Israeli warplanes bomb tunnel along Gaza border

By MATTI FRIEDMAN, Associated Press Writer

JERUSALEM – Israeli warplanes bombed a smuggling tunnel along the Gaza-Egypt border early Monday in response to Palestinian rocket and mortar fire, in a brief flare-up of violence at a time of relative quiet in the volatile Palestinian territory.

Such exchanges of fire, once routine, have become rare in recent months. Rocket fire from Hamas-controlled Gaza has largely subsided since a fierce Israeli offensive against militants early this year.

There were no reports of casualties in any of the attacks.

On Sunday, Gaza militants launched mortar shells at a border crossing between Gaza and Israel just as Palestinian patients were being transferred into Israel for medical treatment, according to Dr. Moaiya Hassanain of the Gaza Health Ministry.

Hassanain said it was a "miracle" that no one was hurt.

According to the procedure, Palestinian patients are brought to the crossing in local ambulances, transferred to Israeli ambulances and taken to hospitals inside Israel.

Two small Palestinian militant factions said they fired 12 mortars at the Erez crossing. The Israeli military said about six shells exploded near the crossing as the transfer was in progress.

The military said Monday's airstrike came in response to the renewed militant fire and targeted a smuggling tunnel running underground between Egypt and Gaza.

Gaza has been subject to a blockade by Egypt and Israel since Hamas seized power in the territory two years ago, with Israel allowing in only vital supplies. Gazan smugglers use the tunnels to bring in everything from gas to livestock, clothes and weapons.

Opium takes over entire Afghan families, villages

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI, Associated Press Writer

SARAB, Afghanistan – Open the door to Islam Beg's house and the thick opium smoke rushes out into the cold mountain air, like steam from a bathhouse. It's just past 8 a.m. and the family of six — including a 1-year-old baby boy — is already curled up at the lip of the opium pipe.

Beg, 65, breathes in and exhales a cloud of smoke. He passes the pipe to his wife. She passes it to their daughter. The daughter blows the opium smoke into the baby's tiny mouth. The baby's eyes roll back into his head.

Their faces are gaunt. Their hair is matted. They smell.

In dozens of mountain hamlets in this remote corner of Afghanistan, opium addiction has become so entrenched that whole families — from toddlers to old men — are addicts. The addiction moves from house to house, infecting entire communities cut off from the rest of the world by glacial streams. From just one family years ago, at least half the people of Sarab, population 1,850, are now addicts.

Afghanistan supplies nearly all the world's opium, the raw ingredient used to make heroin, and while most of the deadly crop is exported, enough is left behind to create a vicious cycle of addiction. There are at least 200,000 opium and heroin addicts in Afghanistan — 50,000 more than in the much bigger, wealthier U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a 2005 survey by the U.N. A new survey is expected to show even higher rates of addiction, a window into the human toll of Afghanistan's back-to-back wars and desperate poverty.

Unlike in the West, the close-knit nature of communities here makes addiction a family affair. Instead of passing from one rebellious teenager to another, the habit passes from mother to daughter, father to son. It's turning villages like this one into a landscape of human depredation.

Except for a few soiled mats, Beg's house is bare. He has pawned all his family's belongings to pay for drugs.

"I am ashamed of what I have become," says Beg, an unwashed turban curled on his head. "I've lost my self-respect. I've lost my values. I take the food from this child to pay for my opium," he says, pointing to his 5-year-old grandson, Mamadin. "He just stays hungry."

Beg's forefathers owned much of the land in the village, located beside a gushing stream at the end of a canyon of craggy mountains in Badakshan province, hundreds of miles (kilometers) northeast of Kabul, Afghanistan's capital.

He once had 1,200 sheep. He sold them off one by one to pay for drugs.

The land followed. He's turned his spacious home, once lined with ornamental carpets, into a mud shell. He grows potatoes in rows in the last of his fields and each time he harvests the crop, he has to make a choice — feed his grandchildren, or buy opium. He usually chooses drugs.

Basic necessities like soap long ago fell by the wayside.

"If we have 50 cents, we buy opium and we smoke it. We don't use the 50 cents to buy soap to clean our clothes," explains Raihan, Beg's daughter and the mother of the 1-year-old. The toddler wears a filthy shirt and no underwear. "I can be out of food, but not out of opium."

The country's few drug treatment centers are in cities far from villages like this one. And even those able to get themselves to the cities are often unable to get help. The drug clinic in Takhar province, the nearest to Sarab, has a waiting list of 2,000 people and only 30 beds.

So the villagers are drowning in opium. They begin taking it when they are sick, relying on its anesthetic properties — opium is also used to make morphine. Sarab, a village located at 8,000 feet (2,438 meters) and snowed in for up to three months a year, is a day's walk over mountain paths to the nearest hospital. The few shops in town do not even sell aspirin.

"Opium is our doctor," says Beg. "When your stomach hurts, you take a smoke. Then you take a little more. And a little more. And then, you're addicted. Once you're hooked, it's over. You're finished."

When his grandson Shamsuddin, 1, cut his finger in the door jamb, Beg blew opium smoke into the child's mouth, a common practice in this part of the world which is now resulting in rampant child addiction. He doesn't want his grandchild to become an addict, but he says he has no choice. "If there is no medicine here, what should we do? The only way to make him feel better is to give him opium."

From a single smoke, they progress to a three-times-a-day habit that spreads. When Beg began using opium, it wasn't just his wife and daughter who followed suit. It was his brother. Then his brother's wife. Like an epidemic, it makes its way across the village.

Health workers say that to treat the addiction, they need to treat the entire community. Last year, the Ministry of Health took 120 addicts from Sarab to a facility in a town one day's drive away to be treated. Three months later, they found that 115 of the 120 had relapsed.

"First my neighbor started doing opium again," explains Noor, one of the women treated, whose eyes are dark caves. "Then my cousin. Then my husband. And then after a while, I also started."

Most of the addicts spend $3 to $4 a day on opium in a part of the world where people earn on average $2. They sell their land and go deeply into debt to maintain their habit.

"I used to be a rich man," says Dadar, a man who looks to be in his 70s and whose family of seven is addicted. "I had cattle. I had land. And then I started smoking. I sold the cattle. I sold my land. Now I have nothing."

He wears an old windbreaker encrusted with dirt. His wife pulls back her lips to show a mouth full of diseased teeth. Their grandchildren have knotted hair and ripped clothes stained with muck.

Because they've sold their cattle, they no longer eat meat. When they sold the last of their land, they also lost their wheat, potatoes and greens. Their diet now consists of tea and the occasional piece of bread given by a neighbor.

Village chief Sahib Dad says even those who are not addicted are forced to pay a price.

"When a person gets addicted, he has nothing to eat," says Dad. "That affects his neighbor because the neighbor is forced to give over a part of his food. For this reason, all of us are poorer."

After selling their land, some families resort to even more desperate measures. They take loans from the shopkeepers who sell them drugs. Then they sell their daughters, known as 'opium brides,' to settle the debt. They lease their sons.

"I know he is angry with me. But what can I do? I have nothing left to sell," says Jan Begum, who has sent her 14-year-old to do construction work for the drug dealers. "I tried to stop, but I can't. Whenever I do, the pain becomes unbearable."

The problem is compounded by Afghanistan's neighbors. Iran immediately to the west has the world's highest per capita heroin use. The heroin labs there, as well as in Pakistan to the east, use opium imported from Afghanistan. These countries are now exporting heroin addiction back to Afghanistan in the form of returning refugees.

Like opium, heroin in Afghanistan is biting off whole families. Gul Pari, 13, watched her mother get high on heroin when she and her brother were in elementary school. Now she lies in a bed in a drug treatment center for women in Kabul. Her 15-year-old brother Zaihar is across town in a rehab facility for men.

Their bodies are like brittle sticks. The 13-year-old tries to push herself up on one elbow, but her thin arm cannot hold her up, so she falls back onto the pillow. Her emaciated brother leans against a wall to steady himself.

What will happen when they go home is unknown. They live with their mother — a recovering heroin addict — under a tarp in the yard of an abandoned house.

Mohammad Asef, a health worker at the clinic taking care of Zaihar Pari, says he is worried about the boy's chances of recovering. "In America people go and get high in the park. In Afghanistan, they do it in the home," says Asef. "They bring it inside. They burn it on the family stove. Everyone sees. So everyone is affected."

In Sarab, villagers who are not addicted keep their distance from those who are. They don't invite them into their homes. They discourage them from coming to village meetings. It's as if they are trying to quarantine themselves.

Beg says that for him all hope is lost. Even after he is buried, it'll take 70 years for the opium to ooze out of his bones. His hope, he says, are his grandkids — the only people in the family who are not yet addicts.

As Beg is getting high on a recent morning, the 1-year-old crawls over and starts playing with the opium pipe. He picks it up and shakes it, as if it were a rattle. Then, imitating his grandfather, he raises the pipe to his mouth.

Sanctions Unlikely to Stop Iran's Nuclear Quest

By TONY KARON

Unless Iran responds positively to President Obama's offer of talks on its nuclear program by next month, it could face what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls "crippling sanctions." That was the message from Administration officials touring the Middle East in recent weeks. And it's backed by congressional moves to pass legislation aimed at choking off the gasoline imports on which Iran relies for almost a third of its consumption, by punishing third-country suppliers. It sounds impressive and, for an undiversified economy like Iran's, potentially calamitous. But a number of Iran analysts are skeptical that new sanctions will break the stalemate.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government has promised to present a new package of proposals on the nuclear issue to Western negotiators in the coming weeks. But that package is unlikely to reflect any shift in Tehran's rejection of the U.S. demand that it forgo the right to enrich uranium as part of its nuclear-energy program. "If the U.S. position remains unchanged," says Farideh Farhi, an Iran expert at the University of Hawaii, "Iran may well come to the table, but only in order to demonstrate to its own people that its regime has been recognized, not to seriously engage with U.S. proposals or give ground."

Iran's postelection turmoil has left Ahmadinejad politically weakened, and his focus in the coming weeks will be on assembling a government and stabilizing a divided regime, rather than on seeking a compromise with the Western powers he blames for the election debacle. "Iranians have never responded well to deadlines and red lines," says Farhi, "and there's no reason to believe they will do so now."

In a TV interview two weeks ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Iran, "You have a right to pursue the peaceful use of civil nuclear power. You do not have a right to obtain a nuclear weapon. You do not have the right to have the full enrichment and reprocessing cycle under your control." But both the Iranian government and its opposition believe that Iran is due the same rights as any other signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which includes the right to enrich uranium to the levels necessary for reactor fuel, under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). "There is no disagreement among political leaders in Iran on proclaiming Iran's right to enrich uranium," says Farhi. Iran's previous government had shown flexibility on the pace of an enrichment program, but not on the principle. Explains Farhi: "It is simply not feasible for any political leader in Iran to accept an arrangement that denies Iran the rights enjoyed by others, that treats Iran as a special case."

Iran's current enrichment efforts are monitored by IAEA inspectors and certified as within permissible limits. The U.S. Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, recently wrote to Congress that "it is unlikely that Iran will have the technical capability to produce [weapons-grade uranium] before 2013". Blair added that U.S. intelligence believes Iran has not yet decided whether to produce weapons-grade materiel, and would be unlikely to do so while its nuclear effort remains under international scrutiny. But with hawks painting Iran's nuclear program as a grave and gathering danger and the Israelis threatening to take preemptive military action, the Obama Administration is under pressure to produce results from its efforts to engage Iran.

Effective sanctions, say Administration officials, require participation by Iran's key trading partners. That's a problem, since neither Russia nor China is convinced that there's an imminent danger of Iran producing nuclear weapons. Coalition of the willing–style sanctions of the sort envisaged by the congressional legislation may have limited impact because they're unlikely to be implemented by neighbors such as Turkey and Iraq. And the use of naval power to enforce a blockade could easily provoke a war that the U.S. military is eager to avoid.

But even if "crippling sanctions" were somehow imposed, Tehran still might not back down. "If it were possible to choke off the gasoline supply into Iran, the likelihood is that Iran's existing refinery capacity would be used first and foremost to ensure that the needs of the security forces and the regime are taken care of," says Dr. Gary Sick, a Columbia University professor and former National Security Council Iran specialist. "Those who are going to suffer most will be the ordinary Iranians with whom we sympathize. You can argue that this might spur them to revolt, but more likely is that if their fuel rations are suddenly cut in half, ordinary Iranians will be very upset with the West."

"The economic well-being of the Iranian people has never been a first-tier priority for the Iranian regime," says Carnegie Endowment Iran analyst Karim Sadjadpour. "The last three decades have shown us that this regime is willing to endure tremendous hardship rather than compromise for reasons of economic or political expediency."

Farhi points out that Iran's regime began making preparations for U.S. petroleum sanctions as early as 2007, diversifying its sources of supply, moving to upgrade its refineries and implementing a comprehensive rationing system, all of which can help the regime manage the impact of a fall in gasoline imports.

So what can the West possibly do? A number of Iran watchers recommend that in the postelection turmoil the Obama Administration should simply reset its clock. "We should continue to allow the rifts between political Élites, and the rift between the people and regime, to widen on their own," suggests Sadjadpour. "As Napoleon once said, 'If your enemy is destroying himself, don't interfere.' The truth is, we don't know how sanctions on refined petroleum could play out, and our bottom line should be to do no harm to the prospects for political change in Iran."

Easy enough for policy analysts to say, but not for a President. "A lot of people are going to be putting immense pressure on President Obama to set a deadline and take firm action," says Sick. The Administration may have no good options beyond continuing to explore diplomacy, he warns, but "it's extraordinarily difficult to sell that to a chorus of people shouting 'Do something!'"

Scientists identify lake shorelines on Mars

Washington, August 9: A team of scientists, using images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, have reported direct evidence of lake shorelines in the Shalbatana Vallis in Mars.

Scientists generally believe that warm, wet conditions existed on Mars until only about 3.7 billion years ago.

In recent years, however, remote sensing studies have hinted at the existence of Martian lakes during the Hesperian epoch (about 3.5 billion to 1.8 billion years ago).

Now, sub-meter-scale images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show clear, unambiguous evidence of shorelines of a lake more than 450 meters (1,476 feet) deep that formed about 3.4 billion years ago.

The study indicates that conditions favorable for flowing water and lake formation may have existed for thousands of years on Mars during the Hesperian epoch, which has been thought to be a period during which surface conditions did not allow significant hydrological activity.

According to the researchers, the sedimentary deposits associated with the lake in Shalbatana Vallis should be considered a priority for further study by future landed Mars missions.

The world's wicked war of words

Anti-Arab brainwashing by the US media

Paul J. Balles

August 8, 2009

Paul J. Balles shows how the US media's application of Joseph Goebbels' dictum that a lie, if audacious enough and repeated enough times, will be believed by the masses, has produced a plethora of anti-Arab bigots, from the likes of Steve Emerson, Alan Dershowitz, Caroline Glick and Ruth Conniff to the racist ranting of brainless lumpen on the internet.

More insidious than the wars with tanks and guns, aircraft and bombs, missiles and guidance systems, shock and awe campaigns. The wickedest wars are the wars for people's minds - the propaganda campaigns that exercise thought control.

"Get control over radio, press, cinema and theatre," said Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler's propaganda minister. He perfected an understanding of the "Big Lie" technique of propaganda based on the principle that a lie, if audacious enough and repeated enough times, will be believed by the masses.

Western brainwashing comes from the media. Readers, listeners and viewers need to be aware of these propaganda sources. About the media in general, Steven Salaita correctly observed:

The flippancy with which US media apply the word "terrorism" to Arab populations reinforces the notion that violence in the Arab world is ahistorical and therefore senseless. Arabs in turn become a people without narratives who belong to a culture incapable of rationality.

Steve Emerson has a website and blog with as much anti-Arab ranting on it as any bigot might produce. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has implied that all Arabs are potential terrorists and therefore worthy of slaughter. American Israeli Caroline Glick, Deputy Managing Editor of The Jerusalem Post, writes two weekly syndicated columns preaching hard-line Israeli propaganda.

In The Progressive, Ruth Conniff validated the false but widespread notion that while violence exists among both Arabs and Israelis, terrorism is exclusive to the Arabs. When Arabs fight against Israelis, the Arabs are guilty of "terrorist violence" but the Israelis are engaging in "military reprisals".

On anti-Arab radio you hear things like "Arabs love dictators" and "Obama is an Arab," as if being an Arab disqualifies one from humanity. If they aren't referring to Arabs as "camel jockeys" or "rag heads", they're calling them as Islamo-fascists. Along with O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck give Fox news stable of anti-Arab propagandists.

Hollywood films have been vilifying Arabs for decades. Jack Shaheen revealed, in The TV Arab, how television stereotypes Arabs as "billionaires, bombers and belly dancers".

Even as a youngster, Shaheen was disturbed by the Arab stereotypes in children's cartoon characters.

In Shaheen's Reel Bad Arabs, a long line of degrading images - from Bedouin bandits and submissive maidens to sinister sheikhs and gun-wielding "terrorists" - have vilified Arabs since the days of silent films.

In his research, Shaheen identified more than 1150 films that defile Arabs. His newest book, Guilty: Hollywood's Verdict on Arabs after 9/11, reveals how the film industry continues to shape American understanding of Arabs and Arab culture.

Muslim scholar Ziauddin Sardar made it clear that anti-Islamic brainwashing is not new: "From the days of Voltaire right up to 1980, thanks largely to the efforts of Enlightenment scholars, it was a general Western axiom that Islam had produced nothing of worth in philosophy, science and learning."

That the propaganda has reached the masses should be clear from some of the slurs on the internet, examples of which are displayed here:

F**K ALL YOU SAND NIGGERS! I HOPE WE BLOW YOU ALL UP AND TAKE THE ONLY THING YOU ARE GOOD FOR OIL!

It wasn't enough to curse Arabs. He had to shout it, writing his message in uppercase letters, revealing how effective anti-Arab propaganda has been in America.

Those who control the media control the mental attitudes of the population; Americans have been programmed to hate Arabs and Muslims and to love Israelis. How could compassionate Americans be nonchalant about their slaughter of a million Arabs in Iraq, even though they know that it was all based on lies? Decades of propaganda and brainwashing.

Hamas: Re-electing Abbas as Fatah leader reflects deterioration

President Mahmoud Abbas' re-election as Fatah leader reflects a state of political deterioration in the Palestinian party, Islamic Hamas movement said on Saturday.

"Selecting Abbas as a leader of Fatah dedicates the political deterioration and independency that Fatah has been suffering from for years," said Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for Hamas.

"Fatah will not be better after electing Abbas," added Abu Zuhri, the spokesman of Fatah's bitter rival.

Delegates at Fatah general conference in the West Bank city of Bethlehem have elected Abbas as a leader in an unopposed voting.

Following his election, Abbas delivered a short speech in which he slammed Hamas for preventing the Gaza-based Fatah members from traveling out of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip to participate in Fatah's first convention in 20 years.

"The conference will succeed in spite of Hamas," Abbas said.

Hamas said it refused to let the 400 Fatah invitees from leaving Gaza as a way of pressure to urge Fatah stop cracking down against Hamas supporters in the West Bank.

Somalia: Armed Opposition vs. Amisom

On July 12, forces allied with Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (T.F.G.) launched an offensive against its armed Islamist opposition, which a week earlier had succeeded in driving the T.F.G. back to small areas of Somalia's official capital Mogadishu that are protected by an African Union peacekeeping mission (AMISOM).

The offensive, which saw for the first time AMISOM forces in the streets moving proactively against the opposition and providing at least back-up support to the T.F.G. fighters, initially gained back much of the territory that had been recently seized by the opposition. The T.F.G.'s president, Sh. Sharif Sh. Ahmad, immediately declared a "historic victory."

Then AMISOM withdrew to its bases and the T.F.G. "victory" was reversed as its forces retreated and the opposition moved back in.

AMISOM, which is obviously the only support preventing the T.F.G.'s extinction, was quick to deny that it had overstepped its United Nations peacekeeping mandate by moving proactively and becoming a combatant on one side of a civil conflict.

AMISOM's spokesman, Maj. Barigye Ba-Hoku, explained that its forces had been attacked and had "pre-empted" future attacks by "securing supply routes." He denied that AMISOM had engaged in "active combat," saying, instead, that it had made a "show of force" in self-defense. It all fell within AMISOM'S mandate, he said.

Then Ba-Hoku seemed to flip his rhetoric, asserting that from then on AMISOM was "allowed to go to all parts of Somalia," including key cities held by the armed opposition.

Since July 12, AMISOM has not engaged in "peace enforcement" or "shows of force," and the situation in Mogadishu has reverted to what it was before then - a T.F.G. encircled by the armed opposition that is composed of the Harakat Al-Shabaab Mujahideen or Youth Mujahideen Movement (Y.M.M.) and Hizbul Islam (H.I.), with AMISOM tanks the only barrier to an opposition takeover.

Although armed clashes have continued, they have not substantially changed the balance of power in Mogadishu. Both sides - AMISOM and the armed opposition - are frozen in place; it is not the T.F.G. that the armed opposition wants to defeat but its protectors. The T.F.G. has already been defeated.

AMISOM is in a severely compromised position. It and its African Union sponsors and favorable regional states have repeatedly called for the expansion of its mandate to include peace enforcement. That call has not been answered by the international coalition of donor states and organizations that recognize and claim to support the T.F.G. - the U.N., the United States, the European Union, and Western European powers that hold the purse strings and legitimacy card tightly in their hands.

The refusal of the international coalition, which gets its dominant influence over the A.U. by opening and closing the money spigot, to resolve the battle for Mogadishu by force has left AMISOM locked into a restricted perimeter and in a state of siege. AMISOM is a casualty of the international coalition's policy. How long will it be politically and perhaps militarily sustainable for AMISOM to remain in Mogadishu.?

The armed opposition understands AMISOM's situation and has based its strategy on it. The stand-off in Mogadishu has allowed the armed opposition to regroup, re-arm and consolidate in preparation for an attack that would be aimed at breaching AMISOM's lines. If such an attack were successful, if not in routing the peacekeepers, then in demonstrating their vulnerability, the opposition would have changed the balance of power decisively.

AMISOM also understands its predicament full well. Although its force of between four thousand and five thousand troops from Uganda and Burundi can defend key infra-structure, government installations and supply routes, it could not enforce peace throughout Mogadishu, even if given the mandate. Uganda has said that 16 to 20 thousand forces would be needed for that.

On August 4, Ugandan Army land forces commander, Lt.-Gen. Katumba Wamala said that AMISOM was "waiting for the green light" from the U.N. Security Council to attack the Y.M.M. Outgoing U.N.S.C. president, Ugandan diplomat Rukuhana Rugunda, responded that an enhanced mandate for AMISOM was not on the Council's agenda. AMISOM clarified that its forces would only go on the attack if the mission were taken over by the U.N., which is very unlikely to happen.

As the opposition sharpens its knives and the international coalition ties AMISOM's hands behind its back, the coalition has diverted itself by pursuing a half-hearted strategy of "capacity building" of the T.F.G.'s armed forces, through training and material support; and increased support for AMISOM.

A tactical rift has appeared between the E.U., which believes that present T.F.G. militias are unfit to receive weapons directly, and the U.S., which has already supplied forty or more tons of light weapons to the T.F.G. and is likely to give more. The Europeans argue that current T.F.G. forces are likely to carry their weapons back to their clans, sell them to the opposition or on the arms market, or even join the opposition.

On July 16, A.U. special representative to Somalia, Nicolas Bwakira, said that A.U. officials were "alarmed at the high ratio" of trained T.F.G. troops "returning to clan-based warfare immediately." The Europeans prefer a "multi-layered" approach that would take time, which AMISOM does not have. Washington likes a quick fix that ends up in its throwing good money after bad.

Washington's self-made predicament was precisely described by a "Western diplomat" who was interviewed by Mike Plantz of Great Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper and said that although the T.F.G. needs military support, if Washington provides it, then the Y.M.M. will get stronger by appealing to Somali nationalism and casting the T.F.G. as a stooge of colonialists and foreign anti-Muslims. "It's a vicious circle," said the diplomat.

As Washington agonizes over its dilemma and is stricken with what psychologists call "hesitation neurosis," the other members of the international coalition look on and dabble in capacity building. AMISOM remains stopped at the red light.

How long can the international coalition expect AMISOM to hold on in its present form? How long can the international coalition keep leaning on AMISOM?

Cracks have begun to appear in AMISOM's lead contributor, Uganda. On August 3, Uganda's major opposition party, The Front for Democratic Change (F.D.C.), came out formally for the removal of Ugandan forces from Somalia. Its chairman, Dr. Kiza Besigye argued that AMISOM was no longer a peacekeeping operation, but had become involved in a "civil war" at the behest of "other selfish states." Besigye counseled Uganda's president, Yowahari Museveni to devote himself to "peace efforts" in Somalia.

On April 6, Uganda's major independent newspaper, The Monitor, published an editorial calling for withdrawal of international support for the T.F.G. and the removal of AMISOM from Somalia. Following in the line of the "vicious circle" diagnosis, the editors argued that U.S. support for the T.F.G. is "only making Somalia a more attractive destination for radical Islamists."

What is to be done, said the editors, is to leave Somalis to themselves. Presenting the hypothetical that the Y.M.M. and H.I. take over Somalia (the international coalition's nightmare), the editors argued that getting rid of the T.F.G. and Sh. Sharif would probably end up allowing clan interests to emerge and render an Islamist regime at least ineffective. Less likely would be the emergence of a "rogue" Islamist state in Somalia. Should that happen, said the editors, a military invasion of Somalia by East African states "is still a better proposition than open-ended support of the T.F.G.," which perpetuates a "religious war which obscures the political contest underneath."

Whatever their present political clout might be in Uganda, the F.D.C.'s and The Monitor's analyses indicate at the very least divided opinion in Uganda's political class about the country's continued participation in AMISOM. How long will Museveni be able to carry the AMISOM millstone around his neck?

Analysis

From the standpoint of rudimentary political analysis, the analyses of the F.D.C. and The Monitor are accurate. AMISOM is involved as one of the two major participants in a civil war and is being used as a pawn in the service of the failed strategy of the self-interested international coalition. AMISOM did not bring this situation on itself; the situation has been forced upon it.

On May 14, after AMISOM's "proactive" move, Y.M.M. spokesman Ali Dhere announced a "second phase" of the "war," which would have "deadlier consequences." The centerpiece of the second phase would be an insurgency against AMISOM of the same kind that it had undertaken against the Ethiopian occupation of Somalia (wearing it down). "The war methodology has given us positive results and we are going to repeat it," said Ali Dhere.

The Monitor gets to the heart of the matter in its judgment that support of the T.F.G. by the international coalition perpetuates a religious war that obscures and distorts the underlying clan political divisions in Somalia. Where the editors are most perceptive is in realizing that it is too late to uproot the Islamic political formula as the discourse of all domestic Somali actors. Thus, the editors argue that Somalis should be left to sort out their conflicts themselves, regardless of consequences - a position that goes beyond the confines of analysis.

That is not to say that AMISOM is simply an innocent victim of the international coalition. Uganda's and Burundi's leaders made a political calculation that they would win the favors of the international coalition and would receive adequate support for the mission - the same mistake that Ethiopia's prime minister, Meles Zenawi, made when Washington gave him a "green light" to invade and occupy southern and central Somalia at the end of 2006, in order to defeat the Islamic Courts, some of the factions of which now form the armed opposition. Zenawi ended up complaining that the international coalition was whipping and starving the Ethiopian horse, and withdrew his forces at the end of 2008. Only AMISOM was left.

What is to become of AMISOM? The armed opposition expects it to be worn down and weakened so as to become vulnerable to attack. The international coalition is unlikely either to back up its rhetoric with muscle or to pull the plug on the T.F.G., thereby prolonging a stop-gap measure until AMISOM cannot or will not take it anymore. "Capacity building" is a policy of deferral. It is a euphemism for beating the AMISOM horse.

Source: allAfrica.
Link: http://allafrica.com/stories/200908080003.html.