Steve Hutcheson

The war in Iraq is mired in controversy, a discombobulating pool of mixed messages, falsehoods and fanciful posturing. Earlier pronouncements as to the reasons for being there in Iraq uttered prior to the invasion now after some years, an enormous cost and an unacceptable casualty rate, have been proven erroneous and in many cases in fact, downright false. The discussion no longer looks at these facts, for the most part been swept under the carpet as historically insignificant, but now concentrates on how best to extricate the military from the scene and leave a lasting peace between the existing factions. A new agenda has surfaced that is constantly being massaged and repositioned.

Compounding this dilemma is the continuation of positive spin being applied by the government and the military on how well the various current actions are going, how much improved the war is going, how successful the various strategies are working, how beneficial it all is for the long term security of the region yet when it is all pealed away, much of what if said is still false, fulfilling an MBA mantra of constant positive affirmation as a panacea to ward off failure as failure in itself is considered unacceptable.

But are the government and the military living in a fantasy world, do they seriously believe that the solution will evolve out of a constant barrage of military might and positive determination on behalf of those that are directing it.

By comparison, one needs to look at the neighbour and again put things into a perspective, stripping away the rhetoric and looking at the logicality of the complex situations and in the end, asking if the powers to be really do have answers to these enormous problems.

Israel and the Palestinians have been warring for more than sixty years and still, even though Israel maintains the upper hand militarily, financially and with its strong US allegiances, it is no closer to a reaching an equitable solution with the Palestinians and their Arab backers now than it was in 1948.

In Iran, the US has imposed sanctions and sought its allies in the region as well as internationally to support them yet still Iran continues on its own quest, greatly inconvenienced but largely unimpeded in cementing its agenda and its position as a regional leader. The US President went to all his major allies of the region and continued to spread the message of moral superiority over the Iranians yet nothing could be further from the truth, a point noted almost universally by the Arab press while that news hardly causing a ripple in the western media where it promoted a sense of achievement.

The UAE, possible the most strongly aligned Gulf State to the US and heavily engaged in democratisation of its economy and political face has in 2007 Iran as its major trading partner, providing and consuming more than 50% of its national GDP as are all the other Gulf States so inextricably involved.

Each of the regional governments of the Gulf States listened to Bush yet retained one foot on the ground in acceptance of his words. They were not being elevated into another space and time frame as the reality of the proximity of their location and their deeper comprehension of the political and strategic issues at hand tempered the Bush almost naive attempt at persuasion.

The feeling of the Middle East and in particular the neighbours of Iran is that it has a place in their midst, it is a significant economy and strategic partner, it is of a similar faith and maintains a religious piety similar to their own, it is one that they will continue to deal with irrespective of the negative imputations delivered by the major international force and consumer.

Where the honesty appears to be failing is the rhetoric that proclaims Iran to be a threat to the Gulf and by extension, US security. The US administration would have the world believe that these States are as one with the US in its determination against Iran however gauging the response of the Gulf and Arabic papers following his excursion, Iran is not a threat to the Gulf nor to the world at large and conversely, on several fronts the Gulf and Arab nations are in advanced states of normalizing of their relationships, even that which is under the strongest US influence in the region, Iraq.

Major dilemmas also for the Bush administration are the constant unravelling of foreign policy for the region. In 2007, Alan Greenspan made a casual remark in his memoirs when he wrote “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”

To avoid being drawn, Greenspan spent the following weeks extricating him self, making the point that this was not the professed reason however never really recanting his assertion that is was the true one. The perceived belief promoted by the administration and its supporting media is that this was not the reason, the doctrine of dishonesty continues in the administrations quest to justify the military incursion.

Over the past two years as the war has entered into a phase that is largely intractable, a more permanent legacy that America will leave on the region for time immemorial extending the divide between the sectarian groups and between Islam and the west for which there appears to be no viable solutions, and the truth being that there may not be one. Committed army Generals after General have come forward upon retiring to lament the politicisation of the process of war with Iraq and the falsehoods upon which the battles have and are being waged. Within the administration itself a number of senior advisors have also been engaged in litigation and prosecution that highlights their dishonesty to the American public. Some such as Richard Perle, one of the architects of the Project for a New American Century have withdrawn their earlier opinions upon which the war was waged arguing that the government once engaged in the process became dysfunctional.

Colin Powell, the most senior insider of the Bush administration left after being obligated to make a case at the UN that in hindsight he regards that episode as a “blot” on his career saying on Barbara Walters program “It will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It’s painful now”.

Where does that leave us? Now a new batch of Presidential hopefuls are pursuing the highest office of the land yet they too are obliged to continue in the wake of their predecessor, to support the dishonesty or at the very least, failing to address it as it should be as it too will weigh heavily on their administrations.

The questions that needs to be asked without the partisan rhetoric, without the flawed logic of the likes of the international hegemony proposed by the Project for the New America Century, without the need to appease influential foreign governments, is what is in fact best for America and why is in the mess it presently is in?

Unless honesty becomes a weapon in the arsenal being utilised by the US administration, unless the awful truths of why battles are being waged in distant countries that pose no serious threat to the security of the region or the west are revealed and addressed in consultation with the public, the house of cards build on lies will reverberate throughout the psych of America and throughout its various roles in the world for decades.

The Battle for Honesty must begin before we can go any further.

In all aspects of life, various segments of our communities have a common perception of their function and purpose. The military is regarded for what it is, a battalion of soldiers whose primary purpose is war, the idea that they might change that perception is difficult conceptually and ideologically and one that I believe is flawed. I have often wondered at the logicality of the “hearts and minds” efforts of military contingents in some of the places I have been engaged such as Kosovo, Afghanistan and Aceh. It is not just simple a matter of their extensive capability to do the work but the perception as to how they are primarily considered in a country where in the past, they may have crashed though doors, pulled down walls, taken captives and even wounded or killed people from the same neighbourhood where they are now installing a well or building a school or clinic. In the any event however, should the security declines they can easily revert to that more aggressive mode, the benevolent bully in the development cycle.

In most peaceful communities of the west, the military may be called out in moments of catastrophe and rightly so. They have the large machines, they have the manpower, the have the organisational structure and they have the logistics to support an immediate response however in terms of nation building they pose a political conundrum that is largely unnecessary and fraught with danger of abuse, abuse from both sides of the crisis. They do so at a cost that is both economically and politically prohibitive.

Where I saw the largest military response to a crisis other than from a military position was in Aceh immediately following the tsunami. Air, sea and ground forces from a dozen countries had descended into the province to provide assistance that raised an immediate dilemma for the national government. The Australian army for instance bought in a large medical and engineering capacity and did an admirable job that made me proud to be associated with them yet the preceding conflict in Timor also bought in a political opposition from the national army who had in a de-facto manner, forcefully opposed them at the time of that incident.

Although there was ample capacity and a willingness, there was a sense of animosity and restriction on movement that severely curtailed what they could and couldn’t do. More “friendly” armies but perhaps less capable units however were given greater freedom of movement, particularly with their air wings that worked tirelessly distributing aid along the coastline where access other than by sea had been completely cut off.

The US sent in a naval medical ship however it arrived some weeks after the majority of tsunami trauma cases had been dealt with by what was an absolute excess of private doctors and medical teams on the ground. Unfortunately it was relegated to dealing with a few special domestic and road casualties cases that normally go with any large city. Being obliged to locate in international waters it also entailed a ground-air-sea mission to treat even a simple appendectomy that may well have been undertaken in the hospital proper yet the large expended funds required to get them there dictated that they be “seen” to be contributing to the population at home.

In Kosovo there was a different agenda and political perspective of the military forces there yet all the time they were still regarded as that, a military force and not one assigned a nation building function. Under this circumstance however it was also largely unnecessary as the province had a surfeit of humanitarian and UN agencies dealing with almost every issue that the population could require and to engage the military in the planning and execution of programs was largely vacant other than in the application of cases that required a more difficult logistics. For a while I was based in a large village quite devastated and where a number of aid agencies had commenced reconstruction programs. The military capacity of the UAE contingent based in the town undertook a similar if not smaller rebuilding program however it applied itself to the most difficult mountain terrain where its numerous rough terrain vehicles and air support had the capacity to deliver the much needed reconstruction materials that otherwise may never have arrived.

Afghanistan was where I saw a transition from the exercise of dominant military capacity to one that was now interested in the hearts and mind campaign of the population, one that also posed an immediate conflict that even today the military and the involved governments are not facing up to while attempting to justify their intervention.

Like in Aceh, the military of the US and NATO is seen as the opposition to those that waged battle against them, in this case it was the Taliban. There is no excuse for the Taliban however the notion of nation building has since been integrated into the fight against them, a sort of play off to win tacit support from the population at large. The population however care naught for either side. They are more intent on resuming their lives after twenty-five years of war, to re-establish farming incomes or find a job in the ever declining economic travails that now beset the country as indeed it is affecting rest of the world, to resume a normal life.

The presence of the military and association with their programs however exposes the local people to the inherent danger of being charged with consorting with the enemy when these friendly armies finally depart, a real and ever present danger and one that on a daily basis is being waged by the Taliban to win back, or at least negate the support that all the good work invokes.

In this case, although the armies on one hand are building good will, on the other they are still applying themselves as an aggressor when the need arises and that is predominantly how the population continue to see them, no matter how much good they can achieve.

Being an aid worker for some years I have since learned that the psychological games that are played on a needy population can backfire and impede development rather than enhance it. Just handing out largess is not the answer if the population have no ownership of the projects or the resultant benefit. Too often a beneficiary or a village will wait until the free service comes along before they find the need to go and create the benefit them self. Too often they want to be paid for their labour that is ultimately for their benefit, it becomes a case of “greed comes before need”. It is this that has become a common issue in the distribution of aid and one that the military unknowingly serves to foster without taking account of the overall development issues at stake.

Often too, the military in its quest to improve its own public perception though aid development, do so outside the purview of those who have an ultimate responsibility, the government, as was often the case in Afghanistan. The final argument being however was that so much was needed that what ever they do will be well received. I would argue that more could be achieved in the application of these resources towards large projects that went outside the smaller hearts and minds exercise but came with wider benefit and of greater national importance, the creation of water storage damns, flood mitigation, the reconstruction of major access roads and the like. Instead the armies are delivering wells and playing with the children in the villages, creating a positive spin to account for their reason to be there.

In Afghanistan, the action of the army or at least those in the position to decide on initiating the hearts and minds campaigns must however take some of the responsibility for the decline in the overall security situation that now exists throughout the country. I was in Kandahar in January 2003 at the time the Taliban killed the first of the civilian casualties. It occurred because in their eyes, he represented the opposing military forces disregarding the fact that he worked for the Red Cross and was delivering water to poor villagers. This was before the US and NATO had taken to deliver these aid programs in the void created when the aid agencies retired to allow the war to conclude. At that time the US was seen as an aggressor, it still it. Its troops postured in that aggressive manner, unfriendly to the local population, disrespectful to local custom, intent solely on doing their job of routing out the enemy, of locating the Mullahs and finding al Qa-ida in a never clear landscape where anyone may have been and most likely was one or at least sympathetic.

The military have a role to play however once that is achieved they need to retire, if not to their base, then out of the country if that is appropriate. Countries prosper under the stewardship of self-determination with appropriate guidance, not a duplication of the existing government services as in some way the foreign militaries are now supposing to do. In Afghanistan and indeed Iraq, the military intervention has seen an escalation of insecurity partly in its quest to win public support and partly in its inability to solve the problems of containment of the enemy.

Communities exist around war. Afghanistan has existed around war for thirty years, Iraq has existed around war for ten years, what is not being addressed satisfactorily is the promotion of these communities to assist themselves achieve peace as opposed to forcing it upon them through constant military intervention.

The role of the military is many fold, it has a significant part to play in many aspects of life, it has no need to display its feminine side, it is desirable in the purpose of ensuing peace exists, in the removal of despotic regimes and powerful invaders, in providing is logistical might in times of critical need, however what it is not is a nation builder, it is not equipped physically or perceptively to play that role or the role of aid worker or to replicate the role of government, no matter how onerous that job might be to those that fulfill those tasks.

This article was the winner of an Essay competition conducted by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in March 2007 

I can remember as a child having a vision about America that made me envious in a strange sort of way coming from a rural Australian background. It was a John Wayne, Doris Day image about all that was right with the world, the good guys always won and the bad guys were consigned to Boot Hill or prison. As I have grown older, I often wondered what has happened to me, and the world for that matter to change that image as much as it has been.

America no longer holds any appeal what so ever, in fact it is the opposite as I have come to peal away the outer Tinsel Town layer image and have been able to see what lies beneath it, the heart of those people to whom I once felt such fascination. The world we live in has contracted. Air travel, the internet and instantaneous news broadcasts have bought it so much closer. It is no longer the visual broadcast that would precede the movies on a Saturday night, now I can see riots in Kenya at the same time as it happens as I see a young movie personality being led away in Los Angeles to serve out a few days in jail.

What is the most disturbing is that the more I look, the harder it becomes to find that which was the heart of America, the moral giants of the likes John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart once portrayed. It is no longer the Magnificent Seven coming to the defence of a peasant village to fighting against an evil oppressor. It is now one criminal gang in Oceans Eleven stealing millions from another criminal gambler who have become the heroes.

The same can be said for the international moral credibility of the US. Too often of recent the US has been seen as the aggressor in what is sees as its moral rectitude. A sign that it too has lost sight of what it was and fails completely to see what it has now become. It is no longer Audie Murphy fighting a heroes battle against a known and international enemy, it is the Murderous Bride from Kill Bill, seeking bloody vengeance for a personal wrong committed against her, an eye for an eye rather than seeking what we all know as legal and moral justice.

In its purpose of seeking to retain its significant power, it’s bully power if you will, it has engaged international sycophants to support its campaign yet they too have tired of being drawn into needless wars for the sake of preserving US hegemony and are gradually leaving it to go alone. Even those that it argues it has saved from oppression would go back to the way things were before the US came to their rescue, the real purpose becoming more and more evident that it was not in their favour all along but that of the US alone.

Over the past decade America has become increasingly a pariah in the international community if not the political arenas, a liability in friendship rather than an asset. An increasing number of Americans travel as faux-Canadians to avoid these conflicts. Listening to their politicians as they campaign for the Presidency, they are in disarray. Everyone on both sides is playing a different tune to their nearest rivals. Some support the wars other don’t. For the average voter, the options are too wide apart to reach any discernable conclusion such that they are left with petty issues such as tears and personal slights that affect the voting patterns.

The one quandary that I have with America is the homage paid to Israel over all other players in the Middle East Crisis. Israel is not the oppressed nation as say Kosovo or Iraq was, but it is the oppressor with people under its stewardship. Israel receives the endorsement and almost one third of all US foreign aid mostly to enable it to continue being the oppressor. It has dominated the lives of the Palestinians mercilessly so much so that young Israelis consistently regard them now as non-human. The power that Israel politicians have over the psych of average Americans is awe-inspiring. Two US academics, Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer wrote a paper on the influence that the Israeli lobby has over the American Congress, a paper that appears objective as I read it, yet as they argue, the lobby has caused them to be isolated in the US community for bringing this issue forward.

As an outsider, and when I discuss it with other outsiders or non-Americans, all we can do is wonder what it is that small nation has over the Americans that has caused them to lose all ability to be fair, the fight for what is the moral right rather than supporting one that has total domination over another oppressed people.

I have worked for some years in these current hotspots and can only reflect on the desire for the average citizen in Kosovo or Afghanistan, and that is to have peace, long lasting and sustainable peace. It would be a peace where they can raise their kids and build their fortunes and perhaps even aspire to be like Americans. In the short term however, while America continues to force its hand over their national sovereignty for its own will rather than theirs they no longer even dream about what could be theirs is solely a purpose to survive and watch their country slip further into a quagmire?

The dream I have now is that America should rediscover itself and remove its own blinkers on its failings. It is no longer reasonable to say world opinion does not matter. World opinion does matter and it is an inherent cause of the continued violence and distrust that we have become. The world requires a leader once more, a moral giant, not a nation that oppresses others nor supports oppression and can no longer distinguish the difference.

The notion of democracy for a country such as Afghanistan, a country that has been in political turmoil for the past century also demands considerable thought as to how that should be applied. The Bonn Agreement at the cessation of hostilities in 2001 established a pro-forma for the constitution and the form of government that would be introduced. There were some Afghans involved in the early discussions yet as a preliminary to the drafting of the constitution, little if any discussion took place in the communities and villages that make up the structure of this war ravaged land.

America, the most dominant architect to the constitution and the form of government that was to prevail looked no further than their own system of representational democracy, a means by which they could install an interim President with strong powers with a view to dominating the electoral process as the time came for elections.

The people of Afghanistan however know little about elections or even the sense of democracy but were excited at the prospect to the point that the fine detail was easily left without question. This was to be the first such exercise and was lauded as a significant transformation of a country that had until now been largely undemocratic, falling into the abyss of socialist thinking for more than half a century and before that a feudal kingdom. Even now the government bureaucrats still promote the notion of state run industries over a free market economy, stifling growth in these important economic agrarian areas.

What the US appeared to have had in mind was to retain an administration that would have the hallmarks of democracy yet leave the principal game play that would pay continued homage to them as their liberators. What has transpired is that the unelected and often criminal warlords who had served US interests in pursuing the Russians during the Cold War continue but now with some official blessing of both the US and the elected Afghan government who appoints them under Presidential decree. The constitutional Loya Jirga merely ratified his capacity to do that and their place in government, a point noted as early as the Bonn Agreement.

This point however destroyed the notion of democracy. Many of those appointments should have been held responsible for atrocious war crimes during the several years of civil war were now being rewarded by the US and following on its apron strings, the rest of the Western countries.

For the people of Afghanistan, many if not most have lost faith in the process of democracy. Their lives have not changed for the better as they had hoped but five years later they are mired in rampant corruption of the appointed officials, a debilitated economy with an illicit drug economy that stifles other economic pursuit, national security is as bad if not worse than it had been during the long periods of conflict and the ability to make change through the democratic process almost extinct.

The problem lay however with the initiators of the democratic process. It was bought about with little if any consideration for the population at large, the dynamics of the communities and tribal connections that influence the local political processes. It was as if the architects saw American representative democracy as the ideal solution failing completely to understand the political will and dynamic of Afghanistan, the very society that had little involvement in its design. Representative democracy with its party politics might suit a more fragmented society such as the US yet historically, previous incursions into the formation of top-down political parties in Afghanistan had transcended into corrupt and unworkable mechanism by which the country as a whole would be governed leading to a constant transition through coup and countercoup.

The present government has no particular strength in the community at large. The disenfranchised Taliban largely dictate security over almost two thirds of the rural electorate and can only be kept at bay albeit in a war zone condition by the large numbers of NATO and poorly trained national troops and police forces. The government has fallen into the depths of unmitigated corruption with positions reputedly being sold off by powerful Ministers that foster further corruptions down the line of their ministries.

The difficulty for Afghanistan is that the present form of government has been established to satisfy western demands of the country. A docile President that has an alignment with the US in particular, a legislature that will accede to similar economic and commercial dictates that in particular relate to the oil and gas fields and the political connections that it has with its neighbors.

The Cold War may have finished in this part of the world but the victory is still being decided.

What will happen in the future is any ones guess. Military experts from the west all agree that the battle for a secure Afghanistan will take a decade at least, disregarding the fact that the battle for total sovereignty over the Afghans had gone on for more than two hundred and fifty years without success. It is as if the conquerors have failed to learn any lessons from all the battle beforehand.

Of course more importantly, what is the ideal solution that will see relative peace transcend this beautiful if not badly damaged country politically and socially. Afghanistan is, like its neighbors, dominated by its religion, Islam. What many in the west fail to comprehend is however, that Islam is not just a religion, it transcends every aspect of daily life in these feudal communities. Without understanding this and determined by the austerity that the Taliban imposed, the west have presumed to have a government that largely negates this religious idealism and allowed it to only enter as a final condition that the new laws will not go against the principals of Islam.

How to serve the democratic process remains aloof from the present masters of its destiny. If the interests of the people and peace for the region were truly the ambitions, other forms of democracy perhaps should have been considered at the onset.

Experience has shown that all forms of top down government in Afghanistan have failed and failed dismally yet at the community and village level there is democratic process of administration that allows the people to participate in a more compelling form of government, that of direct democracy. With some modifications to its guidelines allow the landless and the women of the community to participate, this provides some impetus to a final solution, a form of direct democracy similar to that which functions in a somewhat peaceful Switzerland and in a less transparent manner although equally Islamic country, Libya. What direct democracy can do in these communities, is eliminate the power structures that prevail with strong individuals at the top with sufficient military might they have acquired over the past thirty years from dominating the political landscape. These communities provide the representation to the next level at district, provincial and then national government. At each stage the representative is not sealed into power by a political gerrymander but remains constantly answerable to the will of those committees that nominate them.

The need for a strong leader is insufficient if he is unable to exercise strong and at times barbaric discipline over those that resist the government. Karzai is a strong leader however he also lacks the capacity to rule according to the dictates that an unruly and insecure electorate demands. The principal key to Karzai retaining western support however is his loyalty to his sponsors and in particular to the US for which until recently he retained dual citizenship as have a number of those he has appointed, a policy that is not always in the best interest of his electorate.

To regain the total will of the people, they too need to be drawn into the democratic process, one where they have a determination over the running of and to contribute into the eventual peace process with its present antagonists that is necessary for their country to move forward.

Up front I have to say I am anti-war but I do believe the world does need armies and good people to serve in them. It does and should continue to be the case however my vision in particular is that it should be one of peacekeeping. I have served as a reservist myself when I was younger and would do it again if I was capable and the need was before me.

My life over the past decade has been about working in places like Kosovo and Afghanistan and Aceh on projects that endeavour to take care of the people and the communities that war and catastrophe leaves behind.

In these environments I have been frustrated by the need for various governments to present themselves as the most powerful and most impervious armed with un-restricted budgets to demonstrate that point yet the weak and powerless of all nations are left largely to fend for themselves. The world spends twenty times the amount on waging warfare as it does on its recovery.

It is only recently that the issues of those that suffer PTSD in particular with the influx of huge number of Americans overloading the repatriation system that has bought this in particular to my attention as it has in some way to the rest of the world. I read stories about individual treatments and grew angrier and sadder knowing that the forces that control our lives are failing to react in the same way to protect it. It is also the communities we live in that fail to see outside the comfort of their own existences that there is a cancer within it.

That cancer is ambivalence, the inability or even the desire to make a change. In a recent exchange where I made an issue out of anger one respondent told me he contributes to a charity that serves returnees and is proud of their service and sacrifice they make on his behalf. As I see it, it is not charity that returnees ask for and the pride, although it makes them feel more worthy as a person, it does not pay the rent nor for the treatment they need when they need it. They want and should get the appropriate attention freely and it should be given as a right that they are entitled to if as a nation they are asked to step up to the plate and make their individual sacrifices.

Those that return home safely, do so as heroes no matter the number of medals they wear. Those that die in battle do so with dignity, valour and strength. They are bought back into the arms of their loved ones whom can grieve for them and put them safely into the right place in the repositories of their hearts. It is those that do not come home safely and who do not die that are a legacy to a nations conscience of its true intent and in this case its eternal shame.

Both sides use the issue of wounded veterans vacuously yet in itself it is also a political issue of profound social importance as it reflects on a nation’s humanity. The political arguments affect not those that suffer from the emotional disorders and sacrifice themselves but it is those that they leave behind who find the argument unpalatable. Life is not just about respect for the nation if the nation is not about respect for the lives of those that make it so.

It is the number of veterans that take alternate solutions to resolve their problem that is the most heart wrenching. It takes the lives of as many men and women if not more than those who have actually died in battle but they do so after all the fighting is done and are not mentioned in the honour rolls. Too often they reach that point where they must believe that no one cares enough for the horrors they have seen in war and the continuing frustrations that exist for them in peace, that they are not being guided out of their turmoil as easily as they were guided into it.

On any number of websites there are those dedicated to returned service men and women, I read the condolences to the families of those that have taken their own lives after they have returned home, after they have been received into their family and friends but also after they have been improperly treated by the system they have been proud to dedicate themselves to.

It is their belief in the system that needs to be preserved. It is their self-sacrifice that needs to be seen as the catalyst to avoid others from following them in this somewhat futile and exceedingly frustrating path and we all need to be a part of that process to make change. It is incumbent on us to use the power of their collective memory to draw to the attention of the world at large that where they have arrived at for the moment is not right. They went into battle in far off lands to make the world a safer place, how they are treated at home and the internal battles they fight alone should be a lesson to save others from a similar fate.

There is a battle notion of leaving no man behind yet when they return home we unfortunately do. If that is politics then so be it, they have suffered enough because of it.

Ideally, Afghanistan was presented with a new beginning on the routing of the Taliban and the backing by the US of a new western style democratic government. The reality however has been less dramatic. Afghanistan in 2007 is as lawless and disrupted as it was during the civil wars with more than 40,000 international troops in the country, more than 5000 people being killed in violent attacks since it was liberated, 100,000 people have been displaced due to the fighting in the southern provinces, development is stagnating, the promised democracy floundering under the weight of corruption and flailing institutional capacity along with an opium trade that now provides 92 percent of the world’s supply and constitutes 50 percent of the national GDP.
Where did it all go so wrong?

At the onset of 2001 and the initial promise of some billions of dollars in international assistance, the people of Afghanistan had reason to believe that their lives would change. Even though the country remains steadfastly Islamic, the severity of the Taliban rule had faded giving prospect for schools to be recovered and the expectation that the girls of the towns and the villages would be able to attend them and the people could live their lives with more liberty although greater change will take years. Village people as they do in most of Asia see that the means to climb out of their poverty is through the advent of education of their children.
The difficulty has been that the west, and in particular the US has largely been diverted with the invasion of Iraq shortly after and the initial thrust by the US forces of routing out the terrorists as opposed to providing any semblance of nation building although this has now become an unfortunately belated priority.
The government was resurrected on the basis of past allegiances and not on the basis of capacity rendering managerial skill and facility within the government vacant. The influx of international organizations were vying for the local expertise and paying up to five times that of the government services consumed all of the talent leaving those warlords appointed to the Ministry positions to in turn appoint family and tribal members to all the positions within the ministry. This not only afforded them protection from below, it facilitated the corrupt practices that has blemished and held back the progress of the country ever since.
Much of the existing problems today arrive through the corruption at the top of the administration. Regional Governors have a large hand in the production of opium clearing out fields of opposition growers as a sign of doing something positive while allowing production in their own fields to continue unimpeded. It is even reported that the brother of the President is a major figure in the opium production and international distribution in the south of the country where the majority of the present fighting is taking place.
With the invasion by the US, they facilitated the existing warlords whom they had allied with during the war against the Russians to assume command of strategic Governorships and ministerial positions, many still retaining these posts now even though a much-touted democratic electoral process has taken place. As time passes however they are cementing their position with even greater firmness that it will prove almost impossible without a major recovery at the top to eliminate them.
The opium trade has also usurped the economy to the point that more than 3.3 million people are reportedly involved in it out of 22 million and more than 3 billion dollars a year being invested into the national budget through its international trade. The task of removing it is being rendered almost impossible with a dramatic change in the way the country approaches the issues.
To recover, Afghanistan is going to require a complete change of conditions by the west. No longer can they rely upon the weak structures of government that President Kazai is able to offer but they need to insist that real power and corresponding real accountability is afforded to the people. The centrist government and the pre-drafted constitution have proven to be an abysmal failure and have no significant effect other than within Kabul itself and even that is suspect. The up-scaled drug trade in the major markets of Europe and the US has a cost estimated to be 20 times that derived in Afghanistan, some 60 billion dollars worldwide. Can the world afford to allow it to continue?
Prior to the war Afghanistan was at the lowest point in its economic and social history with all the development indicators pointing it out to be one of the poorest countries in the world. The approach by the US was inadequate and cavalier paying no serious attention to the economic recovery required. If democratization and development is a real concern as was the promise of 2001, the international cost to bring the country back into a path away from the criminal activity that now consumes it will be massive and at least be equal to that which is being derived illegally and take a generation at least. That cost in many ways will have to be born by the west.

From the point of view of many Americans, I am sure they look at the situation and say to themselves, “we are the richest and most powerful nation on earth” and could easily justify an attack against Iran of whom they know so little beyond the perceived crazy talk of their President.

But looking at it more pragmatically, the reasons to launch an attack are for the moment spurious. Talk of nuclear weapons programs are as a consequence of 100 IAEA inspectors going over all the various installations over the past twelve months reportedly unfounded, they have discovered nothing to support that notion and in fact refute it decisively. One then has to analyses in some respect what it is that the US is really pursuing, is it merely capitulation by the Iranians to the will and might of America or is it more sinister and is the oil as Greenspan has confirmed so indiscreetly in his memoirs?

For a moment perhaps it is wise to look at the consequence of an pre-emptive attack on the nature indicated. The US is proposing strategic aerial bombing raids against nuclear facilities or military training establishments encouraged no doubt by the success of their incursions into Kosovo and Iraq over the past decade and the recent raid by Israel into Syria. But is it so easy? Kosovo was waged against a Serbian army, large in number but nevertheless poorly equipped to meet them. Iraq had a population of 25 million, most of them suppressed under a totalitarian regime and their military conscripts capitulated at the first opportunity.

Iran on the other hand has a population of 65 million and for the most part the majority would be anti-American as a consequence of the poor historical relationship that has existed over the past 50 years between these two nations since the US aided in the overthrow of the Mossadegh government. It has an army of around half a million serving members with a reserve base of an extra 300,000 and a further eleven million former reservists that can be mobilized. Iran learned a lesson about self- sufficiency from the Iran Iraq war with a military wing that is now capable of producing its own tanks, missiles and aircraft.

At the first incursion of a US fighter attack against its nuclear or military facilities, Iran has promised to retaliate with 11,000 rockets fired simultaneously at targets yet unspecified. One could imagine that the leveling the Green Zone in Baghdad and the US Centcom headquarters in Oman would be a priority targets as would be the oil installations of all of the allies of the US along the Persian Gulf and a rendering of the Straits of Hormuz. That by itself would bring the world to a standstill almost instantaneously. Less important targets of Israel of US installations elsewhere in the region would also have to contend with the first barrage. It also has Russia and China attending to its corner in the diplomatic sense.

The retaliation by the US however would be swift and decisive paying homage to the “most rich and powerful” epithet it carries, invoking a possible nuclear retaliatory attack against Tehran and other strategic centers it houses across the country. The fallout being that anywhere between one hundred thousand and one million Iranians civilians would be killed in the process and another one or two million injured or displaced as a consequence for a decade. The actions by both sides will afford a trillion dollars or two in collateral damage to the region setting oil production and the economies of the Gulf States back twenty years.

What at the end of the day is the beneficial consequence? Will it bring the surviving Iranian people closer to the US? Will it eliminate the existing government and enable the US to introduce a democratic state of affairs as it has done to Afghanistan and Iraq at either side of it? Will it provide the oil security the US craves from the region or will it just be a matter or two crowing roosters demonstrating who has the largest appendages and are prepared to plunge the world into a state of virtual darkness?

The posturing by both nations has been reduced to name calling and displays of arrogance and wild rhetoric on both parts and most noticeably by the US administration. The idea of a nation going to war because of the irresponsible language of one party or the other has gone beyond ludicrous. It is reminiscent of the Kubilai Khan and the Mongol hordes taking offence by the oppressed in their marauding conquests across Asia Minor.

The difficulty for the US is that with this administration it has lost the capacity to negotiate and an understanding of what its position is in the world relative to that which the world holds them. For decades preceding The US has been able to provide the stability and leadership across all boundaries that is necessary in an aggressive world yet in this last decade in particular it has lost its way and become the visible aggressor, enamored with its own self importance and military capacity, loosing sight of its world prestige and power yet all the while failing to address the most basic requirements of diplomacy, the ability to talk with the opposition.

The difficulty for the United Nations is that it represents a time in history that reflects the imperialistic nature of its main proponents. Formed in 1942 when 26 nations joined together in their pledge to continue fighting the Axis powers headed by German and Japan, it continues today to largely reflect that “victors” democracy that prevailed then. Even to this day both these leading economies that were vanquished are still excluded from the core functionality of the UN at the Security Council.

The UN has not kept pace with the state of the world and the rapid transformations of states that have occurred up until today and continue to metamorphose into the future. The majority of the 192 nations now represented were in many cases former colonies of the major powers that have since gained their independence. However, if the present structure of the UN is anything to go by, their former colonial masters in a way still guard and control that independence.

UN General Assembly and Security Council reform is long overdue and the functionality of the UN is criticized remorselessly, particularly by it most significant stumbling block, the United States, as it is finding it increasingly difficult to force or persuade the General Assembly to accept its various and often seen, self-serving foreign policies. It is this issue that often leads various US politicians somewhat petulantly to call for the US to leave the UN altogether as it is an expression of the world’s growing independence from the US. This matter of reform has been discussed at length without any final resolution so far being arrived at, as those with the present monopoly of power are not prepared to shift from that position anytime in the near future. The final say as it stands rests with the five countries that maintain the power of veto over Security Council decisions.

To reform the UN, there needs to be a system that reflects a democratic positioning and country role based on a more equitable basis, populations, economic factors such as GDP, international investment, international aid etc. are all aspects that need to be factored in to the voting power of a country in both the Assembly and the Security Council. The concept of one nation - one vote is in itself undemocratic if countries such as Nauru with a population of 13,000 and a GDP of 60 million or San Marino with a population of 26,000 and GDP of 850 million have a comparable vote to say China with a population of 1.3 billion and a GDP at 10.5 trillion or the US with population of 300 million and GDP at 13 trillion dollars. The difficulty for the United States however is that countries such as China and India with their increasing prosperity are rapidly approaching that same economic reach as the US and diluting their world power status.

Yet in terms of parity, it is these countries that are grossly under-represented even though China does retain veto privileges and is largely unconcerned and expresses little in the way of discussion about the democracy for the excluded nations.

The other difficulty for the rest of the world is that the foreign policy is largely managed by these five nations and often fails dismally to meet their regional national and foreign policy expectations. The vast number of unfulfilled resolutions concerning Israel’s territorial actions in the Middle East highlights this dislocation from the Arab block in particular.

Can it be brought to a satisfactory conclusion or is it destined to self-destruct from within remains a probable question. Will the major powers relinquish their hold over the control of the UN or will they hold on until it completely fails. As an international medium it was to bring the ideals of peace and prosperity to the world as a whole and as defined in the Charter of the UN below and for which we perhaps need to constantly remind ourselves:

· to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and

· to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and

· to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and

· to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

AND FOR THESE ENDS

· to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and

· to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and

· to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and

· to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples,

It remains to be seen. From that was expressed in the original ideals, the UN is the best international organisation to bring harmony to the world however it needs some sacrifice on the part of some of its promoters to bring that ideal about.

H. L. Mencken wrote passionately about life and society in America one hundred years ago yet he may as well have been writing about events and the people of the United States today as his words still in many respects retain their import. Citing from his reference in Wikipedia,

It is no coincidence he regarded Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be the finest work of American literature; much of that book details episodes of gullible and ignorant people being swindled by Confidence Men like the (deliberately) pathetic “Duke” and “Dauphin” roustabouts with whom Huck and Jim travel down the Mississippi River. These scam-artists swindle country “boobs” (as Mencken referred to them); by posing as enlightened speakers on temperance (to obtain the funds to get roaring drunk), pious “saved” men seeking funds for far off evangelistic missions (to pirates on the high seas, no less), and learned doctors of phrenology (who can barely spell). The book can be read as a story of America’s hilarious dark side, a place where democracy, as defined by Mencken, is “… the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.”

The pressure on American society to subscribe to the threat of terrorism has conducted the world into an open schism between societies, one that harks back to the time of the Crusaders, the need to lead these people out of their religious oppression and into whatever salvations that the American ideal can offer them. For the most part however and largely unseen by the people of the US, Islamic communities are content with their belief and perhaps with some modifications, also with the processes of life that it entails. It is not so much a clash of religions but a clash of cultures, defining the differences what it is about good and evil, a lack of understanding of the others acceptances or dismissals in the way we live our life and they live theirs.

The American psych has been captured in part by the politically inspired media and molded into a compliant morass, the daily denigration of liberal thought and sentiment and the corresponding glorification of all that is conservative promoted as the new gospel. Objectivity on the part of editors and writers has been destroyed by a well founded but misused sense of nationalism and super-patriotism and a strong desire to not be castigated as un-American at a time of war or conflict, to limit the questioning of policy and the principals that lead to them and to fail their own impartiality first and more importantly to fail their readers at large by a lack of honesty and transparency in their writing.

Issues of historical significance are quashed under the false mantles of racism or treason yet allow the conservative impressions of those issues to be further imprinted into the minds of the public, a daily feast of “Soma”, as was applied to the population in George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty Four” without question. The spirit of the intent of the “freedom of speech” enshrined in the US constitution is impinged daily by the conservative writers and the political and judicial processes of taking the legal understanding further along the road towards its neutralization.

In contemporary politics, the issues regarding the Middle East, Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran fail to render sufficient questioning of the wisdom of the rhetoric espoused by the politicians. Their message is giving full credibility for its truthfulness with a clear lack of commitment by journalists to delve behind the words, the expose what underlies their meaning and the policies that are driving them, a clear lack of incredulousness and sense of gullibility that Mencken described satirically of those writers and readers in the nineteen twenties.

Americans, as does the world at large, have to redefine their national intellect, to move away from the supermarket variety of news and information and seek out that which defines the spirit of their forefathers who proposed their constitution and embellished it with the freedoms of liberalism. For its part, the media needs to reevaluate its role in American society, is it to be the foil of the jingoistic or is it to be the promoter of all those values of liberty, freedom that are so prominent in the minds yet lost in the intellect.

The ability of the public to speak freely within the confines of the internet has the capacity to change thought if the individual message can surface through the barrage of competing views. It still requires the mainstream media however to correct its lack of independence and freely provide a cross section of opinion and public debate that is worthy of the mantle of “free press”.

The world waits on the prospect of the present debacle of the Middle East crisis being extended into Iran. The public rhetoric is convinced daily of America’s invincibility and military might yet fails to acknowledge that its public policy may well be flawed, as Mencken said, it is America’s hilarious dark side, and that it may well be igniting a catastrophe across a cultural divide that it is unable to quell for decades to come.

I was just reading an article regarding the increasing incidence of internet crime and I started to contemplate the overall cost of crime worldwide. Now I have a strong inclination towards international aid being effective and it has always concerned me about how we can do it better, how we can minimise the unfortunate corruption that goes with it, how we can turn the tide on worldwide poverty. I am often met with resistance to the effect that aid should be for relief only, that aid is being abused and that market forces should aid development not handouts, that all the aid is wasted yet when I consider it, the amount that say the World Bank applies to world aid by way of loans in a year, reportedly about 30 billion US dollars, it is dwarfed by the magnitude of defence spending on one hand and crime on another.

The British Home office in the UK estimated in 2000 that the cost of crime prevention and prosecution in the UK alone exceeded 60 billion dollars without discussing the proceeds from crime in the economy. In another recent report from Italy, looking at the proceeds, the Mafia is reputedly the biggest business in the country with a turnover of 127 billion dollars annually or 7% of their national GDP without taking into account the extra billions of dollars in the cost of policing, prosecuting, public damage, prisons or the personal costs that accompany the theft of valuables.

In Afghanistan, the production of illicit drugs now accounts for an estimated 50% of the national GDP or 3 billion dollars while that other rogue state Myanmar produces most of the other 8%.

In the US the cost of crime is reaching outlandish and ridiculous proportions. Quoting from an article from the Journal of Law and Economics, the cost of crime in the US now exceeds a staggering 1 trillion dollars annually. By way of explaining how that figure is arrived at and quoting from the article

The effects of crime (and their resulting costs) can be grouped into the following categories:

• Crime-Induced Production — the allocation of resources to the drug trade or operation of correctional facilities — accounts for $400 billion annually.
• Opportunity Costs — which reflect the loss of active criminals’ and inmates’ potential productivity and the cost of crime prevention — are about $130.3 billion annually.
• Risks to Life and Health because of violent crime represents a burden of $574 billion annually.
• Transfers due to fraud and unpaid taxes account for another $603 billion of losses to the economy due to criminal activity.

This amount is close to 30% of the national US budget in 2007 that was posted at 2.9 trillion dollars or again around 8% of the US GDP of 11 trillion dollars. The US now has almost 1/3 of the total prisoner population in the world with 2 million people behind bars.

At an annual international GDP around 39 trillion dollars, if that same ratio of 8% is extended across the economies of the rest of the world, we are looking at a staggering 3 trillion dollars being the cost of crime, I will say that again, three trillion or three thousand billion, being the annual economic component of crime in the world today. That is more than the whole US national budget.

The divide between rich and poor would seem to be having an extreme effect on the world economics, slanting it in an almost impossible direction.

In its context and although the figures above are rubbery as the true cost of crime may never be completely known, it makes the annual budget applied by the World Bank to remedy the world’s poverty that only accounts for 1% of that total amount look completely insignificant by comparison.