I note, with some pleasure, that I've recently received a few visitors from Light of Reason.

Thank you, Mr Silber. But thank you even more for your passionate, angry, yet still measured voice.

This blog entry brought to you courtesy of Lufthansa.

(I've been in Europe begging for money the past week.)

. . .

UPDATE: And still I didn't really blog fom the airplane. Stuck in a center seat, with a book I wanted to finish and sleep to catch up on, spending a few cramped hours on my computer wasn't likely.

If I'd been in business class . . .

This piece from the Counterterrorism Blog has gotten some blog play. LAT's praktike and Jim Henley add their voices to an excellent point about "flypaper". But I'm still thinking about drug trafficking and so this sentence stood out:

" There also seems little doubt that the ability of insurgents to move within Iraq or across the Syrian border has been significantly curtailed since the heydays of "steadfast Fallujah" last summer and fall. "

The insurgents can't move around the country, but the drug traffickers can?

In part because of the recent riots in Afghanistan, I've been thinking about the links between drugs and conflict. What are the connections that exist between drug traffickers and fighters? Which politicians and warlords are involved? What impact will changes in the trafficking have on levels of violence?

Below I ask some questions and offer one deep frustration.

For a comprehensive overview of the issues, "Bitter-Sweet Harvest: Afghanistan's New War" offers a page of links at IRINnews (from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)).

Bashir Noorzai, alleged to be one of the heroin kingpins in Afghanistan, was arrested in New York at the end of April. All the news reports on Noorzai cite his close connections with the Taliban, especially with their leader Omar.

So, tell me, what has Noorzai been doing in the three years since the Taliban fell apart? Surely, he wasn't allowed to continue in the business? Ha! Not only that, but the Center for Strategic and International Studies (PDF) says Noorzai is the heroin supplier for al Qaeda and a major financier of the terrorist organization.

But this begs the question of who have been his patrons and allies for the past three years? He wouldn't have been able to operate without some protection.

Who rolled over on him?

Steve Gilliard has found the anti-war movement.

Reviewing the US State Department's 2005 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, I am struck that there is no entry for Iraq in the section on "Drug and Chemical Control". The entry for Iraq in the section on "Money Laundering and Financial Crimes" is a review of the current laws and regulations, but there is no commentary - as there is for all other countries (e.g. Ireland) - about the current state of crime.

Iraq is now a transit point for drugs, particularly from Afghanistan. This is not surprising. Drug producers and traffickers thrive on lawlessness.

However, articles like this make me wonder if people ever look at maps.

" Drug traffickers from Afghanistan have begun crossing Iraq to get to Jordan, the exit point for Asia and Europe, said Hamid Ghodse, the president of the International Narcotics Control Board. "

How do they get to Iraq from Afghanistan? Those countries don't share a border. How can landlocked Jordan be an "exit point"? What happened to using Turkey as the transit country to Europe? Why the shift to a more southern route?

I am frustrated by reporting that connects A to C without going through B. There is a much bigger story here, one that has implications for the ongoing violence across the region.

How do drug traffickers get from Afghanistan to Iraq? They cross through Iran. They also have to cross a border into Iraq that is the focus of a fair amount of attention from the US military who say they are trying to stop infiltrators. That border gets a lot of attention from the other side by a paranoid Iranian military, on the watch for threatening moves by the US. Clearly it isn't impossible to cross that border, but who, I wonder, is getting rich?

My understanding of Jordan has been that the country is a transit point to the Gulf states and to Israel, but not historically to Europe or to other parts of Asia. The shift, if in fact a shift has taken place, from the northern route to Turkey to a southern route to Jordan is, therefore, curious.

• Who is doing the trafficking?
• Are the organizations Sunni, thus supporting some group or groups of fighters, or are they Shiite?
• If Shiite, are they supporters of Iran or a nationalist agenda or something else again?
• Have Kurd crime organizations, who historically have been involved in the trafficking through northern Iran to Turkey, been cut out altogether? If so, how are they reacting? If not, what is the quid pro quo?

" The unrest follows a recent report in the American magazine, Newsweek, that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated the Koran in order to put pressure on Muslim prisoners.

Investigators probing reported abuses at Guantanamo Bay found that interrogators "had placed Korans on toilets, and in at least one case flushed a holy book down the toilet," Newsweek said.

Former Guantanamo inmates told the BBC Urdu service earlier this month that some Arab prisoners had still not spoken to their interrogators after three years to protest at the desecration of the Koran by guards at the camp. "

Why now? Why in May 2005?

" The American military is still trying to analyze whether the violence is politically driven, instigated by outsiders or a sign of general public frustration with the slow pace of reconstruction in the country, said a spokesman, Col. James Yonts. Students interviewed in Kabul pointed to the presence of American troops in the country as another source of resentment.

Local governors might also be encouraging protests against the central government and its American backers to improve their own standing before parliamentary elections in September, said Jandad Spinghar, head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission in Jalalabad. "

Well-documented stories about the desecration of the Koran at Guantanamo have been available for months. Human Rights Watch released a report in October 2004 on living conditions at Guantanamo. They relied on a report from July 2004 by the Center for Constitutional Rights.¹

The Newsweek article doesn't tell us anything new, but it clearly provided a trigger. No one is - or should be - taking "Newsweek as the cause of the riots" at face value. There are other reasons for riots right now. As reported in the article from the Times, upcoming elections are one.

Another - that we ignore at our peril - is the increasing pressure on the drug trade. Two surveys released in April suggest poppy cultivation is way down this year. Karzai's government, strongly supported by the UN, Britain, and the US, has led the reduction efforts, which have included both eradication and alternative economic incentives for farmers.²

The province of Nangarhar has been the focal point of these plans. The provincial capital is Jalalabad – the city where the riots began this week.

. . .

¹ You can be sure that the Pentagon has followed to stories about what goes on in Guantanamo. You might even reasonably expect our military leaders to keep close track of the conditions at a very high – internationally renowned, even - profile prison. Stories about the desecration of the Koran began surfacing in 2003. Yet the investigation begins after there is violence half a world away. Further, the debunking of the story begins within days after it was used to promote riots – and far too soon for an investigation to be complete.

Why does our military always seem to be reacting and not anticipating? What a way to run a war.

² CARE also released a report in April about counter-narcotics strategies. They emphasized the need for long-term and sufficient funding. One of CARE's offices was targeted in the rioting.

. . .

UPDATE: Newsweek has now backed off the story when barked at by the Pentagon. It seems the source Newsweek relied on was either misquoted, misunderstood, or recanted. Not that any of that matters in Afghanistan.

Molly Bingham, home from the war, telling her stories.

Humanitarian organizations and professionals think about accountability all the time. I get annoyed when people outside the field call for “greater accountability” without any awareness of what already exists and what is happening within the field.

Tomorrow the Social Science Research Council is hosting a talk on the “accountability of humanitarian organizations” as a part of their ongoing "The Transformations of Humanitarian Action" Seminar Series. I won’t be at tomorrow’s session (go to New York for a talk I’m not giving? Not likely), but I have seen the papers. They open some nice cans of worms, just as such papers ought.

The papers for all past sessions are on the web and make interesting reading if you’re into that sort of thing.

And of ongoing interest is the Humanitarian Accountability Partnership, a multi-agency effort to develop and maintain minimum standards.

Where will the climate change exiles go?

"The Daddy Dilemma"?

What the fuck?

Dan Drezner and Marc Lynch have been mixing it up over on Political Animal (Kevin Drum’s gig). Drezner opened with a salvo toward the NGOs and Kevin’s commenters went to work describing a world which bears little, if any, resemblance to the one I work in. And this is the left. Whatever.

I do, however, feel that I must bring up one little, niggling fact about the world whenever people start ranting about NGOs. When governments (and all the largest donors are governments) spend money on “democracy promotion” or “economic development” or “humanitarian action” or “post-war reconstruction”, a large part of your money, taxpayer, goes to private contractors.

Let me say, simply, that calls for greater NGO accountability ring rather hollow to my ears when Halliburton is let off the hook for $2 billion. Sure, different work (in this particular case, but Halliburton is doing some building too), but it comes out of the same kitty and it all gets lumped together in the rhetoric.

Torture, if it is in fact a part of an interrogation process and not being carried out just for kicks and the sweet, sweet smell of piss and fear, is not effective if applied by the actual interrogator. Tyler Cowen’s thought experiment assumes that the people hurting you want you to talk. In fact, they don’t. They don’t care what you say. Intelligence isn’t their job. Destroying bits and pieces of your body, fracturing your sense of self, making you grateful for lesser circles of Hell is their job.

Once you are in his hands, there is nothing you can say to the man with the brass knuckles, the wire, the blank stare. Once you are already there, it’s too late to avoid the rubber hose. You will be beaten. You will be broken.

Where torture is possible, you have to do everything you can to avoid its back rooms. Everything. And the only way to avoid the constant blazing light, the cold cement room, the shit stained chair is to put someone else in it. Your neighbor, your friend, your brother, your wife, your child.

. . .

Torture is never about intelligence. The frame of gathering information, the asking of questions simply allows the guards, the interrogators, the torturers, the officers, the ministers, the presidents to sleep at night. Tomorrow, they think as they sink into their pillows and snuggle closer to the warmth of their partners, tomorrow we'll get some answers. But knowledge is never certain or complete, the job is never, ever done.

Torture is always about trust. Society is only possible when people trust one another, when people agree upon the rules, when people are not afraid of their neighbors, when people gather together to build a better a world. If everybody is trying to stay out of the gulag, if everybody is desperate to fill the prison’s perpetually empty rooms with someone else’s body, organization is impossible. Society withers, civilization crumbles, humanity withdraws, and the desert of loneliness smothers all human feeling.

. . .

UPDATE: Perhaps the title to this post is a wee bit abstruse: the way to avoid torture is to NOT torture, dammit!

The Anatomy of Error: Ancient Military Disasters and Their Lessons for Modern Strategists by Barry Strauss and Josiah Ober.

Read this book. It's out of print but shouldn't be too difficult to find.

I have begun (if not necessarily posted) dozens of pieces for De Spectaculis based upon the frame Strauss and Ober offer, but I have never specifically addressed their work. It is selfish of me to have kept this gem to myself. Of course, wisdom is seldom accompanied by happiness.

From the Introduction:

Chapter 1 shows the problems that arise when policy is a direct product of an imperial ideology and political leader's sense of personal legitimacy becomes involved in strategic planning. In Chapter 2, we investigate the suicidal policy that resulted when a charismatic general played upon a democratic society's vision of its own greatness. Chapter 3 considers the irony of an elite that was so thoroughly indoctrinated in the myth of its own military invincibility that it fell victim to its own self-deception and propaganda. [...] In Chapter 5 we asses what happens when a tactically brilliant general who loves to fight builds a strategy on a falsely optimistic view of the instability of the enemy's [...] system. Chapter 6 concerns the terrible social toll exacted from a state that allows its policy and strategy alike to become enmeshed in the selfish political ambitions of a narrow ruling clique. In Chapter 7 a politician's use of image projection, cultural myth manipulation, and negative propaganda lead to the fall of a masterful field commander. Image leads to error again in Chapter 8, in which an emperor launches a war to enhance his image with his own subjects and loses it because of a disastrous delusion of his own grandeur.

In each case study, we see a failure by policymakers and strategists to know themselves, to know their enemies, or both. In none of the cases is the lack of knowledge just a psychological quirk - as we stated at the outset, this is not a study of born losers. To know oneself is to look outward as well as inward. Each of the failures presented here resulted from someone's or some group's fatal misapprehension regarding the natures and needs of (at least) one of the societies involved in the conflict. It is in the field of the policymaker's vision of social and political reality that the most dangerous strategic errors lie.

I just had a paper published and we sent it to the sorts of family members to whom one sends such things. Last night I was talking with one of my Republican relatives.

“I read your paper. It wasn’t as idealistic as I expected. It was kind of practical.”

In fairness to her, she was complimenting me – and that was a real complement on my writing style. But still, what does she think I do?

Everybody in Nepal is reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. Everybody. (By which I really mean the people I work with: the development folk, both ex-pat and local.)

Why? Because the story concerns the descent of a country into unspeakable violence and how people act in such situations. The Kite Runner is touching a very raw nerve.

that was a well-plotted piece of nonclaptrap that never made me want to retch

There are reports that four people have been arrested in connection with the murder of Margaret Hassan. Five of them, we’re told, have even confessed. How did that conversation go?

“ You want to know about that pale woman who didn't wear a veil? The one who spoke flawless Iraqi Arabic? The one who knew my neighborhood better than I do? The one everybody – starting with Sistani and going from A to Zarqawi - told us to release? Yeah, we capped her. ”

Maybe it went something like

“ My friends and comrades being held in the other room said that we killed her? They said that? You say that it would be better if I confess too? You say that if I don’t, I/my brother/my father will be killed/imprisoned/have it go hard? ”

Or maybe even

“ Mercy! For the love of God, stop! Please! Yes, I killed her! Please . . . please make it stop . . . ”

Yes, I know the numbers in the first paragraph don’t agree. Neither agrees with the first paragraph of the BBC story either (though that could be sloppy editing in any of several directions; seriously, where does the fourth guy come from?). And you wonder why I'm annoyed?

I mentioned back in December that friends of mine at CARE had been of the opinion that the people who kidnapped Margaret Hassan were pretty stupid. I’ve seen nothing since to convince me otherwise.

If this story is true, some of these guys were still holding onto "a bag, clothing, and identity documents" belonging to Margaret.

. . .

The Guardian doesn’t deal the numbers the way BBC does (post above) but the outline of the story is similar enough that they probably got it from the same horse.

Iraq is a dangerous place this week. But in the midst of bombs, well-coordinated attacks, assassination attempts, war, some arrests were made in connection with aid worker Margaret Hassan’s murder.

When are those British elections? Iraq isn’t an issue, is it?