Category: Counterinsurgency

Gaddafi bears responsibility

French-Lebanese scholar Gilbert Achcar on the no-fly zone in Libya:

Over at Al Jazeera, Marwan Bishara asks:

So who bears the responsibility for turning Libya into a war zone and an object of an international military intervention?

Could it be those who confronted a peaceful civil uprising for freedom with lethal force, and when it escalated into a full-fledged revolt, used aerial bombardments, heavy artillery to quell it?

Libya could have and should have gone Tunisia or Egypt’s path of change. But while their militaries conceded the need for regime change, in Libya the family-led powerful militias, financed and groomed to defend the regime’s “country estate”, sided with their pay masters.

While the Gaddafis continue to show images of pro-Gaddafi demonstrators in Tripoli to offset the images of widespread anti-Gaddafi/pro-change, in reality, Libya is not divided between two visions for their country.

Rather between a majority that seeks free and prosperous Libya, and a mostly small heavily-armed minority that runs or benefits from a corrupt rule.

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Srebrenica on the Mediterranean

Two days after Gaddafi promised that he’ll show ‘no mercy’, his troops are bombarding, some entering, Benghazi. The UN Security Council had passed a resolution declaring a no-fly zone over Libya. Thus far, the sky belongs to Gaddafi. There was a point where Gaddafi could have been thwarted, had his armoured columns been checked by the presence of hostile air power. No need to bomb them, just bomb the road ahead. Check their advance, send a message. Instead, the troops have been allowed to enter Benghazi. Now they cannot be attacked without inflicting high casualties on civilians. The UN forces will likely excuse themselves by claiming that tanks can’t be attacked because now they are in the city. Western forces are also reluctant because since 2003, Gaddafi has been a reliable economic parter and Libya has been a favoured destination for rendition flights. (Remember where Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi died?)

The UN could still salvage the situation by threatening Gaddafi’s supply lines. But I fear we are about to see another Srebrenica. In that instance, the UN forces delayed intervention till the Serbs had encircled the enclave and then declined to intervene because they said it would put their own peacekeepers lives at risk. Meanwhile the slaughter continues.

Violence continues across Bahrain

Also see this article by Marc Lynch on the Bahraini government use of sectarianism as a counterinsurgency tool.

Bahrain’s largest opposition group has urged Saudi Arabia to withdraw its forces and called for a UN inquiry into the the government’s on-going crackdown.

Clashes between security forces and anti goverment protesters continue, spilling into villages across the country.

Our special correspondent, whom we are not naming for security reasons, filed this report.

Deadly crackdown in Yemen

Yemeni security forces have opened fire at a protest in the capital Sanaa, killing at least 30 people.

It is the highest death toll in a single day after weeks of demonstrations calling for Ali Abdullah Saleh, the Yemeni president, to stand down.

Witnesses say armed men opened fire from nearby buildings as protesters gathered in Sanaa’s University Square after Friday prayers

Al Jazeera’s Alan Fisher reports.

Salman Taseer Remembered

by Tariq Ali

Mumtaz Hussain Qadri smiled as he surrendered to his colleagues after shooting Salman Taseer, the governor of the Punjab, dead. Many in Pakistan seemed to support his actions; others wondered how he’d managed to get a job as a state bodyguard in the carefully screened Elite Force. Geo TV, the country’s most popular channel, reported, and the report has since been confirmed, that ‘Qadri had been kicked out of Special Branch after being declared a security risk,’ that he ‘had requested that he not be fired on but arrested alive if he managed to kill Taseer’ and that ‘many in Elite Force knew of his plans to kill Salman Taseer.’

Qadri is on his way to becoming a national hero. On his first appearance in court, he was showered with flowers by admiring Islamabad lawyers who have offered to defend him free of charge. On his way back to prison, the police allowed him to address his supporters and wave to the TV cameras. The funeral of his victim was sparsely attended: a couple of thousand mourners at most. A frightened President Zardari and numerous other politicians didn’t show up. A group of mullahs had declared that anyone attending the funeral would be regarded as guilty of blasphemy. No mullah (that includes those on the state payroll) was prepared to lead the funeral prayers. The federal minister for the interior, Rehman Malik, a creature of Zardari’s, has declared that anyone trying to tamper with or amend the blasphemy laws will be dealt with severely. In the New York Times version he said he would shoot any blasphemer himself.

Taseer’s spirited defence of Asiya Bibi, a 45-year-old Punjabi Christian peasant, falsely charged with blasphemy after an argument with two women who accused her of polluting their water by drinking out of the same receptacle, provoked an angry response from religious groups. Many in his own party felt that Taseer’s initiative was mistimed, but in Pakistan the time is never right for such campaigns. Bibi had already spent 18 months in jail. Her plight had been highlighted by the media, women had taken to the streets to defend her and Taseer and another senior politician from the Pakistan Peoples Party, Sherry Rehman, had demanded amendments to the blasphemy laws. Thirty-eight other women have been imprisoned under the same law in recent years and soon after a friendly meeting between Yousaf Gillani, the prime minister, and the leader of the supposedly moderate Jamaat-e-Islami, a member of the latter offered a reward of ten thousand dollars to whoever manages to kill Bibi.

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Taliban can fight forever

Rahimullah Yusufzai: Negotiations must take place now, Taliban fighting for religion and country, can fight forever

Nir Rosen on Afghanistan

Press TV’s Autograph is a very good show, and in the last program they interviewed Nir Rosen, one of the best war reporters, about his time in Afghanistan.

The French in Algeria

The French in Algeria pioneered many of the torture techniques that were subsequently used in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. French ‘counterinsurgency’ specialists, who had already fought the Vietnamese, trained American soldiers and interrogators throughout the 1960s.

Al Jazeera examines the bitterness still provoked by France’s colonial war in Algeria and how it fuels resentment between France and its Muslim community.

Careless Words and Callous Deeds

by David Bromwich

It has lately become usual for right-wing columnists, bloggers, and jingo lawmakers to call for the assassination of people abroad whom we don’t like, or people who carry out functions that we don’t want to see performed. There was nothing like this in our popular commentary before 2003; but the callousness has grown more marked in the past year, and especially in the past six months. Why? A major factor was President Obama’s order of the assassination of an American citizen living in Yemen, the terrorist suspect Anwar al-Awlaki. This gave legal permission to a gangster shortcut Americans historically had been taught to shun. The cult of Predator-drone warfare generally has also played a part. But how did such remote-control killings pick up glamor and legitimacy? Here again, the president did some of the work. On May 1, at the White House Correspondents dinner, he made an unexpected joke: “Jonas Brothers are here tonight. Sasha and Malia are huge fans. But boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words: predator drones. You will never see it coming.” The line caught a laugh but it should have caused an intake of breath. A joke (it has been said) is an epigram on the death of a feeling. By turning the killings he orders into an occasion for stand-up comedy, the new president marked the death of a feeling that had seemed to differentiate him from George W. Bush. A change in the mood of a people may occur like a slip of the tongue. A word becomes a phrase, the phrase a sentence, and when enough speakers fall into the barbarous dialect, we forget that we ever talked differently.

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