Geopolitics

Russia’s Clash With the West Is About Geography, Not Ideology

The Marshall Plan recognized the limits of U.S. power in Europe. To be successful, so must diplomacy with Moscow today.

February 12, 2018 – foreignpolicy.com

At his dacha, standing before a map of the newly expanded Soviet Union shortly after Germany’s surrender in May 1945, Josef Stalin nodded with approval. The vast buffer he’d carved out of Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe would now protect his empire against future Napoleons and Hitlers. Stalin then took the pipe from his mouth, waving it under the base of the Caucasus. He shook his head and frowned.

“I don’t like our border right here,” he said to his aides, gesturing at the area where the Soviet republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan met the hostile powers of Turkey and Iran.

Over the next year and a half, U.S.-Soviet relations would collapse as Stalin pressured Ankara and Tehran for territorial concessions and U.S. President Harry S. Truman pushed back by sending a naval flotilla to the Mediterranean. In February 1947, a penniless Britain told the State Department that it could no longer defend the Greek government in its civil war with Yugoslav-backed Communist rebels, prompting Truman to pledge U.S. economic and military aid for Athens and Ankara. Stalin, whose country was struggling to recover from Nazi devastation, fell back on defense. His aim now would be to hold the new security zone in Eastern Europe and to prevent the United States from controlling Russia’s mortal enemy: Germany.

In March 1947, the new U.S. secretary of state, George C. Marshall, embarked on six grueling weeks of negotiations in Moscow with his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, over the future of occupied Germany. With neither side willing to accept the possibility of such a dangerous, strategically situated country becoming an ally of the other, the talks ended in stalemate. Yet Stalin still believed that Truman would ultimately be compelled to concede German unification on Soviet terms — massive reparations and a political structure favorable to the Communists — in order to fulfill his predecessor Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pledge to withdraw U.S. troops from Europe within two years after the war.

Marshall left Moscow convinced that cooperation with the Soviets was over. Germany, and much of Western Europe, was edging toward economic and social collapse, and the Leninist dictum “the worse, the better” appeared to be Stalin’s response. The time had come, Marshall decided, for unilateral U.S. action to secure democratic, capitalist government in the parts of Europe still outside Soviet control. In an iconic speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947, he presented the outline of what would become a massive four-year U.S. aid scheme to support European reconstruction and integration: the Marshall Plan.

Stalin denounced the plan as a vicious American plot to buy political and military domination of Europe. He feared losing control not just of Germany but of Eastern Europe, too. Prior to the launch of the Marshall Plan, Stalin had never been dogmatic about the forms of socialism pursued by countries within the Soviet sphere. Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania were all allowed to form coalition governments of one sort or another. His demand had merely been fealty to Moscow on foreign policy. That would soon change. By the end of 1948, Stalin had fully co-opted or crushed the remaining non-Communist elements in the governments of Eastern Europe.

Truman had wanted to use the Marshall Plan as a tool to reduce U.S. security entanglements in Europe. But the State Department had conditioned the $13.2 billion (more than $135 billion in today’s money) in grants on the recipients integrating their economies, leaving them to object that the loss of self-sufficiency would make them more vulnerable to Soviet (and German) harassment and threats. So the president now acceded to French and British demands that Marshall aid be given a military escort. On April 4, 1949, a year and a day after signing the Marshall aid legislation, Truman signed the founding agreement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

The following month, the United States, Britain, and France accepted the constitution for a new West German state. The Soviets responded by creating their own East German state in October. The dialectic of each side’s suspicions of the other having played out as far as it could without war, the European borders of the Cold War conflict would remain frozen for the next 40 years.

Four decades later, on Nov. 9, 1989, frenzied East German crowds gathered at the Berlin Wall yelling “Tor auf!” (“Open the gate!”). When a worried and confused border guard complied, tens of thousands began pouring into the West. Millions more would do so in the coming days.

In Dresden six weeks later, a crowd greeted West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl shouting “Einheit! Einheit! Einheit!” (“Unity!”). Nearby, a nervous but determined 37-year-old KGB officer had spent weeks burning mounds of documents in preparation for possible attacks on his station by angry mobs. The enormous volume of ash destroyed the building’s furnace. Years later, Russian journalists interviewed the former officer about his work in Germany. “We were interested in any information about the main opponent,” Vladimir Putin explained. That opponent, NATO, would continue to obsess Russian leaders in the years to come.

By early 1990, the East German Communists, imploding under the weight of popular revulsion and infighting, were a spent political force, and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev had begun to reconcile himself to German unification. What he still demanded was that a reunified Germany not be part of the Atlantic alliance. Continued German membership of NATO, Gorbachev told German and Soviet journalists, must be “absolutely ruled out.”

Gorbachev and his Russian successors have maintained that they were misled over whether the alliance would be permitted to expand eastward. NATO, the Soviet leader said, was “an organization designed from the start to be hostile to the Soviet Union.” “Any extension of the zone of NATO,” he told then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, would therefore be “unacceptable.” Yet when Germany reunified in October, he was powerless to stop the eastern part from exiting the Warsaw Pact and entering NATO.

With the demise of Gorbachev and the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian President Boris Yeltsin continued to press the issue with his American counterpart. The United States, he told then-President Bill Clinton, was “sow[ing the] seeds of distrust” by dangling NATO membership in front of former Warsaw Pact states. For a Russian leader to “agree to the borders of NATO expanding toward those of Russia,” he told Clinton during a 1995 meeting at the Kremlin, “would constitute a betrayal of the Russian people.” Defense Minister Pavel Grachev warned Polish leaders that his countrymen saw the alliance as a “monster directed against Russia.” Foreign Intelligence Service head Yevgeny Primakov, who would later become foreign minister and prime minister, argued that NATO expansion would necessitate a more robust Russian defense posture. “This is not just a psychological issue for us,” he insisted to the U.S. diplomat Strobe Talbott in 1996. “It’s a security question.” Moscow’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy warned that NATO enlargement would make “the Baltic states and Ukraine … a zone of intense strategic rivalry.”

Russia’s resistance left Clinton two sensible options. He could ignore it and insist on expanding NATO in a robust way, under the logic that “Russia will always be Russia” and would harass and dominate its neighbors if not contained by the threat of military force. This was the Republican position at the time, outlined in the party’s 1994 “Contract with America.” The other was to sit tight until Russian behavior belied its pledges to respect its neighbors’ sovereignty. This was former Ambassador to the Soviet Union George Kennan’s position. But Clinton, being Clinton, chose a third option, which was to expand NATO on the cheap — under the logic that the alliance faced no real enemy. In 1996, Ronald Asmus, soon to become an influential Clinton administration official, argued that NATO expansion costs would be modest since the “premise [was] avoiding confrontation with Russia, not preparing for a new Russian threat.”

“Are we really going to be able to convince the East Europeans that we are protecting them,” asked an incredulous Democratic Sen. Sam Nunn in a speech to military officials, “… while we convince the Russians that NATO enlargement has nothing to do with Russia?” Talbott warned in an internal memo that “An expanded NATO that excludes Russia will not serve to contain Russia’s retrograde, expansionist impulses.” On the contrary, he argued, “it will further provoke them.” But Richard Holbrooke, then Clinton’s special envoy to the Balkans, dismissed this warning. The United States, he wrote in World Policy Journal in 1998, could “have [its] cake and eat it too … years from now … people will look back at the debate and wonder what all the fuss was about. They will notice that nothing has changed in Russia’s relationship with the West.”

Holbrooke could not have been more wrong. “We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries,” the 94-year-old Kennan told the New York Times columnist Tom Friedman in 1998, “even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.” He would prove right. Clinton’s gambit would pit an under-resourced NATO against an ever-more embittered and authoritarian Russia.

Days after the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined NATO in March 1999, the alliance began a three-month bombing campaign against Serbia — which, like Russia, is a Slavic Orthodox state. These attacks on a brother country appalled ordinary Russians, especially since they were not carried out in defense of a NATO member, but to protect the Muslim population of Kosovo, then a Serbian province. NATO’s actions in the former Yugoslavia — in Bosnia in 1995 as well as in Serbia in 1999 — were undertaken with noble aims: to stop the slaughter of innocents. NATO expansion into the former Warsaw Pact countries, however, all but guaranteed that Russians wouldn’t see them that way. Moscow knew that its former vassals, by joining the alliance, had now bound themselves to support Western policies that challenged Russian interests. The farther east NATO expanded, the more threatening it would become.

That seemed especially clear when NATO members began taking unilateral actions hostile to Russia, actions they would never have taken outside the alliance. In 2015, for example, Turkey shot down a Russian fighter jet that had crossed into its airspace from Syria, where it was bombing opponents of the Bashar al-Assad regime. “Turkish airspace … is NATO airspace,” the Turkish foreign ministry pointedly told Russia after the attack. Russia took notice. “Turkey has set up not itself” as the actor, “but the North Atlantic alliance as a whole,” said Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in an interview with Time magazine. “This is extremely irresponsible.”

In trying to assure the Russians that NATO was not a threat, the Clinton administration had taken it for granted that legitimate Russian interests, in an era following glasnost and perestroika, would not clash with NATO interests. But this view presumed that the Cold War had been driven by ideology and not geography. Halford Mackinder, the father of geopolitics, would have scoffed at this view. Mackinder, who died in 1947, the year the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were launched, drew policymakers’ attention to the strategic centrality of the vast Eurasian “Heartland,” which was dominated by Russia. “Who rules East Europe,” he famously wrote in 1919, “commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; Who rules the World-Island commands the World.” It was the ideas of Mackinder, and not Marx, that best explained the Cold War.

Russia’s eternal fear of invasion drove its foreign policy then and continues to do so now. “At bottom of [the] Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is [a] traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity,” Kennan wrote in his famous 1946 Long Telegram. Vast, sparsely populated, and with huge transport challenges, Russia had a natural tendency to fracture. Looking outward, Russia was a “land which had never known a friendly neighbor.” Its defining characteristic was its indefensibility. No mountain ranges or bodies of water protected its western borders. For centuries, it suffered repeated invasions. That landscape and history encouraged the emergence of a highly centralized and autocratic leadership obsessed with internal and external security. Communists had been just one variety of such leadership, peculiar to the age in which they emerged.

The country’s western borders have always been particularly vulnerable. The European landmass west of Russia’s borders constitutes a large peninsula surrounded by the Baltic and North Seas to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and the Black Sea to the south. Russia, in contrast, has few maritime outlets. The Arctic Ocean is remote from its population centers. The country’s few ports are largely unusable in the winter. Turkish waters to the south, like Nordic waters to the north, can be easily blocked. During the Cold War, Norwegian, British, and Icelandic airbases also hindered Russian access to the sea.

But such problems were not limited to the 20th century. In the latter half of the 19th century, Russia had been contained by France and Britain — in the Balkans, the Middle East, India, and China — well before Kennan made “containment” a household word. Its defensive options being limited, its military doctrine has historically been offensive. It has sought to dominate its neighbors as a means of preventing the borderlands from being used against it by other powers. Whereas the West sees Russia’s fear of invasion as groundless, history has shown Russian leaders that foreign intentions are typically hidden or fluid. Each age brings a new existential threat; there would always be another Napoleon or Hitler.

After World War II, the threat was, from the Kremlin’s perspective, capitalist encirclement led by Washington and its West German puppet. The incorporation of Ukraine and Belarus (1922) and the Baltic countries (1940) into the Soviet Union, and the creation of buffer states farther east, bolstered Russia’s security at the expense of the West’s. In 1949, splitting control of Germany created a stable equilibrium, one that survived four decades. Once Moscow lost control of Berlin in 1989, however, Russia’s defensive frontier collapsed, forcing it to retreat to borders farther east than they had been since the 18th century.

In his 2005 state of the nation address, Russian President Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer who had been on the front lines of Moscow’s covert efforts against NATO during the 1980s, described the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. Much of his long tenure as president has been devoted to restoring elements of the Soviet Union’s economic space and security frontier in the face of NATO and European Union expansion — and preventing the old Soviet empire’s constituent parts from undermining the interests of today’s Russia.

While military conflicts in Moldova, Georgia, and Ukraine have been attributed to aggressive Kremlin efforts to re-establish elements of the Soviet empire, it is notable that Russia has not annexed any of the breakaway regions — with the exception of Crimea, which houses the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The reason is not merely deniability, but also the fact that annexation of pro-Russian territories would have strengthened the pro-Western forces in the remaining parts of each country. Annexation would undermine Russia’s primary objective, which is keeping the countries beyond the reach of Western institutions seen to threaten Russian interests. The presence of frozen conflicts in the three nations effectively blocks them from joining NATO. The alliance has always rejected aspirants with unresolved border disputes, internal territorial conflicts, and insufficient military capacity to provide for a credible national defense.

In the cases of Georgia and Ukraine, the timing of the Russian interventions coincided with those countries’ achievement of tangible benchmarks on the path to NATO membership. The combined separatist territories, under effective Russian control, now form a valuable protective arc along Russia’s western and southwestern border. Just as Stalin strengthened the Soviet Union’s buffer zone in response to the Marshall Plan, which he expected Washington to supplement with military force, Putin has strengthened Russia’s buffer zone in response to NATO expansion.

Putin’s views are perhaps best captured by a private conversation he had with the former Israeli leader Shimon Peres shortly before the latter’s death, in 2016. “What do [the Americans] need NATO for?” Peres recalled him asking. “Which army do they want to fight? They think I didn’t know that Crimea is Russian, and that Khrushchev gave it to Ukraine as a gift? I didn’t care, until then you needed the Ukrainians in NATO. What for? I didn’t touch them.”

These are not the words of an ideologue. Nor are they a reflection of a uniquely ruthless Russian leader. After all, Gorbachev, no fan of Putin’s, also supported the annexation of Crimea, as well as Russian military action in Georgia. The West, he wrote in his memoirs, had been “blind to the kind of sentiments NATO expansion aroused” in Russia.

Western leaders do not need to sympathize with Russia, but if they wish to make effective foreign policies, they do need to understand it. Communism may have vanished from Europe, but the region’s geography has not changed. Russia is, as it has always been, too large and powerful to embed within Western institutions without fundamentally changing them and too vulnerable to Western encroachment to acquiesce in its own exclusion.

The Marshall Plan, which cemented the Cold War, is remembered as one of the great achievements of U.S. foreign policy not merely because it was visionary but also because it worked. It worked because the United States accepted the reality of a Russian sphere of influence into which it could not penetrate without sacrificing credibility and public support.

Great acts of statesmanship are grounded in realism no less than idealism. It is a lesson America needs to relearn.

The excerpt was adapted from Benn Steil’s new book The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War.

Benn Steil is director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. (@BennSteil)

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Russia and the West: A New Cold War?

January 2, 2018 · by Andrei P. Tsygankov · in Uncategorized. ·

Russia’s conflictual relationship with the West has been described as a Cold War-like confrontation. In reality, these powers are engaged in an asymmetric rivalry, not a Cold War.

Russia’s relations with the United States and other Western nations have been increasingly conflictual. The Kremlin has challenged the position of American hegemony globally and in regional settings. Following election of Donald Trump as the U.S. President, Russia’s military strategy, cyber activities, and media role have been under particular scrutiny although the Kremlin has acted assertively since the second half of the 2000s.

While many Western observers place responsibility for the conflict on Russia, some tend to blame the West. However, most observers agree that a Cold War-like confrontation is set to define the two sides’ relations. Today the narrative of a new Cold War commands the attention of political and scholarly circles.

The Misleading Cold War Framework

Image credit: Kremlin/Wikimedia.

As compelling as it may seem to some observers, the Cold War framework is misleading. In particular, it fails to address the global power shift and transitionary nature of the contemporary international system. In today’s world, the old ideological rivalry is no longer applicable. The new world is no longer divided by the communism-capitalism dichotomy. Instead the competition of ideas is predominantly one between liberal and nationalist principles of regulating the economy and political system. While in the eyes of many the West continues to represent liberalism, the realities of Brexit, Trump, and tightening migration regulations in the European Union demonstrate the global power of nationalist ideas. On the other hand, China, Russia, and other allegedly autocratic and nationalist polities continue to favor preservation of liberal global economy, and oppose regional autarchy and Trump-favored protectionism.

Instead of reviving old Cold War rules and principles, new rules and expectations about the international system and state behavior are being gradually formed. China, Russia, India, Turkey, Iran, and others are seeking to carve out a new space for themselves in the newly emerging international system, as the United States is struggling to redefine its place and identity in the new world.

The described changes altered position of the only superpower in the international system. Structurally, it is still the familiar world of American domination with the country’s superiority in military, political, economic and symbolic dimensions. Yet dynamically the world is moving away from its US- and West-centeredness even though the exact direction and result of the identified trajectory remained unclear.

As a result, many non-Western countries are developing their own rules and arrangements in world. Russia and other non-Western countries increasingly have international options they never had before as new global and regional institutions and areas of development outside the influence of the West gradually emerge.

This does not mean re-emergence of a new international confrontation. Most non-Western nations are not looking to challenge the superpower directly and continuing to take advantage of relations ties with the West. The U.S.-balancing coalition or a genuine alternative to the West-centered world has not yet emerged. Unlike the previous eras, the contemporary world lacks a rigid alliance structure. The so-called Russia-China-Iran axis is hardly more than a figment of the imagination by American neoconservatives and some Russia conspiracy-minded thinkers. The world remains a space in which international coalitions overlap and are mostly formed on an ad hoc basis depending on issues of interests.

Partly because of these global developments, the Cold War perspective also misunderstands Russia’s motives and power capabilities. Unlike the old era, Russia does not seek to directly confront or defeat the other side. Rather, the objective is to challenge the rival party for the purpose of gaining recognition and negotiating a greater space within the still largely West-influenced global order.

Furthermore, Russia is in no position to challenge the Western nations globally given the large – and in some areas widening – gap between the U.S. and Russian capabilities. The importance of defending Russia’s interests and status by limited means has been addressed through the idea of asymmetric capabilities applied on a limited scale and for defensive purposes. When the chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov first described the so-called hybrid war he did not mean to provide a template for an offensive military strategy. Rather, as several military analysts noted, he intended to recognize that the West had already being engaged in such war against Russia and that Russia had to be better prepared for the new type of war. While Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is not acquiescing to American pressures, he is engaged in asymmetric rivalry. The latter targets the competitor’s selected vulnerable areas and is designed to put on alert and disorient, rather than achieve a decisive victory. Asymmetric methods of Russian foreign policy include selective use of media and information technology, cyber power, hybrid military intervention, and targeted economic sanctions.

Finally, the Cold War narrative underestimates a potential for Russia’s cooperation with the West in selected areas. The described asymmetric rivalry does not exclude the possibility of Russia and Western powers cooperating in some areas (nuclear non-proliferation, counter-terrorism, cyber issues) and regions (Middle East and North Korea) while perceiving each other as competitors over preferred rules and structure of the international system. In the increasingly fragmented world, Russia and the West may move beyond viewing each other as predominantly rivals if they learn to focus on issues of common concern and find a way to reframe their values and interests in non-confrontational terms.

Future Co-operation?

Cooperation with Russia remains possible and indeed desirable. Russia’s constant attempts to engage the United States and other Western nations in cooperation, including those over Iran and Syria, demonstrate the importance to the Kremlin of being recognized in relations with the outside world. Despite its internal institutional differences from Western nations, Russia sees itself as an indispensable part of the West and will continue to reach out to Western leaders in order to demonstrate Russia’s relevance.

Although the West continues to possess the power of influence, Western leaders have not been effective in using such power. Instead of devising a strategy of selective engagement and recognition, they largely rely on containment and political confrontation in relations with Russia. The West remains fearful of Russia and wants to force the Kremlin to comply with Western demands to relieve pressures on Ukraine or conduct a more restrained foreign policy.

These pressures are not likely to work. If the West continues to challenge Russia’s perceived interests, there are indeed reasons to expect that Putin may fight back. Even with a stagnating economy, the Kremlin commands a strong domestic support and an ample range of asymmetric tools for action.

However, for reasons of psychological and economic dependence on the West, Russia, unless provoked, is not likely to engage in actions fundamentally disruptive of the existing international order. If the United States does not engage in actions that are viewed by Russia as depriving it of its great power status, the Kremlin will refrain from highly destabilizing steps such as abdication of the INF treaty or military occupation of Ukraine or other parts of Eurasia.

As difficult as it might be to accept for the West, there is hardly an alternative to engaging Russia in a joint effort to stabilize the situation globally as well in various regions including Ukraine and wider Europe. The new policy must be based on understanding that the Kremlin’s “revisionism” is partly a reaction to the West’s refusal to recognize Russia as a potential partner. The alternative to the new engagement is not a compliant Russia, but a continued degradation of regional and global security.

Andrei P. Tsygankov is professor of political science and international relations at San Francisco State University. He has published widely in the United States, Russia, Europe, and China. His books include Russia’s Foreign Policy and Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin, and he has recently edited the Routledge Handbook of Russian Foreign Policy (to be published in 2018).

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North Korea’s Capture of the USS Pueblo Still Resonates

On Jan. 23, 1968, North Korea seized a U.S. Navy ship that had allegedly strayed into its territorial waters. Fifty years later, as tensions flare between Washington and Pyongyang, we are republishing this column from January 2015 that recounts a visit to the captured vessel.

On Jan. 23, 1968, North Korea boarded and captured the USS Pueblo, an intelligence gathering ship belonging to the U.S. Navy. Pyongyang claimed the vessel had strayed into North Korean territorial waters, an allegation that Washington denied. The incident, already diplomatically embarrassing, was exacerbated by a number of factors, not least of which was the clandestine nature of the ship itself and the secret documents and recordings onboard. It would take almost a year for the United States to recover the 82 alive but traumatized Pueblo crewmembers from North Korea — with the notable exception of one man who lost his life during the boarding.

Although exasperating for the United States, when seen through North Korean eyes, the Pueblo incident was a major triumph against an overbearing and threatening global power. Pyongyang was able to achieve a substantial propaganda victory, extracting maximum satisfaction by compelling Washington to release a statement admitting culpability — though the statement was heavily caveated and the U.S. government quickly renounced it. The incident was deeply uncomfortable for Washington, but it was only one of many challenges that President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration faced at the time. The U.S. government was contending with an increasingly problematic war in Vietnam, domestic social unrest and the ever-looming specter of the Cold War. For Pyongyang, however, the capture of the Pueblo resonated beyond its short-term implications, inspiring feelings of pride and tenacity in the North Korean population.

Originally a light cargo ship launched toward the end of World War II, the Pueblo was redesignated AGER-2 by the U.S. Navy and equipped to conduct signals and electronic intelligence gathering and surveillance operations. Its mission at the time it was boarded was to monitor Russian activity in the Tsushima Strait and intercept radio transmissions from Soviet ships as well as from North Korea.

Around midday on Jan. 23, 1968, a North Korean submarine chaser and three torpedo boats, supported by a MiG-21 pair overhead, approached the Pueblo. Ordered to heave to, the Pueblo showed its American colors and made full steam for the open sea. Unable to outrun the faster craft, the American ship attempted to prevent boarding action by taking evasive maneuvers, vying for time to destroy sensitive materials and cryptographic equipment onboard. Eventually the North Korean boats engaged the Pueblo with cannon and machine-gun fire, forcing its compliance. It was then boarded and escorted back to North Korea; any attempt to deviate course was met with more fire. One U.S. sailor was killed in the engagement and a number were wounded. Although the Pueblo had two .50-caliber machine guns for defense, they were not used. Only a fraction of the classified materials and equipment aboard the Pueblo were destroyed before its seizure.

The capture of the Pueblo came at a difficult time for Washington. Only two days before, a B-52G Stratofortress carrying four nuclear weapons crashed near the Thule Air Base in Greenland, causing the dispersal of nuclear material and a major diplomatic incident. Vietnam was not going as planned — in fact, the Tet Offensive would commence a week after the Pueblo was taken, sparking fresh pessimism about the war. The civil rights movement was in full swing, and Martin Luther King Jr. refused to let social injustice be sidelined. The space race had stalled, with both Russia and the United States suspending manned operations in 1967 after a number of fatalities. And, providing the backdrop for all of this, the Cold War between the Soviet bloc and the West continued to grind on. At that moment in time, the capture of a U.S. Navy surveillance ship and all its sailors by North Korea was the last thing Washington needed.

Exploring the USS Pueblo in Pyongyang

Vice President of Asia-Pacific Analysis Rodger Baker shares his impressions of a visit to the USS Pueblo, now a museum in Pyongyang, during a journey to North Korea in 2005. The following excerpt is taken from his personal journal.

Our tour guide aboard the USS Pueblo, it turns out, is Kim Jung Rok, who was part of the boarding party that took the Pueblo. He stands in his dark uniform, his chest covered in campaign ribbons under his Kim Il Sung badge, his wrinkled face under a shining white hat with black brim. He exudes pride; pride in his job, pride in his place in history and pride in his privilege to share his story and view with Americans on this day. It is a moment that makes you realize, whatever your ideology, that a veteran is a veteran.

Stratfor Vice President for Asia-Pacific Analysis Rodger Baker with Kim Jung Rok.

The tour begins with the «invasion» of the «pirate ship» General Sherman in 1866. The General Sherman, we are told, was the first ship from America to invade North Korea, but certainly not the last. It was sunk by «our people,» the guide says, and then informs us that the citizens who attacked the General Sherman in the defense of Korea were led by none other than the great-grandfather of Kim Il Sung himself.

We are sat in front of a television in the ship’s galley and watch a propaganda film, loaded with glorious images reminiscent of a 1950s Cold War movie shown in elementary school to warn us of impending war with the Soviets. The music is a match. The narrator — with an accent more reminiscent of the comic French-English of Peter Sellers than the English-speaking North Korean it actually is — draws us into the story of the «Pueblo armed spy ship of the U.S. imperialist aggression forces.» The ship had a crew of 83 when captured, including six officers. One American sailor died in the capture.

My attention wanes as a mosquito drones around my ear. There appear to be parts of the galley wall that have been rebuilt with fiberglass, but otherwise the interior is relatively well maintained. «…the brazen-faced U.S. imperialists…» It is interesting that the video credits Kim Jong Il with handling the negotiations at the time — in 1968. «…the enemy kneeled down before the Korean people and made an apology…» A flag-draped coffin flashes across the screen — the one American who died in the action. «…the U.S. imperialists who kneeled down before the Korean People are now running on down hill…»

The Pueblo was moved to Pyongyang as a trophy — and opened for tours — in 1999, after North Korea carried out its first Taepodong launch attempt. It was part of Kim Jong Il establishing himself and his bona fides as the legitimate and strong leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. In 2013, the ship was moved again to a new location as part of an expansion of North Korea’s military museum.

Starting the tour in earnest, we lead off through the officer’s mess, past the damage from the boarding action — the scarred metal is marked with red circles to highlight hits from gunfire and shrapnel. We see the Pueblo’s flag, a copy of the letter to Truman, and other items of interest. When we reach the bridge, it is time for another story. When the North Koreans captured the Pueblo’s captain, we are told, neither spoke the other’s language, prompting the North Koreans to draw a picture of a big-nosed man on a piece of paper. After making questioning gestures, the captain was prompted to write the number 83 (83 members of the crew). The Koreans then drew an eagle, by which the American wrote a «6» (six officers).

Damage taken by the USS Pueblo after being engaged by North Korean vessels. 

Again we are told that the Koreans are so proud of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il for capturing the Pueblo — the only instance that a boat of seven soldiers has captured a ship with a crew of 83. Given that our guide was part of the seven that boarded the Pueblo (from their 12 person missile boat), one would think he would remember that neither Kim Jong Il nor Kim Il Sung were actually there with him, but no.

I have mixed feelings about my tour of the Pueblo. On the one hand, it is simply a trophy of a bygone conflict. On the other, here I am standing with one of the Koreans who actually took part in the action — not exactly bygone. Here, Kim Jung Rok is a hero; in America, he is a villain and a pirate. Having met Commander Pete Bucher (the Pueblo’s captain in 1968) in the past, I stand here where he defended his ship, and smirk as I remember his story of his «admission» of guilt, and his offering to paean Kim Il Sung, paean the North Korean military… (pronunciation being «pee on,» the word being one he said he heard as a child in a radio commercial for ice cream). With our trip complete, we are escorted off the ship.

The capture of the Pueblo speaks to deeper truths about the inherent nature of North Korea. From Pyongyang’s perspective, they are a small, embattled nation, surrounded on all sides, and overtly threatened by the most powerful country on earth. From their comparative zenith in the 1960s, Pyongang has watched its economy and global status decline, almost in parallel to South Korea’s rise through the 1970s to the present day. The Pueblo, like the General Sherman before it, is part trophy and part living testament to North Korea’s ability to overcome greater odds — to still be able to deal a humiliating blow to would-be aggressors.

As outwardly resilient and standoffish as North Korea appears, the country remains deeply insecure and acutely aware of its own precarious position. Yet, as innate as its diffidence is, Pyongyang’s belief in the ability of the Korean people to endure is supreme. The country will continue to act in what the West perceives as an aggressive manner because to show weakness is an invitation to be overrun, an unacceptable outcome for a nation that harbors such intensely illustrious sentiments. Also, from Pyongyang’s perspective, the United States is a bully, and a fickle one at that. Relationships and accords can change on a whim, depending on the geopolitical riffles and eddies that influence global power politics. Iraq was a U.S. ally in the 1980s, as was Afghanistan; Washington supplied arms and support to both countries but didn’t hesitate to invade them years later. North American history is littered with examples of broken accords, fractured relationships and aggressive military action.

This is why the continued military drills and cooperation between Washington and Seoul concern Pyongyang so much. North Korea may well be willing to curtail its nuclear activities, but it needs something in return: assurances from the West that the Democratic People’s Republic is not under direct threat. The North Korean administration is acutely aware that, in the current global picture, the United States lacks a clearly defined enemy. The Iraq and Afghan campaigns are officially over, barring small-scale training and advisory tasks. The Islamic State is turning into the world’s problem, not just America’s or the Middle East’s. The rapprochement with Iran is nullifying one traditional enemy, and although Russia continues to antagonize the West, it is economically too weak and too wary of provoking NATO to return to a Cold War level of menace. North Korea, on the other hand, remains very firmly in Washington’s sights. Beneath its inherent pride and outward veneer of audacity, Pyongyang is pragmatic; it cannot compete militarily or economically against a U.S.-supported South Korea, but the Pueblo is a living reminder that North Korea is still capable of surprises.

Published Jan 25, 2015, by Strafor

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Danish PM Løkke Rasmussen Cries for Istanbul Attack Victims forgets His Sponsorship of Terrorism

nsnbc : Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen responded to the terror attack on the Atatürk Airport in Istanbul, Turkey, “tweeting” that he is crying with the Turkish people who once again are witnesses to a cowardly terrorist attack. The Danish PM, conveniently, forgets his background as fundraiser and supporter of Afghanistan’s “mujahedeen”; And then there was the unexplained rape-murder of a female anthropologist who stayed at the hotel in Peshawar that Lars Løkke used.

The death toll after Tuesday night’s terrorist attack at the Atatürk Airport in Istanbul has according to announcements made by the local governor risen to 41. At least 239 have been injured.

The victims reportedly included at least 10 foreign nationals and three people with dual citizenship.

Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen not only “tweeted” that he is crying with the Turkish people.

He also conveniently forgot that he denounced a cowardly act of a terrorism that he has, indeed, helped to unleash.

Lars Løkke Rasmussen was Denmark’s Prime Minister during NATO’s bombardment of Libya that led to the ousting and ultimately the sodomizing and murder of Libya’s head of State Muammar Qaddafi by Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda linked terrorists.

In a nonchalant fashion, the Danish PM forgets that the disaster in Libya created the foundation for the massive proliferation of weapons from Libya, via Turkey to Jabhat Al-Nusrah and ISIS in Syria.

Lars Løkke Rasmussen’s moral engagement with the victims in Turkey is only paralleled by his apparent selective moral disengagement, and his track record with regard to sponsoring terrorism and it does not stop nor did it begin with Libya.

Løkke Rasmussen has “literally” participated in laying the foundation of the very Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Qaeda linked terrorism that is terrorizing Europe, the Midle East, Asia and Africa today.

He was one of the most active fundraisers for Afghanistan’s Taliban (and by implication Al-Qaeda) during the 1980s.

In 1988 Lars Løkke Rasmussen, proudly let himself be photographed alongside Taliban friends in Afghanistan, clinching an AK 47 assault rifle. Lars Løkke would cross the borders into Pakistan and Afghanistan on horseback and deliver 600,000 DKK to the “mujahedeen”.

The money had been raised by Afghanistan youth committees within Løkke Rasmussen’s Venstre and Pia Kjærsgaard’s Fremskridspartiet that was transformed into today’s Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party).

There is one fact, besides the fundraising for terrorists, that may be of interest.

After returning from Pakistan, the now PM Lars Løkke Rasmussen was detained by police and charged with the rape and murder of a female anthropologist who had been living at the same hotel in Peshawar that Lars Løkke Rasmussen stayed in.

Police released the then 25-year-old while the charges against him were upheld. It is noteworthy that the young female anthropologist was opposed to the “freedom fighters’” increasingly radical, fundamentalist and chauvinist policies. In 2011 Lars Løkke would use the pulpit of a Danish church to justify the war on Libya.

CH/L – nsnbc 29.06.2016

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Bernie Sanders and His Supporters Should Do What the Democratic Party Won’t: Advocate for Candidates of Color

By focusing on supporting progressive leaders and organizations of color, they could make a mark that lasts long beyond 2016.

By Steve PhillipsTwitter

April 29, 2016

Bernie Sanders and his supporters are uniquely positioned to advance a political revolution by doing the thing many Democrats won’t do: throwing down, in a real way, with people of color. Although for reasons relating to strategy, familiarity, and message, voters of color across the country chose Hillary Clinton over Sanders, much of the Democratic Party establishment has yet to reciprocate that loyalty in meaningful ways. Many Democratic leaders pay a lot of lip service to people of color, but the revenues rarely match the rhetoric. If Sanders focuses the forces and resources he’s accumulated in his historic campaign on supporting progressive leaders and organizations of color, he could upend progressive politics and significantly strengthen the cause of combating income and wealth inequality in America.

In perhaps one of history’s greater moments of poetic justice, the socialist candidate battling the billionaires actually has a formidable money machine that is unprecedented in progressive politics. To date, Sanders has raised $186 million dollars: 65 percent from “small donations” under $200 each, or—as Sanders loves to say—about $27 on average per donation. What he does with that machine could be revolutionary on a scale perhaps not ever seen before in US politics.

While much of the conversation about wealth inequality focuses on trends of the past 30 years, the roots of inequality in America stretch back more than 400 years to the arrival of the first English settlers on this continent. From the violent theft of land from indigenous inhabitants, to the creation of wealth by enslaved black bodies in chains, to the widespread and legal practice of racial discrimination in employment, hiring, lending, and housing up until 1964, economic inequity has gone hand in hand with racial discrimination and exploitation. Because of the connection between racial and economic exploitation, the struggles of people of color for equality have driven many of the most powerful periods of change in US history.

From participating in civil-rights struggles in the 1960s to being one of the few white politicians in America to endorse Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential bid, Bernie has been on the right side of history. Those who marched, sacrificed, and fought for civil rights and voting rights in the 1960s created the conditions for the passage of the Voting Rights Act and Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which opened the doors of civic participation and citizenship to tens of millions of people of color. That demographic revolution made it possible to elect and reelect a black man as president of a country that formerly held black folks in human bondage.

In 2012, people of color accounted for fully 46 percent of Democratic voters, yet the modern Democratic Party is appallingly slow to properly embrace and invest in the fastest-growing parts of the US population. This year, top party leaders abandoned or, worse, outright blocked progressive champions of color, such as Donna Edwards in her bid for the Maryland Senate seat and Lucy Flores in her Nevada congressional campaign. While some parts of the party infrastructure have taken positive steps in hiring people of color, the racial composition of those in the highest positions of leadership is not just striking, it’s evocative of apartheid South Africa where the people-of-color majority was restricted to lower-level jobs, while the positions of power were almost exclusively reserved for whites.

Sanders has already started to show what’s possible by marrying his movement with the moment of the browning of America. In Las Vegas, progressive Latina Lucy Flores grew up poor, ran with gangs in her teenage years, and was incarcerated at a young age before going on to become a lawyer and state legislator. Flores is running against a wealthy white woman who, up until April, had managed to significantly out-fundraise her. But then along came Bernie. Sanders’s campaign sent out a fundraising appeal on Flores’s behalf, and more than 32,000 donors responded, filling her coffers with more than $428,000 and instantly transforming the race. If she wins, which is now eminently possible, Flores will be one of the most progressive national Latina elected officials in the country.

Backing individual candidates of color like Flores could just be the beginning. One of the most significant legacies of Jesse Jackson’s 1980s presidential campaigns is that they catalyzed the careers of warriors for justice such as Congresswomen Barbara Lee and Maxine Waters who have championed justice and equality for the past quarter century. Sanders’s support of Flores; Washington State Senator Pramila Jayapal, an Indian-American activist; and progressive New York activist Zephyr Teachout may also yield similarly promising results. And, looking ahead, his national surrogate Nina Turner, an African-American former state senator in Ohio, is poised to become the next mayor of Cleveland in 2017.

Elevating the right candidates into elected office is only part of the battle. Ultimately, the entire Democratic Party needs to be transformed. The only Democratic National Committee Chairperson of color in history has been Ron Brown, an African-American who came out of Jesse Jackson’s 1988 campaign. After Howard Dean’s inspiring 2004 candidacy, Dean took control of the Democratic Party, appointing people of color to the very top leadership posts, and implementing the 50-state strategy. The Sanders movement can and should focus on pushing the party back towards the people by insisting on the hiring and promotion of leaders of color and a massive financial commitment to grassroots organizing and infrastructure, especially in the growing communities of color that make up nearly half of Democratic voters.

Approaching the end of the Obama era, the Democratic Party is at a crossroads. The Sanders campaign has already made history, and going forward, by doing what too many Democrats won’t, Sanders is poised to make a mark that lasts long beyond 2016, fosters truly revolutionary change, and moves the country closer to income and wealth equality.

Steve Phillips is a national political leader, civil-rights lawyer, author, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Democracy in Color, a new online publication dedicated to race, electoral politics, and the new American majority. His new book is Brown Is the New White: How a Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority (New Press).

• Jul 01, 2016
  

  This Keystone Activist Is Bringing the Tactics That Defeated the Pipeline Into the Democratic Party By Madeline Ostrander

• Jun 30, 2016
  

  America Needs a New Peace Movement—Especially if Clinton Wins in November By Tom Hayden

• Apr 14, 2016
  

  A Radical Alliance of Black and Green Could Save the World By James Gustave Speth and J. Phillip Thompson III

• Mar 14, 2016
  

  North Carolina’s Voter ID Law Could Block 218,000 Registered Voters From the Polls By Ari Berman

• Jun 30, 2016
  

  Meet Misty Snow: Grassroots Activist, Working-Class Progressive, Trans Woman, Democratic Nominee for the US Senate By John Nichols

• Jun 30, 2016
  

  America Needs a New Peace Movement—Especially if Clinton Wins in November By Tom Hayden

• ———————————————————————————

Saudi Arabia wants US to kill 9/11 bill, threatens to dump US assets worth $750 bn – report

Published time: 16 Apr, 2016 – rt.com

Saudi Arabia appears to be blackmailing the US, saying it would sell off American assets worth a 12-digit figure sum in dollars if Congress passes a bill allowing the Saudi government to be held responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The warning was delivered by Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir last month during a visit to Washington, the New York Times reported. He said his country would sell up to $750 billion in US treasury securities and other assets before the bill puts them in jeopardy.

The newspaper said Riyadh’s resolve to actually deliver on the threat is dubious, since selling off those assets would be technically challenging and would damage the dollar, against which the Saudi national currency is pegged.

Read more

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during his meeting with Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir © Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Judge tosses 9/11 suit against Saudi Arabia, citing sovereign immunity

Under the current US law, foreign nations have a degree of immunity from being sued in American courts. The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 is one of the reasons why families of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks largely failed to bring to court the Saudi royal family and charities over suspicion of financially supporting the attacks.

The bill introduced in the Senate would waiver the immunity for cases involving terrorist attacks that kill US citizens on US soil. Introduced by Republican Senator John Cornyn and Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer, it managed to overcome partisan divisions in the US legislation and passed without dissent through the Judiciary Committee in January.

“As our nation confronts new and expanding terror networks that are targeting our citizens, stopping the funding source for terrorists becomes even more important,” Senator Cornyn said last month.

Possible links between the perpetrators of the attack and Saudi Arabia may be hiding in 28 classified pages of the 2002 congressional report on 9/11, which allegedly describe how Saudi Arabian nationals with links to the government financially assisted the 19 hijackers who flew airplanes into World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Many people, including the co-author of the redacted pages, former Florida Senator Bob Graham, have been campaigning for years to make them public.

The Obama administration is opposing the bill, saying it would make foreign nations retaliate by passing similar legislation and target American citizens and corporations in their national courts. Secretary of State John Kerry told a Senate panel in February that the bill, in its current form, would “expose the United States of America to lawsuits and take away our sovereign immunity and create a terrible precedent.”

Read more

Iran ordered to pay $10.5 billion for 9/11 by US judge

Ironically, sovereign immunity didn’t stop a US judge from last month ordering Iran to pay $10.5 billion in damages to families of the 9/11 victims. The ruling was passed because Iran didn’t defend itself against the allegations. These put the blame on Iran over its links with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which, plaintiffs argued, aided Al-Qaeda. The argument is based on the same congressional report, which also said no link between the hijackers and Iran had been found.

None of the 19 hijackers were Iranian citizens. Fifteen were citizens of Saudi Arabia, while two were from the United Arab Emirates, and one each from Egypt and Lebanon.

Iran and Saudi Arabia are bitter regional rivals, adhering to competing sects of Islam and battling for position in the Muslim world. The US had been a stalwart supporter of Saudi Arabia and opponent of Iran, which overthrew the US-backed Shah in 1979 and became an Islamic republic.

Washington’s cordial relations with Riyadh chilled somewhat as it sought a thaw with Tehran last year, participating in a deal to resolve the controversy over Iran’s nuclear program.

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A Kurdish fighter surveys the border between Turkey and Iraq AFP/Getty

Early in 2014, Isis released one of its first videos. Largely unseen in Europe, it had neither the slick, cutting-edge professionalism of its later execution tapes nor the haunting “nasheed” music that accompanies most of its propaganda. Instead, a hand-held camera showed a bulldozer pushing down a rampart of sand that had marked the border between Iraq and Syria. As the machine destroyed the dirt revetment, the camera panned down to a handwritten poster lying in the sand. “End of Sykes-Picot”, it said.

Like many hundreds of thousands of Arabs in the Middle East, for whom Sykes-Picot was an almost cancerous expression, I watched this early Isis video in Beirut. The bloody repercussions of the borders that the British and French diplomats, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, drew in secret during the First World War – originally giving Syria, Mount Lebanon and northern Iraq to the French, and Palestine, Transjordan and the rest of Iraq to the British – are known to every Arab, Christian and Muslim and, indeed, every Jew in the region. They eviscerated the governorates of the old dying Ottoman empire and created artificial nations in which borders, watchtowers and hills of sand separated tribes, families and peoples. They were an Anglo-French colonial production.

The same night that I saw the early Isis video, I happened to be visiting the Lebanese Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt. “The end of Sykes-Picot!” he roared at me. “Rubbish,” I snorted. But of course, I was wrong and Jumblatt was right. He had spotted at once how Isis captured symbolically – but with almost breathtaking speed – what so many Arabs had sought for almost exactly 100 years: the unravelling of the fake borders with which the victors of the First World War – largely the British and the French – had divided the Arab people. It was our colonial construction – not just the frontiers we imposed upon them, but the administrations and the false democracies that we fraudulently thrust upon them, the mandates and trusteeships which allowed us to rule them – that poisoned their lives. Colin Powell claimed just such a trusteeship for Iraq’s oil prior to the illegal Anglo-American invasion of 2003.

We foisted kings upon the Arabs – we engineered a 96 per cent referendum in favour of the Hashemite King Faisal in Iraq in 1922 – and then provided them with generals and dictators. The people of Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt – which had been invaded by the British in the 19th century – were subsequently blessed with mendacious governments, brutal policemen, lying newspapers and fake elections. Mubarak even scored Faisal’s epic 96 per cent election victory all over again. For the Arabs, “democracy” did not mean freedom of speech and freedom to elect their own leaders; it referred to the “democratic” Western nations that continued to support the cruel dictators who oppressed them.

Thus the Arab revolutions that consumed the Middle East in 2011 – forget the “Arab Spring”, a creature of Hollywood origin – did not demand democracy. The posters on the streets of Cairo and Tunis and Damascus and Yemen called for dignity and justice, two commodities that we had definitely not sought for the Arabs. Justice for the Palestinians – or for the Kurds, or for that matter for the destroyed Armenians of 1915, or for all the suffering Arab peoples – was not something that commended itself to us. But I think we should have gone much further in our investigation of the titanic changes of 2011.

In my own reporting of the uprisings, I attributed them to increased education and travel by the Arab communities throughout the Middle East. While acknowledging the power of social media and the internet, something deeper was at work. The Arabs had woken from a deep sleep. They had refused any longer to be the “children” of the patriarchal father figure – the Nassers and the Sadats and the Mubaraks and the Assads and the Gaddafis and, in earlier years, the Saddams. They awoke to find that it was their own governments that were composed of children, one of whom – Mubarak – was 83 years old. The Arabs wanted to own their towns and cities. They wanted to own the place in which they lived, which comprised much of the Middle East.

But I think now that I was wrong. In retrospect, I woefully misunderstood what these revolutions represented. One clue, perhaps, lay in the importance of trade union movements. Where trade unions, with their transnational socialism and anti-colonial credentials, were strong – in Egypt and Tunisia – the revolutionary bloodshed was far less than in the nations that had either banned trade unionism altogether – Libya, for example – or concretised the trade union movement into the regime, which had long ago happened in Syria and Yemen. Socialism crossed borders. Yet even this does not account for the events of 2011.

What really manifested itself that year, I now believe, was a much more deeply held Arab conviction; that the very institutions that we in the West had built for these people 100 years ago were worthless, that the statehood which we had later awarded to artificial nations within equally artificial borders was meaningless. They were rejecting the whole construct that we had foisted upon them. That Egypt regressed back into military patriarchy – and the subsequent and utterly predictable Western acqiescence in this – after a brief period of elected Muslim Brotherhood government, does not change this equation. While the revolutions largely stayed within national boundaries – at least at the start – the borders began to lose their meaning.

Lines in the sand: The Sykes-Picot Plan, 1916

Hamas in Gaza and the Brotherhood became one, the Sinai-Gaza frontier began to crumble. Then the collapse of Libya rendered Gaddafi’s former borders open – and thus non-existent. His weapons – including chemical shells – were sold to rebels in Egypt and Syria. Tunisia, which is now supposed to be the darling of our Western hearts for its adhesion to “democracy”, is now in danger of implosion because its own borders with Libya and Algeria are open to arms transhipments to Islamist groups. Isis’s grasp of these frontierless entities means that its own transnational existence is assured, from Fallujah in Iraq to the edge of Syrian Aleppo, from Nigeria to Niger and Chad.

It can thus degrade the economy of each country it moves through, blowing up a Russian airliner leaving Sharm el-Sheikh, attacking the Bardo museum in Tunis or the beaches of Sousse. There was a time – when Islamists attacked the Jewish synagogue on Djerba island in Tunisia in 2002, for example, killing 19 people – when tourism could continue. But that was when Libya still existed. In those days, Ben Ali’s security police were able to control the internal security of Tunisia; the army was left weak so that it could not stage a coup. So today, of course, the near-impotent army of Tunisia cannot defend its frontiers.

Isis’s understanding of this new phenomenon preceded our own. But Isis’s realisation that frontiers were essentially defenceless in the modern age coincided with the popular Arab disillusion with their own invented nations. Most of the millions of Syrian and Afghan refugees who have flooded into Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan and then north into Europe do not intend to return – ever – to states that have failed them as surely as they no longer – in the minds of the refugees – exist. These are not “failed states” so much as imaginary nations that no longer have any purpose.

I only began to understand this when, back in July, covering the Greek economic crisis, I travelled to the Greek-Macedonian border with Médecins Sans Frontières. This was long before the story of Arab refugees entering Europe had seized the attention of the EU or the media, although the Mediterranean drownings had long been a regular tragedy on television screens. Aylan Kurdi, the little boy who would be washed up on a Turkish beach, still had another two months to live. But in the fields along the Macedonian border were thousands of Syrians and Afghans. They were coming in their hundreds through the cornfields, an army of tramping paupers who might have been fleeing the Hundred Years War, women with their feet burned by exploded gas cookers, men with bruises over their bodies from the blows of frontier guards. Two of them I even knew, brothers from Aleppo whom I had met two years earlier in Syria. And when they spoke, I suddenly realised they were talking of Syria in the past tense. They talked about “back there” and “what was home”. They didn’t believe in Syria any more. They didn’t believe in frontiers.

Far more important for the West, they clearly didn’t believe in our frontiers either. They just walked across European frontiers with the same indifference as they crossed from Syria to Turkey or Lebanon. We, the creators of the Middle East’s borders, found that our own historically created national borders also had no meaning to these people. They wanted to go to Germany or Sweden and intended to walk there, however many policemen were sent to beat them or smother them with tear gas in a vain attempt to guard the national sovereignty of the frontiers of the EU.

Our own shock – indeed, our indignation – that our own precious borders were not respected by these largely Muslim armies of the poor was in sharp contrast to our own blithe non-observance of Arab frontiers. Saddam was among the first to show his own detestation of such lines in the sand. He cared nothing about international law when he invaded Iran in 1980 – with intelligence help from the Americans – or Kuwait in 1990, when he tore up the old frontier of the emirate and claimed it as an Iraqi province. But the West has now launched so many air strikes across the Middle East’s borders since the 1991 liberation of Kuwait that we scarcely need to search for precedents now that Arab air forces are regularly criss-crossing the Middle East’s national boundaries – along with our own fighter-bombers.

Quite apart from our mournful Afghan adventure and our utterly illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq, our aircraft have been bombing Libya, Iraq and Syria along with the aircraft of various local pseudo-democracies for so long that this state of affairs has become routine, almost normal, scarcely worthy of a front-page headline. The Saudis are bombing Iraq and Syria and Yemen. The Jordanians are bombing Syria. The Emiratis are bombing Yemen. And now the French are bombing the Syrian city of Raqqa even more than they bombed the Syrian city of Raqqa two months ago – when President François Hollande did not tell us that France was “at war”. The point, of course, is that we had grown so used to attacking Arab lands – France had become so inured to sending its soldiers and air crews to Africa and the Middle East to shoot and bomb those whom it regarded as its enemies – that only when Muslims began attacking our capital cities did we suddenly announce that we were “at war”.

A bulldozer cuts through a sand rampart at the Syrian border in the early Isis video (AFP)

There were no code reds or code oranges in Arab capitals. They existed in a permanent state of code red, their people cringing beneath “emergency laws” imposed by dictators supported by the West, legislation even more iniquitous than those our European political masters now wish to impose on us. Of course, since the Iraqi catastrophe, we like to use local militia forces to do the dying for us. So the Kurds become our foot soldiers against Isis, or the Iraqi Shia militias or the Iranians or – though we must not admit this – the Syrian army and the Lebanese Hezbollah.

Isis has weirdly replicated this gruesome policy. However many atrocities in Europe have been committed by men who have supposedly been “radicalised” in Syria, the killers have usually been local proxies; British Muslims in the UK, French Muslims who were citizens of France or residents of Belgium. The significance of this – that Isis clearly intends to provoke a civil war within Europe, especially between France’s huge Algerian-origin Muslims and the police and political elite of France – has been spoken of in whispers. Indeed, much of the media coverage of the Paris massacres has often avoided the very word Muslim.

Just as any incomprehension we express about the borderless world into which the Arabs think they are moving carries no reference to that most borderless of Middle East nations, Israel. Arthur Balfour’s declaration, which gave the UK’s support to a Jewish homeland in Palestine during the same war that Mr Sykes and M. Georges-Picot were plotting to divide up the Arab world, anticipated new frontiers within Palestine itself, borders which, to this day, are largely undefined. Israel’s internationally recognised frontiers are ignored by the Israeli government itself because it will not even say where its eastern border lies. Is it along the old Jerusalem frontline? Is it along the grotesque Israeli wall that has effectively stolen West Bank Palestinian land? Does the state of Israel include every Jewish colony built on land thieved from the Palestinians of the West Bank? Or does it run along the entire length of the Jordan river, thus destroying any Palestinian state that might ever exist? When Israelis ask their critics to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, they should be requested to state which particular Israel they are talking about: the legal one recognised by the UN – or “Israel proper” as we call it – or an Israel that includes the entire West Bank, or “Israel improper” as we assuredly do not call it?

Our support for an Israel that has not told us the location of its eastern border runs logically alongside our own refusal to recognise – unless it suits us – the frontiers of the Arab world. It is, after all, we who are allowed to draw “lines in the sand” or “red lines”. It is we Europeans who decide where civilisations begin and end. It is the Prime Minister of Hungary who decides exactly where he will draw up his forces to defend “Christian civilisation”. It is we Westerners who have the moral probity to decide whether national sovereignty in the Middle East should be obeyed or abused.

But when the Arabs themselves decide to dispense with the whole fandango and seek their future in “our” lands rather than “their” lands, this policy breaks down. Indeed, it is extraordinary how easily we forget that the greatest frontier-breaker of modern times was himself a European, who wanted to destroy the Jews of Europe but who might well – given his racist remark about Muslims in Mein Kampf – have continued his holocaust to include the Arabs. We even have the nerve to call the murderers of Paris “fascislamists”, as the great French pseudo-philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy has just written in the press. Nazis Isis undoubtedly are – but the moment we utilise the word “Islam” in this context, we are painting the swastika across the Middle East. Levy demands more assistance to “our Kurdish allies” because the alternative is that “no boots on their ground means more blood on ours”.

But that’s what George W Bush and Tony Blair told us before marching into the graveyard of Iraq in 2003. We are always declaring ourselves “at war”. We are told to be merciless. We must invade “their” territory to stop them invading ours. But the days are long gone when we can have foreign adventures and expect to be safe at home. New York, Washington, Madrid, London, Paris all tell us that. Perhaps if we spoke more of “justice” – courts, legal process for killers, however morally repugnant they may be, sentences, prisons, redemption for those who may retrieve their lost souls from the Isis midden – we would be a little safer in our sceptered continent. There should be justice not just for ourselves or our enemies, but for the peoples of the Middle East who have suffered this past century from the theatre of dictatorships and cardboard institutions we created for them – and which have helped Isis to thrive.

By Robert Fisk, published in The Independent, Thursday 19 November 2015

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US Intelligence Is More Privatized Than Ever Before

Despite hacks, leaks, and system failures, for-profit contractors are still getting lucrative intelligence contracts.

By

Tim Shorrock

The Nation, 16.09.15

Almost 14 years to the day after the 9/11 terrorist attacks drove intelligence spending into the stratosphere, two of the largest business associations in the spying industry held a “summit” meeting to discuss the current state of national security. Two realities were immediately apparent.

First, US intelligence is more privatized than ever before, with for-profit corporations operating as an equal partner with the surveillance state at nearly every level. The situation was neatly summarized by James Clapper, the director of the Office of National Intelligence (ODNI) in his keynote address.

“If you can’t get a job in the IC, then sign on with one of our contractors,” he told the crowd of 500 people, 75 percent of whom came from the private sector. “Industry is absolutely crucial to our continued viability and success.” It was the first time in my memory I had heard a high-ranking official be so blatant about the stunning degree of contracting in US intelligence that I first exposed in 2007.

In an interesting twist, the former Air Force general even urged the 16 agencies he oversees to expand the revolving door as an incentive for a younger generation of people who “desire mobility” along with their government jobs “We must facilitate their ability to join the community, go to industry, get refreshed technologically, and then come back,” Clapper said. As most people in the room knew, this was the exact path he followed before jumping from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to take his job as President Obama’s intelligence chief.

But there was a second, more troubling theme that ran through the meeting. Americans are now more sensitive than ever before to the risks associated with contractors, from Edward Snowden’s leaking of NSA secrets to the recent hacking of a government database of 21 million federal workers that was supposedly protected by cybersecurity contractors.

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Yet despite these failures, agencies and their congressional allies have ended any pretense of slowing contractor growth or increasing the government’s oversight—steps that were briefly considered when Snowden first revealed himself as a contractor in 2013. Instead, they have opted for self-policing through an internal security system that would make J. Edgar Hoover blush with shame.

Take Booz Allen Hamilton, which was Snowden’s employer when he leaked his trove of NSA documents to the US and British media. In response to Snowden and the penetrations of its system by the hacker group Anonymous a few years ago, it has undergone a “metamorphosis of security,” declared Art Davis, the company’s Director of Corporate Security.

He said Booz has doubled its spending on security by adopting a “full-scale counterintelligence program” focused on 2,500 employees with “access to the kingdom”—a reference to the highly classified documents that Snowden and Booz’s privatized army routinely handled. Such employees are subject to “continuous evaluation,” Davis said. “If they don’t pass, they leave their jobs.”

The meeting was organized by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) and the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA). It offered a rare, albeit sketchy, look into the thinking at the senior levels of the key institutions of US intelligence, including the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, and NGA. It was sponsored by many of the powerful players in the intelligence industry, including CACI, SAIC, IBM, Amazon, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin, as well as a dozen smaller, less-known companies just getting started in the business.

The theme and political tone of the conference reinforced my own understanding of INSA as the representative of an intelligence “ruling class” that, due to its blending of national security and capitalism, has gained far more power than the military industrial complex of the Cold War. In a recent feature in these pages, I explained what I meant by “ruling class.”

These are the people—often referred to as “intelligence professionals”—who do the actual analytical and targeting work of the NSA and other agencies in America’s secret government. Over the last 15 years, thousands of former high-ranking intelligence officials and operatives have left their government posts and taken up senior positions at military contractors, consultancies, law firms, and private-equity firms. In their new jobs, they replicate what they did in government—often for the same agencies they left. But this time, their mission is strictly for-profit.…

Members of this dual public/private class rub shoulders at places like INSA, where they often meet behind closed doors to discuss classified programs. And even while making millions of dollars through their contracting and consulting gigs, these former officials advise the same agencies they profit from.

Not long after my piece was published, Joseph DeTrani, INSA’s president and a former top CIA analyst on North Korea, invited me to his offices in Arlington, Virginia, for an interview. During our conversation, he described INSA as primarily a networking organization that tries to be “as objective as we can” by producing monographs for both the IC and the public. Its primary purpose, he explained, is to provide “thought leadership” on intelligence issues by “drilling down” on complicated issues relevant to its 160 members. INSA “is not a stooge for the DNI or big industries,” he insisted.

He made some fair points. DeTrani, who has visited North Korea at least twice on diplomatic missions for the Obama administration, certainly holds some views that are at odds with some of his colleagues within US intelligence. I would also venture that INSA and AFCEA deserve credit for holding public discussions like this summit (where DeTrani presided over the plenary sessions and delivered remarks at the beginning of each day).

But at the conference itself, it was impossible to avoid the close embrace of contractors and their spy masters, the easy rapport created by years of swapping jobs between the public and private sectors, and the exclusion of skeptical or critical voices from the discussions. Nobody seemed to notice, for example, that DeTrani’s co-chair, Maureen Baginski, was NSA’s director of signals intelligence at the time of 9/11.

As the third person in the NSA hierarchy under Michael Hayden, she championed the disastrous Trailblazer data-mining program that wasted $7 billion and failed to detect conversations that could have signaled a pending attack. A debate between herself and one or more of the five whistle-blowers who exposed the Trailblazer fiasco to the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General (currently the source of a major lawsuit) would have provided the audience with actual policy and moral choices.

There were some interesting moments, of course. When Clapper was asked at one point how Snowden’s NSA leaks had affected intelligence operations, he acknowledged that the exposure of NSA’s massive spying had “forced needed transparency” of intelligence operations. But at the same time, he argued that the leaks had caused “untold damage to foreign collection” efforts and “huge damage to our capabilities.” No surprises there.

Then there was a scowling John Brennan, director of the CIA, refusing to answer questions about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails from an over-eager moderator, Catherine Herridge, the chief intelligence correspondent for the Fox News Channel. Another highlight came when FBI Director Comey blasted critics of his efforts to prevent Apple and other tech companies from incorporating advanced encryption into their devices.

“The American people should be skeptical” of the government, he argued. “But when we try to explain the problem with universal encryption, we’re met with venom.” He didn’t specify anybody in particular, but his message was clear: please shut up and let us decide.

Exchanges like this were not the norm, however: The practical purpose of the summit was to smooth ties between business and government—and decidedly not to question the tenets of official policy.

In one of the sessions, Corin Stone, the NSA’s executive director, said her agency was here because “industry is moving at a heightened speed—if we don’t reach out, we’ll be left in the dust.” She likened its presence to the Pentagon’s recent forays into Silicon Valley, where NSA is “engaging lots of companies out there” to ensure that small businesses are brought into the system. Downstairs in the exhibition area, an NSA representative said he’d been “busy all day” talking with the dozens of companies who’d shown up (but he didn’t seem very prepared; all he had for handouts were blank memos embossed with the NSA logo).

At the same time, I couldn’t help but notice that nearly every speaker has gone through the spinning door I described in The Nation. Take the panel about security and counterintelligence. It was chaired by Charles Allen, a legendary officer from the CIA who ran the IC’s collection system when George Tenet was director. He left government in 2009 to become a principal of the Chertoff Group, the consulting company founded by Michael Chertoff, the former Homeland Security secretary, and the firm that Michael Hayden now calls home.

Davis, the Booz executive who described his company’s security plan at the panel, came to his position in 2012 after a career as head of security at the Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Agency, which runs the Pentagon’s secret satellite programs. Douglas Thomas, Lockheed Martin’s director of counterintelligence operations and corporate investigations, is another Air Force veteran who served in the Bush administration as deputy director of counterintelligence for the White House (he disclosed that Lockheed employs 65,000 people with security clearances, which would make it one of the largest intelligence agencies in the world).

After Thomas described his company’s extensive internal security program, William Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center at the ODNI, noted that he has met with Thomas “a lot” about these issues. “We need to look to the private sector for ideas and innovations,” he said. “That starts with folks like [Thomas and Davis], who’ve left the square of government to go to the private sector.”

Carrie Wibben, the director of security policy for the Pentagon’s undersecretary for intelligence, noted that she had reviewed the Booz insider threat plan the day before. “People shouldn’t see this as big brother,” she assured the room, “but necessary for the world we live in.” Later, she added: “We need industry more than ever to get us where we want to go.” Davis responded in kind: “We are working together as one to make this country safer and better.” It was almost a love fest.

The ardor was apparent in one plan that got much play at the conference—a proposal by Clapper’s ODNI to expand “joint duty tours” beyond government to include industry. For years, intelligence officers have sharpened their skills by deploying from, say, the CIA to the NSA for a period of time, and then returning with a fresh understanding of how signals intelligence works; while at the sister agency, they retain their job title and get credit for federal pensions and other benefits. Now the ODNI is working on a plan to allow such transfers to a contractor.

Ellen McCarthy, the ODNI’s director for intelligence community activities, said the whole thing was Clapper’s idea. A former planning director for the imagery-focused NGA, McCarthy noted that her old agency currently has a top officer assigned to work temporarily at the contractor-funded United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. And she was proud that ODNI’s deputy director was hired from In-Q-Tel, the CIA venture capital fund that invests in companies creating technologies that might be useful for intelligence.

“We’ve realized that we’ve got to get our people out,” she said. “There’s nothing like seeing it from the other side,” added Suzanne White, the chief of staff for the Defense Intelligence Agency, whose workforce is about 30 percent contracted. (Meanwhile, I’m thinking, how about a stint at the ACLU?)

The big challenge for both government and industry seems to be getting young people excited about the possibilities in this privatized environment. Joan Dempsey, a Booz Allen executive who got her start listening to the conversations of Soviet bomber pilots from an NSA base in northern Japan, likened the search for talent to a counterinsurgency war.

“How do we win the hearts and minds of entry-level folks?” she asked, opening a panel titled “A public-private sector dialogue.” That’s difficult in part because of the vast use by millennials of cellphones and other electronic devices, replied the NSA’s Stone. “We’ve got to emphasize the mission,” she said. “We can work on things you can’t do anywhere else, and is usually illegal. But it’s legal here.” Plus “we can put you on the ground with the warfighter in Afghanistan. That’s something you won’t find anywhere else.” ODNI’s McCarthy was right there with her: “The mission is so incredibly cool about what we do.”

Cool, that is, if you’re into mass, privatized surveillance—and you’re ready to go to war. “I just got back from East Africa,” recalled Clapper. “It’s eye-watering to see what our intelligence people are doing there.” Foreign deployments, he said, are at their highest levels “since 9/11, and that’s brought a profound psychological change to the Intelligence Community. We’ve had thousands deployed to war zones multiple times.”

But nobody mentioned that at least six of them were killed in Afghanistan this year alone—three by a Taliban infiltrator at an Air Force base, and three by a suicide bomb in downtown Kabul. That may be the best indication that the line dividing government and business is thinner than ever.

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US Special Forces Are Operating in More Countries Than You Can Imagine

What do you know about the special forces carrying out a secret war in more than half the nations on the planet?

Nick Turse

January 20, 2015

A US Special Forces trainer supervises a military assault drill in Sudan in 2013. (Reuters/Andreea Campeanu)

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

In the dead of night, they swept in aboard V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. Landing in a remote region of one of the most volatile countries on the planet, they raided a village and soon found themselves in a life-or-death firefight. It was the second time in two weeks that elite U.S. Navy SEALs had attempted to rescue American photojournalist Luke Somers. And it was the second time they failed.

On December 6, 2014, approximately 36 of America’s top commandos, heavily armed, operating with intelligence from satellites, drones, and high-tech eavesdropping, outfitted with night vision goggles, and backed up by elite Yemeni troops, went toe-to-toe with about six militants from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. When it was over, Somers was dead, along with Pierre Korkie, a South African teacher due to be set free the next day. Eight civilians were also killed by the commandos, according to local reports. Most of the militants escaped.

That blood-soaked episode was, depending on your vantage point, an ignominious end to a year that saw U.S. Special Operations forces deployed at near record levels, or an inauspicious beginning to a new year already on track to reach similar heights, if not exceed them.

During the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2014, U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF) deployed to 133 countries—roughly 70% of the nations on the planet—according to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bockholt, a public affairs officer with U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM). This capped a three-year span in which the country’s most elite forces were active in more than 150 different countries around the world, conducting missions ranging from kill/capture night raids to training exercises. And this year could be a record-breaker. Only a day before the failed raid that ended Luke Somers life—just 66 days into fiscal 2015—America’s most elite troops had already set foot in 105 nations, approximately 80% of 2014’s total.

Despite its massive scale and scope, this secret global war across much of the planet is unknown to most Americans. Unlike the December debacle in Yemen, the vast majority of special ops missions remain completely in the shadows, hidden from external oversight or press scrutiny. In fact, aside from modest amounts of information disclosed through highly-selective coverage by military media, official White House leaks, SEALs with something to sell, and a few cherry-picked journalists reporting on cherry-picked opportunities, much of what America’s special operators do is never subjected to meaningful examination, which only increases the chances of unforeseen blowback and catastrophic consequences.

The Golden Age

“The command is at its absolute zenith. And it is indeed a golden age for special operations.” Those were the words of Army General Joseph Votel III, a West Point graduate and Army Ranger, as he assumed command of SOCOM last August.

His rhetoric may have been high-flown, but it wasn’t hyperbole. Since September 11, 2001, U.S. Special Operations forces have grown in every conceivable way, including their numbers, their budget, their clout in Washington, and their place in the country’s popular imagination. The command has, for example, more than doubled its personnel from about 33,000 in 2001 to nearly 70,000 today, including a jump of roughly 8,000 during the three-year tenure of recently retired SOCOM chief Admiral William McRaven.

Those numbers, impressive as they are, don’t give a full sense of the nature of the expansion and growing global reach of America’s most elite forces in these years. For that, a rundown of the acronym-ridden structure of the ever-expanding Special Operations Command is in order. The list may be mind-numbing, but there is no other way to fully grasp its scope.

The lion’s share of SOCOM’s troops are Rangers, Green Berets, and other soldiers from the Army, followed by Air Force air commandos, SEALs, Special Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewmen and support personnel from the Navy, as well as a smaller contingent of Marines. But you only get a sense of the expansiveness of the command when you consider the full range of “sub-unified commands” that these special ops troops are divided among: the self-explanatory SOCAFRICA; SOCEUR, the European contingent; SOCKOR, which is devoted strictly to Korea; SOCPAC, which covers the rest of the Asia-Pacific region; SOCSOUTH, which conducts missions in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean; SOCCENT, the sub-unified command of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in the Middle East; SOCNORTH, which is devoted to “homeland defense”; and the globe-trotting Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC—a clandestine sub-command (formerly headed by McRaven and then Votel) made up of personnel from each service branch, including SEALs, Air Force special tactics airmen, and the Army’s Delta Force, that specializes in tracking and killing suspected terrorists.

And don’t think that’s the end of it, either. As a result of McRaven’s push to create “a Global SOF network of like-minded interagency allies and partners,” Special Operations liaison officers, or SOLOs, are now embedded in 14 key U.S. embassies to assist in advising the special forces of various allied nations. Already operating in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, El Salvador, France, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Poland, Peru, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, the SOLO program is poised, according to Votel, to expand to 40 countries by 2019. The command, and especially JSOC, has also forged close ties with the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Security Agency, among others.

Shadow Ops

Special Operations Command’s global reach extends further still, with smaller, more agile elements operating in the shadows from bases in the United States to remote parts of Southeast Asia, from Middle Eastern outposts to austere African camps. Since 2002, SOCOM has also been authorized to create its own Joint Task Forces, a prerogative normally limited to larger combatant commands like CENTCOM. Take, for instance, Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines (JSOTF-P) which, at its peak, had roughly 600 U.S. personnel supporting counterterrorist operations by Filipino allies against insurgent groups like Abu Sayyaf. After more than a decade spent battling that group, its numbers have been diminished, but it continues to be active, while violence in the region remains virtually unaltered.

A phase-out of the task force was actually announced in June 2014. “JSOTF-P will deactivate and the named operation OEF-P [Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines] will conclude in Fiscal Year 2015,” Votel told the Senate Armed Services Committee the next month. “A smaller number of U.S. military personnel operating as part of a PACOM [U.S. Pacific Command] Augmentation Team will continue to improve the abilities of the PSF [Philippine Special Forces] to conduct their CT [counterterrorism] missions…” Months later, however, Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines remained up and running. “JSOTF-P is still active although the number of personnel assigned has been reduced,” Army spokesperson Kari McEwen told reporter Joseph Trevithick of War Is Boring.

Another unit, Special Operations Joint Task Force-Bragg, remained in the shadows for years before its first official mention by the Pentagon in early 2014. Its role, according to SOCOM’s Bockholt, is to “train and equip U.S. service members preparing for deployment to Afghanistan to support Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan.” That latter force, in turn, spent more than a decade conducting covert or “black” ops “to prevent insurgent activities from threatening the authority and sovereignty of” the Afghan government. This meant night raids and kill/capture missions—often in concert with elite Afghan forces—that led to the deaths of unknown numbers of combatants and civilians. In response to popular outrage against the raids, Afghan President Hamid Karzai largely banned them in 2013.

U.S. Special Operations forces were to move into a support role in 2014, letting elite Afghan troops take charge. “We’re trying to let them run the show,» Colonel Patrick Roberson of the Afghanistan task force told USA Today. But according to LaDonna Davis, a spokesperson with the task force, America’s special operators were still leading missions last year. The force refuses to say how many missions were led by Americans or even how many operations its commandos were involved in, though Afghan special operations forces reportedly carried out as many as 150 missions each month in 2014. “I will not be able to discuss the specific number of operations that have taken place,” Major Loren Bymer of Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan told TomDispatch. “However, Afghans currently lead 96% of special operations and we continue to train, advise, and assist our partners to ensure their success.”

And lest you think that that’s where the special forces organizational chart ends, Special Operations Joint Task Force-Afghanistan has five Special Operations Advisory Groups “focused on mentoring and advising our ASSF [Afghan Special Security Force] partners,” according to Votel. “In order to ensure our ASSF partners continue to take the fight to our enemies, U.S. SOF must be able to continue to do some advising at the tactical level post-2014 with select units in select locations,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. Indeed, last November, Karzai’s successor Ashraf Ghani quietly lifted the night raid ban, opening the door once again to missions with U.S. advisors in 2015.

There will, however, be fewer U.S. special ops troops available for tactical missions. According to then Rear-, now Vice-Admiral Sean Pybus, SOCOM’s Deputy Commander, about half the SEAL platoons deployed in Afghanistan were, by the end of last month, to be withdrawn and redeployed to support “the pivot in Asia, or work the Mediterranean, or the Gulf of Guinea, or into the Persian Gulf.” Still, Colonel Christopher Riga, commander of the 7th Special Forces Group, whose troops served with the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan near Kandahar last year, vowed to soldier on. “There’s a lot of fighting that is still going on in Afghanistan that is going to continue,” he said at an awards ceremony late last year. “We’re still going to continue to kill the enemy, until we are told to leave.”

Add to those task forces the Special Operations Command Forward (SOC FWD) elements, small teams which, according to the military, “shape and coordinate special operations forces security cooperation and engagement in support of theater special operations command, geographic combatant command, and country team goals and objectives.” SOCOM declined to confirm the existence of SOC FWDs, even though there has been ample official evidence on the subject and so it would not provide a count of how many teams are currently deployed across the world. But those that are known are clustered in favored black ops stomping grounds, including SOC FWD Pakistan, SOC FWD Yemen, and SOC FWD Lebanon, as well as SOC FWD East Africa, SOC FWD Central Africa, and SOC FWD West Africa.

Africa has, in fact, become a prime locale for shadowy covert missions by America’s special operators. «This particular unit has done impressive things. Whether it’s across Europe or Africa taking on a variety of contingencies, you are all contributing in a very significant way,» SOCOM’s commander, General Votel, told members of the 352nd Special Operations Group at their base in England last fall.

The Air Commandos are hardly alone in their exploits on that continent. Over the last years, for example, SEALs carried out a successful hostage rescue mission in Somalia and a kidnap raid there that went awry. In Libya, Delta Force commandos successfully captured an al-Qaeda militant in an early morning raid, while SEALs commandeered an oil tanker with cargo from Libya that the weak U.S.-backed government there considered stolen. Additionally, SEALs conducted a failed evacuation mission in South Sudan in which its members were wounded when the aircraft in which they were flying was hit by small arms fire. Meanwhile, an elite quick-response force known as Naval Special Warfare Unit 10 (NSWU-10) has been engaged with “strategic countries” such as Uganda, Somalia, and Nigeria.

A clandestine Special Ops training effort in Libya imploded when militia or “terrorist” forces twice raided its camp, guarded by the Libyan military, and looted large quantities of high-tech American equipment, hundreds of weapons—including Glock pistols, and M4 rifles—as well as night vision devices and specialized lasers that can only be seen with such equipment. As a result, the mission was scuttled and the camp was abandoned. It was then reportedly taken over by a militia.

In February of last year, elite troops traveled to Niger for three weeks of military drills as part of Flintlock 2014, an annual Special Ops counterterrorism exercise that brought together the forces of the host nation, Canada, Chad, France, Mauritania, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Senegal, the United Kingdom, and Burkina Faso. Several months later, an officer from Burkina Faso, who received counterterrorism training in the U.S. under the auspices of SOCOM’s Joint Special Operations University in 2012, seized power in a coup. Special Ops forces, however, remained undaunted. Late last year, for example, under the auspices of SOC FWD West Africa, members of 5th Battalion, 19th Special Forces Group, partnered with elite Moroccan troops for training at a base outside of Marrakech.

A World of Opportunities

Deployments to African nations have, however, been just a part of the rapid growth of the Special Operations Command’s overseas reach. In the waning days of the Bush presidency, under then-SOCOM chief Admiral Eric Olson, Special Operations forces were reportedly deployed in about 60 countries around the world. By 2010, that number had swelled to 75, according to Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post. In 2011, SOCOM spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told TomDispatch that the total would reach 120 by the end of the year. With Admiral William McRaven in charge in 2013, then-Major Robert Bockholt told TomDispatch that the number had jumped to 134. Under the command of McRaven and Votel in 2014, according to Bockholt, the total slipped ever-so-slightly to 133. Outgoing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel noted, however, that under McRaven’s command—which lasted from August 2011 to August 2014—special ops forces deployed to more than 150 different countries. “In fact, SOCOM and the entire U.S. military are more engaged internationally than ever before—in more places and with a wider variety of missions,” he said in an August 2014 speech.

He wasn’t kidding. Just over two months into fiscal 2015, the number of countries with Special Ops deployments has already clocked in at 105, according to Bockholt.

SOCOM refused to comment on the nature of its missions or the benefits of operating in so many nations. The command would not even name a single country where U.S. special operations forces deployed in the last three years. A glance at just some of the operations, exercises, and activities that have come to light, however, paints a picture of a globetrotting command in constant churn with alliances in every corner of the planet.

In January and February, for example, members of the 7th Special Forces Group and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment conducted a month-long Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) with forces from Trinidad and Tobago, while troops from the 353rd Special Operations Group joined members of the Royal Thai Air Force for Exercise Teak Torch in Udon Thani, Thailand. In February and March, Green Berets from the 20th Special Forces Group trained with elite troops in the Dominican Republic as part of a JCET.

In March, members of Marine Special Operations Command and Naval Special Warfare Unit 1 took part in maneuvers aboard the guided-missile cruiser USS Cowpens as part of Multi-Sail 2014, an annual exercise designed to support “security and stability in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region.” That same month, elite soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines took part in a training exercise code-named Fused Response with members of the Belizean military. “Exercises like this build rapport and bonds between U.S. forces and Belize,” said Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Heber Toro of Special Operations Command South afterward.

In April, soldiers from the 7th Special Forces Group joined with Honduran airborne troops for jump training—parachuting over that country’s Soto Cano Air Base. Soldiers from that same unit, serving with the Afghanistan task force, also carried out shadowy ops in the southern part of that country in the spring of 2014. In June, members of the 19th Special Forces Group carried out a JCET in Albania, while operators from Delta Force took part in the mission that secured the release of Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl in Afghanistan. That same month, Delta Force commandos helped kidnap Ahmed Abu Khattala, a suspected “ringleader” in the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, while Green Berets deployed to Iraq as advisors in the fight against the Islamic State.

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In June and July, 26 members of the 522nd Special Operations Squadron carried out a 28,000-mile, four-week, five-continent mission which took them to Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Japan, among other nations, to escort three “single-engine [Air Force Special Operations Command] aircraft to a destination in the Pacific Area of Responsibility.” In July, U.S. Special Operations forces traveled to Tolemaida, Colombia, to compete against elite troops from 16 other nations—in events like sniper stalking, shooting, and an obstacle course race—at the annual Fuerzas Comando competition.

In August, soldiers from the 20th Special Forces Group conducted a JCET with elite units from Suriname. “We’ve made a lot of progress together in a month. If we ever have to operate together in the future, we know we’ve made partners and friends we can depend upon,” said a senior noncommissioned officer from that unit. In Iraq that month, Green Berets conducted a reconnaissance mission on Mount Sinjar as part an effort to protect ethnic Yazidis from Islamic State militants, while Delta Force commandos raided an oil refinery in northern Syria in a bid to save American journalist James Foley and other hostages held by the same group. That mission was a bust and Foley was brutally executed shortly thereafter.

In September, about 1,200 U.S. special operators and support personnel joined with elite troops from the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Finland, Great Britain, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Slovenia for Jackal Stone, a training exercise that focused on everything from close quarters combat and sniper tactics to small boat operations and hostage rescue missions. In September and October, Rangers from the 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment deployed to South Korea to practice small unit tactics like clearing trenches and knocking out bunkers. During October, Air Force air commandos also conducted simulated hostage rescue missions at the Stanford Training Area near Thetford, England. Meanwhile, in international waters south of Cyprus, Navy SEALs commandeered that tanker full of oil loaded at a rebel-held port in Libya. In November, U.S. commandos conducted a raid in Yemen that freed eight foreign hostages. The next month, SEALs carried out the blood-soaked mission that left two hostages, including Luke Somers, and eight civilians dead. And these, of course, are only some of the missions that managed to make it into the news or in some other way onto the record.

Everywhere They Want to Be

To America’s black ops chiefs, the globe is as unstable as it is interconnected. “I guarantee you what happens in Latin America affects what happens in West Africa, which affects what happens in Southern Europe, which affects what happens in Southwest Asia,” McRaven told last year’s Geolnt, an annual gathering of surveillance-industry executives and military personnel. Their solution to interlocked instability? More missions in more nations—in more than three-quarters of the world’s countries, in fact—during McRaven’s tenure. And the stage appears set for yet more of the same in the years ahead. «We want to be everywhere,” said Votel at Geolnt. His forces are already well on their way in 2015.

“Our nation has very high expectations of SOF,” he told special operators in England last fall. “They look to us to do the very hard missions in very difficult conditions.” The nature and whereabouts of most of those “hard missions,” however, remain unknown to Americans. And Votel apparently isn’t interested in shedding light on them. “Sorry, but no,” was SOCOM’s response to TomDispatch’s request for an interview with the special ops chief about current and future operations. In fact, the command refused to make any personnel available for a discussion of what it’s doing in America’s name and with taxpayer dollars. It’s not hard to guess why.

Votel now sits atop one of the major success stories of a post-9/11 military that has been mired in winless wars, intervention blowback, rampant criminal activity, repeated leaks of embarrassing secrets, and all manner of shocking scandals. Through a deft combination of bravado and secrecy, well-placed leaks, adroit marketing and public relations efforts, the skillful cultivation of a superman mystique (with a dollop of tortured fragility on the side), and one extremely popular, high-profile, targeted killing, Special Operations forces have become the darlings of American popular culture, while the command has been a consistent winner in Washington’s bare-knuckled budget battles.

This is particularly striking given what’s actually occurred in the field: in Africa, the arming and outfitting of militants and the training of a coup leader; in Iraq, America’s most elite forces were implicated in torture, the destruction of homes, and the killing and wounding of innocents; in Afghanistan, it was a similar story, with repeated reports of civilian deaths; while in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia it’s been more of the same. And this only scratches the surface of special ops miscues.

In 2001, before U.S. black ops forces began their massive, multi-front clandestine war against terrorism, there were 33,000 members of Special Operations Command and about 1,800 members of the elite of the elite, the Joint Special Operations Command. There were then also 23 terrorist groups—from Hamas to the Real Irish Republican Army—as recognized by the State Department, including al-Qaeda, whose membership was estimated at anywhere from 200 to 1,000. That group was primarily based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, although small cells had operated in numerous countries including Germany and the United States.

After more than a decade of secret wars, massive surveillance, untold numbers of night raids, detentions, and assassinations, not to mention billionsupon billions of dollars spent, the results speak for themselves. SOCOM has more than doubled in size and the secretive JSOC may be almost as large as SOCOM was in 2001. Since September of that year, 36 new terror groups have sprung up, including multiple al-Qaeda franchises, offshoots, and allies. Today, these groups still operate in Afghanistan and Pakistan—there are now11 recognized al-Qaeda affiliates in the latter nation, five in the former—as well as in Mali and Tunisia, Libya and Morocco, Nigeria and Somalia, Lebanon and Yemen, among other countries. One offshoot was born of the American invasion of Iraq, was nurtured in a U.S. prison camp, and, now known as the Islamic State, controls a wide swath of that country and neighboring Syria, a proto-caliphate in the heart of the Middle East that was only the stuff of jihadi dreams back in 2001. That group, alone, has an estimated strength of around 30,000 and managed to take over a huge swath of territory, including Iraq’s second largest city, despite being relentlessly targeted in its infancy by JSOC.

“We need to continue to synchronize the deployment of SOF throughout the globe,” says Votel. “We all need to be synched up, coordinated, and prepared throughout the command.” Left out of sync are the American people who have consistently been kept in the dark about what America’s special operators are doing and where they’re doing it, not to mention the checkered results of, and blowback from, what they’ve done. But if history is any guide, the black ops blackout will help ensure that this continues to be a “golden age” for U.S. Special Operations Command.

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Who is responsible for the Pakistan school massacre?

Nafeez Ahmed – 19 DECEMBER 2014

Depends who you ask.

The Pakistan Taliban (TTP), the breakaway group that is spearheading an insurgency against the Pakistani state, has proudly admitted to having executed the horrifying atrocity that took the lives of 148 innocents, including over 130 children.

US officials have been quick to point the finger at Pakistan, noting the role of the notorious ‘S Wing’ of state military intelligence, the ISI, in covertly sponsoring various Taliban factions inside Afghanistan.

And Prime Minister Nawar Sharif, clearly feeling the pressure, has for the first time ever conceded the ISI’s duplicitous strategy and now vows that he will no longer distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Taliban, but will bravely fight them all “until the last terrorist is killed.”

Some in Pakistani diaspora communities in the west, however, have a different view. “Mossad did it,” I’ve heard from a surprising number of people. “To make Muslims look bad.” Others blame the CIA, or MI6, or both – indeed, all three.

This sort of pathetic, ignorant denialism is almost as bad as the pathetic official finger pointing.

The sad truth is that none of these actors are free of responsibility for the murky origins of the TTP.

The double game

It is, of course, a matter of record that the Pakistani ISI has secretly supported the Afghan Taliban for more than a decade, a matter I have tracked and documented since even before 9/11. Yet from the very inception of this policy, it has been pursued with tacit and selective US support.

In the run-up to 9/11, the idea was to use the Taliban as a proxy on behalf of two US energy companies, Unocal and Enron, to achieve sufficient stability to permit the construction of the Trans-Afghan pipeline project – the Pakistani ISI, was the chief conduit of US logistical, financial and military aid to the Taliban during this period.

Yet even after 9/11, despite US intelligence agencies being intimately familiar with ongoing Pakistani ISI support for the Afghan Taliban fighting NATO troops in the country, Pakistan has continued to receive billions of dollars of military aid in the name of counterterrorism.

Yet throughout all this US counter-terrorism assistance, the ISI’s support of the very factions NATO forces are fighting in Afghanistan has gone on, unimpeded. Two declassified US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reports dated two weeks after 9/11, found that al-Qaeda had been “able to expand under the safe sanctuary extended by Taliban following Pakistan directives” and ISI funding.

In 2006, a leaked US Ministry of Defence report showed that the British government was fully aware of how: “Indirectly Pakistan (through the ISI) has been supporting terrorism and extremism” – including being involved in the 2005 London bombings, and insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Confidential NATO reports and US intelligence assessments circulated to White House officials in 2008 further confirmed ongoing ISI support for Taliban insurgents, tracing the complicity to senior ISI officials including Pakistan’s head of military intelligence, in providing extensive military support to Taliban camps in Balochistan and the ‘Haqqani’ network leading the insurgency around Kabul. Despite these reports being circulated around the highest levels of the White House, senior Obama administration officials went to pains to persuade US Congress to extend military assistance to Pakistan for five years, with no need for assurances that ISI assistance to the Taliban had ended.

So it continued, with US support. In 2010, the massive batch of classified US military cablesreleased via Wikileaks documented how from 2004 to 2010, US military intelligence knew full well that the ISI was supporting a wide range of militant factions in Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan affiliated to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, even while receiving billions of dollars of US counterterrorism assistance. And a NATO intelligence report leaked in 2012 similarly showed that the ISI was directly sponsoring the Taliban, providing them safe havens, and even manipulating fighters and arresting only those believed to be uncooperative with ISI orders.

So if it is, indeed, accurate to accuse Pakistan of playing a «double game» in the ‘War on Terror’, what about the United States? The US Congressional Research Service last year pointed out that after 9/11, “the United States has viewed Pakistan as a key ally, especially in the context of counterterrorism and Afghan and regional stability. Pakistan has been among the leading recipients of US foreign assistance both historically and in recent years.”

This year, Pakistan received $1.2 billion in US economic and security aid. Next year, while the civilian portion of aid is being slashed over concerns about misuse of funds, the US will still provide a total of around $1 billion. The military portion of this will help the Pakistan military “to conduct counterinsurgency (COIN) and counterterrorism (CT) operations against militants and also encourage continued US-Pakistan military-to-military engagement.”

Calibrating violence

US military aid in the name of counterterrorism assistance has in other words directly supported the ISI even while it has covertly sponsored the insurgency in Afghanistan. Why?

In 2009, I obtained a confidential report commissioned by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which provided a shocking explanation for this seemingly contradictory policy. The report, authored by respected defence consultant Prof Ola Tunander who had previously contributed to a high-level Danish government inquiry into US covert operations during the Cold War, concluded that US strategy in AfPak is to “support both sides in the conflict” so as to “calibrate the level of violence,” ironically to prolong, not end, regional conflicts. This counterintuitive strategy, the report argued, appears to be motivated by a wider geopolitical objective of maintaining global support for US interventionism to maintain regional security. By fanning the flames of war in AfPak, US forces are able to “increase and decrease the military temperature and calibrate the level of violence” with a view to permanently “mobilize other governments in support of US global policy.”

While pundits are now claiming that the TTP, which broke away from the Afghan Taliban to begin targeting the Pakistani state, is the avowed enemy of the ISI, the situation remains complicated. The TTP still maintains relations with its Afghan counterpart for some operations, members of which often flock to the TTP. And in 2009, an Independent on Sunday investigation reported that despite having burned down 200 girls’ schools and conducted 165 bomb attacks against Pakistani security forces, local politicians fleeing the attacks claimed that “elements of the military and the militants appear to be acting together… The suspicion of collusion, said a local government official in the largest town, Mingora, is based on the proximity of army and Taliban checkposts, each ‘a mile away from the other.’”

Pakistani investigative journalist Amir Mir noted that far from being staffed by mullahs, the TTP’s shura councils are filled with former Pakistani military and intelligence officials. The “large number of ex-servicemen, including retired commissioned officers, as its members,” raised disturbing questions about the extent to which disgruntled extremists inside the ISI have been using the movement to impose their brutal Islamist ideology not just in northwest Pakistan, but within the Pakistani state itself.

Silent killings

Yet as TTP violence has escalated, the Pakistani army has accelerated local military operations in response, just as Obama has accelerated indiscriminate drone strikes across the region. Both these approaches have tended to target not terrorists, but civilians. According to Brown University’s Costs of War Project, Pakistani security forces have conducted major offensives in the northwest Swat Valley and neighbouring areas, killing “civilians with mortars, direct fire, and with bombs… In some years, it appears that Pakistani security forces were responsible for the majority of civilian killings,” as opposed to the TTP, which is clearly brutal enough.

Indeed, while the TTP’s latest wanton massacre of school children has captured public attention, the media has remained essentially silent on the Pakistani military’s slaughter of up to a hundred plus civilians through the first half of this year. No one knows the true scale of the casualties, but the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, analyzing public record news reports (which themselves are conservative due to being based on official government claims), found that the Pakistani airstrikes killed up to 540 people, and that as many as 112 of these could have been civilians. Not a peep of condemnation from either the mainstream media, or Pakistani diasporas in the west.

The CIA’s drone strikes are equally counterproductive. A secret CIA Directorate of Intelligencereport just released via Wikileaks, reviewing the record of drone strikes and counterinsurgency operations over the last decades, admits that these “may increase support for the insurgents, particularly if these strikes enhance insurgent leaders’ lore, if non-combatants are killed in the attacks, if legitimate or semi-legitimate politicians aligned with the insurgents are targeted, or if the government is already seen as overly repressive or violent.”

Militarisation is no solution

The rise of the TTP, which appears in some ways even more extreme than its Afghan counterpart, is a direct result of the massive, indiscriminate violence deployed by both the US and Pakistan in the region – which feeds the grievances driving locals into the TTP’s ranks. Denying that this violence radicalizes people on the ground is futile. The fact is that the TTP was spawned as an ultra-extreme reaction to the ongoing militarised approach to the region, which itself has slaughtered thousands of civilians.

Yet the frankly disgusting double-game of the US and Pakistani governments in the violence does not absolve the Taliban and its offshoots from their own responsibility for mass murder. The twisted ideology they use to justify their terrorist attacks against civilians, and children no less, must be countered and de-legitimised.

But equally, the rampant expansion of this ideology in areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan has been enabled by the comprehensive breakdown of local institutions and basic economic infrastructure, where alienation and resentment find their outlets through a violent extremism fed by a fatal cocktail of covert foreign finance and selective ISI sponsorship. The short-sighted obsession with military solutions coming from both the US and Pakistani establishments, in this context, merely throws fuel on the fire. Who will counter the entrenched ideologies behind these failed military policies?

In theory, there is a way out. The US must wind-down its self-serving obsession with military aid to Pakistan, much of which is being used to finance the very enemies we are supposedly fighting. Instead of providing billions of dollars of ‘counterterrorism’ focused aid to a hopelessly corrupt government, such billions could be used in coordination with the state to empower genuine grassroots networks like the Rural Support Programmes and others with a proven track-record in enfranchising communities in self-development and poverty alleviation. Only be empowering the Pakistani people, can the country hope to begin moving towards a genuine democracy based on a vibrant and engaged civil society.

From here, we may begin to see Pakistanis themselves further developing their own indigenous conceptions of Islam, drawing on the well-established Pakistani spiritual-cultural traditions of peace and inclusiveness represented in the musical movements of eastern classical, folk, qawwali, bhangra, Sufi and contemporary hip hop, rock and pop, and represented by nationally-acclaimed cultural icons like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Junoon, among countless others. Such Pakistani cultural icons demonstrate that truly populist approaches to Islam and spirituality are not regressive, but progressive. The militant madrassas preaching exclusionary violence and totalitarian politics in the name of Islam, are being propped up not by local traditions, but by vast inputs of foreign finance exporting an alien ideology over decades from the Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia.

And there is a role in this for diaspora communities to mobilize their wealth, expertise and resources to help build the long-term capacity of Pakistani communities to resist and counter the alien ideologies represented by movements like the Taliban – but the focus here must be on crafting positive visions for the future, through meaningful institution-building. More than that, diaspora communities, indeed western citizens in general, need to recognize their fundamental responsibility to engage critically and relentlessly to pressure western government institutions and hold them to account for failed foreign policies pursued in our name that are aggravating the AfPak quagmire.

Extremists are gleefully filling a vacuum of despair cultivated by ruthless domestic corruption and callous international geopolitics. It is never too late to begin cultivating the seeds of hope.