Battle for Hodeida Resumes

AP has a long report, "Key battle in Yemen’s war risks tipping country into famine," this morning about the U.S.-blessed resumption of the battle for Hodeida:

BAJIL, Yemen (AP) — With American backing, the United Arab Emirates has resumed an all-out offensive aimed at capturing Yemen’s most vital port, Hodeida, where Shiite rebels are digging in to fight to the last man. Thousands of civilians are caught in the middle, trapped by minefields and barrages of mortars and airstrikes.

[snip]

Hodeida’s port literally keeps millions of starving Yemenis alive, as the entry point for 70 percent of food imports and international aid. More than 8 million of Yemen’s nearly 29 million people have no food other than what is provided by world relief agencies, a figure that continues to rapidly rise.

A protracted siege could cut off that lifeline. The battle has already killed hundreds of civilians and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, adding to the more than 2 million Yemenis displaced by the war. Amid the fighting, cholera cases in the area leaped from 497 in June to 1,347 in August, Save the Children reported Tuesday.

[snip]

The battle brings in to sharp relief a question hanging over the war: What will be the shape of Yemen after all the destruction it has wreaked?

Notably absent from the fight to take Hodeida are the forces of Hadi’s government — the government that the coalition says it aims to restore. Several pro-Hadi officials told the AP that the UAE squeezed him out.

“The government knows nothing about what is going on in Hodeida,” one senior official said. “It’s all in the hands of the Emiratis.” He and the other officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities of relations with the Emirates.

Mistrust runs deep between Hadi’s government and the UAE, which has set up military bases across southern Yemen and controls much of the south through the militias it funds. Some Hadi allies accuse the UAE of seeking to impose its own dominion over Yemen — and see the assault on Hodeida as adding another piece to its hold over the country’s coastline.

Houthi-free southern Yemen has turned into a patchwork of splintered regions under rival militias. Aden, the southern capital, has seen assassinations and street battles between pro-UAE and pro-Hadi militias, as well as increasing crime, robbery and rape.

You will find the AP story in "the newspaper of record" but no original report. The Times has Declan Walsh stationed in Cairo but his last dispatch, "Battle Intensifies for Yemeni Port as Dock Workers Still Unload Aid," on Yemen was published at the end of spring. How many features on the Rohingya -- tales of gang rapes and babies snatched from their mothers breasts to be tossed into a bonfire -- have been published since then? Hannah Beech's output alone numbers half-a-dozen stories, and she has had to cover the Thai underwater cave rescue, various typhoons, earthquakes and tsunamis during the same time period.

It's impossible to avoid the conclusion tweeted by Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif:

US abrogated JCPOA -a multilateral accord enshrined in UNSC Resolution 2231- arguing that it seeks a bilateral treaty with #Iran. Today US withdrew from an actual US-Iran treaty after the ICJ ordered it to stop violating that treaty in sanctioning Iranian people. Outlaw regime.

One wants to recite a prayer: "O outlaw regime. May you be brought low and made to atone for your crimes. Darkness approaches and the earth waits to fold you under its skin."

The Sisi Police State

Egypt held a presidential election last month. The New York Times' Declan Walsh published a handful of stories on the election. Walsh is a notable reporter in that he was kicked out of Pakistan by the government in 2013.

Egyptian strongman Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi won reelection with 97% of the vote. It is worthwhile to note that when inveighing against the rise of the autocrat and the death of democracy opinion leaders rarely mention el-Sisi or Prayut Chan-o-cha, the Thai prime minister and leader of the military junta that rules Thailand, preferring instead to descry Hungary's Viktor Orban, Russia's Vladimir Putin or Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines.

As Walsh reminds us in a story published yesterday, "Egyptian Military Court Sentences Sisi Critic to 5 Years in Prison," Sisi's Egypt is an authoritarian police state edging close to territory occupied by the Gulf sheikhdoms in terms of repression:

CAIRO — A military court on Tuesday sentenced a former government anticorruption czar to five years in prison over incendiary claims about documents said to incriminate Egypt’s leaders, his lawyers and state news media said.

The sentence levied against the official, Hisham Geneina, who had served under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi until 2016 when he became one of the president’s sharpest critics, signaled that the harsh crackdown on the opposition that preceded last month’s election was set to continue.

Mr. Geneina was one of several opposition figures detained before the vote, effectively clearing the field for Mr. Sisi, who ultimately faced a single token candidate and won with 97 percent of valid votes. All of the opposition figures remain in jail, including Sami Anan, a former army chief whose campaign lasted four days before he was arrested.

Walsh goes on to list, one after another, the people Sisi has jailed.

After the Tamarod hocus pocus that paved the way for the military coup and Sisi's toppling of Morsi, I imagined that this would be the drift. Repressive strongman rule. The U.S. accepts it when it is an ally; bemoans it when it is an adversary..

From Otpor! and Tamarod to Today

I went to bed last night thinking about Egypt. I arrived there in my mind after reading a piece that appeared on the TomDispatch web site at the beginning of last month. "Three Times When the World Broke Open -- and Two When It Might Again: In Praise of Impractical Movements," by Mark Engler and Paul Engler, is a refutation of gradualism in politics, where change is engineered in piecemeal fashion by consensus of ruling elites, in favor of sudden paradigm shift powered by the ruled masses.

Nothing to argue with there. The problem I had with the essay was one of the three examples of nonviolent change offered as proof of the potency of spontaneous revolt. The Englers applaud the Serbian student group Otpor! for sparking the movement that removed Slobodan Milosevic from power in October 2000 (what is commonly classed as a color revolution though it is named after a bulldozer), something that the military might of NATO was unable to achieve the prior year. But it is well established that Otpor! received substantial assistance from the U.S. government, including training in nonviolent resistance.

This brought to mind Tamarod, the youth-led Egyptian protest movement that purportedly collected 22 million signatures calling for early presidential elections and sparked the June 2013 mass demonstrations that prefigured the July 3rd coup. It turns out Tamarod was part of the military takeover all along.

Two stories this morning provide insight into the rough shape of "astroturf" popular uprisings a few years on. The first, "Egypt Gives Saudi Arabia 2 Islands in a Show of Gratitude," by Declan Walsh, describes how the el-Sisi government has signed over two islands at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba in exchange for agreements with the Saudis worth billions. The second, "Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Ukraine’s Premier, Quits Amid Splits in Post-Revolution Alliance," by Andrew Kramer, explains how the U.S. has finally eaten its Maidan prodigy, "Yats," forcing him out in favor of the "chocolate king" Poroshenko.

Re-branding coups as popular revolts does not a revolution make. These ersatz rebellions are a ruse to maintain the old, exploitative privileges which motivate the popular uprisings to begin with. It is not a sustainable model for social transformation, to say the least.

War Widens in Iraq & Syria + Spotlight Back on Saudis + Trump & Le Pen Riding High

Sunday night going to bed after watching football on television and reading the news all day I was oppressed by the feeling that world powers are cycling out of control, ably summed up by a Niqnaq blog post this morning titled "come on, cut the shit and start ww4, i was planning to die fairly soon anyway," having to do with Turkey's refusal to withdraw its troops from around Mosul.

Then yesterday Syria accused the U.S.-led coalition of bombing one of its military bases in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour, killing three soldiers and wounding 13. The U.S. immediately denied that it was at fault and blamed Russia. Brett McGurk, Obama's ISIS czar, the guy who managed the Western response to the fall of Mosul, tweeted "Reports of coalition involvement are false."

The problem for the U.S. is the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Western, anti-Assad propaganda outlet, puts the blame on the U.S.-led coalition. According to Hwaida Saad and Eric Schmitt in "Syria Blames U.S. in Base Bombing, but Americans Blame Russia":

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an independent monitoring group that tracks the conflict from Britain through a network of contacts on the ground, also reported on Monday that American coalition airstrikes had apparently hit a Syrian military post on Sunday near Ayyash, in the western part of Deir al-Zour.

Over at the Moon of Alabama blog, "Is Erdogan's Mosul Escapade Blackmail For Another Qatar-Turkey Pipeline?," a connection is made between Turkey's invasion of Iraq and the attack on the Syrian military base in Deir al-Zour:

Damascus insists that four jets entered Syria from Al-Bukamal, Iraq and fired 9 missiles against al-Saeqa military base in Ayyash near Deir Ezzour.

The U.S. accuses Russia to have committed the strike. I very much doubt that. There have been accidental "friendly fire" strikes by the Russian air force against Syrian troops and against Hizbullah. But those accidents were always immediately admitted and investigated within the 4+1 alliance. The Russians say they did not do this strike and Damascus agrees. 

But notice the weasel word in the U.S. statements: "U.S.-led coalition". The Turks in Mosul are not part of the "U.S.-led coalition" even if they first claimed to be. If the air strike in Syria today were not done by the "U.S.-led coalition" it could mean that some country committed these air strikes on its own without the strike being officially within the "U.S.-led coalition" framework. Could that country's name start with a Q? [Qatar]

The U.S. will know who really launched this strike. In both, the Turkish aggression on Iraq and the airstrike in Syria today and even with the earlier mountain ambush on the Russian jet, the U.S. is likely "leading from behind" the curtain. All these events are, like the now forming new alliance with Jihadis, part of Obama's bigger plans and designs for Syria and the Middle East.

Events appear to be spiraling out of control. But the spotlight on the Saudi origin of the Wahhabite ideology espoused by the jihadists of the Islamic State, a spotlight that quickly dimmed after shining brightly for about a week following the Paris terrorist attacks of November 13, looks to have been turned back on. 

Yesterday Declan Walsh published a remarkable story, "Tashfeen Malik Was a ‘Saudi Girl’ Who Stood Out at a Pakistani University," about the female member, Tashfeen Malik, of the husban-&-wife terror team of last week's San Bernardino massacre. Malik was born in Pakistan but reared in Saudi Arabia where her father worked as an engineer. She returned to Pakistan where she attended a religious school, Bahauddin Zakariya University, in Multan. Malik studied pharmacy. Her professors considered her such an excellent student (even if they didn't know what she looked like since she was always decked out in a face-covering niqab) that they hoped she would stay on after she received her degree and teach.

Here is the passage where Walsh focuses the spotlight on Saudi Arabia:

In many ways, Ms. Malik was a classic product of the conservatizing influence that Saudi Arabia has brought to bear on countries like Pakistan. 

Critics of Saudi influence usually focus on the funding of hard-line mosques and religious schools, a criticism echoed on Sunday by the German vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, who connected the export of Saudi-style Islam to the danger from growing extremism in Europe. “We must make it clear to the Saudis that the time of looking the other way is over,” Mr. Gabriel said an interview with the newspaper Welt am Sonntag. 

[Germany's foreign intelligence service, the BND, also squarely affixed blame to the Saudi's for exporting jihadist ideology. See Alison Smale, "Germany Rebukes Its Own Intelligence Agency for Criticizing Saudi Policy." 

But Ms. Malik’s family represents a different strand of the same phenomenon: changes wrought by Pakistanis who, since the 1970s, have migrated to Saudi Arabia for work, only to return with a far more conservative creed. 

Relatives and neighbors said that, after some years in Saudi Arabia, Ms. Malik’s father, Gulzar, rejected the Barelvi school of Sunni Islam that his family had traditionally practiced, and turned to the stricter Deobandi school. He stopped returning home for weddings, and his children, including Ms. Malik, did not meet their Pakistani relatives. 

“There was a lot of friction within the whole family as they adhered to different sects,” said Zahid Gishkori, a journalist based in Islamabad who is from the same district as the family.

Walsh obviously struck a bull's-eye based on the preposterous Saudi reaction reported by Ben Hubbard in "Discrepancies Emerge Over Where Tashfeen Malik Grew Up." Saudi officials are denying that Tashfeen Malik grew up in Saudi Arabia:

Maj. Gen. Mansour Turki, a spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry, said via text message on Saturday that Ms. Malik had visited the kingdom twice. In 2008, she arrived in June from Pakistan to visit her father and stayed for about nine weeks before returning to Pakistan, General Turki said. 

Then, in 2013, she arrived on June 8, from Pakistan, and departed for India on Oct. 6 of the same year, General Turki said. 

He gave her full name as Tashfeen Malik Gulzarahmed Malik and said his office did not know whether her father was still in the kingdom. 

General Turki said there was “no evidence” that Ms. Malik had met her husband in the kingdom, but they were in Saudi Arabia at the same time for about five days in October 2013, according to information General Turki provided.

Mr. Farook, 28, visited Saudi Arabia twice, once for the hajj pilgrimage between Oct. 1 and Oct. 20, 2013, and once for an off-season pilgrimage known as umrah for nine days in July 2014. 

American officials reported that the couple flew to the United States together from Jidda in July 2014. And members of a mosque the couple attended in California said they had been married in Saudi Arabia. 

Both Saudi and Pakistani officials have bristled at the suggestion that their respective countries played any role in the radicalization of Ms. Malik and Mr. Farook. 

In Multan, Pakistan, where Ms. Malik went to the university, the authorities swarmed around journalists who were seeking interviews with people who knew the family. "What is your intention?” one security guard asked a reporter seeking comment at the university. “Why do you want to interview people here? We will not allow anyone to malign our institution.”

Saudi officials, meanwhile, have rejected the idea that Ms. Malik took up more fundamentalist views in Saudi Arabia, or that it played a role in the relationship between her and Mr. Farook. The Saudi narrative has varied to the extent that one official denied she had ever been there. 

The day after the attack, Osama Nugali, a spokesman for the Saudi Foreign Ministry, said via text message that Mr. Farook had visited the kingdom only once, for nine days in 2014. He said he had no record of Ms. Malik having ever entered the kingdom. 

“For the lady, we don’t have a record of this name,” he wrote.

The Saudis are lying of course. Anyone who has followed their war on Yemen should know by now that for the House of Saud no lie is too blatant or too big. The Saudis are scared because things are getting out of their "pay-to-play" control. Trump, the candidate who is going to win the White House and/or destroy its remaining patina of legitimacy, is calling for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration to the U.S., while Marine Le Pen is heading to a resounding victory in France's regional elections.

Coups and Assassinations Coming Shortly to Kabul

I'm sure the Gray Lady ran a biographical perspective piece on Ashraf Ghani at some point when he emerged out of the pack of presidential contenders to replace the increasingly recalcitrant U.S. quisling Hamid Karzai. I must have missed it. But I didn't miss the ringing endorsement of the newly -- one doesn't want to say "elected" because that doesn't really capture the process that led to Ghani assuming the title of president -- seated leader of Afghanistan by Ralph Nader.

I am familiar with Ralph Nader. I changed my life because of his Green Party candidacy for president in 2000. He doesn't give out pro forma recommendations; he does't play the usual kind of quid pro quo, "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine"-type of politics. He's an iconoclast with a lot of pride who does things his own way.

I remember being at a campaign event early on in the 2000 election, a fundraiser. Nader was speaking at a coffee house; he was talking about the legacy of legislature-backed stadium giveaways to professional sports teams. He mentioned the amount of money Seahawks owner Paul Allen had spent to win the initiative campaign to build what is currently named CenturyLink Field. I called from out of the small crowd surrounding him the correct figure, "Five million dollars in five weeks." Nader shot me the steely look -- even though I wrote a check (I can't remember how much) to be in attendance -- of a man who didn't like to be interrupted but one who appreciated another armed with the facts willing to raise his voice.

So Nader's recommendation of Ghani means something. And that is supported in a story today by Azam Ahmed and Declan Walsh, "New Afghan Leader, Putting Focus on Graft, Revives Bank Fraud Inquiry":

KABUL, Afghanistan — Signaling his intent to improve the Afghan government’s poor reputation on corruption, President Ashraf Ghani on Wednesday ordered a new examination of the stagnant Kabul Bank fraud prosecutions. 

The bank, likened to a roughly $800 million Ponzi scheme after powerful insiders pillaged it through fraudulent loans, has come to symbolize the legal impunity enjoyed by Afghanistan’s elite. And the case has become a major sticking point for donor nations and the International Monetary Fund, which at one point made prosecution of those responsible for the bank’s collapse a condition of any new loans to the government.

Just three days into Mr. Ghani’s presidency, his decree about the bank was clearly meant to reassure Western partners that aid to the country would not be a bad investment. The day before, as Afghanistan signed long-term security deals with the United States and NATO, Mr. Ghani had emphasized the importance of international aid in tackling “shared challenges.”

The Gray Lady, at times able to comport herself in stunning fashion, has an excellent unsigned editorial today, "Paying Afghanistan’s Bills," that I will quote in its entirety because it does such a fine job defining those "shared challenges":

By the end of the year, Congress will have appropriated more money for Afghanistan’s reconstruction, when adjusted for inflation, than the United States spent rebuilding 16 European nations after World War II under the Marshall Plan. 

A staggering portion of that money — $104 billion — has been mismanaged and stolen. Much of what was built is crumbling or will be unsustainable. Well-connected Afghans smuggled millions of stolen aid money in suitcases that were checked onto Dubai-bound flights. The Afghan government largely turned a blind eye to widespread malfeasance. Even as revelations of fraud and abuse stacked up, the United States continued shoveling money year after year because cutting off the financial spigot was seen as a sure way to doom the war effort. 

As the Pentagon winds down its combat mission there at the end of the year, it’s tempting to think of the Afghan war as a chapter that is coming to an end — at least for American taxpayers. But, as things stand, the United States and its allies will continue paying Afghanistan’s bills for the foreseeable future. That commitment was solidified Tuesday as the American ambassador in Kabul and Afghanistan’s security adviser signed a bilateral security agreement that will keep a small contingent of NATO troops there for at least two years. 

The United States and NATO partners recently agreed to spend $5.1 billion a year to pay for the army and police, until at least 2017. Western donors are expected to continue to give billions more for reconstruction and other initiatives, recognizing that Afghanistan won’t be weaned off international aid anytime soon. In fact, the government appears to be broke.

A few weeks ago, Afghanistan’s Finance Ministry made an urgent plea to the United States for a $537 million bailout, warning that it would otherwise not be able to make payroll. That’s part of a broader, worrisome trend. The International Monetary Fund estimates that Afghanistan will face a financial gap of roughly $7.7 billion annually between now and 2018. 

If the flow of money is to keep going, the Afghan government has to prove that it can be trusted. And, for its part, Congress should not hesitate to cut off the aid if corruption remains unabated. 

Afghanistan’s new president, Ashraf Ghani, who took office on Monday, has pledged to stamp out graft. “I am not corrupt, and I am not going to encourage corruption, tolerate it or become the instrument,” the president, a former World Bank executive, told the BBC in an interview. 

That will be easier said than done in a country where back-room deals are the norm. Mr. Ghani can show he is serious by appointing and empowering a new attorney general willing to take on unscrupulous officials. His proposal to lead a new procurement board is commendable because it would make him personally accountable. 

Of the $104 billion that American lawmakers have appropriated for Afghan reconstruction, nearly $16 billion remains unspent, according to John Sopko, the inspector general who is overseeing the reconstruction effort. As one of the poorest nations on earth, Afghanistan clearly has plenty of needs. But the American agencies tasked with spending the money must do a better job identifying priorities, setting realistic goals and adopting stronger safeguards. 

Delivering a speech at Georgetown University recently, Mr. Sopko marveled at the Marshall Plan comparison. “What have we gotten for the investment?” he asked.

My only problem with the editorial is the impression it casts that USG has somehow been a duped victim of all this fiscal mismanagement rather than its chief architect. The American way of doing things is just as corrupt as the Afghan way of doing things. What went on with the fleecing of Kabul Bank had a precedent in the American savings and loan scandals of the 1980s.

With the Taliban ascendant -- this year was the deadliest for the Afghan police since the U.S.-led occupation began 13-years ago -- the U.S. experience in Iraq is noteworthy. Once the U.S. military exited, the Iraqi Army became little more than an elaborate system of graft, a Ponzi scheme, where officers purchase their commissions to receive kickbacks from recruits, who may or may not actually be reporting for duty. This is not to say that this doesn't occur when the U.S. is in country maintaining a supervisory role; it is just that the corruption doesn't run so rampant the the entire system implodes as it did in Iraq. The ability of American military supervisors to call in airstrikes probably has something to do with it too.

A singular description of the corruption-fueled collapse of the Iraqi military can be found in an interview of Patrick Cockburn by Tariq Ali, "The Rise of ISIS and the Origins of the New Middle East War," that appeared earlier in the week on the Counterpunch web site:

Tariq Ali: And so, if we come down to the speed with which this particular organisation swept through parts of Iraq, which you yourself talk about in the book, how do you explain the total collapse of the Iraqi army, Patrick? Is it in that sense not too much different from the army created by the West in Afghanistan, the fact that they are not prepared to fight and die for the United States? At that time it was, al-Qaeda and Iraq was only one of a number of serious resistance movements to the occupation but it was very evident in Baghdad at the time when I went to American briefings that anything that happened was attributed by the spokesman, the military spokesman, to al-Qaeda. Of course this played well back in the US, but in Iraq it had quite the contrary effect which people who were against the occupation think, oh it’s al-Qaeda who’s doing all this resisting, let’s go an get a black flag and join them…

Patrick Cockburn: Yeah, and even more so. I mean I think this is, it’s difficult to think of another example in history, where there are 300 or 350 thousand men in the Iraqi army, they’d spent 41.6 billion dollars on this army over the last three years. But it disintegrated because of an attack by maybe a couple of thousand people in Mosul. Why did it happen? Well, the army was rather extraordinary. I mean one Iraqi general I was talking to who’d been forcibly retired said at the beginning of the disaster was the Americans, [who] when they set it up, insisted that supplies and things like that should be outsourced, privatised. 

So immediately a colonel of a battalion nominally of 600 men would get money for 600 men, [but] in fact there were only 200 men in it, and would pocket the difference, which was spread out among the officers. And this applied to fuel, it applied to ammunition… At the time of the fall of Mosul there are meant to be 30,000 troops there. In fact, it’s estimated that only one in three was there. Because what you did was: you joined the army, you got your full salary and then you kicked back half that salary to your officer, who spread it among the officers. So I remember about a year ago talking to a senior Iraqi politician, and who said look: the army’s going to collapse if it’s attacked. I said surely some will fight, he said: no no no, you don’t understand. These officers are not soldiers, they’re investors! 

They have no interest in fighting anybody; they have interest in making money out of their investment. Of course you had to buy your position. So in 2009, you want to be a colonel in the Iraqi army, it’ll cost you about 20,000 dollars, more recently it cost you about $200,000. You want to be divisional commander, and there are 15 divisions, it will cost you about 2 million. Of course, there are other ways of making money. Checkpoints on the roads act as sort of customs barriers and a tariff on each truck going through would be paid. So that’s why they ran away, led by their commanding officer, the three commanding generals got into a helicopter in civilian clothes and fled to Erbil, the Kurdish capital. And that led to the final dissolution of the army. 

Tariq Ali: It is one of the most astonishing events in recent history, Patrick. I mean can you think of any other equivalent, even in the last century?

Patrick Cockburn: I can’t think of any of such a large well-equipped army disintegrating. You could say that Saddam’s army disintegrated in ’91 when attacked by the Americans, and again in 2003. But then it was attacked by the largest military force in the world and was being bombed. So it’s not a parallel. It of course shows that ISIS was quite effective in spreading terror through social media, by films of it decapitating Shia captives. So the soldiers were terrified of ISIS.

Nader's ringing endorsement of Ghani makes me thinks that he is different. If he is, we'll know soon enough. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Working Group on Bribery "will release its report, 'Unfinished Business,' which names every beneficiary of the Kabul Bank scandal" today according to Ahmed and Walsh. If Ghani goes after those named, even if they are the elite, the palace intrigue will grow thick. Coups and assassinations can't be far off.

Uncle Sam Knuckles Down on Syrian National Coalition + Haqqani Network Fundraiser Assassinated

I would not take seriously the news emerging out of Istanbul that the Syrian National Coalition has agreed to attend the Geneva II peace talks. What appears to be going on is some linguistic pussyfooting to appease the West. Rather than demanding that the Baathist government of Bashar al-Assad step down prior to any peace talks, now the opposition's position is that any transitional government that emerges from Geneva cannot include al-Assad and his principals. Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad have the story, "Leading Syrian Opposition Group, Yielding to Pressure, Votes to Join Peace Talks":

With the Monday vote, the coalition appeared to drop its demand that Mr. Assad step down before any talks. But it continued to insist that it would participate only if there are guarantees that the talks would lead to a full transfer of executive power, including over military and security forces, to a transitional government in which Mr. Assad and “those with blood on their hands” would have “no role.”

Other conditions stipulated by the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces include the release of prisoners and full access to humanitarian aid.

This doesn't sound like a breakthrough that will enable substantive peace talks anytime soon. What is encouraging is the line currently coming from the U.S.:

Stoking tensions all around, Robert S. Ford, the United States ambassador to Syria, told the activists on the sidelines that the emerging reality presented them with unpalatable options: accept that the current government could continue in power longer than they would like, or face the continued rise of extremist jihadist groups that have terrified residents, clashed with rival insurgents and undermined Western support.

The U.S. is telling the opposition, "It's either ISIS or the regime," basically saying to the rebels, "Shit or get off the pot. The days of pretending to be a potent force while arguing in hotel conference rooms are over. Either go with the jihadis or sit down and talk to the Baathists in Geneva." It's about time.

Declan Walsh and Ihansullah Tipu Mehsud have an informative piece on the assassination of Nasiruddin Haqqani, chief fundraiser for the Haqqani network and scion of founder Jalaluddin Haqqani, who was gunned down last night outside a bread store on the outskirts of Islamabad:

The killing added to an impression of increased turbulence for the militant groups harbored in Pakistan’s tribal belt, including Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani network. Over just two months, one major leader has been arrested, two have been killed in a drone strike, and now a major financier — Mr. Haqqani — has died. 

The link, if any, between those events remains hidden in the miasma of tribal politics, skulduggery and treachery that has for centuries haunted the rugged frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan. But many are taking the violence as a portent of increased upheaval as rival intelligence services and militant groups vie for power and influence ahead of the withdrawal of American combat troops from the region next year. 

The first major shot came when American forces detained Latif Mehsud, a senior commander for the Pakistani Taliban, inside Afghanistan. Weeks later, on Nov. 1, a C.I.A. drone strike killed the Pakistani Taliban’s leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, and a top deputy. Now, Mr. Haqqani, a looming figure in a militant network closely allied with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, is dead.

Nasiruddin Haqqani was a crucial link to Pakistan's ISI and funders in the GCC. The Haqqani network is aligned with the Afghan Taliban but is really a Saudi and ISI tool. More war can be expected in the tribal belt as jihadi factions positions themselves for the torrent of spoils to be reaped once the United States pulls out next year.

Support for Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Disappears at the Polls

Salman Masood has a story in today's paper about Pakistan's election victor, Nawaz Sharif, visiting his humbled opponent Imran Khan in the hospital. Khan is recovering from a broken back he suffered on the campaign trail. Sharif is riding high; his Pakistan Muslim League-N party surpassed expectations. He can afford to be gracious. The boisterous support for Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party evaporated at the polls. Charges of vote-rigging are being bandied about. And while I'm sure there is some substance to them, the underlying reality is that politics is a grubby affair. We like soaring rhetoric and big pictures; but when it comes time to vote, fear and hate are in the booth with the ballot. Khan's electrifying rallies -- like Nader's in 2000 -- didn't translate to a large percentage of the vote.

What troubles me about a Sharif-led government comes towards the end of yesterday's story by Declan Walsh -- the outsize influence of Saudi Arabia:

But in foreign policy, Mr. Sharif has another source of support: his close relationship with Saudi Arabia, where he whiled away his exile. King Abdullah helped broker Mr. Sharif’s return to Pakistan in 2007, and Mr. Sharif maintains close ties with Riyadh. That relationship, although discreet, could provide an alternative source of economic aid, as well as a powerful ally.

I'm not a big fan of the Persian Gulf monarchies and their deep-pocketed support for the global export of the Wahhabi movement.

Political Ferment in Karachi

Declan Walsh and Zia ur-Rehman have an interesting story today, "Taliban Spread Terror in Karachi as the New Gang in Town." The Pakistani Taliban is targeting two rival Karachi political parties -- the ethnic Pashtun Awami National Party and the ethnic Mohajir Muttahida Qaumi Movement -- and taking their turf.

Police officials, militant sources and Pashtun residents say that three major Taliban factions operate in Karachi — the most powerful one, which is rooted in South Waziristan and dominated by the Mehsud tribe, and two others from the Swat and Mohmand areas.

A senior city police officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that militant commanders with those factions send operational orders to Karachi from the tribal belt; while some captured militants have tried to justify their activities by citing the authorization of religious clerics in the northwest. 

In cases, he added, regular criminal groups have posed as Taliban fighters in a bid to increase their power of intimidation. 

Just why the Taliban are adopting such an aggressive profile in Karachi right now is unclear. Some cite the greater number of militants fleeing Pakistani military operations in the northwest; others say it may be the product of dwindling funds, as jihadi donors in the Persian Gulf states turn to the Middle East.

Imagine a city like Karachi -- 20 million souls (compared to New York City's 8.3 million) with real political parties (not the completely moribund ones, both ruled by the 1%, that are featured in our dysfunctional duopoly). We bomb countries in the name of democracy, but those countries, at least in the case of Pakistan, often times have more democracy than we do.

For a brief period I attempted a study of Pakistan's politics. I read several books by Tariq Ali; on my web browser I bookmarked Dawn and Foreign Policy's AfPak Daily Brief. But it proved too much to keep up with.

Walsh and ur-Rehman conclude their story by saying that a brake on the Taliban's spread in Karachi could be Mullah Omar himself:

Other factors limit the Pakistani Taliban’s ingress into Karachi. One of the more provocative ones is that allied militants — particularly the Afghan Taliban — might not like the added publicity. The Afghan wing has long used the city as place to rest and resupply. There are longstanding rumors that the movement’s leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, is taking shelter here, and that his leadership council, known as the Quetta Shura, has met in Karachi.