Year: 2009

Anthropologists at war

The Economist

This evening, Barack Obama will announce America’s new strategy for pursuing the war in Afghanistan. Recent reports indicate the new approach has been influenced by advocates of a “tribal strategy”, which would seek to build security using local tribes as the unit of agency and point of contact, rather than directing all aid and security efforts through Afghanistan’s corrupt central government and fledgling national army. One document that has been circulating lately among supporters of the tribal strategy is a paper called “One Tribe at a Time”, by Major Jim Gant of the Army’s special forces. (the paper can be accessed [here]: )

Major Gant has spent years fighting in Afghanistan, and developed a close relationship with a tribal leader in a town he deployed to in 2003, whom he nicknamed “Sitting Bull”. (Er…no comment.) His paper sings the praises of the Afghans he lived with, and of their tribal institutions, and—well, goes a bit overboard:

A tribe is a “natural democracy.” In Afghan shuras and jirgas (tribal councils), every man’s voice has a chance to be heard. The fact that women and minority groups have no say in the process does not make it less effective nor less of a democracy to them.

This is a bit rich. It is one thing to say that tribes are the effective unit of social organisation in Afghanistan and must be our points of contact for pragmatic reasons, but to pretend that they are democratic is to fool oneself, and no one else.

However, it is not at all clear that Major Gant is right to claim that tribes are the effective unit of social organisation in Afghanistan. “We must support the tribal system,” he writes, “because it is the single, unchanging political, social and cultural reality in Afghan society and the one system that all Afghans understand, even if we don’t.” Major Gant is not a political scientist or an anthropologist, but a lot of the people who are in the business of analysing counterinsurgency in Afghanistan these days are, and writing the words “unchanging political, social and cultural reality” for an audience of modern academics is like laying a platter of ground beef in front of a pack of pit bulls. For the past week, Major Gant’s approach has been getting torn apart for, basically, the cardinal sin of post-structuralist, post-Levi-Straussian anthropology: essentialism.

In September, the Army’s amazingly named Human Terrain System (apparently just a research department, not a fleet of computer-controlled robot anthropologists) published a paper called “My Cousin’s Enemy is My Friend”. The paper reports a unanimous consensus among researchers that non-Pashtun Afghans do not belong to tribes at all, and that even Pashtun “tribes” do not actually function as coherent groups capable of coordinated action: “Anthropologists have long noted the tendency of Pashtuns to form relationships that don’t break down along tribal lines.” The title comes from the uniquely Pashtun phenomenon of “first-cousin hostility”, caused by competition between father’s-side first cousins over inheritance of scarce arable land, which contributes to a tendency to form flexible alliances with members of other tribes against members of one’s own. To the extent that tribes were important, their cohesion has been sapped by 30 years of Soviet-backed central government, mujahedin warfare and warlordism, Taliban-led ideological organisation and NATO-led nation-building. And the paper notes that the tribes themselves are not primal kinship units out of the primordial past, but historical creations, often fostered by neighbouring states:

The British made great efforts to engage Pashtuns along tribal lines to the exclusion of other methods…The British believed that establishing clear tribal regulations by imposing standards on customary law institutions (like Pashtunwali) would help them better control the Pashtun populations of the “tribal areas”. That approach was unsuccessful.

This is highly similar to the methods of colonial administration through local “traditional” proxies deployed by the British throughout South Asia and Africa. It is also similar to American attempts to enlist “traditional” local power structures (churches, highland ethnic tribes, etc) in counterinsurgencies in Vietnam and elsewhere. There’s a structural reason why such alliances are tempting: local tribes and traditional leaders rarely define their interests in ways that conflict with those of a faraway power like Britain or America. In contrast, state-building ideological movements like the Vietnamese Communists or the Taliban often do define interests that entail geopolitical conflict with other states. It’s important to recognise that the Taliban are trying to build a state in Afghanistan—a bad state, one inimical to the values and interests of the free world, but a state nonetheless. To oppose a state-building movement by backing local power structures that maintain national fragmentation is a strategy that may run against the current of modernisation.

There are a number of other disturbing elements in Major Gant’s paper. On first meeting “Sitting Bull”, he quickly decided to aid him in recovering territory the elder claimed had been seized by a rival tribe—a decision one critic called participating in “tribal cleansing”. His description of his Afghan experience is shot through with an exoticist enjoyment of gazing at himself dressed up in local clothes, his arm flung around the shoulder of a tribal elder. But mostly, what the “tribal strategy” needs is a clearer sense of what exactly it is fighting for. In the age of empire, colonial support for tribal authorities gave the lie to the “white man’s burden”, “mission civilisatrice” fiction that European powers were running Nigeria and Vietnam for their own good. American and European state-building efforts in Afghanistan were initially sold as an effort to build a fairer, more modern, more prosperous, safer state for Afghans (especially Afghan women) to enjoy. If Afghanistan is instead to have a backward, traditional, patriarchal tribal society, should America be helping it to get there?

Economist for more
(Submitted by reader)

By Vinay Lal

In the early morning hours of December 3rd, 25 years ago, a poisonous gas leaked from a Union Carbide plant and crept over the city of Bhopal and within hours had taken a few thousand lives. Since that fateful evening, close to 20,000 people have died. Chernobyl still remains synonymous with industrial ‘accidents’; Bhopal, notwithstanding the valiant attempts of many survivors and their children, activists, and an entire array of organizations – among them, Sambhavna Trust, the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, the International Medical Commission for Bhopal, the Bhopal Gas Peedit Mahila Stationery Karmachari Sangh (the Bhopal Gas-Affected Women’s Stationery Trade Union) — that have been plunged in relief work to ameliorate the conditions under which victims and their communities live and labor, has been largely forgotten.

The facts surrounding the ‘Bhopal Gas Leak’ are no longer disputed, except, of course, by that cowardly and criminal corporation known as Union Carbide, which in 2001 was acquired by Dow Chemical. Shortly after midnight on December 3rd, 54,000 pounds (24,500 kilograms) of untreated methyl isocyanate, known as MIC, escaped from a tank at Union Carbide’s plant in Bhopal, then (as now) a city with a venerable history and a population of over a million. By about 1 AM the alarm had been sounded and people began to flee as the gas, moved along by the wind, swept over the city. None of the six safety systems at the plant were functioning, and the tank refrigeration system, which alone would have sufficed to prevent the leak, was out of order. The Indian Government, which too bears a heavy and to this day largely unacknowledged responsibility for the catastrophe, admits that over 521,000 people were exposed to the gas. By all reasonable estimates, some 7,000 people were killed within the first week of exposure to the lethal gas; in subsequent years, another 15,000 people, perhaps more, have succumbed to their medical ailments as a consequence of their exposure. The number of people still under treatment is many times more.

Why, one might ask, was a chemical plant allowed to function in a densely inhabited portion of the city? The same question should be asked in many countries such as the US, where hazardous wastes’ disposal sites are disproportionately located in poor and minority communities. We know that long before the incident, numerous warnings had appeared in the local press of the dangerous and unsafe conditions in the plant. Raj Kumar Keswani, the Bhopal-based writer for the Hindi weekly, Jansatta, penned a piece in June 1984, six months before the disaster, entitled “Bhopal: On the brink of a disaster.” Had the article appeared in India Today, perhaps – only perhaps – someone may have paid attention, but no one deemed Keswani’s Hindi-language investigative journalism of any consequence. There are far too many hidden scripts, many hitherto still unexplored, in the narrative that is now known as the ‘Bhopal Gas Leak Tragedy’.

While, in the immediate aftermath doctors, nurses, and ordinary citizens struggled valiantly to save people, Union Carbide refused to divulge the chemical composition of the gas. Consequently, since toxological information about MIC was not forthcoming, doctors were compelled to offer symptomatic treatment. Indeed, all of Union Carbide’s endeavors had but one purpose, namely to find ways to absolve itself of all responsibility for a catastrophic failure at one of its plants. Allegations that the company had compromised on the safety of the plant in an effort to cut costs were met with the astounding claim, which the company’s own investigative officers could not substantiate, that a “disgruntled employee” had sabotaged the plant and caused the leak. With 50.9% ownership of Union Carbide India Limited, Union Carbide was the principal shareholder of its Indian subsidiary; but now a resounding effort would be made to depict the relationship between Union Carbide and its Indian subsidiary as a remote and distant one. Now that Union Carbide has ceased to exist, the day may not be very far when Dow Chemical will, in a manner of speaking, pretend that the incident never occurred. In the US, of course, Dow Chemical, as conversant with the insipid languages of multicultural democracies as any other corporation, will continue to project itself as a corporation that ‘cares’ for people’s lives, is committed to safe and ‘nurturing’ work environment to ensure a ‘better future’ for our children and their children, and so on. Meanwhile, other victims will be roasted at the altar of profit.

The story of Bhopal has been told often enough and the struggle continues. The toxic wastes that litter the plant have seeped into the soil and the groundwater has been contaminated, giving rise to a new generation of those who, even if they are not the offspring of victims of the gas leak, are suffering from the consequences of the leak. A mere few days after the leak, American lawyers were flying into India, boasting about the billions that they would win for the victims. The story of the litigation surrounding Bhopal makes for unpleasant reading, but is fully suggestive of the consideration that ethical considerations have never been even remotely present in the minds of governments, courts, Union Carbide, and most lawyers. [See my article on Bhopal and the lawyers on MANAS.] By terms of the Bhopal Gas Leak Act of 1985, the Government of India assumed responsibility as the sole legal representative of the victims, and shortly thereafter the Supreme Court of India awarded a paltry US $470 million, two-thirds of which today still lies unused in the Reserve Bank of India, as a final settlement to all the victims. The maximum compensation to those injured is Rs 25,000 ($550), and to the next of kin of those who died the amount is Rs 62,000 ($1,300): as a Union Carbide spokeswoman once put it, the amount is generous, “plenty good”, for an Indian.

Nearly everything that can be said about corporate responsibility has been said. The monster cannot be tamed, and it is time to recognize that rather than to pretend that, as we become wiser and democracies ‘mature’, rogue corporations can be coaxed into civility. When I think of gas and atrocities, I think of the gassing of Jews by the murderous Nazis. But while the Nazis were brought to justice, the then-CEO of Union Carbide, Warren Anderson, a fugitive from justice for whom an arrest warrant has been out for two decades, is enjoying his retirement years lapping up the sun in one of his many vacation homes. Not one person, American or Indian, has ever been indicted for the criminal conduct that led to the Bhopal tragedy. Meanwhile, as if to suggest that Union Carbide remains an anomaly, we will be told, as in today’s New York Times, by no less a person than the famed author of Maximum City that Union Carbide has failed to abide by the norms that are inculcated in all American children: “It’s a wonderful American tradition: you always clean up the mess you made.” Somehow, the mess that democratic America – where children, unlike in Mumbai (so avers Suketu Mehta), are taught to clean up their mess — has left behind in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, much of central America, and now Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention countless other places, has been forgotten. Once America starts to clean up the mess it has left behind wherever its footsteps are to be found, it will find no need for any other occupation for years to come.

Vinay Lal teaches at UCLA and can be reached at vlal@history.ucla.edu or dillichalo@gmail.com
His blog is Lal Salaam

GÜL DEM?R – N?K? GAMM, ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News

The 350-year-old portico designed by legendary Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan for the Sacred Mosque is to be torn down now that the pilgrims have left. And with its demolition Mecca’s last traces of Ottoman architecture will be dust in the desert wind.

Now that the Kurban Bayram holiday and the time of the Hajj pilgrimage have ended, Islam’s holy city of Mecca can return to normal. But with the number of pilgrims estimated to rise to 10 million in the coming years, Saudis have been working hard non-stop for years to prepare for them.

This year approximately 2.5 million pilgrims converged on the Saudi Arabian city that for centuries has been the focal point of Muslim believers who gather to partake in the pilgrimage at least once in their lifetime provided they can afford it and are in good enough health.

How the city prepares for its visitors, however, is a question that some experts say has not been addressed appropriately, especially regarding ancient Islamic architecture and Ottoman heritage.

According to reports during this year’s Hajj, now that the pilgrims have left, the portico around the Kaabah, designed by legendary Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan in the late 1500s, is to be torn down.

Dr. Sami Angawi, head of the Amar Center for Architectural Heritage in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, is an expert on the region’s Islamic architecture. He said he acknowledges that the Saudis have the right to provide modern cities for their citizens, but also noted that many buildings from early Islamic history are being demolished and replaced with high-rise buildings. Angawi said he calculated that over 300 historical buildings in Mecca and Medina have already been destroyed.

Also, the Washington-based Gulf Institute has estimated that, in the past two decades, 95 percent of the millennium-old buildings in Mecca have been demolished.

Furthermore, the British-based Gensler architectural firm disclosed during the Hajj that is has plans to redevelop one square kilometer in the historic southern area known as Darb Al-Khalil. When completed, however, the area will include residences, hotels and amenities for pilgrims and will allow easy movement from the area to the Mosque Al-Haram, or Sacred Mosque.

Admittedly, the Saudis have the right to ensure that the annual pilgrimage occurs as safely as possible, so it is not surprising they are bent on making changes. For example, the ramp that leads to the area where the pilgrims “throw stones at the devil” at times was where hundreds could be killed when crowds rushed forward to complete this portion of the pilgrimage. Today, however, the ramp system has been changed and can hold 3 million people and has capacity for as many as 5 million.

They also expanded the Mosque Al-Haram in the center of the city, and where there were once hundreds of houses, they have now been replaced with wide avenues and city squares.

The Ottoman fortress that looked over the Kaabah for two centuries has already been razed to make room for the Abraj Al Bait Towers, which are supposed to be finished in 2010. This move provoked anger among Turks who viewed the fortress as part of Ottoman heritage. The towers, however, will have a prayer hall capable of holding 10,000 worshippers, a seven-star hotel, a shopping mall, residential housing and a parking lot. All told, the entire structure will be capable of housing up to 100,000 people.

Mecca has gone through many rejuvenations before. One example is in the late 1500s, when Ottoman Sultan Suleyman had Mimar Sinan design plans that included widening the courtyard and building porticoes. The plan was carried out in 1590 by Mimar Mehmed Aga. Sultan Selim II, in 1571, ordered Mimar Sinan to renovate the mosque and replaced the prayer hall’s roof with domes and reinforced it with new columns. The portico plan was deferred to a later date. In 1629, excessive rain damage led to the restoration of the mosque and the Kaabah.

But with demolition of the portico, the last traces of Ottoman architecture will be erased from Mecca.

Hurriyet for more

By Peter Lee

Beijing will find little cause for joy in United States President Barack Obama’s decision to dispatch 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, as outlined in a major policy speech on Tuesday.

Geopolitical logic (and China’s interests) would dictate that the West disengage from Afghanistan and the Pashtun brief be placed in the eager if not particularly capable hands of Pakistan.

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) would see to it that more tractable assets, such as the Haqqanis and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, would battle the unruly Taliban to a bloody stalemate in Afghanistan’s Pashtun regions, decouple the Pakistan Taliban from their Afghan patrons, and restore a semblance of stability to Pakistan’s west

Meanwhile, as they have always done, the Afghan Tajiks, Hazaris and Uzbeks would turn to outside aid from some combination of Russia, China, Iran and the United States to contain the Pashtuns and forestall the spread of fundamentalist and al-Qaeda extremist contagion.

China has tried to shape the US debate over Afghanistan, repeatedly making the case for letting nature and anti-Western Pashtun militancy take their course and moving beyond counter-insurgency to reconciliation. As M K Bhadrakumar commented on a think piece by a Chinese defense policy authority, Li Qinggong:
The China Daily article makes several important points. First, it bluntly calls on Washington to forthwith bring the US military operations in Afghanistan to an end. There are no caveats here while making this demand, no alibis. (China maps an end to the Afghan war Asia Times Online, October 2, 2009.)

Clearly, China has lost the debate, perhaps not on the merits of its arguments but because of the loss of a heaven-sent justification for the Obama administration to depart Afghanistan: President Hamid Karzai’s rigging of the presidential election and the subsequent absence of a legitimate, capable and honest government supposedly essential to successful counter-insurgency.

In addition to qualms over abandoning Afghanistan’s people to the savage mercies of Taliban theocrats and creating a haven for anti-US extremists, the Obama administration probably calculates that adding a messy collapse in Afghanistan on top of 10%-plus unemployment in the US and the hangover of a brutal recession would spell disaster for the Democrats in the 2010 US congressional elections.

Instead, the United States is hunkering down in Afghanistan and relying on China’s rival, India – the only nation, it can be safely said, that views continuation of the Afghan adventure with any enthusiasm – to help keep the lid on things in Afghanistan.

The Times of India reported with evident satisfaction on Obama’s explanatory phone call to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh prior to the Afghanistan “surge” speech at West Point:
During his recent visit to Washington DC, Singh had made a strong case for the US to remain in Afghanistan for the time being. He insisted that the “forces of extremism” had to be defeated in Afghanistan, and the US-India joint statement reflected the concerns about the sanctuaries and havens of terrorists that had to be destroyed.

In fact, before setting out to Washington, Singh had told Newsweek, “I sincerely hope the US and the global community will stay involved in Afghanistan …”

The Obama-Singh conversation had another important component for India: India’s own presence and activity in Afghanistan. The Indian takeaway here is that the Pakistan “line” which, in some ways was reflected in the report prepared by the top US commander in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal, that Indian activities in Afghanistan could be counter-productive, was comprehensively discarded. Obama reportedly told the PM that Indian activities were not only appreciated but they should continue.

The United States foreign policy commentariat is eager to see India step into the vacuum left by Western abhorrence of Afghanistan’s desolate economic and security landscape.

Asia Times for more

By John Bellamy Foster Interviewed by Max van Lingen

John Bellamy Foster is the editor of the socialist magazine Monthly Review and teaches sociology at the University of Oregon.  He has written on numerous subjects, from political economy to Marxist theory.  This year Foster published The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace With the Planet.

Max van Lingen is a student of political philosophy and modern history at the University of Amsterdam and a journalist for the Dutch monthly The Socialist.  A shortened version of this interview appeared in Dutch in the December issue of The Socialist.  The entire interview appeared in Dutch on the website of the International Socialists: <http://www.socialisme.nu>.

Consciousness about climate change has increased enormously; however, it also seems as if there is a lack of criticism of business and government actions.  Instead it appears as if people are thinking: it doesn’t really matter why people act, as long as they act.

I think people on the left often try to be “practical,” which they interpret as somehow trying to accommodate themselves to the status quo, so as to make minor improvements.  Often this is a kind of desperation to effect change.  However, Copenhagen is already a dead deal before it begins.  The United States and the other leading powers have indicated that there will be no binding agreements, no significant changes, and no non-market solutions.

James Hansen, arguably the world’s greatest climate scientist, has called the latest U.S. climate legislation passed by the House “worse than nothing” in that it locks in a “temple of doom.” The changes, if we are to avoid planetary collapse, need to be much more massive and need to come from below.  Hansen himself has called for mass “civil resistance” and has been arrested while protesting mountain top removal coal mining.

The climate justice movement, which tends to be more radical, is where to take one’s stand at present.  The truth is that we need some extremely strong, short-term solutions to be followed by a long-term strategy of ecological and social revolution.  I have written about this in my new book Ecological Revolution and in an article to appear in the January 2010 Monthly Review.

At the same time people are making ‘green’ choices, which are sometimes much more expensive.  There is a lot of criticism from this group towards people who are opposed to environmental measures because they are afraid they are going to lose their jobs.  Does this contradiction stand in the way of a solution?

There is no doubt that the growing need to make lifestyle changes is important and critical.  A great deal is being learned in this process, which could play into an ecological revolution of the whole society — as part of a total revolutionary dialectic.  Seeking to have a smaller ecological footprint is important on an individual as well as a social level.  But divorced from fundamental economic and political change, such individual, voluntaristic changes, primarily in the realm of consumption, are limited.  We cannot shop our way out of these problems.

Monthly Review for more

By Francis Boyle

( From Sep. 4, 2009) — On September 13, I got a call from FOX News asking me to go on the O’Reilly Factor program that night, two days after the tragic events of September 11, to debate O’Reilly on War v. Peace. It is pretty clear where I stood and where he stood. I had been on this program before. I knew what I was getting in to. But I felt it would be important for one lawyer to get up there in front of a national audience and argue against a war and for the application of domestic and international law enforcement, international procedures, and constitutional protections, which I did.

Unfortunately, O’Reilly has the highest ranked TV news program in the country. I thought someone should be on there on September 13. I think most people agree that I beat O’Reilly. By the end of the show he was agreeing with me. But the next night he was saying that we should bomb five different Arab countries and kill all their people. But let me review for you briefly some of the international law arguments that I have been making almost full time since September 13. They are set forth in the introduction in my new book, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence.

Terrorism v. War

First, right after September 11 President Bush called these attacks an act of terrorism, which they were under the United States domestic law definition at that time. However, there is no generally accepted definition of an act of terrorism under international law, for reasons I explain in my book. Soon thereafter however and apparently after consultations with Secretary of State Powell, he proceeded to call these an act of war, ratcheting up the rhetoric and the legal and constitutional issues at stake here. They were not an act of war as traditionally defined. An act of war is a military attack by one state against another state. There is so far no evidence produced that the state of Afghanistan, at the time, either attacked the United States or authorized or approved such an attack. Indeed, just recently FBI Director Mueller and the deputy director of the CIA publicly admitted that they have found no evidence in Afghanistan linked to the September 11 attacks. If you believe the government’s account of what happened, which I think is highly questionable, 15 of these 19 people alleged to have committed these attacks were from Saudi Arabia and yet we went to war against Afghanistan. It does not really add up in my opinion.

ZMag for more

By Michael Georgy

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari’s rule looks tenuous, with growing calls for him to relinquish powers as his government faces a Taleban insurgency and US pressure to help fight militants in Afghanistan. Political tensions forced Zardari to transfer authority over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons to the prime minister last week. The move was symbolic because Pakistan’s military remains in control of the arsenal. But it highlights the deeply unpopular Zardari’s scramble to pacify the opposition and head off calls for his resignation.

The turmoil raises the possibility, although remote, that another civilian government will fail to serve a full term in a nation ruled by the military for over half of its 62-year history. Zardari’s controversial policies – such as signing a conditional US aid package – have enraged the all-powerful military and ordinary Pakistanis. “He is not in threat of being locked out let’s say in four weeks or six weeks. But he is under a lot of pressure, a lot of criticism because of the way he conducted himself in the past,” said political analyst Hasan Askari Rizvi. “If he amends his ways then I think he may continue until some new crisis emerges.

The opposition wants Zardari to give up sweeping powers inherited from his predecessor Gen Pervez Musharraf, whose cooperation with the United States in the fight against terrorism and tussle with the judiciary ultimately led to his demise. An amnesty paved the way for Zardari’s wife Benazir Bhutto to return from self-imposed exile in October 2007. She was assassinated just over two months later, leaving Zardari to lead her party to victory in general elections in February 2008 and then become president after Musharraf resigned in August.

Zardari’s downfall would complicate US efforts to secure more support for its battle against the Taleban in Afghanistan. Failure there could damage President Barack Obama’s presidency. While few expect Zardari’s imminent fall, Pakistani commentators and media suggest it’s only a matter of time. Pakistan’s domestic troubles come at a critical time for the strategic region. Obama announced on Tuesday he will deploy 30,000 more US troops in Afghanistan.

A surge would create more difficulties for Zardari, who lacks Bhutto’s charisma and is so seldom seen in public that one newspaper recently called him “the invisible President”. Officials fear it would push Taleban fighters into Pakistan, which is already struggling against militants who have killed hundreds in bombings since October in reaction to an offensive. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged Zardari over the weekend to take tougher action to track down Osama bin Laden and crack down harder on the Taleban.

Pakistan’s military runs the campaign against militants. So Zardari would be taking big risks if he bows to Western pressure and tries to take command of security policies. Political analysts say, that for now, the military is only interested in keeping Zardari in line. “They can apply pressure by making one or two statements here and there and the opposition will get encouraged, the opposition will get enough signals to build pressure on him,” said Rizvi . “The only thing the military wants is that any high-policy security matter should be settled in consultation with them, rather than unilateral decision making.

Zardari faces an array of other problems. Public anger is growing over rising food prices some blame on influential businessmen and politicians. The economy is in virtual recession. Security concerns have put off investors. But he may only have time to fight for his survival. After Zardari spent 11 years in jail in Pakistan on corruption and murder charges – though never convicted – the man nicknamed “Mr Ten Percent” is left open to old allegations resurfacing, now that the amnesty has elapsed.

Zardari cannot be prosecuted because of presidential immunity, but a revival of graft cases against officials close to him could deal a lethal political blow. If his position becomes untenable, Washington may look around for another ally, hoping to secure political stability in Pakistan and increase the chances of defeating the Taleban. An obvious choice would be Pakistan’s most popular politician and Zardari’s main rival Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister ousted by Musharraf in a bloodless coup in 1999.

So far, Sharif seems hesitant to capitalise on Zardari’s misfortunes, perhaps fearful of a full-blown political crisis during sensitive times. Asad Durrani, former director general of Pakistan’s ISI spy agency, believes a Zardari exit would help. “It would be a good beginning. Because he is so controversial. He takes up so much time of the government, of the media, of civil society,” said Durrani. Some Pakistanis, like plumber Mohammad Sajid, say the country may as well keep Zardari. “If Zardari goes, then the new leader will be worse, it’s our experience. Therefore, I think may Allah guide him to improve his performance and he completes his five years,” he said. – Reuters

Kuwait Times for more

by Chetan Chauhan , Hindustan Times

India set its first emission target on Thursday, announcing it would reduce emission intensity by 20-25 per cent of its 2005 level by 2020.

India is the world’s fourth largest carbon emitter, China the biggest. India’s emission intensity fell 17.6 per cent between 1990 and 2005.Outlining India’s “flexible” stand for the Copenhagen summit of 192 nations starting on Monday, Environment and Forest Minister Jairam Ramesh told Lok Sabha: “It won’t be an international commitment. We have agreed to it voluntarily and will achieve it irrespective of an agreement in Copenhagen.”

Emission intensity is a measure of emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP). For India, the target would mean emissions would increase to achieve 8-8.5 per cent GDP growth but its pace would fall. According to the Planning Commission, by 2020, India’s emission intensity would be half that of China, which last week announced an emission intensity reduction target of 40-45 per cent from 2005 levels.

Hindustan Times for more

By Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

(Oventic, Mexico, 2005)

The bull fought once or twice.
Scraped its hooves.
Horns pinned to tail.
Neck open to the world.

The crowd pressed closer, moist with the heat of our and the bull’s gasping.

Suddenly, whatever it was – left its body completely.

The exact moment of its death visible
the dissipation of an acrid cloud of smoke – an evaporation.

On this earth, the task of deconstruction began. Knives unfolded for every man. Four sliced circles around the bull’s ankles. Another man began at the throat and bisected the skin on the torso with the tip of his knife, stopping to inspect the furry skin of the penis. A small boy giggled as he held up the freshly severed testicles and rushed down to the kitchen at the bottom of the hill. Other children returned from the kitchen covered in flour with sets of newly sharpened knives. Teenage boys foraged through the trees for fresh branches thick with clean green leaves.

Hundreds of tiny cuts were required to divide the entire skin of the animal from its fat. A dozen hands ripped small knives through the connective tissue. Steam rose off its stringy white flesh into the greyness of the afternoon as four men help open its splayed legs. They rolled the carcass over to the right, laid down a bed of fresh leaves beneath it, and then repeated on the other side.

Droplets of rain forced me and Jan indoors to get our hoodies, but like all the other children and adults in the Caracol, we found ourselves quickly back at the diminishing body of the bull. All the men working on the carcass cheered as a man in a cowboy hat with a mouth full of silver fronts threw his rucksack on the ground and stepped towards the bull. He was the professional they were waiting for. The crowd roared. The butcher had finally shown up.

A few cleared out of the way so the butcher could get to the bull. He stood above its remains and cracked its chest cavity in two with an overhead swing of his axe. The bull’s stomach ballooned forward in a white mass. Three men grabbed what was left of its windpipe attached to an expanding bag of organs and rolled them onto the ground. With the ribcage cracked open, the man with the silver smile set to work on carving the fatty tissue off the liver. He sliced a handle into the red mass and passed it like a suitcase to a young boy, who ran with it to the kitchen with his elbows up.

Next were the large intestines which the man with the silver teeth carried to the ravine, split open and shook out the partially digested grass and dry roots inside. He handed the empty skin to another boy to take to the kitchen as the dogs circled round. A woman and her child set to work on the small intestines, sitting over a bucket, squeezing each tube and cutting it open inch by inch. On the bed of leaves, the man with the silver smile raised the axe over his head again. The crowd had begun to thin out as the sun began to set, and the remaining few of us jumped back as he hacked again and cracked the back bone in half, exposing juicy bits of red and yellow marrow.

He sawed the base of the ribcage from the backbone on both sides. He deepened the circles around each hoof and broke them off one at a time with his hands. At last, he traced the line of the tail, skimmed the hairs off of it, cut clear through the skin and pulled the pointy white snake of bone from the skin in one piece, as two children ran with the last remaining sections of the bull to the kitchen.

That night, we sat at long wooden tables in the school house decorated with red and green paper flowers. We stood in line as the women served the food from tall metal drums. A styrofoam bowl of clear broth, a hunk of meat, vegetables, and jalapeno, and warm corn tortillas. The body of that one bull fed hundreds of us, with more than half of the metal drum to spare filled with bits of beef: the children, their parents and siblings, the committee members, the artisan collectives, the facilitators, me, and Jan. I watched the man with the silver smile at the end of another table with a bowl piled high with scrambled eggs, rice, and beans. Natalio told me later that the man with the silver smile is the regional butcher. Every week he travels from town to town to kill bulls, and every week he never eats them.

When I put the bull back together in my mind – Was I close enough to feel his breath? Could I smell the sun, dirt, twigs, and shit on his skin? Did I feel his bristles around his lips searching, fluttering around the surface of his streaked teeth? Go closer. Look. What was the look? The look in the bull’s eye?

Faith. A simple, incredulous trust. Unbroken.

To Book A Show On
Kelly’s 2009-2010 Tour:
booking@yellowgurl.com

Official Website
(Bio, Poems, Online Store, Blog, Calendar & More):
www.yellowgurl.com

Official YouTube:
www.youtube.com/kztsai

Official MySpace:
myspace.com/yellowgurl_poetry

Official Twitter:
@yellowgurlpoet

Official Facebook:
Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

Official ITunes:
Itunes

By Charles R. Larson

Think of all the great stories that have dealt with frustrated love—unrequited, lost, unacknowledged, unfulfilled, one-sided; painful, agonized, obsessive–so many unhappy characters you’d think there wouldn’t be the need for one more. I’m referring to the characters we’ve invested our reading lives in: Romeo and Juliet, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, Gatsby, Molly Bloom, Tom Jones, Emma Bovary, Pip in Great Expectations. The list goes on forever, not only in fiction but also in epics and drama, even poems. That said, it’s difficult to recall a literary character as obsessive and fixated on another as the hero of Orhan Pamuk’s devastating and astonishing new novel, The Museum of Innocence.

Kemal is thirty years old at the beginning of the story and twice that by the end. The rollercoaster ride he takes us on–relentlessly recording the minutest details of his inability to let go of his lost love–is related in the first-person, though there’s a caveat about that narration that I will reveal later. But, first, it’s necessary to provide a couple of basic facts necessary about the novel.

Chapter one begins: “It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it. Had I known, had I cherished this gift, would everything have turned out differently?” Though that second sentence is an ominous question, the rest of the initial paragraph explains Kemal’s happiness. It’s May 26, 1975, and he’s making love to his distant cousin, eighteen-year-old Füsun, from the poorer side of his extended family. Kemal is thirty, and in three weeks everyone who is important in Istanbul will attend a party to celebrate his engagement to Sibel (from another prominent family) at the newly-opened Hilton Hotel.

Counterpunch for more