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Germany and the neo-Nazis - will the Germans finally rid themselves of their troubled past?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

In Monday’s New York Times, Nicholas Kulish reported on a more than decade long outbreak of suspected violent neo-Nazism that has stalked Germany from Rostock on the Baltic to Munich and Nuremburg in Bavaria since at least 1998.  According to Kulish, the lengthy crime wave is likely connected to a loosely organized group calling itself the National Socialist Underground.

The story came to light on November 4 following an explosion and fire that gutted an apartment in Zwickau in eastern Germany where several members of the group had been living – two of whom are now dead in an apparent double suicide. A third turned herself into police.  A fourth was arrested separately.     

Members of the Underground have apparently murdered at least ten people, committed a minimum of 14 bank robberies and set off a bombing in Cologne in 2004.  Several other bombings – including one in Saarbrucken in 1999 and another in Berlin in 2002 may also turn out to be the work of this same group.  The scope and types of their actions are reminiscent of the left-wing urban guerrilla Baader-Meinhof Gang otherwise known as the Red Army Faction that operated in the 1967s and 1970s - except that their political leanings and targets are not.

The times are also very different.   

Whereas Baader-Meinhof targeted the German elite and US military personnel at the height of the Cold War, today’s National Socialist Underground has seemingly concentrated on murdering Turkish street vendors and small shopkeepers although one bombing – in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin – could be another piece of their handiwork.

The members of the left wing Baader-Meinhof Group turned out to be children of the middle class.   How large is the National Socialist Underground and how does it operate?  Who are these people and what motivated them to engage in militant acts? What is its relationship to German political parties, movements and even the security services?

Right wing extremists in Germany have been under surveillance and largely kept under the carpet ever since the end of World War II.   After the Berlin Wall’s fall and the incorporation of East Germany into the Federal Republic, German right wing militant extremism erupted with a vengeance in the East where it continues to receive its greatest support.  When the Communist lid came off in 1989, the neo-Nazis popped up like toadstools after a rain.

Glaring economic discrepancies and far higher unemployment in the East compared with the prosperous West likely helped trigger the initial extremist reaction especially among minimally educated young men disillusioned with life under Communism but unfit to compete in the West.

Germany's Federal Constitutional Court

Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court has the ability to declare radical groups illegal – and it does so.  This keeps them out of the government but it doesn’t mean they don’t exist – some in shadowy forms – lurking beneath the surface. The National Democratic Party – the extreme right’s closest legal representative – competes in elections.  It currently has seats in two of Germany’s state parliaments – Saxony and Mecklenburg - but none at the federal level.  Its members number 7,000 down from a couple of years ago.

An effort in 2003 on the part of both houses of the German parliament to declare the party illegal failed when it was learned that a number of the NPD's inner circle were undercover agents or informants of the German secret services.  But what does that mean?  And why did it take an explosion, a gutted apartment, joint suicides and a hunted woman turning herself in to the police for the group to be exposed to the public?  

A dream of former times than never existed   

The Military Way With Development: It Doesn't Work Very Well

By Patricia Lee Sharpe.

Drip, drip, drip, and whoooosh: that’s the sound of our hard-earned personal income, once taxed, going down the drain in the Pentagon.  And now I know why the military gets away with it.

America the Fearful

First off, there’s the fear factor.  Too many Americans have been terrorized by military fear-mongering into granting whatever the Pentagon asks for.  As for “our” representatives, they have a different fear.  They’ll support the iffiest military project, lest campaign donations dwinde to a dribble that won’t be enough to get them re-elected in our increasingly plutocratic star-and-serf system.

Here’s some context: the U.S. spends nearly as much money on its military-related functions as the rest of the world altogether and nearly half of all U.S. discretionary funding is allocated for the use of the Pentagon, yet all those trillions are still not enough, we’re told.  No, we sheep are not yet 100% safe from free-wheeling, copy cat terrorists, let alone the occasional malefactor dispatched by organizations like Al Qaeda.  So the dictum is: give up your Social Security, give up your Medicare, give up your carefully-inspected food, give up your well-tested medical devices, and fork it all over to the national security apparatus.   

Playing expertly on those fears, Leon Panetta, Obama’s new Secretary of Defense, accompanied for intimidation purposes by the usual be-medaled general, in this case the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin E. Dempsey, was in Congress this week, doing his best to protect the humongous Pentagon budget from cuts that may go beyond the present $450 billion over the next ten years.  The specter of a $1.2 trillion lopping looms.  To put all those zeros (count ‘em: eleven)  in perspective, that’s the cost of three or four military aircraft.  Seems entirely doable at a time when ordinary people have been losing their jobs and homes, doesn’t it?  Not to the military.

An Audit for the Pentagon, at Last

Meanwhile, Panetta also let a very interesting, very relevant and potentially damaging cat out of the bag: the military doesn’t know how it spends all its money—or whether the funds have achieved their nobly intended goals, which (in practice) may come down to box-checking or  promotion-seeding (see Van Buren below). Evidently, while other executive departments are being hounded to stop waste, fraud and abuse right down to the last paperclip, the Pentagon has escaped thorough scrutiny.  Panetta, clearly on the defensive, has promised to expedite “a full audit” of the Pentagon budget—and (wow! what speed!) to have it done by 2014, not the previously anticipated 2017.  Says Panetta: “ I have also directed increased emphasis on accountability and a full review of the Department’s financial controls....”  Who’d have thunk the Pentagon wasn’t already paying attention to such basics?  Even I had more faith, and I’ve got pretty cynical in recent years.

The FederalTimes reports that “many lawmakers have latched onto the Pentagon’s inability to pass an audit as a [relatively painless] way to make the Department more efficient in light of upcoming budget cuts.  However,” the report continues, “most defense analysts agree that efficiencies alone will not generate the kind of budget savings needed.” 

Indeed!  But easier said than done, as Americans have discovered, whenever attempts to cut military programs or eliminate military bases have been advanced.  Can you say pork?  Have you ever heard, “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.”  Today, if you listen closely enough, you’ll discover that many of the stingiest no-more-taxes Tea Party freshmen have already learned these little tricks.

The Need for Anecdotes

Still, it might help those who are really, not just cosmetically, trying to put an end to the malallocations of business as usual, if we had a trustworthy accounting of exactly where the Pentagon-designated money goes (including the security stuff that’s being turned against us)—and whether this billion or those millions actually achieved anything but ribbon-cutting publicity (also see Van Buren).  Until we have this complete and systematic audit, we’re left with various outrage-producing but isolated examples and anecdotes of a sort that are easily criticized as “atypical” or “merely subjective.”

A. Q. Khan’s Revenge: A Solution to a Pakistani Puzzle?

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Remember the yellow cake forgery that was used by the Bush Administration to support the contention that Saddam Hussain was actively engaged in WMD development which, in turn, was used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq?  This oh-so-convenient smoking gun letter turned out to have U.S. fingerprints all over it.

Now another very interesting letter has surfaced, and it’s not surprising that some Pakistanis and others are floating claims that it was produced by U.S. intelligence services.  Thus, memories of dirty tricks past taint everything that comes after. 

Is It or Isn't It?

Like others cited in this excellent WaPost article which reproduces the letter, I cannot pretend to know beyond a doubt whether this letter that purports to come from North Korean sources is authentic or not  Some people have dismissed it for being written on plain paper, not on official stationary with a recognizable letterhead.  Others have said that the plain paper tactic is well known as the preferred way for North Korean officials to communicate re sensitive issues and on this one they find the signature convincing.  I might point out that the yellow cake forgery included the feigning of an appropriate letterhead. 

Others have said the Khan letter is worth paying attention to because it appears to support rumors or allegations that have been circulating in clandestine circles for some time—rumors about high level Pakistani army involvement in the shopping around  ofnuclear designs and equipment.  The weakness of this argument as “proof” one way or another need not be elaborated, but it predisposes one to more serious consideration of the letter. 

I’m more interested in the arguments of those who try to dismiss the letter by saying it’s been put in circulation only because A. Q. Khan is having another hissy fit over the way he’s been treated. As well he might, it seems to me.  Nothing about the Pakistan government’s handling of the A. Q Khan affair has ever made much sense.  The notion  of “revenge” for selective punishment crops up here, and how natural and appropriate that would be. Khan has always seemed like a scapegoat to me, not an innocent by any means, but a plausible morsel provided with a gilded cage to keep him comfortably alive—and quiet.

Edmund Hull’s High-Value Target: Countering Al Qaeda in Yemen – Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

About four months ago, anti-regime demonstrations erupted in Sana, Yemen’s capital.  The demonstrators were part of a non-violent civil society movement encouraged by previous demonstrations in Tunis and Cairo which had dramatically and in short order deposed long time corrupt, unpopular dictators.  

In contrast to the hasty and largely nonviolent departures of Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak, Yemen’s 30 year veteran President Ali Abdullah Saleh chose a different path.    

Saleh fought back with threats, lies, deception, communications disruptions, intimidation, mass arrests, and ultimately fire-power, troops, and security forces to squelch the popular movement that arose to protest his continued authoritarian rule.  Since then anti-government protests spurred by rampant government corruption in this very tribal, bifurcated and poor country flared up like wild fires after a lightening storm in provincial cities and the capital.

After Saleh used force against the protestors, his chief rivals from the Ahmar clan began to use violence against him. On June 4, he was severely wounded by a rocket attack while praying in the government compound’s mosque and evacuated to Saudi Arabia for treatment.  Six of his closest advisors – also wounded in the attack – went with him.  Chances are good that none will return to Yemen – the Saudis, the GCC (the Gulf Cooperation Council) and the US have wanted him gone for weeks and will certainly help see that it happens.  

A Broken Capital

The situation is politically confused. The capital is reportedly short of water, electricity, gas and cash and the government’s control over the countryside is tenuous.    

Peaceful protestors were ultimately found on both sides of the intra-tribal clan warfare. Now that Saleh has departed the question is whether the Yemeni, the US and the international community – including the Saudis - can prevent complete anarchy from breaking out or the devolution of a country into its several previous parts.  Yemen, after all, was not always a single entity.   

The US initially refrained from publicly condemning Saleh because of his help over the years in fighting Al Qaeda. The administration abandoned this position when Saleh’s forces started to kill peaceful demonstrators in the streets.    

Yemen in the news

Unlike many countries where western media coverage ranges from poor to nonexistent, reports of the continued clashes in Yemen make the front page of The New York Times, and US television news.  

The June 3 edition of FP highlighted “To Save Yemen,” an article by Edmund Hull, US Ambassador to Yemen from 2001-4 and author of the book High-Value Target, released in April by Potomac.  

This small, readable work – part memoir, part contextual analysis, and part prescription for US policy makers, couldn’t have come out at a more propitious time. Hull’s wise and experienced counsel should be taken seriously by those today faced with the rapidly moving situation.  For a nuanced presentation of the historically complex and tense situation in this small country of major importance to the US in its fight against Al Qaeda, neither Hull nor High-Value Target should not be ignored.   

Kuda Hafiz—Farewell, Syed Saleem Shahzad

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Karachi’s Dawn published a piece by S.M. Naseem on Thursday.  It described massive institutional disarray in Pakistan and concluded like this:

"In the wake of its recent twin debacles, the military is increasingly being perceived as a white elephant that grazes well beyond the boundaries it is supposed to protect and is the most obvious candidate for institutional reforms. However, it is obvious that our political class is more likely to be trampled by rather than to rein in the roaming elephant."

Pessimistic?  Yes.  But it’s hard to get over an infatuation.  I refer, of course, to the debilitating dependency that the Pakistani military has nurtured for its own self-aggrandizing purposes, mostly by fear-mongering vis-à-vis India. The Army prospers. The rest of the country starves. So how can the Pakistani army be cut down to size? 

A couple of years ago, the lawyers’ movement unseated Pervez Musharraf, the latest edition of military dictatorship in Pakistan, it seemed as if civil society—in this case, civilian society—might have a chance.  The movement foundered.  However, thanks to three mind-blowing incidents, that possibility has arisen again, but only if the political class can, for a change, think beyond its own narrow interests.  

The latest of the three events was a brutal assassination. 

When Syed Saleem Shahzad wrote his final column for Asia Times on Line, he was acting as that treasured necessity for democratic society, the investigative reporter.  In this devastating piece made possible only by access to well-informed sources, Shahzad asserted that the Pakistani Navy was riddled with militants.  He also wrote that the nocturnal raid on the Mehran naval base was an inside job designed to punish the Navy for detaining known Taliban sympathizers  while conducting an internal investigation to determine the extent of the infestation. 

Here are some passages that might have been construed as offensive to a military already on the defensive:

"Several weeks ago, naval intelligence traced an al-Qaeda cell operating inside several navy bases in Karachi, the country's largest city and key port.  The... grouping was against the leadership of the armed forces and opposed to its nexus with the United States against Islamic militancy. When some messages were intercepted hinting at attacks on visiting American officials, intelligence had good reason to take action and after careful evaluation at least 10 people - mostly from the lower cadre - were arrested in a series of operations....Those arrested were held in a naval intelligence office behind the chief minister's residence in Karachi, but before proper interrogation could begin, the in-charge of the investigation received direct threats from militants who made it clear they knew where the men were being detained.  The detainees were promptly moved to a safer location, but the threats continued. Officials involved in the case believe the militants feared interrogation would lead to the arrest of more of their loyalists in the navy. The militants therefore made it clear that if those detained were not released, naval installations would be attacked.  It was clear the militants were receiving good inside information...."

ISI, Pakistan’s quasi-independent military intelligence service, is widely assumed to be guilty of abducting, torturing and killing Shahzad, although various official spokesmen have issued vigorous denials.  The denials don’t ring true for many reasons, among them the fact that Shahzad had already been interrogated by ISI. The military had wanted him to name  sources for his reportage on militants’ activities. Like the journalist par excellence that he was, he refused to cooperate. More recently he had received fresh threats from ISI.

Shahzad’s sources were so good, in fact, that I had doubts about his sympathies when I began reading his reports.  I found myself wondering if he was a willing conduit for morale-sapping messages from the Taliban.  He seemed to know so much and his sources in F.A.T.A. seemed amazingly hospitable to him.  Be that as it may, his reports were full of useful information.  Ironically, my lingering doubts were finally laid to rest by the piece on the Mehran incident.  Far from being a partisan, I saw, he was a hard-headed journalist so objective and so trustworthy that well informed people on all sides would dare to talk turkey with him.  They’d leak the important stuff.  They’d blow whistles.  I felt a little ashamed of myself for doubting him.

Abbottabad: How the Helicopters (May Have) Got In and Out

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Last week a Pakistani friend and I spent a lot of time wrestling with this question: how could American helicopters have accomplished the Bin Laden mission without being detected and intercepted by Pakistani forces? 

My friend contends that there was nothing to detect. She believes the U.S. and Pakistan had cooperated in shielding Bin Laden until they jointly decided it was time to blow his cover. 

Not convincing was my response.  Delay in capturing or killing bin Laden, once located, would have had fatal consequences for an Obama administration facing an election in 2012.  Imagine how betrayed the Survivors of 9/11 would have felt!  Imagine the response of the Republican leadership!

Then how, without collusion, could those helicopters have reached the target compound?  Some say that Pakistani forces may have been forewarned, but that’s not likely given the deep lack of trust between American and Pakistani forces.

A modest search of the web revealed a second conjecture: Pakistani radar may have been jammed.

Jamming is possible, although I’ve read of no complaints to that effect, but Wikileaks may have provided a third, perhaps better answer.  I found it in one of the classified U.S. cables that was published last week by Karachi’s Dawn newspaper.  The primary subject of this cable was the duplicity of the Pakistani military.  On the one hand, the army begs the U.S. to conduct drone missions over the tribal areas.  On the other, and for public consumption, the Army deplores the egregious intrusion.

The cable I found goes on to describe how the drone missions were to be facilitated: via three Pakistan-approved attack corridors.  Drones using these corridors, obviously, are not intercepted.  They accomplish their missions unmolested by Pakistani defenses.

So here’s my thought: what if the helicopters used one of these pre-approved attack corridors?  Even if they had been observed, no alarm would have been raised.  By the time they’d emerged from the mountainous drone target areas the distance to Abbottabad (and the flying time to get there) would have been shortened by half or more.  Thus, if no one smelled a rat before the shooting in the compound began, it’s not surprising that, given the time needed by Pakistani forces to muster and reach the compound, the mission would have been accomplished.

I’m not a military person, so I could be entirely off the mark here.  But I can’t help thinking that those attack-corridors might have been essential elements in a very successful mission.  Is this possible?  Or am I totally off the wall?

 

The Arab Earthquake: What Happens When Stability is Actually Rigidity

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Even if you believe that Israel’s Palestinian policy is unfortunate, you’ve got to sympathize with Israel today.  Israel was happily playing divide-and-dictate while aggressively promoting settler real estate on the occupied West Bank.  And then the world changed.  Can Israel adjust? Can the U.S.?

Not only did the Arab street demonstrate that ordinary Arabs aren’t mindless passive ciphers with no self-respect or appreciation for democracy, Israel’s comfy modus operandi of the past few years has come under threat---and not from rock-throwing adolescents.  Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are speaking to one another again.  They may collaborate in preparing for a new election that will encompass not only Gaza but the West Bank.  Will Israel accept the results, even if Hamas does well?  Will the U.S.?

Call it the new Arab uprising.  Call it the Arab spring.  Middle Eastern authoritarianism has been under attack.  Can Israel’s equally autocratic my-way-or-the-highway approach to Palestine survive intact now that Hosni Mubarak is gone?  Even Jordan, relatively untroubled so far, will have to be very circumspect about its relatively sympathetic approach to this peremptory neighbor.

Whether a particular manifestation of rebellion succeeds in replacing an unpopular Arab government this year or not, it’s clear that underlying realities have changed.  Much has been said about the loss of fear.  Well, fear can be re-inculcated, if a regime gets unspeakably brutal, and yet, with the exception of Syria and Bahrain, most of the regimes under fire have been remarkably restrained, even when they have resorted to force to stay in power.  Consider the peculiar stand off in Yemen. And consider Syria. It’s unlikely that Bashar Assad  will be toppled, given the increasing harshness of his regime's response, but the extraordinary persistence of protest by the majority against its ruling minority suggests that a victory for Bashar Assad will be fragile indeed.  

All in all, these past few months, the demand for change has been so wide-spread, so deep, so articulate, so persistent and so brave that we may very well conclude that the zeitgeist has changed.  Only the slightly insane Muammar Gaddafi, who sees rebels as vermin to be annihilated, seems not to have taken this in. Other entrenched regimes have resorted to more conventional excuses for violent push back.  Foreign elements.  Religious extremists.  Otherwise the people are happy.  Really!  Nowhere, not even in the U.S., have such self-exculpatory claims been taken seriously.  

Of course, the “democracy” that results in Tunisia or Egypt, where the rebellions may have been most successful, may turn out to be radically imperfect.  And some manifestly unjust regimes will survive, although it’s likely that even they will have to make adjustments, however surreptitiously, to save face. This includes the Sunni sheikdom in Shia majority Bahrain, whose regime has been preserved by Saudi tanks and U.S. silence, as well as Assad’s Alowite regime in Syria.

Thus, one way or another, the spring of 2011 may be seen as a before-and-after moment for the Arab world.  And yet the action on the street this year is simply a manifestation of changes that have been accreting, year by year, in the consciousness of repressed populations.  Like the accumulation of stresses along fault lines in the earth, when the pressure gets too great, earthquakes occur.  Regimes, like buildings, topple.  People die.  

But when regimes are structured to allow for change, through open discussion, through elections, through rejection and replacement of inadequate representatives or leaders, there is no need for desperately unhappy people to take to the streets in normal-life-disrupting ways.  There is no need for threatened regimes to “make order” via tanks and tear gas and live bullets.  This is the beauty of democracy.  It legitimizes change.

When a House isn’t a Home but a Hideout: Clues Anyone Could See

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Pakistan’s in a sovereignty snit.  How dare you invade our air space? 

Well, excuse me.  Doesn’t anyone in Islamabad remember why the U.S.(with a little help) invaded Afghanistan?  Because the Taliban regime in Kabul, despite explicit warnings, wouldn’t divest itself of Osama bin Laden and his cadres.  When the U.S. followed through on its threats, nearly the whole world sympathized.  Given 9/11 and a few other al Qaeda capers, the U.S. had the right. 

Ergo, whether Pakistan was sheltering OBL inadvertently or as a matter of policy, what on earth could Islamabad have expected, once the U.S. discovered where its man was hiding?   

But, sputter, sputter, comes the chorus from Islamabad, you didn’t tell us first. Is this how Americans treat good friends?  Because we didn’t know.  Honest!

President  Asif Ali Zardari’s op-ed piece in the Washington Post was enough to bring tears of contrition to Hilary Clinton’s steely eyes.  Or, more likely, laughter.  Because, frankly, who believes that no one in the Pakistani establishment knew where OBL was?

OK, there’s a slight chance, which would make OBL just about the cleverest most wanted man in history: hiding in the very embrace of the hunters—for some five years or more—in a garrison town, a military cantonment, full of active and retired military men, and just hundreds of meters away from Pakistan’s West Point. 

Well, we know that OBL was pretty smart.  But do any of us think the entire Pakistani establishment is that dumb or negligent?  If we did, wouldn’t that be insulting?

Especially since the OBL set up was so strange that declarations of incurious ignorance by neighbors and officials don’t ring true to me. What I’ve read, seen and heard over the past few days doesn’t match up with my own experience of Pakistani society or my eyes-wide-open several glimpses of Abbottabad.