The Blog

Sara R. Nichols: Afghanistan: Eight Days From the Ground--Part 6 of 8

2009-12-06T09:23:03Z

Friday held the most wonderful coincidence for us. Our guide had been told of some women's conference being held in Kabul that day. Catnip! We headed straight for it first thing in the morning. The Delhi Policy Group was sponsoring a Women's Trialogue, focused on peace and conflict resolution among the women leaders of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Determined to develop mechanisms to build peace with the full participation of women, these dynamic women made my heart both ache and soar.

How many times have you heard that the Indians and Pakistanis don't like each other? Time for some truth in labeling. It turns out that the men with guns in these two countries do not like each other. The two countries are awash in armaments. What else are they going to do with them?!

The women, on the other hand, get along beautifully. And they couldn't hide their enthusiasm for the task at hand: finding a road to peace for all three countries. That's where Richard Holbrook should have been hanging out. He would have learned a lot of useful lessons. But, then, by all accounts, he doesn't talk to the women.

Watching these women work together made me realize that there can be no peace in Afghanistan if women are not at the table in equal force and numbers with the men.

The only tension I noticed was in the insistence of mostly Afghan women to address the Shia Personal Status Law which allows, among other heinous acts, men to rape their wives and take the children if they divorce their wives. The Afghan women just wanted to be heard in their anger and outrage. The Indian leader kept reminding the women that this was a peace conference and there was nothing the women of the other two countries could do about Afghan law or customs. One of the Afghan delegates, Dr. Massouda Jalal, asked if women could contribute to peace without equal rights. A long silence followed.

This extraordinary gathering of women leaders was sponsored by the Heinrich Boll Foundation, a German-based organization named for one of Germany's most famous 20th Century writers. In association with the Green Party, its mission is to promote democracy, civil society, equality and a healthy environment internationally. Why is a German foundation supporting this kind of work and our tax dollars are not?

Dr. Jalal is one of many brave Afghan women we met who, against all odds, is forging a way for women to become engaged in the voting process. She started the Jalal Foundation to teach women in every corner of Afghanistan civic engagement and voting rights. This is the sort of effort our tax money should support yet she receives nothing from any government and runs her operation on a shoe string budget in some of the most dangerous places in Afghanistan--not to be redundant.

We left this inspiring group of women to head for Camp Eggars, an ugly, oppressive-looking, concrete and barbed wire compound in the middle of Kabul, clearly not designed to win friends or influence people in any positive way. I don't know why anyone calls it a military base. It looked like contractor central with a few random soldiers here and there. We entered under the pretext of visiting the camp's bazaar--there really is an Afghan bazaar inside Camp Eggars!

After passing the inspections of at least six "Burham" security guards at the Camp's entrance, we walked through what felt like a bomb-proof rat maze, flashing our passports at various "Blue Hackle" and "Burham" security guards along the way. Once inside, it appeared we had come upon a "Blue Hackle" and "Burhan" security guard convention--too many of them to count, all milling around apparently looking for something to do. Your taxes at work!

The parking lot was loaded with SUV's and huge, menacing MRAPS and Hummers. I could not help but wonder about the collective carbon footprint of these monster gas hogs. Standing next to a monster MRAP, it was pretty clear why the Afghans might not like these things charging around in their already impossible traffic.

Playing cards at the far end of the lot were about ten marines. It didn't take us long to become their new best friends. Guess what they were peeved about. Contractors! What a surprise! For three to four times the pay, contractors do the same or less than the marines. I am just guessing but this sounds like a real morale-crusher to me. I know anecdotes do not prove a thing but I saw significantly more contractors than military personnel. That's a lot of money down the drain. Our money.

We wandered around the surreal bazaar looking for members of the military we could engage. Two particularly interesting ones were women Air Force enlistees who had reenlisted because they had children. "What?" said we! This, they said, is the only way they knew they could guarantee health care for their children and financial support when they went to college. God bless America. My insurance company, Aetna, is so bad it makes joining the military look like a pretty good option!

All of us felt we had unfinished business with the women at the Trialogue so we headed back to the hotel just in time for lunch--not that I was having any of it. There were too many interesting women and too little time before their break was over. And the food was still brown. We left knowing that we would have to return one more time.

The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan was next. Due to the very risky nature of their mission--equal rights for women and peace for Afghanistan are risky business--we not only were unable to meet them at their headquarters, which remains secret, but they did not feel safe giving us their full names. We met them, Weeda, Shaima and Alia, at an orphanage.

Weeda, who was in Kabul during the reign of the Taliban, felt every day may be her last day. Kabul was more modern than the rest of Afghanistan so the Taliban were particularly harsh on the women there. Weeda continued working for RAWA the whole time knowing that were she to be stopped, her bag would be searched and she would be arrested or killed for carrying RAWA information.

Tuesdays were always the worst days for women and the Northern Alliance was worse on them than the Taliban. Presidential Candidate, the Northern Alliance's Abdullah Abdullah, is part of a group that was behind the destruction of Kabul. According to Weeda, he is a very dangerous man, far worse than Karzai. The US, of course, helped fund the Northern Alliance, too. Stop paying attention and that's where your tax money ends up. Is anybody paying attention?

At first, the Afghan women thought the US was there to help bring freedom to women. As they watched the US fund the worst of the worst, their hopes were dashed. If the US continues to support the Northern Alliance--80% of Parliament is comprised of Northern Alliance and Taliban--they want the US out. Right now, they see no difference between Bush and Obama. The more Americans in Afghanistan, the more Taliban members are recruited.

Alia was in her village in Farah Provence (southwest Afghanistan) in September when the US bombed it after being attacked by the Taliban. By the time the US fired back, the Taliban had fled. One hundred civilians were killed. Many of the wounded were sent to Germany and the US to be treated. Many of the survivors joined the Taliban. As the anger and frustration has increased, so has the incidence of rape. Punishment is rare.

Democracy without justice is meaningless. With the blatantly corrupt agent of the US government, Hamid Karzai, in control, justice and democracy for these women are distant fantasies.

We were not able to spend much time at the orphanage; just long enough to see that the children, though in vary cramped quarters, were being as well cared for as the meager means available to them allowed. I could not help wondering if I would live long enough to see a world where children are universally valued.

The last stop of the day was in a bleak, unmarked building in about as shabby a state as a still standing building could be. The Social Association of Afghan Justice Seekers (something may have been lost in the translation), was formed by a brave young woman after she literally stumbled upon a mass grave. Determined to find out who was responsible, she doggedly searched until she discovered that they were victims of the Northern Alliance who were in power before the Taliban. She was able to locate over 500 family members of the victims who then joined her in a demonstration that stirred up enough dust to bring support to her cause from the UN and the EU. Not much but enough to start a Truth and Reconciliation Project which supports women victims of crime. She's not likely to run out of candidates any time soon.

Three women victims were there to tell us their stories, stories most of us will never have to worry about being part of our biography. One lost her husband to the Northern Alliance and her fifteen year-old son was tortured. Another lost most of her extended family. Another, Sedeqa, was a nineteen year-old woman with a prosthesis in place of her right leg. Though dressed in what could only be called rags, she was so composed and forceful, she oozed dignity. When she was three years old, her home was bombed by the Russians. She was badly wounded and languished for several months superficially treated in a Kabul hospital. Someone from the Red Cross found her and sent her to Germany to recover. After seven months, she returned to her family in Kabul. Before she turned five, her home was bombed again. She lost her mother, two brothers and her leg. Her father and other brother have never been the same and can't earn enough money to feed what remains of their family. Sedeqa says she has no life.

We thanked them all for their time and told them how valuable their stories were to our understanding of the Afghan people. We made sure that they understood that the money we gave them was in gratitude for their contribution to that understanding. You would have thought they had just won the lottery. Two of the women donned their burkhas as they walked down the stairs. Sedeqa did not. I watched as she stood on the side of the road, head held high, then limped away, with the sun going down behind her. She turned her head, smiled and waved good-bye. My heart was broken.

Getting my head wrapped around what followed would have been enough of a challenge without having been so sobered by meeting Sedeqa. Surreal does not begin to describe our dinner venue. General Mohammad Humayoon Fawzi, Deputy Defense Minister, heard about the western women and wanted to show us his largess. Many from the same cast of characters with whom we had been dining the previous several nights were there.

"There" was a scene one simply cannot make up. A long, guard-studded driveway led to the heavily guarded entrance. Kalashnikovs appeared to be the accessory of choice. Once searched--rather amateurishly, I have to add--we walked down a concrete tunnel that opened to something akin to a garden, enclosed for the most part by a baby blue cement wall. Down one side of the wall was a walkway and very long birdcage filled mostly and ironically with doves. Looking at the big, burley, loud General Fawzi, an ethnic Uzbek and reportedly member of the Northern Alliance, doves of peace could not have been more incongruous. I was impressed by how well his payraan (top) tumbaan (pants) matched the baby blue walls.

In one corner of the garden was a fake mountainside with a bubbling stream running down it into a singularly ugly square pool. Maybe the shape was was meant to allow the gold lame-covered divans to fit snugly against it. Behind the divans was a sight that really tested my imagination. Could there be a reasonable explanation for the gargantuan baby blue and white concrete throne, topped with an eagle at least twice my height, eyes aglow, wings spread to their fullest extent? It was breathtaking.

To get into the garden, one had to go back to the other end of the birdcage and around the corner. There stood a little archway that led to a very short path and the biggest, freaking statue of a stag I had ever seen. Lying in repose next to the great horned elk, was his adoring doe, her worshipful gaze shining upward toward her hero. Are there even any elks in Afghanistan?

At least a minute passed before the shock wore off and I realized that the path took a sharp right. From there I was drawn into a space surrounded by a watercourse, elevated on metal poles. As I was still grappling with the eagle and elk stag and doe, the watercourse didn't seem so strange by comparison. The lawn was loaded with interesting characters, many from Karzai's government. Off to the side was a table with every kind of alcohol one would never expect to find in a Muslim country and, in the middle, a table full of Afghan food. Much to my regret, I forgot to bring a Cliff Bar.

Inside, the house was what had to be the planet's most perfect example of money, no taste. Suffice it to say, I am reasonably sure that one of the General's investments is in the production of gold lame fabric. Single-handedly he is keeping the industry afloat. Sunglasses would have been helpful. I was so ready for my dingy Guest House #10 bedroom.

Sarah Brown: Downing Tweet Parties to Support Maternal Mortality Campaign

2009-12-05T19:59:19Z

The inaugural #DowningTweet party, like every tweet-up, was an eclectic mix. On one sofa, people from fashion and the arts chat to Mums bloggers and charity workers while R&B singing sensation @Beverleyknight tunes up. On another, student activists introduce themselves to web entrepreneurs and comedians while technology correspondents try to work out how to sum it up in 140 characters.

What brought them all together was a desire to do something to stop the scandal of a woman dying every minute of every day from pregnancy or childbirth-related complications around the world -- mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia. I have written for HuffPost before about my involvement with the www.millionmums.org campaign and @WRAGlobal, who tweet out the maternal mortality campaign messages to reach grassroots members in 143 countries. The campaign has real momentum now and #DowningTweet was the latest idea to raise awareness about all these needless deaths, and how simple it is to stop them.

I have tweeted for the last 9 months about the causes I am most passionate about and shared with many other Twitter followers what is happening in both my and their lives. I love the humour on Twitter, I love the lack of cynicism, and I love the genuine engagement with many people. The twitter community is full of great people from all walks of life who want to make a difference and they are exactly the kind of audience www.millionmums.org is trying to reach.

@Biz (Biz Stone), who has been travelling a lot as the Co-founder of Twitter, Inc recently came to London -- the city with the greatest number of users anywhere on the planet. He always makes the point that twitter is designed both for the greatest reach possible and for local news to be conveyed to local people.

So many of the people with the greatest popularity -- like @queenrania and @stephenfry -- are using the platform for social good and making connections that probably would never have happened any other way. I love that I can be friends with @corybooker, the Mayor of Newark, New Jersey who has given the maternal mortality campaign a big Shout Out, as well as with people like @amanda (Amanda Rose) who is doing such amazing things with Twestivals. It is Twitter that has brought us together.

@BenjaminCohen, the Technology Correspondent of the UK's @channel4news posed the question to me at #DowningTweet about whether my followers come because I am married to Gordon, the British Prime Minister, and share details of my day or because of the strong campaigning message of www.millionmums.org.

You would have to ask my followers, but I imagine the answer is a bit of both. What is interesting is the many hats that people wear in their Twittering -- their own professional life, their personal thoughts, their causes and their passions. Twitter -- in only 140 characters each time -- has the space and capacity to accommodate it all.

It is always interesting though to meet the people behind the Tweets. I've always said Downing Street is a public building without public access so Gordon and I have been determined to throw open the doors to people from all over Britain who are working to make the world better. We do regular tours and charity receptions and events and meetings at Downing Street and it seemed a natural next step to invite some of the country's most enthusiastic tweeters to visit us at home. Gordon was as delighted as I was to meet in person some of the people whose online campaigns we've followed and supported.

I was rather nervous beforehand -- this felt like unchartered territory for me no matter how many receptions I have hosted before. But as soon as the first person bounced in and said 'thanks for the invite @sarahbrown10!' I knew this was a crowd that spoke my language and really wanted to help.

@BeverleyKnight sang beautifully and the crowd seemed to enjoy the festive mince pies made with little pastry birds on top (tweetie pies?). I'm pretty sure it was the first time Downing Street has had a temporary tattoo parlour too -- for guests to show their support for better maternal health with 'I love my Mum' transfers).

This Christmas I hope everyone is showing their Mum how much they love her, and that they will have a little time to spare to support all those Mums whose pregnancy puts their health and life at risk. Mums are the greatest and if #DowningTweet has helped www.millionmums.org even a little bit I'm sure it'll only be a matter of time before Number 10 plays host to #downingtweet:thesequel.

Sarah Brown tweets at www.twitter.com/sarahbrown10 and occasionally blogs at www.number10.gov.uk where she lives with her husband British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and their two young sons. She is the Global Patron of the White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood which campaigns for Millennium Development Goal 5 to reduce maternal mortality by 75% by 2015.

For latest news and information from Downing Street visit: http://www.number10.gov.uk.

Peter Biro: Eastern Congo: "We are Forced to Flee Every Two Months"

2009-12-05T18:24:14Z

Storm clouds are gathering and the wind is tugging at the plastic sheeting covering the hundreds of makeshift shelters that comprise the Mungote camp in Congo's troubled North Kivu province. Over 30,000 people live here, unable to work and with little access to food.

The camp sits on a large lava field, a reminder of an earlier eruption by nearby Mount Nyamulagira, one of Africa's most active volcanoes. The black rocks add to the feeling of gloom and despair surrounding what is the largest camp for people displaced by the fighting in North Kivu. In response to an outbreak of cholera, a team from the International Rescue Committee (IRC) has arrived in the camp. Frank Mungombe, a water and sanitation engineer, has ordered the camp sprayed with disinfectant to kill the cholera bacteria. Mungombe's team is also building latrines and showers to prevent the spread of the disease. So far, two people have died in the outbreak and hundreds more are infected.

On one of the camp's narrow pathways I meet 30-year-old Ruti Riziki. Ruti arrived here three days ago after escaping fighting in the village of Bukala, a day's walk away. Fighting between the many armed groups active in North Kivu has forced her to flee her village numerous times in recent years. Last week, she says, Congolese government troops moved into Bukala only to be confronted by units from the rebel Democratic Front for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR).

"Many people were killed in the crossfire," Ruti says, as she escorts me to her makeshift shelter. "I saw bodies lying dead in the street. I saw men with guns looting houses and then walking away with everything, even mattresses. The only thing I managed to bring with me was a frying pan. "

"We have been forced to flee every two months," Ruti says. "Every time we return to Bukala we have to build a new house. Now if we go back we will build temporary homes from straw. There's no point in building anything permanent from hard materials, because it will only be burnt down."

The core of the FDLR fled into Congo from neighboring Rwanda after being accused of involvement in the 1994 Rwandan genocide and have been a source of unrest in eastern Congo ever since. The situation has worsened since the Congolese army and United Nations peacekeeping forces launched a joint military operation against the FDLR earlier this year. Another rebel group, the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), has thrown its lot in with the government and is now fighting alongside the national army, but this has not brought any more security to the region. A report by UN experts that was recently leaked to the press concluded that the joint military offensive had failed to rein in the rebels and has worsened the already dire plight of civilians.

"The scale of the suffering is massive," says Danielle de Knocke van der Meulen, who runs the IRC office in Goma, North Kivu's main city. "The military offensive has scattered the FDLR into smaller groups, making ever larger areas of North and South Kivu more insecure."

An estimated 900,000 people have been forced from their homes in North and South Kivu provinces since the military offensive began in January. All told, a staggering 1.8 million people are thought to have been displaced in eastern Congo.

Ruti, her husband and their three children have moved into a small crude shelter covered with plastic sheeting. The floor is muddy and flattened cardboard nailed to a flimsy frame made from tree branches serve as walls. While water is provided by aid groups, food is a serious problem. Unable to grow their own crops, the people here rely on United Nations food rations. But they are not distributed regularly, residents say. The last distribution -- six kilos of beans, salt and two bottles of cooking oil per person -- took place almost one month ago, Ruti and her neighbors say. To survive, Ruti's husband spends his days looking for temporary work in the nearby fields. Normally farmers pay about 1,000 Congolese francs (a little over U.S. $1) for a day's work. So far, he has only been able to work half a day.

"We are hungry all the time," Ruti complains. "We only eat once a day, in the evening. It's mainly cassava and bananas."

While the situation in the camp is very hard, the prospect of Ruti and her husband returning home is remote.

"There is just so much fighting," Ruti says, shaking her head. "I have no idea what will happen to us. We just want to go home and live in peace. But this is not possible."

Sara R. Nichols: Afghanistan: Eight Days From the Ground--Part 5 of 8

2009-12-05T02:40:58Z

Why I wanted to come face to face with a member of the Taliban I am at a loss to explain. The Taliban represent just about everything I find repulsive. Morbid fascination? Maybe. But I could not take my eyes off him. Our fourth day began at the Peace and Reconciliation Commission, run by Professor Akram Mihhazar. The professor part escaped me. He was going to introduce us to a recovering Taliban. And not just any Taliban! A serious one; the former Communications Director for the Taliban.

After about thirty minutes of information about the successes of the Peace and Reconciliation Commission, Saider Rahmin was trotted out. No surprises in his looks or demeanor. His attire gave him away. He looked deadly serious and spoke in a quiet monotone, looking at the floor most of the time. I found myself wishing he would stop scratching his beard. I kept thinking about the things lurking inside, information I just didn't want cluttering my mind.

Saider now recruits Taliban members into the process set up by the Commission. Less than ten percent of the current Taliban is ideologically driven. Many are recruited from a national army that has yet to figure out how to shoot straight. Apparently, the $300 dollars a month offered to soldiers by the Taliban, beats the room, board and $200 compensation offered by the military. Understandably, the desertion rate from the Army is about 40 percent. Maybe paying them more than they get from the Taliban would be a good place to start if we are serious about winning the hearts and minds of the people. Good retention strategy, too.

The rest are recruited from masses of males who are seeking revenge for a US drone that bombed their village or killed a friend or relative. Many are men who are frustrated that they do not have any means to earn a living or simply want some sense of security. At our peril, we forget out-of-control hormones as a complicating factor. Women are off-limits to them. Unless, of course, they are beating them for showing a patch of flesh.

According to the professor, 8,000 men (close to 1,000 of whom have been released from prison) have taken part in the Commission's program. They have officers in all the provinces helping to lure the Taliban into the process. If the rehabilitation is successful--by what measure, we could not determine--the saved souls get papers showing that they are no longer members of the Taliban. They have to agree to certain conditions, such as turning in all their weapons, and are given a piece of land and some kind of job.

It can be a tricky situation what with a plethora of warlords still roaming the countryside. As it turns out, we're not the only ones who don't particularly like the Taliban. Neither do the Northern Alliance warlords who the Taliban defeated in the civil war that broke out after the Russians withdrew in the late 1980's. They harass and jail each other whenever they can. Our previous night's dinner companion, Northern Alliance warlord, Haji, is living quite nicely on the money the US gave him to fight the Taliban. Needless to say, these two intra-Afghan forces are working at cross purposes with each other. As usual, Afghan civilians are the losers.

To complicate things, the Pakistani Taliban does not appreciate deserters so they often go after the rehabilitated Afghan Taliban, even kill them. It gets very complicated. Both men agreed that securing the Pakistan boarder should be a top priority and that listening to Pakistan's intelligence is counter productive.

The bottom line for these two men is that the US military presence is essential for the security of Afghanistan until the National Army and Police can be trained adequately. That, they believe, is not going to happen with a government as corrupt and loaded with warlords and Taliban members as the current government is. Neither the Taliban nor the Northern Alliance wants the government to succeed. More troops are not going to make things any better. Could the situation be more complicated? So much testosterone!

What a relief to go to Afghans for Tomorrow, a grades one through seven school for girls who were deprived of an education under the Taliban. There were teenagers in first grade. Many of the girls were, in fact, young women in their twenties. What a joy to see how earnest they were to better themselves! They were eager to know what we were doing there and to tell us what they wanted for their future. Education, education, education.

Their supplies were meager. As many as three girls were stuffed into a desk meant for one. One visible means of funding was a small craft shop containing an assortment of bead work, bags and woven hats. Needless to say, we all bought the fruits of their labor and happily overpaid for everything.

Back at Guest House #10, we met Noreen MacDonald, a Canadian woman who works for the Mercator Fund, a network of European foundations. She has lived in Afghanistan for five years and actually owns a house in one of the southern provinces, in the heart of Taliban country. She presents as one tough woman, one not likely to be harassed by the Taliban. She lives near an internally displaced refugee camp where there has been no food relief since March of 2006. The angry, frustrated, unemployed men there are ripe for the plucking by the Taliban. She calls them AYM's: angry young men.

If poppies were food, Afghans would be fat and happy. Well, not quite but notwithstanding the worldwide shortage of morphine, there is no effort to intervene in the sale of the poppies to the Taliban. Countries with a shortage of morphine should be out-bidding the Taliban for the poppies. Ironically, there is not one drop of morphine available in Afghanistan. Where are the pharmaceutical companies when we need them? Oh--I know! Lobbying Congress to secure their profits.

Noreen talked about "non-violent security instruments" that should be directed towards the 80% of AYM's between the ages of 18 and 25 who are unemployed, angry, single and, of course, the prime targets for the Taliban. If part of our strategy were to give the non-violent security instruments of marriage, land and child allowances, job training and opportunities (including training for the national security forces), to the AYM's, the long-term benefits would be a bargain. Noreen's view of the Afghan security forces was consistent with what we have heard from others. They are aspirational at best.

It was always a challenge to get from point A to point B in Kabul. As foul as the public spaces tend to be, the interior spaces often are green and tidy. That was the case for the home of Shinkai Karokhail, a feisty Member of Parliament who welcomed us into her home. In 1991, she founded the Women's Educational Center. She strongly believes that peace education and conflict resolution should be taught in every school. Yet she has no illusions about the prospects of wielding enough influence to make that or anything else progressive happen in a Karzai government.

Karzai would never approach a woman to hear her point of view. Women parliamentarians are treated terribly both inside and outside of government. The men were forced to draw up a Constitution that required at least 25% of parliamentarians to be women. They see it as a ceiling grudgingly to achieve. She clearly is angry that women have no choices, cannot own property and have to live at the mercy of men.

Seventy-five percent of Afghanistan's population is rural and uneducated. Sixty percent of women are married before they are sixteen. Only twenty-five percent of the country has electricity. She reeled off one distressing statistic after another, basically laying them at the feet of men who do not understand Islam. According to her, Islam does not allow selling daughters; men and women are equal under Islam; and women can own property. It is the illiterate male fundamentalists who have perverted Islam.

Shinkai is neither for nor against more US troops. That said, she was quick to point out that the cost of one US soldier could pay for 70 Afghan soldiers, a statistic we have heard before. She is very clear that the boarder with Pakistan must be made secure. If that were where more US troops were to be sent, she would welcome them. If the boarder is open, the Taliban can flee to Pakistan for safety.

We thanked her for her hospitality and went back outside to the chaos and the kites. Kites are in the most incongruous places. Everywhere. Freely floating, delicate, beautiful kites rising as if, on the other end, the holder were seeing a way out of Afghanistan.

Dinner that night was blessedly low key and simple. Nooria and Asad invited us to their home again where we lounged on couches and ate Afghan pizza. Don't ask.

Josh Schrei: Know When to Fold 'Em: How Obama's Move in Afghanistan is a Strategic Blunder that Plays Right into the Hands of China

2009-12-04T21:09:18Z

"You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, know when to run..."
-Kenny Rogers, The Gambler

When I voted for Barack Obama, I was fully aware of his intention to focus America's military efforts on Afghanistan rather than Iraq. Those who viewed Barack as the 'anti-war' candidate and are now wringing their hands at their beloved President and asking "How could you do this" should have paid more attention to his campaign speeches. His stance on Afghanistan hasn't changed one bit.

What has changed is the global playing field. Once upon a time, even just a few years ago, an escalation in Afghanistan could have been seen as at least somewhat strategically sound from a military perspective -- though I still would have viewed its merits as highly questionable. Now, with the US economy tanked, America's standing in the world softened a bit, and another rising superpower with its own Islamic "problem," there is absolutely no reason for this escalation.

It goes without saying that a troop escalation of this magnitude will empower and embolden the Taliban in Pakistan, in fact it already has. By pre-announcing the date of our withdrawal -- the daft equivalent in poker of betting all your chips while simultaneously showing your opponent your hand -- we have in effect told the enemy that if they can ride this escalation out for 18-months, they will have won. Such a move is not only strategically unsound, it telegraphs everything the world already knows about the current state of America -- it says: we can get involved, but not too deeply; we can take a risk, but not too much of a risk; Its worth lives, but it will cost us the election is it goes poorly; we are hurting for cash, so this really can't go on too long... To say that it empowers the enemy is an understatement: to a society of warlords whose way of life is armed conflict its totally laughable.

Just as al-Qaeda grew in rank and strength the minute we invaded Iraq, so too will the anti-American sentiment spread with this troop escalation, not necessarily within Afghanistan itself, but certainly in Pakistan, the nesting ground of both the Taliban and al Qaeda. As someone who opposed Iraq, Obama should have learned this fundamental lesson - don't needlessly turn the region into an even bigger recruiting ground for extremists. Soon, the Taliban will have 30,000 more targets -- and 30,000 new ways to paint the US as the bad guy once again.

I say 'once again' because it is no exaggeration to say that there has been a sea change in global attitude towards the US over the last year. Since the economic crash and the election of Obama, the US has lost quite a bit of its 'bad guy' status. Of course there are those who always have, and will always, plot against us. But there is also a real sympathy towards America now -- if you travel, you can hear it everywhere you go. The same Islamabad cab drivers who might have been shaking their fists at America two years ago have quite a different view today and will let you know it.

Just as people are quick to anger, they are also quick to forget. Extremists make use of hot sentiment to turn normal citizens into footsoldiers. The less reasons we give them to hate us, the less they will. The less targets we give them, the less people will get killed. The more we put our minds and our money towards constructive development, the more we will build.

Given the potential consequences -- and in the absence of any clearly articulated short or long term security threat -- there is absolutely no reason, to borrow another poker analogy, to go all in. To do so not only strengthens extremism, it plays right into the ongoing strategy of a country we should be far more concerned about -- China.

China's long-term America strategy has always been to benefit economically from us and wait patiently while we run ourselves ragged in a costly ongoing war and milk ourselves dry through rampant overspending.

The strategy has worked. China -- the owner of a huge percentage of our debt -- is undoubtedly on the rise, and has been emboldened by America's recent retreat in global standing. The PRC is now acting as a bully unleashed, making brash claims of territorial sovereignty in India, deepening their investments and arms deals into Africa's most brutal regimes, buying out small governments (Nepal, Malawi) to build allies; and trying to position censored communication and cold war level domestic surveillance as a norm to western companies... in short, they are acting like the guy at the table with all the chips and no one to stop them from winning the pot.

But China, as a country with a massive restive Muslim population that has already erupted into violence once this year, as Pakistan's neighbor, as a country that is pumping money into whatever corrupt Central and South Asian government they feel provides them the most strategic advantage, is clearly next on the list to inherit the ire of fundamentalist Islam, and this concerns them terribly.This has already played out this year, when al-Qaeda issued threats over the Chinese repression of Muslims in East Turkestan. As superpowers rise and fall, the extremists battleground will shift towards China. This is inevitable history.

As much as they may make grumblings about American interventionism, Beijing would like nothing more than for America to continue to deplete itself militarily and financially over an enemy that they know will soon be theirs. In the process, they'll be happy to buy up more of that debt that we will incur fighting what is quickly becoming their war. And they'll be happy to buy access after the fact to the resource pools that we free up with the lives of American soldiers. Why play into this? By upping our costs in Afghanistan and lowering our standard in the Muslim world yet again, we are empowering Beijing financially and militarily.

We need to change the long term strategy.

Were I America, sitting at the poker table with almost no chips, trying to play against someone with twice the stack I have over a pot that I know I can't -- and probably don't even want to -- win, I would do the logical thing.

In the words of Kenny Rogers, you've got to know when to fold 'em.

Fold your cards, and pass the risk on to the next guy at the table. We all know who the "next guy" is... China.

America is still trying to act like the superpower in the room. Yet we have issues at home that need drastic attention, and only then will we start to rebuild that superpower status. What would be the disadvantage of using all of our resources to shore up our own economy, through massive green jobs investment and infrastructure overhaul, while leaving the overspending and the Islamic problem to the country that wants to play superpower? Why don't we turn the tables on Beijing for a change? Why don't WE ride it out long term, and let THEM deplete themselves. Let them get into debt. Let them be the bad guys... because -- little secret -- they already are.

Any immediate short term strategic losses in the Central Asian region we would incur by keeping the focus at home will be far outweighed by the long term strengthening of America domestically and the long term weakening of China internationally as it tries to make sense of its mess of a backyard. How many Pakistani's will stand for China's intervention into their government policies? How many more riots in Urumqi or anti-China protests in Africa until China's Islamic issue becomes a serious game-changer? I say, its time for us to walk away, right now, during that tiny window where they don't hate us quite as much.

President Obama, to summarize, this move of yours does not strike me as a gamble. It strikes me as a game of poker in which you've already showed your hand, you don't have any chips, your wife and kids are sitting behind you saying: "Daddy, we have to go," there's a guy across the table with twice the stack and the pot isn't a pot at all - its a damn powder keg. Not winnable. Ill-advisable. Poor strategy.

Fold. And walk away.

Lapham's Quarterly: A Call to Arms (and Legs) in the Civil War and in the Iraq War

2009-12-04T20:05:47Z

Kate Daloz received an MFA from Columbia where she also taught undergraduate composition. Her most recent essay, "The Dowser Dilemma," was published in the Spring 2009 issue of The American Scholar. For more on medicine and war, please visit www.laphamsquarterly.org.

War drives innovation, in medicine as in weaponry. Those wounded in war stand at the crux of this ironic confluence, of technology designed to kill, and technology designed to heal. In the current wars being fought by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan, the innovations in killing aren't even particularly high-tech. Homemade Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) triggered by remote control can be disguised as an oil barrel or a pile of trash. A dead dog could explode with a force strong enough to send a seventeen-ton armored vehicle flying into the air. To a soldier on foot, even an overlooked soda-can could hide a deadly threat. IEDs account for more than seventy percent of the casualties to US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. In an explosion, body armor protects the core with its vital organs, but leaves the extremities vulnerable. Thanks to high-tech field hospitals and speedy evacuations, US troops stand a better chance of surviving grievous injury than they ever have before -- but the injuries they sustain are also newly terrible.

The American war most often associated with a large number of veteran amputees is the Civil War. Between 1861 and 1865, at least 30,000 soldiers on the Union side alone lost a limb. Amputation accounted for three-quarters of all surgeries performed in field hospitals where doctors sometimes worked for days on end while discarded arms and legs piled up beside them.

Despite the fact that overworked Civil War surgeons often operated on dozens of patients in a row without cleaning their instruments, spreading lethal infections as they went (germ theory was just a few short decades away from being fully understood), the staggering number of amputations represented the best practices of the day. Though soldiers on both sides used a wide variety of weapons, one of the most common was also the most destructive: the minie ball was a soft-lead bullet, which expanded on impact, shattering bone and leading to devastating injuries, on a scale never before seen.

Veterans on crutches or with one neatly pinned-up sleeve soon came to be a hallmark of the Civil War. Philadelphia's South Street Hospital was so dedicated to serving amputee war veterans that its patients soon nicknamed it the "Stump Hospital." One regular visitor there was neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell who interviewed hundreds of wounded soldiers and used the information he gathered to make some of the first clinical diagnoses of what we now know as traumatic brain injury.

In response to the huge number of veteran amputees, the federal government awarded research grants for new innovations in prostheses. Between 1861 and 1873, 133 patents were issued for artificial limbs, crutches, and wheelchairs, up almost three hundred percent from the period before the war. The focus was on making them comfortable and workable, but also as lifelike as possible. "In our time, limb-making has been carried to such a state of perfection that both in form and function they so completely resemble the natural extremity that those who wear them pass unobserved and unrecognized in walks of business and pleasure," wrote one doctor in 1871.

Imagine what he would say if he could see the sleek metal crescents that recently caused controversy by allowing an amputee-athlete to outstrip his "able-bodied" opponents. While the nineteenth century saw many innovations in false legs, upper-body prostheses never went much further than lifelike hands made of India-rubber (an improvement over wood), and specialized variations that replaced the classic hook with forks, saws, and other tools. And, in contrast to the breathtaking breakthroughs in lower-body prostheses, there have not been many improvements in the decades since. Until now.

Since 2003, American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been losing limbs at twice the rate of any previous American war. More than six percent of injured US troops require amputation, in contrast to the three percent wounded during other wars. While the actual numbers are nowhere near even Vietnam War figures, what makes the current situation unprecedented is the ratio of amputations to deaths: for every four soldiers killed, one loses a limb--in Vietnam, it was one to eleven. Military hospitals found themselves ill equipped to handle the influx of amputees returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Plans to renovate the aging Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland were quickly revised to include an entire wing devoted to rehabilitation and state-of-the-art orthopedics

As it was after the Civil War, the newest wave of prosthetic research is being driven by the needs of young veteran-amputees and funded by government grants for research. For the first time, computer chips and wireless technology are being used to create extremely mobile "robot" hands which can pinch, grip and flex. Some have sensors which pick up minute signals from nerves and can move in response to thought. Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, announced last month that his "Luke arm" (named after Luke Skywalker's robotic hand) was ready for clinical trials. The arm, made from aluminum and packed with complex electronics, is light enough to be worn by a medium-sized woman and could be cased inside a silicone mold, specially customized to match its wearer's body.

But no matter the technological wonders, there's no replacement for an intact body. As one nurse wrote in 1871, echoing Lincoln, "A hand, a foot or an eye is, next to life, the most precious sacrifice which can be laid on any alter. To lose in life's morning one of these inestimable possessions, to go through life deprived of the cunning of the right hand or the exceeding service of the foot or the eye, is, no doubt, a great calamity."

Michael Winship: The Afghan Ambush

2009-12-04T19:50:33Z

The decision has been made. The months of meetings and briefings are over. Tuesday night, the President made it official: 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. Along with Friday's announcement of an additional 7,000 from our NATO allies, after all those weeks of debate and consultation, the result's pretty much exactly what our commander over there, General Stanley McChrystal, asked for in the first place.

As they used to say in the old war movies, we're in it now, up to our necks. More than ever, this is Obama's War. The mess he inherited from the previous administration is now his mess. And while many Republicans may don their helmets, rattle their empty rusty scabbards and shout that escalation is the only way to go, their temporary declarations of support are just that -- temporary. Pats on the back are simply their way of finding the proper place to stick the knife.

Last week's Gallup Poll showed that while 65 percent of Republicans support sending all the troops McChrystal wants, only seventeen percent of Obama's own Democrats do; 57 per cent want a troop reduction. In other words, ignoring the entreaties of a majority in his own party Obama is going to war cheered on by the opposition that will do everything in its power next fall to bring him and his fellow Democrats down.

Friday's New York Times reported, "President Obama's decision to send more troops to Afghanistan over the objections of fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill is straining a relationship already struggling under the weight of an administration agenda that some Democratic lawmakers fear is placing them in a politically vulnerable position."

Next year's midterm elections could be a disaster for the Democrats. That's what happened to Lyndon Johnson. After winning by the largest plurality ever in 1964, bringing with him huge majorities in the House and Senate, in 1965 he escalated the Vietnam War. The next year, Democrats lost 50 seats in Congress.

That's just one of the possible effects of this fateful decision, one that could scuttle Obama's campaign promises of social and other reforms just as surely as the Vietnam War did President Johnson's. Guns and butter, LBJ said; for a time he thought we could pay for both. We could not.

Money that could be spent generating jobs, improving education, fighting global warming and world hunger is poured into this bottomless chasm of war. Some estimates put the ultimate cost of occupying Afghanistan at a trillion dollars. Add that figure to the mind-numbing numbers we've already spent on the occupation of Iraq. It keeps mounting even as our cities and states are running out of cash, unemployment benefits are drying up, and we're trying to figure out how to pay for health care reform - which some politicians are suggesting we back burner so that we can "focus" on the war in Afghanistan.

Yet nothing is certain about our objectives there. The original goal of capturing Osama bin Laden was lost long ago, and so scattered now are our motives and so shaky our rationale that, prior to President Obama's speech, the Pentagon was asking the public to Twitter what "points and/or issues" they thought the President should highlight.

Nor is there any real evidence that the administration is serious about the 18-month timetable for withdrawal that the President announced in his West Point address. As The New Republic's Michael Crowley wrote, "The pledge is a largely empty one: In a conference call, White House officials made it amply clear that the extent and pace of any drawdown would be based on conditions on the ground. Theoretically, Obama's promise tonight could entail withdrawing 100 troops in July 2011 and pulling out the rest ten years later. Much as the White House wants to deny it, what we've got here is an open-ended commitment."

Our own military says Osama bin Laden's true believers have been reduced to a relative few, chased across the border into Pakistan or scattered as far as Yemen and Somalia. As for the Taliban, there seems to be a growing belief among many generals that at least certain factions can be bought off, much as the support of certain Sunni insurgents was paid for in Iraq, fueling the so-called "surge" that's increasingly mythologized as victory. But what part of "take the money and run" does the Pentagon not understand?

And when it comes to training the Afghan police and army, and continuing to support the corrupt and dysfunctional government of Hamid Karzai -- such a wager has all the makings of the sucker bet to end all sucker bets. Toss into that pot disputatious warlords fueled by self-interest, the opium trade and hostility toward any outside occupier, and the already slim odds fade to mathematical improbability.

You've made your decision, Mr. President, and good luck with it. But turn back as fast as you can. It's an ambush.

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Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.

Brian Center: We Need More Details About Soft Power in Afghanistan

2009-12-04T19:45:30Z

I need more details about what our "soft power" strategy is in Afghanistan. Without soft power, we will not be successful in Afghanistan. Military force is necessary, but will never solve the problem in the long run.

Joseph Nye says that "soft power" is the ability to obtain the outcomes one wants through attraction rather than using the carrots and sticks of payment or coercion. "In nations, soft power rests upon culture (where it is attractive to others), values and policies (when they are inclusive and seen as legitimate in the eyes of others.)" Afghanistan is dangerous because of the culture of violence, the values of tribalism and corruption and policies that isolate people. Dropping bombs won't change the culture, values or policies.

I live in the City of Los Angeles, and we don't have to look very far to see an example of what I am talking about. Our war on gangs for the past several decades has been tough -- we've conducted a full scale effort to obliterate gangs and gang members. The result? A huge increase in gang violence. The problem got worse. When we tried versions of soft power, by infusing resources into the community, it also made little lasting impact. Why? The soft power came in the form of outsiders throwing money at the problem. There was no shift in culture, values or policies.

It was not until law enforcement leaders like Bill Bratton and Lee Baca started saying that we cannot arrest our way out of the problem, and leaders like newly crowned Chief Charlie Beck started truly empowering inner-city residents, that things started to change. My non-profit, A Better LA, has been right in the middle of this transformation. I've witnessed it first-hand. Hard-nosed cops now engage leaders from within the community -- people they used to loathe -- to build change from within. There is a growing culture of hope, an understanding that we all share the values of protecting children and life (over the fatigue of witnessing death) and policies are being implemented that allow for everyone -- including people who have been considered the bad guys in the past -- to be part of the solution. We have a long way to go, but the progress is astounding. Homicides are way down and we are seeing old enemies build lasting relationships instead of flimsy truces.

My hope is that -- even though we are worlds apart -- the lessons we have learned in Los Angeles can be applied in Afghanistan and other troubled spots around the world. If the soft power plan is simply to invest some money in social programs, schools and jobs, we will be very disappointed when we fail. All of those measures entail outsiders throwing temporary money at the situation. That is not change from "within."

We must find Afghan leaders who have real relationships with those creating the chaos, and engage and empower them to lead our soft power strategy. Change cannot come directly from U.S soldiers.

Is LA different than Afghanistan? Of course, in many ways. But the root causes of violence in one part of the world are the same as those in other parts of the world. The core elements of success in Los Angeles apply anywhere in the world where isolated, dysfunctional people are creating violence and chaos.

William S. Lerach: Gentlemen, Failure Is an Option

2009-12-04T19:27:01Z

How sad it was to watch young President Obama retreat -- Bush-style -- to a protected location and military audience to deliver the speech which likely marks the end of any hope for a successful Presidency. Some 30 years ago, Jimmy Carter's Presidency died in the Middle East desert when his hostage recovery mission blew up. But at least Carter's failed effort was a noble one. Obama has likely lost hope of success in pursuit of a war started by his political enemies and that has failed miserably to date.

By escalating the war to support a corrupt government in a land that has expelled every other invading power, he assures not only that its inevitable failure will be all the more spectacular -- but also that it will be wholly his -- as they say, he now "owns it." How can it be? This young, handsome and intelligent president escalating a war that his core supporters hate, independent voters increasingly disapprove of and his hateful right-wing enemies will never give him any credit for fighting in any event.

We on the left need to get grounded about this. All the excitement about the election of this "transformative" Harvard-educated, African-American with a beautiful wife and family made for great press and post-election bliss. But none of these superficialities guarantee success. And, to be objective, Obama had never actually achieved anything other than waltzing into a Senate seat and winning a Presidential election that took place in the middle of the worst financial crisis and stock market crash in decades -- beating an opponent who had picked a wing nut as his running mate. How hard was all that actually?

Surrounding himself with a bunch of pro-Wall Street advisors and bailing out the banks where their friends work was certainly no great achievement. His economic policies have produced little success in cutting unemployment. He has been hapless in trying to prevent the bankers from continuing to line their own pockets with obscene bonuses - now at the expense of the taxpayers as well as their own shareholders. The banks that were rescued with public money - are now thriving by borrowing from the Fed at 0% and investing in Treasury Securities - earning giant risk-free profits at our expense - while paying themselves bonuses as big as ever. Nothing has changed on Wall Street. Obama has done nothing to support, let alone push, financial reform legislation which insiders know is going nowhere.

On health care, he is allowing a group of Senators who are owned by that industry and Wall Street to craft legislation that is going to provide 40 million new customers to the craven health insurance companies, while preserving their anti-trust exemption that allows them to fix prices and not creating a strong public option to compete with them and control premiums.

Despite his promises, Guantanamo remains open.

Progressives need to face an uncomfortable fact. Obama was never really progressive. His pre-Presidential record was quite centrist. He ran to the left only because he and his handlers saw the political daylight there they needed to exploit to edge out Hillary Clinton. His lack of leadership in the healthcare legislative fight, including his quick abandonment of a public option confirm the reality -- Obama is an accommodationist -- relentlessly pursuing the same kind of non-confrontational behavior that enabled him as a black man to appear sufficiently non-threatening to rise to the top.

Progressives should have seen this coming. Candidate Obama said the Afghan War was the "right" war. We figured he was just saying that for political cover since he was using his purported opposition to the Iraq War to his advantage and thus needed to look "strong" on something. But, now we have it. Did I actually hear him cite the success of the war in Iraq as a justification for his escalation in Afghanistan? Yes, I did -- indicating that we can now add hypocrisy to his growing list of questionable traits. We were bamboozled.

Why is it that all presidents become War Presidents -- captives of the military? Somehow constantly being saluted while surrounded by the pomp -- the helicopters -- Air Force One -- the Situation Room -- seems to make them all want to be Caesars. Commander in Chief is not synonymous with Warrior in Chief.

Now we have our own Democratic War in a far-off land on behalf of a corrupt government. Many years ago, another "liberal" Democratic President (who was close to the military) escalated a war in a far-off land to prop up a corrupt government. That ill-advised adventure and economic policies that generated high inflation made him a one-term president. It also destroyed the progressive political movement for a generation. High unemployment, populist outrage at the bankers who plunder while the economy stagnates and body bags from Afghanistan may produce the same result for this President.

Remember: just because Obama was smart, young, handsome and the first Africa-American President does not mean he was guaranteed to succeed. And right now it looks like he is on the road to failure.

Christian Parenti: For Obama the Road to Reelection Runs Through Kabul - Or So He Thinks

2009-12-04T18:58:49Z

The real goals of the Afghanistan escalation are domestic and electoral. Like Lyndon Johnson who escalated in Vietnam, Obama lives in mortal fear of being called a wimp by Republicans.

To cover his flank and look tough in the next US elections, Obama is expanding the war in Afghanistan. To look strong in front of swing voters he will sacrifice the lives of hundreds of US soldiers; allow many more to be horribly maimed; waste a minimum of $30 billion in public money; and in the process kill many thousands of Afghan civilians.

It is political theater, nothing else. What are the other possible explanations for Obama's escalation? And why has he pledged to start drawling down the new deployment after only a year of fighting?

Is it to get the job done? To rebuild Afghanistan? To kill Osama Bin Laden and crush Al Qaeda? No, all those goals are nearly impossible. And Al Qaeda is too small and internationally defused to destroy.

Some say that Afghanistan is about a pipeline to export gas from Central Asia. Nonsense -- only a maniac would invest large sums of money in building a pipeline there. In the late 1990s the Argentine firm Bridas and the US firm Unocal jockeyed for the right to build such a pipeline. But that dream, always tentative, has evaporated. Afghanistan will never be stable enough for such a project.

Others say the Afghan war is about establishing US military bases to menace China, Russia and Iran. Indeed, the US now has bases on either side of Iran due to its occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. And small bases in Central Asia. But these do not require this new escalation.

The real purpose of these 300,000 soldiers is to make Obama look tough as he heads toward the next US presidential election.

As a landlocked, underdeveloped, fragmented buffer state with few resources, Afghanistan has long served as a means to get at other issues. Consider the history of how the US has used Afghanistan.

First, during the Cold War, Carter then Regan used it as the Soviet "bear trap." Then George W Bush used it to trampoline into Iraq. The Bush administration discussed régime change in Iraq at one of its first cabinet meetings. Among other things, they wanted direct economic control, and indirect geostrategic control, over Iraq's vast oil wealth. That has been partially accomplished, as witnessed by the recent Exxon and Shell deals there.

The only credible way into Iraq was via Afghanistan. On October 12, 2001 Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Paul Wolfowitz, actually suggested that the US skip an invasion of Afghanistan and go directly to Iraq. But that would have made coalition building impossible. After all, Al Qaeda was in the Taliban's Afghanistan.

So, the Afghan invasion was done - but on the cheap, fast and light. And then for eight years Afghanistan festered as the forgotten other war.

Then came the US presidential elections of 2008. Obama promised to end the Iraq war. But living in fear of being called a wimp, he too used Afghanistan. It became a rhetorical charm, a political mojo in his masculine war dance: He promised to lose Iraq (withdrawal or redeploy if you prefer), but do so while salvaging our national honor by winning the "necessary" war in Afghanistan. In short - he used Afghanistan to show that we was not the soft, meek, scared, pussified, little Democrat portrayed in GOP spin.

Wait, you say, most Americans want out of Afghanistan! So what.

US Presidential Elections are not decided by the majority of voters but rather by swing voters, in swing states. By "Reagan Democrats" and "Clinton Conservatives." By a sliver of older, whiter, middle and working-class men and (less so) women, in rural and suburban Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Tennessee, Michigan, etc.

This demographic has a strong sense of national honor, a fondness for the military, a traditional sense of masculinity and the role of violence in ordering the world, and perhaps a too simple view of international politics. Obama feels he must go to the polls able to tell them he was not afraid to fight, that he made a good effort in Afghanistan.

Never mind the reality of the war. What matter is what it will it look like. Nay, what it will feel like to swing voters. Will they believe the young Black President with the funny Muslim name cut and run?

There is nothing else to Obama's Afghan strategy. The war is a lost cause, but a useful story. Victory in Afghanistan is re-election in 2012.

But the ghost of LBJ's re-election surrender in 1968 stalks the young president. The irony is that if Obama cannot claim progress and begin drawing down in time, his Afghanistan gamble may backfire and cost him a second term in the White House.

Whatever the outcome, Obama has made it clear: he is willing to kill to get reelected.

Burton L. Wise: Two Misconceptions about Afghanistan

2009-12-04T18:02:52Z

People who live in the Western, developed countries must re-define at least two concepts when discussing Afghanistan:

1. "Country". Western countries generally are similar, whether democratic or not, in having a leader, legislature, and bureaucracy that, more or less, controls and leads the nation. Afghanistan, on the other hand, since before Alexander the Great, has been a collection of independent tribes and "warlords, and now has a corrupt and impotent "central government". Attempting to deal with problems in this area by hoping to do it through this government in Kabul is doomed to fail.

2."Victory". War between Western, developed countries generally ends at an agreed time, with an apparent winner and loser, or with a truce without winner, but with an end to fighting. Small groups may continue resisting, but most hostilities are over, and a treaty may be signed eventually.

I do not believe such a victory/defeat dichotomy is possible in Afghanistan. Would we agree to a truce with each tribe and warlord individually? What about the Taliban and al Qaeda? Would they disappear back into tribes as they did before, when we "defeated them"?

Phillip Martin: Skin Whitening in the Age of Barack Obama, Part Two

2009-12-04T17:41:23Z

So what, some argue. Sammy Sosa wants to whiten his skin and some folks want a tan. The problem with using tanning as a counter-argument to whitening is that it is a false dichotomy. If one was to assume that skin whitening and bleaching are merely exercises in cosmetics he or she would be spot-on. But skin whitening is mainly about power, as even its defenders citing "age-old traditions" explicitly concede; by this I mean the relative power of white skin in a world still dominated economically, politically and culturally by European and American frameworks of assumption of what constitutes progress, success and beauty.

Even though both artificial and natural skin-tanning are growing in popularity in Asia and elsewhere-- mainly among the young and artistic--it is the great exception not the norm.

On a beach in Penang, Malaysia, during my reporting on this issue, I met Elena Singh, a physical therapist, who was one of two Asians taking in rays under an 85 degree sun.

Many Asian people like to be like Michael Jackson

she told me.

They can pay any amount of money to get white. For me, I would not advise that because many of the chemicals that are used for whitening contain mercury or tar. So it's not doing much goodness to the skin. I would advise people if you want to be healthy to your skin and your health, you should get some sun.

Citing fear of skin cancer, but mainly citing the fear of being dark, Singh's advice is falling on deaf ears in Asia. (Globalpost.com)

Even "Ganguro"--mainly Japanese young women who tanned recklessly to a degree where they were barely distinguishable from naturally dark-skinned people--have fallen out of favor as whitening has surged.

No, this is not a new story. What is new is that since the early 1990's, the use of skin whitening products has exploded. In Asia, Europe, and the US, at various points in history, it was just the elite and the certifiable middle-classes that could afford to maintain pearly white complexions in societies where most people toiled the land. Now both over-the-counter and illegal products are being purchased in greater numbers, especially in Asia where the middle class has grown dramatically in the last three decades.

THE CONNECTION TO JOBS

In many nations worldwide there is extraordinary societal pressure to whiten or to at least lighten one's skin. The failure to do so in societies such as Vietnam and the Dominican Republic can spell the difference between a financially stable marriage or in landing even the most basic secretarial job and other positions that interact with the public.

Some large and small businesses in Brazil, up until the past decade (when anti-discrimination laws started to be enforced), were notorious for posting classified ads seeking white, fair skinned or light skinned applicants ONLY. Simply put, in various societies, whether India, Brazil, Vietnam or the Dominican Republic, your chances of being hired in many positions are considerably better if your skin is lighter than those with whom you are competing.

There, of course, are specific cultural contexts for skin whitening. But they can not be separated from global media images (from BET to the BBC), universal stereo-types and an historical predilection for whiteness based on centuries of western influence, to put it mildly. For example, turn your channel to the "telenovelas" on Spanish speaking Univision and you would not be wrong to come away thinking that only wholesome white Latino families live south of the U.S. border.

Now the messages underlying skin whitening do not necessarily translate as what many here in the U.S. define as racism. Sometimes the terms "shade-ism" or "colorism" might better explain this world-wide phenomenon. But the effects are the same. Even in the United States--arguably a comparatively more enlightened multi-racial and self-confident society than many others--a 2006 study by the University of Georgia revealed that light skinned blacks are often more likely to be considered for jobs over dark-skinned blacks. The study found that dark-skinned blacks face "a distinct disadvantage when applying for jobs, even if they have resumes superior to lighter-skinned black applicants".

Tufts University social psychologist Keith Maddox studies public reactions to skin tone and color: "What some of the research has shown is that black skin color-- and also when you're thinking about other kinds of physical characteristics that are associated with blacks-- tend to be more associated with negative concepts, so more closely associated with fear and closely associated with negative personality traits."

Melissa Nobles, a political scientist at MIT, says the throughout the world lighter skin, "...can connote social status and your standing in a society. And usually societies are hierarchically arranged, and blackness tends to be lower on this scale than let's say whiteness or lightness."

But you don't need to have studied political science to know this. Skin whitening and bleaching products are flying off the shelves of ethnic-oriented beauty salons and stores in the U.S. whereever Asian and Latin American immigrants live, and for that matter, in African American neighborhoods as well. The pressure to alter skin color is enormous, even for super-successful baseball players.

In Sammy Sosa's native Dominican Republic, the desire and everyday struggle to be fair is the stuff of legends. Black and light, and the right shade of light, underlie much of the societal tensions amongst the peoples of Hispaniola, with Haitians in the West and dark skinned Dominicans regarded unequivocally as less-than. So it should not be surprising that the formerly black Sammy Sousa is now a lighter version of himself.

Skin whitening has a long history in the Dominican Republic, as author Junot Diaz reminds us in "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao", with his reference to former dictator Rafael Trujillo, "who bleached his skin, wore platform shoes, and had a fondness for Napoleon-era haberdashery."

Today, many people the world over lighten their skin also in hope of living a good life (sans the dictatorship), or at least one where they think they can compete in an undeniably color coded universe, which still exists in the age of Barack Obama.

Christopher Herbert and Victoria Kataoka Rebuffet: Foreign Affairs Roundup

2009-12-04T16:55:35Z

This Week's Top Stories in Foreign Affairs:

A New Strategy for Afghanistan
SI Analysis: US President Obama announces a new strategy for Afghanistan that focuses on a reinforcement of counter-insurgency actions in the south, stabilization of urban centers, political empowerment with anti-corruption efforts and training of indigenous security forces. An additional 30,000 US troops and up to 10,000 NATO troops (5,000 may be a more likely number) will be deployed over the next eight months, bringing the total presence to about 100,000 US troops and up to 50,000 NATO troops. Notably, Obama announced a commitment to begin the draw down of forces to begin in 18 months, setting a firm timeline for the new strategy to work and largely adhering to General Stanley McChrystal's approach to a "decisive period of war". Some critics say that the timeline gives the Taliban motivation to just hold out until 2011, others say that the timeline is an essential political tool to convince American and Afghan stakeholders of the urgency and temporal nature of the mission. A large part of the strategy focuses on bringing pressure onto the border areas with Pakistan. The real question then is what remains to be assessed: Does the Pakistani Army have the political conviction to fight the Afghan Taliban as it has the Pakistani Taliban? Meanwhile, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari ceded his control of the nuclear dossier to PM Yousuf Raza Gilani. This is an indication that the President is facing a political confrontation with the Army.

Iran Raises Its Nuclear Stakes
SI Analysis: In a surprising response to the scathing IAEA report and unanimous rebuke last week -- that said it had reached a dead end with nuclear inspections with Iran due to Iran's refusal to cooperate -- Iran announced that it was greatly expanding its civilian nuclear program with plans to build 10 new uranium enrichment facilities. The UN 5+1 (US, UK, France, Russia and China plus Germany) will most likely agree to impose harsh energy sanctions against Iran, greatly curbing the flow on gas into the country (though an oil rich country, Iran's infrastructure is so underdeveloped that it imports 40% of its oil). Analysts are divided on whether sanctions will have any important effect on Iran's nuclear dossier; some believe they will be ineffective and merely delay a possible war; others say that they will greatly cripple Iran so much so that it may withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Meanwhile, Mohammed ElBaradei ended his term as head of the UN nuclear watchdog agency; Yukiya Amano took the healm of the IAEA. The worse case scenario is that this posturing will prompt Israel to make a preemptive strike against Iran.

Analysis in Brief:

EU Draft Peace Policy Riles Israel
SI Analysis: Israel took great umbrage with a Swedish drafted EU policy towards Middle East peace that recognizes the Palestinian claim to East Jerusalem. Israel insists that such a policy would marginalize Europe's role as a broker for peace. Presently, France is facilitating Syrian-Israeli talks and Germany is helping with the Egyptian-brokered prisoner exchange talks currently in the works.

What's Next for Honduras
SI Analysis: Porfirio Lobo, a conservative, won the controversial Presidential election on Sunday. However on Wednesday Honduras' Congress rejected the motion to reinstate ousted President Manuel Zelaya to serve out the last few weeks of his term. The international community is divided on how to respond: whether to recognize the elections that seemed to go off well, despite an announced boycott, or to insist on Zelaya's reinstatement before re-engaging with Honduras. Many Hondurans themselves seemed divided on how to respond. The US will have to take the lead on finding a diplomatic solution tot his mess.

Pirates Again
SI Analysis: Somali pirates seized a Greek tanker filled with Saudi crude oil bound for the United States 700 miles off the coast of Somalia. An attack so far off the coast indicates that Pirates are taking greater risks to elude the EU, NATO and American-led multinational patrols in the Gulf of Aden.

Latest from Russia
SI Analysis: Unprompted, Russian President Medvedev presented a proposed European security pact that would limit NATO expansion. Meanwhile, Radical political Islamists from the Northern Caucasus said they were behind the attack that killed 26 people by bombing a train en route from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

Upcoming Events of Note:

Lebanese President to Visit the US
SI Analysis: Lebanese President Michel Suleiman will visit the US on 12 December. Now that a coalition government led by Saad Hariri has been formed, it will be interesting to see what America's position with regards to Hezbollah will be: the Shia group presently labeled a terrorist organization by the US has made legitimizing political inroads. Much debate in Lebanon is currently focused on the effort to disarm Hezbollah's militia and integrate it into the Lebanese security apparatus.

Climate Conference Talks to Start
SI Analysis: Talks in Copenhagen will start next Monday with the EU, the US and China all making significant pledges for action.

You can read this Foreign Affairs Roundup on the Simple Intelligence Site and on the Huffington Post World Page

Khadija Sharife: Sudan Is Still the Issue

2009-12-04T16:30:55Z

For Jerry Fowler, President of the 'Save Darfur' Coalition, Sudan's government - perpetrators of war crimes, got away scot-free as US President Barack Obama engaged in diplomatic-speak 'tacking Sudan on to a laundry list of items behind closed doors' during his recent trip to China.

Indeed, Fowler is correct in his declaration that Sudan is still the issue. The real question is: in what context, and for what end?

Quite some time before Darfur's 'genocide' was identified, G. Dubya Bush, best known for justifying wars in distant oil-rich lands under the guise of 'terrorism', signed the Sudan Peace Act of 2002, declaring that, 'the acts of the Government of Sudan....constitute genocide.'

Fowler has described the war in Darfur, Sudan's westernmost region bordering eastern Chad, as one of the continent's most pressing crisis, with the Save Darfur coalition placing the number of genocide victims at 400 000. The Coalition's 'Darfur Primer' states, "Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, even by the most conservative estimates. The United Nations puts the death toll at roughly 300,000, while the former U.N. undersecretary-general puts the number at no less than 400,000."

The UN itself revealed that 'violence, disease and malnutrition' constituted the chief causes.

According to the US's Government Accountability Office (GAO) however, 'most of the experts had the highest overall confidence in estimates by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED).'

CRED, a WHO-affiliate, arrived at 118, 142 victims (Sep 2003 - Jan 2005); 35 000 were directly attributed to violence-related deaths, with the remainder catalysed by disease and malnutrition.

This of course, should come as no surprise in a region where droughts lending to wide scale famine, lopsided 'right of access' to resources, and the scarcity of ecosystem services such as water and grazing land, have long since reached critical tipping points. As Ibrahim Thiaw of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) noted, in Sudan, "One of the root causes of the conflict is access to natural resources."

But this does not imply that the government played no part in food deprivation, whether directly, through the lack of relief supplies (from food to medical care) as was the case during Ethiopia's great famine, or indirectly, by siphoning billions in oil revenue through for example, tax evasion, devouring one third of Sudan's revenue, or multinational mispricing - as much as 40% or more of total oil revenue through cost oil.

Yet such blatant exploitation on the part of Khartoum is difficult to pin down as the actual revenues that Sudan receives, the volume of oil extracted and exported, the price for which it is sold, the conflict of interest between regulating authorities and those controlling corporate entities exploiting the oil, the lack of accountability - ranging from auditors to confidentiality clauses to name a few, are all but concealed.

This is chiefly due to the lack of mandatory information exchange, preventing countries (and citizens) experiencing flight of development finance from data related to its destination, the lack of corporate country reporting, revealing economic activities in host countries, such as pre-tax profits, subsidies, financing costs, tangible and intangible assets etc, and Sudan's pariah status, rendering it ever more dependent on oil giants - external suppliers of 'rents' from oil than other similarly resource-rich regions.

Though the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005, officially halting one of Africa's longest civil wars, grants the South - where the bulk of oil is located, the right to 50% of revenues remitted to Khartoum, as well as six years of autonomy followed by an independence referendum to be held in 2011, it is lacking in other crucial issues such as disclosure, ownership of resources, ecological and human rights, reparations, representation and re-pricing.

Overall, Africa loses almost $150 billion each year in illicit flight, over 60% caused by multinational mispricing, indicating that the source of the 'resource curse' is rooted in systemic forces, lending to behavioral corruption on the part of states. This is because states are accountable too, and dependent on, multinationals - legal citizens (manufacturing distorted tax bases) as opposed to nations made up of flesh and blood citizens.

The policy of 'tax competition', granting multinationals huge subsidies and concessions, eroding development finance, is yet another trick that works especially well with states that are either isolated, and/or corrupt and more than willing to receive under-the-table payments. This includes everything from low royalty rates, control of ports, railways and other infrastructure, exemption from environmental laws, casualisation of labor, cheapened access to water (especially lethal in regions characterised by droughts) and various other freebies.

This is unlike 'developed countries' where significant portions of state budget is derived not from finite resources but everyday people, rendering states responsive and accountable to citizens through democratic or representative processes.

But Africa's propped up political leaders, directly causing the continent to lose $18 billion each year in conflict alone (or some $280 billion since the 1990s), have no need for citizens as unearned, undisclosed revenue allows them to capture political power indefinitely.

And while 'wabenzis' or Africa's elites, rely on multinationals for revenue - funds that should be invested in citizens through state services such as education (the source of 80% of 'wealth' generated in developed countries), African citizens are forced to survive and earn an income mainly from direct ecosystem services such as water, fisheries, farm and cropland.

This is where Sudan is placed at the edge of precipice, more so than most other nations: in stark contrast to Nigeria and other such ecologically 'rich' regions, much of Sudan is ecologically 'poor', compounded by structurally unjust systems of land tenure --- the inherited legacy of British colonialism, endorsed by Africa's 'internal' colonialists.

But Sudan is rich in oil and it is this reality that has resulted in the country fast becoming one of Africa's fastest growing economies in Africa, despite US sanctions imposed on the country from 1997, the year the US's National Security Council declared Sudan 'the greatest to US security on the African continent'. Unsurprisingly, this stance coincided with China's entrance as Sudan's primary investor, holding 40% of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company (GNPOC).

These days, China, importing 60% of Sudan's oil, is the country's largest trading partner, and Sudan, one of China's three main footholds on the African continent. Unfortunately for the US - consuming one quarter of global energy with just 5% of global population, and hosting 910 military bases in 46 countries - a policy largely determined by the presence of oil and gas (and the US's need to geostrategically secure supplies), homegrown oil giants have been unable to access Sudan's resources under the rule of lifetime dictator Omar al Bashir.

Luckily for Bashir, who came to power in a 1989 military coup (resulting in the speedy 'exit' of Chevron), one freshly wrapped up coup in neighbouring oil-rich Chad, forever more to be ruled by French-backed dictator Idriss Deby, facilitated easy access of AK-47s flowing through the westernmost part of Sudan - Darfur. It was in fact this proximity to Chad's ongoing civil wars, incorporated into the arena of the Cold War (waged by the US and France on one side, and the Soviet Union on the other) that permanently altered Sudan's political landscape.

Whereas prior to this war, access to 'gifts of nature' like water, were more or less equitably managed through traditional 'tribal' mechanisms, the flow of arms militarising the region, accompanied by foreign agendas globally positioned Sudan as just another 'resource colony' for the taking.Specifically recruited were young males from socio-economically marginalised regions. Young males for example, from the Zaghawa 'tribe', composed part of the 'Janjaweed' alleged by the International Criminal Court to have engaged in genocide through targeting ethnic groups such as the Fur, Massalit and Zaghawa in Western Sudan.

According to the WHO, of the 20-30% 'excess deaths' caused by the genocide, the bulk were composed of young males - not unlike the gang subculture so prevalent in the US, where young men born into shattered lives (often searching for identity and purpose) are easily co-opted in the wars of others.

Beneath the skin of the simplistically packaged civil war, portrayed as being rooted in age-old tribal, religious (Muslim versus Christian), and ethnic (Arab versus African) differences - all of which constitute the vehicle internationalizing the 'genocide' -- lies a far more complex reality.

Darfuris are predominantly Muslim. Though the 'Arab' government has centralized power in Khartoum, in Darfur, it is the 'Arab' that remains on the periphery of power. Similarly, all Sudanese are in reality of African ethnicity though geographic proximity to the 'Maghreb', historical trade routes and other factors lead to the 'Arabisation' of specific regions.

That 'Islam' - or Bashir's conveniently militarised, politicised version of it, was used as a weapon against the oil-rich Christian and theistic South may certainly have occurred and with great brutality but it is not the root cause of the war, merely the dressing.

Sudan has thus experienced with the discovery of oil - and unearned resource rents, the speeding up of conflicts already ecologically fated for the nation, a fate that could well be averted if revenues derived from finite resources were sustainably invested.

In Sudan, oil represents at one and the same time, the problem and the solution, a reality innately recognised by the CPA interrogating both revenue and power sharing. The presence of oil is after all the primary reason that foreign powers have taken an interest in Sudan. Through oil, Sudan's conflicts were geopolitically shifted from the local to the global level, intensified on a scale allegedly never experienced before the 1990s.

At around the same time, for example, that Chevron was strenuously 'encouraged' to leave in the early 1990s the SPLA doubled its manpower to 60 000 troops. In 1996, one year prior to US sanctions (and the Sino-Sudanese marriage), the US sent special troops and $20 million in military equipment to US-backed allies such as Uganda and Ethiopia, 'backing rebel forces' ie: the SPLA. Said leader John Garang trained at the US special academy of Fort Benning (USA) - described by investigative journalist John Pilger as the 'world's leading university of terrorism', and this, in tandem with the discovery of oil in the 1970s.

Unlike the US, China does not favor active conflict aka 'gunboat democracy' as an enabling environment. Rather, it appears to support dictatorships as stable business climates in which forced peace can be achieved. Nor is direct access to resources obtained through the pretext of odious debt justifying the implementation of 'structural adjustment'; rather, the barter system, swapping geostrategic control for 'development' and 'returned' policy spaces. This enables dictators to move from the position of dogs-on-leashes to those guarding their own backyards with some measure of 'security'. China's military muscle is therefore rather underdeveloped.

Meanwhile, according to recent statements by the Pentagon, the US government is exploring the possibility of arming the SPLA ensuring the, "transition from a guerilla force to one that can provide adequate defense capabilities for its people and territory. Professional military education and training for officers and enlisted personnel is one key aspect; an air defense capability might be relevant."

As John Jok, a Director on the board of South Sudan's Nilepet, and the head of the Ministry of Energy and Mining, stated, "The fact that the movement has firmly established itself in these areas is evidence of its military gains."

The semi-autonomous government of South Sudan, on the receiving end of more than $7 billion in oil revenue from 2005, has no auditor, is over 95% dependent on oil revenues, and rules over a population where 90% live on less than a dollar a day (with no ecosystem services to act as a substitute).

(For a better visual idea of life in South Sudan, here is a short video filmed by Dr Jack Hickel who, along with his team, is raising the necessary funds to build a hospital in the remote village of Fangak - $130 000 is still urgently required to meet the costs. You can read more about the project here: http://www.alaskasudan.org/).

If the South splits, as SPLM head, and President of South Sudan Silva Kiir recently called for - irrespective of whether majority votes are received, China stands to lose billions in investment perceived as a secure source of oil required to sustain a country housing 20% of the planet's total population. The upside is that the US would then access South Sudan's oil, building alternate pipelines through one or the other of the US's allies.

But the US cannot directly confront China as the latter holds $800 billion in treasury bonds, and over $2 trillion in reserve currency. Thus, the instrument of choice was the UN Security Council, referring the case to the ICC. Given that the UN Security Council, made up of the world's leading arms-dealers and war-makers possesses the power to defer and refer cases (effectively immunizing powerful countries from accountability), the actual legitimacy of the ICC as a vehicle of justice lacks authenticity. Though the ICC panel found Bashir guilty of crimes against humanity, genocide (neatly painting one victim and one aggressor) was dismissed.

Ironically, despite Fowler's statement indicating that Obama has not done enough to drive forward the 'peace process' it is through Obama's special envoy - General Scott Gration, an astute and at the same time 'khaki-minded' diplomat cognizant of the complexities informing Sudan's realities, that the door to political justice for all Sudan has finally been wedged open.

This stands in contrast to the policy of exclusive and selective criminal justice which can only be achieved at the expense of real justice, characterised by peace - not the dictates of oil-driven foreign policy.

After all is said and done, chucking a sitting head of state for war crimes into The Hague is akin to regime change. If we're going down that route, we might as well start with Switzerland, the secrecy jurisdiction that is home to one third of the world's illicit flight - and the secrets of many a corrupt criminal, high level politician and corporate executive.

It would open up a world of possibilities.

Louis Belanger: In the heart of Somaliland, a climate tragedy

2009-12-04T16:17:57Z

Muhammed interrupted me by pounding the ground, laughing out loud and exchanging a few words with Seleban Yussuf , the village's elder sitting next to him.

"Unbelievable. Can you believe this guy came all the way from America to see Somaliland?," he said in Somali. "All the way just to talk to us. Sorry Mr. Louis, carry on."

Indeed, Muhammed Yassin Abdel Llahi was right. There aren't too many people that make the journey to Somaliland these days. The place is sort of the forgotten corner of what used to be a united Somalia. It has a President, a lower house, an upper house, its own money, and more importantly has been relatively stable for over 15 years. If you imagine Somalia as the number seven, Somaliland is at the top left corner, bordering tiny Djibouti and Ethiopia. It's one of the most underdeveloped regions I have ever seen.

Father of seven, Muhammed is the head of over 450 households, based in Ununley, in the heart of Somaliland. He tells me of "changing weather", of his seven children being away and of the drought that has hit the region and its people. All of the households are pastoralists, caring for animals and living a nomadic life.

The communities we met in Ununley told us that they've seen the climate changing in the last decade but "more drastically in the last four years". In Eastern Africa this means a lack of rain which affects every aspect of life for pastoralist communities. Little rain means no green pastures from which animals can feed themselves. The lack of water and irregular rains have become a critical problem for tens of thousands of herdsmen in the region

As a result, many animals become weak, sick and simply start dying one by one. The Ununley community lost 40% of its livestock last year as animals in search of green areas crumbled under the heat, including the stronger ones like camels and cows.

"This is new for us. We have never seen so many animals dying so quickly. There is even a new phenomenon when a cow or even a camel just collapses and dies right there. They would usually fight for a day or two. I think it's an illness they have," Muhammed tells me.

Faced with recurring poor rainy seasons, loss of livestock, loss of lives even, community leaders are wondering what to do next. They are even considering leaving the arid rural areas for the towns in search of a different life. But they are not there yet.

"The thought of splitting our community to go to cities is hard to imagine. What will we do? Beg? For now, we can only pray for rain. With a few days of rain, everything can be good again," the 45 year old leader told me, nervously biting his nails.

Seleban Yussuf Noor, 75, Ununley village, Togheer, Somaliland

Oxfam's partner in the region, Candlelight, recently responded to community requests to coordinate water projects. With the communities, it builds water dams, truck water into villages and improve water basins, called Burkads. In some instances, this has literally saved lives.

"Without water, people and livestock will die, but Oxfam has saved this from happening," explained Safia Hussein Ibrahim, a local villager. "Now we have cash, we can buy food for the children and fodder for the animals. We only ask those who have something to train those who are strong, educate people, give them healthcare. We are expecting God to change our situation in a good way."

With a few weeks left of what should be the rainy season, the people of Ununley are still hopeful. Despite having lost so much and seen their way of life threatened in the last decade, one thing that has not gone away is their resilience. A few rain showers before the end of the year.

That's all they pray for.

Inshallah.

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For more information on Oxfam's work: http://www.oxfam.org
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