Iran Document: Mehdi Karroubi on The Response to Extremism

On Friday afternoon, Mehdi Karroubi visited the home of Seyed Feizallah Arab-Sorkhi , a member of the central committee of the Mojahedin of Islamic Revolution party, who has been detained since June's election. Karoubi comforted his family and made the following statement:

What the country is today suffering from is the extremism of a few that have targeted the Islamic Republic establishment. Without a doubt all of us and you who are the survivors of the martyrs of the revolution and the imposed war will not let the blood of martyrs get confiscated....
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We should all return peace and security to the political and social atmospheres of the country by going back to the constitution and focus on people’s vote and decision. It is the responsibility of all intellectuals that we work to extend law and democracy and do our best to prevent division and separation in the path of Imam Khomeini’s ideas....

My familiarity [with Imam Khomeini] from the years that I was closely accompanying that greatness is different from some of the claims that are being made these days. The Imam was always abiding to people’s votes and opinions and if he had received news about dissatisfaction of [even] a small group of people, he would strongly react to it....

We should have witnessed better treatment of the martyrs’ families who some of them were arrested in the recent events....

A Hail Mary Strategy in Pakistan: The Gut Reaction to Obama's Speech (Part 2)

On Wednesday in Holland, I was set a challenge by a member of the audience: could I summarise, in 30 seconds, the Pakistan side of President Obama's Tuesday speech setting out US intervention in that country as well as Afghanistan?

Here goes....

In American football, there is a desperation play called the Hail Mary pass. You're behind 4 points and there are only 5 seconds left on the clock. So you hurl the football 60, 70, 80 yards down the field and hope against hope that one of your receivers can something snatch it for 6 points and an unlikely victory.

Josh Shahryar’s Afghanistan Primer: The US and the "Warlords"
Afghanistan Special: Josh Shahryar on the Obama Not-So-Grand Plan
A Gut Reaction to Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan Speech: The Halfway House of The Long War (Part 1)

Kill Bin Laden: this is President Obama's Hail Mary.

Of course, the President didn't use that exact expression, preferring general rhetoric with little substance about "an effective partnership with Pakistan". Instead, his advisors left breadcrumbs for more observant journalists to follow, as in this extract from Wednesday's New York Times:

Administration officials said that Mr. Obama had signed off on a plan by the Central Intelligence Agency to expand C.I.A. activities in Pakistan. The plan calls for more strikes against militants by drone aircraft, sending additional spies to Pakistan, and securing a White House commitment to bulk up the C.I.A.’s budget for operations inside the country.

The expanded operations could include drone strikes in the southern province of Baluchistan, where senior Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding, officials said.

There's no mention of Osama or his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, but then again this is not a new strategy. The US has been pursuing the drone strikes, supported by covert ground operations, for years; the only difference since January 2009 has been that President Obama has expanded the effort. This autumn the Administration has been spinning that the attacks killed at least seven top "extremists" (take your pick with the generic label, "Taliban" or "Al Qa'eda"), including Baitullah Mehsud.

Which raises an immediate question: where do you go from there with yet another "expansion"? I guess you hope that you can rub out Mehsud's relative and successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, who popped up alive weeks after US sources said he was most likely dead, and any other claimants of leadership.

But let's assume that the super-effective drones can eliminate most of the local Pakistani insurgent leaders. Let's assume that there is not a "hydra effect", in which you assassinate one senior member only for another two to pop up. Let's even assume that you don't have the inconvenience of eliminating dozens of civilian bystanders, as has happened frequently during the drone campaign.

Here's the problem for the US Government: is this all there is? A possible answer would be no, since in Obama's words, "The Pakistani army has waged an offensive in Swat and South Waziristan."

Well, yes, there has been an offensive in the summer and autumn which has pushed insurgents deeper into the country. It has also displaced millions --- not thousands, hundreds of thousands, but millions --- of Pakistanis from their homes (a minor blip that Obama wished away on Tuesday with, "We are the largest international supporter for those Pakistanis displaced by the fighting"). It has diverted Pakistani resources, at a time of serious economic difficulty, a diversion which the US Government hopes can be covered by its aid package "to support Pakistan's democracy and development".

This is not a strategy beyond Whack-a-Mole and hope he doesn't pop up again. So is there all there is?

Maybe not, in the sense --- unspoken by Obama on Tuesday --- that his Administration is hoping to back a political centre in Islamabad that will be more stable than that in Kabul. (See Part 1 of this analysis for the Afghanistan dimension of the "hole in the doughnut".) President Zardari is to be stripped of any authority beyond shaking hands at official functions. The top civilian is now Prime Minister Gillani --- how coincidental that he was profiled glowingly this week in the US media --- backed, perhaps surpassed, by the Pakistani military.

That will probably be enough to hold the line in Pakistan, barring the long-shot scenario of an implosion of the military structure. Obama, however, declared on Tuesday that Hold the Line is not enough. So can the US, with all the billions in aid and the rhetorical pushing, get the Pakistani military not only to put on offensives but to take the battle all the way into the insurgent heartland? Do US allies in Islamabad share the goal of Get Bin Laden?

(And even if the Pakistani military takes on the task, can you wage such a campaign without further dislocation --- not only physical but economic, social, and cultural --- of the Pakistani people? Can this be a cost-free campaign, given the tensions in Pakistani politics and society that are never far from the surface?)

I don't know the answers, even this late in the War on Terror game. Sometimes even a Hail Mary pass is successful.

But not often.

Josh Shahryar's Afghanistan Primer: The US and The "Warlords"

After my rather scathing criticism of President Barack Obama’s troop surge plan for Afghanistan yesterday, I received many questions from readers on Twitter, Facebook, and e-mail about the realities of the situation. This is the first of three articles trying to offer some answers.

Obama gets away with one thing and one thing only in his approach: he is not the person who has made the wrong choices since the Afghan Invasion of 2001. The first step in the War on Terror was perhaps one of the most misguided and poorly planned of President Bush’s policies. Here is a summary: remove Taliban, institute democracy, then capture bin Laden, and then maybe get out?

What Was Missing in Obama’s Speech: The Black Jail of Afghanistan
Afghanistan Special: Josh Shahryar on the Obama Not-So-Grand Plan
A Gut Reaction to Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan Speech: The Halfway House of The Long War (Part 1)
Afghanistan-Pakistan: Video & Transcript of Obama Speech (1 December)

The biggest blunder the US made, contrary to common belief, was not over the second step of democracy promotion but over the first one of regime change. Instead of using its superior military to fight the enemy, the US sought help from Afghan warlords who controlled less than 5% of Afghanistan’s territory and had been all but vanquished by the Taliban. This might have helped the US oust the Kabul Government, but it handed the country back to the Afghan warlords who may have committed some of the most heinous crimes against humanity.

Rewind history to the early 1990s.

After the ouster of the communist government of Afghanistan, these same warlords, then known as mujahideen and hailed the world over as freedom fighters, took over Afghanistan. For the next several years, the population was abused to the point where more than eight million Afghans were forced to leave the country. The rest remained at the mercy of men who ruled them with such brutality that just reading about it brings a shudder.

Hezbe Wahdat, one of the main groups led by a ruthless warlord named Ustad Abdul Ali Mazari, were notorious for their death dance. Stationed in Western Kabul, Mazari’s men, who were composed of the Hazara ethnic minority, would catch anyone who belonged to the Pashtun group and slaughter them without hesitation.

The death dance would proceed with a man being held down by several Hazara fighters. He would be decapitated and hot oil would be poured over his neck. This would make the body wildly jerk around.

Another group from the north, composed of the Uzbek minority, would place captured fighters and bystanders inside shipping containers, take them to the desert, and then fire hundreds of rounds. The lucky prisoners would be struck and die. Those who did not were left in the desert to die of starvation or thirst.

In the south, the Pashtun-led groups were notorious for sexually abusing young boys. This reached a point where commanders would openly marry boys as young as 12 in official ceremonies attended by their cronies. The situation was so dangerous for pre-teen and early-teen boys that they were kept at home until they grew beards

In this climate of fear, the Taliban entered the scene. Backed up by Pakistan militarily and by the Gulf states financially from 1994, they were able to take over the entire country within a few short years. Their forces were not much superior to their opponents; however, they used people’s hatred for the warlords to gain control of the country. At the time of the US invasion, they held all but one of 32 provinces of Afghanistan, ruling almost 95% of the territory and the population.

People always ask me how Taliban with their stone-age laws were able to rule Afghanistan for almost six years. The answer is simple: stone-age laws are better than no laws at all. They gave people something they had yearned for years –-- safety and security.

Previously, you would be robbed in daylight in front and inside your house. With the Taliban in power, you could haul sacks full of money from one side of the country to the other without hiding the fact that you were transporting cash. And except for targeting the Hazara minority, about 10% of the country’s population, they treated people far more mercifully than the warlords did.

Now the same groups of militias who committed the crimes of the 1990s form the majority of Afghan governors, provincial administrators, security chiefs, and army commanders, as well as the overwhelming majority of senators and representatives to the Afghan bicameral legislature. And they are only able to do so because of the US.

This is why the US invasion was a disaster from the very beginning. The US could have taken over Afghanistan without resorting to help from the much hated warlords, winning the hearts of Afghans. Instead, removing the regime that had brought peace of mind to many, Washington brought back the terror that had haunted them.

So, if the US strategy saved American lives at the start of the offensive, this conflict now takes American lives each week. Afghanistan now has both a Taliban, which not only exists but is enjoying success, and a corrupt and ineffective government.

The reason why the US cannot defeat the Taliban is not because they are powerful or America is weak but because the Taliban have the sympathy of a majority of the Afghanistan’s largely rural population. (The educated class, which makes up a small portion of the population, is simply hoping and praying that both the warlords and the Taliban could somehow miraculously cease to exist.)

The village-dwellers have two choices. They can either support the US military as it finds Taliban hideouts and brings the enemy to justice, then wait for the Americans to depart and leave them at the mercy of the warlords. Or they can continue to lie low and let the Taliban exist, hoping that when the US leaves, the Taliban will get rid of the warlords again.

The choice between a harsh Islamic regime that allows you to live a peaceful life if you lock your wives at home, grow beards, and pray five times a day or between a group of bandits who would pillage your property, rape your women and kill you is quite simple. The Afghans may be illiterate, but they’re not stupid.

If Obama and the US are serious, they still have plenty of time. They could do what the Taliban did and remove these criminals from the Afghan government. This would immediately win the hearts of Afghanistan’s people. If the US chooses otherwise, then it should not blame itself for failing to gain the support of the Afghans.

The Latest from Iran (4 December): The Weekend Before

2110 GMT: No to Sanctions. The National Iranian American Council has responded quickly to the news that members of the US House of Representatives are pressing for a vote on petroleum sanctions against Iran within the next two weeks: "Sanctions can play a constructive role within [engagement], but in order to be effective they must target the Iranian government and the individuals responsible for the government’s reprehensible behavior, with a special emphasis on those guilty of human rights violations."

NEW Iran: Routes and Information for 16 Azar (7 December)
NEW Iran’s Critical Moment: Three Days to Go
Iran, the Greens, and the ex-Bushman: With Washington Friends Like These, Who Needs….?
The Latest from Iran (3 December): Normal Service?

2020 GMT: Here's the Real Nuke Story. Put away the distracting rhetoric from Tehran and keep an eye on Saeed Jalili, the Secretary of the National Security Council and one of the key players in Iran's nuclear manoeuvres. He has been in Damascus bending the ear of President Bashir al-Assad, and now he is in Turkey meeting Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Jalili may be needing Turkish help more than ever, because it looks like he got a cold shoulder from Damascus. Rumours are circulating that Syrian-Iranian relations are deteriorating, to the point where yesterday's bus explosion may have been a tough signal to Tehran.

So here's a question, given that Turkey has been a broker for the "third-party enrichment" deal? Is Jalili trying to get the Turks to accept a package where uranium stays inside Iran? Or will the pressure work the other way, with Tehran trying to find a way to accept third-party enrichment and not lose face?

1840 GMT: Yawn. Ayatollah Jannati may have gotten worked up about the possibility of protesting "American agents" taking away 16 Azar, but Iranian state media can't even care enough to give this as much coverage as Enduring America's update (see 1210 GMT). Press TV puts out the stale rhetoric, "The recent resolution by the [International Atomic Energy Agency's] Board of Governors on Iran's peaceful nuclear activities and other anti-Iran resolutions by the UN Security Council have all been adopted under US pressure," and, um, that's it.

1825 GMT: Non-News of the Day. Even though it was a slow afternoon for events, I couldn't be bothered to update the posturing on the nuclear issue: "Iran will inform IAEA on new nuclear sites when ready", "Iran says it will give just six months’ notice before it begins operating 10 planned nuclear sites," etc., etc.

EA reader Catherine, however, has not only picked up those headlines but has given them the appropriate cursory analysis: "I have to laugh at the news about Iran coming out in the last couple of hours, as if it were some big act of defiance. Well duh....of course they’re going to take their time –-- they don’t even know where five of the 10 sites are going to be located yet."

1210 GMT: The Fight for 16 Azar. So the regime isn't worried? Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati used Friday Prayers in Tehran to warn that some people will try and take over National Students Day (7 December) to "satisfy the United States". He added to those who have "betrayed Islam and the revolution, "Criminals will see your work."

Perhaps Jannati should have taken a tip from Tehran Revolution Guard Commander Ali Fazli who played down the prospect of any trouble on 16 Azar, which is a "flower of a day" to be presented as thanks to Iranian students.

1010 GMT: Tehran Politics. Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf steered an interesting course in a long video interview with Al Jazeera this week. He defended the "democracy" of the Presidential election but criticised both President Ahmadinejad and his opponents for post-election behaviour that fuelled conflict. Qalibaf say "no one was happy" with detentions but evaded placing any blame, saying "everyone is doing his or her best to resolve the issue and I hope no one will be left in prison".

Qalibaf also played down reports of the Revolutionary Guard's expanding influence in the Iranian economy, while saying that Iran's Article 44 governing privatisation must be respected.

1000 GMT: The Green Brief is Back. Josh Shahryar has resumed his updates on the Iran situation, from protests to political developments.

0800 GMT: It is the weekend in Iran, providing an opportunity to catch up on news and to take a breath before the escalation of events leading up to the demonstrations of 16 Azar on Monday. We've posted a special analysis, "Iran's Critical Moment: Three Days to Go".

Included in that piece is the latest manoeuvre from Speaker of the Parliament Ali Larijani to challenge the authority of and around President Ahmadinejad, albeit without naming his rival, “Creating tension in the country is easy but (fostering) unity is not that simple. Damaging reputation is easy but respecting others’ dignity is important. We should not slander others in order to solidify ourselves.”

Meanwhile, Pedestrian has a short, powerful blog on the protest and uncertain fate of Mohammad Younes Rashidi, a student at Amir Kabir University (formerly Tehran Polytechnic). During a visit by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he held up a sign, “Polytechnic is not your place, you Fascist President.”

Rashidi was expelled and is now reported to be in custody in his native city of Mazandaran.

What Was Missing in Obama's Speech: The Black Jail of Afghanistan

Even though this article by Alissa Rubin appeared in The New York Times last Sunday, I don't think it got much attention amidst the speculation what President Obama would say on Tuesday. And it certainly wasn't part of the President's only reference to the "Afghan people" in his address: "We will seek a partnership with Afghanistan grounded in mutual respect — to isolate those who destroy; to strengthen those who build; to hasten the day when our troops will leave; and to forge a lasting friendship in which America is your partner, and never your patron."

KABUL, Afghanistan — An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates, sometimes for weeks at a time, without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.

Afghanistan Special: Josh Shahryar on the Obama Not-So-Grand Plan
A Gut Reaction to Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan Speech: The Halfway House of The Long War (Part 1)
Afghanistan-Pakistan: Video & Transcript of Obama Speech (1 December)

The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day. In interviews, former detainees said that their only human contact was at twice-daily interrogation sessions.

“The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place,” said Hamidullah, a spare-parts dealer in Kandahar who said he was detained there in June. “They don’t let the I.C.R.C. officials or any other civilians see or communicate with the people they keep there. Because I did not know what time it was, I did not know when to pray.”

The jail’s operation highlights a tension between President Obama’s goal to improve detention conditions that had drawn condemnation under the Bush administration and his stated desire to give military commanders leeway to operate. While Mr. Obama signed an order to eliminate so-called black sites run by the Central Intelligence Agency in January, it did not also close this jail, which is run by military Special Operations forces.

Military officials said as recently as this summer that the Afghanistan jail and another like it at the Balad Air Base in Iraq were being used to interrogate high-value detainees. And officials said recently that there were no plans to close the jails.

In August, the administration restricted the time that detainees could be held at the military jails to two weeks, changing previous Pentagon policy. In the past, the military could obtain extensions.

The interviewed detainees had been held longer, but before the new policy went into effect. Mr. Hamidullah, who, like some Afghans, uses only one name, was released in October after five and half months in detention, five to six weeks of it in the black jail, he said.

Although his and other detainees’ accounts could not be independently corroborated, each was interviewed separately and described similar conditions. Their descriptions also matched those obtained by two human rights workers who had interviewed other former detainees at the site.

While two of the detainees were captured before the Obama administration took office, one was captured in June of this year.

All three detainees were later released without charges. None said they had been tortured, though they said they heard sounds of abuse going on and certainly felt humiliated and roughly used. “They beat up other people in the black jail, but not me,” Hamidullah said. “But the problem was that they didn’t let me sleep. There was shouting noise so you couldn’t sleep."

Others, however, have given accounts of abuse at the site, including two Afghan teenagers who told The Washington Post that they had been subjected to beatings and humiliation by American guards.

A Defense Department spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said Saturday that the military routinely sought to verify allegations of detainee abuse, and that it was looking into whether the two Afghan teenagers who spoke to The Post had been detained.

Without commenting specifically on the site at Bagram, which is still considered classified, Mr. Whitman said that the Pentagon’s policy required that all detainees in American custody in Afghanistan be treated humanely and according to United States and international law.

All three former detainees interviewed by The New York Times complained of being held for months after the intensive interrogations were over without being told why. One detainee said he remained at the Bagram prison complex for two years and four months; another was held for 10 months total.

Human rights officials said the existence of a jail where prisoners were denied contact with the Red Cross or their families contradicted the Obama administration’s drive to improve detention conditions.

“Holding people in what appears to be incommunicado detention runs against the grain of the administration’s commitment to greater transparency, accountability, and respect for the dignity of Afghans,” said Jonathan Horowitz, a human rights researcher with the Open Society Institute.

Mr. Horowitz said he understood that “the necessities of war requires the U.S. to detain people, but there are limits to how to detain.”

The black jail is separate from the larger Bagram detention center, which now holds about 700 detainees, mostly in cages accommodating about 20 men apiece, and which had become notorious to the Afghan public as a symbol of abuse. That center will be closed by early next year and the detainees moved to a new larger detention site as part of the administration’s effort to improve conditions at Bagram.

The former detainees interviewed by The Times said they were held at the site for 35 to 40 days. All three were sent there upon arriving at Bagram and eventually transferred to the larger detention center on the base, which allows access to the Red Cross. The three were hooded and handcuffed when they were taken for questioning at the black jail so they did not know where they were or anything about other detainees, they said.

Mr. Horowitz said he had heard similar descriptions of the jail from former detainees, as had Sahr MuhammedAlly, a lawyer with Human Rights First, a nonprofit organization that has tracked detention issues in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The International Committee of the Red Cross does not discuss its findings publicly and would not say whether its officials had visited the black jail. But, in early 2008, military officials acknowledged receiving a confidential complaint from the I.C.R.C. that the military was holding some detainees incommunicado.

In August, the military said that it had begun to give the Red Cross the names of everyone detained, including those held in the Special Operations camps, within two weeks of capture. But it still does not allow the group face-to-face access to the detainees.

All three detainees said the hardest part of their detention was that their families did not know whether they were alive.

“For my whole family it was disastrous,” said Hayatullah, a Kandahar resident who said he was working in his pharmacy when he was arrested. “Because they knew the Americans were sometimes killing people, and they thought they had killed me because for two to three months they didn’t know where I was.”

The three detainees said the military had mistaken them for Taliban fighters.

“They kept saying to me, ‘Are you Qari Idris?’ ” said Gulham Khan, 25, an impoverished, illiterate sheep trader, who mostly delivers sheep and goats for people who buy the animals in the livestock market in Ghazni, the capital of the province of the same name. He was captured in late October 2008 and released in early September this year, he said.

“I said, ‘I’m not Qari Idris.’ But they kept asking me over and over, and I kept saying, ‘I’m Gulham. This is my name, that is my father’s name, you can ask the elders.’ ”

Ten months after his initial detention, American soldiers went to the group cell where he was then being held and told him he had been mistakenly picked up under the wrong name, he said.

“They said, ‘Please accept our apology, and we are sorry that we kept you here for this time.’ And that was it. They kept me for more than 10 months and gave me nothing back.”

In their search for him, Mr. Khan’s family members spent the equivalent of $6,000, a fortune for a sheep dealer, who often makes just a dollar a day. Some of the money was spent on bribes to local Afghan soldiers to get information on where he was being held; they said soldiers took the money and never came back with the information.

In Mr. Hamidullah’s case, interrogators at the black jail insisted that he was a Taliban fighter named Faida Muhammad. “I said, ‘That’s not me,’ ” he recalled.

“They blamed me and said, ‘You are making bombs and are a facilitator of bomb making and helping militants,’ ” he said. “I said, ‘I have a shop. I sell spare parts for vehicles, for trucks and cars.’ ”

Human rights researchers say they worry that the jail remains in the shadows and largely inaccessible both to the Red Cross and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, which has responsibility for ensuring humane treatment of detainees under the Afghan Constitution. Manfred Nowak, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture, said that the site fell into something of a legal limbo but that the Red Cross should still have access to all detainees.