahim. There will be fallout. Those who have backed Abdullah, at least half the population, will believe the election was rigged, stolen. At that point the only question becomes how many of them choose to join or support the insurgency?

How much broader does the insurgency have to become before it transforms into a civil war? That's really debatable but we may be about to find out.

It's understandable that the Pentagon and key NATO allies are now calling for a substantial increase in Western forces in Afghanistan. We've been treading water but it's an ebb tide and we're getting swept out to sea.

Military Mumbo-Jumbo

To listen to Western generals stating their case is to listen to gibberish. They've proven themselves astonishingly adept at spouting nonsense for the past eight years. Remember our own military genius, swaggering Rick Hillier (the "Big Cod"), who boastfully pronounced that Canadian soldiers were going to take over Kandahar province to kill Taliban "scumbags" which he numbered at a "few dozen"? Gibberish then and it's been a steady diet of nonsense ever since.

These guys are still fighting the last war, the one that began in 2001-2003. That was a military war, at least from their point of view. However when the Taliban returned, they came with a classic political war, an insurgency. They had no artillery, no tanks, no jet fighters, no attack helicopters. Even if they were stupid enough to want a military war, they had no means to fight one. But they weren't stupid. They've been steeped in centuries of highly successful unconventional warfare, insurgency, political warfare.

When they came back we had to fight their war, the political war. Our war, the military war, could no longer decide the question. But fighting the political war would have required a massive infusion of forces and enormously costly aid programmes.

We needed hundreds of thousands of troops dispersed among the hamlets and villages of the countryside to secure the local populations from insurgent control. If you don't sleep in their villages, ever ready to repel the insurgents, the villagers have no choice but to co-operate with your enemy if they want to survive.

We needed thousands of additional troops to confront the enemy within, the warlords. We needed to support the central government to keep it strong enough to resist and overcome warlordism but we didn't even try. With that we surrendered the central government to corruption and thuggery.

At the same time we needed to create a viable, alternative economy but, instead, we sat by as the opium fields spread through the countryside.

For a while the generals had a pat answer. We were only staying in Afghanistan until we had trained an Afghan army capable of defeating the insurgency. At first we talked of a modest force and then we boosted that to 150,000. We're now at 180,000 trained soldiers and, not surprisingly, we have set the target at doubling that to 360,000 to 400,000 Afghan soldiers.

Why do we keep moving the goalposts? Because it buys us time and we don't have any other answers. If there's any country that cannot begin to afford to field an army of a third-million soldiers it's dirt poor Afghanistan. The central government's revenues are barely enough to cover the costs of the educational system. This also quite wilfully ignores the reality that there'll never be an Afghan army big enough to prop up a central government that's rotting out from within. What does that leave you with? A huge, unpaid army that exists to defend itself? Brilliant idea!

Canada's only saving grace is that we're out of Afghanistan in 2011. We should have been out this year except for Mr. Dion's fecklessness. Imagine if we'd had an election on the issue of Afghanistan. We might have lost, narrowly. But that would have made Afghanistan Harper's folly and we would have been powerfully positioned to sweep him away today. I guess that's the price you pay when you don't have the courage of your convictions.

I think the Afghanistan war is one that'll go into the "fiasco" column. It sure hasn't been the soldiers' fault, not in the slightest. They've done everything we could have asked of them and much more. They have been sold out not by public opinion at home but by their own generals who, from the outset, have persistently shown themselves unfit - and undeserving - to lead.

Adios Liberalistas!

It began with Mr. Dion and it's come to fruition with Mr. Ignatieff. My four decade-long affair with Liberalism is over. I wish I could boast that I'd found something better but I haven't. The NDP's not better, the Conservatives (whatever that means) much less so. I guess I've come to the point where it simply doesn't matter. As Riley B. King put it, The Thrill is Gone:

Just One More Legend

When the Rolling Stones were trying to put together a serious blues band they faced a lot of competition. But all the bands in London wanted the same guy - a jazz drummer by the name of Charlie Watts. Jones and Richards and Jagger knew this drummer could lift the band where it really needed to be.

Karzai Wins by Landslide

The British newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, reports that early results have Hamid Karzai with 72-per cent of the vote versus just 23-per cent for rival Abdullah Abdullah. Worse yet, most of the votes remaining untallied are from areas of the Pashtun south where Karzai is heavily favoured.

This raises the strong suspicion of massive voting fraud and will certainly be taken that way by anti-Karzai forces.

Karzai warned before the vote that an indecisive first ballot leading to a runoff second ballot election could trigger civil war. This victory, if borne out, could send many of Karzai's enemies into the arms of the insurgency.

A Karzai victory would also consolidate the power of the country's warlords who backed the Afghan president.

Calley Apologizes for My Lai Massacre

It's taken four decades but former US Army lieutenant William Calley has apologized for the 1968 massacre when he and his men gunned down hundreds of villagers - men, women, children, even babies - in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai. The US Army covered it up so well that the number of dead can only be estimated as between 350 to 500.

Calley had long refused to grant interviews about what happened, but on Wednesday he spoke at a Columbus Kiwanis meeting. He made only a brief statement, but agreed to take questions from the audience.

He did not deny what had happened that day, but did repeatedly make the point — which he has made before — that he was following orders.

Calley explained he had been ordered to take out My Lai, adding that he had intelligence that the village was fortified and would be “hot” when he went in. He also said the area was submitted to an artillery barrage and helicopter fire before his troops went in. It turned out that it was not hot and there was no armed resistance. But he had been told, he said, that if he left anyone behind, his troops could be trapped and caught in a crossfire.

Asked about American casualties, Calley said there were two injuries, but neither was the result of enemy fire, adding, “They didn’t have time.”

...When asked if obeying an unlawful order was not itself an unlawful act, he said, “I believe that is true. If you are asking why I did not stand up to them when I was given the orders, I will have to say that I was a second lieutenant getting orders from my commander and I followed them — foolishly, I guess.” Calley then said that was not an excuse; it was just what happened.

The officer Calley said gave those orders was Capt. Ernest Medina, who was also tried for what happened at My Lai. Represented by the renowned Defense Attorney F. Lee Bailey, Medina was acquitted of all charges in 1971.

Calley was convicted, spent a brief time in custody and then was paroled and discharged by the US Army.

A Civil War in Waiting?

We've abandoned all our nonsense about democracy and the claptrap about women's rights. You can lower a lot of expectations over the span of eight years but, eventually, you get to the bottom of the barrel. That's when you set your sights on establishing something, anything in the way of a functioning government that can hold itself together just long enough for you to get the hell out. And that's where we, the US and NATO, are at today in Afghanistan. But some are now asking whether even that is too much to hope for. From The New York Times:

Privately, American officials set out a number of possible ways that the election aftermath could affect their operations. During a meeting on Thursday, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO combat operations here, discussed how the military would have to adapt to each.

Particularly worrisome was the specter of a divisive ethnic presidential runoff between Mr. Karzai, whose power base is in the Pashtun south, and Mr. Abdullah, whose main support resides in the Tajik and Uzbek north, officials said.

Mr. Karzai himself has in the past raised the specter of ethnic violence, telling officials that if there was a runoff it could lead to a civil war, Western officials said.

...For all of their worry about the problems that a runoff could bring, administration officials have also made clear they are not enamored of the Karzai government, and the president’s re-election would not be risk-free, either.

Mr. Obama, during his first news conference as president, criticized the Karzai government as “detached.” And administration officials have complained of Mr. Karzai’s failure to crack down on corruption and the drug trafficking fueling the insurgency. Western officials have also criticized Mr. Karzai’s alliances with unsavory figures to try to secure re-election.

Should Mr. Karzai win, either outright or in a second round, Obama administration officials could find themselves with a president who has engaged in so much deal-making that he may well be even more beholden to warlords than before.

For the past six years at least, Afghanistan has come to resemble a civil war on hold as the major players waited to see how well we would deal with their nemesis, the Taliban. Everyone, even us, knew that Hamid Karzai was much too weak to bring order, to stand up to his country's warlords. He couldn't eradicate them. Instead he had to embrace them, share power with them, just to survive.

Today the Western nations would be more than content to accept strongman rule in Afghanistan because there really is no other way out for us. The trouble is, strongman rule doesn't evolve out of a ballot box. It arises from the brutal suppression of all rivals. Its genesis lies in civil war. That's where Afghanistan was when we showed up eight years ago and that's where it'll be yet again when we leave.

"Dying for Nothing" - Gwynne Dyer's Take on the Afghan Election

Our top political leaders may claim the Afghan elections were a great success - but they're full of crap. Fortunately there are some who'll speak the unvarnished truth, people like Gwynne Dyer:

...we are asked to believe that an election will restore confidence in the government. It is nonsense: this election has no more relevance than the ones that the United States used to stage in Vietnam. Col. David Haight, commanding the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the US 10th Mountain Division in Logar and Wardak provinces near Kabul, was helpfully indiscreet about it in a recent interview.

"I think that apathy is going to turn into some anger when the administration doesn't change, and I don't think that anybody believes that Karzai is going to lose," Haight told an embedded reporter from the Guardian. "There is going to be frustration from people who realize there is not going to be a change. The bottom line is they are going to be thinking: 'Four more years of this crap?'"

Unless bribery, blackmail and threats no longer work in Afghanistan, Karzai is going to win. He isn't even bothering to run a conventional campaign: he bailed out of a televised debate with the other presidential candidates at the last moment, and leaves it to them to hold election rallies in provincial towns. He has made his deals with the warlords and the traditional ethnic and tribal powerbrokers, and is counting on them to deliver victory.

Karzai and the United States are shackled to the warlords because those were the allies that the US recruited to fight the Taliban on the ground when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. The Taliban, being exclusively Pashtun, never controlled all of the country; Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek militias continued to hold out all across the north. So the US made deals with their leaders, showered them with weapons and money, and helped them into power instead.

Western rhetoric insists that the hills of Afghanistan are directly connected to the streets of Manhattan, London and Toronto. But no Afghan, not even any member of the Taliban, was involved in the planning or execution of 9/11, nor in the later, lesser attacks elsewhere in the West. Nor would the Taliban sweep back into power if all Western troops left Afghanistan tomorrow; the other players are still in the game.

Everybody who dies in this conflict is dying for nothing, because it will not change what happens when the foreign troops finally go home. As they eventually will.

http://www.embassymag.ca/page/view/dyer-8-19-2009

Let's Hope They Don't Get the Full Mulroney

Within a few months Canadian tax authorities should know the identities of Canadians who've buried an estimated $5-billion in Swiss bank UBS.

So far seven taxpayers are said to have made "voluntary disclosures," paying the overdue taxes plus interest on their holdings to avoid penalties (fines) and prosecution.

When Brian Mulroney was finally forced to come clean on undeclared cash payments he received from Karlheinz Schreiber, Revenue Canada cut him a sweetheart deal, accepting 50-cents on the dollar of what he owed this country. That sparked a lot of anger to which the Canadian Revenue Agency assured taxpayers that such deals are no longer tolerated.

And if the Conservative government is going to allow voluntary disclosure leniency for the UBS account holders there needs to be a clear cut deadline. Once the Swiss hand over names and account particulars tax evasion investigations should be deemed to have been started disqualifying errant taxpayers from applying to be let off lightly.

Just What Role Does Iggy Have in Mind for Canadian Forces?

I watched a video clip over at Liberal Video Depot of Michael Ignatieff explaining his view of the Canadian Forces' role in Afghanistan and the future roles they may serve in peacekeeping.

After rambling on about a job well done in Kandahar, MI discussed possible future deployments in other trouble spots for Canadian Forces. One point he stressed was that our troops should never be sent in anywhere with only sidearms, suggesting he would send them armed to the teeth.

Why?

You go heavily armed to places where you're expecting to fight. Once you show up with the full array of weaponry, you're not a peacekeeper, you're a combatant. You're not setting yourself up as an honest broker, a negotiator, but as a potential adversary. You're not seeking lasting consensus but temporary compliance.

Canadian peacekeepers must be armed and they always are given what's required for self-defence - sidearms and light automatic weapons. Heavy firepower isn't part of that equation.

NATO's (Opium) Pipe Dream

NATO's new Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen wants to double the size of Afghanistan's security forces to 400,000 to allow Western forces to withdraw.

Rasmussen is, in a word, delusional. Look at it this way. Afghanistan, one of the poorest nations on our planet, has a population of about 32-million. It has a total GDP of but 25-billion dollars annually (the CIA pegs it at a mere 12.5 billion). Per capita GDP is $800 (CIA) which ranks the country 217th in the world. Life expectancy is in the mid-40's.

The central government's takings aren't enough to cover a decent education system. Bureaucrats and security forces alike are so poorly paid they're forced into corruption and extortion.

Even if Kabul could draft enough Afghans to raise an army of 400,000 (and keep them from deserting) there's not a chance in hell the government could pay them much less cover the costs to field them operationally. The United States, which is about 10 times larger in population than Afghanistan and infinitely wealthier, fields a regular force of just 1.45-million all in - Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard. America's army totals 550,000 personnel and somehow Rasmussen figures Afghanistan should have an army of 400,000?

Rasmussen is talking through his hat. We'd do well to keep a close eye on this guy.

Does Ottawa Even Care Who Rules in Kabul?

Shouldn't our government care whether Hamid Karzai retains power in Afghanistan? After all, what are our troops over there for if not to defend the central government?

The Americans care deeply about the Afghan election. They see Karzai falling in with some of the worst warlords in his country in a desperate bid to cling to power. It's been widely reported that Washington was furious that Kabul allowed warlord general Dostum to return to his Uzbek homeland days before the vote.

The US seems to be backing away from its support of expansive Indian influence in Afghanistan in favour of something more acceptable to Pakistan. Karzai is, of course, decidedly pro-India and anti-Pakistan, fearing the domination of his country's immediate and much more powerful neighbour. Likewise Islamabad isn't particularly fond of Karzai either.

America has actively sought to deny Karzai a first ballot win, hoping that a runoff vote might see Karzai's rival, Abdullah Abdullah squeak into office. Karzai has responded by rallying warlord support and tribal intimidation. By many accounts there has also been a good bit of fraud thrown in to boot.

The question becomes does Stephen Harper still back Karzai or is he falling into line with Washington and Islamabad? I think it's time for Steve to fish or cut bait.

The outcome of this election could turn very ugly. Dissident tribesmen may flock to Karzai's only real opposition - the insurgency. It won't take an awful lot to transform the insurgency into a full blown civil war. If it comes to that, what business does Canada - or NATO for that matter - have taking sides?

If our guy is a treacherous, lying, manipulative reprobate willing to sell out his countrymen to murderous warlords simply to keep a grip on power, why are we supporting him at all? Maybe the Harper government can explain just what our troops are over there fighting and dying for.

Vote Early, Vote Often - Afghan Polls Close

Afghans have had their second election since the Taliban were driven out in 2001. The final results could take two weeks to complete but there should be clear indications of who did what well before then.

As Asia Times Online reports, the issue now turns to apparently rampant voter fraud:

Two US-financed polls published during the past week showed support for Karzai was well short of the 51% of the total vote necessary to avoid a runoff election. A poll by Glevum Associates showed Karzai at 36%, and a survey by the International Republican Institute had him at 44% of the vote. Those polls suggest that Karzai might have to pad his legitimate vote total by a significant amount to be certain of being elected in the first round.

Preliminary results were expected to be announced in Kabul on Saturday, according to the Associated Press. But Karzai has been laying the groundwork for just such a contingency for many months. He has forged political alliances with leading Afghan warlords who control informal militias and tribal networks in the provinces to carry out a vote fraud scheme accounting for a very large proportion of the votes.

The socio-political structure of Afghanistan remains so hierarchical that warlords can deliver very large blocs of votes to Karzai by telling their followers to vote for him, and in some provinces - especially in the Pashtun south - by forcing local tribal elders to cooperate in voter fraud schemes.

The system in which warlords pressure tribal elders to deliver the vote for Karzai was illustrated by a village elder in western Herat province who said he had been threatened by a local commander with "very unpleasant consequences" if the residents of his village did not vote for Karzai, according to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KH21Df01.html

Meanwhile the state of security in Taliban country was revealed in a story in The Guardian about a Chinook helicopter shot down in Helmand province. Another helo dropped down to rescue the four-member crew but then, instead of sending in an infantry force to secure the downed aircraft until it could be recovered, it was destroyed by coalition air strikes to prevent it "falling into enemy hands." Say what?

How can a disabled helicopter the size of the massive (and massively expensive) Chinook fall into enemy hands? What are they going to do, pick it up and carry it off? No, the Brits destroyed it because they weren't willing to risk sending soldiers in to defend the ship until it could be airlifted out. When you kiss goodbye a $32-million helo you've got problems.

Think Twice

Afghans are poised to elect a new despot - Karzai or Abdullah. The simple fact that either of these two is able to stand to run for president has been bought and paid for by many lives, including these:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/afghanistan/casualties/list.html

I invite you to go to that link, look at each of those faces, and tell me what we have achieved to justify the sacrifice of these fine people. Then, if you believe their deaths have not been in vain, tell us all how many more should be fed into this gaping maw before we say "enough."

Afghan Election Winner Declared - the Taliban!

Tomorrow's general election in Afghanistan isn't expected to do the government a lick of good no matter who wins. Unfortunately, it's the Taliban who stand poised to emerge the winners. From McClatchey Newspapers:

President Hamid Karzai's re-election, powered by despised warlords linked to war crimes and drugs, could drive more Afghans to join the Taliban or other militant groups and stoke ethnic tensions, Western and Afghan experts say. A victory by his main rival, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, could bring a similar result, they said.

Widespread cries of foul or a delayed outcome could create a power vacuum and lead to violence.

"The election result will not have the legitimacy that it needs. That will add to the ranks of the Taliban and the disaffected and disenfranchised people. It will be a moral victory for the Taliban whichever way you cut it," said Daoud Sultanzoi, a leading parliamentarian from Ghazni Province.

It's been apparent for some time that these elections could leave Afghanistan torn along ethnic and tribal lines. I'd bet that if only Afghanistan had a functioning army capable of taking on not only the Taliban but also the former Northern Alliance warlords, Washington would like nothing better than to support a coup. That "last resort" option, however, doesn't seem viable which leaves the US and NATO having to brace for deteriorating conditions on the ground in Afghanistan. Too little, too late, too bad.

What nobody is mentioning is whether this election could ignite another civil war. Afghan's warlords are notoriously treacherous, willing to jump freely from one side to the other and then back again. With the central government unable to consolidate its power much beyond Kabul except with the collaboration of the warlords, these guys stand to become "free agents" capable of throwing in with the insurgency whenever they judge the moment is right.

Asia Times Online has an interesting analysis of how badly the West, especially the US, has bungled the Great Game in Afghanistan:

Kayhan newspaper, which is identified with the religious establishment, commented: "[Afghan President] Hamid Karzai is truly in a bit of a corner ... Challenges are mounting from every side ... Presidential hopeful Abdullah Abdullah's camp has been acting most peculiarly." The commentary then came out with strong endorsement of Karzai's alliance with the so-called warlords as embodying an approach "to keep the country from falling apart", which recognizes that "Afghanistan is and has been a federation of provinces ruled over by strongmen".

It concluded: "Afghanistan can only be governed via federal rule and Mr Karzai understands the latter fact very well but he can't come out and say it to his Western patrons. His balancing act sometimes falls short of Western expectations and at other times gets right up Afghan warlords' nose. And criticisms immediately follow from either party. The West has sought to 'clear, hold and build' a functioning Afghan state on the Western model in which citizens' assent to a social contract that imposes social and political discipline in exchange for allowing a relatively wide berth in the personal realm. This places the Americans, right from the start, in total opposition to the last thousand or so years of Afghan history, just as it did the Soviets."

Tehran has every reason to be pleased with Karzai's close alliance with erstwhile mujahideen leaders such as Ismail Khan, Mohammed Fahim, Karim Khalili, Mohammed Mohaqiq and Rashid Dostum. Tehran obviously had a hand in persuading Dostum to return from Turkey -- defying US warnings - and galvanizing the Jumbish party just in time to boost Karzai's electoral prospects in the Amu Darya region. The Uzbekis and Hazara Shi'ites account for well over a quarter of the Afghan population.

Besides, Ismail Khan, who is close to Tehran, is allied to Burhanuddin Rabbani. Khan's support for Karzai at this juncture undercuts the entire US-Pakistani strategy behind fielding Abdullah, which was based on the premise that he would garner Tajik votes. Thus, if Karzai's prospects have distinctly improved on the eve of the elections, Tehran has a hand in it.

Washington is aghast that its entire stratagem to prevent a first-round victory by Karzai is in serious jeopardy. (Karzai, the front-runner, would need to win 51% of the total votes cast to avoid a run-off with the second-placed candidate.)

In an extraordinary public vent of choler, the US State Department said in Washington: "We have made clear to the government of Afghanistan our serious concern regarding the return of Mr Dostum and any prospective role in today's Afghanistan." President Barack Obama has already asked his national security team to give further information on Dostum's "background", including concerns that he might have been involved in the deaths of a significant number of Taliban prisoners of war in 2001 during the US invasion.

Holbrooke faces a huge challenge. If Karzai secures a clear-cut victory in the first round on Thursday, it will bring into power a coalition that the US will find extremely hard to control as there will be multiple power centers.

Methane Found Bubbling Up from Arctic Seabed

One of the great fears of climate scientists is "runaway global warming." This is point of no return climate change where manmade warming reaches the point that it triggers natural processes beyond our control that discharge masses of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These are often referred to as "tipping points" which if you've spent much time in a canoe you'll readily understand.

From BBC News:

Scientists say they have evidence that the powerful greenhouse gas methane is escaping from the Arctic sea bed.

Researchers say this could be evidence of a predicted positive feedback effect of climate change.

As temperatures rise, the sea bed grows warmer and frozen water crystals in the sediment break down, allowing methane trapped inside them to escape.

The research team found that more than 250 plumes of methane bubbles are rising from the sea bed off Norway.

...The gas is normally trapped as "methane hydrate" in sediment under the ocean floor.
"Methane hydrate" is an ice-like substance composed of water and methane which is stable under conditions of high pressure and low temperature.
As temperatures rise, the hydrate breaks down. So this new evidence shows that methane is stable at water depths greater than 400m off Spitsbergen.

The image above is an acoustic image of one of these methane plumes. Below is a clip of Alaskan scientists who are monitoring the emission of methane from melting tundra on frozen lake bottoms. They have trouble lighting it at first because there is too much pressure.



http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8205864.stm

Canadian Researchers Weigh Zombie Threat to Mankind

Infectious disease researchers at Carleton and Ottawa U have released a mathematical model of just how long civilization could withstand collapse if attacked by - wait for it - Zombies!

Yes, zombies, those movie creatures that stagger along trying to eat your brain. From BBC News:

The scientific paper is published in a book - Infectious Diseases Modelling Research Progress.

In books, films, video games and folklore, zombies are undead creatures, able to turn the living into other zombies with a bite.

But there is a serious side to the work.

In some respects, a zombie "plague" resembles a lethal rapidly-spreading infection. The researchers say the exercise could help scientists model the spread of unfamiliar diseases through human populations.

Okay, so maybe there is a legitimate purpose for this modeling but it would help if one of the leaders, an Ottawa U mathematics prof, didn't spell his last name, Smith, with a question mark - that's right Smith? Oh yeah, the research showed we'd last days at best.

And did they really have to use zombies? Couldn't they have used a plague of Republicans instead?

Huckabee Slams Obama

Despite his gentle, folksy manner, Rapture-sucker and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee can't hide his fundamentalist zealotry for very long.

Huckabee hopped a freebee junket larded his way by Ateret Cohanim, an organization that buys land in Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods and settles Jews there. And his benefactors got got their money's worth and then some. From McClatchey:

Huckabee criticized the Obama administration's calls for ending such settlements and said Obama's position had only encouraged the Palestinian government not to negotiate with Israel.

More important than Huckabee's words, however, was where he chose to deliver them: at several controversial Jewish enclaves in the mostly Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, which both Israel and the Palestinian Authority claim.

"The policies are a drastic change from previous administrations," Huckabee said at Maale Zeitim, a 100-unit housing project at the foot of the Mount of Olives. "Halting peace talks until 20 families are moved out? Our focus should be on Iran, and not on where 20 Jewish families are moving."

..."It concerns me that some in the U.S. tell Israelis they can't live where they want in their own country," Huckabee said.

Jon Stewart's Favourite Douchebag, Robert Novak, Dead

Uber rightwing columnist with a voracious appetite for sleaze, Robert Novak, is dead of brain cancer. While it's never nice to speak ill of the departed, I'd rank Novak's dirt nap on the trauma scale as somewhere around the death of Karl Rove but well short of the demise of Dick Cheney, two men he literally worshiped.

Afghanistan - The Story of Failure in Four Parts

Afghanistan is falling apart - again. The West's eight-year fiasco in that failed state culminates this week in national elections that threaten to nullify everything we've tried to do there since 2001 and may leave the country shattered along ethnic and tribal lines.

What we're watching unfold today is the product of a succession of political and military blunders dating back to the Reagan administration that may finally have reached critical mass. Al Jazeera has produced a four-part documentary entitled Afghanistan: How The The East was Lost. You can watch them below.









http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/general/2009/08/2009814173838679599.html

Climate Change - India Doesn't Get It

Today's New York Times has a story showing how difficult it can be for local authorities to grasp the reality, much less the nuances, of global warming-driven climate change. In the Indian port city of Mumbai (formerly Bombay) rampant growth continues apace without regard for the climate change that has already arrived.

“Climate change involves a shuddering of the weather thermostat,” said Bittu Sahgal, a leading environmentalist and the editor of Sanctuary Magazine. “More rain in one place, less in another. The problem is unpredictability. Mumbai’s rains this year were delayed but the city has been on alert for floods.”

According to Mr. Sahgal, climate change is going to increasingly “mock” economists.

“As a coastal city we should have been in top gear already, to adapt to climate impacts. Instead we see ignorant planners filling wetlands, planning construction on low-lying salt pan lands and otherwise adding to Mumbai’s heat sink effect by removing over 100,000 old trees,” Mr. Sahgal said — adding, that developers in Mumbai are “behaving as though climate warnings are an American ploy to prevent India from enjoying the fruits of industrial activity.”

Mumbai has become increasingly susceptible to highly destructive and deadly flooding as spreading development has been allowed to take out drainage canals and rivers. When heavy rains hit the sewer drains often become blocked with rubbish, making the problems worse yet.

While there are signs that New Delhi is slowly coming around on global warming, it's going to face enormous hurdles convincing state and municipal authorities to change accordingly. Those are the sort of hurdles that cost lives.

The Guardian Calls Afghanistan - "Mission Impossible"

The Guardian has come out to declare the war in Afghanistan a truly lost cause.

...Counterinsurgency theorists imagine the role of the military mission as creating a "space" to be filled by the nascent institutions of the Afghan state – its army, police and judiciary. But here too, amid preparations for elections this week, there is scant evidence of theory translating into practice on the ground. The Afghan police are still reluctant to go into the Helmand villages that US and UK troops have cleared. And against whom is this "clearing" being defined? After eight years we still have no clear idea who the enemy are, or how to distinguish them from the local population.

Much will be made this week of the numbers who participate in the presidential election, an act that will spell defiance of the Taliban. This will be nowhere truer than in Kandahar, the country's second largest city, from where Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, began his march to power. A small Canadian force has prevented 15,000 Taliban from retaking the city, at a cost of 125 soldiers, the highest proportion of casualties of any coalition partner. As the Canadians acknowledge, theirs has been little more than a finger-in-the-dyke operation. The city is being held, not for democracy, but for Hamid Karzai's powerful half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who has been accused of handing out government jobs and land to his friends and allies, and of extensive involvement in drug trafficking.

Here lies the central problem. As the casualties mount and domestic patience wears thin, the coalition mission will steadily downgrade its once lofty nation-building objectives. If it remained true to them, tackling corruption among the likes of Ahmed Wali Karzai would remain as integral to the project as keeping the Taliban out. In the end neither of these objectives will be secured, and the Afghanistan that the troops leave behind may not be unlike the one which greeted their arrival. Large parts of the Pashtun south will still be dominated by the forces we are currently fighting.

What The Guardian has announced may be a breakthrough in contemporary journalism but, in reality, they're only reading what has been so plainly written on the wall for the past several years. Maybe they needed a lot more convincing than some others, including this writer, but sometimes it takes a bucketful of empty promises and assurances and outright lies before a newspaper of this stature can throw in the towel.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/17/afghanistan-panther-claw-taliban-ainsworth

Afghanisnam - Coup Time?

Prominent Americans are beginning to compare Afghan president Hamid Karzai to an earlier troublesome leader, South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem who was murdered and removed from power in Saigon in 1963 in a US-backed military coup during the John F Kennedy administration.

David Kilcullen, former counter-insurgency advisor to General David Petraeus in Iraq, drew the parallel while speaking to the US Institute of Peace:

"He [Karzai] is seen as ineffective; his family are corrupt; he's alienated a very substantial portion of the population. He seems paranoid and delusional and out of touch with reality. That's all the sort of things that were said about President Diem in 1963."

Then again, who wouldn't be a bit paranoid in Karzai's situation? Washington wants him gone, preferring Tajik rival Abdullah Abdullah. That's driving Karzai ever deeper into the arms of his country's worst warlords.

Asia Times Online outlines a massive US campaign to discredit Karzai:

...the vicious media attack on Karzai continues. Elizabeth Rubin of The New York Times magazine quoted a Western intelligence official as saying, "The Karzai family has opium and blood on their hands ... When history analyses this period and looks at this family, it will uncover a litany of extensive corruption that was tolerated because the West tolerated this family."

Anthony Cordesman, senior foreign policy analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who just visited Afghanistan to assist US commander General Stanley McChrystal in the preparation of the Pentagon's review of the current situation, wrote in the Times newspaper that Karzai's government is "corrupt, grossly over-centralized, lacking in capacity and virtually absent in large parts of Afghanistan". In an article in The Washington Post last week, US ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry ostentatiously distanced the US from Karzai.

...Abdullah's camp openly threatens to create an "Iran-like situation" in Kabul if Karzai pulls off victory in the August 20 round. If violence ensues, the Tajik-dominated Afghan security will be hard-pressed to control the situation and foreign forces may need to intervene, which is hugely controversial.

On the other hand, if a runoff becomes necessary, a date needs to be fixed for that, which cannot be earlier than end-October. Meanwhile, the Abdullah-Ghani combine, with tacit encouragement from the US, is bound to challenge the legitimacy of Karzai running a government even after its mandate expires on August 20. But Karzai will most certainly resist any demand on him to step down.

... Behind all this looms the grim reality that the Afghan body polity has been hopelessly split on ethnic lines. The election campaign has aggravated the creeping ethnic polarization. Every political issue today takes ethnic overtones. The US should have anticipated this and taken the lead to create a level playing field but instead it narrowly focused on ousting Karzai.

If this assessment is right, Afghanistan is poised to fracture along ethnic lines as the result of this election. There's plenty of reason to fear an anti-Western backlash also following the vote. And we thought the Taliban were trouble enough.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KH15Df04.html

(photo - Hamid Karzai shows SHarper the size suit he'll be wearing after the Americans finish carving him up)

Afghanistan Braces for Election

As the Afghan people prepare to head to the polls in four days time, a clearer picture is emerging of a desperate country in which an election will probably improve nothing, especially if the frontrunner, Hamid Karzai, manages to horse trade his way to another term in office.

According to The Guardian, Karzai's fate and fortunes likely hinge on Kandahar City where even the local emergency ward is furiously stocking up on "election supplies." It's an eye-opener. Read it here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/aug/16/afghanistan-hamid-karzai-elections

The article claims that Karzai is the Taliban's favourite in this election. That shouldn't be too surprising given how well they've done against him so far.

A Wrenching American Take on Canada's War in Kandahar

McClathchey Newspapers has published a truly excellent evaluation of Canada's war in Kandahar. Read it, you'll likely be glad you did:


http://www.mcclatchydc.com/117/story/73694.html?storylink=omni_popular