Rewriting history, in a capitalist manner :)

The Soviets airbrushing photos, or Winston Smith in 1984 being one of the employees to constantly re-write history are, well, old ...
Here is a new twist to how to rewrite the past:
A few days ago, Roy Halladay of the Florida Marlins pitched a perfect game.  Suppose you want to claim that you were there at the ballpark, and you witnessed that rare event ... but you weren't actually there.  Yet, you want a piece of real evidence that you can use ... hurry up; don't let that opportunity slip past :)

Here's a chance to buy tickets to a guaranteed perfect game -- the one Roy Halladay already threw.
The Florida Marlins will begin selling on Tuesday unused tickets to the game in which the Philadelphia Phillies ace pitched the 20th perfect game in major league history, a 1-0 victory over the Marlins on Saturday.
All tickets will be regularly priced at "face value" and on sale both online and through the Marlins' box office.

ht

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

Six months ago, I wrote in an opinion column that “how events unfold in South and West Asia this summer will have immense implications even for those of us halfway around the world.”

The two main events I referred to then were the presidential elections in Iran and Afghanistan.  But, it was beyond my wildest imagination that both the incumbent presidents and their governments would engage in massive electoral frauds in order to skew the results in their favor.  Particularly in Afghanistan with the entire world watching, and with the United Nations helping with the logistics of the elections.

Yet, that is how the story unfolded. 

In Iran, protests spontaneously erupted immediately after the rigged election results were made public.  But, the reports of arrests of dissidents since then, and their torture and even death in jails, are absolutely depressing developments.

In Afghanistan, the ineffective Hamid Karzai successfully cooked up the election books.  His main challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, has withdrawn from a runoff election that was hastily scheduled for November 7^th, which has now been cancelled.

Meanwhile, neighboring Pakistan seems to be speeding down towards anarchy.

Thus, mid-autumn it is now, and I am all the more worried.

Try as I might to be cheerful about the outcomes in these three countries, I am unable to because there is now yet another electoral signpost that we are rapidly approaching—general elections in Iraq.

January 16, 2010 is the date when Iraqis will cast their votes in the parliamentary elections.  Iraq’s election commission will need at least 90 days to carry out the elections in accordance with the law.  However, the parliament is yet to approve of the electoral law that will govern these elections and the deadline for a final election plan has come and gone. 

The key disagreement is over voter registration in the oil-rich Kirkuk.  Kirkuk is in northern Iraq, which is a Kurd-dominated part of the country.  The question that remains unresolved is how to count the city’s Kurds, Arabs, and the Turkmen, who are the main ethnic groups there.

It is not as simple as a head count.  Because, when Saddam Hussein was in power, his regime unlawfully evicted Kurds and encouraged Arabs to settle there.  So, naturally, after the US removed the dictator, the Kurdish population returned home in huge numbers.

The parliament has to decide whether only the current population and their residencies count, or whether voter registration records from a few years ago are valid.  A current one would favor the Kurds, while using older registration data would, obviously, be advantageous to Arabs and Turkmen. 

It appears that the Kurds have drawn the metaphorical line in the sand.  Their demand for current data and for Kirkuk as one single constituency has no possible middle ground with the demands from the other sides that records from 2004 or 2005 be used, or that Kirkuk be split into two constituencies.

Kurdish representatives, therefore, boycotted the discussions.  If, on the other hand, the parliament approves a plan that overrules the objections raised by the Kurds, then there is a possibility that it will be vetoed by the Iraqi president—who is Kurdish!

If elections are not held as scheduled, then technically the current government has no legality to continue on past January. 

To review then: Iran’s elections were rigged.  Afghanistan’s elections were rigged.  Pakistan is in disarray.  Iraq’s elections in January are in doubt.

If there is a common thread to all these, it is simply that all these are countries that have been experiencing internal strife for decades now.  Iran is yet to recover from the disastrous coup d’etat in 1953 that overthrew the democratically elected government, and the later theocratic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini.  Afghanistan was practically in a civil war that only worsened after the Soviet tanks rumbled in back in 1979.  Pakistan has never really been stable ever since its creation in 1947.  And Iraq needs no introduction to the American audience.

Despite all these, if we expect elections to somehow magically transform these countries, well, that is worse than naïve optimism

Afghanistan: War escalation to win hearts and minds!

Professor Paul Robinson compares the Soviet experience in Afghanistan with the current US and NATO practices, and finds that we are repeating the Soviet mistakes in a worse way:

[The] barriers to development lie not in a lack of aid but in poor human capital and weak social and political institutions. Although Western economists came rather later to this conclusion than the Soviets, most now accept it. Practice, though, continues to lag theory. Too often, those tasked with development still view it—as the Soviets initially did—as an engineering problem, a matter of building roads, factories, and schools.

The 2009 U.S. inspector general’s audit report cites the renovation of a power station in Khost. After installing three new generators, the Americans handed the plant over to the Afghans, only to find that within a few months two of the three no longer worked. Similarly, the British have invested millions of dollars into digging hundreds of wells in southern Afghanistan in an attempt to “win the hearts and minds” of villagers. The new wells bypass existing institutions for the stewardship of water resources while not putting anything in their place. Afghans, not used to having unrestricted access to so much water, have responded by pumping with abandon. As a result, the water table has dropped, increasing the danger of drought. Meanwhile, according to Nipa Banerjee, nearly half of the schools in Kandahar province sit empty because there are no teachers to staff them. Yet the Canadian government is pressing ahead with plans to build even more schools. Such failures are entirely typical and predictable. They reveal how “hearts and minds” operations, undertaken to support the short-term goals of counterinsurgency, can have damaging effects on long-term development.

In some respects, Soviet advisers, despite their failings, were somewhat better than ours. Ivanov, for instance, studied Dari at the School of Oriental Languages. As he and his wife recounted over a bowl of homemade borscht, rather than living in a fortified compound, he had an apartment in the Soviet-built Mikrorayon district of Kabul with his family (unthinkable for a contemporary adviser) and drove himself without escort to work every day (at least as unfathomable).

The flow of Western advisers is driven by supply rather than demand. The Afghans get what we send them, not what they ask for. Few high-ranking civil servants are willing to go to Afghanistan. As a result, the West sends young and inexperienced personnel to “mentor” much older Afghan colleagues. Few have any knowledge of Afghan languages. Valerii Ivanov told me that his Afghan contacts say that they laugh when these zealous Westerners tell them how to manage their affairs. Now President Obama is promising to send hundreds more. We can hardly imagine that, if he can actually find that many—and so far he appears to be having trouble—such a large number will really consist of highly experienced, properly qualified personnel with appropriate cultural understanding. More will not mean better.

Worse, in our efforts to fight the Taliban, we are providing Afghanistan with a massive army, a huge police force, and vast numbers of schools, hospitals, roads, and so on. All of this has to be paid for. The Afghan state cannot do so, nor will it ever be able to. When the Soviets left, Najibullah’s regime survived only as long as Moscow paid the bills. The same will be true for Karzai and his successors.

The election in Afghanistan is round the corner. Any odd development there, along with chaos in its neighboring countries--Iran and Pakistan--can make 2009 one milestone year in global history. Here is to hoping for an uneventful remainder of 2009.

Hey Medvedev, you are no Tom Joad!

It is amazing how politicians can spin anything. In the Russia/Georgia conflict, Putin and Medvedev talk as if they are defenders of liberty, and the yearning of independence that people have. (Conveniently forgetting Chechnya, of course!) I mean, in a recent FT piece, Medvedev writes as if he is the Russian reincarnation of the Tom Joad character in The Grapes of Wrath: Whenever they's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Whenever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there . . . .

You ought to read that piece. Here is an excerpt:

The Russian Federation is an example of largely harmonious coexistence by many dozens of nations and nationalities. But some nations find it impossible to live under the tutelage of another. Relations between nations living “under one roof” need to be handled with the utmost sensitivity.

After the collapse of communism, Russia reconciled itself to the “loss” of 14 former Soviet republics, which became states in their own right, even though some 25m Russians were left stranded in countries no longer their own. Some of those nations were un­able to treat their own minorities with the respect they deserved. Georgia immediately stripped its “autonomous regions” of Abkhazia and South Ossetia of their autonomy.

Can you imagine what it was like for the Abkhaz people to have their university in Sukhumi closed down by the Tbilisi government on the grounds that they allegedly had no proper language or history or culture and so did not need a university? The newly independent Georgia inflicted a vicious war on its minority nations, displacing thousands of people and sowing seeds of discontent that could only grow. These were tinderboxes, right on Russia’s doorstep, which Russian peacekeepers strove to keep from igniting.

Here is Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) in The Grapes of Wrath