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Afghanistan: No Peace with Terror – London Daily Telegraph leader
It is important to remember why we are in Afghanistan. Our troops are not there to guarantee democracy, nor build dams, nor ensure that girls attend school. Or, to be precise, these are secondary objectives which contribute towards our primary goal, namely the containment of terrorism.
More British subjects died on September 11, 2001 than in any other terrorist attack in history. Afghanistan was the heart of the network which carried out that atrocity.
As coalition soldiers arrived to pacify the country, they discovered an alarming number of British Muslims training with al-Qa'eda – training, we can reasonably assume, for further attacks in the United Kingdom. Our presence in that sparse, beautiful land, in short, was occasioned by self-defence.
It is in this context that we should view the Karzai regime's desire to reach an accommodation with the Taliban. We may dislike the Taliban for their backwardness, their iconoclasm, their treatment of women.
But there are plenty of movements around the world every bit as repellent, whom we are not in the business of fighting. No, our main objection to the Taliban remains what it always has been: that they might rebuild the terrorist infrastructure that we have successfully demolished over the past four years…
Trends in Iraq - Michael O'Hanlon, Washington Times
Are things really improving on the battlefields of Iraq, or not? There is plenty of room for debate about American policy even after we reach a clear answer to this question. But the problem is even harder if we cannot. Unfortunately, some recent reports have clouded the situation.
The latest confusion has arisen from the Pentagon's own published reports and cannot be blamed on the media or anyone else. As Karen DeYoung has just reported in The Washington Post, the Defense Department's Quarterly Report on Iraq, issued just after the recent Petraeus/Crocker testimony, shows only marginal improvement in the overall security environment in Iraq this year.
That contrasts with a clear trajectory in the right direction, toward a less violent country, displayed in Gen. David Petraeus' graphs for Congress,,,
Subcontracting the War – New York Times editorial
There is, conveniently, no official count. But there are an estimated 160,000 private contractors working in Iraq, and some 50,000 of them are “private security” operatives — that is, fighters. The dangers of this privatized approach to war became frighteningly clear last month, after guards from Blackwater USA, assigned to protect American diplomats, were accused of killing at least eight Iraqis, including an infant.
Iraqis — whose hearts and minds the Bush administration insists it is finally winning — were infuriated by the killings, telling tales of arrogant and trigger-happy operatives terrorizing ordinary citizens. The incident provides an irrefutable argument for bringing these mission-critical jobs, which should be performed by soldiers, back into government hands as quickly as possible, and for placing any remaining private contractors under the jurisdiction of American military law…
Trigger-Happy Journalists - Ben Ryan, Wall Street Journal
"They are immature shooters and have very quick trigger fingers," says an anonymous lieutenant colonel.
"Why are we creating new vulnerabilities by relying on what are essentially mercenary forces?" asks a nameless intelligence officer. "They often act like cowboys over here," says an unidentified commander.
Ever since a recent shootout in downtown Baghdad, newspapers have been ablaze with charges that private security contractors in Iraq are trigger-happy.
This rush to pass judgment is hardly surprising. Frequently derided as "mercenaries" and "rent-a-cops," security contractors make an easy target for war opponents.
As a former employee of a major Blackwater competitor, I find this categorical smearing of contractors to be starkly at odds with my experience. I served as an officer in the Navy SEALs for six years. After I left, I joined a private security firm and was promptly sent to Iraq...
History and the Drumbeat of War – James Carroll, Boston Globe
If you Google "war Iran," you will come up with more than 90 million results. The blogosphere is full of alarms about US intentions toward Iran. Newsweek said last week that Vice President Cheney has been looking to provoke an Israeli assault against Iranian nuclear facilities that would draw Iranian reactions, sparking a "justifiable" American attack. At the United Nations, meanwhile, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France seemed to second his foreign minister's recent warning that an unchecked Iranian nuclear program will lead to war.
But this "constant drumbeat of conflict" concerning Iran, said Admiral William Fallon, head of the US Central Command, is "not helpful and not useful." Fallon wants to head off such talk. "There will be no war," he told Al-Jazeera, a denial that keeps the specter looming…
The Heroism of the Burmese, The Shame of China – Rosemary Righter, London Times
When China joined Russia last January to veto a fairly mild United Nations Security Council resolution calling on Burma to free political prisoners and improve its abominable human rights record, Beijing’s Ambassador at the UN helpfully explained that “no country is perfect” and that “similar problems exist in other countries”. Including, as he of course did not say, China.
The parallels may not seem all that obvious this week. Leaving aside the contrast between China’s boom economy and the misery inflicted on all Burmese by the military regime’s cruelty and incompetence, political repression in China these days stops short of organised mass rape and (outside China’s vast lao gai “reform by labour” camps) systemic forced labour. Yet the “problem” on the Chinese leadership’s mind, then and more acutely now that the desperate courage of Burma’s defenceless citizens has been on international display, is the containment of popular discontent in the age of the internet and, beyond that, the question of political legitimacy…
Warning the Junta – London Times leader
The Army is back in control in Burma. Thousands of troops patrolled the streets of Rangoon yesterday, and the dwindling amount of footage still being smuggled past the junta’s media black-out showed few civilians moving around the cowed city. The military Government clearly now feels that it has a firm enough grip on the situation to allow in the United Nations envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, and to give him a token opportunity to talk briefly to Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader still under house arrest. Mr Gambari also met three junior generals of the ruling junta. But he has been blocked in his initial attempt to act as intermediary with Than Shwe, the secretive head of the junta, or his deputy. The junta is in no mood to make concessions.
The crackdown appears to have been as ruthless and as sweeping as the outside world had feared. The Government has admitted that ten people were killed on Wednesday, but Western governments say the toll is far higher…
What We Owe the Burmese – Fred Hiatt, Washington Post
An upheaval like the pro-democracy uprising taking place in Burma over the past month tends to shake up certainties that had seemed self-evident. Certainties such as the primacy of justice. Or the sanctity of the Olympic Games.
Despite an academic industry devoted to the subject, no one can predict when an oppressed people will find that precise combination of hopelessness and hope, impatience and solidarity, and recklessness and anger that leads it to rebel. Nor can anyone answer the most important question facing Burma now: When will the boys and men who prop up a corrupt regime with their guns and prison cells decide that they have had enough -- that they no longer want to shoot unarmed Buddhist monks or round up young girls for possession of cellphones with cameras? …
The Limits of Self-Defense - New York Post editorial
Japan thinks it deserves more respect from the international community - and, judging by his speech to the U.N. General Assembly last Tuesday, President Bush agrees.
His proposal: Give Japan (and maybe a few other countries, too) a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council.
It's a useful notion, but one that's difficult to support. The hard truth is that a nation whose own constitution prohibits it from undertaking anything other than defensive military action has no claim on a privileged voice in world affairs...
Ecuador’s Hugo Chavez? – Washington Post interview
Ecuador's new left-leaning president, Rafael Correa, studied economics in the United States, but the U.S. way of governing does not seem to have rubbed off on him. He appears set on following the example set by Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez. Last week Correa sat down with Newsweek-Washington Post's Lally Weymouth...
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