Afghanistan: Not the “Good War”

Here is the updated text of a talk I gave to the University of Iowa Anti-War Committee (UIAC) on Oct 23, 2008 and to the Iowa International Socialist Organization on July 21, 2009:

For many people, including many who opposed the war in Iraq, Afghanistan is the good war, the one that Iraq was a distraction from, the war that liberated Afghanis from the brutal rule of the Taliban, the war to end terror.

Yet, if you look closely, it becomes obvious that this war is in fact every bit as evil and terrible as the war in Iraq.  The real objectives are not ending terror or bringing democracy or liberating anyone. The US and NATO are in Afghanistan in order to control a key strategic area. The antiwar movement needs to oppose not only the conduct of this war, but its aims as well.

Earlier this month a major offensive was launched into Western Afghanistan as part of Obama’s new war strategy.  Reuters reports that

Soldiers are now dying at rates nearing the worst suffered during the war in Iraq. July had already become the deadliest month of the war for all foreign troops with well over 50 killed . . .  At least 27 U.S. soldiers have been killed in combat so far in July, according to U.S. military figures, more than in any other month of the eight-year-old war. The previous highest monthly total was 26 killed in September last year.

This current offensive is in reality an extension of a “surge” that began in 2007.  Anand Gopal describes the development of this surge :

Then, a growing insurgency was causing visible problems for U.S. and NATO forces in certain pockets in the southern parts of the country, long a Taliban stronghold. In response, military planners dramatically beefed up the international presence, raising the number of troops over the following 18 months by 20,000, a 45% jump.

During this period, however, the violence also jumped — by 50%. This shouldn’t be surprising. More troops meant more targets for Taliban fighters and suicide bombers. In response, the international forces retaliated with massive aerial bombing campaigns and large-scale house raids. The number of civilians killed in the process skyrocketed. In the fifteen months of this surge, more civilians have been killed than in the previous four years combined.

The number of civilians killed or harmed by air raids also increased dramatically. According to a Recent Human Rights Watch Report :

In 2007, Afghan civilian deaths were nearly three times higher: In 2007, more Afghan civilians were killed by airstrikes than by US and NATO ground fire. In the first seven months of 2008, the latest period for which data is available, at least 119 Afghan civilians were killed in 12 airstrikes.

There has been a massive and unprecedented surge in the use of airpower in Afghanistan in 2008. In response to increased insurgent activity, twice as many tons of bombs were dropped in 2007 than in 2006. In 2008, the pace has increased: in the months of June and July alone the US dropped approximately as much as it did in all of 2006.

Airstrikes have caused significant destruction of civilian property, and have also forced civilians to flee and vacate villages, adding to the internally displaced population of Afghanistan. In every case investigated by Human Rights Watch where airstrikes hit villages, many civilians left the village because of damage to their homes but also because of fear of further strikes. People from neighboring villages also sometimes fled in fear of future strikes on their villages. They have also had significant political impact, outraging public opinion in Afghanistan and undermining public confidence in both the Afghan government and its international backers.

Civilian casualties hit record high in Afghan conflict in 2008, according to a U.N. report. Insurgents killed 1,160 civilians while  Afghan and coalition troops killed 828 civilians.  While the US military claims it is implementing a new policy to reduce the number of civilian casualties, deaths of Afghan civilians are likely to increase as a result of this new offensive.  The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) recorded 800 Afghan civilian deaths between January and May 2009.

Despite the fact that Taliban is responsible for 55 percent of reported civilian causalities, Afghanis “generally don’t express the same outrage toward Taliban tactics as they do toward Western ones.”  Why? David Whitehouse argues that

In any case, Taliban tactics send a different message to Afghans than Western tactics do. Taliban tactics demonstrate that they’re willing to die to expel the foreign troops, while Western tactics show that Western forces are willing to kill Afghans in order to avoid exposing themselves to harm. The contrast between these two messages is insulting to Afghans, and it undermines the very pretext for the Western presence—the idea that foreign troops are necessary to bring Afghans the humanitarian help they need. How can Western motives be humanitarian when the foreigners clearly care more about their own lives than they do about the lives of Afghans?

All this contributes to support for insurgency. Tariq Ali observs “While Bush and Karzai blame Pakistan the occupation itself has been the main recruiting sergeant. If a second-generation Taliban is now growing and creating new alliances it is not because its sectarian religious practices have become popular, but because it is the only available umbrella for national liberation.”

Since the beginning of the year, the expansion of the war has into Pakistan also continues.  The New York Times reports that Obama is “continuing, and in some cases extending, Bush administration policy” of extending unmanned drone attacks against targets along the Afghanistan/ Pakistan border. U.S. Special Forces soldiers are now training Pakistani troops.  In addition to military action, the U.S. is running a diplomatic surge into the region. A giant embassy on the scale of the one in Baghdad is in the works for Pakistan while the embassy in Kabul is to be expanded.

The US and NATO are planning for the long haul.  In a recent article in Foreign Affairs , Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and current special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, insisted “as the war enters its eighth year, Americans should be told the truth: it will last a long time–longer than the United States’ longest war to date, the 14-year conflict (1961-75) in Vietnam.”  According to Major General David Rodriguez, commander of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, stabilizing Afghanistan will need an international commitment lasting a generation.

So why is Afghanistan so important? Afghanistan provides the US with access to the Caspian region in central Asia known to hold significant reserves of oil and natural gas. Countries like Georgia, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Pakistan become important as a means of building energy pipelines that bypass Russia and Iran. Afghanistan also sits at one end of an arc of military bases stretching from the Horn of Africa, through the Middle East, Turkey, and into South Asia.  While oil and gas themselves are attractive for U.S. business interests, the larger prize for Washington is an ability to dominate the region militarily and politically. As Asia Times writer Pepe Escobar commented: “Oil and gas are not the U.S.’s ultimate aim. It’s about control… If the U.S. controls the energy resources of its rivals–Europe, Japan, China and other nations aspiring to be more independent–they win.”

Tariq Ali notes the important role Afghanistan plays for NATO:

Herein lie the reasons for the near-unanimity among Western opinion-makers that the occupation must not only continue but expand—‘many billions over many years’. They are to be sought not in the mountain fastnesses of Afghanistan, but in Washington and Brussels. As the Economist summarizes, ‘Defeat would be a body blow not only to the Afghans, but’—and more importantly, of course—‘to the nato alliance’. [24] As ever, geopolitics prevails over Afghan interests in the calculus of the big powers. The basing agreement signed by the us with its appointee in Kabul in May 2005 gives the Pentagon the right to maintain a massive military presence in Afghanistan in perpetuity, potentially including nuclear missiles. That Washington is not seeking permanent bases in this fraught and inhospitable terrain simply for the sake of ‘democratization and good governance’ was made clear by nato’s Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer at the Brookings Institution in February this year: a permanent nato presence in a country that borders the ex-Soviet republics, China, Iran and Pakistan was too good to miss.

More strategically, Afghanistan has become a central theatre for reconstituting, and extending, the West’s power-political grip on the world order. It provides, first, an opportunity for the us to shrug off problems in persuading its allies to play a broader role in Iraq. As Obama and Clinton have stressed, America and its allies ‘have greater unity of purpose in Afghanistan. The ultimate outcome of nato’s effort to stabilize Afghanistan and us leadership of that effort may well affect the cohesiveness of the alliance and Washington’s ability to shape nato’s future.’ [26] Beyond this, it is the rise of China that has prompted nato strategists to propose a vastly expanded role for the Western military alliance. Once focused on the Euro-Atlantic area, a recent essay in nato Review suggests, ‘in the 21st century nato must become an alliance founded on the Euro-Atlantic area, designed to project systemic stability beyond its borders.’

So what are the consequences for the people of Afghanistan?  Christian Science Monitor reporter Anand Gopal paints a grim picture:

Afghanistan is now one of the poorest countries on the planet. It takes its place among desperate, destitute nations like Burkina Faso and Somalia whenever any international organization bothers to measure. The official unemployment rate, last calculated in 2005, was 40% percent. According to recent estimates, it may today reach as high as 80% in some parts of the country.

Approximately 45% of the population is now unable to purchase enough food to guarantee bare minimum health levels, according to the Brookings Institution. This winter, Afghan officials claim that hunger may kill up to 80% of the population in some northern provinces caught in a vicious drought. Reports are emerging of parents selling their children simply to make ends meet. In one district of the southern province of Ghazni last spring things got so bad that villagers started eating grass. Locals say that after a harsh winter and almost no food, they had no choice.

Kabul itself lies in tatters. Roads have gone unpaved since 2001. Massive craters from decades of war blot the capital city. Poor Afghans live in crumbling warrens with no electricity and often without safe drinking water. Kabul, a city designed for about 800,000 people, now holds more than four million, mostly squeezed into informal settlements and squatters’ shacks.

Its hard to believe that life may be worse now for ordinary Afghans that it was under the Taliban.  But it is worse and conditions continue to deteriorate:

The British charity Oxfam announced recently that the country is facing some of the worst conditions in more than 20 years. Nearly 5 million Afghans face severe food shortages, the agency estimates. More the 42 percent of the country lives in extreme poverty — less than 10 dollars per month — according to the Afghanistan Central Statistics Bureau. According to the Brookings institution, 45 percent of the country is experiencing food poverty. . .

The food shortages have fallen particularly hard on children. . . Oxfam estimates that nearly one million children are at serious risk. The United Nations Children’s Fund says that 20 percent of children fail to reach their fifth birthday because of malnutrition.

Only ten percent of Afghans have electricity “The main electricity supply is worse now than five years ago, and while the rich can use private generators to power their air conditioners, hot-water heaters, computers and satellite tvs, average Kabulis ‘suffered a summer without fans and face a winter without heaters.” Barnett Rubin, ‘Saving Afghanistan’, Foreign Affairs, January–February 2007.

“Beyond Kabul, things vary dramatically depending on where you go,” reports one journalist, “ In the parts of the country with the heaviest concentrations of US/NATO troops, Afghans are frequently rounded-up, detained, tortured, bombed, or shot by foreign troops just as in Iraq.”

“In other parts of the country, where the Taliban are strong; girls schools are blown up, civilians are killed in suicide bombings, and journalists, teachers, and elected officials are harassed or murdered. Those areas controlled by warlords are ruled with an iron hand, where extreme interpretations of sharia law rule the day, and women suffer rape and degradation” and “ No matter where you go in Afghanistan, there is utter, grinding poverty.”

The economy is so underdeveloped that opium production accounts for more than half of the country’s gross domestic product. “ The only sector in which Afghanistan has progressed is in drug cultivation and trafficking. “The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government,” the Daily Mail reported July 21, 2007.  Tom Lasseter reports “Seven former Afghan governors and security commanders said they had firsthand knowledge of local or national officials who were transporting or selling drugs or protecting those who did.”  According to UN estimates, narcotics account for 53 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product, and the poppy fields continue to spread. Some 90 per cent of the world opium supply emanates from Afghanistan

So what about all that money spent on reconstruction?  Where does it go? Most of it is what is called “phantom aid.”  The funds go into the pockets of NGOs and corporations in donor countries:

Washington spends about $100 million a day on this war — close to $36 billion a year — but only five cents of every dollar actually goes towards aid. From this paltry sum, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief found that “a staggering 40 percent has returned to donor countries in corporate profits and salaries.” What little money does go for reconstruction is handed over to U.S. multinationals who then subcontract out to Afghan partners and cut corners every step of the way. As a result, the U.N. ranks the country as the fifth least-developed in the world — a one-position drop from 2004.

Simon Jenkins writes in the Guardian, “A reputed 10,000 ngo staff have turned Kabul into the Klondike during the gold rush, building office blocks, driving up rents, cruising about in armoured jeeps and spending stupefying sums of other people’s money, essentially on themselves. They take orders only from some distant agency, but then the same goes for the American Army, NATO the UN, the EU and the supposedly sovereign Afghan government.”

The rest of the aid goes to the corrupt officials who run Afghanistan.   In 2006, Christian Parenti described the Afghani government as a:

. . . classic rentier state: an institution designed to capture revenue rather than deliver services and facilitate economic growth.  Instead of oil, it feeds on the free flow of international aid, which accounts for 92 percent of the nation’s income. The government’s thirty-two ministries are massively overstaffed, with employees usually earning a mere $30-$100 a month. They sit in squalid offices drinking tea, reading newspapers and watching Bollywood films on TV.

Not surprisingly, they use their positions to demand bribes and peculate public funds. The modus operandi of the ministries is to deny access, deny permission, deny responsibility and sabotage those who might be effective at their job–in case they start capturing more of the aid flow.

This mess is largely the result of a US-led process that–in the lead-up to the Iraq War–sloppily fast-tracked Afghanistan’s reconstruction. Warlords were allowed to control the government and the United States signed off on ridiculous shakedown schemes like paying wages to militia commanders who wildly exaggerated their troop numbers. The result is a nonfunctional state that will probably never be able to “stand up” and allow the international community to successfully “stand down.”

Five years after the overthrow of the Taliban, Kabul has only three hours of electricity per day and unsanitary and inadequate drinking water. The healthcare system is nonexistent or run by foreign NGOs, and primary schools lack teachers. The government undertakes almost no public works; there is no food-safety system or program of agricultural extensions; state-owned industries–such as coal mines, gas works, cement factories, the national airline with its half-dozen planes, a chain of old hotels and several massive granaries–receive little or no investment.

To pay taxes in Kabul one must first bribe the tax collector! No bribe and your taxes (which will be stolen) won’t be registered as paid. Without proof of payment a homeowner or shopkeeper could be reported to the police, arrested and repeatedly extorted at every step of the legal process.

Even government offices bribe one another. “To get license plates for our cars we had to bribe the Transportation Ministry,” says Naqib, who runs nebulously defined “capacity-building workshops” at the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. “We had to pay about $2,000.”

Some would blame this sorry state of affairs on racist notations of Afghan backwardness, the lack of international attention, or the legacy of the Taliban.  In reality the current set up is the   result of decades of foreign intervention motivated by geopolitics and imperial maneuvering rather than any concern about the lives of ordinary Afghanis. It is the logical outcome of an attempt to set up a government prepared to operate according to U.S. interests:

The U.S. set out to construct a client state, and nobody should be surprised if it operates by extortion, patronage, official corruption, and permanent insecurity. There is no other way to create a systematic alignment to a foreign power such as the U.S. except by reinforcing the way the local elite maintains the local disparities in wealth.

Afghanistan runs like the mafia because that’s the way imperialism is done. What’s more, Afghanistan is run like a set of competing mafias, relations that are perpetuated by an imperial competition between great powers to back one faction against the others. These crimes are built into the very foundation of Afghanistan as a buffer state, and the crimes have become more acute and devastating as the great powers have devoted more and more attention to it. The past thirty years of escalated foreign intervention have made the situation for Afghans worse and worse. Thirty years ago, many knew nothing of the outside world, but now they’ve gone through two imperial invasions, the Soviet and the American, and they’ve been introduced to international jihad. They didn’t have a cash economy, but now more than one out of seven of them are engaged in the opium business—and one out of twenty-seven is addicted.  And thirty years ago, most were able to produce just a bare subsistence, but now one-third of Afghans—nine million—are facing acute food shortage this winter.  This kind of deterioration serves as yet another sign that the real motivation of foreign interventions has had nothing to do with looking out for the welfare of Afghans

And what about the status of women in Afghanistan who US forces supposedly liberated? Shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan began in October 2001, Laura Bush came on the air declaring “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes. The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”

But, as the Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan (RAWA) asserts, by reinstalling the warlords of the Northern Alliance in power in Afghanistan, the US is ultimately replacing one oppressive fundamentalist regime with another.

The rates of self-immolation and suicide due to domestic violence and poverty, of forced marriages and violence against women are higher than ever. In the first six months of 2008, forty-seven cases of self-immolation among women were reported in a single hospital in the western city of Herat. Reports come every day of gang rapes of young girls, especially in the northern portion of Afghanistan, where pro-US warlords have full power and a free hand. But the rapists are not prosecuted. Last month President Hamid Karzai ordered the release of two men who were sentenced to eighteen years in prison for raping and killing a girl.

According to Sonali Kolhatkar, in an interview on Democracy Now! “Women are being imprisoned in greater numbers than ever before, for the crime of escaping from home or having, quote-unquote, ’sexual relations’–’illegal sexual relations.’ Most of these women are simply victims of rape.”  Every 28 minutes a woman dies in Afghanistan during childbirth and 54 percent of Afghan children are born stunted.

As Kolhatkar points out, while women have political equality in the constitution, “ If you look at what happens on the ground, politically speaking, women who are in parliament, if they speak up, are completely attacked. “ One example is Malai Joya, a member of parliament who was banned for speaking out against the warlords. She has yet to be reinstated.  Women in the government in the government must battle warlordism at every step.  Afghani women face immense difficulties:

Even being allowed to run for parliament is a significant hurdle. Females in Afghanistan cannot leave their house and work unless their fathers, brothers and husbands give them permission. In most cases, female MPs are working in parliament only because a male relative has allowed them to do so.

The female lawmakers’ difficulties pale in comparison to those faced by ordinary Afghan women, women’s rights activists say. The women of the Afghan parliament are educated and wealthy, with lenient husbands and fathers, whereas most Afghan women are mired in poverty and are forbidden from leaving the home. “In this category, women are not even considered human beings (by men),” says Hasina Saafi, director of the Afghan Women’s Education Center, an NGO.

The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a study last week that found Afghanistan to be the second most unequal society in the world in terms of gender, ahead of only Sudan.

Supposedly the Obama administration is implementing a shift to more “nation buildling” and humanitarian assistance.  Toru Shirakawa decribes one of these humanitarian missions:

I left the base with the humanitarian aid unit who said they were going to visit nearby houses. A protection unit accompanied us.

Though they call themselves doctors and vets, they look no different than combatants. They wear bulletproof vests and sunglasses. M16 rifles hang from their necks. Physicians who are supposed to be saving lives are carrying rifles. It is a strange spectacle.

“There’s a woman. Don’t come in.”

As they approach a house, a man of about forty, presumably its owner, is standing in the doorway. The eyes with which he looks at the US troops are extremely frightened.

“Please don’t come into the house. There’s a woman inside. Please stop.” The man firmly refuses the US army’s medical assistance.

The commanding officer persuades the man to yield, promising that only female soldiers will enter.

The female soldiers enter the house. The protection unit soldiers follow directly after them. This is not what was promised.

As I enter the premises, I see protection unit soldiers on the roof.

I tense up. Nearly all the people who live in the border region support the Taliban. The Taliban often use private houses as a base. If any Taliban are discovered, there might be a firefight.

Fortunately, the protection unit emerges from the house having found no one who looks like a combatant.

Medical treatment has been given, but it is a formality. The man, whose skin is dry, has been given cream.

“Sometimes we even bring an Afghan doctor from a hospital. The medicine’s free too. We show them that we can do what even the Taliban can’t.” The aid unit’s commanding officer looks triumphant.

As we leave the house, we see that soldiers from the protection unit have lined up the males of the house against a wall.

A soldier is holding what looks like a camera against a man’s face. The man’s eye is reflected in the apparatus lens.

“I’m taking a photo of his retina and data-basing it.”

I ask him what for, but the soldier says nothing more. According to what a British journalist familiar with army activities tells me later, it is so that when a Taliban fighter is captured they can check the data base and find out what village he is from. Evidently the data can also be useful for targeting air strikes.

David Whitehouse evaluates the Obama administration’s “new “ strategy :

Obama’s proposals represent a continuation of changes that are already underway in the post-Rumsfeld era. Obama is calling for an increase in U.S. troop levels from about 30,000 in the past year to as much as 50,000 in the next couple years, a buildup that has already begun. With this bigger “footprint,” he’s also calling for an increase in development aid, and peace talks with insurgents who are willing to recognize the Karzai government.

The first part—more troops—sounds like more war, while the second part—peace talks and humanitarian aid—sound like a plan for peace. They are all, in fact, parts of a single new war strategy. The Taliban have advanced largely at the expense of the smaller warlords in the South and East. The developing U.S. plan is to start from the Western-backed central state and build authority outwards to replace the warlords in those areas where the resistance has been able to advance. That doesn’t mean replacing the big warlords of the Northern Alliance, who are so influential in the regime and who haven’t lost nearly so much ground to the Taliban.

Development aid—the nation-building aspect of the plan—would go as a reward to local strongmen who collaborate with the war effort and pledge loyalty to the central government

Liberals thus envisage a vast expansion of operations on the model of the PRTs, which integrate military action with development projects. Any attempts at “nation-building” are to be shaped by the policy’s central aim—to extend the authority of the central state. Old clients are to be forced into fully subordinate relationships, and new clients are to be found where the old ones don’t cooperate. The promise of patronage is always to be coupled with the threat of violence, so the iron fist will keep coming down against those who don’t accept the occupiers’ terms.

Like the plan to reward war collaborators with targeted development contracts, peace talks form part of the new war strategy. The objective of the war has not changed. It’s not humanitarian assistance to Afghans, or the liberation of women, and it’s only loosely connected to the hunt for al-Qaeda. The objective is still the occupation itself. The U.S. aims to stay in this strategic location.

As an editorial in Socialist Worker argues “The “humanitarian-security” case made by the U.S. establishment needs to be rejected–just as the case for the occupation of Iraq has been rejected as a pack of lies to justify Washington’s drive to control oil resources and project its power throughout the Middle East.”

U.S. meddling—political, financial, and most importantly, military—has never been a benefit for ordinary Afghans. There is no reason to believe that it can or will be in the future.

Eric Ruder points out,

Those forces in the antiwar movement that don’t include opposition to the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan are at risk of being made irrelevant by the dedication of increasing amounts of U.S. military firepower and personnel to the “good war.  Failure to do so will mean that the further the occupation of Iraq fades in the media and from American political discussion, the more difficult it will get to mobilize sufficient numbers to compel the U.S. to exit both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Which is why we must reject the idea of Afghanistan as the good war and redouble our efforts to get the US out now.

Who are the Terrorists?

Once against bombs are pounding Gaza while the economic blockade remains in full force. Dropping bombs on one of the world’s most densely populated areas is what Israel calls self defense. Haaretz reports that planning for the current offensive began six months ago. What Israel is doing is premeditated, cold-blooded murder.

Ehud Barak said Israel was not fighting the people of Gaza but was in “a war to the bitter end” with Hamas. Olmert had “assured President Bush that Israel is taking appropriate steps to avoid civilian casualties” and said that Israel was “targeting only Hamas operatives and those affiliated with Hamas.“

Apparently Hamas affiliates include family members, neighbors and co-workers. An airstrike that killed a senior Hamas official also killed his family members and other bystanders, when it ” obliterated a house in the densely packed Jabalya refugee camp north of Gaza City.” According to Al Mezan Center for Human Rights:

At approximately 2:40pm yesterday, Thursday 1 January 2008, Israeli aircrafts fired heavy missiles at the house of Nizar Rayyan, a leader in the Hamas movement, in the Jabaliya refugee camp, causing massive destruction in the camp and killing 16 of its residents, 11 of whom were children. The victims were identified as:

• 49-year-old Nizar Abdul-Qadir Rayyan;
• 40-year-old Nawal Ismail Rayyan;
• 46-year-old Hyiam Abdul-Rahman Rayyan;
• 45-year-old Iman Khalil Rayyan;
• 25-year-old Shirin Said Rayyan;
• 2-year-old Asad Nizar Rayyan;
• 3-year-old Usama Nizar Rayyan;
• 3-year-old Aiysha Nizar Rayyan;
• 4-year-old Reem Nizar Rayyan;
• 5-year-old Halima Nizar Rayyan;
• 5-year-old Meryam Nizar Rayyan;
• 6-year-old Abdul-Rahman Nizar Rayyan;
• 12-year-old Abdul-Qadir Nizar Rayyan;
• 12-year-old Ayia Nizar Rayyan;
• 15-year-old Zainab Nizar Rayyan;
• 16-year-old Ghassan Nizar Rayyan

The victims are from the same family. The body of Ghassan was still under the rubble of the house at the time this release was drafted. Moreover, 12 people, including five children and one woman, were injured this raid. It also destroyed 10 houses completely and caused damage to another dozens of other houses.

This is what assassination or, “targeted killings” as Israelis call it, looks like. Missiles or bombs dropped on buildings in crowded areas killing or wounding everyone in the vicinity. Explain how these toddlers and teenagers were involved in shooting rockets. Were they Hamas fighters?

Amira Hass reports from Gaza on similar attacks:

Shortly afterwards, another missile was fired, this one hitting a building full of occupants, 300 meters from al-Attar’s home. The home, little more than concrete and asbestos, belongs to the Abbasi family. The father, Ziad, is a building contractor. Three of his children were killed in the strike and remained buried under the rubble: Sadki, age 3; Ahmed, age 12 and Mohammed, age 14. The parents and three other children were wounded.

On Monday at 5 P.M. a house was bombed in Beit Lahia, and according to initial reports seven family members were killed.

“Every parent understands the home isn’t safe, as the streets aren’t safe,” says Umm Basel.

“Maybe next door lives someone from Iz al-Din al-Qassam, I don’t know, or on your side they think he lives there, and that you’re allowed to fire a missile on us. He is not in his home, we are.”

Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. 80 percent of the people in Gaza Strip are refugees. 750,000 of them are children. Robert Fisk explains who the Gazans are:

That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don’t come from Gaza.

The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.

The New York Times reports that Israel is so gracious as to warn civilians of impending attacks :

Tens of thousands of Gazans have received recorded phone calls from the Israeli Army warning them that their houses have been marked as targets because they harbored either militants or weapons facilities like rocket workshops. Noncombatants were urged to clear out. Hundreds of thousands of leaflets gave the same message.

The fact still remains that people’s houses are destroyed and they are driven out of their homes, which is a crime in itself. But what good is a warning if there is nowhere to go? Mustafa Barghouti asks,

Where should they go away? In which place? Where? Which place they can go to, when Israel is putting Gaza for two years under total blockade, by sea, by air, by land.

Assertions about trying to avoid civilian causalities are all lies. A Palestinian doctor in Gaza told the BBC nearly all the casualties he had seen overnight and on Monday had been civilians. Nir Rosen reminds us, “When you drop bombs on populated areas knowing there will be some “collateral” civilian damage, but accepting it as worth it, then it is deliberate.”

As Jennifer Lowenstein points out, the initial air strikes against Gaza were timed to produce maximum casualties

They occurred at approximately 11:20am on a bustling Saturday morning, just as schools were changing shifts and many children were either leaving for home or coming to afternoon classes; when offices were filled with their employees, and streets busy with the late morning crowds out getting lunch or on quick errands of one sort or another.

In an interview with Democracy now, Dr. Moussa el-Haddad describes the situation on the ground :

No place is safe. All the buildings that were attacked, they are not military buildings. Even in the initial day, on Saturday, the first 150 people, they were civil servants. They were not striking attackers. They were civil servants, civilians.

Mustafa Barghouti speaking on the same program :

. . . what Israel is doing in Gaza is not an act of self-defense, as it is claiming. It’s not an attack on Hamas. It is an attack on the whole Palestinian population. What we see is a war crime, a bloodbath, unprecedented since 1967. What we have had so far is 318 people killed, including thirty children, and at least 1,400 people injured, including 150 children and forty women. I was shocked deeply today over the fact that yesterday the Israeli planes destroyed a house in Jabalya camp and killed five girls, five sisters from one family, and injured their mother seriously and critically. This is a bloodbath that should stop immediately.

Israel is claiming that it is attacking Hamas, but in fact it is attacking all the Palestinians. It is attacking the whole infrastructure. They have destroyed a university. They have destroyed five mosques. They have attacked the hospital. They are shooting and destroying everywhere. And it seems imminent that there will be even a land invasion which could destroy and kill and take away thousands of lives.

Ali Abunimah notes that Israel has simply changed the means by which it kills Palestinians:

In recent months they died mostly silent deaths, the elderly and sick especially, deprived of food and necessary medicine by the two year-old Israeli blockade calculated and intended to cause suffering and deprivation to 1.5 million Palestinians, the vast majority refugees and children, caged into the Gaza Strip. In Gaza, Palestinians died silently, for want of basic medications: insulin, cancer treatment, products for dialysis prohibited from reaching them by Israel.

Israel’s idea of a truce. It is very simple. Under an Israeli-style truce, Palestinians have the right to remain silent while Israel starves them, kills them and continues to violently colonize their land. Israel has not only banned food and medicine to sustain Palestinian bodies in Gaza but it is also intent on starving minds: due to the blockade, there is not even ink, paper and glue to print textbooks for schoolchildren.

There are no rockets launched at Israel from the West Bank, and yet Israel’s attacks, killings, land theft, settler pogroms and kidnappings never ceased for one single day during the truce. The

It did not save, for instance, the al-Kurd family from seeing their home of 50 years in occupied East Jerusalem demolished on 9 November, so the land it sits on could be taken by settlers.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livny has the gall to claim , “There is no humanitarian crisis in the strip, and therefore there is no need for a humanitarian truce,” because “Israel has been supplying comprehensive humanitarian aid to the strip.”

However, International aid agencies present a much different picture. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported Thursday that humanitarian needs in Gaza are growing, despite the aid shipments. The organization said electricity, cooking gas and water are all in extremely short supply. The U.N. also warned of a health and food crisis in Gaza, despite an increase in humanitarian shipments. Maxwell Gaylard, the UN’s chief aid coordinator for the region called the situation a “critical emergency,” while Oxfam warned the situation “is getting worse by the day” with critical shortages clean water, food and fuel. The charity also reports hospitals being “overwhelmed with casualties” and raw sewage “pouring into the streets.”

But Condoleezza Rice claims it’s Hamas and not Israel that’s holding Gazans hostage. “Hamas has held the people of Gaza hostage ever since their illegal coup against the forces of President Mahmoud Abbas.” That would be the democratically elected Hamas government she’s talking about. And how exactly does Hamas hold Gaza hostage when Israel controls the borders, airspace, access from the sea?

Jennifer Lowenstein points out that Hamas has become Israel’s new boogeyman, filing the role once held by Arafat and the PLO. Any destruction or loss of life is justified on the grounds of a link (real or imagined) to Hamas.

“HAMAS”… the word that, in this case, renders any action taken by the other side, no matter how barbaric or sadistic, legitimate. Couple any noun with the preceding adjective “Hamas” and it will be immediately quarantined as if tainted by some infectious bacteria. This is how to dehumanize a million and a half people overnight; how to render them different from us and dangerous to us. 

What we have is a clear case of blaming the victim. The PR machine is at full spin and suddently its seems that it is Israel with its 4 dead from rocket attacks that is under attack rather than the 400 dead and 2000 wounded Gazans. In the calculus of Zionist math, Israeli lives are worth much more than the lives of Palestinians. Israel talks about collateral damage as necessary for security, to bring “peace and quiet” to southern Israel, yet if the casualties were on the other side, there would be howls of rage every time even a single hair on a single Israeli head was harmed.

Mustafa Qadr urges us to place the situation into its proper context:

But the calls of self-defense must be understood within the broader context of the continued annexation of Palestine. It is the greatest of reverse-psychology ploys. Israel calls Hamas and other Palestinian resistance movements existential threats while, at the same time, it continues to ensure that a viable Palestinian state can never hope to exist by imprisoning Gaza and expropriating much of the West Bank.

One could not ask for a clearer example of war being politics by other means. It’s nearing election time in Israel. But that’s not the whole story – it is also about driving Hamas from power. Israel has refused to recognize the democratically elected Hamas government. The .U.S and Israel are working with the quisling “moderate leader” Abu Mazen “and his security forces in West Bank and would like to see something similar in Gaza. Israel cannot let stand any kind of persistant resistance as it may provide an example or inspiration. The aim is to terrorize Gazans into turning on Hamas. The bombing and starvation by blockade are in fact forms of collective punishment, aimed to achieve a political outcome by attacking the civilian population.

Ilan Pappe observes that

Israel presents itself to its own people as the righteous victim that defends itself against a great evil. The academic world is recruited to explain how demonic and monstrous is the Palestinian struggle, if it is led by Hamas.

. . . This righteous fury is a constant phenomenon in the Israeli, and before that Zionist, dispossession of Palestine. Every act whether it was ethnic cleansing, occupation, massacre or destruction was always portrayed as morally just and as a pure act of self-defense reluctantly perpetrated by Israel in its war against the worst kind of human beings.

. . . there is only one way forward: challenging head-on this righteousness as an evil ideology meant to cover human atrocities. Another name for this ideology is Zionism and an international rebuke for Zionism, not just for particular Israeli policies, is the only way of countering this self-righteousness. We have to try and explain not only to the world, but also to the Israelis themselves, that Zionism is an ideology that endorses ethnic cleansing, occupation and now massive massacres. What is needed now is not just a condemnation of the present massacre but also delegitimization of the ideology that produced that policy and justifies it morally and politically. Let us hope that significant voices in the world will tell the Jewish state that this ideology and the overall conduct of the state are intolerable and unacceptable and as long as they persist, Israel will be boycotted and subject to sanctions.

Election Reflections

There’s a lot of excitement about Obama’s electoral victory going around. People across the United States and across the world are celebrating. But a friend said to me the other day, “it feels like change, but is it really?” Is it hope or just hype?

To be sure, we shouldn’t have any faith that Obama will be the one to bring us this change or live up to expectations many have of him. He was a rather conventional candidate with a voting record in Congress nearly indistinguishable from that of Hilary Clinton. Obama’s choice of campaign advisors and future members of his cabinet and White House staff certainly shows much continuity with previous presidential administrations. Moreover, his campaign brought in massive amounts of corporate cash. It is these moneyed interests that he’s beholden to.

While some things stay the same, nonetheless there is a change. This election saw a record voter turnout with long lines at many polling places. Not only was there a high turnout by African Americans, Obama also received many votes from working class whites who supposedly were too racist to vote for a Black candidate. The Republican revolution that began in 1994 is over. Election 2008 seems to have dealt the decisive blow to decades of a right-ward drift in mainstream politics. More importantly is the election of a Black person as president of a country that was built on slavery. From three-fifths a person to President of the United States is a long way to travel. While there is still much further to go, the fact that a Black man is able to become president shows that movements from below, from the Abolitionists to Civil Rights and Black Power, can make significant changes.

Obama’s rhetoric of change and hope shows that he has his fingers to the wind. While Obama will betray those hopes, he is not the originator of them. Rather, he is tapping into something that is already there. There has been a definite leftward shift in popular consciousness. Sharon Smith points out that

. . . opinion polls clearly show that mass consciousness is far left of center, as economist Paul Krugman noted on March 26 in the New York Times:

According to the American National Election Studies, in 1994, the year the Republicans began their 12-year control of Congress, those who favored smaller government had the edge, by 36 to 27. By 2004, however, those in favor of bigger government had a 43-to-20 lead.

And public opinion seems to have taken a particularly strong turn in favor of universal health care. Gallup reports that 69 percent of the public believes that “it is the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have health care coverage,” up from 59 percent in 2000.

The main force driving this shift to the left is probably rising income inequality. According to Pew, there has recently been a sharp increase in the percentage of Americans who agree with the statement that “the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.”

In a CBS News Poll conducted on April 9-12, fully 66 percent of respondents said they “disapprove” of the way Bush is handling the situation with Iraq.

The current “race to the left” among both Democrats and Republicans can only be understood in its historic significance. The political pendulum is swinging left at a rate not seen since the 1960s, when Sen. Robert Kennedy, who built had his political career as a rabid anti-communist during the 1950s McCarthy era, resurfaced as an antiwar presidential candidate in the late 1960s.

Adam Turl presents the case for finally jettisoning the myth of the reactionary working class :

However, it can be said, in contrast to the media stereotype, that the working class–which, for the record, includes tens of millions of Blacks and Latinos, as well as whites, and tens of millions of people who did go to college–tends toward more progressive ideas on a whole series of political questions than the rich and the middle class.

Current polls show, for example, that 51 percent of Americans–the highest number since the 1930s Great Depression–support the longstanding socialist demand of taxing the rich specifically to redistribute wealth. A 2006 poll showed that 59 percent of people support trade unions–with support jumping to 68 percent among those who earn less than $30,000 a year.

But this isn’t merely a question of economic issues.

A majority of citizens and permanent residents responded in a 2006 survey that they believed immigration to be “a good thing.” Nearly 90 percent of Americans said they thought gays and lesbians should have equal rights at work. Support for gay marriage has grown by 19 percent since 1996, and opposition has declined by 15 percent. Even on abortion–one of the few areas where the right wing has gained ground ideologically–a majority of people still holds a favorable view of Roe v. Wade itself.

Also, in contrast to the picture of a fundamentalist hinterland existing between the coasts, polls also show that Americans are becoming less religious, that the religious are less consistent in attending church, and even that the younger generation of fundamentalist Christians are somewhat more left wing on some social justice issues.

It’s not voting the right people into office that will bring us the kind of change we are looking for. Mike Ferner hits it on the head :

“The best thing about an Obama victory would not be his policies — he’s shown too often they differ little from the status quo.  The best thing his campaign and election offers is the way it has inspired millions of people to become active, to expect more, to work hard with many people towards something larger than themselves — in short, to gain a sense of purpose.”

 

But how does this lead to change? Lance Selfa explains :

The important point is that millions of Americans are anxious and hopeful to see a positive political change. All indications point to the end-or at least a severe weakening-of the conservative era. Mass consciousness is shifting leftward on a number of questions. It hasn’t yet found its expression in any sustained social movements, such as the 1950s-1960s civil rights movement that ended segregation and fundamentally altered racial attitudes. Yet long-term political change occurs microscopically and, often in the realm of ideas and attitudes, before it bursts forth on the scene in public, political protest. Although last year’s immigrant rights “mega-marches” took much of the political establishment by surprise, they were the result of decades of immigration into the low-wage workforce on which the U.S. economy depends, and immigrants’ disgust at being made scapegoats for the country’s problems.

Similarly, a political climate that nurtures increased demands and hopes that the government will actually address real social problems can be a spur for the creation of social movements that historically are the only vehicles through which long-term social change has been won. On the one hand, when politicians are forced to talk about genuine issues like the health care crisis, it spurs on people to organize to demand that these promises be fulfilled. On the other hand, when the corporate-dominated political system fails to fulfill those demands-as it most often does-those who thought that “voting for change” was sufficient can conclude that they can only depend on themselves to fight for the change they want.

It is pressure from below that we need to build on. Howard Zinn argues, “the really critical thing isn’t who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in–in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating–those are the things that determine what happens.”

Resources for understanding the current economic crisis.

 

Resources for understanding the current economic crisis.

 

I’d like to share some resources that have helped me understand the ongoing economic crisis.

 

This transcript of a program, jointly produced by Public Radio International and National Public Radio,  The Giant Pool of Money is one of the clearest step-by-step explanations of the development of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.    

 

 Socialist Worker, carries ongoing coverage, featuring The Making of the Free-market meltdown, and Gambling with our Futures, and a special section on the housing crisis.

 

The Dollars and Sense blog also has continuing coverage in addition to a 4-part series written by Larry Peterson on their website: The Subprime/Securitization Market Panic: A Guide for the Perplexed, Finding Spare Change for the Invisible Hand,  Bear Stearns: Not Your Average Bailout, and  Banking on Bankruptcy Thoughts on Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, Commodity Spikes, and the “New Stagflation” . 

 

The International Socialist Review is another resource including a pair of articles by Joel Geier: The Coming Economic Meltdown and More than a recession: An economic model unravels as well as Housing Bubble Deflates by Petrino DiLeo.

 

In terms of books Doug Henwood’s Wall Street is invaluable for understanding derivatives and the like.  It is available online here.  Economics for Everyone is an excellent basic introduction to economics.

 

Also check out The Subprime Debacle and The Financialization of Capital and the Crisis from the Monthly Review and The Financial Crisis: A View from the Left
by Dan La Botz in MR Zine.

 

 

 

Protest Matters

Protest Matters

 

A few weeks ago, 3 separate “waves” of  feminist and anti-war student activists from the University of Iowa disrupted a campaign speech by John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin at the Cedar Rapids Airport.

  

A few days later at a peace fair in Des Moines I met several people from around the state who were inspired by their actions.

 

The following week, People from all over the country wrote into the Daily Iowan about the McCain/Palin demonstration. One writer from NY Grandmothers Against the War said they were “thrilled to read about the admirable students at the UI who protested not only John McCain’s war mind set but Palin’s anti-women beliefs and policies.” All three letter writers expressed the hope that young people standing up brought to them.

 

This is fittingly ironic and gratifying considering the Daily Iowan editorial board’s unrelenting hostility to anti-war protestors.  The editorial board has called anti-war activists irrational for holding sit-ins in senators’ offices, accused them of being childish and naïve for civil disobedience at the Republican national convention and denounced them as “yelling from the cheap seats” for having the gall to shout down the Architect of Evil, Karl Rove.  

 

As Socialist Worker columnist Sharon Smith points out in Why Protest Matters, “The age-old saying “You attract more flies with honey than with vinegar” does not apply to Washington’s entrenched political class, whose campaign coffers depend on a steady influx of corporate dollars.”  “Grassroots activists,” she argues, “ must decide whether the antiwar movement will seek polite engagement for “face time” with Washington powerbrokers or embark on an admittedly less diplomatic strategy to get in their faces. The potential clearly exists for the latter . . . Anger, not diplomacy, points the way forward for the antiwar movement.”

 

In his book, Vietnam, The Logic of Withdrawal, Howard Zinn wrote, “Citizens can create a new self-interest for the president by persuading enough of their fellow citizens, who will then make enough of a commotion to “persuade” the president that he had better make a change. This cannot be effectively done by a citizenry which says only half of what it believes, which dilutes its passion and surrenders its moral fervor”

 

  Protests allow us to connect with other activists, to demonstrate that they are not alone in opposing war and occupation, and provided inspiration to the demoralized.  If a small protest can bring do these things, then some much more so can large demonstrations

 

 The antiwar movement faces great difficulties these days when the level of mass anger and consciousness has not erupted into massive struggle on the streets. The  movement is much smaller in numbers than the numbers of people opposing the war.   Many have begun arguing that we need to focus on small media zaps or that direct actions (usually by a handful of activists) are more effective than largely symbolic demonstrations which no longer work.

 

But as Ashley Smith  argues in Which way forward for the antiwar movement, we cannot afford to “give up on building a mass movement. We have to nurture the small, local coalitions in workplaces, among soldiers, and on campuses. These are the first shoots of a future mass movement.”

 

  He argues that our overall strategy should be one of building mass independent collective action.

 

“Our organizing must aim for mass collective action.”  Because is is mass collective action that “build the  unions, won civil rights, ended the war in Vietnam, and won abortion rights. Mass independent, collective struggle won everything we cherish today.”

 

Independence of  which candidate  is running or which party is in office, is key.  We should not lose sight of the fact that corporate media is “occupied territory.”  Direct action has proven effective in the past, for example in the sit-down strikes of the 1930s or the Montgomery Bus boycott or the  sit-ins used by the Civil Rights movement.  But these were mass actions, “direct actions that are small, secret, and not oriented on winning over a sympathetic mass audience can and will backfire. Moral witness can make us feel good but fail to galvanize mass struggle.”

 

 A strategy of mass independent collective action, then requires a wide variety of tactics. “We must be incredibly flexible in tactics, always with a mind of leading the activist minority to win over the sympathetic majority. So we should organize mass, legal demonstrations in some circumstances. In others, mass direct actions like those that shut down the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle in 1999 are vital. “

   Demonstrations continue to play an important role because then can “help to build the base of the movement. In the process of organizing for demonstrations, coalitions grow in size and sense of purpose. The preparation offers an opportunity for coalitions to educate new layers of activists in the politics of the struggle. On the demonstrations themselves, activists new and old feel the power of their forces. And after effective mobilizations, activists can reach out to include wider layers of new activists, thereby building larger local organization. In and of themselves, demonstrations are not adequate. But they are a decisive component for building organization for even more militant struggle.”

 

Sharon Smith reminds us “A demonstration is not a protest movement. Such a movement requires an ongoing commitment to grassroots struggle.”  A single protest alone will not accomplish much, but protesting is certainly part of building that long-term struggle from below.

 

Why Gnawing Criticism ?

Karl Marx and Frederic Engels collaborated in writing the German Ideology in order “to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience” Upon discovering the manuscript would not be published, as Marx put it, “We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main purpose – self-clarification.”

I don’t know if anyone will bother reading what I post here.

These are the ideas and musings, the unfinished conversations and debates, letters to the editor never completed, responses to ongoing disagreements and reactions to current events, things that continue to gnaw at me, that won’t let me sit still until I think them through.

Gnawing Criticism is about activism and politics.  It is an attempt to engage with the variety of ideas and positions on the left I encounter during my involvement in various activist groups and organizations.  It is in an effort to arrive at clearer understanding of where things stand and the next steps to take.

I make no claims to greatness or originality. This probably won’t be one of the top ten must read blogs.  But here it is.

It is my sincerest hope that by organizing and articulating the variety of thoughts crashing around in my head, I will accomplish, if nothing else, some degree of self-clarification.