Thursday, July 30, 2015
Well That’s Embarrassing: Israel May Be Indirectly Giving Weapons to Iran
Israel has repeatedly expressed its opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, citing fears of an attack. But Tel Aviv may be inadvertently supplying Tehran with its own military technology, thanks to a deal between Tehran and the Chinese government.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been one of the most vocal opponents of the Iran nuclear deal, seeing his nation as a prime target should its nemesis use the lifting of sanctions to develop nuclear weapons.
"They’re going to get hundreds of billions of dollars to fuel their terror and military machine," he told NBC News earlier this month.
Most other nations of the world agree that Iran poses no threat, and is only interested in developing nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. But even if Netanyahu is correct, he appears to be contributing to the very threat he’s warned against.
According to Israeli military website Debka File, Iran is finalizing a deal with the Chinese government for the purchase of 150 Chengdu J-10 "Vigorous Dragon" fighter jets. That plane comes in both single-seat and two-seat versions, is ideal for both ground assaults and electronic warfare, and is evidently identical to the Lavi fighter designed by Israeli aerospace companies.
Unveiled by the People’s Liberation Army Air Force in 2006, many military experts immediately noticed its resemblance to the Lavi, a jet developed jointly by Israel and the United States in the 1980s, but which never saw production.
How did the Chinese government end up with the blueprints? Israel allegedly sold them the plans directly.
"…After Israel discontinued the largely US-funded project, it sold China the plans for the Lavi and the associated secret US technology," military affairs writer Tim Kennedy wrote for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in 1996.
That decision, naturally, upset officials in Washington, angered that the US had now inadvertently aided the Chinese military.
Of course, now that those planes are going to find their way into the hands of Iran, everything seems to have come full circle.
Tehran is also reportedly weighing purchasing options from other nations. It may buy 250 Sukhoi-Su-30 "Flanker H" fighter jets from Moscow. This followed a purchase earlier this month of 100 Midas in-flight refueling planes from Russia.
But as far we know, Israel didn’t have anything to do with those.
Read more: http://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20150731/1025235830.html#ixzz3hQktAmlJ
Commentary: What’s Behind Saudi Arabia’s Connection to IS?
By Ben Rich
Many claim that the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Islamic State (IS) is one of patron and client. IS, they argue, is a pawn of the Saudi regime, used to check the “rising” Shiite power of Iran in the Middle East.
This allegation typically presents certain shared principles between the official Saudi interpretation of Islam and the doctrine motivating IS as damning evidence of complicity between the two.
Although there is a certain truth to this, it assumes a wilful agency on Saudi Arabia’s part that simply isn’t there. Saudi citizens supporting IS’s activities in Iraq and Syria are not the result of a coherent plan directed by the kingdom’s rulers, but the overflow of a long-standing system used to maintain its domestic legitimacy.
Evolution of state control
The Saudi state has relied on the ultra-conservative Wahhabi movement since both emerged in the mid-18th century.
Wahhabism was built on the desire to stamp out religious innovation and restore the “proper” Islam. Its initial power rested on two sources – the common distaste among the inhabitants of Central Arabia for such innovation and preacher Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab’s ability to channel this grievance into a populist doctrine.
The call produced something never encountered before in the region: a proper mass movement.
The Saudis, a small clan of oasis nobility, formed a symbiotic relationship with Wahhab. It lent him military support in return for the movement’s resources and legitimacy. Wahhab agreed to defer all matters of state and politics, restricting clerical activities to administering the social and metaphysical spheres.
As “guardians” of Islam, the Saudis were able to differentiate themselves from their local competitors. Revivalism attached a mass appeal to their mission of conquest in an environment typified by disparate local identities and “petty sheikhs.” The resultant state came to be viewed as key to safeguarding the Wahhabi community, a central factor in its expansion over much of the Arabian Peninsula by the late 19th century.
Realising the importance of the ongoing ideological support of its subjects, the Saudi regime sought to instil Wahhabism throughout conquered territories. The primary motivation for Saudi leaders was political. By instilling the revivalist identity into greater numbers of its subjects, the state was creating demand for its own rule.
Key to this effort was the securitisation of heterodox sects, such as the Shiites. These “others” were presented as a threat to the community’s metaphysical integrity due to their inauthentic practices, which were not encountered during Islam’s early period. The logic dictated that their existence necessitated a higher authority to moderate society and ensure the correct Islamic form was maintained.
This is hardly a novel concept. States commonly construct threats of external war and terror in order to gain domestic power. A by-product of such activities has often been the rise of destructive exclusivist nationalism and xenophobia.
Where the Saudi state remains novel is in its use of a purely metaphysical threat, the extent that it has relied on this to maintain its position, and the longevity of the effort itself.
Glitches in the system
The state’s arms have commonly been employed to ensure this status quo. Saudi Arabia’s education system has been criticized for promoting a radicalizing, sectarian narrative that encourages violence against those outside the sanctioned community.
But while Saudi Arabia has carefully crafted an image as Islam’s protector, it nevertheless has aimed to keep policymaking pragmatic, not ideological. Decisions of economic and foreign policy have tended to be dominated by technocrats, not clerics. In this, religion is often invoked, but generally when it is instrumental to a wider political goal.
Ironically, for Saudis this arrangement has meant that the state has been a prominent promoter of the “innovation” so detested in classical revivalist thought.
This tension has occasionally produced outbreaks of violence. The 1927 Ikhwan revolt was sparked in part by King Abd al-Aziz’s refusal to exterminate the Shiites of Al-Hasa and his diplomatic relations with external “infidel” powers.
Similarly, the 1979 Siege of Mecca was a rejection of the previous two decades of radical modernization initiated by King Faisal. The 2003 attacks by Al-Qaeda inside Saudi Arabia were partially motivated by its accommodation of “infidels.”
Historically, this blowback has been largely domestic. Only since the 1990s have these types of unintended outcomes been felt internationally.
This shift can be attributed to several factors. The most prominent among them was Saudi Arabia’s tacit support for participation in the Afghanistan wars of the 1980s.
The primary motivation for this was not one of ideology, but political pragmatism. Saudi Arabia was experiencing an economic downturn in which household incomes fell by more than half and unemployment skyrocketed. At the same time the regime was struggling with a rising Islamist current in the wake of the Iranian revolution, which was increasingly calling into question its legitimacy to rule.
With a large number of disenfranchised young men at home, a rival power walking into a geopolitical beartrap and a need to appear to the Muslim community to be increasingly activist, the decision was aimed at killing three birds with one stone. Thanks to its strong influence over domestic Islamic identity, it took little encouragement to mobilize thousands of young Saudis into a conflict with a new infidel threat. Although Saudi Arabia began actively discouraging such behavior after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the genie had been let out of the bottle.
Saudis continued to flock to “pan-Islamic” conflicts throughout the 1990s and the 2000s – in Kosovo, Tajikistan, Chechnya, Iraq and, most recently, Syria. They gravitated towards religiously hard-line groups, whose ideologies meshed well with the sectarian narrative of their upbringing.
Treating the symptom, not the wound
While Saudi Arabia has made several attempts to stem the flow of fighters and finances to groups like IS, it has been careful not to appear overly oppressive for fear of antagonizing its own constituents. It may decry such groups, but it continues to promote a system that inadvertently supports them.
Revivalist scholars claim that Saudi Arabia’s doctrine is intrinsically opposed to the IS worldview. They cite esoteric textual minutiae to support such assertions. But such arguments miss a wider point: the issues at play are far less about literary nuance than the wider emotional, psychological and sociological themes that Saudi Arabia promotes in its populace.
Such structures created a demand for sectarian confrontation in some people that cannot be met by the state and which drives them towards radical action. Until such deeper issues are dealt with, other responses will merely be token.
Unfortunately, the domestic efficacy of Saudi Arabia’s control means that it is unlikely to be reformed any time soon. The state’s manipulation of its population’s sectarianism during the Arab Spring, for example, was key to its effective management of the 2011 crisis.
Within this wider context, the ruling elite see the extremist habits of a small number of Saudis as an unfortunate yet tolerable side-effect of a system that has allowed them to remain in power for nearly 300 years.
This certainly does not diminish the Saudi state’s culpability. But it does pose the question: how does one change an entire system of popular governance that inadvertently produces such outcomes and appears structurally incapable of preventing them?
Kerry Five-Nation Tour to Cover Security, Iran Nuclear Deal
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is launching a five-nation tour of the Middle East and South Asia on Friday in a bid to strengthen economic and security ties and ease concerns about the Iran nuclear deal.
Kerry will begin his trip in Cairo, where he and Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry will co-host a strategic dialogue, focusing on a broad range of issues.
“The real challenge for Secretary Kerry in his meetings in Egypt is how to discuss the regional picture — the regional fight against terrorism and the domestic situation in Egypt — and how the two fit together,” said Michele Dunne, a Middle East analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Warplanes to Egypt
Ahead of the trip, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo announced the U.S was delivering eight F-16 fighter jets to Egypt as part of “ongoing” support to Egypt and the region.
“The F-16s provide a valuable capability that is needed during these times of regional instability,” said Major General Charles Hooper, a senior U.S. Embassy defense official.
In March, President Barack Obama announced the U.S. was lifting a hold on U.S. military aid to Egypt that was put in place following the 2013 ouster of President Mohamed Morsi.
The U.S. provides Egypt with about $1.3 billion in annual military assistance.
Despite the resumption of aid, U.S. officials have continued to voice concerns about Egypt’s repression of Morsi supporters.
GCC concerns
In Qatar, Kerry will meet with the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, a group that has raised concerns that the Iran nuclear deal could be destabilizing to the region.
Some Gulf ministers fear that the sanctions relief for Iran, which would result from the country’s compliance with the deal, could empower Tehran to widen its influence in the region and broaden its support of militant groups.
Earlier this week, Kerry defended the Iran nuclear deal.
“I understand the fear,” said Kerry in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “But we believe what we have laid out here is a way of making Israel and the region, in fact, safer.”
It is uncertain whether Kerry will be able to allay Gulf allies' nuclear concerns about Iran, said Daniel Serwer, a Middle East Institute scholar and professor at Johns Hopkins University.
“It seems to me if I lived in the Gulf, I would feel a lot more comfortable with Iran backed off from nuclear weapons and not being able to pursue them for 10 or 15 years than I would without a deal,” he said.
Kerry, Lavrov in Doha
While in Doha, Kerry will also meet with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. They will discuss security issues, including efforts to combat Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.
State Department officials said they would also discuss the situation in Ukraine, where the government has been battling Russian-backed separatists.
On Thursday, the U.S. imposed more sanctions on individuals and entities in connection with the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
A U.S. Treasury Department official, acting Foreign Assets Control Director John Smith, said the action underscored U.S. resolve to “maintain pressure on Russia for violating international law and fueling the conflict in eastern Ukraine.”
State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the action was a way to strengthen existing sanctions so that they would continue to have “maximum impact.”
Ties in South Asia
From Qatar, Kerry will travel to Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. The three Southeast Asian nations are among the 12 countries involved in talks on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal that would cut tariffs and trade barriers among participants.
In Kuala Lumpur, Kerry will also attend an Association of Southeast Asian Nations forum.
In both Singapore and Vietnam, he will discuss bilateral and regional issues. While in Hanoi, Kerry will also take part in an event marking the 20th anniversary of the establishment of U.S.-Vietnam diplomatic ties.
In both Singapore and Vietnam, he will discuss bilateral and regional issues. While in Hanoi, Kerry will also take part in an event marking the 20th anniversary of the establishment of U.S.-Vietnam diplomatic ties.
Afghanistan: Still the King of Opium
BY
Afghanistan remains awash in opium, despite $8.2 billion in American taxpayer dollars spent since 2002 to curb its rampant drug production and trade, a U.S. reconstruction watchdog concluded Thursday.
The country’s own drug use rates remain among the highest in the world, according to a new quarterly report by the congressionally mandated Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, or SIGAR.
A 2014 World Drug Report by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime confirmed Afghanistan again leads the world in opium production and for the third consecutive year saw more land being used for poppy farming — a record 520,000 acres — despite U.S. efforts.
But it looks like the U.S. military has had about enough. With 9,800 American troops focused on training Afghan forces and running counterterrorism missions before withdrawing in December 2016, SIGAR reported that the Defense Department will use $2.8 billion earmarked for counternarcotics activities this year to pay for other needs.
In all, Congress has appropriated $109 billion for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2002.
For years, American military and policy leaders favored an aggressive approach to poppy eradication. That fostered resentment among local farmers and put money in the pockets of warlords, who then were contracted to do the work. But as part of the war’s more recent counterinsurgency missions, more of an effort was made to introduce alternative crops, which also failed.
And Afghan opium continues to flood drug markets, including 90 percent of Canada’s supply and 85 percent of the worldwide market, according to the SIGAR report. Yet hardly any Afghan heroin makes its way to the United States, despite the growing appetite for the drug. Overall, the U.N. found that Afghan heroin accounted for only 4 percent of drugs sold in the United States.
In Afghanistan itself, a full 11 percent of the population tested positive for one or more drugs, according to the U.N.’s survey. To put that into context, the global average is about 5.2 percent.
Mullah Omar death: Why is Pakistan silent?
By M Ilyas Khan
The Taliban have confirmed that their leader Mullah Omar is dead, and are thought to have appointed Mullah Akhtar Mansour as the movement's official head.
But there has been an eerie silence in Pakistani quarters in the 24 hours since the Afghan government announced that Mullah Omar died in a Pakistani hospital in April 2013.
This was despite reports that the top leadership council of the Taliban had been meeting in the Pakistani city of Quetta to choose the successor.
Pakistan's state television has ignored the news for the most part since it first broke.
The private media mostly followed the BBC line, and held debates in which the usual ex-military analysts, while refraining from confirming or denying the death, focused on the timing of the leak, saying it was meant to defame Pakistan and undermine Taliban-Kabul talks, which Pakistan had been set to host.
Some even suggested the Indians might have forced the hand of the Afghan officials who leaked it to the BBC.
A day after Kabul's announcement, a Pakistani foreign office spokesman said he wouldn't like to comment on "rumours" of Mullah Omar's death.
Few are impressed at Pakistan's stance.
Osama Bin Laden was found and killed in Pakistan even though for years Pakistan denied he was present on its soil.
Now Afghan intelligence officials have gone ahead with the claim that Mullah Omar died in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi.
While there may never be official Pakistani confirmation of this, few doubt claims that he lived most of his post-9/11 life in southern Pakistan.
The reason lies in the origin of the Taliban movement, and its symbiotic relationship with Pakistan.
The movement was originally confined to some parts of Kandahar province, and was mainly a localised reaction to extortion and moral crimes by local warlords.
But it gained strength in the later part of 1994 when Pakistanis dressed as madrassah students descended on the border town of Spin Boldak, busted a huge arms cache of a former mujahideen group, and then rolled up the Kandahar highway to free a Pakistani trade convoy to central Asia which had been held hostage by local warlords.
Subsequent years saw former mujahideen fighters joining the Taliban movement in their hundreds in a blitzkrieg in which the southern cities fell to the Taliban one after the other.
Security analysts in Pakistan and the US have long held that Pakistan provided the Taliban with logistics and tactical leadership to capture such important regional centres as Herat in the west, Jalalabad in the east and finally Kabul in 1996.
Post-9/11, when the US-led coalition dislodged the Taliban regime, Pakistan allowed the fleeing militants to carve a sanctuary on its soil in the border town of Wana in South Waziristan tribal district.
This sanctuary later expanded to an entire north-western belt along the Afghan border, called the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata).
This played a major role in the Taliban's ability to survive, and finally take the battle to the US-led coalition troops inside Afghanistan.
All this while, and despite Pakistan's denials, it was common knowledge the entire Taliban leadership set up bases in Quetta and Peshawar, and later in Karachi, from where they guided operations inside Afghanistan.
After the end of Nato's mission in Afghanistan last year, Pakistan moved to clear these sanctuaries of unwanted groups that the Taliban-al-Qaeda militant network had spawned over a decade.
In recent months, it has also reverted to securing peace in Afghanistan, without which it cannot successfully implement a major economic corridor the Chinese are building across the length of the country to connect China with the Arabian Sea.
But Pakistan's need to keep Indian influence out of Afghanistan continues to cause suspicions among some sections of Afghan ruling circles, who believe Pakistan will manipulate peace talks to achieve its own objectives at the cost of Afghan interests.
Many believe the Pakistanis would have kept Mullah Omar's death a secret in order to prevent rifts within Taliban.
Meanwhile, Pakistani officials believe that the Afghan intelligence service, the NDS, has been leaking news of the Taliban's engagement with Kabul to embarrass the Taliban leadership and to encourage defections from their ranks.
They feel by confirming the news of Mullah Omar's death on Wednesday, the NDS pushed President Ashraf Ghani, who was opposed to making the news public, into a corner.
Whether this move by the NDS will achieve peace in Afghanistan is a question only time will answer, but many believe that the Taliban movement will no longer be the monolithic force it remained until about three years ago.
And the NDS will also now be able to sell their long-held view to domestic and international audiences that the Taliban leadership is but a lackey of Pakistan.
Violence erupts as LeJ chief Terrorist Malik Ishaq is buried
Angry protests flared into violence at the funeral for chief of the banned Sunni terrorist outfit Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), Maliq Ishaq, officials said Thursday, as at least two people were killed in an apparent reprisal attack on a police checkpost.
Malik Ishaq, behind numerous bloody attacks on Shia Muslims, was killed in a shootout with police in the early hours of Wednesday, along with 13 fellow militants.
Police said violence broke out in Ishaq’s hometown of Rahim Yar Khan in Punjab when the bodies arrived for burial late on Wednesday evening.
“Protesters tried to damage a Shia mosque and private properties and attacked police with stones,” district police officer Tariq Mastoi told AFP. Mastoi said police flooded the streets with around 5,000 officers and brought the disturbances under control.
Hours later, a group of around 10 militants attacked a police post in Gujrat, sparking a gun battle that left two attackers dead and two policemen seriously wounded.
Malik Mansoor, a senior police official in Gujrat, said LeJ members armed with guns and hand grenades attacked the post apparently to avenge the killing of Ishaq and other senior commanders.
“One of the killed militants has been identified as Muhammad Mumtaz, who is a long-time activist of LeJ and was wanted in several cases of targeted killings,” he said.
Wednesday’s shootout appears to have wiped out much of the top leadership of LeJ, a driving force in a rising tide of violence targeting Shias.
Under Ishaq’s leadership, LeJ claimed responsibility for some of the bloodiest attacks on Shias in Pakistan’s recent history, including two suicide bombings in Quetta in early 2013 that killed more than 180 people.
Ishaq, who had been in and out of police custody in recent years, was arrested on Saturday and was being moved when loyalists attacked the convoy in Muzaffargarh. Those killed with him reportedly included Ghulam Rasool Shah, a hardline LeJ chief who acted as the group’s leader when Ishaq was behind bars.
Wednesday’s killings were the latest blow to militancy in Pakistan, where in the past year authorities have cracked down hard on the myriad insurgent groups that have plagued the country for a decade.
The offensive intensified after Taliban gunmen slaughtered more than 130 children at the Army Public School in December.
Bilawal Bhutto directs MPAs to visit their areas and review flood situation
Pakistan Peoples Party Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has expressed regrets over flood devastation in Sindh and directed MPAs to visit their areas and review flood situation.
According to details, PPP Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has expressed regrets over flood devastation in Sindh and directed MPAs to visit their areas and review flood situation. Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has said that strict action will be taken if MPAs were found neglecting their responsibilities.
https://ppppunjab.wordpress.com/2015/07/30/bilawal-bhutto-zardari-directs-mpas-to-visit-their-areas-and-review-flood-situation/