Imposing Middle East Peace

By Henry Siegman

This article appeared in the January 25, 2010 edition of The Nation.

January 7, 2010

This article is based on a longer study commissioned by the Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre in Oslo.

PETER O. ZIERLEIN

Israel's relentless drive to establish "facts on the ground" in the occupied West Bank, a drive that continues in violation of even the limited settlement freeze to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed himself, seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that "achievement," one that successive Israeli governments have long sought in order to preclude the possibility of a two-state solution, Israel has crossed the threshold from "the only democracy in the Middle East" to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.

The inevitability of such a transformation has been held out not by "Israel bashers" but by the country's own leaders. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon referred to that danger, as did Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who warned that Israel could not escape turning into an apartheid state if it did not relinquish "almost all the territories, if not all," including the Arab parts of East Jerusalem.

Olmert ridiculed Israeli defense strategists who, he said, had learned nothing from past experiences and were stuck in the mindset of the 1948 war of independence. "With them, it is all about tanks and land and controlling territories and controlled territories and this hilltop and that hilltop," he said. "All these things are worthless. Who thinks seriously that if we sit on another hilltop, on another hundred meters, that this is what will make the difference for the State of Israel's basic security?"

It is now widely recognized in most Israeli circles--although denied by Israel's government--that the settlements have become so widespread and so deeply implanted in the West Bank as to rule out the possibility of their removal (except for a few isolated and sparsely populated ones) by this or any future Israeli government unless compelled to do so by international intervention, an eventuality until now considered entirely unlikely.

It is not only the settlements' proliferation and size that have made their dismantlement impossible. Equally decisive have been the influence of Israel's settler-security-industrial complex, which conceived and implemented this policy; the recent disappearance of a viable pro-peace political party in Israel; and the infiltration by settlers and their supporters in the religious-national camp into key leadership positions in Israel's security and military establishments.

Olmert was mistaken in one respect, for he said Israel would turn into an apartheid state when the Arab population in Greater Israel outnumbers the Jewish population. But the relative size of the populations is not the decisive factor in such a transition. Rather, the turning point comes when a state denies national self-determination to a part of its population--even one that is in the minority--to which it has also denied the rights of citizenship.

When a state's denial of the individual and national rights of a large part of its population becomes permanent, it ceases to be a democracy. When the reason for that double disenfranchisement is that population's ethnic and religious identity, the state is practicing a form of apartheid, or racism, not much different from the one that characterized South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The democratic dispensation that Israel provides for its mostly Jewish citizens cannot hide its changed character. By definition, democracy reserved for privileged citizens--while all others are kept behind checkpoints, barbed-wire fences and separation walls commanded by the Israeli army--is not democracy but its opposite.

The Jewish settlements and their supporting infrastructure, which span the West Bank from east to west and north to south, are not a wild growth, like weeds in a garden. They have been carefully planned, financed and protected by successive Israeli governments and Israel's military. Their purpose has been to deny the Palestinian people independence and statehood--or to put it more precisely, to retain Israeli control of Palestine "from the river to the sea," an objective that precludes the existence of a viable and sovereign Palestinian state east of Israel's pre-1967 border.

A vivid recollection from the time I headed the American Jewish Congress is a helicopter trip over the West Bank on which I was taken by Ariel Sharon. With large, worn maps in hand, he pointed out to me strategic locations of present and future settlements on east-west and north-south axes that, Sharon assured me, would rule out a future Palestinian state.

Just one year after the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, then defense minister, described Israel's plan for the future of the territories as "the current reality." "The plan is being implemented in actual fact," he said. "What exists today must remain as a permanent arrangement in the West Bank." Ten years later, at a conference in Tel Aviv whose theme was finding a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, Dayan said: "The question is not, What is the solution? but, How do we live without a solution?"

Prime Minister Netanyahu's conditions for Palestinian statehood would leave under Israel's control Palestine's international borders and airspace, as well as the entire Jordan Valley; would leave most of the settlers in place; and would fragment the contiguity of the territory remaining for such a state. His conditions would also deny Palestinians even those parts of East Jerusalem that Israel unilaterally annexed to the city immediately following the 1967 war--land that had never been part of Jerusalem before the war. In other words, Netanyahu's conditions for Palestinian statehood would meet Dayan's goal of leaving Israel's de facto occupation in place.

From Dayan's prescription for the permanence of the status quo to Netanyahu's prescription for a two-state solution, Israel has lived "without a solution," not because of uncertainty or neglect but as a matter of deliberate policy, clandestinely driving settlement expansion to the point of irreversibility while pretending to search for "a Palestinian partner for peace."

Sooner or later the White House, Congress and the American public--not to speak of a Jewish establishment that is largely out of touch with the younger Jewish generation's changing perceptions of Israel's behavior--will have to face the fact that America's "special relationship" with Israel is sustaining a colonial enterprise.

President Barack Obama's capitulation to Netanyahu on the settlement freeze was widely seen as the collapse of the latest hope for achievement of a two-state agreement. It thoroughly discredited the notion that Palestinian moderation is the path to statehood, and therefore also discredited Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, moderation's leading Palestinian advocate, who announced his intention not to run in the coming presidential elections.

Netanyahu's "limited" freeze was described by the Obama administration as "unprecedented," even though the exceptions to it--3,000 housing units whose foundations had supposedly already been laid, public buildings and unlimited construction in East Jerusalem--brought total construction to where it would have been without a freeze. Indeed, Netanyahu assured the settler leadership and his cabinet that construction will resume after the ten-month freeze--according to minister Benny Begin, at a rate "faster and more than before"--even if Abbas agrees to return to talks. In fact, the Israeli press has reported that the freeze notwithstanding, new construction in the settlements is "booming." None of this has elicited the Obama administration's public rebuke, much less the kinds of sanctions imposed on Palestinians when they violate agreements.

But what is widely believed to have been the final blow to a two-state solution may in fact turn out to be the necessary condition for its eventual achievement. That condition is abandonment of the utterly wrongheaded idea that a Palestinian state can arise without forceful outside intervention. The international community has shown signs of exasperation with Israel's deceptions and stonewalling, and also with Washington's failure to demonstrate that there are consequences not only for Palestinian violations of agreements but for Israeli ones as well. The last thing many in the international community want is a resumption of predictably meaningless negotiations between Netanyahu and Abbas. Instead, they are focusing on forceful third-party intervention, a concept that is no longer taboo.

Ironically, it is Netanyahu who now insists on the resumption of peace talks. For him, a prolonged breakdown of talks risks exposing the irreversibility of the settlements, and therefore the loss of Israel's democratic character, and legitimizing outside intervention as the only alternative to an unstable and dangerous status quo. While the Obama administration may be reluctant to support such initiatives, it may no longer wish to block them.

These are not fanciful fears. Israeli chiefs of military intelligence, the Shin Bet and other defense officials told Netanyahu's security cabinet on December 9 that the stalled peace process has led to a dangerous vacuum "into which a number of different states are putting their own initiatives, none of which are in Israel's favor." They stressed that "the fact that the US has also reached a dead-end in its efforts only worsens the problem."

If these fears are realized and the international community abandons a moribund peace process in favor of determined third-party initiatives, a two-state outcome may yet be possible. A recent proposal by the Swedish presidency of the European Union is perhaps the first indication of the international community's determination to react more meaningfully to Netanyahu's intransigence. The proposal, adopted by the EU's foreign ministers on December 8, reaffirmed an earlier declaration of the European Council that the EU would not recognize unilateral Israeli changes in the pre-1967 borders. The resolution also opposes Israeli measures to deny a prospective Palestinian state any presence in Jerusalem. The statement's endorsement of PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's two-year institution-building initiative suggests a future willingness to act favorably on a Palestinian declaration of statehood following the initiative's projected completion. In her first pronouncement on the Israel-Palestine conflict as the EU's new high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Baroness Catherine Ashton declared, "We cannot and nor, I doubt, can the region tolerate another round of fruitless negotiations."

An imposed solution has risks, but these do not begin to compare with the risks of the conflict's unchecked continuation. Furthermore, since the adversaries are not being asked to accept anything they have not already committed themselves to in formal accords, the international community is not imposing its own ideas but insisting the parties live up to existing obligations. That kind of intervention, or "imposition," is hardly unprecedented; it is the daily fare of international diplomacy. It defines America's relations with allies and unfriendly countries alike.

It would not take extraordinary audacity for Obama to reaffirm the official position of every previous US administration--including that of George W. Bush--that no matter how desirable or necessary certain changes in the pre-1967 status may seem, they cannot be made unilaterally. Even Bush, celebrated in Israel as "the best American president Israel ever had," stated categorically that this inviolable principle applies even to the settlement blocs that Israel insists it will annex. Speaking of these blocs at a May 2005 press conference, Bush affirmed that "changes to the 1949 armistice lines must be mutually agreed to," a qualification largely ignored by Israeli governments (and by Bush himself). The next year Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was even more explicit. She stated that "the president did say that at the time of final status, it will be necessary to take into account new realities on the ground that have changed since 1967, but under no circumstances...should anyone try and do that in a pre-emptive or predetermined way, because these are issues for negotiation at final status."

Of course, Obama should leave no doubt that it is inconceivable for the United States not to be fully responsive to Israel's genuine security needs, no matter how displeased it may be with a particular Israeli government's policies. But he must also leave no doubt that it is equally inconceivable he would abandon America's core values or compromise its strategic interests to keep Netanyahu's government in power, particularly when support for this government means supporting a regime that would permanently disenfranchise and dispossess the Palestinian people.

In short, Middle East peacemaking efforts will continue to fail, and the possibility of a two-state solution will disappear, if US policy continues to ignore developments on the ground in the occupied territories and within Israel, which now can be reversed only through outside intervention. President Obama is uniquely positioned to help Israel reclaim Jewish and democratic ideals on which the state was founded--if he does not continue "politics as usual." But was it not his promise to reject just such a politics that swept Obama into the presidency and captured the amazement and respect of the entire world?

About Henry Siegman

Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.

The Transformation of Hamas

By Fawaz A. Gerges

This article appeared in the January 25, 2010 edition of The Nation.

January 7, 2010

PETER O. ZIERLEIN

Something is stirring within the Hamas body politic, a moderating trend that, if nourished and engaged, could transform Palestinian politics and the Arab-Israeli peace process. There are unmistakable signs that the religiously based radical movement has subtly changed its uncompromising posture on Israel. Although low-key and restrained, those shifts indicate that the movement is searching for a formula that addresses the concerns of Western powers yet avoids alienating its social base.

Far from impulsive and unexpected, Hamas's shift reflects a gradual evolution occurring over the past five years. The big strategic turn occurred in 2005, when Hamas decided to participate in the January 2006 legislative elections and thus tacitly accepted the governing rules of the Palestinian Authority (PA), one of which includes recognition of Israel. Ever since, top Hamas leaders have repeatedly declared they will accept a resolution of the conflict along the 1967 borders. The Damascus-based Khaled Meshal, head of Hamas's political bureau and considered a hardliner, acknowledged as much in 2008. "We are realists," he said, who recognize that there is "an entity called Israel." Pressed by an Australian journalist on policy changes Hamas might make, Meshal asserted that the organization has shifted on several key points: "Hamas has already changed--we accepted the national accords for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, and we took part in the 2006 Palestinian elections."

Another senior Hamas leader, Ghazi Hamad, was more specific than Meshal, telling journalists in January 2009 that Hamas would be satisfied with ending Israeli control over the Palestinian areas occupied in the 1967 war--the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. In other words, Hamas would not hold out for liberation of the land that currently includes Israel.

Previously Hamas moderates had called at times for a tahdia (a minor truce, or "calm") or hudna (a longer-term truce, lasting as long as fifty years), which implies some measure of recognition, if only tacit. The moderates justified their policy shift by using Islamic terms (in Islamic history hudnas sometimes develop into permanent truces). Now leaders appear to be going further; they have made a concerted effort to re-educate the rank and file about the necessity of living side by side with their Jewish neighbors, and in so doing mentally prepare them for a permanent settlement. In Gaza's mosques pro-Hamas clerics have begun to cite the example of the famed twelfth-century Muslim military commander and statesman Saladin, who after liberating Jerusalem from the Crusaders allowed them to retain a coastal state in the Levant. The point is that if Saladin could tolerate the warring, bloodthirsty Crusaders, then today's Palestinians should be willing to live peacefully with a Jewish state in their midst.

The Saladin story is important because it provides Hamas with religious legitimacy and allows it to justify the change of direction to followers. Hamas's raison d'être rests on religious legitimation; its leaders understand that they neglect this at their peril. Western leaders and students of international politics should acknowledge that Hamas can no more abandon its commitment to Islamism than the United States can abandon its commitment to liberal democracy. That does not mean Hamas is incapable of change or compromise but simply that its political identity is strongly constituted by its religious legitimation.

It should be emphasized as well that Hamas is not monolithic on the issue of peace. There are multiple, clashing viewpoints and constituencies within the movement. Over the years I have interviewed more than a dozen leaders inside and outside the occupied territories. Although on the whole Hamas's public rhetoric calls for the liberation of all of historic Palestine, not only the territories occupied in 1967, a healthy debate has grown both within and without.

Several factors have played a role in the transformation. They include the burden of governing a war-torn Gaza and the devastation from Israel's 2008-09 attack, which has caused incalculable human suffering and increasing public dissatisfaction in Gaza with Hamas rule.

Before the 2006 parliamentary elections, Hamas was known for its suicide bombers, not its bureaucrats, even though between 2002 and 2006 the organization moved from rejectionism toward participation in a political framework that is a direct product of the Oslo peace process of the 1990s. After the elections, the shift continued. "It is much more difficult to run a government than to oppose and resist Israeli occupation," a senior Hamas leader told me while on official business in Egypt in 2007. "If we do not provide the goods to our people, they'll disown us." Hamas is not just a political party. It's a social movement, and as such it has a long record of concern about and close attention to public opinion. Given the gravity of deteriorating conditions in Gaza and Hamas's weak performance during last year's fighting, it should be no surprise that the organization has undergone a period of fairly intense soul-searching and reassessment of strategic options.

Ironically, despite the West's refusal to regard the Hamas government as legitimate and despite the continuing brutal siege of Gaza, demands for democratic governance within Gaza are driving change. Yet Hamas leaders are fully aware of the danger of alienating more-hardline factions if they show weakness or water down their position and move toward de facto recognition of Israel without getting something substantive in return. Hamas's strategic predicament lies in striking a balance between, on the one hand, a new moderating and maturing sensibility and, on the other, insistence on the right and imperative of armed resistance. This difficult balance often explains the tensions and contradictions in Hamas's public and private pronouncements.

What is striking about Hamas's shift toward the peace process is that it has come at a time of critical challenges from Al Qaeda-like jihadist groups; a low-intensity civil war with rival Fatah, the ruling party of the PA; and a deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza.

Last summer a militant group called Jund Ansar Allah, or the Warriors of God, one of a handful of Al Qaeda-inspired factions, declared the establishment of an Islamic emirate in Gaza--a flagrant rejection of Hamas's authority. Hamas security forces struck instantly and mercilessly at the Warriors, killing more than twenty members, including the group's leader, Abdel-Latif Moussa. In one stroke, the Hamas leadership sent a message to foes and friends alike that it will not tolerate global jihadist groups like Al Qaeda, which want to turn Gaza into a theater of transnational jihad.

Despite the crushing of Moussa's outfit, the extremist challenge persists. The Israeli siege, in place since 2006, along with the suffering and despair it has caused among Gaza's 1.4 million inhabitants, has driven hundreds of young Palestinians into the arms of small Salafist extremist factions that accuse Hamas of forfeiting the armed struggle and failing to implement Shariah law. Hamas leaders appear to be worried about the proliferation of these factions and have instructed clerics to warn worshipers against joining such bands.

Compared with these puritanical and nihilistic groups, Hamas is well within the mainstream of Islamist politics. Operationally and ideologically, there are huge differences between Hamas and jihadi extremists such as Al Qaeda--and there's a lot of bad blood. Hamas is a broad-based religious/nationalist resistance whose focus and violence is limited to Palestine/Israel, while Al Qaeda is a small, transnational terrorist network that has carried out attacks worldwide. Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have vehemently criticized Hamas for its willingness to play politics and negotiate with Israel. Hamas leaders have responded that they know what is good for their people, and they have made it crystal clear they have no interest in transnational militancy. Their overriding goal is political and nationalist rather than ideological and global: to empower Palestinians and liberate the occupied Palestinian territories.

Unlike Al Qaeda and other fringe factions, Hamas is a viable social movement with an extensive social network and a large popular base that has been estimated at several hundred thousand. Given its tradition of sensitivity and responsiveness to Palestinian public opinion, a convincing argument could be made that the recent changes in the organization's conduct can be attributed to the high levels of poverty, unemployment and isolation of Palestinians in Gaza, who fear an even greater deterioration of conditions there.

A further example of Hamas's political and social priorities is its decision to agree in principle to an Egyptian-brokered deal that sketches out a path to peace with Fatah. After two years of bitter and violent division, the warring parties came very close to agreement in October. The deal collapsed at the last moment, but talks continue. There are two points to make about the Egyptian role: first, Hamas leaders say they feel somewhat betrayed by the Egyptians because after pressure from the Americans, Cairo unilaterally revised the final agreed-upon text without consulting the Hamas negotiating team. Second, many Palestinian and Arab observers think Egypt is in no hurry to conclude the Fatah-Hamas talks. They contend that faced with regional challenges and rivals (Iran, Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia), the Mubarak regime views its brokering process in the Palestinian-Israeli theater as an important regional asset and a way to solidify its relationship with Washington.

Despite its frequently reactionary rhetoric, Hamas is a rational actor, a conclusion reached by former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy, who also served as Ariel Sharon's national security adviser and who is certainly not a peacenik. The Hamas leadership has undergone a transformation "right under our very noses" by recognizing that "its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future," Halevy wrote in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot just before the 2008 attack on Gaza. He believes Hamas is ready and willing to accept the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. The US Army Strategic Studies Institute published a similar analysis just before the Israeli offensive, concluding that Hamas was considering a shift of its position and that "Israel's stance toward [Hamas]...has been a major obstacle to substantive peacemaking."

Indeed, it could be argued that Hamas has moved closer to a vision of peace consistent with international law and consensus (two separate states in historic Palestine, divided more or less along the '67 borders with East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, and recognition of all states in the region) than the current Israeli governing coalition. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vehemently opposes the establishment of a genuinely viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and is opposed to giving up any part of Jerusalem--and Netanyahu's governing coalition is more right wing and pro-settlement than he is.

Hamas's political evolution and deepening moderation stand in stark contrast to the rejectionism of the Netanyahu government and call into question which parties are "hardline" and which are "extremist." And at the regional level, a sea change has occurred in the official Arab position toward the Jewish state (the Arab League's 2002 Beirut Declaration, subsequently reiterated, offers full recognition and diplomatic relations if Israel accepts the international consensus regarding a two-state solution), while the attitudes of the Israeli ruling elite have hardened. This marks a transformation of regional politics and a reversal of roles.

Observers might ask, If Hamas is so eager to accept a two-state solution, why doesn't it simply accept the three conditions for engagement required by the so-called diplomatic Quartet (the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations): recognition of Israel, renunciation of violence and acceptance of all previous agreements (primarily, the Oslo Accords)? In my interviews with Hamas officials, they stress that while they have made significant concessions to the Quartet, it has not lifted the punishing sanctions against Hamas, nor has it pressed Israel to end its siege, which has caused a dire humanitarian crisis. In addition, Hamas leaders believe that recognition of Israel is the last card in their hand and are reluctant to play it before talks even begin. Their diplomatic starting point will be to demand that Israel recognize the national rights of the Palestinians and withdraw from the occupied territories--but it will not be their final position.

There can be no viable, lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians if Hamas is not consulted and if the Palestinians remain divided, with two warring authorities in the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas has the means and public support to undermine any agreement that does not address the legitimate rights and claims of the Palestinian people. Its Fatah/PA rival lacks a popular mandate and the legitimacy needed to implement a resolution of the conflict. PA President Mahmoud Abbas has been weakened by a series of blunders of his own making, and with his moral authority compromised in the eyes of a sizable Palestinian constituency, Abbas is yesterday's man--no matter how long he remains in power as a lame duck, and whether or not he competes in the upcoming presidential elections.

If the United States and Europe engaged Hamas, encouraging it to continue moderating its views instead of ignoring it or, worse yet, seeking its overthrow, the West could test the extent of Hamas's evolution. So far the strategy of isolation and military confrontation--pursued in tandem by Israel and the United States--has not appeared to weaken Hamas significantly. If anything, it has radicalized hundreds of young Palestinians, who have joined extremist factions and reinforced the culture of martyrdom and nihilism. All the while, the siege of Gaza has left a trail of untold pain and suffering.

If the Western powers don't engage Hamas, they will never know if it can evolve into an open, tolerant and peaceful social movement. The jury is still out on whether the Islamist movement can make that painful and ideologically costly transition. But the claim that engaging Hamas legitimizes it does not carry much weight; the organization derives its legitimacy from the Palestinian people, a mandate resoundingly confirmed in the free and fair elections of 2006.

To break the impasse and prevent gains by more extremist factions, the Obama administration and Congress should support a unified Palestinian government that could negotiate peace with Israel. Whatever they think of its ideology, US officials should acknowledge that Hamas is a legitimately elected representative of the Palestinian people, and that any treaty signed by a rump Fatah/PA will not withstand the test of time. And instead of twisting Cairo's arms in a rejectionist direction, Washington should encourage its Egyptian ally to broker a truce between Hamas and Fatah and thus repair the badly frayed Palestinian governing institutions. If the Obama administration continues to shun engagement with Hamas, Europe ought to take the lead in establishing an official connection. European governments have already dealt with Lebanon's Hezbollah, a group similar to Hamas in some respects, and they possess the skills, experience and political weight to help broker a viable peace settlement.

Like it or not, Hamas is the most powerful organization in the occupied territories. It is deeply entrenched in Palestinian society. Neither Israel nor the Western powers can wish it away. The good news, if my reading is correct, is that Hamas has changed, is willing to meet some of the Quartet's conditions and is making domestic political preparations for further changes. But if Hamas is not engaged, and if the siege of Gaza and Palestinian suffering continue without hope of ending the political impasse, there is a real danger of a regional war.

About Fawaz A. Gerges

Fawaz A. Gerges is a professor of Middle Eastern politics and international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science at the University of London. His most recent book is Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy (Harcourt)

The Great Leap

By Christopher Hayes

This article appeared in the January 11, 2010 edition of The Nation.

December 22, 2009

AVENGING ANGELS

In the heart of downtown Chongqing, a sprawling city-state in Western China on the banks of the Yangtze River, a six-story tower commemorates those who died in what the Chinese call "the anti-Japanese war." After Japan invaded in 1937, the government moved the capital of China upriver from Nanjing to Chongqing. That decision brought with it Japanese bombs, and the city was destroyed during the war. A year after Mao Zedong founded the New China in 1949, he commemorated the fallen with the People's Liberation Memorial Tower. I was told by a guide at the city's exhibition center that just twenty years ago the memorial was the tallest building in the city. Today, the tower sits in the shadow of at least three mountainous skyscrapers in the central business district. Situated at the intersection of a pedestrian shopping mall, the tower looms about as large on the Chongqing skyline as a hotdog stand on Manhattan's.

My first trip to China--sponsored by the China-United States Exchange Foundation--came just over a month after the People's Republic celebrated its sixtieth anniversary. Those six decades can be cleaved in half: the first act, 1949-78, were the years of Mao, famine and the cultural revolution; the second, the three decades since then, the years of Deng, "reforms" and the "opening up," as the Chinese call it. And yet as far as China has come in terms of wealth (and the concentration thereof), it remains a very poor country: it ranks 100 among the world's nations in terms of per capita GDP, according to the IMF. "Our biggest challenge is not from without but from within," Yang Jiemian, president of the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, told us, citing (obliquely, as the Chinese we talked to were wont to do) the potential for instability as China continues on its trajectory. "It has become the consensus of the elites that China should stay on the right track: the past thirty years have resulted in remarkable achievements in all aspects of China. We hope that in the same vein, but in different emphasis, China could have another thirty years."

But is another thirty years like the past thirty even possible? The third act of New China begins as a world financial crisis reveals the deep flaws of global neoliberal capitalism and as a diminishing fossil fuel supply and rising global temperatures escalate the competition for resources. Meanwhile, China is in the midst of the largest project of industrialization and urbanization in human history, one that requires massive amounts of capital and fossil fuel. It's like watching a jeep race up a mountain road as an avalanche begins to cascade downward from above.

At a tour of a car factory in Chongqing, the guide from Chang'an Motors pointed to the boxy gray minivans rolling off the assembly line and, beaming, said, "There are 800 million Chinese peasants who need these cars!"

He's right, of course. China "should not be expected to stay forever as a bicycle kingdom," as Yu Qingtai, special representative for climate change negotiations, told us. But 800 million new cars--think about that for a moment.

What's happening in China is at once awe-inspiring and monstrous. Its mixture of planning and markets, autocracy and federalism, competence and corruption both supports and refutes every argument one could make about models of political economy. There is a risk, after two weeks in a country of 1.3 billion people, of falling prey to false certainties: like a traveler airlifted onto the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro who returns home to tell everyone that Africa is covered in snow.

This danger was compounded by the fact that the trip was sponsored by an independent, Hong Kong-based nonprofit whose founder, Tung Chee Hwa, the first Chinese chief executive of Hong Kong, is very close to the Chinese leadership; and our hosts on the mainland side, who chaperoned us from interview to interview, were Communist Party members and former government officials. We had a few painfully staged interactions with "ordinary people" (including an elderly tangerine farmer who couldn't remember the year of a specific agricultural reform but knew that it was during the "5th plenary of the 16th Central Committee").

We did, however, have an opportunity to speak with dozens of members of the Chinese elite: officials, academics and businessmen. And China happens to be a country where the elites hold tremendous power. Indeed, they seem to have seamlessly melded Leninist vanguardism with American-style best-and-brightest meritocracy: "Let me put it simply," said former Shanghai mayor and current president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Xu Kuangdi. "Most successful businessmen or scholars or engineers--they have become party members of the CPC."

China's New Deal

There is no formal social contract that regulates the relationship between members of this ruling class and the people they rule, but there does seem to be an implicit one. It is roughly this: we (the government) provide you (the citizens) with 8 to10 percent annual GDP growth, 24 million new jobs a year and the chance to win the capitalist lottery of sending your son or daughter off to a prestigious school with the promise of a life of industrialized luxury. In exchange: you don't question the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party.

This is not the easiest contract for the government to uphold, and it has already shown some signs of fraying. As recently as 2007, there were 80,000 protests a year in China, and the Internet has given a platform to increasingly rambunctious critics of government policies. The most potent issue is corruption, which captured wide public attention in the wake of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, when many blamed corruption for the fact that school buildings that collapsed had dodged building codes. Several Chinese officials told us corruption was the biggest threat the party faces, the "threat from within," as one put it. Despite high-profile "crackdowns" (such as a trial currently under way in Chongqing involving 9,000 suspects), a recent China News Agency poll shows that corruption remains the number-one issue on the minds of Chinese citizens.

Corruption aside, there are also the raw economic challenges of maintaining hypergrowth, particularly at a moment of global contraction. Exports make up 35 percent of Chinese GDP; in the past year they fell by 25 percent. There are 6 million recent college graduates who need to find jobs. One Chinese hedge fund manager showed us an article for a newspaper about new graduates flooding a job fair, where the ratio of attendees to jobs was 7.5 to 1. What would happen, I asked one local party official in Yichang, a city near the infamous Three Gorges Dam, if unemployment in China went to 10 percent? Before he answered by saying that such a situation would be impossible under the current system, one of our chaperones, a very savvy diplomat who had served in the foreign ministry, leaned over to me and said, sotto voce, "The government would collapse." He chuckled after he said it, but I think he was only half joking.

When you talk to Chinese officials, they seem competent, focused and obsessed with stability (if also, sometimes, arrogant and pedantic). But occasionally you can glimpse the dangers and threats to the established order that lurk just outside the frame. "Chinese government officials face a lot of pressures," Wen Tianping, the spokesman for Chongqing's municipal government, told us. "We work under extreme pressures and we have a lot of difficulties."

The foremost difficulty is immigration. In English we'd call it "migration," but our translators unfailingly used the word "immigration," and I began to see that it was the more accurate description of what was happening. Just as developed countries like the United States and members of the European Union face an influx of workers from the developing world, so does China: it's just that China contains both the developed and developing worlds within its borders.

The way China regulates this flow is not that different from the way nation states do. There is a residence permit called a hukou that anchors people to their home region by tying social services (healthcare, pension and, most important, schooling) to that area. But just as walls and laws have a hard time restricting human traffic from Mexico to the United States when the economic incentives are so extreme, so do the internal regulations of the Chinese state.

"They can be migrant workers forever," said Paul Mak, a Chinese-American businessman in Shanghai who has worked for the American company Mary Kay in Shanghai for twelve years. "A migrant worker cannot become a resident of Shanghai. Now if you have a college degree you can come but not without education. You have a class of people in this limbo."

This marginal population freaks out the Chinese authorities because they desperately wish to avoid the experience of so many other developing countries, from Brazil to India, which have seen the growth of massive, ungovernable miserable slums in their largest cities. "We have learned many lessons from other countries, including the so-called Latin American trap during the urbanization process," said Wen. "The governments didn't think thoroughly about urbanization. Huge numbers of villagers came to the cities and they couldn't find a job. That's why there are so many slums." In a concession to its inability to control the migrant flow, the government in Shanghai recently announced reforms that allow migrant workers to send their children to public school in the city where they are working. As important as it is to keep unauthorized migrants at bay, creating a vast migrant underclass of uneducated children is an outcome the government decided to avoid.

Atop the urban-rural divide is a stark class divide as well. Peasants are the original Chinese revolutionary class, hundreds of millions of whom remain chained to a life of crushing preindustrial penury while oligarchs in Shanghai and Beijing live lives that would make even a Goldman Sachs banker blush. One night in Shanghai we dined at a glass-enclosed restaurant on the roof of an art museum where entrees went for upward of $40. In 2007 per capita net income for China's approximately 800 million farmers was just $50 a month. Managing the flow and settlement of people from country to town is also a means of managing the potentially most explosive source of social tensions.

Making No Small Plans

This is where Chongqing comes in. "Chongqing is a miniature of the whole of China," said municipal spokesman Wen. Roughly the size of Maine, it contains 31 million people, one major city (Chongqing, population 5 million) and a number of satellite cities. In 1997 it was elevated to provincial status so that the municipal government could focus on the internal migration from rural to urban areas, all within its municipal boundaries. "The central government hopes to have an experiment here to explore ways to address the problems we are facing: where should the 20 million people go on such a large scale?"

The key, in the eyes of the government that runs Chongqing, is planning. "We have plans, timetables and goals in our minds whenever we do anything," said Qian Lee, who works in the local government's foreign economic outreach bureau.

"We as a government give guidance and sort of categorize those who want to come to the cities," Wen said. "There are several tiers.... The first group of villagers will go to the downtown center. The second group will go to six regional centers we are building. And the third group will go to the urban places that are closest to their home villages, such as the country towns and townships.... We have thirty-one district centers and 103 towns." For each of these three tiers--downtown Chongqing, the six satellites and the thirty-one district centers--the government has annual targeted population levels for the next three years.

Chongqing is so proud of this planned vision it has constructed a $50 million exhibition hall on the banks of the Yangtze that showcases its past, present and future. Its centerpiece is an 892-square-meter scale model of the city. The tour guide flips a switch, and a comic-book night descends on the model; the rivers glow indigo. She flips another switch and lights up several dozen clusters of buildings, future projections of structures that will be completed in the next five years, then the next ten. Finally she puts all the lights on to reveal the future of Chongqing in all its miniature glory.

The tour ends in a room with a 360-degree, full-screen projection of a computer-rendered flyover of the future metropolis. Unlike the real smogbound and dreary Chongqing, it is bathed in piercing sunlight, and because of software limitations or of an oversight by the creators, not one of the humans who populate this new world--its expensive waterside condos, outdoor stadium and grand office building lobbies--is Chinese.

The ethos that animates this exhibition hall, a High Modernist faith in progress brought about by "scientific" planning, is so distant from the demoralized America of 2009 that my time in the city felt like a visit to Chicago in 1890 on the eve of the World's Fair. (Shanghai will be hosting the World Expo next year.) There's no larger representation of this animating faith than the Three Gorges Dam, which we toured one afternoon. The project took fifteen years and cost $30 billion. It will eventually provide up to 4 percent of China's electricity (the equivalent of about 500 coal-fired power plants). In order to build it, 1.25 million people were forced out of their homes on the banks of the Yangzte, and 1,500 archaeological sites, including ancient temples, were drowned.

To the Chinese elites we talked with, though, the future is everything. Although Chinese civilization (and administrative bureaucracy) is 5,000 years old, no one seemed interested in talking about anything that occurred before 1978. Such intense futurism is easy to lampoon, but it also seems the only worldview one could hold on to in the face of the challenges Chinese planners must overcome. Pick any major city in America and start adding 500,000 people a year. It wouldn't be long before it broke under the strain. It is no small thing to design a sewer system for a city growing at that pace. Just ask the 10 million residents of Mumbai's slums, whose lives are literally mired in shit because there is no access to a sewage system. So if the dark side of Chongqing is the triumph of Robert Moses's vision over that of Jane Jacobs, the silver lining is that--at a technical level, at least--this vision is pursued and executed with what seemed like an impressive degree of mastery.

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

The Chinese affection for urban planning is closely connected to their belief in the virtues of economic planning. The fable we are told about China, particularly by neoliberals, who hold it up as a model of how capitalism has delivered millions from poverty, is that the market reforms have produced growth and prosperity by throwing off the shackles of state intervention. It's a deeply incomplete story: the commanding heights of the economy (telecom, energy, transportation and, most important, finance) remain in state control. There are four major state-owned banks in China, which together have an 80 percent market share.

Planning of the sort undertaken by the central government is viewed in the United States as a disastrous and discredited anachronism, as if the Chinese national weather service were relying on astrology. But whatever inefficiencies the heavy state footprint introduces, the largely government-run financial sector has protected China not only from the ravages of the financial crisis but also the kind of massive misallocation of capital that the global financial system has produced in the West over the past ten years. In fact, Qian Lee, who works for the municipal government in Chongqing, couldn't help but gloat about the benefits of the Chinese approach: "This has been discussed by Internet users in China who say when Obama comes to China that he can discuss with Hu Jintao about the importance of plans. This is something I think we can present to our American friend."

In dealing with the effects of the downturn, the state has devoted itself with impressive vigor to making sure growth is maintained and unemployment doesn't spike: the central government passed a 4 trillion RMB stimulus program (70 percent of its annual budget), the state-owned banks flooded the economy with investment capital and state-owned enterprises were directed not to lay anyone off. The result is that most, if not nearly all of the growth China experienced this year almost certainly came from state-led investment. Weighed down by the collapse of American consumption and the worst global recession since China began its reforms, the state was able to drag the economy over the 8 percent finish line, holding up its part of the unwritten social contract. This is no small accomplishment, but it is an open question whether it can replicate this feat next year, should global demand continue to be depressed.

Like the Death Star, the corporatist behemoth that is the Chinese economy is intimidating to behold, but it is not without its vulnerabilities. The abominable lack of a social safety net helps produce the high savings rate that most economists say stands as the single biggest obstacle to making the necessary transition to an economy driven more by domestic consumption (not to mention basic justice and security for hundreds of millions of people). This is connected to the much deeper problem of distribution, which presents economic and political challenges, although those two categories bear a strange, sometimes mysterious relationship to each other. "We do worry about equality," says Shanghai Institutes for International Studies president Yang Jiemian. "We do need to focus on distribution, allocation of rights, taxes, hospitals, healthcare."

When you raise the issue of distribution with other Chinese officials, they acknowledge the problem (they are nothing if not vigilant about emerging threats to their managerial order) but caution that achieving a more equal society will take time. Xu Kuangdi, former Shanghai mayor and party bigwig, was just one of several men we spoke with who cited Deng Xiaoping's exhortation to members of the party when he launched his reforms: "Let some people get rich first."

The question is, Just how many is "some," how rich is "rich," and how long does "first" last?

China has undoubtedly made some progress on this front: improving rural healthcare, ending taxes on farmers and even passing a labor law with a minimum wage, overtime and other protections (over the objections, I hasten to point out, of the US Chamber of Commerce). But while everything in China on the business side seems to move as fast as Shanghai's Maglev train, which goes 430 kilometers an hour, the project of equality, justice and social welfare proceeds much more slowly.

Xu argued that this is all part of the plan: "Let's look at our neighboring Asian countries," he said. "South Korea: its peak developing speed was reached using military rule.... Indonesia was successful during the reign of Suharto but recently it faces stalemate and difficulties." The reason that democracy is an obstacle to economic progress, Xu said, is that "the poor people want to divide the property of the rich people.... If we Chinese copied the directly elected situation today, people will say, 'I want everyone to have a good job.' Someone will say, 'I will divide the property of the rich people to poor people,' and he will be elected. It is useless: parity will not solve the problem of economic development. That is why we are taking a gradual and step-by-step approach in reform. As Mr. Deng said, we will cross the river by touching the stones. We will not get ourselves drowned, and we will cross the river."

While Xu, as a party leader, had the latitude to speak in explicit terms, almost no one else discussed politics so frankly. In China, economics stands in for politics as the substance of public debate and conversation. You cannot call for elections or for a free Tibet, but you can publish heated polemics about the government's decisions to continue to purchase US treasury bonds.

Where and When East Meets West

But Wang Hui, the lone dissident we spoke with during our time in China, says the state's attempts to maintain a strong and stark dividing line between legitimate critiques of its economic policy-making and illegitimate critiques of its very foundation doesn't always work. China's nominally socialist orientation, Wang argued, has provided many of its citizens with a vocabulary with which to criticize the state. "The paradoxical situation is that many ordinary people can use [Marxism] to defend their own interest because there is a real contradiction between the theoretical claim and what happens in reality."

A participant in the Tiananmen uprising, Wang spent time in re-education camps before going on to edit an independent journal that criticized the government from, for lack of a better word, the left. We met for lunch in a restaurant on the campus of Beijing's Tsinghua University, and as Wang spoke about politics in China, our two chaperones grew more and more uncomfortable, staring down at their plates in silence as if Wang were sharing graphic details of his sex life. It was a reminder that explicitly political debates are taboo. But Wang's point is that there is a public sphere in China, cramped though it may be, and it's beginning to have an effect: if an issue seizes the public's attention, the government now finds itself forced to respond. "It's really up to whether or not you have the capacity to break through that certain kind of barrier and create some kind of space" for public debate, he said.

A few days earlier, over dinner in Chongqing, Zhang Haiqing, a local municipal official, complained to me at length about the uncivil and vicious attacks that local bloggers were incessantly launching toward the government over this or that proposal. He almost sounded like an American politician.

We tend to view China as posing an alternative and threatening model for the future, one that's by turns seductive and repulsive, the source of envy and contempt. But after a while I wondered if we aren't in some way converging with our supposed rival. China has managed the transition from a repressive, authoritarian, impoverished country to an industrial, corporatist oligarchy by allowing a loud and raucous debate while also holding tightly onto power. Perhaps we are moving toward the same end from a democratic direction, the roiling public debate and political polarization obscuring the fact that power and money continue to collect and pool among an elite that increasingly views itself as besieged on all sides by a restive and ungrateful populace.

On one of my last mornings in Beijing, I stumbled upon the "Better English" section of China Daily, which offers readers chances to learn new English phrases. One of them was, "Maybe I'm going out on a limb, but I think we still have to invest in it."

I may be going out on a limb, but I don't think either country is going to be able to make this system work.

About Christopher Hayes

Christopher Hayes is The Nation's Washington, DC Editor. His essays, articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation,The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, The Guardian and The Chicago Reader. From 2005 to 2006, Hayes was a Schumann Center Writing Fellow at In These Times. He is currently a fellow at the New America Foundation. His wife works in the White House Counsel's office.

Shattered city government in quake-ravaged Port-au-Prince in need of help itself

Image by mr brown via Flickr

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 20, 2010; A09

PORT-AU-PRINCE -- No one can find the administration director. The facilities chief hasn't checked in.

City Hall is now a skeletal hulk of concrete and stucco, sagging grotesquely to the left. In that ruined building are lists that Edouard Laurole, Port-au-Prince's human resources director, wants badly to unearth. Lists of employees, phone numbers, addresses and passwords, all lost since last week's earthquake.

"This is awful," Laurole says heavily, pressing a palm against his brow.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

In the wretched chaos of Port-au-Prince, Laurole and a few others are trying vainly to reconstitute a scattered and shattered city government responsible for nearly a million people, slightly fewer than half of the residents of the metropolitan area. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to live in the streets and are desperate for assistance. But before the city can take care of its people, the city government has to fix itself.

City officials venture cautiously into the streets, knowing they will quickly be surrounded by hungry, desperate residents and fearing they could become the targets of pent-up rage. Across the street from City Hall, Lyndsay Jason, the mayor's wife, pleads into a cellphone: "I'm not going out there by myself," she says. "I need some security."

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Only a fraction of city employees have working cellphones. The city has no municipal gasoline reserve, so its crews wait in long lines for gas -- like everyone else. And it is down to only a handful of functioning vehicles. City officials need many things, but right now what they really need is a place to hold a planning meeting.

For days, they have conducted the affairs of Haiti's capital from a folding table on the stone-paved driveway of a borrowed mansion in Canape Vert, a once-lush Port-au-Prince neighborhood now overrun with cinder-block shacks. The stench of rotting bodies outside the mansion's walls mixes with the perfume of the flowering trees inside. At the mansion, the officials find that their welcome is wearing thin.

"What is difficult is to make them understand that they have to clean up after themselves," says Yamily Saint Louis, the homeowner. "Nothing is organized."

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

So Laurole sets off, flip-flops slapping the pavement of the driveway, searching for a more suitable venue. He squeezes into a borrowed Suzuki Sidekick with four employees and jams the clutch hard. "We have to see who is alive," he tells the city employees in the back seat. "We have to find a safe place to meet. We have to find some financial support."

They sputter to a stop outside a city annex building on the Champ de Mars that faces a park, where thousands of Haitians now live in conditions that grow more fetid and squalid with each passing day. Laurole walks delicately up the annex stairs, turning to warn his colleagues, "Don't step too hard!"

"This looks good to me," he says optimistically, seemingly oblivious to the jagged cracks running down the building's facade and to the collapsed balcony. "Get me the engineer!"

An official takes the onus

"At this point, I'm the boss," Laurole says, explaining that he had been unable to reach the mayor. "Normally this would not be my responsibility. But someone has to take charge." He says he draws inspiration from Rudolph W. Giuliani's efforts as mayor of New York in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

An hour later, the engineer pulls up. Laurent Rousseau glances at the building, turns to Laurole and says: "I'm not going in there. My house didn't go down. I'm already saved. I'm not going to put my head on the chopping block."

Laurole, a tall 48-year-old wearing cargo shorts and a sleeveless gray T-shirt, yanks the surgical mask from his mouth. "Everyone here is scared!" he says to no one in particular, spinning on his heels. He nudges Rousseau into the building and waits outside.

Laurole recognizes the face of a city employee in a pickup truck inching by in traffic. "I need you!" Laurole yells. But the employee turns his head.

"I hate that guy!" Laurole says.

Moments later, a gaunt woman is tapping Laurole's shoulder, complaining that the city government is doing nothing for her. He listens patiently for five minutes but finally can't take it anymore: "Go ask your president," he says sarcastically, stomping away.

No place for city business

Port-au-Prince is largely dependent on the national government for money and other resources, and there is always tension between the two governments. For instance, Port-au-Prince employs garbage collectors, but Laurole says the law allows the city only to pile up garbage, while the national government owns the trucks that collect trash.

"There's no coordination," he says. Indeed, garbage-strewn streets are the norm in Port-au-Prince, but the lack of coordination -- and the mountains of waste -- are even more evident since the earthquake.

Two young men walk across the street and tell Laurole that people are beginning to suffer from diarrhea -- the sidewalks provide ample evidence. Laurole shrugs, and the two walk away.

Finally, Rousseau, the engineer, emerges from the annex building and starts writing a report, leaning on the hood of a dusty Toyota Corolla.

Laurole paces. "I need him to say this building is safe," he says.

As soon as he gets clearance, Laurole says, he will ask one of the few radio stations still functioning to announce that the meeting will take place at 10 the next morning.

He hovers over Rosseau.

"Don't push me," Rousseau says. "Don't pressure me. Let me operate."

Rousseau finishes his report but decides he wants to write a neater version, further delaying and frustrating Laurole. The engineer rewrites the entire page-long report. Satisfied with the aesthetics, he delivers the same verdict: The building is unsafe.

Laurole pivots, changing the meeting place to a borrowed room in the national government's Culture Ministry, on the opposite end of the park.

The next morning, he arrives 15 minutes early, turned out in a pressed dress shirt and slacks. A dozen city employees are waiting for him on a street median befouled by human waste -- none of them is a top official.

They scream when they see Laurole. "We haven't been paid in a month!" Primrose Delva, a 53-year-old street sweeper, screeches.

Laurole pauses to hear their complaints, then disentangles himself and marches toward the Culture Ministry's gate. A guard appears. Laurole pushes his identification card against the metal railing. He pleads. He waves his arms.

The guard is unmoved. Laurole cannot enter. No meeting today.

Virginia medical team reaches Haitian city, begins to treat patients

Image by ambafranceht via Flickr

By Susan Kinzie
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 20, 2010; A09

JACMEL, HAITI -- After 2 1/2 days of travel, over the sea, across borders, in planes so small they had to leave most of their food and water behind, the emergency relief workers from Northern Virginia had finally arrived.

They found that the hospital courtyard in Jacmel had become a village of the injured and their families, a community living under tarps, with laundry stretched out on rubble to dry and a large black pig wandering by the ruins of the maternity ward.

Jacmel, a beautiful city on the southern coast of Haiti, known for its artists, its pastel colonial houses and its carnival, had been hit hard by the earthquake and left with almost no functioning medical care. But hope remained. Residents here were still pulling out a few people from under buildings -- alive.

Image by ambafranceht via Flickr

The crew from Community Coalition for Haiti, with doctors and ER nurses from Inova Fairfax Hospital, was glad to finally join the effort, after a crazy, roundabout trip full of mishaps, the same kind of journey that many relief workers faced as they tried to get into the chaos of a devastated country.

The CCH group left Washington before dawn Sunday, flew to Santiago in the Dominican Republic, then got up before dawn again to catch another flight. It was a race that ended like a flat tire at the border with Haiti on Monday.

The relief workers found themselves caught in a throng of thousands of people on market day, women weaving about with huge sacks of macaroni balancing on their heads, small boys tapping at the glass of the CCH bus, asking for food. They waited, stuck without their passports, for the trip leaders to arrive in a truck and get them through the border.

Image by ambafranceht via Flickr

When they finally inched across the narrow bridge to Haiti, they knew they had probably missed their chance at a flight but rushed toward the airfield at Pignon anyway. They crammed people into a pickup truck for a jolting and bruising ride over rough dirt roads through mountains, veering around goats and ditches, fording streams and rattling through small villages, with a doctor on the back clinging to the pile of medical supplies and luggage.

They missed the flight, by a long shot. The next morning, as the sun rose, a Haitian boy shooed goats off the airfield as two six-seater planes arrived to fly them to Jacmel.

Once here, they dropped their tents at the convent where they would be sleeping and headed for the hospital. They were among the first overseas medical teams to arrive.

They found patients lying on beds of bright green planks pulled from the rubble. A girl held an IV drip for her sister, who was on a bed mat, sweat pouring off of her face, which was twisted in agony.

The patients were all outside. Tarps protected them from the almonds that dropped from trees overhead. But it was unbearably hot there, with families bringing meals and living alongside the injured crammed into the small courtyard.

Close enough to reach out and touch one another, patients lay moaning as volunteers wrapped gauze around injuries.

A small boy stood, hands on his head, mouth trembling, as he watched a doctor check his sister's leg.

A woman on crutches limped up the hill toward the tarps. Another, with bandages all over her head, dropped onto a bench, whimpering softly in the midst of the crowd. Another slept on a low concrete wall covered in white dust.

And more people were waiting at the gates.

Ted Alexander, an orthopedic surgeon from Inova, stepped out from under a tarp.

"I looked at one of the guillotine amputations they did at the shoulder," he said.

He was preparing to do an amputation himself as soon as the anesthesiology equipment was hooked up. The 55-year-old woman's arm was black and necrotic, one of many injuries that had gone untreated or had been given only the crudest first aid.

Nearby, a cluster of women waited for news outside the improvised operating room. They were friends of a woman who was killed with all but one of her children when her house collapsed. One girl, her legs crushed, had survived.

Russell Seneca, chairman of the surgery department at Inova Fairfax, was with some of the doctors who had just operated on the girl. He spoke to the waiting women through a translator. "She's going to be fine," he said, and their eyes widened with amazement.

U.S. aid workers find few trained Afghan partners

Image by DVIDSHUB via Flickr

By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 20, 2010; A07

NAWA, AFGHANISTAN -- Alongside the thousands of additional U.S. troops, civilian aid workers are surging into Afghanistan to help refurbish schools, open rural health clinics, build irrigation systems, vaccinate livestock and provide fertilizer to farmers.

But like their military counterparts, the civilian technicians are finding the lack of trained Afghan partners their most difficult challenge. The problem is particularly acute in the remote rural areas, where the Afghan government's presence is virtually nonexistent.

"We're trying to create a centralized government where there's no history of it," said Lindy Cameron, the British head of the multinational provincial reconstruction team in Helmand. "The biggest challenge is the capacity of the Afghan government."

The point was illustrated during a recent day trip to Helmand by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who was in Afghanistan to see how USDA expertise and technical assistance could help farmers boost production in the country's leading agricultural province.

Image by isafmedia via Flickr

Vilsack learned how U.S. aid and agricultural officials had vaccinated more than a million animals, provided seed and fertilizer to 10,000 farmers and distributed thousands of tons of feed for livestock.

But when he traveled to Nawa, bringing along Helmand's governor and the agriculture minister from Kabul, he also came face to face with the Afghan government's limitations. Only two Agriculture Ministry officials were working here, and neither lived in the district. They had no office, no equipment, no cellphone -- not even a bicycle.

The many obstacles

"The government of Afghanistan is not in a position to deliver services at the local level, especially at the district level," said Mohammad Asif Rahimi, the agriculture minister. "There, we don't have a presence still -- or an effective presence."

In Helmand, as in much of the south, part of the reason is the lack of security. With the continuing Taliban attacks, provincial officials prefer to stay in the capital, Lashkar Gah, and they rarely venture to the outlying districts. And finding central government officials willing to relocate to violent areas is virtually impossible.

As one aid worker put it, "No one wants to move to Helmand and get blown up."

But Rahimi said the situation is much the same all over the country, even in northern areas, such as Mazar-e Sharif, which has been relatively peaceful since the Taliban was ousted from power in late 2001.

"Even if they go to the villages, they don't even have a cellphone to call back to the capital," Rahimi said. "That is the same for the Ministry of Education . . . the Ministry of Health . . . the Ministry of Rural Development."

Illiteracy is a huge obstacle. Aid workers in Lashkar Gah described how a senior provincial-level Agriculture Ministry position has remained vacant for months because no one could pass the required civil service exam.

Other aid officials said the centralization of the Afghan government presents problems as well, with all appointments made by Kabul.

There are also logistical challenges. Ministers and provincial governors largely rely on U.S. aircraft to ferry them all over the rural areas. Rahimi and Helmand Gov. Gulab Mangal traveled to Nawa with Vilsack aboard a Marine tilt-rotor Osprey.

Aid workers with experience both here and in Iraq said Afghanistan is more complex. In Iraq, they said, there was an educated population and the remnants of a centralized state. In Afghanistan, they are starting from scratch, trying to build a civil service corps at the local level where none existed before.

Afghans want more say

Rahimi and other Afghans blame the problem on the international community, which, they say, has spent billions of dollars in reconstruction aid here since 2001 but funneled most of the money to foreign and nongovernmental aid agencies as well as Western companies -- with little going to build up the capacity of the Afghan government.

The international community has invested about $60 billion in Afghanistan since 2002, including $40 billion from the United States, according to the Office of the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

"They never developed the government of Afghanistan with their billions of dollars," Rahimi said. "For eight years, almost all the money went to the foreign companies -- the contractors -- with their high security costs."

Some U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, did not dispute the assertion. But they said that course was necessary because the Afghan ministries lacked the capacity to deal with such a massive infusion of funds.

Nawa, a small, dusty outpost, has been largely secured by U.S. Marines. The Marines say they are treading a difficult line, wanting to do as much as possible to help develop this remote area, while recognizing that it is up to the Afghan government to sustain the work for the future.

Next to their base, the Marines are refurbishing an old building that will serve as a district government office, so when provincial officials do come here to visit, they can have a place to meet and even stay overnight.

"It's all about letting the Afghan government take control of what we rehabilitate," said Maj. Rudy Quiles, who is with the Washington-based 4th Civil Affairs Group. "I can build the best health clinics, but it's up to them for staffing it, maintaining it." The problem of scarce skilled personnel in dangerous or faraway areas could be solved by offering qualified Afghans increased pay to serve there -- an idea championed by U.S. officials.

"In this country, there has to be sufficient remuneration to justify the risk," Vilsack said.

He said the U.S. Agriculture Department is committing $20 million "to build that capacity, to ultimately help them get people down in the countryside."

Assault in central Kabul leaves residents angry and fearful

Image by swiss.frog via Flickr

By Pamela Constable and Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, January 20, 2010; A07

KABUL -- In the rooftop ruins of an electronics market Tuesday, overlooking a plaza with the presidential palace just beyond, a shaken security guard pointed out three pools of blood amid spent shells and chunks of fallen plaster on the charred carpet.

It was there that three suicide commandos, part of a Taliban squad that tried to attack multiple buildings in the heart of the Afghan capital early Monday, blew themselves up after a three-hour firefight. Officials said the attack also killed two civilians and three members of the security forces.

"We don't care about the damage they did, but it was terrible to see the fear and panic, the adults trampling on children as they ran," said Hasibullah Khan, 22. "Every time there is another attack, we lose a little more faith in our government."

Afghan and U.S. officials praised the brave response by local security forces, who battled at least 10 Taliban gunmen. The death toll was much lower than in some previous Taliban assaults in the city, which some analysts said was a sign of improved government defenses.

But this assessment contrasted sharply with the angry comments of residents and merchants, who poked through piles of singed cloth, charred teapots and melted hangers in a shopping center that was destroyed by fire as security forces fought the militants. "We feel shame that our government was too weak to defend the capital, shame that even the troops from 36 nations could not protect us," said Abdul Wahid, 43, whose clothing shop was burned to ashes. "We used to feel safe because we were so near the presidential palace. Now we just feel scared."

Psychologically, the battle seemed to leave residents more shaken than previous attacks. In some of those cases, assailants had targeted the same buildings, but none had gone after so many buildings at once or some so close to the seat of power.

The high-decibel firefight sent thousands fleeing and ignited a five-story market, where smoke billowed for hours. By Tuesday morning, the sidewalk vendors and beggars had returned to their posts, but the mood on the streets was edgy and grim. "When I heard the first explosion, I ran across the Kabul River and stood on the other side all day, watching the fire," said Mazullah, 36, whose clothing shop was wiped out. "They wanted to show the world they could invade and destroy Kabul, and it looked like they had."

Residents were also incredulous that the attackers could have penetrated so deeply into the city, reaching within one block of the presidential palace. To do so, they had to evade multiple checkpoints and vehicle searches, which clog commuter traffic every day.

The political mood was already sour and uncertain. The attack came as President Hamid Karzai, reelected last summer in a fraud-plagued poll, was inside the fortified palace, attempting to swear in a group of new cabinet officials after parliament had rejected most of his first choices.

The attack also closely followed a visit by Richard C. Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was here in part to promote the coming U.S. military and civilian buildup, intended to overwhelm Taliban forces and revive the war-battered economy.

But many Afghans remain suspicious and resentful of the U.S. and NATO military presence, and some asked why the thousands of foreign troops -- mostly stationed in rural combat outposts -- were unprepared to help defend Kabul.

"What is the use of these soldiers from so many countries when they can't even stop a few boys in suicide vests," said Wahid. "Our religion teaches peace, but others use it to make war on us. Will nobody stop them?"

U.S. troops move into Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to help keep order, distribute aid

Image via Wikipedia

By William Booth and Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, January 20, 2010; A01

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI -- Hundreds of U.S. troops surged into the epicenter of Haiti's earthquake-ravaged capital Tuesday to guard convoys and food distribution sites, while thousands more stationed themselves on ships and helicopters offshore to bolster relief and recovery efforts.

One week after a 7.0-magnitude quake crippled this city, many Haitians living on the streets have still not received any food or medical assistance from their government or the international community, but there were increasing signs that the aid effort is gaining momentum.

As the U.N. Security Council approved 3,500 additional peacekeepers for the Haiti mission, the U.S. military and other foreign forces began dropping food from planes, delivering troops by helicopter to volatile neighborhoods, and working to prepare other entry points for aid deliveries.

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U.S. Navy divers arrived at Port-au-Prince's crippled port -- where a pier was perilously listing and two of three cranes were submerged -- to help engineers decide how much weight the docks could hold. Slowly, almost gingerly, they began to unload shipping containers from a barge that had sailed from Mobile, Ala., filled with supplies for the World Food Organization and Catholic Relief Services.

"It's really shaky down there," said one of the divers, Chris Lussier.

The delivery of aid was still hampered in some cases, leading to frustration among Haitians and the workers trying to help them. The medical organization Doctors Without Borders said in a statement Tuesday that another one of its cargo planes had been diverted from landing at the Port-au-Prince airport, where officials have struggled to cope with the massive influx of aid. The group said it has had five flights, with a total of 85 tons of medical supplies, refused landing so far.

Army Maj. Gen. Daniel Allyn, second in charge of the U.S. military operation in Haiti, said officials "continue to make progress," but added: "We do not underestimate the scope of the challenge here."

Allyn said troops are working to open more airfields, get more trucks to help deliver water and supplies to victims, and bring in repair and construction equipment to start removing rubble. Some front-loaders could be seen beginning to scoop up the debris of several downtown buildings.

As of Tuesday morning, Allyn said, there were about 2,000 U.S. troops on the ground and about 5,000 on ships or helicopters offshore helping in the efforts. The U.S. military is eventually expected to have 10,000 troops involved in the operation -- with half of them coming ashore.

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U.S. and Canadian military forces have been designated to guard food distribution sites as they open, freeing the U.N. security forces to patrol and keep order. The additional U.N. peacekeeping personnel approved Tuesday will bring the total in Haiti to 12,500.

Throughout the morning, U.S. Navy Black Hawk helicopters shuttled in troops from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division to the National Palace compound in the center of the city. The palace itself is in ruins, but the compound is fenced off and the troops appeared to be setting up a temporary camp.

Hundreds of Haitians, many of whom are living in a squalid tent city just outside the palace grounds, pressed against the iron bars to watch the troops arrive. An old man pushed around a wheelbarrow full of popcorn, selling small plastic bags of it.

"They've come here to help give this country direction again," said Josef Laurient, 35 and unemployed, as he watched the troops unload. "I'm so happy to see them, because up to now there has been no security for us."

On a grassy hilltop at the only golf course in Port-au-Prince, soldiers with the 82nd Airborne were unloading helicopters as they shuttled in boxes of emergency rations, which the troops distributed to the residents of a tent city that had grown around them. "It's all gone pretty smoothly. Everybody's been nice and calm," said Sgt. Caleb Barrieau.

U.S. troops had been dropping food and water from helicopters in various locations, but doing so had created mayhem as Haitians scrambled for the supplies. U.N. aid officials have advised against the practice after one drop near the slum of Cite Soleil almost caused a riot.

Among the many supplies running short in Haiti is blood, a World Health Organization official said Tuesday.

"One of the urgent health needs is for blood," said Jon K. Andrus, the deputy director of the WHO's Pan American Health Organization, which is based in Washington. "Haiti's National Blood Center building was damaged, and some equipment may need to be replaced."

In the volatile city center, Haitian business owners began visiting shops and warehouses, hoping to secure what inventory was left. But only a small contingent of Haitian police, unassisted by foreign forces, worked to hold back increasingly impatient crowds awaiting food, water and international help.

Police fired into the air repeatedly in hopes of keeping the gathering crowds away from intact shops. As quickly as they scattered, the crowds reassembled.

"There's no way to stop the looting, but we're here to try to slow it down," said Louis-Jean Ephesian, a Haiti National Police officer patrolling Boulevard Dessaline, the capital's main commercial strip. "The biggest problem now is that people are trying to destroy what's left."

Ephesian and his partner stood guard outside what had been a photocopying business on the Rue des Miracles in the main business district, where few multi-story buildings survived the quake. He said the banks had been robbed of the money in their vaults. Appliance stores had been emptied. Grocery stores had been stripped bare.

The owner of the photocopying store pulled up in a red Toyota pickup and quickly packed his copy machines into the back while he had police protection.

"It's not dangerous here, but the population is hungry," Ephesian said. "If they get food and water, they'll stop acting out of ignorance."

Nearby, hundreds of young men milled about. Francesco Petruzzelli, the owner of a hardware store that, miraculously, was still intact, said that if he opened the large steel door to his shop without police protection, looters would storm inside and empty the shelves. He kept a shotgun inside, he said, but could not safely get it.

"They keep talking about having 10,000 Marines, but where are they?" said Petruzzelli, who is a U.S. citizen. "If they sent even some Marines here, these guys would get scared off, that's a fact. Where are the Americans?"

Staff writers Dana Hedgpeth and Mary Beth Sheridan in Port-au-Prince and staff writer Rob Stein in Washington contributed to this report.