Iran First-Hand: Assessing Life and Opinions in Tehran (Majd)

Hooman Majd, a prominent US-based analyst of Iran, recently returned to Tehran for a visit and wrote this account for Foreign Policy. An EA correspondent evaluates:

"Majd doesn't address the core political issues. His claim that one should judge a 'military dictatorship' on the basis of the number of armed personnel on the streets is laughable.
I am sure that you won't find men in boots in the headquarters of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps consortium which control Iranian telecomnucations now or in the engineering arm of the IRGC. They have gone deep into the economic and political fabric
and are altering it steadily."

The Latest from Iran (9 May): Not Going Away

Memo to Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton: Iran is neither a military dictatorship nor or a police state. Yet. There is no visible military presence at the international airport, where despite a European ban on flights to and from its capitals in mid-April when I arrived, jumbo jets discharged and loaded thousands of passengers a day arriving and leaving for points east and west. Tehran's sleek and bustling Imam Khomeini international airport reminded one that an Icelandic volcano had temporarily managed to do to Europe what no American administration has succeeded in doing to Iran: isolating it --- though not for lack of effort.



There is also no visible military presence in the sprawling city of some 12 million souls and at times it seems an equal number of cars --- save for the occasional hapless-looking, newly shorn, and unarmed young army conscript in fatigues, begging a ride on the back of a motorcycle or in a shared taxi, a presence that has always been visible in any city in Iran, even in days of the monarchy. The mind-numbing traffic congestion, complete gridlock, on the newly transformed one-way Valiasr Avenue, the broad boulevard that runs from the south of the city all the way to the foothills in the north, the Sunset Boulevard of Tehran and the scene of many past marches and demonstrations in support of the Green Movement that sprang up after last year's disputed election, is as it always was.

Drivers --- men, and often mal-veiled and heavily made-up women --- listen to loud pop music of the sort frowned upon by religious authorities, just as they always did, ignoring traffic laws and even the entreaties of the occasional traffic cop. The restaurants and cafes are bustling; weekly, and sometimes nightly, salons at the homes and offices of the elite continue unabated in a city where public entertainment is limited, the conversations usually fearlessly political in nature. Taxi drivers, reliable barometers for the average Iranian as they include everyone from professional working class drivers to the highly educated unemployed, and moonlighting office workers, continue to offer wisdom on everything from the political situation to social ills and the state of the economy.

My driver at the airport, an eager man in his forties who jumped out of his car with a smile, rather than the more normal scowl, to stow my suitcase, was likely from the professional class of cabbies -- for the airport trade is strictly controlled -- and it didn't take him long to explain his latest theory. "Business is bad, huh?" I first asked him, as he took off at an unsafe speed, barely missing a family struggling to load their private car with a mountain of luggage, presumably containing Western consumer goods from Dubai. "Yeah," he said, "there are no flights from Europe." I mentioned something about the travel ban potentially contributing to Iran's economic stagnation. "I hear Europe could be cut off for days, even weeks!" he excitedly replied. "But you know, Allah always finds a way to punish the wicked, doesn't He? England is the worst country in the world and what happens? Their airports are shut down by God."

I laughed. "England is evil," he continued. "What if their airports don't reopen for a month, or forever! What if Allah decides the volcano will continue to erupt forever? England will finally go down the drain, and we'll be standing!" My driver's dislike of the UK, and his suspicion that Britain is behind all of Iran's (and the world's) woes, is actually shared by many Iranians, even middle and upper-middle class Iranians, although perhaps not to his extent. But Britain, particularly since the Iranian presidential election of 2009 and in the age of a likeable Barack Obama, has to some degree replaced the US as the Great Satan (it was always labeled the "Little Satan", along with Israel) for Iranian supporters of the Islamic system. As if reading my thoughts, though, the driver then said, "Of course, I'm not saying we don't have problems here in Iran; not at all."

Indeed, all is not well in the Islamic Republic, not by long shot. Iran continues to suffer the same economic woes it has for some time, and there is a palpable, simmering discontent in the capital over the state of affairs. Inflation, unemployment, the lack of investment, anemic business opportunities, and looming sanctions all contribute to a malaise among the population that the government will have a difficult time curing.

I spent an evening with a friend, someone who spent 150 days in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison in 2009, charged with sedition. He was arrested in his apartment soon after the election and during the first series of protest marches and disturbances. Fingered as a neighborhood leader by a local shopkeeper, himself arrested and presumably bartering names for clemency, my friend, a music teacher and guitarist, spent much of his time in solitary confinement and was among the first group of four detainees whose court appearances were televised live in the summer. He was not physically abused and suffered no torture beyond that of incarceration in what is Iran's Alcatraz, but was subjected to frequent, lengthy interrogations --- sessions he actually began to look forward to as relief from the monotony of life in his cell.

The people, he told his interrogator, don't care who is President; what they care about is how their government will solve their problems. How will their government deal with the fact that 17-year-old girls are willing to sell their bodies to put food on the table for their families, or even just to buy a $30 handbag? He would tell the interrogator, a man from the intelligence division of the Revolutionary Guards --- anonymous and unwilling to let prisoners see his face --- that the people were fed up and thought they had voted for change, but were not agitating for revolt. He still believes, though, that if President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government is able to make significant progress in relieving economic pressures, and to some extent social pressures, it will not be an unpopular one.

My friend, an artist who was never politically active, surprisingly doesn't hold a grudge against either the system or his jailers; he also told me the warden of his unit, section 2A, less infamous than section 209 but for prisoners of the Guards, phoned him after he was released (and charges against him dropped) and said he hoped he did not take his arrest and detention "personally". Surprisingly, he doesn't. Both for the jailers and the jailed, the politics inside Evin evidently mirror the streets of Tehran and other cities.

Iranians --- both the 4000 or so arrested since last June, according to some estimates, and everyone else --- recognize that the government has been spectacularly successful in curbing overt political unrest, but some say it is too early to tell if Iran's Green Wave of 2009 was more akin to the Prague uprising or the Paris riots of 1968. Either way, Iran is changed --- there is no question that civil rights have become an issue that the government and the opposition will do battle over for some time --- but not necessarily in ways the Obama Administration would like.

Iran is not in a revolutionary, not even pre-revolutionary state and the emperor is, unlike the Shah of old (whose nakedness was revealed for all when he proclaimed in November 1978, on live national television, that he had "heard the people's revolution,"), still very much clothed. "We can only pray for the health and life of the rahbar," I heard many times in Tehran; people from all walks of life (including staunch reformists) agreeing that without the Supreme Leader firmly in control, the stability of the country was seriously at risk, or that a small and extremist group of politicians might accomplish what Clinton warned of, a military dictatorship, back in February.

A working-class acquaintance from South Tehran, one who told me last spring that Ahmadinejad would win the election even though he has boycotted every election in the Islamic Republic, was particularly dismissive of any talk of revolution or toppling the government. "Those on the other side of the water," he said, referring to Iranians in the United States, "exhort us to spill onto the streets and confront the system. For what? They want me to revolt on behalf of those who drive $300,000 Benzes on the streets of Tehran? Never."

The nuclear issue looms large here in Tehran -- there has never been as much talk and even anxiety over the possibility of a military assault on Iran, not even during George W. Bush's days -- but the issue seems to have become a distraction that impedes progress on all fronts, and not the weak point for the regime. My airport cab driver reminded me, as we were going around a traffic circle at an early-morning breakneck pace that he would be unable to repeat later in the day, that despite the ills of society and the political differences in Iran he recognized weren't disappearing as fast as the anti-government street demonstrations, Iranians had one thing in common. "We Iranians have namoos," he said, "and if anyone even thinks of ravishing her, our gheirat will take over. Iran is our namoos." Namoos is a man's wife, his woman; her chastity his responsibility to protect, and gheirat is pride and dignity -- concepts both Persian and Islamic and one reason women, "sisters" in the Islamic Republic, wear the hijab and many did even under the secular shah. What the driver meant was that if Iran were attacked, Iranians, and he presumably thought me as well, would defend her with their lives.

Tehran's nuclear summit in mid-April, dubbed "Nuclear Energy for All; Nuclear Weapons for None" and timed to contrast with Obama's own summit in Washington (to which Iran was not invited), was, despite a paucity of media coverage in the West, successful in laying out Iran's stated nuclear agenda -- non-proliferation as well as complete disarmament -- for a domestic audience and sympathetic listeners in the Middle East, Central Asia, and the developing world. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's opening address to the conference, read by his top foreign-policy advisor Ali Akbar Velayati, in which he emphatically proclaimed weapons of mass destruction haram, strictly forbidden in Islam, went a long way in convincing at least the pious that Iran is not developing nuclear arms (although it begged the question of whether nuclear and Muslim Pakistan, present at the conference, is a sinner state, a question the Japanese representative put to Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency and a moderator at one panel I observed).

But Iranians seem to also know that no summit, fatwa, or public proclamation by their officials will convince the United States that Iran is not hell-bent on building a nuclear bomb and then either deploying it against Israel, handing it over to terrorists, or using it to threaten the world at large (none of those scenarios appearing to be particularly plausible to the average citizen or even to citizens of the region). There are no scientific polls that can accurately gauge public support for Iran's nuclear posture, but here in the capital it is hard to find an Iranian who doesn't agree with at least the concept that Iran deserves to enjoy the same rights as other states when it comes to nuclear energy, even as many may find Ahmadinejad's diplomatic tactics distasteful. In that sense, the military parade in Tehran on the second day of the nuclear summit and the Revolutionary Guards' maneuvers in the Persian Gulf a week later were simply expressions of the national gheirat, particularly in light of escalating threats emanating from Washington and Tel Aviv.

Two days before the start of the Tehran nuclear summit, former President Mohammad Khatami, the founder of the reform movement and a leader of today's reformists, Green and otherwise, was barred from leaving the country to attend yet another nuclear conference in Hiroshima, Japan, where he was due to speak out, like his one-time colleagues in Tehran, against the evil of nuclear weapons (but not of the Ahmadinejad government, for the opposition leaders' nuclear policy is entirely in sync with the supreme leader). Although there was much chatter in Iran about the unprecedented act of denying a former president the right to free movement, guaranteed every free citizen under the constitution, genuine outrage was muted and the government subsequently denied that Khatami had been forbidden from traveling abroad.

Why? Perhaps it's because the population is weary of opposing a state apparatus that has shown itself capable of suppressing any outright dissent (or sedition, as it claims), or because the population is turning apathetic toward opposition leaders who seems to have been rendered impotent at a time when there are other pressing domestic issues, or perhaps because the state can act to hinder the opposition with relative impunity whenever the nuclear crisis threatens to boil over. Perhaps, despite the unrest of the past year, it's because the polarized society that Iran has become has not yet come together to decide exactly what it is that it wants, nor even exactly what it is that it doesn't. Talk to 20 people in Tehran on any given day and one might hear 20 different ideas of what, exactly, Iran is and what it should be. The ranks of the apathetic have grown since protests have died down. "These people [the ayatollahs] can give lessons to the Devil himself," one low-income person told me. "They will be in power another 50 years, at least. And if they can guarantee me one million toman [$1,000] a month, I'll support them 100 percent."

Khatami himself was unperturbed by the dishonor of being mamnoon-e khorooj, forbidden from travel, struggling as he is to continue his work while fending off accusations that he is subverting national security or is opposing not just the lack of civil liberties (and a free vote) but the very foundations of the state. He told me, though, that he didn't expect to be banned from travel in the future, or to be restricted from activities beyond what he is now, and he's probably right. Khatami is still enormously popular and despite the current period of relative quiet, his messages do not go unnoticed, either by the government or by the population at large.

In a car with a friend driving in the mountains north of Tehran one day, we stopped to give a ride to three hitchhikers -- young women who, unlike upper-class North Tehran youth, were properly and fully enveloped in black hijab and said they were on their way to pray at a Imamzadeh, the tomb of a relative of one of Shiite Islam's 12 saints. They were eager to engage in conversation, one of them asking what we thought of Ahmadinejad. "He's not good, is he?" she said, to my surprise. "I mean, things were better under the Shah."

I replied that she couldn't be old enough to remember the days of the shah, over 30 years ago. "Well, we've heard," she said with a shrug. "What about the days of Khatami?" I asked. She and her friends all smiled. "Khatami gol bood!' they said in unison. "Khatami was a flower!" It is one of the paradoxes of Iran that many of its youth, however religious, romanticize an era they know nothing of while still idolizing a cleric that helped usher in a radically different one.

April, normally a month when the weather turns hot, was not just mild but rainy, making Tehran almost free from its usual choking pollution. The almost unprecedented weather in the arid foothills of the Alborz mountain range to the north of the city wasn't attributed to global warming, as it undoubtedly would be in the West, but to forces unknown. Perhaps for that reason, devastating earthquakes, another force of nature often visited on Iranians, were also the talk of the town during my stay. President Ahmadinejad had declared just before my arrival that he had had a premonition of a large earthquake striking Tehran in the near future, and floated the idea that five million residents might consider leaving the city permanently to avoid the kind of calamity that would ensue. Hojjatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, the hard-line interim Friday Prayer Leader of Tehran, subsequently said in a sermon that the earthquakes were the inevitable result of the sin, vice, and corruption prevalent in Iran, particularly the vice of loose women dressed inappropriately, and steps should be taken to correct the problem.

Iranians by and large mocked the idea, and even cab drivers were aware of the "boobquake" campaign on Facebook, but not a few Iranians told me the earthquake fears were suddenly real among government officials because a large earthquake in Tehran, which might do to the city what Haiti's did to Port-au-Prince, would almost certainly bring down Ahmadinejad's government, if not the entire regime. Tehran, sitting on major fault lines, is remarkably unprepared for a quake larger than say, seven points in magnitude. That the hope of some Iranians -- even some who've participated in marches and demonstrations against the government -- for real change rests with an act of God or nature might be disturbing to those promoting regime-change from abroad, but it also speaks to the hopeful attitude some have that a government they view as incompetent might be readily discredited, and lose all the support it has among the religious and the working classes, by a mere spark, or a rumble.

From Tehran, despite the ambiguity of what the future holds, of what the Green Movement might be or become, or how the government will deal with the fundamental problems it faces, it is evident that neither debilitating sanctions nor military action (nor continued threats) will accomplish the Obama Administration's stated and unstated Iran policy goals -- to induce Iran to alter its nuclear course, or to lend support to an opposition that even if successful in bringing about change in the leadership, might not do so.

Most Iranians believe their country is powerful, and unlikely to bend to any Western threats. "The rahbar basically told Obama to go fuck himself, didn't he?" said my South Tehran friend, a little admiringly. "And what happened? Nothing. No one can touch these guys." Iran's nuclear program is entrenched as important, legal, and valid in the minds of most Iranians, and many of them with whom I've spoken find it hard to believe that there is no solution to the crisis short of armed conflict, fewer still believing that the U.S. military would even win a war.

Many Iranians can forgive Obama for his hesitancy to enter into serious negotiations with Iran in the aftermath of the elections of 2009, but given what they know now -- that barring a major natural calamity the government is here to stay --- it seems the U.S. president's only real option is to negotiate with Iran in good faith and reach an agreement that satisfies Western concerns about its nuclear program while also satisfying Iran that its rights as a sovereign nation have not been eroded. Perhaps only then might Iranians turn to seriously addressing domestic concerns; economic concerns about the gaping inequalities between the privileged and working classes, as well as political concerns about civil rights and the nature of the regime, which Iranians are perfectly capable of doing without outside interference. And only then will we be able to better judge whether Iran is turning into a reflexively anti-American military dictatorship, or is on the path to fulfilling the needs and wants, economic and otherwise, of its people.

Iran, Meet Kafka: The Web of Internet Censorship Catches All (Farokhnia)

Hamid Farokhnia writes for Tehran Bureau:

In 2008, the Iranian government boasted of censoring five million Internet sites deemed potentially improper or immoral. The number of restricted sites has skyrocketed since the birth of the democratic movement in 2009. With more than 24 million Internet users by official count, a figure that grew 49 percent in the past year, Iran is second after Israel in the Middle East, making cyberspace a major target of censorship for the Islamic Republic.

Cyber censorship has been so pervasive and indiscriminate that even the regime's supporters have not been immune. Recently, several well-known hardline weblogs were caught in the censor's dragnet, prompting righteous howls of indignation from contributors and readers alike. In a bizarre twist, Mehdi Sarami, the man nominally in charge of "Internet filtering," admits he is largely powerless to ensure that pro-government sites do not continue to run into censorship trouble.



On April 9, the far right website Raja News broke the news of how several hardline blogs had been mysteriously blocked by orders from the government. The site's bewildered correspondent interviewed some of the affected bloggers, who seemed equally flummoxed. Omid Hosseini, whose weblog Ahestan was a top winner in the Revolutionary Guards-sponsored extravaganza "Eight Months of Cyber War" last year, speculated that perhaps his unique style of reporting had incurred the displeasure of the censors. "I don't know on what basis the 'filtering committee' is operating every night and day of the week," he complained.

Ahestan wasn't alone in this predicament. According to Raja News, the other victims included such stalwarts of the right as Esmail News, Madreseyema, and Khateratjebhe. The article implied that several less prominent rightist blogs and other sites had also been blocked quietly in recent months.

Raja News tried to get to the bottom of the mystery by interviewing Mehdi Sarami, the official in charge of Internet censorship. Sarami, a 30-year-old electrical engineer from Sharif University, is a full-time representative of the Guidance Ministry on the Cyber Crimes Committee, a sort of high command for Iran's censors. In the interview, Sarami deplored the closure of the rightist blogs and shifted the blame to other agencies. "We don't close down any blogs," he said. "We only sent our findings to the public prosecutor and they are the ones who decide what to do about various sites."

Sarami also revealed that many privately owned ISPs routinely engaged in censorship of their own. "The ISPs must be pressured to remove their parallel filtering. The mechanisms which have been improperly used by them must be eliminated once and for all -- unless of course, they are used on direct orders of the judiciary."

Asked why his office often expressed ignorance of the blocking of certain sites, Sarami explained that a judge can directly order a block in response to private complaints. "That judge is normally obligated to inform our task force of his decision," he said, implying that this communication does not always happen.

The Raja News reporter asked why the opening page that pops up in lieu of a blocked site looks different at times from the official blockpage. Sarami explained that it was likely due to the "parallel filtering" practiced by some of the country's unruly ISPs. He said that the procedure evidenced by such pages was illegal and needed to be addressed by the Internet regulatory agency.

Sarami gave a second interview two days later, this time to the influential Talabeblog, a portal for young clerics and seminarians. He elaborated on the issues he had already addressed and offered new revelations -- while providing further insight into the workings of a censor's mind.

He first differentiated between "filtering" (or "blocking") and "shutting down." The former, we learn, is what has taken place when the official pop-up page of the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance appears on your computer screen. When the latter occurs, nothing appears in place of the site -- supposedly a stronger form of punishment. He referred Talabeblog readers to Samandehi.ir, where the full list of 50 Internet offenses are listed for users' edification.

The interviewer wondered why it was that young, politically correct Muslims should suffer the same punishment supposedly reserved for counterrevolutionaries. Sarami responded with an analogy:  sometimes, just one or two burglaries in a neighborhood over an entire year will prompt residents to call for round-the-clock policing. He went so far as to discourage extensive blogging by young hardliners. As an alternative, he pointed out, "There are useful social networks that people can refer to available on the mofidnet.ir site."

It was important to use the recommended mofidnet sites, Sarami said, because "the U.S. government had arrogated itself the right to pry into other communication systems. The U.S. State Department "disseminates software that enables it to monitor the private data and information of users," he said, adding that "Gmail has a secret agreement with the U.S. government" for this purpose.

He described the Iranian censorship situation in general as comparing favorably with that in the United States and other countries. "We are witness to a more pervasive form of filtering in the United States. Over there, every single Internet user and the way they operate is closely monitored. The moment they use an illegal site or email to that site, there is a criminal investigation opened against that person. It is a sort of eavesdropping.... It is called the Patriot Act." He continued, "Friends who are studying abroad tell me that they can not email certain kinds of information, that there is a reign of fear there."

Finally, Sarami addressed the question of whether there is an unaccountable "shadowy group" behind the filtering system and if anything could be done to rectify the situation. Describing the higher public profile of the committee on which he sits, he replied, "Perhaps until about six months ago that might have been the case, but our lines of communication have grown dramatically since then.... It may interest you to know that much of the filtering was effectively done by the people themselves, through complaints they lodged against these sites which were then directed to our task force for investigation."

Filtering Galore

It is clear that outside the authorized filtering system, there is a good deal of parallel filtering going on by commercial ISPs in Iran. But rather than a sign of rogue behavior by private firms, this activity is the inevitable consequence of draconian laws that hold ISPs accountable for their clients' content.

In December 2001, the inter-agency Committee in Charge of Determining Unauthorized Sites (CCDUS) was set up under directives of the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution. It was tasked with drawing up criteria for the official blocking of websites, previously left to the discretion of the individual censors. The new committee was made up of representatives from the ministries of Intelligence, Guidance, and Communications, as well as the judiciary. The Ministry of Communications was assigned to develop or obtain the most advanced filtering devices in the world. Ultimately, SmartFilter, a product developed by the American firm Secure Computer, was procured. In November 2006, proposed regulations governing censorship and punishment for web content violation were submitted to the Majles. The conservative-controlled parliament quickly voted them into law.

Under the regulations, a significant legal burden was placed on Internet data carriers. Commercial ISPs were now subject to fines and dissolution should their clients be caught breaking the newly restrictive censorship laws. And it was clear that the government took the matter seriously. Not long before the new Cyber Crimes Bill was implemented, a group of 21 bloggers had been arrested and charged with national security offenses ranging from undermining of the state to fomenting social strife to criticizing the Supreme Leader. One of them, Yaghoob Mehrnahad, was executed for alleged ties with the Baluch armed group Jondollah. In November 2005, several IPSs in the city of Karaj were permanently closed down by the local Cyber Crimes Unit involving the public prosecutor, the Communications Ministry, West Tehran Intelligence, the Naja, and the Basij.

A year and a half ago, Enhanced Punishment of the Disrupters of Psychological Security, a bill orchestrated by the Revolutionary Guards and brought to the floor of the Majles by hardline representatives, was approved. It stipulates the death penalty for advocating "corruption, prostitution, and apostasy" on the Internet, placing such activity on a par with smuggling, kidnapping, armed robbery, and the like. This law has made Iran the world's leading violator of cyber rights. Small wonder that commercial ISPs routinely engage in ad hoc censorship.

A few days after Raja News ran the story of the hardline website blockages, it provided the basis for an expose that appeared on BBC Persian. In a perfectly ironic act of self-censorship, mirroring the tortuousness of Iran's electronic highways, Raja News responded by taking down its own article.

Afghanistan Analysis: Does General McChrystal Have Any Idea of What is Happening? (Mull)

Josh Mull is the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation, and he also writes for Rethink Afghanistan:

Last August, General Stanley McChrystal and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry produced a report, "US Government Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan for Support to Afghanistan".  In it they laid out a complete counter-insurgency strategy, including development aid and international assistance, for their mission in Afghanistan. They also provided various criteria to measure success, as well as a requirement for Interagency Quarterly Assessments which would "identify progression / regression, opportunities / obstacles, and course corrections (adjustments to policy, activities, planning or resourcing)".

Afghanistan Report: Losing Hearts and Minds (Mercille)

I certainly haven't seen any of these progress reports from McChrystal, not to mention anything resembling a "course correction". But we do have a new assessment from the Government Accountability Office, and they say we're screwing up horribly.

It seems that McChrystal and Eikenberry were correct in their report. If they don't have these progress assessments, they won't have any idea what's going on in Afghanistan. They won't know if their COIN strategy is successful, which also means that whenever some out-of-touch politician touts these successes, he's simply engaging in the age old art of "making shit up." McChrystal's plan for measuring progress is absolutely required if we care at all about the truth in Afghanistan. However, the variable in this plan is not necessarily the ability to produce these assessments, but access to the sort of reliable, accurate information sources which provide the backbone of these assessments.


So what do we mean by "measuring progress" in Afghanistan? Here's what the plan says:

The USG will assess progress on the Integrated Civ-Mil Campaign Plan quarterly. This assessment will be done in close coordination between US Embassy, ISAF, and USFOR-A. The purpose of the assessment process is two-fold: 1) to provide decision-makers in Afghanistan with necessary information to prioritize and direct allocation of resources and efforts, and 2) inform Washington decision-making through integrated reporting. Rigorous integrated assessment will require additional civilian and military resources committed full-time.

Assessment Principles: Quality integrated assessments require the following principles to be followed:

• Share information, assessment, and analysis in an open and collaborative way within the USG and with key GIRoA and international partners.


• Validate assessments through the use of a full range of USG, Afghan, international community, and independent data sources – to include qualitative assessment, quantitative data, polling, intelligence analysis, and independent analysis.


• Focus assessment of progress or regression of key instability dynamics.


• Test assumptions through integrated analysis to better inform planning and operations.


• Be accurate and credible.

Let's start with the third bullet point, focusing on "key instability dynamics". That's a bureaucratic way of saying "why they hate us." We have to focus on the issues that make Afghanistan so dangerous and violent, not just whatever flashy propaganda exercise the mainstream media chooses. What really makes Afghans join the Taliban movement? What makes them turn against the government? Joshua Foust gives us an excellent example of a "key instability dynamic" to focus on:

[The central government] owns all the natural resources in the country. Its natural resources, especially timber, are severely stressed. At the same time, exploiting those natural resources is often the only way for communities to make money. Even so, the Afghan government has no real means of leasing access, harvesting quotas, or even cadastres of land to local communities for exploitation. It seems to have no problem giving enormous contracts to operate copper mines, but it can’t figure out how to create an institution by which communities can lease access to the land they live on and cultivate.

Thus, harvesting timber for income becomes illegal. You have timber smugglers, and with them timber “lords,” who are wealthy men who profit handsomely from the large scale denuding of Afghanistan’s countryside.[...]

Now if we had "accurate and credible" assessments that led to course corrections, Foust would be talking about the timber problem in terms of how best to solve it, instead of in the context of US troops wildly exacerbating it. A quality measurement of progress wouldn't tell us to send in 30,000 more troops, or vastly expand our drone program, it would tell us to do something about the crippling resource and governance issues, which requires zero troops. But how are McChrystal and Eikenberry supposed to know about real problems like the timber industry, or lack of it? Well, they have their second bullet point about using the "full range of [US Gov't], Afghan, international community, and independent data sources". Just what is an independent data source? It's not CNN. It's citizen journalists, like Sana Saleem next door in Pakistan.

Saleem already understands the idea of focusing on key instability dynamics. She describes the failure of the mainstream media to focus on anything other than trivial or "sensationalized" coverage of the War on Terror. She instead works in areas like reporting on personal safety procedures during military assaults, child abuse, and yes, even coverage of the drone strikes. And speaking of drone strikes, remember what the Los Angeles Times said about reporting on the strikes (emphasis mine):

U.S. officials say the strikes have caused fewer than 30 civilian casualties since the drone program was expanded in Pakistan, a claim that is impossible to verify since the remote and lawless tribal belt is usually off-limits to Western reporters. Some estimates of civilian casualties by outside analysts are in the hundreds.

We'll put aside the obvious racism of it being "impossible" to obtain the truth without Westerners: for all we know, this could be the fault of an artless copy editor. The real problem with this statement is that it's flatly untrue. Westerners do have access to accurate numbers from the region, because we have computers and telephones and other exciting space-age technology. I don't have to bring my magical, better-at-counting Western eyeballs all the way to Waziristan to know what's going on, I can read Sana Saleem and Nasim Fekrat on my cellphone. And that's not me being absurd, that's exactly how it works. I should know:

The top tweeters on Afghanistan are more heterogeneous in their affiliations than the the top retweeted users. A number of high profile news organizations, individual journalists, and official and semi-official military channels comprise the list of top retweeted users. Notable accounts are those of the Pajhwok Afghan News (@pajhwok) and the Alive in Afghanistan project (@aliveinafghan), as well as the latter’s founder Brian Conley (@BaghdadBrian) of Small World News (@smallworldnews). These accounts are the strongest “local” voices offering Afghan perspectives on events. In the same way that individuals with close affiliations in Iran were both prolific and influential sources of information, these represent similar sources for Afghanistan.

Yep, that's me and my colleagues at Small World News as the "strongest 'local' voices" during the election last year. Clearly we're not from Afghanistan. All we did is talk to the Afghan sources themselves, let them tell the story instead of waiting for Western reporters to parachute in, pillage for headlines, and inevitably abandon the place. And we've talked about Pajhwok before. They're nothing but Afghan bylines, and there's no source more credible and qualitative than Pajhwok that I'm aware of.

The usefulness of all these sources to our strategy is that if you actually factor them into a quality assessment, if you include voices like Saleem's, absolutely none of it would lead you to believe "Hey, we could fix this with 30,000 guys with guns" or "You know what would solve this problem? Massive civilian casualties in Pakistan." Actually knowing the truth about Afghanistan, having "honest and credible" quality assessments of our goals there as McChrystal asks for, would help us end the war faster, if not immediately.

And the best part is, it's way crazy cheaper than our ridiculous strategy of military occupation. It didn't cost me $33 billion to embed that Pakistani podcast about Sana Saleem, and a subscription to Pajhwok certainly won't set you back near what California has paid for the war. And that's all McChrystal is asking for with his progress reports, he knows it's required for ending the war. And not just in this fancy public report, he's even saying it in private. This is from his leaked memo:

V. Assessments: Measuring Progress

ISAF must develop effective assessment architectures, in concert with civilian partners and home nations, to measure the effects of the strategy, assess progress toward key objectives, and make necessary adjustments. ISAF must identify and refine appropriate indicators to assess progress, clarifying the difference between operational measures of effectiveness critical to practitioners on the ground and strategic measures more appropriate to national capitals. Because the mission depends on GIRoA, ISAF must also develop clear metrics to assess progress in governance.

He's got to know what's going on in Afghanistan, or we'll continue our bloody, expensive, and entirely ineffective strategy of military occupation. Or you know what, maybe you think McChrystal is terrible at his job, or you just hate him, or whatever. That's fine, it's not really about him or his awful-to-begin-with COIN strategy. The most important part to take away for this is in his first bullet point, emphasis mine:

• Share information, assessment, and analysis in an open and collaborative way within the USG and with key GIRoA and international partners.

The US Government? That's you! You've got to know the truth about what's happening in Afghanistan, because our strategy in Afghanistan, our objectives, or whether or not we have any national interest in Afghanistan period, is all entirely your business, your decision. And you can force the "USG" to take an honest look at Afghanistan, to see that they shouldn't be spending $33 billion on insane wars, to see all the reasons why we shouldn't be continuing this criminal occupation. Pressure works. Contact your representatives and help them get an "honest and credible" view of our strategy in Afghanistan.

The Latest from Iran (8 May): Back to the Politics

2045 GMT: One to Watch. Khabar Online reports that Seyed Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini and a cleric with uneasy relations with the current Government, will speak before Tehran Friday Prayers this week.

2025 GMT: More Rahim-Mashai. President Ahmadinejad's Chief of Staff Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai, having declared that his boss is "the teacher of all Presidents of the world", is now insisting that he has no additional posts. Unfortunately for him, Khabar Online accompanies the denial with the list of 16 offices that Rahim-Mashai heads.

2020 GMT: Setting Limits? Mohammad Javad Larijani, a high-level official in Iran's judiciary, has responded to talk of a prolongation of the Ahmadinejad presidency: "It is against the nezam , and I strongly object."

NEW Iran: The Green Movement and “Moral Capital” (Jahanbegloo)
Iran: Ahmadinejad’s Chief Aide “Not Too Many People in the Prisons”
The Latest from Iran (7 May): The Original Post-Election Muddle

2010 GMT: Maintaining Hope. Grand Ayatollah Sane'i, meeting with academics, said: “One should not lose hope; because the Almighty’s will is for eliminating oppression. The day will come that those standing against people’s rights and all those hurt people will be fed up with their own actions, and I am hopeful that their moral and spiritual conscience will wake up and they will stop these actions. It is your responsibility to spread awareness among people and expand this awareness so that the deceivers and violators of people’s rights realize that people are aware of their deceptions and also are opposed to their deceptions, but you should spread awareness based on Islamic and religious teachings.”


1650 GMT: Not-Sycophantic-At All Remark of the Day. The President's Chief of Staff Esfandiar Rahim-Mashai commenting on his boss: "He is a teacher to the Presidents of the world".

1610 GMT: The Oil Ultimatum. Minister of Oil Masoud Mirkazemi has repeated the threat that Iran will expel foreign firms for delaying development of the South Pars gas field, replacing them with domestic companies: "We have recently told some foreign firms which have delayed some phases for several years that we would not negotiate with them and domestic firms will be given these projects to implement."

Mirkazemi did not name any foreign company, but South Pars officials have recently insisted that Royal Dutch Shell and the Spanish company Repsol commit by the end of May to development of sections of the field. Shell, citing the prospect of Western sanctions, has suspended any operations in South Pars.

1555 GMT: Trouble for the Rafsanjani Family? An appeals court has upheld the prison sentence of Hamzeh Karami, accused of propaganda and embezzlement.

The decision prompts speculation that pressure, including the prospect of criminal prosecution, will increase upon Mehdi Hashemi, the son of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani. In the mass Tehran trial last August, Karami's "confession" accused Hashemi of misusing funds to carry out inappropriate activity during the Presidential campaign.

1545 GMT: Karroubi Watch. In a discussion on another website, an EA reader frets that we are "especially enthralled with [Mehdi] Karroubi, who is treated with saint like reverence".

Heaven forbid that we should appear biased, so here's Karroubi's latest acts of deviousness, duplicity, and devilishness.

The cleric, visiting the family of Alireza Beheshti Shirazi, the detained journalist and senior adviser of Mir Hossein Mousavi, has criticised Iran's authorities for continued arrests of dissidents and urged them to show greater tolerance. He said, “The Revolution and the Islamic Republic is not what these gentlemen are carrying out and it is our duty to return the Islamic Republic to its right path.”

Karroubi also carried out the despicable act of visiting Ahmad Motamedi, the Minister of Communications in the Khatami Government, in hospital. Motamedi was stabbed early this week in his office at Amir Kabir University.

Motamedi's wife, Fatemeh Azhdari, threatened to reveal “the truth” if "wrongful" reports regarding the attack on his husband’s life continue. Se claimed that authorities are trying to reduce the “assassination attempt” against her husband to a crime with “personal motivations”.

1400 GMT: War on Culture (cont.). It's not just the regime favourite Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami getting tough on cultural infiltration (see 0730 GMT). Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem-Shirazi has urged the formation of a Ministry of Virtue: "A ministry to call upon virtue and ban vice must be formed to deal with moral issues in schools, universities and media."

Makarem-Shirazi said the root cause of society's ills was a lack of supervision on moral issues: "When importance is not attached to moral issues, political and economical problems arise and decadence spreads in the form of lack of hejab and an increase in drug abuse."

1355 GMT: Getting the News. EA colleagues have pointed out the portal for Iran news (in case EA is on a break, of course), Kodoom.

1150 GMT: Nuclear Chatter. Iranian officials continue to put out signals that Turkey and/or Brazil could broker a deal on uranium enrichment. Following Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki's visit to Ankara, Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said, "New formulas have been raised about the exchange of fuel....I think we can arrive at practical agreements on these formulas."

1145 GMT: And the Imprisoned Students. Radio Zamaneh follows up on the published list of 32 detained students, which we noted earlier this week. According to the site, 24 of the detained students have been handed a total of 71 years in prison, one has been sentenced to execution, and the situation of the rest is unknown.

Mahmoud Molabashi, the Deputy Minister of Science, told reporters last week that only a “very limited number of students” are currently in prison.

1130 GMT: The Detained Filmmakers. A Street Journalist features Amnesty International's call for the release of the detained film directors Mohammad Ali Shirzadi and Jafar Panahi.

1000 GMT: Stirring Discontent. Parleman News reports that Hojatoleslam Ravanbakhsh, a supporter of Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, "insulted" Grand Ayatollah Yusuf Sane'i during a talk at Kerman University, angering professors and students.

0940 GMT: More Pressure. Seyed Reza Akrami of the Combatant Clergy Association has called for all budgets of the Iranian system (nezam) to be transparent and published.

0803 GMT: Reformist Economics. Reviewing the approach to privatisation of the Iranian economy, member of Parliament Mostafa Kavakebian declared that the Government has "fattened itself" rather than becoming lean. Mohammad Reza Khabbaz said that the regime's slogan of "shares of justice" (equal distribution) should be "shares of injustice".

0800 GMT: Morning Analysis. We've posted a special feature with the views of Professor Ramin Jahanbegloo on the Green Movement and "moral capital".

0730 GMT: A quiet Friday weekend in Iran, after both the Ahmadinejad show in New York and the internal politics earlier in the week....

Ahmad Khatami Fights Culture

Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami did liven up the day a bit with his Tehran Friday Prayer. We noted yesterday his religious lesson of "a punch in the mouth" for other countries who troubled Iran. Rah-e-Sabz has a different snapshot, with Khatami claiming that the regime has defeated the opposition but warning of "the effects of [an] invasion in the areas of film, theater, sports, and some media".

The website also summarises other Friday Prayers throughout Iran.

International Front: Opening the Door to the US?

An interesting analysis in Rah-e-Sabz, which suggests that the Ahmadinejad trip to New York was designed to maintain the possibility of discussions with the US Government over the nuclear issue. The website concludes, however, that the final decision on the strategy is up to the Supreme Leader.

Of course, Rah-e-Sabz is an opposition website, but this reading matches up with our interpretation from last autumn, when Ahmadinejad was backing the effort for a deal on "third party enrichment" of uranium. That effort stalled in late October, in part because of internal divisions in Iran, and our analysis was that Ayatollah Khamenei had balked at an agreement.

Getting It Wrong on the Economy

Aftab News reports that the Minister of Labour and Social Affairs, Abdolreza Sheikholeslami, made "confused statements" at a national workers' meeting in Mashhad. Sheikholeslami alllegedly claimed that unemployment was due to the vagaries of science and did not bother to consider the workers' problems.

Middle East Inside Line: Mitchell's Talks in Palestine; Israel's Official Perception of Peace

Mitchell in Ramallah: US envoy George Mitchell was in Ramallah on Friday for meetings with the Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and the PA's top negotiator Saeb Erekat. Both Palestinians reiterated their call upon Israel to stop construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Though the Palestinian Liberation Organization's executive committee has not made a formal decision yet, Erekat said:

If the price that we will pay for saying yes to Mitchell will be more settlements and more dictations, that's a big question mark about the possibility of continuing.

Now the Israeli government has a choice, either peace or settlements, and it can't have both.

Following Defense Minister Ehud Barak's request to delay the demolition date of illegal residential structures in the West Bank, Israeli officials told the High Court of Justice that they may legalize the Givat Hayovel outpost in the West Bank.



Livni's Call for an Agreement: In an interview with Haaretz, the opposition leader MK Tzipi Livni (Kadima) on Thursday called to combine the forces of "the two large Zionist parties in Israel" - Kadima and Likud - to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Livni said:

The prime minister is the one preventing the change....Change is possible, but it will not be done with the agreement of the ultra-Orthodox parties. They have no reason [to agree], as long as Likud is the ruling party. Likud has bound its political destiny and all Israelis' fate to the ultra-Orthodox politicians' whims....Change is possible and the keys to change are in the hands of the Zionist parties representing the majority in Israel.

Israel's Official Perception of Peace: In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Vice Premier and Regional Development Minister Silvan Shalom said: "No matter what we do, I do not see a Palestinian leader who is willing to accept what [Yasir] Arafat rejected, and I don’t see a Jewish prime minister who can give more than what [Ehud] Barak offered. Therefore, I see it as a dead end."

Shalom stated that the Palestinian Authority was already functioning like a de facto state. “True, they don’t have borders,” he said, “but we also don’t have borders.” He described the proximity talks as "bypass" talks and said their focus should be on economic projects, development of industrial areas, and joint projects in the spheres of electricity, sewage, water and infrastructure assistance. They could also increase freedom of movement in the West Bank, through the lifting of roadblocks, and help the Palestinians fight terrorism and enhance security.

Israel's Security: On Friday, President Shimon Peres told US envoy Mitchell that Israel placed security at the top of the agenda for the upcoming talks.

Israeli newspaper Maariv reported that FBI Director Robert Mueller came to Israel to discuss international crime and joint U.S-Israeli efforts to counter “terrorism” with Israeli Police Chief David Cohen.

Cohen said that the talks were positive and cooperation between security agencies in Israel and US had been fruitful in "the fight against organized and computer crimes as well as the fight against terrorism".