The Downward Spiral of the War on(of) Terror

I guess you will have heard the news of the murder of Benazir Bhutto. It is a sad day but, unfortunately, just one more unravelling part of the war of terror. The U$/UK administrations, flush with military power and dreaming of a neo-liberal compliant Middle East have set about doing everthing they could to make a bad situation worse. The War of Terror is a monumental cock-up of conspiratorial levels:

Pakistan: "The Pakistani authorities are blaming Muslim militants for the assassination. That is possible, but everyone in Pakistan remembers that it was the military intelligence, or Inter-Services Intelligence, that promoted Muslim militancy in the two decades before September 11 as a wedge against India in Afghanistan and Kashmir."

Afghanistan: "The Americans have a way of painting this black and white," said one European official. "For them it's like a cowboy film - you're either a good guy or a bad guy. But anyone with any experience in this country knows it's not that simple."

Somalia: The Islamic Courts Union driven from power a year ago by Western-backed troops is regrouping and planning a large-scale attack and the government can do little to stop it...

Palestine: "Are you wondering about the Annapolis meeting that will open this week? Will the meeting exceed the low expectations that now embrace it? The confab has already been downgraded from a 'conference' to just a 'meeting.'"

Iraq I: "The rate of attacks in Iraq (for all types) has stabilized at the levels of 2004/2005, which were prior to the bombing of Askariya. During this earlier period, Iraq's open source insurgency was highly decentralized. A good way to quantify this is through the analysis of Oxford's Neil Johnson, who plotted the number of attacks against casualties per attack. He found that the equilibrium point for Iraq's conflict (as well as the long running war in Colombia) was a power law with a coefficient of 2.5 . A conflict with a coefficient of 2.5 looks more like intensive terrorism than conventional warfare. It is also likely, given Colombia's experience, a level sustainable over decades of conflict."

Iraq II: Myth: The Sunni Arab "Awakening Councils," who are on the US payroll, are reconciling with the Shiite government of PM Nuri al-Maliki even as they take on al-Qaeda remnants. Fact: In interviews with the Western press, Awakening Council tribesmen often speak of attacking the Shiites after they have polished off al-Qaeda.

Still, one bright spot, one the Native American nations is planning to go independent of the US; reminds me of what Ward Churchill said, that for the whole planet to survive we need to first end the US occupation of America.

PS. Bristol Indymedia has a review of 2007 online....
-

The War on(of) Terror Continues to Unravel

As Bliar starts to pack his things at number 10, his legacy, Iraq and its fall out continues to burn...

In Basra, militants launched an attack on the UK base in response to the killing of their leader:

In apparent retaliation for the killing of their commander, Mahdi Army militiamen launched a fierce 2 and a half-hour assault on a British base in the southern Shiite city of Basra. The British military must have been alarmed by the assault, since they called in an air strike on the militiamen. Basra crowds said that the airstrike killed 8 innocent civilians and held a public funeral procession for them.

In Afghanistan another solider is killed and four injured in clashes:

A British soldier was killed and four others wounded in Afghanistan on Friday night in heavy fighting. The death was the third this week by British forces in the Middle East. Two other deaths have been reported.

In Somalia the violence continues:

At least one person has been killed and four others were wounded when a roadside bomb went off in north of Mogadishu, Somalia capital on Saturday

In Lebanon, the blowback from covert ops starts to get nasty:

As Seymour Hersh first reported, in an article penned back in March, the U.S. has begun to fund various Sunni extremist groups as part of what Condoleezza Rice refers to as “a new strategic alignment in the Middle East”...This policy appears to have backfired in Lebanon, where a militant Sunni group, Fatah al-Islam, has drawn the Lebanese army into the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared. Rather than acting as a counter to local Shia bogeyman, Hezbollah, the current backlash has Hezbollah and the U.S.-backed Lebanese army colluding in order to crush the intransigent Salafists.

Some legacy.

The War on Terror in Somalia

I had blogged about the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) taking control of Somalia. We were told that the ICU had links al-Qaeda. Then the US then sponsored Ethiopia, the hated neighbor of Somalia, to invade and take over. We saw a mixture of US air-power, Ethiopian troops and the beleaguered 'official' government of Somalia rush in and supposedly crush the ICU. Job done.

Except its not job done. As in Afghanistan, the hard power of the US military is proving incapable of solving what are essentially localised political problems. So once the war-planes have left, we see the rise of an insurgency coupled with human-rights violations by the ruling powers then terror attacks and so on and so forth.