With regard to the people of Afghanistan, my colleague Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy presents the most compelling piece of recent evidence that the occupation is a complete failure. Five years ago, 70 percent of eligible voters participated in the Afghan presidential election. This year it was down to 38 percent. This is mainly because the security situation has deteriorated over the last five years. It also represents a political failure: the inability or unwillingness to negotiate a political settlement that would have allowed many more people to vote.

"ghost wars," steve coll

central thesis: the trouble is, of course, that there really isn't one. the virtue of coll's book is its detail, no doubt--almost six hundred pages of dense narrative (sometimes tedious, sometimes thrilling) tracing the tumultuous relationship between the jihadis, the Saudis, the Pakistani gov't/ISI, and the Empire from the late 70s to the days before 9/11. in that sense, it is an invaluable reference book.

the pretext, though, that this intention to "story-tell"--to do no more than weave a narrative through events that haven't been told together--is somehow apolitical is laughable. and, in fact, as Coll moves closer and closer to 9/11, i found that the book became more and more insufferable. the latter part of the narrative concentrates almost entirely on the CIA's earnest attempts to assassinate Bin Laden in the run-up to 9/11. this resplendent, heroic mission is cast against the dark, seedy world of entangling alliances, diplomatic considerations, and even international law; the abiding impression is "if only"--if only the Pakistanis had been more attentive to terror, if only the Saudis weren't protectors of oil reserves and our strategic interests, if only the White House had let the CIA off the legal leash. and while that's instructive, i suppose, as an insight into the establishment, it's terribly difficult to wade through without becoming angry at Coll's willingness to distill the problem of terrorism through the framework of a Bond movie.

the book really lacks a serious willingness to come to terms with the aggressively offensive posture of Empire, which is--in a general sense--at the root of all the troubles documented here. there are harsh words reserved for the Pakistani intelligence and the Saudis, as there should be--but the book never really indicts the Americans for decades of more unforgivable forms of interference. nor, then, does it suggest that these threats to the homeland require a radical re-think of the premises of American foreign policy. this dovetails with another serious weakness of the nature of the narrative, I think, which is its obsessive focus with Bin Laden. while Coll, on reflection, would likely reject the silly notion that, were Bin Laden killed, America (and indeed, the world) would face no threat from these types of terrorists, reading his book imparts precisely this sort of urgency to the task of tackling UBL.

in sum, Coll's narrative really needs to be infused, again and again, with an appropriate political position. his current posture-less-ness merely masks the obvious fact that he is reading and telling this history through the red-white-and-blue prism of post-9/11 America.

--- important quotes/excerpts ---

(25): "because it had long cultivated ties to informal Islamic networks in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere, Jamaat-e-Islami found itself afloat during the 1970s on a swelling tide of what the French scholar Gilles Kepel would later term "petro dollar Islam"

(36): "by attacking the American embassy, Jamaat had far exceeded Zia's brief. Yet Zia felt he could not afford to repudiate his religious ally."

(40): uprising in Herat in 1979 led by "charismatic Afghan army captain named Ismail Khan"--air raids in response, killing "as many as twenty thousand of its own citizenry in Herat alone."

(41): on the murder of political prsioners in Kabul, "Nur Muhammad Taraki once told his KGB handlers... 'Lenin taught us to be merciless towards the enemies of the revolution and millions of people had to be eliminated in order to secure the victory of the October Revolution'"

(45): KGB report put together by Yuri Andropov for Brezhnev: "The Afghan revolution was struggling because of 'economic backwardness, the small size of the working class,' and the weakness of the local Communist Party, as well as the selfishness of its Afghan leaders"

(49): decision to invade Afghanistan taken by Politburo on November 26, 1979

(56): interesting paragraph here about changing composition of CIA officers in post-Vietnam America. before, Coll is arguing, predominated by the JFK, Ivy-league types. but now these folk sought a career in Wall Street, especially given the beating taken by the civil service in the aftermath of the debacles of the 60s. "Instead of prep school grduates came men like Gary Schroen, working-class midwesterners who had enlisted in the army when others their age were protesting the Vietnam War."

(58): Karachi as a key hub in weapons supplied to mujahideen--"Langley secretly purchased hundreds of thousands of the .303 rifles from Greece, India and elsewhere, and shipped them to Karachi."

(59): more Empire, not less--"But the United Stateds did not own a subcontinental empire, as the British had a century before. If the CIA wanted to pump more and better weapons into Afghanistan, it had to negotiate access to the Afghan frontier through the sovereign nation of Pakistan."

(60): "...as the mujahedin resistance grew and stiffened, the agency's passivity about who led the Afghan rebels--who got the most guns, the most money, the most power--helped ensure that Zia-ul-Haq's political and religious agenda in Afghanistan gradually became the CIA's own."

(66-67): details re: weapons trade

(73): "As much as any individual, Prince Turki became an architect of Afghanistan's destiny--and of American engagements with Islamic radicalism--in the two decades after 1979. He picked winners and losers among Afghan commanders, he funded Islamic revolutionaries across the Middle East, he created alliances among these movements, and he paid large subsidies to the Pakistan intelligence service, aiding its rise as a kind of shadow government" [though much of the later narrative of this book details how much of the Saudi money is private, channeled through a madrassa- and charity-led network.]

(76): the strategy "employed by the Saudi royal family throughout the twentieth century: Threatened by Islamic radicalism, they embraced it, hoping to retain control. The al-Sauds' claims to power on the Arabian peninsula were weak and grew largely from conquests made by allied jihadists. They now ruled the holiest shrines in worldwide Islam. There seemed to them no plausible politics but strict official religiosity..." [see also pg. 230, "The proper and legal outlet for Islamic activism, the royal family made clear, lay not inside the kingdom but abroad, in aid of the global umma, or community of muslim believers."]

(79): "Saudi Arabia's five-year government budget from 1969-1974 was $9.2 billion. During the next five years it was $142 billion."

(86): "In spy lexicon, each of the major intelligence agencies working the Afghan jihad--GID, ISI, and the CIA--began to "compartment" their work, even as all three collaborated with one another through formal liasons. Working together they purchased and shipped to the Afghan rebels tens of thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition. Separately they spied on one another and pursued independent political agendas." [SUMMARY OF AGENDAS: (1) Saudis needed to outsource threat of radical Islamism, prove to their own population their Islamist credentials--Abdurrab Rasal Sayyaf received bulk of aid, but also a very significant private, non-official component to Saudi involvement. (2) Pakistan needed an allied Pashtun presence, which would give it "strategic depth" and stave off "Pashtunistan" (remember Daud Khan's attachment to that project)--it cultivated Hekmatyar and then the Taliban. (3) US wanted to give the Soviet Union its vietnam--it gave indiscriminately, not thinking enough about the future, and split once the USSR fell. it re-entered, aggrieved, as UBL became much more of a threat.]

(92): profile of William Casey, CIA chief--"most influential man in Reagan administration after the President." Committed anti-communist, fueled by evangelical zeal that made him more sympathetic to Islamists than secularists.

(99): "Casey and Zia emphasized that Soviet ambitions were spatial. For them, Soviet strategy echoed the colonial era's scrambles among European powers for natural resources, shipping lanes, and continental footholds... Zia used...to drive home his belief that Moscow had invaded Afghanistan in order to push toward the Middle East's oil. He displayed a regional map and then pulled out a red triangular celluloid template to illustrate the Soviets' continuing southwestern thrust toward warm water ports and energy resources."

(108-114): Coll's primer on Afghanistan.

(114): after Daud expelled Hekmatyar, Massoud, Rabbani, "Pakistan embraced them... General Naseerullah Babar and Hekmatyar, both ethnic Pashtuns, soon became confidants, and together they hatched a plan for an uprising against Daoud in 1975. They drafted Massoud to sneak back into the Panjshir and start the revolt from there. He did so reluctantly, and the episonde ended badly. Massoud fled to Pakistan... The failed uprising exacerbated a split among the Afghan exiles... Hekmatyar created his own organization, Hezb-e-Islami, composed primarily of ethnic Pashtuns, and he forged close relations with the ISI. Massoud struck by Rabbani in Jamaat-e-Islami, which was made up mostly of ethnic Tajiks. When massoud secretely returned to the Panjshir Valley once again in 1978, however, he did so on his own. He no longer trusted the other Afghan leaders... [REMEMBER: this is another of the book's undoubted weaknesses--it's overly generous portrayal of Massoud as the "lost hope" of Afghanistan, another one of the "if onlys."]

(119): [Massoud called a truce in 1983; ISI used it to say he ought to be cut-off]. "Hekmatyar emerged as the most powerful of ISI's Pakistan-based mujahideen clients just as Charlie Wilson and Bill Casey, along with Prince Turki, suddenly poured hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new and more lethal supplies into ISI warehouses."

(140): The CIA's Counterterrorist center was born on February 1, 1986 [at this stage, though, remember, they were concerned with Secular terrorism: "Secular leftist groups carried out the most visible terrorist strikes in 1985 and 1986."]

(144): "By early 1986, Brigardier Mohammed Yousaf [Afghan Bureau ISI 1983-1987] had constructed a large and sophisticated serious infrastructure along the Afghan frontier. Between sixteen thousand and eighteen thousand fresh recruits passed through his camps and training courses each year."

(150): filming a Blackhawk down scene, replace US pilot with Soviet, and reaches a gleeful Ronald Reagan, who preferred video briefings.

(151): funding accelerating in the second half of the decade--numbers here

(152): another fact about the late 1980s--"But for the first time came complaints from some Afghan fighters to the CIA about a rising force in their jihad: Arab volunteers"

(156): ISI's use of Arab money and cooperation, in particular, to construct a border infrastructure to wage jihad (roads, caves, warehouses, and camps) that would be safe from Soviet bombardment.

(157): " 'It was largely Arab money that saved the system' recalled Brigadier Yousuf"

(158-160): November 1986, Gorbachev sets the goal of withdrawal; furious to discover that no negotiated settlement is really on the table, Coll is writing.

(164): Brigadier Yousuf retires, Hamid Gul comes in; CIA-ISI ties, at this point, begin to strain. Brigardier Januja, ardent Islamist, takes over Afghan bureau.

(165): "...the massive weight of private Saudi and Arab funding that tilted the field toward the Islamists--up to $25 million a month by Bearden's own estimate. Nor did they account for the intimate tactical and strategic partnerships between Pakistani intelligence and the Afghan Islamists, especially along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. By the late 1980s the ISI had effetively eliminated all the secular, leftist, and royalist political parties that had first formed when Afghan refugees fled communist rule."

(175): "Zia felt this was only Pakistan's due: 'We have earned the right to have a power which is very friendly toward us. We have taken risks as a front-line state, and we will not permit a return to the prewar situation, marked by a large Indian and Soviet influence and Afghan claims on our territory. The new power willb e really Islamic, a part of the Islamic renaissance which, you will see, will someday extend itself to the Soviet Muslims."

(182): "Majrooh's independent Afghan Information Center had reported in a survey that 70 percent of Afghan refugees supported exiled King Zahir Shah rather than any of the Peshawar-based mujahedin leaders such as Hekmatyar."

(194): details re: failed attack on Jalalabad, after Soviet withdrawal

(201): in 1989, about four thousand Arab volunteers in Afghanistan, organized under Sayyaf's leadership. "He was in turn heavily supported by Saudi intelligence and Gulf charities."

(204): Azzam, who had wanted to concentrate on Afghanistan, killed. Osama takes power of his network, morphs into Al-Qaeda.

(221): Kashmir erupts in 1989; "inspired by their success against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence officers announced to Bhutto that they were prepared to use the same methods of covert jihad to drive India out of Kashmir."

(222-223): Osama and the Gulf War--turning point.

(233): "Afghan poppy farmers supplied heroin labs nestled in cities and along the lawless Afghanistan-Pakistan border. By 1992 hundreds of tons of refined heroin flowed from these labs east through Karachi's port or north through the new overland routes of the Russian mafia, destined for European cities."

(236-237): Battle for Kabul begins. "The first Afghan war was over. The second had begun."

(250-251): Ramzi Yousef's letter: "For a terrorist sermon composed by a graduate of Arab jihad training camps in Afghanistan, his letter struck remarkably secular political themes."

(273): Yousef, on capture, "said he took no thrill from killing American citizens and felt guilty about the civilian deaths he had caused. But his conscience was overridden by the strength of his desire to stop the killing of Arabs by Israeli troops."

(283): The Taliban laying claim to the Durrani legacy--"Much of this Taliban narrative was undoubtedly rooted in fact even if credible eyewitnesses to the most mythologized events of 1994, such as the hanging of notorious rapists from a tank barrel, proved stubbornly elusive. In the end, however, the facts may have matterd less than the narrative's claims on the past. The Taliban assembled their story so that pashtuns could recognize it as a revival of old glory. The Taliban connected popular, rural Islamic values with a grassroots Durrani Pasthun tribal rising. They emerged at a moment when important wealthy Pashtun leaders around Kandahar hungered for a unifying cause... [The Taliban] preached for a reborn alliance of Islamic piety and Pashtun might."

(287): Hamid Karzai contributed $50,000 to the Taliban "as they began to organize around Kandahar."

(289-291): Bhutto and Babar--Bhutto wants to keep the army "happy," and project into Central Asia, as well. Babar and Javed Ashraf Qazi (new head of ISI) author a break with Hekmatyar.

(293): "'I was horrified to learn that they [the Taliban] had emerged literally from the villages' recalled Qazi"

(296): "As the months passed, it became clear to both Turki and Badeeb that Pakistani intelligence had decided to back the Taliban at Hekmatyar's expense. Saudi intelligence had no objection to this betrayal. Hekmatyar had angered Turki by denouncing Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War."

(298): "As the Taliban swept west from Kandahar in sophisticated military formations, the US embassy reported that 'their use of tanks and helicopters strongly suggested Pakistani tutelage or direct control.'"

(302): details of "stranded gas" in Turkmenistan--pipelines oriented towards Russia, despite "bitter battles over how they should be used." hence the appeal of the T-A-P.

(332-333): the story of Kabul's fall--Taliban gets monetary assistance from UBL, ISI, and others; Hekmatyar's feigend alliance with Massoud, Massoud's retreat into the Panjshir.

(342): This is the narrative offered in this book, re: the "radicalization" of the Taliban--"Bin Laden had his own plan: He would convert the Taliban to his cause"

(346): Hekmatyar sent into exile in Iran upon Kabul's fall.

(352-353): in comes George Tenet, the "unsung hero" of this tale, in a sense. apolitical and fiercely committed. BORING.

(358): no better example of this book's unquestioning acceptance of imperial premises. Tenet opposed Gulf War; a political miscalculation because the war didn't take many American lives (oh, but it did take thousands of Iraqi lives, as Coll acknowledges)

(364): UNOCAL, 1997--Taliban stands to earn as much as $100 million a year, from pipeline.

(366): Taliban take pictures with the Christmas Tree, in Miller's house.

(386): winter 1998, Bill Richardson visits Taliban.

(411-413): Clinton's attack on the Somalia plant. NOT ONE MENTION OF THE ACTUAL FALL-OUT (Coll speaks only about the political controversy it caused, presumably regrettable).

(440): allegations of ties between Bin Laden and ISI in late 90s, united by anti-Massoud and Kashmir.

(448): "The UAE royal family had also been targeted by the Clinton administration's "buy American" campaign to win overseas contracts for weapons manufacturers and other corporations. And Sheikh Zayed had come through in a very big way: In May 1998, in a deal partially smoothed by Clarke, the UAE had agreed to an $8 billion multiyear contract to buy 80 F-16 military jets."

(458): mentioning Uzbekistan, and its "jowly, secular ex-communist autocrat named Islam Karimov," who in 1999 arrested 2,000 Islamic activists after an attempt on his life.

(461-462): 1999, murder of Abdul Haq's family and Hamid Karzai's father announce the beginnings of Pashtun opposition to Mullah Omar.

(478): no need to overstate "Islamization"--"Every Pakistani general, liberal or religious, believed in the jihadists by 1999"

(505): "By 2000 there were still a few analysts at the State Departments' Intelligence Bureau who argued for patient engagement with the Taliban. But most of Clinton's Cabinet now accepted that Al Qaeda had hijacked Mullah Omar."

(522): Richard Clarke on the Northern Alliance: [They're] "not a very good group of people to begin with. They're drug runners. They're human rights abusers. They're an ethnic minority. It's just not something that you're going to build a national government around."

(555-556): The American "beard census" of the Pakistani military--"Only two or three generals at the rank of lieutenant general or higher kept beards in 2001. The rate was less than 10% among graduates of the elite officers' schools."

(561): Ahmed Shah Massoud's anti-Taliban alliance: Karzai among Kandahar's Durrani, Ismail Khan in western Afghanistan, Karim Khalili among the Shiites, Haji Qadir around Kunar province, and Aburrashid Dostum among the Uzbeks in the North.

(572): to Karzai, after intensive lobbying--"'You're basically asking for the overthrow of the Taliban,' an incredulous midlevel State Department officer told Qayum Karzai in one meeting that August. 'I'm not sure if our government is prepared to do that.'

(576): Ahmed Shah Massoud, Coll is arguing, was the exception to the rule that modern Afghanistan had produced no nationalists. this is a critical and very weak point in his narrative.

(578): after already clarifying the strategic interests behind Pakistan's cultivation of the jihadists, for some reason he argues that the State is beholden to Al Qaeda. this is just silly.

The high expenditure on paying, protecting and accommodating Western aid officials in palatial style helps to explain why Afghanistan ranks 174th out of 178th on a UN ranking of countries' wealth. This is despite a vigorous international aid effort with the US alone spending $31bn since 2002 up to the end of last year.
(...) The high degree of wastage of aid money in Afghanistan has long been an open secret. In 2006, Jean Mazurelle, the then country director of the World Bank, calculated that between 35 per cent and 40 per cent of aid was "badly spent". "The wastage of aid is sky-high," he said. "There is real looting going on, mainly by private enterprises. It is a scandal."
(...) "I was in Badakhshan province in northern Afghanistan which has a population of 830,000, most of whom depend on farming," said Matt Waldman, the head of policy and advocacy for Oxfam in Kabul. "The entire budget of the local department of agriculture, irrigation and livestock, which is extremely important for farmers in Badakhshan, is just $40,000. This would be the pay of an expatriate consultant in Kabul for a few months."
(...) Mr Waldman, the author of several highly-detailed papers on the failures of aid in Afghanistan, says that a lot of money is put in at the top in Afghanistan but it is siphoned off before it reaches ordinary Afghans at he bottom. He agrees that the problems faced are horrendous in a country which was always poor and has been ruined by 30 years of war. Some 42 per cent of Afghanistan's 25 million inhabitants live on less than a dollar a day and life expectancy is only 45 years. Overall literacy rate is just 34 per cent and 18 per cent for women. But much of the aid money goes to foreign companies who then subcontract as many as five times with each subcontractor in turn looking for between 10 per cent and 20 per cent or more profit before any work is done on the project. The biggest donor in Afghanistan is the US, whose overseas aid department USAID channels nearly half of its aid budget for Afghanistan to five large US contractors.
(...) Another consequence of the use of foreign contractors is that construction has failed to make the impact on unemployment among young Afghans which is crucial if the Taliban is to be defeated. In southern provinces such as Farah, Helmand, Uruzgan and Zabul, up to 70 per cent of Taliban fighters are non-ideological unemployed young men given a gun before each attack and paid a pittance according to a report by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. By using these part-time fighters as cannon-fodder, the Taliban can keep down casualties among its own veteran fighters while inflicting losses on government forces.
(...) The international aid programme is particularly important in Afghanistan because the government has few other sources of revenue. Donations from foreign governments make up 90 per cent of public expenditure. Aid is far more important than in Iraq, where the government has oil revenues. In Afghanistan a policeman's monthly salary is only $70, which is not enough to live on without taking bribes.
(...) 40 per cent: Share of international aid budget returned to aid countries in corporate profit and consultant salaries – more than $6bn since 2001.

ALGERIA

NUMBERS

population: 33,769,668 (July 2008 est.)
land use: arable land, 3.17%; permanent crops, 0.28%; other, 96.55% (2005)
ethnic groups: Arab-Berber 99%, European less than 1% (NB: almost all Algerians are Berber in origin, not Arab; the minority who identify themselves as Berber live mostly in the mountainous region of Kabylie east of Algiers; the Berbers are also Muslim but identify with their Berber rather than Arab cultural heritage; Berbers have long agitated, sometimes violently, for autonomy; the government is unlikely to grant autonomy but has offered to begin sponsoring teaching Berber language in schools)
religions: Sunni Muslim (state religion) 99%, Christian and Jewish 1%
literacy: total population, 69.9%; male, 79.6%; female, 60.1% (2002 est.)
economy: The hydrocarbons sector is the backbone of the economy, accounting for roughly 60% of budget revenues, 30% of GDP, and over 95% of export earnings. Algeria has the eighth-largest reserves of natural gas in the world and is the fourth-largest gas exporter; it ranks 15th in oil reserves. Sustained high oil prices in recent years have helped improve Algeria's financial and macroeconomic indicators.
GDP composition, by sector: agriculture, 8.1%; industry, 62.5%; services, 29.4%
labor force: 9.44 million (or, about 28% of the total population)
labor force by occupation: agriculture 14%, industry 13.4%, construction and public works 10%, trade 14.6%, government 32%, other 16%

HISTORY

THE PRE-COLONIAL PERIOD (-1830)

1000BC-642AD(appx.): The indigenous Berbers (who had inhabited the region since at least 10,000BC) of the area repelled, were subjugated, and/or coexisted with successive invasions and settlement: (1) the Carthaginians, who arrived around 900BC, established Carthage in 814BC (in present-day Tunisia), incompletely subjugated the Berbers to their South, but fell apart after the Punic Wars (264-146BC) --as a result, "by the second century B.C., several large but loosely administered Berber kingdoms had emerged. Two of them were established in Numidia, behind the coastal areas controlled by Carthage" (2) the Romans, who retained a tenuous grip on the Berbers (their lands were the "breadbasket" of the Empire, allegedly) until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476AD; (3) the Byzantines, who under the leadership of Justinian I, in the mid-500s (AD), expelled the Vandal tribes who had settled in and around Carthage after the fall of the Romans. They exercised a "precarious grip" over the Berbers until the Arab invasions: "Local opposition delayed full Byzantine control of the region for twelve years, however, and imperial control, when it came, was but a shadow of the control exercised by Rome. Although an impressive series of fortifications were built, Byzantine rule was compromised by official corruption, incompetence, military weakness, and lack of concern in Constantinople for African affairs. As a result, many rural areas reverted to Berber rule."

642-909: From 642 to 669, a series of sporadic, almost mercenary Arab invasions first spread Islam to these areas. The Ummayads (661-750) launched a more systematic campaign in 670, recognizing the strategic import of these territories. "By 711 Umayyad forces helped by Berber converts to Islam had conquered all of North Africa." However resistance to the heavy-handedness of the ruling Arabs (taxation, discrimination, and even enslavement) soon took the form of an open revolt from 739-740, under the banner of Kharijite Islam (which was, in contrast to Ummayad doctrine, egalitarian and anti-racist). The Ummayads were succeeded by the Abbasids (750-1258) in 750, and exercised control over North Africa by proxy: the East was governed by Al Aghab; in the West, the Rustumid Imamate prevailed from (761-909), notable for the fact that its rulers were elected by "leading citizens."

909-1518: The Fatimids, a Shia caliphate organized by missionaries to North Africa over the course of the 800s, overthrew the Sunni rulers of the region. Though they expanded westward from the site of their first victory at Kairouan (in modern-day Tunisia) in 909, their ultimate ambitions lay in the Mashreq. As a result, they appointed a Berber dynasty (the Zirids: 972-1148) to rule in their stead. Despite these measures, "this period was marked by constant conflict, political instability, and economic decline." "For the first time, the extensive use of Arabic spread to the countryside."

For the latter half of this period, the Almoravids (1106-1147) ruled the Western portion of North Africa, after conquering "Morocco, the Maghrib as far east as Algiers, and Spain up to the Ebro River by 1106". They acknowledged the spiritual authority of the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad; under their rule, "Muslim Spain (Andalus in Arabic) was a great source of artistic and intellectual inspiration." The Almoravids were toppled by the Almohads (so-called for their emphasis on the unity of God), who "took control of Morocco in 1146, captured Algiers around 1151, and by 1160 had completed the conquest of the central Maghrib and advanced to Tripolitania." Their dynasty, which hosted two of this region's most famous thinkers, Abu Bakr ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), fell eventually in 1271.

The following three hundred years (ca. 1200-1500) saw the Western territories ruled by the Almohads in the hands of the Hafsid dynasty, which was based in Tunis. In the central Maghrib, the Zayanids exercised a tenuous hold. For much of this period, effective authority was less centralized: "Many coastal cities defied the ruling dynasties and asserted their autonomy as municipal republics. They were governed by their merchant oligarchies, by tribal chieftains from the surrounding countryside, or by the privateers who operated out of their ports. " Furthermore, the "aridity of official Islam had little appeal outside the mosques and schools of the cities"--as a result, marabouts were strong influences in rural areas, inspiring numerous uprisings and small autonomous republics.

1518-1830: In the early 1500s, after the reconquest of Grenada in 1492, the Spanish had moved to establish their authority on the Maghribi coast, "taking control of Mers el Kebir in 1505, Oran in 1509, and Tlemcen, Mostaganem, and Ténès, all west of Algiers, in 1510." However, despite the relative "ease" of these campaigns (of course they were brutal), Christian Spain never attempted to establish their authority south of these preliminary (and costly) outposts--perhaps because they sought to concentrate their efforts around the Mediterranean. Their failure to do this made it possible for the Ottomans to assert their control, instead.

In 1518, the prominent Barbary pirate Khair ad Din (aka "Redbeard" or "Barbossa"), who, together with his brother Aruj, had been operating under the Hafsids from Tunis, began a campaign to subdue the coastal region around Algeria (more-or-less establishing the modern, northern boundaries of Algeria). He did this with the patronage of the Ottomans, who in 1533 made him admiral of their fleet. "Under Khair ad Din's regency, Algiers became the center of Ottoman authority in the Maghrib, from which Tunis, Tripoli, and Tlemcen would be overcome and Morocco's independence would be threatened."

By 1587, 44 years after Khair ad Din's son had succeeded his father as beylerbey (provincial governor), the Ottomans instituted a more regular form of administration, relying upon pashas (governors) who served three-year terms (who were assisted by janissaries, recruited from Anatolian peasants, and known in Algeria as the ojaq). Turkish was the official language of the court; Arabs and Berbers were prohibited from government posts.

Over the course of the next two hundred and fifty years, this system ran into trouble on numerous occasions, and was re-formed accordingly (not by design, but by those victorious in the various feuds). From 1671-1830, for example, a dey exercised power; he was chosen by a divan, comprised of sixty nobles (at first this was the ojaq, more or less, but it gradually evolved into a group of the dey's lackeys). Remarkably, "[though] the dey was elected for a life term, ...in the 159 years (1671-1830) that the system survived, fourteen of the twenty-nine deys were removed from office by assassination."

The exact details are perhaps relatively unimportant (see, though, the block quote that follows)--the most salient fact was that the administration, like any other pre-capitalist Empire, depended heavily on the local powers that presided over any number of effectively autonomous provinces under its nominal control. In that sense, effective authority for the average citizen rested not in Constantinople, but in institutions that were entirely more local.

"The dey had direct administrative control only in the regent's enclave, the Dar as Sultan (Domain of the Sultan), which included the city of Algiers and its environs and the fertile Mitidja Plain. The rest of the territory under the regency was divided into three provinces (beyliks): Constantine in the east; Titteri in the central region, with its capital at Médéa; and a western province that after 1791 had its seat at Oran, abandoned that year by Spain when the city was destroyed in an earthquake. Each province was governed by a bey appointed by the dey, usually from the same circle of families. A contingent of the ojaq was assigned to each bey, who also had at his disposal the provincial auxiliaries provided by the privileged makhzen tribes, traditionally exempted from paying taxes on condition that they collect them from other tribes. Tax revenues were conveyed from the provinces to Algiers twice yearly, but the beys were otherwise left to their own devices. Although the regency patronized the tribal chieftains, it never had the unanimous allegiance of the countryside, where heavy taxation frequently provoked unrest. Autonomous tribal states were tolerated, and the regency's authority was seldom applied in the Kabylie."

THE COLONIAL PERIOD (1830-1962)

1830-1954: In the aftermath of decades-long tensions over piracy in the Mediterranean (eventually settled by superior European technology, ending in the Barbary Treaties; this defeat for the Dey preceded heightening tensions between him and the French), the French captured Algeria in a three-week campaign in 1930. The war pitted 34,000 of their soldiers against "7,000 janissaries, 19,000 troops from the beys of Constantine and Oran, and about 17,000 Kabyles." The invasion was violent and vicious (allegedly "disappearing" one-third of the entire Algerian population?). Almost as soon as French troops took Algiers, Charles X (of the Bourbon Restoration), who had authorized the military invasion in order to counter his declining domestic popularity, was deposed. He was replaced by Louis Philippe, the "citizen-king," who was surrounded by opponents to Charles X's decision to invade--nonetheless, withdrawing proved more difficult than invading, and in 1834 it was decided to annex the occupied population (about 3 million Muslims at that time) as a colony.

Intensive French settlement, encouraged by a nexus of private and official commercial interests, resulted in the influx of tens of thousands of European settlers (pied noirs) in the first decades of colonial rule.

the European settlers were largely of peasant farmer or working-class origin from the poor southern areas of Italy, Spain, and France. Others were criminal and political deportees from France, transported under sentence in large numbers to Algeria. In the 1840s and 1850s, to encourage settlement in rural areas official policy was to offer grants of land for a fee and a promise that improvements would be made. A distinction soon developed between the grands colons (great colonists) at one end of the scale, often self-made men who had accumulated large estates or built successful businesses, and the petits blancs (little whites), smallholders and workers at the other end, whose lot was often not much better than that of their Muslim counterparts. According to historian John Ruedy, although by 1848 only 15,000 of the 109,000 European settlers were in rural areas, "by systematically expropriating both pastoralists and farmers, rural colonization was the most important single factor in the destructuring of traditional society."

By 1848, nearly all of Northern Algeria was under French control, though not without encountering significant resistance (most notably the establishment of a Muslim state by Abd Al Qadir (he had fought the Ottomans, as well), who controlled two-thirds of Algeria in 1839; he eventually surrendered in 1847 when fully one-third of the French Army was employed, brutally and indiscriminately, against him and his rural support base).

The system of colonial administration employed by the French is best assessed in the context of the shifting contours of the mainland government: (1) till 1848, Algeria remained under military control, with the exception of pockets of civil administration in those areas where settlement was most intense (while the colons argued for full legal rights and integration with mainland France, the military argued that such measures would jeopardize colonial authority); (2) after the Revolution of 1848 till the advent of the Second Empire in 1852, some moves were made in this direction in three "civil" territories (Algiers, Oran, and Constantine), which were organized as French provinces under civil administration; (3) from 1852 to 1870, Napoleon III, who returned the colony to military rule, instituted a motley set of reforms that antagonized the colons while also not properly attending to the concerns of the bulk of the indigenous population. Though he imagined that European settlement would remain confined to the coast, his intentions were defied by the effects of his 1863 and 1865 decrees, which, it seems, accelerated the break-up of traditional institutions (like communal property) by allowing the individuals to whom they'd been given to sell to speculators; (4) from the birth of the Third Republic in 1870 onwards, civil administration was returned to Algeria; the gov't confirmed its intention to assimilate the colony into France. Over time, an "apartheid" system congealed (not that what went before was any distinct, conceptually), premised on the enfranchisement of the colons, and founded on the suppression, discrimination, and immiseration of the indigenous Muslim population (the Jews, against the will of the colons, were made citizens in 1870).

In 1871, in the aftermath of famines following from grain shortages owing to the Crimean War of 1854-1856 (in a three year period, an estimated 20% of the Muslim population of Constantine had perished), but in direct response to the 1870 order extending civil authority to previously self-governing tribal regions, rebellion racked the Kabyle region. It was suppressed in standard fashion, by collectively punishing the whole Muslim population.

Some assorted statistics relating to French apartheid:

• Because of the many restrictions imposed by the authorities, by 1915 only 50,000 Muslims were eligible to vote in elections in the civil communes.
• The bulk of Algeria's wealth in manufacturing, mining, agriculture, and trade was controlled by the grands colons. The modern European-owned and -managed sector of the economy centered around small industry and a highly developed export trade, designed to provide food and raw materials to France in return for capital and consumer goods. Europeans held about 30% of the total arable land, including the bulk of the most fertile land and most of the areas under irrigation. By 1900, Europeans produced more than two-thirds of the value of output in agriculture and practically all agricultural exports.
• In 1909... Muslims, who made up almost 90% of the population but produced 20% of Algeria's income, paid 70% of direct taxes and 45% of the total taxes collected. And colons controlled how these revenues would be spent. As a result, colon towns had handsome municipal buildings, paved streets lined with trees, fountains and statues, while Algerian villages and rural areas benefited little if at all from tax revenues.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, national consciousness had brewed in a new Muslim leadership: "It consisted of a small but influential class of évolués, other Algerians whose perception of themselves and their country had been shaped by wartime experiences, and a body of religious reformers and teachers." There were, correspondingly, various forms of anti-colonial agitation unfolding during this period (the Young Algerians, who were liberal integrationists active in the reformist movement, which was active from the 1890s to WWI; the Star of North Africa, the first group to call for Algerian independence (in 1927, it was banned in 1929), led by Ahmed Messali Hadj; AUMA, which, under the leadership of Shaykh Abd al Hamid Ben Badis, began in the 1920s to call for a return to the Islamic roots of Algeria). Any inclinations the French government may have had towards negotiating with these groups were nipped in the bud by the intransigence and influence of the white minority, who exercised almost total control over the local administration and had friends in high places in Paris. (It came closs to happening in 1936, when the FEI (comprised of evolues, led by Ferhat Abbas) and the ulema gave their approval to the Violette Plan, which would have given citizenship to a number of Muslims; however, it failed due to opposition from the colons).

1954-1962: In various forms, the struggle for independence had continued, through the events of WWII (Algeria had been governed by the Vichy regime from 1940 to 1942, of course)--after the 1945 massacre at Setif (of anywhere between 6,000 to 45,000 civilians, after a march organized by Abbas's AML, which had the support of Hadj and the ulema, for national liberation had turned violent and killed 103 Europeans), affairs had arguably become irreversibly polarized. On November 1, 1954, the FLN launched an uprising which marked the beginning of the Algerian War of Independence. Their increasing success over the next two years was met with very harsh repression by the French (which began, in particular, after the FLN killed 123 Pied Noir civilians in August 1955). By 1956, many nationalist groups, spurred by the repression of the colonial state, had joined the FLN, (with the notable exception of Messali Hadj, whose feud with the FLN resulted in almost 5,000 deaths in "Cafe Wars" in France.) 1956 also saw the Battle of Algiers, as the FLN sought to take the fight to the cities. Though General Jacques Massu employed "whatever means necessary" to dismantle the FLN infrastructure in Algiers, the battle had demonstrated the fact of their popular support.

By 1957, the FLN had evolved into a force of 40,000--in general, they fought as a guerrilla force, and were hardly engaged conventionally. Even still, by 1956, the French had committed almost 400,000 troops against them (including about 170,000 Muslim Algerians)--counterinsurgency tactics, as expected, ranged from napalm and aerial bombardment to the mass relocation of Algerian peasants to "safe zones" (almost 2 million, in all!).

In 1958, the crisis in Algeria led to the overthrow of the French Fourth Republic in a coup d'etat--De Gaulle took over on May 29, 1958, after Parliament approved his candidacy. The idea was that he was the only man who could give direction to the French government (the French feared a repeat of the 1954 debacle in Indochina). Though upon taking power, he had reassured the pied noir population of his support (and had proposed a new constitution for the French Fifth Republic that included an integrated Algeria), events turned in the FLN's favor by 1959. De Gaulle, in September of that year, spoke of self-determination for the Algerian population.

In January 1960, the pieds noir in Algeria, feeling betrayed, launched an insurrection as the police and army stood by. Though it was eventually pacified, another insurrection in April 1961 (this time a "general's putsch", organized by some renegade units and colons vigilantes) threatened the government's writ in a very serious way. De Gaulle was now ready to abandon the pieds noirs. From this, independence became an inevitability: talks with the FLN re-opened in May 1961, a ceasefire was agreed to, effective March 19, 1962--in their final form, these Evian Accords legislated Algerian independence. A vicious three month campaign of pro-pieds noir terrorism notwithstanding (120 bombs a day planted by the OAS), on July 1, 1962, Algerians held a referendum on independence. The vote was nearly unanimous. A few days later, independent Algeria was established.

INDEPENDENCE AND AFTER (1962-2009)

1962-1965: In the immediate aftermath of independence, almost 10% of the population fled for Paris (" most of the 1,025,000 Pieds-Noirs, as well as 81,000 Harkis (pro-French Algerians serving in the French Army"). Appended to the devastation of war, this exodus left Algeria in tatters: "the exodus of the colons deprived the country of most of its managers, civil servants, engineers, teachers, physicians, and skilled workers--all occupations from which the Muslim population had been excluded or discouraged from pursuing by colonial policy. The homeless and displaced numbered in the hundreds of thousands, many suffering from illness, and some 70 percent of the work force was unemployed. Distribution of goods was at a standstill. Departing colons destroyed or carried off public records and utility plans, leaving public services in a shambles. "

FLN leader Ahmed Ben Bella took over as independent Algeria's first president. In his March Decrees of 1963, he announced a program to bring the abandoned land, houses, factories, etc., under state control; additionally, however, the spontaneous cooperatives that had emerged amidst the chaos were to be supported.

At the same time, under Ben Bella's authority, bureaucratic and dictatorial tendencies were clearly in evidence. As Vijay Prashad writes, "The 1963 Constitution of Algeria abolished all political parities except the FLN, and elevated the president of the FLN to the sole formulator of State policy. The energy of the Algerian Revolution would now be concentrated in the body of the president, who for the moment was Ben Bella."

Similarly, the FLN's somewhat opportunistic seizure of the leadership of the anti-colonial struggle reflected the tenuous nature of the alliances that had formed in opposition to the French. It was unsurprising, then, that these began to come apart at the seams, as the FLN one-party state congealed. Indeed, talk of securing the power of the vanguard party against those defying the "general interest" are best situated in the context of these anxieties. Thus, though Ben Bella had support in the National Assembly, he moved to repress other resistance to his rule (in the form of an opposition group eventually led by Ait Ahmed (the FFS-- a Berber Socialist party founded in 1963, and still in existence today); general opposition included also the communists, Messali Hadj, Mohamed Boudiaf of the PRS (or Socialist Revolution Party)). There were also regional insurgencies that needed supressing--in the Kabylie and Southern Sahara (These partly merged with what was left of the general resistance led by Ait Ahmed and Boudiaf).

Ben Bella attempted to further establish his authority by purging figures who were loyal to then minister of defense, Boumediene. Up until this point, it seems, Boumediene had been complicit in the construction of a one-party State, who sought to command the national liberation project in the name of the people (and, of course, against their explicit politics). Nonetheless, Ben Bella went too far, his attempts eventually backfiring in a bloodless military coup, on June 9, 1965. (According to Prashad, however, it was actually Ben Bella's rapproachment with the organized left, perhaps threatening the Army, that inspired to Boumediene to action).

1965-1978: Under Boumediene's authority, "the state dominated society and ruled in the name of socialism." Nationalization increasingly stood for anti-democratic control by the State. "The military played a larger role in society." Revenue from oil and gas reserves played a significant role in the charade of socialism from above. Politically, he cracked down further on the organized left. In all these senses and more, Prashad argues, by the late 1960s Algeria "had moved from an attempt to create a socialist state to a state capitalist one, with a parasitic bourgeoisie confident beside the strong arms of the military."

1978-1992: Boumediene died in December 1978, after which a struggle for succession ensued. As a compromise to the two principal candidates, a relative outsider (but also army man), Chadli Bendjedid, took power in February 1979. He moved to liberalize the economy; in his first Five Year Plan (1980-1984), for example, which turned many state-controlled industries over to private hands. Nonetheless, Algeria suffered from a serious economic crisis throughout the 80's--a state of affairs which deteriorated after a dramatic 1986 fall in the price of oil (oil prices had been declining throughout the decade).

Benjdedid also had to confront an increasingly militant Islamist opposition (can this be theorized as the inevitable outcome of the failure to meaningfully politicize the public?)--he did so by a combination of appeasement and repression: arresting prominent activists but also modifying family law in patriarchal ways. A wave of general outrage from 1985 to 1988 culminated in the the riots of October 1988 (which began as student and worker strikes). In the State's effort to re-assert its control through declaring a State of Emergency, about 500 were estimated killed and 3,000 arrested.

Widespread public agitation in the wake of this incident prompted Benjedid to move towards reform. A new constitution was promulgated in February 1989 (dropping "socialist" from the description of the Algerian state), liberalizing the political sphere but also curtailing women's rights. Local and provincial elections in June 1990 were won by the Islamists (the FIS), but largely because secular parties boycotted--in the aftermath, the FLN attempted to curb electoral laws in their favor, and declared martial law from June to September 1991 under a gov't of national reconciliation, after the FIS responded with a general strike and general agitation.

Nonetheless, the FIS contested the first round of the December 1991 elections, and won handily, trouncing the FLN. This prompted panic amongst the ruling elite, who feared an FIS takeover--on January 11, 1992, members of Benjedid's cabinet dissolved parliament and declared the elections null and void, cancelling the second round and banning all religious parties. Both the FIS and FLN clamored for a return to the electoral process, but police and troops countered with arrests and repression. On February 9th, 1992, a one year state of emergency was announced--Mohammed Boudiaf returned from exile to head the caretaker government.
Massive demonstrations erupted in cities.

1992-2009: All this, of course, set the stage for the Algerian civil war, a conflict which claimed more than 160,000 lives between 1992 and 2002, and pitted the MIA (guerillas in mountains) and the GIA (guerillas in towns)--whose stregnth peaked at 40,000 in 1994, which is also when the GIA and MIA split (which became the AIS), over the question of the latter's loyalty to the FIS (who were locked in soon-to-fail peace talks)--against the military. It was notoriously brutal, claiming the lives of significant numbers of civilians. Nonetheless, it began to subside in intensity after 1997, when the AIS opted for a unilateral ceasefire; the GIA was rent apart by internal divisions, though sporadic fighting continued until about 2002.

Elections in Algeria resumed in 1995 (parliamentary elections were held in 1997). Both of these were won by the Army's party, the National Democratic Rally (RND). In 1999, however, the FLN candidate, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who had allied himself with Boumedienne at the time of Ben Bella's overthrow, won the presidency in ultimately uncontested elections (opposition candidates had pulled out, citing fraud concerns). Even still, in April 2004, he was re-elected, with 85% of the vote in an election deemed free and fair (though his opponents cite State control of the media). He is seeking a constitutional amendment, which would allow him to seek a third term.

AFGHANISTAN

population: 32,738,376 (July 2008 est.)
ethnic groups: Pashtun 42%, Tajik 27%, Hazara 9%, Uzbek 9%, Aimak 4%, Turkmen 3%, Baloch 2%, other 4%
languages: Afghan Persian or Dari (official) 50%, Pashto (official) 35%, Turkic languages (primarily Uzbek and Turkmen) 11%, 30 minor languages (primarily Balochi and Pashai) 4%, much bilingualism
religion: Sunni Muslim 80%, Shia Muslim 19%, other 1%
literacy: 28.1% (male 43.6%, female 12.6%)
GDP composition: agriculture 38%, industry 24%, services 38%.
labor force, by sector: agriculture 80%, industry 10%, services 10% (2004 est.)


1747-1823: Ahmed Shah Durrani creates the Durrani Empire, after the end of Nadir Shah's reign over Persia. Expanded east, sacking Delhi in 1757 (where he agreed to leave the weakened Mughals in power "as long as Shah Alam II acknowledged Ahmad Shah's suzerainty over Punjab, Sindh, and Kashmir"). Later forced to confront the expanding powers of the Maratha Empire at the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761. "The victory at Panipat was the high point of Ahmad Shah's -- and Afghan -- power." Already, soon after, he was losing control of Punjab to the Sikhs--he took Amritsar, sacked Lahore in 1762 and massacred thousands of inhabitants, but could not subjugate the resistance in Punjab. In the North, as well, compelled to negotiate borders with the Uzbek Emir of Bukhara. After Ahmed Shah's death in 1772, the Empire fell apart--his successors failed to stitch together competing tribes, and by 1818 controlled only Kabul and surrounding areas.

1823-1839: The Barkazai Dynasty takes power after battling the Durrani Empire (Shuja Shah had assasinated the elder brother of Dost Muhammad Khan, triggering the feud). Dost Muhammad Khan rules from 1826-1839; initially receptive to British overtures, but following their entreaties to him to keep to himself and abandon hopes of retaking Peshawar from the Sikhs, he renews relations with the Russians.

1838-1842: Fearful that Tsarist moves (1813 Treaty of Gulistan, 1826 Treaty of Turkmanchai, and other advances) indicated that the Russians were preparing for an invasion of British India, via Afghanistan, the British launched the First Anglo-Afghan War--an attempt to impose a reliable puppet regime under the leadership of Shuja Shah (who had ruled the Durrani Empire till 1809, and tried to retake it from Dost Muhammad Khan in 1834--under the cover of this battle the Sikhs had taken Peshawar). But by 1842 they were forced to retreat--a retreat which ended in a complete massacre of the occupying forces (of roughly thirty thousand personnel, only one man escaped).

1842-1878: After these troops were expelled by Mohammad Akbar Khan, Afghanistan was ruled again by his father, Dost Mohammad Khan till 1863. After his death, his sons Sher Ali Khan and Mohammad Afzal Khan who feuded over the kingdom until Afzal's death in 1867. (Akbar Khan had died in1845, possibly poisoned by his father, who feared his ambitions).

1878-1880: Though the 1855 Treaty of Peshawar had cemented British support for Sher Ali Khan in Afghanistan (the British saw his emirate as a buffer state), Sher Ali Khan grew distrustful at the weakness of British support, which only went so far. Sher Ali Khan's 1878 refusal to accept a British diplomatic mission triggered the Second Anglo-Afghan war. In May 1879, Sher Ali Khan's successor and son Muhammad Yaqub Khan signed the Treaty of Gandamak with the British, relinquishing control of foreign affairs to the British (and ceding Quetta and other frontier areas--the British had already taken Baluchistan in 1859, leaving Afghanistan land-locked). Though the British more-or-less withdrew, further uprisings followed--though the were unsuccessful, Yaqub Khan was suspected of complicity, and thus replaced by his cousin Abdur Rahman Khan in 1880.

1880-1919: Abdur Rahman Khan answered the prayers of the British, respecting their diktats. He united the disparate tribes, as well as tried to "modernize" Afghanistan (his vizier, Mahmud Tarzi, was important in this process). Under his rule, the Durand Line was drawn in 1893. His son, Habibullah Khan, who peacefully succeeded him in 1901, then ruled till 1919. (In 1907, an Anglo-Russian Convention marked the end of "The Great Game").

1919-1929: After Habibullah Khan was assasinated on a hunting trip, his third son, Amanullah Khan took power. Amanullah, under the influence of Tarzi (who was his father-in-law), introduced further reforms (women's rights, educational rights, Western dress, etc.). However, to stem intrigue in his own court, he crossed the Durand Line in May 1919, which trigged the Third Anglo-Afghan War. After recovering from defeats in the initial skirmishes, the superior technology of the British told--indeed, this war saw the inaugural aerial bombardment of Afghanistan. The fighting concluded in three months, at which point the British dictated the terms of the Rawalpindi Agreement in August 1919. Amanullah eventually succumbed in 1929--after he abdicated, his brother was deposed by the Tajik Habibullah Kalani, who ruled from January to October.

1929-1973: Nadir Shah, who had served as Amanullah Khan's minister of war until he quit in protest at the reforms, toppled Habibullah Kalani in October (the Pashtun tribesmen were unwilling to submit to a Tajik king). He abolished most of Amanullah's reforms. After his assasination by a college student in 1933, his 19 yr-old son, Mohammad Zahir Shah took control (though Nadir Shah's three younger brothers formed an influential clique of advisers around Zahir Shah). Some limited steps towards political liberalization were made (a legislature, education for women, etc.). In 1953, power shifted away from the uncles to the younger generation of the family--Zahir Shah's cousin, Mohammad Daud Khan, became Prime Minister in 1953. He concentrated much of his energies on the issue of Pashtunistan, resulting in numerous skirmishes with Pakistan on the border in the 1950s and 1960s (in 1962, Daud sent Afghan troops into Bajaur). He resigned, however, in 1963--the King had requested his resignation due to the deleterious effects of his Pashtunistan policies. In 1964, a new, democratic constitution was passed--relatively fair elections were held in 1965 and 1969, though the country could not yet be said to be a functioning democracy, in any sense (still closer to an absolute monarchy than a constitutional one).

1973-1978: In 1973, Daud took advantage of the King's absence to launch a bloodless coup. His rule was brutish, marked by harsh repression of dissident politics (he replaced Zahir Shah's constitutional set-up with a largely nominated loya jirga; in 1977, a presidential, one-party system was approved by said assembly). Though he didn't pursue the issue of Pashtunistan, he distanced himself from the USSR ("At first Daoud’s dictatorship leaned towards the Soviet Union in foreign policy and the Communists supported him. By early 1978, though, Daoud was swinging back towards the US and he had the main Communist leaders arrested.")

1978-1979: The PDPA, which had been founded in 1965 by Nur Mohammad Taraki, Hafizullah Amin, and Babrak Karmal, had been marred by a serious internal schism: Taraki and the Khalq faction represented the more radical arm, committed to a Marxist-Leninst vision of revolution carried out by educated cadres, whereas Karmal and the Parcham faction believed that the underdeveloped character of Afghanistan meant that the emphasis should instead be on building a federation of national and democratic forces. Though they split in the late 60s, the USSR compelled them to reconcile in 1977. In April 1978 (the Saur revolution), the PDPA organized a coup, led by Hafizullah Amin--Daud and most of his family was killed in the uprising. While in power, they were ambitiously secular, and moved to waive farmers' debts and nationalize agricultural resources. Nonetheless, "[though they] had support in the cities [they had] very little in the countryside, where 90 percent of Afghans lived," and soon confronted peasant rebellions led by village mullahs. It was brutal in repressing this opposition (including opposition led by the soon-to-be-purged Parcham faction)--thousands of political prisoners were held and executed in the months leading up to the Soviet invasion in 1979. In September 1979, Amin took over after a palace shootout in which Taraki was killed. (There was also, of course, the small matter of pre-emptive American funding for mujahideen groups, admitted later by Brzezinski.)

(A different view, articulated by Parenti: "“It was a totally indigenous happening. Not even the CIA blamed the USSR for it,” writes John Ryan, a retired professor at the University of Winnipeg, who was conducting an agricultural research project in Afghanistan at about that time. The Taraki government proceeded to legalize labor unions, and set up a minimum wage, a progressive income tax, a literacy campaign, and programs that gave ordinary people greater access to health care, housing, and public sanitation. Fledgling peasant cooperatives were started and price reductions on some key foods were imposed.")

1979-1992: The USSR invaded in December 1979 to prop up the teetering, besieged government (only after months of PDPA requests had gone largely unheeded). There was some suspsicion that Amin was untrustworthy (even that he was a CIA agent!). Kamral was installed as President, the Khalq faction was purged. "The mullahs had been saying that the Communists were Russian puppets. Now everyone could see that this was true." The phases of the Russian Operation:

• Decmeber 1979-February 1980: Occupation of major urban centers, military bases, strategic installations.
  
• March 1980-April 1985: "The Soviet armed forces held the cities and patrolled the highways with tanks. But in the countryside they came under sustained attack. Here their main tactics were land mines, helicopter gunships, bombers and free fire zones." The resistance was waging a guerilla war, and winning.
  
• April 1985-January 1987: Gorbachev came to power in Moscow, declared his impatience with the war. Gradually the USSR shifted the burden of fighting onto the Afghan army.
• January 1987-February 1989: A general peaceful withdrawal of Soviet troops, leaving behind a strained DRA to fight the mujahideen.

In 1986, Mohammad Najibullah was elected President, in place of Kamral. Yet, despite a new constitution and a policy of national reconciliation, insurgents did not negotiate with the new government and the war raged on. Though the Soviets withdrew, they supported Najibullah until the fall of the USSR in 1991.

1992-1996: As a result of the war, "about two thirds of the population were killed, wounded or forced to flee." In 1992, mujahideen entered Kabul, and Najibullah was forced to flee--he sought sanctuary in the UN compound. A war for Kabul ensued, which brutalized the capital: "Kabul had survived the Soviet occupation without being bombed. Now the city was flattened as competing Islamist parties shelled the working class areas. Kabul looked like a German or Japanese city after the Second World War."

1996-2001: The Taliban won the war for Kabul in 1996, after having been patronized by the ISI beginning in 1994. "The soldiers were boys from the religious schools in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. Taliban simply means “the students”. The boys had spent most of their lives not in traditional villages but in that very 20th century institution, the refugee camp." ("The Taliban were driven to emphasise their Islamic credentials partly because everyone knew they were in fact clients of the Pakistani and American governments. Their public executions in football stadiums were barbaric but also welcome to many Afghans. The Taliban enforced law and order, they were more honest than the commanders and people hoped for security. Their odd and un-Afghan Islam went too far for most people. So they had little passionate support but a good deal of toleration in Pushtun areas from people who felt they were better than the alternatives.") Furthermore, "the central ideology of the Taliban was Pushtun chauvinism. The Taliban were exclusively Pushtun. Since the 1920s Afghan politics had always been polarised on religious and class grounds. The Communists, for instance, had always included Pushtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks and people from other groups, and so had the Islamists. The various factions, too, had been mixed. Ethnicity was not trivial, but it was not the main basis of politics. Now that Communist and Islamist politics had betrayed people, ethnicity was all that was left for political organising."

2001-2009: America invades and occupies Afghanistan in October 2001, with the assistance of NATO, deposing the Taliban. Karzai is installed in December 2001: "He was an American client but not simply a puppet. His government relied on three real sources of power. One was the US army. The other was the Northern Alliance, who were willing to put up with the Americans but expected them to leave eventually. The third was a certain degree of popular support in Pushtun areas... The explanation for the lack of resistance is simple. Afghans had endured 23 years of war. That meant death but also desperate insecurity, a life of all against all. There was little passionate support for the Taliban or the Islamists. People were willing to settle for almost anything not to live in perpetual fear." In 2002, a loya jirga affirms Karzai as interim president. In 2003, a constitutional loya jirga is convened, which ratifies a new constitution in January 2004. In elections held in October 2004, Karzai wins and becomes President ("The elections in 2004 were a clear demonstration of the willingness to give peace a chance. The Americans forbade any credible candidate from running against Karzai for president. But Afghans turned out in very large numbers to vote for him and for parliamentary representatives.") Legislative elections are held in September 2005. The national assembly sits in December 2005, for the first time in 32 years. Despite all this, of course, the same patchwork of warlords and criminals that prevailed earlier are reported to retain effective control over the country--via these democratic institutions. As of 2007, significant resistance is reported to have re-emerged (called the Taliban, though this is probably more provocative than accurate; at the very least, the resistance is indigenous and largely a result of the failures of the present administration)--with very recent reports suggesting they control wide swathes of the country. President Obama, of course, has promised to commit more troops in order to win the "good war." Perhaps the abiding lesson, though, is that "Afghanistan is one of the few places in the world where progressives and the left have consistently lined up with brutal imperial mass murder. That is why the right wing is strong in Afghanistan." (Again, the Parenti view: "One might agree with John Ryan who argued that if Washington had left the Marxist Taraki government alone back in 1979, “there would have been no army of mujahideen, no Soviet intervention, no war that destroyed Afghanistan, no Osama bin Laden, and no September 11 tragedy.” But it would be asking too much for Washington to leave unmolested a progressive leftist government that was organizing the social capital around collective public needs rather than private accumulation.")

"The pledges to withdraw from Iraq given by (officials) from occupation forces countries are only for elections sake ", Ahmed al-Safi, a representative of Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, said at Friday prayer speech in Karbala.
The cleric noted "the reality of their pledges is that they desire their troops to stay in (Iraq)". He pointed out "it accounted for their desire to draft an agreement to keep the presence of the troops in Iraq". The cleric called on Iraqi negotiator to be patient "in drafting the issues of such decisive agreement".

"All the politicians are trying to prove that they care more about Iraqis than they do about Americans -- otherwise they know the people and the voters will not support them," said Ala Maaki, a senior lawmaker with Iraqi's largest Sunni political party. "I think we could see al-Maliki and Moqtada Sadr trying to one-up the other today and see who can take the strongest stand against the Americans."

afghanistan: mirage of the good war
(...) Two principal arguments, often overlapping, are put forward as to ‘what went wrong’ in Afghanistan. For liberal imperialists, the answer can be summarized in two words: ‘not enough’. The invasion organized by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld was done on the cheap. The ‘light footprint’ demanded by the Pentagon meant that there were too few troops on the ground in 2001–02. Financial commitment to ‘state-building’ was insufficient. Though it may now be too late, the answer is to pour in more troops, more money—‘multiple billions’ over ‘multiple years’, according to the us Ambassador in Kabul. [4] The second answer—advanced by Karzai and the White House, but propagated by the Western media generally—can be summed up in one word: Pakistan. Neither of these arguments holds water.
(...) Yet never have such gaping inequalities featured on this scale before. Little of the supposed $19 billion ‘aid and reconstruction’ money has reached the majority of Afghans. The mains electricity supply is worse now than five years ago, and while the rich can use private generators to power their air conditioners, hot-water heaters, computers and satellite tvs, average Kabulis ‘suffered a summer without fans and face a winter without heaters.’ [15] As a result, hundreds of shelterless Afghans are literally freezing to death each winter.
(...) Then there are the ngos who descended on the country like locusts after the occupation.
(...) The argument that more nato troops are the solution is equally unsustainable. All the evidence suggests that the brutality of the occupying forces has been one of the main sources of recruits for the Taliban. American air power, lovingly referred to as ‘Big Daddy’ by frightened us soldiers on unwelcome terrain, is far from paternal when it comes to targeting Pashtun villages. There is widespread fury among Afghans at the number of civilian casualties, many of them children. There have been numerous incidents of rape and rough treatment of women by isaf soldiers, as well as indiscriminate bombing of villages and house-to-house search-and-arrest missions. The behaviour of the foreign mercenaries backing up the nato forces is just as bad. Even sympathetic observers admit that ‘their alcohol consumption and patronage of a growing number of brothels in Kabul . . . is arousing public anger and resentment.’ [18] To this could be added the deaths by torture at the us-run Bagram prison and the resuscitation of a Soviet-era security law under which detainees are being sentenced to 20-year jail terms on the basis of summary allegations by us military authorities. All this creates a thirst for dignity that can only be assuaged by genuine independence.
(...) One reason suggested for their increasing support in towns is that the new-model Taliban have relaxed their religious strictures, for males at least—no longer demanding beards or banning music—and improved their propaganda: producing cassette tapes and cds of popular singers, and dvds of us and Israeli atrocities in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine.
(...) It is virtually impossible to build a Texan fence or an Israeli wall across the mountainous and largely unmarked 1,500-mile frontier that separates the two countries.
(...) Some 90 per cent of the world opium supply emanates from Afghanistan. Since 2003 the nato mission has made no serious attempt to bring about a reduction in this lucrative trade. Karzai’s own supporters would rapidly desert if their activities in this sphere were disrupted, and the amount of state help needed over many years to boost agriculture and cottage industries and reduce dependence on poppy farming would require an entirely different set of priorities. Only a surreal utopian could expect nato countries, busy privatizing and deregulating their own economies, to embark upon full-scale national-development projects abroad.
(...) It need hardly be added that the bombardment and occupation of Afghanistan has been a disastrous—and predictable—failure in capturing the perpetrators of 9.11. This could only have been the result of effective police work; not of international war and military occupation. Everything that has happened in Afghanistan since 2001—not to mention Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon—has had the opposite effect, as the West’s own intelligence reports have repeatedly confirmed. According to the official 9.11 Commission report, Mullah Omar’s initial response to Washington’s demands that Osama Bin Laden be handed over and al-Qaeda deprived of a safe haven was ‘not negative’; he himself had opposed any al-Qaeda attack on us targets. [23] But while the Mullah was playing for time, the White House closed down negotiations. It required a swift war of revenge. Afghanistan had been denominated the first port of call in the ‘global war on terror’, with Iraq already the Administration’s main target. The shock-and-awe six-week aerial onslaught that followed was merely a drumroll for the forthcoming intervention in Iraq, with no military rationale in Afghanistan. Predictably, it only gave al-Qaeda leaders the chance to vanish into the hills. To portray the invasion as a ‘war of self-defence’ for nato makes a mockery of international law, which was perverted to twist a flukishly successful attack by a tiny, terrorist Arab groupuscule into an excuse for an open-ended American military thrust into the Middle East and Central Eurasia.
(...) As ever, geopolitics prevails over Afghan interests in the calculus of the big powers. The basing agreement signed by the us with its appointee in Kabul in May 2005 gives the Pentagon the right to maintain a massive military presence in Afghanistan in perpetuity, potentially including nuclear missiles. That Washington is not seeking permanent bases in this fraught and inhospitable terrain simply for the sake of ‘democratization and good governance’ was made clear by nato’s Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer at the Brookings Institution in February this year: a permanent nato presence in a country that borders the ex-Soviet republics, China, Iran and Pakistan was too good to miss.

Footage from a video camera handed out by an Israeli human rights group appears to show Jewish settlers beating up Palestinians in the West Bank.

the war in iraq is pure murder:
The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing. The savagery and brutality of the occupation is tearing apart those who have been deployed to Iraq. As news reports have just informed us, 115 American soldiers committed suicide in 2007. This is a 13% increase in suicides over 2006. And the suicides, as they did in the Vietnam War years, will only rise as distraught veterans come home, unwrap the self-protective layers of cotton wool that keep them from feeling, and face the awful reality of what they did to innocents in Iraq
(...) American Marines and soldiers have become socialized to atrocity. The killing project is not described in these terms to a distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract terms of glory, honor, and heroism, in the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a virtue. The campaign to rid the world of terror is expressed within the confines of this rhetoric, as if once all terrorists are destroyed evil itself will vanish.
(...) "This unit sets up this traffic control point, and this 18 year-old kid is on top of an armored Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun," remembered Sgt. Geoffrey Millard, who served in Tikrit with the 42nd Infantry Division. "And this car speeds at him pretty quick and he makes a split-second decision that that's a suicide bomber, and he presses the butterfly trigger and puts two hundred rounds in less than a minute into this vehicle. It killed the mother, a father, and two kids. The boy was aged four and the daughter was aged three. "And they briefed this to the general," Millard said, "and they briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. They briefed it to him. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says, 'If these f---ing hajis learned to drive, this sh-t wouldn't happen.'"
(...) "A lot of guys really supported that whole concept that, you know, if they don't speak English and they have darker skin, they're not as human as us, so we can do what we want," said Spc. Josh Middleton, who served in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq. "And you know, 20 year-old kids are yelled at back and forth at Bragg, and we're picking up cigarette butts and getting yelled at every day for having a dirty weapon. But over here, it's like life and death. And 40 year-old Iraqi men look at us with fear and we can -- do you know what I mean? -- we have this power that you can't have. That's really liberating. Life is just knocked down to this primal level of, you know, you worry about where the next food's going to come from, the next sleep or the next patrol, and to stay alive. "It's like, you feel like, I don't know, if you're a caveman," he added. "Do you know what I mean? Just, you know, I mean, this is how life is supposed to be. Life and death, essentially. No TV. None of that bullsh-t."
(...) The historian Christopher Browning chronicled the willingness to kill in Ordinary Men, his study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland during World War II. On the morning of July 12, 1942, the battalion, made up of middle-aged recruits, was ordered to shoot 1,800 Jews in the village of Jzefw in a daylong action. The men in the unit had to round up the Jews, march them into the forest, and one by one order them to lie down in a row. The victims, including women, infants, children, and the elderly, were shot dead at close range. Battalion members were offered the option to refuse, an option only about a dozen men took, although a few more asked to be relieved once the killing began. Those who did not want to continue, Browning says, were disgusted rather than plagued by conscience. When the men returned to the barracks they "were depressed, angered, embittered and shaken." They drank heavily. They were told not to talk about the event, "but they needed no encouragement in that direction."
(...) The word "haji" swiftly became a slur to refer to Iraqis, in much the same way "gook" was used to debase the Vietnamese and "raghead" is used to belittle those in Afghanistan. Soon those around him ridiculed "haji food," "haji homes," and "haji music." Bewildered prisoners, who were rounded up in useless and indiscriminate raids, were stripped naked and left to stand terrified for hours in the baking sun. They were subjected to a steady torrent of verbal and physical abuse. "I experienced horrible confusion," Meja remembered, "not knowing whether I was more afraid for the detainees or for what would happen to me if I did anything to help them."
(...) "The frustration that resulted from our inability to get back at those who were attacking us," Meja said, "led to tactics that seemed designed simply to punish the local population that was supporting them."
(...) The failure in Iraq is the same failure that bedeviled the French in Algeria; the United States in Vietnam; and the British, who for 800 years beat, imprisoned, transported, shot, and hanged hundreds of thousands of Irish patriots. Occupation, in each case, turned the occupiers into beasts and fed the insurrection. It created patterns where innocents, as in Iraq, were terrorized and killed. The campaign against a mostly invisible enemy, many veterans said, has given rise to a culture of terror and hatred among U.S. forces, many of whom, losing ground, have in effect declared war on all Iraqis.
(...) Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits -- few people in pulpits have much worth listening to -- but are the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must listen to and heed to know ourselves. They tell us war is a soulless void. They have seen and tasted how war plunges us into perversion, trauma, and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies that have the redemptive power to save us from ourselves.

chris hedges and lalia al-arian:
The terror that I saw on the patriarch’s face, like I said, that really was the turning point for me. I imagined in my mind what he must have been thinking, understanding that he had lived under Saddam’s brutal regime for many years, worried about—you know, hearing stories about Iraqis being carried away in the middle of the night by the Iraqi secret service and so forth, to see all those lights, all those soldiers with guns, all the uniform things that we wear, as far as the helmet, the night vision goggles, very intimidating, very terrifying for the man. He screamed a very guttural cry that I can still hear it every day. You know, it was just the most awful, horrible sound I’ve ever heard in my life. He was so terrified and so afraid for his family. And I thought of my family at that time, and I thought to myself, boy, if I was the patriarch of a family, if soldiers came from another country, came in and did this to my family, I would be an insurgent, too.
(...) And when they do join the resistance, President Bush says, “They’re al-Qaeda. They’re al-Qaeda.” But they’re not. They’re just regular Iraqi people who feel occupied, and they’re reacting to an occupation.
(...) Well, Amy, the numbers are that less than one percent of the Iraqis actually support a US presence in Iraq, and this has been demonstrated time and time again in polls and also in the result when troops do withdraw from the region. For example, last December, British troops withdrew from Basra, and we saw a calm in the area and a rapid decrease in violence. Some estimates are that it was a 99 percent decrease in violence. So we do see that the results are very clear once troops do withdraw and that there is some stability in this certain region.
(...) These are the pillars of the occupation, and we wanted to give readers a kind of lens or view into the gritty details of how these mechanisms works, such as convoys. I mean, these are just freight trains of death. You have to remain moving once you leave what they call the wire, once you leave the safe perimeter of a base. And so, these heavily armored convoys will drive at breakneck speeds, fifty, sixty miles an hour down the middle of roads, smashing into Iraqi cars, shoving Iraqi vehicles to the side, running over Iraqi civilians, and then, of course, any time an IED goes off, unleashing withering what they call suppressing fire with belt-fed weapons—these are light machine guns like SAWs, .50-caliber machine guns—into a densely populated areas. And so, I think that rather than sort of do a Studs Terkel kind of memoir, we wanted to focus specifically on sort of key mechanisms that make the occupation work, how these mechanisms function, and the effect that these mechanisms have on Iraqi civilians.
(...) checkpoints are deadly for Iraqi civilians, in part because checkpoints are often put up very quickly, so that you can turn a corner in Baghdad, Fallujah or any other city, and there could never have been a checkpoint there, and there suddenly is a checkpoint there. Also, you know, as a kind of security measure, American forces will often put Iraqi forces before their checkpoints. So there’s actually two checkpoints. So you’ll go through the Iraqi forces, and many Iraqi civilians, by the way, are terrified, because they don’t know who those Iraqis are in the uniform. So sometimes they’ll just try and gun it, which will mean that their cars—American forces or Iraqi forces or both will open fire on their car, or they’ll get through the Iraqi checkpoint not expecting another checkpoint, or it’s night, or their breaks don’t work. And in Iraq, the situation is so volatile and so deadly for the occupation forces that the response is to open fire repeatedly. Checkpoints are a very common form of death for Iraqi civilians, and these, you know, incidents where cars are fired upon and whole families are killed are rarely investigated or documented.
(...) You would be hard-pressed to find one single Iraqi family who hasn’t experienced the terrifying experience of a raid. And basically, as John Bruhns described on your show a year ago, they storm into a house, they turn the entire house upside-down, making it look like a hurricane hit it. They usually separate the men from the women and children. Most of the time, the vast majority of the time, they actually arrest the men. They zipcuff them, and they take them to a detention facility or a prison, which leaves the family looking for them for days.
(...) They would say that this is something that’s standard operating procedure, that the convoys that race down the streets, they jump over medians in the middle of the street, they drive on the wrong side of the road. They—again, men get arrested for months, sometimes years, at a time, with their families not even knowing where they are. And this just shows that an occupation not only destroys the people that are under occupation, but the soldiers and Marines who are asked to carry out the occupation, because when these troops return from their service, they’re haunted by what they’ve seen and they’re haunted by what they’ve done.
(...) Well, you know, this is sort of perhaps the great irony of the occupation itself. There is an understanding—and Petraeus wrote the counterinsurgency manual, the new one that’s used by the occupation forces—that you can’t win an insurgency unless you win the support of the civilian population. And yet, I think as this book points out, every single mechanism used to enforce the occupation alienates and enrages the average Iraqi. It is not only a form of collective humiliation of great indignity, but violence and danger and terror is the right word. And that is the experience of these Iraqis.
(...) And so, I think if there’s a kind of summation of the book, it is that we are not a force for stability. We are not a force that in any way dampens or inhibits or minimizes violence. But we are another mix in the cauldron of horror and violence and terror, along with militias and criminal gangs and warlords that go into making Iraqi society essentially a kind of Hobbesian nightmare.