The Rag Blog

WASHINGTON (July 17) — The terrorist network Al-Qaida will likely leverage its contacts and capabilities in Iraq to mount an attack on U.S. soil, according to a new National Intelligence Estimate on threats to the United States.

The declassified key findings, to be released publicly on Tuesday, were obtained in advance by The Associated Press.

The report lays out a range of dangers — from al-Qaida to Lebanese Hezbollah to non-Muslim radical groups — that pose a “persistent and evolving threat” to the country over the next three years. As expected, however, the findings focus most of their attention on the gravest terror problem: Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network.

The report makes clear that al-Qaida in Iraq, which has not yet posed a direct threat to U.S. soil, could become a problem here.

“Of note,” the analysts said, “we assess that al-Qaida will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have expressed a desire to attack the homeland.”

The analysts also found that al-Qaida’s association with its Iraqi affiliate helps the group to energize the broader Sunni Muslim extremist community, raise resources and recruit and indoctrinate operatives — “including for homeland attacks.”

National Intelligence Estimates are the most authoritative written judgments of the 16 spy agencies across the breadth of the U.S. government. These agencies reflect the consensus long-term thinking of top intelligence analysts. Portions of the documents are occasionally declassified for public release.

The White House brushed off critics who allege the administration released the intelligence estimate at the same time the Senate is debating Iraq. White House press secretary Tony Snow pushed back at the critics Tuesday, saying they are “engaged in a little selective hearing themselves to shape the story in their own political ways.”

“We don’t keep it on the shelf and say `Let’s look for a convenient time,'” Snow said.

“We’re trying to remind people is that this is a real threat. This is not an attempt to divert. As a matter of fact … we would much rather — one of the things we’d like to do is call attention to the successes in the field” in Iraq, he said.

· Military solution back in favour as Rice loses out
· President ‘not prepared to leave conflict unresolved’

The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President George Bush leaves office in 18 months, the Guardian has learned.

The shift follows an internal review involving the White House, the Pentagon and the state department over the last month. Although the Bush administration is in deep trouble over Iraq, it remains focused on Iran. A well-placed source in Washington said: “Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo.”

The White House claims that Iran, whose influence in the Middle East has increased significantly over the last six years, is intent on building a nuclear weapon and is arming insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The vice-president, Dick Cheney, has long favoured upping the threat of military action against Iran. He is being resisted by the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, and the defence secretary, Robert Gates.

Last year Mr Bush came down in favour of Ms Rice, who along with Britain, France and Germany has been putting a diplomatic squeeze on Iran. But at a meeting of the White House, Pentagon and state department last month, Mr Cheney expressed frustration at the lack of progress and Mr Bush sided with him. “The balance has tilted. There is cause for concern,” the source said this week.

Nick Burns, the undersecretary of state responsible for Iran and a career diplomat who is one of the main advocates of negotiation, told the meeting it was likely that diplomatic manoeuvring would still be continuing in January 2009. That assessment went down badly with Mr Cheney and Mr Bush.

“Cheney has limited capital left, but if he wanted to use all his capital on this one issue, he could still have an impact,” said Patrick Cronin, the director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

The Washington source said Mr Bush and Mr Cheney did not trust any potential successors in the White House, Republican or Democratic, to deal with Iran decisively. They are also reluctant for Israel to carry out any strikes because the US would get the blame in the region anyway.

“The red line is not in Iran. The red line is in Israel. If Israel is adamant it will attack, the US will have to take decisive action,” Mr Cronin said. “The choices are: tell Israel no, let Israel do the job, or do the job yourself.”

Almost half of the US’s 277 warships are stationed close to Iran, including two aircraft carrier groups. The aircraft carrier USS Enterprise left Virginia last week for the Gulf. A Pentagon spokesman said it was to replace the USS Nimitz and there would be no overlap that would mean three carriers in Gulf at the same time.

No decision on military action is expected until next year. In the meantime, the state department will continue to pursue the diplomatic route.

Sporadic talks are under way between the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, on the possibility of a freeze in Iran’s uranium enrichment programme. Tehran has so far refused to contemplate a freeze, but has provisionally agreed to another round of talks at the end of the month.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, has said that there are signs of Iran slowing down work on the enrichment plant it is building in Natanz. Negotiations took place in Tehran last week between Iranian officials and the IAEA, which is seeking a full accounting of Iran’s nuclear activities before Tehran disclosed its enrichment programme in 2003. The agency’s deputy director general, Olli Heinonen, said two days of talks had produced “good results” and would continue.

Dear CNN,

Well, the week is over — and still no apology, no retraction, no correction of your glaring mistakes.

I bet you thought my dust-up with Wolf Blitzer was just a cool ratings coup, that you really wouldn’t have to correct the false statements you made about “Sicko.” I bet you thought I was just going to go quietly away.

Think again. I’m about to become your worst nightmare. ‘Cause I ain’t ever going away. Not until you set the record straight, and apologize to your viewers. “The Most Trusted Name in News?” I think it’s safe to say you can retire that slogan.

You have an occasional segment called “Keeping Them Honest.” But who keeps you honest? After what the public saw with your report on “Sicko,” and how many inaccuracies that report contained, how can anyone believe anything you say on your network? In the old days, before the Internet, you could get away with it. Your victims had no way to set the record straight, to show the viewers how you had misrepresented the truth. But now, we can post the truth — and back it up with evidence and facts — on the web, for all to see. And boy, judging from the mail both you and I have been receiving, the evidence I have posted on my site about your “Sicko” piece has led millions now to question your honesty.

I won’t waste your time rehashing your errors. You know what they are. What I want to do is help you come clean. Admit you were wrong. What is the shame in that? We all make mistakes. I know it’s hard to admit it when you’ve screwed up, but it’s also liberating and cathartic. It not only makes you a better person, it helps prevent you from screwing up again. Imagine how many people will be drawn to a network that says, “We made a mistake. We’re human. We’re sorry. We will make mistakes in the future — but we will always correct them so that you know you can trust us.” Now, how hard would that really be?

As you know, I hold no personal animosity against you or any of your staff. You and your parent company have been very good to me over the years. You distributed my first film, “Roger & Me” and you published “Dude, Where’s My Country?” Larry King has had me on twice in the last two weeks. I couldn’t ask for better treatment.

That’s why I was so stunned when you let a doctor who knows a lot about brain surgery — but apparently very little about public policy — do a “fact check” story, not on the medical issues in “Sicko,” but rather on the economic and political information in the film. Is this why there has been a delay in your apology, because you are trying to get a DOCTOR to say he was wrong? Please tell him not to worry, no one is filing a malpractice claim against him. Dr. Gupta does excellent and compassionate stories on CNN about people’s health and how we can take better care of ourselves. But when it came time to discuss universal health care, he rushed together a bunch of sloppy — and old — research. When his producer called us about his report the day before it aired, we sent to her, in an email, all the evidence so that he wouldn’t make any mistakes on air. He chose to ignore ALL the evidence, and ran with all his falsehoods — even though he had been given the facts a full day before! How could that happen? And now, for 5 days, I have posted on my website, for all to see, every mistake and error he made.

You, on the other hand, in the face of this overwhelming evidence and a huge public backlash, have chosen to remain silent, probably praying and hoping this will all go away.

Well it isn’t. We are now going to start looking into the veracity of other reports you have aired on other topics. Nothing you say now can be believed. In 2002, the New York Times busted you for bringing celebrities on your shows and not telling your viewers they were paid spokespeople for the pharmaceutical companies. You promised never to do it again. But there you were, in 2005, talking to Joe Theismann, on air, as he pushed some drug company-sponsored website on prostate health. You said nothing about his affiliation with GlaxoSmithKline.

Clearly, no one is keeping you honest, so I guess I’m going to have to do that job, too. $1.5 billion is spent each year by the drug companies on ads on CNN and the other four networks. I’m sure that has nothing to do with any of this. After all, if someone gave me $1.5 billion, I have to admit, I might say a kind word or two about them. Who wouldn’t?!

I expect CNN to put this matter to rest. Say you’re sorry and correct your story — like any good journalist would.

Then we can get back to more important things. Like a REAL discussion about our broken health care system. Everything else is a distraction from what really matters.

Yours,
Michael Moore
mmflint@aol.com
www.michaelmoore.com

GENEVA: The situation for Iraqi children is getting worse and, in some respects, it was better before the war began, a senior U.N. official said Monday.

“Children today are much worse off than they were a year ago, and they certainly are worse off than they were three years ago,” said Dan Toole, director of emergency programs for the United Nations Children’s Fund. He said Iraqis no longer have safe access to a government-funded food basket, established under Saddam Hussein to deal with international sanctions.

Toole said conditions for women and children in Iraq had worsened significantly since the February 2006 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad, which triggered a wave of sectarian violence and displacement that continues today.

He added that gains made shortly after the U.S. toppled Saddam’s government in 2003, when people were able to move around the country freely and had access to food markets and health centers, had been lost.

“Nutritional indicators, health access indicators are all changing for the worse,” Toole said. He said recently published data showing improvement referred to the situation a couple of years ago and is outdated.

The system of government-sponsored handouts — set up by Saddam’s government to meet the basic needs of Iraqi citizens from 1991 to 2003, when the country was under U.N. sanctions — started to fall apart last year, Toole said.

Apart from shortages of items such as milk and baby milk formula, “the basic Iraqi food basket was fairly secure under the regime because there was food coming in and the government provided the food basket to its citizens,” he said.

Toole could not say whether malnutrition has worsened significantly but he said UNICEF was concerned by reports it has received from refugees fleeing the country.

Toole said that, because of the violence, mothers were too afraid to send their children to school or take them to health centers to get checkups and nutritional supplements.

While efforts are being made to maintain levels of immunization, particularly against measles and polio, UNICEF is worried about the possibility of a cholera epidemic because two-thirds of Iraqis lack clean water. A couple of cases of cholera have been reported in the south of Iraq but so far there has been no major outbreak, Toole said.

BAGHDAD, 16 July 2007 (IRIN) – For two months, Obeid Jaafar Khalifa, 52, has been worrying about how he will cope with looking after his deceased brother’s four children. Obeid already has six of his own children to look after.

“In total, I have to feed 10 children in addition to my wife and me,” said Khalifa, an employee at Iraq’s Agriculture Ministry. He took over responsibility for the children when a car bomb killed their parents five months ago.

The example of Khalil’s nephews highlights the plight of children orphaned by the violence in Iraq. The UN Children’s Agency (UNICEF) said in its update last week on the plight of Iraqi children that the number of war orphans was rising because of the high civilian death toll.

UNICEF is increasingly concerned that the number of vulnerable children in Iraq has outstripped the country’s capacity to care for them.

“Stressed to the limit”

“Families left to care for children who have lost one or both parents are already stressed to the limit, unable to cope with extra burdens. Many of Iraq’s skilled social workers have been leaving the country,” the report said.

Citing the UN’s civilian casualty figures for 2006 which indicate up to 100 civilian deaths per day, UNICEF said: “Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of children will have lost at least one parent. And if violence continues at current levels, even more will lose a parent in 2007.”

“Such children will be automatically deprived of their rights and are likely to fall into potentially harmful forms of labour,” said Kholoud Nasser Muhssin, a researcher on family and children’s affairs affiliated to the University of Baghdad.

“Some 60-70 percent of Iraqi children in Iraq are suffering from psychological problems and their future is not bright,” Muhssin said.

“Some lost their parents or one of their family members or relatives; others witnessed traumatic events or were subjected to sexual harassment,” Muhssin added.

Psychological toll

“Iraq’s conflict is taking an immense and unnoticed psychological toll on children and youth that will have long-term consequences,” said Bilal Youssif Hamid, a Baghdad-based child psychiatrist.

“The lack of resources means the social impact will be very bad and the coming generations, especially this one, will be aggressive,” Hamid added.

According to UNICEF, half of Iraq’s four million people who have fled their homes since 2003 are children. Many were killed inside their schools or playgrounds and gangs routinely kidnap children for ransom.

Since the beginning of this year, Hamid has treated 310 children and teenagers for psychological problems, most ranging in age from 6 to 16. In the past year he has seen about 750 cases.

WHO survey

Last year the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted a survey of 600 children aged 3-10 in Baghdad: 47 percent were found to have been exposed to a major traumatic event over the past two years.

Of this group, 14 percent showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. In a second study of 1,090 adolescents in the northern city of Mosul, 30 percent showed symptoms of the disorder.

“He reports that among those still being questioned, “11 were Jordanians; 64 Syrians; nine Saudis; two Algerians; six Moroccans; six Yemenis; two Libyans; 57 Palestinians; 284 Egyptians; 113 Sudanese, two Emiratis; three Lebanese and one Somali.”

06/28/07 “Huffington Post” — Today is a banner day for aficionados of the CIA. After a 15-year Freedom of Information Act struggle, the National Security Archive has finally forced the CIA to reveal the “family jewels” — a 702 page treasure trove of documents characterized in The New York Times as a “catalog of domestic wiretapping operations, failed assassination plots, mind-control experiments and spying on journalists.”

Whether or not you wade through the dense coverage of this frightening archive, we all need to keep our perspective on the role of the CIA in U.S. government activities. While the atrocities reported in the “family jewels” are certainly atrocious in their own right, they are actually a tiny corner of a larger history that includes all manner of crimes against humanity, from mayhem against individuals to full fledged state terrorism.

And there is one thing that the “family jewels” will not reveal: how this decades-long criminal history has impacted international politics. Here is a simple summary: most of the world’s current man-made disasters are in some way or another “blowback” from past crimes committed by the CIA and its brethren in the “intelligence,” “security,” or “defense” apparatuses of the United States government. Sadly, this includes (of course) the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, also the multiplex crises in the rest of the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, South Asia, East Asia and…wherever.

A good way to see this is to read Roger Morris’ beautifully presented history three part history of the CIA on TomDispatch, which focuses on the ways in which Secretary of Defense Robert Gates shaped and was shaped by his career in the CIA. I will repeat one example Morris’ comprehensive account that captures so much of the way in which the U.S. has created so much of the ugliness that currently disgraces our world.

This a story about Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia group that successfully fended off what American and Israeli military planners expected to be an overwhelming onslaught of air power, an onslaught that killed thousands, flattened whole cities, and compromised the Lebanon’s infrastructure.

Many of us remember that in 1983, during a previous crisis there, an American military barracks was bombed, killing 241 marines who were part of an international peacekeeping force sent there in 1982. That bombing was, as Morris tells the story “itself a bloody reprisal for earlier American acts of intervention and diplomatic betrayal in Lebanon’s civil war” which had been raging since 1975.

No one in the American intelligence community knew for sure (and no one knows to this day) who was actually responsible for the bombing, but CIA director William Casey decided nevertheless to undertake reprisals. He chose as his target a Shia cleric, Muhammad Husain Fadlallah, “because of his reputation for fiery sermons in favor of social justice and national independence — and because allied spy agencies — Israel’s Mossad, Saudi Arabia’s GID, and Phalangist informers — claimed he led a militant Shiite group that bore responsibility for the attack on the Marines.”

That was enough evidence for Casey to commission an attack on Fadlallah. It was also enough for his top deputy, Robert Gates, Head of the Directorate of Intelligence, and in charge of processing all the best information the Agency could gather. As the rumors of the coming attack on Fadlallah spread through the agency, Gates’ agents tried to warn him about the lack of evidence against the cleric (does this sound familiar?). Here is Morris’ story of their efforts:

“In our shop, we knew what Casey would be looking for in revenge for the barracks bombing and what the Israelis and Saudis were pushing,” related one analyst who would later become a senior Agency official. “We laid out all the unknowables and caveats and how we were being whipsawed [by allied spy agencies], and we sent it upstairs for Gates to give to Casey, and we recommended it be bootlegged to the NSC and White House and even to Defense if it came to that.”

When there was no sign that Gates had done anything with their warning, two of the analysts confronted the deputy director. “This is terrible,” one of them told him.

“We are not here to pick a fight with the boss,” Gates answered dismissively. “I’m not particularly concerned about some set-to in Lebanon.”

The CIA did not just try to assassinate Muhammad Husain Fadlallah. Instead the Agency carbombed his entire neighborhood with an explosion that was felt “miles away in the Chouf Mountains and well out in the Mediterranean.” Whether or not the cleric was the perpetrator, the message would be clear to all concerned: attacks on American marines would result in retribution against the whole offending community. It was, in short, an act of state terrorism. Eighty-one people were killed and over 200 wounded in the crowded impoverished Bir El-Abed neighborhood where Fadlallah lived. (Fadlallah himself was unhurt — he had been delayed arriving home that evening because he stopped on the street “to speak to an elderly woman.”)

“Study shows that white people are mean and uncaring”

That would have been my headline for a recent story from Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, which was reprinted on AlterNet, and reported an Ohio State University study of white people’s understanding of the black experience (AlterNet’s headline was “Whites Just Don’t Understand the Black Experience”). Curiously, the psychologists who conducted the research spun the data in exactly the opposite direction, and the conflicting interpretations tell us much about race relations in the United States.

The researchers found that whites more accurately assessed the burden of discrimination borne by a hypothetical minority group in a fictional country than they did in the specific case of black people’s experience in the contemporary United States. In the hypothetical, whites estimated that the minority group members (described in the same terms as black Americans) deserved $1 million in compensation, but when presented with the question in the context of black Americans, the median estimate was $10,000.

That result was not surprising, but I was taken aback by the conclusion one of the researchers drew:

“Our data suggest that such resistance is not because White Americans are mean and uncaring, morally bankrupt or ethically flawed. White Americans suffer from a glaring ignorance about what it means to live as a Black American.”

I think the data — along with all my experience both as a white person and someone who writes about white supremacy — suggests exactly the opposite:

White Americans are mean and uncaring, morally bankrupt and ethically flawed, because white supremacy has taken a huge toll on white people’s capacity to be fully human.

My reasoning is simple: Given all the data and stories available to us about the reality of racism in the United States, if at this point white people (myself included) underestimate the costs of being black it’s either because (1) we have made a choice not to know, or (2) we know but can’t face the consequences of that knowledge.

On #1: To choose not to know about the reality of a situation in which one is privileged in an unjust system is itself a moral failure. When a system is structured to benefit people who look like me, and I choose not to listen to the evidence of how others suffer in that system, I have effectively decided not to act by deciding not to know.

On #2: If I do know these things but am not willing to take meaningful action to undermine that unjust system, then my knowledge doesn’t much matter. Again, I have failed in moral terms.

In either case, white people have incentives to underestimate the costs of white supremacy, to avoid facing our moral failing. Rather than suggesting whites “suffer from a glaring ignorance about what it means to live as a Black American,” it’s more accurate to point out that we whites typically choose to turn away from (1) the information readily available to us, or (2) the consequences of the information we do possess.

Much the same argument could be made about men’s assessment of the cost of being female in a patriarchal culture; or the way in which affluent people view the working class and poor; or how U.S. citizens see the rest of the world. In each case, there’s a hierarchical system that allows some to live in privileged positions while consigning others to subordinate status. The systems are unjust, and hence the advantages for the privileged are unjust. There’s no shortage of data and stories available to those of us in the privileged positions if we want to struggle to understand the lived experience of those without those privileges. If we willing avoid learning about that experience, or we know about it but fail to organize politically to change those systems, then we are responsible for the systems’ continued existence.

So, is it too harsh to say that we white folks are mean? Uncaring? Morally bankrupt? Ethically flawed? What about men, the affluent, and U.S citizens?

My point is not to preach from on high. I happen to be a member of all four of those privileged groups: white and male, affluent relative to the vast majority of the world, and a U.S. citizen in a world dominated (for now) by a hyper-militarized United States. Because I have a job as a teacher that allows me to spend a lot of time acquiring information, I know a fair amount about the reality of all four of those systems of power: white supremacy, patriarchy, predatory corporate capitalism, and imperialism. As a result of that study and the privileges of my job, I spend a fair amount of time writing, speaking, and organizing as part of movements trying to undermine these systems.

But this doesn’t leaving me feeling particularly upbeat. The more I study and organize, the more I realize that the system of white supremacy is woven more deeply into this society — and, hence in some sense, into me — than I ever imagined. That leads me to a little thought experiment, a twist on the researchers’ study.

Imagine that you could line white people up in front of a door and get them to really believe that if they walked into a “race-changing room” they would emerge on the other side with black skin and an accent associated with blacks from the South. Then ask whites to set their price — the amount of money it would take them to agree to enter that room. Imagine there was an attendant there with stacks of cash, ready to hand money to the white folks. Just for fun, let’s say the cash award would be tax free. In that setting, when white people really had to face the possibility of being black — knowing all they know about the reality of life in white-supremacist America — what would the price be?

My guess is that a significant percentage of whites would not become black for any amount of money. I also am fairly confident that the median price set by the whites who might be willing to go into the room would be considerably more than $1 million.

In that moment of choice, which would get at the truth about white people think about being black, the problem wouldn’t be that we whites don’t know enough. We know plenty. The issue would be whether or not we had transcended the deeply rooted white supremacy of the culture. In that moment, we would find out about the depth of white people’s commitment to a color-blind society.

I applaud the researchers for devising a study that tries to get at these difficult realities. But we must not fall prey to the temptation to interpret data the way we wish the world were. In this world, we struggle to transcend 500 years of white supremacy. The more we struggle, the more we learn about just how difficult that is.

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. (July 15) – A Marine corporal testifying in a court-martial said Marines in his unit began routinely beating Iraqis after officers ordered them to “crank up the violence level.”

Cpl. Saul H. Lopezromo testified Saturday at the murder trial of Cpl. Trent D. Thomas.

“We were told to crank up the violence level,” said Lopezromo, testifying for the defense.

When a juror asked for further explanation, Lopezromo said: “We beat people, sir.”

Within weeks of allegedly being scolded, seven Marines and a Navy corpsman went out late one night to find and kill a suspected insurgent in the village of Hamandiya near the Abu Ghraib prison. The Marines and corpsman were from 2nd Platoon, Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Regiment.

Lopezromo said the suspected insurgent was known to his neighbors as the “prince of jihad,” and had been arrested several times and later released by the Iraqi legal system.

Unable to find him, the Marines and corpsman dragged another man from his house, fatally shot him, and then planted an AK-47 assault rifle near the body to make it appear he had been killed in a shootout, according to court testimony.

Four Marines and the corpsman, initially charged with murder in the April 2006 killing, have pleaded guilty to reduced charges and been given jail sentences ranging from 10 months to eight years. Thomas, 25, from St. Louis, pleaded guilty but withdrew his plea and is the first defendant to go to court-martial.

Lopezromo, who was not part of the squad on its late-night mission, said he saw nothing wrong with what Thomas did.

The one-word answer supplied in most news reports to this question is, of course, “Taliban”. It would be astonishing if this was all there was to it, so occasionally we get the admission that it includes other elements. For example, a UNAMA spokesperson says:

“The Taliban are not the only component of Afghanistan’s insurgency. There is factional fighting in parts of the country, insecurity caused by drug traffickers and those fighting because they have been intimidated or paid to do so … They all form important elements of this insurgency.

There is, of course, a way to put this that saves the basic underlying claim that anyone resisting the occupiers, in military or other ways, must have obscure and disreputable motives. The occupiers are innocent, everyone else is guilty until proven innocent. USA Today put it thus last year: “The insurgency is a loose alliance of Taliban guerrillas, followers of former prime minister and fundamentalist warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, al-Qaeda terrorists recruited from across the Islamic world, opium traffickers and local fighters whose murky motives are rooted in tribal politics.” Pro-occupation think-tanks like the Senlis Council and the International Crisis Group advise the occupiers to meet the grievances of the local population, who can thus be won away from supporting the insurgency. The Senlis Council’s report, focusing on Helmand, Kandahar and Nangarhar, describes a number of reasons why local populations are increasingly turning toward support for the insurgency, and thus putting local politicians under pressure to support it as well, and the main one is Dyncorp’s destruction of the opium farms of the poor (those belonging to the wealthy warlords are left well alone). Senlis has advocated legalising opium production for medicinal purposes There is a misperception that opium production is especially controlled by the Taliban. It is true that the biggest increase in product lately has been in Helmand – taking it to almost 70,000 hectares. But across the country, according to the UNODC, total production last year was 165,000 hectares. In those areas controlled by US-allied warlords, and for Afghanistan’s wealthy landlords more generally, opium production is a vital component of their continued control. Various commentators have suggested legalising opium production rather than destroying livelihoods, but this sort of misses the point: keeping it illegal makes it an excellent source of funds for covert action, and right now it is providing America’s allies in Afghanistan with enormous leverage over the country. In other words, the current war to secure a successful client regime relies on extirpating production that could generate revenue for the opposition, while leaving the resources of the ruling elite well alone. Indeed, billions of US dollars have been ploughed through the channels of a patrimonial state into the hands of the pro-American rentier elite. The “war on drugs” is what it has always been: a free-form, wide-ranging counterinsurgency campaign; meanwhile, the insurgency has, as a result of this, an element of class warfare, since what is now fuelling it, in part, is the misery of poor farmers being deprived of their means of livelihood, with massive starvation and misery, while the rich prosper.

So, then, perhaps we should also ask a question about who exactly the Taliban are. For, although we assume we know, Najib Manalai, an Afghan government adviser, insists that the Taliban are a very different kind of movement today: the Taliban are no longer a single group, one single entity. The Taliban, at first, were students — Afghan students who traditionally wanted to study theology. In the beginning, they were a group of Afghans who had very good intentions after five years of anarchy in Afghanistan — they just wanted to bring peace to Afghanistan. They were very popular. Then this movement was somehow hijacked by Pakistani intelligence services and by international terrorist groups. Now when we talk about the Taliban, we are talking about a kind of amalgam of different forces, such as people who are unhappy about government forces because they can’t find their place in the present confederation of Afghan policies; people who are committed to other interests — foreign interests, mainly from the Pakistani circle; and there are people with the fundamentalist ideology of the international Islamic movements. “The Taliban” is a composite of these components.

There is a great deal of euphemism in that. Afghanistan’s current polity is a sectarian one, which largely excludes Pashtuns (Karzai is in this respect a useful token). Recall that the initial success against the Taliban involved the ethnic cleansing of some 50,000 Pashtuns. But this sectarian dynamic is in part a result of the failure of the US to win Pashtun allies prior to the war beginning. They had tried with Abdul Haq, the anti-Taliban ‘moderate’ who had broken with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hizb e-Islami before fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan under the CIA-funded Yunus Khalis. But he wouldn’t follow orders and publicly criticised the bombing of the country. It was his aim to mobilise a domestic insurgency independently of the CIA and the ISI. One or the other of these two agencies leaked his plans to the Taliban during the bombing and ensured his death. At any rate, the US was only interested in pro-American Pashtun leaders, and could find precious few. As such they had to rely on the Northern Alliance with whom they started making a secret alliance in 1999. So, those who “can’t find their place in the present confederation of Afghan policies” are those who are being specifically excluded. The predominantly Pashtun Taliban regime was in fact more representative of the different ethnic groups than the current one. Aside from the various groups in the south, there is a growing insurgency in the north-west of the country, due to conflict with the warlords in government such as Ismail Khan, and the ridiculously brutal spate of Nato bombardment (apparently these recent massacres are the result of a deliberate policy shift).

Aside from the growing armed insurgency, there is of course an unarmed political opposition developing. The Taliban era was a desperate one, but this regime is hardly more progressive. Aside from the fairly serious matter of occupying troops rampaging through cities, airplanes lobbing bombs at villages, secret prisons, torture cells, kidnappings and so on, there is the small problem that the state built and the groups empowered by the occupiers are client despots. They murder and torture their enemies with impunity, and their police chiefs rape and extort. They steal taxes, bulldoze houses, steal land. Northern Alliance rulers kidnap people and ransom them back to their families with the pretense that they were Taliban arrestees. There is nothing the attorney general likes more than to lock up media workers who displease him. Critics like Malalai Joya are unwelcome (she has recently been suspended for the remainder of her term). The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice continues to operate. Reports last year that it would ‘return’ after a resolution passed by Karzai’s cabinet last year were misleading: the department, although now synonymous with Taliban terror, had actually originated under the US-recognised Rabbani regime, and continued under Karzai’s regime in various forms. The Vice and Virtue squads continued to operate in Kabul, warlords like Ismail Khan imposed the old regime, and Karzai’s ‘Accountability Department’ took over many of the roles of the department. In this respect, it is worth noting that, as NGO workers Chris Johnson & Jolyon Leslie point out in their widely praised Afghanistan: The Mirage of Peace, that the Taliban have been demonised out of all proportion. This isn’t simply an artefact of war propaganda, but in part a result of NGO misconceptions. Their repression, as brutal as it was, should not have been understood as simply an emanation of their own peculiar, reactionary ideology. It was rooted in the common social practises of the most conservative elements of society in Afghanistan, which fused with the conditions of war, and then civil war, to produce a militant war on ‘sin’ and ‘vice’ (with well-known, and savage punishments such as stonings and amputations). If you go back and have a look at the scholarly studies of Afghanistan during the rule of the Taliban, this is a frequent theme raised by the regime in justification for some of its worst policies (excluding girls from education for example). Nasreen Ghufran noted in Asian Survey in May 2001 that the regime’s claim was that it needed time to develop the correct environment for girls and women to be educated and work: it saw its model, ironically, as the Islamic Republic of Iran. Nevertheless, women’s struggles were able to exert some effects. As Jeanette O’Malley wrote in 2000: “In early June, supreme leader Mullah Omar issued an edict allowing for the expansion of mosque schools for young boys and girls. The mosque schools are apparently little more than a substitute acceptable to clerics and hard-line officials for state-run schools, as they offer the same curriculum.” NGO groups who worked in Afghanistan were able to set up schooling for girls by simply telling local Taliban officials that it was a mosque. The point is that the assumption that hardline religious and social conservatism was something that could be pinned exclusively on the Taliban has been at best a misguided one. Today, of course, the imposition of the burqa is still enforced even if not by edict. Women must now struggle against empowered warlords, who are given to raping women (and children) they like the look of. A recent study found that most women in Afghanistan suffer mental and physical abuse. So-called ‘honour killings’ continue, as do slavery and stonings.