EU reluctant to commit troops to Afghanistan without clear shift in strategy

Geraint Rees Published in Open democracy 29 – 09 – 2009

European Union defence ministers have expressed reluctance to committing more troops to Afghanistan except as part of a limited plan training the Afghan military and police.

The statements were made as EU defence ministers met yesterday in Göteborg, Sweden, for informal discussions on theEU’s security and defence policy. Several ministers were reluctant to send front line troops, instead wishing to focus resources and efforts on training Afghan security forces. ‘We have a lot, about 2,000 men in Afghanistan. I think it’s far more important in the long run that we have more Afghan military, and Afghan police,’ Dutch defence minister Eimert Van Middelkopp told reporters.

The ToD Verdict: The statements come in anticipation of a possible call by the US for the EU to commit more front line troops to support the Nato-led mission in Afghanistan. The US is considering a request by General Stanley McChrystal, commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, for up to 30,000 extra troops, without which the eight-year mission “will likely result in failure“. In a leaked report to the Pentagon, General McChrystal expressed doubts that any purely military solution to the Afghan war would succeed and called for a complete overhaul of tactics that would focus on safeguarding the Afghan population. Extra troops would be needed to secure civilians in population centres in an effort to loosen the grip of the growing Taliban-led insurgency, but the exposure of troops under such a strategy would almost inevitably result in higher casualties.

Economic Contractions in the United States: A Failure of Government

Charles K. Rowley and Nathaniel Smith

Obama is repeating the mistakes of the Great Depression

Seeking ‘not to let a crisis go to waste’, left-leaning politicians and old-style Keynesian economists want to remedy the alleged failure of capitalism with a rising tide of big government. Let the budget deficits rip, empower the unions, socialise healthcare, increase trade protection, go green, and socialise the financial and industrial base.

The irony, as Charles Rowley and Nathanael Smith show in this timely monograph, is that the Keynesian policy prescriptions that are serving as the pretext for this programme have already been tried. Expansionary fiscal and monetary policies by the Bush administration and the Greenspan Fed were implemented to deal with the recession of 2001, and are precisely what caused the current crisis.

Three women tortured, forced to walk naked in public

Dawn: 29-09-09

No case has been registered against the mob that attacked the women and publicly humiliated them

LAHORE: Three women, accused of prostitution, were tortured by an angry mob and were later forced to walk naked on Multan Road in Phoolnagar, Kasur, a private television channel reported on Monday.

A large number of people attacked a house in Jambarkalan village, torturing the women — including one Shahnaz — for alleged involvement in prostitution and running a brothel in the village.

The victims said the accusations against them were baseless. They said they had a property dispute ongoing with Union Council Nazim Ilyas Khanzada who wanted to occupy their house illegally. The women have accused him of planning the assault on their home.

Khanzada confirmed the women were tortured by the mob. He, however, denied plotting against them.

Jambarkalan Police Sub-Inspector Bashir said a case had been registered against the women for running a brothel on the local residents’ complaints.

Meanwhile, no case was registered against the mob that attacked the women and publicly humiliated them.

How Top Generals May Trap Obama in a Losing War By Tom Engelhardt

Front and center in the debate over the Afghan War these days are General Stanley “Stan” McChrystal, Afghan war commander, whose “classified, pre-decisional” and devastating report — almost eight years and at least $220 billion later, the war is a complete disaster — was conveniently, not to say suspiciously,leaked to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post by we-know-not-who at a particularly embarrassing moment for Barack Obama; Admiral Michael “Mike” Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has been increasingly vocal about a “deteriorating” war and the need for more American boots on the ground; and the president himself, who blitzed every TV show in sight last Sunday and Monday for his health reform program, but spent significant time expressing doubts about sending more American troops to Afghanistan. (“I’m not interested in just being in Afghanistan for the sake of being in Afghanistan… or sending a message that America is here for the duration.”)

Devastating Report Documents Israeli Crimes Against Civilians in Gaza: Where’s the Outrage?

By Roane Carey, The Nation

The Goldstone report has been denounced in Israeli and ignored by the U.S. press, unless you count the NY Daily News, which called it a “blood libel against Israel.”

The recently released UN Human Rights Council fact-finding mission on the December-January Gaza conflict, released on the eve of Barack Obama’s attempt to jump-start comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, was but the latest in a series of investigations, most of them by human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Like its predecessors, the so-called Goldstone report, named after chief investigator Richard Goldstone, is devastating in its critique of Israeli actions: indiscriminate use of firepower; deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian structures, including hospitals, schools, mosques, water and sewage plants, and rescue vehicles; use of white phosphorus munitions in built-up areas; use of human shields; abusive treatment of detainees; imposition of a blockade on Gaza before and after the attack itself–the report concludes that Israel violated international humanitarian law, committed “grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention in respect of wilful killings and wilfully causing great suffering to protected persons,” and war crimes, possibly even crimes against humanity. The courageous Israeli journalist Gideon Levy summed it up well in Haaretz: it was “an unrestrained assault on a besieged, totally unprotected civilian population which showed almost no signs of resistance during this operation.”

While our Country starves, Senators spend Rs. 22 Million as travelling expenses in FOUR Months

Teeth Maestro

26 Sep 2009

Senate secretariat has spent a staggering amount of over Rs22 million in just four months, traveling / jet-setting around the world from April to July 2009 on 13 foreign trips made by senators to participate in various international events. The Chairman Senate Farooq H Naik said these expenses were incurred on air tickets, foreign exchange, and communication charges, hiring of transport and other miscellaneous expenditures, Geneva Rs 5.452 million, Oslo for a meagre Rs 5.127 million, China for Rs 4.515 million, UK trip cost us Rs 2 million and a trip to Ethiopia costed us Rs1.22 million.

Goodness gracious 22 Million in four months or an average of 5.5 million a month is enough to be the basic monthly salary of 4000 people (6000/month), it can possibly teach 2200 children for a whole year at Citizens Foundation (10,000/year) or another more touching calculation could be that this 22 Million can possibly feed 50,000 people for an entire week, or simply feed 2500 people for the entire four months that our Senators were out partying at the expense of the National Exchequer

I dread not hear the traveling expense of our dear’ol President Asif Ali Zardari and his side-kick Rehman Malik, which would be far more staggering then the senate disclosure. To be honest it may be spare change for some, but considering the hungry and starving in our country how can these elected representatives consciously, do our parliamentarians actually work FOR the people, or merely CON them for their own gains

G20 leaders map out new economic order at Pittsburgh summit

Bankers’ bonuses and excessive national deficits targeted in package of reforms

Patrick Wintour & Andrew Clark

G20 leaders, installing themselves as permanent stewards of the world economy for the first time, agreed yesterday on a tighter regime for bankers’ bonuses and mapped out an economic order in which countries would be urged to co-operate to avoid building up excessive trade deficits or surpluses.

Gordon Brown hailed the result of the summit in the former steelmaking city of Pittsburgh as a victory for British thinking and persistence, insisting the economic regime would have an impact in restoring balanced growth.

Stagnating the parliament

By Dr. Khalil Ahmad

The article was carried by Frontier Post

Our parliament is nothing more than a trade union house of the parasites of Pakistan!

Both of the houses of the parliament are populated by those whose only ‘qualification’ is that they are elected by a constituency. Why they have been elected, and how they have been elected is just beside the point. There is rampant manipulation of the process of election be it direct or be it indirect: before it, during it and after it, at all the three stages. Some of the noted examples of manipulations are delimiting the constituencies, parties’ and candidates’ give-and-take and adjustment before the formal process of election starts; fake voters’ lists, use of fear and foul to keep away the voters, bribing of the voters, selling and purchasing of the votes, concocted counting at the polling stations while the election is held; and altering the results when the final counting is done. All these and so many other factors affect the fate of those who aspire to be elected but have no good bearing on the fate of those who elect them.

Quran, hadith & women

By Asghar Ali Engineer

THE Quran indeed had ushered in a revolution as far as women’s rights were concerned. Women hardly enjoyed any rights before Islam in marriage, divorce or inheritance. They were left totally dependent on father, husband or brother and had no individual identity. The Quran straight away gave them distinct individual, legal personalities. At the time women did not enjoy such status anywhere in the world. In fact even philosophers like Aristotle thought women and animals had no soul. However, this revolutionary approach to women’s distinct individuality was hardly acceptable to Arab society.

Arabs were, by and large, a patriarchal society and wanted to keep women under their thumb. But after Islam became a national religion for Arabs they could not easily deny what the Quran gave to women. Thus many found a via media of hadith and thousands of traditions were falsely attributed to the Prophet of Islam (PBUH) that were quite derogatory to women and sought to take away from them what the Quran had given them.

Swat locals welcome cinema re-opening

We first opened in August, then closed again for Ramadan. Now we are open permanently.’

Dawn: 24-09-09

MINGORA: More than a year after locking doors and ripping down racy posters because of Taliban threats, cinema is once again attracting excited men in Swat valley. Mingora, the capital of the northwest district formerly overrun by militants determined to enforce sharia law and ban entertainment, is now seeing hundreds queue up to watch re-runs of Pakistani films. ‘I love the big screen. It’s a lot of fun. The curse (Taliban) is almost finished,’ 21-year-old mechanic Abid Khan told AFP inside the Swat Cinema. ‘Forget the Taliban, come on enjoy,’ he said, jumping up to dance along to a song from a fabled Pashto musical blaring out into the auditorium. Taliban fanatics set fire to music and DVD shops, closed cinemas, killed and threatened dancers and banned people from even listening to music, plunging the once relatively liberal, northwest tourist centre into fear – and boredom. But this week a billboard showed a silver screen hero, Kalashnikov in hand, with an actress dancing in a provocative manner on the side. The Pashto film, ‘Gul Soori Soori Karam’, which loosely translates as ‘The Flower Who Injured Me’, is a popular old-time favourite for of Eid al-Fitr. ‘There is no other source of entertainment. Where can the young go? That’s why I’m here to enjoy,’ said 17-year-old shop worker Sajid Ali who came to see the film with eight friends. Pakistan launched a blistering assault against the Taliban in and around Swat last April after foot soldiers loyal to radical cleric Maulana Fazlullah advanced further south towards Islamabad in defiance of a peace deal. The military announced ahead of this week’s Eid al-Fitr festival a series of high-profile arrests of wanted Taliban commanders. Scores of bodies, mostly Taliban suspects, have piled up – the victims of revenge killings. ‘I’m not afraid of the Taliban anymore. We saw their dead bodies. We know (Swat Taliban spokesman) Muslim Khan and others are in jail,’ said Ali. The Swat Cinema opened at Eid, putting on two screenings of a Pashto film. But night-time showings are still out of the question because of a curfew. The city’s Palwasha cinema remains closed but staff say they are planning to re-open when they feel the risks have eased. Families still avoid the cinema and women are not yet back in the audience. Eighteen months ago, the Taliban turned up and ordered staff to shut the cinema, threatening to bomb it. It wasn’t a difficult decision. ‘Dozens of Taliban armed with Kalashnikovs came in a jeep and other vehicles and ordered us to close,’ said Swat Cinema manager Fazal Ghani. ‘They were aggressive, they weren’t listening me and we decided to close,’ said the establishment’s owner, Ayub Khan. ‘We first opened in August, then closed again for Ramadan. Now we are open permanently,’ said Khan. ‘There were only two people at the first show in August. Now you can see more than 200 people in the audience,’ said his manager Ghani. Militants have bombed hundreds of entertainment shops across the northwest in recent years, claiming music and movies as against the teachings of Islam. Cinemas are still closed elsewhere in the northwest, but even in Peshawar, a city known for its conservative Islam and brush with militancy, posters of actresses in short skirts and shirts have sprung up, an AFP reporter said.

The real issues in Pakistan

Dawn Editorial, 18 Sep, 2009

PEOPLE are dying queuing for grain in Pakistan. This is a country where food inflation is forcing parents to pull their children out of school – they can eat sparsely or be educated, not both. Lives are being lost to ailments that are easily curable. Street crime is rampant across a country where human life is worth less than a cellphone. Yet our political leaders appear oblivious to the misery that is everywhere. They seem to have no perspective, no grip on reality. Does a man who can’t feed his children really care whether or not Pervez Musharraf is tried for treason? Is a mother whose child has died of gastroenteritis likely to give much thought to America’s military presence in the region? Will a jobless person be impressed by the president’s much-touted ‘achievements’ during his first year in office? Our leaders have clearly lost sight of the core issues.

This is a country where religious minorities are targeted by Muslim mobs while the law-enforcers look on. Deadly attacks against Christians, in particular, are on the rise in Punjab. As is usually the case in such incidents, the violence has been triggered by unproven allegations of blasphemy. Robert Fanish Masih, who had been arrested last Saturday on blasphemy charges after Muslims went on the rampage in village Jaithikey near Sialkot, was found dead in his cell on Tuesday. The next day his family and community members, who had all been forced to flee Jaithikey, were prevented from burying him in their native village. And this heartless, inhumane act wasn’t the work of Muslim vigilantes alone. The local police also told the mourners to turn back, on the grounds that their presence could fan violence. In short the victims were punished, not the aggressors.

The Punjab government needs to take urgent steps to protect minorities in the province for the situation there is deteriorating. Its stance on minority rights will be gauged by its response. The centre, meanwhile, should start working towards the repeal of the blasphemy laws. For too long they have been used to settle personal scores, grab land – and to kill. These draconian laws must be struck off the books.

How We Read each other’s Minds

Rebecca Saxe talks about how we read each other’s minds in TED