Mark Kukis

Moving Day

2009-06-18T09:13:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers,

Both of you please know that the Global List has moved. Please follow the link below to the blog's new home, and visit often in the coming weeks. Many thank, MK

http://www.thegloballist.net

Washington and the Iranian Elections

2009-06-15T03:18:00.000-07:00

Many voices in the Iranian opposition now protesting the increasingly bogus looking election results have called for a show of support from the United States. Bad idea.

Outreach now by Washington to the Iranian opposition would conjure memories of 1953, when the United States whipped up street crowds as part of a successful coup to overthrow Mohammed Mosaddeq. Any suggestion that the Iranian opposition is in league with the United States would damage the movement’s standing in the eyes of average Iranians who are growing disenchanted with the current government but still wary of the United States for historical reasons.

If Iranian oppositionists and reformers hope to make gains now or in the future against the ruling ayatollahs, they must stand on their own in this moment. There is no support the White House could offer that would help their cause.

The Ghost of Mosaddeq

2009-06-11T01:52:00.000-07:00

Anyone pleasantly surprised to see Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad genuinely struggling in the ongoing elections should take a moment to thank the late Mohammed Mosaddeq, one of Iran’s greatest democrats and a bitter foe of the United States.

Mosaddeq perhaps more than any other figure in modern Iranian history showed how a combination of populist energy and sophisticated politicking behind closed doors can deal major blows even to a powerful government unafraid to steal elections. That vibrant political legacy is on display now in the various forms of opposition mounting against Ahmadinejad, who may indeed still prevail even so.

For a great book on Mosaddeq’s rise and fall, read All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer. And for those looking to understand the complicated internal political machinations of Iran, the Persian Puzzle by Kenneth Pollack is a thorough and lively overview worth picking up.

The Other Tripwire for Korean War II

2009-06-08T08:23:00.000-07:00

The Obama administration is apparently getting serious about organizing high seas interdictions of suspect vessels steaming from North Korea. This is wise and necessary. But as many have noted interdictions risk escalating into open conflict if North Korea responds violently to the capture of its ships.

There is another more hidden tripwire for large-scale hostilities out there too as the newest tensions between Washington and Pyongyang mount. If the White House is indeed serious about grabbing North Korean ships, the Pentagon will almost certainly beef up both naval forces and ground troops in and around South Korea. The last time the United States did this was in the 1994 crisis, when North Korea’s nuclear program first came to light.

In that standoff, the Clinton White House drew up plans to destroy North Korea’s main nuclear reactor with airstrikes and positioned ground forces and naval assets to face an expected North Korean retaliation against South Korea. But North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, then ailing and in the twilight of his time in power, seemed to have misread the U.S. thinking behind the buildup, which he watched carefully. He apparently thought the U.S. forces gathering around the Korean peninsula might be planning an invasion of North Korea. And he seemed at the time determined to strike first if that were the case. Kim Il-sung had paid close attention to the 1991 Gulf War, in which U.S. forces openly massed around Iraq while Saddam Hussein basically just sat and watched in a false sense of comfort. No way was Kim Il-sung going to let that happen to him.

Kim Jong-il, like his father in 1994, is ailing and approaching the end of his time in power. He mostly likely had a stroke recently, leaving his ability to think through strategic moments looming ahead as the current crisis escalates impaired. And let’s not forget that even on his sharpest days Kim Jong-il is a deeply freaky paranoid hermit who leads a massive army that worships him like a cult. See today’s news about the sentencing of two U.S. journalists to 12 years of hard labor for the latest example of dark North Korean weirdness and unpredictability.

In the weeks and months ahead, Kim Jong-il may make the same miscalculation that nearly led his father to launch a pre-emptive war or commit some other worse blunder with potentially bloody consequences for thousands. No one should envy the Obama administration officials tasked with trying to guess what counter-moves Pyongyang may make as the White House goes forward with its new measures to deal with the North Korean threat.

Years to Remember

2009-06-07T05:11:00.000-07:00

What was the most important year ever? That’s the question Andrew Marr opens for discussion in an article up now on Intelligent Life, a quarterly sister publication of the Economist.

Marr makes a strong case for 1776, the year American was born. He’s pretty convincing. But many online commentators strongly disagree with good reason in looking over history going as far back as 480 B.C.

In recent decades I tend to think 1989 stands as the most important year historically. The abrupt end of the Cold War certainly reshaped the world as we know it. Before that, 1968 has to rate high, as author Mark Kurlansky shows in his vivid book 1968: The Year That Rocked the World.

Lately I’ve been reading 1421: The Year China Discovered the World by Gavin Menzies. If you have not heard of the book, it’s a fascinating study on how imperial China almost certainly reached the New World with voyages of discovery well before the Europeans did.

I think you can argue that China offered another world-shaping year in 1949, when Mao Zedong established the People’s Republic of China and made himself per capita the most powerful dictator history has ever known. The advent of modern China arguably looks set to shape as many lives around the world now and in the future as the advent of America has, a point Marr stresses in highlighting 1776.

Droning on against al-Qaeda

2009-06-03T02:43:00.000-07:00

The New Republic has an excellent article up now looking at the increasing use of drone bombers in Pakistan. Authors Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann highlight a number of interesting points in their analysis of the program, which has undoubtedly eroded the capabilities of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In 2007, the sitting White House launched just three drone attacks in Pakistan, but in 2008 the pace of the bombings increased dramatically to 34. For 2009, the Obama administration has already pulled the trigger on 16 such attacks, and dozens more seem imminent as the assassination program emerges as the chief U.S. instrument for fighting bin Laden’s organization in Pakistan.

The attacks, and their civilian casualties, have of course produced political backlash in Pakistan in general -- but not so much in the tribal badlands formally called the Federal Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), where the strikes have taken place. From the article:

The one place the drone strikes do seem popular is in the FATA itself. The Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy, a Pakistani think tank that does work in the tribal regions, found that more than half the people it polled in the FATA say the drone strikes are accurate and are damaging the militant organizations. Fewer than half said that anti-American sentiment in the area had increased due to the drone attacks. This is perhaps less surprising than it might initially seem; if a bunch of heavily armed religious nutcases took over your neighborhood, you too might not mind if occasionally they were whacked by mysterious missiles falling from the sky, whatever their provenance.

Long Way to Go

2009-06-01T01:20:00.000-07:00

President Obama is set to appear this week in Cairo for an address the White House is billing as another step in the administration's efforts to renew U.S. standing across the globe and in the Muslim world in particular. Already Obama is inspiring optimism among Muslims hoping to see a change in U.S. attitudes and policies towards the Islamic world. A recent poll cited by the Associated Press showed that 73 percent of people in six Arab countries held a positive or neutral view of Obama.

But the goodwill Obama’s election has generated will not erase some fundamental differences in worldviews any time soon. The Pew Global Attitudes Project in 2006 published the most comprehensive study I know of examining the sharp divergences in opinions and perceptions between Westerners and Muslims. The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other offers a sobering reminder of how far apart Western and Islamic societies are today culturally and politically even as they increasingly share the same geographic space.

Gaming War

2009-05-29T00:40:00.000-07:00

Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said the United States is ready to fight a conventional ground war on the Korean peninsula if needed, despite draining conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Pentagon has wisely long kept itself ready for a sudden conflict with North Korea, where loss of life would likely be massive. One of the best studies I have seen on how a new Korean war would go appeared in the Atlantic in 2005. The only good thing that could come of such a conflict would be the end of the North Korean regime, which now probably can no longer count on China to save it from destruction if war erupts.

How Close is War with North Korea?

2009-05-27T07:40:00.000-07:00

Few realize how close the United States came to war with North Korea in 1994, when Pyongyang’s nuclear program was first discovered by U.S. spy satellites. The Clinton White House was unwilling to allow plutonium reprocessing underway at North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor and came up with a plan to bomb it. They figured they could destroy the facility and entomb radioactive material in one stroke with precision airstrikes. The catch: North Korea would likely retaliate with a massive artillery and missile barrage on Seoul and elsewhere in South Korea, sparking all-out war on the peninsula. Pentagon officials calculated that the ensuing battles would likely leave between 300,000 and 500,000 American and South Korean soldiers dead along with hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Such a war was only days away from unfolding in 1994. For the best account of the saga, see Don Oberdorfer’s excellent book the Two Koreas, which goes a long way towards explaining why North Korea remains such a dangerous and difficult issue for the current White House.

In the 1994 crisis, the bombing of the Yongbyon reactor loomed as the trigger for what would surely be the bloodiest fighting seen in Asia since Vietnam. An eleventh-hour political bargain between Washington and Pyongyang diffused the situation. But North Korea’s continued pursuit of nuclear weapons poses a new trigger for such a war today. U.S. Naval intercepts of North Korean vessels thought to be carrying nuclear materials could occur in the seeable future as Washington grows increasingly worried and watchful of what comes and goes off the North Korean coast. North Korea has already said it would consider such intercepts an act of war and warned South Korea not to cooperate with U.S. Naval efforts.

It’s hard to know, honestly, how strongly North Korea would react if the United States or South Korea captured one of its ships carrying nuclear weapons or materials. Would North Korea’s leadership beat their chests or bomb Seoul? Pyongyang regularly airs venomous war rhetoric towards the United States and South Korea, much of which can be dismissed as the wackiness of a hermetic Stalinist regime. But I suspect that North Korea would be willing to fight for real over the one national treasure the desperately impoverished country holds, nukes. Which means a war like one the United States and North Korea were both ready to fight in 1994 may be nearer than we realize.

Why Federal Courts Can Handle Gitmo Cases

2009-05-22T20:06:00.001-07:00

The advocacy group Human Rights First in May of 2008 issued a detailed report showing that federal courts have a long, successful track record of handling terrorism prosecution, despite arguments otherwise chiefly by Bush administration officials out to defend torture, black sites and Guantanamo Bay. The report examined more than 120 international terrorism cases prosecuted in the judicial system over 15 years. The cases ranged from the famed 1993 World Trade Center bombing to obscure pre-emptive prosecutions of plots uncovered and thwarted.

Existing law and the adaptability of courts allowed successful prosecutions in the vast majority of cases, the study found. The report’s authors concluded that there is no need to create special tribunals or unusual legal measures such as prolonged detention in order to deal with terrorism cases. They are right, and the Obama administration is wrong to be considering both those practices in trying to figure out what to do about the cases in Guantanamo and future ones like them certain to come.

The U.S. court system as it exists today stands as one of the most successful enterprises of the American political experiment. Over the course of U.S. history the court system has faired better, arguably, than the economy, the electoral system and the institutions of the free press on the whole in terms of its effectiveness and durability. It does not need to be reinvented or augmented with special tribunals or measures allowing prolonged detention, which would inevitably invite the kind of Constitutional challenges that have plagued the organizers of the Guantanamo Bay trials. The federal courts already have the flexibility to address even the enormous complexities imposed by terrorism prosecutions that sometimes involve classified evidence and other obstacles.

To be sure, the courts are not perfect. And they certainly do not represent the only way the U.S. needs to confront the likely unending threat of terrorist violence. Military action, diplomacy, development and aid in the regions of the world where terrorism thrives of course must continue. But abandoning or sidelining the legal system should not be part of that approach.

Look, I’m not a lawyer. But through my travels as a journalist I have had the chance to observe up close some of the world’s good and bad governments and legal systems. In my experience, creating special tribunals and locking people away for long periods without trial is the stuff of weak and fearful states in troubled corners of the world. It’s un-American, in other words. Moreover, that approach is not toughness in the face of terrorism. It’s another form of the scared cringe the Bush administration wore in the aftermath of 9/11, a reflection of the mentality that led the U.S. government in those years to jail people illegally and then begin systematic torture of many of them.

Obama took the White House in large measure because the American public had come to reject the political mindset that put the country’s leadership down the path of the “Dark Side,” as former Vice President Dick Cheney famously put it. Obama has an obligation to resist the pressure he is facing now from Cheney and others to take backward steps on the path he charted to move the country past what so many agree today is shameful history.

Closing Gitmo

2009-05-21T03:26:00.000-07:00

The Obama administration has clearly made little progress towards its goal of closing the military detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It’s easy to see why. Closing Gitmo poses an extraordinarily complex legal dilemma. At bottom, there are no good options. Anything short of proper criminal trials for Gitmo prisoners treads on the spirit if not the letter of U.S. law. Allowing trials risks seeing known terrorists go free on legal technicalities sure to arise in courtrooms because of the Bush administration’s unthinking approach to detaining suspected terrorists.

I tend to think the best (or least bad) option is to put the roughly 30 hard-core Gitmo inmates on trial in federal courts and either release the rest or hand them over to their home countries. This is not a popular idea I gather by the recent congressional vote on the issue. But it’s the only option I can see that would empty Camp X-Ray while trying for some sense of justice for 9/11 and other acts of terrorism at the same time.

Staggering Sums

2009-05-19T02:28:00.000-07:00

According to recent U.N. figures the ongoing strife in Pakistan has now displaced more than a million people. In Sri Lanka, months of fighting have left an estimated 265,000 people displaced. And in recent days the United Nations upped its estimate for the number of displaced in central and east Africa to 11 million throughout 16 countries.

Meanwhile, a new U.N. report shows that urban areas around the world are groaning under the weight of poor migrants. Roughly a billion people now live in slums or shanty towns across the globe. That's almost a sixth of humanity living in places like Kibera, the sprawling slum at the edge of Nairobi, Kenya. The U.N. report stresses that urban crowding raises the risk of human catastrophe in increasingly frequent natural disasters related to climate change.

If those statistics aren’t dizzying enough, click here for a real-time world clock with streaming data on everything from traffic accidents to replanted forestland.

Beyond the Valley in Pakistan

2009-05-17T03:50:00.000-07:00

The Pakistani military appears poised to deliver a blow to Taliban fighters holed up in Swat Valley, which has seen a massive refugee exodus. The picture of how the battle is unfolding day to day is murky at best. There are few, if any, journalists in the area, and neither the Pakistani army nor the Taliban can be expected to provide honest accounts.

The eventual outcome is already clear nonetheless. In the days ahead, Pakistani troops will overrun the Taliban positions in Mingora, the valley’s main town. Taliban survivors of the assault will scatter and begin to regroup for a counterpunch. Pakistan now has an insurgency on its hands, and so it will go like this for as long as one side or the other is willing to keep up the fight.

But the battles in the counter-insurgency campaign Pakistan is now undertaking distract from the real mission the government must launch, i.e. bringing the tribal territories where the Taliban were born under government control. The military will have a role in that to be sure, but the real work to be done is in development of this desperately poor region.

For decades the central government of Pakistan has allowed tribal rule of its territories bordering Afghanistan. Islamabad has granted the tribal territories government support such as roads and basic services but without demanding that the societies who benefit from this state support adhere to systematic rule of law like the rest of the country. That’s why you see the occasional news of a public stoning in the tribal territories, where the central government usually leaves law and order to tribesman rather than police and courts. Nuclear Pakistan allows, even encourages, a huge swath of the country’s population to languish in underdevelopment and backwardness. This must end if Pakistan is to escape the fate of failed states.

There are many voices in Pakistan and even the West who may balk at the idea of judging an entire society’s way of life as “backwards” and consider it an imperial insult. To that I would say: Bullshit. There are societal norms we can all agree are good. Things like low infant mortality, literacy and longevity. These development indicators all point in the wrong direction in tribal societies and have throughout time. There is an enormous body of scholarship documenting this truth. Read Nonzero by Robert Wright and Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond for a start if you need convincing that romantic notions of tribalism serve only to perpetuate human suffering.

The reasons why Pakistan has preserved its tribalism are part cultural, part economic and part strategic. Regardless, the result of brooking tribalism for decades amounts to a social and political disaster for all involved. The people in the tribal territories of Pakistan live in some of the deepest poverty found in Asia or the Islamic world. And the militancy bred there now threatens to undo much of the rest of the country’s progress, hence the fleeing of more than a million Pakistanis from Swat, a formerly bucolic tourist destination.

The Pakistani military can and must defeat Taliban forces on various battlefields in the months and years ahead. But no number of military victories can solve the root problem. To civilize the tribal territories will require a massive act of well-intentioned statecraft along with a completely altered political view from Pakistan’s leadership on what the country will be in a future time, when perhaps the residents of Swat have returned home.

Damage Done

2009-05-14T03:10:00.001-07:00

The American Civil Liberties Union is quite right to cry foul at President Obama’s refusal to release more than 2,000 photos documenting detainee mistreatment at U.S. military prison facilities in the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The Obama administration's adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president's stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero. “This decision is particularly disturbing given the Justice Department's failure to initiate a criminal investigation of torture crimes under the Bush administration.”

The ACLU and other civil rights activists have mainly voiced concern over the domestic legal and political implications of withholding the photos. But the Obama White House appears to be at least as equally worried about international reaction in making its decision. Top Pentagon officials have apparently convinced the president that airing such photos may inflame anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world and make U.S. troops less safe than they already are in combat zones. The administration’s thinking on reaction in the Muslim world is as wrongheaded as its domestic calculation, however.

True, the Pentagon leadership is correct in anticipating that such photos will enrage many Muslims who see them. But the Muslims who would do harm to U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are already enraged, and there is no use in making any effort at placating the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan or the Shi’ite militias and Sunni insurgents in Iraq. Members of these various camps have brought us lately things like school poisonings in Afghanistan and bombing carnage in Iraq so severe that the hitherto slow return of refugees has all but stopped.

What will the rest of the Islamic world outside radical circles think? We can guess. By all accounts the photos contain images that would offend anyone who values human rights, regardless of faith. To suggest that the Islamic world in general is so reactionary that it cannot handle a frank disclosure of misdeeds by the United States on human rights is an insult to Muslims and a contradiction of Obama’s pledge for a new approach by the United States towards followers of Islam around the world.

For one, probably nothing in those photos will shock anyone familiar with detainee treatment in, say, Egypt, Algeria, Syria or Iran. Most of the abusive practices done by the United States are already widely known in those countries and elsewhere in the Islamic world. And U.S. human rights abuses pale in comparison in many regards to the past and present abuses of some predominantly Islamic nations.

In other words, they can handle it. And the Obama administration must open up further on this issue now and in the future if it is indeed serious about having a better relationship with the Islamic world. Withholding the photos will only increase suspicion and resentment towards the United States from the Muslim world, deepening a gulf already too wide.

The Military’s Dangers Within

2009-05-11T23:36:00.000-07:00

Life on base at U.S. military instillations around the world has gotten a lot more violent in recent years than many realize. Yesterday’s Camp Liberty shootings in Baghdad seem to fit into a pattern of troubling trends.

In Niger, The Worst Mother's Day

2009-05-10T11:11:00.000-07:00

The NGO Save the Children released its tenth annual State of the World’s Mothers report to mark Mother’s Day. The report includes a Mother’s Index, a ratings list of 158 countries. Sweden is the best place to be a mother, according to the index. Niger is the worst, and several other sub-Saharan African countries rank similarly low. From the report:

The gap in availability of maternal and child health services is especially dramatic when comparing Sweden and Niger. Skilled health personnel are present at virtually every birth in Sweden, while only 33 percent of births are attended in Niger. A typical Swedish woman has almost 17 years of formal education and will live to be 83 years old, 65 percent are using some modern method of contraception, and only one in 185 will lose a child before his or her fifth birthday. At the opposite end of the spectrum, in Niger, a typical woman has little more than 3 years of education and will live to be 56. Only 5 percent of women are using modern contraception, and 1 child in6 dies before his or her fifth birthday. At this rate, every mother in Niger is likely to suffer the loss of a child.

The United States ranked 27th.

What Was al-Sadr Doing in Turkey?

2009-05-10T07:52:00.000-07:00

Who knows.

Iraq’s Mass Graves: A Warning Sign

2009-05-07T10:10:00.000-07:00

The story I repeatedly heard about mass graves when I first started coming to Iraq in 2006 was as follows. At the edge of Sadr City there was a dumpsite. In that dumpsite lived a local drunk. And gunmen from the Mahdi Army would bring him bodies of the Sunnis they had killed for burial, plying him with booze to do the ugly work of putting them in the ground. The rumored gravesite even had a nickname, Happiness Hotel. The drunk, I took it, was supposed to be the innkeeper.

I never had the nerve to properly investigate the rumor. Doing so would have likely put me and my Iraqi colleagues at risk of death threats or worse from Shi’ite militiamen. But the story always disturbed me, because it struck me as plausible.

The newest U.N. human rights report on Iraq points to six recently uncovered mass graves, including one containing 17 bodies at the edge of Sadr City. More mass graves are sure to be uncovered in Iraq in the months and years to come. Whether Happiness Hotel is ever found remains to be seen. But every corpse unearthed in or near Shi’ite militia havens raises the question of culpability in mass murder by the Iraqi government, which abetted the Mahdi Army during the height of the sectarian violence. That same government is still in power now, as U.S. forces prepare to hand over control of the streets across the country to Iraqi security forces whose future human rights practices remain an open question.

Who Controls Pakistan’s Nukes?

2009-05-03T05:30:00.000-07:00

Pakistani leaders in recent days have gone out of their way to assure Washington that the country’s nuclear weapons are in safe hands, i.e. out of the reach of the Taliban and their confederates in al-Qeada. No one in Washington should find much comfort in this. Elements of the military establishment supposedly controlling Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal are openly sympathetic toward the very Islamic militants now battling the government for control of territory inside the country. The civilian government in Islamabad in fact is hoping for a return to the supposed Taliban truce. That "truce" essentially ceded whole portions of the country to fundamentalists brazenly vowing to host followers of Osama bin Laden, who has already made attempts to get a hold of a Pakistani nuclear weapon.

In other words, Pakistan’s nukes are already in the wrong hands, because the government may not be willing or able to fully ensure they are not gotten by militants increasingly thick on the ground in Pakistan after them. This has been the case for some time, as we know from the alarming disclosures of proliferation profiteering by Pakistan’s leading nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan. How much worse the situation can get remains to be seen. But it is a safe bet to assume that whatever nuclear safeguards the Pakistani government has in place are eroding along with the breakdown of law and order surrounding Taliban advances.

Is Baghdad Safer Than New Orleans?

2009-05-01T03:30:00.000-07:00

Statistically, yes. According to murder rates, Baghdad is also now safer than Caracas, Venezuela, and Cape Town, South Africa. But that’s little comfort to residents of the city, where bombs have killed scores in recent days.

Will the Mahdi Army Rise Again?

2009-04-26T21:02:00.000-07:00

The latest spasm of violence in Baghdad has raised fears among many in Iraq that the Shi’ite Mahdi Army may abandon its standing unilateral cease-fire and return to the business of sectarian revenge killings. Not likely, at least no yet.

Cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Mahdi Army, has given no indication that he plans a bloody show of strength in the streets with gunmen. I suspect Sadr, like many in Iraq, will be waiting quietly to see how the next few months unfold before making any major moves. Sending Mahdi Army fighters into the streets of Iraq now would bring them face to face with American forces and create a crisis for which U.S. troops may linger beyond the June deadline to be out of Iraq’s urban areas. Above all Sadr wants to see U.S. troops leave, so he is unlikely to pick a fight now. If Sadr is indeed interested in reasserting his militia, he will do so after U.S. forces move to the sidelines of whatever fighting persists in Iraq as U.S. troops move to go.

Death by Numbers in Iraq

2009-04-24T10:58:00.000-07:00

There was some discussion last week on TIME's Swampland blog about Iraqi civilian casualties related to my recent article on the subject. The question many blog commentators were wondering was one of the most enduring of the Iraq war: How many have died? To start, there is no fully reliable count. Estimates have ranged from more than half a million on the high end to less than 100,000 as a low.

The high estimate comes from a widely disputed study published in the Lancet in October of 2006 that put the number of civilian casualties from 2003 to the summer of 2006 at 654,965. The findings flowed from a statistical survey and appeared as sectarian violence in Iraq was reaching a fever pitch, meaning thousands of other deaths were yet to be tallied. The low estimate, between 91,466 and 99,861, comes from Iraq Body Count and is considered a credible minimum.

The Associated Press ran a story today citing unreleased Iraqi government figures saying at least 87,215 people have been killed since 2005. The Associated Press, which tracks casualty figures with its own reporters and researchers, estimates that more than 110,000 Iraqi civilians have died since 2003, including those counted in the Iraqi government tally.

I think that number sounds low based on my experience looking into civilian casualty figures in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans. For Iraq, the best civilian causality estimate I have seen comes from a study published in January of 2008 by the New England Journal of Medicine. That study, another statistical survey, estimated 151,000 deaths in Iraq in the period from March 2003 through June 2006, roughly the first three years of the war. I think you could safely double that figure to come up with a reasonable estimate covering the deaths from 2006 until now, since the New England Journal of Medicine survey did not cover the most violent years of the conflict here.

That means probably more than 300,000 Iraqi civilians have died through the course of the war so far. Meanwhile, at least another 148 Iraqis perished in the last 48 hours in a spate of fresh bombings.

However you look at the numbers, the figures are staggering, especially when considered as a portion of the Iraqi population, which is around 30 million. Take for example the number of just the missing in Iraq. Iraqi officials have told me that unpublished statistics of theirs show that at least 140,000 Iraqis have gone missing since 2003, with 82,000 documented cases in Baghdad alone. The real figure is likely much higher. Many Iraqis, particularly Sunnis, have been fearful of dealing with the predominately Shi'ite police because of their suspected ties to militia death squads blamed for much of the kidnapping and murder. So, undoubtedly many disappearances have gone unreported. But even the known disappearances add up to a sizable segment of the Iraqi population. In proportional terms, the mass disappearances in Iraq since 2003 would be roughly equal to seeing more than 800 people vanish daily from America's sixth largest city, Philadelphia, until it stood empty.

Taliban at the Gates

2009-04-23T04:37:00.000-07:00

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is absolutely right in saying the Taliban gains in Pakistan pose an “existential threat” to the government in Islamabad. The dangers of the Taliban grabbing more territory go deeper than simply the obvious threat of anti-government guerillas inching towards Islamabad.

Taliban gains in Pakistan reflect the increasing weakness of Pakistan’s civilian government, led by President Asif Ali Zardari. Civilian governments have never done well in Pakistan, where the military is effectively a state of its own that sometimes works with civilian governments – and sometimes not. In 1999, for example, the Pakistani military brought the country to the brink of nuclear war with India while the civilian leadership sat largely uninformed on the sidelines. Western diplomatic intervention helped avert that disaster. Shortly thereafter, of course, military commander Pervez Musharaff took power in a coup. Many in Pakistan, and some in Western capitals, welcomed the move at the time, because the 1999 crisis showed that the civilian government essentially was not a player any more.

Zardari is looking less and less like a player these days as the Taliban extends its control in parts of the country. Taliban fighters are unlikely to storm Islamabad. But their (many) sympathizers and supporters within the Pakistani military and its intelligence wing, the ISI, are likely to get ideas about toppling the civilian government with a coup so long as the Taliban keeps growing stronger.

Torture on Trial, Already

2009-04-22T01:08:00.000-07:00

The running debate in Washington on whether to prosecute either CIA interrogators or the policymakers who authorized the harsh techniques they used is unlikely to yield any new information or legal actions any time soon. Lawmakers and Obama administration officials are essentially pondering questions already largely answered on the issue. A series of books, news articles, de-classified documents and public disclosures by Bush administration officials have revealed what interrogation methods were used, who authorized them and who is answerable legally. Continuing to wonder aloud about what to do now may prove cathartic to many in Washington, but it’s unlikely to produce any meaningful accountability for what many have long considered the commission of war crimes by the Bush administration. What some seem to have forgotten amid the latest headlines in the U.S. torture saga is that the issue is headed to court in a variety of venues at present anyway. A host of legal proceedings related to torture, detention and surveillance were already moving forward even before President Obama took office. The slow, quiet machinations of those are likely to produce some measure of accountability before Congress or the White House acts.

Bullets and Ballots

2009-04-20T06:41:00.000-07:00

Afghan and allied officials in Kabul are struggling to come up with a plan to go forward with nationwide presidential elections Aug. 20, despite a worsening insurgency that has left whole swaths of the country in the hands of the Taliban. India’s ongoing vote offers a model. Indian authorities have staggered balloting for parliamentary elections in five stages over the course of a month. The plan is designed in part to deal with the difficulties of up to 714 million voters going to the polls. But the approach also allows security forces to concentrate in specific trouble spots. Indian authorities staged the first round of voting Thursday in areas where Maoist insurgents are active. Rebels attacked more than a dozen polling stations in election violence that left at least 17 dead, but overall the initial vote was widely considered a success in India. Balloting in Indian Kashmir, the scene of another long-running insurgency, will be a key test of the approach as it unfolds in the coming weeks. U.S., European and Afghan officials should pay close attention to how the election goes from a security perspective in Kashmir in the days ahead, especially since many of the militants in Kashmir originate from Pakistan, just as they do in Afghanistan.

Who’s Shelling the Green Zone?

2009-04-19T03:54:00.000-07:00

On Saturday night, two huge explosions rocked central Baghdad. A pair of mortars or rockets, not clear which, fell in the Green Zone area in quick succession. They were the loudest and closest blasts I had heard in months. Iraqi police said the bombs sailed in from eastern Baghdad, essentially putting blame on the Shi’ite Mahdi Army. But there is reason to doubt that. The Mahdi Army has been effectively dormant since last year, when Moqtada al-Sadr declared a unilateral cease-fire that is still in effect as far as his followers are concerned. Many Iraqis who heard the attack instead took the explosions to be a “Back in Business” sign by Sunni militants recently released from the huge American military prison outside Basra, Camp Bucca. For months the U.S. military has been steadily releasing hundreds of detainees in line with a U.S.-Iraqi agreement that calls for the prison to be shuttered as soon as July. U.S. officials have always acknowledged that some of the detainees held at Bucca and other smaller U.S. prison facilities in Iraq are innocent. But questions remain about many. And those questions are unlikely to be answered by the Iraqi Judicial system, which has barely functioning courts and overflowing jails.

Sharing the Blame for Torture in Iraq

2009-04-18T03:22:00.000-07:00

This week the New England Journal of Medicine released a new report analyzing the causes of death of civilian casualties in Iraq during the first five years of the war. The findings were surprising. Executions, not headline-grabbing bombs, have killed the most. Researchers say 33 percent of the victims examined in the study died by execution after abduction or capture. And 29 percent of those victims had signs of torture on their bodies such as bruises, drill holes or burns.

Many of the incidents of torture undoubtedly were the work of Shi’ite militias, chiefly the Mahdi Army, which launched a year-long sectarian revenge quest beginning in 2006 against Sunnis. But the government of Iraq has been involved in torture too, and almost certainly still is. As I noted in a dispatch for TIME, the most recent U.N. human rights report on Iraq cites "continuing reports of the widespread and routine torture or ill-treatment of detainees, particularly those being held in pre-trial detention facilities, including police stations." How much the Iraqi government is torturing in its jails and elsewhere is not clear. Neither the United Nations nor any human rights group has published any verifiable statistics on the trend, and the Iraqi government isn’t saying. Almost no one doubts that it’s happening, however.

It’s tempting to chalk up this sad fact as just one more ugly thing from a very troubled country, especially considering the legacy of torture left by Saddam Hussein. But ongoing torture in Iraq poses a moral dilemma for any leaders in Washington willing to consider it: The U.S. government supports the government of Iraq, which has established a pattern of torturing prisoners. Therefore the United States is at present a party to torture.

Of course there is no shortage of countries with shady human rights records who’ve enjoyed U.S. support, past and present. Egypt and Israel come to mind. But Iraq is a special case for two reasons. One, the U.S. military gives direct support to Iraqi security forces, working closely with the very institutions accused of so many crimes. And two, U.S. efforts to remake Iraq represent the most ambitious mission America has undertaken on the world stage since the fall of the Berlin wall. The new Iraq is American-made, a 51st state in many regards as some have noted.

There is no seeable way at this point in the history of the war in Iraq to offer any meaningful accountability for human rights abuses that have occurred since 2003. The full extent of the abuses is unknown, and the notion of U.S. culpability by supporting the Iraqi government goes largely unconsidered by officials in Washington and Baghdad. Moreover, the war is not over. The government of Iraq is still battling an insurgency in Mosul and Diyala province while fighting to preserve the relative calm in Baghdad, all with help from the U.S. military.

The Iraqi government will be fighting insurgents and militias for the foreseeable future. The U.S. military role in that will lessen obviously as U.S. troops begin to withdrawal over the next year or so. But some military assistance is certain to continue, and the current administration should be more, much more, demanding on human rights toward the Iraqi government if indeed President Obama is serious about shunning torture.

Failure to do so will leave the United States playing much the same role in Iraq as it did Guatemala, where Washington offered military assistance to a series of governments that grew utterly brutal through decades of internal conflict in that country. More than 200,000 people died in violence that stretched from 1960 to 1996 in Guatemala. In its landmark 1999 report, the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification documented 42,275 victims. Of those, 23,671 were arbitrarily executed, while another 6,159 were “disappeared.” The Guatemalan government was responsible for most of the violence. But the commission’s conclusions said U.S. military assistance played a major role in “reinforcing the national intelligence apparatus and for training the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques, key factors which had significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation.”

Prosecuting for Torture

2009-04-16T23:59:00.000-07:00

President Obama yesterday answered the question many in Washington have been wondering about since he took office: Will there be prosecutions for torture done during the Bush administration? Obama says no, which is a relief to the ranks of the CIA but a frustration to human rights advocates who hoped to see abusive interrogators and their superiors in court. In releasing new Justice Department memos, the Obama administration effectively crafted a compromise for those on both sides of the argument that allows a fulsome disclosure of the abuses authorized by the Bush White House without the pain of trials. It’s almost as if the White House has appointed itself to be a quiet version of the truth and reconciliation commission many have called for. Which is fine, except that approach leaves one major question unanswered in the U.S. torture saga: How do you prevent it from happening again?

What techniques the CIA used were already widely known before the release of the latest memos. Now we know that there will be no prosecutions of interrogators and presumably none for the senior officials who authorized the abuses. The harshest punishment anyone senior in the Bush administration is likely to face for involvement in torture is a post facto reprimand by Justice Department’s ethics office. And that will stand as a sign for future administrations beyond Obama’s stay in the White House who find themselves considering torture or some other clearly illegal activity that seems justifiable amid whatever crisis they happen to be facing down the road.

The best argument for prosecutions I have read appeared in Harpers’s magazine in December. Attorney Scott Horton essentially makes the case that prosecutions of those involved in torture during the Bush administration should go forward, because that is the best way to check temptation for such activity by future administrations. It’s an article worth reading and considering as many in Washington appear eager to shut the door on the torture issue and move on.

Keeping U.S. Troops in Mosul

2009-04-16T09:45:00.000-07:00

The first concrete signs that the U.S. forces may be staying in Iraqi cities past a June 30 deadline to withdrawal came this week. The U.S. commander in Mosul says American troops will remain in the volatile northern city if asked by the Iraqi government. Many Iraqis I talk to seem to think that U.S. troops will be slow to leave Mosul and other cities in any case despite the standing U.S.-Iraqi withdrawal agreement. Indeed it’s hard to imagine a life in Baghdad at this point without the presence of the U.S. military, which still clogs the street with armored vehicles and shakes the sky with helicopters, every day.

I tend to think the Iraqi government will not be asking U.S. troops to stay in Mosul or anywhere else, however. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki never wanted surge troops in the first place. Even when violence was at its worst, al-Maliki would have rather been left alone to handle things with his army and police, whose counter-insurgency methods have at times involved human rights abuses and cooperating with militias. Given the choice again, I suspect he’ll go the same way.