Posts tagged Politics
مہرین کسانه
Some Al Qaeda text up there.
[I] didn’t realise my main job was to kill people.
Well. Shit.
I’m curious: Why didn’t we call for intervention when Sri Lanka butchered thousands in single month in 2009?
Important question. Naresh Fernandes further asks: “How come they’re all so upset about Syria but let Sri Lanka get away with much worse in 2009? And Israel all the time?” You know where this is leading to. While the plight of the ongoing massacre in Syria will never be downplayed, it is essential to keep an eye on foreign policy decisions and how interventions are prioritized for reasons a little too obvious.
According to U.S. code, domestic terrorism occurs when the act is “dangerous to human life” and is “a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State” and “appear[s] to be intended … to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.” When discussing Francis Grady in a press release, FBI Special Agent in Charge Teresa Carson’s comments suggest Grady’s alleged actions were indeed terrorism: “The FBI will always investigate and bring to justice anyone who resorts to violence as a means to harm, intimidate or prevent the public’s right to access reproductive health services.” The key word there is “intimidate,” which is one of the core characteristics of any terrorist act. Yet Grady has only been charged with arson and “intentionally damaging the property of a facility that provides reproductive health services.
In fact, we didn’t even hear much about Francis Grady just like we didn’t hear about BNP candidate Michael Green who threatened to blow himself up in a building in London. Here’s a humble suggestion as to why both weren’t called “terrorists”: They’re white and they’re not Muslims.
The term you’re looking for starts with a D. It’s called Double Standards.
We’re killing these sons of bitches faster than they can grow them.
Head of the CIA’s counterterrorism division to The Washington Post in 2011.
That’s American political vocabulary for you. Describing unidentified Muslims as “sons of bitches.” Any Muslim resentment or rage against this is classified as “hating on our freedoms.”
The coercive interrogation of prisoners—the use of individualized terror— is part of the regime called security, which in turn is part of the ‘just war’ against terrorism. In liberal democratic society this practice tends to give rise to debates: Has torture actually taken place? Is it proper to call the practice torture? Can torture sometimes be morally condoned? Some self-styled liberals have proudly claimed that at least liberal democratic states allow public debate on such matters. But the implications of public debate on torture are not merely a sign of freedom. Open dispute over what constitutes torture (physical or psychological distress beyond certain limits) legitimizes the idea that suffering may be inflicted within limits. And it thus opens the way to arguments, especially among liberals, in favour of shifting the limit in exceptional circumstances.
- Talal Asad in Thinking About Terrorism and Just War
One of the sharpest and most poignant critical take-downs of the rampant hypocrisy present within liberal democracies advocating ‘just war.’ Exhibit A: United States of America.
Then, in August 2009, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, told Mr. Brennan that the agency had Mr. Mehsud in its sights. But taking out the Pakistani Taliban leader, Mr. Panetta warned, did not meet Mr. Obama’s standard of “near certainty” of no innocents being killed. In fact, a strike would certainly result in such deaths: he was with his wife at his in-laws’ home.
“Many times,” General Jones said, in similar circumstances, “at the 11th hour we waved off a mission simply because the target had people around them and we were able to loiter on station until they didn’t.”
But not this time. Mr. Obama, through Mr. Brennan, told the C.I.A. to take the shot, and Mr. Mehsud was killed, along with his wife and, by some reports, other family members as well, said a senior intelligence official.
President Obama and the Secret Kill List
Look at that Nobel Peace Prize winner. Executing people without trials and not even caring about collateral damage (or, as we might call them, murdered innocent civilians.)
(via fearandwar)
In case anyone was confused about how the Executive works (because apparently, according to Tumblr, Obama isn’t to blame but “institutions which can’t be changed”):
Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.
“He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go,” said Thomas E. Donilon, his national security adviser. “His view is that he’s responsible for the position of the United States in the world.” He added, “He’s determined to keep the tether pretty short.”
[…]
In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of his current and former advisers described Mr. Obama’s evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda.
They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”
Read that last sentence again.
(via mohandasgandhi)
How humanitarian, Obama.
(via mohandasgandhi)
“Militants”: media propaganda | Glenn Greenwald
“Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent. …
“’It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,’ the official said. ’They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.’” — New York Times, 5/29/2012
Greenwald:
For the moment, leave the ethical issues to the side that arise from viewing “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants”; that’s nothing less than sociopathic, a term I use advisedly, but I discuss that in the separate, longer piece I’m writing to be published a bit later this morning. For now, consider what this means for American media outlets. Any of them which use the term “militants” to describe those killed by U.S. strikes are knowingly disseminating a false and misleading term of propaganda. By “militant,” the Obama administration literally means nothing more than: any military-age male whom we kill, even when we know nothing else about them. They have no idea whether the person killed is really a militant: if they’re male and of a certain age they just call them one in order to whitewash their behavior and propagandize the citizenry (unless conclusive evidence somehow later emerges proving their innocence).
What kind of self-respecting media outlet would be party to this practice? Here’s the New York Times documenting that this is what the term “militant” means when used by government officials. Any media outlet that continues using it while knowing this is explicitly choosing to be an instrument for state propaganda — not that that’s anything new, but this makes this clearer than it’s ever been.
“They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”
(via fariyahsn)
That is the imperial mind at work. Its premises are often embraced implicitly rather than knowingly: American lives are inherently more valuable; foreign lives are expendable in pursuit of American interests; the U.S. has the inalienable right to take action in other countries that nobody is allowed to take in the U.S. (just imagine: “An Iranian drone fired two missiles at a bakery in the northwest U.S. Saturday and killed four suspected militants, Iranian officials said, as Iran pushed on with its drone campaign despite American demands to stop. This was the third such strike in the country in less than a week” or “Thirty five women and children were killed by a Yemeni cruise missile armed with cluster bombs which struck an alleged Marine training camp in Texas”).
These self-venerating imperial prerogatives are the premises driving the vast bulk of American foreign policy and military discourse. It is certainly what’s driving the spectacle of so many people pretending that the punishment of Dr. Afridi is some sort of aberrational act which the U.S. and other Decent, Civilized Countries would never do.
Glenn Greenwald: The Imperial Mind
Glad to see someone point out the hypocricy of the outrage over Dr. Afridi’s sentencing. If you start a fake vaccination camp, thereby exposing hundreds of children to Hep B while they’re under the impression they’re protected (all while essentially committing treason) I’m not sure why you’d expect to be let off without a prison sentence. Unless you’re siding with the US, of course, in which case… just read the article.
(via rcabbasi)
Yep. Hypocrisy always wins when it comes to American foreign policy.
(via rcabbasi)
The Afghan jihad was the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. In fiscal year 1987 alone, according to one estimate, clandestine U.S. military aid to the mujahideen amounted to 660 million dollars—”more than the total of American aid to the contras in Nicaragua” (Ahmad and Barnet 1988,44). Apart from direct U.S. funding, the CIA financed the war through the drug trade, just as in Nicaragua. The impact on Afghanistan and Pakistan was devastating. Prior to the Afghan jihad, there was no local production of heroin in Pakistan and Afghanistan; the production of opium (a very different drug than heroin) was directed to small regional markets. Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at University of Ottawa, estimates that within only two years of the CIA’s entry into the Afghan jihad, “the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand,” (2001:4). The lever for expanding the drug trade was simple: As the jihad spread inside Afghanistan, the mujahideen required peasants to pay an opium tax, Instead of waging a war on drugs, the CIA turned the drug trade into a way of financing the Cold War. By the end of the anti-Soviet jihad, the Central Asian region produced 75 percent of the world’s opium, worth billions of dollars in revenue (McCoy 1997).
Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism
(via maozedongisnotcool)
Never forget. I humbly recommend that you folks read this; the link redirects you to the downloadable PDF. One of the most important things I’ve read in my life.
Recommended Read(s)
- Ashis Nandy’s The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism.
- Vinay Lal’s The Concentration Camp and Development: The Pasts and Future of Genocide
- Vijay Prashad’s Droneland
- Chapati Mystery’s The E Word
- A historical truth deliberately ignored: America’s midwifing of violent transnational Jihad during the Cold War.
- Beyond Power/Knowledge: An exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity.
From my post on Wordpress: Challenging the Empire’s Narrative.
What has emerged in the second decade after 9/11 is a remarkable consensus among Democrats and Republicans on a core approach to the nation’s foreign policy. It’s certainly not a perfect alignment. But rarely since the end of the Cold War has there been this level of consensus. Indeed, while Americans may be divided, polarized and dysfunctional about issues closer to home, we are really quite united in how we see the world and what we should do about it. […] Paradoxically, both George W. Bush’s successes and failures helped to create this new consensus. His tough and largely successful approach to counterterrorism — specifically, keeping the homeland safe and keeping al Qaeda and its affiliates at bay through use of special forces, drone attacks, aggressive use of intelligence, and more effective cooperation among agencies now forms a virtually unassailable bipartisan consensus.
In simple words: While domestic policies remain a forum where disagreement is diverse and intense, the platform for foreign policies is where agreement is reached. Which also means candidates claiming to change the foreign policy won’t deliver much - similar to the case of Obama. Drones, bombing, covert ops, assassinations will continue to “protect US freedom.”
On Challenging the Empire’s Narrative
As a student and ex-teacher, I used to (and sometimes still do) find myself helpless before the constant influx of ‘academic’ and ‘political’ analyses emanating from the West concerning the Middle East, Asia and Islamic world - the East. The dichotomy mentioned by me here is deliberate due to the fact that it is highly obvious and perpetuated in Western ‘studies’ regarding 9/11 and post-9/11 dynamics in the world. The ideology of Us VS Them is endorsed directly and indirectly by the ones favored by the Empire - i.e. the United States of America. It becomes obvious when you read op-eds by Thomas Friedman, Seth Jones and Co simply because you can witness their views take practical form in the instances of drones, intervention, ‘necessary’ surveillance against a particular community, etc. When I spoke to Seth Jones on BBC WHYS after Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad, I was very taken aback by the tone and assertion made - after being interrupted - by Mr. Jones that he “knew Osama more than anyone” and that his “regional knowledge of Pakistan” told him enough to understand the “militant ideology of its public.” He was, basically, claiming that the views of a native Pakistani were inadequate compared to his evaluation of the country - a land that is extremely diverse and subsequently complicated. This is a microcosmic example of how the Empire or the Super Power shuns the native voice and claims that its knowledge of a certain land, a certain people is all that should be heard and goes on to force others to accept it.
But it’s not completely bleak; There is hope. And that hope stems from those who choose to question the Empire and its modus operandi. I’ve learned from several people the powerful significance of reading between the lines and knowing that although imperialist powers would love to have matters committed in black and white, things are actually suspended in grey. A thick, murky and often bloody grey space that has to be delved into and sorted out by natives and those who openly oppose imperialism and rhetorical colonialism in, ironically enough, a post-colonial era.
But what is this narrative? What is the Empire? How does it function and how does it destroy the weak and hapless by simply using words? It is important to know the answers to these questions before you stand up and challenge the Empire. The narrative, as I would explain to my students and class fellows, is the description for a certain demographic/region/people established by the Empire. e.g. The narrative concerning Muslim populations has been a bigoted, racist and overly generalized set of theories, ideas and approaches.
To answer some of these questions, I’ve found gold in the words of the witty and wise Manan Ahmed as well as my friend and humanoid library Salman Hussain. They write for Chapati Mystery, a website dedicated to South Asian literature, world politics, reviews and essays as well as critical slam-downs on racism, Islamophobia, violations of civil liberties and more. In one of the best essays I’ve read on the topic, Salman explains how the Empire controls the narrative and projects a certain image of a land that is called the “frontier” which is the target. Another important aspect of this imperialist manner of dealing with the “backward, Muslim world” is how the Empire uses a traditionalist way of constantly stating that so-and-so is “on the verge of a collapse” or that <insert Muslim majority country> is a “failed state” (by the Empire’s standards). By reinforcing the idea the Country A on that side of the world is ‘unstable’ and thus requires ‘correction’ is how the Empire maintains a control on its brutal and inhumane foreign policies. i.e. All that is done - bombing, drones, torture methods, spying - is justified in the name of patriotism and security. Usually the Empire uses “experts” on the region, something explained by Manan Ahmed:
Such an “expert” is usually one who has not studied the region, and especially not in any academic capacity. As a result, they do not possess any significant knowledge of its languages, histories or cultures. They are often vetted by the market, having produced a bestselling book or secured a job as a journalist with a major newspaper. They are not necessarily tied to the “official” narratives or understandings, and can even be portrayed as being “a critic” of the official policy. In other words, this profile fits one who doesn’t know enough.
Furthermore Mr. Hussains explains:
[…] Globetrotters like Robert Kaplan “who claim expertise by staying in hotels and who produce nothing but banal observations;” unabashed apologists for empire such as historian Niall Ferguson; peddlers of racist tripe such as Thomas Friedman, reportedly a pundit President Obama reads “to get a local flavor for events;”and “authentic voices,” like that of Ahmed Rashid and Daniel Mueenuddin, that serve to confirm the caricature of violent brown masses.
I realized that many of you - curious and critical - asked me what I meant when I’d urge my students and readers to challenge the narrative. As someone from a land that was colonized during the days of the subcontinent and then, post-partition, waged a covert war upon - that was never and probably will never be officially declared - I believe it is important to understand that the legitimacy with which governments - local or foreign - silence and misrepresent people through literature, media and politics has to be aggressively questioned. Like Mr. Hussain says:
The time to contest the hegemonic narratives and systems of dominance is now. “The effort to be ethical in the world we inhabit,” writes Ahmed “cannot wait for better times and milder risks.” For while the tenured illuminati console themselves with doses of virtuous patience and cautious knowledges, drones continue to colonize the skies and rain death from afar like gods. And they are headed home to roost.
I grew up thinking what Frantz Fanon described aptly in his quote: “The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.” Because it was what I was fed through TV, newspapers, comics, ad infinitum until I realized: There is a lot more to the story and it is purposefully hidden from my sight. The Empire will do everything to justify its violence. If anything, I had to question it and for that I had to use my mind and my voice.
And in case you forgot. Reagan and Zia’s bromance was famous back then. Too bad US history doesn’t own up to it now.
I grew up in Pakistan with two Americas. One was the America of To Kill a Mockingbird and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, of the young Michael Jackson and Laura Ingalls Wilder, of Charlie’s Angels and John McEnroe and Rob Lowe’s blue eyes. Of Martin Luther King and Snoopy. That America was exuberance and possibility. But there was another that I lived with. The America which cozied up to Pakistan’s military dictator, Zia-ul-Haq, because it served its own interests in Afghanistan to do so.
Pakistani Novelist Kamila Shamsie - The Storytellers of Empire for The Guernica Magazine.
This America threw vast amounts of money at Zia, propping up his rule, strengthening his military, turning a blind eye to its nuclear program, working with him to promote the war in Afghanistan as a jihad for all Muslims rather than a territorial matter between Afghans and Soviets; this America spoke eloquently of the Afghan people’s right to freedom and self-determination but decided it was an internal matter when Zia’s government cracked down on pro-democracy protestors in Pakistan, or when he instituted public floggings and hangings, or when he passed a law which made it possible for a woman who had been raped to be stoned to death for adultery.
Janus-faced American policies. Something you won’t find openly discussed in political discourse: US regime(s)’s habit of backing up dictators in third world countries.
Your soldiers will come to our lands, but your novelists won’t. The unmanned drone hovering over Pakistan, controlled by someone in Langley, is an apt metaphor for America’s imaginative engagement with my nation.
Oh, Kamila. I love you.
During the run up to the invasion of Afghanistan, three burly American classmates jeered at me. They said, “We’re gonna kill Osama.” Presumably, I would be especially aggrieved at Osama’s death, since I am a Muslim, and therefore, an Osama sympathizer if not also a bomb-carrying terrorist. My classmates were full of assurance and triumphalist pride. They said: “We can hit even a coffee mug in a cave.” The cave stood for where I am from, the enemy territory, the blank space on the map, the primitive place that lacked modernity. I couldn’t stop myself from asking how they would know which cave to hit. They said: “If you can bring down the whole mountain, you don’t have to know which cave to hit.” This is how the Empire reveals its darkness: behind the fantasy of technological dominance lies a world of complete violence.
Archive Remix II: Empire’s Ways of Knowing - Chapati Mystery.
One of the best essays on CM’s website because of its accuracy.
