Robert Fisk: Watch us lead the UN donkey up the Khyber

So back to THAT BLOODY WAR. I mean not the Syrian one – where we're going to stay hands off – or the Libyan one (where we were hands on, but not touching the ground). Nor the Iraqi one, which is a war at 60-a-day fatalities (pretty much equal with Syria's daily death toll, though we can't make that comparison). Nope. Of course, I mean the Afghan war which we fought in 1842 and in 1878-80 and in 1919 and from 2001 to 2014 (or 2015 or 2016, who knows?). We wouldn't let them down this time, we said about the Afghans – or Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara said – in 2001. Oh yes we will.

We learned our lesson in Iraq where our belief in a bloodless victory – bloodless for us, very bloody indeed for them – came hopelessly unstuck. We died, too. Which is why the Americans went home. Vietnam was supposed to see the end of Western casualties. But we are not immune to death. No more in Afghanistan than in Iraq. So we are going home there, too. We may not leave behind a "perfect" democracy – the Americans were admitting years ago that we might not leave a "Jeffersonian democracy" behind. Ho-hum, no we're not!

And we must quietly abandon all the stuff about our being in Afghanistan to fight terror – on the grounds that if we don't fight it there, it will be heading for Kent on the Channel Tunnel – because it's a load of old cobblers. The 7/7 bombings had more to with our being there than our not being there.

The French have a unit in Afghanistan, but it did not prevent the unspeakably cruel murders in France last week. I'm becoming, I must say, a bit amazed at old Obama. He's been carrying on up the Khyber for so long that I suspect he has forgotten his own words of wisdom. More

 

RUSI Video; Iran and the west

 

Panelists: Sir Malcolm Rifkind MP, Peter Jenkins, Shashank Joshi. Once again, the possibility of military intervention in Iran looms large as tensions increase among a concert of western countries over its nuclear activities and refusal to comply with UN Security Council resolutions. With a new round of economic sanctions focusing on Iran's oil exports beginning, and diminishing confidence in other forms of influence as time becomes an increasing factor, pressure seems to be building once again for more drastic measures. To seek answers and debate what should be done about the Iranian dilemma, this discussion panel gathers three prominent experts to assess Iran's actions and its intentions, and will lay out possible responses from the UK and the international community. More

 

What does Pakistan Want? - The New Yorker

“I think it’s important for us to get it right,” President Obama said on Tuesday of the American relationship with Pakistan. Lately, though, we haven’t.

After 2009, the United States and Pakistan constructed what they called a “strategic dialogue”—addressing Pakistan’s needs for economic growth, its search for energy and water security, Afghanistan, and possible negotiations with the Taliban—to define and solidify a long-term partnership. Three years later, those ambitions are in tatters, undone by the Raymond Davis affair, the killing of Osama Bin Laden, and continuing drone strikes, which most Pakistanis regard as acts of war.

In late February, I travelled to Pakistan and met with a number of military officers there, including several senior ones. They explained how they saw, from their side, the rise and collapse of the strategic dialogue with Washington.

It is a story laced with the generals’ resentments, geopolitical calculations, fears, and aspirations. Listening to them after absorbing the recent months of Pakistan ennui and Pakistan bashing in Washington was like watching one of those movies where a single narrative is told and retold selectively, from irreconcilable points of view.

Some of the basics of the Pakistan Army’s arguments about the Afghan war and the struggle against Al Qaeda-influenced terrorist groups are contained in a twelve-page document called “Ten Years Since 9/11: Our Collective Experience (Pakistan’s Experience).” The document, labelled “Secret,” is below; it has not previously been published.

Despite its classification, the essay is perhaps best understood as part of a Pakistani strategic communications or lobbying campaign. (Presumably, the sources that provided the document to me were undertaking an act in that campaign.) This particular text was a basis for briefings that General Ashfaq Kayani, the powerful Army chief, provided to NATO leaders at closed meetings last September, around the tenth anniversary of the 2001 attacks. It updates a case Pakistani generals have been making in meetings with their counterparts for years: that the casualties, economic disruption, and radicalization Pakistan has suffered from because of spillover from the American military campaign in Afghanistan are deeply underappreciated. The essay declares that Pakistan’s total casualties—dead and wounded—since 2001 in the “fight against terrorism” number about forty thousand. More

 

Pakistan tribal areas: what matters

Within Pakistan and internationally, there is a growing recognition that well-off tribesman will not become the tools of terrorist organizations. But will it come soon enough?

Since the most recent phase of US involvement in Afghanistan began, Pakistan has been a witness to

multiple terrorist attacks on its soil in one form or the other. It has been generally recognised that Pakistan has suffered grave consequences from this conflict. Unfortunately, media outlets and commentators consistently refer to terrorist activities taking place in Pakistan as being undertaken by the ‘Taliban’ or ‘Terrorist Organizations’.

It needs to be understood that every tribal man is not a terrorist. On analyzing tribal areas in Pakistan it is clear that there exist some traditional socio-political norms and values there which are understood as acts of terrorists by others. For instance, by the end of President Zia’s administration the majority of the population kept guns for self protection. Nowadays if an individual is armed they are termed as a terrorist by default.

There are a number of groups in tribal regions who are neither Taliban members nor terrorists but instead view them as criminals, to be despised by the majority of the population. The first such group is the country’s elite. These groups may have links with particular tribal regions in that they are involved in policy making or political representation for those regions. Unfortunately however, they are disconnected from the real issues facing the local population.

The second category is the middle class which makes up a substantial portion of society. This is an interesting group in that they want to be a part of progressive social developments and are equipped with some of the means to do so. However at the same time their progress is being hampered by a number of factors. They want to play a role in policy making and escape the influence of terrorism but are failing to do so, primarily due to the economic pressure under which they find themselves.

The third category consists of people living below the poverty line. These are the people who have actually suffered throughout. They essentially have no choice but to act according to the demands of external influences within their region. If they live in an area which is under the influence of the Taliban then they are compelled to adhere to their wishes, but if Taliban influence diminishes then this often precipitates a shift in the mindset of the local population.

The most pertinent example here is the operation that took place in the Swat region close to the Afghan-Pakistan border. Before the initiation of the operation in Swat the local populace was supportive of the Taliban and the majority of the young joined up with the Taliban in order to secure an income. The reason being that the poor run towards bread: that is to say they seek to grasp the maximum economic benefits from their actions.

After the army’s intervention in these areas people have become highly supportive of the state military forces. This is because they understand that state institutions are able to provide them with security. A man in uniform has rules to obey and is required to protect the interests of the state - he is answerable to the system because he is part of the system. The tribesmen feel that they are deprived of the basic necessities of life. They lead an isolated existence as no one is ready to bring them into the mainstream, in part because liberals are not ready to accommodate them within society.

President Musharraf ushered in change post 9/11 when he banned all jihadi organizations in Pakistan. Many jihadists fled to tribal areas and the relics of both Al-Qaeda and Afghani Taliban joined them in the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA). There they had initial success in recruiting members through economic rewards, and later through religious ideology. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban possess substantial strategic experience. They knew exactly how to deal with the tribesmen in order to use them for their own purposes. Initially, the tribesmen were committed to not attacking Pakistani state forces, but the Afghan Taliban and Al-Qaeda successfully turned the them against the state. They accomplished this by launching terrorist attacks within Pakistan, in turn forcing the army to launch military operations in FATA, previously designated as no-go areas for them.

The United States are currently engaged in peace talks with the Taliban. They have also pushed Pakistan to continue its military operations in these areas, inadvertently providing new opportunities to radicalise elements within FATA. This is a wake up call for Pakistan. They should be making intensive use of non-military strategies and projects. Haqooq-e-Balochistan should be given to the tribal areas of Balochistan, and the needs of the tribes must be treated in the same way as those of other Pakistani citizens. Quality education, implementation of proper security measures and job opportunities can transform this region from an extremist to a moderate hub. The US has to realize that assisting the development of FATA will be a benefit to their own cause. So called ‘Reconstruction Opportunity Zones’ can be very helpful if implemented properly. There is a growing recognition that well-off tribesman will not become the tools of terrorist organizations. This approach will damage those terrorist activities around the globe that take place under the banner of “Global Jihad”. More

 

Israel’s Secret Staging Ground

In 2009, the deputy chief of mission of the U.S. embassy in Baku, Donald Lu, sent a cable to the State Department's headquarters in Foggy Bottom titled "Azerbaijan's discreet symbiosis with Israel." The memo, later released by WikiLeaks, quotes Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev as describing his country's relationship with the Jewish state as an iceberg: "nine-tenths of it is below the surface."

Why does it matter? Because Azerbaijan is strategically located on Iran's northern border and, according to several high-level sources I've spoken with inside the U.S. government, Obama administration officials now believe that the "submerged" aspect of the Israeli-Azerbaijani alliance -- the security cooperation between the two countries -- is heightening the risks of an Israeli strike on Iran.

In particular, four senior diplomats and military intelligence officers say that the United States has concluded that Israel has recently been granted access to airbases on Iran's northern border. To do what, exactly, is not clear. "The Israelis have bought an airfield," a senior administration official told me in early February, "and the airfield is called Azerbaijan."

Senior U.S. intelligence officials are increasingly concerned that Israel's military expansion into Azerbaijan complicates U.S. efforts to dampen Israeli-Iranian tensions, according to the sources. Military planners, I was told, must now plan not only for a war scenario that includes the Persian Gulf -- but one that could include the Caucasus. The burgeoning Israel-Azerbaijan relationship has also become a flashpoint in both countries' relationship with Turkey, a regional heavyweight that fears the economic and political fallout of a war with Iran. Turkey's most senior government officials have raised their concerns with their U.S. counterparts, as well as with the Azeris, the sources said. More

 

Israel: Possible Military Strike Against Iran’s Nuclear Facilities

Several published reports indicate that top Israeli decisionmakers now are seriously consideringwhether to order a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and if so, when.

Twice in Israel’shistory, it has conducted air strikes aimed at halting or delaying what Israeli policymakersbelieved to be efforts to acquire nuclear weapons by a Middle Eastern state—destroying Iraq’sOsirak reactor in 1981 and a facility the Israelis identified as a reactor under construction in Syriain 2007. Today, Israeli officials generally view the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran as anunacceptable threat to Israeli security—with some viewing it as an existential threat.

This report analyzes key factors that may influence current Israeli political decisions relating to apossible strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. These include, but are not limited to, the views of andrelationships among Israeli leaders; the views of the Israeli public; U.S., regional, andinternational stances and responses as perceived and anticipated by Israel; Israeli estimates of thepotential effectiveness and risks of a possible strike; and responses Israeli leaders anticipate fromIran and Iranian-allied actors—including Hezbollah and Hamas—regionally and internationally.

For Congress, the potential impact—short- and long-term—of an Israeli decision regarding Iranand its implementation is a critical issue of concern. By all accounts, such an attack could haveconsiderable regional and global security, political, and economic repercussions, not least for theUnited States, Israel, and their bilateral relationship. It is unclear what the ultimate effect of astrike would be on the likelihood of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. The current Israeligovernment, President Barack Obama, and many Members of Congress have shared concernsabout Iran’s nuclear program. They appear to have a range of views on how best to address thoseshared concerns. Iran maintains that its nuclear program is solely for peaceful, civilian energypurposes, and U.S. intelligence assessments say that Iran has not made a decision to build nuclearweapons. However, Iran continues to enrich uranium in militarily hardened sites and questionsremain about its nuclear weapons capabilities and intentions. More

 

Playing Politics With Nuclear Security

When a Republican president negotiates reductions in nuclear arsenals, it is statecraft; when a Democratic president does the same, it is treason. That, at least, is the position advanced this week by several leading Republican politicians and their political advisors.

In his remarks at Hankuk University in Seoul last weekend, President Barack Obama again stated his desire to modernize US national security and jettison outdated weapons and strategies. He said:

The massive nuclear arsenal we inherited from the Cold War is poorly suited to today’s threats, including nuclear terrorism. I firmly believe that we can ensure the security of the United States and our allies, maintain a strong deterrent against any threat, and still pursue further reductions in our nuclear arsenal.

This is not a view unique to the president. It represents the broad, bipartisan consensus of America’s national security establishment. Most military and defense leaders recognize that nuclear weapons serve little purpose in the 21st century other than deterring other nations from attacking us with nuclear weapons. That mission does not require the thousands of weapons currently deployed.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell explained two years ago the evolution in his thinking that tracks closely with the views of many senior security experts today:

I became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1989 and I had 28,000 nuclear weapons under my supervision. Every morning I looked to see where the Russian submarines were off the coast of Virginia and how far away those missions were from Washington. I kept track where the Russian missiles were in Europe and in the Soviet Union.

The one thing that I convinced myself after all these years of exposure to the use of nuclear weapons is that they were useless. They could not be used.

If you can have deterrence with an even lower number of weapons, well then why stop there, why not continue on, why not get rid of them altogether…This is the moment when we have to move forward and all of us come together to reduce the number of nuclear weapons and eliminate them from the face of the earth. More

 

Empires Then And Now

Great empires, such as the Roman and British, were extractive. The empires succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance. The reason Rome did not extend its empire east into Germany was not the military prowess of Germanic tribes but Rome's calculation that the cost of conquest exceeded the value of extractable resources.

The Roman empire failed, because Romans exhausted manpower and resources in civil wars fighting amongst themselves for power. The British empire failed, because the British exhausted themselves fighting Germany in two world wars.

In his book, The Rule of Empires (2010), Timothy H. Parsons replaces the myth of the civilizing empire with the truth of the extractive empire. He describes the successes of the Romans, the Umayyad Caliphate, the Spanish in Peru, Napoleon in Italy, and the British in India and Kenya in extracting resources. To lower the cost of governing Kenya, the British instigated tribal consciousness and invented tribal customs that worked to British advantage.

Parsons does not examine the American empire, but in his introduction to the book he wonders whether America's empire is really an empire as the Americans don't seem to get any extractive benefits from it. After eight years of war and attempted occupation of Iraq, all Washington has for its efforts is several trillion dollars of additional debt and no Iraqi oil. After ten years of trillion dollar struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Washington has nothing to show for it except possibly some part of the drug trade that can be used to fund covert CIA operations.

America's wars are very expensive. Bush and Obama have doubled the national debt, and the American people have no benefits from it. No riches, no bread and circuses flow to Americans from Washington's wars. So what is it all about? More

 

Increased solar power use in Pakistan

Pakistani teacher Kashif shows solar geysers on the roof of his seminary in Murree. From mosques, to homes to street lights, Pakistanis are increasingly seeing the light and realising that year-round sun may be a quick and cheap answer to an enormous energy crisis.

 

Pakistan needs to produce 16,000 megawatts of electricity to cater for daily demand, but falls short by providing only 13,000 megawatts, according to the state-owned Pakistan Electric Power Company. More

Pakistan would be very smart if the encouraged investment in Alternative Energy (AE) now for a number of reasons. The most obvious being the shortage of electricity and the second and perhpas more important being the fact that oil prices are going to keep escalating making it more difficult for Pakistani's to afford electricity in the future. Editor.

 

 

 

Obama to seek easing of strains with Pakistan's Gilani

SEOUL (Reuters) - The White House made clear on Monday that President Barack Obama would seek to put strained relations with Pakistan on a more even footing when he meets Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani at the end of a nuclear security summit in Seoul.

The meeting on Tuesday will be the highest-level contact between the uneasy allies since U.S. commandos killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani military town in May last year, a raid Pakistan called a violation of its sovereignty.

Ties plunged to a new low in November when aircraft from NATO’s Afghanistan force mistakenly attacked two Pakistani border posts and killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.

“There obviously has been a fairly turbulent period in U.S.-Pakistan relations over the course of the last several months,” U.S. deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters in Seoul on Monday.

“We’ll want to address the state of the relationship.”

He said Obama would assure Gilani of “our continued interest in counter-terrorism cooperation” with Pakistan and stress shared interests in stabilizing neighboring Afghanistan.

The Pakistani leader would bring up a parliamentary review that has been drawing up recommendations on how to proceed on ties with Washington, Rhodes said.

Pakistan’s cooperation is considered critical to U.S. efforts to stabilize Afghanistan before most foreign combat troops leave at the end of 2014. Pakistan has strong traditional links with the Afghan Taliban and other militant groups. More

 

Pakistan lawmakers to debate end to U.S. drone strikes

Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) -- Pakistan's parliament reconvenes Monday to debate a committee's recommendation that the United States stop drone strikes inside its territory and apologize unconditionally for airstrikes last year that killed two dozen soldiers.

"No entity in Pakistan, in this current government, because I can only speak for this government, has ever given any tacit agreement to the authorization of drone strikes," said Hina Rabbani Khar, the Pakistani foreign minister.

The Parliamentary Committee on National Security, a group of 18 members of parliament members responsible for reviewing relations with the United States, made the recommendation in a report to lawmakers Tuesday.

"No overt or covert operations inside Pakistan shall be tolerated," the report said. More

 

Keep focus on nuclear security

More than 53 heads of state and representatives from four international organizations will attend the second Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul on Monday and Tuesday. They will take stock of the progress they have made in implementing the communiqu and work plan agreed at the first summit in Washington D.C. in April 2010 and endeavor to agree on substantial new measures that will be reflected in the communiqu released at the end of this summit.

But the original aim of these summits, strengthening global nuclear material security through national and cooperative measures, seems to have taken a back seat to a new focus on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear safety.

While the mandate of the first summit was to evolve national mechanisms to secure or dispose of nuclear and radioactive materials and prevent their trafficking, the attention of participants at the second summit has already shifted to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and Iran, thanks to its staging in Seoul,

Although neither the DPRK nor Iran has been invited to attend, various comments in the lead-up to the summit have been frontloading the challenge of the DPRK and Iran's nuclear issues, and some of the leaders will be tempted to raise these issues, even if only on the sidelines of the summit. Particularly the United States, as President Barack Obama will no doubt want to play to the media with the presidential election on the horizon.

In addition, given the backdrop of the crisis at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant following the tsunami in Japan last March, the focus of the summit has shifted from the security of nuclear materials to the safety of nuclear installations. The Republic of Korea is an emerging exporter of nuclear technologies and this is likely to see the summit deliberating on the need to ensure the safety of nuclear power facilities. Several other influential leaders will also be carrying this message from their powerful domestic lobbies. The US has recently revived - after a freeze of three decades - its nuclear reactor manufacturing with a new project now sanctioned for Georgia. More

 

Report Finds NSS Process on Track, But More Work To Do

(Washington, D.C.) An independent report released today ahead of the March 26-27, 2012 Nuclear Security Summit in Seoul finds that states are on track to meet most of the national commitments they made in 2010 to improve the security of nuclear-weapons usable materials worldwide, but that more work, political will, and financial resources are still required to address the ongoing challenge of safeguarding nuclear material.

"States have made significant progress on their 2010 summit national commitments, but that is only half of the story," said Michelle Cann, Senior Budget and Policy Analyst at Partnership for Global Security (PGS) and co-author of the report.

"The commitments on the books will not get the job done. To prevent nuclear terrorism in the years ahead, the global nuclear security system must grow and adapt to new threats," she said.

"Substantial work remains if the summit process is to meet its goal of securing all vulnerable nuclear materials," said Kelsey Davenport, Herbert J. Scoville Peace Fellow at the Arms Control Association (ACA) and co-author of the report.

"The 2010 summit focused attention and galvanized action to better secure nuclear materials, but the actions states took on were never meant to be comprehensive. It would be a huge missed opportunity if states do not make significant new commitments and adopt higher nuclear security standards in Seoul to better safeguard vulnerable nuclear material," she said.

The report, The Nuclear Security Summit: Assessment of National Commitments, published jointly by ACA and PGS, concludes that approximately 80 percent of the 67 national commitments made by 30 global leaders at the 2010 summit in Washington have been completed.

The Seoul Nuclear Security Summit is expected to review states' progress on implementing their commitments and to set the course for future efforts to secure weapons-usable nuclear materials. A third summit is planned for the Netherlands in 2014.

"There is a danger that early successes of the summit process will lead to complacency," said Cann. "It is important to recognize that the nuclear security challenge will not be solved once the 2010 commitments are completed. The Seoul summit must acknowledge that nuclear material security is a long-term challenge that will require stable funding and a global commitment," she said.

"A core achievement of the 2010 summit was that the 47 nations in attendance reached consensus that nuclear terrorism is among the top global security challenges and that strong nuclear material security measures are the most effective way to prevent it," said Davenport. "As a result, vitally important progress has been achieved across the globe," she said. More

 

The False Debate About Attacking Iran

I WONDER if we in the news media aren’t inadvertently leaving the impression that there is a genuine debate among experts about whether an Israeli military strike on Iran makes sense this year.

There really isn’t such a debate. Or rather, it’s the same kind of debate as the one about climate change — credible experts are overwhelmingly on one side.

Here’s what a few of them told me:

“I don’t know any security expert who is recommending a military strike on Iran at this point,” noted Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton University professor who was a senior State Department official earlier in the Obama administration.

“Unless you’re so far over on the neocon side that you’re blind to geopolitical realities, there’s an overwhelming consensus that this is a bad idea,” said W. Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle East affairs for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“Most security experts agree that it’s premature to go to a military option,” said Michèle Flournoy, who has just stepped down as the No. 3 official in the Defense Department. “We are in the middle of increasing sanctions on Iran. Iran is already under the most onerous sanctions it has ever experienced, and now we’re turning the screws further with sanctions that will touch their central bank, sanctions that will touch their oil products and so forth.

“So it has been bad for them and it’s about to get worse,” Flournoy added. “The overwhelming consensus is we should give some time to let that work.” More

 

What Seoul can and can’t achieve

‘Beyond Security, Towards Peace’: the official slogan of next week’s Nuclear Security Summit is plastered around Seoul. And as South Korea prepares to host the largest gathering of world leaders on its soil, hopes are high for significant agreements aimed at protecting nuclear materials, including preventing them from falling into the hands of terrorists.

However, the summit is already being overshadowed by North Korea’s planned satellite launch next month. Furthermore, while the agenda will include measures to better protect nuclear weapons-grade materials and nuclear facilities – as well as to prevent the illicit trafficking of nuclear materials – a weak international governance framework makes it virtually impossible for summits like these to effectively eliminate the nuclear-security threat.

When not trying to galvanise action against his northern neighbour’s proposed satellite launch, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak has pledged that the summit will produce ‘more advanced and concrete’ results than the 2010 summit in Washington (pictured). These are likely to include a consensus pledge to minimise the use of highly enriched uranium (HEU) in civilian research reactors (although the time frame might not be finalised), and a promise on the part of more than ten countries to remove or eliminate their own weapons-grade materials. However, it could be six to ten yearsbefore these commitments are fulfilled.

The threat of radiological terrorism will be addressed for the first time at this political level. This discussion is much-needed given the abundance of radioactive sources and the disruption that can be caused by their dispersal. The importance of protecting sensitive nuclear-security information (such as the know-how for building bombs) will be also examined.

Though the chances are remote, in a worst-case scenario, a well-equipped terrorist group armed with about 60kg of HEU could produce a nuclear weapon of similar design and effect as the Hiroshima bomb. The global stockpile of HEU is estimated at about 1,440 tonnes, while that of weapons-grade plutonium is thought to be about 241 tonnes (although a plutonium weapon is harder to make). Not all material is secured to the highest standards. HEU is used in about 120 civil nuclear research reactors worldwide and these are less secure than military sites. More

 

Underground Facilities: Intelligence and Targeting Issues

U.S. Intelligence : Hiding of Military Assets by "Rogue Nations" and Other States a Major Security Challenge for 21^st Century - U.S. Documents Describe Monitoring Effort Going Back to Early Cold War Years

Washington, D.C., March 23, 2012 – A central element of the current debate over how to deal with Iran's nuclear program has focused on the possible difficulty of destroying the Qom underground uranium enrichment facility via air strikes. However, documents posted today by the National Security Archive show that Qom is only the latest in a long series of alleged and real underground facilities that for decades have been a high priority challenge for U.S. and allied intelligence collection and analysis efforts, as well as for military planners.

The documents featured in this posting describe in detail the agencies and programs the U.S. government has brought to the task of identifying and assessing underground structures in foreign countries since World War II. Internal records indicate there are more than 10,000 such facilities worldwide, many of them in hostile territory, and many presumably intended to hide or protect lethal military equipment and activities, including weapons of mass destruction, that could threaten U.S. or allied interests.

The records (and introductory essay by Archive Fellow Jeffrey T. Richelson) also discuss the vast complexities of gathering and analyzing intelligence on these facilities, and detail several of the highly technical methods U.S. agencies have developed for the purpose over time.

Introduction: "Underground Facilities: Intelligence and Targeting Issues"

By Jeffrey T. Richelson

A central element of the current debate over how to deal with Iran's nuclear program has focused on the possible difficulty of destroying the Qom underground uranium enrichment facility via air strikes.¹ But documents posted today by the National Security Archive show that Qom is only the latest in a long series of alleged and real underground facilities that for decades have been a high priority challenge for U.S. and allied intelligence collection and analysis efforts, as well as for military planners.

Such challenges go back to at least the Second World War. In August 1943, the Germans, in the face of allied aerial attacks, decided to move production of their A-4 (V-2) rocket to an underground facility near Nordhausen. By late 1944, British intelligence was reporting that the facility was producing over thirty rockets a day, while the British Chiefs of Staff wanted to know the feasibility of a bombing campaign to halt or seriously impair production. In her memoirs, Constance Babington-Smith reported examining aerial photographs of Kahla, in the Thuringian Hills, and finding evidence of an underground jet-fighter factory.^{2 More}

 

Report warns of water shortage may be used as a weapon between states

WASHINGTON -- Fresh-water shortages and more droughts and floods will increase the likelihood that water will be used as a weapon between states or to further terrorist aims in key strategic areas, including the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa, a U.S. intelligence assessment released Thursday says.

Although "water-related state conflict" is unlikely in the next 10 years, the assessment says, continued shortages after that might begin to affect U.S. national security interests.

The assessment is drawn from a classified National Intelligence Estimate distributed to policymakers in October. Although the unclassified version does not mention problems in specific countries, it describes "strategically important water basins" tied to rivers in several regions.

These include the Nile, which runs through 10 countries in central and northeastern Africa before traveling through Egypt into the Mediterranean Sea; the Tigris-Euphrates in Turkey, Syria and Iraq; the Jordan, long the subject of dispute among Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians; and the Indus, whose catchment area includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Tibet.

"As water problems become more acute, the likelihood ... is that states will use them as leverage," said a senior U.S. intelligence official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity. As the midpoint of the century nears, he said, there is an increasing likelihood that water will be "potentially used as a weapon, where one state denies access to another."

"Because terrorists are looking for high-visibility structures to attack," the official said, "water infrastructure" could become a target.

Release of the assessment coincides with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's scheduled announcement of a new public-private program to use U.S. knowledge and leverage to help find "solutions to global water accessibility challenges, especially in the developing world," a State Department release said.

The assessment was compiled by the office of the Director of National Intelligence, with contributions from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA and other agencies. It assumed, as a starting point, that there would be "no big breakthroughs" in water technology over the next decade and that countries would continue their present water policies. More

 

Nuclear watchdog chief accused of pro-western bias over Iran

Former officials warn of parallels between IAEA approach to Iran and mistakes over Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the nuclear watchdog at the heart of the growing Iranian crisis, has been accused by several former senior officials of pro-western bias, over-reliance on unverified intelligence and of sidelining sceptics.

Yukiya Amano, a veteran Japanese diplomat, took command of the IAEA in July 2009. Since then, the west’s confrontation with Iran over its nuclear programme has deepened and threats of military action by Israel and the US have become more frequent.

At the same time, the IAEA’s reports on Iranian behaviour have become steadily more critical. In November, it published an unprecedented volume of intelligence pointing towards past Iranian work on developing a nuclear weapon, deeming it credible.

However, some former IAEA officials are saying that the agency has gone too far. Robert Kelley, a former US weapons scientists who ran the IAEA action team on Iraq at the time of the US-led invasion, said there were worrying parallels between the west’s mistakes over Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction then and the IAEA’s assessment of Iran now.

“Amano is falling into the Cheney trap. What we learned back in 2002 and 2003, when we were in the runup to the war, was that peer review was very important, and that the analysis should not be left to a small group of people,” Kelley said.

“So what have we learned since then? Absolutely nothing. Just like [former US vice-president] Dick Cheney, Amano is relying on a very small group of people and those opinions are not being checked.”

Other former officials have also raised concern that the current IAEA is becoming an echo chamber, focused on suspicions over Iran’s programme, without the vigorous debate that characterised the era of Amano’s predecessor Mohamed ElBaradei.

They point to Amano’s decision, in March last year, to dissolve the agency’s office of external relations and policy co-ordination (Expo), which under ElBaradei had second-guessed some of the judgments made by the safeguards department inspectors. More

 

Flooding Mitigation for Pakistan

How Much Will it Cost to Save Our Economy’s Foundation?

Lester R. Brown - Earth Policy Institute

During the past two summers, Pakistan was hit with catastrophic floods. The record flooding in the late summer of 2010 was the most devastating natural disaster in Pakistan’s history. The media coverage reported torrential rains as the cause, but there is much more to the story. When Pakistan was created in 1947, some 30 percent of the landscape was covered by forests. Now it is 4 percent. Pakistan’s livestock herd outnumbers that of the United States. With little forest still standing and the countryside grazed bare, there was scant vegetation to retain the rainfall.

Pakistan, with 185 million people squeezed into an area only slightly larger than Texas, is an ecological basket case. If it cannot restore its forests and grazing lands, it will only suffer more “natural” disasters in the future. Pakistan’s experience demonstrates all too vividly why restoring the earth is an integral part of Earth Policy Institute’s Plan B to save civilization. Restoring the earth will take an enormous international effort, one far more demanding than the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild war-torn Europe and Japan after World War II. And such an initiative must be undertaken at wartime speed before environmental deterioration translates into economic decline, just as it did for the Sumerians, the Mayans, and many other early civilizations whose archeological sites we study today.

Our natural systems are the foundation of our economy. We can roughly estimate how much it will cost to reforest the earth, protect topsoil, restore rangelands and fisheries, stabilize water tables, and protect biological diversity. The goal is not to offer a set of precise numbers but rather to provide a set of reasonable estimates for an earth restoration budget.

In calculating reforestation costs, the focus is on developing countries, since forested area is already expanding in the northern hemisphere’s industrial countries. Meeting the growing fuelwood demand in developing countries plus conserving soils and restoring hydrological stability will require an estimated 380 million additional acres of forested area. Beyond this, an additional 75 million acres will be needed to produce lumber, paper, and other forest products.

If seedlings cost $40 per thousand, as the World Bank estimates, and if the typical planting density is roughly 800 per acre, then seedlings cost $32 per acre. Labor costs for planting trees are high, but since much of the labor would consist of locally mobilized volunteers, we are assuming a total of $160 per acre, including both seedlings and labor. With a total of 380 million acres to be planted over the next decade or so, this will come to roughly 38 million acres per year at $160 each for an annual expenditure of $6 billion. More

 

Water and Food Facts for World Water Day

March 22 is World Water Day, and its theme this year—water and food security—couldn’t be more pressing. But what do we really know about water—where it goes, what it’s used for, and how to preserve it? Here are a few water facts to get people thinking about what the “food and water crisis” really means, and how we can begin to change things.

Consumption

India, China and the United States together account for about one-third of the water extracted each year globally.

Over 90 percent of the water consumed globally by humans is used for agriculture.

Irrigation and Groundwater

Only 16 percent of world’s cropland is irrigated. But because irrigated land is more than twice as productive, that land accounts for 36 percent of the food we harvest.

To meet the constant demand for irrigation, countries are increasingly using more and more non-renewable groundwater. According to the United Nations, groundwater extraction has tripled in the last half century. India and China’s use of groundwater grew the most – today these countries use ten times as much groundwater as they did in 1950.

The amount of groundwater the world uses is so huge, it’s contributing to rising sea levels – as much as 25 percent of the observed amount in recent years. That means that an enormous amounts of water drawn from underground aquifers is never replaced. Or as Duke University’s Bill Chameides puts it, “Mankind is moving buckets and buckets of water from land to the ocean.”

The amount of groundwater the world uses is so huge that it’s also changing local climates, and it may bemasking the effects of global warming, according to research published in Climate Dynamics. This masking effect is most striking over North America, India, the Middle East and East Asia.

Pumping groundwater consumes enormous amounts of energy. In India, approximately one-fifth of the nation’s total electricity consumption goes toward pumping groundwater for irrigation. In the most important food producing areas, that number is much higher.

Virtual Water

Almost everything we do—from growing food, to making clothes and computers and automobiles, to generating electricity requires water. “Virtual water” refers to the amount of water it takes to produce and transport a commodity. Check your own water footprint here.

Many water-stressed nations are today virtual water exporters. India is the largest net exporter of virtual water.

Climate Change and the Future

According to the OECD, by 2030 almost half of the world’s population will be living under severe water stress.

Globally, heat waves and extreme drought could increase under climate change. The impact will be worse in some areas. According to research by Lamont-Doherty scientists at the Earth Institute, by mid-century dustbowl conditions seen in the 1930s will become the new norm for the southwestern United States.

Water stress threatens the grid. Conventional powerplants – hydroelectric, coal-fired, gas fired and nuclear—require tremendous volumes of water to run, accounting for 50 percent of water withdrawals in the United States. According to a study for the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, the convergence of population growth, rising demand and drought could cause huge water shortages and force powerplant shutdowns.

What You Can Do

Think about diet. The amount of water it takes to produce different kinds of food various tremendously. The water footprint of beef is particularly egregious, consuming anywhere from 2500 to 5000 gallons of water per pound. Consider cutting back, or switching to grass-fed beef, which has a significantly lower water footprint. More

 

Past in Monsoon Changes Linked to Major Shifts in Indian Civilizations

ScienceDaily (Mar. 16, 2012) — A fundamental shift in the Indian monsoon has occurred over the last few millennia, from a steady humid monsoon that favored lush vegetation to extended periods of drought, reports a new study led by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). The study has implications for our understanding of the monsoon’s response to climate change.

The Indian peninsula sustains over a billion people, yet it lies at the same latitude as the Sahara Desert. Without a monsoon, most of India would be dry and uninhabitable. The ability to predict the timing and amount of the next year’s monsoon is vital, yet even our knowledge of the monsoon’s past variability remains incomplete.

One key to this understanding lies in the core monsoon zone (CMZ) – a region in the central part of India that is a very sensitive indicator of the monsoon throughout the India peninsula.

“If you know what’s happening there, you know more or less what’s happening in the rest of India,” said Camilo Ponton, a student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography and lead author of the study recently published in Geophysical Research Letters entitled "Holocene Aridification of India". “Our biggest problem has been a lack of evidence from this region to extend the short, existing records.”

The study was designed by WHOI geologist Liviu Giosan and geochemist Tim Eglinton, now at ETH in Zurich, and makes use of a sediment core collected by the National Gas Hydrate Program of India in 2006. Sailing around India aboard the drilling vessel JOIDES Resolution for several months, Giosan enlisted colleagues from India and US to help with the project. Extracted from a “sweet spot” in the Bay of Bengal where the Godavari River drains the central Indian peninsula and over which monsoon winds carry most of the precipitation, the core has provided the basis for a 10,000-year reconstruction of climate in the Indian peninsula’s CMZ .

“We are fortunate to have this core from close to the river mouth, where it accumulates sediment very fast,” said Ponton. “Every centimeter of sediment contains 10 to 20 years’ worth of information. So it gives us the advantage of high temporal resolution to address the problems.”

When put together, the research tells the story of growing aridity in India, enables valuable insights into the impact of the monsoon on past cultures, and points scientists toward a way to model future monsoons.

To assemble the 10,000-year record, the team looked to both what the land and the ocean could tell them. Contained within the sediment core’s layers are microscopic compounds from the trees, grasses, and shrubs that lived in the region and remnants of plankton fossils from the ocean.

“The geochemical analyses of the leaf waxes tell a simple story,” said Giosan. “About 10,000 years ago to about 4500 ago, the Godavari River drained mostly terrain that had humidity-loving plants. Stepwise changes starting at around 4,000 years ago and again after 1,700 years ago changed the flora toward aridity-adapted plants. That tells us that central India – the core monsoon zone – became drier.”

Analyses of the plankton fossils support the story reconstructed from plant remains and reveal a record of unprecedented spikes and troughs in the Bay of Bengal’s salinity – becoming saltier during drought periods and fresher when water from the monsoon filled the river and rained into the Bay. Similar drought periods have been documented in shorter records from tree rings and cave stalagmites within India lending further support to this interpretation.

With a picture emerging of changes in the ancient flora of India, Giosan tapped archaeobotanist Dorian Fuller’s interest.

“What the new paleo-climatic information makes clear is that the shift towards more arid conditions around 4,000 years ago corresponds to the time when agricultural populations expanded and settled village life began,” says Fuller of the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. “Arid-adapted food production is an old cultural tradition in the region, with cultivation of drought-tolerant millets and soil-restoring bean species. There may be lessons to learn here, as these drought-tolerant agricultural traditions have eroded over the past century, with shift towards more water and chemical intensive forms of modern agriculture.”

Together, the geological record and the archaeological evidence tell a story of the possible fate of India’s earliest civilizations. Cultural changes occurred across the Indian subcontinent as the climate became more arid after ~4,000 years. In the already dry Indus basin, the urban Harappan civilization failed to adapt to even harsher conditions and slowly collapsed. But aridity favored an increase in sophistication in the central and south India where tropical forest decreased in extent and people began to settle and do more agriculture. Human resourcefulness proved again crucial in the rapid proliferation of rain-collecting water tanks across the Indian peninsula, just as the long series of droughts settled in over the last 1,700 years.

What can this record tell us about future Indian monsoons? According to Ponton, “How the monsoon will behave in the future is highly controversial. Our research provides clues for modeling and that could help determine whether the monsoon will increase or decrease with global warming.”

The study found that the type of monsoon and its droughts are a function of the Northern Hemisphere’s incoming solar radiation – or “insolation.” Every year, the band of heavy rain known as the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone, or ITCZ, moves north over India.

“We found that when the Asian continent is least heated by the sun, the northward movement of the rain appears to hesitate between the Equator and Asia, bringing less rain to the north,” said Giosan. “The fact that long droughts have not occurred over the last 100 years or so, as humans started to heat up the planet, but did occur earlier, suggest that we changed the entire monsoon game, and may have inadvertently made it more stable!” More

 

IAEA: significant nuclear growth despite Fukushima | Reuters

VIENNA - Global use of nuclear energy could increase by as much as 100 percent in the next two decades on the back of growth in Asia, even though groundbreakings for new reactors fell last year after the Fukushima disaster, a U.N. report says.

The report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has not yet been made public but has been seen by Reuters, said a somewhat slower capacity expansion than previously forecast is likely after the world’s worst nuclear accident in a quarter of a century.

But, it said: “Significant growth in the use of nuclear energy worldwide is still anticipated — between 35 percent and 100 percent by 2030 — although the Agency projections for 2030 are 7-8 percent lower than projections made in 2010.”

Japan’s reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear plant triggered by a deadly earthquake and tsunami on March 11 last year shook the nuclear world and raised a question mark over whether atomic energy is safe.

Germany, Switzerland and Belgium decided to move away from nuclear power to grow reliance on renewable energy instead.

The IAEA document, obtained by Reuters on Friday, said the number of new reactor construction starts fell to only three last year - two in Pakistan and one in India - from 16 in 2010.

Also last year, 13 reactors were officially declared as permanently shut down, including the four units at Fukushima as well as eight in Germany.

“This represents the highest number of shutdowns since 1990, when the Chernobyl accident had a similar effect,” the Vienna-based U.N. agency said in its annual Nuclear Technology Review. “As a comparison, 2010 saw only one shutdown and 2009 three.”

In 1986, a reactor exploded and caught fire at Chernobyl in the then Soviet Union, sending radiation billowing across Europe.

TEMPORARY DELAYS?

At Fukushima one year ago, fires and explosions caused a full meltdown in three reactors while a fourth was also damaged.

Today, the four reactors are in a stable, cold shutdown state and clean-up of the site continues, but the final phase of decommissioning will not happen for 30 or 40 years.

Almost all of Japan’s 54 reactors sit idle, awaiting approvals to restart.

“The 7-8 percent drop in projected growth for 2030 reflects an accelerated phase-out of nuclear power in Germany, some immediate shutdowns and a government review of the planned expansion in Japan, as well as temporary delays in expansion in several other countries,” the IAEA report said.

But many countries are still pushing ahead with nuclear energy, with 64 reactors under construction at the end of 2011, most of them in Asia, said the document prepared for a closed-door meeting of the IAEA’s 35-nation board last week.

Factors that had contributed to growing interest in nuclear energy before Fukushima - increasing demand for energy, concerns about climate change, energy security and uncertainty about fossil fuel supplies - had not changed, it said.

“In countries considering the introduction of nuclear power, interest remained strong. Although some countries indicated that they would delay decisions to start nuclear power programs, others continued with their plans to introduce nuclear energy.”

China and India are expected to remain the main centers of expansion in Asia and Russia is also forecast to see strong growth, it said. More

 

India has been criticized for not doing enough to pressure Iran. But Delhi has sound economic and domestic reasons for what it’s doing.

The signing of the 2006 civilian nuclear deal was supposed to be emblematic of a burgeoning strategic relationship between India and the United States. After some forty or so years of frosty relations, the beginning of the 21st Century saw leaders in Washington and Delhi touting a grand strategic partnership.

To realize this, the George W. Bush and Manmohan Singh administrations courted great political risk in taking on the entrenched mindsets opposed to the nuclear agreement.

In Washington, opposition from the non-proliferation community nearly sank the deal during negotiations. In Delhi, the signing of the deal was so controversial it almost brought down the Congress Party’s coalition government in the 2008 vote in parliament. An upside to the tortuous negotiations was supposedly the empathy and understanding Indian and U.S. diplomats developed for the political constraints the other side operates under.

The Indian policy establishment and strategic community were therefore taken aback when Nicholas Burns, former undersecretary of state and the chief American negotiator on the nuclear deal, slammed India for its Iran policy in The Diplomat. Having reaffirmed India’s “immense strategic importance to the United States” in the Boston Globe a mere 10 days prior, Burns now argued that Delhi’s unwillingness to support U.S.-led sanctions amounted to a failure “to meet its obvious potential to lead globally,” thereby equating, in a spurious sort of way, India’s leadership ambitions with toeing the American line. Despite recognizing some of India’s votes against Iran at the U.N., Ambassador Burns went further in accusing India of “actively impeding the construction of the strategic relationship it says it wants with the United States.” More