Under the original Bretton Woods system, IMF loans were aimed at preventing devaluation and propping up demand. U.s. capital accepted these Keynesian measures when the U.S. was the major world exporter, ran large trade surpluses and the rest of the world depended on its currency to pay for those imports. But in the 1980s, the IMF turned all of its previous policies on their heads: It now deliberately imposed devaluation and forced reductions in national income and demand in order to limit imports—all as a means to guarantee repayment of debt to international finance capital.
(...) In the 1980s, 187 structural adjustment loans were negotiated. They were the bitter medicine that only a seemingly objective, nonprofit multilateral organization like the IMF could get away with politically. Structural adjustment led to hunger, malnutrition, poverty, disease and death throughout the Third World. Under IMF surveillance and enforcement, virtually every nation in sub-Saharan Africa entered a structural adjustment program. In every case, they were a disaster for the people of Africa and did nothing to restore growth. In the 1980s, GNP in sub-Saharan Africa fell by 2.2 percent per year, and per capita income fell below pre-independence levels. To pay back the debt, government health expenditures were cut by 50 percent and education by 25 percent. In Tanzania, debt repayment was six times the expenditure for health costs—which is all the explanation one needs to understand why 40 percent of the population of Tanzania dies before age 35.12 Flood-ravaged Mozambique—whose debt was $8.3 billion in 1998—pays $1.4 million per week in debt repayment. It will pay out in less than one year more than it has been promised in flood relief.
(...) In IMF-“adjusted” countries, government spending per capita was reduced yearly from 1980 to 1987 and diverted to ever-increasing payments on debt interest. In Latin America, the portion of government budgets allocated to interest payments increased from 9 percent to 19.3 percent. Under IMF auspices, the 1980s were a lost decade for Latin America. In Chile, IMF loan conditions cut real wages by 40 percent. The IMF loan to Mexico in the debt crisis of 1982 cut real wages in half in the next decade, while investments in health, education and basic physical structure were also halved. Infant deaths in Mexico due to malnutrition nearly tripled in the same period.
(...) Yet, at the end of the decade, the debt of Third World countries was greater than when the structural adjustment programs began. Rather than “saving” these countries, the IMF had enmeshed them in an endless debt trap.
(...) The IMF rationale was that loans would stimulate the economic growth that would allow for debt repayment. In truth, most existing international debts were serviced only by increasing international borrowing. From 1976 to 1982 Latin American foreign borrowing doubled. Seventy percent of new loans went to interest payments on old loans.
(...) The IMF Asian loan conditions went far beyond the needs of stabilizing the situation and repaying debt. The IMF demanded that foreign banks (primarily U.s.) be allowed in immediately—in the depths of the crisis—so that they could acquire existing banks at fire-sale prices. This piece of U.s. robbery was justified in the U.s. press on the grounds that the Asian banking crisis grew out of Asian corruption, or “crony capitalism,” an unholy alliance of corporations, banks and government—something apparently different than the alliance between the U.S. government, U.S. corporations and the IMF.
(...) The human impact of IMF loan conditions on the countries that became its wards was (and continues to be) horrendous. In Korea, the IMF imposed mass layoffs, leading to the joke that IMF stood for “I’M Fired.” Children abandoned by destitute parents were called “IMF orphans.” In Thailand, large numbers of children were thrown into child prostitution. In Indonesia, school enrollment dropped by a quarter. IMF loan conditions for Argentina demanded that labor laws be altered to eliminate national bargaining and grant employers the right to fire workers at will. The IMF program that was imposed on the Suharto dictatorship raised the price of rice by 38 percent, cooking oil by 110 percent and fuel by 70 percent This provoked the rioting that led to Suharto’s fall in 1998. IMF austerity conditions were now becoming dangerous to the health of local ruling classes. The IMF was forced to backtrack; loan conditions had to be less draconian for fear that no local ruling class, no matter how corrupt and subservient to Western capitalism, could carry them out without provoking a major upheaval.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Friday, June 5, 2009
It wasn’t only his desire to restore the health of capitalism that set Keynes apart from Marx. His theory of crisis was also fundamentally different. Where Marx saw the driving force of capitalism as accumulation for accumulation’s sake—the constant drive toward profit—Keynes continued to assume that “consumption…is the sole end and object of all economic activity.” The lack of “effective demand” in Keynes’ theory of crises is another way of saying that capital is not being invested; it does not, however, explain why. In short, whereas for Marx the possibility of the separation of purchase and sale that makes crisis a possibility is the starting point for understanding capitalist crisis, for Keynes it is the endpoint. Keynes’ theory of crisis—the lack of aggregate demand—is merely a description of the effects of crisis, not an explanation of why crises take place.
(...) The appeal for some, then, of Keynesian policy is that it calls for some redistribution of wealth from the top to the bottom, and that he pushes for “full employment.” However, Keynes’ perspective on this was strictly a ruling-class one. He supported not higher wages, but rather “the maintenance of a stable general level of money-wages” in order to maintain “equilibrium.” Keynes also thought it important that wages not become too high. In fact, though Keynes criticized the neoclassical theory of wages, he did not completely reject its premises, writing, for example, that, “A reduction in money-wages is quite capable in certain circumstances of affording a stimulus to output, as the classical theory supposes.”
(...) What Keynes added to this understanding was that at times, capitalists might view all other options as money-losing prospects and no matter how low the state moved interest rates, capitalists may still save. Keynes called this a “liquidity trap” and this is exactly the scenario that befell Japanese capitalism in the 1990s. For this reason, Keynes saw manipulating interest rates as only one tool for encouraging investment. The theory is that interest rates can be used to stimulate investment if real interest rates—that is interest rates adjusted for inflation—are cut to a point that they are negative. However, the Japanese experience illustrates that even if interest rates are negative, capitalists won’t invest if there is not a perceived avenue for investment. A similar dynamic is currently playing out within the U.S. economy. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has reduced the target for the Federal Funds rate from 5.25 percent to 1 percent. This has failed to induce lending or investment because there is little for capitalists to invest in that is profitable. Furthermore, central banks only have control of the economic policies within their own countries. It makes the system unstable, because central banks can end up working at cross purposes based on national needs as opposed to having a cohesive view of fiscal policy within the global economy as a whole.
(...) Keynes conceptualized something called the “multiplier” effect. That is, by pumping $100 into the system at the right place, it could generate significantly more activity. Giving $100 to a worker might mean they immediately spend it at the local grocer. The grocer might then turn around and spend $90 of it himself on something else and so on and so on. On the flip side, giving $100 to a billionaire might not accomplish the same thing because the billionaire has no immediate need for the $100 and is only to going to spend if he sees investment opportunities with high rates of return.
(...) Neoliberal ideology, for its part, rejects the role of fiscal stimulus and puts greater emphasis on monetary policy, which accounts for the predominant role of the Federal Reserve Bank over the past thirty years in dealing with economic problems. In practice, however, neoliberals do have a fiscal policy—cutting taxes on the rich and increasing defense spending. As a result, during the neoliberal era government spending as a percent of GDP and per capita has risen, not fallen. Theoretically, neoliberalism is opposed to state intervention. In practice, military spending and corporate welfare are not only accepted but welcome. Now that the system is in crisis, ideology is discarded, and those who may have crowed loudest for the state to leave the market alone demand that the state intervene to save it.
(...) A key linchpin in this agenda was the dollar policy. Coming out of Bretton Woods every currency was pegged to the dollar, which, in turn, was pegged to gold. The fixed exchange rate put a dollar at $35 for an ounce of gold. Currencies would move against the dollar based on whether individual nations had balance of payments problems. If you had a deficit, you had to cut imports or else be forced to devalue. This arrangement more or less held until 1971 when the United States pulled the plug on the gold standard.
(...) The Bretton Woods institutions eventually took on much broader mandates than rebuilding capitalism in Europe and Asia, and after the crisis of the 1970s, adopted neoliberal loan conditions requiring nations to privatize and deregulate their economies. As Joel Geier writes,
(...) The Great Depression played out in two acts. There was an initial drop to the depths in 1932, a recovery from 1933 to 1936, and then a second drop in 1937 and 1938, even after the initial Keynesian salves had been applied. The economy only decisively recovered in 1939, when the United States began war production for the Allies.
(...) The war effort created the rise in effective demand—in reality, government war spending, not consumer demand—that Keynesian measures failed to produce. As a result, employment and production, especially of arms, helped stimulate economic growth and an end of the Depression. Keynes himself saw the stimulating effects of the war effort as a vindication of his theories, having commented before the outbreak of war, “It is, it seems, politically impossible for a capitalist democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiment that would prove my case—except in war conditions.”29 Of course, the cost of this method of recovery—fifty-five million dead—was a brutal price to pay. Moreover, the war played an important role in helping to wipe out and devalue capital and drastically reduce wages, both of which contributed to the restoration of profit rates after the war, but which were not part of Keynes’ remedies for crisis.
(...) Moreover, in adopting these state-led measures, nations were simply returning to the same policies of “war socialism”—“forced savings, controls on money, credit, prices and labor, priorities, rationing, government-borrowings”—that they had put in place during World War I, “despite the ‘orthodox’ approach to economics that prevailed at that time.”30 It was a sleight of hand for Keynes to now promote war—a product of the unplanned, competitive character of the world system—as proof of his theories.
(...) Yet there was never a point, except during the war itself, where the United States, or any European country, reached full employment. Though the term full employment was thrown around, in practice it was adjusted to mean, in the words of the American Economic Association in a 1950 report, the “absence of mass unemployment.” Proceedings of the British Royal Institute for International Affairs in 1946 defined full employment as “avoiding that level of unemployment, whatever it may happen to be, which there is good reason to fear may provoke an inconvenient restlessness among the electorate.”
(...) It was only well into the 1960s that they started to face competitive pressures that unearthed the contradictions. The U.S. was spending huge sums on its arms industry while its most dynamic competitors—Germany and Japan—were reinvesting in new plant and equipment. Those competitors began to outpace the U.S. in the 1970s. In order to retain economic power, the U.S. needed to lower its labor costs relative to Japan and Germany, a difficult task especially important given that it was saddled with heavy arms expenditures when those nations were not. It was this crisis, in which stagnation was accompanied by inflation, that ultimately paved the way for the neoliberal restructuring of capitalism.
(...) In practice, neoliberalism did not produce a full break from Keynesianism; and in some important respects the limitations of a return to full Keynesian economic policy are already clear. First of all, interest rate reductions—the first line of defense recommended by Keynes—have already been used under the Fed chair Alan Greenspan (when the economy was in boom) and now by Ben Bernanke (in response to the financial crisis). In the first instance, easy money helped create the housing bubble that formed the basis of the current crisis; and the more recent cuts aimed at lifting the financial crisis have not unfrozen bank lending. Second, the government has already run up large deficits for the past two decades—the federal debt now stands at $10.6 trillion, and the current deficit is set to go up to a $1 trillion next year as new stimulus plans are brought on line. The question is how far can this go? The government can print more money, as it has already begun to do now that the dollar has rebounded; but there is a long-term danger of runaway inflation, which could force them to raise interest rates that put a halt to growth.
(...) It is a sign of just how much the economic literacy of the left has deteriorated that Keynesianism—born as a reforming ruling-class economic program—today may become the default position when calling for an alternative to neoliberalism. Yet socialists must make a distinction between those measures of state intervention—such as the bank bailouts—that are measures of state monopoly capitalism designed to save the bankers to the detriment of the working-class taxpayer; and those measures of state intervention that will come as a result of popular demands. Socialists are not indifferent to the reforms—or the struggles to achieve them—that will be necessary to reverse the three decades of capitalist assault on the working class.
(...) The appeal for some, then, of Keynesian policy is that it calls for some redistribution of wealth from the top to the bottom, and that he pushes for “full employment.” However, Keynes’ perspective on this was strictly a ruling-class one. He supported not higher wages, but rather “the maintenance of a stable general level of money-wages” in order to maintain “equilibrium.” Keynes also thought it important that wages not become too high. In fact, though Keynes criticized the neoclassical theory of wages, he did not completely reject its premises, writing, for example, that, “A reduction in money-wages is quite capable in certain circumstances of affording a stimulus to output, as the classical theory supposes.”
(...) What Keynes added to this understanding was that at times, capitalists might view all other options as money-losing prospects and no matter how low the state moved interest rates, capitalists may still save. Keynes called this a “liquidity trap” and this is exactly the scenario that befell Japanese capitalism in the 1990s. For this reason, Keynes saw manipulating interest rates as only one tool for encouraging investment. The theory is that interest rates can be used to stimulate investment if real interest rates—that is interest rates adjusted for inflation—are cut to a point that they are negative. However, the Japanese experience illustrates that even if interest rates are negative, capitalists won’t invest if there is not a perceived avenue for investment. A similar dynamic is currently playing out within the U.S. economy. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has reduced the target for the Federal Funds rate from 5.25 percent to 1 percent. This has failed to induce lending or investment because there is little for capitalists to invest in that is profitable. Furthermore, central banks only have control of the economic policies within their own countries. It makes the system unstable, because central banks can end up working at cross purposes based on national needs as opposed to having a cohesive view of fiscal policy within the global economy as a whole.
(...) Keynes conceptualized something called the “multiplier” effect. That is, by pumping $100 into the system at the right place, it could generate significantly more activity. Giving $100 to a worker might mean they immediately spend it at the local grocer. The grocer might then turn around and spend $90 of it himself on something else and so on and so on. On the flip side, giving $100 to a billionaire might not accomplish the same thing because the billionaire has no immediate need for the $100 and is only to going to spend if he sees investment opportunities with high rates of return.
(...) Neoliberal ideology, for its part, rejects the role of fiscal stimulus and puts greater emphasis on monetary policy, which accounts for the predominant role of the Federal Reserve Bank over the past thirty years in dealing with economic problems. In practice, however, neoliberals do have a fiscal policy—cutting taxes on the rich and increasing defense spending. As a result, during the neoliberal era government spending as a percent of GDP and per capita has risen, not fallen. Theoretically, neoliberalism is opposed to state intervention. In practice, military spending and corporate welfare are not only accepted but welcome. Now that the system is in crisis, ideology is discarded, and those who may have crowed loudest for the state to leave the market alone demand that the state intervene to save it.
(...) A key linchpin in this agenda was the dollar policy. Coming out of Bretton Woods every currency was pegged to the dollar, which, in turn, was pegged to gold. The fixed exchange rate put a dollar at $35 for an ounce of gold. Currencies would move against the dollar based on whether individual nations had balance of payments problems. If you had a deficit, you had to cut imports or else be forced to devalue. This arrangement more or less held until 1971 when the United States pulled the plug on the gold standard.
(...) The Bretton Woods institutions eventually took on much broader mandates than rebuilding capitalism in Europe and Asia, and after the crisis of the 1970s, adopted neoliberal loan conditions requiring nations to privatize and deregulate their economies. As Joel Geier writes,
Under the original Bretton Woods system, IMF loans were aimed at preventing devaluation and propping up demand. U.S. capital accepted these Keynesian measures when the U.S. was the major world exporter, ran large trade surpluses, and the rest of the world depended on its currency to pay for those imports. But in the 1980s, the IMF turned all of its previous policies on their heads: It now deliberately imposed devaluation and forced reductions in national income and demand in order to limit imports—all as a means to guarantee repayment of debt to international finance capital.
(...) The Great Depression played out in two acts. There was an initial drop to the depths in 1932, a recovery from 1933 to 1936, and then a second drop in 1937 and 1938, even after the initial Keynesian salves had been applied. The economy only decisively recovered in 1939, when the United States began war production for the Allies.
(...) The war effort created the rise in effective demand—in reality, government war spending, not consumer demand—that Keynesian measures failed to produce. As a result, employment and production, especially of arms, helped stimulate economic growth and an end of the Depression. Keynes himself saw the stimulating effects of the war effort as a vindication of his theories, having commented before the outbreak of war, “It is, it seems, politically impossible for a capitalist democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiment that would prove my case—except in war conditions.”29 Of course, the cost of this method of recovery—fifty-five million dead—was a brutal price to pay. Moreover, the war played an important role in helping to wipe out and devalue capital and drastically reduce wages, both of which contributed to the restoration of profit rates after the war, but which were not part of Keynes’ remedies for crisis.
(...) Moreover, in adopting these state-led measures, nations were simply returning to the same policies of “war socialism”—“forced savings, controls on money, credit, prices and labor, priorities, rationing, government-borrowings”—that they had put in place during World War I, “despite the ‘orthodox’ approach to economics that prevailed at that time.”30 It was a sleight of hand for Keynes to now promote war—a product of the unplanned, competitive character of the world system—as proof of his theories.
(...) Yet there was never a point, except during the war itself, where the United States, or any European country, reached full employment. Though the term full employment was thrown around, in practice it was adjusted to mean, in the words of the American Economic Association in a 1950 report, the “absence of mass unemployment.” Proceedings of the British Royal Institute for International Affairs in 1946 defined full employment as “avoiding that level of unemployment, whatever it may happen to be, which there is good reason to fear may provoke an inconvenient restlessness among the electorate.”
(...) It was only well into the 1960s that they started to face competitive pressures that unearthed the contradictions. The U.S. was spending huge sums on its arms industry while its most dynamic competitors—Germany and Japan—were reinvesting in new plant and equipment. Those competitors began to outpace the U.S. in the 1970s. In order to retain economic power, the U.S. needed to lower its labor costs relative to Japan and Germany, a difficult task especially important given that it was saddled with heavy arms expenditures when those nations were not. It was this crisis, in which stagnation was accompanied by inflation, that ultimately paved the way for the neoliberal restructuring of capitalism.
(...) In practice, neoliberalism did not produce a full break from Keynesianism; and in some important respects the limitations of a return to full Keynesian economic policy are already clear. First of all, interest rate reductions—the first line of defense recommended by Keynes—have already been used under the Fed chair Alan Greenspan (when the economy was in boom) and now by Ben Bernanke (in response to the financial crisis). In the first instance, easy money helped create the housing bubble that formed the basis of the current crisis; and the more recent cuts aimed at lifting the financial crisis have not unfrozen bank lending. Second, the government has already run up large deficits for the past two decades—the federal debt now stands at $10.6 trillion, and the current deficit is set to go up to a $1 trillion next year as new stimulus plans are brought on line. The question is how far can this go? The government can print more money, as it has already begun to do now that the dollar has rebounded; but there is a long-term danger of runaway inflation, which could force them to raise interest rates that put a halt to growth.
(...) It is a sign of just how much the economic literacy of the left has deteriorated that Keynesianism—born as a reforming ruling-class economic program—today may become the default position when calling for an alternative to neoliberalism. Yet socialists must make a distinction between those measures of state intervention—such as the bank bailouts—that are measures of state monopoly capitalism designed to save the bankers to the detriment of the working-class taxpayer; and those measures of state intervention that will come as a result of popular demands. Socialists are not indifferent to the reforms—or the struggles to achieve them—that will be necessary to reverse the three decades of capitalist assault on the working class.
What makes Malcolm different from every signature Black figure in American history is that he combines the two central characters of Black folk culture. He is both the trickster and the minister. He’s both. That’s “Detroit Red”—the hustler, the gambler, the outlaw. And, he is also the minister who saves souls, who redeems lives, who heals the sick, who raises the dead. He’s both. King is one. Jesse Jackson is one. Malcolm’s both and he understood the streets and the lumpen proletariat. I hate that phrase, but it comes from Marx. As well as, he saw himself as a minister and an Amun, a cleric. He was always this. And he embodied the cultural spirit of Black folk better than anyone else. When I asked one student about a decade ago, “What was the fundamental difference between Malcolm and Martin?” He said, “Dr. Marable, that’s easy. Martin Luther King, Jr., belongs to the entire world. Malcolm X belongs to us.”
Friday, May 29, 2009
"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.
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.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
"the state of martial rule," ayesha jalal
central thesis: book makes a very convincing case that the first eleven years of Pakistan's history, preceding Ayub's coup in 1958, confirmed the dominance of non-elected institutions (specifically, the civil bureaucracy and the military) over the political process. internally, this represented a failure to transcend the inherited weaknesses of the Muslim League as a political organization (which won power in precisely those provinces where it had no real political presence, eleventh hour alliances with landed elites notwithstanding). externally, jalal demonstrates how the subordination of the political process suited the strategic designs of the British and then the Americans (though she never argues that they were "agents" of this accommodation, they unquestionably figure).
moreover, jalal makes important points, in particular, about the impact of this excessive centralization on centre-province relations. those eleventh hour alliances were never going to offer legitimacy to the State in the eyes of provincial inhabitants--what was crucially absent from Pakistan's early political scene, she suggests, was the sort of political project that could unite provincial grievances (a socialist project, we can say). without it, the centre retreated into itself. this "closing off" of all traditional means of engagement with State authority only exacerbated the problems of provincialism.
in my humble opinion, jalal doesn't make explicit the thoroughly "backward" justifications offered for this progressive centralization of State power, even while she traces them in great detail (she does make the obligatory refutation of the silly thesis that military rule stepped into the vacancies left by "bickering politicians"; indeed, her point is that these bickering politicians are the product of the same structural dynamics that encourage military dominance via the consolidation of central authority). in particular, one could stress more the continuities with colonial rule, which are truly striking to those unfamiliar with the history: Pakistan was governed according to the British Government of India Act of 1935 for the first 9 years of its existence. and even when the first constituent assembly, after those 9 years, agreed upon the first constitution in 1956, it was pressured into making huge concessions to presidential authority. in that sense, it is important to stress that pakistan never made a "break" with the colonial era (complementing this inherite political "superstructure," remember, is the patronizing of landed elites by jinnah in the time immediately preceding partition). if there's one thing jalal's book lacks, then, it is this sense of outrage at the unforgivable hubris of the project of managed, colonial democracy.
but a great read and valuable reference-book all round.
--- important quotes/excerpts ---
(introduction): good summary of her central theses
(17): "With no organizational machinery in the Muslim-majority provinces, Jinnah and the league had little option but to advocate terms largely defined by landed notables in control of local politics."
(28): "A man of unquestionable constitutional acumen, Jinnah could see the perils ahead in letting anyone other than himself exercise the vast powers bestowed upon the governor-general [in newly independent Pakistan]"
(60): "While the provincial arenas continued to serve as the main centres of political activity, those who set about creating the new central apparatus were either politicians with no identifiable bases of support or civil servants well-versed in the traditions of British Indian administration." (these pages trace also the separation of the Muslim League from the business of government)
(135): "By the time Pakistan's first prime minister became the target of an evidently hired assasin, the institutional balance had begun gravitating away from the political centre in Karachi to military headquarters in Rawalpindi. It was to take a few years and the unfolding of yet more painful domestic political and economic crises before the central government was forced to make the shift..."
(145): first elections based on adult franchise in Pakistan's history--provincial elections in Punjab, March 1951
(151): critical: anti-ahmediya riots came in a context of serious economic crisis; state did not do anything to nip them in the bud
(152): "...[T]he shift in Pakistan's foreign policy [from London to Washington] owed nothing to popular opinion. Quite the opposite. Relentless demands for military equipment by the defence establishment generated pressures for warmer relations with the United States; financial stringency and a deepening food crisis made them irresistible..."
(186): legends of the fail--proposal by ambassador to US for governor-general to change government, in efforts to stave off a "fanatical theocracy"
(200-202): story of the attempt to dismiss the first constituent assembly by the governor-general, and then consequent legal wrangling (Sindh High Court reverses, eventually Chief Justice re-reverses)
(213-222): extensive discussion of 1956 constitution and its absurdly anti-democratic (of the liberal sort, even) provisions
(236): "Yet here was the rub. Nowhere had the consequences of the disjunction between the political process and the imperatives of state consolidation been felt more acutely than in the realm of economic decision-making. The absence of stable and popularly based governments at the centre capable of keeping firm checks on the demands of military headquarters and the activities of a sprawling administrative machinery had been as great, if not greater, obstacle to sound economic planning than the shortage of finance and trained personnel."
(241-246): a useful discussion of the Harvard Advisory Group years ("Clearly then, the first five year plan was an attempt to confirm, correct, and coordinate rather than to radically change the tenor of the central government's past economic politices. The mere fact that the final verison of the plan was made public just six months before the military takeover demands a closer scruitny of the political and structural obstacles in the way of its implementation.")
(257): birth of the National Awami Party, 1956
(269-270): "Yet the centre which for so long had dodged the issue of elections was now to face them when its revenues were falling and defence and civil administration expenditures were rising. Barely able to remain solvent, the centre could meet the provinces half way only by slashing the budgets of the two institutions which were the best hope the stat had for surviving assaults from below. This double paradox--the need to dole out funds to allay some of the provincial grievances just prior to the elections and the impossibility of finding the finances without cutting back on defence and civil administration--was the crisis of the state which the October 1958 military intervention aimed at dispelling if not altogether resolving."
(272): June 1958 mobilizations
(276): As of October, Mirza gone, Ayub ascendant
(277): "The very fact that the British transferred power in India to two centralized high commands instead of the provincial and the local bosses whose support they had so long solicited and used to strengthen their raj meant that the institutionalisation and consolidation of a new political centre over the Muslim-majority areas was implicitly a question of society accomodating itself to a state whose structures of authority were as uncertain as its claims to legitimacy were vague and ambiguous... This is where Islam proved to have its uses" (this is important to complicating the assertion that we are dealing with simple continuities of colonial rule)
(278): "the ambiguities of Islam seemed to offer the best hope of lending legitimacy to a state which, because it had only the most tenuous roots in society, was coming to base its authority on an administrative rather than a political centralization."
(288): interesting reflection on the stratified socio-economic base of syncretic islam (i.e., the welding of landed powers and pirs/etc.)
(295): [GOOD SUMMARY OF WHOLE THESIS]: It was during the first decade of independence that an interplay of domestic, regional and international factors saw the civil bureaucracy and the army gradually registering their dominance over parties and politicians withing the evolving structure of the state. While allowing the state a relative autonomy of action in directing the course of political and economic developments, the shifts in the institutional balance of power by their very nature militated against forging organic links with society. With decision-making firmly in the hands of a ruling alliance drawn mainly from the top echelons of the bureaucracy and the army, although loosely tied to dominant classes and interest groups, there was no obvious equation between the actual wielding of state authority and the structures of economic power and social control. Consequently, the relative autonomy of the Pakistani state from the internal class structure came to rest in large part on the closely nurtured connections of its senior state officials--civil and military--with the centres of the international capitalist system."
(302-303): discussion of the absurdity of Ayub's "basic democracts"
(304): re: land reforms and more, Jalal writes: "Preoccupations with the growth-redistribution debate has tended to blur analyses of the state's critical role int he creation of socio-economic privilege. The overwhelming trend has been to focus on the location of dominant socio-economic groups in relation to the state structure. But the dissonance between the military and the bureaucracy's institutional interests and those of socio-economic groups makes it equally, if not more important, to investigate how positions within the state apparatus facilitate the relocation of functionaries of government at various levels in key socio-economic sectors.
(307-308): November 1968 mobilizations
(310-311): Jalal suggests reconciliation was made impossible (between Bhutto and Mujib) by the entrenched role of the "praetorian guard and the mandarins."
(311): assessment of PPP's base
(317): Jalal links Bhutto's use of the Islamist idiom to the oilboom-financed patronage of religious forces (also the beginnings of the story of migrations to and from the Gulf, for sure)
(320): Zia's call for an end to class discord in the name of Allah.
---- timeline -----
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor-General_of_Pakistan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Prime_Ministers_of_Pakistan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_Pakistan
central thesis: book makes a very convincing case that the first eleven years of Pakistan's history, preceding Ayub's coup in 1958, confirmed the dominance of non-elected institutions (specifically, the civil bureaucracy and the military) over the political process. internally, this represented a failure to transcend the inherited weaknesses of the Muslim League as a political organization (which won power in precisely those provinces where it had no real political presence, eleventh hour alliances with landed elites notwithstanding). externally, jalal demonstrates how the subordination of the political process suited the strategic designs of the British and then the Americans (though she never argues that they were "agents" of this accommodation, they unquestionably figure).
moreover, jalal makes important points, in particular, about the impact of this excessive centralization on centre-province relations. those eleventh hour alliances were never going to offer legitimacy to the State in the eyes of provincial inhabitants--what was crucially absent from Pakistan's early political scene, she suggests, was the sort of political project that could unite provincial grievances (a socialist project, we can say). without it, the centre retreated into itself. this "closing off" of all traditional means of engagement with State authority only exacerbated the problems of provincialism.
in my humble opinion, jalal doesn't make explicit the thoroughly "backward" justifications offered for this progressive centralization of State power, even while she traces them in great detail (she does make the obligatory refutation of the silly thesis that military rule stepped into the vacancies left by "bickering politicians"; indeed, her point is that these bickering politicians are the product of the same structural dynamics that encourage military dominance via the consolidation of central authority). in particular, one could stress more the continuities with colonial rule, which are truly striking to those unfamiliar with the history: Pakistan was governed according to the British Government of India Act of 1935 for the first 9 years of its existence. and even when the first constituent assembly, after those 9 years, agreed upon the first constitution in 1956, it was pressured into making huge concessions to presidential authority. in that sense, it is important to stress that pakistan never made a "break" with the colonial era (complementing this inherite political "superstructure," remember, is the patronizing of landed elites by jinnah in the time immediately preceding partition). if there's one thing jalal's book lacks, then, it is this sense of outrage at the unforgivable hubris of the project of managed, colonial democracy.
but a great read and valuable reference-book all round.
--- important quotes/excerpts ---
(introduction): good summary of her central theses
(17): "With no organizational machinery in the Muslim-majority provinces, Jinnah and the league had little option but to advocate terms largely defined by landed notables in control of local politics."
(28): "A man of unquestionable constitutional acumen, Jinnah could see the perils ahead in letting anyone other than himself exercise the vast powers bestowed upon the governor-general [in newly independent Pakistan]"
(60): "While the provincial arenas continued to serve as the main centres of political activity, those who set about creating the new central apparatus were either politicians with no identifiable bases of support or civil servants well-versed in the traditions of British Indian administration." (these pages trace also the separation of the Muslim League from the business of government)
(135): "By the time Pakistan's first prime minister became the target of an evidently hired assasin, the institutional balance had begun gravitating away from the political centre in Karachi to military headquarters in Rawalpindi. It was to take a few years and the unfolding of yet more painful domestic political and economic crises before the central government was forced to make the shift..."
(145): first elections based on adult franchise in Pakistan's history--provincial elections in Punjab, March 1951
(151): critical: anti-ahmediya riots came in a context of serious economic crisis; state did not do anything to nip them in the bud
(152): "...[T]he shift in Pakistan's foreign policy [from London to Washington] owed nothing to popular opinion. Quite the opposite. Relentless demands for military equipment by the defence establishment generated pressures for warmer relations with the United States; financial stringency and a deepening food crisis made them irresistible..."
(186): legends of the fail--proposal by ambassador to US for governor-general to change government, in efforts to stave off a "fanatical theocracy"
(200-202): story of the attempt to dismiss the first constituent assembly by the governor-general, and then consequent legal wrangling (Sindh High Court reverses, eventually Chief Justice re-reverses)
(213-222): extensive discussion of 1956 constitution and its absurdly anti-democratic (of the liberal sort, even) provisions
(236): "Yet here was the rub. Nowhere had the consequences of the disjunction between the political process and the imperatives of state consolidation been felt more acutely than in the realm of economic decision-making. The absence of stable and popularly based governments at the centre capable of keeping firm checks on the demands of military headquarters and the activities of a sprawling administrative machinery had been as great, if not greater, obstacle to sound economic planning than the shortage of finance and trained personnel."
(241-246): a useful discussion of the Harvard Advisory Group years ("Clearly then, the first five year plan was an attempt to confirm, correct, and coordinate rather than to radically change the tenor of the central government's past economic politices. The mere fact that the final verison of the plan was made public just six months before the military takeover demands a closer scruitny of the political and structural obstacles in the way of its implementation.")
(257): birth of the National Awami Party, 1956
(269-270): "Yet the centre which for so long had dodged the issue of elections was now to face them when its revenues were falling and defence and civil administration expenditures were rising. Barely able to remain solvent, the centre could meet the provinces half way only by slashing the budgets of the two institutions which were the best hope the stat had for surviving assaults from below. This double paradox--the need to dole out funds to allay some of the provincial grievances just prior to the elections and the impossibility of finding the finances without cutting back on defence and civil administration--was the crisis of the state which the October 1958 military intervention aimed at dispelling if not altogether resolving."
(272): June 1958 mobilizations
(276): As of October, Mirza gone, Ayub ascendant
(277): "The very fact that the British transferred power in India to two centralized high commands instead of the provincial and the local bosses whose support they had so long solicited and used to strengthen their raj meant that the institutionalisation and consolidation of a new political centre over the Muslim-majority areas was implicitly a question of society accomodating itself to a state whose structures of authority were as uncertain as its claims to legitimacy were vague and ambiguous... This is where Islam proved to have its uses" (this is important to complicating the assertion that we are dealing with simple continuities of colonial rule)
(278): "the ambiguities of Islam seemed to offer the best hope of lending legitimacy to a state which, because it had only the most tenuous roots in society, was coming to base its authority on an administrative rather than a political centralization."
(288): interesting reflection on the stratified socio-economic base of syncretic islam (i.e., the welding of landed powers and pirs/etc.)
(295): [GOOD SUMMARY OF WHOLE THESIS]: It was during the first decade of independence that an interplay of domestic, regional and international factors saw the civil bureaucracy and the army gradually registering their dominance over parties and politicians withing the evolving structure of the state. While allowing the state a relative autonomy of action in directing the course of political and economic developments, the shifts in the institutional balance of power by their very nature militated against forging organic links with society. With decision-making firmly in the hands of a ruling alliance drawn mainly from the top echelons of the bureaucracy and the army, although loosely tied to dominant classes and interest groups, there was no obvious equation between the actual wielding of state authority and the structures of economic power and social control. Consequently, the relative autonomy of the Pakistani state from the internal class structure came to rest in large part on the closely nurtured connections of its senior state officials--civil and military--with the centres of the international capitalist system."
(302-303): discussion of the absurdity of Ayub's "basic democracts"
(304): re: land reforms and more, Jalal writes: "Preoccupations with the growth-redistribution debate has tended to blur analyses of the state's critical role int he creation of socio-economic privilege. The overwhelming trend has been to focus on the location of dominant socio-economic groups in relation to the state structure. But the dissonance between the military and the bureaucracy's institutional interests and those of socio-economic groups makes it equally, if not more important, to investigate how positions within the state apparatus facilitate the relocation of functionaries of government at various levels in key socio-economic sectors.
(307-308): November 1968 mobilizations
(310-311): Jalal suggests reconciliation was made impossible (between Bhutto and Mujib) by the entrenched role of the "praetorian guard and the mandarins."
(311): assessment of PPP's base
(317): Jalal links Bhutto's use of the Islamist idiom to the oilboom-financed patronage of religious forces (also the beginnings of the story of migrations to and from the Gulf, for sure)
(320): Zia's call for an end to class discord in the name of Allah.
---- timeline -----
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor-General_of_Pakistan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Prime_Ministers_of_Pakistan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_Pakistan
Friday, May 15, 2009
With the dramatic decline in the price of oil and the slashing of the budget for 2009, the prospects for integrating significant numbers of the sahwat into the security forces or otherwise accommodating them look bleak. To date, while the actual numbers are contested and public pronouncements by the government have varied, recent estimates suggest that only 5,000 of these individuals have been formally inducted into the security forces.[13] Furthermore, the outbreak of hostilities following al-Mashhadani’s arrest is still seen by many Sunnis in sectarian terms. A stepped-up and more comprehensive campaign against the sahwat could still trigger a broader sense of Sunni Arab grievance and a series of uncoordinated reactions that would catalyze a larger outbreak of destabilizing sectarian violence.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
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.
(...) 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.
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