McKinney Leads DIGNITY Delegation of Independent Journalists to Libya on Fact-Finding Mission
1 June 2011
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia – Today, independent journalists from across the United States departed on a truth-telling, fact-finding mission to Libya. This coincides with what was supposed to have been a debate in Congress on U.S. involvement in the war against Libya, but the debate got sidelined due to the fact that the legislation requiring a pullout by the U.S. could actually have passed. Both Democratic and Republican leadership are responsible for pulling the bill at the last minute.
Al Jazeera film footage shows that Western soldiers have their “boots on the ground” in Libya overstepping authority granted by the United Nations Security Council for action in Libya. Every day that President Obama contributes to the military action against Libya, he tests the United States Congress and defies the United States Constitution and the War Powers Act which limit Presidential acts of war, subject to authorization by the U.S. Congress.
Incredibly, in what yet may prove to be another act beyond the mandate of the United Nations Security Council Resolution, NATO extended its operations in Libya for another 90 days.
Because the public has become increasingly unable to rely on embedded media to tell the American people the “whole truth and nothing but the truth,” the DIGNITY Delegation will shed rare light on NATO's actions inside that country.
According to some estimates, the American people and the global community were lied to 935 times by Administration officials and the media in the lead-up to the Iraq War. As Aeschylus said, “In war, truth is the first casualty.” The DIGNITY Delegation is expected to make daily reports while on the ground of the ongoing NATO actions in the country.
By Chuck Leddy – Boston Globe Correspondent / June 1, 2011
Journalist James Fergusson has spent more than a decade covering the Taliban, from its beginnings in the 1990s as a militant Islamist response to the brutal warlordism then dominating Afghanistan to its 2001 ouster by US-led forces to its present-day battle to topple the US-supported Afghan regime of President Hamid Karzai. Rather than present the Taliban as a caricature of jihadist, misogynistic thugs, Fergusson has worked hard to understand them. Filled with insights about the group’s origins and motivations, this sympathetic and eye-opening account should be required reading for anyone seeking to understand contemporary Afghanistan.
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Fergusson opens with a portrait of the burned-out, lawless hellscape of Afghanistan in the aftermath of Soviet occupation. With multiple tribal warlords practicing highway robbery and murder, absent any control from a viable, centralized government, Afghanistan was a Hobbesian “failed state’’ run by bandits. The Taliban coalesced around a few mujahideen — holy warriors — who had been part of the insurgency that ousted the Soviet army. These fighters sought to restore order under sharia, Islamic holy law. But the Taliban were also Pashtun tribesmen. It is in explaining the complex interconnections between Pashtun and Islamic traditions that Fergusson truly shows his understanding of the organization.
Fergusson describes how the militarily powerful Taliban took over Afghanistan in the late 1990s but lost the global public relations war. The movement was irreparably tainted by horrific videos of public executions and reports of extreme restrictions against women. “From 1997 on,’’ Fergusson writes, “the Taliban were almost universally portrayed in the West as a regime beyond comprehension or redemption.’’
But what these Western reports never quite explained, Fergusson notes, is how the Taliban brought law (however harsh) and order to a nation that had rarely seen either. Today, Fergusson reports, the Taliban are riding a growing wave of anti-Americanism and anti-corruption sentiment triggered by both US military operations and strong support for Karzai, who is considered unusually corrupt by the standards of a country where governmental corruption is the norm.
As he travels a few miles outside the capital, Kabul, Fergusson observes the resurgent Taliban collecting taxes, meting out local justice, attacking American soldiers, and pockmarking the roads with bombs. Taliban commanders repeatedly tell Fergusson that the Americans must depart before national reconciliation can begin. Even an Afghan police officer, ostensibly an agent of the Karzai government, denounces the American military presence: “If [US soldiers] kill fifty people, they create five hundred Taliban,’’ he tells Fergusson, “If they did something to my family . . . I’d take revenge. I hate the Americans.’’ And he’s supposed to be on our side.
One disillusioned local official tells Fergusson, “Warlordism and insecurity have returned, and the people are fed up. They are ready to welcome the Taliban back again.’’ Indeed, the Taliban are coming back just when the Obama administration has reduced US forces in Afghanistan. Fergusson makes clear the differences between the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Many of those inside the Taliban told Fergusson that they would welcome an agreement with Washington that would swap the exclusion of Al Qaeda from Afghanistan for an American pullout and foreign aid.
Fergusson makes a powerful case that US strategy in the region is failing, and that bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table is the most sensible option. This is a provocative account written by somebody who’s talked to all the relevant parties, however unsavory, and has learned to navigate some of the world’s most treacherous terrain. In the end, Fergusson believes that talking with the Taliban might work better than fighting them.
Chuck Leddy, a freelance writer who lives in Dorchester, can be reached at chuckleddy@comcast.net.
President Obama could be impeached for violating U.S. Constitution and law by going into Libya without congressional consent, but Rep. Dennis Kucinich says he doesn't want to cause that kind of havoc on the Republic, he just wants the United States to get out of Libya's civil war. While many lawmakers in general support the U.S. role in Libya, even if they want the final say on approving military action, Kucinich, D-Ohio, will introduce a joint resolution when Congress returns this week that he says “hopefully will lead us out of this mess that we've waded into in Libya.”
. . . . . . .
Kucinich said the U.S. has no business intervening in Libya because it's a civil war. He added that the rebel forces the U.S. and NATO appear to be backing are demonstrating some disturbing behaviors, including “committing some of the same practices that they accused Colonel Qaddafi of.” Beyond that, he added, the whole operation stinks of a bid for the oil fields of Benghazi, where the rebels have set up their stronghold.
Nuclear Pakistan, we are often told, is the Islamic-state equivalent of a Wall Street firm: In geostrategic terms, it is too big to fail. That explains why, even as the Obama administration begins preparing for modest troop withdrawals from Afghanistan this July, it dispatched Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Islamabad last week to smooth over bilateral relations with Pakistan's paranoid regime, which were strained even before the killing of Osama bin Laden. But Clinton's trip and the Obama administration's instinctive embrace of Islamabad is a fool's errand, doomed by history, geography and globalization itself.
In fact, the U.S. should drop the entire Afghanistan-Pakistan mess in China's lap now, while the getting is good, and here are the reasons why: …
Phi Beta Iota: World Politics Review has not figured out the new world of information quite yet, and we have no desire to copy their entire article. Suffice to say that Barnett, who has gotten much more coherent since his first book, is on target here, but add to that that the US Government's foreign policy is both ideological and idiotic — apart from the huge error by Zbigniew Brzezinski giving Pakistan the nuclear bomb in the first place, the US has no business in Central Asia that is of benefit to the American people, only to the American carpet-baggers that feed at the public treasury (now much depleted and greatly in debt) while looting foreign countries.
Phi Beta Iota: Immediately obvious are the immediate focus on Iraq, Iran, Somalia, and Yemen. No big picture focus on preventive peace from the sea here. The emergent focus is on Central Asia (far from the sea) and the Indian Ocean area. One wonders if the time has come to tell the Navy to focus on defending the USA, not trying to intervene everywhere. Finally, the enduring languages are the usual suspects, but (we do not make this stuff up) we observe that there is no such thing as a Saigon Vietnamese dialect/language. Could they mean Ho Chi Minh (VS/QNS)?
Phi Beta Iota: We consider the attacks on Tripoli to be outrageously illegal and immoral by every standard. There is every reason for the non-NATO world to bring war crime charges against every participating NATO nation.
Peacekeepers from the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) park their tanks near the main Bakara market during fighting between Somalia government soldiers and Islamist insurgents in the capital Mogadishu, on May 23. Feisal Omar/Reuters
Phi Beta Iota: As with all regional organizations including security organizations such as NATO, the AU lacks a multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information-sharing and sense-making (M4IS2) capability. Until they have one, they will remain at the mercy of predatory states and corporations.
I recently met up with Facebook colleagues Simon Axten and Matt Perault to discuss the role that they and their platform might play in disaster response. So I thought I’d share some thoughts that come up during the conversation seeing as I’ve been thinking about this topic with a number of other colleagues for a while. I’m also very interested to hear any ideas and suggestions that iRevolution readers may have on this.
There’s no doubt that Facebook can—and already does—play an important role in disaster response. In Haiti, my colleague Rob Munro used Facebook to recruit hundreds of Creole speaking volunteers to translate tens of thousands of text messages into English as part of Mission 4636. When an earthquake struck New Zealand earlier this year, thousands of students organized their response via a Facebook group and also used the platform’s check-in’s feature to alert others in their social network that they were alright.
