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Philippine Elections 2010 and the Mindanao Question

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Once every six years since the ousting of Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, Filipinos have gone to the polls to elect a new president.  The 2010 electoral campaign is in full swing. Balloting takes place on May 10.  Political parties often mean little and ideology even less in this personality-first Southeast Asian archipelago where the individual, cash and clan loyalties rule.  Weakening whatever party cohesion there is even further, Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates run separately. Furthermore, the campaign trail is too often fraught with violence.

This year is no exception.  There are, thus far, ten candidates –all but one male - and it’s anyone’s guess who, among the front-runners, will emerge the victor.  The overall economy is always a fundamental problem but another issue is the handling of Muslim secessionist groups in Mindanao.  The two, in fact, are related.

The Perennial Question of Mindanao

 Whether and how the country’s policy towards Mindanao will influence the coming election’s outcome is beyond me, but it is clear that the decade long war against the Muslims begun under former President Joseph Estrada in 2000, now out of jail and running again for the same seat and still advocating the same take-no-prisoners’ approach, has not resolved the deep-seated terrorist problem in the Philippines. This policy has continued under President Arroyo and was supported by President George W. Bush as a part of America’s global anti-terrorism, anti-Al Qaeda crusade in 2001.

In 2001, the Bush administration assured us that sending 600 US troops to the Philippines to advise and help equip the Filipino military to better fight Abu Sayyaf, a small and deadly ransom-for-hostages band that had spun-off from a much larger Muslim insurgent force would be short lived.  It is nine years later. US troop strength remains about the same – except when there’s a surge connected to a particular operation.

Abu Sayyaf is still active as is the far larger MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front) from which it came.  If anything, the insurgency in Mindanao has become more complicated with the Communist-NPA (New People’s Army).  The NPA reportedly raided two villages and the Dole pineapple camp in Mindanao during the past few days.  

US troops still there - albeit only 600

Russia, the US and a new START

By Patricia H. Kushlis

What’s healthcare reform got to do with it?

In case anyone missed it, please note that the Russians signed on to the replacement agreement to START, one day after the House of Representatives approved the Healthcare reform bill and Obama signed it into law.

Now I know it may be difficult for some to comprehend that a relationship exists between how a leader is perceived at home and what happens abroad in terms of US foreign policy initiatives and relationships, but I - for one - think that the two are related.  I'm not alone.

Perhaps the Netanyahu government hasn’t figured this out yet, but the Russians certainly have.  If there’s one thing the Russians understand, it’s political power.  They’re masters at sensing political weakness.   They’re also bloodhounds at detecting political strength:  they will follow the latter and take advantage of the former.

Negotiations mean compromise

The agreement that has been reached – from the outlines I’ve read in the press – was a compromise. But that’s what negotiations are all about. Both sides wanted an agreement to reduce their overblown nuclear arsenals by about 25 percent for different reasons. Both sides have domestic fears, lobbies and financial interests to contend with as the numbers of those weapons and delivery systems decline.

For the Obama administration, the agreement serves as a concrete foundation for his dream of a nonnuclear world as enunciated in last year’s Prague Speech. It provides him with the bounce needed to enter the US nuclear policy review in April with, as usual, the recalcitrant fear-mongering angry Republicans in the opposition yapping at his heels followed by a multinational review conference of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) in May.  The Russians and the US are likely to sign the START replacement treaty in April and likely in Prague give or take one year after Obama’s nonnuclear world speech on the tenth anniversary of the Czech Republic’s entrance into NATO.   

Respect:  one of the ingredients

The Russians, meanwhile, wanted the respect they had received when they controlled the Soviet Union and which the Bush 43 administration refused to give them.  The Moscow Treaty, the only bilateral document negotiated between the two countries during W’s stay in the White House, was largely, in my view, a sham negotiated by Americans who didn’t believe in arms control. 

The Russians have wanted to cut their nuclear arsenal for years – but for various reasons needed it to come with an American drawdown as well. The US, for its part, certainly doesn't need all those nuclear weapons - to defend itself against. . . who? 

14 telephone calls to break the deadlocks

The 14 Obama-Medvedev telephone calls to break deadlocks along the treaty’s way demonstrate to me that both parties wanted an agreement.  The various Russian demands tossed in during recent months were, well, just part of standard Russian negotiating behavior.  Fortunately, the Obama administration had brought experienced American nuclear arms control negotiators out of retirement, the think tank world and the woodwork who understood arms control, US nuclear needs and how the Russians negotiate and how to deal with them in high-stakes negotiations.  The Russians, likewise, used top negotiators to head their negotiating team. 

Clearly, the Russians perceived Obama’s supposed domestic weakness last fall and early this year and thought they could get away with upping the ante.  When Obama personally made clear to Medvedev what his terms were, Medvedev listened, grumbled and, after the healthcare reform bill made it through the Congress  . . . agreed.   

The Greek Financial Crisis through a Political Lens Darkly

By Patricia H. Kushlis   

Only on rare occasion does the media coverage we get here in these United States  about the ongoing Greek financial crisis even attempt to put it in the larger perspective of Greek politics or the country's political history.  Mark Mazower's commentary in the Financial Times on March 9, 2010 and some of Nicole Itano's spot reporting on Global Post are exceptions to the rule.

Instead the news focuses on the daily financial minutae, the recalcitrance of certain EURO zone members to bail out this debt ridden government and the Greek government’s limited options to avoid default.

In reality, however, I think the current Greek saga should be seen as much through a political lens as an economic one.    

Every day it seems as if there’s yet another article or three published about the clashes between profligate Greeks and parsimonius Germans who object to helping Greece out of its current financial misery.  That some of the anti-government, anti-EU and anti-everybody placards held up by demonstrators in Athen’s Syntagma Square are in English for the all too obliging “Johnny-on-the-spot” camera crews to film suggests to me that intended viewers are not Prime Minister George Papandreou or others in the Greek government but a wider audience in Brussels, Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris and Washington.   

How Important is the Foreign Factor?

That some of these demonstrators are African, Middle Eastern and South Asian indicates that the racial and ethnic composition of Greek labor has changed dramatically in recent years.  I would like to know how and where these foreign workers fit into the country’s political scene. I would also like to know how many there are and the degree of influence they have.  For a country founded on the basis of a single religion and ethnicity, the presence of a seemingly substantial number of working class foreigners raises a whole different dimension.

As a case in point, one of the photos in a slide show accompanying Nicole Itano’s Global Post report entitled “Greek: The Language of Protest” earlier this week, showed a chador-clad woman walking by a bank in downtown Athens.  Since women dressed in black, a traditional Greek Orthodox sign of mourning, were everyday sights in the mid-1960s, the color itself is not surprising.  But head-to-toe chador is. Whoever this person may have been, she was not Greek.      

Dueling Red and Black Political Slogans

Itano described the streets of Athens these days as “adorned with political slogans in dueling black and red,” in this case, the colors of anarchism and Communism. 

Great Negotiations by Fredrik Stanton – A Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

July 1, 2010 Update (see final paragraph below)

If I had to summarize Fredrik Stanton’s forthcoming book Great Negotiations: Agreements that Changed the Modern World in one sentence it would be the observation Winston Churchill made in a speech at the White House on a trip to the US in 1954:

 “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.” – Winston Churchill, White House, June 26, 1954.

Keeping this in mind, Stanton demonstrates the critical role negotiations have played in shaping America’s future as well as the world’s destiny from the Revolutionary War onward.  He does this through a series of mercifully readable but also sophisticated and instructive chapters – arranged chronologically – beginning with the Republic’s founding in 1789 through the 1987 Reykjavik Summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.  Each chapter emphasizes the context and dynamics of a particular negotiation as well as the people involved, their personalities, connections and the roles they played in the deliberations.

All but one of the negotiations included in this 227 pages of text (plus end notes, a bibliography and an index) represent successes – albeit only after a number of cliff-hanger, fingernail biting episodes which Stanton chronicles well before the negotiations drew to conclusion.

One failure amidst the successes

Stanton also includes one colossal failure – the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, a multilateral extravaganza, into which the US entered totally unprepared and at far too high a level and whose consequences set the stage for the rise of Hitler and World War II.  This chapter delineates the multitude of reasons for the failure.  Even if the Wilson Administration had had its ducks in a row – which it did not - the mammoth size, scope and complexity of the conference itself and the cavalier attitudes of the European victors were such that they might still have overridden US policies and interests regardless of the lack of preparedness on the American side.  

Hero Clerk and the Number People: A Visit to the Post Office

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I think I went to a farce two days ago.  The setting was the local post office.  I thought I was going to be a client, a customer.  Mostly I was a reluctant member of an audience fixated on the solo performance of a single postal employee I’ll call Hero Clerk.  For this privilege I became a Number Person.  I’d get served when my number was called. 

A One Hero Drama

The hero of this exasperating drama was the one clerk at a counter set up for five or six clerical performers.  Actually, I’d experimented in recent weeks to see when there might be two or more clerks available, hoping for a shorter wait.  I tried ten o’clock.  One o’clock.  Three o’clock.  Always just one clerk.  Clearly this was a one actor play. 

As for my fellow audience members, were they having a better time than I was?  Being brilliantly clairvoyant, I read their minds.  What I read was: UPS, FEDEX, ANYTHING BUT USPS NEXT TIME.

Number People Rebel

 Number People often walk out, as I did that day, to avoid a parking ticket for underestimating the time I’d need to get some media mail posted.

Early on, the take-a-number system was a good idea.  You didn’t bet on one line only to find that other lines were moving faster—that being the halcyon days of plural clerks.  Now your number grants access to a single virtuoso, so I expected to observe the epitome of efficiency, a Superhero Clerk.  No such luck. 

The Script

So what's a Hero Clerk’s job as counter man?  The customer places a previously addressed envelope or box on the counter.  Hero clerk rapidly eyeballs or weighs it, then slaps the right postage on.  The client proffers payment. The clerk makes change and/or gives a receipt. Done!  No time wasted. You’d think.

But no.  Hero clerk is also Genial Helpful Clerk (which would have been fine if all six clerk stations were occupied).  The client* brings an unaddressed empty box which needs to be packed.  Then  flaps have got to be manipulated, and there's sealing to be done.  Hero Clerk does not say, “There’s a table over there.  Please bring it back when it’s ready.”  Oh no!  He does the job.   Himself.   Patient Obliging Super Packer Hero Clerk then watches as the client laboriously addresses the package.

Ah, what a fascinating performance for the crowd of  Number People who are watching!  Maybe the USPS could sell tickets just for such performances.  Meanwhile, Hero Clerk is finally getting around to weighing and accepting payment for his masterpiece of box-prep. 

OK.  Whew!  That job is done. On to the next number, or so we Number People expect. We are treated to dialog instead.  Hero Clerk and customer chat.  (I suspect there’s a prescription for chitchat in the USPS customer manual.  Be courteous.  Make friends. Etc.)  The Number People watch mutely, politely, until finally the happily served customer is leaving.  The Number People don’t applaud at this stage of the play, but they are delighted.  

Suspense 

Yet Hero Clerk does not call a number. He hefts the box and walks to the far end of the long, otherwise unoccupied counter to toss the box into a receptacle.  He may even carry it into the back room, leaving the counter absolutely unattended. When will he come back?  When will he finally start calling numbers again? How delicious to speculate! Suspense is at the heart of drama.

Occasionally supernumeraries wander in from the mysterious precincts out back.  They paw at the unused computers, raising expectations.  Another clerk on duty! Needless to say they do not dare to make eye contact with the clientele. And then they disappear.

(Sort of) Happy Ending

Finally, Hero Clerk is ready for the next client.  He presses a button.  Seventy-six.  Gone! Seventy-seven.  Gone!  Seventy-eight—

Here! I’m here!   A breathlessly grateful Number Person staggers to the counter. 

*Note to clients: please do your packing and addressing at home!!!!

America and India and Russia and China and Pakistan: What's New?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

There are two possible openers here:

1.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

2.  Location.  Location.  Location.  As in geography.

Masood Khan, Pakistan’s Ambassador to China, has recently given an interview to China Daily replete with words of praise for China far more adoring than America’s billions have ever been able to buy.  For those with a high tolerance for smarm, here are a few samples:

China has demonstrated leadership by maintaining a very high growth rate when        the  entire international community was hit by financial crisis.   

China has led the world in a very effective manner by conducting bilateral, multilateral, public and cultural diplomacy.    

China is talking about a harmonious world.

True, Pakistan has every reason to be grateful to China.  When Pakistan was on the financial ropes a couple of years ago, China advanced a useful US$500 million.  While the U.S. has been wasting money on wars, in South Asia and elsewhere, China has built a very nice highway from the China border to the Arabian Sea and now China is constructing a very nice port, so Chinese exports can travel down that road and be loaded onto ships and be sold abroad at prices that are irresistible, thanks to highly questionable currency policies.  (So much for that growth rate!)  These are excellent acquisitions for Pakistan, even if they are also highly beneficial to China.  As for all those American dollars flowing to Pakistan, largely in the form of military assistance, successive U.S. administrations contrive to pretend that the funding doesn’t mostly serve to keep India at bay, although Pakistan has latterly awakened to the existence of more immediate threats of a domestic sort.

Who's Nicer?

But there’s nothing American that ordinary Pakistanis can point to with pride, nothing visible, nothing durable. What’s more, China isn’t a nag.  No nonsense about what kind of Islam is ok.  No shame-inducing lectures about democracy and social change. And what a lovely world it would be if China and Pakistan could encircle India and smother India once and for all!  That’s the big Pakistani dream that America has never latched onto. But China, with its own need to gnaw away at India’s borders, is very handy for the purpose of neutering India.

Yet America needs Pakistan today, just as Pakistan was needed back in Cold War days when Pakistan (like Iran) was necessary for the purpose of encircling the Soviet Union.  Pakistan has always been right about American motives.  “You don’t love us for ourselves.”  Darn right.  We love you for your location.  The only difference?  We're not fighting Communism now.  We’re fighting radical Islam.   “We” being our official Washington-based avatar. 

Old Friendships Renewed

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has been to Delhi.  When the meetings and ceremonies were over, the Russians and Indians had signed off on a slew of agreements aka contracts worth US$10 billion.  The material consequences for India include supplies of existing MiG fighters, co-development of a fifth-generation fighter, a revised (and more expensive) deal on an aircraft carrier, a joint venture to produce navigation systems and support for the construction of up to 16 nuclear power plants. 

Civilian nuclear power figured in discussions between the U.S. and India during the George W. Bush administration, but Congress has yet to ratify those accords, and India wants those power plants. Like China, India needs energy.  What’s more, from India’s point of view, the US is not a particularly reliable partner as sole supplier of hardware—as Iran and Pakistan discovered, when they ceased to perform as step’n-fetch-it agents of American power.  So it’s hardly surprising that India has continued to look to its old Cold War source of hardware.  Not the U.S.S.R., of course, but its stripped-down successor Russia, which is, for its part, in need of customers to bolster its faltering military-industrial estate.  Plus Russia has been looking askance at India's post-Cold War flirtations with the U.S. 

Who knows who will gain the most in terms of all-important techno expertise from these agreements to co-develop?  We do know that Russia will get sales and India will get investment.  Even at that simple level, it’s pretty win-win, it seems to me.  

Meanwhile, Back at the U.N.

Moreover, India stands to gain in other ways by shoring up its relations with Russia.  India has border issues with China, issues that could end up on the U.N. Security Council agenda.  Russia and the U.S. are permanent members of the S.C.  Which will turn out to be the better friend in that arena?  Generally speaking,  two potential friends are better than one.

So here we go again: Communism’s gone, but Russia and China are still jockeying and competing for advantage in neighboring South Asia.  Meanwhile, from a much greater distance, the U.S. struggles for influence and control over events which, more than ever, touch directly on its own well-being.   Need I say that all parties concerned are nuclear powers?  During pessimistic moods one is tempted to recall the machinations in Europe before World War I erupted.  On sunnier days one hopes that such thoughts are nonsense.

That annual March madness: the Armenian Genocide Resolution Yet Again

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Here we go again.  No it’s not US collegiate basketball finals.  It’s the perennial debate in the US House of Representatives over the Armenian genocide resolution.  This time it squeaked through the House Foreign Affairs Committee on March 4, 2010 by just one vote (23-22).  In November 2007 said resolution which had been voted out of the same committee by a 27-21 margin and nearly 230 sponsors and cosponsors almost made it onto the floor with the strong support of then and now Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Her district includes - unsurprisingly - wealthy and influential Armenian-Americans.  Pelosi backed down after much arm twisting and needless public embarrassment at the last minute under heavy pressure from the Bush administration that argued passage would not be in the US national interest.  

US support for the negotiations  

Prior to becoming members of the administration – Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had supported a similar resolution in the Senate.  Now because they have national, not just local constituency interests to defend, namely, the US government’s relationship with Turkey, a major ally with a strategic Middle Eastern address, they have sworn to fight its passage.  My guess – along with others who also follow this issue - is that the bill this year will yet again never see the light of day.

Last spring, the then new administration dodged the bullet when the Turkish and Armenian governments began to talk to each other for the first time in years, negotiations the US government strongly supports and Hillary Clinton helped mediate.  In October the Armenians and the Turks signed an agreement to establish diplomatic relations between the two countries for the first time in nearly 100 years.

Bilateral panel to sort things out

As a part of a thaw between these long time sparring partners, the two governments agreed to establish a bilateral experts’ panel to examine the documents of the period in question to determine whether, in reality, the Ottoman massacre of Armenians living in Anatolia, the eastern part of Turkey, in 1915 was undertaken with the intent to annihilate Armenians in the then empire.  This is how I, at least, understand the loaded term of genocide.   I just checked Webster’s.  Here this authoritative definition:  “the systematic killing of a whole people or a nation.”   

Two weeks ago, the Turks recalled their Ambassador to the US for consultations as a demonstration of displeasure with the March 4 House Committee vote and summoned US Ambassador to Turkey, James Jeffrey, to the Foreign Ministry in Ankara to protest.  These tactics represent nothing new.  But really, it’s not exactly in Mr. Jeffrey’s competency to tell the members of the US House of Representatives to chill out – even though he might like to do so.  Ambassadors are the President’s emissaries – not the Congress’s.

Unhelpful AIPAC hands seemingly at work

Meanwhile, it has been reported that AIPAC, that ubiquitous right-wing Jewish lobbying organization with strong Israeli government ties, supports the Armenian genocide resolution’s passage - for the first time - because of a Turkish-Israeli government rift that began last year over Israel’s brutal behavior in Gaza. I’ve seen this mentioned in news reports elsewhere but Brussels-based Jerry Loftus at Avuncular American has a particularly interesting take on this aspect of the 2010 round of the Armenian genocide resolution.

In whose interest in reality would passage of the Armenian genocide resolution be?  The Israelis?  Now really?  Why? As a cheap shot at the Turks – who after all are mostly Sunni Muslim, whose Ottoman forbearers ruled all of Palestine for 400 years and who have been the most supportive of Israel of all the Muslim countries in the region for years?  If so, that’s really smart.

But then the current Israeli government including its bizarre Foreign Minister who once upon a time was a night club bouncer in Moldova has not exactly demonstrated finesse, smarts or intelligence in the foreign affairs realm overall.

One particularly important aspect of the Armenian –Turkish negotiations is that if successful, the Turks will open the border between the two countries for the first time since 1993.  This is vital for the health of the Armenian economy and improvement in international trade – unless, of course, the Armenians prefer to remain forever a poor, vassal state of the Russian Federation.  The current sticking point seems to be settling the contentious Nagorno-Karabakh dispute that caused the Armenian-Turkish rift in the 1990s.

Who's interest is it to continue to raise the Armenian genocide resolution?

So who’s to profit from the annual raising in the US Congress from the Armenian genocide issue, albeit a tragic event that occurred nearly a century ago?

Lena, who writes the blog Global Chaos, suggests that this is an issue where the interests of the Armenian Diaspora - still stuck in the past - and today's Armenian government are at fundamental odds.  As a Diaspora child herself, it’s not exactly as if she hasn’t thought hard and long about it either.  But hers is the most sensible argument I’ve read in a long time.

Besides that, however, I think that there are times when it is inappropriate for the US government to take sides on an issue that was not of our making and more importantly does not represent this country’s national interests.  Sometimes silence is golden. 

Previous WV posts on this issue

Congress and the Armenian Genocide Resolution: Once burned, twice shy? October 18, 2007

Turkey and Armenia: Settling Differences not Scores, October 14, 2009

How Not to Run an International Visitor Program

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Even as U.S. international exchange programs are being reviewed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, an exchange program involving prickly proud parliamentarians has been gleefully revealed, on Pakistani TV, to have been a debacle, thus proving that the problems affecting U.S. public diplomacy over the past decade haven’t been a matter of funding, which has increased substantially, but of management.  And worse, perhaps: an inability or unwillingness to understand other cultures.

The International Visitor program looks so simple.  You send people to the U.S.  They travel around and meet the right people.  They go home full of gratitude, singing the praises of the U.S.  In fact, in all my years in U.S.I.A. (and briefly the State Department), I never debriefed an IV recipient who wasn’t happy with the U.S. and the program.  But there was nothing easy or automatic about that outcome.

Rules for Selection

First of all selection.  The IV program isn’t designed for VIPs.  It provides economy class air travel, less than five star hotels, vans not limos.  You get the picture.  But third world dignitaries don’t travel that way.  They go first class.  So rule Number One for IV selection was this: go for long term impact; go for mid-career people who haven’t got used to sycophancy and whose noses won’t easily be put out of joint.  A variant was this: go for younger people whose opinions aren’t settled, whose agendas aren’t cut in stone, whose expectations are open-ended, who are more willing to go with the flow.

Often U.S.I.A. officers would have to wrestle with the political section or, worst case scenario, with an ambassador over the selection process.  Since we had no program explicitly designed for the VIPs they wished to curry favor with, they hoped to use the IV program to send ministers, leading parliamentarians, long term top bureaucrats or tribal leaders to the U.S.  I'm talking Big Men (or women) used to being kowtowed to and life à la luxe.  Usually we managed to persuade our colleagues that complying with their wishes would lead to disaster.

As it did, recently, with a group of Pakistani parliamentarians of such stature that they “were welcomed at high levels in Washington.” They had meetings with Richard Holbrooke.  They were received at the Pentagon and the National Security Council. And then they were to go on the road.  First stop: New Orleans.  At the airport, from their point of view, they were treated like shit.

The Briefing Business

We briefed them, claims the American Embassy in Islamabad.  We told them that the U.S. isn’t a VIP culture, “unlike Pakistan, where politicians are often exempted from unpalatable procedures that other people have to tolerate.”  Indeed, said an Embassy spokesperson,

We are disappointed that the group took offense at the security procedures thousands of Americans and visitors must endure every day...No offense was intended.

But they weren’t treated like ordinary Americans randomly picked for secondary screening.  As a group, they “were selected from a crowd of passengers and asked to stand aside.”  All of them would have to submit to a “secondary screening,” which involves a full-body scan, thus adding injury to insult. 

It Wasn't Random

Look at it this way.  Pakistanis get—um—special treatment in U.S. airports.  They are treated as a suspect nationality.  Rightly or wrongly, then, no exception was made for these high level Pakistani visitors, even though they were accompanied, as they must have been, by an official guide.  So they were subject to discrimination in a way that was, evidently, quite obvious.  And that would have led to the innocuously named “secondary screening” which would have allowed some low level guard to view an image with the appearance of nakedness, a truly horrible prospect for a Muslim.  A revolting breech of honor and modesty. Result: the visitors rebelled.  Given their tribal origins, this seems wholly in character. The potential for this debacle was inherent in the selection process.