By Jonathan Cook*

For 20 years, the White House stood guard over the peace process, reserving for itself the role of stewarding Israel and the Palestinians to a resolution of their conflict. Like some Godfather, the US expected unquestioning loyalty.

But Washington’s primacy in the relationship with both the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships is unraveling at astonishing speed.

The crisis has been building for six years. Barack Obama arrived at the White House just as Israel elected one of the most right-wing governments in its history, led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

At their first meeting Obama reportedly told his Israeli counterpart “not one more brick”, insisting on a settlement-building freeze so that Washington could revive the long-stalled Oslo peace process.

Netanyahu soon defied the president, and has been doing so ever since. The latest humiliation – the final straw, according to White House officials – was Netanyahu’s success in engineering an invitation to address the US Congress next month.

By all accounts, the Israeli prime minister hopes to undermine a key plank of Obama’s foreign policy – negotiating a deal with Iran on its nuclear program – by persuading Congress to stiffen sanctions against Tehran. That risks a crisis that might ultimately drag the US into war with Iran.

But Netanyahu is not alone in testing Obama’s power. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has also recently chosen to bypass the White House. After years of fruitless waiting, he has pinned his hopes on new international sponsors who can help him achieve his goal of statehood.

Ignoring White House injunctions, he has pressed ahead with resolutions at the United Nations and has now deployed his doomsday weapon: joining the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague. Israelis are calling this a “diplomatic intifada” and urging the US to cut its $400 million annual aid to the Palestinian Authority.

Just as with a mafioso boss, Obama is in trouble if he can no longer inspire fear, let alone respect. But the problem is all his own making.

For six years, Netanyahu “spat in our face”, as one White House official memorably observed of the latest crisis, and paid no discernible price for his impudence. Conversely, Abbas has done everything the Obama administration asked of him, and has precisely nothing to show for his efforts.

Both the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships believe separately that they have core – even existential – interests that the White House is now an obstacle to realizing.

Abbas’ disobedience is born of necessity. Aware that the US will never act as honest broker in the peace process, he has been forced to turn to international forums, where Washington’s power is weaker, in the hope of forcing Israel to concede a small Palestinian state.

Netanyahu’s move, meanwhile, is based on the risky calculation that he can maneuver the US into a confrontation with Iran to maintain Israel’s regional domination. In doing so, he has made two dubious assumptions.

The first is that he can wait out Obama, who has little more than a year and a half left in office. Netanyahu is betting on a hardline Republican successor who will follow his lead against Tehran.

He may well be disappointed. Even assuming a Republican wins, their hawkish campaign rhetoric on Iran will be fiercely tested by the limitations of office. The US intelligence agencies and military will be instructing the next president in the same cold political realities faced by Obama.

And second, Netanyahu believes he can use the Congress to stymie any threat of an agreement between Washington and Tehran. His working assumption is that the Congress is “Israeli-occupied territory”, as a US observer once called it.

Certainly, Israel has enormous sway in the Congress, but Netanyahu is already getting a lesson in the limits of his influence when up against a cornered US president.

Leading Democrats, it seems, are choosing to side with Obama. Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, has already warned that many Democrats may boycott Netanyahu’s speech. Others may attend but sit on their hands rather than join in the rapturous applause he received last time he addressed Congress.

And here is one of the several warning signs Netanyahu has adamantly refused to heed.

His – and Israel’s – influence in the US depends on its bipartisan nature. By taking on the president, Netanyahu risks smashing apart Washington’s political consensus on Israel and exposing the American public for the first time to a debate about whether Israeli interests coincide with US ones.

The very rift he is fostering with Obama is likely to rebound on him strategically too. He is giving Tehran every incentive to sign an accord with the western powers, if only to deepen the fracturing relationship between Israel and Washington.

Meanwhile, the ICC has preferred to initiate an investigation itself against Israel for war crimes, even before the Palestinians’ accession, rather than wait for the threats of retaliation from Israel and the White House to escalate.

What the unraveling of the triangular relationship has achieved – stoked by Netanyahu’s intransigence towards the Palestinians and insolence towards the US – is an opening up of diplomatic wriggle room.

Others states, from Europe to Russia, China and Iran, and international bodies such as the ICC, will fill the void left by Washington’s diminishing credibility and start to shape perceptions about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

That could yet have unpredictable – and dangerous – consequences for Israel.

*Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. He is the author of “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit: www.jonathan-cook.net. (A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.)

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Brigadier General Antonio Maggi has been appointed new Mission Commander for the EU Training Mission in Somalia (EUTM Somalia).

General Maggi, from Italy, takes up his duties on March 8, 2015. He will succeed Brigadier General Massimo Mingiardi, who had been in the position since December 2013.

EUTM Somalia, launched in spring 2010, is part of the EU’s comprehensive approach for a stable, democratic and prosperous Somalia and embedded in the EU strategic framework for the Horn of Africa. It has contributed to training over 4.000 Somali troops so far, with a special focus on officers, specialists and trainers.

The mission delivers political and strategic advice to the Somali ministry of defense and the chief of defense forces on security sector development. It also advises on military training so as to lay the foundations of a Somali-owned military training system. Since January 2014, the mission has been based in Mogadishu, Somalia.

The decision was taken by the Council’s Political and Security Committee.

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By Abu Bakr al-Yamani

The destruction of the most important Muslim landmark in the Yemeni city of al-Hawta, Lahij province last week by suspected al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) elements has drawn strong condemnation from officials and scholars.

A group of suspected AQAP gunmen on 30 motorcycles attacked the shrine and mosque of renowned Muslim scholar Sufyan bin Abdullah, the Yemeni Defense Ministry’s 26sep.net news portal said Wednesday (January 28th).

The gunmen blew up and demolished the shrine, ransacked the tomb and adjacent graves, and removed the remains of the dead, it said.

Bin Abdullah’s tomb dates back more than 800 years.

Yemen’s General Authority for Antiquities and Museums issued a statement Thursday denouncing the demolition of the shrine at the hands of “terrorist groups”.

“I am astonished at the attack on a historic Muslim landmark which dates back 800 years,” authority head Muhannad al-Sayani told Al-Shorfa.

Officials suspect AQAP was behind the attack as its elements have carried out similar incursions damaging archaeological and historical landmarks in the past, he added.

“The dysfunctional security situation is having a negative impact on archaeological and historical sites,” al-Sayani said, urging the protection of Yemeni landmarks from vandalism that targets the country’s heritage and memory.

“A terrorist group attacked the shrine of the scholar Sufyan Abdullah, demolishing it and leveling its dome, and also ransacking graves,” Aref Abdul Aziz of the Lahij archaeological office told Al-Shorfa. “A team from the archaeological office visited the site and found the shrine no longer exists, which highlights the malice of those who carried out this attack against humanity.”

Abdul Aziz condemned the incident, saying, “No one has the right to demolish a historic Muslim landmark since it does not belong to any party, sect, faith or group, but rather is a landmark of human history and civilization and thus belongs to all people.”

“We are anguished by the damage inflicted on antiquities at the hands of some groups which take advantage of the security situation to carry out their attacks,” he said.

‘Impermissible in Islam’

Ministry of Culture undersecretary Aeed al-Shawafi also denounced the attack on the historic Muslim landmark.

“We condemn and denounce in the strongest terms what is happening to archaeological and cultural sites, which reflect human civilisation,” he told Al-Shorfa.

Al-Shawafi called on citizens of all affiliations to protect historic landmarks and sites, “because they are public property and do not belong to a particular sect, faith or party”.

“An attack on archaeological and historical sites is an attack on the people and their civilization,” he added.

Islam prohibits ransacking graves and committing transgressions against the dead, Yemen’s Ministry of Endowments and Guidance said.

“It is impermissible in Islam to commit a transgression against the dead or to attack and dig up graves or even walk over them,” Sheikh Jabri Ibrahim, director general of preaching and guidance at the ministry, said in an interview published by the official news agency Saba.

Prophet Mohammed, he said, “saw a man sitting on a grave and said to him, ‘Arise, do not harm the owner of the grave, he does not harm you'”.

Bombing and attacking shrines is a crime, Sheikh Ibrahim said, adding, “Humans inherently do not harm the living nor the dead, but rather pray for the dead and coexist with the living in line with the prophet’s saying: ‘A Muslim is he who spares Muslims his tongue and his hand’.”

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By K.V. Kesavan*

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has never made a secret of his views on the future security role of Japan in Asia. On many occasions he has articulated that Japan should take up greater responsibilities in its own defence sphere. The fact that he is now enjoying overwhelming political strength in the Japanese Diet as well as popular support as reflected in several recent opinion polls gives him a good opportunity to translate many of his ideas into concrete action. For instance, he has taken several far reaching measures to revamp Japan’s security ever since he came back to power in December 2012.

First, Mr. Abe established the National Security Council as a key institution in the security affairs and followed it up by formulating the National Security Strategy (NSS) for the first time in the post-war Japan. The main objective of the NSS is to provide a detailed outline of the security challenges confronting Japan and to make suggestions for possible responses. The Abe government also simultaneously published the National Defence Policy Guidelines (NDPG) and the Mid- Term Defence Programme for the five years starting from 2013.

The NDPG was first formulated in 1976 in the midst of the cold war and has been revised four times since then. The second NDPG was issued only in 1995 following the end of the cold war. Subsequently, two more NDPGs were formulated in 2004 and 2010. One important aspect of the NDPGs of 2004 and 2010 is that when they were formulated Japan’s defence spending was declining continuously for ten years from 2003 onwards. The present NDPG, the fifth one to be formulated, was issued in 2013 by Prime Minister Abe. But the formulation of the 2013 NDPG was followed by an increase in the defence spending. The Mid-Term Defence Programme which was prepared along with the NDPG envisaged an augmented defence spending for the period 2013-18.

Defence budget in Japan started increasing from 2013 fiscal year from 4.64 trillion in 2012-13 to Y 4.68 trillion in 2013-14. In 2014-15, it jumped to Y 4.78 trillion. The Abe government has already formulated the 2015-16 defence budget which is estimated to increase further to Y 4.98 trillion. Since the government is committed to implementing the five year defence build up programme 2013-18, the total budget for the fiscal 2016-17 may go well beyond Y5 trillion.

One is still not sure whether Prime Minister Abe will be inclined to let the defence budget cross the self-imposed limit of 1 per cent of the GNP. Successive Japanese governments have stuck to this limit; however, only once in the 1980s Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone crossed the Rubicon. But considering the ‘extraordinarily grave’ security situation in East Asia, Prime Minister Abe may feel impelled to do so. Japanese Defence Minister Gen Nakatani explained it thus: “The situation around Japan is changing. The level of defence spending reflects the amount necessary to protect Japan’s air, sea, and land and guard the lives and property of our citizens.”

The expanded defence budget for 2015-16 has been used to buy twenty P-1 patrol airplanes and an E-2D early warning plane. A heavy amount has also been allotted for the introduction of Global Hawk reconnaissance drones.

Since 2010, China has intensified its maritime activities in both East and South China Seas and its ships are encroaching on the Japanese territorial waters in and around the Senkaku Islands. In the current NDPG, Japan has attached utmost urgency to the need for taking measures to safeguard the Senkaku Islands. It will purchase six F-35 stealth fighter jets, five V-22 Osprey aircraft and thirty AAV-7 amphibious vehicles.

Mr Abe is also making all efforts to strengthen the alliance framework with the US and will soon undertake legislative measures to operationalise the exercise of the right to collective self-defence which will involve obligations on the part of Japan to defend its allies under armed attacks.

Lastly, while Japan’s defence spending has been increasing since 2013, many strategic experts still feel that the volume of increase is not adequate enough. What really concerns them is that Mr Abe will not be able to significantly enhance the military capabilities of Japan if he still continues to keep his military budget under 1% of the GNP. As things stand now, they complain, China’s military spending is three times more than Japan’s. They also point out that as long as Japan’s capabilities remain constrained by its own self-imposed restrictions, its dependence on the US will continue in the coming years too.

*The writer is a Distinguished Fellow at Observer Research Foundation, Delhi

Courtesy: Indian Defence Review

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What had started off as a handful of enthusiasts’ bid to build the first open digital cinema, camera, AXIOM, from scratch has now become a platform for film-makers, creative industry professionals, artists and enthusiasts – and they have just received good news.

The APERTUS° project’s development of its AXIOM Gamma camera is now being backed by Horizon 2020 funding. The supported project will kick off in March 2015 and runs for 15 months. The knowledge they generate in the development of their camera system will be completely open. APERTUS° releases its software under the GNU General Public License V3, their documentation under the Creative Commons License and the hardware under the Cern Open Hardware License. ‘All the things we learn on this path shall be shared and be available freely to anyone,’ explain the project team.

The AXIOM Gamma will become a full-featured shoulder camera that ‘does it all’ and will be ready for directors who just want to turn it on and start shooting. It will offer an alternative to film-makers who want to use devices and technology that are tailored to their needs.

The project plans to democratise camera technology and put the power back into the hands of the users. ‘It is a self-liberation by creating high end tools that we ourselves love to work with – fully independent of any of the big, established camera corporations,’ explains a member of the team.

But why do we need open source technology independent of established corporations? As those in the film industry know, the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) is made up of six major US film studios: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Universal Studios, The Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros.

The project explains the DCI defines standards for digital film formats and projection. But they also develop anti-piracy measures. Cinemas only receive DCI certification if their equipment contains a Secure Media Box which communicates with the DCI servers and controls what film is shown, and when. Its equipment is expensive and most cinemas converting to digital get national grants to help with costs.

But smaller, independent cinemas showing arthouse films often do not meet funding criteria. Not everyone is accepting the situation. Smaller cinema owners, developers and enthusiasts from all around the world have teamed up to create an alternative system based on open source technology. The reaction to APERTUS°’s launch of AXIOM on the crowd-funding platform Indiegogo beating its target of EUR 100 000 by EUR 74 520, in October 2014, shows the level of enthusiasm. Now the partners have secured EU funding for their project, they can focus entirely on developing their camera.

‘All in all this EU grant means that the future of the AXIOM project is secured for the next couple of years – it means we are not required to search for additional investments that would take a bit of our independence away from us,’ a member of the project team said.

Source: CORDIS

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By Nick Cunningham

The oil markets are showing some life, having rallied 11 percent over a two-day period. But if a bigger rebound is not around the corner, it won’t just be oil companies that will be feeling the pain: their lenders will also face some steep losses if drillers can’t come up with the cash to cover debt payments.

Drilling for oil is an expensive process. Until the oil begins to flow, companies have to shell out cash without seeing much in return. Without revenues from other wells already in production, oil companies have to take on debt to finance operations. Even for companies with big production portfolios, debt is a crucial source of funds to keep the treadmill of new drilling going. Between 2010 and 2014, the oil industry took on around $550 billion in debt, a period of time in which oil prices surged. Now with a crash, that volume that becomes especially hard to service.

The largest banks – JP Morgan, or Citibank, for example – are so massive that losses on loans to the energy industry will likely result in only “slight negatives,” as JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon put it a January conference call with investors. But smaller more regionally-focused banks, especially in Texas and North Dakota, are facing a much bigger problem.

During the last oil crash in the 1980’s, around 700 banks failed after oil prices crashed. Analysts aren’t expecting failures to come close to those numbers, but there are a series of banks that have high percentages of their loan portfolios coming from the energy sector. For example, companies like International Bancshares has (42.4 percent), and Cullen/Frost Bankers (35.9 percent), two Texas-based regional banks, are highly exposed, as CNN Money reported in January.

Canadian banks are also reeling from oil prices that have dropped by more than 50 percent since mid-2014. The S&P/TSX Commercial Banks index, an index of eight Canadian banks, dropped by around 10 percent in January, the index’s worst start to a year since 1990, according to Bloomberg.

Even British banks could be on the hook. The Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays, and a series of other British banks are exposed to more than $50 billion in high-yield loans in the energy sector.

But not all lenders are in trouble. Eyeing wounded animals, some financial vultures sense an opportunity. Hedge funds and private equity are stepping into the fray, providing credit to distressed oil companies at exorbitant rates. Shut out of traditional debt markets, oil companies drowning in debt have few other options. Particularly for smaller drillers, these emergency loans provide a lifeline to pay off other debt.

Bloomberg reported on February 2 that several major private equity firms – Carlyle Group, Apollo Global Management, Blackstone Group, and KKR – are in the midst of taking massive positions in indebted oil companies.

KKR, for example, provided $700 million in credit to Preferred Sands LLC, a producer of sand used to frack oil and gas wells. In exchange for the emergency loan – which carried a 15 percent yield – KKR took a 40 percent ownership stake in the company. Blackstone did a similar deal with Linn Energy LLC, another struggling oil firm.

The New York Times chronicled the case of Resolute Energy, a company barely alive after being overwhelmed by debt. Highbridge Capital Management, a hedge fund, provided $150 million in loans to the company at a more than 10 percent interest rate.

The onerous terms on new debt obviously makes it even less likely that oil drillers will be able to get back on their feet. But these vulture investors know that they can seize assets in the event of a bankruptcy. And if oil prices do turnaround, then these financial institutions come away with potentially lucrative oil-producing assets that they obtained at fire sale prices.

“The single best opportunity to invest is distressed debt in energy,” David Rubenstein, a co-founder of The Carlyle Group, said in Davos at the World Economic Forum.

Source: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Rise-Of-The-Vulture-Investing-Class.html

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By Saeed Murad Rahi*

Corruption is pervasive in Afghanistan. Corruption is widely recognized to be a serious problem in the Afghan society and has significantly affected people’s lives. It has undermined security, political stability, good governance, and development objectives.

Afghanistan is ranked as one of the worst corrupt countries in the world. Transparency International ranks it 172nd out of 175 countries in its 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index. World Bank 2015 Doing Business Report lists it 183 of 189. The Asia Foundation’s Survey of the Afghan People 2014 has found corruption, after security, as the second national problem in Afghanistan.

Most Afghans perceive that they have to pay bribes or gifts in order to obtain services from the government. Surveys indicate that the police, justice sectors, municipalities, and customs department are known as the most corrupt institutions.

Corruption exists in many forms in Afghanistan, but the two types are widely being practiced and publicly observed in the government’s institutions. First, there is administrative corruption found at all level of government, both at the national and subnational level. Besides the financial incentives, lack of security and political uncertainty has also contributed in administrative corruption. As a result, government employees try to benefit from their positions in the short-term. Government’s key officials taking advantage from their positions shape the public resources for their personal gain or favor their relatives and friends to benefit from public resources. Second, there is criminal and patronage network or mafia-type corruption committed by certain powerful and politically connected figures. Using their political affiliation, they are engaged in illegal land-grabbing, shaping large contracts, dealing drugs, kidnapping, robberies and organized crimes.

“Political Will”

Despite years of national and international community pressures, the Afghan government under the leadership of former President, Hamid Karzai (December 2001-September 2014) did not undertake serious measures to effectively tackle corruption in Afghanistan. To combat corruption, Karzai’s most significant efforts were: (1) the establishment of the High Office of Oversight (HOO), and (2) the Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee (MEC).

The High Office of Oversight’s main functions included receiving complaints and preliminary investigations, asset registration, simplification of administrative procedures, prevention, and overseeing the implementation of anti-corruption strategy which now have been limited to asset registration and simplification of administrative procedures.

Similar to the HOO, the Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee is also tasked to fight corruption in Afghanistan. MEC is responsible to oversee the anti-corruption activities, develop anti-corruption recommendations and benchmarks, and monitor and evaluate the Afghan government and international community’s efforts in fighting corruption. But these institutions are week or limited by lack of capacity, staffing, powers, professionalism and jurisdictional conflict.

In a dramatic move in 2012, Karzai issued Presidential Decree No. 45 to curtail administrative corruption in government’s institutions; however, the decree did not result to a positive outcome in fighting corruption.

In addition, in 2008, Karzai’s government approved Afghanistan National Development Strategy (ANDS) that outlines strategies for security, good governance, economic growth and poverty reduction which also offers initiatives to undertake legislative reform and strengthen justice institutions to properly tackle corruption; however, no major achievements has been made to date.

Most Afghans blame Karzai for his failure to tackle corruption during his more than one decade rule in Afghanistan. He created a culture of impunity in the country, wasted public resources, and misused international assistance. He did not take serious anticorruption measures against corrupt individuals around him. Karzai left the burden to fight corruption to his successor, President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani.

President Ghani, after he took Office on September 29, 2014 made combating corruption one of his top priorities. He reopened the Kabulnak case – the most major corruption case in Afghanistan involving relatives and others close friends to Karzai and his former first Vice President-, as a first step in fighting corruption. He had the Chief Justice of Afghanistan to resign for not taking serious measures to combat corruption in the judiciary. He also dismissed some provincial government employees of Herat Province due to the allegation of corruption and weak performance.

For the purpose of institutional reforms, the President reduced responsibilities and duties of the High Office of Oversight only to: (1) registration of public officials’ assets, and (2) simplifying the administrative procedures in the government institutions.

In the London Conference Policy Paper in December 2014, he recognizing corruption as an endemic problem, proposed an anti-corruption strategy that emphasizes on strengthening enforcement mechanism and reducing opportunities with the hope that this approach may limit the opportunities for commission of corruption in the
country.

Many Afghans interpret the President’s recent efforts as demonstration of his “political will” to fight corruption, but at the same time, they perceive corruption as an extremely growing problem in the country which may remain as a major challenge for him and his new government.

Legal Framework

There are a number of laws and some key presidential decrees targeting the issue of corruption in Afghanistan. The Law on Overseeing the Implementation of Anti-Administrative Corruption Strategy and Law on the Campaign against Bribery and Official Corruption are laws that directly deal with corruption issues. The
Constitution of Afghanistan binds key government officials, including the president, vice-presidents, ministers, the attorney general and judges to register and declare their assets before the appointment and also after the termination of their positions.

In addition to these laws and decrees, Afghanistan has ratified the United Nations Convention against Corruption and the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.

However, these laws, decrees and policies do not adequately address problem of corruption at all level. They are either weak or vague. In addition, laws relating to corruption do not articulate international due process standards and proper judicial proceedings processes. Punishments suggested for the perpetrators of
correction under laws are not consistent with the Afghan societal context or internationally based practices. On the other hand, the implementation of these laws has always been an issue in Afghanistan.

Key Policy Recommendations

The new Afghan government by demonstrating a strong “political will” needs to take certain comprehensive measures to effectively fight the rampant corruption in Afghanistan. Some of the key measures that can help Afghanistan’s fight against corruption are underscored as follows:

• Review and update legislation, regulations, procedures and legislative documents relating to anti-corruption, and adopt additional legislation to boost fighting corruption,
• Adopt whistleblower law, and whistleblower protection to bind people to report cases of corruption, expose misconduct and illegal activity in an institution,
• Focus on training of justice personals, including judges, prosecutors and police, and strengthen the judicial system so that they properly can investigate, prosecute and punish corrupt individuals,
• Prepare policies and plans to bind the justice sectors to coordination their efforts in fighting corruption and collaborate with entities directly responsible for fighting corruption,
• Properly evaluate the performance of the anti-corruption agencies and institutions responsible for prosecution of corruption cases,
• Ensure proper implementation of laws, policies and regulations pertaining anti-corruption,
• Take effective measures to prosecute and punish the high level government officials who are involved in corruption cases. Also, take serious coherent steps to shut down networks of corruption and discipline its facilitators,
• Fill key positions with clean and qualified individuals who have good reputations in the Afghan society, and
• Properly engage civil society organizations and help to strengthen their capacity to enable them to effectively expose and report corruption cases.

*Saeed Murad Rahi is an Afghanistan rule of law and anti-corruption expert. Mr. Rahi formerly worked as a rule of law and anti-corruption advisor with USAID-Afghanistan. He is the founder of Legal and Peace Studies Organization.

References:
1. Transparency International: 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index.
2. World Bank 2015 Doing Business Report
3. The Asia Foundation’s Survey of the Afghan People (2014)
4. Law on Overseeing the Anti-Corruption Strategy
5. Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan
6. London Conference Policy Paper (2014)
7. Afghanistan National Development Strategy (2008)

The post Challenging Corruption In Afghanistan – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Geoffrey F. Weiss

On December 5, 2013, with the stroke of a pen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin E. Dempsey profoundly altered the U.S. approach to the pressing problem of air and missile defense. On that date—coincidentally, 70 years to the day after the U.S. Army Air Corps began Operation Crossbow, the Anglo-American bombing campaign against Adolf Hitler’s V-1 and V-2 missile forces and a missile defense milestone—General Dempsey signed the Joint Integrated Air and Missile Defense: Vision 2020.1 This seminal document for air and missile defense (AMD) outlines the Chairman’s guidance to the joint force and, by extension, to all the stakeholders that contribute to the air and missile defense of the U.S. homeland and its regional forces, partners, and allies. What makes the new vision both exceptionally timely and highly relevant is that it accounts for the volatility and reality of 21st-century strategic and threat environments characterized more often than not by rapid, enigmatic change.

By crafting a holistic integrated air and missile defense (IAMD) vision—that is, one that encompasses a full range of integrated means including passive, nonkinetic, and left-of-launch—the Chairman has definitively departed from the previous paradigm that addressed an era of fewer, less capable threats. No longer can the United States reasonably expect to unilaterally defeat most air and missile threats with its own active defense systems or to outpace growing threat capabilities by outspending all of its potential adversaries. Instead, the new vision directs the joint force to embrace a broad spectrum of cost-informed options that enable greater IAMD adaptability and create flexibility to meet the challenges presented by proliferating air and missile threats across the global battlespace.

The core of the Chairman’s intent for IAMD is encapsulated in six key imperatives designed to guide the joint force in meeting these challenges in a logical and fiscally responsible manner. These include recognizing the need to leverage all forms of information to support IAMD detection, targeting, and engagement; enacting baseline joint and combined force employment to tap cooperative synergies; targeting IAMD system improvements to meet specific needs while ensuring affordability and interoperability; incorporating passive defense efforts to close seams and coordinate with other elements of IAMD; ensuring policies leverage partner contributions and burden-sharing; and fostering awareness across the Department of Defense (and beyond) of the benefits and proper use of the IAMD mission.2

Clearly, these discerning directives to the joint force stand on their own; nevertheless, their significance and applicability are best understood by taking a closer look at IAMD and the factors and reasoning that gave birth to them.

A Brief History of Air and Missile Defense

Joint Publication 1-02 defines IAMD as “the integration of capabilities and overlapping operations to defend the Homeland and United States national interests, protect the Joint Force, and enable freedom of action by negating an adversary’s ability to create adverse effects from their air and missile capabilities.”3 This is just a formalized way of saying AMD helps to win wars by defeating or mitigating enemy air and missile attacks. The origins of AMD can be traced back to the headwaters of war itself and the need to defend against ranged weapons. Throughout the history of warfare, there have been numerous so-called revolutions in military affairs, yet perhaps none as profound as the invention of ranged weapons, of which modern air and missile threats are currently the ultimate expression.

Early ranged weapons, such as the bow and arrow, transformed war from a personal and highly risky affair to a less intimate one, enabling warriors to strike from safer distances that reduced the risk of immediate counterattack and the psychological consequences of face-to-face killing—an activity most people, even in ancient times, found abhorrent.4 These weapons presented a new danger that compelled a Newtonian reaction to stave off a Darwinian fate—adapt or die. Early humans adapted by fashioning primitive defenses, which at the time consisted exclusively of passive measures such as shields or armor to survive an attack and movement, camouflage, concealment, and deception (CCD) to avoid an attack by confounding detection and targeting.

Over time, as the art and science of war and its weapons matured, the development of improved propulsion, guidance, and payloads in guns, artillery, rockets, mortars, aircraft, and missiles upped the ante, placing ever greater pressure on defenses to keep up in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse. The first use of a powered missile in war dates back to 13th-century China, but it was not until the early 19th century in Europe that these rockets gained the range and power to be of true military significance. The German V-2 missile holds the distinction of being the first true military ballistic missile.5

As the offense pursued weapons with greater speed, range, accuracy, stealth, and firepower, the defense, at least for most of war’s history, has had a more limited menu of options. Of course, the first requisite element of any defense against air and missile threats is detection, tracking, and target discrimination. The target in question might be the aircraft, missile, its point or system of origin, or its guidance or command element. This part of the missile defense calculus began with human spotters, who have since evolved into expensive, technologically sophisticated land-, air-, and space-based sensors such as electronically scanned radars and infrared detectors. After the threat is detected, subsequent defensive options include movement and CCD (avoid the attack); shields, armor, or fortifications (survive the attack); and destroying or deterring the attacker (prevent the attack). With respect to countering aircraft, the theories of Generals Billy Mitchell and Giulio Douhet notwithstanding, a range of active measures, including surface-based and airborne guns, artillery, and missiles, has proved effective. However, ballistic missiles present a more daunting challenge because their speed and operating envelope make them nearly impossible to detect, track, and successfully engage. This is the problem often referred to as “hitting a bullet with a bullet.”

Not until the mid-20th century did technology finally support a fourth option to address missiles—interception of the missile (neutralize the attack). This new, technology-assisted alternative ushered in the era of “active” missile defense—missiles could now kill missiles. Indeed, so much attention has been given to this new capability that the terms active missile defense and missile defense have become nearly synonymous. In 1996, the United States incorporated history’s AMD lessons and added command and control to tie it all together within a doctrinal concept known as the “four pillars” of IAMD: passive defense (survive the attack), active defense (neutralize the attack), command, control, computers, communications, and intelligence (C4I) (detect and respond to the attack), and attack operations (prevent the attack).6 Though no longer formally part of doctrine, the four pillars concept is still valid and useful for understanding the fundamental elements of AMD.

In the United States, modern active AMD programs began about the same time that long-range air and missile threats emerged. Defense against aircraft gained serious attention with the advent of combat aircraft in World War I and mainly relied upon other aircraft, antiaircraft artillery (AAA), and surface-to-air missiles (SAM), a paradigm that endures to this day. In countries with fewer resources, greater dependence is placed on AAA and SAMs, which are less costly to develop, man, and employ than manned aircraft. In this regard, missiles are something of a “poor man’s air force,” a fact that accounts for their proliferation throughout the world today.

U.S. ballistic missile defense efforts originated in response to the Nazi V-2 rocket program in World War II. Interestingly, the threat posed by Nazi missiles to the U.S. homeland was more significant than is usually recognized; the Germans actually had plans to attack the U.S. mainland with submarine-borne V-2s and had intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) on the drawing board.7 After World War II, adversary air and missile threats, particularly from the Warsaw Pact countries, became more numerous and capable, and the United States began developing countermeasures in earnest. Direct threats to the homeland were limited initially to long-range aviation but later expanded to include ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles. Overseas, America’s forward forces, partners, and allies faced a full range of threats to include short- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, bombers, and tactical weapons such as artillery, rockets, and mortars. To address these threats, the Army and Air Force shared the initial burden of developing missile defenses. They tackled the thorny technical problem of creating viable active missile defenses for both the homeland and regional areas of responsibility. Early Air Force programs included Projects Wizard and Thumper in 1946 followed by the Army’s Patriot in 1949.8

By 1958, the dire threat from Soviet nuclear-armed ICBMs coupled with unproductive inter-Service squabbling over missile defense responsibilities led Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy to assign the task of active strategic defense solely to the Army and to establish the Advanced Research Projects Agency to explore innovative solutions to aid the effort.9 Against the strategic backdrop of the Cuban missile crisis, the Army wasted little time in getting to work on new systems designed to intercept Soviet missiles. Examples included the Nike Zeus and Nike-X anti-ballistic missiles (ABMs), which used nuclear warheads to destroy incoming missiles (a practice the Soviets also explored) in their terminal phase of flight.

Yet despite some successful tests, the Nike programs were never fully implemented due to the risks of nuclear detonations over the United States as well as technical challenges in computing, detection, and target discrimination. The failure of Nike did not deter the Army or the other Services from continuing to explore and debate active missile defense concepts right up until President Richard Nixon signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union in 1972. The ABM Treaty imposed limits on the number of ABM sites and interceptors each country could field, essentially rendering strategic missile defenses on both sides militarily ineffective due to the overwhelming advantages in numbers and capabilities enjoyed by the country using ICBMs offensively.10

Even so, the ABM Treaty did not induce the United States to abandon its quest for a viable defense against missile attack. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the United States created a series of organizations assigned to collaborate with the Services and private industry to develop concepts for directed energy and nonnuclear, hit-to-kill missile interceptors. These organizations included the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (1984–1994); the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (1994–2002); and today’s Missile Defense Agency (MDA, 2002–present).11 Some of their novel initiatives explored methods for interception in all phases (boost, mid-course, and terminal) of ballistic missile trajectories by means of a variety of air-, sea-, and space-launched weapons integrated with advanced sensors and C4I. Ultimately, America’s efforts and investments in pursuit of practical active missile defense were vindicated when, in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm, the Army’s Patriot interceptors became the first missile defense system to successfully engage a missile in real-world combat by destroying an Iraqi Scud mid-flight.12

Seeking to capitalize upon the proven success of Patriot and the end of the Cold War, President Bill Clinton directed greater attention to the problem of theater missile defense (TMD). It was during his tenure that many of today’s most well-known active TMD systems matured, including Patriot Advanced Capability-3, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), and the Navy’s Aegis-enabled Standard Missile-3 (SM-3).13 As part of this initiative to improve integration of theater AMD, in 1997, the Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff established the Joint Theater Air and Missile Defense Organization (JTAMDO) as a Chairman’s Controlled Activity reporting through the Joint Staff Director of Force Structure, Resources, and Assessment (J8). JTAMDO’s initial charter was to work with all the Department of Defense (DOD) AMD stakeholders, especially the geographic combatant commands, to define requirements, architectures, and capabilities for joint force theater AMD.14 Later, JTAMDO’s role expanded to include leadership in the integration of all AMD requirements, capabilities, and architectures, a nod to its repository of IAMD expertise, its success in capabilities analysis and war-gaming, and its unique position within the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) process. Thus, JTAMDO became JIAMDO with integrated replacing the word theater. Today, JIAMDO remains the Chairman’s lead agency for implementing the Joint IAMD Vision 2020, advocating for affordable solutions to warfighter IAMD requirements and integrating AMD equities among a diverse range of stakeholders, each with its own organizational culture and priorities.

The final phase of U.S. AMD history began at the end of President Clinton’s second term. Having reinvigorated TMD, the President and Congress collaborated on the National Missile Defense Act of 1999, which made it “the policy of the United States to deploy as soon as is technologically possible an effective National Missile Defense system capable of defending the territory of the United States against limited ballistic missile attack (whether accidental, unauthorized, or deliberate).”15 This law paved the way for President George W. Bush to withdraw from the ABM Treaty in 2002 and pursue a national missile defense designed to negate a limited ballistic missile strike on the United States. That vision became a reality with the implementation of a ground-based midcourse defense system with ground-based interceptors (GBIs) in Alaska and California. Today’s IAMD systems, due to the complementary efforts of DOD, the Services, MDA, combatant commands, private industry, and JIAMDO, consist of an array of advanced, strategically positioned radar and infrared sensors, layered active missile interceptors—such as Patriot, THAAD, SM-3, and GBI—and robust C4I that links it all together.

Today’s Strategic Context

While the strategic context during the 20th century’s formative period of missile defense was certainly dynamic, most of it could be defined within the rubric of the Cold War. During this epoch, defense priorities and resourcing could always be calibrated against the Soviet Union’s existential threat. In contrast, the 21st century’s strategic context is much harder to define and has proven far more volatile. As the recently released 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review summarized, “The global trends that will define the future security environment are characterized by a rapid rate of change and a complexity born of the multiple ways in which they intersect and influence one another. As a result, despite the growing availability and flow of information around the world, it is increasingly challenging to predict how global threats and opportunities will evolve.”16 Indeed, though the prospect of global thermonuclear war has diminished, myriad other strategic challenges have cropped up, each having the potential to wreak havoc on U.S. national interests at home and abroad as well as upon the global economy. Among these are nonstate criminal and terrorist organizations and their enablers such as North Korea and Iran, who have also developed or sought to develop nuclear weapons. In the Far East, China is rapidly building more advanced weapons of all types as it grows bolder in flexing its might in the East and South China seas. In Europe, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has overturned the post–Cold War order by posturing against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), defying U.S. policy in Syria, annexing Crimea, invading Ukraine, and intimidating the other former Eastern Bloc nations along its borders. Africa continues to seethe with political unrest, terrorism, and humanitarian crises, and the Arctic promises to become a new battleground in the international race for greater access to food and energy resources.

The Chairman’s vision outlines the implications of all this for IAMD. First, within this evolving security environment, AMD remains vital in supporting the U.S. ability to project power and have freedom of movement and access to the world’s strategic thoroughfares. Today’s geopolitical volatility means that IAMD must be more integrated and flexible than ever to respond to a wider array of less predictable and more capable threats. Moreover, potential adversaries have steadily improved their arsenals in terms of both quantity and quality, incorporating upgrades in range, accuracy, mobility, speed, stealth, and targeting.17 Second, these advanced capabilities and the proliferating air and missile threat have further collapsed the old paradigm of separate IAMD domains—regional and homeland. Now, the entire globe is a seamless battlespace within which air and missile attacks can easily and rapidly cross area of responsibility boundaries, placing a premium on coordination and integration between combatant commands (including U.S. Northern Command).18 Third, over a decade of war and the economic collapse of 2008 have led to record U.S. budget deficits and the political impetus to reduce those deficits with smaller governmental budgets. The coincidence of these economic pressures and the increasing combatant command appetite for more and better IAMD systems obliges the joint force and Services to use extra care in setting priorities. IAMD in 2020 must be versatile, responsive, decisive, and affordable.19 Finally, the ominous strategic context has not been lost on America’s partners and allies around the world. Never has the demand for IAMD systems and the protection they provide been greater.20 From Japan and the Philippines to Qatar and Lithuania, more nations are turning to the United States for assistance in protecting themselves against attack. The U.S. response to this situation will be watched closely, not only by our allies but also by our potential adversaries; though demand for a protective U.S. AMD umbrella is peaking, our financial ability to provide it is on the wane.

The IAMD Threat Environment

While America contends with the difficulties of a dynamic strategic context, potential adversaries seek to capitalize on perceived opportunities. Countries such as Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran perceive U.S. fiscal burdens and political paralysis as promoting policies aimed at reducing and reapportioning its overseas presence.

Thus, regional powers with goals inimical to U.S. interests are emboldened to strive for greater local influence as the tide of American power ebbs. This has caused a great deal of angst around the world; just ask the Ukrainians, Japanese, or Emirati. Moreover, global competitors have embraced an antiaccess/area-denial stratagem, backed by offensive air and missile weapons systems of greater capability and quantity, intended to keep the United States and its friends at bay. Complicating the threat picture even further is the prospect of rogue nations such as Iran and North Korea, against which traditional notions of deterrence are unreliable, developing weapons of mass destruction capable of delivery on ICBMs. Indeed, Iran possesses the “largest and most diverse missile arsenal in the Middle East,” which it acquired in large part from foreign sources such as North Korea.21 After a recent series of tests in early 2014, “Iranian Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Hossein Dehqan said [Iran’s newest] long-range ballistic missile can evade enemies’ anti-missile defense systems and has ‘the capability of destroying massive targets and destroying multiple targets.’”22 For its part, North Korea also has a huge missile arsenal, and its technology is advancing to the point where it could potentially threaten the U.S. mainland with nuclear warhead–armed ICBMs.23 As the Chairman’s vision warns, “The future IAMD environment will be characterized by a full spectrum of air and missile threats—ballistic missiles, air-breathing threats (cruise missiles, aircraft, UAS [unmanned aerial systems]), long-range rockets, artillery, and mortars—all utilizing a range of advanced capabilities—stealth, electronic attack, maneuvering reentry vehicles, decoys, and advanced terminal seekers with precision targeting.”24

Never has the United States faced a more complex or comprehensive global challenge in this area, and the forecast for 2020 and beyond is no more optimistic. Threats will continue to progress, placing greater burdens on U.S. defensive capabilities and coverage as they become increasingly transregional and global. Additionally, air-breathing threats are experiencing a renaissance due to new technologies, many of which were pioneered in the United States but have now found their way into other hands.

Unmanned aerial systems, stealthy cruise missiles, and hypersonic glide vehicles are becoming more common, threatening to exploit gaps and seams in traditional IAMD architectures. The challenge of detecting, tracking, and engaging these systems has compressed response times and decision cycles. Even at the tactical level, ground and maritime forces can be held at risk simply by sheer numbers of cheap, long-range rockets.25 Without question, all of these facts indicate a dire and growing air and missile threat to the United States and its interests around the world. Success in negating it will take no less than a bold, holistic reimagining of America’s IAMD.

A Forward Vision

Fortunately, Joint IAMD Vision 2020 paints just the type of bold new picture that is required. It pulls no punches in assessing the threat, nor does it hold anything back in recommending solutions. Moreover, it rejects the notion that missile defense must equal active, kinetic missile defense. More must be done with passive, nonkinetic, C4I, and left-of-launch options. The document makes it clear that the first responsibility of joint IAMD is to deter adversaries by convincing them that attack is futile, then to prevent an attack in the first place by “killing the archer” rather than shooting down or absorbing his arrows. Should deterrence and prevention fail, joint IAMD melds active and passive defenses to mitigate and survive the assault. None of these actions is meant to be decisive alone. Joint IAMD is a necessary element within the broader context of the joint campaign intended to buy time and preserve the joint force during hostilities while imposing increasing cost and resource expenditure on the enemy, but it is neither intended nor able to afford victory by itself.26 As the vision points out, “the link between offensive and defensive operations for IAMD is critical,” and “all means, including penetrating assets” should be employed to “defeat large threat inventories.”27 Still, it is unreasonable to believe that offensive operations can wholly negate any sophisticated threat; therefore, the joint force must employ robust passive measures, such as CCD, dispersion, and hardening, as well as layered, complementary active defenses to survive air and missile attacks. Frankly, the failure of IAMD “risks suffering potentially devastating attacks” that could jeopardize an entire campaign.28 Because of the extraordinarily high stakes, the integration of IAMD must extend beyond the joint force both horizontally and vertically to encompass “policy, strategy, concepts, tactics, and training” and will require the participation of interagency and international partners and allies.29 Diplomacy, military-to-military engagements, officer exchanges, foreign disclosure of previously classified information, information-sharing, interoperability tests, and treaty negotiations are all vital features in this holistic approach to IAMD.

At the same time, the joint force cannot lose sight of its traditional responsibilities in IAMD capability development, but all stakeholders must proceed in a cost-conscious manner. Hitting bullets with bullets will always be more expensive than just firing bullets—thus, the combatant commands need to maximize resources already in hand and pay special attention to prioritizing capability and capacity gaps responsibly. Meanwhile, DOD, the Services, MDA, research laboratories, and industry must work together to identify and pursue only the most promising, realistic, and affordable solutions to IAMD’s problems. This methodology is the only way the joint force is going to get the surveillance, identification, discrimination, fire control, and battle management improvements it needs to deter and defeat current and future threats. 30

The Chairman outlined six imperatives designed to facilitate creation of the joint IAMD force necessary to confront the challenges of the coming decades. The first is to “incorporate, fuse, exploit, and leverage every bit of information available regardless of source or classification, and distribute it as needed to U.S. Forces and selected partners.”31 Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) provides the eyes and ears that the IAMD force requires to operate. Joint force commanders must properly prioritize and allocate limited ISR resources to support IAMD, and no source of ISR, whether traditional or nontraditional, national or tactical, should be considered too sacred for the IAMD mission. The United States fields many highly capable detection and collection systems, but their information chains remain rigidly stovepiped; the joint force must ruthlessly seek out and eliminate technical deficiencies and organizational barriers to information-sharing and enable the free flow of ISR data from national systems directly to the warfighters who need it.

The second imperative is to “make interdependent Joint and Combined force employment the baseline.”32 It is no exaggeration to say there is no such thing as U.S.-only or single-Service IAMD. The Nation simply cannot afford to do this mission without the synergies provided by the joint force and the cooperation of its partners and allies with whom “interdependence and interoperability breed efficiency and economy of resources.”33 From the earliest stages of planning, exercising, and employment, IAMD must leverage the comparative advantages of joint force components and partner nations. Successful examples to build upon include exercises such as U.S. Central Command’s Air and Missile Defense Exercise; U.S. Strategic Command’s Exercise Nimble Titan, a 22-nation, future-focused tabletop wargame that investigates multinational, strategic IAMD concerns; U.S. Pacific Command’s Exercise Keen Edge; as well as the 8-nation Maritime Theater Missile Defense forum and various combatant command IAMD Centers of Excellence.

The third imperative is to “target development, modernization, fielding, and science and technology efforts to meet specific gaps in IAMD capabilities, all the while stressing affordability and interoperability.”³⁴ While seemingly self-explanatory, in this imperative the Chairman asks for “special focus” on “closing high-leverage technology gaps such as an adversary’s emerging seeker or missile development, and the development of U.S. non-kinetic capabilities.”³⁵ This last point holds great promise, since nonkinetic means such as cyber, directed energy, and electronic attack have the potential to turn an enemy’s advancements in sophistication into vulnerabilities, and at greatly reduced cost relative to kinetic options. JIAMDO in conjunction with the entire IAMD community must work closely through the JCIDS and Warfighter Involvement Processes to ensure requirements for new capabilities are prioritized, feasible, and affordable and address valid threats so that acquisition decision authorities pursue programs with realistic cost, schedule, and performance parameters. While programs such as Patriot, THAAD, and Aegis have been successful, there is still room for improvement as the Services develop new technologies in sensors (such as the Three-Dimensional Expeditionary Long Range Radar), interceptors (the Standard Missile-6 and railgun), and C4I (Cooperative Engagement Capability).

Imperative number four requires the joint force to “focus Passive Defense efforts on addressing potential capability and capacity shortfalls in air and missile defense.”³⁶ Passive defense is a pillar of IAMD that has been around for a long time, but its importance is not reduced in the 21^stcentury. The notion that passive defense measures, which help joint forces survive an attack, are a separate problem from other IAMD pillars is not acceptable. The joint force commander must be able to assess passive defense effects, along with active defense and offensive operations, within planning and execution cycles. Failure to fully integrate and coordinate offensive, active, and passive actions places joint force objectives and resources at unnecessary risk. There are positive signs that DOD is taking this to heart, especially with respect to dispersal and hardening considerations within the Asia-Pacific region.³⁷However, DOD needs to extend these plans to other regions as well.

The fifth imperative is to “establish and pursue policies to leverage partner contributions.”³⁸This is similar to the second imperative, but it merits additional emphasis because of how important it is to IAMD. While the second imperative speaks to warfighting operations, this one outlines the significance of long-term preparation running the gamut from political relationships to technology. Before combined employment can be brought to bear in a conflict, diplomats and warriors have a great deal of legwork to do. Regional IAMD architectures are not built in a day or on a whim. Painstaking establishment of bi- and multi-lateral agreements forged through cooperation and communication will pave the way to more effective regional IAMD. Moreover, a network of interoperable air and missile defenses comprised of a complementary mix of U.S. and partner nation weapons systems sends a clear message of deterrence to any would-be aggressor and offers assurance to international allies. In this vein, the United States should continue its full engagement with NATO to develop a viable air and missile defense strategy, building on its commitment to the European Phased Adaptive Approach while also encouraging greater burden-sharing by NATO and non-NATO nations in the region. Beyond NATO, the United States must work with the Gulf Cooperation Council countries to bolster AMD in Southwest Asia, via foreign military sales, information-sharing, and exercises, while also exploiting opportunities for trilateral cooperation and IAMD technology development with South Korea and Japan in the Asia-Pacific.

This article exemplifies the spirit of the sixth and final imperative, which directs the joint force to “create an awareness of the IAMD mission and the benefits of its proper utilization across the Department of Defense to include the development of the enabling framework of concepts, doctrine, acquisition, and war plans that support full integration of IAMD into combat operations.”³⁹Here, the Chairman recognizes that great ideas are useless if they are not communicated to the forces that will be called upon to implement them. This is a directive to the joint force and all IAMD stakeholders to move out smartly and educate each other on the IAMD mission and the way forward articulated in the vision. Commanders at every level need to understand how IAMD is supposed to work for the joint force and to train their people to effectively execute. The Joint Functional Component Command for Integrated Missile Defense and the Joint Staff J7 Joint Force Development could help lead the way here. In particular, the J7’s December 2013 release of the U.S. Planning Guide for Multinational Air and Missile Defense along with JIAMDO’s forthcoming IAMD Roadmap and revision of Joint Publication 3-01, Countering Air and Missile Threats, are positive steps forward.

The Chairman’s Joint IAMD Vision 2020 comes at a critical juncture in U.S. military history. As the Nation wraps up more than a decade of war in Southwest Asia, it must contend with new strategic challenges and air and missile threats, growing in both capability and quantity, from a variety of potential adversaries. Against this backdrop, success in deterring and, if necessary, winning future wars will require a robust, global IAMD architecture that incorporates affordable, innovative capability improvements to all four pillars of IAMD—active, passive, C4I, and attack operations—as well as a holistic approach to joint and combined planning, training, and employment. There is simply too much at stake to cut corners or leave anything on the table. Without question, IAMD is and must remain a cornerstone of U.S. national defense, for as the Chairman aptly asserts, “The effectiveness with which we field competent Joint IAMD capabilities will help prevent catastrophic attacks on the U.S. Homeland; secure the U.S. economy and the global economic system; and build secure, confident, and reliable Allies and partners.”⁴⁰ The Chairman’s Joint IAMD Vision 2020 points the way. Now it is up to the joint force and the entire IAMD community to make it happen.

Source:
This article was originally published in the Joint Force Quarterly 76, which is published by the National Defense University.

Notes:

1. “Aerospace Chronology: Up From Kitty Hawk,” Air Force Magazine, December 1, 2003, available at <www.airforcemag.com/magazinearchive/documents/kittyhawkchronology/kitty1903-79.pdf>.
2. Martin E. Dempsey, Joint Integrated Air and Missile Defense: Vision 2020 (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, 2013), 4–5, available at <www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/Publications/JointIAMDVision2020.pdf>.
3. Joint Publication (JP) 1-02, Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, November 8, 2010, as amended through March 15, 2014), available at <www.dtic.mil/doctrine/new_pubs/jp1_02.pdf>.
4. John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 119.
5. Joseph Cirincione, “Brief History of Ballistic Missile Defense and Current Programs in the United States,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 1, 2000, available at <http://carnegieendowment.org/2000/02/01/brief-history-of-ballistic-missile-defense-and-current-programs-in-united-states/4bff>.
6. JP 3-01.5, Doctrine for Joint Theater Missile Defense (Washington, DC: The Joint Staff, February 22, 1996), viii, available at <www.fas.org/spp/starwars/docops/jp3_01_5.pdf>.
7. Missile Defense Agency, “Missile Defense: The First Seventy Years,” 13-MDA-7397, August 8, 2013, 1–3, available at <www.mda.mil/global/documents/pdf/first70.pdf>.
8. Ibid., 5–6.
9. Ibid., 7.
10. Ibid., 7–11.
11. Ibid., 12–16.
12. Missile Defense Agency, “Missile Defense after the Cold War,” available at <www.mda.mil/news/history_resources.html>.
13. “Missile Defense: The First Seventy Years,” 15.
14. Department of Defense, “Joint Theater Air Missile Defense Organization Is Established,” release no. 021-97, January 16, 1997, available at <www.defense.gov/Releases/Release.aspx?ReleaseID=1128>.
15. “Missile Defense: The First Seventy Years,” 15.
16. Quadrennial Defense Review 2014 (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, March, 4, 2014), 6, available at <www.defense.gov/pubs/2014_Quadrennial_Defense_Review.pdf>.
17. Dempsey, 1.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Michael Elleman, “Iran’s Ballistic Missile Program,” United States Institute of Peace, available at <http://iranprimer.usip.org/resource/irans-ballistic-missile-program>.
22. Holly Yan, “Iran touts launch of new missiles; U.S. says it’s watching closely,” CNN.com, February 11, 2014, available at <www.cnn.com/2014/02/11/world/meast/iran-missiles-launch/>.
23. “North Korea’s missile programme,” BBC News Asia, March 25, 2014, available at <www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-17399847>.
24. Dempsey, 2.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., 2–3.
27. Ibid., 3.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 4.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Marcus Weisgerber, “Pentagon Debates Policy to Strengthen, Disperse Bases,” Defense News, April 13, 2014, available at <www.defensenews.com/article/20140413/DEFREG02/304130017/Pentagon-Debates-Policy-Strengthen-Disperse-Base>.
38. Ibid., 5.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.

The post Seeing 2020: America’s New Vision For Integrated Air And Missile Defense – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Steven Gruzd and Yarik Turianskyi*

Africa may be rising, but its success is primarily measured by economic growth and development, while discourse on democratisation is far less prominent than at the onset of the new millennium. At the same time, many African states are forging ever-deeper ties with emerging powers that seem to place little value on democracy and human rights.

This begs the question of whether Africa’s leaders are still committed to advancing good governance, accountability and transparency.

A recent continental meeting to discuss governance matters did not inspire confidence. Only three (out of a possible 35) presidents attended the meeting of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) Forum on 29 January 2015 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This was in spite of the announcement and endorsement of a number of key decisions, which have the potential to revive and strengthen the APRM – the continent’s premier home-grown governance assessment and improvement tool.

This low turn-out has been a disturbing trend in meetings of the APR Forum – the mechanism’s highest decision-making body, composed of the participating heads of state and government. This time, even the Forum chairperson was absent, although understandably Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was at home dealing with the Ebola crisis. Apart from South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma, who chaired the meeting, only two other heads of state attended: Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo and Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara. The former country joined the APRM exactly one year ago, while the latter became the 35th state to voluntarily accede. The Forum decided to appoint a deputy chairperson, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, in absentia.

The Ivorian leader highlighted successes in his country since he took office in 2011 (after disputed elections that eventually ended the rule of President Laurent Gbagbo). He mentioned legitimate presidential and legislative elections, and polls at municipal and regional levels; economic growth of 9% per year, and inflation below 2%; increased agricultural exports and growing investments in infrastructure, all of which were improving the lives of Ivorians. However, it is important to note that that an APRM review looks beyond just the tenure of a sitting government and takes a longer, historical and structural view of the governance landscape. It is an opportunity to articulate and diagnose serious governance gaps.

Despite both Benin and Sierra Leone being scheduled to present progress reports on the implementation of their National Programmes of Action – the remedial action plans that emerge from the review – these reports were not tabled.

Two new members of the APRM’s Panel of Eminent Persons were announced – former South African Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development Brigitte Mabandla, and Chief (Mrs) Chinyere E Asika from Nigeria, whose many posts include being a former presidential advisor on the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). This shows continuity and integration between the APRM and NEPAD; the ‘soft’ infrastructure of governance matters as much as ‘hard’ infrastructure like roads, railways and airports.

In a welcome innovation, there was live tweeting from the Forum by the official @APRMorg Twitter account, enhancing both immediacy and greater transparency, especially because civil society representatives were asked to leave when the closed session started, and thus were not present when key announcements were made.

A much-anticipated announcement was the appointment of Professor Adebayo Olukoshi as the new chief executive officer of the APRM Secretariat based in Midrand. Since June 2014, the Secretariat has been under the stewardship of Dr Ibrahim Mayaki, who heads up the NEPAD Policy Coordinating Agency, as acting CEO. Dr Mayaki was commended for sterling work in stabilising the APRM by the chairperson. One of the main tasks in this interim period was the recruitment of the new CEO, a task outsourced to a professional South African-based recruitment agency. Reportedly over 200 applications were received for the CEO position.

OIukoshi is a respected Nigerian academic, who recently was director of the UN African Institute for Economic Development and Planning in Dakar, Senegal, and formerly was executive secretary of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). He will need to revive the mechanism’s image and its funding. President Zuma noted that ‘the Secretariat faces a projected [budget] shortfall’, and urged states to pay their dues and contribute more than the stipulated USD $100,000 per annum where possible. Contributions from development partners have largely dried up.

Enthusiasm around the APRM has been declining in recent years, with fewer new countries joining and fewer reviews taking place. What started out as an initiative that could transform Africa became an overly complex and technical academic review, with member states seemingly lacking the political will to implement proposed changes. It will be up to the new CEO and his team to demonstrate that there is still energy and drive in the APRM project, and to demonstrate tangible governance results. He will need to strategise how to re-engage the continent’s leaders to actively participate. And he will have to raise serious funding to fulfil the APRM’s potential aspirations.

The APRM takes a holistic view of governance, focusing on politics, economic, corporate and development matters. It does not prioritise one thematic area over the other and the 17 country reports which have been published so far provide a balanced and detailed analysis of what’s right and what’s wrong in the country. While economic growth is important, effective political governance is necessary to ensure that its gains are not lost to corruption and maladministration and that development benefits all equally.

Some African 18 elections are scheduled for 2015, and attempts to extend constitutional terms remains a critical issue – as witnessed in Burkina Faso last year. As citizens become economically well-off, they are also likely to demand more rights and liberties.

The APRM is the only continental tool has the potential to improve all governance aspects in its member states, which is why Africa cannot afford for this governance experiment to fail.

*About the authors:
Steven Gruzd is the head of the Governance and APRM Programme at the South African Institute of International Affairs, and Yarik Turianskyi is the programme manager. They were in Addis Ababa for the APRM Forum.

Source:
This article was published by SAIIA.

The post Where Is The African Peer Review Mechanism Heading? – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Julio Godoy*

The governments of Russia and the United States are using the Ukraine crisis as a justification for upgrading their formidable nuclear arsenals.

This escalation became evident January 25, as the conservative German Sunday newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) opened its edition with a whole page devoted exclusively to accuse Russia of “threatening gesturing” with its nuclear weapons.

Under the headline “Atom weapons come again into play“, the FAS reported, without giving any source, of a long list of incidents involving Russian military “nuclear capable” – mind the ambiguity, for it is important – vehicles, from armoured tanks to airplanes, all allegedly occurred during the last couple of months.

The paper goes as far as to claim that the next North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) meeting of defence ministers, to take place February 5 in Brussels, Belgium, will be devoted to analyse “the aggressive way Russia is targeting its nuclear capabilities against” NATO members, in Europe and North America, and its unofficial allies, such as the Ukraine.

Apart from the anonymity of its sources, the alarmist nature of the FAS report includes an important misrepresentation: It claims that until the outbreak of the Ukraine crisis in 2014 the NATO felt under pressure to reduce its own nuclear arsenals.

Quite the opposite is true: Under the leadership of the present U.S. government, and despite president Barack Obama’s celebrated speech in the Czech capital Prague in 2009, during which he stated “clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons”, the NATO in 2010 launched a substantial modernisation of its nuclear arsenal, of some 180 B-61 nuclear bombs, deployed in Europe. The official cost of this modernisation programme amounts to at least 10 billion U.S. dollars.

This programme is but a tiny part of a whole process of massive renovation of the U.S. nuclear weapons facilities, from the actual bombs to research centres and industries, which is expected to cost more than 355 billion U.S. dollar over a period of ten years. But, as Lawrence Wittner, professor of history at the State University of New York/Albany, and author of the scholarly trilogy entitled “The Struggle Against the Bomb”, says in his most recent blog entry, the cost is scheduled to soar after this renovation, when an array of new nuclear weapons will be produced.

Wittner recalls that the Obama government “has asked the Pentagon to plan for 12 new nuclear missile-firing submarines, up to 100 new nuclear bombers, and 400 new (or refurbished) land-based nuclear missiles. According to outside experts and a bipartisan, independent panel commissioned by Congress and the Defence Department, that will bring the total price tag for the U.S. nuclear weapons build-up to approximately one trillion U.S. dollars.”

Such extraordinary nuclear build-up has disappointed many Obama supporters, as the New York Times (NYT) reported in September 2014. The NYT quotes Sam Nunn, former U.S. senator, whose writings on nuclear disarmament deeply influenced Obama, as saying: “A lot of (Obama’s nuclear weapons policies) is hard to explain. The president’s vision was a significant change in direction (in the nuclear weapons debate). But the process has preserved the status quo.” Actually, Obama’s nuclear expansion policies have worsened that status quo.

This context makes the German newspaper’s assertion the most startling, in addition to the fact that the modernisation of NATO’s nuclear arsenal deployed in Europe was adopted against the express opposition of the foreign ministry in Berlin.

More than a ‘Life Extension Program’

The modernisation of NATO’ nuclear arsenal, approved in 2010, is officially called “a full-scope Life Extension Program (LEP)” of the B-61 bombs. These bombs are deployed in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey, all members of the U.S.-led military alliance.

According to the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the B61-12 Life Extension Program (LEP), now in its fourth year of development engineering, includes “refurbishment of both nuclear and non-nuclear components to address aging, ensure extended service life, and improve safety, reliability and security of the bomb. With the incorporation of an Air Force tail kit assembly, the B61-12 will replace the existing B61-3, -4, -7, and -10 bombs. Moreover, fielding the B61-12 will enable the retirement of the B83, the last U.S. megaton class weapon, in the mid to late 2020s.”

Independent analysts of the LEP say such modernisation won’t mean only “a life extension programme”, but instead a formidable increase of NATO’s nuclear capabilities.

Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, and one of the most distinguished civil experts on nuclear weapons, says that new features of the weapons contradict early pledges by U.S. authorities that the LEP “will not support new military missions (n)or provide for new military capabilities.”

However, new information about the LEP indicates precisely the contrary.

“The addition of a guided tail kit will increase the accuracy of the B61-12 compared with the other weapons and provide new warfighting capabilities,” Kristensen says. “The tail kit is necessary, officials say, for the 50-kilotons B61-12 (with a reused B61-4 warhead) to be able to hold at risk the same targets as the 360-kilotons B61-7 warhead. But in Europe, where the B61-7 has never been deployed, the guided tail kit will be a significant boost of the military capabilities – an improvement that doesn’t fit the promise of reducing the role of nuclear weapons.”

For comparison, the ‘Little boy’ nuclear bomb, with which the U.S. destroyed on August 6, 1945 the Japanese city of Hiroshima, had an explosive yield of between 13 and 18 kilotons. The ‘Fat man’ bomb that destroyed Nagasaki three days later had a yield of up to 22 kilotons.

During hearings at the U.S. House of Representatives, carried out in October 2013, it became also clear that B61-12 would replace the old B61-11, a single-yield 400-kiloton nuclear earth-penetrating bomb introduced in 1997, and the B83-1, a strategic bomb with variable yields up to 1,200 kilotons.

For Kristensen, “The(se) military capabilities of the B61-12 will be able to cover the entire range of military targeting missions for gravity bombs, ranging from the lowest yield of the B61-4 (0.3 kilotons) to the 1,200-kiloton B83-1 as well as the nuclear earth-penetration mission of the B61-11.”

Such increasing in destructive capabilities would make the new arsenal an “all-in-one nuclear bomb on steroids, spanning the full spectrum of gravity bomb missions anywhere,” Kristensen points out.

The FAS report is the last in a series of articles and studies, published by U.S. and European media and think-thank institutes, all based on NATO leaks, or on rumours. One widespread rumour, for instance, claims that Russia has deployed Iskander-M short-range ballistic missiles in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula in the Black Sea Moscow annexed in 2014.

The source of the rumour is a video available on the Internet, which allegedly shows Russian ballistic missile launchers rolling through downtown Sevastopol. But nuclear weapons experts, such as Kristensen, consider that the video in question shows no Iskander missiles, but instead Bastion-P (K300P or SSC-5) costal defence cruise missiles.

Breedlove – Dr. Strangelove

Other reports in Western media are not so clear-cut misrepresentations, but at least ambiguous enough as to cause alarm about the Russian nuclear arsenal. In November 2014, NATO’s top commander U.S. Gen. Philip Breedlove – all resemblances with the character in Stanley Kubrick’s nuclear war satire “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb”, are real life ironies – claimed that Russia was reinforcing its bases in Crimea.

Breedlove admitted that the NATO does not possess information whether the Russian military operations included the deployment of nuclear weapons.

Breedlove only said at the occasion that Russian forces “capable of being nuclear” were being moved to the Crimean Peninsula.

To quote Hans Kristensen again: “Th(is) uncertainty about what’s being moved to Crimea and what’s stored there illustrates the special problem with non-strategic nuclear forces: because they tend to be dual-capable and serve both nuclear and conventional roles, a conventional deployment can quickly be misinterpreted as a nuclear signal or escalation whether intended or real or not.”

Kristensen adds: “The uncertainty about the Crimea situation is similar (although with important differences) to the uncertainty about NATO’s temporary rotational deployments of nuclear-capable fighter-bombers to the Baltic States, Poland, and Romania. Russian officials are now using these deployments to rebuff NATO’s critique of Russian operations.”

Again, independent experts consider talk of such operations exaggerated, because neither the Soviet Union nor today’s Russia deployed nuclear arsenal in Crimea since 1950s until today.

The rhetoric on nuclear weapons is not confined to NATO or the U.S. government. In November 2014, almost simultaneous to Breedlove’s press conference, the Russian newspaper Pravda published a comment titled “Russia prepares nuclear surprise for NATO” in which it claimed that, as of today, “Russia’s strategic nuclear forces (SNF) are even more advanced in comparison with those of the US, as they ensure parity on warheads with a significantly smaller number of carriers of strategic nuclear weapons.”

Return to Cold War hard times

This gap between Russia and the United States, the formerly official Soviet newspaper goes on as if it were a matter of pride, “may only grow in the future, given the fact that Russian defence officials promised to rearm Russia’s SNF with new generation missiles.”

Russia and the NATO possess some 15,000 nuclear weapons, about 93 percent of the whole world’s total nuclear arsenal. This formidable capacity of global devastation, obsolete and implying high maintenance costs, constitutes, as Obama put it in his Prague speech, the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War.

And yet, to no surprise to independent analysts, both sides have grabbed the first opportunity, the Ukraine crisis, to justify their nuclear build-up. For the U.S., the Ukraine crisis was a welcome chance to retighten its relations with the European Union, badly damaged after the revelations that the National Security Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies have been tapping all electronic communications between Gibraltar and Berlin, including the cellular phones of heads of allied governments.

In addition to assuring European NATO members’ mute support for the costly B61-12 LEP, the U.S. also needed a major crisis to force European governments to accept the highly unpopular Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), as well as to wipe out all chances for political asylum for Edward Snowden.

For Russia, the crisis brought evidence that it was about time to stop behaving as a supplicant, as Michael Krepon, another U.S expert on nuclear arms control, has said.

Commenting on yet another victim of the new war of nuclear words between Russia and the NATO, the unceremonious end of the so called Nunn-Lugar cooperative threat reduction act, Krepon writes, “A quarter-century after the Cold War ended, bilateral relations have again reverted to hard times. The (Nunn-Lugar) programs are now deemed unnecessary and inappropriate by Russian President Vladimir Putin and by majorities in both houses of the U.S. Congress. Russia is no longer a supplicant, and the U.S. Congress is no longer feeling generous.”

The Nunn-Lugar act aimed at securing and dismantling former Soviet nuclear arsenals deployed in former Soviet territories, in such states as Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Or, to quote Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, and one of the most distinguished peace researchers in Russia: “The political crisis that erupted in Ukraine in early 2014 has ended the period in Russian-Western relations that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The crisis marks the end of a generally cooperative phase in those relations (…). Instead, the Ukraine crisis has opened a new period of heightened rivalry, even confrontation, between former Cold War adversaries.” They are in fact more than armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons.

*Julio Godoy is an investigative journalist and IDN Associate Global Editor. He has won international recognition for his work, including the Hellman-Hammett human rights award, the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Investigative Reporting Online by the U.S. Society of Professional Journalists, and the Online Journalism Award for Enterprise Journalism by the Online News Association and the U.S.C. Annenberg School for Communication, as co-author of the investigative reports “Making a Killing: The Business of War” and “The Water Barons: The Privatisation of Water Services”.

The post Dangerous Nuclear War Of Words Between NATO And Russia – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

A new analysis led by researchers at the American Cancer Society in collaboration with the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) finds lung cancer has surpassed breast cancer as the leading cause of cancer death in females in developed countries.

The authors of the report say the change reflects the tobacco epidemic in women, which occurred later than in men. Lung cancer has been the leading cause of cancer death in males in developed countries for several decades. It is also the leading cause of cancer death for males in developing countries, where breast cancer remains the top cause of cancer death in females.

The finding is reported in Global Cancer Statistics, appearing in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, and a consumer-friendly companion publication, Global Cancer Facts & Figures 3rd Edition, both released on World Cancer Day. The reports rely on the worldwide estimates of cancer incidence and mortality produced by the IARC for 2012 in their GLOBOCAN series.

Cancer now constitutes an enormous burden on society in more and less developed countries alike, and its occurrence is increasing because of the growth and aging of the population, as well as an increasing prevalence of risk factors associated with economic growth and urbanization, such as smoking, being overweight, physical inactivity, and changing reproductive patterns.

An estimated 14.1 million new cancer cases and 8.2 million cancer deaths occurred in 2012 worldwide. In less developed countries, lung and breast cancer are the most frequently diagnosed cancers and the leading causes of cancer death in men and women, respectively. In more developed countries, prostate and breast cancer are the most frequently diagnosed cancers among men and women, respectively, and lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in both men and women. Colorectal cancer has become a frequent cause of cancer death not only in developed countries, but also in developing countries.

The researchers point out that breast, lung, and colorectal cancers are increasing in many countries in economic transition with an already disproportionately high burden of cancers related to infection, including cancers of the liver, stomach, and cervix.

“A substantial proportion of the worldwide burden of cancer can be prevented through the application of existing cancer control knowledge, including tobacco control, vaccination (for liver and cervical cancers), early detection, and the promotion of physical activity and healthy dietary patterns,” the researchers write. They add that suffering can be further alleviated by applying appropriate treatments and palliative care. In addition, more research is needed to identify the causes of several major cancers, including prostate and blood cancers.

The authors report that a number of cancers that were once rare in developing countries are becoming increasingly common as those countries adopt a more Western lifestyle. “A coordinated and intensified response from all sectors of society, including governments, civil society, the private sector, and individuals, is required to seize control of the growing burden of cancer,” they conclude.

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Planetary scientists have calculated that there are hundreds of billions of Earth-like planets in our galaxy which might support life.

The new research, led by PhD student Tim Bovaird and Associate Professor Charley Lineweaver from The Australian National University (ANU), made the finding by applying a 200 year old idea to the thousands of exo-planets discovered by the Kepler space telescope.

They found the standard star has about two planets in the so-called goldilocks zone, the distance from the star where liquid water, crucial for life, can exist.

“The ingredients for life are plentiful, and we now know that habitable environments are plentiful,” said Associate Professor Lineweaver, from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Research School of Earth Sciences.

“However, the universe is not teeming with aliens with human-like intelligence that can build radio telescopes and space ships. Otherwise we would have seen or heard from them.

“It could be that there is some other bottleneck for the emergence of life that we haven’t worked out yet. Or intelligent civilisations evolve, but then self-destruct.”

The Kepler space telescope is biased towards seeing planets very close to their stars, that are too hot for liquid water, but the team extrapolated from Kepler’s results using the theory that was used to predict the existence of Uranus.

“We used the Titius-Bode relation and Kepler data to predict the positions of planets that Kepler is unable to see,” Associate Professor Lineweaver said.

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New evidence showing the level of atmospheric CO2 millions of years ago supports recent climate change predications from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

A multinational research team, led by scientists at the University of Southampton, has analysed new records showing the CO2 content of the Earth’s atmosphere between 2.3 to 3.3 million years ago, over the Pliocene.

During the Pliocene, the Earth was around 2ºC warmer than it is today and atmospheric CO2 levels were around 350-400 parts per million (ppm), similar to the levels reached in recent years.

By studying the relationship between CO2 levels and climate change during a warmer period in Earth’s history, the scientists have been able to estimate how the climate will respond to increasing levels of carbon dioxide, a parameter known as ‘climate sensitivity’.

The findings, which have been published in Nature, also show how climate sensitivity can vary over the long term.

“Today the Earth is still adjusting to the recent rapid rise of CO2 caused by human activities, whereas the longer-term Pliocene records document the full response of CO2-related warming,” says Southampton’s Dr Gavin Foster, co-author of the study.

“Our estimates of climate sensitivity lie well within the range of 1.5 to 4.5ºC increase per CO2 doubling summarised in the latest IPCC report. This suggests that the research community has a sound understanding of what the climate will be like as we move toward a Pliocene-like warmer future caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.”

Lead author of the study, Dr Miguel Martínez-Botí, also from Southampton said: “Our new records also reveal an important change at around 2.8 million years ago, when levels rapidly dropped to values of about 280 ppm, similar to those seen before the industrial revolution. This caused a dramatic global cooling that initiated the ice-age cycles that have dominated Earth’s climate ever since.”

The research team also assessed whether climate sensitivity was different in warmer times, like the Pliocene, than in colder times, like the glacial cycles of the last 800,000 years.

Professor Eelco Rohling of The Australian National University in Canberra says: “We find that climate change in response to CO2 change in the warmer period was around half that of the colder period. We determine that this difference is driven by the growth and retreat of large continental ice sheets that are present in the cold ice-age climates; these ice sheets reflect a lot of sunlight and their growth consequently amplifies the impact of CO2 changes.”

Professor Richard Pancost from the University of Bristol Cabot Institute, added: “When we account for the influence of the ice sheets, we confirm that the Earth’s climate changed with a similar sensitivity to overall forcing during both warmer and colder climates.”

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The sharp decrease in the oil price has benefitted countries dependent on oil imports to sustain their economies such as Indonesia. However it could also undermine the country’s energy security.

By Keoni Indrabayu Marzuki*

The falling price of crude oil – from US$110 dollar per barrel to below US$50 dollar per barrel (based on the West Texas Intermediate and Brent Crude benchmark) – is benefitting oil-dependent economies around the globe. Oil hungry countries such as Japan, South Korea and China would be able to purchase oil at a lower price and could potentially cut their energy bills significantly.

On the contrary, oil producing countries such as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran and Russia would be negatively affected by the falling price of crude as it would slash revenue from oil and gas sectors, hence undermining government policies that are dependent on oil and gas revenues. As a net oil importer, Indonesia benefits tremendously from the dip in crude oil prices as it allows Jakarta to cut its energy import bills. Cheaper oil prices could possibly stimulate economic growth with increased consumption. From a political perspective, it could help the fledgling Jokowi administration gain greater approval from the public in the aftermath of the fuel price hike in November 2014.

Sugar-coated benefits?

The sharp decrease in oil price provides an opportunity for Indonesia to significantly minimise its trade balance deficits by cutting its hefty oil import bill. Oil and gas imports, which rose sharply in 2011, dealt a heavy blow to the country’s trade balance by counteracting surpluses generated by Indonesia’s non-oil and gas trade. According to official data from the Ministry of Trade, Indonesia’s non-oil and gas sectors generated roughly US$8.5 billion in surplus in 2013. The oil and gas sector, on the contrary, generated US$12.6 billion in deficit in the same year.

The deficit is also likely to linger in the fiscal year of 2014 noting that Indonesia already faced a deficit of US$1.6 billion in October in its trade balance due to massive imports in the oil and gas sector, climbing to US$10.6 billion. The deficit incurred by Indonesia’s imports of oil and gas would decline following the fall in global crude oil prices and thus have an ameliorating effect on the country’s lopsided balance of payments.

The tumbling oil prices also eased the economic burden of the Widodo administration which is reallocating fuel subsidies. The government has responded by lowering the price of RON 88 petrol (better known as Premium) – the staple fuel for most Indonesian vehicles – from IDR8,500/litre (about US$0.68) in November 2014 to IDR7,600/litre (about US$0.61) on 1 January 2015 and then to IDR6,600/litre (about US$0.53) on 19 January 2015.

The falling retail price of oil would in turn lessen the costs of transportation, goods and services that had increased during the fuel price hikes of 2014. Moreover, it would also defuse political pressure from the opposition and the disgruntled.

A bitter aftertaste

Though tumbling oil prices are economically beneficial at first glance, there are also negative implications that may undermine the Indonesian economy. The Minister of Finance, Bambang Brodjonegoro, has expressed his concern that the tumbling oil prices will slash revenue from gas and oil exports, negating the opportunities and benefits.

Despite Indonesia’s status as a net oil importer, it still relies on oil and gas exports as its primary source of revenue. If oil prices in the international market continue to slide, the country’s revenue from oil and gas exports will follow suit, neutralising the gains from a lower trade deficit.

From an energy security standpoint, the drop in price is detrimental to Indonesia’s short term energy security in three ways. Firstly, it deters interested parties from participating or investing in oil exploration activities. Indeed, there are other factors at play such as a high tax rate and the lack of a governmental financial support framework that would have discouraged to oil exploration efforts in Indonesia.

However, even though the price of crude oil was at its peak, oil exploration efforts were lacklustre because of the high costs and risk involved. The declining crude price exacerbates the already meagre exploration effort; a protracted period of low oil prices would further discourage potential investment.

Secondly, the tumbling oil price may undermine the Widodo administration’s undertaking of the Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) mechanism to boost production levels of Indonesia’s maturing oil reservoir. EOR requires in-depth engineering and geological studies including sufficient technological capabilities and financial sustainability. It would be difficult for the government to attract external investment for additional funding because gains from EOR project may not cover the costs due to falling oil prices.

Thirdly, the tumbling oil price in the international market may also undermine Indonesia’s long-term energy security projections, especially in relation to energy diversification. According to the National Energy Council (Dewan Energi Nasional or DEN), the role of oil in Indonesia’s energy mix from 2010-2013 averages about 45 percent, which means that Indonesia is heavily reliant on oil.

In the event of an oil crisis, Indonesia would face severe consequences that could possibly undermine the country’s political stability. Cheaper oil prices will promote more oil consumption and minimise incentives on the consumption of alternative energy sources such as gas. Subsequently, the infrastructure development for alternative energy would stagnate as its demand declines.

Lasting bitterness?

The positive implication of low oil price is beneficial for Indonesia in certain sectors, namely the economic and political realms. It is also beneficial from the standpoint of Indonesia’s short term energy security projection due to the more affordable energy prices. Its implication on Indonesia’s energy security in the long term, however, is potentially more harmful than beneficial.

Indonesia desperately needs new oil reservoirs as its reserves are expected to be depleted in 11 years according to estimates from British Petroleum (BP). Indonesia is also in urgent need of rapid development of its alternative energy sector such as gas and renewable energy sources.

So long as oil prices remain low, there would be little interest in enhancing the resilience of Indonesia’s energy sector as its energy needs could be imported cheaply. The new administration should look beyond the immediate impact of the tumbling oil price and set their sights on building resilience to counter a different market dynamic in the future.

*Keoni Indrabayu Marzuki is a Research Associate of the Indonesia Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University.

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By Sarah Lazare*

The expanding U.S.-led war on the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, has largely fallen off the radar of U.S. social movements.

Many (but not all) who were active in anti-war organizing over the past decade have turned away from this conflict. The dearth of public debate is conspicuous, even as the U.S. government sinks the country deeper into yet another open-ended and ill-defined military operation. The refrain “it will take years” has become such a common utterance by the Obama administration that it slips by barely noticed.

There are many reasons for the relative silence in the face of this latest military escalation. I would venture that one of them is the sheer complexity of the situation on the ground in Iraq and Syria — as well as the real humanitarian crisis posed by the rise of ISIS, the many-layered power struggles across the wider Middle East, and the difficulty of building connections with grassroots movements in countries bearing the brunt of the violence.

But the answer to complexity is not to do nothing. In fact, great crimes and historic blunders — from Palestine to South Africa to Afghanistan — have been tacitly enabled by people who chose not to take action, perhaps because the situation seemed too complex to engage. When millions of lives are on the line, inaction is unacceptable.

The task is to figure out what to do.

The most important question to ask is this: Do we really think that the U.S. military operation against ISIS will bring about a good outcome for the people of Iraq and Syria, or for U.S. society? Is there any evidence from the more than 13 years of the so-called “War on Terror” that U.S. military intervention in the Middle East brings anything but death, displacement, destabilization, and poverty to the people whose homes have been transformed into battlefields?

The answer to these questions must be a resounding “No.”

But there are also many things to say “Yes” to. A better path forward can only be forged by peoples’ movements on the ground in Iraq and Syria — movements that still exist, still matter, and continue to organize for workers’ rights, gender justice, war reparations, and people power, even amid the death and displacement that has swallowed up all the headlines.

Now is a critical time to seek to understand and build solidarity with Iraqi and Syrian civil societies. Heeding their call, we should strengthen awareness here at home of the tremendous political and ethical debt the United States owes all people harmed by the now-discredited war on Iraq and the crises it set in motion.

“U.S. Military Action Leads to Chaos”

“A rational observer of United States intervention in the swath of land that runs from Libya to Afghanistan would come to a simple conclusion: U.S. military action leads to chaos,” wrote scholar and activist Vijay Prashad a month after the bombings began.

More than 13 years on, there is no evidence that the “War on Terror” has accomplished its stated, if amorphous, goal: to weed out terrorism (defined to exclude atrocities committed by the U.S. and allied states, of course). According to the Global Terrorism Index released by the Institute for Economics and Peace, global terrorist incidents have climbed dramatically since the onset of the War on Terror. In 2000, there were 1,500 terrorist incidents. By 2013, this number had climbed to 10,000. People in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Syria suffer the most, the index notes.

The so-called “good war” in Afghanistan, which is now entering its 14^th year and has not ended, illustrates this failed policy (President Obama’s recent claim that the combat mission is “over” notwithstanding).

In contradiction of the Obama administration’s “mission accomplished” spin, Afghanistan is suffering a spike in civilian deaths, displacement, poverty, and starvation, with 2014 proving an especially deadly year for Afghan non-combatants. The Taliban, furthermore, appears to be growing in strength, as the U.S. forces Afghanistan into long-term political and military dependency with the Bilateral Security Agreement signed last September by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

The Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan is one of numerous civil society groups in Afghanistan that have no illusions about the U.S. track record so far. “In the past thirteen years, the U.S. and its allies have wasted tens of billions of [dollars], and turned this country into the center of global surveillance and mafia gangs; and left it poor, corrupt, insecure, hungry, and crippled with tribal, linguistic, and sectarian divisions,” the organization declared in a statement released last October.

The current crisis in Iraq and Syria is another piece of this puzzle. It is now well-documented that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 played a critical role in fueling al-Qaeda in Iraq, which would eventually become ISIS. Emerging as part of the insurgency against the United States — and now thriving off opposition to the sectarian Shiite government propped up by Washington — ISIS did not even exist before the United States invaded Iraq. Its ranks were initially filled with Sunnis who were spat out by the brutal, U.S.-imposed de-Baathification process, and later by those disaffected by a decade of negligence and repression from Shiite authorities in Baghdad.

In neighboring Syria, the United States and Saudi Arabia backed anti-Assad fighters that were, as journalist Patrick Cockburn put it, “ideologically close to al-Qaeda” yet “relabeled as moderate.” It was in Syria that ISIS developed the power to push back into Iraq after being driven out in 2007.

Ordinary people across the region are paying a staggering price for these policies.

2014 was the deadliest year for civilians in Iraq since the height of the U.S. war in 2006 and 2007, according to Iraq Body Count. The watchdog found that 17,049 civilians were recorded killed in Iraq last year alone — approximately double the number recorded killed in 2013, which in turn was roughly double the tally from 2012. And more than 76,000 people — over 3,500 of them children — died last year in Syria, according to figures from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, recently warned, “The Syria and Iraq mega-crises, the multiplication of new crises, and the old crises that seem never to die have created the worst displacement situation in the world since World War II,” with at least 13.6 million people displaced from both countries.

But instead of reckoning with these legacies, the U.S. government has taken a giant leap backward — towards another open-ended, ill-defined military operation in Iraq and now Syria.

President Obama vowed in his recent State of the Union address to double down in the fight against ISIS, declaring yet again, “this effort will take time.” His remarks came just days after the United States and Britain announced a renewed joint military effort, and the Pentagon deployed 1,000 troops to Middle Eastern states to train “moderate” Syrian fighters. That comes in addition to the 3,000 soldiers ordered to deploy to Iraq, with more likely to follow. Meanwhile, the rise of Islamophobia in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks is feeding war fervor abroad and at home.

And so the Obama administration — which falls into the political realist camp and has, at times, pressed for a moderate retrenchment of U.S. war in the Middle East (in part to enable a disastrous pivot to Asia) — is now leading a military response to a crisis that the president himself has acknowledged cannot be solved by the U.S. military. To do so, Obama has repeatedly sidestepped congressional debate by claiming authority from the post-9/11 war authorization against the perpetrators of the attacks — the same legislation he once denounced for “keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing.” (He vowed in his State of the Union address to seek out explicit authorization from Congress for the war on ISIS, but has claimed in the past not to need it.)

“As If Further Militarization Ever Brought Peace to Iraq”

As the U.S. government makes unverified claims that U.S. lives are under threat from ISIS, it is Muslims, Arabs, Kurds, Yazidis, and Christians in the Middle East who are being killed, raped, and displaced. “The occupation of the city of Mosul started a new chapter of women’s suffering in Iraq,” wrote the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq in a statement published last December. “Daesh (ISIS) reawakened the ancient tribal habits of claiming women as spoils of war.”

Meanwhile, Kurds are fighting and dying to beat back ISIS in both Iraq and Syria but are not even offered a seat at the international table. This was highlighted in the recent exclusion of Kurdish groups from an anti-ISIS conference in London of representatives from 21 nations.

At this conference, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry claimed that the coalition had “halted the momentum” of ISIS fighters, while other U.S. officials insisted that half of the “top command” of ISIS had been killed. While global media outlets ran with this “news,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel publicly expressed serious doubt about such claims, describing the body count as “unverified.”

Furthermore, the ability of the U.S. military — the most powerful in the world — to blow up and kill is not in question. But in a complex geopolitical arena, that’s simply not a valid measure of “success.” The histories of the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars are tragic examples of the vast difference between killing a lot of people and “winning” a war.

Over five months in, U.S. military operations in Iraq and Syria are neither alleviating the humanitarian crisis nor meeting any of the shifting goals of U.S. officials (containing ISIS, destroying them, etc.). The perception that ISIS is primarily at war with the United States is, in fact, critical to their growth. The CIA estimated in September — just a month after U.S.-led bombings began — that ISIS had tripled its ranks, from 10,000 to over 30,000. As Patrick Cockburn reported in early January, “The territories [ISIS] conquered in a series of lightning campaigns last summer remain almost entirely under its control, even though it has lost some towns to the Kurds and Shia militias in recent weeks.”

So while the expansion of ISIS’ frontiers may have slowed, the intervention has failed to prevent the group from consolidating its control in Iraq and Syria. “Extremism thrives during foreign interventions and military actions,” said Raed Jarrar of the American Friends Service Committee in an interview for this article. “Bombing different groups who live in the same areas as ISIS has helped unite ISIS with more moderate groups, more reasonable groups, who could have been persuaded to rejoin the political process. In Syria, bombing ISIS and other extremist groups, including al-Qaeda, has helped them unite, although they have been killing each other for the past two years.”

In addition to the crimes perpetrated by ISIS, U.S.-backed and armed Iraqi forces, sectarian Iraqi militias, and “moderate rebels” in Syria are also committing brutal war crimes.

In July, for example, Human Rights Watch condemned the Iraqi government for repeatedly bombing densely populated residential neighborhoods, including numerous strikes on Fallujah’s main hospital with mortars and other munitions. And in October, Amnesty International warned that Iraqi Shiite militias, many of them funded and armed by the Iraqi government, are committing war crimes that include abductions, executions, and disappearances of Sunni civilians. In Iraq, Patrick Cockburn writes, “The war has become a sectarian bloodbath. Where Iraqi army, Shia militia, or Kurdish peshmerga have driven ISIS fighters out of Sunni villages and towns from which civilians have not already fled, any remaining Sunni have been expelled, killed, or detained.”

In other words, U.S. military intervention is not advancing the side with a clear moral high-ground, but militarizing what Raed Jarrar calls a “bloody civil conflict with criminal forces on all sides.”

And now, of course, Iraqis must contend with the return of a far more powerful fighting force guilty of numerous atrocities and war crimes across the globe, including torture, massacres, use of chemical weapons, and cluster bombing of civilians in Iraq: the U.S. military.

In a recent statement, the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq slammed the U.S.-led military campaign for, in the midst of this humanitarian crisis, “providing further military arms and bombing only, as if further militarization ever brought peace to Iraq.” Neither the international coalition nor the Iraqi government, the statement continues, is concerned “with the enslavement of more than five thousand women who are being bought and sold in broad day-light in Mosul, Raqqa, and other ‘Islamic State’ cities.”

None of this is to overstate the coherence of the U.S. strategy in Iraq and Syria, nor to even confirm the existence of one.

Since the bombings began in August, the U.S. has waffled and balked, going from support for “moderate rebels” in Syria to the announcement that it would create its own proxy force. The United States initially hesitated to militarily back Kurdish forces holding out against ISIS in the Syrian town of Kobani, and many people bearing the brunt of ISIS’ repression on the ground seem to doubt that the U.S. is seriously trying to stem the group’s advance. The U.S. government has trumpeted its broad military coalition, yet seemingly turns a blind eye as its allies go on directly and indirectly supporting ISIS.

In truth, the U.S. and global publics are kept in the dark about what the U.S.-led military coalition is doing, how long this war will last, where its boundaries lie, and what “victory” means. Obama and Kerry have both indicated that the war on ISIS will take years, but Pentagon officials repeatedly refuse to reveal basic information, like what specific duties troops on the ground in Iraq are tasked with and who is dying under U.S. bombs in Iraq and Syria. Just last December, a U.S. coalition bomb struck an ISIS-operated jail in the town of al-Bab, Syria, killing at least 50 civilians detained inside, according to multiple witnesses. Yet while the Pentagon has demurred that civilians “may have died” during its operations, it’s refused to actually acknowledge a single civilian death under its bombs.

Alternatives to U.S.-Led War

Some people in the United States have thrown their support behind the military operations, or at least not opposed them, out of a genuine concern for the well being of people in Iraq and Syria. However good these intentions, though, all evidence available suggests that military intervention won’t make anyone safer.

“The first level is stopping the U.S. from causing more harm,” Jarrar told me. “That is really essential.” According to Jarrar, a U.S. push to stop the bombings is solidaristic in itself. In fact, he said, we can’t talk about solidarity, reparations, or redress for all the harm the U.S. has done in the now-discredited 2003 war “while we are bombing Iraq and Syria. It doesn’t make any sense to reach out to people, ask them to attend conferences for reconciliation, while we are bombing their neighborhood.”

However, stopping the U.S. from further harming Iraq and Syria requires far more than simply halting the bombings and ground deployments. The U.S. government must withdraw and demilitarize its failed war on terror, not only by pulling its own forces from the Middle East, but by putting out the fires it started with proxy battles and hypocritical foreign policies — including its alliances with governments that directly and indirectly support ISIS, from Saudi Arabia to Turkey.

In a recent article in Jacobin about the courageous struggle of the people of Kobani against ISIS, Errol Babacan and Murat Çakır argue that the United States, and the West more broadly, should start with Turkey. “Western governments must be pressured to force their NATO partner Turkey to end both its proxy war in Syria as well as its repression of political protest,” they write. “Western leftists could also work for goals such as the removal of foreign soldiers (as well as Patriot missiles) stationed in Turkey and demand sanctions against Turkey if it continues to support” the Islamic State.

Phyllis Bennis, senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, argues that U.S. power to pressure allies to stop supporting ISIS extends beyond Turkey. “A real coalition is needed not for military strikes but for powerful diplomacy,” she writes. “That means pressuring U.S. ally Saudi Arabia to stop arming and financing ISIS and other extremist fighters; pressuring U.S. ally Turkey to stop allowing ISIS and other fighters to cross into Syria over the Turkish border; pressuring U.S. allies Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and others to stop financing and arming everyone and anyone in Syria who says they’re against Assad.”

Meanwhile, it’s critical for the U.S. left to step up its opposition to further escalation of the military intervention, including the upcoming White House bid to win bipartisan authorization. It will also be important to fight back against congressional efforts to sabotage diplomatic talks between the United States and Iran, which could embolden hard-line forces in both countries and open the door to further escalation in Iraq, Syria, and beyond.

Towards a Politics of Solidarity

A long-term alternative to war, ultimately, can only be built by popular movements in Iraq and Syria. While we in the United States are inundated with images of death and victimization, surviving grassroots efforts on the ground in both countries tell a different story. These countries are not mere geopolitical battlefields — they’re hotbeds of human agency and resistance.

Iraq saw a blossoming of nonviolent, Sunni-led movements against repression and discrimination by the U.S.-backed government of Iraq in 2013. But the Iraqi military brutally crushed their protest encampments. This included the Hawija massacre in April 2013, discussed by scholar Zaineb Saleh in an interview last summer, in which at least 50 protesters were killed and over 100 were wounded. In a climate of repression and escalating violence, civil society organizations from across Iraq held the country’s first social forum in September 2013, under the banner “Another Iraq is Possible with Peace, Human Rights, and Social Justice.”

Amid siege from ISIS, repression from the Iraqi government, and bombing from the United States and its allies, popular movements survive on the ground in Iraq. Groups like the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq are organizing emergency aid for women and families fleeing ISIS — while at the same time demanding U.S. withdrawal, and end to Iraqi government oppression, and reparations for the U.S.-led war.

The Federation of Workers Councils and Trade Unions in Iraq, meanwhile, continues to organize workers against Saddam Hussein-era anti-labor laws that were carried over into the new government and backed by the United States. Right now, the Federation — alongside OWFI — is mobilizing within the country’s state-owned industries, which are undergoing rapid privatization and imposing lay-offs, firings, and forced retirement on hundreds of thousands of workers.

Falah Alwan, president of the Federation, explained in a recent statement that the gutting of the public sector is the result of austerity measures driven, in part, by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. “We are in daily confrontations with the government, by demonstrations, sit-ins, seminars, [and] agitating the other sectors to take part,” Alwan told me over email. “At the same time we are preparing for a wide conference next March, for all the companies across Iraq, that will need support from our comrades in the U.S. and worldwide.”

Both of these organizations are collaborating with U.S. groups — including the War Resisters League, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and Madre — under the banner of the Right to Heal Initiative to press for reparations for the harm from U.S. policies in Iraq dating back to 1991. Along with damages from the last war and the sanctions regime that preceded it, their grievances include environmental poisoning in Iraq from the U.S. military’s use of depleted uranium, white phosphorous, burn pits, and more.

Likewise, “There are still people and groups in [Syria] who are working through nonviolent means,” said Mohja Kahf, a Damascus-born author and poet, in a recent interview. “And they matter. They are quietly working for the kind of Syria they want to see, whether the regime falls now or in years.” As Kahf argued in a piece penned in 2013, it is critical for the U.S. peace movement to connect with movements on the ground in Syria, not only when they are threatened by bombings, and not only when they are used to win arguments against U.S.-led military intervention.

We in the U.S. left must take a critical — if painful — look at the harm U.S. policies have done to the Middle East, press for a long-term shift in course, and seek to understand and build links with progressive forces in Iraq and Syria. The United States has a moral obligation to provide reparations to Iraq for its invasion and occupation. But these things must be demanded now, before the U.S. spends one day more waging a new armed conflict based on the same failed policies.

Grassroots movements did offer an alternative to endless war following the 2003 invasion, and that needs to happen again. This dark time is all the proof we need that the U.S. must get out of the Middle East once and for all, and the pressure to do so is only going to come from the grassroots.

Next Steps

Building international solidarity takes time, but you can get started today. Here are a few suggestions for productive next steps anyone can take.

Direct Support. Donate to relief efforts on the ground in Iraq and Syria that are orchestrated by grassroots organizations seeking to help their communities survive in the face of ISIS. The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq has been working to provide food and winter survival gear to people fleeing ISIS and maintains shelters in Baghdad and Karbala. Furthermore, they have created a “Women’s Peace Farm” outside of Karbala, which provides “a safe and peaceful community” for refugees, according to a recent OWFI statement. Direct donations to this work can be made at OWFI’s PayPal account.

Now is a critical time for U.S.-based movements to educate ourselves about both the histories and current realities of struggle and resistance in Iraq and Syria, as well as Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, and beyond. A forthcoming book by Ali Issa, field organizer for the War Resisters League, will be important reading for anyone interested in learning more about Iraqi social movements. Entitled Against All Odds: Voices of Popular Struggle in Iraq, the book is based on interviews and reports highlighting environmental, feminist, labor, and protest movement organizers in Iraq.

In the process of learning about civil societies in Iraq and Syria, it is important to avoid simplistic equations that reduce all opponents of Assad to agents of the U.S. government, and likewise regarding opponents of ISIS. As Kahf emphasized in her interview, “It is racist to think that Syrians do not have agency to resist an oppressive regime unless a clever white man whispers in their ear. … Syrians can hold two critiques in their minds at the same time: a critique of U.S. imperialism and a critique of their brutal regime.”

There is also a great deal to learn from U.S. civil society, including the powerful movement for black liberation that continues to grow nationwide. From Oakland to Ferguson to New York, people are showing by example that justice and accountability for racism and police killings will not be handed from above, but rather must be forced from the grassroots. This moment is full of potential to build strong and intersectional movements with racial justice at their core — a principle that is vital for challenging U.S. militarism.

Make this live. Talk to your families, friends, and loved ones about the war on ISIS. Encourage conversations in your organizations, union halls, and community centers. Raise questions like, “How does U.S. policy in the Middle East relate to our struggles for social, racial, and economic justice here at home?”

The Stop Urban Shield coalition — comprised of groups including Critical Resistance, the Arab Organizing and Resource Center, the War Resisters League, and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement — powerfully demonstrated the connection between domestic and international militarization when they kicked a global SWAT team, police force, and mercenary expo out of Oakland last September.

Ultimately, solidarity with Iraqi and Syrian people will require more than a push to end the U.S. bombings, but long-term pressure to steer away from U.S. policies of endless war and militarism, in the Middle East and beyond. Building consciousness across U.S. movements is critical to this goal.

Pressure the U.S. government. Grassroots mobilization in the United States can play a vital role in preventing lawmakers from charging into war. This was recently demonstrated when people power — including overwhelming calls to congressional representatives and local protests — had a hand in stopping U.S. strikes on the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2013. Mass call-ins, as well as scattered street protests, also had a hand in preventing war hawks from passing new sanctions in the midst of talks with Iran last year. It will be important to closely track any Obama administration attempt to pass explicit authorization for the war on ISIS, as well as congressional efforts to sabotage diplomacy with Iran.

OWFI wrote in a December 11 post, “With the help of the freedom-lovers around the world, we continue to survive the ongoing attacks on our society, and we will strive to be the model of a humane and egalitarian future.”

We must strive alongside them.

Members of War Times/Tiempos de Guerras contributed to this report.

*Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for Common Dreams and an independent journalist whose work has been featured in The Nation, Al Jazeera, TomDispatch, Yes! Magazine, and more. She is also an anti-militarist organizer interested in building people-powered global movements for justice and dignity. You can follow her on Twitter at @sarahlazare.

The post How To Get Serious About Ending The Islamic State War – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who the US, along with the Europeans and NATO, helped place in power after last year’s coup, has declared that he has “no doubt” America’s taxpayers will provide the lethal weapons he desires to fight the separatists in eastern Ukraine. I never had any doubt, either. Of course it’s all to stop “Russian aggression.” NATO’s expansionism is never considered an important issue in the very dangerous war.

President Barack Obama and then President-elect Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine talk after statements to the press following their bilateral meeting at the Warsaw Marriott Hotel in Warsaw, Poland, June 4, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Our policy in Ukraine is a far cry from “neutrality,” staying out of the internal affairs of others, or avoiding entangling alliances. It is more like being the policeman of the world and claiming the title of the greatest arms manufacturer of all history. The military-industrial complex must be pleased with its repeated successes.

I’m sure the neo-cons are also ecstatic. And sadly it looks like Sen. Lindsey Graham may get his way and get US troops further involved.

The claimed need for our sending lethal weapons to Ukraine is to combat the Russian troops supposedly already in Ukraine. Yet the propagandists never provide any evidence to verify this assertion.

Both sides are now recruiting and even drafting the young to prepare them to do the fighting. There’s evidence that resistance is building to this effort. It would be nice if the young victims of wars started by old people and foreigners would just go on strike and refuse to fight. Let the instigators of the war put their own “boots on the ground.”

Reprinted with permission from author’s Facebook page and from The RonPaul Institute.

The post Ron Paul: No Doubt US Taxpayers Will Be Robbed To Arm Poroshenko – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world. It has suffered a devastating earthquake followed by a deadly cholera epidemic, both set in the backdrop of a history of oppression by corrupt rulers and foreign exploitation. In spite of incredible challenges, two intrepid human rights attorneys – one Haitian and one American – have worked diligently to vindicate the rights of the people of Haiti, with some notable successes.

Fran Quigley’s important book, How Human Rights Can Build Haiti, tells the story of Mario Joseph and Brian Concannon, whose Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) has given hope to untold numbers of Haitians. They opt for a ‘bottom-up’ rather than a ‘top-down’ approach. Their preference is to help to empower the Haitian people to make change themselves, instead of relying on outsiders – particularly the United States and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – which establish ‘rule of law programs’ and provide charity, generally with strings attached.

Mario Joseph

Often called the leading human rights lawyer in Haiti, Mario Joseph is president of BAI. “We had an earthquake, yes, but far too many people died in this earthquake. And that is because we in Haiti have no respect for the rule of law,” he says, attributing the deaths to poorly built homes crowded onto steep hillsides. It is estimated that more than 200,000 were killed, 300,000 were injured, and two million were rendered homeless by the earthquake.

Joseph has developed a reputation in Haiti as a fearless advocate, in the face of numerous death threats. While court proceedings take place in French, Joseph speaks Creole so his clients can understand the proceedings. “The justice system is unaffordable for the people of Haiti,” Joseph observes, “but if you are rich or important and your rights are not respected, you can find justice. Conversely, if you are powerful and you abuse human rights, you can find ways to avoid the consequences of your actions.”

Brian Concannon

Joseph’s counterpart in the United States is Brian Concannon, who directs the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) in Boston. Concannon, also fluent in Creole, worked in Haiti for nine years, including the successful case he and Joseph filed after the Raboteau massacre. Concannon returned to the United States and founded IJDH, BAI’s sister organization in 2004. Known as a “tireless worker who makes the transition from human rights lawyer to political strategist to movement organizer as the needs of the Haitian dictate,” Concannon has developed a reputation with congresspersons, who “clearly look to him as the definitive voice on Haiti justice issues,” according to Nicole Lee, former BAI lawyer, now executive director for TransAfrica Forum.

A legacy of exploitation

Quigley outlines Haiti’s tragic history, starting with the occupation by the United States in 1915.

After occupying Cuba and Puerto Rico, the United States sent Marines to invade Haiti, the only nation born from a successful slave rebellion. The United States declared martial law, seized control of the treasury, and arrested the editors of a newspaper critical of U.S. actions. Haitian opposition to the U.S. occupation grew for the next 20 years, and in 1934, the Marines left Haiti.

Haitian president Francois ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier exploited the bitterness of the people of Haiti about U.S. domination. But his anti-communism endeared him to the United States and led to U.S. endorsement of his presidential campaign and his successful election in 1956. For the next 30 years, Papa Doc presided over a reign a terror in Haiti, backed by the United States. U.S. support continued during the oppressive tenure of Papa Doc’s son, Jean-Claude Duvalier (‘Baby Doc’).

Haiti’s fragile economy was further weakened by the neoliberal ‘structural adjustment’ program foisted upon it byits international creditors, including the International Monetary Bank. Wages and social services were kept at a minimal level as taxes and tariffs were lifted. By 1986, 300 U.S. corporations were located in Haiti. People migrated from the countryside to seek low-wage jobs in the city.

In 1990, Jean-Bertrand Aristide became Haiti’s first democratically elected president, winning more than 67 percent of the vote and defeating a neoliberal former World Bank official. When Aristide attempted to reverse the neoliberal policies foisted on Haiti, the United States strongly resisted. Less than one year later, Aristide was ousted by officers of the Haitian army, who had been trained at the U.S. School of the Americas and/or were on the CIA payroll.

President Bill Clinton helped restore Aristide to power only after the Haitian president promised to cut government programs for the poor and lower tariffs on food. Clinton regrets that condition to this day. The United States also blocked a $146 million loan to Haiti from the Inter-American Development Bank, money earmarked to improve the water infrastructure system. That move would prove to have devastating consequences in the cholera outbreak in 2010.

In 2004, Aristide was forced to leave Haiti in what many thought was a kidnapping by U.S. Army Special Forces as part of a U.S.-backed coup d’etat. The Bush administration then saw to it that Aristide’s progressive policies were reversed. That same year, the United Nations mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) arrived but UN peacekeeping troops did little to protect civilians targeted by the new coup government. In fact, MINUSTAH troops helped facilitate political violence, causing resentment among the Haitian people. Cables obtained by WikiLeaks confirm that MINUSTAH protected U.S. interests and global capital.

After the 2004 coup, Haiti descended into lawlessness as the coup government instituted a system of repression with torture, disappearances, summary arrests and executions, rape and drug trafficking. Only a tiny fraction of those in prison had been convicted of a crime and prison conditions were deplorable. When Quigley visited one of the prisons, “[a]ll the prisoners were shirtless and barefoot, very thin, and wearing as little as possible,” he says. “The startling sight of near-naked dark-skinned men crammed together and crouching on a bare floor evoked images of Africans chained in the hold of a slave ship.”

Haiti had “endured a full thirty-two coups and a near-constant state of military dominance over civilians,” Quigley writes. “The government of Haiti made disastrous choices in loans and alliances, and has never been able to develop an economy that is independent of foreign powers, particularly the United States.”

The earthquake in 2010 triggered an overwhelming global response. But since aid was administered by NGOs instead of the Haitian government, much of the pledged money never reached the people of Haiti. And because, writes Quigley, “the military and the media mischaracterized post-earthquake Port-au-Prince as a security crisis rather than a humanitarian crisis, the Haitian people paid dearly.” The United States sent soldiers instead of humanitarian workers, and many food and supplies were not distributed to the victims. “[M]ost of the USAID dollars spent for Haiti went to top U.S. contractors, most based in Washington, DC, area. Less than one percent of U.S. government expenditures have gone to Haitian businesses or organizations.”

Shortly after the earthquake, an outbreak of cholera claimed more than 8,600 lives, and 684,000 became ill. The World Health Organization describes cholera as “an easily treatable disease.” Dr. Paul Farmer, founder of Haiti-based Partners in Health, notes that chronic poverty and deficiencies in the infrastructure made Haiti vulnerable to disasters such as earthquakes and infectious disease. The cholera infection was traced to the dumping of sewage near a river by troops in a camp where the MINUSTAH was based. Bill Clinton admitted that UN peacekeepers were the ‘proximate cause’ of the cholera epidemic.

A human rights-based approach to change in Haiti

In 2011, BAI lawyers filed more than 5,000 claims against the UN and a petition for relief on behalf of cholera victims, requesting compensation. The UN had concluded a status of forces agreement (SOFA) with the government of Haiti in 2004, granting UN troops immunity from civil and criminal claims. But Concannon told Quigley that the UN forfeited its immunity by failing to establish a commission to hear claims of cholera victims, as required by the SOFA. In 2013, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon refused to receive BAI’s claims. BAI then filed a lawsuit against the UN in a New York federal court. That suit is now pending.

Joseph and Concannon won the most important human rights court verdict in Haitian history in 2000. As a result of their work, 53 military and paramilitary officers and soldiers were convicted of human rights violations during the 1994 massacre in Raboteau. They were ordered to pay the victims $140 million.

In other lawsuits, Joseph and Concannon are advocating prosecution of ‘Baby Doc’s’ collaborators for financial crimes and political repression during the brutal Duvalier regime. And the work of BAI and IJDH in responding to the epidemic of rapes in the IDP (internally displaced persons) camps following the earthquake has been exemplary. They have helped to empower the victims, challenged law enforcement, established security patrols and know-your-rights training, pushed prosecutions, and developed an international campaign through the media. As a result, sexual assaults have decreased dramatically, and women are now willing to file complaints. Joseph says, “Where the rule of law does not exist, you have to build it.”

Quigley describes how these two courageous lawyers are creating a template for an effective human rights-focused strategy to end global poverty and failed states. He writes, “[t]heir docket includes community-based programs on rape accountability and prevention, housing rights, and prisoners’ rights, along with international advocacy for fair elections in Haiti, earthquake response, and immigration rights for the Haitian diaspora. BAI helps organize street-blocking protests by camp dwellers facing eviction, and loud, aggressive demonstrations in protest of the UN’s cholera response.”

Joseph and Concannon work indefatigably to give voice to the voiceless and vindicate their human rights. They seek justice both inside and outside the courtroom.

This excellent book combines careful research with personal observations and interviews to paint a graphic portrait of the reality in Haiti and the critical work of Joseph and Concannon. Far from a dry history, it is a gripping tale of two courageous lawyers working to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds to better the lives of the Haitian people. This is a must-read for all those concerned about human rights – both in Haiti and elsewhere.

The post The Fight For Human Rights In Haiti – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

NATO Defense Ministers are expected to make important decisions on the implementation of the Readiness Action Plan agreed at the NATO Wales Summit last year, at their one-day meeting on Thursday.

According to NATO, ministers will decide on the size and composition of the new Spearhead Force, which will enable the Alliance to respond to security challenges to the east posed by Russia and risks emanating from the southern neighborhood, the Middle East and North Africa.

This will be the first opportunity since the Wales Summit for NATO Defense Ministers to look at the progress made and look forward to the 2016 Warsaw Summit.

NATO Defense Ministers will also meet in the NATO-Georgia Commission format, together with the Georgian Defense Minister Mindia Janeldidze. According to NATO, they ministers will discuss the implementation of the Substantial NATO-Georgia Package endorsed at the Wales Summit.

That package includes measures aimed at strengthening Georgia’s defense capabilities and helping Georgia advance its preparations for NATO membership. Ministers will also review the ongoing work to establish a Joint Training and Evaluation Centre in Georgia, which will help the country in further modernizing its security forces, NATO said.

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By Cheryl Pellerin

President Barack Obama’s defense secretary nominee Wedneday pledged to protect the nation and its allies in a turbulent world and to work with Congress to find a way through defense budget turmoil and the looming spending cuts of sequestration.

Ash Carter, who served as deputy secretary of defense from October 2011 to December 2013 and was the Pentagon’s acquisition chief before that, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee considering his nomination that he very much hopes to find a way with them out of the “wilderness of sequester.”

Sequestration spending cuts are scheduled to take effect in 2016 unless Congress changes current budget law.

“Sequester is risky to our defense,” he said. “It introduces turbulence and uncertainty that are wasteful and conveys a misleadingly diminished picture of our power in the eyes of friends and foes alike.”

Carter said that if he is confirmed as defense secretary, his responsibilities will be to protect America and its friends and allies in a turbulent and dangerous world.

Dangers to the Nation

The dangers include continuing turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa, “malignant and savage terrorism” emanating from the region, an ongoing war in Afghanistan and a reversion to old-style security thinking in parts of Europe, Carter told the Senate panel.

Dangers to the nation and its allies and friends also may arise from long-standing past tensions and rapid changes in Asia, a continuing need for the stabilizing U.S. role in that region, a continuing imperative to counter the spread or use of weapons of mass destruction, and dangers in new domains such as cyber, he said.

“Strategy,” Carter added, “needs to keep all these problems in perspective and to craft lasting approaches to each of them.”

Despite these challenges, he said, “I never lose sight of the fact that the United States remains the strongest, most resilient and most influential nation on earth.”

World’s Finest Fighting Force

The United States has the finest fighting force the world has ever known, and an innovative economy that has long set the pace for the rest of the world, he said.

“Our country has friends and allies in every corner of the world, and our adversaries have few,” Carter said. “This is clear testimony to the appeal of our values, our principles and our leadership. All this makes me proud and hopeful and determined to grab hold of the bright opportunities in front of us, as well as to counter the very real dangers we face.”

Carter said he promised the president that as defense secretary he would offer Obama his most candid strategic advice.

“In formulating that advice, I intend to confer widely among civilian and military leaders, including [those] on this committee, and among experts and foreign partners,” he added. “And when the president makes a decision, I will also ensure that the Department of Defense implements it with [the department’s] long-admired excellence.”

Carter said he also would ensure that the president receives candid professional military advice, as is consonant with the law and with good sense, “since our military leaders possess wide and deep experience and expertise.”

Supporting Relief from Sequester Caps

On the fiscal year 2016 budget proposal submitted this week, Carter said he’s unfamiliar with the details. But he pledged, if confirmed, to come back before the committee for a full posture hearing to discuss those details.

“But I strongly support the president’s request for relief from the sequester caps in [fiscal] 2016 and through the future-year defense plan,” he told the panel.

Carter said he would do his part if confirmed to help the president work with Congress to resolve the defense budget and other issues of the country’s fiscal future.

“But I cannot suggest support and stability for the defense budget without at the same time frankly noting that not every defense dollar is spent as well as it should be,” he said.

Making the Defense Budget Work

“The taxpayer cannot comprehend, let alone support, the defense budget when they read … of cost overruns, lack of accounting and accountability, needless overhead and the like,” Carter said. “This must stop.” Every company, state and city in the country has had to lean itself out in recent years, he added, and it should be no different for the Pentagon.

Carter said he began his career in defense in connection with implementing the Packard Commission’s recommendations.

The commission, formally called the President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management, led by David Packard, was a federal government commission created by President Ronald Reagan’s Executive Order 12526 to study areas of defense management, including procurement.

Needed Changes in the Pentagon

“Issues and solutions change over time, as technology and industry change. They extend from acquisition — and this is important — to all other parts of the defense budget, [including] force size, compensation, and training as well as equipment,” Carter said.

If confirmed as defense secretary, Carter said he’d work to make needed changes in the Pentagon and to seek support from Congress, which holds the power of the purse.

“I look forward to partnership with this committee in what can be a period of historic advance,” Carter said.

The post Carter Pledges To Make Needed Changes In Pentagon appeared first on Eurasia Review.

The European Union hopes to secure its natural gas sources at a time of troubled ties with its major supplier, Russia. At this juncture in what could become a major energy crisis in Europe, Azerbaijan once again reemerges as the most cost-effective and secure energy supplier.

The route that will deliver Azerbaijani gas to Europe was defined as a priority in the EU’s efforts to diversify sources and routes of energy supply, as Miguel Arias Canete, EU Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy said.

“The Southern Corridor project will be a top priority,” Canete said on February 4. “We will double our efforts to diversify energy supplies, their sources and routes. The recent story of the South Stream should become a lesson and an opportunity for us. From now on we will focus attention on the projects that will allow us to diversify supplies,” he noted.

European officials be it EU commissioners or premiers of the EU states have repeatedly confirmed that they rely on Azerbaijan as an alternative gas supplier. Europe does not intend to abandon its goal to reduce dependence on Russia, as the officials has openly stated that the EU recognizes the need for securing alternative gas supply and gives priority to real projects rather than initiatives.

The Turkish Stream project is at a very early stage and it will be interesting to see how the project will evolve, both in terms of investments and market potential, Italian Ambassador to Azerbaijan Giampaolo Cutillo told Trend, commenting on the discussed projects.

“The SCP-TANAP-TAP implies, furthermore, a complex binding legal framework for all parties concerned, both private companies and governments, and we have to start to think of it more as a reality than as an on-paper project,” the ambassador said.

The hot discussions on the mentioned projects gained new speed after Turkey’s statement on rivalry between TANAP and Turkish Stream, and the picture become even stranger with the statements of the new Greek government.

Panagiotis Lafazanis, new Greek energy minister, said the Greek government supports the construction of the Trans Adriatic pipeline, but it wants to get more benefits from gas transit through Greece’s territory.

Speculations of better route options have recently risen on the eve of the first meeting of the advisory council for the Southern Gas Corridor scheduled for next week in Baku. The energy ministers of countries that are on the Southern Gas Corridor, including Croatia, Bulgaria, Greece, Albania, and high-level EU officials are expected to participate in the event to mull European energy policy and to identify the necessary new paths to ensure the desired European integration.

Several pipeline projects and energy-rich countries are competing with one another to bring to life the idea of being a major gas supplier to Europe, consuming over 18 trillion cubic feet of natural gas a year.

Europe has considered so far various initiatives, including Nabucco and Russia’s South Stream project, which failed to materialize and was replaced by Turkish Stream initiative.

The Southern Gas Corridor designed to supply gas to Europe from the Caspian and the Middle East in the future remains the only real gas pipeline project for now.

Azerbaijan and its Western allies together with the major energy companies worked hard to breathe life into the Southern Gas Corridor, being part of the major transport and energy links between Europe and the Caspian region.

However, today several governments, particularly Russia, which is the main gas supplier of Europe and also main opponent over the Ukraine events, are pushing for their projects. Some join these initiatives with more ‘political’ interests, while others appear to make more business sense given the strategic locations.

The economic point comes first while assessing the future gas routes, as the infrastructure, the volume of supply and demand are key for realizing project rather than “wishes”. The Southern Gas Corridor in fact loses points to Turkish Stream over the gas volumes, but it leaves behind the Russian-Turkish initiative given the available infrastructure, secured gas volumes and exact date of the realization – 2019 for the first gas supply via the TAP.

Another aspect when considering competing projects is that some appear to have difficulty in raising the required finances, while others have everything organized.

The financial situation of Russia is far from brilliant due the imposed sanctions, “junk” ratings of international institutions and declining oil prices. Turkey and Europe also didn’t mention so far any intention to finance the project. It therefore remains unclear how exactly Turkish Stream would be financed.

The main political factor, here is how much the supplies will be secured. Russia, lost its credibility due to gas wars between Moscow and Kiev, and Europe mainly mentions Azerbaijan as a reliable source and partner and relies on gas from Azerbaijan’s Shah-Deniz, at least during its first phase. Other countries such as Turkmenistan, Iran and Iraq would be added when political conditions allow.

The Trans Adriatic Pipeline will turn on the Southern Gas Corridor to Europe and provide access to natural gas from the Caspian Sea region. The project capacity will expand from 10 to 20 bcm per year depending on throughput, the TAP consortium says.

The Southern Gas Corridor is recognized as being ‘of European interest’, while other projects such as Turkish Stream do not enjoy the same status. But, the EU’s final position is still to come out.

The post EU To Make Southern Corridor A Top Priority – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.