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The End of Qaddafi

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 18:02:58 +0000

A Parody of Himself: Muammar el Qaddafi had become irrelevant a long time ago. Like most tyrants, he never knew when to give it up. The graffiti on Benghazi's walls says it all. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)...

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Is Pakistan at War With the United States?

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 08:11:51 +0000

Sneaky: The Kunar River in northeast Afghanistan, at the border with Pakistan, where Taliban insurgents, likely aided by Pakistani forces, have been attacking U.S. bases. (John Moore/Getty Images)

To answer the question in the headline: not in so many words. But Just about the entire relationship between Pakistan and the United States since 2001 can be defined by those five words: not in so many words. Pakistan has reaped the monetary benefits of an alliance with the United States, cashing in on more than $12 billion, without quite acting like an ally in return. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (its combination CIA-FBI) never seriously abandoned its loyalty to the Taliban, which it created in the 1990s as a hedge against Indian influence in Afghanistan.

Pakistan had the experience of 1989, when, after the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, the Americans lost interest in what until then had been a well-funded CIA proxy war on Afghan soil, by way of Pakistan. Pakistan has no reason to think the same thing won't happen again, as indeed it has with the killing of Osama bin laden and the American public's weariness with the war in Afghanistan.

But Pakistan's sense of abandonment on that account is self-inflicted. Just last year, Congress passed a Pakistani aid package worth $7.5 billion over five years. Then bin Laden was discovered and assassinated in his laird in Abbottabad, just north of Rawalpindi, the Pakistani military establishment's capital. It is almost impossible to think that al-Qaeda's leader lived there five years without some knowledge, at some level, by Pakistani authorities. It's par for Pakistanis' course: they helped him escape from Tora Bora in 2001. They helped him escape from prying eyes for the past five years, maybe more. Chances are that bin Laden had been in Pakistan for the past decade.

It's all been a double game.

Now American forces along the Afghan-Pakistani border are taking fire from insurgents who either step onto Afghan territory to fire their 105 mm shells or do so from inside Pakistan. The attacks have surged in 2011, as documented by The New York Times, and American military officials say that the level of command and control exhibited by the attacks is too sophisticated not to be backed up by the Pakistani military. Those officials are also angry at the rules in place: no firing back at Pakistani-based positions.

That, of course, is deceptive, too: Just as attacks on American forces from Pakistani bases have increased, so have attacks by American drones vastly increased on Pakistani targets. There's a tit-for-tat war going on, with each side choosing to tell only half the story. Strictly speaking, neither side is acting according to the rules of war. But the rules of war have never really prevailed in Afghanistan, which long ago ceased being, on the American side, a war against terrorism. It turned instead into a counter-insurgency, an insinuation into a civil war fudged as a battle against terrorism. But al-Qaeda is all but eradicated. And the Taliban is no al-Qaeda. It has no interest in attacking the United States or Europe or spreading its caliphate anywhere but in Afghanistan.

It's the Americans who are the strangers in the mix. They'll continue to be. Until, like every other invading foreign force on Afghan soil since the days of Alexander the great, they, too, are forced to leave.

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Iraq War: a Liberal Hawk Repents

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 21:48:57 +0000

WMD Duo: Judith Miller, whose reporting on Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction would embarrass an inattentive New York Times, with Bill Keller of The Times, who now admits to inattention. (Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)...

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Finally, Palestinians Bid for a State of Their Own

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 20:28:23 +0000

Pass this bill: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas pulled an Obama on Obama. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

I can understand, up to a point, the contortions of the Obama administration as it tries to find a way, any way, to oppose Palestinian statehood by equating that opposition, absurdly, with "standing with Israel." But it's a little embarrassing to see even The New York Times falling for the absurdities. "President Obama was right to stand with Israel," the subhead to its lead editorial reads today.

To stand with Israel. In other words, Obama was right to put Israeli interests--no, not quite Israeli: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's interests, which are far narrower than Israel's interests, and far more dangerous to Israel than legions of Israelis are comfortable with--ahead of American interests.

For what? For this, as Haaretz's Aluf Benn put it: "The years-long diplomatic effort to integrate Israel as an accepted neighbor in the Middle East collapsed this week, with the expulsion of the Israeli ambassadors from Ankara and Cairo, and the rushed evacuation of the embassy staff from Amman. The region is spewing out the Jewish state, which is increasingly shutting itself off behind fortified walls, under a leadership that refuses any change, movement or reform ... Netanyahu demonstrated utter passivity in the face of the dramatic changes in the region, and allowed his rivals to seize the initiative and set the agenda." Now he's got Obama to go along with the suicide mission.

Thomas Friedman summed it up this way: "I have great sympathy for Israel's strategic dilemma and no illusions about its enemies. But Israel today is giving its friends -- and President Obama's one of them -- nothing to defend it with. Israel can fight with everyone or it can choose not to surrender but to blunt these trends with a peace overture that fair-minded people would recognize as serious, and thereby reduce its isolation." But it's not about to. And Obama and The New York Times are bending over backward to justify the passivity.

Today at the United Nations, Palestinians did what they should have done a long time ago. They made a bid for statehood. Palestinian Authority President submitted the bid to the United Nations Security Council. The United States will veto the bid. The spiral downward will continue, fueled mostly by American and Israeli intransigence, not, this time, by the Palestinian's long history of shooting themselves in the foot. In this case, it's the others who are pulling the trigger on themselves.

Soon after Abbas made his bid, the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia, known as the quartet, settled on terms to resume direct talks between Israel and Palestinians. Supposedly. But the United States was using that belated (and, in my view, bogus) settlement as a way to delay, postpone or eliminate the bid for statehood, as if resuming negotiations has anything to do with granting Palestinian full and permanent legitimacy at the United Nations.

Statehood and negotiations are not mutually exclusive. To the contrary. If the quartet has found a way to resume direct talks (and it hasn't, really, because, as the Times reports tonight, "the quartet's statement was a watered-down document, avoiding any of the difficult and highly contentious issues that have been the focus of negotiations for months and that continue to divide the Israelis and Palestinians"), it'll be a good thing to look forward to--once the United Nations ratifies the Palestinians' statehood bid. The bid is long overdue.

The Economist sums it up quite well: "The principle is simple: the Palestinians deserve a state, just as the Israelis do. The United States, the European Union and the Israeli government have all endorsed a two-state solution. There is broad agreement that the boundary should be based on the pre-1967 one, with land swaps allowing Israel to keep its biggest settlements close to the line, in return for the Palestinians gaining land elsewhere; Jerusalem should be shared; and the Palestinians should give up their claimed right of return to Israel proper. That still leaves much room for negotiation. But provided that the Palestinian request at the UN, still unfiled as The Economist went to press, does not undermine the basic terms of this deal, it is hard to see why any peacemaker, including America's Barack Obama, should oppose a proposal that nudges Palestine closer to real statehood."

I give it a shot myself. Here's my defense of Palestinian statehood: "Why Palestinian Statehood Is Necessary."

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Rick Perry's Palestinian Statehood Problem

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 14:20:41 +0000

Cover Girl: Rick Perry's facts get a splash of make-up. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

It's not surprising that Rick Perry's Truh-O-Meter file at Politifact.com is an embarrassment to the GOP's prospective presidential candidate, if not to the GOP itself. Perry has been rated 80 times. Sixty-one of those times, or 76 percent of the time, his statements have been half-true, mostly false, false or pants-on-fire false. (In comparison, President Obama has been rated 320 times and fell in any of those four categories 169 times, for a 52 percent half-true-or-less rating. Not brilliant, but certainly much improved for a politician.

Some of Perry's utter falsehoods: the Obama administration's stimulus package "created zero jobs," Social Security is "a ponzi scheme," Obama gave Brazil $2 billion to help with offshore drilling, and Texas's Medicaid waiver proposal to the federal government has "languished in a file cabinet" in Washington for years: not so, of course. It was sent to Washington during the Bush years, and dealt with, by another Texan, to Perry's discontent.

Perry, like Sarah Palin, has no foreign policy experience, though he once saw the Middle East from a plane. He's been working hard to build up his credentials. Last Friday he wrote an OpEd in the Wall Street Journal and handed it to the Jerusalem Post as well. He opposes Palestinian statehood. He explains why. He does so with a series of falsehoods and misleading statements that should not go unanswered, because it's this sort of malinformed pieces (which should have been halted or better edited by both newspapers) that have a way of perpetuating errors and legitimizing them.

Have a look: "Fact-Checking Rick Perry on the Palestinian-Israeli Peace Process."

And since the next few days are going to be rife with the debate over Palestinian statehood at the United Nations, you might as well have a say in the matter. Should Palestinians declare their own state? You decide.

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Israel and Egypt: No Bromance There

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 09:00:26 +0000

Symbol of Deterioration: Bus 392 stands on the highway to Eilat, its shattered following an attack by Palestinian militants, one of several that left eight Israelis dead on Aug. 18, 2011. (Yehuada Ben Itah/Getty Images)...

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France's Ban on Public Muslim Prayer

Sat, 17 Sep 2011 18:09:03 +0000

Allah's Rollercoaster: Muslims gather for prayers during Great Muslim Adventure Day at Six Flags Great Adventure amusement park on September 16, 2011 in Jackson, N.J. Thousands of Muslims converge on the park every year to celebrate the end of Ramadan in what is billed as one of the largest outdoor gatherings of Muslims in the United States. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)...

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The 9/11 Anniversary's Terror Threats

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 22:13:19 +0000

Unrelenting: New York City on high alert from fears that terrorists would use car bombs on bridges or in tunnels. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

"Are we safer today?" Thomas Fuentes, a former former FBI assistant director asks. "I agree with experts who believe that a large sophisticated and coordinated attack such as 9/11 is extremely unlikely. The decimation of al Qaeda, the killing of bin Laden, the monitoring of the global financial network and international communications among terrorists, greater international sharing of information and public awareness make it nearly impossible to duplicate the scale and scope of the 9/11 plan."

He goes on to predict that while a large-scale attack is ruled out, "smaller attacks will continue for decades," including, possibly on the 10th anniversary (a few hours from now) a car bomb, or something of a similar scale.

It's not an original or difficult prediction to make. What Fuentes is saying is that terrorism has happened before, and will happen again. That would sound a little churlish to European or Asian ears, where terrorism has been an on-again, off-again fact of life for centuries, depending on how it's defined. But it shouldn't sound strange to American ears, either, for a couple of reasons.

First, the relative safety from perceived terrorism that the United States enjoyed until the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 is unusual for any great power. Periods of terrorism come and go: witness Europe in the 1970s, the Red Brigades, the Basque terrorists in the 1980s, the IRA for decades until the 1990s. The United States was oddly, luckily insulated.

I say perceived terrorism, which brings me to my second point. The reality is that terrorism is a far more common fact of American life than most Americans are willing to admit, because the near-totality of that terrorism is homegrown. The Southern Poverty Law Center keeps tabs. It makes for depressing reading.

An example from Oct. 9, 1995: Saboteurs derail an Amtrak passenger train near Hyder, Ariz., killing one person and injuring about 70 others. Several antigovernment messages, signed by the "Sons of Gestapo," are left behind. The perpetrators remain at large.

July 19, 2002: Acting on a tip, federal and local law enforcement agents arrest North Carolina Klan leader Charles Robert Barefoot Jr. for his role in an alleged plot to blow up the Johnson County Sheriff's Office, the sheriff himself and the county jail. Officers find more than two dozen weapons in Barefoot's home. They also find bombs and bomb components in the home of Barefoot's son, Daniel Barefoot, who is charged that same day with the arson of a school bus and an empty barn.

April 25, 2009: Joshua Cartwright, a Florida National Guardsman, allegedly shoots to death two Okaloosa County, Fla., sheriff's deputies -- Burt Lopez and Warren "Skip" York -- at a gun range as the officers attempt to arrest Cartwright on domestic violence charges. After fleeing the scene, Cartwright is fatally shot during a gun battle with pursuing officers. Cartwright's wife later tells investigators that her husband was "severely disturbed" that Barack Obama has been elected president.

That's just a very quick sampling from a too-long list: not a year has gone by since the mid-1990s, when the law center started the tally, that numerous terrorist acts haven't been recorded.

None of that is much comfort regarding the threat of car bombs on 9/11's anniversary, though it does raise this question: even if the attacks are relatively small, what have the last 10 years achieved, if not relative safety from such attacks? In a sense, there has been one significant success: aside from errant incidents, none of them massive, the nation has been spared. But other nations have not. Wars continue. And more than twice the number of victims on 9/11 have died in Iraq and Afghanistan-American soldiers, that is: the number of civilian victims is in the six digits.

So there's not much room for satisfaction about that relative calm of the past decade when so much violence has been off-shored. And there's never been room for indulgence on a national scale, whether al-Qaeda existed or not.

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Turkey's Angry Response to the UN's Gaza Flotilla Report

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 20:12:11 +0000

Impounded After the Killings:Israeli soldiers and port workers stand next to the Mavi Marmara, at the Ashdod Port on June 1, 2010 in Ashdod, Israel. (Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)...

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The Irrelevance of Qaddafi's Whereabouts

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 08:55:39 +0000

Chief Farce: Qaddafi in 2001, deriding the Lockerbie verdict in front of the sculpture of a fist clenching an American fighter jet--itself a sculpture deriding the 1986 raid on Qaddafi's compound in Tripoli. (Courtney Kealy/Getty Images)...

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