Oppenheim Arts & Letters

Afghanistan: Token Visibility

In correpondence with a friend, I wrote:

In addition to calling the whole kit and caboodle of Islamic strife the “Islamic Small Wars”, I’ve also referred to the whole as a “detective’s war” as it seems a war custom-made for the men, families, and tribes that manage actions through tangles of manipulated personal obligations shielded in privacy separate from specific institutional imprimatur.   

A secret involves information of known value to someone else—“tell no one”—but there’s much information of value not kept secret per se but rather maintained as private and seldom transmitted in any fashion.

While Hamid Karzai's government mobilizes to chase its "banditos" equivalents off its land and across the Pakistani border, it's soon and sure to be noticed that the Talibani numbers that may stand, fight, and die in a conventional scenario may not approach the numbers involved in this past week's prison breaks and subsequent "takeovers" of towns in Arghandab District in the south of the country.

As less involved citizens decamp, that old "hold and fold" may come into play, and the militant Taliban recede purposefully back into the populations from whence they came, protected not by their firearms, which may be abandoned or stashed, but rather the friendly arms of quiet kith and ken.

While even with overwhelming firepower on its side, battle may prove hard on young and untested Afghanistan government troops, the cultural battle overall and that part of the front characterized by detective work may prove the most merciless facet of all, for Afghanistan, and probably no less so the region, private relationships--the esteem, love, obligations, and promises of family and tribe and relationships that develop to resemble either--trump all official mouthwork.

Everyone understands a secret--i.e., information of value willfully kept from the party to whom it is most relevant; the notion of troves of information purloined within the privacy of one's own head, of family, and affiliates may be a close but quite different thing.

Let's deal with something banal.

If Joe Engineer, corporate "project manager" by day, plays in a "down and dirty" blues band at nights and on weekends, whose business is that? Provided J. Engineer avoids scheduling conflicts, who's to know of the avocation, and how wide or how high may that information pass? Whatever your answers, take it up a notch: J. E. does a little "smoke and blow" with the band: who's to know? What if JE brokers a bit of the same for this buddies?

The private way that becomes the secret way becomes both for the state and its enemies in Afghanistan: nepotism; officials on the take for all manner of services; a poppy industry much appreciated by Iran's addicts, one may be sure, and doubtless defended by skeins of invested--"in cahoots" we used to say--relationships, some looking the other way, some profiting from it, many not looking at all: who's to know?

Such things are private.

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1. Sameem, Ismael.  "Afghan start anti-Taliban offensive in south."  Reuters, June 18, 2008.

2. Legg, Sonia.  "Afghan battle with Taliban looms."  Video. Reuters, June 18, 2008.

3. Loyd, Anthony. "Corruption, bribes and trafficking: a cancer that is engulfing Afghanistan." Times Online, November 24, 2007.

4. Jones, Ann. Kabul in Winter. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Hold and Company, 2006.

5. Chayes, Sarah. The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006.

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Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim

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Gaza: Fire Follows Change

Israel vs. Hamas has overnight become Israel and Egypt vs. Hamas.

Intending to brake the retaliatory siege for having launched rockets (and continuing to do so) against Israel, Hamas breached Gaza's border with Egypt last week.

Egypt withstood the first waves of rightly miserable Gazans yearning for food and fuel and comfort and then responded to the break with razor wire and construction.  In the wake of less than accommodating talks with Hamas, the character of the conflict has returned within the past 24 hours to its inherent nature: fire and force. [1]

Even David had but one Goliath for an antagonist.

Political Analyst Daniel Pipes suggests Egypt should absorb Gaza on the basis of general cultural affinity. [2]

Egypt, however, would seem to fear the fundamentalist and militarized Hamas, which caution about hosting warriors it would seem to share with Lebanon and Jordan.  For the nonce, of course, it has also its peace treaty [3] (and trade) with Israel for consideration.

Here's Item 2 of Article III of Egypt's treaty with Israel:

"Each Party undertakes to ensure that acts or threats of belligerency, hostility, or violence do not originate from and are not committed from within its territory, or by any forces subject to its control or by any other forces stationed on its territory , against the population, citizens or property of the other Party. Each Party also undertakes to refrain from organizing, instigating, inciting, assisting or participating in acts or threats of belligerency, hostility, subversion or violence against the other Party, anywhere, and undertakes to ensure that perpetrators of such acts are brought to justice."

"I against my brother," the first phrase of the well known saying, has come too bitterly to life at Gaza's border with Egypt. 

However, the brother who has the better friends--more peaceful, more reliable, better tempered, and stronger--may now well resent the threat to and destruction of peace and trade that intrudes with hatred in the head and Kalashnikov in the hand.

For a taste of how it starts (or has started, if not yet ended), the International Herald Tribune provides this nugget from the period following the border's resecuring and the stranding of some Gazans and Egyptians on the respective wrong side of the fence:

"Eyewitnesses said anger boiled over in the late afternoon as people on both sides waited for permission to cross over. Hamas policemen in the area encouraged people in the area to throw rocks at the Egyptians. Youths began pelting an Egyptian command post in the area, and forces there first threw stones back, and then fired tear gas. Medics said 26 people were treated for tear gas inhalation." [4]

The Associated Press filing in the International Herald Tribune has reported one dead, a 42-year-old Palestinian, and six wounded.

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1. "Egyptian forces trade fire with Palestinians at border."  Reuters AlertNet, February 4, 2008.

2. Pipes, Daniel.  "Give Gaza to Egypt."  Jerusalem Post, January 30, 2008.

3. "Peace Treaty Between Israel and Egypt."  March 26, 1979.  Reprinted.  Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

4. Associated Press.  "Several wounded in clashes at Egypt-Gaza border."  International Herald Tribune, February 4, 2008.

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Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim

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Pakistan: A Note on Civil Unrest

Riots, I think, are inherently politically incoherent.

The extent and intensity of the street violence following Benazir Bhutto's assassination may strike one as far less against Musharraf's government (otherwise man the barricades) and more in line with an incontinent and apolitical lust for engagement with base emotions.

Confronted with an individual who has engaged in some inexplicable act of violence, a social worker might probe for the "precipitating event"; confronted here with strangers in riot involving sundry others and private property, one well knows the event that opened the gates, but the sensibility of so many acts lies in the psychology of the perpetrators rather than in the politics of the culture.

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Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim

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Pakistan: Poisoning the Well

First, I offer my condolances with regard to the recent assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

Both Bhutto and Musharraf have long represented strands of the English education system, colonialism, and contemporary cosmopolitanism, and of the two, Bhutto may have offered Pakistan the greater hope for stability and continued integration with other of the world's trade systems by campaigning from her position out of power.

The incumbent "government in power" is always the "devil one knows"--the best alternative inevitably the best hope for change amenable with the needs of a culture at large.

Having done here with appropriate sentiment, however, Pakistan's down-to-the-core deepest issue would seem its inability to produce sufficient trust or systems enforcing such to the effect that the best of its would-be leaders produce the capability of working together for achievable and common ends.

Instead of providing the bellweather for an effort to produce a cohesive national politics, Bhutto's assassination seems to have touched off another round of "hot potato", starting with the discovery of a report "to give proof of vote rigging" [1] related to upcoming Pakistani polling to U.S. politicians.  The report could well exist and well be true, but its surfacing in the nation's political conversation so soon after murder contributes to and reinforces Pakistan's already devisive and xenophobic political life.

Instead of spurring an effort to distill essential state issues and produce for Pakistanis a greater distributive justice within state systems in their totality, the PPP stance, which amounts to "Musharraf did it" (or, less vindictive but equally pointed, "Musharraf allowed it"), would seem to reinforce some culture-wide obsession with retribution, i.e., a retributive social system, the produce of which is deep mistrust among all parties concerned with governance as well as a continued drift toward the political chaos that undergirds Musharraf's reactionary position and Islamic extremism both.

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1. "Benazir was to give proof of vote rigging, says PPP senator."  The Daily Times, January 2, 2008.

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Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim

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Deciphering Pakistani Politics

Children may draw with crayons, the cartoon balloon, and the odd expressive noun, but adults burdened by greater responsibilities have rather to perfect their penmanship and both draw and write with fine sharp points.

Dr. Tariq Masood's note in NaiTazi [1], an online publication reached through the workings of the Pakistan Muslim League, may well strike to the heart of the Rubic's Cube that belies Pakistani politics.

First, the problem, according to Dr. Masood: "Due to domination and control of opportunists, hypocrites, and power as well as money hunger persons in Pakistani politics, public are seriously hit by administrative victimization and judicial injustice along with economical disaster and social polarization."

The solution, according to Dr. Masood: "It is the need of time that the Political Parties of Pakistan should be organized properly by considering the necessity of Cadres at Union Council, Taluka and District as well as Provincial and National level."  In the letter, there are several reasonable thoughts on the underlying concept of governance by cadre, provided one accepts that notion as reasonable on its face.

Moving on with the one letter . . . .

"Let there arise out of you a band of people inviting to all that is good, enjoining what is right, and forbidding what is wrong: They are the ones to attain felicity. [3:104]."

And there you have one facet of Pakistan's Fall 2007 emergency and the nearly intractable structure, language too, that maintains an insensible struggle between the divine and profane, the corrupt and holy, the ideal in living in community and the plain human, pragmatic, practical, and responsible nature of contemporary national administration involving globally integrated industrial, scientific, and trade systems.

The Big Military-Industrial Complex Bogey

This dimension of Pakistani politics, so embroiled in anti-American sentiment, may be one to which most Americans can relate: what to do with the generals who, and if they're anything like their American counterparts, are fairly minted to produce upper-echelon executive leadership services, first to defense contractors, and then to every entity from banks to shopping malls?

I think there's both more and less to the ascendence of martial personalities in capitalist circles, and truth to tell, many don't fare well out of the service.  Still, there's business to be had and money to be made in one's late 50's, 60's, and 70's and those boys (I'm sure there are some girls out there too) know how to do it.

For Pakistan, the military dictatorship headed up by President Musharraf has meant stirring the pot, subtracting inredients, usually, and generally trying to formulate a benevolent political society where discension, jealousy, and rivalry may well be considered a part of the language.

Anne, not to drift too far off-topic, had the telltale experience one Sunday morning of hauling her Lutheran self off to a more conservative denomination where, in casual social exchange, she was told she hadn't been baptized "the right way".  The business of degrading others along the lines of spiritual belief and practice may be as universal a thing as religious sentiment itself, but here in the good ol' USA, such opinions are more likely to drive personal affiliations from one denominational roof to another: the broad impact on national politics exists but goes only so far--certainly not far enough to grow and activate Christian or other militias without severe consequences from local, state, and national law enforcement.  About Pakistan, for those of us dipping into the news out of Pakistan, we're not so sure of what the state's response might be given any number of changes in regime.

Still, and ask any Burmese student you happen to know, politics at the end of a gun barrel, anyone's gun barrel, suffers from an illegitimacy all its own.

For Haider Mehdi, publishing in the Indust-Asia Online Journal, the military is the bogey: "Unless remedial steps are taken to absolutely roll back and completely block future military interventions in the political process of the country, the prospects of this nation’s survival remain despairingly bleak." [2]

Mehdi goes on to provide a plan for neutralizing the Pakistani military in relation to the internal politics of the state.  In the fourth point of ten declarations, he writes, "From now on, Pakistan’s armed forces will not take part in any military operation in which citizens of Pakistan or the civilian population is targeted."

And "woe to the wicked" sings Don Quixote de La Mancha, for with that, the heavily armed fortess that students and their guides made of Lal Masjid would most certainly by now have acquired the nuclear part of its arsenal.

In the treason committed against King George of England, Ben Franklin addressed his peers at the Declaration by saying, "We shall all hang together or we shall most assuredly all hang separately."

From the cursory glance, and I will try to grow that over time, Pakistan's many leaders face a similar challenge in terms of developing sufficient common ground--animosity toward a leader is not enough--to garner and secure one another's cooperation in the development of a contemporary politics.

Even though Al Qaeda may have little interest in other than theocracy, others may, but producing a positive social binding, that is, finding the common things to be in favor of rather than the obvious few to be against, proves a mighty challenge.

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1. Tariq, Masood.  "Problems and Political Parties of Pakistan."  NaiTazi.com, December 14, 2007.

2. Mehdi, Haider.  "Re-Inventing the COAS."  Indus-Asia Online Journal, December 13, 2007.

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Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim

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Shouts of Fire, No Smoke, Many Mirrors on the Kurdistan Frontier

It's hard hiding a war, or, despite the lessons bestowed by the how-to movie Wag the Dog, pretending to have one, but something like one or the other seems to have happened on the border of Iraqi Kurdistan this month.

Abid Mustafa's essay [1] for Global Research provides background on Turkish political mechanics, and it helps make sense of the timing of the Turkish military build-up--hard to hide that--on the frontier, the U.S. Armenian Genocide Bill, may it again rest in peace a good long while, and even, possibly, the latest in Kurdish obfuscation: what is going on Out There, this 7th day of December, Google has yet to tell.

Although such as Reuters may note, "The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK or Kongra-Gel), founded in 1978 as a Marxist-Leninist insurgent group, has been fighting for an independent Kurdish state," a cursory look at the PKK paints the picture of the romantic freedom fighter with varying levels of cause, or none, as member and leadership rolls churn with time and original fervor drifts around a multipurposed alternative idealism.

Somewhere, on the backside of a mountain, figuratively, or scattered through the social weave of tens of thousands of Kurds, there are approximately 3,000 PKK rebels (literally, and whose names the governments purport to know), and how an army, any army, may fight them except by killing any and all around them, one might wish to know. 

"The Turkish military said Saturday that it had inflicted "significant losses" on a group of Kurdish guerrillas in Iraq, though it offered no evidence for its claim," reported The New York Times earlier this week.[3]

Well, where are the bodies?

Then, presuming the cold earth has preserved those bodies or fire not eaten their bones, where might be the authentication as PKK?

Try this for Orwellian gymnastics: after reporting that spokesmen for the PKK, also the Kurdish Democratic Party, and the "commander of Iraqi border protection forces in Dohuk Province" denied that attacks had taken place or that Turkish special forces had crossed the frontier, the clip goes right on with, "The operation occurred a day after the Turkish cabinet granted final permisson to the military to make a cross-border strike." [3]

The mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan may be less developed by industrial standards, but one may suppose, or hope, the area hasn't been isolated from the Internet by the local equivalent of a Burmese military junta.

Perhaps I read too closely, but the end of the NYT article notes the positions of the journalists reporting the story: Sabrina Tavernise--Istanbul; Stephen Farrell--Baghdad; Khalid al-Ansary--Baghdad; and "Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Sulaimaniya and Diyala."

One cannot fault journalists or the organizations that support their work of reporting from the edges in any of the Islam Small Wars and hot zones--for that, you may well fault me, and I would have to accept the criticism--but one may appeal to warrior authorities of all stripe to leave journalists to their jobs or, really, reconsider the sensibility of their own agendas.

In the meantime, there's got to be someone on the frontier with a satellite uplink to the web: pray we hear from that party.

Reference:

1. Mustafa, Abid.  "Turkey's military operation in Iraq: Limited incursion or full scale invasion?"  Global Research, December 2, 2007.

2. "FACTBOX-Turksih incursions into Northern Iraq."  Reuters AlertNet, December 1, 2007.

3. Tavernise, Sabrina and Stephen Farrell.  "Turkey Says It Attacked Kurdish Fighters in Iraq."  The New York Times, December 2, 2007.

Turkey's PKK Hot List

One may wish the PKK membership list, whatever its authenticity or age, did not exist in that it pushes the rank-and-file within the guerrilla band away from desertion and into a less equivocal stand-or-surrender position.

Given the nature of other Islamic small wars, surrender will be a late option, if that, for those known through the list by Turkish authorities.

While one might say, "good, I hope they get them all," the price disinterested parties--the non-members, if you will, in the PKK sphere of influence--will pay for having through chance geographic proximity to the organization may or may not galvanize Kurdish resistence to or resentment of the incursion.

This is tough political calculus for the United States as well as military and political scientists worldwide.  In essence, focusing on the PKK leadership and scattering the rest, a half-measure of uncertain adequacy, has been taken off the table in favor of a more thorough piece of work but one more dangerous.

As was thought during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the sooner the war ends the better; as with some plans elsewhere, even with extraordinary control over the "battlespace" as at Nahr al-Bared this year, guerrilla fighting has a way of creeping along into tomorrow and the next day and so many after that.

There's a challenge to creating retreat or alternative course for one's enemies, and it would seem often insurmountable for them to find that for themselves.  I've used the word "inexorable" once today and here wish to use it again: there seems in this way of "working problems" that suffering through the full extent of misery becomes as inevitable as it may be remarkable.

Somalia today can barely sustain a humanitarian aid mission or two for the inability of its troops, bandits, rebels, and warlords to refrain from making the same targets for mayhem and plundering; ditto, Darfur.

Cold weather will come to Iraqi Kurdistan, and both the Turkish Army and PKK rebels will suffer as it does, but the rebels, approximately 3,000, will either escape through relatives and sympathizers elsewhere, or, if sufficiently cordoned about now, they simply won't as the numbers of the force against them would seem by every measure overwhelming. 

With the regional government and most of its constituents benefiting from "peace and prosperity" in general and the Kurds dependent, healthily so, on Turkish services and trade, the Peshmerga may be in the same position as the Lebanese Army during the Israeli incursion against Hezbollah and its rocket attacks: it hasn't a way of defending its uncommitted citizens without also tangling itself in political barbed wire.

For the sake of realpolitic and the lives of so many uninvolved or far less involved Kurds, one may hope the incursion goes fast, produces much in the way of what the Turks want, and ends with a fugitive PKK contingent that may then be demoted to an INTERPOL-type security interest

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1. "Turkish air force on the move."  Reuters, October 26, 2007.

2. Mesci, Evren and Selcuk Gokoluk.  "Turkey pounds rebel positions, Iraq pushes diplomacy."  Reuters, October 26, 2007.

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Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim

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PKK and the Familiar Model

"I assured the minister that the Iraqi government will actively help Turkey to overcome this menace. We agreed that the position we should take is a common one to fight terrorism. We will not allow any party, including the PKK, to poison our bilateral relations." [1]

The speaker: Iraq's Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari.

However unpleasant the announcement to Kurdish readers, it fits with the Conspiracy Against the Romantic that has characterized battles at places as different as Lal Masjid in Pakistan and Nahr al-Bared in Lebanon.

The militant's whose causes have been so deeply woven into their heads as to defy translation into immediate, realistic, and achievable political objectives, find themselves inevitably cordoned by far larger powers.

The principle of the romantic: the good gesture.

Across the Islamic Small Wars, the beau geste signals authentic dedication to the cause.

The issues that have energized the PKK differ quite from those that have turned "Islamists" into self-immolating smart bombs elsewhere: for the PKK, communal sharing (or whatever remnant ideas have survived its socialist start), preservation of culture, and the consolidation of Kurdish culture into a single national entity (rather than scattered across four state boundaries) serve for cause.

Unforutunately, for the PKK, the mechanics that pit contemporary guerrilla warriors against determined state forces would seem to care not for cause: the world and time swirl on around these fixed brave last stands.

In my opinion, of course, until they stand, the less notorious of PKK members may well recede into Iraqi Kurdistan's security force and then serve under the control and at the pleasure of the still new minted regional government.  Who is to know?  How?  But those who are better known may face a frightful prospect under arrest or battle with Turkish forces or otherwise fugitive from the people and land closest to their hearts.

The NATO allies have at stake the preservation of their established security arrangement, which here would seem to pit young democracies and "meritocracies" against the feudal ties that would comprise the alternative organizing system.

Where the students at Lal Masjid thought Pakistanis would rise up behind them, or, lord only knows, the army would turn against Musharraf and in their favor, or that their martyrdom would turn the country toward an Islamic Revolution akin to that in Iran, nothing of the kind happened.

Similarly, the colonizing Fatah al-Islam at Nahr al-Bared, intending to save the Palestinians, destroy Israel, and reconfigure the Middle East similarly failed to lead latent and imagined legions into battle against the Lebanese Defense Forces.

This too with the PKK has that structure.  If the PKK turns an army or creates a widespread "people's war", it will break a pattern established elsewhere.

The two most glaring failures of guerrilla forces anywhere: 1) failure to become without question an overwhelmingly popular cause; 2) failure to at some point stand and survive as a conventional force.

For the most part, and most troubling, "success" where contemporary guerrillas operate has come to mean sustained political chaos and senseless (random) death and economic misery for noncombatants unlucky enough to have found themselves sharing the same relative geography.

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1. "Iraq says to help Turkey crack down on Kurd rebels."  Reuters Alert Net, October 23, 2007.

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Correspondence: James S. Oppenheim

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Bill Roggio on the Bomb Meant for Bhutto

"Sophisticated attack targeted Bhutto in Pakistan": http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2007/10/sophisticated_attack.php

PKK -- Nothing to Lose -- Anything to Gain?

What force could withstand the pressure?  Affluence and empowerment on one side, accountable government on the other--it must be horrible.

;-)

Youthful and old idealists and intellectuals have a grievance, possibly, in the search for meaningful and reasonably funded life roles offering the possibility of greatness.  Whatever the substance of its expression, that's part of both the generational and revolutionary zeitgeist.

We want to make our marks.

Where the separatist rebels gathered in Iraqi Kurdistan once found themselves before the heel of Saddam Hussein and frightfully unwelcomed by other hosts, they may now entertain prospects more difficult than gunships, bombs, and bullets: there's much accommodation, peace, trade, and prosperity whizzing through the air.

Could things get better? Yes, much. 

Will getting there continue to lend itself to, one may say, encouragement through violence?

Daren Butler in his article for Reuters [1] this morning notes the risks to interests that Turkish Kurds may encounter in an open hot conflict.  I'll get fancy here and mix, match, and add a few of my own:

• General misery of impersonal bloodletting that accompanies wars of all kinds but in the Islamic Small Wars bears down with special ferocity on unaligned noncombatants--i.e., people who would have rather just minded their businesses and their families (and screw politics);
• Reduced agricultural industry, reduced levels of interested or volunteered professional services (a. who in the countryside can work in a war zone? b. who in professional life would want to put together a practice in a war zone?);
• Loss of over-the-border trade and employment for Turkish Kurds participating in the regionalized and captial infused economy.

Personally, quite naively, perhaps, I wonder if systems of dual citizenship should not be created for people whose loyalties to kin, kind, and land span international boundaries. 

Why not? 

The states have interest, of course, in populations and resources within their purview, but there's much to be said to for coherent cultures and unimpeded transit between relatives.

One may caution about Kurdish expansion into the host countries, but as ties between people evolve through business and commerce, liberal educations, and open international communications, virtually everyone participating (one may read "allowed to participate") also transforms.

Whatever the PKK's immediate political wants, the agenda would seem a hard sell where so many Kurds in the border area have benefited from "The Liberation" and have been able to live with peace,  close-by prosperity, and an overall improvement in government concern and capability on both sides of the border with Turkey.

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1.  Butler, Daren.  "Turkey's Kurds fear incursion to fuel conflict."  Reuters, October 17, 2007.

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Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

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