Afghanistan and Pakistan.....
One of those two sites was checked off the list today, in Aleppo Province, confirmed as previously reported to have been long abandoned and dismantled. The building is said to have sustained major damage in the ongoing civil war.
Drone Strike Served CIA Revenge, Blocked Pakistan’s Strategy
by Gareth Porter, November 08, 2013
After a drone strike had reportedly killed Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud Nov. 1, the spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council declared that, if true, it would be “a serious loss” for the terrorist organization.
That reaction accurately reflected the Central Intelligence Agency’s argument for the strike. But the back story of the episode is how President Barack Obama supported the parochial interests of the CIA in the drone war over the Pakistani government’s effort to try a new political approach to that country’s terrorism crisis.
The failure of both drone strikes and Pakistani military operations in the FATA tribal areas to stem the tide of terrorism had led to a decision by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to try a political dialogue with the Taliban.
But the drone strike that killed Mehsud stopped the peace talks before they could begin.
Pakistani Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan immediately denounced the drone strike that killed Mehsud as “a conspiracy to sabotage the peace talks.” He charged that the United States had “scuttled” the initiative “on the eve, 18 hours before a formal delegation of respected ulema [Islamic clerics] was to fly to Miranshah and hand over this formal invitation.”
An unidentified State Department official refused to address the Pakistani minister’s criticism, declaring coolly that the issue was “an internal matter for Pakistan”.
Three different Taliban commanders told Reuters Nov. 3 they had been preparing for the talks but after the killing of Mehsud, they now felt betrayed and vowed a wave of revenge attacks.
The strategy of engaging the Taliban in peace talks, which was supported by the unanimous agreement of an “All Parties Conference” on Sept. 9, was not simply an expression of naïveté about the Taliban as was suggested by a Nov. 3 New York Times article on the Pakistani reaction to the drone strike.
A major weakness of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) lies in the fact that it is a coalition of as many as 50 groups, some of whose commanders are less committed to the terrorist campaign against the Pakistani government than others. In the aftermath of the Mehsud killing, several Taliban militants told Reuters that some Taliban commanders were still in favor of talks with the government.
The most important success achieved by Pakistan in countering Taliban violence in the past several years has been to reach accommodations with several militant leaders who had been allied with the Taliban but agreed to oppose Taliban attacks on government officials and security forces.
Sharif and other Pakistani officials were well aware that the United States could unilaterally prevent such talks from taking place by killing Mehsud or other Taliban leaders with a drone strike.
The government lobbied the United States in September and October to end its drone war in Pakistan – or at least to give the government a period of time to try its political strategy.
Obama had already suggested in a May 23 speech at National Defense University that the need for the strikes was fast diminishing and would soon end, because there were very few high value targets left to hit, and because the US would be withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. In August, Secretary of State John Kerry had said the end might come “very, very soon.”
After the meeting with Sharif on Oct. 23, Obama said they had agreed to cooperate in “ways that respect Pakistan’s sovereignty, that respect the concerns of both countries” and referred favorably to Sharif’s efforts to “reduce these incidents of terrorism.”
Shortly after the meeting, Sharif’s adviser on national security and foreign affairs, Sartaj Aziz, said in an interview with Al Jazeera that the Obama administration had promised to “consider” the prime minister’s request to restrain drone attacks while the government carried out a political dialogue.
A “senior Pakistani official” told the Express Tribune that Obama had “assured Premier Nawaz that drone strikes would only be used as a last option” and that he was planning to end the drone war once “a few remaining targets” had been eliminated.
The official said the Pakistani government now believed the unilateral strikes would end in “a matter of months.”
But Obama’s meeting with Sharif evidently occurred before the CIA went to Obama with specific intelligence about Mehsud, and proposed to carry out a strike to kill him.
The CIA had an institutional grudge to settle with Mehsud after he had circulated a video with Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, the Jordanian suicide bomber who had talked the CIA into inviting him to its compound at Camp Chapman in Khost province, where he killed seven CIA officials and contractors on Dec. 30, 2009.
The CIA had already carried out at least two drone strikes aimed at killing Mehsud in January 2010 and January 2012.
Killing Mehsud would not reduce the larger threat of terrorism and would certainly trigger another round of TTP suicide bombings in Pakistan’s largest cities in retaliation.
Although it would satisfy the CIA’s thirst for revenge and make the CIA and his administration look good on terrorism to the US public, it would also make it impossible for the elected Pakistani government to try a political approach to TTP terrorism.
Obama appears to have been sympathetic to Sharif’s argument on terrorism and had no illusions that one or a few more drone strikes against leading Taliban officials would prevent the organization from continuing to mobilize its followers to carry out terror attacks, including suicide bombers.
But the history of the drone war in Pakistan shows that the CIA has prevailed even when its proposed targets were highly questionable. In March 2011, US Ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter had opposed a CIA proposal for a drone strike just as CIA contractor Raymond Davis was about to be released from a jail in Lahore.
Munter had learned that the CIA wanted the strike because it was angry at Pakistan’s ISI, which regarded the Haqqani group as an ally, over Davis’s incarceration, according to an AP story on Aug. 2, 2011. The Haqqani group was heavily involved in fighting US and NATO troops in Afghanistan but was opposed to the TTP’s terror attacks in Pakistan.
CIA Director Leon Panetta rejected Munter’s objection to the strike, however, and Obama had supported Panetta. It was later revealed that the strike had been based on faulty intelligence. It was not a meeting of Haqqani network that was hit but a conference of tribal leaders from all over the province on an economic issue.
But the CIA simply refused to acknowledge its mistake and continued to claim to journalists that only terrorists had attended the meeting.
After the strike, Obama had formalized the ambassador’s authority to oppose a proposed drone strike, giving Munter what he called a “yellow card.” But despite the evidence that the CIA had carried out a drone strike for parochial reasons rather then an objective assessment of evidence, Obama gave the CIA director the power to override an ambassadorial dissent, even if the secretary of state supported the ambassador.
The extraordinary power of the CIA director over the drone strike policy, which was formalized by Obama after that strike, was evident in Obama’s decision to approve the CIA’s proposal for the Mehsud strike. The director was now John Brennan, who had shaped public opinion in favor of drone strikes through a series of statements, interviews and leaks as Obama’s deputy national security adviser from 2009 to 2013.
Even though Obama was determined to phase the out drone war in Pakistan and apparently sympathized with the need for the Pakistani government to end it within a matter of months, he was unwilling to reject the CIA’s demand for a strike that once again involved the agency’s parochial interests.
A late July 2013 survey had shown that 61 percent of US citizens still supported the use of drones. Having already shaped public perceptions on the issue of terrorism, Obama allowed the interests of the CIA to trump the interests of Pakistan and the United States in trying a different approach to Pakistan’s otherwise intractable terrorism problem.
Syria......
Inspectors: Only One Syrian Chemical Weapons Site Remains
Aleppo Site Confirmed Abandoned Long Ago
by Jason Ditz, November 07, 2013
When the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed all chemical weapons manufacturing equipment destroyed in Syria last week, there were two storage sites that they hadn’t visited because they were too dangerous.
One of those two sites was checked off the list today, in Aleppo Province, confirmed as previously reported to have been long abandoned and dismantled. The building is said to have sustained major damage in the ongoing civil war.
The OPCW has confirmed several deadlines already met by Syria, and today’s report once again confirms good progress being made, though the questions of how the disarmament can continue with funding expected to run out in a matter of weeks remains unanswered.
The vast majority of Syria’s chemical arsenal is in the form of unweaponized chemicals. Their neutralization is expected to take place abroad, since the civil war makes the process difficult to do domestically, though with both Lebanon and Norway refusing to take the chemicals in, it remains to be seen where they’ll actually wind up.
‘Bitterly disappointed’ lobby resort to ‘tried and trusted arguments’ to bomb Syria
Published time: November 08, 2013 02:47
The Syrian chemical disarmament is flowing smoothly, but the US is meticulously checking Assad's declaration of stockpiles, suspecting him of hiding sites. Geopolitical historian Mark Almond thinks the US is hunting for a pretext for intervention.
RT: Are there valid indications that Damascus is trying to keep some of its chemical stockpiles - or is this just Washington's distrust that's fuelling these rumours?
Mark Almond: Well, the hopes in Washington, people like Susan Rise, the US ambassador to the United Nations, were bitterly disappointed by the deal to resolve the chemical weapons question peacefully. And they are resorting if you like to the tried and trusted arguments used against Saddam Hussein twelve years ago. That is to say saying that even though he seems to be going along with the inspectors, even though inspectors are not finding any evidence of cheating he must be cheating somehow, because that’s what a dictator would do. And also you want to use force, and I think there is a lobby in United States that was bitterly disappointed that they were not able to bomb because Assad agreed to renounce any weapons that he had of mass destruction and also because of course it enabled a country like Russia to play a role.
And the irony of the current situation is that Obama has around in his national security team a number of people who are as unilateralist as ever George Bush was, it’s just that they use the rhetoric of humanitarianism to justify bombing whereas George Bush and Dick Cheney essentially said: “America is in a position to do it so we are going do it to Iraq.” These days’ people say we are going to do it for humanitarian reasons in Syria. But in essence it’s really an exercise in brutal power politics dressed up with the milky human kindness, concern for refugees as well outrage at alleged use of chemical weapons.
RT: Washington previously praised Syria's disarmament - why this sudden scepticism?
MA: It is not absolutely impossible but after all this argument was used about Iraq at the beginning of 2000s. And as with Saddam Hussein, Assad will be very foolish to try to cheat because if caught out it would legitimize a massive military intervention against him in essence. The Security Council has said that if they were cheated then what the Americans wanted to do would be justified. So he hasn’t any incentive to cheat. Of course if we look at what has happened over the last 12-13 years in the Middle East we might be inclined to say just as observers if you disarm as Saddam Hussein did and as Muammar Gaddafi did in Libya then sooner or later the West will attack you because you have no way of deterring them. That I think is a potential risk for Syria down the line.
But the immediate risk to Assad’s regime was precisely that if he refused to disarm, it would have been attacked by United States and its NATO allies. Which would have been calamitous for the regime and hence also for Syria.
RT: This happens as Geneva 2 peace talks have been postponed. Western powers have committed to persuading the opposition to take part - why has it proven impossible to deliver?
MA: This is partly because their opposition is deeply split. There are several oppositions some of whom are more reasonable than others. But also their sponsors are very unhappy about any compromise. If there is a compromise then people like the King of Saudi Arabia, the unlikely proponent of democracy in Syria, might find that trouble can come to their door. Equally in the United States and in Britain there are people in the defense and intelligence world, hard-liners who really don’t want any kind of peaceful settlement, because the danger is from their point of view that it won’t produce a government in Syria which will be subordinate to what they want. And after all we have seen that Assad has survived, primarily because enough Syrians continued to support him, but the idea that Assad regime has no popular basis has I’m afraid been exploited in the conflict in the last two years. And in fact the only effective way to remove it if you are not going to compromise with it is to use force. So the hard-liners who don’t want to admit that their own side does not have enough support in legitimacy don’t wish to see any kind of a will discussion because it will not produce the result they want, they see it as the winner takes it all situation.
RT: So is there still a chance that peace talks will actually happen?
MA: Well it’s really difficult because very powerful influential countries with a lot of money like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and so on, backing the hardliners in the NATO countries. On the other hand there are people in the NATO countries including in Washington who say: ‘The recipe for regime change that we were sold on Syria hasn’t worked. The costs of trying to introduce it regardless are too high.’ That after all is in part why Obama backed down from launching unilateral military action in the end of August against Syria over the chemical weapons.
So it is possible that there are voices in Washington who may be able to recover the influence to say: ‘Some kind of negotiations, some kind of compromise is both from a humane point of view preferable but also from a practical political point of view the best way out.’
There are still as I say those people who think that Shia brute force will produce a kind of regime change they want, because they see the events in Syria as a kind of precedent for rolling on to Iran.
So we have in the background the negotiations with Iran over the nuclear question. And there are those people who would like to see the Iranian question resolved peacefully and the solution to the dispute over Iran’s nuclear polices resolved without violence. But of course there are people who think that they would like to resolve that by use of force, even though many people would say it’s not clear what the force required would be, that would be commensurate with dangers that would result in NATO military attack on Iran. But we have to see that there are people who are not just looking at Syria, but are looking at the whole wave of regime change across the Middle East. And those people are not totally concerned about the cost to ordinary people in these countries. But there are people in Washington and even in London, I think, who recognize that pushing this agenda is a very cruel pursuit of so-called democratization, where you won’t have too many people left to enjoy the fruits of it.
Mark Almond: Well, the hopes in Washington, people like Susan Rise, the US ambassador to the United Nations, were bitterly disappointed by the deal to resolve the chemical weapons question peacefully. And they are resorting if you like to the tried and trusted arguments used against Saddam Hussein twelve years ago. That is to say saying that even though he seems to be going along with the inspectors, even though inspectors are not finding any evidence of cheating he must be cheating somehow, because that’s what a dictator would do. And also you want to use force, and I think there is a lobby in United States that was bitterly disappointed that they were not able to bomb because Assad agreed to renounce any weapons that he had of mass destruction and also because of course it enabled a country like Russia to play a role.
And the irony of the current situation is that Obama has around in his national security team a number of people who are as unilateralist as ever George Bush was, it’s just that they use the rhetoric of humanitarianism to justify bombing whereas George Bush and Dick Cheney essentially said: “America is in a position to do it so we are going do it to Iraq.” These days’ people say we are going to do it for humanitarian reasons in Syria. But in essence it’s really an exercise in brutal power politics dressed up with the milky human kindness, concern for refugees as well outrage at alleged use of chemical weapons.
RT: Washington previously praised Syria's disarmament - why this sudden scepticism?
MA: It is not absolutely impossible but after all this argument was used about Iraq at the beginning of 2000s. And as with Saddam Hussein, Assad will be very foolish to try to cheat because if caught out it would legitimize a massive military intervention against him in essence. The Security Council has said that if they were cheated then what the Americans wanted to do would be justified. So he hasn’t any incentive to cheat. Of course if we look at what has happened over the last 12-13 years in the Middle East we might be inclined to say just as observers if you disarm as Saddam Hussein did and as Muammar Gaddafi did in Libya then sooner or later the West will attack you because you have no way of deterring them. That I think is a potential risk for Syria down the line.
But the immediate risk to Assad’s regime was precisely that if he refused to disarm, it would have been attacked by United States and its NATO allies. Which would have been calamitous for the regime and hence also for Syria.
RT: This happens as Geneva 2 peace talks have been postponed. Western powers have committed to persuading the opposition to take part - why has it proven impossible to deliver?
MA: This is partly because their opposition is deeply split. There are several oppositions some of whom are more reasonable than others. But also their sponsors are very unhappy about any compromise. If there is a compromise then people like the King of Saudi Arabia, the unlikely proponent of democracy in Syria, might find that trouble can come to their door. Equally in the United States and in Britain there are people in the defense and intelligence world, hard-liners who really don’t want any kind of peaceful settlement, because the danger is from their point of view that it won’t produce a government in Syria which will be subordinate to what they want. And after all we have seen that Assad has survived, primarily because enough Syrians continued to support him, but the idea that Assad regime has no popular basis has I’m afraid been exploited in the conflict in the last two years. And in fact the only effective way to remove it if you are not going to compromise with it is to use force. So the hard-liners who don’t want to admit that their own side does not have enough support in legitimacy don’t wish to see any kind of a will discussion because it will not produce the result they want, they see it as the winner takes it all situation.
RT: So is there still a chance that peace talks will actually happen?
MA: Well it’s really difficult because very powerful influential countries with a lot of money like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and so on, backing the hardliners in the NATO countries. On the other hand there are people in the NATO countries including in Washington who say: ‘The recipe for regime change that we were sold on Syria hasn’t worked. The costs of trying to introduce it regardless are too high.’ That after all is in part why Obama backed down from launching unilateral military action in the end of August against Syria over the chemical weapons.
So it is possible that there are voices in Washington who may be able to recover the influence to say: ‘Some kind of negotiations, some kind of compromise is both from a humane point of view preferable but also from a practical political point of view the best way out.’
There are still as I say those people who think that Shia brute force will produce a kind of regime change they want, because they see the events in Syria as a kind of precedent for rolling on to Iran.
So we have in the background the negotiations with Iran over the nuclear question. And there are those people who would like to see the Iranian question resolved peacefully and the solution to the dispute over Iran’s nuclear polices resolved without violence. But of course there are people who think that they would like to resolve that by use of force, even though many people would say it’s not clear what the force required would be, that would be commensurate with dangers that would result in NATO military attack on Iran. But we have to see that there are people who are not just looking at Syria, but are looking at the whole wave of regime change across the Middle East. And those people are not totally concerned about the cost to ordinary people in these countries. But there are people in Washington and even in London, I think, who recognize that pushing this agenda is a very cruel pursuit of so-called democratization, where you won’t have too many people left to enjoy the fruits of it.
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