WhirledView

Addendum: Lights Out in Karachi

By PLS

I forgot to add a bit of obvious advice to those who are supposedly (but not necessarily in all seriousness) trying to find out exactly who was behind the suicide bombs in Karachi. Start by compiling a list of whoever, high or low, has access to the controls for street lighting in Karachi and another list of those who actually entered the building (or other critical premises) at the crucial time. Work from there. Follow the network of personal connection from the little guy who probably pulled the plug to the bigger guys who gave the orders, etc.

All this would be kindergarten stuff to any serious investigator, but since there are probably those in the chain of command who are not interested in pointing fingers at the culpable, it's worth the charge of simplisticism to lay it out here.

Prosecutable results aren't guaranteed, of course, but the resulting info might be interesting, not only for the outside chance of actually pinpointing who's to blame, but in devising procedures to prevent such sabotage in the future.

Assuming such prevention is wanted! I'm sure I'm not the only one who wonders if the investigation now under way will be anything but cursory. It's not only the Islamists who might want Benezir Bhutto out of the way. As the leader of a major political party and a possible rallying point for all the centrist secular forces whose desire for change was clearly manifest during the demonstrations protesting the frivolous removal of an independent-minded Chief Justice, she is also an obstacle to continued military rule, whether by Musharraf or any ambitious officer who wants to supplant him, now that he is vulnerable. What I'm suggesting here is pretty cynical: get her back and get rid of her.

I don't wholly admire Benazir, but I think she's pretty gutsy.

About Those Street Lights that Didn't Light in Karachi

By PLS

According to news reports, as dusk gave way to night, the street lights that should have illuminated the route Benazir Bhutto’s homecoming cavalcade was inching along failed to do their job. Yet house lights went on as usual in the same sector.

So why were the critical streets dark?

Systematic load-shedding to make up for inadequate capacity?

Plain old third-world power failure, as some commentators have suggested?

Or sabotage, to make it possible for suicide bombers to get really close to Benazir Bhutto’s vehicle?

Those with Motive Abound

Without having access to any special information, I’d vote for the latter: sabotage by those who fear Benazir Bhutto’s return to politics. The Islamic parties have had it easy over the past few years. Because no organized secular political opposition to military rule was allowed, Islamists took advantage of the vacuum; they achieved a degree of power never possible when they had to contest elections against parties like the Pakistan People’s Party and the real Muslim League. Benazir’s return changes the equation. The Islamists lose their free ride.

And there are those who loathe this extremely articulate female politician even more than the essentially reputable Islamists do. Ever since the days of the first (recent) Afghan War, the one against the Russians, the Taliban and other violently intolerant jihadists have been goaded on, financed and protected by elements of the Pakistani military, as Bhutto herself laid out, in detail.

So plenty of people would like Bhutto dead. Arranging for a convenient power failure wouldn't have been beyond the capacity of many of them.

The Big Power Question

Aside from motive, here’s why sabotage looks plausible to me:

I spent a week in Karachi this August, in the middle of the monsoon. It was ghastly hot outside and the humidity was soaring, too. Every functional air conditioner was grinding away. Yet there was no systematic power shedding required to distribute access to electricity as fairly as possible across the city. Nor were any area-wide power failures reported in newspapers.

For that matter, not once during that week did I encounter the sort of angry letters to the editor that are commonplace when cities don’t provide the electricity that makes urban life in a hot climate bearable.

One day we had a particularly torrential rain. The street in front of the house became a fast flowing river. It was over a foot deep. We were stuck indoors for hours. Other sectors of the city were badly flooded, too. But we suffered no power failure in our neighborhood that day, and I read of none elsewhere in the city.

Amaryllis Watch

by CKR

I couldn't resist. I bought an enormous amaryllis bulb today. The racks of tulip, daffodil, hyacinth, crocus, and many other little bulbs were like a penny candy store. I restrained myself by reminding myself I will have to plant them (and it's windy today, supposed to get worse over the weekend), but I am imagining five or six clumps of beautiful flowers for the spring, culminated by a multicolored exuberance of tulips.

And there were small wooden crates of amaryllis wealth, the bulbs so fat and happy, promising flowers in the dead of winter. My mother grew amaryllis, which bloomed almost every year. My father bought the plants about to flower, and then my mother tended them for the next year. So I couldn't resist. This is how it looks today: no new leaves at all; the tips of the new leaves were smashed on the bulbs that had them, and I want mine perfect. And I'll document its growth for WhirledView's audience.

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

By PHK

You might think that this country’s troubling experience in Iraq would make America’s legislators think more than once before landing feet first in the middle of yet another ethnically based seemingly intractable Middle Eastern conflict no matter how innocuous, and righteously right one side’s version of the truth appears.

Obviously not - or at least not until, "increasing criticism and high-profile defections from among the bill's supporters," suggest that it would no longer muster enough votes to pass.

Last week the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee voted 27-21 to support the Armenian Genocide Resolution and over the weekend Speaker Nancy Pelosi was stubbornly insisting on bringing it to a vote on the House floor before the beginning of the November 16 legislative recess. On Monday, the resolution had nearly 230 sponsors and cosponsors and a companion resolution in the Senate had just over 30 if the statistics I found on the Armenian National Committee’s website which is devoted to lobbying Congress on the issue are up-to-date but the numbers have now declined.

Whatever term used to describe the sorry plight of countless Armenians who lived, fought and died in the central and eastern part of what is now Turkey during and shortly after World War I that was then. This is now.

True: painful history cannot and should not be erased. On the other hand, for even the most troubling history to be credible it needs to be viewed from all available vantages. And the viewpoints and the biases of the protagonists need to be made clear. Moreover, the events themselves need to be placed in the context of the times and locations in which they occurred.

This is just one problem with the text of the Armenian Genocide Resolution that now faces members of Congress.

Taking the Resolution at its word, the distinct impression is that the Ottoman Empire (which expired in 1923) carried out mass murders, resettlements and expulsions of nearly two million innocent, non-combatant Armenians for no apparent reason between 1915 and 1923 and these murderous actions are comparable to Hitler’s later treatment of the Jews.

From my understanding of Ottoman history, such heinous actions, however, rarely if ever occurred unprovoked in the multiethnic multi-religious Ottoman Empire. Think of the far more recent heavy-fisted Russian responses to the latest Chechen separatist insurrections or the US reaction to 9/11. Both resemble the proverbial killing of gnats with a baseball bat. This is also how the Ottomans often responded to rebellions by their various independence-driven subjects throughout the shrinking Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

All about land?

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, most, if not all, Ottoman reprisals were reactions to actions of ethnically-based independence fighters who were seeking independence for the parts of the Empire where they and their ancestors had lived for generations. In eastern Turkey, as in parts of the Balkans, and in Iraq today, sometimes more than two separatist groups fought over the same city, town, orchard, lake or mountain thus making the situation even more difficult to untangle. Assassinations, retributions and reprisals among the various groups who represented different ethnicities, religions and even political stripes ran rampant throughout the Empire as the Sultan’s power weakened over the decades after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars and nationalist ideas exploded.

Yet nowhere, for instance, does the Armenian Genocide Resolution even hint that the largest ethnic groups that had been living for centuries in Eastern Turkey – Armenians, Greeks, Kurds and Turks – were, at the time, all battling for control of some of the same turf or that the Ottoman authorities were using force to respond to these armed insurrections that had erupted on territories ruled by the Sultan since at least 1453.

Nowhere does this Resolution indicate that at the time the Ottoman Empire was also being torn asunder by Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Italy because the Sultan had mistakenly sided with the Germans, the UK was hell bent on creating a clear overland path to India and Russia’s Czar Nicholas II – the Armenians’ principal protector until 1917 - was shopping for a permanent palace with a Bosporus view and the Russian Empire saw support of Armenian revolutionary groups as helpful in achieving that goal.

Nowhere does the Resolution indicate that the post World War I Treaty of Sevres (1920) upon which rest some of the Armenian Genocide Resolution’s claims to the genocide designation was never ratified by the U.S. Congress. Furthermore, nowhere does the Resolution indicate that the Sevres Treaty terms – which included incorporation of parts of eastern Turkey into the short-lived Armenian Republic (1918-1920) among other elements – were overtaken by events and that the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne formed the de facto and de jure basis for the post-World War I settlement of the region.

Implications for the present?

Wednesday Sevilleta Blogging

by CKR

Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge is an impressive place. It’s located between Albuquerque and Socorro, spanning the entire Rio Grande Rift from the Los Pinos Mountains on the east to the Ladrone Mountains on the west. Most of it is closed to the public, except one weekend a year.

I found out about the open house through Earth Matters, a newsletter published by the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources. I started getting it in dead tree form some years ago; I think they decided to send it to all of us who subscribed to New Mexico Geology. Now I see that both are available on the Web.

The open house offered tours both days of last weekend, but Sevilleta is a two-hour drive for me, and I didn’t want to stay overnight, so I settled for a full Saturday: the Chihuahuan Desert Native Plant Walk in the morning and the Geology East Field Trip in the afternoon. Morning tours came with a breakfast burrito, and afternoon tours came with lunch of a giant chalupa assembled as you watched, to your taste, by members of the La Joya Community Development Association. Red chile, rather than green, becomes the culinary focus as you move south along the Rio Grande Valley, but I tried both. I arrived too late for the breakfast burrito, but I had eaten a light breakfast before I left.

I brought along my latest issue of New Mexico Geology, because its main feature was an article about Cretaceous strata in Sevilleta. Little did I know that one of the authors of that article (Stephen Hook) would show us exactly where he collected his materials for the article. (The article has a good map of Sevilleta in it.)

I have a particular interest in ammonites. Two large and heavy ones sit just outside my front door. John Fowles, in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, uses them nicely to represent the past that is gone and mysterious. I bought a small one when I visited Lyme Regis, Fowles’s home.

Burma: Translating U.N. Speak

By PLS

Within 24 hours recently I read two communications about the situation in Burma. They were both describing the same thing but the language was strikingly, almost ludicrously different.

One employed the highly abstract language of extremely careful diplomacy, the kind of bland speak that’s supposed to keep lines of communication open while possibilities for resolution are cautiously explored. The minimal hope of this kind of language is that the door to understanding will not be closed even though, for the longest time, nothing seems to be passing through but a cold breeze.

The other style is designed to arouse public indignation to heights that will compel perpetrators of atrocity to make a deal, and quickly, with the soft talking bureaucrats who know that insults normally stiffen opposition.

So here’s the U.N. speak as transmitted in a “World Briefing” squib in the NYT:

The United Nations Security Council, after a week of negotiating the language of a statement, said it “strongly deplores” the use of violence against demonstrators in Myanmar, “emphasizes the importance” of the early release of political prisoners and detainees and urges the government to “create the necessary conditions for genuine dialogue” with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader held under house address.

Now it’s easy to ridicule language like this as so insipid it’s useless. But the U.N. has to work by consensus, and the fact that all the veto-wielding members of the Security Council could sign onto a statement criticizing the junta in Myanmar is a critical step forward. Even China signed on, and China is busying sucking Burma’s old stand teak forests and every other natural resource into its insatiable industrial maw.

Now, here’s the other extreme of political language, the kind that shows up in the more outspoken print media outlets:

Monks confined in a room with their own excrement for days, people beaten just for being bystanders at a demonstration, a young woman too traumatized to speak, and screams in the night as Rangoon's residents hear their neighbours being taken away.

Harrowing accounts smuggled out of Burma reveal how a systematic campaign of physical punishment and psychological terror is being waged by the Burmese security forces as they take revenge on those suspected of involvement in last month's pro-democracy uprising.

And so on, with even bloodier details. When specifics like this see the light of day, it’s a lot harder for dictators to convince the world that they are really acting in their people’s interest. And it’s correspondingly easier for the diplomats to make their own kind of pressure work.

At this point it would be easy to insist that one form of discourse is “better” than another—and we regularly see people who do just that. However, in practice, the two styles are complementary. In a way, it's tantamount to a good cop, bad cop routine. Villains may be forced, eventually, to change course, but they are seldom willing to admit that they are vicious sadists in public or in print. The same thing happens when corporations pay huge fines without admitting they have actually poisoned or cheated thousands of people.

Calling a spade a spade, a brute a brute, is extremely satisfying in the short run, but the essential, indispensable goal of negotiations or court procedures is to stop or prevent human rights violations or fraud. And the quicker the negotiators get there the better, even if they have to deny themselves a few raw emotional satisfactions.

Short Takes

by CKR

There are always more things I might comment on than I have time to. Here’s today’s sampling.

Looks like the Indian nuclear deal may collapse from the Indian side. The Indian Communist Party says that it will pull out of the governing coalition if the government even approaches the IAEA to discuss safeguards for the very minimal number of reactors that the Indians have offered for inspection under the agreement.

Charles D. Riechers, 47, principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisitions for the Department of Defense, was found dead in his home, an apparent suicide. He’s the one who accepted a complicated and probably illegal way to “transition” his job, so he wouldn’t have to go without pay while he awaited congressional approval. I’m wondering if he managed to justify his actions to himself by some variant of “everyone’s doing it and thought again only when his actions became public. It’s easy enough to do; I’ve seen similar stuff happen, although without the suicide. (Update of this post.)

The US media are concentrating on only one part of Vladimir Putin’s visit to Iran. He is attending a summit meeting on the Caspian Sea, with others from the littoral states: besides Russia and Iran, they are Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan. National boundaries within the Caspian are a point of contention, along with measures to keep the sturgeon who supply the world’s best caviar healthy. Or maybe US warmongering has brought that kind of issue to the fore. In any case, the meeting points up the fact that these states will continue to be neighbors, with the concerns and common interests that neighbors have. This factor goes unnoticed far too often the US’s calculations of international politics.

Anne Applebaum has discovered Estonia. Or maybe just Tallinn. Or maybe just Skype. The headline writer put Estonia in Central Europe, along with all those other countries that people like Applebaum continue to think of as the detritus of the Soviet Union. The current media convention seems to be that Russia is Eastern Europe, and the satellites are Central Europe. Beats “the former Soviet Union,” I guess. But Estonia has long considered itself “the East of the West and the West of the East,” a nice way of thinking about it if you want to start to understand the relationships going back to the Hanseatic League and the Great Northern War. If you want to get a feeling for Estonia from a sympathetic and sometimes baffled American viewpoint, try Itching for Eestimaa. On a personal note, having skipped my usual trip to Estonia this year, I'm envious of both Applebaum and Giustino, but Giustino gives me believable vignettes of all of Estonia.

Seems to me that the Verizon executive’s revelations that the NSA came to his company for information about who was calling whom before 9/11 isn’t getting enough play. But the Washington Post is continuing to follow up on the story, so maybe we’ll eventually get the bigger picture of who wants to know all your friends.

On Israel’s strike into Syria, I’ll just note that David Sanger is spinning an awful lot out of his anonymous sources. And that I’m wondering why President Bush isn’t livid about all those folks spilling the classified beans to the New York Times, of all newspapers. My personal guess is that nothing was hit, whether by mistake or calculation. I would guess that David Albright is studying all the overhead photos he has access to for signs of the alleged reactor and the results of the strike. We want to hear your conclusions, David! More than this (via Newshoggers)!

Questions on Revolutions and Moral Authority

By PHK

Victor Mallet concluded his October 11, 2007 Financial Times column with the admonition that the world should not give up so easily on the possibility of radical change in Burma in the not so distant future: “Revolutions happen,” Mallet wrote. “It is just hard to predict when.”

I agree with his assessment to the extent that I can think of no fail-safe predictors of when, where and how a revolution in Burma or elsewhere might happen. There are also no fail-safe predictors as to whether a revolution will succeed – or how long it will take revolutionaries to topple a regime or whether the new regime will be any better than the previous one if and when it does succeed in supplanting the old order.

When I lived in Moscow during the latter part of the Brezhnev era, for instance, I never expected the Soviet Union to fall apart. The 60 year old regime appeared rock solid. I certainly never thought it would crumble in the relatively peaceful way it did over the next decade.

Only eight years after leaving Moscow, I watched the old order start to unravel from my comfortable catbird seat in Helsinki – often with baited breath as I waited for the next shoe to drop or machine gun draped OMON security guard to strafe a group of unarmed protesters in a Baltic capital.

In early 1973 when I went to Thailand, a military junta controlled the country. But less than a year later, a student-led revolt demanding a democratic constitution brought that round of armed forces rule to a screeching halt and ushered in several years of unsteady parliamentary democracy. No one had expected the Thai student protests to happen, let alone swell and end the way they did. In Thailand, the military’s firing on unarmed students on the Pra Mane Ground near Thammasat University led the King to tell the ruling generals that enough was enough, that they had badly overplayed their hand and it was past time for them to leave.

Moral Authority and Revolution Making

There’s a lot of chatter now about the significance of moral authority in revolution-making most recently as a result of the monks role in the anti-junta demonstrations in Burma.

It seems to me, however, that moral authority usually only overrides brute military power when fissures exist within the security forces’ ranks. And by the way, true revolution also occurs only when a new political order is installed – not just when one group of military officers replaces another. That’s a coup d’etat not a revolution.

The Burmese Buddhist monks, we’re told, had the moral authority that might have made their popular revolt succeed. History tells us that their predecessors had played an important role in opposing a dictatorship at least once in the past.

In the end, however, the army did not break ranks. The soldiers obediently rounded up the monks, tortured or murdered some, locked many in their monasteries – just like the current president of China Hu Jintao broke the anti-Chinese rebellion led by Tibetan monks in the 1980s when he was in charge there.

The Burmese junta’s gun-wielding lackeys then apparently murdered some of their countrymen, intimidated non-religious demonstrators, arrested non-clerical leaders of the opposition and kept democratic opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi under raps. The junta did not, however, have the lengthy Burmese border with Thailand sealed from which a Burmese opposition today watches and waits.

I think the question that begs an answer is why the Burmese army – nearly 500,000 troops – remains so loyal to the reclusive and corrupt ruling junta. Had potential opposition leaders in the military already been purged and the rank-and-file so frightened and kept so ignorant that there would have been no thought of disobedience?

This is the 12th largest army in the world. But what’s in it for most of its members? A little petty smuggling on the side?

Burma is rich in natural resources and it’s also increased its opium production business this year. Before the SLORC, the first junta, took over in 1962, Burma was the largest rice exporter in the world. Now it’s one of the most impoverished places in existence.

Why, for instance, is the Burmese Army so different from the neighboring Thai Army or most other armies in Southeast Asia which all play large – but not exclusionary roles in the political process? Why did the Burmese army not crack when the soldiers were ordered to murder their much revered citizens and brothers? In contrast, this is precisely what happened in the Philippines in 1986.