Afghanistan Conference in The Hague: A Turning Point?

Tomorrow, something new will happen in the windy Dutch government seat at the North Sea. All, I repeat: ALL, possible players in the Afghan drama will come together and talk. Will it be THE turning point, or will it only be a significant step forward?

Obama delivers. A completely new US approach to the world is taking shape. No more imperialist 1000 years' dreams like those in the "American Century" documents of the neoconservatives. A more realistic view takes into account the interests of the Afghan people in all their diversity, and, also, those of the neighbouring countries, as well as those of the world players: the US, Europe, Russia, China, India.

This, in itself, is already a major turning point. But will it materialize into something sensible?

The subject is extremely complicated. Afghanistan is divided in itself along ethnic, cultural and religiuous lines. The Northern neighbours are interested in halting the fundamentalist infiltrations. Pakistan has been considering the country as its backyard, providing a strategic depth against arch enemy India. Iran has a religious (the Shiite Hazaris) and cultural (the large Persian speaking minorities) stake. At the oil and gas producing end, Iran, Turkmenistan and others, as well as Pakistan and India (and China?) at the potential receiving end have an interest in Afghanistan as a necessary transit country. the whole world has an interest in stopping or limiting the poppy (heroine) production. I would like to add the interest the whole world should have in rolling back the safe havens for terrorist fundamentalism.

It is my innermost conviction, that only the Afghan people themselves may find a solution to the problems mentioned above and to others that I did not mention (yet). The Obama-Clinton first measures (reigning in the Pakistan ISI, look for an arrangement with authentic local forces in Afghanistan) and proposals, would possibly create the necessary room for an Afghan awakening taking place.

Many people are critical of the pressure, Obama is putting on Pakistan. I am not. Before 2001, the US were blindly following the Pakistani Secret Service ISI's manipulations in Afghanistan (and Pakistan/Kashmir). Under G.W.Bush this did not change. A decisive key to a solution in Afghanistan, is cutting out the ISI's support to Islamist fundamentalism. It created and maintained in power (with Saudi help) the Afghan Taliban. Facilitated their resurrection after 2002. And let them also develop in Pakistan itself (the Northwest Territories).

Dealing with Pakistan, a country with a huge population, nuclear bombs, and a fierce frustration gainst India, is extremely difficult. Obama's carrot (7,5 billion dollars help) and stick (US intrusions into the Territories, chasing Al Qaeda) is, if I may judge, the only possible way to make things move into the right direction.

Iran has a number of stakes here in common with the US, Russia and Europe. It would like to stop fundamentalist anti-Shiite Sunni rule in Afghanistan. It has an interest in a pacified Afghanistan as a transit country for its oil and gas to the east. It doesn't like Pakistani, nor American, nor Russian, nor European military too close to its eastern borders.

Summa summarum: There are some chances, that the new realistic configuration that has been put in place by the new US Government, will produce a turning point at The Hague. As I said long before this, a counter-guerilla war in Afghanistan by NATO armies is as hopeless as the British (XIXth century) efforts at a "Great Game" and the Russian ones after 1979 were from the beginning. Poor dead and wounded soldiers from Canada, the UK and othe NATO countries have fallen for a chimera. I do not understand, what the US extra-NATO forces have been doing all the way from 2002 to now. They sabotaged objectively the pacification and community-building efforts of the NATO allies. Like tomorrow's host country the Netherlands in Uruzgan. They did not crush Al Qaeda, nor capture its chief. And I regret their vain casualties, too.

The remnants of the neoconservative movement are complaining. Tonight, on Dutch television, Iranian refugee turned Dutch Professor of ethnic integration, Afshin Ellian, criticized sternly and repeatedly Obama's praise for the greatness of the Iranian civilization. As if respect for the Iranian people, holding out against a world wide boycott since 1979 (30 years!), would be a crime! Should we be taking Ellian for a guide, Ellian, who was for years a Tudeh (Iranian Communist Party) propagandist in a Kabul exile under the Soviets?

Other voices from Iran, also shown on Dutch television, tell another tale. A woman refugee fro.m Iran sais, she was moved by the respect Obama finally showed in the name of the American people, for Iranian culture and civilization. Looking at that woman, I thought: She will be able to deal herself, together with her friends, with retrograde mollahs. That is not our task.

Give people room to make their own communities. In dignity. And in their own way. Our democracy is superb. We developed it all by ourselves. in blolod and with much trial and error. Genuine democracy is not imported by force from elsewhere. it is obtained democratically - by the people themselves.

A reading suggestion about "La démocratie des autres" (Amartya Sen): Democracy and its global Roots (2003).

US embassy in Baghdad: We caused "expletives" in the State department and an order to remove the images from the Bechtel-Berger Website!

An AP press release, relayed by CNN today (June 1, 2007):

Web site offers too much detail on new U.S. Embassy

Story Highlights:

• Architectural firm posts detailed plans for U.S. Embassy being built in Baghdad
• State Department says images "detract" from security of new embassy
• Company says they were "conjectural" and you'd learn more from Google Earth
• Images were removed from Web site Thursday at State Department's request

But on this blog, they were published in full! (See yesterday's "Pharaonic US Embassy in Baghdad"). Here is one of them:

[Marine guards US Deputy Ambassador's villa in Baghdad. Computer drawing (design phase) from BTY website.]

We did not intend to do harm to US security. Really! Our post about the "Pharaonic US embassy in Baghdad" (29.5.07) was about its "hybris", its provocative grandeur and aloofness. Not about it's security provisions.
We deemed it a symbol of the new US "isolationism", an aggressive isolationism for export.

Just like the Project for an American Century of the NeoCons imagined it.

But, let us not exaggerate: Very few (too few!) people read "Legal Alien". Some more "At Home in Europe", and, practically nobody "huibslog", the very new comprehensive blog, I publish on another network than "blogger.com". It is difficult to imagine, that these marginal blogs caused such a "shock and awe" in the State Department...

Sudden nervous visiting from Washington on my blogs...
However... After publication of the drawings of the Kansas BTY Bureau in my blogs, I saw, on my monitoring site 'Motigo', some nervous visitors' movements from Washington and California on my 'blogger'-related websites. But not on "huibslog". I should work at my Technorati and Google ratings for that last blog...

In short, I think, that the main cause of the panic was the blog post by Tom Engelhardt, in the Tomdispatch Blog, a widely read anti-MSM publication, that also served as my link to the BTY drawings.

Tomdispatch blog did not publicize the images. Engelhardt only ridiculed them in a delicious way. I DID look them up and posted them here, with my comments and those of the BTY-Bechtel firm.

So, if I am not mistaken, this blog is now one of the few places in the world, where curious people (people who got curious because of the panicky Washington move), may see, copy and transfer those very dangerous images!

It was not at all my intention, to deliver blueprints for would-be attackers of the buildings! I am a peace-minded, anti-violence person. I loathe the Al Qaeda terrorists as much as I hate the racist protagonists of a "Clash Of Civilizations".

Much ado about nothing
In earnest: I do not think that the computer-generated drawings will learn anything new to evil people. That is also the opinion of US experts. (AP:)

Berger Devine Yaeger's parent company, the giant contractor Louis Berger Group, said the plans had been very preliminary and would not be of help to potential U.S. enemies.

"The actual information that was up there was purely conjectural and conceptual in nature," said Louis Berger spokesman Jeffrey Willis. "Google Earth could give you a better snapshot of what the site looks like on the ground."

But that is not the view of the secretive Washington administration of today:

"Expletives"

Some U.S. officials acknowledged that damage may have been done by the postings and used expletives to describe their personal reactions, but downplayed the overall risk posed.

In translation, that means, that self-imposed secretive rules have been broken by stupidity (hence the 'expletives'), but that, the 'officials' personally think, that it is much ado about nothing. Look:

"People are eventually going to figure out where all these places are, but you don't have to draw them a map," said one senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak about the embassy project.

The construction site in Baghdad is under heavy guard and treated with extreme secrecy. It is off-limits to all but those with special passes, surrounded by tall, concrete blast walls and impossible to see except from the air.

And, as if to refute this last statement AP and CNN publish this photo of the construction site:

If I am guilty of divulging US State secrets, then I am in excellent company!

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Algiers Bombings: European Solidarity Now!

Today, it was Algier's 11/4.
Not less important to us, than Madrid's 11/4 or London's 9/7.
I do not want to hear that it were the Algerians' fault, that their Salafists united with Al Qaeda.
It is ours. We left free Algeria alone. We stuck to the illusion, that the North face of Africa has almost nothing to do with us. Of course, of course: I do not agree with the Boumediene dictatorship, I did not agree with islamisation and arabisation, I loathed the methods the Algerian army applied to the countryside during the 90s.
Corruption, economic stagnation, isolation - all wrong policies.
But what did Europe do to help Algeria diversify its economy?
Why did we hesitate to join the transmediterranean accession efforts of the EU, led by France and by Spain? That the North-Africans belong to the same cultural and geographic sphere as we do, it suddenly became evident, today, when suicidal bombs ravaged the Algier government buildings and a popular neighbourhood.
I lived in Algier, in June 1963, and I experienced the joy of freedom, of self-management in the 'biens-vacants', abandoned by the fugitives from the North. I saw, what havock, what wounds the the repression during the fifties had caused. And I came to admire the human resourcefulness of so many people I met in the city and outside of it.
Algeria is no Afghanistan. It should not be left to slide into a new civil war, theatre of atrocities committed by fanatics first, by repressive local and foreign military next.
A generous move imposes itself on Europe. In its own interest. Diversification, development, open frontiers should destroy the basis of unrest and frustration that lies behind the upsurge of Al Qaeda and its methods on our doorstep.

Here is what Reuters reports about today's bombings:

Al Qaeda claims deadly Algiers bombings

By William Maclean and Lamine Chikhi
Reuters - Wednesday, April 11

ALGIERS (Reuters) - Bombs killed 30 people in Algeria's capital on Wednesday, attacks claimed by al Qaeda that raised fears the north African oil exporter was slipping back into the intense political violence of the 1990s.

One of the blasts, believed to be a suicide bombing, ripped part of the facade off the prime minister's headquarters in the centre of Algiers. A second bomb hit Bab Ezzouar on its eastern outskirts, the official APS news agency said.

The Al Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb claimed responsibility for the bombings in an Internet statement, which also included a claim of responsibility for attacks in neighbouring Morocco and pictures of three "martyrs".

[...]

One Algerian analyst said the operation appeared to be a reply to stepped-up attacks by the army on Islamist insurgents in the Bejaia region in mountains east of Algiers.

"This is a violent reaction to Bejaia operation where important leaders of al Qaeda in the Maghreb are surrounded," said security expert Anis Rahmani.

"I do believe though, that that group has no capability to topple the government but obviously it has the means to disturb the life of peaceful people in Algiers."

For more comments, take a look at my posts in L'Europe chez Soi and in Toto Le Psycho, both in French. In the latter, I dwell somewhat more than here on my relations to Algeria.