Global News Journal

from Photographers Blog:

A tribute to journalist and colleague Sabah al-Bazee

Reuters correspondent Peter Graff in Baghdad writes following the death of journalist Sabah al-Bazee:

For those of us who work in the Baghdad bureau, it is always a shock to look back through the collected photos of one of our Iraqi colleagues. We think we are used to those old scenes. But seen one after another, the images compiled over eight years of carnage by a single journalist like Sabah al-Bazee still have the power to freeze your blood.

There’s a photo that Sabah took showing the bodies of a family killed during a botched U.S. military raid on their home in 2005. Three small children wrapped in blankets, who look almost like they are sleeping, snuggled with their parents, their faces pale and lifeless in the dust.

The first word that colleagues around our office were using on Tuesday to describe Sabah, who died in an attack in his home town of Tikrit, was “enthusiastic”. The second, heard from several and meant as a sincere compliment, was “almost childlike”.

Like many of our Iraqi colleagues, he was young. Just 23 or so when he started taking pictures of war for a living. He had boundless energy, constantly pestering our reporters, photographers and cameramen for tips at how to hone his skills. How do you square that boisterousness with the bone-chilling images he photographed over the seven years he worked for us?

from FaithWorld:

A review of Christian-Muslim conflict and a modest proposal to counter it

At a Christian-Muslim conference in Geneva this week, participants agreed to build a network for "peace teams" to intervene in crises where religious differences are invoked as the cause of the dispute. The idea is that religious differences may not be the real problem in a so-called religious conflict, but rather a means to mobilise the masses in a dispute that actually stems from political or economic rivalries.

If outside experts could help disentangle religion from the other issues, the argument goes, that could help neutralise religion's capacity to mobilise and inflame, in the hope of leading to a de-escalation of the crisis.

Is this idealistic? Maybe. However, given the number of crises throughout the world that have religion factored into the equation, it certainly seems worth the effort. Many of these conflicts are not simply battles between religious fanatics, as they may be presented, but calculated agitation by one group against another, usually for political or economic advantage. Some smokescreens are easy to see through, others almost impenetrable.

In his speech to the conference, Jordanian Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal sketched out the problem facing religious experts who undertake such peace missions.  "Before considering what to do and how to do it, we are faced with a series of complex social, political and religious puzzles which we must fully understand in order not to make things worse," he said.

He then offered a brief tour d'horizon of Christian-Muslim tension and conflict in the world.  It's not complete and readers may disagree on specific points (that's what the Comments section below is for!), but it's a useful overview worth posting verbatim to highlight the problems and invite debate on them.

Ghazi said there are:

• "places where Christians are clearly severely oppressed by Muslims (such as Pakistan, Iraq and Sudan), and places where Muslims are clearly severely oppressed by Christians (such as the Philippines);

from Afghan Journal:

Is the surge failing in Afghanistan?

(Afghan women in a car in Kandahar province. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis)

Six months into the surge in Afghanistan, Americans and Afghans alike are asking the question whether it has worked and the ugly reality is that it has failed to make a difference, writes Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post.

To be sure, as U.S. President Barack Obama said last week only half the reinforcements he ordered in December have arrived and there is still more than a year to go before the troop withdrawals begin.

But comparisons with Iraq - America's other war - are hard to push away and they don't look good at all. Diehl says five months into the Iraq surge in 2007, sectarian violence was dropping, Sunni tribes were turning against al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government was delivering on its promises.

Afghanistan, in contrast, is a failure on all these counts. Violence has gone up and it cannot just be because more troops have been deployed in new areas and there is more fighting. As we wrote earlier, there were 400 attacks in one week in April, a majority of them roadside bombs.

On Tuesday, the Taliban struck in heavily-guarded Kabul, killing 18 people including six foreign troops  in a suicide attack on a NATO convoy. It was the biggest loss for NATO since September and the deadliest attack in the capital since a February raid.

from Afghan Journal:

U.S. troop numbers in Afghanistan set to overtake Iraq

(On patrol in Kandahar province. Reuters/Jonathon Burch)

At some point this month or early June, the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan will outnumber those in Iraq, writes Michael E. O 'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution. It's an artificial milestone but it is worth noting because it tells you a good deal about the two wars and where the United States stands in each.

The cross-over is also a measure of how big and rapid has the shift been in America's military power toward Afghanistan since President Barack Obama took office last year promising to bring the troops home.

There are currently around 90,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and just under 100,000 in Iraq. The United States is adding roughly 2,000 more troops each month in Afghanistan as part of a build-up to beat back a resurgent Taliban while drawing down more than 5,000 from Iraq.

By the end of the summer, the troop strength in Afghanistan will hit 100,000 while the number in Iraq would have fallen to half of that. It's a dramatic shift since Obama was inaugurated as U.S. president in January last year when there were just 35,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

The casualty count from the two wars also tells you about which is the hotter theatre, perhaps in part also because more troops mean more fighting.  U.S. casualties in Afghanistan are greater than Iraq by a ratio of roughly 5 to 1, and that imbalance will likely increase over the course of the year, says O'Hanlon.

from Afghan Journal:

Burying the Powell doctrine in Afghanistan

A U.S. soldier in Helmand. Picture by Shamil Zhumatov)

Early this month Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivered what military experts are saying was the final nail in the coffin of  the Powell doctrine, a set of principles that General Colin Powell during his tenure as chairman laid out for the use of military force. A key element was that the military plan should employ decisive and overwhelming force in order to achieve a rapid result. A clear exit strategy must be thought through right from the beginning and the use of force must only be a last resort, Powell said, the experience of Vietnam clearly weighing on him.

U.S. military involvement overseas has deviated far from those principles since then but Mullen finally finished it off, according to Robert Haddick in this piece for Foreign Policy. The United States is faced with low-level warfare and the public must accept it as a way of life. The question no longer is whether to use military force; America's enemies whether in Afghanistan or Iraq or Yemen have settled that issue, ensuring it remains engaged in conflict. The question is how should it use its vast power.

The nature of the threat from irregular warfare is such that it would often make more sense for the United States to turn to use of military force as a first option, according to the new Mullen doctrine. And you don't need to assemble an armada before going in, as Powell did for Operation Desert Storm. You need to be precise and principled.

Last week another one of Powell's principles came under withering attack and this goes directly to the heart of the issue of nation-building that the United States has been faced with in Afghanistan and Iraq after invading these countries.  Powell said America had a  moral obligation to countries it got militarily involved in, a sort of a "Pottery Barn rule" which meant  "you break it, you own it."

Bernard Finel, a senior fellow at the America Security Project, rejects the Pottery Barn rule saying that while the U.S. must launch quick decisive operations in third countries,  it must not get subsequently involved in an open-ended military occupation.  In short, the U.S. military  must play to its strengths and not fight the asymmetric war that its adversaries want it to, as it has discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

from Afghan Journal:

Terror index: Iraq down, but Afghanistan and Pakistan red-hot

A U.S.military convoy in southern Afghanistan

Iraqis  are voting today for a new parliament and despite the bombings in the run-up to the election, the over-all trend is down, according to the Brookings Institution. Not so in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theatre, America 's other war, which remains red-hot according to a country index that the Washington-based thinktank  puts out for Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The index is a statistical compilation of economic, puiblic opinion and security data.

It's quite instructive just to look at the numbers in the three  countries. Weekly violent incidents in Iraq are  about 90 percent less frequent than in the months just before the surge.  Violent deaths from the vestiges of war are in the range of 100 to 200 civilians a month, meaning that mundane Iraqi crime is probably now a greater threat to most citizens than politically-motivated violence, Brookings says in its latest update.

Afghanistan is a different story. In terms of raw violence, the situation is at a historic worst level, with early 2010 levels of various types of attacks much higher than even last year at this time. Some of it is because of the offensive in Marjah in Helmand province and the deployment of U.S. and Afghan troops to parts of the country where they were previously not present,  triggering a militant response.

By way of comparison, the rate of attacks in Afghanistan countrywide is now more than double the level seen in Iraq, the Brookings data shows. The number of civilian deaths is similar, though, mostly because the militants in Afghanistan target security forces  more than civilians. A renewed drive by  U.S. and NAT'O commander General Stanley McChyrstal to adjust war strategy to avoid civilian deaths at all costs may also be making a difference.

Pakistan presents a similar picture  in terms of recent  trends and dynamics, the index shows. "Viewing all the data, the bottom line is continued improvement in Iraq, and more fighting in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater," Brookings said summing up the results of study.

Did I hear ‘freedom fries’? – France says Iran is no Iraq

February 2003. Anti-French sentiment sweeps across the United States. President George W. Bush and his top aides can barely contain their irritation at the French government for undermining U.S.-led efforts to get the U.N. Security Council to authorize the impending invasion of Iraq. With the aid of Germany and Russia, France torpedoes the drive for a new resolution authorizing war. Frustration erupts into anger. Bottles of French wine and champagne are emptied into toilets and some restaurants rename French fries “freedom fries.”

The rest is history. The United States tells U.N. weapons inspectors to clear out of Iraq and launches an invasion in March 2003 to put an end to Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction programs. They topple Saddam’s government and execute the deposed Iraqi leader three years later. But U.S. and British intelligence claims that Saddam Hussein had revived his nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs turn out to be false.

Seven years later. France and the U.S. are friends again and working on the same side to prevent Iraq’s neighbor, Iran, from developing nuclear weapons. (Interestingly, both France and the United States had supported Iraq during its bloody 1980-88 war with Iran.)

Some people shudder with deja vu at the mention of Iran’s nuclear program. For years, officials at the Vienna-based IAEA warned that the campaign against Iran was Iraq all over again. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, often spoke of the need to avoid the mistakes of Iraq by not jumping to conclusions about Iran’s atomic program, which Tehran insists is a peaceful one that will produce only electricity, not bombs.

Speaking at New York’s Columbia University this week, France’s U.N. ambassador, Gerard Araud, made clear that Iran’s nuclear program couldn’t be more different from Iraq’s phantom weapons of mass destruction. The concerns about Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, he said, are shared across the globe. He pointed out that five Security Council resolutions — three of them imposing sanctions on the Islamic Republic — had passed “without dissent” and that countries like Libya, South Africa, Russia and China had cast their votes in favor of them.

“To be blunt, it’s not Iraq revisited,” he said. “It’s not the West, the North, against Iran. It’s the international community at large which is expressing its concerns.” Araud noted that four of the six countries leading efforts to persuade Iran to halt its uranium enrichment program had actively opposed the war in Iraq — France, Germany, Russia and China. Now they’re all in it together, offering Iran the prospect of economic and political incentives if it stops enriching and new sanctions if it continues to refuse.

French-U.S. cooperation on Iran is nothing new. Even while former French President Jacques Chirac and his chief diplomats were working hard to block the U.S.-British push for war in Iraq, French intelligence agents were quietly amassing evidence of covert Iranian nuclear activities and sharing it with their American counterparts. In May 2003, France presented its intelligence assessment of Iran to a closed-door meeting of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, an informal club of 46 countries that produce raw materials or technology useful in nuclear programs. “For several years intelligence sources have been collecting evidence of a covert military program (in Iran),” the French presentation said. “France’s assessment is now that this country may obtain a sufficient quantity of fissionable materials to manufacture a nuclear weapon within a few years.” The French presentation, it said, “was coordinated with the American one.”

Allah, Antarctica and Ancient Inca-The best reads of 2009

When I have time to lavish on reading something other than news, I want to spend it on stories that leave me saying, “Wow!” A great read should tell readers something they don’t already know, enlighten them about the world and its people, inform them about the human condition. Readers should be moved to laughter, tears, anger, action through superb writing and extraordinary reporting.  Here are my picks for the best reads of 2009.

As Spain’s jobless lose homes, tensions mount

A packet of cigarettes is enough to cause a fight among the Spaniards and immigrants shivering in the dark outside an emergency homeless shelter in Madrid, set up for a bitter winter and depression-era unemployment. Police push past jobless Romanian and Hungarian construction workers.  ”One day this place is going to explode,” says unemployed waiter Miguel Roa, a Spaniard.

Pakistani newlyweds live in fear of honour killing

Pervez Chachar and his young wife live in the police headquarters in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Their crime? They fell in love and married without their families’ permission. In traditional rural society in Pakistan, getting married without permission is such a serious slight to the “honor” of a family or a tribe that death is seen as fitting retribution. They share a cramped room with another young couple in the same position.

from Afghan Journal:

Afghanistan: neither Vietnam nor Iraq, but closer home perhaps

[Women at a cemetery in Kabul, picture by Reuters' Ahmad Masood]

As U.S. President Barack Obama makes up his mind on comitting more troops to Afghanistan, the search for analogies continues. Clearly, Afghanistan cannot be compared with Vietnam or Iraq  beyond a point. The history, geography, the culture and the politics are just too different.

The best analogy to Afghanistan may well the very area in dispute - the rugged Pashtun lands straddling the border with Pakistan and where  the Pakistani army is in the middle of an offensive, argues William Tobey in a piece for Foreign Policy.

Tobey, a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfar Center and who served on the National Security Council staff under three U.S. presidents, takes a walk down history to the 1936 uprising against British rule in Waziristan.

The rebels were driven by radical Islam, Pashtun nationalism and armed opportunism, much the same factors firing up the modern Taliban campaign.  

"The rebels improvised roadside bombs, ambushed convoys, and launched hit and run attacks on isolated outposts to drive out alien forces. They kidnapped and beheaded British soldiers and civilians. In unprotected villages, they massacred civilians who did not support them. "

from The Great Debate UK:

Past and present: a correspondent in Iraq

-Tim Cocks is a Reuters correspondent in Iraq.-

This month we reported that the number of civilians dying violent deaths in Iraq had hit a fresh low since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion -- about 125 for September.

Sounds like a lot, but for a country that only two years ago was seeing dozens of bodies pile up in the streets each day from tit-for-tat sectarian killing, it was definitely progress.

And as I prepare to end my assignment in Iraq this week, I need no argument from numbers to convince me that things are better here than when I arrived in Feb. 2008.

During my first few months, militants loyal to to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr were raising hell in Baghdad, firing mortars and rockets at the Green Zone almost every hour. We could hear or feel them thud on impact, especially when they fell short, on our side of the Tigris.

A rocket hit the BBC building opposite us, causing a blast loud enough to shake our windows, although thankfully no one at the BBC was hurt by the strike.

U.S. airstrikes on Baghdad's Sadr City slum were killing many civilians. Roadside and car bombs were erupting all over the place and the streets were largely deserted after dark.