See related piece from Julian Cribb, "The Coming Famine" published in NYTimes. Raj Patel's book "Stuffed and Starved" is also an excellent read on the topic.
The original report on which the below article is based.
How Goldman Sachs gambled on starving the world's poor - and won
Johann Hari, July 2, 2010
Source
Excerpt
"At the end of 2006, food prices across the world started to rise, suddenly and stratospherically. Within a year, the price of wheat had shot up by 80 percent, maize by 90 percent, and rice by 320 percent. In a global jolt of hunger, 200 million people - mostly children - couldn't afford to get food any more, and sank into malnutrition or starvation. There were riots in over 30 countries, and at least one government was violently overthrown. Then, in spring 2008, prices just as mysteriously fell back to their previous level. Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, called it "a silent mass murder", entirely due to "man-made actions."
Earlier this year I was in Ethiopia, one of the worst-hit countries, and people there remember the food crisis like they were hit by a tsunami. "It was very painful," a woman my age called Abeba Getaneh, told me. "My children stopped growing. I felt like battery acid had been poured into my stomach as I starved. I took my two daughters out of school and got into debt. If it had gone on much longer, I think my baby would have died."
Most of the explanations we were given at the time have turned out to be false. It didn't happen because supply fell: the International Grain Council says global production of wheat actually increased during that period, for example. It isn't because demand grew either. We were told the swelling Chinese and Indian middle classes were pushing it up, but as Professor Jayati Ghosh of the Centre for Economic Studies in New Delhi has shown, demand from those countries for them actually fell by 3 percent over this period.
There are some smaller explanations that account for some of the price rise, but not all. It's true the growing demand for biofuels was gobbling up much-needed agricultural land - but that was a gradual process that wouldn't explain a violent spike. It's true that oil prices increased, driving up the cost of growing and distributing food - but the evidence increasingly shows that wasn't the biggest factor.
To understand the biggest cause, you have to plough through some concepts that will make your head ache - but not half as much as they made the poor world's stomachs ache.
For over a century, farmers in wealthy countries have been able to engage in a process where they protect themselves against risk. Farmer Giles can agree in January to sell his crop to a trader in August at a fixed price. If he has a great summer and the global price is high, he'll lose some cash, but if there's a lousy summer or the price collapses, he'll do well from the deal. When this process was tightly regulated and only companies with a direct interest in the field could get involved, it worked well.
Then, through the 1990s, Goldman Sachs and others lobbied hard and the regulations were abolished. Suddenly, these contracts were turned into 'derivatives' that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. A market in "food speculation" was born.
So Farmer Giles still agrees to sell his crop in advance to a trader for £10,000. But now, that contract can be sold on to financial speculators, who treat the contract itself as an object of potential wealth. Goldman Sachs can buy it and sell it on for £20,000 to Deutschebank, who sell it on for £30,000 to Merryl Lynch - and on, and on, provided they think the price can be jacked up, until it seems to bear almost no relationship to Farmer Giles' crop at all.
If this seems mystifying, it is. John Lanchester, in his superb guide to the world of finance, 'Whoops! Why Everybody Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay', explains: "Finance, like other forms of human behaviour, underwent a change in the twentieth century, a shift equivalent to the emergence of modernism in the arts - a break with common sense, a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction and notions that couldn't be explained in workaday English."
Poetry found its break broke with straightforward representation of reality when T.S. Eliot wrote 'The Wasteland.' Finance found its Wasteland moment in the 1970s, when it began to be dominated by complex financial instruments that even the people selling them didn't fully understand. As Lanchester puts it: "With derivatives... there is a profound break between the language of finance and that of common sense."
So what has this got to do with the bread on Abiba's plate? How could this parallel universe of speculation affect her? Until deregulation, the price for food was set by the forces of supply and demand for food itself. (This was itself deeply imperfect: it left a billion people hungry.) But after deregulation, it was no longer just a market in food. It became, at the same time, a market in contracts that were speculating on theoretical food that would be grown in the future - and the speculators drove the price through the roof.
Here's how it happened. In 2006, financial speculators like Goldman's pulled out of the collapsing US real estate market, and they were looking for somewhere else to make their stash of cash swell. They started to buy massive amounts of derivatives based on food: they reckoned that food prices would stay steady or rise while the rest of the economy tanked. Suddenly, the world's frightened investors stampeded onto this ground and decided to buy, buy, buy.
So while the supply and demand of food stayed pretty much the same, the supply and demand for contracts based on food massively rose - which meant the all-rolled-into-one price for food on people's plates massively rose. The starvation began.
The food price was now being set by speculation, rather than by real food. The hedge fund manager Michael Masters estimated that even on the regulated exchanges in the US - which take up a small part of the business - 64 percent of all wheat contracts were held by speculators with no interest whatever in real wheat. They owned it solely to inflate the price and sell it on. Even George Soros said this was "just like secretly hoarding food during a hunger crisis in order to make profits from increasing prices." The bubble only burst in March 2008 when the situation got so bad in the US that the speculators had to slash their spending to cover their losses back home."
...
"How do we know this is wrong? As Professor Ghosh points out, some vital crops are not traded on the futures markets, including millet, cassava, and potatoes. Their price rose a little during this period - but only a fraction as much as the ones affected by speculation. Her research shows this speculation was "the main cause" of the rise.
So it has come to this. The world's wealthiest speculators set up a casino where the chips were the stomachs of hundreds of millions of innocent people. They gambled on increasing starvation, and won. This is what happens when you follow the claim that unregulated markets know best to the end of the line. The finance sector's Wasteland moment created a real wasteland. What does it say about our political and economic system that we can so casually inflict such misery, and barely even notice?"
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Friday, October 1, 2010
Milne: US rebranding the occupation in Iraq
The US isn't leaving Iraq, it's rebranding the occupation
Obama says withdrawal is on schedule, but renaming or outsourcing combat troops won't give Iraqis back their country
By Seumas Milne, Guardian.co.uk, August 4, 2010
Source
For most people in Britain and the US, Iraq is already history. Afghanistan has long since taken the lion's share of media attention, as the death toll of Nato troops rises inexorably. Controversy about Iraq is now almost entirely focused on the original decision to invade: what's happening there in 2010 barely registers.
That will have been reinforced by Barack Obama's declaration this week that US combat troops are to be withdrawn from Iraq at the end of the month "as promised and on schedule". For much of the British and American press, this was the real thing: headlines hailed the "end" of the war and reported "US troops to leave Iraq".
Nothing could be further from the truth. The US isn't withdrawing from Iraq at all – it's rebranding the occupation. Just as George Bush's war on terror was retitled "overseas contingency operations" when Obama became president, US "combat operations" will be rebadged from next month as "stability operations".
But as Major General Stephen Lanza, the US military spokesman in Iraq, told the New York Times: "In practical terms, nothing will change". After this month's withdrawal, there will still be 50,000 US troops in 94 military bases, "advising" and training the Iraqi army, "providing security" and carrying out "counter-terrorism" missions. In US military speak, that covers pretty well everything they might want to do.
Granted, 50,000 is a major reduction on the numbers in Iraq a year ago. But what Obama once called "the dumb war" goes remorselessly on. In fact, violence has been increasing as the Iraqi political factions remain deadlocked for the fifth month in a row in the Green Zone. More civilians are being killed in Iraq than Afghanistan: 535 last month alone, according to the Iraqi government – the worst figure for two years.
And even though US troops are rarely seen on the streets, they are still dying at a rate of six a month, their bases regularly shelled by resistance groups, while Iraqi troops and US-backed militias are being killed in far greater numbers and al-Qaida – Bush's gift to Iraq – is back in business across swaths of the country. Although hardly noticed in Britain, there are still 150 British troops in Iraq supporting US forces.
Meanwhile, the US government isn't just rebranding the occupation, it's also privatising it. There are around 100,000 private contractors working for the occupying forces, of whom more than 11,000 are armed mercenaries, mostly "third country nationals", typically from the developing world. One Peruvian and two Ugandan security contractors were killed in a rocket attack on the Green Zone only a fortnight ago.
The US now wants to expand their numbers sharply in what Jeremy Scahill, who helped expose the role of the notorious US security firm Blackwater, calls the "coming surge" of contractors in Iraq. Hillary Clinton wants to increase the number of military contractors working for the state department alone from 2,700 to 7,000, to be based in five "enduring presence posts" across Iraq.
The advantage of an outsourced occupation is clearly that someone other than US soldiers can do the dying to maintain control of Iraq. It also helps get round the commitment, made just before Bush left office, to pull all American troops out by the end of 2011. The other getout, widely expected on all sides, is a new Iraqi request for US troops to stay on – just as soon as a suitable government can be stitched together to make it.
What is abundantly clear is that the US, whose embassy in Baghdad is now the size of Vatican City, has no intention of letting go of Iraq any time soon. One reason for that can be found in the dozen 20-year contracts to run Iraq's biggest oil fields that were handed out last year to foreign companies, including three of the Anglo-American oil majors that exploited Iraqi oil under British control before 1958.
The dubious legality of these deals has held back some US companies, but as Greg Muttitt, author of a forthcoming book on the subject, argues, the prize for the US is bigger than the contracts themselves, which put 60% of Iraq's reserves under long-term foreign corporate control. If output can be boosted as sharply as planned, the global oil price could be slashed and the grip of recalcitrant Opec states broken.
The horrific cost of the war to the Iraqi people, on the other hand, and the continuing fear and misery of daily life make a mockery of claims that the US surge of 2007 "worked" and that Iraq has come good after all.
It's not only the hundreds of thousands of dead and 4 million refugees. After seven years of US (and British) occupation, tens of thousands are still tortured and imprisoned without trial, health and education has dramatically deteriorated, the position of women has gone horrifically backwards, trade unions are effectively banned, Baghdad is divided by 1,500 checkpoints and blast walls, electricity supplies have all but broken down and people pay with their lives for speaking out.
Even without the farce of the March elections, the banning and killing of candidates and activists and subsequent political breakdown, to claim – as the Times did today – that "Iraq is a democracy" is grotesque. The Green Zone administration would collapse in short order without the protection of US troops and security contractors. No wonder the speculation among Iraqis and some US officials is of an eventual military takeover.
The Iraq war has been a historic political and strategic failure for the US. It was unable to impose a military solution, let alone turn the country into a beacon of western values or regional policeman. But by playing the sectarian and ethnic cards, it also prevented the emergence of a national resistance movement and a humiliating Vietnam-style pullout. The signs are it wants to create a new form of outsourced semi-colonial regime to maintain its grip on the country and region. The struggle to regain Iraq's independence has only just begun.
Obama says withdrawal is on schedule, but renaming or outsourcing combat troops won't give Iraqis back their country
By Seumas Milne, Guardian.co.uk, August 4, 2010
Source
For most people in Britain and the US, Iraq is already history. Afghanistan has long since taken the lion's share of media attention, as the death toll of Nato troops rises inexorably. Controversy about Iraq is now almost entirely focused on the original decision to invade: what's happening there in 2010 barely registers.
That will have been reinforced by Barack Obama's declaration this week that US combat troops are to be withdrawn from Iraq at the end of the month "as promised and on schedule". For much of the British and American press, this was the real thing: headlines hailed the "end" of the war and reported "US troops to leave Iraq".
Nothing could be further from the truth. The US isn't withdrawing from Iraq at all – it's rebranding the occupation. Just as George Bush's war on terror was retitled "overseas contingency operations" when Obama became president, US "combat operations" will be rebadged from next month as "stability operations".
But as Major General Stephen Lanza, the US military spokesman in Iraq, told the New York Times: "In practical terms, nothing will change". After this month's withdrawal, there will still be 50,000 US troops in 94 military bases, "advising" and training the Iraqi army, "providing security" and carrying out "counter-terrorism" missions. In US military speak, that covers pretty well everything they might want to do.
Granted, 50,000 is a major reduction on the numbers in Iraq a year ago. But what Obama once called "the dumb war" goes remorselessly on. In fact, violence has been increasing as the Iraqi political factions remain deadlocked for the fifth month in a row in the Green Zone. More civilians are being killed in Iraq than Afghanistan: 535 last month alone, according to the Iraqi government – the worst figure for two years.
And even though US troops are rarely seen on the streets, they are still dying at a rate of six a month, their bases regularly shelled by resistance groups, while Iraqi troops and US-backed militias are being killed in far greater numbers and al-Qaida – Bush's gift to Iraq – is back in business across swaths of the country. Although hardly noticed in Britain, there are still 150 British troops in Iraq supporting US forces.
Meanwhile, the US government isn't just rebranding the occupation, it's also privatising it. There are around 100,000 private contractors working for the occupying forces, of whom more than 11,000 are armed mercenaries, mostly "third country nationals", typically from the developing world. One Peruvian and two Ugandan security contractors were killed in a rocket attack on the Green Zone only a fortnight ago.
The US now wants to expand their numbers sharply in what Jeremy Scahill, who helped expose the role of the notorious US security firm Blackwater, calls the "coming surge" of contractors in Iraq. Hillary Clinton wants to increase the number of military contractors working for the state department alone from 2,700 to 7,000, to be based in five "enduring presence posts" across Iraq.
The advantage of an outsourced occupation is clearly that someone other than US soldiers can do the dying to maintain control of Iraq. It also helps get round the commitment, made just before Bush left office, to pull all American troops out by the end of 2011. The other getout, widely expected on all sides, is a new Iraqi request for US troops to stay on – just as soon as a suitable government can be stitched together to make it.
What is abundantly clear is that the US, whose embassy in Baghdad is now the size of Vatican City, has no intention of letting go of Iraq any time soon. One reason for that can be found in the dozen 20-year contracts to run Iraq's biggest oil fields that were handed out last year to foreign companies, including three of the Anglo-American oil majors that exploited Iraqi oil under British control before 1958.
The dubious legality of these deals has held back some US companies, but as Greg Muttitt, author of a forthcoming book on the subject, argues, the prize for the US is bigger than the contracts themselves, which put 60% of Iraq's reserves under long-term foreign corporate control. If output can be boosted as sharply as planned, the global oil price could be slashed and the grip of recalcitrant Opec states broken.
The horrific cost of the war to the Iraqi people, on the other hand, and the continuing fear and misery of daily life make a mockery of claims that the US surge of 2007 "worked" and that Iraq has come good after all.
It's not only the hundreds of thousands of dead and 4 million refugees. After seven years of US (and British) occupation, tens of thousands are still tortured and imprisoned without trial, health and education has dramatically deteriorated, the position of women has gone horrifically backwards, trade unions are effectively banned, Baghdad is divided by 1,500 checkpoints and blast walls, electricity supplies have all but broken down and people pay with their lives for speaking out.
Even without the farce of the March elections, the banning and killing of candidates and activists and subsequent political breakdown, to claim – as the Times did today – that "Iraq is a democracy" is grotesque. The Green Zone administration would collapse in short order without the protection of US troops and security contractors. No wonder the speculation among Iraqis and some US officials is of an eventual military takeover.
The Iraq war has been a historic political and strategic failure for the US. It was unable to impose a military solution, let alone turn the country into a beacon of western values or regional policeman. But by playing the sectarian and ethnic cards, it also prevented the emergence of a national resistance movement and a humiliating Vietnam-style pullout. The signs are it wants to create a new form of outsourced semi-colonial regime to maintain its grip on the country and region. The struggle to regain Iraq's independence has only just begun.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Dawn Editorial: Trouble in Parachinar
For background, click here.
[Edit October 21, 2010: More from Dawn: "Haqqani’s two sons mediating in Kurram"]
Trouble in Parachinar
Editorial, Dawn, Sep 20, 2010
Source
The seemingly interminable violence in the Parachinar area of Kurram Agency has spiked once again. This time a water dispute between two of the four main tribes — Bangash and Mangal — has claimed the lives of over 100 people in weeklong fighting that shows no sign of abating. Water, along with other resources such as forests, has long been a source of inter-tribal rivalry in the agency, but what makes Kurram Agency doubly dangerous is that the violence has been thoroughly infused with sectarian hatreds — starting as far back as 1982, though much of the present blame must lie with the ingress of the Taliban in the area in 2007.
For a couple of years the area remained cut off from the rest of Pakistan with the closure of a key road; however, a political agreement signed in Murree and a limited military operation in the area has helped to reopen the Thall-Parachinar road. Limited traffic continues to move on the road, though many people of the area still use the Afghan route to travel to other parts of Pakistan because of the dangers involved. (The Afghan route is no less dangerous: in July, 11 residents of Parachinar who were en route to Peshawar via Kabul were ambushed and killed in Paktia.)
Bringing an end to the violence in Kurram Agency, and the Parachinar area in particular is a matter of the state taking its responsibilities more seriously. The agreement signed in Murree in October 2008 was in part possible because of the initiative of the then political agent of the agency, who has since been replaced. That agreement remains the best hope for the return of peace to the area and as such should be implemented in all earnestness. From the return of displaced persons, some of whom have not returned home since the 1982 violence, to the payment of compensation for property damaged and destroyed to the return of property confiscated, the agreement encompasses many sensible and pragmatic measures. In addition, cellphone services should be restored in the area (at present, locals have to use Afghan SIMs and networks, which adds to the difficulties of life).
By now it should be apparent that the longer Pakistan delays resolving the crisis in Kurram Agency, the more it will slip back towards the sphere of Afghan, and by extension American, influence. Such a development may only further complicate the resolution of the troubles in the area. The sooner the Murree accord is implemented the better. Unfortunately, implementation isn’t the state’s strongest suit.
[Edit October 21, 2010: More from Dawn: "Haqqani’s two sons mediating in Kurram"]
Trouble in Parachinar
Editorial, Dawn, Sep 20, 2010
Source
The seemingly interminable violence in the Parachinar area of Kurram Agency has spiked once again. This time a water dispute between two of the four main tribes — Bangash and Mangal — has claimed the lives of over 100 people in weeklong fighting that shows no sign of abating. Water, along with other resources such as forests, has long been a source of inter-tribal rivalry in the agency, but what makes Kurram Agency doubly dangerous is that the violence has been thoroughly infused with sectarian hatreds — starting as far back as 1982, though much of the present blame must lie with the ingress of the Taliban in the area in 2007.
For a couple of years the area remained cut off from the rest of Pakistan with the closure of a key road; however, a political agreement signed in Murree and a limited military operation in the area has helped to reopen the Thall-Parachinar road. Limited traffic continues to move on the road, though many people of the area still use the Afghan route to travel to other parts of Pakistan because of the dangers involved. (The Afghan route is no less dangerous: in July, 11 residents of Parachinar who were en route to Peshawar via Kabul were ambushed and killed in Paktia.)
Bringing an end to the violence in Kurram Agency, and the Parachinar area in particular is a matter of the state taking its responsibilities more seriously. The agreement signed in Murree in October 2008 was in part possible because of the initiative of the then political agent of the agency, who has since been replaced. That agreement remains the best hope for the return of peace to the area and as such should be implemented in all earnestness. From the return of displaced persons, some of whom have not returned home since the 1982 violence, to the payment of compensation for property damaged and destroyed to the return of property confiscated, the agreement encompasses many sensible and pragmatic measures. In addition, cellphone services should be restored in the area (at present, locals have to use Afghan SIMs and networks, which adds to the difficulties of life).
By now it should be apparent that the longer Pakistan delays resolving the crisis in Kurram Agency, the more it will slip back towards the sphere of Afghan, and by extension American, influence. Such a development may only further complicate the resolution of the troubles in the area. The sooner the Murree accord is implemented the better. Unfortunately, implementation isn’t the state’s strongest suit.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Kenneth O’Keefe on BBC’s Hardtalk, talks about Gaza Aid Flotilla Attack
Kenneth O’Keefe talks about the Israeli attack on the MV Mavi Marmara which killed 9 humanitarian activists. See a previous post on this issue, here.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Mineral riches and the future of Afghanistan
Stories about the existence of such mineral resources in both Afghanistan and Pakistan were in circulation for quite sometime. They have been cited as one of the main reasons why imperial powers are so interested in this region. Learning from other cases, the future of Afghanistan might not be very different from what is described in the following clip by John Perkins.
Economic Hitmen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7Fzm1hEiDQ
[Update June 14, 2010: Paul Jay argues that the US knew about mineral riches at least from 2007. He writes:
One did not need to read an "internal Pentagon memo" to find about the discovery. Just visit the public website of the U.S. Geological Survey and read the press release "Significant Potential for Undiscovered Resources in Afghanistan Released: 11/13/2007 10:00:00 AM"...
In an interview with USGS's Stephen Peters published at the same time on the same site, Peters says there are "Known deposits of asbestos, mercury, lead, zinc, fluorspar, bauxite, beryllium, and lithium."
In the NYT story, this is all presented as a recent and pleasant surprise to the Afghan government. According to the NYT, after the USGS survey was completed in 2006 and '07, "the results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments."
The problem is the USGS results were announced in 2007 at the 3rd annual U.S.-Afghan Business Matchmaking Conference organized by the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C.
The press release from the USGS included a quote from Afghanistan's Ambassador to the United States, Said T. Jawad, who said at the time "Afghanistan's natural resources have a quality comparable to the highest-class minerals of the entire region."
Why the story broke in the NYT on Sunday could be linked to a desire by the Pentagon to create a reason why U.S. troops might want to stick around in Afghanistan for some time to come. Things are not going very well on the ground and the promise of vast mineral riches would sound enticing.
The Times story includes a quote from Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command who says, "There is stunning potential here."
The serious question is, Did the knowledge of these massive mineral deposits affect President Obama's decision to increase troop levels and widen the scale of operations in Afghanistan? Are Canada, the UK and other NATO countries aware of the USGS report?
Has securing this mineral bonanza become the real US/NATO mission in the region?]
U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan
By James Risen, NYTimes, June 13, 2010
Source
Excerpts:
WASHINGTON — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
Economic Hitmen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7Fzm1hEiDQ
[Update June 14, 2010: Paul Jay argues that the US knew about mineral riches at least from 2007. He writes:
One did not need to read an "internal Pentagon memo" to find about the discovery. Just visit the public website of the U.S. Geological Survey and read the press release "Significant Potential for Undiscovered Resources in Afghanistan Released: 11/13/2007 10:00:00 AM"...
In an interview with USGS's Stephen Peters published at the same time on the same site, Peters says there are "Known deposits of asbestos, mercury, lead, zinc, fluorspar, bauxite, beryllium, and lithium."
In the NYT story, this is all presented as a recent and pleasant surprise to the Afghan government. According to the NYT, after the USGS survey was completed in 2006 and '07, "the results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments."
The problem is the USGS results were announced in 2007 at the 3rd annual U.S.-Afghan Business Matchmaking Conference organized by the Afghan-American Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C.
The press release from the USGS included a quote from Afghanistan's Ambassador to the United States, Said T. Jawad, who said at the time "Afghanistan's natural resources have a quality comparable to the highest-class minerals of the entire region."
Why the story broke in the NYT on Sunday could be linked to a desire by the Pentagon to create a reason why U.S. troops might want to stick around in Afghanistan for some time to come. Things are not going very well on the ground and the promise of vast mineral riches would sound enticing.
The Times story includes a quote from Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command who says, "There is stunning potential here."
The serious question is, Did the knowledge of these massive mineral deposits affect President Obama's decision to increase troop levels and widen the scale of operations in Afghanistan? Are Canada, the UK and other NATO countries aware of the USGS report?
Has securing this mineral bonanza become the real US/NATO mission in the region?]
U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan
By James Risen, NYTimes, June 13, 2010
Source
Excerpts:
WASHINGTON — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.
The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.
While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.
“There is stunning potential here,” Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the United States Central Command, said in an interview on Saturday. “There are a lot of ifs, of course, but I think potentially it is hugely significant.”
...
The mineral deposits are scattered throughout the country, including in the southern and eastern regions along the border with Pakistan that have had some of the most intense combat in the American-led war against the Taliban insurgency.
The Pentagon task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal with mineral development. International accounting firms that have expertise in mining contracts have been hired to consult with the Afghan Ministry of Mines, and technical data is being prepared to turn over to multinational mining companies and other potential foreign investors. The Pentagon is helping Afghan officials arrange to start seeking bids on mineral rights by next fall, officials said.“The Ministry of Mines is not ready to handle this,” Mr. Brinkley said. “We are trying to help them get ready.”
Like much of the recent history of the country, the story of the discovery of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth is one of missed opportunities and the distractions of war.
In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.
During the chaos of the 1990s, when Afghanistan was mired in civil war and later ruled by the Taliban, a small group of Afghan geologists protected the charts by taking them home, and returned them to the Geological Survey’s library only after the American invasion and the ouster of the Taliban in 2001.
“There were maps, but the development did not take place, because you had 30 to 35 years of war,” said Ahmad Hujabre, an Afghan engineer who worked for the Ministry of Mines in the 1970s.
Armed with the old Russian charts, the United States Geological Survey began a series of aerial surveys of Afghanistan’s mineral resources in 2006, using advanced gravity and magnetic measuring equipment attached to an old Navy Orion P-3 aircraft that flew over about 70 percent of the country.
The data from those flights was so promising that in 2007, the geologists returned for an even more sophisticated study, using an old British bomber equipped with instruments that offered a three-dimensional profile of mineral deposits below the earth’s surface. It was the most comprehensive geologic survey of Afghanistan ever conducted.
The handful of American geologists who pored over the new data said the results were astonishing.
But the results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments. In 2009, a Pentagon task force that had created business development programs in Iraq was transferred to Afghanistan, and came upon the geological data. Until then, no one besides the geologists had bothered to look at the information — and no one had sought to translate the technical data to measure the potential economic value of the mineral deposits.
Soon, the Pentagon business development task force brought in teams of American mining experts to validate the survey’s findings, and then briefed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mr. Karzai.
So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.
Just this month, American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium. Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves.
For the geologists who are now scouring some of the most remote stretches of Afghanistan to complete the technical studies necessary before the international bidding process is begun, there is a growing sense that they are in the midst of one of the great discoveries of their careers.
“On the ground, it’s very, very, promising,” Mr. Medlin said. “Actually, it’s pretty amazing.”
Monday, June 7, 2010
Helen Thomas - Paying the Price for Daring to Speak Out
In Defense of Helen Thomas -- On Apologizing to Apologists Paul Jay, HuffingtonPost, June 7, 2010
Source
"Helen Thomas was the dean of the White House Press corp. She has a fifty-year history of tough-minded journalism and is one of the very, very few journalists in the mainstream press who has had the guts to question US policy towards Israel. On Monday she was pressured into resigning, "effective immediately".
On Friday she was asked by a guy who stuck a video camera in her face for any comments on Israel and she said, "Tell them to get the get the hell out of Palestine. Remember, these people [the Palestinians] are occupied and it's their land. It's not Germany, it's not Poland." She was asked where they should go and she answered, "They should go home, to Poland, Germany and America". The video has been making its way around the Internet.
This was said days after the Israeli attack on the aid flotilla that killed at least nine activists as their boat sailed in international waters.
She later apologized in a short statement on her website "I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon."
Her apology was not enough to stop calls for her head from those who have wanted to shut Thomas up for years."
...
Do I think all Jews (that came after 1948) should get out of Palestine? Well, no more or less than Europeans should get out of North America, or the Portuguese should get out of Brazil, or the British should get the hell out of Australia. There does come a point where such things are simply not possible.
There's really no need anyway, there's plenty of land and resources. The only issue is, are the rights of the people who owned the land before colonization going to be respected now; is there proper compensation; do they have the right to self-determination and so on.
In the case of the Palestinians, what Israel needs to do has been made very clear in UN resolutions and in the demands of the Palestinians. In spite of the illegal blockade of Gaza, almost no one, including the Hamas representative I interviewed a few weeks ago, says the Jews have to get out. Ok there are some that say it, people get very angry after 62 years in a refugee camp, but what most Palestinians want is to live as equals with Jews in a truly democratic state.
It's way past time that we can discuss Israel and Palestine without the McCarthyite witch hunt atmosphere that has ruled for sixty years.
I said in my last blog, not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism - but some is.
Helen Thomas' isn't.
You can watch my interviews with Helen Thomas here."
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Gaza Aid Flotilla: Media tries to define good vs. bad activists
Consider the following two excerpts. See a related IS post here. My further comments at the bottom.
When did resistance become a dirty word?
PulseMedia, June 6, 2010
Source
"It’s time we stopped playing this game. To recognise Israel’s ‘right’ to exist in security is to deny Palestine’s right to exist in security. No state which occupies other states’ territories has a right to security. Did Hitler’s Germany have a right to security once it had invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland? And apartheid states don’t have a right to exist at all. There’s nothing anti-Semitic about this, just as there was nothing anti-white or anti-Afrikaaner in arguing that apartheid South Africa didn’t have a right to exist. A state established by massive ethnic cleansing and perpetuated by occupation and repeated massacres is not a normal state like any other. Israel will earn its right to exist when it allows the refugees to return home and when Jews, Muslims and Christians enjoy equal rights."
...
"As for the brave passengers on the MV Rachel Corrie, I wish they had not said, “we will not resist.” I wish they had said, “We are unarmed and we have no desire to come to blows with Israeli soldiers. However, if we are hijacked by armed men in international waters or near the shore of Gaza – over which we do not recognise Israeli jurisdiction – we will resist as best we are able.” Unwittingly, the activists handed Israel ammunition for its propaganda – ‘when civilised, peaceful activists arrive we deal with them peacefully. When mad Islamist Turks attack us with sticks when we board their ship, we have no choice but to shoot them many times at close range in the back of the head.’
The passengers on the Mavi Marmara should be congratulated for resisting piracy and the illegal, barbaric siege. We should never be ashamed of resistance – in occupied Europe, in South Africa, in Iraq, in Vietnam, in Palestine, in Lebanon, or on the Mediterranean sea. Resistance is beautiful. Resistance proves the existence of the human spirit amid a vast sea of inhumanity."
------
I had a similar first reaction at the brave people on the Rachel Corrie (who were in fact involved in an act of 'resistance' but who chose their rhetoric unwisely. See here). But I also think that the wrong play of rhetoric was more a result of media twist, which de-emphasized the context of Israeli aggression and shifted the focus on the use of aggressive ("bad") vs. non-aggressive ("good") forms of resistance. It is a distraction to get into that debate in this case. I was very disappointed when I read the following story on Dawn. Pathetic, wherever they copied that story from. Pathetic, that they did not bother to read the underlying framing of Good vs. Bad Activists. Notice also the use of the verb "board" which dilutes the nature of Israeli aggression; it was an act of PIRACY and violation of international laws, to say the least, considering that the ships were in international waters.
Israeli forces board Gaza-bound aid vessel
Dawn, June 5, 2010
Source
JERUSALEM: Israeli forces seized a Gaza-bound aid vessel without meeting resistance on Saturday, preventing it from breaking an Israeli maritime blockade of the Hamas-ruled territory days after a similar effort turned bloody.
The military said its forces boarded the 1,200-ton Rachel Corrie cargo ship from the sea, not helicopters.
The takeover stood in marked contrast to a violent confrontation at sea earlier this week when Israeli commandos blocked a Turkish aid vessel trying to break the blockade. At the time, Israeli commandos rappelled from helicopters and a clash with passengers left nine pro-Palestinian activists dead.
Army spokeswoman Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich says Saturday's takeover took only a few minutes and that the vessel was being taken to Israel's Ashdod port.
The Irish ship - named for an American college student who was crushed to death by a bulldozer in 2003 while protesting Israeli house demolitions in Gaza - was carrying hundreds of tons of aid, including wheelchairs, medical supplies and cement.
The standoff has raised international pressure on Israel to lift the three-year-old blockade that has plunged the territory's 1.5 million residents deeper into poverty.
Activists on board the boat, including Irish Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan, had said they wouldn't resist if Israeli soldiers tried to take over their vessel.
This latest attempt to breach the blockade differs significantly from the flotilla the Israeli troops intercepted on Monday, killing eight Turks and a Turkish-American after being set upon by a group of activists.
Nearly 700 activists had joined that operation, most of them aboard the lead boat from Turkey that was the scene of the violence.
That boat, the Mavi Marmara, was sponsored by an Islamic aid group from Turkey, the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedom and Humanitarian Relief. Israel outlawed the group, known by its Turkish acronym IHH, in 2008 because of alleged ties to Hamas. The group is not on the US State Department list of terror organizations, however.
By contrast, the Rachel Corrie was carrying just 11 passengers from Ireland and Malaysia, whose effort was mainly sponsored by the Free Gaza movement, a Cyprus-based group that has renounced violence. Nine crew were also on board.
When did resistance become a dirty word?
PulseMedia, June 6, 2010
Source
"It’s time we stopped playing this game. To recognise Israel’s ‘right’ to exist in security is to deny Palestine’s right to exist in security. No state which occupies other states’ territories has a right to security. Did Hitler’s Germany have a right to security once it had invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland? And apartheid states don’t have a right to exist at all. There’s nothing anti-Semitic about this, just as there was nothing anti-white or anti-Afrikaaner in arguing that apartheid South Africa didn’t have a right to exist. A state established by massive ethnic cleansing and perpetuated by occupation and repeated massacres is not a normal state like any other. Israel will earn its right to exist when it allows the refugees to return home and when Jews, Muslims and Christians enjoy equal rights."
...
"As for the brave passengers on the MV Rachel Corrie, I wish they had not said, “we will not resist.” I wish they had said, “We are unarmed and we have no desire to come to blows with Israeli soldiers. However, if we are hijacked by armed men in international waters or near the shore of Gaza – over which we do not recognise Israeli jurisdiction – we will resist as best we are able.” Unwittingly, the activists handed Israel ammunition for its propaganda – ‘when civilised, peaceful activists arrive we deal with them peacefully. When mad Islamist Turks attack us with sticks when we board their ship, we have no choice but to shoot them many times at close range in the back of the head.’
The passengers on the Mavi Marmara should be congratulated for resisting piracy and the illegal, barbaric siege. We should never be ashamed of resistance – in occupied Europe, in South Africa, in Iraq, in Vietnam, in Palestine, in Lebanon, or on the Mediterranean sea. Resistance is beautiful. Resistance proves the existence of the human spirit amid a vast sea of inhumanity."
------
I had a similar first reaction at the brave people on the Rachel Corrie (who were in fact involved in an act of 'resistance' but who chose their rhetoric unwisely. See here). But I also think that the wrong play of rhetoric was more a result of media twist, which de-emphasized the context of Israeli aggression and shifted the focus on the use of aggressive ("bad") vs. non-aggressive ("good") forms of resistance. It is a distraction to get into that debate in this case. I was very disappointed when I read the following story on Dawn. Pathetic, wherever they copied that story from. Pathetic, that they did not bother to read the underlying framing of Good vs. Bad Activists. Notice also the use of the verb "board" which dilutes the nature of Israeli aggression; it was an act of PIRACY and violation of international laws, to say the least, considering that the ships were in international waters.
Israeli forces board Gaza-bound aid vessel
Dawn, June 5, 2010
Source
JERUSALEM: Israeli forces seized a Gaza-bound aid vessel without meeting resistance on Saturday, preventing it from breaking an Israeli maritime blockade of the Hamas-ruled territory days after a similar effort turned bloody.
The military said its forces boarded the 1,200-ton Rachel Corrie cargo ship from the sea, not helicopters.
The takeover stood in marked contrast to a violent confrontation at sea earlier this week when Israeli commandos blocked a Turkish aid vessel trying to break the blockade. At the time, Israeli commandos rappelled from helicopters and a clash with passengers left nine pro-Palestinian activists dead.
Army spokeswoman Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich says Saturday's takeover took only a few minutes and that the vessel was being taken to Israel's Ashdod port.
The Irish ship - named for an American college student who was crushed to death by a bulldozer in 2003 while protesting Israeli house demolitions in Gaza - was carrying hundreds of tons of aid, including wheelchairs, medical supplies and cement.
The standoff has raised international pressure on Israel to lift the three-year-old blockade that has plunged the territory's 1.5 million residents deeper into poverty.
Activists on board the boat, including Irish Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Corrigan, had said they wouldn't resist if Israeli soldiers tried to take over their vessel.
This latest attempt to breach the blockade differs significantly from the flotilla the Israeli troops intercepted on Monday, killing eight Turks and a Turkish-American after being set upon by a group of activists.
Nearly 700 activists had joined that operation, most of them aboard the lead boat from Turkey that was the scene of the violence.
That boat, the Mavi Marmara, was sponsored by an Islamic aid group from Turkey, the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedom and Humanitarian Relief. Israel outlawed the group, known by its Turkish acronym IHH, in 2008 because of alleged ties to Hamas. The group is not on the US State Department list of terror organizations, however.
By contrast, the Rachel Corrie was carrying just 11 passengers from Ireland and Malaysia, whose effort was mainly sponsored by the Free Gaza movement, a Cyprus-based group that has renounced violence. Nine crew were also on board.
Amnesty Intl: 'US cluster bombs killed 55 in Yemen'
'US cluster bombs killed 55 in Yemen'
PressTV, June 6, 2010
Source
Amnesty International says the United States used cluster bombs on a cruise missile in Yemen, killing 55 people, most of whom were civilians.
The attack, according to the rights group, targeted Al-Maajala in the Abyan province at a time when Washington was pushing hard to project militants in the country.
"Amnesty International is gravely concerned by evidence that cluster munitions appear to have been used in Yemen," said Mike Lewis, the group's arms control researcher, AFP reported.
The group cited a Yemeni parliamentary committee as reporting in February that the attack had killed 41 local residents, including 14 women and 21 children, in addition to 14 alleged militants.
Deputy Director of AI's Middle East and North Africa Program, Philip Luther warned that "a military strike of this kind against alleged militants without an attempt to detain them is at the very least unlawful."
"The fact that so many of the victims were actually women and children indicates that the attack was in fact grossly irresponsible, particularly given the likely use of cluster munitions," he also said.
Lewis said, "Cluster munitions have indiscriminate effects and unexploded bomblets threaten lives and livelihoods for years afterwards."
AI had obtained photographs which showed remains of the BGM-109D Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile. "This type of missile, launched from a warship or submarine, is designed to carry a payload of 166 cluster sub-munitions (bomblets) which each explode into over 200 sharp steel fragments that can cause injuries up to 150 meters (about 500 feet) away," an AI statement said.
"An incendiary material inside the bomblet also spreads fragments of burning zirconium designed to set fire to nearby flammable objects," it added.
PressTV, June 6, 2010
Source
Amnesty International says the United States used cluster bombs on a cruise missile in Yemen, killing 55 people, most of whom were civilians.
The attack, according to the rights group, targeted Al-Maajala in the Abyan province at a time when Washington was pushing hard to project militants in the country.
"Amnesty International is gravely concerned by evidence that cluster munitions appear to have been used in Yemen," said Mike Lewis, the group's arms control researcher, AFP reported.
The group cited a Yemeni parliamentary committee as reporting in February that the attack had killed 41 local residents, including 14 women and 21 children, in addition to 14 alleged militants.
Deputy Director of AI's Middle East and North Africa Program, Philip Luther warned that "a military strike of this kind against alleged militants without an attempt to detain them is at the very least unlawful."
"The fact that so many of the victims were actually women and children indicates that the attack was in fact grossly irresponsible, particularly given the likely use of cluster munitions," he also said.
Lewis said, "Cluster munitions have indiscriminate effects and unexploded bomblets threaten lives and livelihoods for years afterwards."
AI had obtained photographs which showed remains of the BGM-109D Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile. "This type of missile, launched from a warship or submarine, is designed to carry a payload of 166 cluster sub-munitions (bomblets) which each explode into over 200 sharp steel fragments that can cause injuries up to 150 meters (about 500 feet) away," an AI statement said.
"An incendiary material inside the bomblet also spreads fragments of burning zirconium designed to set fire to nearby flammable objects," it added.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Gaza Aid Flotilla Attack - News and Analysis
Glenn Greenwald - How Israeli propaganda shaped U.S. media coverage of the flotilla attack - Salon.com, Jun 4, 2010
Paul McGeough's eyewitness report - 'Prayers, tear gas and terror' - SMH.com.au, Jun 4, 2010
Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah calls for continuing Gaza aid flotilla-s - Press TV - Jun 4, 2010
Anna Baltzer's eyewitness report - 'A people united will not fall' - AnnaInPalestine blog, Jun 2, 2010
Juan Cole's analysis on UNSC condemnation of Israel, Gaza Blockade - Informed Comment, Jun 1, 2010
Norman Finkelstein speaks on Israeli raid on Gaza flotilla - RussiaToday - May 31, 2010
Paul McGeough's eyewitness report - 'Prayers, tear gas and terror' - SMH.com.au, Jun 4, 2010
Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah calls for continuing Gaza aid flotilla-s - Press TV - Jun 4, 2010
Anna Baltzer's eyewitness report - 'A people united will not fall' - AnnaInPalestine blog, Jun 2, 2010
Juan Cole's analysis on UNSC condemnation of Israel, Gaza Blockade - Informed Comment, Jun 1, 2010
Norman Finkelstein speaks on Israeli raid on Gaza flotilla - RussiaToday - May 31, 2010
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