Month: October 2009

by Victor Grossman

Much of the media complained that the German election campaign was dull; after all, the two main opponents had worked together in a coalition for four years and generally agreed or compromised on most issues. Dull or not, however, it had three important results.

Angela Merkel of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) will remain in office as chancellor, but no longer as an unhappy senior partner with the Social Democrats, once her party’s main rivals. In future, her party will share Cabinet seats in a new coalition with its favored partner, the Free Democrats (FDP), who stand even further to the right on most issues. Although they are the party of businessmen and conservative professionals, their leader, Guido Westerwelle, has been making all kinds of promises to the voters in his smiley manner which somehow gets across to voters. Since he will probably be the next Foreign Minister, the whole world may get the chance to enjoy his slimy smile. It was especially broad after the elections; the many votes for his party will permit Merkel to stay in office. Her own party, though still ahead of the others, took a bad beating at the polls.

The CDU’s losses were serious, but nowhere near those of the Social Democrats, which lost over 11 percentage points, its worst results since World War Two. The party is now down to about 23 percent; after eleven years in government it must now get used to the harder, colder seats on the opposition side. The disaster resulted from its policies of assailing working people, the jobless, and small business people while cutting taxes for the super-rich and the corporations. True enough, the three other main parties had also joined in or supported these policies, but it was the customary voters for the Social Democrats, working people and the jobless, who were most disappointed at this direction. They did one of three things: they fell for Guido Westerwelle’s beaming grin and promises, partly because his party has not had any government responsibility for decades; or they stayed home or went to the park to enjoy the wonderful post-summer weather — without voting; or they voted for the Left.

This helps explain the low turnout and a third main phenomenon. The Left, now gaining strength in West Germany, jumped from a national total of 8.7 percent in 2005 to about 12 percent this time, increasing the number of deputies sent to the Bundestag from 54 to nearly 80. There was clearly great distrust of both the CDU and the Social Democrats. While the two major parties, which shared in government for the past four years, licked their wounds, all three smaller parties made big gains: the Free Democrats, who now move into the government with Angela Merkel; the Greens, who finally — just barely — gained double digit numbers; and the Left.

Until now the Left was almost alone — except for a few mavericks from other parties — in opposing the military adventure in Afghanistan; majorities in all other parties voted to send in the troops though a solid majority of the German public were opposed to it. Only the Left fought the brutal cuts and pressures aimed at the jobless that increased unemployment or forced people into miserable low-paid dead-end jobs. The Left was alone in opposing the raising of the pension age from 65 to 67 at a time when almost no one over 50 can find a job. None of the other three parties supported the Left when it opposed cutting taxes on the wealthy and increasing a value added tax which hit all customers, but worst of all the poor.

MRZ

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

NEW YORK – United States President Barack Obama’s speech on Wednesday, the second day of the 64th summit of the United Nations General Assembly, was a strident challenge to world leaders – an ostensible rallying cry to join the US and its allies in the war in Afghanistan.

“Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world’s problems alone,” said Obama, in what many see as preparation for an expected troop surge in Afghanistan.

An even clearer signal of Washington’s quest for stronger participation from its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the non-NATO allies, was a secret meeting between Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Central Intelligence Agency director Leon Panetta at New York’s Barclay Hotel earlier this week.

The meeting, reluctantly confirmed by Pakistani officials, was meant to review the next stage in the post-Afghan presidential elections and the regional “war on terror” theater. This next chapter in the war, many experts believe, will be its hottest time to date.

A formal request to Obama from the top US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, to send more troops in Afghanistan is likely to be made soon. The Pentagon’s rationale for the increase is the upward spiral of Taliban violence – but some feel it has as much to do with protecting Pakistan.

Despite the excellent performance of the Pakistani armed forces against the Taliban in the Pakistani tribal areas and the Malakand area, Washington remains unsure over the level of the Pakistan army’s cooperation. The Pentagon was quick to note that Pakistan army leaders recently refused a ground operation in the North and South Waziristan tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, McChrystal is expected to ask for at least 40,000 additional troops to be deployed mainly in the southern border provinces with Pakistan, such as Helmand and Ghazni, and provinces such as Wardak and Kapisa, in Afghanistan’s northeast. The troops will reportedly undertake active operations against the Taliban as well as regular ground campaigns.

The Obama administration is worried that if Pakistan changes course and becomes inactive, US forces could be trapped along the border – resulting in an horrific casualty rate that would be catastrophic for the White House in the mid-term US elections next year.

The indications from different Asia Times Online sources are that next summer the battle between the Taliban and NATO forces will no longer be restricted to Afghanistan – it will expand inside Pakistan. The primary reason for this, sources say, is the deployment of coalition forces in Afghan border provinces such as Helmand.

The Taliban’s main sanctuary in Helmand is Gereshk district, which borders the Pakistani district of Noshki. The porous border between Noshki and Gereshk serves as a haven for anti-Western Taliban fighters as well as anti-Pakistan Baloch insurgents.

Neither Afghan nor NATO authorities have any control in the region – and neither does Pakistan. As a result, it is inevitable that in hot pursuit of the Taliban through the area, NATO troops will cross into Pakistan and expand the war. This threat also looms over Afghanistan’s Kunar province and Pakistan’s Mohmand area and some other tribal areas, but to a lesser degree compared to Helmand.

AT

Gordon Brown’s bid for a secret inquiry into Britain’s role in the Iraq war has backfired spectacularly, with the Chilcot inquiry threatening to return Iraq to the headlines before the general election. But this is not the first time that Brown has sought to sweep the issue under the carpet.

Today I can reveal that Brown misrepresented an earlier promise to “learn the lessons” of Iraq. A Labour member of the Commons foreign affairs committee (FAC) has compared this to the spin scandal that took Britain to war.

It was during a visit to the country in June 2007, just before he became prime minister, that Brown first sought to take the sting out of the Iraq issue. He announced that he had asked cabinet secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell to make two major changes to the way that intelligence is used.

Brown said he had instructed O’Donnell to separate intelligence analysis from the political process, and to ensure that any intelligence published in future was “properly verified and validated”. The announcement was spun as a criticism of the spin in Tony Blair’s September 2002 dossier on Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction.

A few days later, in a set-piece television interview with the BBC, Brown repeated these promises. He said he would put “rigorous procedures” in place to ensure “that where public information is provided it has gone through an authoritative process and it is free of political influence”.

In reality, Brown’s promise to separate intelligence analysis from politics actually returned government structures to the situation that had existed at the time of the dossier, where the chairman of the joint intelligence committee was nominally separate from the political process. And his claim to have asked O’Donnell to ensure the validity of published intelligence was as much of a pipedream as the dossier itself.

In response to my freedom of information and other enquiries, the Cabinet Office has told me it has no written record of Brown’s request to O’Donnell. It says the request was made orally to O’Donnell’s private secretary.

But the Cabinet Office has twice given accounts of the request that differ from Brown’s version. In each account, Brown is only said to have asked O’Donnell to ensure that intelligence analysis is separated from politics — making no reference to the future publication of intelligence. Although it has refused to publish O’Donnell’s recommendations, the Cabinet Office has admitted that they did not include any recommendations relating to the future publication of intelligence.

IOC