Kremlin Intensifies Pressure as Ukraine Prepares for Vote - washingtonpost.com

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Russia Lodges List of Complaints Against Neighbor

By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 14, 2009

KIEV, Ukraine -- Five years after Ukraine defied Russia and turned toward the United States and Europe in a peaceful, democratic revolution, Moscow is poised for a comeback in this former Soviet republic.

The pro-Western president who came to power as the hero of the Orange Revolution is struggling with single-digit ratings just months before he stands for reelection. The man Russia backed in 2004 is leading the race to succeed him. And the next-strongest candidate also appears acceptable to the Kremlin.

But rather than sit out the election, Russia has redoubled its efforts to portray Ukraine as a hostile neighbor, lodging a barrage of complaints against its policies and plunging relations between the two countries to their lowest point since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The vilification campaign has puzzled and alarmed analysts here as well as in Washington and Moscow. Many say Russia is trying to tilt the electoral field even further in its favor. But because that seems unnecessary, some are also asking whether Russian leaders might be laying the groundwork for a more serious confrontation with Ukraine, just a year after a brief war with another pro-Western neighbor, Georgia.

"Wars and conflicts begin with discussion of them as an option," said Valeriy Chaly, a foreign policy scholar at the Razumkov Center, a top research institute in Kiev. "Now, for the first time in years, the word 'war' is being used here, and it's not dismissed as impossible."

Eighteen years after the Soviet Union's collapse, Ukrainian independence still does not sit well with many Russians -- and a sizable minority in Ukraine -- who feel strongly about the country's cultural and historic ties to Russia. Relations have always been strained, but they became especially rocky after the Orange Revolution, when huge crowds protesting election fraud and autocratic rule rejected the Russian-backed presidential candidate and swept in a pro-Western government.

The democratic uprising worried Russia's own authoritarians, and Ukraine's subsequent push to join NATO alarmed them further. Recriminations between Moscow and Kiev became almost routine and culminated in a prolonged standoff over natural gas deliveries to Europe in the winter.

In recent weeks, though, Russian officials have ratcheted up the rhetoric, accusing Ukraine of sending troops to Georgia last year to kill Russian soldiers and of disrupting the operations of the Russian fleet in the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev issued a letter last month that denounced his Ukrainian counterpart, Viktor Yushchenko, and read like a brief for war.

The letter catalogued more than a dozen "anti-Russian" policies, including Ukraine's NATO bid, mistreatment of Russian investors, limits on the use of the Russian language, and efforts to promote a version of history that says the Soviet Union committed genocide against Ukrainians in the 1930s.

In a somber video released with the letter and staged with warships floating in the Black Sea behind him, Medvedev said he would refrain from sending a new ambassador to Ukraine, adding that tensions between the two countries had "hit unprecedented levels."

"Basically, we've entered a cold war," said Oleksandr Tretiakov, a parliamentary leader in Yushchenko's party who argues that Russia is trying to use its economic clout and control of the media to portray Ukraine as a "failed state" and unravel the Orange Revolution, which Moscow describes as a U.S.-engineered coup.

Some say the Kremlin is trying to distract its population from problems at home; polls show that Russians have more negative attitudes toward Ukraine than they do even toward the United States. But the message has resonated with many in Ukraine who are nostalgic for the Soviet era. Ukraine's 46 million people include 8 million ethnic Russians concentrated in the east and south.

A friendly government in Ukraine is a strategic priority for Russia. Ukrainian pipelines carry Russian gas to Europe, and the Black Sea Fleet is based in Sevastopol under a deal that expires in 2017. But there is also an emotional bond, because both Russians and Ukrainians trace their history to a medieval kingdom that was centered in Kiev.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once argued to President George W. Bush that Ukraine wasn't a real country, and speaking to reporters in late May, he read approvingly from the diaries of an imperial general who referred to Ukraine as "Little Russia."

Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, said the Kremlin cannot imagine Russia as a great power without Ukraine. The debate among policymakers, he said, is between moderates who want to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and ensure that it continues delivering Russian gas, and officials calling for a proactive strategy aimed at "soft dominance" over the country.

"Recently, it's moving toward the more proactive position," he said.

Both Putin and Medvedev have a personal stake in reversing the Orange Revolution, which was seen in Moscow as a humiliating defeat. Putin, when he was president, recognized the losing candidate as the winner of the election, while Medvedev, then Putin's chief of staff, supervised the heavy-handed campaign effort that backfired.

Mikhailo Pohrebinski, a political consultant who advised Ukraine's former president and often worked with Medvedev, said Russia's president appears to be building a case that Ukraine is violating its 1997 friendship treaty with Russia -- the only agreement in which Moscow has recognized Ukraine's borders.

The escalation of tensions comes at a difficult time for Ukraine, which has been hit hard by the global economic crisis and is struggling to enact painful reforms required for billions of dollars in emergency loans. With the January presidential election approaching, the nation's fractious leadership is even more divided and distracted than usual.

Russia has not endorsed a candidate, as it did five years ago when it backed the then-prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, who is now leader of Ukraine's largest opposition party and has made progress shaking his old image as a corrupt autocrat.

Though he may still be Moscow's favorite candidate, and is the front-runner in the race, Russia seems to be spreading its bets this time. Only Yushchenko has been attacked by name by Russian media, and he has proven such an unpopular and ineffective leader that he has little chance of winning reelection anyway.

Oleksandr Sushko, research director at the Institute for Euro-Atlantic Cooperation, said the Kremlin is trying to force itself onto the campaign agenda and hold a "casting call" in which the candidates must clarify their positions on the issues Russia cares about.

But all of the major candidates, including Yanukovych, favor further integration with Europe, and none is likely to make as many concessions as Russia demands once in office, he said. As a result, the Kremlin is trying to increase its leverage over them now, while also preparing for a confrontation if that fails.

Yanukovych's strongest opponent in the race is Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a leader of the Orange Revolution and former ally of Yushchenko's who says she will improve relations with Russia without sacrificing Ukraine's independence.

Tymoshenko won praise from Putin after negotiating a deal with him to end the standoff that cut fuel supplies to much of Europe last winter. But she committed Ukraine to buy a fixed amount of gas in the contract, and now, with demand down in the recession, she is trying to renegotiate.

She and Putin emerged from a meeting last month saying Russia had agreed in principle to give Ukraine a break. But critics say Tymoshenko has left herself open to be blackmailed by the Kremlin, perhaps just before the election. For example, Russia has objected to a deal that Tymoshenko signed with the European Union to help modernize and reform Ukraine's gas sector.

Julia Mostovaya, deputy editor of Kiev's most independent newspaper, Zerkalo Nedeli, said Yushchenko's failure to pursue further democratic reforms after the Orange Revolution has left Ukraine vulnerable to Russian influence.

"It's a very dangerous situation now," she said. "We have two leading candidates without principles, and Russia has leverage to influence both."

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What is Obama's real plan for Afghanistan? | TPMCafe

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By Tom Hayden - September 14, 2009, 7:48AM

What is Obama's real plan for Afghanistan? Surely he sees all the signs of quagmire that we do. So why is this happening?

The key to Obama is that he often assumbles what he considers "best practices" into new packages he then tries to promote. The other key is that like any President, he wants to avoid the appearance of losing, even if escalating doesn't assure winning. So here is what he is doing:

[1] Repeating the 2007 Iraq surge strategy of Gen. Petraeus. This was designed for political reasons, to lessen the Iraq violence in order to suppress the Iraq issue as the defining one in the presidential elections. As Petraeus said at the time, he wanted to speed up the Iraq clock to slow down the American one. Anti-war critics were caught off balance. The surge "worked" in ways that were under-reported. First, nearly 100,000 Sunni insurgents were put on the American payroll if they agreed not to shoot American troops. Second, the same McChrystal who now commands Afghanistan was in charge of a massive top-secret extra-judicial killing operation that devastated the remaining insurgents and gave a leading US operative "orgasms" [details in Bob Woodward's last book].

[2] Repeating Richard Holbrooke's diplomatic role in the Balkans where he presided over the complicated Dayton all-party talks on Bosnia, which cobbled together a fragile peace of sorts for the next decade. Holbrooke even negotiated with Slobodon Milosovic over pear brandy and in hunting lodges while the US military campaign was tightening against the Serbian leader. Holbrooke has been managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, and a director of Lehman Bros. and AIG. He is a symbol of so-called "soft power." As Obama's special ambassador to Afghanistan and Pakistan, he has assembled a large team of diplomatic, political, commercial and agricultural advisers who serve as a shadow neo-colonial state ready to assume responsibility for a negotiated settlement in Afghanistan. He famously said last month that it was impossible to define "success" in Afghanistan "but we'll know it when we see it."

In summary, the Obama plan is to use escalating military force to weaken - but probably not defeat - the insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, largely based among Pashtun tribes. According to the plan, the next 12-18 months are the "critical window" for "demonstrating measurable progress" in disrupting and dismantling al Qaeda "and its allies" in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As the escalation kills and wounds greater numbers of Taliban, the violence will be described as declining, and Holbrooke's soft-power infrastructure will take over the role of nation-building, including standing up a newly-trained police force and army of hundreds of thousands of Afghans. In this plan, US casualties then will decline after the first 18-24 months and a phased withdrawal can proceed, ending in five, ten or 12 years.

The latest version of the plan is contained in the August 10 Pentagon "sensitive but unclassified" report, "United States Government Integrated Civilian-Military Campaign Plan for Support to Afghanistan", by generals Karl Eikenberry [chief of mission in Kabul] and Stanley McChrystal, US commander. Their document is laced throughout with references to "civ-mil" strategies and "civ-mil" units, as if to emphasize the seamless connections between hard power and soft.

Perhaps it is a tribute to American and global public opinion, but the military strategy lacks any bloodthirsty references to combat, instead describing goals in sanitized language such as this: "International security forces [aka US troops] in partnership with Afghan security forces reverse security trends especially in Helmand, Kandahar, Khost Paktya and Paktika, facilitating GIRoA [Kabul government] presence at sub-national level."[p.17] the only slip came last week when the generals openly talked of using more "trigger pullers" on the ground and outsourcing more non-combat duties.

Have no doubt, they will kill a lot of Afghans and Pakistanis without press releases. Given unlimited time, troops and funding, it is possible that the US strategy can succeed in suppressing a restless Afghanistan/tribal Pakistan, though at the expense of numerous other American priorities. But with a majority of Americans and 70 percent of Democrats opposed to the war and occupation, with similar anti-war majorities rising in NATO countries, the question is whether the Obama strategy can appear to "succeed" in the short run.

The brief answer is no.

First, the current military surge is resulting in higher American troops losses than at any time since the beginning of the war. At the July-August 2009 rate, another 1,100 American troops will die by the end of 2011, on top of some 700 who were killed on Bush's watch. The American death toll inevitably has to rise before it ever begins to subside, if it even does by the end of Obama's first term. The dispatch of more American troops will increase the American casualty rates in the short term, stirring more questions from the public and Congress.

Similarly, the civilian casualty rates in Afghanistan and Pakistan will still increase in an escalated war, inflaming public opinion, even if the Pentagon's tighter guidelines are actually followed. The latest controversy over air strikes called by German forces shows the impossibility of truly "surgical" strikes, pits most Afghans against the foreign forces, and is having an unsettling effect on the Merkel coalition.

Second, unlike Iraq or the Balkans, the longer the foreign occupation, the more the Afghanistan client state weakens. The same is proving true in Pakistan, where the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas [FATA] and Baluchistan [homeland of Pakistan's Pashtun] show signs of breaking from the grip of the centralized state. The most immediate crisis is the discrediting of the Afghan government in the presidential election on which the entire American strategy depends. The civ-mil strategy paper sets a near-term goal of a "capable, accountable and effective government" in Afghanistan, and states that the "most important component [of the plan]", according to the document, "is a strong partnership with the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan [GIRoA]." But the US government was unable either to [1] fix the recent elections to benefit its client in Kabul, or [2] unable to prevent its own client from engaging in the most blatant of vote-rigging tactics.

We should not be surprised at this catastrophe. The same US government ignored, or was ignorant of, the "Lord of the Flies" behavior rampant among the private security contractors in charge of security at the American embassy in Kabul.

Now the US has dwindling choices. Ahmad Karzhai and his main opponent, Abdullah, are made of the same cloth. Any foreign plan to impose another leadership is sure to be rejected. The entire US plan to combine military and civilian tracks is derailed.

Whoever was responsible for this failed US strategy, from Karzhai to his American consultants at the highest levels, should be forced to resign. President Obama should retreat with his most trusted advisers to his most secluded study to ask who led him to this place, and quietly plan to slip out of the untenable position he is in. When President Kennedy realized that he could not trust his advisers during the Cuban missile crisis, he turned to his brother Bobby to open a second, secret track. Obama needs a Bobby.

The Democratic-led Congress, which is hardly known for a consistent anti-war stance, may be better able to see the quagmire in the making, and begin hearings on an exit strategy if only to avoid political consequences to their self-interests down the road.

The indispensible factor- never consulted by the experts but never ignored by the consultants- is the 70 percent of Democratic voters who, having no stakes in a failed enterprise, are the difference between winning and losing for the Congress and administration in 2010 and 2012. The public is the only force capable of making Congress step back from the brink.

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Reemergence of Taliban in Kandahar Presents Challenges for U.S., NATO - washingtonpost.com

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By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, September 14, 2009

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- The letter, neatly folded and placed under the front door, was addressed to Nisar Ahmad's father, a gray-bearded schoolteacher who could not have been prouder that his son had graduated from Kandahar University and had secured a well-paying job as a field assistant here for the U.N. Development Program.

This is the last warning. Keep your son away from this work. . . .

We know your son is working for infidels. If something happens to him, do not complain.

Two hours later, after he and his father discussed their options and concluded that they had no faith in the local police to protect them, Ahmad called the United Nations and resigned.

That private moment of fear handed yet another small victory to the Taliban in its campaign to reclaim Kandahar, the religious extremist movement's spiritual home and a key battleground for control of Afghanistan nearly eight years after the U.S.-led military campaign began.

The slow and quiet fall of Kandahar, the country's second-largest city, poses a complex new challenge for the NATO effort to stabilize Afghanistan. It is factoring prominently into discussions between Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the overall U.S. and NATO commander, and his advisers about how many more troops to seek from Washington.

"Kandahar is at the top of the list," one senior U.S. military official in Afghanistan said. "We simply do not have enough resources to address the challenges there."

Kandahar in many ways is a microcosm of the challenges the United States faces in stabilizing Afghanistan. The city is filled with ineffective government officials and police officers whom the governor calls looters and kidnappers. Unemployment is rampant. Municipal services are nonexistent. Reconstruction projects have not changed many lives. A lack of NATO forces allowed militants free rein.

But it is also unique. It is bigger and more complicated than any other place in southern Afghanistan -- and there is a growing belief among military commanders that it is more important to the overall counterinsurgency campaign than any other part of the country.

"Kandahar means Afghanistan," said the governor, Tooryalai Wesa. "The history of Afghanistan, the politics of Afghanistan, was always determined from Kandahar, and once again, it will be determined from Kandahar."

Increasing the Troop Level

For years, NATO's strategy had been to entrust corrupt and incompetent local police with principal responsibility for securing the dusty collection of neighborhoods here that are home to an estimated 800,000 people. But several senior officers and strategists now think that this approach no longer makes sense and that more troops are necessary to prevent the Taliban from further reclaiming the pivotal city.

McChrystal will probably present the Pentagon with a range of options in the next week or two that will outline the hoped-for gains if additional troops are deployed, according to people familiar with the discussions. The ultimate decision rests with President Obama, who must determine whether McChrystal's plan to mount a comprehensive counterinsurgency effort across the country, one that aims to arrest the loss of places such as Kandahar to the Taliban, merits sending more U.S. forces.

Just how many forces are needed in this city, and what they would do, has become a matter of debate at the highest levels of the NATO military command in Kabul. There is near unanimity that more Afghan soldiers are needed in Kandahar. But there are no spare units to be deployed, and with violence increasing in the country's previously stable north and west, commanders are reluctant to pull troops from those areas.

As a consequence, some officers maintain that NATO forces need to move into parts of the city. Other military officials in Afghanistan, including top leaders of the regional headquarters that encompasses Kandahar, contend that sending more foreign troops into the city would only pull in more Taliban fighters from rural areas, drawing NATO forces into perilous urban combat. But even they acknowledge there is a need for more Special Forces soldiers and military police who can mentor the local police force, as well as possibly more NATO troops on the city's outskirts.

Residents say the level of Taliban activity in Kandahar can be deceiving to outsiders because the fighters' tactics are different here. Roadside bombs and suicide attacks are not the most commonly used weapons, largely because of the relative lack of foreign troops. Instead, it is paper and ink -- and the assassin's bullet when the recipient of a warning letter does not comply.

Taliban fighters have opted not to drive around in their trademark white pickup trucks, clad in black turbans. For now, they operate under the cover of darkness, prosecuting their intimidation campaign with correspondence and traffic checkpoints aimed at making it clear to residents that they are everywhere. Some NATO officials think the insurgents are trying to so weaken the government, security forces and relief agencies that they can one day assert full control over a city they are already dominating.

"Nobody in this city feels safe," said Ahmad, who now spends his days at home. "The Taliban do not show their faces during the day, but everyone knows they are in charge."

The Taliban Reemerges

To the U.S. government, and to many people here, the last Taliban holdouts in Kandahar appeared defeated by December 2001. Some fled across the desert to Pakistan. Others melted into the local population.

After a few months of intensive Special Forces operations to apprehend al-Qaeda members, the U.S. military largely ignored Kandahar. Afghan President Hamid Karzai soon installed an iron-fisted tribal ally as governor. Convinced that he would maintain order, the United States scaled back troop levels.

By 2005, as Taliban attacks were increasing in eastern Afghanistan, the United States ceded responsibility for security in Kandahar province to Canada, which sent about 2,500 troops to the area. Although Canada has allowed its forces to operate without some rules that have limited the activities of other NATO members, Canadian commanders acknowledge that they did not have enough soldiers on the ground while Taliban activity increased over the past three years.

When Canadian troops conducted repeated missions to clear militants from areas around the city, there never were enough forces to stay to keep insurgents from returning. Canada did not have the resources to maintain a large presence in the city: That was left to the local police.

Mistrusting the Police

It is the corruption of the police -- and that alleged of senior government officials -- that many Kandaharis say has been the principal reason for the Taliban's resurgence. Just as they did in the 1990s, residents say the Taliban is appealing not to a popular desire for religious fanaticism but to a demand for good governance. Part of the problem is that the police are ill-trained and ill-paid, driving them to graft. Another contributor: local leaders who have created a culture of impunity.

Chief among them, several Afghans contend, is the chairman of the Kandahar province council, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's younger brother. He is alleged to have links to the opium trade -- a charge he has denied -- and is accused of other misdeeds, including engaging in ballot-box fraud in support of his brother in the Aug. 20 presidential election.

Several U.S. lawmakers, including Vice President Biden when he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, have urged the president to dismiss his brother from the council. But U.S. and Canadian diplomats have not pressed the matter, in part because Ahmed Wali Karzai has given valuable intelligence to the U.S. military, and he also routinely provides assistance to Canadian forces, according to several officials familiar with the issue.

At 10 p.m. on a recent evening, two dozen Canadian soldiers rumbled out of their base on the city's eastern fringe in a convoy of armored vehicles. Their mission was the same as it is most days: Head to the police headquarters, link up with a squad of municipal policemen and go on patrol. The goal is to get the police out of their stations and into the community, to convince Kandaharis that somebody is protecting them.

Only five bothered to report for duty. In one green pickup truck.

When the Canadians stopped to talk to a man guarding a row of closed market stalls in one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods, the policemen stayed in their truck.

"It's better when you are with the police," the guard, Agha Mohammed, told the Canadians. "If you are not here, the only time we see them is when they want bribes."

Earlier that day, Agha said, the police were at the market. They helped themselves to enough watermelons to fill the back of their pickup, he said.

Are there Taliban around here? one Canadian asked.

"They're here all the time," Agha said. "Sometimes they set up checkpoints at night."

But, he said, "they never ask us for money."

Fixing Kandahar

Shortly after he took over as the overall U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, McChrystal asked his subordinates why more than half of the 21,000 troops deployed this spring were sent to neighboring Helmand province instead of Kandahar. The implication was clear, according to a person familiar with the discussion: Kandahar requires more forces.

By then, however, it was too late to move the Marines from Helmand. For now, NATO will have to try to fix Kandahar -- not just the city but the entire province, which is the country's second-largest in land area -- with the Canadians and five U.S. Army battalions, four of which are part of the new forces sent by Obama. The overall troop deployment is far less than what NATO has in Helmand, which has fewer residents.

That has forced commanders to address the Kandahar problem indirectly. Instead of sending troops into the city, the military's initial approach is to deploy most battalions in districts around Kandahar. The goal is to target insurgent redoubts in those areas and cut off infiltration routes into the city.

Those operations are just beginning. In Arghandab, a Taliban stronghold to the north, two U.S. Army infantry battalions equipped with Stryker armored vehicles have spent the past three weeks trying to flush out insurgents from villages surrounded by lush pomegranate orchards and grapevines. It is perilous work: The soldiers have encountered scores of booby traps and roadside bombs, and they have suffered more casualties in the those weeks than any other U.S. units in Afghanistan.

NATO officials regard only one of the districts around the city as reasonably stable, and that is because Canadian commanders concentrated the bulk of their forces in the area over the past six months. They also poured money into development projects, with the aim of getting residents to band against the Taliban.

The effort in Dand district has shown promising signs, in part because of what some Canadian development specialists regard as a mistake: The district chief hired his brother to administer a Canadian-funded public works project aimed at generating employment, and the brother gave most of the jobs to fellow members of his Barakzai tribe. That nepotism, however, wound up encouraging Barakzai elders in Dand to write a letter to the local Taliban commander telling him to "stay away," according to Canadian officials. Young tribesmen also have mounted informal security patrols in the area.

But what occurred in Dand may be hard to pull off elsewhere, Canadians note, because that district has fewer tribal rivalries and is relatively small, resulting in a much higher concentration of NATO troops to residents than will be possible in other places. And thus far, NATO officials have been reluctant to embrace tribal solutions to combating the insurgency out of fear that will create a new class of warlords.

Even if counterinsurgency operations in the surrounding districts are successful, some military officials at NATO headquarters in Kabul remain skeptical that the strategy will improve security inside Kandahar. They warn that the new push on the fringe will simply push militants inside the city.

"We could wind up with the exact opposite effect than we're seeking to achieve," one official said.

But, the official noted: "Unless we get more troops, we don't really have a choice. We can't go into the city with the forces we have now."

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Foreign Policy In Focus | Afghanistan: What Are These People Thinking?

Cover of Vietnam: A History

Conn Hallinan | September 10, 2009

One of the oddest — indeed, surreal — encounters around the war in Afghanistan has to be a telephone call this past July 27. On one end of the line was historian Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History. On the other, State Department special envoy Richard Holbrooke and the U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal. The question: How can Washington avoid the kind of defeat it suffered in Southeast Asia 40 years ago?

Karnow did not divulge what he said to the two men, but he told Associated Press that the "lesson" of Vietnam "was that we shouldn't have been there," and that, while "Obama and everybody else seems to want to be in Afghanistan," he, Karnow, was opposed to the war.

It is hardly surprising that Washington should see parallels to the Vietnam debacle. The enemy is elusive enemy. The local population is neutral, if not hostile. And the governing regime is corrupt with virtually no support outside of the nation's capital.

But in many ways Afghanistan is worse than Vietnam. So, it is increasingly hard to fathom why a seemingly intelligent American administration seems determined to hitch itself to this disaster in the making. It is almost as if there is something about that hard-edged Central Asian country that deranges its occupiers.

Delusion #1

In his address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Obama characterized Afghanistan as "a war of necessity" against international terrorism. But the reality is that the Taliban is a polyglot collection of conflicting political currents whose goals are local, not universal jihad.

"The insurgency is far from monolithic," says Anand Gopal, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor based in Afghanistan. "There are shadowy, kohl-eyed mullahs and head-bobbing religious students, of course, but there are also erudite university students, poor illiterate farmers, and veteran anti-Soviet commanders. The movement is a mélange of nationalists, Islamists, and bandits...made up of competing commanders and differing ideologies and strategies who nonetheless agree on one essential goal: kicking out the foreigners."

Taliban spokesman Yousef Ahmadi told Gopal, "We are fighting to free our country from foreign domination," adding, "Even the Americans once waged an insurgency to free their country."

Besides the Taliban, there are at least two other insurgent groups. Hizb-I-Islam is led by former U.S. ally Gulbuddin Hekmatyer. The Haqqani group, meanwhile, has close ties to al-Qaeda.

The White House's rationale of "international terrorism" parallels the Southeast Asian tragedy. The U.S. characterized Vietnam as part of an international Communist conspiracy, while the conflict was essentially a homegrown war of national liberation.

Delusion #2

One casualty of Vietnam was the doctrine of counterinsurgency, the theory that an asymmetrical war against guerrillas can be won by capturing the "hearts and minds" of the people. Of course "hearts and minds" was a pipe dream, obliterated by massive civilian casualties, the widespread use of defoliants, and the creation of "strategic hamlets" that had more in common with concentration camps than villages.

In Vietnam's aftermath, "counterinsurgency" fell out of favor, to be replaced by the "Powell Doctrine" of relying on massive firepower to win wars. With that strategy the United States crushed the Iraqi army in the first Gulf War. Even though the doctrine was downsized for the invasion of Iraq a decade later, it was still at the heart of the attack.

However, within weeks of taking Baghdad, U.S. soldiers were besieged by an insurgency that wasn't in the lesson plan. Ambushes and roadside bombs took a steady toll on U.S. and British troops, and aggressive countermeasures predictably turned the population against the occupation.

After four years of getting hammered by insurgents, the Pentagon rediscovered counterinsurgency, and its prophet was General David Petraeus, now commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia. "Hearts and minds" was dusted off, and the watchwords became "clear, hold, and build." Troops were to hang out with the locals, dig wells, construct schools, and measure success not by body counts of the enemy, but by the "security" of the civilian population.

This theory impelled the Obama administration to "surge" 21,000 troops into Afghanistan, and to consider adding another 20,000 in the near future. The idea is that a surge will reduce the violence, as a similar surge of 30,000 troops had done in Iraq.

Delusion #3

But as Patrick Cockburn of The Independent discovered, the surge didn't work in Iraq.

With the possible exception of Baghdad, it wasn't U.S. troops that reduced the violence in Iraq, but the decision by Sunni insurgents that they could no longer fight a two-front war against the Iraqi government and the United States. The ceasefire by Shi'ite cleric and Madhi Army leader Muqtada al-Sadr also helped calm things down. In any case, as recent events have demonstrated, the "peace" was largely illusory.

Not only is a similar "surge" in Afghanistan unlikely to be successful, the formula behind counterinsurgency doctrine predicts that the Obama administration is headed for a train wreck.

According to investigative journalist Jordan Michael Smith, the "U.S/ Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual" — co-authored by Petraeus — recommends "a minimum of 20 counterinsurgents per 1,000 residents. In Afghanistan, with its population estimated at 33 million, that would mean at least 660,000 troops." And this requires not just any soldiers, but soldiers trained in counterinsurgency doctrine.

The numbers don't add up.

The United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies currently have about 64,000 troops in Afghanistan, and that figure would rise to almost 100,000 when the present surge is completed. Some 68,000 of those will be American. There is also a possibility that Obama will add another 20,000, bringing the total to 120,000, larger than the Soviet Army that occupied Afghanistan. That's still only a fifth of what the counterinsurgency manual recommends.

Meanwhile, the American public is increasingly disillusioned with the war. According to a recent CNN poll, 57% of Americans oppose the war, a jump of 9% since May. Among Obama supporters the opposition is overwhelming: Nearly two-thirds of "committed" Democrats feel "strongly" the war is not worth fighting.

Delusion #4

Afghanistan isn't like Iraq because NATO is behind us. Way behind us.

The British — whose troops actually fight, as opposed to doing "reconstruction" like most of the other 16 NATO nations — have lost the home crowd. Polls show deep opposition to the war, a sentiment that is echoed all over Europe. Indeed, the German Defense Minister Franz-Joseph Jung has yet to use the word "war" in relation to Afghanistan.

That little piece of fiction went a-glimmering in June, when three Bundeswehr soldiers were killed near Kunduz in northern Afghanistan. Indeed, as U.S. Marines go on the offensive in the country's south, the Taliban are pulling up stakes and moving east and north to target the Germans. The tactic is as old as guerrilla warfare: "Where the enemy is strong, disperse. Where the enemy is weak, concentrate."

While Berlin's current ruling coalition of Social Democrats and conservatives quietly back the war, the Free Democrats — who are likely to join Chancellor Angela Merkel's government after the next election — are calling for bringing Germany's 4,500 troops home.

The opposition Left Party has long opposed the war, and that opposition gave it a boost in recent state elections.

The United States and NATO can't — or won't — supply the necessary troops, and the Afghan army is small, corrupt and incompetent. No matter how one adds up the numbers, the task is impossible. So why is the administration following an unsupportable course of action?

Why We Fight

There is that oil pipeline from the Caspian that no one wants to talk about. Strategic control of energy is certainly a major factor in Central Asia. Then, too, there is the fear that a defeat for NATO in its first "out of area" war might fatally damage the alliance.

But when all is said and done, there also seems to be is a certain studied derangement about the whole matter, a derangement that was on display July 12 when British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told parliament that the war was showing "signs of success."

British forces had just suffered 15 deaths in a little more than a week, eight of them in a 24-hour period. It has now lost more soldiers that it did in Iraq. This is Britain's fourth war in Afghanistan.

The Karzai government has stolen the election. The war has spilled over to help destabilize and impoverish nuclear-armed Pakistan. The American and European public is increasingly opposed to the war. July was the deadliest month ever for the United States, and the Obama administration is looking at a $9 trillion deficit.

What are these people thinking?

Conn Hallinan is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus.

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The Retreat of the Tongue of the Czars - NYTimes.com

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By CLIFFORD J. LEVY

SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine

IN a corner of Bukvatoriya, a bookstore here in the capital of the Crimean Peninsula, are some stacks of literature that may be as provocative to the Kremlin as any battalion of NATO soldiers or wily oligarch.

The books are classics — by Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo, Mark Twain, and Shakespeare — that have been translated into Ukrainian, in editions aimed at teenagers. A Harry Potter who casts spells in Ukrainian also inhabits the shelves.

Two decades ago, there would have been little if any demand for such works, given that most people in this region are ethnic Russians. But the Ukrainian government is increasingly requiring that the Ukrainian language be used in all facets of society, especially schools, as it seeks to ensure that the next generation is oriented toward Kiev, not Moscow.

Children can even read Pushkin, Russia’s most revered author, in translation. (This tends to bother Russians in the way that “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung in Spanish can touch off cross-cultural crankiness in the United States.)

The Ukrainian policy has become a flashpoint in relations between the two countries and reflects the diminishing status of the Russian language in not just the former Soviet Union, but the old Communist bloc as a whole.

The Kremlin has tried to halt the decline by setting up foundations to promote the study of Russian abroad and by castigating neighbors who shove the language from public life. In some nations, a backlash against Russian has stirred its own backlash in the language’s defense.

Still, the challenge is considerable. At stake is more than just words on a page.

Language imparts power and influence, binding the colonized to the colonizers and, for better or worse, altering how native populations interact with the world. Long after they gave up their territories, Britain and France and Spain have retained a certain authority in far-flung outposts because of the languages that they seeded.

Czars and Soviet leaders spread Russian in the lands that they conquered, using it as a kind of glue to unite disparate nationalities, a so-called second mother tongue, and connect them to their rulers. That legacy endures today, as exemplified by the close relationship between Russia and Germany, which stems in part from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ability to speak Russian. She learned it growing up in Communist East Germany.

But with the language in retreat, there are unlikely to be many future Angela Merkels. For the Kremlin, could there be a more bitter reminder of how history has turned than the sight of young Estonians or Georgians or Uzbeks (not to mention Czechs or Hungarians) flocking to classes in English instead of Russian?

“The drop in Russian language usage is a great blow to Moscow, in the economic and social spheres, and many other respects,” said Aleksei V. Vorontsov, chairman of the sociology department at the Herzen State Pedagogical University in St. Petersburg. “It has severed links, and made Russia more isolated.”

Russian seems to be faring more poorly than other colonial languages because the countries that had to absorb it have a more cohesive sense of national identity and are now rallying around their native languages to assert their sovereignty.

Russian is one of the few major languages to be losing speakers, and by rough estimates, that total will fall to 150 million by 2025, from 300 million in 1990, a year before the Soviet collapse. It will probably remain one of the 10 most popular languages, but barely. Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish, Arabic and Hindi head the list.

The situation has not been helped by the demographic crisis in Russia itself, which is expected to shed as much as 20 percent of its population by 2050.

The fall in Russian speakers has not been uniform across the former Soviet Union, and Russian officials praise former Soviet republics like Kyrgyzstan where Russian is embraced.

But countries that felt subjugated by Soviet power, like the Baltic States, have taken vengeance by mandating knowledge of the native language to obtain citizenship or other benefits. (As a correspondent in the former Soviet Union, I find that in some countries, I can often speak Russian with people older than 40 and English with those younger.)

The dispute is vitriolic in Ukraine, especially here on the Crimean Peninsula on the Black Sea, a former Russian territory where about 60 percent of the population of two million is ethnic Russian and others also speak Russian as a first language. Many residents here would prefer that Russia reclaim Crimea.

Ukraine’s pro-Western president, Viktor A. Yushchenko, indicated this month that a deepening understanding of the Ukrainian language is one key to keeping Moscow at bay. “With our native language, we preserve our culture,” Mr. Yushchenko told the German magazine Spiegel. “That greatly contributes to preserving our independence. If a nation loses its language, it loses its memory, its history and its identity.”

The policies in Ukraine, the Baltics and other countries have often drawn the ire of not only the Kremlin, but also local Russian speakers.

At the Bukvatoriya bookstore in Simferopol, the manager, Irina P. Germanenko, said locals were upset by “Ukrainization” — laws compelling the Ukrainian language in government, on television and in other areas.

Many schools in Crimea use Russian as their primary language, but they often must teach courses in subjects like geography and math in Ukrainian. And important national examinations are given only in Ukrainian.

Most of Bukvatoriya’s stock is in Russian, but Ms. Germanenko said sales of books for teenagers in Ukrainian showed the policy’s impact. “It’s an unfortunate process that is occurring,” she said. “People should be able to have freedom of choice in their language.”

The resentment can bubble up in unexpected locales. When Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, said this summer that it would demote the status of Russian, requiring government documents to be only in the Tajik language, an outcry arose from those who saw Russian as a bridge to Russia and the outside world. And in former Soviet satellites in Europe, where Russian was essentially purged after Communism, there has been a small but noticeable revival.

The language is obviously helpful in doing business in Russia’s sizable market, so interest in Russian-language classes is rising. The lingua franca of Communism, it seems, is now an asset in the pursuit of capitalism.

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Taking Helm in Japan, Party Is Wary of Divisions - NYTimes.com

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By MARTIN FACKLER

TOKYO — As the newly elected Democratic Party works to assemble what will be only the second government in Japan’s postwar history not to be led by the Liberal Democratic Party, it is treading carefully to avoid infighting that could split the ideologically diverse party or drive a wedge between it and its coalition allies.

Since smashing the Liberal Democrats’ nearly uninterrupted half-century monopoly on power two weeks ago, the center-left Democrats and their leader, Yukio Hatoyama, 62, have hurried to fill top posts in the party and his incoming cabinet and to cobble together a coalition with other parties before their government’s formal accession to power on Sept. 16.

The party is working under unrelenting scrutiny from the news media and from Japanese citizens still affected by the bitter aftertaste of their only previous experience with non-Liberal Democratic rule since 1955. That government, which took power in 1993, lasted less than a year before collapsing amid bickering and defections.

Nightly news broadcasts, which are dominated by detailed coverage of the political maneuverings within the newly formed coalition, frequently feature veterans of the earlier failed government who offer lessons from their brief, rocky time in power.

While there have been no major bumps so far, warning signs are already appearing.

On Wednesday, when Mr. Hatoyama and the heads of two smaller anti-laissez-faire parties, the Social Democratic Party and the People’s New Party, agreed to form a coalition government, they left unresolved disagreements over the status of 50,000 American service members in Japan. Mr. Hatoyama has spoken in vague terms of re-examining the American military bases, while still trying to remain close to Washington, but the leftist Social Democrats want the bases removed.

There have also been signs of division in the Democratic Party since Mr. Hatoyama gave a top party position to one of the party’s most powerful men, Ichiro Ozawa, in what analysts say was an attempt to keep his loyalty. But in doing so, Mr. Hatoyama raised concerns by other Democrats that the party was embracing a shadowy kingmaker whose money-oriented political style closely resembled that of the Liberal Democrats they defeated.

Those critics fear that Mr. Ozawa, 67, will compete with Mr. Hatoyama for control of the party; Mr. Ozawa was a member of the 1993-1994 government, and political analysts have blamed his clashes with other coalition members for contributing to its demise. On Thursday, many Democrats lobbied to have Seiji Maehara, a young proponent of clean politics, included in the new cabinet to help offset Mr. Ozawa’s influence.

Mr. Hatoyama has tried to dispel concerns that he is creating competing centers of power.

“This will not create a dual power structure,” Mr. Hatoyama, the presumptive next prime minister, told reporters. He added that policy would be set by his cabinet and not the party.

Still, the barest hints of fissures within the party have made news in a nation keen to see if the Democrats can pull off the daunting task of essentially dragging the country into a true multiparty system.

The 1993-94 government, which included eight small parties and groups and was first led by Morihiro Hosokawa as prime minister, lasted only 11 months. Its quick collapse drove disappointed Japanese voters back into the arms of the Liberal Democrats, where they stayed until the election.

While there are many differences between now and 1993 — the biggest being the fact that a single, large party, the Democratic Party, has beaten the Liberal Democrats — the mistakes of that earlier government still cast a shadow, according to veterans of that coalition.

“It took 16 years to get this second chance,” Mr. Hosokawa, who retired from politics in 1998, said in an interview. “Lack of cohesiveness has always plagued efforts to build a second big political party.”

Mr. Hosokawa said the Democrats’ main weak point might be their broad manifesto of campaign promises, which would be hard to achieve quickly enough to satisfy Japan’s recession-weary voters. The party is trying to reinvigorate Japan’s sclerotic system of government by empowering elected politicians and consumers over the bureaucracy and industry, and to blunt the pain from globalization with a stronger social safety net.

Instead, Mr. Hosokawa said, focusing on a few high-profile policies would make it easier to keep the party on the same track and offer voters results.

“They need a single flag to stand under,” he said.

Adding to the difficulty will be the fact that Mr. Hatoyama heads a party that is broad and often hazy in its identity.

The party was formed in 1998 as a motley grouping of former Socialists and defectors from the conservative Liberal Democratic Party. Since then, it has tried to forge a unique culture and identity, with mixed success.

By finally winning power, the party has been robbed of its main source of unity, say political analysts and former politicians. The glue that held the Democrats together has been a shared desire to end the Liberal Democrats’ rule.

“The Democrats are like wet, unformed concrete, which still lacks a mold,” said Atsuo Ito, an independent political analyst who wrote a book on the party. “Just holding power may be enough to keep the party together at first, but eventually the party will need shared beliefs to keep from flying apart.”

In Anbar Province, New Leadership, but Old Problems Persist - NYTimes.com

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By SAM DAGHER

RAMADI, Iraq — It has been just more than seven months since a mainly tribal coalition came to power here in Anbar Province, but already its leaders are being accused by many of doing little for most citizens while seeking to enrich themselves through sweetheart business deals.

“The majority of them are after personal gains,” said Sheik Ghazi Sami al-Abed, a prominent local businessman recently. “Few are looking to rebuild the country.”

The provincial elections at the end of January were supposed to enfranchise people in this staunchly Sunni Arab province, once a stronghold for insurgents and militants linked to Al Qaeda. After almost all the Anbar Sunni tribes boycotted the previous elections in 2005, this year’s voting was seen as a crucial way to bring them into government and perhaps ease tensions with the Shiite-dominated national government in Baghdad.

But extensive interviews with Anbar residents show that they see very little difference between their new government and the previous provincial council. That council, widely deemed illegitimate by many boycotting Sunnis, was accused so vehemently of corrupt and dysfunctional rule that it created fears of renewed intertribal warfare.

“They are thugs; they became politicians and now they have a lot of money,” said another Anbar businessman about the province’s current political leaders. He spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The discontent in Anbar is coming at a critical time, as the United States has reduced its military presence here significantly and completely stopped spending money on new projects despite the province’s “enormous” infrastructure needs, said one senior American official. It was American cash and contracts that spurred most tribal leaders to renounce the insurgency and switch alliances to the American side almost three years ago, in what is now known as the Sunni Awakening — a model the United States is seeking to replicate with tribes in Afghanistan.

In the absence of American patronage, the worrisome question in Anbar, which makes up roughly one-third of Iraq’s territory, is whether public dissatisfaction coupled with political and economic rivalries between the tribal leaders in power and those on the outside could lead to large-scale violence.

“The structure of modern local governance including transparency and accountability are at variance with the traditional expectations of tribal leaders,” said James Soriano, who leads the State Department’s Provincial Reconstruction Team based on the outskirts of the provincial capital, Ramadi. “There is a potential for a recipe for trouble if the pie is shrinking.”

Mr. Soriano spoke before his expected departure from Ramadi this month.

Anbar’s test also comes at a time when insurgents appear to be regrouping. Almost no day goes by without an attack or a bombing in Falluja, the province’s other main city. Several pro-American tribal leaders have been killed, and there have been a number of deadly bombings in Ramadi and other cities like Haditha and Qaim since July.

The picture is further complicated by a still uneasy relationship between this province, once among the most loyal to Saddam Hussein, and the Shiite-led national government. Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki appears to be pitting Sunni leaders against one another and finding tribal allies here who can bolster his standing as a national leader and help him in his bid for re-election in January.

In addition to money spent by the Americans in Anbar, the previous provincial government received hundreds of millions of dollars from the central government. Much of it is believed to have been lost to corruption and mismanagement.

Among the new political leaders coming under increased criticism is the province’s governor, Qasim Abed al-Fahadawi.

In the absence of new American development aid, dwindling as the United States has urged the government in Baghdad to fill the breach, Mr. Fahadawi has followed the Western model and turned to the private sector for investment and help. The governor was even recognized for his efforts as “global personality of the year” by the London-based magazine Foreign Direct Investment.

But increasingly, the governor’s business affiliations are sounding alarm bells inside the province and elsewhere.

In a recent interview, Mr. Fahadawi made no secret of favoring a small clique of his tribal and business friends over others when it comes to future investments and contracts in the province. His relationship with Sheik Ahmed Abu Risha, who two years ago took the lead role in the American-backed tribal Awakening movement, has caused hard feelings here.

Sheik Ahmed has turned the Awakening movement into the dominant political party here, leading the coalition that runs the Anbar provincial council. Many of the two men’s opponents say that Mr. Fahadawi has basically served as Sheik Ahmed’s money manager, with the two combining forces to use their political power to control how business contracts in Anbar are distributed to outside companies.

Both men insist that their business dealings are completely aboveboard, and Mr. Fahadawi says he has helped bring in investment and jobs that have helped revitalize local industries.

One of the biggest deals the men have been involved in is an effort to bring in two companies from the United Arab Emirates, Dana Gas and Crescent Petroleum, to develop Anbar’s giant Akkaz gas field. Sheik Ahmed has taken the lead in the negotiations, and the two companies have committed to helping create as many as 100,000 jobs in the province, Mr. Fahadawi said.

But the men are circumventing the Oil Ministry’s plan to put the contract up for general bidding, instead appealing directly to Mr. Maliki for support. It was one of the main topics Sheik Ahmed and Mr. Maliki discussed when the prime minister visited Anbar this summer. Almost 175 sheep were slaughtered and the meat was distributed in Mr. Maliki’s honor, according to local residents.

Opposing tribal leaders in Anbar see the deal as an attempt by Sheik Ahmed to use national backing to cement his position as the province’s de facto chieftain and to freeze them out of lucrative business interests. They say he already has a dangerous amount of control over the local government and security forces.

“There will be a bloody struggle if he takes it all,” warned Sheik Ghazi, the prominent local businessman.

Another Anbar business magnate, Sheik Tariq Khalaf al-Abdullah, who was instrumental in introducing American forces to the local power structure at the beginning of the Awakening movement, also is fighting the deal. Sheik Tariq is now based in Amman, Jordan, but he has been trying to galvanize the opposition within Anbar.

In an interview in his plush office in Amman, he wondered why the Americans were not taking a bigger role in monitoring Anbar’s affairs. “I am surprised how they could withdraw before tying the loose ends,” he said.

Sheik Tariq established a tribal council and businesses for Anbar’s sheiks that benefited from American money and largesse when it was more abundant in return for allegiance.

Mr. Soriano, the leader of the State Department reconstruction team, said that the United States would continue to assist and advise Anbar’s government but that it would be up to Iraqis to resolve their differences and determine their priorities.

“A nice way to exit Iraq would be for a tribal society to support the structure of local government and local security forces to prevent a setback,” he said.

Inside Indonesia - A disaster, but not genocide

Migration has caused many problems in Papua, but it is not part of a genocidal master plan

Stuart Upton

In the second of two pieces on demographic change in Indonesian Papua, Inside Indonesia here presents an analysis by Stuart Upton that suggests – in contrast to the first piece written by Jim Elmslie –there is little hard evidence to support claims of genocide in Papua.

Urban areas are where the population is most mixed, and where the best opportunities are Sergio Piumatti http://www.stockimagesnet.com/

The indigenous population of Papua has resisted Indonesian control from the start. Since the Dutch passed sovereignty over Papua to Indonesian hands in 1963 there has been recurrent violence in the territory, resulting from the heavy military presence there. The armed forces have committed many human rights abuses. These are well-documented and indisputable. What is problematic is how these and similar experiences are interpreted. Many people have claimed that this violence, along with attacks on Papuan culture and social structures, constitutes a program of genocide against the indigenous population. This emotive term has been widely used by both indigenous and Western activists in the last few years. However, the case in favour of using the term genocide to describe the Papuan situation is weak. It is also potentially damaging to the cause of positive change in Papua.

Demographic change

One of the common charges is that the Papuans are subject to genocide by stealth, in the form of migration by non-Papuan settlers. Through looking at the figures on lifetime migration and religious affiliation, the broad patterns of demographic change can be discerned. While there were issues with the coverage of the 2000 census, there have not been any substantiated claims that the statistical data have been manipulated for political reasons, and these figures remain our best guide for understanding population trends in Papua (by which I mean the two contemporary provinces of Papua and West Papua).

If there was genocide in Papua, we would expect the number of Papuans to be declining. The 2000 census recorded ethnic composition of the population, showing there were 1,460,000 Papuans in the province, up from 890,000 in 1971. The yearly growth rate of 1.7 per cent is only marginally less than that of Indonesia as a whole of 1.8 per cent. While Papuans made up only two-thirds of the province’s population in 2000, their numbers are only decreasing in relative terms.

The case in favour of using the term genocide to describe the Papuan situation is weak, and it is potentially damaging to the cause of positive change in Papua

Much of the eastern part of the archipelago, of which Papua is one part, has experienced significant economic development over the last three decades, prompting large numbers of migrants to move to these areas of growth using the improving transport system. Between 1971 and 2000, the population of Papua increased from just over 920,000 to nearly 2,440,000. This is a seemingly large increase but it is a population growth of only 3.1 per cent per year over these three decades, this rate being lower than other provinces in eastern Indonesia such as East Kalimantan (4.2 per cent) or Southeast Sulawesi (3.2 per cent). Papua is also not the only province to experience high levels of immigration, with the percentage of lifetime migrants in East Kalimantan in 2000 (35 per cent of the population) being far higher than in Papua (20 per cent). Put in their broader Indonesian context, population changes in Papua don’t look like genocide, they just look like part of the normal pattern of inter-island migration.

Papua is also not the only province to experience high levels of immigration, with the percentage of lifetime migrants in East Kalimantan being far higher than in Papua

Migration was an important factor from the first few years after the Dutch left and the Indonesians took over. Initially there was an influx of Indonesians taking the higher level public service positions. By 1971 there were over one thousand tertiary educated Indonesians in the province (mostly from Java) compared to less than 100 Papuans educated to this level. This was a blow for the Papuan elites because the government was the dominant employer. There were also some transmigrants settled in Papua prior to the so-called Act of Free Choice in 1969 (surely an indication that Indonesia had every expectation that the vote would go the way they intended).

Transmigration and military violence

There were relatively low levels of migration through the 1970s, unsurprising for such a remote part of the nation, with the 1980s bringing settlers from Java due to increasing transmigration projects. The figure of 90,000 migrants in 1980 rose to 260,000 by 1990. The settlement of transmigrants along the PNG border was a government attempt to cement the incorporation of Papua into the nation. Since then, transmigration has ceased to be a major factor in demographic change. The importance of this program diminished in the 1990s with the rising number of self-financed migrants from Sulawesi and Maluku taking advantage of the improving shipping system. It is hard to accurately estimate the proportion of migrants who have arrived through the transmigration program but they probably represent less than a third of migrants overall. The transmigration program was finally halted in 2000.

Instead, the great majority of newcomers were not part of the transmigration program and came to settle in the towns and cities along the coast with little or no government assistance. The chief force bringing them to Papua has not been government policy but instead pull migration for economic reasons, with the migrants mainly coming from eastern Indonesia, particularly Sulawesi and Maluku. In urban areas, migrants from these areas made up 23 per cent of the population compared to 12 per cent from Java in 2000. The impression on the ground is that the proportion of migrants from Eastern Indonesia is rising.

Another common accusation is that the Indonesian military has been responsible for so many attacks on the population that they amount to attempted genocide. But genocidal actions would be expected to lead to gaps in the population statistics such as missing men in particular age groups. My analysis of the figures from all the censuses carried out in the province shows no evidence of such gaps. There are low male-female ratios for the 20-29 year age group but these low ratios do not carry over to older age groups in later censuses. It seems that young men are simply not being counted in the census, possibly due to their avoidance of government agencies or through difficulties in the administration of the census. Similar issues with counting young men were encountered by the statisticians in charge of the latest census in Britain.

Genocidal military actions would be expected to lead to gaps in the population statistics, but my analysis of the figures from all the censuses carried out in the province shows no evidence of such gaps

For particular ethnic groups who have been the victims of violence from the military, such as the highland Dani, the 2000 census did not show evidence of men missing on a large scale. Additionally, there are no large decreases in population figures in particular districts which would point to massacres of whole villages in these areas. All this is not to deny that there have been serious human rights abuses, but it seems they have not been on such a scale as to leave their mark on the population records.

Explaining the charges of genocide

A glimpse of houses in the transmigrant settlement in Babo Bintuni, founded 23 years ago Iskandar Nugraha

The figures show that many of the provinces across Eastern Indonesia have experienced massive demographic change, change that has impacted greatly on the indigenous populations. So why are there suggestions of genocide in Papua but not in East Kalimantan or other eastern provinces? The reasons behind this are complex but involve the lower level of commitment to the Indonesian nation felt by Papuans, partly as a result of the separation of Papua from the new nation of Indonesia following the Pacific War. With the Dutch holding on to this half of New Guinea until 1962, an indigenous elite with an expectation of separate independence was born. The dashing of this hope by the Cold War politics of the time created resentment and little commitment to Indonesian nationalism.

There is also a subtext of racism implicit in much of the discussion of the genocide issue from both sides. Papuans suggest that they could never be part of Indonesia due to differences in skin colour (they are dark, Indonesians are light) or hair type (they have curly hair, Indonesians have straight hair). Such reliance on physical appearance in marking national identity – a racialist assumption of a sort that is repudiated these days in many parts of the world – is itself a response to the negative attitudes, including racist stereotyping, that many Indonesians show towards Papuans.

The charges of genocide also stem from Papuan social disadvantage. Migration patterns have indeed contributed to this disadvantage. The influx of economic migrants has impacted greatly on the indigenous populace, blocking them from gaining better education and employment in the coastal towns. Only one in five migrants in these towns are from another area of Papua, with the rest being migrants from outside the province. With most industries located along the coast, the better-educated migrants settling in these areas have tended to get the jobs in higher status sectors. For example, in the cities non-indigenous people are four times more likely to have jobs as traders than indigenous people. Overall, migrants hold more than 90 per cent of the lucrative jobs in trading.

The figures for rural areas are even more striking, with non-indigenous people being 16 times more likely to work in the trade sector than Papuans. Ethnic connections are important for getting jobs in Indonesia, and in helping migrants to establish themselves in towns. With few indigenous businesspeople, Papuans can’t use ethnic affiliation to obtain employment. The indigenous population continues to work in agriculture in rural areas, with the majority still in subsistence farming and only peripherally engaged with the modern economy.

Along with the majority of employment possibilities, the coastal urban areas have the best education opportunities. Illiteracy is only four per cent in the migrant-dominated capital Jayapura but it is nearly 60 per cent in the rural highlands of Jayawijaya. Migrants are more than twice as likely as indigenous people to have finished secondary school, and five times more likely to have tertiary qualifications. The poor standards of education in the areas where Papuans live, the distances between villages and schools (especially secondary schools), and financial obstacles to regular school attendance mean that many indigenous children do not obtain the education necessary to compete for employment.

The results of all these factors are that indigenous people have little chance of migrating to the towns, are unable to compete in the job market and do not see their children getting an education that will enable them to compete in the future. Rather than simply being the result of human rights abuses in the province, the current sense of a shared Papuan identity is more the result of the marginalisation of the indigenous people, and the understandable resentment and jealousy felt by this group towards the economic success of the newcomers.

With little realistic prospect of independence, working with the Indonesian side to implement policies to reduce corruption and the power of the military in Papua would be a vital first step to create trust in the government among the indigenous population

With little realistic prospect of independence, working with the Indonesian side to implement policies to reduce corruption and the power of the military in Papua would be a vital first step to create trust in the government among the indigenous population. In the longer term, policies to address the poor education standards of Papuans, assist indigenous small-businesses and enable more equality in employment are needed.

The claims of genocide in the province are mistaken and misleading. Such dramatising of the situation in Papua is only likely to result in the alienation of those Indonesian groups who are in a position to implement meaningful change. The ‘Papua Road Map ’ drawn up by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences suggests that some in the Indonesian academic community are willing to embrace such change. Let us hope that there are those in the bureaucracy and the military who can do the same in the future. ii

Stuart Upton (suptons@optusnet.com.au) completed his PhD about migration in Papua at the University of New South Wales in 2009.

Better than plain old telephone service? - GlobalPost

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The technology used by Skype is transforming the global telecommunications industry.

By Tom Abate - Global Post

Published: September 13, 2009 09:47 ET

SAN FRANCISCO — Make a phone call that crosses a national border and, without even knowing it, you're probably using a technology that is transforming the global telecommunications industry.

The technology, known as Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP), began in Israel in the mid-1990s and was popularized by startups like Skype. It chops conversation into thousands of digital data packets, sends these packets over the internet and reassembles the conversation at the other end — bypassing the traditional phone system and its per-minute charges.

“VoIP began as a much cheaper way to make international and long distance calls,” said analyst Ken Landoline of Synergy Research Group in Reno, Nevada.

Now it is now being quietly adopted by telecommunications carriers in Europe, Asia and North America.

Analyst Jeff Pulver said VoIP as a technology has been more successful than Skype, the Scandinavian company that was acquired in 2005 by eBay, the online marketplace. EBay recently spun Skype back off again to compete more freely in the VoIP marketplace.

“Skype as a company hasn't done all that well, but VoIP has gotten a lot of traction in the telecom world,” said Pulver, who tracks the industry through his website, Pulver.com. “The incumbent telecommunication carriers, especially in Europe and Asia, have embraced VoIP to make themselves more competitive.”

Pulver said the Israeli company VocalTec unveiled the first commercial VoIP system in 1995. Skype debuted in 2003 with VoIP software that enabled computer users to have conversations through their PCs, via the internet, essentially for free.

“Skype became very popular very quickly,” Pulver said. “In 2004 and 2005 it was threatening every major phone company.”

In 2005, eBay bought Skype for more than $2.6 billion, hoping to weave online conversation into its digital marketplace and thus spur more transactions. Pulver said the acquisition never delivered the benefits eBay expected and blunted Skype's momentum as an alternative to traditional phone carriers.

In September, eBay sold a controlling stake in Skype for nearly $2 billion to a group of outside investors that includes browser software pioneer Marc Andreessen. Whether the new ownership will revive Skype as a challenger to the telecom status quo remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, analysts say the major telecommunications firms have embraced VoIP as a way to lower their own costs of delivering long-distance voice traffic.

Analyst Stephane Teral with the market research firm Infonetics said telecommunications firms in Europe and Asia have been pushing VoIP all the way into their systems, using it not just for long-haul transport but also selling digital lines directly to consumers, in contrast to U.S. phone carriers that still typically offer old-fashioned analog lines, which essentially connect the caller and receiver over wires that are dedicated to their conversation, like a string stretched between two cups.

NTT in Japan has more than 7.3 million VoIP subscribers, and France Telecom has about 6.5 million, Teral said.

In the United States, cable companies are using VoIP to deliver the phone component of the bundled services they are selling to consumers, enabling them to compete with the telephone carriers.

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“Phone calls in my home office come through my cable provider's infrastructure along with my internet and television service,” Landoline said. “The telephone company does not enter my house.”

Silicon Valley technology forecaster Paul Saffo said the Skype spin off comes at a time when VoIP technology is approaching an inflection point.

“So far VoIP has just been cheaper,” Saffo said. “Now the voice quality is getting better. But what will really make VoIP take off is that it can add features that weren't possible with plain old telephone service.”

For instance, he said VoiIP makes it possible for players in online games to speak with one another, adding another dimension to their interactions.

“We're just starting to understand what VoIP can do that the old telephone system couldn't,'” Saffo said. “This is a technology that is moving into the mainstream.”

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