Don’t Blink: Obama Administration Funds the Civil War in Palestine

Related Post: Gaza War - How the US Re-Armed Israel

On April 9, President Obama sent his 2009 supplemental budget request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to Congress. Predictably, most of the media coverage was simply carried over and adapted from the previous battle over funding for the military.

For example, some attention has centered upon the stiff opposition to Secretary of Defense Gates' decision not to order additional F-22 fighters. While this discussion is important, particularly on the usefulness of F-22 fighter planes in Iraq, there was something else in this supplemental budget that seems to have escaped notice.

We find this on page 6:

$0.8 billion to support the Palestinian people, strengthen the Palestinian Authority, and provide humanitarian assistance for the crisis in Gaza.

Even compared to the $85 billion plus total of the supplemental budget, $800 million for Palestine is nothing to sneeze at. And assuming you stop reading here, almost a billion dollars to “support the Palestinian people” actually sounds like a pretty good idea. But that’s not the entirety of it. The money is broken down into several sections scattered throughout the budget.

A section called “Migration and Refugee Assistance” has $150 million, including:

$25 million for assistance to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and $125 million to support emergency humanitarian needs in Gaza and the West Bank

Then we have a massive chunk of money in the “Economic Support Fund” section:

$556 million for West Bank/Gaza including $200 million for budget support to the Palestinian Authority; $93 million for institutional capacity building, and investments in education and social services in the West Bank; $12 million for humanitarian assistance in the West Bank; $60 million to promote West Bank economic growth; $30 million to support governance and rule of law in the West Bank; $95 million to support programs in Gaza to improve basic human needs, support economic recovery, create jobs, and restore some humanitarian essential services; $61 million for immediate humanitarian and food relief to Gazans through well-established international organizations; $5 million for contractor and locally engaged staff, program oversight, and related security and other support costs

And finally, hidden away in the “International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement” section, we find this gem:

$109 million to train and equip Palestinian security forces and to enhance security along the Gaza border [emphasis added]

What’s missing? There’s no mention of Hamas. That’s because:

This provision prohibits the use of Supplemental funds for assistance to Hamas, Hamas-controlled entities, or any power-sharing government of which Hamas is a member. Assistance may be provided to a power-sharing government acceptable to the United States if the President certifies to the standards in section 620K(b)(1)(A) and (B) of the Foreign Assistance Act. It is expected that such a power-sharing government would speak authoritatively for the entire Palestinian Authority government, including its ministries, agencies and instrumentalities. This provision also would allow the President to utilize the waiver authority provided in the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006 for the purposes provided. [emphasis added]

Got that? Let’s break it down.

First off, note that only a slice of the money is even allocated to the Gaza Strip, under the control of the democratically elected Hamas government, while the majority goes to the West Bank, held in the iron grip of Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority. While the Palestinian Authority, like Hamas, was also democratically elected, their electoral mandate expired long ago, and by the time this money reaches them, their term limits will be ancient history. The idea of any democratic government existing in the midst of Fatah’s repressive police state is a highly dubious proposition, but contrasted with the internationally certified elections that brought Hamas to power in the Gaza Strip, the notion of democracy in the West Bank is simply laughable.

Second, the budget essentially nullifies any diplomatic efforts being carried out between the leadership of Hamas and Fatah. Perversely, it does this by ensuring that any diplomatic arrangement would have to be absurdly unacceptable to both parties. Either Hamas accepts a “power-sharing” deal in which they have no power at all over the Fatah “government, including its ministries, agencies and instrumentalities”, or Fatah agrees to share power with Hamas at the price of losing $815 million a year in US funding, not to mention whatever the International Community is paying them.

Mahmoud Abbas, President of Palestinian Authority, with Ramadan Shallah, Secretary General of Islamic Jihad

Finally, this funding ensures that there will continue to be violent confrontations in the Gaza Strip. Where does $109 million worth of paramilitary training go in Gaza if it can’t go to Hamas? It goes to Fatah, or more specifically, to their military wing. That would be the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, an internationally designated terrorist group responsible for at least 130 Israeli deaths, and that’s just counting the suicide bombings.

The Al-Aqsa brigades are also known to collaborate with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. They are the group fond of lobbing Qassam rockets at schoolchildren in southern Israel. So not only will this money provoke conflict between Hamas and these freshly equipped and trained Fatah militants, but these resources will undoubtedly be used in acts of terrorism against Israel, and we know how Israel usually responds to these things in Gaza.

There you have it: for the low price of $815 million, American tax-payers have propped up an oppressive dictatorship, intensified a Palestinian civil war, enabled acts of terrorism against Israeli civilians, and provided the excuses Israel needs to further pummel the Palestinian population.

And all this tucked away in a supplemental budget. No, not even the regular US government budget, this is the extra money they spend just on fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But hey, at least they’re not talking to Hamas. Those guys are terrorists.

Pakistan: Who’s Calling Who A Failed State?

"Collateral Damage"

A disturbing picture is emerging of one of the countries at the center of the Global War on Terror, a terrifying confluence of events which constitutes a “perfect storm” of instability. This country, which President Bush formerly praised as a “leader” in the fight against militant Islamism in Central Asia, now appears to be increasingly ungovernable, what we in the West commonly refer to as a “Failed State.”

A porous border facilitates the funneling of arms and resources to a booming narco-insurgency next-door, an insurgency which takes the lives of innocent civilians, militants, soldiers and police on a daily basis. In the halls of power and government, corrupt western-educated oligarchs continue to, in the midst of catastrophic economic collapse, wildly pillage the state treasuries while their rural fundamentalist constituencies, and the militant industries they patronize, fuel money and weapons to the neighboring insurgency, often with the explicit help of state intelligence services. And yet even though the citizens have recently achieved some modest democratic gains, the central government seems oblivious to their cries for justice against members of the criminal ex-regime. Meanwhile, a brutal domestic terrorist outbreak, flush with recently unemployed recruits, continues without mercy, killing over 50 civilians and security services in a series of suicide attacks over the last month.

This is not Pakistan.

It’s the United States.

The narco-insurgency? It’s not the Taliban in Afghanistan, it’s the drug cartels in Mexico. And those corrupt western-educated oligarchs aren’t the bumbling US allies in Islamabad, it’s the elites calling the shots in Washington, DC. I’ll let you do the rest of the math on your own, but the last figure commands special attention. The Associated Press reports, “A string of shootings in the US in the last month alone has claimed the lives of 53 people” starting with a gunman in Samson, Alabama who killed 11 people including himself and ending in Graham, Washington with a man who massacred his 5 children before finally killing himself.

So is this to say that America is really some kind of “Failed State?” Absolutely not. Rather this semantic bait and switch is intended to serve as a catalyst for western experts, analysts, and academics, those typically thought of as foreign policy elites, to rethink their perceptions of Pakistan and the role it is playing in the War on Terror. In particular, this is an antidote to the endemic tendency to paint Pakistan as weak, corrupt, and ungovernable, also known as a failed state. Far from being a dangerous, failed state, Pakistan is actually a thriving democracy with more in common with its allies in the West than either party would be comfortable admitting to presently.

I don’t expect this change of perspective to be simple. Western elites have a long history of despising democratic governments while at the same time enabling the militant and authoritarian undercurrents of society within the countries they govern. The names are well known: Vietnam, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, Panama, Iraq.  All of these places at one point in time had democratic governments, albeit messy and tumultuous ones. Western expertscharacterized them as weak, corrupt, and ungovernable, however, and used this rhetoric as a jumping off point for violent intervention. The reward was a foreign policy timeline punctuated with the blowback of war, mass killings, and terrorism.

Pakistan, one of the largest Muslim democracies on the planet, doesn’t have to be next.

Take for example the recent public demonstrations in Pakistan over the disqualification of the Sharif brothers from politics. Nawaz Sharif, placed under house arrest by the government, defied his detention and marched with thousands of people in the streets, eventually forcing President Zardari to reinstate the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. That Supreme Court then agreed to hear an appeal of the political disqualifications. In the west, this was seen as a horrifying example of Pakistan’s  weakness, corruption, and inability to be governed. Thomas Friedman seemed on the verge of soiling himself when he breathlessly exclaimed on the CBS political talk show, Face the Nation, “they’re rioting in Pakistan!”

The western narrative is that Nawaz Sharif, agent of Saudi Arabia and staunch ally of the Islamic political parties, led an angry mob in the streets to de-stabilize the weak US-backed President and threaten the US campaign against al-Qa'eda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A more reasonable view would be that Nawaz Sharif, a typically-corrupt religious politician, the Pakistani parallel of Newt Gingrich or Tom DeLay, led a grassroots public protest against the lame duck, unpopular (think low approval ratings) President, forcing him to restore the power of the judiciary as a check and balance against legislative power, not to mention the Pakistani military. What elites in the west saw as an angry mob destabilizing a weak, corrupt government was actually a shining moment for democracy, more akin to a Pakistani version of Marbury v Madison than anything else.

"Rioting Mobs"

When mass public demonstrations are called “destabilizing” and  “riots,” the west undermines the confidence and ability of the population to determine its own government, which in Pakistan hampers their ability to strengthen the judicial system to the point where it can hold the civilian and military leadership accountable, and in effect discredits the entire democratic political philosophy. The result is that terrorist elements are legitimized and authoritarian elements in the government are forced to crack down on the population.

That Pakistan's government is becoming more responsive to the demands of its citizens should not be called weakness, but rather it's an amazingly positive sign that the concept of law and order is alive and well in Pakistani society. Indeed it is this concept that fuels a great majority of Pakistani protests against the ongoing US drone attacks inside Pakistani territory. While classified in the west as strikes against “high value” terrorist targets, they are nevertheless strikes against Pakistani citizens who have their constitutional rights violated every time the US extra-judiciously executes them for crimes they’ve never been accused of, tried, and convicted for in Pakistani courts.

And even this war crime doesn’t factor in the extreme human cost, those innocent civilians who are slaughtered as “collateral damage.” That the Pakistani government approves of these extra-judicial killings, in fact providing the US full basing rights to conduct its military campaign, doesn’t make it any less illegal. Certainly in the light of elected representatives allowing such cruel and unusual capital punishments, Pakistan’s democratic battle for the credibility of its legal system takes on a whole new urgency.

Of course the analysts, experts and academics who conduct the foreign policy assessments in the west aren’t directly responsible for these crimes, but they did ask for them. Indeed, President Obama’s “AfPak” strategy is nothing so much as a regurgitation of foreign policy conventional wisdom from the last few years.

"Corrupt civilian government"

The vast majority of this strategy was laid out during Vice President Joe Biden's Democratic primary run in a speech on November 15, 2007 at Saint Anselm College. In addition to calling for a “surge” of the troops and advisors, the plan called for tripling US aid to Pakistan to $1.5 billion, for the US to condition its military aid to Pakistan on benchmarks measuring success or failure in quelling the insurgency (as opposed to spending it all in an arm's race with India) and for broader diplomatic engagement with regional players such as Iran, Azerbaijan, and India.

These ideas didn’t come to Biden in a stroke of genius, they came from a politician’s typical pedestrian reading of contemporary foreign policy publications. One part of the plan in particular, calling for an influx of 4,000 advisory troops, seems to be lifted directly from a June 2007 paper John Nagl wrote for the Center for a New American Security, an elite foreign policy think tank, titled Institutionalizing Adaptation: It's Time for an Army Advisor Corps.

President Obama first called for the extra-judicial killings of Pakistani citizens in a speech on August 1, 2007 at The Woodrow Wilson Center. Citing the danger posed by al-Qa’eda safe havens in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, Obama said, “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and [the Pakistani government] won’t act, we will.”

Again this was a standard action called for in foreign policy publications. President Bush was consistently attacked in the press for appeasing the Musharraf regime, who was seen as too hesitant to strike terrorists inside Pakistani territory. Naturally, the response from elites was to urge the use of military violence. As far back as 2003 analysts for Jane’s Defense Weekly and Newsmax were lamenting the inability of the US to strike al-Qa’eda targets in Pakistan.

Clearly the narratives of Pakistan created by foreign policy elites have real world consequences, and thus there is a responsibility to ensure that any analysis offered into the debate should be reasonable and accurate, and not grounded in western fallacies of weak, corrupt, and ungovernable failed states. When experts called for strikes against al-Qa’eda in Pakistan, they weren’t offering realistic counterterrorism solutions, they were calling for the equivalent of Canada dropping 500lb bombs on criminals in Detroit, Michigan. They were advocating illegal vigilante justice.

"Collateral Damage"

Now the foreign policy debate has turned to even greater existential questions about the fate of Pakistan. Experts casually run the cost-benefit analysis of wider military action against Pakistani criminals, while at the same time using frequent instances of mass killings and terrorism as impetus to question the very governability of Pakistani citizens. However, these questions could be answered, presumably without such depraved and violent solutions, by simply accepting the perspective that Pakistan and the West are far more similar than they are different. Quite simply, follow the golden rule, and treat others the way you would expect to be treated.

Remember the suicide attacks in the United States, those that have killed 53 Americans in a single month? The reactions from citizens have been confused, hurt, and frightened. There is a general difficulty comprehending the purpose of so much tragedy and bloodshed. In response to one of the attacks in Binghamton, New York, a local resident told WIVB-TV, “This is crazy - 13, 14 people dead. I never dreamed I'd wake up to see this, to hear this, you know?"

Similarly, in response to a recent string of violent attacks, Adil Najam wrote in the Pakistaniat, “For the life of me I cannot understand how the US thinks it will root out terror by lobbing bombs at Pakistani women and children. Nor how these militants think they are helping Islam or fighting America by killing Muslims and Pakistanis, bombing girls schools, or terrorizing civilian populations…All we know for sure is that innocent Pakistanis are dying. For what? For whom? Why?”

Pakistan is not a failed state, it is a vibrant democracy, and it is not weak and ungovernable, it is a fellow law abiding member of the international community. Until pundits, analysts, and academics in the foreign policy establishment, and those in the halls of power who feed off their conventional wisdom, can break with their western superstitions about the weakness, corruption, and chaos of developing democratic countries, they will be incapable of providing any answer to these questions. If the foreign policy elites wish to engage in Pakistani politics and tackle issues of counterterrorism, they should do so in a manner that acknowledges the democratic and legal values of the Pakistani citizens.

When we call a country a failed state, it leads to extra-judicial killings and exorbitant numbers of civilian casualties. This illegal violence undermines the democratic institutions, strengthens the militant and authoritarian factions within society, and like so many times in the history of western civilization, leads to the blowback of violent, extremist terrorism. Quite frankly, the next time a Pakistani gazes upon the scenes of carnage from a US drone strike and asks “why,” we’d better have a damn good reason.

Saturday Contribution To Britain's Anti-Terror Campaign

This person clearly doesn't support the Policing Pledge. They should have their home raided, their family threatened with being shot, and then be followed by a police helicopter for two weeks.

EA's Canuckistan in The Guardian: State-sanctioned Snitching

Canuckistan, aka Steve Hewitt, has become the second Enduring America in the past few days to be featured in The Guardian's Comment Is Free with this piece on how the UK government is encouraging its citizens to become stake-holders in counter-terrorism. If you weren't feeling inspired about Bruce Schneier's contest, this might help:

State-sanctioned snitching

The UK's new counter-terrorism strategy of neighbour spying on neighbour echoes proposals that caused outrage in the US

Steve Hewitt

Whether similar controversy as in the US will appear in the UK remains to be seen. Past experience with CCTV would suggest not. Nevertheless, there remains a fine line between encouraging a well-informed public to be vigilant about terrorism and promoting paranoia that will lead to neighbour spying on neighbour.

With much fanfare, the government of Gordon Brown unveiled Contest 2, its sequel to the UK's previous counter-terrorism strategy. In the lead-up to its emergence, bits of the programme were leaked to the media, including that approximately 60,000 people such as security guards and shop clerks would receive training on what to watch for in terms of suspicious behaviour and how to react in the aftermath of a terrorist attack.

That aspect of the strategy was preceded by a new anti-terrorist campaign launched by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) and the Metropolitan police involving advertisements appearing at tube stations, on billboards in London and elsewhere, and even on the radio. These ads raise the spectre of terrorism and the reward for action by diligent citizens who in the tube and billboard ads notice suspicious behaviour, such as chemical containers in a skip or an individual studying CCTV cameras, and report the incidents via a confidential anti-terrorism hotline. The radio commercial provides the alternative to citizens failing to act with the sound of a devastating explosion.

In a UK context these campaigns represent an effort to widen public participation in counter-terrorism, essentially turning citizens into stakeholders in the effort. They also reflect a continued government concern about the risk of terrorism, particularly through low-level attacks carried out by so-called "self starters" who exist outside those groups and individuals already known to the police and security service.

Encouraging suspicion through counter-terrorism training of ordinary citizens or public advertising campaigns is not, however, without its own risks. There is the potential for certain citizens to be demonised and stigmatised when their activities receive excessive scrutiny and, through calls to the hotline, to unwarranted attention from the police. Indeed, this point plus the wider implications for civil liberties of state-sanctioned snitching were the issues that emerged when a similar effort was proposed in the US in 2002.

In January 2002, the Bush administration introduced the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (Tips) with the goal of increasing public participation in domestic counter-terrorism. The goal of Tips was to "enable millions of America transportation workers, postal workers, and public utility employees to identify and report suspicious activities linked to terrorism and crime". It was to do so by setting up a special hotline, similar to the one in the British advertising, that these workers could call to report suspicious behaviour. The US deputy attorney general hailed the programme as providing "millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others, whose routines allow them to be the 'eyes and ears' of police, a formal way to report suspicious or potential terrorist activity".

The programme largely escaped wider public attention until a story in an Australian newspaper compared it to something that could have emerged from the former German Democratic Republic. Very quickly a maelstrom of criticism erupted that ran across the American political spectrum from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Village Voice on the left to the New York Times in the centre to Republican congressmen Dick Armey and Bob Barr on the right, the latter who called it a "snitch system", that appeared to typify "the very type of fascist or communist government we fought so hard to eradicate in other countries in decades past". The New York Times ran interviews with some workers who potentially might be called upon to report information. A delivery driver remarked on the increased number of satellite dishes he had delivered to "Arabs" after 11 September while another driver complained that "[i]mmigrants stare more than anybody else". In an editorial the paper decried the new version of the programme: "Even if it is limited to public places, the programme is offensive. The idea of citizens spying on citizens, and the government collecting data on everyone who is accused, is a staple of totalitarian regimes."

By then, Tips had made a host of enemies, including Armey, the then Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives. With little fanfare, Armey inserted a clause into the Homeland Security Act that prohibited any efforts to implement Tips. The programme died when Bush signed the act into law in November 2002.

Whether similar controversy as in the US will appear in the UK remains to be seen. Past experience with CCTV would suggest not. Nevertheless, there remains a fine line between encouraging a well-informed public to be vigilant about terrorism and promoting paranoia that will lead to neighbour spying on neighbour.

Bruce Schneier's Fourth Annual Movie-Plot Threat Contest

Something to keep you out of trouble (you hope!) this weekend:

Let's face it, the War on Terror is a tired brand. There just isn't enough action out there to scare people. If this keeps up, people will forget to be scared. And then both the terrorists and the terror-industrial complex lose. We can't have that.

We're going to help revive the fear. There's plenty to be scared about, if only people would just think about it in the right way. In this Fourth Movie-Plot Threat Contest, the object is to find an existing event somewhere in the industrialized world—Third World events are just too easy—and provide a conspiracy theory to explain how the terrorists were really responsible.

The goal here is to be outlandish but plausible, ridiculous but possible, and—if it were only true—terrifying. (An example from The Onion: Fowl Qaeda.) Entries should be formatted as a news story, and are limited to 150 words (I'm going to check this time) because fear needs to be instilled in a population with short attention spans. Submit your entry, by the end of the month, in comments.

If you send Schneier an entry, be sure to let us know!