The idea communicated to The Times' large Sunday audience is simple: U.S. military occupation of the Greater Middle East is all that stands in the path of an aggressive incipient Iranian empire. The truth is a bit more complex, but not by much: Iran is merely collecting the windfall created by the bellicose imperial U.S.
Gall is a good reporter who certainly knows the truth of Afghanistan, that the Taliban are proxies of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan:
There is no doubt that as the United States winds down the Afghan war — the longest in American history, and one that has cost half a trillion dollars and more than 150,000 lives on all sides — regional adversaries are muscling in.
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan remain the dominant players. But Iran is also making a bold gambit to shape Afghanistan in its favor.
This "bold gambit" is fleshed out entirely with quotes from Afghan officials, particularly Afghan intelligence. So a discerning critical reader will come away skeptical as to the extent of Iranian influence in Afghanistan. Gall, based on her published story, could just have easily replaced Iran with Russia.
The story goes something like this: Taliban CEO Mullah Mansour was on his way back from a powwow in Iran with Russian officials when he was blown up by a U.S. drone. Pakistan had blessed the assassination believing that Mansour had strayed too far off the reservation:
The death of Mullah Mansour removed Iran’s crucial link to the Taliban. But it has also fractured the Taliban, spurring a number of high-level defections and opening opportunities for others, including Iran, to meddle.
An overwhelming majority of Taliban blame Pakistan for Mullah Mansour’s death. The strike deepened disillusionment with their longtime Pakistani sponsors.
About two dozen Taliban commanders, among them senior leaders who had been close to Mullah Mansour, have since left their former bases in Pakistan.
They have moved quietly into southern Afghanistan, settling back in their home villages, under protection of local Afghan security officials who hope to encourage a larger shift by insurgents to reconcile with the government.
Those with family still in Pakistan live under close surveillance and control by Pakistani intelligence, said the former Taliban commander, who recently abandoned the fight and moved his family into Afghanistan to escape reprisals.
He said he had become increasingly disaffected by Pakistan’s highhanded direction of the war. “We all know this is Pakistan’s war, not Afghanistan’s war,” he said. “Pakistan never wanted Afghanistan to be at peace.”
The lede of Gall's story, that the Taliban are no longer entirely operated by remote control from Islamabad, thanks in no small part to assassination of Mullah Mansour, is buried beneath a lot of malarkey about Iranian meddling.
Any feelers the Taliban make in the direction of Russia and Iran are for peace. The Pakistan/U.S./Saudi position is one of perpetual war. That is how the U.S. role in Afghanistan is frequently referred to now in the mainstream media.
Bettors favored the Carolina Panthers (though I saw the headline to one story that claimed a late load of lucre poured in on Denver, evening things out), as I did, only to be disappointed by the performance of the false idol of the Zeitgeist, Cam Newton. The Panthers star QB's fourth quarter cowardly refusal to dive into a pile to regain his own fumble might prove to be a Fisher King type wound from which his career will never recover. The Broncos defense dominated Carolina like no other team has this season, proving once again the truism that defense wins championships.
The media seems to be going apeshit over Lady Gaga's singing of the national anthem. At one point during her performance, CBS cut away to troops watching the game in a mess hall somewhere in Afghanistan. The picture of course was meant to convey that our men and women are abroad in a savage land so we can sit safely in front of our flat screens and be entertained by athletes sustaining chronic brain injuries. But the CBS cutaway to the troops in Afghanistan, even more so than the Blue Angels flyover after Lady Gaga belted out the last lines of the Star Spangled Banner, struck me as awkward and not anchored in reality.
At the end of 2014 Obama announced the end of combat operations in Afghanistan, except for trainers and special operators to conduct counter-terrorism attacks, meaning, presumably, operations against Al Qaeda. Those pictured during the Star Spangled Banner looked more like support staff, cooks and forklift operators, than Navy SEALs or Army Delta Force.
Along with "ending" combat operations, Obama promised the removal of all troops by the end of 2016. So when Super Bowl LI is televised next February whatever network is hosting the event will have to cut away to a different U.S. theater of war, possibly Iraq, another place where Obama had declared an end to of combat operations; possibly Poland or Bulgaria, where the U.S. is embarked on a reboot of the Cold War; possibly Libya; maybe even Haiti. The only boundary to the U.S. military footprint is the globe itself.
But wait. Not so fast. After Kunduz fell this past September Obama extended the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan past when he leaves office in 2017. The Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police were decisively outperformed by a much smaller Taliban force; it took U.S. A-10 Warthogs (the aircraft responsible for killing the medical staff and patients at the Doctors Without Borders hospital) and special forces to take Kunduz City back from the Taliban in October.
The problem for the U.S. is even though Obama has committed U.S. troops to Afghanistan through 2017, making them available for a cutaway shot during the next Super Bowl performance of the national anthem (Miley Cyrus?), more and more it is becoming a topic mentioned in the mainstream press that Afghanistan -- at least American/NATO political entity by that name -- might not be around past 2016.
For instance, a story by Najim Rahim, David Jolly and Ahmad Shakib, "Kunduz Residents Live in Fear of Taliban’s Return," spells out clearly that Kunduz Province, for all intents and purposes, is already controlled by the Taliban:
“You can see the white flags of the Taliban along the road as soon as you step out of Kunduz City,” said Mr. Azyanfar, 20, who travels back to his district outside the provincial capital several times a week. The area controlled by the government extends “only to the buildings in which they are based,” he said. “As soon as you step outside, it is totally a different picture: The Taliban’s presence and influence are much larger than the government’s.”
It has been more than four months since the Afghan forces crumbled as Taliban fighters overran Kunduz. But there has been no improvement in the conditions that made the two-week Taliban takeover of the city possible. Disillusionment with the government has only gotten worse; the Afghan forces are still overstretched and demoralized; and the Taliban still control much of the outlying areas and roads.
Now, the worry in and around Kunduz is that it is inevitable that the insurgents will return, strengthened this time by weapons, ammunition and vehicles looted during their capture of the city.
For a national government already strained by territory losses and infighting, another loss of a provincial capital — whether that is a repeat in Kunduz or a new setback in Helmand or another contested province — is an alarming prospect.
The initial loss of Kunduz was a national trauma. Many Afghans began fleeing neighboring provincial capitals and district centers. An already huge wave of emigration accelerated after the assault. And, worrisomely in a country torn by warring strongmen in the ’90s, local warlords were threatening to remobilize and settle scores in the absence of a capable government defense.
The repercussions of Kunduz’s fall were felt all the way to Washington, where President Obama abandoned his goal of ending America’s involvement in the Afghan war this year and instead extended the United States military mission beyond 2016.
The litany of woe for Afghanistan is stunning. Islamic State is on the rise in Nangarhar Province in the east. In the north, in Kunduz and Baghlan, the Taliban is on the march. While in the south, the Afghan government is struggling to maintain a toehold in Helmand Province, the richest region for poppy cultivation. Army and police casualties are at record highs. And there are murmurings of an impending split or coup in the Ghani/Abdullah government in Kabul.
Don't take my word for it. Read Carlotta Gall's think piece, "Pakistan’s Hand in the Rise of International Jihad," in yesterday's paper. It is a breath of fresh air, particularly as it appears in what is basically a government organ, The New York Times. So I quote it whole:
TUNIS — PRESIDENT ASHRAF GHANI of Afghanistan has warned in several recent interviews that unless peace talks with Pakistan and the Taliban produce results in the next few months, his country may not survive 2016. Afghanistan is barely standing, he says, after the Taliban onslaught last year, which led to the highest casualties among civilians and security forces since 2001.
“How much worse will it get?” Mr. Ghani asked in a recent television interview. “It depends on how much regional cooperation we can secure, and how much international mediation and pressure can be exerted to create rules of the game between states.”
What he means is it depends on how much international pressure can be brought to bear on Pakistan to cease its aggression.
Critics of the Afghan leadership say it’s not Pakistan’s fault that its neighbor is falling apart. They point to the many internal failings of the Afghan government: political divisions, weak institutions, warlords and corruption.
But experts have found a lot of evidence that Pakistan facilitated the Taliban offensive. The United States and China have been asking Pakistan to persuade the Taliban to make peace, but Afghanistan argues that Islamabad has done nothing to rein in the Taliban, and if anything has encouraged it to raise the stakes in hopes of gaining influence in any power-sharing agreement.
This behavior is not just an issue for Afghanistan. Pakistan is intervening in a number of foreign conflicts. Its intelligence service has long acted as the manager of international mujahedeen forces, many of them Sunni extremists, and there is even speculation that it may have been involved in the rise of the Islamic State.
The latest Taliban offensive began in 2014. United States and NATO forces were winding down their operations in Afghanistan and preparing to withdraw when Pakistan decided, after years of prevarication, to clear Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters from their sanctuary in Pakistan’s tribal area of North Waziristan.
The operation was certainly a serious endeavor — Taliban bases, torture chambers and ammunition dumps were busted, town bazaars were razed and over one million civilians were displaced.
But the militants were tipped off early, and hundreds escaped, tribesmen and Taliban fighters said. Many fled over the border to Afghanistan, just at the vulnerable moment when Afghanistan was assuming responsibility for its own security. Ninety foreign fighters with their families arrived in Paktika Province that summer, to the alarm of Afghan officials.
Further along the border in Paktika Province, Taliban fighters occupied abandoned C.I.A. bases and outposts. A legislator from the region warned me that they would use the positions to project attacks deeper into Afghanistan and even up to Kabul. Some of the most devastating suicide bomb attacks occurred in that province in the months that followed.
Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the Haqqani network, the most potent branch of the Taliban, moved from North Waziristan into the adjacent district of Kurram. From there it continues to enjoy safe haven and conduct its insurgency against American, international and Afghan targets.
Pakistan regards Afghanistan as its backyard. Determined not to let its archrival, India, gain influence there, and to ensure that Afghanistan remains in the Sunni Islamist camp, Pakistan has used the Taliban selectively, promoting those who further its agenda and cracking down on those who don’t. The same goes for Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters.
Even knowing this, it might come as a surprise that the region’s triumvirate of violent jihad is living openly in Pakistan.
First, there’s Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of the Haqqani network, and second in command of the Taliban. He moves freely around Pakistan, and has even visited the Pakistani intelligence headquarters of the Afghan campaign in Rawalpindi.
Then there is the new leader of the Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, who has openly assembled meetings of his military and leadership council near the Pakistani town of Quetta. Since he came to power last year, the Taliban has mounted some of its most ambitious offensives into Afghanistan, overrunning the northern town of Kunduz, and pushing to seize control of the opium-rich province of Helmand.
Finally, Al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, enjoys sanctuary in Pakistan — one recent report placed him in the southwestern corner of Baluchistan. He has been working to establish training camps in southern Afghanistan. In October, it took United States Special Operations forces several days of fighting and airstrikes to clear those camps. American commanders say the group they were fighting was Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, a new franchise announced by Mr. Zawahri that has claimed responsibility for the killings of bloggers and activists in Karachi and Bangladesh, among other attacks.
Pakistan denies harboring the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and points out that it, too, is a victim of terrorism. But many analysts have detailed how the military has nurtured Islamist militant groups as an instrument to suppress nationalist movements, in particular among the Pashtun minority, at home and abroad.
Perhaps most troubling, there are reports that Pakistan had a role in the rise of the Islamic State.
Ahead of Pakistan’s 2014 operation in North Waziristan, scores, even hundreds, of foreign fighters left the tribal areas to fight against President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Tribesmen and Taliban members from the area say fighters traveled to Quetta, and then flew to Qatar. There they received new passports and passage to Turkey, from where they could cross into Syria. Others traveled overland along well-worn smuggling routes from Pakistan through Iran and Iraq.
The fighters arrived just in time to boost the sweeping offensive by ISIS into Iraq and the creation of the Islamic State in the summer of 2014.
If these accounts are correct, Pakistan was cooperating with Qatar, and perhaps others, to move international Sunni jihadists (including 300 Pakistanis) from Pakistan’s tribal areas, where they were no longer needed, to new battlefields in Syria. It is just another reminder of Pakistan’s central involvement in creating and managing violent jihadist groups, one Pakistani politician, who spoke on the condition of anonymity when talking about intelligence affairs, told me.
This has been going on for more than 30 years. In 1990, I shared a bus ride with young Chinese Uighurs, Muslims from China’s restive northwest, who had spent months training in Pakistani madrasas, including a brief foray into Afghanistan to get a taste of battle. They were returning home, furnished with brand-new Pakistani passports, a gift of citizenship often offered to those who join the jihad.
Years later, just after Osama bin Laden was found and killed in Pakistan, I interviewed a guerrilla commander from the disputed region of Kashmir who had spent 15 years on the Pakistani military payroll, traveling to train and assist insurgents in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir and Afghanistan.
In 2012 I came across several cases where young clerics, fresh graduates from the Haqqania madrasa in Pakistan, returned to their home villages in Afghanistan, flush with cash, and set about running mosques and recruiting and organizing a band of Taliban followers.
I visited that madrasa in 2013. It is the alma mater of the Afghan Taliban, where many of the leaders of the movement were trained. The clerics there remained adamant in their support for the Taliban. “It is a political fact that one day the Taliban will take power,” Syed Yousuf Shah, the madrasa spokesman, told me. “We are experts on the Taliban,” he said, and a majority of the Afghan people “still support them.”
The madrasa, a longtime instrument of Pakistani intelligence, has been training people from the ethnic minorities of northern Afghanistan alongside its standard clientele of Pashtuns. The aim is still to win control of northern Afghanistan through these young graduates. From there they have their eyes on Central Asia and western China. Pakistani clerics are educating and radicalizing Chinese Uighurs as well, along with Central Asians from the former Soviet republics.
No one has held Pakistan to account for this behavior. Why would Pakistan give it up now?
It is easy to tune out news coming from Afghanistan with all that is going on these days. World War Three, or, at the very least, a new Cold War, is being launched in southeastern Ukraine, what is known as the Donets Basin, or Donbass. The century-old Sykes-Picot Middle East is being remade with U.S. support, both tacit and manifest. And China is looking at protracted conflict with its many neighbors and the United States over access to the China Sea.
So it is easy to skip stories like Azam Ahmed's "Taliban Making Military Gains in Afghanistan, " which appeared in the Sunday paper yesterday, the gist of which is the Taliban is resurgent:
At a time when an election crisis is threatening the stability of the government, the Taliban’s increasingly aggressive campaign is threatening another crucial facet of the American withdrawal plan, full security by Afghan forces this year.
“They are running a series of tests right now at the military level, seeing how people respond,” one Western official said, describing a Taliban effort to gauge how quickly they could advance. “They are trying to figure out: Can they do it now, or will it have to wait” until after the American withdrawal, the official added, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the coalition has officially ceded security control.
Interviews with local officials and residents in several strategic areas around the country suggest that, given the success of their attacks, the Taliban are growing bolder just two months into the fighting season, at great cost to Afghan military and police forces.
In Kapisa, a verdant province just north of Kabul that includes a vital highway to northern Afghanistan, insurgents are openly challenging and even driving away the security forces in several districts. Security forces in Tagab District take fire daily from the Taliban, who control everything but the district center. Insurgents in Alasay District, northeast of Kabul, recently laid siege to an entire valley for more than a week, forcing hundreds of residents and 45 police officers to flee. At least some of the local police in a neighboring district have cut deals with the Taliban to save themselves.
To give you an idea of how dire the loss of authority in Kapisa is, Bagram Airfield, the seat of U.S. power in Afghanistan, lies just outside the boundaries of the province.
This morning Carlotta Gall and Taimoor Shah report in "After Losing Province in 2010, Afghan Taliban Strike Back" that the Taliban, in addition to bold moves north of Kabul, are simultaneously making an audacious move to assert control of Kandahar:
In an annual public statement over the weekend for the holiday of Eid al-Fitr, the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, reiterated his determination to re-establish an Islamic emirate in Afghanistan. The proof was borne out by a multifront offensive in Kandahar involving hundreds of Taliban fighters that was seemingly timed to take advantage of Eid al-Fitr, which closes the holy month of Ramadan.
The question is not if but when the Taliban returns to power. The situation is similar to when the Soviets pulled out. The contested presidential election pitting candidates Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani against one another is likely to devolve into some form of armed conflict. The Taliban will sweep in with the promise of restored order. Then, very soon, we will have an Islamic State stretching from northern Syria up to the border of Iran before picking back up in Afghanistan and running all the way to the Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The pressure on Iran will be enormous.
With large sections of Gaza devastated and the Palestinian death toll topping 1,000, Hamas waffled over the weekend on the United Nations’ calls for a “humanitarian pause” in hostilities. It said Saturday night that such a pause was unacceptable as long as Israeli troops maintained positions and limited operations inside Gaza, then hours later declared its own pause without conditions, a bewildering back-and-forth that made it difficult to glean a clear strategy.
Politically isolated after breaks with Syria, Iran and especially Egypt, and its effort at reconciling with the Palestinian factions that rule the West Bank having failed to bear fruit, Hamas has all but given up on governing Gaza to focus on the battlefield. Israelis have expressed outrage that thousands of tons of concrete built a vast network of tunnels rather than schools or hospitals, but that argument has little traction in Gaza, where many see violence as the only language that works.
Though weary of war, many Gazans see the so-called resistance as the only possible path to pressing Israel and Egypt to open border crossings, and to ending Israel’s “siege” on imports and exports and naval “blockade.” Hamas and its backers in Qatar and Turkey have also been calling for a seaport and airport in the coastal enclave.
“The only option left for us was to defend ourselves and to make Israel bleed the way that we have been bleeding all these years,” said Ahmed Yousef, a former Hamas official who remains close to its leaders. “It is not acceptable to go back to a situation where we are being squeezed to death and where the whole society is being paralyzed.”
Faraj al-Loul, a plumber shopping for vegetables on Sunday in a Gaza City market, echoed the opinions of many residents interviewed who said life had become so miserable that they were willing to suffer the high costs of war if it could bring change.
“We want a cease-fire, of course, but it has to be based on the demands of the resistance,” he said. “If they refuse to open the crossings, then we’ll all become martyrs, God willing.”
Michael Gordon provides a summary, "Even Gaza Truce Is Hard to Win, Kerry Is Finding,"
of the U.S. Secretary of State's shuttle diplomacy last week to secure a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. It does not look good. Israel reacted negatively to the tentative agreement that Kerry concocted, which would have locked in a week-long ceasefire during which negotiations over an "enduring solution" to Gaza's myriad crises would begin.
After five days of marathon diplomacy in Egypt and Israel, Mr. Kerry presented Mr. Netanyahu with a confidential draft, titled “Framework for Humanitarian Cease-Fire in Gaza.”
A version of the document, which was presented on Friday, stated that a seven-day cease-fire was to be established by Sunday.
Two days later, talks would begin in Cairo between Israel and the Palestinians on achieving an “enduring solution” to the crisis in Gaza, a phrase that Hamas could read as the lifting of the economic embargo and that Mr. Netanyahu could interpret as the neutralization of the group’s military threat to Israel.
The draft, which was obtained by The New York Times, noted that the parties would “refrain from conducting any military or security targeting of each other.” But it did not explicitly call on Israel to stop sealing the tunnels during the humanitarian pause. Those operations have continued during recent cease-fire efforts, creating anger on the Palestinian side.
Clearly, this favored the Israelis because it gave them a way to stop their slaughter of innocents while maintaining the status quo ante. Everyone knows that Israel will never allow Gaza to open its borders. So they could have played the bargaining charade, deescalated the violence in Gaza and then when talks inevitably foundered and Hamas resumed its rocketry, Israel could have responded in a way that was not based on military overkill.
That Israel interpreted Kerry's proposal as pro-Hamas is a bad sign, a mark of a nation seriously out of whack. Netanyahu's government appears to be pushing for genocide in Gaza in order to stop the rockets. The political situation favors Israel. Hamas' siding with the Salafis in Syria isolated it from Iran and Hezbollah. Morsi's ouster by the military in Egypt eliminated the group's chief benefactor. In the United States, there is no politician who will stand up to Israel.
The Iraqi government issued a statement accusing Saudi Arabia of funding the Sunni extremists, as Mr. Maliki continued to offer explanations for the stunning success of the Sunni extremists that do not focus on his leadership. The statement drew almost immediate criticism from the United States, with Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, describing it as inaccurate and “offensive.”
Reuters has a little more information about the statement, which was made yesterday by Maliki's cabinet:
Maliki's government accused Saudi Arabia, the main Sunni power, of backing ISIL - something Riyadh denies.
"We hold them responsible for supporting these groups financially and morally and for its outcome - which includes crimes that may qualify as genocide: the spilling of Iraqi blood, the destruction of Iraqi state institutions and historic and religious sites," a government statement said.
Maliki has blamed Saudi Arabia for supporting militants in the past, but the language was unprecedented. On Monday, Riyadh blamed sectarianism in Baghdad for fuelling the violence.
But in the years they were getting started, a key component of ISIS’s support came from wealthy individuals in the Arab Gulf States of Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Sometimes the support came with the tacit nod of approval from those regimes; often, it took advantage of poor money laundering protections in those states, according to officials, experts, and leaders of the Syrian opposition, which is fighting ISIS as well as the regime.
“Everybody knows the money is going through Kuwait and that it’s coming from the Arab Gulf,” said Andrew Tabler, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Kuwait’s banking system and its money changers have long been a huge problem because they are a major conduit for money to extremist groups in Syria and now Iraq.”
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been publicly accusing Saudi Arabia and Qatar of funding ISIS for months. Several reports have detailed how private Gulf funding to various Syrian rebel groups has splintered the Syrian opposition and paved the way for the rise of groups like ISIS and others.
Gulf donors support ISIS, the Syrian branch of al Qaeda called the al Nusrah Front, and other Islamic groups fighting on the ground in Syria because they feel an obligation to protect Sunnis suffering under the atrocities of the Assad regime. Many of these backers don’t trust or like the American backed moderate opposition, which the West has refused to provide significant arms to.
***
“ISIS is part of the Sunni forces that are fighting Shia forces in this regional sectarian conflict. They are in an existential battle with both the (Iranian aligned) Maliki government and the Assad regime,” said Tabler. “The U.S. has made the case as strongly as they can to regional countries, including Kuwait. But ultimately when you take a hands off, leading from behind approach to things, people don’t take you seriously and they take matters into their own hands.”
Donors in Kuwait, the Sunni majority Kingdom on Iraq’s border, have taken advantage of Kuwait’s weak financial rules to channel hundreds of millions of dollars to a host of Syrian rebel brigades, according to a December 2013 report by The Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank that receives some funding from the Qatari government.
“Over the last two and a half years, Kuwait has emerged as a financing and organizational hub for charities and individuals supporting Syria’s myriad rebel groups,” the report said. “Today, there is evidence that Kuwaiti donors have backed rebels who have committed atrocities and who are either directly linked to al-Qa’ida or cooperate with its affiliated brigades on the ground.”
Kuwaiti donors collect funds from donors in other Arab Gulf countries and the money often travels through Turkey or Jordan before reaching its Syrian destination, the report said. The governments of Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have passed laws to curb the flow of illicit funds, but many donors still operate out in the open. The Brookings paper argues the U.S. government needs to do more.
“The U.S. Treasury is aware of this activity and has expressed concern about this flow of private financing. But Western diplomats’ and officials’ general response has been a collective shrug,” the report states.
When confronted with the problem, Gulf leaders often justify allowing their Salafi constituents to fund Syrian extremist groups by pointing back to what they see as a failed U.S. policy in Syria and a loss of credibility after President Obama reneged on his pledge to strike Assad after the regime used chemical weapons.
That’s what Prince Bandar bin Sultan, head of Saudi intelligence since 2012 and former Saudi ambassador in Washington, reportedly told Secretary of State John Kerry when Kerry pressed him on Saudi financing of extremist groups earlier this year. Saudi Arabia has retaken a leadership role in past months guiding help to the Syrian armed rebels, displacing Qatar, which was seen as supporting some of the worst of the worst organizations on the ground.
The Saudis say that they only fund moderate Islamists. But the whole moderate vs. extremist distinction is a word game meant to obscure the fact that, as in the heady days of "Charlie Wilson's War," the U.S. is up to its old tricks again backing, along with its good monarchical friends in the gulf, the Mujahideen.
That's why you have the denial by the truly odious Jen Psaki. As a rule of thumb, if Psaki goes out of her way to issue a strong denial, as she did by labeling the Iraq cabinet statement as "offensive," you know there is a rat in the house. Psaki lies. This is what she does for a living.
For seasoned news consumers, the unified response from Western governments and the prestige press that Maliki is to blame for all that is presently going wrong in Iraq (with nary a word about the role of wealthy gulf emirs in Jiffy Popping a Salafi army into being, nor the destabilizing effects of the 2003 U.S. invasion) is a strong indication that the goal of USG is not to fight terrorism but to neuter Shiite state power.
Another fruitful line of inquiry is to look at the rat line of Salafi fighters. Carlotta Gall made a start yesterday with "Spanish Police Target Cells Recruiting War Volunteers." More than half of ISIS's fighters are foreigners. Getting them to the battlefield requires a logistics network that a localized Anbar jihadi group could not have put together in such a short span of time. The jihad network is run out of mosques and madrassas. This network is funded by the gulf emirates, foremost of which is Saudi Arabia.
USG knows all this. But where is the rallying cry for sanctions? Compare it to the U.S. response to the peaceful vote in Crimea to accede to the Russian Federation. The U.S. is now in the midst of relaunching the Cold War with all its inherent risk of nuclear annihilation. And in the case of Crimea becoming part of Russia, there is no risk to U.S. national security. But a caliphate rising in the Middle East? That certainly represents a risk. So far the U.S. seems to be doing everything it can to make sure it becomes a reality.
It has been three years since the Arab Spring. Back then it was a hopeful time. Rancid autocratic governments were being toppled by what appeared to be youthful, pro-democratic, tolerant, anti-neoliberal populations. The intractable problems of the Middle East -- oil wars, Palestine, the export of Salafi jihad -- suddenly seemed soluble by a mass people movement of the disenfranchised.
But the turds in the punch bowl didn't take long to appear. A totalitarian crackdown in Bahrain fueled by riot weapons supplied by Uncle Sam; NATO intervention in Libya; Gulf Cooperation Council intervention in Syria; a botched Muslim Brotherhood post-Mubarak democratic transition followed by the coup de grace delivered by the SCAF and the return of a more extreme version of the Mubarak police state.
Today David Kirkpartrick and Carlotta Gall report on the different trajectories of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, where Arab Spring protests began, and Egypt, where the Arab Spring was snuffed out. Tunisia at this point looks like a qualified success story with the Islamists cooperating with the secular opposition to craft a new constitution which acknowledges the Islamic character of the state without enshrining Sharia.
Ennahda [the Islamist party] won wording stating that Islam is the religion of Tunisia but gave up on any reference to Islamic law. “Tunisia is a free, independent and sovereign state, Islam is her religion, Arabic her language and republic her regime,” a clause of the preamble reads. The more liberal parties, with strong lobbying from civil society groups, secured guarantees that Tunisia would remain a civil state with separation of powers and pledges of freedoms and rights. “Tunisia is a state of civil character, based on citizenship, the will of the people and the primacy of law,” the counterpart clause of the preamble reads.
Neither clause can be amended by future governments.
Next door in Egypt a new constitution is being voted on in a plebiscite that was conducted yesterday and finishes up today. The new constitution validates the July 3 coup of Mohamed Morsi and solemnizes the police state. The Muslim Brotherhood, now a criminal organization with its leadership behind bars, has called for a boycott. The constitution is expected to pass overwhelmingly. Sisi, the military man who led the coup, is widely predicted to run for president.
What I felt at the time of the Morsi's imprisonment last summer is that elites around the world were taking note. Violence works. Crack down and crack down hard when you feel your power slipping. That's the ticket. It might be messy, but eventually the masses will fall into line. Elections are necessary only to validate the violence perpetrated by the rulers.
Thailand, though half-a-world away, is going through, I think, a situation not entirely dissimilar from Egypt in the run up to the July 3 coup. If there is a trend that was set in motion by the SCAF in toppling Morsi, then Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra should be watching her back. It could be argued that the trend was on display in Ukraine recently and that Viktor Yanukovich was on his way out, if not for the artful intervention of Vlad Putin.
The bottom line? I see a bull market for authoritarian coups ushering in police states.
