Afghanistan - The Road to Peace

For years I've been writing that the biggest obstacle to sorting out Afghanistan was India or rather America's tolerance of Indian meddling in Afghanistan. I might just have been right.

Those watching Bill Maher's show, Real Time, this weekend were treated to a fascinating discussion of the Afghan problem by CNN's Aussie-born veteran war correspondent, Michael Ware. He stunned his host and panel by claiming that a negotiated settlement to end the insurgency/civil war may not be that far off. The key, said Ware is Pakistan or, more accurately, India and Pakistan.

Those familiar with this blog will know the scenario. Pakistan fears India, seeing it as its mortal enemy. India likes to keep Pakistan off-balance and wants Afghanistan as its "client state." That leaves Pakistan bounded by one known adversary on its eastern border and a potential adversary on its western border with the Indian navy capable of sealing off Pakistan's southern coastline at will. At one point India was even talking about sending troops to Afghanistan to help fight the Pashtun (Taliban) insurgency. Pakistan, home to what has been called the "Islamic Bomb," has a large army but its generals believe they need almost all of it to defend Pakistan's border with India. Pakistan doesn't really have the forces or the money to truly secure its border with Afghanistan.

The Northern Alliance thugs and warlords who prop up Karzai and who, collectively, are then propped up by NATO and the United States like the idea of Afghanistan being a client state of India. The US, which has its own agenda for India, mainly focused on containing China, has tolerated the Delhi-Kabul relationship.

Pakistan's generals and especially its military intelligence mafia, the ISI, knows that the West isn't going to win in Afghanistan. They know, beyond any doubt, that we're not going to defeat the Taliban no matter how many troops we send, no matter how many bombs we drop. It isn't going to happen and they know that we know it too. So it's in their interests to tolerate, if not directly support, the insurgency to keep Afghanistan destabilized until Kabul and Washington are prepared to deal. Meanwhile the Pakistanis are telling Washington that they can bring the Taliban to the table if the Americans are willing to meet Pakistan's terms.

Here's the deal. India out of Afghanistan entirely. No client state of India deal. Pakistan and Afghanistan to accept some sort of Pashtun state (half of the Pashtun territory is in each country). On the creation of an acceptable Pashtun homeland the Taliban, whose objectives have always been nationalist anyway, will drop the insurgency which will also avoid the civil war that was bound to resume when we left in any case.

When you boil that down, what does it mean we're fighting for in Afghanistan? In reality we're fighting for a few things and none of them are pretty. We're fighting to retain the power and influence the Northern Alliance thugs and warlords snagged when the US helped them drive out the Taliban in a half-assed and utterly failed effort to destroy al-Qaeda. We're fighting to preserve India's interests in Afghanistan as a client state for the purpose of destabilizing Pakistan. We're fighting because we can't think of anything else to do ever since we lost the war way back in 2003 when al-Qaeda was allowed to slip away and decentralize throughout the Muslim world, Europe and North America.

If Michael Ware is right and if Pakistan is able to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table we (the US) had better grab that opportunity and do what's necessary to make it work which will include laying down the law in Delhi and Kabul. India and the Karzai criminal enterprise need to know that their game is over - for good.

Does This Sound Familiar?

A British Commons committee has found that UK soldiers "were sent into [Afghanistan's] Helmand province on an ill-defined mission undermined by "unrealistic" planning and lack of manpower." From The Observer:

After eight years in Afghanistan, the west has failed to live up to many of its grander promises, while "mission creep" has imposed too many competing priorities on the armed forces, according to the Labour-chaired Commons foreign affairs select committee.

Meanwhile, it raises the alarming spectre of al-Qaida, which has shifted its focus into Pakistan, gaining access to Islamabad's nuclear arsenal.

The report concludes that, while the military campaign in Helmand may be gaining traction, Afghan support for the troops has been damaged by civilian casualties and "cultural insensitivity", while there is no evidence the war on drugs has reduced poppy cultivation. A weak, corrupt police force is driving Afghans back to the Taliban to seek justice, it argues, while cultural assumptions about women are barely changed.

The British report is telling, particularly compared to the drivel John Manley & Co. pumped out for SHarper a year back.

Yet Another American Strategy to Win in Afghanistan

After eight years of essentially screwing the pooch, America's military leadership wants to add another new strategy to the mountain of earlier strategies to win the war in Afghanistan.

The new strategy calls for more troops, lots more, and new roles with a focus on unconventional warfare and - wait for it - using the military to crack down on corrupt officials at the local level.

Now when you come up with a "new" strategy like this what you're saying is that the last strategy (aka "the surge") and all the previous strategies were duds. Surprise, surprise, didn't work. All those armchair generals and home schooled history buffs were right after all and all those gold braid generals with all those shiny medals and colourful ribbons were wrong, again and again and again.

Word has it that the White House is awaiting General Stan McChrystal's new strategy proposal with as much enthusiasm as they would have for contracting leprosy.

Bill Maher - "Birthers" Must Be Stopped

From today's LA Times:

For the last couple of weeks, we've all been laughing heartily at the wacky antics of the "birthers" -- the far-right goofballs who claim Barack Obama wasn't really born in Hawaii and therefore the job of president goes to the runner-up, former Miss California Carrie Prejean.

Also, when Obama was sworn in as president, he forgot to give his answer in the form of a question.And yet, every week, the chorus of conservatives demanding to see his birth certificate grows. It's like they're the Cambridge police, Obama's in his house -- the White House -- and they need to see some ID.

And there's nothing anyone can do to convince these folks. You could hand them, in person, the original birth certificate and have a video of Obama emerging from the womb with Don Ho singing in the background ... and they still wouldn't believe it.

...Which raises the question: Why, in this country, is it always the religious right that won't take anything on faith?

So far, the reaction from Democrats is to laugh this off, and I understand why. If you seriously believe that President Obama is an African sleeper spy, get out of your chat room and have your house tested for lead.

...And once these stories get out there, they're hard to stamp out because our media do such a lousy job of speaking truth to stupid. Vietnam, Iraq and the Spanish-American War were all sold on lies that were unchallenged or even abetted by the media. Clinton got impeached and Kerry got destroyed in large part because the media didn't have the guts to say, "This is nonsense."

Lou Dobbs has been saying recently that people are asking a lot of questions about the birth certificate. Yes, the same people who want to know where the sun goes at night.

And Lou, you're their new king.

Think About It

I'm a Cassandra and I know it. I write a lot about the decay in our institutions, the rot in our leadership and the environmental and ecological cataclysm that's descending on us from so many directions.

One of my favourite contemporary chroniclers, Chris Hedges, explains how we will be paying dearly for a society in self-delusion. Think about it:

The childish idea that we can always prevail, that reality is never an impediment to what we want, is the central motif of illusion peddled on popular talk shows, by the Christian Right, by Hollywood, in corporate retreats, by the news industry and by self-help gurus. Reality can always be overcome. The future will always be glorious. And held out to keep us amused and entertained are spectacles and celebrities who have become idealized versions of ourselves and who, we are assured, we can all one day become.

The cultural embrace of illusion, and the celebrity culture that has risen up around it, have accompanied the awful hollowing out of the state. We have shifted from a culture of production to a culture of consumption. We have been sold a system of casino capitalism, with its complicated and unregulated deals of turning debt into magical assets, to create fictional wealth for us and vast wealth for our elite. We have internalized the awful ethic of corporatism -- one built around the cult of the self and consumption as an inner compulsion -- to believe that living is about our own advancement and our own happiness at the expense of others. Corporations, behind the smoke screen, have ruthlessly dismantled and destroyed our manufacturing base and impoverished our working class. The free market became our god and government was taken hostage by corporations, the same corporations that entice us daily with illusions though the mass media, the entertainment industry and popular culture.

The more we sever ourselves from a literate, print-based world, a world of complexity and nuance, a world of ideas, for one informed by comforting, reassuring images, fantasies, slogans and a celebration of violence the more we implode. We ask, like the wrestling fans or those who confuse love with pornography, to be fed lies. We demand lies. The skillfully manufactured images and slogans that flood the airwaves and infect our political discourse mask reality. And we do not protest. The lonely Cassandras who speak the truth about our misguided imperial wars, the global economic meltdown and the imminent danger of multiple pollutions that are destroying the eco-system that sustains the human species, are drowned out by arenas full of fans chanting "Slut! Slut! Slut!" or television audiences chanting "Jer-ry! Jer-ry! Jer-ry!" The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered population wants to hear about it and the more it distracts itself with squalid pseudo-events of celebrity breakdowns, gossip and trivia.

http://www.alternet.org/media/141675/the_rise_of_gonzo_porn_is_the_latest_sign_of_america%27s_cultural_apocalypse_/

I Heard It Through the Grapevine

Ever have a non-partisan political discussion? Most of us are so miserably enmeshed in partisan politics that it's tough to turn non-partisan, especially when you're having a lengthy political discussion with, say, a lifelong Tory insider. For several decades I've had a close friend from the Dark Side with whom I've had my very best political chinwags.

The other day our conversation turned to Stephen Harper. I mentioned I thought Harper must be getting close to quitting time. Unable to win a majority and his legislative agenda tied up in knots, why would a guy want to hang on any longer? My Tory friend said he thought Harper would leave except for the prospect of an election call this fall. Unless he manages a miracle and somehow swings a majority, Stevie will be packing his bags.

I asked what the Tory rumour-mill had on possible successors. My friend said that, up until a couple of weeks ago, Jean Charest's organization was laying the groundwork for the Quebec premier to stage a comeback. Then, it seems, some sort of health issue popped up, ending Charest's ambitions to join the ranks of Canada's prime ministers.

Interesting bit of gossip. Just thought I'd pass it along.

Playing the Great Game - Badly

When it comes to global security, the greatest threat today may not be terrorism or nuclear proliferation either. The gravest danger may lie in the lack of a coherent American policy toward South and East Asia.

To put it simply, America is stirring the pot in Afghanistan, in Pakistan and in India with potentially destabilizing ripple effects spreading to China and Russia. America's love/hate relationship with Central and South Asia seems to have drawn it into policies that are, by turns, inconsistent and even dangerously incoherent.

American policy in this region would make plain sense if only Pakistan, nuclear armed Pakistan, didn't exist. It's when Pakistan is factored into the mix that reason and sense seem to go out the window.

Hillary Clinton is continuing the Bush administration's initiative of cozying up to India with both nuclear technology and military support and co-operation treaties. This is bound to give the Chinese fits especially given the Indian navy's stated goal of maritime supremacy from the Indian Ocean to the Sea of Japan which just happens to envelope China's entire coastline. Both nations are now furiously expanding their blue water fleets. The latest move in this arms race came this week with the launch of India's first. made-in-India nuclear missile submarine, the Arihant.

While China is remaining silent, Pakistan is openly proclaiming the Indian sub will kick off an accelerated nuclear arms race. Yeah, now there's something the world could probably do without. From the Pakistan news service, Dawn:

ISPR spokesperson for the Pakistan Navy Commander Salman Ali told Dawn on Monday the Indian move would have far-reaching destabilising effects on the security environment not only of Pakistan but also of all the littoral states of Indian Ocean and beyond. He said the induction of 6,000-tonne INS Arihant in the Indian Navy had the potential to trigger a nuclear arms race in the region and all littoral states, including Pakistan, would have to take appropriate safeguards.

Washington never hesitates to loudly demand that Pakistan turn its military forces to fighting the Taliban and securing its western border with Afghanistan. Then it collaborates with India in ways bound to make Islamabad ever more paranoid about the security along its eastern border, the one it shares with India. At the same time the United States does nothing to curb India's involvement with the Kabul government in Afghanistan, a second-front for Pakistani paranoia.

America doesn't seem to grasp that stabilizing Afghanistan won't be possible without securing Pakistan. Without the full support of Pakistan, Afghanistan is a lost cause. Without securing Pakistan, America risks creating two failed states, one of them with a nuclear arsenal. This also gives rise to a power vacuum that could well suit China's interests in meeting an emerging Indian military challenge. Just imagine a Chinese naval base on the Arabian Sea at Gwadar.

If there was ever a time demanding coherence in American foreign policy toward Asia, this is it. Unfortunately the Obama administration's foreign policy, like that of its predecessor, isn't up to the challenge.

The End of Warming Deniers, The End of Tar Sand Shills

It may be time for Michael Ignatieff to yet again recalibrate his position on global warming (if you actually know what that is today, please let the rest of us in on it).


Iggy, the Liberal Party's self-styled Knight Errant and arch Bitumen-Booster may yet again find his irresistible impulse toward political expediency has dumped him in another mess of his own making.


Now we all know that Ontario has been cold and wet of late which, of itself, ought to be enough to put everyone on enquiry but beyond the centre of the universe the rest of the planet has been hot, very hot indeed. Now, as reported in The Guardian, the world is poised to warm much faster over the next five years than imagined by the IPCC.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/27/world-warming-faster-study


The analysis shows the relative stability in global temperatures in the last seven years is explained primarily by the decline in incoming sunlight associated with the downward phase of the 11-year solar cycle, together with a lack of strong El Niño events. These trends have masked the warming caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases.



As solar activity picks up again in the coming years, the research suggests, temperatures will shoot up at 150% of the rate predicted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Lean and Rind's research also sheds light on the extreme average temperature in 1998. The paper confirms that the temperature spike that year was caused primarily by a very strong El Niño episode. A future episode could be expected to create a spike of equivalent magnitude on top of an even higher baseline, thus shattering the 1998 record.


Read the report and then ask yourself where the leadership of the Liberal Party is taking us. But let's not get too carried away with global heating even as many of us non-Torontonians are trying to find ways to keep our homes somehow liveable. How are the flora and fauna doing these days? The easy answer is, "bloody awful." A report just released in the journal Conservation Biology says we may be on the verge of an extinction in the southern hemisphere. Again from The Guardian:

Researchers trawled 24,000 published reports to compile information on the native flora and fauna of Australasia and the Pacific islands, which have six of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. Their report identifies six causes driving species to extinction, almost all linked in some way to human activity.


"Our region has the notorious distinction of having possibly the worst extinction record on Earth," said Richard Kingsford, an environmental scientist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and lead author of the report. "We have an amazing natural environment, but so much of it is being destroyed before our eyes. Species are being threatened by habitat loss and degradation, invasive species, climate change, over-exploitation, pollution and wildlife disease."

The review, published in the journal Conservation Biology, highlights destruction and degradation of ecosystems as the main threat. In Australia, agriculture has altered or destroyed half of all woodland and forests. Around 70% of the remaining forest has been damaged by logging. Loss of habitats is behind 80% of threatened species, the report claims.

...The report sets out a raft of recommendations to slow the decline by introducing laws to limit land clearing, logging and mining; restricting deliberate introduction of invasive species; reducing carbon emissions and pollution; and limiting fisheries. It raises particular concerns about bottom trawling, and the use of cyanide and dynamite, and calls for early-warning systems to pick up diseases in the wild.

"The burden on the environment is going to get worse unless we are a lot smarter about reducing our footprint," said Kingsford. "Unless we get this right, future generations will surely be paying more in quality of life and the environment. And our region will continue its terrible reputation of leading the world in the extinction of plants and animals."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/28/species-extinction-hotspots-australia

History has shown the governments either confront problems or they confront catastrophes. The difference is often whether they act proactively, that is to say effectively and in time, or drag their heels long enough to permit what had been a problem to grow and return as a catastrophe.

The slack jawed leadership so prevalent in the world today and particularly in Canada are foreclosing the proactive option. Our Conservative, Liberal and NDP 'leaders' are resolute heel draggers who are leading this country and future generations to a very difficult time and place. We know Stephen Harper is a genuine knuckle-dragger but what is Iggy's excuse? Cowardice? Let's face it, these changes aren't materializing on Iggy's personal political timetable. They're not somehow nicely slotting in to his agenda. He's so out of step with this growing basket of threats that he doesn't even talk about them.

A couple of weeks back I wrote to Ignatieff's office, asking that he press Harper to do for Canadians what the British government did for its own people - give them a forecast based on the greenhouse gas emitted so far of what warming effects they should expect by 2070 - a baseline, "best case" scenario for the global warming we absolutely will not be able to avoid.

This time I did hear back from Iggy's policy advisor, Jean Benoit Fournier:

I concur that adaptation to the inevitable hardships that Canada will face because of climate change should be an immediate concern. Fortunately, some scientists have taken the lead on this issue, filling the void left by Conservatives. I would recommend to you visiting the website of an organism called “Ouranos” (http://www.ouranos.ca/en/). I know them from a former life, and am following their work closely. They provide advice (mainly to the Québec government) on how to adapt to climate change.

Yes, Jean-Benoit, it should be an immediate concern but it's not and your guy is doing nothing to change that beyond ladling out utterly banal posturing.

Next to the United States, Canadians have become the most ill-served public on the major environmental confronting us. The Oil Patch government of the day doesn't want to talk about it and the opposition (with the exception of the Bloc) doesn't want to either. They're all afraid to touch it and the irony is that this is an issue that sells itself. Even the "best case" scenarios, if put in the hands of the Canadian public, would be enough to generate solid support for meaningful action, both domestically and internationally.

A Friday Smile

This is what weddings should be about - sheer joy.

The Abject Futility of Our War in Afghanistan

I have largely given up writing about our stupid and counterproductive war in Afghanistan but I found Chris Hedges' take on it from TruthDig worth excerpting:

...We have stumbled into a confusing mix of armed groups that include criminal gangs, drug traffickers, Pashtun and Tajik militias, kidnapping rings, death squads and mercenaries. We are embroiled in a civil war. The Pashtuns, who make up most of the Taliban and are the traditional rulers of Afghanistan, are battling the Tajiks and Uzbeks, who make up the Northern Alliance, which, with foreign help, won the civil war in 2001. The old Northern Alliance now dominates the corrupt and incompetent government. It is deeply hated. And it will fall with us.

We are losing the war in Afghanistan. When we invaded the country eight years ago the Taliban controlled about 75 percent of Afghanistan. Today its reach has crept back to about half the country. The Taliban runs the poppy trade, which brings in an annual income of about $300 million a year. It brazenly carries out attacks in Kabul, the capital, and foreigners, fearing kidnapping, rarely walk the streets of most Afghan cities. It is life-threatening to go into the countryside, where 80 percent of all Afghanis live, unless escorted by NATO troops. And intrepid reporters can interview Taliban officials in downtown coffee shops in Kabul. Osama bin Laden has, to the amusement of much of the rest of the world, become the Where's Waldo of the Middle East. Take away the bullets and the bombs and you have a Gilbert and Sullivan farce.

...We have ensured that Iraq and Afghanistan are failed states. Next on our list appears to be Pakistan. Pakistan, like Iraq and Afghanistan, is also a bizarre construct of Western powers that drew arbitrary and artificial borders, ones the clans and ethnic groups divided by these lines ignore. As Pakistan has unraveled, its army has sought legitimacy in militant Islam. It was the Pakistani military that created the Taliban. The Pakistanis determined how the billions in U.S. aid to the resistance during the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was allocated. And nearly all of it went to the most extremist wings of the Afghan resistance movement. The Taliban, in Pakistan's eyes, is not only an effective weapon to defeat foreign invaders, whether Russian or American, but is a bulwark against India. Muslim radicals in Kabul are never going to build an alliance with India against Pakistan. And India, not Afghanistan, is Pakistan's primary concern. Pakistan, no matter how many billions we give to it, will always nurture and protect the Taliban, which it knows is going to inherit Afghanistan. And the government's well-publicized battle with the Taliban in the Swat Valley of Pakistan, rather than a new beginning, is part of a choreographed charade that does nothing to break the unholy alliance.

The only way to defeat terrorist groups is to isolate them within their own societies. This requires wooing the population away from radicals. It is a political, economic and cultural war. The terrible algebra of military occupation and violence is always counterproductive to this kind of battle. It always creates more insurgents than it kills. It always legitimizes terrorism. And while we squander resources and lives, the real enemy, al-Qaida, has moved on to build networks in Indonesia, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Morocco and depressed Muslim communities such as those in France's Lyon and London's Brixton area. There is no shortage of backwaters and broken patches of the Earth where al-Qaida can hide and operate. It does not need Afghanistan, and neither do we.

Afghanistan is no longer a primarily military war but a domestic political war being waged overseas by military means. We still pretend that winning in Afghanistan will strike a mortal blow at al Qaeda and thereby avenge the 9/11 attacks. We still maintain that fiction even though we know, everyone knows, it's complete nonsense. We still claim we're saving Afghanistan by fighting the Taliban while we know, everyone knows, that the country is beset by a host of lethal maladies. No point operating on a patient's heart while someone else holds a bag tightly over his head.

Ultimately, the war in Afghanistan was lost in Washington and in the capitals of every nation that joined America's crusade. It was lost to sophomoric political leadership and military careerism, a double whammy that cannot be overcome.

As I have long argued on this site, the key to defeating Islamist fundamentalism lies in the radicalization of the Arab Street. In those supposedly friendly Muslim nations, reform movements are brutally crushed by tyrants we prop up. In places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, those who suffer the lash of tyranny feel our hand on the whip along with their own ruler's. In these conditions, to whom can they turn? That's commonly the Islamist fundamentalists who stand as the only viable resistance to the tyrants. They're the default option. They're also the side that shares the Arab peoples' fury over the Palestinian oppression as well as the Crusader's attacks on the Muslim world - Afghanistan and Iraq.

We keep putting ourselves on the wrong side of the Arab Street, in opposition to the Muslim peoples. We do the terrorists' work by driving these people into the arms of the radicals. Why are we so insistent on using firepower to impose democracy on Afghanistan while condoning strongman rule among our supposed friends? What message are we sending to Muslim people worldwide without whose support much of the terrorist threat would wither and die?

When are we going to stop bashing our heads against this wall of stupidity?

Putting the Sizzle Back Into Sleaze

The New York Times is reporting on a "major corruption and international money laundering conspiracy probe" in New Jersey.

Oh this promises to be juicy, very juicy.

Federal prosecutors say about 30 people have been arrested in the two-track investigation. They include Assemblyman Daniel Van Pelt, Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano III and Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell. Federal prosecutors say several rabbis in New York and New Jersey are also arrested.

A state assemblyman, the mayors of Hoboken and Secaucus and several rabbis walk into a bar...

The Power of Positive Pessimism

One of my fellow bloggers very respectfully asked if my environmental posts weren't too pessimistic? It's a question I ask myself a lot. Most of the information and opinions I post here are obviously much darker, far more pessimistic than anything you're going to hear from our political leadership and most of what you hear from contemporary media outlets.


In terms of relative pessimism, however, they are pretty close to the unfiltered opinions coming from leading climate scientists and experts in related fields including biology, botany, epidemiology, geology and hydrology among others. They also closely parallel a lot of the concerns shared by military experts from, among others, the Pentagon and the British Ministry of Defence.


Is it pessimistic to accept these opinions as most probably true? Isn't life itself a constant weighing of probabilities, a process essential for us to evaluate options, priorities and trade-offs and then make decisions, often very difficult decisions?


I have accepted that these opinions are probably right. These writings are aimed at getting this information in front of people to get people thinking and discussing and reading so that they too can decide whether to accept these opinions as probably correct. Because once you've evaluated the information and decided these opinions are probably correct, it gives you a compelling reason to begin to evaluate options, priorities and trade-offs and then reach your own conclusions.


As I pointed out, we're very good at this process even if we're not always successful. We use it at the individual, community and societal level all the time.


Having come to accept these scientific opinions as probably correct, it gives rise to a couple of other thing we've learned to do fairly well - risk management and risk avoidance. There is no way to avoid all risks so long as you draw breath. What you can do is work to improve your odds by figuring out what threshold of risk is acceptable and what risks can be avoided. It's a trade-off.


Fly across the ocean or the polar cap today and there's a good chance you'll be in a modern, twin engine airliner. It used to be we demanded four engines for this sort of thing (think Constellation, 707, DC-8) but then engines became not only more powerful but, most importantly, more reliable. At that point the risk management people inside our various aviation authorities decided twin engine aircraft could probably carry passengers across vast stretches of open ocean in relative safety.


Everything in an aircraft is a trade-off. A big trade-off is the extra expense, especially in fuel consumption, we accept to maintain a minimum redundancy standard. Two engines to keep your jetliner flying aren't enough. We demand that those engines be big and powerful enough that the aircraft can be flown on just one far enough to probably be able to reach a runway somewhere.

Now for something completely different - the Cold War. During the standoff between the Western nations and the Soviet bloc everyone accepted the threat of a global, nuclear exchange. As British economist Nick Stern pointed out, many Western nations considered the threat serious enough that they were willing to invest up to 4% of their GDP into their military forces, their deterrence. (Stern, as an aside, believes we can avert catastrophic climate change by accepting a GDP reduction of less than half that)

Thanks to that investment in deterrence, and a good bit of luck, that world ending nuclear exchange never happened. For a while top generals would debate survivable nuclear war, a madness based on pre-emptive attack. The thinking went, "If I launch everything at him without any warning, I'll be able to wipe out all his cities and most of his nuclear arsenal. Then, at worst, he'll probably only be able to wipe out 70% of my cities, so I'll have 30% of my cities left, enough to rebuild and I win!" Fortunately we got past that to the point of MAD or Mutually Assured Destruction, nuclear Armageddon and rode that out to the end of the Cold War.

Now consider it this way. Is the risk of catastrophic climate change more or less probable than was the threat of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War? If you fall back on your acceptance that the views of these climate scientists and military experts are probably right, the risk of catastrophic climate change is considerably more probable than nuclear annihilation ever was during the Cold War. A logical conclusion, even if dire, is not pessimistic.

So, if you have climbed down off the fence and accepted that catastrophic climate change will probably occur the way mankind is going, then you either bury your head in the sand or engage the risk management and risk avoidance mechanisms that have served us well in the past - well enough at least that you're still around to read this.

The Brits (bless them and their horrid, greasy food) aren't afraid of probability. That's clear from the report recently released by the British environment secretary detailing the amount of warming Britons can expect by 2070 based on the existing state of carbon emissions. They've been told there'll probably be two degrees of warming in most parts of Britain and possibly as much as six degrees in some southern areas, including the City of London. Now, if you accept that as the probable outcome based on the existing situation, it's a no-brainer to see that things are probably going to get worse, much worse, unless the community of nations accepts that they must do whatever it takes to decarbonize their economies and get it done very, very soon.

Why do we need immediate action now? Because replacing a carbon-based economy is a decadal job. According to America's leading climate scientist, the Goddard Institutes James Hansen, the latest research shows the onset of global warming is happening at a pace they could not have imagined just a few years ago. Hansen sees smoke billowing out beneath the door and wants to pull the alarm. He now says, quite unequivocally, that we have no more than 20-years to completely give up our dominant energy source, coal. Twenty years, that's it. If we don't give it up, Hansen warns that we will very probably be unable to avert truly catastrophic global warming.

Now I think it's logical enough to assume that we're probably not going to decarbonize our economies without drastic action by all the major emitters. This is where "think globally, act locally" comes in. Any hope of meaningful action is being blocked by the dissenters, the heel-draggers. How do you know who they are? Easy. They're the guys who've fallen back on the disingenuous claim that they'll cut their own emissions only when everyone else agrees to do the same.

What's disingenuous about this "all or nothing" tactic? Among other things, it throws us right back into the arms of MAD or mutually assured destruction. It's like a scene from a western where all the bad guys are gathered around the poker table, holding their cards in one hand and a six-shooter in the other hand underneath the table. It's really, really hard to step down from that mentality because it fosters suspicion, delay and inaction.

Then factor in logical inconsistency. How much credibility on the global scene can either of Canada's two major political leaders hold when both are openly committed to the expansion of the Athabasca Tar Sands? They want China to do what, shut down its coal plants?

The Copenhagen summit is coming up in December and the climate science community is doing everything in its power to convince the world's leaders of the very real, very high probability of runaway global warming if they don't commit themselves now to radical action over the next decade or two. That's a very high bar to clear and I really don't think they're going to make it.

Now back to probabilities. If you believe that catastrophic climate change is probable unless we act quickly to do whatever it takes to stop emitting greenhouse gases and if, following the Copenhagen summit it appears probable that the collective will to act effectively, globally and in time hasn't been achieved, then it's probably time to reset our risk management and risk avoidance parameters accordingly and, as James Lovelock has been urging lately, prepare for the worst.

Why prepare now? Because we're lucky enough that we can, that's why. We're not Africa, and we're not the Middle East. We're not eastern Europe or Central, South or East Asia. We're not South or Central America. If you believe these top climate scientists and military experts are probably right and you're not willing to bet the farm that the world leaders are probably going to act quickly and radically enough, then we had better begin looking at what that probably means for Canada, for us and begin evaluating the unique options - call them blessings if you're so inclined - that are open to us, how we can take advantage of those and even what we may be required to do to protect them.

That's not pessimistic. That's simply logical. Okay, if you want you can call it "positive pessimism."

On Cronkite and Speaking Truth to Power

Walter Cronkite stands as an object lesson of how even the most influential Americans can expect a pummelling if they dare speak truth to power. It revolved around what became known as the Tet Offensive of 1968 when the supposedly vanquished Viet Cong insurgents rose up to overrun towns and cities the length of South Vietnam. In Saigon the guerrillas briefly occupied the American embassy, a symbol of US power and prestige in Vietnam.

Eventually American military firepower prevailed and the Viet Cong were largely wiped out in fierce fighting. While that appeared to be a victory in the Pentagon's view, it prompted Hanoi to step up the war by sending in regiments of the conventional, North Vietnamese Army.

In the aftermath of Tet, Walter Cronkite travelled to South Vietnam to draw his own conclusions and filed an opinion piece that sent shockwaves throughout America. Cronkite said that, try as it might, America was not going to win. On mainstreet America public support for the war collapsed but it still took another five years for American troops to leave the country.



America was traumatized by the failure of its war in Vietnam. America wasn't defeated, it just couldn't win and so it failed. In the wake of that failure, American hawks and the country's now widely discredited military blamed every scapegoat they could finger and one of their favourites was Walter Cronkite. Few could have withstood that. Cronkite was one who could.

Walter Cronkite, Dead at 92

The veteran CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite has died, age 92. The iconic newsman's death was announced by his son. Cronkite had been seriously ill for the past month.

During the Bush years, Cronkite emerged from retirement to regularly lambaste America's right-wing, "lap dog" journalism that regurgitated every government lie and turned its head at the first sign of truth. That made him a target of the worst and slimiest in American broadcast journalism - the barrel bottom scrapings like Limbaugh and the FOX News crew.

Bracing for Our Future

Here's the bottom line. The world is facing a number of critical environmental and social challenges that are going to require remedial action but also adaptation. The severity of these various impacts isn't going to be felt universally. Some nations will be extremely hard-hit. Some are already being extremely hard-hit. For others the impacts may be later in arriving and less hard-hitting.

Canadians don't get to control how severe these problems will become. We can certainly contribute to making them worse or making them somewhat better but in either direction our influence will be limited. We can, however, do a great deal by way of how we adapt and minimize the negative consequences and that is what we ought to be focusing on right now, today.

How we position ourselves to meet these challenges is up to us. As a general rule, however, this may well be the century of the quick and the dead. Those who are quickest to act will most greatly increase their prospects of doing as well as possible. The best off will be those who are cognizant of the changes they'll experience, who have both the will and the means to respond as early as possible in order to take advantage of opportunities that may be fleeting and who happen to inhabit one of the few "lucky" countries. We are fortunate in that ours is indeed one of those really lucky countries. That leaves the other two criteria - recognition and action - entirely up to us.

Some experts, like James Hansen, now figure we're already well past the safe carbon atmospheric threshhold. He warns we have to get off coal energy entirely within twenty years. Twenty years. Yet there is no other fossil fuel remotely so abundant in a rapidly growing energy hungry world.

Then there's Peter Odell, professor of international energy studies at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. This energy economist says we don't have a (pardon me for this) snowball's chance in hell of breaking our fossil fuel addiction in this century.

Painting a gloomy picture of the short-term outlook for renewables, Odell told Reuters that even with a growing global effort to limit carbon dioxide emissions, the world would still be relying on hydrocarbons by 2100.

"Oil use won't peak until 2050," Odell said in an interview. "It will decline thereafter but even by 2100 oil supplies will be 20 percent higher than they were in 2000."

He said alternative, renewable forms of energy would increase 15-fold over the 21st century to become the biggest single source of energy by the year 2100, but even then alternative energy would still only account for 35-40 percent of the total energy mix.

...Odell said global energy demand could increase four-fold this century under some scenarios to as much as 38 giga (billion) tons of oil equivalent (gtoe) by 2100 from 9 gtoe.

He forecast world use of hydrocarbons would rise to a peak of 16.5 gtoe by 2070, from 5.8 gtoe in 2000.

Now, I personally find Odell's model unrealistic. He has failed to account for the fact that, in his outlook, civilization will have collapsed probably by mid-century and we'll have trimmed the hydrocarbon consumers to what James Lovelock estimates will be a "few hundreds of millions."

But Odell's predictions can't simply be dismissed because the important kernel is that we won't be able to shed our carbon economy. How many people are alive to consume fossil fuels in 2070 or 2099 is pretty much irrelevant. The only thing that really matters is whether, as Odell claims, mankind and the community of nations will be unwilling or unable to stop catastrophic climate change.

Even if there's a 20% chance that he's right then the Canadian people and our experts and our elected officials need to do a serious, brutally honest and open risk assessment right now. Not ten years from now. Not when we see how the global community performs on wrestling with greenhouse gas emissions. Even if we began analyzing the risk potential in Odell's report, it is going to take some time for us to put together something meaningful but we need to get started on that now.

As Canadians we have pretty much everything going for us. That's a gift best appreciated.

Bring Out Your Dead - Just Not Now

When is "dead" not really dead? That's an issue tackled today in the National Post.

The question revolves around the point at which helpful hospital staff can begin playing pickpocket with your internal organs, harvesting what they can for recycling in some other poor soul. The article warns of a "trend" of stripping organs from patients who have suffered cardiac death - no pulse - but may not yet be truly brain dead. Get'em while they're fresh!

Trouble is, you see, stopped hearts can sometimes be restarted. I know. Sometimes it's the paddles, sometimes it's a shot of adrenalin straight into the heart. But, surely, should the medical team not give up the ghost on us until we've really given up the ghost ourselves?

Dalhousie medical ethicist Jocelyn Downie has written a paper in which she suggests medical staff may be breaking the law in their rush to help save other patients from mortal illness.

The cardiac-death protocol, meanwhile, should probably be halted until more is known about when someone whose heart has stopped is beyond recovery, Prof. Downie said.
"We need clarity around this because it is critically important for a host of reasons," she said in an interview.
"It's only after the declaration of death that certain things can happen: We can take your organs, we can bury you, we can do an autopsy ... we can trigger all sorts of things around your property."

Who knows, is this next? -

It's the RCMP. What Did He Expect - The Truth?

Four high-level drug figures have walked because RCMP officers misled the court when they got their initial warrants and lied again when the matter came up in court.

Mr. Justice Peter Leask, a very sharp legal mind, ordered wiretap evidence obtained via the warrants inadmissible and, with that, the Crown folded its case. Leask didn't mince words. He found the officers misled the judge who granted the wiretap warrants and then lied to his court as they tried to explain away the false statements in their wiretap affidavits.

So the mounties got caught lying their asses off under oath, so what else is new? Sadly, here's something else that's getting old. Responding to the judge's ruling, an RCMP spokesman said the force is very concerned about Justice Leask's findings, so concerned that they're going to close ranks as usual and see if they can appeal. Not a word about taking a hard look at fellow officers who have broken the law, sullied the force and breached their duty to the Canadian public. I mean it's not as though they shot some unarmed kid in the back of the head in self-defence or Tasered some unfortunate to death in an airport.

Cleaning up the RCMP is Harper's responsibility. Seems that neither the prime minister nor the Tory apparatchik he appointed RCMP commissioner has much interest in doing that. Sad, really.

Just Because Stephen Harper Doesn't Want to Admit It, That Doesn't Make It "Dumb."

Canada's parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page has been exonerated by legitimate economists of accusations by pretend-economist Stephen Harper that Page's deficit warnings were "dumb."

The self-styled "Smartest Man in the Room" and part-time chair kicker had a sphincter malfunction when the budget officer said Canada was now running a structural deficit and would either have to raise taxes or cut spending before the budget would ever return to surplus.

"Not So" yelled the indignant man who has shown himself persistently inept and wrong-minded about this recession from well before it began. Furious that the budget officer should deign to tell Canadians the truth, Harper slammed Page, saying, "That’s a very dumb policy and, to the extent, frankly, that the parliamentary budget officer suggested it, it’s a dumb position.”

Of course Kevin Page's "dumb policy" was to presume he was able to speak candidly and honestly with the Canadian public and not first submit his remarks for "adjustment" by Harper's political commissars within the PMO. As the folks at DND and EnviroCan know, that sort of thing is a hanging offence in Harper's government.

Harper claims Canada's federal government will be rolling in a $700-million surplus by 2013-2014 (provided always that the Tories are not in power by then). Harper also claims the earth is 6,000 years old, global warming is a myth and tinfoil hats really do make watching television much more enjoyable. The insolent Page, however, foresees a deficit of $16.7 billion by then.

Harper's position is backed by, well, nobody except possibly his cherubic little finance minister with the impossibly red face. Page is backed by real economists:

“Kevin’s numbers are quite close to the numbers we put out,” said Toronto Dominion Bank’s chief economist Don Drummond. “It depends on whether you think we can grow our way out of this deficit and our view, and Kevin Page’s view, is that’s not the most likely outcome.”

Veteran Bay Street economist Dale Orr also reportedly backed up Page’s numbers in a statement his Toronto-based consultancy released yesterday. It predicted the budget deficit in 2013-14 at around $15 to $20 billion and suggested new taxes or cuts to spending would have to be considered.

There's Gold In Green

California has a sometimes controversial medical marijuana industry. California growers produce 8.6-million pounds of weed annually valued at $13.8 billion. Now there's a proposal that could help California taxpayers - an excise tax on pot.

At $50 an ounce it would generate $1.4-billion in excise revenues atop the sales taxes already collected from purchasers. One can only imagine what California could take in if it decriminalized marijuana altogether and collected excise tax on all production, medicinal and recreational.

The Afghanistan Indictment

The role that Western nations have played in contributing to the current mess that we call Afghanistan is just beginning to come under scrutiny. The much expected re-election of Hamid Karzai will cement our legacy in that distant land and, as Nushin Arbabzadah notes in The Guardian, that legacy isn't good:

When the Taliban arrived in a village in Farah in May, the village elders approached them and asked them to leave. They told the Taliban that if the fighters stayed, the foreigners would bomb their village. The Taliban said: "We are fighting and dying for Islam and so should you. Why should you be spared death? Is your blood redder than ours?"

And so the foreign planes came, dropped their bombs and, according to locals, killed more than 100 civilians. "What could we do?" said a local man to the BBC's Afghan service. "The Talibs were young men with guns and grenades. We had no weapons to protect ourselves and no young men to help us."

...A cabal of discredited Afghan warlords accused of war crimes and ousted by the Taliban allied themselves with the foreign troops against the Taliban, and were co-opted into the system, becoming ministers, MPs and governors. To Afghans they remained just that – warlords – albeit warlords with new "democratic" titles and western friends. The 2001 intervention was a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11 done on the cheap. As local wisdom has it, there are three types of people in Afghanistan today: al-Qaida (the fighters), al-faida (the enriched) and al-gaida (the fucked). Most Afghans belong to the third category.

...Far from disarming the many Afghan militia gangs, the current intervention has created a new set of armed men who are highly trained and well-equipped. Their daytime job is to protect foreign problem-solvers. But in their spare time, they run their own criminal businesses, robbing and intimidating locals and recently, even killing a government official.

It's not as though any of this comes as a surprise. While we have been asking our soldiers to risk their lives we have been helping this cancer spread throughout the cities and the countryside, ensuring our soldiers' many sacrifices will be futile.

I find it telling that the many cheerleaders for this mission, the "Support the Troops" types with their yellow plastic ribbons on the trunks of their cars, never bothered to look at what was really going on in Afghanistan, never raised a protest. At the end of the day, they didn't really support the troops, they supported the troops being over there. Those are two really different things.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/16/afghanistan-west-corruption-conflict