[DAWN] A PLACARD denouncing the US is hardly a novelty in most parts. But when it is hoisted aloft at a protest in Kabul ...the capital of Afghanistan. Home to continuous fighting from 1992 to 1996 between the forces of would-be strongman and Pak ISI/Jamaat-e-Islami sock puppet Gulbuddin Hekmayar and the Northern Alliance, a period which won Hek the title Most Evil Man in the World and didn't do much for the reputations of the Northern Alliance guys either.... against the stoning to death of a woman in Afghanistan and reads "Ignorant Taliban are the mercenaries of Pakistain and America", it indicates that more is wrong with US policy in Afghanistan than many Americans appreciate.
While the US has been rightly accused of many errors in Afghanistan in the war it has fought against the Afghan Taliban and in its support for an inclusive Afghan state and society, it is troubling for American policymakers that they have not convinced Afghan civil society that the US stands with them against the Taliban.
That is the only real measure of a counter-insurgency -- you cannot lose the very people whose goodwill you are fighting for. Perhaps the protest placard is a sign of fresh divisions in a state and society that is worried about the potential collapse of the post-Bonn Afghanistan and that blames the US for its seemingly soft approach on the Taliban now.
What is undeniable is that yet again the lack of foresight in American policy has ended up poisoning relations with the people of a country that it is US policy to support.
While the US may have belatedly -- and rightly -- corrected its approach on the Taliban, the Afghans are likely to resent the change of heart. This paper has long argued that it was a mistake to exclude the Afghan Taliban from the national political settlement in Bonn after their 2001 overthrow.
Similarly, it took long for the US to accept that a political settlement between the government and the Taliban was the viable option for stability.
That the US only now has come around to this point of view -- when US political considerations made the continuation of a large-scale war effort in Afghanistan untenable -- has underlined the fecklessness of American foreign policy.
Pakistain, too, has made many mistakes and there is still ambiguity in state policy towards Afghanistan. But when the American superpower errs, it has lasting consequences.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/09/2015 00:00 ||
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"they have not convinced Afghan civil society that the US stands with them against the Taliban."
I am not convinced there is such a thing as an "Afghan civil society". The closest thing is Afghani Islam, and its essential ingredient seems to be hatred of armed infidels anywhere on Afghan territory. There wasn't much to work with. Still isn't.
American cities are currently experiencing continuous outbreaks of violence and arson in the wake of disputed police shootings by white officers of African-Americans. The violent protests purport to be inspired by the desire to save black lives, but, in the end, as history has well taught us, these destructive uprisings will take the lives of more blacks than those they allegedly seek to save.
Meanwhile, in the West African country of Mauritania, a fearless but unknown anti-slavery activist, Biram Dah Ould Obeid, is going to prison for the next three years. A black African, he has saved more black lives than all the rioters and race hucksters in America put together. But Dah Obeid has never destroyed any property, started any fires or assaulted anyone for his cause. So what is his “crime”? He peacefully protested against the obscenity of Islamic slavery and Arab racism that scar his nation.
Dah Obeid, whose father was a slave, had his appeal to dismiss his three-year prison sentence turned down earlier this month by a Mauritanian court. He was arrested with two aides last November for holding an anti-slavery demonstration. Convicted on spurious charges in January, he received a three-year prison sentence. The two aides also received jail terms and had their appeals turned down as well.
“The intensification of the crackdown on anti-slavery activists has no legal justification in a country which ironically just this month adopted a new law indicating slavery is a crime against humanity,” said Alouine Tine, an Amnesty International official, about the unsuccessful appeals.
Mauritania’s black African population has great need for such dauntless and courageous human rights fighters like Dah Obeid. In 2013, the Global Slavery Index ranked Mauritania the number one slave state in the world, the West African nation having been the last country to outlaw slavery in 1981. Slave ownership was criminalized only in 2007 and declared a crime against humanity just this month.
But Mauritanian and foreign human rights NGOs have called these decrees simply “window-dressing,” adopted for foreign consumption. Since 2007, for example, only one slave owner has been successfully prosecuted.
Mauritania’s slaves are all black Africans and their owners are Arabs or Berbers, called “whites,” who constitute about 20 percent of the population. Both slaves and masters are Muslim.
The “whites,” like Mauritania’s president, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, make up almost all of Mauritania’s political, business and military elite class that controls the country. And therein lays the problem. It is very difficult to get the elite class that makes the laws to take any meaningful action against slavery when many of them are reported to own slaves themselves. But this inaction is also based on a pronounced, anti-black racism that African-American writer Samuel Cotton noticed when he travelled to Mauritania in the 1990s to explore the slavery issue.
“The problem is that Mauritania’s Arabs sincerely believe that blacks are born to be slaves,” wrote Samuel Cotton in his book Silent Terror: A Contemporary Journey Into Contemporary African Slavery. “They believe that a black man, woman or child’s place in life is to serve an Arab, and does not matter whether that black is a Christian, or a fellow Muslim.”
Another problem is that slave owners also believe they are doing nothing illegal. The Prophet Muhammad owned slaves and Islam’s legal code, Sharia law, justifies the practice. The eminent scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, wrote that “…the institution of slavery is not only recognized but is elaborately regulated by Sharia law.”
“This is state racism that has become institutionalized, that has caused pogroms, purges, murdering of the black population…,” Dah Obeid said in a speech at the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Summit in Geneva last year. (The Mauritanian abolitionist was a recipient of the UN’s Human Rights Prize in New York in 2013.)
Here's a little reminder for anyone who doesn't believe that what the left really wants is a totalitarian state in which opposition to its agenda is a crime.
New York's Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is extreme even by left-wing standards. He's a radical who ran by promising that violent racist thug Al Sharpton would have an "annex" in Albany if he won.
Now Schneiderman and a few left-wing congressmembers have come up with a great idea. Charge Exxon with securities fraud for not "disclosing" the risks of Global Warming.
Whether on not any charges happen, this is a foot in the door for an agenda list that goes well beyond Global Warming.
After energy companies that aren't paying protection money to Al Gore, gun manufacturers can be hit with charges for not "disclosing the risks" of gun violence. Private prisons can be hit for not disclosing the risks of failing to back sentencing reforms. Educational companies can be hit with charges for not disclosing the risks of not adopting Common Core.
Basically any company that disagrees with a left-wing policy can be hit with civil and criminal charges. It helps if the company, like Exxon, at one point employed kooks who claimed the sky was falling. But that just makes the case easier. If the executives disagree with a left-wing policy, it's securities fraud.
Under this standard, it becomes child's play to cut off conservative organization from any corporate funding. Furthermore, conservative organizations would be muzzled by extension. Funding organizations and people that dissent from the left would be "fraud". Because that is what this is really about.
Global Warming is the testbed for making leftist ideology mandatory. Manufacture a fake consensus, then use the law to make it mandatory.
Then there can be a pseudo-scientific consensus on a variety of issues, such as the need for higher taxes, and a crackdown on anyone who disagrees.
Since there's money in pursuing charges like this, and since the best way to get the left off your back is to give their political allies money, this is robbery for tyranny. And that's how the left does business.
This is where the left has always been headed. This is a totalitarian movement
[DAWN] LAST week didn't go too well for Bloody Karachi ...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It is among the largest cities in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous... 's traffic police. Monday started with the news that the department had decided to roll up its sleeves and try to do something -- anything -- about the city's nightmarish traffic situation. Remedies must obviously match the scale of a problem, and the tangles on the roads of this city are of legendary proportions. So, the measures announced were severe enough to literally instil fear: anyone caught driving without a licence, said the authorities, would be jugged I ain't sayin' nuttin' widdout me mout'piece! and incarcerated I ain't sayin' nuttin' widdout me mout'piece! for up to a month.
One may pause here to spare a thought for the hundreds of traffic coppers who must have gone to work that day; no doubt they had an unaccustomed spring in their stride as they pondered the rosy thought of finally having in their arsenal a tool with which to counter at least some of the drivers who plague them on a daily basis. Not just do drivers flout the law with impunity, they often seem to take positive pleasure in the traffic coppers's discomfiture. Anyone who has noticed the manner in which these poor souls often actually jump into the path of a moving vehicle in order to get the driver to obey the red light could not argue otherwise.
It's a pity, then, that the result of this move was a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. They probably did catch a few people without licences because the numbers are certainly on their side: according to the records of the Motor Vehicle Inspection and Driving Licence Branch of the Capital City Police, Karachi, only 1.2 million licences have been issued, against the 3.8 million registered vehicles plying the city roads. Even allowing for persons who hold licences issued in another city, this implies that there be thousands of people who don't have one.
Within hours, though, a more urgent problem started to emerge. Anxious to avoid the strong arm of the law, people flooded the offices that issue licences; the rush was so great that the system broke down. Over the next couple of days, the drive was suspended twice and then altogether, and it was announced that new branches would be opened for the issuance of the documents.
The experience illustrates the fact that if Pakistain's traffic problems are to be addressed, it can only be done through a cohesive, multi-pronged and creatively thought-out strategy -- possibly even sets of strategies. Consider, for example, what the traffic police in different cities themselves say on official websites about the challenges.
One major problem seems to be the state of disrepair or poor engineering of the roads in many places. Another is the mix of vehicles, from donkey- and hand-carts to container trucks and tankers. The Lahore police blame car-leasing, too, correctly to some extent: one of the fascinating figures I came across in last week's driving licence debacle is the fact that a little over 900 new, private vehicles are added to the roads of Karachi every single day.
There is evidence that rectification can be achieved, though. In fact, like many other things in Pakistain, the frustrating thing is not that the problems are intractable, but that here and there officialdom figures it out, and then either promptly forgets the solution or fails to replicate it -- as though having demonstrated piecemeal success were enough.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/09/2015 00:00 ||
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[Ynet] The tools used by European officials to deal with Israel belong to the days when the Middle East was stable and the Jewish state was perceived as a problem. But now, as millions of Muslims are moving towards the continent, Israel is actually the solution, or at least part of it.
One of the governments in Libya (there are a few) warned the European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... this week that if it won't recognize it, it will send hundreds of thousands of additional Muslim migrants towards Europe: "We'll rent boats and transfer them too."
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[Legal Insurrection] Moshe Halbertal is a law professor at New York University, and Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Hebrew University in Israel. He lectures widely on the ethics of war, particularly asymetric war of the type Israel faces. Excellent presentation on terrorism and asymmetric warfare.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Legal Insurrection] Moshe Halbertal is a law professor at New York University, and Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Hebrew University in Israel. He lectures widely on the ethics of war, particularly asymetric war of the type Israel faces.
