Syria's Assad is hitting Homs with the heaviest mortars in the world (video)

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 02.21.12

Reports coming out of Homs, which has been pounded for weeks now by Bashar al-Assad's military, indicate one of the worst days of shelling against a Syrian city since the war started there.

The Syria Observatory for Human Rights says that at least 16 civilians were killed in Homs' Baba Amr neighborhood, three of them children. The BBC reports at least 30 dead in Homs, which has emerged as a stronghold for both armed and peaceful resistance to Mr. Assad's continued rule. Among the dead in Baba Amr was Rami al-Sayyed, a young Syrian who'd devoted himself since July to filming fighting and protest marches. As Syriapioneer on Youtube, he uploaded 831 videos between then and earlier today.

The next to last video on the account posted early today, too graphic to share here, was of Mr. Sayyed sitting beside a man in tracksuit who'd been mutilated beyond recognition. Sayyed was cut down by an infantrymen a few hours later, and the final video on the account is of his body being prepared for burial, uploaded by his brother. 

From Peter Bouckaert, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, comes an indication why the death toll has been steadily climbing in Homs. He says a video from Homs that shows the fragments of a mortar the struck a building there is proof that Assad has deployed the Russian-made "Tulip" weapons system against the town, which fires the largest mortar round in any military's arsenal. The tank-like vehicle that serves as the firing platform can lob 240mm mortar rounds up to 20 kilometers away, and they carry over 70 pounds of explosives. The largest mortar used by the US, in contrast, is 160mm.

Syria has another Russian-made system for firing rounds that size, the towed M240, and it's possible that's being used to fire the rounds instead of the Tulip.

The Tulip was designed for use against dug in positions from a standoff distance. But its lethality has been used in the past to bring devastation to civilian neighborhoods, most famously by the Russians during the siege of the Chechen capital of Grozny over a decade ago, where thousands of civilians were killed and hundreds of buildings reduced to rubble. The use of such weapons in dense urban environments is a war crime.

There are ongoing international efforts to convince Assad to stand down. But the increasing lethality of the weapons used by his army, and the mounting civilian death toll, paint the picture of a man who has determined to win this fight whatever the cost in lives.

The first video below is of the 240mm fragments that hit Homs, and the second is a Russian video showing how the weapons system works.

Updated after posting to include information on the M240.

Read entire post | Comments

The Iran war party and the war skeptics

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 02.21.12

We are in the midst of one of the semiannual national freakouts over Iran's nuclear program. In response, oil prices are at eye-catching heights, Iran is promising to fight to defend its interests, and many of the cheerleaders for the Iraq war (for instance, Max Boot) are getting the band together to warn, once more, that all will be lost if we don't strike soon.

But despite all the hysteria – Judith Miller, whose articles for The New York Times a decade ago played up Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, seems to believe it's "5 minutes to midnight" for Iran's nuclear program – some of the leading voices in US defense policy are making an increasingly strong case against a war, at least any time soon.

Over the weekend, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said unilateral Israeli action over Iran would be "destabilizing" and that "it's not prudent at this point to decide to attack Iran."

That followed comments from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who reiterated the US intelligence community's assessment that Iran is not currently working on a nuclear weapon. Instead, US officials believe Iran would like the material and expertise to build a bomb without crossing the line to actual weaponization. Mr. Clapper said a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran could at best set back Iran's nuclear program by two years, and said he didn't believe Israel was seriously contemplating an attack in the near future.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta also sought to turn down the volume on the war talk last week. "The intelligence does not show that [Iran has] made the decision to proceed with developing a nuclear weapon. That is the red line that would concern us and that would ensure that the international community, hopefully together, would respond," he told a congressional committee. That position, by the way, is one that appears to be shared by the Israeli intelligence community.

So, on the one hand you have the consensus position of the most senior defense and intelligence officials in the United States. And on the other? People like CNN's Erin Burnett, a former Goldman Sachs financial analyst and occasional participant on Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice. Ms. Burnett says "no one buys Iran's claim that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes," (and then bolsters her point with a clip of Clapper's testimony in which he said Iran is not currently pursuing a nuclear weapon).

She's not alone. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina, for instance, pushed back on Clapper during his testimony. When Clapper told him that he has doubts Iran is seeking a bomb, Senator Graham responded, "I'm very convinced they're going down the road of developing a nuclear weapon." Graham was likewise convinced that Mr. Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. In February of 2003, a month before the US invasion, he wrote: "There’s no question that Iraq and Saddam Hussein aren’t telling the truth. Iraq had hundreds of artillery shells with chemical weapons, thousands of liters of anthrax, and hundreds of tons of nerve agents in their inventory. Now they are not accounted for. The Iraqi response of ‘we have no weapons of mass destruction,’ is a flat-out lie."

Or you could listen to John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the UN who now works at the American Enterprise Institute. Bolton recently wrote that "the world's central banker of terrorism will very soon become a nuclear weapons state" the US defense and intelligence communities' protestations notwithstanding. He also says that if Iran does get a weapon, a containment strategy like the one that was effective during the cold war (when the Soviet Union had hundreds of nuclear-tipped missiles pointed at the US) is doomed to failure.

Mr. Bolton was also certain of Saddam's WMDs before the Iraq war, stating in February 2002, when he was an undersecretary for arms control, that "we are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction and production facilities in Iraq."

Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich (another politician who just knew that Saddam had WMDs) is even more apocalyptic, warning of 300,000 Americans dead in an Iranian attack on the US. "This is not science fiction," he said.

Are we headed to war? Clearly not if men like Dempsey, Panetta, and Clapper get their way. Intelligence officials in Washington have also been leaking doubts about Israel's ability to conduct meaningful strikes on Iran, its possible dalliance with the designated Iranian terrorist group MKO in an assassination program targeting Iranian nuclear engineers, and concerns about damage to US interests if Israel carries out an attack -- all clearly designed to forestall that possibility.

Iran continues to insist that it's not interested in a nuclear weapon, only nuclear power. But it's hard to imagine that it isn't interested in developing a so-called breakout capacity, given that there is no better deterrent to invasion or other external attempts at imposing regime change than a nuclear bomb (a fact that Libya's Muammar Qaddafi must have dwelt on as he fled NATO bombing raids and his own enraged citizens last year). And many say if the day comes when Iran has an actual nuclear weapon, it may not be as dire a moment as men like Mr. Bolton project.

Scott Peterson recently wrote a cover story for us that lays out the case that the day after Iran obtains a nuclear weapon might be much like the day before. Iran would have a handful of bombs, while Israel would have hundreds and the US thousands. He quotes the eminent Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld: "Say they build one bomb – it's not good enough. They need how many – 2, 3, 5, 10, 20? And that will take them a long time, so it's all nonsense.... [Iran is] not going to commit suicide by dropping the bomb – or even threatening to drop the bomb – on us."

Read entire post | Comments

Syrians chant anti-Bashar al-Assad slogans during a protest in front of the Syrian embassy in Amman, Jordan, Friday, Feb. 17. (Mohammad Hannon/AP)

Syria, Al Qaeda, and cognitive dissonance for fans of intervention

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 02.17.12

A recent audiotape from Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Pakistan-based Egyptian exile who runs what's left of "Al Qaeda Central" called for Muslims to rise up and toss out Syria's Bashar al-Assad.

That's hardly surprising. Al Qaeda's ideology leads it to hate all secular regimes, but reserves a special hatred for the likes of Syria and Iran, countries that are run by what it considers to be apostates who, if Al Qaeda had its way, would all be put to the sword. Shiite Iran is bad enough. But Alawites, a sect that believes in reincarnation and divinities beyond the one singular God? The religion of Mr. Assad is practically tailor-made to stir the fury of Salafi jihadis like Al Qaeda.

US officials have started claiming that there is evidence of "Al Qaeda" behind some of the attacks on government forces in Syria, though what precisely they mean by "Al Qaeda" they don't say (the term seems to have become a catch-all for "Sunni jihadi"). Meanwhile, some analysts say Iran is watching all this with alarm, since Syria is something of a client regime and the loss of Assad could leave it more vulnerable to the machinations of enemies like the US and Israel. 

But take heart, Iran! Remember that Syrian regime that Al Qaeda is going to help topple and severely damage your regional standing in the process? Al Qaeda is here to help, Tehran.

At least, that's that claim of a recent strain of analysis that's started to emerge practically simultaneously with the dour Mr. Zawahiri's latest performance. Some experts say Al Qaeda and Iran are set to jump into bed together with the enemy of my enemy is my friend logic. These claims have been particularly persistent in the British press, though they've found a home on this side of the pond as well (Fox News).

A recent example is from The Telegraph.

The Islamic regime, which was accused of attempting to assassinate Israeli diplomats in three countries this week, is seeking to expand the network of Western enemies it assists, officials believe. As a result, Tehran has loosened restrictions on high level al–Qaeda operatives under its controls as well as offering financing and training to the terrorist group's senior planners.

Security experts said that recent intelligence suggested Iran and al–Qaeda could attempt to find a common project in Europe, possibly targeting the London Olympics, which opens in July.

So, if you chose to believe everything you read: Al Qaeda is definitely working to destroy Syria's Assad, who is definitely a vital ally and asset of Iran, and Iran in turn is stepping up its cooperation and support for Al Qaeda (which may then use that help to undermine Iran's interests in Syria.). Got it?

In the murky world of great power politics, war, rumors of war, terrorism and rumors of terrorism, anything is possible. But from my perch, there's a growing amount of fairly mutually exclusive fear mongering in news articles and on the airwaves.

I lived through the run-up to the Iraq war and then learned from bitter experience that almost none of the dire predictions made about Iraq's relations with Al Qaeda, its alleged weapons stockpiles, and what might happen to them, came true. I feel like I'm living a rerun this week.

Read entire post | Comments

Indonesia and Egypt separated at birth? No, just completely separate.

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 02.17.12

Since Hosni Mubarak was toppled a year ago, I've been periodically asked to write a piece comparing Egypt now to Indonesia after Soeharto.

Since "country x is not country y" is one of my mantras, I've declined. I covered the fall of both men, and see very little beyond superficial similarities between Indonesia in 1998 and Egypt today.

But a small literature comparing Egypt's uprising to Indonesia's in 1998 has cropped up, suggesting Indonesia may be a predictor or a model for Egypt. So I've decided to throw my hat into the ring as a corrective. 

The latest example to catch my eye is John T. Sidel's essay in Foreign Policy. Dr. Sidel, an academic focused on Southeast Asia, begins by listing a set of "striking parallels" between Egypt now and Indonesia over a decade ago: The countries are big, with Muslim majorities and significant non-Muslim minorities. They were led by anti-Western gadflies in the 50s and 60s. And after that they were military-dominated dictatorships with warm relations with the US, particularly during the cold war.

This is all true, but not particularly relevant or instructive. Most discussions of what Egypt and Indonesia have in common ignore the rather striking differences between their economies, geographies, and historical experiences. These differences are far more important than both states having lots of Muslims.

Money

Indonesia is an archipelago blessed with vast natural resources. It has abundant natural gas and oil production that, though dwindling, dwarfs Egypt's. The country holds the richest tropical forests outside of the Amazon, the largest copper and gold mine in the world, and is the dominant exporter of commodities ranging from palm oil (with exports worth about $14 billion a year) to natural rubber ($7 billion a year) to plywood and paper.

Indonesia has dramatically more arable land than Egypt, with parts of Java and Bali home to some of the most productive soils on the globe. Traditionally, rich farmland has taken the edge off of economic shocks, with laid off factory workers returning to the village.

Indonesia has enjoyed centuries of maritime trade with China to the east and India to the west. It has a far more literate and productive population than Egypt. 

So, the geographic and economic reality couldn't be more different between Egypt and Indonesia. Indonesia was a funnel for foreign manufacturing investment before the 1998 economic crisis that led to Soeharto's downfall, and was so again a few years after. The country was soon booming again –thanks in part to having China and India nearby – creating jobs and leading average Indonesians to be happier with political change. Egypt, with creaky infrastructure and low productivity, has been losing manufacturing jobs for years. Egypt's prospects for a fast economic recovery – let alone a boom like Indonesia's – are much grimmer, and economics influences politics.

Backdrop

Sidel's comparison of the revitalization of the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) under Megawati Sukarnoputri in the early to mid-1990s and the rise of the Kifaya (Enough) movement in Mubarak's final years is also misplaced.

Megawati, as the daughter of Indonesia's founding president Sukarno, had an almost pre-fab cult of personality around her, with many early supporters muttering that she had some of her father's mystical aura. The PDI was one of two opposition political parties legally tolerated by Soeharto, and he allowed her to take the reins, reasoning that a poorly-educated and inexperienced housewife would prove easy to control.

Soeharto's guess was wrong, mostly because an ambitious group of reformers hitched themselves to Megawati's star and started real opposition politics as Soeharto's family members began jockeying to succeed the aging leader.

She was eventually removed as the head of the party, though perhaps had the last laugh when she became Indonesia's president in 2001. Once in power, she demonstrated autocratic tendencies, a hyper-nationalism that sought to forgive human rights abuses by the Indonesian military, and an unwillingness to take steps that might effect the power and privilege of the Indonesian elite she'd been born into.

The Kifaya movement in Egypt was a far looser protest movement opposed to the continued rule of Mubarak and the obvious plans the regime was laying for succession by his son, Gamal (another superficial, but not particularly interesting parallel with Soeharto; despots frequently like dynastic succession). But Kifaya hasn't existed in any real sense for years, never had a unifying political personality like "Mother Mega" (as her fans called her), and the activists that worked with it years ago have splintered into various political camps – socialist, Islamist, etc... since.

Immediate aftermath

And though the ultimate cause of Soeharto's demise was the military withdrawal of support, as was the case with Mubarak, Soeharto was immediately replaced by his civilian vice president, BJ Habibie. Egypt's military, meanwhile, has ruled directly for the past year in a fashion more like the military command council that followed Soeharto's 1965 coup than post-Soeharto Indonesia in 1998.

The mercurial Habibie defied the military and set the stage for the independence of tiny East Timor. By June of 1999 the country had held its first free legislative elections since 1955. The result? The dominance of secular parties in the new legislature (among them Soeharto's Golkar, which unlike Mubarak's NDP was not outlawed). Islamist parties took about 35 percent of the vote (compared to the over 70 percent Islamist groups won in Egypt's just completed parliamentary election.)

Indonesia did experience years of upheaval, with some horrific religious wars in Maluku and parts of Sulawesi. Egypt, too, could face religious conflict as Sidel suggests. But Sidel is wrong to see "many parallels" between the war in Maluku, which was as much about cultural clashes between economic migrants and longstanding residents as it was about faith, and the recent killing of Coptic protesters by Egypt's military during a protest outside the state TV building in Cairo.

The nature of communal religious tensions between Christians and Muslims in Egypt is far different from those in Indonesia, which is also a dramatically more religious and culturally diverse place. Exhibit A might be Abdurrahman Wahid, Habibie's successor. Mr. Wahid was the hereditary head of a mass organization called the Nahdlatul Ulama, or roughly "The Revival of Muslim scholars." His National Awakening Party won 12.5 percent of the vote in the first post-Soeharto elections, making it the biggest "Islamist" party in Parliament (compare that to Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood is the single largest party in Parliament, with about 48 percent of the seats).

But Sidel suggests that Wahid's success parallels the Egyptian experience so far. But Mr. Wahid is a brand of "Islamist" that almost no one in Egypt would recognize. He was a long term defender of religious pluralism, the right of Muslims to convert to other faiths (most Brotherhood members would be uncomfortable with this). He made a habit of meditating and communing with the Javanese spirits for guidance (the average Brother's discomfort would shoot to horror at this point) and he once told eminent Indonesianist William Liddle that his favorite book was My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok's allegory about a descendant of a long line of rabbis struggling to reconcile modernity and faith. Potok is not generally found on Brotherhood reading lists.

Sidel concludes his piece by suggesting that Egypt could very well follow the footsteps of Indonesia, which has prospered mightily since the fall of Soeharto, and forged a much more open and responsive political culture than had ever been possible there. Let's hope he's right. But Indonesia, with its dramatically different culture, economic standing, and results in early elections, teaches us nothing about what's coming next in Egypt.

Follow Dan Murphy on Twitter.

Read entire post | Comments

Libyan militias from towns throughout the country's west parade through Tripoli, Libya, Tuesday Feb. 14. (Abdel Magid Al Fergany/AP)

Amnesty International report brands Libya's militias 'out of control'

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 02.15.12

Last week, Libya's transitional leaders requested that Niger extradite a son of Muammar Qaddafi to stand trial in the country. Today, a new report from Amnesty International lays out its case for why it would be crazy for anyone to send someone to the new Libya to face "justice."

More than six months since Muammar Qaddafi was killed near his hometown, the torture and murder of former Qaddafi loyalists (or suspected loyalists) remain widespread. Some of the victims are sub-Saharan Africans caught in the crossfire of Libya's war, who the revolutionaries insist fought for Qaddafi. (When I was in Libya last year, I was shown African men, wearing rags and some without proper shoes, described as "mercenaries" for Qaddafi; that did not seem accurate to me.)

The militias that toppled Qaddafi's dictatorship remain outside of any central authority and, in the picture painted by Amnesty, are increasingly behaving like ferocious regional mafias. During and immediately after the war, the militias murdered scores of Qaddafi supporters in captivity, tortured many others, and razed the homes of still others to punish them for their political beliefs.

Now, Amnesty says "hundreds of armed militias ... are largely out control," that armed clashes between rival militias are "frequent," and that "thousands" of people remain illegally detained by the militias.

Amnesty researchers met "scores" of torture victims in Tripoli, Zawiya, Gharyan, Misrata, and Sirte in January and February. The victims reported a range of torture methods used against them that were once standard in Qaddafi's own prison system: electric shocks, extensive burning, whippings with metal chains, and hours tied up in contorted stress positions. Some militia members opposed to torture told Amnesty they feared reprisals if they spoke out against it. 

During Libya's uprising against Qaddafi, rebel leaders and supporters spoke confidently and often about the new era of respect for human rights that would be ushered in with the demise of Qaddafi. The reality of the early days of the new Libya has been far shot of those lofty promises. The country hasn't had the rule of law for more than 40 years, and vengeance is almost always sought in the aftermath of violent revolutions. But having spent more than two months in Libya at the start of last year, I didn't expect the situation to be as bad as the one described by Amnesty.

I imagined, wrongly as it's turned out, that the Transitional National Council would be able to use the carrot of oil revenue to bring the regional militias under control once the war was over. I was also wrong in thinking the scope of reprisals would be far more limited. Amnesty writes that the NTC "appears to have neither the authority nor the political will to rein in the militias" and is "unwilling to recognize ... the mounting evidence of patterns of grave, widespread abuses in many parts of the county."

How bad is it? There has been no investigation into the murder of 65 people in Qaddafi's hometown of Sirte last October, despite some of the militiamen responsible having been identified; 30,000 people from Tawargha have been expelled from their homes (most of which have since been destroyed) and have not been allowed to return home for the crime of having supported Qaddafi; former soldiers have been tortured until they falsely confessed to rape;  others have died after hours of electric shocks and the use of nails and drills.

Libya's revolutionaries aren't the plucky underdogs fighting for freedom anymore. They're the most powerful people in the country, at least for the moment, and some of them, according to the report, are doing horrific things with that power. Libya is currently planning elections for June, but it's hard to imagine a fair or accountable process until the militias are brought under some kind of control.

Read entire post | Comments

An advertisement for Rupert Murdoch's tabloid The Sun newspaper is seen on a billboard outside News International's headquarters in London, in January. (Chris Helgren/Reuters)

The chutzpah of Rupert Murdoch's Sun

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 02.14.12

The Sun – Rupert Murdoch's racy tabloid famous for pages filled with de-bodiced young women, jingoistic headlines in times of war and international football, and vicious verbal attacks on its critics – is now playing the victim.

Exhibit A from yesterday's edition is deputy editor Trevor Kavanagh's "Witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on Press Freedom."

Mr. Kavanagh's rant was a response to the arrests of five senior Sun journalists over the weekend on allegations of bribing public officials. Four other Sun reporters have also recently been arrested as part of an ongoing probe into bribery of public officials and illegally hacking into the cell phones of crime victims, celebrities, and politicians.

As Kavanagh tells it, the widening probe (which already saw multiple arrests and the demise of The Sun's sister weekly tabloid, The News of the World) has left the British press less free than in former Soviet republics. Not only is The Sun maintaining its tradition of hysteria and hyperbole, but Kavanagh has also managed to cement the paper's reputation for myopia and insularity.

Yes, it's true that Britain was ranked 28th in press freedom by Reporters Without Borders last year behind Poland, Estonia, and Slovakia, as Kavanagh writes (the US ranked 47). But only one of those is a former Soviet state (Estonia), and enforcing existing laws against bribery and invasions of privacy isn't press censorship.

For real challenges to press freedom, look to former Soviet states like Kazakhstan (154), where journalists covering labor protests were beaten with bats last year; Turkmenistan (177), where all media is controlled by the state and where a reporter was sentenced to five years in jail last year for reporting on an explosion at a military weapons depot; or even Kyrgyzstan (108), where all broadcasters are controlled by the state and where reporters are routinely beaten by thugs.

Russia ranks 142. Crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who focused on military human rights abuses and corruption, was murdered for her work in 2006. Three men connected to the Federal Security Bureau were tried for her murder and acquitted. 

Yet Kavanagh feels his paper is being ganged up on. "In what would at any other time cause uproar in Parliament and among civil liberty and human rights campaigners, [The Sun's] journalists are being treated like members of an organised crime gang," he writes.

Organized crime gang, huh?

Senior executives of News International, the holding company for Murdoch's papers in Britain, have admitted to lying to the police and destroying evidence of criminal activity. Police have uncovered a pattern of law-breaking extending over a period of years at multiple Murdoch papers that have resulted in a number of arrests. The police say they have evidence of bribery of public officials by Sun reporters over a period of years.  

Over the years, the paper has bullied and harassed its enemies. Clare Short, a former member of parliament (MP) who had advocated restrictions on naked women in Britain's national press, was subjected to a busload of scantily clad women parked outside of her home courtesy of the Sun in 2004. A Sun headline branded her "Fat, jealous Clare."

News Corp., meanwhile, is now cooperating with police investigators and an internal investigation is what led to the latest arrests (many British reporters say the tradition of omerta within the Murdoch papers has been severely strained by that cooperation).

Kavanagh's piece also appears to imply that the effort to root out corruption is putting citizens at risk. He writes, "Major crime investigations are on hold as 171 police are drafted in to run three separate operations. In one raid, two officers revealed they had been pulled off an elite 11-man anti-terror squad trying to protect the Olympics from a mass suicide attack."

The Metropolitan Police is taking issue with Kavanagh's assertions, however.

It issued a statement in which it said none of the arrests involved more than 10 officers, contrary to Kavanagh's "up to 20 officers at a time rip up floorboards and sift through intimate possessions, love letters and entirely private documents." It also said that "given the seriousness of the allegations currently under investigation and the significant number of victims, the [Metropolitan Police Service] does not believe that the level of resources devoted to the three inquiries is in any way disproportionate to the enormous task in hand... At no stage has any major investigation been compromised as a result of these deployments."

There are, of course, real concerns about press freedom in Britain. Some MPs have called for tighter regulation of the press, sensing an opening in the public revulsion at the antics of The Sun and The News of the World. Hopefully, they won't succeed.

This story was edited after posting to correct the spelling of Mr. Kavanagh's name.

Read entire post | Comments

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a Likud party meeting at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in Jerusalem Feb. 13. Bombers targeted staff at Israel's embassies in India and Georgia on Monday, wounding four people, and Netanyahu accused Iran and its Lebanese ally Hezbollah of involvement. (Baz Ratner/Reuters)

Israel blames Hezbollah and Iran for attacks on diplomats. Is it right? (+video)

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 02.13.12

Two attempts to assassinate Israeli diplomats failed in India and Georgia today – the wife of Israel's military attaché in Delhi was slightly injured by a bomb attached to her car, while the bomb on an Israeli diplomat's car in Tbilisi was detected before any harm was done.

A coincidence – two isolated swipes at Israel – seems highly unlikely. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately blamed both Iran and Hezbollah for the attack. That's plausible, but it's impossible to know anything for certain in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.

Both Iran and Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militant group that receives much of its financing from Iran, make sense as prime suspects. The attacks came a day after the four-year anniversary of Hezbollah leader Imad Mughniyah's assassination in Damascus, Syria.

Mr. Mughniyeh, a senior Hezbollah official, was indicted by Argentina in connection with two deadly attacks on Israeli missions there in the 1990s. He was killed by a bomb planted under the dashboard of his car. At the time of his death, Hezbollah blamed Israel for the murder, and vowed revenge, though Israeli officials said they were not involved.

Iran, too, has claimed reason to strike out at Israel. Officials in Tehran have said that a wave of assassinations against military officials and civilians working on its nuclear program was arranged by Israel and has vowed to retaliate. Israel has refused to confirm or deny its involvement in those attacks. Last week, NBC news cited an unnamed US official as saying that Israel is financing and training the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK), an Iranian militant group on the State Department's list of international terrorist organizations, to carry out the assassination campaign in Iran. 

So either Iran or Hezbollah, or both, are reasonable objects of suspicion in today's attacks. But it's hardly a secret that Israel is unpopular with a range of militant groups, many of them deeply hostile to Shiite Iran and Hezbollah. And no evidence has been provided to support the assertion.

The obvious backdrop to all this is the growing push for a war with Iran over its nuclear program, and you can take it to the bank that these two attacks will be used in the coming days to bolster arguments that Iran is an implacable foe that can't be reasoned with, and steps stronger than sanctions will be needed to dissuade them from their nuclear ambitions.

(Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful uses only. The US intelligence establishment says there is no evidence of ongoing nuclear weapons-related work in Iran, a conclusion that many Israel and American politicians disagree with.)

But the truth could lie elsewhere, and it's worth keeping an open mind until evidence emerges. Israel frequently walks back early statements of blame in terror attacks. Last August, after a bloody cross-border attack from Egypt on the Israeli town of Eilat, Israel immediately blamed Hamas, the Sunni militant group that controls the Gaza Strip. Retaliatory air strikes were soon carried out on Hamas members in Gaza. At the time, Israeli officials said Hamas gunmen had crossed through tunnels into Egypt's Sinai peninsula and made their way to Eilat from there.

But a month later, the Israeli Defense Forces's analysis of the events determined that all of the attackers were Egyptian natives.

In this case, Israel's early finger-pointing certainly makes sense. But it made sense to a certain extent after the Eilat attacks, too. 

Read entire post | Comments

US colonel: Don't believe US statements on progress in Afghanistan

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 02.06.12

I spent five years covering the Iraq war, and at the end of it I was not inclined to believe anything official spokesmen had to say about Iraq anymore. I heard denials an insurgency was erupting in 2003, watched President Bush's "mission accomplished" moment after Saddam Hussein was captured, and was earnestly told Iraq's insurgency was on its last legs in 2005.

Again and again, the gap between observed reality and official rhetoric was wider than the ocean. I've only taken one reporting trip to Afghanistan, but follow the story from a distance and know many reporters who have lived there for years. Most of them believe, much as the Baghdad press corps did back in the day, that military spokesmen are running an information operation, not a clearing house for facts and honest opinion.

Now a colonel who just finished his tour in Afghanistan is backing that position up, in some of the most candid and critical comments you'll ever read from a serving officer. Many are certain to disagree with Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis' conclusions in Truth, lies, and Afghanistan. But his argument against continuing the war there is as straight and clear as a tracer bullet, particularly coming from a serving officer. 

Davis spent most of last year in Afghanistan working with the Army's Rapid Equipping Force, a job he says took him "into every significant area where our soldiers engage the enemy. Over the course of 12 months, I covered more than 9,000 miles and talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces. What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground."

He writes: "I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level." He also reports low moral among soldiers, doubtful the risks they're taking are doing much good, and incidents of Afghan soldiers trained and equipped by the US working with the Taliban.

The assessment differs sharply with the tone of progress emerging from the top brass. For instance, a press release from the end of January from the US Department of Defense information office begins:

"Almost a month into 2012 -- a year both Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Marine Corps Gen. John R. Allen, the top commander in Afghanistan, called pivotal to operations there -- International Security Assistance Force officials said last year’s accomplishments have set the stage for continued success."

But Colonel Davis provides a different assessment from those on the ground. He recounts a conversation in September he held with an Afghan official who serves as a cultural adviser to the US commander in Kunar Province. Davis asked him if Afghan security forces would be able to hold out against the Taliban when US troops withdraw from the province.

“No. They are definitely not capable," the adviser told him. "Already all across this region [many elements of] the security forces have made deals with the Taliban. [The ANSF] won’t shoot at the Taliban, and the Taliban won’t shoot them."

Davis also echoes John Kerry's famous question to Congress in 1971 after serving in Vietnam: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

"How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding and behind an array of more than seven years of optimistic statements by US senior leaders in Afghanistan? No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan. But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on."

Colonel Davis, who did a previous combat tour in Afghanistan during 2005-2006 and in Iraq from 2008-2009 was clearly shaken by what he saw this go around. His public statements are unusual in the extreme for a serving officer. In case you missed the link to his piece in the Armed Forces Journal the first time, here it is again. 

Read entire post | Comments

Head of Egypt's ruling military council Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi speaks during a televised address in Cairo, in this still image taken from video January 24. (Egypt TV/REUTERS)

Despite $1.5 billion in US aid, Egypt threatens prosecution of Americans

By Dan Murphy, Staff writer / 02.06.12

When Egypt raided the offices of American democracy promotion groups in December, warnings poured out of Washington: "Your $1.5 billion in annual aid isn't as sacrosanct as you think it is."

But Egypt has consistently upped the ante with the administration in this confrontation. The latest move came Sunday, with the military junta deciding to put 40 employees of these and other democracy promotion groups on trial – including 19 US citizens. Sam LaHood, the son of President Obama's Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, is one of a group of Americans currently living in the US Embassy to avoid arrest. 

Mr. LaHood and a few of the other officials targeted by Egypt, which says it is investigating illegal foreign funding to political groups, have been barred from leaving the country. The threatened prosecutions are focused on 10 foreign and domestic groups, among them the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute (NDI), and Freedom House, all heavily financed by US taxpayers.

At the end of January, Senator John McCain, who is friends with the LaHood family as well as chairman of IRI, warned Egypt in stark terms: "I have watched with growing alarm and outrage how the Egyptian government is treating US non-governmental organizations that are working peacefully and transparently to support civil society in Egypt."

What may be behind the confrontation is the growing paranoia of Egypt's ruling generals about continuing protests over military rule. The generals and their civilian supporters consistently warn that malevolent "foreign hands" are behind the protests. They could be prosecuting the NGOs to rally domestic support and redefine the protesters as working with foreigners against Egypt. 

"The government will not hesitate to expose foreign schemes that threaten the stability of the homeland," Faiza Aboul Naga, the Minister of International Cooperation, told the state-owned Al Ahram newspaper. Ms. Aboul Naga has spearheaded the NGO probes and sought for years to increase the share of US aid to Egypt directly under the government's control. Freedom House described Naga as a "Mubarak holdover who has been directing the assault against civil society."

Though the groups were not licensed under the Mubarak-era laws designed to control and limit civil society organizations, the American NGOs had been tolerated in Egypt for years and were in frequent communication with the authorities. If Egypt had wanted to curtail their activities, a quiet word could have done so while avoiding this blossoming diplomatic crisis.

"The Egyptian authorities are using a discredited Mubarak-era law to prosecute nongovernmental groups while proposing even more restrictive legislation,” Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

On Saturday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton strongly implied she had told her Egyptian counterpart Mohammed Amr that Egypt's aid was at risk if the country did not back down, and that followed a week of more explicit warnings from lawmakers. "We will have to closely review these matters as it comes time for us to certify whether or not any of these funds from our government can be made available under these circumstances," she told reporters in Munich.

Congress recently attached conditions to Egypt's aid, requiring that the military keep the peace with Israel, demonstrate steps towards handing over full power to civilians, and make progress on human rights before aid would be released.

"The Egyptian military is clearly not meeting at least two of those three conditions right now. Consequently, the Obama administration should not certify compliance, nor should it invoke the national security waiver by arguing that Egyptian-Israeli peace is paramount and that Egypt’s military is the only bulwark against Islamist domination of the country – because both of these arguments are deeply flawed," Michelle Dunne and Shuja Nawaz wrote in the New York Times last Friday. Ms. Dunne is a former State Department official and National Security Council staffer focused on the Middle East.

Egypt is in desperate need of foreign assistance. Tourism and investment have collapsed since the uprising began and capital flight has seen foreign exchange reserves more than halved to about $15 billion, enough to cover about three months of imports. Despite Egypt's shaky finances, the junta has continued to take a series of steps that are going to make it harder for aid to flow.

In addition to going after NGOs, foreign and domestic, the most famous actor in Egypt was given a three month jail sentence last week for "insulting Islam" in his film roles over the years. Adel Imam is probably one of the two or three most popular actors in the Arab world.

That sentence was handed down with the military, not the Islamists that dominated recent parliamentary elections, in the driver's seat. Though parliament has convened, Egypt's system concentrates power in the hands of the executive. The Supreme Council for the Armed Forces (SCAF) currently occupying the executive role has repeatedly signaled it wants its political influence to extend to the writing of a new constitution. Presidential elections have been promised for later this year.

US democracy NGOs have run into trouble with the Egyptian government in the past, but not to this extent. The work of IRI and NDI in Egypt was suspended for months in 2006, again at the instigation of Aboul Naga, but there were no prosecutions or threats of arrest. The two groups eventually worked out an arrangement with the Mubarak government to resume highly-monitored outreach efforts.

Read entire post | Comments