Feed aggregator

Ezt a sírfeliratot alkalmazza a HM Társadalmi Kapcsolatok és Háborús Kegyeleti Főosztálya abban az esetben ha ismeretlen katonákról van szó. Ez a felirat kerül majd annak a 17 katonának a sírkövére is, akiket május 13-án, szerdán Miskolcon temettek el, s akiknek nem sikerült megállapítani a kilétüket, valamint a nemzetiségüket.

Egy társát szándékosan agyonlőtte és három másikat megsebesített egy hadgyakorlat során, majd végzett magával egy dél-koreai tartalékos katona.

Aki egy levegőre képes elmondani, hogy mi mindennel is foglalkozik egyszerre az MH 43. Nagysándor József Híradó és Vezetéstámogató Ezred, feltétlenül jelentkezzen katonai búvárnak! Egy biztos: a háttérben dolgozó, székesfehérvári alakulat Stabil Vezetés 2015 nevű gyakorlása jól tükrözte a „negyvenhármasok” sokrétű, általában láthatatlan, ugyanakkor alapvető fontosságú munkáját.

In a recent Democracy Lab piece, editor Christian Caryl laments that genocide and mass atrocities continue to occur, and wonders why. After nodding to arguments that “we’ve made a lot of progress in preventing mass slaughter,” he turns pessimistic:

I have to confess that I don’t find the signs of progress he cites quite so encouraging. There are far too many places in the world where people are still being singled out for death on a grand scale simply because they belong to the wrong group.

In moral terms, it is impossible to disagree. Any situation “where people are still being singled out for death on a grand scale simply because they belong to the wrong group” is one situation too many.

Empirically, however, the historical trend is more encouraging than Caryl’s enumeration of recent examples and potential genocides implies. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker aggregates data on genocides (loosely defined) over the course of the twentieth century from three public sources: research by R.J. Rummel, the Political Instability Task Force (PITF), and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). Each of these data sets is imperfect in its own way, and the quality of all estimates of the tolls of specific episodes of mass killing — in these sources or elsewhere — ranges from careful approximation to crude guessing. Still, the data they have produced collectively represent some of our best well-educated guesses about the frequency and severity of deliberate, lethal violence against noncombatant civilians by states and other armed groups over the past 100 years.

So what do those data show? Below, via Max Roser, is a reproduction of Figure 6-7 from Pinker’s book, showing annual death rates according Rummel and PITF data from 1900 to 2008. As Pinker wrote, “in the four decades that followed [the 1940s], the rate (and number) of deaths from democide went precipitously, if lurchingly, downward.” Contrary to popular belief, that long-term decline did not stop when the Cold War ended. Despite terrible genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere, the global trend remained “unmistakably downward… The first decade of the new millennium [was] the most genocide-free of the past fifty years.”

Coincidentally, the statistics discussed in Pinker’s book stop just before the start of the global spell of economic malaise and political instability that began with the financial crisis of 2008 and includes the Arab Spring. That spell has produced new episodes of mass atrocities, including ongoing ones in Syria, Iraq, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic. To assess the trend since then, we can turn to the most recent data from UCDP, which now covers the period from 1989 through 2013. The chart below plots deaths per 100,000 people per year — the same statistic as in the previous chart, and shown on the same scale — for that 14-year period. UCDP’s data set includes low, best, and high estimates; to err on the side of overcounting, I used the high ones. The estimates of global population used to calculate the annual rates come from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.

As the chart shows, the spell of global political instability that began in the late 2000s has not yet produced a significant increase in the severity of one-sided violence around the world, at least as of the end of 2013 and as far as UCDP can tell from its sources. This chart uses the same scale as the previous one to facilitate easy comparison. At this scale, the recent annual rates of less than 1 death per 100,000 people are hard to tell apart from zeros. The annual rate more than doubled from 2012 to 2013 — from 0.05 to 0.12 — but both of those figures remain radically smaller than the rates in the tens or hundreds the world saw just a few decades earlier. Even if UCDP’s best estimates are lower than the true counts — and, as UCDP acknowledges, they almost certainly are — the long-term decline has not been reversed. The latest data from PITF show essentially the same thing.

In short, humans certainly do continue to perpetrate mass killings, but the frequency and intensity of these terrible episodes has diminished significantly over the past half-century, and even the recent increase in violent instability has not reversed that longer-term decline. As horrible as the past few years may seem when reading the news, the intensity of deliberate, lethal violence against civilians remains an order of magnitude lower than what we typically saw just a few decades ago, which was itself an order of magnitude lower than the peak rates in the middle of the twentieth century.

Why? This, as Dartmouth professor and genocide scholar Ben Valentino wrote in a recent email, is the “million dollar question.” In his book, Pinker construes the decline in mass atrocities as part of a broader and longer decline in violence among humans, and attributes that trend to changes in cultural and material conditions that increasingly favor and reward our cooperative instincts over our more violent ones.

Valentino’s own answer resembles Pinker’s in general, if not in all the specifics. Valentino spotlighted two forces: a decline in the frequency and intensity of civil wars, and the collapse of communism. “Since most genocide and mass killing occur during civil war,” he wrote in an e-mail, “fewer civil wars means fewer mass killings.” As for why civil wars are rarer, “I’m inclined to believe that stronger central governments and the rise of full democracies are at least a big part of the story.” Meanwhile, the collapse of communism removed both the perpetrators and, to some extent, the motive behind many of the worst mass killings of modern history, and “nothing has really replaced communism as an ideology for mass killing on that scale.”

Valentino’s colleague and sometimes-coauthor Chad Hazlett, now a political scientist at UCLA, also sees the collapse of communism as an important part of the explanation, but more due to its effects on competition in the international system than the waning of the ideology. During the Cold War, the superpowers often prolonged and intensified armed conflicts within states by supporting rival sides, and many those conflicts involved mass killings of civilians. After the USSR collapsed and the Cold War ended, however, that external support evaporated, and with it went most mass killings. “Without superpower support to both sides,” Hazlett wrote in an email, “long-running conflicts and atrocities began to come to an end at unprecedented rates, producing a long decline in the number of atrocities.”

Scott Straus, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has written several books on the topic, sees the wider decline in armed conflict as a relevant factor, too. He also gives partial credit to changes in global norms and improvements in international and domestic policy options. He emailed:

Peacekeeping is better mandated, bigger, and more equipped for civilian protection than before. A range of non-military mechanisms is in place, from commissions of inquiry to “smart sanctions” to threats of international prosecution. I am as skeptical as the next scholar and practitioner on the specific effectiveness of each of these but the policy tools are at a minimum thicker and more applied than in the past. Whether these measures are causally related to the decline of mass atrocities is difficult to know at this stage, but there is a plausible connection between these developments and the decline in the mass atrocity events.

All of these scholars, including Pinker, acknowledge that this decline is not necessarily permanent, and none is certain of its causes. The trend itself is clear, however. While we recognize and grieve for those who suffer and die in the atrocities that persist, we might choose to take some encouragement from that fact.

This piece was written as part of the author’s work as a consultant to the Early Warning Project, a new effort to provide routine, public assessments of mass-atrocities risks for countries worldwide.

In the photo, Chorale Abagenzi singers take part in a genocide commemoration ceremony in Kigali, Rwanda.
Photo Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Jeb Bush has flip-flopped-flip-flopped.

On Monday, the Republican, who is running for president but hasn’t made it official, was for the Iraq war.

Under pressure, Bush said a day later he misunderstood the question.

Then he clarified his position.

One more time.

This type of waffling is impressive, even if the former Florida governor hasn’t officially launched a bid for the GOP nomination in next year’s presidential election. But it illustrates one of his biggest challenges to being an attractive candidate: the legacy of his big brother, former President George W. Bush, and his disastrous Iraq policy.

W. is still admired by many in the Republican Party, but keeping him at arm’s length may be something Jeb is forced to do to win over Democrats in a general election. His back-and-forth on the issue shows just how difficult it will be to completely sever family ties.

And just so you’re clear: Knowing what we know now — that the intel on WMDs was trumped up — Jeb Bush would not invade Iraq. Until he would.

Photo Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

When the European Council – the institution that sets the European Union’s agenda on broad, strategic issues[1] – published its Declaration on the Environment on December 3, 1988, climate change was mentioned briefly and in passing.[2] In 2009, the year of the United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen, the topic’s salience had risen dramatically. In that year, climate change made up more than 80% of the references to the environment in the European Council’s publicly-available Conclusions, and more than one-tenth of all references to policy issues.

This estimate of climate change’s increasingly important role is possible because of data compiled by the EU Policy Agendas Project. The project’s researchers have analyzed the European Council’s Conclusions sentence-by-sentence from 1975 to 2012 to identify which policy issues are discussed and when.[3] This information is available in a public dataset[4], which gave me an exciting opportunity to explore how much attention the Council has given to climate change in the last three decades. This post retraces how I mobilized the EU Policy Agendas Project data – and added to it – to explore patterns in the Council’s attention to climate change since 1988.

First, some context: in the EU Policy Agendas dataset, climate change is considered a subtopic of the broader “Environment” policy topic.  Between 1975 and 2012, the environment garnered an average of around 4% of the Council’s attention.[5] Overall, 32% of the references to the environment in the Council’s Conclusions are categorized as related to climate change. However, this average masks significant year-to-year changes. For example, in the six years from 1988 to 1993, climate change made up only 5% of the Council’s references to the environment. In contrast, from 2006 to 2011, climate change made up 74% of environmental references.

Figure 1. Council attention to the environment, by subtopic, 1975-2012 (1,679 total mentions). Source: Alexandrova et al., 2014.

Climate change: international negotiations and EU climate policy

Although the EU Policy Agendas dataset distinguishes between climate change and other environmental issues, it does not include analysis of the specific climate-related topics that the European Council discusses. Therefore, as a next step, I analyzed all mentions of climate change in the dataset and organized them into three overall categories: general statements about climate change, statements about the international climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and statements about European Union climate policy. Three examples of statements I placed in each category are given below in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Examples of European Council climate change-related statements in three categories: general climate change, international climate negotiations, and EU climate policy.

So which of these three categories gained the most attention? Overall, the international negotiations under the UNFCC garner almost 60% of the Council’s climate-related attention. The EU’s climate policies attract a further 25%, with 15% related to generic climate statements. Figure 4 below gives a historical perspective on these estimates (from 1997 to 2011). The first mention of climate change was in 1988 (not shown), but it did not become prominent on the Council’s agenda until after the international agreement on the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. This same pattern was repeated in relation to the 2009 Copenhagen Conference, explaining the large increase in references to the international negotiations during that year.

Figure 3. European Council attention to climate change topics by year. Author’s analysis based on Alexandrova et al., 2014.

Which EU climate policy?

Finally, I wanted to explore which specific climate policies the Council discusses. In its 132 references to internal EU policy over the period 1988-2011, the Council focused on general references to policy (39%), the EU’s targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions (22%) and the EU Emissions Trading System (20%). Other policies received 5% or less of the Council’s attention.

Figure 4. European Council attention to EU climate change policies. Author’s analysis based on Alexandrova et al., 2014.

Conclusion

As I mentioned in the introduction, the data exploration presented above has a few limitations. I have looked at the basic share of attention to climate change, and have not attempted to explain why we see the patterns that we do. Although I did not have the time to do so, more detailed analysis could examine the reasons why these patterns of attention exist. I also limited the analysis to only the references that were coded as climate change-related in the EU Policy Agendas dataset. Some climate topics were categorized differently (for example, ‘the global carbon market’ was placed in the energy policy category[6]). A broader analysis could attempt to track Council attention to those climate-related issues that were categorized as a different policy topic.

What I have found is, however, quite interesting. Taken together, this analysis suggests that in the mid-2000s, climate change became the dominant environmental issue on the European Council agenda. Much of the Council’s attention focused on the international climate negotiations, but with increasing space for EU climate policies like the EU Emissions Trading System. Although the EU Agendas dataset stops in early 2012, climate change is still clearly on the Council’s agenda (as evidenced by the 23-24 October, 2014 Council Conclusions, where the EU’s 2030 climate and energy framework occupied more than half of the document). It remains to be seen whether climate change will continue to play this important role on the EU’s environmental policy agenda in the years to come.

[1] Peterson, John and Michael Shackleton. 2012. The institutions of the European Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See pages 43-67.

[2] European Council Conclusions, 2-3 December 1988, Annex I

[3] Alexandrova, Petya, Marcello Carammia, & Arco Timmermans. 2012. Policy punctuations and issue diversity on the European Council agenda. Policy Studies Journal, 40(1), 69–88.

[4] Alexandrova, Petya, Marcello Carammia, Sebastiaan Princen, and Arco Timmermans. 2014. Measuring the European Council agenda: Introducing a new approach and dataset. European Union Politics, 15(1): 152-167.

[5] Alexandrova, Carammia, & Timmermans, 2012, pg. 75.

[6] “The strengthening and extension of global carbon markets” (March 9, 2007) was categorized under energy policy.

The post The rise of climate change on the European Union agenda: 1988-2011 appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Western sanctions imposed on Russia over its alleged role in the escalation of the Ukrainian conflict only served as an impetus for Moscow to take more efficient steps to develop its own economy, Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko told Sputnik Serbia on Thursday.

The summit between President Barack Obama and representatives from the Persian Gulf countries that kicked off today at Camp David is meant to reassure Washington’s Arab allies. “Don’t worry about the nuclear deal with Iran,” Obama will say. “We’ve got your back.”

And what’s the best way to show your friends that you’ve got their back? Sell them billions of dollars worth of advanced weapons. In fact, it seems like arms sales are the Obama administration’s tool of choice these days for dealing with everything from counterterrorism to a lagging economy. And the consequences, unsurprisingly, are bloody.

In its first five years in office, the Obama administration entered into formal agreements to transfer over $64 billion in arms and defense services to Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states, with about three-quarters of that total going to Saudi Arabia. And new offers worth nearly $15 billion have been made to Riyadh in 2014 and 2015. Items on offer to GCC states have included fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, radar planes, refueling aircraft, air-to-air missiles, armored vehicles, artillery, small arms and ammunition, cluster bombs, and missile defense systems.

Sales to GCC members have been the most important component of the record-level U.S. arms deals concluded during Obama’s term. The Obama figures for sales worldwide even edge out levels reached during the Nixon administration, when the end of the Vietnam War and the rising purchasing power of members of the OPEC oil cartel spurred the United States’ first major arms export boom.

The surge in arms sales under Obama is rooted in two factors, one political and one economic. The political aspect of the Obama approach mirrors the path pursued by President Richard Nixon in response to the unpopularity of the Vietnam War. In 1969, Nixon announced that henceforth the United States would supply generous quantities of military assistance to allied regimes, in an effort to “avoid another war like Vietnam anywhere in the world.” And in a 1967 article in Foreign Affairs, Nixon referenced the political roots of his emerging policy, noting that Vietnam had sown “bitter dissension” domestically, producing a “deep reluctance to become involved once again in a similar intervention on a similar basis.”

Substitute Obama for Nixon and Iraq for Vietnam, and you have a latter-day version of the Nixon Doctrine of arms sales promotion. Obama wants to be seen as a president who ended large-scale wars, not a president who started new ones. And, as he has made clear time and again, he is particularly reluctant to put large numbers of U.S. “boots on the ground,” as the Bush administration did in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Given these restrictions, the Obama administration has developed an approach to warfare designed to limit U.S. casualties. This has relied largely on drone strikes and the extensive use of Special Forces; but boosting arms sales advances is also a part of this hands-off approach, giving allies the equipment and training to fight terrorism on their own. (Let’s forget for the moment the fact that Obama’s approach may spawn more terrorists than it kills by generating anti-U.S. sentiment.)

But it might be the legacy of the 2008 economic crisis, as much as the 2003 Iraq disaster that drives this White House’s arms sales. The Obama administration clearly wants to create jobs in the defense industry and boost the bottom lines of major defense contractors. The Pentagon’s 2010 announcements of offers involving tens of billions of dollars’ worth of F-15 fighter planes, Apache attack helicopters, armored vehicles, and other equipment to Saudi Arabia listed the prime beneficiaries as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Electric, the Sikorsky Helicopter unit of United Technologies, and ITT Aerospace. But these are just the major contractors; thousands of subcontractors across the United States will get a piece of the action as well. For example, in announcing the deal for selling 84 Boeing F-15s to the Saudis, Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs Andrew Shapiro proudly asserted that the deal would create 50,000 jobs in 44 states, most notably in St. Louis, the site of the main assembly plant for the plane.

Foreign sales are particularly critical for keeping alive weapons production lines that are about to be closed down as the Pentagon moves towards buying next-generation systems. Absent new domestic orders, Boeing’s F-18 production line will have to close in early 2017. But last week’s report that Kuwait intends to buy 40 F-18s for $3 billion holds out hope that the line will stay open for another year or more, during which time the company can seek more foreign sales to prolong the life of the program even further. Similarly, the General Dynamics M-1 tank, a program which the Army started winding down in 2012, has been surviving based on yearly add-ons to Pentagon budget requests spearheaded by the Ohio and Michigan delegations, whose states host the main production sites for the vehicles. These efforts have been supplemented by a deal to upgrade 84 M-1s for Saudi Arabia.

The Obama arms sales boom has bolstered the bottom lines of companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. Each firm has been the lead contractor one or more mega-deals like the $29 billion offer of 84 Boeing F-15 fighter jets and related equipment to Saudi Arabia, a $6.5 billion sale of Lockheed Martin’s THAAD missile defense system to Qatar, and the proposed transfer of the Lockheed Martin/Raytheon produced Patriot Air and Missile Defense System to Saudi Arabia for $1.8 billion. The payoff won’t come all at once, but as these deals work their way through the pipeline, they will generate substantial profits for each of these firms for years to come.

As Pentagon procurement spending has dipped slightly due to the caps on the agency’s budget established in the Budget Control Act of 2011, arms industry executives are looking to promote overseas sales even more aggressively — and the Middle East market will be central to these efforts. Lockheed Martin has set a goal of increasing exports to 25 percent of total sales over the next few years. In a conference call with investors in late January, Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson suggested that continued “volatility” in the Middle East and Asia make them “growth areas” for the firm. And a few years ago, Boeing launched an effort to get export sales in its defense division up to 25 to 30 percent, from just 7 percent in 2005. Dennis Muilenburg, a company vice president who formerly ran Boeing’s defense segment, has suggested that if the F-15 deal with Saudi Arabia stays on track, the company will be “well on our way” to its goal.

The Obama administration is clearly on board with the industry’s agenda. The lengths to which U.S. officials will go to help secure an arms sale for a U.S. company were revealed at a House Foreign Affairs Committee in April 2013. Asked whether the administration was doing enough to advocate for U.S. arms exports, Tom Kelly, principal deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s bureau of political-military affairs, said that, “it is an issue that has the attention of every top-level official who’s working on foreign policy throughout the government, including the top officials at the State Department … in advocating on behalf of our companies and doing everything we can to make sure that these sales go through.” Just to make himself perfectly clear, Kelly went on to say that [arms sales promotion] “is something that we’re doing every day, basically [on] every continent in the world, and we take it very, very seriously and we’re constantly thinking of how we can do better.”

The Obama administration can definitely do better — but not by hawking top-of-the-line weaponry to Middle Eastern regimes. That approach has already proved disastrous.

In 2011, the U.S-backed security forces of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates intervened to help put down the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain. Last summer, the United Arab Emirates conducted bombing raids against Islamist forces in Libya, further inflaming the situation in that country. Most recently, Saudi Arabia, armed with U.S. planes and bombs, has launched a devastating assault on Yemen that has killed at least 700 civilians, displaced hundreds of thousands, and sparked a humanitarian emergency by blocking access to food and medicine.

One shudders trying to imagine what comes next after the president inks billions more dollars worth of arms sales at Camp David this week.

Photo by Kevin Dietsch – Pool/Getty Images

Just over a year ago, Edward Snowden appeared in a pre-recorded clip during a nationally televised public forum to ask President Vladimir Putin whether Russia spies on its citizens by monitoring their communications. The president declared in response, “We don’t have a mass system for such interception, and according to our law it cannot exist.” Conveniently, Putin didn’t provide robust details on the System for Operative Investigative Activities, under which the state can amass data from Russian communication systems; phone calls, emails, and Internet searches are all fair game. Collecting information requires a court order, but legal decisions are made largely in secret. In 2012 alone, according to Russia’s Supreme Court, security services were authorized to intercept phone and web traffic more than 500,000 times. This is to say nothing of the illegal surveillance many Russia hands suspect the Kremlin of conducting.

 

Yet the new epoch of snooping in Russia involves more than metadata. Much like British authorities, who use closed-circuit TV devices throughout London, Moscow deploys cameras to keep a watchful eye on its populace. And it is the next generation of such video surveillance that has inspired the work of British-based photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin: What would the consequences be if cameras didn’t simply document, but could actively recognize faces, allowing security forces to monitor specific individuals’ whereabouts?

 

To explore this question, the artists recruited more than 1,000 Muscovites as models, including Pussy Riot band member Yekaterina Samutsevich (pictured above), and shot a series of portraits using a prototype of facial-recognition technology developed by Russian engineering company Vocord. Unlike with a typical biometric system—for instance, touching a thumbprint pad to enter a secure room—Vocord’s innovation does not require a person to be an active participant in, or even to be aware of, the identification process. (Hence the portrait subjects’ expressions being rendered passive.) Rather, it uses four lenses, operating in tandem, to capture and recognize a face, stripping it bare of shadows or even makeup. Conceivably, the technology could be linked to police databases across Russia, notifying law enforcement as individuals of interest—terrorism suspects, Kremlin critics, human rights activists—
are recognized. It could be placed in subways, stadiums, or other crowded places.

 

To the artists, the project is something of a warning: Technology, Chanarin says, “is always ideological.”

 

The new blogsite is under construction
Please see the older blog entries here

The projection ship ordered by Turkey will based on the Spain LHD ship Juan Carlos 1 (built by the Spanish shipyard Navantia) which also serve as the base of 2 futurs Australian Canberra-class landing helicopter dock (LHD) HMAS Canberra and HMAS Adelaide.

In 2004, French company Direction des Constructions Navales (DCN) and Spanish company Navantia were invited to tender proposals, with DCN offering the Mistral-class amphibious assault ship and Navantia proposing the "Buque de Proyección Estratégica" design (later commissioned as Juan Carlos I). The Spanish design was selected in 2007, with Navantia responsible for construction of the ships from the keel to the flight deck, and BAE Systems Australia handling the fabrication of the superstructure and fitting out.
The construction of the first ship, HMAS Canberra, commenced in late 2008, with the hull launched in early 2011, and sea trials in early 2014. Canberra was commissioned in November 2014. Work on the second vessel, HMAS Adelaide, started in early 2010. Adelaide is predicted to enter service in 2016. They are the largest vessels ever operated by the RAN, with a displacement of 27,500 tonnes (27,100 long tons; 30,300 short tons).

The French Mistral class is an Amphibious general assault ship (LHA) that means an Amphibious general assault ship with flush deck and dock for amphibious craft. Tarawa Class ships (US Navy) are an other example. The Spanish Amphibious Assault-Ship, Multi-purpose (LHD) Juan Carlos 1 is identical to the LHA but with a capacity to lead maritime space control operations and force projection missions using ASW helicopters and V/STOL aircraft. Other examples of these type are the Wasp (US Navy).

This Turkish decision is a bad news for the French shipyard DCNS unable the deliver Sevastopol and Vladivostok Mistral class BPC ordered by Russia, due to political reason (EU embargo) and after the loss of the Australian tender France can lost the confidence of others futur potential customers.

AIN EL HILWEH, Lebanon — The gunmen who control this tiny, cramped Palestinian refugee camp in south Lebanon are uncharacteristically eager to please. Hardened militants scurry to meetings with political rivals, and speak with newfound candor to journalists about past unsuccessful efforts to overcome a history of deadly feuds in the camp.

For decades, the coveted slot of camp boss has gone to the man able to deploy the most shooters and force Ain el Hilweh’s unruly clans and factions to fall in line. Today, however, an unlikely new order prevails: Bitter rivals have forged an unprecedented level of cooperation to police their sometimes-anarchic camp, forcing the most violent jihadists to lay low, and even turning over Palestinian suspects to the Lebanese Army, an act that just a few years ago would have been considered an unpardonable treason. Strongman Munir Makdah, a member of the Fatah movement, presides over a special council of 17 militia leaders — including some borderline jihadists — who must approve the most sensitive moves.

“It’s very important: This is the first time we’ve done anything like this,” Makdah said during a recent visit to his headquarters, nestled in Ain el Hilweh’s claustrophobic horizon of apartment blocs. “I call it the democracy of the gun. We tell our brothers when they visit that they can do the same thing in Palestine.”

Since its establishment in 1948, Ain el Hilweh has been a byword for militancy — a haven for fugitives and a bête noir (at different times) to the Lebanese government, the Israeli military, even the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). An estimated 100,000 people live in the camp, which is rimmed by walls, barbed wire, and army checkpoints. Under a convoluted agreement, Lebanese soldiers search the cars going in and out, but don’t enter the camp itself, leaving policing inside to the Palestinian factions.

The experiment underway in this camp represents a rare instance of cooperation and pragmatism in a region where fragmentation and infighting is the norm. Much more is at stake than simply the stability of an overpopulated square kilometer: There is a widespread fear that if the Islamic State, or jihadists sympathetic to the group, ever gained a foothold in Lebanon, it will be in a place like Ain el Hilweh — where residents are poor, politically disenfranchised, and ineffectively policed.

The agreement in Ain el Hilweh presents significant potential upside, too, in a region currently short of examples of political progress. The camp is home to actors who can impact flashpoints all over the region: It could contain the seeds of reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza and the West Bank, while authorities everywhere might look it as a model for a successful initiative to curb jihadists.

“Syria’s war was like a storm coming to us,” Makdah said. “Everyone was worried about the camps. We reflect society.”

When it comes to security, senior Hamas officials in Ain el Hilweh amiably take orders from Makdah. At the camp’s Hamas office, a visiting Fatah official refilled the Hamas chief’s coffee cup as the Hamas official gave his unvarnished assessment of the regional security situation. “Honestly, we Palestinians are in a weak position,” said the official, Abu Ahmed Fadel.

Fadel said it took the factions much too long to learn the lesson of the crisis in the Nahr el Bared refugee camp in north Lebanon in 2007, when jihadists battled the Lebanese Army. That fight destroyed the entire camp and left 27,000 residents homeless. Ever since then, Fadel said, Lebanese leaders suggested that the Palestinians set aside their internal differences and form a united front. It took what Fadel called “the fires in Syria” to finally push the sides to agree.

“Compared to what’s happening around us, we’re a stable river,” said Khalid al-Shayeb, the Fatah deputy who’s in charge of the patrols in Ain el Hilweh and the neighboring Mieh Mieh camp. “We managed to neutralize the threats from Palestinians much more effectively than the Lebanese Army has managed to neutralize the threats from the rest of Lebanon.”

There’s no sign here of the discord that forced a bitter break between Hamas and its long-time patrons in Damascus, or the blood feud between Hamas and Fatah, or between Hamas and the more extreme religious factions like Islamic Jihad and Ansar Allah. One fear has managed to outweigh all that acrimony: the dread of an encroachment by the Islamic State, whose entry into the camp could provoke outsiders to destroy it and cost the grand old factions everything.

“People should be united because there is a threat to everybody,” said Ali Baraka, a senior Hamas official based in Beirut.

That’s not to say that the camp’s residents have entirely stayed out of the Syrian war. Some reports say that one of Makdah’s own sons snuck into Syria to join the jihadists. Makdah has figures of his own: precisely 52 Palestinians from all the camps in Lebanon, he says, have been tracked joining the Syrian jihadists.

The impact of the war is felt everywhere in Ain el Hilweh. A human flood of refugees has entered over the past several years, filling the impossibly crowded camp to its breaking point. According to Makdah, at least 20,000 newcomers moved to the camp since 2011, when war broke out in Syria. Officials have struggled to maintain the camp’s fragile water supply and say they can’t provide adequate education, housing, and health care to the camp’s residents. Until last week, Makdah said, he had turned over his offices to refugees. Now that they’ve found better dwellings, he’s moved back in.

A murder in April tested Makdah’s efforts to construct a new order in the camp. A Lebanese supporter of Hezbollah named Marwan Issa was dragged into Ain el Hilweh and murdered. According to Palestinian security officials, Issa was a member of a Hezbollah auxiliary militia called the Resistance Brigades, and his suspected killers were known arms dealers. They believe the murder was related to a weapons deal gone awry. Two suspects were quickly apprehended. Leaders of the 17 factions called an emergency meeting to vote on whether to hand them over to the Lebanese authorities.

“Usually the Islamic factions object,” said Bilal Selwan Aboul Nour, the camp security officer in charge of liaising with the Lebanese security establishment. “In this case, it was different. The victim was Lebanese. And if we didn’t cooperate, it could bring trouble on the entire camp.”

Aboul Nour immediately delivered the captives himself to the Lebanese Army barracks up the road.

A third suspect in the murder remains at large in the camp, however, illustrating the limits of this new cooperative order. That suspect is under the protection of Jund el-Sham, a jihadist faction, in the Taamir area of the camp. “We can’t use force,” Aboul Nour said. “He’s in an area outside our control.”

Hezbollah and the Lebanese government have been patient and understanding, according to the Palestinians, although Hezbollah called the killing a “stab in the back of the Lebanese resistance.”

It was the Islamic State’s infiltration of the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk in Damascus that motivated the dithering Palestinian factions to unite last summer. At the time, the already unraveling region was experiencing extra strain: The Islamic State had seized much of northern Iraq and declared a caliphate, and had seized control of some entrances to Yarmouk and assassinated Palestinian operatives, according to Baraka. Senior officials from Fatah, Hamas, and the Lebanese government quickly agreed that if the Islamic State could win followers in Yarmouk, it could easily do the same in Lebanese camps.

Since September, the Palestinian Joint Security Committee has doubled the number of camp police in Ain el Hilweh from 200 to 400. Fatah supplies the top commanders and foots 70 percent of the cost of the committee, and Hamas provides the rest. The officers are mostly familiar faces in the camp, some of them veteran fighters in their fifties. Now they wear red armbands that identify themselves as Joint Security Committee fighters. Makdah has not only brought together Fatah and Hamas, he has also convinced jihadists and secular Marxists to police the camp in joint patrols — a success that eluded generations of Arab leaders before him.

Most of the fighters still stay close to their factions: In the headquarters, Fatah old-timers cluster around the small fountain full of goldfish. Outside, Ansar Allah’s fighters — identifiable by their long Salafi-style beards — politely decline to talk to reporters. Near the hospital, the clean-shaven leftists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine shun the uniform altogether; their unit commander, Ali Rashid, wears blue jeans and a brown leather jacket. The groups sometimes organize joint patrols, and the major checkpoints include fighters from all the factions.

It was especially difficult for secular leftists to join forces with Islamist jihadists, Rashid said.

“We agreed that we would cut off any hand that tries to mess with security in the camp,” Rashid said. “We cannot tolerate even the smallest action from any takfiri [extremist] who enters here.”

So far, he said, the extremists in the camp have obeyed the new order. They might shelter fugitives — but so long as the fugitives are in the camp they refrain from any active role in militant operations.

Makdah says the camp really needs 1,000 police officers. In March, he extended his writ to the nearby camp of Mieh Mieh. If the experiment continues to succeed, Palestinian and Lebanese security officials said they hope to spread the experiment to all the Palestinian refugee camps in the country.

Ain el Hilweh’s unique circumstances make it an unlikely template for other places: It’s a hyper-politicized area whose claustrophobic living conditions make the Gaza Strip appear positively suburban by comparison. But sudden and intense collaboration between militants of secular, Marxist, Islamist and jihadist pedigrees show just how dramatically the Syrian war has shaken the old order. And it provides a fleeting glimpse of the kind of politicking — and transcending of old divisions — that has so far escaped mainstream Palestinian politics and the revolutionary movements that fueled the Arab Spring uprisings.

MAHMOUD ZAYYAT/AFP/Getty Images

Eight months after a devastating war, Israel’s continued and deliberate policy of besieging Gaza and enforcing its separation from the West Bank means conflict could break out again.

The formation of a new right-wing coalition government doesn’t look like it will help. The cabinet appears to be a devastating blow to hopes of any accord with the Palestinians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a lot to do to convince domestic and foreign audience that he has a credible desire and vision for peace.

Netanyahu is now trying to find common cause with neighboring Arab countries over the Islamic State and violent Salafi-jihadism, instead of working toward a regional peace agreement. But Israel should recognize that Gaza is not immune to these radicalizing trends as its population sinks further into poverty and despair.

The plight of Gaza and its people, and the security threat it poses to the whole region, was at the heart of our mission earlier this month to Israel and Palestine. We went as members of The Elders, the group of independent former leaders who campaign for peace and human rights across the globe.

One place we visited was Kibbutz Nir Am, just one kilometer from the border with Gaza. We heard directly from people on the front line of the conflict who wish to live in peace with their Palestinian neighbors. One mother’s words stood out: “If people have nothing to live for, then they will find something to die for.”

She and her fellow kibbutz residents are understandably frightened and angry about the threats of rocket attacks and tunnel raids, but we were impressed by their insistence that only a just peace can bring security to their community.

We regret that we were unable to visit Gaza on this trip, to see the situation there for ourselves. What we heard from independent experts and United Nations officials confirmed our worst expectations regarding poverty, housing, health, and political deadlock. It only strengthened our determination to work for peace, a two-state solution, and the lifting of the blockade.

The situation in Gaza is intolerable. Eight months after the end of last summer’s war, not one destroyed house has been rebuilt. People cannot live with the respect and dignity they deserve.

A complete paradigm shift is essential. This demands the lifting of the siege and an end to Israel’s policy of separating the West Bank and Gaza: the two main components of what should, in our view, become an independent Palestinian state. Unfortunately, as we heard during our visit, without Gaza the two-state solution simply cannot be realized.

We have both spent decades working for peace in the Middle East and, notwithstanding the growing number of skeptics, believe the two-state solution remains the only viable outcome.

Gaza’s 1.8 million people are besieged, isolated, and desperate. They cannot enjoy any of the aspects of normal life, from trade and travel to health and education, that people in our countries — and, indeed, in Israel — take for granted.

The risk of another war is very real. This would be disastrous not just for the people of Gaza but for all Palestinians and all Israelis as well. Everyone who lives in the Holy Land has suffered under the shadow of conflict for long enough.

To avoid further bloodshed and boost the currently slim chances of a peace agreement, Palestinian reconciliation and unity is a prerequisite. When we met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, we were encouraged by his commitment to convene the Interim Leadership Framework, a new caucus that would bring together the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization and representatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the main factions in Gaza.

Abbas asked us, as Elders, to secure from Hamas a written request for the convening of elections, and he committed to hold fresh presidential and Palestinian Legislative Council elections upon receipt of this communications. This is now the focus of our ongoing work in the region.

We also believe it is essential that the Palestinian Government of National Consensus is fully established in Gaza, initially to control the border crossings and thus to allow many more goods to enter the territory for reconstruction and other essential purposes.

These steps might seem merely procedural but they are vital to reconnecting Gaza and the West Bank politically, economically, and socially.

Even if Palestinian factions can be reconciled, however, they will still need credible and sincere partners for peace on the Israeli side. Such forces do exist despite the dominant trends in the Knesset. We were encouraged by the sincere commitment of several proudly patriotic Israelis we met for the realization of the two-state solution.

The best guarantee of Israel’s future security and acceptance by its neighbors will be the two-state solution and an end to the occupation and settlement expansion. To help achieve this goal, we feel it is high time that the countries of Europe take a more proactive role, underpinned by a serious financial commitment to assist in Gaza’s reconstruction.

Although the United States will remain a key player, it cannot shoulder the burden of peacemaking alone. We will do all we can to support EU High Representative Federica Mogherini so an effective multilateral process can be set in motion.

This was the fourth Elders mission to Israel and Palestine since 2009. Our organization was founded by Nelson Mandela to work for peace and human rights around the world. Each time we visit this region, it is brought home to us how the former cannot be secured without the latter. The people of Israel and Palestine deserve nothing less.

ABBAS MOMANI/AFP/Getty Images

The Russian economy must reach average global growth rates by 2018, according to a major outline of the government's activities until 2018 adopted on Thursday.

The Taleban attack on a Kabul guesthouse which killed 15 people (not 14, as earlier reports said) on 13 May 2015 was aimed, the Taleban claimed, at “invaders”, specifically an “important meeting” of “important people from many invading countries, especially Americans.” In this update of our earlier dispatch, AAN’s Kate Clark identifies all the dead: all were civilian and eight were aid workers, five, Afghans from the regions who had been visiting Kabul for training. Even by the Taleban’s own crude metrics of nationality apparently denoting ‘targetability’, she says just two of the dead came from NATO member states. Moreover, once again, she says, the Taleban have breached the distinction between military and civilian, seemingly branding all foreigners as ‘invaders’. Along with biographical details of all those killed, she pays tribute to one of them in particular, a friend of AAN’s, the former director of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), Paula Kantor, who was a serious-minded, generous researcher and mentor who carried out important work on reducing poverty in Afghanistan.

 (Originally published 14 May; updated 18 May 2015.)

15 people, all civilians, were killed when the Taleban attacked the Park Palace Hotel in central Kabul on the night of 13 May 2015. It is a mid-range hotel, where many foreigners, largely Indians and Pakistanis, but also Westerners stay or live. Most tend to be aid workers, researchers and journalists; those with more money or who feel particularly under threat usually stay at the far more expensive Serena. On Wednesday night, the Park Palace was hosting Afghan classical musician Ustad Eltaf Hussein (1) and the concert had drawn many Afghan and foreign music lovers. The police believe the attack was pre-planned since the gunman/men (the number is disputed; the Taleban say one, Afghan security forces say three) did not need to force their entrance with explosives or by killing guards, but appear to have been inside the hotel beforehand.

By nationality, those killed were: Afghan (six, including a joint British-Afghan national), Indian (four), Pakistani (two) American (one), Italian (one) and Kazakh (one).

The number of foreigners killed and wounded made this an unusual attack, as the vast majority of those killed in the conflict continue to be Afghans (both civilian and military). Last year, on average across the country, 29 civilians were killed or injured as a result of the war every day (UNAMA figures; see also AAN analysis). However, that average is likely to increase this year, given that the violence has already intensified. UNAMA reported the number of civilian casualties during the first four months of 2015 as 16 per cent higher than in the same period in 2014. There was virtually no ‘winter lull’ this year, except in the Afghan capital which had been enjoying an unusually quiet few months after a particularly violent autumn and early winter. A number of explanations have been supplied for this – that it was partially linked to President Ashraf Ghani’s decision to ‘take the gloves off’ with regard to night raids by NDS and Afghan Special Forces (Karzai had largely banned these), and partially to the president’s demands that Pakistan put greater pressure on the Taleban to, among other things, cease all suicide and complex attacks in the capital.

Then came two suicide attacks on shuttle buses ferrying workers to and from the Attorney General’s Office, first on 4 May and then on 10 May 2015, which, together, killed seven civilians and injured dozens more. And now the attack on a cultural event at a hotel. (2) The lull is certainly over. The end of the calm raises questions about Pakistan’s intent and influence over those sending attackers and suicide bombers into the Afghan capital. It condemned the attack, which came a day after a visit of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif; he had assured Afghanistan of Islamabad’s full support in its battle against the Taleban, saying, “the enemies of Afghanistan cannot be the friends of Pakistan.”

The attack also raises questions about Taleban intentions this year.

The Taleban’s ‘spring offensive’ statement, issued on 11 April 2015, reads as if, after years of being lambasted for attacking civilians, the movement was finally trying harder to protect them.

… top priority will be given to safeguard and protect the lives and properties of the civilian people; and those Mujahidin who are negligent and careless in preserving the lives and properties of the civilian people and their operations result in the civilian losses or casualties, will be panelized according to Jihadi and Sharia rules and regulations. Similarly, consisting with its policies, the Islamic Emirate has never and will never target religious and other educational institutions like mosques, madrassas, schools, universities, health centers like clinics and hospitals, public buildings and other projects of public welfare. [English as original]

However, both the Taleban attacks on prosecutors and judges, and the assault on the Park Palace Hotel, represented major breaches of international law which prohibits attacks on civilians. Despite their talk, the Taleban continue to fail to abide by the Geneva Conventions, which demand the protection of non-combatants. Instead, the Taleban divide people into those they deem to be with the government, whether military or civilian, and those who are not. It is only the latter which they call ‘civilians.’ In their eyes that makes, for example, prosecutors ‘fair game.’ (UNAMA, quoted earlier, noted on 10 May, that there had, by that point in 2015, been 11 separate attacks against legal professionals and court houses, causing in total 114 civilian casualties (28 killed and 86 injured) this year so far – “an increase of more than 600 per cent from the same period last year.”)

Taleban justifications of the Park Palace attack

The Taleban’s repeated use of the word ‘invaders’ as an apparent synonym for ‘foreigner’ in their claim of responsibility for the Park Palace attack (read a translation at the end of this dispatch) also reads like a deliberate attempt to blur the distinction between military and civilian.

… the mujahed managed to… attack a meeting attended by over 100 invaders.

… an important meeting attended by important people from many invading countries, especially Americans…

The enemies…were holding night-time parties consisting promiscuity and indulgence as well as other important meetings.

Among the dead, there are a number of important/senior people from the invading countries…

The invading countries should understand that they will not stay safe from our attacks at any place and under any cover as long as they fail to withdraw their troops from our country and recognize our sovereignty. … (3) 

Following this statement, some people pressed the Taleban on whether they now considered foreign humanitarian workers as legitimate targets. Here was one exchange with Abdul Qahar Balkhi who tweets for the Taleban (all English as per the original)  in which it looked like they were backing off from their initial hard-line messaging:

Abdulqahar Balkhi: Every foreigner from invading country especially @NATO is considered an invader, we don’t classify any as civilian

@SwoopOuttaOrbit: So even if i was on a humanitarian mission For instance as a doctor in a hospital then i would be your enemy?

@Abdulqahar Balkhi: Any Muslim/non-Muslim not part of @NATO alliance working for humanitarian cause is not considered invader

@Abdulqahar Balkhi: there are proper procedures in place for humanitarian orgs to contribute positively in Afghanistan

Balkhi made another response, to Amnesty International which had condemned what it called an “atrocious attack,” the Taleban’s “contempt for human life” and a “surge” in their targeting of civilians:

@Abdulqahar Balkhi: Reaction: #amnestyinternational accusations about civ/cas baseless, foreign nationals working for invaders not civ.

@Abdulqahar Balkhi: US & their hirelings deliberately target Ulama, madaris, homes & civilians daily; these same organizations have elected absolute silence

In other words, there was both a denial that the dead were civilians and a counter-accusation, that the US and Afghan government forces regularly kill Afghan civilians.

The main claim came 12 hours after the attack started – a long delay by Taleban standard. Apart from the Twitter comments, there has been only one other statement, an article published on the Taleban’s al-Emara (‘the Emirate’) Pashto website. Reporting only the confirmation of the Indian and American casualties, it still insisted the attack had been against “invaders,” but now emphasized the ‘moral decay’ of the concert, saying it had been organised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and had involved ‘scandal’ and ‘obscenity.’

Conflating civilian and military

Whatever justifications the Taleban try to make, from the list of those killed below, it is clear just how far away they were from being the “important invaders” claimed by the movement. Of the 15 dead – 11 men and three women – eight were aid workers, (4) five of them Afghan nationals who had travelled in from the regions for training. Three others worked in finance, three others as consultants in energy, infrastructure  or in an unspecified sector. The last was a visiting spouse.

The place which was targeted was also at odds with the Taleban’s portrayal of it. A mid-range hotel, its guests were mostly Indians and Pakistanis, along with Westerners and Afghans from the provinces; these were professional people with access to limited budgets and little reason, they thought, to fear a Taleban attack. If they had had more money or felt themselves to be more obvious targets, they would have been staying elsewhere.

Did the Taleban just make a mistake in their estimation of the worthiness of Park Palace as an important target? (UNODC used to be based there; when they did, there were indeed more stringent security measures. However, it has also not previously been linked to the ‘invasion’.)

Or was the Park Palace just a place which the Taleban could attack easily and hope to net victims who could be held up afterwards as “the targets”?

Or was this actually intended as an attack on foreigners linked to NATO countries? We wrote earlier that in the killing of someone like Paula Kantor the inherent racism of viewing all foreigners or Westerners as ‘invaders’ became clear, in that her suitability as a target in Taleban eyes apparently had nothing to do with who she was or what she did, but only that she was a westerner. However, even here the gunman/men apparently failed to distinguish among potential victims according to the crude metrics of a foreigner/Westerner being an enemy, given that Afghans and those from the region were not spared (Pakistani, Indian and Kazakh). One of the victims, for example, according to two eye-witnesses who spoke to AAN, was an older ‘local-looking’ man with a long grey and white beard wearing shalwar kamiz. Did the gunman/men expect more Westerners and then just kill whomever they found?

As AAN wrote after the attack on the Lebanese restaurant in Kabul in January 2014, we have seen the Taleban crossing the red line of targeting foreign civilians before. And we have seen them trying to justify this before (see, for instance, their response to AAN’s piece on the Taverna attack). We have also seen them pulling back. This time the Taleban’s language is again worrying and many will be watching to see whether their targeting ‘guidelines’ have indeed changed. The fear is that the paucity of foreign military targets (the vast majority of the international military are in non-combat roles advising at senior levels; they are not in the field, except for some United States special forces) may make the softer foreign civilian targets more attractive. Many people, anyway, will already be sceptical of the Taleban’s assertions on Twitter that humanitarians are not targets, given the sheer number of aid workers among those killed.

If there was a shift in the Taleban’s targeting, this would put a large part of the international humanitarian and aid effort under threat, with potentially grave consequences to vulnerable Afghans (50 per cent of whom live beneath the poverty line). The irony would be that those affected would include NGOs who, out of principle, have always distanced themselves from the western military and who have often been in the country for decades, including during the Taleban regime.

15 dead, all civilians, all individuals, among them Paula Kantor

Before giving a longer obituary of Paula Kantor the former director of the other leading Kabul-based research organisation, AREU, who was a colleague and friend of AAN’s, we present what is known of the other victims. Many of the Afghan families did not want the identities of their kin released, possibly for privacy reasons, familiar to grieving families everywhere, possibly also because of the fear of repercussion. We have respected this.

The Afghans

Two Afghans working for the NGO Action Aid, 27-year old Muhammad Muhammadi and 36-year old Dr Jawed Ahmad Sahai, were killed. They were both working in Balkh and had come to Kabul for training on watershed management and water harvesting. A colleague, Andrew Wieteacha, told Vice News he was close to both and described how he would periodically travel to the provinces with Sahai:

It would be Sahai’s stories about his family, including anecdotes of his 4-year-old daughter, that Wieteacha would miss most, he said. “He was more than a hard worker, more than a dedicated humanitarian,…he was also a father and a husband. His family was paramount to him.”

Wieteacha said Muhammadi had always been listening to other people, “It was his patience and kindness that made [him] so easy to work with.” Other colleagues, describing how he had risen within the ranks at Action Aid, told Vice News of his “innate ability to win the respect of everyone from senior colleagues, high-powered political officials and even local elders.” 

The families of three other Afghans working for another NGO, the Aga Khan Foundation, who were killed in the attack did not want their identities revealed. A colleague said the two men and one woman, who were “of a variety of ages, young and old” were normally based in Takhar working on the Foundation’s human and institutional development programme. Like the Afghan Aid staff, they had been in Kabul for training.

A British Afghan who had been working for the British Council was also killed at Park Palace. His family also did not want his details released.

The Indians

Dr Martha Farrell (1959-2015) was a director of the NGO, Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), which she and her husband had founded in 1982 to promote citizens’ participation in democratic government. In a professional career lasting more than 30 years, she had worked in India and abroad in the fields of education, research and policy advocacy, especially on gender and women’s rights. She had been in Kabul to train staff from the Aga Khan Foundation and was killed along with three of her trainees. There were strong tributes for Martha from former colleagues:

Dr Martha Farrell was a dear friend, popular colleague and a great support to others. She has always championed the causes of poor and marginalized. She lived and sacrificed her life for gender equality and women empowerment.

(from the PRIA website)

Martha was a strong woman, always very focussed and determined. She was a great trainer, she was instrumental in mainstreaming gender in PRIA, and she always raised gender issues in all discourses. Martha was passionate about her work.

(a message posted at Sahayi – Centre for Collective Learning and Action; see here)

Dr Farrell is survived by her husband and two children.

Two other Indians were auditors at the same firm. Rajesh Kumar Bhatti, who was 64 and from Chandigarh, had retired as a Senior Deputy Accountant General of Punjab in 2011 and, his son said, had been planning to finish his assignment in Kabul and return home next month: “I spoke to him yesterday, and he seemed excited about his coming trip to the US. He had booked the flight tickets and was going to stay with my younger brother there.” (5) His colleague, George Mathew from Ernakulam in Kochi, had called his family during the attack saying he was fine and hiding. Later, when they called back, there was no response.

The fourth Indian to be killed, Dr Satish Chandra, was described as a “technical consultant”

The Pakistanis

Pakistan lost two nationals in the attack: Ismail Awan, an adviser with an Afghan power supply company who was from Sargodha in Punjab, and Abdul Sattar, a finance manager in an Afghan construction company who was from Charsadda district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The Italian and Kazakh

Aigerim Abdulayeva, 27 years old and from Kazakhstan (parents from Taraz but they had migrated to the capital), was killed along with her husband, Alessandro Abati, who was 48 and from Lombardy in Italy. They had met in Kazakhstan and married there before moving to Milan where Abdulayeva was studying for a degree in fashion design. It seems, from the Italian press, that they had been planning a second marriage ceremony in Italy in July. It reported that Abati had been a consultant for infrastructure projects and had worked extensively in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. According to the Italian Foreign Minister, Paolo Gentiloni, he had been working most recently “as a consultant to an agency that promotes investment in Afghanistan.” His parents, said the press, were “shut up in pain; [they] preferred not to comment.”

The American

Dr Paula Kantor, was a dedicated and meticulous researcher who spent five years working in Afghanistan, first as senior researcher and then director of AREU (2005-2010). She had been in Kabul for a few days, the first time in five years, very excited to be starting a new project looking at women and wheat-growing in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Ethiopia for the Islamabad-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre, the world’s leading centre for research, development and training for these two essential staple crops. Four months ago, she had been appointed as its senior scientist working on gender and development. Typically, for Paula’s work, the new project was aimed at helping the poorest and most vulnerable.

Previously, Paula had worked at the WorldFish Centre, the International Centre for Research on Women and at the Universities of East Anglia and Wisconsin-Madison. With a BA in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in Gender and Development from the University of Sussex and a PhD in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina, she brought a formidable skill-set to her work in Afghanistan.

More importantly, however, she brought a commitment to positive social change through policy research. Behind her often self-deprecating front were firm and steadfast views on the importance and relevance of research and the need to uphold high standards. She was pro-active and energetic in seeking out new ideas and opportunities for research that would make a difference in improving people’s lives, especially in the areas of child labour, women, livelihoods, and migration. “She was focused on her work,” one former colleague said, “yet with staff, she was always generous with her time.” Her output at AREU was prolific (6), but she was also crucial for training up a new generation of Afghan researchers and was always a strong advocate for defining a meaningful career path for them.

She remained hopeful for Afghanistan as she made clear on the eve of the London conference in 2010 when Afghan and international leaders met to discuss ‘progress’ in Afghanistan:

“If the international community listens as much as it speaks, and if it responds genuinely to Afghan needs and priorities, then the shoots of hope, already present, can grow.” 

Billions of dollars have been spent on aid in Afghanistan and yet there is still an overwhelming need for the kind of research which Paula carried out and mentored others in doing: thoughtful, passionate, practical and committed, seeking to understand the intricacies of the Afghan social and economic systems that keep people thriving, oppressed or just alive.

 

(1) Ustad Eltaf Hussain is the son of Ustad Muhammad Hussain Sarahang. He was born in Kabul in 1955 and learned classical music from both his grandfather, Ustad Ghulam Hussain Khan, and father. He was also trained by Ustad Amanat Ali Khan and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan of Pakistan.

(2) Most recently, the Taleban’s 17 May suicide attack against a EUPOL convoy (a civilian target, although one which the Taleban consider military) next to the Kabul airport was bound to hurt civilians; indeed, two teenage girls were killed, along with a British security guard working with EUPOL.

(3) A hint that the Taleban might be about to widen their targeting had already come in their spring offensive statement: “the occupation has not ceased in political, cultural, educational, propaganda and other aspects.”

(4) Quoting Acbar, we earlier reported seven aid workers killed. However, the British Afghan had also been working on a development project.

(5) The Indian press reported that two of the Indians had been working with the UN, but UNAMA has confirmed to AAN that none of the dead had been “working with nor was contracted to any UN entity.”

(6) A list of Paula Kantor’s publications at AREU (some co-authored) are:

Create More Quality Jobs with Regular Pay to Improve Livelihoods and Political Stability, May 2007, with Stefan Schütte

Target Assistance to Families with the Least Access to Diverse, Better-Paying Jobs, May 2007, with Stefan Schütte 

Microcredit, Informal Credit and Rural Livelihoods: A Village Case Study in Kabul Province, November 2007, with Erna Anderson 

Microcredit, Informal Credit and Rural Livelihoods: A Village Case Study in Bamiyan, April 2008, with Erna Anderson

Factors Influencing Decisions to Use Child Labour: A Case Study of Poor Households in Kabul, April 2008, with Anastasiya Hozyaninva

Focusing ANDS Implementation on Pro-Poor Outcomes: Workshop Proceedings, 23 February 2009, with Sayed Mohammad Shah

Delivering on Poverty Reduction: Focusing ANDS Implementation on Pro-Poor Outcomes, February 2009, with Adam Pain

From Access to Impact: Microcredit and Rural Livelihoods in Afghanistan, June 2009

Child Labour in Afghanistan: ACBAR Presentation Notes, November 2009

Building a Viable Microfinance Sector in Afghanistan, January 2010, with Erna Anderson

Speaking from the Evidence: Governance, Justice and Development—Policy Notes for the 2010 Kabul Conference, May 2010, with Anna Larson, Deborah J Smith, Emily Winterbotham, Jay Lamey and Rebecca Roberts

Improving Efforts to Achieve Equitable Growth and Reduce Poverty, April 2010

Afghanistan Livelihood Trajectories: Evidence from Faryab, September 2010, with Zarah Batul Nezami

Poverty in Afghan Policy: Enhancing Solutions through Better Defining the Problem, November 2010, with Adam Pain

Securing Life and Livelihoods in Rural Afghanistan: The Role of Social Relationships, December 2010, with Adam Pain

Understanding and Addressing Context in Afghanistan: How Villages Differ and Why, December 2010, with Adam Pain

Running out of Options: Tracing Rural Afghan Livelihoods, January 2011, with Adam Pain

Beyond the Market: Can the AREDP transform Afghanistan’s rural nonfarm economy? February 2011, with Adam Pain

ANNEX: The Taleban’s statement on the Park Palace attack (AAN translation from the Pashto text)

Fedai Attack on Meeting Related to Occupiers Killed and Wounded Dozens of Occupiers Last Night in Kabul

Last night at 9 pm during the Azm operation, a self-sacrificing [fedai] mujahid, Muhammad Idris hailing from Logar province, using a special tactic, carried out [a series of] attacks on Park Palace guesthouse in Taimani area of Kabul city. The mujahid, who had a pistol, a Kalashnikov, a huge amount of explosives, a [suicide] vest and hand grenades, managed to breach the perimeters of the guesthouse and attack a meeting attended by over 100 invaders.

The attack which lasted until late last night was designed carefully; an important meeting attended by important people from many invading countries, especially Americans, was in progress as the attack happened.

Such attacks had previously happened in Wazir Akbar Khan and Shahr-e Naw which resulted in severe casualties for the enemy. The enemies have now [after the two previous areas turned insecure] moved to this area [Taimai] where they were holding night-time parties consisting of promiscuity and indulgence as well as other important meetings.

The mujahedin had followed the enemies carefully and knew about the timing of the meeting precisely. The fedai mujahid managed to cross all the security blockades safely and arrived in the hall [where the meeting was taking place]. According to information, more than 100 people were present in the meeting, half of whom were either killed or wounded in the attack.

Among the dead are a number of senior people from the invading countries; the media and the enemies will perhaps keep silent over that.

Rumours suggesting that the attack was carried out by three people are inaccurate; only one person carried out the attack.

The invading countries should understand that they will not stay safe from our attacks at any place and under any cover as long as they fail to withdraw their troops from our country and recognize our sovereignty. 

A Máltával és Lengyelországgal szemben folyó deficiteljárás lezárását javasolta a héten az Európai Bizottság, amely a Nagy-Britanniának a túlzott mértékű hiány megszüntetésére adott határidőt további két évvel történő meghosszabbítását is indokoltnak tartja. Finnország ellen viszont rövidesen elindulhat a deficiteljárás.

Europe is poised to try to help Libya stem the lethal human trafficking trade that has imperiled the lives of tens of thousands of desperate migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea in search of a better life in Europe.

But Libya’s U.N. ambassador, Ibrahim Dabbashi, is essentially saying “not so fast.”

The Security Council’s four European members — Britain, France, Spain and Lithuania — have crafted a resolution that would grant Europeans broad authority to use military force to seize suspected smuggling ships on the high seas or in Libya’s territorial waters, according to a diplomat familiar with the draft. The resolution, which European foreign ministers are scheduled to take up on Monday in Brussels, would also allow European forces to pursue human traffickers in Libya.

It’s unclear how many European navies are prepared to participate in a concerted interdiction effort on the high seas, and it seems highly unlikely that any European countries would relish the chance to send combat forces into a country riven by a bloody civil war.

Dabbashi doesn’t want to wait to find out. In an interview with Foreign Policy, Dabbashi expressed deep reservations about the European plan, which he said could violate Libya’s sovereignty. He also fretted that Libyan fishermen might get caught up in the international operation and have their boats, their only source of income, destroyed. “It will be very difficult to distinguish between fishermen and trafficking boats,” he said. “It could be disastrous for fishermen.”

The ambassador’s concerns echo public and private misgivings being expressed about the European plan from the United Nations, the United States, and Russia. The resolution would be adopted under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, a provision that is traditionally invoked to impose sanctions or authorize military action. The European text, which may be shared with the 15-nation Security Council later this week or next week, also would permit the detention of smugglers and the scuttling of their ships. In addition, foreign powers would be allowed to mount attacks on Libyan soil to seize any “assets” the smugglers might use to further their illicit trade.

The initiative is being driven most fervently by Italy and EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, an Italian. Rome has shouldered the greatest burden of accommodating the massive flow of tens of thousands of desperate migrants into Europe. In previous efforts to stem the tide, Italy sought unsuccessfully to rally international support for a U.N.-backed stabilization force in Libya.

European powers cast the diplomatic push on humanitarian grounds, but Dabbashi voiced suspicion that Italy and other European powers were actually seeking a blank check to carry out offensive military operations on Libyan soil and Libyan territorial waters. The European approach, he said pointedly, could “raise more problems than it solves.”

The European diplomacy follows one of the deadliest months for the nearly 60,000 migrants that have fled unrest in Africa and the Middle East for Europe since the beginning of the year. In one particularly horrific incident, a boat carrying more than 750 migrants capsized off the coast of Sicily, killing most of the passengers.

“In the first 130 days of 2015, 1,800 people have drowned in the Mediterranean,” Peter Sutherland, the U.N.’s special representative for international migration, told the Security Council Monday. “That total represents a 20-fold increase over the same period last year – and at this pace, between 10,000 and 20,000 migrants would perish by autumn.”

The migrants come from as far away as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia, and Syria, where political repression or long-standing conflicts have fueled a mass exodus. The largest numbers are transiting through Libya, which is in the midst of its own civil war, and are paying a fee of $5,000 to $15,000 for their passage to the southern shores of Italy, according to the United Nations. “They face a substantial risk of death,” Sutherland said. “But, clearly, the situations from which they flee are even more dangerous.”

European governments have faced intense criticism for mounting what has largely been a lackluster response to the rising migrant death toll.

Last November, European leaders shuttered an Italian naval operation, dubbed Mare Nostrum, that patrolled international waters in search of smuggling boats and sought to prosecute the traffickers. The program, which is credited with saving thousands of lives, was considered too costly by its European funders. A newer, less ambitious European program, called Operation Triton, only operates within about 21 miles of Italy’s shores, and has only six vessels at its disposal, according to Sutherland. Mare Nostrum had 32.

The push for a Security Council resolution is aimed to show renewed European resolve. It comes as the European Commission on Wednesday announced a new European migration plan, which would triple funding for a European maritime operation aimed at rescuing migrants at sea, establish a quota system for distributing refugees throughout Europe, and forge a common security policy aimed at dismantling traffickers networks and fighting the smuggling of humans.

On April 23, the European Council endorsed a plan favored by Mogherini “to undertake systematic efforts to identify, capture, and destroy vessels before they are used by traffickers in accordance with international law.”

The European call for the use of force has faced some skepticism at the United Nations, where U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Russia, and the United States have expressed public or private reservations about the plan. “Destroying the boats in not the appropriate way, it’s not the good way,” Ban told reporters during a visit to the Vatican. He voiced concern that destroying boats could damage an already ailing local economy.

Russian officials, for their part, have voiced regret for supporting a resolution in 2011 that paved the way for a NATO-backed overthrow of former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, saying they were fooled into believing that the mission was designed only to prevent the mass slaughter of civilians. Moscow remains skeptical about the latest European plan. “We think it’s just going too far,” Russian Ambassador to the U.N. Vitaly Churkin said late last week.

The United States has not publically criticized the European proposal. But during a May 11 closed-door Security Council debate, Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, asked a series of pointed questions about the European plan, according to three diplomats briefed on the meeting. One of her biggest: Whether creating a European force designed to deliver rescued migrants to Europe for processing might actually encourage people to try to make the risky passage.

Power and other American diplomats have also privately raised concerns with foreign officials about the wisdom of trying to adopt the resolution under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, a provision used to authorize sanctions or the use of military force. Washington worries that governments in other parts of the world, including Asia, might seek authorization for military force against their own migrants using the provision.

Some diplomats, however, say they suspect the U.S. is reluctant to see the Security Council getting into the business of addressing migration issues because it doesn’t want to set a precedent that might invite other governments to call for council consideration of American migration policies.

Speaking to the Security Council on May 11, Mogherini sought to downplay the military nature of the operation, saying the Europeans had no intention of sending an intervention force onto Libyan soil. She also assured council members that the effort was not aimed at forcing refugees to remain in Libya, where many faced detention in extremely harsh conditions.

“Let me explicitly assure you that no refugees or migrants intercepted at sea will be sent back against their will,” Mogherini told the council. “Their rights under Geneva conventions will be fully honored.”

Asked to expand on Power’s remarks in the closed-door meeting, a U.S. official said that the Obama administration wanted to ensure that “any response that imposes consequences on smugglers and their assets should avoid putting migrants in further danger.”

But the official, who declined to be identified by name, said: “We support Europe’s effort to take a comprehensive approach to resolving these migration challenges and would emphasize that – as laid out in the EU council’s conclusions – a sustainable solution must include elements to expand search and rescue operations, increase legal avenues to migration, provide protection to refugees, and help source and transit and transit countries to manage migrants and refugees more humanely, in addition to cracking down on smugglers.”

European officials, meanwhile, are calling on Libya’s leaders to write a formal letter to the U.N. granting their consent for a new mission.

But any effort to secure Libyan backing is complicated by the fact that two rival factions — the internationally recognized government, headquartered in the eastern city of Tobruk, and a coalition of Islamists and fighters from the Misrata-based militia — are in the midst of a bloody civil war. Any decision to use force would require the formal consent of the government in Tobruk, which fled the Libyan capital of Tripoli last summer. But it would also require the approval of the rebels, who now control Tripoli and many of the country’s main ports. The failure to secure both parties consent, U.N. officials warn, could undermine U.N.-brokered talks aimed at forming a government of national unity in Libya.

While Dabbashi didn’t rule out the possibility that the Libyan government might ultimately agree to an outside maritime force, he set potentially insurmountable terms. “If we have to ask for assistance we will ask for assistance of the Security Council to extend the authority of the Libyan government over all of Libya,” he said.

That is a non-starter as it would run contrary to U.N. efforts to negotiate a power-sharing arrangement, according to diplomats. But they said they remain confident that they can secure the support of the key Libyan parties.

“We know what Dabbashi thinks, but at the end of day, if we are going to get a request from the government, it’s not going to be a letter written by Dabbashi,” said one U.N.-based diplomat.

The Libyans are not the only ones to harbor serious doubts about the European plan. “Nobody really thinks the European Union has a very convincing plan,” said Richard Gowan, a U.N. expert at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. “There is a lack of clarity over how these operations would work [and] there is a lot of fear that this will end up in situation where the Europeans blow up harmless civilians. The U.N. secretariat is unconvinced it’s a good idea, Ban Ki-moon is unconvinced it’s a good idea.”

Gowan said the Italian government has failed to build European and U.N. support for a peacekeeping force in Libya, and the current strategy offers an opening to enlist greater support for military involvement in Libya. “This is partially a genuine response to migration crisis but it’s also an alibi for a serious European intervention in Libya,” he said. There is a lot of “genuine skepticism” about whether this constitutes a viable strategy capable of addressing Europe’s migration crisis, Gowan added, or a “lowest common denominator” pact that simply papers over differences within Europe.

“To be honest it looks like a half-baked baked plan that could go seriously awry,” said Gowan. “My suspicion is a lot of people are hoping maybe Russia and China will kill this off and save everyone a lot of embarrassment.”

Francesco Malavolta/AFP/Getty Images

In the past visitors could leave the Kremlin only via Kutafya Tower and had to walk around the entire Kremlin to get to Red Square.

Mazrak camp in the tough mountainous scrublands of Yemen’s north-west border with Saudi Arabia is now home to more than 10,000 people displaced by the escalating war between the government and rebels from the Huthi clan.
Photo: Annasofie Flamand / IRIN / 201003230854400244

By Ali G. Scotten

As Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) officials meet with President Obama at Camp David, their lobbying efforts are revolving around one question: In the event of a nuclear deal with Iran, what will the U.S. do to counter the Islamic Republic’s influence in the Middle East? The more important question, however — and one that Obama should ask them — is how they plan to stop the spread of sectarian warfare in the region.

The intensification of fighting along the Sunni-Shia divide should be of far greater concern than the challenge posed by Iran’s emergence from isolation. Sectarian hatred is drawing religious extremists from around the world to fight in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. The longer that violence continues along religious communal lines, the harder it will be to arrive at political solutions to each conflict, and the more battle training foreign insurgents will receive — experience that can be used to wreak havoc when they return home.

The transnational nature of the current sectarian conflict is largely a result of the way a number of GCC countries, led by Saudi Arabia, have attempted to counter Iran’s increasing influence in the region. For over a decade, Arab leaders have been warning Western governments of the Islamic Republic’s nefarious plan to establish a Shia empire across the Middle East — an argument based on the assumption that all Shias are sleeper agents, mindlessly awaiting orders from Iran’s Supreme Leader. The irony is that, in employing sectarian rhetoric to thwart Shia community efforts to address local grievances, these leaders have galvanized Sunni extremists, whose violence often serves to push Shias into Iran’s arms as a last resort.

Iraq and Yemen provide just two examples.

Following the U.S. overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Saudi Arabia and its allies feared that a new representative government in Baghdad would emerge as a Shia theocracy operating under Tehran’s thumb. This was despite the fact that the majority of Iraqi Shias align with the Najaf school of Shiism, which looks down on ayatollahs engaging in worldly politics, and that most Shias polled at the time didn’t see Iranian involvement in their political affairs as a positive development. However, anti-Shia rhetoric and funding from wealthy individuals in GCC countries — coupled with the U.S. de-Ba’athification program, which exacerbated Sunni fears of marginalization — drew Sunni militants to Iraq harboring the intent to spark a sectarian civil war. When the civil war erupted in 2006, Shia Iraqis had little recourse but to turn to Iranian-allied extremist groups for protection.

In Yemen, the Saudis have been bombarding Houthi rebels, whom they view to be Iranian proxies because of their Zaydi Shia faith. But Zaydis share more in common religiously with their northern Yemeni Sunni neighbors than they do with distant Iranian Shias; in fact, many Zaydis even consider themselves to be a distinct sect. As a result, until the past couple of decades, Yemen experienced relatively little in the way of sectarianism. The more assertive form of Zaydism that the Houthis follow, however, emerged in the early 1990s in response to the encroachment of Saudi Wahabbism—the brand of Sunni Islam that has inspired the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State—into northern Yemen, accompanied by attacks on Zaydi shrines and mosques.

This new tension, combined with the economic deprivations experienced by northern Yemenis, created the Houthi movement. During the past decade, the Houthis became more radicalized following Yemeni dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh’s six military incursions into northern Yemen, which left thousands dead. The Saudis, who supported the attacks as a means of countering Iran’s supposed influence in the Arabian Peninsula, joined the fight against the Houthis in 2009, prompting emboldened rhetoric from Tehran in support of the rebels.

Ultimately, in attacking the Houthis as Iranian proxies rather than seeking to alleviate the social and economic problems afflicting northern Yemen, Sana’a and Riyadh pushed the rebels to seek Iran’s help. Moreover, Saudi intervention in the name of countering Tehran created an incentive for the Iranians to operate in a region that held minor strategic importance to them, largely in order to prevent the Saudis from claiming that they had dealt the Islamic Republic a blow. Today, multiple flights travel each week between Tehran and the Houthi-held Yemeni capital, with many likely carrying arms (although most analysts see Saleh’s about-face in support of the Houthis, rather than Iranian weaponry, as the key to the rebels’ recent success).

None of this is to say that Iran is blameless in the sectarianism game. The Saudis and Bahrainis, for instance, likely wouldn’t see their sizeable Shia populations as security threats if it weren’t for Islamic Republic founder Ayatollah Khomeini’s call in the 1980s to spread the Islamic Revolution — a call that led to the establishment of pro-Iranian revolutionary groups throughout the Persian Gulf. One such group, Hijazi Hezbollah, is widely believed to have been behind the 1996 bombing of the U.S. military barracks in Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia. And Iran’s failure to rein in previous Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s persecution of Iraqi Sunnis contributed to the widespread alienation that allowed the Islamic State to take over much of the country’s Sunni areas with such ease. The massacres being perpetrated against Sunni civilians by Iranian-backed Shia militias in areas liberated from the Islamic State do nothing to address this problem.

At today’s meeting with Obama, GCC leaders will ask for more military assistance. While Washington is likely to grant them their wish — perhaps providing them with a missile shield — it’s unclear what more weaponry will ultimately accomplish given that most of the fighting is being waged by non-state actors who can’t be defeated through conventional military means. Already possessing the world’s fourth-largest defense budget, the Saudis have been unable to achieve definitive success against the Houthis. Instead, the fighting is spreading into Saudi Arabia, and the Islamic State appears to have used the unrest to gain a foothold in Yemen.

It’s time for the GCC to accept that the years of containing Iran are over; the Bush administration’s decision to overthrow Tehran’s mortal enemy in Baghdad made that all but inevitable. Even in the face of the most crippling sanctions it has ever seen, the Islamic Republic has been able to preserve the Assad regime in Syria and increase its influence in Iraq. Is it possible that, following the lifting of sanctions, Iran could use the billions of dollars in unfrozen assets and increased oil revenue to intensify the fighting? Yes. But it should be painfully clear by now that none of the region’s most serious conflicts can be resolved without having Iran at the table. Ultimately, lasting security will have to involve the establishment of a new regional framework that binds the Islamic Republic and the other Persian Gulf countries into a relationship that elevates economic collaboration over geopolitical confrontation.

This is unlikely to occur, however, without domestic reform in the region. All of the conflicts raging in the Middle East today — with the exception of the U.S.-inspired chaos in Iraq — were sparked by protests against repression. In this regard, it’s important to note that Persian-led Iran has only made substantive inroads into the Arab world in times of instability. This was the case following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which provided the context for Hezbollah’s emergence, and it’s the case in Iraq and Yemen today. Meanwhile, GCC leaders’ policies that marginalize their Shia subjects, rather than integrate them into a pluralistic national project, have created the very susceptibility to Iranian influence that the Sunni monarchs fear.

For these reasons, when President Obama’s visitors ask him how they can best counter Iran, the most honest answer he can give is, “Get your own houses in order.”

Ali G. Scotten is a Fellow with the Truman National Security Project and founder of Scotten Consulting, LLC, a company specializing in sociocultural and geopolitical analysis of the Middle East. Views expressed are his own.

Famed fictional archaeologist Indiana Jones often said antiquities belong in museums. A new bill introduced this week in Congress agrees.

Rep. Bill Keating (D-Mass.) is offering new legislation, called the Prevent Trafficking in Cultural Property Act, to help the Homeland Security Department block Islamic State sales of antiquities on the black market, a major source of the group’s revenue. It’s not clear how much the sale of these artifacts, looted from museums and archaeological sites, is bringing in, but intelligence officials estimate it’s the second largest source of funding for the group, behind oil revenue. In one region of Syria, the group reportedly cashed in on $36 million by selling plundered artifacts.

The United Nations already has a ban against the sale of items looted from Iraq and Syria. But according to Keating, efforts within U.S. law enforcement to stop their sale are poorly coordinated, and officials charged with preventing the illicit trade are not well trained.

“It takes more expertise to be able to spot what’s an antiquity,” Keating told FP. “These investigations aren’t occurring the way they should.”

The Islamic State profits from the sale of stolen relics in two ways. In some cases, the group offers them on the black market. In others, it serves as a courier between parties, exercising a tax as high as 50 percent on their sale.

The market for these goods is global, but Keating said the main buyers are in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan. His bill would require DHS to appoint a lead law enforcement coordinator to stop such sales in America, better train U.S. officials to identify stolen pieces, and improve efforts to prosecute buyers.

Keating said Reps. Mike McCaul (R-Texas) and Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) also have signed on to the plan, which he described as a way to cut off Islamic State funding that is just as important as military operations against the extremists on the battlefield.

“It’s something we have control over,” he said, referring to cracking down on the black market. “There are so many things we don’t have control over.”

Photo Credit: Louai Beshara/Getty Images