by David Steven | Sep 18, 2007 | Conflict and security, Global system, Influence and networks, North America
Over at Foreign Policy, there’s an interesting debate about Pakistan’s army. Sameer Lalwani, a policy analyst at the New America Foundation (and a democracy promotion sceptic) kicks it off with a love letter to President Musharraf and the military:
Despite all the talk of elections and civilian rule, meaningful democracy will not emerge in Pakistan anytime soon, nor will the military abandon its grip on government. Pakistan’s military possesses much greater staying power than most U.S. analysts assume, and it will remain the most potent and important political institution in the country for the foreseeable future.
Lawlani disses Pakistan’s democratic pretenders, Nawaz Sharif (on whose abortive return from exile we blogged from Pakistan last week) and Benazir Bhutto (still manoeuvring towards a deal with Musharraf that could leave him President, her Prime Minister):
Far from building democratic institutions, their governments—bereft of competence and riddled with corruption—consistently undermined them. Bhutto was run out of the country for skimming millions off the top of government contracts; Sharif orchestrated the storming of the Supreme Court by street thugs as he was being tried for contempt. In an effort to efface their legacies, both former prime ministers are hoping to duck the legal charges that await them upon their return.
Lalawani’s piece has provoked an angry response from Benazir’s party – the PPP (the letter comes via their US public relations company):
True that democracy has been weak in Pakistan, largely because it has never been allowed to flourish in the country. The answer lies not in dictatorship but in more democracy. Every democratically elected official has been overthrown by the military, not out of the army’s sense of loyalty to the state, as Mr. Lalwani suggests, but because of the army’s thirst for power… The military regime has destroyed the very fabric of society for its political survival.
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by Alex Evans | Sep 9, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Influence and networks
Osama’s new video is worth watching / reading in full. He’s been reading Chomsky, and it shows. Multinational corporations figure heavily, and there’s even strong criticism of the US withdrawal from Kyoto.
Here’s the transcript:
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by David Steven | Jul 30, 2007 | Conflict and security
According to Wesley Clark, in the weeks following 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld was hoping to “take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, [with] Iran.”
Clark’s account in full:
About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”
by Alex Evans | May 2, 2007 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development
US chat show presenter Jon Stewart’s recent interview with Senator John McCain (here) is interesting for what it says about US perceptions of statebuilding and peace support operations. Towards the end of an interview focused almost entirely on Iraq, Stewart gets one of the bigger audience rounds of applause of the night when he asks McCain with a rhetorical flourish:
How do you quell a civil war when it’s not your country?
Now, what’s really at issue in this debate is not so much the tactics of peacekeeping or peacemaking (though heaven knows the US has made an appalling hash of both in Iraq) nor even the exigencies of immediate post-conflict reconstruction (ditto), but a much longer term set of questions about what external actors can hope to achieve on governance in developing countries. What it really comes down to is this: can donors build effective states?
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by Elizabeth Sellwood | Apr 27, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa
Condoleezza Rice, in an interview with the Financial Times this week, was invited to reflect on the dilemmas of promoting democracy in the Middle East. Would the Bush administration continue to push for democratic elections, Rice was asked, even though it was now having to deal with elected militias in Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine? Rice was unequivocal: every time, she said, she would choose “elections and democracy, even if it brings to power people that we don’t like.” She has been consistent on this point: in September 2005, Rice was asked about Hamas’s participation in the forthcoming Palestinian elections. She argued then that while “you cannot have an armed option within the democratic process”, it was also important to recognise that the Palestinian political process was “in transition”: “we have to give the Palestinians some room for the evolution of their political process”.
Since Hamas won, the US has taken a number of measures to influence the Palestinian political situation and to change the government’s policies. The US and its partners in the Quartet issued a statement that in the Quartet’s view, “all members of a future Palestinian government must be committed to non-violence, recogition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations, including the Road Map.” US officials immediately ceased contact with all Palestinian government officials, and terminated funding to all PA government-administered projects. The US Treasury imposed restrictions on private banks dealing with the PA. At the same time, funding and support to the office of President Mahmoud Abbas, to the security services that report to him, and to his Fatah party, continued or increased. (more…)
