KUALA LUMPUR — When the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve, China and 10 Southeast Asian nations will usher in the world’s third-largest free trade area. While many industries are eager for tariffs to fall on everything from textiles and rubber to vegetable oils and steel, a few are nervously waiting to see whether the agreement will mean boom or bust for their businesses.
Trade between China and the 10 states that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations has soared in recent years, to $192.5 billion in 2008, from $59.6 billion in 2003. The new free trade zone, which will remove tariffs on 90 percent of traded goods, is expected to increase that commerce still more.
The zone will rank behind only the European Economic Area and the North American Free Trade Area in trade volume. It will encompass 1.9 billion people. The free trade area is expected to help Asean countries increase exports, particularly those with commodities that resource-hungry China desperately wants.
The China-Asean free trade area has faced less vocal opposition than the European and North American zones, perhaps because existing tariffs were already low and because it is unlikely to alter commerce patterns radically, analysts say.
However, some manufacturers in Southeast Asia are concerned that cheap Chinese goods may flood their markets, once import taxes are removed, making it more difficult for them to retain or increase their local market shares. Indonesia is so worried that it plans to ask for a delay in removing tariffs from some items like steel products, textiles, petrochemicals and electronics.
“Not everyone in Asean sees this F.T.A. as a plus,” said Sothirak Pou, a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.
Asean and China have gradually reduced many tariffs in recent years. However, under the free trade agreement — which was signed in 2002 — China, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei will have to remove almost all tariffs in 2010.
Asean’s newest members — Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar — will gradually reduce tariffs in coming years and must eliminate them entirely by 2015.
Most of the goods that will become tariff-free in January — including manufactured items — are currently subject to import taxes of about 5 percent. Some agricultural products and parts for motor vehicles and heavy machinery will still face tariffs in 2010, but those will gradually be phased out.
In recent years, China has overtaken the United States to become Asean’s third-largest trading partner after Japan and the European Union. The overall trade balance has shifted slightly in China’s favor, although there are significant differences among Southeast Asian countries’ trade balances, said Thomas Kaegi, head of macroeconomic research for the Asia-Pacific region at UBS Wealth Management Research.
Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand have only small trade deficits with China, while Vietnam’s has grown substantially in recent years. In 2008, Vietnam exported items worth $4.5 billion to China but imported about $15.7 billion worth of Chinese goods.
In Indonesia, the textile and steel industries are particularly nervous about the lifting of tariffs, prompting the government to say that it would ask for a delay on some provisions. No time frame for submitting the request was given, but the Asean secretariat said it had not yet received an official request.
While competing with more Chinese imports may pose new challenges for Asean manufacturers, analysts say increasing their access to the 1.3 billion people of China could produce significant benefits.
Rodolfo Severino, who was secretary general of Asean from 1998 to 2002, identified Malaysia — which already exports palm oil, rubber and natural gas to China — as one of the countries that might benefit most from the removal of tariffs.
But nations like Vietnam that focus on the production of cheap consumer goods are more likely to be hurt, said Mr. Severino, head of the Asean Studies Center at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.
Those countries may need to look for new export products and identify new niche markets, he said: “This is the nature of competition.”
Song Hong, an economist, expects that China will import more agricultural goods, like tropical fruit, from countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam when the trade area takes effect. That could hurt Chinese farmers in southern provinces like Guangxi and Yunnan, said Mr. Song, director of the trade research division at the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.
Mr. Sothirak, who was Cambodia’s minister of industry, mines and energy from 1993 to 1998, said the removal of tariffs might help increase Cambodia’s agricultural exports to China. Cambodia needs to diversify its export markets because its exports to the United States and Europe have declined, he said.
While he does not hold much hope that Cambodian textile exports would be able to compete with China’s highly developed garment industry, he said he believed the free trade area might entice more Chinese garment factories to set up operations in Cambodia, where production costs and labor are cheaper.
Pushpanathan Sundram, deputy secretary general of Asean for Asean Economic Community, acknowledged that there would be “some costs involved” for some countries when the free trade area took effect, but he said he believed China and Asean would “mutually benefit.”
Despite the expectations for increasing trade, Mr. Severino predicted that the introduction of the trade zone would not be a “breakthrough event” setting off a dramatic surge in commerce come January.
“There are many factors that traders and investors consider, and the trend has been going this way anyway,” he said. “What this does is to send out good signals and show the determination of governments to make things easier.”
BANGKOK — The first in a series of trials of dissidents in Vietnam concluded Monday, when a court convicted a former army officer of subversion for pro-democracy activities and sentenced him to five-and-a-half years in prison.
The conviction of the former officer, Tran Anh Kim, 60, comes as the government is tightening controls on dissent in advance of a Communist Party congress in early 2011.
Mr. Kim is one of five activists who were arrested in June and at first, faced the less serious charge of spreading antigovernment propaganda. But this month, Mr. Kim and at least two others were charged with the capital crime of subversion. Prosecutors asked for a lighter sentence in view of the military background of Mr. Kim, a wounded veteran.
Sentences in political cases are generally determined in advance, and the trial, held in Thai Binh Province in northeastern Vietnam, took just four hours. The other four campaigners are scheduled to go to trial next month. The most prominent among them is Le Cong Dinh, 41, an American-educated lawyer who has defended human rights campaigners and has called for multiparty democracy.
The others are Nguyen Tien Trung, who recently studied engineering in Paris; Tran Huynh Duy Thuc; and Le Thang Long. They are among dozens of dissidents and bloggers who have been arrested in recent months as the government attempts to set the boundaries of public speech before the party congress, which is held every five years, diplomats and political analysts said.
In court, the defiant Mr. Kim acknowledged his membership in the Democratic Party of Vietnam, an outlawed group of small affiliated parties and opposition factions. In June, Mr. Kim attempted to hang a sign at his house saying, “Office of the Democratic Party of Vietnam.”
He also said he had joined Bloc 8406, a group of petitioners calling for democratic elections and a multiparty state. The petition was released on April 8, 2006 — hence its name — but Mr. Kim was not one of the original 118 signatories.
A principal architect of Bloc 8406, Nguyen Van Ly, a Catholic priest, was convicted and sentenced along with four other dissidents in March 2007. He received an eight-year prison term for “overtly revolutionary activities” and “conspiring with reactionary forces,” according to the official Vietnam News Agency.
Journalists who watched the proceedings on closed-circuit television quoted Mr. Kim as saying he had been fighting for “democratic freedom and human rights through peaceful dialogue and nonviolent means.”
“I am a person of merit,” he was quoted as saying. “I did not commit crimes.”
Judge Tran Van Loan said Mr. Kim had participated in what he called an organized crime against the state, cooperating with “reactionary Vietnamese and hostile forces in exile.”
“This was a serious violation of national security,” the judge said.
The site of Mr. Kim’s trial, Thai Binh, was likely to resonate with government loyalists and dissidents alike. The coastal province is the birthplace of some of the country’s legendary military heroes and political leaders, including Politburo members, senior generals and Vietnam’s first cosmonaut, Pham Tuan.
But Thai Binh also has been home to some of the most ardent critics of the government, notably the writer Duong Thu Huong, whose banned novel, Paradise of the Blind, was a searing description of life in postwar Vietnam, and Thich Quang Do, a Buddhist monk who has been a critic of the Communist government for decades.
In 1997, farmers and workers in Thai Binh staged a violent rebellion against local party leaders over tax increases, land seizures and the misuse of public funds. The violence unnerved the central government, which dismissed a number of party bosses in Thai Binh but also instituted a harsh crackdown there on public gatherings and political dissent.
Seth Mydans reported from Bangkok, and Mark McDonald from Hong Kong.
Cool poker-players, we are tempted to believe, only raise or fold: they only increase their bet or leave the game. Calling, making the minimum bet to stay, suggests that you can't calculate the odds or face losing the pot, and that the other players are intimidating you. Calling is for children. Real men and women don't want to call in Afghanistan: they want to dramatically increase troops and expenditure, defeat the Taliban, and leave. Or they just want to leave. Both sides—the disciples of the surge and the apostles of withdrawal—therefore found some satisfaction in one passage in President Obama's speech at West Point on December 1:
I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.
But the rest left them uneasy. This was not, as they might have imagined, because he was lurching between two contradictory doctrines of increase and withdrawal, but because the rest of his speech argued for a radically different strategy—a call strategy—which is about neither surge nor exit but about a much-reduced and longer-term presence in the country. The President did not make this explicit. But this will almost certainly be the long-term strategy of the US and its allies. And he has with remarkable courage and scrupulousness articulated the premises that lead to this conclusion. First, however, it is necessary to summarize the history of our involvement and the conventional policies that have long favored surge and exit.
A legion of arguments almost drove Obama away from this new moderate position over the last ten weeks of discussion. There was our general fear in Afghanistan and Pakistan of the modern demons, which policy experts dub "insurgency, terrorism, civil war, human rights–abusing warlords, narcotics, weapons of mass destruction, and global jihad" and the spawn of "safe havens, rogue, fragile, and failed states." There was our developing sense, over the last eight years, that the status quo was unacceptable.
From 2001, sections of the international community attempted to assist the Afghan government in the construction of a state. The British Department for International Development put 80 percent of its funds into direct budgetary support for the Afghan government and NGOs implemented health, education, and rural development projects as contractors for the Afghan government. Such efforts were described by NATO as a "comprehensive approach to security, governance and economic development" in which the UN, an apparently benevolent Karzai government, NATO, and the NGOs would all play their part—largely in concert because there was no perceived conflict between their aims and values.
Challenges from warlords, druglords, lack of funds, and lack of government authority were to be met through cen- tralization, disarmament of opposition groups, crop eradication, coordination, and closer partnership. It was assumed that it would be possible within a reasonable time (some documents claimed within seven years) to build a stable centralized state, largely independent of foreign support, arranged around the rule of law and a technocratic administration, with a vibrant economy based on lawful commerce and trade. Few expected the Taliban to reemerge. Comparisons were drawn with the development of Korea or Singapore.
Eight years later this seems a tragic fantasy. Frustrated by lack of progress, the US and its allies have oscillated giddily between contradictory policies. The British government that once championed more generous budgetary support for the Kabul government now portrays it as corrupt, semi-criminal, ineffective, and illegitimate. "Warlords" such as Gul Agha Shirzai, who we once demonized, are now tolerated or even praised, and are almost certain to be given good positions in the new Karzai government. We armed militias in 2001, disarmed them through a demobilization program in 2003, and rearmed them again in 2006 as community defense forces. We allowed local autonomy in 2001, pushed for a strong central government in 2003, and returned to decentralization in 2006. First we tolerated opium crops; then we proposed to eradicate them through aerial spraying; now we expect to live with opium production for decades.
Meanwhile, the Karzai government and the nations involved in Afghanistan have fallen into a cruel and dysfunctional arranged marriage that seems too often to lack common values, common projects, trust, and even patience. Each undermines the other's legitimacy. NATO is blamed for being associated with a corrupt and illegitimate administration; the Karzai government is blamed by Afghans for bombarding civilians and for accepting the support of foreign infidels. And each has sought to shift blame to the other side.
Many of these tensions were illustrated in the first week of November: five British soldiers were killed by the Afghan policeman they were training; nine Afghan policemen, trying to come to the rescue of lost American servicemen, were killed by a coalition bomb; five UN election observers were killed by the Taliban in their Kabul guesthouse, causing the UN to begin to withdraw its staff. A PBS journalist interviewed President Karzai:
Margaret Warner: "The UN did reluctantly withdraw about two thirds of its foreign staff.... What impact is that likely to have?"
Margaret Warner: So you don't care if they return?
Hamid Karzai: They may or may not return. Afghanistan won't notice it. We wish them well wherever they are.
Even an optimist would now describe Afghanistan as a poor, dangerous country, struggling to survive in the face of jihadist ideology, insecurity, and poor governance. It is now hoped that good development in Afghanistan might allow it over decades to draw level with Pakistan. The Taliban have a growing presence even outside their traditional heartland in the south and east of Afghanistan and they mount attacks on previously safe areas and communities. Civil war is now seen as very likely. Comparisons are drawn with Somalia.
Through all these bewildering years, a subtle and refined edifice of justification for troop increases has emerged, in which arguments are categorized by type and family and reinforced with analogies and precedents, in a structure in which each claim supports another. The tone, history, and arguments in this liturgy are not only the product of soldiers, spies, explorers, journalists, administrators, writers, aid workers, professors, think-tank directors, and politicians. They have been developed by the great alliances of NATO and the UN and have drawn on World Bank economists, veterans of Iraq and the frontier, linguists with decades of experience in rural Afghanistan, and even, occasionally, Afghans. The creed, hammered out in the great international councils of Washington, Bonn, and Paris, runs as follows:
Afghanistan is an existential threat. It is the epicenter of international terrorism and the epitome of a failed state. We must fight in Afghanistan for six reasons: (1) to protect the United States and the rest of NATO from terrorist attack; (2) to protect Pakistan and the region; (3) to protect the credibility of the United States and NATO; (4) to protect the Afghan people; (5) to defeat the Taliban; and (6)to create an effective, legitimate, stable state.
Our enemies include corruption, drugs, poverty, and insecurity and we will address them through governance and capacity- building, alternative livelihoods, a regional solution, a comprehensive approach, and an exit strategy. The surge worked in Iraq. We have a moral obligation to the Afghan people. By abandoning them in 1989, we created the conditions that led to September 11. We must, therefore, implement counter-insurgency operations across the spectrum.
Just as Buddha's fourth noble truth can be divided into an eightfold path, so each justification, need, ethical claim, doctrine, precedent, and analogy of this modern metaphysics can be further subdivided. Thus the article of faith that our operations in Afghanistan are crucial to the stability of Pakistan can conventionally be defended by reference to the need for a two-sided pincer movement against the Taliban on the border; worries about safe havens, failed states, and global jihad; the support for drone attacks in Pakistan conveyed in one opinion poll on the frontier and by one Pakistani general; the appearance of the Taliban "only sixty miles from Islamabad." And the possibility that mad mullahs will seize the nukes.
Each argument echoes much deeper assumptions about the world: a belief in the moral imperative of humanitarian intervention, backed by our failures in Rwanda and our success in the Balkans; a maximal vision in which no one good ("security," for example) can be achieved without the achievement of every other good (such as "development" or "the rule of law"); a rhetorical tradition in which all goods are seen as consistent and mutually reinforcing; and an Enlightenment faith that there is nothing intrinsically intractable about Afghan culture and society and that all men can be perfected (to a Western ideal) through the application of reason and the laws of social science.
But perhaps more importantly there are our more recent theories about the global order. There is the credit we take for the success of postwar Germany, democracy in Eastern Europe post-1989, and economic growth in South and East Asia. There are our apparent mistakes with Mossadeq in Iran in the 1950s; fighting in Vietnam in the 1960s, Latin America in the 1980s, and Somalia in the 1990s; the September 11 attacks; North Korea today; and the different lessons we have chosen to take about working against the popular will, supporting dictators, leaving, or failing to act. All of this experience is reflected in our division of the world into friendly, puppet, rogue, fragile, and failed states and our anxieties about instability, insurgency, terrorism, or weapons of mass destruction.
All these fears, frustrations, and doctrines contributed to the relentless logic that drove Obama to state, last year, "We must win in Afghanistan"; and to claim that Bush failed in Afghanistan because he did not invest enough resources. Even Obama's latest speech began with the story of how Afghanistan fell and September 11 occurred because "the attention of America and our friends had turned elsewhere," and the speech reminded us of "a nuclear-armed Pakistan,...NATO's credibility,...failed states."
Such arguments explain why he sent an extra 17,000 troops last March, insisting that "there is an uncompromising core of the Taliban. They must be met with force, and they must be defeated," and he committed the US to "promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government" and "advance security, opportunity and justice." This is also why he announced a more maximalist counterinsurgency strategy in the March White Paper and appointed a new commanding general, Stanley McChrystal, to implement it.
By agreeing to a counterinsurgency strategy, Obama implicitly committed to all the doctrine contained in a two-hundred-page field manual, derived from the analysis of seventy-three previous insurgencies. "Full-spectrum counter-insurgency," or COIN, the President was informed in the manual, "is all-encompassing." It is expressed in aphorisms such as "the center of gravity is the population" and "we are not being out-fought but out-governed"; and mottoes like "Clear, Hold, Build." It includes economic development, infantry tactics, political negotiation, building capacity for governance, and eliminating "high-value" targets using predator drones. The soldiers, according to the COIN doctrine, need to have considerable cultural sensitivity, knowledge, and good fortune. They must work in close and constructive concert with a credible local government. They need to be able to control the borders and protect communities during the lengthy process of reconstruction.
It is almost impossible to say what counterinsurgency does not include. But it almost always requires more troops. I first heard almost a year ago that General Petraeus was pressing for another 40,000 troops. When I finally saw McChrystal in Kabul in October, he had completed his report and formally requested another 40,000 troops. Obama could not refuse the bulk of the general's requests without being personally blamed for the future of Afghanistan.
Little wonder that some called (in the President's words) "for a more dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort—one that would commit us to a nation-building project of up to a decade." How could they ask for any other course when they argued from within a conceptual prison, founded on fears, boxed in by domestic political calculations, restricted by misleading definitions, buttressed by syllogisms, endorsed by generals, and crowned with historical analogies? Yet this is what the President said about full-scale escalation:
I reject this course because it sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost, and what we need to achieve to secure our interests. As President, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests. And I must weigh all of the challenges that our nation faces. I don't have the luxury of committing to just one. Indeed, I'm mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who—in discussing our national security—said, "Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs."
I felt as though I had come to hear a fifteenth-century scholastic and found myself suddenly encountering Erasmus: someone not quite free of the peculiarities of the old way, and therefore haunted by its elisions, omissions, and contradictions; but already anticipating a reformation. Obama's central—and revolutionary—claim is that our responsibility, our means, and our interests are finite in Afghanistan. As he says, "we can't simply afford to ignore the price of these wars." Instead of pursuing an Afghan policy for existential reasons—doing "whatever it takes" and "whatever it costs"—we should accept that there is a limit on what we can do. And we don't have a moral obligation to do what we cannot do.
The US must husband its resources to meet other strategic challenges. Obama's description of these is still narrowly focused on failed states and terrorism: it does not include the threats posed by states such as China or Russia, still less Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, or Kashmir, and it does not attempt to compare the conflict in Afghanistan to the risks posed by climate change or threats to the supply of food in poor nations. But he names Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia as posing challenges. The US responsibility to the Afghan people is only one responsibility among many and "the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own." He emphasizes the competing demand of domestic priorities and costs:
Over the past several years, we have lost that balance. We've failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy.
Or to return to poker, he argues that we have limited chips and the amount we stake in Afghanistan should reflect the amount we stand to gain and the likelihood of winning.
This may imply that Obama has given up and is in favor of a rapid exit. (I, for one, have rarely managed to convince anyone during the last four years that I can be both against troop increases and against withdrawal.) But Obama opposes precipitate withdrawal. He acknowledges that although "our responsibility, our means, or our interests" are limited, they exist in Afghanistan. We have a certain responsibility to the Afghan people who would suffer a civil war if we withdrew. This would initially be between the Taliban and the Karzai government, but it could expand (as it did in the 1990s) into more fragmented local conflicts, fueled by neighboring countries, in which no faction is strong enough to win or weak enough to give up the fight, and in which Afghans are plunged back into anarchy, cruel conflict, and poverty. We have the means, however, to make a positive contribution and we have an interest in preventing a defeat that would wreck our hopes, humiliate the United States and NATO, embolden our enemies, and weaken our allies (and not only in Pakistan). He implies that just because we cannot do everything does not mean we can do nothing.
Obama's objectives in remaining in Afghanistan are as follows:
We must deny al Qaeda a safe haven. We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's security forces and government so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future.... And we will also focus our assistance in areas—such as agriculture—that can make an immediate impact in the lives of the Afghan people.
In other words, he would continue to use intelligence and special forces to keep the pressure on Osama bin Laden. He would continue to deliver humanitarian assistance and economic development aid particularly to the many poor and neglected communities who want to work with us in the north and center of Afghanistan. In addition (which differentiates this model from the strictly counterterrorism approach), he would retain a sufficiently robust presence to prevent the Taliban from ever gathering an army or mounting a conventional threat or rolling artillery and tanks up the highway to take an Afghan city like Kabul. And combine US military presence with political action and incentives to keep tribal leaders and other regional power brokers on our side and away from the Taliban. And ultimately, through all these techniques, decrease the likelihood of civil war, increase the likelihood of a political settlement with the Taliban, and leave Afghanistan in twenty years' time a more stable and prosperous country than it is today.
This strategy assumes that the Afghan Taliban are less of a threat to Pakistani stability and NATO than they appear. It also assumes that a counterinsurgency strategy and Iraq-style surge will not—on their own—succeed and a state-building strategy will not work. Obama still needs to find the language to express these insights without falling into the trap of withdrawal.
There are, in reality, no inescapable connections between Afghanistan and Pakistan, al-Qaeda and the Taliban. There are positive and negative effects of our Afghan operations on Pakistan, (positive, through increasing pressure on the Taliban; negative, through inflaming Islamist anti-US sentiment in Pakistan and driving "bad guys" over the border into Afghanistan). But the future of Pakistan will be determined predominantly by factors internal to Pakistan, such as the military, the feudal system, and the relationship between the institutions of Islam and the Pakistani state. Similarly, although al-Qaeda and the Taliban cooperate and share funding, they are still largely divided between a non-Afghan group focused on international terrorism and Afghan–Pakistani groups whose primary aim is to drive foreign troops from Afghanistan and spread Islamist rule in Pakistan. You could at least in theory defeat the Taliban without eliminating al-Qaeda, and the Taliban could return to power in Afghanistan without bringing back al-Qaeda.
The counterinsurgency strategy and surge in Iraq led to a drop in violence (against predictions), but the same will not happen in Afghanistan. The Iraq insurgency was the movement of a minority sectarian group, the Sunnis, whose supporters have been driven from most of the neighborhoods in the capital city and whose leaders were tribal figures with a long-standing relationship to the central government. The Shia-dominated Baghdad government was a powerful, credible force, from the majority ethnic and sectarian group, and was supported by mass political parties, with their own militias. The challenge for Petraeus and his predecessors in Iraq was to grasp this political opportunity; provide support, money, and status to the losing Sunni groups to separate them from al- Qaeda; and convince Nouri al-Maliki to disengage from some of the Shia militias and endorse the settlement. In Afghanistan, neither the Karzai government nor the Taliban have the history, the structure, or the incentives to foster such a deal.
Afghanistan contains a diffuse rural insurgency spread among a population of 30 million people, 80 percent of whom are scattered among 20,000 remote, often mountainous villages. It is different from Iraq, where the insurgency was largely centered around the flat urban areas surrounding Baghdad. Nor is it like the much smaller Malaya of the 1950s, where the British in their antiguerrilla operations were able to move villagers to walled and guarded camps. At least half of Afghanistan (a country almost the size of Texas) is now threatened by insurgency, and the COIN doctrine requires sufficient troops to secure and protect the population areas.
This is why the architects of the COIN doctrine are calling for a ratio of one "trained counterinsurgent" (a category that includes Afghans, if they have been given the necessary skills) for every fifty members of the population or a combined total that would amount in Afghanistan to 600,000 troops, if they intended to cover the country (though most theorists believe it is only necessary to cover half). The effective, legitimate Afghan government, on which the entire counterinsurgency strategy depends, shows little sign of emerging, in part because the international community lacks the skills, the knowledge, the legitimacy, or the patience to build a new nation. In short, COIN won't work on its own terms because of the lack of numbers and a credible Afghan partner and in absolute terms because of the difficulties of the country and its political structures.
But equally history does not doom the allies to absolute failure. The situation may not be that of Iraq in 2006 or Afghanistan in 1988, but neither is it Afghanistan in 1842, still less in 330 BC (even if we actually understood the victories of the Victorians or Alexander). Pakistan may not be a failed state and mullahs may not be a hand's breadth from its nukes; but Pakistan is facing serious instability and a moderate, constructive policy in Afghanistan could at least prevent Afghanistan from con- tributing further to its instability. The US and its NATO allies would be able to survive withdrawal from Afghanistan but it would be damaging to their reputations. While we cannot write a blank check to Afghans, we would like to prevent their country from falling into civil war, which would probably result in tens of thousands of deaths. It makes sense to stay, if we can maintain a realistic, affordable, and legitimate presence in Afghanistan and do some good.
It is difficult to find the appropriate language to express such insights. A moderate, light policy runs against a natural tendency to invest extravagantly in defending against even minor threats to our national security (the reverse of our systematic tendency to "lowball," i.e., to undercompensate for, or underprice, risk in our banking system or the environment). This partly reflects a general, ancient view of the "night watchman" state, involved not in internal regulation but in security. It is partly because terrorism seems a much more immediate and horrifying prospect than financial collapse, climate change, or threats to food security and is more directly linked to loss of life (even if the other issues ultimately may kill many more people). And our culture puts a very high value on life (though a higher value on the lives of our own citizens than on those of other nationals).
We would prefer, therefore, to believe that any war in which we engage is a vital threat to our very existence—in which case the odds of victory are irrelevant and any sacrifice is justified. And there must be a defined end. It would be difficult for a president to argue that we should sacrifice lives without winning in order to prevent something worse (although we build dams when we can't control the flow of water and employ a police force when we can't end crime).
We would be revolted by someone who tried to calculate how many lives the objectives in Afghanistan were worth (fifty? a thousand?). And these are all healthy intuitions: we would not want to be in a world where lives were treated simply as units, to which we assigned a definite and explicit expendable value in a grand cost-benefit analysis. But these intuitions still reinforce an all-or-nothing approach to foreign policy.
The simple process of naming our past and present strategies already generates and restricts our response. Thus by naming operations in Afghanistan a counterinsurgency, we may feel compelled to deploy one trained counterinsurgent for every fifty members of the population; by labeling our approach "an Afghanistan–Pakistan strategy," we imply that our actions in Afghanistan are vital to the security of Pakistan; by putting the Taliban in the category of those pursuing a global jihad, we conclude that we cannot negotiate with them; by naming Afghanistan a terrorist safe haven or a failed state, we conclude that failure (or even a light "footprint") is not an option.
Obama deftly avoided all these words and traps in his speech, perhaps because he has become aware of their extreme implications. There was no talk of victory. His aim was no longer to defeat but to contain the Taliban: to "deny it the ability to overthrow the government." He explicitly rejected a long "nation-building project." He talked not of eliminating but of keeping the pressure on al-Qaeda. He did not speak of a moral obligation to the Afghan people. He did not specify any necessary logical connections between the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He asserted that "there's no imminent threat of the [Afghan] government being overthrown." He emphasized that "we will support efforts by the Afghan government to open the door to those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens." He did not draw parallels with the surge in Iraq. And most strikingly of all, whereas he had referred four times in March to insurgency, now he stated that "unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency."
Such moderate analysis disappointed those who wanted a call to arms. The West Point cadets in the audience yawned, stared at the floor, and clapped only halfheartedly. Bush's surge in Iraq was a troop increase of only 20 percent; Obama's contributions to Afghanistan since he took office will more than double US troop presence on the ground. Bush spoke at a time of overwhelming public opposition to the war and with one of the lowest popularity ratings ever recorded; but it was Bush, not Obama, who spoke about determination, commitment, victory, and doing whatever it takes. Obama sounded like those he criticized for wanting to "simply maintain a status quo in which we muddle through."
But this moderate tone gains Obama the leverage that Bush lacked. As long as the US asserted that Afghanistan was an existential threat, the front line in the war on terror, and that, therefore, failure was not an option, the US had no leverage over Karzai. The worse Afghanistan behaved—the more drugs it grew and terrorists it fostered—the more money it received. If it sorted out its act, it risked being relegated to a minor charitable recipient like Tajikistan. A senior Afghan official warned me this year "to stop referring to us as a humanitarian crisis: we must be the number one terrorist threat in the world, because if we are not we won't get any money." By asserting convincingly that Afghanistan is not the be-all and end-all and that the US could always ultimately withdraw, Obama escapes this codependent trap and regains some leverage over the Afghan government. In his politer words:
It must be clear that Afghans will have to take responsibility for their security, and that America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan.
But perhaps even more importantly, defining a more moderate and limited strategy gives him leverage over his own generals. By refusing to endorse or use the language of counterinsurgency in the speech, he escapes their doctrinal logic. By no longer committing the US to defeating the Taliban or state-building, he dramatically reduces the objectives and the costs of the mission. By talking about costs, the fragility of public support, and other priorities, he reminds the generals why this surge must be the last. All of this serves to "cap" the troop increases at current levels and provide the justification for beginning to reduce numbers in 2011.
But the brilliance of its moderate arguments cannot overcome that statement about withdrawal. With seven words, "our troops will begin to come home," he loses leverage over the Taliban, as well as leverage he had gained over Karzai and the generals. It is a cautious, lawyerly statement, expressed again as "[we will] begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011." It sets no final exit date or numbers. But the Afghan students who were watching the speech with me ignored these nuances and saw it only as departure.
This may be fatal for Obama's ambition to "open the door" to the Taliban. The lighter, more political, and less but still robust militarized presence that his argument implies could facilitate a deal with the Taliban, if it appeared semi-permanent. As the President asserted, the Taliban are not that strong. They have nothing like the strength or appeal that they had in 1995. They cannot take the capital, let alone recapture the country. There is strong opposition to their presence, particularly in the center and the north of the country. Their only hope is to negotiate. But the Taliban need to acknowledge this. And the only way they will is if they believe that we are not going to allow the Kabul government to collapse.
Afghanistan has been above all a project not of force but of patience. It would take decades before Afghanistan achieved the political cohesion, stability, wealth, government structures, or even basic education levels of Pakistan. A political settlement requires a reasonably strong permanent government. The best argument against the surge, therefore, was never that a US operation without an adequate Afghan government partner would be unable to defeat the Taliban—though it won't. Nor that the attempt to strengthen the US campaign will intensify resistance, though it may. Nor because such a deployment of over 100,000 troops at a cost of perhaps $100 billion a year would be completely disproportional to the US's limited strategic interests and moral obligation in Afghanistan—though that too is true.
Instead, Obama should not have requested more troops because doing so intensifies opposition to the war in the US and Europe and accelerates the pace of withdrawal demanded by political pressures at home. To keep domestic consent for a long engagement we need to limit troop numbers and in particular limit our casualties. The surge is a Mephistophelian bargain, in which the President has gained force but lost time.
What can now be done to salvage the administration's position? Obama has acquired leverage over the generals and some support from the public by making it clear that he will not increase troop strength further. He has gained leverage over Karzai by showing that he has options other than investing in Afghanistan. Now he needs to regain leverage over the Taliban by showing them that he is not about to abandon Afghanistan and that their best option is to negotiate. In short, he needs to follow his argument for a call strategy to its conclusion. The date of withdrawal should be recast as a time for reduction to a lighter, more sustainable, and more permanent presence. This is what the administration began to do in the days following the speech. As National Security Adviser General James Jones said, "That date is a 'ramp' rather than a cliff." And as Hillary Clinton said in her congressional testimony on December 3, their real aim should be to "develop a long-term sustainable relationship with Afghanistan and Pakistan so that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past, primarily our abandonment of that region."
A more realistic, affordable, and therefore sustainable presence would not make Afghanistan stable or predictable. It would be merely a small if necessary part of an Afghan political strategy. The US and its allies would only moderate, influence, and fund a strategy shaped and led by Afghans themselves. The aim would be to knit together different Afghan interests and allegiances sensitively enough to avoid alienating independent local groups, consistently enough to regain their trust, and robustly enough to restore the security and justice that Afghans demand and deserve from a national government.
What would this look like in practice? Probably a mess. It might involve a tricky coalition of people we refer to, respectively, as Islamists, progressive civil society, terrorists, warlords, learned technocrats, and village chiefs. Under a notionally democratic constitutional structure, it could be a rickety experiment with systems that might, like Afghanistan's neighbors, include strong elements of religious or military rule. There is no way to predict what the Taliban might become or what authority a national government in Kabul could regain. Civil war would remain a possibility. But an intelligent, long-term, and tolerant partnership with the United States could reduce the likelihood of civil war and increase the likelihood of a political settlement. This is hardly the stuff of sound bites and political slogans. But it would be better for everyone than boom and bust, surge and flight. With the right patient leadership, a political strategy could leave Afghanistan in twenty years' time more prosperous, stable, and humane than it is today. That would be excellent for Afghans and good for the world.
Meanwhile, Obama's broader strategic argument must not be lost. He has grasped that the foreign policy of the president should not consist in a series of extravagant, brief, Manichaean battles, driven by exaggerated fears, grandiloquent promises, and fragile edifices of doctrine. Instead the foreign policy of a great power should be the responsible exercise of limited power and knowledge in concurrent situations of radical uncertainty. Obama, we may hope, will develop this elusive insight. And then it might become possible to find the right places in which to deploy the wealth, the courage, and the political capital of the United States. We might hope in South Asia, for example, for a lighter involvement in Afghanistan but a much greater focus on Kashmir.[*]
I began by saying that "calling" in poker was childish and that grownups raise or fold. But there is another category of people who raise or fold: those who are anxious to leave the table. They go all in to exit, hoping to get lucky but if not then at least to finish. They do not do this on the basis of their cards or the pot. They do it because they lack the patience, the interest, the focus, or the confidence to pace themselves carefully through the long and exhausting hours. They no longer care enough about the game. Obama is a famously keen poker player. He should never be in a hurry to leave the table.
At least 30 people have been killed and dozens injured in a suicide bombing on a Shia Muslim march in the Pakistani city of Karachi, officials say.
The attacker had been walking amidst a procession with tens of thousands of people, said the interior minister.
After the explosion, marchers turned their anger on ambulance workers, security forces and journalists.
Pakistan's security forces have been on high alert as Shia Muslims marked the holy month of Muharram, or Ashura.
Monday was the climax of the holy period, which commemorates the death of the Prophet Muhammad's grandson.
Blood-stained walls
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, which comes amid an upsurge of attacks by Taliban militants in Pakistan.
“ I am hearing people are clashing with police and doctors, that is what terrorists want, to see this city again on fire ” Mustafa Kamal Karachi Mayor
Karachi has a long history of sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis.
There have been numerous attacks on such processions across the country over the last few days, says the BBC's Aleem Maqbool.
On Sunday, eight people were killed when a suicide bomber targeted a Shia march in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
Interior Minister Rehman Malik blamed Monday's blast on extremists who wanted to destabilise Pakistan.
"Whoever has done this, he cannot be a Muslim. He is worse than an infidel," he told reporters.
Karachi police chief Waseem Ahmed said the severed head of the bomber had been found, reports Reuters news agency.
One survivor, Naseem Raza, told AP news agency: "I saw walls stained with blood and splashed with human flesh. I saw bloodstained people lying here and there."
Fleeing the scene of the blast, another mourner told AFP news agency: "My sister, her husband and children are dead."
The bombing unleashed further pandemonium as angry Shia mourners fired shots in the air.
Smashed ambulances
Rioters torched dozens of shops and vehicles, while members of the security forces who had been guarding the procession were pelted with stones.
TV footage showed smashed police vehicles and ambulances.
Karachi Mayor Mustafa Kamal appealed for calm.
"I am hearing people are clashing with police and doctors. Please do not do that," AP news agency quoted him as saying.
"That is what terrorists are aiming at. They want to see this city again on fire."
Our correspondent says an incident like this was feared by the authorities. Stringent security measures had been put in place across the country over the last month.
Hundreds of civilians have been killed in bomb attacks in recent months as Pakistan's army pursues an offensive against Taliban militants in South Waziristan and surrounding areas.
Pakistan also has a long history of violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims that is estimated to have killed several thousand people in the last three decades alone.
Some radicals in the Sunni majority regard Shias - who make up about 20% of the population - as heretics.
Mr Mousavi's nephew, Seyed Ali Mousavi, was among those killed on Sunday.
State media said authorities were doing forensic tests on his and four other bodies, preventing the rapid burials that are usual under Islamic tradition.
The bodies had been "retained in order to complete forensic and police examinations and find more leads on this suspicious incident", the Irna news agency reported.
The Mousavi family had said earlier that Seyed Ali's body had been taken without their permission from the hospital where it was being held.
RECENT UNREST IN IRAN
19 Dec: Influential dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri dies aged 87
21 Dec: Tens of thousands attend his funeral in Qom; reports of clashes between opposition supporters and security forces
22 Dec: Further confrontations reported in Qom
23 Dec: More clashes reported in city of Isfahan as memorial is held
24 Dec: Iran reportedly bans further memorial services for Montazeri except in his birthplace and Qom
26 Dec: Clashes reported in central and northern Tehran
27 Dec: At least eight dead following anti-government protests in Tehran; 300 reported arrested
Opposition sources said the body had been taken by government agents in order to prevent his funeral becoming a rallying point for more protests.
An opposition website, Norooz, said police had fired tear gas on Monday to disperse a group of Mousavi supporters who were demonstrating outside the hospital.
According to Mr Mousavi's website, Seyed Ali Mousavi was shot in the back on Sunday as security forces fired on demonstrators in Tehran.
Intermittent protests in Iran following President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's controversial re-election in June have represented the biggest challenge to the government since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Foreign media face severe restrictions in Iran, making reports hard to verify.
BBC Tehran correspondent Jon Leyne, reporting from London, says the government's immediate response to the latest confrontation has been to arrest senior opposition figures, as it did after protests against the disputed presidential elections in June.
The authorities are blaming troublemakers for the violence, our correspondent says, with the police denying that security forces are responsible for any deaths and suggesting that protesters may have shot each other.
The majority hardline block in the Iranian parliament called on "security and judiciary authorities to firmly deal with those who mock Ashura", referring to the Shia Muslim festival that reached its climax on Sunday.
But members of the opposition believe Seyed Ali Mousavi was deliberately targeted by the government in an attempt to intimidate Mir Hossein Mousavi.
Our correspondent adds that the government will be doing itself no favours if it has taken his body because this would outrage religious conservatives, as well as the opposition.
'Shameless act'
Among those reported arrested on Monday were opposition politician Ebrahim Yazdi, a foreign minister after the 1979 revolution and now leader of the Freedom Movement of Iran, his nephew, Lily Tavasoli.
Mr Yazdi's son Khalil, who lives in the US, told the BBC's World Today programme he believed the Iranian authorities wanted to close down all opposition groups.
"It is a shameless and irresponsible act," he said.
"Any opposition now, they want to shut [it] down. We're going down a one-way street that's now going downhill."
The Parlemannews website reported that three aides to Mir Hossein Mousavi had been arrested.
It also named two aides to reformist former President Mohammad Khatami as being among those rounded up by the authorities.
Mousavi Tebrizi, a senior cleric from the holy city of Qom who is close to Mr Mousavi, is also reported to have been arrested, as is human-rights campaigner and journalist Emeddin Baghi.
International condemnation
After Sunday's clashes, police fired tear gas to disperse crowds of demonstrators in various parts of Tehran overnight, according to reports.
On Monday, state-owned English-language Press TV said eight people had died. Earlier, Persian state television had reported at least 15 people killed.
The official death toll for Sunday's confrontation is the highest since June, and police said about 300 people had been detained.
Unconfirmed reports, later denied by a local prosecutor, said four people also died in protests in the north-western city of Tabriz. Clashes were also reported in Isfahan and Najafabad in central Iran and Shiraz in the south.
Moderate cleric Mehdi Karoubi, who came fourth in last June's election, criticised Iran's rulers for Sunday's violence, an opposition website reported.
The US, the UK, France, Germany and Canada have all condemned the violence.
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said it was "particularly disturbing to hear accounts of the lack of restraint by the security forces" on a day of religious commemoration and reflection.
In a strongly-worded statement, German Chancellor Angela Merkel criticised the "unacceptable actions of the security forces" and urged Tehran to respect civil rights.
Iranian security forces have been on alert since influential dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri died a week ago aged 87.
His funeral attracted tens of thousands of pro-reform supporters, many of whom shouted anti-government slogans.
Patrols are on the lookout for unmarried couples, although the Indonesian province has stopped short of stoning adulterers
It is late afternoon; the light is softening and young people have gathered at the harbour in Banda Aceh to play music, buy an ice cream and just hang out. Suddenly the tranquillity of the scene is shattered when two black pick-ups arrive and discharge a dozen men and women in olive uniforms.
The officers approach a couple sitting in the shade. One says: "We're here to enforce local regulation 14. Are you married?" Shamefaced, the boy and girl shake their heads. The officers examine their identity papers, then order them to leave. The couple ride off on their motorbike, flushed with embarrassment.
It's all in a day's work for the Wilayatul Hisbah, a special unit established to enforce sharia in the staunchly Muslim province of Aceh, on the western tip of Indonesia's Sumatra island. The unit patrols several times a day, looking out for people drinking alcohol, gambling, unmarried couples, and women wearing tight clothes or not wearing an Islamic headscarf, a jilbab.
Aceh - known as the "Veranda of Mecca" because Islam entered Indonesia there centuries ago - won the right to implement sharia law in 2001, after the province was granted semi-autonomy as part of efforts to end a decades-long separatist war. In recent years, the law has been enforced with increasing rigour, with dozens of public canings carried out.
In September the provincial parliament approved a new criminal code that includes a provision for adulterers to be stoned to death. The move was condemned by human rights groups, and has alarmed local businessmen, who fear it will harm Aceh's attempts to attract investment following the tsunami five years ago. The provincial governor, Irwandi Yusuf, has refused to sign the new code, so for now it remains in an uncomfortable limbo. That has not prevented the Wilayatul Hisbah, sometimes compared with Saudi Arabia's notorious "vice and virtue" police, from pursuing their task with zeal. And Aceh is not alone. Across Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, dozens of local governments - given wide scope to enact their own laws under a decentralised system - have adopted Islamic regulations on dress and behaviour.
The trend threatens to undermine Indonesia's reputation for fostering a moderate brand of Islam, yet the creeping fundamentalism is not widely endorsed. At elections earlier this year, support for Islamic parties plummeted, at national level and also in Aceh. Many Acehnese abhor the stoning penalty, although few are prepared to criticise it publicly for fear of being labelled bad Muslims.
Observers say a radical Islamist minority is being allowed to hijack the agenda, and in Aceh that minority is certainly making headway. In October, clerics denounced an Acehnese woman who failed to wear a jilbab while competing in a national beauty pageant. From 1 January, tight trousers will be banned in one district.
Iskandar, head of the Wilayatul Hisbah, or "Wi-Ha", as it is known colloquially, applauds such measures. "In our religion, it's forbidden to wear tight clothes, because they can show the body shape and arouse men's desire to do things with women," he explains. "It's all about protecting women and increasing respect for them. Before sharia law, women were dressing impolitely and getting pregnant outside marriage. That has all decreased now."
At Wi-Ha's dilapidated headquarters in central Banda Aceh, Iskandar is in charge of 62 officers, including 16 women. "Right now three of them are pregnant," he confides, adding hastily: "All are married, of course."
For the dusk patrol, six women and six men set off in the two vehicles, men in front, women following. They cruise slowly towards the harbour, then suddenly veer off sharply to the right. Two young couples have been spotted behaving suspiciously.
It turns out that they are just sitting together in a public place. But Kuzri, the patrol leader, gives them a stiff warning nonetheless. "It's preventative action, to make sure nothing else happens," he says. "We told them that to be together in a romantic way if not married can be dangerous and is actually forbidden. It can lead to bigger things, and on to adultery." ("Adultery", in Aceh, means any kind of illicit sex.)
Further on, a girl and boy take off on a motorbike as soon as the sharia police arrive. "Actually we're brother and sister, but we were leaving anyway," says the boy. Another couple, who are fishing off some rocks, say they are married. Kuzri believes them. "You can tell whether people are married," he says. "First the location: married people don't need to find a secluded place to spend time with their spouses. Unmarried couples will try to find a place out of sight. Also, they sit next to each other, very close. People who are married don't do that."
It may seem semi-farcical, yet those who transgress the moral code can be caned, even if the stoning law has yet to be enacted. Critics say the code discriminates against women and poor people (since rich couples can go to a hotel), intrudes into private lives, encourages vigilantism and violates the Indonesian constitution. Iskandar receives about 20 anonymous tip-offs a day. A man is spotted going into a hair and beauty salon; he is suspected of visiting prostitutes. An unmarried couple are seen entering a house at 7pm and not leaving until dawn. "What do you think they were doing all that time?" asks Iskandar. He laughs. "Just sleeping or talking?"
But he insists that Aceh is "very different from Afghanistan", and says no one has been caned since he took over last year. "I prefer to give people advice, maybe call in their parents. I think caning is not a good solution." He leans forward conspiratorially. "Actually, I hate caning," he says.
While there is support for sharia, particularly in socially conservative rural areas, many Acehnese have reservations. Lindawati, a seamstress, says: "Women are dressing more modestly now, and there are fewer cases of adultery, which is good. But as for the stoning regulation, I don't know how I would feel if one of my family had to suffer that kind of punishment."
Back at the harbour, a woman selling barbecued sweetcorn by the roadside is displeased to see Kuzri's team. "To be honest, most people don't like the sharia police," she says. One of her customers, a young man, agrees. "I got a warning for being out with my girlfriend," he says. "It's annoying. We weren't doing anything wrong."
But the Wi-Ha is happy in its work. "There are two advantages of our job," says Herman. "We get to carry out our duties, and we also get blessed by God because we're strengthening Islam."
VILA DOS CRENTES, Brazil — Raimundo Teixeira de Souza came to this sweltering Amazon outpost 15 years ago, looking for land. He bought 20 acres, he said, but more powerful farmers, who roam this Wild West territory with rifles strapped to their backs, forced him to sell much of it for a pittance.
Then someone shot and killed Mr. de Souza’s 23-year-old stepson in the middle of a village road two years ago, residents said. No one has been arrested. In fact, the new police chief has no record that the crime was even investigated by his predecessor. It is hardly surprising, the chief said, considering that he has only four investigators to cover an area of rampant land-grabbing and deforestation the size of Austria.
“We are being massacred,” said Mr. de Souza, 44, who leads the local residents’ association. “We just want to work and raise our children.”
It has been this way for decades, residents say. Throughout this huge stretch of the Amazon, the state has been virtually nonexistent, whether in the form of police officers or clear records of land ownership, giving way to a brazen culture of illegal land seizures, often at the tip of a gun barrel.
But using a new law, Brazil’s government is trying to impose order on this often lawless territory, and in the process, possibly nip away at a broader global concern: deforestation and the threat of climate change that comes with it.
For the first time, the Brazilian government is formally establishing who owns tens of millions of acres across the Amazon, enabling it to track who is responsible for clearing forests for logging and cattle — and who should be held accountable when it is done illegally.
“The government will finally know whose land it is, and who is responsible for what goes on there,” said Thomas E. Lovejoy, the biodiversity chair for the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment in Washington.
This county in the state of Pará is the worst place for forest destruction in Brazil, and environmentalists say they hope that the new law, approved by Brazil’s Congress in June, will help the government finally enforce its official limits on clearing land.
But it is a huge and messy undertaking. Clear ownership records exist for less than 4 percent of the land in private hands throughout the Brazilian Amazon, government officials said. Here in Pará, officials have discovered false titles for about 320 million acres, almost double the amount of land that actually exists, according to federal officials.
And while small farmers like Mr. de Souza are pinning their hopes on the law, many larger-scale land holders say they have sacrificed too much blood and sweat for bureaucrats in Brasília, the capital, to force new rules upon them.
“Everything we have today was built from our own desire to work,” said Jorgiano Alves de Oliveira, 68, who raises cattle and grows cocoa on about 600 acres.
The problem began with the military dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s, which invited settlers to occupy the Amazon but required them to clear forests to gain access to land and credit.
Growing criticism of Brazil’s Amazon policies pushed the civilian government of the 1980s to develop laws that, on paper at least, were among the world’s most protective of forests. But with scant presence of authorities to enforce them, the laws did little to stop the widespread grabbing of land.
“This chaos of legal insecurity was the most important basis for the perverse incentives in the Amazon to pillage rather than to preserve or to develop, and constant incitement to violence,” said Roberto Mangabeira Unger, the former minister for strategic affairs who helped develop the new land law.
Under the law, which applies to more than 150 million acres, the government will award plots up to 250 acres free to settlers. Bigger plots will be sold at varying prices, with or without public auctions, depending on their size. Those larger than about 6,000 acres cannot be sold without an explicit act of Congress. So far, settlers have registered about 4 percent of the land singled out under the law, according to government officials.
Since the days of the dictatorship, this huge county in Pará State, known as São Félix do Xingu, has drawn hardy settlers and prospectors in search of cheap land, good soil, a rich array of minerals and rare Amazon fruits.
But notorious criminals have also found refuge. Leonardo Dias Mendonça ran a vast criminal enterprise from São Félix, which included a fleet of planes used to deliver weapons to the Colombian rebels in exchange for drugs, before being convicted in 2003.
Disputes in São Félix were traditionally settled with “a lot of death,” said Waldemir de Oliveira, the leader of the São Félix agricultural association. “It was the law of the strongest,” Mr. de Oliveira said. “Farmers put guards on the perimeter of their land and no one went in. Those that did were told to ‘Get out or die.’ ”
Mr. de Oliveira and other residents say the violence is diminishing but is still a major worry. In November, a local bar owner turned the tables on four men who came to kill him in broad daylight, killing all of them, said João Gross, an architect in the area.
In Vila dos Crentes, the loud roar of a generator nearly drowned out a recent meeting of residents gathered in a church. “We are beginning to understand that we have to get engaged in reforestation and stop deforestation,” Mr. de Souza said.
But those goals are clouded by the constant threat of violence. Residents said workers on a nearby farm had been carrying out a campaign of violence and intimidation to try to force them out, and even dumped a poisonous chemical from a plane over the area, killing fish and animals.
In May 2007, residents found Mr. de Souza’s stepson dead in the road, shot multiple times.
“No one should make enemies here,” said Eder Rodrigues de Oliveira, 26, who said he grew up with Mr. de Souza’s stepson. “Everyone here must be humble.”
At the closest police station, more than 100 miles away, Chief Álvaro Ikeda said killing was common here, touching a stack of files containing information about 11 suspected homicides under investigation.
Witnesses often are too afraid to come forward. “I cannot guarantee the witnesses’ life,” Chief Ikeda said. “I cannot even guarantee my own life.”
To that end, the police chief decided to live in the police station. He keeps a 12-gauge shotgun and an assault rifle at the ready.
“Here we do not let go of our guns,” he said.
Mery Galanternick contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.
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