A.LOWENSTEIN ONLINE NEWSLETTER

The kind of letter that Western leaders need to read and appreciate. As the war in Afghanistan fails tragically, blood is on their hands for continuing to pursue imperial policies in a broken land:

To the President of the United States: Mr. President, We have been engaged and working inside Afghanistan, some of us for decades, as academics, experts and members of non-governmental organisations. Today we are deeply worried about the current course of the war and the lack of credible scenarios for the future. The cost of the war is now over $120 billion per year for the United States alone.
This is unsustainable in the long run. In addition, human losses are increasing. Over 680 soldiers from the international coalition – along with hundreds of Afghans – have died this year in Afghanistan, and the year is not yet over. We appeal to you to use the unparalleled resources and influence which the United States now brings to bear in Afghanistan to achieve that longed-for peace.
Despite these huge costs, the situation on the ground is much worse than a year ago because the Taliban insurgency has made progress across the country. It is now very difficult to work outside the cities or even move around Afghanistan by road. The insurgents have built momentum, exploiting the shortcomings of the Afghan government and the mistakes of the coalition. The Taliban today are now a national movement with a serious presence in the north and the west of the country. Foreign bases are completely isolated from their local environment and unable to protect the population. Foreign forces have by now been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviet Red Army.
Politically, the settlement resulting from the 2001 intervention is unsustainable because the constituencies of whom the Taliban are the most violent expression are not represented, and because the highly centralised constitution goes against the grain of Afghan tradition, for example in specifying national elections in fourteen of the next twenty years.
The operations in the south of Afghanistan, in Kandahar and in Helmand provinces are not going well. What was supposed to be a population-centred strategy is now a full-scale military campaign causing civilian casualties and destruction of property. Night raids have become the main weapon to eliminate suspected Taliban, but much of the Afghan population sees these methods as illegitimate. Due to the violence of the military operations, we are losing the battle for hearts and minds in the Pashtun countryside, with a direct effect on the sustainability of the war. These measures, beyond their debatable military results, foster grievance. With Pakistan’s active support for the Taliban, it is not realistic to bet on a military solution. Drone strikes in Pakistan have a marginal effect on the insurgency but are destabilising Pakistan. The losses of the insurgency are compensated by new recruits who are often more radical than their predecessors.
The military campaign is suppressing, locally and temporarily, the symptoms of the disease, but fails to offer a cure. Military action may produce local and temporary improvements in security, but those improvements are neither going to last nor be replicable in the vast areas not garrisoned by Western forces without a political settlement.
The 2014 deadline to put the Afghan National Army in command of security is not realistic. Considering the quick disappearance of the state structure at a district level, it is difficult to envision a strong army standing alone without any other state institutions around. Like it or not, the Taliban are a long-term part of the Afghan political landscape, and we need to try and negotiate with them in order to reach a diplomatic settlement. The Taliban’s leadership has indicated its willingness to negotiate, and it is in our interests to talk to them. In fact, the Taliban are primarily concerned about the future of Afghanistan and not – contrary to what some may think – a broader global Islamic jihad. Their links with al-Qaeda – which is not, in any case, in Afghanistan any more – are weak. We need to at least try to seriously explore the possibility of a political settlement in which the Taliban are part of the Afghan political system. The negotiations with the insurgents could be extended to all groups in Afghanistan and regional powers.
The current contacts between the Karzai government and the Taliban are not enough. The United States must take the initiative to start negotiations with the insurgents and frame the discussion in such a way that American security interests are taken into account. In addition, from the point of view of Afghanistan’s most vulnerable populations – women and ethnic minorities, for instance – as well as with respect to the limited but real gains made since 2001, it is better to negotiate now rather than later, since the Taliban will likely be stronger next year. This is why we ask you to sanction and support a direct dialogue and negotiation with the Afghan Taliban leadership residing in Pakistan. A ceasefire and the return of the insurgency leadership in Afghanistan could be part of a de-escalation process leading to a coalition government. Without any chance for a military victory, the current policy will put the United States in a very difficult position.
For a process of political negotiation to have a chance of addressing the significant core grievances and political inequalities it must occur on multiple levels – among the countries that neighbour Afghanistan as well as down to the provincial and subdistrict. These various tables around which negotiations need to be held are important to reinforce the message – and the reality – that discussions about Afghanistan’s political future must include all parties and not just be a quick-fix deal with members of the insurgency.
We believe that mediation can help achieve a settlement which brings peace to Afghanistan, enables the Taliban to become a responsible actor in the Afghan political order, ensures that Afghanistan cannot be used as a base for international terrorism, protects the Afghan people’s hard-won freedoms, helps stabilise the region, renders the large scale presence of international troops in Afghanistan unnecessary and provides the basis of an enduring relationship between Afghanistan and the international community. All the political and diplomatic ingenuity that the United States can muster will be required to achieve this positive outcome. It is time to implement an alternative strategy that would allow the United States to exit Afghanistan while safeguarding its legitimate security interests.
Respectfully,
Matthieu Aikins Journalist
Scott Atran Anthropologist (University of Michigan) and author of Talking to the Enemy
Rupert Talbot Chetwynd Author of Yesterday’s Enemy – Freedom Fighters or Terrorists?
Robert Abdul Hayy Darr Author of The Spy of the Heart and humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Gilles Dorronsoro Visiting Scholar (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace) and author of Revolution Unending
David B. Edwards Anthropologist (Williams College) and author of Before Taliban Jason Elliot Author of An Unexpected Light
Antonio Giustozzi Author of Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop and editor of Decoding the New Taliban
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi Associate Professor, James Madison University
Daniel Korski Senior Policy Fellow, European Council on Foreign Relations
Felix Kuehn Kandahar-based writer/researcher, co-editor of My Life With the Taliban
Minna Jarvenpaa Former Head of Analysis and Policy Planning, UNAMA
Anatol Lieven Professor, War Studies Department of King’s College London and author of Pakistan: A Hard Country
Bob McKerrow Author of Mountains of our Minds – Afghanistan
Alessandro Monsutti Research Director, Transnational Studies/Development Studies at The Graduate Institute, Geneva
Ahmed Rashid Journalist and author of Taliban and Descent into Chaos
Nir Rosen Fellow, New York University Center on Law and Security
Gerard Russell Research Fellow, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard University
Alex Strick van Linschoten Kandahar-based writer/researcher, co-editor of My Life With the Taliban
Astri Surkhe Senior Researcher, Chr. Michelsen Institute, Norway
Yama Torabi Co-Director, Integrity Watch Afghanistan
Jere van Dyk Author of In Afghanistan and Captive
Matt Waldman Afghanistan Analyst

Good point. Let’s not madly focus on Julian Assange’s absurd legal battles and remember to appreciate the vast treasure trove of information Wikileaks has released:

The role of Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi has fascinated me for years. The corporate press used him as a key source over Iraq’s alleged WMDs. Oops.
Wikileaks delivers a little more:

For Iraq-watchers, a tiny but enticing tidbit surfaced in a WikiLeaks cable from February 2004, 11 months after the U.S.-led invasion. It involved Ahmad Chalabi, the brilliant, controversial and always fascinating Iraqi politician best known for helping to convince the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
The secret cable from the U.S. Embassy in Amman describes a meeting in which Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher accused Chalabi, then the chairman of the finance committee in the provisional Iraqi Governing Council, of opposing closer ties between Iraqi and Jordan. Muasher “blamed Chalabi for spoiling deals negotiated by Jordan’s Arab Bank and Export and Finance Bank with Iraq banks” and said he’d complain to Bush administration officials on an upcoming trip to Washington.
There’s no love lost between Chalabi and Jordan. In 1989, he had to flee Jordan after a bank he owned collapsed. Three years later, Jordan convicted him in absentia for embezzlement. Chalabi has always maintained that he did nothing wrong and that the prosecution was politically motivated.
The implication in the cable was juicy: Did Chalabi use his government post to settle an old score with Jordan?
I met Chalabi at one of his Baghdad homes on Thursday night and put the question to him. The smooth talking politician, dapper as always in a navy suit and matching tie, said that he had indeed blocked the bank deals — but had a ready explanation. His committee, he said, had obtained documents showing that the Mukhabarat, Iraq’s feared secret police, had attempted to open an account in the Swiss branch of Jordan’s Arab Bank, and that an officer in the Mukhabarat was holding a deposit in a Dubai office of the bank.
“So I said no,” Chalabi said. At the time, the Mukhabarat was accused of abuses and filled with Saddam loyalists and Baath Party members — and there was perhaps no more bitter opponent of Saddam than Chalabi. If Arab Bank were allowed to open up in Iraq, he told me, “it will facilitate the transfer of the money from these (offshore) accounts to help the Baathists and terrorists do things without the thing going through the international banking system. They could do an international transfer within the bank itself.”
In January 2004, Chalabi traveled to Washington and met with President Bush and other senior U.S. officials in the Oval Office. After the meeting, L. Paul Bremer, then the American viceroy in Iraq, took Chalabi aside and asked, “Why are you blocking the opening of Arab Bank in Baghdad?”
Chalabi explained what he found and Bremer asked him to pass the evidence to his staff in Baghdad. “I gave them copies of the documents and nothing more was said about it to me,” he said.
So, it seems, there you have it. It’s a bit inside baseball, but any story involving Chalabi, the Bush administration and the early days of the U.S. occupation of Iraq is worth telling, even almost seven years later.

I was asked by US-based Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting to sign this important petition about defending the right of Wikileaks to exist and publish:

As journalists, activists, artists, scholars and citizens, we condemn the array of threats and attacks on the journalist organization WikiLeaks. After the website’s decision, in collaboration with several international media organizations, to publish hundreds of classified State Department diplomatic cables, many pundits, commentators and prominent U.S. politicians have called for harsh actions to be taken to shut down WikiLeaks’ operations.
 Major corporations like Amazon.com, PayPal, MasterCard and Visa have acted to disrupt the group’s ability to publish. U.S. legal authorities and others have repeatedly suggested, without providing any evidence, that WikiLeaks’ posting of government secrets is a form of criminal behavior–or that at the very least, such activity should be made illegal. “To the extent there are gaps in our laws,” Attorney General Eric Holder proclaimed (11/29/10), “we will move to close those gaps.” 
 Throughout this episode, journalists and prominent media outlets have largely refrained from defending WikiLeaks’ rights to publish material of considerable news value and obvious public interest. It appears that these media organizations are hesitant to stand up for this particular media outlet’s free speech rights because they find the supposed political motivations behind WikiLeaks’ revelations objectionable. 
 But the test for one’s commitment to freedom of the press is not whether one agrees with what a media outlet publishes or the manner in which it is published. WikiLeaks is certainly not beyond criticism. But the overarching consideration should be the freedom to publish in a democratic society–including the freedom to publish material that a particular government would prefer be kept secret. When government officials and media outlets declare that attacks on a particular media organization are justified, it sends an unmistakably chilling message about the rights of anyone to publish material that might rattle or offend established powers.
We hereby stand in support of the WikiLeaks media organization, and condemn the attacks on their freedom as an attack on journalistic freedoms for all.
******
Daniel Ellsberg 
Noam Chomsky
Glenn Greenwald (Salon)
Barbara Ehrenreich
Arundhati Roy (author)
Medea Benjamin (Code Pink)
Tom Morello (musician)
John Nichols (The Nation)
Craig Brown (CommonDreams)
Glen Ford (Black Agenda Report)
DeeDee Halleck (Waves of Change, Deep Dish Network)
Norman Solomon (author, War Made Easy)
Tom Hayden
Fatima Bhutto (author)
Viggo Mortensen (actor)
Don Rojas (Free Speech TV)
Robert McChesney
Edward S. Herman (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania)
Sam Husseini
Jeff Cohen (Park Center for Independent Media)
Joel Bleifuss (In These Times)
Maya Schenwar (Truthout)
Greg Ruggiero (City Lights)
Thom Hartmann
Ben Ehrenreich
Robin Andersen (Fordham University)
Anthony Arnove (author, Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal)
Robert Naiman (Just Foreign Policy)
Dan Gillmor (Salon)
Michael Albert (Z Magazine)
Kate Murphy (The Nation)
Michelangelo Signorile (Sirius XM)
Lisa Lynch (Concordia University)
Rory O’Connor (Media Is a Plural)
Aaron Swartz
Peter Rothberg (The Nation)
Doug Henwood (Left Business Observer)
Barry Crimmins
Bill Fletcher, Jr (Blackcommentator.com)
Bob Harris (writer)
Jonathan Schwarz (A Tiny Revolution)
Alex Kane
Susan Ohanian
Jamie McClelland (May First/People Link)
Alfredo Lopez (May First/People Link)
Antonia Zerbisias (Toronto Star)
Mark Crispin Miller (NYU)
Jonathan Tasini
Antony Loewenstein

If the US thinks, according to the Wikileaks cables, that Britain has done a terrible job connecting with Muslims after the 7/7 attacks, how the hell is Washington viewed by the world when occupying Muslim lands and killing civilians on a daily basis?
Seriously, our world is run by clueless clowns who think war will bring peace or resolution. It brings the opposite.

Bravo:

Today’s rally for Wikileaks in Sydney was a success, apart from the excessively brutal police force seemingly determined to not allow citizens the right to protest in the streets.
Before the event itself, the Sydney Morning Herald reported under the misleading headline, “We’ll march anyway; Wikileaks protesters to defy police” – suggesting the police were completely correct to oppose the holding of the event – and the story included this:

According to the Facebook page, the rally will be addressed by Mr [NSW Greens MP David] Shoebridge, independent journalist Wendy Bacon and author Antony Loewenstein.
Mr Loewenstein, a spokesman for the rally, accused police of having ulterior motives for denying the protest.
“We have been given the reasons [for denying the protest], yes, but we don’t accept them,” he said.
“We feel the real reasons [for police denying the protest] could be rather that they might be overwhelmed with the Oprah circus in town and they don’t want the embarrassment for the Gillard government while the international media is in town.
“We have a democratic right to protest and we will do so at Town Hall at 5.30pm today.”
Mr Loewenstein said the protest was planned to be peaceful, but could not rule out possible violence.
“Look, you know … it is planned to [be] a peaceful protest … but what they, the police do, well that’s up to them,” he said.

The rally took place (roughly 800 people attended), we all spoke and then the crowd wanted to march. A number of people tell me that the police were overly aggressive and keen to provoke the crowd. State-sponsored thugs, in reality:

Protesters have clashed with police at a rally in central Sydney in support of the WikiLeaks website and its jailed founder Julian Assange.
About 70 officers, including mounted police and the riot squad, tried to keep the crowd of several hundred people on the footpath.
The protesters marched down busy George Street alongside a wall of police, chanting slogans and waving banners reading “Hands off WikiLeaks” and “We deserve the truth”.
But when some of them tried to run on to the road, police stepped in and made a number of arrests.
The crowd reacted angrily and continued to march to Martin Place, where another arrest was made.
Police allege one man punched an officer and three protesters tried to block traffic at an intersection.
The man has been charged with assaulting police and the trio have been released with a penalty notice.
Greens MP David Shoebridge, who was among the protesters, says police could have handled the situation better.
“There were two ways the police could have dealt with it,” he said.
“They could have worked with the organisers and there would have been a peaceful march to the consulate.
“The police refused to give permission to the organisers and instead there was a confrontation on the streets caused by that police intransigence.”
Police say the protesters were refused permission to march through the city because the mandatory five days’ notice was not given.
Inspector Chris Craner says police had a deal with the organisers that the protesters stick to the footpath.
“From the outset we’ve had a bit of non-compliance in relation to the issue of the scheduled one (march),” he said.
“We’ve been in negotiations with them, some of the organisers have been quite fine to talk to.
“There’s always a crowd of people who try and disrupt certain events. Some people are here purely for a peaceful protest which is what we’re happy with, we’ve facilitated that. Those that play up, end up being arrested.”
But activist Pip Hinman says the protesters staged a peaceful rally and did not disrupt peak-hour traffic.
“The police I saw were grabbing people from the footpath. They were pulling people onto the street. At the same time they let out their dogs from their vans and that’s where I saw a few people getting dragged away,” she said.
She says they were trying to send a message to Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
“It was a message to Julia Gillard that Julian Assange is not a criminal,” she said.
“If any charges have been laid, he has a right to have them heard in a court of law and not be tried by governments and the media.”
Meanwhile, about 600 people protested in support of WikiLeaks in Melbourne, marching along Swanston Street to the British consulate.
Police say the protest was peaceful and no arrests were made.

Let’s not forget the main reason people are protesting. Defending Wikileaks and its right to publish important information for the public good.

The fight continues:

The founder of WikiLeaks has issued a plea from jail for his supporters to keep fighting, accusing Visa, Mastercard and Paypal of being instruments of US foreign policy.
In a world exclusive statement provided to the Sunshine Coast Daily via his Australian mother, Julian Assange said he was determined to fight for the future of WikiLeaks.
“My convictions are unfaltering. I remain true to the ideals I have always expressed,” he said from Wandsworth Prison in London.
“These circumstances shall not shake them. If anything, this process has increased my determination that they are true and correct.
“We now know that Visa, Mastercard and Paypal are instruments of US foreign policy. It’s not something we knew before.
“I am calling on the world to protect my work and my people from these illegal and immoral acts.”
Julian Assange’s mother Christine, who lives on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, has flown to London to visit his son and support him in his bail hearing, expected tonight (NZT).
Mrs Assange was not able to see her son face-to-face on Monday but a 10-minute phone call reunited the duo.
It was the first time the Noosa woman spoke to her son since he was arrested.
Mr Assange told his mum there were CCTV cameras monitoring his cell because of fears he could be assassinated for his role in releasing 250,000 confidential US government documents.

Jeremy Scahill:

Holbrooke backed Indonesian genocide in East Timor, killing of journos in Serbia and supported 2003 Iraq invasion.

Johann Hari:

I’m more inclined to grieve for victims of Indonesian genocide in East Timor than Richard Holbrooke, who armed & supported that genocide.

Read this.

The people have spoken:

The controversial founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has won an online vote to be TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year.
The annual online vote asks readers to choose the most influential person, people or things from the previous year.
Readers voted a total of 1,249,425 times, and the favorite was clear, TIME reported. Julian Assange raked in 382,020 votes, giving him an easy first place. He was 148,383 votes over the silver medalist, Recep Tayyip Ergodan, Prime Minister of Turkey.

Speaking of people power:

The US Army private suspected of giving a mountain of secret data to WikiLeaks, may be crowned a hero in the California city known for hippies and anti-war protests.
Berkeley city council members were to vote on Tuesday on a resolution proclaiming Bradley Manning a hero and urging military officials to release him from custody.
“Blowing the whistle on war crimes is not a crime,” read a resolution endorsed by the city’s Peace and Justice Commission.
“If Pfc. Bradley Manning is the source who provided WikiLeaks with the ‘Collateral Murder’ video and/or the 92,000 documents known as ‘The Afghan War Diary’, (then) he is a hero.”
Manning is already seen as a hero by anti-war activists and a villain by government officials outraged over the exposure of classified files.