America’s new year resolution

Great commentary at McClatchy by former US ambassador Dennis Jett about the resolution American should be making for this new year, but won’t. He includes this fun teaser:

George W. Bush is raising hundreds of millions of dollars to establish his belief tank at Southern Methodist University. A team of scholar-sycophants will be hired to selectively cull 65 million pages of documents in order to demonstrate that between 2001 and 2009 we enjoyed the most enlightened leadership in the history of western civilization.

The good news is that my friend Mike will soon be moving to Dallas. So, I’ll have someone to stay with for the grand opening.

The land of faith and wisdom

Two experts on Yemen – they’re also co-authors of the fantastic Yemen-centric Waq al-Waq blog – put up with questions from me today for my radio story about the Yemen-based group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Here’s a clip from Gregory Johnsen talking about how the country of Yemen fits into the early history of al Qaeda.

UPDATE: And here’s the radio story.

Yemeni counter-terrorism unit at work

In the wake of the foiled Detroit bomb plot, Yemen’s government seems to be keen to show it’s working hard to crack down on al Qaeda. The video is said to show Yemeni counter-terrorism troops making a raid on a Qaeda hideout. (via Waq al-Waq blog)

Yemen in the spotlight

The Obama administration is going put more pressure on Yemen’s weak government to go after al Qaeda in the country, says the Wall St. Journal. Or, maybe the CIA and US Special Operations forces are taking things into their own hands. In any case, the small Arabian nation was getting a lot of attention in Washington even before the Christmas day bombing attempt outside Detroit. There’s a real risk though, if the US does take a greater role in counter-terrorism activities in Yemen. It could undermine the government, former US ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine told me today.

And for more about Al Qaeda in Yemen, go here.

Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab

He had the world at his feet, says the UK Independent, but:

[T]he son of one of Nigeria’s most important figures opted to make his impact in a very different way – by detonating 80g of explosives sewn into his underpants, and trying to destroy a passenger jet as it came in to land at Detroit Airport on Christmas Day.

More war now!

I just got around to opening up today’s NYTimes op-ed page and almost choked on my tuna sandwich when I came across this call for US war against Iran. Alan Kuperman’s argument is like the cry of a neocon zombie who’s been locked in the basement since 2002, only to be let loose on the opinion pages of the paper of record. His argument boils down to this:

Incentives and sanctions will not work, but air strikes could degrade and deter Iran’s bomb program at relatively little cost or risk, and therefore are worth a try. [my emphasis]

To get an idea of Kuperman’s own sense of what “cost or risk” means, here’s the preceding sentence.

If nothing else, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that the United States military can oust regimes in weeks if it wants to.

Why does the US need to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites and bomb them now? Kuperman says it’s because diplomacy has failed, Iranian leaders will give nukes to terrorists and the Pentagon’s got better bombs than Israel. He also says Israel’s bombing attack at the Osirak nuclear reactor worked in Iraq in 1981, and so did the bombing campaign in Yugoslavia in 1999.

This is insane. Are we going to have to listen to more and more of this stuff in the coming months?

UPDATE: Jeffery Goldberg says Kuperman is a serious guy. Goldberg’s no softie on the threat posed by Iran. But he’s also far from persuaded by Kuperman’s take.

Goldblog also links to Marc Lynch’s post on this… he breaks it down nicely.

New UN Security Council sanctions for Eritrea

Eritrea has been granted the dubious distinction of being the first new nation to be slapped with UN Security Council sanctions since Iran in 2006. And these sanctions have a lot to do with Somalia.

Neighboring Eritrea has been accused for some time now of supporting the insurgency in Somalia, most significantly, that includes the al Qaeda-linked Islamic militants, the al-Shabaab. I just talked with New York Times East Africa bureau chief, Jeffrey Gettleman. And he told me things are not as straightforward as they might seem.

Eritrea has been vilified – somewhat justifiably – for meddling in Somalia, Gettleman said. But there is also a complicated political game going on that involves Eritrea’s long-time rival, Ethiopia, which is probably closer to the US than Eritrea. Gettleman said it’s hard to blame all of the chaos in Somalia on Eritrea. “There was some pretty good evidence in 2006 that Eritrea was shipping weapons to Somalia to back up the government at the time, it was an Islamist government. But since then, the evidence has kind of dropped off and to me it’s kind of an open question as to how involved they are.”

Gettleman described Eritrea as the “North Korea of Africa.” Here’s some of my interview with him, where Gettleman talks about how the situation looks from Eritrea’s perspective.

Bad China

Why didn’t China want to give foreign experts permission to study carbon emissions inside China? John Lee writes at ForeignPolicy.com:

“… these international teams would undoubtedly discover exactly how dysfunctional the heart of the country really is. They would see firsthand and report back how China’s 45 million local officials remain the most formidable obstacle to improving transparency in China’s sprawling economic structure — protecting their turf, defending their privileges, arbitrarily enforcing the law, and when it comes to economic performance, blatantly cooking the books.”

The short of it, Lee says, is that Beijing couldn’t get local power brokers on board to meet emissions requirements even if it wanted to. It’s an old story about central control in China; that is, the mountains are high and the emperor is far away. So, what actually happened in Copenhagen? At the Guardian, Mark Lynas says he was in the room when China wrecked the deal on climate change. And China’s leader wasn’t.

What I saw was profoundly shocking. The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, (sic) did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country’s foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal, as was the practical implication: several times during the session, the world’s most powerful heads of state were forced to wait around as the Chinese delegate went off to make telephone calls to his “superiors”.

And why did China deep six a deal? Lynas says it had everything to do with geopolitics.

China knows it is becoming an uncontested superpower; indeed its newfound muscular confidence was on striking display in Copenhagen. Its coal-based economy doubles every decade, and its power increases commensurately. Its leadership will not alter this magic formula unless they absolutely have to.

Pyongyang job opportunity

If it’s true, this would be a big development in US-North Korean relations. The Obama administration is apparently willing to open up an office in Pyongyang.

Is the CIA condoning torture in the West Bank?

The Guardian has a story today on the link between the CIA and Palestinian intelligence services in the West Bank, who’ve got a reputation for being less than enlightened when it comes to treatment of detainees – especially Hamas members. Here’s the most serious nugget in the story, and it refers to the two Palestinian agencies alleged to have engaged in torture:

One senior western official said: “The [Central Intelligence] Agency consider them as their property, those two Palestinian services.”

It’s a hell of an interesting line of inquiry – what exactly is the CIA up to in the Palestinian territories? But the piece falls way short of backing up the contention that Palestinian security agencies are CIA puppets or that the CIA is basically outsourcing torture in violation of the Obama administration’s explicit policy against it. Here’s another point  I’m skeptical about:

While there is no evidence that the CIA has been commissioning such mistreatment, human rights activists say it would end promptly if US pressure was brought to bear on the Palestinian authorities.

Since when has “US pressure” been a magical lever to change Palestinian behavior at will? Nonetheless, the kicker hits on the most intriguing dynamic here. And that’s the tension between the US mission under Gen. Keith Dayton to help train Palestinian security services in the West Bank on the one hand, and the intelligence services (possibly with CIA links?) that are accused of heavy-handed tactics.

Some in Dayton’s team are said to have been warned by senior CIA officers that they should not attempt to interfere in the work of the PSO or GI. Privately, some of them are said to fear that the mistreatment of detainees, and the anger this is arousing among the population, may undermine their mission. One source said: “I know that Dayton and his crew are very concerned about what is happening in those detention centres because they know it can jeopardise their work.”

Meantime, Al Jazeera’s going with the headline: CIA linked to Palestinian ‘torture.’

UPDATE:  I came across this story via Marc Lynch’s blog, and here’s his take on the story.