Another bombing in Afghanistan has lead to civilian deaths.

Western air strikes sparked fresh controversy in Afghanistan on Wednesday as NATO said a bombing killed eight civilians and the US military estimated that up to 30 villagers died in an attack this month.

NATO soldiers on patrol in the southern province of Helmand on Tuesday came under attack from about 25 insurgents, the alliance’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said.

“Finding it difficult to extract themselves from this dangerous situation, ISAF troops resorted to calling for close air support,” it said. A plane dropped a bomb. “Tragically, it is believed that eight civilians were killed as a result of the air strike,” it said.

ISAF accused the attackers of sheltering among the civilian population.
The soldiers “were not aware that the insurgents were once again using civilians as human shields,” the statement said. “If this information had been known by ISAF troops, no ordnance would have been used.”

The ongoing war in Afghanistan has been in progress for many years nows and it is not clear when it will end, partially because it is not clear what the end goals is. The initial invasion was to overthrow the Taliban Government which was providing refuge for Al-Qaida. Since then there doesn’t appear to be clarity over the aims of the war. Is it to ensure Afghanistan women can attend schools? To create a functioning liberal democracy in Afghanistan? To eradicate poppy growing?

It is sometimes difficult to evaluate actions in Afghanistan because all the battles seem to be against the ‘Taliban’, yet one gets the sense that the term Taliban is used to describe any forces fighting western troops, even when they are simply Pashtun fighters opposing forces invading their homeland.

The border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan are home to millions of ethnic Pashtun who have traditional fought any foreign forces invading their homeland, whether they be British, Soviet or US forces. What is the war aim regarding the Pashtun tribes? Can they be subdued by force? If the desire is to bring them around to a more pro-western, or at least neutral position, then using force seems to be the wrong way of going about it.

It is this lack of clarity that makes assessing the war in Afghanistan so difficult. However, Graham Fuller, a former CIA chief in Kabul has written evaluated the situation with admirable clarity in an article for the Huffington Post. His main points are:

– Military force will not win the day in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint.

– The Taliban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taliban — like them or not — as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in 2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the end, the Taliban are probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist.

– It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The “Durand Line” is an arbitrary imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. And there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan. The struggle of 13 million Afghan Pashtuns has already inflamed Pakistan’s 28 million Pashtuns.

– India is the primary geopolitical threat to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Pakistan must therefore always maintain Afghanistan as a friendly state. India furthermore is intent upon gaining a serious foothold in Afghanistan — in the intelligence, economic and political arenas — that chills Islamabad.

– Pakistan will therefore never rupture ties or abandon the Pashtuns, in either country, whether radical Islamist or not. Pakistan can never afford to have Pashtuns hostile to Islamabad in control of Kabul, or at home.

– Occupation everywhere creates hatred, as the U.S. is learning. Yet Pashtuns remarkably have not been part of the jihadi movement at the international level, although many are indeed quick to ally themselves at home with al-Qaida against the U.S. military.

– The U.S. had every reason to strike back at the al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan after the outrage of 9/11. The Taliban were furthermore poster children for an incompetent and harsh regime. But the Taliban retreated from, rather than lost, the war in 2001, in order to fight another day. Indeed, one can debate whether it might have been possible — with sustained pressure from Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and almost all other Muslim countries that viewed the Taliban as primitives — to force the Taliban to yield up al-Qaida over time without war. That debate is in any case now moot. But the consequences of that war are baleful, debilitating and still spreading.

– The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a direct consequence of the U.S. war raging on the Afghan border. U.S. policy has now carried the Afghan war over the border into Pakistan with its incursions, drone bombings and assassinations — the classic response to a failure to deal with insurgency in one country. Remember the invasion of Cambodia to save Vietnam?

– The deeply entrenched Islamic and tribal character of Pashtun rule in the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan will not be transformed by invasion or war. The task requires probably several generations to start to change the deeply embedded social and psychological character of the area. War induces visceral and atavistic response.

– Pakistan is indeed now beginning to crack under the relentless pressure directly exerted by the U.S. Anti-American impulses in Pakistan are at high pitch, strengthening Islamic radicalism and forcing reluctant acquiescence to it even by non-Islamists.

From this it is not clear that there is an easy way forward with Afghanistan. All these aspects of the situation mean that it may not be possible to impose a liberal democracy in Afghanistan.

However the one tool the US does have is a powerful military, and they are using that in Afghanistan. But that does not mean it is the right tool. The way forward should be to recognise the cultural and political situation in Afghanistan and realise that we will not create a democracy by bombing villages. We must accept more limited aims, work work with the local culture, not against it, and find a way forward that involves more humanitarian work and less bombing of civilians.

The news today reported on the rescue of an American merchant seaman who was being held by Somali pirates (see for example, this Washington Post article).

The interesting dimension in the Somali pirate story is that it is still occurring at this time after so many resources have been directed to the issue. Somali pirates have been operating of the coast of Somalia for some time, this is a prime location as there is a large traffic of cargo ships travelling past Somalia as they exit from the Suez Channel and relating ports around the Gulf.

Countries from around the world, developed and developing, have sent naval ships to the ocean off of Somali to counter the pirates, and while we will see occasional stories of triumph overall this naval surge does not appear to be that successful. It is not difficult to see why. The sea area around Somalia is vast, dotted with merchant ships travelling too and fro and also seething with Somali fishing vessels, some of which may contain pirates.

Arrayed against this are relatively few large industrial strength warships, primarily designed for high-intensity modern naval warfare. Some are armed with enough cruise missiles to level a Somali town, but perfectly useless for catching pirates.

And it has always been this way. When the United States had problems with Barbary pirates from North Africa capturing United States ships in the Mediterranean at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries they launched two wars against the Barbary nations, landing and fighting in Tripoli and other North African ports (1801-1815).

The way to defeat pirates is to remove the safe havens they have on land, not to try and intercept them in the endless oceans.

The implications of this however, for the Somali situation are too terrible for many to contemplate. Somalia is a “failed state”, and one in which the United States intervened for humanitarian reasons, only to have the soldiers killed by warlords in desperate gun battles in the narrow streets of Mogidishu (see Black Hawk Down). Bill Clinton rapidly removed the American forces, and I doubt any President is likely to wish to go down that road again.

With the most effective response closed off, it will be interesting to see how affected nations adapt to the Somali pirate threat and if their military forces, and in particular their navies, are able to come up with a strategy the uses all their high-tech equipment to defeat a low tech opponent for which the were never designed to.

An imaginary conversations between a US citizen and a Cuban citizen:

American citizen (AC): Cuba is an despotic country that locks up dissidents.

Cuban citizen (CC): Yes but it does not lock up very many.

AC: it still has over 200 dissidents imprisoned in Cuba.

CC: Well yes, but America has over 270 detainees locked up in Guantanamo Bay.

AC: Yes but they are unlawful combatants, maybe even terrorists.

CC: What about the rest of the prison system, America has 2.5m people incarcerated, one per hundred adults.

AC: Yes but they are criminals.

CC: So we have 270 dissidents locked up, but you have one in every hundred adults locked up, either you unfairly lock them up, or your capitalist system has generated a massive underclass of criminals. It is bad either way.

From this I am not attempting to draw a complete moral equivalence between the US and Cuba. However I am trying to demonstrate that the moral stance of an individual can be, and usually is, influenced by the culture in which it occurs.

You don’t pay attention too much over the weekend, and a country gets invaded by Russia.

Over the last few days the simmering tensions in the break away Georgian region of South Ossetia broke into outright hot war.

The region has declared itself independent since 1993, although on the map it has been part of Georgia, although after the fall of the Soviet Union the newly created country of Georgia has never had the capability to do much about it.

Russia has claimed to support the people of South Ossetia, and has had peacekeeping troops in the province.

This changed when the Georgian military launched an offensive last Thursday. I suspect that they thought that they could pull it off without Russian intervention. This was certainly the opinion of Douglas Muir over at ‘A Fistful of Euros’ who argued:

That last point bears emphasizing. There’s just one road, and it goes through a tunnel. There are a couple of crappy roads over the high passes, but they’re in dreadful condition; they can’t support heavy equipment, and are closed by snow from September to May. Strategically, South Ossetia dangles by that single thread.
So, there was always this temptation: a fast determined offensive could capture Tsikhinvali, blow up or block the tunnel, close the road, and then sit tight. If it worked, the Russians would then be in a very tricky spot: yes, they outnumber the Georgians 20 to 1, but they’d have to either drop in by air or attack over some very high, nasty mountains. This seems to be what the Georgians are trying to do: attack fast and hard, grab Tsikhinvali, and close the road.

They seem to have underestimated the size and power of the Russian response, as Robert Farley reported over at ‘Lawyers, Guns and Money’ the Russians managed to move 650 armoured vehicles into South Ossetia, more than that possessed by the entire Georgian military. In addition CNN have been reporting Russian plans bombing the capital of Georgia.

Obviously things have not turned out well for Georgia, which was a one stage angling for membership of NATO. But the bigger message here is the willingness of Russia to go to war with its neighbours. This was not a police action, but a full scale invasion of another country. Russia is regaining its mojo after the fall of the Soviet Union, and I don’t think anything good can come of it.

During the recent debates about greenhouse gases statements have been made about not making an effort on greenhouse gases before large emitters like China and India make some effort.

Of course, China and India are large greenhouse emitters because they are large countries, each with around a billion inhabitants. This is largely due to arbitrary political boundaries, if we look at the India State of Kerala (just as valid a unit of analysis) we would get a different picture for its 31m inhabitants.

Thus the best thing to do is look at emissions per person. Any sensible global scheme for stabilising the emission of greenhouse gases would involve a standard emission target per person across the world. Any alternative, such as allowing US citizens higher emissions than allowed in India or China would be a pretty hard argument to put forward.

So in this context how does the argument that we should not take any action before India and China do stack up?

Information on emissions per person is available on this Wikipedia page.

The data a bit old, from 2000, but serves the purpose.

The emissions for Australia are 25.9 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per person, for the United States it is 22.9 tonnes per person.

In China 3.9 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per person and in India it is 1.8 tonnes.

China and India are way below developed countries levels of emissions.

The emission reductions required in the developed world are so far in advance of what the developing countries need to achieve. We need to get started way before them if we are going to achieve our objective, and it is not necessary or practicable to wait for them before undertaken to reduce developed world emission.

BONUS POINT:

My understanding of the global warming issue is that it a very significant environmental disaster confronting us. The whole “waiting for India and China” negotiating strategy must by definition be based around an argument that if agreement is not reached we will just abandon attempts to reduce emissions and let global warming occur. This “waiting” argument seems to equate global warming more with an argument about whether to go down to the shops to get some milk, rather than a massive environmental disaster where if we all don’t start bailing soon the entire ship is going to sink. In that circumstance it is not in the best interest of anyone to sit around saying “you start bailing first”, “no you!” Just grab a bucket and get at it!

As stated in this Canadian National Post article, a group in Quebec is advocating the banning of the Hijab by teachers in public schools (the Hijab is the item of Islamic dress that covers the hair and neck, but does not obscure the face). As the article states:

The Quebec Council on the Status of Women, a 20-member body that advises the government on issues relating to women, is urging the province to force public employees to remove visible religious signs when they are on the job. Aside from large Christian crosses, Sikh turbans and Jewish yarmulkes, these also include the hijab, a veil that generally covers the hair and neck, and the more controversial niqab, which covers the face, leaving only the eyes exposed. The council argues that equality between men and women trumps religious freedoms, and that the symbols oppress.

I have always found this debate interesting and consider that the answer to these issues are not at all straight-forward, as they deal with the intersection of two different kind of rights, the right to self expression and freedom of religion, and the right to freedom from oppression.

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On The Religion Report on 3 October (I am a bit behind on my podcasts) they covered the Burma uprising. their guest, an ex-budhist monk from the US (Alan Clements ) said:

I think they’ve obliterated the democracy movement as we’ve known it for the last 19 years. I received reports today perhaps like a lot of people in the world, who follow the BBC, ABC, CBS, so on and so forth, of 15 monasteries in Rangoon alone, according to US Embassy officials, had been ‘emptied’… So it sounds like the democracy movement was not only quelled and violently suppressed but it’s been obliterated at this point by this regime.

If this is true it is a sad day for Burma. I think it also highlights just how much protest/revolutionary movements are a necessary but not sufficient condition for regime change in oppressed countries. The ones who decide whether a regime is going to change are not the protesters themselves (although they are the catalyst). The ones who decide if the regime is going to change are the military – the one who control the use of violence.
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