Year: 2009

By Oleg Kalugin

I was the head of the KGB’s foreign counterintelligence branch when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979. The fateful order to send our military into such difficult terrain was by no means a foregone conclusion. Before Soviet leaders made the final call, we wrung our hands, considered our options, and argued among ourselves. Here is the inside story of how that wrenching decision was made.

At the time, I viewed Afghanistan as a country within the Soviet sphere of interest and thought we had to do whatever possible to prevent the Americans and the CIA from installing an anti-Soviet regime there. How wrong I would turn out to be.

My first and only trip to Afghanistan came in August 1978. Four months earlier, a pro-Communist coup headed by Noor Mohammad Taraki had overthrown the government of Mohammad Daoud, killing him and his family. Moscow had not been overjoyed by news of the coup, for in Daoud we had enjoyed a stable ally and relative peace along our southern border.

Reports soon began to filter back to KGB headquarters in Moscow of growing Islamic opposition in Afghanistan to the new Taraki regime. My KGB colleague Vladimir Kryuchkov and I were then sent to Kabul on a fact-finding mission. Our objectives included signing a cooperation agreement between the Soviet and Afghan intelligence services.

What we found on the ground was not encouraging. Kabul struck me as a big village, with worse poverty than I had seen on my prior visits to India. We had wanted to visit the southeastern city of Jalalabad, but Afghan officials said it was not safe — a troubling signal that the situation was less rosy than our hosts portrayed it.

Kryuchkov and I proceeded to meet the Afghan leaders who had slaughtered their opponents to gain power, and who later would die by the sword themselves.

Taraki, who had co-founded Afghanistan’s Communist party in 1965 and personally ordered the murder of Daoud, was by then a fragile, stooped old man. In his advancing age, he struck me as a fuss-budget given to general utterances, and I saw then that he didn’t have the physical strength or the political backing to continue to lead the country for long.

The man who eventually would depose Taraki, Hafizullah Amin, was a far more physically impressive figure. Amin was a dark, handsome man with glittering eyes. He was the shrewdest and most literate of the officials I met in Afghanistan, and when we discovered that we had both studied in New York at Columbia University, we hit it off immediately. We spoke to each other in English and reminisced about old haunts and familiar landmarks in the Big Apple. When we parted he gave me a big hug and invited me back as his personal guest. (I would never get the chance. The following year, KGB special forces troops gunned down Amin at the presidential palace as Soviet troops took over the city.)

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(Submitted by reader)

By Peter Lach-Newinsky

Whenever most conversations I have these days move around to matters political I often find myself in a quandary. I have the choice of either accepting the tacit assumptions behind the other person’s remarks or questions, or else remaining largely silent and trying to change the topic. This is because I don’t share the tacit assumptions.

I would classify most of these usually unexamined assumptions as social democratic or liberal. They dominate all corporate media for reasons that will become obvious below. In my view, these prevalent myths of our age do not hold up to rational scrutiny and are a, largely unrecognised, form of mind control. Here is my attempt to list fifteen of them and briefly comment on them from the viewpoint of critical political science and a radically democratic ethics.

1. This is a democratic system (The Democratic Fallacy).

If ‘democracy’ means ‘rule by the people’, it isn’t. It is an oligarchic system of elected political elites tightly enmeshed with the unelected economic elites in industry, state bureaucracy and the media. These, often discordant, elites together make up the ruling class.

2. Democratic parties are run democratically (The Party Fallacy).

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By Kamran Reza Chowdhury

Dhaka, Dec 23 (bdnews24.com)—Bangladesh has sent a draft deal to Kathmandu, ahead of prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s India visit next month, to activate a 1976 transit treaty allowing Nepal to use Mongla port for export of goods to a third country.

Government officials say Bangladesh and Nepal are ready to sign the deal to activate the transit agreement, which will also allow goods-laden trucks and trains to enter each others’ territory.

Positive signs are also there that India will give landlocked Nepal the long-awaited approval on using a patch of territory as transit for transporting goods to Bangladesh, communications ministry officials told bdnews24.com on Monday.

The approval is likely to coincide with Hasina’s visit now slated for the second week of January, they added.

THREE-WAY COOPERATION

Bangladesh and Nepal must both have Indian approval, to cross its territory, before implementing the deal aiming to increase trade volume between them.

The relations between Dhaka and Delhi have been boosted recently as the two countries have moved closer through cooperation in a number of areas, including trade and cross-border crime.

Delhi in September this year assured Bangladesh of providing transit facilities to reach both Nepal and Bhutan through Indian territories.

In return, Dhaka agreed to allow India to carry equipment via Bangladesh to one of its Northeastern states to set up a power plant there.

“The issue of third-country trade between Bangladesh and Nepal, and Bangladesh-Bhutan will be discussed during the prime minister’s upcoming Delhi visit,” foreign secretary Mohamed Mijarul Quayes told bdnews24.com Saturday.

“We hope the deal with Nepal will be signed,” he said.

TRADE BOOST EYED

The volume of Bangladesh-Nepal bilateral trade is negligible and the balance is highly in favour of Nepal. Bangladesh’s exports to Nepal were worth only US$ 8.1 million against imports amounting to $69 million in fiscal 2008-09.

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(Submitted by Pritam Rohila)

By Carmen Joy King

Last week I decided to write a list of top ten “best” things about Brazil because writing a top ten “worst” things would seem cynical; after all, we’re headed into a new year and reflecting healthfully about the past encourages optimism and hopefulness about the future…

And there’s another reason too: you could call it white, middle-class, liberal arts degree, first world guilt. A nagging feeling that any and all criticisms I observe about Brazil are a direct result of my over-educated, over-analytical upbringing conveniently observed from up here on my throne [a commenter called me a “hippie (…) who didn’t understand THE ROAD TO PROSPERITY” (his caps) but I like to think of myself as a “prudentist”: everything in moderation.]

And as it turns out, I’m not sitting in a political science class anymore and can confidently write that as a ten-year plus traveler, and not a tourist, I’ve allowed myself the full range of experiences that accompany long-term sojourns and with that investment of time, the right, as it were, to evaluate a place for good or bad has been earned. Plus I never purported to be an expert, I’m expressing how I feel.
Recently, on Fridays, my husband and I have been celebrating the beginning of our weekends with wine-du-jour paired with an appropriate cheese, a nice salad, and usually a baguette. We sit on the balcony facing each other, wine and food between us, talking about our dreams, the amazing year we’ve had, how happy we are…(c’mon, we’re newlyweds!).

This week we were feeling especially jazzed up because of the impending Christmas holiday week beginning on Tuesday and felt like finding a bar or club to dance at. This is actually the second consecutive weekend we’ve wanted to go out and hear some live music and/or meet some new people.

Last weekend we had the same idea, scoured the web a bit for new venues, then gave up once we’d had too much to drink and were feeling love-happy and sleepy. This weekend however, we were determined to be social and though I wouldn’t say I expressed this explicitly at the time, there was a part of me hoping to find my “people” somewhere out there in this city. A haunt. A place where everybody knows your name. Maybe even just some members of my tribe.

We got in the car around 11 pm and decided that we would hit up three areas of the city: Pinheiros, Vila Magdalena, and Consolação and see which of them begged our company. Within the first fifteen minutes of the drive, cruising around Pinheiros, an area which houses the city’s rich, predominantly white population and some nice restaurants and bars, I spotted a large group of rich hipsters lined up outside a nightclub dripping in the latest fashions and smoking; sprawled out beside them was a similarly sized group of homeless people, including some women and young children.

The moment I glanced the group of street sleepers, a woman, likely in her thirties, sat up from her sleeping position on the sidewalk and hacked into her dirty blanket. We drove on. Our conversation turned to “the situation” here – a topic we often visit without conclusion because it’s a conversation that’s impossible to conclude.

We continued our analysis of “the situation” (…what is “the situation” exactly? it’s the plain, visible fact that hundreds of thousands of São Paulo’s residents are very poor and the other percentage of the population is significantly richer, and we’re not talking about the rich as millionaires, we’re talking about the rest of the people that aren’t poor. The figurative space that a Brazilian poor person sees between themselves and a “rich” person is fields long, unchangeable. It’s desperate and divided…) and as we talk about it, I get angry; that visceral, unstoppable anger that makes the face hot.

And it’s not exactly the poverty problem that’s bothering me, it’s the idea that a person can live in a city of 20,000,000 people and not belong. It’s that there can be this immense concentration of resources, but nowhere to turn; great city streets filled with tiny, individual empires and no one interested in what’s happening nearby.

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What the United States can learn from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan

By Nikolas K. Gvosdev

Summary: The Soviet Union came closer than many think to achieving its objectives in Afghanistan. How it almost managed to win — and why it ultimately did not — should serve as a lesson for U.S. policymakers today.

NIKOLAS K. GVOSDEV is Professor of National Security Studies at the Naval War College. The views expressed herein are entirely his own.

Could the Soviet Union have won its war in Afghanistan? Today, the victory of the anti-Soviet mujahideen seems preordained as part of the West’s ultimate triumph in the Cold War. To suggest that an alternative outcome was possible — and that the United States has something to learn from the Soviet Union’s experience in Afghanistan — may be controversial. But to avoid being similarly frustrated by the infamous “graveyard of empires,” U.S. military planners would be wise to study how the Soviet Union nearly emerged triumphant from its decade-long war.

There are, of course, some fundamental differences between the Soviets’ war in the 1980s and the U.S.-led mission today. First, the Soviet Union intervened to save a communist regime which was in danger of collapsing due to resistance to its comprehensive and often traumatic social-engineering programs. Unlike the Soviets and their client regime, the United States is not interested in forcibly removing the burkas from Afghan women, shooting large numbers of mullahs for resisting secularization, or reprogramming the political and social mores of Afghans. Instead, Washington has a far more limited objective: namely, ensuring that Afghanistan remains an inhospitable base for extremist groups hoping to attack the West.

Second, the Soviet army was prepared to fight a total war in Afghanistan, taking heavy losses in men and machinery and inflicting sweeping violence on the Afghan people. No U.S. commander would be willing to wage such a war today; the U.S. military realizes that making a desert and calling it peace is no way to curtail an insurgency.

But the Soviet experience should not be entirely ignored. When Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan in February 1989, many in the United States expected to see the mujahideen quickly topple the pro-Moscow government in Kabul. This did not happen. The regime led by Mohammad Najibullah, whom Moscow installed as president in 1987, remained in control of the country. For a moment, it appeared as if the Kremlin had successfully left in power an Afghan government and army that could withstand the Soviet withdrawal.

FA for more
(Submitted by reader)

Are there any WIMPs inside?

For weeks physicists have been speculating whether the CDMS-II collaboration based in the US has detected the first direct evidence for dark matter, one of the universe’s most mysterious entities. Now the evidence is out in the open – although it’s not quite a strong as some had hoped.

In a preprint submitted to the arXiv server yesterday, the CDMS-II team claim to have detected two “events” that are characteristic of dark-matter constituents known as weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. However, they point out that there is a one-in-four chance that these events could be background noise.

“Scientists have a set criteria for determining whether a new discovery has been made, in essence that the ratio of signal-to-background events must be large enough that there is no reasonable doubt,” they write in a summary. “Typically there must be less than one chance in a thousand of the signal being due to background…so we can make no claim to have discovered WIMPs”

Where are the WIMPs?

While invisible, dark matter is thought to make up some 85% of all gravitating mass in the universe. The most popular candidates for its makeup are WIMPs, hypothetical particles that could be heavier than atomic nuclei.

Located half a mile underground in a disused mine in Soudan, Minnesota, the CDMS-II experiment was designed to detect WIMPs using 30 detectors made of germanium and silicon cooled near to absolute zero. The hope was that, as the Earth sweeps through clumps of dark matter in our galaxy, these detectors would spot charges generated by occasional interactions between the germanium and silicon atoms and WIMPs. Although radioactive decays or cosmic rays could also produce signals, those of the right size and timing would be evidence of WIMPs.

CDMS-II’s first run starting in 2003 failed to find any evidence, but the same cannot be said of the latest run from 2007–2008. In this data set, which is roughly double the size of all previous sets, there are two events that fit a WIMP. The probability that these could be radioactive decays or cosmic rays is 23%.

Reactions are mixed in the particle physics community. “It is a tantalising hint of what might be,” says Alexander Murphy, a physicist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who works on the ZEPLIN-III dark-matter experiment. “As a community we have been hearing rumours for weeks and this is almost unbearably exciting. If correct, then the next generation of experiments are destined for and perfectly placed to capitalize and make the true discovery, finally determining what the universe is made of, and we’ll even be able to start to tell some of the properties of the stuff.”

Mirko Boezio at Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics told physicsworld.com, “As a detection of dark matter, while the two events are intriguing, I would be reluctant to interpret them as evidence for WIMP interactions”. Boezio, who is a member of the PAMELA collaboration that claimed indirect evidence for dark matter last year added, “The probability for [the events] to be background is too large for a significant claim.”

About the author

Jon Cartwright is a freelance journalist based in Bristol, UK

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Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, president of Indonesia, sees tolerance-building as a central task of the 21st century

The big question for 2010—and the whole century—is whether the world’s civilisations, religions and cultures will finally depart from their persistent patterns of conflict. Some predict that the rift between “Islam and the West” will widen and that a clash of civilisations is unavoidable.

Despite globalisation and technology, I predict a steady rise of religiosity worldwide. The politics of identity—locally, nationally, regionally—will become more prevalent.

But this will be against a backdrop of multiculturalism and tolerance. People all over the world are beginning to realise that co-operation yields dividends not only within civilisations but also between and among them. Racism is on the decline, and apartheid is gone. The number of countries adhering to religious freedom and the portion of global citizens living under open, pluralistic societies are at their highest ever.

At the start of the last century, there were only a handful of democracies; today there are 89 free democracies. In the Muslim world, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference has committed its members to promoting democracy, human rights, fundamental freedoms and good governance.

Indeed, non-Western civilisations have begun their march to modernity. In this process, peoples of various religions and cultures have found renewed confidence, seeing others as partners rather than as a threat. Global challenges—from climate change to terrorism—are providing new imperatives to transcend civilisational differences.

But these encouraging trends must vie with the negatives. Bigotry, intolerance and ignorance are still rife. Polls show that the perception gap between civilisations—particularly between Islam and the West—remains worryingly wide.

There is no single remedy for this, but let me offer a few. First, the world’s leaders must strengthen in 2010 the various dialogues already taking place, such as the UN Dialogue Among Civilisations, the recent Saudi initiative of an Interfaith Conference, and the Global Inter-Media Dialogue (launched by Indonesia after the crisis following cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad).

Economist for more

(Submitted by reader)

Now govt blames global crisis for mining woes
By Zephania Ubwani, Arusha

The mining sector faces a bleak future due to the ongoing global financial crisis, the government says, apparently exonerating an industry that has come under severe public criticism in recent times.

It is, indeed, a matter of great concern because the crisis threatens to even wipe out the hard-won socio-economic gains by the sector in the past decade, Mr David Jairo, the permanent secretary for Energy and Minerals, warned on Wednesday.

The ministry of Energy and Minerals has predicted that the mining sector, which accounted for 52 per cent of the country’s exports in 2007, generating about $1,003 million, is suffering the consequences of the global economic crisis.

The senior government official told industry stakeholders attending a meeting here that the crisis, which had led to falling prices of minerals in the world markets, poses the greatest danger ever to the country’s mining development.

He was opening a three-day consultative meeting organised by the ministry for the stakeholders to review the draft mining law.

Mr Jairo challenged the various players in the sector to fully reflect on the impact of the global crisis for Tanzania, while discussing the proposed Mining Act.

The official’s statement comes at a time when the government is under intense public pressure to fulfil President Jakaya Kikwete’s promise that he would ensure that a major review of mining legislation was carried out before the end of his five-year term, with the General Election expected to be held next October.

This was one of the pledges he gave during campaigns for the presidential election of 2005. Mr Kikwete is expected to seek his second and final five-year tenure.

With less than a year before the next elections, the government is clearly behind schedule in putting in place a new mining law and policy.

But, on the other hand, the miners have registered their concern over the government’s lack of a clear stand on the sector’s operations.

Mining companies have said that the government’s apparent indecisiveness is a major disincentive, as their operations require “predictable and stable policies” so that they can comfortably invest.

But on Wednesday, Mr Jairo said the global economic downturn could not be ignored, as it had dealt “a massive shock to the world economy” and also affected Tanzania, despite the fact that the country is not too integrated into the world financial system.

He said the economic crisis, which originated in the United States, with the collapse of the housing sector, had led to the skyrocketing of oil and food prices.

However, the PS did not reveal, which minerals that earn the country millions of dollars annually through exports, had been particularly affected by the global recession.

However, a recent report by the Bank of Tanzania listed some of the affected minerals, as gemstones, including tanzanite, which is only found in Tanzania.

Mr Jairo said Tanzania did not only need increased sales of its mineral exports, but also the capital of more mining investors from all over the world to tap the vast potential in a sector that had grown fast in the past decade.

”Tanzania needs investors in mining and they also need Tanzania as a viable destination for their capital,” he told the stakeholders at the Arusha International Conference Centre (AICC).

The contribution of the mineral sector to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose from 0.1 per cent in the 1980s to 2.7 per cent last year.

The value of mineral exports alone was 52 per cent of the total exports last year, while it was only 0.1 per cent in the 1980s.

According to the national mining sector report, a copy of which was made available to The Citizen yesterday, in the past 10 years, the average annual growth rate of the mineral sector was 13.74 per cent.

At the same time, the value of mineral exports increased from $26.66 million in 1997 (less than one per cent of the total exports) to $1.003 billion in 2007 or 52 per cent of the total exports.

A similar meeting of the players in the mining sector was held 13 years ago to review the 1997 draft mineral policy, and the subsequent Mining Act 1998.

Analysts say the policy, legal and regulatory framework that followed, attracted a number of exploration and mining companies and boosted trading in minerals in the country, especially after the liberalisation of the economy.

During the past 10 years of implementation of the policy and enforcement of the law, over $2.5 billion has been invested in the sector, with several large and medium-scale mining companies starting operations in mining gold, diamonds and other gemstones.

The stakeholders are in Arusha to go over the proposed mining guidelines, which Energy and minerals minister William Ngeleja has described as intended to create a win-win situation for the investors and the government.

Speaking in Dar es Salaam last week, Mr Ngeleja said the government was expecting a breakthrough at the Arusha meeting to beat the deadline for the Cabinet approval of the draft Bill before its expected endorsement by Parliament and the presidential assent to become the new mining law early next year.

The passage of such a law, our sister paper, the Sunday Citizen, reported last week, would also pacify government critics, who have waged a relentless campaign over the alleged plunder of the country’s natural resources by foreign investors at the expense of improving the citizens’ welfare.

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By Lee Salter – Venezuelanalysis.com

Researchers at the University of the West of England, UK, have exposed ongoing and systematic bias in the BBC’s news reporting on Venezuela. Dr Lee Salter and Dr Dave Weltman analysed ten years of BBC reports on Venezuela since the first election of Hugo Chavez to the presidency in an ongoing research project, and their findings so far show that the BBC’s reporting falls short of its legal commitment to impartiality, truth and accuracy.

The researchers looked at 304 BBC reports published between 1998 and 2008 and found that only 3 of those articles mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the Chavez administration. The BBC has failed to report adequately on any of the democratic initiatives, human rights legislation, food programmes, healthcare initiatives, or poverty reduction programmes. Mission Robinson, the greatest literacy programme in human history received only a passing mention.

According to the research the BBC seems never to have accepted the legitimacy of the President, insinuating throughout the sample that Chavez lacks electoral support, at one point comparing him to Hitler (‘Venezuela’s Dictatorship’ 31/08/99).

This undermining of Chavez must be understood in the context of his electoral record: his legitimacy is questioned despite the fact that he has been elected several times with between 56% and 60% of the vote. In contrast victorious parties in UK elections since 1979 have achieved between 35.3% and 43.9% of the vote; the current UK Prime Minister was appointed by his predecessor, and many senior members of the British cabinet have never been elected. It will come as no surprise that their legitimacy is never questioned by the BBC.

Of particular note is the BBC’s response to the military coup in 2002. BBC News published nine articles on the coup on 12th April 2002, all of which were based on the coup leaders’ version of events, who were, alongside the “opposition”, championed as saviours of “the nation”. Although BBC News did report the coup, the only time it mentioned the word “coup” was as an allegation of government officials and of Chavez’s daughter.

The “official” BBC explanation was that Chavez ‘fell’, ‘quit’, or ‘resigned’ (at best at the behest of the military) after his ‘mishandling’ of “strikes” (which, as Hardy [2007] reminds us, were actually management lockouts) and demonstrations in which his supporters had fired on and killed protestors. In reporting this latter, Adam Easton, the BBC’s correspondent in Caracas wrote ‘Film footage also caught armed supporters of Mr Chavez firing indiscriminately at the marchers’ (‘Venezuela’s New Dawn’). The footage in question was broadcast by an oligarch’s channel that had supported the coup and was shown to have been manipulated.

Given that Chavez had won two elections and a constitutional referendum before the coup, it is surprising that the BBC privileged the coup leaders’ version of events. The democratic, restorative intentions of the coup leaders were unquestioned.

In ‘Venezuelan media: “It’s over!”’ the BBC allows the editor of El Universal to declare unopposed “We have returned once again to democracy!”. Perhaps more significantly, in ‘Venezuela’s political disarray’ the BBC’s Americas regional editor chose to title a subheading ‘Restoring democracy’. ‘Oil prices fall as Chavez quits’ explains that Chavez quit as a result of a ‘popular uprising’.

Crucially, all of the vox pops used in the nine articles were from “opposition” supporters, and the only voices in support of Chavez were from government officials, Chavez’s daughter or Cuba. It is therefore reasonable to infer from BBC reports that ordinary Venezuelans did not support Chavez; whilst the coup was inaccurately reported as ‘popular’, the counter coup was not.

The researchers hypothesised that one of the factors underpinning the inaccurate reporting of Venezuela was the BBC’s adherence to the ideological outlook of the Venezuelan elite. Against the weight of historical research into Venezuelan history, the BBC underpins its reporting with the “exceptionalism thesis” – the idea that Venezuela was the exception among Latin American nations in that its democracy was robust enough to resist dictatorship.

However, historical research suggests this idea is wrong. As Professors Ellner and Salas explain, those who referred to the exceptionalism of Venezuela,

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In the West Midlands on officer with the counter terrorism unit wrote to community groups warning: “I do hope that you will tell me about persons of whatever age, you think may have been radicalised or be vulnerable to radicalisation … Evidence suggests that radicalisation can take place from the age of four.” Arun Kundnani, of the Institute of Race Relations, who contacted the officer, said he explained how members of his unit had visited a number of nursery schools. Mr Kundani told the Times: “He said the indicators were they [children] might draw pictures of bombs and say things like ‘all Christians are bad’ or that they believed in an Islamic state. It seems nursery teachers in the West Midlands are being asked to look out for radicalisation.”

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Children as young as four should be monitored for signs of brainwashing by radical extremists, counter terrorism police have warned.

Specially trained officers in one area have already begun visiting nurseries in order to identify youngsters who could be vulnerable to radicalisation.

In the West Midlands on officer with the counter terrorism unit wrote to community groups warning: “I do hope that you will tell me about persons of whatever age, you think may have been radicalised or be vulnerable to radicalisation … Evidence suggests that radicalisation can take place from the age of four.”

Arun Kundnani, of the Institute of Race Relations, who contacted the officer, said he explained how members of his unit had visited a number of nursery schools.

Mr Kundani told the Times: “He said the indicators were they [children] might draw pictures of bombs and say things like ‘all Christians are bad’ or that they believed in an Islamic state. It seems nursery teachers in the West Midlands are being asked to look out for radicalisation.”

But politicians have criticised the move warning that it could do a lot of damage to community relations.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling said the scheme ran the risk of “alienating even more people”.

Chris Huhne, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman added that it was a “complete waste of police time”.

The West Midlands counter-terrorism unit confirmed that its officer had visited a nursery attached to a primary school and had spoken to staff.

A spokesman said: “We have been trying to bring counter-terrorism work out of the shadows.”

Last year in Birmingham, Parviz Khan, who was jailed for plotting to kidnap and behead a British soldier, was heard on tape indoctrinating his five-year-old son.

WPA for more