Freedom of the Press Around the World
Some of the topics I routinely try to address, like development and connectivity, can only be fully achieved in places there is a reasonable amount of freedom of the press. Some people believe the press has too much power. They like to point out that with dozens of humanitarian relief operations going on at any moment the one that gets the most attention by the press is the one that normally gets the most resources (the so-called "CNN effect"). In the U.S., liberals like to carp about the right wing bias of Fox News and most radio talk shows while the conservatives rant about the liberal bias of the print media (like the New York Times). Love 'em or hate 'em, however, news sources are essential in helping expose political corruption, humanitarian need, and so forth. Tyrants try to control the press and, thus, control what those under their iron-fisted rule see and hear. Reporters Without Borders just released their latest Worldwide Press Freedom Index detailing its perception of where countries rank when it comes to freedom of the press. Traditionally the Index looked primarily at mainstream sources of news, but with the rise of the World Wide Web, it now also looks at how bloggers are treated ["Crackdowns On Bloggers Increasing, Survey Finds," by Nora Boustany, Washington Post, 17 October 2007].

"Government repression in some countries has shifted from journalists to bloggers, with the vitality of the Internet triggering a more focused crackdown as blogs increasingly take the place of mainstream news media, according to Lucie Morillon, Washington director of the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. 'Countries that were not sentencing journalists to prison terms anymore have been doing it these last months for bloggers. This is the case in Egypt and Jordan,' she said yesterday as the group released its sixth annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index. Egypt ranked 146th and Jordan 122nd in press freedom among the 169 countries for which data were available."

If you question the importance of blogs as a source of news and commentary, take the case of Iran. If the Mullahs had their way, they would control all access to information. They repress dissent in every possible way from passing laws to sending out thugs as morality police to harrass or assault so-called offenders. As a result, blogs have become a major source of news and political expression. According to Nasrin Alavi, author of the interesting volume We Are Iran, "Farsi is the fourth most frequently used language for keeping on-line journals. There are more Iranian blogs than there are Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese or Russian. According to the 2004 NITLE Blog Census, there are more than 64,000 blogs written in Farsi. A phenomenal figure, given that in neighboring countries such as Iraq there are fewer than 50 known bloggers." The Index confirms, Boustany reports, what most of us know intuitively -- democracies have more freedom of the press.

"Reporters Without Borders said major industrialized countries, including the United States, made slight progress, moving up several notches, with the exception of Russia. Iceland topped the list for press freedom in the survey, and Eritrea ranked last. While not all press freedom violations were known in the countries ranked second and third from the bottom -- North Korea and Turkmenistan -- 'Eritrea deserves to be at the bottom,' the group said. Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki has banished privately owned press outlets and jailed the few journalists who have dared criticize the government, it said. 'We know that four of them have died in detention and we have every reason to fear that others will suffer the same fate,' the group added. Most democracies improved their ranking, with the United States moving up to 48th place from last year's 53rd, Morillon said."

America's ranking at 48 sounds pretty low for a country that enshrines freedom of the press in its Bill of Rights. Here's why the U.S. ranked so low:

"The reason the United States did not make the top 30 is because videographer and blogger Josh Wolf spent almost eight months in jail for not turning over video footage of a demonstration in San Francisco and because the confidentiality of sources is under continued attack, she said. Cameraman Sami al-Hajj, from al-Jazeera satellite television, is still being held without charges at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and journalist Chauncey Bailey was killed in Oakland, Calif., after his coverage made him a target."

Although it could be better, the U.S. ranking is not as bad as it sounds. There are less than 14 points separating the U.S. from the Iceland at the top of the list, whereas there are more than 100 points separating the U.S. from Eritrea at the bottom of the Index. According to Boustany, the only region that has been spared from censorship or violence against reporters is Europe. Although freedom of the press is difficult to find at the Edges of Globalization where I'm trying to implement Enterra Solutions' Development-in-a-Box™ framework, encouraging more openness is essential to its success. Connectivity is a critical for helping emerging market countries attract foreign direct investment. Eliminating corruption is also important. A free press demonstrates an effort is being made in both areas.

From Iraq to Sudan
Enterprise Resilience Management Blog, written by Stephen DeAnglis and edited by Bradd Hayes, links to a recent article in The Economist thatlooks forward to New Sudan. Both The Economist and the ERMB articles are worth reading, but I want to use this opportunity to extend my comparison of Palestine to Iraq.

Another Trifurcation?

Within a decade of 9/11, the world may see the division of the Palestinian territories into Fatah and Hamas states, the division of Iraq into Shia, Kurdish, and Sunni Arab regions, and the division of Sudan into "New Sudan" in the south, Darfur in the west, and a rump Khartoum government in the north.

This is exactly what is needed. 9/11 was a sympton of a malfunctioning Sunni Arab civilization combined with the Sunni Arab's world to divert feedback from itself onto others. Our responses to 9/11 have served to redirect that feedback back to the source, destabilizing a Sunni Arab system already out of kilter instead of accepting a "stability" which generates violence for us.

That's a good thing.

Update: Tom adds his thoughts.
10:15 Posted by Dan tdaxp in Africa , Stephen DeAngelis | Permalink | Comments (7) | Email this | Tags: sudan, sunni arabs

Thursday, August 23, 2007
From Palestine to Iraq
Democracy Now recently interviewed Nir Rosen (hat-tip to Democratic Underground and This Modern World). Mr. Rosen is reflexively sympathetic toward America's enemies, but otherwise his analysis is accurate.

This lept out at me:

Well, when we think of the Iraqi refugee crisis, we have to think of the crisis that people in the region think of in relation to that one, and that’s the Palestinian refugee crisis. In 1948, up to 800,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes in Palestine [sic] to make way for what became Israel. They went to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan. There were put in refugee camps. Eventually, after a few years, they were militarized, mobilized. They had their own militias. They were engaged in attacks, trying to liberate their homes. And they eventually were instrumentalized by the various governments, whether Lebanon, Syria, Jordan. Different groups used them. And they were massacred, as well, by the Lebanese, by the Jordanians. They contributed to destabilization of Jordan, of Lebanon, as well.

And I think you will see something similar happening with the Iraqis, because we have much larger numbers, approaching three million, and many of them already have links with militias back home, of course, because to survive in Iraq you need some militia to protect you. And there are long-established smuggling routes for weapons, for fighters, etc.

And add to that the very sensitive sectarian issue in Syria, in Jordan. The Syrian regime is a minority regime perceived by radical Sunnis to be a heretical. Syria is a majority Sunni country. The majority of the refugees are Sunni. Syria has a good relationship with a Shia-dominated Iraqi government. There have been various Islamist opposition groups who have sought to overthrow their government in Syria. Jordan, as well, has its own Islamist opposition. We’re likely eventually to see, as Sunnis are pushed more and more out of Baghdad and as the militias are pushed into the Anbar Province, that they might link up with Islamist groups in Syria, in Jordan, in Lebanon.

Two themes, both of which I've described before.

First, the Sunni Arabs have now lost a second country. The first time, they lost Palestine to survivors of the Holocaust. Now, they are losing it to heathens living in the rear-end of the Arab world, the Shia. The Iraq War was about feedback, about demonstrating the consequences of running an entire civilization into the ground. There is no reason to think that the effects of losing Iraq will be any less than the consequences of losing Palestine.

Second, Islam is the answer. Since decolonization, the Sunni Arab states that have gone most off the rails have adopted some form of socialist secular nationalism, such as the Baath Party, Naserism, etc. Surprisingly, banishing God and the market doesn't do much for national health. Because Sharia incorporates market mechanisms, Islamist parties such as the Muslim Brotherhood appear to be in the best position to lead their countries forward

I like Fallon's metrics fine (to me, the issue's always been about getting casualties down by dealmaking, either with allies to boost numbers or with enemies to reduce attacks), and I think it's fine he's entertaining different drawdown skeds, but those alternatives involve issues way beyond that one "knob,"

OP-ED: Next Challenge in Iraq, By David Ignatius, Washington Post, Sunday, October 21, 2007; Page B07
The flaw in the analysis here troubles me: Ignatius argues with seeming certitude that the surge reduced violence, when many on the ground say that flippping the Sunnis mattered, not our numbers.

So why the argument on the numbers "knob" being so supreme?

I like Fallon's metrics fine (to me, the issue's always been about getting casualties down by dealmaking, either with allies to boost numbers or with enemies to reduce attacks), and I think it's fine he's entertaining different drawdown skeds, but those alternatives involve issues way beyond that one "knob,"

Our surge under Petraeus wasn't unprecedented, the flipping was. So the key questions ahead are, Can similar effects be achieved under the Shia? And what must the follow up be?

If, on the basis of accepting Iraq's soft partition we jump start the regions' economic connectivity with the outside world, then we're in a different glidepath. If not, then we're simply delaying violence for another day.

November 8, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Musharraf

By ROGER COHEN
When Zalmay Khalilzad was the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, he would clash with Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, over whether Gen. Pervez Musharraf’s Pakistan was friend or foe.

Khalilzad saw a disingenuous Pakistan whose post-9/11 commitment to undoing its Taliban creation was ambivalent at best. Far from confronting the Islamist radicals, Musharraf’s security apparatus — or elements of it — abetted the reconstitution of the Taliban in the border areas.

It was clear to Khalilzad that the age-old Pakistani dream of a weak Afghanistan under Islamabad’s sway endured.

Powell was skeptical of this view from Kabul. His priority in 2003-2004 was shoring up a friend, Musharraf, to pursue Al Qaeda and hold the line in a nuclear-armed Islamic state. His message to his Afghan envoy: don’t criticize the Pakistanis, they’re doing what they can.

Uncoordinated policy tends over time to produce a mess. Pakistan and Afghanistan present linked problems — of Islamist radicalization, transborder Pashtun restiveness and democratic transition — but the Bush administration’s dealings with them have been erratic.

And here we are, three years later, with a beleaguered Musharraf imprisoning lawyers and gagging the press in the name of a “state of emergency;” a revived Taliban leavened with foreign jihadists destabilizing southern Afghanistan and turning on Pakistan itself; Pakistan’s democratic transition on hold and Afghanistan’s democratic experiment in danger.

Things could be worse. Pakistan’s nukes are not in the hands of the Islamist International. The Taliban has not retaken Kabul. But the picture is bleak.

U.S. funds — $22 billion — have poured into Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban even as $10 billion has gone to a Pakistani military still inclined to view the Taliban as agents able to provide Islamabad with “strategic depth” to the Afghan west as its confronts India to the east.

These self-defeating financial flows illustrate the discombobulated Bush foreign policy also evident in Iraq: the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing. The result is self-amputation. Musharraf should have been held to account much earlier on the Taliban’s steady revival.

This failure has led to the recent rampages of Islamist militants in Pakistan’s Swat valley, long a vacation spot, now a war zone. From Pakistan’s remote tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, the threat has turned inward.

As Vishakha Desai, the president of the Asia Society, has pointed out, these Islamist attacks near Swat have already included the partial destruction of a seated image of the Buddha carved into a 130-foot-high rock, a work of Buddhist art second only in importance in South Asia to the Bamiyan Buddhas, destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban.

Blowback, outrageous Buddha-blasting and all, is visiting Pakistan. A strategy conceived to undermine Afghanistan now threatens Pakistan. The army, with U.S. help, has responded by getting serious in the border areas. Many Pakistani soldiers have died. But it’s late in the day.

This is the uneasy backdrop to Musharraf’s promulgation of a provisional constitutional order. That’s Orwellian for martial-law lite. Confronted by a serious legal challenge to his recent re-election, the galvanizing presence of Benazir Bhutto and the baby-turned-monster of Taliban-jihadism, the general chose repression.

His measures have been deplorable. But this is not the dictatorship of Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, who hanged Bhutto’s father. Musharraf, as his Jekyll-and-Hyde alternation of military and Savile Row gear suggests, is a dictator with a gentleman’s itch. He’s playing for time. The United States must use his vulnerability to get more of what it wants.

There are hopeful signs. Only a sophisticated society could produce an opposition so grounded in constitutional law. Unlike Palestine-dawning, Pakistani democracy does not equal Islamist electoral victory: radical parties are weak. The U.S.-mediated Bhutto-Musharraf pact that brought Benazir home suggests civilian-military compromise is possible.

But is Musharraf part of the problem or the solution? The more isolated he becomes, the more he will resemble what Dan Markey of the Council on Foreign Relations called “a completely diminished asset.”

Musharraf is not yet that. Given the nuclear-charged risks, the U.S. must stick with him and maintain aid for now, but with the insistence he move rapidly toward promised elections, restore an independent judiciary, work with Bhutto and get real about quashing the Taliban.

U.S. failure to harmonize Afghan and Pakistani policy has been disastrous. You can’t beat the Taliban in Afghanistan alone. You can’t stabilize Pakistan within a democratic system — guided or not — while developing Islamism for export and alienating the professional middle class.

These lessons must be learned — by Musharraf and Bush. As Khalilzad put it to me: “Afghanistan and Pakistan need each other. The moderates of both countries must work together.”

•

Blog: www.iht.com/passages.

Saddam's Damn Dam

by Daniel Pipes
Jerusalem Post
November 7, 2007
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/5107

The surge of U.S. troops in Baghdad is succeeding but deeper structural problems continue to plague the American presence in Iraq. The country's largest dam, 40 kilometers northwest of Mosul, near the Turkish border, spectacularly symbolizes this predicament.

Just after occupying Iraq in April 2003, a report found that Mosul Dam's foundation was "leaking like a sieve and ready to collapse." A more recent, still-classified report from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers concludes that "The dam is judged to have an unacceptable annual failure probability." More explicitly, the corps finds the current probability of failure to be "exceptionally high." A senior aid worker calls the dam "a time bomb waiting to go off."



Mosul Dam, formerly known as Saddam Dam (Arabic: "Sadd Saddam") is in danger of collapse.Mosul Dam, formerly known as Saddam Dam (Arabic: Sadd Saddam) is in danger of collapse. That's because the dam was built on unstable bedrock of gypsum that requires a constant infusion of grout to prevent the foundation from eroding and the giant earthen wall from collapsing. Over the years, engineers have pumped into the foundation more than 50,000 tons of a bentonite, cement, water, and air mixture. As the Washington Post explains, "Twenty-four clanging machines churn 24 hours a day to pump grout deep into the dam's base. And sinkholes form periodically as the gypsum dissolves beneath the structure."

Despite these efforts, the dam's condition continues to deteriorate, raising the prospect of its complete collapse. Were this to happen with a reservoir full of water, predicts Engineering News--Record, "as much as 12.5 billion cubic meters of water pooled behind the 3.2-km-long earth-filled impoundment [would go] thundering down the Tigris River Valley toward Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq. The wave behind the 110-meter-high crest would take about two hours to reach the city of 1.7 million." In addition, parts of Baghdad (population 7 million) would come under 5 meters of water.

The Army Corps estimates the flood would kill a half-million people immediately, while the aftershocks, such as power outage and drought, would kill many more. (Not coincidentally, Iraq was the site of Noah's Ark.) It would likely be the largest human-induced single loss of life in history.

Many Iraqi officials, unfortunately, exhibit a cavalier attitude toward these dangers, further exacerbating the problem. They reject as unnecessary, for example, the Army Corps recommendation to build a second dam downstream as a back-up.

Yet, were a catastrophic failure to take place, who would be blamed for the unprecedented loss of life? Americans, of course. And understandably so, for the Bush administration took upon itself the overhauling of Iraqi life, including the Mosul Dam. Specifically, the U.S. taxpayer funded attempts to shore it up by with improved grouting, at a cost of US$27 million. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has, however, judged these efforts mismanaged and ineffective.

Massive Iraqi deaths would surely spawn conspiracy theories about American malevolence, inspiring epic rage against the U.S. government and creating a deep sense of guilt among Americans themselves. Yet, this blame and remorse would be entirely misplaced.

Saudi and other Arab aid – not U.S. monies – funded what was originally called the "Saddam Dam." A German-Italian consortium headed by Hochtief Aktiengesellschaft built the US$1.5 billion structure in 1981-84. It had a primarily political goal, to bolster Saddam Hussein's regime during the Iran-Iraq war. The dam, in other words, had nothing to do with the United States – not in funding, construction, or purpose. Nonetheless, misbegotten American policy has made it an American headache.

Mosul's dam replicates a myriad of lesser problems in Iraqi life that have landed in the lap of Americans (and, to a much lesser extent, their coalition partners), such as provisioning fuel and electricity, working schools and hospitals, a fair political and legal system, and an environment secure from terrorism.

Since April 2003, I have argued that this shouldering of responsibility for Iraq's domestic life has harmed both Americans and Iraqis. It yokes Americans with unwanted and unnecessary loss of life, financial obligations, and political burdens. For Iraqis, as the dam example suggests, it encourages an irresponsibility with potentially ruinous consequences.

A change of course is needed, and quickly. The Bush administration needs to hand back responsibility for Iraq's ills, including and especially the Mosul Dam. More broadly, it should abandon the deeply flawed and upside-down approach of "war as social work," whereby U.S. military efforts are judged primarily by the benefits they bring to the defeated enemy, rather than to Americans.