It’s a fact of nature that a single conversation can be interpreted in very different ways. For people with anxiety or conditions such as Asperger’s, this can make social situations extremely stressful. But what if there was a more objective way to measure and understand our interactions?

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Institute of Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) say that they’ve gotten closer to a potential solution: an artificially intelligent, wearable system that can predict if a conversation is happy, sad, or neutral based on a person’s speech patterns and vitals.

“Imagine if, at the end of a conversation, you could rewind it and see the moments when the people around you felt the most anxious,” said graduate student Tuka Alhanai, who co-authored a related paper with PhD candidate Mohammad Ghassemi that they will present at next week’s Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference in San Francisco. “Our work is a step in this direction, suggesting that we may not be that far away from a world where people can have an AI social coach right in their pocket.”

As a participant tells a story, the system can analyze audio, text transcriptions, and physiological signals to determine the overall tone of the story with 83 percent accuracy. Using deep-learning techniques, the system can also provide a “sentiment score” for specific five-second intervals within a conversation.

“As far as we know, this is the first experiment that collects both physical data and speech data in a passive but robust way, even while subjects are having natural, unstructured interactions,” said Ghassemi. “Our results show that it’s possible to classify the emotional tone of conversations in real-time.”

The researchers said that the system’s performance would be further improved by having multiple people in a conversation use it on their smartwatches, creating more data to be analyzed by their algorithms. The team is keen to point out that they developed the system with privacy strongly in mind: The algorithm runs locally on a user’s device as a way of protecting personal information. (Alhanai said that a consumer version would obviously need clear protocols for getting consent from the people involved in the conversations.)

How it works

Many emotion-detection studies show participants “happy” and “sad” videos, or ask them to artificially act out specific emotive states. But in an effort to elicit more organic emotions, the team instead asked subjects to tell a happy or sad story of their own choosing.

Subjects wore a Samsung Simband, a research device that captures high-resolution physiological waveforms to measure features such as movement, heart rate, blood pressure, blood flow, and skin temperature. The system also captured audio data and text transcripts to analyze the speaker’s tone, pitch, energy, and vocabulary.

“The team’s usage of consumer market devices for collecting physiological data and speech data shows how close we are to having such tools in everyday devices,” said Björn Schuller, professor and chair of Complex and Intelligent Systems at the University of Passau in Germany, who was not involved in the research. “Technology could soon feel much more emotionally intelligent, or even ’emotional’ itself.”

After capturing 31 different conversations of several minutes each, the team trained two algorithms on the data: One classified the overall nature of a conversation as either happy or sad, while the second classified each five-second block of every conversation as positive, negative, or neutral.

Alhanai noted that, in traditional neural networks, all features about the data are provided to the algorithm at the base of the network. In contrast, her team found that they could improve performance by organizing different features at the various layers of the network.

“The system picks up on how, for example, the sentiment in the text transcription was more abstract than the raw accelerometer data,” said Alhanai. “It’s quite remarkable that a machine could approximate how we humans perceive these interactions, without significant input from us as researchers.”

Results

Indeed, the algorithm’s findings align well with what we humans might expect to observe. For instance, long pauses and monotonous vocal tones were associated with sadder stories, while more energetic, varied speech patterns were associated with happier ones. In terms of body language, sadder stories were also strongly associated with increased fidgeting and cardiovascular activity, as well as certain postures like putting one’s hands on one’s face.

On average, the model could classify the mood of each five-second interval with an accuracy that was approximately 18 percent above chance, and a full 7.5 percent better than existing approaches.

The algorithm is not yet reliable enough to be deployed for social coaching, but Alhanai said that they are actively working toward that goal. For future work the team plans to collect data on a much larger scale, potentially using commercial devices such as the Apple Watch that would allow them to more easily implement the system out in the world.

“Our next step is to improve the algorithm’s emotional granularity so that it is more accurate at calling out boring, tense, and excited moments, rather than just labeling interactions as ‘positive’ or ‘negative,'” said Alhanai. “Developing technology that can take the pulse of human emotions has the potential to dramatically improve how we communicate with each other.”

The number of vampire bats, which transmit rabies and are a concern for livestock breeders, may be increasing in Brazil and the Americas along with growth in the populations of invasive feral pigs and wild boars (Sus scrofa).

A group of researchers has recently reported an alarming rise in the numbers and distribution of S. scrofa, as well as showing that the common vampire bat Desmodus rotundus is now feeding on the blood of these animals.

Results of this study have been published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment by Mauro Galetti, a professor at São Paulo State University’s Bioscience Institute in Rio Claro, Brazil (IB-UNESP/RC), his PhD supervisee Felipe Pedrosa, Alexine Keuroghlian, a biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS Brazil), and Ivan Sazima, a collaborating professor at the University of Campinas’s Zoology Museum (MZ-UNICAMP) in São Paulo State.

As numbers of invasive feral pigs increase, so does the damage to crops and native fauna, among other problems. S. scrofa is also a growing source of blood for vampire bats, so the population of D. rotundus is also likely to increase.

Only three of the approximately 1,200 known bat species feed exclusively on blood, and all three are found only in the Americas. D. rotundus is the most widely distributed, inhabiting a territory that ranges from Mexico to Argentina. This species feeds mostly on livestock and poultry, but it has also been documented to prey on mammals such as tapirs and deer.

In Brazil’s Atlantic Forest biome, about 1.4% of vampire bats are infected with rabies. The proportion may be as high as 10% in the Peruvian Amazon. Transmission of rabies by vampire bats is a major concern for ranchers in Brazil, even in areas where cattle are routinely vaccinated. Wild animals, including feral pigs, are not vaccinated and may therefore pose a serious threat by spreading this disease.

The researchers have used camera traps to monitor mammals in the Brazilian Pantanal and Atlantic Forest for the past 12 years. These are remotely activated infrared cameras that film at night when triggered by sensors that detect the presence of an animal.

After checking 10,529 photos and videos with several examples of vampire bats feeding on feral pigs, cattle, tapirs, and red brocket deer (Mazama americana), the researchers selected 158 independent events in the Pantanal (101 with feral pigs, 38 with deer, and 19 with tapirs), and 87 events in the Atlantic Forest (35 with feral pigs, 29 with deer, and 23 with tapirs). Based on these events, they estimated that the probability of vampire bat attacks on feral pigs was as high as 10% for nights in which recordings were made.

“The rabies virus is transmitted through the saliva of infected bats. D. rotundus is a reservoir for other viruses with epidemiological potential, including hantavirus and coronavirus,” Sazima said.

“Vampire bats are fond of pigs’ blood, and switching from domestic to feral pigs must have been easy for such an adaptable animal.”

Invasion

Feral pigs combine the ferocity of the wild boar with the size and fertility of the domestic pig, an animal selected to supply more meat and offspring than its wild ancestor. A male boar can weigh as much as 100 kg. Feral pigs often weigh over 150 kg and reproduce constantly.

Brazil faces an unprecedented invasion of feral pigs in rural areas, with an increase of 500% in these animal populations since 2007. In 1989, feral pigs from Uruguay began crossing the border with Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state. This was the onset of the infestation in the South region.

“Major incentives were introduced in the Southeast region in the mid-1990s to encourage the production of boar meat,” Pedrosa recalled. “Producers imported sows and bred herds. But it proved not to be a very profitable line of business, and some producers gave up and released their boars into the wild.”

In an attempt to save their failing businesses, producers began crossing wild boars with domestic pigs, but they ended up also releasing the resulting crossbred pig-boars. As a result, the infestation previously confined to the South advanced through the Southeast to the Atlantic Forest region of São Paulo State. In the Pantanal, the invasion is older, dating from the colonial period, when free-range pigs raised by Portuguese settlers escaped and gave rise to the feral pig.

“Wild boars, crossbred pig-boars, and feral pigs all belong to the same species as the domestic pig, Sus scrofa. The wild boar’s original habitat was Eurasia, but it was introduced to Australia, South America, and the United States. Wild boars and other suids in a feral state are held to be among the worst exotic species in the world,” the researchers say.

The study concludes that the invasion of feral pigs in the Pantanal and Atlantic Forest areas is a serious threat and that “there is an urgent need to develop and implement effective control measures”.

Feral pigs are social animals that roam in groups. They are aggressive and highly dangerous. The problem is likely to spread. “Within a few years, they’ll be in the Amazon and Caatinga biomes. In the US and Europe, S. scrofa is the fastest-growing vertebrate species. Nearly 14,000 wild boars were killed in Germany near the Danish border in 2016 alone,” Galetti said.

The problem may not be limited to suids. “Other viral diseases carried by boars and feral pigs may be transmitted to native animals that are bitten by vampire bats, such as tapirs, deer, and capybaras,” Keuroghlian said.

Kuwait, itself a Muslim nation, has ripped a page from the playbook of US President Donald Trump by suspending the issuance of visas for travelers native to Syria, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.

Tourism, trade, and visitor visas from the nations have all been restricted, following an order from the Kuwaiti government to slap a “blanket ban” on possible migrants.

Observers have pointed out that most of the nations on Trump’s list have substantial Muslim populations and are experiencing some form of economic or military conflict. Alex Nowrasteh, of the Cato Institute, a right-leaning think tank, writes “foreigners from those seven nations have killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks on US soil between 1975 and the end of 2015.” Nowrasteh opined that “the measures taken here will have virtually no effect on improving US national security.”

The Kuwaiti government has told would-be migrants to not apply for visas from the five banned nations, as Kuwait City is worried about the possible migration of radical Islamic terrorists. A group of militants bombed a Shia mosque in 2015, killing 27 Kuwaiti nationals. A 2016 survey conducted by Expat Insider ranked Kuwait one of the worst nations in the world for expatriates, primarily due to its strict cultural laws.
Kuwait was the only nation to prohibit the entry of Syrian nationals prior to Trump’s executive action. Kuwait City previously issued a suspension of visas for all Syrians in 2011.

As a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Kuwait has become embroiled in escalated tensions between the GCC and Iran. Washington has emerged as a guarantor of GCC security since the early 1990s, according to a Congressional Research Service brief. On Wednesday, Trump’s National Security Adviser, retired Gen. Michael Flynn, made a highly unusual appearance at a White House daily briefing in which he announced that the US is “officially putting Iran on notice,” but did not detail what the warning entailed.

Flynn cited a recent Houthi attack on a Saudi vessel and ballistic missile weapons testing as “Iran’s destabilizing behavior across the Middle East,” adding that “these are just the latest of a series of incidents in the past six months in which Houthi forces that Iran has trained and armed have struck Emirati and Saudi vessels, and threatened US and allied vessels transiting the Red Sea.”

Amnesty International has called for an independent investigation into the killing of U Ko Ni, a prominent human rights lawyer who advised Myanmar’s ruling party.

“The killing of prominent lawyer U Ko Ni in Yangon [on Jan. 28] is an appalling act that has all the hallmarks of an assassination,” said Josef Benedict, Amnesty International’s Deputy Campaigns Director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

“It demands that the authorities immediately launch a thorough, independent and impartial investigation,” said Benedict.

A Muslim, U Ko Ni was returning from a government-organized trip to Indonesia, part of wider efforts to foster interfaith tolerance and reconciliation. He and a taxi driver were shot at Yangon airport. The suspected gunman has been arrested.

“His death will send shock waves across the human rights community in the country and beyond, and the authorities must send a clear message that such violence will not be tolerated and will not go unpunished,” said Benedict.

“U Ko Ni was a tireless human rights campaigner, and his death marks the loss of an important voice in the fight for human rights in Myanmar,” he said.

U Ko Ni was a lawyer and legal adviser to the National League for Democracy, the ruling party led by Aung San Suu Kyi.

Recent years have seen a worrying rise in tensions between Myanmar’s Buddhist and Muslim communities, at times leading to deadly violence.

By Paula Lamoso*

Over the last few years, the EU’s influence on the global stage has been undermined by a number of developments. Two of them merit special attention: (1) Europe’s economic and financial crisis, and the concomitant political crisis within the EU; and (2) the decision of the Obama Administration to shift its foreign policy priorities towards the Asia-Pacific region. One obvious way for the EU to try to mitigate these two problems is to tap into the economic and geo-political potential of the broader Atlantic Basin. In this vein, the EU has been negotiating a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the US for some time, the so-called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Admittedly, Donald Trump’s election as President of the US represents a serious setback for TTIP.

However, if the EU and US managed to weather future complications and reach a reasonable agreement, this could create a truly transatlantic market, with the potential of playing a pivotal role in global trade. Moreover, and given that Canada and Mexico enjoy close trade ties with the US –through the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA)–, the EU has found it convenient to negotiate separate FTAs with these two countries. The FTA with Canada was signed last October, despite some controversies during the ratification process within the EU. The FTA negotiations with Mexico are still ongoing.

t is in this broader context of tapping the economic potential of the Atlantic Basin that we must understand the EU’s efforts to reach an FTA with Mercosur. Should this agreement be concluded successfully, the EU will have FTAs with most countries in the Americas, with the exceptions of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. This would boost the EU’s economic position in Latin America, especially in relation to other great powers like China. While China has been very active economically in Latin America, its presence there revolves mainly around raw materials. However, China has recently shown interest in an FTA with Uruguay, which could constitute a foundation for a broader process aimed at striking a more comprehensive economic relationship with Mercosur as a whole.

The first EU-Mercosur agreement –the Interregional Framework Cooperation Agreement– was signed in 1995, but it did not come into fruition until 1999. Following successive (failed) attempts to reach further agreements, the EU and Mercosur began getting more serious about an FTA in May 2016. EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström has stressed the strong determination from both sides to reach an agreement. Federica Mogherini, European Commission Vice-President and EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, has also shown her strong support recently, by noting in an official visit to Argentina last March that ‘interregional connections are the future’.

This time around, however, it was Mercosur that initiated the process, not least due to the interest expressed by the new Argentine administration. During a recent visit to Brussels, Argentine President Mauricio Macri made a public demonstration of his own personal commitment to furthering economic ties between the EU and Mercosur, by pointing out that ‘The European Union and the Argentine Republic have been working intensively together over recent months to give a new political impetus to our longstanding bilateral relations… We are happy we have built an ambitious renewed agenda based on our common understanding of the challenges and opportunities our societies are facing in a globalizing world’.

This new EU-Mercosur FTA would be a ‘first generation’ trade agreement, and could bring significant economic advantages for both sides. At present, the aim is to wrap up the most complicated parts of the negotiations by the end of 2017 (before the dissolution of the Brazilian Congress in 2018), and to conclude the agreement before the 2019 European parliamentary elections. A key element will be a reduction of trade tariffs, which remain very high. EU companies still pay €4 billion in tariff duties each year when exporting to Mercosur countries. The EU economy is heavily dependent on exports, and Mercosur is the EU’s 6th most significant market destination (in 2015 the EU-Mercosur trade in goods accounted for €88 billion). One important reason why Mercosur is particularly interested in the agreement is that the EU has already signed FTAs with Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which are major agricultural exporters –agriculture and raw materials being the main export products for Mercosur countries–.

On the EU’s side, discussions on the Mercosur FTA revolve mainly around agricultural products. Member states do not want to undermine the prerogatives of their farmers by offering quotas and huge tariff reductions to the agricultural products that come from the Mercosur countries. France, Ireland and Poland are most vocal in this regard, being amongst the member states with the biggest proportion of farmers. Ireland, for instance, has a very important livestock industry. Other strong opponents are the beef-industry lobbies. On the flip side, an FTA would give most EU member states an opportunity to expand their exports of manufactured products to South America, especially in sectors such as heavy machinery, transport equipment and chemicals. Spain is highly competitive in all these areas, and is championing an EU-Mercosur agreement.

Although the Mercosur-EU agreement is a first generation FTA, mainly focused on tariff reductions, it is also necessary to highlight its geo-political significance, and potential. Europe enjoys long-standing historical, cultural, political and economic ties with the Americas, and these new FTAs (with Mercosur, Mexico, Canada and the US) can help energise the economic and geo-political potential of the Atlantic space –and, in doing so, help assist Europe’s economic recovery and check Asia-Pacific’s economic and geo-political pull–.

About the author:
*Paula Lamoso, PhD Candidate, Autonomous University of Madrid | @PauLamGon

Source:
This article was published by Elcano Royal Institute

In the United States, patient death rates are lower for internationally trained graduates than for graduates from a US medical school, despite international graduates caring for patients with higher rates of chronic conditions, finds a study published by The BMJ.

The researchers say that current standards of selecting international medical graduates for practice in the US “appear sufficiently rigorous to ensure high quality care.”

International medical graduates make up a quarter of the physician workforce in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Although international graduates are required to pass examinations to practice medicine in the UK and US, concerns have been raised about the quality of care provided by these graduates.

Yet no study has investigated differences in patient outcomes between international medical graduates and US medical graduates using nationally representative data.

So a team of researchers set out to determine whether patient outcomes differ between general internists who graduated from a medical school outside the US and those who graduated from a US medical school.

They analyzed a national sample of data for over 1.2 million Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 years or older admitted to hospital with a medical condition in 2011-14 and treated by over 44,000 international or US medical graduates who were general internists.

The primary outcome was 30 day mortality of patients. Secondary outcomes were 30 day readmission rates and costs of care.

Compared with patients treated by US graduates, patients treated by international graduates had slightly more chronic conditions.

After adjusting for factors that could have affected the results (including patient characteristics, physician characteristics, and hospital fixed effects), they found that patients cared for by international graduates had a lower risk of mortality (11.2% v 11.6%) than patients cared for by US graduates across a broad range of clinical conditions.

The researchers say that for every 250 patients treated by US medical graduates, one patient’s life would be saved if the quality of care were equivalent between the international graduates and US graduates.

Readmission rates did not differ between the two types of graduates, whereas costs of care per admission was slightly higher for international medical graduates ($1145 v $1098). Further analysis to test the strength of the results made no difference to the overall findings

One possible explanation, say the authors, is that the current approach for allowing international medical graduates to practice in the US may select for, on average, better physicians.

They stress that this is an observational study so no firm conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect. Nevertheless, they say their findings “should reassure policymakers and the public that our current approach to licensing international medical graduates in the US is sufficiently rigorous to ensure high quality care.”

By Joyce Karam

The Trump administration left little to no doubt Thursday about its intentions to take a more aggressive posture against Iran.

In a statement from National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and tweets early Thursday by the president himself, Tehran was “put on notice” after a ballistic missile launch it carried out on Sunday.

Trump went as far as decrying the nuclear deal that his predecessor Barack Obama and five other nations had signed with Iran, saying it “gave it a lifeline in the form of the Iran Deal: $150 billion.”

Flynn struck a similar tone, saying that Iran after the deal “instead of being thankful to the United States … is now feeling emboldened.”

But aside from the hawkish rhetoric that signals a stark departure from the Obama days, foreign policy experts who spoke to Arab News explained that there is no clear policy or a game plan yet.

180 degree turn from Obama

Issuing the statement and upping the ante on Iran was a clear departure from the Obama policy said Jonathan Schanzer, vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Schanzer said that “after a dozen previous ballistic missile tests (by Iran) went essentially unchallenged, it is refreshing to see the US government call out these violations. We have gone from not challenging Iran at all for its malign behavior (zero) to challenging Iran directly’ it’s a 180 degree turn and that seems significant.”

Flynn’s statement and the White House talking points that followed made reference to the provocative actions by Yemen’s Houthis — “supported and trained by Iran” — against Saudi Arabia and UAE.

Schanzer said he sees that reference as evidence that “the new administration will be looking at the full range of Iranian destabilizing behaviors after Obama chose to effectively ignore much of it.” He blames the latter on “what made our Middle East allies so irate.”

But for Brian Katulis, a Senior Fellow at American Progress, the White House statements and the president’s tweets, are concerning because “they confirm the risky and reactionary nature” of this administration’s response.

“A parent tells a child you’re on notice, but what’s next?” said Katulis. He cautions that without a clear plan and strategy to respond to Iran’s provocations, this hawkish rhetoric could backfire on US interests and regional security.

Pushed yesterday on what putting Iran on notice means in terms of policy, White House spokesperson Sean Spicer told reporters, “We will have further updates for you on those additional actions, but clearly (national security adviser Michael Flynn) warned to make sure that Iran understood that they are on notice that this is not going un-responded to.”

Vague game plan

The key question for the Trump administration now, said Schanzer, is “what does it do the next time Iran tests the US, violates UN resolutions or challenges a US ally?”

Katulis said there are plenty of vagueness and little strategy in how to respond to Iran.

“There is no deliberative process … and there is no actual game plan,” he said. This obscurity on strategic planning and next to an escalatory rhetoric could end up “playing into the hands of the hardliners in Iran” Katulis warned.

“The hardliners in Iran might view this as an invitation to escalate in a manner that would undermine the security of our regional allies or make our troops vulnerable (to Iranian provocations) in Iraq, when we don’t have a strategy to respond yet.”

Schanzer said there are a number of options available for a response, noting “they have always been there but Obama refused to deploy them, and it’s up for Trump to determine the appropriate responses.” “Multilateral and unilateral sanctions are undoubtedly among the tools available and so are US sanctions through executive order are probably the easiest to deploy,” he said.

Two bills were introduced in the US congress since Flynn’s statement. The first in the House called “Iran Nonnuclear Sanctions Act of 2017” urges to “target the Islamic Republic’s support for terrorism, human rights abuses and ballistic missile program.”

The second in the Senate, called “Iran Ballistic Missile Sanctions Act,” targets directly the program and entities supporting it.

It is unclear yet in terms of policy where will these measures against Iran fall in the Trump administration. What is clear, however, is that the escalatory rhetoric between Tehran and Washington is already overhauling the dynamics from the past eight years.

Georgian citizens will be able to enter the EU without a visa for short stays, under a new law passed by Parliament on Thursday.

The legislation still needs to be formally approved by the Council and will only enter into force once the suspension mechanism, which allows the temporary reintroduction of visas in the event of migration surges or risks to public security, is in place.

Parliament´s rapporteur for the proposal, Mariya Gabriel (EPP, BG), acknowledged the “broad and complex reforms” carried out by Georgia to get the visa waiver and thanked the country´s authorities and citizens for their consistency and patience. She also congratulated them on the strength of their democratic conviction and noted that the visa exemption brings the country closer to the EU.

Under the visa exemption, endorsed in plenary by 553 votes to 66 with 28 abstentions, Georgians who hold a biometric passport will have the right to enter the EU visa-free for 90 days in any 180-day period, for business, tourist or family purposes, but not to work.

Tbilisi has complied with all the benchmarks of its visa liberalisation plan, the text notes, underlining that “continuous fulfilment by Georgia of such criteria, especially on the fight against organised crime, will be duly monitored by the Commission”.

The visa waivers apply to all EU member states (except Ireland and the UK), plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.

The military campaign to oust Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Da’esh) terrorists from Iraq is nearly won, but the humanitarian crisis is expected to continue for months, if not years, the United Nations top official for the country said Thursday.

“Three months after the Mosul military operation started, combat operations in the eastern part of Mosul have come to an end,” the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Iraq, Ján Kubiš, told the UN Security Council during a briefing.

He said that the Iraqi forces, with significant support from its international partners, especially the United States, will remain engaged in complex urban operations, in particular inside the old city in western Mosul.

“Yet, in the rather short foreseeable future, the liberation operations in Iraq are coming to an end – the days of the so-called ISIL in Iraq are counted,” added Mr. Kubiš, who is also the head of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI).

According to an advance summary of the 2017 Humanitarian Response Plan submitted by relief aid partners in December, at least $985 million is required this year to reach the 5.8 million most vulnerable Iraqis. Of this, $331 million is being sought specifically for the Mosul response.

Already a lot is being done. Over 1.4 million displaced Iraqis have returned to their homes, including one million in the past 12 months.

In the post-Da’esh period, Iraq will need continuous, substantial and sustainable support and assistance from the international community, including its regional partners, he stressed, warning that any abrupt scaling-down of engagement or support would mean repeating mistakes of the past – mistakes that have had grave consequences for stability and security, well beyond the borders of Iraq, even globally.

The protection of civilians, the avoidance of steps that could incite sectarian tensions, and the prevention of looting and revenge attacks in Mosul and other liberated areas of the country “constitute first steps in the process of national and community-based reconciliation, in building a new and truly unified Iraq,” he said.

Since 2003, Iraq has lost more than half of its ethnic and religious minority population. Special attention should therefore be paid to arrangements that address the specific security and other concerns of minorities to enable returns to their homes.

The National Alliance Initiative, submitted to UNAMI by the largest parliamentarian bloc, on the way forward in post-Da’esh Iraq is a good starting point in the Iraqi-owned and led, but UN-facilitated, process of national settlement and reconciliation, he said.

UNAMI is currently working with various groups, including the Sunni and Turkmen components, Kurdistan region of Iraq, civil society, minority communities, tribal leaders, and youth and women groups with the aim of soliciting their views and vision on how to build a post-ISIL united Iraq, based on the principles of equality and citizenship.

He emphasized that “for national reconciliation to succeed, it must be supported by grassroots initiatives.”

By John R. Haines*

(FPRI) — The Washington commentariat continues to roil over President Donald J. Trump’s naming of Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor Stephen K. Bannon to a seat on the National Security Council Principals Committee (NSC/PC).[1] For the new president’s first National Security Directive is the object of much breathless criticism. Take this, for example:

The director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff no longer get automatic seats at the adults’ table — also known as the Principals Committee. Below the NSC, the Principals Committee is the most senior interagency body of the national security process. It’s the last stop before taking a major national-security decision to the president.[2]

While characterizing aspects of the presidential directive as historically anomalous, much commentary around it is cloaked in language that masks—often thinly—animus toward Mr. Bannon personally. Consider this from the New York Times:

[T]he defining moment for Mr. Bannon came Saturday night in the form of an executive order giving the rumpled right-wing agitator a full seat on the “principals committee” of the National Security Council — while downgrading the roles of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence, who will now attend only when the council is considering issues in their direct areas of responsibilities. It is a startling elevation of a political adviser, to a status alongside the secretaries of state and defense, and over the president’s top military and intelligence advisers.[3]

An experienced and capable polemicist, Mr. Bannon can capably (or not, depending on one’s view) defend his suitability for the post. What remains unanswered, however, is whether his appointment can be fairly characterized as a “startling elevation of a political adviser,” as claimed by the New York Times and others. The answer is no.

Some historical context is in order. The NSC/PC has a short legacy, dating only to the 1989 reorganization of the National Security Council by President George H.W. Bush. His NSC Directive 1, dated 30 January 1989, established the NSC/PC “as the senior interagency forum for consideration of policy issues affecting national security.”[4] Its named chair was the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs aka the National Security Advisor[5] — at the time, Brent Scowcroft — and its named members were, respectively, the secretaries of State and Defense, the Director of Central Intelligence, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the President’s Chief of Staff (at the time, John Sununu).

President George W. Bush’s first National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD 1), issued on 13 February 2001, amended the 1989 directive’s language regarding the organization of the NSC/PC. Notably, it changed the Director of Central Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, respectively, from permanent to ad hoc members. NSPD 1 also provided that “Other heads of departments and agencies, along with additional senior officials, shall be invited where appropriate.”[6]

The Evolution of the National Security Council

Like the NSC/PC, the named members of the NSC have changed regularly since inception. So, too, suggestions to include political advisers of one stripe or another as participants have been floated regularly since the NSC was established in 1947.[7] In its first four weeks in office, for example, the Eisenhower administration considered it but demurred over concerns about muddying lines of authority within the Executive branch.

This situation, I believe, provides much of the basis or justification for the criticism of the Council and for the proposals that ‘elder statesmen’ or ministers without portfolio be added to the Council machinery. Such proposals are, of course, one possible solution which appears to have some merit in solving the problem. The addition of such officials having no responsibility for the execution of the policies they recommend would, however, mean a complete change in the principle of responsibility-with-authority upon which the Council is now based. Put more plainly, these proposals would appear to contemplate two or more officials within the Executive Branch exercising the policy-making prerogatives of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, etc.[8]

The Eisenhower administration at the same time considered vesting executive authority in the NSC, which it rejected as inconsistent with governing principles:

It has occasionally been suggested that the Council should be charged with coordinating the execution of policies . . . Such proposals, however, would radically alter the principle under which the Executive Branch operates, namely that the various heads of departments and agencies are directly responsible to the President for the conduct of their operations. In effect, the council as a committee would be interposed between the President and his Cabinet members and other agency heads. This is not the American way of government.[9]

The distinction between on the one hand the authority to formulate policy, and on the other the authority to execute policy, was later elaborated by Robert Cutler, who in January 1951 served as NSC Executive Secretary:

The Council advises the President both on policy and on plans for its execution, but its primary statutory function thus lies in the formation of policy. The role of the Council as a planning body is subordinate to its policy function.[10]

Within a matter of months, however, expanding who was authorized to participate in NSC meetings would reemerge as a political matter. On 16 March 1953, Mr. Cutler (who a week hence would become the country’s first National Security Advisor) submitted a memorandum titled “Recommendations Regarding the National Security Council,”[11] which President Eisenhower formally accepted the following day.[12] Among what became Reorganization Plan 3 of 1953 was this provision:

In addition to Statutory and Participating Members, there will be in attendance at each Council meeting the following persons who do not formally participate as Council members.

The named persons included three so-called “Advisers” — the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Director of Central Intelligence, and the Special Assistant to the President for Cold War Planning, respectively.[13] The Director of the Psychological Strategy Board was eliminated as a named “Observer” when the Special Assistant to the President for Cold War Planning became a named Advisor.[14]

Moreover, as discussed in a July 1960 “Organizational History of the National Security Council” prepared for the Senate Subcommittee on National Policy Machinery, so-called “participant members” of the NSC included “individuals who were invited on a ‘standing-request’ basis to attends all council meetings until the President otherwise decided and those who were invited to attend a meeting on an ‘ad hoc’ basis.”[15]

The Special Assistant to the President for Cold War Planning at the time was Charles D. “C.D.” Jackson. The historian Walter Hixson called him the “ultimate psychological warrior of the Eisenhower team.”[16] Mr. Jackson was a member of the President’s Committee on International Information Activities aka “the Jackson Committee” (named not for him but for its chair, William H. Jackson, a former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence[17]), which President Eisenhower established two months before he accepted the recommendation of Mr. Cutler (who also served on the Jackson Committee) to reorganize the NSC.[18] Among the Jackson Committee’s several recommendations was abolishing the Psychological Strategy Board, which President Truman established by presidential directive in June 1951 “to authorize and provide for the more effective planning, coordination, and conduct within the framework of approved national policies, of psychological operations.”[19]

The Eisenhower administration’s reordering and reorganizing of the NSC set a precedent followed by every subsequent administration. These actions intermittently have resulted in modifications as to how the NSC is organized and operates, including broadening the circle of participants — both formal and informal — to suit the President’s leadership style. A Central Intelligence Agency retrospective assessed it this way:

Each presidential administration has tailored its use of the NSC to suit the chief executive’s preferences for obtaining national security advice. Like Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson de-emphasized the NSC in favor of ad hoc groups and select advisors. In contrast, President George H. W. Bush leaned heavily on the NSC and established the system of Principals and Deputies Committees that is still in effect.[20]

During the Kennedy administration, National Security Action Memorandum 196, adopted 22 October 1964, established an NSC executive committee. Its named members included Llewellyn E. “Tommy” Thompson,[21] who served as President Kennedy’s Ambassador-at-Large for Soviet Affairs; and Theodore Sorensen, who served as his Special Counsel.[22] Other persons attended NSC meetings as informal participants, notably during the Cuban Missile Crisis, including Kenneth O’Donnell, a White House political advisor, and White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger.

Bannon, the New Rockefeller?

While Mr. Bannon has sardonically compared himself to “Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors”[23] (perhaps choosing to ignore how that role ended), his national security brief might better analogize to Nelson Rockefeller. As noted earlier, he succeeded C.D. Jackson as Special Assistant to the President for Cold War Planning in the Eisenhower administration.[24] Mr. Rockefeller’s appointment was memorialized in a March 1955 memorandum to President Eisenhower from Rowland Hughes, the director of the Bureau of the Budget (later renames the “Office of Management and Budget”):

b.The appointment of Mr. Nelson Rockefeller as Special Assistant to the President to provide leadership on your behalf in the development of increased understanding and cooperation among all peoples and in reviewing and developing methods and programs by which the various departments and agencies of the Government may effectively contribute to such cooperation and understanding.

c.The assignment to a Special Committee chaired by Mr. Rockefeller of responsibility for coordinating the implementation of the policies contained in NSC 5505/110 and NSC 5502/1.[25]

Mr. Rockefeller assumed a direct role in national security and intelligence operations when President Eisenhower named him chair of the Planning Coordination Group (PCG), which was subordinate to the NSC’s Operations Coordinating Board (OCB). The OCB was established by a September 1953 executive order “to provide for the integrated implementation of national security policies by the several agencies.”[26] According to a letter to Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, “At the time of the issuance of the Executive Order creating the OCB the President designated his Special Assistant for Cold War Planning as his representative on the OCB.”[27]

President Eisenhower authorized the PCG in a 10 March 1955 letter to Mr. Rockefeller. He directed that the PCG was to be advised “in advance of major covert programs initiated by the Central Intelligence Agency;” and furthermore, that the PCG “should be the normal channel for giving policy approval for such programs as well as for securing coordination of support therefor among the Departments of State and Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency.”[28] The two referenced NSC reports — NSC 5505/1 (“Exploitation of Soviet and European Satellite Vulnerabilities”) and NSC 5502/1 (“U.S. Policy Toward Russian Anti-Soviet Political Activities) — are January 1955 directives for an “active political warfare strategy” against the Soviet Union.

Mr. Rockefeller’s brief was defined in a March 1955 NSC memorandum that discussed “The Foreign Information Program and Psychological Warfare Planning.”[29] Declaring “the principle that propaganda in both peace and war is a continuing mechanism of national policy directed toward the achievement of national aims,” the NSC charged Mr. Rockefeller to conduct:

[A] high level review of the existing arrangements in the light of NSC 59/1[30] and NSC 127/1[31] should be undertaken with a view to preparing appropriate recommendations for consideration by the National Security Council. Such a review should be undertaken with a full understanding of the existing arrangements and current plans and programs in this field, as well as the status of planning for the possibility of limited or general war.[32]

The NSC further directed that “responsibility for making such a review and recommendations [was] assigned to Mr. Nelson Rockefeller as Special Assistant to the President:”

[T]o provide leadership in the development of increased understanding and cooperation among all peoples and in reviewing and developing methods and programs by which the various departments and agencies of the Government may effectively contribute to such cooperation and understanding. In this assignment Mr. Rockefeller should be provided with such advice and assistance as he requires from the Bureau of the Budget, the Office of Defense Mobilization and the Operations Coordinating Board as well as the responsible operating departments and agencies.[33]

Preparing for a New Type of Cold War

Fast forward to today, a recent Voice of America headline declared bluntly, “NATO Warns West ‘Losing Information War’ Against Russia, IS.”[34] A recent report by the NATO StratCom Centre of Excellence sounds a similarly bleak note:

In the 18 months since Russia’s seizure of Crimea, Western understanding of Russian information warfare techniques has developed beyond all recognition . . . The challenge of Russian information warfare is, however, not a static situation, but a developing process . . . [T]hose nations or organizations that think they understand Russian information warfare on the basis of current studies, and are responding by preparing for currently visible threats and capabilities, are out of date and will be surprised once again by what happens next . . . One of the most striking elements of this evolution has been in the Russian approach to the relationship between information warfare and a traditional state of war.[35]

There is a certain parallel between, respectively, the conditions of c.1950s propaganda and “psychological strategies”[36] and their contemporary embodiment as information warfare. Like all analogies, it is of course imperfect, but the parallels are there nonetheless. Modern information warfare (IW) consists of three parts: first, IW techniques and capabilities; second, a comprehensive strategy to apply and organize those techniques and capabilities; and third, a target — not the specific systems to be attacked but instead, the adversary’s decision process — and objective.[37]

Even Mr. Bannon’s detractors must concede he has proved an adroit information warrior. His portfolio as a presidential adviser and White House chief strategist logically extends to policy (not operational) matters, a distinction that is fully consistent with the NSC’s brief. With Mr. Rockefeller (and possibly if less plausibly, his predecessor, C.D. Jackson) as a model, one might well ask why wouldn’t Mr. Bannon sit on the NSC/PC?

So let’s hope Mr. Bannon executes his assignment well. Whether he can play a role on the scale of the one assigned to Nelson Rockefeller by President Eisenhower — and here, it is worth pausing to consider the uproar that would have ensued had President Trump appointed, say, a Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services to serve as Special Assistant to the President for Information War (or Counter Jihadist) Planning — remains to him to evince. That being said, his detractors’ suggestion that the NSC organizational chart is carved on stone tablets is wrong, completely — its structure and membership have changed dynamically over the NSC’s seven decade-long existence.

It must be added that one ought not minimize the apprehensions of intelligence professionals regarding well-intentioned novices. As John le Carré wrote in Call for the Dead, “He knew how intelligent men could be broken by the stupidity of their superiors, how weeks of patient work night and day could be cast aside by such a man.” That being said, wise women and men from outside the intelligence community were instrumental to winning the Cold War.

George Kennan . . . more than any other official pressed the National Security Council to reorganize covert action planning and management. This resulted in the creation of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) at the CIA in September 1948 and the appointment of the visionary OSS veteran Frank G. Wisner as its chief [ . . . ]

From the start, Wisner and OPC regarded NCFE as one of their signature operations. As the Cold War reached perhaps its most dangerous phase, NCFE and other projects (such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1950, and Radio Liberty, which began broadcasts to the Soviet Union in 1953) rallied anti-Communist intellectuals, politicians, and activists to fight the Soviets in a contest for the peoples’ “minds and loyalties.”[38]

And with that, the ball is squarely in Mr. Bannon’s court. Let us hope for the country’s sake that he exceeds our most optimistic expectations.

About the author:
*John R. Haines is a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Executive Director of FPRI’s Princeton Committee. He is also a Trustee of FPRI.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

[1] The White House Office of the Press Secretary (2017). Presidential Memorandum Organization of the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council (28 January 2017). https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/01/28/presidential-memorandum-organization-national-security-council-and. Last accessed 31 January 2016. The pertinent language of the 28 January Presidential Memorandum reads as follows:

“The PC shall have as its regular attendees the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff, the Assistant to the President and Chief Strategist, the National Security Advisor, and the Homeland Security Advisor.  The Director of National Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff shall attend where issues pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed.  The Counsel to the President, the Deputy Counsel to the President for National Security Affairs, and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget may attend all PC meetings.”

“The Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor (Deputy National Security Advisor), the Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to the Vice President, and the Executive Secretary (who shall serve as the Executive Secretary of the PC) shall attend all of the meetings of the PC, and the Representative of the United States to the United Nations and the Assistant to the President for Intragovernmental and Technology Initiatives may attend as appropriate.” [Emphasis added]

Similar but less widespread objection was heard to President Trump naming his Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, to the NSC/PC. The author has elected to let the ample precedent from previous administrations for such an appointment speak for itself.

[2] Kelly Magsamen (2017). “What Trump’s Reshuffling of the National Security Council Really Means.” The Atlantic [published online 30 January 2017]. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/the-trump-national-security-council-an-analysis/514910/?utm_source=twb. Last accessed 31 January 2017.

[3] Glenn Thrush & Maggie Halberman (2017). “Bannon Is Given Role Usually Held for Generals.” The New York Times [published online 29 January 2017]. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/29/us/stephen-bannon-donald-trump-national-security-council.html. Last accessed 31 January 2017.

[4] See: B.1. The NSC Principals Committee (NSC/PC). http://orchestratingpower.org/lib/National%20Security%20Council/official%20org%20docs/PD-1989-Bush-NSD-1.pdf. Last accessed 31 January 2016.

[5] This position — originally called the “Special Assistant for National Security Affairs” — was created as part of President Eisenhower’s 1952 reorganization of the NSC, which was established under the National Security Act of 1947.

[6] The White House (2001). National Security Presidential Directive 1 (13 February 2001). https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nspd/nspd-1.pdf. Last accessed 31 January 2017. The pertinent language of the NSPD 1 reads as follows:

“The NSC Principals Committee (NSC/PC) will continue to be the senior interagency forum for consideration of policy issues affecting national security, as it has since 1989. The NSC/PC shall have as its regular attendees the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, the Chief of Staff to the President, and the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (who shall serve as chair). The Director of Central Intelligence and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff shall attend where issues pertaining to their responsibilities and expertise are to be discussed. The Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget shall be invited to attend meetings pertaining to their responsibilities. For the Attorney General, this includes both those matters within the Justice Department’s jurisdiction and those matters implicating the Attorney General’s responsibility under 28 U.S.C. 511 to give his advice and opinion on questions of law when required by the President. The Counsel to the President shall be consulted regarding the agenda of NSC/PC meetings, and shall attend any meeting when, in consultation with the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, he deems it appropriate. When international economic issues are on the agenda of the NSC/PC, the Committee’s regular attendees will include the Secretary of Commerce, the United States Trade Representative, the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy (who shall serve as chair for agenda items that principally pertain to international economics), and, when the issues pertain to her responsibilities, the Secretary of Agriculture. The Chief of Staff and National Security Adviser to the Vice President shall attend all meetings of the NSC/PC, as shall the Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor (who shall serve as Executive Secretary of the NSC/PC). Other heads of departments and agencies, along with additional senior officials, shall be invited where appropriate.”

“The NSC/PC shall meet at the call of the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, in consultation with the regular attendees of the NSC/PC. The Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs shall determine the agenda in consultation with the foregoing, and ensure that necessary papers are prepared. When international economic issues are on the agenda of the NSC/PC, the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy shall perform these tasks in concert.”

Readers will note that the blue highlighted language above is identical to the language of President Trump’s directive [see fn(1), above].

[7] The National Security Council was established by the National Security Act of 1947 (P.L. 80-235, 61 Stat 496), which President Harry S. Truman signed on 26 July 1947.

[8] James S. Lay, Jr. (1953). Suggestions for Further Strengthening of the National Security Council (19 January 1953).  http://orchestratingpower.org/lib/National%20Security%20Council/official%20org%20docs/1953,01,19%20NSC%20org.pdf. Last accessed 31 January 2017. Mr. Lay at the time was the NSC’s Executive Secretary.

[9] Lay (1953), op cit.

[10] Robert Cutler (1959). “Intelligence as Foundation for Policy.” Studies in Intelligence. 3:4 (1959) 59-71. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol3no4/html/v03i4a05p_0001.htm. Last accessed 1 February 2017.

[11] Memorandum for the President by the Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (Cutler) dated 16 March 1953. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, National Security Affairs, Volume II, Part 1, Document 50. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1952-54v02p1/d50. Last accessed 31 January 2017.

[12] Letter from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Robert Cutler dated 17 March 1953. http://orchestratingpower.org/lib/National%20Security%20Council/official%20org%20docs/1953,03,17%20NSC%20org.pdf. Last accessed 31 January 2017.

[13]  Recommendations Regarding the National Security Council, 16 March 1953, op cit. http://orchestratingpower.org/lib/National%20Security%20Council/official%20org%20docs/1953,03,17%20NSC%20org.pdf. Last accessed 31 January 2016.

[14] This switch is discussed in a letter from James S. Lay, Jr., Executive Secretary of the National Security Council, to Allen W. Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence. https://archive.org/stream/LETTERTOALLENWDULLESFROMJAMESSLAYJR80B01676R0011000600231/LETTER%20TO%20ALLEN%20W.%20DULLES%20FROM%20JAMES%20S.%20LAY,%20JR.%20RDP80B01676R001100060023-1_djvu.txt. Last accessed 31 January 2017.

Mr. Cutler’s 16 March 1953 recommendations defined “Observers” as “Such person or persons as the President may desire to attend for the purpose of observing, but not participating—like his Military Liaison Officer. Observers are not seated at the table.”  See: Part III. Membership in the Council. 4.b. Observers.

[15] National Security Council (1960). “Organizational History of the National Security Council,” 30. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80B01676R001100060023-1.pdf. Last accessed 1 February 2017.

[16] Walter L. Hixson (1997; 1998). Parting the Curtains: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945-1961. (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin) 22. C.D. Jackson was succeeded as Special Assistant to the President for Cold War Planning by Nelson A. Rockefeller, who at the time of his appointment was serving as Undersecretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

[17] William H. Jackson served as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for eleven months (October 1950-August 1951) and later replaced Nelson Rockefeller (who himself had succeeded Charles D. Jackson as the Special Assistant to the President for Cold War Planning) as a Presidential special assistant.

[18] Recommendations Regarding the National Security Council, 16 March 1953, op cit.

[19] 128. Directive Establishing the Psychological Strategy Board (20 June 1951). https://trumanlibrary.org/publicpapers/index.php?pid=342&st=&st1=. Last accessed 1 February 2017.

[20] Central Intelligence Agency (2010). “A Look Back . . . The National Security Council Helps Shape the CIA.” https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2010-featured-story-archive/nsc-helps-shape-cia.html. Last accessed 1 February 2017.

[21] Llewellyn E. Thompson served as the United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union under Presidents Eisenhower (1957-) and Kennedy (1961-1962), resigning his position in July 1962 to become Ambassador-at-Large, as a member of the newly created NSC Executive Committee. Dean Rusk called him “our in-house Russian during the missile crisis.” In 1967, President Johnson reappointed him Ambassador to the Soviet Union, where he remained until his retirement in 1969. He came out of retirement to advise President Nixon during the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty negotiations, and represented the United States in the SALT talks from 1969 until his death in 1972.

[22] National Security Action Memorandum 196 dated 22 October 1962. https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsam-jfk/nsam196.htm. Last accessed 1 February 2017.

[23] Michael Wolff (2016). “Ringside With Steve Bannon at Trump Tower as the President-Elect’s Strategist Plots ‘An Entirely New Political Movement’.” The Hollywood Reporter [published online 18 November 2016]. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/steve-bannon-trump-tower-interview-trumps-strategist-plots-new-political-movement-948747. Last accessed 30 January 2017.

[24] See fn(16).

[25] Memorandum From the Director of the Bureau of the Budget (Hughes) to President Eisenhower dates 3 March 1955. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/d210. Last accessed 1 February 2017.

[26] Executive Order 10483 Establishing the Operations Coordinating Board (2 September 1953). http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=60573. Last accessed 1 February 2017.

[27] Letter from James S. Lay, Jr., Executive Secretary of the National Security Council, to Allen W. Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence. https://archive.org/stream/LETTERTOALLENWDULLESFROMJAMESSLAYJR80B01676R0011000600231/LETTER%20TO%20ALLEN%20W.%20DULLES%20FROM%20JAMES%20S.%20LAY,%20JR.%20RDP80B01676R001100060023-1_djvu.txt. Last accessed 31 January 2017.

[28] https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1955-57v19/d16. Last accessed 1 February 2017.

[29] National Security Council (1955). “Memorandum From the Executive Secretary of the National Security Council (Lay) to the National Security Council” Document 213 dated 15 March 1955. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/d213. Last accessed 1 February 2017.

[30] The opening paragraph of National Security Council Report NSC 59/1 reads “Foreign information programs in periods of peace and psychological warfare programs in periods of national emergency or war are established instruments of national policy and must be continuously directed toward the achievement of national aims.” NSC 59/1 established an inter-departmental body known as the Psychological Operations Coordinating Committee (“POCC”) charged with strengthening and coordinating peacetime foreign information activities. In the event of a conflict, the POCC was to ensure continuity from these peacetime activities to active psychological warfare operation. [National Security Council Report NSC 59/1. The Foreign Information Program and Psychological Warfare Planning  (9 March 1950). https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/d2. Last accessed 1 February 2017] The POCC created a subordinate group known as the “X-Day Working Group” to develop specific recommendations for transitioning psychological warfare responsibilities from peacetime foreign information activities to overt psychological warfare operations “during the initial stages of hostilities”. [National Security Council (1952). “Memorandum From the Under Secretary of State (Bruce) to the Executive Secretary of the National Security Council (Lay)” dated 31 July 1952. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/d124. Last accessed 1 February 2017.

[31] NSC 127/1 “Plan for Conducting Psychological Operations During General Hostilities” was approved by President Truman on 25 July 1952.

[32] Regarding the references to NSC 59/1 and NSC 127/1, an earlier August 1954 memorandum concluded “The National Security Council noted that NSC 59/1 and NSC 127/1 are deemed obsolete, but deferred further action with respect thereto pending receipt of the study described in the preceding item.” See: National Security Council (1954). Memorandum of Discussion at the 209th Meeting of the National Security Council” dated 5 August 1954. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1950-55Intel/d187. Last accessed 1 February 2017.

[33] “Memorandum From the Executive Secretary of the National Security Council (Lay) to the National Security Council,” op cit.

[34] “NATO Warns West ‘Losing Information War’ Against Russia, IS.” Voice of America [published online 27 September 2016]. http://www.voanews.com/a/nato-russia-information-war-propaganda/3526780.html. Last accessed 1 February 2017. The Russian government-controlled news portal RT published a rejoinder under the header “ Russia winning ‘information war’ – or just telling the truth?” See: RT [published online 1 October 2016]. https://www.rt.com/op-edge/361300-russia-winning-information-war/. Last accessed 1 February 2016.

[35] Keir Giles (2017). The Next Phase of Russian Information Warfare, 2, 4. Prepared by the NATO StratCom Centre of Excellence. http://www.stratcomcoe.org/next-phase-russian-information-warfare-keir-giles. Last accessed 1 February 2017.

[36] The reference here is to the activities of the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), which was established by presidential directive on 4 April 1951. Its charge was to “see that the psychological weapons at their disposal are employed to maximum effectiveness in pursuance of NSC policies.” See: Central Intelligence Agency (1951). “Relationship of the PSB to the NSC.” Paper dated 24 May 1951, 2. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80R01731R003400010025-1.pdf. Last accessed 1 February 2017. Another CIA memorandum issued four months hence made clear that the PSB “does not itself engage in operations” but “will determine as to the various psychological operational plans: (1) emphasis, (2) priority, and (3) pace.” Central Intelligence Agency (1951). “Role of Psychological Strategy Board under 4/4/51 Presidential Directive.” Memorandum dated 28 September 1951. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80R01731R003200010003-7.pdf. Last accessed 1 February 2017.

[37] L. Scott Johnson (1997). “Toward a Functional Model of Information Warfare.” Studies in Intelligence, 1 (1997 unclassified version) 50. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol40no5/pdf/v40i5a07p.pdf. Last accessed 1 February 2017.

[38] Central Intelligence Agency (2007). “A Look Back . . . The National Committee for Free Europe, 1949.” https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2007-featured-story-archive/a-look-back.html. Last accessed 1 February 2017.

Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry on Thursday, February 2 confirmed that a meeting of Russia, Turkey and Iran with participation of the UN envoy for Syria will be held in Astana on February 6, Sputnik reports.

UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura said Wednesday that there would be a technical meeting on February 6 to discuss issues relating to a mechanism to monitor ceasefire in Syria.

“We received a request to help organize on February 6 in Astana an international technical meeting on the Syrian settlement of the delegations of Russia, Turkey and Iran, with the participation of the UN envoy,” ministry spokesman Anuar Zhainakov told Sputnik.

On January 23-24, talks on Syria’s crisis settlement took place in Astana, Kazakhstan. The talks brokered by Russia, Iran and Turkey brought together the representatives of the Syrian government and the armed opposition groups for the first time since the beginning of the Syrian war in 2011.

During the negotiations, the Russian delegation presented to the parties a draft of the Syrian constitution, sending it later to the office of the UN special envoy for Syria. The Syrian opposition also elaborated its own proposals on amending country’s constitution.

Two new developments – a Russian plan to tighten control of its border with Belarus and a report that Minsk is actively considering leaving not only two Moscow-dominated regional organizations but even the “union state” with Russia as well – could fundamentally change the geopolitics of Eastern Europe.

But it cannot be excluded that they have a more ominous meaning, an indication that relations between Vladimir Putin and Alyaksandr Lukashenka have deteriorated to the point that Moscow is preparing both by its actions on the border and its spread of stories about Minsk’s intentions to intervene in Belarus in order to change its leader and hence its orientation.

Ever since Minsk extended visa-free travel to a large number of countries and adopted a different approach to trade with the West, many in Moscow have been talking about the need for a more real border control regime than had been in place given that Russia and Belarus are nominally “a union state.”

Now the Kremlin has decided to act and directed the FSB to set up border posts with Belarus over the next five days so that any free flow of people and goods between the West and Belarus will stop at the Russian border (rg.ru/2017/02/01/v-prilegaiushchih-k-belorussii-regionah-rf-poiavitsia-pogranichnaia-zona.html and novayagazeta.ru/news/2017/02/01/128635-glava-fsb-rasporyadilsya-ustanovit-pogranichnuyu-zonu-na-granitse-s-belorussiey).

Belarusians of a more nationalist orientation are celebrating rather than bemoaning this development, viewing it as establishing “almost a border” between the two countries and thus reinforcing Belarusian sovereignty rather than being some kind of a threat, even though the new facilities could present one (belaruspartisan.org/politic/369594/).

There are, of course, many reasons that the dividing line between the Russian Federation and Belarus is a real border or should become one; but this reality is visually underscored by a picture that has accompanied some Russian and Belarusian accounts. It shows well-paved roads on the Belarusian side and potholed ones on the Russian (snob.ru/selected/entry/120094).

More intriguing is a Regnum report today in which an anonymous source says that given Belarus’ aspiration to be “an independent state like ‘fraternal Ukraine’ [the term Lukshenka has used in recent days], Moscow “will not make any loud declarations if Belarus moves to leave the Eurasian Economic Union, the Organization of the Collective Security Treaty and “possibly” the Union state of Russia and Belarus (regnum.ru/news/polit/2233858.html).

Regardless of what Belarus does, the anonymous source says, Moscow will always consider that country “a fraternal one” just as it does Ukraine. But it will not help Minsk either, and people in Belarus need to consider what their fate would likely be if they turn away from Russia and thus move to “the sidelines of world development.”

Dmitry Oreshkin, an opposition Russian political scientist, says that at the very least all this means that the union state is dead and that Russia will be left with allies drawn exclusively from Central Asia and the South Caucasus (svaboda.org/a/28274604.html and charter97.org/ru/news/2017/2/2/239609/).

But unfortunately it remains to be seen whether the end of that Kremlin project will result in a truly independent Belarus moving toward integration with the West or in one whose government and people have been taken over by force from the east. After all, the notion that even Belarus is moving away from Russia is a most powerful mobilizing tool for Moscow.

What a week in US foreign policy! First President Trump approves a commando raid in Yemen that was a total fiasco, leaving one US soldier and scores of innocent women and children dead. Then Trump’s Iran-obsessed National Security Advisor, Gen. Michael Flynn, hijacks a White House Press conference to put Iran “on notice” over its legal testing of a missile and the false claim that it is involved in the Yemen war.

But today marks an own-goal hat trick! Today, President Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley used her first appearance before the UN Security Council to condemn Russia for the renewed violence in eastern Ukraine.

Haley told the Security Council:

I consider it unfortunate that the occasion of my first appearance is one in which I must condemn the aggressive actions of Russia. It is unfortunate because it is a replay of too many instances over many years in which United States representatives have had to do that.

What were the “aggressive actions of Russia”? She did not say. Does she accuse Russia of another “invasion” of Ukraine, as Obama’s mouthpieces endlessly claimed without proof? What exactly did she mean?

But it got even stranger.

Haley went on to tell the Council that US sanctions on Russia would not be lifted until Crimea is returned to Ukraine:

The United States continues to condemn and call for an immediate end to the Russian occupation of Crimea. Crimea is a part of Ukraine. Our Crimea-related sanctions will remain in place until Russia returns control over the peninsula to Ukraine.

That’s quite different from what President Trump has been saying. Asked in July whether the US would end US sanctions on Russia and recognize that Crimea is Russian, President Trump — Haley’s boss — said, “Yes. We would be looking at that.”

Is this a new policy? Should we not be hearing such a dramatic shift from Trump? Or at least Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, now ensconced in Foggy Bottom?

While Ambassador Haley blames the Russians for the re-start of fighting in eastern Ukraine, the real cause may be a bit closer to home. Violence in eastern Ukraine began flaring up not long after a New Year’s Day visit to the front lines in Ukraine by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC), where the two Senators encouraged the Kiev forces to renew their war against the separatist east.

Graham told Ukraine’s 36th Separate Marine Brigade:

I admire the fact that you will fight for your homeland. Your fight is our fight. 2017 will be the year of offense. All of us will go back to Washington and we will push the case against Russia. Enough of a Russian aggression. It is time for them to pay a heavier price. Our fight is not with the Russian people but with Putin. Our promise to you is to take your cause to Washington, inform the American people of your bravery and make the case against Putin to the world.

Not to be outdone, McCain urged the Ukrainian army and president to renew the war:

I believe you will win. I am convinced you will win and we will do everything we can to provide you with what you need to win. We have succeeded not because of equipment but because of your courage. So I thank you and the world is watching and the world is watching because we cannot allow Vladimir Putin to succeed here because if he succeeds here, he will succeed in other countries.

McCain and Graham actually appeared in a video distributed by Ukrainian President Poroshenko encouraging Kiev forces to attack. Watch this shocking video here.

The areas around Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine have been bombarded by Kiev forces for the last several days and elsewhere in Donetsk grad missiles are raining down. And even the US government’s own propaganda mouthpiece, RFE-RL has admitted that the violence in Ukraine is the result of Kiev’s forces engaged in a “creeping offensive” against eastern Ukraine — in clear violation of the Minsk II accords.

Yet Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations took her first appearance before the Security Council to place all of the blame on Moscow’s doorstep. With all evidence to the contrary. Just like her predecessor, the warmongering Samantha Power.

If President Trump is serious about wanting to improve relations with Russia, this is a curious way to go about doing it. If his appointments are not serving his intended policy well it is not too early to make some re-adjustments. He made a name for himself uttering the line, “you’re fired!” Might be time to start dusting the phrase off. We can provide the list.

Starting one’s presidency threatening war on Iran and condemning Russia for an offensive in which it is not involved is not the best way to re-assure the war-weary Americans who voted for Trump over Hillary the hawk.

What a week…and it’s only Thursday. What might happen next?

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

By Adelaide Mena

Rather than protecting U.S. interests, recent executive orders restricting immigrants and refugees could actually pose a threat to national security, warned a group of Catholic leaders on Wednesday.

“These refugees are victims of the same violence we are trying to protect ourselves from,” said Jill Marie Geschütz Bell, senior legislative specialist for Catholic Relief Services, criticizing what she called a “disproportionate security response.”

“It’s time to be the Good Samaritan,” she urged.

Geschütz Bell and other Catholic immigration and refugee leaders spoke at a Feb. 1 press conference in Washington, D.C., hosted by the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc.

Don Kerwin, executive director for the Center for Migration Studies, contended that by limiting refugee protection, the United States would actually harm its security goals.

“Refugee protection actually advances and furthers security,” he said, because when refugees are left in unstable situations, terrorist organizations such as ISIS have a “potent” recruiting opportunity.

In addition, the executive orders may damage alliances – both present and future – with other nations, Kerwin said, echoing similar statements by former CIA director Michael Hayden.

During his first week in office, President Trump signed three executive orders addressing a range of issues concerning immigration, refugees, border enforcement and vetting of immigrants to the country.

One of the orders halts refugee admissions for 120 days – indefinitely for Syrian refugees – and temporarily bans visa permissions for people seeking entry to the United States from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.

The effective travel ban quickly caused chaos at airports around the country as travelers already en route were told upon arrival that they would be sent back and would not be allowed into the United States for 90 days.

The same order also caps the number of refugees that will be allowed to enter the United States in 2017 at 50,000. In comparison, the 2016 cap was placed at 117,000 people, although only around 85,000 refugees actually entered the United States.

The executive action says that priority will be given to “refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution” for members of minority faiths in the refugee’s country of origin.

While the order does not mention Christianity, Trump has told media such as Christian Broadcasting News that the order would prioritize Christian refugees.

President Trump said the ban was put in place to stop “radical Islamic terrorists” and to allow time for agencies to develop stricter screening programs for those coming into the country.

Two other orders the same week focused on addressing undocumented migrants already in the country and increasing border security. They included plans to build a wall along the Mexican border, increase the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants, and penalize jurisdictions that do not comply with federal immigration laws – called “sanctuary cities” – by withholding federal grants and other funds.

Kerwin argued that while the executive orders are framed as a matter of national security, in fact, the order “exaggerates the threat from refugees in the United States beyond recognition.”

He pointed to research by the Cato Institute, which found that between 1975 and 2015, the United States admitted 3.2 million refugees, and only three people have been killed by refugee attacks – a minuscule risk that also doesn’t fully incorporate new, more restrictive protections already in place, he said.

“The overall point is that refugees themselves do not threaten security, terrorists do, and the failure of states to address this crisis also undermines security,” Kerwin stated. “We’re facing not a refugee crisis, but a crisis in refugee protection, which the executive order makes far worse.”

“More broadly,” he continued, by stepping back, the United States might be providing a troubling example for other nations. “It’s really impossible to think how the greatest refugee crisis in history since WWII could be resolved without the US playing a leading role as it has in past refugee crises.”

Speakers at the press conference emphasized that current U.S. security vetting for refugees is already very strong, and while vetting concerns are always valid, the actions taken by the executive orders are disproportionate to the threat presented.

Jeanne Atkinson, executive director for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc., worried that the new orders would make Americans less safe by making immigrants less likely to report crimes for fear of deportation, thus allowing perpetrators to evade justice.

She also argued that the United States does not have the resources to carry through on the orders – there are simply not enough immigration officers and judges to review each of the 11 million cases in the country.

“What we’re going to see is the long-term detention of immigrants,” she warned. “People waiting for their day in court may languish in prison for years,” a move that she said will be costly to taxpayers and will violate the dignity of the persons detained.

Geschütz Bell added that the funds that will go into building a wall and hiring new border and immigration officers could instead be used to examine the root causes of migration. She pointed to Catholic Relief Service’s investment in and work with Honduran schools – work that undermines the gangs and resultant violence that has lead people to flee Honduras in the first place.

Within three years, she said, the program has already had immense success in educating people and stabilizing the area. “Enabling people to thrive where they are is not only more humane, but it is a cheaper option for the American people.”

Bill Canny, executive director of Migration and Refugee Services for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, voiced hope that as time passes, implementation of the executive orders will become more “humane.” He noted that the Trump Administration has already agreed to allow in more than 8,000 people who have already left refugee areas, as well as Iraqis who have provided aid to the United States Military.

“We’re getting some indications of the humane implementation of the order,” he continued, and asked Catholics to use their influence to continue to push the administration towards more humane actions.

Geschütz Bell advocated for the humane protection of other vulnerable communities that need special consideration, such as female-headed households, children and people with medical needs.

At the root of the idea of humane treatment, added Sister Donna Markham O.P., president and CEO of Catholic Charities USA, is the understanding that refugees are human persons with dignity.

She urged Catholics to remember that “they are people like ourselves who woke up one morning and learned everything they had was destroyed,” and who feel depressed, downtrodden and rejected by those who turn them away in their time of distress.

“These are human beings like you and I.”

By Ashok Malik

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s fourth budget is a solid, stolid and entirely consistent effort. It may not be perfect and meet every parameter of every analyst – no budget ever can – but is remarkable in its unwillingness to resort to gimmickry and political populism even as the polity enters a near non-stop election season.

This follows a pattern. The fiscal deficit target has been a Lakshman Rekha for the Narendra Modi government from its first year itself, when Jaitley ambitiously adopted the number left to him in the vote-on-account presented by the outgoing UPA government. Now, after three years of fiscal consolidation, the NDA government has just that much more room to spend. Even here, Jaitley has been judicious.

He has refrained from going overboard, promised a fiscal deficit of 3.2 per cent of GDP this year and 3 per cent in the following year, but given concessions and bigger outlays to infrastructure and housing in the hope of promoting private investment. Politically, he has also given himself the space to spend intelligently in his final year – when the slow jog to the general election will commence.

Jaitley was right in offering a budget with continuity and few shocks. He has assessed that the economy is in for a major disruption this year when the Goods and Services Tax is implemented, and is just coming out of a period of pain following demonetisation. The budget needed to be a balm, especially because, as the Finance minister pointed out, “In several parts of the world, there are signs of increasing retreat from globalisation of goods, services and people, as pressures for protectionism are building up. These developments have the potential to affect exports from a number of emerging markets, including India.”

The impact of Donald Trump’s economic policies is a concern. These have the potential to trigger a United States trade war with China and a global slowdown. India will not be unaffected which means the room for adventurism and risk-taking was just not there for the Indian Finance Minister. It also suggests why the Economic Survey, while such a remarkable document this year, remains an aspiration, as it tends to each year, irrespective of the government in question. Political realities and now global conditions make it difficult to embrace bold and daring ideas.

Both Modi and Jaitley have a habit of sticking to points and promises made and sometimes even obsessing over them. When demonetisation was announced, the two men had spoken of it being the first of a series of steps against black money and corruption, as well as a trigger to promote digital payments. Inattentive critics had scoffed at such reasoning and ascribed it to an afterthought following the cash shortage in the early weeks after November 8.

Today, not only is the bulk of that cash shortage behind us, both the endeavours – fighting corruption and promoting digital payments – are being pursued. The honest citizen and tax-payer is being rewarded or at least being told that she is not a fool for being honest and those who act dishonestly will be put to inconvenience.

Tax incentives for Point of Sales (POS) machines, announced a month after demonetisation, have been broadened and institutionalised. Payments to the government, by way of taxes for instance, will mandatorily follow the digital route beyond a certain (and to-be-announced limit). Cash transactions above 3 lakhs have been plain abolished. One suspects that ceiling will be lowered still further in the years to come. Mr Modi’s “war on cash” is a serious one.

An important aspect of the battle against corruption is cleaning up campaign finance and election funding. In this the reduction of individual cash donations to a political party to a limit of Rs. 2,000 – from the earlier Rs. 20,000 – is a strong move. True, parties will try and work around this, and at some point, cash donations will have to go altogether, but it is still a good first measure.

The mechanism of “electoral bonds”, to allow donors to buy bonds from banks and leave it to chosen political parties to redeem these, is also a welcome innovation. It will allow white-collar folk to donate to a political cause or party, without necessarily interacting directly with the party and its politicians.

Overall, this budget has stuck to this government’s key themes – infrastructure, including in agriculture; entrepreneurship at the grassroots; an energy revolution – the availability of and access to power will certainly be among the BJP’s calling cards in the campaign of 2019; and tackling corruption. The phrase “Swacch Bharat” has been expanded from physical cleanliness to a moral and systemic cleansing.

In that, with its appeal as well as warning to those Indians still avoiding taxes – “The number of people showing income more than Rs. 50 lakh in the entire country is only 1.72 lakh. We can contrast this with the fact that in the last five years, more than 1.25 crore cars have been sold, and number of Indian citizens who flew abroad, either for business or tourism, is 2 crore in the year 2015” – the budget persists with a Modi-Jaitley resolve: the willingness to sacrifice short-term popularity, even among those who may be BJP voters, to effect a longer-term transformation.

That mission continues. Of course, it will require 2019 to be won. The BJP cannot afford to, once more, repair a wounded economy, nurse it back to health – and, as in 2004, leave it to a successor that can’t believe its luck.

This article originally appeared in NDTV.

While Balkan countries have curbed the flow of fighters to foreign wars, the online space is still a haven for Islamist extremists who remain out of reach there, recruiting and spreading messages of hate.

By Fatjona Mejdini, Marija Ristic, Denis Dzidic, Ervin Qafmolla, Sinisa Jakov Marusic and Natalia Zaba

“What makes the Lord the most joyful is when his slave, without protection, enters among the non-believers and shoots until he gets killed … Kill and get killed – this is how those who we should be proud of end,” says Imam Bilal Bosnic in one of his many YouTube videos, posted via various channels. Just this one has had 21,000 views.

A court in Sarajevo, Bosnia, jailed him last June for seven years for instigating and recruiting foreign fighters to go to war in the Middle East.

Before his arrest, Bosnic was considered a key recruiter and preacher of violent extremism in the Balkans.

But Bosnic’s hate speech is not isolated case. Videos put out by and about extremist groups in the Balkans attract millions of viewers.

The “Sword of the Merciful” [“Shpata e Meshiruesit” in Albanian], for instance, among other jihadist marketing acts, features a video message from Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, entitled “15 years on from the blessed attacks of September 11” with Albanian subtitles.

Radical extremism has found its place not just on YouTube, but also on Facebook and Twitter. The Facebook page “White Minaret”, which counts 3,424 likes, does not shrink from expressing sympathy for supporters of terrorist organisations, and openly engages in Islamist propaganda, with direct references to Al-Qaeda and related organisations and clerics.

Source: Balkan Insight

Numerous Facebook pages all across the Western Balkans that BIRN has seen also engage in propaganda for Islamist extremists groups like Al-Qaeda, Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, formerly known as the al-Nusra Front, the Taleban and other affiliates.

Since 2014, around 200 people have been put on trial in Western Balkan countries, suspected of either being part of violent terrorist groups fighting in Middle East or of recruiting groups to go and fight there.

While the focus has been on putting them in jail, the authorities have left the worldwide web, which is where modern jihadists are also very active, unmonitored.

Even those in prison often remain active online, as is the case with Bosnic, but also with the jailed Macedonian imam Rexhep Memishi, whose Facebook page is regularly updated.

BIRN research shows that while most Western Balkan countries now have counter-terrorism strategies in place, they have struggled to counter violent extremism online.

Effective control of cyberspace is still too complicated for already poorly equipped police and prosecutors in the Balkans.

Experts also warn that little effort is being invested in the prevention of Islamist radicalism, while for many, the line between freedom of speech and online speech that incites violence, hatred or is otherwise harmful to individuals and communities remains unclear.

In some countries, websites containing violent content have been registered abroad. This also limits the scope of work of the authorities.

Extremism flourishes online

Source: Balkan Insight

While most of the world was shocked by news of the horrific November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, France, not everyone was.

One Islamist website in Bosnian, Vjesti Ummeta, in a post called the mass killings “joyful news for all true Muslims”.

This website has been a headache for the Bosnian authorities for the last two years as it continues to share and spread ISIS propaganda videos, magazines and praise mass killings carried out in the name of the Islamic Caliphate.

The authorities have pulled it down on several occasions, but the website simply reappears under different names.

The website is not an isolated case. Most similar websites have servers outside Bosnia. They are often registered in Saudi Arabia, which Bosnia’s authorities say hampers their power to shut them down.

Sarajevo-based analyst and theological expert Muhamed Jusic says the authorities are struggling to find a common ground with web providers who have certain criteria about freedom of speech.

“The other issue is that these profiles and websites are easily registered; it is like a game of cat and mouse – you close one, they open two,” Jusic told BIRN.

Besides Bosniaks, Albanians are the largest group of foreign fighters traveling to the Middle East from the Balkans.

Albanians are spread over three Balkan countries, Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia, so it is often difficult to find out exactly where Albanian Islamist propaganda is coming from.

Skender Perteshi, a researcher at the Kosovo Centre for Security Studies, said the digital and social media remain a key propaganda tool of the terrorists.

“ISIS, the biggest terrorist organisation to date, has an overwhelming presence on social media, including Facebook, Twitter and other apps,” Perteshi noted.

He said social media have been instrumental in the organisation’s success in recruiting around 25,000 foreign fighters from all over the world; countering their violent propaganda on such channels is tough.

As with the case of Bosnian counterparts, the “official” ISIS webpage in Albanian, hilafeti.wordpress.com, routinely vanishes and re-emerges after being offline for several months.

The website has been going on and off repeatedly in the last couple of years. In December, it reappeared after being shut down for less than 48 hours.

Filip Stojkovski, security research fellow at the Analytica think tank in Skopje, Macedonia, one of the authors of research entitled “Assessment of Macedonia’s efforts in countering violent extremism, view from civil society”, carried out by Analytica and published last year, says most people who join radical Islamist movements are youngsters who continue to be recruited online.

“There are still many active pages online, profiles on social networks like Facebook, that are spreading these ideas,” he said.

One such profile belongs to Imam Rexhep Memishi, who is currently serving a jail sentence for terrorism in Macedonia.

He was found guilty in 2016 after being busted in 2015 in an operation codenamed “Cell”, and was sentenced to seven years last year for recruiting fighters for the Middle Eastern war fronts.

“Although he is in jail, his profile is still very active which probably means that someone else is maintaining it, updating posts with his speeches and other content,” Stojkovski said.

Other private profiles, calling for an Islamic Caliphate in Albanian, depicting convicted terrorists as freedom fighters and calling for religious war, are by no means rare.

One Facebook group called “Eja ne Islam” [“Join Islam”] that has more than 700 supporters calls on its members to join ISIS as “a rebellion against the injustice done to Muslims’’.

Other Facebook groups curse American soldiers, wishing them to be beheaded in Syria.

“Mektebi Hasanbeg”, a YouTube channel like this, contains more than 270 videos, some of which glorify terrorism and “call for Allah to help ISIS raise the flag of Jihad”.

Terrorist leaders like Osama bin Laden are called scholars on such sites, while the flags of US and Israel are shown in flames.

Fabian Zhilla, an Albanian fellow at Harvard University in the US, says while ISIS in Albania seems to be a fading force, ISIS online propaganda in Albanian continues.

“ISIS uses and plays with tough images of children and women murdered or bombed in Syria. It tries to portray that war as a religious war, non-believers vs believers.  In general, the online content aims to attract and target an Albanian-speaking audience by mixing religious messages with ISIS ideological propaganda,” Zhilla explained to BIRN.

“It is often very difficult to distinguish between messages that call on people to strengthen their faith and messages that call on them to join the cause of ISIS,” he warned.

Strategies are in place but are not enough

The differences between propaganda, calls for terrorist acts and recruitment are also hard for the police and prosecution services to distinguish.

All Western Balkan countries have counter-terrorism strategies in place, most of them adopted in the last couple of years, to counter the flow of fighters from the Balkans to the Middle East.

All these countries have also now criminalised recruitment of fighters for participation in foreign conflicts.

Bosnia’s Security Ministry told BIRN that Bosnia’s counter-terrorism strategy envisages combatting the abuse of the internet for the purpose of terrorist activities, as well as spreading hate speech and discrimination.

As one of its plans, the ministry says that, together with the Regulatory Agency for Communication of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it aims to create control mechanisms to monitor problematic websites and punish those that do not respect the rules.

One measure involves creating a black list of webpages calling for hate speech, radicalism and violence.

However, the Regulatory Agency told BIRN that it lacks the authority to decide whether or not content online is extreme and unacceptable, unless it is radio or TV programs. And so far, it has not actually been included in drawing up a so-called blacklist of websites, it added.

Albania is also tackling extremism, partly by the formation of an Counter-Terrorist Directorate within the state police.

Alongside work in the field with investigating individuals suspected of violent extremism and terrorism, it is also working on identifying threats spread online.

“In 2016 we have grown the human capacities … for the monitoring and investigation of online propaganda through the Counter-Terrorist Directorate and the General Directory for the Organized and Serious Crimes in collaboration with the other Albanian and foreign law-enforcement agencies,” an official from the directorate told BIRN.

This official listed cases of online violent extremism that they have investigated over the last four years.

“Investigations are being conducted into two individuals, one from Albania and the other from Kosovo, both based in Syria, who appeared on social networks in a video threatening citizens of Albania, Kosovo, and region with terrorist acts,” the official said, referring so a video of June 2015 I which two Albanian supporters of ISIS threatened their compatriots.

“An individual from Pogradec is under investigation for threats on social networks against a journalist,” the same official said, also referring to a case from 2015.

“One individual from Kukes was arrested and another from Berat is under investigation for calling on social networks for acts of terrorism. Another investigation is underway after some radicalized individuals threatened an official,” he continued.

Serbia also has national strategies for counter-terrorism that refer to online terrorism as an issue that needs tackling.

However, so far, Serbia has not actually issued any indictments against violent online extremists.

Kosovo police also have a dedicated unit on cybercrime, but did not reply to requests from BIRN explaining the Kosovo police’s efforts to tackle online extremism.

Enri Hide, researcher on violent extremism and religious radicalization and a lecturer at the European University of Tirana, Albania, said strategies and specialized agencies are not enoug and a tailor-made approach is needed.

Online propaganda is difficult to eliminate,” he said. “I’m not aware of the presence of any strategy against online radicalization. We have a national strategy against violent radicalism, but not one that targets online extremism,” he told BIRN.

His colleague Zhilla agrees. “We cannot rely on the same cyber-crime legislationthat was in force in the pre-ISIS era,” he said, warning that the threat of radicalisation would likely increase in the near future.

State needs partnership with citizens

Around 60 per cent of population is on Facebook in almost all Balkan countries, while in Kosovo this figure is as high as 80 per cent.

Valon Canhasi, a social media expert in Pristina, told BIRN that violent extremists are making increasing use of social media to promote their ideology, leaving Balkan authorities struggling to keep pace.

“We have a billion daily users of Facebook, which translates into one account for every seventh inhabitants of the earth, so this platform will obviously be used by organisations that promote violence and terror,” Canhasi said.

He also said that while violent extremist propaganda was present on social media, including 360,000 Twitter accounts recently closed in relation to violent extremism, “rule-of-law [institutions] have no adequate presence on social media.”

His Bosnian colleague, the analyst Mirnes Kovac, agrees that while the biggest concentration of radical messages are to be found on social media, most citizens are not aware of the scale of the problem.

“It is very important to know how to recognise problematic preachers of hate but not violate freedom of speech. This is a global problem,” Kovac said.

Muhamed Jusic, from Bosnia, suggests forming a new partnership of institutions and ordinary citizens to counter the threat.

“Our security agencies must develop mechanisms that are available to citizens who can then report problematic content and create producers that would start removing this content in line with international standards,” Jusic said.

According to Jusic, states should also assist in developing critical thinking with citizens who consume content on social media. He adds that citizens, independently from the state, should be able to report content as innaporopriate on Facebook or Youtube.

Partnership between governments and civil society in combating online extremism remains a novelty in the Balkans.

However, in Macedonia, the NGO Analytica and the Interior Ministry are pioneering this approach, working on concrete measures to jointly curb the spread of radical propaganda online.

“We are now working on a project that tries to pinpoint in more detail how online recruitment functions and establish effective preventive mechanisms,” Stojkovski from Analytica says.

According to him, the plan is to strengthen mechanisms that warn people about radical sites and profiles through an online tool called the “red button” through which internet users could easily report such sites to the police. The police would then quickly react and, if need be, asked internet companies to close those profiles or sites down.

Who needs territory? Russia uses soft power and information warfare to win control over former Soviet states.

By Agnia Grigas*

During the first phone call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on 28 January, both sides agreed on the need to improve the US-Russian relationship. While it’s still uncertain how this new relationship will evolve, the conclusion of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson during his confirmation hearing that “we’re not likely to ever be friends” is telling. More importantly, Tillerson noted that the Kremlin has “a geographic plan” and that it is “taking actions to implement that plan.”

Russia has much more than a simple territorial plan. In fact, in recent decades Moscow has actively pursued Putin’s long-term vision of reestablishing Russian power and influence in the former states of the Soviet Union and not shied away from redrawing borders and launching military campaigns.

Since the 2000 Russia has shown increasing tendency towards “reimperialization” of the post-Soviet space, especially in regards to the territories inhabited by ethnic Russians, as I argue in my book Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire. Moscow counts some 35 million Russians and Russian speakers abroad as compatriots concentrated in states such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Latvia and Estonia and has repeatedly demonstrated commitment to engage and protect these populations. In other words, broad reimperialization is the end-goal of Moscow’s policies, and Russian compatriots are among the means for Moscow achieving that end.

The concept of reimperialization should not be solely understood in the narrowest sense of the term. An empire does not simply result from acquisition of territories. Rather, reimperialization should be understood as a process allowing a dominant country to have indirect control over the sovereignty of other states.

To achieve this end, namely dominance of the post-Soviet region, Russia uses a consistent seven-stage trajectory of policies to reimperialize the former Soviet republics. This trajectory begins with soft power and cycles through humanitarian policies and compatriot policies, which create institutions, laws and policies to co-opt the Russian diaspora. This proceeds to information warfare; “passportization,” which hands out Russian citizenship and passports to compatriots abroad; calls for compatriot protection, which can eventually result in annexation of territories. Although various stages can occur simultaneously or in different order, the general trajectory involves cooptation of the Russian diaspora to achieve territorial expansion under the guise of compatriot or minority protection. All of this occurs under the veil of a blitz of information warfare.

Russia has already achieved various degrees of success with these policies across former Soviet republics, but possibly the most effective application is in Ukraine. Russia’s use of soft power instruments in Ukraine traces back to the early 1990s and gained considerable momentum after Ukraine’s attempts to turn westward with the Orange Revolution of 2004. For example, in October 2008, Viktor Chernomyrdin, the Russian ambassador to Ukraine, called on the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to monitor the rights of Russians in Ukraine. He claimed that Ukraine used “restrictive measures without taking into account the interests of the Russian-speaking citizens of Ukraine.” However, no international human rights organizations had received personal complaints from ethnic Russians living in Ukraine. The timing of Moscow’s policies was related to Ukraine’s ambitions of moving closer to institutions like the EU and potentially NATO, which from Russia’s point of view could have been perceived as a security threat. If Kiev had succeeded, it would have not only removed Ukraine as a neutral buffer state, standing between Russia and the West, but would have also reduced Moscow’s sphere of influence in the region.

Alongside humanitarian efforts, Russia simultaneously ramped up compatriot policies. Russian citizens created illegal and semi-legal organizations in eastern Ukraine and provided members with paramilitary training. According to media reports and information from social networks, in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, a pro-Russian separatist organization, “Donetskaya Respublica,” was registered in 2006 and started receiving military training no later than 2009.

In the late 2000s, Russia increased the scope of its passportization strategy in Ukraine. In 2008, the Ukrainian media reported that the Russian consulate as well as individuals such as a librarian in a Sevastopol library began systemically handing out Russian passports to Ukrainian citizens. Soon after, estimates suggested that the number of Crimeans with Russian citizenship ranged from 8,000 to 40,000. During this time Russian officials continued to deny the policy of passport distribution in Crimea. Once sizable populations in neighboring foreign states became Russian citizens, Moscow then could call for their protection both rhetorically and militarily, starting the process of annexation or de facto control of these territories.

Russia’s information warfare accelerated in wake of the Ukrainian Maidan revolution of 2013-2014. In autumn 2013, Russian television – including Perviy Kanal, Rossya 24, Life News, the Russian edition of Euronews and Russia Today – began a wide-ranging propaganda campaign to shape the perceptions of Russian compatriots. First, they discredited European integration of Ukraine and the Maidan protests. Second, the Russian media turned to a favorite tactic – smearing opponents as “fascists.” The media tried to propagate a narrative among eastern and southern Ukrainians and Russian speakers that “fascism is returning to life” in Kiev and western Ukraine, and that their rights would be severely undermined.

Following President Viktor Yanukovych’s departure from both government and Ukraine on February 21^st, Moscow’s instruments of soft power suddenly shifted to what can be best described as a hybrid warfare campaign under the pretext of protecting the rights of Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine. The night of February 27, 2014, Russian special-mission troops captured the local legislature of Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea. At the same time, Russian troops, previously stationed in Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, attacked Ukrainian troops, governmental buildings and infrastructure in the same region.

In the meanwhile, pro-Russia hackers embarked on a cyber-espionage campaign against the Ukrainian government. Using a technique called spear-phishing, the hackers sent emails to targets that appeared to come from legitimate sources and included attachments that, when opened, enabled access to their computers.

On March 16^th, Russian authorities and pro-Russian separatists conducted an illegal referendum for Crimea and Sevastopol to join Russia with the reported but unlikely outcome of 96.7 percent supporting annexation.

However, annexation of Crimea was not the only objective.

Despite sporadic violence that broke out in eastern Ukraine in early March, the real fighting began after April 11^th when a special Russian military detachment, commanded by Russian Colonel Igor Girkin, who had participated in the capture of Crimea, crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border and captured the city of Slavyansk in the region of Donetsk. In later months, pro-Russian militias continued advancing on other towns and cities in eastern Ukraine. Despite the Ukrainian Army’s efforts to liberate the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, subsequent offensives in 2014 and 2015 enabled militants to maintain control over some territories in the area. This led to a frozen conflict in the eastern part of the country, which not only severely hampered Kiev’s bid of joining the EU, but also complicated its chances of joining NATO.

The aggressive policies Moscow pursued in Ukraine in the name of Russian compatriots recall Russia’s war in Georgia and efforts to strike discord among ethnic minorities in the Baltic States, in Kazakhstan and beyond. By establishing frozen conflicts in such places as Luhansk and Donetsk, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Russia gained considerable leverage over Kiev and Tbilisi’s politics and foreign policy for years to come, without having direct territorial control.

The world waits for how the Trump administration will manage Russia’s ambitions in the former Soviet republics, though tension is anticipated between efforts to improve relations with Putin and the Kremlin’s strategic plans of preventing neighboring countries from slipping away from its sphere of influence.

*Agnia Grigas, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, is the author of Beyond Crimea: The New Russian Empire and The New Geopolitics of Natural Gas. Follow her on Twitter @AgniaGrigas or www.grigas.net

By Massoud Mousavi Shafaei*

Unlike the era of the Cold War, when concentration of power within framework of a bipolar world system was considered as a major feature, we are now witnessing multiple power centers under the present international conditions. As a result, analysts have been talking about a multipolar system or even a non-polar world system.

The main effect of multiplicity of power centers is fluidity of international system and emergence of new conditions for action in various regional environments. This is true because both the ability and determination of traditional big powers (mostly Western) for direct engagement in regional conflicts have decreased so that they are more inclined toward indirect presence in those conflicts and setting the direction for a fluid regional balance of power.

For this reason, at the present time, emerging and regional powers have tuned into active actors and are trying under new conditions to boost their power and influence.

Under these circumstances, the dominance of a geo-economic logic and opportunities for cooperation and prosperity, which are embedded in it, have brought relative order and stability to some regions, including East Asia. On the opposite, the dominance of the geopolitics of terror has brought instability, war and conflict to some other regions, including the Middle East. In the meantime, due to its international role and geographical position, Iran is situated between two regions, which follow two different logics. The first region is Asia in its general sense, which seems to be heading toward geo-economics of hope, with the second region behind the Middle East, which is now engulfed by the geopolitics of terror.

The necessity and importance of a major turn in Iran’s foreign policy from the geopolitics of the Middle Eastern terror to the geo-economy of Asian hope is due to the fact that we are currently witnessing incremental, accumulated and contagious crises in the Middle East. As a result, talking about any form of cooperation, especially economic cooperation and convergence and establishment of a cooperative regional order under such conditions is more similar to a lame joke.

Under these critical conditions, if we extended the scope of our analysis beyond the Middle East and Southwest Asia, we would see other regions where the framework for cooperation and rivalry has been defined on the basis of a geo-economic logic in such a way that relative order and stability has been maintained in those regions. Therefore, two main arguments can be put forth in this regard:

1. Making an effort to rebuild the regional order in the Middle East within framework of the logic or paradigm of geopolitics and through military and security domination is very difficult, if not impossible. This region is now trapped in all kinds of conflicts that arise from the geopolitics of terror. There are many ethnic and religious conflicts, terrorism, collapse of governments, civil wars, and so forth in the region, which are incremental, accumulated and contagious in nature and depict a picture that foretells endless conflicts.

Under the present circumstances, the outlook for the reconstruction of the regional order seems improbable, because neither the big powers have the ability and resolve to build a new order here, nor suitable conditions are in place for establishment of a hegemonic order by a single regional powers, nor there is any promising outlook for creation of a cooperative order.

2. Due to its geographical position, Iran is situated between two regions, which follow two different logics. The first region is Asia in its general sense and with its own geo-economic logic, with the second region being the Middle East, with its own geopolitical logic. We are all aware of difficulties of making a paradigm change in Iran’s foreign policy, but as geopolitical, military and security conflicts escalate in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, the necessity and importance of turning toward Asian geo-economic structures is felt more than before.

It is evident that this paradigm change does not mean that Iran should end its influence in the Middle East, because as a result of geographical and geopolitical realities, Iran’s presence in the Middle East is vital for protecting the country’s national security. The meaning of paradigm change is a subjective and objective development, which would be able to prioritize the country’s spheres of influence (the Middle East, Southwest Asia, Central Asia…) and type of influence (security, military, economic, cultural…) in line with the Islamic Republic’s national interests. In the second step, limited resources of the country must be allocated in an optimal manner, and policies aimed at achieving goals (not just oriented toward fulfilling obligations) be adopted in order to guarantee sustainable security and national prosperity of the country.

*Massoud Mousavi Shafaei
Faculty Member at Tarbiat Modarres University & Political Economy Researcher

Source: The International

Lethal interpersonal violence, by which a subject is able to kill his fellow beings, is a widespread behavior in mammals, and the human species has inherited it during the course of its evolution.

These are the findings of a team of Spanish scientists, in which the University of Granada (UGR) participates, in a study published in the journal Nature, researchers have compiled data on more than 4 million deaths and quantified the level of lethal violence in 1024 species of mammals, from 137 taxonomic families and in about 600 human populations, ranging from approximately 50,000 years to the present.

“Are humans naturally violent, as Hobbes said, or peaceful beings to whom civilization corrupts, as Rousseau suggested? This question has captivated intellectuals and scientists since time immemorial, but to this day we still do not have a definitive answer, although probably both were partly right,” said the main author of this work, José María Gómez Reyes, researcher at the Arid Zones Experimental Station (EEZA-CSIC, from its abbreviation in Spanish) and the University of Granada.

In this article, which also counts with the participation of the King Juan Carlos University (URJC) of Madrid and the Center for Research on Desertification (CIDE-CSIC), the researchers worked on the idea that the violent component of human nature could be deduced from our evolutionary history in common with other mammals.

Non-violent mammals

Scientists found that there are lineages of mammals almost non-violent with their peers, and others where violence is prevalent.

“Humans evolutionarily belong to one of the latter, which suggests that the violence that we manifest today already happened in the species that were our ancestors,” said Marcos Méndez from the URJC, and coauthor of this article.

Taking data of humans and other mammals from a variety of bibliographic sources, and using phylogenetic comparative tools, scientists have determined that lethal violence as a consequence of our evolutionary past is around 2%.

“Lethal violence in humans has, therefore, an undoubted evolutionary component that precedes our own origin as a species,” said Adela González Megías, researcher at the UGR and co-author of the article.

However, a review of lethal violence in 600 human societies, from the Palaeolithic to the present, revealed that it is not possible to ignore cultural influences on lethal violence in humans.

In fact, “levels of lethal interpersonal violence have changed throughout history. Thus, the level of lethal violence in prehistoric societies is in close agreement with that estimated from our long evolutionary history in conjunction with other mammals, but it increases greatly in cacique societies and descends to very low levels in more complex societies,” said Miguel Verdú, co-author of the article and researcher at CIDE-CSIC.

Therefore, although interpersonal violence is a primordial trait in the human being, the type of social organization that we develop can mitigate it and favor the peaceful resolution of our conflicts. Thus, the results of the study suggest that culture can influence the evolutionary heritage of lethal violence in humans.

By Fahimullah

Jamila says that she has become a social outcast, just because she has six female children.

The 45-year-old, who lives in the eastern province of Nangarhar, said that her daughters were also beaten and mistreated.

“After I gave birth to my sixth baby girl, all the members of my family stopped talking to me and I even was beaten by my husband during my recovery,” she said. “My life has become so difficult that I constantly think it would be better to just die.”

Conservative Afghan tradition has always valued the birth of sons over that of daughters. Boys are seen as guaranteeing the family’s economic security and – especially among Pashtuns, who make up the majority in Nangarhar – as future defenders of its rights and honour.

Although attitudes are changing in urban centres and among the more educated, women are sometimes badly injured or even killed after being abused for their failure to have a male child.

Men often take one or more extra wives in their search to produce a male heir.

That was the experience of Mah Noor, 39, who lives in Nangarhar’s Haska Mena district, who wept as she told her story.

“I was always put under mental pressure by my father-in-law, my mother-in-law and other family members,” she said. “After my daughters were born, my husband also gave me a lot of trouble and sorrow.”

She continued, “After the birth of my second daughter, all the family started ignoring me and treating me badly. Then my husband told me that he was going to marry another girl.”

Men say they feel stigmatised by society if their wives fail to bear male children.

“I have two wives and both have given me six daughters, but I don’t have a son, so people still bother and annoy me for not having son,” said local resident Jabar Khan. “Everyone asks me, ‘Why don’t you have a son?’ Such questions really anger and irritate me and sometimes I even start fighting with my wives and it leads to violence.”

Mohammad Liyaqat Adil, an internal medicine specialist, runs a clinic in Nangarhar’s Jalalabad city. He said people simply did not understand the biological factors that decided the sex of a child.

“Women don’t have any role in the gender of a baby,” he said. “It is men whose sperm determine the whether the baby will be male or female.”

Explaining how the sex of a baby was determined, he added, “If the X chromosome of a man joins with the X chromosome of a woman in an ovum a female baby will be born, but if a man’s Y chromosome joins with the woman’s X chromosome then a male baby will be born.”

Islamic experts argue that not only was discriminating against female children forbidden, but that girls brought blessings to their entire family.

Religious scholar Maulawi Naweed Ahmad told IWPR, “When a girl is in her father’s home, she is his key to paradise. When she gets married, she completes the faith of her husband and when she becomes a mother, paradise will be under her feet.”

He continued, “After the birth of a baby girl, the family will be blessed with the mercy of God for 40 days. We should be happy after a girl is born and we should not disrespect, beat or insult a mother after she gives birth to a baby girl.

“Anyone who troubles and insults a woman for giving birth to a baby girl will be condemned and punished by God.”

Nonetheless, social activist Nasratullah said that the social prejudice seemed intractable.

“This issue is embarrassing and disgraceful. We have discussed our concerns with government officials and we raised the issue during many meetings, conferences and workshops, but there is still no solution for the problem.”

“I have heard hundreds of such stories where women faced many different problems after giving birth to baby girls, and these tales are so tragic, ” agreed Nangarhar provincial council member Nelofar Azizi.

“We have shared these women’s troubles with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), the department of women’s affairs and other similar organisations and they have started public awareness programmes to address these issues.”

Sharifa, AIHRC head of women’s rights support, also told IWPR that she had seen for herself how women were mistreated for having daughters.

“I witnessed a case in [Nangarhar’s public] hospital where a women was threatened and insulted by her husband after she gave birth to a female baby, but fortunately we managed to help her,” she said.

Although some women had approached them after suffering similar abuse “due to cultural and traditional issues, women cannot speak out against this problem”.

It was vital to try and change attitudes through outreach work with the media and Muslim scholars Sharifa continued, adding, “We don’t just run our awareness programmes in the city, but also in the districts.”

Anisa Imrani, the provincial director of women’s affairs, agreed that social pressures meant that few women felt able to make formal complaints over such mistreatment.

“Many women come and explain their problems to us so we can give them advice, but they tell us not to register their cases,” she said, adding that despite their best efforts, little had improved.

“Despite holding hundreds of workshops and public awareness programmes in Nangarhar’s cities and villages we haven’t had many positive results.”

Psychologist Mohibullah Mohib noted the mental damage women suffered when they were bullied for not having male children.

This in turn affected a woman’s ability to raise her family, he continued, and could lead to serious mental illness.

“When a woman is pressurised, she becomes deeply depressed and may commit suicide or even kill her daughter, so families need to be very sensitive about this,”Mohib said.

But such sensitivity has been sorely lacking in the lives of women like 32-year old Bas Bibi.

“After the birth of my third daughter, my husband left home and didn’t return for 20 nights,” she told IWPR.

“My husband always taunted me that I was not able to give him a baby boy. He told me, ‘You are not as good as other women who can give birth to boys.’”

“My life is full of hardship,” she continued. “All my husband’s relatives hate me and disrespect me, but what is my sin and why am I blamed? It’s not in my hands. It is the work of God, but I am punished for it. I also want a son, but it is not under my control.”

This report was produced under IWPR’s Promoting Human Rights and Good Governance in Afghanistan initiative, funded by the European Union Delegation to Afghanistan. This article was published by IWPR’s ARR 565