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The widening gyre - not much to hold

Thursday, October 22, 2009

GOOGLE EARTH is the kind of internet tool that can induce delusions of power - or compound them if you are already predisposed that way. Pull back and westward from Afghanistan, for instance - where US media are now predictably if belatedly boosting their reporting presence - you’ll see the globe rotate a bit, and you can enjoy an ersatz sensation of flying.

It’s probably not too different from what some generals in a war-room may feel as they monitor video feedback from their unmanned Predator drones or spy-satellites. For my part, I get a vertiginous feeling that is shared, I discover this week, by a friend who works as both editor and frequent anchor for a well-resourced international TV news service.

 

An online virtual tour of troubled territories - from Kabul in the east to … well, it’s hard to know where to stop - will provoke dizzying anxiety in even the most strong-stomached of geo-political observers. But that’s more to do with what both generals and journalists these days like to call "facts-on-the-ground" than with the aeronautic simulation involved.

 

Starting in that uncertain domain of President Hamid Karzai, whose gritted teeth and pursed lips were tellingy captured this week by news cameras, we can see he was so obviously strong-armed by the US and other international representatives standing either side of him when he announced a run-off election between himself and his nearest challenger Abdullah Abdullah. He’d been pressed to redeem if possible the fraudulently-conducted vote of nine weeks ago.

 

“He simply had to accept it” was the oft-repeated quote on the lips of that ubiquitous tribe which always emerges in such situations, the Anonymous Diplomats - who speak “without attribution, citing the sensitivity of the subject”. Those same unnamed sources are telling reporters to expect another strong-armed agreement, for a new coalition government – since preparing for a fresh round of voting by the announced date of November 7th (just 16 days from now) looks well-nigh untenable, not least because of the seriously deteriorating security situation.

 

As if to highlight that concern, another US soldier was killed yesterday by a roadside bomb in the south of the country, according to a terse press statement from the international coalition. His or her death brings to 252 the number of Americans killed in Afghanistan this year. The total for all international forces is 419, and the number for Afghanis is estimated as close to 2,000. Altogether this is proving to be the worst year for casualties since the war began eight years ago.

 

  

 

 

NEXT DOOR IN PAKISTAN, the new Western-backed attacks by the national army against Taliban militants in the South Waziristan region are said to be effective - but this can’t be checked by reporters, who are barred from the battle areas. In the meantime jihadists have successfully caused the shut-down of schools and colleges throughout the country, by suicide-bombing the renowned International Islamic University in the capital, Islamabad. They killed six people besides their own pair of attackers and injured thirty more. It was of course a high-profile assault that came after weeks of bombings, often brazenly hitting military targets, to claim over 150 citizens’ lives. And then only today comes news that an Army brigadier and a soldier were assassinated amid the capital's morning rush-hour traffic.

 

Just across the next border, in Iran - where Western concerns center more on that country’s development of a nuclear capability - the unpredictable force of murderous Muslim extremism is also making inroads (this time Sunni on Shiite violence). Iran's elite Revolutionary Guard lost more than a dozen senior officers after a bold guerrilla attack on a high-level regional meeting; the overall death toll has climbed to above 40 as many of the wounded died during the three days since the explosion.

 

Zoom over one more frontier and we hover above Jordan - a relatively untroubled island of security in the Middle East, while King Abdullah continues his efforts to both modernize his country and, through “on-good-terms-with-all” diplomacy, achieve a comprehensive peace settlement for the region. But even he is getting restive, making some less diplomatic noises now toward Israel. In reaction to yet more Israeli efforts to claim all of Jerusalem as the Jewish nation's undivided capital, along with unrestrained encroachment by Israeli settlers, the King has given a this-far-and-no-further warning that “Jerusalem is a red line, and any manipulation in this city would have disastrous repercussions”.

 

Meanwhile in studied obliviousness toward the Arab populations under Israeli occupation - most egregiously the blockaded Palestinians of the Gaza Strip - the US military is conducting the largest-ever joint exercises with Israel’s armed forces, code-named Juniper Cobra and scheduled to extend through 16 days.

 

Military briefers have insisted the operations are not a "response to any world events" and I guess we may as well believe them. But other military developments in Israel are indeed affected by international concern. Besides Jordan, another Muslim country which is relatively well-disposed toward the Jewish state, Turkey, has canceled the air-force exercises it had planned jointly with Tel Aviv. Israel's treatment of Gaza is proving an unacceptable irritant to good relations and peaceful co-existence.

  

 

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THE MISSILE-THREAT RADIUS that the US-Israel operations are designed to counter obviously encompasses both Syria and Iran, but for the future, defense specialists are also looking to the south, across the Red Sea to Sudan and the Horn of Africa.

 

The Obama Administration has just announced a new deal on Sudan - yes, the country led, if that’s the word, by indicted war criminal Omar Hassan al-Bashir. The State Department's approach is designed in carrot-and-stick fashion to finally stop the genocidal killing in the country’s Darfur region, and to revive stalled progress toward elections throughout the country next year, and a referendum on autonomy for the southern region in 2011. Not mentioned in the (generally fulsome) media coverage of this new policy are its unspoken but evidently necessary military dimensions.

 

The joint military operation in Israel is being well-reported, but you'd be forgiven for not knowing that a nine-day joint US-led exercise is currently underway just across Sudan’s southern border in Uganda, bringing together five African nations’ troops, and spearheaded by the US military’s still newly-created AFRICOM (that's Africa Command, which is headquartered, in a somewhat imperial touch, an hour north of Rome).

 

The operation, code-named Natural Fire 10, is demonstrating military readiness for emergencies of all kinds, including any sudden humanitarian crisis, but it also sends a strong reminder about America’s over-arching strategic reach to everyone in the region, but especially to the Sudanese – who no-one will forget harbored Osama Bin Laden before he decamped for Afghanistan.

 

In neighboring Somalia, Al-Qaeda has a more current and stronger presence than in Sudan (though for its part the Sudanese National Congress Party has never - every informed observer knows - fully severed its Bin Laden connections) and an enduring struggle goes on. Helicopter-borne US commandos may have recently raided a band of local Al-Shabab jihadists inside Somalia, and into the bargain killed a leading Qaeda liaison man with Al-Shabab, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan. But only this week ... and once again you’ll look in vain for an American report on this ... Al-Shabab fighters managed - for the first time, according to local accounts - to shoot down an American Predator. And just this morning the insurgents fired mortars at Somalia’s airport, sparking a battle with troops that killed at least 20 people.

 

I don’t know about you, but my action-spotting virtual flypath has left me quite queasy.

 

At the very least it prompts me to echo journalist and essayist Mark Danner's words on the enormity of the challenges facing Barack Obama. On PBS last Friday night, Bill Moyers’ Journal rightly showcased the compendious collection of Danner’s writings just published under the grim title Stripping Bare the Body, addressing America's vastly-changed role in the world. Moyers had quite seriously suggested that the President should give his security team an assignment and send "everyone home for the weekend to read this new book". The writer's poignant understatement of the evening was: “Oh, I think I would not like to be in President Obama's position”.

 

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