A Heads-Up on Obama's First Steps?

I've picked up a bit of information about the immediate measures of an Obama Administration.

As the media is anticipating, there will be the announcement of the closure of Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay. Then, in a more surprising step, Obama will make a move for better relations with Cuba.

Less heartening is the evaluation that "engagement" with states like Iran may come "in the second year" of the Obama Administration. My fear is that even this cautious timetable will slip or be set aside.

Obama and the Media

Just back from a lively panel, held at the US Embassy in Dublin, on the media's relationship with and coverage of Barack Obama during the campaign. Other panellists were Mark Little and Ryan Tubridy of RTE, Conor O'Clery of The Irish Times, and Mary Jordan of The Washington Post.

Unfortunately, Embassy restrictions prevented recording of the panel, as it was fascinating to hear some of the best journalists in the US and Europe talk about the phenomenon of Obama. I think it's fair to say that the campaign had left all of them with high hopes, which made it all the more difficult for me to strike the discordant note of caution over what the new Administration might and might not do.

Fact x Importance = News (Dec 8)

• American counterterrorism officials say Pakistan's ISI provided assistance to the Mumbai attackers.


• Lebanon is immune to the global financial collapse.


• One blogger fears a Yugoslavia-style break-up for Canada.


• Fox News is up in arms about "A Lego-style figurine resembling an Islamic terrorist strapped with explosives and made by a small American company." The company, which also produces Nazis, spies, World War 2 marines and a plethora of tiny weaponry, has currently stopped taking orders due to overwhelming demand.

[Photo via BrickArms]

MADRE Statement on Mumbai Attacks

A reader forwarded me this statement from the women's rights website MADRE. In contrast to today's disturbingly shallow opinion piece in The New York Times, "They Hate Us --- And India is Us", I found this a thoughtful and necessary statement:

From Mumbai to Washington: Now is the Time to Renounce the War on Terror

Right now, while the horror of the attacks in Mumbai is reverberating around the world and tensions between India and Pakistan are mounting, there is a crucial move that President-elect Obama could make to chart a positive course forward. Obama should renounce the "war on terror."



Think about it: since the weird semantic banner was first unfurled, the number and ferocity of terrorist attacks has only increased. Mumbai is just the latest battle-front. And in the seven years since George Bush put the world on notice with his "you're either with us or with the terrorists" declaration, the US has actually managed to fuel support for groups that use terrorism. That's because the "war on terror" has led millions of people to conclude that the US is an even greater threat to their safety and freedom than Al Qaeda and other violent fringe groups.

And who can blame them? After all, George Bush and Dick Cheney literally declared the whole world to be their battlefield - and forever. Under the banner of the "war on terror," the US has overthrown a sovereign, if nasty, government (Iraq), trampled the UN Charter (the 2003 invasion), tortured prisoners ("enhanced interrogation techniques" to quote the Bush Administration and the Nazis), openly armed and funded death squads (the "Salvador Option"), and lowered the bar on governments' accountability to human rights standards and civil liberties worldwide.

Now, the Indian government is poised to go down the same road. Leaders of India's main opposition party, the Hindu-nationalist BJP, are demanding that their government act like the US did after 9-11. They see no reason that India shouldn't avail itself of the same strong-arm tactics that the Bush Administration has enjoyed-and legitimized.

Here's the reason: terrorist attacks are not acts of war to be responded to in kind, but crimes against humanity. As crimes, they should be investigated and the perpetrators tried and prosecuted. We have the body of international laws and institutions needed to pursue genuine justice in the wake of terrorist attacks. Let's use them. And let's dust off the tradition of peaceful cooperation between governments (we're going to need it anyway, to deal with the global recession and climate change).

The lessons of the past seven years are that there is no military solution to terrorism; that a militarized response only feeds the same constellation of forces that produce support for terrorism; that a war on terror enhances the power of extremists on both sides and shuts down the space for dialogue, diplomacy and decency.

That's the message we need to deliver loud and clear to President-elect Obama and his new foreign policy team. We may not be able to undo all of the damage inflicted by the Bush Administration, but we can demand a new direction, starting with a forceful human-rights based response to the atrocities in Mumbai.

Many people in India and Pakistan are calling for just such a response from their governments. Those of us in the US should demand no less of the incoming administration. The best thing President-elect Obama could do to chart a new and improved US foreign policy is to renounce the "war on terror."

One to Watch: UK-US Divide on Afghanistan?

The latest news from the Afghanistan-Pakistan theatre is of an attack by insurgents --- probably Pakistani, rather than Afghan --- on a Peshawar warehouse, destroying 150 NATO trucks. Meanwhile, there is high-profile comment, spectacularly missing the point, from Robert Kaplan ("our best strategy is, as difficult and trite as it sounds, to be at all places at once"). The following may be of significance:

Juxtapose two stories from Sunday: "British army officers are in face-to-face negotiations with former Taliban enemies" with "Most of the additional American troops arriving in Afghanistan early next year will be deployed near the capital, Kabul".



For context, you can add the comment of Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN Special Representative in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2004, "The Afghans and NATO countries must recognize that no strategy can succeed or endure if it is drawn up in isolation from the country's core political issues." And set that against the latest US initiative, reported by Walter Pincus in The Washington Post today, "The U.S. Army is looking to private contractors to provide armed security guards to protect Forward Operating Bases in seven provinces in southern Afghanistan."

It may well be that the Obama Administration has a strategy for "engagement" in Afghanistan, not just with the increasingly precarious central Government, but with opposition groups who are usually clustered under the umbrella term "Taliban". If it doesn't, however, I suspect that --- as the Pakistan spillover from the Afghan conflict overtakes it in crisis intensity --- America's allies are going to agitate for a political alternative to more troops and more mercenaries.